The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Microsoft 365
Microsoft has announced that Stream will no longer create a people timeline in new videos it processes after June 1 and that the feature will be retired. The people timeline feature works well for videos taped in controlled conditions, like studios. It is less successful (and useful) for recordings of Teams meetings, which is where a lot of work for Stream comes from currently.
PowerShell modules are often updated regularly to add new features and functionality. When the time came to update the Azure Active Directory preview module to 2.0.2.89, things didn’t work so smoothly because the files for the previous version of the module had ended up in OneDrive for Business. The moral of the story is that there’s a reason why the Scope parameter exists for the Install-Module cmdlet.
Microsoft announced on May 1 that the limit for Teams group chats is increasing from 100 to 250. The new limit will be available everywhere by mid-May. Nice as an expanded limit it, large group chats come with some notable decreases in functionality, like losing the ability to display user status messages or read receipts. In some cases, taking a conversation to a channel might be a better idea.
Word users range from casual to professional writers. Those involved in collaborative co-authoring can now @mention others in comments. The feature is available in Word and PowerPoint (click to run) and the Office Online apps now and Excel desktop is due to get it too. Documents must be stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business to allow @mentioned people access the files.
Several updates are available for the standard usage reports in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. One helps Office 365 tenants understand the changed user activity profile due to remote working. Another gives views of user activity across the complete tenant. The updates are useful and interesting, but an ISV product will do a better job of analyzing and reporting the same data.
The May update is now available for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 edition) eBook. Subscribers can download new files as they wish. Because so much has changed in this update, we recommend that you download the update as soon as convenient.
Microsoft reported that Office 365 now has 258 million paid seats (not the same as active users) and Teams has reached 75 million daily active users. That’s impressive growth, with Office 365 adding 58 million extra seats in the last six months. Teams has done even better, sprinting from 20 million to 75 million. The Office 365 infrastructure sometimes shows the strain of handling all the extra users, but some new functionality delivered recently helps.
In the latest example of rebranding wizardry, Microsoft has announced that Office 365 Groups are becoming Microsoft 365 Groups. You’d wonder if the rename is just to keep the marketing people happy. But maybe the new name reflects what Office 365 Groups have become. Less of a collaboration platform and more of a membership service for Microsoft 365 apps.
The OneDrive development team has announced that the roll-out of differential sync is now complete. Large files can synchronize without difficulty because only the changed bits need to be transmitted to the server. This isn’t an excuse to start uploading MP4 files to OneDrive, but you can now do it more easily.
The Teams Admin Center now includes a Manage Apps page to allow administrators to view the complete inventory of apps available to Teams. Administrators can decide if they want to make apps available to users via Teams app setup policies or block the installation of apps. Each app has a publisher and certification status, but not many apps have been through the full “Microsoft 365 certified” process, including many of Microsoft’s own apps.
In a surprise development, Microsoft announced that recording of Teams 1:1 calls is now available. Some limitations are present and the feature seems rushed, but perhaps this is because people working at home on confidential transactions need the feature, In any case, record away!
Microsoft is updating the Teams default meeting policy to enforce lobby entry for external users. Sounds good, but what does this mean? This post explains what happens and how Microsoft is able to update the default meeting policy for many tenants while not affecting the tenants who have customized their default meeting policy.
Microsoft has released the Communities app for Teams. The app integrates Yammer into Teams as a pinned app or in a channel tab. The pinned app mode is most functional, even if the channel mode includes a Share to Channel option. Overall, it’s a nice integration, which begs the question as to when the same might be done for OWA?
If an Office 365 tenant goes to the bother of creating nice OWA autosignatures for users, shouldn’t we also removed the ability to edit the signatures in OWA settings? RBAC seems like the right way to do the job, but in this case, the way RBAC restricts options by removing the right to run cmdlets or parameters means that the block affects other OWA settings. Fortunately, the Exchange developers thought of this and provide an option in OWA mailbox policies to save the day.
Teams posts service messages to the General channel to inform people when members join or leave a team or for channel operations. The information can cause problems in some situations, like when organizations go through corporate restructuring and lay people off. The problem is that Teams doesn’t give administrators any way to disable these messages.
PowerShell is a great way to get work done with Office 365 data. The downside is that PowerShell can sometimes be slow, which is why we look for ways to speed things up, especially when dealing with some of the “heavier” cmdlets like Get-UnifiedGroup. The good news is that switching loops to use the ForEach method can speed things up. The bad is that you might only squeeze an extra 5% performance out of your code. Is that enough to bother? Your call…
Office 365 services are now available in the two Norway datacenters in Oslo and Stavanger. The new datacenters join several other “Go Local” country-level regions around the world.
