Teams Gets a PowerShell Refresh
The new version of the Teams PowerShell module (0.9.5) supports a Get-Team that’s actually useful because it can return a full list of teams in the tenant. But there’s still some work to do…
Category: Teams
Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s team collaboration solution. The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook includes over 300 pages dedicated to Teams, and we cover the topic extensively on the site.
Block Guest Members from Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams
By default, the Groups policy for an Office 365 tenant allows group owners to add guest users to group membership. You can block this access if necessary, but it’s probably not what you want to do as blocking brings guest access to a complete halt across the tenant.
The Vexed Question of Microsoft 365 Backups
Backup vendors say you should definitely use their products to protect your valuable Microsoft 365 data. Backup products can do a good job, but the nature of Microsoft 365 creates many challenges at a technical level. A lack of APIs is the most fundamental issue, but the connected nature of Microsoft 365 apps is another.
Microsoft Cancels Windows S Client for Teams
Microsoft will retire the Windows S client for Teams on November 29, 2018. The decision to double-down on the Electron-based client is probably due to the fact that not many people use Windows S.
Purging Bad Stuff from Teams
Do you need to remove some offensive or otherwise doubtful material from Teams? If the original author won’t do the right thing, the team owner or an Office 365 administrator might have to step in to do the right thing.
Existing Guest Accounts and the Azure B2B Collaboration Policy
When you impose a block on certain domains, you’d like to think that applications like Teams will respect that block. As it turns out, if you have some lingering guests in your Azure Active Directory, the B2B collaboration policy might not be as effective as you’d hope.
Can Teams Replace Email for Corporate Communications?
Tony spoke about “Can Teams Replace Email” at the Modern Workplace Conference in Paris on October 17. Here’s a sketch note about what he said and a copy of the slides.
Network performance and connectivity evaluation with Network Testing Companion
Microsoft has released a nifty Network Testing Companion to help Office 365 admins validate that their network can support the deployment of Teams and Skype for Business Online.
T-Bot Gets a Bullet
The Teams T-Bot is no more and has been replaced by a snazzy new help “experience.” No doubt this is good news for those who consult help on a regular basis, but it won’t help Office 365 tenant admins much.
Managing Guest Users in a Microsoft 365 Tenant
How many guest users does your Office 365 tenant have? And how many of those accounts are actually used? Given that many Office 365 applications now generate guest user accounts to facilitate external access to content, managing these accounts is a growing concern.
Org-Wide Teams Don’t Need Azure AD P1 Licenses
The prospect of having to pay for many Azure AD Premium P1 licenses just because you use an org-wide team is horrible to contemplate. But don’t worry. You don’t have to because the Teams developers look after membership updates for you.
Check Your Azure AD Accounts Before Adding Org-Wide Teams
Org-Wide Teams are a nice feature, but calculating their membership can be puzzling, as in the case of some perfectly valid accounts that were not added to a team. As it turns out, the error lies in Azure Active Directory.
New Training and Adoption Resources for Microsoft Teams
Microsoft is releasing new training resources and materials as part of its continuous commitment to help in the adoption and usage of Microsoft Teams. In the “Instructor-led training for Microsoft Teams” web site, anyone using or interested in using Microsoft Teams will find a series of free, live, online training classes designed to get you …
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How to Create Org-Wide Teams in Microsoft Teams
Teams supports the ability to create org-wide teams, but only if your tenant has fewer than 10,000 accounts. It’s a neat idea, if you can use it, but if your organization spans more than 10,000 accounts, there are other ways to foster company-wide communications.
Org-Wide settings in the Teams & Skype Admin Center
Microsoft designed the Teams & Skype Admin Center to make it easy to manage settings for both platforms. In the case of the organization wide settings, the latest updates in the Teams & Skype Admin Center provide the following features: Manage External access, Guest access, Teams settings and Teams upgrade options for the organization. This …
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Teams and Slack By the Numbers
Slack is the most obvious competitor for Microsoft Teams. The question is how many users does each platform have? Here is our best guess.
Using the Alias Parameter with the New-Team Cmdlet
A quirky side of the New-Team cmdlet is that it creates some interesting values for the properties of the underlying Office 365 group that you might like to control better. As it turns out, the Alias parameter is what you need to set.
Inside the Teams Wiki
A simple question asked where Teams stores its Wiki content. A search found that the Wiki is stored in a SharePoint document library, while some further investigation discovered some interesting facts about the Teams wiki.
How Microsoft IT Manages Microsoft 365 Groups
Details of how Microsoft IT manages its deployment of Office 365 Groups were discussed at the recent Ignite 2018 conference. It’s a good idea to write down the basic framework of your Office 365 Groups deployment, if only to understand how all the different policies and features fit together.
Managing Microsoft Teams Through the Teams Admin Center
If you read yesterday’s article about the new team management functionality in the Teams and Skype for Business Online Admin Center, you might be interested to hear what Microsoft has to say on the topic. Head over to Ignite, in person or virtually, and you’ll find out.
