Microsoft Teams, here’s the admin guidance

Yesterday Microsoft released a preview version of Microsoft Teams, the new product to compete with Slack. It will be very interesting to see Teams integrate in Office 365 as yet another collaboration product next to Skype for Business, Exchange, Yammer, SharePoint Newsfeed and Office 365 Groups.

Currently Microsoft Teams is not enabled by default, a tenant admin has to enable the application in the Office 365 Admin Center.

This will change in 2017 Q1 when Teams will be enabled by default. Or as Microsoft states in the Message Center (id MC84541):

We are rolling this preview out off-by-default, to give you a chance to explore the new capabilities. This experience will be turned on-by-default in the first quarter of 2017. At this time, you can control access to this experience, at the organization level. We are working on user-level controls for this feature, and will communicate again when available.

I know that many of my customers are still struggling how to handle Office 365 Groups creation and the lack of governance and control around this area. Microsoft is working hard to improve this, as they explained in this session at Ignite 2016: Manage Microsoft Office 365 Groups But with every new Microsoft Team there will be a corresponding Office 365 Group created.

This raises the question how admins can manage the Microsoft Teams roll-out in their organization. What are the firewall requirements? And how to estimate bandwidth for peer-to-peer calling?

The good news is, there is actual admin documentation. The bad news is that it’s no longer consolidated on a single place as we’re used to with TechNet. The currently available resources for admins can be found here:

• Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Tech Community
• Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Teams - Office Support
• Microsoft Teams: Step-by-step intro for using, enabling and managing the experience - Microsoft Mechanics YouTube Channel
• Introducing Microsoft Teams (in Preview) - Microsoft Virtual Academy

Much to my surprise the most relevant information for admins was hidden in part 2 of the MVA video series. I highly recommend to download the Deploy_Microsoft_Teams.pdf document that can be found in the Resources section of this training.

There’s a ton of extremely valuable information in this document that helps you understand how to prepare for Microsoft Teams, at least from an infrastructure point-of-view.

Have fun!