In this episode, Craig and Jay discuss the top 12 Gifts of Teams – oh – we cover 12 categories of Teams with a recap some of the top releases of 2020, mixed with some of the classic features of #MicrosoftTeams and why they’re still so important.
The 12 Gifts of Teams covered today included:
(02:37) – 12. Teams Enabled Devices – What are they and how they are beneficial to users.
(04:19) – 11. Teams Rooms – Coming to conference rooms near you to better enable an immersive Teams experience.
(07:13) – 10. Calling Features – The ability to have all your calls through Teams, not just a phone.
(09:08) – 9. Video Conferencing – The ability to put a face to a voice or multiple voices, together mode, transcripts, and live captioning
(11:51) – 8. Teams Live Meetings – The ability to hold and manage large webinar type events.
(15:00) – 7. Office 365 Platform Integration – Bring the Power Apps and Power Automate into Teams and making it a more powerful platform for development.
(17:46) – 6. 3rd Party Apps – Integration with hundreds of apps such as Jiram Salesforce, or Twitter.
(19:57) – 5. Search Filters – Easy, but often overlooked ways to find information.
(22:12) – 4. Security & Compliance – One place to manage the security of Teams using sensitivity labels, retention policies, and data loss prevention.
(22:38) – 3. Sharing with External Users – How to share externally and the difference between external users and guest users.
(33:53) – 2. Collaboration – Working with others on files and get work done without multiple emails or multiple copies of the same files.
(36:41) – 1. Discussions – The backbone of Teams by allowing easy communication among team members through threaded discussions.
(41:42) – Wrap-up and Closing – are normal awkward finish and wish you a Happy New Year’s!
Full Transcript
Jay Leask 0:01
weaken teams, December 27, Christmas has come and gone. And Craig and I are very excited to bring you the 12 gifts of teams. Most of the new features that affect end users and some of the old, old but true ones that really make an end users day that much better. Anything we missed? Let us know in the comments.
need to go get a drink before we start?
Craig Jahnke 0:44
No, I’m good. But we’re already started. We’re
Jay Leask 0:46
recording now. Yes. And and I’m not sharing my screen, right? Yes, man. What a week. So. So this is. This is the second time we’ve recorded this episode. And the last time, I mean, we recorded it, it was kind of kind of funky, but we recorded it. And it was ready to go for Christmas. And I went to do the editing. And I just had a giant screen like nothing like not have anything of value. just literally my background. I was sharing it. And when you record in teams that gets the priority. Yes. So what what happened, like what was like, well, you went
Craig Jahnke 1:24
to show me something, and then you never switch back. And I’m looking at him going well, maybe it’s going to just record him because I don’t know how teams works.
Jay Leask 1:34
It’s only our jobs.
Craig Jahnke 1:36
And mostly I was looking at like the show notes to make sure that we kept on right. So that was covered most of the screen and you were down there and little I could see it. So who knows?
Jay Leask 1:46
Well, I’ll tell you what, man, we clearly, I don’t clearly we don’t know Microsoft Teams was a disaster. But here we are. I’m hoping. Today’s December 27. And we’re recording our post Christmas episode where we cover where we cover the 12 gifts of teams, mostly from this year, some really great things that came out in 2020. But of course, some of the basics as well, to make sure we really like from an end user perspective, mostly, you know, what are the 12 most important features of teams, I guess?
Craig Jahnke 2:22
Yes. So that’s what, but you want to kick us off? That’s not really what we’ve kind of talked about. So
Jay Leask 2:27
isn’t it what we talked about?
Craig Jahnke 2:29
Well, it’s the 12 categories, because there’s a there’s a boatload of there’s a boatload of features that we’re going to cover.
Jay Leask 2:35
All right, well,
Craig Jahnke 2:37
number 12 teams enabled devices, I don’t know what that actually means. No. Teams enabled devices. So these are devices that are certified to work with teams. Right, right. Oh, like microphones and cameras and stuff.
Jay Leask 2:52
Yeah, and like we talked about in the last episode there. The The key here is, these are the these are devices that because their teams enable their team certified, you get a bunch of specific things like frame rates and audio quality features. But I think my favorite part about that is the fact that you get the guarantee that there is the ability for firmware updates. So as Microsoft team’s capabilities expand, the hardware manufacturer can send updates out, and if it’s a software based update, they can update the hardware so that it better matches Microsoft team’s capabilities.
