New changes in Teams will enable UAB faculty and staff to get their work done more efficiently by improving how they connect and collaborate. UAB campus and UAB Medicine users will soon be able to communicate more easily with each other over Microsoft Teams, a first step toward improved collaboration as part of a campus-wide technology initiative: the Technology Alignment and Collaboration Committee, or TACC.

This improvement is part of a broader effort to align technology systems across the university and health system through the TACC, an initiative that originated from the Research Strategic Initiative and reflects feedback gathered during extensive stakeholder interviews across UAB.

By introducing Microsoft Teams federation, TACC is beginning to close communication gaps, laying the foundation for future initiatives that will better equip the UAB community to collaborate and achieve shared goals.

On the evening of Friday, Oct. 31, UAB IT and HSIS will enable Teams federation, allowing users:

• To initiate direct Teams chats with UAB.edu or UABMC users by using their BlazerID or UABMC ID information. Learn more about how to find email addresses.
• To see Teams presence status (e.g., available, busy, away) for UAB.edu or UABMC users once those users are in their chat list.
• To join Teams meetings in each organization without completing CAPTCHA verification, streamlining access and saving time. Currently, UABMC users must verify when joining UAB meetings, and vice versa. Users from outside UAB and UABMC will still be required to enter verification.

UABMC users should still request access to the campus Microsoft Office 365 instance to further collaborate on campus Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint sites. For access to a UAB Health System SharePoint site or Microsoft Teams workspace, please contact the site or team owner and request that they submit a service request for a guest account via the HSIS portal at helpdesk.uabmc.edu.

UAB and UAB Medicine are committed to exploring further ways to collaborate and streamline technology through the UAB TACC, which launched in August 2025 under the leadership of UAB President Ray Watts and UAB Health System CEO Dawn Bulgarella.

“This is a first step in our work toward a more unified technology strategy that allows UAB users across the campus and Health System to collaborate more easily,” said Robert Howard, associate vice president for Information Technology and deputy CIO for the UAB campus. “We are just getting started, but one of our goals is to help you do your work more easily and efficiently.”

Howard is co-executive sponsor of the TACC initiative, along with Ryan Allen, associate vice president and chief information security officer for UAB Health System Information Systems. Committees and working groups for the project are expected to be formed as needed.

“We are looking forward to exploring ways that employees across our enterprise can better communicate and collaborate, promoting efficiency and compliance,” Allen said. “Our partnership can also give us greater negotiating power as we coordinate technology purchases.”

TACC will look at further improvements such as federated identity management, which would give users a unified login experience for BlazerID and Health System credentials, as well as unified file sharing and a more unified collaboration experience through email and calendaring.