New administrator capabilities in Microsoft Teams! – Nov. 2018

November has been a great month for our administrators in Teams because Microsoft has recently expanded the administrative capabilities! In order for your organization to have a great experience with Teams you need to ensure your administrators are well equipped with good governance capabilities. With that said, let’s go over what has recently been added for our Teams administrators and what impact this will have for your organization as a whole.

New Teams admin roles!

After hearing feedback from customers and partners Microsoft has added some additional administrator roles to cater to the various roles and different tools each role requires. With the latest update you will have the option of 4 different Teams admin roles:

• Teams Service Admin – Manage ALL the controls available in the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business admin center and equivalent PowerShell cmlets
  • Allows you to manage all meetings, voice, messaging, and organization wide settings
• Teams Communications Admin – Manage meetings and calling functionality in Microsoft Teams
  • Includes changes to audio conferencing bridge/phone number assignments
• Teams Communications Support Engineering – Have access to advanced call analytics tool
  • View full call record info
• Teams Communications Support Specialist – Have access to basic call analytics tools 
  • View info for specific users being searched

These new admin roles allows you to more tightly control what permissions your admins have to ensure they aren’t given too much power or not enough power. In the past, it was more of an “all or nothing” permission set where you either had the ability to change everything or nothing at all. With this new granular approach you can more efficiently govern your Teams capabilities across all IT admins.

How do I assign these admin roles?

Assigning these rules is as easy as a few clicks within the Azure Admin Portal. You will just need to do the following to assign roles accordingly:

1. Login to Azure Admin Portal
2. Find the user profile in the Azure AD and click on the “Directory Role“
3. Click “Add Role” and select the specific admin role you want to assign to that user profile
4. You’re off to the races!

In addition to the updates mentioned above, your Teams admins now have the ability to manage teams from within the Teams and Skype for Business Admin Center (or via PowerShell)! So you may be saying, “great, but how…?”. Well all you’ll need to do for this is select “Teams” within the admin center and then select “Manage Teams“. From there you will have the ability to manage the entire list of all teams in your tenant. This will provide your Global Admins and Teams Service Admins the ability to search/edit details like:

• Team name
• Channels – a count of all channels in the team, including the default General channel.
• Users – a count of total users, including owners, guests, and members from your tenant.
• Owners – a count of owners for this team.
• Guests – a count of Azure Active Directory B2B guest users who are members of this team.
• Privacy – the AccessType of the backing Office 365 group.

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With these abilities your admins can do things like:

• Update membership
• Change settings
• Transfer ownership

To learn more about this exciting update for your administrators take a look at the official documentation here.

Lastly, to wrap things up we’ll discuss the recent updates to the automation of the Teams lifecycle!

Automating the Teams Lifecyle!

Whether you are managing 10 users or 10,000 users it is important to have a familiar experience between all users in Teams. With the latest update to the Teams lifecycle you can now streamline this process for your users with a total of 37 Microsoft Graph API’s! With Microsoft Graph you can create a new virtual team, add the right people, configure the team with the appropriate channels, tabs, apps and more all without human intervention! The API’s will help you automate:

• Provisioning of large groups of Teams
• Automatically creating teams and channels (with business-specific limitations)
• Deployment of apps in teams and channels

Picture provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/New-Provide-a-great-Teams-experience-with-improved-manageability/ba-p/288059

The diagram above just gives you a quick idea of what you can automate with the Microsoft Graph API’s which can save a considerable amount of time for your administrators especially if they are creating hundreds of teams manually today.

Let’s say you don’t need the virtual team anymore? No worries, you will have the ability leverage the Microsoft Graphs API to delete or archive that team or if you set an O365 group expiration policy for that team you can have it automatically removed when the group expires.

This concludes the latest updates for our administrators. For a full breakdown of these updates check out the tech community blog article here. Check back next week, I’ll be recapping all of the updates for the month of November so you can ensure you haven’t missed anything!