Craig Jahnke 3:29
Yes, so that’s, that’s important because, well, everything gets updated all the time. Now, it’s not like, you know, five to 10 years ago, where you got a patch every three years or patches every month or something like that. So important to have the latest and greatest. And both the software and the hardware and all that good stuff going on.
Jay Leask 3:46
And with the team’s enabled devices towards the latter half of the year towards the last couple of months, they they announced the team’s companion devices. So we saw the Lenovo device and I think a couple of others that are more or less tablets, but specifically designed to work with teams. So I would love to play with one but at their current price range. It’s out of my my wife acceptance factor list.
Craig Jahnke 4:15
Amazing how that happens.
Jay Leask 4:18
So all right, so number 11, kind of going in that same vein and and and it’s interesting, because it’s gotten a lot of publicity. But in a year where almost everybody in the knowledge space is working from home this concept of teams rooms.
Craig Jahnke 4:34
Yes, so that’s actually pretty cool. And that was something that was expected to have a lot of traction this year, last year this year. But will we expect going forward is the team’s room. So like the conference room set up with teams enabled devices to be that full functioning conference room where we have the Microsoft Surface or similar type of device on a wall, big, flat screen TV type of thing with touch capabilities, where you can go up and run your teams meeting be able to switch between devices like your laptop, or the the empty bar in the little council app that are not console app, but the council so that you can control who’s coming in and scheduling them and having different cameras having different speakers. So having that fully teams integrated conference room is something that should be very cool. And I have seen videos, I mean, I saw them like at Ignite and things like that, where they eventually will get to like almost holodeck experience. Right? So I don’t know how in the future that will be. But you know, just so be able to sense where you are, and maybe put do like a little image of somebody. You know, I’m not, I’m not calling for someone. But, and I think he talked about commercial you’d seen?
Jay Leask 5:52
Yeah, yeah. So there’s that there’s a commercial going on are not a commercial, but a application of a green screen, where in the sports world, they had a broadcaster in a green room. And then they had four other broadcasters around a desk, and they were able to beam them in to be five people, the desk using the green room technology. So I mean, I can imagine where this technology is going, if you haven’t had a chance to see a team’s room, you know, I’ve been able to give over the last couple of years, some workshops at the Microsoft spaces, and the technology they have put in there from the service hubs, to the drop mics to the ability to really get those mics, synchronizing with the speaker phones, all of those capabilities. Like I’m really excited to see what that looks like in a team’s room enabled workspace. So just who knows when we’ll actually get to take advantage of it right.
Craig Jahnke 6:42
And I can’t remember who I saw on Twitter. But there’s a couple geeky people, right? Imagine that geeky people on Twitter, who are setting up their own teams rooms in their houses, right. So that you don’t have that experience just to practice with and you know, have that full experience. So
Jay Leask 6:58
they don’t have you doing that yet,
Craig Jahnke 7:00
they Well, I’m supposed to be able to do that I’ve just not done it, I have the empty RV I had the device, I just haven’t. I’ve had a lot of things on my plate going.
Jay Leask 7:12
So speaking of working from home, the next two categories of features, numbers 10, and nine calling features and video conferencing. From a calling features perspective, this is pretty cool. This is something that I’ve been taking advantage of in Microsoft Teams for a couple of years now is the ability to have an actual phone number and use voice over IP technology to utilize in teams instead of a desk phone. Right. And with that, if someone calls my phone number it rings, my desktop, it rings teams on my mobile. The the switching capability is really nice. There’s been some really great features over the last year with call merging and voice and or transcript enable voicemail, some really cool stuff. They’re pairing with that, of course, the video conferencing side.
Craig Jahnke 8:02
Yeah, some some really nice features. Sorry. I got stuck with what I was going. Also some network improvements. You know, I assume that they work really well. The One of the nice things about or one of the interesting things about everybody working from home and right as we don’t have to worry about the network being able to support all the loads of everybody in your office is. So that will be interesting to see if there gets some complaints when people move back to a fully, fully, fully using teams in an office setting where you have 1000 people and how the bandwidth can hold that I know that we get asked a lot about doing network advisories and making sure that everything goes out and we have some when you’re doing like team live meetings, which will come up later. How do you handle like hundreds of people that are potentially 1000s of people inside one building? I’m streaming all that video. And there’s some ways that we go around routing that like you have a server that it all comes into the server and the server just distributes it internally into the network so that we can not take down your entire network. So that’s pretty cool.
