Category: Modern Work

#MSIgnite, the Microsoft Ignite 2020 – did it again. The big and beautiful Microsoft tech and developer conference delivered again tons of announcements, news and information. In this post I am focusing on Microsoft Teams related news.. and I am not trying to list all of them but ones I see the most essential + a few picks from the roadmap that make sense in this context. There are some “old” news with updated schedules and then again I did left some out in purpose. And this is still a long post – If you are in a hurry check out news marked with  and come back later for the rest.

When there are new interesting announcements or additional information later I will update this article to include them as well. So please come back again.

As always, it is good to remember that roadmap dates are “best estimates for release product group can give today”. They are subject to change but they give idea when features can be expected to start the rollout. For currently known estimated schedules (23rd of September) I listed all roadmap dates to a summary blog post to make it easier to have a one-glance view when these can be expected to be available for users.

Of course one important link to keep on checking is the M365 roadmap for Microsoft Teams in development and rolling out features – including several of these: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=In%20development%2CRolling%20out%2CMicrosoft%20Teams

Microsoft Ignite Books of News can be found here: https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/ for all announcements in Microsoft Ignite 2020

Microsoft Teams will support teams up to 25k members later this year! I just leave that there because it will be enable the use of Teams in larger organizations than before – without a need to break the organization to smaller teams. Thinking about other releases like PowerApps for Teams, Pinned posts, Home Site App and others it enables to use Teams as a platform – or ‘operating system’ for daily info work. In some organizations this will lead Teams to be the main internal social media when team structure (channels, context, tabs, apps, use of business processes) is built smart and lasting way.

Together Mode was a success when it emerged during the summer. It has helped to fight the meeting fatigue already since it is refreshing and I can see everyone at one glance. On top of that it can be also fun since you can high-five your friends and useful since raising your real a hand is very nicely visible in the Together mode. Now this gets better since it gets new screens: new auditorium, conference rooms or and even a coffee shop. Together mode will also be enhanced with a feature that automatically scale and center participants in their virtual seats, regardless of how close or far they are from their camera. Release schedule is later this year.

The other greatly anticipated features was been real Breakout Rooms and they are coming out really soon: October!

Breakout Rooms allows meeting organizer (the one who created the calendar invitation) to split meeting participants into smaller groups by creating breakout rooms. Teams can distribute attendees automatically to rooms. The organizer can then start rooms and visit any one of those or make announcements that reach out every room. When rooms are closed all attendees are returned to the main room.

Custom Layouts make meetings look better via enabling dynamic experience. Presenters can enable different views where both video and content are visible at the same time – including overlaying video on content or prioritizing video while moving content box to a corner. For example, they can choose for participants to see the presenter’s video feed transposed onto the foreground of the content being presented on screen. This feature uses the same AI segmentation technology employed by background blur and Together mode.

This makes it possible to create more versatile and interesting presentations with just Microsoft Teams – without having to use other tools, like OBS Studio for example, to manage the stage. Custom Layouts are coming later this year.

Meeting Spotlight is already rolling out to tenants! Spotlight allows a presenter to choose the video camera that is shown to all attendees. This differs from “Pin camera” in a way that pin camera was a personal setting while Spotlight affects all attendees.

Create tasks from chat and channels, will available in the next few weeks. This feature has been awaited since Microsoft To Do came out. It allows to create tasks right from any Teams chat or channel conversation. Select More options on a Teams message to choose Create task and track in the Tasks app.

Customizable Praise badges, now rolling out, enable organizations to customize employee praises with custom branding. Admins can customize Praise in Teams Admin Center

Meeting Recap brings post-meeting experience to the new level by bringing in together all relevant meeting information like the recording, chat, shared files and for example transcript in the details tab. You can also download attendance report from this screen.  Live captions with speaker attribution is now rolling out and will be also part of the meeting recap. Enabling the meeting transcription is a great way to automate note taking – when the meeting is in English.

Meeting recap is coming this year.

What is also change is how meeting recording is stored and managed. In the future (scheduled to be released later this year) meeting recordings will be stored in OneDrive or SharePoint site. This enables to manage recordings just like any other file allowing permissions and sharing (external sharing! Hooray!) , retention policies, governance, immediate recording availability right at the meeting end much more. Since recordings will be files in OneDrive/SharePoint they are also included in the search.

