Microsoft Confidential—Do Not Share
Microsoft Teams FAQ: Partners
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Contents
Product (Preview, Positioning, Availability, Integration)
Sales Guidance
Deployment and IT Admin
Partner and Developer Ecosystem
Objection Handling/Rude Q
Product (Preview, Positioning, Availability, Integration)
Q: What is Microsoft Teams?
A: Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace in Office 365 that is a hub for teamwork and is extensible and customizable for the information your team needs. Microsoft Teams is flexible for file storage, chats, calls, meetings, private and group messages.You can rely on the same security, privacy, transparency and support that comes with Office 365 to help ensure privacy for your team’s most sensitive collaboration.
Q: How does Microsoft Teams fit into the changing landscape of work?
A: We see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done. More transparency and openness in decision making. Flatter organizations structures to keep information flowing and with team members working from everywhere, even physical workspaces are changing.
With Microsoft Teams, we see an opportunity to create a more open, digital environment that can meet the evolving needs of today’s teams. Microsoft Teams is intended to be a digital translation of an open office space. One that fosters easy connection and conversation to help people build relationships. One that makes work visible, integrated, and accessible across the team, so everyone can stay in the know.
Q: How does Microsoft Teams fit in the Office collaboration story?
A: Microsoft Teams brings chat-based team collaboration to the Microsoft Collaboration story. With Microsoft Teams, Office 365 provides a competitive offering in this emerging market category with Office 365 advantages such as Office 365 integration, security and compliance and global scale.
Microsoft recognizes that there is not one collaboration tool or service that universally meets the needs of our customers. Unique situations, workstyles, functional roles and workforce diversity call for different collaboration solutions. Teams are diverse, and because of this, some may use all Office 365 collaboration solutions or just one or two of these apps to collaborate.
Q: What happens on Launch Day, November 2?
A: Starting November 2ndMicrosoft Teams is available to customers in preview, which means that IT Admins ofOffice 365commercial customers can begin usingMicrosoft Teams. We recommend that IT Admins enable Microsoft Teams (it’s disabled by default during the preview) and begin piloting Microsoft Teamsnow with targeted teams in their organization.
We also announced the Microsoft Teams Developer Platform for preview, enabling developers to extend the Microsoft Teams offering. Partners like Zendesk and Asana have already leveraged the Teams Developer Platform to bring their offerings directly into the Microsoft Teams experience with integrations that are coming soon. Connectors from over 70 additional services like Jira and Trello are also available today, and more than 40 bot developers have already committed to integrate their bots into Microsoft Teams in the coming months.
Q:How does Microsoft Teams help teams achieve more?
A: As a hub for teamwork, Microsoft Teams is a customizable workspace in Office 365 where content, people and tools – many of which people are already familiar with – live together so teams have instant access to everything they need to help enable better, faster decisions across organizations. Tabs provide instant access to frequently used documents and cloud services like PowerPoint and Planner.More services like Zendesk and Asanawill be available soon. Bots like Polly, Meekan and Workbot, which will be available soon will allow teams to explore data and take quick actions. Integration with Connectors will provide updates from services like Twitter, Dynamics CRM Online, VSTS, or GitHub.
Q: What are the Microsoft Teams supported markets?
A: Microsoft Teams will launchin 181 Office 365 markets, with localized language support with 18 languages in 52 markets. The 18 supported languages are: English (US), Chinese (Simple & Traditional), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Turkish, Czech, Polish.
Q: What do customers need to do to turn on Microsoft Teams?
A: Following Microsoft Teams preview which begins on November 2, customers with an Office365 commercial suite can turn on Microsoft Teams for their organization by flipping the tenant switch from Off to On in the Office 365 admin center. Admins go to:Office 365 admin center and click ServicesSettings & Add insMicrosoft TeamsOn. Microsoft Teams is accessible to end users via the Office 365 app launcher as well as via the link:
Q: Is Microsoft Teamsavailable to all existing and new Office 365 commercial customers?
A: Microsoft Teams is available with most Office O365 commercial suites: Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3, and E5. Microsoft Teams will also be available to existing E4customers who have purchased E4 prior to its retirement. Team is also available to non-profit customers as well.
Q: What is the availability for Education and Government customers?
A: Microsoft Teams is not available to Education and Government customers at this time. Microsoft is currently focused on making the preview and GA a great experience. We have started investing engineering work to ensure future readiness for Education and Government, and will communicate roadmap after commercial GA.
Q: Can a customer purchase Microsoft Teams as a standalone service?
A: No.Microsoft Teams requires customers to have additional products such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Office Online, so Microsoft Teams is only available as part of Office 365 commercial suites, as listed above.
Q: Is there any tiering of Microsoft Teams features across different O365 suites?
