Welcome to July! Microsoft has a cornucopia of updates across various areas of Teams: Meetings, calling, chat and collaboration, management, and security! In this blog, we’ll cover some of the latest and greatest announcements announced last month, many of which you can start using today!
Meeting Updates
Attendance Dashboard
Now as a meeting organizer, whenever you’ve finished a meeting or webinar you will have the ability to view the attendance report which shows who registered for the meeting versus who actually attended the meeting. This also includes the other goodies like the names of the participants, the duration they were on the call, participant join and leave times, and their role in the meeting (organizer, presenter, attendee). You will still have the option of downloading the excel spreadsheet containing the attendees but this new option is built into the Teams UI for easier access and better reporting analytics. As the meeting organizer, all you need to do is click on the Attendance tab in your Meeting Details to find the attendee dashboard. Check out the Microsoft documentation on the attendance dashboard here.
Note: The attendance dashboard is not available for channel meetings at this time.
Lower all raised hands
Now while in a meeting as a meeting organizer or presenter, if you have multiple users with raised hands you no longer need to go one by one and lower their hand. Instead, you will now see the option of Lower all hands with a single click! All you need to do is navigate to the participant pane and click on the ellipses ( … ) and you’ll be presented with the option of Lower all hands. Nothing groundbreaking here, but if you have a large group of people with their hands up, this is a godsend.
Spotlight up to 7 participants at once
In the past, you were limited to spotlighting only one participant in a meeting. Now organizers and presenters can spotlight up to 7 participants simultaneously during a meeting! A common misconception is that pinning and spotlighting do the same thing. However, pinning only pins that participants video/screen for yourself, not others in the meeting. Although you could pin multiple people, you weren’t able to spotlight multiple people, until now!
If you’re not familiar with spotlighting, you can check out the step-by-step guide here!
New Chat Bubble pop-ups
During a meeting, it is often hard to track some of the conversations happening within the chat window. Luckily, Microsoft has added a new chat bubble that surfaces chats on the screens of all meeting participants making it easier to correlate chats with ongoing conversations. The best thing of all, you won’t even need an admin to enable this, as this feature is on by default! However, if you’re just not feeling the whole chat bubble feature, you can easily disable this in the meeting by going to the More actions ( … ) and then selecting Don’t show chat bubbles.
Inking and Laser Pointer features in PowerPoint Live
Get the most out of PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams with the new visual laser pointer and inking annotations! Now, with just a few simple clicks you can engage your audience by drawing attention to certain areas of the PowerPoint or adding clarification with real-time inking capabilities! The inking will be visible to everyone in the meeting and only the presenter can point and draw on the slides.
Microsoft has some additional documentation on using these features, which can be found here!
Teams mobile large gallery view updates
With the latest updates to Teams mobile, when selecting Large Gallery view in your Teams meeting, you will now see an updated layout that allows you to swipe through all the participants in the meeting. In addition, this update allows you to see up to 10 participants (plus yourself) on the screen at one time! To get this cool new layout you’ll one of the following criteria:
- iOS 13+ for our Apple folks
- Android OS 9+ for our Android folks
- Any OS version that has more than 4GB of RAM
Including device audio when sharing on Teams mobile
If you’re familiar with the “Include computer sound” option (example below), then this will be a welcomed addition to the mix.
Now you can include your mobile device audio when sharing on your Android or iOS device during a Teams meeting! So if you’d like to include video audio and/or a voiceover, you can now do so all from your mobile device! Now you won’t need to worry about playing music/voiceovers so loud from your mobile device speakers for others in the meeting which ultimately just resulted in audio syncing issues and massive echoes! To use this feature, go to More actions > Share screen with audio. This is available today for those with Android 10+ or iOS 13+.
Live Transcription w/ Speak Attribution for additional license types
If you’re unfamiliar with Live Transcription in Teams, basically it allows you to follow and review conversations (English only at this time), in real-time with the meeting audio/video. So, if you have someone that arrives a little late to the party (or maybe they missed the entire meeting), they’d be able to easily catch up by reading through the transcript. This cool feature was only available to Office 365/Microsoft 365 E3/E5, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium license types. However, Microsoft has now expanded this feature to customers with Office 365 E1/A1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A3/A5, Microsoft 365 F1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 F3, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic license types. If you’re totally lost by that licensing, don’t worry you can find Microsoft’s license plan options here.
Large Gallery for VDI
The Large gallery feature is now available for those on VDI’s! If you’re using a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure you will now be able to expand your gallery and view up to 49 participants on the same screen during a Teams meeting! This now aligns with the typical Teams desktop client experience!
Calling Updates
1:1 PSTN Call Recording
There have been some slight tweaks in how call recording is enabled within the tenant. Microsoft has delineated meeting recordings from PSTN call recordings. Previously, the two fell under the same umbrella which was controlled via the CsTeamsMeetingPolicy > AllowCloudRecording attribute. With this latest update, PSTN calling will get its own policy and will now be controlled via the CsTeamsCallingPolicy > AllowCloudRecordingforCalls attribute.
Note: This feature is only available via PowerShell at this time.
Chat & Collab Updates
Approval Templates
Looking to streamline a workflow within Teams? Look no further! With the Approvals app in Teams, as a team owner (or admin) you can now use approval templates as is, customize existing templates, or create a new approval template from scratch for your organization to use! You can learn more about Approval templates here.
Tasks in Teams
You can now quickly create a task right from a chat or channel conversation! No need to jump between windows or switch apps to create a task, just click the ellipses ( … ) by hovering over the chat and then select More actions and choose Create Task. You can then find that newly created task within the Tasks app for Teams! Learn more about this cool new feature here!
Management Updates
App Risk Evaluation capabilities
As a Teams admin, you’ll now have the ability to view the security, compliance, and privacy details for apps detected in MCAS (Microsoft Cloud App Security). This will help Teams admins and your security team more easily review apps to see if they meet your organization’s security specifications.
Automatic Alerting for devices in Teams Admin Center
Identify device issues quicker than ever! With Device health monitoring you can proactively monitor the health of various Teams devices in your environment. For example, if the device goes Offline, you now have the ability to trigger notifications which can be turned into immediate corrective actions by your administrators.
Security, Compliance, and Privacy Updates
Data Protection for apps
Now all Microsoft 365 Certified Teams apps will contain security, compliance, and data protection details within the Teams admin center. This gives your security and compliance teams peace of mind when granting the apps access to run within the organization. You can learn more about Microsoft’s App Compliance Program here.
That wraps up the biggest updates for Microsoft Teams that were announced last month! I hope you have found this blog helpful and I encourage you to check back regularly for more Microsoft 365 related content!
]]>The month of May had a plethora of new features announced by Microsoft. In today’s article, we’ll review some of the biggest features and innovations released in Microsoft Teams around meetings, calling, chat and collaboration, security, compliance, and privacy! Let’s get started!
Meeting Updates
Dynamic View
One of the biggest announcements around Teams meetings involves Dynamic view. Dynamic view will automatically arrange the elements in your meeting for the best viewing experience. This means that as people join the meeting, turn on their video, start speaking, or present their screen, Microsoft Teams will adapt to these real-time changes and adjust the layout automatically!
Presenter Mode
Microsoft has been hyping up this new feature for quite some time and now you can finally start using this new meeting feature to put a new spin on how you want to present your video feed and content to your audience. With the new Presenter mode, you can customize how your video feed and content is displayed in the meeting by using layouts like “Standout” which shows the speaker’s video as a silhouette in front of the content being shared! This will be the only layout within Presenter mode available at this time, however, there are two additional layouts (Reporter and Side-by-side) coming at a later date.
Large Meeting Updates
Now you will have the ability to hold interactive meetings and webinars with up to 1,000 people which can include features like chat, polls, and live reactions. What if you surpass that 1,000 user limit though? Luckily for you, the meeting will then scale to accommodate up to 10,000 people with a view-only experience. In addition, you can now have view-only broadcasts of up to 20,000 attendees until the end of 2021. For those of you that are not familiar with Live Events the typical limit is half of that (10,000 attendees), so take advantage while you can!
Attendee Registration
Microsoft is giving you more customization options for your meeting and webinars by allowing you to create your own attendee registration page as the meeting organizer. This attendee registration page will help meeting organizers easily manage attendance before and/or after your virtual event. Once your attendee has registered, they will automatically receive a confirmation email with a calendar invite to join the event. Additionally, you can add custom questions and images for branding purposes! What are you waiting for? Try it out today!
Updates to your sharing experience in a meeting
While sharing content in a Teams meeting, you’ll now see a new streamlined experience that consolidates all windows into a single bucket so you no longer have to endlessly scroll to find the one piece of content you would like to present. Additionally, any PowerPoints you have will be automatically organized to present with PowerPoint Live for easier access to the content you need now!
Include computer audio while sharing your desktop on a Mac
Better late than never! Mac users are finally getting the option to include their computer’s audio when presenting their desktop or a particular window in a Teams meeting. For the majority of us on Windows computers, we have had this option for years now, however, Mac users no longer need to feel left out on this nifty feature that makes sharing video with voiceover and music a breeze! Mac users, you can finally say goodbye to echoes while trying to blast your audio from your speakers so they watching your presentation can hear the music 
.
