Technology Musings

Microsoft Teams is a great solution for chats, calls, and meetings - but it's not so great for larger meetings. For that, there's Microsoft Teams live events, which is the next evolution of Skype Meeting Broadcast. Why is Live Events better for larger meetings? Well, Teams is fundamentally a collaboration tool, and Teams meetings are many-to-many meetings. Whilst Teams has a maximum of 250 attendees, such a large Teams meeting would be pretty hard to manage, to say the least. Live Events is designed to work for one-to-many meetings (up to 10,000 attendees), and is much better suited to that type of event: all attendees are muted for example, and just the presenter's video is shown. There are also audience feedback mechanisms much more suited to large-scale events. As this is a <cough> live area of interest right now, here's a quick run-down which might be useful if you're looking at trying it out. Understanding Event Types Although this doesn't ...

For many years when I worked as an IT Manager in 'corporate IT', Macs were a big No No for me. "It's not our standard!" we would say. "We can't manage them!" we would assert. But a few years ago, when I needed to buy a new computer for myself, I went out and bought a Mac. I guess from a professional point of view, I felt I really should find out what they're like. And from a personal point of view, I use an iPad and an iPhone, and I knew that the Mac would integrate well into the ecosystem. I thought I'd find it hard getting used to the Mac - but d'you know what? I didn't. Sure, some of the keyboard shortcuts took me a while to find or get used to (but to be fair, most PC laptop keyboards have things like their cursor keys and other special keys in non-standard locations). But by-and-large, things Just Worked. On a couple of occasions - like when my work laptop died suddenly with no warning, and it wasn't until the follo...

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...