Jay Leask 9:07
It’s very kind of you on the video conferencing side. There are some really cool things that came out this year. breakout rooms are huge in the education space. Custom backgrounds, like you can see Craig and I doing here. The together mode, which we just talked about last week where we talked about whether or not there’s value and yeah, I think ultimately we both agree there’s there’s some for some value for some so at least Yes. And then the we talked about transcripts and voicemail that the live captioning especially when you when you’ve got you know when you’re trying to include as many people as possible. The ability to provide live captioning is just fantastic.
Craig Jahnke 9:49
So yeah, and what did I see I had a company that was was loading it up early in the stream, well it kind of it so they would do the video they were gonna do a live event but they wanted to Have, they want to have translations available. So they got load, they actually made the video early, loaded it up in stream and got a translation for it, because they would load it up and say, hey, I want to use Japanese, right, and then grab that, translate that transcript and pull it up. And then when they were doing the Live Meeting, they could distribute the trends, and the translations to all of those, yes. Easiest way for them to do that. So that was actually kind of cool. I meant something to you that you had not heard of. But when you schedule a meeting, there’s a place for you to add files to it. So yeah, that even when you do it in the chat, and it loads it into that same, that same folder, or OneDrive file or it. So that’s what I take advantage of, because I do a lot of workshops with some of my clients. I will upload the agenda and the exercise files and stuff ahead of time so that they have the ability to go in there and pull them out.
Jay Leask 10:52
Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. And then, of course, the very important feature for project managers for teachers, the mute all except me option.
Craig Jahnke 11:03
Oh, yeah. So
Jay Leask 11:04
that you can make sure that if your group gets a little rowdy, you can bring him back down and get the get the conversation going in the right direction. Yeah, I’m still
Craig Jahnke 11:14
good. For me, the participant list is huge. Right? Having that on the side? And now the ability to be able to download that afterwards.
Jay Leask 11:22
Yeah, yeah. So you can see lots of stuff in the video conferencing calling space, and eventually the team’s room space that are all really interrelated. In trying to help organizations be more productive, whether you’re in the same office or not.
Craig Jahnke 11:39
We could have done a 12 days of a 12 of just that. 12 steps of video conferencing and a 12 step program. Is that what we’re doing no, something like that? Yes, I think
Jay Leask 11:50
so. Which which, of course leads to, you know, the next piece of that being teams live meetings. So we just ran a conference for 1000 register, it’s about 500 attendees. And we mixed both teams, live meetings and video meet or regular teams meetings, giving us the ability to have more than 300 users in a single event for your team’s Live Meeting. Having that built in QA, people being able to pause or rewind and teams live and it because it’s directly recorded in the stream, some really cool stuff there. And of course, which we don’t use, because we don’t record it with teams, live meetings, but the ability to connect to third party production, software, and really do professional style broadcasts. These are very often used, I mentioned at events, my office uses them for our monthly town halls, some really great capabilities. And you can have something like I want to say you can have more than 20 of these running concurrently an attendant if that’s correct.
Craig Jahnke 12:56
Ah, no, I thought it was 15. But
Jay Leask 12:59
okay, is it 15? It’s still I mean, it’s, I can’t imagine many scenarios where, where a more than fatal organization would break that number.
Craig Jahnke 13:08
No, yeah. So they have to be a huge conference. Yeah. But no, uh, yeah, yeah, really good stuff there. I think what I like best about live meetings is, you know, as an organizer or a presenter, and that you have that you have that meeting for those people. So you’re really just dealing with like, a normal team’s meeting as far as that goes, if I didn’t know any better as being a presenter or an organizer. So I have my chat, and I can chat with the people that I’m organizing with. And then we can have the QA as a managed chat. So as people ask questions, from there, we can decide which ones we want to answer, which ones need to be set aside which ones we want to add or privately, privately, which ones we want to publicly answer. So those kind of things are really beneficial when you kind of do that. And then the ability to, you know, publish, what you’re wanting to present, and then have a queue for the next available item coming up. So really good way to manage stuff. And it works really well. And it goes up into the cloud, and it kind of gets distributed that way, you know, so, yes,
Jay Leask 14:11
yeah. So it’ll be interesting to see what comes in the next 12 months with relation to these to this feature, as well, as they’re trying to get more and more organizations, for example, through 2020, Microsoft’s own advice was if you need to be able to track registrants to particular events, or particular sessions than you then you might want to consider using a different tool than teams. But you know, Microsoft doesn’t like sending people to use other tools. Not for very long so I imagine we’ll see a lot more from a marketing perspective being able to track leads etc. With with tools like teams live and even teams meetings in the near future.
