Surprisingly Useful New Teams Features, How to Avoid Teams Cybersecurity Issues & What to Expect from Microsoft Inspire: The Practical 365 Podcast S3 E31

In this week’s show, Steve and Paul discuss Microsoft’s big partner conference: Inspire. Relevant to consultants and Microsoft customers alike, as it signals what Microsoft feels is ready for primetime.

Microsoft Teams had a lot of new feature that were released over the last few weeks – from meeting rooms to devices to in-product features; we discuss the ones that are surprisingly useful.

And lock down your Microsoft 365 tenants – malware might be incoming – we walk through cybersecurity issues that might sound bad but can be easily avoided by following solid advice.

Discussions on the show

AI, ChatGPT, Copilots, and Everything it Relates to: Microsoft Inspire sets the Agenda

Microsoft’s headline conference for its partners, Microsoft Inspire, is coming up this month on July 18-19th. This is the event that sets in motion how Microsoft envisages its customers deploying or configuring its software, often with the help of Microsoft’s partners. Whilst Build might set the imagination going for what people can create, and Ignite sparks interest in what Microsoft is getting ready to launch – the partner conference is very focused on what Microsoft thinks is ready for the prime-time.

This year – no surprises – it is AI solutions, ranging from Microsoft’s off-the-shelf offerings, like integrated Copilots, to encouraging Microsoft’s partners to build solutions in Azure using OpenAI. If you work for a Microsoft partner then all this will sound a familiar message, but expect that message to get louder.

Check out the Microsoft Inspire session catalog

Three New Features in Teams that are Surprisingly Useful

Microsoft released 45 new features in Teams over the last month, but two in particular are especially worthy of note. Spatial Audio works with a stereo headset or wired speakers; it’s not Dolby Atmos, but it’s designed to make it easier to identify who is speaking by separating the soundstage so you hear the person speaking from where they appear to be in front of you. Paul uses a similar technology when he pilots a plane and finds it very useful; it should also be especially useful if you aren’t looking at the screen (or can’t) because you’ll be able to identify people by where their voice is, rather than looking for who has a highlighted border.

More straightforward features such as (finally) being able to mark all your activity as read are very welcome – as is seeing the “work location” feature appear, allowing you to indicate where you are working that day.

What’s New in Microsoft Teams on the Microsoft Tech Community

Teams Malware

I’ll leave the deep dive for Paul’s article, linked below. On the show, we discuss a recently re-reported vulnerability in Teams external chats, where it appears that the configuration for what an external chat participant can do is deployed from the Teams cloud service and only enforced on the client-side itself, meaning someone with bad intentions can alter this and make it so they can send files across the external (federated) chat to your internal users. Simply put: restrict the domains your users can chat to rather than leaving the default, open federation, on.

Two Routes to Avoiding Malware in Teams | Practical365

Join us in two weeks’ time where we’ll be joined by special guests in the run up to TEC 2023 Atlanta.