Microsoft is changing the storage location for Teams Meeting Transcripts from Exchange Online to OneDrive for Business. The change is designed to standardize storage of meeting recordings and transcripts in OneDrive for Business. The change makes sense seeing that Stream has completed its migration to SharePoint and OneDrive. In other news, because transcripts are now so important for other features, a bunch of new controls are coming to allow organizations to limit access to this data.
A new feature for Teams recurring meetings allows meeting organizers to create Loop workspaces to hold content shared within the meetings. It’s an example of close integration between different parts of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem to add value for customers. That’s great, providing you have the correct licenses to allow meeting organizers to create Loop workspaces and don’t need to support guest access (coming soon).
The Financial Times reported that the EU is lining up new charges against Microsoft for Teams anti-competitive behavior. Given that Microsoft has already unbundled Teams from Office 365 products, it’s hard to know what remedy the EU will seek. If it’s a fine, then Microsoft could be charged up to 10% of their worldwide revenues. That’s unlikely, but the issue highlights how hard it is to compete against an integrated solution.
Teams has added the ability to use slash commands (shortcuts) to the message compose box. Although the feature seems useful, I wonder about its potential usage. The fact is that people are pretty accustomed to how they compose message text and other options are available to add Loop or code blocks or set their online status, so why would they use the slash commands in the message compose box?
The Follow response is a new option for people invited to a meeting to indicate that they can’t attend but are interested in what happens. Replying with a Follow response means that the user gains access to the meeting artifacts (like the chat and recap). It also means that the allotted time is not blocked in their calendar. The feature will be most valuable to people who have heavily-used calendars.
Team channel collaboration might be a better choice than always creating a new team to host discussions about a topic, especially if channels grow in features. Now that a single team can support a mix of up to 1,000 regular, shared, and private channels, all of which can be archived, is it a good option to continue to create new teams? The answer is probably not, especially if Microsoft continues on a path to develop channel capabilities.
The Teams iOS client can send one-minute Teams video messages (or clips) to chats or channels conversations. Now, the videos can use image or blur backgrounds. Nice as it is to be able to expose your artistic side in Teams messaging, the compliance problem with Teams video messages remains. If you allow users to send video messages, remember that they could use this route to get around compliance barriers.
The Share to Teams Outlook add-in posts an email to a Teams chat or channel conversation. I was asked how to disable the add-in for some mailboxes. Here’s how to do the job using PowerShell to find a set of target mailboxes and then turn off Send to Teams for each mailbox.
The Teams classic client has been replaced by the Teams 2.1 client. Microsoft will block access to the Teams classic client for people running the app on unsupported platforms in October 2024. The final block swings into place for everyone on July 1 2025. The migration to the new client appears to be going well, so I’m not sure if many will miss the old client.
Teams group chats are getting a new Meet Now experience. Is that good news? Well, it’s not an earthshattering change, but it is a nice change because it simplifies the way the Meet Now feature works. It’s the kind of change that software vendors make to tidy up the loose ends in a product.
A reader asked if it is possible to script sending chat messages. In this article, we explore how to compose and send Teams urgent messages to a set of recipients using Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets. The conversation with each recipient is a one-to-one chat that Teams either creates from scratch or reuses (if a suitable one-on-one chat exists).
Microsoft Teams now boasts the ability to add customizable group chat pictures to what might be otherwise a set of chats with not-very-good generated pictures. The idea is to make it easier for people to find the right group chat in their chat list, Of course, it might be difficult to find just the right picture to use, but Microsoft has selected 36 illustrations and there’s over 1,800 emojis to choose from.
A new parameter for the Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration cmdlet made me look at the Teams tenant federation configuration again to improve how a script works. Instead of taking all the domains guest accounts came from and adding them to the configuration, I created a function to check if the tenant uses Microsoft 365. If it does, we add the tenant to the allow list in the tenant federation configuration. If not, we ignore the domain.
