New blog articles in Microsoft Teams

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | April 2021

Microsoft_Teams_team — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 18:33:14 GMT

Welcome to the April edition of What’s new in Teams – the monthly post where we’re keeping you updated on all the new features and innovation that we have made available in Microsoft Teams.

This month we're also excited to announce we’ve launched our new Microsoft Teams Instagram account. Go check it out for fun updates and new ways to engage with the product.

Let’s check out all the new features we have delivered this month:
Meetings and webinars
Devices
Chat and Collaboration
Management
Frontline worker
Government

Meetings and webinars

Breakout room retention and participant reassignment
Organizers can now reassign participants even when rooms are opened. Previously, you could only reassign when rooms were closed. Breakout room assignments also now persist over multiple sessions. These features are useful for efficiently managing discussions and ensuring the right participants are in each breakout. Learn more

Invite-only meeting options
A new meeting setting is now available in Teams meeting options that automatically sends those who were not originally invited by the organizer to the lobby. For example, if an invitee forwards a meeting invitation to a colleague, when that person tries to join, they’ll be directed to wait in the lobby until the host selects to admit them. This helps prevent those uninvited from joining the meeting. Learn more

Polls in Teams meetings has advanced capabilities for expanded options, intelligent suggestions and analytics
Attendees and guest attendees on mobile devices can now participate in Polls in Teams meetings. Also, discover intelligent poll suggestions to prepare relevant poll questions quickly and analyze responses to take swift action post-meeting. Learn More

Enhanced meeting creation and expiration policies
For added security and compliance, Teams meetings and join links are disabled for users whose scheduling permissions have been revoked. Previously, a user could continue to reuse their old meeting join links after their scheduling capabilities have been disabled. This policy update automatically expires those old meeting links so they can’t be reused.

Improvements to audio permissions settings for attendees
As a meeting presenter and organizer, you can now manage attendee audio permissions with greater flexibility. Attendees no longer need to request to speak for you to allow them to unmute, and you also have the ability to prevent individual attendees from unmuting. Learn more

External presenter support for Live Events
For Live Events created in Teams, you can allow anonymous users who do not have an Microsoft Service Account (MSA) or Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity to be a presenter. This makes it easier for people outside of your organization to deliver presentations for your Live Events. Learn more

Producer Management in Teams Live Events
You can now manage a live event as a Producer in a separate Teams window, so you can simultaneously support the event, while still collaborating with others on Teams.

Custom Backgrounds on iOS for Teams meetings
Custom backgrounds are now available on iOS. Select from Microsoft provided backgrounds or one of your own directly from your iOS mobile device. Now you can make your video meetings more fun and personal while you’re on the go. Learn more

Teams casting from Android and iOS Teams App
For quick ad-hoc meetings that don’t require a formal scheduled meeting, users can leverage Teams casting to wirelessly connect to a Teams Room and display content from their mobile device. Users can broadcast their screen and share content stored locally on their device or accessible via Teams or OneDrive. Learn more

Devices

Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows updates
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, version 4.8.19.0, is available in the Teams Admin Center. The latest update includes:

Improved meeting join experience – Customers using Advanced Threat Protection safe link service can now reliably offer external users a seamless meeting join experience. Organizations using a third-party URL rewrite service just need to add teams.microsoft.com domain to their exception list.

Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android updates

Center of room meeting console support - Meeting participants can now control the center of room touch control console the same way they do on Windows devices, using directional keys to navigate. The touch console includes calendar functionality to view current and upcoming meetings, ability to view participants or add more, and features the most common meeting and calling functionalities. Currently available with Poly TC8 and Yealink CTP18 devices.

Improved display experience in Microsoft Teams Rooms

Get a full view of a conference room’s daily schedule, join a meeting, and interact with common features like calling—right from the easy-to-navigate, front of-room display screen.

Join meetings from the room console in personal mode

Bring more Microsoft Teams Rooms experiences to meetings by signing in with your personal credentials and navigating from the center-of-room touchscreen console. From the console, you can apply background effects, record the meeting, and initiate whiteboarding to share with both in room and remote participants.

Intelligent detection and remediation for Microsoft Teams Rooms
The service in Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium uses Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to provide advanced threat protection capabilities that can detect incidents, vulnerabilities, and missing security KBs. The service will take action based on these detections to apply necessary updates, keeping your rooms secure and ready to go. Learn more

Threat detection and security update management for Microsoft Teams Rooms
The service in Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium uses Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to provide advanced threat protection capabilities that can detect incidents, vulnerabilities, and missing security KBs. The service will take action based on these detections to apply necessary updates, keeping your rooms secure and ready to go.

Microsoft and Surface Accessories Certified for Teams
The first line up of Microsoft and Surface devices certified for Teams include the Microsoft Modern USB & Wireless headsets, providing both a wired and wireless option for headsets that keep Teams call controls at user’s fingertips. Additionally, we have the first Surface audio device certified for Teams. This premium headset has a dedicated Teams button and an advanced microphone system to provide great voice clarity in your meetings.

For users who prefer audio to be amplified by speakerphone, the new Microsoft Modern USB-C Speaker captures and delivers sound such that users are heard clearly in their calls and meetings. A convenient Teams button brings up the interface and a simple USB-C wire keeps users connected all day.

The new Microsoft Modern Webcam lets you be seen clearly in their video calls and meetings and activates Teams features like background blur and replacement. It can be easily attached to a laptop, monitor, or tripod and connected to a PC or docking station via USB cable. 1080p video, 78 degree field of view, and True Look technology makes this device great for personal office use. And when you don’t want to be on video, a privacy shutter slides closed with an LED indicator letting you know when you are and are not seen in meetings.

New web cameras from Poly and Yealink
The Yealink UVC20 is a personal web camera designed for easy plug and play functionality. Connect to a laptop or monitor, a privacy shutter lets you switch off video when you need to and a powerful 5 megapixel camera let’s you be seen even in low or backlit conditions.

The Poly Studio P5 is the first web camera from the brand designed entirely with the personal office in mind. It’s compact form factor, exceptional camera optics, and digital zoom technology work for where users work, allowing you to show up to your video calls and meetings with confidence and clarity.

Lower-cost phones from Audiocodes and Yealink
The Audiocodes C435HD and the Yealink MP52 are two new phones with a lighter weight experience bringing them to a lower price point. Now you can experience the same richness of a Teams call with devices better suited for your budget.

Chat and collaboration

Product feedback tool in Microsoft Teams

We are here to listen for your feedback. Teams automatically reviews the feedback that you submit, and provide help documentation related to the topic, if available. Additionally, once enabled by Teams administrator, you have the option to share your email address when submitting feedback in Teams, to allow for Microsoft to follow-up with you.

Windows 10 native notifications in Teams

You can now choose the style of your notifications: built-in Teams or Windows native notifications. The latter brings a suite of benefits, like respecting focus assist mode which enables you to avoid distracting notifications when you need to focus, and integrating with Windows 10 action center to helps you review your notifications in one place. If you have a Windows build 10.0.17763.288 or higher, you can make this change in Teams notifications settings.

Visual update to Microsoft Teams mobile app on Android and iOS
The Teams mobile app has a new visual look and feel that delivers new headers, icons, and styling along with the ability to automatically switch to dark theme when you set your device to dark.

Organize chats in mobile app
In the Teams mobile app, you are now able to pin chats and filter the Chat list. This is great for when you quickly want to get back into important conversations! Pinned chats are also rolling out on Android shortly.

Emoji library and GIFs in mobile app on Android and iOS
In the Teams mobile app, there is an expanded library of emojis, and the ability to trim GIFs directly in the app.

Management

Preconfigured website tab in Team Templates
As an admin you can now add a URL of their choice to the website tab in a team template. When the end-user creates a team using the pre-built template, it will include the preset website you specified, making it easier to distribute standardized content to the entire organization. End-users can access important web resources, such as company sites, commonly visited pages, online documents, from their team with minimal manual set up.

App customization and branding
With the app customization and branding capability, app developers are able to specify if they want to provide the option for their customers to customize the app. If the developers provide this option, admins are able to customize app properties like app name, descriptions, icons and more to deliver a branded app experience right within Teams.

Teams user usage report in Teams client
The Teams user usage report provides you a view into your Teams activities and usage. You can generate insights and metrics on a per-team and cross-team basis to understand your interaction with peers and across the organization. The reports are generated with privacy in mind, so only you can your own data.

Anonymous user usage reports
As a Teams admin you have the option to anonymize user data, protecting user privacy while viewing, downloading, sharing, and accessing the Teams usage report data. Once enabled, personally identifiable information like username, email addresses, and Active Directory IDs are anonymized.

Custom policy packages
Custom policy packages enable Teams admins to configure their own set of policy packages tailored to users with similar roles in their organization. We have also added the capability to assign policy packages to a group so you can assign multiple policies to a group of users.

Frontline worker

Time Clock APIs
New APIs (Application Programming Interface) for Time Clock allows integrations into your organization’s Time & Attendance system. to enable rules for how early or late someone can clock-in/out and new processes like a health screening survey that must be completed before clocking-in for the day. Learn more

Shift Settings & Permissions
With the Teams Shifts Policy, an organization can now allow users who aren’t the owner of a Teams site to be able to edit and manage Shift schedules, approve swaps, and authorize time off requests. This enables you as a managers or supervisor to have schedule ownership without having to be the owners of the entire Teams site, reducing instances of accidentally deleting or modifying the Teams site. Learn more

Enhanced tasks publishing capabilities
We have enhanced task publishing so operations and corporate teams can more clearly manage and plan their task distribution to frontline locations. As a member of a publishing team you can now see separate Drafts, Published, and Unpublished sections to easily see which task lists are at which stage of their lifecycle. We've also made it easier to see the impact of publishing tasks at a glance with an updated summary that displays the number of tasks and the number of recipient teams, so you can easily confirm that everything looks right before sending. Learn more

Government

These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

Manage meeting options
Organizers are now able to modify the user experience across desktop, mobile, and web by using the new Meeting Options to customize their meeting safety and security settings. Meeting Options can be accessed in the Teams meeting invitation details in Outlook and Teams Calendar. Available in GCC-High.

Improvements to audio permissions settings for attendees
Meeting presenters and organizers can now manage attendee audio permissions with greater flexibility. Attendees no longer must request to speak for the organizer or presenters to allow them to unmute, and presenters and organizers can prevent individual attendees from unmuting instead of all attendees at once. Available in GCC. Learn more

More labels in Planner
Labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks in Planner and we've increased the number of labels to help you get even more organized. You can now add up to 25 labels in all different colors to your tasks in Planner web, mobile, and in Microsoft Teams. Available in GCC, GCC-High and DoD. Available for GCC, GCC-High and DoD. Learn more

New way to update the Teams Rooms app
You can now use Teams meetings and calling functionality in your Teams Rooms on Windows. IT Admins can easily perform a manual update. Simply download and run an offline app update PowerShell script to your Teams Rooms devices. Follow the steps in this article to get started. Available in GCC-High.

Out of Office Setting
Let others know that you are not available by scheduling your Out of Office in Teams. During this time, your presence status changes to "Out of Office" and your status message is displayed when someone reaches out to you via chat. Additionally, your Outlook calendar and automatic replies are updated accordingly. Available for GCC.

Skype for Business Online retires July 31, 2021 – here’s what to expect

Microsoft_Teams_team — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 20:57:18 GMT

As we approach the retirement of Skype for Business Online, we want to take a moment to appreciate the efforts organizations are making to complete their transitions to Teams prior to July 31, 2021, as well as those who have already upgraded to Teams. Thank you! If you still have Skype for Business Online users, keep working your upgrade plan. Regardless of the technical and change management dynamics with your upgrade, you can accomplish so much over the next three months.

What to expect as Skype for Business Online retires?

Skype for Business Online will be fully functional through July 31, 2021 to allow customers time to transition users to Teams or to an instance of Skype for Business Server. Here are some other details you should know about the Skype for Business Online service retirement:

Services that integrate with Skype for Business Online will not be supported beyond the July 31, 2021 retirement. This includes support for third-party audio conferencing providers (ACP), Skype for Business Online Cloud Connector Edition (CCE), hybrid voice configurations, and Skype Meeting Broadcast.
Customers will not be able to move online users out of Teams Only mode after retirement.
Coexistence modes enable customers to operate Skype for Business Server/Teams side-by-side experiences until they are ready to move users to Teams Only.
Users can be moved directly from Skype for Business Server to Teams Only after configuring Skype for Business hybrid with Microsoft 365 or Office 365.

Microsoft-assisted upgrades to Teams

In the coming weeks, we’ll begin scheduling Microsoft-assisted upgrades to Teams for Skype for Business Online customers with cloud-only or hybrid deployments. Assisted upgrades help with last-mile technical steps of the transition to Teams. Customers will be notified through the Teams admin center and the Microsoft 365 Message Center, 90 days prior to the scheduled date of their assisted upgrade. Customers tracking to complete their transitions to Teams Only prior to their scheduled automated upgrade date are encouraged to do so for better control over the timing of their upgrade experience.

The duration of each customer's upgrade will vary by volume of users and characteristics of their deployment, but generally users within a tenant will be upgraded within 24 hours from the start of the upgrade. During this time, users will still be able to access Skype for Business Online. Once the upgrade has completed and users log out of Skype for Business Online, they will only be able to use Teams to initiate and receive messages and calls as well as to schedule and host meetings. These users will be able to join a Skype for Business meeting scheduled by a user on Skype for Business Server or in a federated organization.

When the assisted upgrade completes, the coexistence mode for upgraded users is set to Teams Only. Admins should review Teams Only mode considerations prior to upgrade. Learn more about Microsoft-assisted upgrades to Teams.

Teams upgrade resources

Whether you’re at the start of your upgrade journey or are wrapping up, these resources can help guide your organization through its transition to Teams:

Microsoft Teams admin documentation provides guidance for rolling out, managing, and preparing users for Teams.
Online upgrade guidance helps you prepare your technical environment and end-users for the upgrade to Teams.
Teams upgrade planning workshops take you through a proven framework for planning and implementing your upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams.
Microsoft Chalk Talks workshops teach best practices and practical guidance around some of the most popular and compelling scenarios in Teams.
FastTrack deployment assistance is available for eligible subscriptions.
Microsoft Partners can help you plan and execute your upgrade.

The retirement of Skype for Business Online and corresponding assisted upgrades do not affect the Skype consumer service, Skype for Business Server products and Skype for Business Online operated by 21Vianet (China Sovereign Clouds Instance).

Additional guidance for customers with hybrid configurations

In the coming weeks, we will be sharing more retirement guidance for Skype for Business customers with hybrid (server + online) configurations.

See you in Teams!

New Diagnostic: Missing Teams Meeting Recording

Corbin Meek — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 13:07:22 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

Our team has just released a new diagnostic, Teams Meeting Missing Recording. Thanks to for coding this one up!

With the ongoing shift of Teams Meeting Recording storage from Stream to OneDrive SharePoint, sometimes a Meeting Recording file can become misplaced. We discuss some known issues and troubleshooting options in the following Article: Issues with Meeting Recordings

This new Diagnostic can find missing Meeting Recordings in the event they are lost or misplaced. To access the Diagnostic in your M365 Admin Portal, type Diag: Missing Recording into the Need Help or New Service Request description box:

Notice that the Diagnostic requires a Meeting Join URL, one way to get that is from the Meeting details page in the Teams client. Find the Meeting Chat, then click on the three lines top right:

And then you can copy the link:

From there, you simply need the Date the meeting occurred. Note that we only keep Meeting Recording telemetry for 30 days, so if the meeting recording is older than 30 days, you'll need to try one of the manual methods in the troubleshooting article linked above.

Enter your meeting join URL and date in YYYY-MM-DD format:

And then click on Run Tests. In my case, here is the result:

And this indicates that my Meeting Recording was saved to OneDrive, and provides a link to our troubleshooting article with instructions on how to go find it in OneDrive. The Diagnostic can detect if the user's storage is still Stream as well, and those instructions (how to find the recording file in Stream) are there too. For this example, here's where I found my missing recording:

We hope this Diagnostic is helpful in situations where the Meeting Recording file can't be found after a meeting. Please give it a try and let us know how it went in the comments below.

As a reminder, all of our Microsoft Teams Diagnostics are listed in the following article: Self-help diagnostics for Microsoft Teams administrators

Thanks!
Microsoft Teams Support

Build and ship software better with GitHub and Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Millions of developers use GitHub daily to build, ship, and maintain their software – but software development isn’t performed in silos and require open communication and collaboration across teams. Microsoft Teams is one of the key tools that developers use for their collaboration needs, so it was important that the integration of our platforms provide a seamless, connected experience. Context switching is a drain on productivity and stifles the flow of work, which is why the GitHub integration in Teams is so important – as it gives you and your team full line of sight into your GitHub projects without having to leave Teams. Now, when you collaborate with your team, you can stay engaged in your channels and ideate, triage issues, and work together to move your projects forward.

GitHub has made tremendous updates refreshing the integration – with public preview last September and recently with general availability of the app last month. Many in the developer community have been looking forward to the updates in the new GitHub app, which they’ve experienced on other collaboration platforms, and so we’re excited to share some of new features and the existing capabilities you can experience today.

New support for personal app and scheduling reminders
Since the public preview launch of the GitHub app last September, we’ve made some great updates on a couple key areas. First, we’ve added support for the personal app experience and secondly, we’ve added capabilities to support scheduling reminders for pending pull requests.

Personal app experience
As part of personal app experience, you can now subscribe to your repositories and receive notifications for:

issues
pull requests
commits

All the commands available in your channel are now available on your personal app experience with the GitHub app.

Image showing subscription experience within the personal app view

Schedule reminders
You can now schedule reminders for pending pull requests. With this feature you can now get periodic reminders of pending pull requests as part of your channel or personal chat. Scheduled reminders ensure your teammates are unblocking your workflows by providing reviews on your pull request. This will have an impact on business metrics like time-to-release for features or bug fixes.

Image showing user setting up scheduled reminders within the GitHub Teams app

From your Teams channel, you can run the following command to configure a reminder for pending pull requests on your Organization or Repository:

@github schedule organization/repository

This will create reminder for weekdays at 9.30 AM. However, if you want to configure the reminder for a different day or time, you can achieve that by passing day and time with the below command:

@github schedule organization/repository <Day format> <Time format>

Learn more about channel reminders.

You can also configure personal reminders in your personal chats, as well, using the below command:

@github schedule organization

Stay notified on updates that matter to you through subscriptions
Subscriptions allow you to customize the notifications you receive from the GitHub app for pull request and issues. You can use filters to create subscriptions that are helpful for your projects, without the noise of non-relevant updates – and you can create these in channels or in the personal app.

Subscribing and Unsubscribing
You can subscribe to get notifications for pull requests and issues for an Organization or Repository's activity.

@github subscribe <organization>/<repository>

Image showing user subscribing to a specific organization and repository via GitHub app

To unsubscribe to notifications from a repository, use:

@github unsubscribe <organization>/<repository>

Customize notifications
You can customize your notifications by subscribing to activity that is relevant to your Teams channel and unsubscribing from activity that is less helpful to your project.

@github subscribe owner/repo [feature]

Learn more about subscription notifications on the GitHub app.

Use threading to synchronize comments between Teams and GitHub
Notifications for any pull request and issue are grouped under a parent card as replies. The parent card always shows the latest status of the pull request/issue along with other meta-data like description, assignees, reviewers, labels, and checks. Threading gives context and helps improve collaboration in the channel.

Image showing pull request card staying updated with latest comments and information

Make your conversations actionable
Stay in the flow of work by making the conversations you have with your teammates on GitHub actionable. You can use the app to create an issue, close or reopen an issue, or leave comments on issues and pull requests.

With the GitHub app, you can perform the following:

Create issue
Close an issue
Reopen and issue
Comment on issue
Comment on pull request

You can perform these actions directly from the notification card in the channel by clicking on the buttons available in the parent card.

Image of a GitHub pull request notification on a card and the user from Teams commenting

More to come!
We’re excited for you to use these new and existing features as you continue to build world-class software and services – and we’re equally excited to see the growth and evolution of the app in the future. If you haven’t already installed the GitHub app for Teams, you can easily do so today to get started.

Happy coding!

Your questions from the Microsoft Ignite Ask the Experts sessions about Microsoft Teams…answered!

Stephen Rose — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Last month many of you joined our Ask The Experts (ATE) sessions at Microsoft Ignite, specifically ATE-FS191 – Ask the Expert: Microsoft Teams Manageability and ATE-FS191-R1 – Ask the Expert: Microsoft Teams Security and Compliance. We promised that we would pull together the questions and answers and post them in a blog post, so here we are making good on that promise.

1. How easy is it to retrospectively apply data sensitivity labels at the Teams or channel level?

a. Once you get sensitivity labels enabled and set up to apply to Microsoft 365 groups/sites/teams, you'll be able to edit a team to apply a label published. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/compliance/sensitivity-labels-teams-groups-sites?view=o365-worldwide

2. Are shared private channels available to all tenants now?

a. Private channels have been around for a while, but shared channels are not yet available.

3. Are there any plans to allow real-time reporting out of the management solution? Right now, reports are delayed until, at the very least, the meeting or call is over.

a. We will introduce this capability to Private Preview in April 2021.

4. How can an admin retrieve Teams chats if a user leaves the company and/or does a forensic audit must be done?

a. You will need to use content search and eDiscovery investigation. Note that with E5 compliance license, you can put conversations together; with basic eDiscovery, you will get the single chat messages. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/ediscovery-investigation

5. Will there be a way to find which apps are being used by a team?

a. Yes, use the app usage reports by using a Graph call to enumerate apps installed per team. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/graph/api/team-list-installedapps?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http

6. Will the Teams client installer change from being profile-based to computer-based? Customers mentioned that they had shared devices in learning spaces that they want to update, so users don't have to wait or, in some cases, quit Teams and re-launch before class.

a. Yes, you can install per machine. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/teams-for-vdi

7. Will we ever get the ability to delete Teams chats? Customers have mentioned that chats are really cluttered right now without this function.

a. Yes, you can do this with Retention Policies at compliance.microsoft.com. You can age conversations that are greater than a specific number of days.

8. Does Microsoft have a recommended Teams naming taxonomy/naming convention?

a. No, best practice is to follow your organization’s guidelines/requirements and take advantage of custom dictionary/taxonomy controls like preventing names. My personal recommendation is always leave room for organizational growth/expansion when creating your taxonomy.

9. Is there a way to report on activity outside the 90 days? Customers have mentioned that extended unused Teams that need to be cleaned, but identifying them might be problematic?

a. You can use the Graph API for that purpose. It can access historical data up to a year.

10. Are there any good resources for managing Teams sprawl, guest users, and general Teams hygiene?

a. You can restrict the creation of Teams and put a gating process in front of it. You can get creative with Forms and Flows via Power Automate to have users submit requests and then the helpdesk can create the team.

11. Can you manage Teams membership via a domain security group?

a. Currently, you cannot manage Teams membership using an AD security group. The Office 365 Group membership drives Teams membership, and as of right now, you cannot add nested groups to an Office 365 Group.

12. When will real-time/live analytics be available for Teams Live Events and traditional Teams meetings? It is challenging right now as an admin to troubleshoot exec calls for townhall-type sessions.

a. This feature is coming in April 2021.

13. Could someone give a basic overview of the purpose of the Network Planner in the Teams Admin Center?

a. The Network Planner is meant to give you an idea of what the impact of Teams will be on your network. It allows you to define all your network subnets and user personas so that you can pre-determine the network impact of Teams.

14. Can you talk about the controls or policies for Teams Connect regarding adding external people to channels? How are the permissions different than that for external guests today?

a. Guest access uses guest accounts that are created in the source Azure AD hosting the guest access. Teams Connect, or shared channels, does not use this method; it works by allowing federated Teams users to have access to the shared channel. Expect to have more published on this in the coming weeks.

15. Is there a Microsoft recommended solution or app to install in Teams to manage user requests for creating new Teams?

a. There is no Microsoft recommended solution I'm aware of for this. However, approaches I have seen work well involve using PowerApps that have users submit their Team request and then have the back-end helpdesk review the request and approve/reject the request. You can create some pre-checks in the flow to see if the team already exists, for example.

16. With the coming enhancements to Teams meetings recordings around captioning/speech to text, will this be discoverable with core and/or advanced eDiscovery?

a. Yes, the plan after the Stream migration of the recordings to OneDrive and SharePoint will have this functionality to retain and search with eDiscovery.

17. I have not seen wherein Teams policy in Admin Centre changed to OneDrive from Stream, is it global or group based?

a. It has been rolled out globally to most tenants, and you can delay it through PowerShell. The change is done via PowerShell today, it can be set on meeting policy level, and if it is not available yet in your tenant, you can follow this guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/tmr-meeting-recording-change. It should, however, be default for all tenants.

18. We have a ton of distribution groups created on-prem and maintained with scripts. How can we use these existing groups to create and maintain Teams?

a. There are few steps you may need to consider for this: (1) Clean up the distribution groups; (2) Sync your on-prem AD with Azure AD; convert your distribution group to a Microsoft 365 group; create a team from the Microsoft 365 group. Keep in mind when you do so, the membership management will be within the converted Microsoft 365 Group after you upgrade the distribution list.

19. Will it be possible at some point to specify policies for a user group to block them completely from all external communication?

a. You can create an ExternalAccessPolicy and use New-CsBatchPolicyAssignmentOperation to assign it to multiple users at a time, based on a group in AAD regularly, though, it will not automatically add it to new users in the group.

20. We need to record all calls for our call center associates. Is there a way to make this based on group membership?

a. Compliant call recording is possible through third parties such as Verint and Numonix. I would reach out to them to check for this functionality. It should be possible in a direct routing configuration.

21. Is it possible to enable guest access per Team like you can in SharePoint, or is it all or nothing?

a. Yes, you can restrict guest access for certain Teams (Office 365 groups). The configuration is only performed via PowerShell. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/solutions/per-group-guest-access?view=o365-worldwide

22. Any plans to consolidate Guest and External entities for 1:1 chat (not switching organization and minimizing end-user confusion)? Also, group chat with External entities without having to switch organizations.

a. Guest access and External access will continue to function as they are, as they each have their own use cases. However, with the new Teams Connect, you will have channels shared outside of your tenant into an external user tenant.

23. How come policies take forever to roll out - up to days??

a. It can take time, usually 2 - 4 hours. I would recommend periodically logging out and clearing cache, and logging back in. If it persists for more than a day, I recommend raising a ticket to Microsoft support. That seems like a very long time.

24. Is it possible for end-users to create a team in a different domain than the default? We would want them to be able to pick the domain; for example, teams.company.com.

a. Yes! See: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/solutions/choose-domain-to-create-groups?view=o365-worldwide

25. Are there any licensing requirements to be able to add members of a group to a private team?

a. There are no specific license requirements.

26. Is there a way to list all applications in Teams and which are enabled or disabled?

a. Yes, in admin.teams.microsoft.com you can see all apps and enable/disable them.

27. Hello, I work at a school with children from 4 till 18 years old. In the last couple of weeks, we have some students who like to start big group chats and add a lot of (younger) students. In these chats, there is a lot of swearing and cursing. We want to protect our younger students from this, and I am wondering if there is an option that can block being added to a group chat or at least give them a choice of being added. I know it is possible to disable the chat for these users, but that has a lot of impact on their schoolwork. I know it is not a specific security question, but it is a safety question to protect our (younger) students, but this can be a security question too if there is a breached account.

a. Have a look at Communication Compliance: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/compliance/communication-compliance?view=o365-worldwide

28. I want to enforce MFA for all guest accounts to create secure Teams channels. Should the guest accounts have any Microsoft licenses to use MFA with their respective domain accounts?

a. You can use Conditional Access for this. The license model here is based on the licenses you have in your tenant.

29. SafeLinks are coming to Teams (which is good). Will the SafeLinks wrapper be visible to Teams participants? If so, some may read "protection.outlook.com" and assume the link to Microsoft.

a. SafeLinks act the same as they do in Outlook.

30. How can we ensure the coherence/governance of all the controls/labels we put in place? Any tool/method to use before diving into Teams configuration?

a. This is all controlled from the Compliance Center under Information Protection, where you can implement your labels and label policies.

31. Can we use the OCR example to check that sent pictures in Teams don’t contain privileged info?

a. You can use Advanced eDiscovery to check this.

32. Is it possible to prevent your users from joining Teams meetings hosted by external orgs? Currently, everyone can click on a Teams meeting link someone sent to them, and that will either load their Teams client, and they will join as authenticated or via browser as anonymous?

a. No, if the meeting or Live Event is available to "everyone".

33. How is end-to-end encryption 1:1 different compared to an average Teams meeting?

a. E2EE is encrypted same "key" from start to endpoint, with no interception. Teams standard is encryption in transit and at rest so customers can access content as needed.

34. Is there a possibility to invite external users within channels and manage permissions on a per folder basis within the channel so that R/RW is possible within a channel and subfolders?

a. You can use granular SharePoint permissions for this.

35. Who can follow up on GDPR requests from attendees of a meeting held a while ago and provide them information on what data has been collected from them?

a. You can use the Data Subject Request (DSR) case tool by the compliance administrator. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/compliance/regulatory/gdpr-manage-gdpr-data-subject-requests-with-the-dsr-case-tool

36. What levels of staff will be able to turn on E2E encryption? IT staff generally do not lose passwords.

a. IT will have full control over what users/user groups can opt into E2EE.

37. Can you use a retention policy to prevent team owners from deleting a team?

a. Not at this time, but a retention policy will ensure all the files are saved for compliance purposes. Be mindful that Teams retention policies must exist on their own, independent of other Teams workloads. So, you need to have EOL policy for 1:1 chats, Microsoft 365 groups for group chat, and SPO policy for files held in teams

38. Is there any way to stop anyone from sharing files in Teams? We have certain locations where they don't want to use it for file sharing.

a. Those policies are the ones set in OneDrive and SharePoint. You would need to adjust those there.

39. Is it possible having a person out of the company, out of my network become part of the Organizer Team in a Teams Live Event and so actively contribute?

a. Yes, that’s possible. Either as a Guest in your org, or they have an AAD account in their own org. There will also be improvements coming to this to make it easier.

Thank you again if you attended these sessions. We hope this recap helps you as you continue to support Teams for your customers and organizations.

For more information about all the exciting announcements around Microsoft Ignite, be sure to check out the recap episode on Inside Microsoft Teams. We have special guests Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott, and Brad Sams in this episode that you don’t want to miss out.

Streamline requests with new approval features in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 17:23:06 GMT

Getting an approval on your work items is an essential part of almost every workflow. The approval can be a written acknowledgement from your manager, a formal authorization from a diverse group of stakeholders, or an official signature from a customer. Regardless of the type of approval needed, it can be hard to track and manage the requests when many systems and people are involved and often leads to unnecessary delays.

Approvals in Microsoft Teams enables everyone, from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees, to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from Teams.

We’ve been listening to your feedback and have added new capabilities to streamline your approval request and get faster results.

Create an approval request with an electronic signature
There may be times when you need a more formal attestation and require the approvers’ signatures. Now, key partners like Adobe Sign, DocuSign and other 3rd party providers allow you to create an electronic signature approval natively within the Approval app. With this new feature, approvers can add their signature without leaving Teams, enabling an efficient and faster approval process. Once the approval process is completed, the information is stored in Teams, and you can easily access the approval record and view the eSignatures.

To request the approver’s eSignature, choose eSign as your request type. Then choose your electronic signature provider, select the file that needs to be signed, and include additional details needed. Once submitted, internal signers are sent a notification via Teams and an email asking for their signature. If the signer is external to the organization, they will be notified with an email, in which they can easily review the details and sign. Approvals will keep track of the entire audit trail right in context of Teams, so you are able to track who already signed the approval and when it was signed. This feature will start rolling out at the end of April.

Create an approval template
To streamline workflows, new out of the box templates provide a repeatable structure for common approvals like filling out expense reports or requesting overtime. Admins and team owners can use these as is, customize, or create new templates for their organization and teams.

Teams admins and teams owners can also create approval templates by clicking on template management in the overflow menu and following the instructions. Enter the name of your template, select the approvers, add in the necessary form fields and the workflow settings. When done, hit publish.

Once you create your first organizational template, it will create a new admin team. From there, you can add additional admins that can manage the organizational templates, right from the Approvals App.

This feature will be rolling out in April.

Create an approval request with templates
Leverage the templates your admin or team owner enabled for you and make it easier to create an approval request. Use the structured form to input all the necessary information and eliminate back and forth on missing data for a faster approval.

New attachment capabilities
Approval hub enables you to attach files directly from OneDrive and SharePoint, as well as attach a generic link for content that is hosted outside of Microsoft 365. This will ensure your approval is connected to the latest version of the file, reflecting any changes. This feature is available now.

Markdown support
We are also adding full Markdown support in both adaptive cards and the detail’s view, so you can ensure all your approvals are formatted correctly for all your approval processes. This feature is available now.

Approve or reject an approval request inline
Approvals role based adaptive cards enable you to quickly respond to an approval request right from within the chat or channel without having to view the details. If you do not have permission to respond to the request, you will not see the "Approve" or "Reject" buttons on the card. This feature is available now.

Resources
Getting your request approved just got easier with the new features coming to approvals in Microsoft Teams. Learn more and get the most out of approvals in Microsoft Teams using these resources:

New frontline worker enhancements in Teams to communicate, digitize processes and stay secure

Microsoft_Teams_team — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 18:00:00 GMT

Today, we continue to strike a balance between many of our current conditions, where most frontline workers are strained and socially distant, and tomorrow, where there is the possibility of a safe return to the more traditional ways of working. As we continue supporting frontline workers and organizations in this digital transformation balance, we are releasing new enhancements for frontline workers and corporate teams to continue to communicate more effectively, digitize processes and make data and workers more secure no matter the work conditions.

Richer communication and community
Coming soon, Teams for RealWear headsets will make it easier for workers to show what they see - with voice commands for using the device flashlight and adjusting zoom levels with their outgoing video. Learn more about RealWear and Teams here.

Coming soon: RealWear Camera Zoom & Flashlight

For organizations with thousands of employees scattered across different locations, internal communications can grow quite complex. Connect your entire workforce to drive deeper connection and insights across your organization while keeping everyone informed. Now you can share important community announcements for all members of your community and notify them to make sure they see the message, even if it’s outside of their preferred notification settings, with Yammer essential announcements.

Now Available: Yammer Essential Announcements

Manage and moderate content shared with your entire organization faster with Yammer community insights. These key metrics help admins and corporate teams measure activity, understand engagement, and find valuable insights about how frontline workers are engaging as a community.

Available now: Community insights

Dig deeper and see which conversations and content performs the best. Conversation insights provide real-time visibility into impressions, total views, click-through rate, and a break-down of reactions.

Coming soon: Conversation insights

Improve your live events viewership by monitoring attendance, to understand which audience has the greatest viewership, and see where those views are coming from with live events insights in Yammer. All geared to help you optimize your current and future events with your frontline workforce and entire organization.

Now available: Live event insights

Finally, improve the sense of community for your frontline workers with new suggested communities on the right rail of the Yammer homepage that will suggest relevant communities for frontline workers to discover and join.

Now Available: Yammer Suggested Communities

Learn more about all the new features coming to Yammer here.

Automated business workflows
As work conditions continue to fluctuate, it has become increasingly important to make sure repeatable but still critical processes are automated and have the right systems and owners connected to the workflow.

New APIs for Time Clock will notify your organization’s Time & Attendance system and determine if the clock in/out is valid and prevent it if it is not. This helps organizations create rules for how early or late someone can clock-in/out without requiring manager approval. It can also enable new business workflows around clocking in/out such a health screening survey that must be completed before clocking-in for the day. All these clock-ins will be automatically shared to your existing payroll system to provide even more visibility and alignment. Learn more about frontline relevant APIs here.

Now available: Time Clock APIs

With the schedule owner permission setting on TeamsShiftsPolicy, the organization can identify which users should be able to modify a Shifts schedule while still protecting the ownership of Teams that they are members of. It allows users who aren’t the owner of a Team to be able to edit and manage Shift schedules, approve swaps and authorize time off requests. This enables users such as managers and supervisors to have schedule ownership without having to be the owners of the entire Teams, reducing instances of accidentally deleting or modifying the Team without realizing the effects it has on other users. Learn more about how to set up Shifts here.
Now available: schedule owner permissions

Approvals are a critical component of how frontline workers get the right permissions for anything from delivering fast customer service to making speedy repair decisions on the factory floor. To streamline workflows, new Approvals templates provide a repeatable structure for common approvals such as when employees are reporting leave, filling out expense reports or requesting overtime. Admins and Team owners can use these as is, customize, or create new templates for their organization and teams.

Now available: Approvals templates

Often frontline processes need more formal attestation and require the approvers’ signatures in the process. Now, key partners like Adobe Sign, DocuSign, and other 3rd party providers allow teams to create an electronic signature approval natively within the Approvals app. With this new feature, approvers can add their e-signature without leaving Teams, enabling an efficient and faster approval process. Once the approval process is completed, the information is stored in Teams, and you can easily access the approval record and view the eSignatures.

Now available: Approvals with electronic signature

Finally, we have enhanced our task publishing feature in Tasks in Teams so operations and corporate teams can more clearly manage their Task lists and drive alignment with frontline locations. A member of a publishing team can now see separate Drafts, Published, and Unpublished sections to easily see which task lists are at which stage of their lifecycle. We've also made it easier to see the impact of publishing tasks at a glance. Teams will see an updated summary that prominently displays the number of tasks and the number of recipient teams, so they can easily confirm that everything looks right. Learn more about task publishing here.

Now available: Publish list confirmation screen summary & unpublished lists section in task publishing

More secure with simple management

Like frontline workers day-to-day job, we know their roles, tasks and devices can vary. Whether your organization empowers workers to bring their own devices or provides shared devices, we have you covered with secure and simple tools to make sure the experience is seamless.

You can now provision shared devices at scale with Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager now a part of a unified management platform known as Microsoft Endpoint Manager. IT admins can choose to enroll their organization’s Android Enterprise (AE) dedicated devices into Microsoft Intune with Azure AD shared mode automatically configured, making it easier to set up and customize how frontline workers use shared devices.

Now Available: Identity – Provisioning Shared Devices at Scale

IT admins can now enforce Zero Trust security policies such as device-based Conditional Access, using device compliance to secure corporate data for shift-based frontline users signing in and out of apps on shared devices. These policies enable organizations to secure their frontline workers and organizational data from identity risk with powerful, adaptive risk detection.

Now Available: Identity – Device Based Conditional Access for Shift Workers

Now, IT admins can now use Managed Home Screen to create a customized sign-in and sign-out experience across all apps, including Microsoft Teams, that participate with shared device sign-out. Improve user experience by customizing a single screen for frontline users to easily sign-in, configure a session PIN for the duration of the shift, and configure timers for automatic sign-out for added security during shift handovers. To see the full list of configurations available with Managed Home Screen, see the documentation.

Now Available Identity – Customized Sign-in Experience with Microsoft Managed Home Screen

Frontline workers are the backbone of the world’s economy, and in today’s rapidly evolving landscape, yesterday’s tools are often not enough to get today’s job done. Don’t wait for the future with yesterday’s tools, innovate today with Microsoft Teams and bring all the tools your entire workforce needs into one platform.

Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android | April 2021 Updates

SandhyaRao — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 16:36:25 GMT

We are thrilled to announce a number of enhancements that are now generally available on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. From an updated calendar view to a new touch console experience, users now have more visibility of meetings and easier access to them on these devices.

A New Calendar on the Home Screen
In this release we are bringing a more robust calendar experience to the front of the room so you can see and join not only the current meeting but also future meetings as well. Also, all the familiar controls you need have moved alongside the calendar for a sleek, modern look.

Introducing A New Touch Console Experience
Formerly, the touch console experience mimicked a physical remote, where users had to use directional keys to navigate the UI. With this new experience on the touch console, users can directly interact with the console UI, similar to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. Check with your manufacturer to see if your device supports this new, updated touch console experience.

The touch console includes calendar functionality where you can view your current and upcoming meetings. In addition, it also features the most important meeting and calling functionality.

Once you join a meeting, you will be able to take advantage of call functionality, toggle between gallery views, see hands that are raised, and use inclusive features such as pinning and turning on live captions.

Touch console is an optional peripheral and Teams Rooms on Android will continue functioning without the console. However, once touch console is paired, front-of-room controls will be hidden, and device operation will be available from the touch console.

More Enhancements When Using Microsoft Teams Rooms in Personal Mode
Some users may want to bring this experience to their home office to take Teams calls and meetings on a large, dedicated screen. If you are logged into a Teams Rooms on Android with a personal account, we have added convenient features that help you manage your meetings better.

You can blur your background or change it entirely. The background will persist across meetings to make things easier. This option is available through the ellipsis in the menu bar.

Recordings can be an important way to keep those who couldn’t make it to the meeting in the loop. We are introducing an ability to start and stop recordings directly from your Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. As in all other Teams applications, you can find the “Start recording” button in the … menu.

For now, starting and stopping recording is only supported for personal accounts. Shared account (aka resource account) support is coming soon.

Whiteboard is a great collaboration tool. Previously, users could use Microsoft whiteboard as part of a Teams meetings, but they could not initiate a whiteboarding session. We are introducing the ability to start a whiteboarding session directly from your device. You can find “Share whiteboard” button in the … menu.

For now, sharing the whiteboard is only supported for personal accounts. Shared account (aka resource account) support is coming soon.

Still getting started on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android? Check our Get Started guide here:
Get started with Teams Rooms on Android - Office Support

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | February and March 2021

Microsoft_Teams_team — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 14:47:46 GMT

It’s been a busy, productive couple of months. We announced a lot of exciting product updates and offerings at Ignite earlier this month, and many of these are now generally available.

For meetings you can now use PowerPoint Live and Live Reactions. Similarly for webinars and larger meetings, you can now host 20,000-person view-only broadcasts and download attendee reports after the webinar. When you are using a cellular connection and want to limit the used bandwidth, you can now use the low data calling mode. And if you happen to be mobile with spotty reception, you can still access your file offline. There are several updates to the Approvals app that lets you respond inline, as well as markdown and seamlessly attach files inside and outside of Microsoft 365 to your approvals. And to better manage your Android Teams Rooms devices you can now use remote device provisioning.

You can read about all Teams announcements during Ignite in the What's New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2021.

However, these aren’t the only new features and capabilities to launch in February and March. In fact, there’s a lot. So, grab a cup of something and let’s see what’s new in:

Meetings and webinars
Calling
Devices
Chat and Collaboration
Power Platform and custom development
Management
Security, compliance, and privacy
Government

Meetings and webinars

Live transcription with speaker attribution
Live transcription allows you to follow and review conversations (in English-US) alongside the meeting video or audio in real time. This promotes inclusivity for participants who have hearing disabilities or different levels of language proficiency. Attendees who joined late, or missed the meeting, can easily catch up by reading what was discussed and searching the transcript by speaker. Tenant admins have to turn on the Allow transcription policy to enable this feature. Learn more

Meeting recap
Meeting recap helps teams stay on track and keep their work moving forward after the meeting is over. It includes meeting recording, transcript, chat, attached files and more. The recap is shared with participants in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab. Those who missed the meeting, joined late, or want to revisit what was discussed, can play the recording, or review the transcripts respectively.

Meet Now in Outlook client for Windows
You can now start an instant Teams meeting from the Calendar tab in Outlook for Windows by clicking Meet Now. To enable this feature, tenant admins just have to set the Allow Private Meet Now policy option to True in the admin console.

Get a Meet Now meeting link from the Calendar
Users can now copy a Meet Now meeting link from the Calendar and share it out with others without starting the meeting. If you are in an email, chat, or channel conversation and agreed to meet at a certain time, this is an easy way to copy a meeting link and paste it into the conversation.

Masking PSTN participant phone numbers
For customers who have Audio Conferencing enabled for their Teams meetings, their tenant administrators now have the ability to define how their participants' phone numbers appear in the roster view for meetings scheduled within their organization. The options include masked to external users, masked for everyone, or off (visible to everyone). This provides flexibility in securing PSTN participants’ phone numbers. This feature is currently available through PowerShell cmdlet. Learn more

New bypass lobby option
The Teams meeting policy has a setting that allows certain groups of users to bypass the meeting lobby and join the meeting directly. This month’s update includes two additional options: “People in my organization” (which excludes guests) and “People in my organization, trusted organizations, and guests.” This provides another level of security and flexibility to Teams users.

Outgoing participant video in meetings in Safari browser
Outgoing video in web meetings is now available to Safari users. Simply click the camera icon to start a sharing your video in the meeting. This requires Safari 14 or higher on MacOS BigSur.

Touch Bar meetings controls on Mac
MacBooks with Touch Bars now have Teams Meeting controls that quickly allow users to access controls without clicking into the window. Users can open the ‘view participants’ panel, open meeting chat, use raise hand, enable video, mute/unmute, open shared tray, and leave the meeting from one place.

Dynamic meeting experiences on Android
New meeting experiences on Android devices enables participants to view content, speakers, and attendees all on one screen. Attendees are now able to see up to 20 participants on mobile devices and up to 30 participants on tablets. In addition, attendees are able to view shared content and a spotlighted participant simultaneously, and no longer have to choose between content being presented or pinned speakers. Already available on iOS.

Live Event presenter for iPad

Sales teams, executives, and other iPad users now have the ability to present live in Teams Live Events. Just open the Teams for iPad app, join the Live Event as Presenter and broadcast your video or screen share to your audience. Learn more.

CVI support for Teams Live Events
Support to join Teams Live Events on non-native Teams devices via Cloud Video Interop (CVI) is now available. Contact your CVI provider to get started! Learn more.

Teams Live Event GoLocal Data Center Support
We are now enabling local data centers for Teams Live Events in the following countries: France, Germany, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates. Any user with the eligible SKU and the appropriate IT admin policy is able to schedule a live event.

Calling
Voice-enabled channels
Voice-enabled channels allow connecting a call queue to a channel in Microsoft Teams. Users can collaborate and share information within the channel while taking calls in the queue. This feature is ideal for scenarios such an IT help desk or HR hotline. IT admins can quickly connect call queues to specific channels, and team owners can manage the settings. Learn more

Survivable Branch Appliance
To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows users to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a network outage. During an outage, the Teams client switches to the SBA automatically and ongoing calls continue without interruptions and no user action is required. Once the Teams client identifies that network connectivity has been restored, normal call functionality is resumed, and any call data records are uploaded to the cloud. Organizations can now take advantage of Survivable Branch Appliance capabilities by following the step-by-step configuration guidance provided by their SBC vendor. Learn more

Devices
We've have newly certified devices for Microsoft Teams this month from EPOS and Poly.

EPOS ADAPT 100 Series
Headsets from EPOS help meet the need for increased collaboration and seamless user workflows as they transition from tasks to meetings. The series encompasses many variants that are optimized for unified communications. Using the Teams button, you can easily join your Teams meetings and calls and their easy-to-use plug-and-play functionality makes getting started simple.

Poly Trio C60
The Poly Trio C60 is now certified for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows as USB audio peripheral. Previously certified as a Teams IP conference phone, the Poly Trio C60 can now be configured for use with a Teams Room system, such as Poly G85-T. The Trio C60 supports Poly signature audio innovation such as distraction-free NoiseBlock AI and rich 22kHz sound.

Poly Savi 7300 Office
The Savi 7300 Office Series is the ultra-secure DECT™ wireless headset perfect for anywhere sensitive conversations happen. The series is designed to meet the highest-level DECT™ security Step C, with military-grade 256-bit AES encryption for maximum security. Combined with Poly Acoustic Fence technology and Microsoft Teams Open Office spec, conversations always stay clear, private and protected. A dedicated Teams button provides a seamless Teams experience.

Poly Studio P15
The Poly Studio P15 is a personal USB video bar that gives you everything you need to look and sound your best on video calls in one sleek device. High performance 4K image sensors and automatic camera framingallow you to be seen without staying glued to your chair. A powerful speaker and microphone array deliver rich, clear audio, while NoiseBlockAI and Acoustic Fence technology keep out distracting sounds.

Chat and Collaboration
Android On-Demand Chat Translation
Inline message translation helps ensure that every worker in the team has a voice and facilitate global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.

Additional settings for multiple Accounts and Organizations
You can now in the Teams desktop client add a personal account, along with one work/school account, change your profile picture, and switch between accounts and orgs through Settings.

250 GB file size support in Microsoft teams
We have now increased the upload file size limit for Microsoft Teams from 100 GB to 250 GB. This also applies to all other Microsoft 365, services including SharePoint and OneDrive. You are now able to easily share large files like a 3D model of a new building, a client commercial shot in 8K video, a large dataset for a vaccine trial or research projects or large videos for educational projects. Learn more

Viva Connections on Teams desktop
Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern employee experience. It is personalized and appears in the apps and devices your employees already use every day, such as Microsoft Teams. Viva Connections gives people a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.

Learn how you can add Viva Connections to your Teams desktop.

Balance productivity and wellbeing with Microsoft Viva Insights
Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized insights and actionable recommendations that help everyone in an organization thrive. This new app - discoverable directly in the Teams app bar by selecting the ellipsis (…) - makes it seamless for users with Exchange Online mailboxes to strengthen relationships with key people, follow up on to-dos, and protect focus time to work uninterrupted. For Workplace Analytics customers, manager and leader insights provide visibility into the impact of work patterns on people and the business and can help identify where a change in team and organizational norms could improve wellbeing and business outcomes. Personal insights are visible only to the individual, and for manager and leader insights, customers can rely on safeguards like de-identification, aggregation, and differential privacy by default. Learn more

PowerShell Support for team templates
Admins can now manage team templates at scale with templates cmdlets in PowerShell. With this new set of templates cmdlets, admins are able to get a list of all available templates within their tenant, get details of a particular template, and create, edit, and delete a team template.

Manage team templates with template policies
Admins can now choose which team templates are shown to the end user. In the Teams Admin Center, admins can create teams template policies and designate which team templates to hide or show. Once the policy was created, assign users to it so that each user sees only the team templates tailored to their role.

New file sharing experience
We have streamlined file sharing in Microsoft Teams. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation. Learn more

Add Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site
We are making it even easier to bring SharePoint content into Teams, in the same motion of adding Microsoft Teams to your team site, aka #teamify. As you connect SharePoint to Teams, you choose what lists, libraries, and pages you want to bring into Teams as tabs in the new, default General channel. Learn more

Include up to 10,000 users in an org-wide team
You can now create an org-wide team to promote collaboration and communications across the entire organization. Administrators who manage tenants that have less than or equal to 10,000 members can now create an org-wide team, which automatically syncs all the tenant’s members with the team. Learn more

25,000 person teams
Team membership limit is increasing to 25,000 per individual team. With millions of employees working remotely or in hybrid environments, it’s more important than ever for employees to feel connected. Teams makes it easier to collaborate with others, chat, meet virtually, and integrate your business solutions, all in a single platform. The increased member limit enables you to easily communicate and collaborate with larger size teams.

Out of Office
Let others know that you are not available by scheduling an Out of Office message in Teams. This helps set expectations with your colleagues, letting them know that you won’t be able to respond during this time and allows you to take the time off. During this time, your presence status is changed to "Out of Office" and your status message is displayed when someone reaches out to you via chat. Additionally, your Outlook calendar and automatic replies are updated accordingly.

History Menu
The History Menu for Teams desktop clients displays your recently visited locations when hovering over the backward and forward navigation options. Using the menu you can quickly jump back to previous locations, making it much easier to quickly get back to nested locations like tabs or documents. The menu is also accessible via keyboard shortcut. Learn more

Queue sent messages when offline
When attempting to send messages while offline, Teams queues messages and send these once a network connection is re-established. This help ensure that your messages get to your recipients. If the message is in an unsent state for more than 24 hours, the message fails, and the user is prompted to resend or delete the message.

More labels in Microsoft Planner
Labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks in Planner and we've increased the number of labels to help you get even more organized. You can now add up to 25 labels in all different colors to your tasks in Planner in Microsoft Teams and Planner across web and mobile. Learn more

Power Platform and custom development
New mobile device capabilities APIs – QR/Barcode Scanner and Location APIs
We are excited to share new device capabilities – location and QR/Barcode scanner – that you can now utilize to light up new and compelling scenarios. These high-value experiences come out-of-box in the Teams Client JavaScript SDK and can be leveraged with minimal effort, reducing the barrier to app development. Learn more

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) version 1.12 for even more flexible and comprehensive extensibility options for both Microsoft Teams and SharePoint
With the release of SPFx version 1.12, we are making it even easier to build Microsoft Teams extensibility with automatic hosting of your UX layer and we enable you to combine the SharePoint Framework pieces together with the other Microsoft Teams extensibility options. Learn more

Management
Restricting Windows and Mac managed device sign-in to specific tenants
You are now able to restrict Teams sign-in for Windows and Mac managed devices to ensure that employees cannot sign-in to another organization's tenant using the other tenant's credentials from the device they are authorized to use for work. This policy can also be used to configure access to personal accounts.

Manage Teams displays in Team Admin Center
We are adding one more device category, the Teams Display, to the device portfolio that can be now managed within Teams Admin Center. This allows IT admins to simplify, customize, and automate Teams panel devices as well.

Simple Periodic review for guest users
We have added scheduled access reviews for guests across all Teams and Groups by default. The system automatically schedules periodic guest access reviews across Teams, delivering better identity security hygiene.

Assign policy package to a group
We have added the ability to assign policy packages to groups. Admins can now can easily assign a policy package to a group such as an entire retail workforce. This helps making your work more efficient in a simple friendly step. Learn more

Unifying the experiences of creating teams
We have aligned the experience of creating a team via the Teams Admin Center to the experience of creating a team in the Teams client, both on the desktop and web, to provide a unified experience when a team is added, regardless of interface.

Updated Teams table of content on docs.microsoft.com
To make it easy for our IT pro audience to find the right content at the right time we have launched an updated landing page for Teams on docs.microsoft.com. We have made it easier to find our MSLearn content and have reorganized the lifecycle content. Finally, we have dedicated content for our government and industry customers. Learn more

Security, compliance, and privacy
Microsoft Information Protection: changes in display of sensitivity labels for Teams
For Teams with hierarchical sensitivity labels applied, the channel headers only displays the parent label instead of showing the child label. For example, with a parent sensitivity label such as Confidential and a child sensitivity label of Finance, Teams only shows "Confidential" in the channel header.

Bounty Awards for Teams Desktop Client Security Research
We are excited to expand our partnership with the research community and introduce bounty awards for Teams desktop client security research under the new Microsoft Applications Bounty Program. The Teams desktop client is the first in-scope application under the new Apps Bounty Program and you can learn more about the Bounty Awards for Teams Desktop Client here.

Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

PowerPoint File Sharing
PowerPoint File Sharing allows you to share a PowerPoint file within a Teams Meeting without having to use Desktop or Window sharing. Available in DOD.

Multi-Window Meetings and Calling experiences
Multi-window experiences are coming to Teams meetings and calling. Users will have the ability to pop out meetings and calling into separate windows to help them optimize their workflow. These experiences can be turned on directly within Teams for PC and Mac clients. Available in GCC-High and DOD as opt-in.

Add a shared calendar to a Teams channel
Create and share a calendar with members of a specific channel. When a channel meeting is created, Teams automatically creates a new post in the channel’s activity feed. Users, who have notifications turned off, will see the event only when they open the channel’s calendar. Once a channel event is posted, you can add it to your personal calendar. This feature provides all members within the channel, except guest users, visibility to upcoming events. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more

Virtual Breakout Rooms
Breakout rooms allows meeting organizers to divide the meeting into smaller groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions. A breakout room can be created in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, allowing greater flexibility on how you want to meet. Organizers can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. Any files from the breakout rooms can be shared in the main meeting and is available afterwards in the meeting chat. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more

Touch Bar Meetings Controls for Mac
MacBooks with Touch Bars now have Teams Meeting controls that quickly allow users to access controls without clicking into the window. Users can open the view participants panel, open meeting chat, use raise hands, enable video, mute/unmute, open shared tray, and leave the meeting from one place. Available in GCC, GCC-High, and DOD.

Live Reactions in Microsoft Teams meetings
All attendees can now use emojis to react during a meeting. These reactions help promote inclusivity in meetings and keep things upbeat and interactive. Available in GCC. Learn more

Get a Meet Now meeting link from the Calendar
Users can now copy a meeting link from the Calendar tab and share it out with others without starting the meeting. If you are in an email, chat, or channel conversation and agreed to meet at a certain time, this is an easy way to copy a meeting link and paste it into the conversation. Available in GCC.

