With Microsoft 365 many of us are collaborating via guest access to many tenants owned by clients, partners, communities or even family. Some of these will be following best practice and implementing additional security controls such as MFA. So what happens when you get a new phone or new authentication app and need to change all of those tenants to look at a new authenticator app? You may also have been granted access to apps and groups, or be eligible to request access packages as part of Azure Active Directory Entitlement, or be an approver as part of Access Reviews.

Whenever someone leaves an organisation or changes roles, the permissions of their user account should be checked to ensure that No Teams are left without an owner (every Team should really have two owners) Their access to Teams they no longer need access to is revoked. There are many ways to do this but most organisations will consider this when the need arises. I have published a PowerShell module that provides commandlets to carry out some essential actions to support the management of Teams permissions.

I went for a walk last weekend. A very long walk. As I sit here aching from the hills I climbed I look back on that walk and I think about what I achieved: Exercise - As well as a virtual commute around the local park for 30 mins every morning, I like to feel like I’ve pushed myself by walking up and down a lot of hills at the weekend Relaxation - I find walking in fields and woods and along quiet country lanes very relaxing Learning - I tend to spend half of each walk listening to an audio book and half listening to nature I used to go for a walk most weekends and since the pandemic started, most has turned into every weekend.

I organise a fair number of meetings and I am invited to a lot more meetings. I do have a Power Automate Flow in place to automatically respond based on whether I am available and whether there is an agenda Link, however, most other people do not. This post is intended to help people understand what response they should provide. As a meeting organiser I identify people who “must” attend and people for whom attendance is optional.

The ability to share content rather than send copies of content is one of the main benefits of Office 365. There are many settings that need to be configured this ability and they are distributed through multiple interfaces. This article documents the settings and their locations. It is fair to say that these settings would be much easier to manage if they were all in one location, but the evolution of different products has produced a complex set of locations and settings, which in some cases exist in multiple locations with different wording.

I have been speaking at conferences on the benefits of daily and weekly ceremonies to help with building habits to increase productivity. I did blog about this very briefly a while back but this blog is expanding on the purpose and benefit of the ceremonies that I use to manage my tasks and my time. During one session I did there was a comment that read “Now I understand what you mean by ceremonies” so let me start by clarifying what I mean by ceremony.

Oh, how I have been waiting for this! As I successfully get more communications in Teams, unfortunately I pick up more tasks from Teams messages. But as Planner morphs to Tasks, I see more of my To Do tasks in Teams so yet again, I have less reasons to leave Teams. Now to the issue at hand - how do I create a To Do task from a Teams message?

First up, let’s get the disappointment out of the way: I’m really disappointed that I can’t meet up with people and network at Ignite. The benefits of speaking to attendees, vendors and Microsoft staff are immeasurable at the in person event. Also, it is far easier to avoid the inevitable distractions of work when you are there. That being said, Microsoft have proven themselves as innovative and creative in the other events that have taken place since in-person events have become unviable.

A while back I was involved in a discussion about the need for agendas when accepting meeting invites. The general consensus was that agendas are required to allow the attendees to be able to understand whether they can commit to the expected time commitments and, if there is a conflict, effectively prioritise meetings. See my blog on the subject for more information. Off the back of the conversation, I have been testing some automation around agendas which I want to now share.

My Invite to You I will expect you to attend my meeting if: I provide you with the knowledge you need to make the meeting a success, which includes: What preparation do you need to complete to contribute to the meeting? What do I expect from you during the meeting? What do I expect from you following the meeting? I provide a clear agenda for the meeting?