Microsoft Teams Displays Update | June 2021

by Contributed | Jun 28, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In this month’s update to the Teams display you will see that the experience is becoming increasingly personalized to your preferences and working style. We also would love to hear from you about how you use your Teams display! Please comment below on where you use your display and how you use it to stay productive and in the flow of work.

1. New Wallpapers for display screen

Feeling a new change? A new array of wallpapers are now available for use on Teams Devices in a variety of colors and designs. Select one based on your mood, the weather, or close your eyes and choose one at random for a fun surprise to back your ambient screen, calendar, and other apps.

2. Live captions 1:1 calls

Come again, say what? No matter how hard we try to listen actively, sometimes it can just be hard to understand what our colleagues are saying. Whether that is due to language barriers or noise distractions, this new feature in the display writes out what is being said in a 1:1 call in real time. These captions are available in US English and will not be available on the government cloud.

3. Presenter can unmute participants without “Raise Hand”

In a meeting where there are presenter and attendant roles, usually the attendants will be muted to prevent and disturbances to the content. In order to contribute with video or audio, an attendant would have had to raise their hand and the presenter would manually unmute them. With this new meeting setting, an attendant can unmute themselves to make a contribution without waiting for the presenter. This will improve the natural engagement to the meeting people and content and can encourage self-selected participation.

4. Microsoft Outlook Contacts will be available on Teams displays in read-only mode

If you have contacts that are saved in Microsoft Outlook with a phone number, these contacts are now visible in the People app. While only the phone number for each contact can be seen today, this is an easy way to search for Outlook connections and dial out with a few taps of a finger.

5. Improved usability for advanced calling features

While using your display a few new options are now available to give you additional information and processes depending on your needs. When you select the drop down arrow within the active call indicator icon, you can see the status of the person you are clicking on and a few quick actions like calling a related contact. Additionally, if one of your contacts has multiple numbers, you can now use this drop down to select which number to contact before placing an outgoing call.

When a boss or admin are in calls, the touch target to see call status has been updated. Pressing these contacts will show an action sheet to either see call status or to make an outgoing call to them.

6. Support for DTMF in Pre-Call Screen

Dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) will now be available in pre-call screens which can easily facilitate quick responses for auto attendant scenarios.

Updates on the Microsoft 365 platform community calls

by Contributed | Jun 28, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We have been hosting different set of Microsoft 365 community calls since 2015 where we share the latest news and do live demos on the different capabilities in Microsoft 365.

We are excited to share more details on our updated community call structure focusing holistically on the Microsoft 365 developer platform. Based on a community survey from spring 2021, it was visible that a more holistic platform level messaging would be needed, rather than having isolated community calls based on individual products in Microsoft 365. When we are creating solutions and services for the Microsoft 365, we often combine numerous technologies across this platform stack, so this new model is targeted on covering more widely the awesomeness of Microsoft 365.

We will also have some Northern Hemisphere summer cancellations.

What’s new? – New weekly Microsoft 365 Platform community call

This call is targeted for the Microsoft 365 engineering PMs and other Microsoft employees to update our community on the latest features and capabilities across the Microsoft 365. Call will start from 31st of August 2021 and will happen each Tuesday at 8 AM PT. Like other community calls, this call is recorded and published from the Microsoft 365 Community YouTube channel.

This call will replace monthly Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint community calls. It will also feature other Microsoft 365 features and capabilities.

• Download invite on the Microsoft 365 platform call – Recurrent weekly call starts from Tuesday  31 of August


• Direct link to join the call is https://aka.ms/m365-dev-call-join

This call will typically have following generic agenda:

• 0-15 min – Latest news from Microsoft and group photo


• 15-30 min – Microsoft 365 demo 1


• 30-45 min – Microsoft 365 demo 2


• 45-60 min – Microsoft 365 demo 3

We will answer on any questions throughout the call in the chat.

Summer schedule adjustments

Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint monthly community calls are on a break during summer and will discontinue after that as they will be replaced by the platform call.

Other calls will continue normally through out the summery.

Microsoft 365 community calls – available for everyone to join

Here’s a summary of existing Microsoft 365 calls and the structure for future. Join on the calls to hear about the latest features and to engage with the community. All community calls are recorded. Call summaries are published as blog post articles at Microsoft 365 PnP Tech Community blog and videos at Microsoft 365 Community YouTube channel.