Enable tenant administrators to configure masking of PSTN participant phone numbers
If a customer has Audio Conferencing enabled for their Teams meetings, their tenant administrators now have the ability to define how their Audio Conferencing participants' phone numbers appear in the roster view for meetings scheduled within their organization. The options include masked to external users, masked for everyone, or off (visible to everyone). This provides flexibility in securing PSTN participants’ phone numbers. This feature is only available through PowerShell cmdlet at this time. Available in GCC. Learn more

Live Event Presenter for iPad
Live Event Presenters can now join and share content from their iPad. Select ‘Join as presenter’ to start broadcasting content to your audience. Available in GCC. Learn more

Set Presence Status duration for Government clouds
Manage your availability with the new status duration option in the presence menu allows users to set a certain status for a specific period of time. For example, they will be able to set their status settings to “Do not disturb” for 30 minutes, one hour, two hours, or the entire day or whole week. Learn more

Offline Presence Status for Government clouds
You can now change your presence to appear offline, signaling to colleagues that you are not available, while having a full access to Teams. The Offline presence status comes in handy for people who want to access Microsoft Teams outside of working hours and users who simply want to focus on their work. Learn more

Location picker support for security groups and distribution lists
Data loss prevention (DLP) for Microsoft Teams will now support security groups and distribution lists as part of the Teams location picker, enabling more granular control of DLP policy scope (i.e. to include/exclude particular departments, business units, geo-specific security groups, etc.). Available in GCC.

Data loss prevention for Microsoft Teams
Data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities in Microsoft 365 government clouds will be extended to include Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages, including private channel messages. If your organization has DLP, you can now define policies that prevent people from sharing sensitive information in a Microsoft Teams channel or chat session. Avaliable in GCC-High.

Channel notification settings updates
Manage your notification settings to get only the notifications you want, and better manage your time. Through the teams and channels list or from the channel header, the users can quickly manage their notification settings by the means of a new fly-out design. Users can turn on all activity on or off with a single click or diving deep into custom to set their preferred permutations. Available in GCC.

Polls in Teams Meetings
Forms polls for Teams meetings provides an easily discoverable and seamless experience that will help you conduct more engaging and productive meetings. With Forms polls, meeting presenters can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls before, during, and after meetings, respectively, all from one place under a tab in the Teams meeting. Avaliable in GCC.

Share from Microsoft Teams to Outlook
Sometimes not all your audience is in Teams. Leverage the information discussed over Teams messages and continue the conversation, without losing context, in email. Send a copy of a Teams chat message or an entire channel conversation into Outlook. The message will include rich text support. Avaliable in GCC.

Meeting recordings saved to OneDrive and SharePoint
Ability to save Microsoft Teams meeting recordings to OneDrive and SharePoint for improved sharing capabilities, basic governance, automatic retention labels, go local, bring your own keys and, more that comes from recording video files and storing them in SharePoint and OneDrive. Avaliable in GCC, GCC-High and DoD.

Walkie Talkie
Walkie Talkie, a push-to-talk experience that enables clear and secure voice communication over the cloud, enables teams to communicate instantly and always stay on the same page. This native built-in app in Teams turns employee or company-owned Android smartphones and tablets into a walkie-talkie, reducing the number of devices employees must carry and lowering costs for IT. Available in GCC.

Simplified Global Notification Settings
Government users can now configure and customize their notification settings through a newly designed notification settings section. Available in GCC.

Follow or Mute Conversations
This feature will empower users to have finer controls at a conversation thread level within a channel. Available in GCC.

Low data mode
Whether you want to preserve data or are just in a location with a poor or limited network connection, sometimes it’s helpful to limit the amount of data you’re using during a video call. A new low data mode is now available, allowing users to cap the amount of data that will be used during Teams video calls as well as establish different settings based on network availability so that the setting can be turned on always, or only while on cellular networks. Available in GCC, GCC-High, and DOD.

Reporting and analytics in the Teams Admin Center for GCCH
The reporting and analytic section in the Teams Admin Center was added in the left navigation bar, to enable them generating Teams usage reports. Available in GCC-High.

Microsoft Ignite wrap-up on Inside Microsoft Teams

Stephen Rose — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Inside Microsoft Teams is a live Microsoft Teams webcast series for IT professionals hosted by Stephen Rose. Season 3 is focused on voice of the IT Pro, as we are doing shows that focus on real world customers like Lego, Envision Technologies, and more, to discuss the tips, tricks, and lessons learned on how they deployed, managed, and secured Microsoft Teams. In addition, viewers will get to see the latest innovations for Teams rooms and devices.

Microsoft Ignite Wrap-Up with Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott and Brad Sams (aired March 9, 2021)

Our most recent episode, “Microsoft Ignite Wrap-Up” featured industry experts: Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott, and Brad Sams. We discussed all the exciting announcements from Microsoft Ignite around Teams and Teams Platform! We dove into all the new capabilities that will make it easier to collaborate, stay connected, and build solutions in Teams.

In case you missed it, you can watch the episode here.

Below are highlighted enhancements within Teams that we discussed in our episode.

Chat and collaboration – Teams Connect makes it much easier to share channels with anyone, internal, and external (if they have an Azure AD account). This feature helps improve cross-organizational collaboration. Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 now allow users to chat and share documents and manage meetings and webinars without leaving the Dynamics 365 workspace.
Meetings – Microsoft is launching Dynamic View, View Switcher, Live Reactions, Presenter mode, and PowerPoint Live in Teams to help presenters feel confident and comfortable presenting during a meeting. These new features also allow meeting attendees to interact with the presentation by expressing live reactions and quick responses to messages.
Virtual events and webinars – Teams now allows you to set up and run webinars just as efficiently as running a meeting. You can have up to 1,000 attendees and produce custom attendee registration and post-event attendee reports. Teams has also included moderation controls like disabling chat, audio, and video. If your webinar grows to over 1,000 attendees, Teams seamlessly scales to accommodate a 10,000-person view. Lastly, Teams and Dynamics 365 can collaborate to deliver any robust integrated marketing campaign capabilities to follow-up with webinar attendees.
Security, compliance, and privacy – With all the new capabilities within Teams, Microsoft provides features to enable a secure environment to collaborate. Teams will support end-to-end encryption for online conversations. There is also further support for multi-geo, which will help customers meet data residency requirements.

In case you missed some of the Microsoft Teams announcements, here are some of the key resources to check out to get you up to speed:

Be sure to tune in for new episodes of Inside Microsoft Teams or watch the latest episodes on-demand here: aka.ms/InsideMSTeams.

We’ll continue to post recap blogs after each episode to stay up to date with all the exciting features of Teams and easily access the resources shared during the episode.

Stephen
For more information on Stephen or feel free to reach out here.

What’s new for Teams phones | March 2021

Microsoft_Teams_team — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 18:38:22 GMT

In our first Teams phone update of the year, we bring features to make getting started with phones certified for Teams easier, improving the in meeting experience, and other improvements which help users and IT stay connected.

Remote provisioning and Sign in from Teams Admin Center
We are excited to bring a feature customers have been frequently requesting-the ability for IT admins to deploy a device without needing to be physically present in the room. Four short steps allow a phone to light up simply from the Teams admin center. Please see this article in docs for more details on how to activate this feature.

User Sign-In Simplified
Devices will now show a device code when turned on; IT admins or end users can enter this code into a browser on their PCs or smartphones to sign into the phone. If the user wants to sign in without using the code, they can do so as well by entering their username and password onto the phone itself.

Multi-cloud sign-in support
If you are using a specialized cloud, for example the government cloud, we are now able to support sign-in options available to that tenant. Please go to settings within the sign in page to see what is available in the cloud which hosts you.

New meeting stage with docked call controls and reactions
A new option will allow for the bottom bar which hosts the mute/unmute feature, video on/off control, and toggles between Gallery and TogetherMode, to remain persistent on the user’s screen. This way users do not need to tap once to activate the menu and then tap again their desired option. With this simplicity, users can stay in the flow of their collaboration and reduce distractions. Additionally, we’ve made it easier to get to reactions so participants can express non-verbal sentiment.

Transfer call to work voicemail
If a user needs to convey a voice message to another user promptly, we have now installed the capability to drop into work voicemail without needing to ring the far-end user. Consider needing to give a colleague an update on a meeting held earlier in the day. Simply select the “work voicemail” option while transferring the call to get to their voice mailbox and deliver the message.

LLDP for E911 Updates
LLDP-MED (Link Layer Discovery Protocol – Media Endpoint Discovery) is a standard link layer protocol used by network devices to advertise their identity, capabilities, and neighbors on a local area network based on IEEE802 technology, principally wired Ethernet. In this update, Teams devices connected to the network via ethernet will dynamically update location information for emergency calling services based on changes to network attributes including chassis ID and port ID.

Click to dial phone numbers in meetings
Users with phone numbers that are included in a meeting invite will now be able to be reached directly by selecting the number in the user interface

Opt out of call queues
Call queue agents can select whether or not they wish to be included in a queue within the new option in settings.

1:1 Call Recording Policy Controls Are (Almost!) Here

Corbin Meek — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 20:42:06 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

A long outstanding request from Teams Administrators is the ability to control 1:1 Call recording independently of Teams Meeting Recording. We're pleased to announce these controls are almost here.

Today, any user allowed to record Teams meetings can also record 1:1 Calls. This setting is currently governed by Teams Meeting Policy parameter AllowCloudRecording. Very soon, 1:1 Call Recording will be governed by a new parameter in Teams Calling Policies, AllowCloudRecordingForCalls.

For more information, be sure you're logged into your M365 Admin Portal as a Tenant Admin account and review the following Message Center Post: (Updated) 1:1 Call recording policy introduction

In fact, the AllowCloudRecordingForCalls parameter is there now, and you should take immediate action to ensure your users have the desired experience once we begin enforcing this policy, current Plan of Record is to start the rollout April 12, 2021.

What this means for you as a Teams Administrator depends on what your business requirements are. If you are fine with your users recording 1:1 Calls, you will need to take action to ensure they can continue to do so after the new Policy goes into effect. Because of the policy requirements of a significant majority of Teams customers, 1:1 Call Recording will be disabled by default. Further, the new policy is only manageable through PowerShell.

So, if you would like your users to continue to have the ability to record 1:1 Calls after April 12, 2021 - you should take action now. What action? Set -AllowCloudRecordingForCalls to $True in the Calling Policy applied to the desired Users. For many of you this will be the Global Default policy and for that, the change can be achieved with the following PowerShell cmdlet:

Set-CsTeamsCallingPolicy -Identity Global -AllowCloudRecordingForCalls $True

If however you want some users to be prevented from recording 1:1 Calls, you would modify the appropriate policy by setting -AllowCloudRecordingForCalls to $False. Keep in mind, $False will be the default value for the Global and any out-of-the-box a.k.a. "OOB" Calling Policies when this change rolls out.

OOB Calling Policies cannot be modified - so if you have users with OOB Calling Policies set you will need to move those users to a new policy if you want them to be able to record 1:1 Calls. Based on customer feedback we expect this case to be somewhat rare - but just in case we've provided you an example PowerShell script that copies your existing Calling Policies and creates new policies with -AllowCloudRecordingForCalls set to $True. We hope this eases the administrative burden of preparing for this change and also gives you a cool example of how to make a copy of a Teams Policy (yes, with appropriate modifications this script can make a copy of other Teams policies, not just Calling!).

You can find the script here: TeamsCallingPolicyUpdate. It was written by our good friend , thanks Andy!

Side note - there are other very useful Sample Scripts there - take a moment and bookmark this shortcut:

aka.ms/teamspowershellsamples

Be sure to read the ReadMe file there for important instructions (requires MicrosoftTeams ps module, 2.0.0 or higher, for example).

From my test tenant, running the script example:

And, this is what it looks like in the Teams Admin Center after I've copied my Calling Policies with the script:

In my case, I had a 'CustomCalls' custom Calling Policy created as the only non-default (OOB) policy in my Tenant. You may have others, and you can copy only select policies if you wish, the script will prompt you.

At this point I would use my preferred method of applying the new policies that allow 1:1 Call recording to my desired user set. Remember, you do have to Grant these policies to users for the setting to take effect.

TLDR: 1:1 Call Recording Policy controls are coming starting April 12, 2021. Default will be disabled. If you want your users to be able to continue recording 1:1 Calls in Teams - you need to make policy changes now to ensure they can continue to do so. If you are OK with the default (disabled) - no action is required!

Final notes:

First, you may be wondering what constitutes a 1:1 Call vs a Meeting? If you schedule a Meeting with 1 other person only, is that a 1:1 Call? Nope. That's a Meeting, and will be governed by Meeting Policies. So will a Meet Now. If you call someone, then add video, or screensharing, and then decide to Record - that's a 1:1 Call and will be governed by Calling Policies.

Second, this new Calling Policy Parameter does not apply to PSTN calls, yet. That's coming later. For the moment you cannot record PSTN calls or calls with Skype for Business users in Teams.

And last but not least, this new policy setting relates to the Microsoft Teams Recording solution for 1:1 calls. This setting does not affect 1:1 Compliance Recording, which is still controlled via the Compliance Recording policy.

As always we hope this information is useful for you, please comment the blog with any questions or feedback.

Thanks!
Microsoft Teams Support

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 3 – Calendar-Based Presence and Delegates

Thomas Stensitzki — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 20:12:08 GMT

This blog post is part 3 of the three-part series on Microsoft Teams and on-premises Exchange mailboxes.

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 1 – How do Teams and Exchange Server interact?

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 2 - Teams Calendar App Troubleshooting

In the first part of the series, I presented an overview of how Teams Backend Services and on-premises Exchange organizations interact. The second part of the series describes how the Teams Backend Services find the on-premises Exchange organization via AutoDiscover and what options you have to isolate sources of error when problems arise during this process, and the access to the calendar app.

This blog post covers Calendar Delegates for Teams meetings and the calendar-based presence status.

Troubleshooting Microsoft Teams and Calendar Delegates
The Calendar App displays your calendar to plan meetings or live meetings. If you want a delegate to create a Teams meeting on your behalf, the delegate must schedule the meeting in Outlook for desktop if both users have on-premises mailboxes. You can only plan a new Teams meeting if the Microsoft Teams AddIn is available in Outlook.

Another essential prerequisite is that you, as the mailbox manager, grant delegate access with Editor-permissions via the Outlook setup wizard for delegates. Assigning folder permissions on the calendar folder is not sufficient.

Creating a new team meeting by a delegate for a manager mailbox in an on-premises Exchange organization also uses the Exchange Web Services endpoint. Creating a new meeting by a delegate uses the following steps:

The delegate selects the managers' calendar in Outlook for Desktop and clicks New Team Meeting in the ribbon bar
The Teams AddIn connects to the Teams Backend Services and queries the delegate permissions for the manager mailbox
The Teams Backend Services uses AutoDiscover V2 to acquire EWS URL
The Teams Backend Services establish an OAuth authenticated connection to the /EWS virtual directory of the on-premises Exchange Server
The Teams Backend Services send a GetDelegate SOAP-Request for creating the Teams meeting in the manager mailbox
Exchange Server returns the list of configured mailbox delegates and the corresponding mailbox permissions
The Teams Backend Services sends the Teams meeting information as a response to the Teams Outlook AddIn, which adds the information to the Outlook meeting request

If you encounter problems creating a new Teams meeting invite as a delegate, you can check the following:

Does the Teams Calendar App work as expected for the manager and the delegate?
Execute a GetDelegate query using a SOAP client, i.e., SOAPe
- Again, use Fiddler for additional troubleshooting on the protocol level
You receive a Teams error notification
- Verify the delegate permission, as direct folder permissions are not sufficient
You receive a Teams error notification that a connection to the server is not possible
- Check the EWS protocol log for the GetDelegate query
- Check the IIS Frontend and EWS-Proxy logs for Teams Backend connections
- Check the Exchange Server PartnerApplication-configuration

Another error source for connection issues to Exchange Server endpoints is user agent string filtering. If you use Layer 7 network devices that perform such filtering, configure them for bypass.

In part 2 of this mini-series, you learned the detailed steps for troubleshooting using the Exchange Server log files. Use the same procedures for troubleshooting the calendar delegate issues.

Troubleshooting Microsoft Teams and calendar-based Presence Status
Microsoft Teams can update the presence status to "In a meeting" based on calendar information in your mailbox. However, there are limits to this functionality in conjunction with an on-premises Exchange Server mailbox.

The Microsoft Teams client queries the presence status every six minutes from the Teams backend's Presence Service. An Exchange calendar query can be done in two different modes:

Pull-Mode
Calendar query based on a 1-hour interval
Push-Mode
Subscription-based

The combination of Microsoft Teams with on-premises mailboxes supports Pull-Mode only.
The Presence Service uses the REST protocol when querying calendar information and performs the following steps:

The Teams Backend Services uses AutoDiscover V2 to acquire REST URL
The Teams Backend Services establish an OAuth authenticated connection to the /api virtual directory of the on-premises Exchange Server
The Teams Backend Services try to create a new calendar event subscription
a. This action fails because a missing RPC endpoint
The Teams Backend Services use a REST request to query calendar information and determine a calendar-based presence status

The options analyzing issues are the same that you have already learned about for AutoDiscover and calendar access:

Does the AutoDiscover response contain the correct REST URL, and is the endpoint accessible from the internet?
- Again, Fiddler is your tool of choice for troubleshooting connection issues on the HTTPS layer
If you have not yet installed the Exchange Server December 2020 Cumulative Updates or newer, check the web.config of the Frontend REST virtual directory
- Add the maxQueryStringLength attribute to the httpRuntime configuration

File path: $exinstall\FrontEnd\HttpProxy\rest\web.config
<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="2097151" maxUrlLength="2048" maxQueryStringLength="4096" requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,*,%,\,?" requestValidationMode="2.0" />

Check the IIS Frontend and REST Proxy logs for Teams Backend connections
Check the Exchange REST logs for proxied Frontend connections

As with the calendar delegate access, user agent string filters are also sources of error for presence status. If you use Layer 7 network devices to filter access to the REST endpoint, configure them for bypass or remove them from the access path for troubleshooting.

Links

Thomas Stensitzki is a leading technology consultant focusing on Microsoft messaging and collaboration technologies and the owner of Granikos GmbH & Co. KG. He is an MVP for Office Apps & Services and an MCT Regional Lead. As a user group organizer, he hosts the Microsoft Teams User Group Berlin and the Exchange User Group DACH.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stensitzki
Blog: https://JustCantGetEnough.Granikos.eu
Teams User Group: https://TeamsUserGroup.berlin
Exchange User Group: https://exusg.de

To write your own blog on a topic of interest as a guest blogger in the Microsoft Teams Community, please submit your idea here: https://aka.ms/TeamsCommunityBlogger

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 2 - Teams Calendar App Troubleshooting

Thomas Stensitzki — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 16:13:12 GMT

This blog post is part 2 of the three-part series on Microsoft Teams and on-premises Exchange mailboxes.

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 1 – How do Teams and Exchange Server interact?

Teams Backend AutoDiscover
The Teams Backend Services use AutoDiscover Version 2 to find a user's Exchange mailbox on behalf of a Teams client. This AutoDiscover V2 call is an anonymous call for performance reasons to determine the Exchange target URL for the mailbox sought as quickly as possible. As already mentioned in the previous blog post, the Teams Backend Services query the AutoDiscover endpoint of Exchange Online first. If Exchange Online does not host the mailbox, the services receive an HTTP redirect to search for the local Exchange organization's endpoint.

The detailed steps are:

1. The Teams Backend Services query the Exchange Online AutoDiscover endpoint for the URL for the EWS protocol using an AutoDiscover V2 JSON query
https://outlook.office365.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.json?Email=John.Doe@varunagroup.de&Protocol=EWS

2. Exchange Online verifies the recipient type for the email address contained in the JSON query and replies with one of the following options:

a. RecipientType: Mailbox
https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

The mailbox is an Exchange Online mailbox. No further steps are necessary. The Teams Services have the information they need to access the users' calendar.

b. RecipientType: MailUser
Exchange Online determines the AutoDiscover endpoint based on the ExternalEmailAddress attribute; in this example autodiscover.varunagroup.de

3. Exchange Online replies with an HTTP 302 redirect to autodiscover.varunagroup.de

4. The Teams Backend Services send an AutoDiscover V2 JSON query for the URL for the EWS protocol
https://autodiscover.varunagroup.de/autodiscover/autodiscover.json?Email=John.Doe@varunagroup.de&Protocol=EWS

5. On-premises Exchange Server replies with an external EWS URL of a virtual Exchange Web Services virtual directory
Example: {"Protocol":"EWS","Url":"https://mail.varunagroup.de/EWS/Exchange.asmx"}

6. The Teams Backend Services use the received URL to establish a connection to the on-premises Exchange organization

But what do the Teams Backend Services exactly, after receiving the EWS URL? The services perform the following steps:

Open an HTTPS connection to the on-premises EWS URL and perform an OAuth authentication using the registered services principal
Send an EWS calendar query
Receive the Exchange Web Services response
Send the parsed calendar data to the Teams clients' calendar app for further use

As you can see, accessing the calendar of a user mailbox hosted in an on-premises Exchange organization is complex. This complexity can lead to errors.

How can you now perform an error analysis for the AutoDiscover process and the subsequent calendar access? Let's start with AutoDiscover.

Troubleshooting AutoDiscover
Since Microsoft Teams Backend Services perform all AutoDiscover and other client accesses, there are no viable troubleshooting steps on the local Teams client. The client itself must have access to the internet and proper DNS name resolution working.

Because AutoDiscover V2 uses anonymous access, you can test it for any email address. This self-test helps you as an IT administrator check AutoDiscover for a users' email address that might not work correctly. You can check the AutoDiscover response using PowerShell or with the help of a browser.

PowerShell
Run the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet with the following Uri-Strings for EWS and REST protocol

Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'https://outlook.office365.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.json?Email=John.Doe@varunagroup.de&Protocol=EWS'

Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'https://outlook.office365.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.json?Email=John.Doe@varunagroup.de&Protocol=REST'

Out-of-Office information and calendar-based presence status requests use the on-premises REST-endpoint.

Ensure that there are no unsupported characters in the Uri.

Browser
You can test and query the AutoDiscover endpoint using the following URLs

https://outlook.office365.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.json?Email=john.doe@varunagroup.de&Protocol=EWS
https://outlook.office365.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.json?Email=john.doe@varunagroup.de&Protocol=REST

For an on-premises mailbox, you receive an AutoDiscover response from your on-premises Exchange Server, like the one shown in the following screenshot.

Perform a Fiddler trace for a more detailed error analysis when executing the HTTPS queries. The trace results help you to identify other possible sources of error, i.e., a failed TLS handshake.
If an error occurs while determining the AutoDiscover information, this does not automatically imply a problem. Check the following options:

The AutoDiscover query terminates with a timeout
- Is the HTTPS access to your Exchange organization restricted to the remote IP address ranges of Microsoft 365?
- Maybe the Exchange Server systems have a performance problem and cannot respond promptly?
You receive a "User Not Found"-response
- Is the user account excluded from the Azure AD Connect synchronization and does not exist as a "Mail User" object in Exchange Online?
The response does not contain the expected EWS or REST URL
- The mailbox is an on-premises mailbox, but the response contains the Exchange Online endpoint

https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

Most likely, the user has an additional mailbox in Exchange Online. Resolve the double mailbox situation.

- The response contains a URL that seems to be an internal URL, i.e.,

https://exch01.varunagroup.local/EWS/Exchange.asmx

The ExternalUrl attribute configuration is not correct for all virtual directories.

- You use bound namespaces, the user mailbox location is AD site EMEA, but the response contains an URL of a different site, i.e.,

https://mail.apac.varunagroup.de/EWS/Exchange.asmx

Expected URL: https://mail.emea.varunagroup.de/EWS/Exchange.asmx

Until March 2021, AutoDiscover V2 is not AD site-aware. The March 2021 cumulative updates for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 fix this issue. Read more about the updates in this blog post.

DNS Name resolution fails for the email address target domain
- There is no DNS resource record for AutoDiscover in the internet-facing DNS zone

The next steps to identify connection problems lead us to the on-premises Exchange servers. With a local network trace, you can determine whether there are TLS handshake errors. Please note that your Exchange Server systems must be configured correctly for TLS 1.2. The TLS 1.2 configuration might require manual steps if you use Exchange Server 2016 or Exchange Server 2013.

If there are no errors in the TLS handshake, you must check the Exchange server's log files. Checking the log files on the local Exchange servers requires several steps. Depending on your local Exchange organization's size and the number of Exchange Servers, this check can be very complicated.

The following diagram shows the participating Exchange Server components of a single Exchange Server for incoming connections from the Teams Backend Services to the Exchange Web Services endpoint.

The IIS Default website receives the incoming HTTPS connection from the Teams Services and passes it to the Frontend Proxy component, i.e., EWS or REST. You find information about those two connections in the W3SVC1 (1) and the HttpProxy logs of the targeted protocol (2). The Frontend Proxy component proxies the connection to the Exchange Backend website of the Exchange Server, where the active database copy containing the user mailbox is mounted. This is not necessarily the same Exchange Server accepting the Frontend connection. You find information about this proxied connection in the W2SVC2 IIS logs (3) and the queried Exchange service (4). Depending on the Exchange protocol you want to troubleshoot, you must check the AutoDiscover, EWS, or REST log files.

Troubleshooting Calendar App
Now that you know how to deal with the AutoDiscover process's errors, it's time to take a look at the Teams Calendar app.

Suppose the access to AutoDiscover works without errors. There is a high probability that the access to the Exchange Web Services will also work, and therefore the calendar app in the Teams client will show calendar information.

However, if the Teams client does not display the calendar, check the following:

Can the EWS URL determined by AutoDiscover, is the hostname resolvable in the domain's external DNS zone, and can it be reached from the Internet via HTTPS?
- Use a browser to connect to the EWS URL and use Fiddler to identify any connection-based issues
  The EWS endpoint must reply with am HTTP 401 status code
Use the Remote Connectivity Analyzer to perform a Teams Calendar Access Tab Test

http://bit.ly/TeamsCalTest

Verify the OAuth Authentication configuration
- Use the PowerShell Cmdlet Test-OAuthConnectivity
- Verify ServicePrincipalNames, IntraOrganization- and AuthServer-configuration

In the next blog post, we will take a closer look at calendar delegate situations.

Links

Twitter: https://twitter.com/stensitzki
Blog: https://JustCantGetEnough.Granikos.eu
Teams User Group: https://TeamsUserGroup.berlin
Exchange User Group: https://exusg.de

To write your own blog on a topic of interest as a guest blogger in the Microsoft Teams Community, please submit your idea here: https://aka.ms/TeamsCommunityBlogger

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 1 – How do Teams and Exchange Server interact?

Thomas Stensitzki — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:00:00 GMT

The calendar application is an essential component of Microsoft Teams. This application's task is to display your calendar from the personal mailbox. You access the calendar app directly from the app bar within your Teams client. The following screenshot shows the Microsoft Teams web client as an example.

Microsoft Teams contacts the Teams Backend Services in Microsoft 365 to get calendar information from the Teams Backend Services to display the users' calendar. The Backend Services get the required information from the Exchange mailbox. This access is not a problem for mailboxes hosted in Exchange Online, as Microsoft 365 provides the required access paths and permissions for your tenant.

Your on-premises Exchange Organization must meet specific requirements to provide access for Microsoft Teams. These technical prerequisites bring additional complexity into daily operation, which has its troubleshooting challenges. As an IT administrator, you need to know the individual components involved and their interaction to handle problems efficiently.

In this first article, I focus on the technical components and the requirements to make local Exchange mailboxes accessible for Microsoft Teams. The following two blog posts show you your options and tools for troubleshooting connectivity issues to on-premises mailboxes.

Microsoft Teams (Backend) Services
In contrast to other software clients that access an Exchange mailbox, calendar access in Microsoft Teams is not done by the Teams client itself, but rather by the so-called Teams Middle-Tier, which is part of a set of Teams Backend Services, independently of the client. Client access to other Microsoft 365 services, such as SharePoint Online or OneNote, is done directly.
The following diagram shows how Teams clients access the Teams Backend Services.

We only focus on the two components highlighted with a red rectangle, the Teams Services and Exchange. The connection between Teams Backend Services and Exchange is drawn as a simple line in the diagram, but it is precisely this connection that needs your attention to make Microsoft Teams work with on-premises mailboxes.

Calendar Access Overview
When a user accesses the calendar app in a Microsoft Teams client, the client queries the calendar information from the Teams Backend Services. The request uses the user's login name (e.g., John-Doe@varunagroup.de), which is supposed to be the primary email address.
Let us assume the user uses John.Doe@varunagroup.de as a login when starting the Teams client.

In the first step, after receiving the calendar request from the Teams client, the Teams Backend Services perform an AutoDiscover V2 query on Exchange Online (1). The Teams Backend Services always query outlook.office365.com first because the services assume that Exchange Online has the necessary information for calendar access to John Doe's mailbox.

In this example, the mailbox is in an on-premises Exchange organization, Exchange Online replies with an HTTP 302 redirect response. As a result, the Teams Backend Services need to determine the local Exchange organizations endpoints using AutoDiscover V2 independently. The services use the domain part of John Doe's email address for the request, which is varunagroup.de.

In step (2), the Teams Backend Services tries to determine the default AutoDiscover endpoint using the DNS name provided in the HTTPT 302 response. After successful DNS resolution, the services establish an anonymous AutoDiscover V2 connection using HTTPS. Exchange Server responds to this request with the local Exchange organization's URL information configured as ExternalUrl attributes for the virtual Exchange Server directories.

Authenticated access to the Exchange mailbox only takes place in step (3). The AutoDiscover V2 requests use anonymous requests for performance reasons. Teams Backend Services uses OAuth-Authentication when accessing the Exchange Web Services' endpoint and reading calendar information. The Backend Services services then prepare the calendar information and respond to the Teams client request.

After receiving the Teams Backend Services response, the Teams client displays the calendar app icon for John Doe.

The requirements for this process to function correctly are:

Correctly configured Azure AD Connect with Exchange Hybrid option enabled
Synchronization of all on-premises mailbox users to Azure AD
Exchange Organization published to the internet
Exchange Server 2019 or 2016 running the latest cumulative updates
Exchange namespace correctly configured in the external DNS zone
Configured AutoDiscover endpoints for all primary email domains in the external DNS zones, accepting non-authenticated requests
Configuration of Exchange Classic Full Hybrid Mode using Hybrid Configuration Wizard

With a hybrid Exchange configuration that meets these requirements, the use of on-premises mailboxes with Microsoft Teams works.

Exchange Server is a very tolerant server application that you can operate in very different configurations. Individual deviations from the preferred architecture of Exchange Server and a hybrid configuration with Microsoft 365 lead to possible errors when using Microsoft Teams with on-premises user mailboxes.

I highly recommend reading the Microsoft Docs article Troubleshoot Microsoft Teams and Exchange Server interaction issues, when encountering problems with your on-premises mailboxes and Microsoft Teams.

In the next two blog posts, I will take a closer look at calendar access and calendar delegate situations and the possible sources of errors and options for error analysis.

Links

Requirements to create and view meetings for mailboxes hosted on-premises

Twitter: https://twitter.com/stensitzki
Blog: https://JustCantGetEnough.Granikos.eu
Teams User Group: https://TeamsUserGroup.berlin
Exchange User Group: https://exusg.de

To write your own blog on a topic of interest as a guest blogger in the Microsoft Teams Community, please submit your idea here: https://aka.ms/TeamsCommunityBlogger

Live transcription with speaker attribution now available in Teams meetings for English (US)

Shalendra Chhabra — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 16:55:27 GMT

We’ve all been in situations where we’re double-booked or joined a meeting late. You don’t want to interrupt the flow but need to catch up quickly. Or, for accessibility reasons or ambient noise situations, you need help following the conversation and understanding who’s speaking. Wouldn’t it be great to have transcription with speaker attribution built into the meeting?

We’re excited to now offer live transcription in Microsoft Teams meetings for English (US). Live transcription is a written record of the spoken text that occurs during a meeting. It identifies each speaker, is captured automatically in near real time, and is available during and after the meeting.

Delivering live transcription with high accuracy, minimal latency, and cost efficiency at enterprise scale has been one of the toughest challenges in the industry. Over the last two years we’ve made significant strides in solving this problem and have dramatically improved our models for accuracy using meeting context in real time and cutting edge AI.

Live transcription in Teams uses a meeting's invitation, participant names, attachments, etc. to improve the accuracy and recognize meeting-specific jargon for each transcript automatically, without any human involvement. This means no one at Microsoft ever sees the meeting’s content, and the models are automatically deleted immediately after each meeting. In addition, Microsoft doesn’t use or store this data for improving its own AI.

How to set up live transcription in Teams meetings
To get started, the tenant admin just needs to turn on the Allow Transcription policy. Then the meeting organizer or a presenter can start transcription.

In terms of privacy, live transcription is similar to recording a meeting. Participants are notified that live transcription is on and have the ability to hide it from their meeting view with just a click. If they choose not be identified, attendees can also turn off speaker attribution in their profile settings.

After the meeting, the saved transcript is available for reference and download in Teams for desktop and web.

The transcript is also immediately available in the meeting event in Teams calendar, as well as through the transcript tile in the chat.

Teams live transcription files are stored in the meeting organizer's Exchange Online account and only the organizer and tenant admin have permissions to delete it.

Teams meeting recordings that are saved in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint (ODSP) use Teams live transcript to display captions in recordings, so we recommend turning on live transcript to ensure captions are present in post-meeting recordings.

Note that live transcription is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate and so should not be relied upon in life-altering situations.

Cloud Video Interop customers:

If you are using Cloud Video Interop (CVI) to join Teams meetings, please contact your CVI provider to ensure that your CVI participants get the transcription notification when transcription starts.

Who can start using live transcriptions?
Live transcription with speaker attribution is available for scheduled Microsoft Teams meetings (in U.S. English) to our public cloud customers with licenses for Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium SKUs. Live transcripts for channel and Meet Now meetings will be coming soon.

Delivering highly accurate, AI-based live transcriptions for Teams meetings has been a massive and rewarding effort across the company. With this powerful foundation built at scale, we’re ready to tackle the next set of challenges to keep improving inclusivity, accessibility, and productivity in Microsoft Teams meetings. Stay tuned…

Microsoft Teams Displays Update | March 2021

Microsoft_Teams_team — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 15:08:39 GMT

The Teams display experience was built from the roots up knowing that the modern worker needs to balance getting individual work done while engaging in multiple forms of collaboration. To help streamline communications, stay on top of tasks, and save users time we created the ultimate second screen that is dedicated to productivity. This experience running on the Lenovo Thinksmart View, pairs easily with your PC in BetterTogether mode, and uses the power of Teams and AI to keep you in the flow of work.

In this update to theTeams display experience, we are excited to bring enhancements to Cortana, and new capabilities in meetings and chat .

Get your facts fast with Cortana + Bing
In one of our best demonstrations of collaboration, the voice activated AI capabilities in Cortana now leverage Bing to fetch information from the internet and present to users. Imagine you are collaborating with someone in a different time zone, use commands like:

“Hey Cortana, what time is it in New York?”
“Hey Cortana, what’s the weather in New York?”
“Hey Cortana, how much does a flight to New York cost?”

When Cortana and Bing work together they help you stay in the know with relevant facts and information just when you need them, at the sound of your voice.

Get ready Canada, Australia, UK, and India, Cortana is coming!
With this app update, users in select English speaking markets will be able to access Cortana. Have Cortana show you your schedule, send messages, make calls, and more in additional geographies starting now.

Swap out your background for the occasion
We knew users loved being able to change their backgrounds in Teams meetings and calls on their PC and are thrilled to bring this experience to the display. With a few taps of a finger users can not only blur what’s going on behind them, but upload any of our Teams backgrounds to suit their mood or occasion. A messy room, housemates’ motion, or even weather can be distracting in a meeting. In order for users to present themselves with confidence, we believe this feature will be helpful and fun. Is there a team celebration? Try the balloon background! Virtual happy hour? A trip to the beach can set the scene.

A round of applause goes to…live reactions in meetings!
Did your teammate say something impressive that you want to agree with? Is your manager highlighting a colleague's achievement that you want to support? Or maybe the new hire on the team is sharing their excitement to start work with you? All these situations elicit genuine human emotions like enthusiasm, happiness, and empathy. While where we work has changed, the desire to express these emotions hasn’t. Now in the Teams display experience users can show emotions like support, applause, love and laughter during a meeting. Additionally, you can see what your meeting members are thinking without disrupting an ongoing meeting. Consider asking a question and asking participants to submit their thoughts via live reactions to get a quick survey on participant sentiment. The possibilities are endless and we are excited about this new way to stay engaged during meetings!

When “read” receipts aren’t enough, send quick responses!
Now on the ambient screen users have the ability to press and hold incoming chats for a variety of options. Like, love, laughter, surprise, disappointment and frustration can all be expressed easily for a quick display of reaction to new information. Additionally, using the power of AI, quick responses are generated that a user can choose from. Suppose you get the following message:

“I will send the file over later today.”
The display experience will suggest appropriate responses like:
“Thank you” “I understand” “Looking forward to it”

The user can easily select what’s appropriate for the context and send away without context switching or missing any beats.

With every update we are excited to bring new and innovative experiences that both help users maximize productivity and bring delight to the way they work. We hope these enhancements will make you more productive, save you time, and help you bring your best self to work, from wherever you may be!

Secure Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 Policies

Dipti Chhatrapati — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 16:00:00 GMT

Information security understanding is becoming more and more crucial for Enterprises in the last 40-50 years, and it is inevitable for any industry to protect resources against cybercrime or attacks. These security demands are further challenging in the Pandemic era where people are working remotely. However, Microsoft® Teams - a trustworthy centralized collaboration system providing greater security within Microsoft 365 through security, compliance, and protection offerings - is making organizations safe and employees more productive. Although Teams has its own org-wide policies (Teams policies, meetings policies, messaging policies and much more to control users accesses and information from Microsoft Teams Admin center), it is essential to configure security within Microsoft 365 to protect teams that is strongly coupled with SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive, and any other integrated services as per the org need.

In short, Microsoft Teams as one of the Microsoft 365 applications leverages security advantages from SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange by default. For example, as a site member, if a user is not allowed to access a file stored in Teams’ SharePoint site, the same experience will be inherited in the team for the user, even though they can access the teams. All these workloads further can be configured-investigated-secured for Microsoft Teams in Microsoft 365 using various security, protection and compliance Microsoft 365 policies described as follows:

Note: This article only covers Microsoft 365 policies that can be leveraged in Microsoft Teams Security; for more information on other security and compliance features apart from Microsoft 365 policies, go to the “Learn More” section of this article located at the bottom.

Security and Protection Policies for Teams
Microsoft Teams as a part of Microsoft 365 services allows to configure essential Microsoft 365 security and protection policies such as Safe attachment policy, safe link policy, conditional access policy, data encryption policy as described below to protect teams content as per the organization need. A good way to start is checking the Microsoft Secure store to know the organization security posture – the higher the number, the greater the security - available at Microsoft 365 Security center as indicated in the following screen.

Based on the security score, you can make an action plan from the “Improvement Actions” to further boosting security score; for example, “Require MFA for administrative roles,” which prevents attackers from accessing important information in case of admin password leakage or Restrict anonymous users from joining meetings which helps to align with company regulation such as external partner, must have a valid account to join the Teams meeting. Additionally, security score also helps to compare your security score with similar organizations as yours as explained here.

Safe Attachment policy
With safe attachment policy, you can protect users from opening or sharing the malicious files in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. When a file is identified as suspicious as indicated in the following screen, users cannot access that file; however, they can delete it.

It is recommended to block the malicious files while configuring Safe Attachment policy from the Microsoft 365 Security center as indicated in the following screen.

Please find more information here to turn on safe attachments policy in SharePoint, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams. Improve your action plans further when malicious links are found as explained here.

Safe Links policy
Safe links policy protects users from accessing the malicious links in emails, documents, and Teams conversations. This policy settings, allow to implement URL scanning and determine how user would interact with the link. For example, if user clicks in a link in teams chat, it shows warning page with malicious link information as indicated in the following screen.

It is a best practice to enable the “Do not allow users to click through to original URL” setting while configuring the Safe links policy as indicated in the following screen to protect users from clicking malicious URLs.

Please find more information on how Safe links policy can be configured and how it works here.

Conditional Access policy
Conditional access policy helps enforcing the desirable access controls such as allow/block access to user based on users, locations, devices, and applications to make organization secure by unexpected app access as indicated in the following screen:

For example, if a conditional access policy includes “Microsoft Teams” as a cloud app, then it will be applicable to specified users based on other criteria such as device/location/client application from where app will be accessed. And, when the specified user in the conditional access policy sign into Microsoft Teams, it would display a message as follows:

For more information about conditional access policy, please find the documentation here explaining overview, deployment and commonly used conditional policies in the organization.

Data Encryption Policy
Data encryption policy is a part of setting up Customer key for encrypting the content at application level that provides additional layer of security to align with organization compliance obligations, for example, leaving Microsoft 365 service. Now, you can have the customer key assigned for Microsoft teams to encrypt new Teams files stored in SharePoint online via single Data encryption policy at tenant level. As a customer you can revoke the access when you decide to leave the Microsoft 365 service, which deletes the cryptography of the data to meet security and compliance regulations.
To achieve encryption for Microsoft Teams using DEP and customer key, upload the keys in Azure Key vault and grant access to SharePoint online service. By doing so, the user’s file will be encrypted and accessible. However, the moment, keys are deleted when you decide to leave the service, users will not be able to access files from SharePoint Online as it will throw a message as follows as service has no information available to encrypt the data.

This layer of security does not allow anyone to access the data even from Microsoft, so as a customer you can be rest assured on the controls of your data. Please find more information about strengthening your data by setting up data encryption policy for Microsoft Teams using customer keys here.

Compliance policies for Teams
Microsoft 365 compliance policies help Microsoft Teams to match organization compliance guidelines through Information Barrier policy, Communication compliance policy, sensitivity label policy, data loss prevention policy and retention policy as described below. To know more compliance features apart from compliance policies, please review “Learn More” section located at bottom.

Information Barrier Policy
To regulate Teams communication between specific users for the compliance reason, an Information Barrier policy comes in handy that blocks/allow access between set of users to communicate by determining communication restrictions. For example, when team owner tries to add user in the teams affected by information barrier restriction, then it will show following message:

This policy can be triggered at 1:1 chat, group chat, meeting invitation, screen sharing, phone calls, adding user as guest. For more information, on IB policy, please click here.

Communication Compliance Policy
Communication Compliance policies in Microsoft 365, help detecting and acting up on unprofessional messages within the Microsoft Teams that may put your organization at risk. This helps regulating internal and external communications as per the organization standards. It also detects unexpected activities such as increasing Teams channel or volume of messaging data. Configuring Communication compliance policies support healthy culture between organization and employees. Behind the scenes, it uses machine learning over signals coming from various channel such as Exchange, Teams, Yammer, and Skype for Business. For example, as a Communication Admin, you can set up the policy for Teams that matches any offensive words defined in the condition as indicated in the following screen and as reviewer, you can get the trigger when that matches. Learn about planning and configuring communication compliance here.

Sensitivity Label Policy
Sensitivity label policy help secure and protect content in Microsoft teams which are created during the collaboration for example, creating or editing team. For instance, as an administrator, you want to allow users to create only private channels. In that case, create and publish sensitivity label called “Confidential” with the “Private” privacy option. Next, when user create a team and apply “Confidential” label to the team, User will only see “Private” as a privacy option as indicated in the following screen. Please find more information on sensitivity labels for Microsoft Teams here.

Data loss prevention policy
Prevent people from sharing sensitive information relevant to your business with internal or external users in Teams chat and channel messages by defining the data loss prevention policy. For example, if user sends a social security number in the Teams channel which is prevented by DLP policy created in Microsoft 365 compliance center, then the DLP policy automatically detects an action and block the message as indicated in the following screen.

You can also configure sending the incident reports to relevant users, when sensitive information is shared with specific instances at one time. Please find more information about DLP policies in the Microsoft Teams here.

Retention Policy
Retention policy helps to manage the Teams chats per the organization policies, legal requirements, or industry standards. For example, you can create a retention policy to delete the Teams chat after five years as indicated in the following screen. It also provides configuration settings such as retain chat data, delete it, or retain it for a specific period and then delete it. Please find more information about how retention policy works for Microsoft Teams here.

Learn More
Further information on security, privacy and compliance features, please have a look here. Know latest Teams announcement on security and compliance from here.

Dipti Chhatrapati is a passionate and ambitious Microsoft Professional with more than 12 years as a Developer, Consultant, Architect, and Manager for SharePoint (2007, 2010, 2013), Office 365, and Power Platform projects. Learn more at Insightrun with Dipti C.

To write your own blog on a topic of interest as a guest blogger in the Microsoft Teams Community, please submit your idea here: https://aka.ms/TeamsCommunityBlogger

Teams Meeting Recording Diagnostic in Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Corbin Meek — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 21:33:03 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

We're back with another addition to Support Diagnostics for Microsoft Teams. @João Loureiro has written our third offering in the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, the Meeting Recording test.

This new Diagnostic will help you troubleshoot and test if you meet requirements to record a Teams meeting. If you recently attempted to record a Teams meeting or group call and you were unable to, for example the Recording button was greyed out, you should use this diagnostic to help you troubleshoot.

To access the new diagnostic, navigate to Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, select Microsoft Teams, then click on the Teams Meeting Recording Test.

You'll need to enter valid credentials of an affected account. Optionally you can specify the Teams Meeting URL you are planning to record. Keep in mind your end users can also perform these tests, you do not need to be an Administrator of your tenant. In some scenarios you'll want to work with your impacted end user to run the tests and collect additional data for Microsoft Support.

At a high level the test checks a couple things:

The user is licensed and fully provisioned for Teams
The user is enabled for cloud meeting recording
Recordings saved to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or Microsoft Stream
If recordings configured to use Stream will check if user is within valid region for streaming
The user as permissions to record provided Teams Meeting URL

You'll also want to go over the following documents carefully when configuring Teams cloud meeting recording

Teams cloud meeting recording

Use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or Stream for meeting recordings

Record a meeting in Teams

Please give the new diagnostic a try if you're having trouble with Teams Meetings Recording and let us know if it helped?

Thanks!
Microsoft Teams Support

Teams Meeting Delegation Diagnostic Now Available in Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Corbin Meek — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 17:24:29 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

We're back with another addition to Support Diagnostics for Microsoft Teams. @Chunlong Li has written our second offering in the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer.

This new test will help you troubleshoot and test if you meet requirements to Schedule a Teams Meeting on behalf of a Delegate. If you’re assisting one of your users with Teams Delegate configuration or troubleshooting, this diagnostic is for you!

Typical symptoms of Delegate issues include an error message in Outlook:

Looks like you don't have permission to schedule meetings for this account. Talk to the owner to get permission and try again.

To access the new diagnostic, navigate to Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, select Microsoft Teams, then click on the Teams Meeting Delegation test.

At a high level the Diagnostic attempts to create a test meeting in the Delegator’s calendar using the provided user account credentials and returns the result from the Teams Scheduling Service. Success indicates Delegation is configured correctly and should work for the Delegate.

Any failures will result in an error message that can be used by Support to assist Administrators in troubleshooting further. In fact we expect this Diagnostic to greatly lessen the administrative burden of collecting Outlook and Teams client logs to troubleshoot these issues. For the vast majority of failure cases the output from the MRCA Teams Meeting Delegation test should be all we need to help you fix the issue!

Please give this new Diagnostic a try with your Teams users’ Delegation issues, and let us know how it goes?

Thanks!
Microsoft Teams Support

Microsoft Teams Community Update February 2021

Laurie Pottmeyer — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 19:35:22 GMT

It is hard to believe it is just one year since all of us around the world began staying at home due to COVID-19 and though it's been quite the challenge, it's taught us how important it is to lean on each other. Through all the bad…the isolation, an overload of work, concern for loved ones, fear of the unknown, and wondering if life will ever get back to normal, there have been some silver linings. I've heard great stories of people around the community starting podcasts with one another without ever meeting in person, individuals digging into the Microsoft Technical Community to interact with others during down time, and event organizers opening their virtual doors to the world allowing for global audiences and speakers to interact with one another. Thank you for allowing Microsoft Teams to be a big part of your life the past year. We are looking forward to a brighter year ahead and excited for the innovation yet to come.

We had an exciting Ignite week last week and in case you missed it, some of our MVPs recapped the following Microsoft Teams sessions. Have a read:

If you are interested in sharing your knowledge, experience, or story with community, we’d love to hear from you. We invite all community members to participate in the Microsoft Teams Community Blog Space aka.ms/teamscommunityblog; submit your blog idea at aka.ms/teamscommunityblogger.

As announced last month, Microsoft Teams Engineering would like to recognize community members who make significant contributions to improving the product and sharing their knowledge with community by presenting the Microsoft Teams Community Star Award; I am excited to share the community member we'd like to recognize for February 2021. It's not a surprise the Microsoft Teams space in the Tech Community has seen significant growth over the past year given the increase in use. With that increase comes a need for community members to participate by sharing tips and tricks, experiences, and answering questions of others. Every month since May 2020, Christian Jernqvist Bergström, an M365 and Teams specialist in Sweden, has been one of the top 5 contributors to the discussion board (in February 2021 he was number one!) and has replied to a total of 2131 posts since becoming a member in February 2020. With a new baby at home, it's a miracle Christian had time to tend to others and it's a true testament to his love for community. Thank you, Christian Bergström, for your commitment to Microsoft Teams, for your passion of the product, but mostly - thank you for your love of helping others. You are a true Community Star! (Anyone can nominate an individual for the Microsoft Teams Community Star Award - MVPs are not eligible).

The thought of getting together is exciting and it seems like there is a light at the end of the tunnel with many community events confirming in-person event dates. I'd like to share a few of the events we're looking forward to. For a full list, please visit: aka.ms/CommunityEvents. If you have your own user group or community event, be sure your event is listed in the Tech Community.

We celebrated International Women's Day on March 8th and the Women in Teams Community hosted the second monthly gathering on the 9th. All women and allies are invited to participate in monthly gatherings with Microsoft and Community speakers and regular discussions in Microsoft Teams. This month, we welcomed @Sandya Rao, Principal Group Product Manager for Personal and Small Room Devices for Microsoft Teams, and Community Members and allies Peter Rising and David Patrick. To join, please sign-up at aka.ms/WomenInTeams. All are welcome.

On behalf of the Microsoft Teams Engineering Team, we wish you health, happiness, and a Happy March. We love seeing you on camera but we're very much looking forward to seeing you in person soon.

Stay well,
Laurie

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: FS191 - Secure and Compliant Collaboration with Microsoft Teams

PeterRising — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 18:35:23 GMT

Blogger: Peter Rising, MVP Office Apps and Services, Principal Consultant at Softcat PLC

Sessions: FS191, FS191-R1

Speakers: John Gruszczyk | Microsoft, Rushmi Malaviarachchi | Microsoft, Mansoor Malik | Microsoft

As the author of two books that focus on Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Security & Compliance administration, it’s safe to say that I was looking forward to this session, and it did not disappoint.

We get underway with our host John Gruszczyk, Product Manager for Microsoft Teams, who speaks passionately about what he has to share with us on the latest security and compliance innovations in Microsoft Teams. We will learn how Microsoft Teams will help us to collaborate with confidence, while meeting regulatory and business requirements.

John begins by explaining that we have seen online communication with Microsoft Teams evolve beyond just meetings and chat. Teams has kept us connected with friends and colleagues and enabled us to get our work done remotely. However, this increase in remote working has brought more challenges to IT and Security teams who are facing increasing cyber security threats such as malicious documents and attachments, and mounting compliance obligations to protect organizational data.

A recent Harvard Business Review study shows that 77% of organizations agree that an effective security, compliance, and risk strategy is essential for business success, while 82% also acknowledge increased risks and complexities have made an effective strategy significantly more challenging.

This has made Microsoft keenly aware that it is crucial to remain focused on helping organizations enable both secure and compliant collaboration without interrupting the ways in which end users are able to collaborate with each other.

The unique advantage that Microsoft Teams provides is the fact that it is a centralized platform for collaboration. This enables organizations reduce shadow IT and the use of fragmented collaboration services which can lead to data sprawl which in turn can lead to data leaks.

John goes on to share with us some key areas where Teams has been investing, and how these investments will help organizations achieve the correct Security & Compliance strategy.

Rushmi Malaviarachchi, Partner Director of Program Management for Microsoft Teams is introduced and talks with John about how Microsoft Teams has evolved to become a content generating platform; when users work together in chat, video calls, channels, collaborating on documents, or even within custom or third-party apps, these activities create valuable business content that needs to be protected. Rushi went on to highlight the following plans and announcements for Security and Compliance in Microsoft Teams:

Adaptive cards now in scope
Microsoft recently announced that Adaptive card content generated in Teams Apps is now in scope for compliance capabilities. More than 70% of Teams apps today generate card content in Teams conversation. When an app posts a card to a chat, the content of that card will be visible in eDiscovery, can be preserved with Legal Hold, covered by retention policies, and any actions people take on that card will be available in the audit log.

Teams Multi-Geo
Also announced in relation to the critical subject of Data residency was that Microsoft have carefully listened to customer feedback, and they are extending Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo support to include Microsoft Teams so you can specify where your Teams data at rest will sit. You will be able to set the Geo-location for both individual users and teams. The roll out of Teams Multi-Geo is planned for the 2nd quarter of this year and this is going to be welcome news for many organizations with a global footprint who have very specific data residency obligations.

Secure Score
The Microsoft Secure Score helps to prevent unwanted incidents across Microsoft 365 services including - Exchange Online, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity, and Cloud App Security. Microsoft Teams has recently also been brought into scope for Secure Score and more configuration best practices will be coming soon so watch this space!

Azure Sentinel
Beyond prevention, the correct systems to detect when an intrusion event is happening is of key importance. In Teams, Microsoft have been bolstering the events that are collected by the audit log, so that now the Microsoft Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) tool - Azure Sentinel, can analyze what is going on within Teams and be on the lookout for threats, and use playbooks to respond.

Customer key
Also announced was that bring your own key for Microsoft Teams will be rolling out in the second quarter of this year.

A frictionless approach
The overall theme of aiming for secure organizational collaboration was that it needs to be frictionless. The balance between security and useability is an important consideration, but these principles should not be at odds with each other.

Fritctionless cross organization collaboration will be bolstered by the introduction of shared channels which was also announced at Ignite. In conjunction with the use of technologies such as Microsoft Information Protection across the collaboration space, a label driven approach using sensitivity labels and leveraging conditional access will help to break down traditional collaboration boundaries.

Meeting safety

Next, Mansoor Malik, Principal Group Manager, Microsoft Teams discussed the hugely important subject of meeting safety in Microsoft Teams.

Meeting safety covers a wide range of criteria, which includes meeting participants, content being presented, who can present that content, what is being recorded, and who can record.

One of the big concerns that Microsoft are keenly aware of is uninvited attendees getting into meetings. Being able to control meeting intruders and disruptors, especially in the student and classroom space is crucially important, and if this subject is not correctly addressed, then mental health and wellbeing can be put at risk.

Microsoft have been working to provide brand new meeting controls, such as preventing anonymous attendees from being able to join meetings at an organization level through policy.

Restricting the ability to forward meeting invites is also a very welcome introduction.

In addition, new lobby bypass setting controls will provide the ability to allow only specific invitees to bypass the lobby.

And meeting safety does not stop there. There will also be options for allowing or not allowing attendees to present, chat or unmute, and it was also announced that the ability for meeting organizers to disable video for all attendees is coming soon.

End-to-end encryption
Mansoor also talked about End-to-end encryption for Microsoft Teams. This is a new feature that is coming soon and will provide the ability in Teams to encrypt at the origin and decrypt at the destination. Initially this will only be supported in Teams 1:1 VOIP calls and only participating parties in the End-to-end encryption communication will be able to access the content. The announcement of End-to-end encryption is based on year-long feedback and Teams will be introducing the ability to use End-to-end encryption for 1:1 calls in the coming months.

Some important considerations for End-to-end encryption:

Both the caller and callee in the 1:1 call will need to have been enabled by administrators for End-to-end encryption
Only voice, video and screen sharing in those 1:1 calls will be end to end encrypted.

Microsoft will continue to talk to customers about widening the scope of this crucial new feature, and you can expect to see End-to-end encryption come to Microsoft Teams meetings next. Watch out for more details available soon.

Summary

This was a fast paced and engaging session that gave us a glimpse of what is to come for Security and Compliance in Microsoft Teams. I must say that I am hugely encouraged by what this session revealed. Microsoft customers have been asking the correct questions, and Microsoft are providing some very good answers in return.

