When thinking about managing Microsoft Teams users, there are many components to cater for.
In this blog post, we aim to cover all the topics you need to know about if you’re charged with looking after your employees who use Teams.
Contents include:
- How do you manage Teams accounts and users?
- How do you control participants in Microsoft Teams?
- How do you manage team members in a Teams channel?
- How do I restrict members of a Microsoft Teams team?
- Can you restrict access to Microsoft Teams channels?
- Can I give someone access to just one channel in Teams?
Let’s jump straight into the first question.
Note: If you don’t see your Teams user management query covered here, follow us on LinkedIn and send us a message.
1 – How do you manage Teams accounts and users?
Managing Teams user accounts is an admin task usually associated with the Teams Admin Center (TAC).
This is an area reserved for Teams admins who know what they’re doing. The average Joe User won’t have access to here as part of their Teams account.
In the TAC, you can make basic changes like assigning a phone number to a user, applying new policies, and configuring Shared Calling.
For almost any basic one-off change, you’ll be catered to in the TAC. Just load it up, navigate to the Users menu on the left-hand side, and choose your action.
Access the TAC by navigating to admin.teams.microsoft.com and log in using your Microsoft admin credentials.
If you need to make wholesale or complex changes, you need a single pane of glass for Microsoft Teams management tasks.
That’s where we introduce you to Orto for Teams.
Originally designed to bring you Microsoft Teams auto-provisioning, Orto is now a full user management solution for enterprise Teams admin tasks.
Whether it’s speeding up moves, adds, and changes or getting a new user provisioned from scratch in the click of a button, Orto covers all your management needs in one place.
You get services and users sorted by location and can apply blanket changes instead of one-by-one.
And it’s not just user changes, either.
Automated provisioning and at-scale user management covers:
- Team access
- Policy assignment
- License assignment
- Number management
- Call queue assignment
- Moves, adds, changes, and deletions
When using Orto, you benefit from zero-touch provisioning directly from Entra ID.
That means you remove the chance of manual error and missed requirements on support tickets.
The next time a new user starts but you/they don’t know what Teams access they need, their needs have already been collated in a user persona.
If they are joining your company as part of the senior HR team, they will get templated access. This means you have a single provisioning ticket that doesn’t need to get revisited every time a user tries to do something new and discovers they don’t have the right license or policy.
With the ability to integrate with service management platforms like ServiceNow, WorkDay, Zendesk, and Power Platform, the combination of Orto and your ITSM platform means you could save $500,000 worth of time and productivity by introducing a new provisioning tool.
Seeing is believing?
👉 Book a free trial of Orto here.
2 – How do you control participants in Microsoft Teams?
Sticking with user management, access and restrictions within meetings can make or break a Teams meeting.
If you’re the meeting host
If you’re the meeting host, you can set a few permissions using the Meeting options menu.
To access this menu, open your scheduled meeting before it starts.
- Click Edit.
- Select Meeting options.
This will redirect to the Meeting options page, which will open in your browser.
Here, you have many meeting settings you can tweak. Controlling meeting participants are covered by these options:
- Who can bypass the lobby?
- Who can present?
- Selecting a co-organizer
- Allowing mics for attendees
- Allowing cameras for attendees
If you’re a Teams admin
If you’re a Teams admin, you can control meeting participants at a higher level. You may even choose to override the host controls mentioned above.
You can set global rules like:
- Who can bypass the lobby
- Who can present
- Co-organizers
- Manage what attendees can see
- Allow mics
- Allow cameras
- Allow green room
- Allow reactions
- Who can record
- Who can give and request screen control
- Allow participant renaming
All these settings apply to standard meetings and webinars but not town halls which are one-way meetings.
To change meeting policies, head to the TAC, select Meetings then Meeting policies.
3 – How do you manage team members in a Teams channel?
Managing team members in a Teams channel can be something of a personal or subjective choice.
However, there are some best practices you should follow as a channel owner or as a Teams admin passing on advice and setting the tone for the rest of your business.
Start by rolling out an org-wide naming convention for your channels and using the description for its intended purpose. If everyone knows what the channel is for, channel management is a lot easier from day one.
Channels provide a few management options for owners to play around with.
To access channel management features, right click the channel name and select Manage channel.
Inside this menu, you have the basic option to choose who can send messages. Select either everyone or owners only, depending on the channel purpose.
To start managing members in a Teams channel or team, right click the channel name and select Manage team.
In this menu, you can add new members or make existing members an owner.
Moving to the Settings menu across the top pane will open Member permissions, Guest permissions, and choose who can use @mentions.
4 – How do I restrict members of a Microsoft Teams team?
You can restrict members of a team by selecting the relevant options in the Member permissions menu.
Here, you can enable/disable the following:
- Allow members to create and update channels
- Allow members to create private channels (only applicable if the above is selected)
- Allow members to delete and restore channels
- Give members the option to delete their messages
- Give members the option to edit their messages
- Allow members to add and remove apps
- Allow members to upload customized apps
- Allow members to create, update, and remove tabs
- Allow members to create, update, and remove connectors
5 – Can you restrict access to Microsoft Teams channels?
You can restrict access to any Teams channel by making it private. This means only invited members can access a channel.
These channels won’t be searchable to anyone without access to the channel. So, there’s no chance of unwanted guests popping up out of the blue.
To create a private channel, start creating a new channel as standard but change the Privacy option to Private – specific team mates have access.
You’ll then be prompted to add members to your private channel by entering their names.
You can’t make an existing channel private, but you can change the privacy of a team. To do, select Edit team when you right click a team then change the privacy to Private.
What is the difference between private and public teams?
The setup of a team is the same whether it’s private or public. What you can do when inside a team is the same too.
The main differences are the access, visibility, and usage.
| Private teams | Public teams |
| Searchable by members only | Searchable by all |
| Members must be invited | Members can request to join |
| Share sensitive data and information | Share any data and information |
| Used for private projects | Used for all purposes |
| Displayed using a padlock symbol | No padlock symbols |
6 – Can I give someone access to just one channel in Teams?
This is a common use case for external contractors, customers, or other parts of your business using different Teams tenants. You can give someone access to a specific team in Teams. By default, they will have access to all the public channels within that team.
For example, you may have merged companies recently and are yet to consolidate all your Teams users.
To grant these “guests” access to a specific channel in Teams, right click the channel name and choose Add member. Then add their email address to send an invite to the team.
The bottom line on managing Microsoft Teams users
For in-team and in-meeting changes, there are lots of settings areas you can use to create mini-policies and make on-the-fly changes.
If you’re a small business that makes minimal user changes, the TAC may be all you need for user management.
For businesses with over 1,000 users or those in industries with high turnover, you need a holistic management solution that covers user, number, and policy management.
Orto for Teams is purpose-built with you in mind, helping you to optimize your user management processes.
