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news and know-how about microsoft, technology, cloud and more.

Bye bye, Skype for Business Online

Last summer, the Microsoft Teams team announced that Microsoft Teams will be the primary client for Intelligent Communications in Office 365, replacing Skype for Business Online over time. Well, time is running and Skype for Business Online will be completely discontinued in July 2021. See more here.

Join us at the Global Microsoft 365 Developer Bootcamp in Vienna!

We are excited to kick off the Global Microsoft 365 Developer Bootcamp in Vienna, Austria on November 27, 2019!

Having fun with IoT Flic buttons and Microsoft Flow

I just got a cute Flic button to play around with. It takes only some minutes to connect that IoT button to a connector and execute customs tasks. Well, as first step, I simply created a message in a Microsoft Teams channel. See the step-by-step instructions here.

How to convert your legacy Yammer Groups into Group connected Yammer Groups

Office 365 Groups bring a lot of advantages to a connected workspace within Office 365. For me they are like the glue between all different Office 365 Services. If you provision an Office 365 Group you get an Outlook Mailbox, a SharePoint TeamSite, Planner and much more. When you create a Microsoft Team, you create an Office 365 Group.
Yammer has the option to be Office 365 Groups connected as well. This article decribes how you can trigger the process on your terms.

Groups Governance Toolkit Part 4-Ownerless Groups

In this multi-part series we show you how to handle the Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams governance toolkit. The next article cover the governance part of our Groups Governance Toolkit.Imagine your company policy requires at least 2 owners per Office 365 Group or per Microsoft Team. In this part, we want to monitor all groups that are ownerless (orphaned), or do not comply with our organization's policies. The IT department shall get the information of all groups and teams where there are no owners or not enough owners and the possibility to fix that. Read below how this can be accomplished.

Groups Governance Toolkit Part 3-Develop Azure Functions

After the introduction of the Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams Governance Toolkit and with the necessary requirements we are now looking into Azure Functions. In our group and team provisioning scenario, we need a little code for provisioning of an Office 365 group and a Microsoft team. Serverless computing with an Azure Function provides the optimal solution for that. Follow these steps to create the function we need for our workflow.

Groups Governance Toolkit Part 2-Provisioning requirements

In part 1 of this series we described the scenario for our Office 365 groups governance toolkit. In this part we will setup a workflow for the Office 365 and Microsoft Teams provisioning. Workflows help to follow specific processes for a successful collaboration.
Offering self-services for users is a key to reduce workloads on the IT department and to allow users to cover their requirements quickly while the organization's policies are enforced during the process. A frequently asked request is how to provision a new Microsoft Team in Office 365 in a secure and monitored way. See how this can be implemented here.
To allow an app to create a Microsoft group or team programmatically in a workflow, we will use the Microsoft Graph API, Azure Functions and Flow or Logic Apps. With these technologies, we can create powerful workflows to offer a self-service for users to create a team when needed, approved by the manager and being provisioned with all the necessary properties and permissions.

Groups Governance Toolkit Part 1-Overview

IT-Governance is an important topic, especially in large organizations. At Microsoft Ignite conference, we showed the "Groups Governance Toolkit" with a bunch of useful tools to regulate and monitor Office 365 groups and Microsoft Teams. Here, we will show the step-by-step guidance how to implement that toolkit with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. Let's start with an overview what topics we cover in this article series.

Ignite MVP Live Blog : THR2041 How Microsoft does IT: Best practices for your Champion program

This session gives you insights from Microsoft IT about how they use their internal Teams Champion program to drive collaboration and communication using Microsoft Teams. The session was delivered by Sara Bush, Sr. Program Manager Microsoft Teams, Microsoft. Sara is a member of the Teams & Voice team in End User Services Engineering, Sara is driving Microsoft Teams adoption internally through the Art of Teamwork Tour training program, the Teamwork Champions program and the EUSE change management effort to bring all Microsoft users into a deep understanding of how Microsoft Teams supports day to day work, increasing collaboration and productivity. Pouneh Kaufman, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft. Pouneh is responsible for the global rollout of Microsoft Teams within Microsoft.Every time I have the chance to listen to a session from Microsoft IT I try to attend. It is valuable and gives you good insights, how a worldwide company with more than 220k employees adopt and implement IT. During my projects I see that there is not a lot of difference in IT planning among large enterprises. Microsoft IT shares insights which can be extremely valuable when you use that in your own enterprise. First Sara and Pouneh talked about why Microsoft moved form Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams helps the organization to get all communication channels together in one place. To drive adoption Microsoft IT runs an internal adoption program around awareness, engagement, measurement, management.Success factors were defined in measurements, like collecting usage data, feedback to gain trust and awareness. The project scope was very clear:Get more than >200k users to use Microsoft Teams and move away from Skype for Business. Success factors showed that it worked:over 55% of all chats happen in Teams, Teams meetings are widely used.Champions feedback measurements: 98% Program satisfaction, 88% Satisfaction Training support. 83% Satisfaction with monthly calls.To drive adoption and usage Microsoft IT used a champions program. First champs came from passionate users which were found within their most active Teams Yammer participants. People wants to be in the know. Microsoft IT developed a training: Art of teamwork. It is a level 100 training for end users, which is available to customers as well. More showcases are available here. The best thing about a Champions program: Champions are bringing in other champions.So what are the Champions give and gets:Gives: Teamwork Training. Teams Yammer Group support. Champions List for organization. promote readiness. Gets : Digital Profile Badge, Digital & Physical Swag. Engage with SME's and the Microsoft Product Group. "I see you, I recognize you, I need you". access to monthly call with product group. Champions need to be visible to end users. The results are impressive:more than 650 Champions, 45 Countries, 90 BuildingsTo find champions use the channels which are available - like Microsoft IT used the Yammer group. They make their Champions recognizable. Further ways to drive adoption worked through Gamification: A little friendly competition. Earn points by hosting internal training. Point system for users development. new badges for new levels. Impacts the performance reviews.What did not work: too much products, different generations, resistance about taking Skype away. Give users a place to talk about that: UserVoice. Yammer community.If you look into bringing a new communication tool into life, look at this usecases!Resources:Slides VideostreamThe Art of Teamwork resource Kit

Join us at SharePoint Conference North America!

Celebrate the Return of the SharePoint Community to Las Vegas! After four years, SharePoint Conference North America is back from May 21st to 23rd 2018 at MGM Grand in fabulous Las Vegas. Meet the Microsoft SharePoint team, community members and peers from around the world there. We from atwork are happy to be there as well to meet and contribute to SPC 2018!

Multiple Users in Microsoft Teams (and other Office 365 services) with the same name

Recently a colleague asked me: How can you deal with users in large Enterprise Tenants, who share the same name? How do you know who is who?” Indeed, this can happen, as soon as your Office 365 Tenant has a lot of users in it. There are some very common names in each language, so you should know who you add to your Microsoft Team. From an organizational perspective, this should be solved with a proper identity management: Users have a unique e-mail address, but it does not end here: there are some other fields that need to be filled, like Job Title, Department and a lot more. But in fact: which fields is the Microsoft Teams user dialog using here?