Microsoft Teams NOT in Preview for EDU
Update: The word form Microsoft now is that Teams is NOT in preview for Education. Dan Stevenson (Microsoft) said in the Tech Community that the blog post referenced below was incorrect. According to Dan, Teams is in a very limited NDA beta program and preview should be coming…. yes you guessed it… “soon.” Dan’s words:
The blog post is incorrect. Teams for Edu is not in preview, but there is a very limited NDA beta program. Proper preview – like we did for commercial users between November and March – is coming soon. Please bear with us as we line some things up.
Back to the original post…
I posted a while back about Microsoft Teams not being available for Education customers back before GA. All we were being told was that we would hear more about availability for Education and Government customers after goes GA. Today Ben Dumke pointed out to me a post on the Microsoft Teams Blog (“Microsoft Teams Top Questions Answered”) from yesterday (March 15) that has new info for us. Karuana Gatimu says in the post:
Q. Is Microsoft Teams available for EDU customers?
A. Our product is currently in preview for EDU customers. We will make announcements about its general availability soon. You can stay up to date on these announcements here or at our Office Blog.
I’ll grant you that this is not a lot of news, but at least we know that somebody somewhere in Education is actually kicking the tires. I don’t know who, but would like to find out. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the comment about announcements about GA coming “soon” really means soon.
What is problematic for Education customers is that our users see the tile for Teams when they logon, but if they click it they see a message that they should ask their admins to enable it. That would not be so bad, save for the fact that we can’t do that.
Dan Stevenson, Principal Group Program Manager for Teams explained why this is in a post in the TechCommunity.:
The tile appears in the app launcher because those users are in fact licensed for Teams. But then we have the tenant-level switch set to off, and locked off for Edu (for the time being), so nobody actually has access. The tenant switch and licensing are two separate beasts – it’s impossible to have the tile (driven by licensing) obey the tenant setting (driven by business logic inside Teams).
Unfortunately, we can only update the licensing configuration about once every two months. Because of our intentions to make available Teams for Edu customers not long after GA for commercial customers, we did not want to be gated on that timing.
Every two months? I thought things in the cloud were supposed to be nimble and responsive. Only being able to change licensing information ever two months is neither. I guess this is all part of adapting to life with our heads (and services) in the cloud.