Integris loves to use Teams for collaboration, file storage, and remaining connected. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions we receive about working remotely with Teams.
How do you add calendar to Teams? How do you schedule a meeting via calendar on Teams?
The calendar in Teams is tied to an Office 365 mailbox. While almost all Office 365 accounts include email, there are some that don’t. When using those plans, the calendar doesn’t appear in the list of apps.
If you’re working remotely with Teams and need to schedule a meeting from the app, use the “New Meeting” button in calendar view or double click on the time. The link to the meeting will come up automatically when the invite is sent out. Important: If you don’t invite any additional attendees, the link to a meting won’t show up such if you send yourself a “Test” meeting.
What is the limit of faces/video when working remotely with Teams?
The original limit to the number of video participants was 4. The limit has been changed to 9 in a feature update that is being rolled out across Office 365.
Are you able to choose whose webcam is displayed when in a large group of users?
This is called “Pinning” video so that it’s always in the foreground. By default, Teams will attempt to show you the video of the person speaking. To pin the video, right click and select ‘Pin’.
We’ve been facing a 4 face/video limit, was there a recent update that needs to get pushed out for the 5×5 grid for the 7×7?
Microsoft recently upped this limit to 9 participants on the screen at a time. This is a good chance to mention the Teams update mechanism. Teams is self-updating, meaning that it checks for new updates when it runs. You can also check for updates manually by clicking on your picture and selecting “Check for Updates”. This makes updates when working remotely with Teams easy.
Will the screen share be for all members on the team or can it be specific to that one person on the team?
Everyone in the meeting will see the screen when it’s shared. If you need to share your screen privately with one person, that schedule a separate call outside of the Teams meeting with only those participants who need to know the information.
Can you demonstrate what a screen share would look like? Can you, as a manager, pull Praise reports? Can you, as a manager, pull Praise reports?
Teams doesn’t have reporting on Praise. It’s an active feature request, and Microsoft’s response was “Many customers have asked for reporting capabilities around Praise, so this will be one of our top items in the list of things we want to add to Praise in the future.”. There is not an ETA on this, however.
Why on Praise button is there a different name giving the praise other than Matt Topper?
For this webinar, we used a demo tenant rather than our internal Teams tenant. The demo conversations are more interesting than ours anyway.
Is Teams synchronized with your AD and Individual Contacts from Outlook?
Teams is synchronized with Azure Active Directory. The credentials and sign-in are the same. The contacts list that’s accessible from the top of the Chat section is not synchronized with Outlook contacts. To start a chat when working remotely with Teams, the fastest way is to type the person’s name into the search bar at the top – it’s even faster than using the contacts list as that search bar is always visible, regardless of where you are in the program.
I know that Team Voice option is still new. How reliable is this service? Does the Team Voice Option allow you to make and receive calls to a traditional phone through your PC? Can you and a team member make call a single call together with Team Voice?
The PSTN service is still new, yes. Most issues and complaints I’ve seen about the service related to missing features rather than reliability issues, though there have been several outages so far. Teams Voice does allow PSTN calls to normal phones. There are also several models of phone that can be configured to work with Teams if your employees prefer a desk phone. Teams voice does allow conference calls.
Back to the limit question. I meant how many faces/participants in a group meeting can be shown? For example, Zoom has many faces, which you can scroll through, Skype limits it to 4.
Microsoft increased this limit to 9 and additional participants are shown at the bottom of the call. This is a widely requested feature improvement, with more than 47,000 votes in Microsoft’s User Voice platform.
Is working remotely with Teams free for the Outlook owners?
Teams is included in almost all Office 365 plans, aside from specific cases such as plans for a single mailbox, etc. Tip: Microsoft has recently renamed plans such as “Office 365 Business Premium” and “Office 365 Business Essentials” to “Microsoft 365 Business Standard” and “Microsoft 365 Business Basic” respectively to bring them under the Microsoft 365 naming scheme.
How long can you hold a video call for?
Microsoft’s specifications page on meeting length doesn’t specify a limit for the maximum length, but an unofficial answer from one of Microsoft’s documentation writers is that the limit is 24 hours. Teams live events (webinars) can last for up to 4 hours.
I have a slightly unrelated — but related question – while we haven’t had any issues with Zoom — how confident are you in continuing to use it as a platform? Other options than WebEx?
This is a big question and Zoom has real security concerns. The “Zoom bombing” issue that was widely publicized is mostly a result of the world not being used to video conferencing etiquette and best practices – meetings should have passwords and use the lobby feature. I do agree that requiring just a number to log-in wasn’t the best design idea, though it was modelling the paradigm set with normal conference calls.
Outside of that issue, Zoom did and does have actual security and privacy concerns and we’re evaluating Zoom’s response.
Can you manage team deployment to team members through group policy or some other admin console? Same question for ongoing management/maintenance.
The Teams client can be deployed with Group Policy and it’s installed with ODT – it’s included by default in Office installations now. There is also a management console for it in the Office 365 Admin center.
Do you know if this could be a replacement for Basecamp?
While Teams isn’t a project management tool, Microsoft Planner is the part of Teams that has a direct correlation to Basecamp. If Planner meets your project management needs, Teams is a viable replacement for it, but make sure to consider who within the organization will need to access each Plan.
Can you chat in Teams with people outside of your org or not necessarily using “Teams” or Office 365?
