Real World Computing

Seeing as we're in isolation, we seem to be spending a whole lot more time in Microsoft Teams -- and of course, Microsoft seems to have picked up the pace of teams updates as well.  One of the things that Zoom, (one of Teams' competitors) has that is enviable is a "sense of fun".  Zoom has these great backgrounds and they have some fun filters too. In this post, I wanted to look at how to get these options in teams.  Bear in mind that Teams is always changing and that some of these features are already being developed for the platform, so you probably won't have to use these workarounds for long. The Built-In Backgrounds Yesterday (15 April 2020), Teams started up with a new feature; Background effects. To get to these, simply click on the three dots while in a video conference and choose Show Background Effects . This opens up a selection of backgrounds in the right hand panel.  The first bunch are suitable for corporate meetings and include "...

Office 365 Groups are No Longer Automatic Mail Groups Until recently, if you created an office 365 group (usually by creating a Teams or a SharePoint site), you would also be able to send that group mail directly via outlook. Unfortunately, with everyone having the ability to create teams and sites on demand -- and very few people following good naming standards, it's very easy to get your corporate address books cluttered. Microsoft received a lot of feedback about this clutter and as a result, they disabled the functionality. Existing Office 365 groups are unaffected but if you create a new one, you'll find that you can't locate them in the typeahead when you want to send mail. You can however, still have your cake and eat it too. You just have to use PowerShell. Procedure Since this is an admin feature and I'm presuming that all admins should be on Multi-Factor authentication now, the instructions are for MFA.  If you're not using MFA, you mig...

Depending upon your settings and circumstances, there's a chance that groups created in Microsoft Teams might play so well together.  Specifically, your team might not be available for email.  As it turns out, the teams ARE available... they're just hidden.   and a little PowerShell is enough to coax them out.  Our Example In our example, the site is called Application Redevelopment and you can see from the screenshot that it appears in teams but not in outlook. The PowerShell Commands Session Setup The setup is as per usual; Start PowerShell in Administrator Mode. Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Press Y and Enter. $UserCredential = Get-Credential Enter your user name and password. Create the session. $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection and activate it. Import-PSSessio...