Tag Archives: Teams

2020/06/24 · 11:29

Office 365 Exposed, Episode 19: Here Comes the New Book!

This episode marks a happy occasion: the upcoming release of the 2021 version of Office 365 for IT Pros.

editor’s note: we are running a sale. Buy the 2020 edition now, get the 2021 edition for free!

Tony, Vasil, and I talk about the book creation process, why the book’s a subscription instead of a single-priced purchase, how the sausage is made, and why tech editing is so important. We close out the episode by choosing our “favorite” recent O365 feature– you may be surprised to hear our choices.

Episode 19, all about the 2021 book!

Office 365 Exposed, Episode 18: Live from Microsoft Teams

Tony and I had grand ambitions of recording a podcast but, uh, things have been a little busy, what with all the lockdown, working-under-quarantine, and so on. We did something a little different this time– we recorded this episode in a Teams meeting with guests in attendance. See if you can spot the difference!

(programming note: we originally recorded a section planned on the coming death of Basic Authentication in Exchange Online. As Microsoft has pushed this date back until sometime in the happy future, we took that segment out since most of it was us expressing certainty that Microsoft wouldn’t push the date back.)

Episode 18, live from the midst of COVID-19-topia

Microsoft Teams privacy bug: the cat and the camera

As longtime readers probably know, I have a cat. As cats do, he will sometimes jump on my desk.

Pancake the cat on his royal pillow

Some of you may know that, because my job entails working with a worldwide team, I often have early-morning conference calls. To make this easier, I have a small workstation in my bedroom where I can work and be near the coffee machine. This machine is set up with a Logitech c920 webcam and a Blue Snowball USB microphone.

Most of you probably don’t know that I tend to pace when on telephone calls.

So picture the scene. I’ve straggled out of bed to grab a cup of coffee, yawn and stretch, and get on a call. I’m pacing around and speaking. Suddenly the gentleman I’m speaking to (my long-suffering counterpart, Tony Sterling, who owns our customer experience team) starts cracking up. “Dude, turn your camera off!”

Sure enough, somehow the Teams app had started showing Tony video of me pacing around in my boxers and T-shirt. Thankfully it was only him. I apologized deeply, turned off the camera, and removed Pancake from the keyboard. After the meeting, I scoured the Teams documentation to find out what the keyboard shortcut for controlling the camera was.

There isn’t one. This made me a little nervous, nervous enough to put a Post-It note over the camera lens so Pancake didn’t accidentally turn on the camera one night when I was asleep or something.

Today I was in a Teams meeting. The cat jumped on the keyboard and… voila… I got a macOS permissions dialog asking me whether Teams should have permission to use the camera. He’d done it again!

It turns out that when you’re in a Teams meeting, hitting a key will act like a mouse click on whatever control currently has focus. By default, the camera on/off button has focus. Try it yourself: join a meeting, switch out of the Teams app and back into it, and hit a key.

This is, shall we say, not a great design. I appreciate that the Teams team has provided keyboard focus selection, which is great for accessibility, but having focus default to camera on/off is a recipe for unpleasant surprises.

Lesson learned: since I can’t keep my cat off the keyboard, I’ll keep my webcam covered.

Office 365 Exposed, Episode 10

Tony and I decided to do a special holiday edition of the podcast to celebrate a banner 2017. In 2018, we have some big things planned– but until then, enjoy this episode where you can learn what our favorite new Office 365 features were, hear Tony fulminate about the Teams PowerShell extension, and find out whether we actually believe that Teams will kill off email (spoiler: nope.)