- Coming up, we take a look at the free version
of Microsoft Teams available now, and with more people
using Teams, we're gonna show you updates
to extend stability and management,
including for developers, how you can now bring
your Line of Business applications into Teams.
And for IT, how scripting options in Teams allow you
to build teams and channels at scale,
as well as other updates in managing the lifecycle
of Teams over time that span team owners and IT.
(upbeat music)
I'm joined once again by Dan Stevenson, from the Teams
Engineering team, welcome.
- Hey thanks, Jeremy, it's great to be back.
- So, last time we caught up with Ann Michaels
who walked us through updates to Teams a year on.
If you missed that show you can check it out here.
Now Teams has been available with Microsoft 365
and Office 365 subscriptions for a while now,
but there's a new way to get it, right?
- Yeah, that's right.
Now we have a free version of Microsoft Teams.
The free version is a great way for people to start
using Teams, whether they're a small business
or a couple co-workers, group of people
working together, maybe an association.
It's pretty easy to sign up, let me show you how to do that.
So we have a page here, where I can compare
the differences between Teams free and paid.
Let me go ahead and click on the free button right there.
And then, I'm presented with a pretty easy
form where I just put in my email.
Let me choose this gmail address here.
And then I answer a few questions here about
how I'm gonna be using it, and then a few seconds later,
presto, I've got my new Teams environment set up for free.
Now, I've already got one going, so let's hop over there.
So you can see, here's my Teams free,
in my probably fictitious sheep farm.
Now, this is Teams as you know it, right?
It's got all the features you would expect,
I've got Teams and Channels, Chats,
I got all the stickers, I got a picture of my son
riding on a sheep, he's the one on top.
It's pretty much Teams as you would expect to see it.
So, when I first came in to Teams free, I was actually
asked to invite a bunch of people.
As you can see, I did that, but there's always room for more
so let me bring you in Jeremy.
And I'm gonna use that email address you've used for
your Garage Series, I think it was garageseries@outlook.com,
and I'll go ahead and send an invite out to you.
And then let's go take a look and see
what happens on your side.
- Okay, so on my machine I can see
that the mail just came in.
I've been invited to join Teams here by the Chief himself,
Dan Stevenson, so let me go ahead and join Teams.
And here you can see the invite from Contoso Sheep Farm.
I'll hit accept.
This page is loaded, so now I can say I'm gonna
open it in the web app, then launch straight into
Microsoft Teams and click next.
I can invite people here if I want to,
but I'm gonna go ahead and close that.
And there I can see your team.
So I'll go ahead and type hi everyone, and send.
- Very cool, Jeremy, great to have you
here in Teams, for free.
- So of course, we need text-based chat like we see here,
but can we also do things like video chat or screen sharing?
- Yeah, it's basically all the core features of Teams.
Chat, teams and channels, files, group video calls,
ad hoc meetings, even app integrations.
It's all here, and of course, our mobile apps
work as well, for Teams free.
- So quite a bit in terms of the free version,
so what's actually different than in paid?
- Good question, so there's some great things you get
when you upgrade to paid Office 365 or Microsoft 365.
Including more than 300 people in your organization,
scheduled meetings, and then depending on your SKU,
things like phone number calling and dial-in conferencing.
You also get the full power of the Office 365 Suite,
that's exchange mailboxes, SharePoint site,
a Terabyte of OneDrive storage, and more,
including the Office calling apps, depending on your SKU.
But most importantly, upgrading gives you a full set
of powerful IT capabilities, compliance and security
controls, and developer options to manage and scale Teams,
all as part of Office 365, which I'll walk you through
actually in a couple minutes.
Plus, support and guaranteed uptime.
- Got it, so in the full version, there's a lot more
that you can do with large organizations, dial-in voice,
plus stuff for IT admins and developers.
So speaking of developers, what are some of
the latest updates there?
- We made a bunch of improvements for LOB
and over our LAP developers, plus we're working on
integrating the SharePoint App platform into Teams.