An article by security researchers Black Hills pointed to some vulnerabilities with incoming webhook connectors and email connections for Teams channels. Fortunately, it seems like Microsoft is making changes to Teams to improve security. Even so, it’s always wise for tenants to keep an eye on how information flows into Teams.
An update allows Teams owners to archive Teams channels. This is an excellent way of keeping old channels online while removing them from open view. The PowerShell cmdlets have not yet caught up the archive channel option so they don’t report this status, but all good things come to those who wait and I’m sure that we will be able to report archived channels soon.
Teams Tags Support for Private and Shared Channels should arrive in targeted tenants soon. The new tag capability uses channel memberships instead of the team roster. It’s a small but useful change, as is the option to start a chat with tagged members. On the downside, Microsoft is deprecating suggested tags. But on the upside, you can include emojis in tag names.
Microsoft originally said that Copilot for Microsoft would only support the Monarch client. Now it turns out the Outlook Win32 Copilot support is coming. No formal announcement is available and Microsoft hasn’t shared when the support will turn up in an Office channel, but it’s good news that this deployment blocker is no more. And Teams has a new Copilot experience, so things are moving in the world of AI-powered assistants.
Message center notification MC711019 covers the ability to hide the General channel for a team, a feature designed to free up space in the teams and channels list. Team members (including guests) can decide if they want to see the General channel in their list. Because teams can have up to 1,000 channels, being able to hide the General channel is a useful change.
Microsoft plans to change the way that the Teams website channel tab works in early April 2024. Instead of the client opening a site, a new browser tab opens. Microsoft says that the change better aligns with best practice for web security and privacy. Even so, it creates an administrative challenge to find what teams have website channel tabs that might need to be adjusted. Fortunately, we have a script to do just that.
The essence of a good teams naming convention is simplicity and clarity. This article explains why those aspects are so important in terms of helping users. We suggest some guidelines that tenant administrators can use to make sure that their team names are simple and clear.
A new Share Someone’s Contact Info feature is available for Teams one-to-one and group chats. The option inserts a link to the person’s profile card in a chat message. Contact information can only be shared for members of the tenant (guests are unsupported). It’s a small but useful addition to Teams chat.
Teams background blur now comes in two flavors. The standard blur is what we’ve had since 2018. The new portrait blur applies a more subtle level of blurring and doesn’t obscure background details as much as the standard blur option. It’s a small but interesting addition to the range of video effects people can use during Teams meetings.
Message center notification MC687849 announces the retirement of the Teams Who bot. This was one of the original apps developed to show the potential of Teams. In truth, the bot was never very useful. Microsoft says that its functionality will be replaced with Copilot. You’ll be able to query for the answers the Who bot provided for a small extra investment.
From mid-November 2023, users have the chance to forward Teams chat messages. The feature works for 1:1, group, and meeting chats. The lack of a forward option in the Teams desktop and browser clients is a little surprising because the mobile client has been able to do this for some time.
Following new support of Loop components for Teams channel conversations, it’s sad to discover that Loop component eDiscovery remains challenging two years after the first appearance of component technology in a Microsoft 365 application. eDiscovery can certainly find Loop components, but creating a seamless picture about their usage is harder than it should be.
Loop components have been available for Teams chat for nearly two years. Now they’re coming to channel conversations. The loop files generated for the components are stored in the channel folder of the SharePoint Online site belonging to the team. Once posted, every channel member can edit the Loop component.
The new Teams client applies AI to the creation of custom announcement images by invoking Designer to generate images either from scratch or based on your input. The new mechanism generates some nice images that can be extensively customized with Designer. It’s more complex than the way the Teams classic client handled custom announcement images, but the output is nicer.
This article explains how to create SharePoint lists using cmdlets from the PnP.PowerShell module. The original data comes from a script to create a Teams Directory in HTML and CSV format files. The CSV data is imported into SharePoint to populate a list in a communications site. Everything works very smoothly, which begs the question why this kind of import isn’t done more often. Perhaps it’s because people don’t know that it’s possible. They do now.
A setting in the Teams meeting policy controls whether users can access the meeting chat in meetings hosted by non-trusted external tenants. By default, the setting is On, meaning that users can participate in chat for any meeting they join in any tenant. If you have concerns about this aspect of meetings, turn the setting Off and define trusted tenants.
An interesting discussion in the Microsoft Technical Community about limiting the teams privacy mode to private for new teams caused me to try out the principles. The idea works, with caveats, and I wonder if anyone will use it in production. It’s an interesting technique for using container management sensitivity labels that I’d never thought about before, so here it is.
Microsoft suggests that allowing every user to create new Microsoft 365 groups. That’s mad. Controlling group creation through policy settings is the only way to go. It will avoid group sprawl (or team sprawl) and avoid a lot of administrative effort that will otherwise be devoted to cleaning up the mess of unused and unwanted groups. This article explains how to update policy settings to control group creation using cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.
Everyone likes a bit of help from time to time, but the number and persistence of irritating Teams pop-ups has become a real pain in the rear end. Worst of all, there’s no way for administrators or end users to suppress Teams pop-ups, which keep on coming in an effort to bore end users to death. On a positive note, the new Teams client includes settings to allow users to choose the classic theme and revert to having channel posts display at the bottom of the screen instead of the top.
This article explains how to use PowerShell to create dynamic Microsoft 365 groups (and teams) based on the departments assigned to Entra ID user accounts. Creating a new group is easy. The trick in team-enablement is to wait for the synchronization between Entra ID and Teams to finish before you go ahead. After that, it’s plain sailing.
Teams town halls are a new event type designed to host large audiences. Town halls will replace Live Events, which Microsoft will remove on September 30, 2024. If you’ve ever created a Teams webinar event, running a town hall will seem very similar. That’s because the two event types follow similar methods to set up and manage events. Microsoft still has some features to build into Town Hall to make it functionally equivalent to Live Events. These features will come in time.
The Teams 2.1 client uses a different folder and naming convention for custom background images. People who switch must move their images, so here’s a script to do the job by resizing images to meet Teams requirements, renaming the files to comply with the new naming scheme, and copying the files from the old to the new folder, It’s PowerShell, so you can change the code as you like.
I was asked how easy it would be to write a PowerShell script to monitor new teams members and reject any additions that met specific criteria. Easy, we said, so we set to creating a script to interrogate the unified audit log to find new member events. Once that was done, it’s a matter of analyzing the events to find if we should reject the addition of any of the added members.
It’s possible to use PowerShell to create a report detailing the SharePoint Online site URLs used with Teams. My first attempt used the Exchange Online module, but is the Graph any faster? As it turns out, not really. At least, not for interactive sessions using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (things are different when running SDK code using a registered app). I tried several approaches, but Graph permissions got in the way every time.
A Teams unified picker for fun content is now available in the Teams 2.1 client. The new picker replaces the existing options to add GIFs and stickers. I’m sure this update will be important to some people, but I’m more impressed by the change to improve the performance and reliability of synchronizing calendar updates between Outlook (Exchange Online) and Teams. All available soon.
Teams channel meetings belong to a channel, but who receives the invitations for these meetings? The answer is “it depends” – on group settings and options. The underlying Microsoft 365 group might have a subscriber list of users who want to receive email for new events like meetings or the user might choose to send invitations to everyone. We discuss the mechanics and explore a way to schedule meetings in shared and private channels too.
Delayed until October 2023, the Teams Meet app will appear in the Teams 2.1 client to help users manage meetings more effectively. At least, that’s the plan. The app works well for internal meetings but its review capabilities are limited when you attend meetings hosted in another tenant. The Meet app will be beneficial in large organizations where people attend lots of meetings, but will might be less effective in smaller organizations. It’s worth looking at to decide if the Teams Meet app works for you.
