Microsoft Whiteboard is a free-form, digital canvas where people, content, and ideas come together. Whiteboard integration in Microsoft Teams meetings is powered by the Whiteboard web app, which lets Teams meeting participants draw, sketch, and write together on a shared digital canvas. Users can share a whiteboard to make it available to all participants in a Teams meeting. That same whiteboard is simultaneously available in all the Whiteboard applications on Windows 10, iOS, and the web app.
How do I get started with a whiteboard in a Teams meeting?
Note: The ability to start a new whiteboard is currently limited to the Microsoft Teams clients on Windows 10, macOS, and for the web. The Teams apps for iOS and Android cannot initiate sharing a whiteboard, but they can collaborate once a whiteboard is shared.
If you share a whiteboard during a Teams meeting that is being recorded, it will not be part of the recording. Microsoft are yet to announce when this feature will be available.
After a Teams meeting, its whiteboard will be available to all participants from the Teams meeting chat, in a tab labelled Whiteboard. The whiteboard will also be available in the Board Gallery in the Microsoft Whiteboard apps for Windows 10 and iOS, so that meeting attendees can continue collaborating on a whiteboard even after a meeting has ended.
Teams meeting attendees within the same Microsoft 365 tenant can collaborate on a whiteboard. Anonymous, federated, or external users are not yet supported. Microsoft are yet to announce when collaboration will be added as a feature.
So where can Microsoft Whiteboard integration with Microsoft Teams take you? At Adepteq, we are delighted that Microsoft have given organisations the resources to remain engaged, creative and experimental through a collaborative feature such as Whiteboard.
If you would like to see how your workplace can enhance creativity and productivity during the pandemic and working remotely, contact us now to discuss your options.
Click here to read the full Microsoft Whiteboard Release Article.
Following the announcements in 2020 that Microsoft Teams replaces Skype for Business Online by the end of July 2021, we want to make sure that you have everything you need to have a successful migration. Whether you're thinking of upgrading to Microsoft Teams or enhancing your Microsoft Teams keep reading on to find out what the fuss is all about!
Microsoft Teams successfully extends the abilities of Skype for Business by bringing together calling, chats, meetings, collaborations, file storage and app integration into one single platform. This central hub streamlines the way teamwork is done, improving user satisfaction and accelerating your company's businesses plans. Microsoft are constantly making changes and updates to Microsoft Teams ensuring workforces are able to collaborate and communicate in a multitude of ways with limited restrictions. Your staff are working from home during Covid-19 and struggling to stay connected, and by migrating to Microsoft Teams we help you resolve this.
Working remotely has led to the need for people to feel connected whilst staying online. Gone are the days where we go to a conference room or pop to a colleagues desk for a catch-up. With Microsoft Teams, you won't miss out on the social interaction with video calls and instant messaging chats, as well as the ability to set up and schedule meetings one-on-one or as a group.
Our experienced developers and business teams are experts when it comes to setting companies up with Microsoft Teams. We are here to educate and make you feel comfortable with Microsoft Teams right from the set-up stage all the way to integrating it within workforces.
While the Skype for Business Online service will be fully functional until July 31st 2021, we encourage organisations to begin their journey today. Make sure you allow ample time to complete your upgrade prior to the retirement date.
Contact us for more information on upgrading to Microsoft Teams today by completing our form.
One salient statistic in the shift to remote work over the past eight months is the fact that on average people spend an additional hour working per day versus when they were previously working in the office. We know that people don't necessarily want to be working more, but the change in how people are working has resulted in this shift nonetheless. One way to help people take back some of this time is by automating routine processes to make their workday easier.
The new Power Automate app for Teams makes it more approachable and straightforward for users to automate routine tasks.
The new Power Automate app for Teams allows you to build a flow to automate processes using a simplified creation experience. Now by just selecting parameters from a few drop-down menus, you can automate routine tasks for yourself and for your team. The new simplified experience also makes the process of building flows faster for experienced makers.
The new simplified designer lets you create flows based on 50 templates, and there are more templates on the way. You can always modify a flow using the full creator experience by clicking on 'Edit in advanced mode'. Also, you can create a flow from scratch, using the button on the top right of the 'Create' experience - all of this right within Teams.
The new Power Automate app provides a simple way to manage your flow in Teams from the home screen. It's now easy to turn your flows off and on, see who they are shared with, what types of flows you have, and see in which Teams and channels they function. From here, you can click right into those flows to modify if needed.
Also, the app still provides you with the approvals management tab from the previous version of the Power Automate app, helping you manage your approvals in one place.
