Overview: Microsoft Teams

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To log in to Nexus365, use your Oxford username (in the format of abcd1234@OX.AC.UK) and your Single Sign-On password.

For easy access you can download the Teams app. Open Teams and click the ‘Get app’ button in the left-hand menu. You’ll need to check with your local IT Support Staff to confirm that you can download and install the application onto your desktop.

You can also download the desktop and mobile apps from the Microsoft website.

Request a New Team by completing the online form in our self service portal (SSO required). Microsoft has information on the different team types.

In order to support remote teaching and learning, we have temporarily enabled the use of dial in numbers for staff involved in teaching and learning, this can be enabled on completion of this form. This request will be actioned immediately, future Teams meeting invitations sent out by the requestor will include a freephone dial in number as well as the usual 'Join Teams Meeting' link.

Teams offers a chat facility that allows individual to chat with others on a one-to-one basis or to a group of people without being a member of a Team. There are many different things that you can do in a chat from simply conversing using instance message, to sharing screens, working on documents or starting voice and video calls from within the chat itself.

See Chat in Microsoft Teams.

You can use Teams meetings to conduct remote meetings using the audio, video, and sharing capabilities of Teams. This is a great way to come together with your colleagues both inside and outside of the University. Read our Top Tips on Running Webinars in Teams.

You can present, share screens and collaboratively work on files within a Team meeting. You can take joint meeting notes and have a persistence text chat throughout the meeting.

External guests can join a Teams meeting directly though a browser after receiving the meeting invite link via email. Guests can join from any device through a browser and do not need a Nexus Account to do so.

See guidance for Arranging a Meeting in Teams.

To add custom background in Teams please see our How to add custom backgrounds in Teams guide.

Telephony over Teams is part of the Microsoft Teams application, supported by the Chorus and Nexus teams.  For further information see the Overview: Telephony over Teams collection of webpages.

We do not recommend creating a new Team site to manage remote committees. Remote committee meetings should make use of existing Nexus SharePoint committee sites and Teams online meeting functionality.

See guidance for Running Remote Committee Meetings

A Team can be created to allow a group of people to get together to collaborate on a short-term project, or it can be used as an ongoing Teams workspace for a Team, Department or working group.

Teams are made up of channels allowing conversations and collaboration with other teammates. Each channel can be dedicated to a specific topic, department, or project. Team members can have chat conversations, store files, work collaboratively and comment on documents and initiate video or audio meetings from within the Team.

See Working in a Team and Channel.

If you do want to work within a Team, you will need to put in a service request with your local IT Support Staff or the Service Desk to get one set up.

As well as generic channels shared with your entire team, there are two 'special' Teams channel types that allow you to control access, and share content safely with people outside of your team. 

  • Private Channels allow you to set up a channel with exclusive membership for scenarios where you want to create content that is not shared with the entire team. Private Channel memberships can be separate and even the Team Owners can be excluded from their membership (though we advise against this to avoid any instances of 'orphaned' channels). Teams can have up to 30 private channels but when a private channel is deleted, it will still count as one of the 30 channels until 30 days after it is deleted, when it will be purged from the team. Find out more about private channels here - Private channels in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs
  • Shared Channels are a new type of channel that allow you to set up extended sharing privileges safely within teams, if you have content that you want to share with people or teams external to your own team.

At present, this feature is only available to internal users - you cannot use shared channels with external users directly (though if they are a member of the team already, they will be able to see the channel).

Up to 50 shared channels can be created per team and like private channels, once a shared channel is deleted it will take 30 days until it is hard-deleted. Read more about shared channels in Teams here - Shared channels in Microsoft Teams (Preview) - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

External users can be invited to Nexus365 Microsoft Teams to collaborate within a Team. External users will need to be added by Teams Owners

You can find out more about Nexus365 Guest accounts.