Need to be noticed in a Teams meeting? You can now raise your hand (virtually) to attract the attention of meeting participants. No one might notice, but at least you’ve tried. To some, this might be a small feature. To others, like teachers facing large classes, it might be a real boon.
Recent developments sees the ability to stop Teams users updating their photos by enforcing controls in OWA mailbox policies. Organizers can stop Teams meetings without waiting for everyone to leave with a new End meeting option in the meeting menu. Both changes are rolling out.
On April 13, the Teams development group announced they will deliver a 3×3 video view for Teams meetings by the end of April. Further increases in the number of participants shown in meetings are being worked on. Corporate users might not see the value of an expanded view, but it will be welcomed in the education sector.
Yammer networks can be in any of three modes. The most modern is Native mode for Microsoft 365, which is where Yammer can use many Office 365 features. Although I am not a Yammer expert by any stretch of the imagination, I decided to move my tenant’s Yammer network into a brave new world. Here’s what happened.
Teams supports pop-out windows for personal and group chats, including those with federated users and Skype consumer users. From June, Teams will support pop-out windows for meetings and calls too. Microsoft plans to roll-out the new meeting window slowly and users will have the choice to use the current or new implementation until August. At that time, pop-out windows for calls and meetings become the norm.
The SendAs audit event is logged when someone uses the send as permission to send a message from an Exchange Online mailbox. The events are stored in the Office 365 audit log and can be found there with an audit log search. However, things aren’t as straightforward as they are on-premises because some other types of delegated messages turn up in searches. Fortunately, we have a script to help.
Teams Live Events are a form of Teams meeting that’s more structured than the regular gathering. You won’t use a live event for every meeting, but they’re very valuable for scenarios like company town halls, product announcements, and so on. It’s easy to create a live event and a little practice goes a long way to broadcasting solid performances.
Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers will benefit from the provision of Azure Active Directory P1 Premium licenses. All good, but what about the Office 365 E3 tenants who pay the same monthly fee? Many enterprise tenants could use the features licensed by Azure Active Directory Premium P1, but they’ll have to pay $6/user/month to get the same benefit.
The Plenom Busylight is a small LED light that plugs into a USB port on your computer and changes color to reflect your presence status in Teams, Skype, Zoom, Jabber, or several other UC clients. It’s well worth the price to signal when you’re busy to people whom you share your home with.
Teams supports the selection of an image to use as the background for meetings. For now, you can choose from a set of images selected by Microsoft, but soon users will be able to upload their own images and use them in Teams meetings. While we wait for Microsoft to complete some work on admin framework to control image upload, a workaround is available to use custom images today.
Covid-19 dealt a blow to Microsoft’s plans to remove basic authentication from 5 connection protocols for Exchange Online and forced them to postpone the removal from October 13, 2020 to sometime in the second quarter of 2021. The news is disappointing because basic authentication is a weakness exploited by many hackers. But you can’t plan for a pandemic and Office 365 tenants need more time to be ready for the deprecation.
In a moment of levity to lift the current situation, we discuss the wide range of themes offered by Office 365 to users. People can choose from 49 different themes to customize the online apps. You can go crazy with something like Super Sparkle Happy, display your love of cats, or choose a simple color. Once chosen, you should see the same theme across all the Office online apps. Except Teams, which does its own thing.
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.
We’re going to tape an episode of the Office 365 Exposed podcast at 20:00 UTC on April 2 and everyone can join the Teams meeting we’re using to tape the podcast. There’s lots to talk about, including Microsoft’s decision to make Ignite 2019 virtual.
The April 2020 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is now available. Subscribers can download the updated files from Gumroad.com (EPUB/PDF) or Amazon (Kindle). 17 of the 24 content chapters are changed in this update.
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.
Microsoft Forms is a great way to build questionaires and other forms for Office 365 (and other) users to answer. Now you can insert media into questions by adding images or videos. When used effectively, the media delivers additional information to help respondents understand the full context of questions before they answer.
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.
Exchange Online mailboxes support SendAs, Send on Behalf Of, and FullAccess permissions. A previous script focused on the FullAccess permission. This version covers all three. It’s also a good example of how you need to pay attention to property sets when writing PowerShell code to use the new Exchange Online REST-based cmdlets.
SharePoint Online comes with a reasonable amount of free storage, but it’s surprising how quickly that storage can be consumed, especially if you use Office 365 retention policies. With that thought in mind, it’s a good idea to check what sites are consuming your SharePoint storage. This post covers how to write a PowerShell script to report SharePoint Online site storage, complete with a couple of bells and whistles.
In addition to mailbox permissions, Exchange Online supports folder-level delegated permissions. Users can create folder delegations through Outlook desktop. Like mailbox permissions, it’s a good idea for tenants to check folder-level delegations to ensure that people don’t keep permissions for longer than they should. We explain how to create a PowerShell script to generate such a report.
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.