Introduction: In this article, we are going to take a quick overview of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module and will cover a few things which we can perform in Microsoft Teams with the help of PowerShell. There are two different PowerShell modules to manage Microsoft Teams. 1. Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module – You can get this module from here: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/MicrosoftTeams/1.0.0 2. Skype for Business PowerShell Module – You can download it from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39366 Teams PowerShell module contain all the cmdlets needed to create and manage teams whereas Skype for Business module contains the cmdlets to manage policies, configuration, and other tools. Connecting to Microsoft Teams PowerShell:   1. Install the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module. Open Windows PowerShell and run the command “Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams” and then enter Y. Module was already installed on my system, that’s why I got the messages highlighted in the above image. The version was old, so I re-entered the command and added the -Force parameter “Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -Force” 2. Connect with Microsoft Teams. Run command “Connect-MicrosoftTeams” and enter the credentials. After login, you will be able to see your tenant details. 3. After the PowerShell Module relates to your Microsoft Teams, you can use the cmdlets for creating and managing teams. For e.g, To get all your teams list, run command “Get-Team” For creating a new team, run command “New-Team” For managing Team users, run command “Add-TeamUser”. You will be asked to provide GroupId. After providing the GroupId, it will ask to provide the user, which needs to be added to the team. 4. Similarly, you can remove the user from a team, create a new channel or remove any team channel or else remove any group, etc. All these cmdlets can be run as end users, but it will only work for the teams you own, or you are a member of that team. As a global admin, you will be able to act on all the teams. Managing MS Teams policies via PowerShell:   1. Download and install Skype for Business PowerShell Module. 2. Connect with Skype for Business PowerShell Module. Open Windows PowerShell and run the following commands: “Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector” “$userCredential = Get-Credential” “$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential” “Import-PSSession $sfbSession” Now you are connected to Skype for Business PowerShell Module. 3. There are basically 5 commands to manage the policies. GET – Get the details of the policy. NEW – Create new policies. SET – Lets you set particular values on a given policy. REMOVE – Delete the customs policy. GRANT – Assign policy to particular user.For e.g, you want to get the details of all the meeting policy, run command “Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy” You will be able to get the details of the all the meeting policy whether it has been created by Microsoft or it is a custom policy that will be shown. Similarly, for Messaging policy run command “Get-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy” Managing configurations via PowerShell:   Connect to Skype for Business PowerShell Module. You have seen above how to connect to Skype for Business PS Module. Run command “Get-CsTeamsClientConfiguration”. This is basically your Teams settings in the admin center. Conclusion: Administrators can manage a good set of tools in Microsoft Teams through Microsoft Teams admin center and also through PowerShell. In this article,  we have seen how easily we can connect through PowerShell and can manage things.

Many times you find issues like one of your users are unable to set up their Office 365 Email account in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook suddenly stopped working or it is taking too much time to setup account after the credentials are entered. What will be the steps you will be performing at that time to resolve that issue? The best and very simple solution, in this case, would be to run Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant. I was facing one similar issue one day. Let me go through the steps below which I performed and the issue what I found and how easy it became to resolve the issue. Before I proceed, let me provide you some info on SARA tool and how to install. Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant work by running tests to figure out what’s wrong. It can fix many problems or can tell you how to fix them. SARA can fix several issues such as Office setup, Outlook (for MAC as well), Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, etc. Installing SARA: Go to Outlook Support Center, click Download now. Click RUN when you are prompted on your system and then click Install. SARA will get downloaded. Click on I Agree after you have read the service agreement. And now you are ready to use the tool. How I resolved the Outlook issue for one of my users? Open SARA application or if you had just installed select Outlook and then click NEXT. You will be asked to confirm that you are on the affected machine, select Yes and click NEXT. You will be asked for the user credentials, enter the Office 365 account credentials and then click NEXT. After the validation process, the scan begins automatically. Below is the screenshot my Outlook scan results on the affected system. You have seen how I got the issues found with the help of SARA. So, in this case, the issue was that the “Use a proxy server for your LAN” option was checked on this system and I fixed that. After doing the same my issues got resolved. What if you are unable to understand the issues after scanning? SARA also provides an option to view the detailed report of the issue and if you are unable to understand the issue, you can always raise a support ticket with Microsoft. SARA also provide you with the feature of sharing your scan results to Microsoft. So, if you are working with a Microsoft support engineer, this option is very helpful. What if I am using other email system and not Office 365 with Microsoft Outlook App? Sara also provides support to accounts who don’t have Exchange Online, instead, they are using some other email system with Microsoft Outlook app. You will be able to authenticate and start the scanning for your Outlook app and can view the issues or detailed report. The only difference is, you won’t be getting the option to share your data with Microsoft instead you can share the logs with the person who is responsible for your Outlook issues, for example, your helpdesk person.  

