On the SPOT - Technology Podcast

OTSTWIT Episode 19, September 12, 2020

In this episode of “This Week in Teams” Jay and Craig talked about of the newest features rolling out, or soon to be rolling out for the Microsoft Teams platform:

* Microsoft Lists in Microsoft Teams is now generally available The Lists app in Microsoft Teams helps users in your organization track information, organize work, and manage workflows. With Lists, users can track data such as issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory, incidents, loans, patients, and more using customized views, rules, and alerts to keep everyone on the team in sync. Try the new Microsoft Lists click-thru demo: Create a list in Teams

* Microsoft Teams Breakout Rooms feature rolling out in preview Breakout Rooms are a much requested feature by teachers and corporate trainers that will allow meeting organizers to split a large group call into separate smaller sessions for group discussions. They can assign users to a room, add/remove/rename the rooms and then call them back to the larger meeting when they need to.

* From tasks in Microsoft Teams to white-boarding during remote meetings—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365, Teams will be bringing deeper integration with Teams as well as more feature to Teams Whiteboard that will make it more closely resemble the desktop product and spur better collaboration meetings.

* Announcing the GitHub integration with Microsoft Teams Developers use GitHub together with a number of other platforms, to communicate with each other on issues, pull requests, deployment statuses, and other updates. We want to integrate GitHub with other platforms to make it easier for developers and teams to collaborate around their projects from whatever context they work in. We’ve had a GitHub + Slack integration for years, and today we are excited to announce that we’re expanding our portfolio, with a new GitHub + Microsoft Teams integration, now available in public beta.

* Microsoft Teams: NDI for Teams is Rolling out Coming soon, NDI for Microsoft Teams transforms a Teams meeting into a virtual stage by converting each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the production tool of your choice, OBS, Wirecast, Xsplit, StreamLabs and many more. This functionality enables you to use Teams meetings in other ways, including hosting a professional broadcast.

* The New conversation button and Reply buttons rolle...

Last week on This Week in Teams we talked about some of this basics of Teams. This week Jay and Craig talked about some important considerations around managing your Teams, such as: naming conventions, team creation, managing membership, and the ever popular guest accesses vs. external users.

This Week in Teams Episode 17Boot Camp: Names, Members, & Outsiders

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly … Names

When creating new teams consider naming what names that are meaningful. That mean something to you as the owner, but also the IT team, and possible members. An example of a bad name is HR. Your team might be an HR site, but is it the only one in the company. Something like HR_EmployeeRelations_US or HR_EmployeeRelations_UA. Auto prefixes and suffixes can be set in the Groups –> Naming policy –> Group naming policy found in Azure AD.

Naming policy – Group naming policy

Also it is important to think about using business appropriate names. Sometimes users can be careless or try to be funny and name teams with bad names. You may have reserved like “CEO” or “Payroll” that we don’t want our users to use, or words that are inappropriate or offensive, so you can upload a blocked words list to Groups –> Naming policy –> Block words policy found in Azure AD.

Naming policy – Blocked words

Who can create Teams?

By default any licensed users can create a team.  If you have a small or well trained user base, this can be ok.  As your organization grows, you may be concerned with team sprawl. Often organizations will often want to limit Teams creation to an administration group so that they have more control over who can create them.  For more information, visit How to manage creation of groups.  Lastly, Teams can be created through 3rd party tools or programmatically using the Graph API.  

It is important to note that a user can only create 250 teams, but Global Admins and the GraphAPI are exempt from that (unlimited). A user also, can only be a member of 1000 teams.  For a complete list of Teams limitations visit Limits and Specifications for Microsoft Teams.

Who is in my Teams?  Owners, Members, Guests

Within Microsoft Teams there are two user roles: owner and member. By default, a user who creates a new team is granted the owner status. In addition, owners and members can have moderator capabilities for a channel (provided that moderation has been set up). If a team is created from an existing Microsoft 365 Group, permissions are inherited. Guests can be invited to a team as a member. Guests only have access to the teams they have been invited into and have no other access in Teams.

The table below shows the difference in permissions between an owner and a member.

ActionTeam OwnerTeam MemberCreate teamYes1NoLeave teamYesYesEdit team name/descriptionYesNoDelete teamYesNoAdd standard channelYesYes2Edit standard channel name/descriptionYesYes2Delete standard channelYesYes2*Add private channelYesYes2*Edit private channel name/descriptionNoN/A*Delete private channelYesNoAdd membersYes3No4Request to add membersN/AYes5Add appsYesYes2

1 Team owners can create teams unless they’ve been restricted from doing so.

After weeks of new

features and deep dives into various capabilities that compliment the Teams

platform, Jay and Craig decided to go back to basics. This Week in Teams we

provide an introduction to #MicrosoftTeams. We talk about what Teams IS: the

hub for M365 but also the hub for the enterprise with its ever-expanding

extensibility. We also talked about the base for Teams: SharePoint, OneDrive,

and Exchange Server. And, we discussed if a Team should be Organizational or

Functional (sneak peek: It depends).

