Teams

For SharePoint fans, this month brings improved online teams restore features, sticky headers, and PNP makes the platform prettier.

If your Office 365 tenant has many private Teams, you might run the risk that people create duplicate teams because they don’t know that a team already exists. Teams doesn’t have a separate directory but you can create one with PowerShell and publish the output in Teams. The magic is provided by deep links, which users click to navigate to a team they want to join.

Microsoft released the generally available (1.0) version of the Teams PowerShell module on April 24. The Get-Team cmdlet receives a big makeover (and slowdown), but overall the module is solid and you shouldn’t need to make too many changes to scripts.

Slack released some integrations for Office (365) on April 9. I took a look and discovered some interesting things about how the Outlook add-in for Slack works (and doesn’t work sometimes). If you use Slack, you’ll probably be interested in a tighter connection between it and Office, but if you’re invested in the Office 365 ecosystem, Teams is a better choice.

Microsoft Teams supports Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, which means that you can check for the sharing of sensitive data like credit card or passport numbers in personal chats or channel conversations. Quite why someone would want to share their credit card number with someone else in a chat is beyond me, but there’s no accounting for human taste.

Slack is rolling out new features for Office 365 that the company hopes will bridge the gap between the two services.

On April 4, Microsoft announced that Kaizala, their mobile chat application, is now available to all Office 365 commercial customers and will be integrating with Teams. On the surface, the two applications target very different user types: Teams takes care of corporate users with Office 365 licenses while Kaizala uses phone numbers as identities. We don’t know how the two will meld, but the process will be interesting.

Teams is on a roll at present with the number of organizations using the app accelerating past 500,000. Good planning and forethought help enormously to ensure the success of any deployment and Teams is no different. Whether you’re running a migration from Skype for Business Online or a greenfield deployment, thinking before deploying is always a good thing to do.

Good news for those who like to know what’s going on in email: Office 365 supervision policies now support Teams personal chats and channel conversations in addition to email. And you can now use sensitive data types to find communications worth reading. Seriously, supervision policies are important to a certain section of the market, so it’s good that Teams messages now surface for review.

Microsoft’s Teams app has quickly become a cornerstone of the Office 365 platform. Offering a wide variety of customized experiences, the communication hub is a product that is receiving significant investment from senior management and today they are rolling out several new features.