Microsoft Teams

One of the big feature updates coming to Teams that many have been waiting for is the ability to chat with Skype contacts inside the Teams application. Microsoft stated that this feature would be available by the end of April but that timeline has come and gone. The company has posted a new message to its admin center and…

This week, Microsoft’s Build conference is happening and the company is making announcements from updates to Windows development to new API features in Office. For users of Teams, and more specifically developers of apps for Teams, there are updates that you should know about. Microsoft has announced new extensions for both Visual Studio and Visual…

Microsoft is finally increasing Teams calling to support 9 participant streams, up from 4 but well behind Zoom.

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels are supported by Teams, Groups, and Sites, but some work is needed if you want to replace older text-only classification labels with Office 365 Sensitivity Labels. This article explains how to use PowerShell to update Office 365 groups with new sensitivity labels. The labels are then synchronized to teams and sites.

Microsoft’s Teams has quickly found itself at the center of the work-from-home conversation that has kicked up during the past month. The company reported that they added 12 million new users in a week last month and coming next month, they will roll out a highly requested feature.

Slack has revealed its add-on for Teams calling to dispel the mystery (at least in my mind) for how they would create a calling integration without Microsoft’s help. As it turns out, Slack has taken some work they already had and the fact that Teams has URIs for meetings and combined them together to get their integration done. Very smart|

The Slack CEO says that the company is working on a calling integration with Teams. Slack hasn’t released any technical information, which leads to a certain amount of speculation as to how such an integration might happen. Slack’s previous attempts to integrate with Office 365 applications haven’t been too successful, but perhaps a federated hook-up like the one between Skype consumer and Teams might work.

Although Teams has seen a spike in usage due to more people working at home, the view of participants in Teams video meetings is not as good as competitors such as Zoom. Basically, the 2 x 2 view used by Teams isn’t as visually attractive or useful as the gallery views supported by other video conferencing systems. Microsoft says they have elevated the priority of the work necessary to increase the number of participants in the meeting window. They don’t say when this will happen.

As expected, Microsoft is rolling out later this year a Teams update that will enable functionality for families (and friends) to create a Teams hub for communication, document sharing, calendaring, and password management.

Seemingly overnight, a sizeable portion of the global workforce moved to being a remote operation. While everyone is looking for new options about how to try and keep operations running as smooth as possible, cloud vendors are seeing a significant spike in usage.