Microsoft Teams – Managed Path for SharePoint Site

When using SharePoint online you would have noticed that you can create sites under /Sites or /Teams managed path. This is fine when you are creating classic sites where you can pick your managed path.

When creating modern sites you do not have option to select the managed path and it is always defaulted to /Sites managed path. This behavior is exactly the same when you create a new Team using MS Teams. When you create the new Team it creates the Office 365 Group as well as a brand new modern SharePoint site. This site is also created under the /Sites managed path.

What if you wanted to create all your teams connected SharePoint sites under /Teams managed path? Well it is possible as long as you want all your SharePoint sites gets created under /Teams managed path.

There is a setting in SharePoint Admin Center which allows you to select default managed path.

Go to your SharePoint Admin Center and click Settings.

Under Settings, scroll down to site creation section and there you would see that you can set the managed path for the new site that gets created.

Now there is another gotcha here. This would only work if you have your Self Service Site Creation setting is set to “Show the Create Site Command to user who have permission to create sites”. The moment you choose “Hide the Create site command” option, section which allows you to set the managed path is not visible.

I really wish Microsoft would allow two things here.

  1. Allow me to add more managed paths
  2. Allow me to set the managed path for SP Sites that gets created as part of Teams. Probably a setting on the Teams Admin page.

I understand there is not much flexibility here but I hope this help someone.

SharePoint Communication site pages in Microsoft Teams

For anyone that is living under the rock, in May last year Microsoft announced Communication sites. Communication sites are mobile friendly and allows users to communicate to people throughout the organization with beautiful, dynamic, mobile-ready communication sites and pages that keep everyone informed and engaged.

You can read more about that HERE and HERE.

While communication sites are awesome they are not Group connected sites. In many cases you would want to use Communication pages within your Team.

It is very simple to bring them to your Microsoft Teams.

  1. Go to Microsoft Teams and click Add a Tab (+)
  2. Click WebSite under the various options.
  3. Give tab a name and paste the URL and select if you want to share that message in your Team channel.

  4. Click Save and you should see the communication page shows up in your Team Tab.

 

 

Teams is smart enough to trim all the additional SharePoint controls and display only the page in the Teams teab.

This is one of the awesome feature and I cannot wait to start integrating MS Teams and communication pages.

Microsoft Teams – Create Team from existing Group

Microsoft Teams is a new chat-based work-space in Office 365. Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations and content so they can easily collaborate to achieve more.

If you have been using Group connected SharePoint sites then you will have option to create Teams from existing Office 365 Group. This means you will be adding Team to your existing Office 365 Group and still be able to lever existing investments on SharePoint site.

When you go to create new Microsoft Team you will see option to “Create a team from existing Office 365 Group”.

Now one thing to note here is that you would only see this option if you are the Group Owner of the existing Office 365 Group. If you are not the owner you will not see this option. I have seen lot of people getting confused that they do not see this option. If you do not see that option you are not the Group owner of existing Office 365 group.

Once you click the link to Create a team from an existing Office 365 Group you will be presented with th existing Office 365 Groups that you own.

On this screen be careful as to which Group you are selecting as currently there is no option to Swap your Groups.

Select the group and click Choose Team button which will get enabled once you select the Group.

This will create the team and connect to existing Office 365 Group.

Adding Planner to your Existing MS Teams

Microsoft Planner is a task management tool that your team can use to manage task and view the status of each task visually. It helps teams to create new plans, assign task and share files around projects or any other work that is going on. You can read more about it HERE.

In this blog post I am going to talk about how to add existing Plan to Teams. This is straight forward process but I still wanted to talk about some gotchas when adding Planner to the Team.

To add a Planner to the team you will go to any existing channel or create a new channel. Then you will click + sign to add a new tab. When you add a new tab you will have bunch of options to select type of tab. Here you will select Planner. Once you click Planner new dialog will open.

As you can see from the screen shot above I have a option to Create a new plan or Use and existing Plan. Now let me take a step back and explain what happens behind the scene. When you create a new Team or add Team to existing Office 365 Group you will have few things provisioned for you i.e. Office 365 Group, SharePoint Site and a Planner. Currently when writing this blog post there is one to one relationship between Planner and MS Groups. At the same time Teams have one to many relationship with Planner i.e. One team can have more than one Planner.

This is why you are seeing an option to either create a new Plan or use the existing Plan. If you select existing plan then you will have option to select your Plan from the dropdown and then you can access that Plan either from your Teams tab or from Planner Hub. When you create a new Plan then that Plan is not accessible from your Planner Hub and can only be visible from the Teams tab but tasks assigned to you are visible on the Planner Hub.

So it is bit confusing and I hope Planner and Teams team will work together to sort this out.

One last thing is that you will only see an option to select existing plan if you are an Owner on that Office 365 group. If you are member of a team and are allowed to add new tabs to the teams then you will only see Create new Plan option. So if you do not see option to select existing plan it might already be added to your team or you are not the owner on that Office 365 Group.

I hope this helps some of you.

Test drive Microsoft’s new collaboration tool – Microsoft Teams

I am just cross posting this for anyone who reads my blog regularly.

Microsoft is currently offering hands-on live sessions where you will have the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and my favourite collaboration tool Microsoft Teams. During this small-group sessions you will apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they work for you.

Each 90-minute session starts with an online business roundtable discussing your biggest business challenges with a trained facilitator and then transitions into a live environment in the cloud. You will receive a link to connect your own device to a remote desktop loaded with Microsoft’s latest technology, so you can experience first-hand how Microsoft tools can solve your challenges.

This is pretty exciting since this is first time Microsoft offering this. Each session is limited to 12 participants.

You can read more about this at:

https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/15/test-drive-our-hottest-new-collaboration-tool-microsoft-teams/

U.S. customers: Register here
Outside the U.S.: Register here

Microsoft Teams is now generally available

Today is one of the awesome day as Microsoft announced that Microsoft Teams – the chat based workspace in Office 365 – is not GA in 181 markets and in 19 languages. This Office 365 based application is pretty awesome and it was very well received by over 50,000 organizations when Microsoft announced the preview in Novermber last year.

One of thing I really like about Microsoft Team is the speed at which they worked on many user feedback in last four months or so.

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public

For anyone that is new to Microsoft Teams I will just provide very high level overview here.

Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversations experience, with threaded, persistent chat to keep everyone engaged. We’ve rolled out many new communication features since preview, including audio calling from mobile devices, plus video on Android, which is coming soon to iOS and Windows Phone. And we’ve addressed numerous customer requests, adding the ability to email a channel, including attachments, send messages with markdown-based formatting, and receive notifications about all posts in a channel.

You should check out the official announcements and discussion below.

https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/14/microsoft-teams-rolls-out-to-office-365-customers-worldwide/

I am very confident that moving forward, Microsoft Teams will be providing new features and good developer platform.