Large meeting support is a bit of old news already but we got more details out. The Teams meetings supporting 1000 interactive participants is coming by end of this year. And meetings exceeding 300 interactive users can scale to support 20 000 participants in a view-only mode with live captions. This overflow meetings is rolling out soon . Both these capabilities are included only with Advanced Communications add-on.

Registration and engagement reporting, in other words webinar support, is coming to Teams! This includes new attendee registration process with automated emails and it will make it really easy to organize webinars and events when this rolls out! It also includes a reporting dashboard to post-meeting insights and attendee engagement analysis.

Also the Q&A is included in the attendance report.

Scheduled for release this year.

Teams Templates are now rolling out! This updates the team creation experience and allows Teams admins to manage templates & their structure that are available in the organization by defining channels and apps. New templates can be created by selecting an existing template or building a new from the scratch.

Info Pane emerged earlier this autumn but now Pin Posts and the New Conversation button are rolling out to Teams. The New Conversation should reduce the number of accidentally created new threads when users see better the difference between reply and creating  a new thread. Pinning posts allows to attach specific posts to the info pane so they can be easily opened later and important information (like vacation list or after-work activities or even project information ) is not lost when the channel has active conversation. To take fully advantage of pinned posts the info pane should be open – but it is just a touch of the button to open or close it so as usual: make Teams to suit your needs and don’t be ok with defaults!

This month also sees the rollout of Suggested replies on Teams mobile. AI will create and suggest short responses based on the context of previous message.

The Teams Search is dead! Long live Microsoft Search for Teams! We all had our difficulties and anger moments with Teams search (while it did grow to be better and usable during years) but that will be soon a thing of the past when the new Microsoft Search is released to Teams later this year. This allows a better and more smart searching experience. When using Microsoft Search from Teams it is focusing on Teams vertical only. But that is not all – you will be able to search Teams (& Yammer) conversations from SharePoint (Conversations-vertical)! This is a small step for… No. Let’s rephrase: This is a giant leap for both users and Teams.

SharePoint Home Site App for Teams will connect your SharePoint Home site / intranet to Teams! Unlike those versions done with App Studio “Teams-ready solution” this app fully supports navigation in SharePoint sites. And that is big because organizations can start using Intranet from within Teams – and they can use it via browser as well. This truly makes Microsoft Teams SharePoint and they are #bettertogether. One giant leap to users and towards using Teams as the primary operating system for work. And yes, it is fully branded as well! Coming later this year.

Insights app in Teams (Wellbeing and productivity) is coming to Teams starting in October. It will get new features like virtual commute and integrations with apps like emotional check-in experience during first half of 2021. Visit https://Aka.ms/ProductivityAndWellbeing  to learn more.

Yammer notifications will come to Teams activity feed when you are using Yammer Communities app. This way you will get Yammer notifications even when you Yammer app is not open. On top of notifications Teams users can search for Yammer conversations using Teams search bar!

Tagging by shift allows Teams messages to be targeted to recipient groups based on their role (tags) and the shift they are working – such as tagging or sending a message to every nurse, doctor or security personnel on duty. Users are automatically assigned to tags based on their Shifts app schedule. Rolling out in November.

Walkie-Talkie is now available on Android.

Off-Shift access controls, rolling out in October, will let admins to configure Teams to alert employees when they accessing Teams app on their personal device outside of working hours.

Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) is getting a Meeting room capacity notifications warning message. MTR Analyzes data using meeting room cameras to count the number of people in the room and if the count exceeds the capacity defined for the room by admin a warning message is displayed.

Coming soon: Coordinated meetings with Teams Room and Surface Hub using proximity or one-touch join this enables both devices join the meeting simultaneously with Teams Rooms running audio and video, while Surface Hub is automatically muted to avoid any distracting feedback. During the meeting Teams Room is used to show attendees in the meeting gallery, while the Surface Hub is used to show content or to conduct a collaborative whiteboarding session.

