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New Teams Management Capabilities

Microsoft recently announced a plethora of new Teams management capabilities, all of which can be used today! These new management features and capabilities rolled out at the end of July and touch several different areas of Teams management. Today we’ll be summarizing all the latest and greatest enhancements so you as the IT administrator can start using them within your organization!

Teams Management Enhancements

Device Management Enhancements

Now you can manage all of your Teams devices in one central location. This latest enhancement brings all Teams devices (even Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR)) into the Teams Admin Center for easier management. Microsoft announced this enhancement to the Teams Admin Center back in July, which also included simplified device setup, more granular device management, improvements to bulk management, troubleshooting/health monitoring improvements. There is also the ability to securely delegate administration through Partner Center, so that partners can administer and manage the devices on the organization’s behalf, all while ensuring secure authorized device access. For the complete breakdown of all these enhancements, you can check out the official Microsoft blog here.

Manage App Specific Settings

Configure Microsoft apps and Teams apps without even leaving the Teams Admin Center! With this latest update, you can now configure app-specific settings, which can be found by going to Teams Apps > Manage Apps. In the picture below, you’ll see we have our Praise App, and we’re changing the app-specific settings by adding a custom badge so we can more closely align these settings to our organization’s needs.

praise.gif

Image provided by Microsoft

Advisor for Teams now Generally Available

If you’re not already familiar with Advisor for Teams, basically, it lays out several different plans based upon your journey to Teams. The Advisor for Teams consists of the following programs:

  1. Chat, teams, channels, and apps
  2. Meetings and Conferencing
  3. Skype for Business Upgrade

So whether you’re just looking to configure your environment for Teams meetings or if you’re looking to upgrade from Skype for Business (on-prem or online) to Teams, Microsoft has got you covered! This excellent onboarding tool breaks down each of these workloads in easy to follow steps so you can ensure no stone is left unturned.

Teams Life Cycle Enhancements

Sensitivity Labels in Teams

With the use of Microsoft Information Protection (MIP), you can benefit from the use of sensitivity labels, which can be applied at a container level (team/site/group) so you can ensure secure collaboration across all of your workloads. This latest enhancement includes the ability to assign those sensitivity labels to Teams created within the Teams Admin Center, which just ensures a more consistent experience across your Microsoft 365 environment. These sensitivity labels can also be associated with policies that handle privacy, external user membership, and even unmanaged device access. To learn more about creating sensitivity labels in Teams, you can check out the Microsoft Docs article here.

Better Filtering Capabilities for your Teams

With this enhancement, you can now quickly filter the list of teams in your organization by using the Teams summary table to display and manage all Teams configured within your tenant. As of the time of this writing, you can filter your teams on name classification. However, Microsoft has indicated there will be more filtering fields released in the future.

App Life Cycle Enhancements

Develop, validate, publish, and manage your apps in Teams like never before! Microsoft has released several new capabilities that will help your administrators/developers streamline the entire process all within the Teams admin center!

Custom App Submission & Approval

Building apps has never been more accessible. Now your admins and/or developers can enjoy the streamlined app submission process and enhanced app management capabilities by allowing them to submit a Teams app through any of the following clients:

  • Visual Studio Code
  • Power Virtual Agents
  • Power Apps

This submission process is all handled via the App Submission Microsoft Graph API, which streamlines this process by having the apps submitted directly to the Teams Admin Center for review and approval by the IT admins.

 Publish Custom Apps

Speaking of streamlining, you’ll now be able to review, approve, and publish custom apps all from within the Teams Admin Center. Can’t get much more streamlined than that!

Image provided by Microsoft

As the administrator, you’ll be able to easily view the custom app publishing status, look at the details,  and update their status from “submitting” to “publishing” so that the end-users will be able to access those custom apps.

Install Apps directly to a team from the Teams Admin Center

Just as the title suggests, you can now install an app for any team within your organization, all within the Teams admin center!

install app.png

Image provided by Microsoft

View and Purchase Subscriptions associated with 3rd Party Teams Apps

This new subscription purchase experience will allow you to purchase a subscription right within the Teams Admin Center. In the admin center, you’ll also be able to see offers, plans, and pricing information for each subscription. Also, this is integrated with Microsoft AppSource and Microsoft Admin Center for license purchases, management, and renewal.

application monetization.png

Image provided by Microsoft

Policy Management Enhancements

Batch/Bulk Assignment of Policies now Generally Available

Last but not least, we have some great additions to policy management within the Teams Admin Center. With this latest update to the Teams Admin Center, you can now assign policies in bulk via PowerShell! The PowerShell module supports:

  • Policy assignment to O365 groups
  • Batch assignment of policies for up to 5,000 users
  • Batch assignment of policy packages for up to 5,000 users

More Control Over IP Video Usage in Meetings

Also, there is a new audio and video policy in place that affects the incoming IP video. With this recent change to the Meeting Policy within the Teams admin center, you will now have more control over the use of IP video in your Teams meetings. Before this update, you were only able to regulate outgoing video. However, now you will be able to monitor both incoming and outgoing video feeds as needed. These new updates can be applied within the Teams Admin Center > Meetings > Meeting Policies.

meeting policies.jpg

Image provided by Microsoft

That wraps up the latest and greatest management updates for Microsoft Teams! I hope you have found this helpful, and I encourage you to start using some of these new management capabilities today!

 

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Brian Siefferman

Brian is a Technical Consultant for Perficient’s Unified Communications practice focusing primarily on Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams workloads. He has been in this role since December 2017 and has an active presence blogging about all things Teams related. Currently, Brian resides in the suburbs of Chicago and enjoys running, swimming, weight lifting, and playing soccer in his free time.

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