IGNITE: Microsoft Teams adds Shared channels, Co-authoring encrypted docs, Multi-Geo capability, and more

In the recent session at Microsoft Ignite, Ronit Ben Sheffer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and John Gruszczyk, Product Manager at Microsoft discussed how their team is always looking for ways to make tasks and processes more efficient by centralizing workloads in Microsoft Teams.

Recently, the Microsoft Teams’ group has been improving efficiencies for the IT admin. They’ve been working on ways of optimizing behavior for users as well as your organization. They are constantly evolving the Microsoft Teams management capability so that you’re able to manage them in a simple and intuitive way.

Using Teams Admin Center, you’re able to manage all of the teams’ activities including administration analytics, reporting, and other information. These features offer you a broad set of management controllers that will help you administer the customer experience. Microsoft wants you to be able to accomplish all of the admin functions from within a single user interface.

New security features in Microsoft Teams

1. Multi-Geo: One of the new features that was introduced at Microsoft Ignite is the Multi-Geo capability for Microsoft Teams. Multi-Geo allows the customer to specify the location of data and then allows them to set this in services like SharePoint, Exchange, and OneDrive. With this enhancement, this functionality now exists in Microsoft Teams. This will help organizations meet the requirements of data residency.
2. Customer Key Support: Microsoft Teams now supports customer key support. Now customers are able to provide root encryption keys for their data and other compliance items.
3. Co-author encrypted documents: Microsoft Teams now gives users the ability to co-author encrypted documents. This means you no longer need to download or check out an encrypted file in order to collaborate. You can actually collaborate in real time on a document that has a sensitivity label applied to it.

Seamless external collaboration with Teams Connect using shared channels

Microsoft Teams Connect is a game-changer for companies that want to collaborate more efficiently. It streamlines external communication while strengthening relationships with partners, clients or customers. Using shared channels, organizations will be able to create a shared workspace for both internal and external stakeholders all from within the Teams account.

Every week, business decision-makers need to work with external partners in order to get things done. Microsoft says that users have told them when external collaboration is optimized, it can help improve accountability, visibility, and trust. Microsoft Teams offers secure solutions to allow organizations to collaborate with external parties.

With Microsoft Teams Connect, Microsoft is making it easier to collaborate with anyone outside of an organization. Teams Connect offers a full suite of collaboration capabilities to allow organizations to work better with external partners.

Making the most of shared channels

With shared chats, you are able to start a chat with people external to your organization. This will allow you to have a real-time, secure conversation with external people and allow you to collaborate better.

You can create a shared space for deeper and more long-term collaboration with your external partners by using the B2B Direct Connect feature. Using shared channels can allow a team to collaborate more effectively across boundaries. Channels allow for collaboration spaces within a team. This can help teams organize conversations based on a topic, project, or some other type of purpose.

Using a standard channel, you can facilitate open collaboration within a team. You can also use private channels to have private conversations with subgroups of a team.

While using standards and private channels may work well for connecting a team, sometimes an organization needs to be able to collaborate outside of their organization. This is where shared channels come from. This allows a new type of channel that enables more efficient, faster, and transparent collaboration with both internal and external partners.

This means that employees no longer have to switch to another application to collaborate externally. Using shared channels, they can add partners to a team and just add them to a channel. Using shared channels, you can bring in individual people or an entire team.

With shared channels in Microsoft Teams, you can get faster results while you strengthen relationships all with partners. In order to set this up, admins on both sides will need to configure cross-tenant access policies. The tenant hosting the shared panel will need to have set up inbound access specifying who from the external tenant will be allowed to participate. In order to participate in the shared channel, you’ll have to set up an outbound access specifying who from your tenant can be invited. These access settings can be set up at the user, group, and application level.

How to keep Microsoft Teams secure?

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