The

Hub for Teamwork

Microsoft Teams is

described as The Hub for Teamwork in Microsoft 365. At its base it pulls

together SharePoint, Exchange, and all of the Office 365 capabilities into a

single, user-friendly interface which is much more simplistic than interfaces

like SharePoint. This is a good thing, as the complexity often confuses end

users. For membership, Teams utilizes Office 365 Groups, which simplifies what

we were used to as 4 different membership types in SharePoint down to two very

simple things: Members and Owners.

Beyond Microsoft

365, though, Teams can be The Hub for your enterprise thanks to its

extensibility!

SharePoint

and OneDrive … and Exchange? Oh My!

Behind Teams is the

ever-familiar SharePoint interface, brought to you by SharePoint Online. Within

Teams the interface is MUCH more simple — files with minimal metadata and

configurations. However, with power comes a FULL SharePoint Site collection. For

power-users this means endless functionality as always provided by SharePoint,

but for end-users, it means not having to navigate them.

But what about

OneDrive. I hear this all the time. The key here is to keep it simple: OneDrive

is an app built on SharePoint, so it’s still SharePoint. That said, the

differentiation is WHERE are those files being shared: if you are sharing a

file in a Team, your files are stored in the SharePoint Site Collection; if

your files are being shared in a one-to-one or one-to-many private chat, your

files are being stored in OneDrive and the app is smart enough to set the

participants of the chat as “contributors” — they can edit the file.

Nifty feature.

The connection with

Exchange is much less often discussed. Discussion threads for private chats are

stored in each user’s mailbox that is participating in the discussion. Channel

threads from a Team are stored in the inbox created for the Office 365 Group.

NEITHER OF THESE are available to the end user. These are primarily for

discovery within the M365 Security and Compliance Center. Even the APIs to

these are limited for 3rd part app developers. So, it’s there, but it’s not for

the end-user to touch.

Function

versus Organization

The answer to “when should I create a Team” is, unfortunately, “it depends”. We recognize the usefulness of Teams as a department home for collaboration; so yes, go create your “Information Technology” Team. But don’t stop there. Cross-functional teams allow you to bring together individuals from multiple departments to create mission-centric teams for short (or long) periods of times. Create a Team for collaboration on your hardware modernization. Create a Team to support a customer project. Create a Team to engage with your officemates (and channels for the different office clubs like Coffee Club, Pie Club, Runners Club … yes these are all real clubs in Jay’s DC office!).

Over the last two weeks Hunter and I had conversations with two people from very different backgrounds to help showcase the need for, but also the value of developing customer feedback loops in your engagements.

Today’s Episode

Maxine Teller is a strategic consultant in the Washington DC area with a large book of Federal agencies and commercial customers.

Two of my favorite stories to come out of the conversation with Maxine included gamification and communications guidance. While Jay’s reaction to Gamification, by its title alone, suggests a lack of interest, even he admits that the theory behind it is rather sound at understanding how to engage people in training, engagement, and feedback. Maxine’s story on a recent customer of hers who realized rather quickly that to succeed in the face of the recent pandemic-based work from home situation they needed to provide their staff guides to ensure efficiency and easy communications across the board.

Maxine also shared a great reminder that if we want to consider how to engage the end customer to ensure they understand the value and become engaged, consider yourself, while sharing a story of her own experiences on a consumer advisory panel.

As Office 365 was rolled out at Heathrow Airport, Samit Saini was a security officer checking bags. As a security officer, Samit new there had to be a better solution to the common tasks in which security officers relied on shared sheets of paper to communicate with passengers who spoke different languages. Diving into the Power Platform he built a simple translation app, now in use acrosss the airport.

Samit is now on the Devops team managing the Power Platform adoption program with over a dozen apps utilized across the airport improving efficiency of previously analog processes. His path to technology ensures he understands the value in not just gathering feedback from end users post deployment, but working with them to properly document the business requirement.

These tenants in hand, Samit believes end user engagement is the only way to successfully deploy technology today.

Regarding Gamification – this reminded Jay of a scavenger hunt for Microsoft Teams he had heard about, but couldn’t recall. Immediately after recording he remembered taht it was Carrie Basham Marshall, CEO of Talk Social To Me, who posted these three scavenger hunts; they are great examples of how to game training of new technologies with your staff. Check them out, and if you ARE using Teams, check out the This Week in Teams podcast, another podcast on the On the Spot Network!

