Microsoft Teams

Because it’s that time of the quarter, this edition of Short Takes looks solely at Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, which was huge for Commercial Cloud, Microsoft 365, and Windows, and not so much for Surface and Xbox. Right. Nothing changed.

Office 365 applications now create many guest accounts in Azure Active Directory. You can see what accounts exist, but it’s more difficult to discover who created the accounts – or why they were created. Fortunately, the Office 365 audit log holds a lot of useful data that can be interrogated to find some answers and PowerShell is a great tool for slicing and dicing audit data. See what you think of the answers I’ve come up with.

The fit-and-finish quality within Office 365 is sometimes less than desirable. Two recent changes in SharePoint Online make it easier for users to know when a document library is connected to Teams and to generate thumbnails for items stored in the library. Neither change is awe-inspiring, but both are examples of how to improve SharePoint’s fit-and-finish, which is a good thing.

Microsoft Teams is very successful at present, but a nagging doubt exists that some of the approaches taken by Microsoft towards Teams management and administration are less than optimum. It’s great to introduce a mass of new features on an ongoing basis and it’s better when policies exist to control the use of the features. But do new features always need to be enabled out-of-the-box?

The September update of the Office ProPlus monthly channel delivers support for Office 365 sensitivity labels without the need to install the Azure Information Protection client. This is a step forward to make it easier for Office 365 users to be able to protect their most confidential information with encryption. More work remains to be done to upgrade the Office Online apps (including OWA), Outlook Mobile, and SharePoint and OneDrive. Will all this happen before Ignite?

This week, Oracle is hosting OracleWorld in San Francisco and at the event, the company is unveiling several updates to its products including a new digital assistant for Teams.

Lots of hot air and fuss resulted when Microsoft confirmed on the Teams UserVoice site that they are actively working on a Teams client for Linux. Many Office 365 tenants will be bemused at the attention this topic received, but competition with Slack and the need to drive faster adoption in Teams deployments are compelling reasons for Microsoft to do this work. We can only hope that the project results in better Teams clients all round.

Because summer ends when I say it ends, this edition of Short Takes looks at Slack and its inability to turn a profit, Microsoft testing 5G game streaming in Korea, deep fake videos, mega-yachts, and Window 10 update quality, and so much more.

Although Teams has a PowerShell module, its cmdlets can’t get at some of the interesting information for team objects. But the Graph API reveals that information. Combining the Graph with PowerShell makes it possible to retrieve the information with just a little effort. A working example helps make the point, so here’s a script to report the Teams channels with email addresses.

According to Office 365 notification MC187538, Microsoft plans to start asking users to give feedback about Teams in pop-up surveys within the app to help Microsoft improve functionality. That all sounds OK until you consider that Microsoft will control the data it obtains from users and tenants will have no insight into what their users have told Microsoft. That’s not right.