Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: Microsoft Teams: Part 3

These announcements, enhancements, and new features are super exciting and will help streamline, provide easy access, and seamless communication and collaboration within Teams. But we also know this comes with greater responsibility, more intense support, and meticulous organization on the part of the IT Admins.

Microsoft continually acknowledges the complexities that the IT Admins face from the very beginning of planning the architecture and every step in between towards a successful deployment and post-deployment support. In Teams, the IT Admins are receiving some game-changing enhancements to make their responsibilities more manageable.

Managing Teams and Protecting Data with Planning and Administration Tools

1. Advisor for Teams: Advisor for Teams provides IT Admins assistance in the planning for a successful Teams deployment across the organization by offering recommended plans, encompassing a collaboration space for the deployment team to streamline the rollout of all the Teams workloads, including meetings, messages, and calling;

2. Microsoft Semi-Annual Channel: With Office ProPlus, Teams deployment will be streamlined with the Click-to-Run, which will install the Teams client on all PCs that are already on the semi-annual channel. Going forward from January 14, 2020, the client will then update itself regularly;

3. App Catalogue: The new App Catalogue will provide administrators detailed information for applications that are available in the Teams environment. These details will include name, description, publisher, certification status and policy details;

4. Policy Packages: A Policy Package is a collection of pre-defined policies and policy settings. These can be easily assigned by IT Admins to users in an organization who have similar roles thus ensuring that users have access to the Teams capabilities that they need;

5. Policy Assignment to Security Groups in PowerShell: This will be available at the end of this year;

6. Microsoft Teams Room and the Teams Admin Portal: IT Admins will be able to manage device inventory and execute device tasks such as restarting, assigning configurations, and monitoring and diagnosing issues. This can all be performed with the Microsoft Teams Room in the Teams Admin Portal;

7. Managed Meeting Rooms: This is a cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service offered by Microsoft. This service ensures that Teams meeting rooms are up-to-date and secure with proactive monitoring;

8. Safe Links in Microsoft Teams: Safe Links in Microsoft Teams safeguards Teams messages against harmful links when a URL is shared in a channel conversation or in a private chat in real-time. Teams will perform a time-of-click verification of URLs. If there is a risk of malware or viruses, the user will be alerted. Safe Links is powered by Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection;

9. Additional Compliance and Security Capabilities: By the end of this  year, audit log search (deleting and editing messaging events within audit log search), information barriers policies (extending to include files stored in a Team’s SharePoint site); retention policies (applicable to short retentions like one day); and e-Discovery (results will now include search results for keywords and conversations around them) will become available.

Automating Workflows, Integrating Custom Apps and Data Insights within Teams using Power Platform

1. Power Apps and Teams Apps: Power Apps creators can publish their apps as Team apps. This will provide users easy access to these apps in Teams and users will be able to access them in Teams. Admins will have the ability to publish custom apps directly into the app library in Teams which will make them more easily discoverable to users;

2. Pinning an App: An app created with Power Apps can be pinned in Teams to the left rail. By pinning an app, the user will have easy access to frequently used apps;

3. Teams-Centric Actions & Triggers – Power Automate: Users can use Power Automate Teams-Centric Actions & Triggers to create new automated workflows within Teams; and

4. Power BI Interactive Cards in Teams: Users will be able to quickly find and act on their data with Power BI Interactive Cards in Teams.

With the many new and improved features in Teams, users across the organization along with external clients will have the ability to communicate from varying platforms such as Linux, iOS, and android. Flexibility, versatility, and ease of access being provided by Microsoft Teams strengthen the cohesiveness for users to work together. Microsoft continues to improve and innovate collaboration through communication.