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.
The latest build of the Teams clients (desktop, browser, and mobile) include the ability to remove a participant from a group chat. This is a much-requested feature that’s taken surprisingly long to deliver, but now you can have fun adding and removing people to your heart’s desire. It’s nice to have a chat and it’s even better if you can control who you chat with.
Office 365 notification MC177587 tells us that Teams will soon start to move underused teams to the More section of the teams gallery, letting users concentrate on the set of teams that they really use. Background agents do the work of detecting teams that haven’t been accessed in 45 days or so and users get the chance to reverse the process. But it’s a good idea to let users know what’s coming, just in case they panic when they can’t find a moved team.
Office 365 notification MC177013 gives the news that team members can now nominate other people to join a private team. Teams routes the requests to team owners, who approve or deny access. It’s a small but useful update.
The Teams Admin Center now boasts the ability to delete teams and (if you don’t want to get rid of them altogether) archive teams. And unarchive teams back into use. All is good, even if Microsoft is making slow progress at building out Teams management functionality. Some of the slowness is due to dependencies, some because of other factors.
The tabs in a Teams channel can be associated with many different forms of data. When you delete a channel, you only remove the conversations for that channel. Any other data is left intact, including files in the folder in the SharePoint site used by the team. To fully clean up a deleted channel, you must therefore check what tabs exist and what data is accessed through those tabs.
Office 365 Message Center update MC176548 says that Teams has started to roll out “Praise” a way of sending another user a graphical reminder of how much you appreciate their work. Undoubtedly, praising people in Teams will make the world a happier place.
Every Office 365 group (and team) has a SharePoint site. But how to find the URLs of all the sites used by teams in a tenant. One PowerShell answer came from Syskit, but it’s an old technique and we can do better now by fetching a list of teams in the tenant and then retrieving the URL for each team-enabled group.
Teams supports federated chat with other users in Office 365 tenants using a feature called external access. It’s similar to the way that Skype for Business federated chat works, except that you can’t use emojis. Generally things work very well, which is nice when you want to reach out and communicate with someone externally.
At the Enterprise Connect conference, Microsoft announced that Teams is now used by 500,000 organizations. That’s a jump of 80,000 since the last data given in January. They also said that 150 organizations have more than 10,000 users and that Teams is used by 91 of the Fortune 100. All in all, some impressive numbers.
Microsoft announced that the era of favorites and following is over for Teams. The new way is to show or hide teams and configure notifications for channels. Apparently, people found the old terminology confusing. Hopefully the new world of Show/Hide and Channel notifications will be more reassuring.
New data about the number of Slack and Workplace usage gives the chance to compare how Microsoft is doing with Teams. And the answer is that things seem to be going well, largely because Teams is growing off the huge Office 365 base. With 155 million users (the last figure) and 3 million more added monthly, Teams has a lot more to go after in the Office 365 installed base.
Microsoft Teams suffered its first major worldwide outage on 18 February 2019. Users reported a failure to connect because Teams couldn’t authenticate them. The Post-Incident report for TM173756 revealed an issue with the Azure Key Vault. What’s more interesting is that the issue affected users in multiple Office 365 datacenter regions, which is not good.
In one of those interesting (but possibly worthless) facts discovered about Office 365, we find that audit records are captured for Teams compliance records written into Exchange Online group mailboxes. The Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet reveals details that we can interpret using some techniques explained in Chapter 21 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.
Office 365 changes all the time, which is good because it keeps the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team busy and happy. Discussions this week included Microsoft’s response to a Dutch DPIA, the effect large Teams have on Yammer, how Exchange Online validated a fix to a security problem, and graphics to help understand the components of the Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 plans.
The Teams Admin Center has been renamed to remove any reference to Skype for Business Online. The console now includes a set of new Teams usage reports. The reports differ from what’s available in the Office 365 Admin Center and aren’t quite as powerful, but we can expect Microsoft to improve and refine these reports over time.
