Understanding Teams Meetings and Collaboration Between Pitt and UPMC

In Microsoft Teams, the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC exist as separate “organizations.” Pitt staff members have “University of Pittsburgh” as their home organization within Teams, and UPMC staff have “UPMC” as their home organization within Teams.

When you need to communicate and collaborate with people outside your organization, Microsoft Teams has two options:

• External access - A type of federation that allows users to find, call, and chat with people in other organizations. These people cannot be added to teams unless they are invited as guests.
• Guest access - Guest access allows you to invite people from outside your organization to join a team. Invited people get a guest account in Azure Active Directory.

You can compare external and guest access on Microsoft’s website. In general, guests have more access than external users, including the ability to share files, use Meet Now, and see out-of-office messages for people outside their home organization.

To create a team that includes members of both Pitt and UPMC, the owner of the team must add individuals from the other organization as guests. To add a guest, you must know the individual’s full Pitt or UPMC email address.

Once you have added a guest, they will receive a welcome email message. This message includes some information about the team and what to expect now that they're a member. The guest must accept the invitation by selecting Open Microsoft Teams in the email message before they can access your team and its channels. Learn more about the guest experience in Teams…

Additional Notes for UPMC Staff

• Before inviting users as guests, you must request permission in IMS, add the domain to an allowed list, and then invite the actual guest.
• Please review UPMC's Cloud Storage and File Sharing page for details.

After a guest has accepted the invitation and completed the initial steps to join a team hosted by another organization, they will need to switch organizations whenever they want to participate in that team. For example, a UPMC staff member will not be able to see a Pitt-owned team while they are in their home UPMC organization.

To switch to another organization, complete these steps:

1. Hover over your Profile photo in Teams. The organizations to which you belong will display below your name.

2. Click the University of Pittsburgh (Guest) or UPMC (Guest) organization to switch.

3. Important: When you are finished using the guest organization’s team, switch back to your home organization. If you do not switch back, you will miss calls and instant messages sent from within your home organization.

Note: Microsoft is working on a feature called Teams Connect that will eliminate the need to switch organizations when working in a team that was not created in your home organization. We will update this guide with more details as soon as this feature becomes available.

After you have added a guest from another organization to a team (see previous sections), you can also add that individual to your Contacts list in Teams so that you can chat and call them more easily. To do so, complete these steps.

1. Click the Chat icon in the left-hand navigation menu, then click the drop-down menu next to the Chat heading and select Contacts.

2. Click the ellipsis next to one of your Contact groups (or create a new contact group), then select Add a contact to this group.

3. Type the name or email address of the individual to search for them, then select their name and click Add.

4. The contact will be added to your Contacts list. The word (Guest) next to their name indicates that they are part of another organization.

Recording Microsoft Teams meetings enables participants to review meeting content at their leisure. It also allows individuals who were unable to attend the live meeting to catch up on what they missed.

General Guidelines

Keep in mind when recording meetings that Pennsylvania is a two-party consent state, meaning that all participants in a meeting must give consent prior to recording. Learn more …

UPMC Guidelines

Written meeting summaries or notes are the preferred medium for documenting meetings at UPMC. Please refer to UPMC Policy HS-IS0241 (Electronic Meeting Recording Policy) for guidance regarding the recording and sharing of Microsoft Teams meetings.

Pitt Guidelines

Keep in mind that before you can share a recording with an individual outside your home organization, you first need to add that individual to one of your teams as a guest (see previous sections).

It is important to understand who has access to your recordings and what type of access they have (for example, read access, write access, etc.). This is especially true if the recordings include Restricted data (see Pitt IT’s Data Risk Classification and Compliance page for details), such as HIPAA information that is discussed during the meetings.

You can check the Recordings folder permissions to view who has access to your recordings. To do so, click the three dots next to the Recordings folder and then click “Manage access.”

Additional individuals can be granted access to the folder, but this is not recommended, since individuals who are granted access at the Recordings folder level will have access to all the recordings in the Recordings folder.

Instead, you should manage access to the individual recording files that are in the Recordings folder. To do this, click the three dots next to the individual recording file you want to share, then click “Manage access.” (See following section for details.)

How-to Steps (UPMC)

Reminder: please refer to UPMC Policy HS-IS0241 (Electronic Meeting Recording Policy) for guidance regarding the recording and sharing of Microsoft Teams meetings.

How-to Steps (Pitt)

When a user records a Microsoft Teams meeting, the recording is automatically saved to OneDrive for Business in a folder called “Recordings” within the meeting organizer’s account.  For meetings without an organizer (such as an ad-hoc meeting or call), the person who clicked “Record” is considered the owner.

All meeting participants from the same organization as the organizer are given access to the recording of the meeting by default. UPMC employees who participate in Teams meetings will not automatically have access to meeting recordings made by Pitt employees.

However, the organizer of the Teams meeting can share the video with other participants by adjusting the sharing settings of the meeting within OneDrive. Keep in mind that when sharing content with UPMC users, you will need to know their full UPMC email address.

To share a Pitt recording with UPMC users, complete these steps:

1. Review the guidelines and limitations for sharing recordings (see previous sections).

2. Navigate to the Recordings folder in OneDrive, select the individual recording file you want to share, click the three vertical dots, then click Manage access.

3. Grant access to individuals using the “Links giving access” or “Direct Access” sections.

4. If using Direct access, click the plus sign, enter the individual’s full UPMC email address in the To: field, then click Enter.

5. A note will display indicating the individual is from an outside organization. Click the down arrow to select the individual’s permission level (for example, view or edit), then click Grant Access.

6. Once the UPMC employee has been granted access, they will receive an email with a link. They will need to log in using their UPMC email address.

7. The UPMC employee will next need to enter the verification code that is sent to their UPMC email address.

8. The Pitt staff member will need to ensure the UPMC employee has been granted access to the Team where the recording was made.

Note: If the meeting took place on a Private Channel within the Team, the UPMC employee will also need to be granted access to the private channel.

9. The UPMC employee should now be able to view the recorded meeting in the Posts tab of the team.

Please refer to Microsoft’s website for additional information about sharing recorded Teams meetings.

The Whiteboard feature within Teams enables meeting participants to collaborate on a shared digital canvas.

Although it is not yet possible to share a Teams whiteboard across Pitt and UPMC, Microsoft is working on features that will enable this functionality. Both organizations are monitoring Microsoft’s progress and will update this website when whiteboard functionality becomes available across Pitt and UPMC.