M365 - Microsoft Teams Center

Hello from the bunker! I assume most of you will be reading this blog post from my future, and hopefully the world has returned to something closer to “normal”. By normal, I mean there isn’t a pandemic going on and people can leave their houses. As I write this blog post, I am about a month into the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and I haven’t left my house except for trips to the grocery store for what feels like about 20 years.

Teams is Microsoft’s collaboration hub within Office 365. Teams was originally introduced as a direct answer to Slack, but it’s become a much bigger solution than that over the last two years it has been publicly available within Office 365.

If your familiar with my writing, you know I'm a huge proponent of Office 365 administrators learning and using PowerShell. While it may be true that some admin tasks are easier to accomplish with a GUI, I'm strongly of the opinion that doing as much as possible in PowerShell will help build invaluable skills.

I have spent most of the last six years of my professional life configuring Exchange hybrid deployments for organizations looking to move their email into Office 365. Speaking from the perspective of someone who has set it up repeatedly, Exchange hybrid is pretty straight forward. You take your on-premises Exchange organization and run the Hybrid Connectivity Wizard (HCW) to connect to Office 365. I suppose there is more to it than that, but this blog post is not the place to go into those details.

Generally, I write about Exchange and Office 365 topics, but recently I’ve been doing more work in the Skype for Business Online area. That is still Office 365, but it’s an area I haven't paid much attention to in the past. Until the release of the E5 license with Cloud PBX, I don’t think there was a reason to pay attention to Skype for Business Online. It was really only good for IM and presence, and there was nothing to configure or set up there.