I will surely be testing and reporting on these features as they become available and if you would like to discuss any of these with me then please feel free to reach out to me in the Microsoft Technical Community.

I hope you have enjoyed this Ignite as much as I have, and I wish you a frictionless experience in your Microsoft Teams journey moving forward!

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: KEY06 - The Hybrid Workplace

Christopher Hoard — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 18:24:08 GMT

Blogger: Chris Hoard, Partner Education Lead, Vuzion (UK), MCT Regional Lead, OAS MVP

Sessions: KEY06, KEY06-R1

2020 was a year that changed everything. The way we live. The way we work. As the Covid-19 pandemic spread across borders and over continents organisations in every country of every type needed to adapt in order to survive or to function. We, as IT professionals, came into a situation where it was imperative we act as the first responders. On the one hand we needed to help our customers maintain business operations and keep their workforces secure in the face of growing cyber-attacks. On the other, we needed to support many of our colleagues in this new world of remote working helping to safeguard and ensure their mental and emotional wellbeing. As Jared rightly points out in the opening scene of Hybrid, we also needed to do both of these things whilst navigating our own personal challenges at home. When does work start? When does it stop? Where can our business conversations or activities take place without intruding on the privacy of our loved ones whose home it is as much as ours? Given these new realities, how many of us forget that throughout the pandemic many workers have still needed to go onsite each and every single day as it’s an essential requirement for their job. Think of healthcare workers and construction workers. Think of police, and firefighters, those who work in waste disposal, electricians, plumbers, vets. Think of retail and hospitality. These first-line workers have needed to be able to easily communicate with their remote colleagues whilst at the same time still be safe on the job.

As vaccination programs roll out across the world, we now begin to think and to re-imagine how work will be as we enter a period where the pandemic becomes more manageable. What is already clear is that things are not going to return to the way they were pre-pandemic. Some of us will remain at home. Some of us will go back to working or continue to work onsite. Others may choose to work at home or onsite in a hybrid setup depending on how it makes sense to them. This is not conjecture. The statistics back this up. Over 80% of managers expect more flexible work from home policies post-pandemic; 70% of employees expect to adopt flexible work from home policies. Yet the key insight of Hybrid is this: as Jared notes, in our experience of living through the pandemic we come to understand that whilst physical spaces will always be important, we cannot rely on them or being together in person the way that we used to. Because we cannot rely on them, cloud powered technologies such as Microsoft Teams are fundamental to how businesses support working from home, working onsite or anywhere in between. Look at the numbers for Teams since the start of the pandemic - daily active usage (DAU) has rocketed to 115 million, up from 20 million at the end of 2019 when it first emerged out of China. 30 billion collaboration minutes worldwide by Microsoft 365 users in a single day. Astronomical growth.

Yet growth isn’t just about Covid in-itself. Microsoft has worked hard and relentlessly over the course of 2020 to introduce over 100 new features for Microsoft Teams which has helped organisations and their users communicate and collaborate more effectively wherever they may be. Two examples that Hybrid gives to illustrate this are Large Gallery Mode which allows attendees to see more colleagues and up to 49 video feeds at the same time and Together Mode - a unique meeting experience where everyone is together within a virtual shared space designed to reduce meeting fatigue. Going beyond Jared’s examples, some of the other features introduced throughout 2020 include Breakout Rooms, Custom Backgrounds, Hard Mute, Pop Out Chat Meetings and Calling, the New File Experience and closer integration with SharePoint, Sensitivity Labels, Meeting Extensibility, the Yammer communities app, new Power Platform apps, Spotlight mode, Raise Hand, Live Captions, Presence duration and Skype Consumer Interop. It’s difficult to articulate just how much innovation has gone into Teams or do justice to all the passionate engineers and product managers who have clearly thrown themselves into this to deliver the functionality organisations have needed to succeed throughout the pandemic.

Moving onto some of the new features for Microsoft Teams which were introduced in Hybrid and which will bring a new dimension to how we will work in the hybrid workplace, we saw Endpoint transfer allowing users to seamlessly move their calls between different devices - for example from a laptop to a mobile device - without any interruption in call service or quality. Great for wanting to get up and go for a walk on that call when you’ve been sitting on that chair at home all day.

We saw Dynamic View. Dynamic view intelligently arranges the elements of your meeting for an optimal experience and lets you control who shows up alongside content that’s shared. For example, you can place the gallery at the top of the meeting screen, so people appear at the top of the meeting window enabling a more natural eye gaze with other participants. The participant gallery also auto-adjusts when the meeting window is resized. This will help to make meeting more engaging and, for many of us, help us to break out of the grid view we have become accustomed. It will be great to see colleagues’ reactions as content is shared.

One of the features announced that will excite many Teams users is Teams Connect, otherwise known as Shared Channels. Teams Connect enables users to share channels in Teams across multiple organizations meaning you can collaborate - chat, meet, use apps, share, and co-author documents in real-time with individuals and teams that have an Azure Active Directory all without having to switch tenants - a pain point for many users and which many IT pros have flagged. Admins have access to granular security and compliance controls, allowing them to stay in control of how external users access data and information. This is a real game changer - and what is less known about Teams connect is that you can share channels across multiple Teams in your own organisation!

Next, we have Presenter Mode. Presenter mode empowers you as a presenter to customize how your video feed and content appear to the audience. There will be three options available. Standout which shows your video feed in front of the shared content, Reporter which has content as a visual aid above your shoulder like how a news report on television looks and Side-by-side which displays your video feed next to your content. This experience will allow you to form a much stronger connection to your audience where you can transmit your energy and personality into the presentation.

Finally, following on from the standard meeting and Live Event we will see the release of Webinars. A meeting organizer can easily add a registration page to a meeting to better manage attendance before and after any engagement. Following registration, attendees will automatically receive an email confirmation with a calendar invite for a simple join experience. Teams will support interactive webinars for up to 1,000 attendees including rich presentation options, reactions, and controls to disable chat, audio, and video. This will seamlessly scale to accommodate 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience and 20,000-person to the end of 2021 to support throughout the pandemic. Following a webinar, the organizer can use reporting to learn who attended and how long they participated. In addition, they can also upload contacts to other marketing tools to manage ongoing communication. All this will be delivered in Q1 2021. Another game changer.

Moving onto Teams Rooms, the hybrid workplace will demand an inclusive and equitable meeting experience whether remote, onsite, or even on the shop floor. Everyone needs to be seen and heard clearly no matter where they join from. Large gallery view and Together Mode in Microsoft Teams Rooms brings users together in the same form, where a second screen such as a Surface Hub 2S can be used to display and work the content.

We will also see the introduction of the intelligent speaker. The intelligent speaker brings speaker attributed captions and transcriptions to Microsoft Teams Room which enables attendees to easily follow along with what has been said and who said it. Using advanced speech recognition powered by Cortana, it can identify and differentiate the voices of up to 10 people in meeting rooms and apply their name and profile picture next to their transcripts.

There were three reasons why this segway on teams meeting rooms was so exciting: Firstly, there was a great demonstration of Virtual Whiteboarding and how people can work together to ideate and be creative from anywhere on any device, using Surface Hub 2S and an iPad as examples. This really drives home how Teams removes location and environment as barriers to share and start a great dialogue with others on the idea we have to move things forward.

Secondly, Jared gave us a peek into how Microsoft see the new Casting to Teams Rooms evolving and how this could be leveraged to be able to share content on any screen.

Thirdly, Jared also gave us insights into how Microsoft see Microsoft Teams Rooms themselves evolving. Designing for a future of flexible working means rethinking about physical spaces. What does the meeting of future look like? Fluid, dynamic and cloud powered, where everyone feels included, engaged, and empowered to bring their best ideas.

At the conclusion of Hybrid, Jared says that Microsoft are ‘designing experiences to empower people in a work from anywhere world’ where they can work, learn, and collaborate whether that is at home, on the go, in the office, or from the manufacturing floor. Everything shown in this session has been ‘a scaffold to navigate a hybrid world’ with Teams as that organising layer. Yet Teams alone cannot give business leaders such things as ways to foster trust, build a culture and establish deep connections amongst employees - things which ultimately makes for a resilient organisation. This is the beginning of a conversation for Microsoft Viva. Built on Teams, Teams as the foundation of the employee experience as delivered by Viva.

For a session that was a little over 15 minutes, this had a significant amount of content and delivered masterfully as you would expect. But why should this session matter to us as IT Pros at all? Because it is important to understand where we are headed. Why is it important to know where we are headed? Because we need to lead and help organisations - our customers as well as our own - re-imagine how work will be as we move into a period where the pandemic becomes manageable. In our experience of living through the pandemic, we come to understand that whilst physical spaces will always be important, we cannot rely on them or being together in person the way that we used to.

And that is why we need Microsoft Teams. It’s no longer simply a tool to communicate and collaborate. When we have this organisation layer - this scaffold, this foundation upon which we can operate from anywhere - we can begin to build upon that and focus on the employee experience. By getting to where we give workers what they need wherever they may be in order to thrive in challenging times; we are developing resilience in a way we never could before.

Resilience is the reason we can never go back.

Read More here:

See great sessions on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva at MS Ignite

About Chris Hoard
Blog: https://www.microsoft365pro.co.uk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/microsoft365pro

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: FS192, OD380, OD378 - Latest Innovations in Teams Calling and Meetings

StaleHansen — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 17:08:31 GMT

Blogger: Ståle Hansen, RD & MVP, CEO and Principal Cloud Architect at CloudWay

Session codes: FS192, OD380, OD378

As the author of the Teams calling and meetings chapter of the monthly updated book called Office 365 for IT Pros, I was looking forward to the news on these topics at Microsoft Ignite.

Calling updates
I did not expect to be as surprised as I was with the announcement of Operator Connect and Operator Connect Conferencing. This is the next evolution of Direct Routing, where you can bring your own telecom operator and handle connectivity and number assignment natively in the Teams Admin Center without the technical setup. The service provides shared SLA’s to ensure a stable service. This was unexpected news since Microsoft has been focusing on Direct Routing to connect to your own telecom equipment and Calling Plans. They even announced availability of Calling Plans in 8 new markets with countries such as New Zealand, Finland, and my own home country Norway. This means that even more countries have the freedom of choice when choosing how to get telephony in Teams.

The way I will talk about calling in Teams from now in is:

Use Calling Plans in countries where it is available, and you do not have need for least cost routing
Use Operator Connect to bring your own operator and continue your current agreements with your favourite partner, more partners will certify in the future. The question is, can we do least cost routing in this setup? We need to investigate that when it becomes available.
Use Direct Routing when you need to connect with your own PBX environment through a certified SBC to Teams and get the full flexibility for least cost routing and branch site connectivity. This is suitable for complex calling scenarios for global organizations.

Let us not forget about Operator Connect Conferencing, I did honestly not see this one coming. This is where you can add operator dial-in numbers to a Microsoft Audio Conferencing bridge. The advantage here is that you can add additional location not provided natively from Microsoft. I am not sure about how licensing will work in this scenario at this point in time. Read more about calling news at https://aka.ms/OperatorConnect.

There is one more interesting calling update at Microsoft Ignite, SIP Gateway. This is a service at no extra cost where you can leverage existing SIP phone investment since you can connect Cisco IP phones, Polycom VVX phones, Yealink T20 series and the cheaper AudioCodes 400 HD series. If you already have this SIP based phones you can leverage them as desk phones or shared devices. Best of all, these will show up under Devices in the Teams Admin Center.

Security updates in calls and meetings
Today Teams traffic is encrypted in transit and at rest which is detailed here. To be able to place a call you need to go through layers of identity security and conditional access. It is a very secure service where you can be confident that your calls will not get compromised. But it does not qualify as a true end-to-end encryption (E2EE) service, since you have bot services that does transcripts and cloud recordings. Personally, I did not expect Microsoft to deliver E2EE in Teams, but they just announced this at MS Ignite. It will be available for ad-hoc 1-to-1 calls initially and will later be available as an option for scheduled calls and meetings. You should expect that recordings, AI based services such as transcript and live translation, and analytics to be unavailable for these calls. The reason for this is that the call is getting encrypted at the source and decrypted at the destination, without any ability for intermediary services to bring added functionality. Voice, video and screensharing is available in such a call. E2EE will be possible to enable for individuals or groups and they can specify which calls are E2EE. A welcome addition.

Working with larger organizations and governments I spend a lot of time talking to security about how to secure meetings. Features I typically point to are lobby, attendee role, unique conference ID for each meeting and the ability to adjust meeting options before and during the meeting. Microsoft announced two additional highly requested features, chat moderation controls and Invite only meetings options.

Chat moderation is the ability to enable, disable or only enabled during meeting configuration of the chat. In addition to this organizer should be aware that if you leave the chat open for recurring meetings, people who were invited to single occurrences of a meeting, has access to the chat after the meeting. This is something we teach users about, to go in to chat and remove those who do should not be in future version of the chat. Hopefully, this feature can create a new chat per occurrence of a meeting, but that is purely speculation and needs to be investigated when the feature becomes available.

A question I get when talking to the security department is how we can know that only invited people can join the meeting. Today, the answer is, you cannot. If you have access to the meeting link, then you can join the meeting or get to the lobby. With the Invite only meeting option, it is only the addresses of those users that were directly invited that can bypass lobby. If a user tries to join the same meeting and was not invited directly, but got a copy of the meeting link, they will get to the lobby. This is useful within organizations where we often see the lobby setting of everyone in the organization can bypass lobby.

Meetings updates
As in IT Pro I do a lot of workshop, presentations, and technical handovers. When doing that using Teams meetings, it is important to keep the audience engaged and connected. Even though these are not IT Pro specific news, I wanted to highlight them. Dynamic view and standout presenter mode are welcome additions to the Teams meetings layout. Now you can have the video gallery on top of your Teams client, so that you can look more into the camera when looking at yourself or attendees in the meeting. The standout presenter mode puts you on top of your content, more like in a gamer stream, which makes it easier for you to connect with you audience when presenting content. Paired with Live Reactions, it can make for a very engaging session. Learn more here.

Management updates for calls and meetings
There are two announced features I want to call out for management. Real time telemetry for ‘in progress’ meetings and remote provisioning of Android based devices.

Real time telemetry is something a lot of IT Pros has asked for. It will empower the IT/Helpdesk to do live support during high stakes meetings. The data you will see is jitter, latency, packet loss, and frames per second for audio, video, and screen sharing. Based on this insight it is possible to take immediate action during meetings or use it as an active troubleshooting tool.

Remote provisioning of Android devices is the ability to sign into the device directly from the Teams Admin Center without physically being at the location of the device. This is a specific feature for common area phones. Read more here.

A bright future
It is interesting to see that Microsoft is constantly improving the capabilities for calling and meetings, making them more feature rich, secure, and manageable. I am looking forward to learning more details on these capabilities as soon as they become General Available.

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: FS189 - Easy, intuitive webinars with Microsoft Teams

Ragnar_Heil — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 22:33:55 GMT

Blogger: Ragnar Heil, MVP Office Apps and Services, Channel Account Manager at Quest.

Wednesday, March 3
Session code: FS189
2:00 AM - 2:30 AM CET
Speakers: Lars Johnson | Microsoft, Christina Torok | Microsoft

Microsoft starts this Ignite Session about easy, intuitive webinars with Microsoft Teams in a different and refreshing way – not looking like a typical webinar, rather than a TV News Shows. Lars Johnson, Sr Director of Microsoft Teams Marketing, is our Anchor Man for next 30 minutes and leads us to new ways of virtual engagement in the age of remote work. First funny ice breaker: "It’s been a long time since we have been able to tell the difference between weekdays and weekends.“

Joining Webinars as an attendee in many different ways with more reactions
I assume we all have faced Webinar fatigue especially since global Covid 19 pandemic started. Too many webinars were offered with too less interactions. Now you can share your reactions, it can be loving hearts, applause or constructive criticism. You can attend the event on demand or real time. You can think about joining the event from your home bike and increase your fitness.

Creating Events and Webinars as organizer
Setting up and running webinars will be just as easy as meetings in Microsoft Teams. Just add a custom attendee registration page to your meeting or webinar to manage attendance before and after any engagement. Following registration, attendees automatically receive an email confirmation for a simple join experience. In case you are using different providers for webinars and team meetings / conference calls: This is now a good time to consolidate and save money.

Christina Torok (Sr Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft) explains how to setup a registration page including:

Event details like title, date, time, abstract and Microsoft Teams Link
Teams Channel
Location
Repeating event?
Collaborative meeting note taking: yes/no
Speaker information with Name and short CV
Registration fields like First Name, Last Name and Email
Custom questions
Requires registration: None/people in your organization and guests/everyone

With Teams you can organize and conduct interactive webinars for people inside and outside of your organization with up to 1,000 attendees. You are afraid that too many attendees could disturb your webinar based on Teams Meetings? Host controls such as the ability to disable attendee chat and video. If your webinar grows to over 1,000 attendees, Teams will seamlessly scale to accommodate a 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience. Due to the pandemic Microsoft has increased this number up to 20,000 attendees for a limited time.

Now PowerPoint also wants to transform your webinars with rich presentation options: Simply launch a Teams meeting and instead of opening a PowerPoint deck and sharing your screen, just pick a file under the PowerPoint Live section of the new and improved Share content in Teams. Get full control over your content, the view you see as the presenter is yours only – review notes, engage in chats, and see your audience – all in one panel view.

PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams allows attendees to access the shared content through screen readers and increases inclusion significantly. Whether you are joining via a mobile phone or 8k monitor, using low bandwidth or fiber connection, each attendee experiences is optimized for their screen type.

Analyzing Webinars as Marketing expert
After the event Marketing can see on a dashboard how many people went to the registration page, have registered and attended. Total event time and average attendee time is shown as well as list of all attendees with status, duration, join-and leave time.

Looks good so far? Maybe you are looking for deeper ways of integration into your CRM. Microsoft is offering an integration with Dynamics365.

In this session I have learned more how Bob Bejan (Corp VP, Microsoft) is looking at the future of Hybrid Events. He is responsible for the development, production and execution of global events and experiential marketing for Microsoft. Ignite 2021 is produced completely different than all previous Ignites which happened onsite. Perspectives are so much different and ways of interactions and gathering feedback changes completely. Don’t just send a feedback poll at the end of your webinar, create a story or interesting video around it.

We are going to see more much more immersive webinar experience types soon, so I highly recommend to also watch Microsoft Mesh Ignite Session – powered by VR and Augmented Reality devices like Hololens or Oculus.

New inclusive features in Microsoft Teams and more | Ignite 2021 Edition

Microsoft_Teams_team — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 19:03:53 GMT

As IT leaders, we have a responsibility to make the workplace more inclusive of the 1 billion people in the world with disabilities, by using technology developed with accessibility in mind. This week, we announced exciting new capabilities—from more flexibility in how you view, present and participate in meetings, to more voice commands, to apps that help you learn about built-in inclusive features—that will make everyone more productive and workplaces more inclusive.

Read on to learn all the ways Teams can help you work more inclusively.

Meetings
Chat & Collaboration
Devices
Platform
Microsoft 365 Announcements
Learn more and take action

Meetings

Dynamic view
With more important calls, meetings and events happening virtually, it’s important to make sure everyone can participate easily, including people with disabilities. We are happy to announce Dynamic view, which intelligently arranges the elements of your meeting for an optimal viewing experience, is coming soon to Commercial and GCC customers. As people join, turn on video, start to speak, or begin to present in a meeting, Teams auto-adjusts and personalizes your layout. For instance, with Dynamic view, meeting attendees who are deaf can pin a sign language interpreter, fit the interpreter’s video to frame, and see the interpreter alongside shared content throughout the meeting. This is a significant step forward in inclusive communication with more to come, so stay tuned!

Image Description: GIF of Teams Meeting, with a PowerPoint presented main screen (large Boeing plane), 5 circular profile pictures of attendees at bottom right, and an ASL interpreter at top right, saying ‘today we are going to talk about…’.

PowerPoint Live in Teams meetings
With PowerPoint Live in Teams, presenters can feel more confident as they present, with their slides, slide notes, meeting chat, and participant video feeds all in a single view. The ability to see the facial expressions of attendees while also sharing slides may be particularly helpful for presenters who are neurodiverse and want more information about their audience. For presenters with memory loss, having slides and slide notes in a single view will make it easier to stay on track. PowerPoint Live in Teams also makes it easier to create an inclusive meeting experience—as presenters are more easily able to acknowledge chat comments, raised hands, and reactions. PowerPoint Live in Teams also enables meeting participants to engage with shared content more flexibly. Audience members who have learning or attention disabilities can privately navigate through shared slides at their own pace, jumping back to any slide for quick reference without interrupting the meeting. People who are blind and low vision can privately both turn on a high contrast mode and use a screen reader to consume the shared slides. Presenters—don’t forget to make your PowerPoint content accessible with the Accessibility Checker built-in to PowerPoint!

Learn more: What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2021

Image Description: GIF of Teams Meeting, with a PowerPoint presented main screen (slide titled ‘Key Sustainability Purchasing Drivers’) using PowerPoint Live in Teams. 4 video feeds of attendees are at top right, 4 circular profile pictures of attendees middle right, and the presenter’s video bottom right. Mouse pointer moves to bottom center to toggle on ‘View slides in high contrast’. Presented slides adjust to a high contrasted black and white view.

In case you missed it

Live captions in more languages for live events — Translate spoken Japanese, Korean, French, French-Canadian, Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Hindi-Indian, Portuguese-Brazilian, and Russian into captions in up to 50 different languages. Event organizers can select up to 6 captioning languages to make available to attendees, to create a live event experience that is more inclusive! Now available for Commercial and GCC customers.
Less background noise, please! — AI-based noise suppression in meetings is now Generally Available in Teams for desktop. When you turn on background noise suppression, you make it easier for your colleagues to hear you, even when you are in a noisy environment. This is especially helpful for people who are hard of hearing, are neurodiverse or have attention disabilities like ADHD/ADD.
Stay on track and on time — End-of-meeting notifications let participants in a meeting know when there are five minutes remaining in the scheduled meeting time. These reminders may be particularly helpful for people with attention disabilities like ADHD/ADD.

Chat & Collaboration

Enhancements to the Teams mobile experience

Yesterday we announced updates to the Teams mobile app that include the ability to automatically switch to dark theme when you set your device to dark, a new search experience with suggestions, and the ability to pin chats, among other exciting enhancements. These capabilities will make it easier for people who are blind and low vision to use a screen reader and magnification to find content, keep it at the top of the feed, and view it in a way that is comfortable and accessible. These features are coming to iOS first, followed by Android.

In case you missed it

Chat in multiple languages easily — Inline message translation gives all your team members a voice, and facilitates global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat. Now available in the Teams mobile app for Android, as well as for Teams Desktop for DOD. Additionally, with language-aware proofing, you can write messages in multiple languages, and now see spellchecking relevant to the language you’re writing with at that time. Now available in the Teams desktop app.
More easily personalize your notification settings — With a redesigned Notifications settings section in your Profile, in addition to notification settings in the channel header, now you can more easily manage your attention and keep track of the activity you care most about. Personalized notification settings can be particularly helpful for people with attention disabilities like ADHD/ADD, and for people with mental health disabilities. Available for Commercial and GCC customers.
Confidently step away and recharge — Now, with the ability to set presence status duration, you can let your team know when you are stepping away from Teams and for how long. Proactively communicating work-life boundaries can be particularly helpful for people making time to manage mental health.

Devices

Microsoft Teams Intelligent speaker

Microsoft Teams intelligent speaker can identify and differentiate the voices of up to 10 people talking in a Microsoft Teams Room. These speakers were created in partnership with EPOS and Yealink, and allow attendees who are following along with captions and transcripts to see speaker attribution for the remarks made by those in the meeting room. To enable privacy and security, users are in full control and can turn speaker attribution on or off at any time. Whether you are working remotely or following the meeting in the Microsoft Teams Room, you can now create a more inclusive meeting experience. Teams intelligent speaker will be available summer 2021.

Image Description: Image of two black cylinder-shaped Intelligent speakers side by side. Left speaker with the “Yealink” logo underneath, and right speaker with EPOS logo underneath.

New Cortana commands on Teams display

As questions come up throughout your day, you can use voice to find the information you need with Cortana in Teams Display. Now, you can ask things like: “What’s the time and weather in New York?” or “How many rupees are in a dollar?” just with voice, and without needing to disrupt the flow of work. Voice capabilities like these provide people with mobility and learning disabilities another way to be productive that doesn’t require typing.

Learn more: What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2021

In case you missed it

Live captions in Teams Rooms — Meeting participants joining from a Teams Room can now view live captions in a Teams meeting. In-room participants can turn live captions on or off from the center of room console. Captions will appear at the bottom of the meeting experience shown on the front of room display.
Cortana in Teams Rooms and Teams Displays — In-room meeting attendees can now use voice assistance powered by Cortana to join and end their meetings without touch. Using natural language, people can simply state “Cortana, join/end my meeting” for a seamless hands-free experience. These capabilities are available in Teams Rooms for Windows. You can also use voice commands to manage your daily tasks, with Cortana in Teams Displays. You can make requests like: "What is on my calendar today?", "Join my next meeting” or "Share this document with Megan".

Platform

Accessibility Bot by Future Worx on Teams App Store
Accessibility Bot is a free chatbot designed to help users learn about the Microsoft accessibility features built into the tools they use every day. In addition to the many people who have permanent accessibility needs, there are many additional people who have situational or temporary needs. For instance, someone may be in a noisy environment and need live captions during a meeting, or juggling work and childcare and could benefit from blurring the background. Regardless of the situation, users can ask the Accessibility bot questions like – “what is Immersive Reader?”—all from within the familiar Teams chat experience, and use the inclusive chat capabilities to more easily read responses. The bot currently has knowledge to support with hearing, mental health, mobility, neurodiversity and vision needs, and covers Microsoft 365, Windows 10 and the Edge browser.

Future Worx, developer of the Accessibility Bot, is a Microsoft partner that specializes in Employee Engagement.

Learn more: Accessibility Bot by FutureWorx

Image Description: GIF of the Teams App Store, with the Accessibility Bot’s summary page center screen. Shows video called “Future Worx’s Accessibility bot”, with a paragraph description underneath titled “Accessibility Bot for Microsoft Tools by FutureWorx”. Screen changes to show full screen view of a Teams chat with the Accessibility Bot. User chats ‘Hello’, and Accessibility Bot responds saying the user can ask a question or see the main menu.

In case you missed it

Easily design accessible apps for Teams — The new Microsoft Teams UI Kit and Microsoft Teams UI Library helps you as a designer, product manager, or developer quickly understand the key design considerations for making high quality Teams apps that users will love! Simplify the design and development process by using these new templates and tools that serve as the building blocks for the interface and experience you’re looking to create. All the templates and components are responsive, theme-able, and completely adhere to Teams’ design and accessibility guidelines! Learn more: Guides and tools to design your Microsoft Teams app effectively
ADI bot by Akari Solutions on Teams App Store — Akari Diversity and Inclusion (ADI) is a free chatbot built to help organizations create inclusive cultures. Users can learn all about the Accessibility features built into Microsoft products, as well as best practices for diversity, inclusion and wellbeing. Akari Solutions, developer of ADI, and the winner of the 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year - Diversity and Inclusion Changemaker Award, creates custom and IP solutions built on Microsoft Teams to change how people work, communicate, and access the technology and tools they need.

Microsoft 365 Announcements

Passwordless Authentication now Generally Available
Passwordless authentication not only simplifies the user experience but also strengthens your security posture. With expanded policies that define which authentication methods specific users or groups can use, to new reporting capabilities that allow you to see the usage and adoption of passwordless authentication methods across your organization, it’s never been easier to go passwordless at scale. The ability to use authenticators, rather than complex and everchanging passwords, can be especially helpful for people with memory loss or learning disabilities that make recall, spelling and typing more difficult.

Learn more: Identity at Microsoft Ignite: Strengthening Zero Trust defenses in the era of hybrid work

In case you missed it

Viva Insights – In a time when nearly 70% of employees report higher stress levels, and more than half report elevated levels of anxiety, supporting employee wellbeing is of the utmost importance. Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. It brings new personal wellbeing experiences, insights, and recommended actions into the flow of people’s work in Microsoft Teams. You can download the Viva Insights app for Teams now.
Hear documents read aloud — For people with learning disabilities like dyslexia, it sometimes can be easier to hear a document read aloud. Now, you can use Read Aloud on Android phones to have documents read aloud, with new voices that offer a more natural and pleasant listening experience. You can easily pause and resume Read Aloud as well as adjust the voice speed.

Learn more and take action!

Join us in May for the Ability Summit – Mark your calendars and join us at the Ability Summit, May 5 – 6, 2021. The Ability Summit is a two-day, free digital event that brings together people with disabilities, technology leaders, accessibility professionals and allies to Imagine, Build, Include, and Empower the future of disability inclusion and accessibility. We hope to see you there!

Learn from other organizations – Learn more about how enterprises and educational institutions are using technology to build an accessible workplace.

Fannie Mae, a financial services company focused on making mortgages and affordable rental housing possible for millions of people in America, is seeing Microsoft 365 play a crucial role in digital transformation and building an inclusive workplace that helps all employees reach their potential.
Sodexo, a food services and facilities management company committed to improving Quality of Life, is helping employees work independently by building digital accessibility skills using Microsoft 365 as its communications and collaboration platform.
Dell Technologies, a leading hardware, software and services provider, uses Microsoft Teams and the accessibility features built in to work remotely in a way that is inclusive of employees with disabilities and their multicultural, globally diverse team.
Imperial College London, a 43,000-person university, made the Accessibility Bot by FutureWorx available in Teams to all students and staff, and has seen the bot provide necessary support to people who may not feel comfortable asking for help with accessibility needs.

Introducing Operator Connect and more Teams Calling updates

Microsoft_Teams_team — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 17:49:07 GMT

Voices matter - and we think that Microsoft Teams Calling is a powerful way to use those voices to strengthen connections and build new ones. The hallway chats and informal customer conversations that we used to rely upon now need to happen digitally, reinforcing the need for a modern and seamless calling solution. In fact, we recently announced that Teams users placed over 650 million calls in October, up 11 fold from just a few months earlier in March 2020.

We are committed to building a modern calling solution that is simple and quick to deploy – for example with innovations like Operator Connect, which we are excited to introduce today. The updates shared here represent just some of our on-going efforts, and you can watch the Microsoft Teams Calling session at Ignite to hear more. We’ll continue to share further details here, so be sure to check back often.

Simple and seamless options to add PSTN calling to Teams

Operator Connect

Our commitment to creating a best-in-class and modern calling experience begins with the deployment of Teams Calling, including if you want to enable calling with your own operator, as many organizations do. To that end, we are very excited to announce Operator Connect, a new operator-managed service for bringing PSTN calling to Teams. Operator Connect makes it simple to bring your operator to Teams if they are participating in the program, and it unlocks several important benefits:

Leverage existing operator contracts: Keep your preferred operator and contracts, while enabling a modern calling experience in Teams
Simple and quick to deploy: It can take just minutes to connect to your operator and assign phone numbers to users – all from the Teams Admin Center. You do not need to be an expert in voice to deploy calling to Teams
Operator-managed infrastructure: PSTN calling services and Session Border Controllers (SBCs) are managed by operators, saving on hardware purchase and management
Enhanced support and reliability: Operators provide tech support and shared service level agreements to improve support service, while direct peering powered by Azure creates a 1:1 network connection for enhanced reliability

When Operator Connect launches, Admins will be able to open the “Operators” tab in the Teams Admin Center, where qualified operators will be listed. Admins can then select their preferred operator and connect calling services, at which point they can acquire phone numbers from these operators and assign them to their users.

Operator Connect will enter public preview next quarter with the initial wave of partners which includes BT, Deutsche Telekom, Intrado, NTT, Nuwave, Orange Business Services, Pure IP, Rogers, Swisscom, TATA, Telenor, and Verizon. We have been working in close partnership with these operators to create a seamlessly integrated experience, and we will add additional partners to the Operator Connect program. We will continue to share more details as Operator Connect approaches general availability, so please check back regularly!

Microsoft Teams Calling Plans market expansion

Microsoft Teams Calling Plans provide a quick and simple way to deploy calling in Microsoft Teams with no on-premises equipment. With Microsoft Teams Calling Plans, you can procure and assign phone numbers to users right from the Teams Admin Center in a matter of minutes.

To enable more Teams users to take advantage of Microsoft Teams Calling Plans, we are expanding availability to 8 new markets beginning in April and completing by the end of June. The new markets are New Zealand, Singapore, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Slovakia, bringing Microsoft Teams Calling Plans to 26 markets across the globe.

Direct Routing updates
As more and more of our customers are turning to Teams for their calling solution, their use of Direct Routing has expanded significantly – over just the past year, Direct Routing call minutes have grown 8-fold, and more than four times as many organizations are using Direct Routing to enable PSTN calling in Teams.

To provide organizations with choice and flexibility for their Direct Routing deployments, we are continuing to add to the list of Session Border Controllers (SBC) certified for Direct Routing, with 6 new SBCs completing certification in just the past 3 months. Additionally, to add resiliency to the most critical locations, Survivable Branch Appliance is now generally available, enabling PSTN calling in the event an outage does not allow the Teams client to directly connect to our services.

Operator Connect Conferencing

Furthermore, to enable more options for conferencing, we are announcing Operator Connect Conferencing, a new service that uses the same administrator interface as Operator Connect and allows you to add operator dial-in numbers to a Microsoft Audio Conferencing bridge.

Operator Connect Conferencing is an operator-managed service that provides the following benefits:

Bring your own operator for conferencing, for operators participating in the program: Maintain your preferred operator contracts as you migrate existing PSTN infrastructure to the cloud.
Variety of operators available at your fingertips: Diversify your PSTN infrastructure to include additional qualified operators.
Expanded geographic dial-in coverage: Additional dial-in locations available to support your multi-national needs.
Enhanced support and reliability: The tight partnership with operators provides enhanced technical support and service level agreements to address reliability.

Operator Connect Conferencing will enter private preview next quarter with the initial wave of qualified partners, which includes BT, Deutsche Telekom, Intrado, NTT, Orange Business Services, and Telenor. We have been working in close partnership with these telecom operators to create a seamlessly integrated experience and we will add more qualified operators over time. We will continue to share more details as Operator Connect Conferencing approaches general availability, so please check back regularly!

Innovative value for broad & sophisticated calling scenarios

Voice-enabled channels

Many teams tackle calling as part of their workflows, and often collaboration can yield better and faster results. Voice-enabled channels allow you to turn any Teams channel into a team-based call queue, allowing for collaboration and information sharing before, during, and after the call. This can help departments like Human Resources or IT solve important issues as a team – for example addressing new hire questions as they come in or responding to tech support requests even more quickly. By the end of March, Teams Admins will have the option to create new voice-enabled channels.

Enhanced Calls app experience
Teams is the hub for chat, collaboration, meetings, apps, and workflows, and the enhanced Calls app brings the most important calling elements – the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts, and settings – into a single location, making it easier to stay connected in the flow of your work. Teams users will see this new experience in their Calls app starting in March.

Certified Contact Center and Compliance Recording solutions
Teams is an extensible platform, and that applies to Teams Calling as well. The Teams Contact Center certification program and Compliance Recording certification program can help customers feel confident that their preferred contact center and compliance recording solutions integrate seamlessly and reliably with Teams. We are pleased to share that Anywhere365, ComputerTalk , 8x8, and Enghouse Interactive have achieved contact center certification for their solutions. Additionally, NICE, AudioCodes, Dubber, ASC, Numonix and Verint have achieved compliance recording certification for their solutions.

Endpoint transfer
Teams makes it easy to place and receive calls from several different endpoints, including desktop and mobile devices, but sometimes you need to move locations or devices to finish your call. The new endpoint transfer capability will allow you to seamlessly move your calls between different devices, such as from your laptop to mobile phone, without any interruption in call service or quality. Endpoint transfer will be available early next quarter.

Low-data mode
Whether you want to preserve data or are just in a location with a poor or limited network connection, sometimes it’s helpful to limit the amount of data you’re using during a meeting or call that uses video. A new low data mode is now available, allowing users to cap the amount of data that will be used during Teams meeting or video calls, as well as establish different settings based on network availability so that the setting can be turned on always, or only while on cellular networks.

Bandwidth control
Many organizations have limited bandwidth capacity at locations on their network and require the ability to restrict Teams bandwidth consumption at those locations. The new bandwidth control feature will permit Teams Admins to proactively establish network bandwidth consumption for Teams clients at specific network locations – for example, a low bandwidth control limit for remote locations and higher limits for other sites. Bandwidth control capabilities will be available early next quarter.

Flexible and powerful calling endpoints

SIP Gateway
For supported SIP phone models, we are excited to introduce the preview of our SIP Gateway solution, which will enable core Teams calling functionality on legacy phones from Cisco, Poly, Yealink and AudioCodes. Capabilities may include inbound & outbound calls, call transfer, dial in/out to meetings, device-based do not disturb and voicemail indicators on devices similar to those below.

New calling form factors

Two new phones, the Yealink MP52 and AudioCodes C435, will be generally available by early April. These new form factors provide a simplified Teams phone experience with core calling functionality, at a more affordable price point. These offerings make for excellent desk phones or common area phones.

Remote deployment for common area phones
Remote deployment is now available for common area phones. Within the Teams Admin Center, IT Admins can add a phone into the device inventory using a device tag-MAC Address, which will generate a verification code that an in-room technician can input on the device. Then the phone will show the tenant ID and bring up a sign-in screen, which the same remote admin can unlock by selecting the device, applying a device code, and completing sign-in.

Teams display enhancements
There are exciting new enhancements to the Teams display experience on the Lenovo ThinkSmart View. Teams display allows users to stay in the flow of work with convenient access to collaboration updates and short cuts to their meetings and calls. We have added background replacement and live reactions to meetings as well as the ability to send quick responses and reactions to chats from the ambient screen.

Most exciting are our new Bing and Cortana integrations which allow users to fetch useful information from the internet that can help them stay prepared for their meetings and calls. Use Bing to ask questions like:

“What time is it in New York?”
“What is the weather in Seattle?”
“How many pesos are in a dollar?”

To learn more about our devices, visit aka.ms/TeamsDevices.

Device-as-a-Service expansion
We are excited to announce an expansion of our monthly financing plans offered through our 3rd party fulfillment partners into new geographies - specifically Ireland, UK, Canada, and Australia by the end of March for qualifying shopping cart orders.

Try Teams Calling for free and get support with your deployment
With all these capabilities launching, it’s important to keep in mind that Teams Calling can be rolled out in weeks – not months or years – as Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) showed by rolling out Calling globally to over 40,000 users in 4 weeks.

To learn more and get started, check out the links below for additional information and guidance:

Start with a free trial (aka.ms/e5trial for organizations ≥300 users, or aka.ms/BusinessVoiceTrial for <300 users)
Get guidance and resources from FastTrack as you roll out Teams Calling
Check out additional Teams Calling customer stories to hear how organizations from across industries are addressing critical business needs with Teams Calling

Secure and compliant collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 20:29:27 GMT

We hope you have the chance to join us virtually at Microsoft Ignite to catch all of the latest announcements. Be sure to check out our featured session, Secure and compliant collaboration with Microsoft Teams, to hear from some of our product engineering and community experts! Below is a summary of the latest Microsoft Teams announcements around security and compliance capabilities that enable safe and trustworthy online collaboration.

Microsoft Teams Multi-Geo Support
Microsoft Teams will now support Multi-Geo capabilities, similar to those already being leveraged by customers with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive Multi-Geo. Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo provides greater control to organizations over the location of specific data centers their data is stored, especially helpful for multi-national organizations. Teams Multi-Geo enables customers to store Teams core customer data at rest for end users and teams in the geo locations of their choice to help meet data residency requirements. IT administrators will utilize an end user or Microsoft 365 Group’s Preferred Data Location (PDL) AAD attribute, already leveraged by existing Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo services, to specify what geo location the data should be stored in.

All existing information protection and compliance capabilities will continue working as is with Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo. For customers who are already using Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo licensing and capabilities, Teams will be included and respect PDLs that have been set by IT automating the migration. If an end user or tenant’s multi-geo license is removed, Teams data will migrate to the tenant default geo location. For customers who have not setup and enabled Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo, there will be no impact. As a reminder, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo is designed to support data residency requirements and is not designed for performance optimization. Teams Multi-Geo will be available in Q2 2021.

End-to-end encryption option for Microsoft Teams 1:1 Calls
Today, we shared that an end-to-end encryption option for Teams 1:1 ad hoc VoIP calls will be available in preview to commercial customers planned for the first half of this year. Over the last year, we have gathered feedback from global customers, analysts, and the security community around particular industries and specific cases where end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for online collaboration might be important. To help support customer security and compliance obligations, Microsoft is planning to support E2EE for Teams 1:1 calls to provide additional option for conducting sensitive online conversations.

Organizations will have the ability to enable E2EE capabilities for 1:1 ad hoc Teams VoIP calls. In order to maintain compliance and have full discretion of how E2EE is used within the company, customers will have control of who in their organization can use this capability. E2EE for 1:1 Teams ad hoc calls can only be utilized if both the caller and callee are enabled by IT and have both opted in. As we release E2EE for Teams 1:1 calls, we will continue to learn from customers how the scenarios address their needs. We will then work to bring E2EE capabilities to online meetings later. Microsoft remains committed to helping customers address security, compliance, and privacy needs with a broad portfolio of tooling.

Meeting safety controls:
Meeting option: invite-only lobby setting
To help prevent uninvited participants from gaining access to meetings, Microsoft Teams has introduced a new lobby setting available in Teams Meeting Options where only meeting participants who were explicitly invited to the meeting can join it directly. Once this invite-only meeting option is applied by the meeting organizer, any participants who were not invited and are attempting to join the meeting will be directed to the meeting lobby. Meeting organizers can leverage this invite-only meeting option, along with applying a do-not-forward setting to the Teams meeting, to help prevent unauthorized participants from attempting to join their meeting. The Invite-only meeting option will be generally available this month.

Disable attendee video during meetings
We are excited to share that soon meeting organizers will be able to disable the video of an individual or all attendees within a meeting. This meeting safety capability, similar to hard mute, will help those running a meeting or class to have more control and better manage undesired disruptions. Disable video will be rolling out later this spring.

Meeting option: chat moderation controls
Another recent meetings option feature to help meeting organizers maintain control is the ability to moderate the meeting chat. Organizers will have the ability to determine whether meeting chat is enabled, disabled, or only enabled during the meeting. Chat moderation can be especially useful for large lectures and classroom settings where the conversation may need to be limited to during the event only. Chat moderation controls are another meeting safety tool that organizers can leverage to keep the meeting focus where they need it.

Co-authoring enabled in encrypted documents using Office Apps
Co-authoring allows multiple authors to simultaneously edit a document using different OS platforms, as well as the Office desktop apps, Office web apps, and Teams. Today we announced a new ability for multiple users to simultaneously edit an Office document that has been encrypted using Microsoft Information Protection, including auto-save. Sensitive documents will remain protected with the same sensitivity label and protection applied.

Figure 5: Apply encryption protection settings for files and emails with sensitivity labels

By leveraging sensitivity labels integration with Azure Rights Management service, we can protect and encrypt a document to restrict access to that content to only authorized viewers. This helps ensure that the content can only be decrypted by users authorized by the label’s encryption settings and it remains encrypted wherever it travels – inside or outside of the organization. Once a document is protected by a sensitivity label with encryption, the document can be shared as an attachment or by sharing the document link all while remaining encrypted. Note that IT must ensure it has enabled sensitivity labels for Office files to take advantage.

Safe Links for Microsoft Teams
Safe Links is a feature in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 that helps provide URL scanning and time-of-click verification of URLs in links shared through email messages and other locations across Office 365. We are happy to announce that Teams will now leverage the power of Safe Links to help protect end users against potential malicious sites shared through Teams conversations, group chats, and channels. IT administrators will need to create a Safe Links policy in Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and enable Safe Links for Teams to begin taking advantage of these new capabilities. Safe Links for Teams will begin rolling out later this month.

Reinforcing our commitment to secure collaboration
Microsoft remains committed to helping customers protect content and meet compliance obligations by offering a broad portfolio of tooling. We are building on top of our industry standard secure platform, expanding our advanced security capabilities as highlighted by these latest announcements around helping customers meet data residency requirements, adding more meeting safety and moderation controls, and providing an additional option for conducting sensitive online conversations.

Microsoft 365 supports encryption in transit and at rest which provides multiple layers of encryption to work together to secure data. For organizations who may need more control over key arrangement requirements due to compliance obligations, Customer Key allows an organization to provide and control encryption keys – now in public preview for Teams!

Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities for Adaptive Card content
With Teams being the hub for collaboration, it brings together apps and services that we also need to help ensure are protected and handled appropriately. More than 70% of the apps today generate card content in Teams conversations, much of which is business communication that falls under the purview of regulations as is with Teams chat and file content. To help organizations maintain compliance, we happily announced that Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities are available for Adaptive Card content generated through apps in Teams messages! Legal hold, eDiscovery, audit, and retention capabilities are built into the platform and will be available for all apps including first party, third party, and line-of-business apps with no additional work from developers required to enable.

Security monitoring integration with Azure Sentinel and Secure Score
To help IT and secops teams proactively detect intrusions and respond appropriately, Teams integrates with Azure Sentinel to deliver intelligent security analytics and intelligence across the enterprise. Azure Sentinel collects event data across users, devices, apps, and infrastructure for your tenant applying AI to detect threats, investigate what’s going on, and can even automate your response using some simple yet powerful Playbooks. For instance, if Sentinel identifies a user account completing a large amount of suspicious activity - like deleting a lot of channels or adding a new external account to exfiltrate a bunch of data and then quickly removing that user to try to hide what happened - Sentinel can detect these items, automatically open a ticket, post an alert to your Teams security operations channel, and give your secops team ability to take action right away or investigate further. Additionally, we’ve recently included Teams integration with Microsoft Secure Score to provide recommendations on how to strengthen your organization’s security posture. You’ll see us adding more Teams configuration best practices to Microsoft Secure Score over time.

What's New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2021

Microsoft_Teams_team — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 22:07:52 GMT

Today at Ignite, we are announcing innovation coming to Microsoft Teams to help people connect, collaborate, and accomplish more together!

This blog post provides details for all the Microsoft Teams announcements from Ignite. If you are looking for a quick high-level summary, please read this blog post on our Microsoft 365 blog.

Here’s what’s new in:

Meetings

Webinars

Chat and collaboration

Security, compliance, and privacy

Calling

Devices

Power Platforms and custom development

Management

Check out more announcements from Ignite

Meetings

Dynamic view
Dynamic view intelligently arranges the elements of your meeting for an optimal viewing experience. As people join, turn on video, start to speak, or begin to present in a meeting, Teams auto-adjusts and personalizes your layout. Dynamic view is rolling out soon.

View switcher
The new view switcher in the top bar of your Teams meeting allows you to control how you see the meeting content. You may prefer to interact naturally with your colleagues and without visual distractions using Together mode. With Gallery at top, all video feeds display at to the top of your meeting window, making it easier to have a more natural eye gaze with others. Focus hides all video feeds and puts the attention fully on the shared content and Full screen can help remove other desktop distractions. View switcher will be available soon.

Presenter mode
Use Presenter mode to step up the production level of your presentations and customize how your video feed and content appear to your audience. Our first mode, Standout, shows your video feed as a silhouette in front of the shared content. Reporter places content as a visual aid above your shoulder just like a news story. Side-by-side displays your video feed next to your content. Presenter mode will be available soon.

PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams
PowerPoint Live in Teams gives presenters control and confidence, while providing a more interactive and inclusive experience to your audience. As a presenter, you can now lead meetings with a single view of your notes, slides, meeting chat, and participants. Attendees can also personalize their experience by navigating the content at their own pace or using the screen reader to consume content, allowing people with vision disabilities to follow along with the presentation more easily. PowerPoint Live in Teams is available now. Learn more.

Webinars
Attendee registration and email confirmations
Soon, setting up and running webinars will be just as easy as meetings in Teams. Easily add a custom attendee registration page to your meeting or webinar to manage attendance before and after any engagement. Following registration, attendees automatically receive an email confirmation for a simple join experience.

1,000-person interactive webinars with moderation control
Beginning this month, Microsoft Teams supports interactive meetings and webinars for up to 1,000 attendees, including rich presentation options, live reactions, and moderation controls to disable chat, audio, and video for the attendees of the event.

20,000-person view-only broadcasts
Once your webinar grows to over 1,000 attendees, Teams will seamlessly scale to accommodate a 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience, including host moderation control that automatically disables attendees’ audio and video to prevent accidental presentation interruptions. And during this time of increased remote work, take advantage of even larger 20,000-person broadcasts through the end of this year. This feature is available this month.

Attendee reporting
Following your webinar, you can use reporting to understand attendee participation such as who attended and how long they participated. Download an attendee report to review, or use data to produce your own custom reports. Attending reporting will available to download this month, and additional reporting capabilities within Teams will be available next quarter.

Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 event experience
Today, Dynamics 365 Marketing customers can deliver integrated marketing campaigns using the robust event capabilities in Teams and the attendee management experiences from Dynamics 365 Marketing. And coming soon, following a Teams webinar, customers can connect to Dynamics 365 Marketing to deliver a range of marketing activities, from basic follow-up communications to more sophisticated relationship marketing campaigns. And if you use another marketing platform, Teams makes it easy to bring your event contacts with you. Learn More about generally available features..

These new capabilities will be available in Microsoft 365 E3/E5, Microsoft 365 A3/A5 and Microsoft 365 Government G3/G5 plans. Additionally, Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Microsoft 365 Business Premium plans will include all the features above for 300 attendees.

Chat and Collaboration
Microsoft Teams Connect
Teams Connect makes it easy to share channels with anyone, internal or external to your organization. The shared channel will appear within an individual’s primary Teams tenant alongside other teams and channels, making it easy for everyone to access it in their workflow. In the shared workspace, you can leverage Teams rich collaboration capabilities: chat, meet, call, share and co-author documents in real-time. Admins have access to granular controls, allowing their organization to stay in control of how external users access data and information. Teams Connect is available today in private preview and will roll out broadly later this calendar year.

Teams and Dynamics 365 business process experience
Stay in the flow of work with new Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, and Teams connected experiences. Take advantage of Teams capabilities like chatting, sharing documents, and managing meeting and webinar invites without leaving the Dynamics 365 workspace. You can also securely access, update, and share Dynamics 365 records from within Microsoft Teams. These features will be rolling out in April.

Learn more in the Dynamics 365 announcement blog.

Task publishing checklist and editing capabilities
Task publishing enables corporate teams to create and publish tasks, for example to all frontline locations and other configurable attributes of a distributed workforce. Now, corporate teams can add a checklist to the tasks they publish, enabling them to include rich details on what needs to get done within each task and drive deeper clarity from top down. Corporate teams can also edit published tasks without having to recall the entire task list. These features will be available later this month. Learn more.

Approvals app updated with templates, attachment capabilities, and markdown support
Approvals in Microsoft Teams enables you to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from your workflow. Starting in April, new out-of-the-box and customizable templates will provide a repeatable structure for common approvals—like requesting time off or paid leave. Coming later this month, you’ll be able to attach files directly from Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint, as well as attach a generic link for content that is hosted outside of Microsoft 365, so your request will always have the latest content. Finally, this month we are also adding full Markdown support in both adaptive cards and the details view, so you can ensure all your approvals are formatted correctly for all your approval processes.

Teams mobile experience enhancements
This month, we’re announcing several new capabilities to enhance the mobile experience. First, the mobile app will have an updated visual look and feel that includes new headers, icons, and styling along with the ability to automatically switch to dark theme when you set your device appearance setting to dark. Other updates include the ability to access files stored in Teams while offline, a new search experience with suggestions, the ability to pin chats, and an expanded library of emojis and the ability to trim GIFs directly in the Teams app. These features are coming to iOS first, followed by Android.

Security, compliance, and privacy
End-to-end encryption option for Teams 1:1 VoIP calls
Microsoft Teams will support an option to use end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for ad hoc 1:1 Teams VoIP calls, providing an additional option for conducting sensitive online conversations. To support customer security and compliance requirements, IT will have full control of who can use E2EE in the organization. E2EE for Teams 1:1 VoIP calls will be available to commercial customers in preview in the first half of this calendar year, expanding support for online meetings later. Learn more.

Teams Multi-Geo support
To help customers meet data residency requirements, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo has been extended to include Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to specify where their Teams customer data sits, down to the team and end user. Teams Multi-Geo will be available in Q2 2021.

Disable attendee video during meetings
Disable video will allow a meeting organizer to disable the video of an individual or all attendees. As a meeting safety capability, disable video can help organizers and educators running meetings or classes have more control to better manage undesired disruptions. Similar to hard mute, once an attendee has had their video disabled, they cannot override the organizer. Disable video will be rolling out later this year.

Invite only meeting options
A new lobby setting will be available in Teams meeting options where only meeting participants who were explicitly invited to the meeting are able to join directly. Once applied, any participants who were not invited directly will be directed to the lobby where they will wait to be admitted. Invite only will be rolling out later this month.

Safe Links for Teams
Safe Links helps protect your business against malicious sites when people click links in Office apps. Safe Links for Teams will be rolling out later this month.

Co-author in encrypted docs using Office Apps
Multiple users can now simultaneously edit an Office document that has been encrypted using Microsoft Information Protection, including using auto-save. Co-authoring in encrypted docs is supported through the Office apps, Office Web Apps, and Teams and is available now!

Calling
Operator Connect
Operator Connect is a new way for customers to simply and quickly enable PSTN calling for Teams, using services from non-Microsoft telephony operators. Administrators can select their desired operator in the Teams Admin Center, and provision phone numbers to their users in just hours, with no required hardware. Operator-managed technical support and service level agreements are available to help with deployment and meet operational requirements. Operator Connect will enter public preview later this year. Learn more.

Operator Connect Conferencing
Operator Connect Conferencing allows you to add non-Microsoft telephony operator dial-in numbers to a Microsoft Audio Conferencing bridge. You can maintain your preferred non-Microsoft telephony operator relationships, diversify your PSTN infrastructure to include additional non-Microsoft telephony operators, and take advantage of expanded geographic dial-in coverage. Operator-managed technical support and service level agreements are available to help with deployment and meet operational requirements. Operator Connect Conferencing will enter private preview next quarter. Learn more.

Microsoft Calling Plan expansion
Microsoft Teams Calling plans provide a fast and simple way to deploy calling in Microsoft Teams with no on-premises equipment. We are expanding our geographic coverage to eight new markets beginning next month and completing by end of June 2021. New markets include New Zealand, Singapore, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Slovakia, meaning that customers in 26 markets can now use Microsoft-provided calling plans to place and receive PSTN calls in Teams. Learn more.

Contact Center and Compliance Recording certified solutions
Contact Center and Compliance Recording certification programs help ensure the reliable and seamless integration of contact center and compliance recording solutions with Microsoft Teams. This month, we are announcing that Anywhere365, ComputerTalk, Enghouse, and 8x8 have achieved contact center certification for their solutions. Additionally, NICE, AudioCodes, Dubber, ASC, Numonix, and Verint have achieved compliance recording certification for their solutions. Learn more about these certified contact center and certified compliance recording solutions.

Low data mode
Whether you want to preserve data or are just in a location with a poor or limited network connection, sometimes it’s helpful to limit the amount of data you’re using during a video call. A new low data mode is now available, allowing users to cap the amount of data that will be used during Teams video calls as well as establish different settings based on network availability so that the setting can be turned on always, or only while on cellular networks.

Devices
New gallery views now available in Microsoft Teams Rooms
In a Teams Room, we want everyone to feel included, and that starts with being able to see people clearly, especially those joining the meeting from home. We’ve brought new video gallery views to the room, including Together Mode and large gallery. And whether the room has one screen or two, you’ll be able to see meeting content and people joining remotely at the same time. New gallery views on Teams Rooms are available today.

Intelligent speakers for Microsoft Teams Rooms

We’re also announcing new Microsoft Teams Intelligent speaker that can identify and differentiate the voices of up to 10 people talking in a Microsoft Teams Room. These speakers were created in partnership with EPOS and Yealink, and allow attendees to use the transcript to follow along or capture actions, by knowing who in the room said what. Whether you are working remotely or following the meeting in the conference room, you can effectively see who said what during the meeting. To enable privacy and security, users are in full control and can turn attribution on or off at any time.

