This Week in IT – 3 NEW Useful Features in Microsoft Teams (December 2023)

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This Week in IT, our last episode of 2023, I look at three new features and changes in Microsoft Teams that can help you boost productivity. Plus, Microsoft releases a tool to fix a bug that renamed printers, Windows Mixed Reality exits stage left, and Microsoft Authenticator is getting support for passkeys to prevent password phishing. Plus, a whole load more.

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This Week in IT, and our last episode of 2023, I look at three new features in Microsoft Teams that could help you boost productivity, plus Microsoft releases a tool to fix a bug that renamed printers, Windows Mixed Reality exits stage left and Microsoft Authenticator gets support for passkeys to help prevent password phishing, plus a whole load more.

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Microsoft has been rolling out several changes to Microsoft Teams this week if you’re on the new 2.0 Teams client and these changes have been promised since the Ignite conference back in November. So the two biggest changes are first of all now instead of the files app we have the all new OneDrive app that is now integrated into Teams. So this provides all of those good news features that Microsoft released as part of Ignite back in November like new views, filters and AI powered recommendations to help users quickly locate files and other content that’s been shared with them.

Now Microsoft has said that users that work with other cloud storage like Google and Dropbox in the future they’ll be able to download specific apps for those providers that will allow them to have access to that storage from within Teams. And something that I was a bit surprised to hear is that Microsoft is planning to bring this new OneDrive app experience to the legacy Teams client in 2024.

The other big change that’s rolling out this week is that now you can add loop components into channels. So loop components have been available in Teams chat for a long time. I guess everybody knows what loop is by this stage. Of course I’ll put a link into the show notes if you want to find out a little bit more about it. But basically it’s a little bit like Notion. So there’s a loop app that looks very much like Notion if you’re familiar with that. But something that is a little bit different is that you can take individual parts of a page, turn them into a component and share them across Microsoft 365 in different applications. So that might be Word, it might be Whiteboard, it might be Outlook.

So loop components are available across all the various different types of channels but the biggest restriction is that those components won’t be available to external users of any type. So whether they’re just a guest or whether they’re an external user because you’re working in a share channel, unfortunately they won’t be able to see these loop components. So depending on how your Teams are compromised that may or may not be a big problem.

Another thing is that people using Teams on iOS and Android, I believe they’ll be able to view loop components but not able to edit them in the mobile apps at this stage at least. The other significant change that Microsoft has made in Teams this month is that now there’s a new action menu. So if you want to add a file or an app to a chat, now there’s a little plus icon that you have to click. So you don’t have that row of endless icons along the bottom of the chat window like you have before. It’s all been tidied up, you now click plus and you get access to add a loop component to attach a file or to add an app and you can even search for actions and apps.

The only thing that I feel about that search dialogue is it would be really nice if I could actually search directly in that dialogue for files to add. Maybe because the dialogue is quite small that’s not really practical, they were not able to find a way to make that happen. Maybe it’s something they’ll add in the future but I think it would be nice to just be able to search for other types of content that I want to add there without having to click yet another dialogue to attach a file but we’ll see what happens with that. But I think these three changes are really significant things that are changing especially the ability to add loop components to channels because obviously that was a really important piece of functionality that was missing that you could add it here in a chat but not there in a channel.

That was a big problem in my view so really happy to see these three things come to Teams. That’s a nice little Christmas present for all you Teams users out there. Let me know in the comments what you think about the ability to use loop components in Teams. Are they something that you use or are the restrictions about up until now where you could use them in Teams and who can access them? Does that really make this something that you just wouldn’t consider using because there are still restrictions around accessing them?

Let me know please in the comments below. Windows Mixed Reality. Now you could be forgiven for not even knowing what this is but you probably remember a few years ago I suppose even maybe pre-COVID there was a lot of talk about HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality which was a platform built into Windows that essentially enabled people producing headsets you know things like that to plug into a system that Windows would then support that hardware out of the box.

At least that’s my understanding of it. I don’t really know anybody who’s ever used it. Of course there are people who have seen it and used it I think over at Windows Central. There was a lot of coverage of HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality and all that kind of stuff and you could argue well what has this got to do with business? Well of course HoloLens was the more business orientated hardware that Microsoft produced itself on top of this system.(…) So Microsoft hasn’t really talked about HoloLens you know there was a HoloLens 1, a HoloLens 2. There doesn’t seem to be any talk about it these days so I think we can safely assume that there isn’t probably going to be a successor to HoloLens 2 and it was actually Windows Central who seemed to be reporting this first of all at least that’s where I found out about it and it was just kind of noted in a list of features that Microsoft were deprecating from Windows. There was no fanfare about this at all. Now having said all of that Microsoft recently made available Microsoft Office on Metacrest 3 which is you know Facebook or Meta’s virtual reality platform.