Another coming soon for in-room participants will be able to control Teams Room and collaboration bar devices using the Teams mobile app. The new room remote experience enables users to mute and unmute the room, adjust audio volume, turn cameras on and off, and exit the meeting. Wireless casting will be enabled to any Teams Room, collaboration bar, and Surface Hub. Beginning later this year, voice assistance will be enabled for Microsoft Teams Room devices, allowing in-room participants , in US, to ask Cortana to join and leave a meeting, and add a phone number or participant from the address book to a meeting. Read more from Meeting Room Experiences blog!

Intelligent speakers were also shown in demo sessions with mention they can identify who is speaking in the room and that information is used in Live Captions/meeting transcription to speaker attribution. Currently there isn’t much information available about these devices.

Microsoft Teams Panels is a new category of devices for Teams but we have seen similar panels from other vendors to be used with different solutions: these can be mounted outside a meeting room to easily view upcoming reservations, see availability or to reserve the space for example. Building Floor plan is a catchy new feature there to help booking a another space in the office using “Nearby rooms” feature to find a empty room.

This is expected to pair with Teams Room device but it will work standalone as well with ordinary meeting rooms. First panels will come out from Crestron and Yealink early next year.

To help you get started with transforming your meetings rooms, Microsoft, with support from specialized meeting room partners (like Sulava https://en.sulava.com – my employer! ), can help qualifying customers deploy two Microsoft Teams Rooms at no additional charge. Customers can learn more at rooms.microsoft.com or be in touch with us at Sulava directly. Beginning October 1st Teams Rooms will be added to the FastTrack benefits!

There are also lots of improvements to Teams Calling experience. First one is the upgrade to new Calling view and Collaborative Calling that connects a call queue to a channel in Teams. Users can work at the channel while taking calls in the queue.

Admin and Development news and announcements

Bulk policy assignment allows admins to apply policies in batched of up to 50K users.

Line-Of-Business (LOB) Teams app catalog with organizational branding.

Enterprises want also keep the data secure. Customer Key support is coming to Microsoft Teams as well. It is similar to what is already in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive: adding a layer of encryption with organization’s own keys when data is at rest in Microsoft datacenters. Public preview starts at the end of this year.

Microsoft Graph API for Teams Data-Loss-Prevention (DLP) is rolling out. This allows developers to build apps that can listen to Teams messages in near-real time to enable DLP scenario implementations and it also allows applying DLP actions to Teams messages.

Microsoft Graph API for Teams Export allows the export of Teams messages (1:1 and group chat) along with attachments like file links & stickers, emojis, GIFS and user at-mentions. API also supports polling daily Teams messages and allows archiving of deleted messages up to 30 days. This should help with various archiving scenarios.

Resource-Specific Consent (RSC) team owners are empowered to install an RSC-enabled app for their specific team and restrict the app’s scope and access to data to only that one team, without needing the global IT admin to provision access. RSC allows apps to create, rename and delete channels; read channel messages; create tabs; and read team membership and settings. RSC are now available on the Graph API beta and will become generally available soon.

Single sign-on (SSO) through Azure Active Directory for Teams apps. Developers can build their apps to sign-in their users using the same account they are using to sign into Microsoft Teams. SSO support for tabs is generally available and support for bots and messaging extensions are coming soon.

Updates to Adaptive Cards for Microsoft Teams include design improvements, universal actions and cards, contextual views, and security & compliance. Design improvements include full-width cards, information masking, and incoming webhook support. Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance capabilities are extended to Adaptive cards, including eDiscovery and information protection & governance. Coming soon / this year.

Meetings extensibility with apps in meetings will allow developers be able to integrate their apps into Teams meetings and create scenarios that have deep awareness of the meeting context — including roster, roles, and permissions. I will explore this further because it enables to integrate meetings to be part of business processes via apps and also connect meetings to a context like customer, project or person in a new way. This will bring meetings to the next level in the experience that benefits from these capabilities. Great apps to integrate with meetings are, for example, polls – yes Polls!, CRM or human resources (interviews).  Generally available in October and there are more than 20 launch partners who have been integrating their apps to these new extensibility points already.

Read more from the blog post.

Power Platform in Teams highlights

Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents are coming! Now in public preview, generally available release is estimated to roll out at the end of the year. These will include embedded Power Apps and Bot creation studios inside Teams. During spring 2020,when I started to discover amazing capabilities of Power Virtual Agents, I didn’t think that the intelligent conversational bot creation would become possible from within Teams! But of course the ability to create Power Apps, with relational datastores with rich data types, from Teams is even more important to businesses. Better together applies in this as well. And these solutions can be published to Teams app store to be used off the shelf or customized to specific needs. And the sugar on the top: Power Virtual Agent bots can identify the user who is interacting with them and thus allows personalized and user-context dialogue and actions.