Breakout Room Timers
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of time in a meeting, especially when it comes to breakout rooms where multiple meetings are going on at the same time. Luckily, Microsoft is giving organizers the ability to set a timer within a Breakout room so you can make sure everyone rejoins the main meeting in a timely manner. With this new setting enabled, all users in the Breakout rooms will be returned to the main meeting as soon as the timer has expired. These settings can easily be tweaked to your liking within the Breakout room settings!
Attendee Video updates
This new feature is a great new addition to Microsoft Teams! Now you’ll have 3 new ways to manage the attendee’s camera in a meeting.
- Meeting attendees will be able to turn their camera on or off to share video (default option)
- Disable all attendees’ camera from within the Meeting Options web page before a meeting
- Re-enable attendee video capabilities mid-meeting, allowing attendees with the ability to turn their camera on once again
- Enable or disable the camera for attendees on an individual user basis.
Note: For the attendees of the meeting, even if the video capabilities are re-enabled by the organizer, this won’t force your video to turn on automatically. Additionally, these settings have no bearing on presenters or meeting organizers.
AI-based noise suppression for Mac users
Another one of those “better late than never” features for our Mac users . If you’re like me and you have a very loud work environment (thanks to my dog), you likely have your noise suppression turned to high. This capability is extremely helpful and luckily Mac users will now be able to benefit from this awesome feature!
Note: If you are a Mac user with an M1 ARM processor, I regret to inform you that you will not be getting the noise suppression capabilities yet.
Participant List updates
The participant list is getting a facelift! You may have already noticed that the participant list is now broken up into three different sections:
- Lobby
- Presenters
- Attendees
For the lobby section, you can now review a full list of people waiting in the lobby before admitting them into the meeting. Additionally, attendees will be sorted in alphabetical order and once someone raises their hand in the meeting, they will be pinned to the top of the participant list.
But wait…. there’s more! There have also been some updates around searching capabilities in the participant list. You can now search by the user’s name or PSTN number within the participant roster. If the user you’re searching for isn’t included in the meeting, you will also have the option to request that the user joins.
Block Downloads for non-channel Teams meeting recordings on OneDrive
By default, all users in a non-channel Teams meeting will have view-only permissions to meeting recordings. This means that if the user attempts to download the meeting that was uploaded to OneDrive they will be blocked by default. This is done intentionally to provide greater control over meeting recordings and prevent accidental data loss. Microsoft does however give you the ability to go into the OneDrive file share dialog and toggle the “block download” option on/off for individual files if you find the need to share the recording.
Calling
Updated calling user interface
Microsoft has updated the layout of your calling tab in Teams. Now you’ll see a more streamlined view that includes contacts, voicemail, and calling history all on a single screen. Prior to this update, you had to go between several different tabs in order to get to the area you wanted.
Call Merge in Teams
If you have the calling capabilities within Teams you will now see the option of merging an active 1:1 call into another 1:1 group call. Let’s say you’re preparing for a fundraising event for your organization and you’re currently on a call with the event coordinator. The event coordinator wants to talk about some specifics that you don’t have an answer for so you want to reach out to someone on your team to see if they can lend you a hand. Now you won’t have to end the call with the event coordinator. Instead, you can call your colleague while your call with the event coordinator is still active and then merge the two calls together so he can nail down all of the specifics the event coordinator was asking you about! Best of all, this capability isn’t limited to PSTN calls, you can also merge VOIP calls!
Calling Plan updates
If you’re unfamiliar with Teams Calling Plans, they give you a quick method of deploying PSTN calling capabilities in Microsoft Teams, without the need for any on-premises servers or equipment! Microsoft has recently expanded its geographic coverage on where they offer Calling Plan capabilities to include:
- New Zealand
- Singapore
- Romania
- Czech Republic
- Hungary
- Finland
- Norway
- Slovakia
- Poland
- Luxembourg
This now makes 28 different markets where Microsoft offers Calling Plans! Find out more about Calling Plans here!
Chat and Collaboration
Group chat with external users
As you may know, you have the ability to chat with up to 250 participants within a single chat. However, Microsoft is expanding on this capability by giving you the ability to add multiple federated/external users into chats to collaborate more efficiently. In the past, you could only have a single user for federated chats which means you’d be forced to create a Teams meeting with all federated participants if you wanted to communicate with them all at once. If you’re the Teams administrator, don’t forget to look at your external access/federation settings as this is the main setting driving this ability to chat with federated users.
Security, Compliance, and Privacy
Customer Key support in Teams
Microsoft 365 Customer Keys allow your organization to meet specific compliance requirements by providing encryption keys that are used to encrypt your data in a Microsoft Datacenter. This is handled through DEPs (Data Encryption Policies) which encrypt your data across multiple M365 workloads for all users within the tenant. As it relates to Microsoft Teams, this could include:
- Teams chat messages (1:1 chats, group chats, meeting chats, and channel conversations)
- Teams media messages (images, code snippets, video messages, audio messages, wiki images)
- Teams call and meeting recordings stored in Teams storage
- Teams chat notifications
- Teams chat suggestions by Cortana
- Teams status messages
- MIP exact data match (EDM) data – (data file schemas, rule packages, and the salts used to hash the sensitive data). For MIP exact data match (EDM) and Microsoft Teams, the multi-workload DEP encrypts new data from the time you assign the DEP to the tenant. For Exchange Online, Customer Key encrypts all existing and new data.
To learn more about Customer Key support in Teams, check out the Microsoft docs article here.
That wraps up the latest updates to Teams for the month of May! This blog covered most of the larger updates around the core Teams features, however, if you are looking for the full list of updates big and small, you can find that here!
]]>We’re well into May and Microsoft still has quite a few features on their roadmap that are slated for release before the end of the month. In this article, we’ll cover some of the features that should be showing up in your Teams client within the next couple of weeks. With that said, let’s see what Microsoft has in store for us!
Android On-Demand Chat Translation
Get inline message translation on your Android device with a simple click! Now you’ll be able to easily communicate with someone that speaks a different language by translating posts in channels and chats. Now you can break down those language barriers by allowing every worker to facilitate global collaboration!
Dynamic View
Microsoft is making some changes to how content is seen when being shared within a meeting. The new controls will allow you to personalize the view such as the ability to show shared content and participants side-by-side to better suit your viewing preferences.
Custom Attendee Registration
Looking for ways to more easily manage the attendance in a Teams meeting or webinar? Look no further, now you can add a custom attendee registration page so you can manage the meeting attendance before or after an engagement. Once the registration has been set, all meeting attendees will receive an email confirmation and a calendar invite.
Out of Office
Microsoft is making it easier to set your Out of Office status by integrating this feature into your presence status options in Teams! Now you’ll be able to schedule your “Out of Office” presence in Teams which will also carry over to your Outlook calendar and update the automatic replies accordingly.
Block Downloads for non-channel Teams meeting recordings on OneDrive
Now if a standard (non-channel) meeting is conducted and you are only granted view-only permissions of a meeting recording that was uploaded to OneDrive, you’ll be blocked from downloading the recording by default.
Updated in-meeting sharing experience
Microsoft is giving its in-meeting sharing experience a facelift! The in-meeting share features have been redesigned to help presenters more easily navigate and find their desired content for sharing.
Updates to Sensitivity Label hierarchical display in Teams
If you are currently using hierarchical sensitivity labels (parent label and child labels), the channel headers in Teams will now only display the parent label as opposed to showing the child label. For example, if we had a sensitivity label entitled Confidential\Accounting, the Teams client would only show the parent label “Confidential” in the channel header and now the Accounting header.
New updates for Together Mode and Large gallery views
You will now have the option to change the viewing layout for both Together mode and Large gallery views in Edge and Chrome browsers! Sorry Firefox users, you weren’t invited to the party.
Disable/Enable a single attendee’s video or all attendee’s video in a Teams meeting
Soon you will have the ability to disable/enable either a single attendee’s video or the all attendee’s video in a Teams meeting! As of right now the only way to disable video is via meeting policies which would then disable video for all meetings the user(s) organize. Having the ability to control this on a per-user basis and per-meeting basis is a great addition for Teams!
Noise suppression coming to Macs
A little late to the party, but better late than never! Windows users have had the capability to set the level of noise suppression on their microphone however, Macintosh users will now have this same capability coming to their Teams clients! If you’re working from home and you’re like me where at times you have a good amount of background noise (i.e. barking dogs) then this feature can be a godsend! There are four different levels (auto, low, high, and off), and I take full advantage of the “high” noise suppression setting .
Note: This feature is available now for all Mac users except for those with the new Macs that have M1 ARM processors.
Polls are getting smarter in Teams meetings
Now when you create a poll for your Teams meeting, Microsoft Forms intelligence service will suggest some polls based on your meeting purpose. In addition, after you’ve used polls for some of your meetings the Forms intelligence service will suggest your historical polls based on the meeting’s purpose.
