4. Managing Private Channel Creation Policies
So now that we’ve looked at our different team channels and we’ve kind of looked at and configured some of the different settings, what I want to do now is show you where in your team’s Admin Center policies you can configure whether or not somebody is allowed to create a private channel such as this one. Okay? So to do this, we’re going to jump into Portal.Microsoft.com. All right, that’s a sordid little starting point here. We’re going to click on the team’s admin centre again. If it doesn’t show up, just click “Show All.” And here we are.
And from there, we’re going to drop down teams, and we’re going to look at teams’ policies, all right? And for the time being, we only have a global default. We’re going to click on that, and then from there, this is where you can turn this off for everybody if you want. You do not want to allow the creation of private channels. This is a way to go about doing it. Of course, if you want, you can click Add, and then you can actually create a new team’s policy. I guess I could call it sales. And then I could adjust the setting there. If I wanted to turn it off just for that one group, I could, and then I could basically hit Apply. Then from there, you’ll be able to select this sales team policy. And you’ll notice I’ve got a Manage Users option here that I can click on, and I can search and notice. It says here that you can assign the policy to individual users.
To assign the policy to a group, go to the Group Policy Assignment tab. So I can put in individual users here if I want to assign this to them. Or I can click this group policy assignment. And let me warn you guys: you may have to wait for this to show up. It does not show up immediately, but once it’s there, you may have to wait a little while and refresh your browser. But once it shows up, you can click on Group Policy Assignment here. You can click “Add Group.” You can then add your existing sales group here. After you click Add, you’ll have a select rank. And they tell you that with Rank, if users in the group are part of other groups with policies assigned, those users will inherit the policies. This is basically a matter of prioritisation because you can only have one. Users can only really apply one of these at a time. Okay, so that’s just a priority level, right? lower priority wins.
So then you go down here, select the policy, click Apply, and away you go. All right, so it’s now applied. Okay, let’s jump over now and take a look at how we can do this through some of the PowerShell stuff. Now the first thing to be aware of when it comes to dealing with your channel policies is that the commands for doing this are not part of the team’s commandments. Unfortunately, when we installed the team’s command lines earlier in one of the previous lessons for PowerShell, they didn’t come with this. And the reason is because these are commands that were associated with Skype for Business. And of course, eventually, I do feel like they’ll just make their way into the team’s commands, but right now they’re not there.
So you will actually have to install those. and I’ll show you how to do it quickly. They made it a little bit of a pain in the buttocks, and I’ll be honest with you on this. But ultimately, once you do the process once, it’s not so bad. So my point is that you will not have this command right here by default in PowerShell, even if you’ve installed the Teams command like we did in an earlier lesson. But this is what the command looks like. Channel policy for csteams Take note of the module that comes with Skype, okay? So you can actually follow that link if you go there, and it talks about how you can install the Skype module. All right? And you can click this link right here, and they’ll basically go over it with you step by step.
Okay? So what I’m going to do right now is walk you through this step by step if you want to do it, and get the SkypeOnline connectors so you have all the power of those commands to control everything. So the first thing you have to do to get these Skype commands is to download the Skype for Business Online Connector module. So you just click that little link, and then you click download. It’s going to download this little file, and then you just install it. Okay? So you’re just going to click it. It’s going to pop a little box up, and you’re going to install it. I’ve already installed it, so I don’t have to install it again. That’s going to be the first thing you’re going to do.
Okay, then generally, what I like to do is just go by this little article, because it tells you exactly what to do. and I think that’s probably going to be the easiest thing for you. So we’re going to pull PowerShell up, and then we’re going to type import Module Skype Online Connector. So we’re going to do that. It’s now imported. Then, just like they show in their user credential equals get credentials, you’re going to create a variable by going to Enter, and I’m going to put in my log-on information for JC at ExamLabPractice.com, put my password in here, and now I’ve got that stored in a variable. So then we’re just going to create another variable called “SFB session equals new CS Online.” So now that we’ve installed it, we have the CS:GO commands. Oh, by the way, if you had PowerShell open before you installed the commands, you’re going to want to close and reopen it. Okay.
