Microsoft Teams only

When you need to establish HOME Office workplaces quickly and easily, a Microsoft Teams Only setup is an option. Of course, a planned and coordinated rollout of Office 365 overall, including an adoption and training concept, is the preferred approach. Nevertheless, sometimes it simply has to go fast and then a pragmatic solution is required.

Overview

If the focus is a solution for virtual meetings and collaboration, the planning approach is primarily about not encouraging uncontrolled sprawl in the involved backend systems SharePoint, Exchange and Azure AD. The Microsoft Team service is based on these services and therefore cannot work without them. This is also reflected in the fact that by assigning a Microsoft Teams license, access to SharePoint is also technically included.

The services and licenses listed in the "Minimum technical requirements" section are required per user to use Microsoft Teams. The services in parentheses are optional depending on business requirements and deployment scenarios.

Even if Microsoft Teams should only be used in the context of Online Meeting, the owner of a Team has further options available. For example, he can create additional Channels in a Team or create additional SharePoint Lists and Libraries in the associated SharePoint Team Site. This applies to users who have a Teams license because they need to create Teams Meeting, for example. To join a Teams Meeting invited from another tenant, a user only needs an account in an Azure AD or a LiveID / Guest User.

Minimum technical requirements

Azure Active Directory Account / synchronized identities to Azure Active Directory

Exchange Online / Exchange Hybrid: Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/exchange-teams-interact

The SMTP matching to match on-premises user accounts to Office 365 user accounts option can be used to merge mailboxes at a later date. This is relevant when users and mailboxes need to be created in Exchange Online in parallel with existing mailboxes in Exchange Server on-premises, for example because Exchange Hybrid cannot be implemented in a short term.

SharePoint Online & OneDrive for Business: Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/sharepoint-onedrive-interact

The following is not a general recommendation. The described actions make sense if the goal is to use Microsoft Teams only as an ad hoc solution for online meetings etc. and not to use any other Office 365 service for now.

• Restriction that users cannot create additional SharePoint Site Collections.
• Further options for restrictions in SharePoint Online & OneDrive:
• Restrict content from being shared anonymously.
• Conditional Acceess Policy that only allow access to SharePoint. This prevents services such as PowerApps and Power Automate being used in SharePoint.

Access monitored via Microsoft Cloud App Security. Details and examples can be found here: Secure your environment by Conditional Access & App Controls

Licenses / Apps:

The bracketed apps in the following list are not mandatory to work with Microsoft Teams as such. However, the Teams App license as such must be assigned to a user so that the basic Teams functions are available and the client can be used:

Microsoft Teams, (SharePoint & OneDrive), (Exchange Online), (Office for the web), (Microsoft Planner), (Microsoft Stream), (Whiteboard).

If the user is not assigned a SharePoint license, OneDrive for Business is also not available to him. This has the effect that in personal chats no attachments can be attached to the chat by this user. The user will see the following message:

He can still chat with other users.

If the Exchange Online license is missing or no Exchange Hybrid is in use, the calendar is not available in Teams.

Weitere Details und Abhängigkeiten sind in diesem Artikel von Microsoft beschrieben: Prerequisites and environmental dependencies for Teams.

Example setup:

Tips

To keep track of Teams usage and keep users themselves engaged, Microsoft is already providing some Azure features:

• Azure AD Access Reviews, showing which Teams are in active use: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/governance/access-reviews-overview    
• Azure AD Expiration Policy, which requires Teams Owners / Members to periodically confirm that a Team is still needed: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/groups-lifecycle    

Scripts to generate custom reports can also be easily created using PowerShell. The CLI for Microsoft 365 can be used for this: https://pnp.github.io/cli-microsoft365.