Maxine Teller – Maximize Strategies

Maxine TellerMaximize Strategies

Maxine Teller has 25 years of success creating new business opportunities, leading digital transformations and solving strategic problems for C-level leaders and senior program executives in government, media, digital, technology, health and nonprofit sectors. With depth of experience across a breadth of industries, Maxine draws from a toolkit of innovative processes and methodologies to rethink traditional approaches by aligning business objectives, fostering collaboration,

This Week in Teams, Craig and Jay focus on the new Tasks App, it’s connection to the To Dos in Outlook, and the incredible business value of Planner. All the with help of our special guest, Stacy Deere-Strole (MVP).

Stacy Deere-Strole (MVP)

Stacy Deere-Strole (MVP)Owner, Focal Point Solutions

Stacy is the Owner of Focal Point Solutions LLC, a Cincinnati, OH based company that provides SharePoint Solutions for the Enterprise in the mid-to-large market. Previously, Stacy led a rapidly growing SharePoint practice where she engaged in a wide range of consulting projects across various industries. With nearly 18 years of experience in the IT Industry, Stacy has mainly focused on Collaboration Solutions such as IBM’s Lotus Notes\Domino and Microsoft’s Messaging and Collaboration Solutions including deployments and SharePoint upgrades.

* Find Stacy on:Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

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Within the SharePoint community, Stacy is a SharePoint MVP and is actively sharing her real world expertise through authoring in the Focal Point Solutions blog, and speaking at various SharePoint Saturday’s, Collab365, ITUnity, SPTechCon, SharePoint Fest, SharePoint Engage, and User Group events. She also co-authored two books called SharePoint 2013 and 2010 Using Managed Metadata.

It’s a regular struggle between end users and the IT shop: features versus security (and budget, and time, and actual value vs perceived value). The list is actually a lot longer than that, but the general point is this: end users, the drivers for mission success, often feel as though the technical solutions provided to them miss the mark and your Information Technology team feels as though end users don’t understand the unrealistic burden being put on IT to support the business. Sound familiar?

Enter Shadow IT. This is not a new conversation, but when your IT doesn’t, or can’t, provide what the end users need they find workarounds. Share from your personal account. Use the corporate credit card and spend under the limit which requires the procurement team. Heck, just spend the money on your own because that tool is going to save you enough time and frustration that it’s worth it.

But what does that do to your corporate data? Sensitive data shared via uncontrolled toolsets. Stored in “someone else’s cloud”. Unprotected. Uncategorized. Ill-fated to be stolen and used in nefarious ways, if not today, tomorrow.

OK – I’m kind of fear-mongering here, but for a purpose.

If data is the modern-day currency for business success, then not knowing what’s happening to it is absolutely against all better judgement.

In this conversation Hunter and Jay discuss the Shadow IT problem and provide strategies for combatting it – but the focus isn’t on simply locking down your network, it’s understanding the problem and providing solutions that remove the symptoms causing it.

Check out Hunter’s 7 strategies to stop Shadow IT and Joanna Schloss’s Is Shadow IT isn’t going away – and that’s a good thing on CMS Wire.

This week, Craig and Jay invite Bobby Chang, a Microsoft Business Apps Technical Specialist for the US Federal/Civilian market, to talk about DataFlex. DataFlex Pro and DataFlex for Teams were recently announced at Microsoft Inspire and in this conversation Bobby tells us why this is important, not just to technologists, but to end users and the business side of your enterprise.

Microsoft DataFlex Announcement at Inspire 2020

NBA uses Microsoft Teams Together Mode to bring the fans to the games

This Week in Teams Episode 13 – July 27, 2020

This

week saw some interesting market announcements from the industry. Slack is

taking Microsoft to anti-trust

court in the EU. Google announced that Gmail

will continue to be the center of their collaboration strategy. And Zoom

has been surprised by Microsoft in usage stats.

For

users of multiple tenants, frustrated with the web browser profile game,

someone found a hack

to load multiple instances of Microsoft Teams — but neither Craig nor Jay

have tested it. If you do, let us know how it worked!

Microsoft

and the NBA have taken an interesting spin on how to have live games without

fans – and are bringing

the fans in via Together Mode on 70+ foot wide screens! While there are a

number of privacy and security concerns – including, how do we keep trolls from

putting inappropriate content on their screens in a live video share – but this

takes pulling fans in virtually to a new level. Certainly more interactive than

MLB’s cardboard cutouts!

Last

week was Microsoft

Inspire, their annual partner awards festival, and with that came a few

interesting announcements.

