Office 365
Microsoft Teams for Faculty and Staff
Announcement
Microsoft Teams is now available for all active Faculty, Staff, and Students. The below page contains critical resources and training suggestions for our Faculty and Staff to facilitate remote instruction and general productivity.
Ensure that you are setting roles correctly in your meetings. Refer to this link for more information on meeting roles and modifications. This topic is also covered in the instructional video below "Creating and Configuring Meetings".
You may also experience attendees being placed in a lobby - this will occur for anyone outside of USF entering a meeting. To allow a guest into a meeting, just click "admit" on the lobby notice that appears on your screen.
Microsoft Teams videos
- Accessing Teams and Signing In
- Creating and Configuring Meetings
- Joining and Conducting a Meeting
- Accessing and Managing Your Meeting Recording
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is Microsoft's new enterprise communication tool. Teams combines persistent chat rooms, video/voice, file sharing, meetings, and many other features into one application. Teams is beneficial for meetings, class sessions, and remote communications. We recommend using it for any conversational or video conferencing application.
Microsoft Teams Meeting Safety and Best Practices
Click here to download the guide for Microsoft Teams meetings.
How do I access Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is accessible via your web browser, Android or iOS device, or desktop client available on both Windows and Mac operating systems. We recommend testing out all available options to determine the method that best suits your productivity requirements.
Essential links for quick set-up
Notifications
Notifications in Teams are off by default. To set them up, click here.
Training for Microsoft Teams
You have several options for self-paced training available for Microsoft Teams.
- LinkedIn Learning - LinkedIn Learning is available to you through MyUSF under the 'Learning and Teaching Tools' tab.
- Microsoft Teams Video Training
- Personalize Student Learning
- Office 365 Training Center
- Office 365 Quick Starts
- Teacher Training Packs
Accessing Teams
Login using your netid@usf.edu.
- Web Browser - visit https://teams.microsoft.com and sign in with your USF email address.
- Mobile Application - Visit https://aka.ms/getteams and select the version that works for your device.
- Guest Experience - Click here for documentation of the Guest Teams experience.
Help for Teams
- Creating a Team
- Create Join Link
- Add a student to a Class Team
- OneNote Class Notebook
- Meeting Scheduling
- Presenter/Attendee - note that students by default will be presenters - be certain to change this via invitations.
- Call test and audio settings
- Teams for Education
We automatically admit anyone in our usf.edu environment to a meeting. If you are being redirected to a lobby, please be sure you are logged into Microsoft Teams via a web browser, or via the Microsoft Teams App. To admit someone from the lobby, just click "admit" after verifying who they are.
What can I do with Teams?
Teams allows diverse and remote groups for collaborate for a variety of reasons. We heavily encourage utilizing this to ease your transition to a remote learning environment. Read further for capabilities and documentation.
Teams at it's core is a persistent chat service. You can create channels for specific conversations or projects within your team. Chat records will stay there for review later, or to allow people to respond without requiring an immediate reply. You can break off into one-on-one conversations with co-workers, and people within other groups and teams.
You can enhance your chat with emojis and visual responses, as well as subject formatting.
Click here for more information on chat.
For more information on channel messages, review this article.
Access and Productivity
Microsoft Teams uses tabs at the top of each Team to display your apps and other integrations. This makes Microsoft Teams an effective workspace - integrating applications like Excel, Word, Planner, PowerBI, and others into one space.
Visit this link for more information.
Microsoft Teams comes with a group OneDrive to store, share, and edit your files. You can also post documents and files to the channel like a Word document, and the entire team can edit it in real time within the Teams app, creating a much more collaborative and interactive workspace.
Click here for more information on File Collaboration.
You can also add other cloud storage providers, like Box, to Teams. Click here for more information.
Scheduling and hosting meetings
You can create ad-hoc meetings with your Team, or even schedule them all within the Teams app. Starting a meeting is easy - you just open the channel you want to meet with, and select the meeting notification icon at the bottom of your screen. It opens up to a video chat where you and your team can collaborate, share files, present your desktop, and meet no matter where your team is.
To schedule a meeting, select the "Meetings" tab from the left, and select "Schedule Meeting".
For more information on the Meet Now feature, click here.
For meeting scheduling assistance, click here.
USF IT offers Audio Conferencing for your Teams meetings. With audio conferencing, a phone number and meeting pin is attached to your meeting invites. This allows remote and external personnel connect with just a phone call and work within the meeting. The phone number is attached automatically to your meetings - no need for you to take any action.
You are also able to dial out from a meeting to invite a participant or conference phone number.
3rd party integrations and applications
Microsoft Teams supports a wealth of external applications, bots, and other integrations to enable you to be more productive.
Some examples include Asana, Box, PagerDuty, and others. Additionally, there are bots that can automate repeat tasks or alerts that your team depends on.
Review the full list of integration instructions here.
Note: USF IT does not have every app enabled. For a list of every available application, click here.
If you have an application you want please submit a ticket to help@usf.edu
Security and Compliance within Teams
If you are planning on storing data considered highly sensitive or restricted, contact the Security Operations Team so that additional protective measures can be placed around the data.
Review USF ISSP-0001 here for more information.