Teams auto renewal - Groups expiration policy

If your company have Azure AD Premium licenses, there is a new "housekeeping" feature coming this month. Microsoft 365 roadmap feature 56784 is being rolled out, and it will slightly change how the expiration policy works.

Where you previously set an expiration policy and an notification was sent out to every admin, groups will  now be auto renewed based on activities within the group.

The following actions will lead to auto renewal:

• SharePoint: View, edit, download, move, share, or upload files
• Outlook: Join group, read/write group message from group space, Like a message (in Outlook Web Access)
• Teams: Visit a Teams channel

I encourage all my customers with the premium license to use this feature as a part of their lifecycle management, and I think the experience just got better as active teams now will be renewed automatically and not require manual actions by group owners (which can be seen as "nagging" when the expiration timer is set with a short timer.

New file experience coming to Teams

We all know (I hope) there is a tight integration between Teams and SharePoint. But many have pointed out the files tab isn't as rich the library experience in SharePoint.

Today, Microsoft announced an update that will bring these two products closer together and make the files experience a lot better. You can read about all the new features and how it make it easier to solve your tasks from within Teams. (Link)

Personally I've been using the "Open in SharePoint" many times, but after I started testing the new feature, I see I'm using it less than before.

Cross posting in multiple channels

Here is another feature that has been in the works for a while, and I know a lot of customers who have been waiting for this: Cross porting of messages in multiple channels in multiple teams.

It easy to use, and accessed through the "rich text" button on the bottom left when you create a new message. Then select your channels in the "select channels" button.

Be aware though, once these are posted, there is for now no way to see which channels you have posted the message in, and there is no aggregated view of all the comments in the different channels, they have to be monitored individually for now.

This is the M365 roadmap ID 52393 and should reach all tenants by the end of this month.