For the past several months we have been gathering extensive feedback from users regarding theirTeamsexperience, and we are using that feedback as guidance to continuously improve theTeams platformand admincapabilities. For our customers and partners, the Teams platform is giving organizations the ability to customize and extend their experience with developer tools, third-party integrations, and more,unleashing the value of Microsoft Teams.For admins, core todelivering a great experience in Teamsfor your organizationisbetter governance, and today we are excited to announce thatthe followingcapabilities that we announced at Microsoft Ignite 2018are now available to you:
NewMicrosoftTeams AdministratorRoles
In many organizations,there is an entire team that comes together toenable and support users as theycollaborate within Teams.Members of this teamperform different roles and require differenttypes ofinformation and tools.ThenewMicrosoft Teams admin roles allows youprovide members of your admin teamthe access they needto be effective at their job.
We are introducingfour Team admin roles:
- Teams Service Administrator:The overall Teams workload admin, whocan also manageand createO365 Groups.This role has accesstoall the controls available in the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business admin centerand their corresponding PowerShell equivalents.For example, this role can manage all meetings, voice, messaging, andorg-wide settings.
- Teams Communication Administrator:This rolecan manage meetings and calling functionality inMicrosoftTeams.For example. this includeschanges toconferencebridgesandphone number assignments.
- Teams Communications Support Engineering:Users who are assigned this role have access to advanced call analytics tools. For example, they canview full call record information.
- Teams Communications Support Specialist:This role has access to basic call analytics tools. For example, the can view information for thespecific users being searched for.
PowerShell cmdletsare available for each role. Most of these can be found in the Skype for Business PowerShell module andsome of them control share settings that are also used by Skype for Business.
Users can be assignedany of theseTeams admin roles via the Azure Admin Portal.Simply find the user profile in the Azure Active Directory and click on “Directory Role” from the left navigation. Next, click “Add Role” and select the Teams admin role you want to assign. Find details about the available admin roleshere.
Assign the new Microsoft Teams admin roles
Manage your teams from the Admin Center
Delivering a great experience to your users not only requires you to understand how teams are coming together and the details of each virtual workspace but being able to make changes to foster communication and collaboration.
You can now access and manage a complete list of all teams in your organization from the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Admin center (or via PowerShell). You can access this list in the admin center by selecting “Teams” in the left navigation and clicking “Manage Teams”.
This view provides Global Administrators or Teams Service Administrators access to team properties such as team name, number of users, and privacy information. Complete with search and edit capabilities, you can easily find a specific team and perform key actions like updating membership, change settings, and transfer ownership. Learn more here.
Manage your teams directly from the Admin Center
Note: It make take some time for all teams in your organization to appear initially as the backfill process is ongoing.
Automate the Teams Lifecycle
Streamlining the process of creating and customizing teams allows you to save time while enabling a familiar experience for your users when they open up Teams. With the general availability of 37 Graph APIs, you now have the ability to achieve all this, and more.
With the new Microsoft Graph APIs, you can now automate:
- Provisioning of large groups of Teams
- Automatically creating teams and channels (with business-specific limitations)
- Deployment of apps in team and channels
Use Microsoft Graph APIs to create a new virtual team when a new business issue arises,populate the teamwith the right people, and configure the team with channels and apps.
When the business issue is resolved and you no longer need the virtual team, use the Microsoft Teams API toarchiveor delete the team. If you know the maximum duration of the virtual team when you create it, set anOffice 365 group expiration policyfor the team that automatically removes the team according to the policy.
Example scenarios
Here are a few potential scenarios where you might provision groups of teams:
- Airlines: provision new channels for new flight routes
- Legal: create a new team or channel when a new case arises.
- Educational institutions: every semester, create a new batch of teams tied to class rosters, schedules, etc.
- Project management teams: every time you spin up new projects, automatically create & populate relevant teams and channels to get started more quickly and efficiently.
- Sales: Have a new lead? Perfect, automatically provision a launch a new team with the key virtual team you’ll need to land the deal.
- Event planning: for each new conference and event, coordinate better by leveraging templates to spin up new teams and channels for that event. This is how we planned Ignite!
- General: re-orgs, memberships for external databases, incident management and more.
You can now create familiar experiences for your people by automatically deploying relevant apps (from Microsoft and others) into Teams.List the teams in your tenant, andinstall appsin them.Create tabsin channels and pin your app to a tabto give users easy access to apps. Then, send messages to the channel linking back to your website."
Example scenarios
- Legal: in addition to the example scenario above, you can go beyond simply provisioning the team with the right people and now also automatically deploy relevant apps into these teams thanks to partners like LawToolBox, and more!
- Sales: in addition to the example scenario above, you can auto-populate relevant teams with integrations like our Dynamics CRM app.
How you can leverage the Graph APIs?
- Speak to your developers or trusted partners to begin leveraging the power of Microsoft Teams and the Graph APIs, today
- Check out this tutorial to see how to leverage the Graph APIs in your organization, today
Stay tuned for more announcements regarding Graph APIs for retrieving and posting messages in channels and chats.
This blog was written by both@Christopher Bryanand myself