You can chat with someone outside of your organization when working remotely with Teams, or even invite them to a team if that person is also an Office 365 subscriber. Meetings outside of the organization do not necessarily require having a Teams subscription, but chats and other features, including inviting participation in a team do require that the person has a valid license.
If we have file in a team file section, can only one person update it at a time?
Multiple people can edit files in a Team (or in a group chat, where the file is stored in the uploader’s OneDrive). This is called coediting. You can also simultaneously work on a document in the full Word, Excel, etc. and see the other person editing it if the document is stored in Teams or OneDrive.
It’s my understanding the Teams has screen sharing and audio-conferencing capability. We are looking to use Teams to host virtual meeting events for our clients and request a secure platform. I notice Iconic is using Zoom instead of Teams for this demo. Can you confirm that Teams has screen sharing and virtual meeting capability and if so, why are you using Zoom? We are in finance and need a secure platform for our meetings. Thanks!
Teams does have screen sharing and a feature called Teams Live Events. The live events do allow external participants, but don’t have a mechanism to keep track of registrations. Teams Live Events also does not support attendees dialing in from a phone, even as a paid option.
Is there a best practice (or advantage) for hosting files on Teams vs in your local folder structure? Our struggle when we used to use SharePoint was, we would have files on SharePoint, but they also existed in our folder structure, and one would get edited and the two files would begin to diverge. You almost have to pick Teams or the folder structure to store the files, wouldn’t you?
This is a data governance issue in that files need to have a “home” and it should be either Teams or your local file server/SharePoint etc. As you may know, a Team is really a SharePoint site behind the scenes. If the files are stored in Teams, the best practice is to edit them in Teams or use OneDrive’s ability to sync to a Teams document library so that you are editing the file in what looks like a folder structure. Ultimately, this comes down to company policy in determining where files relating to a project, customer, or department are going to reside and then managing to that policy.
I thought tasks was coming to Teams. Is there something I need to do to activate it?
This was originally announced at Ignite but still hasn’t rolled out to Teams yet. It’s expected this year. “Tasks” is a consolidate view of items from Planner, Outlook tasks, and To-Do with hopes to connect it to Office documents. For example, @mentioning someone while reviewing a word document and creating a task for that person.
Can Teams meetings be sent to people outside our organization like Zoom does, and what if those individuals don’t have a Microsoft subscription?
Both meetings and chats can happen outside of your organization. Without a Microsoft subscription, the outside person will only have access to meetings. Calling in to a phone requires an additional license for meetings (and is not available on the Live Events webinar feature)
I don’t see a Calendar icon on the left side of my Teams. It has Activity, Chat, Teams, Calls, Files
This very likely means that the account you are using to connect does not have a mailbox associated with it.
Could the screen sharing aspect of Teams be a solution to a paid Splashtop subscription?
It can, depending on your use case for Splashtop. It’s great for troubleshooting or collaboration – can you look at this error on my screen? Teams isn’t a replacement for Splashtop’s ability to connect to a machine unattended, such as connecting to your work computer from home.
If you set your calendar meeting or appointment in Outlook, will it automatically appear in Teams?
The calendars in Teams and Outlook are synchronized. In fact, you’re not viewing a separate calendar – you are looking at your calendar in your mailbox, just through Teams instead of Outlook.
How many attendees can you have in a Teams video conference call?
Teams can support up to 250 participants in a meeting and up to 20 if starting a meeting from a chat rather than a Channel.
Are the limitations with Team functions if you do not have Office 365? We use Windows 10.
Teams is part of Office 365, so you’ll need an account in Office 365 to use it. The availability of some features depends on the level of subscription you have. For example, the calendar feature requires having email in Office 365 or a hybrid Exchange setup.
Can you bring/connect tasks from outlook to planner?
That feature doesn’t exist now. Microsoft has created a great video on where it wants to take Task integration in general and it’s worth a watch: https://youtu.be/GApEgSszb34
Can we send texts from team?
There isn’t a native solution for sending texts to or from Teams, but several 3rd party applications exist to enable this.
Can we link personal outlook email to Teams so that a person using Teams is now only using one App to login?
Teams is based on an Office 365 email account, so when working remotely with Teams, the login is with your business or other O365 account, not from a Gmail/Yahoo, etc. account.
Can you use Teams for webinar?
Teams has a Live Events feature that does webinars, which may meet your needs depending on the use case. For example, registration tracking and phone call-in aren’t available.
Could you address at a high level how we should look at Teams vs SharePoint? For instance, we have shared files in a document library in SharePoint sites, but it seems like Teams has that capability as well. How should I think about the two environments and how to set up our usage?
Behind the scenes, a Team is a SharePoint site and you can even work within that site from an administrative perspective if you need to. Which to use depends on the type of content. If you are using SharePoint widgets that integrate with the web UI or using the site as a document repository more than anything else, a SharePoint site might make more sense. If collaboration is more important, a SharePoint site may make more sense.
A key point is to remember that Teams isn’t superseding SharePoint – there are still times where a SharePoint site is the right answer compared to Teams. In those cases, you might link to the SharePoint site in a channel. We’re happy to have a further discussion on specific use cases to dive in deeper.
How do you delete a team?
To delete a team, click the ellipsis next to the team name and select “Delete the team”. You can also archive a team by clicking the gear button at the bottom of the list of teams and select “Archive Team”
Can Teams be used to set up audio/video conference call like meetings (like Skype or GoToMeeting etc.)
When working remotely with Teams, you can setup conference calls like Skype, GoToMeeting, etc. The ability to call in from a phone requires an additional license.
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