Introduction

Recently, someone asked me if it was possible to export a Microsoft Teams Meeting Attendance List to Excel while in the meeting!

My first reaction was that I hadn’t seen that possibility in my tenant and that probably this wasn’t possible. The truth is that Microsoft Teams has added a new feature that allows organizers to download and view the attendees that are present in a meeting. However, this option is not enabled by default.

After googling a bit, I found a Microsoft support article that pointed me in the right direction.

Pre-Requisites and How-To Steps

Unfortunetaly, this configuration isn’t available in Teams Admin Center and in order to enable this meeting policy, we have to use PowerShell.

Pre-Requisites

The first step is to install Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business PowerShell modules:

• Microsoft Teams – just run the following command in a PowerShell console: Install-Module MicrosoftTeams
• Skype for Business: download and install the PowerShell Module (update 26/07/2021: no longer necessary)

How-To Steps

After installing the required PowerShell modules, we are ready for the fun part! Just run the PowerShell commands below (ensure that you run using the “Run as Adminstrator” option). In my example, I will change the Global meeting policy, that can make sense if we want to enable this policy for all users but you may want to create a new policy instead if we want to enable meeting attendance download to a restricted set of users. Check this Microsoft article for details.

1. Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
2. Connect-MicrosoftTeams
   
   This step will allow ask for credentials of a Global Admin user. This authentication method works fine if you have Multi-Factor Authentication enabled (MFA) in your tenant.
   
   
   
3. $sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession
4. Import-PSSession $sfbSession
   
   Lines 3 and 4 are required to avoid an error saying Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy is not available in the next command.
   
5. Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Global”
   
   After running this command, we can see that the “AllowEngagementReport” property which enables/disables the meeting attendance download is disabled.
   
   
   
6. Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Global” -AllowEngagementReport Enabled
   
   This command will enable the the meeting attendance download
   
   
7. Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Global”

After running this command, we can see that the “AllowEngagementReport” property is now enabled.

Testing The Results

To test if the configuration was successful, just schedule a meeting and check if while in the meeting, you are able to download the meeting attandance list.

You now should have a new option named “Download attendance list” and you should be able to download the meeting’s attendance list. The list will contain all users that are effectively attending the meeting and will not contain the attendees that were invited that are not attending the meeting, even if they accepted the meeting request.

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to learn how you can rename a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you want to learn how to save time time scheduling your meetings, click here.

If you want to modernize your SharePoint classic root site to a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you want to learn how to create a dynamic org-wide team in Microsoft Teams with all active employees, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you prefer to use the traditional method to update your farm and want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated, click here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy Scheduling!

The post How to Enable Teams Meeting Attendance List Download in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Blog IT.

I recently was involved in a scenario with a customer that had to choose between having multiple Office 365 tenants or just a single tenant. This post will talk about some of the technical considerations that you will have to ask yourself if you are considering choosing between a single or a multi-tenant approach and the impacts that this decision has on the end user experience.

Introduction

The decision of going with multiple tenants for your organization should not be taken lightly since it has a LOT of implications for the end user experience. I will discuss the end user experience implications in a greater detail below but let me be clear: you should choose to use a single Office 365 tenant for your organization if you can.

Common Scenarios for Multiple Tenants

There are a few scenarios that organizations may feel that the best or even the only option is to go with multiple tenants. Here are some of the most common scenarios:

• Our organization is composed by several divisions worldwide and each division must have its data stored in different geographies
• We must provide complete autonomy of administrative control for each division within the organization
• We want to avoid network latency problems with Office 365 workloads (Ex: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams)
• One of your divisions may one day leave the organization and we want to ensure that if this happens, data is properly isolated
• The organization has multiple Office 365 licensing providers from different geographies

Going with multiple tenant is a possible way to solve the problems above but there are almost always alternative solutions. Recently, Multi-Geo capabilities were announced that allow organizations to split its data residency across different geographies without the need to have multiple tenants. To learn more about Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365, click here.

Important Technical Questions To Consider

Domains

One fairly common mistake that many organizations can make is to think that because they have multiple DNS domains, they need to have multiple Office 365 tenants. This is NOT true and you can have multiple domains in a single tenant (you can have up to 5000 domains in a single Office 365 tenant, more details here).