With Power Apps for Teams it is possible to create innovative apps that interact with team in channel.

Read more from Power Apps blog post!

The new Power Automate app for Teams, coming later this year, is a rebranded and enhanced Flow app. It offers an enhanced set of templates to automate work in Teams, along with a new designer  experience that makes it even easier to get started building. Additionally, we will be rolling out new ways to automate work, including actions like creating a Teams meeting, as well as additional entry points such as message extensions and message actions.

And looks at these new Power Platform logos!

And it looks like the team has had some fun too! 

Approvals in Microsoft Teams via Power Automate will become generally available during October. This is great since it allows creation of approval processes based on a team and not a single person (who is often a bottle-neck).

Enhancements to the Power Bl App for Teams will make it easier to use and review Power BI data from Microsoft Teams. The new app rolls out by the end of year.

Something missing?

Read more from Microsoft Teams, Power Apps and other Microsoft blogs.

+ Virtual Hub

And there is always something more. This time it is the reminder to go ahead and visit the Virtual Hub!

This is the place where you can keep on learning and enjoying Microsoft Ignite for more. It is not just about Microsoft Teams but about all things Microsoft 365.

This blog was originally posted at My Teams & Office 365 Day

vesanopanen
Vesku on toiminut yli 20 vuoden ajan erilaisissa asiantuntija-, konsultointi- ja valmennustehtävissä. Hän on Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Vesku on erikoistunut Office 365:n ja Microsoft Teamsin tarjoamiin modernin työn ratkaisuihin, mutta kokemusta löytyy monista erilaisista toimialoista ja teknologioista.

Teams live events are streamed and scheduled one-to-many broadcasts with up to 10 000 (temporarily max is 20 000 until October 1, 2020) attendees whereas the maximum meeting attendees for regular Teams meeting is 300.

When considering the suitability of the live meeting for your need it is important to know that two way communication is achieved via Questions & Answers (Q&A) -functionality without two way audio or video possibility. Hence Teams live events can be utilized for example for large audience webinars, trainings, announcements or informative staff meetings. Live event producers and presenters require Teams desktop client. For producers and presenters Teams web client or mobile app is not supported.

There are many similarities but also subtle differences between regular Teams meeting and Teams live event. We have collected the top 10 tips and tricks (+ 1 bonus) for succesful Teams live events. We have concentrated on the most important nuances and tasks requiring your attention in order to deliver succesful live events.

For everyone

1 Practice makes perfect. I know it is a cliche but still this tip applies to even the most experienced Teams meeting expert there is. Invite a colleague or two and create a couple of practice Teams live events while rotating roles of organizer, producer, presenter and participant before your actual real live event with hundreds or thousands of attendees.

For organizer

2. Enable feedback channel with Q&A while scheduling the event. Most of the live events benefit from possibility of two way communication.

For producer

3. Learn the power of mute button. Producer can mute the presenters but producers can’t unmute them! It is important to realize that everything that is shared by voice during the live event is broadcasted to attendees. There is no private voice channel for production team. If private communication for production team is required the teams meeting chat is the only option. Make sure that everyone in production team reads meeting chat. Be clear and vocal when the broadcast is about to start.

4. Have Plan B and backup slide.

• Have alternative internet connection i.e. 4G ready to use.
• Problems with live picture? Create speaker slides. If there are any problems with the picture, you can show a slide “Now speaking..” with the speaker picture and name + title. You can also use these slides every now and then just to inform your users who is speaking in a big organization.

5. Create structure slides to show before the event and during breaks. “Event is starting at 08:00. Please wait” and “We are on break. Event will resume at 12:00”. This way you have something informative to share after starting the live feed but before the event has actually started and also during the breaks. The event attendees are informed what is happening and when. The leading slides can be trimmed from the recording afterwards with Stream.

6. Changing live video from one to another is not instant. It can sometimes take up to tens of seconds. Take this into account when planning your live event. Avoid really fast camera changes. You can also tackle this by using “now speaking” slides or by using third party encoder instead of Teams Live events default encoder.

