Custom Filters. Defined by Microsoft as follows: 'a new feature in Microsoft Teams Meetings that will allow participants to augment their video streams with visual effects such as frames and styles. [They are] built on the Teams Platform infrastructure and provided by Microsoft first and third-party partners as apps and displayed as a collection of filters'. Sound good? Well they have now surfaced into preview, expected GA in February. But if we look back into the history of Teams then filters themselves aren't strictly a new functionality. They have been around for at least three years (half of Teams life): and were certainly being used by IT Pros when custom backgrounds were introduced back in 2020 through third party apps such as Snapchat and OBS which leveraged virtual cam. Microsoft then introduced Soft Focus and Adjust Brightness - which are also Filters - later in 2022. So at this point, we have backgrounds, Avatars on the way, and we now have Filters, too. All native, all options for the meeting. But like backgrounds, and like Avatars, Filters are going to provoke the same questions and spark the same discussions. Can we control them? Do we allow our users to use them? The old famous just because we can doesn't mean we should. Will they be a fad? Will they add richness to the meeting? We come face to face once again with those hard subjects of culture and identity and expression and bias. Luckily, I will leave that to you to decide. Here's how to configure them, with a few pertinent questions for the administrator such as - do they work with Teams Meeting Recordings, and are they compliant to meeting policies?
Category: Microsoft OneDrive
Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Let’s Embed Stream videos in Teams – and get Embed Codes from both SharePoint and OneDrive
The feedback about the Stream-Teams blogs has been real positive the last few weeks. And that's all good. Feels like I'm almost back in the flow of the blog writing when I was pre-covid. So let's hold fast to the tack this week and talk about embedding Stream videos. Video embedding involves getting a snippet of code or script, known as an “embed code” - typically from the video and then adding that snippet of code to a site, such as a SharePoint Site. Embedding helps us to surface videos where we want them to be consumed. Now, generating embed codes for videos via the new Stream on SharePoint is not completely straightforward today. It has been confirmed - in writing - as being in development so a button will be there in the future on videos to easily generate the embed code. Yet how can we do it today if we really needed to do that? And not only videos that will be housed within SharePoint, but for videos that will be housed within OneDrive too. This blog builds on the excellent work of Mark Mroz, one of the leads in the Stream Team who wrote some excellent JSON in order to obtain and surface it for videos housed in SharePoint.
The new Stream Web App is here. I found it! And it supports Teams Meeting Recordings
given that I pretty much liked everything about Stream: the web experience, the mobile experience. Both were easy to use and did what it said on the tin. It had started to have great features like trim and screen capture. It could be brought into Teams in a number of ways - and kudos has to go to the Stream Team for how hard they must of worked on it; creating a strong app which was really taking off and really focused bringing out the best in video. However, on the other hand whilst recognising all of this; pivoting made a lot of sense. There was a growing amount of noise and frustration from the tech community about not being able to share video externally, about not being able to apply common compliance functionality such as retention. Since Stream had it's own completely separate storage many things had to be developed separately. Whilst I know there was plans to do this - ones which were very near to completion since I was involved in roundtables previewing the functionality; in a world where apps like Microsoft Lists were being designed to work right across the stack leveraging existing storage on SharePoint and OneDrive and existing security and compliance functionality; Stream felt outside of that almost moving in the opposite direction. So 'bringing it into the Microsoft 365 stack', the idea that a video 'is a file just like any other file' won out. And what did that mean? Stream 2.0 would pivot to become the player across the Microsoft 365 stack. SharePoint and OneDrive would house video files. There would be a new personal web app, a new player and video 'portals' which could be created on SharePoint. Now, in the time between Ignite 2020 and now much has focused on things such as recordings, changing the default location to SharePoint and OneDrive and CDN support. We know that the new player is coming soon due to it hitting the message centre. However not much has come out officially about the web portal and when we can start using it. Tonight, out of sheer curiosity I had a go at amending an URL since this worked previously for Lists via OneDrive. The new Stream portal is already there. This wasn't in a TAP or preview ring. This was in a Ring 4 GA tenant. Let's see what we can do
Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Opting into SharePoint/OneDrive for Business as the location for Teams Meeting Recordings
Stream is changing. If you kept up to date with Ignite then you will know that it's being re-imagined and rebuilt to integrate seamlessly with applications across the stack. One of the consequences of this change is that Teams Meeting Recordings (TMR) will - like all video - be stored within SharePoint (in the case of channel meetings) and OneDrive (in the case of non-channel or what we call private meetings). There is a lot of sense and upside to this. For example, video will now be able to be shared externally which was the Achilles heel with classic stream and which many users ended up doing anyway albeit moving the video manually. Secondly, we can now leverage Microsoft 365's security and compliance functionality such as retention
Microsoft Lists Fundamentals Part 1
I have a little detour from Teams this week. Of course, Microsoft Lists will come into Teams in the next month or so - this has already been confirmed. Yet I like many others have been caught up in the hype and wanted to get hands on with the web app experience as a primer for that. So it's a good thing that even though it's not officially in my Ring 4 test tenant - as in no icon on login - there's still a way to access it - many thanks to Matt Wade and Michael Pisarek for bringing it to my attention on social. So, Lists. Lists are effective for many things - Itineraries, Assets, Expenses, Project Steps, Go to Market actions. And there is many reasons as to why you would make a list. You would make it to record track and organise. You would make it in order to collaborate with others. You would make it to share with others. Yet lists in Microsoft 365 are not new. As announced at Build, Lists are an evolution of SharePoint Lists and encompasses SharePoint Lists and which is now a cross app all of it's own. Let's have a look
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