Teams users can now set their own status message to inform co-workers about what they’re up to for the next few hours, days, or on an ongoing basis. It’s a small but useful feature that seems to have crept into Teams without much publicity!
Microsoft revealed that Teams now supports a membership limit of 25,000 members per team (March 2021). The new maximum will help large organizations like Accenture (the largest user of Teams). Even with the increased limit, Teams might not be the best choice for organization-wide communications for the largest companies. Yammer is still the Microsoft collaboration scalability champ.
A new report commissioned by Microsoft explains how Exchange Online and the Security and Compliance Center meet the electronic records requirements of regulatory bodies like the SEC and FINRA. Within the report, there’s some news about changes to the way that Office 365 handles Teams compliance records stored in Exchange Online. And after all that, we consider how some backup vendors treat Teams compliance records as equivalent to the data stored in the Teams Azure services.
According to Microsoft’s FY19 Q2 results released on January 30, Teams is now used by 420,000 organizations. That’s a strong growth rate over the 329,000 number given at Ignite 2018. And with Office 365 still growing, there’s plenty of room for Teams to expand.
The new version of OWA is maturing and new features are turning up on a weekly basis. You can now schedule a Teams meeting from OWA and the prospect of joyful animations hang in the air. But only for Office 365 users as there’s no sign that the new OWA will come to Exchange on-premises servers.
The Shifts app is now available to Office 365 tenants worldwide. Hosted as a Teams app, the idea is that managers can build out and publish schedules for hourly-paid frontline workers, who can then view their hours and request changes.
It’s easy to create a webhook connector to post information to a team channel or an Microsoft 365 group. What might not be quite so easy is formatting the JSON payload. Here’s how to use a template card to simplify the process.
Microsoft’s CMO says that the largest customer deployment of Teams (Accenture) has reached 170,000 users. Numbers like this underline the success of Office 365’s fastest growing application.
Encrypted email is becoming more common within Office 365. Things usually flow smoothly when sending protected messages to email recipients, but other Office 365 recipient types like Teams and Yammer might not be able to handle protected email.
You can now buy a Meeting Room license to connect Teams to a device in the room. The license allows the device to participate in Teams meetings.
A survey found that Teams is now the second most popular chat application in large businesses and has put Slack into third position. But anyone who has tracked the numbers isn’t surprised because Teams has been growing strongly for some time.
Now that we know all about the different email addresses used by Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams, the question arises of how to include a team channel as a member of a distribution group. As it turns out, there’s a simple way and a more complicated way.
Some recent questions in the Microsoft Technical Community show confusion about the email addresses used by Office 365 Groups and Teams. Here’s our attempt to clarify.
Teams has released version 0.9.6 of its PowerShell module. You should upgrade to the new module because it fixes some bugs and allows administrators to manage any team, even when they’re not a team owner.
Exchange Online distribution lists can be used to populate the membership of Office 365 Groups or Teams by applying a little PowerShell magic. Here’s how.
Teams offers a number of ways to create new teams, which is good. However, if you create a new team with PowerShell, make sure that you add the team owners to the members list as otherwise they won’t be able to access Planner.
The latest version of the Teams desktop and browser clients support the creation of dynamic teams based on dynamic Office 365 Groups. The functionality is welcome, as long as you can pay for it as every member who comes within the scope of a query used for a dynamic team needs an Azure AD P1 license.
Office 365 doesn’t include a way to export a list of Teams in a form that can be imported by Power BI, but PowerShell makes it an easy task to accomplish. Here’s a script to help solve the problem.
Team owners can set the picture for their teams, but can tenant administrators do the same thing? As it turns out, no. But there’s a reason why.
Microsoft has made the intelligent features of Stream available to all Office 365 commercial customers, meaning that you can now luxuriate in closed captions, automatic transcripts and deep search, and face recognition.
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…
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.
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 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.
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.