Remove "Staff Notebook" from Microsoft Teams for Education
I am not sure if this is a bug or not but we are using Microsoft Teams educational licenses. We want to use the Teams for our internal staff departments first. For some reason the setup of teams includes extra educational features like it force creates a OneNote tab called "Staff Notebook" in the General channel of each team. the OneNote includes a lot of classroom type customization that we do not want/need. Our departments have their own OneNotes. I cannot delete Staff Notebook tab or even rename it. I can add and delete other OneNotes but we want a clean set of tabs. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting rid of this? Thanks.
Robert Derby
shared this idea
Hi everyone! If you do not want to use the OneNote Staff Notebook or any of the other default tabs across the various team types, we suggest creating an ‘Anyone’ team instead.
The ‘Anyone’ team will not include any add-ons by default and gives you the flexibility to use Teams however you would like. We understand that there are so many other ways you can use Teams that does not fit the Class/PLC/Staff team template. So ‘Anyone’ will be your best option!
More information on the different team types in Teams for Education can be found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/choose-a-team-type-to-collaborate-in-microsoft-teams-0a971053-d640-4555-9fd7-f785c2b99e67
Feel free to reply back here if you have additional feedback.
Thank you!
Justin
53 comments
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Benjamin Koch
commented
Please, please, please enable an option to remove the "Staff Notebook" tab.
It is an obvious and intuitive solution, which is available on other tabs.
If we need to create the Team again, We will have to delete the Team and Email Group (e.g. staff@company.com) and then recreate and add all the Members back into the Team/Group. In the process, we would lose all our Group and Team Tabs, Channels and Posts history and have to create all the Team tab and Channel contents again.
It would be much easier to just hit "delete/remove".
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Timothy Timmerson
commented
Agreed with those below. Why not just add the option to delete the Staff Notebook? It seems like a not-so-difficult solution to this problem, and is certainly a better option than having to create a new team from scratch.
Offering functionality for the end-user is always preferable to requiring some clunky work-around.
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Gerard Fernandez Gancedo
commented
Justin you are not giving a solution, you are patching.
If you decide to create a team like others you lose other functionality.
It really is so complicated to have the functionality of being able to remove or not, "OneNote Staff Notebook". Perhaps it would be more interesting than when creating a team to be able to decide what functionalities you want in the team, or to be able to create a team template. -
Ros
commented
To whom it may concern,
I need to delete in Staff Notebook old sections and staff from a previous year. I know it is easy to add but I really need to delete. Can someone please show me these steps as soon as possible. -
Randy Sailer
commented
Hi Justin, Just bumping this. Any word how to delete a staff notebook for a team?
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Anonymous
commented
Why do my team types look different than yours? I have Class, Professional Learning Community, Staff, and Other. When you say "Anyone," do you mean "Other?"
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Aaron McHale
commented
We created a Team for our Department (which is entirely Staff), but we used the Staff type and now are stuck with these useless "Notes" and "Staff Notebook" tabs, which take up space, since you can't move or remove them, and we need that space for other more useful tabs. Please make it possible to remove this feature from an existing team, or to allow existing teams to change their template to "Other" so that this tab goes away. Thanks.
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Scott Ison
commented
I don't want to "try this instead". A feature was suggested because we don't like the way its done. How about this ... instead, you try giving people what they wanted.
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Peter
commented
Hi Justin, how do we remove the Staff Notebook tab once its been added?
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Jon Coffee
commented
Justin, I can understand the recommendation. However, we have had so much trouble getting people on-board with teams, that to have to now move an entire group of people from one team to another just because there is a tab that is cluttering up our team? That is not a practical option at all. People have spent hours setting up a team with their files and channels. To now have to tell them they have completely relocate? That's not a practical or acceptable solution. Why is the solution to move an entire team to a completely new team, rather than simply giving us the ability to remove an unwanted tab?
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Anonymous
commented
@paul EXACTLY
I just created a team and I had zero information about which one to choose. None of the options seemed to make sense for what I wanted. I need a breakdown of what each option means.@Justin .... "Anyone" isn't an option. I suppose you mean "Other"? I wish the app explained this and I didn't have to come here looking for answers.
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Paul de Vrieze
commented
The application should really provide much clearer information about what the consequences of the different choices are. In addition it should recognize that academic institutions do other things than teach and people may not be students or teachers.
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Philip
commented
@ justin Chando,
Unfortunately I learned of the "anyone" workaround too late and have several teams already in use with the "staff notebook" tab. Is it possible to remove the tab, or perhaps port the team into a new template setup? We can't really generate an entirely new team site at this point and the staff notebook tab is completely unused, a constant question from new team members, and a constant irritation to longterm users.
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Radu Negoescu
commented
An extra vote for an easier tab management (with particular focus on Staff Notebook) - once the team decides this is irrelevant, they should be able to hide if not completely remove the "Staff Notebook" tab.
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Anonymous
commented
We really need a way to control what Team types are available to which users. Ideally I'd like to only publish the "Class" and "PLC" to teachers while the only option everyone else has is "Other". Also calling it something other then "Other" would be really helpful. Standard, or General maybe?
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Chad V Kealey
commented
Justin, I completely understand your suggestion, but let's be honest about who will see it here. Mostly IT folks like me. Not the end-users who are creating Teams without seeking guidance. Try as we might to provide them the necessary guidance, most just don't listen. So, there are two things that your team could provide to help us address this issue as appropriate for our institutions:
1) Give us a way to disable certain types of Teams so that they simply don't appear as options when a user creates a Team. Alternately (but probably much more complicated), restrict Team type by security group (e.g.: if we have an AD group of "Faculty", only let members of that group create a "Class" Team).
2) Give us a way to "convert" a Staff Team to a regular ("Anyone" or "Other") Team, or at least just delete the accursed Staff Notebook (including the link in the General channel) and replace it with a regular old OneNote Notebook.
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kbcatnap
commented
There is no option for an "Anyone" team under Create a team. Maybe there was in the past but it's not there now. And suddenly I have Staff Notebooks being forced upon us, too, even though I selected "Other" for my teams. I have never used Class, PLC nor Staff. **Microsoft:** Just because an organization is "educational" doesn't necessarily mean they will be using it solely with students.
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kbcatnap
commented
There is no option for an "Anyone" team under Create a team. Maybe there was in the past but it's not there now. And suddenly I have Staff Notebooks being forced upon us, too. I did not choose the Staff team type. I chose "Other" but Staff Notebooks have started appearing in my Other teams despite my best efforts.
Microsoft: Just because an organization is "educational" doesn't necessarily mean they will be using it solely with students.
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Christophe B
commented
Don't let people choose between "Staff", "PLC", etc. Let them choose/select functionalities instead. Now it is very confusing. Nobody knows what type to choose and once you have chosen a type, you can't change it anymore.
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Jessica Archambault
commented
Hi, I have the same issue also (switching from Staff to Anyone Team type after it's been created). Any updates or how-to?