Microsoft announced at Ignite in March 2021 the coming availability of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Teams, starting with 1:1 Teams calls. Learn what this means to you and your users.
Two recent updates for Microsoft Teams and Office (Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise) allow you to self-select whether you want to use Beta (Insider), Current, Monthly and Bi-Annual features within the client, and toggle Teams Preview features. Find out how to switch this on for your copy of Office and Teams, and how as an admin you can enable this for your users.
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 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 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.
The new Teams Approvals app delivers simple workflow capabilities built on top of Power Automate and Dataverse. The simplicity is attractive and makes the app very easy to use, but maybe it's a little too simple to handle the kind of workflow scenarios proposed by Microsoft. It will certainly be interesting to see how tenants use the Approvals app in their deployments.
Microsoft currently offers people the opportunity to talk to them about the challenges of managing Microsoft 365 Groups. I spoke to the Groups developers on February 18 and brought five requests to the table from dealing with group creation to cleaning up group debris.
Microsoft announced a revised plan to switchover storage of Teams meeting recordings from Stream to OneDrive for Business. The July 2021 switchover will happen for all tenants. In some respects that's a good time of year for a change like this because everyone will be on vacation and much too busy to join and record Teams meetings. At least, that's the plan. What could go wrong?
Nearly seven years after the introduction of Office 365 Groups, Microsoft has finally admitted that tenants might just have a problem with "group sprawl." In other words, tenants have too many underused or unused groups because the groups have been created without oversight and not managed thereafter. Microsoft wants to discuss the problem with tenant administrators. Practical365.com thinks this is a great idea and strongly supports the initiative to get a handle on group sprawl once and for all.
