Microsoft 365 Governance, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams Apps, Modern Workplace, Prepare for Change

Did You miss the update about “Use app centric management to manage apps”?

Those of you who follow all the updates posted on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap may have caught “Microsoft Teams: App centric management in Teams Admin Center to manage the Apps access for tenants, end-users and groups” when it was posted there on August 23, 2023? I have to reluctantly admit that this update passed my otherwise sharp eyes when it comes to updates posted in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and/or Microsoft 365 Message Center.

As if it wasn’t enough that I missed it in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, I also missed it in the Microsoft 365 Message Center when it appeared there on November 11, 2023.

There is also more information on this topic on Microsoft Learn in the “Use app centric management to manage apps” article.

Since I missed all of this, I guess there might be a few more people who missed it and so I thought I’d give a short and simplified explanation of what this update has entailed.

Continue reading “Did You miss the update about “Use app centric management to manage apps”?” →
Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams Apps, SharePoint, Use Microsoft Teams the right way, Viva Connections

Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 5 – Connect your SharePoint Home Site to Microsoft Teams with the Viva Connections app

I have previously written about the importance and benefits of being able to have Microsoft Teams as the workspace where you should preferably access all the applications and solutions you use during your working day. One application that is a must to be able to access directly from Microsoft Teams without first having to start a browser is your Home Site in SharePoint. The Home Site in SharePoint is usually your Intranet or your employee portal (beloved child has many names). For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this SharePoint site your “Employee Portal”.

When you have built a good Employee portal in SharePoint, you want it to be available in Microsoft Teams. The best way to do this is to use the Teams App called Viva Connections. Very simply, we can say that by using Viva Connections you get an icon in the left menu that can be connected directly to the Employee Portal.

BUT, there are some important things you need to keep in mind to make this work in the best possible way.

Make sure you’ve thought it through and done it right in SharePoint first

First of all, it is important that you, on the site (usually a Hub site with connected Communication sites) in SharePoint, build up a good information structure and a good Global Navigation. The reason why the navigation in SharePoint is important is that it will be the same navigation that you will see via Microsoft Teams. You can read more about global navigation in the article “Introduction to the SharePoint app bar“.

Over to Microsoft 365 Admin Center

You must also have specified which site should be the “Home Site”. You do this in “Viva Connections experiences“, which are now located in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. When you create a new “Viva Connection Experience”, select “Build from an existing portal to set a home site” and paste in the “URL” to the site, then save. Once you’ve done this, it’s important that you change the status from “Draft” to Enabled or you’ll be scratching your scalp a little later when you find that the site isn’t showing up…

When you’re done creating your “Viva Connection Experience” it’s time to head over to the Microsoft Teams Admin Center.

In Microsoft Teams Admin Center.

In the Microsoft Teams Admin Center, click In the left menu on “Teams Apps” and then on “Manage Apps”. Look for the app called “Viva Connections”. Click on the app and then select “Customize.

Inside the app settings, you enter, again, the URL to your Home Site. You can also change the title of the app to the text you want to appear on the icon in Teams. You can also change the color and upload an image for your icon. You can read detailed instructions on how to do this in the article “Pin the Viva Connections app in Teams“.

Almost there

If you followed the instructions to the letter and had a little patience (sometimes it can take an hour or so before everything started working), you should now have a Viva Connections icon in the left menu in Microsoft Teams. The default behavior of this button is that when you click it, the “Viva Connections Dashboard” will open. From there, you must then click on a tiny icon in the top right corner to proceed to your employee portal. I personally think that you should get directly to your Employee Portal and you can solve that in the following way with a little simple PowerShell if you are (or can easily elevate yourself to) SharePoint Administrator.

The Shell of Power

Start (first download and install if you don’t already have it) “SharePoint Online Management Shell”.
Run the following code snippets:
1. Log in to your Tenant

Connect-SPOService -Url https://TenantName-admin.sharepoint.com/

2. Then run this script (where you also here enter the address of your Home Site).

Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl <SiteUrl> -VivaConnectionsDefaultStart $true

Time for a coffee break, and then try again

Wait a little while and then test by going to Microsoft Teams and clicking on your Viva Connections icon in the left menu. Now it should open your Employee portal directly without going through the “Viva Connections Dashboard”.

