New presentation features in Teams, coming later this month and announced at Microsoft Ignite 2021, are all designed to make it easy to look more professional in meetings and build in advanced effects into Teams itself. Presenter Mode adds features to allow you to add yourself into the presentation, PowerPoint Live makes life easier when showing slides, and webinars finally become a core part of Teams.
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.
Microsoft has issued critical security updates for Exchange on-premises servers. The fixes close off four known vulnerabilities which expose Exchange to day-zero attacks. It's important to apply these updates ASAP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
