Microsoft 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.

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.