Technology Musings

A new item popped up last week on the Teams roadmap - and it's quite a big deal: Whilst Microsoft want everyone in the world to fully adopt Teams as soon as possible, for some customers, it's not an easy transition: there are complex dependencies, especially on the telephony side, for which there is no quick fix. So, there needs to be interoperability between users who are fully in Teams ('Teams only') and those who are still using Skype for Business. The current interop provides chat and calling, but until now, has not provided for screen-sharing: and for many users, that's a big deal. In fact, I've heard of a number of companies where the IT Department has chosen to be the first group to move to Teams-only: but has then had to roll-back because the lack of screen-sharing has proved too inconvenient. But Microsoft announced last week that the current interop is to be improved to provide screen-sharing between Teams-only users and those running Skype fo...

If you're looking at moving to Microsoft Teams, or you're currently using Skype for Business Online for telephony but are thinking about the inevitable move to Teams, you may be wondering about what your options for handsets are. The situation is evolving all the time, but I've tried to summarise the current (August 2019) situation here. Of course, the question as to why anyone needs a handset - rather than using a headset with their PC - to use Teams or Skype for Business is a question in itself, but personal preference does mean that there is some requirement in most organisations. And of course, not everyone in a business uses a computer, so most environments have at least a few non-personal common-area phones (and sometimes more than a few - I've worked on projects with hundreds of common-area phones). If you need phones for Teams now Today, your choices are to buy phones from Audiocodes, Yealink or Crestron (the Crestron phones are actually by Yealink). The...

So....the news we've been expecting for a long time has finally been announced - Skype for Business Online is being retired in July 2021. Not a huge surprise, we all knew it would happen at some stage, but two years away should be long enough for any business using Skype for Business Online to be able to get their migration to Microsoft Teams planned and executed. If you want to know about the options for migrating to Microsoft Teams, the migration routes are explained here . It's important to note though that Skype for Business Server (the on-premises version) is not affected by this announcement. What else has been announced? There are some other snippets in the Microsoft announcement: Dynamic E911: this is a big deal for US-based organisations, and is an improvement over what is currently offered within Skype Online. In the US, if you call the emergency services, your call needs to be routed to one of over 6,000 Public Safety Answering Points, or PSAPs, depending ...

When you start a Teams meeting, you may be used to the fact that users from outside of your company wait in a virtual 'lobby', and need to be manually 'admitted' by someone before they join the meeting. It used to be the case that this behaviour could not be changed (so external users would always wait in the lobby) but  the meeting organiser can now change this . However, Microsoft have advised that shortly (from the end of August 2019), they will be changing the default behaviour so that external users will not wait in the lobby. If your organisation is familiar with the lobby behaviour and expects this, you may need to take action now to make sure that this continues to be the case. What do I need to do? If you have created your own custom Teams meeting policies and all your users have one of these policies, then you have nothing to worry about. However, if you have not customised your policies, your Teams Meeting policy admin page might look like this,...

The other week, I was looking into using Teams as a phone system for a potential small business customer - and spotted a major problem. But it's not a technical one, it's a licensing (or commercial) one: if you're licensed with one of the Small Business Plans (for less than 300 users), you cannot add a Phone System licence. To be able to add a Phone System licence, you need to have at least an 'E3' licence, which really surprised me. I spent a little while trying to tabulate the relevant features of a number of different licence plans, and produced this table to help try to compare and understand the options. Some points: I've not listed every single product and feature, just what I thought the ones which would be most relevant to a small business customer. I've translated the 'features' into actual 'products' to make it easier for techies to understand. All pricing is standard, with no discounts applied, as of July 2019 in GBP...

Federation was always a really useful feature of Lync, then Skype for Business and now Teams - the ability to see presence and be able to chat and call a contact outside of your business. In fact, for quite some years now, the vast majority of people I work with are using Skype for Business (and now Teams) and I very, very rarely get an actual work phone call. If you've got used to having features such as emoji, GIFs, stickers and rich text in your internal Teams chats, you'll be glad to hear that Microsoft have announced that native Teams federation is coming soon. Ever since Teams was originally launched, federation has been working via the original Skype for Business Online federation gateway, and hence subject to it's limitations, but Microsoft always said that they intended to move to a native Teams federation gateway in due course. You'll be able to tell when it's live when you see the additional feature buttons just below the new message window. But as...