Collaboration, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Modern Workplace, Use Microsoft Teams the right way

Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 4 – Unify all communication and information and involve everyone needed

Are you one of those people who cling to their old ways of working. Perhaps you are a bit of a traditional conservative “Ferdinand the Bull” who enjoys sitting under your cork oak tree with your file server and mail client?

At most, maybe you use Microsoft Teams to chat with your colleagues and conduct Teams meetings? Do you think it is unbeatable to send emails with attached files to your colleagues when you need to communicate with them? Have you ever thought that you could reduce the need to jump back and forth between several different windows and applications during a normal working day. Have you thought about whether you are really using Microsoft Teams in the right way? In part four of my ongoing blog series, you can read about what I think about old-fashioned ways of working and incorrect use of modern applications. Nice reading!

Stop toggling between applications

I don’t want to have to exit Microsoft Teams during my work day. If I have to switch between several different applications (email, browser, document libraries, OneDrive, CRM system, Notes, etc.) during my working day, I get tired of all the context changes, and the information is then also in different places and I don’t get things to hang together.

I want everything, that can be integrated or managed in Microsoft Teams, to be available in the Teams I work in. I also want my colleagues to work in the same way. There should be no ambiguity about “what I find where” or “where I should store what”. We will never be truly effective if we do not all work in the same way in one and the same interface and have a stated or unspoken agreement that this is the way it should be.

Continue reading “Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 4 – Unify all communication and information and involve everyone needed” →
Community Contribution, Community Rocks, Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Community, Microsoft Purview Information Protection, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Security & Compliance, SharePoint, Teams Nation

My experience of Teams Nation 2024

Teams Nation 2024 is completed and I would like to share my experience of this. Yesterday, Wednesday, February 22, Teams Nation 2024 took place. This was my fourth time and this year I and Daniel Sønstevold were “on stage” together.

We had a great and solid Moderator in the form of “The one and only” (and always helpful and nice) Peter Rising who guided us safely and kept us organized before, during, and at the end of our session. We even had time for a few good laughs right before we started. (A little chat and laughter is, in my opinion, the best calming preparation before going “on air”.)

Daniels and mine session was in the Security & Compliance track and we demonstrated and shared our knowledge and our experiences so far when it comes to what should be done to become Copilot Ready or Optimized for Copilot for Microsoft 365. We started by talking about the importance of having secured the Microsoft 365 platform itself and always thinking (and striving for) Zero Trust. Then we went on to talk about how you can (and should) clean up- and secure Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. Finally, we showed the possibilities and the importance of using Microsoft Purview in terms of establishing and being able to comply with rules and implementing and managing Information Protection.

Often, at other conferences, this type of presentation is a one-way communication where you present what you planned to present and when you’re done, it’s thank you and goodbye. Here at Teams Nation, it’s something completely different. During the time we presented, and after the presentation, we experienced an unusually dynamic dialogue with the participants. The meeting chat bubbled and filled up with relevant questions, good answers and friendly comments. Everyone shared questions as well as knowledge and experiences and all the time the tone was good, helpful and inclusive.

Recordings and Presentations

If you were unlucky enough to miss Teams Nation this time, our PowerPoint-presentation (and many of the other presentations) is available here. The recording of our session can be viewed here. Most of the other recordings will be available here

Teams Nation is truly an amazing event that lives up to and fulfills what it claims to be. I’ve given you organizers well deserved credit many times before but it can’t be said and done enough times. Chris Hoard, Vesa Nopanen, Adam Deltinger, Chris Webb, Matti Paukkonen and Paul Dredge. You do an amazing job!




About Teams Nation
“Teams Nation is a 100% free, 100% community driven online conference dedicated to Microsoft Teams, it’s underlying technologies and it’s extensibility options. It aims to bring together exceptional technical talent and thought leaders to democratize Teams knowledge, encourage participation in the Teams community and give those who are struggling financially an opportunity to attend a first class Teams conference”
(Source: https://teams-nation.com/about/)
Collaboration, Collaborative Meetings, Information Structure, Meetings, Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Teams, Modern Workplace, Use Microsoft Teams the right way

Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 3 – Better Teams Meetings when using Channel Meetings

A majority of the team meetings that I am invited to are meetings created through “classic” meeting invitations where the organizer created the invitation from his or her Outlook calendar. Sometimes they are created from the organizer’s Teams calendar. I myself basically never create meetings from the Outlook calendar, but I exclusively use the Teams calendar as it works best for me. By creating meetings from Teams channels and the Teams calendar, I get greater flexibility and it gives me the opportunity to make sure that I store and collect all the information that belongs to my meetings in the right context so that it is easy for me and the other meeting participants to find and follow up the meetings afterwards.

