Welcome to Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a chat-centered workspace in Microsoft 365. It brings people, conversations, files, and tools into one place, so everyone has instant access to everything — facilitate meetings, chat one-on-one, make audio or video calls, and connect your Teams site to third-party apps safely.

Be sure you have Duo to provide multi-factor authentication (MFA) with Microsoft 365 applications - including Teams - when on-campus or off-campus. OIT recommends using the Microsoft Teams desktop or mobile device application for access to all your Teams from your phone or other mobile device so that you only need to authenticate about every 90 days.

New Update: Microsoft Teams live events are enabled for all university staff, faculty, and students. Live events provide similar functionality to a Zoom Webinar and does not require any additional cost to use. Click on the Calendar in Teams and click on the down arrow next to New meeting to view the Live event option. 

Teams live image

View Microsoft's live events training material: 

Microsoft Teams live events video training 

Microsoft Teams live events are an extension of Teams meetings that enable you to schedule and produce events that stream to large online audiences:

Get started using Microsoft Teams:

  1. Go to your University Microsoft 365 Webmail
  2. Click the “waffle” in the upper left corner
  3. Under “apps”, find “Teams”
  4. Click the “Download Teams for Desktop” link in the bottom left-hand corner
  5. Install Teams for your operating system (Windows or OSX).
  6. Any Teams you belong to will show up on the left-hand pane of the Teams download.

Watch a video about accessing the Teams application. 

Helpful Tips for Setting Up Teams

  1. Create a Team: Hints for naming Teams...
    • The name of the Team is public, even if the content is private
    • Be specific, Include segment, business unit or department prefixes and acronyms
    • Include “Project Team” or “Working Group” for Teams set up around commonly-known programs and services
  2. Channels:
    • Dedicated sections within a Team to keep conversations organized
    • Organize by topic, department, client, project
    • Currently, everyone on a Team has access to every channel. Private channels are coming soon.
    • Every channel has its own conversation space, apps, notebook, document library, etc. These are organized as tabs across the top.
    • Create a channel video
  3. Tabs: Tabs, added along the top of a channel, can contain a document from your files area which is especially important to that channel (such as a project charter), or an application like a Planner project plan, a Youtube video, or a polling application like Polly. Learn more about tabs.
  4. Notify others: Notify your teammates about conversations in Teams. The Teams equivalent of addressing someone on the To: line in an email is  @-mention. You can @mention an entire team, a channel, or an individual. Teams offers an opportunity to replace email threads with Teams conversations. Learn more.
  5. Integrate apps: Apps, bots, and connectors integrate into a channel. You can get data from your social media accounts like Twitter or Facebook, have a personal assistant schedule meetings and track your packages, or keep your project plans in a channel for all to find. Learn more about using apps with Teams. 

Microsoft Teams HIPAA Compliance

Training Options