There’s no great ADMX or ADM file for Teams Group Policy Object or GPO settings. Beyond that, a lot of the user level Teams settings aren’t available in the Teams Admin settings either. But we still may need to push settings organization-wide, for example we may want to disable GPU Hardware Acceleration for everyone to help ease the burned on workstations or VDI. This article covers individual PowerShell commands to change a handful of user-level settings by manipulating the desktop-config.json. We do this with single line commands of Powershell, which can also be pushed through a GPO by addin ..read more

If you’re here, it’s likely because you tried out a toll free number for Audio Conferencing in Microsoft Teams, it applied to all users, and you were charged way more than you had anticipated. Now you’re looking to control costs and turn it off via policy so that only select users can have it. Spoiler: There’s no policy (as of 9/29/2020 at least), it’s user by user so we’ll need to script it. Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/disabling-toll-free-numbers-for-specific-teams-users If you only need to modify one or two offenders, the easiest way is through the Admin Consol ..read more

Just a small one I was fighting for a solid half hour, wasn’t popping up a lot in Bing and I let my mind get overwhelmed for a moment. Thought I’d toss it here in case anyone ended up fighting the same issue. This was a Skype for Business Server (mixed 2015 and 2019) environment where the virtual infrastructure took a complete loss and everything had to be restored overnight. Everything came back online and seemed to be working well, but calling was failing. All services were running, the event log was nearly free of errors. Rebooted everything for good measure, still no calling. The debug log ..read more

This is a crummy, but sometime necessary workaround. As with all things Teams, new features are constantly hitting, new capabilities and new tactics so this may be unnecessary in a month, year, or perhaps even today. The scenario is: You’re using Microsoft Teams on a phone call or other media chat and you need to move that media from your desktop client to your mobile client. However, there’s no obvious way to accomplish this. Many of my clients just assume this standard feature exists because it exists on other VoIP platforms. When this scenario needs to be accomplished, there are two ..read more

I’m spending a moment blogging about this because it will affect remaining Skype and Lync deployments out there, which aren’t going away any time soon. Apple announced that Safari will trust only certs within 398 days of issuance, effectively taking the maximum validity time down to a year. This was a unilateral decision on Apples part in an effort to increase security, and to an extent, it’s a decent decision despite the maintenance hassle. I expect other browsers to eventually follow suit so a heads up for anyone who manages certificates as part of their day to day. Read more here: htt ..read more

A reminder for those of you in the Chicago area, Monday, February 10th is our quarterly Microsoft Teams user group, this one is during lunch and I’m catering Mediterranean! These are always fun and valuable, and a great place to network with your peers and make those relationships.  Vendors and local experts attend regularly as well so it’s a place to get those questions answered too! This time around there are two sessions, the first I’ll be presenting on Private Channels, then we’ll talk about all that’s new in Microsoft Teams. I can’t wait! To register or to find other local g ..read more

I’m going to start this post off by thanking a friend of mine who works for CDW, Matt Edlhuber for pointing this out. If you’ve read my previous article below or tested yourself in the past, the 911 calling behavior from the Teams mobile client used to force the call through the cell carrier. What happens when I call 911 from my Skype for Business or Teams mobile client? Wrong!With the new Dynamic Emergency Calling configuration, we have additional location controls and can often send more accurate info. Calls from the Teams mobile clients now use the licensed calling plans or direct ..read more

Oooooo I’ve been waiting for this one forever! I fell in love with this tech years ago when we saw it first with Skype for Business Broadcast Meetings. Now we have it with every meeting in Teams. Live Captions (what you may think of as closed captioning) in in preview and has hit my tenant. I love this feature for several reasons, not only because I’m a lousy multitasker and like to reread what was said if I look away for a moment, but also because there are a lot of meetings where I’m simply not a presenter, the content isn’t critical to me, and I’d rather read along that wear my head ..read more