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.
Microsoft has announced the preview of the Teams payment app. The app can handle payments through Teams chats and meetings in the United States and Canada using services like Stripe, PayPal, and GoDaddy. We’ve got a Stripe account to handle payments for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, so we took the new app for a test run and it proved very easy to set up and use. The payments app should be very popular with small businesses.
New options to handle teams expiration and restoration are available in the Teams admin center. Having the options in the TAC is useful even if there’s no new magic involved because it’s possible to perform these operations using other Microsoft 365 consoles or programmatically with PowerShell or Graph API requests. Even so, because some teams administrators only ever use the Teams admin center, it’s good to have these options available there.
Teams Shared Channels are a great way to collaborate across multiple Microsoft 365 tenants. From an administrative side, it’s nice to know about who’s connecting – who’s coming into your tenant to use a Teams shared channel and who’s leaving your tenant to share ideas in a Teams shared channel belonging to another tenant. This article explains how to retrieve that information from Azure AD shared user profiles.
Microsoft introduced video messages in Teams chat in November 2022. Now they’ve added auto-generated captions and transcripts for the one-minute long clips. This allows people to read the content of video messages without having their audio on, which could be handy in noisy places. Despite the availability of the transcript, the compliance issues we pointed to last November still exist. That’s regrettable.
Teams meeting participants can now choose from 24 Snapchat Lenses as effects to apply to their video feed. It’s unclear how advantageous these lenses are to the efficient running of Teams meetings, but beauty is very much in the eye of the individual meeting participant. Some will find the Snapchat Lenses create a compelling effect. Others will be less positive. But across the 280 million monthly active Teams users, there’s bound to be some who absolutely love these effects.
A Teams profanity filter is available to detect offensive and profane words used in Teams meetings and captured in live captions. The effectiveness of the filter and its ability to mask bad words depends on many factors, including microphone quality. I can see the Teams profanity filter being popular in education settings, but maybe less so in the more red-blooded corporate world. It’s a personal choice!
Microsoft has made a preview version of the new Teams client available to commercial tenants worldwide. The preview runs only on Windows and isn’t yet available in browser sessions. Some functionality is missing because it’s incomplete but the new client is faster and snappier than the classic Teams client. To use the preview, you’ll need to enable the new client through a Teams update policy.
Microsoft has overhauled the Teams Files App as part of its work to refresh the Teams client UI. We’re still waiting to know about the new channels experience which is supposed to appear at around the same time. This work will refresh and enhance the Teams V1 client while also appearing in the Teams V2.1 client that’s expected to be available in preview soon.
The Teams green screen effect allows people to select a uniform backdrop to apply effects upon using fewer system resources and achieving a cleaner output. Not everyone has a suitable backdrop, so I used the wall behind my desk to see what the Teams green screen effect could do with it. And although some imperfections resulted from the lack of uniformity for the wall, you can still see how this will be a useful feature. That is, if you use a proper backdrop!
Microsoft continues to improve the sound quality available in Teams meetings with support for spatial audio and ultrasound howling detection (feedback echo). Spatial audio depends on the right equipment and aims to help you know who’s speaking in a meeting. Howling detection means that Teams detects when multiple people in a physical room join a meeting and suppresses audio to avoid a feedback loop.
Teams now displays People Insights on the User Profile card. The insights come from LinkedIn and Viva Insights and are intended to keep people informed. The user profile card already includes lots of information and it’s debatable whether knowing when birthdays come around for your LinkedIn contacts adds much value. As always. beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
A new setting in the Teams meeting policy allows Microsoft 365 tenants to dictate that meetings organized by some or all users must gain explicit consent from users before they can be recorded. The new control is intended to help address privacy concerns that some users might have. This article describes how to apply the policy setting and its impact on meeting participants.
Teams bulk policy assignment options include two features in the Teams admin center, batch jobs, Azure Automation and plain-old PowerShell. In this article, we examine the options in the Teams Admin Center to revert policy assignments back to the global (default) policy and a way to perform Teams bulk policy assignments for selected accounts. And we mention the other methods that exist which don’t involve the Teams admin center.