Within a Teams meeting you have the option to add live captions, record or produce a transcript of your recorded meeting. For more information please see Record a Meeting in Teams and Teams: Captions and Transcripts

Standard Microsoft Apps are made available in Microsoft Teams, but additional apps (including third-party apps) will only be activated if part of a dedicated project and after a thorough investigation of the security implications involved in releasing any apps to the Teams global policy and Teams user community.

Apps will not be enabled or made available if requested through Oxford IT Self-Service requests.

In addition, several Teams apps require a license for Microsoft Power Apps. These apps are: 

  • Milestones  
  • Issue Reporting/Manage Issues  
  • Ideas/Manage Ideas/Staff Ideas/Employee Ideas  
  • Bulletins/Manage Bulletins  
  • Inspections/Manage Inspections/Review Inspections  
  • Solution Health Hub  

Please do not deploy these apps or use them within your Teams and please do not sign up for the Power Apps Trial License in order to activate these. Doing so will create a separate Dataverse within our Power Platform, but this will only be available if you undertake the trial version of Power Apps, and will be deleted automatically by Microsoft once your trial period has expired. You will receive several email messages about the wind-down of Dataverse items you've created until Microsoft finally deletes the component after 180 days.

Important: Deletion of Dataverse components or trial versions of the above apps will NOT affect any other data in your Microsoft Teams, only data contained within those apps will be affected.

More details about Power Apps (which is not currently available in Nexus365) can be found on the Microsoft Power Apps page.

To summarise, use of trial apps is not recommended in Nexus365, and no trial versions of apps or services will automatically be transitioned into full versions, no matter how you use them. 

Teams Live Events is a feature within Microsoft Teams that enables Oxford University staff to schedule, produce and broadcast meetings to a large online audience up to 10,000 and is supported by the Educational Media team and their support documentation.

It is especially useful if you are presenting to an audience outside of the University as attendees can watch via a web URL link and don’t have to log in.  Teams Live Events is designed to be used for large-scale information dissemination such as town hall meetings, departmental updates, broadcasting keynotes or online training at scale. It is an extension of Teams Meetings and uses all the familiar tools and layout of a normal Teams meeting but with the ability to control the presentation of the meeting more and, importantly, go past the current 350 attendee limit.

Unlike regular Teams meetings, Teams Live meetings are not designed to be a chat-based collaborative events but instead one-to-many communications where the hosts/producers are guiding the presenter-led interactions. Attendees join via a shared URL link and can only view the content the hosts decide to make live. Attendees cannot be seen or heard by the presenters, but can participate in discussions using a moderated Q&A chat function.

There is information on what is the difference between Microsoft Teams and Nexus 365 Groups, as well as Teams and Groups: Security guidelines which highlights your responsibilities, privacy and legal requirements.

For owners of a Microsoft Team there is guidance to provide help with the management of the Nexus365 Team with a focus on Team security at Teams: Owners Guide.

If your name in Teams is not the name that you are known by, then you can request a change to your display name::

Submit an Email Address Name Change request:

Specify that you want to Change the Account Display Name, and enter your preferred name. For example: Jo Smith instead of Josephine Smith

For the fastest response, please enter your new display name to match or to clearly reflect your name as it appears in your email address. We may need to contact you to discuss any other variations.

NDI (Network Device Interface) technology allows you to broadcast the audio and video streams from a Teams meeting to your local network. You can then use the unique video and audio steams with you own video production software or NDI compatible hardware.

Please see the following guidance for broadcasting audio and video from Teams using NDI technology.  

Information on how to book and join a meeting in a Teams room is on our How to arrange a Teams room meeting

Walkie-Talkie Mode has now been enabled in our tenancy for Mobile Teams Clients (iOS and Android). This allows users to use a Smartphone or "Touch-To-Talk" enabled device or headset to use Walkie-Talkie type communication in a Teams Channel. 

More information on this feature can be found here: Getting started with Teams Walkie-Talkie Mode with a further end-user experience page here