Craig Jahnke 14:55
Yeah, that should be I think that’s coming but I haven’t so visual on that.
Jay Leask 15:00
So that leads us to numbers seven and six, which I think when we recorded this last time, we went out of order six being the office 365 integration across across the Microsoft 365 platform, and seven being apps, specifically third party apps. Where do you want to start? Craig? Um,
Craig Jahnke 15:24
let’s start with the Let’s start with the Office 365 integration. So one of the big things that I talked about it is, you know, you have the waffle there in teams, and you have the ability to, to integrate with the power platform, which is huge, right? So yeah, it has been the latest announcement, really. So bringing power Power Apps into the studio and like power app studio, right into teams, so I can develop my apps. And with the data verse back end, I can have a little two gig database, I think I’m gonna have almost a million rows in that, right. So it doesn’t have to be just using SharePoint as a back end of that. So I can I can, I can do things a little bit more database relation, relational database ish. What I’m doing that we can also publish it a lot easier to a team we can do things with, we’re also there’s a flow. We’re not Flo Sorry, I forgot what we’re talking about power automate, I can bring that in. there’s a there’s a little ID for that. And power virtual assistants also coming in. So there’s, there’s development right there. And then it integrates seamlessly. Well, with OneDrive SharePoint project, we’ve seen that the ability to add tabs, bring in the first party apps. So that kind of brings in the apps in that. And then we have profiles from Azure Active Directory, which we can leverage pretty easily in teams.
Jay Leask 16:42
Yeah. And you mentioned integrating with SharePoint. So earlier in the year, they announced the ability for organizations to change the left navigation of your team. So you could actually push out with global policies, like a link to the internet. And then later in the year, they started to talk about additional SharePoint integration, which which is good, because one of the conversations we have most regularly is what is my information architecture? And how is it? How is it affected by the existence of teams, most people think about information architecture, specifically relating to the navigation. And it’s really hard when you’ve got 10 2050 teams that you’re a member of trying to figure out that navigation. So the fact that Microsoft is starting to bring those features into Microsoft Teams, load SharePoint pages, and other things, be able to change that the left nav, I think those are some pretty big features that we’ll see expanded, as Microsoft tries to, you know, integrate more,
Craig Jahnke 17:44
right. And then just talking about apps and the third party apps, I mean, I think they’re up to over 300 now that integrate with them. So really cool, some really cool things, some of them are free, some of them require purchases, but you know, or licensing there. So that gets a little bit tricky when you’re trying to manage that. But still some really cool integrations with some really cool stuff. And if you need it like JIRA, or Salesforce or Twitter, for marketing, any of those in there, you know, just have to have them available, and have your IT people sign off on them. So that you can you can take them, publish them, pin them to the side rail, they work really nicely with teams. So keeping you giving you that one place to access all your stuff.
Jay Leask 18:29
And and for our government customers or our government listeners, that is late December news that the ability to sideload apps in the GCC and GCC high environments, it has been released. And that’s huge for organizations who don’t want to have a third party app store per se, but they do have apps that they’ve developed for their own processes that they want to be able to integrate sideloading lets you install those apps and push them out to your staff. So for cut for organizations who sell to the government like avepoint, we’re excited because we’re finally able to push our tool out to those customers and for organizations who develop a lot of things themselves that that capability to integrate through third party apps, even if it’s your own party. That’s big. Another one that I’m interested to see more about over the next few months is this concept of teams certified apps. There are not a lot of them. I know we’re looking at the process right now. But they’re Microsoft has recognized that you know that this, the certification of applications, makes it easier to use them makes it easier to convince it so they have released a certification and I’ll be interested to see that expand more. I don’t have a lot of details today. But I’ll be interested to see that expand more over the next six to 12 months. Cool.
Unknown Speaker 19:53
I will be interested in that as well.
