Two new features will help users enjoy Microsoft Teams meetings better. Or at least, improve the “user experience” by removing some irritations people currently have during meetings. The first allows users to suppress notifications arriving during meetings. The second hides a user’s video feed from their view to remove what seems to be a distraction for many. I’ve already disabled notifications for meetings. Maybe you should do the same?
A new List Teams API is available in the beta version of the Microsoft Graph. In time, the new API might replace the existing methods used to fetch sets of teams for processing. For now, there’s no need to update any code as we wait for Microsoft to fully bake the new API. Maybe it will be more performant and functional in the future!
Microsoft Teams posts system messages to a team’s information pane to let people know about membership changes. You can’t stop Teams doing this because Microsoft doesn’t provide control over the system messages at the tenant or team level. You can obscure the names of new members by changing their display name, but maybe the best idea is not to add new members until the time is right.
Whiteboard is the latest Teams-enabled app to use OneDrive for Business for its storage. It’s unsurprising and it’s a trend likely to continue, and it creates an administrative challenge in terms of how to handle deleted Microsoft 365 user accounts. The suggested approach of having a designated user review the information and retrieve what’s important is OK for documents but doesn’t work for app-linked content. Retention policies are a better option.
Among the changes Microsoft postponed to January is the introduction of a new unmute keyboard shortcut for meetings. While I lik shortcuts generally, this one doesn’t seem to make much sense, especially because an existing keyboard shortcut is available to toggle mute on and off during meetings. In any case, if you don’t want to use the shortcut, you can disable it in Teams settings. To each their own…
Some changes in the Microsoft Teams desktop and browser clients will allow users to decline guest invitations from other organizations, leave organizations, and hide organizations from Teams. Although leaving another organization has been a well-trodden path for several years, it’s required knowledge to find the right place to go. Having these options in Teams makes it much easier to manage a cluttered set of organizations.
A new tweak to the sharing link dialog used by OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and other Microsoft 365 workloads block downloads of video and audio files by default. This is probably what you want to happen as, unlike Office documents, when you share a video or audio file, it’s likely to be final content ready to be consumed rather than being worked on.
New audit events are available to capture information about Teams meetings and participants, but only if you have Office 365 E5 or above licenses. That’s because Microsoft deems these events to be high-value audit information prized by forensic investigators when they try to unravel what happened in an incident. You’ll have to make your own mind up how valuable the events are, but we’ve written some PowerShell to make the data more accessible.
Microsoft is rolling out new activity feed controls for notifications posted by apps and when people use reactions to respond to messages. The idea is to make the activity feed less distracting for busy users. The interesting technical issue is how to deal with notifications created by the many hundreds of Teams-enabled apps available today.
Microsoft enhanced a new 99.99% SLA for Teams Phone and Calling on December 1. The new SLA is backed with financial commitments for credit if Microsoft doesn’t meet its standards. All of this is very nice, as long as you understand how the SLA is calculated and what you need to do if problems happen to be in a position to make a claim.
Microsoft is adding Audio conferencing to all Teams plans and making it easier to embrace the Teams Phone system with a new Teams Phone and Calling Plan product. The new offering is available on January 1, 2022 and replaces separate products targeted at the SMB and enterprise markets. While it’s good that Microsoft is simplifying their Teams Phone offering, buying a product is only the start of a journey to implementation.
The Viva Learning app is available for deployment to Microsoft Teams users. The Viva Learning app delivers courseware to users to allow them to browse and access content created by Microsoft, the tenant, or external courseware providers such as Skillsoft and Pluralsight. In this article, we describe the three quick and easy steps to get Viva Learning up and running to help expand the minds of your Teams users.
A new per-user policy setting for Microsoft Teams allows admins to exert per-user control over who can have anonymous people join their meetings. The new policy setting can be managed now with PowerShell and will co-exist alongside the current tenant-wide setting for a period. Microsoft will then deprecate the tenant-wide setting to allow the policy settings exert sole control.