• Adaptive Cards – 2nd Thursday each month at 9 AM PT – no summer break


• Microsoft Identity Platform – 3rd Thursday every month at 9 AM PT – no summer break


• Office add-ins – Second Wednesday every month 8 AM PT – no summer break


• Power Apps – Third Wednesday every month 8 AM PT – no summer break


• SharePoint Framework – bi-weekly call on Thursday at 7 AM PT – no summer break


• Microsoft 365 developer community (with community demos) – bi-weekly call on Thursday at 7 AM PT – no summer break


• Microsoft 365 developer platform call – weekly on Tuesdays at 8 AM PT – starts from 31st of August
  
  

Discontinued calls, replaced with the weekly call on Tuesdays:

• Microsoft Graph


• Microsoft Teams


• SharePoint

These invites will be routed to the new weekly call starting from 31st of August.

You can download invites for the community calls from https://aka.ms/m365pnp.

Learn Microsoft Graph Toolkit interactively with a code tour

by Contributed | Jun 28, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Learn interactively how to turn your React app into a Microsoft 365 app with Microsoft Graph Toolkit.

The easiest way to connect your app to Microsoft 365

Using Microsoft Graph Toolkit is the easiest way to connect your app to Microsoft 365. Toolkit’s components help you retrieve relevant data from Microsoft 365 and show it in your app in any way you want. And with toolkit’s authentication providers, setting up auth is a matter of adding a few lines of code. Never again fiddle with setting up a login, handling access tokens, building web requests, and dealing with errors.

Learn Microsoft Graph Toolkit interactively

To help you learn what Microsoft Graph Toolkit has to offer and how you’d use it in your app, we recently released a new learning path on Microsoft Learn. By following a few learn modules you’ll learn everything that you need to know to use the toolkit in your app. But that’s not all.

Thinking about the different ways in which people learn, we’ve launched an experiment – an interactive code tour that you can follow to add Microsoft Graph Toolkit to a React app.

By following the instructions in the tour, you gradually extend an empty React app with Microsoft Graph Toolkit turning it into a true Microsoft 365 app. What’s cool about this code tour, is that it puts the code of your app in the center. Rather than reading long-form, you’re in the code and get relevant, and in-place tips for building your app.

The Microsoft Graph Toolkit React code tour is a great way to quickly experience how you’d use the toolkit in a React app. We’d love it if you gave it a try and told us what you think. Shall we consider building tours for other technologies and scenarios?

Try the Microsoft Graph Toolkit React code tour

Monitor Resource Allocation with Project Power BI Template

by Contributed | Jun 28, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

One important function of a resource manager or a project manager is to monitor the assignments for each of their resources so that they can effectively balance their team’s workloads while minimizing overallocation. To efficiently manage the resources and make necessary adjustments, project managers or resource managers need to be able to view their workloads and availability.

The Power BI Report Template for Project for the web provides a solution for powerful and effective resource management. A “Resource Allocation” report page has been added to the Power BI Template. This report can help answer questions such as how much work is allotted to a resource each day, what are the active tasks a resource needs to work on, or what are the future tasks allotted to a resource.

Where can you find the resource allocation report?

You can find the updated report here: aka.ms/ProjectReports 

You can also build an allocation report on top of your previously downloaded and customized report pack by following the steps below.     

How to build the allocation report?

To build a resource allocation report, you will need resource timephased data. The time phased data is stored in the Resource Assignment table . Follow the steps to get work allocated to a resource for each day:

1. Open your Project for the web Power BI Template in Power BI desktop app

2. Create a new blank query and use the “Resource Assignment Staging” table as the source

3. Remove the columns that are not needed but keep msdyn_bookableresourceid, msdyn_plannedwork, msdyn_projectid, msdyn_resourceassignmentid, msdyn_taskid.

4. Filter out any msdyn_plannedwork rows for non-null values.

5. Transform msdyn_plannedwork column to JSON.

6. Expand the List data in msdyn_plannedwork to new rows and then expand data in the records (End, Hours and Start).

7. Remove the “/Date(“ from the End and Start columns using the Replace Values function.

8. The end and start are milliseconds from midnight 1970/01/01. To convert them into the required date format, add a new custom column to calculate the End and Start date from the milliseconds value.

Planned Work End= #datetime(1970,1,1,0,0,0)+#duration(0,0,0,[PlannedWork.End]/1000)

9. Change the type of new columns to Date.

That’s it, now you can build any visualization on top of this data that you prefer.

Please submit feedback through in-app feedback button on new scenarios you would like in your Power BI Template for Project for the web.