Identity

In Office 365, users will authenticate to every workload using their identity, typically in one of the following scenarios:

• An Azure Active Directory account synchronized with your local Active Directory environment (recommended scenario for most organizations)
• A Cloud Only Account (if your organization doesn’t have a local Active Directory or some users will only need to access Office 365 and Cloud resources)

Azure Active Directory

If you need to sync your local Azure Active Directory with Azure Active Directory, there are a few considerations you have to take into account:

• An Azure Active Directory tenant is associated to a single Office 365 tenant
• Each user is unique in Azure Active Directory and you cannot synchronize the same user into multiple tenants. This has a very important implication: each user is a member of a single tenant and is consider as a Guest user in any other tenant
• If you have multiple tenants, each DNS domain can only be registered in a single tenant
• If you have several local Active Directory forests and you want to sync all forests into a single tenant, you can only have one Azure AD Connect instance that will have to have access to all the local AD forests. To learn more about the Azure AD Connect supported topologies, click here

Tenant Migration

If you are in a case where there are already several tenants in your organization and you want to migrate users and Office 365 workloads into a single tenant, it is important to evaluate which workloads are already being used. The easiest migration path is if the only workload in use is email and the more workloads in use, the harder the migration will be.

If you still evaluating if you are going for a single tenant or multiple tenants, read on.

User Experience

One of the most important things to consider before deciding between a single or multiple tenants is the end user experience. Next, I will discuss in greater detail, what the end user experience will be like in each of the two scenarios.

Single Tenant

This is how the end user experience will look like if you go with a single Office 365 tenant:

• All users are treated as from the same company
• Single point of access for all collaboration (single Intranet Portal for collaboration), users will only have to access one URL, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for
• Better user experience overall
• Seamless sharing experience
• Sharing Office 365 groups can be done directly from SharePoint
• SharePoint Search will returns results for all information in the organization that each user has access to and the new intelligent/modern search recommendations will have a full experience on all the organization’s content, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for
• Term Store can be used across the whole organization
• Users will access their OneDrive for Business site from any location in the tenant
• Users will access their user profile from any location in the tenant
• Using services like Flow, PowerApps, PowerBI, Stream, and Forms will be much easier:
  • PowerApps applications are all in one tenant and can be shared with all users in the organization without restrictions (Ex: Vacation Request App to allow all users in the organization to shedule their vacations)
  • Flows can be used by all users in the organization
  • Forms can be responded by all users in the organization
• Full Microsoft Teams Experience (no need to switch between tenants). This is how Microsoft Teams experience will look like with a single tenant:
  • Users do not have to switch between tenants in Teams and can talk to everyone in their organization
  • Users are notified of new conversations (or conversation replies) they have with anyone inside their organization
  • Presence of users in Teams is consistent (there is only one tenant and users are always connected to the same tenant)
  • You can talk to anyone in the organization in Teams and you can easily find anyone in the organization in the Teams search bar
• Full Experience in Office 365 Groups
• A single tenant already supports Multiple Geographies (for Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint). To know more about Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365, click here
• Shared mailboxes may include users from different domains as all users are in the same tenant
• Sync offline any document library in any SharePoint site in the tenant using the same identity
• Office 365 App Launcher will appear for all users since they are always using the tenant they belong to

Multiple Tenants

This is how the end user experience will look like if you go with multiple Office 365 tenants:

• Users from other tenants are treated as Guests (limited user experience)
• Several points of access for collaboration (several Intranet Portals for collaboration), users will have to access several different URLs, making it harder for users to find the information they are looking for
• Delve is limited to one Office 365 tenant and users will not be able to collaborate using Delve with users from other tenants
• Shared mailboxes cannot include users from different tenants
• Across Office 365 tenants, external Out of Office replies will be used. The internal Out of Office replies will only work for users within the same tenant
• Guest users cannot be pre-authorized on SharePoint content; they need to follow the invitation workflow on a case-by-case basis through an email invitation. External Access will also need to be enabled in the tenant
• Adding external users to a Office 365 group must be done from Outlook Web App (confusing for users, since they have two places to share an Office 365 group: SharePoint for internal users, Outlook Web App for external users)
• SharePoint Search and Term Store are bound to a single tenant. Users will have to search in multiple tenants, making it harder for users to find the information they are looking for
• Microsoft Search does not work across tenants, and the new intelligent/modern search recommendations will not be nearly as helpful as they could be
• Users will only be able to access their OneDrive for Business site from the tenant they belong to
• Users will only be able to access their user profile from the tenant they belong to
• Trying to use the services like Flow, PowerApps, PowerBI, Stream, and Forms will be much harder:
  • PowerApps only supports users from one tenant . For example, a Vacation Request App can only be used by users in one tenant (or the app should be installed in all tenants and data gathering for all organization would have to be merged)
  • Flow can only be used by users in one tenant
  • Forms can only be answered by users in the same tenant. If we want to share the form with other tenants, the form must be public which allows users from any organization or an anonymous user to respond
• Users can’t sync offline document libraries from multiple tenants using OneDrive for Business with the same identity (there is a user voice request to enable this feature)
• Limited Teams Experience (users from one tenant need to switch between tenants to talk with users from another tenant).
  This is how Microsoft Teams experience will look like with multiple tenants:
  • Users have to switch between tenants in Teams to talk to people from another tenant
  • Users are not notified of conversations of other tenants in which they are Guests when connected to another tenant (eg, the tenant to which they belong)
    • Only when there is a direct mention to the team, users are notified of other tenant’s conversations in the upper right corner of Teams
  • Users, when connected to another tenant as Guests, are only notified of their tenant’s conversations in the upper right corner of Teams
  • The names of users when connected as Guests to other tenants appear with suffix “(Guest)”
  • Presence of users in the Teams is not consistent, and the indication of presence is only correct in the tenant to which the user belongs to. Example:
    • User as Guest appears as Offline
    • User in the tenant that belongs to appears as Busy
  • By default, it is only possible to talk with people of the same tenant at the same time. If we want to talk to people from other tenants, we have the following possibilities:
    • We have to switch tenants in Teams and we can no longer talk to people in our tenant
    • We add the person as guest in our tenant in one of the teams to which we also belong
• There are several Teams features limitations for Guest users (see the table below)

