Microsoft Ignite 2019 – Update – Microsoft Teams

Hello there!

Here’s so many updates for Microsoft Teams.  I cannot name them all. But do look at this link (What’s new with Teams – Ignite 2019). Let’s start with Teams Meetings.

Teams Meetings

Microsoft Teams allows for multiple meeting-types. These are:

Scheduled | Ad hoc | Channel | Live events

Any meeting follows three steps:

Before

• Chat with attendees and collaborate on documents and presentations.
• Prepare the meeting.

During

• Co-author Office 365 documents. Follow the content using live captions and subtitles.
• Participate from anywhere and use the integrated whiteboard.

After

Review meeting notes and access meeting recordings.

Teams tooling

Teams supports these steps with the relevant tools (chat, files, meeting notes and the whiteboard) right from the meeting details. Just upload a document from OneDrive before the meeting starts.

During the meeting you will see the live captions. You also have more options when sharing content during the meeting. On the mobile device, you get all the nice video-options you already have in the (fat)client. But also: you can share your mobile-screen 🙂 When using PowerPoint on the device, you can use the device as a clicker…Or use it as a content capture device.

When you create an ad-hoc meeting in a channel, everyone how’s following the channel will be notified of the meeting.

Whiteboard

The whiteboard integration is very cool. Whiteboard itself is so underrated. It is very powerful. One of the nicest features is to capture a real whiteboard and convert it to a digital whiteboard. When used from Teams, the whiteboard is automatically saved to the participants accounts.

Teams for government employees

Collaboration is crucial. Even for governments 🙂  But it also needs to be secure and compliant. Microsoft showed some nice ideas for creating a Teams environment for a specific government team. Like:

• Create a who’s who page in SharePoint and add it (tab) to the channel;
•  Adding Stream video’s as a tab;
• Embed Forms and use Flow (Power Automate) to speed up processes;

This was part of a short session here at Ignite. Not really earth-shocking information 😦  But that’s also Ignite….

Compliance recording

Cloud Video Interop and data-loss prevention is already available in Teams. What’s to come is compliance recording, contact center and virtual consults.

There’s four types of recordings:

• Ad-hoc of a meeting or call;
• Live-event or transcription;
• Compliance recording (because of compliance regulations);
• Lawful intercept.

Compliance recording is difficult. It’s not just the Teams environment or certain users which are affected. It goes beyond UC/PBX and needs to record existing systems as-well. Compliance recording is a cloud-based solution using compliant regional storage. It’s available for Office 365 Phone System users (E5 or E3 add-in).

 

The recording is stored in location of the participants, participants get an automatic visual or audio notification. To enable this kind of compliance recording, you will need to create a policy and assign these to users.

Private channels

Yep, they are here: private channels.Coming next Wednesday, these are GA! And looking at the amount of people attending a Friday morning session on the last day of Ignite, a very hot topic.

Private channels offer the ability to have a Teams environment with specific content that’s separate (private) from the rest. When released, you will be create a maximum of 30 private channels per team. Each private channel can have a maximum of 250 members.  Please refer to this link (Private channels in Teams) for lots on information on this new offering, including guidance on when to use this or other options.

The private channel provides you all functions and also shows you the people the channel is shared with.

The Teams admin-portal will show all channels, including the private ones in the Teams overview. Admins decide how can create the private channels. Within a specific team, a team-owner can decide. A private channel has its own owner. This owner can decide who has access to the channel. The team owner does not (automatically) have access to the content in the private channels. He/she will see:

• A list of all private channels;
• The owners;
• The latest activity,

When the team is deleted, all private channels will be deleted as-well. Apps and tabs are all supported in the channels, but the apps need to be installed at the team level first.

One specific interesting architecture aspects is the SharePoint sites behind the team. Yes, sites, not site. Because Microsoft solved the issues for separating the channels by using additional (small-scale) SharePoint site-collections. These site-collections are managed by Teams! If you modify these groups from SharePoint, these will be overruled by Teams.

These site-collections are hidden by default!

Retention policies for private channel messages comes later. Retention policies for the site-collections work by default.

So having one Team with three private channels will set you up with four SharePoint site-collections. I’m not sure how this is going to be received from the admin or compliance people. But it does underscore my feeling: if your collaboration in Teams, leave the back-end platforms alone….

That’s not quite how Microsoft sees this however. In the documentation (see link) they propose that the additional site-collections can be used as well……

But all-in-all, this is some great news.