Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is working to address this market by adding functionality to its popular Teams application to enhance workflows for all types of workplace scenarios. The company is also building hardware, such as the Surface Go, to help bring low-cost, high quality, interactions to the Firstline worker.

Since its inception, Microsoft Teams has had an odd relationship with email. Some think that Teams will replace email, at least for many internal conversations. The real facts are that Teams and email need to survive and co-operate together as collaborative modalities for Office 365 tenants. Microsoft is introducing three new features to help Teams gets along better with email, and that’s a good thing.

Microsoft Teams is up and coming in the world of business chat and collaboration clients. Much like Slack, Microsoft Teams offers many of the same tools and integration abilities; a key selling point of business-oriented chat clients is the interoperability that the clients offer.

The fact that the Teams outage on 3 February was caused by an expired authentication certificate is enough to cause Office 365 tenants to ask why such a thing happened. Teams is built on top of a lot of Office 365 and Azure components, so it’s not altogether surprising that issues happen in what is a very complex infrastructure spread around the world. But given Microsoft’s hyped focus on DevOps, you would have thought that something as fundamental as an expired certificate would have been picked up and fixed before it caused customer disruption.

Microsoft has made a preview PowerShell module for the Graph available for developers to play with. Being able to use PowerShell with the Graph exposes a lot of data to play with, so it’s a great addition to the administrator toolkit. To see how things worked in practice,, I convert a script to report Teams channels that are email-enabled to use the Graph module. Things worked out pretty well, but as you’d expect, some rough edges exist that need to be smoothed.

If you woke up this morning and are unable to sign in to Microsoft Teams, you are not alone. Microsoft’s productivity application was unavailable for many users but the outage does not appear to be a serious threat to the service.

For the past half-decade or so, Google has been trying feverishly to crack the enterprise market with its cloud and productivity application. While the company has made some serious in-roads, with its cloud services growing and the adoption of its productivity suite, Google Apps, often becoming the preferred choice for small companies, Microsoft still rules the roost for the productivity market.

Microsoft is about to roll out new features for Teams that will make it easier to communicate and sign-in while Dynamics is getting new functionality too but questions about its future remain uncertain.

Because the year is winding down, this edition of Short Takes looks at the terrible new direction of the Windows Insider Program, New Edge is to browsers as New Coke was to cola, Windows 7 and Microsoft Security Essentials, and much, much more. Now they’re just messing with us Keeping track of how the Windows…

The Brave Browser offers the prospect of speed and security. But how well does it work with the Office 365 browser apps? As it happens, pretty well, with some exceptions. Here’s what I discovered when I test-drove Brave with OWA, Teams, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Planner, and Stream.