Calling in Teams: Collaboration Made Simple

I think we can all agree that 2020 has been a wild ride when it comes to communicating with our coworkers. Instead of face to face meetings or cubicle chats, we’ve been in virtual meetings. Personally, I haven’t noticed an increase in the amount of instant messaging, but I have noticed that a lot of my messages end in a call, like this:

Hey, I was just on a call with client ABC and we were talking about DEF. Do you have a minute to hop on a call and debrief with me?

I’ve also been pulled into active calls as my expertise comes into scope. I’ll get a chat “hey we’re on the phone with this team and there’s a compliance question, can we loop you in?” I can join the active call immediately without having a meeting invite or starting a new call. What a world!

However, I’ve started to wonder if I am using the call features in Microsoft Teams as well as I could be? Are there features I’m not aware of yet? With so many people rapidly adopting Microsoft Teams, I can’t be the only one wondering this, so let's take a look at some of the features Microsoft Teams has when it comes to calling, including the new Collaborative Calling.

Fellow PAIT Group colleagues, Joy Apple (aka JoyofSharePoint) and Richard Calderon, recently hosted a webinar focused on the basics of Teams Calling features. If you were not able to make the live webinar we have recorded the session. When you have a moment in your day, please watch. It's worth it.

Microsoft Teams Templates 101: Getting Started

Microsoft Teams templates allow you to introduce a pre-defined structure to Teams across your organization so you can maintain consistency throughout your digital workplace. Having consistency across teams and channels has several benefits for both administrators and end-users, making the Microsoft Teams experience much more enjoyable. In this article, we will be taking a deep dive into Microsoft Teams templates, how they work, and how you can utilize them within your organization to drive a more predictable Microsoft Teams user experience.

My favorite 5 Features of Microsoft Lists: A List

Microsoft Lists officially dropped in August, and now that we’ve all had some time to play around it’s a good time to create a list of our own: our favorite five (5) features or functions of Microsoft Lists.

To start, what is Lists? Didn’t SharePoint already have lists? Yes it did, but the custom list feature in SharePoint was pretty well restricted to SharePoint. You could create columns and content types and all sorts of views and pretty ways to present data and metadata and datadatadatadata, but the only ways to use that data out of SharePoint was an export, typically Excel. With Microsoft Lists you can take that same data manipulation power and use it in Teams, SharePoint, or as a standalone application. In addition, you can use Power Automate (formerly Flow) to crunch that data even better.

Before we dive in .... We discussed this topic in webinar form click here to check out the discussion.

Ok now lets dive in!

How to Reuse a Planner Plan as a Template

You can now copy a plan to existing Groups or Teams! Exciting Right!!!!

When showcasing how teams and organizations can use Planner in Microsoft 365, one question that comes up repeatedly is: How can I create a plan template? Last year, Microsoft released the ability to copy an existing plan to a new Office 365 Group (now called, a Microsoft 365 Group), effectively enabling a reusable plan “template”. However, creating a new Group for each plan is not ideal for most teams and can easily create Group sprawl.

How to Create, Publish, and Use Sensitivity Labels in Microsoft 365

We all want to know where our data is and who can see it, and most importantly we want to know without a doubt that people who shouldn’t see it can’t.

Working with Likes & Replies in SharePoint REST API

Recently, while working on a webpart that mimicked functionality provided for SharePoint News Articles, I came across several issues where solutions were either barely documented or non-existent. After several hours of Googling, troubleshooting, reverse engineering, and guessing I found discovered various obscure solutions to all my problems.

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