Continue reading “Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 3 – Better Teams Meetings when using Channel Meetings” →
Information Architecture, Information Structure, Microsoft Teams, Modern Workplace, Use Microsoft Teams the right way

Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 2 – The key to a good information structure within Teams is relevant channels

This post is part two of my blog series “Use Microsoft Teams the right way”. In the last post “Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 1 – Take control of your Teams“, I wrote about how important it is to have a good general structure on your Teams in terms of naming standards, team types, settings and security. In this blog post, I will now show how to establish a good information structure within the teams you have. This topic is very important and an area where, unfortunately, frequent carelessness or omission quickly shows negative effects in an organization’s collaboration both in terms of user experience, efficiency and security. I highly recommend that you take the time to read through this blog post to learn more about this important and even success-critical area.

Continue reading “Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 2 – The key to a good information structure within Teams is relevant channels” →
Automation, Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Purview Information Protection, Microsoft Teams, Modern Workplace, Power Platform, Security & Compliance, Teams Administration, Tips & Tricks, Use Microsoft Teams the right way

Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 1 – Take control of your Teams

I am probably a member of and have access to hundreds of teams. Some teams are located in my organization’s tenant, and there I am either the owner or a member of these teams. Some teams exist in other organizations and then I am invited as a guest in them. You might now be thinking that it must be messy and stressful to be a member of so many Teams? The answer to that question is, as so often, “it depends”. What it depends on is whether you have good settings and a good structure in your teams or not.

Continue reading “Use Microsoft Teams the right way – Part 1 – Take control of your Teams” →
AI, Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Community Contribution, Community Rocks, Copilot, Hackathon, Machine Learning, Microsoft Community, Power Automate, Power Platform

My experience of Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge 2024

In the fall of 2023, I was asked if I would like to be a judge at a three-day hackathon that would take place in Oslo in February 2024. This was an offer that I could not refuse. At that point, I had no details on what I was actually going to do. I had heard about this event several times before, so it was not completely unknown to me. Today is the fifth of February 2024 and I stand here with a richer experience and can say that participating as a judge at the Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge 2024 was such a great experience that I think it deserves its own blog post. Below I have summarized my impressions and experiences from this fantastic Community event which, in my opinion, is something above the ordinary.

Continue reading “My experience of Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge 2024” →
AI, Artificial Intelligence, Copilot, Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Governance, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams Tech Community, Modern Workplace, Security & Compliance, Teams Nation

Speaking at Teams Nation 2024

Wednesday 21st February 2024, 09:00 – 19:30 CET (Central European Time) (UTC+1) , it’s time for Teams Nation, one of the biggest highlights of the year for us Microsoft Teams fans.

Teams Nation is a 100% free, 100% community driven online conference dedicated to Microsoft Teams, it’s underlying technologies and it’s extensibility options. It aims to bring together exceptional technical talent and thought leaders to democratize Teams knowledge, encourage participation in the Teams community and give those who are struggling financially an opportunity to attend a first class Teams conference.

Continue reading “Speaking at Teams Nation 2024” →
AI, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Productivity, Collaboration, Copilot, Copilot for Microsoft 365, Digitalisation, Exchange, Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Governance, Microsoft Teams, Modern Workplace, OneDrive, Prepare for Change, Security & Compliance, SharePoint

Wise men say “only fools rush in”

Most of us have hoped but not really dared to believe that yesterday’s news “Bringing the full power of Copilot to more people and businesses” would come already now, but yesterday’s news struck like a bolt from the blue. This announcement includes Microsoft “Expanding Copilot for Microsoft 365 to businesses of all sizes” and thus the previous “brake pedal” with the 300-seat purchase minimum is now gone.

Continue reading “Wise men say “only fools rush in”” →