Episode 189 – Teams Client Updates

In Episode 189, Ben and Scott discuss some of the enhancements to the Microsoft Teams client on desktop and mobile with the public rollout of pop out meetings and chats as well as the Tasks app in Teams for task management across Planner, To Do, and Outlook/Exchange Online mailboxes. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 189. This is Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on July 31st, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of our it pros and end users. Where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it leads to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott discussed some of the enhancements to the Microsoft Teams client on desktop and mobile with the public rollout of pop-out meetings and chats, as well as the Tasks app in Teams for task management across Planner, To-Do and Outlook or Exchange Online mailboxes. - So guess what I did in honor of episode 189, which means absolutely nothing. And then we're getting close to 200. Will we need to do something fancy for episode 200? - No, we'll be there right around conference season. Right around the socially distance conference season. - Yes. Although I am going to one conference there. As in person as of yet, we will see. Mark Rack. I am braving Mark Rackley's North American collaboration summit at this point in time. - Yeah. I don't know. Have you checked the news this week? I know you've been remote up there. - I am hiding from the news. - Google is officially remote until summer 2021. Microsoft, I think we're not far behind. Like nobody at Microsoft is going back until at least January 2021. CES is going virtual. Let's put it that way. - I saw that I did see CES was going virtual. - That's the point that we're at. - Though to be fair, I mean, Mark Rackley is great, but his conference also is not quite as big as CES. Because of all of it understandably so his registration dropped. So I think it's gonna be a combination of in-person and virtual and then yeah. He's doing some things, but I think because registration dropped, it's gonna be a lot easier to socially distance there. I think he's working on some things. Again, we'll have to see, 'cause there it is still a couple months away. - It'll be interesting. - It shall be. But that is not what I'd do in episode of 189. I actually pushed the button and upgraded to Big Sur. So I could not take it any longer. - So there is no upgrade to Big Sur. It's a beta. You should not be doing this. You should be playing with the mm-hmm map with Sean and I. - Sure to not tell me about the mm-hmm map. No, I've actually been surprised. It has been three or four days now. I have two apps that just don't work. They're minor ones. One of them is the bartender app that I use to help manage my menu bar. And the other one is my TripMode app that helps me control which apps are allowed to access the internet. Particularly when I'm in a hotspot, my bandwidth is limited. Neither one of them are day-to-day critical. But other than that, everything has actually been working really well. - You're a brave soul . And would you look at that. - I don't know if I'm classified as brave. Usually it comes back and I tell myself I was a stupid soul. As of right now. - On that note. - As of right now, though, it's doing okay. So yes, the icons are a little different to get used to. But they're really are kind of like people have said. Under the covers, there's a lot of changes because the whole ARM processor coming. But on the surface, other than some of those visuals, I haven't noticed much change in pretty much anything. Other than visually. - Our gardens are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace. And Sperry Software has all the Add-ins you'll ever need. To Save As PDF Add-in is a best seller and it is great for project backups, legal discovery, and more. This Add-In saves the email and attachments as PDF files. It's easy to download, easy to install and Sperry Software's unparalleled customer services is always ready to help. Download a free trial at sperrysoftware.com. S-P-E-R-R-Y-S-O-F-T-W-A-R-E.com and see for yourself how great Save As PDF is. Listeners can get 20% off their order today by entering the code, cloudit. That's cloudit, C-L-O-U-D-I-T. All one word at checkout. Sperry Software; work in email, not on email. - So that's my Apple news and I have no random links for... I forgot to do it again, Scott. Find some random off-the-wall news article for you. - I got you covered. I'll put some stuff about Google in the pandemic 'cause that keeps everything going. - Everybody, Google's just gonna dissolve their company headquarters and everybody's gonna be remote for the rest of time. I wonder how many companies will do that out of all of this. That they'll just say, "you know what? We really don't need an office anymore." Or at least massively reduce the footprint of their office. - I saw a great tweet the other day. I forget who did it. I'll see if I can pull it up. And I'm gonna paraphrase it, but it was along the lines of, this pandemic has done 100 times more for the digital transformation of your company than your last five CIOs. - There is definitely some truth to that. 'Cause Microsoft has been seeing it too, right? They compared it to like four years of digital transformation in four months or a year of digital or two years in like a month. But along the same lines where I've seen a few different quotes that kind of imply the same thing. That this has caused the, I can't think of the word, but it's expedited the whole digital transformation in pretty much every company out there. - It's definitely the thing. Corey Quinn. "COVID-19 has done more to further your company's digital transformation the last dozen CIOs." There we go. Oh wait, at least I get to quote. - But the amount of conversations I've had with people that never would want to talk to me about Teams in office 365 before, cause they had no idea what it was, now like every time I run into somebody they're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah Teams. And I'm like, "yup." Everybody's using Teams. Teams, Teams, everywhere. - Teams, Teams everywhere. Now we just gotta teach people how to reply to conversations versus starting a new thread. Which I continue to argue is not a user issue. That is 100% a UI issue. And then we need to teach people how to share properly and understand what they're sharing. which again, I will argue is not an end user issue. It is a UI issue. There are some things in there that just need to be fixed. And if they get like little things done, it'd be so much better. - Although there are some things you could do, like not so much from the chat, but from the sharing perspective. If you really don't ever want people sharing their whole desktop, because of notifications. To be fair, you can go set up a policy to remove desktop sharing and allow them only to share applications which could help with some of that. - So the new one is, I don't know if you've played around with the latest version of Teams where you get the ability, actually, I don't know if it's on Mac yet, but it's definitely out on windows in most tenants. Except Mark Anderson's. There's the ability to have your meetings split into a new window so that your Teams client with kind of your chat and access to Teams or your apps or whatever it happens to be stays in one window. And then your meeting pops out into another window - I do have that. - Yeah so there's some weird behaviors there. Like you mentioned, app sharing. So if you share an app in the old client experience, guess the legacy client experience. When you shared an app or you shared your desktop, no matter what you shared a little window popped up and sometimes you would see it in like a desktop share. You'd see like the little window in the in the lower right hand corner of your screen, which would show that you are screen-sharing. Well now with that new pop-up mode where every chat or every meeting can be its own window, that little sharing window doesn't pop up anymore. It's very hard to figure out, how do I stop sharing? The only way to stop sharing is to find your way back to the original meeting window now, and then find the Stop sharing button there. Where in the past you would have had two places to do it. You would have had that little pop-up window that came up and was kind of persistent unless you minimized it. And you would have had the meeting window. So that's a little bit of a regression, I think. The other one that's been killing me is, if there's a chat going on in the meeting, alongside the meeting, that chat is potentially showing up in two different places. In my case, and I think for lots of us, we have multiple monitors. Or maybe you have your laptop and a monitor. You've got two screens. And if you leave the Teams window up, so it kind of the persistent Teams window with chats, access to your Teams apps, all that stuff. And you have this meeting window up now on the other side, if somebody chats you in that meeting chat and you have the chat bar in I don't know, window, pane, whatever it is, that little slider, Open for chat. You actually see that text come in in real time in two places and it's very distracting. So you go like, okay, I'm just gonna minimize the other Teams window because I don't wanna be distracted by all that other incoming stuff. Well, the other issue you run into is, because Teams is an Electron app and it is a poor citizen for following operating system conventions on any platform it's on, particularly when it comes to notifications, it responds in horrible ways. Like if I'm just a meeting participant, I'm not in DND mode, especially in DND mode like on my desktop. So I'll still be getting toast notifications for all those chats....