Microsoft Teams is introducing a new co-organizer role for meetings. The role allows people to share the workload involved in managing complex meetings, like webinars. The role is optional and likely to be used in a small minority of Teams meetings. Even so, it’s a useful feature to have available when you’re planning a large and complex meeting.
The Microsoft Teams feedback policy assigned to user accounts controls whether users can give Microsoft feedback through the Teams clients. Not every organization wants their users to communicate directly with Microsoft. If you’re in this category, you can disable the Give feedback option easily by updating the Teams feedback policy assigned to user accounts. All explained here!
The Viva Insights app will soon have the ability to display the last six months’ data about praises users receive and send. This stunning engineering achievement will bring joy to the folks who like to send praise around. It leaves me cold. I’m probably not the target audience interested in praise history.
After upgrading to Windows 11, you have Chat in the taskbar. This is really a Teams personal client, meaning that you end up with two Teams clients on the PC. To make life even more confusing, if you search Windows 11 for Teams, you see the personal version suggested first. Some pruning of clients is needed.
Every Teams deployment has some defunct or obsolete channels. In this article, we explore how to mark unwanted channels as defunct before their eventual removal. It’s a manual but very easy technique that’s very effective when explained to users. As long as everyone remembers to recover any required information from channel conversations before its deletion, everything goes swimmingly
A new Teams search results page (in preview) makes better use of space, presents results in a clearer manner, and is more accurate. Even after stripping away the normal Microsoft hyperbole and grand statements about artificial intelligence powering everything, there’s lots to like about the change, which should show up to all tenants in mid-November.
Microsoft has delivered a massive refresh for the Whiteboard app. Now available in Teams, browser, and Android clients (Windows native and iOS updates are coming), the update delivers many new features including reactions, importing graphics into whiteboards, and object alignment. A bunch of out-of-the-box templates can help people use Whiteboard in different scenarios, and if you’re looking for some digital smarts, there’s ink shape recognition to play with.
A new Teams preview feature introduces Top Hits in the set of suggestions it makes for a search term. Teams also highlights the search term in its suggestions to provide context. Neither feature will make much different to end users in the overall scheme of things, but both are useful in a kind of fit-and-finish way.
Teams clients can use quoted replies in group, 1:1, and meeting chats. A quoted reply is where Teams inserts a snippet from a previous message to create a new message. It’s a tremendously useful feature which allows users to add context to something discussed in a chat. (quoted replies are not supported in channel conversations). The only question is why it’s taken Microsoft so long to add this feature to Teams?
Teams-based webinars are a popular way of hosting events like product briefings or announcements. Behind the scenes, the Microsoft 365 substrate stores information about webinar speakers, attendance, and event details as lists in the meeting organizer’s OneDrive for Business account. The information stored in OneDrive is indexed and available for eDiscovery. It’s a great example of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem in action.
Microsoft has released support for background effects for Teams browser clients. It seems like only Microsoft-curated background images (including blur) works and that you can’t use organization images or custom uploaded images. This might just be a timing issue and Microsoft will enable this functionality in the future. For those who like using the Teams browser client to join meetings, this is a nice solution.
The latest innovation in the Teams client is the display of a P marker to the upper right of the user profile photo (avatar). This means that the client runs public preview software and the marker is intended to allow users and support personal understand when clients run public preview rather than the generally available software. Of course, users only know this when they’re told about the magic P.
Adding the ability to search for spoken text in Teams meeting recordings is just one of the new features added after Microsoft moved storage for meeting recordings to OneDrive for Business. A new video viewer and support for 27 additional languages (some different variants of a base language) are also important developments. In this article, we explore how Exchange Online captures the text spoken in Teams meetings, how OneDrive for Business links the text with the video, and how Search can find spoken text from the transcripts.
The longstanding problem where the renaming of a Teams channel did not rename the folder in the SharePoint document library is being fixed. First flagged as an issue in 2016, this is one of the oldest bugs in Teams and it’s taken far too long for Microsoft to squash. The good news is that the fix will deploy in mid-September to close off the problem once and for all.
