Category: Office 365

Do you know … Teams Activity View?


The very first icon on the left-hand navigation menu, “Activity”, isn’t just a listing of all unread Teams activity. This view provides a customized view of important Teams communications, allowing you to focus on the most important communication first. 

This isn’t a list of every thing that has been posted to every one of your Teams spaces. It doesn’t even include chat messages sent to you –new chat messages will show up as a red circle with a message count on the“Chat” view icon.

So what shows up in the Activity feed? Missed calls – missed calls are only displayed in your Activity feed. Clicking on the entry will display a chat with the caller; you can reply with a chat message or click the phone icon to return their call.

Posts with @mentions – both your individual mentions and mentions for Teams of which you are a member – will appear in the Activity feed.

Beyond that, you control what appears in your feed. Posts to channels you follow will appear in your feed. To follow a channel, click the“Teams” icon. Click the not-quite-a hamburger menu next to the channel name and select “Follow channel”.

When messages are posted to the channel, you’ll see a red circle with the number 1. This indicates that there is one thread with unread post(s). There may be a bunch of replies in that thread, but the thread is only counted once. This doesn’t mean replies won’t be highlighted – if someone replies to a thread you’ve already read, that thread will again be counted as a thread with unread post(s).

You can click on an entry to display the specific thread. Clicking on a reply will focus on the reply – which helps identify what part of the thread you haven’t seen.

If a channel becomes prolific and irrelevant to you, you can simply stop following the channel. Click the not-quite-a hamburger menu next to the channel name and select “Unfollow this channel”. Anything from the channel in your feed will remain there, but new activity in the channel will cease appearing in your Activity feed.

In addition to a feed of activity from other individuals, you can use the activity feed like the “Sent Items” in your mailbox. Click the inverted caret next to “Feed” and select “My Activity”. You’ll see two weeks of your Teams posts.

Did you know … You can control what members of a Microsoft Team group can do within the team?

When you create a new Team, members can create new channels, delete channels, add apps … they can do a lot of things. Did you know much of that is configurable? You can create a Team where individuals receive but cannot respond to posts. You can restrict your Team so only owners can remove channels.

From the hamburger menu next to your Team, select “Manage team”

On the Team management page, select the “Settings” tab.

Expand the “Member permissions” section. Now uncheck any permission you want to restrict to Team owners. There’s even a radio button near the bottom of this section so only Team owners can post to the “General” channel (if that’s the only channel, and members are prohibited from creating their own channels, you’ve got a broadcast-only Team space)

Scroll down and expand “Fun stuff” … you can prevent Gliphy content from being used in the Team (or change the filter used to determine which Gliphy content is appropriate), disable stickers, and disable memes.

Did you know … OneDrive for Business Retains Document History?

Have you ever really messed up a document? Like “man, I wish I could go back to what I had last week, because this is just W.R.O.N.G” messed up? Even if that’s just me, files can become unusable without perfectly human err’ing – ransomware encrypts the file, a colleague removes that paragraph you spent hours getting just right. Did you know that you can restore earlier versions of files stored to OneDrive for Business?

How? From the https://portal.office.com site, select OneDrive

Click the three dots that aren’t quite a hamburger menu – the ones between the file name and the modified date.

On the menu which appears, select “Version History”

A complete version history of the file will be displayed

You can select “Restore” to replace the “current” file with the selected version, or you can select “Open File” to view the file without replacing the “current” file. Voila!

Did you know … you can prevent meetings from being forwarded?

Have you ever had an attendee forward a meeting that was supposed to be confidential? Microsoft Exchange will notify you when a meeting attendee has forwarded your meeting; unless you are really close on that time machine project, what’s done is done. Unless … did you know that you can prevent the meeting from being forwarded? 

* The forwarding restriction is enforced on the mail client, so attendees outside the company may still be able to forward the meeting request. Additionally, there are ways to circumvent this forwarding restriction – e.g. meeting content can still be copied and pasted into a new appointment item. While restricting forwarding is a way to convey the confidentiality of the meeting and deter casual forwarding, this doesn’t guarantee eyes-only security.

How do I do it?

Right now, you can only restrict meeting forwarding when using the Outlook client on Windows or the Web – Mac, iOS, and Android client users will need to use the Web client.  

Outlook for Windows

This feature has not been deployed to all of the Office 365 channels as of this writing. The screen-shots below were created using an Office 365 installation with the monthly update channel. The semi-annual channel is slated to be updated in March 2019, so use Outlook Web until then!

Create a new meeting:

On the ribbon bar, select “Meeting”. You can restrict forwarding under the “Response Options” button.

Outlook Web

Create a new meeting:

Once you have added an attendee, a gear icon will be displayed above the attendee list.

Click the gear icon – by default, meetings can be forwarded. You can click “Allow forwarding” to prevent the meeting from being forwarded to others.

What does the recipient see?

Exchange Online recipients using Outlook Web will see a banner indicating that forwarding is disabled. The forward option will be grayed out.

Exchange online recipients using Outlook with the Monthly update channel will see the banner as well. Those will the semi-annual update channel will not see any indication that they cannot forward the invitation … in fact, their client will seemingly let them forward the meeting. But Exchange Online will refuse the message and they will get a non-delivery report indicating that the meeting could not be forwarded.

Recipients outside of Exchange online not notice any change — Gmail, for example, happily allows me to forward the meeting request.

Did you know? … Sub-Addressing

There are all sorts of reasons you need to provide your e-mail address to random Internet strangers – purchasing products, registering for a conference, signing up for a newsletter. Unfortunately, disseminating your address across the internet can lead to an inundation of unwanted email.

