How to create, manage and assign Microsoft Teams team Template policies

Microsoft Teams team Templates have been in use for several months now. One of issues organizations has been having with them is the inability to choose which users get which templates. Instead everyone was seeing and was able to use all templates. That is changing with team Template policies. The documentation can be found at Docs.

You can use this to hide Microsoft or custom team Templates from user(s)
You can hide up to 100 Templates in a single policy
Batch assignment to users via PowerShell
Any new templates will be visible by default

As a Teams Admin go to Teams Admin Center (TAC as we call it) and Open Teams-menu. Or there directly : Templates policies – Microsoft Teams admin center.

You can see the list of templates there. On default there is just the Global -policy that has been assigned to everyone.

You can then see + Add option in there as well. That is where you start creating a new policy

When those sections are closed you can see a summary what would be included in your policy. The goal is of course to reduce the number of viewable templates to the essential for users and hide everything else.

First give it a good name and description. This is not visible to your users but instead this will serve admins who manage those templates and assignments to users so they know what’s the purpose of these templates.

Then just click to select on those templates you want to hide.

Clicking hide will move them to the hidden list.

And in case you made a mistake – don’t worry. You can select and enable templates as you wish!

Once we are ready we hit the Save.

Now we can see the template policy in the list

When you select your policy you see a few options to work with: Edit, Duplicate, Delete and Manage users.

Edit: just like the creation dialogue. You can edit the policy via this option. When you save it users will start eventually see those changes.

Duplicate: make a copy of the template to get started or use to make a backup.

Manage users. use this to apply the template to users right away.

How to assign a team Template policy to a user.

In case you didn’t use Manage users part directly via the Template policy screen you can also do this from users view by navigating to Users, selecting an user and opening Policies tab. (Or directly by Edit settings for the selected user(s)).

At the bottom you can see what template policy user has assigned to.

Of course to edit policies you will choose Edit in the Assigned policies.

You can find Templates policy at the bottom of the list.

Dropdown lists your Template policies.

And we hit Apply

It may take several hours before the Template policy is in effect.

Note: when I was writing this article I had already done this change in my another test tenant a day before and I am still not seeing the effect. The Docs article states it can take 24 hours before this is reflected to users! Also note that this feature is in preview so it might not affect users yet – or it can take longer before it is visible there.

You can also assign policies to a single or multiple users in TAC – Users with Edit settings.

Admins: You can start preparing your template policies already so you have them ready when it is time to deploy them to your users.

Have you noticed you have a useful Filter in Users list? If you want to see which users have a specific policy you can use this one to discovery the information quickly.