Getting the most from Teams

Did you know that Oxford now has more than 9000 Nexus365 Teams! We’ve seen a lot of change and there have been more useful developments in Teams over the past couple of months. We hope you find the below summary helpful but if you want to know more about what’s coming next, don’t forget you can check the Teams roadmap.  

Teams recordings expiry

We’ve had some queries about Teams recordings expiry dates and wanted to put your minds at ease. Your recordings are stored in your One Drive and will be available for at least 297 years, unless you delete them or leave your job (in which case, make sure important recordings are moved to a shared space).

Want to check? Click the expiration date link to find out when your recording will expire (this is the same for all Teams recordings for everyone at Oxford University. 

Keeping your Team in tip top shape

A few important dos and don’ts to keep your Team in tip top shape: 

Do get the most from Teams by:

• Browsing the Teams owners guide which has lots of useful information to help you, as well as answers to many popular questions. 
• Using private channels if you want to ‘lock away’ certain content in your Team. To avoid 'orphaned' channels, always make one of your Team owners an owner of your private channels too.
• Using shared channels if you need to share documents and chats with people who are not members of your Team.
• Joining the Nexus365 User Group to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and find answers to questions - the joining code is LNJVOFR.

Don’t break your Team by:

• Changing any aspect of the sites behind Teams. You should not rename Teams channel folders (unless you are doing so through Teams itself), or rename the home page.  
• Sharing documents from your Team files with people outside your Team. If you need to do this, please use shared channels. 
• Attempting to change permissions for the underlying SharePoint site associated with your Team. If you need to use granular permissions in SharePoint, please request a proper SharePoint Online site from your unit’s SharePoint Network Administrator. See SharePoint Online help and guidance for more information.

Features now available

As always, Microsoft teams are working hard to improve Teams and add or update features. We’ve set out a few we hope you’ll find useful.

• Arrange automatic recording for your meeting when setting it up – now you don’t need to remember on the day.
• Improvements to Presenter mode mean that content size will be adjusted automatically when presenters move or resize their video feed. This can be applied to all modes on Desktop or Window sharing, including standout, side-by-side, and reporter.
• A new search results page experience in Teams makes finding messages, people, answers, and files faster and more intuitive. This enhancement means you can see top results with better relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.  

• Integration with Panopto brings your webinars, meetings and lecture recordings into a shared space between Microsoft Teams and Canvas. Our Panopto and Microsoft Teams Integration page has useful guidance.

• Loop Components are live interactive components that you can use in Teams chats, Outlook and web pages – this article about transforming creation and collaboration with Microsoft Loop components has more information.  
• The ‘Message read by’ feature in Teams Chats lets you see who has engaged with and read your chat messages in channels and private chats. 
• Emojis - the fun stuff - Teams is joining Microsoft 365 and Windows in updating all emojis and reactions to the new Microsoft Fluent emoji style, bringing users a more vibrant and expressive emoji experience.   
• Teams shared channels are collaboration spaces where you can invite people who are not members of your Team. This is a game changer for sharing and collaborating without breaking your Team. Our experts in the Nexus365 team have written guidance on how to use this new feature. 

Coming soon

• Multiple account support - enabling seamless account swapping without logging out and in again. Teams will prompt you for credentials to access materials if you are using more than one Nexus account (or even an account outside our tenancy). 
• Channel name pairing will ensure that channel folders in SharePoint match the team channel name when channel names are changed through Teams. 
• The co-organiser feature will allow a colleague help you organise/manage meetings  
• Camera lighting and filters will enhance your appearance and change lighting settings for your webcam when used for Teams meetings

Top tip!

Don’t forget you can schedule your 'out of office' message using Teams - your Outlook calendar and automatic replies will be updated too.