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.
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.
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.
