Microsoft is unlocking the "Full Potential" of Private Channels in Microsoft Teams: What You Need to Know

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It has been a while since I posted something just about a Microsoft Teams update, as a lot have been Copilot in Teams to be honest. But here is a real Microsoft Teams update I think is worth knowing about, and it involves Security and Compliance as well. Microsoft is rolling out a "major" update to private channels in Teams, starting in late September 2025 and continuing through mid-December. This biggest change in this update is a shift in how private channel data is stored from individual user mailboxes to a dedicated channel mailbox. Not only will this simplifie compliance management, it will also and align private channels with shared channels, making governance and experience more consistent across Teams. This update promises to increase the support up to 1000 channels per team and 5000 members per channel, removing previous limitations. Teams will also allow meetings to be scheduled directly within private channels, enhancing collaboration.  For organizations using Micr...

Enable or edit Lync users based on AdGroupMembership

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In my previous blogposts on Lync user management using PowerShell, I have demonstrated how you can edit  by using an OU search string, or import a csv file. I thought maybe it would be nice to show how to add/manage Lync users by searching for a AD Group. It might be a bit tricky, but it is possible.

I have created a tiny script to prompt the admin for the group name, find users within that group, enable them for Lync and finally enabling the user for Enterprise voice (Presuming the phone attribute in AD is populated in the correct E.164 format, or the script might need adjustment) and setting a specific policy (just because I can, not because I have to).

Something worth mentioning, the set-csuser doesn't seem to like being pipelined to, which is why the get-adgroup is run twice.

The first part of the script is not doing anything, it's just a reminder to import the ad module. The first thing you have to do, is to enter the ADGroup Name (the display name of the group).


When the ADGroup is known to the script, we move on to enabling those users for Lync (skip this part if they are already enabled, but you want to edit users). This is quite straight forward.


But I'm not done yet. I also want to enable the user for voice, and grant him a client policy (These are just examples. Your imagination of PS command combinations is your only limitation).

Doing all I wanted to gave me an unexpected problem. As it turns out, the "get-adgroupmember" will not return the phone property of the user, and it became a challenge to figure out a way to get that property. That is why there are two foreach statements with in this last section. After we get hold of the adgroupmemner name, we can run the get-csaduser with that name (A bit dirty? I know, but it works).


As you can see, the script is fetching the $_.phone attrib of the user, and uses it to create the LineURI after adding the "tel:" prefix.

If you want to take a closer look at the actual script, it can be found right here. Have fun playing with it :)