Need to Know Podcast–Episode 189

This is our follow up episode with Marcus Dervine from Webvine speaking about Digital Transformation. We continue with the transformation pillars that Marcus has outlined in his as the road to successful adoption of technologies like Office 365. Of course Brenton joins me again to catch you up on all the cloud news. We’ve tried to keep the update as short as we can as we noticed that the episodes are getting longer. We’ll do a deeper dive into updates in the next episode as we wanted to make sure there was plenty of time for our guest.

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-189-marcus-dervin/

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

@marcusdervin

@contactbrenton

@directorcia

Marcus’s book – Digital Transformation, from the inside out (use coupon code CIAOPS for 20% off)

Webvine

Azure outage

New file template management

Mass delete notification

Passwordless Login

Windows 10 sandboxing

Windows 10 Quality updates

Join my free Microsoft Team

A while ago I create a free Yammer network for people to see what Yammer is all about as well as share Microsoft Cloud information. Since then, Microsoft has announced that it is making a version of Teams freely available, so I thought why not do the same there as well.

So I have gone out and created a free Microsoft Team which you are more than welcome to join. All you need to do is send me an email (director@ciaops.com) and I’ll arrange an invite for you that will allow access.

I think making a free version of Teams is great move by Microsoft and will allow more people to see what Teams is all about without the need for Office 365.

Of course, you can go out and create your own free Microsoft Team but hopefully, if we can get some people into this free Team I have created, you’ll get a better idea of exactly how it works with a group of people.

Need to Know podcast–Episode 185

A great interview this episode with Marcus Dervin from Webvine focused on Digital Transformation. Marcus has some real insights to share from his recent book on this very subject and we even have a special offer to listeners of this podcast to also grab a copy and learn from an experienced operator. If you are looking to digitally transform or help other business do the same, don’t miss this episode.

You’ll also get the latest round of Microsoft cloud updates from Brenton and myself as we aim to keep you up to date with the ever changing face of the cloud.

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-185-marcus-dervin/

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

@marcusdervin

@contactbrenton

@directorcia

Marcus’s book – Digital Transformation, from the inside out (use coupon code CIAOPS for 20% off)

Webvine

Page metadata coming to SharePoint and Office 365

Idle session timeout policy in SharePoint and OneDrive is now generally available

New Office ribbon

Microsoft Surface Go

New Planner capabilities

Introduction to Microsoft Teams

Introduction to Microsoft Teams from Robert Crane

Location of chat history in Microsoft Teams

I have a Microsoft Team in my tenant called “Patrons”. In there is a channel called “Social”. In this area CIAOPS Patrons chat about things such a cryptocurrency as you can see.

As an administrator what I want to do is find out how I can view information that is shared by others in this chat location. In short, how do I see chat history in Microsoft Teams?

As an example, let’s say I want to find the term ‘kodak’ in these chats. You’ll see from the above that it is part of a link that was pasted into the chat.

All the chat history from Microsoft Teams is saved into a mailbox with the name of the Team. So I’m looking for a mailbox called “Patrons”.

Easiest way is to fire up trusty PowerShell and run:

get-mailbox

and as you can see from the results above, I only see user mailboxes.

but if I run:

get-mailbox –groupmailbox

I see all the shared mailboxes in my tenant.

As you can see I find one called “Patrons” as shown above.

To get the details I run:

get-mailbox –groupmailbox patrons@ciaops365.com

and you can see that I again get all the information but just for that mailbox. So this is the one that is linked to my Microsoft Team.

If I now run:

get-mailbox –groupmailbox patrons@ciaops365.com | get-mailboxstatistics | select-object identity, itemsinfolder, foldersize

I basically get a report of what is inside that Teams mailbox. In there I can see a folder:

\conversation history\team chat

this is indeed where the chats are located. You can see there is currently 344 items of 4.38 MB in size.

Now I can actually add this mailbox to my Outlook Web Access and view the contents as you can see above. However, I can’t get the folder \Conversation History\Team Chat because it is hidden and probably has other permissions associated with it.

I can’t add this shared mailbox to Outlook 2016 on my desktop as you can see above.

So now if I try to view/change the permissions on the mailbox using:

get-mailbox –groupmailbox patrons@ciaops365.com | get-mailfolderpermission

I get the message that the mailbox doesn’t exist.

If I now try:

get-mailfolderpermission –identity patrons@ciaops.com:\inbox

I again get the message that the mailbox doesn’t exist.

If I use that same command on another ‘standard’ shared mailbox the command works. So I know my command does work, it just doesn’t work with a Microsoft Teams mailbox.

