Teams

As Microsoft wraps up its 2019 fiscal year, the company made several significant announcements for Office 365 in the month of June.

What happened in June with SharePoint? A lot of reminders but also a little bit of a look towards the future.

Microsoft is rolling out priority notifications for Teams, the ability for users to send urgent messages in chats so that the recipients get notified every two minutes until they respond. Office 365 tenants (except GCC) should see the new functionality in July. Tenants can control who gets to send urgent messages with messaging policies, and some user education would be good to help those allowed to send these messages understand when a message is truly urgent.

PowerShell is a great way of automating common administrative Office 365 operations. That is, if you know what module to use and how to use the cmdlets in that module. Unfortunately things are a bit of a mess with too many modules and inconsistent behavior in areas like error handling. With so many development groups working on Office 365, the PowerShell situation might be inevitable, but it needs cleaning up.

With many companies starting to move to Teams, Matt Wade has a simple suggestion to expedite the user-adoption process.

Tony Redmond and Paul Thurrott discuss Teams momentum, Teams as the new Outlook, OneDrive, and hybrid computing at AvePoint’s Shift Happens conference in Washington D.C.

You can easily rename a team by giving it a new display name, or do the same thing to a channel. But Teams and SharePoint Online have the kind of relationship that’s based on tight connections, so renaming team or channel names leaves SharePoint untouched. Site URLs remain unchanged and if you try and fix up the folder names for channels, you can end up with a real mess.

You can now connect Office 365 sources like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, and Yammer to Microsoft Search and have Bing reveal results from those sources in its searches. It’s a useful trick, as long as you use Bing as your search engine. And there’s the small matter that Microsoft has left Exchange out of the list of connected sources, which seems to reduce the usefulness of searches a tad.

Microsoft is about to enable functionality inside of Teams that will allow for ISVs to build a business around the communication platform.

PowerApps, Slack, and G-Suite migration tools; this month was filled with new Office 365 updates that you need to know about.