Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is rolling out priority notifications for Teams, the ability for users to send urgent messages in chats so that the recipients get notified every two minutes until they respond. Office 365 tenants (except GCC) should see the new functionality in July. Tenants can control who gets to send urgent messages with messaging policies, and some user education would be good to help those allowed to send these messages understand when a message is truly urgent.

You can add photos to Azure Active Directory guest accounts and have Office 365 apps display those photos. But it’s a lot of work to track down suitable photos for individual guests. If you want to change the default two-initial icon displayed by Office 365, you can use PowerShell to update all guest accounts with a photo. Here’s how I handled the problem.

With many companies starting to move to Teams, Matt Wade has a simple suggestion to expedite the user-adoption process.

At ShiftHappens this week, we had a chance to sit down with Pouneh Kaufman and Sara Bush about the steps you need to take to migrate to Teams.

Tony Redmond and Paul Thurrott discuss Teams momentum, Teams as the new Outlook, OneDrive, and hybrid computing at AvePoint’s Shift Happens conference in Washington D.C.

You can easily rename a team by giving it a new display name, or do the same thing to a channel. But Teams and SharePoint Online have the kind of relationship that’s based on tight connections, so renaming team or channel names leaves SharePoint untouched. Site URLs remain unchanged and if you try and fix up the folder names for channels, you can end up with a real mess.

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at this week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. If you’re an Office 365 tenant administrator, the health of SharePoint Online and what it and OneDrive for Business can do is important to you. Among all the fluffy stuff about intelligent intranets, there was some good news about improvements in administration, security, and network utilization, all of which will help other Office 365 apps too.

Microsoft is about to enable functionality inside of Teams that will allow for ISVs to build a business around the communication platform.

Office ProPlus Version 1904 boasts new privacy controls and Microsoft has documented how it thinks about required and optional data collected from users. Office 365 still lacks privacy controls for the server apps. It remains to be seen if customers will be happy and consider that Microsoft has solved the GDPR issues identified in the Dutch DPIA report in November 2018.

If your Office 365 tenant has many private Teams, you might run the risk that people create duplicate teams because they don’t know that a team already exists. Teams doesn’t have a separate directory but you can create one with PowerShell and publish the output in Teams. The magic is provided by deep links, which users click to navigate to a team they want to join.