Microsoft Teams

Microsoft released the generally available (1.0) version of the Teams PowerShell module on April 24. The Get-Team cmdlet receives a big makeover (and slowdown), but overall the module is solid and you shouldn’t need to make too many changes to scripts.

Microsoft announced the Files Restore feature for SharePoint Online on April 22. It’s the kind of news we can expect as the SharePoint conference draws near, and it’s good news for Office 365 tenants. Some backup vendors might not be so keen as Files Restore makes it a tad harder for them to sell their backups. Small Office 365 tenants also got the news that the new SharePoint Admin Center is becoming the default. The new portal might even be ready soon.

Microsoft Teams supports Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, which means that you can check for the sharing of sensitive data like credit card or passport numbers in personal chats or channel conversations. Quite why someone would want to share their credit card number with someone else in a chat is beyond me, but there’s no accounting for human taste.

On April 4, Microsoft announced that Kaizala, their mobile chat application, is now available to all Office 365 commercial customers and will be integrating with Teams. On the surface, the two applications target very different user types: Teams takes care of corporate users with Office 365 licenses while Kaizala uses phone numbers as identities. We don’t know how the two will meld, but the process will be interesting.

Teams is on a roll at present with the number of organizations using the app accelerating past 500,000. Good planning and forethought help enormously to ensure the success of any deployment and Teams is no different. Whether you’re running a migration from Skype for Business Online or a greenfield deployment, thinking before deploying is always a good thing to do.

Good news for those who like to know what’s going on in email: Office 365 supervision policies now support Teams personal chats and channel conversations in addition to email. And you can now use sensitive data types to find communications worth reading. Seriously, supervision policies are important to a certain section of the market, so it’s good that Teams messages now surface for review.

Microsoft’s Teams app has quickly become a cornerstone of the Office 365 platform. Offering a wide variety of customized experiences, the communication hub is a product that is receiving significant investment from senior management and today they are rolling out several new features.

Microsoft has flipped the switch and you can now integrate a Yammer conversation directly into Teams.

If you have a small Office 365 tenant, you probably don’t need to use Teams messaging policies to control user access to Teams features. But larger tenants soon discover that policy-based management is a great way to control the functionality available to select sets of Teams users. Here’s how to create and assign a policy to users through the Teams Admin Center or PowerShell.

A year is a long time in Office 365. Lots changes in that time, so it’s good to go back and look at some PowerShell written to report Teams and Groups activity. Improvements can be made, advantage taken of changes made by Microsoft, and generally the whole thing can be tidied up and upgraded. PowerShell makes it easy to do – and to change if you don’t like what I’ve done.