For

one, Lists

are officially rolling out in August, and this is a GREAT step forward for

end-user use of the powerful tools in SharePoint.

Next,

DataFlex

was announced as a rebrand

of the Common Data Service (CDS) but more specifically, DataFlex for Teams

was announced as a low-code option for developing some really powerful apps and

bots within Microsoft Teams. We’re looking forward to going into this in a bit

more depth next week with special guest Bobby Chang.

In

other rebranding news, Microsoft

Meeting Rooms are now Microsoft Team Rooms, and with that branding comes

change in administration and integration with the flagship collaboration hub,

Microsoft Teams.

And

lastly, a very excited announcement of the newly released Adoption.Microsoft.Com

– while there is a heavy focus on Microsoft Teams,

This week Hunter and Jay enter the world of Information Management and Information Architecture. Information Management and Information Architecture are key components to the usability of an information system – IM helps you know the processes for managing tacit knowledge, documenting it as elicit knowledge, and finally recording it as authoritative, or records. IA is all about how your people FIND that information, how it’s organized.

To aid in the conversation, Jay and Hunter are very thankful to have solution architects Erin Glenn and Matt Barns to join us and tell their stories.

What is Information Management?

While there are a lot of definitions of Information Management (IM) out there, in our overly simplified definition, IM is the application of processes to identify tacit information (what I know in my head), make it explicit information (information we know and have access to), and finally document it as authoritative information, or records. Every organization has different processes around these types of information, and different definitions as to what information is which type. However, it is these definitions and processes which ensure users have access to the types of information they need at the time they need it.

What is Information Architecture?

Information Architecture (IA) is all about HOW those users access this information. How is it organized? How is it connected? What is the navigational structure? What TYPES of information are there, and where are they stored? What tools are we using to access that information?

All of these questions lead towards the definition of an organization’s Information Architecture and needs.

What did we learn?

Both Erin and Matt came to the same basic conclusion: plan. In Erin’s case, one thing that really stood out was her interaction with the end users in designing their Information Architecture through a card sorting exercise. In Matt’s case, it was the decision to define relevant information for the centralized shared knowledge library, ensuring that corporate knowledge was not only easily found but well curated.

Who is Erin Glenn?

Erin Glenn on LinkedInGoodwill of Central and Coastal VA

Erin is a passionate SharePoint SME that focuses on business solutions in SharePoint. In the early 2000’s, she asked her software development manager how she could get into “web stuff” when she didn’t want to write code and is certainly not a graphic designer. Little did she know that SharePoint was that “web stuff” she wanted to do!

She has been working with SharePoint since 2005 (SPS2003) which includes two large Virginia law firms (Hunton & Williams and McGuireWoods), an IT consulting company, and the Virginia Housing Development Authority. Today, she’s the SharePoint Solutions Architect for Goodwill of Central & Coastal Virginia. She has also co-lead the Richmond SharePoint User Group since 2009. She is passionate about the end user, focusing on not over complicating solutions, such as providing a phased approach. She also focuses on just in time training – giving them just enough information to perform their actions. She performs her own requirements gathering/business analysis sessions and builds the solutions herself with out-of-the-box tools (browser-based) and some third party tools such as Nintex Forms and Workflows and SSRS reports....

This Week in Teams E12 – July 17, 2020

Who are these people, and what happened to Craig?

This week we invited Sven and Matt to talk about their newly released eBook, Rockstar Meetings with Microsoft Teams. Unfortunately, Craig’s internet service provider decided it was a good time for an outage, so he couldn’t join us. Hopefully, Jay sufficiently kept the conversation going without him and you’ll enjoy this discussion on the new eBook and some of Sven’s, Matt’s, and Jay’s favorite features of Microsoft Teams meetings!

Sven Seidenberg is a Microsoft Teams enthusiast and consultant for Bright Skies, based in Hamburg, Germany. He focuses on Microsoft Teams administration and change management. Together with clients, he develops concepts about how Microsoft 365 apps and services can best help their organization work more productively in different ways. He also focuses on automation and digitized processes through the Power Platform. (LinkedIn | Blog)

Matt Wade is an engineer-turned-IT nerd and Microsoft MVP. His career began in the nuclear power design field and ended up in SharePoint adoption, pretty much by mistake. He’s best known for his SharePoint and Office 365 infographics—especially the Periodic Table of Office 365—and advocating Microsoft Teams, AI, and chatbots to automate business workloads. (LinkedIn | Blog)

If you want to check out the eBook for yourself, go download it here!

Also, if you want to hear Craig and Jay’s discussion on Microsoft Teams Live capability, check out Episode 9 from June 20, 2020.