Teams panels
Microsoft Teams panels is a space and time management solution powered by a native Teams experience running on a compact digital display, built in partnership with Crestron and Yealink. It comes with vibrant color-coded LED indicators, you can determine space availability from a distance, while the intuitive and easy to read UI presents space and meeting information so you can confirm you’re in the right place at the right time. If you have an ad hoc meeting, you can book it directly from the panel and instantly reserve a room when you need it. Teams panels are now available.

Microsoft Teams panels by Yealink and Crestron.

New functionality for Teams display

This month, we’re announcing several new features for Teams display. Now, when joining a Teams meeting from the Teams display, you will now be able to change your background to any of the existing Teams supplied images. You can also now express live reactions in a meeting to show applause, humor, appreciation, and other sentiments from the Teams display. We’ve also added quick responses and reactions for incoming messages on the ambient screen. Finally, you can now ask Cortana questions like “What’s the time and weather in New York?” using voice on the Lenovo Thinksmart View.

New peripherals certified for Teams
Our portfolio of devices certified for Teams meetings & calling is growing. The Video Conferencing Monitor & Studio P21 from Dell and Poly are the first monitors to integrate web cameras, speakerphones and microphones certified for Teams. The Studio P21 even includes lighting, perfect for helping users present with confidence. Our first video bar certified for Teams is also available, the Studio P15 from Poly, which can be mounted over an existing screen to create a high-definition collaboration endpoint. Finally, new web cameras from Yealink (UVC20) and Aver (Cam 130) help to broaden our portfolio. The Cam 130 also integrates adjustable lighting, so users can be seen well no matter what their environment looks like.

Device-as-a-service (DaaS) expansion
The device-as-a-service (DaaS) monthly financing plans will be extended to additional markets later this month by our Teams marketplace reseller partners. New markets include UK, Australia, Ireland, and Canada. All the products in our portfolio today, pending regional availability, will be available for the offer with qualifying shopping carts. These will be available by the end of March 2021.

Custom development and Power Platform
Teams interoperability with Azure Communication Services
Now in public preview, we’re excited to announce Teams interoperability with Azure Communications Services. Use Azure Communications Services to deliver a better customer experience by easily connecting your employees who use Microsoft Teams with users of a custom-built app via voice, video, or chat. Learn more.

App customization and branding
Now you can customize app properties like app name, description, icons, and more to deliver a branded app experience right within Teams. This feature is now available in the Teams Admin Center.

Teams automation capabilities
Later this month, you will be able to create an action from a message, enabling you to make a Power Automate workflow directly from the message on the spot. We’re also adding a new automation category in the Teams app store full of new Power Automate templates, providing an easy starting point for your automation workflows.

Updates to Dataverse for Teams limits and upgrades
We are increasing the Dataverse for Teams environment limit for larger tenants from the current 500 to 10,000. Also, you will now be able to seamlessly upgrade your Dataverse for Teams environments to take advantage of the full premium license capabilities—your existing apps and data are automatically ready to go. Learn more.

Management

Secure and scale your meeting rooms with ease using Teams Rooms Managed Services
We are announcing a new AI-driven service that delivers proactive Teams Rooms management. The new service uses Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to provide advanced threat protection capabilities that can detect incidents, vulnerabilities, and missing security KBs. The service will take action based on these detections to apply necessary updates, keeping your rooms secure and ready to go. We have also added the ability to detect developing incidents based on complex patterns seen across multiple signals over time. The service will then take proactive steps to remediate on your behalf, to remove disruptions. Learn more.

Remote device provisioning
We are simplifying the experience of setting up Teams Android devices remotely from the Teams Admin Center. Remote provisioning eliminates the need to physically handle devices to sign in. Instead, once the MAC address is added in the Teams Admin Center, technicians just need to install the device, connect to the network, and enter a verification code. After that, IT admins can successfully completely the provisioning remotely.

Real-time telemetry
The new real-time telemetry for meetings enables IT admins and helpdesk to troubleshoot problems during meetings or the events for quick resolution. The data is generated in the Teams Admin Center reports and meetings reports, and provides detailed information around different network parameters like jitter, packet loss, latency, and frames per second—all while using audio, video, and screensharing session. This functionality will ship in the first half of the calendar year.

Anonymous user usage reports
While all Teams reporting can only be viewed by approved roles, we are adding an extra layer of data privacy to protect user data even more. Now, you have the option to anonymize user data, protecting user privacy while viewing, downloading, sharing, and accessing the Teams usage report data. Once enabled, personally identifiable information like username, email addresses, and Active Directory IDs will be anonymized. This capability will be available by the end of March.

Teams user usage report in Teams client
Teams user usage report in the Power BI analytic hub provides users with a view into their Teams activities and usage. You can generate insights and metrics on a per-team and cross-team basis to understand a user’s interaction with peers and across the organization. The reports are generated with privacy in mind; individual users can view their own data. This reporting capability will be available by end of March.

App risk evaluation
Coming soon, Teams admins will be able to view the security, compliance, and data privacy details for apps coming from Microsoft Cloud App Security. This will help Teams admins save time on security reviews and enable more focused selection-based security specifications, resulting in increased app quality. This capability will be rolling out this year.

Streamline the experience of managing guest users
Last month, we turned on guest access by default to simplify an inclusive meeting experience. This month, we are adding scheduled access reviews for guests across all Teams and Groups by default. The system will automatically schedule periodic guest access reviews across Teams, delivering better identity security hygiene.

Policy enhancements in Teams Admin Center
New custom policy packages will empower Teams admins to configure their own set of policy packages tailored to users with similar roles in their organization. We are also adding the capability to assign policy package to a group so you can assign multiple policies to a group of users. These policies enhancements will be available during March. Learn more.

Check out more announcements from Ignite
Microsoft Viva
Last month we introduced Microsoft Viva, the new employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights seamlessly into the Microsoft 365 apps that you use every day, empowering people and teams to be their best from wherever they work. Today we’re excited to announce that the desktop experience for Viva Connections will begin rolling out to all customers as part of their existing SharePoint license. Starting in April, the Viva Learning module will begin rolling out in public preview. Finally, the Viva Insights virtual commute experience and the new Home tab will be available starting in April. To learn more about these updates, please visit the Microsoft Viva Blog.

Before you leave, be sure to check out all the great Teams sessions and content from Ignite and read more about what’s new in these other Teams blogs:

Thank you all for reading and being a part of our Microsoft Teams Community. Your feedback has been critical in the development of Microsoft Teams and we wouldn’t have reached this point without it. What was your favorite announcement from today?

Manage meeting space availability with Microsoft Teams Panels

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 22:55:08 GMT

In the new Hybrid Workplace, providing the right digital tools to connect and support employees wherever they are is essential. It supports productivity, engagement, safety, and collaboration. As companies begin to reopen their offices, and conference rooms and meeting spaces become busy again, optimizing how they are utilized will be key to everyone’s success.

Microsoft Teams Panels were announced last October at Ignite 2020 as a new category of devices. They provide a space and time management solution powered by a native Teams experience, running on a compact digital display that can be mounted virtually anywhere. Today, we’re pleased to announce that they’re now generally available.

Supporting the Hybrid Workplace with the right devices in the right places
With Teams Panels, employees can book an available room on the spot or find another time slot and reserve it right from the panel. With vibrant, color-coded LED indicators, it's easy to determine space availability from a distance. And, the intuitive and easy-to-read UI presents space and meeting information, so you can confirm you’re in the right place at the right time.

A popular feature available now is the ad hoc meeting scheduler. Let’s say you and a colleague need to jump on a quick client call. Simply go to the Teams Panel outside a meeting space. If the time slot is not booked, it will appear green. Just tap the screen to instantly book it and the room is yours for the time selected. Teams Panels use the Exchange calendar for the booking of the room, so users can have insight in the meeting space free or busy status at any time.

Teams Panels work with a range of devices
When paired with Microsoft Teams Rooms or Surface Hub devices, users can take advantage of connected device experiences, like booking an ad-hoc Teams meeting on the Panel and joining the same ad-hoc meeting on a Teams Rooms or Surface Hub device.

And while the best end-to-end experience is pairing a Teams panel with another Teams device or Teams Room configuration, you can add a panel outside of any meeting space, allowing users to schedule any room through Outlook or right from the panel itself. All Teams Panels can be centrally provisioned, updated, and monitored from Microsoft Teams Admin Center.

In the coming months, four powerful new features will roll out:

Room Capacity Warning leverages select in-room cameras to detect when the maximum people allowed per room is reached.

Nearby Rooms lets employees view the building floor plan and book another room when a space is unavailable.

Room Check-in Notification sends a message to the in-room display that people in the next meeting are waiting outside.

Remove Unused Scheduled Room identifies and allows for the removal of ‘ghost’ meetings to free up unused meeting space time slots.

Teams Panels are currently available from our partner Crestron and Yealink will release theirs in April, with additional partners to be announced later in the year. Our certified hardware partners deliver optimized touch screen experiences with LED indicators and multiple mounting options, as well as additional sensors that integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Teams.

There are two ways to license Teams Panels:

Pair each panel with an existing Microsoft Teams Room (the Standard and Premium licenses includes peripherals)
Purchase a Teams Meeting Room license for each panel installation configured with standalone hardware.

Your Guide to Microsoft Teams @ Microsoft Ignite Spring 2021

Microsoft_Teams_team — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:49:21 GMT

Microsoft Spring Ignite is just around the corner and we’d like to share a preview of what you’ll see from Microsoft Teams at this event. This spring we will be focused on external collaboration, meetings, and digital events and webinars. We’ve created sessions that span the breadth of Teams to give you a view into our product capabilities, answer your questions, and provide insights into how your organization can create an even better hybrid workplace with Microsoft Teams.

Featured Sessions
To kick off the event, we will be presenting our Modern Work and Teams featured sessions. Learn from leaders across the Teams business, and get an in-depth view of our product vision, the latest capabilities, and upcoming releases.

The Hybrid Workplace - Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, Modern Work
The Latest Innovations with Microsoft Teams - Nicole Herskowitz, General Manager, Microsoft Teams Marketing
Secure and Compliant Collaboration with Microsoft Teams – John Gruszczyk, Product Marketing Manager; and Mansoor Malik, Principal General Product Manager
Easy, Intuitive Webinars with Microsoft Teams: Virtual Engagement in the Age of Remote Work – Lars Johnson, Sr. Director, Microsoft Teams Marketing; and Christina Torok, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Ask the Expert sessions
If you’re looking to engage with Teams product and engineering experts, join an “Ask the Expert” session following our featured sessions. “Ask the Expert” is a place to get your questions answered and hear directly from subject matter experts. Space is limited so make sure to add these to your calendar ASAP.

Additionally, explore our on-demand sessions offering you a deeper dive into a variety of key topics. See our digital brochure below for the full list where you can take advantage of all of our sessions at any time.

Resources
Below is a list of resources so you can learn more now or bookmark to reference later:

Register for Microsoft Ignite and start building your event schedule with Teams sessions.
Check out all our Teams sessions at: https://aka.ms/TeamsSessions to view videos and join the conversation.
Follow Microsoft Teams on Twitter to stay up to date with the latest Teams @ Ignite news.

Teams Sessions Digital Brochure
Click the session titles to access sessions:

What we’ve been learning about using Microsoft Teams for Virtual Consultations

TomScottModality — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 16:00:00 GMT

At Modality Systems, I've been managing our virtual consultation service, OneConsultation, since 2018, and whilst before the Covid-19 pandemic, video consultations and telemedicine were used in specific services and use cases, it was never considered a realistic alternative way of delivering healthcare services for the masses.

Virtual consultations gain traction
The crisis has brought necessity, innovation, and a complete change of thinking – which I think is here to stay.

And it must be here to stay. Offering virtual consultations, through Microsoft Teams – or any vendor for that matter – is crucial for a number of reasons. And none of them are related to the pandemic.

Virtual consultations solve the following problems:

Lack of patient mobility
No access to transport
Fear of hospitals
Fear of infection
Unable to take time off from work

Initiatives from vendors have certainly helped.

Many UK National Health Service (NHS) trusts have adopted Teams, for instance, thanks to the offer from Microsoft enabling NHS staff to use Teams for free during the Coronavirus outbreak.

This has enabled staff and patients to get used to video calls internally whilst working from home which has made the adoption of virtual consultations a lot quicker.

What is a virtual consultation?
You might also hear virtual consultations referred to as remote consultations or online consultations. Ultimately, these are all the same.

Virtual consultations provide healthcare providers with an alternate method of diagnosing and treating patients. By switching to virtual consultations, clinicians, doctors, and patients benefit from accessibility improvements, fewer cancellations, and faster appointments.

Most virtual consultation systems need tailoring for the specific needs of the healthcare sector. Customisation can assist with the fact that patients are often vulnerable and struggle with technology.

Healthcare appointments rarely run to time so being able to offer a simple waiting room experience rather than rearranging email-based calendar appointments has proven beneficial to us.

Clinicians can simplify the join experience even further by sending patients a SMS message contain a link directly to the consultation. They just then tap that link to join.

Most consultations are also one-to-one and highly confidential. Security is therefore vital, as is the ability for healthcare providers to connect with patients from their smartphone, laptop, or tablet with just one click.

Rapid adoption of virtual consultations
Of course, we only have the stats available from our own virtual consultation software, OneConsultation.

When you think about how many telehealth platforms exist, scaling our numbers to match the number of platforms is quite extraordinary.

As of the end of August 2020, OneConsultation had supported over 100,000 different consultations across 541 different services.

This amassed to 36,000+ hours of video. The average call length being around 22 minutes.

The average length of an in-person appointment is only 17 minutes. So, the intangible benefits of more and better patient-doctor time must be mentioned too.

We discuss at length the benefits of virtual consultations with all our clients. But, the most important factor is understanding how virtual consultations and virtual clinics benefit patients.

What happens next?

We continue to push and promote virtual consultations in a market heavily dominated by telemedicine platforms that don’t offer the functionality of Microsoft Teams.

While we’ve seen tremendous uptake on our virtual consultation service, the healthcare world is full of providers struggling to offer (or not able to offer) a virtual alternative to an in-person appointment.
We see no reason healthcare providers - and healthcare patients – shouldn’t have access to the same mobility and productivity benefits that a desk worker has.

Tom Scott is a Product Manager at Modality Systems. Read more about Teams virtual consultations and how Modality can help.

To write your own blog on a topic of interest as a guest blogger in the Microsoft Teams Community, please submit your idea here: https://aka.ms/TeamsCommunityBlogger

Satin: Microsoft’s latest AI-powered audio codec for real-time communications

jigardani — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:40:37 GMT

Jigar Dani, Principal PM Manager, Microsoft
Sriram Srinivasan, Principal Software Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Over a decade ago, Skype invented the Silk audio codec to transmit speech over the internet and it catalyzed the voice over internet protocol (VoIP) industry. The primary codec used in VoIP then was G.722 that required 64 kbps to transmit wide band (16 kHz) speech, Silk on the other hand offered wideband quality starting at just 14 kbps. Additionally, Silk was an adaptive variable bitrate codec that seamlessly switched from delivering narrow band (8 kHz) speech at ultra-low bandwidth of 6 kbps to offer a near transparent quality of speech at higher bit rates. This was critical for dial-up and limited broadband internet available at that time and served us well as the default codec for Skype and Microsoft Teams. Silk is also the basis of voice mode in the Opus codec, one of the default WebRTC codecs.

As we enter a new decade, users can now choose from several high-end connectivity alternatives such as high-speed broadband, optical fiber, and 5G. Yet, large segments of Microsoft’s user base are still limited to low cable internet speeds or slower 3G and 4G cellular networks. They often experience situations with over 50% packet loss and sporadic loss of coverage when moving between cell towers, commuting, or switching between network types. Network availability can even be unpredictable in their homes where many share bandwidth with others who are working and learning remotely. After all these years, it turns out that utilization of available bitrate is every bit as important today as it was in the dial-up world. Any bitrate savings can be used to provide additional resiliency and improve experiences on other workloads like modern video or content sharing.

Our challenge is to deliver a virtual voice experience that’s as good as talking in person even over ultra-low bandwidth and in highly constrained network conditions. To truly serve our customers, we know they need to be able to communicate and collaborate on the go, on all device types, over any network, in every environment.

That’s why we’re excited to share the details of our new AI-powered audio codec named Satin. Satin can deliver super wide band speech starting at a bitrate of 6 kbps, and full-band stereo music starting at a bitrate of 17 kbps, with progressively higher quality at higher bitrates. Satin has been designed to provide great audio quality even under high packet loss. In addition, its great quality at low bitrates allows us to use more of the available bandwidth for providing better resiliency to packet loss. We have recently improved our redundancy algorithms to provide better protection under burst loss. Here is the net effect of our improved resiliency algorithms and new Satin codec (please use your favorite headset to hear the two audio files).

Silk at 6 kbps, burst packet loss (additional 6 kbps for redundancy):

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Satin at 6 kbps, burst packet loss, improved redundancy algorithm (additional 6 kbps for redundancy):

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Our team built this new codec by combining decades of algorithmic experience and advanced machine learning techniques. Let’s take a deeper dive into how Satin works.

What’s narrowband, wideband, and super wideband voice?
Our ear can generally perceive sounds that range in frequency from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. When dealing with discrete time signals, we need to sample the audio waveform at a minimum of twice the highest frequency we wish to reproduce. This is generally why CD-quality music is sampled at 44.1 kHz (44100 samples per second) or 48 kHz. Early telephony systems used a sampling rate of 8 kHz and could reproduce frequencies up to 4 kHz (in practice up to 3.4 kHz), which was considered sufficient at the time for speech communication. While a lower sampling rate implies fewer bits per second to transmit over the wire, it resulted in the all too familiar tinny voice quality over the phone as the higher vocal frequencies present in natural speech could not be reproduced. VoIP solutions, which were no longer limited by the narrowband telephony infrastructure, introduced us to the magic of wideband speech (reproduce up to 8 kHz, sampled at 16 kHz) and users were immediately able to appreciate the crisper, more natural and intelligible sound.

Silk took this a step further with the introduction of super wideband voice, capturing frequencies up to 12 kHz, sampled at 24 kHz (energy drops off rapidly at frequencies above 12 kHz for human voice). As mentioned earlier, higher sampling rates imply a higher bitrate. Satin re-defines super wideband to cover frequencies up to 16 kHz (sampled at 32 kHz) for greater clarity and sibilance, and its efficient compression enables super wideband voice at 6 kbps.

Frequency components of the sound /t/ in the word “suit.” There is a significant amount of energy well beyond the narrowband cutoff of 4 kHz and even the wideband cutoff of 8 kHz. Preserving energy in the higher spectral components results in more natural sounding speech.

Listen to these two samples below on your headphones. The Satin super wideband speech sample sounds a lot more natural and intelligible, much like what you hear when you are talking to someone in person.

Silk narrowband at 6 kbps:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Satin super wideband at 6 kbps:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

How do you achieve super wideband at 6 kbps?
To achieve super wideband quality at 6 kbps, Satin uses a deep understanding of speech production, modelling and psychoacoustics to extract and encode a sparse representation of the signal. To further reduce the required bitrate, Satin only encodes and transmits certain parameters in the lower frequency bands. At the decoder, Satin uses deep neural networks to estimate the high band parameters from the received low band parameters, and a minimal amount of side information sent over the wire.

While this approach solved the primary challenge of reproducing super wideband voice at ultra-low bitrates, it introduced a new challenge of computational complexity. The analysis of the input speech signal to extract a low dimensional representation is computationally intensive. Real-time inference on deep neural networks adds even more complexity. To solve this, the team then focused on both algorithmic optimizations as well as techniques like loop vectorization beyond what the compiler could achieve. This achieved nearly 40% reduction in computational complexity and allowed us to run on all our users’ devices.

As with all new features, we A/B tested Satin before widely rolling it out—both to ensure there were no regressions, as well as to quantify the positive impact for our users. The A/B tests showed a statistically significant increase in call duration for Satin compared to Silk at these low bitrates. Offline, crowdsourced subjective tests to evaluate codec quality at 6 kbps showed the mean opinion score (MOS) rating of Satin to be 1.7 MOS higher than Silk.

How resilient is Satin to packet loss?
The majority of calls are on Wi-Fi and mobile networks, where packet loss is common and can adversely affect call quality. Satin is uniquely positioned to compensate for this. Unlike most other voice codecs, Satin encodes each packet independently, so the effect of losing one packet does not affect the quality of subsequent packets. The codec is also designed to facilitate high quality packet loss concealment in an internal parametric domain. These features help Satin seamlessly handle random losses where one or two packets are lost at a time.

Another type of packet loss, which is even more detrimental to perceived quality, is when several packets are lost in a burst. Here, Satin’s ability to deliver great audio at a low rate of 6 kbps provides the flexibility to use some of the available bitrate to add redundancy and forward error correction to quickly recover from these situations. Satin does this without compromising overall audio quality.

Satin is already being used for all Teams and Skype two-party calls and will roll out for Teams meetings soon. It currently operates in wideband voice mode within a bitrate range of 6 – 36 kbps and will be extended to support full-band stereo music at a maximum sampling rate of 48 kHz in the near future. We are very excited for you to try this new codec and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Teams Engineering Blog RSS feed to stay in touch with the latest innovations from Teams.

Want to work on the team that builds bleeding edge AI technology: AI Jobs in M365 Intelligent Conversations and Communications Cloud Team

Enhance productivity in Microsoft Teams with pop out apps and tabs

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:00:00 GMT

For millions of users, Microsoft Teams is the digital workspace where work gets done. It’s where we come together to collaborate with teammates and where we integrate apps and processes to work on projects. And in this digital workspace, we rely on multiple apps and windows to work through tasks whether independently or with others – so having access to the tools we need without context switching is essential. That’s why we’ve expanded the capability to pop out multiple windows over the past several months – starting with chats and meetings to now personal apps and tabs! We’ll show you how you can use these capabilities and stay focused to keep your workflows ongoing.

The ‘pop out’ symbol in the app tab bar is in the top right.

Pop out your apps and tabs in multi-windows to stay focused
There are many situations where we need to juggle multiple tools and resources to work through tasks. For example, maybe you need to reference some notes from your team’s shared OneNote pinned in your team channel while working through action items comings out of a recent meeting or perhaps you need talk through some open tasks from your Tasks personal app along with your daily standup chat following a sync with your team. These are just a couple common scenarios which popping out apps and tabs in multiple windows come in handy.

So now how do you do it? Let’s go through a couple ways to easily pop out apps and tabs

1. Pop out your personal apps pinned in your app bar
You can easily pop out your personal apps from your app bar on the left rail. Simply ‘right click’ on the desired app and select the “Pop out app” field in the window or open the app and locate the ‘pop out’ symbol in the top right of the tab bar. Your personal app will then pop out in a separate window, enabling you with the ability to continue utilizing the app while using the main screen for chat or other apps.

User right clicking on a personal app to pop out in a separate window.

2. Pop out tabs pinned in your chats and channels
You can also pop out tabs pinned in your chats and channels by simply selecting the desired tab and then the “pop out tab” symbol to the right of the header. The tab will pop out in a separate window, enabling you to continue to have access to the tab while navigating elsewhere.

The ‘pop out’ symbol in the channel tab is in the top right.

We’re excited to see how these new capabilities will help users stay productive and increase focus on their tasks. These new capabilities work today for many different apps and tabs and we will continue to expand across more as we continue to progress! Start popping out apps and tabs today!

Track projects and share news in Teams with two new Power Apps

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 20:08:35 GMT

Within the Teams app store, you’ll now find two brand new applications published by Microsoft: Milestones and Bulletins. With the Milestones app, you can seamlessly track projects across your company, and with Bulletins, you can quickly publish news articles to the rest of your company.

Both are deeply integrated within Teams, but what makes them unique is that they are built with Power Apps on top of the recently released Dataverse for Teams. By shipping them on top of Dataverse for Teams, we’re making it possible for you to fully customize these apps from top to bottom and to leverage them as inspiration to build your own apps!

Further customizing the apps to fit your needs
Like the existing Employee ideas, Inspection, and Issue reporting Teams apps, these brand new apps are built on top of Power Apps so that you can easily customize them to address your company’s specific needs.

With Power Apps and Dataverse for Teams, you can change things as simple as the branding of your app, all the way to what type of data you want to collect and the business rules you want to enforce.

Using Milestones and Bulletins as inspiration for your next app
If the new Milestones and Bulletins apps have inspired you to build your own apps on top of Dataverse for Teams, check out our documentation on how to get started.

In particular, these new apps take advantage of the recently released share with colleagues functionality. With the new share with colleagues feature, you can take apps like Bulletins and broadly distribute them to the rest of the company. The same feature can allow you to build organization-wide apps like time reporting, invoicing, expense reporting, and more, all on top of Dataverse for Teams.

Governing apps on top of Dataverse for Teams
Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t call out the powerful tools we ship to allow admins to govern apps like Milestones and Bulletins. In particular, we’ve shipped a powerful template as part of the Center of Excellence Starter Kit to manage Dataverse for Teams environments. With it, users within your company can provide business justifications for Dataverse for Teams so that admins can approve the usage.

Team owners can provide a business justification for their new environment within X days of creating the environment

Admins approve or reject the submitted business justifications, and optionally mark them for a later review.

We can’t wait to see what you’re able to build with Power Apps and Teams
We’re always excited to see what the community is able to build. To learn more about the Milestones and Bulletins, and to get further inspiration for what’s possible, check out the deep dive into these two apps by the Power Apps team.

New Diagnostic: Teams Call Forwarding

Corbin Meek — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 18:45:25 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

Our team has just released a new diagnostic, Teams Call Forwarding.

If you or your users are having issues with Call Forwarding in Teams, this Diagnostic is for you. We check the most common causes of Call Forwarding issues in Teams including User Provisioning, Policies, Licensing, and forwarding configuration.

As always you can call the diagnostic directly in your M365 Admin Portal by typing in Diag: Teams Call Forwarding in the Support experience (Need Help, or Support - New service request) as in the following example:

Here's an example from my test tenant where I do not have the user configured for calling:

The diagnostic checks the most common causes for Call Forwarding issues that we know of, so if you or one of your users is having an issue getting call forwarding to work, including SimRing - give this Diagnostic a try.

As always, we're constantly working on new diagnostics and expanding our existing ones; for a full list, click here.

Questions? Comments? Please post below and we'll happily follow up!

Thanks!

Microsoft Teams Support

Important updates to Guest Access defaults in Teams starting in February 2021

Bill Kaupp — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 18:27:40 GMT

In Teams support, we often receive questions from customers seeking help when working with Guests – especially from new tenants. You can guess how excited we are to see Guest Access be enabled by default in Teams for new tenants starting on February 8, 2021. This default behavior follows the rest of the Office 365 suite where Guest Access is already enabled, so this should empower new tenants to collaborate with greater ease, while also still supporting the same deep controls to adjust guest settings to fit individual organizations’ needs.

With this being a support focused blog, let's talk about some things that customers may have questions about related to Guest Access being enabled by default.

The biggest question is – what is going to happen?

Until February 2021, guest access is still turned off by default. You must turn on guest access for Teams before admins or team owners can add guests. After you turn on guest access, it might take a few hours for the changes to take effect. If users see the message Contact your administrator when they try to add a guest to their team, it's likely that either guest access hasn't been turned on or the settings aren't effective yet.

After February 2021, guest access in Microsoft Teams will be turned on by default for new customers & existing customers who haven't configured this setting. When this change is implemented, if you've not already configured guest access capability in Microsoft Teams, that capability will be enabled in your tenant. If you want guest access to remain disabled for your organization, you'll need to confirm that the guest access setting is set to Off instead of Service default.

If you are signed into your M365 Tenant Admin Portal as an Admin you can also review the information in Message Center Post 234252.

Additional Frequently Asked Questions

Q: When will these changes impact my tenant?

A: The changes will start to roll out beginning February 8, 2021 and should complete within about a week.

Q: My tenant has Guest access enabled, but I don't want that. How can I turn off Guest Access in Teams?

A: Follow these steps:

1. Sign in to the Microsoft Teams admin center.

2. Select Org-wide settings > Guest access.

3. Set Allow guest access in Microsoft Teams to Off.

Q: I already have Teams and Guest Access is enabled, will anything change?

A: No, you will continue to have Guest Access and no action is needed.

Q: I'm still having trouble with Guest Access, what should I do?

A: Admins can run the Teams Guest Access support diagnostic (shortcut cmd Diag: Teams Guest Access). Learn more at Self-help diagnostics for Teams administrators - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

More Information

Learn more about Guest access settings in Teams in Guest access in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs and Collaborate with guests in a team | Microsoft Docs

Introducing Microsoft Viva, the Employee Experience Platform in Microsoft Teams

Seth Patton — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 20:17:55 GMT

By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience

Today we are announcing Microsoft Viva, the first Employee Experience Platform (EXP) built for the digital era. Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated employee experience that builds on Microsoft Teams to empower people to be their best, from anywhere.

For all the details on Microsoft Viva, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/Viva/Blog

Microsoft Viva Connections

Viva Connections offers a new way for leaders to shape culture and invite employees to participate in building an inclusive workplace that helps everyone succeed by giving people a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.

Viva Connections is personalized and appears in the apps and devices employees already use every day, such as Microsoft Teams.

For all the details on Viva Connections, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/VivaConnectionsBlog.

Microsoft Viva Insights
To help people achieve balance, build better work habits, and find focus wherever and whenever they need it, we’re excited to introduce Viva Insights – available in Microsoft Teams starting today in public preview. Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. In addition to new productivity and wellbeing experiences and insights in Microsoft Teams, Viva Insights will, over time, bring the power of Microsoft Workplace Analytics and Microsoft MyAnalytics together under the Microsoft Viva brand.

Viva Insights is designed to protect privacy. Personal insights are visible only to the individual, and for manager and leader insights, customers can rely on safeguards like de-identification, aggregation, and differential privacy by default.

For all the details on Viva Insights, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/VivaInsightsBlog.

Microsoft Viva Learning
Viva Learning empowers everyone to gain targeted skills in the flow of their work by creating a central hub for learning in Microsoft Teams where people can discover, share, assign, and learn from content libraries available across the organization. Viva Learning makes learning a natural part of your day - seamlessly connecting into the day to day for our 115 million daily active users in Teams. You can chat about learnings and training, share content via chat, and pin curated resources collections to Teams channels and dedicated tabs – and much more.

For all the details on Viva Learning, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/VivaLearningBlog.

Microsoft Viva Topics
Viva Topics uses artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day and to connect, manage, and protect content across systems and teams.

Viva Topics is built on the content and platform services of Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft Graph, and will deliver knowledge directly through the Teams user experience later this year. We’re pleased to announce that today, Viva Topics has reached general availability for our commercial customers.

For all the details on Viva Topics, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/viva/topics/announce.

Simplify an inclusive meeting experience by enabling Guest access as the default

Jamie Stark — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:43:27 GMT

We want to make everyone aware of an upcoming change to the default setting for Guests in Microsoft Teams. With the large increase in organizations looking to use Teams to expand collaboration beyond the boundaries of their tenant, we want to make it easier for customers to get started. This has also been announced in Message Center post MC234252.

As a result, starting on February 8th we are turning on Guest access in Microsoft Teams by default for any customers who have not already configured this setting. This will bring the control for Teams Guest capability into alignment with the rest of the suite, where the setting is already on by default.
When this change is implemented, if you have not already configured Guest access capability in Microsoft Teams, that capability will be enabled in your tenant. With guest access enabled, you can provide access to teams and other resources to people outside your organization while maintaining control over your corporate data.

Prior to this change taking effect beginning on February 8th, if you want Guest access to remain disabled for your organization, you will need to confirm that the Guest access setting is set to "Off" instead of "Service default". Instructions for how to configure the Teams guest access settings can be found here: Teams guest access settings

A view of Teams admin center Guest access page, showing the choices for Guest access being “Off”, “On”, and “Service default”. Currently the service default is off but beginning February 8th the service default will be “On”.

Microsoft Teams Release Processes - Why do I not see a feature but my colleague does?

Martin Rinas — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 16:19:05 GMT

At Microsoft Teams, we frequently hear the question, “I am running the same version as my coworker, but they have a feature I don’t. Why don’t I have that feature now? And how can I get it now?” Before we answer that question, we want to shed some light on our overall release processes so that the answer makes sense.

As a productivity tool connecting hundreds of millions of people around the world and enabling remote work, remote learning, and connections with family and friends, we take a very orchestrated approach to how we roll out and enable new features. We have multiple updates that get rolled out: web, desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux), mobile (iOS, Android), packages for conference room devices, and our backend services. Each of these packages are backed by feature flag configurations that let us ship a new Teams version and enable features separately.

When we roll out features, it consists of two activities:

Shipping the version (Teams application version with code for new features included)
Enabling the feature through the feature flag

Both activities happen progressively, but at different times. We first ship the build with the feature flags turned off. We progressively roll out the build to users, wait for the build to be picked up and used by users, and reach certain penetration rates. We’ll run scorecards for key performance and usage metrics between the prior build and the new build to ensure we are not introducing any form of regression with our latest version.

Once we have scorecards and confidence in the version, we can then begin to progressively enable our feature flags – making the new features available for users. For our larger, external customer facing rings, this is a multiple step process that usually happens over a few days.

Below is a high-level view of our audience segmentation. Each ring represents an audience with specific gating criteria to allow us to exit the build and the feature flag, and to progress them to the next ring.

When we begin rolling out feature flags within a ring is where you will usually see differences in features within the same version. We roll features and versions out on in increasing % tranches at user level (considering the worldwide user pool and not at an organization/tenant level) as it gives us the best cross section of use cases, hardware configurations, software configurations, network topology, bandwidth availability, etc., to validate our changes and the user experience they provide – but this does mean that co-workers on the same build can see differences in their features. Rolling out feature flags by organization introduces the potential to bias our results with similar hardware, bandwidth, and usage patterns, so we focus on getting a cross section of users and usage patterns with our rollouts.

In December 2020 we announced the availability of Teams Public Preview. Public Preview is a great mechanism to expose a subset of your user base to features a little ahead of everyone else. This allows you to get familiar with new features before they are available to all users.

Launch of Microsoft Teams preview experience and alignment with Microsoft 365 deployment channels | Microsoft Tech Community

Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

Teams-Updates - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

Skype for Business Online retires in six months – what you need to know

Microsoft_Teams_team — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:30:52 GMT

Eighteen months ago, we announced the July 31, 2021 retirement of Skype for Business Online. With six months until the service ends, we’re focused on helping each of our customers upgrade to Microsoft Teams and enabling more ways to come together and get things done.

Skype for Business Online has been a critical communications tool for millions of organizations across the globe. Once customers experience the way Teams brings together chat, calling, meetings and more, they realize the amazing potential to collaborate seamlessly and simplify work in a secure and compliant way.

Regardless of where you are on the journey from Skype for Business to Teams, this is an important checkpoint to make sure your organization is on track to upgrade to Teams before Skype for Business Online retires and access to the service ends.

“We’ve got a plan, and we’re working the plan.”

Most Skype for Business Online customers have deployed Teams, either with Overlapping Capabilities (aka “Islands Mode”) or Select Capabilities, and are gradually moving users and workloads as their organization is ready. Chances are if you’re in this camp, your finish line is in sight. You still have time to double-check your technical and organizational readiness before changing the coexistence and upgrade settings as you move users or your tenant to Teams Only.

“Uh oh, we’re not ready.”

Some organizations may not be far along in the Teams upgrade planning process. It’s understandable as the events of the past year have impacted strategies, priorities, and resources for so many. Don’t worry, you still have time. In fact, there are numerous examples of organizations that have made the upgrade from Skype for Business Online, or hybrid deployments or Skype for Business Server to Teams in a matter of months. With six months until retirement, we encourage you to begin planning today to accommodate the technical, process, and user scenarios that may be unique to your organization. But rest assured, there are resources to guide you step-by-step.

If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend the following:

Microsoft Teams admin documentation provides guidance for rolling out, managing, and preparing users for Teams.
Teams upgrade planning workshops take you through a proven framework for planning and implementing your upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams.
Microsoft Chalk Talks workshops teach best practices and practical guidance around some of the most popular and compelling scenarios in Teams.

FastTrack assistance is available for eligible subscriptions, or you may choose to engage a Microsoft Partner to help plan or execute your upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams.

Automated upgrades to Teams
Some Skype for Business Online customers will be eligible for automated upgrades to Microsoft Teams. This program was designed to assist customers with the technical elements of upgrading a Skype for Business Online tenant to Teams Only. Customers scheduled for automated upgrades will receive notifications in both the Teams admin center, as well as the Microsoft 365 Message Center, at least three months before their upgrade date to allow time for technical and user readiness. To learn more about eligibility and more details about the experience, read Automated Upgrades from Skype for Business Online to Microsoft Teams.

More engaging and efficient meetings. Improved collaboration. Easy app and workflow integration. There’s so much to love about Teams.
In six months, access to Skype for Business Online will end. Though we’re getting a bit nostalgic about what’s going away, it’s easy to see how much more organizations can do with Teams – staying connected and accomplishing more together across work, school, and life. And that has us excited about what’s ahead.

Please note the retirement of Skype for Business Online does not affect the Skype consumer service, Skype for Business Server products and Skype for Business Online operated by 21Vianet (China Sovereign Clouds Instance)

See you on Teams!

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | January 2021

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 22:11:13 GMT

Welcome to another installment of What’s new in Microsoft Teams! In this post we are sharing everything we have made available in January! Enjoy the read!

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration
Approvals in Teams
Approvals in Microsoft Teams enables everyone, from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees, to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from your hub for teamwork. You can quickly start an approval flow from the same place you send a chat, in a channel conversation, or from the Approvals app itself. Just select an approval type, add details, attach files, and choose approvers. Once submitted, approvers are notified and can review and act on the request. Learn more.

Offline autosend
The offline experience for Microsoft Teams chat and channels helps you to continue be productive even without a network connection. Offline autosend identifies when Teams messages are sent or edited while the user is offline. These messages are automatically sent once the device is back online.

Include up to 10,000 users in an org-wide team
Create an org-wide team to promote collaboration and communications across the entire organization. Administrators who manage tenants that have less than or equal to 10,000 members can now create an org-wide team, which automatically syncs all the tenant’s members with the team. Learn more.

What’s New: Meetings

Meeting chat moderation settings

Meeting organizers and teachers can now choose from three chat settings to help create a safe and inclusive meeting environment. Chats can be “Disabled”, preventing the organizer and participants from using the meeting chat. Alternatively, they can be set to “Only during the meeting”, allowing participants to send messages only during the meeting and the organizer to send messages at any time. Lastly, the default will be set to “Enabled”, allowing chats for all meeting attendees at any time.

Offer: Get Audio Conferencing for free
Join Microsoft Teams meetings with a global dial-in number from virtually any mobile device or dial out to help others join a meeting with Audio Conferencing. Enterprise Agreement customers¹ and customers purchasing via partners and web² can take advantage of our free Audio Conferencing offer now extended through June 30th, 2021. Get started.

What’s New: Calling
Session Border Controller certifications
Cataleya, ULTATEL, Atos, and Patton have successfully completed the Session Border Controller (SBC) certification process, which ensures that their SBCs support Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams, joining the list of certified SBCs. This rigorous certification process includes 3rd party testing and validation in production and pre-production Direct Routing environments. Direct Routing permits customers to bring their own operators and infrastructure to enable users to place and receive calls over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) in Teams when coupled with Microsoft Phone System. Learn more.

What’s New: Devices
Logitech Rally Bar
The Logitech Rally Bar is the newest addition to Logitech’s Teams Rooms portfolio. Intended for midsize rooms, the integrated form factor makes it easy to set up and maintain. The Logitech Rally Bar features motorized pan and tilt lenses and AI-powered RightSense™ technologies for expansive room coverage with automatic framing, lifelike video quality, people count, and exquisite voice clarity. Learn more.

Crestron Flex Mercury Mini
The Crestron Flex MM Teams Audio device fits several scenarios from the conference room to the home office. Exceptional microphone and speaker quality with 10’ mic pickup range. Stunning all-new 7” touch screen delivers easy to see and use controls. In a home office environment, it enables you to view your calendar, join calls with one touch, place phone calls, or browse the directory. Learn more.

Yealink A30
Yealink MeetingBar A30, the integrated Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, designs a dual-camera system that fits perfectly for small meeting spaces. Audio features and AI-powered camera with Speaker Tracking and Auto Framing, the MeetingBar A30 brings a powerful video and voice experience. With the all-in-one design and plug-and-play features, the MeetingBar A30 ensures an easy deployment. Supporting the dual-screen share and whiteboarding, the MeetingBar A30 brings a seamless Teams experience to every user.

AudioCodes RXV80

The AudioCodes RXV80 video collaboration bar delivers an intuitive meeting room experience that supports collaboration in video-enabled meeting rooms and is especially designed for huddle rooms. Integrating unified communication and video collaboration capabilities, one standalone device enables remote participants to see and hear everyone in the room with outstanding image clarity and enhanced voice quality.

EPOS Expand 80T

A new premium, scalable speakerphone supports rooms with up to 7 meeting participants. This speaker is built with six adaptable, beamforming microphones that isolate voices from room reverberations and ambient noise. A great speaker phone to add to meeting rooms to enhance audio quality in meetings.

Nureva HDL300
The Nureva HDL300 system brings full-room audio coverage to large Teams spaces –making it ideal for the new reality. No matter where people sit, they’ll be heard easier by remote participants. Because it’s not a multicomponent system, the HDL300 takes just 30 minutes to install, with no need for specialized technicians or complicated setups. Learn more.

Poly Sync 40

Poly Sync 40 USB/Bluetooth® smart speakerphone is designed for flexible and huddle workspaces. Everyone can hear and be heard without missing a word with multi-microphone array and full-duplex audio. The Poly Sync 40 is battery-powered for hours so teams can use it anywhere in the room. You can also pair two units together for larger meetings with bigger volume, more microphones and wider voice pickup.

Video Conferencing Monitors by Dell

Three monitors from Dell are now certified for Microsoft Teams. Integrated into 24, 27 and 34 inch displays are cameras, speakers and noise cancelling microphones-meaning that users can be seen and heard on their teams calls and meetings with one device. The monitors also include a dedicated Teams button-simply press the icon in the lower right-hand corner to instantly join a Teams meeting.

Phones from Yealink MP 54 & Audiocodes C470HD

The Yealink MP54 is an entry-level desk phone with a 4-inch capacitive touch screen, offering an easy-to-use Microsoft Teams communication experience for common areas, front desks, and office workers. Thanks to Yealink Optima HD voice, magnet handset, dedicated Teams button and optional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity (via USB dongles), the MP54 is a practical and cost-effective option to enable efficient collaborations.

The AudioCodes Microsoft Teams-native C470HD IP phone is a feature-rich, executive high-end business phone for Microsoft Teams. The C470HD is equipped with a large, single surface, full touch interface, incorporating an exceptionally sharp 5.5” color touch screen, with optional support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Sidecars from Audiocodes and Yealink EXP50

We recently announced sidecar support from Teams phones, and two of our OEMs Audiocodes and Yealink have introduced two newly certified devices to allow for easy contact access and information. The sidecar from Audiocodes and the Yealink EXP50 are two great ways to quickly connect to numbers and understand their availability.

Check out all these devices and more at http://aka.ms/teamsdevices!

What’s New: Power Platform and custom development
New Teams UI Design Kit and UI Library
The new Microsoft Teams UI Kit and Microsoft Teams UI Library helps you as a designer, product manager, or developer quickly understand the key design considerations for making quality Teams apps and also simplify the process by providing templates and tools to use. Learn more.

App Spotlight

Soapbox empowers teams to be high performing by simplifying the agenda preparation and management process by allowing teams to build, collaborate, and action team meeting agendas all without leaving their workspace in Teams. With the new Teams app in meeting functionality, teams now stay on track during meetings by collaborating on their agenda without switching context, can document decisions made, and assign next steps all without having to navigate out of their meeting. When the meeting is finished, meeting notes can be sent out along with pulse surveys to stay on top of how team members are feeling. Learn more and check out their Teams app available on AppSource.

What’s New: Security, compliance & privacy
Microsoft 365 Compliance capabilities for card content generated through apps in Teams messages
We are excited to announce that the following Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities are now generally available for Adaptive Card content generated through apps in Teams messages: Legal hold, eDiscovery, Audit, and Retention. Learn more.

Microsoft Teams Secure Score recommendation
We are happy to announce our first security recommendation for Microsoft Teams on Secure Score is now available! Learn more.

What’s New: Teams for Education
Education Policy Wizard
With remote and hybrid learning on online platforms, it’s more important than ever to help keep your school community safe. With the new Microsoft Teams for Education policy wizard, you can easily apply education tailored policies for a safe learning environment. The policy wizard allows you as an IT admin to quickly and easily apply the most relevant set of policies for students at a global (Org-wide default) level and apply a custom policy set to a group of educators and staff tailored to their needs. Learn more.

What’s New: Frontline Workers
Task publishing feature in Tasks in Teams
As the need for corporate offices to better communicate and work with their frontline workforce becomes top of mind, task publishing lets companies create tasks centrally at the corporate level and publish those tasks to different locations, specific store layouts or other customizable attributes of their frontline teams. For example, leadership for a nationwide retailer can create tasks for the reopening of their stores, attach relevant documents like a planogram, send that list to only the affected store locations, and then track progress against the assigned tasks. Managers can easily assign tasks to individual employees, while frontline workers can see a simple prioritized list of those tasks on their personal or company-issued mobile device. Learn more.

@mention by shift group
Tagging by shift connects you to the right people faster. Tagging by shift helps you to take the guesswork out of knowing the names of on-shift employees and automatically assigns users with tags matching their schedule in the Shifts app in Teams, backed by major workforce management systems like AMiON, BlueYonder, and Kronos. Use this @mention tag to start a chat or call, or to just notify everyone on a channel. Learn more.

What’s New: Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

Together Mode
Together mode reimagines meeting experiences to help participants feel closer together even when you are apart. We are excited to introduce Together mode scene selections to transport your team to a variety of settings. Choose a scene to set the tone and create a unique experience for your meeting, whether it be a smaller conference room meeting, or an all-hands meeting held in an outdoor amphitheater. Available in GCC and GCC-High.

Multi-Window Chat
You are now able to pop out individual Teams chat conversations into a separate window, to help them streamline their workflow and more easily move between ongoing conversations. Available in GCC and GCC-High.

Multi-Window for Meetings and Calling experiences
Multi-window experiences are coming to Teams meetings and calling. Users will have the ability to pop out meetings and calling into separate windows to help them optimize their workflow. These experiences can be turned on directly within Teams for PC and Mac clients. Available in GCC-High as opt-in. Learn more.

Meeting recordings saved to OneDrive and SharePoint

You can now save Microsoft Teams meeting recordings to OneDrive and SharePoint. This provides improved sharing capabilities, basic governance, automatic retention labels, and more. Available in GCC.

Simplified way to manage your channel notification settings

Through the teams and channels list or from the channel header, the users can quickly manage their channel notification settings by the means of a new fly-out design. Users can turn on all activity on or off with a single click or diving deep into custom to set their preferred permutations. Available in GCC.

Targeted communications in GCC

Targeted communication allows team members to message everyone in a specific role at the same time by @mentioning the role name in a post by using tags. For example, you could send a message to all cashiers in a store or to all nurses in a hospital. With this feature, you can quickly reach a group of people all at once. Available in GCC. Learn more.

Footnotes

^{1 Updated 3/23/2021: Get Audio Conferencing for free until the end of your enrollment, up to three years. Available only for net new Audio Conferencing seats (defined as seats incremental to any existing seats as of August 1, 2020) for EA, EAS, or EES (A3 Only) customers with paid subscriptions that include Teams. Available now through June 30th, 2021. Available worldwide with exceptions in China and India. Talk to your Microsoft sales representative to learn more. The offer is subject to additional terms and conditions.}

^{2 Updated 3/23/2021: Get Audio Conferencing for free for 12 months. Available only for net new Audio Conferencing seats (defined as seats incremental to any existing seats as of August 1, 2020) for CSP or Web Direct customers with paid subscriptions that include Teams. Available Starting October 1st, 2020 through June 30th, 2021. Available worldwide with exceptions in China and India. The offer is subject to additional terms and conditions. If you do not have a Microsoft Account representative, please work with your Enterprise Agreement reseller to request the offer.}

Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities for Adaptive Card content through apps in Teams now available

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:03:47 GMT

Teams is built on the Microsoft 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud, delivering advanced security and compliance capabilities. These capabilities can be managed across Microsoft services including Teams through a single pane of glass experience in Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance centers.

Currently these capabilities are available in Teams for chat and file content. As a collaboration hub, Microsoft Teams brings together apps & services you love into Teams. Adaptive Cards, being platform-agnostic, are preferred vehicles for sharing information between Teams and other apps and services whether you are using apps for project management, productivity, sales, support and more.

More than 70% of the apps today generate card content in Teams conversations. Much of this is business communication and would fall under the purview of regulations as it is with Teams chat and file content.

We are excited to announce that Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities are now available for Adaptive Card content generated through apps in Teams messages. The following capabilities are now generally available:

Legal hold: Preserve Adaptive Card content
eDiscovery: Identify, collect and produce card content in response to an investigation
Audit: Audit user activity on Adaptive Cards for forensics
Retention: Manage card content lifecycle in Teams

The above capabilities are built in platform and will be available for all apps including 1P, 3P and LOB apps. There is no additional work required from app developers to enable them. For the tenant admins, selecting Teams as a location in the above compliance workflows will now automatically include card content generated through apps in the corresponding Teams conversations.

Legal hold
When a reasonable expectation of litigation exists, organizations are required to preserve electronically stored information (ESI), including Teams chat messages that are relevant to the case. Selecting Teams as a location in a Litigation hold workflow will now automatically include Adaptive Card content generated through apps in the corresponding Teams conversations including 1:1 chat, 1:many or group chat, or a channel conversation.

For more information on Teams and eDiscovery holds, please see Create an eDiscovery hold.

Figure 1 – Creating a new Legal hold

eDiscovery
Large Enterprises are often exposed to high penalty legal proceedings that demand submission of all Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Microsoft Teams content can be searched and used during eDiscovery investigations. Now in addition to chat and file content, Adaptive Card content generated through apps in Teams can be searched and exported.

Like Teams chat content, card content generated via Teams apps in 1:1 or group chats is journaled through to the respective user mailboxes and card content generated in channels is journaled through to the group mailbox representing the team. Adaptive Card content is converted to a html file and journaled as a message with the html file as attachment.

Selecting Teams as a location in Core eDiscovery or Advanced eDiscovery workflows will now automatically include card content generated through apps in the corresponding Teams conversations including 1:1 chat, 1:many or group chat, or a channel conversation.

For more information on Teams and eDiscovery, please see Conduct an eDiscovery investigation of content - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs.

Figure 2 – Selecting Teams location for a custodian in eDiscovery (will automatically include card content from Apps)

Figure 3 – Card content in eDiscovery review set

Audit
Audit log can help you investigate specific activities across Microsoft 365 services including Teams. Now inline input actions on Adaptive Cards will be available in the audit log. You can filter audit logs corresponding to actions on cards by selecting “Performed action on card” as the Teams activity.

Figure 4 – Audit log for actions on card

Retention
Retention policies help you to effectively manage the information in your organization. Use retention policies to keep data that's needed to comply with your organization's internal policies, industry regulations, or legal needs, and to delete data that's considered a liability, that you're no longer required to keep, or has no legal or business value.

Now, in addition to Teams chat and file content, you can include card content in your retention policies. Selecting Teams as a location while setting up retention policy will now automatically include Adaptive Card content generated through apps in the corresponding Teams conversations including 1:1 chat, 1:many or group chat, or a channel conversation.

Figure 5 – Selecting Teams location while setting up a retention policy (will automatically include card content from apps)

What app developers are saying about these new capabilities
We are thrilled to extend these Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities to card content generated from Teams apps. To help highlight how great these capabilities are, take a look at a few testimonials from the app developers that we worked closely to enable this feature!

SurveyMonkey
“SurveyMonkey allows organizations to collaborate on rich insights uncovered using our integrations, while ensuring data remains secure. The latest platform capabilities from Microsoft Teams allowed us to bring our mutual customers the improved data governance and compliance features with no additional implementation effort.”

Fuze
"For organizations with specific compliance, risk, and legal concerns––from manufacturing to financial services––Fuze provides safe and secure collaboration across the distributed workforce," said Jed Brown, SVP of Product & Design at Fuze. "This extends to organizations utilizing the Fuze for Teams integration for click to call and click to meet. With Fuze for Teams, all interactions with the integration are compatible with Microsoft's auditing and eDiscovery tools. By adhering to Microsoft's development guidelines from the start, Fuze was able to easily comply with Teams controls for security and compliance and requires zero effort from customers to enable."

Medxnote
“We are excited for the roll out of compliance capabilities in 3rd party apps. Being able to integrate into a customer's existing compliance framework is a real and tangible benefit for Medxnote and our customers!”

We’d like to hear your feedback on the product to keep improving functionality, adding new features, and enhancing existing ones. Sign in today using your Microsoft 365 account, and give us feedback via the Feedback button at the bottom right corner of Microsoft 365 compliance center.

Welcome to WorkLab -- a site devoted to the future of work

Jeff Teper — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:04:34 GMT

Microsoft Teams is dedicated to helping our customers achieve more and we spend a great deal of time listening to our customers describe their goals and challenges. This feedback is an essential guide to what we focus on next in the product.

Our engineering teams also partner with industry-leading researchers to help shape new experiences and improve existing ones. This has been especially true over the past 10 months, as the pandemic moved so many of us to remote and hybrid work. We worked together to inform and inspire Teams features like Together mode, Virtual commute, and the new integration with the Headspace meditation app.

It’s exhilarating to share these new experiences with our customers but we don’t often get to share the thinking behind them – or the people who helped bring them to life. People like Jaron Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality” and is one of Together mode’s leading creators; or Mary Czerwinski, a Microsoft research leader, who’s leading ground-breaking work to bring emotional intelligence to technology. As product leaders and thinkers, we realize the power of listening to customers directly and to what the data and research tells us about their needs. We are committed to understanding how work is evolving, and how we can shape our tools and products to benefit the greatest number of people.

Today, I am excited to help introduce WorkLab, a site focused on the future of work. WorkLab leverages Microsoft expertise and research, as well as customer voices, to spark conversation on the changing world of work. Stories range from Together mode’s origin story (who knew Stephen Colbert was involved?) to tips on how to improve your meeting culture. You’ll hear from an expert on workplace friendships; learn about the technology opportunity for frontline workers; and discover new ways to find balance in the ever-evolving workday.

With WorkLab, we are starting a conversation and we’re counting on this community to jump right in. I hope you’ll take a moment to check out the site, let us know what you think on LinkedIn and Twitter, and keep engaging as this experiment evolves.

Work is changing fast, and we’re dedicated to innovating and bringing value in this rapidly changing landscape. There’s so much we can discover and learn together.

Notifications from Yammer communities are now available in Microsoft Teams

MuraliSitaram — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 14:54:39 GMT

Today we’re announcing the rollout of notifications from Yammer communities in Microsoft Teams. With millions of employees working remotely or in hybrid environments, it’s more important than ever for employees to feel connected. Teams makes it easier to collaborate with others, create workspaces, chat, meet virtually with others, and integrate your business solutions all from a single platform. But many conversations extend beyond your workgroups and departments, linking employees who may have never met or have never worked together. These types of engagements are happening in communities. Last year, we released the Communities app for Microsoft Teams, brings all of your Yammer communities and conversations into Teams. Today, we are excited to take that integration to the next level.

Get Yammer Communities notifications in Teams
Stay up to date with notifications coming from your Yammer communities while in Teams. Once installed, you will receive Yammer notifications in the Teams Activity feed on web, desktop, and mobile.

This means that you can be notified in Teams for high-value scenarios—when announcements are made in communities that you are a member of, and when you are @mentioned in a conversation. You can then like read, respond to the post and react with our new inclusive reactions without leaving Teams.

Take corporate communications to the next level
The Communities app in Teams brings a platform for your communities and employees to thrive. Communicators and leaders can now use these notifications and other scenarios in Yammer to keep everyone connected and informed of news and updates by sending push notifications that reach all the way to the lock screen on mobile devices, and new insights offer deep insights and feedback into engagement happening on those communications. Perfect for:

Large scale announcements such as policy updates, safety information, and organizational change
Frontline workers and mobile employees who need to access important information and conversations with headquarters from mobile devices
Employee communities that span departments such as new employee onboarding, and diversity & inclusion communities
Functional communities that connect people to crowdsource solutions, ideate, and share with coworkers (example: hackathons, events, kickoffs)

Notifications from Yammer communities are now available in the Teams mobile app

If you’re new to Communities, here’s how you can use Yammer with Microsoft Teams to keep everyone connected.