7. Breath and stay calm during the live event. If live event deviates from the plan that is not the end of this live event nor does it ruin the attendee experience. In case something doesn’t go as scripted just recover and resume the live event. And remember whatever you do, do not end the live event prematurely! That is practically the only mistake you can’t recover from. Once live event has ended it is really over.

For presenter

8. Have patience and share you presentation only when it is your turn to give presentation. If you start sharing during other presentations and ignore the warning message you will interrupt the ongoing presentation.

9. Q&A: There is approximately 10 second delay between the presentation and attendee experience so keep that in mind when asking for attendees for questions.

For attendee

10. Enjoy the live event from desktop (no Teams client required) or mobile (app required). Use DVR (Digital Video Recorder) controls to rewind, pause and resume if necessary. Utilize automatic subtitles and translation if enabled by the live event organizer.

+1 bonus tip: Choose a quiet space for the whole duration of Teams live event where you won’t be interrupted. Otherwise you could share the fate of this gentleman Children interrupt BBC News interview – BBC News.

What’s new on Teams – welcome to our webinar!

Teams and Teams live events are constantly evolving and getting better and thus it might require some serious effort to keep oneselves up to date of all these improvements. For learning the theory and practicalities behind all these improvements I would recommend you to register and participate in Teams Spotlight webinar by hosted Microsoft MVP Vesa Nopanen. See you at the webinar at 1st of September!

Webinar in Finnish on the 4th of September

Writers: Tomi Kontio, Marko Rosberg

Tomi Kontio
Consultant. Tomi on koulutukseltaan filosofian maisteri tietojenkäsittelytieteestä ohjelmistotekniikan koulutusohjelmasta. Aiempaa työkokemusta on yli 10 vuotta eri rooleista IT-projekteissa vastuualueina mm. digitaalisten palveluiden käyttöönotto ja jalkauttaminen organisaatiossa, palveluiden jatkuva kehittäminen ja ylläpito sekä loppukäyttäjien kouluttaminen. Projekteissa toimin asiakaslähtöisenä teknisenä konsulttina. Usein on tarpeellista toimia myös IT-Suomi-IT -sanakirjana eri sidosryhmien välillä. Sähköposti: tomi.kontio@sulava.com

As we all know, COVID-19 is forcing people to stay inside, to work remotely and the world is facing situation we have not seen before. Now it’s definitely time to rethink remote work policies in every company. Luckily, the technology has been ahead of time, and we don’t have to invent new tools to manage remote work. If your company doesn’t already have Teams for employees working remotely, we have a solution for you – and by the way, it’s free.

Did you already know that there´s also a free version of Microsoft Teams?

Because Teams is a cloud-based application, you can get the benefits of it literally on any device at anytime, anywhere. You only need proper internet connection. The Teams Free doesn’t include all the features compared to paid Microsoft Teams. Anyhow, with free version of Teams you can support your team members and start to collaborate in online meetings, chats and channels.

Ok, how to get Microsoft Teams Free?

First you need to follow the link. Scroll down nearly to the bottom of the page until you see “Get Microsoft Teams for your organization today” and then click “sign up for free”.

After this, enter the email address you want to use for Teams. I recommend using your business email for this, if Teams is going to remain in use in your company. In the next section choose “for work”. Do not use “for friends and family”, it will sign you up in Skype. Teams is better than Skype, trust me!

After this you will have to insert other requested info (name, company name and country or region).

When you are done with these you can start to use Teams. I recommend you to download the application by following this link.

First step after downloading is to sign into Teams, and then invite people from your organization. Invite people by clicking “invite people” from the bottom left. After this you will have three options to invite people:

 

• By sending the link provided by Teams manually to the people inside your organization
• Invite people from your email contact list
• Inviting people by adding email addresses to a form that opens by clicking “Invite by mail”

After your done with these, I recommend you to check out this cool video made by Microsoft of how to get started with Teams Free. With Teams Free you can help your teams to accomplish more and faster with simple file sharing and online meetings—all accessible anywhere.

Now it’s your time to create a collaborative workspace for your employees and use channels to keep your team organized. Proper playbook and good ways of leading are the keys to situation where all the information needed is easy to find with the latest data available to everyone who needs them when using Teams. And this is the point where Sulava can help you to get all the benefits of Teams.