Jay Leask 19:56
Alright, so going into our top five For the year, are top five gifts of teams, I suppose this was what we’ve called This is search filters. And I love talking about search filters. Whenever we’re having tips and tricks for new hires or something like that, I’m always called upon to talk about this. So if you search in teams, there’s some things that you may have realized. There’s not it doesn’t seem very intuitive, it searches across all messages or files or people, but not much else. So a couple of things worth noting is, first, the fact that you can filter those. And the fact that when you filter, first thing you can do is in chats or activities you can look for on read things. But also if you if let’s say you’re in an a chat, or I’m sorry, if you do a search, you can actually filter by channel by team, by who posted it by a date range. So there’s some really great capabilities in there. The thing I learned this month, is, let’s say you’re in a chat, you know, Craig and I are having I know Craig and I have been talking for years. In Microsoft Teams, it’s hard to find something I’m looking for, if you’ve ever tried to scroll back over six to 12 months worth of chat, it’s very hard to find something even but if you go back
Craig Jahnke 21:15
two to three days,
Jay Leask 21:18
if you Ctrl F now within a chat, it searches within that chat. And that keeps the context there too. So it’s really we’re just seeing a lot of capabilities of growth in these capabilities that I think is really cool.
Craig Jahnke 21:32
Yeah, I would just like to see them highlight the chat a little more. I mean, they talk about it, but the filter, like if you don’t know it’s there, I don’t think that you see it, like, Yeah, when I pointed out people are like, Oh, I didn’t know that. I could do that. It seems obvious once you find it, because it’s right in the upper left hand corner. But the fact that you can actually click on things, I don’t know why, to me, it just it’s not been an obvious feature.
Jay Leask 21:55
Yeah. Well, and and once people know that the symbol is a funnel, because you start with a lot and you filter it down. It’s not quite intuitive. But once people realize that’s what it is, you’re absolutely right, it becomes part of their daily practice. So, so pulling away from the end user perspective for a little bit, because most of what we’re talking talking about really is focused on them. You know, Craig, when we were doing this list, you really wanted to talk about security and compliance center.
Craig Jahnke 22:24
Yeah, I think it’s it’s one of the biggest features about teams that actually office 365 or M 365. In general, right? Because the The good thing about Microsoft 365, is they give you the cert, the security and compliance center. So one place shopping to kind of manage all of your security and compliance for the entire m 365. Which obviously includes teams, which is one of the big things when people go to teams is they’re like, how do I secure it? How do I make sure we’re compliant. So the the effects, you know, the so we can have retention in there, we can manage retention, similar to leave the I can’t even talk today. So similarly to how we’re already doing SharePoint how we’re already doing OneDrive, we’re already doing exchange, we just need to add teams to IT teams, chats and channel messages. And the same thing goes with data loss prevention, because those rules are very similar. You know, we can look for what we call sensitive information types, social security numbers, passport numbers, driver’s license numbers, financial information, credit card numbers, if there’s not, I mean, it comes with like 88 different types of what we call sensitive information types. But if you don’t have one that you like, you can create a dictionary, you can create one with a regular expression, you can create a key word one. So there’s ways to create sensitive information types. And then you can use those for DLP rules, you can use it for retention, you can use it for sensitivity labels. And then what the the important things with the sensitive information or sensitive, the sensitivity labeling, is it sensitivity, its sensitivity, right? Then I can start creating my teams and say these need to be private, these can be public, and if they are private, then these can only be these should only have internal people in there. And I can classify them at different levels similar to the Azure Information Protection labeling, so they work hand in hand or can work hand in hand with that. Now,
Jay Leask 24:22
I’ll say on that I, I appreciate what they’ve done. They’ve definitely enhanced by by mixing sensitivity labels with Microsoft Teams and replacing the old classifications which really didn’t do anything. They definitely enhanced the security profile for teams. However, by tying it to the user, rather than to a business purpose, I still think we’re missing something here. So for example, it What I mean by that is, you know, Craig, if you are granted a policy that’s different than what I am granted, and we’re both owners of a team, then we can set the sensitivity differently. It doesn’t matter what the purpose of the workspaces. So I think if you’re if your organization is looking at sensitivity labels, they need to look at exactly how they’re laid out. And, you know, if it’s a single sensitivity label for all users, no problem. But the minute you start adding different policies for different types of people, you have to recognize that that means there are now workarounds to your security potential workarounds to your security policies,
Craig Jahnke 25:28
I believe that you can set that up. So at least there’s an alert if it changed. Yep. So now
Jay Leask 25:33
the other the other thing that you talked about here is the informational boundaries. I thought this was pretty fascinating.
