The Teams admin center now includes the ability to create template policies to control the set of templates shown to users when creating new teams. It's a small but important change that allows organizations to show only the templates it wants to users instead of being forced to show the set of default templates created by Microsoft. New templates are automatically included in template policies.
Microsoft has released several improvements to Teams meetings to make these gatherings more functional and easier to use. The features range from giving video feeds priority in the gallery view to reactions in meetings to allow participants to show what they really think about a presentation. It's all grist to the mill in the battle for corporate online meeting domination between Teams and Zoom.
The new Teams Approvals app delivers simple workflow capabilities built on top of Power Automate and Dataverse. The simplicity is attractive and makes the app very easy to use, but maybe it's a little too simple to handle the kind of workflow scenarios proposed by Microsoft. It will certainly be interesting to see how tenants use the Approvals app in their deployments.
Microsoft currently offers people the opportunity to talk to them about the challenges of managing Microsoft 365 Groups. I spoke to the Groups developers on February 18 and brought five requests to the table from dealing with group creation to cleaning up group debris.
Microsoft announced a revised plan to switchover storage of Teams meeting recordings from Stream to OneDrive for Business. The July 2021 switchover will happen for all tenants. In some respects that's a good time of year for a change like this because everyone will be on vacation and much too busy to join and record Teams meetings. At least, that's the plan. What could go wrong?
Nearly seven years after the introduction of Office 365 Groups, Microsoft has finally admitted that tenants might just have a problem with "group sprawl." In other words, tenants have too many underused or unused groups because the groups have been created without oversight and not managed thereafter. Microsoft wants to discuss the problem with tenant administrators. Practical365.com thinks this is a great idea and strongly supports the initiative to get a handle on group sprawl once and for all.
Insights is one of the four modules in the Microsoft Viva Employee Engagement Platform. The Insights app for Teams surfaces the same information as MyAnalytics for most people, but more is coming when the Wellbeing module is delivered or when people have access to the management insights available through Workplace Analytics.
Microsoft posted an announcement about a new Teams Pro license last week and promptly confused everyone. The clarification posted a few days later didn't help too much either. Here's what we know about Teams Pro and how we think this new licensing capability will be used.
In this article, MVP Steve Goodman explores whether having too many Microsoft Teams meetings impacts productivity at work.
Microsoft Teams rolls out Background Effects. MVP Steve Goodman explains how you can set a custom background using it.
MVP Steve Goodman demonstrates how to create an all company Team for better communications and to enable cross-department comms
In this article, MVP Steve Goodman explains what the Teams Exploratory license is and how you can use it in your environment.
