Tagged: Teams
Anrufe in Microsoft Teams klingeln bald auch auf zweitem Gerät
[DE] In diesem Beitrag geht es um ein neues Features für Microsoft Teams, welches im September 2019 ausgerollt wird. Microsoft Teams erhält ab diesem Monat ein sehnsüchtig erwartetes Feature, den “Secondary Ringer”, oder “Sekundärer Rufton” (DE).
Der “Sekundäre Rufton” erlaubt das Klingeln bei einem Anruf auf zwei Geräten. Das ist sehr praktisch, wenn ich das Headset auf dem Schreibtisch liegen habe und mich jemand anruft. So kann ich einstellen, dass es sowohl auf meinem Headset und auf dem Lautsprecher meines PCs klingelt.
Bislang sehe ich bei abgesetztem Headset nur eine visuelle Benachrichtigung für eingehende Anrufe. Somit kommt mit dem “Sekundären Rufton” ein zweites auswählbares Ausgabegerät hinzu.
Zusätzliche Ressourcen
- Microsoft Teams – Secondary Ringer [Microsoft 365 roadmap update item 51089]
BitTitan White Paper – Migrate Microsoft Teams Tenant-to-Tenant
In a previous post I wrote about how you can migrate Microsoft Teams from one (source) Office 365 tenant to another (target) Office 365 tenant by using third party (3P) tools to ease and automate the migration process. BitTitan is one of the tools which can be used.
BitTitan published a White Paper regarding “Top Migration Considerations for Cross-Tenant Teams Migrations” which you can request and download to avoid typical pitfalls and get awareness on what limitations there might be. You can find the link to request the download of the White Paper at the bottom of this post.
Additional resources
Location Based Routing (LBR) in Microsoft Teams
This post is about LBR – a planned feature – for calling or telephony with Microsoft Teams which might be released and available in Q4 2019.
Location Based Routing (LBR) allows basically to route and control voice calls depending on the location. In my opinion, this is very useful for deployments with roaming users especially regarding emergency calls or call restrictions.
Why LBR?
There are some reasons to use LBR for managing and controlling your voice call flows:
- Egress calls: Enforce outgoing calls to egress via local PSTN gateway, prevent PSTN toll bypass
- Ingress calls: Prevent incoming PSTN calls via a NON-local PSTN gateway
- Undefined location: Prevent PSTN calls to and from users in undefined locations
Let me describe a small (fictive) scenario where LBR could help:
Erik works for a special machinery engineering company.
Still, the company has decentralized PSTN connectivity.
Each location and site has a dedicated PSTN link and SBC.
Erik is a Teams user including calling capabilities.
He’s located and “homed” in Stuttgart, Germany.
Erik travels to another company site.
Erik needs to place an (emergency) call while being in another office in Berlin, Germany.
By default this (emergency) call would be routed via Stuttgart to the local emergency service answering point. However, that would be a very bad routing and in case of an emergency were every second counts this is not acceptable.It would be ok if Erik was really in Stuttgart and not Berlin.
By using LBR this (emergency) call would be routed locally and breakout to PSTN via the SBC in Berlin and land at the emergency service answering point in Berlin instead of Stuttgart. If Erik would have to call for emergency in the company site in Hamburg, Germany the call would be routed locally and breakout to PSTN via the SBC in Hamburg as well.
How does LBR work?
Usually you’ll have to define and save some of your network parameters (IP address ranges per site …) to define sites in the phone system. Afterwards you’ll have to define (LBR) voice routing for each site (e.g. LBR policies, voice route/s, policies …) so that calls are routed according to the location requirements and its configuration.
Conclusion, opinion and summary
This is subject to change or might be implemented different to what’s described above. This is just my personal assumption how it might look like. I’ve just assumed that it might be like that because of the approach which can be found in Skype for Business Server.
Additional resources
- Microsoft Teams – Location Based Routing [Microsoft 365 Roadmap item ID 24180]
- Plan for Location-Based Routing in Skype for Business
Microsoft Teams interop screen sharing with SFB
Microsoft announced the roll out of (interop) screen sharing between a Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business user during a chat or voice call for September 2019.
