Use of Email Groups, Teams, Office 365 SharePoint, and Planner

Summary

Information about creating, using, and deleting Office 365 Teams, Groups, SharePoint, Plans

Overview

Within Office 365 – staff, faculty, and students – have access to many applications as part of an integrated application suite. The collaborative nature of the integrated applications means the use of one application such as email groups will have a systematic effect of also providing and effecting other applications such as Teams, SharePoint, and Planner. Individuals should be thoughtful in their use and creation of these resources. A-B Tech assists in the provisioning of these resources to ensure proper governance.

Creating a Resource (Teams, Groups, SharePoint, Plans)

Creation of any of the services – an email Group with an active email address, a Team, an Office 365 SharePoint site, or a Planner site creates a resource that has access to all of the other resource. Simply stated: A Group is a Team is a SharePoint Site and is a Planner Plan. They are all linked to each other. Conversely, they cannot be turned off should you not want one of the other resources. Limits may be placed on a person’s ability to create these resources if the user is found to be violating the following governing procedures.

Resources Are Email Addresses

Important: When you create a team, group, SharePoint site, or plan, you also create an associated email address. Anyone can send to that address in which anyone in that group will be able to read the email. There is a possibility that your group email address can be discovered by other people in the organization.

Naming a Resource

Anyone can create a resource using email (exchange groups), Teams, Planner, or SharePoint. The name you use will also be the name of the other integrated services as they are all created at the same time. The College employs automated rules that prevent the use of some words and names in a resource. The application will warn you what names you will not be able to use.

Resource Naming Protocols

Not all names will be allowed. You may not use department or division names. You may not use profanity. You may not use any names that make it sound like you operate from a position of authority. The list of terms you may not use is maintained by the Information Technology department. To create a team without a naming restriction, you must request the name from Information Technology. The request may need to go through an approval process.

Auto-Generated Naming

The resource will have a default name. When anyone at A-B Tech attempts to create a resource, it will have a prefix or suffix added automatically to the name so it is easy to identify who created team, group, SharePoint, Plan, etc.

To create a team without a prefix or suffix, you must request the name from Information Technology. The request may need to go through an approval process.

Names for Classes

If creating resources for a class, the name should follow the current curriculum standard – Year, Semester, Subject, Number, Section (2018FA CTI-240-D1).

Deleting a Resource

Individuals who created the resource have full control to delete the resource. Individuals should exercise regular maintenance to ensure content is not stagnant and College resources are not wasted. The Information Technology department may periodically apply retention policies to remove and/or archive content that may not be in use. The automated policies should notify the original creator 30 days before content removal so the creator may stop the removal.

If a resource is found to violate these governing procedures or violates acceptable computer use policies, the resource may be deleted. The Information Technology department also maintains the right to remove any resource for any reason but will make good faith attempts to notify the creator of a resource before removal and provide additional information about its removal.

Teams Chats

Careful consideration should be used when communicating in chat.

• Team Chat
  • Everyone in the Team will see the contents of the messages
• One-to-Many
  • Everyone in the list of people will see the messages. People may be added or removed and the content will be there as you add people to the chat
• One-to-One
  • Perhaps the most private but other individuals may be added at a future time and the historical content may be accessed. One-to-one chats are best preserved as one-to-one. Begin a new chat with multiple recipients if you would like to expand your conversation with other people.

Key Words: Office 365, Teams, Groups, SharePoint, share point