Microsoft Teams

Templates

When you create a self-managed team, you can choose from various templates to start. You can see examples of the different templates on our training site.

• The Professional Learning Community (PLC) template is used for communities of practice and academic group work outside of registered courses.
• The crisis communication and incident response templates have ready-made features for quick deployment and rapid communication.
• The manage a project and event planning templates are collaborative spaces that leverage task tracking and news post tools.
• The onboard employee template helps you guide new employees through your team's onboarding process.

Templates are only available for self-managed teams. Departmental teams always use the standard team template. Courses always use the class template.

You'll choose how you want to manage team membership when you create a new team:

Departmental teams are managed by your department's IT staff. Membership will include everyone employed in your unit or department.

Self-managed teams are managed by a team owner. Membership is determined by the team owner. This type of team is best used for projects, committees and communities that include people from all over campus. The team owner is responsible for:

• adding and removing members
• managing team ownership permissions
• curation and stewardship of team content
• user support within the team

Your UVic account is for teaching, learning, research and work related to UVic. Commercial use is prohibited. You can find more information in UVic’s acceptable use policy.

Some personal use is permitted as long as it doesn’t disrupt UVic business, but we recommend you keep UVic business and your personal data separate as much as you can. If you keep personal files in Teams, you’ll lose access to them when you leave UVic.

For their privacy, students aren't included in the global address list. It's not possible to look a student up by name to message them, add them to a team or share a document unless you're already in a team or group with them. Some employees have also asked to be removed from the address list.

If someone's not listed, you can:

• If you know their email address, you can use that to share documents with them.
• You can give them a link to your team or team code to invite them to join.

Only pre-approved Teams apps are available.

• Most Microsoft apps are approved for general use unless there are technical reasons they don't work at UVic. Some others are available but need IT support staff to activate them specific accounts.
• Most 3rd-party (non-Microsoft) apps aren't available.
• You can request the approval of new apps. However, many Teams apps can access personal or classified data, so they need to be carefully reviewed and tested to make sure they don't compromise the privacy of UVic students or employees. Reviews can take months and there's already a substantial backlog of requests.

• Creating new teams using self-serve tools isn't supported.
• Messages sent by Teams chat are assumed to be transitory and are automatically deleted after 5 months. Record any important messages and decisions related to UVic business elsewhere.

• You can share files with specific people outside of UVic (“external users” or “guests”), but you can’t set sharing permissions to “Anyone”.