A: No. Microsoft Teams has the same core functionalities across all Office 365 commercial suites listed above. This allows all our customers to immediately get the most value from Teams.
Q: What is T-Bot?
A: T-Bot is a help bot that answers questions and provides help about Microsoft Teams through chat. T-Bot is available in English now and will be available in more languages soon.
Q: What level of security and compliance does Microsoft Teams support?
A: Microsoft Teams is Tier C compliant at launch. This includes: ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SSAE16 SOC1 Type I & II, SOC2 Type I and II, HIPPA, FERPA, GLBA. Microsoft Teams also enforces team wide and tenant wide two-factor authentication, single sign on through Active Directory and encryption of data in transit and at rest. Files and notes are stored in SharePoint and OneNote, respectively, which are backed by SharePoint and OneNote respective encryption.
Microsoft Teams was included in our SOC audit for this year and we expect final report by end of 2016.
Q: What does Tier C compliance mean?
A: Within theMicrosoft compliance framework, Microsoft classifies Office 365 applications and services into four categories. Each category is defined by specific compliance commitments that must be met for an Office 365 service, or a related Microsoft service, to be listed in that category. Services in compliance categories C and D that have industry leading compliance commitments are enabled by default while services in categories A and B come with controls to enable or to disable these services for an entire organization. Details can be found in this Compliance Framework for Industry Standards and Regulations.
Q: Are Office 365 security features like legal hold and eDiscovery supported in Microsoft Teams?
A:We are proud to have achieved SOC-2 compliance before the launch of our preview, and we are working to achieve additional compliance certifications. We are working to support archiving, eDiscovery, and legal hold, based on Microsoft Exchange.
Q: What client platforms and browsers does Microsoft Teams support?
A: Microsoft Teams is available on Windows (Windows 7 and above) and Mac desktop (Mac 10.10 and above), web, iOS (9.0 and above), Android (4.4 and above) and Windows Phone (10.0.10586 and above).
Microsoft Teams supports the web client on Microsoft Edge 12+, Internet Explorer 11+, Firefox 47.0+, and Chrome 51.0+. Users trying to open the Microsoft Teams web client on Safari will be directed to download the desktop client. Microsoft is looking into Safari support and will share updates via the public Office 365 Roadmap.
Q: Can I collaborate with people outside of my organization using Microsoft Teams?
A: External access is not available in Microsoft Teams preview.We are working on several ways to expand the value of Microsoft Teams to more diverse types of organizations and teams, including the ability for guests outside the team or company to participate in a meaningful way.
Q: What is the maximum number of people in a MicrosoftTeam?
A: Each Microsoft Team can have a maximum of 600 per Team and 80 people in a meeting.
Q: Does Microsoft have access to uploaded content?
A: No. Content is stored in OneDrive for Business and/or SharePoint Online, customer data stays within the tenant.
Q: What are the minimum technical requirements for Microsoft Teams?
A: Microsoft Teams customers must be enabled on Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory (or sync). Microsoft Teams can also support some scenarios of hybrid deployment.
Exchange Online
The ideal state is for all Microsoft Teams users to have their mailboxes homed on Exchange Online. The minimum state for users to use Microsoft Teams are Exchange mailboxes on-premises with their identities synchronized to Office 365. For these Exchange hybrid customers, if the user's mailbox is on-premises, the only limitation is the user cannot add Connectors to Microsoft Teams channels. However, as long as one IT Pro / user can add Connectors for a given team, the rest of the team members can have Exchange mailboxes homed on premises with their identities synchronized to O365. Exchange mailbox enabled ('online' or 'on-premises + directory sync') is required.
Group Creation Enablement
Group creation must be enabled as a feature under Exchange (it is on by default) so that groups can be created. IT Admins can limit users who can create groups through updating MSOL settings in Powershell and restrict to a specific security group.
Azure Active Directory Connect for Hybrid Users
All Office 365 subscribers are assigned a free license by default for Azure Active Directory. In the case where tenant have users' mailboxes homed on-premises, they must go through O365 Directory synchronization to either:
- Synchronize Identities: Synchronize on-premises directory objects with Office 365 and manage users on-premises. Users can also synchronize passwords so that the users have the same password on-premises and in the cloud, but they will have to sign in again to use Office 365.
- Federate Identities: Synchronize on-premises directory objects with Office 365 and manage your users on-premises. The users have the same password on-premises and in the cloud, and they do not have to sign in again to use Office 365. This is often referred to as single sign-on.
Q: What is the SharePoint integration with Microsoft Teams?
A: Every Microsoft Team channel comes with a Files tab so that users can upload, edit and save files that are shared with the team. This tab uses SharePoint for storage. Users can additionally integrate an existing SharePoint to their Microsoft Team by clicking “+”at the top of the page to add SharePoint as a tab.
