Using Teams External Access for Federated Chats

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.

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.

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.

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 Did Slack Justify That $7B Valuation?

Teams and Slack competitive data

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 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.