Despite many hints that Teams will soon be able to use custom backgrounds in meetings, Microsoft hasn’t shipped the feature yet. Some users are trying out software like Snap Camera, and the experience is highlighting some issues that companies might face if employees use custom filters without guidance.
Teams makes it easy to schedule meetings for people to attend online. You can create meetings with Outlook or the Teams calendar app. Notifications go to those invited, but you can’t really invite a channel from a team. If you add a channel to a meeting, that’s where the online gathering takes place. So who gets notified then?
The swelling interest in Teams has driven interest in online meetings. The recording generated from Teams meetings end up in Stream, but how much storage is consumed by these recordings? Stream will tell you an overall figure, but you won’t know how much storage is consumed by individual videos or who’s taking up all the space.
If you look at your Teams activity feed, you might notice some notifications automatically generated because “you might be interested.” The suggested and trending notifications are intended to drive user engagement, which is nice, but experienced users who already have a busy activity feed might want to disable these notifications.
Microsoft says that the number of Teams daily active users is now 44 million, with 12 million of that growth coming in the last week due to the rush to work from home. Perhaps even more impressive is the growth in large deployments, with 650 companies now having 10,000 Teams users and 20 with more than 100,000.
Due to the impact of the Covid-19 virus, there’s been a huge upsurge of interest in using Microsoft Teams to work from home, especially for online meetings. Here’s a collection of practical tips about setting your company and personal network up for Office 365 and how to use Teams to run effective meetings collected from a March 18 gathering to discuss best practice about working from home with Teams.
The Teams user interface is being updated to allow non-English clients to be able to use @Team and @Channel mentions in local language and English. It’s a small but important point for those who work in a multi-lingual world. The Teams translate feature works pretty well too, even if you translate from one language to another and then to another.
Microsoft released Version 1.0.4 of the Teams PowerShell module on March 9. The new module comes with some useful updates and is recommended for anyone working with Teams through PowerShell. And if cmdlets don’t do the job for you, there’s always the Microsoft Graph as you can combine PowerShell and the Graph to solve even more problems.
Teams and Skype consumer users can now chat together if the Office 365 tenant configuration allows. Text-only chats and VOIP calls are supported. Teams users have the opportunity to see what Skype consumers have to say before they accept a connection. It’s all part of making sure that Skype for Business Online users can move to Teams without losing connections.
Microsoft has announced the retirement of the Twitter connector for Teams. The news is disappointing because the Power Automate alternative doesn’t do as good a job at injecting tweets into Teams. It’s a mystery why Microsoft is retiring a working component that does a good job, but no doubt a good reason is known to some and they’re saying nothing.