Teams

If you work with Teams through PowerShell, you’ll know that you sometimes need to open the Skype for Business Online module. It’s a royal pain in the rear end to deal with two inconsistent modules. It would be much neater if everything was gathered into one coherent module. However, that’s not going to happen much before Skype for Business Online retires in 2021. In the interim, here are seven sets of policy cmdlets that you’ll probably need to use to assign policies to multiple users at one time.

Microsoft’s Teams application has added seven million daily active users in four months but the growth will not be slowing down anytime soon.

Microsoft launched private channels for Teams at the Ignite conference. This article describes the architecture and structure of private channels and discusses their intended usage. In a follow-up, I’ll go into how to create and manage private channels in a Teams deployment and discuss some of the issues you should consider when using this new feature.

Microsoft made a ton of Office 365-related announcements at their Ignite conference in Orlando. Here’s a summary of the key news for SharePoint, Exchange, Stream, Teams, Yammer, and Outlook. More information will emerge during the week, so stay tuned for more coverage as news emerges.

Office 365 applications now create many guest accounts in Azure Active Directory. You can see what accounts exist, but it’s more difficult to discover who created the accounts – or why they were created. Fortunately, the Office 365 audit log holds a lot of useful data that can be interrogated to find some answers and PowerShell is a great tool for slicing and dicing audit data. See what you think of the answers I’ve come up with.

The fit-and-finish quality within Office 365 is sometimes less than desirable. Two recent changes in SharePoint Online make it easier for users to know when a document library is connected to Teams and to generate thumbnails for items stored in the library. Neither change is awe-inspiring, but both are examples of how to improve SharePoint’s fit-and-finish, which is a good thing.

Microsoft Teams is very successful at present, but a nagging doubt exists that some of the approaches taken by Microsoft towards Teams management and administration are less than optimum. It’s great to introduce a mass of new features on an ongoing basis and it’s better when policies exist to control the use of the features. But do new features always need to be enabled out-of-the-box?

Adoption and Change Management are often discussed when companies move to cloud services, including Office 365. How quickly can we adopt the new services and how can we manage change? As it happens, Microsoft is extremely interested in driving customer adoption, so much so that this can cause problems with change management simply because so much change happens so quickly insist Office 365. As we discuss here, a structured approach to change management helps.

Lots of hot air and fuss resulted when Microsoft confirmed on the Teams UserVoice site that they are actively working on a Teams client for Linux. Many Office 365 tenants will be bemused at the attention this topic received, but competition with Slack and the need to drive faster adoption in Teams deployments are compelling reasons for Microsoft to do this work. We can only hope that the project results in better Teams clients all round.

Although Teams has a PowerShell module, its cmdlets can’t get at some of the interesting information for team objects. But the Graph API reveals that information. Combining the Graph with PowerShell makes it possible to retrieve the information with just a little effort. A working example helps make the point, so here’s a script to report the Teams channels with email addresses.