Install the Communities app in Teams
Any user can install the Communities app using the options in the Teams app bar (see below) and pin it in just a few clicks. IT Admins can also choose to deploy and pin the app for all users or particular departments through custom policies.

Install the Communities app, powered by Yammer, from the app store in Microsoft Teams.

Better together
We’re continuing to deepen the integration of communities and teams to help organizations achieve more. Recently, we’ve added Search to the web, desktop, and mobile apps so you can find and discover community conversations without leaving Teams. We’ve also updated the Yammer channel tab to inherit the styling and functionality of the new Yammer. Users will automatically see this change with no action required from them.

Stay tuned as we’ll have more news to share soon!

Murali Sitaram
Murali is the Vice President of Yammer and Office 365 Groups.

Join us in the Microsoft Teams Community - 2021

Laurie Pottmeyer — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 18:14:48 GMT

As Community Lead for the Microsoft Teams Engineering team, I want to THANK YOU for being part of the Community. I think we can all agree that 2020 was a challenging year for all of us, and Microsoft Teams played an enormous role in staying connected to family and friends, and for enabling us to stay productive at work. With the sudden spike in usage and the quick need to pivot on existing roadmap items due to changing demands, it would have been impossible without all of you working together as a community to share experiences, best practices, and to help us shape the product based on your real-world needs.

As a team, we are proud of the interaction we have with customers, partners, MVPs, and community leaders worldwide. Through attending community events, reading blogs, listening to UserVoice and having discussions at events like Ignite, we are constantly learning from you. I wanted to take a moment to share some of the exciting things going on with the Microsoft Teams Community and invite you to be involved.

New for 2021 is the Microsoft Teams Community Star Award. This monthly award is presented to someone who has made a significant one-time or on-going contribution to the Microsoft Teams Community making impact on the product. Anyone can nominate an individual for the Microsoft Teams Community Star Award.

We would like to congratulate who has been named our first Microsoft Teams Community Star Award winner for the month of January. An active member of the community, Mark runs the Microsoft Teams Community Event out of the UK, Commsverse. During the start of Covid-19, he was one of the first event organizers who was forced to move his event to a virtual environment. He did so with creative ideas, pushing the limits as a creative problem-solver. Mark worked very close with the Microsoft Teams product group to share real-world feedback around the virtual event scenario to help drive relevant, timely product feedback. He pulled off a successful virtual event with only a few weeks of planning and shared his experience with other event organizers to help ensure their success. Mark is an expert on Microsoft Teams and has a strong background in telephony. We look forward to participating in Commsverse June 29-30, 2021 and the many learning opportunities leading up to the big event. Follow Mark Vale on Twitter @MarkVale83 or find him on LinkedIn.

Several members of the Microsoft Teams Community have come together to organize a Women in Microsoft Teams Community with the purpose of collaborating, sharing ideas and learning from each other in a virtual setting. All are welcome and monthly gatherings will kick-off February 2nd. If you're passionate about Microsoft Teams and interested in being part of this group, please join. Register here and you'll be added to the team to start collaborating!

Since we aren't able to travel and be in-person like we've done in the past, the community has gotten very creative with ideas to keep attendees engaged and continue delivering rich content across a variety of topics with audiences, worldwide. One of the benefits to virtual events is the ability to attend and engage with different people in places you may not have been able to visit, otherwise. We urge you to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge and global experiences the community is sharing. You can find a list of regional and worldwide User Groups and Events in the Microsoft Technical Community Event Listings. If you have a UG or Event to share, please add it to the Event Listing!

Here are a few I have on my personal list; I hope you'll join!

Commsverse, Weybridge, UK: June 29-30, 2021

CommsvNext, Denver, CO, USA: August 19-20, 2021

European Collaboration Summit, Wiesbaden, Germany: June 14-16, 2021

Get-CSLatam, Mexico City, MX: TBD

Microsoft 365 Collaboration Conference, Las Vegas, NV, USA: December 7-9, 2021 + Spring 2021 Announced Soon!

TeamsCommunityDay 2021, Virtual from Germany: January 28, 2021

Teams Nation, Virtual from UK: May 12, 2021

Thrive Conference, Slovenia: April 13-14, 2021

If you haven't already been monitoring this blog space, I hope you will take time to check out the many articles written by members of the community for the community. Not only do we hope you'll share your own experiences and knowledge in the discussion board, we do hope you'll consider authoring your own blog. There's so much knowledge and we can learn so much from each other and our different experiences. If you have something to write about, please submit your topic at aka.ms/teamscommunityblogger for consideration.

Until next month...Be well! #CommunityRocks

7 tips for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:05:18 GMT

Remote and hybrid work has become the new norm for many employees across the globe as day-to-day collaboration continues to be accomplished virtually. With this shift to online communication, how can you ensure that you’re collaborating safely?

Queue Microsoft Teams! Whether you’re hosting virtual meetings, carrying out daily group and 1:1 chat, sharing documents, or coauthoring in a document in real-time - Teams enables safe and secure collaboration!

Tip 1: Control who can join your Microsoft Teams meetings directly and present

Meeting organizers can change participant settings for a specific meeting through the Meeting options web page. In Teams, go to your Calendar, select a meeting, and then select Meeting options. From here you can determine settings like who needs to be admitted to the meeting and who can bypass the lobby to join it directly. Additionally, you can decide which participants are able to join with the presenter role to present out content and who should join as standard attendees. Another helpful control for large meetings is the ability to prevent attendees from unmuting themselves – this is particularly useful when the meeting will be led by specific participants while the rest of the audience will be listening in. Note that your organization controls the default participant settings.

Tip 2: Minimize Teams meeting disruptions by muting individual or all meeting attendees

In order to prevent meeting disruptions, intentional or accidental, as a meeting organizer you have the ability to mute individual attendees or all meeting attendees. If an attendee happens to leave their microphone unmuted while being away, you can easily mute that participant from the participant pane. During large meetings led by designated speakers, such as a town hall or lecture, the ability to mute all attendees ensures your presenters won’t be accidentally interrupted.

Tip 3: Determine who can present content or share their screen in your Teams meeting

As the meeting organizer, you can determine who has the ability to present out content or share their screen within the meeting. Prior to the meeting start, we discussed above how this can be accomplished via Meeting options. Once your meeting has begun, you can select a participant via the participant pane to determine whether they have the presenter role or are a standard attendee. This can be especially useful when you have outside participants attending your meeting who may only need the presenter role temporarily.

Tip 4: End your Teams meeting for everyone in attendance at once

As the meeting organizer, sometimes the meeting needs to end at your discretion without allowing participants to remain. Ending a meeting for all attendees is often applicable in large-meeting settings such as a town hall, lecture, or webinar class to ensure attendees don’t remain in the meeting. Once a meeting has wrapped up, instead of clicking Leave, select the dropdown located next to it and click End Meeting. You can also access this by going into your meeting controls, click more options (...) , and select End Meeting. This will end and close the meeting for everyone in attendance.

Tip 5: Create a team with increased security

If any of the content stored or discussed within the team may be considered business sensitive, such as financial details or classified project information, it’s best practice to apply increased protections to that team to ensure the content security. This can be accomplished by creating a new team and applying an IT-created sensitivity label. When applying a sensitivity label to your team, it automatically applies the configured protections to the team.

When creating a new team, on the sensitivity and privacy pane select the dropdown under Sensitivity to select an IT-created sensitivity label to apply to the team. As a reminder, it’s always best to check with your organization or IT department on how sensitive business information should be stored.

Tip 6: Create a private channel

Sometimes you need to share sensitive information within a team to specified team members only, such as project details or strategic planning, that doesn’t require holistic team protection. Rather than creating a new team, you can create a private channel within an existing team that is only accessible to designated members. This is a great way to provide a security layer to protect sensitive business information without creating a new team.

To create a private channel, go to the team and choose more options (...) and select Add channel. After providing a name and description, under Privacy select the dropdown arrow to specify the channel is Private – Accessible only to a specific group of people within the team. Once created, you can add additional private channel owners and up to 250 members. As a reminder, it’s always best to check with your organization or IT department on how sensitive business information should be stored.

Tip 7: Help protect sensitive data in Teams
Microsoft Teams supports data protection policies to help protect sensitive information from being accidentally or inadvertently shared. When collaborating in a Teams 1:1 or channel chat, you may have a message return as blocked if that message contains information that meets your organization’s sensitive information policy.

If your message is blocked, within that blocked message you may see a clickable link that says What can I do? If you click that link, a helpfully policy tip created by your organization will display educating you on why content within that message is considered business sensitive. Policy tips are designed to help the sender understand why certain content is considered business sensitive or is best practice not to share.

We hope that these safe online collaboration tips will help you remain productive while having the confidence you’re remaining secure.

Getting to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business Server and hybrid configurations

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:07:23 GMT

With the retirement of Skype for Business Online in sight, we’re working to ensure customers transition to Microsoft Teams by July 31, 2021, including users homed online in hybrid configurations. But Skype for Business Online customers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from upgrading to Teams. Organizations using Skype for Business on-premises have also experienced the transformational impact Teams can have on communication, collaboration, and culture.

Teams is where innovation happens.

Though mainstream and extended support continues for versions of Skype for Business Server and Lync Server, our focus is squarely on Teams and its ecosystem of applications, devices, and services. We’re continually developing new capabilities in Teams to meet our customers’ evolving needs, while enabling Teams experiences to scale across devices and varying connectivity.

We recently announced Microsoft Teams reached 115 million daily active users, a clear reflection of the positive impact of Teams, leading to increased efficiency and faster outcomes for organizations across the globe.

Realize the full value of Teams.
Customers of all sizes and technical configurations have successfully transitioned from Skype for Business Server to Teams for their communication, collaboration and platform needs. We hear example after example of Teams’ ability to bring people, data, applications, and processes together to get things done. For instance, DSM, a global nutrition, health, and sustainable living company that decommissioned their on-premises deployment of Skype for Business as part of their move to Teams.

DSM’s upgrade to Teams was key to a digital transformation strategy to become more agile, connected, and empowered, while eliminating the cost and effort to maintain their Skype for Business Server setup. A successful change management strategy allowed DSM to migrate over 19,000 employees to Teams in just three months.

Not ready for a full transition to Teams? No problem.
We recognize some organizations may need to maintain their Skype for Business Server deployment. The great news is you can still benefit from Teams without a full transition. Whether you plan to deploy select capabilities of Teams such as collaboration and meetings while maintaining chat and calling capabilities in Skype for Business, or use the overlapping capabilities method in which access to both Teams and Skype for Business enables a broader range of Teams functionality, you can choose the path that works for your organization.

Start with meetings.
Though there are many possible paths to Teams, meetings can be a great way to begin. "Meetings First" is a coexistence configuration optimized for Skype for Business Server organizations with Enterprise Voice on premises who want to start using Teams meetings as rapidly as possible. In this mode, users create meetings in Teams while continuing to use Skype for Business for chat, calling, and presence. There is no overlap of modalities between Teams and Skype for Business. Chat, calling, and presence are “on” in Skype for Business and “off” in Teams. This enables unique scenarios between Skype for Business and Teams that enhance the meetings experience during coexistence, as well as interoperability scenarios with Teams Only users.

Offers to help you get to Microsoft Teams.
To help our customers experience the best of what Microsoft Teams can offer, we announced new promotions that customers can take advantage of today:

Free Audio Conferencing
FastTrack support along with great pricing offers to help you move to Teams in a cost-effective manner.

Contact your Microsoft account representative for more details.

Everything you need to plan a successful Teams upgrade today.
Join thousands of organizations who have benefitted by upgrading from Skype for Business to Teams, through faster decision making, improved meeting quality, and more efficient communications.

Whether you’re coming from a pure on-premises deployment or a hybrid configuration, technical preparation and user readiness can ensure a successful journey to Teams. Take advantage of the great resources to help plan your upgrade to Teams, configure coexistence and interoperability, and get the most from your Teams deployment.

See you on Teams!

8 new productivity hacks for frontline workers, managers, and IT

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:08:44 GMT

If there’s one thing we learned in 2020, it is that frontline workers are essential in today’s world. As companies realize how important they are, this time, they are bringing them along the digital transformation journey. There is no excuse for these workers to be left on the sidelines anymore.

Here are 8 new features that make frontline workers, managers, and IT's jobs a little easier.

One tool to meet frontline worker needs

Whether working in back-to-back shifts where hand-offs cannot occur in person, connecting with corporate employees or consulting with remote company experts - Microsoft Teams has your frontline workers covered. In fact, Teams daily active usage more than doubled since March, primarily driven by chats/channels activity, which resembles frontline worker behavior.

1. Tasks Publishing - As the need for corporate offices to better communicate and work with their frontline workforce becomes top of mind, task publishing lets companies create tasks centrally at the corporate level and publish those tasks to different locations, specific store layouts or other customizable attributes of their frontline teams. For example, leadership for a nationwide retailer can create tasks for the reopening of their stores, attach relevant documents like a planogram, send that list to only the affected store locations, and then track progress against the assigned tasks. Managers can easily assign tasks to individual employees, while frontline workers can see a simple prioritized list of those tasks on their personal or company-issued mobile device. Task publishing is now generally available. Learn more about task publishing here.

2. SMS sign-in - employees are able to sign in to their Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account using one-time SMS codes—reducing the need to remember usernames and passwords. Once enrolled, the user is prompted to enter their phone number, which generates an SMS text with a one-time password. SMS sign-in is a single sign-on (SSO) experience, enabling frontline workers to seamlessly access all the apps they are authorized to use. This new sign-in method can be enabled for select groups and configured at the user level in the My Staff portal—helping to reduce the burden on IT. Click here to learn more.

3. @mention by shift group – Tagging by shift connects you to the right people faster. This new feature enables teams to take the guesswork out of knowing the names of on-shift employees and automatically assigns users with tags matching their schedule in the Shifts app in Teams, backed by major workforce management systems like AMiON, BlueYonder, and Kronos. Use this @mention tag to start a chat or call, or to just notify everyone on a channel.

Tagging by shift is rolling out now and will be fully available by Jan 31. Learn more about how to start using @mention by shift group here.

Supporting frontline managers

4. Delegated user management through My Staff portal - Frontline managers can approve password resets and enable employees to use their phone numbers for SMS sign-in, all via a single customizable portal enabled by IT. With this tool, managers can unblock staff issues—reducing the burden of identity management on IT, and keeping employees connected to the apps they need on the job. Click here to learn more.

5. Digitize manual processes with the Power Platform - Power Apps allow you to create custom low code apps for your frontline workers. The relative simplicity of building these apps allow you to be responsive to the needs of your business, including many firstline scenarios that don’t have technology solutions today. And when combined with automated workflows built with Power Automate, you can digitize and streamline entire processes. For example, Power Apps and Power Automate can totally transform a customer service recall process by alerting store members on Teams via an automate workflow of an item that needs to be pulled from shelves. The frontline workers can then monitor recall alerts and flag new issues with products using a custom app built with Power Apps. Click here to learn more!

Simplifying IT
Bring time to value benefits by streamlining the deployment process and tailoring a frontline team’s collaboration experience. See what Teams templates and policy packages can do for you.

6. Policy Packages - With frontline worker and frontline manager policy packages, IT administrators can easily assign pre-defined policies and policy settings tailored for their frontline workforce. Policy packages create a simple, centralized, and consistent way to manage your Frontline workforce, no matter how big. This month, we are launching group assignment for policy packages via PowerShell and coming soon, group assignment via Teams Admin center.

Availability: These new policy packages are available by default in the IT Admin Center and in PowerShell. Learn more about setting up and customizing the policy packages for Firstline Workforce here.

7. Team Templates - With Teams templates, you can create effective teams faster and more easily than ever. Users can choose from common business scenarios, such as Employee Onboarding and/or industry-specific templates, like Retail – manager collaboration and Organize a store. Each team template comes with pre-defined channels, tabs, and apps. Coming soon are team template policies which allow IT administrators to hide/show specific team templates for users in their organization. This allows admins to tailor the content for business needs. For example the IT administrator could only show retail templates or only show a set of retail + custom team templates, etc.

Custom team templates empower admins to create the right collaboration space for users in their organization. Learn more about creating a template from scratch, from an existing team, from an existing template, and team templates using Microsoft Graph. Teams templates policies will be rolling out soon.

8. Manage shared devices with Endpoint Manager - Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager are now part of a unified management platform known as Microsoft Endpoint Manager. You can choose to enroll your Android Enterprise (AE) dedicated devices into Microsoft Intune with Azure AD shared mode automatically configured. For more information: Customize and configure shared devices for Firstline Workers at scale - Microsoft Tech Community

Looking ahead
We look forward to sharing the latest innovations as we approach Microsoft Ignite! This is just the beginning in our journey to empower every frontline worker in every organization to achieve more. We look forward to sharing more announcements in future blogs. Don't forget to check out the newest Microsoft Mechanics video covering the latest frontline worker features in Teams!

Approvals in Microsoft Teams, Now Generally Available

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:09:44 GMT

Approvals in Microsoft Teams enables everyone, from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees, to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from your hub for teamwork. Approvals in Teams is currently rolling out and should be generally available by mid-January. Once the Approvals apps is automatically installed, you can seamlessly:

Create an approval request
You can quickly start an approval flow in Microsoft Teams from a chat or a channel conversation. You can also create an approval from the Approvals app. Simply fill in the name of the request, who needs to approve it, any additional information, and add an attachment if needed. Additionally, you can create custom responses to tailor your request to the needs of your business.

Approve or reject a request
Once an approval is submitted, approvers are notified. They can quickly review the details of the request and any files included in the approval. If the request was submitted in a chat or a channel, an approvals card will be displayed with all the relevant actions you can take.

Track and manage your approvals
You can see and manage all your approvals from one place, the Approvals app in Teams. Each request is displayed along with key details such as the status, source, requestor, and approvers. You can also select a specific approval to see some more information and track progress.

Bring all your approvals in one place
Approvals in Teams is built on top of Power Platform so you can bring all your approval flows across the company together in one place using the simple workflow and extensibility capabilities of Power Automate.

From the Power Automate design studio, you can create a new flow and select a trigger such as a system driven event from one of our 350+ connectors including the Azure DevOps and ServiceNow connectors that were recently updated to easily be plugged into the Approvals App in Teams.
Add a workflow step to create a Start and Wait Approval by using the Approvals block as an action and fill in the relevant approval details like approvers, attachments, etc. By adding this step, you will automatically start seeing approval status updates and notifications directly in Teams via the Approvals hub.
Add a condition to monitor whether the request was approved or denied to complete the next step in your workflow.

Capture electronic signatures (Coming soon)
There may be times when you need something approved and recorded with more formal attestation, and adding signatures to the approval process is necessary. We’re working closely with key partners to allow you to create an electronic signature approval using Adobe Sign, DocuSign, and other 3rd party providers natively within the Approval app. Simply choose your electronic signature provider and add the details. Once submitted, signers are notified with an email and can easily review and sign. Approvals will keep track of the entire workflow right in context within Teams.

Resources
Get the most out of approvals in Microsoft Teams using these resources:

Connect Guru with Microsoft Teams for a Collaborative Wiki

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:09:59 GMT

When communicating with teammates over chat, nothing can slow you down like having to pause your conversation and open up a new window to find the answer to a question or the right piece of information to share. The context-switching involved in jumping between applications to access the information you need to do your job can cost you and your teammates productive time. Complementing real-time communication with a collaborative knowledge base is key to keeping teams aligned and productive even when distributed.

Guru’s app for Microsoft Teams can make both real-time and asynchronous collaboration easier by bringing your team's collective knowledge right to Microsoft Teams. With the updated integration for Teams, you can now access and share verified knowledge from Guru in the same place that you chat and collaborate with your teammates - within your Teams workflow.

The Guru app for Teams makes the transition from office to remote (and back again) seamless, and employees won't feel like they're missing information by not being in the office. Complement your real-time collaboration in Teams with expert-verified information so that regardless of where - or when - your teammates work, they are connected and aligned.

Share Guru cards within conversations

Here are some of the ways customers can connect Teams with Guru:

Streamline your internal communications
Sometimes, amidst conversations and collaboration, critical information can get lost or overlooked. By integrating Guru into Teams, you can capture updates and announcements that are shared in a Teams channel to create visibility and accountability for the entire team and make it easier for them to revisit and act upon them later.

With notifications integration, a Guru bot will deliver select notifications and allow you to take action on them directly within the Teams workflow:

Card Comments: Receive and reply to mentions on any comments made on Guru Cards
Knowledge Alerts: Receive and read Knowledge Alerts on important knowledge that has been pushed to you and requires attention (including an in-app "I Read It" action)

Notifications and updates from Guru within Microsoft Teams

With Guru and Teams, you can improve your internal communications with notifications on real-time releases, company updates, and more by bringing information directly to employees where they’re already working, and giving them a way to let you know that they've seen it.

Enable every team with the product information they need
Because product information can change rapidly, employees need access to up-to-date information as the product changes. Guru’s app for Teams makes product information accessible and shareable in the same place that employees would go to ask questions about it: in Teams chat and channels. You can save time for your frontline employees and your product experts by integrating your product delivery process into your communication workflow. When those frontline employees are empowered to find product information and answers themselves, they’ll spend less time pinging your internal subject matter experts (SMEs) with repeat questions, resulting in more focused time for everyone involved.

Ramp up new hires faster
Effectively onboarding new employees is critical to their long-term success and that of your company. Teams is a great way for new employees to meet their teammates and ask questions as they get acquainted with the culture, team, and product. Guru gives these new employees a single place to find all the company knowledge they need to thrive, while you lower your costs of administrative support.

Help new hires feel autonomous by allowing them to turn to Guru with all of their onboarding questions instead of having to interrupt another employee. With Guru and Teams, you can keep your new teammates productive in Teams, help existing employees stay focused on their own work, and reduce your new hire onboarding costs.

Improve collaboration with Guru and Teams

With Guru’s Teams integration, your teams have access to more of the information they need to stay productive within the Teams console. By bringing knowledge directly to the place where people already work, you can help make sure that important updates don’t go unnoticed and that teams spend less time searching for information and more time delivering value. Help keep your company connected, engaged, and aligned, both in real-time and asynchronously, with Guru in Teams.

To get started with Guru’s Teams integration, log in to your Teams account and add Guru.

To learn more about the benefits of collaborative knowledge management, visit Guru’s site.

An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams

Mark Rackley — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:54:56 GMT

Over the past few years, it has become increasingly easier to create powerful chatbots with little to no code. Now almost anyone can quickly create a deploy a chatbot with ease. Power Virtual Agents is a premium add-on to the Power Platform that allows you to create and deploy such bots.

However, as part of Dataverse (previously called Project Oakdale) many Microsoft 365 subscribers have access to Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams. These chatbots are covered under their Microsoft 365 licensing and require no premium licensing to develop, deploy, or use.

There are limitations with the Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams. Unless you upgrade to a full Power Virtual Agents subscription you will not be able to:

Deploy chatbots to a specific Channel or specific Team.
Utilize premium connectors in Power Automate
Access and Update the source code for the bot using the Bot Framework

You can find out more about licensing for Power Virtual Agents at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/requirements-licensing-subscriptions

Don’t let this dissuade you though! Even with these limitations, users can build exceptionally powerful chatbots with little to no effort with an intuitive interface. Using Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams users can:

Create and deploy bots to the left rail in Teams that other users in your organization can take advantage of
Use Power Automate flows to connect to other systems, send emails, and perform other business logic
Create bots that prompt users with follow up questions, use conditional logic, and help guide the user to perform their tasks
Review and analyze the performance of the bot, such as what questions are being asked the most, and how effective the bot is at understanding and answering questions

It’s really amazing what you can accomplish. Check out the following video to show you how quickly and easily you can get started building chatbots with Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams.

To recap some of features I show you in the video:

Users create Power Virtual Agents by using the “Power Virtual Agents” application located in Teams
A “Topic” is a specific job or conversation thread that bot executes. Topics have “trigger” phrases to determine if a user is wanting to perform a certain task. For example, “Hello” and “Hi” would trigger the “Greeting” Topic.
There are a handful of default topics already created that users can customize as needed (ie: Greeting)
You can create actions (Power Automate Flows) where data can be passed into the flow and returned back to the Power Virtual Agent.
Using the Authoring Canvas, you can create conditional branches and prompt users for more information (check out the pre-baked “Lesson 3” Topic when you create a bot for good example).
You can pass the Azure ID of the user interacting with the bot to Power Automate in order to retrieve specific information about the user (in the video I retrieve the current user’s Manager)
If you run into issues while testing, be sure to “Reset” your bot.
When you update your bot, it may be necessary to start a conversation with “Start over” to get your updated changes.

All in all, Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams is one of my new favorite things and I look forward to digging into it more. Check it out! You might surprise yourself with what you can build!

To find out more about Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams you can visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/teams/fundamentals-what-is-power-virtual-agents-teams

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams and how you are taking advantage of them in your organization!

Enabling your organization for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:10:30 GMT

In 2020, remote work became the norm for most organizations around the world – a trend that is likely to continue in 2021. In fact, the percentage of workers permanently working from home is expected to double this year. With more than 115 million daily active users on Microsoft Teams, we’ve seen how organizations have truly empowered their employees with remote collaboration tools such as online meetings, chat and calls, and real-time document coauthoring. As remote collaboration continues to be business critical, how can IT and security operations teams enable productivity while safeguarding enterprise assets?

The Importance of end user training
In many ways, end users hold the key to protecting corporate assets because their actions or inactions can create inroads for cyber threats. Certainly, a data governance strategy and security tools like device management or automated information protection capabilities can help, but realistically, security operations can’t be involved in every action an end user makes. This makes end user training a vital element in any cyber security strategy.

For example, training end users to use sensitivity labels to classify content appropriately can significantly improve security and compliance. Many of our customers have rolled out sensitivity labels for email and trained their users to flag emails that contain sensitive business information so that they can be appropriately restricted to specific audiences.

In Teams, IT can enable easy-to-use security controls such as data encryption, data loss prevention, and secure guest access. But for these controls to work effectively, end users must be educated on when and how to appropriately use these security tools.

Providing accessible and consumable end user training
To promote a security-conscious work environment, many organizations provide end user training through a dedicated internal site, such as a Wiki or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, and then amplify this training through communication channels or organizational initiatives to reiterate and reinforce a security mindset. Creating an effective end user security training program can be difficult especially for IT teams that don’t have the capacity or capabilities to do so. Microsoft Teams video training is a helpful place to start.

Microsoft Teams training focused on safe online meetings and collaboration
With the influx in online collaboration, these new Microsoft Teams training assets are designed to help any user to take advantage of Teams security features and become Teams power users. Across the security-focused training, you’ll find three asset types:

	End user guides tailored to specific functions, such as how to mute attendees or create a new team
	Infographics that contain a collection of relevant actions or functions, like safe online meetings and collaboration controls
	Bite-sized videos demonstrating how to use Teams features

Here are some of the practical topics covered in these training assets:

Meeting options available to every meeting creator to control who can join the meeting directly or who can present their screen (note that some meeting option defaults are set by IT)
How to mute individual attendees or mute all attendees
Understanding presenter vs. attendee meeting role and how to promote/demote attendees
Creating a new Team using an IT-created sensitivity label to help regulate sensitive information contained in the team
How to end a Teams meeting for all attendees
Understanding Teams chat policy violations, such as a message being blocked due to sharing sensitive business information or violating internal organization policies

You can download and access the end user guides and infographics at the end of the post, while the bite-sized videos will be posted to the Microsoft Teams video training site.

Tips on using the Microsoft Teams training assets
The individual end user guides and bite-size training videos are ideal to host on a central training site for educating end users on how to use Teams features and functionality. The collective infographic helps group related security-focused functions together to help promote a security-conscious workforce.

In addition to hosting the assets on a centralized site, end user training is often more impactful when the resources available or specific training is communicated through regular intervals. This continues to help promote any centralized training site and assets while also directly sharing a useful tip, trick, or useful feature.

If you’ve recently rolled out Teams or are starting to scale adoption, more frequent communications such as a “Feature Friday” mail can help achieve a targeted training plan. This can be especially useful during an initial Teams rollout where general awareness of how to use Teams may be limited. Helping end users understand how to use Teams not only drives business productivity, but creates a frontline security defense of Teams power users!

For more depth learning and interactive training make sure to check out the latest Teams training on Microsoft Learn including a specific learning path on enforcing security, privacy, and compliance in Microsoft Teams!

End User Guides and Infographics

Does Your Organization Record Teams Meetings? Bookmark this link!

Corbin Meek — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 21:07:46 GMT

January 22nd Update: We're pleased to announce that the rollout has completed! At this time, all Tenants that did not explicitly opt out should see their Teams Meeting recordings stored in OneDrive SharePoint. Thanks!

Hi Teams Community,

Tomorrow January 7th, 2021 is another big milestone date for Teams Meeting Recording Storage. We wanted to send a quick reminder to everyone to bookmark and review https://aka.ms/tmrodsp for all the details!

What's happening tomorrow? Glad you asked:

Rolling out starting January 7, 2021

All new Teams meeting recordings will be saved to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint unless you delay this change by modifying your organization’s Teams Meeting policies and explicitly setting them to Stream. Seeing the policy reporting as Stream isn't enough. You need to explicitly set the policy value to Stream.

Be sure to review the document carefully for additional information. For most of you there's no action you need to take. If you have business requirements to stay on Stream, be sure to opt out following the instructions in

Opt out of OneDrive for Business and SharePoint to continue using Stream

Otherwise, starting tomorrow this change will begin rolling out world wide to non-GCC/DoD tenants (the rollout isn't 'instant' so your Tenant may not start saving Teams Meeting Recordings to OneDrive SharePoint immediately, please be patient).

If you are signed into your M365 Tenant Admin Portal as an Admin you can also review the information in Message Center Post 222640.

And finally, this Feature rollout is listed in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, item 67138.

As always we welcome your feedback on the Blog.

Happy Recording!
Microsoft Teams Support

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2020

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:11:09 GMT

Happy new year and welcome to 2021. It’s going to be an exciting year for Microsoft Teams, but before we get any further, let’s have a look at all the great capabilities that launched in December.

What’s New: Meetings
Virtual Breakout Rooms
Breakout rooms allows meeting organizers to divide the meeting into smaller groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions. A breakout room can be created in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, allowing greater flexibility on how you want to meet. Organizers can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. Any files from the breakout rooms can be shared in the main meeting and is available afterwards in the meeting chat. Learn more.

End-of-meeting notifications
Microsoft Teams notifies the participants in a meeting when there are five minutes remaining in the scheduled meeting time. The notification appears on screen for 10 seconds and disappears without any user action. This helps you stay on track and wrap up as necessary without unintentionally running late to your next schedule. Notification is triggered for all scheduled private and channel meetings and does not cause the meeting to end automatically.

Teams meeting pre-join experience
We have now improved the pre-join meeting experience for Teams meetings including easier discovery of audio, video, and device configurations before joining a meeting. Previously, you had to go to settings to change meeting devices, but now these can be easily adjusted prior to the meeting in the pre-join experience.

New languages supported for real-time translation in live events
Translate Japanese, Korean, French, French-Canadian, Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Hindi-Indian, Portuguese-Brazilian, and Russian into up to 50 different languages. Learn more.

Live events limit increases are extended until June 30, 2021
To continue help support our customers, through June 30, 2021, we extended limit increases for live events, including:

Event support for up to 20,000 attendees
50 events can be hosted simultaneously across a tenant
Event duration of 16 hours per broadcast

Additionally, events for as many as 100,000 attendees can be planned through the live events assistance program. Learn more.

What’s New: Calling
Multiple Number Dialing
You can now see a split button in the chat header for audio/video calling. This displays multiple numbers for a single contact making it easier to view available numbers to initiate a call.

Live Captions for 1:1 Calls
Whether you’re in a noisy environment or just missed what was said, live captions can make it easier to follow along in calls. Admins can disable this capability if desired, and users have control to turn these off. For the most accurate captions possible, it is recommended to speak clearly into the microphone and avoid having multiple people speaking at the same time.

What’s New: Devices
New features rolling out to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows
The latest app for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, version 4.7.15.0 is now available in the Teams Admin Center. The latest update includes the following new capabilities:

Cortana Voice Assistance (Preview): Launching in Preview, in-room meeting attendees can now use voice assistance powered by Cortana to join and end their meetings without touch. Using natural language, people can simply state “Cortana, join/end my meeting” for a seamless hands-free experience.
Control Spotlight from console: People in the meeting room can now control the Teams meeting Spotlight feature from the Teams Rooms console control. Once enabled, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants in the Teams meeting.
Share HDMI audio: A highly requested feature, users connecting to a Teams Room via HDMI can now share their PC audio into the Teams meeting.

Enhanced meeting experiences on Teams phones
Teams phones now support a new video layout including 3x3 gallery view, large gallery view for more participants and Together mode. Using 3x3, users can see the video feeds of up to 9 meetings participants at a time. For even larger meetings, enable large gallery view to show up to 49 participants. Teams phones now also supports Together mode, the meeting experience where participants are transported to a virtual shared space. No matter which style of meeting you select you can always enable background blur to reduce distractions and obscure any imagery found in a video setting.

Proximity Join for Teams conference phones
Proximity based meeting join for an available Microsoft Teams conference phone is supported from this update. The Microsoft Teams client on your PC and mobile detect proximity of the conference phone via the BLE beacon transmitted by the phone and allow you to add the phone easily to the meeting from your pre-join screen on your desktop or mobile client. When a user adds the conference phone to the meeting, the phone would auto accept the incoming meeting request. Learn more.

New unified communication workstation and phone form factors from Yealink and Audiocodes
Yealink is excited to introduce a new set of peripherals, the WH66 and WH67, an integrated unified communication workstation. The all-in-one format has a built-in speakerphone, wireless mobile phone charger, multi-touch screen and USB hub. Calling is now even more convenient with a dedicated Teams button. All these features reduce the number of tools and wires on a desktop, simplifying a workspace and boosting productivity.

The newly certified Yealink MP58 desk phone provides a high-quality collaboration experience for executives and professionals alike. With HD Audio features, a 7-inch adjustable touch screen and a dedicated Teams button, this phone was built with Teams calling and meetings in mind. Moreover, the MP58 can support the innovative Bluetooth wireless handset, adding extra mobility and flexibility to the users by allowing them to leave the desk while on the call.

Another newly certified device is the Audiocodes C470, a Teams native high end desk phone. The C470HD is equipped with a large, single surface, full touch interface, incorporating an exceptionally sharp 5.5” color touch screen, with optional support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Check out these and more devices at http://aka.ms/Teamsdevices!

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration
Improved Search relevance
Now when searching for messages in Microsoft Teams, the top 3 messages are generated and ordered by a newly developed relevance model – previously messages were ordered chronologically with the most recent messages at the top of the search results.

Teams learns the relevant characteristics of a message that matters most to you based on a vast array of active and passive signals, for example, who you interact with most frequently or on which teams and channels you are most active on.

Access files offline on iOS
The Teams mobile app for iOS now allows you to access files even when you are offline or in bad network conditions. Simply select the files you need access to, and Teams will keep a downloaded version to use in your mobile app. You can find all your files that are available offline in the files section of the app.

Improvements to video playback experience
Now included in Teams is a faster-loading experience for embedded videos. You will now experience up to 25% reduction in the time it takes a Stream embedded video to load, and up to a 90% reduction in the time it takes for the video to start playing. This means a much faster Stream video playback experience within Teams. Learn more.

Improvements to Yammer communities and conversations in Teams
You can now search for Yammer conversations while in the Communities app within Microsoft Teams as well as add a tab with new Yammer styling in your Teams channels. Learn more.

Updated ‘Add a Team to a site’ wizard in SharePoint
We want to make it easier to use the connected value of Teams and SharePoint. People can use SharePoint team site home pages with dynamic web parts as mini-dashboards for group content: pages, news, links, documents, group activity and more - and it's configurable. Choose the SharePoint content that you want to add as tabs in Teams when you first connect them via the "Add a Team" flow from your site. Learn more.

Add document libraries, pages or news to a channel in Teams via the updated SharePoint tab
Team members can now use the SharePoint tab experience to pin any page, news, list or document library as a separate tab in their Teams channel. Just go to the "+" button from any channel in Teams, select SharePoint and start pinning resources that your team needs to collaborate better. Learn more.

Teams and OneDrive destinations in SharePoint admin center Migration Manager
SharePoint Migration Manager now lets you select a Teams channel or a OneDrive username when setting your content migration destination. Learn more.

What’s New: Power Platform and custom development
Power App in Teams – Broad distribution apps
The tight Power Apps and Teams integration empowers you to build custom apps for whatever business challenge you are facing, especially with the recently released Power Apps Teams app. With the Power Apps Teams app you can build custom low code apps to use in Teams – and now you can deploy those apps to your entire tenant. You can still deploy apps to a select team, but this added functionality lets you distribute apps backed with Dataverse for Teams to your entire organization.

App spotlight

Many teams today use Jira for project and issues management and Microsoft Teams for collaboration, but not all users may use both – which may lead to some breaks in the communication flow. That’s where Yasoon comes in to bridge the gap and maintain a clear line of communication across both Jira and Teams. With Yasoon’s Smart Connect for Jira app, users can have cross-tool conversations seamlessly – even with members who can’t access Jira – so now everyone can stay engaged and understand the context of every issue being worked through. Learn more.

What’s New: Management
Restricting Windows and Mac managed device sign-in to specific tenants
You can now restrict Teams sign-in for Windows and Mac managed devices to help ensure that employees cannot sign-in to another organization's tenant using the other tenant's credentials from the device they are authorized to use for work. This policy can also be used to configure access to personal accounts.

Manage Teams displays in Team Admin Center
We are adding the Teams Display as one more device category that can now be managed within Teams Admin Center. Learn more.

What’s New: Security, compliance & privacy
Only Invited Users can join directly with new Lobby Setting
A new lobby setting is coming to Teams meeting. We are adding "People I invite" as an option to the "Who can bypass lobby?" setting. Once enabled, only the participants invited by the organizer in the meeting invite can join the meeting directly. Everyone else is sent to the lobby.

Customer Key for Teams available for public preview
Customer Key support for Microsoft Teams is now available for public preview! Customer Key is an added layer of encryption and is already available in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive. Learn more.

What’s New: Teams for Education
Students and educators get a notification when a new Class Notebook page is distributed
We are making a new update that allows any Educator using Page Distribution in the OneNote client to ensure that all students get a notification in Teams after a page is distributed! This notification works for educators using the Class Notebook Toolbar in OneNote Windows 10, iPad, Web and Mac.

Coming soon – Teams for Education policy wizard

In the next few days, the new Education policy wizard will be available. Using this wizard admins can easily and quickly apply global policy defaults for students and apply a custom policy set to the group of educators and staff tailored to their needs. Learn more.

What’s New: Healthcare
EHR connector for virtual visits in healthcare
The Microsoft Teams EHR connector let's patients schedule and join the virtual visit from within their electronic health record (EHR) system’s patient portal. Providers can schedule and launch the visits from within the EHR provider portal. Integration with Epic is currently supported by the Microsoft Teams EHR connector, with other EHR systems coming soon. Learn more.

What’s New: Firstline Workers
Customizable Praise badges
Now, organizations can create customized Praise badges to express their culture and values when recognizing successes and fostering comradery. Praise can help improve workplace culture and job satisfaction, from corporate headquarters to Firstline Workers. Learn more.

What’s New: Government
Virtual Breakout Rooms
Breakout rooms allows meeting organizers to divide the meeting into smaller groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions. A breakout room can be created in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, allowing greater flexibility on how you want to meet. Organizers can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. Any files from the breakout rooms can be shared in the main meeting and are available afterwards in the meeting chat. Available in GCC in December. Learn more.

PowerPoint file sharing
PowerPoint file sharing in Teams allows you to share a PowerPoint file within a Teams Meeting without having to use Desktop or Window sharing. Participants can view the presentation at their own pace, navigate through slides on their own and sync back to the presenter at any time. This gives them time to focus on or revisit relevant slides before resuming back to the current presentation. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.

Multiple number dialing
You can now see a split button in the chat header for audio/video calling. This displays multiple numbers for a single contact making it easier to view available numbers to initiate a call. Available in GCC in December.

Inline message translation in DoD
With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat. Inline message translation helps ensure that every worker in the team has a voice and facilitate global collaboration. Learn more.

Set presence status duration in GCC
Let others know when you are available in Teams by managing your presence status. Users can now change their presence status for a specific period. Learn more.

New offline presence status in GCC
Let others know when you are not available in Microsoft Teams. You can now change your presence to “Offline”. This allows you to have full access to Teams while signaling to colleagues that you are unavailable. Learn more.

Linux Client available in GCC-High
The Microsoft Teams Linux client is now available in GCC-High.

Data loss prevention for Microsoft Teams
Data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities in Microsoft 365 government clouds is now extended to include Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages, including private channel messages. If your organization has DLP, you can now define policies that prevent people from sharing sensitive information in a Microsoft Teams channel or chat session.

GCC support for devices management in Teams Admin Center
Device management support in Teams Admin Center is now available in the GCC cloud environment. Admins can now control the entire lifecycle of their Teams devices, which include an increasing variety of supported device types - IP Phones, Collaboration bars, Teams displays, and Teams Meeting Room devices, all from one place.

Teams Calendar App test now available in Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Corbin Meek — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 21:54:53 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

We're back with another great addition to Support Diagnostics for Microsoft Teams. @João Loureiro has written our first offering in the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, the Teams Calendar App test.

As you know, Teams and Exchange integration needs to be properly configured for users to get the full feature experience in Teams with Calendar functionality. This new test will help you troubleshoot and test your Exchange On-Premises Hybrid configuration to ensure it's properly setup for Teams users.

If you're experiencing issues with the Calendar App missing in Teams, or getting odd error messages in the Teams Meeting Add-in for Outlook like "We couldn't schedule the meeting. Please try again later." AND you have On-Premises Exchange server, you should use this diagnostic to help you troubleshoot.

To access the new diagnostic, navigate to Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, select Microsoft Teams, then click on the Microsoft Teams Calendar Tab test.

You'll need to enter valid credentials of an account with an On-Premises Exchange Server mailbox. Keep in mind your end users can also perform these tests, you do not need to be an Administrator of your tenant. In some scenarios you'll want to work with your impacted end user to run the tests and collect additional data for Microsoft Support.

At a high level the test checks a couple things:

The user is licensed and fully provisioned for Teams
The user's mailbox is accessible via Exchange Web Services (EWS)
We can get items from the user's Calendar

You'll also want to go over the following documents carefully when configuring your environment or troubleshooting these issues:

How Exchange and Microsoft Teams interact

Configuring Teams calendar access for Exchange on-premises mailboxes

Troubleshoot Microsoft Teams and Exchange Server interaction issues

Please give the new diagnostic a try if you're using Exchange Server On-Premises and having trouble with Teams users' Calendar apps or Outlook add-ins for Teams Meetings and let us know if it helped?

Thanks!
Microsoft Teams Support

Customer Key support for Microsoft Teams now in Public Preview!

Microsoft_Teams_team — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:31:00 GMT

In September, at Microsoft Ignite, we shared that Customer Key support for Microsoft Teams would become available for public preview at the end of 2020 – we are now happy to share it’s here for public preview!

Microsoft Teams helps keep data safe by encrypting it while at rest in Microsoft data centers, starting with volume-level encryption enabled through BitLocker while service encryption ensures that content at rest is encrypted at the application layer. Customer Key is built on service encryption and provides an added layer of encryption at the application level for data-at-rest and allows you as the organization to control the encryption keys.

Customer Key helps you meet compliance obligations because you control the encryption keys that Microsoft 365 uses to encrypt and decrypt data, enhancing your ability to meet the demands of compliance requirements that specify key arrangements with the cloud service provider.

Already available in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, this extension into Teams will be offered as a preview. You can now assign a single data encryption policy at the tenant level to encrypt your data-at-rest in Teams and Exchange. For more details, please see Overview of Customer Key for Microsoft 365 at the tenant level.

4 ways to deliver better meetings with apps in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:11:44 GMT

For so many of us, meetings form an important part of how work is done. With new applications and updates inside of Microsoft Teams, you will be better equipped to handle the ebb and flow of meetings throughout your day.

We’ve recently released apps in meetings, and there are nearly 20 apps now available. To get started with apps in meetings, edit the meetings you have scheduled and sent out within Teams, and select the + button at the top to add apps to your meetings:

Many apps in meetings have a pre-meeting preparation experience you can engage in before a meeting starts (e.g., setting up an agenda, designing simple poll questions.) Then, during a meeting, you can call up your tools as needed and as it fits the conversations you are having. Just like that – you can transform your meeting experiences with different apps to suit the types of meetings you are in.

1. Structured meetings are productive meetings with Decisions
For all the time that you and your colleagues spend within a meeting, you want to ensure you actionable outcomes and next steps. Decisions has extended their Teams integration with an app for meetings – starting with an easy-to-edit agenda that allows you to tag and organize the expected timelines. This will help you, as a meeting organizer, become instantly better structured and outcome-oriented for the meetings you run. Within a meeting, Decisions takes advantage of the meetings pane so that you can see and interact with the agenda, alongside your colleagues, in real time during a meeting. With the power to keep the agenda always in view – alongside capabilities for adding notes, tasks, and taking votes – you can ensure that every great idea and every action follow up is recorded.

See more about Decisions available on Microsoft AppSource.

2. Connect with your team via Teamflect
For managers and their team, the 1-on-1 meeting is a critical tool for team members to shape their relationships– including their status review, yearly plans, mentoring relationships, and more. Teamflect, a new app in Microsoft Teams, provides a way to manage and structure the process of those management relationships within an organization. It evaluates your connections with other colleagues and makes it easy to record follow up notes and feedback from your management conversations with your teammates. Because it particularly focuses on 1-on-1 conversations between managers and their team, it has focused tools to help structure plans for growth for everyone on your team. To have better and more structured 1-on-1s, give Teamflect a try within your next management meetings.

Add Teamflect from AppSource.

3. Poll the meeting audience with Slido
During a meeting – especially a large meeting – you will want to plan for ways to keep the audience engaged. At several points, consider asking the audience questions so you can encourage conversation or tailor your pitch to the mood of the audience. Slido is a simple but flexible polling tool you can integrate into your meeting workflows that help you get a broader sense of the room. Supporting several different question types – including word clouds, multiple choice questions, quizzes and ratings, there are a number of options for pausing during a meeting to ask for more audience participation and engagement.

Add the Slido app to your meetings from Microsoft AppSource.

4. Take a mini-break from meetings with Breakthru
Finally, with more and more digital meetings it is more important to pay attention to your individual workload and sense of fatigue. We have found that ensuring you get time in between meetings to take some time out, relax, and shift your focus can make a big impact to your overall sense of wellbeing, and help you stay refreshed for that final late-afternoon meeting. Breakthru is a new application in Microsoft Teams that helps you do just that – it helps you take 2-minute mini breaks with meditative exercise that can help you and your team re-energize. Whether within a meeting with colleagues, or just by yourself, you can enhance your overall well-being with these helpful restorative pauses that can help clear your mind for what comes next.

Add the Breakthru app to try it out for yourself, or within a meeting.

For all the decisions and actions that take place in meetings, apps within and outside of meetings give you the right tools to get to better outcomes. With these apps in your toolbox, you can run more meaningful and engaged meetings throughout the week – and keep everyone engaged as well.

New Diagnostic: Teams Voicemail

Corbin Meek — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 18:46:36 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

Our team is constantly hard at work to bring you Diagnostics to help troubleshoot and resolve the top issues we see in Microsoft Teams Support. We've just released Teams Voicemail Diagnostic written by my teammate Tony Quintanilla

If you or your users are having issues with Teams Voicemail, this Diagnostic is for you. We check the most common causes of Voicemail issues in Teams including User Provisioning, Policies, Licensing, and Voicemail configuration.

As always you can call the diagnostic directly in your M365 Admin Portal by typing in Diag: Voicemail in the Support experience (Need Help, or Support - New service request) as in the following example:

Here's an example where a user didn't have Voicemail enabled via policy:

And here's an example where the User had Busy on Busy set. Occasionally users will have Busy on Busy set and not realize it. When BoB is set and the user is in another call (or joined to a meeting) any incoming calls will be rejected with a Busy signal. Read more about that here: Busy on Busy is available when on a call

And of course the Diagnostic does a lot more than that! So if you're having trouble with Voicemail for a particular user, please use the Diagnostic as your starting point for troubleshooting.

As always, we're constantly working on new diagnostics and expanding our existing ones; for a full list, click here.

Questions? Comments? Please post below and we'll happily follow up!

Thanks!

Microsoft Teams Support

Get the most from your meetings and calls with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 18:55:27 GMT

Part 2: Re-setting the bar for meeting and call quality

This is the second in a series of blog posts focused on helping you get the most out of your meetings and calls with Microsoft Teams. Millions of people around the world rely on Teams to collaborate via meetings, calls, and chat. In this series, we share best practices and highlight new features in Teams and the Microsoft 365 service designed to help your teams achieve more together.

As many of us have experienced, meetings often get derailed by unintentional distractions. An echo or unidentifiable background noise cuts in. Someone’s audio breaks up while they’re making an important point. A person suddenly gets booted off the call. Poor audio and visual quality can hijack a meeting, inhibiting focus, wasting time, and in the long term, causing meeting fatigue. However, in the moments when technology fails us, it seems there’s nothing we can do but keep going and hope the problem resolves quickly.

With Microsoft Teams, we want to give people more control over the digital quality of their meetings. Born in the cloud and built with Microsoft AI at its core, Teams uses AI to remove unwanted sounds, monitor quality and adapt as needed, give users more information and proactive actions, and provide insight into issues before they disrupt meetings.

AI-based noise suppression

Whether it be multiple meetings occurring in a small space, children playing loudly nearby, or construction noise outside of your home office, unwanted background noise can be distracting in Teams meetings. We are excited to announce that you will have the ability to remove unwelcome background noise during your calls and meetings with our new AI-based noise suppression option.

You can enable this helpful new feature by adjusting your device settings before your call or meeting and selecting "High" in the "Noise suppression" drop-down (note this feature is currently only supported in the Teams Windows desktop client). See this support article for details about how to turn it on here.

Our new noise suppression feature works by analyzing an individual’s audio feed and uses AI to filter out noise and only retain speech. While traditional noise suppression can only address simple stationary noise sources such as a consistent fan noise, our AI-based approach learns the difference between speech and unnecessary noise and is able to suppress non-stationary noises such as keyboard typing, crunching of paper or food wrappers, and vacuuming.

Satin: A new audio codec for great quality even in low bandwidth
With more virtual meetings, many users require great call quality even when your network is limited. There are many scenarios that can contribute to low bitrate – parents and children sharing the household’s network for meetings and classes, high cost of large data plans, and many more. To help with these challenges, our latest innovation is a new audio codec, Satin, which offers great audio quality at a bitrate as low as 6kbps, making meetings sound natural and clear even when the network has low bandwidth.

Before

Your browser does not support the audio element.

After

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Packet loss improvement for choppy audio
Teams also pays attention to the strength of the network and adapts as needed. When bandwidth is poor, some of the audio information gets lost in transmission, which causes the choppy audio that we’ve all become too familiar with. When Teams detects an unable network, it automatically attempts to recover some of the lost data to deliver smooth, clear audio. Teams continually monitors audio quality and adapts accordingly to keep participants engaged in the meeting.

Before

Your browser does not support the audio element.

After

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Proactive user assistance
Teams actively helps people improve the quality of the meeting by offering suggestions to optimize their audio and video experience based on their work environment. For example, the dreaded echo or howling noise is caused when multiple devices are present and connected in the same room. When Teams notices that a participant is joining via their PC in a conference room, Teams will prompt them to “join with audio off” since the conference room device will manage the audio. If they don’t see the prompt, Teams will automatically mute the participant’s microphone and speakers upon joining – circumventing a potential distraction.

Actionable insights for IT
Your IT department also has an important role to play in improving the quality of virtual meeting experiences. Teams has a robust set of capabilities to help IT manage, triage and resolve issues. The Call Quality Dashboard gives IT administrators an at-a-glance view of monthly, daily and hourly quality trends for various types of Teams meetings and calls. When issues arise, IT can quickly access data reports to effectively troubleshoot. These reports include rich information that helps IT not only understand the problem, but also data about specific individuals affected or involved in the issue.

When it comes to getting the most out of meetings and calls, quality matters. That is why we continue to invest in intelligent capabilities that improve the quality and reliability of calls and meetings experiences. We’re excited for the new innovations ahead that will bring even better quality to our customers around the world. With our continuous commitment to quality improvement, users can save time and focus on connecting with one another.

Reduce background noise in Microsoft Teams meetings with AI-based noise suppression

robertaichner — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:25:08 GMT

Whether it be multiple meetings occurring in a small space, children playing loudly nearby, or construction noise outside of your home office, unwanted background noise can be really distracting in Teams meetings. We are excited to announce that users will have the ability to remove unwelcome background noise during their calls and meetings with our new AI-based noise suppression option.

Users can enable this helpful new feature by adjusting their device settings before their call or meeting and selecting "High" in the "Noise suppression" drop-down (note this feature is currently only supported in the Teams Windows desktop client). See this support article for details about how to turn it on and more here: https://aka.ms/noisesuppression.

Our new noise suppression feature works by analyzing an individual’s audio feed and uses specially trained deep neural networks to filter out noise and only retain speech. While traditional noise suppression algorithms can only address simple stationary noise sources such as a consistent fan noise, our AI-based approach learns the difference between speech and unnecessary noise and is able to suppress various non-stationary noises, such as keyboard typing or food wrapper crunching. With the increased work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, noises such as vacuuming, your child’s conflicting school lesson or kitchen noises have become more common but are effectively removed by our new AI-based noise suppression, exemplified in the video below.

The AI-based noise suppression relies on machine learning (ML) to learn the difference between clean speech and noise. The key is to train the ML model on a representative dataset to ensure it works in all situations our Teams customers are experiencing. There needs to be enough diversity in the data set in terms of the clean speech, the noise types, and the environments from which our customers are joining online meetings.

To achieve this dataset diversity, we have created a large dataset with approximately 760 hours of clean speech data and 180 hours of noise data. To comply with Microsoft’s strict privacy standards, we ensured that no customer data is being collected for this data set. Instead, we either used publicly available data or crowdsourcing to collect specific scenarios. For clean speech we ensured that we had a balance of female and male speech and we collected data from 10+ languages which also include tonal languages to ensure that our model will not change the meaning of a sentence by distorting the tone of the words. For the noise data we included 150 noise types to ensure we cover diverse scenarios that our customers may run into from keyboard typing to toilet flushing or snoring. Another important aspect was to include emotions in our clean speech so that expressions like laughter or crying are not suppressed. The characteristics of the environment from which our customers are joining their online Teams meetings has a strong impact on the speech signal as well. To capture that diversity, we trained our model with data from more than 3,000 real room environments and more than 115,000 synthetically created rooms.

Since we use deep learning it is important to have a powerful model training infrastructure. We use Microsoft Azure to allow our team to develop improved versions of our ML model. Another challenge is that the extraction of original clean speech from the noise needs to be done in a way that the human ear perceives as natural and pleasant. Since there are no objective metrics which are highly correlated to human perception, we developed a framework which allowed us to send the processed audio samples to crowdsourcing vendors where human listeners rated their audio quality on a one to five-star scale to produce mean opinion scores (MOS). With these human ratings we were able to develop a new perceptual metric which together with the subjective human ratings allowed us to make fast progress on improving the quality of our deep learning models.

To advance the research in this field we have also open-sourced our dataset and the perceptual quality crowdsourcing framework. This has been the basis of two competitions we hosted as part of the Interspeech 2020 and ICASSP 2021 conferences as outlined here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/dns-challenge/home/

Finally, we ensured that our deep learning model could run efficiently on the Teams client in real-time. By optimizing for human perception, we were able to achieve a good trade-off between quality and complexity which ensures that most Windows devices our customers are using can take advantage of our AI-based noise suppression. Our team is currently working on bringing this feature also to our Mac and mobile platforms.

AI based noise suppression is an example of how our deep learning technology has a profound impact on our customer’s quality of experience.

Learn more in the second part of our series about getting the most from your meetings and calls with Microsoft Teams: Re-setting the bar for meeting and call quality

5 things you may not know about the free version of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:00:00 GMT

In the months since remote work became the new normal for many of us, we’ve all had our fair share of “virtual everything,” from customer meetings to online events and virtual team gatherings. Businesses of all sizes are using Microsoft Teams to stay connected, whether as part of their Microsoft 365 plan, or the free version of Microsoft Teams, which enables you to meet, chat, and collaborate securely, all in one place, at no cost.