Again, just changing mailbox identity confirms that the command can’t even see the mailbox.

The way to actually see what the contents of the Teams chats are is to use the Content Discovery component of the Security & Compliance center in Office 365 which you’ll find under the Search & Investigation heading on left hand side. You need to be an administrator with appropriate rights to access this area.

You start by creating a new Content Search by pressing the + icon as shown above.

Give the new Content Search a title and select the locations where you wish to search. In this case I’ll simply look through all email data.

Next, I enter what I want to search for. Here, I’m only looking for the word ‘kodak’.

After I finish my configuration, the search commences and I need to wait a few moments while it searches all the nominated locations and generates the results.

When the process is complete I select the Preview search results hyperlink on the right as shown above.

Another window opens and I can locate the item I’m after as the type is ‘IM’ as shown above. When I select that item on the left I see the full context on the right. I confirm that the search does display the link that is the Microsoft Team chat.

If I elect to download the item, it does so as an .EML file which I can open in any mail client as shown above. This indicates that each chat message appears to be a separate email in a sub folder in a shared mailbox in Exchange Online effectively.

So I went back in and changed the content search terms to make it broader to encompass more chats.

I ran the search and exported the data from the Security & Compliance center into a .PST file and then imported that into Outlook.

Thus, as you can see above, I can now view all the chats that match my search criteria as an administrator.

The problem with this is, from a pure ‘overwatch’ point of view, it is a very manual process to get to the information and secondly you can only look at things you specify in your content search. It would be nice to have the ability for an administrator to export the whole chat content from a Microsoft Teams channel into a single document that could then be viewed.

However, at the end of the day, rest assure that your Microsoft Teams chats are being saved and you can access them if you need to. Hopefully, the above has shown you how to do exactly that.

Enabling Microsoft Teams External Access

Microsoft Teams has just announced that you can grant access to users outside your tenant. You can read about it here:

https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/11/expand-your-collaboration-with-guest-access-in-microsoft-teams/

Now being the eager beaver I am, I wanted this working asap. So I started invited people but for some reason they couldn’t gain access to my Team. They also seemed to get automatically removed from the Team after a period of time.

Turns out that external access for Teams is not enabled by default. To enable it you must go to your Office 365 Admin Center. Then select Settings from the left hand side.

From the menu that appears select Services & add-ins.

Locate Microsoft Teams from the list and select that.

In the Tenant-wide settings locate Settings by user/license type. Change the pull down to read Guest and the set the option to On as shown above.

The first time I looked, I didn’t change the pull down from the default of Business & Enterprise so I totally missed the Guest option D’Oh.

After I made that change I could indeed invite external users successfully into the Microsoft Team I had prepared for them!

So if you are having troubles like I was, check that you have enabled guest access as shown above.

Using Microsoft Teams to keep up to date

I wrote an article a while back about

Using Office 365 to stay up to date

That article focused on the functionality provided by Office 365 Groups. Of course, you can solve the same challenge multiple ways in Office 365. So here’s how you can do something similar but this time using Microsoft Teams.

I already have a Marketing Team as you can see, so what I do is select the ellipse (three dots) to the right of that and from the menu that appears I select Add channel.

My suggestion would be to create an individual channel for each source of information. This allows you to not only group incoming information on that topic together but also start grouping additional resources around that like files and plans if you choose.

I give the new channel a name a description and select Add.

Once the channel has successfully been created, I select the ellipse for this new channel and then Connectors from the menu that appears.

Locate the RSS option and select Configure.

Enter in all the details as per the previous article for this feed and select Save.

You should now see the feed information appear in the conversations tab as shown above. The big benefit here is that everyone in the marketing team can not only see the information but they can also comments and provide additional feedback on the item, all in one central location. This gives this item far more value that if everyone just consumed it on their own.

Another great option about having a single channel for these communications is that we can also connect other information sources, like Twitter.

To add the Microsoft Australia Partner Twitter account to this same channel, I firstly get the address of the Twitter account, which in this case is:

https://twitter.com/msau_partner

I repeat the above process and add a connector to my channel, however this time instead of select RSS I select the Twitter connector as shown above.

You’ll need to provide a valid Twitter account to authorise access to the feed, so Log in if you need to.

Configure the Twitter feed as desired. You can see I can elect to follow a Twitter account and/or a specific hashtag as well.

Once this is all configured, simply save the options.

You should again see confirmation of the configuration in the channel conversations.

Now the information from Twitter also ends up in the channel and you can potentially also take actions from the cards that are presented depending on how you configured the connector.

