Tag: Office365

Office 365 Feature Scale-back

Microsoft is adjusting some non-core features to save capacity while the number of remote workers increased dramatically. This won’t impact core services (signing on, viewing/sending messages, uploading/downloading files), but don’t be concerned if you’re getting replies where the person seemingly didn’t type, presence updates seem slow, avatars aren’t showing up next to someone’s name (or yours in the upper right-hand corner of Teams), etc.

Microsoft Teams Meeting Notes

The trick to understanding this is knowing that “Meeting Notes” are, for some reason, Wiki pages and not OneNote documents. There are two types of meetings — those held in a Teams channel and those held outside of a channel — and the ability to get a useful link to the Meeting Notes depends on which type of meeting you have.

Meetings in a Teams Channel:

When your meeting is in a Teams channel, you can use the ellipsis to grab a link to the Meeting Notes location in Microsoft Teams.

This link points to the “Meeting Notes” tab created in the channel. That tab is available without a link, too — so I can access the meeting notes just by going to the channel where the meeting was held.

Meetings Outside of a Teams Channel:

The meeting notes wiki file is stored in your OneDrive. You can find that file by searching your OneDrive for the name of the meeting. In this example, I have a meeting titled “Super Important”. You can right-click on this and select “copy link” to grab a link to the file.

The problem is that it’s an MHT (basically a self contained web page) file. I can give you a link to the file, but it’s not a convenient link to a OneNote page like you’d expect. For some reason, Chrome wants to save it as an EML (email) so the file opens in Outlook (or change the extension to MHT manually). Firefox keeps the MHT extension, and the file opens up in a browser so you can view the notes.

 

Upcoming Features from Ignite 2019

  1. Private channels should be coming this week … not my tenant yet, but soon
  2. Multi-window functionality where chats, calls, and such can pop out into another window
  3. Live captioning should land later this year — this is an obvious great feature for people with reduced hearing or frequency loss, live “closed captioning” is awesome if you’re working from a noisy location too
  4. Microsoft Whiteboard moved into general availability — it’s been a preview for quite some time now
  5. “Attendee” roll will prevent people from inadvertently sharing their screen in the middle of a meeting
  6. My Staff portal that allows managers to perform password resets (and maybe unlocks) for their employees. This is something I’ve done as custom code in IDM platforms, but it’s nice to see Microsoft incorporating ideas that reduce down-time due to password challenges.
  7. I’ll be curious to see if the healthcare-specific features move into other verticals — MS rolled out a feature that allows you to designate a contact when you’re in surgery (basically redirect all of my messages to Bob because I’m busy right now) that seemed like it would be quite useful in enterprise or education uses. The “patient coordination” feature they talk about might work as a contact management tool out of the medical realm too.
  8. URLs in Teams will be protected like the links in other Office 365 programs — if you click on a link and see something about “Advanced Threat Protection” … that’d be why 🙂

Did you know … A OneNote notebook and Planner board are automatically created for each Microsoft Team space?

They are! But to make them reallyuseful, add them as tabs to one of your channels. Pick the channel where you want the OneNote and/or Planner tabs to appear. In that Channel, click the “Add a tab” button. 

OneNote is straight-forward – select OneNote 

And then select the notebook with your new team’s name. Click “Save” and the notebook will be available as a tab on the channel.  

Planner is a little trickier – the automatically created Planner board does not show up until it is used (you’ll be asked to create a new Planner board if you try adding a Planner board before the automatically created one has been used). But how do you use the one that’s already there instead of making a new one? Open Planner from https://portal.office.com and select “All plans”. Find the Planner board with your new team name. Click on it to open it.

And then close it 🙂 Now you can add the Planner board to your Teams space. Click on the “Add a tab” button within your channel.   

Select “Planner” 

Click the radio button before “Use an existing plan”, then click the inverted caret, and the automatically created Planner board is a valid selection.  

  Click “Save” and the Planner board will be available as a tab in your channel.