- This is really great news if you're a SharePoint
developer because the custom apps
that you're rolling out will just work in Teams.
- Yeah, that's exactly the plan.
SharePoint has this rich Web Part framework
for building LOB apps, and when we're done you'll be able
to deploy those apps directly into Teams.
On the IT side, we've got updates to PowerShell
and Graph APIs for provisioning teams, channels, and apps
from business processes, plus we made improvements
to managing team life cycle, and updates to the Skype
in Teams integrated admin experience.
Finally, as you know, compliance and security
have been important to us from the get-go,
and we recently did more work there for GDPR.
- Great, so can we see all these updates then, in action?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So here I am in the Store, and you can see some new apps
there as well as some familiar faces.
One of the things we did was we also made it possible
for apps to project a personal view into Teams,
so for example, on Planner I've got tasks across
lots of different Teams, now with the personal app
for Planner, I can see how late I am on all my tasks
together and when you want.
- [Jeremy] That's always good.
- [Dan] Now if I go here to the LOB app category,
you can see a bunch of Line of Business apps
that developers at my company have created
for my employees to use in Teams.
I've got one for expense reports, a really nice one
for hiring and interviewing, one from a partner
called Intumit that is a help desk for Office 365,
and this New Employee Orientation,
or NEO app that I built myself.
So let me talk about how easy it is to build apps,
and then we'll take a deeper look into that app itself.
So let's take a look at the Teams App Studio,
which is a super helpful tool for building the app manifest,
and previewing code and things like that within Teams.
Here I've got a Card editor, that lets me see
how some of my adaptive cards in JSON might look.
I've got a Control Library, where I can see some of the
helpful JAVA Script controls that I can use to build
rich UI inside of Teams, and then once I'm done
working in here, I can export the config from my app
and do the actual coding in something like VS Code.
Let's actually take a look and see what I did there.
And this is the code for the NEO app, that is going to
provide kind of a Q & A interface to new employees
wanting to learn about the company.
You can go through here and see a few interesting things.
I'm using luis, which is the text analyzer, looks at intent,
does a lot of natural language processing,
it's one of the AI libraries from Microsoft.
- [Jeremy] Right.
- [Dan] I've got adaptive cards in here, which are a really
rich way to show interactive content within a bot response,
including actually messages go back to the bot.
And then, here's one of those actions actually
that sends something back to the bot, in this case
it lets an employee attest that they've viewed
the employee handbook, it's kinda cool.
- Okay, so everything's coded up, ready to go.
What does that look like then inside of Teams?
- Well, let's take a look and see.
So here I am chatting with that
New Employee Orientation bot.
I asked it who's my HR contact, got some helpful info there.
I can actually click that button to start a chat.
I lost my badge again, so I get this carousel of things
I can do to try and get my badge working.
Let's say I wanna look up something on, I don't know,
the Moonlighting policy, given I have a sheep farm, right?
Well, I can bring up the Employee Handbook, and the
handbook is presented in an interactive card.
I first have to attest to the policies and terms
in the handbook, to view the handbook, and then I can open
it up, and there it is, showing up, my Employee Handbook.
Now we've got a few other things going on here as well.
I've got that Office 365 Help Desk app
from our partner Intumit, can provide some
help desk automation for me.
And then let's say I'm interviewing some people to join
my team, because you know, we are hiring.
Well, I've got this Talent app now in my interviewing team,
I can chat with a bot and it has a really nice tab
where I can keep on top of the interview status
for the candidates that we're talking to.
And that's just a quick taste of some of the things
you can do with LOB apps in Teams.
Check out the info below for more docs and code samples,
and look for updates on how bots can send files,
participate in calls and meetings,
and even show their own UI popups.
- So, pretty straightforward process to build code
and some really powerful capabilities then we brought
into Teams, but what if I'm not a coder and I wanna
actually build some of these apps.
- Yeah, so we've got you covered there too.
