Teams

As expected, Microsoft is rolling out later this year a Teams update that will enable functionality for families (and friends) to create a Teams hub for communication, document sharing, calendaring, and password management.

Microsoft announced that Teams now supports a maximum of 10,000 users in the membership of an individual team. The new limit is rolling out to Office 365 tenants in April and should be available worldwide in May. The need for increased membership is likely driven by large enterprise deployments of Teams who find the previous 5,000 limit just too small for their discussions.

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.

Microsoft has imposed further restrictions on some Office 365 services to release CPU cycles and other resources to allow end users to work. The major impact is felt by SharePoint Online, OneNote, and Stream, and consequently by Teams because it uses all of the above. We can expect restrictions to last until Microsoft manages to deploy additional resources in its Office 365 datacenters.

The rise of COVID-19 has put a significant amount of pressure on IT departments around the globe. With the onset of needing to support robust remote work experiences, every type of remote collaboration application has seen strong growth during the past month.

It’s a bit hard to believe but Microsoft’s Teams application is turning 3 this week. To say that the application has been a success for the company is under-selling its performance as the communication tool has been the fastest growing productivity app in the company’s history.

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels can now be applied to “containers” – Teams, Office 365 Groups, and SharePoint sites. Sensitivity labels replace the old text-only classifications that have been available since 2016. The labels don’t affect the contents of the containers, but they can control some container settings, like whether a team allows guest access or if it’s open to any tenant user to join. It’s yet another development in the label and protection story for Office 365.

There is one feature that I have been waiting to be brought to Teams that has been on the roadmap since July – the ability to chat with Skype contacts inside of Teams. Starting this month, Microsoft will being rolling out that functionality to all customers.

In the world of software development, dogfooding is the act of using your own software. For Microsoft, this is done as a sign of trust that if they can use it for the multi-billion-dollar operation, every other company should be able to as well.

Microsoft is working to address this market by adding functionality to its popular Teams application to enhance workflows for all types of workplace scenarios. The company is also building hardware, such as the Surface Go, to help bring low-cost, high quality, interactions to the Firstline worker.