Link your existing frontline teams to be managed with flexible membership

Overview

Save time and enhance the way you manage your existing frontline teams with flexible membership. When you link your existing teams to the frontline workforce management tool on the Manage frontline teams page, membership is automatically synced with your frontline workers' Microsoft Entra attributes. Additionally, frontline managers can manually add or remove members on their teams.

Existing team members are not removed when you link teams. Monitor usage of Teams and other frontline apps on the Usage tab of the Manage frontline teams page.

How it works

  1. Complete all the steps to set up your frontline team settings that include identifying frontline workers, managers, and an attribute by which your frontline workers are grouped. Our tool generates a list of frontline locations that exist in your organization based on these inputs.

  2. Link your existing frontline teams to discovered frontline locations from the setup process by uploading a CSV that includes the team IDs of your existing frontline teams.

Linking your existing frontline teams

  1. After you follow the instructions to set up your frontline team settings, select on Deploy on the Manage frontline teams page.

Select Deploy on the Manage frontline teams page on the Teams admin center to get started.

  1. View your discovered frontline locations on the Deploy or link frontline teams page. Start linking your teams to these locations by selecting the Link existing teams tab.

View your discovered locations on the Deploy or link frontline teams page and select Link existing teams to learn more about linking teams.

  1. On the Link existing teams tab, select on Get started.

Select Get started on the Link existing teams tab to start linking.

Uploading your CSV

  1. Begin by downloading the CSV template, which have all your identified frontline locations already populated in the first column under Locations.

Upload your CSV of team IDs of the teams you want to link.

  1. Enter the team IDs for each frontline location you wish to associate with a team in the Team ID column. Leave the Team ID field blank for any locations where you do not wish to link teams. You can always come back and link teams to more locations.

Important

Ensure all Team IDs are for static groups. Convert dynamic groups to static before uploading the CSV to avoid errors.

  1. To take advantage of flexible membership, where the membership of frontline teams is synced to the frontline workers' Entra attributes and frontline managers can manually add or remove team members, enter TRUE under the FlexibleMembership column next to each team ID. Existing team members are not removed if you opt in for flexible membership.

Important

If you set FlexibleMembership to FALSE, no membership changes occur on your behalf. However, you can still track your frontline teams' usage on the Usage tab of the Manage Frontline Teams page. 4. Upload your CSV and select Link.

  1. Refresh the Manage frontline teams page to check if linking is complete. The Link status shows the last linked date. Select Deploy again to link more teams, following the same steps.

Link status shows the last linked date and you can select Deploy to link more teams.

Troubleshooting

  1. To unlink a team from a location, download the CSV template and remove the team ID associated to a previously linked team and leave the cell blank.

  2. To relink a new team to a location, download the CSV template and replace the team ID associated to a previously linked team with a new team ID.

  3. To stop syncing membership from a location to a linked team, set the FlexibleMembership column with the associated team to FALSE.

  4. Re-upload the CSV once you are done making changes.

Get analytics on frontline teams usage

The Teams frontline usage report on the usage dashboard of the Manage frontline teams page gives you an overview of usage activity in Teams for each of your frontline locations. You can view data, such as the number of active users, last activity date, active users on Walkie Talkie, etc. to quickly see how many users at your frontline locations are using Teams to communicate and collaborate.

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