How to check if an external user has accepted the invitation

From time to time, I receive calls from my customers saying that they send invitations from SPO to external users, but they claim that they did not receive nothing. This post will try to clarify the process, and how is it possible to check the user invitation status.

As you know, every invitation made into O365 (Teams, O365 Groups, SPO…) relies in Azure Active Directory, so our source of information will be there. So what are the steps that we need to follow?

• Browse to the User and Groups under Azure Active Directory (https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/UserManagementMenuBlade/All users/menuId/)
• Browse to the invited User’s profile
• Check the User type is guest
• Check the source field

The important thing here, is the source field. If the source field shows invited user, it means the user has not accepted the invitation. If that is the case, than you can click on resend invitation and this will trigger another invite for the user to redeem

Once the user has redeemed the external user invite, you can check the source field, because depending on the Identity Source, the field will be updated regsarding the IS.

In this case, the user has been invited to a Microsoft Account (@outlook, @hotmail)

In this other case, the user has been invited from an Organization Account (note that the source is External Azure Active Directory)

That’s all!

 

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Recording a meeting in Teams

Since the launch of Microsoft Teams, it is evolving quickly, one of the new features that have been recently launched is Cloud Recording. Cloud Recording allows to record a meeting from Microsoft Teams which is fantastic, the only drawback that I have to add, it is that this feature is still in preview, so probably isn’t totally finished.

First of all, we need to check if all the necessary policies have been enabled in the tenant (by default are enabled), but to check this, we can execute the following PowerShell lines:

Import-Module LyncOnlineConnector
$userCredential = Get-Credential
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential
$userCredential Import-PSSession $sfbSession

Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global

If you need to change some of the parameters, you can execute the following:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -AllowCloudRecording $true
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -AllowTranscription $true

Ok, now we have everything enabled at the side of Microsoft Teams, but currently this feature has something hide inside, the recording video works under Microsoft Stream. Yes, you’re reading well, wether in SFB the video were stored in the user who started the recording, in Teams, Stream provides the storage, playback and sharing capabilities, and if you have the right license, transcription and indexing.

So… what are the requirements? A valid Microsoft Teams license and a valid Microsoft Stream license. Because all the users that initiate recording in Teams, needs a license with the rights to upload videos to Stream, also take into account that this license also will be necessary for those users who wants to visualize the video…

For those who don’t know yet Microsoft Stream, I have to say that it comes in two plans (P1 and P2), P1 for view and upload videos and P2 for more things. More info here

AS it can be seen in the previous link, P1 license is included in E1, E3 and E5 licenses, and the most surprising thing is that Stream is not available in Business Plans (at the time writting this I tried in one of my tenants and unfotunately was not possible).

Once we have check the necessary requirements, we can start recording a meeting

and once we have finished the meeting, we can stop the recording and automatically will be processed and upload to Microsoft Stream:

We can play the video directly from Microsoft Teams, which will pop up Microsoft Stream to reproduce the record:

From the video itself we can share the video

Or even, access to Stream, where the video has been autommatically uploaded:

I have to add that if you’re an invited user, you can’t start the recording, even if you’re the moderator

In case you need more info about this new cool feature, I suggest to visit the following link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-recording

Till next time!

Teams eDiscovery supported for team users in an Exchange Hybrid!

First of all, I have to say that this announcement has a trick, is it possible to do it, but not by the UI, you need to open a Microsoft ticket support in order to do it (I supose that in a near future will be avalaible trought the UI admin).

To open the support ticket, would be necessary to have the following data:

• The default domain name of your Office 365 organization.
• The tenant name and tenant ID of your Office 365 organization.
• And of course a title or description of the purpose of the support request: for example “Enable Application Content Search for On-premises Users”. This will help route the request to the Office 365 eDiscovery engineering team who will implement the request.

Also take into account that Teams channel conversations are always into Group mailboxes which are always in the cloud, so probably would be not possible to extract this information from the chat for those users who are in a hybrid environment and their Exchange data resised OnPrem.

Then after the ticket has benn submmited, I hope that Support will send us an email, and they will process the request internally.

