New Teams Admin and Management Capabilities

Personally, I have been doing more and more with Teams.  I will admit, making the change from Email to Teams definitely requires some re-orientation and change in how I communicate and share information.  I have to say even I am turning the corner, and the vision is so clear to me now.

With that said, there were some new Admin capabilities released into Teams.

New Microsoft Teams Administrator Roles

• There are four new admin roles that have been created that will provide finer granularity around how Teams are managed: Teams Service Administrator, Teams Communication Administrator, Teams Communications Support Engineering and Teams Communications Support Specialists.
• From my perspective, organizations will have specialists that may be more focused on the group chat features of Teams versus the Phone / PBX features.  This level of administrator definition will allow you to break roles and responsibilities out.

New Admin View

• There is a new all up view that allows you to see every Team in your tenant.
• Within this new view, you have the ability to take actions across multiple Teams from a single view.

New Automate Teams Management
This one I was the most interested in learning about.  There are new management APIs that have been released that allows you to automation around Team and Channel generation.  You can control the entire life-cycle of that Teams generation.  This just super interesting because there is opportunity to some really creative things.  For instance, lets every time new sales lead is created, you initiate a new Team or Channel, and then drive all the users who need to participate in the sales lead to have all their conversation and collaboration directly to that Team or Channel.  Your CRM can generate the Teams or Channel automatically.

Reference - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/New-Provide-a-great-Teams-experience-with-improved-manageability/ba-p/288059

Office Productivity Server 2019

There is still lots of good reason why customers need to deploy Office Productivity Server builds either on-premises or in an IaaS cloud, in a hybrid mode with Office 365.  If you did not see this week, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Skype for Business Server and Project Server all had GA releases of 2019 complete.

All of these builds continue with the investment in hybrid experiences with the Office 365 cloud.  Recommend you read up on these releases and prepare your environments to get to 2019 as soon as possible.

Office All Up announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Office-2019-servers-available-for-commercial-customers/ba-p/275879

Skype for Business Server 2019 What’s New - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/whats-new

Skype for Business Server 2019 What’s Deprecated - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/deprecated - XMPP and Persistent Chat are the biggies.

Exchange Server 2019 What’s New - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/new-features/new-features?view=exchserver-2019

Exchange Server 2019 What’s Deprecated - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/new-features/discontinued-features?view=exchserver-2019 – Unified Messaging is the big one.

SharePoint Server 2019 What’s New - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/what-s-new/new-and-improved-features-in-sharepoint-server-2019

SharePoint Server 2019 What’s Deprecated - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/what-s-new/what-s-deprecated-or-removed-from-sharepoint-server-2019 - Definitions, Access Services, Groove Sync Client, InfoPath Services, SharePoint Designer, PerformancePoint Services, Sandbox Solutions, etc.  A lot of stuff I worked on over the years…

Project Server 2019 What’s New - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Project/what-s-new-for-it-pros-in-project-server-2019

Project Server 2019 What’s Deprecated - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Project/what-s-deprecated-or-removed-in-project-server-2019 - Resource plans, My tasks was some biggies

Disable Ability to create Microsoft Teams / Channels

I have seen a few situations now where customers are looking to transition from Skype for Business Online to Teams, yet they want to initially disable the Teams / Channel capability at the outset.  The thinking is, first transition over some of the core IM, presence, and web capabilities first.  Then later, once that has been adopted on Teams, start enable Teams / Channels.

There is a governance feature you have which will disable all user’s ability to create Teams / Channels.  Basically, you will disable the ability to create Office 365 Groups.  Here is a reference - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-who-can-create-office-365-groups-4c46c8cb-17d0-44b5-9776-005fced8e618

Office 365 Data Delete

I receive lots of questions about how to remove data from Office 365.  There can be lots of business scenarios: for instance, someone leaves the organization and you no longer want to retain data another instance is critical business or mission data needs to be deleted.  If you are looking to build procedures for data deletion, recommend that you review these:

Deleting Personal Data - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-office365#deleting-personal-data

eDiscovery solution series: Data spillage scenario - Search and purge - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycompliance/data-spillage-scenariosearch-and-purge?redirectSourcePath=%252fen-us%252farticle%252fediscovery-solution-series-data-spillage-scenario-search-and-purge-d945f7dd-f62f-4ca7-b3e7-469824cfd493

Teams is Ready to replace SfBO, start your planning

There was an important announcement last week that Teams had completed porting over capability that is traditionally delivered in SfBO.

Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Microsoft-Teams-is-now-a-complete-meeting-and-calling-solution/ba-p/236042

Start your planning now!  Recommend you start reading here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/Microsoft-Teams

SharePoint Server 2019 Preview

SharePoint Server 2019 is now in Preview and available for customers to try out.
Investments for SharePoint 2019 are in:
1) user experiences for desktop and mobile,
2) scalable collaboration platform
3) institutive user experience.

There is new integration with PowerApps and Flow from the cloud.

Expanded support for hybrid configuration with SharePoint Online.

Integration with the new SharePoint Framework.

SharePoint 2019 will be going GA before the end of CY18.

Announcement and References - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Announcing-Availability-of-SharePoint-Server-2019-Preview/ba-p/214427 - Instructions are here to obtain the Preview.

Free Microsoft Teams

There was a big announcement by Microsoft Teams.  Microsoft Teams is now being offered in a Free version worldwide.  This capability is intended to provide Microsoft Teams to small businesses and groups of users who do not have access to an Office 365 subscription.

This new free version of Microsoft teams allows you:

• Collaborate with up to 300 people.
• Audio and video calling.
• 10 GB of file storage
• 2 GB per person of personal storage
• Office Online
• Ability to communicate with other organizations using Teams

Anyone can use this free version of Microsoft Teams.  However, if you use an identity that is associated to an instance of Office 365, the user will be routed to the Microsoft Teams user experience managed by Office 365.  

References
Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Introducing-a-free-version-of-Microsoft-Teams/ba-p/214592

Comparison - https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/free?ms.officeurl