Microsoft Teams is already provisioned for all members of DePaul's community. DePaul faculty, staff, or student employees who use a DePaul-based phone number will now have access to the Calls tab within Microsoft Teams, which is an additional tab in the application allowing for phone calls on and off campus. If you don't have a DePaul-based phone number associated with you, the Calls tab will not appear in Teams. These users are encouraged to make calls or video calls to colleagues by searching for individuals in the Teams app. Physical phones are still available for front desks, common areas, and other offices that require physical phones.
DePaul students, faculty, and staff have several options for accessing Microsoft Teams: web, desktop, or mobile app. For each app, users must login with their BlueKey login credentials and authenticate with BlueKey multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Microsoft Teams does not necessarily replace Zoom as a video conferencing solution. Zoom is a widely used enterprise-level Video conferencing solution, and works extremely well for scheduled and pre-planned video conferencing. Microsoft Teams also works well for scheduled/pre-planned video meetings and is also integrated directly into Outlook, but is also excellent for unplanned, ad-hoc phone and video conferencing between small groups.
Public Teams are searchable in the Teams client or online for authenticated DePaul users. Anyone in DePaul can join a Public Team. Team members and owners can also use the "Get a link to team" function to provide a URL to publicize the team and share it either on a website, an email, or another method.
Teams provides very granular control over how and when you receive notifications from Teams. You can change your notification settings at the system level, as well as within each Team you are a member of. You can find short videos here, and detailed instruction pages on managing notifications, getting someone's attention, and more. One important recommendation is to Reply to others inside of a Conversation rather than start a new one, as this will keep the Conversation in one thread making it easier to follow (and will also not send separate notifications to users of a new Conversation to review/follow).
Users can record a personalized voicemail in Teams to answer Teams calls when they are unavailable. To record or manage your Teams voicemail, click on your picture in the upper right of the client, click Settings, and then click Calls.