For more info about this: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/searching-cloud-based-mailboxes-for-on-premises-users-in-office-365-3f7dde1a-a8ea-4366-86da-8ee6777f357c?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

New File Viewers for Onedrive, SharePoint and Teams

The new functionalities included in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, allow the users to  have a quick and easy access to those files across devices regardless of the file type. So the user can have previews and thumbnail images for Adobe formats, like Photoshop and Illustrator, 3D files or DICOM medical images without actually installing the native application.

The following extensions are included:

3-D Modeling/Printing: 3MF, COOL, GLB, GLTF, OBJ, STL

Apple: MOVIE, PAGES, PICT, SKETCH

Adobe: AI, PDF, PSB, PSD

Audio/Video Media Files: 3G2, 3GP, ASF, BMP, M2TS, M4V, MOV, MP3, MP4, MP4V, MTS, TS, WMV

AutoCAD: DWG

AutoDesk: FBX

BioWare Game Engine: ERF

Compressed File: ZIP

Compressed File (Unix): Z

DICOM Medical Images: DCM, DCM30, DICM, DICOM

Finale: PLY

HydroCAD: HCP

Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, JPG. JPE, MEF, MRW, NEF, NRW, ORF, PANO, PEF, PNG, SPM, TIF, TIFF, XBM, XCF

License Key: KEY

Log Files: LOG

Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel): CSV, DIC, DOC, DOCM, DOCX, DOTM, DOTX, POT, POTM, POTX, PPS, PPSM, PPSX, PPT, PPTM, PPTX, XD, XLS, XLSB, XLSX, SLTX

Microsoft Outlook: EML, MSG

Microsoft Visio: VSD, VSDX

Microsoft Windows: CUR, ICO, ICON

Open eBook: EPUB

OpenOffice: ODP, ODS, ODT,

Photo: ARW, CR2, CRW, DNG

Rich Text Format: RTF

Text and Code: ABAP, ADA, ADP, AHK, AS, AS3, ASC, ASCX, ASM, ASP, AWK, BAS, BASH, BASH_LOGIN, BASH_LOGOUT, BASH_PROFILE, BASHRC, BAT, BIB, BSH, BUILD, BUILDER, C, C++, CAPFILE, CBK, CC, CFC, CFM, CFML, CL, CLJ, CMAKE, CMD, COFFEE, CPP, CPT, CPY, CS, CSHTML, CSON, CSPROJ, CSS, CTP, CXX, D, DDL, DI. DIF, DIFF, DISCO, DML, DTD, DTML, EL, EMAKE, ERB, ERL, F90, F95, FS, FSI, FSSCRIPT, FSX, GEMFILE, GEMSPEC, GITCONFIG, GO, GROOVY, GVY, H, H++, HAML, HANDLEBARS, HBS, HRL, HS, HTC, HTML, HXX, IDL, IIM, INC, INF, INI, INL, IPP, IRBRC, JADE, JAV, JAVA, JS, JSON, JSP, JSX, L, LESS, LHS, LISP, LOG, LST, LTX, LUA, M, MAKE, MARKDN, MARKDOWN, MD, MDOWN, MKDN, ML, MLI, MLL, MLY, MM, MUD, NFO, OPML, OSASCRIPT, OUT, P, PAS, PATCH, PHP, PHP2, PHP3, PHP4, PHP5, PL, PLIST, PM, POD, PP, PROFILE, PROPERTIES, PS, PS1, PT, PY, PYW, R, RAKE, RB, RBX, RC, RE, README, REG, REST, RESW, RESX, RHTML, RJS, RPROFILE, RPY, RSS, RST, RXML, S, SASS, SCALA, SCM, SCONSCRIPT, SCONSTRUCT, SCRIPT, SCSS, SGML, SH, SHTML, SML, SQL, STY, TCL, TEX, TEXT, TEXTILE, TLD, TLI, TMPL, TPL, TXT, VB, VI, VIM, WSDL, XAML, XHTML, XOML, XML, XSD, XSL, XSLT, YAML, YAWS, YML, ZSH

Web/Hypertext: HTM, HTML, Markdown, MD, URL

You can find more info in the following link

Microsoft Teams Recap

If you have a customer like me that wants to use Teams in W7 environment, and they want to uninstall Teams in order to know if reinstalling solves the problem, you will face that is not possible to uninstall Teams “easyly”, because the program is not shown in Control Panel and thus the user won’t be able to uninstall Teams. To do it, it is necessary to use PowerShell! You can have more info in the following link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/scripts/powershell-script-teams-deployment-clean-up

