Requesting a new team (non academic)

Contact the teams creator for your section in this SharePoint list. If there's nobody listed in your section, contact us to request a team, including evidence of authorisation (such as a forwarded email).

Teams for academic modules 

Module teams are created automatically with the appropriate students and staff added. There is no link between the student timetable in SDS and Microsoft Teams calendar. 

Seminar groups

These aren't created for you. How to invite seminar groups to a meeting:

• Open Teams on your computer
• Click Calendar (left menu)
• Double-click a day/time in the calendar and manually invite the relevant students. The meeting isn't attached to the module team, and can be set as a recurring meeting

You can export the event attendance list from the meeting participants menu.

Creating teams for your section

• Initially, use your organisational arrangement as a guide for grouping. Create one team for your section, and use channels for each team within your section
• For example, instead of creating a separate teams for Admin and one for Finance, have one team for a group named Business Support, and create channels for Admin and Finance
• As you become more familiar with Microsoft Teams, you can add more your departmental teams or for topics such as projects
• Recommendation: start with as few teams as possible and add teams as you identify where distinct teams are preferable to channels

Benefits of this approach: it's better to start with fewer teams, and add as you need them, rather than start with too many and reduce them. It promotes cross-section collaboration and prevents information silos, with shared channels visible to all members. In addition, there will be fewer teams to monitor, and team owners can see all channels for an easy overview.

Do not use ‘special characters’

Your team name can't include any of the following characters:

~ # % & * { } + / \ : < > ? | ' "

It will affect functionality such as meetings.

If your team name uses these characters, don't rename it. Information Services are currently investigating the best way to deal with this issue.

Information Services has responsibility for managing names, and may need to delete your team if a name is confusing. This would mean losing its history (chat, files etc).

Prefix your team name with your departmental name (or its abbreviation) or use KENT. Make it identifiable to everyone at Kent, and use the same prefix for all the teams in your department.

For example, Estates-Customer Services or EST-Customer Services is OK;  Customer Services as a teame name won't work. We can't have duplicate names across Kent.

We recommend the following default settings. Click the three ellipses (...) next to your Team and selecting Manage Team to implement them; you can change these settings at any time once you know how you want to work.

• Let members delete their messages
• Let members edit their messages
• Let members create and update channels
• Let members create, update and remove tabs  
• Don't let members create private channels  
• Don't let members delete and restore channels  

1. Open Teams 
2. Click Teams in the left side bar
3. Click Join or create a team then Create a team 
4. Choose Build a team from scratch 
5. Choose Private (a Public team would be open to anyone at the University, including students) 
6. Enter a name (following the naming guidelines above), and click Create
7. Add members to the team by name or email 

If you get an error when creating a team, try to create it outside of business hours 09:00 - 17:00 if possible. Microsoft servers are busiest during those times as usage has surged to meet the national increase in home working.  

• Teams webinar for staff (YouTube)
• Teams FAQs on SharePoint
• Instructor-led training on Teams from Microsoft 
• Microsoft Teams video training
• Teams guide (PDF)

Ask us a question

• Get in touch to ask for help or give us feedback