Last Week in Microsoft Teams: Week of October 19th

Direct from Microsoft

Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro post a great Twitter thread on how the pandemic has impacted workplace well being. Findings include more workers experiencing burnout, a blurred work/life balance, and a lack of a commute that may hurt remote workers. Read more about these findings in the Microsoft 365 article A pulse on employees’ wellbeing, six months into the pandemic.

The Microsoft Teams Developer Blog announces the general availability of Microsoft Graph Teams membership API. This new functionality speeds up adding and removing members from a team or changing their role (e.g. owner to a non-owner).

Community Contributions

I posted an article on working with Microsoft Teams templates and Graph API. While the command to create the team completes immediately, the team itself takes time to provision. I go into detail on how you can view the status of this process using Graph API.

Steven Collier has an excellent YouTube video covering Teams Templates. Steve goes into some criticisms of the new feature and what he would like to see in the future. Steve has many more Microsoft Teams videos on his YouTube channel that I recommend checking out.

Tony Redmond goes into detail on how to manage third-party app permissions in the Teams admin center. The Teams admin center now shows which third-party apps require permissions (apps by Microsoft don’t need admin consent). Administrators can now grant org-wide access to the requested information required by the third-party app.

Tom Arbuthnot has an interesting discussion on how short retention deletion policies negatively impact Microsoft Teams user experience. At one point, policies could only delete Microsoft Teams private and channel messages after 30 days. Organizations requested that deletion retention policies have a one-day deletion option, and Microsoft delivered. However, Tom argues that this removes functionality in Teams by removing conversation history and context.

Mark Value warns against removing Skype for Business on-premises attributes prematurely. In his case, the ms-RTCSIP attributes for the Active Directory user accounts were removed, causing issues with Teams calling for the migrated users.

Kar Kocar has a great article and video covering how to secure Teams meetings content sharing using sensitivity labels. By applying a sensitivity label to documents, you can restrict the ability to share these during a Teams meeting.

Upcoming Events

On October 21, CommsVerse hosts their next monthly Talking Teams chat covering The Teams Meeting Room of 2021. Learn from organizations that have transformed their meeting rooms using Microsoft Teams devices.

Road Map and Message Center Updates

Road Map: Restricting sign-in to specific tenants for GCC, GCC-High, and DoD
Administrators will have the ability to restrict signing in to Teams on managed devices to specific tenants. This prevents signing into another organization’s tenant on the device the user is authorized to use for work. The expected rollout is scheduled for November 2020.

Road Map: AI-based noise suppression
AI-based, real-time noise suppression will automatically remove distracting background noise during meetings. The noise suppression works by analyzing the individual’s audio feed and filtering out any remaining noise. Users will be able to configure how much noise suppression they want, with “high” suppressing the most noise. The expected release is scheduled for November 2020

Road Map: Create a task from a message in the Desktop Client for Microsoft Teams
Users can create a task from a one-on-one or group chat or from a channel post or reply. The new Tasks in Teams powers this experience, and users will be able to save the task to an individual or shared plan. The expected rollout is scheduled for November 2020.

Road Map: Out of Office
Users will be able to schedule their out of office settings inside of Teams. While out of office, your status will change to “Out of Office”, and the status message will be displayed to other users when they reach out via chat. Your Outlook calendar and automatic replies will also be updated. The expected rollout is scheduled for December 2020.

Message Center: Improvements to Teams Meeting Notes
Team Meeting Notes will no longer have a 20 person limit. Available now, notes will support meetings with up to 100 participants. The 101st meeting participant can request access to the notes with approval from the notes’ creator.

Message Center: Announcing sharing links that block video file download
With Microsoft Teams meeting recordings moving to OneDrive and SharePoint, Microsoft is adding video files to the list of file types that support blocking download. When users create a sharing link to a video file, they will see a Block download option in the link settings. If enabled, people with the sharing link can view and watch the video but will not be able to download. This feature will start rolling out in late October 2020.

Message Center: Transfer Teams meeting between devices or add another device
Meeting participants will be able to transfer a meeting between a mobile device and a computer when using the same Azure Active Directory account. Meeting participants can also add another device as a companion to the meeting. Adding a device will join the meeting without audio and keep the other device in the meeting. This feature is currently being rolled out to production.

Message Center: Free for one year: users can join Team meetings via call-in number
Tenant administrators can activate a one year of free dial-in Audio Conferencing for Microsoft Teams. This offer is available now and redeemable through March 31, 2021. Audio Conferencing enables adding a dial-in number to Microsoft Teams meeting invitations. This allows participants to join using a telephone when they do not have Internet access.

Message Center: Microsoft Teams – Virtual Breakout Rooms
Virtual breakout rooms are a much-anticipated feature for Microsoft Teams. Meeting organizers can split the primary meeting into smaller sessions for participants to have a focused discussion. The meeting organizer can bring everyone back into the main meeting once the smaller discussions are complete. Meeting organizers can access this new functionality by turning on the new meeting experience in their Teams client’s profile settings. The rollout is expected to begin in mid-November 2020.

Message Center: Teams PowerShell Module
The Microsoft Teams PowerShell module now includes all cmdlets from the Skype for Business Online PowerShell Connector. Administrators now only need to install the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module without installing the separate Skype for Business one. This is available in version 1.1.6 or greater of the Teams PowerShell module.

Message Center: Meeting chat moderation settings
Meeting organizers can use the meetings options page to configure chat options before, during, and after a meeting. Meeting organizers can enable chat to be available at any time, off so it is read-only, or only available during the meeting.

Tip of the Week

On Twitter, Kim Manis (@kimmanis) shares a great tip on sharing Power BI artifacts directly in a Teams chat.