Microsoft Teams interface change when you’re added as a guest to another Team

For the life of me, I could not figure out how Microsoft had implemented their counterpart to Slack’s workspaces.. I personally found the lack of this feature (I thought) to be a deal breaker for my use of the platform, as I use Slack for personal use and really, REALLY wanted to move this functionality to Teams.

With the launch of FREE (yes, FREE) Teams, I was able to set up a free tenant and a Team for the club I belong to and really get to playing with how this feature would appear within Teams.

The Rub:

A feature of Microsoft’s Skype for Business that has been carried over to Teams is the hiding of features the user doesn’t have access to, keeping the interface nice and clean (I like this). The challenge here is that the drop down does not automatically appear when you’re added as a guest in another Tenant’s Team. When I browse to the Web Client, I see the following:

Teams Guest

However, in the Windows Client, nothing appears, even after a 10 minute wait…

Team No Guest

To resolve this, I had to click on the Teams Client logo in the notification bar, quit Teams and relaunch. After my client signed back in, I could see the drop down in the Windows client.

Teams Win Guest

I would like to see this appear without having to kill the application. Maybe we’ll get an update soon that fixes this…

Remove old Monitoring Service from SfB

Occasionally, normally after an upgrade or decommission, I come across a reporting service in the Skype for Business control panel that is no longer valid.

It doesn’t cause anyone (except my OCD) any pain, but I don’t want that sucker there any more..

Capture1

Here’s how we make my OCD’s pain go away 🙂

First, run Get-CsReportingConfiguration to get a list of what the topology believes are the reporting servers in your environment.

Capture2

From the output, we can see the nicely named version we’re expecting, as well as the now defunct configuration. We can usually identify this by the fact it has a service id and not a nice name. In this case Service:2-MonitoringStore-1.

Being extra careful (we don’t want to accidentally remove the wrong configuration), I run Get-CsReportingConfiguration -Identity <identity>. In this example, I ran:

Get-CsReportingConfiguration -Identity Service:2-MonitoringStore-1

Once I confirm that I have isolated the Reporting Configuration I want deleted, I proceed with:

Get-CsReportingConfiguration -Identity Service:2-MonitoringStore-1 | Remove-CsReportingConfiguration

Close and re-open the control panel and your pain should be relieved.

 

 

Test User or Common Area Phone Extension/Pin Sign-in with 2 Parameters

I recently came across a project that involved the migration of a large number of endpoints from an unmanaged state to a managed state.

 

As happens with these projects, a number of devices did not cut across cleanly for a multitude of reasons and manual intervention was required.

The first step in ensuring everything was as it was supposed to be was validating that the SfB account was able to successfully authenticate using the extension and pin combination we thought were set for that account.

I have to say, I love the fact that there are a multitude of test command within Skype for Business, but man, the use of them sometimes could do with a slightly more user friendly interface.

I wrote up this script to allow you to test the extension and pin signin without having to remember the full Test-CsPhoneBootstrap command and parameters.

 

P.S. We were testing this from the server in an environment with everything nicely isolated from everything else, so DHCP discovery was a no-go for this one…

 

Running the script:

1) Download and save the script to the folder of your choice
2) Execute as follow:

.\Test-CsPhoneSignin.ps1 -UserExtension 1234 -UserPin 123456

The script will ensure a pin has been set and that the user is not locked out, then retrieve the confiured pools and web service locations and test against them..

 

I hope this saves you some time 🙂

(Sad face emoji) It’s broken..

And when I say it’s broken, I’m talking about the emojis in Skype for Business.

As far as I know, this only affects the Click-2-Run version, and it’s not everyone that’s getting affected.

Luckily, there is a fairly quick way to fix this, which I share below. I make the presumption that you want to fix this for all of your policies, if that is not the case, please edit the script before you run it on your environment. 🙂 <- Happy face emoji (just in case)

Run this little beauty to fix your emojis, then have your clients exit and restart their SfB clients (some need a cache clean out, results may vary)

$emojifix = New-CsClientPolicyEntry -Name “DisableRicherEditCanSetReadOnly” -Value “true”
Get-CsClientPolicy | % {Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity $_.Identity -PolicyEntry @{Add=$emojifix}}

Get-CsClientPolicy | fl Identity, PolicyEntry