Microsoft 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.

Microsoft’s Teams suffered a significant outage but the company has a vested interest in making sure that it offers a better uptime than what traditional on-premises provides.

Teams now supports memberships of up to 5,000 users. This is great for large tenants, but probably isn’t too interesting for most of Office 365. If you’re in the situation where you might need to operate very large teams, you might need Microsoft to make some changes to the client, write some tools, and impose some basic etiquette on Teams users.

Microsoft is working on a new feature for Teams that will take background blurring to the next level, full customization.

Microsoft is working on new features for Teams that they hope will entice workers in the healthcare industry to adopt the collaboration platform.

Secure (or private) channels is the biggest user request to the Teams development group, possibly because Slack has this feature. The only problem is that the Office 365 Groups membership model doesn’t allow for filtering within a group, so introducing elements available to a selected set of members might create all sorts of difficulties for how Teams interacts with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.

Microsoft is announcing a new peripheral for the Surface Go, new laptops aimed at educators, and new features for Teams.

Microsoft is bringing new features to Teams that will make it easier for firstline workers to communicate with other employees.

PowerShell is great at getting lots done for Office 365 administrators. As an example, here are a couple of ways to check the membership of an Office 365 Group or a Microsoft Team to find out whether a specific user is already present. You might never need to use this tip, but then again, it’s always surprising when PowerShell comes to the rescue.