Webinars in Microsoft Teams
You will now be able to schedule and deliver a webinar to upwards of 1,000 people within the Teams application! Webinars support capabilities such as the registration page we talked about earlier, email confirmation for those registrants, host management for attendee audio and video, attendee reporting, and even interactive features like your polls, chats, and reactions!
Meeting participant roster changes
Microsoft is making some major changes to how the participant list is displayed. The participant list will be displayed within a meeting for the following sections: “Lobby”, “In meeting”, “Presenters”, and “Attendees”. Going forward, a maximum of 20 participants for each of the sections mentioned above will be displayed in the initial view. However, you will have the option of drilling into each of these sections to view more participants. Within the Lobby section, you will also have the ability to review a full list before admitting anyone into the meeting. Lastly, the roster will display additional details like who is the most active participant in the meeting which will be listed in alphabetical order for your viewing.
Search capabilities in participant roster
If you have a large meeting with hundreds of users attending, sometimes it becomes a bit overwhelming trying to find a particular user in the roster. Luckily, Microsoft is releasing searching capabilities so you can search for in-meeting participants. If you find that the user you’re looking for isn’t part of the meeting you can continue that search for participants outside the meeting and drag them in by requesting them to join the meeting.
Correct Answer capabilities in Polls
Microsoft is adding a new feature allowing you to select a correct answer to a multiple-choice polling question. This includes the ability to select a single option or multiple options if the “multiple answers” option is selected. After the poll is complete the correct answer choice will be shown within the Results card. The feature will exist in the following scenarios:
- Teams meeting polls (ones that pop up as a window on your screen)
- Polls used within a Teams chat (inside or outside of a meeting)
- When opening the polls from the Forms site (read-only)
Polls in Teams are getting support for large meetings
Polls are getting a buff to their meeting support capabilities. With the power of Forms, your polls within a Teams meeting will support up to 1,000 users!
Teams Live Event Producer experience updates
Now as the Producer of a Teams Live Event you’ll have the ability to produce the event in a separate window, which will then allow you to more effectively manage and track your event!
Well, that wraps up all of the updates currently rolling out for the month of May! I hope you have found this article helpful and I encourage you to start using these features as soon as they drop to your Teams client! As always, Microsoft is constantly releasing new exciting features for Microsoft Teams, so this list will continue to grow as the month progresses. Stay tuned for another blog in a couple weeks where we’ll discuss all of the upcoming features coming to Teams over the next few months!
]]>We’re only a couple months away from Skype for Business Online’s retirement (July 31, 2021). Many organizations have been proactive with moving their users off of the service, however, some organizations may have been procrastinating for the past two years in making the switch to Microsoft Teams so now they are faced with scrambling to get everyone moved over to Microsoft Teams before its retirement at the end of July. If you fit into the latter, all hope is not yet lost, as Microsoft has some great resources and options as you plan your transition to Microsoft Teams, which we’ll discuss in today’s blog.
What happens once Skype for Business Online retires?
According to Microsoft, “after Skype for Business Online retires on July 31, 2021, the service will no longer be accessible.” Something else worth mentioning, for services that integrate with Skype for Business Online, will no longer be supported after July 31st. This includes support for third-party audio conferencing providers (ACP), Skype for Business Online Cloud Connector Edition (CCE), hybrid voice configurations, and Skype Meeting Broadcast. In addition, you’ll no longer be able to move online users out of Teams Only mode after July 31, 2021. For example, if you’re in a coexistence mode you should currently see several different options to choose from (Islands, SfB Only, Teams Only, Skype for Business w/ Teams Collaboration, and Skype for Business w/ Teams Collaboration and Meetings (Meetings First). Going forward, once your users are on Teams Only you won’t have the option of moving them back to one of the Skype for Business Online based options. Microsoft allows customers to use the coexistence modes as a stepping stone for getting to the cloud (Teams Only). With that said, if, at all possible, you shouldn’t be using the coexistence modes as an end-state for your organization, as support for coexistence modes could be deprecated at a later time and you’d find yourself scrambling to get to Teams Only mode in the end. For those reasons alone, Microsoft has made it exceedingly easier to move directly to Teams Only from Skype for Business Server, provided you have configured hybrid connectivity between Skype for Business Server and Microsoft 365. However, Microsoft hasn’t stopped there, for those of you still on Skype for Business Online (hybrid or cloud-only), Microsoft will be scheduling assisted upgrades to help you make the jump to Microsoft Teams!
Let Microsoft help get you to Teams
As mentioned, Microsoft will be offering help with getting your organization to Microsoft Teams, however, there are a few caveats that should be mentioned:
- You must be in a hybrid or cloud-only deployment state (sorry you on-premises Skype for Business server folks)
- Microsoft will only provide “last mile” technical steps with your transition to Microsoft Teams (more info on this in the coming weeks)
- The upgrade duration will vary depending on user volume. Obviously the larger the volume, the longer the upgrade duration. However, Microsoft states that most customers can easily be upgraded within 24 hours from the start of the upgrade
Now that we’ve gotten those caveats out of the way let’s discuss what this assisted program has to offer. Microsoft has started to offer this assisted upgrade to Teams program as a way to reduce the number of technical tasks that you as the customer need to do and also allows for a greater focus on end-user training, awareness, and overall preparedness. If you have signed up for the assisted upgrade to Teams you will receive a series of upgrade notifications. You’ll start seeing these notifications 90 days prior to the scheduled upgrade date. You should see these notifications displayed as “Plan for Change” posts within the Microsoft 365 Message Center, Teams Admin Center, and as in-app flags to end-users. From a post-upgrade end-user experience, users will need to sign out of their Skype for Business Online client, they will begin to utilize the Teams client for messaging, meetings, and calling. To break things down further:
- Chat and Calling
- All calls and chats are started and received in Teams
- Users can communicate (chat/call) with any Skype for Business user
- Organizations can enable Teams users to communicate with users of the Skype consumer service by managing external access permissions
- Teams users who attempt to sign in to Skype for Business Online will be redirected to Teams
- Meetings
- Users schedule all new meetings in Teams (plugin replaced)
- Existing Skype for Business Online meetings are converted to Teams meetings
- Migrated Data
- Existing contacts from Skype for Business Online including federated (but no distribution lists)
On the backend, the coexistence mode will be set to Teams Only for those users and can only be changed to a different coexistence mode by Microsoft. To get the full breakdown and more information on your upgrade to Teams Only, I’d recommend that you check out the Microsoft Docs page here which gives you all the information you’ll need in your journey to Teams! If you’ve been putting off the upgrade for the past two years, don’t wait another minute, get started today!
]]>Welcome to May! As per usual, Microsoft has released a plethora of new features that you can start using today! In this blog, we’ll cover the biggest announcements around Teams meetings, chat & collaboration, and management! Let’s see what Microsoft has in store for us this month!
Teams Meeting Updates
Breakout Rooms Retention + Participant Reassignment
With this update, Breakout Room retention will give the meeting organizer the ability to persist room configuration and assignment over multiple sessions. Another update is around participant reassignment, which gives the organizer the ability to move joined participants across rooms and main meetings while the meeting room is still open! This feature is in the process of rolling out to tenants, so keep an eye out! You can check out the official roadmap item here.
Invite-Only Meeting Options
Do you ever have an issue with people getting straight into your meetings without being officially invited? Worry not, Microsoft has a new meeting option to automatically send those who were not originally invited by your meeting organizer to the lobby. This means that if an invite is forwarded to a colleague that you (as the meeting organizer) didn’t explicitly invite, they would be sent to the lobby until they’ve been admitted.
Meeting Creation and Expiration Policy Updates
In order to better meet security and compliance requirements, Microsoft has disabled meetings and their join links for any users that have had their scheduling permissions revoked. As you could likely guess, this wasn’t always the case. In the past, a user could continue to reuse an old meeting join link even after their scheduling permissions had been disabled. Luckily, that issue will be a thing of the past!
More Flexible Audio Permission Settings
Meeting organizers are getting greater flexibility around attendee audio permissions. Going forward, attendees will no longer need to request to speak for you to allow them to unmute. In addition, you’ll have the ability to prevent individuals from unmuting on a per-user basis! You can learn more about those settings here.
Live Event Presenter Support for External Users
Provided your Live Event is scheduled within Teams, you’ll have the ability to allow anonymous users (those not having a Microsoft service account or AAD account) to present content! This makes it easier than ever to allow someone outside of the organization to present content to large audiences in your Live Event! Get all the details here!
Teams Live Event Producer Updates
As the producer of the Live Event, you’ll now be able to manage the Live Event in one Teams window, all while collaborating with others in a separate window!
Custom Backgrounds on Teams iOS Devices
If you’re joining a meeting from an iOS device you’ll now have the capability of applying a custom background while using video in your Teams meeting! Get the full details here!
Casting Capabilities for Android and iOS
You can now cast your screen from either an Android device or an iOS device to a Teams Room! In addition, you can broadcast your screen to share content located locally on your device or from within OneDrive or Teams! Check out this awesome new feature here.
