October 2021 #M365AMA Summary

In this month’s Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) panel, I was joined by Eric Riz, MVP (@rizinsights), Mike Nelson, MVP (@mikenelsonio), Hal Hostetler, MVP (@TVWizard), expert Shari Oswald (@shortcutshari), and Microsoft’s Neil Hodgkinson (@nellymo). Questions were selected from various online community groups — but we also welcome questions during the live stream, so don’t be shy! Our next live broadcast will be November 10th at 9am Pacific, so join us!

Take note that I experienced a technical issue — I enjoyed a forced update to Streamlabs OBS this morning, which altered some of my camera and microphone settings on some (not all) of my scenes. I missed one setting…on my own mic. So you cannot hear me for the intro and each time I comment on Mike’s Message Center updates. At the 16:34 mark, I was alerted to the issue (thanks Ron!) and fixed the problem. Oh, the joys of being live!

Microsoft 365 Message Center topics covered:

• Mike kicks off the Microsoft Message Center updates [5:48]
• Join Teams meetings anonymously across tenants [6:15]
• You will soon be able to restart (reboot) a Live Meeting event [8:18]
• Creating collapsible sections in SharePoint [9:38]
• In Teams, you can launch a whiteboard using your camera [12:07]
• Azure cloud shell is now available through the Admin center [15:02]
• Private drafts are now available in SharePoint pages and news posts [18:08]
• The panel discusses the loss of User Voice, and the introduction of the Feedback Portal [19:34]
• Microsoft stops the 2nd largest DDOS attack in history [24:30]
• The session catalog for Ignite 2021 is now live, and people can register for free [28:13]

Community questions covered:

• Is it possible to put a time on a Teams meeting for when people can join? [35:35]
• Is there any way to mask the output from Azure DevOps pipeline? [38:03]
• I’m having trouble with the chat function whilst in a Teams meeting and guests in the group can’t see the chat. Why is this happening? [42:31]
• re: the superior user experience for multi-tenant access to Teams via the mobile app, Christian opines on wanting a mobile phone emulator on his desktop — and Shari mentions she has shared this exact tip on her blog [46:18] (and here’s her video tip)
• As a Microsoft Azure partner, what benefits can we get? The panel expands on partner benefits, in general (not just Azure) [48:39]
• Can we store heavy zip files (more than 50GB) in Azure blob storage and search the zip file later? [57:00]
• Moving from years-long usage of Yammer free to business basic, I saw that M365 has an ‘All Company’ group, but do not see this group in Teams. Do I need to create a new group for all of our users to be in (organization-wide Teams group)? Mike shares his dislike of Yammer, and the panel gets into a brief discussion on “which tool do you use, and when?” [1:00:15]
• We moved a hosted exchange environment to Microsoft 365 and have a local fileserver. Do I have to create a site for each fileshare? The panel has a great discussion on migration planning [1:06:34]
• Does anyone know if we can share resources (conference room or an open office, for example) between two tenants? [1:18:01]
• I have a client where he says we can connect ONLY if using a VPN. Is it possible to connect into SharePoint Online using a VPN (client-to-site)? [1:21:00]
• Can anyone please suggest how can we can display SSRS reports on SharePoint Online? [1:24:25]

You can watch the entire recording here (audio begins at 5:48):

 

If you would like to watch our next live stream on November 10th, or watch past recordings (and many other community-focused interviews) be sure to follow the YouTube channel. Thanks!