Purchase Transitioning from Zoom to Teams for Faculty in Fall 2024

MS Teams is a pillar of the Microsoft collaboration and office suites. At its most basic level it provides Videoconferencing, breakout-rooms, chat, and file sharing tools to enhance interactions with colleagues and students across the college. Teams has a simple and intuitive interface, and you can instantly use it effectively. There is little to no learning curve for the activities you use the most, and there are abundant self-paced tutorials available.

For the Fall 2024 semester faculty Zoom Pro licenses will not be renewed. Your existing licenses will continue to functional normally for the entire Spring and Summer 2024 semesters. But as you prepare for your next term’s sections, I encourage you to start getting familar with Teams functionality.

This past September, all staff were transitioned from Zoom Pro licenses to Teams. This provided the school with approximately $13,000 in annual saving this year, and upon completing this transition campus wide, will save an additional $30,000 next year.

Everyone will continue to have a Basic Zoom account associated with their Purchase College accounts. These basic Zoom accounts can join any Zoom meetings hosted by others and can even host short zoom meetings on their own – up to 40 minutes. Basic Zoom accounts are free. Our students already use basic Zoom accounts.

At the onset of the pandemic, we chose Zoom for wide deployment since it was the best tool available at that time. Zoom enabled us to switch quickly to remote instruction and remote meetings, getting us through a difficult situation. Back in 2020, Teams had a limit of 8 participants, and like all other video tool makers they scrambled to catch up. They have now caught up and surpassed Zoom in many ways. Teams directly integrates with Outlook and setting up a meeting or ad hoc conversation is as easy as clicking a button. Beyond the video conferencing capabilities, it offers many options for collaborative work. Teams is included in the Microsoft product suite giving us all these options at no additional cost.

For additional information see the CTS Wiki article for MS Teams.

Thank you for your assistance and support during this future transition.

Ryan Nassisi
Interim Director of Campus Technology Services
Purchase College - SUNY