Microsoft is preparing to enable lightweight plans soon. The new plans are managed via the Planner app and should turn up in Teams meetings as a fluid component to allow meeting participants to capture tasks assigned during calls. It’s a neat way to use a plan that isn’t associated with a Microsoft 365 group. We’ll see what happens in September/October when the functionality lands. Also, a new cmdlet is available to export Planner data for a user. You never know where this might be useful.
Teams has more than 250 million monthly active users, but many fewer than this use Teams Phone. As we return to work from the pandemic, Ståle Hansen asks if it’s time to enable PSTN connectivity for Teams. This is a follow-up to an recent interview between Ståle Hansen, author of the chapter on Teams Phone and Devices in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, and the esteemed journalist Mary-Jo Foley
A new music mode for Teams desktop clients is rolling out now to improve the quality of music playback in Teams meetings and calls. The new feature depends on the Satin codec released earlier this year. Basically, music mode delivers high-quality playback even when connected across poor networks when packet drops are common and throughput is uncertain. A range of other controls are available to adjust the audio stream when hosting meetings using professional facilities. It’s all too much for this non-audiophile, but music mode is great for those who care.
Teams supports pinning of chats to highlight important messages to chat participants. You can also pin messages in channel conversations, but the highlighting is different. Like many things in life, it’s the details that matter when figuring out how useful message pinning will be for individual users. I’ve found a way to make chat pinning useful for me. The question is whether you can do the same!
The Viva Insights app for Teams now boasts Headspace-powered meditation to add to its mindfulness capabilities. Available to English users with Exchange Online mailboxes, the set of six meditation exercises and two music selections will help some people relax and destress. Others won’t be interested, but that’s OK because a new PowerShell cmdlet is available to turn the Headspace feature off.
In September Microsoft will introduce a new auto-expiration feature for Teams meeting recordings stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. By default, recordings will be moved to the recycle bin 60 days after creation (30 days for users with Office 365 A1 licenses). Tenants can control the default expiration period using Teams meeting policies while users can override expiration for individual files. And if you use retention policies to control Teams meeting recordings, their instructions take precedence over auto-expiration.
The Safe Links capability in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is now generally available to protect Teams messages in chats and channel conversations, and even in web site links pinned as a channel tab. Most bad links flowing into an Office 365 tenant will continue to arrive by email, but this new capability closes off a gap where users are tempted to make a poor decision to share a malicious link through Teams.
Microsoft claims that Teams has “nearly” 250 million monthly active users, which is quite a jump for the 145 million reported in April. We take a closer look at the numbers to try and figure out how Microsoft arrived at such a number. It seems like they can get there by lumping the numbers for commercial, education, and personal users together, but that’s not the same as reporting a nice simple number for commercial usage.
If their developers allow, Office 365 tenants can customize the properties of Teams apps to add their own icons, text, and links. In this article, we show how by customizing the Yammer Communities app to add a most remarkable photo taken at an Ignite event, a snazzier title (that no one can see), and some modified text. Is this enough to make the exercise worthwhile? that all depends on how you feel about corporate branding!
A new option in the Teams desktop and browser clients allows users to choose how they open Office documents. The choices are Teams (a viewer), browser (Office Online), and the desktop app. Being an old-time stuck-in-the-mud kind of person who’s used Office for 30-odd years, I naturally selected desktop apps. After all, who doesn’t like seeing Word spin up for the 99th time in an afternoon?
It is now possible to apply Microsoft 365 retention policies to Teams private channel messages. The messages are in user mailboxes and discoverable due to their properties. All the retention policy must do is find the messages and apply the policy settings, and if an item is expired, remove it from the mailbox. Easy… or is it?
New teams created using Teams clients are hidden from Exchange Online, but those created using administrative interfaces are not. The result is potential confusion. in this post, we describe a PowerShell script to find any team-enabled Microsoft 365 Groups which are visible to Exchange and hide them. It’s easy scripting, but you need to run the script periodically to update the settings for new teams.
How do you create a report of all the Teams in a tenant and their SharePoint Online sites? As it turns out, a two-line script does the job. We make the script slightly prettier, but it’s still simple. And because it’s PowerShell, anyone can change the code to make it work the way they want it to.
