End Users:

As a result of the recent COVID-19 outbreak NHS Digital are introducing measures to support remote working across the NHSmail platform. This is in line with guidance from the Department of Health and Social Care, as the UK moves towards the delay phase of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Microsoft communications tool Teams will be made available for 3 months across the platform for all active NHSmail users, free of charge.

Teams will help to facilitate remote working through instant messaging, audio and video calling, ensuring that NHS staff can continue to work throughout the outbreak regardless of physical location.

How to Access:

Teams will be enabled for all NHSmail user accounts from 16/03/2020. You do not need to do anything to prepare, the provisioning and setup activities will be centrally managed by NHS Digital.

Once enabled, you can navigate to portal.office.com and sign in with your normal NHS.net username and password. Once signed in, you can click on the Teams icon to get started.

How to use Teams:

Teams is Microsoft’s replacement tool for Skype for Business, with a range of similar features and settings. It can be used on the NHSmail platform in the following scenarios:

• Chat: Instant messaging with your colleagues (or any NHSmail user) on either the Teams application on your desktop or mobile device
• Call: Direct audio or video calling to your NHSmail colleagues
• Meet: Setup ad hoc meetings as and when required with members in your team

For more information and training on Teams features, please visit the Teams knowledge base category.

Local Administrators:

As a result of the recent COVID-19 outbreak NHS Digital are introducing measures to support remote working across the NHSmail platform. This is in line with guidance from the Department of Health and Social Care, as the UK moves towards the delay phase of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Microsoft communications tool Teams will be made available for 3 months across the platform for all active NHSmail users, free of charge.

Teams will help to facilitate remote working through instant messaging, audio and video calling, ensuring that NHS staff can continue to work throughout the outbreak regardless of physical location.

As a local administrator there are a few important actions to take in preparation, these are outlined below:

Technical Preparation:

There are some technical steps required to support and facilitate the successful use of Teams. Most importantly local organisations will be required to whitelist a number of IP addresses and endpoints to ensure users can access Teams. Further detail on this requirement can be found here.

There are a number of other technical considerations to be made, these can be found as detailed in the December LA bulletin.

Administration:

Users will be provided access to Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint as a standard. As this is a temporary solution, Local Administrators won’t have the ability to configure application access for end users. This will be managed centrally by NHS Digital.

Teams Application Install:

Local Administrators can use this link to facilitate the download and installation of the Teams desktop client application. Alternatively, standard local methods to download and distribute applications to devices can be used.

Having the application installed is not mandatory, the browser based version of Teams can also be used.

Teams Functionality:

Standard Teams functionality will be available to end users, notably instant messaging, audio and video calling with all other NHSmail colleagues. Instructions on how to complete certain tasks will be provided to end users and made available on the NHSmail Portal Helpsite.

Using Teams with Outlook & OWA:

In order to use Teams within Outlook (for meeting scheduling) – you will be required to download and install the Teams desktop application. This will automatically create the Teams add-in for Outlook (version 2010 onwards).

Teams meetings cannot currently be setup directly in OWA (Outlook Web App). Instead users will be required to use the ‘Meet Now’ functionality in the Teams application to facilitate meetings as and when required.

Creating Teams:

Local Administrators will be responsible for creating Teams for end users. This can be done by logging into the NHSmail Portal and following the instructions outlined in the creating a team and adding members article.