Join my Teams Shared Channel

Microsoft now has the capability to create a Shared Channel. I have created a Shared Channel in my own tenant that I am freely making available to anyone who wants an invite to see what Shared Channels are all about.

If you are keen on participating then you’ll need to take some actions in your own tenant first to allow the connection.

As an administrator open the Azure portal.

In the top search box inside the Azure portal search for Azure Active Directory. Then select the service matching that when it appears as shown above.

From the menu that appears on the left select External Identities.

On the screen that appears, select Cross-tenant settings from the menu on the left. Then select Organizational settings on the right as shown above.

Now select Add organization either from the menu at the top or the button at the bottom as shown.

From the dialog that appears from the right enter either the domain ciaops365.com or the tenant id 5243d63d-7632-4d07-a77e-de0fea1b77a4. You see the name as CIAOPS after this is completed successfully. When it does appear as shown above, select the Add button.

A CIAOPS entry should now appear as shown above.

Select the hyperlinked text under the Outbound access heading which will say Inherit from default.

Select B2B direct connect from the menu across the top. Then select Customize settings. Finally, select Allow access as shown above.

Select the External applications tab. Then Allow access. Finally, select Save at the bottom of teh screen.’

If you take a moment to read the top of the screen before you press Save you’ll see:

Outbound access settings determine how your users and groups can interact with apps and resources in external organizations. The default settings apply to all your cross-tenant scenarios unless you configure organizational settings to override them for a specific organization. Default settings can be modified but not deleted.Learn more

B2B direct connect lets your users and groups access apps and resources that are hosted by an external organization. To establish a connection, an admin from the external organization must also enable B2B direct connect. When you enable outbound access to an external organization, limited data about your users is shared with the external organization, so that they can perform actions such as searching for your users. More data about your users may be shared with an organization if they consent to that organization’s privacy policies.Learn more

In short, you have allowed your tenant to access my shared Teams channel from just my tenant (ciaops365.com).

When you do press Save you see the above message. Press Yes to continue and accept.

That is all the configuration you need to do inside your tenant. What you then need to do is send me an email (director@ciaops.com) letting me know you’d like to be added to my shared channel. When I receive this I will add you.

After I’ve added you the shared channel should appear in your Teams environment as shown above without the need to switch tenants.

Once you are in my shared channel encourage you to participate and get involved with the content that is there. More details are inside my shared channel. To get things started post a message about why you are in the shared channel and say hello to everyone else.

Feel free to let others know about this offer as I’d like to make my shared channel a free resource for people to come and share information about the Microsoft Cloud.

Using PowerShell to create Teams from a CSV file

There was another Teams import from CSV PowerShell script that someone was working on and having issues with. That script was a bit old and used commands that had been changed in the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module since the script was created. So I have taken that script (unfortunately original source specifically unknown but credit noted) and modified it and uploaded to my Github repo here for all to use:

https://github.com/directorcia/Office365/blob/master/o365-tms-import.ps1

and the CSV file in the format required is here:

https://github.com/directorcia/Office365/blob/master/o365-tms-import.csv

Now that it is in my Github it is easy for me to update when and if required. I encourage you to also go in and have a look at the comments to understand what is going on.

In essence the script will import the data from CSV file and loop through all the entries creating a new Microsoft Team and then the channels specified in this Team as well as assign member and admin roles for you.

If you use the –debug command line parameter it will record a log file for you.

I have also added some error checking and improved output, as shown above, to give you a better idea of what is going on in each step.

I will note that when you assign member and admin permissions to the Team created via this script they seem to take while to show up in the portal. So be patient, as they will appear. This isn’t a limitation of this script but just the refresh cycle of the portal.

There are some additional items I want to add but take a look and let me know what you’d like to see added or if I have made any errors that need fixing. Don’t forget to check back regularly for updates.

June Microsoft 365 Webinar resources

Slides from this month’s webinar are at:

https://www.slideshare.net/directorcia/june-2022-ciaops-need-to-know-webinar

If you are not a CIAOPS patron you want to view or download a full copy of the video from the session you can do so here:

http://www.ciaopsacademy.com.au/p/need-to-know-webinars

Watch out for next month’s webinar.

Teams on the web failing to login

(Be patient, the video might take a few moments to load)

I recently had an issue accessing Microsoft Teams using a web browser even after logging into Microsoft 365. I could get to just about everything else but Teams, which always threw up a login dialog as shown above.

The issue turned out to be the time of the local device which hadn’t updated for some reason after a change to daylight savings time. Thus, the local devices (Windows 11) for some reason was one hour ahead. After changing this so the workstation had the correct time, everything worked as expected.

Hopefully,this helps someone else who is searching for this strange one.

Creating a file location with unique permissions in Microsoft Teams

I wrote and article about:

Creating unique file permissions with Microsoft Teams

but I thought I’d also do a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BifpwKTt4

as I do get this question a lot about having a different set of file permissions for users inside a Microsoft Team. Best practice is NOT to alter any of the existing permissions that are provisioned by channel creation. Instead, create a separate area, with the permissions you want, and then link that back into your team.

That provides a lot more flexibility and doesn’t ‘break’ any of the standard settings.