Here are five things about the free version of Teams that make remote work easier, including new features now available.

1. Schedule meetings with anyone
Earlier this year we delivered scheduled meetings in the free version of Teams, answering one of the most frequent feature requests. When scheduling a meeting, organizers can either copy the meeting link to send it directly to other participants or send an invite via Outlook or Google calendar. Anyone, including external participants, can join meetings in one click—no setup or account required.

Now, we are also adding the ability to view past and upcoming meetings in Teams. Soon you’ll be able to view and edit all the meetings you scheduled in Teams, including their security options, right from the Meetings app on the left rail.

2. Reduce meeting fatigue with Together mode
Together mode is a new meeting experience in Teams that digitally places meeting participants in a shared background. It’s great for meetings in which multiple people speak, such as brainstorms or roundtable discussion, because it makes it easier to pick up body language and non-verbal cues. Together mode is now available in the free version of Teams with a variety of scenes including auditoriums, conference rooms, and even a coffee shop.

3. Work with external stakeholders using guest access
Often you need to collaborate with people outside your organization, such as clients, suppliers, and partners. You can do so directly in Teams by adding them as a guest. Guest access allows you to provide access to certain teams and chats to people outside the organization, while maintaining control over your company data.

Note: Guest access is not required to join a meeting.

4. Share files with built-in cloud storage or integrate your existing storage
The free version of Teams comes with 10 GB of team cloud storage and 2 GB of personal cloud storage per user. This allows organizations to securely store, access, and share important documents in Teams. You can even co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint files with colleagues in real time within the Teams app.

Want to keep using your existing cloud storage service? No problem. You can easily integrate third party storage providers such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Box, enabling you to view, manage, and share those files in Teams as well.

5. Brainstorm together with Whiteboard in Teams
Whiteboard in Teams makes it easy to run brainstorming and creative thinking sessions in a remote or hybrid work environment. Each Teams meeting has a dedicated whiteboard where participants can draw, sketch, and write on a shared digital canvas. You can also quickly add sticky notes to a whiteboard, making it easy to contribute if you’re not using a digital pen.

Powerful ways to connect SharePoint team sites, files, lists and pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:16:26 GMT

This past year has been one of tremendous integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. SharePoint provides rich content services that power files, lists and pages directly inside of Teams. Team members can easily highlight files, organize lists, and design pages – all as powerful tabs in Teams – due to the ease of benefitting more from the connected SharePoint team site.

We’re pleased to announce the following updates within Teams – all powered by SharePoint:

Updated flow to add Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site
Updated SharePoint tab app
Updated SharePoint pages tab app

More screenshots, details, and links to documentation below…

Unifying Teams and SharePoint content collaboration
Updated flow to add Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site

[roadmap ID: 46990]

We’re pleased to announce that we are making it even easier to bring SharePoint content into Teams, in the same motion of adding Microsoft Teams to your team site, aka #teamify.

We’ll make it easy to choose lists, libraries and pages that you want to bring into Teams as tabs. When you’ve selected what you need, click the Add Team button to make it happen. By default, your team site home page will be selected, you can change it to suit your needs, and you can fully navigate primary document library from the Files tab – just follow the folder breadcrumbs.

When adding Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site, you can select resources (pages, lists and document libraries) to be added as tabs in the general channel of the newly created Teams team.

Once in Teams, it is easy to collaborate with the same group directly around the SharePoint content you just brought in. Pick the same list or page (even the team site home page) you were just working on and engage your colleagues with chat side-by-side the list directly in Teams.

With your content available in Teams, we make it even easier to collaborate and get work done.

Learn more about adding Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site.

Updated SharePoint tab app

[roadmap ID: 68860]

We have improved the SharePoint tab experience when adding pages, lists or document libraries to a channel in Teams. It's easy to select multiple content types from the connected team site, or by providing a link to any other page, list or library to which the user has access.

The updated SharePoint tab experience when adding pages, lists or document libraries to a channel in Teams.

We have also added a new "Recommended" section in the SharePoint tab to help user easily find the most relevant content from their site to pin in their channels. It's a one-stop shop for adding various types of existing content that began in SharePoint.

Learn more how to add a SharePoint page, list, or document library as a tab in Teams.

Updated SharePoint pages app

[roadmap ID: 60614]

Using SharePoint pages is a great way to consolidate and share content in the right context using images, Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents, videos, links, Twitter feeds and more – all on the same page. And now you can more easily your pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams.

The updated experience makes it easier to choose pages from the connected SharePoint team site and you can also add a page from any SharePoint site link and then paste the URL of the page, or news post, that you want to add as a tab.

Choose pages from the connected SharePoint team site or add a page from any SharePoint site (via URL).

SharePoint will validate the SharePoint URL and if you have access to the page. Permissions of the page itself will not change, and if users on the team do not have permission to the tabbed page, they will be shown a page to request access.

Note: When adding content as tabs in Teams, you may notice a few SharePoint-powered apps – here as an FYI and clarity (in quotes is the text that shows in-app). This is an area of investment to ensure you can easily connect content stored in SharePoint in Teams channels:

“SharePoint”– add existing content from the connected team site or any SharePoint site – including: Recommended content, Pages, Lists and Document libraries.
“SharePoint Pages”– add a SharePoint page from the connected team site or from any SharePoint site using a URL. (this is the new app mentioned above)
Microsoft “Lists”– Create a new list for your team or add an existing list from any existing SharePoint site. (more about working with the Lists app in Microsoft Teams)
- “SharePoint lists”– you may see this app if you don’t yet have the new Lists app. It can be used to bring existing lists as a tab in Teams – but not to create a new list.
SharePoint “Document Library”– add a SharePoint document library from relevant sites or use a SharePoint document library URL to a site or folder.

Learn more about adding SharePoint pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams, plus further info on how to use built-in and custom tabs in Microsoft Teams.

In closing …
When people work together and get things done, there is less confusion between team members and the content they create. This is the design goal behind Microsoft Teams – the hub for teamwork – and the reason why SharePoint is deeply integrated to provide great content experiences and services within the same user interface. And, it’s all backed by world-class security and compliance to meet the needs of every team across your organization.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. And when you do this together – as a team – it’s teamwork that moves things forward.

Thanks,

Microsoft Teams plus SharePoint = better together.

Eloops employee engagement platform now integrates with Microsoft Teams

arvindsa — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:15:36 GMT

Today, when more and more organizations are using Microsoft Teams on a daily basis, we are happy to add more apps to our Marketplace that help our users, managers and employees enjoy using Teams more. This week we added Eloops, an employee engagement platform at Microsoft AppSource. With Eloops employees get to earn company virtual currency through engaging with content and activities like quizzes, challenges and a Peer-2-Peer recognition program and then redeem for rewards of their choosing in their virtual and customized company store. Eloops adds value by bringing a fun element to Teams.

Eloops helps HR professionals engage and align employees with company culture, values and goals at scale. The secret sauce behind the platform is endless pre-made content and virtual activities available in the Eloops marketplace that HRs can choose and customize based on short or long-term company needs. The content is designed to boost engagement, build company culture and improve overall employee experience.

Onboarding
Once you’ve added Eloops as an app to your Microsoft Teams account, you’re able to log into your Eloops account and you are immediately in the loop! (if If you don’t have an Eloops company account, you can easily create one and sign up using your Microsoft SSO!)

Engage & Earn Coins
Each company’s ‘Admins’ use the Eloops Dashboard to customize and send activities to their employees in Teams. Employees engage with the different content and earn themselves virtual coins.

Appreciate And Recognize Colleagues
Admins are able to customize the Peer-2-Peer Recognition feature by adding their company values. Employees are then able to reward their colleagues with virtual coins for ‘living’ these values as well as for other reasons.

Collect and Redeem Virtual Coins
Admins create their virtual currency by choosing its name, color, and how much employees will earn for participation and engaging with different activities.

The company store can also be customized with different gifts, experiences, and perks.

Measure and improve
Through the Eloops Dashboard, Admins can instantly find out which content works best, who are the most engaged employees or teams or departments, who are the most recognized employees, what are the most valued company values, and more!

Personalized Communications
Eloops allow managers to schedule, automate and send targeted and personalized messages to specific audiences and employees with special announcements, updates, birthdays and work anniversaries, or any kind of message from the Eloops dashboard.

How to get started?
If you haven’t already, you can install Eloops directly from Microsoft AppSource.

For more info and to see how Eloops works, go to https://eloops.com/microsoft-teams-app/.

Or if you prefer, watch this video to learn all about how to use Eloops in Microsoft Teams:

Holiday parties & background fun with Microsoft Teams

Karuana Gatimu — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:02:57 GMT

Now is the time to bring some holiday fun to your Microsoft Teams meetings. There are many new features in teams that are perfect for your holiday gathering. Plus we've launched a Microsoft Teams background page that will give you some fun holiday backgrounds to use to dress up your next virtual meeting.

It's time to bring people together to do something other than work. Below you’ll find some ideas for making your virtual holiday gathering fun, but remember a party is about the people not the technology! Whatever you do just make sure you remember that and enjoy this holiday season!

Set the stage for a great holiday themed meeting

Festive attire: Part of the fun of a holiday party is dressing up. This doesn’t have to be forgone just because the party is virtual. In your invite, suggest a festive dress code. Maybe your office vibe is to go all out with a more formal look, or if going more casual, ask the team to wear their favorite ugly holiday sweater.

Dress up your background: You can bring a festive atmosphere to any meeting by using our holiday themed backgrounds every day. We’ve also created a set of new holiday-themed custom backgrounds for standard meetings and video calls. Visit our Microsoft Teams custom background page (http://aka.ms/TeamsCustomBackgrounds) and pick one, or a few, that are good for you. While you’re setting up your video and audio before joining a meeting, select Background effects, click Add new, and then select a background to upload from your computer. More detailed guidance can be found here.

Submit your background for our library

Our community is diverse and we’d like to show that by expanding our library of holiday themed backgrounds! Don’t see the background you want? Have one that you think is fantastic? Submit your background here to be included in our library of backgrounds from around the world.

Plan some fun holiday activities in Microsoft Teams with some unique activities and new features

Food and drinks: Ahead of your party, send your team the recipe—and the ingredients if you’re feeling extra festive—for a food, cocktail, or mocktail you can enjoy together during the party. You can also turn this into an activity by making a special drink or meal together over Microsoft Teams, led by one of your talented chef or mixologist teammates.

Photobooth: To recreate the classic holiday party photo booth in Microsoft Teams, ask the team to go on a scavenger hunt at their home or office for a few fun items to use as props—a hat, sunglasses, feather boa, their daughter’s princess tiara—the crazier the better. Ask the team to pose, then take a few screenshots to share in your Microsoft Teams team to commemorate the moment. For a cohesive look, you can ask team members to choose the same custom background, or better yet, use our new winter wonderland Together mode scene in Microsoft Teams.

Use our new together mode scenes: Whether you are playing some fun holiday games together like the scavenger hunt or just spending time together our new together mode scenes can bring some holiday cheer to your party. Our new winter wonderland Together mode scenes add a dash of holiday spirit that’s perfect for hosting a virtual holiday party with your team.

You’d be surprised how it lightens a mood to show up with some festive holiday cheer in your meeting!

In addition to these we are announcing additional Together mode scenes, rolling out now, that you can use any time of the year that transport your team to a variety of settings including a coffee shop, conference room, classroom, and more. Read more about this and other features in our Microsoft 365 blog post. To get started, once you are in your Microsoft Teams meeting, select Together mode from the drop-down menu, then click the small pencil in the left-hand corner of the screen to choose a scene (Together mode requires at least five people in your meeting).

Breakout rooms

We are excited to share that breakout rooms are generally available in Microsoft Teams today. Breakout rooms make it easy to divide your meetings into sub-groups to facilitate smaller discussions, brainstorming sessions, learning groups, and even holiday mixers.

Organizers can jump in between meetings on their own, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. And unique to Microsoft Teams, breakout rooms can be initiated both in Microsoft Teams channels and in Microsoft Teams meetings to give you flexibility on how you want to meet. Breakout rooms are especially great this time of year for mixing and mingling and playing games during a virtual holiday party. Learn how to get started with breakout rooms here.

Games: There are a variety of great online party games that are easy to play with your team using screen-sharing in Microsoft Teams. Kahoot offers engaging quizzes and challenges. Jackbox Games are the makers of several party games that are great to play together virtually. From speech games like Talking Points to drawing games like Drawful—there are a wide variety of games to suit every taste. Learn more about using Kahoot and Jackbox Games in Microsoft Teams.

Have a PowerPoint Party: Holiday parties are often a chance to mix and mingle with people outside of your immediate team. To do so virtually, use new Breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams to split up into smaller groups and get to know each other. To help break the ice, we recommend jumping on a popular trend, the PowerPoint Party. Have the team break out into groups of three or four and ask them to create the funniest, most insightful, or interesting presentation they can think of in just 15 minutes. Then present to the team in just three minutes and the best presentation gets a prize. Learn more about hosting a virtual PowerPoint party.

White elephant gift exchange: Take your white elephant gift exchange virtual using White Elephant Online. It’s a simple way to reimagine the age-old tradition in a Microsoft Teams meeting. It brings the fun of buying a wild and wacky gift and stealing gifts from your teammates, all from the comfort of your home.

Happy holidays from the Microsoft Teams team. We hope these new experiences and tips bring joy to your workplace and make meetings and office parties more festive this holiday season. And we’d love to hear how you’re celebrating the holidays on Microsoft Teams. Share your holiday spirit and ideas using #HolidaysWithTeams and submit your background today!

AI-powered IT support with Moveworks in Microsoft Teams: now on AppSource

ErinBailie — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:15:57 GMT

Microsoft Teams is excited to announce that AppSource now includes Moveworks, the world-leader in AI-powered IT support.

Moveworks is a conversational AI chatbot that allows employees to resolve their tech issues directly in Teams, instantly and autonomously, with no involvement from your IT team. Unlike conventional chatbots, Moveworks leverages advanced natural language understanding, or NLU, to determine exactly what employees are requesting—no matter how they phrase those requests.

“By helping to quickly resolve employees’ IT issues within Microsoft Teams, Moveworks allows companies to work faster. And in a world that now relies on technology to collaborate, it’s never been more critical to provide real-time, location-agnostic tech help.”

— Mike Ammerlaan, Director, Microsoft 365 Ecosystem, Microsoft

Behind the scenes, Moveworks takes action and retrieves knowledge by integrating with other enterprise systems, such as Active Directory, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365. These deep integrations enable the Moveworks bot to deliver end-to-end resolution for a wide range of IT issues:

Provisioning and deprovisioning software licenses
Unlocking accounts and resetting passwords
Creating and editing distribution lists
Serving up answers to troubleshooting questions
Ordering devices and accessories for the home office
...And much more.

Before Moveworks became available on AppSource, fully deploying the bot still took just eight weeks. But by downloading Moveworks at the click of a button, you can shrink that time-to-value even further—thanks to these added capabilities:

Rapidly roll out the bot to your workforce
Access the latest Moveworks features on Teams faster
Build your custom bot avatar, alongside Moveworks’ design team
Easily contact Moveworks Support for rapid assistance

For enterprise Teams customers like Equinix, Moveworks has significantly enhanced the Teams platform in two distinct ways. First, Moveworks allows Equinix employees already using Teams to fix their tech problems—from accessing software to editing email lists to unlocking accounts—via quick, painless conversations with the AI chatbot. And second, Moveworks intercepts IT issues submitted through other channels and then resolves those issues on Teams, bringing new users to the platform.

You can read Equinix’s success story here.

Reimagining your virtual workplace
Particularly in this new normal of remote work, the ability to remain productive anywhere and anytime defines successful employees. But without a physical office or access to in-person help, these employees often don’t know where to find critical resources.

With Microsoft Teams, however, every key team member, workflow, and file is consolidated in a single place. And by adding Moveworks to Teams, getting IT support is just as simple.

“Microsoft Teams is a powerful platform, and Moveworks makes it even more valuable. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

— Greg Ogle, VP of Global IT Infrastructure, Equinix

Aisera and Microsoft Teams streamline service desk support driving employee productivity

ErinBailie — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:16:12 GMT

Today’s urgent need to optimize and transform service desk support across internal departments such as IT, HR, and Sales has led to a dynamic new partnership between Microsoft Teams and Aisera’s AI Service Desk. The agile technologies of Conversational AI, NLU, Cognitive Search, Unsupervised NLP, and Conversational RPA combined with Teams’ ability for employees to connect and collaborate seamlessly, underscores the growing trend of work from anywhere.

Service desks were previously unable to meet the demands of offering a five-star employee experience—bogged down by manual processes, lack of self-service and automation, and long waits to resolve support requests. Previously, employees had to wait an average of three days to get their internal IT or HR issues resolved, as support desks were stretched thin and unable to meet business Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). This problem was amplified during the pandemic, leaving many internal support organizations unprepared.

Aisera’s AI Service Desk, integrated with Microsoft Teams, takes advantage of cutting-edge AI collaboration technology and dramatically improves employee support experience. Now, employees are freed from long wait times that once characterized the service desk. Aisera on Teams provides instant resolutions of employee requests, thus making employees more productive.

Auto-resolve support requests in seconds, not days
With the growing emergence of Teams as a preferred channel for employee communication, Aisera’s integration fits perfectly into IT service desk environments for ITSM automation. Aisera serves as a go-to IT and HR channel for employees that don’t force users to log into service desk environments and portals. Here, using AI, their requests are auto-resolved in seconds.

Building the ultimate support hub
The convenient central interface created by unifying Aisera with Teams has propelled employee productivity to unprecedented levels. Aisera’s agility in resolving issues is founded on a virtual assistant using Conversational AI, NLU, Cognitive Search, Unsupervised NLP, and Conversational RPA in a scalable, cloud-native AI technology platform. Moreover, Aisera’s conversational RPA technology acts as the AI-driven workflow automation engine, which enables MS Teams with automation for user workflows and tasks.

Employees can leverage pre-built integrations to Microsoft products from Active Directory, Office 365, SharePoint, Knowledge Bases, Dynamics 365, and leading ticketing systems, including Service Now, JIRA Service Desk, and BMC.

Teams adoption rates soar with Aisera’s Conversational AI
The ability of MS Teams integration to transform self-service has been instrumental in automating internal services and boosting service desk productivity. Customers have reported an increase in user engagement, with proactive notifications and a substantial decrease in tickets created through Teams via AI-powered auto-resolution. The results? Employee satisfaction has improved by 70 percent, agent productivity has doubled—and average resolution rates improved by 90 percent in many cases—a significant key performance indicator of Service Desk efficiency.

Breakout rooms generally available today in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:16:50 GMT

Creating meaningful connection can be difficult in larger group settings. Breakout rooms allow organizers to divide the meeting into sub-groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions.

We are excited to share that Breakout rooms are generally available in Microsoft Teams today (available in GCC this week).

The meeting organizer can create up to 50 breakout rooms and choose to automatically or manually assign participants into rooms. The organizer can start a breakout room in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, allowing greater flexibility on how you want to meet.

Using the breakout room settings, the meeting organizer can choose to allow participants to come back to the main meeting at any time, then return to the assigned breakout room. This way participants can ask a clarifying question without disturbing the breakout room discussions.

Also, organizers can use the setting to re-create breakout rooms in the same meeting. This allows them to assign participants into new room setups.

The meeting organizer can create, rename, and delete rooms as needed.

Once the breakout rooms are open, meeting organizers can join any of the breakout sessions. And should the need arise, you can quickly switch attendees in between breakout rooms.

Organizers can send announcements to the breakout rooms, and recall all participants back to the main meeting at any time.

Since breakout rooms are Teams meetings, all the innovation that makes Teams meetings inclusive, interactive, and intelligent are available within. Attendees can discuss a topic in their breakout room while in a virtual coffee shop in Together mode. Or students can bring up the Microsoft Whiteboard and draw out their ideas. This is also true of our security features that help make your Teams meetings a safe and secure place to meet.

Any files from the breakout rooms can be shared in the main meeting once everyone is back together and will be available afterwards in the meeting chat.

FAQ
Who can start a breakout room?

Only the meeting organizer can start breakout rooms.

How can I use breakout rooms?

The meeting organizer can start a breakout room on the desktop client only.
Participants can join a breakout room from desktop, web or mobile. Microsoft Teams Rooms do not have breakout room capabilities yet.
Participants logged in from multiple devices will have all end points join the same breakout room.

How do I make sure I can start using breakout rooms?

Make sure that the new meeting experience is enabled (Teams -> Settings -> General -> Check “Turn on new meeting experience”)
Check and make sure you have the latest Teams updates (Update Microsoft Teams - Office Support)
IT admins can check how often their tenants get updates, which may impact when their users receive new features like breakout rooms (Set up the Standard or Targeted release options - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs)

I’m an educator, what will my students be able to do?

Educators will have the option to push students into the breakout rooms and pull them back to the main meeting, without any additional action needed by the student.
Students can be assigned to breakout rooms, join breakout rooms, use the whiteboard or screen share if allowed to in normal school meetings, re-join the main meeting, and see their breakout room chat.
Since breakout rooms are Teams meetings, the same security policies and options apply to the breakout room.
Learn more about using breakout rooms at your school or university here.

Teams Direct Routing and Local Media Optimization

Thorsten Pickhan — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Teams Phone System and Direct Routing is more important than ever because it helps companies and their employees to stay connected with their office number even if they are working from home.
To gain best audio quality in a PSTN phone call it is important to understand how local media optimization can support this scenario and how to configure it.

With Teams Phone System in general companies can close the gap between working from anywhere and still stay connected with the office phone number. This is an often-underestimated scenario. Users can use legacy technologies like VPN securely to get a company access from home. They can use Office 365 services like Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to collaborate with colleagues and get work done. But one missing piece is most often left out: the desk phone in the office. With a legacy PBX system, it is difficult to bring the office phone number at home to the user. Here Microsoft Teams Phone System can help and support you. The Microsoft Teams Client will be extended by PSTN calling and the user is reachable under the office number in their home office or wherever they like to work.
But as often: there is no joy without sorrow. The network part and especially the WAN connection is critical. If the roundtrip time for the audio packages in the network is not optimal, users are complaining about bad audio quality and the well-intended solution can turn into a fiasco.

To offer the best experience for your users, Microsoft provides several techniques and features to optimize the media flow for this scenario.

Media Flow in Microsoft Teams– some basics
In case of Microsoft Teams, we must two types of media flow. The first scenario is a 1:1 scenario. Microsoft Teams always tries to use the shortest network path for transmitting the data packages. In this 1:1 scenario this is a direct connection between the two endpoints. To optimize the flow even further, Microsoft Teams will try to establish a UDP connection first and will switch to a TCP connection if the first one is not possible.

Figure 1 - Media flow 1:1 call

The second scenario is the Meeting scenario. A meeting scenario can be a scheduled online meeting, but also when you start a one on one conversation and add a third person to it, it will be turned into a meeting. And in case of a meeting, the media flow is always to the Office 365 platform as the central meeting platform.

Figure 2 - Media Flow in Teams Meeting

In case of PSTN Calling with Teams Direct Routing a session border controller is required. A session border controller (SBC) terminates the PSTN connection from the provider and routes inbound calls to the Teams platform and vice versa. Therefor the media flow for a PSTN call is slightly different because there is at least one more hop: the SBC itself where the audio packages will be routed through.

Media Flow and Microsoft Teams Direct Routing – default scenario
In a default scenario without Media Optimization, the audio packages will be routed from the SBC to the Microsoft Teams platform and from there to the Teams endpoint. In case of an employee inside the company, the media stream traverses the firewall twice: first time from the SBC to Office 365 and for a second time from the Office 365 platform to the user. As you can imagine this costs bandwidth and, of course, package runtime.

Figure 3 - Default Media Flow with Teams Direct Routing

How to optimize Media Flow with Teams Direct Routing – Media Bypass
The first step to optimize the media flow is a well know technique from Microsoft Lync and Skype for Business deployments: Media Bypass.

Figure 4 - Media Flow with Teams Direct Routing and Media Bypass

If the Microsoft Teams endpoint can communicate directly to the SBC external IP address, the call is established with Media Bypass. This means that the audio data are transmitted directly between the Teams endpoint and the SBC itself. The audio data does not traverse the firewall and the routing is optimized. Additionally, you have the option to prioritize Microsoft Teams audio data in your network with Quality of Service.

With a current firmware release installed on the SBC and Local Media Optimization, you can configure the SBC to provide an internal facing network adapter to use for Media Bypass, too. The Teams client will send and receive the audio packages to and from an internal IP address of the SBC directly.
In the past, you had to configure the external interface with the public IP address for Media Bypass, so that internal clients use the external IP for a direct connection. This made it very hard and complex because your firewall had to support this scenario.

The advantages are very simple: the media flow stays in your local network and you can control it better with Quality of service. Also, the firewall configuration is much simpler for this scenario.

Local Media Optimization with Centralized SBC for Branch Offices
For your branch offices you can use Media Bypass as a centralized SBC, too. In this scenario the different phone number ranges for your offices will terminate on one SBC in your datacenter. The SBC will do the routing between the users in the branch offices and the Microsoft Teams platform.

Figure 5 - Media Flow with Media Bypass from the Branch Office

Local Media Optimization with Proxy SBC
A second option for your branch office can be to implement a Proxy SBC in your main datacenter and local SBC systems on site. In this scenario, the Proxy SBC is used for the central communication to the Microsoft Teams platform. The SBC in the branch site is responsible for the local PSTN connection and will route calls over the Proxy SBC to Microsoft Teams and vice versa.

In this scenario a Proxy SBC can help to reduce the requirements to your infrastructure. Only a single SBC instance must be configured to work with Microsoft Teams. Also, it is often used where a centralized SBC is not possible when there are some regulatory or the onsite SBC does not meet the technical requirements.

Figure 6 - Proxy SBC for the Branch Office

Can Home Office users participate from Media Bypass?
Of course, Media Bypass and local Media Optimization also provides some benefits for your home office and mobile users.

Microsoft provides several Transport Relay servers in their worldwide datacenters. Best practice is to allow the Teams subnet networks to communicate to the public SBC IP address for media traffic. It is also possible to open the SBC public IP address to your mobile worker, but it is quite difficult to manage this. Each time they connect to the internet, they will use another public IP address. Therefor my recommendation is to allow only the Teams subnet networks to your SBC public IP and to benefit from the Microsoft Global Network.

If you are doing so, the audio data from the home user will be transmitted to one of the nearest Transport Relay server of the Microsoft Global Network. Pay attention that your users can use a local internet break out and reach the nearest egress point to the Microsoft Global Network. The Microsoft Transport Relay server will connect to the SBC directly and will establish a communication. And here is the same behavior: the path from the Microsoft Global Network to your SBC will be shorten to the most necessary. That is why even your home user will benefit from Media Bypass. The runtime of the audio packages is optimized with the help of the Microsoft Global network.

How to configure Media Bypass and local Media Optimization
To configure Media Bypass and Local Media Optimization you must check if your installed SBC firmware already supports this feature. If not, ask your vendor for a current release and install it on the SBC.

Then you must configure your network topology in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center, so the Teams platform is aware of your network infrastructure. You can allow or decline Media Bypass in two ways, as we already know from the good old times: Always ByPass or Local Only.

In case of Always ByPass the Microsoft Teams endpoint tries to connect directly to the SBC every time, regardless of where the user is located in your network.

When you configure Local Only, Media Bypass will only be used, if the user is in the same network site as the SBC. If each one is in a separate network site, the media flow is routed to a Microsoft Transport server and then to the SBC.

Therefor you must configure Regions and Sites in the Teams Admin Center or with PowerShell. Next you assign your networks to a site. You must configure the trusted WAN IP addresses as well. Theses are the public IP addresses used by your users to connect to Microsoft Teams. According to this information and the network topology, Microsoft Teams will allow to use Media Bypass for the endpoint.

The last step is to enable Media Bypass on the SBC level in the Teams Admin Center or on the PowerShell.

More information can be found on Microsoft Docs Configure Local Media Optimization for Direct Routing

Launch of Microsoft Teams preview experience and alignment with Microsoft 365 deployment channels

Kaushal Mehta (LYNC) — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:17:38 GMT

Applies to: Commercial and education tenants

Today, we are announcing a change in how customers can preview upcoming Microsoft Teams features. This includes adopting pre-release channel names like Office and Windows Insider programs, as well as a new broadly available Public Preview channel. With this change, Insiders will find similar names and expectations for similar channels across Windows, Office, and Teams programs. As mentioned in the Windows Insider blog post, our goal is to not only make it clearer for existing Insiders to choose the experience that’s right for them, but also for new Insiders to pick the right channel as they join. The Insider community is important to us due to their early actionable feedback and we are working to align how all our Insider programs work better together across Microsoft.

Read on to learn more about the Public Preview channel and why we are launching it.

Teams Public Preview and channel names alignment
Teams continues to innovate at a fast pace while delivering an enterprise-grade experience to over 115M daily active users. We first launched pre-release access to Teams features via our Technology Adoption Program (TAP) over 4 years ago. This continues to be a private and under NDA program for all participating customers.

As Teams adoption continues to accelerate, it is important to bring in more diversity and easier options for customers to preview pre-release features for product quality, internal planning, adoption & training readiness. With this, we are launching Teams Public Preview channel to allow customers to preview and evaluate features before they roll out to the rest of their company. Please review this article for guidance on how to configure preview access for selected users in your tenant.

Teams Insiders can pick one of the three channels, based on the quality of client builds they are most comfortable with and participation commitments.

One key difference between Teams and rest of Microsoft 365 is that Teams delivers feature rollout against build rollouts. This means (1) a feature can be enabled without a new build update, and (2) different channels may have the same build version at any point in time.

About Teams pre-release channels
Here is an overview of the available channels:

Beta Channel
Ideal for early adopters and IT Pros who want to test features as they are being built. We look for bugs and regressions from this audience before releasing the features to the next channel. This was previously called Ring 1.5 and is available to participating Teams TAP customers and only under NDA and program requirements. This channel requires the most time commitment and is only available via self-customer nominations.

Private Preview Channel
Insiders in this channel will see more stable features for validation and piloting adoption. There will be faster updates and adoption help from Microsoft. Pre-release feature support is provided directly by Teams engineering. This channel was previously called Ring 3 and, like Beta channel, is available to participating Teams TAP customers only under NDA and program requirements.

Public Preview Channel
We are launching Public Preview with this announcement. This is for customers who want to evaluate a feature or developers who want to build a solution before broader deployment. There are no program requirements or commitments. This is an opt-in program, controlled via IT admin policy. Please read about how to configure this policy here. For Developer Preview please read here.

Aligning with Office and Windows
With today’s announcement, Teams pre-release channels are better aligned with Office and Windows Insider programs. An Insider can now make a choice as to which experience, they want and have it mean the same thing between Windows, Office, and Teams. Insiders will need to opt into each Insider Program separately, but we are looking to improve this experience over time.

How to join Public Preview channel
Please read the instructions here Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

December 2020 Preview pack

We are releasing below features in public preview channel. They will start rolling out later this week.

Windows 10 native notifications

Large gallery and Together mode for web
2x2 view on VDI (Citrix, VMWare)
Meeting reactions (Note: requires everyone in the meeting to be in Public Preview to experience the feature)

Call merge capability

Thank you for helping us grow and evolving with us. We hope you enjoy the new features and look forward to your participation in our new discussion board within the Tech Community.

What’s new in Teams Phones | December 2020

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:17:49 GMT

The Teams devices portfolio strives to give users options based on the space they use for work, the kind of collaboration they engage in, and their personal preferences for when and how they choose to get things done. We are constantly working to provide an intuitive and familiar experience for Teams on every device type, and this means carrying over the great features we have for meetings and calling into the phone experience as well. This month we’ve got some great updates that bring together the features users love in Teams meetings into the Teams phone app and more to keep users productive and secure.

1. Video Enhancements for Teams meetings: 3x3 Layout, together mode, gallery view and background blur

Teams phones now support a new video layout including 3x3 gallery view, large gallery view for more participants and Together Mode. Using 3x3, users can see the video feeds of up to 9 meetings participants at a time. For even larger meetings, enable large gallery view to show up to 49 participants. Teams phones will also support Together Mode, a revolutionary meeting experience where participants are transported to a virtual shared space.

No matter which style of meeting you select you can always enable background blur to reduce distractions and obscure any imagery found in a video setting.

2. Meet Now on Phones

Sometimes, the need to collaborate with a teammate can pop up at unscheduled times; it is easier to get clarity or talk through a few quick details with the new instant meeting feature on Teams phones. Users can select “meet now” in their calendar interface to easily start a meeting and add a participant.

3. Screensharing on Select Audio Phones

With this update some models of touch screen audio phones meeting the minimum hardware requirements will now allow user to see content that is being presented or shared by others during calls and meetings.

4. Spotlight

From a desktop client, presenters can pin an individual feed for all attendees to see during a Team meeting. The spotlighted video will be the main video the Teams phone user will see on their screen. For more information, see here.

5. Request to Speak

The hard mute functionality allows you to prevent attendees from unmuting themselves. This can be switched on or off from within the meeting, and individually for attendees who put up their hand to speak.

In addition to meetings functionality, there are some exciting core updates to Teams phones coming out this month.

6. Sidecar Support Beta Release

Sidecars are an efficient way for a phone user to reach frequently used contacts on a desk phone. They are an accessory to a Teams phone with hardware buttons that can be linked to speed dial contacts. A user can select and pin the names of any contacts in the Teams phone to the screen of the sidecar so that calls can be made with one click and it is clear whether a contact is available or not at-a-glance with LED indicators. Teams will support sidecars with touch or non-touch enabled hardware.

Now Teams supports sidecar functionality on the Yealink EXP50, and the Audiocodes C450HD with the expansion module in beta release.

7. Phones in Microsoft 365 Government - GCC

Microsoft Teams phones application is ready to be deployed in the Microsoft 365 Government – GCC environment. For more information, see here. Please check with your vendors for any hardware compliance questions.

8. Policy changes to enable/disable HomeScreen and BetterTogether

There will be two new settings (AllowHomeScreen and AllowBetterTogether) added to the TeamsIPPhone policy that will allow tenant admins to enable/disable home screen and better together on Teams phones. See here for more information.

9. Proximity based meeting join on Teams conference room phones

Proximity based meeting join for an available Microsoft Teams conference phone is supported from this update. The Microsoft Teams client on your PC and mobile detect proximity of the conference phone via the BLE beacon transmitted by the phone and allow you to add the phone easily to the meeting from your pre-join screen on your desktop or mobile client. When a user adds the conference phone to the meeting, the phone would auto accept the incoming meeting request. For more information, see here.

As always you can shop our robust portfolio of Teams certified devices, including a wide array of calling endpoints at the Teams marketplace!

Host your next virtual party in Microsoft Teams with apps and screen sharing games

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:18:13 GMT

Whether your team is working hybrid or working around the world, it’s always great to stay connected personally and professionally with members of your team. Many teams use scheduled get-together meetings in Teams to hold book clubs, celebrate a special moment, or just gather together and catch up on weekend plans. Conversations are always central in these meet ups – but we also know that every get together can be more fun and connecting with quizzes and games. Within Microsoft Teams, there are several good options for hosting these events, virtually.

Running Kahoot! Quizzes and Trivia in your meeting
Who doesn’t love great trivia or a friendly competitive quiz? For hosting these for your team, a good option is to use Kahoot! – which is available as a standalone app and with an associated integration directly within Microsoft Teams. Kahoots are engaging quizzes and challenges you can create and re-use within your team. These quizzes can be questions for learning or adding interactivity to presentation experiences, and in addition, you can also use Kahoot! to create team trivia challenges for your next team gathering.

With the Kahoot integration inside of Microsoft Teams, you can see a dashboard of your designed Kahoots, and use them during meetings to spur friendly competition. Before the meeting, design your Kahoots and add questions and answers. In addition to exploring and using questions from popular Kahoots via the Discover option, consider mixing in various forms of general trivia, trivia specific to topics for your team, or maybe trivia about your team specifically.

When it is time for the meeting itself, you can launch a Kahoot from the Kahoot app tab within Teams. Expand the Kahoot! gameplay window, and then share that during a meeting by sharing your screen. Make sure to use the Include computer sound option when you share. Once the Kahoot! gameplay screen is shared, attendees can join in and answer questions from their own devices. Answering question quickly matters, and you’ll soon see a friendly competition bloom. You can find out more about Kahoot! on kahoot.com, and you can add the Kahoot! integration for Microsoft Teams from AppSource.

Using Jackbox Games with Microsoft Teams screen sharing
Jackbox Games are the makers of several party games that are great to play together in person or virtually. From speech games like Talking Points to drawing games like Drawful and witty quip games like Quiplash – there are a wide variety of games and styles to suit every taste. Most games run for about 15-25 minutes with straightforward rules and quick tutorials, so they are easy to pick up and play. Most games support up to 8-10 players, and some have additional audience viewing options if you have extra visitors.

Jackbox Games are available for a wide variety of devices and consoles, but if you want to use Jackbox within a virtual Microsoft Teams streaming session, we’d recommend getting Jackbox on your PC or Mac. The host of the virtual get-together will need a copy; the attendees in the meeting can follow along on their devices. Every player will join the meeting and then connect to the Jackbox game with a room code – which they can do in a web browser or on a separate device, like their phone. It is easy and takes seconds to get everyone started on a game.

You’ll likely want to use Steam – a service for purchasing and installing games – to get Jackbox games. These games come in Party Packs of 5 games each – so each Party Pack provides a lot of choices for different gameplay styles. No one will be bored, and any party pack will work well – the most recent Jackbox Party Pack 7 features both Quiplash 3 and Blather ‘Round which work well in virtual game settings.

As you host your virtual get-together, you’ll want to start up the Jackbox Party pack of your choice. Use the screen sharing option in Teams, and make sure you check the “Include computer sound” option.

From there, start up a game and your room code will be visible, and attendees can join in.

Tips for using Jackbox Games in a Teams meeting
As you start your Jackbox Games, we recommend a couple of options:

In almost every Jackbox Game, there is a “Family Friendly” checkbox – you may want to consider checking that for your work conversations.

In a few Jackbox Games, there is also an option to filter out US-centric content, if you want to have questions or prompts that are more broadly relevant to teammates around the world.

Also, to keep the sound of the game from potentially drowning out your virtual guests and conversation while attending, in some cases you may want to consider turning down the background music.

Also, some more advanced tips can help your virtual party even more:

If you have it, hosting a game with two screens (e.g., your laptop screen plus a plugged-in monitor) can work better, as you can place Teams on one screen and Jackbox on the other. That way, it is always easy to see your teammates and the game at the same time.
Using headphones can also help with isolating the sound of the game from the conversation.

We hope you get to explore the wide variety of games and quiz options for having fun, virtually, with your teammates. While the centerpiece of any virtual gathering is the conversations that you’ll have, virtual activities through Kahoot! and Jackbox Games, you can help to break the ice, provide some memorable experiences, and heck – have some fun! - in almost any meeting you run.

Join us for the new Learn Together event, “Developing Apps on Microsoft Teams”

jennymevents — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:18:47 GMT

Hello Developers & Microsoft Teams Fans!
The Learn Together: Developing Apps on Microsoft Teams event is happening on Dec 16.

Currently, there are 115+ million Teams daily active users. That is millions of new users that developers can reach when they develop apps for Teams.

Join us! We will be hosting LIVE discussions and learning opportunities that are specially curated for developers (by developers) around the possibilities and reasons to build apps for Teams.

Expect to see appearances from your favorite Microsoft personalities, surprise guests, trivia, digital swag, and a Teams Learn Challenge to win prizes.

Did we mention it is all FREE?

This digital experience is going to be a bit different. Rather than being talked TO, we will be talking WITH you. Whether you can join us live, or you want to have the content to watch on-demand, make sure to sign up today so you can have all the links and information!

Visit http://aka.ms/learntogether to join the conversation!

Please invite your community to join the event with you! You can also create a watch party to stream the event on Learn TV while watching together in a Teams Meeting with together-mode on.

See you there!
- The #LearnTogether Team

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | November 2020

Microsoft_Teams_team — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 22:59:16 GMT

Welcome to December! I know you have been waiting for this post as November has been another month with a lot of great features that will help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams. Let’s jump right in!

What’s New: Meetings
AI-based noise suppression
Our real-time AI noise suppression feature automatically removes unwelcome background noise during your meetings. The AI-based noise suppression analyzes your audio feed filtering out the noise and retaining only the speech signal. You can also control how much noise suppression you want, including a high setting to suppress more background noise.

New Together mode scene selection
Together mode reimagines meeting experiences to help participants feel closer together even when you are apart. We are excited to introduce new Together mode scene selections to transport your team to a variety of settings. Choose a scene to set the tone and create a unique experience for your meeting, whether it be a smaller conference room meeting, or an all-hands meeting held in an outdoor amphitheater.

Polls in Teams Meetings
Polls in Teams meetings is a seamless experience powered by Forms that helps you conduct more engaging and productive meetings. As a meeting organizer or presenter, you can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls before, during, and after meetings, respectively. Your attendees can easily view and respond to the polls in the pop-up bubble or chat pane. To enable this feature as the meeting organizer or presenter, simply add the Forms app as a tab in your Teams meeting. Learn more.

Full screen support in new meetings experience
We heard you, full screen mode is back! With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention.

Start an instant meeting from your mobile device
You'll now find the familiar Meet Now icon on the calendar tab and in the Teams channel helping you connect with your team instantly. Once you start your meeting, you can use any messaging app on your mobile device to share the invite or add participants directly to the meeting, and anyone in the Teams channel can join without an invite.

Updated layout for meetings on iOS

We have improved the Teams experience on iOS devices with a new presentation mode, the ability to see more participants, and the ability to see shared content and a spotlighted participant concurrently.

What’s new: Calling
Call Merge
While you’re on a call with another person (or a group), you might want to add another expert to participate in the call. Similarly, you may receive an incoming call that makes sense to connect with one you’re already on. Call Merge gives end users the capability to merge their Teams VoIP and PSTN active 1-1 calls into another 1-1 call or another group call. You can merge your calls, simply by choosing the “…” (more actions) button from the call controls and select “merge calls”. Learn more.

Survivable Branch Appliance
To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows you to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a WAN outage. This SBA is now available to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network.

Ericsson Session Border Controller certification
Ericsson has completed the Session Border Controller (SBC) certification process, which ensures that their SBC supports Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams, joining the list of certified SBCs. This rigorous certification process [insert link here] includes intense 3rd party testing and validation in production and pre-production Direct Routing environments. Direct Routing permits customers to connect their own carriers and infrastructure with Phone System to enable Teams Calling. Learn more.

What’s New: Devices
Microsoft Teams displays
Microsoft Teams displays is a new category of all-in-one dedicated Teams devices that features an ambient touchscreen and a hands-free experience powered by Cortana. These devices seamlessly integrate with your PC, providing easy access to Teams chat, meetings, calling, calendar, and files. With natural language, users can ask Cortana to join and present in meetings, dictate replies to a Teams chat, and more. Learn more.

USB phone by Yealink: MP50
The plug and play format of the newly available MP50 by Yealink offers a new way to experience calling features in Teams, allowing you to connect a phone to your PC and start engaging in full phone functionality instantly. The MP50 provides a cost-effective option, giving you a traditional handset experience with a dedicated Teams button, for quick meeting and calling join, as well as USB and Bluetooth connection for both mobile and PC.

Yealink A20
Yealink A20 is an integrated, Android-based Microsoft Teams Room designed for small meeting rooms and huddle spaces. The A20 delivers premium audio and video experiences through a 20-megapixel 133-degree horizontal field of view lens, 8 MEMS microphone array and built-in speaker. The A20 is easy to deploy and brings Teams Rooms features like wireless content sharing and whiteboarding, to small meeting spaces.

Poly Sync 20 USB/Bluetooth® smart speakerphone now certified for Microsoft Teams
Poly Sync 20 is a portable personal speakerphone certified for Microsoft Teams that delivers great audio for your meetings as well as music. Combined with up to 20 hours of talk time, the ability to charge your smartphone and IP64 dust and water resistance, it’s a great companion for hybrid workers. Learn more.

New features rolling out to Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hub
The latest app for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, version 1.0.94.2020102101, is now available through the Teams Admin Center. New features have also begun rolling out to Surface Hub! Features enabled through this update include:
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android

Support for dual screens: Now you can use Teams Rooms on Android in spaces with a dual screen configuration, allowing one screen to be focused on meeting participants in the gallery view, while the second screen can be used to show content or whiteboard.
New gallery views: Teams Rooms on Android now supports the 3x3, large gallery, and Together Mode gallery views.
Auto-answer for meetings: In some meeting scenarios where Teams Rooms devices are deployed, like a healthcare patient room, meeting participants want to be able to connect to an incoming call without taking an action to accept it. Now, we’re providing a setting that allows calls to be answered automatically. This new feature can be enabled through the Admin settings.

Surface Hub

Together mode: view meeting participants in the new Together mode, which brings everyone into a shared virtual space.
Large gallery: view up to 49 meeting participants simultaneously in full screen mode,
in the new 7x7 video grid.

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration

Pinned Posts

Keep important information easily accessible and top of mind with Microsoft Teams. You can pin any message in a channel, and it appears in the channel information pane for all members of the channel to see.

More options to use polls, surveys & checklists in Teams
Easily gather information or keep track of things in chat and channels with new app templates for polls, surveys, and checklists in Teams. Once installed and configured by the Teams administrators, these messaging extensions provide a simple and intuitive experience for users across all platforms without the need to use 3rd party apps.

Quickly create and send polls to gather input to make decisions.

Easily create surveys to gather feedback to improve your processes.

Collaborate with your team and keep things on track by creating a shared checklist.

Set presence status duration
Let others know when you are available in Teams by managing your presence status. Users can now change their presence status for a specific period. Learn more.

Android On-Demand Chat Translation
Inline message translation gives all your team members a voice and facilitates global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.

What’s New: Power Platform and custom development
Build solutions with Power Apps in Teams
The new Power Apps app for Teams is now generally available. It allows you to build and deploy custom apps without leaving Teams. With the simple, embedded graphical app studio, it has never been easier to build low code apps for Teams. You can also harness immediate value from built in templates like the Great Ideas or Inspections apps, which can be deployed in one click and customized easily. The new Power Apps app for Teams can be backed by a new relational datastore – Dataverse for Teams. Learn more.

New Power Automate App for Teams
The new Power Automate app for Teams is now generally available. The new app makes it easier than ever to automate workflows within teams. With the simplified flow designer, you can easily build flows by selecting from a number of templates and simply selecting your options from drop down menus. Also, the home screen of the new app improves your visibility into your flows and let’s manage your flows for Teams from there. Learn more.

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) for Teams
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) for Teams is now generally available. Since announcing the PVA preview at Ignite 2020 users have found chat bots useful well as easy to create and we have seen thousands of bots created in the past few weeks. We are now also providing additional features including native authentication, where bots can be designed to provide information to users based upon their identity. You can now also easily make your bot available to your teammates and have admin approval to make it available for the whole organization.

Teams apps for meetings now generally available
Teams apps for meetings are now generally available with nearly 20 new apps in the Teams app store, such as Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect, as well as familiar Microsoft apps such as Forms. Learn more. If you’re a developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings.

Support for Single Sign-On (SSO) for Bots
We are thrilled that Single Sign-on (SSO) support for bots is now available. SSO authentication in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) minimizes the number of times users need to enter their login credentials by silently refreshing the authentication token. If users agree to use your app, they will not have to consent again on another device and will be signed in automatically. Learn more.

Microsoft Teams App Development Challenge
We’re continuously planning new events and ways to connect with the developer community. For example, Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Teams App Development Challenge. Starting November 16, 2020 through February 8, 2021, developers, partners, and organizations can participate in a challenge to develop a new and innovative Teams App for publishing to AppSource, to be eligible to win a share of $45,000 in cash and prizes. For full challenge details visit http://microsoftteams.devpost.com

Learn Together: Developing Apps for Microsoft Teams

We have a free two-hour livestream event coming up for developers by developers around the possibilities and reasons to build apps in Teams. Join us live on December 16 at 9:00 AM PT to be a part of the discussions and learn about creating engaging and unique application experiences on Microsoft Teams. http://aka.ms/learntogether

App Spotlight

This month the Now Virtual Agent app by ServiceNow features new capabilities that help improve employee productivity with seamless self-service and faster case resolution – allowing you as a user to submit support requests, view open ticket approvals, act on notifications, chat with virtual agents for automated assistance, or streamline communication between agents and employees – all while staying in the flow of work in Teams.

What’s New: Management
Device management automatic alerting in Teams Admin Center
Device management automatic alerting provides more efficiency in identifying devices issues by triggering notifications that can be turned into an immediate correction action.

What’s New: Teams for Education
Insights across classes and spotlight student activity
New capabilities in Insights helps you as an educator to understand engagement and progress of students over time and across your classes. Now, educators can see high-level trends across classes, like inactive students, active students per day, missed online classes and missed assignments. And within a class, new spotlight cards show trending student behaviors an educator may want to take action on. Learn more.

What’s New: Firstline Workers
Shift schedule assistance
Shifts schedule assistance will alert managers if conflicts occur anywhere in the schedule and they will receive conflict warnings when approving schedule change requests. This alerting saves managers time, makes shift scheduling more efficient and reduces inaccuracies that lead to employees not turning up for their shift. Learn more.

Full screen support in new meetings experience
We heard you, full screen mode is back! With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window, and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention. GCC only in November.

OneNote in Teams DoD
You can now add new or existing OneNote Notebooks tab to your Teams channels if you're a DoD customer. You can also go to Files or add OneNote Personal App to open your OneNote notebooks directly. Learn more.

Prevent attendees from unmuting in Teams Meetings
Meeting organizers and presenters in the US Government Community Cloud can now prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands. This can be helpful for press conferences and classrooms scenarios where you want to be in control of who’s speaking. Learn more.

5 things you may not know about Microsoft Teams

PeterRising — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 16:00:00 GMT

Everybody loves Microsoft Teams, right? Even before the world of Covid-19, Teams was Microsoft’s fastest adopted product in their history. Teams brings us so much, all in one place. We have chat, files, audio and video calls, apps, and so much more. When you open up Teams at the start of your day, there is little that you cannot do without having to change to another app. So much goodness is baked right into Teams!

What I love just as much though, is that there are so many hidden gems in Teams. Cool features that will help you to be productive, access the information that you need to get to quickly and easily, and help you to manage your work/life balance.

In this blog, I will take a look at some of the lesser known hidden gems that are available to you within Microsoft Teams right now. So, without further ado, here are 5 of the most underrated Teams features that you need to know about, and you will wonder how you ever did without them!

1. The Search Bar

When you open up Microsoft Teams, the search bar is right at the top of your screen. If you are new to Teams, and need a bit of help, this is a great tool to help you find your way around.

Figure 1 – The search bar in Microsoft Teams

By placing your cursor in the search bar, and pressing the / key, you are presented with a list of useful commands that you can use. This is shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 – Commands available from the search bar

An example of one of the available commands is /find.

Figure 3 – The Find command

When you choose the /find command and hit enter, you will first see the option to search within a Channel or Chat as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 – Use /find in Channel/Chat

In the example in Figure 5, I have chosen my chat with Adele, and searched the chat for the word Anaheim. Any search matches are displayed in the Results pane on the left of the page and selecting one of the results takes you directly to it.

Figure 5 – Chat /find results

Some additional quick and easy ways to use the search bar in Teams are to pressing Control + F (Command + F on Mac OS) to quickly carry out a search as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6 – Use Control + F to search

You may also press Control + . (Command + . on Mac OS), to quickly view a list of useful keyboard shortcuts.

Figure 7 – Use Control + . to view keyboard shortcuts

Go and try these out, and you will see how useful the search bar is and what a powerful tool it can be.

2. Switch easily between devices during meetings

Teams meetings have become a way of life for many of us, but they can consume a lot of your time. What if the meeting you are attending overruns and you need to **bleep** out in the car to run an errand or do the school run? Well, Teams has you covered again!

In the following example, I have joined a meeting on Teams from my laptop as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8 – Teams meeting in progress

The meeting is overrunning, and I need to get in my car to run some errands. No problem, I grab my iPhone (you can use Android devices too) and I open the Teams App. In Figure 9 we can immediately see at the top of the screen that we have an option to join the meeting from here.

Figure 9 – Join the meeting on your mobile device

We have two choices on joining the meeting on our mobile device as shown in Figure 10. These are:

Add this device – Join without audio on this device and keep your other device in the meeting
Transfer to this device – Join with audio on this device and leave the meeting on your other device automatically

Figure 10 – Add this device, or transfer to this device

In this example, I will choose the second option to transfer to this device.

Figure 11 – Transfer to this device

When I select Transfer now, I am placed into the meeting on my iPhone as shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12 – Meeting now transferred to mobile device

So now I can stay in the meeting whilst getting on with some other tasks on the go.

3. Channel Announcements

Announcements in channels is another feature that many people do not seem to know about. Let’s see how it works.

From any channel within Teams, click on the New conversation button shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13 – New conversation in a channel

Click on the format icon (which is the first icon on the left shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14 – Choose the format icon

The New conversation options will expand as shown in Figure 15.

Figure 15 – New conversation options

Click the dropdown next to New conversation and you have the option to choose Announcement.

Figure 16 – Choose Announcement

The announcement format is shown in Figure 17.

Figure 17 – The announcement options

I can now type in my announcement headline, sub-heading, and the announcement itself. If I choose the ellipsis, I can choose some further options for my announcement such as Mark as important. This is shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18 – preparing your announcement

You may also choose some color and image settings if you wish, and when you are ready to post your announcement, click Send. Your announcement will now be visible to all in the channel as shown in Figure 19.

Figure 19 – New announcement posted to channel

Announcements are a really great way to grab your colleague’s attention with important information that you post to a channel. Go and give them a try!

4. Share to Teams

Whilst Teams is very much the product of the moment, email is still very much alive and kicking and Outlook is one of the most important tools we have available to communicate efficiently. What if you receive an email though, and you immediately think that email contains some great information that you would like to share with your colleagues in Teams?

Figure 20 – Microsoft Outlook

This is where Teams channel email addresses come in. By clicking the ellipsis on your Teams channel, you will see the option to Get email address. This is shown in Figure 21.

Note: The Email integration features must be enabled from the Teams admin center in order for this feature to work.

Figure 21 – Get the channel email address

Click Copy to get the email address for your channel.

Figure 22 – Copy the channel email address

Now we can return to Outlook and open the email that we wish to share with the Teams channel. Click to forward the email and paste the channel email address into the To field.

Figure 23 – forwarding an email to the Teams channel

After you send the email, it will appear in the Teams channel immediately as shown in Figure 24.

Figure 24 – The email is now posted to the Teams channel

You can also reverse this process and share content from the Teams channel back to Outlook as shown in Figure 25.

Figure 25 – Share to Outlook

A very useful way to share information between Teams and Outlook quickly and easily!

5. Pin favorite channels

Last, but not least, we have the ability to pin your favorite channels. As Teams users, we can very quickly find ourselves as members of a number of different Teams and channels. The list can grow very quickly. What if you want quick and immediate access to the channels that you work with the most on a daily basis? No problem, channel pinning has you covered!

Let’s say we want to pin the Sales West channel shown in Figure 26. All we need to do is highlight the channel, click the ellipsis, and choose Pin.

Figure 26 – Pinning a channel

Now the channel is shown right at the top of the Teams window in the Pinned section as shown in Figure 27.

Figure 27 – Pinned section

Pinning is so quick and easy and helps you to get to content in your favorite channels in Teams!

Summary

So, these are 5 of my favorite lesser known features within Microsoft Teams that you need to know about! In truth, it was hard to pick just 5, so maybe we can do a follow up post sometime and show you some more amazing features!

I hope you enjoy these features and find them as useful as I do! Please do feel free to reach out and let me know about any of your own favorite Teams features that you would like to share with the community!

Thanks for reading!

Take care

Peter

Microsoft Teams calling devices for every user

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 16:00:00 GMT

As calls and online meetings have increased, Microsoft has worked on continually improving our features and services to help you collaborate across teams, create clarity and maintain the human connection that went from the hallways of work to digital spaces. To complement the calling experience in Teams is a robust portfolio of Teams phones designed for the places and ways you stay connected.

USB Solutions
The first USB phone certified for Microsoft Teams will be available this month, the Yealink MP50. This PC peripheral gives users a phone experience with a dial pad and handset that is plugged directly into a PC or docking station without complicated set up. While connected to Teams, the USB phone frees up your PC screen for other tasks while the device can take on the call.

