Disabling Microsoft Teams from launching on startup can be done from within the Teams desktop app. To do so:

1. Launch Microsoft Teams for Mac or Windows

2. Click the “…” next to your avatar in the top right-hand corner of the Teams window
   

3. Click “Settings” in the menu that appears

4. Once the Settings modal is shown, click “General”. The General tab includes a range of settings including the active theme and new chat window behaviour

5. Look for the setting “Auto-start application”. It lives in the section called “Application” on the “General” tab from step 4. Ensure this is checked off, as shown in the screenshot below
   

Once you’ve disabled the “Auto-start application” setting, Microsoft will remove Teams from your startup items list on Windows and Mac OS. You can verify this by following these steps on a Mac:

1. Open System Settings by clicking the Apple logo in the top left-hand corner of the screen and clicking “System Settings”

2. Click “General” > “Login Items”

3. You should no longer see “Microsoft Teams” listed under “Login Items” once you’ve disabled the “Auto-start application” checkbox in the previous steps
   

While Copilot will be integrated into most Microsoft Office products including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, in this article we’re going to focus on the key changes announced for Microsoft Teams.

Business Chat

Business chat is a new feature that works across the suite of Office products. For Teams, this means you’ll be able to engage with the data stored in your Office account such as documents, meeting transcripts, calendar events and other Teams conversations via chat.

Microsoft is promising you’ll be able to use business chat to quickly summarise documents, recap meetings held earlier in the day and even generate status updates for other team members based on meetings and documentation produced.

Meeting Summaries

Copilot will soon be available in Teams meetings and provide summaries of who said what, as well as the key discussion points from within a conversation. Action points can be identified, and as mentioned above the information can also be surfaced in Business Chat later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1gpkk-MwpY

Based on Microsoft’s demonstrations, the meeting summaries feature works in real-time as the meeting is occurring. One expects you’ll need to have the transcription feature enabled to ensure the Microsoft AI model can work it’s magic.

How much will it cost?

At this point Microsoft hasn’t yet confirmed pricing details for these new AI capabilities in Office, but it’s easy to imagine that the company will introduce new licenses particularly for organisations using commercial Office 365. The company says more information, including a launch date, will be provided later this year.

With the Build conference just around the corner in late May, expect to hear more soon including how developers might be able to build experiences upon Microsoft’s AI capabilities.

What is a team?

A team in Microsoft Teams is the top-level container for channels within the “Teams” tab. As the name suggests, it typically represents a bunch of people working together towards a common goal such as a project or shared interest.

Channels are contained within a team, and allow for specific topics of conversation & collaboration. For example, you may have a ‘Sales & Marketing’ team that has the following channels each of which can be made public or shared privately:

• General
• Monthly Reports
• Celebrations

Behind the scenes, when you create a team a Microsoft 365 group is also created in Azure Active Directory. Upon team creation, a new SharePoint site is created (or linked, if your team is an existing Microsoft 365 group) that in time will hold your channel’s documents and files.

How can I create a team?

Note: If you’re not seeing the ability to create a team as shown below, your organisation admin may have restricted the ability for employees to create new teams.

1. Open the Microsoft Teams app, or the web interface if you don’t have it installed
2. At the bottom of the “Teams” column, click “Join or create a team”
   
3. Click “Create a team”
4. Choose “From scratch” to create a brand new team, or select “From a group or team” to use an existing Microsoft 365 group within Azure Active Directory. You can also select from a number of templates, including management of projects, events and employee onboarding. These templates include common channels and apps that relate to the type of template selected - for example, the onboarding template includes 4 channels by default - general, announcements, employee chat and training. It also installs 9 apps that Microsoft think are useful for onboarding teams, such as Bulletins, Employee Ideas and Milestones.
   
5. Next you’ll be asked about the type of team you want to create. Each option has a brief description below the title, but in essence you can choose to create public teams (where anyone in your organisation can join, via the directory), private teams (people need to be invited to join) or org-wide (everyone in your organisation is automatically added)
6. Lastly you’ll need to give your team a name.

Once completed, your team will show soon after. There may be a brief delay before it appears while Microsoft scaffolds the SharePoint site & provisions the team.

Can I delete a team?

Yes, assuming your administrator hasn’t restricted access & you’re an owner of the team. To delete a team, click the ‘…’ at the end of the team name and choose ‘Delete the team’.

Note that all channels, files, conversations, and the Microsoft 365 group itself will be removed, so be sure there’s nothing left that you wish to refer to at a later point before deleting.

