Prerequisites and environmental dependencies for Teams

• Applies to:

  Microsoft Teams

This article is part of the Technical Readiness stage of your upgrade journey, an activity you complete in parallel with the User Readiness stage. Before proceeding, confirm that you've completed these activities from previous stages:

• Enlisted your project stakeholders
• Defined your project scope
• Understood coexistence and interoperability of Skype for Business and Teams
• Chosen your upgrade journey

Teams uses multiple Microsoft 365 and Office 365 services, and is therefore dependent on the correct implementation and operation of these services. These services include—but aren't limited to—SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and OneDrive for Business.

Although not all services are required, we highly recommend that you implement all of them. If you choose not to implement certain services, it will affect the functionality that Teams can offer your organization. For example, though you don't have to implement SharePoint Online, Teams does rely on SharePoint Online for certain functionality such as file sharing in group conversations, so not implementing this service will reduce the functionality offered through the client.

See the following articles to learn about prerequisites and how Teams interacts with other technologies:

• If your organization hasn't deployed any Microsoft 365 or Office 365 workloads, see Get started.

• If your organization hasn't added or configured a verified domain for Microsoft 365 or Office 365, see Domains FAQ.

• If your organization hasn't synchronized identities to Microsoft Entra ID, see Identity models and authentication in Microsoft Teams.

• If your organization doesn't have Exchange Online, see Understand how Exchange and Microsoft Teams interact.

• If your organization doesn't have SharePoint Online, see Understand how SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business interact with Microsoft Teams.

• To learn how Microsoft 365 groups and Microsoft Teams interact.

• If your organization is an educational institution and you use a Student Information System, see Welcome to Microsoft School Data Sync before deploying Microsoft Teams.

• If your organization is considering Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) calling options, see Voice - Phone System and PSTN connectivity, Which Calling Plan is right for you, and Phone System Direct Routing.

• To ensure all network requirements have been met before rolling out Teams, see Prepare your organization's network for Microsoft Teams.

• If you are currently using Skype for Business Online Connector to manage your services, you will need to move to the Teams PowerShell module and update your existing PowerShell scripts. See Move from Skype for Business Online Connector to the Teams PowerShell module for more information.

After you've verified that your environment meets all applicable prerequisites, evaluate your current environment for Teams.