Microsoft 365

Microsoft Teams: Guest Notifications

Microsoft Teams has the great ability to invite users who are in other organizations to join your Teams in order to collaborate, assuming your IT admin has not turned that feature off. Guests in the Team can’t do everything that an internal member can do, but it’s pretty close, so it’s a strong environment for connecting with partners.

But there is one pretty significant catch to be aware of: notifications.

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Microsoft Teams: Search Filters

I recently was asked whether it is possible to search in Microsoft Teams for a file but only within a specific site. The short answer is yes, but that’s not the default search behaviour. When you use the search bar in Teams, it will default to all types of results across all Teams you are a member of. But then you can filter from there. This is significantly improved by some recent changes.

So, if I know I am looking for a particular file in a particular Team, I can do that this way:

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Mail Tester

A common scenario with many web services like a CRM is sending mail and realizing that it is often going to the junk of recipients.

There are several reasons why a message may go to spam. Some of those reasons come from the content of the message. Some are because of filters set up by the recipient or their email provider. And some factors come down to technical configuration on the part of the sender.

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Microsoft Teams: Information Session

I recently gave a presentation introducing some key concepts and answering questions around Microsoft Teams. The context was for those who already have accounts and have used it throughout Covid-19. They didn’t need the day-to-day basics like how to start a meeting, but they needed a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together and when it is best to use what. It was not a full consultation process, but I did put out a call for questions a couple weeks in advance and received several that I made sure to integrate into the presentation.

I’ve edited my notes to be a bit more generic and included those below:

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Microsoft 365: Tools for Recognizing Sensitive Data

There are a handful of tools in Microsoft 365 to help you with information protection. Which one is the best option will depend on the scenario you will need to use it for. Once you’ve identified sensitive data using one of these tools, you can use it apply compliance rules like blocking sharing outside the organization or retaining for a certain number of years.

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Microsoft Teams: Phone Numbers

I personally have not used Microsoft Teams as a phone system. My employers have stuck completely with Internet-based communications, mostly to others in the same organization. But if you want to integrate your organization’s phone system into Teams and have your phone calls ring through in Teams, that’s absolutely possible.

Here’s an introduction on some of the things to consider:

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Microsoft Teams: Information Barriers

What if you need to partition your organization so that some members of your tenant cannot communicate with others in Teams? For example, maybe you have interns who you do want to have Teams access but not to any sensitive information.

Information barriers are the solution you need. You can block interaction across the barriers so that the interns cannot see any content from anybody else or vice versa.

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Microsoft Teams: Lifecycle

If you’ve been paying attention to Microsoft 365 products in the last 5 years or so, you’ve likely noticed that things have moved toward a much flatter architecture where users have more freedom to set up their own Teams / SharePoint sites, etc. In many ways this is great, but it does carry some risks of sprawl caused by users casually creating data structures and then forgetting about them.

Fortunately, Microsoft does offer some mechanisms in the Teams lifecycle to help with this.

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