Teams: Owners guide

There are 3 types of roles in a Team.

• Team owner
• Team member
• Team guest

For a deeper look at roles and permissions, see Team owner, member, and guest capabilities in Teams.

Microsoft provided a go-to guide for team owners that explains how to add and remove members, promote members to owners and change some of the Teams settings in relation to the different Team roles.

We would recommend that Team Owners periodically check the membership of their teams to ensure the members list is current and up-to-date.

Team Members can request someone be added as a Team member. These requests will be sent to the Team Owners and they can accept or deny these requests.

Teams can be set up so that users can join the Team via a joining link or code. Those who join via this route will not end up in the pending requests list but will show in the general channel as being added by a Team Owner.

Team Owners will soon be able to change the discoverability of their Team. Private teams that are discoverable will allow all users to search for and request to join the Team.

We would advise Team Owners to review all requests to join their Team carefully before accepting them.

All Nexus365 Teams are provisioned as Private Teams, accessible only to the list of Team Members controlled by the Team Owner. Team Owners can change the privacy of a Team to Public and this will make the Team open for all Nexus365 Users to Join.

Each Team provisioned sits on top of a SharePoint Online site. This site holds all the information stored within the Team. Owners should note that all members of the Team can access this SharePoint site.

Teams has been designed to work in a specific way on top of the supporting SharePoint site. It is strongly recommended that you do not make any changes to this SharePoint site. Please do not change document library structure or make any changes to the underlying SharePoint permissions. We have seen many instances where this has caused the Team to stop working correctly and, in some cases, changes to the permissions have compromised data security and opened up access to the Team for all users.

Members can share documents stored within the SharePoint site with users who are not members of the Team and this includes external parties. We do not recommend that this is done and would advised Team Owners to periodically check the SharePoint Site usage data which will show how users interact with your SharePoint site and importantly will show if files have been shared with external users by members of your Team.

Private Channels have been introduced as a method of providing separate secure channels and file areas within Microsoft Teams. If you are using Private channels, we would recommend that you review the Using Private Channels Effectively guidance to ensure that these are set up and managed correctly.

Guest access allows you to collaborate with external users by granting them access to existing teams and channels. The Team Owners can add Guests to a team, guests are required to have Microsoft account associated with their email. If they do not have this, they will be directed to create one for free direct with Microsoft.

You can find out more about Nexus365 Guest accounts.

Each Team comes with a General Channel. The general channel will always be the first channel in the Team and this cannot be renamed. The general channel can act as an audit history of Team Membership. This will show who was added to the Team and by who. It will show if a user leaves or joins the Team. We would advise Team Owners to periodically review this to ensure the Team is secured and users are joining as you would expect them to.

Team owners can archive their Nexus365 Team when it’s no longer active and reactivate this in the future if required.

There is currently no retention applied to Archived Teams. The Nexus Team may contact Team owners to confirm archived Teams are still required.

Team owners can nominate new owners from the membership of a team before they leave the University. Occasionally Teams are left "Orphaned" (that is, without an active owner). Any "Orphaned" teams can be rescued by using the Nexus365 Change of Ownership Teams or Private Channel in IT Self Service.

Teams and Private Channels security is very important so requests will be delayed or cancelled if the service request is not completed properly. 

Note that this form is only to be used for ownership changes: 

• If there are no current owners with active accounts. The service request will be delayed or cancelled if there are active owners of the Team or Private Channel.
• If requested by an authority in your Unit, College or Department - for example an ITSS / ITSS01 or other senior member of your unit (in cases where there are no active owners who can make the change).
• You are using the correct Team or Group title. The full name including the unit prefix is needed, otherwise the service request could be delayed or cancelled.

How to get the full actual name of your Team: 

1. Open Teams via your client or a browser
2. Click on the Team you're requesting an ownership change for and click "Manage Team"
3. Copy and paste the team name as shown next to the team logo
4. If you do not yet have access to the team as a member, please speak to someone else in the team to check the proper / actual name with them