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Taming Teams Notifications
Microsoft Teams notifications

Taming Teams Notifications

There are several areas where Microsoft could improve the way Teams handles out-of-office and away-from-work scenarios. Are the default "quiet hours" reasonable? Should there be a global setting for quiet hours or do-not-disturb? While there may be good reasons to leave some of these as a tenant-level settings, you don't want to forget about the extra steps you must take to truly escape from Teams for a bit.

June 4, 2021
Deploying Custom Teams Group Policy Assignments
Microsoft Teams

Deploying Custom Teams Group Policy Assignments

Microsoft Teams uses an array of policies to control the features available to end users. Group policy assignments make it easier to assign packages of policies to groups of users. Microsoft provides a set of policy packages out of the box, and organizations can create custom packages. That is, if they have the Teams Advanced Communications license. Demanding a special license for functionality which helps tenants manage Teams better seems excessive, especially as you could relatively easily recreate policy assignments with PowerShell.

June 3, 2021
Creating Custom B2B Guest User Invitations with Graph API 14 Comments
Azure AD Microsoft Graph API PowerShell

Creating Custom B2B Guest User Invitations with Graph API

Azure AD business-to-business guest user accounts are a terrific way to securely grant access to apps and services for external users and partner organizations. In this article, a script is introduced that can be used to automate the guest user invitation process, integrating it more seamlessly with any custom applications.

June 2, 2021
The Practical 365 Update: S2, Ep 19 – What’s new from Build 2021, and Accenture IT on Running the Largest Teams Deployment in the World

The Practical 365 Update: S2, Ep 19 – What’s new from Build 2021, and Accenture IT on Running the Largest Teams Deployment in the World

On the show this week, we're talking through the news from Build and going into detail on the most important announcements for IT pros. We're also joined by Jason Warnke and Tony Leraris from Accenture, who give us a glimpse into the fun and games around running the world's largest Microsoft Teams deployment.

May 28, 2021
Upgrade Your Exchange Online Scripts to Use the Get-EXOMailbox Cmdlet 6 Comments

Upgrade Your Exchange Online Scripts to Use the Get-EXOMailbox Cmdlet

Many Exchange Online scripts use the old Get-Mailbox cmdlet to fetch mailbox data. It's time to change these calls out and replace them with Get-ExoMailbox. The new cmdlet is faster than the old and more resilient in its ability to handle server glitches. There's no reason to continue using the old Remote PowerShell cmdlets unless you like slowness and errors.

May 26, 2021
Talking Teams with Rish Tandon
Microsoft Teams

Talking Teams with Rish Tandon

Tony Redmond sat down (virtually) with Rish Tandon, Corporate VP for Microsoft Teams Development, to discuss how Teams has evolved over the last few years. The conversation was wide-ranging and covered many topics, including the operationalization of Teams to create a service capable of running at massive scale, client performance, compliance, backups, people, the effect of Teams on other Microsoft 365 workloads, and more.

May 24, 2021
Prepopulating Outlook Contacts with the Graph API 55 Comments
Microsoft Graph

Prepopulating Outlook Contacts with the Graph API

When contacts are added to an organizations Global Address List (GAL), they do not always populate in the users personal device contacts depending on what app, device, etc. is being used. This becomes problematic when users working from outside the office are unable to contact the IT Service Desk, HR, or other internal services. To solve the problem, this article introduces a PowerShell script that will read a set of standard contacts from a CSV file and write them as personal contacts to user mailboxes. Mobile devices can then synchronize these contacts along with others created by the user.

May 20, 2021
Microsoft Extends Teams Retention Policies to All Licensed Office 365 Accounts

Microsoft Extends Teams Retention Policies to All Licensed Office 365 Accounts

Microsoft announced a bunch of changes for Microsoft 365 records management on May 19. The most interesting changes are allowing all licenses Office 365 accounts to use Teams retention policies and the advent of adaptive scopes for retention policies, both of which should be useful for many tenants. The announcement also covers multi-stage disposition reviews. If you know what that means, you'll be excited. If not, you won't.

May 20, 2021
Microsoft Updates Outlook to use Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels 24 Comments
Sensitivity Labels

Microsoft Updates Outlook to use Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels

Updates to Outlook clients (desktop, mobile, and OWA) respect the advanced settings in label policy which previously needed the deployment of the unified labeling client. Many organizations want to use mandatory labeling, but have been frustrated because of the lack of support in the Office applications. Now support is available, so it's time to label that email!

May 19, 2021