Very useful to detect errors before rolling out Teams to the entire company: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/known-issues

Another thing that I discovered doing a battery test, depending on which version of Chrome you’re running Microsoft teams meetings does not work. So in this case my customer was running the version 57 of Chrome and the last supported version of Chrome for meetings in Microsoft Teams is the v59. You can have more info in the following post: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/get-clients

I will try to keep updated this post 🙂

 

Private Teams will be discoverable in Search

Nowadays, if you want to join a Private Team, the only way to do it is by being invited by an admin of the group. But this will change in the next days, I found the following annouce in my tenant:

So, will be possible to find the groups in SharePoint Search or even searching the groups in the Microsoft Teams App. I think this make sense, you find the group and if it’s necessary you request access to the group.

The only thing that is it necessary to take into account is to be aware of the name policy that the groups will have, if you don’t want a certain name group in your tenant, check it before, and if it’s necessary, execute the Set-UnifiedGroup command with the attribute HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled to $true

It’s great to see how Microsoft is improving all the collaboration tools 🙂

Limit who can post in general channel of Microsoft Teams

As we know, each Team of Microsoft Teams include a General channel, by default all users can post in that channel, but you can limit who can post in that channel. For example imagine that you want to use that channel to post the rules of the Team.

In each Team, we can configure the following levels:

• Everyone can post (the default setting)
• Everyone and display an alert that everyone in the Teams will be notified
• Just the Teams owner

To change the default permissions we must be a Team owner and do the following procedure:

• Select the 3 dots of the Team, then Manage Team

• Settings, under Member permissions, we can see the 3 options, select which option fits better to your Team

And it’s all set!

Developer preview in Teams and Planner integration

After seeing that MS is launching new features to Microsoft Teams via developer Preview, I decided to enable it and try it. But for my surprise, this option was not enabled in my tenant, so I struggled how to activate it.

First I navigate to: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/setup#3-enable-sideloading-of-apps-for-microsoft-teams where is it possible to find the instructions of how to activate. In my case the steps to follow where pretty simple:

• Go to the admin center
• Settings, select Services & add-ins or Apps
• From the list of services and add-ins, or apps, select Microsoft Teams.
• On the Microsoft Teams settings screen, switch both Allow external apps in Microsoft Teams and Allow sideloading of external apps to On, and then select Save.

After doing that, I went to https://teams.microsoft.com and under my profile I was able to select the Developer Preview:

Accept the dialog:

And start with the new available features in this mode. One of these new available features is Planner, well done Microsoft 🙂

Is great to see how Microsoft is improving the collaboration in Teams, and in this case bringing Planner to the app, instead of having to add the plan as a tab.

With this implementation, we can see all our assigned tasks in Planner, in addition to that able to edit the tasks, assign tasks to other users. It’s like accessing to Planner, but integrated into Teams.

We have different views, where we can group by tasks or even by plan, is important to show all our assigned tasks.

To close this post, I have to add that this new feature it is only available via web, I expect that this implementation will be also added soon to Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile app.

16/11/2017 Edit: Once again Juan Carlos Gonzalez is right 🙂 ,  developer view is it already available in desktop app, so is it possible to take advantage from the Planner integration. Thanks again!

PowerShell for Microsoft Teams

Last week, Microsoft made available new PowerShell Modules, in this case was for Microsoft Teams, and I have to say that it is wonderful, because since then, we were obliged to use the Office 365 Groups PowerShell commands, and not all the commands fulfill the use case.

First of all, we need to install the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module:

Once we have installed the commands, as is needed for each O365 service, we’ll need to connect to it:

If we want to see all the available commands, we will need to put the following:

As it can be seen, the list of cmdlets is a bit short, but I’m sure that will grow and will improve the capabilities and also the availble features.

Till next time!

Skype to Teams Roadmap

Yesterday was announced in the Techcommunity the roadmap for Microsoft Teams.

I want to highlight the integration between the Skype For Business client and the Microsoft Teams client. With this integration we will be able to share the presence, contacts between this two applications and even to call between this two applications. In a near future, we will have the PSTN calling plans for Teams and more features yet to come.

If you want more information about this, visit the following link: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Roadmap-for-Skype-for-Business-capabilities-coming-to-Microsoft/bc-p/120002#M340