The hosting venue has changed to serve you better.
A few days ago, I was working on a small project for a health care provider where they wanted to leverage some sort of calendar with training tasks and checklists.
The organization makes heavy use of Microsoft Teams, so I immediately thought of Microsoft Planner for organizing, coordinating, and managing the onboarding tasks for the trainers and new employees. … [ Continue reading ]
If you talk to yourself, is it bad? Or is it only bad if you answer?
You can now find out. In a new feature rolling out, you can now initiate a chat conversation with yourself.
To use this new feature, simply strike up a chat–and address it to yourself.… [ Continue reading ]
At long last–after almost a year of development, updates, and revisions, I’m super-excited to announce that our Microsoft Teams book has finally landed!
Big shout out to my co-authors who helped make it happen:
Also, we couldn’t have gotten over the finish line without Denzil and Aaron! … [ Continue reading ]
And it’s a wrap! Thanks to our great team for working tirelessly to make this an exciting and complete book covering the entire Teams experience.
Thanks to everyone on our scoping, authoring and review team (Yura, Grant, Angel, and Alan) who helped get this book over the finish line. … [ Continue reading ]
Apologies for the delay–but with the advent of Operator Connect and a few other new features, we wanted to make sure we brought you the most up-to-date desk reference for configuring Microsoft Teams. We’ve also included a great flow chart on the number porting process, which we think will be really helpful to organizations starting up with cloud voice!… [ Continue reading ]
For folks who want to get started on bringing your intranet into Teams, here’s a quick take on configuring Viva Connections, including screenshots, tips, and the ever popular “what happens to the end users” question answered.
Buckle up.
Viva Connections, from our marketing material, is “a desktop and mobile experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in one place for your organization.”… [ Continue reading ]
At long last, I’m pretty excited to announce this labor of love with some of my peers / teammates:
We’re still finalizing a few things (so a few chapter titles/headings may change), but here’s the top level outline:
| Chapter | Title | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Teams Overview | Azure AD architecture Organization and user interface Instant messaging, chat, and presence Calendaring Mobile Devices |
| 2 | Approvals | Creating and responding to approvals Administration of the Approvals app |
| 3 | Task Management | Planner, To Do, and the Tasks App |
| 4 | Bookings | Creating and managing a booking calendar Integration with other apps and services |
| 5 | Meetings | Scheduled, Ad-hoc, and Channel meetings Meeting features (including transcription, recording, webinars, break-out rooms, and registration) Meeting options Audio conferencing |
| 6 | Meeting Room | Licensing and configuring Meeting Rooms Room scheduling Meeting room devices |
| 7 | Live Events | Scheduling live events Presenting and sharing content and invitations External meeting production |
| 8 | Teams app development | Building and publishing apps in Teams |
| 9 | Workflow integration | Connecting Power Automate to Teams, including posts and notifications |
| 10 | Power Virtual Agents | Creating and publishing chat bots |
| 11 | Phone System | Terminology, including calling plans, communication credits, conferencing, and emergency policies Calling features Licensing |
| 12 | Cloud Phone System Architecture | Cloud-only and direct-routing configurations Implementing phone system features, including E911, creating and assigning phone numbers, policies (call park, calling, caller ID, emergency) Configuring outbound calling |
| 13 | Microsoft Teams devices | Working with phones, Teams rooms, collaboration bars, and Teams displays |
| 14 | Planning and adoption | The Microsoft Teams adoption framework |
| 15 | Governance | Identity and authentcation Compliance (including retention and information barriers) Lifecycle management (including provisioning and access packages |
| 16 | Integration with Exchange Hybrid | Enabling and configuring hybrid connectivity between Teams and Exchange |
| 17 | Security and Data Protection | Conditional Access, Data Loss Prevention |
| 18 | Reporting | Call Quality Dashboard, Call detail reports, User-based call reports, Live events, Teams usage |
You can go pre-order it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09DDV1WR6… [ Continue reading ]
While working on my current book, I was thinking about a deeper exploration of how Microsoft Teams handles permissions and content. One of our Sr. Customer Engineers has a fantastic (and very expansive) diagram of the moving pieces, which I’ve adapted to fit here.… [ Continue reading ]
In order to help our customers (and their users) fully transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, I’ve updated the Disable-SkypePlugin script that I published back in 2020 and put it on the PowerShell Gallery.
As we encounter more and more customers still working remotely, helping enable them use the most modern tools (like Microsoft Teams) is critically important. … [ Continue reading ]
Recently, I had a customer ask how to help enable their Office 365 tenants to collaborate more easily. Currently, the problem they face is generating invitations to an ever-growing and ever-changing list of recipients across tenants. It requires a lot of hand-holding and maintenance.… [ Continue reading ]
This error falls into the “both nebulous and specific at the same time” category. Here is a list of a few things you can do to troubleshoot it.
The full text of the message looks something like this:
There are a handful of things to check.… [ Continue reading ]
UPDATE: An updated version script is now available on the PowerShell Gallery at https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Teams-AutoAnswer/.
Today, while working with my esteemed colleague Stephen Jones, we were discussing a need for some of our customers to auto-answer Teams with a video call. … [ Continue reading ]
Here’s a quick tip:
For organizations that may not have rolled out the Teams client yet and may want recipients to one-click join meetings without having to interact with this page:
There’s a way. It takes a little bit of work when scheduling your meeting, but it can be done.… [ Continue reading ]
With the rise of remote work over the past several weeks (now turned months and years), I’ve engaged with many customers who want to use Microsoft Teams to as part of their work-from-home tool set. Many of my customers have investments in both Microsoft Office 365 as well as Google G Suite Workspace or Google Apps (frequently with other third-party IdP, metadirectory, and federation services thrown in the mix), so it’s not always just as easy as “flipping a switch.”… [ Continue reading ]