The Pro plan offers a number of benefits over the free “Basic” plan, including:

• Camera & audio AI enhancements to ensure an optimal experience for those dialling in to hybrid meetings. Includes features to make front row and automatic framing work optimally.
• Addition of personal Teams meeting features like raise hand and live reactions
• Ability to add a touch display to enable multi-user experiences such as shared whiteboarding
• Enhanced management and security including remote configuration, analytics about devices and more

From the 1st September, Teams Rooms Basic is now included for free with the purchase of certified Teams Rooms devices. Up to 25 Basic licenses can be added to a tenant.

We will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days (early December).

We hear from you that you want the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view, etc. We found the best way to act on this is to offer a Teams progressive web app (PWA) on Linux as a new feature of our current web client, which we’ll make available to our Linux customers in the coming months.

It doesn’t appear that this announcement has been made widely available by Microsoft yet. We haven’t received this message in the admin message centre within any of our Office 365 tenants.

Microsoft dropping the Linux app (powered via Electron) signals the end of a short life for the Linux client. It was the last desktop client to launch, after being made available as a public preview in 2019.

The company is going all-in on progressive web apps these days - even on Windows - so this isn’t the most surprising of decisions. The Windows Teams client is also moving away from Electron and will soon use Edge WebView2 on Windows - something not presently available on Linux.

Teams App Camp is an on-demand workshop complete with videos and hands-on labs in which you’ll extend a simple web application to become a full-featured Microsoft Teams application, complete with a sample license service based on Microsoft’s Commercial Marketplace. It doesn’t assume any prior Microsoft knowledge. All the code is in vanilla JavaScript with no special tools. If you know JavaScript, you can learn how Teams apps work at their core and apply your learning to any environment and tool chain

As Microsoft continues to pursue app developers for the Teams App Marketplace, it’s great to see the company roll out more training modules to lower the barrier to entry. This latest initiative covers the basics of building a Teams app, and the various integration points available to developers.

With sessions broken down into labs and ’extended’ labs, the App Camp documentation also goes into detail around monetising Teams apps, adding dialogs, meeting apps and more. There are two paths - A & B. A focuses on building a solution with Azure AD, and B builds a solution with a non-Azure AD identity solution.

Also worth noting that Microsoft is using the open source Material for MkDocs to host the App Camp documentation.

Read Meeting Navigator

This app is a game-changer for ensuring you’re running a successful and well-engaged meeting.

The in-meeting sidebar app shows the time remaining within the meeting, as well as giving you numerous statistics about engagement and time spoken.

It even boasts a transcription service, allowing you to read & share transcripts from your meetings if you’re unhappy with Microsoft’s transcription capabilities.

Aster

This app allows you to easily prepare for meetings, run meetings and then follow up on meeting outcomes post-event.

When it comes to running timers, rather than show one timer with the time remaining in the entire meeting you can start timers against each topic of your meeting agenda.

Showmaster

Need to show a countdown timer highlighting the time remaining before your meeting commences? Then this app is for you.

You can customise backgrounds, text, animations and more - meaning your employees or other team members won’t be bored while waiting for your live event to commence.

Seen any other apps for meeting countdown timers, or have a different way of tracking the time remaining within Teams meetings? Let us know in the comments.

Microsoft Teams News

Link: Apple Podcasts

As the name suggests, this podcast - released monthly - takes a deep-dive into the latest Teams news. The team also take a look at emerging trends surrounding the Teams platform. On average episodes run for 30mins or less.

What’s New in Microsoft 365 and Teams?

Link: Apple Podcasts

This podcast takes a look at the latest new features in Microsoft 365 and Teams. Episodes are released fortnightly, and they tend to run for 25 minutes or less. The show is hosted by Microsoft adoption specialist Mark Thompson.

Teams On Air

Link: Apple Podcasts

There hasn’t been any new episodes of this podcast for many years (since 2018), but it remains one of the few official Microsoft sources for Teams insights. If video is more your thing, you can also watch episodes on YouTube.

Found some other podcasts about Teams that you’d recommend? Let us know in the comments.

Notion has soared in popularity in recent times, but there’s still no official way to integrate the service with Microsoft Teams. However, there are some ways you can consume or create Notion data from Teams.

Create Notion database items from Teams

The easiest way to create Notion database items from Teams is to integrate with a third-party platform such as Zapier or Automate.io - the latter of which Notion themselves recently acquired.

Power Automate is another alternative, but there’s no out of the box task for Notion. So while you can trigger flows from Teams or elsewhere, you’d need to write some code to call the Notion REST API yourself to create database items.