Introduction: In Microsoft Teams we create several teams, managing teams and channels is also very important so that you can work in a compliant way. When you create a team a SharePoint site and an Office 365 Group is also created.  With the increased use of O365 Groups, admins and users must have some way to clean up unwanted or unused groups. Here comes the need of setting up Team or Group Expiration Policy from Azure Active Directory and as you know Teams is based on Office 365 Groups, it is influenced by Group Expiration Policy. In this article, we will see how we can effectively manage teams or groups with the help of Group Expiration Policy. Let’s get started: 1. Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center > Azure Active Directory. 2. In Active AD, go to Groups > Expiration Policy. 3. You can then set an expiration policy for a group by providing Group Lifetime. 4. You can set a default group expiration as 180 or 365 days else you also select custom and enter the number of days as per your requirements, but it should be more than 30 days. 5. When the expiration policy is in place, once a group ages to 30 days before their lifecycle period lapses, group owners receive notifications for renewal (3 notifications are sent on 30, 15 and 0 days respectively). If it is renewed the lifecycle extends for a defined period and if not renewed O365 soft-deletes the group when it expires. If there are no owners of that group, you can provide an email Id of someone who will be receiving the notifications. Note – Owners can recover the soft-deleted groups during the next 30 days. 6. Select the groups and save the policy by hitting the Save button. FAQ’s:- Is Group Expiration Policy available with a free or basic subscription of Azure AD? Answer – Group Expiration Policy is a premium feature and is only available with Azure AD Premium subscriptions. What happens if a Team or Group owner fails to check the expiry notifications? Answer – Teams also shows the expiry information on Teams settings. Open the team for which you are the owner and select manage team and then go to settings. At the bottom, you can see Team Expiry option. In addition,  If O365 soft-deletes the team or group, owners have 30 days to recover the group and when a team is expiring, a warning triangle is displayed alongside the team name which is only visible to team owners. Conclusion: In this way, you can effectively manage your team or groups. The policy helps to remove inactive groups from the system and make things cleaner.  

