This post is part of the overall MS-700 Exam Study Guide. Links to each topic as they are posted can be found here.

In this post we get into the core of Teams by starting the Create Teams exam topic. The areas covered in this post are:

• Manage privacy levels for a team
• Create a team from a default or custom template
• Create a team from existing resources

At their heart, Teams are based on Microsoft 365 Groups. M365 Groups are objects that can be create in Office 365 that support a variety of services from Planner plans to mail groups to SharePoint Team sites. It’s important to remember when thinking about Teams that every Team must have an associated M365 Group but not every M365 Group will be a Team.

---

Manage Privacy Levels for a Team

There are three Privacy levels available for new Teams: Public, Private and Org-wide. The privacy level is important because it controls how users see and access the Team:

• Public Teams can be joined by anyone in the organization – use cases include social clubs and initiatives
• Private Teams require an owner to admit new members – use cases include departmental and project Teams
• Org-Wide Teams are an special case. They include all users in the tenant automatically
  • They can only be created by a Global Admin
  • They are only supported in organizations with 10,000 users or less
  • There can be a maximum of 5 Org-wide Teams per tenant
  • New users are automatically added with the exception of:
    • Accounts that are blocked from sign in
    • Guest users
    • Resource or service accounts (for example, accounts associated with auto attendants and call queues)
    • Room or equipment accounts
    • Accounts backed by a shared mailbox

The Privacy of a Team can be set when creating a new Team as an admin (Figure 1) or as a user (Figure 2).

The privacy of a Team can also be modified after creation from the Teams settings. Team privacy can also be set using Sensitivity Labels for Groups which I detailed in a previous article here.

---

Create a Team from a Default or Custom Template

Teams templates are very useful when you want to standardize new Teams for particular use cases. For example, you want to create an offering for users who want a Team to manage a project. You may want this Team to automatically add a Planner and several standard channels. For this, you can create a Team template and allow users to provision the fully formed Team with all the bells and whistles from the template.

I have actually gone into detail on Teams templates in a previous post so rather than repeating it here, I recommend checking out Creating and Deploying Microsoft Teams Templates.

---

Create a Team from Existing Resources

At the start of this post I mentioned how Microsoft 365 Groups are very important to Teams and the wider M365 ecosystem. I also mentioned that you can create an Office 365 Group without creating a Team. Some examples of this are Planner plans, Yammer groups and Power BI workspaces. To see the full breakdown of what a Group can or will contain, I recommend checking out the Jump to 365 blog where they have an awesome infographic that breaks down the components of a Group.

Lets say we have a Group that already exists, for example, a Group that was set up to create a Planner plan. If that Group already contains all the members and settings appropriate to our requirements – but does not contain a Team, there is no need to create a new Microsoft 365 Group for a Team.

We add a Team to an existing Microsoft 365 Group by selecting the option to create the Team From a group or Team as shown in Figure 3.

On the next page, select the option to create the Team from a Microsoft 365 Group as in Figure 4. Selecting Team here will copy the apps, settings and channels of another Team for your new Team but will set up a new Group.

Finally, select the Group you want to use to add a Team to it (Figure 5).

This can also be done as an Admin by locating the Group in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and selecting Create a Team from the Group settings as shown in Figure 6.

---

Summary

About 14 posts in and we are finally creating Teams! That is because practical Teams governance requires a deep understanding of many of the areas of the Microsoft 365 platform. In this post we looked at the basic concepts of creating Teams in the organization. Next I will go through some more advanced scenarios for Teams creation to ensure that we have a full understanding of the creation options and process.