To: Departmental Executive Officers
From: Jonna Higgins-Freese, Senior Director of IT
RE: Reminder: Upcoming Teams Training & Transition from Skype for Business

Later this calendar year, Microsoft is retiring Skype for Business. Microsoft Teams will replace Skype for Business as our solution for chat and phone services. (Microsoft Teams can also duplicate many online meeting functions currently happening in Zoom.)

While Teams has been available for a while, we wanted to make sure everyone has the chance to start learning about it in preparation for upcoming changes.

The link below offers an introductory, one-hour training on Microsoft Teams just for College of Liberal Arts faculty and staff. This training will cover the basics of the Teams software layout, navigation within the app, how to chat, what “Teams” and “channels” are, online meetings, and a few other miscellaneous topics. Use of the upcoming phone features will not be a part of this training. We hope that the opportunity to learn other Teams basics now will make the phone transition later in the year easier.

The final online training session specifically for CLAS faculty and staff will occur on June 6 at 2:00 pm. Click here to register. Register using your full email address (typically firstname-lastname@uiowa.edu). Once you’ve registered for a session, you will receive a confirmation email from ITS Training and it will include an option to add a reminder for the training to your Outlook calendar.

Additional training will be offered in the fall or you may review a recorded version of the training anytime. You can also sign up to attend a refresher session through My Training in Employee Self Service at any time.

If you are already comfortable with introductory features, you can learn about training offerings and other Teams courses. If you do not find what you are looking for, then email its-training@uiowa.edu for more information. As always, you can reach out to your assigned ETS consultant who can help get you the Teams answers you need. Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.