FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

No. All members of a Team can see all channels. Chats can be private among some members, however.

The best way to notify a Team member of new content would be to tag that team member with an @ symbol.

Guest accounts have some limitations within Teams.

No. Many of the voice features within Teams requires Skype Online, which is not currently licensed for the SMU tenant. Enterprise Voice features are coming, utilizing Skype for Business on premises via the Phone Replacement Project.

Microsoft Teams in Office365 shares the smu.edu namespace with other campus services, including email. The prefix is required to differentiate Office365 Groups (which is the foundation for Teams) from security and distribution groups, as well as to avoid conflicts with campus user email addresses.

Microsoft accepts submissions via . Here you can submit suggestions, and upvote existing recommendations for product enhancements.

Microsoft provides publicly available for MS Teams users.

See for a summary of Team creation options for SMU’s EDU tenant.

is updated by Microsoft with a list of known issues for MS Teams.

Here’s how you change your team’s privacy setting:

  1. Click the ellipses next to the team name and choose “Edit Team”.
  2. A pop up box will appear and there will be a drop-down menu labeled “Privacy.”
  3. Then you can select Private or Public for the team’s discoverability setting.

provides a list of what’s new in MS Teams.

MS Teams (and Groups) at SMU have a one-year expiration policy. Teams owners have an option to renew Teams, and will receive an email notification 30, 15 and 1 day(s) prior to expiration. Once a Team expires, owners have an additional 30 days to recover deleted items. Please contact the OIT Help Desk for assistance with recovery.

Files shared in private chats are stored in the OneDrive belonging to the user who shared the file. Files uploaded to the Teams channels are stored in the corresponding Group’s SharePoint instance. When a Team is deleted, users will have access to the content they shared in private chat (via OneDrive), but not the channel content.

No. You can invite an outside party into Teams, and Teams will bring them in as guests. Guests have almost the same access as SMU members of a Team. They can add files, comment, chat, and work on other integrations in your Team.

Currently, our account termination process removes membership of on-premises security and distribution groups, but does not do the same for Office 365 Groups and Teams. If a member of your Office 365 has changed roles or ended employment, you must manually remove them as a Team member.