Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Retention Policies on Private Channels

Ok quick one as we start the weekend. I had a scenario this week where a customer of a partner asked me 'is it possible to add retention policies to private channels in Teams' - for files in private channels, not standard channels and to do this centrally. The reason for this is that they had third party backup software which doesn't work with private channels currently. Now hands up before investigation and testing I didn't know the answer to this, and it was one of those situations your probably familiar with - considering I do this every day why hadn't I come across this previously? I know. Yet these are good opportunities to learn and to fill in the blank. So, it turns out you can, but the documentation on docs doesn't exactly make this explicit. This blog aims to do so and clarify retention policies on private channels, and in contrast to standard channels

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Catching up on the the latest YouTube videos with Power Automate, Lists and Teams

It's been a while since I wrote anything about video. I did quite a few blogs on Teams and Stream last year and even did a few sessions on how they worked together on the circuit - but with the transition to modern Stream I'm very much waiting for the new experience; when we start seeing features like the web experience, when podcasts and portals emerge. All in good time - even though in moving the TMR's over I badly need the use of trim, and I still want to talk about video. You see, I watch a lot of it. I love the medium, and so doing a few blogs on power automate and approval scenarios with Lists and Teams, I also had an idea for a new blog involving video. The idea is that I constantly struggle with time. With responsibilities for work, family and community I often miss quality content that goes by on great channels like Microsoft Mechanics. So I thought what if I could put this into a List which updates and I can work through that. Surfacing it in the Team could be quite valuable

Teams Real Simple in Pictures: Disabling List Item Comments in the Web App and in Teams

It's been a bit of a mad week. Over the last five days I've spoken at Modern Workplace Conference Paris, the Microsoft Reactor in London and Microsoft 365 California. Awesome events with great organisers and every one a fantastic experience. Honestly, it's such a privilege given our situation, and if you came to see one of my sessions then thank you for your support and the time you've set aside. Now the subject of today is a question I got at the end of the Reactor session which I thought I would follow up on. The session was about Teams and Lists and the question was specifically, can you disable comments in Microsoft Lists? As I said in the session the answer is yes - at least in the web app. So this one is for you. And for anyone else reading why would we disable comments? Well, we may not want to have comments and conversations around List Items. We may find them too busy or too distracting. They may not, in our case, add value. So to start out there is two things you need to know about comments on Lists at the current time. Number one - comments on List Items in the web app are different from conversations on List Items in Teams. As shown below in the screen shots of the same item in the different experiences the comments are different and do not synchronise. Being that you can have two different sets of comments in the same item - that in itself is a reason to want to turn it off to avoid confusion. In addition the data isn't housed in the same place, the conversations in Teams are not housed in SharePoint where the List is. Number two. Disabling comments on List Items in the web app experience can only be done via Powershell and can only be done tenant wide - for all Lists. It's not as granular as being able to do it for specific Lists in specific Sites/Teams, however Microsoft do have future plans to introduce this. So you have to tread carefully here and understand this isn't the complete experience which we want - ideally it would be consistent across Teams and this raises the question? Does disabling it via the Shell for the core web app experience also disable it in Teams? Let's find out

[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

An Invite to Teams Nation: Headliners, Call for Speakers and Moderators

It's time to start again. A new conference with a new name. Back in November we announced that we were leaving TeamsFest behind and moving forward with Teams Nation. It's a decision that we were thinking about for some time given we wanted to become more inclusive of our audience outside of Europe, but we also wanted to avoid conflict with other parties who had a desire to use the name. Now - as then - we wish them the very best and hope it brings them as much success that we had the last few years. So what have we been up to since then? Over the last two months, we have worked on consolidating our old user group, the European Teams User Group into the Teams Nation Monthly meetup and so far we've have had some awesome sessions from speakers such as Hadrian Nessim Socard, Tomasz Poszytek, Joao Ferreira and Albert Hoitingh. With more attendees than ever before, our meetup group has grown to over 150 members in a really short space of time. We've set up on Twitter. We've set up on LinkedIn. I think Vesku mentioned he spun something up on Insta. It's gone well so far with the kind of incremental growth that is really nice to see. We're already booking up for the monthly meetup into June