Need to Know podcast–Episode 270

Join me for this episode with Microsoft MVP James Arber who’ll spend some time with us talk about Teams Voice. In short, he’ll help us demystify what it takes to get Microsoft Teams connected to the plain old telephone system. Microsoft’s world wide partner conference, Inspire is this week, and I’ll be tuning in to catch all the announcements from the event. I’ll bring you all those in the next episode, but not to be be outdone, I have a few handy links and news from the Microsoft Cloud to tide you over till then.

This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2020.

Brought to you by www.ciaopspatron.com

Take a listen and let us know what you think – feedback@needtoknow.cloud

You can listen directly to this episode at:

https://ciaops.podbean.com/e/episode-270-james-arber/

Subscribe via iTunes at:

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/ciaops-need-to-know-podcasts/id406891445?mt=2

The podcast is also available on Stitcher at:

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ciaops/need-to-know-podcast?refid=stpr

Don’t forget to give the show a rating as well as send us any feedback or suggestions you may have for the show.

Resources

James Arber – Twitter, Linkedin

UCMadScientist.com

Teams and Skype for Business tools

@directorcia

Getting started with Microsoft Endpoint Manager

Three new voice features for Outlook mobile—now on iOS, and coming soon to Android

What’s new for admins in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise – June 2021

Enabling automation with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

Get nostalgic with new Microsoft Teams backgrounds

New updates to the SharePoint admin center in Microsoft 365

Microsoft Teams Webinars not allowing registrations for everyone

I have been looking forward to the new Teams Webinar functionality. So as soon as I saw it appeared in my tenant I was keen to implement it.

I went to the calendar app inside Microsoft Teams and displayed all the meeting options available in the top right as shown above. In there I could see that I had the Webinar option, which mean that I was in theory good to set up a webinar.

However, I discovered I had a problem that I couldn’t require registration For everyone as shown above. The option was greyed out!

A little digging revealed this article:

Set up for webinars in Microsoft Teams

which indicated I need to run the following PowerShell commands:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -AllowPrivateMeetingScheduling $True

and

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -WhoCanRegister Everyone

to allow anyone, including anonymous users, to register for webinars.

So, I ran these commands and waited, and waited, and waited but the For Everyone option would still not allow selection??

After much investigation here is what solved the issue for me.

I went into the Teams administration area and selected Users on the left or you can use the direct link:

https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/users

I then found the user in my tenant I wanted to check and select them.

I then selected Policies from the menu in the middle of the page as shown above.

In my case, you’ll note that the Meeting policy is set to RestrictedAnonymousAccess (Direct) as shown. I then selected Details button and the following dialog appeared from the right:

RestrictedAnonymousAccess didn’t sound like the right option to have set, so I closed that dialog and selected the Edit button to change the policy assignments.

I changed the Meeting policy option to Global (Org-wide default) from the list that appeared and saved the changes.

I received an assignment message at the top of the screen and the Meeting policy value changed to Global (Org-wide default) as shown above.

After about one hour or so I could now see the For Everyone option in the Teams webinar registration section could be selected and I was good to go!

I have no idea why the Meeting policy had changed from Global To Restricted but I found the same configuration on another tenant I have. It may have something to do with the security I set up for my environments. Not sure. However, hopefully, if you see the same issue you now know where to look to get it sorted!

Missing calendar icon in Microsoft Teams

I recently ran a Live Event in Microsoft Teams and wanted to get back to the event resources but found my calendar was missing as seen above. This was evident on both the desktop and web interface.

When I attempted to use the link from the Live Event appointment in the calendar in my Outlook I was greeted with the above message:

Unable to connect to your Exchange calendar at the moment

I thought this strange as i had scheduled the Live Event using the calendar icon in Teams?

Turns out that what I had done in the meantime was disable Exchange Web Services (EWS) in my environment. Doing so affects a number of services in my environment including Teams and Exchange Add-ins as it turns out.

If you are seeing the same issues you can use PowerShell to check the EWS status of your environment. You’ll firstly need to connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell which you can do using my script:

https://github.com/directorcia/Office365/blob/master/o365-connect-exo.ps1

then run the following command to see what the EWS settings are at the tenant level:

Get-organizationconfig | fl ews*

to which you should see something like:

From what I understand you’ll need to ensure that EWSEnabled and EWSAllowOutlook are NOT False (i.e. disabled). This will take care of allowing EWS for any new mailboxes created from this point forward.

Also run the command:

Get-CASMailbox | fl identity, ews*

which should result in a list of all the EWS for each user like so:

Make sure that users do not have EwsEnabled or EwsAllowOutlook set to False (i.e. disabled). If it is you can use the command:

set-casmailbox –identity user@domain.com –ewsenabled $true –ewsallowoutlook $true

command to re-enable it and set it to True.

If you change an EWS setting for an individual mailbox it can take 4 – 24 hours for that change to flow through according to documentation I’ve seen. In my case however, I found by logging out and back in the change appeared almost immediately.

It should then re-appear in Teams as shown above. If it doesn’t, simply use the three dots (ellipse) at the bottom of the list to add it back in. You may also need to right mouse click it once you have added it back in and “pin” it to the side menu, so it stays there.

So in a nutshell, don’t disable EWS in your environment because things like Microsoft Teams needs it! If you are missing your calendar in Microsoft Teams or have issues with Outlook Add-ins, check EWS is enabled.