Category: Microsoft

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Weird issue with video freezing in Teams – RESOLVED

The past couple of weeks I have been seeing an odd issue where in Microsoft Teams my video became frozen. Annoying to say the least in this time where everyone is working from home and having video meetings. Up until a couple of weeks ago it was all working perfectly, no hardware or software changes on my machine (other than the usual windows updates).
Video worked in all other meeting software (Zoom, Webex, Go to meeting, Sametime meetings) which I have been using.

Troubleshooting had included – reinstalling my external webcam, swapping USB ports, removing and reinstalling Teams all of which made absolutely no difference at all.

Google was giving me some very generic fixes for ‘Webcam not working in Teams’ .. I switched my search results to ‘Video freezing in Teams’ and bingo a bunch of new trouble shooting ideas.

The one that has worked has been adding a registry entry, a quick reboot and as if by magic video has stopped freezing 🙂

Hopefully this will help anyone else having the same issues as it has been driving me insane for at least 2 weeks.

Solution :

  • Press Windows + R, type regedit and ok to open windows registry editor
  • Backup registry Database
  • Navigate to –
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Media Foundation\Platform
  • Create a new DWORD value –  New>DWORD (32-bit)
  • Name the new value ‘EnableFrameServerMode’ and make sure its value is set to ‘0’
  • Close registry editor, and restart windows to take effect the change
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This week I am at #ESPC19

This week I am in a chilly Prague at #ESPC19. This is one of the biggest Microsoft user group events in Europe and is definately a favourite of mine.

It is the first big event post Ignite and is a great oportunity to catch up with all the news and progress since then.

As usual my focus is all about the social business side and collaboration so its all about Teams and Yammer for me and I will be heading to a few sessions on those topics.

Of course BCC have a great Teams Management Tool – so if Teams is your thing, or you are struggling to manage the sprawl of Teams let us know.

These events are always great fun and very social and tonight is Party night – Prague is a beautiful city, with good beer, great food and the architecture is amazing so I am really looking forward to seeing some sights whilst here too.

 

 

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The year of Yammer

As I am working a lot with Microsoft 365 lately and I am a social animal I was very interested in what is going on with Yammer – 2020 is #YearOfYammer  and rightly so.
Microsoft have given Yammer the love it needs and it will now integrate with the rest of the O365 stack of products and work hand in hand with Teams and Sharepoint just as it should.

The new Yammer is slick looking, well integrated and fills the parts for social collaboration that Teams can’t quite reach- which is exactly what it should be for.
Here is a quick overview video:
 
Here is a summary on what is new:
  • A new, personalized discovery feed powered by AI
  • Customize the All Company feed to bring your organization’s unique branding and culture into the default Yammer community.
  • Renaming Yammer groups to communities and adding many new improvements and experiences.
  • Adding a cover photo to communities
  • Expanding the use of announcements so you can have the same reach with polls, questions, or praise
  • Improvements for gifs, videos, link previews, and file attachments to make sharing beautiful content simple
  • Community managers (admins) can now pin a conversation to the top of the feed
  • Community managers will have the ability to close conversations. Use this to share messages as read-only etc.
  • New event discovery page to each community so members can stay informed about what’s happening
  • Schedule and produce a Live Event in Yammer using webcams and desktop and file sharing
  • Totally rebuilt the mobile apps to bring modern responsiveness and readability to both iOS and Android.
  • The new Yammer App in Teams can be pinned directly into the Teams navigation rail for quick access. It’s Yammer. Just in Teams.
  • Participate in Yammer conversations without leaving your Outlook inbox.
  • Bringing new Yammer to the conversations web part for SharePoint – including file attachments, rich text, and question and answer to help you capture knowledge and mark best answers.
  • Enhanced Security and Compliance
  • eDiscovery in Yammer to rollout in December 2019
  • Native Mode, Admins can confidently manage Yammer policy through Azure Active Directory and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center without entering Yammer to manage things like group membership, group privacy, or data classification
 
 
There are a couple of good blogs about what is coming :
 
 
Full announcement from Ignite
 
The new Yammer is due to roll out to all customers in the first half of 2020. A private preview will be available in early 2020 which I have signed up for of course as I like to be in the know about these things.
I spent a lot of time talking to the product managers and developers and I am really excited about what the new Yammer will offer – can’t wait to start using it.

#YearOfYammer

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MS Teams stuck on dnd

Yesterday after an update and a reboot my Teams app was set to offline and no matter what I tried to do it was stuck. Not at all frustrating as I use Teams every day.

My other office apps were working ok, and my status showed as online in the web version of teams.

I couldn’t work out why it wasn’t playing ball so a quick google led me to a few community articles about setting the status as a command rather than from the UI.

Even though I was offline already the only way I could get my status to show up as available was to set my status to dnd on the desktop app using the command /dnd and then back to available with /available, I then had to force it by hitting the webapp version of teams and suddenly my desktop app showed up as being available!

No idea why it happened in the first place, but this work around seems to have resolved the issue. Hopefully this won’t happen again, but if it does at least I have a work around.

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European Collaboration Summit was a blast

The European Collaboration Summit was last week in Germany. I am still fairly new to the world of Microsoft Conferences and user groups / community events, but the collabsummit was fantastic.

Will about 2,000 attendees it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest community run events in the world. Jam packed with lots of sessions about all types of collaboration there was too much to chose from.

I presented on Wednesday 29th May. The session “How to automate life cycle management of Teams and ensure compliance and security”, covered some of the challenges organizations face with managing teams – from creation and security, through to Teams lifecycle management and how BCC can help with our new Teams Management module for AdminTool.

My first time presenting at a Microsoft Event and the audience were great – so thank you 🙂 Yet again Olaf pushed me slightly out of my comfort zone as he is a big believer in my ability – which I am very greatful.

 

The sense of community at the collabsummit was amazing .. this conference has been running for about 10  years and the community is family to a lot of the attendees – which I can relate to after being in the IBM space with the community.

The thing I have learned most is that

  • The adoption problems are the same not matter what the technology you use
  • Collaboration is all about the people – still all about the people and has always been about the people
  • Teams is the way forward for Microsoft as far as real time collaboration goes
  • The Microsoft community guys are fantastic

I am very much looking forward to seeing some of my new family at Microsoft Ignite in Novemeber and the ECSP Conference in December.

Next step is to get an MVP .. that is high on my priority this year 🙂