For advanced SharePoint functionality, Microsoft Team users can easily drill down to see the SharePoint document library, making it easy to manage files, apply workflow, review version history and comply with document retention policies.
Q: What is the user experience if the customer doesn’t have a SharePoint license?
A: A key user benefit of Microsoft Teams is Office 365 integration which includes file sharing through SharePoint. This makes it possible to find files in one place for teamwork including chats, people, and everyday tools. If a customer doesn't have SharePoint enabled in their tenant, Microsoft Teams users will not be able to share files in Microsoft Teams. File sharing between users in private chat will also not function as OneDrive (which is tied to the SharePoint license) is required for that functionality.
Q. How is Microsoft Teams integrated with Office 365 Groups?
A: Office 365 Groups is a cross-application membership and various shared assets used by Office 365 apps and services, enabling a teamto collaborate effectively using the different team services all team members have access to. When a Microsoft team is created, Office 365 Groups membership group is created, which provides the team with a SharePoint site, OneNote notebook and more. Further, an owner of an Office 365 Group which meets certain criteria can activateMicrosoft Teams for that group. To be activated for Microsoft Teams, theOffice 365 Group needs to be set to "private" by the Team owner and have fewer than 600 members.
Q: Is there interoperability between Microsoft Teams and Email?
A:Microsoft Teamsusers will receive a missed activity notification via email if an @mention or private chat message has gone without a response for 90 minutes. Users will also receive an email notification when they are added to a new Microsoft Team.
There is some interoperability with Calendar, where Microsoft Teams users can see scheduled Skype for Business meetings from their Calendar and join those meetings from Microsoft Teams.
Q: Will Microsoft Teams support additional email integration in the future?
A: Email is a powerful and proven tool for communication, especially with broad audiences and across company boundaries. Today, Microsoft Teams uses email to notify people of missed messages and other important updates. We are also looking at appropriate ways to integrate email into our chat-based team workspacein the future.
Q: How does Microsoft Teams integrate with Skype for Business?
A:Microsoft Teams users can join scheduled Skype Meetings on their calendar from the Meetings icon. see additional detail in Rude Q&A>
Q: Will Microsoft Teams replace Skype for Business over time?
A: No. There is not a plan for replacement. Skype for Business provides best-of-breed telephony and conferencing for Office 365, and is integrated into the Microsoft Teams experience to help teams have the right kind of conversations, chat, voice and video, in the context of their work
Q: Is Yammer dead? How is it different from Microsoft Teams?
A: No, Yammer is a key part of our Office 365 collaboration vision to help people connect across a company and used by 85% of the Fortune 500. We continue to invest in new Yammer features, including integrations with Delve, Office Video, and Skype Meeting Broadcast. Yammer is great for cross-organizational conversations where one-to-many conversations are critical.
Q: Does Microsoft Teams support 3rd party cloud storage solutions?
A: Microsoft Teams does not support Google Drive, DropBox and Box at this time. OneDrive and SharePoint are built into Microsoft Teams for encrypted cloud storage.
Q: What are the Office 365 services that back Microsoft Teams?
A: Microsoft Teams is part of the O365 Collaboration solution with a foundation built on Office 365 Groups, Office Graph and Trust. Microsoft Teams is supported by SharePoint for files, OneNote for notes, Planner for project management, Power BI for data visualization, Exchange for calendar, scheduled meetings and Connectors.
Microsoft Teams also benefits from the global reach Office 365 data centers.
Q: What is the basis for status in Microsoft Teams?
A:Status in Microsoft Teams is based on the person’s activity in the Microsoft Teams app. The signals for Status are different from presence in Skype for Business. There are plans to bring these together in the future.
Q: What is the data retention and data deletion policy in Microsoft Teams?
A: Microsoft Teams retains all messages. Microsoft Teams retains deleted messages for at least 7 days and at most 30 days before messages are permanently deleted. However, there is no support yet for retaining edit and deletion logs for all messages.
Q: What accessibility tools are included in Microsoft Teams?
A: Microsoft Teams supports screen readers, keyboard navigation, high contrast, and other accessibility features. We'll have more to share on supportedaccessibility standardsplans at GA.
Sales Guidance
Q: Who is the target customer for Microsoft Teams?
A:Microsoft Teams targets highly engaged teams across companies of all sizes, from small businesses to enterprise customers. Microsoft Teams is well suited for teams that work closely together, iterating on shared deliverables. Some roles that fit these scenarios include Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, and Customer Service.
Q: What is the business opportunity for driving Microsoft Teams usage?
A: Microsoft Teams will be made broadly available to most Office 365 commercial suites customers. Chat-based team collaboration creates new, viral usage scenarios and an expanded Office 365 footprint in our customers. By expanding the value customers receive from Office 365 we strengthen the overall usage and loyalty to Office 365.