Introduction:   Since the release of Microsoft Teams on March 2017 which was designed for business for all sizes, it is now being used by almost 500,000 organizations worldwide. Microsoft Teams is a big hit in the messaging app market after having such huge competitors like Slack, Facebook, Google, etc. Microsoft released its free version in July 2018 which is designed for small businesses or groups of people within a company who doesn’t have commercial Office 365 subscriptions or a couple of people working together. In this article, we are going to discuss the feature comparison between MS Teams ‘Premium’ and ‘Freemium’. I have written several articles on Microsoft Teams which comes with Office 365 subscriptions (Refer blogs on https://www.cloudfronts.com/category/azure-office365/) but asked by many users to provide some info on Microsoft Teams free.   Sign Up for MS Teams – Any person with corporate or consumer email address can sign up for Teams. People who have commercial O365 subscription will already have access to MS Teams and those who don’t have the commercial subscription can sign up for the Microsoft Teams Freemium from this link – https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free Maximum no. of users – Free Teams brings up the features for up to 300 people. This number is similar for the commercial subscription as well, excluding Enterprise plans for which the max no. if users are unlimited. Online Apps in MS Teams – Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are available online with a free version of Teams. With Office 365 commercial subscriptions the desktop versions of apps are available for Office 365 Business Premium and Enterprise plans (excluding E1). Like the premium MS Teams, the free version of Teams can also be integrated with more than 140 different apps. Note – Office 365 services like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and other Office 365 services will not be available with free MS Teams as it doesn’t have Office 365 subscription. Guest Access – This is a very awesome feature introduced by Microsoft in Teams with the help of which you can collaborate with external contacts, clients or with partners. Guest access is available with MS Teams free version as well. We can invite users with corporate or consumer email address and the users with commercial Office 365 subscriptions using Teams as well (see below image for sending an invite from MS Teams free). Audio & Video calls, Screen sharing and chat – Audio, video calling, screen sharing, and one to one chat are some of the key features any communication and collaboration platform. So, of course, these features are available with Microsoft Teams free version as well otherwise what would be the use of the free version. Scheduling meeting and Audio conferencing – Feature of Scheduling meetings, Audio conferencing and then depending upon your SKU, things link phone number calling and dial-in conferencing is not available in Microsoft Teams free version which we get with the paid version of MS Teams. Security and Compliance – Paid version gives you a full set of powerful IT capabilities, compliance and security controls and developer options to manage and scale Teams all as part of Office 365. Plus, you also get support and guaranteed uptime which you don’t get in free MS Teams version. Of course, security features such as Data Encryption and region-based data residency is available with free Teams, but we don’t have features like MFA, Auditing, reporting, etc which are there with a paid subscription. Custom status message – Presence status we can set in free MS Teams version which is awesome, but we don’t have an option to set custom status message compare to that we have in paid Teams. Storage – With free MS Teams you get 2 GB of storage per user and 10 GB of team storage (Shared storage) whereas with paid Teams you get 1 TB per user. Conclusion:   Microsoft Teams Freemium is an awesome way for the people to start using Teams whether they are a couple of co-workers, small business or a group of people working together. It is easy to use and has all the major functionalities a messaging and collaboration app should have but if you want all the features with discussed above you can of course upgrade to the paid version and have a commercial Office 365 subscription. Hope this article helps you to understand the differences between Microsoft Teams ‘Premium’ and ‘Freemium’.

Introduction: When you check your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Entity records, you might think where your documents related to specific entities will get stored. Here, SharePoint comes into the picture. The built-in integration between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint is mainly focused on managing & storing documents in SharePoint and ultimately then surfacing these in the context of a CRM record. Apart from storing the documents in SharePoint, you might also wonder that is your stuff secure on SharePoint Online. In this article, we are going to see how you can store the documents on SharePoint Online and how we can secure those documents through SharePoint Online security features. For using the document management functionality, you need to enable the server-based SharePoint integration on a Site Collection in SharePoint Online. Note – Installing Microsoft Dynamics 365 List Component was used for SharePoint On-Premise earlier versions and is not required for SharePoint Online and later versions of SharePoint on-premises. IT Considerations: No additional software is required to install on SharePoint You need to have System Administrator Security role in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Make sure that the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and SharePoint Online in under the same Office 365 tenant. Steps for enabling server-based SharePoint Integration: Login to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement services > Settings > Document Management. Under Document Management, go to Enable Server-Based SharePoint Integration. Check out the changes (in the below image) which you will notice if you have used the previous SharePoint integration and click on Select