So we’ll call these NEWCS online sessions. This is going to establish a session that is going to be able to pull in connectivity with Skype for Business so we can run this. So then we’ll say “credential,” and then the user will call upon that variable that we created. So we’ll hit enter. All right. And that’s going to establish the session and store it inside that variable. Now we just have to import the session. So we’ll import PS session and use the session variable. There we go, hit Enter, and it should be connected after a few seconds, and we now have our commands that we need in order to work with some of these additional features that we have. Now by the way, the reason I’m getting an errorhere is because I had already done all this.
So that’s already been done. If you ever want to do it again, it tells you that you can run this “allow clobber” parameter and it’ll reinstall everything. But I’ve already got it. But if you were to do that, you should not be getting that error. Okay. All right. So now we are actually ready. We can go back, and we’re actually able to run the SETCS channels policy command. Okay, so there’s the Set CS Team Channel Policy, but we can also run a git against that. So if we bring up PowerShell again, we can say “Get-Steams-Channel-Policy,” hit Enter, and it’s going to show us what we’ve got here. So here are my sales that I’ve got listed there. That was the policy that I just created, and if I wanted to modify it, for example, I could say, “Set CSteams channel policy identity,” and the identity would be sales.
And then I can say “allow private channel creation,” and we say “dollar sign false.” If we wanted to turn that off, we would go about doing that. So, at this point, people will be unable to create channels in that policy and will simply verify that it exists, that it has been configured, and let’s change it back to True. I’m just hitting the up arrow, and we’re just going to change that to true. When you do a true false in PowerShell, you’ll always have that dollar sign in front of it. So we’re going to hit Enter, and we’ve now hopefully changed it back, and we’ll go back into A Get and verify that it’s true again. So that’s how you manipulate this using PowerShell. You do have to jump through a few hoops, and I do think Microsoft is going to make it a little easier in the future. But as of right now, you have to get the Skype for Business connector in order to do that. So hopefully that clarifies everything for you. And now you have a good understanding of it.
5. Managing Email Integration
I’d now like to show you how you can actually allow an email address to be associated with the channel and allow your users to be able to email the channel to have messages pop up. It can be very convenient for people to forward emails and other items directly into channels, making collaboration much easier. So in order to do this, we are going to start out on portal Microsoft.com.This is our Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Look over here to the left; we have teams. Okay, again, if you don’t see it, just click “Show All.” And then here it is. We’re in the team’s admin center. Okay, so what we’re going to do now is drop down here where it says. org-wide settings, and we’re going to click on Team Settings. All right? So when you get to this page, if you scroll down, you’ll see an area that says email integration. Now, that is where this is controlled.
Okay? So it tells you here that email integration is going to let people send an email to a team’s channel and have the contents of the email displayed in conversation. So if you want, you can turn that off. If you don’t want it to be allowed to allow users to send emails to a channel, I’m going to leave it turned on, and then you can turn it off, turn it on, or whatever you want to do there, but I’m going to have mine turn on and say “accept channel email from these SMTP domains.” So, if you want, you can specify domains from which you will only accept messages. So, for example, if we’re only going to allow emails to come in from Examlabpractice.com, Contoso.com, and Fabricam.com, I can do that. I can specify, and it says to press space after entering a domain. So that’s how you would do it; you can enter multiple domains there if you want.
OK, so once that’s already been turned on, the only thing we’re really doing here is just verifying that it hasn’t been turned off. Right? So let’s move on to Teams. We’ll open up teams, and we’re going to basically check to make sure that this actually works. Okay? So, right now, we have convention planning and fourth quarter sales planning. Why don’t we do that? Okay, let’s do that. So the first thing I want to do is click here; we’re going to click Manage the Team, and let’s see who our members are. Okay, so we’ve got Greg Johnson and Chris Jones. So why don’t we test this out with Greg Johnson? So I’m going to fourth-quarter sales planning now. I’m going to click the little ellipse symbol, and I’m going to say, “Get an email address.” Okay, so it’s going to generate an email address for me. Sometimes it takes a moment. There we go.