How to use Background Blur in Microsoft Teams Meetings
Would background blurring make a real difference to your video meetings? If it does, then try it out in Teams meetings, but only if you have a recent PC that supports AVX2.
No Skype for Business Online for Small Office 365 Tenants
The news has emerged that Microsoft won’t provision new Office 365 tenants with Skype for Business Online unless they have more than 500 users. Any smaller and the tenant gets no choice but Teams.
How to Upgrade from Teams Free to Full Office 365
Microsoft has documented how organizations using the free version of Teams can upgrade to the full enterprise version (and Office 365). It all seems pretty easy, which is good. Paying those Office 365 licenses mightn’t be as nice.
New Teams Administrative Roles Available in Azure AD
Microsoft has released four new administrative roles to help Office 365 tenants manage Teams. It’s a good thing and we were able to include the news in the September 20 update for Office 365 for IT Pros.
How to Synchronize AAD Security Groups with Microsoft 365 Groups
Security groups are often used to protect access to resources, but they can’t be used to control membership for Microsoft 365 Groups or Teams. If you want to use AAD security groups to control membership for Groups and Teams, you need to come up with a way to synchronize. PowerShell is available to do the job, and as it turns out, it’s not too difficult.
Preserving the Teams Data of Ex-Employees
Content Searches Find Teams Compliance Items When someone leaves your company, you might need to preserve their Office 365 data. The steps needed to preserve user information stored in Email, OneDrive, and SharePoint are straightforward, but what about the messages the employee sent using Teams? As it turns out, an Office 365 content search or …
Office 365 Audit Records Truncated for Azure Active Directory Events
A demo to show how easy it is to use PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups and Teams was progressing nicely at the UK Evolve conference when a problem happened with code that used to run perfectly. Sounds like a normal programming situation, but in this case, Microsoft had changed the format of Office 365 audit records for Azure Active Directory operations. That’s not so good. What’s worse is that some essential data is now missing from the audit records.
How to Publish SharePoint Online News to Teams
A Petri.com article explains how to publish news items generated in SharePoint Online sites to Teams channels. It’s the way to spread those important announcements as widely as possible.
Teams Now Available in Hebrew and Arabic
Teams is now available in Hebrew and Arabic and has a new right to left display mode to boot. Now supporting 37 languages and inline translation, Teams is a multilingual application.
Enabling Access to Teams for Guest Users with PowerShell
During transitions, things sometimes don’t go so smoothly. Such is the case if you want to enable or disable guest user access to Teams and find that the setting to control the access is no longer available in the Office 365 Admin Center. But PowerShell can control the setting, so that’s the solution to the problem.
How Eradicating Bad Email Habits Improves Microsoft 365 Account Security
Hanging on to old email habits is a bad idea, especially if you use a cloud service like Office 365 where Microsoft introduces a steady stream of new features. The worst bad habit is password sharing. It’s time to stop this now.
Using Dynamic Office 365 Groups with Teams
Some say that Microsoft Teams doesn’t support dynamic Office 365 Groups. Well, I couldn’t find anything formal on the topic and the teams that I have configured to use dynamic groups work well, so what’s the real scene? As it turns out, Microsoft is still working on the feature.
Making sure that Microsoft 365 Retention Policies process Teams Items
Microsoft Teams support Office 365 retention policies, but how do you know if policies you create are effective in removing items from Teams? Well, as it turns out, you must go poking under the covers to validate that removals happen as planned.
How Did Slack Justify That $7B Valuation?
Apparently, Slack is now worth $7.1 billion. That’s a lot of money for a company that faces huge competition from Microsoft Teams, especially with the ever-increasing size of the Office 365 installed base.
Microsoft to Support Google IDs for Azure B2B Collaboration
Microsoft has launched the preview of Google B2B Federation, which allows Google accounts to be used to access Azure AD apps. Quite how this will work out for apps that use guest user accounts is unknown at this point.
Free eBook Covering Teams Deployment
Everyone likes free stuff. Here’s a link to a free eBook published by Quadrotech relating their experience of introducing and using Teams.
Reassembling IM Conversations with Skype for Business Online and Teams
A new Petri.com article explains how to reassemble IM conversations using the compliance records captured by Skype for Business Online and Teams.
Creating an All-Employees Team (in Microsoft Teams)
Do you want to create an all-employees team spanning everyone in the company? Here’s a PowerShell script that will create and populate the team for you.
Teams Data Now Stored in Japan and Australia Office 365 DataCenters
In a surprise Sunday announcement, Microsoft said that from August 27 they will deliver Teams services from Office 365 datacenters in Australia and Japan.
Microsoft Completes Work to Bring Skype for Business Functionality into Teams
On August 24, Microsoft announced that their roadmap to bring the functionality and features from Skype for Business Online to Teams was complete. It’s always good news when you see a plan coming together, but it’s also important to understand that a world of difference exists between an announcement and being able to move an organization’s communications workload.