Affordable phones with hardware buttons - launching Q1 2021
We have teamed up with partners Audio Codes and Yealink to release a line of phones with a non-touch display and hardware buttons. These phones will provide support for core calling functionality in Teams at an affordable price point. They will be available for purchase in spring of2021.

Teams phones
Since the first Teams phones came to market in 2018, we have added various options to our product portfolio to expand form factors, features, and experiences our devices can deliver. The Microsoft Teams phone app is brought to life with our OEM partners, Yealink, Audiocodes, and Poly. Together we bring best in class user experiences like sidecar support, redesigned home screen UI, and enterprise grade security and management.

Teams Displays
The Teams display is the newest category of collaboration experiences brought to market by our first partner, Lenovo. Now available on the ThinkSmart View, the Teams display integrates Artificial Intelligence and Cortana into your collaboration experience, creating the first intelligent companion device in market. Leverage voice activated commands with Cortana to quickly place a video call to your collaboration partners and rely on an informative ambient display which brings to your attention your personalized notifications and alerts.

Device as a Service
We are excited to announce that Teams certified devices, including the phones above, will be available for monthly financing through the Teams devices marketplace in the US starting in November. Users can add products to their shopping cart and with qualifying orders, be eligible for two or three year payment plans. This way what would have been an initial high investment can be broken up into smaller payments and redirected to other priorities customers may have. Shop today at the marketplace! More countries to come in 2021.

New Diagnostic for Teams Meeting Recording

Corbin Meek — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 19:57:27 GMT

Hi Teams Community,

As you may have heard, Microsoft Teams usage is up, WAY up and we recently announced a new "daily collaboration minutes" metric. To quote: "This quarter, Microsoft 365 users around the world generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day as people communicated, collaborated, and co-authored content across work, life, and learning." Read more from that announcement here.

That is an astounding number of daily collaboration minutes. While not all of them are spent in meetings, many are, and we know that our Teams Community loves to record meetings! So today I'm pleased to announce we just shipped our most recent Teams Diagnostic for Meeting Recordings.

From working with you all in Support we know that top support case drivers include Meeting Recording availability and end user capability (i.e. the Meeting Recording button is grayed out!). These issues typically fall into two categories, either the impacted user isn't allowed to record meetings via Policy settings or, in some areas of the world, Stream is not available in your region. Luckily our Diagnostic can identify both of these issues and tell you how to fix them.

But wait! There's more! In case you missed it, we recently began rolling out a change to Teams Meeting Recording Storage. If you're signed into your M365 Tenant Admin portal you can read all about it in the following Message Center Post: (Updated) Microsoft Teams: meeting recordings saved to OneDrive and Sharepoint.

You should also carefully review the following documentation that goes over these changes in detail:

Use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or Stream for meeting recordings

And of course, our Diagnostic can help you identify if you're using Stream or have switched to OneDrive SharePoint storage. In fact, if you are in a part of the world where Stream is not available, we are very pleased to inform you that you can Opt-in to OneDrive SharePoint storage to enable Teams Meeting Recording functionality!

As always we've provided you with a shortcut to get directly to the diagnostic. In your Admin portal, click on the Need Help button and then type in Diag: Meeting Recording like in the following screenshot:

Screenshot of the Need Help dialogue

If you're currently experiencing issues getting Teams Meeting Recording to work for some or all users, please give the new Diagnostic a try. Beyond checking your policy settings and storage location the Diagnostic does a lot more, so be sure to check it out. And, we're constantly working on new diagnostics and expanding our existing ones; for a full list, click here.

We'll be back soon with additional Teams Meeting Recording troubleshooting tips and tricks, stay tuned for 'Dude, where's my recording?' and other fun stuff.

Happy Collaborating!

Microsoft Teams Support

Protecting your data - creating a secure and compliant Microsoft Teams environment

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:20:31 GMT

Organizations are continuing to work in a remote or hybrid-remote environment which accentuates the need to protect people, devices, apps, and the data that spans across the entire landscape. An increase in online collaboration has caused an influx of data that is critical for organizations to ensure remains secure, wherever employees are collaborating from. This is supported by the 115 million daily active users on Microsoft Teams, reemphasizing the need to ensure we can protect all the information and data created from increased online collaboration.

Key customer questions for data governance and protection
As the world has shifted to remote work as the new normal, organizations are facing a variety of increasing regulations and challenges. We are often asked a common set of questions by business leaders:

How can we ensure sensitive data is not purposefully or accidentally shared with unintended recipients?
With the shift to online collaboration creating an increased volume of information and data, how do we remain complaint with regulations and privacy needs?
When employees are communicating online, how can we ensure they follow company policies to foster a safe and inclusive culture?

These questions are supported by a Harvard Business Review study commissioned by Microsoft that reveals organizations are finding an increased difficulty in securing and governing their data. While 77% of organizations agree an effective security, risk, and compliance strategy is essential for business success, an alarming 82% acknowledge increased risks and complexities have made an effective data management strategy more challenging.

Understanding the data landscape: structured versus unstructured data
One of the first components of data protection involves understanding how much structured and unstructured data exists in your organization. Structured data, organized in a pattern such as account numbers or credit cards, can often be identified using tools focused on preventing data loss. But how can we also ensure that unstructured data, like an internal release plan or confidential product specifications, also remains protected?

Creating an effective data governance and protection strategy
To help customers address complex data management needs, we can leverage built-in protections and AI capabilities to help safeguard both structured and unstructured data wherever it lives. By focusing on an approach of knowing, protecting, and governing data we can effectively build our organizational data governance and protection strategy.

Identifying the volume of structured and unstructured data in our organization helps us understand what protection capabilities we need to implement to have protection across our landscape. Data Loss prevention capabilities can leverage both built-in and custom sensitive information types to help protect structured data. Using trainable classifiers helps us govern our unstructured data by being able to identify items that meet our organization-defined policies to apply protections such as sensitivity or retention polices.

How does that apply to Microsoft Teams?
As part of the Microsoft 365 services, Teams follows all the security best practices and procedures such as service-level security through defense-in-depth and rich controls within the service. This means we can apply these same principles to ensure our collaboration and communication landscape have consistent advanced security and compliance capabilities leveraged from Microsoft 365. Teams enforces team and organization-wide multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single single-on through Azure Active Directory. Teams integration with SharePoint ensures file storage is backed by SharePoint encryption, while items like notes stored in OneNote are backed by OneNote encryption and stored in the team SharePoint site.

Because of this integration with familiar services like SharePoint and Exchange, IT can take advantage of simplified manageability in the centralized Microsoft 365 admin center to protect the data landscape. Let us look at how information protection and data loss prevention are implemented in Teams.

Data Protection in Microsoft Teams
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities allow IT to define policies that help prevent people from sharing sensitive information, extending into Teams chat, channel, and private channel messages. This also includes protection from OneDrive for Business for documents containing sensitive information shared in Teams messages to ensure unauthorized users cannot access the document. Similar to how DLP works across Microsoft 365 like in Outlook or OneDrive, when a DLP policy violation occurs in Teams the sensitive content is blocked for data protection. Additionally, a helpful end user tip appears to educate the end user on why the content was blocked.

The sender’s view:

An educational policy tip for the sender:

The recipient’s view:

By leveraging the strength of Microsoft 365 security across our data landscape, we can easily leverage existing DLP policies in other services, like Exchange or SharePoint Online, to extend their protection into Teams. IT can also create new policies across Microsoft 365 or specific to Teams depending on organizational needs or requirements.

Sensitivity labels allow us to classify and protect unstructured organizational data that may not be identified through our DLP policies such as a confidential internal memo. Once a sensitivity label is applied to an email or document, the configured protection settings for that specific label are enforced wherever that content travels within the Microsoft ecosystem. This includes encrypting emails or documents, applying watermarks, automatic and recommended labeling, and the ability to protect content in site and group containers.

Now let’s cover how to take advantage of data protection and governance in Teams to address the security needs of your organization.

Applying Data Protection and Governance in your Organization
Data protection and governance is often not a one-size-fits-all model. While organization-wide baseline protections play a critical role in a data management strategy, different business groups, departments, or subsets of users may need heightened protections to ensure data security. Below are some of the most impactful capabilities and controls organizations can implement across their landscape to drive an effective data protection and governance strategy.

How to secure data and prevent data loss
As mentioned throughout this blog, effective data management requires IT to be able to identify, monitor, and automatically protect all sensitive information across Microsoft 365. For structured data, this can be supported through creating data loss prevention policies to intelligently detect and prevent inadvertent disclosure. In order to protect unstructured data, IT can take advantage of sensitivity labels to have protection settings, such as content encryption or markings, applied to the content. The integration of sensitivity labels in Teams helps regulate access to sensitive organizational documents within teams by protecting content at the container level.

For groups or individuals that may need to be prevented from communicating with other groups, such as departments handling confidential information, Information Barrier policies can help IT isolate segments to meet relevant industry standards or regulations. Additionally, with this major shift to online communications we can leverage Communication Compliance in Teams and across Microsoft 365 to foster a safe and inclusive workplace. Communication Compliance helps organizations meet corporate policies such as ethical standards and risk management including identifying potential data leakage.

How to govern data for compliance and regulatory requirements
While items like DLP and Communication Compliance enable organizations meet regulatory requirements, we also need to ensure we can retain and search data across our landscape. Retention policies enabled across Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, help organizations meet both industry regulations and internal policies on data retention and deletion.

Organizations have many reasons to respond to a legal case that might require stakeholders to quickly find and retain relevant data across email, documents, instant messaging conversations, and other content locations. eDiscovery case tools help relevant stakeholders perform tasks like managing holds, case management, content search, and many other similar activities all in the security and compliance center. Additionally, large organizations can be required to turn over all Electronically Stored Information (ESI) which can be assisted by eDiscovery in Teams.

Creating a secure and compliant Microsoft Teams environment
While data protection and governance in Teams is foundational with the increase in online communications, it’s only one set of security capabilities. With Teams you have comprehensive security including items like multi-factor authentication, Conditional Access policies, Safe Attachments, Advanced Threat Protection capabilities, and more that builds on the Microsoft 365 security foundation. You can learn more about leveraging the Microsoft 365 security foundation to manage security and compliance in Teams in our latest Microsoft Ignite session.

In order to create a secure and complaint Teams environment for your organization, please review the below guidance to start enabling these capabilities:

Low code apps and bots in Microsoft Teams with Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:20:45 GMT

Many Microsoft customers like Lumen Technologies and Etihad are embracing low code tools in Microsoft Teams to accelerate their digital transformation. Also, companies such as Office Depot and Suffolk turned to low code apps to quickly adapt to the changing realities of the world over the past year.

Today we are excited to announce the General Availability of the next evolution of low code tools in Teams with the new Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents apps to help our customer continue their low cod journey. Also generally available today is Microsoft Dataverse for Teams (formerly known as Project Oakdale), a low code built-in data platform for Teams.

Build custom low code apps without leaving Teams
The new Power Apps app for Teams allows users to build and deploy custom apps without leaving Teams. With the simple, embedded graphical app studio, it’s never been easier to build low code apps for teams. You can also harness immediate value from built in teams app templates like the great ideas or inspections apps, which can be deployed in one click and customized easily.

Soon, you’ll be able to distribute apps to anyone in your organization. People on your team can collaborate to build apps and then share with everyone in their organization by publishing in the Teams app store. Also, we’re excited to announce that the apps you build with Power Apps will be natively responsive across all devices for an enhanced end to end user experience.

Low code chatbots in Teams are here to help
Chatbots are a great way to improve how users get work done. They are especially useful in Teams as they conversational nature of these bots blend into the flow of the chats you have with your teammates – chatting with a bot is as simple as chatting with your colleague. Some common uses for these bots within an organization include IT helpdesk, HR self-service, and onboarding help. These bots help you free up time, allowing people to focus on more high-value work.

Power Virtual Agents empower people in your organization to make bots with a simple no code graphical user interface. Starting today, with the now generally available Power Virtual Agents app for Teams, you can make bots within Teams with the embedded bot studio. You can now deploy these bots to teams or your entire organizations with just a few clicks.

With this more approachable way to create and manage bots, subject matter experts can build and use bots to help address common department-level needs that maybe weren’t substantial enough to get addressed by busy IT departments. Customers with select Office 365 subscriptions that include Power Apps and Power Automate will have access to Power Virtual Agents’ capabilities for Teams at no additional cost.

Dataverse for Teams - A new low code data platform for Teams
The new Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams can be backed by a new relational datastore – Dataverse for Teams. Dataverse for Teams provides a subset of the full Microsoft Dataverse (formerly known as CDS) capabilities but more than enough to get started building apps and bots for your organizations. Dataverse for Teams also improves application lifecycle management, allowing customers seamless upgrades to more robust offerings when their apps and data outgrow what comes with their Office 365 or Microsoft 365 licenses.

Also, IT professionals and Professional developers, can now use the Azure API Management connector and connect to data stored on Azure as part of their Microsoft and Office 365 licenses*.

Admin, security, and governance for your low code solutions in Teams
Microsoft Dataverse for Teams follows existing data governance rules established by the Power Platform and enables access control in the Teams Admin Center like any other Teams feature. Within the Teams Admin center, you can allow or block apps created by users at the individual level, group level, or org level – you can learn more here. The Power Platform admin center provides more detail on Power Platform solutions use and control, including monitoring dedicated capacity utilization.

Accelerate your transformation with Teams and Power Platform
We hope you are ready to start your Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents journey. For additional information on the content shared above and on the latest Teams platform news, please visit:

Microsoft 365 Blog: Enhancing your Teams experience with the apps you need
Microsoft Tech Community – Teams Blog: Growing momentum of Teams as a platform
Microsoft Tech Community – Teams Blog: Start automating processes with the New Power Automate app for Teams
Power Apps Blog: Microsoft Dataverse for Teams is now generally available
Power Automate Blog: Easily create and manage flows with the new Power Automate App for Teams
Webinar on 11/17/2020: Drive Better Meetings Experiences with Apps for Microsoft Teams

*Azure costs still apply

Building and managing amazing Teams apps

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:20:59 GMT

This past year has been one of tremendous adversity and disruption – dramatically changing the way we live and work. Organizations responded in turn by quickly adopting to tools like Microsoft Teams to support their people and ensure business continuity. Now, as organizations look to the future, they are seeking ways to advance their digital transformation – where they can bring apps and workflows into how they work and to better serve customers, streamline work, and improve employee productivity and wellbeing.

This digital transformation will be enabled through the creativity and determination of developers and IT professionals and admins who will drive the next generation of apps that will be used by the workforce. With this, we’ve made tremendous investments and progress in providing best in class developer tools and streamlined app management & enablement – extending the power of Teams platform.

Bringing developers the tools they need to build modern Teams apps

Teams apps for meetings now generally available!
This year at Ignite, we gave a sneak peek into the new capabilities we would soon be opening to partners and developers to customize and extend the meeting experience with apps. Today, we are thrilled to announce the general availability of Teams apps for meetings – providing you access to new surfaces and meetings APIs to further expand the capabilities of your apps across the entire meeting lifecycle and giving you a canvas to create new scenarios that will enhance your customers’ meeting experience. Get started by accessing our developer docs here.

We are also excited to share that nearly 20 new Teams apps for meetings, created by our partners, will be released by the end of this month!

Monday.com, for example, has built a seamless integration of their work operating system into the meeting lifecycle – allowing customers to plan, track, and follow up on tasks directly within Teams meetings.

And with Teamflect, managers can maintain high performing and engaged employees by bringing in the feedback loop directly into meetings – allowing for more effective one-on-one’s and engagement with staff.

New Teams Fluent UI Design Kit coming soon
Designing a great Teams app requires you to understand the scenarios you’re trying to achieve, the capabilities & integration points within the platform, and following best practice design principles to really drive the experience your want your customer to have. But we know that this is easier said than done, and so we are excited to share that, coming soon, designers will be able to access our new Teams UI Design Kit which includes UI components, templates, best practices, and other resources to help create your Teams app.

Enhancements to developer tools and apps enablement
We want to make your experience building Teams apps as frictionless as possible, so we’ve built comprehensive developer tools, Teams Graph APIs, and SDKs to help you get started building with ease.

Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code – provides you an all-in-one experience for building Teams apps including technical docs, project setup, configuration, validation, and publishing. Recently we added the integration of VSCode authentication, streamlined deployment, and debugging with the new “F5” experience, enhanced bot creation tools. Coming soon, you will be able to build tab-based apps that leverage the power of Microsoft Graph and single-sign-on right from the toolkit. Learn more on how to kick-start building apps with the Teams toolkits.

The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has been used by developers across the globe to build thousands of enterprise line-of-business solutions we’ve made tremendous strides over the last couple of years in enhancing the integration with SPFx and enabling the capabilities and functionality for SharePoint developers to extend Teams. By building Teams apps using SPFx, IT can save costs on hosting infrastructure and simplify the deployment and operation process – while SharePoint developers can expand the breadth and use of their solutions and reach customers where they are and work. Learn more on how to build Teams apps using SPFx.

The Microsoft Graph APIs for Teams enables developers and admins to leverage the power of the Microsoft Graph for apps and enablement. For example, we recently made generally available one of the most common requests from developers with Resource-Specific Consent (RSC), which enables team owners to grant consent for an application to access and/or modify a specific team’s data. Another commonly requested API has been with respect to change notifications for Teams messages, which we made generally available earlier this fall and allows apps to listen to Teams messages in near-real time, without polling, to enable scenarios such as data loss prevention, enterprise information archiving, and bots that listen to messages they aren’t @mentioned on. And lastly, another significant development was the availability of our Teams App Submission API from this summer, which allows all users at an organization to develop on the platform of their choice and submit their apps into Teams with zero friction. In turn, relieving the burden of discovering, approving, packaging, and deploying these apps by IT.

Support for Single Sign-On (SSO) for Bots
Users today expect a frictionless sign-on experience across devices – where they don’t have to repeatedly enter their username and password each time they interact with their bot. That’s why we are thrilled that Single Sign-on (SSO) support for bots is now available. SSO authentication in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) minimizes the number of times users need to enter their login credentials by silently refreshing the authentication token. If users agree to use your app, they will not have to consent again on another device and will be signed in automatically. Learn more on how to enable SSO for bots.

Microsoft Teams App Development Challenge

We’re also continuously planning new events and ways to connect with the developer community. For example, Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Teams App Development Challenge. Starting November 16, 2020 through February 8, 2021, developers, partners, and organizations can participate in a challenge to develop a new and innovative Teams App for publishing to AppSource, to be eligible to win a share of $45,000 in cash and prizes. For full challenge details visit http://microsoftteams.devpost.com

Streamlining Teams app management and enablement for IT

Viewing app permissions and granting admin consent
Admins have the important responsibility of managing apps and safeguarding company data, so we’ve made the experience managing different types of app permissions simpler for them inside the Teams admin center. Now, global admins will be able to review and grant consent to Graph API permissions registered in Azure Active Directory, on behalf of the entire tenant for the permissions an app is requesting. IT admins will also be able to review resource-specific consent (RSC) permissions for the apps within Teams admin center. With that admins will be able to unblock their users for the third-party apps they have already reviewed and approved to use in their organization. Learn more on app permissions.

Adding apps to teams
Another feature that has been highly requested by customers has been the ability to add apps to specific teams. Now, admins can add apps (that are eligible in team scope) to specific teams to help streamline the process and relieving team owners with the need to do so. Learn more on adding apps to teams.

Managing Power Platform apps in Microsoft Teams admin center
With the increasing usage of apps built using our low code solutions in Teams, admins can now control whether Microsoft Power Platform apps are listed in ‘Built by your colleague’s’ on the Apps page in Teams. You can collectively block or allow all apps created in Power Apps or all apps created in Power Virtual Agents at the org level on the Manage apps page or for specific users using app permission policies. Learn more on managing shared Power Platform apps on Teams.

Customized branding for line-of-business Teams app catalog
Each organization has their own line of business apps that they rely on for their unique business needs, and Teams enables customers the capability of bringing in those solutions directly to where their people work. Today, line of business apps show up in the Teams app store as apps built for their organization and we’re thrilled to share that now IT Admins will be able to customize their Teams line-of-business app store look using their organization’s branding. This will enhance the user experience for end users and increase organic discovery and use of an organization’s line-of-business apps.

We are humbled by the engagement and feedback from our developer ecosystem, and IT professionals and admins. Teams enables a new way of work, and our Teams apps integrations make work even easier.

Learn more on how you can build Teams apps.

Automating everyday tasks is even easier with the new Power Automate app for Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:21:48 GMT

One salient statistic in the shift to remote work over the past eight months is the fact that on average people spend an additional hour working per day versus when they were previously working in the office. We know that people don’t necessarily want to be working more, but the change in how people are working has resulted in this shift nonetheless. One way to help people take back some of this time is by automating routine processes to make their workday easier.

The new Power Automate app for Teams makes it more approachable and straightforward for users to automate routine tasks.

Simplified flow designer for Teams templates
The new Power Automate app for Teams allows you to build a flow to automate processes using a simplified creation experience. Now by just selecting parameters from a few drop-down menus, you can automate routine tasks for yourself and for your team. The new simplified experience also makes the process of building flows faster for experienced makers.

The new simplified designer lets you create flows based on 50 templates, and there are many more templates on the way. You can always modify a flow using the full creator experience by clicking on ‘Edit in advanced mode’. Also, you can create a flow from scratch, using the button on the top right of the ‘Create’ experience – all of this right within Teams.

Manage your flows from the home screen
The new Power Automate app provides a simple way to manage your flows in Teams from the home screen. It’s now easy to turn your flows off and on, see who they are shared with, what types of flows you have, and see in which Teams and channels they function. From here, you can click right into those flows to modify if needed.

Also, the app still provides you with the approvals management tab from the previous version of the Power Automate app, helping you manage your approvals in one place.

More templates, triggers, and actions for quick automation creation
There are a range of new templates available and recently released triggers and actions that allow you to quickly automate many elements in your Teams experience. One interesting new template allows you to schedule 1:1 time with someone and sets up a Teams call. We’re constantly adding more templates, triggers, and actions to expand the ways you can use automation to customize your Teams experience and make your day a bit easier.

For additional information on the content shared above and on the latest Teams platform news, please visit:

Microsoft 365 Blog: Enhancing your Teams experience with the apps you need
Microsoft Tech Community – Teams Blog: Growing momentum of Teams as a platform
Microsoft Tech Community – Teams Blog: Start automating processes with the New Power Automate app for Teams
Power Apps Blog: Microsoft Dataverse for Teams is now generally available
Power Automate Blog: Easily create and manage flows with the new Power Automate App for Teams
Webinar on 11/17/2020: Drive Better Meetings Experiences with Apps for Microsoft Teams

New Sentry Connector for Microsoft Teams

ErinBailie — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:22:07 GMT

Millions of people use Microsoft Teams to be productive across different workstreams, and the latest Sentry app in Microsoft Teams is here to keep you up to speed on emerging alerts and issues in your DevOps environment.

Sentry Connector in Microsoft Teams
Using rule-based configurations, the Sentry app in Microsoft Teams will automatically notify pre-defined channels of code errors, performance issues, or other events. Rule-based configurations allow customers flexibility in customizing which alerts generate notifications in Teams. Users can respond to the alert by ignoring, assigning, or resolving directly from Teams; they can also use channel messages and mentions to collaborate with others on response and next steps.

How to use Sentry in Teams
Integrating Sentry into Teams for your DevOps practices takes two steps: install and configure. See Sentry’s step-by-step documentation for full details and instructions.

If you’re currently using the legacy Sentry integration, consider moving your notification configurations to use the latest integration.

Kitchen Table Admin: Microsoft Audio Conferencing Part 2 - Troubleshooting

Corbin Meek — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 15:29:21 GMT

Hello Microsoft Teams Community,

We're back with another Kitchen Table Admin video for you, Microsoft Audio Conferencing Part 2. This video adds onto the the introduction we did previously and gets into more technical depth and troubleshooting guidance. If you're looking for an introduction to Microsoft Audio Conferencing, please check out the previous video.

In this video I'll show you how to use our Support Diagnostic tools available in your M365 Admin Portal to troubleshoot the following problems:

Users create a Microsoft Teams Meeting and do not have a dial-in number in the invite (missing dial-in conference number in Teams meeting invitation)
Provisioning (licensing) or configuration delays when you setup new users or apply an Audio Conferencing License to a user
A quick and easy way to determine which users are correctly setup for Microsoft Audio Conferencing

This is also a great time to remind everyone of the Diagnostic shortcuts we recently created. To immediately access the Diagnostic I'm demonstrating in this video, type the following text into the Need Help box: Diag: Teams Conference and hit enter.

Like so:

OK, without further ado - here's the video. As always we welcome your feedback, especially requests for additional topics or issues you'd like to see covered in a future video, please post below in the blog comments. Thanks for watching!

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | October 2020

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:22:20 GMT

Welcome back! This month we have a packed blog with a lot of new features that are now generally available to improve your experience with meetings and calling, chat and collaboration, as well as a number of new updates to Microsoft Teams devices. This blog also contains a few industry specific items for Education, Firstline Workers, and our Government customers. We have updates on Teams platform capabilities and we’re introducing a new section called “App spotlight” that showcases 3rd party apps available in Teams.

What’s New: Meetings & Calling
Live Captions with speaker attribution
Microsoft Teams added speaker attribution to live captions so that you can see who is speaking along with what’s being said, making meetings more inclusive and easier to follow along.

Spotlight an individual video participant for all attendees in a Teams meeting
Presenters can now pin an individual video feed for all attendees to see during a Teams meeting. Once pinned, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants. This applies to PC, Mac, mobile (view only) and Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. Learn more

Prevent attendees from unmuting in Teams Meetings
Meeting organizers and presenters can now prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands. This can be helpful for press conferences and classrooms scenarios where you want to be in control of who’s speaking. Learn more

Advanced Production for Teams Meetings

Transform your Teams Meeting into a virtual stage with a new advanced production option for broadcasts. Network Device Interface (NDI) support for Teams allows event producers to convert each participant's video into a discrete video source that can be used in the video streaming production tool of your choice. This functionality enables you to use Teams meetings in new ways, including bringing speakers into Together Mode or customized views, to deliver professional broadcasts to the end point of your choice and reach audiences wherever they are.

Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode

Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode is available in Teams allowing for more flexibility for you to either present the digital whiteboard in read-only mode, or to allow others to edit and collaborate when given access.

Meeting & Calling recordings stored in OneDrive and SharePoint
Teams meeting and call recordings can now be stored in your OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint, providing the ability to share recordings with guests or external users, access meeting recordings faster, and manage recordings with security and compliance controls available to other file types in Microsoft 365. Teams Admins can select their recording storage location by updating policies using PowerShell. Learn more

Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)
We are updating our meeting policies to allow IT administrators more control over how video is managed in Teams meetings. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video. We have extended the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. Learn more

What’s New: Devices
ARM64 Native Teams App
Unleash the full power of Microsoft Teams on your favorite ARM devices with the new native ARM64 Teams client now generally available. Stay connected and organized while enjoying improved performance, reliability, and battery life in devices such as the Surface Pro X.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms
Features beginning to roll out to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows include:

Spotlight support: Microsoft Teams Rooms now supports the spotlight feature in Teams meetings, which enables you as a meeting organizer or presenter to select a video feed as the spotlight for all attendees. Once selected, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants, which is great to make sure everyone focuses on, for example, the presenter.
Hard mute: This feature allows you as a meeting organizer to disable microphone controls for all meeting participants. This feature can be useful for scenarios like distance learning or executive board meetings where organizers want a higher level of control over who can unmute their microphone and when. Teams Rooms supports this setting and joins muted with microphone disabled unless granted permission.

Dell Meeting Space Solution for seamless onsite and remote collaboration
Dell’s newest Meeting Space Solution for Microsoft Teams Rooms offers a complete group collaboration ecosystem that includes the OptiPlex 7080 Micro running the Teams Rooms experience on Windows, Dell Large Format Monitors, plus Logitech Tap and ConferenceCams. With proximity detection and one-touch join, you can start a meeting while instantly projecting content in the room and to virtual participants.

EPOS announces two new headsets certified for Microsoft Teams
The IMPACT MB Pro 1 UC ML and 2 UC ML have now passed the rigorous reliability testing required to be certified for Microsoft Teams. You can now experience high end audio tools that provide optimal comfort, easy call handling and rich, natural sound – all while reliable, intelligent technologies filter out unwanted noise, enhance audio and boost efficiency.

See the latest in Teams Devices at http://aka.ms/teamsdevices

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration

New offline presence status
Let others know when you are not available in Microsoft Teams. You can now change your presence to “Offline”. This allows you to have full access to Teams while signaling to colleagues that you are unavailable.

Language-aware proofing
Communicate using multiple languages in Microsoft Teams. If you write different messages in different languages, you now see spellchecking relevant to the language you use when typing a message in the Teams desktop app.

Templates for creation of a new Team
When creating a new team, you can now choose from a variety of customizable templates including event management, crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates like hospital ward and bank branch. Microsoft publishes a set of first-party templates and as an IT professional you can also create new custom templates for your organization, allowing you to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices.

New file sharing experience
Team members share and work together on content from a single source of truth seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation. Learn more

Updated SharePoint pages app
Using SharePoint pages is a great way to consolidate and share content in the right context using images, Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents, videos, links, Twitter feeds and more – all on the same page. And now you can more easily add your pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams. Learn more

New and simplified global notification settings
As a user you can now configure and customize your notification settings through a newly designed notification settings section. This new experience makes it easier to find the exact notifications you want so you can keep track of the activity you care about. To access, go to your profile picture > Settings > Notifications. We also added a new setting that allows you to turn off message previews in chat notifications if you desire more privacy.

What’s New: Teams for Education
Anonymous grading and marking in Assignments
Tackle unconscious bias and even the playing field in class with Anonymous Grading. When enabled in the assignment detail view, students’ names are anonymized and avatars are temporarily removed, presenting a random list of students. This allows you as an educator to review work with identities hidden, no shuffling of paper involved.

View assignments across all classes
Being able to see what’s upcoming, whether you’re an educator or student, is critical to getting a handle on your week, month, or year. Now both educators and students can once again view upcoming and turned in assignments by class or view them across all classes. Just visit Assignments in your app bar on the left-hand side of Teams to view assignments across all classes. Students can also filter by category, see the due date, and assigned value of the assignment and more.

What’s New: Firstline Workers
Off-shift access controls
With off-shift access controls, IT administrators can now configure Teams to alert you when you are accessing the app on your personal device outside of working hours. The feature prompts you to accept that you will not be getting paid for time spent on Teams to help ensure that you are not involuntarily working while not on shift and helps your employer to comply with labor regulations. The feature does not require active usage of the Shifts app, but it does require Shifts being configured and schedule data being inside the app; either added natively with Excel import or including workforce management API connectors like Kronos, BlueYonder and more. Learn more

Priority notifications
Share urgent messages and time-sensitive information more effectively with Teams. Priority notifications alert a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. IT admins can manage this feature as part of messaging policies in Teams. Priority notifications are now available in GCC, GCC High, and DoD. Learn more

Read receipts
Now available in GCC, read receipts in private chats allow senders to know that a message was read by the recipients. IT admins can configure messaging policies from the Microsoft Teams admin center to enable or disable this feature for users. Learn more

File viewer upgrades
Teams file viewer is being upgraded for Gov clouds from legacy to OneUp for non-Office file types and to unified app for Office file types (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel).

Together mode
Together mode, now available in GCC, uses AI segmentation technology in meetings to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else.

Large Gallery view (Preview) - see up to 49 participants
Large Gallery is providing a new way to view video up to 49 participants at once on a single screen (7x7). This feature rolled out to production with the new multi-window experience. To take advantage of this new view, users will need to turn on the new multi-window meeting experience. Large Gallery is now available in GCC.

Spotlight an individual video participant for all attendees in a Teams meeting
We are delivering the ability for presenters to lock on an individual video feed for all attendees to see during a Teams meeting. Once selected, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants. This applies to PC, Mac, mobile, and Microsoft Teams room systems. The spotlight feature is now available in both GCC and GCC High.

Improvements to meeting notes
Meeting notes now support 100 users by default. Also, if anyone joins your meeting past after it is scheduled and, doesn't have access to notes, they can now request access from the note’s owner in one click. Meeting notes are now available in GCC, GCC High, and DoD.

Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)
We are updating our meeting policies to allow IT administrators on GCC more control over how video is managed in Teams Meetings. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video. We are extending the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. Learn more

What’s New: Healthcare
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
Earlier this week we announced the general availability of our first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, including the new Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Epic EHR. This allows clinicians to launch a virtual visit in Teams from within their electronic health record system. Learn more about how and about the many new features now available as part of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

What’s New: Platform
Microsoft Teams and Power Automate - Simpler automation for everyone
A new Power Automate app for Teams makes automating workflows easier than ever with new templates and a simplified editor experience.

Organizational branding for line-of-business Teams app catalog
IT Admins can now customize their Teams line-of-business app catalog using their organization's branding. This enhances the user experience for end users and increase organic discovery and use of an organization's line-of-business apps. Learn more

Resource-Specific Consent now generally available on the Microsoft Graph v1.0 endpoint
We are excited to announce that Resource-Specific Consent (RSC) is now generally available on the Microsoft Graph v1.0 endpoint! Your Teams app can now call Teams Graph APIs from the BETA endpoint without needing admin consent. This capability empowers Team owners to install an app for their specific team and restrict the app’s scope and access to data to only that one team, without needing the global IT admin to provision access. Learn more

App certification
Publishers building Microsoft Teams add-ins can now work with Microsoft to certify that their app – and its supporting infrastructure – protect the security and privacy of sensitive customer data. Certified apps receive a badge that is visible in AppSource and from within the Microsoft 365 tenant administrator’s console. We strongly encourage app publishers to take advantage of this program, and over time, expect to make it a requirement. Learn more

Publisher verification
It’s critical that IT Admins and end-users know that partner apps come from verified sources. Using a process that relies on a verified Microsoft Partner Network account, Microsoft now offers application developers a publisher verification service. Verified apps receive a badge that is visible in AppSource and in the consent dialog when a user or admin installs an application. Learn more

Teams App Spotlight

Clio is a cloud-based legal software that law firms trust to manage their practices and clients from intake to invoice. As the needs of legal professionals have changed over the last year, Clio has been focused on building solutions law firms need in this new digital-first reality. To make remote collaboration even easier, Clio customers can now check the status of their matter, scan recent communications, and plan for upcoming events all within Microsoft Teams. Learn more

Microsoft Teams displays now available!

Microsoft_Teams_team — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 22:49:57 GMT

Reimagine your workday with Microsoft Teams displays, a new category of Teams device solutions that combine productivity, collaboration and artificial intelligence into one seamless experience. Teams display is the first all-in-one touchscreen device dedicated to bringing the Teams experience to life; by channeling your alerts, schedule, calls and meetings into one device you can free up your PC and mind space to the task at hand and minimize distractions. Most exciting, Teams displays are powered by Cortana, transforming what would be an ordinary video phone into a powerful personal assistant.

Whether you are at home or in the office, Teams displays change how you work.

1. Teams at your fingertips
As a device dedicated only to Teams, displays bring together everything you need to stay in the rhythm of work: chat, meetings, calls, calendar, and files can be accessed instantly, freeing up your PC for other tasks. Engage in high quality calling and meetings with your colleagues with industry leading microphones, cameras and speakers built in.

Dedicated Teams devices like Bluetooth headsets (left) and displays (center) create a more reliable calling and meeting experience.

2. Everything you need to know, at-a-glance
The customizable home screen of the display shows you key alerts from Team, your schedule highlights, and shortcuts to key communication apps like calling, contacts voicemail. Ever been heads down in a deliverable and can’t remember what is next in your day? Take a look at your display to stay caught up without skipping a beat. Customize your notifications to surface what is important to you and reduce pings and distractions from your primary work device or mobile. Finally change your wallpaper from a variety of delightful preset options, with the capability to add your own coming soon.

Microsoft Teams displays can be personalized to include wallpapers and highlight important activities and notifications.

3. Use the power of Cortana to go hands free

Use voice commands to leverage Cortana in your daily tasks. You can make requests like:

"What is on my calendar today?"

"Share this document with Megan"

"Join my next meeting"

“Add Joe to this meeting"

"Present the quarterly review deck"

Take back the time from little tasks with built in voice assistant capabilities.

4. Better together with your PC
Microsoft Teams displays seamlessly integrate with your PC to bring a companion experience that allows for seamless cross-device interaction. You can easily lock and unlock both devices from your connected PC, open files or messages on one with the option to respond on the other. You can even split the contents and participants in meetings across two screens, so you can consume information while maintaining contact with your collaborators.

Using Microsoft Teams displays allows for a distributed meeting experience across devices.

5. Enterprise privacy, security, and compliance
Microsoft Teams displays ensure user's privacy and meets enterprise-grade security and compliance in several ways:

With a camera shutter and microphone mute switch, users can feel assured that your conversations and video will remain private.
IT admins can securely manage, update, and monitor Microsoft Teams displays through the Teams admin portal.
Users will securely sign in with their enterprise Azure Active Directory credentials.
Voice assistance experiences are delivered using Cortana enterprise-grade services that meet Microsoft 365 privacy, security and compliance commitments.

The Lenovo ThinkSmart View will be the first Microsoft Teams display to market, with Yealink coming soon.

The first Microsoft Teams displays are from Lenovo (left) and Yealink (right).

To learn more about portfolio of devices certified for Teams, visit office.com/teamsdevices or shop the ThinkSmart View at Microsoft Stores.

New training resources for Microsoft Teams admins and IT Pros on MS Learn

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:23:00 GMT

As organizations, big and small, across the world rely on Microsoft Teams to help enable hybrid work for all their employees, our goal is to help make sure IT Professionals and Teams admins are up to the task. To help you get ready to deploy and manage Microsoft Teams in your organization and deliver the experiences that meet the needs of your users, we have created new Teams training courses and interactive product how-to guides designed to quickly ramp up your Teams admin knowledge base.

At Microsoft Ignite last month, we introduced a number of new Microsoft Teams role-based learning paths, learning modules, and interactive product experiences that are available at MS Learn.

MS Learn provides free, online training that you can work through at your own pace to build skills and earn certifications. Interactive product how-to guides are a hybrid of traditional hands-on labs and click-thru demos that do not require a sandboxed environment for training.

If you need help figuring out where to start your learning journey or just want to browse the new Teams learning content, check out the new MS Learn landing page for Microsoft Teams and the new interactive product how-to guides for Microsoft Teams admins.

Microsoft Teams Learning paths and modules on MS Learn

Below is a list of the latest Microsoft Teams learning content for administrators. Learning paths are full topic learning solutions, while modules are bite sized learning chunks dedicated around a specific task. These are designed for you to learn at your own pace and even includes bookmarks for you to save your progress.

Learning path/modules	Role/Level
Set up Microsoft Teams meetings for your organization (Learning Path – 3 Modules)	Administrator/Intermediate
Deploy Teams phone systems with Direct Routing (Learning Path – 4 Modules)	Administrator/Intermediate
Enforce security, privacy and compliance in Microsoft Teams (Learning Path – 8 Modules)	Administrator/Intermediate
Design and configure Microsoft Teams Rooms (Learning Path – 4 Modules)	Administrator/Intermediate
Manage calls in Microsoft Teams by using auto attendants and call queues (module)	Administrator/Intermediate
Configure your network for M365 and Teams connectivity (Module)	Administrator/Beginner
Navigate the Teams admin center (Module)	Administrator/Beginner
Configure enterprise-grade security in Microsoft Teams (Module)	Administrator/Intermediate
Configure enterprise-grade compliance in Microsoft Teams (Module)	Administrator/Intermediate
Rollout Teams using Microsoft Advisor for Teams (Module)	Administrator/Beginner
Configure Microsoft Teams meetings and calls for inclusion (Module)	Administrator/Beginner
Onboard users to Microsoft Teams (Module)	Administrator/Intermediate

Microsoft Teams Interactive Product How-to Guides

These guides are designed to simulate the hands-on lab experience to guide you through the specific individual steps needed to complete a task. They include an interactive window to perform tasks and a comprehensive script to follow. This script can also be downloaded as a reference to complete tasks on your own Microsoft 365 and Teams environment.

How-to Guide	Abstract
Identity, Access management & Threat Protection for Teams	Learn how to use Microsoft admin centers and PowerShell to configure access and identity policies and Enable Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection for Teams
Managing Compliance in Teams	Use the Microsoft 365 Security, Microsoft 365 Compliance, and Microsoft Teams admin centers, as well as Windows PowerShell to manage and configure an Office 365 organization's Microsoft Teams policies and settings.
Teams Advisor: Deploying chats, teams, channels and apps in Microsoft Teams	Learn how to leverage Teams advisor to assess your environment and build a plan for deploying chats, teams, channels and apps.
Streamlining Teams administration with PowerShell and dynamic groups	Convert an Office 365 group from static membership to dynamic and use Windows PowerShell to assign a new App permission policy to all members.
Managing Teams and Guest Access in the Microsoft Teams admin center	Learn how to configure and manage Microsoft Teams and guest access for your organization.
Configure Teams Phone System: Auto Attendant & Call Queue	Step through the process of creating and deploying a Call Queue and Auto Attendant as part of Microsoft Teams calling using the Microsoft Teams admin center.
Configure Direct Routing: connecting SBCs and voice routing	Use Microsoft Teams Phone System Direct Routing to integrate with your existing telephony infrastructure.
Configure Governance in Microsoft Teams	Learn how to create a Teams messaging retention policy for your organization and how to archive, delete and restore individual Teams
Configuring and deploying Microsoft Teams meetings	Step through the process of deploying the meetings workload for Microsoft Teams.
Configure Audio Conferencing for Microsoft Teams	Discover the capabilities of Audio Conferencing in Teams and learn how to assign conference bridges and dial-in phone numbers.
Configuring Microsoft Teams for Firstline Workers	Learn how to configure and deploy the right Microsoft Teams environment for your Firstline Workforce.

We will continue to create new learning and training content as Microsoft Teams continues to add great new features and capabilities. We would love to hear from you on how we can help better prepare and support your learning journey. We know that not everyone learns the same, so please let us know how and what your needs are to help us evaluate new and exciting learning content!

Microsoft Partners with Salesforce to Deliver Microsoft Teams Integration for Sales and Service

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:23:31 GMT

Addressing customer demands, giving teams a shared view of every customer, and making collaboration and meetings between teams easier is the goal with our collaboration with Salesforce.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Salesforce in Microsoft Teams pilot. The integration will be offered to Sales and Service Cloud customers with Enterprise or Unlimited edition at no additional cost.

For many teams – including the sales teams present at many organizations – there is no more critical data than customer data, typically stored within a customer relationship management (CRM) application. A close connection between customer information and the conversations around them can improve the productivity for any team that works with customers, which is why we are pleased to see the integration from Salesforce with Microsoft Teams – now you can interweave key customer and case records within your Microsoft Teams.

By connecting Salesforce CRM with Microsoft Teams, our joint customers can now benefit from a close connection of the chat and workspace capabilities of Teams alongside key information and actions from Salesforce – which makes team collaboration more focused and effective.

– Doug Camplejohn, Sales Cloud Executive Vice President and General Manager, Sales Cloud, Salesforce

For sales teams, the integration will help bring sales teams together more easily and help make up for some of the hallway discussions that are now missing from many salespeople’s daily routine in light of the current work-from-home environment. For service teams, the integration will enable better coordination and faster response times to open cases, allowing for more team collaboration both within the service department and outside.

It all starts with the conversations that teams and individuals can have in chat. With a Salesforce message extension integration, now you can integrate key customer details right inline within a conversation, keeping details right in context and alongside your conversations. Relevant details around customer contact information are displayed within the broader chat stream. Administrators can also choose and determine the level of visibility for this information – whether details can be shared within a secured team, or whether they require a Salesforce log-in to display.

Add connected records inline within your conversations

In addition, you can now pin customer information as a Tab in a channel. Within this Tab, you can see and update key vendor information, related contacts, and view updates and activities all in one place. This facilitates a workflow where you use a team or channel per customer to holistically manage all aspects of that relationship. Add the corresponding Salesforce display as a Tab, and you’ll have an integrated workspace that brings together chat files, and more alongside key customer information stored within the Salesforce CRM.

With these capabilities, it is now possible to design customer-focused workspaces within Microsoft Teams, featuring the Salesforce app and integration.

To get started, Salesforce customers will need to contact their customer success representatives or account executives to have them provision integration capabilities for Microsoft Teams. After this, team owners can add the Salesforce application to their team from AppSource or the Microsoft Teams store. We look forward to seeing more integrations that help you build the ultimate workspace for collaborating around customers.

Kitchen Table Admin: Introduction to Microsoft Audio Conferencing

Corbin Meek — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 23:35:54 GMT

Microsoft Teams Community,

We're back with the second video in our Kitchen Table Admin series, an Introduction to Microsoft Audio Conferencing, or meeting dial-in. We get a LOT of support volume on this topic and we hope to clear up some of the most common questions and issues we hear from Teams Administrators when first setting up this feature set.

Demo starts at about 0:53 into the video. This is level 50/100 stuff here, so if you're already familiar with Microsoft Audio Conferencing and using the feature, this information should be well known to you. However, if you're just getting started, check out the video we hope it is helpful to you.

As always we welcome your feedback in the blog comments. We're especially interested in topics you'd like to have us cover in a future video.

Thanks for watching!

Stay in Teams: Using Microsoft Teams with External Apps like Slack and Webex

DomKent — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 15:02:30 GMT

Want your workforce to stay in Microsoft Teams? Just roll it out, right? Wrong!

Microsoft supports over 75 million daily active Teams users. But the app hasn’t wiped out the competition yet. Many companies are using alternative apps alongside Microsoft Teams. For example, 63% of companies using Microsoft apps are using Slack in parallel. Users who have to navigate between Teams and another app either spend all day switching between apps or risk a huge gap in communication and information.

So, how do you stay in Microsoft Teams and empower full collaboration?

Microsoft Teams in the current collaboration landscape
Workplace silos are a common problem in today’s app-rich environment. Experimentation with video conferencing, file sharing, and productivity tools leads to app sprawl. Flexera Software found 64% of businesses have more apps than they need.

Internally, companies end up with fragmented app portfolios for various reasons. Mergers and acquisitions combine different styles of working with preferred apps for each team. New talent comes into the office and struggles to switch to a new environment. Just because most of your staff love Microsoft Teams, doesn’t mean there aren’t other apps in play. Even if you manage to get all employees on the same app internally, the challenge isn’t over.

What if your external contacts aren’t Teams users? How do you connect with a contractor on Webex while staying in Teams? If external contacts are in Teams, is a guest account on your channel enough?

Now, we’ve set the scene, the rest of this blog post details how your users can stay in Microsoft Teams and still communicate with users in external apps like Slack and Webex.

How to stay in Microsoft Teams when communicating with people on Webex
For external contacts, the easiest way to chat with Webex Teams users while staying in Teams is by creating a universal channel. Universal Channels for Microsoft Teams simplify collaboration. The app connects your Microsoft Teams chats and your external contact’s Webex Teams chats.

If you send a message in Teams to a contractor on Webex Teams, they’ll see it without having to switch tools. Webex Teams users can message Microsoft Teams users and vice versa. There are no guest accounts needed and no app-swapping actions required.

You can even connect Microsoft Teams for one business to another Teams instance. All you need to do is install a universal channel and choose Microsoft Teams as your app.

Once created, send the link to your universal channel and your external contacts can join from their app of choice.

Once they join, you’ve connected your Microsoft Teams account to their Webex Teams account. Just like that, there’s no reason to leave Microsoft Teams.

Are there other ways to connect Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex?
Installing a universal channel is the only way to link chat, emojis, and file-sharing between Webex Teams and Microsoft Teams.

Want to connect Microsoft Teams users with Cisco Webex Teams calling features? There’s an option for that too. Cisco announced the Call App for Microsoft Teams in April 2020.

To access this feature, search Cisco Webex Meetings app in Teams and install. Your users will need to have activated Webex Control Hub accounts. Users also need to access Cisco Webex Calling or the UC manager.

Go to the Microsoft Teams Admin Center and click Teams Apps. Click on Manage Apps and search for Webex Calls. Toggle the app on.

Remember to update your permissions policies in the Teams app menu. Click on Setup policies and allow access to third-party apps. You’ll be able to use the Webex tab in Microsoft Teams to view upcoming meetings. You can also start, schedule, and join Webex meetings on this tab.

Remember, this function only connects calling features.

Other connection options for Cisco Webex and Microsoft include:

Using bots: IFTTT bots are an option for those with developer knowledge. With bots, you can set up notifications. These alerts appear in Microsoft Teams when someone shares something in Webex.
Cisco Meetings app: There’s a Cisco Webex Meeting app for Microsoft Teams. Downloading this app lets you schedule Webex Meetings without leaving Teams.

How to stay in Teams and talk to Slack Users

What if some employees in your company use Slack instead of Teams? A common scenario is that a small pocket of Slack users exists in your engineering or marketing teams. Through personal preference, shadow IT is common in most businesses.

By enabling message interoperability in your communicate estate, you can sync your internal Teams users with your internal Slack users. This means your employees who use Slack – either on the sly or approved – can now message cross-platform to their colleagues who are using Teams.

How does it work?
When you install Mio in the background, you choose which channels and teams to synchronize so you and your colleagues are always on the same page.

Once connected, Mio syncs all the features your teams depend on every day:

Direct messages
Threaded messages
File uploads
@ mentions
Emoji reactions
Message editing

By translating messages from Microsoft Teams to Slack (and vice versa), your Teams users can stay in Teams and stop using Slack.

What about external contractors who prefer Slack?
As is the case for connecting Microsoft Teams to Webex Teams, you can set up a universal channel to message cross-platform and cross-company to users in Slack.

When you create a universal channel, the tool grabs messages from Slack and delivers them to Microsoft Teams. (And vice versa).

It’s the easiest way for your team members to stay in Teams while communicating with Slack users. You can send messages this way, files, and even emojis. There’s no need to switch between apps for you or your contacts.

Can you connect Slack and Microsoft in other ways?
Slack and Microsoft Teams introduced a VoIP integration in April 2020.

Install the Microsoft Teams Calls app and you can launch Teams calls in Slack. The shortcuts button on Slack will give you instant access to Teams calling. You can also use the /Teams-calls command to achieve the same results.

Unfortunately, this integration only goes one way. It doesn’t bring any Slack functionality into Teams.

An alternative option might be to use webhooks. With webhooks, you might let Slack messages on one channel appear on a channel in Teams. Unfortunately, webhooks aren’t scalable. You can’t connect endless channels and teams.

APIs and bots may offer another alternative. Microsoft has a Slack connector in its inventory allowing for some crossover. You can join Slack channels from Teams and set triggers for events. You can even set “Do Not Disturb” statuses for Slack users from Teams.

Again, you have limited options here. There’s no connection for direct messages or sending files from one platform to another. You could try building your own app if you have the knowhow. Unfortunately, functionality only goes as far as your building skills allow.

How to connect with Microsoft Teams external users?
So, what if everyone you want to reach is on Teams, but not in the same workspace? Maybe you need to reach contractors with another Teams instance.

One solution is guest access. Setting up guest access lets people use your Teams instance, with limited functionality. For example, your contacts still need to log out of their Teams tenant.

Another option is federation.

You have a few options here:

Open federation: Open federation lets people find you on Teams. It also lets people in your company find, call, and chat with external parties. Users in this environment can chat with all domains using Skype for Business or Teams. The other company must be using open federation too, or have you added to their allow list.
Specific federation: Go onto Org-wide settings and External access. Here, add companies to your Allow list. Only the domains you allow can reach you. Teams block all other domains.
Block specific domains: Stop certain people from reaching you. Microsoft Teams supports blocking certain domains. Adding domains to your block list prevents connections with dangerous domains.

Whether your scenario is time burned switching between apps that aren’t Teams or lost information and productivity flicking between accounts, there are ways to remedy this.

What to do next?

Read over this blog post again now you’ve identified your pain point. Use the steps provided to sync your Microsoft Teams instance with other apps so you (and your team) need never leave Teams again!

Introducing Zoho Notebook for Microsoft Teams: Bring your thoughts and teams together

Ankur_Yadav — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:24:10 GMT

We're delighted to introduce Zoho Notebook for Microsoft Teams today. With this integration, you can create, access, and edit all your note cards without switching browser tabs. Organize your note cards by creating and associating them with notebooks. Personalize your Notebook by color-coding your note cards and choosing your notebook covers. Install the Zoho Notebook tab for Microsoft Teams to stay organized and increase your productivity. Watch how Zoho Notebook works in Microsoft Teams here:

Have your thoughts by your side

Save time and jot down your thoughts the moment you think of them using the new Zoho Notebook tab for Microsoft Teams. Take notes, create to-do lists, capture moments, and add files and spreadsheets with the different types of note cards in Notebook. You can also access and edit your note cards without having to switch tabs.

Organize your thoughts

Become more organized and productive by creating and associating your note cards to notebooks. Move and copy note cards between different notebooks. You can also group your note cards together and favorite to find them easily.

Personalize your Notebook

Make your Notebook personalized by color-coding your note cards. Choose from a list of hand-drawn covers or get creative and use an image of your own as your notebook cover. Notebook even adjusts itself according to your theme in Microsoft Teams.

All the extras

Lock your notes using a passcode to keep them away from prying eyes, get notified of your key events by setting reminders to your notes, and find and retrieve your important note cards, all from within the Microsoft Teams interface.

Exclusive offer for Microsoft customers

Exclusive COVID-19 assistance for Microsoft customers: Sign up before December 31, 2020 and get Zoho Wallet credits worth $500 USD, valid for 60 days. The wallet credits can be used for the purchase of any Zoho app or for edition upgrades.

How to avail the offer:

Sign up via this link: https://www.zoho.com/wallet/?cn=Microsoft2Zoho
$500 USD will be automatically added in your Zoho wallet
Voila! You can purchase any Zoho product using your Zoho Wallet credits within the next 60 days.

We hope you enjoy this new integration with Microsoft Teams. We've already started working on bringing in more contextual features in this integration, so hopefully you'll hear from us soon.

Have suggestions? Leave a comment below or write to the Zoho team at support@zohonotebook.com.

Hi5 employee engagement app now integrates with Microsoft Teams

Ankur_Yadav — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:24:24 GMT

With many organizations already using Microsoft 365 and choosing Microsoft Teams as a platform for collaboration, file-sharing and communication, it only makes sense that there’s a market expectation for Microsoft Teams to offer an employee engagement and recognition platform that enables managers and employees alike to share in company wins and recognize individuals for great work, as well as communicate with their teams and get feedback from them.

Microsoft Teams recently integrated with Hi5, a simple, easy mobile and cloud solution that unlocks the potential of every team member through ongoing recognition and feedback. Customers of Microsoft Teams can download and use Hi5 app to trigger recognitions to one or more co-workers to celebrate and show appreciation when they’ve excelled in their work or represented the company well through key behaviors. This ultimately frees up management and HR teams to focus on qualitative employee engagement to improve company culture.

Onboarding
Once you’ve added Hi5 as an app to your Microsoft Teams account, you’re able to log into your Hi5 account and start giving Hi5’s (if you don’t have a Hi5 company account, you can easily create one and sign up using Microsoft SSO!).

Personalizing Appreciations
You can personalize your Hi5 by adding an image and emoji. If the Admin has added the company’s values to the Hi5 account, you can also tag the company values that a particular Hi5 highlights.

All Hi5’s given in Microsoft Teams are shared in your designated Teams team channels and allows for Hi5 Backing (acknowledgement or agreement). Each user can access their Hi5 Profile tab to keep track of the recognition they’ve given and received.

Personal Tabs
You can also navigate to your company’s Notice Board tab to stay in the loop with announcements and special events on an easy-to-view calendar.

Your Hi5 Admins can create Notices and Events within Microsoft Teams and are able to send you notification cards in your personal chat, so that you never miss an important update. Notices are interactive, too: you can clap for notices and leave comments to acknowledge receipts and share your views.

Moreover, you can go to your Pulses tab to complete your performance reviews or participate in surveys to help your team measure company culture and pretty much anything else!

Hi5 Bot
The Hi5 bot is really helpful! In your Hi5 on Microsoft Teams chat, simply type and send ‘help’ and the bot will show you all the options you have, including adding notifications to your Hi5 chat, logging out, and a quick tour of the features.

Channel Tab
Want to know who the top recognition givers are in your company? You can add your Hi5 Leader board tab to a channel, which shows the top Hi5 givers within the company in real time. This is also a great tool for nominating great givers for company-wide recognition rewards.