What I'm gonna show you now is how I connected
Microsoft Forms through Microsoft Flow into Teams
for a new employee survey, and then had a special
text analysis AI engine to make sure I was catching any
negative employee comments really quickly.
So here we've got the form, pretty basic form, I just wanna
ask employees for their feedback, a few questions there.
Now, I've got that connected up to Flow, as you can see here
and I'm taking the responses from the form,
piping it through our AI text analytics engine,
scoring that based on a sentiment score,
and then if the sentiment is negative, it's posting
a message straight into the HR channel in Teams,
and then regardless also tabulating all the results,
and notifying my team that somebody has submitted that form.
- Okay.
- So let's take a look and see how that actually works.
So I think I'll start by filling out a form, and maybe
expressing some negative sentiment.
So I've got that partially filled out here,
I decided they've misspelled my name on my ID badge,
so let me go ahead and submit that.
And let's see what happens in Teams.
I just got a message saying that a negative sentiment
was received on the survey, so that's important.
I can even click on that person's name
and message right back to them.
And, I can go to this tab here, and just see the tabulation
of the survey results over time.
We've been doing so-so here, but that's mostly because
I've been sending a lot of negative sentiment in.
- So in this case Flow, and you can also use logic apps
really to kind of automate the different work flow processes
to do what you just did here, but what about other
business processes, maybe can I integrate Teams
as part of those to automate some provisioning?
- Yeah, absolutely, so let's go to provisioning.
We have a really powerful PowerShell Commandlet support,
and we actually now have some updated Graph APIs as well.
Earlier we had that New Employee Orientation team.
Well, I wanna actually create that team
programmatically from my directory.
Right, I shouldn't need to type in everybody's name.
So I've got a PowerShell script here, let me just
show you some of the salient parts of that.
So, it's using Teams and PowerShell to create a team.
Down here, it's creating a new team, and then you can see
here where it's adding users to that team.
And then a little further down is where I'm actually
installing that NEO app that we were just showing.
So anytime somebody is added to a team, to the NEO team,
then that app will wake up and start talking to them,
both in the team and in private chat, of course.
So I'm gonna run it in PowerShell, create the NEO team.
It's gonna do a little bit of authentication,
against the graph, let me make sure I choose
the right account here, prove all the permissions we need.
I'll just go with the default name.
Creates a few channels for me, creates a bunch of users.
And I think right at the bottom there, yep,
you are one of those new users, new employees.
Welcome to the company.
- [Jeremy] Thank you.
- Let's go take a look and see what happened on your side.
- Okay, so over on my machine here I can see that my Teams
is fairly blank, there it is, and there I've got
a provision, I can see a toast here in the corner.
It looks like you've actually added me to the team,
I can look into General here, and here I can see
conversations with all my teammates.
I can chat with NEO there, which is my NEO bot,
and I can also do one-on-one chat with NEO.
This is great, and in case I've got any questions,
like who is my HR contact like you just asked,
so very cool, and I just provision that with PowerShell.
All right, so we saw that users can create teams,
business processes can also create teams, like we saw
there in Flow, and IT admins can create teams like we saw
with PowerShell, but stepping back though.
What are we doing in order to manage
the life cycle of Teams over time?
- Few things we have going on here.
You probably know it's easy to control who can create a team
although I'd definitely recommend leaving that relatively
open to unblock collaboration.
You can still exercise plenty of controls in admin,
for example, with naming policies.
Let me show you how that works.
So, here I'm gonna actually try and create a team.
And in my company, I'm not allowed
to call a team payroll or finance.
I'm gonna go to the new Manage Teams UI,
click on create team, let's just try it.
Let's give our team the name Payroll and see what happens.
And it's gonna come back and tell me nope,
you can't do that, that's not, that's a forbidden word.
I can also do things like put naming conventions in,
like a prefix or a suffix for the team as well.
Now, once the team is up and running, we've got some
usage reports, actually some improvements to those coming
in the near future, and we also recommend that
companies create team champions or ambassadors
who go around and really help their organization
get abreast of using Teams.