between Online & On-Premises depending upon the SharePoint infrastructure you have and click NEXT (check below image). Now you must enter the URL of your SharePoint site where you want your Dynamics 365 entity records documents to be stored. Here, I have entered the URL of my root site collection ‘https://o365talks.sharepoint.com’, you may want to have a different Site Collection for your D365 documents as per Organisation requirements. For that, you can create a new Site Collection, such as https://o365talks.sharepoint.com/sites/Dynamics365You can create Site Collection from the SharePoint Online admin center. Here it will show the site URL validation status. Click on NEXT after the validation succeeds. So we are done with the SharePoint integration. Now we need to enable document management for specific Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Entities. Enable SharePoint document management for specific Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps entity records.   Go to Settings > Document Management Settings. Select the entities (for eg, Accounts, Lead, Opportunities, Projects) for which you wanted to store the documents in SharePoint Online and click on NEXT. Check Based on Entity and select Account or Contact to create a folder structure based on a specific entity (Account or Contact), or else you click on NEXT without checking if you don’t want your folders to be automatically created based on the Account or Contact entity. Now you can see the SharePoint Online Document Library has been created as the status is Succeeded. Click FINISH. You can see in the below image Document Libraries has been created for the entities under the SharePoint site (https://o365talks.sharepoint.com). You can access the same by going to Site Contents. Keep your D365 Customer Engagement documents safe While having the integration done for document management in SharePoint Online, it is also important to secure these documents. For that, there are several features which you can use to keep your SharePoint Online documents secure. Using Permission Level: – Microsoft already provides a set of default permission levels which is very useful, but you can also create new permission levels in SharePoint Online. You can then create Groups for that Site Collection for e.g. https://o365talks.sharepoint.com, associated with the permission level. For e.g., you can create a permission level called Contribute (Not delete) which means the users associated with this permission level will not be able to delete anything. Note – Never modify or delete a default permission level. Retention policy from Office 365 Security & Compliance center: – Create a Retention Policy for all or chosen SharePoint Online sites, so that if accidentally or by purpose if the documents are deleted from SharePoint Online it can be recovered. Restricting access for certain records: – You might not want that all the users should have access to all D365 for Customer Engagement records. You can basically customize permission for that SharePoint Document library to achieve the same. By default, all sites, list, libraries within a site collection inherit permissions from the parent site break the inheritance from library settings and then add only those users whom you want to provide access. Alerts: – Alerts can be set in two ways for SharePoint Online. a. Setting up alerts from SharePoint Online – You can set alerts for a specific document library within SharePoint Online, so if there is any modification or deletion you can get email or SMS alert.b.  Alerts from the Security & Compliance center in Office 365: – Here we can set alerts whenever there is any activity in SharePoint Online defined by you. We can only get Email notifications in this case and not an SMS, unlike SharePoint Alerts. Audit in Office 365 Security & Compliance center: – With the help of Audit you can search for Users and Admin activities. Before you can start searching for the audit logs it needs to be turned ON. To turn it ON, just click Start recording user and admin activity on the Audit log search page in the Security & Compliance center. Here, we can get the audit logs for the activities defined by you. Access Control in SharePoint Online admin center: – With the help of access control, you can restrict or allow all the users to access SharePoint Online contents on basis of network location, which can do in just a few clicks. This helps to prevent access from untrusted locations. Conditional Access using Azure Active Directory: – You can either restrict access or enforce Multi-Factor Authentication for specific users or group of users whenever SharePoint Online is accessed from an … Continue reading Manage and secure Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement documents in SharePoint Online →

Setting up custom status messages in Microsoft Teams was awaited for long but it is finally here. As Microsoft released Teams as Skype for Business replacement it was also right to say that Microsoft Teams must have the useful features of Skype for Business. Since the feature of setting up custom status messages was available in Skype for Business, it was long awaited in Microsoft Teams but it is here finally. Now, Teams users can set their own status messages to inform colleagues about their status for the next few hours, days or on a continuing basis.  This status is different from the user’s presence status (Available, Away, Be right back, etc). In this status message you, an add up to 280 characters and can provide more detailed information. To set the status, hover over your profile picture at the top right-hand corner and select Set status message. You can mention your status message and then you can select till when you want to display the status messages to your colleagues. Guest users can also set the status message in Microsoft Teams. For viewing the status message on Teams, you can view the users’ card. You can also view each users’ card from the Manage team option of a Team so that you can see the whole members and then hover over each member. In the below image, you can see I have set my status message as ‘break’ and when one of the user viewed my people card, status is reflected.

