What’s new in Microsoft Teams – November update
Published Nov 30 2017 10:23 AM 62.1K Views
Microsoft

Since we started to work on Microsoft Teams, our mission hasn’t changed – to create a hub for teamwork that provides people with a single place to communicate and collaborate with others so that teams can achieve more.

We’d like to thank each one of you who has provided feedback on Microsoft Teams through channels like UserVoice. Over the last year, we have received numerous pieces of feedback that have helped us identify gaps, fix bugs and evolve Teams to truly enable teams to be more productive and to meet the needs of all customers.

Based on your feedback, we continue to add new capabilities on a regular basis to further improve the service. Here’s a summary of the main updates that we introduced in October and November:


Manage Teams more effectively

Manage Microsoft Teams via PowerShell - IT Professionals always look for ways to automate tasks and make daily operations simpler. In November, we released a new PowerShell module for Microsoft Teams that enables you to leverage PowerShell to configure and manage Teams.
The first version of the Microsoft Teams module - version 0.9.0 –includes 23 PowerShell cmdlets that make the administration of Teams easier. You can use the cmdlets for example to automate the creation of teams and channels, to bulk edit users or to set options such as a picture, and member permissions. The PowerShell module for Teams is a big step in our efforts to enable you to manage Microsoft Teams more effectively. Learn more

 

Manage Microsoft Team with PowerShellManage Microsoft Team with PowerShell
Understand how your users are using Teams – We released two new usage reports in the Office 365 admin center that enable you to understand how your users are leveraging Teams to communicate and collaborate.

  • The Microsoft Teams user activity report gives you a view of the most common activities that your users perform in Microsoft Teams - including how many people engage in a chat in a channel, how many communicate via private chat message, and how many participate in calls or meetings. You can see this information both at the tenant level, as well as for each individual user.

Track usage of Microsoft TeamsTrack usage of Microsoft Teams

  • The Microsoft Teams app usage report provides you with information about how your users connect to Microsoft Teams, including mobile apps. The report helps admins understand what devices are popular in their organization and how many users work on the go.

To access the reports, go to your admin center homepage, click on Reports and on Usage. You will land on the usage reporting dashboard where you can select the respective report from the dropdown menu at the top of the page. Learn more

Store your Teams data locally in the UK – Security, compliance and trust is a huge priority for us. To help UK customers in industries like banking, government, public sector and healthcare address their legal, regulatory and compliance needs, Microsoft Teams now provides data residency in the UK. This means that new customers who have signed up for Teams after Nov 1st, 2017 automatically receive the benefit of having their data stored in country. Learn more

Support for conditional access on Macs – The macOS app for Microsoft Teams now supports device-based conditional access for Azure Active Directory and Intune. This enables IT admins to manage macOS devices with Intune and create policies to secure the data in Teams and prevent leakage on untrusted devices. Using conditional access policies, organizations can for example restrict access to Teams to devices that comply with the company's security policy or require multi-factor authentication. Learn more

 

Communicate more effectively with new chat functionality

Leave a group chat – Group chats in Teams are a great way to communicate with a group of people about topics that might not be relevant to all members of a team. When you’re part of a group chat, it sometimes happens that the conversation evolves into a direction that is less important to you. Or you might have been added to a group chat by mistake in the first place. To help you in these scenarios, we have added the ability for you to leave a group chat. To remove yourself from a group chat, click on the overflow menu next to the chat and select Leave. You will still be able to access the chat history up until the moment you left.


Leave a group chatLeave a group chat

Improved settings and notifications

Control who can post in the General channel – When you create a team, a General channel is created for you automatically. Many organizations use the General channel to share an overview of what the team wants to achieve and to share other high-level information like a welcome presentation.


Team owners now have more control over who can post in the General channel. You can choose between three settings – allow everybody to post, limit posting to team owners only, or allow all team members to post but remind them that their message will be seen by many people.
You can find this setting in the Settings area of each team which you can access by clicking Manage team next to the team’s name.

Control who can post in the General channelControl who can post in the General channel
Access all your personal settings in one place –
We've rebuilt the Settings menu to make it more streamlined for you to manage your preferences. Now, you can change your app theme, language, and notifications settings all in one place. To access your settings, click on your profile picture and select Settings.

 

Updated personal settingsUpdated personal settings

Discover new tabs more easily – Whenever someone adds a new tab at the top of a channel you belong to, you'll see a New badge right next to the tab name. It'll disappear once you click into the tab or after the tab has been up and running for a week.

Caption: Easily discover new tabs

Further improvements. In addition, we have also increased the maximum team size to 2,500 members per team.

Understand the Roadmap for Skype for Business capabilities coming to Teams

Last month at Microsoft Ignite we introduced a new vision for intelligent communications, which includes Microsoft Teams becoming the primary client for communication and collaboration in Office 365. You can now access our planned roadmap for adding Microsoft Skype for Business capabilities to Teams, so that you can plan your onboarding. The roadmap provides you with details about what features are available and coming in the areas of messaging, meetings and calling.

roadmap final slow.gif

 Click to download a full PDF of the roadmap

To plan your transition to Teams as an existing Skype customer, please engage your account team, FastTrack, and partners for guidance and support along the journey. Access online guidance to get started on your Microsoft Teams Journey.

New bots, tabs and connectors

Teams is a single hub for teamwork and allows you to connect to the tools and services you use every day via tabs, connector and bots. Each month, we are adding more apps and services so that you can truly customize your Teams experience and get work done more efficiently. Here are some of the latest adds:

 

Social, Creative & Marketing:

Add the Adobe Creative Cloud tab to your team to find, view and share Adobe Creative Cloud Assets or search for new Adobe Stock images with the Creative Cloud bot.

 

Sociabble delivers top of the line enterprise social media solutions for employee advocacy, social selling, internal communication and employee engagement. Add Sociabble to your team to view and get updates from all of your enterprise social channels all in one place.

 

Productivity & Workflow:

Adobe Sign keeps document workflows moving fast by integrating e-signatures into your Teams workspace. You can sign documents, send them for legally binding e-signatures and approvals all in one place.

 

Bizzy uses Microsoft Flow to train your bot to do thousands of things. Using the Bizzy flow connector, you can create a flow for each use case you want your bot to handle.

 

Use Calendar bot, the Approved Contact bot for calendar comparison and scheduling.

 

Talla uses machine learning to surface relevant information in the right context and keeps constantly changing information up to date. In Microsoft Teams, Talla allows teams to create and share information to apply the automation, insights, and contextual awareness made possible by AI.

 

IT/Developer tools:

Add a GitHub tab to your channel showing issues and pull requests for any repository you work with. You also have the ability now to add a personal tab giving you an individualized view of issues and pull requests across all your repositories.

 

Add a Jira Cloud tab to your channel to display issues from any project in JIRA ServiceDesk, JIRA Core or JIRA Software.

 

Bitbucket Cloud is the Git solution for professional teams. Add a Bitbucket Cloud tab view pull requests for any repository you work with.

 

Site24x7 is an all-in-one monitoring solution that constantly tracks uptime performance of your websites, servers, applications and cloud infrastructure. Add the connector to your team to receive status notifications and root cause analysis. 

Let us know what you think!

Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Microsoft Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your idea via User Voice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs.

 

—Anne Michels, @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager Microsoft Teams

 

 

 

 

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