Conclusion, opinion and summary
I’m looking forward to this update however I’m not sure what this means in detail right now. Why? Because with Microsoft Teams we need to differentiate between “interop” and “federation“!
Teams Interop (in conjunction with SFB) usually means intra-tenant interop, e.g. how can a Microsoft Teams and a Skype for Business users within the same Office 365 tenant communicate and collaborate with each other.
Teams Federation usually means external [to your Office 365 tenant] federated communication and collaboration with other users from other companies with Teams, Skype for Business Online or Skype for Business Server. For example, how can a Microsoft Teams user from company X communicate and collaborate with a Microsoft Teams/Skype for Business user from company Y.
So, if this capability is only intended for “Teams Interop” this would imply that screen sharing between Skype for Business and Team users within the same Office 365 tenant is added. Finally, you’d benefit of this as long as you are during a migration and transition phase within your Office 365 tenant from Skype for Business Online to Microsoft Teams and you will still have users on Skype for Business (Online).
Additional resources
- Microsoft Teams – Screen sharing in Teams/Skype for Business interop [Microsoft 365 roadmap update item 53934]
Automate tasks in Microsoft Teams code free
In this post I like to cross reference a video from the Microsoft Mechanics which shows how to start to automate tasks code free in Microsoft Teams in conjunction with Microsoft’s PowerPlatform services Flow and PowerApps.
Conclusion, opinion and summary
Microsoft Teams as a hub for teamwork let’s you integrate many other apps and services of the Office 365 stack like Flow and PowerApps. This enables you to automate certain (recurring) tasks and focus on more relevant tasks. The most impressiv aspect is that you do not need to be a developer, you can start to automate processes and tasks code free within little time.
For instance, if you get certain data delivered by your project team mates and you might collect and insert it in a Excel sheet or else. You might change this either starting small with sharing the Excel sheet to allow your team mates to added there data directly or you might want to build a PowerApp for the data input, insert it in the Team as tab, ad flow to get notified of new data inputs and maybe visualize the data via PowerBI…
There are infinite use cases and options which you could automate code free to focus on more relevant things at work. By adding Flows and PowerApps to your Teams you don’t even need to switch to another app.
Additional resources
Microsoft Teams gets private channels
Microsoft plans to gradually roll out private channel in Microsoft Teams in September late October (till early November) 2019. This is one of the most requested features in Teams. [UPDATED 17.09.2019]
Finally, this enables to manage and control access to channels in Teams. So only defined users can access a Teams channel within a specific Team.
Conclusion, opinion and summary
I’m looking forward to this feature update because this brings more manageability for team owners within a [Teams] team, if required. Especially, if you have a project team with external guests you might want to have an internal project-related conversation or data exchange, too. So, by secure private channels you have [soon] the option to define such “internal” channels for a project team within a [Teams] team. There’ll be no need to create an extra Team for this use case, just as one possible use case, e.g. you do not need to create two project Teams for [internal] and [external] collaboration. Instead you can utilize secure private channels and avoid creating duplicate Teams due to access-control needs for project contents and collaboration.
Right now ( 8th August 2019) I’m not aware of plans if the feature will come to existing [Teams] teams or only to newly created ones. I hope that it will apply to existing [Teams] teams but we’ll see in September October/November 2019. [UPDATED 17.09.2019]
Additional resources
- Microsoft Teams – Secure private channels [Microsoft Roadmap Item ID 50588]
- Support for Private Channels [Microsoft Teams User Voice]
- Create a private channel in Teams
Manage discover of private Teams
Microsoft rolls out a new feature which allows to manage the discovery of private Teams.
Conclusion, opinion and summary
To manage the discovery of private Teams allows that Teams are listed and searchable like public Teams. However, an user cannot directly join a Team he/she need to get approved by a Team owner in order to join.
You’ll be able to manage this per-Team either via PowerShell or in the Teams GUI.
