11 unmissable Practical 365 Posts from 2021
We've had a bumper year on Practical 365. To finish up 2021 here are eleven articles that you can't miss as you break for the holiday season and get ready for 2022.
We've had a bumper year on Practical 365. To finish up 2021 here are eleven articles that you can't miss as you break for the holiday season and get ready for 2022.
Lots happened in 2021. Looking back on events, Tony Redmond has figured out five themes that will influence Microsoft 365 tenants in 2022. You might disagree with the list Tony created (and let us know why). At least it's a prompt to be proactive and think about how developments will affect your tenant operations in 2022.
Microsoft has updated the Teams PowerShell module to allow it to run in a Cloud Shell session. This is good news if you need to run one or two Teams cmdlets without access to your normal workstation, but it's not so good if you expect to run code which runs well in normal PowerShell sessions. The limitations which exist get in the way of getting work done, which is a pity.
With the COVID-19 pandemic driving rapid adoption of Office 365, tenant-to-tenant migrations are becoming more common. While content on this subject is plentiful and readily available, little detail exists around how to move the Teams Phone system as part of a migration. Jason Wynn and Mike Weaver detail best practices around testing prior to proceeding.
Office 365 tenants are now getting to use Loop components in Teams chat. Some are very excited at the new technology; others are less so. It all depends on how you use current composition tools and how easily work habits can embrace ever-changing Loops. In this article, we look at some of the challenges facing user acceptance of dynamic composition as seen in Loops.
Governance and Compliance can be a complex subject, especially in the context of modern collaboration. While cloud services and mobility have improved productivity and collaboration, it has also become essential to secure and monitor that data and protect sensitive information on-premises, across devices, SaaS applications, and cloud services. Kat Greenan provides more context around retention policies, specifically for Microsoft Teams, to remain compliant.
On December 1, Microsoft launched Teams Essentials, a new product that isn't connected to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. Teams Essentials looks a lot like Teams Free (launched in 2018). We checked out the functionality available in Teams Free and compared what you can get for nothing against what Microsoft says is available in Teams Essentials for $48/user/year. Small organizations certainly have a choice, and for an extra $12/year, they can get Teams and Microsoft 365.
Like all the other Microsoft 365 administrative consoles, the Teams admin center doesn't have any print options. If you want to print off any kind of information about Teams settings, you need to write your own code. PowerShell makes it easy to create a report about the Microsoft Teams policy assignments for user accounts. In this article, we explain how to extract policy information and generate a HTML report.
The Office news at Microsoft's Fall Ignite event was dominated by Teams and technology associated with Teams. A new Microsoft 365 app called Loop will be available in 2022 and we'll have the chance to use Connect IQ to make our messages even more intelligent than they are now. And if you really get funky, you can join a Teams mesh meetings in a virtual environment. But the bad news is that Teams Shared Channels are delayed until preview in early 2022.
Microsoft has made end-to-end encryption available in preview for Teams 1:1 calls on Windows and Mac desktop clients. The full roll-out to tenants is due in November. End to end encryption means that the workstations involved in both sides of a conversation do extra work to secure the communications. Although E2EE results in extra protection, it means that some call features cannot be used.
Microsoft Ignite 2021 happens (virtually) on Nov 2-4. There are tons of sessions scheduled and in this post we consider some important Microsoft 365 topics that we hope Microsoft will cover to help technologists plan tenant development over the coming year. Above all, we're looking forward to being able to attend conferences like Ignite in person so that we can learn from experts from inside and outside Microsoft.
Along with the general availability of a new Graph Export API for Teams, Microsoft is introducing new licensing and charging models. Understanding the charging incurred for different uses will take some time to sort out and could pose real challenges for ISVs working in the migration space. Developers need to understand terms like model A and model B, seeded capacity, and consumption units and how these apply to their apps. The question now is if this is a test bed for Microsoft to apply similar charges to other APIs.