Chat & Collaboration Updates
Product Feedback tool
Microsoft cares about your feedback! Based on the feedback you submit, Microsoft automatically sends you help documentation pertaining to that topic. Additionally, (if enabled by your Teams admin) you’ll be able to share your email address when submitting the feedback which gives Microsoft the ability to follow up with you personally!
Windows 10 Native Notifications
You now have the ability to decide whether you want to receive your notifications through the regular built-in Teams method or through the Windows native method. If you’ve chosen the Windows native notification method, you’ll get benefits like focus mode and integration of Windows 10 action center to get notifications in one place. As for prerequisites, you just need to have a Windows build of 10.0.17763.288 or higher. If you do meet these requirements, you should see the ability to change to the Windows native notification method via the Teams notification settings.
Management Updates
Pre-configured website tab in Team Templates
You can now add URLs to the website tab within a team template. This gives your users the ability to access important web resources like company sites, most popular pages, and other online documents that you believe are pertinent.
Anonymized Users in Teams Usage Reports
As the Teams admin, you can now keep your user’s data anonymized to protect their privacy if you’re viewing, sharing, or downloading the Teams user usage report. If your admin has this enabled, PII information like email addresses, usernames, and Active Directory IDs will all be anonymized.
Custom Policy Packages
Everyone loves the ability to customize things! The same thought holds true for our Teams admins out there, especially with all of the unique scenarios presented every day. Luckily, Teams admins can create policy packages that they can customize, configure, and assign accordingly. Gone are the days of canned policy packages in Teams! Teams admins even have the ability to assign policy packages to a group allowing them to assign multiple policies to that group of users.
That wraps up the biggest updates this month for Microsoft Teams! If you want to see all of the updates (including things like Government, Devices, and Frontline Workers), I encourage you to check out the official blog post here. Also, if you’re currently a Skype for Business Online user, we’re only a couple months away from Skype for Business Online’s retirement. In my next blog, I’ll cover what this means for you and how you can take action now with your migration to Microsoft Teams!
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Spring has sprung! If you’re like me and you live in frigid temperatures about 7 months out of the year, the first day that reaches 50+ Fahrenheit you’ll find me on the running trail in shorts and a t-shirt! However, rising temps aren’t the only thing to be excited about, Microsoft has also been hard at work releasing a plethora of new features to end-users! In today’s blog, we’ll outline some of the biggest announcements for Microsoft Teams over the past two months!
Meeting Updates
Meeting Recap
Microsoft is making it easier than ever to stay on track and keep your work moving forward even after the meeting has concluded. With the new meeting recap feature, you can easily view meeting recordings, transcripts, chats, and attached files! The meeting recap will be shared with meeting participants in the Chat tab and will also be viewable within the Details tab.
Meet Now Option in Outlook for Windows
You can now easily spin up ad-hoc Teams meeting from within Outlook for Windows by going to the calendar tab and clicking the new Meet Now option. If you don’t see this option have your admin check the Allow Private Meet Now policy option in the Teams Admin Center (TAC).
Meet Now Link in Teams Calendar
You can now copy a Meet Now directly from your Teams Calendar and share it with others without having to actually start the meeting! This isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it is definitely a nice feature to have!
Mask PSTN Participant Phone Numbers
This request has been in high demand for those using Audio Conferencing for Teams meetings! Now tenant administrators have the ability to decide how they want participant phone numbers to be displayed in the roster view for meetings scheduled in the organization. The options include:
- Masked to external users
- Masked for everyone
- Off (visible to everyone)
This allows organizations to conceal PSTN participant phone numbers if needed. To turn on this feature, you’ll just need to run a quick PowerShell command, which can be found here.
Bypass Lobby Meeting Option
Microsoft is giving organizations an even more granular approach when scheduling a Teams meeting. Microsoft has just released two additional Teams Meeting Options, the two additional options include:
- People in my organization
- Excludes guests
- People in my organization, trusted organizations, and guests
This gives meeting organizers additional options, security, and flexibility when it comes to allowing users to bypass the lobby and get directly into the meeting.
Calling Updates
Voice-enabled channels
This awesome new feature allows you to connect a call queue to a channel in Teams! So if you have users that need to collaborate within a channel while taking calls (i.e. IT service desk or HR), admins can now easily connect a call queue to a channel and the team owners will have the ability to manage the settings! You can learn more about this neat new feature here.
Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) Support
If you’re unfamiliar with SBAs, they allow users to continue to place and receive PSTN calls in the event of a network outage. In the event of an outage, the Teams client would switch to the SBA automatically and any outgoing calls would continue to work without any type of break in the call! Then once the network connection has been restored, the Teams client will detect this and normal call functionality will continue as normal. You can learn more about SBAs in Teams here.
Chat and Collaboration Updates
250 GB file size support in Teams client
Microsft is upping the file size upload limit in the Teams client from 100GB to 250GB. This not only applies to the Teams client, but it’ll also apply to all other Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.
Viva Connections on Teams Desktop
Viva Connections was recently announced by Microsoft and it integrates seamlessly into apps and devices you use every day! With Viva Connections, you get a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources. Best of all, you can start using this within Teams today! Learn more about Viva Connections and how you can easily add this to your Teams desktop experience here!
Viva Insights in Teams
With Viva Insights, you get personalized insights and actionable recommendations to help you and your organization thrive in your work environment. Available today as an app in Teams, Viva Insights allows you to build better work habits and dedicate focus time so you can work individually without being interrupted. These insights are derived by summarizing your Microsoft 365 data around emails, meetings, calls, and chat and presents you with private and personalized insights that only you can see! You can learn more about Viva Insights here.
Teams Template PowerShell support +Template Policies in TAC
As a Teams admin, you can now manage your team templates at scale with template cmdlets in PowerShell! Admins can now easily get a full list of all available templates within the tenant, get details from a particular template, create templates, edit templates, and delete templates all within PowerShell! In addition, admins can choose which policies they want to be shown to end-users. Within the Teams Admin Center, admins can create different Teams template policies and target which templates to show/hide.
New File Sharing Experience in Teams
Sharing files in Microsoft Teams has never been easier! Now you can create shareable links for any file that is stored in Teams and easily set permissions on each file. This now aligns with the permissions that can be set for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business so the sharing experience becomes more streamlined and consistent regardless of where you’re sharing the file. You can learn more about the file-sharing process and the permissions for file sharing here.
Bring SharePoint content into Teams
Microsoft is making it easier than ever to bring SharePoint content into Teams! When connecting SharePoint to Teams you’ll have the ability to choose which lists, libraries, and pages you want to bring over into Teams as tabs as part of the General channel.
10,000 member org-wide team
Org-wide teams can now support up to 10,000 members! For tenants with less than or equal to 10,000 users, you can easily create an org-wide team, which syncs all tenant members with the team.
25,000 person teams
Yep, you read that right! Microsoft has increased the limit for an individual team to 25,000 members! This new increase allows you to easily communicate and collaborate with larger-sized teams!
Out of Office Status
You can now schedule an Out of Office status within Teams! No need to update your Outlook calendar too, as automatic replies will be updated there accordingly!
History Menu in Teams
You can now quickly and easily get back to areas you’ve recently been to in Teams by hovering over the Back Arrow < or Forward Arrow > located to the left of the search bar. The history menu will list up to the last 12 areas you’ve visited and can include activities, channels, conversations, tabs, files, apps, and more!
Management Updates
Restricting Windows and Mac managed device sign-in to specific tenants
With this latest update, administrators now have the ability to set device policies for Windows and macOS that restrict sign-in to your organization. The policies can be set via device management solutions like MDM or via GPO. Once applied, users will only be able to sign in with accounts homed in an Azure AD tenant that is included in the “Tenant Allow List” defined in the policy. For example, we have a user named Adele that is using a company-issued laptop. Adele is doing some consulting work for an organization called Contoso that has given her an account in their tenant. If Adele tries to log into Contoso’s tenant from her company-issued laptop with the account they provided her, she will be blocked from doing so. As an added note, this can be used to configure access to personal accounts as well! You can learn more about this new feature here.
Assign Policy Packages to Groups in TAC
Microsoft is making it even easier to push out policy packages to users by giving admins the ability to assign the policy packages to groups! Learn more about it here!
Team Creation Alignment
In the past, a team’s creation would differ slightly depending on where you created the team (Teams Admin Center vs Teams client). Microsoft has now aligned the team creation process experience so now all teams will have the same look and feel regardless of which interface you created the team.
Security and Compliance Updates
Sensitivity Label Display
Microsoft has made some tweaks to how sensitivity labels are shown in a team. Now the channel headers will only display the parent label instead of showing the child label (if one exists). So let’s say we had a parent label entitled “Confidential” and a child label of “TOP SECRET”. In this scenario, Teams would only display the “Confidential” label in the channel header since this is the parent label.
That just about wraps up all of the biggest updates around Microsoft Teams for the past two months! If you’d like to get the full breakdown of the new features that Microsoft announced, you can check out the official blog post here. I hope you’ve found this helpful, and I encourage you to check back shortly for more Teams related updates!
