The Microsoft Teams app has become a fundamental tool for collaboration, integrating chat, meetings, and business functionalities seamlessly. Using Microsoft’s integrated phone services and calling plans can transform your communications infrastructure into an all-encompassing, efficient hub.

Benefits of Unifying Your Communications with Microsoft Teams Phone:

Centralized Communications System

• One-stop Communication Solution: Integrating phone services transforms Microsoft Teams from a basic collaboration tool into a unified communication system. Manage voice, video calls, and chats all within one platform—reducing the need to switch between apps and thereby boosting productivity.
• Expand Global and Local Reach: Enable your team to make and receive calls with local phone numbers through Microsoft Teams Voice, regardless of geographical location. This feature not only ensures a consistent local presence but also helps to establish a global reach without the complexities of traditional phone systems.

Cost-Effective Communication

• Significant Cost Reduction: Merging your telephony with Microsoft Teams can lead to substantial savings. Traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) systems are expensive compared to the VoIP services that Microsoft Teams uses, which reduces call costs, especially for international communications.
• Simplified IT Management: Unifying your communication tools into the Microsoft Teams client minimizes IT complexity. This integration facilitates easier management, maintenance, and secures your communications under one platform, ultimately cutting down on IT costs.
  Boosted Productivity and Collaboration
• Seamless Office 365 Integration: Microsoft Teams Phone services are intricately linked with Office 365 applications. This integration allows for effortless access to emails, contacts, and calendars, streamlining workflows and enhancing decision-making processes.
  Accessibility and Availability – Features such as voicemail, call forwarding, and caller ID are accessible worldwide. This availability ensures that team members are reachable anytime and anywhere, enhancing responsiveness and connectivity.

Enhanced Customer Interactions

• Direct Client Engagement: Integrated calling in Microsoft Teams facilitates direct and immediate communication with clients, providing a personalized touch. Easy access to previous interaction histories offers valuable context during follow-ups, improving customer service outcomes.
• Call Center Features: Utilize advanced features like call queues, auto-attendants, and conference calls to handle customer inquiries professionally. These capabilities are essential for maintaining high customer service standards and ensuring client satisfaction.

Taking your communications to the next level is made easy by partnering with Thrive. Our managed IT service experts will work directly with your IT team to set up and manage Microsoft 365 Platform services, so that your team can communicate and work seamlessly across a secure platform. Unifying your communications will also increase organizational productivity and customer service capabilities. Businesses looking to refine their communication systems will find Microsoft Teams with integrated phone services an invaluable solution. Contact Thrive today to learn more about this advanced communication platform and propel your business to new heights of efficiency and connectivity.

The post Unify Your Business Communications with Microsoft Teams Phone appeared first on Thrive.

This month we’re looking at Microsoft Teams — a collaboration application that helps your team communicate and stay organized. Teams is actually a suite of bundled collaboration services available on your desktop, mobile device, or browser.

Many users assume that Teams only offers voice and calling capabilities. After all, with most of us working remotely, the phrase “I’ll send a Teams Meeting invitation shortly” is now a part of our daily vocabulary.

However, that’s just one of Teams’ many features. In this article, I’ll show you eight tips and tricks every Teams user should know.

1 – Customize Your Experience

The Microsoft Teams desktop application interface is highly customizable. Simply drag and drop the nodes into your preferred order or remove a node entirely by right-clicking and selecting ‘Unpin.’

2 – App Integration

Teams provides an App Gallery that lists Microsoft and third-party apps. If you’re using Microsoft Planner for task management or Zoom for video, you can prevent application switching by adding them to the Teams user interface.

If you’re not yet using Microsoft Planner, click here to review our Microsoft Planner blog.  

3 – Meet Now

Have you ever needed to get your team on a call quickly? Using emails, phone calls, and text messages to notify everyone is slow and painstaking. Teams has a fix for that! Click the Calendar node, and in the top right-hand corner, you’ll find Meet Now. Click the button, give the meeting a name, then click Start Meeting.

When the standard Teams Meeting screen appears, select the required settings and click Join Now.

4 – Screen Sharing

Previously, screen sharing was not available to everyone and didn’t always work well. But performance has improved, and now everyone has access to this feature!

When in a Teams Meeting, click the screen sharing button, select the screen or document you want to share, and you’re done! This feature is also available in the mobile app, so you can easily share documents while on a call. Who says you can’t close deals while sitting in the airport lounge or enjoying coffee and cake on a restaurant patio?

5 – Recording

If you’re presenting via Microsoft Teams and need to record, Microsoft Teams has you covered. Click the menu button (3 dots) at the top of the screen, then click Start Recording. A banner will appear across the screen, alerting everyone that the call is being recorded. We’ll discuss how and where this recording is saved later in this article.

6 – Live Captions

Have you ever lost sleep wondering if Microsoft Teams had a captions feature? Perhaps not, but don’t worry — there’s a captions feature built into the application.