I have led several Office 365 implementation projects from scratch like from migrating emails to Office 365 to implementing various features of Office 365. When it comes to choosing the Office 365 subscriptions, I have seen that many of the organizations go with Office 365 Business Premium or Office 365 Business Essential subscriptions as both of these subscriptions are almost identical, the only difference is Office 365 Business Essential doesn’t contain Microsoft Office applications. In the below table you can find the list of features available with Office 365 Business Premium & Business Essential subscriptions. While in this article I am not actually highlighting the difference, I am just trying to provide the list of features available in these two subscriptions. I have also mentioned the Security & Compliance features which I have seen that most of the organizations don’t actually use but are very beneficial and I always try to convince my clients to use all these features. S. No. Features Features (Office 365 Business Premium) Features (Office 365 Business Essential)     1 Office Application Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote Not included     2 Services Included Exchange Online, Skype for Business, OneDrive, SharePoint, MS Teams Exchange Online, Skype for Business, OneDrive, SharePoint, MS Teams     3 Max Users 300 300     4 Mailbox Size 50 GB (Exchange Online Plan 1) 50 GB (Exchange Online Plan 1) Security & Compliance Features 5 Protect access to data and service Configure Multi-Factor Authentication Configure Multi-Factor Authentication Device Management (Enroll devices, Device Wipe) Device Management (Enroll devices, Device Wipe) 6 Prevent data loss Not Available Not Available 7 Manage data governance Import Data Import Data Archiving feature for Emails Archiving feature for Emails Retention for SharePoint & OneDrive Retention for SharePoint & OneDrive Retention (EAC) Retention (EAC) 8 Protection against threats Anti-Spoofing Anti-Spoofing Anti-Spam & Anti-malware Policies Anti-Spam & Anti-malware Policies Email encryption Email encryption Quarantine email messages Quarantine email messages Submitting malware to Microsoft for analysis Submitting malware to Microsoft for analysis 9 Search for content Content Search in Office 365 Content Search in Office 365   10 Manage legal investigations eDiscovery in Office 365 eDiscovery in Office 365   11 Audit Log Audit Log search in Office 365 Audit Log search in Office 365 Enable mailbox auditing Enable mailbox auditing 12 Monitor Security & Compliance Alerts in Office 365 Alerts in Office 365 Quarantine in Office 365 Quarantine in Office 365 Check secure score Check secure score Office 365 Service Health Office 365 Service Health Monitor reports (access and usage reports) Monitor reports (access and usage reports) Note: Many security features are not available within the subscription, but we can procure add-on licenses to enhance the security. Apart from these features, Microsoft also offers other services with these subscriptions. MS Teams– Platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, collaborate on files and especially the guest access feature in Teams is awesome. Exchange Online– Exchange for email services, also there is a lot you can do with Exchange Admin Center. OneDrive for Business– Storage for documents SharePoint Online– Document Management & Real-time Collaboration with attractive modern sites, document versioning, web parts & lot more. Hope this article helps you to easily find out the list of all features so that you can implement the same when you purchase any of the subscriptions and keep your organization secure.

I had one of my clients recently asked about the Office 365 Apps on their MacOS, of course, I guided him to download the same from Microsoft’s website but now I can easily tell the client to go to the Apple’s Mac App store and download Office 365 apps directly from there. It became so simple, isn’t it! Microsoft has finally announced that Office 365 is now available on Mac App store from where Apple users can directly download Office 365 Apps such as PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, OneDrive & OneNote. You can download these apps individually or as a bundle and the packages are free to download but as Office 365 is a subscription-based you will need to pay a subscription fee to use the apps. Microsoft Office has been available on Mac already, but it is available through Microsoft’s website, but people are nowadays preferring handy things! For e.g.: YouTube on the web or YouTube on the app? YouTube on the app, right? So as to have a smooth and flawless experience! This is exactly the case with MS Office now on App store. Microsoft finally releasing these apps on the Mac App store will be surely a huge hit. It will also be easier than ever to get the updated version of Office 365 for Mac, iPad & iPhone as we all know that with Office 365 we always have the best version of Office Apps.

Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based chat and collaboration platform, designed to simplify group work. Whether you prefer any chat options available across the markets, if it is not user-friendly, it won’t make any sense. For being user-friendly, the first and foremost requirement is the notifications. Of course, you would not want the hassle of logging and checking into the app every moment. So, we all rely heavily on notifications on the chat to persuade us to open it. This ensures you are updated in the real time. Such kind of wonderful notifications features is available in MS Teams. Now, having said this, let’s check out all the fabulous notification features one by one. Channel notification: To turn ON notifications for any new activity or messages on channels in Microsoft Teams, you need to follow the channel. You will not be able to follow the Team (Team is a group of personnel’s together for work, projects, etc and team are made up of channels), so you need to follow the channels within that team. Once you follow the channel, for any new message or activity in the channel you will be getting a notification (see below image). Chat notifications: You will be automatically getting a notification for one to one chat (see below image). Customize your notification settings: To further customize your notification settings, click your profile picture at the right-hand top of the application and then click Settings > Notifications. You can select, how you want your notifications from the given options (see below image). Do not disturb: As we know that if we are in a Do not disturb mode, we do not get notifications for any messages. In Microsoft Teams, we have this feature that we can still receive notifications from people who have priority access when your status is Do not disturb. You just need to add those people to Manage priority access. Click your profile picture at the right-hand top of the application and then click Settings > Privacy Mobile Notifications: Turning ON notifications on MS Teams mobile app, go to the Menu option (Hamburger button) and then click on Settings > Notifications. And then you can select from given options, how you want the notifications. To ensure you are updated in the real-time, we heavily rely on the notifications. And this is how we can manage notifications in Microsoft Teams.

Introduction: Activity alerts play a very important role while setting up Security & Compliance. You can create an alert that will send you an email notification when users perform specific activities in Office 365.  In this article, you can see how we can get alerts if someone accesses any document in SharePoint Online. Similarly, you can also set alerts for different activities such as common user activities, file & folder activities, file sharing activities, synchronization activities & also for administration activities. Difference between Alerts and Audit logs search in O365 Security & Compliance? Activity alerts are similar to searching the Office 365 audit log for events, except that you’ll be sent an email message when an event that you’ve created an alert for occurs. In Audit logs search, we can see the results as soon we search for it within the period of 90 days since the activity occurred (retention of the audit records depends on the subscription you have). Creating Alerts  Office 365 Security & Compliance center > Alerts > Dashboard You can also go to Office 365  Security & Compliance center using URL – https://protection.office.com Name your alert, add description, severity & select category. Next, you will need to choose an activity & when to trigger an alert. So, in our case alert needs to be triggered whenever a file is accessed from SharePoint Online. You can also add a condition, for this alert. Such as in this case you can mention the Site Collection URL so that if the file is accessed in SharePoint Online from that Site Collection an alert will be triggered. After that click on NEXT. The last step is setting up your recipients & daily notification limits. You can choose a user to whom the alerts will be sent. After the alert is all set, you can now review your settings, turn ON the policy and click FINISH. Alert result – If any user tries to access any file in SharePoint Online, the recipients (the user which has been mentioned as a recipient in the alert policy) will get an email notification (see below image). Conclusion: In this way, we can create different types of alert policies with respect to Security & Compliance of any organization and this is how you can monitor each activity within your organization. We can create alert policies for different activities like common user activities, file & folder activities, file sharing activities, synchronization activities & also for administration activities.