]]>Microsoft Ignite wrapped up last week, and Microsoft announced a plethora of new updates coming to Microsoft Teams! In this blog, we’ll cover some of the biggest announcements around meetings, chat, collaboration, and calling from Ignite. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!
Meeting Updates
Dynamic View
With this new update, your meeting layout will auto-adjust based on who turns on their video, starts speaking, or begins to present content. With the dynamic view, Teams will intelligently arrange your meeting elements so you can more easily view what’s most important. The new dynamic view will begin rolling out soon to a tenant near you!
View Switcher
A perfect compliment to the dynamic view will be view switching! The new view switcher will allow you to control how you see the meeting content. One of the newest view options is called gallery at top, which will show all of your video feeds at the top of your meeting window. Just like with dynamic view, the view switcher is due to start rolling out very soon!
Presenter Mode
With this latest update, you’ll be able to change how you and your meeting content appear to your audience when presenting. Some of the new presenter modes include Standout, which shows your video feed as a silhouette in front of the shared content. There will also be the option of Reporter view, which will place you in front of your content almost as if you were presenting news. Last but not least, we have side-by-side, which will do exactly what it says, your video feed will appear right next to your content. As with the other two upcoming features, this will be coming to your meeting experience “soon.”
PowerPoint Live
Available to all Teams users now, PowerPoint Live allows you to lead a meeting with an easy single view of your notes, slides, meeting chat, and participants! Learn more about PowerPoint Live here!
Live Reactions
Live reactions give your attendees a fun way to keep things upbeat and interactive by allowing them to react to what’s being said. The meeting organizer can also turn off this feature in the participant settings if they so desire. Live reactions are already available, so get out there and start experimenting for fun!
Chat and Collaboration Updates
Microsoft Teams Connect
In private preview, Microsoft Teams Connect will allow you to easily share channels with anyone internally or externally to your organization! Once the channel has been shared, it will appear within the individual’s primary Teams tenant alongside other teams and channels. This will make it easier than ever to access the content and work collaboratively. This may raise all sorts of red flags for organizations fearful of sensitive content being shared externally. Fear not, Teams admins will have the ability to control how they’d like to control external user access to data and information. As mentioned, this is only available for private preview at this time but will be rolled out broadly later this year!
Tasks App Updates
The Tasks app is getting some additional capabilities! Soon you’ll be able to add a checklist to a task for a more fine-tuned, detail-rich experience! With this added checklist, you’ll be able to provide more detail around each task and provide more clarity to those assigned to each task! Additionally, soon you’ll be able to edit a published task without having to recall the entire task list! Sometimes small additions like these can make a world of difference to the end-user! You can expect to see these updates to the Tasks app later this month!
Approvals App Updates
Approvals is a newer capability in Teams that allows you to quickly create, manage, and share an approval workflow directly in Teams! In April, Microsoft will begin upgrading this experience with new out-of-the-box and customizable templates! This will give the end-user more structure to their approvals and easily find and repeat common approvals, like requesting PTO or paid leave! Later this month, Microsoft will give you the ability to attach files directly from OneDrive, SharePoint, or even generic links for content outside of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem! But wait, there’s more! Microsoft has also announced that they will be adding markdown support in adaptive cards and the details view later this month. That way, you can easily see if your approvals are formatted correctly!
Calling
Operator Connect
Looking to connect your current operator to Teams without the need to worry about managing new hardware? Look no further. With Operator Connect, you will now be able to bring your own operator’s PSTN calling services directly into Teams without the need of purchasing and managing SBC’s. Microsoft will be offering a public preview next quarter with the initial wave of partners to include:
- BT
- Deutsche Telekom
- Intrado
- NTT
- Nuwave
- Orange Business Services
- Pure IP
- Rogers
- Swisscom
- TATA
- Telenor
- Verizon
For a deeper dive into Operator Connect, check out the official blog here.
Calling Plan Expansion
Beginning in April, Microsoft will expand Calling Plan availability to 8 new markets! Those will include:
- New Zealand
- Singapore
- Romania
- Czech Republic
- Hungary
- Finland
- Norway
- Slovakia
After this rolls out to those countries, this means that Calling Plans will be available to 26 different markets across the globe!
Direct Routing Updates
More and more organizations have been adopting Teams as their preferred calling solution. So much so that Microsoft reported a Direct Routing call minute increase of 8-fold and more than four times as many organizations utilizing Direct Routing! Microsoft is continuing to drive Direct Routing forward with additions like the certification of 6 additional SBCs for Direct Routing and the release of SBA (Survivable Branch Appliance), which enables PSTN calling capabilities even in the event of an outage.
Operator Connect Conferencing
Operator Connect won’t be limited to hosting PSTN calling. It will also give you more options for conferencing with the addition of Operator Connect Conferencing. This service will allow you to add operator dial-in numbers to a Microsoft Audio Conference bridge. If you see your operator listed in the image below, soon, you’ll no longer need to worry about terminating a contract if you’re trying to switch over to Teams audio conferencing. Instead, you’ll be able to bring your own operator for conferencing and leverage enhanced technical support and service level agreements (SLAs) for reliability. If you don’t see your operator below, no need to worry, Microsoft will be expanding this list in the coming months!
- BT
- Deutsche Telekom
- Intrado
- NTT
- Orange Business Services
- Telenor
Voice-enabled channels
With the new addition of voice-enabled channels, you can turn any Teams channel into a call queue! Whether you’re looking to tackle any questions for new-hires as HR or troubleshoot important issues as tech support, now you’ll be able to easily collaborate on issues like never before! You can expect to see this capability in your tenant by the end of the month!
Enhanced Calling App Experience
Microsoft is making your calling experience easier than ever by bringing the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts, and settings into a single location! You can expect to see this nice update by the end of March!
Contact Center and Compliance Recording Enhancements
Microsoft offers the Contact Center certification program and the Compliance Recording certification program to help customers choose only the best contact center and compliance recording options for Teams. Microsoft has recently announced the following additions to those certification programs:
- Contact Center Certification additions
- Anywhere365
- ComputerTalk
- 8×8
- Enghouse Interactive
- Compliance Recording Certification additions
- NICE
- AudioCodes
- Dubber
- ASC
- Numonix
- Verint
Endpoint Transfer Capability
This new endpoint transfer capability will allow you to transfer your calls between different devices without interruption in the call service or call quality. You can expect to see this new update to endpoint transfers in early Q2 2021.
Low-data mode
Not all of us have unlimited data, and Teams can consume a lot of data, especially if you’re using video. Luckily, Microsoft has just released a new low-data mode that allows users to cap the amount of data used during meetings and video calls. In addition, you will be able to configure the low-data mode to apply different settings based upon your network availability. This means settings can be configured to apply low-data mode at all times or only while using a cellular network.
Bandwidth Control
Available later this quarter, as a Teams administrator, you’ll also be able to proactively restrict bandwidth consumption for Teams clients at specific network locations!
That wraps up some of the biggest updates for Microsoft Teams announced at Ignite! If you want to check out the official blog, which touches on additional topics like security and compliance, devices, and Teams management, you can do that here! I hope you have found this helpful, and I encourage you to check back soon, as I’ll be digging into some of these topics in more detail as they are released for general availability!
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Microsoft Teams has already had some exciting updates in January and Microsoft shows no signs of slowing down! In this article, we’ll highlight some of the major updates coming to Teams over the next few months and discuss some of the potential impacts that this may have on your users and administrators.
Major Updates
Teams Pro Service Plan
Starting mid-March 2021 you will see a new Teams service plan added to select M365 and O365 SKUs. This new Teams Pro service plan will consist of new webinar and ‘meeting intelligence’ capabilities in the Teams client. According to Microsoft, there will be no change to existing product licenses with this new addition and the new service plan will be automatically added to M365 and O365 E5/E3A5/A3 and M365 Business Standard/Business Premium licenses. This means no action will be required by your admins and no additional costs associated with this new service plan.
Enhanced Teams Calling experience
Starting late February (previously mid-February) through mid-March, Microsoft will be simplifying the calling experience in the Teams desktop app (Windows and Mac) by streamlining the view to combine contacts, voicemail, and calling history. Once this has been pushed out your users will see the new calling experience which shows contacts, voicemail, and calling history all in one place! For organizations using Teams Calling, it is recommended to start notifying your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation accordingly.
Team Creation Alignment
Starting mid-March users can begin to benefit from a more consistent user experience for teams created via the Teams admin center and those created via the Teams clients (desktop and web). Once the update has been pushed out to your tenant, teams created via the Teams admin center will:
- Send welcome emails to new members rather than Group welcome emails
- No longer send updates to members of the new team for events scheduled in the group calendar
- Hide new teams in Outlook experiences
- New teams will not be displayed in Outlook clients, such as Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web.