If you've tried to use the preview Whiteboard in Teams , you might have been a bit frustrated by its limitations. Currently, you can 'ink' - but that's about it. If your handwriting (with a mouse, anyway....) is as bad as mine, that's not great if you want to put text on your whiteboard. There also doesn't appear to be a way, from Teams, to export your creation. But there is a (relatively) easy workaround to get more functionality, it is actually documented in the Microsoft article Use Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams . Step 1 - install the Windows 10 Microsoft Whiteboard app from the Microsoft Store. Step 2 - Once it's installed, run the Whiteboard app and sign in with your Office 365 credentials, then close Whiteboard. Step 3 - Start your Teams meeting, click on the Share button and share a whiteboard (sometimes that menu item isn't immediately visible - scroll to the far right). Step 4 - Open the Windows 10 Whiteboard app, and you'll ...

If you're currently using Skype for Business in your organisation, you have almost certainly started to think about how you might start to implement Microsoft Teams, and indeed, eventually, migrate fully to Teams. The question is, what's the best approach? Inevitably, there is no one answer, as every organisation is different. Microsoft's own guidance is here , and continues to evolve as they work with more and more organisations. Having worked with a customer on this topic recently, I've tried to put down some of the pros and cons of each approach. Straight-to-Teams This is my own name for this approach, and it's not covered in the Microsoft guidance, but I've included it for completeness. Pro No messing about with coexistence - users go straight from Skype for Business one day, to using Teams the next. Cons Large change brings the potential for technical risks. Users have to get used to a lot of change all at once. Realistically, you'...

A question I'm often asked by customers moving from Skype for Business to Teams is: will my existing headsets and other peripherals work with Teams? The simple answer is Yes - any Skype for Business certified device will also work with Teams, but there is some potential for confusion around call controls (call answer/hang-up, and mute buttons). This article lists some specific devices for which call controls don't work, but they're mostly fairly old devices, and in fact there are devices which have gradually disappeared from the list over the past few months as this article has been updated (so, if things don't seem to work, try a firmware update on your device): However, what causes the most confusion is that if - as many people are - you're running Skype for Business and Teams side-by-side, with Teams in Islands mode, then the call controls will only  work with Skype for Business. This means that as far as most people are concerned, the call controls...

Microsoft [at Teams launch]: Teams is cool! Lots of features! New chat! Users: Yay! Emoji! GIFs! Users: Um, we may be a bit slow here, but how do you Tag a contact for Status Change as we do in Skype? We use presence all the time, presence rocks . Users: Also, it's very slow to update presence for another user, now we come to think of it. Microsoft [loftily]: Oh, you don't need Presence any more, that's old stuff. Look, Teams isn't about Instant Messaging, where you can only message someone who is actively online, it's a Chat application, like WhatsApp. You don't check if someone is online in WhatsApp before messaging them, do you? Users: Yes, but I want to know if someone has read my message - if I can see their presence, I know they have got the message. And, in WhatsApp I may not get presence, but I can get a Read Receipt. Users: Look, when Lync came out, you told us that Rich Presence was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and you were right...

Back in November 2018, Tom Arbuthnot reported that Microsoft had started to automatically upgrade smaller Office 365 customers from Skype for Business to Teams. My own Office 365 tenant has now had this, so I thought I'd share some screenshots of the process. First warning The first notification came through to the Office 365 admin email address on April 9th: Lots of useful links, all the information is there. The 'See what happens next' takes you to a page on the Fastrack web site . You can select to postpone the automated upgrade, but I wanted to see what happened, so I just 'ignored' the communication! User Communication Received On May 3rd (a week before the scheduled upgrade), all users on the tenant received this message: At this stage, if you look at the Teams Admin portal, you can see that Microsoft have enabled the 'Notify users' setting: This means that the Skype for Business client (desktop and mobile) has a banner at the ...