Enable Microsoft Whiteboard for Teams

Whiteboard in Teams is powered by Whiteboard for the web and this is a very useful feature for collaborating in group meetings. A shared canvas space allows meeting participants to collaborate. In Office 365, Whiteboard feature is enabled by default unless you disabled it manually (mostly customers disable it due to data residency concerns).

Microsoft 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.

Now let’s get this configured. Login to Office 365 Admin center using admin credentials and type ‘Whiteboard’ in the global search field. You will get the Whiteboard global settings option in a search result dropdown.

Check the ‘Turn on’’ tick box to enable it globally in your Tenancy. Diagnostic data collection by Microsoft is disclosed via three options here.

Connected experiences and sharing from Surface Hub are two optional settings depending on the organizational requirements. Finally hit ‘Save’ to complete it.

Now the global setting is enabled, we need to ensure the Whiteboard capability is also enabled in the Meeting policies. If you have multiple policies, make sure this is enabled for all of them to affect it to the desired target audiences.

From the Teams admin center, navigate to Meetings –> Meeting policies

Then click on the desired policy (in my case, the ‘Default’ as it affects to all users)

Toggle the ‘Allow Whiteboard’ switch to ‘On’ state to enable it and hit ‘Save’

Notes: This might take a couple of ours to reflect to all users (in my case it took 7+ hours).

Testing the feature.

1. Now to try this out, you can create a test meeting with another user and ensure the Whiteboard is appearing once ‘Share’ option is clicked.

1. Also, if you login to office.com, you should be able to see the ‘Whiteboard’ App under the Apps list.

Troubleshooting:

If you still don’t see the feature in Teams meetings, try to toggle ‘Off’ the Whiteboard feature from Teams meeting policy. Then turn in it on again and try it in a couple of hours.

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Silence when Microsoft Teams queue call put on hold

Recently I noticed at one of our major client’s Teams Voice setup that on hold music never played for queues when agents put callers on hold, instead it goes silent which makes callers wondering what’s going on with the call.

This is a vital feature specially for a call queue as it gives clarity for callers to understand the status of the call. Agents mostly put callers on hold to get things done offline to meet callers requirements so the music of course make the caller relaxed while agent helping them out behind the scene.

First thing I had to check is, if the feature is enabled from the Teams Admin Centre –> Call Queues –> Choose the affected queue –> Of course it has

However, it seemed the file hasn’t recognized by Teams or probably the file is faulty which could have caused the silence during hold.  Till I locate the original file, I added a temporary classic music clip to verify if that picks by Teams. And it did ! Hold music played like charm when the agent put me on hold.

Moving Microsoft Teams Data Location

If you are a existing Office 365 customer who have been waiting Microsoft to allow you to move your Teams data location, It’s now time to do it.

Office 365 now allows you to decide where your Teams data residency should be. We have noticed that most of our clients got their Data residency set to Australia as the data region.

Microsoft now offer existing O365 customers listed in the following table an option to request early migration of organization’s core customer data at rest to their new datacenter geo.

Changing the geo location is completely taken care by Microsoft behind the scene. You as a customer, only have to opt-in to allow Microsoft to do this in the backend (despite your request, this will anyway happen eventually) and the change is seamless with no user interaction, interruption.

To see your current data location for each workload, go to Office 365 Admin center –> Settings –> Settings –> Organization Profile

Navigate to Data Location to see where your data currently resides

Switch to Data Residency and “check the tick box” below to opt-in. You will not see this option if:

• Your tenant is not eligible for the Office 365 Move Program. Eligibility is determined by tenant signup country.
• All of your core customer data at rest is already located in the new geo (see Data Location section of the page).

And wait for a few months as advised in the notification. Microsoft will notify you stage-wise in the Office 365 Message center when the activity is being actioned or completed.

Note: The information on this page only applies to customers who had existing Office 365 tenants before the new datacenters in their geo launched.

More details are here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Office365/Enterprise/request-your-data-move

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