Teamsfest 2020 - Demo session: Microsoft Phone system for users

Presented by: Linus Cansby

Session Summary:
Teams is a perfect place for collaboration and one of the parts of the collaboration is voice. With Teams you can activate Phone system and start calling to the Telephone network directly from your Teams client. In this session I will show how it works for the user and what users can expect. This session is for users and administrators that want to know if Teams can be their phone system platform and for users that recently started to use Teams as their phone system and want some tips. Expect demos, demos and demos.

My notes:

Phone system (the "PBX" in Office 365) connects to the PSTN via Calling Plans (hosted by Office 365) or Direct Routing (using an SBC hosted by the customer or a provider.)

The contact list in the Teams client is the same as the contact list in Outlook, and the Teams client have call history and built-in voice mail. Forwarding, Simultaneous ringing, voicemail settings and ringtones can be customized in settings. Call through in Do-not-disturb mode and call blocking can be handled in privacy settings. Call transfer with call back, consultative transfer, calling groups, delegation of calls, handling multiple incoming calls, hold was also demoed. Merging of calls is soon to be released in Teams.

The demos ended with a Call Queues demonstration.

 

Questions and Answers

When do you use conference mode in call queue?
When you have all agents in Teams (improves performance.)

Is there an attendant console coming?
Yes, several 3rd party options already exist.

Voice calling recording?
Is coming later this year.

If my boss setup my account as a delegate, am I able to change the boss call forwarding settings?
Yes.

Can the admin set delegation and call forwarding for boss and secretary?
Yes, using the Teams Admin Center.

Are call queue and Auto Attendant reporting by Graph API available?
Yes, and PowerBI reports are coming in the future (announced at Ignite). Reporting for queues and Auto Attendants is available from https://www.codesoftware.net/solutions/microsoftteams/

When is presence for the Teams API coming?
Presence is in beta in Graph API already.

Are there any new custom roles coming for Teams admins?
The Microsoft Teams Communications Administrator now has access to Direct Routing, Auto Attendant and Call Queue administration.

Teamsfest 2020 - Creating your Champions Quarter in Teams

Presented by: Ville Gullstrand

Session Summary:
Most organizations are either managing their own champions program for Microsoft 365 or looking into creating one. The obvious place for your dear champs to share ideas is in Microsoft Teams! During this live demo session will go from nothing to a full scale Champions Quarter where your champs can thrive!

My notes:

The world is changing? The world has changed!

Office 365 - evergreen cloud - Continuous updates are happening and a champions team is needed. This group of engaged persons might be called

• Ambassadors
• Pioneers
• Early adopters
• Champions
• Ninjas
• or something cool
  
  

A practical hand-on session on how to build a "Champions Quarters" in Teams.

Add a Team called "The champions quarters" or something similar. Change the logo to something that people will recognize / remember. Create channels called, News, Continuous improvement (for feature updates) and fun stuff. Add an RSS feed to the News channel, for example the Office 365 roadmap and news.microsoft.com. Go and reply on some of the items in the feed to start discussions (be active.)

In Continuous improvement add teamsdemo.office.com as a tab.

In the General channel add a tab to the Teams uservoice. Go to the files tab and open the underlying SharePoint site, add links to this site as well and change the look of the site. Create a new news post with the title "Who are we as Champions" explaining the champions program. Go back to the General channel and add this news post as a tab.

Spend a few minutes to build a nicer SharePoint site.

On the SharePoint site add a list called "Tips in Teams" with the columns Title, Description and Publish date and continuously add tips to this list. Go to Power Automate (Flow) and build a flow to use todays date to publish the tip on the date specified in the list. This way new tips can be prepopulated and posted once a day for example.

Teamsfest 2020 - Building no-code chatbots for Microsoft Teams

Presented by: Tomasz Poszytek

Session Summary:
Chatbots are a good solution for employees to find answers to their questions, help them onboard, participate in processes and much more! We used to think that building a bot requires development. With Virtual Agent this is not true anymore! If you want to learn more how to create a chatbot without a single line of code and give it to Teams users, join this session! You will learn what is Power Virtual Agent is, how you can build your own chatbot, how you can integrate that chatbot with other sources using Power Automate and how you can embed chatbot in Microsoft Teams. Well designed and operating chatbots can save you hours on solving simple employees' problems and answering the most common answers.


My Notes:

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) was first announced in 2019 under the name "Virtual Agent for Customer Service" and have now been incorporated into the Microsoft "Power-" family. PVA combines the Power Platform and the Azure Bot Service and is used to create bots without programming skills. It can also integrate with Azure Cognitive Services. Conversations with the bot can be converted/escalated to chats or voice calls with people. A PVA used within an Organization will not be billed, but a stand-alone PVA is incurring cost depending on the number of sessions connecting to it.

A PVA editor can be added as an app in Teams, and it is possible to start developing the bot right in Teams.

A demo of how a bot is built using the graphical tools followed.

• Trigger phrases and responses
• Call actions from Power Automate
• Catching UserID to do look up’s
• Publishing the bot
  
  

Building a Power Virtual Agent in Teams

Roadmap

• Adaptive cards, video support
• Topic suggestions from documents
• Voice interactions
• Basic theming
• List variables

Questions and Answers

In which situations it is recommended to use standalone (paid) Power Virtual Agent?
The most common use case is if you want to interact with users outside of your organisation - you can add a PVA to a webpage.

