Saturday, December 16, 2023

New Microsoft Teams Client Supports VDI

 Pretty important announcement.  The new Microsoft Teams client app now supports VDI.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/announcing-general-availability-of-the-new-microsoft-teams-app/ba-p/4000093


OneDrive for Business Vision

Back in October, the OneDrive team made an announcement around the next generation of OneDrive for Business - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/unveiling-the-next-generation-of-onedrive/ba-p/3935612

There are a lot of new interesting capabilities and vision that are part of this announcement.  Here are a few of my takeaways:

  • The OneDrive home has been optimized to help you quickly and easily identify or find files that you need to work with.
  • There are several new views like meetings, people, etc. where files and content are presented to you based on how you work.
  • The OneDrive home screen on the web has been brought to Teams and Outlook providing you a consistent way to find your files.
  • There is a vision statement on the capabilities that will become available with Copilot.  Instead of you trying to click around and dig in views, you will ask Copilot questions and it will find and organize information, documents and content for you.
  • Copilot will then assist in sharing documents with coworkers when reading and it will keep you up to date on changes documents that you interact with in a conversational engagement.

Pretty cool.  Keep watching that Copilot innovation.


Saturday, November 18, 2023

New Copilot Features for Teams and Outlook

No…I did not us copilot to write this blog…

There are a ton of new announcements from Ignite.

I found this article on new Copilot in Outlook very interesting: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/outlook-blog/copilot-in-outlook-helps-you-achieve-more/ba-p/3981033

A lot of creative new features that I will need to give a try:

  • Ask copilot to schedule a meeting
  • Get ready for your next meeting
  • Summarize long email threads and get suggested actions
  • Follow a meeting you cannot attend
  • Preserve declined meetings
  • Draft messages that sound like you
  • Summarize an email you are authoring
  • Coach on improving tone and clarity of a message you are authoring

I will definitely need some time to start playing around with these features….

Additionally a ton of Microsoft Teams Copilot features are discussed here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-microsoft-ignite-2023/ba-p/3976670

  • Copilot compose for Teams Chat and Channels…. Copilot will literally change your quick chat into fuller more complete communications
  • Copilot in Teams Channel will help summarize key information in long chats to help you catch-up
  • Copilot Teams Calls can take notes as you are doing direct calls with team members, capture notes and capture all your tasks.  Can even capture questions and activities that need to be competed.
  • Intelligent recap helps you get information from meetings that you were not able to attend.
  • Copilot collaborate notes will take real-time notes, shared with all participants.

Frankly there is so much here, I am going to have to sit down and really start trying to learn how to use all these tools in my day-to-day work.


Saturday, October 14, 2023

Town Halls replacing Microsoft Teams Live Events

Microsoft Teams Live Events is now being replaced by Town Halls in Microsoft Teams.  Live Events has a long legacy at Microsoft, and it was part of an old platform that is not utilized by Microsoft Teams.  Live Events also a different user experience than what users were accustom to in the Teams client.  Live Events will be supported through 9/30/2024.

Town Halls is now Generally Available (GA) and is fully integrated into the Teams app user experience.  Town Halls has tons of features to help you have large virtual events.  New features such as attendee capacity, event concurrency, event duration, eCDN, green room, structured Q&A, attendee reporting, live translated captions, etc., etc.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-town-halls-in-microsoft-teams-and-retiring-microsoft/ba-p/3925739

New Microsoft Teams App is Generally Available (GA)

The new Microsoft Teams App for Windows and Mac has moved from Public Preview now Generally Available (GA).  This has been a long time coming.  One of the biggest objectives was performance with it being two times faster using 50% less memory.  I have personally seen a big difference because running video in meetings used to really tax my older devices.  It is a pretty seamless upgrade and for an every day user like me, with all the capabilities I am accustomed to are there.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/announcing-general-availability-of-the-new-microsoft-teams-app/ba-p/3934603

Monday, September 18, 2023

Multi-Tenant Organization (MTO) for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is now releasing a new group of features that fall under what is called Multi-Tenant Organization (MTO).  Over the past several years, Microsoft has received a significant amount of requests for supporting organizations that have multiple tenants.  Administrators need the ability to provide common configuration and management of users across these tenants, plus enable collaboration between users in these tenants.

