MS Teams in TCM

Cambridge has access to the Microsoft Teams collaboration software via its EES agreement. Teams can be used for hosting chat, sharing documents, and both audio and video calls. It is not the only solution which the University offers, and much of its functionality is also available in the Cambridge G Suite.

Teams may be accessed via an application (Windows, MacOS or Linux), or via a web browser.

There is plenty of general, and Cambridge-specific, documentation which is readily found on the web, so this page lists some of points specific to TCM, or which are not readily found in the documentation.

People in TCM should be members of both the Physics Team (PHY_Department of Physics), and the TCM Team (PHY_TCM). Membership of the latter is currently maintained manually by [email protected], so send corrections (join requests?) there. PHY_TCM is private to its members, which is approximately those listed under the "people" menu of our website (including visitors, excluding those who do not have Cambridge EES accounts).

Teams is full of maddening restrictions. So here is a list of some...

One Window

The official application does not believe in allowing one to have multiple windows (except that both chats and help can pop out in separate windows). So if you wish to work on two things at once, use the web browser interface for at least one of them.

Channel creation limits

Each Team can have up to 200 public channels (public to Team members), and 30 private channels. For a Team which encompasses a large Department, such as Physics, these limits are rather low. For a Group the size of TCM they are less low, so in the TCM Team any member can create a public channel. Be aware that they take a month to delete. (That is, on deletion they enter a state from which they can be undeleted. This state persists for a month, and channels in this state cannot have their names re-used, and continue to count to the above quotas.)

Private channels currently by request ([email protected]) only, as with a limit of thirty, if everyone decides to experiment with one we exceed that limit by almost a factor of four.

Ideally staff would be allowed to create private channels themselves, and others on request, but Teams has just two classes of user in a channel, owner and members, and permissions are assigned to those classes, not to individuals. I doubt that all staff wish to be owners of Phy_TCM.

Public vs private channels

Conversion from public to private, or private to public, is not currently possible.

Private channels do not support scheduled meetings, forms, wikis or apps (amongst other things). They do support immediate meetings ("meet now"). Their contents is not visible to the Team owners, unless those owners are also members of the private channel.

Attendee limits

A standard meeting can have up to 300 attendees

A meeting started from the chat tab can have up to 20 attendees.

A "live event" (sometimes called a "webinar") can have up to 20,0000 attendees (10,000 from 30/6/2021), but there can be only fifty simultaneous "live events" across the whole University (fifteen from 30/6/2021). So there is a restrictive booking process.

Data retention etc.

Unclear. Retention probably no more than a year. Not an archive service, nor a service for highly confidential data.

Document undeletion

Teams does not provide undelete functionality for documents. But all of its documents are actually stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, and those do. So one can log in directly to those services and hunt around...

Hermes users

Those who have not switched to ExOL will be unable to create a scheduled meeting, or to do anything with calendars except create them. (Yes, they can create calendars which they then cannot even view.)

Owners

Do not attempt to rename the "general" channel. This causes complete chaos.

The last word

I am no fan of MS or of Teams, and know very little about Teams. Hence some of the above information is a little sketchy. So Phy_TCM may be looking for someone to help curate it. Are you that person?