- New teams will not be displayed in Outlook Address Book; in address lists for selecting message recipients; or in the Browse Groups dialog when searching groups
If you have just allowed your users to create their own teams in the client without admins creating teams in the Teams Admin Center this won’t have any impact. However, if you leave team creation strictly to your admins or allow both admins and users to create teams, this may be worth notifying your users about this change and update your training and documentation accordingly.
1:1 Call Recording Policy Introduction
Starting mid-March, Microsoft will begin changing how 1:1 Call recording is enabled by creating its own policy. In its current state, 1:1 Call recording is controlled via the -CsTeamsMeetingPolicy / AllowCloudRecording attribute. After this update has been pushed out, this will be controlled via the -CsTeamsCallingPolicy / allowCloudRecordingForCalls attribute. As you may have noticed this change will be controlled via PowerShell and Microsoft suggests you review this setting and makes changes accordingly prior to March 11. If you haven’t been messing around with this policy attribute it will be set to false, so 1:1 call recording won’t work unless you’ve explicitly changed this attribute to true. With all that said, if you are currently using 1:1 Call recording and would like to continue doing so, you’ll want to update the -CsTeamsCallingPolicy /allowCloudRecordingForCalls attribute to true. You can actually go and make this change now but please note, if you don’t make the change to the attribute, once policy enforcement has been rolled out, users using 1:1 Call recording will no longer be able to use this feature. If you’re not using 1:1 Call recording, feel free to go on to the next major update! As a final note, this new policy attribute relates to the Microsoft Teams recording solution for 1:1 calls, this won’t affect 1:1 Compliance Recording, which will continue to be controlled via the Compliance Recording policy.
New Revised In-meeting Share Experience
Starting late March (previously mid-February) through the end of April, Microsoft will begin rolling out the new revised share experience in Teams meetings. This new sharing experience will affect the Teams desktop clients (Windows and Mac), and users will start seeing a new design when sharing their screen, window, Whiteboard, or PowerPoint during a meeting (as seen below).
Share to Teams from Outlook
This change is twofold, as it affects both Teams and Outlook. Starting mid-March through late March, Microsoft will begin updating the “Share to Teams” capability in Outlook for Windows, Outlook on the web, and Outlook for Mac preview. For those of you using Outlook mobile, you’ll have to wait a bit longer to receive this update. As the capability name indicates, you’ll be able to share an email conversation from Outlook, including attachments, to any chat or channel in any Teams client. This means that when a user shares an email from the Outlook desktop client or Outlook on the web, the “Share to Teams” in Outlook will either launch a window in the Teams desktop client if it is installed or open a window within Outlook. As the recipient, you will see a preview of the email message in your Teams client which you will be able to open to view the full contents by clicking on the preview. In addition, when using the “Share to Teams” option from Outlook, this will create a copy of the email message along with any attachments. These copies will be stored in the “Email Messages” sub-folder within SharePoint for channels or in the sender’s OneDrive for chats outside of a team. One important note, this new capability does not support IRM (Individual Rights Management) nor Do Not Forward (DNF) emails. So with such a big update coming down the pike, how will you manage this? Well, if you’d like to manage this capability you can do so by enabling or disabling this add-in for individual users via PowerShell (documentation coming soon).
New Meeting Options for managing large Teams Meeting in Outlook for Windows
Starting late March, Microsoft will begin rolling out new meeting options for your large Teams meetings. Once this update has been pushed out to tenants, users organizing a Teams meeting in Outlook for Windows with 40 or more participants (or 10 or more distribution lists), will see a prompt to set meeting options. If a meeting has the criteria just mentioned, the organizer will see a meeting options prompt (as seen below) which will give them the option of “Setting Options” or “Not Now”.
If they select “Set Options” they will be taken to the typical Meeting Options layout where they can set options around who can bypass the lobby, who can present, and whether or not you’d like to allow meeting chat. On the other hand, if the user selects “Not Now” the meeting will just inherit the default Teams meeting options defined in the tenant. As a quick reminder, the organizer will also be able to set/change meeting options anytime before or during the meeting.
Profile Menu Updates
Starting late January (and it looks like continuing into mid-February as my tenant still hasn’t received this update), Microsoft is making a change to your profile menu view. Microsoft refers to this as the “Me Menu” and going forward will focus on account management, where users can switch to another account or tenant through the first level of the Me Menu. With that said, the following links will have a new home within a new menu in the title bar:
- Zoom Controls
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- About
- Check for updates
To get a good idea of what the Profile (Me) Menu and links will look like going forward, Microsoft has provided some helpful screenshots of the upcoming change (as seen below).
Configuration Changes for Guess Access
For those of you with Guest Access disabled in your tenant, listen up! Starting earlier this month, Microsoft has begun turning on Guest Access in Microsoft Teams by default for all customers who have not configured this setting. Yes, you heard that right! This was done in an effort to bring Teams Guest capabilities into alignment with the rest of the suite, where the setting is already on by default. With that being said, if you have not already configured Guest Access in your Teams Admin Center, you better start planning for this change! If you want Guest Access to remain disabled you will need to confirm that the Guest Access setting is set to “Off” instead of “Service default”. Instructions on how to configure the Teams guest access settings can be found here. You can also learn more about turning on/off this feature here.
Change in Display of Hierarchical Sensitivity Labels
Starting mid-February and continuing through the end of March, Microsoft will be making some changes to how the Teams channel header displays the hierarchical sensitivity labels to provide an improved exposure to the confidentiality status of content in the channel. Currently, the Teams channel header displays the child label for hierarchical sensitivity labels (i.e., Confidential > Finance) in the channel header. Once this update rolls out to your tenant you will see the parent label rather than the child label. For example, Confidential > Finance would display Confidential in the channel header as opposed to the child label Legal. Microsoft is making this change in an effort to improve exposure to the confidentiality status of content in the channel. Some example screenshots of this change are provided below.
R.I.P. Skype for Business Connector
The Skype for Business Connector is going the way of the dodo bird. We all knew it was coming but Microsoft has finally taken the ax to the Skype for Business Connector and will no longer be available for download after February 15th. Going forward, admins should reference the Teams PowerShell module for any and all Skype for Business and Teams related cmdlets. For instructions on how to move from the Skype for Business Online Connector over to the Teams PowerShell module, check out Microsoft’s documentation on that here.
Security Improvements to Teams Connector Apps Webhook URL
New webhook URL incoming! Microsoft has already begun transitioning to the new webhook URL but has indicated that the old webhook URL will continue to work for 3 months to allow for migration time. This is being done in an effort to enhance security and will contain the name of the tenant going forward. The impact this will have on end-users is dependent upon the type of connector they are using. With that said, they will need to take one of the following actions:
- Recreate the connection by removing and then re-configuring the connector
- For incoming webhooks, tap the Update URL button, and then copy-paste the new URL to the third-party source that is consuming the URL.
- After the new URL has been generated the “Update URL” button will disappear, and the user will then see a message stating that the URL is up-to-date.
Blocking Download Permissions for Teams Meeting Recordings (OneDrive and SharePoint)
As of early February, Microsoft has begun rolling out a new enhancement to the Teams meeting recording storage experience. If you didn’t already know, Microsoft is changing the Teams meeting recording storage location from Microsoft Stream to OneDrive and SharePoint (depending on where the meeting is hosted). As part of this new experience, Microsoft is giving users the ability to control download capabilities by those with view-only permissions. Once this change has been implemented all new Teams meeting recordings uploaded to OneDrive or SharePoint will get the same permissions as outlined in the Microsoft Docs article here. The only difference here will be the changes to view-only permissions. Now anyone that would typically have view-only permissions will instead be blocked from downloading the recording by default. In addition, any time the recording is shared with someone else, the block download permissions will follow that recording thus it will be blocked. Only the recording edit owners will have the ability to explicitly override the setting and re-share with download permissions if they choose to do so. Since this will be an explicit action on the owner’s part, you won’t need to worry about them accidentally oversharing the recordings. With all that being said, you will need to ensure that your organization is already using the new OneDrive and SharePoint recording storage experience. One last thing to note, these new enhanced security and privacy permission settings will happen by default and cannot be overridden.
That wraps up the major updates for Microsoft Teams that’ll be coming to your tenant over the new month or two. I hope you have found this helpful and I encourage you to check out Microsoft’s Message Center (if you have access to it), as this highlights not only updates around Teams but instead around all of the Microsoft services!
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It’s February! With Valentines Day right around the corner, love is in the air, and Microsoft has so graciously given us a plethora of new features and functionality over the past month! What’s not to love about that!? In today’s blog, we’ll discuss some of the latest and greatest features around Teams collaboration, meetings, calling, and security/compliance!
Chat & Collab Updates
Approvals App in Teams
Looking for an easy way to create, manage, and share approvals without even leaving Teams? Look no further, with the Teams Approvals app you can easily start an approval flow directly from a chat or channel conversation! To complete an approval, all you’ll need to do is fill in the name for the request, who needs to approve it, and any additional details. You even have the option to attach files if needed! For instructions on starting your first approval, check out Microsoft’s support article here!
Offline Autosend
Trying to send a message but you don’t have internet connectivity? No need to worry, with Microsoft’s latest update to the offline experience in Teams you can craft your messages and send them while offline and have the messages automatically sent as soon as you establish connectivity again!
