Configuring Channel Moderation for Microsoft Teams Channels

Microsoft Teams now allows you to have control over some end user actions for desired Channels. This post is based on my client’s scenario where he needed it to be enabled for some of the channels (obviously not all).

Teams Channel moderation is configurable channel wise, you do not have to be an Administrator to get this done (A channel owner can configure this). Providing the ability to define who can create new posts, control weather team members can reply to existing channel messages and weather bots and connectors can submit channel messages are the main ideas behind this feature.

Once enabled, channel moderators are capable of the followings:

• Start new posts in the channel. When moderation is turned on for a channel, only moderators can start new posts in that channel.
• Add and remove team members as moderators to a channel. Keep in mind that by default, team owners are channel moderators and can’t be removed.
• Control whether team members can reply to existing channel messages and whether bots and connectors can submit channel messages.

Configuring Channel Moderation

This is enabled channel wise. Go to any desired channel and click on that 3 dots (options) and Manage Channel

Moderation is OFF by default, which means any user can start a post in this channel

Use the dropdown to switch it ON

Now the permissions, you can define the moderators here. Currently as you can see, Team owners inherit the moderation. Click on Manage button to customize this.

Add the new moderators here. Could be groups or individual. I would recommend groups so that you can add or remove people easily and it makes maintenance agile.

Take a Note:

• Moderation feature slightly differs in General Channel
• Moderator Capability is Not Audited in Office 365

General Channel:

And now in the other channel setting –> Permissions, I can see the option to turn on moderation with multiple permission levels configurable.

We can also target the audience directly within the message. Tap the rich text button and use the drop down list to set what you want.

Choosing the first option allows anyone to respond to this post in this channel.

If I choose the second option, only moderators can respond to this message. This is a very common scenario in corporate channels.

This is indeed a nice welcome feature for some of the specific use cases. Almost any organization might have that formal channel which needs some level of moderation.

Microsoft reference article for this functionality is here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-channel-moderation-in-teams

Advertisement

Setup PowerShell to connect Microsoft Teams Administration

Error “Connect-MicrosoftTeams : The term ‘Connect-MicrosoftTeams’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet”

Root cause – Obviously because of the PowerShell module availability in the machine you are trying to connect from. Every module needs its presence in the local machine to be able to work with PowerShell properly so, installing it and keeping it up to date is vital for commands to execute against the target workload (like Teams, SharePoint or Exchange etc..)

Let’s get through the basics of installing Microsoft Teams PowerShell module. Ensure you launch the native PowerShell from your machine, not Exchange Online PowerShell or SharePoint ones.

Type PowerShell in the start menu and –> right click on the native PowerShell tool and run as Admin

Type this in PowerShell and Enter

Find-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams

Now let’s install this. Type this in PowerShell and Enter

Find-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams | Install-Module

Type “Y” to continue

Now let’s run the connect command to interact with the Office 365 tenant

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

And this should prompt you for authentication where you will provide the Admin credentials to connect

Once done, you will get connected to the tenant as below

Now, let’s just verify the functionality by running a simple Teams command. If this succeeds, you have installed PowerShell module for Microsoft Teams properly!

Get-Team

Turn an existing folder in to a Teams Channel

This is a small real world case that I resolved a few days back. Some may not understand the difference of Folders and Channels so they sometimes create folders inside SharePoint libraries to achieve what they need.

If you ever worried that these folders can be turned in to channels, worry no more ! here’s the quickest way to do it.

Head on to your Teams site and find out the folder name which you want to turn in to a channel. In my case its “Linda Scope” and “Northwind Scope” folders.

Now go to your respective Team from the Teams app and click on “Create more channels” to create a channel under the relevant Team.

Name it identical as the folder and hit “Add”

That’s it ! Now if you try to upload a file in to your original location (SharePoint Folder) and check back in Teams Channel, it should be right there.

This simply means that our goal is achieved.

Stay tuned for more interesting articles…..

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor. Please do not copy/duplicate the content of the post unless you are authorized by me to do so.

Create a Team from an existing Office365 Group

When you have an existing O365 Group or a SharePoint site which associated with an O365 group, you have the ability to provision an associated Team too, for the same Group.

In this article we are going to explore the steps to get this done.

First thing is first, this is my modern SharePoint site which was recently provisioned and there is a Group too associated with it.

Now, let’s switch to Teams from the O365 App Launcher.

