Navigation
Select a link below to jump to that section:
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams (aka Spartan Teams) is a collaboration application that helps your team stay organized and have focused conversations all in one place. With Teams, on a computer or mobile device, you can chat one on one or with a group, share and edit files, co-author documents, track changes, assign tasks for projects, and make audio or video calls. Teams also integrates with the other services within Office 365 like Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive.
Back to Top
Acceptable Use
This product should not be used to store confidential data (social security numbers, credit cards, bank data and more). Information about confidential data at Michigan State is provided in the MSU Institutional Data Policy (link). Please make sure that as of now, data content stored in MS Teams satisfies the definition of Public data in terms of security.
Back to Top
Who Has Access?
Teams is available for faculty, researchers, staff, and students. Information Registered Student Organizations and Teams is available in this article (link).
Updating Access
As members leave the unit, owners can add or remove members (link) as desired. Access can be provided as a "team owner" (can add/remove individuals) or "team member". To remove an owner, an existing owner must first change an owner to a "team member" and then delete the member.
Guest Access
Guest access has been enabled for Microsoft Teams. Individuals outside our organization can be added to a team by using their external email address. Invited guests should review the support information at Microsoft regarding how to join a team as a guest (link).
Note that creating an official MSU Guest Account does NOT grant you access to use Microsoft Teams and will cause problems in MSU Teams meetings, where your display name will be a kpid and will not be changeable. Please use a different email address than what you used to set up a MSU Guest Account if you wish to be able to control your display name in Teams.
Back to Top
Schedule a Meeting in Teams
You can schedule your meeting in Microsoft Teams (link) or in Outlook if you have installed Microsoft Teams on your computer.
Back to Top
Record a Meeting in Teams
To capture the contents of your meeting you can easily record your meeting (link).
Back to Top
Preventing others from recording in Teams Meetings
If you have a meeting that you do not want others to record you can prevent invitees from recording (link).
Back to Top
Additional Information and Training for Microsoft Teams
Detailed information including quick start guide, tutorial videos, chats, and meetings is available in our Teams Help and FAQ information pages (link).
Back to Top
Microsoft Teams Premium
Microsoft Teams Premium is a new offering that builds on the current Teams experience with additional features that help make Teams meetings more personalized, intelligent, and protected. It also enables premium capabilities for additional meeting scenarios, including Virtual Appointments and webinars. With Teams Premium, you can:
- Focus on what matters with AI-powered meetings and intelligent meeting recaps that automatically generate meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights to help you get the information most important to you, even if you miss the meeting.
- Hold Intelligent meetings
- Microsoft Teams Premium makes your meetings smarter with an intelligent recap feature that uses the OpenAI GPT-3.5 model to capture meeting notes and highlights for every meeting. The productivity gains here are significant. Meeting participants can spend more time listening and sharing and less time taking notes.
- At the end of the meeting, everyone gets a recording that the AI has analyzed and broken into meeting chapters with highlights of key information shared during the meeting. Teams Premium also adds personalized timeline markers, visible only to you, that note when you joined or left the meeting. So, if you weren’t able to attend, arrived late, or left early, you can quickly get up to speed on what you missed.
- Virtual Green Room—Another cool feature is the virtual green room. It allows presenters to get together behind the scenes of the event in a dedicated space separate from attendees. This allows presenters to easily manage and collaborate throughout the event to make it a smooth experience for their attendees.
- Only the meeting host needs to purchase Teams Premium
- Purchase Teams Premium thru the MSU Tech Store at: Microsoft Teams Premium Edu Subscription Per User | MSU Tech Store (link).
Back to Top
Download Microsoft Teams
- Within Teams online, click on your profile picture or icon (most likely in the upper right corner of the screen).
- Select the option to download the desired application.
- Alternatively, you can visit http://teams.microsoft.com/downloads (link)
Back to Top
Requesting a Team
You can request a team be setup for your unit or organization thru the teams request form (link).
Back to Top
Team Expiration and Renewal
Microsoft teams are generally created without a specific expiration date. There are some cases, however, where certain Teams may have been set up with an expiration date.
If a Team is due to expire:
- The owners of that team will receive a notification that the Team is due to expire in 30 days.
- Additional emails will be sent to the owners as the expiration date approaches:
- 30 days remaining
- 15 days remaining
- 1 day remaining
- The email the owners receive will provide an option to renew the team for 365 days.
- There will also be a notice in the team itself indicating the upcoming expiration.
If the owners do not renew the team before the expiration date, the team will be deleted and CANNOT be recovered.
A Team I Own is Expiring and I Can't Find the Emails
You can also renew a Team from within the Team itself:
- Right-click the Team and select Manage team
- Select Settings
- Look for the "Team expiration" setting, and select Renew now
Back to Top