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Teams Meetings Get Webinar Capability 48 Comments
Microsoft Teams Webinar

Teams Meetings Get Webinar Capability

Anyone who can run a Microsoft Teams meeting can now run a webinar using a modified version of a standard Teams meeting. Microsoft is quite clever in extending the standard functionality to be able to deliver the features needed to publish and deliver a webinar. Some rough edges exist, but because running a webinar is very like running a regular meeting, you can expect that this will be an extremely popular new feature.

April 12, 2021
Microsoft Relaunches Teams Pro Service Plan to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Tenants 12 Comments
Microsoft Relaunches Teams Pro Service Plan to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Tenants

Microsoft Relaunches Teams Pro Service Plan to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Tenants

Microsoft has clarified that the Teams Pro service plan is being added to Office 365 enterprise and Microsoft 365 business standard and premium licenses. Tenant admins don't have to do anything to add the new service plan as Microsoft will do this for them. Teams Pro adds the ability to differentiate product features across different types of user licenses. Teams Pro does not replace the Teams Advanced Communications add-on, but it needs an overhaul too.

April 6, 2021
Microsoft Delivers Live Transcription with Speaker Attribution for Teams (Finally) One comment

Microsoft Delivers Live Transcription with Speaker Attribution for Teams (Finally)

Teams offers meeting organizers the ability to create an automatic transcript of conversations in meetings. For now, the feature is limited to the Teams desktop client and only for US English. The AI-based processing works well if people speak clearly and have good microphones, but even if a few bloopers exist in a transcript, it can be downloaded and fixed up in Word to create a permanent record. Overall, this is a very interesting and worthwhile feature to add to Teams meetings.

March 24, 2021
How to Define Custom Sensitive Information Types for Use in DLP Policies 23 Comments

How to Define Custom Sensitive Information Types for Use in DLP Policies

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a feature of Office 365 E3 and E5 plans. Most DLP policies focus on matching sensitive information types created by Microsoft, like credit card numbers, but it is relatively easy to create a custom sensitive information type for use in DLP policies to detect information specific to your organization. In this example, we create a sensitive information type for Azure AD passwords and explore its use in Teams DLP policies.

March 15, 2021
Switch between Office update channels and enable Teams Preview features

Switch between Office update channels and enable Teams Preview features

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.

March 5, 2021
Teams Meeting Improvements to Make Presenters Look Smarter

Teams Meeting Improvements to Make Presenters Look Smarter

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.

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
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