I wrote an article recently about how Microsoft

Teams adds cloud storage connectivity

and I noted in there that the ability to connect Microsoft Teams to things like Dropbox and Google Drive was enabled by default, as it typically is.

Of course, there may be the need to disable this ability, which can be done. Let me show you how.

You’ll need to login to the Office 365 portal as an administrator with the rights to make the changes. You’ll then need to navigate to the Admin center as shown above.

In the search box on the right hand side of the page, type “service” and from the menu that appears select Service & add-ins settings.

Scroll down the page and select Microsoft Teams from the list.

Locate and select the option Custom Cloud Storage Options and expand it as shown above.

You can now unselect one or all of the storage services here.

After you have made your choice ensure you scroll to the bottom of the page and select the Save button to update your preferences.

if you go into the files area of any Microsoft Teams channel you’ll now see an option to Add cloud storage.

You can then add a connection to one of the services shown above.

In this case, I added a connection to Dropbox where my podcast recordings are located.

This means that you can now easily access your third party cloud storage locations directly from within Teams and you can effectively put a link to the location of your files directly into the appropriate location within a Microsoft Teams channel.

Even better than that, you can now easily go to the cloud storage location you have added and copy or move a file, all within the Microsoft Teams interface.

You can then copy the file to another location, not necessarily within the added cloud storage. What immediately sprang to my mind was the ability to copy/move from the added cloud storage directly into the Microsoft Teams files area.

This therefore makes it not only dead easy to migrate files from other cloud storage locations into Microsoft Teams but also dead easy to move them directly into a SharePoint Teams Site.

Thus, Microsoft Teams now has added an integrated ability to migrate files from other cloud storage services to Microsoft Teams. This is going to be very handy because I see a lot of customers who are already using something like Dropbox but want to move to Microsoft Teams. This new ability allows them to link the appropriate location quickly and easily within a channel and start using those files in their current location. Then over time, they can start migrating them to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Teams Sites without additional assistance.

Once the location is linked it will also appear in the Files area of your Microsoft Teams interface as shown above.

I can see Microsoft Teams becoming more and more a central hub of not only Office 365 information but also cloud information. I also like how it is making it easier for people to get started using Office 365 by removing a lot of the complexity and allowing them just to get things done!