Teams

Artificial intelligence is of major interest to Microsoft right now, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that Jeffrey Snover, one of their technical chiefs, is now heading the charge to bring AI to the Office 365 substrate. Quite what this means for the internal operations of Office 365, applications and clients, and customers is to be seen, but some interesting times lie ahead in the evolution of Office 365.

Microsoft has flipped the switch and you can now integrate a Yammer conversation directly into Teams.

If you have a small Office 365 tenant, you probably don’t need to use Teams messaging policies to control user access to Teams features. But larger tenants soon discover that policy-based management is a great way to control the functionality available to select sets of Teams users. Here’s how to create and assign a policy to users through the Teams Admin Center or PowerShell.

A year is a long time in Office 365. Lots changes in that time, so it’s good to go back and look at some PowerShell written to report Teams and Groups activity. Improvements can be made, advantage taken of changes made by Microsoft, and generally the whole thing can be tidied up and upgraded. PowerShell makes it easy to do – and to change if you don’t like what I’ve done.

Microsoft’s Teams suffered a significant outage but the company has a vested interest in making sure that it offers a better uptime than what traditional on-premises provides.

Microsoft has announced the ability of the Planner web app to create multiple plans for an Office 365 group. This is a useful feature that Teams and SharePoint Online (the Planner web part) can already do, but some extra work was needed to break the connection between a plan and a group, and that’s what Multiplan means. Or it means a spreadsheet.

Teams now supports memberships of up to 5,000 users. This is great for large tenants, but probably isn’t too interesting for most of Office 365. If you’re in the situation where you might need to operate very large teams, you might need Microsoft to make some changes to the client, write some tools, and impose some basic etiquette on Teams users.

Microsoft is working on a new feature for Teams that will take background blurring to the next level, full customization.

Microsoft is working on new features for Teams that they hope will entice workers in the healthcare industry to adopt the collaboration platform.

Office 365 Groups and Teams make SharePoint much easier for people to use, with the price paid being the imposition of the groups permission model on SharePoint. On the upside, everything is very simple. On the downside, the permissions assigned to group members might not be what you want.