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 

Cross Cloud Guest Access Features

Two new features are now available for Public Preview.

Cross Cloud Guess Access

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/solutions/collaborate-guests-cross-cloud?view=o365-worldwide

Cross Cloud Meeting Access

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cross-cloud-meetings

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/

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 

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

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 

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/

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

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