Using PowerShell to provision teams in their EDU tenant

I guess all those MVP’s around the world are currently helping schools to quickly deploy and create teams. So, I did not want to feel left out and provided some help to schools out there with some sample PowerShell to manage teams. Now while PowerShell is not rocket science, I did encounter some weird behavior.

Teams Module versions

Creating teams with PowerShell is easy using the MicrosoftTeams module. However, if you want to create teams for schools you might want to provide a specific template type. So, you might end up with something like

New-Team -DisplayName MyClass -Description Sample -Template EDU_Class

As described by the official New-Team documentation. The weird thing is that the -template parameter is no longer supported. I did install module 1.0.5 (the latest at that point). Even the new update 1.0.6 is not providing me that parameter. So off to Bing (or Google) to find a version that was working. And luckily version 0.9.6 was still supporting that. So un-installing the module and using Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -RequiredVersion 0.9.6 did solve that for me. Now off to create some nice class teams. Brush up the script a bit so you can use CSV’s and you are good to go.

Missing new stuff

But then again, you are using a really old version of the module. Meaning that some of the newer things are missing. You cannot set the -visibility for Class Teams (makes sense), but now you cannot set the visibility for normal teams either. Resulting in some additional PowerShell to set a team to private once provisioned.

$team = New-Team -DisplayName OrgTeam
Set-Team -GroupId $team.GroupId -Visibility Private

I would have expected that creating teams in an Educational tenant would have been a bit easier. Now you are expected to have quite some understanding of what is happening on the back-end before you figure out why certain things are not available or are not resulting in what you expect them to be.