Increase in user count for org-wide teams
If you’re part of a small to medium-sized organization with less than 10,001 members you’ll be happy to hear that Microsoft has increased from 5,000 to 10,000! Provided you fall into that category, your administrators will have the ability to create an org-wide team that will automatically pull in every user within the organization and has the team automatically keep itself updated with Active Directory as people join or leave the organization! If you’re interested in learning more about org-wide teams, check out Microsoft’s documentation here.
Meeting Updates
Meeting chat moderation
With this latest update, you will now have the ability to choose from 3 different chat settings for better moderation capabilities in your meetings! The 3 options include:
- Disabled
- Organizer and participants won’t be able to use meeting chat
- In-meeting Only
- Allows participants to send messages only during the meeting
- Allows organizer to send messages at any time
- Enabled
- Allows chats for all meeting attendees at any time
Adding a shared calendar to a Teams channel
Now you can easily create, manage, and share a calendar with members of a specific channel! Whenever a channel meeting is created you will have the ability to see the event within the channel’s activity feed and now the channel’s calendar. This allows you to easily track any upcoming channel meetings, especially if you have notifications turned off! To get this added, simply go to your channel and select the ‘ + ‘ option to add a tab to the channel. From there just search for channel calendar and add the app as a tab within the channel!
Free Audio Conferencing Offer
If you missed the deadline to benefit from Microsoft’s free audio conferencing add-on offer, no need to worry! Microsoft has just extended this offer until June 30, 2021! This offer gives your meetings a global dial-in number so those joining on any mobile device can easily dial into the meeting. In addition, you can connect others to the audio portion of your meeting by dialing out to them. To learn more about the offer, check out the official announcement here.
Calling Updates
If you’re involved in the voice side of Teams you’re probably familiar with Direct Routing. If not, I encourage you to check out my whole series on Direct Routing, you can start that off here! To put it simply, Direct Routing allows your organization to place and receive calls over the PSTN (Public Switch Telephone Network) in Teams when coupling this Microsoft’s Phone System. With this latest update, Microsoft has added 3 additional SBC vendors who have successfully completed their Session Border Controller (SBC) certification process. This certification ensures that the SBC supports Microsoft Teams Direct Routing and includes rigorous 3rd party testing and validation before being released to the public.
Security and Compliance Updates
Adaptive Card Compliance Capabilities
According to Microsoft, more than 70% of the apps today generate card content in Teams conversations. This means that 100% of that card content should be regulated since it involves Teams chat and file content. Luckily, Microsoft has just released new compliance capabilities around Adaptive Card content that is generated through apps in Teams messages. The following compliance capabilities are now generally available:
- Legal hold
- Preserve adaptive card content
- eDiscovery
- Identify, collect, and produce card content in response to an investigation
- Audit
- Audit user activity on Adaptive Cards for forensics
- Retention
- Manage the card content lifecycle in Teams
So what do you as the app developer need to do to benefit from these capabilities? Easy, nothing! Simply have your tenant admin turn on the Teams workflow as a location for any of the compliance capabilities mentioned above and Adaptive Card content generated through apps in the Teams conversation will be automatically included in the reports! Looking to learn more about this? Check out Microsoft’s official post here.
Secure Score for Teams
Microsoft Teams has just joined the Secure Score family! Now you can see Microsoft’s security recommendations around Teams for your tenant! Within the Improvement actions tab of the Microsoft Secure Score, you can easily filter on Microsoft Teams to get improvement actions strictly around Teams.
That wraps up this month’s main updates around Microsoft Teams! If you’re looking for additional updates around GCC or Education tenants, I encourage you to check out Microsoft’s updates located here. Check back soon, as I plan to start branching out with my blogs by including workloads like Intune/Endpoint Manager, Security, Compliance, and even governance in Microsoft 365!
Welcome back to the second blog post on Microsoft Teams Breakout Rooms! Last time, we discussed what breakout rooms were, how they are created, how to assign users, and how to open/close a breakout room. If you are joining us for the first time, I encourage you to check out the first post here. This time, we’ll take things a step further and discuss the different breakout room settings, how to rename your breakout rooms, how to make announcements, how to interact with your participants of the breakout rooms, and even discuss some of the small limitations around breakout rooms at this time! With that being said, let’s dive right in!
How do I tweak the Breakout Room settings?
Since you already know how to create and start a breakout room, let’s take a look at the settings you have at your disposal. After a breakout room has been created, you should see the ellipses ( … ) next to the breakout room’s flyout pane. Select the ellipses and then you should see a few different options: make an announcement, recreate rooms, and room settings. First, we’ll cover the Rooms settings option.
After selecting Rooms settings, you will see two different options to choose from:
- Automatically move participants to rooms
- Participants can return to the main meeting
The first switch controls whether or not you want to automatically move the participants into the breakout rooms once they are opened. This setting is on by default but can be disabled by just toggling this off. When disabled, the participants will receive a message asking them to join a breakout room where they will need to select Join room in order to be moved to the breakout room.
The second switch controls whether or not participants can return to the main meeting once they are done with the discussions in their breakout room. By default, this setting is disabled. However, if enabled each participant will see the option Return to the main meeting space for further discussion. Below are examples of what you will see from a participant perspective when this setting is disabled vs enabled.
Disabled
Enabled
Can I join any breakout room as the organizer?
You certainly can! As the organizer, you can easily jump from one breakout room to another by selecting the ellipses ( … ) next to the breakout room and selecting Join room. When you’re ready to leave that particular breakout room, just select Return.
How do I make an announcement to the Breakout Rooms?
Let’s say you’re a teacher and you want to let your students know that the group discussions will be concluding in 10 minutes. With the announcement feature in breakout rooms, you can easily send an announcement chat to all groups without having to join each individual room! To do this, find the ellipses ( … ) in the breakout room flyout pane and select the Make an announcement option.
Once selected, you will see a pop-up box where you can type your message.
When you’re ready to send the announcement, simply hit Send.
The message will pop up as a toast notification in the bottom corner of each participant’s Teams client and will also be shown in the chat of each breakout room. This leads me to my next point, chats in breakout rooms.
How does chat work in Breakout Rooms?
Each breakout room you create will have its own dedicated chat. Let’s use our last scenario where we are the teacher and our students have been broken into several different groups. As the teacher you see students writing a message in one of the breakout room chats with questions on the assignment. If you’d like to reply in the chat you can quickly find the room in your chat list and respond without having to physically join the breakout room!
This also means that as the organizer you can monitor all breakout room chats and chat with any of the members of the breakout rooms. One important thing to note, once the breakout room has been closed, the room chat will end as well, meaning you can no longer use the chat. However, you will still be able to view the chat history and any shared files within the chat.
How do I rename my Breakout Room?
As the organizer, you can easily rename a breakout room to whatever you’d like by selecting the ellipses ( … ) next to the breakout room you want to rename and select Rename room.
What if I want to start from scratch and recreate my breakout rooms?
Let’s say you want to start on a clean slate (and I’m not talking about your New Year’s resolution for 2021 ) by recreating all of the breakout rooms from scratch. Instead of recreating a brand new meeting, you can easily return to the beginning of the breakout room process by selecting the ellipses ( … ) at the top of the breakout room flyout pane and select Recreate rooms.
Once selected, you will see a prompt letting you know that by recreating your breakout rooms you will also be deleting all existing rooms. Assuming you’re fine with this, select Recreate.
What limitations are there for Breakout Rooms?
There are a few caveats to breakout rooms that should be mentioned. Although many of the features I list below aren’t available at this time, that isn’t to say that Microsoft won’t be releasing these capabilities in the near future. With that being said, here are some current limitations with breakout rooms:
- Breakout rooms can only be created and managed on the desktop versions of Teams (Windows and Mac)
- The ‘Call me’ feature is not currently available for breakout rooms
- You cannot add people to the meeting from the participant panel
- You cannot add additional people to the meeting chat of a breakout room
- You are unable to copy the Join meeting info for a breakout room
- Anyone joining the meeting via PSTN or Teams devices can’t be assigned to a breakout room
- You can only move participants and edit room settings when breakout rooms are closed
That wraps up all of the things you need to know about breakout rooms! Get creative with your breakout rooms and find new and inventive ways of using them! I hope you have found this short blog series helpful and I hope you’ll check back soon, as I’ll be covering the new announcement around approvals in Teams!
]]>Welcome to 2021! I’m sure I can speak for pretty much everyone when I say that 2020 won’t be missed! Nevertheless, Microsoft has graced us with some exciting new updates to start the year off on the right foot. In today’s blog, we’ll cover some of the biggest updates around meetings, calling, management, and even security and compliance released in late December/early January!
Meetings
Breakout Rooms
Last month, Microsoft released the one feature everyone has been eagerly awaiting, virtual breakout rooms! Breakout rooms give you the ability to separate the meeting into smaller groups so they can each have brainstorming sessions and then regroup once those discussions are done. Breakout rooms have been a very hot item for schools seeing as many teachers are conducting class via Teams, so having this new capability of breakout rooms gives teachers more flexibility in how they want to teach their students. If you’d like to learn more about breakout rooms, I encourage you to check out my blog on this topic!