• Limited Experience in Office 365 Groups (see table below)

• Office 365 App Launcher will only be displayed for users when they access the tenant they belong to. When they access other tenants, the App Launcher will not be displayed, making it a confusing experience for the user

Conclusion

The analysis above takes in consideration the current features in Office 365 and things may change in the future. Despite the changes that may occur in the future, the user experience with multiple tenants will always be limited in comparison with the end user experience with a single tenant.

If your organization needs to collaborate without barriers and have a richer collaboration experience, a single tenant scenario is your best option.

You may go for multiple tenants but in the way I see it, this should only be an option if technically there is no other option.
One of strongest arguments in favor of a multi tenant scenario is the case of organizations that are composed by multiple divisions or companies (ex: hotel chain with multiple hotel units) and one of the companies may leave the organization. Even in this case, the decision to go for multiple tenants should be carefully evaluated since the degree of separation that this solution imposes within the organization and the limitations in what regards to collaboration experience are very significant and should not be overlooked. No doubt that if, in the scenario above, a company leaves an organization that has a single Office 365 tenant, migrating users and Office 365 workloads will be harder but should this alone make organizations go for multiple tenants, sacrificing the collaboration experience? I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject and feel free to leave your opinion in the comments section of this post below.

Related Articles

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post Pros and Cons of Single Tenant vs Multiple Tenants in Office 365 appeared first on Blog IT.

New email notifications are a big distraction. Disable them!

Archive processed email

Archive emails that you don’t need to take further actions. In your inbox, you should have only the things you need to do, not those you have already done.

I personally have only one archive folder, you might need to have more, but try to keep it simple!

If you have never archived your emails, archiving everything now might take several hours, but is well worth it! Also, it should not take any of your time, as it can be done overnight.

Use tasks and calendar appointments

Use tasks for things that can be done quickly (less than 30min).

Use calendar appointments for bigger tasks (more than 30min).

Setup calendar and tasks on the main screen

Have all the information you need on the main screen to avoid extra clicks and loading wait times!

Use drag and drop

Take full advantage of drag-and-drop for moving files and creating tasks and events!

Keep windows small

Don’t open your emails on a big window, it’s easier to read on a smaller screen (like books).

Use the file preview feature

Preview your files directly on the email.

Colour direct emails

Distinguish emails sent directly to you with colour!

Don’t abuse folder rules

Use folder rules wisely. If you have too many rules and folders, you might lose time checking them all.

I hope this was helpful,

Thanks for reading!

Mário Nunes

The post 9 Outlook Quick Tips for Productivity appeared first on Blog IT.

The post Day @ Office Episode #5 – Onboarding Talent appeared first on Blog IT.

The post Day @ Office Episode #4 – Ups! Need to rescue THAT document! appeared first on Blog IT.

Stop hurting yourself!

Try co-authoring, it’s easy, integrated a agile. See how on the video below:

The post Day @ Office Episode #3 – Collaborate without creating duplicates appeared first on Blog IT.

Now imagine that you could do all that without leaving the PowerPoint application window…..

Here is how in the new Day@Office episode:

The post Day@Office Episode #2 – Fast presentations with great images appeared first on Blog IT.

My answer is clear: it depends on the scenario constraints and on the experience that you want to provide. One way to provide an answer to this is to have a clear assessment of the pros and cons of each solution. Today I present my contribution to this daunting task by summarizing the  availability for users and guests (users outside the organization) of some of the most relevant functions  of Yammer Groups, O365 as well as an attempt to tackle these by combining Microsoft Teams and of the combination of Yammer Group with a Team Site as well as an Office365 Group with a Yammer channel.