Another great benefit of feeding information into Office 365 Groups and Teams is that there is a mobile app available on just about every platform for these two services. Thus, no matter whether people are on the road or at their desks they can see and contribute to conversation around the news as it arrives.

As I mentioned, even though I am a team of one, I have configured a lot of news sources to be delivered to me in the manner. I also use other aspects of the Microsoft Teams that was created, such as the SharePoint Team Site, for managing my scheduled tweets as I have detailed previously here:

Sending recurring tweets using Microsoft Flow

and

Using Microsoft Flow for event confirmations

So even as a team of one, Office 365 helps me manage and be more effectively with my marketing. Imagine the benefits when you start scaling this out to larger teams.

If you now move beyond just marketing you can hopefully see the benefits things like Office 365 connectors can provide you. You could use them to stay up to date with patches, security alerts, and so on. The use cases are pretty endless.

Office 365 provides a very extensive toolbox to allow your business to be more effective. Where could you use it to improve your business?

Microsoft Teams and OneNote integration

One of the ways that I describe Microsoft Teams to people is as a simplified and aggregated wrapper over things such as SharePoint Teams Sites and Skype for Business. Many may not appreciate however that it is also a wrapper over one of other favourite products, OneNote.

When you create a new Microsoft Team you also get a new SharePoint Team Site as part of that. That SharePoint Team Site contains a OneNote notebook which is known as a ‘site notebook’. To view it, simply select the link Notebook from the Quick Launch menu on the left of the SharePoint Team Site.

If you open that notebook you’ll see that it is blank, as shown above. OneNote is arranged by sections, inside which are individual pages.

If you now go to that Microsoft Team (in my case, called Help Desk), you will see the normal Conversations and Files tabs at the top of the only channel I currently have in the Team called General, like so:

You’ll notice that I have already added a new tab to this channel (Polly) thanks to a bot I’ve inserted into this Team. I’ll cover bots in another post.

What you don’t yet see in the Team channel is anything to do with OneNote. The reason is that OneNote connectivity is not added by default.

To connect this Microsoft Team channel to OneNote press the ‘+’ (plus) item on the menu.

That will display a new window, as shown above with all the items you can add to menu. One of these you should find is OneNote.

Select the OneNote tile.

You’ll then be asked to give the new tab a name. Here I have called it Meetings. Select the Save button when you have made your choice.

Now you should see a new menu item across the top matching the name you just gave OneNote (here, Meetings). You’ll also notice that you are placed into a OneNote style page below the menu.

You are now free to give your page a name and enter any notes into that page.

If you now select the ‘hamburger’ menu in the top left of the page you will see,

This should now begin to look more and more like OneNote. Here you can go in and create new pages like so,

That’s really handy for everyone in that channel to capture information.

If you now return to the Site Notebook directly in SharePoint you should find the notebook looks something like that shown above. There is a new section with the name Channel – Selection name (here General – Meetings) and the information just enters appears as pages.

Thus, when you add the OneNote option to a Team channel a new section is created in the Site Notebook in the SharePoint Team Site that was created when that Microsoft Team was established. Pages you create in that channel are then saved under that section.

If I now go and create a new channel for that Team (here called Office 365) and then add OneNote to that channel as above, I again get the ability to add pages. Here, I have created a new page called Scripts in my Office 365 channel.

If I now go back to my Site Notebook in the SharePoint Team Site I can see this new channel as a section and the page I created underneath it in standard OneNote format.

So in summary, when you create a new Microsoft Team you get a new SharePoint Team Site. This SharePoint Team Site contains a single OneNote notebook called a Site Notebook. If you then add OneNote to a channel in Microsoft Teams, the name you give that OneNote tab becomes a new section in the Site Notebook. Any new page you create in that channel gets created under this section in the Site Notebook.

If you elect to Edit Notebook, as shown above, you will get the option to work with the WHOLE notebook in the web or via OneNote on the desktop. That means you are in effect opening the complete Site Notebook where you will see ALL the sections (channels) and pages below like so

Given the way the sections are named after the actual channel, hopefully this avoids confusion but there will no doubt be those who don’t see the connection between the Microsoft Team as a whole and all the channels within it and the Site Notebook which holds ALL the OneNote information for the Microsoft Team as a single OneNote notebook file. You can view the OneNote information for the Microsoft Team by channel inside the Microsoft Teams app or for the WHOLE Microsoft Team (i.e. all the channels) at once using the OneNote app.

Hopefully, this articles goes some way to explaining the configuration and connectivity between Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Teams Sites, the Site Notebook and OneNote.