In addition to spam filters to filter out unwanted mail, Exchange Online supports “sub-addressing”. A sub-address is a slightly modified version your e-mail address that can customize your address for every situation – just before the ‘@’ symbol in your e-mail address, put a plus and then some unique text. It will look like Your.N.Ame+SomeIdentifier@company.ccTLD instead of Your.N.Ame@company.ccTLD.

When signing up for a Microsoft newsletter, I can tell them my e-mail address is Lisa.Rushworth+MicrosoftSecuritySlate@company.ccTLD and messages sent to that address will be delivered to my mailbox. When I sign up for the NANPA code administration newsletter, I can tell them my e-mail address is Lisa.Rushworth+NANPACodeAdmin@company.ccTLD.

Should you start receiving unwanted solicitations to the sub-address, you can then create a rule to delete messages sent to that address. You can even exclude messages from the intended sender from the deletion rule – allowing, for example, messages from the NANPA Code Admin newsletter to reach your mailbox whilst blocking anyone else from using the address.

You can also alert the person to whom you provided the address that their contact list may have been compromised.

Did you know … you can use mini-charts to visualize Excel data?

Using charts and images, data visualization, clearly and efficiently communicates data. But when you’re trying to visualize statistics for several items, your chart can be anything but clear and hardly efficient to read. In this example, I’ve created a line chart depicting the monthly score for eight different people. While you can pick out obvious high or low performance, there’s not a whole lot of information being communicated here.

Did you know Excel can create mini-charts, known as “sparklines” to visualize individual statistics and compare statistics across items? Select the data that you want to compare. From the Insert ribbon bar, look for the “Sparklines” section. I am going to use a “line” style sparkline.

The data range will be selected. Enter the range where you want the mini-charts to display – this can be the row under your data or the column next to your data, or it can be some completely different location.

By default, the y-axis range for each mini-chart depends on the values of the data contained in the chart. This makes comparing the charts a little difficult – the scale is different. In the example below, scores in the 30’s don’t look different than scores in the 80’s.

Click on one of the mini-charts, and a “Design” tab will appear on the ribbon bar. Select it. Under “Axis”, change the minimum and maximum values to “Same for All Sparklines”.

Now you can see how individual performance varied as well as compare individuals.

Blank values will show up as broken lines in the mini-charts. If you do not want to display a gap, return to the “Design” ribbon bar and select “Edit data”. Select “Hidden & Empty Cells”

Select what you want instead of gaps – you can treat null values as zero or have a line drawn between the values on either side of the missing value.

Microsoft Teams – Creating A New Team

Anyone can create a Team space – this makes Teams an amazing resource for collaboration because you have all of the features of Teams without filling out a request form, writing a business justification, and waiting for someone to complete your request. Whether you want to call it a quote from the Spiderman comics, Churchill, or the Decrees of the French National Convention … responsibility follows inseparably from great power.

The first consideration is should you create a Team? Teams is an amazing platform for interactive communication, but not all communication is meant to be interactive and collaborative. If you want to broadcast information to thousands of people (and maybe get a little feedback too), then a Stream site may be a better choice. If you want to solicit feedback about a specific topic and analyze the results, a Forms questionnaire or SharePoint form will likely better suit your needs. If you want to share documents, OneDrive for Business or a SharePoint site may be more appropriate. But if much of your content warrants responses, you want to increase collaboration, you share documents and Planner boards and OneNote notebooks … then you probably want a Teams space.

Can my Team have too many members? Well, from a technical perspective … no. There’s a limit to the number of members you can add to a team – the service won’t let you add too many people. Practically, though, the question isn’t if there are too many members but rather if the information stored in the Teams space is relevant to the individuals. Maybe you’ve got a topic that fifteen hundred people should be discussing – the information helps them do their job, their input helps others. In that case, a team of fifteen hundred people isn’t too many. But if I add thirty people to my Team space and the information is only relevant to eight of them … then I’ve got too many members of my team.

Once you’ve decided that a Teams is a great place to host your collaborative efforts and identified the people who will find the information relevant, here are some “best practice” guidelines for creating and managing your Team.

Click on “Join or create a team” at the bottom of your Teams list.

The Teams carousel will be displayed – search your organization’s public teams to make sure there’s not already one out there doing exactly what you want. At the time of writing, this is a starts with search so searching for “Falcon” will not find “Project Golden Falcon”. To create a new team, click “Create team”.

When creating a Team, the first step is to create a name. Team names do not have to be unique, but it will be confusing for members if they have six “Engineering” teams in their list. Use something descriptive. Filling in the Team description will help members identify the purpose of the Team space too. Click “Next” and optionally add team members.

After your team is created, add another owner. While members can perform most functions within a Team space, there are a few rights limited to Team owners. Adding another owner now ensures you’ve got back-up when you go on holiday or are otherwise unavailable.

Click the hamburger menu next to your team name and select “Manage Team”.

You can add additional members here. And click the drop-down next to any member you wish to become an owner and select “Member” – voila, another owner.

On the “General” channel, add tools and resources that are frequently used – that might be a link to a vendor’s web site (in the Team where we discuss updates and issues with a vendor’s product, having a link to the vendor’s support site is really helpful) or a Planner board to keep track of tasks <ref out to ‘did you know’ on adding the auto-created ones!>. Click the “General” channel then click the + next to the channel’s tabs.

You’ll be presented with a list of resources you can add to your Teams space.

To separate discussions into different channels, click the hamburger menu next to your Team name and select “Add channel”. We will create a new channel for different projects and sub-groups to avoid confusion and information overload.