Craig Jahnke 25:39
Yeah, informational boundaries are pretty cool. I’ve been getting asked about this a lot lately, but because we get some clients who are in the financial industry, and they have traders, right, they have people who are working in the market, and they’re making trades on a daily basis. And they should not according to the SEC, and you know, federal regulations be contacting being in contact, and working and sharing information with people like marketing or sales. So sure, informational boundaries, let’s just really put up that that wall like between them, so that they can’t go back and forth and share information and almost treat them like they’re external to the company or a little sub device subdivisions, informationally within the tenant itself, so that those groups cannot talk, there has to be a two way street, I can’t just set it up and say, Hey, the SEC, people can’t send it to marketing, but marketing can send to them. So right that has been getting more and more traction from from my clients. And then there’s also been as we just rolled out, communicate compliance, communication, compliant communications, or communication, okay. So basically, we’re scanning, we’re scanning how people are communicating via email in chats to look for key words, like a dictionary word or bad words to kind of flag that earlier, because a lot of the ways that you find that is through discovery or content searching afterwards. So somebody somebody complains about, hey, Jay has been saying bad things in the chat in an email he sends to me Yes. So that I go to a thread pulls that up. But the the, the compliance communication monitoring flags that are we’ll look at, we’ll look at the the emails and things going by for keywords for bad words, and those kind of things, you can set up your own rules, and it’ll flag it and send a report. When that is actually happening. It does take depending on how you set it up, like as a percentage of what’s going through, so it doesn’t look at every email, but it’ll say like, let’s let’s grab 5% or so just to make sure. Or if I know, or if I’ve gotten some complaints that, that perhaps you are sending stuff, I can say, Okay, let’s monitor Jays email for a little while. And kind of catch that proactively as like I said, the, the content searching or the E discovery type of searches tend to be more retroactive, right? Somebody complained about it. Now we got to search and see what’s there. So they work hand in hand, but you can get a little bit notification earlier. So a lot of that is good stuff, like I said it. And it’s all there in a security compliance center, and can be set up pretty easily, and all managed in one place, which is different. So where I see other customers having this this issue are not our customers, right? We’re other organizations complaining about it. They’re using Dropbox, they’re using Gmail, they’re using zoom. And they can’t manage all that in one place, or it’s a big pain.
Jay Leask 28:34
Yeah, no. And so the key here for our end user listeners, is there’s a lot on the back end to make sure you are able to collaborate safely with the right people. And I’m really interested to see more about the informational boundaries. And that that last thing, he talked about the compliance what was that the
Craig Jahnke 28:56
compliance community communication compliance? Yes.
Jay Leask 28:58
So I’m interested to learn more about those two features in particular. But but it’s it’s good to know that these controls are there, to make sure the that your organization can protect the data that that you are working with it. Also, it’s good for end users to know that those features are there simply because they’re going to affect the policies that allow you to use the tool. So if something isn’t working, the way you expect it to, it may be related to a policy. And knowing a little bit about that makes it a little bit easier to communicate to it to communicate security, what you’re trying to do and why and how what they’re doing is affecting that.
Craig Jahnke 29:36
And that becomes really important as we move to the third gift of teams sharing with external users.
Jay Leask 29:42
So we’re in the homestretch our last three, sharing with external users. There are three ways we’ve talked about this before but I feel like it’s so important to understand. So first of all, you know, you’re working in your tenant, you’ve got your co workers, your project members, your your department, team members, Right, and you want to share with Bob from your vendor. And and the way you do that is threefold. If you want to message with them, you might do something called external access, this is your traditional Federation, there are whitelists, which say only these domains can be can be external have an internal access, there are block lists, which say these domains cannot have external access. So it’s everybody, but the. And then there is a, there’s just open Federation where you can anybody in office 365, that is in your Azure Active Directory capability, so commercial, and then GCC, high, etc. Then they, they can look for each other. And it’s fantastic. One of my favorite stories of the year was one of my account reps, who I said, How are you getting this information that you’re sharing with me the screenshots look like they’re from teams, but you’re talking with one of our customers? He said, I haven’t sent them an email in 12 months, what are you talking about? They were they were whitelisted, he was able to communicate with this customer live using external access. So that’s the number one, the first option. The second option is guest access. This is when you let somebody into your home, you give them a you get let you you kind of give them a key, they can come into your teams, the teams that they’re allowed to the key only works in certain rooms, that kind of thing, you know, so basically, they can collaborate in your team. And in any other team they’re invited to. And this is what most people think of when they think of external sharing is, is bringing someone in sharing documents, etc. The the gotcha to me is the third way, which is the SharePoint, external access, external sharing via SharePoint. And this is when people don’t think about this is the one that’s been around for years within SharePoint. But it kind of gives you a backdoor to share if team’s Guest Access is turned off. But your organization hasn’t locked down SharePoint sharing, then you get you have that backdoor capability. It is not, it is not recommended to do this. But it’s important for people to know that it’s there. Because if you do share something externally, then people in your team may not recognize that something is shared with people outside your organization. And this is a prime way you could have serious data, data spills.
