Direct Routing with Microsoft Teams

If you are looking to learn about what is Direct Routing with Microsoft Teams, recommend you start with the references below.  Direct Routing allows customers to bring their trunk and then use a certified SBC to integrate with Microsoft Teams.  You have the ability to host the SBC yourself or do partner hosted SBCs.

References
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Direct-Routing-is-now-Generally-Available/ba-p/210359#M1277

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/direct-routing-plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N478Sq1v7Ss

Terms of Use with Office 365

There is a new capability in AAD that is available Terms of Use which a lot of Office 365 customers may want to utilize.

An organization will want users to accept a Terms of Use agreement to access their environment.  The Terms of Use solution can:

• Required all users accept a terms of use agreement to access Office 365 services.
• There is a new feature that can be used for B2B scenarios for such services SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams.  If you invite in an external user that is on AAD, that external user will be required to agree to a Terms of Use.

This is awesome because I find tons of customers who want this type of capability.  Here are some other features that are part of this.

• Can require users sign it once or every time they access.
• Can associate a Terms of Use document that is organization specific for users to review.
• Require users to expand and scroll through entire terms of use before accepting.
• Can expire the Terms of Use agreement after a specific amount of days or associated a frequency for when they must accept the Terms of use.
• Can enforce Conditional Access policies against the Terms of Use policy.
• Access to reports of who accepted and declined a Terms of Use.
• Works for browsers and mobile device scenarios.

Here are some detailed articles about this capability.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Azure-Active-Directory-Identity/Updates-to-Azure-AD-Terms-of-Use-functionality-within/ba-p/294822

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/governance/active-directory-tou

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