Okay, now there’s the email address, but before we look at that, let’s click on advanced settings and look at our options. So right now, anyone can send emails to this address, which is pretty obvious what that means. Anyone collaborating with guests must be a member of this team, OK? Only email sent from these domains So, in this case, anyone can, technically, email the team anonymously if they so desire. Only team members are mentioned in this one. That’s obviously a little bit more restricted. And then finally, you can do kind of the same thing we saw in the team’s admin center. We can say only email sent from these domains I’m just going to leave it as is. Okay? So from there, I’m going to copy the email address. Now I’m going to go to the portal office. Let’s open up Outlook and send an email, and then we’ll jump over and see if Greg Johnson is able to see it. All right, so here we go. I’m going to click to create a new message. I’m just going to paste the link that I copied in. There it is, right there.
And I’m going to say, “Let’s talk sales.” All right. Sounds very exciting, doesn’t it? So, blah blah, fourth quarter, boring data. Yay. All right, so I’m going to do that. I’m going to hit send, and hopefully that’ll go through. Now I’ve got Greg Johnson logged on in a different window. Here it is. This is Greg Johnson. I’ve got him in a private browser over here. As you can see, Greg Johnson, who is logged in, can see this message in a separate window. So it did work like it was supposed to. So very simple to configure and set up. and hopefully that helps you wrap your brain around it.
6. Configuring External Access for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business
I’d like to now talk to you about disconfiguring some of the external sharing we have with SharePoint OneDrive. So your users can go through a discussion and have the ability to share files, right? They can share links and files. Now, with your teams and the communications that are going on there, your users are being tied back to the SharePoint site, as well as when they are sharing files. This can link back to OneDrive for business. So I can go here in this Manager discussion or private chat and share this image with your users.
And if I go right here to files, it’ll show you right here that this image has been shared. Okay? So link information goes into SharePoint, and then on the back end of that, from my user perspective, it’s tied to my OneDrive. But here’s the other question, and this is kind of what this is focused on: what about the external sharing options with all this?
What happens when you have a guest in your team and you’re basically sharing files with somebody who’s outside your organization, right?So you want to be thinking about that and how we can control the SharePoint side of that as well as the One Drive side of that, because we want to make sure that we’re not sharing information with somebody who’s not really supposed to see it. Especially when it comes to classifications and other fun stuff. So let me show you where we’re going to go. We’ll start by jumping into the SharePoint Administrative Center, which is where we’re going to look at how SharePoint manages its external sharing. So to do that, we’re going to jump over to portal Microsoft.com.
So we’ll open that up first. Alright? Okay. And then from there, we’re going to click “Show all,” and we should see the SharePoint Admin Center option here. We’re going to click on that. We’re going to expand sites and then click on “active sites,” okay? From there, we can select whichever of the sites we want. OK? So if I were looking at, say, the Payroll theme, by the way, there’s the URL for that, and SharePoint is keeping the active site for that. And then I can go right here and I can click on Permissions, and that’s going to show you who your owners are.
OK, this is also going to tell you if you’ve got any visitors. So that’s important. Then there are policies. And this is where your external sharing is going to be. So I’m going to go here. It says this site can be shared with new and existing guests. I believe I talked about this in my guest video. But just to kind of run through the items again, since we are talking specifically about external sharing with the help of people posting files and all that, So right here, I can share with anyone. I can accommodate new and existing guests. I can say existing guests only, and I can say only people in your organization. You can limit sharing by domain.
So you can add domains here if you want. Okay, allow or block a specific domain. So either allow only specific domains or block specific domains. Okay? And then, down here, the default sharing linksays are the same as organisation-level settings. So what we said in our settings, which we went over in our guest videos a little earlier, is OK? Right now, the Default Link permission is the same as the level. But if you wanted to be more granular and you wanted SharePoint to have its own settings on that, you could actually uncheck those boxes and modify those permissions. Okay? So that is the SharePoint side of things. Now let’s go look at the one-drive side of things. So for one drive, we’re just going to look over on the left here. We’re inside the SharePoint admin center. We’re going to click on the OneDrive admin center. All right? Then we’ll get to sharing. All right? And if you scroll down, you’ll see it right here: external sharing.
So you can move the little slider bar up and down. And this is going to help you understand the relationship between One Drive and SharePoint, right? So far, we’ve set the most permissive option, allowing anyone to create Shareable links that don’t require sign-ins, okay? Then you can add new and existing external users, okay? Existing external users or only people in your organization So you can move this little bar down into these categories here. And interestingly enough, you can have different settings for SharePoint than you do for OneDrive on that if you want. Okay? So, with external sharing, if a user, say, in a private chat, posts a file and uploads it from their computer or whatever, post it into the chat channel, that file is linked with their OneDrive and permissions are set to share with whoever is there.
