Expert Microsoft Teams Solutions

Aaron Guilmette, Yura Lee, Grant Oliasani, Angel Aviles

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781801071277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Microsoft Programming
• Index: Computer Science

Get expert-led advice on how to make the most of underused Teams features, find answers to questions that are rarely covered elsewhere, and explore tasks that customers frequently rely on Microsoft Partners to accomplishKey Features• Deliver a better Teams experience with the help of Microsoft's technical specialists• Explore advanced Teams capabilities such as voice, governance, and Power Platform integration• Get to grips with planning resources for voice integration in TeamsBook DescriptionMicrosoft Teams is an invaluable tool that can integrate various Microsoft products into a single convenient hub. But making the most of it often requires expert help and hours spent on calls and live chats. If you'd rather have all the information you need to make the most of Teams in one place, then this book is for you.Written by two Microsoft technical specialists who have spent years helping clients find the best way to utilize Teams, this book will help you understand Teams as a whole — from architecture and collaboration through to apps and voice. You'll study the platform from the perspective of the end user as well as the administrator, gaining insights and learning from real-life examples.You'll tackle adopting, implementing, and administering Teams efficiently, which will help you realize its full potential. From setup and deployment to modernizing your organization's chat and voice infrastructure, you'll get plenty of useful and actionable tips as you progress.By the end of your journey through this book, you'll be able to design and implement the most important and exciting aspects of Microsoft Teams help your organization work more efficiently.What you will learn• Gain a clear understanding of Microsoft Teams architecture and deployment concepts• Become well-versed with advanced Teams voice capabilities• Explore best practices to extend the Teams experience to various apps through collaboration• Focus on how to conduct effective meetings, including ad hoc, scheduled, channel, and live events• Integrate Power Apps and Power Automate with Microsoft Teams• Understand key governance and security concepts in administering Microsoft TeamsWho this book is forThis book is for intermediate-level and experienced Microsoft Teams IT professionals, as well as administrators looking to implement Teams. To get the most of this book, you'll need intermediate-level knowledge of the platform.

Part 1: Collaboration and Apps

This part of the book focuses on the native features and built-in apps of the Microsoft Teams platform, as well as some of the underlying technology components.

This part comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Taking a Tour of Microsoft Teams
• Chapter 2, Approvals
• Chapter 3, Task Management in Teams
• Chapter 4, Bookings in Teams

Chapter 1: Taking a Tour of Microsoft Teams

Welcome to Microsoft Teams – the new hub for collaboration in the modern workplace! Microsoft Teams is part revolutionary and part evolutionary – a whole new way to connect and integrate data, applications, and communications by bringing together familiar pieces of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem (and introducing some new ones).

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration and communications tool as well as a development platform. As a collaborative tool, it allows users to natively leverage existing applications such as Exchange calendaring or SharePoint document management. As a communications tool, it replaces the instant messaging and telephony capabilities of Skype for Business. And, as a platform, it provides internal and external developers ways to integrate data in third-party external applications (such as Salesforce or Adobe Document Cloud) as well as use Microsoft-based tools to connect to cloud-based services and applications (such as Dynamics 365, Power BI, or Planner).

In this chapter, we're going to review the foundational concepts of Microsoft Teams, including:

• Architecture
• User interface

Once you have those basics under your belt, we'll be getting into the more advanced features and capabilities.

Let's get going!

Architecture

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration and communications tool as well as an application development platform built on several existing cloud services. While it may present a simple User Interface (UI) on the surface, Teams brings an enormous number of technologies to bear, all unified under a single experience. These diverse components and services make up the Microsoft Teams architecture.

The core object in Microsoft Teams is a team, which is based on a Microsoft 365 group. A Microsoft 365 group is comprised of an Exchange group mailbox, a SharePoint site collection, and a OneNote notebook. Microsoft Teams adds additional features, structures, and extensibility to that Microsoft 365 group.

From an implementation perspective, any Microsoft 365 group can be converted or extended into a Microsoft Teams object (some authors and articles may use the term teamify to communicate the idea of converting a standard Microsoft 365 group into a team).

You might think of a team as a sort of container object that can be used to group related conversations and resources. Inside the team, channels can be used to further organize content around topics, departments, projects, or other categories. Figure 1.1 shows the Microsoft Teams user interface and how these concepts of teams and channels are presented:

Figure 1.1 – Teams user interface

Different content types such as files and messages are stored and managed inside the team. While a Microsoft 365 group by itself is somewhat of a flat object, teamifying a group creates structures and linkages inside that object. Figure 1.1 shows both the team channels (such as subfolders). Each of those channels maps to a unique subfolder inside the Microsoft 365 group's corresponding SharePoint Online site, as shown in Figure 1.2:

Figure 1.2 – SharePoint site structure

The exception to this is a private channel. Private channels are used to restrict information to a smaller subset of users in the team. Private channels have their own membership list. In Figure 1.2, the Financials channel is identified as a private channel by the lock icon next to its name. Private channels show up in the team channel hierarchy, but the channel's file content is actually stored in a separate SharePoint site with a different set of permissions. This prevents users who are members of the team (but not the private channel) from gaining access to the data stored in that channel.

The following diagram shows a deeper look at the connection points between services, applications, and storage inside the Microsoft Teams ecosystem:

Figure 1.3 – Teams architecture overview

The following list highlights some of the core features and components:

• Identity
• Messaging
• Files
• Voicemail
• Recording
• Calendars and meetings
• Contacts

Let's expand further on some of these.

Identity

It should come as no surprise that identity is the core of everything in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Microsoft has emphasized the phrase "identity is the security boundary" as part of its zero trust design principles. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) provides the identity storage and authentication functionality for all Microsoft 365-based workloads.

As we just noted, Azure A...