Manage Microsoft Teams with PowerShell: Create and configure teams, add users

End users can mostly manage Microsoft Teams themselves, but the IT department still has some administrative and supporting tasks to cope with. As with all other Microsoft 365 services, there is a dedicated PowerShell module that allows administrators to automate many tasks.

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Roland Eich

Roland Eich is an IT specialist for system integration and has been working in IT for over 10 years as a system administrator. His areas of expertise are Windows Server and IT infrastructures. Certifications: MCITP EA, MCSA and MCSE.

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In the first step, as with most external services and applications, you have to add the appropriate PowerShell module to the system. For Teams, the command used to do this is as follows:

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams

To install the module, you may need to agree to update your NuGet provider and confirm that you want to download from an unsafe source. PSGallery is still not considered trustworthy.

Installation of the PowerShell module for Microsoft Teams from PSGallery

Occasionally, the following error may occur:

Unable to resolve package source 'https://powershellgallery.com/api/v2'.

This is usually because PowerShell Gallery no longer accepts connections with TLS 1.0 and 1.1. Some versions of PowerShell still use them by default. I was able to solve the problem by configuring the registry keys with the following commands:

Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NetFramework\v4.0.30319' `
-Name 'SchUseStrongCrypto' -Value '1' -Type DWord
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NetFramework\v4.0.30319' `
-Name 'SchUseStrongCrypto' -Value '1' -Type DWord

In this case, you need to restart PowerShell and run the Install-Module command again.

To verify the success of the installation and get an overview of the available cmdlets, you can issue this command:

Get-Command -Module MicrosoftTeams\*

List of cmdlets included in the PowerShell module for Teams

Currently, the list contains 32 cmdlets or functions.

Connecting to Teams

As with PowerShell for Exchange and other online services from Microsoft, you have to connect to Teams first before you can manage them via scripts. For this purpose, enter the following command:

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

Connect to Teams using the Connect MicrosoftTeams cmdle

Logging on to the tenant is possible with or without multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Show existing teams

With the following command, you get an initial overview of the teams that have already been created:

Get-Team | Format-List

View existing teams with PowerShell

Creating and changing teams

You can create a new team using the following command:

New-Team -DisplayName MyTeam -Description "My new team" -Visibility Public

Creating a new team using PowerShell

Corresponding to the options available in the Teams client, you can pass several parameters to the cmdlet.

If you want to change the settings of a team afterward, you can do this using Set-Team.

It essentially supports the same parameters as New-Team, so you can use it to subsequently change or add values to the properties of a team if you did not configure them when you first created it.

In this example, I will just change the name of the team:

Set-Team -GroupId <GroupID> -DisplayName <new-name>

Renaming team using Set Team

As you can see, you refer to a certain team using the parameter GroupId.

Adding members

Members can be added when creating a team with New-Team or later on with Add-TeamUser. Conversely, you can remove them again with Remove-TeamUser.