So the whole idea of virtual reality isn’t completely dead but I think the use cases for it and the available hardware of course just isn’t wide enough for this really to be something that Microsoft is going to invest a huge amount in at the moment and let’s face it right now it’s all about artificial intelligence and co-pilot so this move doesn’t really come as a big surprise. There’s a whole load of news this week connected to identity and we know that identity is really important for Microsoft’s security initiatives especially their zero trust security initiative. Everything is based on you know ensuring that the people that log into your systems are the people who they say they are and that they’re logging in safely from safe locations and all sorts of things around this identity piece and Entra ID. So there are some new capabilities coming to Entra ID in terms of supporting third-party systems. So in short permissions management in Entra ID is getting integration with service now and support for Okta and the AWS identity center.

So this is allowing organizations to manage identities in places that are not directly Entra ID to get some visibility and control in certain circumstances over what’s going on in those other systems. So the cloud infrastructure entitlement management service that’s part of Entra ID is what allows organizations to get that control and visibility over other end identity providers. So you can do things like request, approve, revoke and audit permissions and automate that all now with service now workflows. Entra ID domain services get in support for two-way trust so domain services what this does is it adds things that were previously part of on-premises active directory things like Kerberos authentication,(…) NTLM and LDAP support, domain joining all those features that we were used to working with in on-premises active directory. It adds those features into Entra ID and of course trusts and establishing trusts was very much something that you did with your on-premises AD.

Now Entra ID has supported one-way trusts for a long time so essentially that allowed people who are working on-premises to access things in the cloud and Microsoft is now changing that and upgrading it so that you’re able to also have a two-way trust relationship so that you can communicate from the cloud back to your on-premises systems should you need to do that and this is in a private preview at the moment and should become publicly available sometime next year. Microsoft Authenticator is getting support for pass keys so as I’ve understood at the moment you know with Windows 11, 23H2 support for pass keys was added to Windows so that allows you to create a FIDO standard pass key and log in to things online, systems online Microsoft Entra ID for instance and other supported systems without having to use a password so the idea of this of course is to protect your credentials or to have you not type in a password something that a hacker could potentially steal while you’re doing that so pass key is much more secure in that respect.

So Microsoft Authenticator is getting support for pass keys so as I understood what you would be able to do is essentially maybe use a system that you don’t usually use where you haven’t set up a pass key for instance and instead of having to type in a username and password to access a website or some kind of resource you can use the pass key that you’ve configured and installed in your Microsoft Authenticator application. Now you probably remember about a month ago there was a bug I think it was connected to a Windows update that suddenly renamed users printers to HP LaserJet regardless of what kind of printer was connected to their devices.

Microsoft acknowledged that this was a problem and this week they released a tool for administrators to help them fix the mess.(…) Now this tool is something that you can download for free from Microsoft’s website of course we put a link into the show notes there are a couple of things that you should understand about it. Now it’s of course a fix and it runs on the local system and it will tidy up any printers that have been mistakenly renamed and correct the name and the icon.(…)

Now there’s a big caveat to this that this tool runs on the local system it doesn’t you know you can’t use it as far as they’ve understood to solve this problem remotely so you can’t just type you know a list of machines for it to work with remotely on your network that’s that’s not going to work and if you want it to fix the issue for all users on the computer then you need to run it as a local system.

Now if you’re going to set this up you know as something that runs as at logon or using Windows Task Scheduler then that shouldn’t really be a problem because scheduler tasks they can be run as a local system but this does mean that you’re going to have to make sure that the tool runs individually on every single device where this problem has occurred and that’s a little bit of a pain for administrators I would imagine.(…) So there is a fix I think this is not the greatest fix in the world I think you know Microsoft could have maybe rolled out something via Windows update maybe they will in the future that will help to fix this problem automatically for users especially of course as many users are now not working in the office so it may not be so easy for IT to run this tool on end devices.

Thank you for watching the video if you found it useful I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a like because that helps us get the video seen by more people on YouTube. I’m going to leave you with another video on the screen now about some of the rumors surrounding a possible release of Windows 12 and the new AI features that could be part of that release but that’s it from me today I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year and from this week in IT we’re going to see you in January 2024.