Microsoft Teams is now Available for Education
Teams The word “soon” can have varied meanings, but in terms of Microsoft Teams, it means one week. After becoming generally available for Business customers on March 14, Microsoft announced the availability of Teams for Education customers yesterday on March 21. The announcement was made on a post on the Microsoft Teams blog:
Last week, Microsoft Teams became generally available to Office 365 business users. Today we’re making Teams available in Office 365 Education, free for faculty, staff and students. We’re thrilled by the enthusiasm for Teams in the education community and look forward to seeing how customers build Teams into the way they collaborate every day.
Finally, education customers get to play with the newest toy in Office 365! Teams is off by default, but admins can enable it on their tenants for Faculty & Staff and/or Students. The post provided instructions for enabling Teams, as part of a FAQ. A couple interesting notes in the FAQ covered who was eligible for Teams:
Microsoft Teams is available in all Office 365 for Education suite licensing: Education, Education Plus and Education E5, as well as existing Education E3 customers who purchased E3 prior to its retirement.
So if you’re in education, you get Teams at no added cost.
The FAQ also talked about client support:
Microsoft Teams runs on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and web platforms. Teams supports the web client on Microsoft Edge 12+, Internet Explorer 11+, Firefox 47.0+, and Chrome 51.0+. Users who try to open the Microsoft Teams web client on Safari are directed to download the desktop client. Safari support may be added at a later time.
Sorry Safari, no Teams love for you!
I’m having difficulties with Edge and IE on my machines with a loop of authentications requests before finally telling me that either something went wrong or that I have to allow 3rd party cookies (even though it is already set). A quick look at forums show other people are having the same problem. Firefox, Chrome, and the desktop app all worked, so I’m not too worried about the Edge/IE issues for the moment. Your mileage may vary.
If you are looking for some help with Teams, check out these links from Microsoft:
My university has enabled Teams in the test tenant where we will be kicking the tires a bit. I’m looking forward to putting Teams to use in the production tenant soon. I expect there will be a rapid take-up of Teams in Higher Education because of all the pent-up demand. What are you planning to do at your institution? Please share in the comments.