Tony Redmond

The Teams PowerShell module is flawed, but that does not mean that you cannot do work with it. Here’s a primer of the most important cmdlets, together with a link to a rather interesting approach to finding out what Office 365 Groups are team-enabled.

Microsoft Teams is the hot property in Office 365 right now, but sometimes its user interface shows signs of immaturity. For example, when you got back to work after the holidays, you might have seen a ton of new activity to deal with. Email clients have rules, views, and automated assistants to help with the load, but with Teams you have to sort it all out yourself.

Microsoft has a new Information Protection guide to help Office 365 tenants prepare for GDPR. The guide is incomplete because it focuses on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, but it contains some good information that will help companies figure out what they need to do to prepare for the May 25, 2018 deadline. Expect more guides of this type to appear in the future.

Lots of good things happened in the world of Office 365 during 2017. More people than ever before use the service, new applications and functionality appeared, and Microsoft delivered a robust service. On the other hand, a few lows happened as well, as sometimes bad decisions and miscommunication soured the experience. But overall, 2017 was good and laid a great foundation for 2018.

Creating great content in Microsoft Teams is all very well. But what happens when some not-so-good content turns up or the CEO posts something secret into a public team? You might just want to remove those messages. It’s all good as long as you don’t need to remove complete threads or messages from multiple teams, at which point things get tiresome.

Office 365 Groups have been very good for SharePoint Online. Because many apps use Groups, they also use SharePoint, even if they don’t know it. Teams, Planner, Yammer, StaffHub, Stream, and Groups in Outlook (or whatever the name is this week) all drive SharePoint usage. SharePoint Online is Office 365 document management, and that’s a good thing.

A new Microsoft support article clarifies premium features used by Office 365 Groups that require premium licenses. While good to know when you have to pay extra, it is baffling why some of the features fall into the premium category and why so many licenses are needed. The solution is to buy the Enterprise Mobility and Security suite. Or just pay for the extra licenses.

Microsoft Teams is popular now, but if you decide to use it, how can you move content from other applications to Teams. Getting email into Teams can be done individually and moving documents into SharePoint is straightforward, but moving content from other chat platforms is problematic because of the lack of a migration API.

Microsoft launched Advanced Threat Protection for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams on December 5. It’s good to have extra anti-malware capabilities, but ATP requires Office 365 E5 or an extra add-on, so it might be out of the reach of some tenants. And it’s all about SharePoint – Teams is just there because Teams can store documents.

Azure Conditional Access policies can be used with Azure Information Protection (AIP) to secure protected documents against unauthorized access. If you have already decided to use AIP as part of your Office 365 data protection strategy, adding a conditional access policy is a quick way to frustrate people who try to access documents when they shouldn’t.

Saying that Teams will reduce the amount of email traffic is one thing; proving it is another. After making the case that Teams reduces email traffic, I set out to prove the case by looking at data in the Office 365 usage reports, Office 365 content pack for Power BI, and third-party reporting software.

Some observers say that Teams will replace email. Well, Teams won’t because email still has so many advantages over what Teams offers. But Teams has its own capabilities that will lead it to take some of the traffic currently carried by email. Because of its internal focus, the traffic that moves to Teams is in-house chats, and Teams is a good place for those conversations to be.