Requesting a new Team in Microsoft Teams

'Team' is the name for an official collaborative group in Microsoft Teams set up for working groups, departments or projects. Each Team has their own SharePoint storage and tools to enable collaboration, communication and coordination.

Within the Team you will have channels for sub-teams, for services the Team is responsible for, or for topics. The channels aren’t private so all members of your Team will be able to see the conversation and content of each channel.

Before requesting a Team

There's plenty of functionality available to you within the Teams platform before you might need a specific Team creating. One-to-one chats, group chats and recurring meetings all work without needing a specific Team.

Limitations of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams and other Group creation is currently switched off until we can provide staff and students with a self-service tool to provision a collaborative area best suited to their needs. In the interim staff and PGR can request Teams using the form below. Staff and PGR are asked not to grant Team Owner roles to non staff or PGR.
People external to the University cannot currently join a Team (but will be able to soon).
A Team should be used for University related business.
No Teams of just one or two people. You could use a 1:1 or Group chat instead.
Created Teams are private by default and membership is by invitation. If you change a Team to public, ITS admin will reset it to private.
Do not use a Team to process sensitive personal data or other highly restricted data, as described in the University's Standard Operating Procedure for Information Security Classification, Ownership and Secure Information Handling.
The content of Teams, chats, recorded meetings and more may need to be obtained in order to respond to information requests, so the same level of care regarding the content should be taken as with other University records and correspondence.
You must request permission to create a private channel within a Team. To do so, please read the following page and submit the request form at the bottom of the page: Microsoft Teams Private Channels (sharepoint.com).

Use of Teams must not contravene the Acceptable Use Standard Operating Procedures:

Responsibilities of Team owners

Team owners are the information store owners for the site. Further information regarding the responsibilities of information store owners can be found in the Information Governance Accountability and Assurance Framework (para 3.4.4).

Specifically in relation to Teams this includes:

Ensuring that access is only provided where necessary and access must be removed promptly when no longer required
Ensuring that all data stored or processed within a Team adheres to the mandatory requirements set out in our Standard Operating Procedures:
- Information Security Classification, Ownership and Secure Information Handling
- Document and Information Management

Naming convention

Teams, Sites and Groups will be created using a naming convention to help the University easily understand where a Team/Site/Group fits within the organisation.

For readability it's best to keep the names short and use the description field for context. Names should have no more than 60 characters.

Name examples:

LIB-C-Library-Executive-Team (a committee site for the Library exec team)
IT-PMO-P10001-Campus-Reopening (An IT project for campus reopening)
Whitworth-Art-Gallery-Finance (A Team for the Whitworth’s finance team)
RG-FSE-Physics-Faster-Than-Light (A FSE research group and their 'Faster than light' project)

After creation, it is possible to change the display name to something shorter; for example:

Library Exec committee
Campus Reopening
WAG Finance
Faster than light

How to apply

Please complete the following form to request a Team. Teams created outside of this process will be deleted by IT Services.