News

Microsoft Releases PowerShell Module for Teams

• By Kurt Mackie
• 04/25/2019

The Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module reached the "general availability" stage this week, enabling IT pros to create and delete teams, and other such operations.

Specifically, the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module lets IT pros do things like provision a new team or convert an existing group to a team. IT pros also can delete a team, or just delete a channel within a team. Owners or members of a team can be removed, as well.

While the general availability milestone implies that the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module is ready for use in production environments, some of the cmdlets "were left in the beta-only module," according to this Microsoft "Overview" document, which offered a table. The table isn't too explanatory, but apparently the cmdlets listed as not having support for version 1.0 Graph APIs are the beta-only versions, which presently won't work in the new Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module.

A future release of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module will permit these beta cmdlets to work, according to a Microsoft Teams Gallery commenter at the PowerShell Gallery landing page:

One of the requirements for our 1.0 module release is that it can use only 1.0 Graph APIs -- so customers can take a production dependency on the module. These specific APIs have less server-side filtering support, so the client-side filtering means that the operations take a bit longer. Improving run time is an important focus for the team that will take some time to execute on, so we'll also be publishing an update of our preview module -- which CAN use beta APIs -- to follow the same object model we've released in 1.0.

Exactly when that update to the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module will arrive wasn't suggested.

There are two different PowerShell modules that IT pros managing Microsoft Teams, Microsoft's workspace collaboration app that comes with Office 365 subscriptions, may need to tap. The Microsoft Teams Power Module is used to carry out creating and managing teams. The other PowerShell module that may be needed is the Skype for Business PowerShell Module, which is used to manage policies and configurations in teams.

There's a role-based access control restriction on using the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module. However, according to the "Overview" document, "if you are a Global Admin or Teams Service Administrator, you'll be able to act on all teams in your organization."