Click the menu button (3 dots) at the tops of the screen, then click ‘Turn on Live Captions’ to see the dialogue printed at the bottom of the screen.

7 – Meeting Notes

Did you know that Microsoft Teams provides a Meeting Notes feature? Click the menu button (3 dots), then click Meeting Notes. This creates a new group in Teams Chat, automatically adding all meeting members and ensuring that everyone has access to the meeting minutes, both during and following the meeting.

8 – Content Aggregation

Once your meeting has ended, you’ll find the meeting notes and call recording listed in a newly created group under Teams Chat. Teams automatically puts everything in a single, easy to access location.

Are You Teams-Ready?

Microsoft continues to integrate new features into Teams, improving and expanding its capabilities. In future posts, we’ll explore some of the more advanced Teams features. In the meantime, using these eight tricks and tips should help improve your productivity and overall Teams experience.

The post Mastering Microsoft Teams appeared first on Thrive.

Unlike a simple “review site,” I’ll address this from the view of a remote worker trying to get their job done and highlight the differences in functionality. This comparison is not intended to target the “social distancing cocktail party” crowd, though they may benefit from it as well. 

Security

Zoom should essentially be treated like an “open conversation” until they get their security issues fixed. The platform is easy to hack and Zoom has previously admitted to collecting and sharing users’ personal data. If security is a real concern, I would not recommend Zoom for anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable with any random person hearing. 

Microsoft Teams does not use users’ data for anything other than to provide better services. The Microsoft 365 platform, in general, is designed around data loss prevention and information protection. However, it has more to protect as it is designed for persistent storage and collaboration on sensitive information, not just a simple video conferencing platform. 

Web Conferencing

Zoom is simple — which is part of what made it vulnerable. It’s really just an audio/video conferencing tool. Zoom makes it easy to set up a virtual meeting, meet, chat, discuss, and be done. It also doesn’t require any advanced authentication or account management besides your name. 

Teams has similar functionality, but may take a moment longer to set up a conference due to the intent of the platform. For example, Teams was built for integration with Microsoft 365, not as just a standalone product. Its scheduled meetings can be done from within its own calendar interface, which pulls directly from your Outlook/Microsoft calendar. You can also create meetings for Teams directly within Outlook and never open Teams. 

Video Calls & Chat

When it comes to one-on-one or multi-person calls and chatting, Zoom is heavily built around the ID of a meeting or user, which is sent out for attendees to “join.” This system is designed to help users schedule meetings or start ad hoc video conferring meetings quickly, but it gets a lot less user-friendly when you want chat with someone, view their availability, jump on a video call, and add/remove people from that context.   

Teams is designed around the individual, not the meeting. Chatting with someone, adding another person to a chat stream, sharing documents and notes, and collaborating on files are Teams’ main goal. It’s called “Teams” for a reason — it’s meant to let smaller groups of people work together.  

It’s important to know that when sharing documents or data with people in ad hoc chats or video calls, that data is stored in OneDrive and available indefinitely if you want to continue working on it.   

Since Teams is part of the overall Microsoft 365 ecosystem, all the data is searchable and discussion/chats can be sent out via email. 

Telephone Integration

One of the biggest differences between Teams and Zoom is telephony. Zoom allows you to use a web link or a dial-in number for those joining from phones, but that’s pretty much where it leaves off. Teams has advanced integration with true calling capabilities because it was designed to replace telephone systems as well. 

For example, with the proper licensing, I can call a telephone or join someone else’s conference via a traditional dial-in number with Teams, treating it like it was a telephone. In a voice meeting or chat, when I want to add a user, I can choose to call their telephone to dial them in. If Teams knows the user, it allows you to choose to invite them via telephone or their traditional online user account.   

If you want the ability to add legitimate telephone capabilities (including receiving calls and voicemail), Teams is a much better choice. 

Complete Internal Communication

Teams was created to be a complete internal communication hub — a context-based front-end to a lot of the work we perform on a daily basis. Its capabilities include: emailing, chatting, meeting, co-authoring documents, setting up calendar items, working on projects, and collaborating with both internal and external users on various secured topics and data.  

Teams allows users to work with documents in secure channels, synchronize data to desktops, and co-author documents, adding workflow and automation to them as well. It also allows users to notify others when certain changes are made or reduce notifications on items they don’t need to hear about.  

Teams provides for persistent notes integrated into meetings or work “locations” and @ mentions and hashtags to message people and groups specifically or allow them to search for tagged data and conversations. 

One of the most important aspects of Teams is the ability to create multiple teams to work on specific content or projects and make sure those locations are private, secure, and audited, only accessible by the intended groups or users you define. 

Platforms

Both applications are available on all typical platforms: PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. There isn’t a big distinction here in terms of availability, and both tools can be browser–based. 

Price

Teams has a free version and the paid access starts with a $5 minimum licensing. However, most organizations already have Microsoft 365 Business Premium ($12.50) or E3 ($20) licensing, which includes a fully–functioning version of Teams at no additional cost. Prices increase if you want to use Teams as your office phone. 

