[m365weekly] #8: Zoom or Teams? Pick one.

☁️What’s on my mind

This week’s issue of m365weekly is a few hours late. I’ve been technical support for the marital and family therapy association’s yearly Convention. This year their Convention is a virtual event, of course. I was hoping that they would use Teams for it. But as it turned out Zoom was a far better choice. Why? Two words: Breakout rooms.
I have never used Zoom except for a few short meetings. And after today I have to say Zoom outperforms Teams when considering user experience.
I’m a Microsoft fan and I am impatiently waiting for some kind of competitive improvement of Teams towards a better webinar experience. Come on Microsoft.

What is your choice? Zoom, Teams, something different?

Have a nice day. Matt.

💻 Productivity & Modern Workplace

Microsoft Teams to get multi-account sign-in support in December. Holy cow!!! Really? As it turns out … NO. Personal and Work account – YES. But no multiple work accounts. Practically every other app supports that … except for Teams. When we will get support for multi-tenant sign-in? Not even the mighty Roadmap knows.

Edit Stream videos in admin mode. You have probably noticed Stream service when you recorded your first Teams meeting. At the moment the downside is that you can’t share videos with external audiences. That is going to change in a couple of months. But for me, Stream is a very high added value internal educational portal I use for my small M365 organization. From recorded webinars to short instructional videos I can create directly from Stream without any additional software.

Backing up Office 365 to an on-premises server!? Let’s face it. There is no single answer to the question of whether you need or don’t need to backup your Microsoft 365 data. The answer depends on multiple factors. Does the organization have enough knowledge and resources to set up retention policies properly? Is this a Small Business or Enterprise organization? In some cases having backup does not hurt. If you’d like to watch a great pro et contra debate about this topic, you have to check this Youtube video. Having a local backup is quite an interesting idea. With Synology NAS servers you can do it easily – all you need is included in the software suite already installed.

How to resolve duplicate Outlook for iOS contacts. Contact synchronization is far from being perfect on mobile devices. I didn’t have much of sync problems lately but I have been solving a few of them in the last years for my clients. A real pain in the neck when you’re dealing with a phonebook with over 5k of contacts.

☁️Sysadmin Stuff

Convert Word documents to markdown, HTML, or other formats. Useful tool. And it’s free.

Leave an organization as a guest user. Okay, it’s not as easy-peasy as the document says. As always UI is a bit changed and most users will never grasp the ways Microsoft handles identities. I am in a bunch of different organizations that I want to leave. I feel like in “Hotel California”: you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. A slightly different approach to the same problem on this link.

Rename SharePoint folders using Power Automate in 2 easy steps. Ever wondered if you rename Sharepoint folders with Power Automate flows? Of course you can. It’s quite simple actually. Read on.

☁️Security & Data Governance

Protect sensitive data with Microsoft Information Protection. [Interactive guide] Overview of the technology at hand.

Basic Network Monitoring for Microsoft 365. A question of monitoring of on-premise IT infrastructure is actually a question of selecting the proper solution and implementing it. You know all the variables. But monitoring a cloud is a completely different beast. You know very little about the core IT infrastructure the cloud runs on. Fortunately, you have a few options.

Microsoft Planner cheat sheet. Planner is one of the apps you have at your disposal if you have at least a Microsoft 365 Business Standard plan. I actually never used it as have a useful use case for it. This article sheds some light upon Planner and it gives you some clarity what Planner is and what it is not.

☁️ Last but not least …

Here are a few things you can do if you enjoyed reading this newsletter:

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