Trial #39: Making Class Teams with the MicrosoftTeams PowerShell Module

Problem:

We have c. 500 different sets, each with at least one teacher and many pupils. This information is all available from our MIS but how can we automate to provisioning of the Class Teams complete with Classroom Notebooks?

Solution:

Microsoft provide a very helpful Module called MicrosoftTeams.

You might need to install and then connect to your Office365 instance before trying following along.

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams
Connect-MicrosoftTeams

The template for a Class Team is called EDU_Class and can be used like this

$newTeam = New-Team -Template EDU_Class -DisplayName "Your New Team"

Once you have a team, via the return object of New-Team or Get-Team, you can add members and teachers using Add-TeamUser.

Add-TeamUser -GroupId $newTeam.GroupId -User pupil@domain.com -Role "Member"
Add-TeamUser -GroupId $newTeam.GroupId -User teacher@domain.com -Role "Owner"

Although this approach does work, it runs into problems at scale. Team creation can be very slow and even at failure prone due to throttling. For this reason, I found it better to create the teams in several passes with error correction and then populate the sets once this stage is complete.

I get my set information from my MIS in a particular format which might not match your own. All the same you may find this script a useful resource when creating your own. I did find some slightly annoying loops when an email address from the MIS did not quite match AD, where a member would be added and removed on each pass, keep your data consistent where you can and look out for similar problems.

Batching - Not currently supported:

In the future, there may be better approaches such as batching. Microsoft also provide a batch option called New-CsBatchTeamsDeployment which is not clear in the help file but is described in the following article, Deploy Teams at scale for frontline workers.

I attempted to use this API using the following tables in csv format.

Team Name	Existing Team ID	Visibility	Team Template ID
Your New Team		Private	EDU_Class

User Full Name	User UPN or ID	Team Name	ActionType	Owner or Member
Mr Teacher	teacher@domain.com	Your New Team	AddMember	Owner
Miss Pupil	puplil@domain.com	Your New Team	AddMember	Member

New-CsBatchTeamsDeployment -TeamsFilePath team.csv -UsersFilePath users.csv -UsersToNotify "admin@domain.com"

However, the Team Template ID EDU_Class is unsupported which makes this approach useless at this time. I have asked Microsoft if they are going to support this Template or if it operates under a different name but have yet to receive an answer. Please up-vote this if you would like to make Teams this way.

School Data Sync (SDS):

You may be able to plug your MIS directly into SDS. It is too prescriptive for our needs but I believe that it could be used to create teams from a custom system for example using the csv data ingestion API. I may look at using this for Teams creation next school year.

Microsoft Graph:

I have used Microsoft Graph a little bit now to get data on Teams Assignments and it seems really powerful. It looks like this might become a good alternative to the Teams Module, please see the MSGraph Create educationClass endpoint.