[m365weekly] #10: Breakout rooms for Teams are late. Again.

☁️What’s on my mind

Hello. I’m working from home due to lockdown for the second week in a row. 🙁 And I think I will work that way for at least another 3 weeks.

This issue is a little bit more packed with links to the good stuff I’ve found in previous days.
I started to play around with Power Automate a bit trying to find ways to automate some of the source gathering errands for this newsletter. There’s an incredible amount of excellent online resources.

Have a nice day. Matic Z.

💻 Productivity & Modern Workplace

A first look at the Productivity Score Dashboard. Is your company productive enough? Can it get better? You can get some insights into your company culture and productivity by inspecting this new feature.

Make your Teams meeting screen work for you. Especially if you’re mostly using some other platform for video conferencing, you might struggle with the Teams user interface. You’ll find a very thorough overview of how to adjust bits and pieces of Teams to suit your needs.

“Only the organizer can bypass the lobby.” This option is among additions to Teams that happened in the last months.

Downloading attendance reports in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Is the boss asking you who attended that webinar you had? Do you know who to email with a follow-up email? Not a problem anymore as you can easily get the attendance report.

How to use breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams. A bit misleading, I know. Breakout rooms in Teams are late. Again. This time MS says they will start to roll them out in December. Let’s hope so because Zoom is way better with this. But until then check this article where the author presents how the work with breakout rooms will look like in Teams. For those who are already using them somewhere else (Zoom), here’s a bit of reading on best practices.

At-mentions lower stress. Use at-mentions to help teammates keep on top of conversations in Teams. At-mentions remind them that there’s something we want from them.

Microsoft Forms Brings Polls to Microsoft Teams Meetings. Another good and most welcomed feature in teams. Polling.

☁️Sysadmin Stuff

How to stay on top of all things happening in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem? First, read this newsletter. 🙂 Second, read about some other good ways to stay on top of changes.

IT Admins: you can now brand the Microsoft Teams Company App Catalog. This can be achieved through the Teams admin portal.

Sharpen your team’s technical skills with the Cloud Skills Challenge. A great resource for those who like to participate in challenges and learn new things on a daily basis.

How to Store Teams Meeting Recordings in OneDrive for Business. Have you ever wondered how to share meeting recordings with external participants of the Teams meeting? I did and I always felt like a fool that doesn’t know his ways in Teams. It just wasn’t possible to do it. It was not a bug. And it was not a feature either. Microsoft is fixing this as you read this. But it will take them some time to do properly. Fortunately, there’s a way to do it manually …

☁️Security & Data Governance

How much security is ‘enough’ security? Looking at Microsoft 365 Defender vs. Azure Sentinel. It happened again: MS changed some security product names in the last months. That’s just another layer of confusion to already confusing sets of products. Alex Fields wrote an excellent article explaining the basics.

Office 365 phishing campaign detects sandboxes to evade detection. We will never be completely safe against advanced attacks. Criminals are getting very creative in avoiding threat protection solutions.

10 Minute Tips & Tricks with J. Peter Bruzzese: Azure Information Protection part 1. What is Azure Information Protection? Can AIP prevent someone to print or forward your mail? Click and watch the video on the link.

Microsoft rolls out protection for critical accounts in Office 365. VIPs are VIPs also in Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Priority protection is now a part of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (formerly Office 365 ATP).

💻 Upcoming Webinars

26. November 2020 – #3 Meetup – Workplace Ninjas Usergroup München.

10. – 11. December 2020 – Microsoft 365 Collaboration Conference Virtual Event. Keynotes and sessions are free to attend.

💻 Slightly Off-Topic

Guido van Rossum, the Python language’s founder, joins Microsoft. Yes, slightly off-topic but needs to be mentioned as it’s a great win for Microsoft to have him on a team. Who would have guessed 10 years ago that Microsoft is going to become one of the most active contributors to the open-source community?

Battling fear and toxicity in the workplace. Always important issue to address.

☁️On a Less Serious Note


☁️ Last but not least …

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