Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Bulk unassign policies in the TAC

Over the years, I have spoken about and covered several blogs on Microsoft Teams policies. As any good Teams administrator will know, policies play a big part in terms of managing users and defining the experience of the front end. Whether it is configuring messaging policies, or app setup policies, or the gamut of calling policies - you won't get very far into the administration without coming up against them and having to understanding and define them. And once we understand them, we begin to understand such things as the difference between org-wide and custom policies, and about policy precedence and the several ways policies can be applied such as direct, batch, package and group. And once we learn all the ways that we can apply them, we then understand that some policies are not even the TAC at all, that we have to use the shell to create new policies and grant those policies to users. So now having returned from annual leave, and Ignite, and South Coast Summit, and plowing through the backlog of all of those things, there is an extremely rich vein of material and functionality to be explored over the coming months. However, I wanted to start with something easy, short, and which I was waiting for before I flew out to Florida. This is bulk unassignment of policies which was announced back in July but didn't surface in the TAC until late September. Now bulk unassignment of policies actually means bulk unassignment of directly assigned custom policies (not org wide) - and what we must remember here is that directly assigned policies take precedence over group policies, which in turn take precedence over org-wide policies. In other words, the ability to bulk unassign custom policies is a utility to clean up and standardize Teams environments, as well as transition out of overly complex configurations with high numbers of bespoke assignments. How can we do achieve this? Does it work with Policy Packages which are also directly assigned and take precedence over group?

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Adding a Custom Messaging Policy to the Team

Messaging policies are used to control which chat and channel messaging features are available to users in Microsoft Teams. For example, a business may not feel at ease with the Team using GIF's or Stickers in what they class as corporate communications (I.e. in Sales or Finance), whereas it may not want the Team to edit or delete posts for compliance reasons. A great thing about Teams is that it isn't just a one size fits all policy in terms of Messaging - sure, the organisation starts out with a global org wide policy, and this overarching policy can be amended to make changes to all users if required - but custom messaging policies can be implemented for specific users/teams too. Regardless of the debate as to whether aspects of messaging policies such as GIF's ought to be used, this flexibility gives organisations much needed choice and flexibility to how they want messaging in Teams to be used and by whom.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Changing the App Bar for the Team with an App Setup Policy

There may be an app your Team frequently uses. For the purpose of this article lets take this app to be Microsoft Flow where the Team is repeatedly adding Flows between apps such as Forms and SharePoint and Twitter and Powerapps across multiple Teams. They could always add Flow as a Tab to a particular Team, but with the increasing amount of Teams this wouldn't make much sense as the Team members would have to remember what Team, or - as is more likely - they are now adding Flow Tabs across multiple Teams which is littering Teams with Tabs which don't necessarily need to be there.