Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Opting in to OneDrive Storage for Whiteboard, View Switcher, Teams Meeting Recording Expiry in TAC and more!

Ok! It was back to teaching this week. First up? Microsoft Teams Phone Essentials. I had spent the previous week facelifting the course; aligning it to Microsoft's new branding of Teams Phone for the calling workload. But then Ignite came along. And so I had to facelift it again with all of the awesome news which dropped: native contact centre, SIP gateway, workspace management and the device dashboard. It really is awesome. True - after all these years it still hasn't got 100% of the old Skype for Business features and yes, still no sign of native compliant call recording and smaller SKU's. But the news last week, together with the news that comms credits will run through an Azure subscription, is all pointing in the direction we are looking. For those who worked with OCS, Lync and SfB these are the kinds of things we always wanted to see. Now, setup for the labs for courses are always opportunities to spot features in preview or GA and this week I spotted a few which were ripe to send to the blog. First, we now have the ability to now opt in to using OneDrive to store Whiteboard. Microsoft Whiteboard is being rebuilt on top of OneDrive for Business and this will become the default starting in January 2022. We can opt the whole tenant in. However, there is an important caveat to know. We are now also seeing the View Switcher in meetings, the ability to switch seamlessly between modes such as between the gallery and together mode and focus mode. This is ideal insofar that we don't have to drill down through the control bar where we may, for example, accidently stop recording or turn off live captions if we are in a rush. Needless to say; the introduction and release of functionality for Teams remain relentless. Announcements and roadmap is all very exciting - but so is getting hands on with the functionality when it drops.

Teams: #FightCorona – How do I add an agenda prior to the meeting?

Having discussed the lobby, the next area we will look at is adding an agenda prior to the meeting. Agendas can help focus the meeting, keeping members on track and making them more productive. They help with a structure and a narrative. Of course, not all meetings or audiences warrant agendas, and they are not a mandatory part of the scheduling - so this is completely your decision on a meeting by meeting basis

Teams Real Simple with Pictures – Four ways to create a set of links for the Team

A set of common links (I.e. https://teams.microsoft.com/start) can be important for a team. Whether to access training, vendor sites, or even files within a channel it democratizes access to information, makes information more readily available and brings it to the users instead of them having to search for it. Yet with Teams there are different ways to create sets of links and each way has it's own pro's and con's. At the time of writing there is no single accepted way which has been recognized by the Tech Community as the best - so its a case of choosing which one is right for the Team. This will show you four potential methods to create a set of links.