My school is beginning to plan for a transition from Zoom to MS Teams (via Office 365 LTI) in mid to late 2027. Our goal is to make the user experience with Teams as close to that of Zoom as possible. We did the Office 365 LTI about a year ago but are just now looking at how best to configure it for Teams.
We have managed to add a tool link to the Office 365 (Microsoft Education) dashboard in a course sandbox Nav Bar.
This takes the user to the Office 365 dashboard from which MS Teams can be accessed.
Question 1: Is there a configuration where a link can be placed in the Nav Bar that takes the user straight to the MS Teams dashboard (see below)?
I tried this but the behaviour was similar to creating a Teams meeting via insert Quick Link or a custom widget that does not take the user to the appropriate dashboard (not ideal for us). The result was more useful for impromptu meetings rather than scheduling a series of meetings in accordance with a weekly schedule.
Question 2: I set up the Microsoft Education dashboard in my sandbox course about a year ago with all available tools including OneDrive, Class Notebook, Teams, Meetings, Reflect, Reading Coach and Insights. Is there a way that I can remove some of these tools from the dashboard so that only the tools we want available to our faculty are present or is tool selection something that can only be done during the 1st launch after which no changes can be made? Can this be done at the system level for all courses or is this strictly done at the course level by Instructors? It would be ideal if we could set the tools/configuration once and then apply it to all users to remain consistent across all courses and avoid confusion among Instructors.
Question 3: When you create a meeting in Zoom, it auto populates the meeting information in the course calendar but not the user's Outlook calendar. For MS Teams, it auto populates in the user's Outlook calendar but not the course calendar. Can MS Teams be configured to also add the meeting information to the course calendar or will that need to be done manually by the course Instructor?
We have the basic functionality for MS Teams up and running so it's this fine tuning and best practices that we are trying to sort out. Our plan is to pilot this with a few small programs during the winter 2027 semester with full implementation in our full-time programs in summer 2027.
I look forward to your input as we embark on this exploration of MS Teams vs. Zoom in Brightspace!