Zoom has a free version with some meeting time limitations, and their standard pricing is approximately $15-20 per month. 

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that, in many ways, Teams and Zoom aren’t even comparable.  

Security aside, if all you want to do is create a video/audio conference calls from a computer, Zoom is certainly easier to set up and use. Because the functionality is very specific and limited, there isn’t much else to do with it. 

Teams, however, is designed to be an enterprise collaboration and productivity tool for business that do a lot more than calling and conferencing. The integration of documents, data, workstreams, permissions, and sharing all lend themselves to a deeper overall product. This product does come with some complexity and governance challenges that need to be addressed unless you simply want to use it for video conference calls. 

If you want to do more with the tools you have and prefer software you can manage internally via settings, provisioning, and auditing, Teams is the clear choice for you. 

The post Microsoft Teams vs. Zoom: Feature Comparison appeared first on Thrive.

Watch the Webinar:

Meet the Speakers:

Ryan Thomas, CEO of Timlin Enterprises

Helping clients advance Office 365 capabilities to increase efficiency. Managed and professional services support migrations, administration, support, secure collaboration, automated business processes, and more.

Brad Hannes, Innovation Executive at LiveTiles

Defining the intelligent workplace. Giving developers and business users tools to easily create dashboards, employee portals, and corporate intranets that can be further enhanced by artificial intelligence and analytics features.

Steve Marsh, VP of Product at Nucleus Cyber

Provides a data-centric solution to secure collaboration. Delivers effective, intelligent security that minimizes data loss from internal misuse, rogue cloud environments, cyberespionage, and human error.

The post How To Ensure Secure Collaboration In Microsoft Teams appeared first on Thrive.

Select a Technology / Tool

If you can standardize one tool for your company to use, it makes the effort a lot easier. Trying to use various different technologies to maintain continuity can be difficult. We are a Microsoft shop, so we use Microsoft Teams. Recently, Microsoft offered to give this tool away for free to help companies struggling with recent events.

In short, Microsoft Teams provides a platform for calling, video chatting, conferencing and recording, written and verbal discussion areas, file storage, document co-authoring, tagging, notifications, and more. Teams even allows for the compartmentalization of workstreams and security so you have context when collaborating in a certain location. Instead of one giant, open phone line, Teams helps streamline what you are working on and notifies when you people are working/discussing other topics.

Stop Emailing

This one is tough, but we recommend you think twice before emailing people within your organization. Email inboxes can be difficult to search properly, tedious to keep organized, and can make it hard for users to keep track of timelines and files.

In Microsoft Teams and other similar technologies, users can post documents, allow for collaboration on those documents, and determine who can and cannot edit those documents. If your team is working on a document without you, you can still hop in whenever you want to see the progress, add comments, or review updates. When you aren’t viewing the channel the document was added in, you won’t get bombarded or distracted as you might with email.

Reducing internal emails reduces clutter and distractions, and lets you choose the topics and virtual work locations that are important to you.

Talk to People

Schedule time to actively reach out and talk to your team throughout the day. We strongly suggest video chats (most laptops are equipped with a camera) so you can see their faces, look at their inflection, and remember there are human beings on the other side of these conversations. The biggest risk in remote work is the human isolation component. Now more than ever, with the recommendation to physically isolate, it is imperative for our mental health to stay connected, involved, and actively engaged in not just social activities, but also productive/work social activities.

Create Multi-Person Chats

A great way to encourage a positive online culture is to create and participate in chats between more than just two people. Go out of your way to respond, and others will follow suit. It’s inspiring to see people responding, helping, and moving the ball forward together in a way you can see (rather than just hoping it’s happening).

Consider an even wider audience chat instead of emails for major communication and news. Company-wide channels allow for responses and interaction from all the folks on the team — not just those in one department. Staying connected and cross-pollinating are the names of the game here.

Go one step further! Modern tools can securely invite people from outside your organization to participate with almost all the available activities for collaboration. Your contractors, vendors, support personnel, and partners will all be able to continue working with you — possibly better and more efficiently than they have up to until now.

Stay Notified

Since email, chat, and just about anything except a phone call or video chat are asynchronous, it’s important your technology notifies you of activities and changing information. In the old world, we called this “toast” because a small window in the lower right would pop up like a piece of toast, with just enough information on it so we knew what was going on, but not so much that had to interact or do anything about immediately unless we wanted to.

By using these notifications, you can continue working on your current efforts and glance quickly at notifications coming in. Emails and phone calls do not give you this level of anti-distraction capabilities.

Don’t Keep Documents Locally

Use the modern workplace tools to work on documents in a specific location where others can join in. When you get to the “can you take a look at this?” moment, you can easily ask and notify the group that you need some feedback. All work on the document(s) can be tracked, saved, and available for everyone at any time — without using ANY email.

