M365 News Roundup for January 2024
Microsoft announced that there are 320 million monthly active Teams users. Do you know where all that data is?
It’s interesting to me to think about 320 million active Teams users and all the data they generate, but then I think about all the companies that don’t use Teams but have clients and partners who do.
How much data is generated by those people when they attend Teams meetings with the organizations hosting them? So, how many people have created data stored in an M365 environment through Teams?
400 million? 500 million? More?
That’s a lot of data. And it’s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of the people in charge of compliance and security.
This reminds me of something I came across this week that I thought was an interesting thing to consider:
It’s curious to me to consider this because I have to remember that for many people, their only exposure to Teams has been in meetings and in meeting chats. They haven’t been added to a Teams group to use the full channel experience for collaboration. They haven’t seen the Teams integrations with Planner, Loop, SharePoint lists, etc.
I’ve seen in my own experience that many organizations view Teams as mostly a meeting and chat application when it offers so much more through the interface and the integrations with other M365 tools and thousands of third-party apps.
More applicable to this newsletter, though, I have to wonder how many people in the legal world only think of Teams as meetings and chat apps. How much potential eDiscovery are they missing out on by overlooking all the other ways people might be using Teams, let alone something like Viva?
It’s worth considering. What do you think the risk is here based on your interactions?
Is it even possible that Microsoft has even broader plans for Teams?
In other news:
Tony Redmond has a helpful piece on creating a hold report using Powershell while we wait for the long-expected hold report from Premium eDiscovery. (It’s now scheduled for March. It was January. The Preview was supposed to hit in December, but has it been seen yet? Are we in for a repeat of 2021-22 when hold reports were coming soon and then rolling out but never did? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.)
Suppose you have users accessing Teams on the web with Chrome. In that case, there are some important changes that Google has made with Chrome that might present some problems for you - M365 Changelog: (Updated) Affected Teams behavior in Chrome due to privacy sandboxing.
I’ve started to see some of this with the Website app being finicky about displaying in the Teams interface. It’s either the problem where Chrome is blocking the embed or the browser cache is coming into play. I’m not sure which.
If you are using the new Teams desktop app, keep this handy - Steps to remove Teams cache for new version 2.0
This upcoming feature, also due in January, to give users a Discover feed for channel activity could be useful. The reason I say that is because the default behavior to notify on chats and replies to your own channel messages, but not generally on new channel messages, has been a bit of a blocker to wider adoption of the Teams channels. Why would I use the channel instead of creating a group chat if members might not even notice the channel post? Perhaps a feed of recent channel activity might help.
Also, because some of us don’t have the budget for Copilot - 24 AI features in Microsoft Office 365 – no Copilot needed.
That’s it for this week. A little light on big news while we wait for new features to roll out to evaluate the impact of eDiscovery. As soon as I see them and can test them, you’ll start to see those results here!
One final thought on this holiday when we remember Dr. Martin Luther King. My wife and I recently visited Montgomery, Alabama. We spent most of a day exploring the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It was a hard day. It was an intense day. It was also a day full of truth, learning, and reflection on our country, past, and future. I highly recommend it.