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How to Co-author Office Documents Protected by Sensitivity Labels 24 Comments

How to Co-author Office Documents Protected by Sensitivity Labels

Microsoft has released a preview of co-authoring for protected (encrypted) Office documents using the desktop apps. While it might seem straightforward to enable co-authoring (and the online apps have been able to do this for over a year), making it work for the Office desktop apps requires a complex mix of Office, SharePoint Online, the OneDrive sync client, and sensitivity labels. Once everything lines up, it works beautifully, even if you can't take a screenshot to prove that it works.

March 4, 2021
Microsoft Teams Connect aka Shared Channels Coming Later in 2021 24 Comments

Microsoft Teams Connect aka Shared Channels Coming Later in 2021

Microsoft Teams Connect, a new way of collaboration based on federated shared channels, is now in private preview and should be available later in 2021. The best thing about shared channels is that you don't need to switch tenants to access a channel in another tenant. Azure B2B collaboration (guest accounts) is still important, but this is a brand new way of working that should be very popular.

March 2, 2021
Microsoft Makes Teams Multi-Geo

Microsoft Makes Teams Multi-Geo

At the Ignite 2021 event, Microsoft announced that Teams will have multi-geo capabilities later this year. The same $2/user/month uplift as used for other multi-geo workloads applies to Teams. The announcement is not unexpected. Teams consumes services from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft 365 Groups, all of which are already multi-geo capable.

March 2, 2021
Hands-on SharePoint Syntex: Part 3

Hands-on SharePoint Syntex: Part 3

In Part 3, Peter covers how to create forms processing models from SharePoint document libraries by using AI Builder, a feature of Microsoft PowerApps. Before plunging into the detail, it is important to understand how forms processing models compare and differ to document understanding models.

March 1, 2021
OneDrive Gets a New Warning and Microsoft Clarifies that 250 GB File Size Limit

OneDrive Gets a New Warning and Microsoft Clarifies that 250 GB File Size Limit

Microsoft has introduced a first file delete warning in the OneDrive sync client. The new warning is flagged after a user deletes a file in a synchronized location and continues until they turn the warning off. The idea is that people might not realize how the OneDrive recycle bin works. Also in the OneDrive world, Microsoft confirmed that OneDrive for Business supports the 250 GB limit for file uploads some six weeks after the feature was originally announced with some confusion if it applied to business users. Now it does, so all is well.

February 28, 2021
The Practical 365 Weekly Update: S2, Ep 12 – Microsoft Lists with Mark Kashman One comment

The Practical 365 Weekly Update: S2, Ep 12 – Microsoft Lists with Mark Kashman

On the Practical 365 weekly update, we're joined by Microsoft's Mark Kashman to talk about Lists. We explore when and how to use it, how to launch it to the business and how you can extend and build applications using it. We begin with a quick primer, discuss who should use it, and explore when Microsoft Lists is the right tool to use instead of other Microsoft applications. We explore use-cases and opportunities and Mark gives us great examples when Lists is the perfect tool, and talks about how he uses Lists day-to-day.

February 26, 2021
Benefits and Gotchas of Running a Public-Facing Multi-Track Virtual Conference in Microsoft Teams

Benefits and Gotchas of Running a Public-Facing Multi-Track Virtual Conference in Microsoft Teams

In 2020, the pandemic forced The Experts Conference (TEC) to switch from an in-person to a virtual event. This article dives into the real practical challenges I faced turning a highly engaging in-person event into a successful virtual one using the Teams platform. I'll explain why we chose and how we used Microsoft Teams, the personnel required to pull this off, including the tenant administrator's critical role, an overview of the technical environment, and several of the significant technical/delivery gotchas we had to live with or workaround.

February 26, 2021
Teams Template Policies Now Available in Admin Center 2 Comments

Teams Template Policies Now Available in Admin Center

The Teams admin center now includes the ability to create template policies to control the set of templates shown to users when creating new teams. It's a small but important change that allows organizations to show only the templates it wants to users instead of being forced to show the set of default templates created by Microsoft. New templates are automatically included in template policies.

February 26, 2021
Recent Improvements Rolling Out to Make Teams Meetings Better 11 Comments

Recent Improvements Rolling Out to Make Teams Meetings Better

Microsoft has released several improvements to Teams meetings to make these gatherings more functional and easier to use. The features range from giving video feeds priority in the gallery view to reactions in meetings to allow participants to show what they really think about a presentation. It's all grist to the mill in the battle for corporate online meeting domination between Teams and Zoom.

February 26, 2021
A New Start at Practical365.com

A New Start at Practical365.com

As some of you might have noticed, Tony Redmond has joined the Practical365.com team to write for the site covering a range of Microsoft 365 topics. We're looking for more writers to join the team. People with fantastic knowledge and insight about how Microsoft 365 technology really works. That kind of thing...

February 24, 2021
Intune policies for a user-friendly Edge Chromium deployment 2 Comments

Intune policies for a user-friendly Edge Chromium deployment

With the move from Edge Legacy to Edge Chromium, there are few reasons to use a third-party browser on Windows 10. Despite being the browser of choice for most businesses, Edge, much like OneDrive for Business, needs a bit of configuration to get it right. In this article, Ru explains the different Intune Administrative Templates recommended to make your users’ first run of Edge smooth and appropriate for the enterprise.

February 23, 2021