Microsoft 365 pronouns for display in apps like Teams and OWA can now be enabled on a tenant-wide basis. Displaying pronouns is a topic that can cause strong feelings for some, so organizations should take their time and plan an implementation before rushing to deployment.
Microsoft is dropping lots of hints to the press about the imminent arrival of the new Teams client (V2.1), due to arrive in public preview in late March 2023. According to reports, the new Teams client will deliver better performance while using 50% less memory and making fewer demands for CPU. It all sounds great. With the new client coming into sight, it’s time to prepare Teams update policies to make sure that the right users get the new software at the right time.
Version 5.0 of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module contains a major overhaul for the Get-CsOnlineUser cmdlet, which receives better filtering capabilities. The overhaul is part of Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to modernize and enhance the cmdlets inherited from the Skype for Business Online connector. Although there’s still work to do to fix some glitches, the update is welcome.
On April 12, 2023, Microsoft will retire the original version of Teams free introduced in 2018. If you want to stay using a free version, Microsoft has Teams for Home. However, the functionality isn’t the same and there’s no migration tools available to move from one platform to the other. In this kind of situation, it might just be time to bite the bullet and pay for Teams.
Mesh avatars are a new visual way for people to participate in Teams meetings. A mesh avatar is a 3D representation of a person used instead of a video image. Some will consider the notion of using an avatar in a meeting abhorrent, but it’s really not that bad and can be very useful at times. Using avatars is an intensely personal decision. For some, it might be their first step into the metaverse. For others, it could be their last (until something better comes along)…
Microsoft makes a 30-day Teams Premium trial license available to allow customers to test the premium features. Once the trial finishes, it’s a good idea to clean up and remove the Teams Premium trial licenses from the Azure AD accounts that participated in the trial, especially as the trial license has the same display name as the paid-for Teams Premium license. You can accomplish the task through the Microsoft 365 admin center, but we explain how to do the job with PowerShell too. The same technique works to remove any specific license from a set of user accounts.
Teams Premium is now generally available. Not all its features are online yet, but Teams meeting templates are, so we tested them to see if they help users to organize better meetings. After playing around with templates, including the optional use of sensitivity labels to control template settings, we conclude that this is a nice feature to have but maybe not one that will influence the buying decision for Teams Premium.
Every thirteen weeks, Microsoft shares some numbers as part of its quarterly results. The FY23 Q2 data included a new Teams user number (280 million monthly active users) and some clues that Office 365 is approaching 400 million paid seats – or maybe active users. You can never quite tell from the data Microsoft releases. One thing’s for sure. The cloud market is slowing in line with the general economy, which means that Microsoft needs to extract more money from each user to offset the slowdown in seat growth.
Microsoft has introduced a set of visual effects for Teams meetings. The Teams video effects are a set of styles and filters that apply to (augment) an existing video stream. It’s a cute idea that will mean a lot more to some users than others. You can stop people using Teams video effects by blocking the Custom Filters app in the Teams admin center. But that might be a pity because everyone deserves a little levity in life.
The Microsoft 365 Groups Report (membership of groups and teams) originally used the Azure AD and Exchange Online PowerShell modules. Now its code uses only cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. It’s an example of the kind of update that many organizations are going through due to the upcoming deprecation of the Azure AD and MSOL modules.
Microsoft expects the Teams Premium license to be generally available in February 2023. In advance, Microsoft confirmed that they will move four features from the set covered by the Teams standard license to Teams Premium. In reality, this probably won’t affect many users, but does Microsoft really have to do this and run the risk of offending some people by demanding extra for features they use today?
Teams external federation allows users to chat with people in other Microsoft 365 tenants. External participants can see presence data unless you suppress it by running the Set-CsPrivacyConfiguration cmdlet to put the tenant into “privacy mode.” The policy affects everyone in the tenant and there’s no way to apply privacy mode to selected users.
Microsoft is adding the @Everyone mention to Teams group and meeting chats. Using @Everyone highlights a message to all chat participants by notifying them through their activity feed (dependent on user settings). It’s a feature similar to the @Team and @Channel mentions available for channel conversations. Not a huge advance, but welcome none the less.
