Category: Technology

Did you know … you can record Microsoft Teams meetings (and add a transcription)?

Once you have started a Microsoft Teams meeting, click the not-quite-a-hamburger menu in the meeting control and select “Start recording.

You will see a confirmation that your meeting is recording – and, as the message mentions, make sure everyone knows they are being recorded.

If you are attending the meeting using a web browser, the browser tab will have a little red circle indicating that recording is active.

If you no longer wish to record the meeting, click the not-quite-a-hamburger-menu button again and select “Stop recording.

Now where is that recording?? Open the meeting chat

And you’ll see a post indicating that the recording is saving. Once the recording has been saved, a link to the recording will appear in the conversation. You can get a link to share with others.

If you would like a transcription to be created for your meeting, select “Open in Microsoft Stream”. This will open the recording in a web browser. Under the meeting information, click the not-quite-a-hamburger menu and select “Edit”

On the edit page, select the video language. Ensure “Captions” is checked.

Scroll up to the top of the page and click “Apply”.

Wait for it – the transcription process can take a loooong time. Once the transcription is done, you can click the gear icon in the video information and select “Show transcript” (if the transcript isn’t done yet, this option is still available. But the transcript pane will just tell you to come back later)

Read through the transcript – an AI engine is used to perform the natural language processing, and the transcription accuracy *should* improve as you use the service. Click on “Edit”, make any corrections

Click “Done” to save your changes.

When your video is played, there is now a button to display closed captioning.

And the transcript will be displayed as the video progresses.

When you view the transcript, you can copy the entire thing & paste the transcript into OneNote or the meeting chat to have computer-generated meeting notes. I usually edit the transcript to remove the timestamps (and remove any tangential discussions).

 

Did you know … Microsoft Teams saves your un-sent chat messages?

While cognitive research says we focus best if we’re not switching topics every few minutes,sometimes I find myself needing to switch to a new channel in the middle of a thought. Desktop notifications, important content flags … but Teams will save what you’ve already typed even if you leave the channel or chat session.

I’ve switched over to the channel with that important activity – I can even send a new message here.

And when I return to my original channel, everything I’ve typed is still in there. Teams even saves the un-sent post if you close the client (I still copy my post to notepad just in case if I’m doing anything more than re-launching the browser to apply updates, but I haven’t needed the saved post content yet)

I can continue writing my post and send it.

Active Directory – Prevent Renaming and Moving OU

On my home domain, I’ve always added an access control entry to prevent this from happening … it’s really easy to double-click and be in rename mode or drag and drop an OU into a new location. I’ve always considered this to be a bit of paranoia on my part — not like anyone’s routinely screwing up entire OU’s.

Until they are. We’ve had significant two outages at work caused by unintentional changes to Active Directory organizational unit names. Partially to avoid wide-spread outages due to something that’s fundamentally silly and partially because any widespread outage requires a root cause analysis that includes some action you’ve taken to prevent whatever from happening again we’re going to implement the same permission tweak at work now.

Since it’s not just me who has wanted/needed this permission, figured I would publish how I’ve got the permissions set:

No idea why the GUI shows name and Name instead of rdn and CN respectively. But I’ve denied write for adminDisplayName, rdn, and cn.

Just like the “prevent accidental deletion” checkbox is a bit of a pain when you want to delete an OU, this is inconvenient if you want to rename or move OUs. The first step is to remove the permission, then you can make your change, and then you’ve got to re-apply the permission. Slight inconvenience, but having the entire company failing LDAP authentications (where the base DN no longer finds the users) is a massive inconvenience too.

Did you know … you can name a Teams chat?

As you use Teams to chat with colleagues, you may find your “recent”chats include several entries with almost the same list of people. And now you’re clicking between groups with someone’s name to find the right group chat. Don’t! You can rename group chats to make it easier to find a specific conversation.

Within the group chat, click on the little pencil next to the participant names.

You will have an edit dialogue where you can add a group name – this is displayed to the other participants so select the name accordingly 😊 Click ‘Save’.

The conversation is now listed with the name you’ve supplied. Should you want to remove the name, simply click the pencil again and delete the name. Save a blank name, and the conversation will be titled with the participants again.

Did you know … you can get desktop notifications from the Microsoft Team web client?

The *one* disadvantage of using Teams in a web browser was not getting notifications for new activity, but the Teams web site now supports desktop notifications. Next time you log into Teams in a web browser, you’ll be asked if you want to turn on desktop notifications – click “Turn on”.

You may see an additional browser prompt asking you to confirm you wish to grant the Teams website the right to show notifications –click Allow.

If you have Windows 10 notifications enabled, you will now get notifications in the lower right-hand corner of your screen and the Windows notification panel.

You will get notifications even if you’ve disabled desktop notifications.When you are on the Teams tab, you’ll see notifications in the lower right-hand corner of the browser.

And when you are not on the Teams tab, you’ll see a number indicating the number of new notifications that have been sent.

Did you know … Excel performs logical tests?

I have been writing a lot of “did you know” articles as part of our Microsoft Teams reintroduction, and I have an Excel file that lists topics for which we want articles. To avoid posting the same article twice (or worse, writing the same article twice!), I mark off when the article is written and posted. With a long list, though, it is difficult to identify which articles still need to be posted (yeah, I know I’m not apt to have posted an article that hasn’t been written so I could have just used a filter on the ‘Posted’ column … but there are plenty of cases where a simple filter does not suffice). Sometime you can build an advanced filter that isolates the specific data you need, but there’s an easier way — the Excel IF function.