From the bottom of the page or app (you can use either Teams Web Portal or App to do this) hit “Join or create a team” link.

From the join or create page, choose the 1st option to create new team.

Go for the 2nd option on this screen and hit “Next”.

Choose the existing group which you can easily recognize by the name. for my case it’s “User Group” which is my existing Group associated with the SharePoint site. Once selected hit “choose team” to proceed.

Just a matter of few seconds, you will be immediately redirected to the newly created team interface for you to start using it.

So now you have a brand new Team space for your Group, why not explore it’s capabilities right ? Check out members space if you want to add more people there.

Settings will allow you to control major areas of the app.

And, last but not least, there are various other productivity apps associated to your brand new team space, so go ahead and enjoy.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

How to Make Microsoft Teams Content Available Offline

Microsoft Teams is rapidly becoming the most popular app for corporate collaboration due to the simplicity and the bunch of capabilities it offers for Office365 users. As you work with Teams, it brings an document library for content sharing which looks like it self-contained within but it’s actually relies on Office 365 Groups and Back-ended by a SharePoint Library.

When you submit a file in to a Teams channel window, that file is uploaded to a document library within the main Group.

It’s great that I can share files like everyone else in the conversation but what if I need it later ? Especially when I don’t have Internet connection on my device? Well, that happens ! To me very often.

However, not to worry anymore because synchronizing the files from Teams is similar to synchronizing your OneDrive for business or SharePoint Library content which simply means you can synchronize Teams files with OneDrive. But how ?

Let’s find out. Open up your target Team channel and hit “Files” tab. You will see the files that you have there.

Now, you will be redirected to the following screen on the browser. This is the ultimate SharePoint library (Backend) which holds all your Teams channel files. Now, hit the “Sync” button here.

You will be prompted with app switching screen. Say “Yes‘ here.

That’s it and you will receive a notification immediately saying that your library is now synching. Great !

If you open it from the Windows explorer, you will see the new folder created under your organization icon and all files are synchronized to your local device perfectly.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Configure routing all incoming calls to Teams client

Our internal IT team was in the mission of setting up calling feature of Microsoft teams ad we discovered that the calls are not directly routed to user devices. Users can dial out from Teams clients, Desktop and mobile both however, Teams client automatically diverts incoming calls to voice mailbox.

With this post, I am going to explain through the steps of the analysis of the issue and how we managed to configure Teams coexistence mode to route incoming calls to the Teams client.

During our discovery:

1. We went through Call forwarding settings in Teams client on several devices (Teams Client > Settings > Calls > Call Forwarding Settings) and figured out that call forwarding is disabled. Which basically proves our first assumption is out. Client side forwarding option isn’t the cause of this issue.

2. Then checked Skype for business admin center to find out if any helpful entries are there as it provides PSTN usage detail reports on inbound or outbound calls. Anyhow, this had nothing to offer in our case so that’s out as well.

However, having a Microsoft calling plan to connect to the PSTN is mandatory. Ensure that you have a calling plan applied to your tenant and then you can go ahead and assign phone numbers to your users from Skype for Business and Teams Admin Centers. Calling plans are detailed in this Microsoft write-up.

Call routing is depends on the coexistence mode configurations defined in the Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center. Coexistence offers the flexibility of configuring in two different scopes.

1. User context
2. Tenant context (Organization wide)

It simply means that, if you configure the coexistence in user context mode while tenant context exists too, tenant context will be overwritten by the user-context mode. Above chart explains the behavior of each scenario.

Now in our scenario, this tenant was configured as the coexistence mode islands, hence any of our calls were automatically transferred to the Skype for Business client. However, because we didn’t have Skype for Business downloaded on our devices, we didn’t receive any of these calls. Once we had updated these settings and waited for it to sync with Office 365, calls were simply received in Teams client.

Here are the steps taken to achieve this. First, log in to your Office 365 tenant using Global Admin account, and, head on to Admin centers –> all Admin centers –> Click on “Teams and Skype”

1. On left pane, expand Org-wide settings
2. Click Teams upgrade

You will notice the Coexistence mode in in Islands state here.

Go ahead and change this to “Teams Only” mode from the dropdown menu.

Save the change.

And, confirm the upgrade by accepting the message. hit “Save” again.

When you done with this. Ensure that all users across the organization follow the root. They should have the “User Org Wide Settings”.

Useful links:

• Teams only mode considerations
• Calling Plans

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.