Getting started with these platforms is simple. Simply create a Notion account if you don’t have one already, and then create an account with your automation platform of choice. In the case of Automate.io, after signing in you can connect your Notion account and your Microsoft 365 account and then setup a workflow.

The workflow allows you to pick what changes in Microsoft 365 you would like to trigger a new database item in Notion. For example, you may choose the “New message in Microsoft Teams” trigger on Automate.io, and have a new database item added to Notion containing the message and the author details.

It’s worth noting that these automation platforms have limited free tiers - if you’re creating lots of triggers that are called frequently, you may need to pay for the premium tiers.

Show Notion content in Teams

If you’re looking to show Notion content within a Teams channel, your best bet is to use the custom website tabs app to embed the Notion web app.

You can use the Website app to show the Notion website in a Teams channel tab

However this comes with some significant limitations - there’s no single sign on between Teams and Notion, so you’ll need to frequently sign in to Notion.

Performance of the Notion web app can also sometimes be sub-par when used within Teams tabs.

Power Automate (Free tier, 1st party)

If you’re looking for a way to integrate Twitter without paying for a third-party tool and you’ve already got a Power Automate license, then this is your best bet. By using Power Automate, you can do things like:

• Send new tweets to a channel in Teams
• Filter tweets to send to a channel in Teams based on the hashtag
• Ping a channel when your Twitter account is @ mentioned
• Post a message from Teams to Twitter
• Perform sentiment analysis and post the results to Teams

Zapier

Similar to Power Automate, Zapier allows you to setup workflows to post messages on your behalf into channels in your Teams workspace.

In fact, the most popular Zapier Microsoft Teams/Twitter integration is that which posts messages into a channel containing a mention. You can also readily customise the workflows to suit your needs.

MailClark (Paid, 3rd party)

This app is available from App Source, and allows you to quickly connect multiple Twitter accounts to Teams and monitor them. You can be notified almost immediately when someone responds or tweets your accounts.

You can also use MailClark to quickly triage issues & ping the right people from your team to investigate customer enquiries faster. Pricing starts at $5 per active user, per month.

Twitter connector (now deprecated)

This connector used to allow you to connect Twitter and Teams directly, and was provided by Microsoft.

However, it has since been removed as Microsoft decided to no longer continue supporting and maintaining the connector.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

If you’re an end user

Looking for an easy way to export Teams chats? Check out our new Chat Exporter for Microsoft Teams tool. You can export conversations as CSV, JSON or PNG files.

If you’re using a personal Microsoft account with Teams, you may be able to export your messages following the steps listed here.

For work accounts, one option is to setup a workflow using Microsoft Flow to call the Microsoft Graph API and convert individual chats to HTML or a PDF file.

An alternative is to call the Graph API endpoints yourself to retrieve messages and conversations yourself as part of your own script/program, although that has a higher degree of complexity when compared to using a tool such as Microsoft Flow. These endpoints are also in beta.

You could also open the Microsoft Teams website in your browser (Chrome or Edge) and use a full page screenshot extension to capture a conversation. Note however that you’ll need to manually scroll back through the chat to ensure that the full history is shown.

If you’re an admin

The options are still quite limited, but you can try and use the eDiscovery tools available in Office 365 to retrieve messages from channels.

While this list is far from conclusive, many of the resources below cover end-user and admin training, while some are more targeted to one scenario or the other.

Microsoft training

Free, Microsoft Training

If you’re looking for the best free training, it’s hard to go past Microsoft’s official training resources. Microsoft has created training for admins and end-users.

And if reading guides isn’t your thing, they even run free instructor-led sessions that anyone can sign up for, and run on a frequent basis.

Microsoft Teams essential training

Paid, LinkedIn Learning

One of the most-watched Microsoft Teams courses on LinkedIn Learning, this course will run you through the basics of setting up a Microsoft Teams workspace.

It then dives into incorporating the best of Teams functionality into your team’s workflow. A quiz at the end of each chapter helps recap what you just learnt.

Mastering Microsoft Teams Training

Paid, Udemy

While this training was recorded last year, the majority of the content remains relevant when using Microsoft Teams. Heavily focused on end-user functionality, this course won’t satisfy those looking for admin tips.

The course has some good content, and can be had at a more affordable price than the LinkedIn Learning course.

Adopt & Embrace Microsoft Teams

Paid, Amazon

If a book is more your thing, and you’re after a book that covers integrating Microsoft Teams within your team’s workflow then Adopt & Embrace Microsoft Teams is a solid buy.

The book covers integrating Microsoft Teams from a manager’s perspective, and includes chapters on getting to know Teams, through to some principles and best practices.