Teams

Secure (or private) channels is the biggest user request to the Teams development group, possibly because Slack has this feature. The only problem is that the Office 365 Groups membership model doesn’t allow for filtering within a group, so introducing elements available to a selected set of members might create all sorts of difficulties for how Teams interacts with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.

Microsoft is bringing new features to Teams that will make it easier for firstline workers to communicate with other employees.

Microsoft announced that the MyAnalytics app is available to any Office 365 user with an Exchange Online license. Also, Teams and SharePoint signals are soon to be included in the MyAnalytics analysis and dashboard. Expanding the user base is a good idea, but the really big news is the expansion of MyAnalytics to cover a much wider breadth of Office 365 activity.

PowerShell is great at getting lots done for Office 365 administrators. As an example, here are a couple of ways to check the membership of an Office 365 Group or a Microsoft Team to find out whether a specific user is already present. You might never need to use this tip, but then again, it’s always surprising when PowerShell comes to the rescue.

Microsoft is frequently expanding the functionality of Office 365 and with the success of Teams, the company may have found its new Excel.

Microsoft says that Office 365 has 155 million monthly active users. That’s an interesting statistic, but how many people use Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and Planner? Microsoft never gives firm numbers, only clues to what might be happening, so we have to do some analysis to tease out what might be happening behind the Office 365 curtain.

Microsoft has updated the Teams PowerShell module to version 0.9.5. The best thing about the refresh is that the Get-Team cmdlet works. Well, it can now retrieve a full list of Teams in an Office 365 tenant. It would be good if Get-Team returned more data and supported server-side filtering, but it’s a start.

Teams borrows from many other Office 365 applications to build its functionality.The latest component taken is Exchange Online address book policies, used to segment the directory and stop users getting in touch with other people in the organization outside the scope of a policy. But it’s an imperfect and partial block, and if you really want to stop people talking, you’ll have to do a lot more work.

Do you need to backup Office 365 data? The question isn’t simple because technology changes all the time and it’s hard to backup some applications like Teams and Planner because APIs don’t exist. The important thing is for companies to review what data they use, the features available to them, and then figure out if any gaps exist.

Teams is a great place to host conversations, but sometimes certain messages need to be purged. It’s easy for a team owner to remove something offensive from a single channel, but what happens if someone posts in multiple channels across multiple teams. As it turns out, some manual intervention is needed.