Microsoft Teams Integration

The integration works with Microsoft 365 Education A1, A3, and A5 license tiers, as well as Microsoft 365 Education Plus. The core capabilities (Team creation, channel management, meeting scheduling, and Azure AD SSO) are available across these tiers. Features that depend on specific Teams meeting capabilities, such as meeting recording, are tied to what your institution's license tier includes for Teams. Microsoft 365 Education A1 (the free tier for eligible educational institutions) supports Teams meetings and the core integration capabilities. A1 Plus and A3 add recording and other advanced meeting features. Before deployment, confirm your current license tier with your Microsoft representative to verify which meeting capabilities are included.

Enrollment changes processed in the academic management system propagate to Teams channel membership automatically through the Microsoft Graph integration. When a student successfully adds a course, they are added to the corresponding Teams channel, typically within minutes of enrollment processing, not on a manual or daily batch schedule. When a student drops a course, they are removed from the channel. Faculty do not need to manage these changes manually in Teams. If your institution processes enrollment changes in batch cycles rather than in real time, the sync timing follows the same cycle the academic system uses for roster updates.

The Teams meeting participation data that flows into the attendance record is sourced from Microsoft Graph's meeting attendance report, which captures participation regardless of the device or Teams client used to join. A student who joins from the Teams mobile app, the desktop app, or a web browser generates the same join time and leave time data in the participation report. The integration does not distinguish between client types for attendance purposes. The attendance module records whether the student joined, when they joined, and for how long, based on the meeting report rather than any client-side data. Your institution's attendance policy for partial attendance or late arrivals applies uniformly regardless of how the student connected.

The institution controls the lifecycle of course Teams after term completion. Common configurations include archiving the Team at term end, which preserves all messages, files, and meeting records but makes the channel read-only, or retaining Teams in an active state for students who need to reference course materials during a grace period. The academic management system can trigger Team archival aligned with the academic calendar. Meeting participation records that have synced to the SIS attendance module remain in the academic system permanently as part of the student's academic record, independent of what happens to the Teams channel itself. Course files stored in the course Team's OneDrive folder persist under whatever retention policy the institution has configured for SharePoint/OneDrive.

Course Teams created by the integration use a naming convention derived from the academic system (typically course code, batch identifier, and academic year) which is separate from the naming conventions used for departmental or administrative Teams. The Azure AD application registration creates Teams under the institutional tenant but does not modify or access existing Teams outside of the ones it creates. IT administrators can review all Teams created by the application through the Azure portal's group management interface and can configure a naming prefix or suffix for course Teams if the institution wants to distinguish them visually from other Teams in the directory. There is no functional interference between course Teams created by the integration and existing departmental Teams.