Teams holiday data define when users of the Teams phone system might not be at work and alternative calling arrangements exist. It’s easy to update holiday data using the Teams admin center, but it’s also easy to write a PowerShell script to update Teams about new holiday events on an ongoing basis. All explained here!
Microsoft is making 30-day trial licenses available to customers to test Teams Premium functionality with up to 25 users. Given the short test period that’s available, we suggest that organizations put the idea to one side until after the holidays are over. You can come back in 2023 and do some in-depth testing to find out if Teams Premium is worth the $10/user/month price tag.
On December 5, Microsoft announced a new Adobe Integration with Teams for PDF files stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The new integration uses an Azure AD enterprise app to link Teams to the Adobe Document Cloud. The new integration can’t handle protected PDFs, but you can always use a browser to view those files.
A new feature allows people to add participants to Teams group chats through @mentions in the compose box. It’s a nice feature that should have been there a long time ago. Microsoft says that adding new group chat participants this way saves a whole two clicks over the old way. Will those two clicks make any difference to you?
A new setting in the Teams feedback policy controls the display of the Suggest a Feature option in the Teams help menu. It’s up to an organization to decide how they want users to communicate with Microsoft. The Teams feedback policy gives that control, if you want to use it.
A policy setting called RestrictTeamsSignInToAccountsFromTenantList is available to restrict the ability of Teams desktop clients to connect to Azure AD tenants. It’s a fact that floated under our radar for a while, but now that we know about it, we’re telling you too. Of course, you probably knew about this capability anyway, but someone probably didn’t!
Microsoft has released the Teams Games for Work app to enterprise and education tenants. The intention is to bring people together through game play. The technology in the game isn’t very different to anything we’ve seen before and the games are OK, even if it’s slightly weird to play them in a Teams meeting. The question is, is an app like Games for Work needed? If not, it’s easy to block the app.
The Teams Delete chat option allows people to remove chats from their chat list. It’s a nice way to restore some order to a list that can be very cluttered with long-dead chats. Some subtle differences exist between leaving a chat and deleting a chat that you might need to explain to users before deploying the feature, which is controlled by a setting in the Teams messaging policy.
Microsoft Teams doesn’t come with a Teams Directory, so it’s hard to know if a suitable team already exists when people ask for a new team. This fact contributions to teams sprawl where multiple teams exist to serve the same purpose. Teams sprawl creates an obstacle to effective collaboration and runs the danger that some important information is tucked away inside teams that no one ever goes near. Creating a Teams Directory helps team owners and users know what teams already exist inside a tenant. It’s an idea that just makes sense.
Message center notification MC454809 announces that Microsoft will deploy a new Teams Webinars experience to tenants at the end of November with worldwide availability complete in early December. The new Teams Webinars experience is based on customer feedback and addresses issues like branding, registration control, and scalability. A new Teams events policy is available to control who can create webinars.
This article explains how to make Teams policy assignments using an Azure Automation runbook and some of the modernized cmdlets available in the Teams PowerShell module. Not everything worked as smoothly as we’d like, but like most PowerShell scenarios, there’s usually a workaround available to get the job done. It just needs to be found.
The new Teams Premium product ($10/.user/month) and Outlook both claim that they will support sensitivity labels and a meeting recap. That’s confusing, especially if Outlook delivers the features at no cost. However, when you look into the matter a little deeper, it’s obvious that what Teams Premium will deliver is very different to what you can expect to see in Outlook. All of which proves why it’s important to read announcements carefully and put them into context with what you already know about how products work.
Before an app or an Azure Automation account can use the Teams PowerShell cmdlets in a script or runbook, it must have the permission to act as an administrator. In this article, we cover how to assign the necessary role to a service principal.
Teams clients now have an unread only toggle for the activity feed. The toggle hides previously read notifications to highlight messages awaiting attention by the user. Apart from hiding work you’ve already done, the toggle might just surface some items you haven’t yet taken care of.