Probably the most important part of the release of Microsoft Teams in a company is the pilot phase, namely introducing the new tool gradually. This phase is essential in order to figure out how Teams works and exploring the functionalities, this is something that could be conducted by a few Teams involved in several topics like IT security, governance, data protection and so on. In order to do that the tenant admin has to configure the Azure Active Directory properly across Powershell, but there is a requirement, in fact, it’s necessary to install Powershell cmdlet for Office 365. Basically, there are two possibilities to release Microsoft Teams only for few people:

• Disabling the license to the users that are not involved in the pilot phase
• Creating a group in the Azure Active and defining for it the license of Teams

Disabling the license to the users across Powershell

Below the snippet in order to make a connection to the Office 365 tenant and disabling the Teams license for all users or some of them:

# Make the connection with your Tenant
Connect-MsolService
# Get the subscription in order to display the name
Get-MsolAccountSku
# Set the subscription name and defining the disabled plans
$acctSKU="your subscription name here"
$x = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId $acctSKU -DisabledPlans "TEAMS1"
# Disable Teams for single user
Get-MsolUser -SearchString <email user> | Set-MsolUserLicense -LicenseOptions $x
# Disable Teams for all users in your organization
Get-MsolUser | Where-Object {$_.licenses[0].AccountSku.SkuPartNumber -eq  ($acctSKU).Substring($acctSKU.IndexOf(":")+1,  $acctSKU.Length-$acctSKU.IndexOf(":")-1) -and $_.IsLicensed -eq $True} |  Set-MsolUserLicense -LicenseOptions $x

Azure Active Directory Group with the Teams license enabled

This option is easy to configure also through the Azure UI, basically, you can assign the Teams license to a group and then add the users involved in the pilot phase: