Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s team collaboration solution. The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook includes over 300 pages dedicated to Teams, and we cover the topic extensively on the site.
The need for more nuanced responses to Teams chat and channel messages can apparently be met through multiple emoji reactions instead of a basic one-emoji response like a smile or thumbs up. In any case, users can add up to 20 emojis in response to Teams chat and channel messages. The possibilities of what 20-emoji combinations might communicate are endless, or so it seems.
The Teams Discover Feed highlights unread items from channels that users might have missed. Microsoft tweaked the feature so that it only works with 5 or more channels. The logic behind the change is that if you have access to less than five channels, the Discover Feed is unlikely to be much use because it probably won’t have many unread messages to show. One limitation is that guest users can’t use the feed.
The update to allow team members to add a Loop workspace as a channel tab is now rolling out and should be available worldwide soon. Microsoft is currently putting a lot of emphasis on Loop and its almost read-time collaboration capabilities are turning up in many places within Microsoft 365, like Copilot Pages. Will Loop replace OneNote eventually? That’s a big question…
Last year, Microsoft removed the need to have a General channel in a team. Now the General channel is making a comeback, and you can choose to have one in a team. If you choose to have a General channel, it appears at the top of the channel list. If not, Teams sorts the channel list alphabetically. In other news, code snippets are being replaced by code blocks and the end of classic Teams is nigh.
Teams Windows and Mac desktop clients have started to prompt users about location privacy. Location data is used by several Teams features like the Call Quality Dashboard and emergency calling, so it’s good to allow access. These are Teams Phone features that you might not care about, but keeping an eye on location privacy is a good thing in case the data is used elsewhere.
The Facilitator agent can make sense of the messages posted to a Teams chat and summarize the discussion and extract to-do items and unanswered questions. It’s a very practical tool that allows chat participants to focus on the ebb and flow of a conversation instead of pausing to take notes. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required before you can use AI Notes in Teams chat.
Microsoft has enabled a one-year retention policy for Teams meeting attendance reports. Tenants can’t opt out of the policy or set a different retention period. Microsoft says that the new policy exists to make sure that Teams complies with the Microsoft privacy policy. Another way of looking at the situation is that the new policy will simply remove some old data that no one ever looks at.
Microsoft reannounced the Teams policy to suppress certain categories of in-product advertising messages but has done nothing to control Teams pop-up messages that irritate users. The volume of pop-up messages appears to have increased, or maybe it’s my frustration level that’s rising. A simple setting to turn informational pop-up messages would be appreciated.
In January 2025, Teams will support the ability to post video clips to channel conversations in posts and replies. The feature is similar to that released for Teams chat in September 2022. It’s also similar to the ability to include a video clip in Outlook messages. Given the popularity of video clips in other apps, it’s likely that this feature will be popular with users.
Microsoft is deploying the option for meeting organizers with Teams Premium licenses to use OTP verification to allow anonymous users to verify their identity. The new option fills in a gap where external people who don’t have an Entra ID or MSA account are unable to verify their identity to join a Teams meeting. It’s a good feature, but should it be available in the basic Teams license?
Microsoft plans some big changes for Teams recording and transcription policies in February 2025. Events like webinars and town halls get separate controls for recording and transcription through the Teams event policy. By default, meeting transcription is enabled to generate transcripts for more meetings (and make transcripts available to Copilot). In addition, face and voice profile enrollment is enabled by default (important if you have Teams Rooms devices).
I’ve used Teams avatars for a couple of years but never liked them all that much. The chance to create a Teams avatar from a photo seemed like a great idea. Alas, the results obtained from uploading a professional headshot photo or from an image captured by the PC’s camera didn’t live up to expectations. The avatar is closer to my reality, but not by much.
In January 2025, Microsoft will introduce resizable Teams windows for the Windows and Mac desktop clients. This is a fundamental change to the client experience that will affect how end users interact with Teams. In a nutshell, users can resize panes like the chat list or meeting stage to a minimum of 360 pixels, which isn’t a lot. On the other hand, you can zoom a Teams window to 400%, which is definitely a lot.
A recent report noted an increase in social engineering attacks through Teams federated chat. You can stop these attacks by limiting external access to an allow list of known domains, which is what I do. Or you can depend on the technology built into Teams to detect suspicious connections and remind users about potential risk. This now extends to connections from brands commonly targeted by phishers.
Microsoft launched private channels in November 2019. A lot has happened since, and private channels don’t really get much attention these days. That’s a pity because private channels can be very useful in the right situation. I rediscovered this fact recently when working through an issue with a university where private channels were the right answer. Like all technologies, happiness comes from choosing the right tool.
The Teams calendar app is being refreshed in November 2024 when Teams takes on the calendar UI used by OWA and the new Outlook for Windows. The unified Microsoft 365 calendar experience is based on OPX and WebView and looks much better than the old Teams calendar. It makes perfect sense for the same UI to manipulate the same calendar data in both Outlook and Teams.
Microsoft announced blocked Teams federated chat for trial tenants in June 2024. That block is now well and truly enforced. If you use an account in a trial tenant (and many flavors of these accounts exist), then you won’t be able to set up a federated chat with someone in another Microsoft 365 tenant. It’s an example of how Microsoft restricts service functionality to stop misuse.
One of the things that vexes me is the need to change account to attend a Teams meeting. I forget this all the time and end up with unexpected waits in virtual lobbies, twiddling my thumbs while waiting for someone to admit me to the call. Sometimes I end up missing calls because people can’t admit participants from outside the tenant if they don’t have a guest account. The solution might come from the application of more intelligence and a change to the Teams UI.
Thankfully, Teams pasted text no longer contains a timestamp and the author’s name. The change is effective worldwide and addresses a longstanding irritation. Quite why it took so long for Microsoft to understand how people felt about the insertion of unwanted metadata is a mystery, but it’s gone now. And in other news, Mic Pending is a new feature for Teams calls and meetings.
Microsoft says that they plan to refresh the Teams external domain activity report from September 2024. But access to the report requires a Teams Premium license. It seems like this kind of fundamental information should be available to every tenant as it’s not basic security data instead of something that could be considered as Advanced Collaboration Analytics.
When someone leaves a Microsoft 365 organization, the possibility exists that they leave some active Teams online meetings dangling behind them. What can be done to take over these meetings and make someone else the meeting organizer? The answer is simple: nothing. Organizing a replacement meeting is one way out, but maybe it’s best to use a dedicated account to organize important company events.
A question asked about filtering Teams apps based on their blocked status. The Teams admin center doesn’t support this kind of filter and getting details of Teams apps is surprisingly difficult. For instance, you can’t get a list of the 2,500+ apps shown in the Teams admin center. PowerShell cmdlets are available to list Teams apps, but they focus on apps known to a tenant rather than the entire catalog.
Tenant administrators know that they need to deal with mailboxes and OneDrive accounts when people leave, but what about Teams chat messages? Or rather, the information stored in the compliance records captured in Exchange Online mailboxes? Reviewing chat messages can be an ardous task, so perhaps the solution might be to export the compliance records to a PST for long-term retention.
Teams meeting transcripts are enormously helpful and are used by many features, including Copilot for Microsoft 365. Access to transcript files needs good control because of the possibility of confidential information being captured in transcripts. Several recent changes made to the Teams meeting policy and meeting options help organizations to exert better control over access to transcript files.
Teams ACM replaces app permission policies with an easier method of defining who can use Teams apps. A wizard in the Teams admin center runs a one-time non-reversable switchover from app permission policies to ACM and makes sure that the permissions assigned through policy are present for each app. In other news, Teams is much better at presenting Graph permissions that apps need to run.
In what seems to be a small change, team owners can rename general channels (naturally with ‘meaningful names.’ The change is more important than it seems because it’s associated with an effort to make users think about using channels as the basis for collaboration instead of always creating a new team. Being able to rename the General channel might make the channel more useful. After all, it’s just a regular channel.
In June, Microsoft retired Office Connectors for SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 Groups. Starting on August 15, they’re retiring connectors for Teams. The problem is finding out which teams and channels have configured connectors. That’s when PowerShell comes in handy, as we prove with a script to report which teams have connectors.
In a welcome update, the Teams development group have provided a new policy setting to control the display of some in-product messages in Teams clients. The policy can only be updated with PowerShell. Some other Microsoft 365 development groups need to follow Teams and offer paying customers a way to suppress the annoying in-product ads.
From mid-July 2024, Teams will begin hiding inactive channels for users. The inactive channels can be unhidden, and users can opt out of the automatic process. The new clean up routine can be invoked whenever users want and if a mistake is made, it’s easy to unhide a channel. Given the number of channels in use, it’s likely that a few in everyone’s channel list are inactive and deserve to be hidden.
The old Files tab in Teams chat is being replaced by the Shared tab. The new tab exposes both files and hyperlinks and Microsoft says that the Shared tab will support more types of objects in the future. No dates are given for the future enhancements, but the new Shared tab will roll out for Teams chat users in early July 2024. I like the new tab because I tend to share many hyperlinks in chats.
Microsoft is moving to block federated communications with trial Microsoft 365 tenants to cut off a potential exploitation route for attackers. The new block goes into force on July 29, 2024, and is controlled by the ExternalAccessWithTrialTenants setting in the tenant federation configuration policy. We’ve been saying for years that tenants should clamp down on federated chat. It seems that Microsoft now agrees.
The incoming webhook connector is a popular method to post information to Teams channels, but Microsoft seems set on retiring the Office connectors. The Teams post to channel workflow when a webhook request is received seems like is a possible replacement, but it’s not just a matter of switching mechanisms. Some PowerShell magic is needed to create a suitable adaptive card to post to the channel, which is exactly what we explain how to do here.
Our review of the Videos chapter for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook found a Teams meeting policy setting we hadn’t documented to block downloads for channel meeting recordings. Naturally, this was a disaster, so we spent some time investigating what the policy setting does and if it’s useful in practice. It works, but do you want to block downloads of channel meeting recordings?
Office 365 Connectors bring data from external sources into Microsoft 365 apps like Teams and Outlook. Workflows and Power Automate are replacing Connectors for Microsoft 365 Groups (Outlook groups) and SharePoint Online. Connectors are still available in Teams but for how long? No one knows, but it does seem like Microsoft is rationalizing no-code automation around Power Automate.
The latest technology initiative from Microsoft comes in the form of Teams custom emojis, designed to bring light and happiness to Microsoft 365 tenants. Of course, the light and happiness will only happen if tenants don’t disable the settings in Teams messaging policies that allow users to upload custom emojis. A tenant can support up to 5,000 Teams custom emojis. That’s a lot of room for people to get inventive.
Without any fuss or bother, Microsoft announced that the Teams 2.1 client has regained the Notify When Available feature. This functionality allows users to subscribe to the presence status for someone else to receive notifications when that person’s presence status changes to Available. It’s a very useful and worthwhile feature to have that goes back to Skype. It’s good to have it back!
Microsoft is deploying additional audit events to tenants with Purview Audit (Standard) licenses. Among the 15 Teams events in the set are Teams meeting audit events to capture details of meetings and participants. Unhappily, some of the data that you’d like to have for meetings, like the subject, are missing. And meeting participant information is available for some classes of user but not for others.
The Teams Activity feed received two recent major changes. First, calendar notifications now show up in the feed. Second, the set of filters that were available are reduced to just two (mentions and unread). Reducing the filters is part of Microsoft’s effort to streamline the Teams 2.1 client and remove unnecessary screen elements. I guess it’s OK, and you can disable the calendar notifications to stop that annoyance.
