Contemplating Commsverse
Paul Robichaux provides insights from the independent Microsoft Teams conference, Commsverse, that just took place last week at Mercedez-Benz World outside of London.
Paul Robichaux provides insights from the independent Microsoft Teams conference, Commsverse, that just took place last week at Mercedez-Benz World outside of London.
Building a bot used to require developer skills - writing complicated code, deploying it to a resource like Azure, and then performing cumbersome configuration steps to ensure it functioned properly. Now, with the Power Virtual Agents (PVA) app for Microsoft Teams, you can create exceptionally powerful chatbots without having to write a single line of code. What’s more, you don’t need direct access to Azure resources to deploy these bots. There’s no reason to not create a bot for your organization today.
Mike Weaver, Paul Robichaux and Steve Goodman head to Commsverse on Sept 15 & 16 at Mercedez-Benz World just outside of London, UK. Learn more about the hybrid conference as well as the session that Mike and Paul are hosting together - 'Teams Tenant-to-Tenant Challenges: It Just Keeps Getting Worse!'
There's no definitive 'right' or 'wrong' way to structure Teams and channels, however there are some limits and best practices that can be followed to ensure the structures created are easy to use and navigate. This article explores the decision process Team owners can use to assess if a new channel is needed, what type should be used and how to manage large numbers of channels in a team.
On the show this week, we're joined by the Commsverse conference crew to discuss next week's Teams conference. Missed TEC? Find out about the best bits. And as always the latest Microsoft 365 news
Microsoft MVP Christina Wheeler demonstrates how to automate tasks with Power Automate and trigger events using Teams data. The new Teams connector (currently in preview) enables you to use in Logic Apps, Power Automate, and Power Apps.
After a false start in 2020, Microsoft is coming back with version 2 of the Teams Advanced Communications add-on. The documentation lists four new capabilities. You'll have to make your mind up whether these features are worth whatever Microsoft asks for in terms of add-on pricing. We probably won't have that information until the preview phase of the features terminates at the end of 2021. I can't wait!
In the show this week - Microsoft price increases, Ignite is back later this year, we bid IE11 farewell, cover the latest Teams new features and - discuss Exchange vulnerabilities you need to patch and protect yourself against.
Microsoft has hired a new boss to lead development of Teams consumer. This is the version bundled in Windows 11 based on a new client architecture. But as we explain here, while Microsoft will ship a nice new consumer Teams client in Windows 11, there's a bunch of work to be done to ship an enterprise Teams client built on the new architecture. Don't expect this client to appear when Windows 11 ships.
If allowed by your organization, you can send email to a Teams channel. Teams uses the email to start a new conversation and this is a great way to get a debate going about something which first appears in email. Managing the Teams email integration features isn't hard. You can define domains to accept email from and enable or disable the feature. After that, it's up to team members to use the capability. Hopefully, they'll resist the temptation to remove email addresses from channels, which is something which should be limited to team owners.
From August 17, 2021, Microsoft 365 apps no longer support IE11 (the Teams browser client dropped support last year). IE11 fans need to move to a new browser. Microsoft would prefer if you choose the Edge browser, but anything but IE11 should do a better job in the future.
TEC 2021, The Experts Conference, takes place as a virtual event on September 1-2. In this article, Tony selects his favorite sessions from the event agenda. This isn't to say that the other sessions are no good. Everyone's got their own favorite topics and there are many other TEC 2021 sessions covering other topics which will make others very happy.