Craig Jahnke 32:35
Yeah, I usually see it the other way around, they share with the so they’ll turn on guest access and let you share with it. But forget to turn on external sharing with SharePoint or OneDrive. And then people are like, it can’t share a file. Why can’t I share a file with the people in my team? Yeah, because that’s in and then the other important thing to know. So we’re talking a little bit about admin rights is for guest access, if you want to allow list or blacklist for that, that is outside of teams and x actually maintained in Azure Active Directory. So um, you know, external access, I can do that right in the team’s admin at Admin Center. They’re moving that for guest access into the team’s administration center, but it’s kind of hidden, and you have to go through a little bit of a hot and fine if you don’t know where it’s at, it would be hard to find, well, yep. So
Jay Leask 33:23
so. So that’s sharing, there are those three ways I’ll share I wrote an article about this earlier in the year, not a lot has changed. The one thing that I think is changing is the integration between external sharing and SharePoint and guest access in teams, I think I think we’re gonna see more and more. connectivity is not the word. I’m looking for integration between those. So that is less dumb, more dummy proof, I guess is the way I would phrase it. Yeah. So in our last two, I think this goes very much to the basics of teams. I don’t I don’t think we’re going to talk about much, much that is 2020. This is what does teams give you and and in my favorite here is is the collaboration across organizations, but specifically on documents and getting files out of email. Yeah. I remember two things from my consulting days. One is people would install tools in Outlook, to capture your email when you sent it and save the file to your SharePoint. But with no, no metadata, no information about just move the file there, which it was a first step in CO authoring. It was a first step in making sure that files are shared in the right way. Right, but it really was a mess. And I think the fact that not only can you do co authoring and teams have your origin information organized, based on the team, based on the channel, etc. But then in Outlook, when you go To send an email, you can attach a file that you’ve been working on in office 365 working on in SharePoint or OneDrive. And, and when you attach it, it pops up that informational boundary of saying, hey, do you want to attach the file or a link to the file, which, again, this isn’t necessarily team’s function, but the back end of SharePoint Online and, and the use of teams has really enabled these capabilities.
Craig Jahnke 35:23
Nice. I agree with that. So
Jay Leask 35:25
yeah, and, and the other story for my consulting days was was with regard to this book boss concept. So we used to write a lot of proposals. And you know, you’d have three to six weeks to write this proposal. And I’d say five or six business days, spread out across the the proposal writing period were specifically designed so that a book boss could receive the 20 different iterations of edits and combine them so that they could then send them out and get 20, new new edits like this, this, the CO authoring has really saved, what that looks like. And the fact that now you can see not only what has someone edited, but where is their cursor right now and live watch them type. Like it’s really cool.
Craig Jahnke 36:10
Yeah, nothing like the old days when you used to go in and see project proposal, underscore, j, l, three, one, v two, V three, and then CJ to eat.
Jay Leask 36:24
My favorite was final underscore, j, l underscore the date underscore final number two, I’m like, Okay, guys, you don’t, this isn’t this isn’t working.
