Login with your UVic NetLink ID to onlineservices.uvic.ca to sign up for a UVic Office 365 account. Access Teams through the Office 365 portal.

Please allow up to 48 hours after you have signed up for Office 365 for all of the Teams features (including chat and calling for faculty and staff) to populate. After 48 hours, you may need to sign out of Teams and sign back in.

Ensure you have configured your Teams Desktop application as your preferred Office chat application.  You can do this in your Teams application’s in General Settings.  The setting to enable is called Register Teams as the chat app for Office (requires restarting Office applications). 

After registering Teams as the chat app for Office, in Outlook, open the contact card of the person you’d like to chat with and click the little chat icon. This will open up a chat in Teams with the person.

If you are having difficulty finding the person you want to add to your team, you can provide potential team members with a join code or link. Please note that a team owner will need to approve a member joining through a team link; the team code will allow members to join the team without any further action by a team owner.

Students registered in a course should automatically have access to the course team.

Yes, you can add people outside of UVic by email into your team.

Before inviting external guests into your team, you should review the content in your team to determine whether it is appropriate for external guests to access. Please contact privacyinfo@uvic.ca if you have any concerns.

Yes, a team for each of your courses will be automatically provisioned and available, should you choose to use it, on your Teams dashboard. Your teams will not be available to your students until you choose to ‘activate’ them. A step-by-step walkthrough of this activation process can be found here.

You can request a cross-listed team using the team request form.

See Microsoft’s Quick Start guides for class teams.

You can add your Brightspace course as a website tab in your course team.  Please see our how-to guide for more information.

Yes!  See Microsoft’s Breakout Rooms Quick Start Guide for Educators for some helpful tips to get started.

When recording a Teams meeting, ensure you click the ‘Start transcription’ button when you click ‘Start recording’. After the meeting, you will be able to view the recording with captions in OneDrive or the Team channels files, depending on where you hosted the meeting.

If you have a course that is using Teams, you will be able to access your course team. See Microsoft’s Quick Start guides for using class teams as a student.

If you aren’t in a course that is using Teams, you will be able to access the Teams workspace as well as the chat and calling features. This allows you to have one-on-one and group chats.

Please email helpdesk@uvic.ca if you have any questions.

There are a few things that students cannot do in UVic’s Microsoft Teams service:

• Students are unable to create private or channels. If a student is required to assist as a team owner and has a need to create private channels in a team, an employee can consider sponsoring them as an affiliate.
• Students are unable to start a recording of a Microsoft Teams meeting

Note: students who also have employee roles will get the employee functionality

In general, fewer teams remain more active so the fewer the better. If the membership of your channel is wholly contained in your team, it is probably a good candidate for a channel. If the membership of your channel involves people from another department or even guests from other institutions, that might be a trigger for a new team entirely. We get into a bit more detail in our team owner course: https://www.uvic.ca/systems/support/computerssoftware/microsoft365/protected/teams-request-form.php

Team channels are places where everyone on the team can have open conversations that will be viewable for everyone in the team.

Chats are meant for one-on-one or one-to-few collaboration and are only visible to those people in the chat. Chats are treated as transitory records and have a 5-month retention policy applied to them. Teams Chat messages that are older than 5 months will be deleted from the system.

You can also have private channels for focused collaboration where only select members will have access to the channel. There is a limit to the number of private channels and public channels in a team.  You can view the specific limitations on Microsoft’s limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams page.

There’s no limit on how many channels you can create, but there can only be a maximum of 200 channels in each team, regardless of who created them.

Microsoft Teams app works in Microsoft Edge, the latest version of Chrome, and the latest version of Firefox. Teams is not fully supported in Safari yet. If you are using Safari, you may have to go to Preferences > Privacy  and uncheck the Prevent cross-site tracking setting. See Microsoft’s Safari Browser support for more information.

PC users: If your computer is a DSS supported machine, install the Teams app through your computer’s Software Center application.