Keep a History

One of our biggest issues with email is when we need to go back and look at a series of communications or activities and try to piece it back together. It feels like we must be a detective.  Choose a technology that keeps a running tab of contextual communications and documents so all you have to do is go look, maybe scroll a bit, and can view any version of the document at any time.  Then, when you add someone else to the workstream, you don’t have to try to find all the correct emails to forward to them in order to get them up to speed on the project  — they can simply go look in the channel for themselves.

Logically Segment the Work

Don’t use an advanced tool and treat it just like email. A singular Teams setup with one big channel where all your work, chats, meetings, and interaction occur is essentially the same single steam firehose that email gives you, and is not valuable.

Break up your work into logical areas, departments, projects, teams, and efforts. Don’t choose so many that you must jump around for absolutely everything, find the balance that best suits your company’s needs. If you need assistance making this determination, our specialized consultants are here to help. We are willing to help at no cost to you during this pandemic, so don’t suffer because you didn’t budget for an emergency. We are happy to have a quick call with your team to pass along best practices and get your remote work started off on the right foot.   

We hope this helps trigger some thoughts, ideas, and actions to make you and your organization more effective as you find you may have no choice but to work from home.

Stay safe,

Ryan Thomas
CEO, Timlin Enterprises

Get in touch with the Timlin Team

The post COVID-19 and Remote Work: Tips for Working and Collaborating Remotely appeared first on Thrive.

Are your powers users confident about the security of their content in Teams? A constant point of contention for power users are uninvited guests or unfamiliar users found within an Office 365 group, team, or site the power user owns. This persistent issue negatively impacts adoption and needs to be addressed. Surprisingly enough, SharePoint admins usually wind up being one of the root causes. Let’s investigate why.

Currently, in SharePoint Online, support staff with the SharePoint Administrator role must grant themselves Owner rights before they can access a site, team, or modify group membership. Admins that perform this action show up on the modern permissions display panel and in the O365 group causing concern amongst the site owners who quickly feel that they have no control over the access of their content. 

So what are these admins up to? 

Most SharePoint setups today use this method to perform system maintenance. In some cases, support may be performing a change request or resolving an issue.

6 Steps To Secure Access

These headaches can be alleviated by one Office 365 Group, a few updates, and a little scripting. Just follow the below steps:

1. In the Office 365 Admin Center, create a “SharePoint Administrators” Office 365 Group and add all your SharePoint Support staff to it as “members” (Owner rights don’t seem to be as effective in this scenario).
2. Request temporary Global or User Management Administrator rights.
3. Run a PowerShell script to add “yourself” as an owner to all group connected SharePoint sites (Requires Global or User Management Administrator rights). 
4. Add “yourself” as an owner to all other Team and Communication sites (not group connected) via the SharePoint Admin Center: https://[TenantName]-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/AdminHome.aspx#/siteManagement
5. Run another PowerShell script to add the “SharePoint Administrators” Office 365 Group to the “Site Collection Administrators” section of all sites.
6. Run a final PowerShell script to remove your personal account’s access from the sites and the Office 365 Groups minus the “SharePoint Administrators” Office 365 Group.

That’s it! Your support staff now have Full Control access to all sites so that they can perform their daily duties without:

• Disrupting the end-users by showing up in the Owners section and/or Office 365 Group.
• Needing to add and remove themselves to make SharePoint changes.

Likewise, you can and should use this same process in tangent with a “SharePoint Service Accounts” Office 365 Group. Otherwise, whenever your Flow or analysis service account or job needs to access something, it will take additional steps to manually grant it access.

The Final Touch

Make adding these groups part of your manual and/or automated site creation process.

Interested in diving deeper on secure internal and external collaboration? Reach out to our team here to set up a free consultation call.

The post How To Manage Office 365 Access Without Hindering Owner Confidence appeared first on Thrive.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 has come to a close, but we’re recapping all the fun that was had with a round-up of the top takeaways, announcements, and moments at this year’s event in Orlando. 

This year’s attendees were lucky enough to experience first-hand new Microsoft feature announcements, compelling sessions, and inspiring keynote speakers. 

Top Announcements from Microsoft Ignite

• Autonomous Systems – You can now design and manage autonomous systems across their lifecycle with a comprehensive portfolio of leading-edge technology that you can apply to your real business scenarios. 
• Microsoft Endpoint Manager – Provides transformative, modern management and security that meets customers where they are and helps them move to the cloud.
• Microsoft Flow Becomes ‘Power Automate’ – UI flows bring together the rich feature set of API-based digital process automation (DPA) that is available today, with RPA UI-based automation to create a truly end-to-end automation platform.
• Power Platform Certification – In addition to the existing fundamentals and role-based certification types, Microsoft has added a third certification type—specialty. Specialty certifications validate deep technical skills and the ability to manage industry solutions, including third-party solutions, on or with Microsoft platforms. 
• Teams Announcements – At Ignite, Microsoft announced a variety of new capabilities in Teams to help customers in all industries work in new ways and better respond to the evolving needs of their business.
• Project Cortex – A new service that uses AI to create a knowledge network that reasons over your organization’s data and automatically organizes it into shared topics like projects and customers. 
• Teams for Virtual Consultation – Healthcare providers can now schedule and conduct B2C virtual consultations through Teams with new Virtual Consults capabilities, and new features like SMS Sign-In and Global Sign-Out make it quick and easy for Firstline workers to securely access Teams from their mobile devices.
• Edge Announcement – The new Microsoft Edge is built on the Chromium engine, providing best-in-class compatibility with extensions and web sites, providing great support for the latest rendering capabilities, modern web applications, and powerful developer tools across all supported platforms.
• Updates to Azure Product and Service Offerings – A host of exciting updates about Azure Arc, Azure Stack, Azure Quantam, and Azure Synapse.