In my next blog, I will write more about why proper playbook is the key to success when using O365 and Teams.

Ossi Ågren

Nobody disagrees that COVID-19 is something from our worst nightmares – there’s nothing fun about full hospitals and people losing their jobs and life savings. We should all do our part by staying at home and minimizing all social interactions. However, this doesn’t have to be boring or mentally burdening – in fact, you can keep most of your daily routines with fairly minor tweaks, not to mention finally getting those things done that you always wanted to but never got around to doing until now. Read some tips below and share yours in social media to help others!

Socializing while social distancing

Meeting your friends, extended family or connecting with lonely elderly people has never been this easy – no need to fix your schedules weeks in advance, travel or think of a reason to call someone you normally wouldn’t. During the quarantine it’s completely acceptable to suggest a video call to that relative or neighbor of yours you never normally talk to and the call doesn’t have to take more than 5 minutes to delight the both of you. Technically it’s no more difficult than having a normal phone call – for example with Microsoft Teams you can do neat video calls with others, and it’s available for any mobile device for free.

Going online can level up even those meetings you have with your best friends or closest colleagues! Take a quick game session in the afternoon to boost your energy levels before the last work tasks of the day. For example, Pictionary and other drawing games can be played with the white board feature of Teams and you can enjoy Trivial Pursuit with polls.

Also, watching reality shows and commenting them online is a surprisingly fun way to spend your evening with friends. Even house-warming parties and baby showers have been proven to work, with just a little bit of creativity.

Personal development

Have you always wanted to read more, join a book club, accomplish a certificate or two or perhaps start meditating? So have I! Now’s your perfect chance to make room for any goal in your daily schedule – that’s actually all it takes. Decide to go for a walk every morning, evening or during your lunch break and listed to an audio book, or start your every working day with 10 minutes of meditation. There are plenty of mobile apps available for both of these routines. You can make reading even more fun and motivating by setting up a monthly online book club meeting with your friends.

It goes without saying that during these times most seminars and trainings have also gone online, and now you can even participate in that one training that would have otherwise been too far away from you in terms of distance. Some of these might even be available for free now due to savings on venue, food etc.

Exercising and sports

Now that all the gyms are closed, you can save money and travel time by doing home exercises. Most gyms offer online classes for free or against a small fee. It’s super easy to arrange and join one also with Microsoft Teams and there’s practically no limit on the number of participants. Personally I have now fallen to yoga and mobility online, which I normally neglect in real life.

There are also numerous super cool apps and services available for specific sports online, like Zwift for running and cycling and Peloton for any cardio. And don’t forget about keeping it simple by walking and running outdoors!

Have a date night with your special one

One could easily assume that all the days are the same at home, but you can even arrange a date night with gigs, live music and fine dining without physically moving a meter. For instance, Helsingin Sanomat offers live ballet, opera and concerts online and your can party at Berliner underground clubs from the comfort of your couch.

Keep your local restaurants afloat and save yourself from cooking by ordering food for your date night. Even the nicest fine-dining restaurants now serve multi-course meals with home delivery to be enjoyed in candle light – and this can also be done online in case your date is in another location.

Smooth transition from Tinder to Teams

For singles, the quarantine can be harder or at least lonelier than for people surrounded by family or roommates. Just the thought of chatting in dating apps for months without meeting your promising candidate may sound quite burdening. But hey, not to worry! This can also be turned to your advantage by immediately suggesting an online date instead of just conversing in writing. This way you can more quickly see who really has the potential and is worth the wait throughout the quarantine.

To sum this up, there is practically nothing in real life you can’t keep on doing online. And you should, for the sake of your own mental health, for people around you, for economy and the whole society. See a clip from a Pictionary game we had with colleagues. The game was played in a Teams meeting using Whiteboard-function.

Playing Pictionary with Microsoft Teams

Karoliina Partanen
Karoliina Partanen (ent. Harjanne) toimii Sulavalla Chief Experience Officerina (CXO). Hän vastaa asiakaskokemuksen viemisestä uudelle tasolle niin tarjooman kuin asiakas- ja työntekijäkokemuksenkin näkökulmasta.