Teams

Microsoft introduces default New Teams on April 1, 2024

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaborative work space that brings together people, content and conversations. With Teams, channels of colleagues can create content while collaborating with one another at the same time. Users can share files through Teams both internally and externally, and access their team files on SharePoint.

Teams’ powerful chat feature means that colleagues across the University can instantly communicate with one another through text, audio and video conferencing. Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are connected to Teams, similar to Slack. Teams also offers:

  • Team email addresses.
  • Integration with Outlook Calendar.
  • Mobile, desktop and online versions of the application.

If you use MS Planner within an MS Team, please note that the Planner Tasks are NOT backed up automatically. Read more on the Enterprise Service Centre knowledge base.

Teams is now available to all graduate students. Note that Teams is not currently available to undergraduates.

Microsoft Introduces New Teams 

Classic Teams will be automatically updated to new Teams for all users after March 31, 2024. The update is quick, easy and seamless: users will be able to pick up exactly where they left off after updating to the new version of Teams.

From February 2024, an informational banner will appear for users on classic Teams to remind them about the timeline for auto-update and encourage them to update to new Teams. Users can dismiss this banner in every client session until the end of February 2024, but it will reappear with each client launch.

What you need to know:

  • There is no action required from the user end to prepare for the update.
  • New Teams is a performance-focused update (up to 2x faster, 50% less memory usage). There is no major impact on user experience.
  • The update process is quick and easy. There should be no interruption to accessing teams and chats.
  • Users will not be able to switch back to classic Teams after March 31 because classic Teams will not be functional. Visit this page to learn more about the experience and different user impacts.

Important information for IT admins:

Additional Information:

Campus deployment
Deployed at U of T Saint George campus Deployed at U of T Missisauga campus Deployed at U of T Scarborough campus
User group
Available to Staff Available to Faculty Available to Students

Access

UTmail+ Home

Teams is available to all faculty, staff and graduate students and can be accessed online or by downloading the app. Users can only access individual Teams channels by invitation.

To access Teams online, log in to your Outlook/UTmail+ account and click on the waffle in the top left hand corner. Select the Teams tool. To download Teams, log in to the online version and click on the computer icon in the bottom left hand corner.

Requests for new teams should be made through the Enterprise Service Centre (ESC).

Products