3 tips that made me rock Microsoft Teams during COVID19 lockdown.

 It′s four weeks ago, since I′ve been working from my home office with several tools that should increase the collaboration between the teams internally and with clients. Besides the classical tools and services like TeamViewer, the VPN tool and Azure Bastion, Microsoft Teams improved the way we work a lot, when well configured.

During the past weeks, I′ve frequently worked with Microsoft Teams for example as Consultant, supporting my clients to get ready to use the service, as a Speaker to tell interested people how this tool can increase their productivity or as an end-user, collaborating with my colleagues or customers in different ways. 

 When talking about Teams nowadays I would describe this tool more like a modern workspace than as a tool for collaboration (which is a functionality in my eyes included in such a platform). A workspace, where I can actively work with my collaborators on the same documents (co-authoring), create polls to receive feedback on my ideas, or to bring a smile while sending a funny GIF to my customers.

 In this article I want to share with you my four lessons learned during the past weeks and hope that they might help you too!

 #1 - Live Events

As some of you might have seen, besides my work as a Consultant I also speak about the technology I love most in front of my clients and colleagues, such as Microsoft Teams. During the April we′re going to offer more events to you, so if you′re interested register to one of the free live events provided in French, English and German here: https://lnkd.in/dBs7_dq

The answer to the question, which tool provides the best platform for us to hold such live events was - what else? - Microsoft Teams. To enable this feature, you need to implement a change from within the Teams Admin Center (Link: https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/) to get ready to stream Live Events to outside your organization.

 In this Admin Center, select Meetings > Live Event Policies and create a new policy, which will be assigned to the persons in your organization that plan and hold such events. The important thing, while configuring an existing or new policy is, to set the "Who can join scheduled live events" option to "Everyone". After certain hours (the process can take up to 24h) your users will be able to plan and execute a live event from their calendar. 

 The first thing to do is to switch to the user's calendar and select "+ New meeting", afterwards select "Live event".

Now you need to provide your planned meeting a name, add other information and presenters to this appointment and click "Next".

Now you just need to select "Public" to start the public streaming from your specified date. Additionally Teams offer the possibility to record and present the session to your attendees as well as to deliver engagement reports or start a Question and Answer session.

Click schedule once you′ve finished the specifications for your first Public Live Event in Microsoft Teams! 

#2 Stay updated on upcoming feature announcements

As the utilization of Teams is increasing rapidly (some people talk about an increase of 775%), the functions which are coming are also very exciting and I′m curious how they will improve the way of working furthermore. Those features are interesting me the most for the upcoming feature updates:

Background Blur for iOS

As we′re going to use the video and conference call functionality a lot nowadays, the background blur, which is a feature already available to the desktop/web client version will come to iOS devices very soon. The point why I mention this feature at position 1 is, because privacy is a very important point and to keep the focus while talking to each other. While benefitting from the beautiful weather and having a phone call will not highlight any other persons or the garden in the background, it will keep the focus on the persons who′s participating in the phone call - a great feature for on the go! What do you think? 

(Image from Microsoft. Source: https://gxcuf89792.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/178022iFE38628B882D306B/image-size/large?v=1.0&px=999 - Last accessed 13.04.2020) 

Bookings app integration into Teams

The Microsoft Bookings app offers the possibility to easily schedule appointments with external participants over Teams which could be used in multiple scenarios like job interviews, visits with your doctor, consultations with your IT company as well as a simple meeting with external people. A customized appointment scheduling e-mail will be sent to the customers where they can join the Teams meeting. Great feature, especially for those who need professional consultancy without taking the risk of going outside.

(Image from Microsoft. Source: https://gxcuf89792.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/177878i76E2E44A4F4A4697/image-size/large?v=1.0&px=999 - Last accessed 13.04.2020) 

#3 Office 365 Groups (also Teams) naming convention automation

You′ve always wanted to manage a structured hierarchy of Office365 Groups in your Microsoft 365 / Teams ecosystem?

I′ve been asked so many times how to get organized in Microsoft Teams and where to get started and maybe the following feature will help you to simplify the process of a unique pattern while creating groups. Based on user-defined attributes like Department, Company, Office, State or Province, Country or Region or the Title of specific people in your organization you can create a pattern to keep a single naming convention for Office 365 groups in your tenant.

 If you′re interested in the full details, here is the link to the documentation article (Link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/groups-naming-policy), the following steps describe how I did it in my demo tenant: 

1. Log in to the Azure Portal while redirecting to the following link: https://portal.azure.com
2. Enter your Administrative credentials to Access Azure Active Directory
3. Select "Groups" on the left-hand side
4. Select the naming policy and click on the "Group naming policy" in the center area of the screen.
5. Now you′re able to define the attributes and the way future groups should look like, so that your users/administrators just need to type the name of the group. Let′s have a look at my configuration below. 

6. Once this policy is applied it can take up to 60 minutes or more until the policy is active. And if your users want to add a new group or basically a "Team" in Microsoft Teams the result will look like this: 

While keeping updated on new features that are coming next and the possibility to support customers from any kind of business Microsoft Teams still keep me very curious.

I hope the tips mentioned in this article might help you too, rocking Microsoft Teams for your environment.

Stay safe and healthy and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me via PM at any time.

Cheers,

Patrick