Now, all good things do come to an end,
and sometimes a team, well it's time to retire it.
I'm pretty excited about a new
feature we have called Archive.
Let me show you how that works.
So I'm in that same team management UI here.
And let's go look at this HR Coordination working group,
hasn't been a lot of activity on that, no members.
I'm gonna go down and archive that.
Now what that does is, it puts the team in kind of a
read-only mode, so the content is still there,
it's still searchable, I can always restore it
later if I want to, but it sort of puts it on the shelf.
It doesn't permanently delete it.
Speaking of deleting, sometimes there's just too many teams.
People created them and they left, they moved on.
We have this new feature called Expiration and Renewal,
so an IT admin can set an expiration policy,
and then a team owner has to attest that they're still
using that team and renew it, otherwise it gets deleted,
and then 30 days later it gets permanently deleted.
- Right, so they're resetting the clock.
- [Dan] Exactly, so here's actually how you can set those
expiration policies, I've moved over here
to the Azure portal, and you can see here I've just got
the ability to choose a certain time frame, 180, 365 days.
And then I can apply that to just one group
or all of the groups in my company, or in some cases, none.
- All right, so we're in the Azure ID portal, looking really
at the group expiration policies, but I know that we've done
a lot of extra admin work in terms of bringing together
some of the functionality between Teams and Skype.
- Yeah, so this is actually really awesome,
bringing Skype and Teams together.
I've been in the org for a while and it's really
great to see this come to fruition.
This is the Teams and Skype for Business combined
Admin Center, and you can see here,
just as I go down on the left, you can see some of the
different capabilities we have, some of the different
sections we have for administrators.
And then what I've done here on the right is I actually
found my user record in the directory.
And when I click on my name, you're gonna see that I get my
call quality history, if I go to activity, in fact
you're gonna see the list of calls I've made recently,
and I can drill in on device issues,
network issues, whatever behind those.
Go back to my account, you can see here I've got
a custom meetings policy and a custom messaging policy.
Let's look at that meeting policy.
So this allows me as an admin to set
a custom policy for a group of users.
Maybe I want certain people in the company
to have the ability to record meetings
or screen share, and others not.
That's really powerful, I can even do the same
for messaging policies as well.
So we've got other updates on the Skype for Business
front rolling out, which will bring us pretty much
to parity with Skype for Business online, adding features
like calling, PowerPoint sharing, things like that.
We're even going beyond that, with things like
Cloud recording, screen sharing from an iPad,
and live camera feed into meeting as content.
And then this thing we have called direct routing
is a great way to bring an existing SIP trunk into Teams,
while still keeping your on-premises voice infrastructure.
So, how do existing Skype for Business
customers move to Teams?
Well, just like everything else, it's in the Admin Center.
So we go over here, and I can look at my migration policies
for this user, and click on edit and decide that
instead of using the Org-wide settings,
I'm gonna go straight into Teams.
Now, it's not Teams exclusively, I still have
really good inter-op with Skype for business,
so I can send messages back and forth to those users
and make calls and so on.
Lots of companies are running these side by side,
and quite a few are now moving to Teams only which is great.
And these are just a few of our recent highlights.
You can check out our announcements blog
at the link shown below to find out more
about the Skype to Teams features.
- So lots of really great updates, and of course,
if you wanna see some of those features
Dan was just talking about, they're on the link shown
when we caught up with Ann Michaels.
So, it's really good to see Teams being made available
for more people, the extensibility, the management options,
it really helps admins and team owners
manage their teams over time,
but where can people go to learn more?
- Yeah, great, so to learn more about the free version
of Teams, you can sign up today at the link shown below.
And if you're a developer and want to integrate with Teams,
check out the Office Dev Center and our great code samples
on GitHub, and of course, to plan your migration
from Skype to Teams, you can learn more by reviewing
our detailed guide on this link.
- So great stuff, thanks for joining us today Dan,
also remember to subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest updates across the company.
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)