Microsoft Teams

With GDPR coming, it’s good news that Teams now supports Office 365 retention policies. You can apply retention to messages posted to channels and chats, or use a mixture of policies to target different sets of users and teams. You might be surprised how Teams has implemented retention – and remember, we’re only talking about messages – other content might also need a policy.

Office 365 has a new admin center for Teams and Skype for Business Online. It’s still early days for the TSBAC, as I like to call it, but you can see where Microsoft is going as it unifies the disparate parts of Teams and Skype for Business Online into one uber-admin center to beat them all.

Teams now hides the Office 365 Groups that it creates from Exchange clients (Outlook, OWA, and the mobile apps). That’s as it should be for groups created for new teams. If you want to hide groups created for older teams, you can run the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet, but that soon becomes boring when you might have hundreds of groups to process. PowerShell to the rescue once again.

It is nice to have an Azure Active Directory Expiration Policy for Office 365 Groups, but it’s not so good that the policy functions exclusively based on age. Another problem is that administrators have no way of knowing when groups will expire. So we take out PowerShell, write a script, and hey presto, we have a report. We still need to solve the problem of creating a policy that functions based on activity rather than age, but that’s another day’s work.

Tons of Spring Updates in the Office 365 space to cover this month. As always, it will be the news you need with the two cents you don’t.

PowerShell is a critical skill for Office 365 tenant administrators. A knowledge of PowerShell allows you to fix things that Microsoft leaves undone in apps like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. Sure, black holes exist for PowerShell (like Planner) and it is slow to process thousands of objects, but there’s nothing like a little script for getting things done.

Microsoft’s Teams is off to a strong start but the company needs to be aggressive with feature deployment and not become complacent upon its success.

Since Office 365 appeared in 2011, Microsoft’s collaboration story has varied according to whatever technology is available. Originally based on Exchange and SharePoint, it’s gone through Yammer, Office 365 Groups, and now Teams. You’d be forgiven for being confused by the frequent changes in the strategy du jour. And now we have inner and outer loops to consider, at least according to Microsoft’s favorite collaboration slide. Here’s my take.

Even though Teams only turned one this week, the company has begun testing a PWA version of the platform with a small group of users.

Owners of Office 365 Groups can delete groups if they want. Some don’t like this as it means that SharePoint site collections, teams, and plans are removed. The simple membership model used by Office 365 Groups is the cause, and while you cannot stop owners deleting their groups, you can take action to detect and recover deleted groups if necessary.