Is it possible to query the cds database of the team, without premium?
No, the premium license is needed for this.

How soon can we see the published changes?
Normally around 15 minutes.

Is there a possibility to access chat history in order to improve our bot responsiveness?
No.

Can we publish a bot to the left menu in Teams?
Yes, that should be possible. Manage app setup policies in Microsoft Teams

Teamsfest 2020 - A Journey through Microsoft Teams Development

Presented by: João Ferreira

Session summary:
Microsoft Teams is changing the way people communicate and work worldwide and will be part of our lives in the decade to come. Even though it is very robust and comes out of the box with fantastic features, it lacks native support for many business scenarios and this is where you can make the difference by extending it with custom Apps making everyone much more productive. Long gone are the times where software development was restricted to a few geeks living for years in basements, in this new decade anyone have super powers to be a developer and Microsoft Teams clearly embraces and encourage any power user to build their own applications. In this session you will travel through all Microsoft Teams development methods. It starts with the Power Platform, makes a pit stop on the Microsoft App Templates and SharePoint Framework and finishes with the native Microsoft Teams Development. Looking to get more out of Microsoft Teams? This session will teach you how and what is the method that works best for you.

My notes:

Started with the famous "Developers, Developers, Developers" video featuring Steve Ballmer.

How to extend Microsoft Teams

App Templates - solutions provided by Microsoft:

• HR support bot
• Company Communicator
• List Search
• Building Access

They are secure, well documented, anyone (with permissions in a tenant) can install them and they are free (but some of them may incur Azure costs.)

There is a good "Coffee in the cloud" video discussing App templates.


Power Platform is integrated with Teams and every Power app is a Teams app.

• Power BI
• Power Apps
• Power Automate
• Power Virtual Agents

Two examples of apps developed by non developers from Tacoma Public Schools and the American Red Cross where shown.

Power Automate (previously known as "Microsoft Flow".) can be used to for example post a message in Teams. There are tons of connectors available to build integrations with Power Automate without the need to code.

SharePoint and SPFx (SharePoint Framework) can also be used to develop apps for Teams. SPFx have built-in Graph support, Azure AD secured APIs and hosting in SharePoint Online. There is silent authentication between a Teams client and SharePoint available through the _layout system in SharePoint.

Will a SPFx framework app be able to authenticate via the Teams token?
Yes, an SPFx framework app will do the authentication automatically using the credentials of the user currently logged in to Teams.

Teamsfest 2020

Today I again joined Teamsfest arranged by the European Teams User Group, just like last year. A great community driven event held totally on-line in Microsoft Teams. Look at twitter under #teamsfest for some buzz about the event.

Teamsfest - powered by Teams of course!

The event was running the entire day with many sessions and good speakers. For recordings of all the sessions from the day look at the YouTube page of the European Teams User Group. Thanks to Chris Hoard, Vesa Nopanen, Adam Deltinger and Chris Webb for arranging this event!

The keynote started with a video note form Jeff Teeper - Corporate Vice President Microsoft 365 Collaboration of Microsoft.

Remote everything - the world has changed forever, what we learnt the last few months will stick with us forever.

History of Teams

• March 2008 - Microsoft Online Service availability
• June 2011 Office 365 General Availability
• March 2017 Microsoft Teams General Availability
  (Office 365 85M Monthly Active Users)
• April 2020 Microsoft Teams 75M Daily Active Users
  (Office 365 258M Monthly Active Users)

Ignite Recap - a few highlights

• Together Mode Scenes
• Custom Layouts
• Breakout Rooms
• Meeting Recap
• Webinars
• Meeting Rooms
• Calling Experience
• Teams Templates
• New Search Experience
• Power Platform Integration
• Meetings Extension
• SharePoint Home Site App in Teams
• SharePoint Syntex
• Teams meetings recoding in SharePoint

A big thank you to the community!

About the day - Chris Hoard

Teamsfest is 100% free, 100% community, 100% passion.

• 8 tracks
• 85 sessions
• 50 hours of Content
• 8 moderators

There is also a lounge for socializing at https://teamsfest.rocks/lounge (aka Veskus virtual sauna)

Teams as a Platform - Vesa Nopanen

It is possible to create a bot to welcome new employees to the company, sending info and relevant links to the user. Teams could become the one-stop-shop for employee onboarding. Other examples are CRM integrations, screen pops at incoming calls, and the new meetings extensibility feature. 600+ applications are available in the store as of today. Power Platform allows "citizen developers" to develop apps and bots without code.

The importance of Wellbeing - Adam Deltinger

Wellbeing comes before productivity (or at least should.) The new work from home environment have several benefits, but also challenges like burn out. Both tricks and features in Teams can be used to ease the stress and improve the wellbeing of any employee:

• Virtual commute
• Emotional Check in
• Meditation breaks
• Break scheduling
• Together modes
• Quite hours
• Focus assist
• Do Not Disturb
• Tasks in Teams

Chris wrapped up by discussing Teams for Education and all the great features in Teams that are the result of feedback from schools using Teams.

Have a great fest!