How to get started
If you haven’t already, install Hi5 from our Microsoft AppSource. For more info and to see how it works, go to https://www.get5.io/features/microsoft-teams-integration. Watch a video to learn about how to use Hi5 in Microsoft Teams:

Kitchen Table Admin: A New Video Series for Teams and M365 IT Admins

Corbin Meek — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 13:12:51 GMT

Hi Microsoft Teams Community,

Today I'm excited to introduce a new video series we're calling Kitchen Table Admin. This video series is intended to help M365 IT Pros and Admins solve common configuration and troubleshooting tasks in Microsoft Teams.

While our production is low-fi - think garage band with a 4-track, not Abbey Road Studios - we hope the content is useful and valuable to you all. Why Kitchen Table Admin? Well, like most of you out there, we at Microsoft find ourselves working from home, or anywhere we can safely access a reliable Internet connection. In my own case, that means working from my kitchen a lot. I'm sure you can relate.

In this first ever video in what we hope to be a long series, I'm going to show you how to use Self Help Diagnostics that my team makes available to you in your Admin Portal to troubleshoot a basic setup of Microsoft Teams Guest Access. I cover the top 3 things we see in support from IT Admins when setting up this very popular feature.

Please check out our short video and let us know what you think in the comments. The demo portion starts at 0:57 if you want to skip the intro. What would you like to see covered in a future video?

Enable your remote workforce to work with Microsoft 365 and Teams with enhanced security

Anil Singh — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 15:00:00 GMT

Microsoft 365 enabled all its consumer to use Microsoft 365 workloads from everywhere/anywhere. Microsoft has built data center in almost all the regions which help customers to connect closed data center from your office egress and remote work locations. But still many corporates are not willing to allow their remote work force to connect directly to closet Microsoft 365 front door, and wants users to connect company VPN and then let route traffic to Microsoft 365 via egress which cause latency and performance issues. For Workloads like Microsoft teams, Its wider impact on performance which use media traffic for calls and meetings and doesn’t like to pass the traffic via VPN concentrator.

We all can agree on this that, cloud solution has given a seamless platform to connect services from anywhere but increased security and compliance threat in proportionally, And this is the fear in organization causing to not let them allow direct connectivity to Microsoft 365, even today most of the workforce is working from home due to COVID-19 outbreak.

You can use Microsoft enhanced security feature and Azure policy to enable remote users to work directly with Microsoft 365 and provide a great user experience. We must implement the security controls at mainly two level.

1. End Point Level
Using below solutions and tools, you can make sure that your user’s endpoints are secure, safe and qualifying to connect Microsoft 365 services directly.

a) Patching
An automated patching system should be in place to regularly patch the end-points like SCCM to meet the defined threshold of the compliance policy.

b) Defender ATP
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection is a complete end-points security tool delivers preventative protection, post-breach detection, automated investigation, and response. The beauty of this solution is, it’s not only detect the threat but immediately response and help to remediate vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

c) Antivirus
Systems should be protected with antivirus with the latest updates. If your organization is only having windows 10 OS environment, Microsoft Defender Antivirus is automatically enabled and installed on them. But if you have mixed environment then you need to use third party antivirus with combination of Defender AV. You can go Microsoft Defender Antivirus compatibility for more details.

d) EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response)
As name suggest, when a threat is detected, alerts are created in the system for an analyst to investigate and The response capabilities give you the power to promptly remediate threats by acting on the affected entities. It’s part of Microsoft defender ATP.

e) Device Compliance

2. Azure Level

a) Azure AD Device Registration
Your device needs to be registered with azure AD. Azure AD registered devices are signed in to using a local account and additionally have an Azure AD account attached for access to organizational resources like Microsoft 365. Access to resources in the organization can be further limited based on that Azure AD account and Conditional Access policies applied to the device identity.

Administrators can secure and further control these Azure AD registered devices using Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools like Microsoft Intune.

b) Multi factor authentication
Users should be enabled to Azure MFA to access Microsoft 365 apps from external. The MFA requirement would be enforced with conditional access policy which will allow users to consume the service. The exclusion can be setup for admins accounts if required so they can connect PSshell script without MFA to manage the service without any interruption.

c) Conditional Access policy
Conditional access policy is a feature part of azure active directory to enforce the company policy based upon clients signals and decision. You need to setup conditional access policy to grant Microsoft 365 app access from external locations (Each organization may have different requirements, so they need to work with their IT security to implement it), The grant control can be enforced as per the requirements.

Setup Conditional access policy

Once you have made sure the above pre-requite for machines is in place, now you are good to configure conditional access policy to meet the requirements aligned with company IT security, which will let end user to connect M365 and teams from external.

a) Create a new CA policy

• Sign in to the Azure portal as a global administrator, security administrator, or Conditional Access administrator.
• Browse to Azure Active Directory > Security > Conditional Access.
• Select New policy.
• Give your policy a name.

b) Grant access to clients for the conditions required

c) Allow “apps”

• Select “cloud apps or actions” in the new conditional policy options
• In “Select what this policy applies to” select “cloud apps”
• Click on “Include” and pick “Select apps” radio button
• Now in the apps, you need to select the apps which you want to allow to access from external for example, Microsoft Teams.

You need to allow SharePoint and exchange apps as well as Teams use one drive, Messaging and SharePoint in background for several used cases.

How it works?

Now, I am connected with open internet and trying to login with my teams desktop app. Yes, I can sign-in successfully and use the teams over open internet.

To verify the end-end connectivity, I am checking my IP address got from service provider which is “103.86.183.43”. you can use whatismyipaddress web tool.

Now, Go into azure active directory > Sign-ins and find out the user logged-in into teams. You would see the above IP address connecting you.

As above stated, Using the strong security control you can enable your end users to access M365 and teams from outside and provide them better experience with good performance.

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | September 2020

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:24:34 GMT

September has been an eventful month filled with exciting news and announcements. Before we dive into the new product features released this month, we want to address feedback we’ve heard from you regarding the performance of Microsoft Teams and share some of the investments we’re making to improve it.

Teams performance update

Organizations of all types and sizes depend on Teams to keep their users connected and productive throughout the work and school day. As we drive new capabilities to meet our customer’s evolving needs, we’re also working to ensure they have a high-performance experience that scales across their devices and levels of internet connectivity.

We’ve recently doubled down on Teams performance with improvements you can experience now and we'll continue to update you on future improvements as part of this monthly blog.

Offline support in desktop
Limited network connectivity is a reality for many of our users around the world. In March, we launched the ability to run the desktop client on Windows and macOS in environments with limited bandwidth or without a network connection. This was accomplished through caching of data and code, and we also adopted a local fetch approach over network requests which led to improved launch times of the desktop client. Now we’re working on allowing users to author messages even when offline and have them automatically sent when network connectivity is reestablished.

Improved desktop launch time
As users start their meetings, classes, and days in Teams, it’s essential they can get things running quickly. We’re rolling out multiple updates to improve the launch time of our desktop clients on Windows and macOS. This includes deferring non-essential operations until after launch, optimized code delivery flows and service side optimizations like migrating services infrastructure to Azure Front Door. In our testing these investments resulted in a 30% reduction in application launch time.

Video rendering optimizations in desktop
With more users working and learning from home, video is a critical way to connect with others. However, video rich features can also raise the average workload of device CPUs and GPUs. To address this, we’re adjusting how much compute power is used during video calls and meetings by reducing animations, blending layers, and simplifying the overall experience. We are also making changes to video rendering, the UI overlays composite on top of the video, and hardware drivers. These improvements are rolling out now to our desktop clients on Windows and macOS with more updates coming soon.

Battery life optimizations in iOS
Staying connected through Teams on a mobile device is essential for Firstline Workers and those away from their desktops throughout the day. To reduce the Teams app battery consumption in iOS, we ’ve moved a significant amount of background processing to our cloud services and reduced the frequency of syncing static information. In our testing this resulted in close to 40% improvement in background battery life consumption. You can experience these improvements today using the latest version of the Teams app for iOS.

Low bandwidth optimizations for Android
Lastly, we’re optimizing the Teams app on Android for low bandwidth environments. This includes reducing message sync latencies while increasing messaging reliability by optimizing background conversation syncs and database access patterns. We also improved the network quality detection logic that enables scenarios such as file uploads to intelligently balance between reliability and performance based on the available bandwidth. These enhancements are available in the latest version of the Teams app for Android.

What’s new in Microsoft Teams in September?
Last week at Ignite, we announced many new features coming to soon to Microsoft Teams. Be sure to have a look at What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2020 for a recap of the news and read on to see features that have started rolling out in September.

What’s New: Meetings & Calling
Large Gallery view - see up to 49 participants
Large Gallery is providing a new way to view video up to 49 participants at once on a single screen (7x7). This feature rolled out to production with the new multi-window experience. In order to take advantage of this new view, users will need to turn on the new multi-window meeting experience.

Together mode
Together mode uses AI segmentation technology in meetings to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else. Last week at Ignite, we announced new Together mode scenes are coming later this calendar year.

New Teams meeting pre-join experience
We’ve improved the pre-join meeting experience for Teams meetings including easier discovery of audio, video, and device configurations before joining a meeting.

Reverse Number Lookup Enhancements
In October 2019, we released Reverse Number Lookup to make it easier to identify the caller. Now with these latest enhancements, the caller name will also show up in your activity feed, call history, and voicemail.

Safe Transfer
Safe Transfer allows you to transfer a call between Teams and Skype for Business with confidence. If the recipient doesn’t answer the call, it will ring back to you so don’t lose the call. You must be a Teams user to transfer a call and the recipient must be either a Teams or Skype for Business user in the same tenant or in a federated tenant.

New Teams meeting and calling offers
This month we announced three promotional offers to help you experience the best of what Microsoft Teams can offer in meetings and calling. For eligible customers, these include free Audio Conferencing, a 35% discount on Advanced Communications, and FastTrack support to help you move from Skype for Business to Teams in a cost-effective manner. Learn more about these offers.

What’s New: Devices
New feature for Microsoft Teams phones
We have delivered a series of new feature updates to Microsoft Teams phones that are available now in version 1449/1.0.94.2020071702.

Redesigned Home Screen: A new, simple view providing up-to-date information about your calling and meeting activity, reminders of your current and upcoming meetings, and access to quick actions like replying to missed calls and listening to voicemail.
Customize Quick Access to Apps: Set the default views for your phone by pinning and re-ordering your apps suited to your needs. See here for more details.
Auto accept incoming meeting and call requests: Teams phones can now be provisioned to automatically accept incoming meetings nudges and calls, allowing instant, hands free connection to incoming join requests.
Dedicated Teams button: new and upcoming Teams phones will have a dedicated Teams button to quickly launch Teams app on the device home screen.

Lenovo Announces New ThinkSmart Hub Solution
Lenovo’s ThinkSmart Hub is now better than ever. The redesigned meeting room solution is purpose-built to deliver a best-in-class Microsoft Teams Rooms experience, and now sports an even sleeker design, richer audio, and cleaner cable management. The new ThinkSmart Hub is under certification for Teams.

Poly G-Series Microsoft Teams Rooms Solution is Now Certified for Microsoft Teams
Available now! Poly G-Series Room Solution for Microsoft Teams not only delivers the premium Poly audio and video for Teams, but it also provides ultimate simplicity from start to finish, with clutter-free cabling and Meeting AI technology enabling hands-free tracking and noise block technology in any size room. To learn more about the Poly G Series solution for Microsoft Teams Rooms, click here.

Yealink Announces New Teams Rooms Device
Yealink MVC400 brings a dedicated Teams Rooms system with an integrated USB video bar UVC40, including a premium AI-powered camera, microphone arrays, and speaker. The enhanced MTouch II offers flexible content sharing, and the new MCore mini-PC has a simplified cabling system. Learn more about these products here.

Crestron Announces New Crestron Flex Solutions
Recently released, the Crestron Flex MM transforms more rooms into collaboration spaces, delivering a premium UC experience with its compact tabletop design and it is under certification for Teams. Also announced, the Crestron Flex MX brings every option to the table, supporting both native, one-touch join for Microsoft Teams and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) for all other platform software. Learn more about both products here.

Please visit http://aka.ms/teamsdevices to see the latest our portfolio has to offer in the world of collaboration devices!

Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, app version 4.6.20.0 now available
The latest app for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, version 4.6.20.0, is now available through the Windows Store. Features enabled through this update include:

Live captions: Meeting participants joining from a Teams Room can now view live captions turned in a Teams meeting. In-room participants can also turn live captions on or off from the center of room console. Captions will appear at the bottom of the meeting experience shown on the front of room display.
3x3 gallery view: Meeting participants can now view up to nine participants in the meeting gallery view, shown on the front of room display.
Direct Guest Join with Zoom Rooms (Preview): Teams Rooms and Zoom Room devices can now connect to each other’s meeting services via embedded web technologies. This will reduce the friction you experience when trying to join calls from external partners or clients who may not be using the same meeting service.

Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, app version 1.0.94.2020062501 now available
The latest app for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, version 1.0.94.2020062501, is now available through the Teams Admin Center. Features enabled through this update include:

Pin video: Now you can pin the video stream of a meeting participant from the Teams Rooms device, keeping the pinned user's video visible in the gallery. This “pinned view” is only applied to the gallery view in the meeting room and not to other meeting participant's views.
Support for structured meeting role and roster controls: Allows meeting organizers to assign meeting roles (presenter and attendee) from the Teams Rooms experience, enabling participants to take specific actions associated with those roles (e.g. mute participants, present content, etc.)

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration
Reflect messaging extension
Managers, leaders or teachers now have an easy way to check in with how their team or students are feeling -- either in general, or about a specific topic like work-life balance, the status of a project, current events, or a change within the organization. IT administrators can install the Reflect extension from GitHub and make it available to their users in the message extension menu.

Microsoft Lists in Teams
We recently announced the general availability of the Lists app in Teams for all our commercial and Government Community Cloud (GCC) customers. Microsoft Lists help track information and organize work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, and help teams stay on top of what matters most. And now you can create a list directly in Teams as a channel tab.

Microsoft Whiteboard updates
Microsoft Whiteboard is integrated within every Teams meeting, enabling meeting participants to join in with touch—or their mouse—and contribute with digital ink. We recently added the ability to add sticky notes and text to a canvas, making it easier to contribute if you’re using a device without a digital pen, and added the ability to move and re-order objects on the canvas through a simple drag and drop gesture. Learn more here.

What’s New: Teams for Education
“Only Me” Admin Policy for all Organizer Meeting Options
IT Admins can apply a policy that defaults “Only Me” to allow only educators (or the meeting organizer) to enter the meeting and keep students in the lobby until the educator admits them. This helps maintain student safety and contains student to student interaction in class to the right time when the educator is present. Learn more about this and other recommended Teams for Education policies here.

For more Microsoft Teams for Education features and announcements, check out What’s New in Teams for Education | September 2020.

What’s New: Firstline Workers
Walkie Talkie Android
Walkie Talkie is a push-to-talk experience that enables instant and secure voice communication over the cloud, turning your personal- or company-owned Android smartphones and tablets into a walkie-talkie. It reduces the number of devices you need to have while providing clear communication free of radio interference, static and no distance limitations in range. Learn more.

Integration between Teams and RealWear
Through an integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, you, as a field worker can remain 100% hands-free using a voice-controlled user interface while maintaining situational awareness in loud and hazardous environments. Learn more here.

Shifts Connector in Power Automate
With the new Power Automate Shifts connector you can automate processes within the Shifts application. As a manager you can be more efficient and save time with schedule management and by auto-approving shifts all at once. With these new templates, team members can view all Shifts in the calendar of choice (such as Outlook), and can be empowered to create Shifts templates of their own to meet the needs of your business. These features can be enabled in the Power Platform directory. Learn more here.

New experience for launching instant channel meetings for GCC
Meet Now buttons in Teams channels have a new home. You will soon find them in the Channel header where you can easily find and launch the meeting.

Custom Apps and Sideloading in GCC
Sideloading and custom (line-of-business) apps are now available in GCC. GCC tenant administrators can decide whether to upload a custom app to their tenant environment and publish it to their tenant app catalog. To learn more, read our technical documentation here.

What’s New: Power Platform and custom development
Microsoft Graph API for change notifications
The Microsoft Graph API for change notifications allows developers to build apps that messages in near-real time, without polling, to enable scenarios such as data loss prevention (DLP), enterprise information archiving, and bots that listen to messages that they aren't @mentioned on. This helps both customers and ISVs to enable DLP scenario implementations to remain secure and compliant. Learn more at our detailed developer blog post here.

Teams membership Microsoft Graph APIs
Team Membership APIs allow your app to list, add, change, and remove Team members and their roles. Learn more about how to utilize this API here.

Private Channels Microsoft Graph APIs
With the Private Channels Microsoft Graph APIs we enable apps to create and manage private channels. Developers will be able to add, update, remove, members of a private channel and be able to create a private channel on behalf of a user.

What’s New: Management, security, and compliance
New meeting lobby configuration setting available for PowerShell and Teams Admin Center
A new lobby type option is coming to PowerShell and Teams Admin Center that allows tenant administrators to assign a user-level policy to send everybody but the Teams meeting organizer into the meeting lobby. Once assigned, all meeting attendees--including those from within the same organization--will be sent to the meeting lobby to be admitted by the organizer.

Screen share from chat policy governance
Screen share from chat allows you to immediately start sharing your screen in a one-to-one or group chat. This entry point was previously governed by the AllowPrivateCalling policy. If this policy was disabled, users weren’t able to screen share from chat. This will now be governed by the ScreenSharingMode policy.

Advanced eDiscovery: Supporting modern attachments from SharePoint Online
Advanced eDiscovery can now automatically collect documents from a storage location, such as SharePoint or OneDrive, to pull the content into an eDiscovery case. The attachments are collected, reviewed, and exported along with the Teams conversations so IT or relevant stakeholders don’t need to manually find and collect the documents one by one.

Microsoft Information Protection: Data loss prevention for Microsoft Teams
Data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities in Microsoft 365 government clouds will be extended to include Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages, including private channel messages. If your organization has DLP, you can now define policies that prevent people from sharing sensitive information in a Microsoft Teams channel or chat session.

New capabilities on Microsoft Teams phones | September 2020

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:24:48 GMT

Teams Phones have some great new features shipped in the last release, which you can read about in this update! We are working to make sure that it is easier and more intuitive than ever to stay connected using the Teams Phone application. Our newest features allow for a newly designed home screen experience tailored to the user’s schedule, an automatic meeting acceptance feature streamlining the joining experience, and customizations for the user experience depending on the users preferences.

1. Home Screen with Meeting Reminders

We know that each day presents a host of notifications, alerts, and updates - we wanted to make this as simple and easy to use as possible by redesigning the home screen interface. Now, users can see reminders of your current and upcoming meetings, perform quick actions like joining a current meeting, play voicemail, or reply to missed calls directly from the home screen. A click deeper allows access to more detailed information about call history, calendar, and people.

Home screen with meeting reminders

Additionally, for users who would like to restrict the content that shows up on their home screens, notifications can be disabled using the option under Settings. The home screen can be entirely disabled if the user would like to continue using the original interface, consisting of just the time, calls, address book, calendar and voicemail.

Home screen and notification settings

2. Customize Quick Access to Apps

We wanted to make sure that the tools most relative to users were easy to open, which is why we now have customization of quick access apps. Users can customize the default views on the phone by adjusting which icons appear in the bottom bar. For example: users who spend most of their time on calls can set the screen to show only the “Calls” and “Voicemail” apps and move the “People” and “Calendar” tabs to the “more options”. The Home icon will be available as long as the home screen is enabled in user settings. IT administrators can also provision this customization capability for all endpoints via the Teams global app setup policy.

More options to reorder apps

3. Customize Default View for Calls
A single user interface does not work for all users. For example, users with devices that do not have physical keypad might prefer to have an always-on dial pad while others might prefer to have the Speed Dial as their default landing page. Users can now customize where they land when opening the calls app, whether that is Speed Dial, contacts, the dial pad or call history. You can modify this under Settings->Calls->Call views. The phone icon can be used to swap between the views.

Customize default view for calls

4. Auto Accept Meeting Nudges with Video

Teams video phones will now provide the capability to auto accept incoming meeting join requests for scheduled meetings. This will allow a meeting participant to automatically enter a prescheduled meeting without needing to click the “accept” icon on any interface, leading to a hands free, seamless engagement. One application of this scenario could be in healthcare, where care teams can check in on patients’ bedside without the patient needing to activate a meeting.

To maintain privacy and security, auto accept settings are only enabled when:

The Teams video phone is signed in with Meeting room accounts (Teams IP Phone Policy setting for Sign In Mode should be set to Meeting Sign In)
The person enabling this feature on the Teams video phone has access to the phone’s admin password.
The Teams video phone is already invited to the scheduled meeting.
Participants within the same tenant can invite the Teams video phone into the meeting.

Auto accept settings and experience

Note: The auto accept feature is currently enabled manually by Microsoft for tenants that request this feature. It will be available via policies soon. If you would like to enable this for your tenant, please reach out to your Microsoft support contact.

5. Teams Button Support

There is now a dedicated Teams button on several new phone models, where a user presses the Teams button to quickly launch the home screen mentioned above. This allows users convenient, easy access to a view of their notifications, voicemails, schedules, and contacts. If the Teams button is not configured to launch the home screen, then the button will automatically activate the Calling app by default.

6. Coming Soon: Better Together Experience for Meetings
The Teams phone and Teams Windows Desktop client will soon work “Better Together” in a new experience for calling and meetings. The devices can be coordinated such that when one device-either Phone or PC-is unlocked, the other automatically unlocks as well.

While in a meeting using better together mode on a PC, the call will automatically be routed to the connected device, in this case a Teams phone. The connected device will be shown in device settings in the pre-join screen.

Once the user has joined the meeting, the call control for same meeting can be accessed from either the connected phone or Teams Windows client.

This feature could free up the PC screen to be used for other purposes such as co-authoring, taking notes, or engaging in other forms of collaboration while simultaneously engaging in a meeting or call.

We hope that you will enjoy these updates and if you are interested in seeing some of them in action, please watch this session from Microsoft Ignite 2020 where we showcase some of the features in this blog, available here. Additionally, learn more about the devices and stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest in hardware at https://aka.ms/Teamsdevices.

New inclusive features in Microsoft Teams and more | Ignite 2020 Edition

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:40:19 GMT

As IT leaders, we have the ability to make the work experience more inclusive of the 1 billion people in the world with disabilities with the technology products and capabilities we choose to make available to our organizations. This week, we’ve announced exciting new features that everyone—including people with disabilities—can leverage to be more productive and to make the workplace more inclusive. From Live transcripts, to search to personal wellbeing insights, read on to learn all the ways Teams can help you work more inclusively.

Meetings & Calling & Devices
Chat & Collaboration
Microsoft 365 Announcements
Learn more and take action

Meetings & Calling & Devices
Live captions and transcripts with speaker attribution available for 1:1 calls and meetings
With more important calls, meetings and events happening virtually, it’s critical to make sure everyone can understand the discussion and participate easily, including people with disabilities. Live captions and transcripts with speaker attribution can make meetings more inclusive of people who are hard of hearing or deaf, or have learning disabilities like dyslexia and prefer spoken content to be reinforced with text. You can now provide live captions and transcripts with speaker attribution for 1:1 calls, all the way through to interactive meetings of up to 1,000 participants. And when you need to expand the reach of your meeting even further, up to 20,000 participants can view the meeting and live captions to follow along. These features can be enabled via the control bar within the call or meeting window, and will be made available in the coming months. Speaker attribution for live captions in meetings is now Generally Available for Commercial customers.

Live captions with speaker attribution during a Microsoft Teams meeting.

New Together mode scenes
When managing our mental health and wellbeing, it’s important to make sure we feel connected and close to other people—whether family members, local communities or those we collaborate with at work. We commissioned a Harris Poll survey of over 2,000 remote workers in six countries, and nearly 60% of people surveyed reported feeling less connected to their colleagues since they started working remotely more often. In China, this number spiked to 70%. In the past few months we’ve introduced new capabilities to make it easier for each of us to more naturally connect with teammates, and to take control of our wellbeing. One of these new capabilities is Together mode, a view in Teams meetings that makes you feel like you’re sitting in the same room with your teammates, and makes it easier to pick up on the non-verbal cues that are so important to natural human interaction and connection. This week we announced new Together mode scenes, coming later this year, including various auditoriums, conference rooms and a coffee shop. Presenters will also be able to select a scene from the gallery as the default scene for all meeting attendees. We hope you can find a Together mode scene that works for you and your team, and that can help your team feel closer together, even when you’re apart.

In case you missed it

Touchless experiences in Microsoft Teams Rooms — Touchless experiences not only make Teams Meetings Rooms safer as we return to physical workplaces, they also make them more inclusive of employees with disabilities. Teams Meeting Room devices and other conference calling devices are typically placed in the middle of large conference room tables, making them difficult if not impossible to access for those with limited reach or strength. With Cortana voice assistance and Room Remote on Microsoft Teams Room devices, people with vision and mobility disabilities can more easily use shared meeting room devices with their voice—completely hands free—or with their mobile device. These new capabilities build on the flexibility already afforded by proximity join.
Dynamic view — Dynamic view gives you more control over how you see shared content and other participants in a meeting. New controls—including the ability to show shared content and specific participants side-by-side—let you personalize the view to suit your preferences and needs. This is particularly important for participants who are deaf and use sign language interpreters to participate in the discussion. With Dynamic View, participants can view shared content and pin their interpreter so they are always in view.
Live Presentations in Teams — Every presenter knows how hard it is to get—and keep—your audience truly engaged throughout a presentation. With PowerPoint Live, audience members can follow along with the presentation from their personal device, move through slides at their own pace, and enable live subtitles in their preferred language. Not only will Live Presentations help empower participants who are hard of hearing, it will also break language barriers and make sure that everyone in the audience is engaged and included.
Read more about these recent announcements: Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning

Chat & Collaboration
Wellbeing and productivity insights coming in Teams
The rise in remote and hybrid work during the ongoing pandemic is pushing people and organizations to work in new ways, introducing challenges as well as opportunities for a new normal. Our research shows four clear challenges: after hours work is on the rise, boundaries between work and home are being eliminated, the rise of virtual collaboration and video meetings has led to a rise in stress levels, and people feel less connected to their colleagues when working remotely. To help us address some of these challenges so we can thrive and build resilience, we're bringing wellbeing and productivity insights to Microsoft Teams. From unwinding with Headspace on your virtual commute to discovering opportunities to prevent burnout, see how new insights for individuals, teams, and organizations can help.

Wellbeing and productivity insights in Microsoft Teams

Improved search experience
A new search experience in Teams, powered by Microsoft Search and available by the end of 2020, will make finding messages, people and files faster and more intuitive for everyone, including people with disabilities who use assistive technologies like screenreaders. A redesigned search results page provides better context and faster results, with AI-powered relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services. Assistive technology users will be able to use the ‘Control F’ shortcut to access the search bar, initiate a search, and bring information right to their fingertips. It’s everything you love about Search in other Microsoft 365 applications, right in the Teams experience.

New search experience in Microsoft Teams powered by Microsoft Search.

In case you missed it

Less typing, please! — Whether you’re looking to increase your productivity, or have a mobility or learning disability like dyslexia that makes typing or writing difficult, Cortana in Teams and Suggested replies in the Teams mobile app give you another way to communicate with teammates. Cortana is now Generally Available in the Teams mobile app on iOS and Android to Microsoft 365 Enterprise users in the U.S. in English. Suggested replies are also now Generally Available to Commercial customers.
Read more: Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning

Microsoft 365 Announcements

Play My Emails more broadly available – Play My Emails lets you listen and respond to what’s new in your inbox hands-free using Cortana, giving people with learning disabilities like dyslexia a way to consume written content that doesn’t require reading blocks of text. Play my Emails is already available in Outlook for iOS and Android in English in the United States, and will start rolling out in the coming months in English in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and India. With updates this month to Outlook for iOS in English in the United States, users can interact with their inbox via their headphones while their phone is in their pocket, initiate a call with the sender of an email to move the conversation forward in real time, play emails from a specific person, time or topic, and connect multiple eligible accounts—whether personal or professional—to the experience.

Voice commands in Outlook Mobile—Now you can use your voice to write emails, schedule meetings, and make calls, all from within Outlook mobile. Tap the microphone, and say “Email Adele that I’m running late”, “Schedule a meeting about Group Meditation with Megan", or “Call Anna on Teams”. Outlook will find the relevant person, draft up a message, meeting or provide the option to start a call, and help you be more productive, all with voice. Voice capabilities like these provide people with learning disabilities like dyslexia, another way to write content, that doesn’t require typing. It also gives those with mobility disabilities another way to create content on the go.

Briefing Email from Cortana improvements — The Briefing Email is becoming generally available in September for Microsoft 365 Enterprise users with Exchange Online mailboxes in English. And with updates coming by the end of the year, the Briefing email will streamline meeting preparation. Actionable reminders will make it easy to add an agenda or a Teams link for an upcoming meeting if you forget, and to spot if a meeting is missing quorum. Integration with Microsoft To Do will make it seamless to follow up on a suggested task later. We’re also working on bringing specialized insights for people managers to help boost your team’s productivity and wellbeing, such as prompts to schedule regular one-on-one time with your direct reports and reminders to follow up on key asks. The Briefing Email gives people with disabilities like memory loss or ADHD, more proactive assistance and tools to stay on top of their important tasks and relationships.

A reimagined Microsoft Stream – This week we announced a new vision for Microsoft Stream—to bring intelligent video creation, sharing, and viewing to all parts of Microsoft 365, while empowering users and administrators to manage video just as they would any other file. Part of this new vision is an enhanced playback experience that displays more accurate transcripts with speaker attribution for meeting recordings, among other exciting enhancements. These experiences will be made available over the coming year.

In case you missed it

Dictation with Voice Commands in Word – Whether you are on a short walk to stretch your legs, have a temporary or permanent disability that makes typing or writing difficult, or you just think better out loud, now you can Dictate your content into a Word document, and add formatting through voice commands as you go.
Read more: Microsoft 365 saves you time and effort with transcription and voice commands in Word

Learn more and take action
1. Watch these Microsoft Ignite sessions to learn more about building an inclusive culture with support from Microsoft 365, and to get a closer look at these new inclusive features:

2. Complete the “Configure Microsoft Teams meeting and calling for Inclusion” training module to learn what you can do to configure Microsoft Teams in a way that maximizes inclusion of your diverse employees.

3. Find more Microsoft 365 Inclusive Workplace resources

New capabilities for Teams Management | Ignite 2020

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:40:36 GMT

What an exciting set of Teams announcements today at Ignite! Here we’d like to discuss new Teams management capabilities and how these can help you craft a customized experience for your organization. These new capabilities are all part of the Teams Admin Center, the portal for you to manage your Teams related activities. We continue to innovate and deliver a broad set of management controls to help you address the unique needs of your business.

Introducing new capabilities, across all functional categories in the Teams Admin Center:

Policy bulk assignment
In policies, we added the new bulk assignment capability, that will make your operation much more efficient.

Policies are used in Teams to provide a custom experience, ensuring the experience that end-users receive conforms with the needs of the organization. Previously Teams admins would assign custom policies to users one by one or they had to write a PowerShell Script for bulk assignment operations. Now we are bringing both policy assignment to groups and bulk policies assignment to Teams admin center. This bulk assignment operates asynchronously, meaning you can apply policy to large cohorts of users – up to 50K users, across the subscription from Teams & channels to Meetings to Voice & Calling.

Application management
The app lifecycle connected experiences span from development and validation to publishing and managing apps in Teams– all those aims to streamline and smartly automate apps integration into Teams, which will help users to leverage more easily the key business apps they use every day inside of Microsoft Teams.

We are listing here all the new capabilities we recently announced in New capabilities for Teams Management | July 2020 together with the new capabilities we are introducing today, to provide you the full comprehensive pictures, of the App life cycle connected experience.

Custom app submission API
Streamlining the process of submitting apps directly to the Teams Admin Center for you, to review and approve, resulting by increasing the productivity with simple steps will enable the end users to leverage the App.

Share Apps from the Power platform
Enable Teams users to discover and install Power Apps & Power Virtual Agents in Teams in just one-click, you as an admin control it by using app permission policies to restrict access for feature usage.

Purchase licenses
Enables you to view and purchase subscriptions associated with the 3rd party Teams apps. You can view app licensing status and link to purchase the app all within the Teams Admin Center.

App Configuration
We are enabling App configuration in the Teams Admin center - without the need to jump between portals to the application store to perform the changes. It enables you to configure App specific settings that will streamline your management task and enable simple customization of apps to the organization's needs. The capability is currently enabled via the Praise App and soon will be available for more and more Apps.

Add or install app to a team from Teams Admin Center
To create a customized, more productive environment for the users, you can now install an app for any team in your organization.

App permissions, grant consent
Coming soon, you will be able to grant consent to Graph API permissions on behalf of the entire tenant and you will be able to see granular permissions and provide resource-specific consent.

Custom app store branding
Soon we are going to introduce the custom app store branding that allows customers to use their own brand, logo, and coloring for the app store in the Teams client. As a result, your end-users will see that the Teams app store is especially curated for the organization.

Calling (voice) management
Phone System is a powerful set of features that allows Microsoft Teams to replace a company's legacy PBX system with software from the cloud.

Calling plans allows you to acquire new numbers from Microsoft and port your existing numbers from a current carrier. If you want to keep your existing carrier, you can do that as well with Direct Routing and we provide all the tools needed to establish and monitor that connectivity with the cloud.

In addition, we offer a powerful speech enabled auto attendant and call queue capability for automated call handling, treatment, and distribution.

Device management
Device management is enriched with new powerful features, which we recently announced here, and those capabilities allow you to simplify and customize Teams device management, and now we are adding additional new experience enhancements along with the new premium offering.

Watch our session at Ignite about Microsoft Teams device management essentials here: https://aka.ms/PR144

Display devices new category to be managed in Teams Admin Center
In addition to Teams phones and Collaboration bars, we recently added the ability to also manage Microsoft Teams Rooms, and newly introducing also Teams Displays, all of which can be now managed within Teams Admin Center.

Device management automatic alerting
We are providing a troubleshooting enhanced capability to the existing device health check which will help you to efficiently identify any issues much faster.

Admins can setup alerting conditions for your devices. If a device goes Offline or is in an Unhealthy state, an alert can be sent to a Teams channel of the Admins that are predefined in the system. This triggered notification can be turned into an immediate correction action.

The alerts can be integrated with ITSM providers through webhooks to facilitate auto ticket generation.

Focused device management role
We have created a new admin role strictly to manage devices. The Teams Device Admin role will have the ability to view and manage only the Devices section in Teams Admin Center. This allows Global Admins and Teams Service Admins to delegate device management to individuals without the concern of many individuals in the organization having access to all Teams Admin functions.

Global Admin role permission (left) and Teams Device management admin role permission (right)

Microsoft Teams Premium

At Inspire, we launched Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium, a new license for Microsoft Teams Rooms which includes Microsoft Teams Rooms Managed Services. With Microsoft Teams Rooms Managed Services, experts take on the responsibility of room management and operations on our customers’ behalf.

Microsoft Teams Rooms Managed Services are designed to give you peace of mind, free up your IT, and delight end users by maintaining a great in-room meeting experience through expert operations. The service delivers expertise via our intelligent software, dedicated service engineers, and enhanced insights across many customers.

To learn about the newest capabilities in Microsoft Teams Rooms Managed Services, check out our session here.

You can also sign up here to join the Microsoft Teams Rooms Managed Services product team in a roundtable session on Oct. 6th and 7th to discuss your management needs and learn more about our FY21 roadmap.

Reporting and analytics
We are constantly looking to expand the reporting and analytics capabilities, listening to your evolving needs, and area of focus. We're providing more predefined web reports for the ease of use of generating the data you really need as well as additional reporting tools to extend your customized and extended requirements.

Large event reporting and analytics improvements
Provide new data management capabilities for large event reporting, such as search, filter, pagination, and exporting of the data for better analysis.

Call Quality Dashboard data enrichment
The Call Quality Dashboard provides calling and meeting advanced reporting and analytics data, that provide you a single page view of all your organizational calls and meetings, and we added new PSTN data around calling plans and direct routing information.

We also now enable you to leverage advanced reporting capabilities by utilizing the Power BI for fast report building, customize workflow and incorporate customers’ own data to provide insights specific to your infrastructure.

New capabilities in troubleshooting that are coming soon will provide much more granular data for live events and a real time data that will help you to monitor live event for immediate remediation actions.

Single Teams Module in Power Shell
PowerShell allows IT Pros to script up common tasks and link the service with internal systems for automating processes across all the different products available in M365.

New improvements we introduced in Teams PowerShell is the Skype for Business Online Connector consolidation to Teams module that Simplify Teams administration experience with a single Power Shell module that includes complete management capabilities for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online

Advisor for Teams is now available
Advisor for Teams enables you to plan your Teams deployment in your organization and it brings your project team together to help you plan the best possible Teams deployment in your organization.

Advisor for Teams gives you a collaboration space and recommended plans – to provide you step by step guidance, to walk you through the deployment of your Teams workloads such as messaging, meetings, calling, etc.

You will hear from us much more, as we continue to evolve Teams management capabilities to provide you more customized experience and better control, we aim to continue delivering efficiency in one portal for all your Teams management work.

Get faster results with Approvals in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:27:43 GMT

Whether you need written acknowledgement from your manager, a formal authorization from a diverse group of stakeholders, or an official signature from a customer, getting things approved is part of almost every workflow. However, they can be hard to track and manage when so many systems and people are involved.

Approvals in Microsoft Teams lets you easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from your hub for teamwork. You can quickly start an approval flow from the same place you send a chat, in a channel conversation, or from the Approvals app itself. Just select an approval type, add details, attach files, and choose approvers. Once submitted, approvers are notified and can review and act on the request.

You can see and manage all your approvals from one place, the Approvals app in Teams. Each request is displayed along with key details such as the status, source, requestor, and approvers. You can also select a specific approval to see some more info and track its progress.

Approvals in Teams was built using the same security and compliance standards that Microsoft customers expect and rely on. Events such as creating a new approval, an approved request, and a rejected request are recorded and can be reviewed in the M365 Compliance center. Additionally, admins can define how the Approvals app is used across the organization from the manage apps page in the Microsoft Teams admin center.

Capture electronic signatures
There may be times when your workflow needs something beyond just approving or rejecting a request, like getting a signature. Because of this, we’re working closely with key partners to allow you to create an electronic signature approval using Adobe Sign, DocuSign, or other 3rd party providers natively within the Approval app. Simply choose your electronic signature provider and add the details. Once submitted, signers are notified with an email and can easily review and sign. Approvals will keep track of the entire workflow right in context within Teams.

From the Power Automate design studio, you can create a new flow and select a trigger such as a system driven event from one of our 350+ connectors (e.g. a new file is created in a SharePoint Folder or an issue is assigned to you in GitHub). Then, add a workflow step to create a Start and Wait Approval by using the Approvals block as an action and fill in the relevant approval details like approvers, attachments, etc. You can also add a condition to monitor whether the request was approved or denied to complete the next step in your workflow, like updating another system of record.

For example, when a specific form is submitted, you can create a flow to act on the request directly from Teams and define what happens after the request is approved (e.g. post a confirmation message in Teams) or rejected (e.g. create a task in Planner).

The approval will automatically show up in Teams:

Approvals in Microsoft Teams will be available soon. For the latest status, refer to the M365 Roadmap. In the meantime, check out our Look Book.

5 new ways to boost productivity with enhanced Teams + Power Platform integrations

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:28:00 GMT

Microsoft Teams can help people and organizations stay productive in hybrid work environments, and Microsoft Power Platform provides low-code custom development tools. The powerful Teams + Power Platform integration allows anyone to create the tools they need to get work done and bring them into their digital workspace. We are excited to share some new ways that it is becoming easier to build, deploy, and manage these custom solutions so teams can be more productive!

Easily automate work for users and teams
A new Power Automate app for Teams, coming later this year, will make it easier than ever to build automated workflows. The new app will include a robust set of easy-to-use templates for some of the most common automation scenarios for Teams. A simple building experience will allow users to build these flows with drop-down menus and pre-populated dynamic text. Users will also have the ability to start building flows from scratch or edit flows that they’ve already built.

Manage custom approvals in Teams
Nearly every industry and every business department needs to manage approvals in some form, so we are excited to announce that Teams users will soon be able to easily create, manage, share, and act on approvals directly in Teams. Users can start an approval from a chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app in Teams. These easy approvals are powered by Power Automate and will become generally available in October.

Coming later this year, we will have integrations with Adobe Sign and DocuSign, to get legal consent or approval of electronic documents from people inside or outside the organization. Additionally, approval flows from across the organization can be integrated in Teams with over 350 systems using Power Automate, including ServiceNow, Dynamics, and GitHub.

Build and deploy custom apps and chatbots in Teams
We are pleased to announce that the new Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams, powered by CDS Project Oakdale, have entered public preview allowing Teams users to build custom apps and AI-powered bots right inside Teams, then easily deploy them to their teams.

The new embedded Power Apps studio allows users to create custom apps with a simple drag and drop approach to add app elements, and these apps can be connected to existing CDS Project Oakdale data tables or new data tables that can be created right inside the studio. These apps can be used on desktop or mobile devices, so everyone can be more productive, wherever they are working.

We have also built several Power Apps solutions for common use cases like equipment asset inspections and employee ideas, and made them available in the Power Apps app as well as the Teams app store, so anyone can open and use them right away. Since these solutions are built on Power Platform, they are also highly customizable and can be edited to meet an organization’s specific needs.

It is important to keep in mind that Power Apps can also help professional developers accelerate their app development process. To that end, we are excited to announce that professional developers will soon be able to build Power Platform connectors with Azure API Management and Azure Functions to any Microsoft hosted third-party, legacy, or line-of-business apps. Apps built with Power Apps that utilize these new connectors can then be deployed to users in Teams at no additional cost. These capabilities will be available for preview in October 2020.

The new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams provides a low-code authoring experience to create custom chatbots Bots can be built simply by adding questions for the bot to ask, and messages for the bot to send back to the user. While these bots can be simple to build, they remain very powerful. New features such as the ability for bots to recognize which user they are chatting with can provide a personalized user experience. For example, an employee who queries a bot about company HR policies could be provided with policies that are specific to their region or country.

Engage with data in the new Power BI app
An enhanced Power BI app for Teams, available in public preview later this year, will make it easy to discover data and quickly create visualizations from Excel datasets within Teams. The app also provides users with quick access to their frequently used reports, example reports from the Power BI community, and commonly used organizational datasets. The app also allows users to send a report that they’re reviewing to a chat or channel quickly, even maintaining the filtering and slicing of the report so it is easy to start a discussion with data. Also coming later this year is the ability to search for Power BI content through the Teams search bar. These new features in the Power BI app for Teams provide a centralized place for users to collaborate on data and more effectively and make decisions based on real-time insights.

Getting started:
We think that these innovations will make it easier for anyone with an idea to build a solution. To get started, open the Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Power Automate, and Power BI apps in Teams. Check out the Microsoft Teams + Power Platform Virtual Hub to learn more about this Teams and Power Platform integration and the innovations discussed here, including CDS Project Oakdale. The following information sessions also provide an overview of the integration, as well as details on how to start building custom solutions.

We’re excited to hear about what you’ll build!

3 challenges Microsoft Teams can help your essential Firstline Workforce overcome

Microsoft_Teams_team — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:37:36 GMT

As our world looks to respond, recover and reimagine the way it works, the Firstline Workforce and the IT teams who support them have proven to be the essential force behind business continuity. Firstline Workforces and IT teams keep businesses moving forward during times of crisis and lead the charge to transform the way we work across many industries.

They are the reason grocery stores stay open and transform to accommodate curb-side pick-up; the reason hospitals keep running and evolve in-person health consults into virtual ones; and how manufacturing continues to create essential products like face masks and transform operations.

Three macro challenges emerge when we listen and learn from customers about their new normal.

The need for better communication, transparency and the ability to foster culture from corporate headquarters to Firstline Workers, and within teams on the ground, is changing from a nice-to-have to a must have.
There is an accelerated need to digitally transform processes that were manual or occurred in-person.
Working conditions have become unpredictable; the need for tools that keep Firstline teams and operations agile and everyone informed is essential for fluctuating working conditions like unexpected locations closing.

We see your Firstline workers and IT admins as the heroes of your business, and we would like to talk about how Microsoft Teams enables you to overcome these challenges.

The need for communication and connection with Firstline Workers has long been on customer minds, but the rapid response required to address shutdowns created by COVID-19 has put a spotlight on this gap. Customers also realize the importance of culture for job satisfaction and the need to make employees feel more connected to the organization and to each other.

Within a Firstline team, employees are facing new protocols that make connecting with each other more challenging throughout their everyday work. Walkie Talkie, a push-to-talk experience that enables clear and secure voice communication over the cloud, enables teams to communicate instantly and always stay on the same page. This native built-in app in Teams turns employee or company-owned Android smartphones and tablets like the Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro into a walkie-talkie, reducing the number of devices employees must carry and lowering costs for IT.

Customers who currently use analog radio devices no longer need to worry about static, crosstalk, interference from outsiders or traditional radio distance boundaries as Walkie Talkie works over WIFI or cellular data. For Firstline teams not yet enabled with a push-to-talk experience, Walkie Talkie in Teams enables instant team communication with pre-configured channels set to have the right conversation with the right people.

Walkie Talkie is not pre-installed. To enable this feature for users in your organization, you need to add Walkie Talkie to the App Setup Policy assigned to users from the Teams Admin Center. Once enabled, Walkie Talkie will become available on the Android app within 48 hours. This feature will be generally available alongside purpose-built devices from BlueParrott, Klein Electronics, and Galaxy XCover Pro on Sept 22nd , learn more here.

To take the guesswork out of knowing the name of on-shift staff when users need to quickly relay information, Tagging by Shifts allows messages to be targeted to groups based on the shifts they are working on, such as all nurses currently on duty. Users are automatically assigned to tags matching their schedule in the Shifts app in Teams, which allows for integration with major workforce management systems, including AMiON, BlueYonder, and Kronos.

Tagging by Shifts is on by default and enabled by Team Owners by creating shift groups and naming them after an attribute such as a role, which will be the name of the tag. Then assign shifts to team members and share the shift schedule with your team. IT can disable this feature in the IT admin center. Tagging by Shifts will be generally available in November.

The need to engage your Firstline Workers with company-wide announcements that employees can access anywhere is important to create transparency within the company. With Yammer notifications in Teams activity feed, available later this year, teams using the new Yammer Communities app in Teams will be able to receive Yammer notifications in the Teams activity feed and on your mobile lock screen. You can also find Yammer conversations using the Teams search bar so that large scale announcements and updates can reach all employees within Microsoft Teams mobile, desktop, and browser experiences.

Yammer notifications in Teams activity feed will be available this year, to learn more

As the world continues to applaud Firstline Workers for the jobs they are doing, internal steps to engage, recognize and appreciate employees go a long way to improve job satisfaction and promote a positive work culture. Customizable Praise Badges provides the ability to customize Praise badges to express a company’s culture and values in celebration of every success and foster greater comradery during a time of disconnect.

Customizable Praise badges will be GA in September. Learn more here.

The acceleration of digital transformation arose from travel restrictions, capacity limitations and more safety protocols around manual processes across all industries. Whether it is expert assistance in a manufacturing plant, virtual store walks in a retail store or patients being able to visit their doctor - processes are changing from what was normal in the past.

Processes that normally would have been transformed over 2 years have accelerated and are transforming in a few weeks. And this transformation has allowed companies to work in ways never available before, enabling new ways to scale the once in-person work. For example, through an integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, field workers can get virtual expert assistance while remaining 100% hands-free using a voice-controlled user interface while maintaining situational awareness in loud and hazardous environments.

To enable this feature for users in your organization, you need to add Microsoft Teams to devices via the RealWear Foresight platform. This feature will be generally available in late September.

With more technology in the hands of your shift workers, the need to make sure you comply with labor regulations while also digitally empowering your workers is essential. With off-shift access controls, IT administrators can now configure Teams to alert employees when they are accessing the app on their personal device outside of working hours. The feature prompts employees to accept that they will not be getting paid for time spent on Teams to ensure employees are not involuntarily working while not on shift and helps employers to comply with labor regulations. The feature does not require active usage of the Shifts app, but it does require Shifts being configured and schedule data being inside the app, including workforce management API connectors like Kronos, BlueYonder and more.

This feature is not enabled by default but must be enabled through PowerShell. This feature will be generally available in October.

With manual processes becoming more strained in current conditions, the need to be more efficient and cost-effective around approval processes has become even more important to keep businesses moving forward. Approvals in Teams makes it easy to request, approve or reject various requests. For example, a Firstline worker in manufacturing could request approval to confirm that a repair is completed correctly right from a chat conversation. It brings all your approval flows across the company in one place by seamlessly integrating Teams with over several systems using Power Automate, including ServiceNow, Dynamics, GITHUB, and more. Whether you need written acknowledgement from your manager, a formal authorization from a diverse group of stakeholders, or an official signature from a customer, approvals in Teams can be customized for your needs and leverage the capabilities of Adobe Sign and DocuSign to get e-signatures all in one place in our Approvals Hub natively in Teams.

This feature is enabled by default and will be generally available in October. E-signature features will be GA in November. Learn more here

Unpredictable working conditions seemed to hit the whole world overnight. Not only are locations fluctuating between being open or temporarily closed, but shift schedules and employees are as well, which has put a lot of pressure on managers and legacy processes to keep up.

The need for flexible and agile shift scheduling has become essential for keeping up with work fluctuations. With the new Power Automate Shifts connector, users can automate shift processes with triggers and actions, so managers save time and are more efficient with schedule management during times of increased pressure on shifts. With these new triggers and actions, a user can view all their Shifts in the calendar of their choice (such as Outlook), a manager can auto-approve shifts all at once and it also enables users to create Shifts templates of their own to meet the ever-fluctuating needs of their business.

The new triggers and templates will begin rolling out in September and are enabled in the Power Platform directory. Learn more here.

To further save managers time and reduce inaccuracies that can lead to employees not turning up for their shift during heightened pressures of work, Shifts schedule assistance alerts managers when a scheduling conflict occurs while they are creating shift schedules or approving a schedule change request.

This feature is on by default and requires no IT involvement as managers can turn it on or off as wanted. This feature will be generally available in October.

With fluctuations in the workplace, streamlining the onboarding process is important to maintain continuity in the business. With new custom policy packages, IT can now create custom policy packages and assign them to their Firstline workers and managers to get them onboarded quickly with the right policies for them and the business. Policy packages provide IT administrators with pre-defined policies and policy settings tailored for their Firstline workforce to create a simple, centralized, and consistent way to manage your Firstline workforce, no matter how big.

Now with Teams templates, you’re able to create effective teams faster and more easily than ever. Users can choose from common business scenarios, such as Onboarding and/or industry-specific templates, like Retail – manager collaboration and Organize a store. Each template comes with pre-defined channels, tabs, and apps. Administrators can also create custom templates for their organization, helping them standardize team structures, reveal relevant apps, and scale best practices. They can create these from scratch or use an existing template or team structure as a starting point, so Teams are set up for success at the beginning to keep business moving forward.

Custom team templates empower admins to create the right collaboration space for users in their organization. Learn more about creating a template from scratch, from an existing team, and from an existing template. Custom packages will be rolling out in October, learn more here.

With Microsoft Teams as your hub for communication and teamwork for your entire organization, we have the tools to help you overcome the new challenges you face today. Tools that keep you agile during fluctuating work conditions, digitally transform processes under pressure, and connect the entire workforce during a time when communication is no longer a nice to have, but now, essential.

To learn more about why it is important to empower your Firstline Workforce, read this Harvard Business Review Analytics Service Report.

New blog articles in Microsoft Teams

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | April 2021

Meetings and webinars

Devices

Chat and collaboration

Management

Frontline worker

Government

Skype for Business Online retires July 31, 2021 – here’s what to expect

What to expect as Skype for Business Online retires?

Microsoft-assisted upgrades to Teams

Teams upgrade resources

Additional guidance for customers with hybrid configurations

New Diagnostic: Missing Teams Meeting Recording

Build and ship software better with GitHub and Microsoft Teams

@github schedule organization/repository

@github schedule organization/repository <Day format> <Time format>

@github schedule organization

@github subscribe <organization>/<repository>

@github unsubscribe <organization>/<repository>

@github subscribe owner/repo [feature]

Your questions from the Microsoft Ignite Ask the Experts sessions about Microsoft Teams…answered!

Streamline requests with new approval features in Microsoft Teams

New frontline worker enhancements in Teams to communicate, digitize processes and stay secure

Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android | April 2021 Updates

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | February and March 2021

Microsoft Ignite wrap-up on Inside Microsoft Teams

What’s new for Teams phones | March 2021

1:1 Call Recording Policy Controls Are (Almost!) Here

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 3 – Calendar-Based Presence and Delegates

File path: $exinstall\FrontEnd\HttpProxy\rest\web.config<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="2097151" maxUrlLength="2048" maxQueryStringLength="4096" requestPathInvalidCharacters="&lt;,>,*,%,\,?" requestValidationMode="2.0" />

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 2 - Teams Calendar App Troubleshooting

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 1 – How do Teams and Exchange Server interact?

Live transcription with speaker attribution now available in Teams meetings for English (US)

Microsoft Teams Displays Update | March 2021

Secure Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 Policies

Teams Meeting Recording Diagnostic in Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Teams Meeting Delegation Diagnostic Now Available in Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Microsoft Teams Community Update February 2021

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: FS191 - Secure and Compliant Collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: KEY06 - The Hybrid Workplace

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: FS192, OD380, OD378 - Latest Innovations in Teams Calling and Meetings

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: FS189 - Easy, intuitive webinars with Microsoft Teams

New inclusive features in Microsoft Teams and more | Ignite 2021 Edition

Introducing Operator Connect and more Teams Calling updates

Secure and compliant collaboration with Microsoft Teams

What's New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2021

These new capabilities will be available in Microsoft 365 E3/E5, Microsoft 365 A3/A5 and Microsoft 365 Government G3/G5 plans. Additionally, Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Microsoft 365 Business Premium plans will include all the features above for 300 attendees.

Manage meeting space availability with Microsoft Teams Panels

Your Guide to Microsoft Teams @ Microsoft Ignite Spring 2021

What we’ve been learning about using Microsoft Teams for Virtual Consultations

Tom Scott is a Product Manager at Modality Systems. Read more about Teams virtual consultations and how Modality can help.

To write your own blog on a topic of interest as a guest blogger in the Microsoft Teams Community, please submit your idea here: https://aka.ms/TeamsCommunityBlogger

Satin: Microsoft’s latest AI-powered audio codec for real-time communications

Enhance productivity in Microsoft Teams with pop out apps and tabs

Track projects and share news in Teams with two new Power Apps

New Diagnostic: Teams Call Forwarding

Important updates to Guest Access defaults in Teams starting in February 2021

Additional Frequently Asked Questions

More Information

Introducing Microsoft Viva, the Employee Experience Platform in Microsoft Teams

By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience

Simplify an inclusive meeting experience by enabling Guest access as the default

Microsoft Teams Release Processes - Why do I not see a feature but my colleague does?

Skype for Business Online retires in six months – what you need to know

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | January 2021

Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities for Adaptive Card content through apps in Teams now available

Medxnote“We are excited for the roll out of compliance capabilities in 3rd party apps. Being able to integrate into a customer's existing compliance framework is a real and tangible benefit for Medxnote and our customers!”

Welcome to WorkLab -- a site devoted to the future of work

Notifications from Yammer communities are now available in Microsoft Teams

Join us in the Microsoft Teams Community - 2021

7 tips for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Getting to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business Server and hybrid configurations

8 new productivity hacks for frontline workers, managers, and IT

Availability: These new policy packages are available by default in the IT Admin Center and in PowerShell. Learn more about setting up and customizing the policy packages for Firstline Workforce here.

Approvals in Microsoft Teams, Now Generally Available

Connect Guru with Microsoft Teams for a Collaborative Wiki

An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams

Enabling your organization for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Does Your Organization Record Teams Meetings? Bookmark this link!

File path: $exinstall\FrontEnd\HttpProxy\rest\web.config
<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="2097151" maxUrlLength="2048" maxQueryStringLength="4096" requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,*,%,\,?" requestValidationMode="2.0" />

Medxnote
“We are excited for the roll out of compliance capabilities in 3rd party apps. Being able to integrate into a customer's existing compliance framework is a real and tangible benefit for Medxnote and our customers!”

6. Sidecar Support Beta Release