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.
Message center notification MC687849 announces the retirement of the Teams Who bot. This was one of the original apps developed to show the potential of Teams. In truth, the bot was never very useful. Microsoft says that its functionality will be replaced with Copilot. You’ll be able to query for the answers the Who bot provided for a small extra investment.
From mid-November 2023, users have the chance to forward Teams chat messages. The feature works for 1:1, group, and meeting chats. The lack of a forward option in the Teams desktop and browser clients is a little surprising because the mobile client has been able to do this for some time.
Following new support of Loop components for Teams channel conversations, it’s sad to discover that Loop component eDiscovery remains challenging two years after the first appearance of component technology in a Microsoft 365 application. eDiscovery can certainly find Loop components, but creating a seamless picture about their usage is harder than it should be.
Loop components have been available for Teams chat for nearly two years. Now they’re coming to channel conversations. The loop files generated for the components are stored in the channel folder of the SharePoint Online site belonging to the team. Once posted, every channel member can edit the Loop component.
The new Teams client applies AI to the creation of custom announcement images by invoking Designer to generate images either from scratch or based on your input. The new mechanism generates some nice images that can be extensively customized with Designer. It’s more complex than the way the Teams classic client handled custom announcement images, but the output is nicer.
This article explains how to create SharePoint lists using cmdlets from the PnP.PowerShell module. The original data comes from a script to create a Teams Directory in HTML and CSV format files. The CSV data is imported into SharePoint to populate a list in a communications site. Everything works very smoothly, which begs the question why this kind of import isn’t done more often. Perhaps it’s because people don’t know that it’s possible. They do now.
A setting in the Teams meeting policy controls whether users can access the meeting chat in meetings hosted by non-trusted external tenants. By default, the setting is On, meaning that users can participate in chat for any meeting they join in any tenant. If you have concerns about this aspect of meetings, turn the setting Off and define trusted tenants.
An interesting discussion in the Microsoft Technical Community about limiting the teams privacy mode to private for new teams caused me to try out the principles. The idea works, with caveats, and I wonder if anyone will use it in production. It’s an interesting technique for using container management sensitivity labels that I’d never thought about before, so here it is.
Microsoft suggests that allowing every user to create new Microsoft 365 groups. That’s mad. Controlling group creation through policy settings is the only way to go. It will avoid group sprawl (or team sprawl) and avoid a lot of administrative effort that will otherwise be devoted to cleaning up the mess of unused and unwanted groups. This article explains how to update policy settings to control group creation using cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.
Everyone likes a bit of help from time to time, but the number and persistence of irritating Teams pop-ups has become a real pain in the rear end. Worst of all, there’s no way for administrators or end users to suppress Teams pop-ups, which keep on coming in an effort to bore end users to death. On a positive note, the new Teams client includes settings to allow users to choose the classic theme and revert to having channel posts display at the bottom of the screen instead of the top.
This article explains how to use PowerShell to create dynamic Microsoft 365 groups (and teams) based on the departments assigned to Entra ID user accounts. Creating a new group is easy. The trick in team-enablement is to wait for the synchronization between Entra ID and Teams to finish before you go ahead. After that, it’s plain sailing.
Teams town halls are a new event type designed to host large audiences. Town halls will replace Live Events, which Microsoft will remove on September 30, 2024. If you’ve ever created a Teams webinar event, running a town hall will seem very similar. That’s because the two event types follow similar methods to set up and manage events. Microsoft still has some features to build into Town Hall to make it functionally equivalent to Live Events. These features will come in time.
The Teams 2.1 client uses a different folder and naming convention for custom background images. People who switch must move their images, so here’s a script to do the job by resizing images to meet Teams requirements, renaming the files to comply with the new naming scheme, and copying the files from the old to the new folder, It’s PowerShell, so you can change the code as you like.
I was asked how easy it would be to write a PowerShell script to monitor new teams members and reject any additions that met specific criteria. Easy, we said, so we set to creating a script to interrogate the unified audit log to find new member events. Once that was done, it’s a matter of analyzing the events to find if we should reject the addition of any of the added members.
It’s possible to use PowerShell to create a report detailing the SharePoint Online site URLs used with Teams. My first attempt used the Exchange Online module, but is the Graph any faster? As it turns out, not really. At least, not for interactive sessions using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (things are different when running SDK code using a registered app). I tried several approaches, but Graph permissions got in the way every time.
A Teams unified picker for fun content is now available in the Teams 2.1 client. The new picker replaces the existing options to add GIFs and stickers. I’m sure this update will be important to some people, but I’m more impressed by the change to improve the performance and reliability of synchronizing calendar updates between Outlook (Exchange Online) and Teams. All available soon.
Teams channel meetings belong to a channel, but who receives the invitations for these meetings? The answer is “it depends” – on group settings and options. The underlying Microsoft 365 group might have a subscriber list of users who want to receive email for new events like meetings or the user might choose to send invitations to everyone. We discuss the mechanics and explore a way to schedule meetings in shared and private channels too.
Delayed until October 2023, the Teams Meet app will appear in the Teams 2.1 client to help users manage meetings more effectively. At least, that’s the plan. The app works well for internal meetings but its review capabilities are limited when you attend meetings hosted in another tenant. The Meet app will be beneficial in large organizations where people attend lots of meetings, but will might be less effective in smaller organizations. It’s worth looking at to decide if the Teams Meet app works for you.
