[Archived] Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Terms of Use with Conditional Access

Happy Christmas! I hope you have enjoyed the last few days - and whether it has been with family, friends, going shopping, eating out, going to church, taking exams or feet up binge watching movies and taking a real break from everything I really hope you have managed to spend it how you have wanted to after a full on 2021. You deserve it. Me? I'm spending most my with my family, but during the holidays I'm also taking some a bit of time to clear the decks for 2022 and refocus on several things which I've missed doing this year. One of those things is the Microsoft Tech Community. Tech was where I first started out doing community work back in late 2018. I did it compulsively right up until the beginning of 2021 and it's been a big part of my life the past few years. It's a place where I met a lot of my community friends: people like Adam Deltinger, Chris Webb, Juan Carlos Gonzalez Martin, Vasil Michev and Linus Cansby. Its a place where I got the opportunity to help people directly. It's also the place which led to many more opportunities including Teams Nation. Yet with everything else going on this year - work, events, exams, speaking on the circuit, you name it - it's been tough to allocate the time in order to really get back into it like I used to. So I needed to change things up in order to get back to the start, and having re-engaged the last few weeks I feel much happier and sharper. Now one of the questions I was asked was regarding Terms of Use. This is fortunate considering I am teaching Microsoft SCI Fundamentals next month and it's a component of that. Terms of Use is an Azure AD functionality but applies to many services including Microsoft Teams. Do you require employees or guests to accept your terms of use policy before getting access? Do you require employees or guests to accept your terms of use policy on a recurring schedule per your compliance policies? Do you require employees or guests to accept your terms of use policy as part of a conditional access policy? Once you use it, it seems strange that you wouldn't want this in place to ensure anyone who is accessing your environment is accepting your terms - especially as it's an Azure AD P1 functionality and available to small businesses as well as large

[Archived] Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Let’s saddle up and apply Adaptive Scopes to Retention and Label Policies

course updates. I am also back on the circuit courtesy of aMS Germany and Power Platform France. As always, thank you to the organisers for having me. Yet, despite all this good stuff I am also acutely aware that I haven't done any technical writing on the blog since the day before I got Covid - and as my good friend Vesku Nopanen released one today on the new Whiteboarding features in Teams, the situation demands I write. So where to start? Having effectively had two months off I can certainly say I am not in short supply of subject matter - but one that I thought I would start on since I am really interested in it is adaptive scopes for retention and label policies.

[Archived] Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Granting Org Wide Admin Consent to an App

To all my friends and readers from the US - happy independence day! And to everyone else I hope you are enjoying the summer. It's nearly time for a break. But unlike my Scandinavian friends Vesa Nopanen and Adam Deltinger who are taking a month off - a month! (they tell me it's cultural), I still have a few weeks of grafting. Well, not all graft since Microsoft Inspire is here on the 14th and since I am going as an attendee it'll be enjoyable to just kick back and watch some sessions; something I have rarely done the last few years as I have been doing lots of speaking and moderating. So after focusing on Stream and the new web experience last week I am going to jump back into Teams this week. I originally thought about writing on Teams Meeting Recordings since I have an upcoming talk at the end of the month on exactly this. Yet something caught my eye in the Teams Admin Centre (TAC) and you know me...I thought I just have to write it TMR's can wait. Now this functionality is called Org Wide Admin Consent to an App. Sounds abstract right? Yeah. In layman's it's all about allowing apps permission to do what they need to do in your environment on behalf of users. Examples would include the ability for an app to read information stored in a team, for an app to read a user's profile, for an app to send an email on behalf of users and so on. Typically, when a user adds an app from the Teams App Store or starts using a custom or third party app, they have to grant the app permission. So administrators doing it on their users behalf can be beneficial. Why? It saves time, potentially a lot of confusion and makes the process of adding an app much more user friendly. Secondly, for the admin it gives them more control of apps and another tool alongside blocking, app permissions and custom app configuration. Third, users may not even be allowed to give consent as the admin may have locked this down already in Azure AD as part of their enterprise app configuration. Now, some things to know right off the bat is that org wide admin consent to an app can only be done by a global admin - not even the Teams Service Admin can do it. Secondly, it applies only to custom and third party apps. Microsoft's are exempt. Finally, org wide admin consent to an app is a much broader brush than resource specific consent (RSC) which is granular and applies to specific teams, so careful review has to be given before applying it. Sound good? Let's get going

[Archived] Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Getting Hands on with Bulletins

Happy Valentines Day! It's been a busy few weeks. I am in the middle of this thing called the Microsoft Teams Winter Tour. Basically, it's about ten conferences I am speaking at chained together throughout at the course of January and February. At the time of writing I have done seven. So three more to go - and all three come a week from today on the 19th in a triple header that'll see me speak in France, Italy and Nigeria all on the same day. To be fair its been incredible - but it's also been hard to keep up with all the new stuff coming out in Teams too - and there's been a lot. A lot of news and a lot of developments. So in the period between now and Ignite I am going to try and step back up and I'll start with something which seemed to fly under the radar which is bulletins. This is an app which appeared sometime last week and what interests me particularly about this is that its a Power App, one whose data is stored within Dataverse. Now Power Apps in Teams has massive potential - we all know this, we've all known this a long time. However, previously Power Apps designed by Microsoft typically came as either Teams Templates, or Power Apps Templates which meant you would need to customise and install them yourself as Custom Apps: in other words they weren't already available out of the box from the Teams App store. Is this a new direction? Have Microsoft seen the best way to get into Power Apps is to actually go from the position of using them then customising them? Well, yes. Read the description below - 'it's then easy for an org to go on and extend the core functionality'. Clever Microsoft. Oh I see you. But let's talk about Bulletins. It's an app that's designed to keep Team Members informed in terms of broadcasts and announcements. FAQ's also. Now I can only imagine some within the Yammer community are going to have something to say here - but before we mosey on down to Defcon 1 in regards to apps which dupe functionality, let's have a walkthrough and deploy this and see how we go. Personally, from the description I think this could be good. On the other hand, I also think it could go really bad if people don't understand about storage

[Archived] Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Forms to the Flow, to the List, to the Team and Yammer using conditions and approvals

I had a lot of fun writing the last blog on approvals. So I'd thought I would double down and use the Forms app with Flow and Lists which we can surface into Teams and then push out to Yammer by the way of conditions and approvals. I thought it would just be cool to cover a real world scenario which you could apply, customise to your needs to take parts and use them in your own flow. Rather unusually given the length and amount of apps involved I haven't got much to say - I really hope you really enjoy this one