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This week in Teams, we’ve been exploring some new functionality rolling out for use with Intune, meeting limits/meeting join improvements, interoperability settings and more.

 In this blockbuster episode, Stephen and Paul are joined by Microsoft director Jeremy Chapman to discuss how organizations can effectively transition to remote work without compromising control. Transcript: Paul Thurrott (00:01): Welcome back everyone to the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series. I’m Paul Thurrott, I’m here as usual with Stephen Rose, Senior Product Marketing Manager…

One of the big feature updates coming to Teams that many have been waiting for is the ability to chat with Skype contacts inside the Teams application. Microsoft stated that this feature would be available by the end of April but that timeline has come and gone. The company has posted a new message to its admin center and…

This week, Microsoft’s Build conference is happening and the company is making announcements from updates to Windows development to new API features in Office. For users of Teams, and more specifically developers of apps for Teams, there are updates that you should know about. Microsoft has announced new extensions for both Visual Studio and Visual…

Year of Yammer Keeps on Rolling Seven months after Microsoft declared the “Year of Yammer,” a public preview of a much-hyped (at Ignite 2019) new user interface is available to Office 365 tenants. General availability of the new Yammer is expected in July 2020. The new interface is already available in the Yammer mobile app…

We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.” In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees;…

This week, we are taking a look at the security features offered within the Microsoft 365 suite and how you can take advantage of them for your operations. Joining Paul Thurrott and Stephen Rose this week is Chris Jackson – Principal Architect, Commercial Endpoint Customer Experience Engineering    Transcript: Paul Thurrott (00:06): Hello and…

The new licensing guidance for Microsoft 365 security and compliance features is welcome, but as is probably inevitable, some inconsistencies exist that need to be probed and discussed, and hopefully resolved by Microsoft in the long run. Why do DLP policies for Teams need E5 licenses? Why does applying a default retention label to a SharePoint library need E5? There’s lots to discuss about issues Microsoft should fix.

Microsoft announces that it will pause Windows 10 optional updates starting in May and extend security updates for some Windows 10 version 1709 SKUs to October. There are also details on new features coming to Edge, an update to Microsoft Emulator for Windows 10X, and news that Microsoft Search integration with Windows 10 is being delayed until Q4 2020. Additionally, I provide some tips on working at home.

Although Teams has seen a spike in usage due to more people working at home, the view of participants in Teams video meetings is not as good as competitors such as Zoom. Basically, the 2 x 2 view used by Teams isn’t as visually attractive or useful as the gallery views supported by other video conferencing systems. Microsoft says they have elevated the priority of the work necessary to increase the number of participants in the meeting window. They don’t say when this will happen.

Teams is all about communication, but now you can have “targeted communications,” which is a long-winded way to describe tags. A tag is a shortcut method to address a set of team members. You can have default tags defined at the organization level or use tags specific to individual teams. Either way, tags are a useful way to identify the specific people you want to address in a conversation.

Online meetings are becoming an even more regular part of daily work life as many of us move to ‘work from home’. Whether you are a small business or large corporation, online meetings can enable teams to work remotely more effectively and maintain a sense of community and connectedness.