Teams Premium Trial licenses are to be offered to end users in commercial tenants worldwide for self-service purchases from September 2023. I quite like some of the functionality available in Teams Premium, but I think organizations are better off using the “regular” Teams Premium trial licenses to run a test involving up to 25 users for 30 days. The results are probably going to be more indicative of the worth of Teams Premium than any individual test can be.
Microsoft announced on August 17 that they are not proceeding with the implementation of dark mode support in the Teams Admin center. The news came as a surprise, but it’s an indication of the lack of user interface consistency across the different Microsoft 365 administrative consoles. Token handling is another example. I can live without dark mode, but being forced to sign out by the Teams admin center is a pain.
A question about how to report specific changes to Teams memberships gave another excuse to use PowerShell with the unified audit log to deliver a solution. The idea is that you can check audit log entries to see when specific user accounts join the membership of Teams. Once you’ve found that data, it’s a simple matter of creating email to share the results. All done with a few lines of PowerShell…
Stream video playback in Teams chats and channels is now inline, meaning that the video plays direct without any need to call the Stream browser client. It’s a good update that makes watching Stream videos a very seamless experience. It would be nice if Microsoft can improve some other integration points where Stream and Teams touch because some of the other integration features don’t work so well. In other news, SharePoint Online is rationalizing how it stores user photos.
An update coming soon increases the channel limit for regular and shared channels to 1,000. That should be enough Teams channels for anyone. Then again, a case can be argued that 25 channels should be enough to organize discussions for any team. In any case, you’re going to have the opportunity soon to create channels to your heart’s content. That is, until you reach the 1000-channel; limit.
A new Maybelline video filters app allows Teams meeting participants to enhance their appearance during or before a meeting. 12 filters are available to apply AI-powered enhancements based on a 70-point map generated from a user’s face. It’s good if a filter helps you feel better about yourself when you join a call, but I can’t help thinking that maybe Microsoft could work on more important functionality?
Microsoft is making it easier for owners of Teams shared channels to request help if they run into a trust problem when adding a member from another domain. If Teams detects a problem with a missing trust, it flags the error to the channel owner and offers a link to a web page to seek additional support. Of course, the tenant might decline to trust the domain the channel owner wants to use, but that’s a different story.
Microsoft announced that they are rolling out a refresh for the Teams Admin Center search feature. Useful as it can be, TAC search can output odd results. That’s a pity because the TAC search feature would be a whole lot better if its results were less profuse and more reliable.
Microsoft released details about the deployment schedule for the new Teams client (2.1) on June 30, 2023. It looks like a lot of work to roll out the new Teams client will happen over the remainder of 2023. It seems like tenants can use the classic Teams client for at least until mid-2024, but soon there’ll only be one Teams client in use, and that’ll be Teams 2.1.
Security Researchers JumpSec demonstrated a weakness in Teams External Access by showing how to send malware to users via a federated chat. The exploit depends on another weakness in that attackers can interfere with the set of policy controls transmitted by the Teams server to clients. It’s yet another reason why Microsoft 365 tenants should restrict external access to the set of domains they really want to chat with.
Collaborative meeting notes are a preview feature available for Teams meetings which uses a Loop component composed of three other components to capture the agenda, notes, and task list for meetings. Because the feature is based on Loop. it inherits the goodness and problems of the technology (like no guest access). But overall, this is a nice solution that will go down well in large organizations that run many internal meetings.
Microsoft has announced that Teams now supports the Microsoft 365 targeted release mechanism, meaning that new Teams features should appear more consistently. The Teams preview program continues, but targeted release takes precedence. In other news, the Teams chat client in Windows 11 is being replaced by the Teams Free client. This probably won’t make much different, but it’s good to know.
Teams animated backgrounds add something to meetings. According to Microsoft, it’s “a dynamic animation for a more immersive virtual environment.” Based on the limited set of background animated released by Microsoft (which currently can’t be augmented by custom backgrounds), the effect might not be quite what you expect. In any case, animated backgrounds will please some and disappoint others, which is what happens in a very large service spanning over 300 million active users.
Microsoft 365 tenants using Teams group policy assignments to assign policies to user accounts now have a much larger range of policies to choose from, even if assignments can only be made through PowerShell for the moment. In other news, the Teams admin center now has support for dark mode, which is fine if you don’t customize the theme of a Microsoft 365 tenant.
Work locations are a new concept that OWA and Teams share in an attempt to make it easier for people to schedule meetings with knowledge of where participants are working from. It’s a nice idea but the implementation is sadly flawed because of a lack of flexibility in defining or customizing locations. Let’s hope Microsoft improves the feature in future.
Nearly seven years into the product’s existence, Teams offline meetings can now be scheduled through the Teams calendar, but only for Teams private meetings. Making it possible to set aside time for private commitments and in-person meetings is sensible and a good change. The only mystery is why it took so long to happen.
Microsoft plans to roll out the new Teams channels experience to commercial and GCC tenants in mid-June 2023 with GCC-High and DoD tenants getting the software in July. The new UI gives Teams channel conversations a visual makeover and adds some useful features like being able to pop out conversations and using Viva Topics in messages, Moving the compose box to the top of the screen takes a bit of getting used to, as does the way that Teams creates a focus on reading a conversation. Overall, the new UI is an incremental rather than a radical improvement, which is probably what people want.
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.