Top Takeaways from Microsoft Ignite

• The Microsoft community is stronger than ever:  Community Central proved to be a popular place for the Microsoft community to gather and connect at this year’s event.
• The tech industry is truly investing in women in business:  Female power and investment was a huge focus during the 2019 event, with daily sessions regarding women in business and technology, and a successful lunch & learn panel event. In addition, Microsoft is keeping the investment going after the conference — for every Ignite conference evaluation submitted, they are donating $1 to Girls Who Code.

 

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A post shared by Blair Niederhauser (@kcbrunetteintech) on Nov 9, 2019 at 9:18am PST

• Microsoft Azure and the future of cloud computing:  From the Community Central day dedicated to Azure topics to the community whiteboard wall which encouraged people to talk about what Azure means to them, there sure was a lot of buzz about the future of cloud computing.

Top Moments from Microsoft Ignite 2019

Attendees of Microsoft Ignite know how to get social! Here are a few of our favorite photos shared during the week through the #MSIgnite hashtag. 

 

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A post shared by Daniel Rubino (@daniel_rubino) on Nov 4, 2019 at 1:06pm PST

A post shared by ShareGate (@sharegatetools) on Nov 12, 2019 at 8:00am PST

 

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A post shared by Bexar County IT (@bexarcountyit) on Nov 8, 2019 at 1:58pm PST

 

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A post shared by Scott Duffy – Azure Trainer (@softwarearchitect.ca) on Nov 8, 2019 at 4:28pm PST

 

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A post shared by Kyla Mitsunaga (@withwarriors) on Nov 7, 2019 at 9:33pm PST

 

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A post shared by jon (@jonmedel) on Nov 7, 2019 at 3:30pm PST

 

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A post shared by Danny (@dannycire) on Nov 7, 2019 at 2:07pm PST

 

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A post shared by Veritas Technologies LLC (@veritastechllc) on Nov 7, 2019 at 3:40pm PST

 

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A post shared by BindTuning (@bindtuningcom) on Nov 7, 2019 at 4:19am PST

My summary of #Teams announcements from Ignite 2019. Great to see better integration with Yammer and Outlook, and private channels finally available. #MSIgnite #Office365 pic.twitter.com/MdzYwDcbUq

— Chris O’Brien (@ChrisO_Brien) November 6, 2019

This may be the most awesome sticker I’ve gotten at #MSIgnite pic.twitter.com/Gf29FUxQ38

— Jen Gentleman (@JenMsft) November 6, 2019

Today, I shared my story of how I’ve used personal branding to redefine myself from a shy, awkward outsider to a confident speaker at #MSIgnite. It was the most challenging and terrifying session I have ever presented, but also the most rewarding. Thank you all #HumansofIT pic.twitter.com/WrZBCB9hSS

— Cathrine Wilhelmsen (@cathrinew) November 7, 2019

My most important take-away from #MSIgnite:#Microsoft transformed totally into an open, diversity embracing company. At the booth and on stage I met knowledgeable people with different genders, colors and nationalities. This is how it should be everywhere. Well done

— Tobias Zuegel (@MrAzureAD) November 8, 2019

#MSIgnite smiles from amazing people! pic.twitter.com/HiUiolwzRm

— Octavian (@octav_cm) November 7, 2019

The power of computer to produce images is mind blowing, stepping into technology literally… #MSIgnite pic.twitter.com/V5M9SvwZ91

— Tim Milan (@tmilan) November 6, 2019

Great things happening at @MS_Ignite! Hear what #LiveTiles Enterpise Sales Lead, Colin Burke has to say about the experience below.

Learn more: https://t.co/tf2aouGGkR#wiseupyourworkplace pic.twitter.com/FSm0nDeuYw

— LiveTiles (@livetiles) November 7, 2019

What were your favorite moments from MS Ignite? Let us know by following us on LinkedIn and starting a conversation with a comment on this post! 

The post Top Takeaways, Announcements, and Moments from Microsoft Ignite 2019 appeared first on Thrive.

The successful completion of another SPTechCon Boston is under our belt.

As I like to do after these events, I stop and think about the people I talked to in the industry, the problems, and challenges they are encountering with various aspects of Office 365 tools and their businesses, plus what they hoped to achieve by attending the conference.