Some important features that are part of this are:

  • Side-by-side multi-tasking and cross tenant notifications – This allows a user to be in multiple tenants within a single Teams client user experience. 
  • Improved people search and chat experience – Allows users to find their peers in other tenants and chat with them.
  • Richer meeting experience – Enables full fidelity meeting experience between users in different tenants.

Highly recommend reviewing the entire article.

Reference: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/announcing-more-seamless-collaboration-in-microsoft-teams-for/ba-p/3901092 


Monday, July 24, 2023

Additional Logs to be made available

For the past few months, CISA has been working closely with the Microsoft team to identify solutions that will help US Government organizations and their partners to protect themselves from evolving threats.  In recent announcement is a result of this teamwork.  In the coming months there will be expanded access to additional security logs at no additional cost.  These logs are very useful for forensics and incident response teams examining potential intrusions.  Please read the article for additional information.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/19/expanding-cloud-logging-to-give-customers-deeper-security-visibility/

Saturday, June 17, 2023

Teams Collaborative Notes

Heavy note taker?  “Collaborative notes” is a new interesting Microsoft Teams that was just released for Public Preview. It leverages Loop components to enable collaborate note taking in a meeting.  Meeting agenda, notes, actions, tasks, etc. are developed before or on the fly in meetings.  All meeting attendees can contribute, and all the information is then available across the Microsoft Office suite at conclusion of the meeting so meeting attendees can continue to collaborate. I will give this a try next week!

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/now-in-public-preview-collaborative-notes-in-microsoft-teams/ba-p/3848533 


Saturday, May 20, 2023

Microsoft Copilot Explained!

Great video that explains how Microsoft Copilot works within Microsoft 365.  The video gives a simple explanation of Large Language Models (LLM) and while at the same time leveraging Microsoft Graph to securely access corporate data that a user has access to.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/how-microsoft-365-copilot-works/ba-p/3822755

Monday, April 17, 2023

New Teams Client Public Preview

In March 2023, it was publicly announced that there is a new Teams windows app that is now in Public Preview.  One of the main objectives of this complete re-architecture of the Teams app is to improve speed and performance.  The existing Teams app has had many performance issues, which I have seen day-to-day.  

Another big change is the new Teams app will allow users to simultaneously sign into multiple tenants at the same time.  This has been a critical ask for customers who have Office 365 tenants implemented in different clouds so they can meet their complex organizational data management requirements.

References:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-the-new-microsoft-teams-now-in-preview/ba-p/3774406

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-advantages-of-the-new-architecture/ba-p/3775704 


Friday, March 17, 2023

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Very exciting public announcement.  Microsoft 365 is now being integrated with ChatGpt.  Introducing Microsoft Copilot which is a next-generation AI solution integrated with Microsoft Office.

From the announcement:

  • Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and creates right alongside people as they work.
  • Copilot in PowerPoint enables the creation process by turning ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands.
  • Copilot in Excel helps unlock insights, identify trends or create professional-looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time.
  • Copilot in Outlook can help synthesize and manage the inbox to allow more time to be spent on actually communicating.
  • Copilot in Teams makes meetings more productive with real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of the conversation.
  • Copilot in Power Platform will help developers of all skill levels accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools with the introduction of two new capabilities within Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.
  • Business Chat brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files.

This is beyond exciting and is going to definitely change the game….

Announcements

https://news.microsoft.com/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/


Saturday, February 18, 2023

New Teams Webinar Features

I found this to be a really nice article that explains all the NEW capabilities from Microsoft Teams Webinar that is available in the new Teams Premium SKU.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/delivering-new-webinar-experiences-with-microsoft-teams/ba-p/3725145

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Microsoft Teams Search and Purge

There are times when customers require the ability to purge data from their tenant.  The major services of Office 365 like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online (plus OneDrive for Business) and Microsoft Teams have always had methods for performing permanent deletion of data.  Exchange Online and SharePoint Online have always had capabilities that allows you to do item level data purging.  There have always had ways to delete Microsoft Teams chat data too, however the deletion options of chat item level data was very limited and not optimal.  This is no longer the case.  

Microsoft Teams has a new feature in the eDiscovery Premium SKU that allows you to have item level deletion of chat data.  This feature is now fully Generally Available.  

Please review the links below.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=Teams%2Cpurge

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/ediscovery-search-and-delete-teams-chat-messages?view=o365-worldwide

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/search-for-and-delete-messages-in-your-organization?view=o365-worldwide

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assurance-exchange-online-data-deletion

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assurance-sharepoint-online-data-deletion