Microsoft Teams

Microsoft has announced that they will retire Skype Online for Business in two years with the company pushing everyone to Teams.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed how to setup Office 365 Information Barriers. We now get to the practical application of those barriers to stop different user groups communicating with Teams. Chats and VOIP calls are blocked, users are removed from team membership, and generally everything works as you’d expect.

Office 365 Information Barriers allow organizations to erect logical firewalls between different user communities to ensure that regulatory and legal requirements are met. Teams and Exchange Online support Information Barrier policies, which replace Address Book Policies. Some work is necessary to get Information Barriers set up. We cover that work in this article and prepare the ground for deploying the policies to Teams.

Slack’s July 22 post reports some advances in their desktop client that seem to aim at reported weaknesses in the Teams desktop client. The best update is better protection against network outages. The other claims of 50% less RAM, 33% faster startup, and 10x better call joining need validation in the real world.

Microsoft’s Teams application has more than 13 million daily active users and the company is pushing out new features in July and August.

In February, I published a script to report the activity in Office 365 Groups and Teams. It is natural that some of those groups will be obsolete, so here’s another script to email the owners of those groups. I know the script works because I tested it against 200 groups, but it’s rough and ready and deserves some TLC from people who really know PowerShell.

Microsoft is making updates to its sales agenda for FY2020 and for the year ahead, Windows is out, Teams is in.

Microsoft introduced support for like reactions in OWA in 2015. Teams also supports likes, but it also supports other reactions to messages from sad to angry. Knowing how to use these reactions is a social minefield. On a serious notes, reactions are not currently stored in Teams compliance records in Exchange Online, which is a problem if people react to messages with likes.

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.