OVERVIEW
Target audience: Students, faculty and staff members who are owners of a Microsoft Teams team
You can manage team membership in several ways: by adding individual members, using Active Directory groups to add multiple members at once, or sending out a generic invitation with a team code, so that people can join by themselves. You can also give non-team members permission to view or edit team content through the Team's SharePoint site.
In this article:
Add and remove team members
You can add students, faculty and staff members within McGill, as well as guests from outside McGill.
- From your Team, click the three dots and select Manage team.
- On the Members tab, you see the Team owner(s) and existing members. Click Add member.
- Start typing the name or email address of the member you want to add; if they are in the McGill directory, their name and email address will appear in a selection list. You can add multiple members at the same time, and then click Add.
The individuals you added will receive an email notification with a link to the Team.
NOTE:
You can enter the name of an Active Directory (AD) group to add all members at once; however, see the section below to understand how AD groups work with Teams.
You can also manage the membership of individual channels within your Team by making them "private", if needed.
To remove Team members
- Follow the steps above to access the Members tab for the Team you manage.
- Search for the member you want to remove.
- Once you have located that member in the list click the X to remove them.
Note that you cannot remove an entire Active Directory group at once. See below for further explanation.
NOTE:
If a member who needs to be removed has the role of Owner, you must change that member's role from Owner to Member to be able to remove that member from a Team.
Add Team members with Active Directory groups
Active Directory (AD) groups are used to assign roles and permissions in various systems at McGill. However, there are limitations on how they can be used to manage membership in Teams.
As the owner of a Team, you can select and add an AD group to your Team. However, each member of the AD group is simply added, one-by-one; there is no further association between the Team and the AD group.
- When the group membership is updated in Active Directory, new members are not automatically added to (or removed from) the Team.
- If you want to remove members from the Team, you have to remove each member one at a time. You cannot remove the entire AD group as a whole.
Grant permissions to files or folders through SharePoint
Behind every Team, there is a SharePoint site, which contains all the content of the Team. The SharePoint site is similar to OneDrive, but is accessible by all the Team members.
To access the Team's SharePoint site, go to the General channel, click the three dots in the upper right corner, and click open in SharePoint.
Grant permissions to all team content from SharePoint
In SharePoint, you can add or remove permissions for individuals or Active Directory groups from the site permissions window.
- Click the settings icon (gear) at the top right of the SharePoint site and select site permissions.
- Click Advanced permissions settings
- Select the group that ends with "_Group Members"
- Click New > Add users to this group
- Enter the name of an individual or AD group; wait till the name appears in the list and select it. You may add multiple users at the same time.
Enter a customized message so the recipients know what to expect and will not confuse the sharing notification with a phishing email.
NOTE:
If you don’t want to notify a user about permissions granted, click on Show options below the customized message field and unclick the Send an email notification checkbox.
- Click Share.
The users you have added to the group will now have access to the content of your SharePoint site; however, they will not have access to the Team from the Teams interface.
From the SharePoint site you can also remove permissions for all members of the AD group.
Grant permission for a specific folder or file from SharePoint
- Once you have opened the SharePoint site, navigate through the folder structure to find the file or folder you want to share. Click on the arrow next to the filename, or click the three dots and select Share.
- Enter the name of an individual or AD group; the name will pop up in a selection list.
- Enter a customized message for the recipients and click Send.
Relationship of SharePoint to Teams:
All members of your Team can access your Team's content through the SharePoint interface. However, if you add or remove permissions directly from the SharePoint site (using the instructions above) those permissions are not synced with the Team membership. This can be beneficial because you can grant permissions for people outside your Team to access specific files within the SharePoint site, without giving them access to the Team itself.
Creating a code that allows members to join on their own
You can generate a Team code so that anyone who has the link will to be able to join the Team without having to request permission from the Team owner.
How to create a code that allows members to join on their own
