Last Week in Microsoft Teams: Week of January 18th

Jeff Brown

Updated: 1/29/2021

Direct from Microsoft

The Microsoft Teams blog released several articles this week:

• Approvals in Microsoft Teams, Now General Available: The Approvals app enables Teams users to create, manage, and share approvals directly within Teams.

• 8 new productivity hacks for frontline workers, managers, and IT: Teams is an excellent tool for frontline workers and includes functionality like tasks, SMS sign-in, shared device management.
• Getting to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business Server and hybrid configurations: With the retirement of Skype for Business Online later this year, Microsoft is making a case for Skype for Business on-premises organizations to use Microsoft Teams to make a transformational impact on their users.

Microsoft has released PowerPoint Presenter View for Microsoft Teams into Public Preview. Presenter View allows presenters in a Teams meeting to view the current slide, slide notes, and a thumbnail strip for all the slides in the deck. To take part in the public preview, you need to configure your tenant to allow preview features for your users.

This week, Microsoft released a Microsoft Teams Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Playbook. The playbook takes administrators through how to protect sensitive information as it interacts with Microsoft Teams.

You can now enable Azure AD access reviews for guest users across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 groups. Access reviews are enabled automatically for new Teams and Groups that have guest users in them. This feature is in public preview and requires an Azure AD Premium 2 subscription.

The OfficeDev GitHub repository released a new Teams app template called Ask Away. The Ask Away app allows a host to gather questions for a Q&A event from Teams channels and chats. As team members submit questions, colleagues can upvote these questions, and Q&A managers can generate a list of the most popular questions.

Community Contributions

Vesa Nopanen has a very detailed write-up on creating your own Teams Meeting apps with Power Apps. Creating a custom app that can integrate with Teams meeting shows how extensible the platform is. Tom Morgan also covers how to do this in his article on how to turn a Teams tab into an in-meeting sidebar.

Fabrizio Volpe documents how to ensure you have the right admin permissions when the Set-CsUser cmdlet wasn’t available to him in PowerShell (hint: make sure you are assigned the Skype for Business administrator role).

Jeff Schertz outlines how the new device pairing works in Microsoft Teams. He covers proximity join between devices and Microsoft Teams Rooms devices, Better Together functionality between phones and desktops, and Teams casting from mobile devices to room devices.

Mike Tholfsen has a quick YouTube video showing how to add the new shared Channel Calendar app to a Microsoft Teams channel. This app will show the current channel’s meeting in an Outlook-styled calendar. The app is added as a tab to the channel for easy navigation. Tony Redmond also has a write-up on the new app.

Upcoming Events

Teams Community Day is hosting a free community on Thursday, January 28, 2021. You can register for the event here.

Road Map and Message Center Updates

Road Map: OneDrive: 250 GB file size support in Microsoft 365

In February 2021, users can upload large file sizes into OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams.

Road Map: Microsoft Teams: Teams casting from iOS Teams App + Road Map: Microsoft Teams: Teams casting from Android Teams App

Users can use Teams casting to wirelessly connect their mobile device to a Teams Room to display content. Users can display their screen and cast content stored locally on the device or content accessible from Office 365. Microsoft is scheduling the release of this feature for May 2021.

Road Map: Large gallery view and Together Mode for web meetings in Edge and Chrome browsers

Users joining meetings using Edge or Chrome browsers can change their meeting layout to Together mode or Large Gallery. Microsoft is scheduling the release of this feature for February 2021.

Message Center: Microsoft Teams connector apps webhook URL security improvement

Microsoft is transitioning Microsoft Teams webhook URL format to enhance security. The new webhook URL will contain the friendly short name for the tenant. Teams using the Incoming Webhook app will see a prompt to migrate to the new configuration. Microsoft is notifying users to update their webhook URLs starting January 11, 2021, and existing webhook URLs will continue to work for three months to allow for migration time.

Message Center: Introducing history menu in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is adding a history menu in the Teams desktop client. The history menu will display recently visited locations and can be found by hovering over the backward and forward navigation buttons. Microsoft is rolling out this feature starting in early February 2021.

Message Center: New usage report for Microsoft Teams in Microsoft 365 admin center

Microsoft is releasing a new report named Teams usage activity. The report shows tenant-level aggregates and per-team level details. You can view the new report by navigating to the Microsoft 365 admin center > Reports > Usage. Microsoft is rolling out the new report starting in late January 2021.

Tip of the Week

Have an email with information that you want in Teams? Send it to a Teams channel! You can learn how in this Office support article Send an email to a channel in Teams. Or check out the video in this tweet from the @MicrosoftTeams account.