FAQs and troubleshooting

It may seem obvious if you’re already using it, but MS Teams and email are quite different methods of communication, and it’s good to bear that in mind when interacting with people who may not be used to the more immediate workflow of MS Teams collaboration.

• Teams can be good for discussion and collaboration whereas communications requiring a formal record are often best sent via email
• Teams incorporates real-time messaging, both in Teams/Channels and direct Chats
• With email you set the audience when you enter addresses in the recipient fields
• You can check membership of a Team in the application. By default, all Team members can access all Channels, but some Channels may be set to Private and have restricted membership
• Think of Channels within a Team as similar to ongoing email threads specific to a particular subject area
• Each Channel will have its own Files area, everyone with access to the Channel can access the files. It’s far more efficient to share files with people in this manner and allows for collaborative document creation and editing.
• When new people are added to the Team, they automatically get access to all the previous conversations and files

Notifications

Teams, and Channels within them, will appear in Bold in the Teams tab (as will Chats in their tab) when they have activity that you’ve not seen. The Activity tab is more focussed on events specific to you, including replies and reactions to posts you’ve made, missed calls and voicemails.

Hiding a Team/Channel

You may find that you’ve been added to Teams as part of a project, organisational group or Technical Service that isn’t directly relevant to you. You can hide this Teams (or just particular Channels within them) by clicking the ellipsis next to their name and selecting Hide.

You can also switch from Grid to List view to make it easy to spot Channels with new conversations in Bold and show/hide channels that you’re not actively

Notifications settings

Once you’re a member of a few Teams you’ll no doubt notice that the notifications can get distracting, if not overwhelming. Teams allows you to set default Notifications preferences, and also specify settings on a per channel basis that override the default.

It’s important that you take time to familiarise yourself with the notification options and customise them to ensure you receive the notifications you want, when you want. The mobile app (for Android an iOS devices) also incorporates Quiet Times, allowing you to keep the app running on your device outside of regular office hours, but not be bothered by notifications.

Setting your status

Your status will be automatically set appropriately if you’re on a call, or your Exchange calendar has you marked as being in a meeting, but you can also set it manually by clicking on your icon in the top right-hand corner of the app. You can select from options such as Busy, Do Not Disturb, Appear offline, etc. These can be set permanently, or for specific intervals such as one hour or a day. These allow you to carry on working within the app without being interrupted, so long as people respect your status.

If you are having issues with Teams, you can try clearing the cache on your device, which may help solve some issues you may be experiencing.

You won't lose any user data by clearing the cache and restarting Teams after you clear the cache might take longer than usual because the Teams cache files have to be rebuilt.

Managed Windows Desktop Service

On the Windows Desktop Service you can clear the MS Teams cache by going into Software Center.

To access the Software Center, type in 'Software Center' in Windows menu search bar on your PC or laptop and select ‘Microsoft Teams Maintenance – Clear_Teams_Cache’ and follow the on-screen prompts.

Windows Devices

• If Teams is still running, right-click the Teams icon in the taskbar, and then select Quit
• Open the Run dialog box by pressing the Windows logo key and R
• In the Run dialog box, enter %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams and then select OK
• Delete all files and folders with in the %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams directory
• Restart Teams

macOS Devices

• If Teams is still running, right-click the Teams icon in the dock, and then select Quit, or press Command -Q
• In the Finder, open the /Applications/Utilities folder, and then double-click Terminal
• Copy and paste the following command, and then press Return:
• rm -r ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Teams
• Restart Teams

Once a team is no longer active but needs to be kept around for reference or reactivation in the future, Team Owners should archive the team. The conversations and files in the team become read-only once you archive it. You’ll still be able to search through it for stuff you need—you can even keep it as a favourite. Only team owners can archive and restore teams.

Note: Archived teams are still subject to expiry and will need to be renewed by Team Owners periodically.

Information on how to archive and restore a team:

Team owners should archive any data that needs to be retained and delete teams that are no longer required or inactively used.

In order to keep the service clear of stale or inactive content, it is planned to routinely expire and remove inactive teams and their contents.

Advice on archiving research data can be found at:

Desktop or web instructions:

• If you have been added as a guest into another organisations Team, then a list of those organisations will appear when you click on your 'picture' in the top right-hand corner of the Teams client
• Select the organisation you wish to switch to; this will log you in to see the Teams within the organisation you have been added to. Please note you may be required to log in the first time you switch to the organisation
• Carry out the same process to switch back to Loughborough University organisation

Three years after a Microsoft team is created, it will automatically be deleted if it has not been actively used during that period.

When a team is about to expire, team owners will receive reminder emails 30, 15 and 1 day prior to expiry. Using the Renew now button when the reminders first appear will immediately extend the date by 3 years and prevent future reminders.

If the team owners fail to do this, the expiry mechanism checks whether there has been any team activity and if there has, the team is automatically renewed.

If the team owners don't manually renew the team and the expiry mechanism determines that there has been no team activity the team and all its contents are deleted.

If the team owners have all left the University, the same process will occur, except that there will be no owners to receive the notifications. For this reason, it is recommended that each team has multiple owners.

To see the date a team will expire or renew a team, follow this short guide using the button below on the Microsoft website: 

Sign in to multiple O365 accounts at the same time through a web browser:

• Open the Chrome browser
• Open the menu (click on the 3 dots which are at the top right of the window)
• Select ‘open new incognito window’ – 3rd option down on the menu
• This will open a ‘dark mode’ window
• Now log into the Office 365 account; so do a quick google search for Microsoft O365 login, then log into the account when prompted
• Now the O365 page will appear; on the left hand side there is a ‘Teams’ icon. Click on this and the Teams app window will open

It will only be possible to create a SharePoint site by creating a Team (in Microsoft Teams) first which automatically creates and governs an associated SharePoint site.