End of meeting notifications
Another small change you may have noticed towards the end of your meeting is the end of meeting notification. Once only 5 minutes are remaining in the meeting, you will see a banner appear at the top of your meeting. The notification can be dismissed or it’ll automatically disappear after 10 seconds without user action. This small change just allows you to keep better track of your time so you can start wrapping up your meeting and still make it to your next meeting on time!
Teams meeting pre-join experience
Your pre-join experience has been improved drastically! Microsoft now makes it easier to discover your audio, video, and device configurations before joining the meeting. With the new interface, you no longer have to go to the settings to change your meeting devices, now everything can be tweaked prior to joining the meeting.
Live Event limits extended
Microsoft has graciously extended the live event limit all the way until June 30, 2021! This means that you can continue to schedule live events that support:
- Up to 20,000 attendees.
- 50 simultaneous live events across your tenant
- Live Events that can last up to 16 hours per broadcast
If you’d like to learn more about this extension, you can do that here. However, if 20,000 still doesn’t cut it, Microsoft allows for live events for as many as 100,000 attendees which can be planned through the live events assistance program. You can learn more about the program here.
Calling
Multi-contact dialing
Now when making an audio/video call you’ll see the drop-down arrow allowing you to select from multiple numbers for a single contact (i.e. work number or mobile number). This small change was made to make things easier for the caller so they can see the available numbers before initiating the call.
Live Captions during 1:1 calls
If you’re like me and you’ve been working from home, sometimes things can get a bit noisy (in my case, it’s my dog barking at anything and everything it sees outside). Luckily, Microsoft has released the capability of enabling live captions to make it easier to follow along with 1:1 calls you are on. This setting can be controlled by admins (enable/disable), and if enabled will also give the end-user the option of turning this on/off.
Chat & Collaboration
Search Relevance Updates
If you’re like me, you’re probably very accustomed to using the search capabilities within Teams. The search capabilities have become quite robust over the past few years and Microsoft has taken things a step further by using its newly developed relevance model which will generate the top 3 messages based upon various active and passive signals. For example, say you regularly work within a specific team and channel. With this latest update, the search will likely show you the top 3 messages from the channel that you are most active on rather than just the 3 most recent messages.
Offline file access on iOS
If you’re an iOS user, you’ll be happy to hear that now you’ll have the ability to access files even when you are offline or have poor network connectivity. To benefit from this, all you’ll need to do is select the files you’d like to access and then Teams will keep a downloaded version to use on the mobile app. This can be very useful if you’re about to jump on a plane to travel or maybe you just need to pull up a file quickly while on the go.
Video playback improvements
Microsoft has made some significant improvements to the video playback experience. Embedded videos will now experience a 25% reduction in time loading the video in Stream, up to 90% reduction in time it takes for the video to start playing! As with it being the new year, Microsoft said “out with the old, and in with the new”! This is all possible due to Microsoft replacing the old embed play and replacing it with the new and improved version called Fast Embed. This results in faster loading times for all of your Stream videos embedded across the entire Microsoft 365 stack!
Yammer communities and conversations in Teams
If you’re familiar with the Communities app in Teams, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now search for different Yammer conversations as well as add tabs with Yammer styling in Teams channels. If you’re unfamiliar with the Communities app, you can learn more about it here. Also, if you’d like to learn how to do this, Microsoft has a quick step-by-step walkthrough on adding the Yammer (Communities) tab to a Teams channel.
Updates to SharePoint tab in Teams
Microsoft is making it easier than ever to bring all of your team’s resources to one central place so you can communicate, collaborate, and get work done! Microsoft has made some updates to the SharePoint tab in Teams so you can quickly paste any published pages, news posts, or even lists from a SharePoint site. To add a page, list, or document library as a tab in Teams, check out the steps to do each of these here.
Updates to SharePoint Migration Manager
With the latest updates to the SharePoint Migration Manager, you can now get even more granular with your content migration destinations by selecting a specific Teams channel or OneDrive username. To learn how to use the Migration Manager, check out the docs article here.
Management
Restrict Teams sign-in to other tenants for Windows and Mac managed devices
The title says it all, now you can restrict Windows and Mac managed devices from signing in to another organizations tenant by using the other tenant’s credentials from a device that is managed by your organization. In addition, you can use the same policy to configure access to personal accounts.
Teams display management
Microsoft has now added Teams Display as one of the device categories that can be managed within the Teams admin center. If you’re not familiar with Teams displays, you can learn more about them here.
Security and Compliance
Lobby Setting Updates
Microsoft recently released a new lobby setting allowing you to specify whom you want to bypass the lobby using the new “People I invite” option. If this option is chosen, only the participants invited by the organizer in the meeting invite will be able to join the meeting directly. This means that everyone else not invited by the organizer will be sent to the lobby until they’ve been admitted.
Customer Key for Teams
If you’re not familiar with Customer Key, it is basically an additional layer of encryption at the application level for data-at-rest and allows your organization the ability to control the encryption keys. Customer Keys are already available for services like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, so this extension into Teams for public preview helps you meet any compliance obligations that may have been missing before. You can see the official announcement here.
That wraps up the biggest updates around Microsoft Teams for our first month of 2021! If you’d like to check out all of the updates (including those around GCC, Education, Firstline Workers, etc.) you can check out Microsoft’s official post here. I hope you have found this article helpful and I encourage you to check back soon, as I will be covering some of these topics in more detail as the features light up in our tenant!
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]]>Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Teams Breakout Rooms! This has been a long-awaited ask from the tech community and has been in the works for quite some time! In today’s blog, we’ll discuss what a breakout room is used for, how to create one, how to assign people to a specific breakout room, and how to start/open and close your Breakout Rooms. In the next blog, we’ll take things a step further by digging into the Breakout Room settings, discussing how to rename your Breakout Rooms, showing you how to interact with all participants of your Breakout Rooms, and even outline some small caveats with Breakout Rooms at this time.
What is a Microsoft Teams Breakout Room?
Simply put, breakout rooms allow you to separate your meeting into sub-groups so you can facilitate individual discussions/sessions. Once those individual sessions are completed everyone can be brought back into the main meeting where everyone can discuss the outcomes of their brainstorming sessions. This can be very useful for teachers who would like to separate the class into several smaller groups to discuss topics or what they learned in the last lesson with a few other students. This can also be used in a corporate setting for projects that have several different moving parts and multiple departments in play. Now that we know what Breakout Rooms are and what they can be used for, let’s talk about how to get a Breakout Room created!
How do I create a Breakout Room?
Breakout Rooms are now built into the meeting controls at the top of your meeting. To start using Breakout Rooms, schedule a meeting, and include all participants that you’d like to be part of your discussions. Once you’ve joined the meeting you should see the option to start a Breakout Room (icon below).
Once you’ve selected the Breakout Room icon you’ll be presented with the Breakout Room settings page where you will specify how many rooms you’ll need (1-50), and also how you would like to assign your participants (automatically or manually).
Once you’ve chosen your room settings and participants, select the Create Rooms option to create your Breakout Room.
How do I assign specific people to a Breakout Room?
In the example above, when creating the Breakout Room, you had two options on how you’d like to assign your participants: automatically or manually. If you want to assign specific people to a Breakout Room you would choose the Manual option. If chosen, you will see a full list of all meeting participants with a checkbox next to their names. To manually assign users to a Breakout Room simply select the checkbox next to the names of the people you’d like to share a Breakout Room and then select the Assign option. Lastly, select the room you’d like to add those people to and that’s it!
How do I start/open my Breakout Rooms?
Great, you’ve created your breakout room and assigned your participants accordingly! Now it’s time to start/open your Breakout Rooms so they can be used. As soon as you’re ready to start your Breakout Rooms you will see the option to Start Rooms. Selecting this option will start all rooms at the same time. However, if you’d only like to start one room, find the room in your list and select the More Options ( … ) ellipses next to the room and then select Open room.
How do I close my Breakout Rooms?
Just like with starting your Breakout Rooms, you have a couple options in how you’d like to close your Breakout Rooms. If you’d like to close all Breakout Rooms at once you’ll see the option to Close Rooms. However, if you’d like to manually close one room at a time you can do this by selecting the More Options ( … ) ellipses next to the room and then select Close room. Once the rooms have been closed you should see a status next to the room showing Closed. Once you have closed the room, the meeting participants will be returned to the main meeting space. Once everyone is back in the main meeting you will see the option to Resume, select this, and continue your meeting with the larger group.
Note: You can open or close a Breakout Room more than once during a meeting.
Great job! You now know the basics of how to use a Breakout Room! In the next blog, we’ll take things a step further by showing you how to interact with your participants of the Breakout Rooms, showing you the different room settings, and even discussing some small caveats present in Breakout Rooms at this time! I hope you have found this article helpful and hope you have a wonderful 2021!
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