In my spreadsheet, I added a column, named “Status”. The “IF” function displays different text when the test evaluates to TRUE and FALSE: if(B2=”x”,”Written”,”Not written”) displays “Written” in all of the rows where column B has an x, and “Not written” in the remaining columns.

In conjunction with IF, I can use the Boolean AND function to display “Finished” in any row where both columns B and C contain an X:      =IF(AND(B2=”x”,C2=”x”),”Finished”,”In Progress”)

The content of the Status cells can be used as a filter. On the “Data” tab, select “Filter”.

Click the drop-down menu on the “Status” column, deselect whatever values you do not wish to display, then click “OK”.

Voila! Now I see only the articles where the status is not “Finished”.

Did you know … You can move documents between Microsoft Teams?

I frequently collaborate on documents with a small group of people – not that I don’t want everyone’s input, but starting a discussion with thirty people and a blank sheet of paper can become a cat-herding endeavor. I start drafting a document with a small group of people and then present the mostly finished information to a larger team for final review. I do not want to keep track of different versions of the document spread across multiple Teams! Fortunately, you can move documents between Teams.

Find the document that you want to move. Click the not-quite-a-hamburger menu to the right of the document listing. Then select either “Move” or “Copy”.

A “Copy/Move To” dialogue will open, allowing you to select where you want to document to appear. You can navigate the folder structure within the channel’s file space or click this arrow to move outside of the channel’s file space.

Clicking the arrow once will bring show the channels within the team. Clicking it a second time will display all your Teams. Click on the team into which you want to move the document.

Select the channel in the new team where the document will appear.

If there is a folder structure within that channel’s file space, select the folder path you want. When you’re in the right place, click “Copy” or “Move”.

Did you know … you can blur the background when joining Microsoft Teams video meetings?

Do you have a two-foot-high stack of papers on the desk behind you? Does your whiteboard contain information that isn’t quite ready to be broadcast? Or maybe you are working from the aeroport and your camera is facing the main terminal hallway – all of those people running past can be distracting. Video meetings humanize participants, but what’s behind you isn’t always something you want to share with others. When you join a scheduled Teams meeting, you can use a video filter to blur all of that stuff.

Click to join a meeting.

Click the slider next to the video camera to join the meeting with video.

You will see a video preview. Click the middle slider to activate the background blurring filter.

The video preview shows the changes. If the blur sufficiently obfuscates whatever you didn’t want to show, click ‘Join now’ and join the meeting. If your desk still looks a mess … move your stuff 😊 The blur effect is not applied to things the filter considers to be in the “foreground” … so you might be able to achieve more blurring by pushing an object farther from the camera.

You can currently blur the background when joining scheduled Teams meetings. There is an RFE on UserVoice to enable this feature for ‘meet now’ meetings and video calls.

Did you know … Microsoft Teams aggregates all your Planner tasks?

Adding a Planner board to Teams spaces is a great way to manage tasks within a group or for a project, but it can be a little difficult as an individual to keep track of tasks scattered across various Teams. Microsoft Teams also provides a view of your tasks.

Click on “More apps” on the left-hand toolbar and select “Planner”

Click on “My Tasks”. You will see tasks in any Planner board that have been assigned to you. You can edit task content, change labels, and change the completion status from within this view.

Although you can edit most of the Task details, you cannot drag it between buckets on the Planner board. To do that, you need to open the containing Planner board. Currently, there’s no way to navigate directly to the Planner board from within this view. You can click the inverted caret next to “Group by …” and select “Plan” to see the name of the Planner board that contains your task. You can then find the board on https://tasks.office.com

Did you know … Microsoft Office programs can grab a screenshot for you?

You’ve encountered some odd error in an application and need to send IT support a picture. Or you’rewriting documentation. There are lots of reasons you need a picture of your computer screen. You can hit the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (even hold Alt and hit print-screen to isolate the image to the active window). But did you know Microsoft Office programs can do that for you? On the ribbon bar, select “Insert” and locate “Screenshot”

Click on one of the “Available Windows”, and an image of the window will be inserted into your Word document, Excel spreadsheet, Outlook e-mail, or PowerPoint presentation.

Use the “Screen Clipping”selection to grab part of a window. Minimize all of your Windows. Bring up the Window of which you want an image. Now bring up the Office document into which you want the image inserted. Use Insert => Screenprint => Screen Clipping, and wait a minute. Your Office document will be minimized, your screen will get washed out, and you’ll have a cross-hair instead of a mouse pointer. Click and drag to draw a rectangle around something. When you release the mouse, whatever is in that rectangle will be pasted into your Office document.

Wait – what about those rectangles I use to highlight the image? From the ribbon bar, select “Insert”and “Shapes”. I took a University course where debugging screen shots had to have the “important bit” highlighted with a red square – that stuck with me. You’ve got an array of shapes and colours available. Pick one. Draw the shape over your image – yes, it looks like the shape covers the important part. Draw it anyway. While the shape is still selected, click “Format” in the ribbon bar. Select “Shape Fill”

Select “No Fill” (you could also use a highly transparent fill colour if you’d prefer).

Click “Shape Outline” – pick a colour, and if the line is not thick enough select “Weight” to increase the line width.

When I’m writing documentation with a lot of images, I’ll still use an image editor and ‘print screen’. There are filters that just don’t exist in the Office image editors – sometimes I want to selectively blur screen text so my work conversations are not included in documentation. Sometimes I want to create a composite image. But for small documents – showing someone the error I get on their web site, “click here, type this” – using a single application is efficient.