Microsoft Teams is a workspace within a network. It acts as the “digital hub” of Office 365, bringing together conversations, web conferences, content and apps in one place. Teachers can create communal classrooms in Oamk’s Teams, and all Oamk employees and students can create professional learning communities in Teams and communicate with each other.
You can also add users from the University of Oulu to teams, discussions and web conferences. You can easily find Oamk employees in the user directory by name, but you can only add university employees with their full email address.
- Teams has replaced Skype for Business
- Teams as a teamwork platform – including student teamwork
- Check out MS Teams Quick Start (by Microsoft)
- An interactive Teams demo (by Microsoft)
Teams has replaced Skype for Business
Teams has the same features as Skype for Business:
- real-time voice and video conferencing, and text-based conversations
- one-on-one, between a self-assembled group, or a pre-determined team
- screen sharing + remote control
- file sharing
- video conference recording
Teams as a teamwork platform
In addition to instant messaging features, Teams has other features that are especially suited for teamwork. In Teams, you can create teams that can be public and open to everyone, or they can be on available to certain users and hidden from others. You can be a team owner or team member – both students and staff can create teams.
There can be many teams, different for their own purposes. It is also possible to subdivide a topic into channels. Channels are smaller entities within the team. The team owners can create channels for different subjects. Channels can be available to all team members or only to a limited group. Each channel has its own discussion board and file storage area. Office documents in a team are automatically shared between all team members (or members of a restricted channel) and the files can be edited at the same time.
The files view is similar to OneDrive’s file manager and it works with the same logic. In practice, the files are located in a file library created for the team in SharePoint. If you know how to use OneDrive, you know how to manage files in Teams: There may be some differences, but overall the functions are the same.
If you record a web meeting created within the team, the recording will be saved directly to the team and it will remain there for later use.
For staff: Review what information is allowed to be stored in the cloud and how to share it. See the Oamk Data Handling Guide made by Oamk’s GDPR Officer.
NB. ICT Services does not back up the files stored in Microsoft’s 365 service. The amount of data to back up would simply be too large. Back up your important files yourself. You might need the backups in case you manage to destroy your files in Onedrive / Teams / Sharepoint or if they are encrypted by ransomware: Also, you would need your backups if you want to reach your files after graduating, when you no longer have access to your Oamk account.