There are a range of new templates available and recently released triggers and actions that allow you to quickly automate many elements in your Teams experience. One interesting new template allows you to schedule 1:1 time with someone and sets up a Teams call. Microsoft are constantly adding more templates, triggers, and actions to expand the ways you can use automation to customise your Teams experience and make your day a bit easier.
Adepteq use Teams and Power Automate ourselves and have successfully planned, deployed, trained on and are supporting Microsoft Teams with many of our clients.
If you would like to know more visit our Microsoft Teams or Power Automate page. You can contact us or call on 0800 6444 365.
During Microsoft Ignite 2020, Microsoft announced the new home site app for Microsoft Teams. The app gives employees a gateway to your organisation, starting with the app's name and icon, which you can customise to reflect the identity of your organisation or your intranet. The app's multi-level navigation lets people find sites across the organisation, including portals, teams, communities and application.
This blog gives you a great first look at the app, an on-demand video session packed with demos and a set of common questions and answers below.
The home site app for teams brings the power of your SharePoint-based intranet home site seamlessly into Microsoft Teams.
Bring the power of your SharePoint-based intranet home site directly into Microsoft Teams - seamlessly. The home site app in Teams gives your users global navigation across sites, communities, and teams; quick access to sites they use regularly; and a personalised news feed.
Many questions have been asked for additional information. As part of Ignite Microsoft have produced an on-demand video focused on the new home site app in Teams - showcasing how it works and the value of empowering users to discover, consume and collaborate on content like never before.
Q: Can any site be pinned as a Home site app in Teams?
A: Communication sites designated as Home Sites are eligible for pinning in Teams as the Home site app using our default configuration flow.
Q: Where are global navigation links curated?
A: Links for global navigation are managed through the home site, by home site owners, freeing global admins from having to play the role of curator.
Q: Can my classic site be pinned in Teams?
A: Only home sites are eligible to be pinned as the home site app in Teams with our default configuration flow. Home sites must be modern SharePoint communication sites.
Q: What is the difference between Home site app and Home page pinned as tab?
A: The home site app provides organisations to pin company branded entry point to their intranet as a top level app in Teams. It provides an immersive site consumption experience, complete with navigation, mega-menus and support for tenant wide search. It also provides quick access to company curated resources, important sites and news similar to those provided by the SharePoint App Bar in the web. Home pages (or any other SharePoint pages) pinned as tabs in Channels provide ways to bring content directly into Team collaboration scenarios, and these pages have navigation and search elements removed to facilitate focus on the page content itself.
Q: Do I need a Home site app for the Global navigation to show up in Teams?
A: Yes, the global navigation links are stored in the home site of a tenant, and is required in order for the navigation panel to appear in the home site app in Teams
Q: Can a SharePoint team site be a Home site?
A: No. Only communication sites can be made a Home site in a tenant.
Adepteq use Teams ourselves and have successfully planned, deployed, trained on and are supporting Microsoft Teams with many of our clients.
If you would like to know more about Microsoft Teams or SharePoint, or would like to to discuss how Microsoft Teams Apps can improve your communication and collaboration, then please contact us or call 0800 6444 365.
Microsoft Teams can help people and organisations stay productive in hybrid work environments, and Microsoft Power Platform provides low-code custom development tools. the powerful Teams + Power Platform integration allows anyone to create the tools they need to get work done and bring them into their digital workspace. We are excited to share some new ways that it is becoming easier to build, deploy, and manage these custom solutions so you can be more productive!
A new Power Automate app is coming later this year, will make it easier than ever to build automated workflows. The new app will include a robust set of easy-to-use templates for some of the most common automation scenarios for Teams. A simple building experience will allow users to build these flows with drop-down menus and pre-populated dynamic text. Users will also have the ability to start building flows from scratch or edit flows that they've already built.
Nearly every industry and every business department needs to manage approvals in some form, so Microsoft have announced that Teams users will soon be able to easily create, manage, share, and act on approvals directly in Teams. Users can start an approval from a chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app in Teams. These easy approvals are powered by Power Automate and will become generally available in October.
Coming later this year, Microsoft will have integrations with Adobe Sign and DocuSign, to get legal consent or approval of electronic documents from people inside or outside the organisation. Additionally, approval flows from across the organisation can be integrated in Teams with over 350 systems using Power Automate, including ServiceNow, Dynamics, and GitHub.
Microsoft have announced that the Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams, powered by CDS Project Oakdale, have entered public preview allowing Teams users to build custom apps and AI-powered bots right inside Teams, then easily deploy them to their teams.
The new embedded Power Apps studio allows users to create custom apps with a simple drag and drop approach to add app elements, and these apps can be connected to existing CDS Project Oakdale data tables or new data tables that can be created right inside the studio. These apps can be used on desktop or mobile devices, so everyone can be more productive, wherever they are working.