Mac, Android, and iOS users can download the apps from Microsoft’s Teams download page.

You must abide by UVic’s record management policies, including IM 7200, IM 7700, and IM 7800 while using Teams.  Microsoft Teams is built on the Office 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud, delivering advanced security and compliance capabilities. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Files are stored in your team’s shared storage and are backed by encryption. Notes are stored in OneNote and are backed by OneNote encryption.  You can read more about security and compliance in Microsoft’s documentation found here.

Students, please note that all interactions within UVic Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, are subject to the university expectations and policies. Please see Online Student Conduct for more information.

Microsoft Teams is a university communication channel. Abide by record management policies, including IM 7200, IM 7700, and IM 7800. Use UVic email for formal conversation and decisions and consult with your supervisor about your department’s data storage strategy.

Microsoft Teams Chats are treated as transitory records and have a 5-month retention policy applied to them. Teams Chat messages that are older than 5 months are deleted from the system.

Students, please note that all interactions within UVic Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, are subject to the university expectations and policies. Please see Online Student Conduct for more information.

All data is stored in Canada, however, some automated processing may occur outside of Canada. This may include things like spell check and video transcription. You can read more about privacy in Microsoft’s documentation found here.

Whitelisted apps include Praise and Weather. You will also be able to add the following Microsoft 365 apps:  Lists, Planner, Stream, Forms, Wiki, OneNote, Staff Notebooks, Edu Notebooks (class style teams), Assignments (class style teams), as well as the familiar Office 365 applications.

For privacy and information security reasons, you can only add apps that have been whitelisted by University Systems. Please contact helpdesk@uvic.ca if you have any questions about this.

You can customize your settings such as theme, language, time zone, and date. See Microsoft’s change settings in Teams documentation for more information.

10,000. Please see Limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams documentation for more information.

Yes. In chat, click the ellipses beside the user you wish to block and first select Mute and then Hide from the dropdown menu. You will not see any more messages from the user.

You can report concerns about online student conduct by emailing onlineconduct@uvic.ca Any concerns about student conduct may be reviewed and responded to in accordance with the appropriate university policy. 

Students will not be discoverable in Teams or other Microsoft 365 applications. Staff and faculty will be discoverable by default but can be hidden from the Gloabal Address List (GAL). Please contact helpdesk@uvic.ca for more information. 

No. The email attribute is only provided by UVic for faculty and staff. Students’ personal/preferred email (eg- joestudent@gmail.com or other non-UVic addresses) is not available on student profiles in Teams.

By September 2022, the retention schedule for credit course teams will be:

1) On the first day of the subsequent term course teams are archived. Team owners will continue to be able to access their archived team, and restore (un-archive) their team if required.  More information on Team archival and it’s impact can be found on Microsoft’s website: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/archive-or-restore-a-team-dc161cfd-b328-440f-974b-5da5bd98b5a7.

2)  Two years after archival course teams are permanently deleted. Team owners are encouraged to maintain their own copies of course team materials.

As of July 2022, all other team types (departmental, self-managed) have not yet had a deletion schedule determined.  There will be an expiration for inactive teams.

Teams chat messages are treated as transitory records and have a 5-month retention policy applied to them. Teams Chat messages that are older than 5 months are deleted from the system.

No, you cannot access a complete directory listing in Teams. You can search for individuals matching a given search criteria but you cannot browse a list of all users. This information cannot be searched by users who have not signed up and been enrolled in Teams.

To hide a team, click the ellipses in the top-right corner of the team and select Hide from the drop-down menu:

This will move the team to your Hidden teams:

Teams are collections of people, content, and tools that center around different projects, departments, and courses. Team members can have conversations, have video and audio calls, share files, notes, and more.

Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines, etc.

Every team has its own set of channels and will be automatically created with a General channel. The General channel is meant to be an all-encompassing place where you go to discuss topics general to the team.