Craig Jahnke 36:34
That was where naming conventions were important. And they still are. But we’ll just we’ll talk about those in another day. Well, that leaves us with the final gift of teams that I think that kind of get wrapped into the CO authoring and being able to do that, but discussions. So the ability to actually have a team and have one place for all that discussion to go on, whether it’s in a channel, but keeping that that organizational knowledge. So as people come in and out of your team, they can go back and look to see what’s been talked about. It’s threaded. Now it’s threaded, it didn’t necessarily used to be that way. So I could respond to a specific thread. Before it just kind of was all as you put it in there, we have the ability to just type what we want to type or we can click on the little a button with the underscore on it, I believe, and it pops it up. So I can add a title to it. I can format it like much like Word. So we have all that kind of rich x text editing. Everybody loves gifs, and GIF, ease and stickers and embedding images, I think that’s all cool. And the app mentioning so if I specifically want you to look at something, I’m going to mention you if I need everybody in the team to look at it, I can do the whole at General, I can do that team. So that’s, that’s great. And for me, that’s really important because I’m in so many teams that I can manage them. So if somebody doesn’t ask me, so that shows up in that activity part, I am not going to find that for days, right, I may eventually wander into the team, but my boss said, Look, if you want me to answer something, you got to ask me or you got to add our team, but I yeah, too busy with my clients to just go back through our channel and see if there’s anything there. And yeah, I guess
Jay Leask 38:23
I was just gonna say like, from a like, allow me to beg for just a second on on proper etiquette of teams, use the subject lines, and make your conversations threaded in your channels. For my sales teams, every conversation has to have a subject and and our our naming convention, speaking of naming convention, is if it’s an opportunity related conversation, name the subject of the thread the same as this as the opportunity name and CRM so so have some conscious thought as to how you use this and and provide that education out and like you said the app mentions my senior leadership team has been very straightforward. If you don’t have mentioned us, we don’t know the conversation happened. And that’s fine. But if you need us you have to add mention us. I’m so so consider those capabilities for from a team’s etiquette perspective. And if you’re an administrator, let me also implore you leave gifties and stickers on there. silly way for people to express their personality and their emotion. When words don’t always do it. Don’t remove them, please. There’s no reason to remove them.
Craig Jahnke 39:43
I have seen a lot of people do that. I mean, the people that I have seen it, do it. They also delete the chats after one day. So
Jay Leask 39:51
yes, yes. Which Okay, I get it. They’re industries where this makes sense. But the power of teams is not doing that.
Craig Jahnke 40:00
Yeah, no, no, I get it. I really discouraged against it. But there are like, Yeah, well, at most I say just create, like certain teams that you can’t do that but or groups, put people in groups, but don’t do it for your entire organization. And then the last part, I guess, the last one of the last things that come out actually came out this year, which was a private channel, saying
what I said,
Jay Leask 40:22
so you’re saying the partridge in a pear tree is private channels?
Craig Jahnke 40:25
Yes, partridge in a pear tree is private channels. And what was what really channels is being able to take that sub, that sub group that we have, so if we have a project working, and only you know, we have some financial information about the project, and only the project managers, and maybe the business analysts need to know about, we can put that into a channel and they can have those chats all day without having to start up a new team, right. And then the rest of the team, like the worker, bees don’t really care about that. And what doesn’t get talked about often with that is when that first came out, it was just kind of out there, you had teams, private channels, but really no control over them, as far as data loss prevention or discovery. But that has been since fixed and retention. So like I said, originally, when those were launched, you could do retention, you could do data loss prevention, and you could do e discovery in teams, but it was in a private channel. That’s kind of it’s no man’s land. But we’ve been able to catch up on that and make all of those features available in private channels. So now going back to user doesn’t need to know, it doesn’t need to know how it works. But they need to know that it it can be your data secure, and all that good stuff that goes along with it.
Jay Leask 41:41
Yep. So with that, we give you the 12 gifts of teams categories.
Craig Jahnke 41:48
Yeah, don’t say that. So excited.
Jay Leask 41:51
To enable devices, teams rooms, calling features, video conferencing, teams, live meetings, office 365, integration apps, search filters, security and compliance center sharing with external users collaboration, and of course, discussions. On the curious, if you’re listening to this, and you’re just shaking your head going, man, they really should have talked about X, Y or Z. Tell us shoot us a message. Hit us up on Twitter, put it in the comments on YouTube. Let us know what we missed. After the channel while you’re there. Yeah, absolutely. Whether or not you want to hear more from us Subscribe to the channel. Because we we were lonely and want more subscribers, frankly.
Craig Jahnke 42:33
And I’ll close with saying I did see Jeff Tepper, the godfather of SharePoint and the owner of teams, as far as Microsoft’s concerned, put out a tweet today that they were working on some exciting stuff for both one driving team to come up in 2021 that he’s excited about. I don’t know what that means, but he’s excited about it. What Jeff’s excited about it, that’s all you need to know.
Jay Leask 42:55
Then we are forcibly excited about it. Craig, it’s been a pleasure. I’ve enjoyed kicking this off with you in 2020. And I hope our dozen or so listeners have also enjoyed it. And cheers to a successful 2021 my friend. Okay, look at that. You can’t even see my glass in there. That’s beautiful. Now,
Craig Jahnke 43:13
I don’t have one.
Jay Leask 43:14
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you know, right there.
Craig Jahnke 43:18
Look forward to seeing in the new year, whatever that might be. Thursday.
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