Whiteboard is a digital canvas application that can be loaded into Teams meetings to allow participants to share and develop ideas. The app available in Teams isn’t the most functional way to interact with Whiteboard, what whatever version you use can draw and sketch ideas to share with team members and other people within an Office 365 tenant.
For compliance purposes, the Microsoft 365 substrate captures copies of Teams messages in Exchange Online mailboxes. The compliance records are indexed and discoverable, which means that they can be found by content searches. However, Teams compliance records are imperfect copies of the real data, which is a fact that seems to have escaped many people.
An item in the Teams release notes tells us that analytics are now available for channels. You can find out how many topics and replies are posted within a channel. You’ll probably know what channels are in heavy use anyway, but seeing how little traffic some channels get is a good way of knowing that maybe your teams don’t need those channels.
It’s very convenient to be able to record a Teams meeting and have the recording processed and stored in Stream. But what happens when the recording fails to be processed? Usually it’s because the account that starts the recording (the owner) doesn’t have a Stream license. Fortunately, the situation is easily rescued.
Microsoft has updated the Teams meeting policy to introduce a new control over video filters in Teams meetings. The VideoFiltersMode setting controls if people can use background blur and background effects, including the ability to upload custom images. A client update is needed to respect the new setting. It will come at the end of May.
Teams is a highly functional application that receives regular functionality upgrades. This post offers seven tips for making effective use of Teams from pinning important objects to making great video calls. All very practical and nothing too difficult to master.
Microsoft has announced that Stream will no longer create a people timeline in new videos it processes after June 1 and that the feature will be retired. The people timeline feature works well for videos taped in controlled conditions, like studios. It is less successful (and useful) for recordings of Teams meetings, which is where a lot of work for Stream comes from currently.
Microsoft announced on May 1 that the limit for Teams group chats is increasing from 100 to 250. The new limit will be available everywhere by mid-May. Nice as an expanded limit it, large group chats come with some notable decreases in functionality, like losing the ability to display user status messages or read receipts. In some cases, taking a conversation to a channel might be a better idea.
Microsoft reported that Office 365 now has 258 million paid seats (not the same as active users) and Teams has reached 75 million daily active users. That’s impressive growth, with Office 365 adding 58 million extra seats in the last six months. Teams has done even better, sprinting from 20 million to 75 million. The Office 365 infrastructure sometimes shows the strain of handling all the extra users, but some new functionality delivered recently helps.
The Teams Admin Center now includes a Manage Apps page to allow administrators to view the complete inventory of apps available to Teams. Administrators can decide if they want to make apps available to users via Teams app setup policies or block the installation of apps. Each app has a publisher and certification status, but not many apps have been through the full “Microsoft 365 certified” process, including many of Microsoft’s own apps.