One of my main goals at SPTechCon is to speak with attendees and understand why they came to the event.  Most people come with some problems or ideas and hope to get more direct-human feedback on technology issues. 

Here are the big takeaways, challenges, and trends that I uncovered from conversations throughout the week:

Takeaways and Trends from SPTechCon 2019

1. Collaboration and Automation Are The Future

Microsoft Teams, Flow, PowerApps are the big winners over the past year and continue to lead today into the future. The desperate need for a powerful workflow engine to replace classic SharePoint features has put us in the driver’s seat to create real-world applications in SharePoint Online.

Microsoft Teams has been such a needed addition to the toolset that it’s no surprise how quickly it has taken off.  Users have switched over almost entirely to this tool for communication and collaboration, relying on classic SharePoint features for more process-based on document and information management.

2. Change is Constant in the Office 365 Ecosystem

Office 365 users have a difficult time making sure their team (often a team of one) can keep track of the features being updated and introduced by Microsoft. 

From small changes that derail a training exercise to whole new applications becoming available to an entire organization, changes to the platform are constant and can have a huge impact on how teams do business.

We, collectively, haven’t fully converted from the classic installation, service pack, and major revision model of yesterday. In the past, users and admins could review the release notes, understand the changes, test the installation, and release several feature changes on our schedule. Now, enhancements come in an unsteady stream.

This is a scary proposition to those who try to build and maintain the confidence of business while offering cutting edge capabilities.

It’s one of the reasons I publish the Timlin Office 365 Monthly Buzz Newsletter every month with updates, trends, and goings-on related to Office 365 and SharePoint. If you’d like to receive it, sign up here.

3. Understanding the Longer Microsoft Roadmap is Challenging at Best

Microsoft has never done a great job at helping us build a 3-5-year technology plan based on their feature and release roadmap – the guidance just isn’t cohesive enough. 

For example, if we knew that InfoPath and Workflow were going to be abandoned and replaced with PowerApps and Flow, we could have planned for it in advance. Also, the new versions of these tools don’t have feature parity, so they aren’t completely compatible as replacements.

This is a frustrating proposition for CIOs and technology leaders to recommend a plan, not knowing if the technology will be abandoned, what its possible replacement may be, and if something else will take its place within 2-3 years. 

The strategy, training, and political clout required to correctly implement these tools are too high to guess and hope.

4. Using Strategy and Governance Helps Identify the Right Tool(s) for the Job

The features in the Office 365 Suite contain several overlapping and interconnected capabilities.  Organizations struggle to understand how set the proper guidance, support, and train people down a path they are comfortable managing.

When there are too many ways to manage tasks, it becomes almost impossible to severely limit the choices, so many organizations turn to a “free for all” approach.  This methodology can increase initial user adoption, but almost always creates major problems if the platform takes off.

Organizations should consider when to use which tools and how to set the stage to provide solutions to their internal business problems in a well-orchestrated capacity. Information architecture, business analysis, governance, training, and ongoing support are all crucial to the success of user adoption and achieving digital transformation. 

5. Guaranteeing Proper User Adoption Isn’t Easy

Hopefully, you are noticing a theme here.  Most of these issues stem from similar problems.  Without the time or resources, you often have one of two paths to choose, or possibly both paths at the same time:

1. Pick and choose high-value problems/solutions and solve for those.
2. Open the spigot and let people use the tools in whatever way works for them.
   

Both approaches have their pros and cons, but I talked to a lot of frustrated business analysts and administrators that were expected to make these tools useful for thousands of people with no help beyond their knowledge of the platform.  This is not a good recipe.

6. Limited Time and Resources for Management and Maintenance are Commonplace

The obvious final piece of the puzzle is there isn’t enough time to make the impact these professionals want to make on their businesses.

For example, if an organization decides it needs a new ticket tracking system, it will create a team, spin up the plan, work it through to completion, provide training, support, and ongoing resources for management.  They will then require that all new tickets come through this system, thus ensuring its viability.

When organizations start using Office 365, they treat it much differently.  They bought it for email, Microsoft Office, and possibly OneDrive, and go into it assuming these are essentially desktop/individual tools.

The mindset and business approach to implementation are entirely different. Unlike a mandated/required ticketing system, many of the capabilities and solutions within Office 365 are not a pure requirement to complete work.

Instead, they are optional tools designed to create efficiency and error reduction.  You must think ahead, build solutions, and entice or require people to perform certain activities within these tools to solve specific problems.

The Roadmap Ahead In The Office 365 Industry

As you will note from these takeaways, the world, and the businesses that thrive within it, are changing.

Where we used to work so hard to create process, efficiency, and predictability, the new methods of succeeding are based on adaptability, flexibility, and some bravery to embrace and accept that the world around will be adjusting a pace that we’ve never seen before. 

Information (and misinformation) is given to the entire world in seconds, ideas, concepts, and features show up without warning. 

The classic IT mentality has been tested and appears to be failing in a world that needs something different.