The post O365 Groups Vs Yammer Groups Vs Microsoft Teams a brief comparison. appeared first on Blog IT.

today I’m proud to announce the first episode of my new web series Day@Office where I will present many very short films with Office365 productivity tricks.

Please enjoy, comment, share and have a wonderful and productive day !

The post Day@Office #1 – Schedule a team meeting with a single message appeared first on Blog IT.

Although you can safely assume that I’m incredibly biased towards the positive side of the debate (just take a peak at my taskbar in the picture below), I will still share my opinion with you: “Modern Workplaces are here to stay and it’s up to you to make your life better with it”

As an early millennial, born in 1982, I’ve had the opportunity to witness firsthand the transition to a fast-developing information era in the context of my social, student and professional life. In little more than 30 years we’ve passed from patiently waiting for someone to call us on the home landline to the exasperation of waiting for an instant message reply for more than 30 seconds. We’ve passed from getting the phone of our teacher for scheduling a prep-exam class to studying online with our colleagues. We substituted the reading of an encyclopedia for an era of abundance at the distance of a mouse click.

Alongside with this development, we’ve witnessed how geeks can change the world. We’ve seen how easy it is to collaborate with someone that we found across the ocean and shares our interests. We’ve seen regular people going viral on Youtube. We followed their success stories and recreated our own heroes. As a result, now we are always on.  We value mobility and believe that we can change the world if we find the wright people and the wright tools.

So, what could you expect when people like these enter your organizations? What can you do about it?

1. Stay updated. If your people don’t get the tools they need, they will get the tools they need.
   Let’s put it this way “If your people don’t get the tools they need, they will get the tools they need”. Meaning, if you don’t empower your people with right tools within your company’s ecosystem, they will move your company’s work and knowledge to somewhere more useful where they will be able to achieve their purposes. They will do it just because they can do it and because they are used to doing it for so long in so many different ways. This is the fundamental reason behind the growth of Shadow IT as one of the most relevant threats to company’s safety.
   Almost every day a new tool gets out on the market, are you still using the right tools? Most of the time the answer to this question is inside the organization. Promote the sharing of experiences in groups or in small presentation sessions and discuss the alignment between the possibilities of a tool and your team’s purpose. At Create IT we promote internal DemoShots which are 10min of a fully functional demonstration of a tool or feature that someone finds that could be of use to the company followed by 15 min of discussion around the pros and cons of adopting that tool or feature in our day to day work. Anyone can scheduled a DemoShot.
2. Respect personal space. You have the best team, and they are the best because they are who they are.
   Every once in while (let’s keep it this way…) you have a productivity desire or a very tough deadline that gets in your extra time and most of the times, when you love your job, you feel good about it. That’s great, but that’s your own personal choice and you can’t expect the same from your team just because you made that choice. Don’t put expectations about contacting them or getting that email response during the night or weekends unless you have seriously and freely talked about it. Of course, there is the Virgin way of doing it but you might not need to go that far.
3. Every team is a team
   Every team has its own micro culture. Its own challenges and its own business cases. There is no universal solution for team work. Don’t get stressed if one team uses an online group and another is still using email. Just make sure that they know the pros and cons of their option and that everyone on the team is comfortable with that option (even if they still use email for discussing a subject). Again, talk about it.
4. Teamwork is sharing
   Stop downloading every single version of your documents to your laptop. You will only need one final version, which is the sum of your contributions and your team contributions. Do you really want your work to be spread among several desktops? Are you going to merge every single contribution? What if you lose your laptop somewhere in the process? Don’t take these chances when you can have your work on the cloud with version control and can sync it with any of your devices.
5. Every work is work in progress
   Share it from the beginning. Our sales team at Create IT deals with many PowerPoint files that are shared between people in different locations. We found out that during the writing of proposals our team members never shared a document before they finished it, so when they finally were ready to ask for feedback it often was too late ask for asking or too late for replying. To overcome this problem, we decided to adopt a shared from the beginning policy, meaning that we create our documents directly in a shared workspace right from the beginning. Thus, we are always open to feedback and ready to give it, always aware that the document is in progress until someone says that it is finished. Don’t wait for the wright moment to share your work. Share it from the beginning.
6. Finally, say yes and build on it
   Don’t be a show stopper! Be a builder. Receive what the team proposes to you as a challenge to build upon. You might be comfortable with whatever you’re doing and don’t see the need for the change that your colleague is proposing. Ask yourself “Is there something that I do today that I could improve with this change? Is there something that I would not be able to do?” Share it.

As Bob Dylan once wrote “There’s nothing so stable as change” as soon as we integrate this reality in our workplace we will be more ready face changes and adapt to them and as consequence we will improve our work-life balance and happiness.

The post Modern Workplaces are here to stay and it’s up to you to make your life better with them. appeared first on Blog IT.