If you are like many users in an organization where Teams adoption is growing fast, you are being added to a LOT of teams. After a certain point, it becomes daunting; an overwhelming list of teams and activity that is akin to drinking from a fire hose.  Most chat based collaboration app’s suffer from this challenge – how do you allow end-users to participate in all of the projects and teams they are part of it, yet, allow them to focus on what they need to do? There are many different approaches to this problem, and the right one depends on your situation (how many Teams and Channels and ..read more

With more organizations adopting Microsoft teams and upgrading from Skype for Business, there are more users in those organizations that have a mix of Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business usage. The experience of one user using Microsoft Teams, and another user using Skype for Business largely depends on what coexistence mode each user is in.  The coexistence mode is set in a Teams Upgrade policy which applies to the user account. There is a global Teams Upgrade policy defined at the tenant level which takes precedent if there is no Teams Upgrade policy applied to the user. I often ge ..read more

This past year, I’ve largely focused my efforts on other community efforts such as Office 365 Podcast O365Eh! with fellow MVP’s Habib Mankal, Dino Caputo, and Michael LaMontagne.  This left little time for blogging. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of my Office 365 MVP Award (see below for the cool 10th year MVP ring!), this blog is coming out of dormancy and being re-branded to “Inside Office 365” to better reflect my expertise and the move to Office 365 applications and services, with an emphasis on Microsoft Teams. You can expect some great tips, tricks, and resource for Microsof ..read more

The Microsoft Surface Hub has been a popular choice for a next generation collaboration device for Skype for Business & Teams with it’s immersive and feature rich meeting experiences.  As organizations migrate to the cloud and look to upgrade their collaboration devices, this quick post addresses a common question –  does the shipping version of Surface Hub support Microsoft Teams, and is it worth waiting for the newly announced Surface Hub 2.0? If you are not familiar with the Microsoft Surface Hub collaboration experience, there are some quick videos here which illustrate the power of t ..read more

April 5th, 2018 Update:  Microsoft has made an official announcement of the new Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center here: Announcing the new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center. At Ignite 2017 we first learned of Microsoft’s plan to deliver a new Office 365 Admin Center that unifies the management experience for both Teams and Skype for Business Online (SfBO). Since then, many ITPro’s have had questions such as what features will be included, what is the fate of the existing SfBO Admin Center, and when will it be available? Microsoft recently released more public de ..read more

Skype for Business Online integration directly within the Yammer web client rolled-out in the latter half of 2017. As more organizations adopt Skype for Business Online, Yammer users are leveraging this integration. This post summarizes the features available, and more importantly, two common issues and how to resolve them. Feature Recap At a high level, the SfB integration enables Yammer users: Use basic Skype for Business features in a thin web client embedded directly in the Yammer web client See the SfB presence of other Yammer users and initiate communication with them Receive IM convers ..read more

Questions often arise in Skype for Business Online (SfBO) administration regarding the a user’s registered “location”.  In the SfBO admin center we see it as the location field in the user listing as shown here: This subtle setting is important for the voice Phone System calling plan (PSTN) service configuration in SfBO because it restricts what phone numbers can be assigned to a user, and their associated emergency location.  Specifically, only registered emergency locations (addresses) that belong to the same country as a users’ location can specified for that user. In addition, when assig ..read more

As Office 365 adoption grows, more Skype for Business (SfB) hybrid deployments are being transitioned to pure online after all of the users have been migrated to online. While some steps in this final transition process are well documented, such as the decommissioning of the SfB on-premises servers, other steps are poorly documented. This post provides some details on one step of the transition to pure online that isn’t well documented: removing the SfB user attributes (e.g. msRTC*) in on-premises AD from users after hybrid mode has been changed to pure online. This post assumes that the hyb ..read more

The world is adopting multi-factor authentication, and Microsoft is rapidly adding support in their server, services, and clients to support it. Microsoft’s name for multi-factor support is Modern Authentication (MA) and support has been added for Skype for Business Server (SfB), Exchange Server, and more recently, the equivalent online cloud services (Exchange Online and Skype for Business Online). In practice, with potentially a decade of legacy client versions, and a now matrix of possible SfB and Exchange hybrid topologies, supporting MA for all the users in an enterprise requires some pl ..read more

I have talked to several people lately who have had the need to mute the audio coming from a Skype for Business meeting or web conference.  Not mute their microphone, but the speaker/headset audio stream from the conference.  They they are needing to listen to something else  – take another call, listen to music while they just watch the conference, or even trying to participate in two conference calls at the same time. They have struggled in the Skype for Business 2016 client on how to control this, so I wanted to pass along a couple of tips. The simplest option to just mute the incoming aud ..read more