Of course, if we say only people in our organisation, then it won’t let them use OneDrive. If they post that in a channel, it will block them from being able to do that. Okay, keep in mind that in order for your users within your organisation to utilise these features and all that, they do have to have a licence for all of this. So they have to have a Microsoft 365 subscription or an Office 365 subscription that includes SharePoint, which gives you one drive. However, the majority of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 licences include OneDrive for Business, a terabyte of storage, and other features.
So they pretty much have it. But as far as external users go, they do have the ability to share with external users. If you allow this option here and it is the default, it is Share setting that up. But if you do not want OneDrive to be able to do that, you could drop that all the way to the bottom. Okay? And at that point, they would not be able to share with external users via OneDrive. Okay? Right now, it says users can share with SharePoint. So if you’re talking pure SharePoint without the help of OneDrive, then you could still share file links and all that. However, unless you have explicitly instructed people to use SharePoint without the use of OneDrive and all that, most people will set these to the same level. But OneDrive is your default storage location when users are out there posting files and stuff in private chats and making those available to people and all that, and they’re going to tie back to their storage.
Okay, so when a file gets posted, if we actually go over to Portal Office for a particular user, we can pull up OneDrive here and their files will show up here. So you have my recently shared files, and of course they have the OneDrive app. They’ll see this as well. So I can go to more libraries that show all the different shared libraries that this user account can take part in right now. Okay, so quite a few things are here, like sales and private discussions. OK, if there are any files that have been shared there, you go to private discussion and you can see any shared files that have taken part in that. Okay, the social team here is General, and we have a PDF file called Dishwasher that’s been posted there. You can see these files, as well as who posted them, through your OneDrive for Business account. Again, this is the user site, sort of like OneDrive for business, showing you everything. And then back over here, this is the admin centre where you’re able to see all that. They’re not really trying to turn this into a full-blown OneDrive and SharePoint course, but they do give you an idea of how this is all related together.
Okay? All right, so that is going to be your internal sharing. Your external sharing for one drive is going to be managed here. Okay? And then your SharePoint external sharing is managed by clicking on the actual active site, which is related to group policies, and you can manage it here. All right? And that’s how you’re going to manage directional sharing for both the SharePoint side as well as the One Drop side. But definitely, you should have watched the guest videos on all of this. That was earlier in the course because that’s where it really gets into organisational setup and all that good stuff. Alright, so hopefully that makes sense when working with external sharing between SharePoint and OneDrive.
7. Managing Cloud File Storage Options for Collaboration
So for the most part, teams integrate really well with SharePoint and OneDrive. Many of your file collaboration and other needs will be met by Microsoft products. But Teams does support the ability for you to share and collaborate on files using other file sharing features. Now, to be honest, there’s really not a whole lot of configuration here for this. It’s very simple to turn on or off, and you can just stop people from using it altogether if you want.
Or you can allow people to use it. So you might be surprised—it’s literally just a few little switches you can turn on and off. So there’s not a whole lot here. But the main thing is to just know that, yeah, you can allow integration with things like Dropbox and all that if you want. Or you can easily turn it off. Let me show you how to do that. Here we are on portal Microsoft.com.We’re going to go to the Teams Admin Center here, and then once we get into the Teams Admin Center, we’re going to drop down here where it says. org Wide Settings.
So this will enable or disable Teams for the entire organization. We’re then going to go to team settings, all right? And once that finally loads up, we can scroll down and take a look right here. So turn on or turn off. File sharing and cloud storage options for the Files tab so I can turn this off if I want. All these different options here—Citrix and Dropbox and Box, Google Drive, Ignite, all that stuff—are things you can allow for file sharing that can be integrated with Teams.
All of these features are supported by Teams, so I can easily disable them if necessary. Now your users can access them from within Teams; as you can see, I can return to my sales quarter report. Then your users can click Files, and they can see all the files and stuff that are here, including email messages, and they have the ability to go through a course and upload, and they can share links and things from Dropbox and all that if you allow it. If you don’t allow it, then they can’t. So again, very easy—sort of just turn on and turn off, and there’s not really too much configuration as far as all that goes.