In conclusion, Office 365 and SharePoint continue to help organizations harness the power of technology to improve operational efficiency. As with any technology that has numerous, regular updates, it can be challenging to keep up, though, but it’s worth it.

Reach out if you need any help as our team is very well versed in all of Office 365’s tools and capabilities.

The post 6 Takeaways, Trends, and Observations from SPTechCon 2019 appeared first on Thrive.

Getting Started on the Microsoft Bot Framework

We can get started with creating our first bot on the framework by navigating to the Microsoft Bot Framework Developer platform, which can be found here. Once here, we can follow the prompt triggered by the “Create a Bot” button. This will then redirect you to your Azure portal to select between three types of bot templates (if you do not have an Azure subscription, you can sign up for a trial here and receive $200 in credit to utilize).

Please note that provisioning a Microsoft Bot, Azure Active Directory Application, App Service and other Azure resources will result in associated costs. In order to fully understand the associated costs that may incur from following this guide, please refer to the Azure Pricing Calculator which can be found here.

In this instance, we will want to select the “Web App Bot” template and select “Create”. You will be brought to a screen as shown below.

Once here, proceed to fill in all the required information for the bot. Feel free to create a new resource group or Azure storage blob or use existing instances if you have them. This guide will be using Node.JS so please select Node.JS Basic as the Bot template option.

Once all the information has been filled in, click on “Create” and wait for Azure to provision all necessary resources. When all resources have been successfully provisioned, navigate to your new Web App Bot resource. The management of this bot is very similar to managing other applications in Azure.

Enable the Bot for Microsoft Teams

In this guide, we will be integrating the bot with Teams to allow for messages to be posted to a SharePoint list from Teams by means of the bot.

To enable the Teams channel, proceed to the “Channels” section of the bot and select the Microsoft Teams icon. If the channel was successfully configured, you should see the screen below.

Preparing our Bot for Microsoft Graph API and SharePoint Integration

Considering that we want our bot to communicate with the Microsoft Graph API and can read and post information to and from a SharePoint list, we will need to provision an Azure Active Directory Application.

To do so, navigate to the Azure Active Directory section of the portal, select App registrations and then “New Application Registration”, as shown below.

We need to fill in the required fields which are the name of the app, its application type, and the Sign-on URL. In this instance, we want the application type to be Web app / API and the sign-on URL can be pretty much anything.

For example, you can use something along the lines of https://contoso.com as your sign-on URL. We aren’t creating an Azure web application that requires authentication redirect, so this URL won’t be used in our bot. Once created, we need to assign the bot a few permissions. Select the “Required Permissions” option and click on Add. We will now add the required API access for Microsoft Graph (most of these permissions require that you be a Global Administrator to add them).

Select the following permissions: Read and write files in all site collections, read files in all site collections and create, edit and delete items and lists in all site collections (as shown below).

Once the permissions have been delegated, we will now need to generate a secret application key that will be used in our bot’s code to authenticate with the application.

Click on the “Keys” button and under the “Passwords” section, give the key a name and duration.

When you click save the key will be generated. Please copy and save the key to a safe place for now as we will need it later. Also, while we are here, copy and save the Application ID as this is our client public key that we will also need later.

Starting to Code and Build our Bot

For simplicities sake, we will be using the online code editor for editing code in our bot.

Alternatively, you can download a .zip package of the bot to use a local IDE of your choosing and set up a deployment option for deploying updated code to Azure from your local development environment. Before we jump right into the code, we will want to add our Azure Active Directory App Client ID and Secret Key we copied earlier to the environment variables.

Adding these to the environment variables as opposed to in the code itself ensures that the keys aren’t stored in plain text in the code.

Navigate to “Application Settings” and under “App Settings” we will add the two keys. The first key will be named “ClientID” and have the value of your Application ID you copied earlier. The second key will be named “AppSecret” and have the value of the Secret Key you copied earlier.

Now that we’ve done that, navigate to “Build” then “Open online code editor”.

In here, our main application code is found under the app.js file. A standard project comes with three npm packages: restify, botbuilder and botbuilder_azure. In order to connect to the Microsoft Graph API and make post requests to SharePoint, we will be using the adal-node npm package.

This guide won’t be going too in-depth on using Node.JS or breaking down how Node.JS works but will give you a base understanding of the code works so no previous knowledge of Node.JS is necessary to make everything function.

First, we are going to need to install the adal-node package. To do so, click on the console icon (sixth icon on the left-hand side of the screen), type ‘npm install adal-node –save’ without quotes and press enter.

When the install is complete, we will need to require the package in our app.js. Add the following code below the botbuilder_azure line at the top.

var adal = require(‘adal-node’);

 Next, we will have to the same thing for another package from Microsoft that integrates with Teams. Head back to the console and run ‘npm install botbuilder-teams –save’. Once the package has installed, add the following line under the adal line we just added.

var teams = require(“botbuilder-teams”);

Finally, there is one last package we need to install which is the Microsoft Graph Node.JS package. Navigate to your console and type in ‘npm install @microsoft/microsoft-graph-client –save’. When the package has finished installing, add the following line under the teams line added previously.

const MicrosoftGraph = require(“@microsoft/microsoft-graph-client”);

Now we are going to add the core of the code. First, we will want to remove all lines from the code after the connector was configured (var connector) while leaving in the server.post(‘/api/messages’, connector.listen()); line.

