This article is an overview of Community Tenant for Fabric user group (UG) leaders.
What is Community Tenant?
Community Tenant is a platform where user group leaders can host virtual events using the Microsoft Teams platform, engage with their communities, share resources, collaborate with fellow organizers, and gain access to best practices and resources. To take advantage of this offering, your user group must have at least two organizers who can act as team owners.
Why sign up for Community Tenant?
Community Tenant is a free platform for you to host your user group meetings and webinars. As a user group leader on Community Tenant, you will also have:
- 5 E5 Tenant Licenses for named organizers to manage and moderate their user group. Each UG leader will get a new msftcommunity.com identity (limit 5 per UG) to manage their team while members of the user group can be invited as guests.
- Access to Community Leaders team and associated resources moderated and maintained by Microsoft
- Personalized team to manage their community and host virtual events
- Virtual event guidance and ongoing resources for successful community events with Teams
- Templated resources and access to apps and bots designed for community use (SharePoint Templates, Feedback apps, etc)
Getting access to Community Tenant
If you are a user group leader and would like to get access to Community Tenant for your user group, please email the user group coordinators at: fbccommunity@microsoft.com. You will need to provide your user group home page URL.
The user group coordinators will then send you an informational email with the participation application for the Tenant.
When completing the application make sure to indicate that you were referred by the Fabric Community.
Once your application is reviewed, you will receive onboarding emails from the Team Creation Service Account: teamcreator@msftcommunity.com. These will include a welcome email and your new Community Tenant login credentials (@msftcommunity.com) which you will use to access your new Microsoft Teams and your new Microsoft Office 365 account.
Depending on your email settings, these may go into Junk or in rare cases are quarantined by your administrator. Please be sure to check your junk mail if you are not receiving your emails.
Use your new @msftcommunity.com credentials to login at https://www.office.com/. Once logged in, you will be able to see all the applications and services available to you. From this page, you can visit Microsoft Teams or your Outlook account to schedule a meeting.
Adding your members to your Community Tenant
After the Community Tenant is created, you can add three additional organizers to help manage the user group. These organizers will also be given new Microsoft Office 365 accounts.
You may also decide you want to add members to your Microsoft Teams team, adding members allows your attendees to access recordings and documents and collaborate outside of your regular meeting cadence. *Attendees do not need to be members in your Team to attend a Teams meeting hosted on the Microsoft Community Tenant.
If you choose to add organizers or members, you can do this by visiting the Account Management Portal.
Owners must be added via the Account Management Tool. Members can be added directly through the tool or by providing your Team’s unique self-service join link, which will allow members to add themselves.
To access the tool, simply log in with your Community Tenant credentials (@msftcommunity.com account) and follow the guidance provided in the account management guide https://aka.ms/QSAccountManagement.
Common Member Management Portal features include:
- Manage membership for all your Teams. If you are the Organizer for more than one Team, choose the team you want to manage in the user interface.
- Resend member join link or account credentials. Select Review Members to resend their member join link.
- Bulk upload lists of members. Visit the portal to find instructions to bulk upload your members via CSV and optimized bulk upload process.
After signing up for Community Tenant
The Community Tenant team hosts monthly office hours for user group leaders. To attend an office hour session, please check out the calendar here: https://aka.ms/MSCommunityOfficeHours
We strongly encourage attending office hours sessions to get familiar with accessing the Community Tenant, setting up your user group’s team, and understanding your resource. If you cannot make a live session of Office Hours, all sessions will be available on demand.
What to do if you have multiple Tenants:
For leaders who have multiple tenants and accounts, there are a couple of tricks available to help manage this:
- Use Edge/Chrome profiles (Sign in and create multiple profiles in Microsoft Edge). You can use these to create a profile per account and run the Teams web client (Use Teams on the web (microsoft.com)) within the profile.
- Use the Microsoft Teams mobile client. This client allows you to add all your accounts, get notifications from them in one place, and switch tenants easily.
- Use Meeting Options to change your lobby settings (either your defaults or on a per meeting basis). This will disable the lobby security (making it work more like that other collaboration product’s default settings) and avoid the “everyone else cannot join until I do” issue.
What to do if you need support
If you need support getting access to your Community Tenant, please contact the user group coordinators at fbccommunity@microsoft.com. If you are in the Community Tenant, you can post a comment in the Community Tenant Support located at the top of your team.