Microsoft have also built several Power Apps solutions for common use cases like equipment asset inspections and employee ideas, and made them available in the Power Apps app as well as the Teams app store, so anyone can open and use them right away. Since these solutions are build on Power Platform, they are also highly customisable and can be edited to meet an organisation's specific needs.
It is important to keep in mind that Power Apps can also help professional developers accelerate their app development process. To that end, Microsoft have announced that professional developers will soon be able to build Power Platform connectors with Azure API Management and Azure Functions to any Microsoft hosted third-party, legacy, or line-of-business apps. Apps built with Power Apps that utilise these new connectors can then be deployed to users in Teams at no additional cost. These capabilities will be available for preview in October 2020.
The new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams provides a low-code authoring experience to create custom chat-bots. Bots can be built simply by adding questions for the bot to ask, and messages for the bot to send back to the user. While these bots can be simple to build, they remain very powerful. New features such as the abilities for bots to recognise which user they are chatting with can provide a personalised user experience. For example, an employee who queries a bot about company HR policies could be provides with policies that are specific to their region or country.
An enhanced Power BI app, available in public preview later this year, will make it easy to discover data and quickly create visualisations from Excel datasets within Teams. The app also provides users with quick access to their frequently used reports, example reports from the Power BI community, and commonly used organisational datasets. The app also allows users to send a report that they're reviewing to a chat or channel quickly, even maintaining the filtering and slicing of the report so it is easy to start a discussion with data. Also coming later this year is the ability to search for Power BI content through the search bar. These new features in the Power BI app provide a centralised place for users to collaborate on data and more effectively and make decisions based on real-time insights.
These innovations will make it easier for anyone with an idea to build a solution. To get started, open the Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Power Automate, and Power BI apps in Teams. Check out the Microsoft Teams + Power Platform Virtual Hub to learn more about this Power Platform integration and the innovations discussed here, including CDS Project Oakdale. The following information sessions also provide an overview of the integration, as well as details on how to start building custom solutions.
We live and breathe Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 and we love it. Whether you want to ask us a few questions about Power Automate, arrange training with one of our experts, or discuss an automation project you are considering, you are welcome to get in contact with us today. It doesn’t cost anything to talk to us, and we are always happy to help.
We are available on 0800 6444 365 or you can send us a message via our contact page.
Microsoft have announced the general availability of the Lists app in Teams. As you might already know, Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organise your work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matter most to your team. Track patients, loans, issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more using customisable views and smart rules and alerts to keep everyone in sync. With ready-made templates, you can quickly create lists from directly within Teams and access them on the Teams mobile app by accessing the Lists tab you added as a channel.
The vision of the Lists app in Teams is to bring all the collaboration and communication modalities to lists and list items, so it is easy to get work done.
The new Lists app experience in Microsoft Teams, for mobile on the left and for Web and desktop on the right.
Lists in Teams is supported as a team based tab app built on top of the Microsoft Teams platform and supports the following features:
To get started, simply go to any channel where you would like to start tracking a list and hit the "+" button to explore the tab gallery and select the Lists app. Once the tab is added you can either create a new list or bring in an existing list (from another team or an older SharePoint site, but not a personal list from Lists home) into the channel as a new tab.
Create a new list inside Teams with conversations side-by-side. The above shows using the Asset manager template.
The Lists app in Teams includes 3 new industry-specific templates - Patients, Loans and Incidents. Team members start managing and tracking these key entities. Here are some examples of how these templates can be leveraged.
Create a new list from within Microsoft Teams and choose from numerous ready-made templates, including the new industry-specific ones.
Once you have configured the tab and have a list with list items, you can start a conversation about an individual list item. go to the details view (or form) for the list item by clicking into the title field and then click on conversation to start a conversation about the list item on the channel. With this feature, you can collaborate with your team about the list item and get work done, faster.
Since the conversation is a channel message in Teams, all the messaging features like @mentions, rich text, gifs, stickers, emojis, mentions, tagging, and attachments are available for use! The conversation shows up in the right rail for the list item and also on the channel for those who might not have viewed the list as yet.
You can chat side-by-side individual list items within Teams.
See more about getting started with the Lists app in Teams "Create a list in Microsoft Teams" click-thru demo. And do not forget to try the Lists app experience in Teams mobile app to track your lists within Teams on the go. Just go to your Teams android or iOS mobile apps and go to the channel where you have added the Lists app and click on more and tap on the tab name to open up the list.
We are very excited to get stuck in with Microsoft Lists. Contact us today if you would like us to discuss in more detail.
We will be sharing more about Microsoft Lists and it's Teams integration with you very soon.
Adepteq are experts in SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams. Call us on 0800 644 365, email info@adepteq.com or complete our Contact Form.