At the time of writing this, these would be lines 27 to 43. This will leave the following line as the last line of our code now.

server.post(‘/api/messages’, connector.listen());

Next, we will add the code below and talk a bit about what it is doing.

First, we are committing our ClientID and Secret Key to a variable for use in authentication using ADAL later on in the code. We then initiate the builder.UniversalBot function which takes the connector and a function that passes the session as arguments.

The connector.fetchChannelList is technically optional here. This function was put here to show you how you might go about fetching specific channel information in case you wanted to post what channel the information came from to the SharePoint list.

Next, we are setting up the ADAL package, so we can authenticate with Microsoft Graph API and start to utilize its functionality. The application ID is our Azure Active Directory App Application ID and the Client Secret is the key we generated earlier. These are both currently stored in our application’s environment variables.

Using the ADAL package, we can then generate an authenticated context token that has all of the permissions we assigned to it earlier. Next, we are initializing the Microsoft Graph client and passing it the authenticated access token. We can then use this instance to build our Graph Query that posts information sent to the bot to a specified list of our choosing in SharePoint.

In the following line you will need to replace the two variables being queried with your root SharePoint URL (in the format of xxxx.sharepoint.com), the GUID of the site that contains the list we want to post information to (this GUID can be found by using the Microsoft Graph explorer to query all of your sites or even by using the SharePoint REST API) and the title of the list we are posting to.

.api(‘https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/sites/contoso.com,SITE-GUID-TO-POST-TO/lists/LIST-TITLE/items/’)

We are then defining the fields of the list item that is going to be posted. Here, I’m using the messageText variable to set the Title of the object. The messageText variable is being provided by the user when they call our bot. Their message will be what is stored under ‘session.message.text’.

Finally, we post the request and resolve the promise using a .then() statement. If the promise resolves successfully then we let the user in Microsoft Teams know that their content has been published to SharePoint.

Testing our Bot using Microsoft Teams

Now that the code has been implemented, we can test our bot before deploying it to a team. To do so, navigate to your bot application in Azure and select “Channels” and then “Microsoft Teams”.

This will ask you if you’d like to open your Microsoft Teams client or open Teams in the web. You can pick whichever platform you’d like to test this out. Once the application opens, you should be automatically directed to the bot conversation window. Test the bot by sending any message to it. If everything goes as planned, you should see the screen below.

You can also check the SharePoint list you specified in the Graph API call earlier for the new list item.

Packaging and Deploying your Bot
In order for your bot to be deployed to your instance of Microsoft Teams, you need to create a package. The package is essentially 3 separate files: Color Icon, Outline Icon, and your manifest.json.

The Color Icon is used throughout Microsoft Teams and should be an icon of 192×192 pixels. The Outline Icon is used as the smaller app tray icon and should be 32×32 pixels. These icons are required and can be made in most design programs. Stock icons may be available online as well. The manifest.json file contains all of the information needed to deploy the bot.

The Bot Framework actually handles the task of gathering the bot from Azure and you merely need to supply the Application/Bot ID in the manifest.json. There are many settings and customizations that can be configured in this file. We won’t cover them in this guide but if you’d like to learn more you can view the current Manifest Schema for Microsoft Teams here.

We will begin by creating a folder that will become our .zip package. Inside the folder, create a file named `manifest.json`, and populate it with the information below. Also, add your outline.png and color.png to the folder.

As you may notice, you will need to populate your specific Bot Application ID in the botId parameter. Otherwise, the other information can remain the same or if you choose, you can customize it. When you have completed this, you should have three files in your folder. Proceed to packaging that folder into a .zip.

** Be careful as sometimes you end up having a root folder in the zip with the files inside the root folder. If this happens, you may want to use a program like WinRAR to manually add the three files to the .zip. They should be at the absolute root of the .zip package and be the only files there. **

When the package has been created, we can now work on deploying the package in our Teams client. Open the Microsoft Teams application, choose a channel, select the ellipsis and then navigate to “Manage Team”, as shown below.

From here, navigate to “Apps” and then select the option to upload a custom app in the bottom right-hand corner (we have uploaded this same custom bot with the name SalesBot).

Once the package has been uploaded, you should now be able to call the bot from the team you added the app to using @BotName where the BotName is whatever you defined it to be in the manifest.json. At this point, you have successfully created, provisioned and deployed a Microsoft Framework Bot that communicates with Microsoft Teams, Graph API, and SharePoint Online.

The post Microsoft Bot Framework: Integrating Microsoft Teams, Graph API and SharePoint appeared first on Thrive.