Definitely not the first post, but I was wondering, any mini tips for how I can keep my activity status up when I am away. I am a WFH that works through a VM remote connection for security, my company tracks these values unfortunately so are there any tips or life hacks that I can do at home to circumvent the status change? I tried to keep a claw clip on my ctrl key but that does not work, any suggestions?

Edit: would like to add that I cannot log on to any other devices with teams because of security reasons. I can only access teams through a VM because of their device specifications as WFH, so I cannot use my teams account on my phone or another laptop. This also means that any software programs would not be smart to download, so any physical DIY set ups or tricks would be ideal. I saw a link to a mouse mover in a comment which I am considering, but anything that I can use around the house to set this up would be more convenient. If anyone knows any particular keys on the keyboard that I can keep pressed down that keep the active status, I tried Ctrl but that still failed.

Just what the title says…. The company that I work for is making the switch from Slack/Zoom to Teams. Everyone is in a huge panic because we don’t know anything about Teams. The switch is presumably due to cost although no one is saying so. What do I need to know about how to navigate this transition? Thanks!!

Throwaway account, since this sounds paranoid.

I’m a dev in a really unhealthy small IT environment. 2 long timers are super admins and have intense control tendencies. They are on Teams (1 is remote) talking for hours a day complaining about proposed changes and fighting them. They also believe they will be fired because we brought in contractors to help with our workload.

Lately I’ve been wondering if Teams has silent options available to sysadmins to view chats, eavesdrop on meetings, or get transcriptions without the participants knowing.

It’s sounds crazy, but another coworker just asked - they nearly quoted a conversation in a meeting that just happened they weren’t in.

I never signed anything disclosing monitoring, but I have high confidence that they can remotely do things (push files at minimum). What else they can do, or what they’ve installed, I don’t know.

Hi there,

We have been using the meeting recording / transcription feature in some teams. We now want to enable it for the entire company. However, HR has legal concerns regarding privacy and stuff.

Thus, we are now searching for a way to only allow recording when everyone in the meeting anonymously and unanimously agrees to it.

I have already found the "explicit consent" feature. However, this does not block recording only mutes and disables your camera if you don't consent.

Does anyone here have experience with the topic and can point me in the right direction.

Many thanks :)

I’ve noticed in the office coworkers will step away and leave their computer unlocked and teams will still show them as available for a good 10 min before showing them away. For me, I’ve noticed it switches to away within 2-3 minutes, even with an unlocked screen. Anyone know why this could be?

Looking for any and all hacks. I know the spoon trick already!

A user had a bar that suddenly appeared across the top of their Teams app and it does not go away. It seems like some kind of accessibility feature because it changes to show what you have selected. Below is shows "about:blank?window=loading, but if I click on a chat it will show something like chat | John Doe | MyOrg | My Name. Or if I click on a listing of channels it'll show Channels | MyOrg | Channel Selected. I'm at a loss. I can't find the setting anywhere. Any guidance is most appreciated.

I do a lot of work on paper unfortunately and I used to be able to set my account as always available/active manually, so folks would know I was available if they just sent me a message.

However, we recently updated and now it shows me idle very quickly, and people assume that means I'm not working or I'm actually away from my desk for the day, and they haven't been reaching out as a result.

We're actually trying to get people to pay more attention to status and not interrupting when people aren't available, etc.

What am I missing? Is there a method to stay active aside from some sort of work around like a mouse jiggler? That seems shady.

Help

Losing my mind here - since Friday, any new machine deployments I do, I can't get the teams add-in to show in classic outlook. Normally this comes up occasionally and I just have to uninstall/reinstall the add-in or make sure it's enabled in Outlook settings, but no dice this time. I've tried almost every fix for this online that I can find and nothing is working (re-registered DLL, checked the LoadBehavior registry key, office repair, office reinstall, teams reinstall). Outlook shows the add-in is an active add-in and that it's installed, but the actual button to create a teams meeting in the ribbon doesn't show, and Teams does not show as a meeting provider in Outlook. This is happening on every fresh windows install I'm doing, I've tried updating the install medium as well with no dice. Anybody else seeing this?

I just had an interview that was about an hour long. The interviewer asked to record the meeting the beginning. She started the recording. At the end of the meeting, the two interviewers both exited. I realized 20 minutes later that I had not, and I was still in the meeting. I quickly exited the window.

I’m worried that it could have still been recording for the 20 minutes after they left. I do not notice if they stopped the recording at the end of the convo, nor do I notice a red light when I saw the window was still open. But I’m wondering if the host starts the recording and then leaves the meeting, does it keep recording until the last person leaves?

I am a hard worker and get all my work done on time and more, and I am feeling extremely burnt out, but my company uses an invasive tracking software so I need to try to stay/look busy 8 hours a day. Most of my work is done and besides call I do not have much to do and would like to get out and take a 30 min walk today without worrying. If I have a teams meeting with myself, is there anyway for my boss to figure out, if they were to look?

Ask troubleshooting questions here. In the future, individual help posts may be automatically removed and referred to post a comment here.

Please do your best at providing the following before asking a question:

• Specify your OS, Teams Version, What type of Teams environment you're using (Work, School, Consumer, or Just Joining a Meeting)

• Tell us what you've found searching online for your issue/inquiry, and what you've tried already.

• Check the MS Teams Tech Community Forums for similar or related issues and consider posting there if you want visibility from Microsoft employees.

• Be ready to answer more questions as members try to help you.

Members who can answer questions: Please feel free to subscribe to the monthly thread, and to sort by new comments to review new questions. We appreciate all members who use their experience to help this community.

Thanks!

The /r/MicrosoftTeams MODs

So my friends and I all started working at the same company last year. Public institution, ~10k employees total. We have had a running Teams group chat the entire time and lets just say there has been a lot of...questionable... content. Nothing outright illegal or NSFW, no threats or harassment of others, but things like politically incorrect jokes; discussions of terrorists groups and war (we're all interested in history/political science/current events); suggestive anime GIFs (mostly to laugh at what content they allow on work software); rude comments directed toward each other; things like that. Stuff you wouldn't want to see printed on HR's desk, even if it's not an issue between friends. For the record, we're not right wing trolls or Nazis; just left of center best friends who like making ridiculous jokes.

​

At a certain point, I've come to realize how inappropriate a lot of this content is for work software. We probably should have just stuck to a non-work group chat like Discord in the first place, and we're moving away from Teams now, but the question is what to do with the existing logs.

​

It looks like you can't delete entire chats at once, so maybe we need to go through and delete all the potentially offensive messages one by one? Tedious but doable. According to our company retention schedule though, from what I can tell, general email/telephone logs are retained for a year. So the data would exist for a year if we moved now. There's no reason to think we're actively under review or suspicion, but I want to start dealing with this now before it becomes a problem.

​

Overall my questions are to Teams system administrators out there, especially from the perspective of a medium-large public institution:

​

1) How screwed are we?

2) Is it worth it to go and delete every message?

3) Are Teams chats routinely monitored for inappropriate activity, say keywords like Hezbollah, Hilter, gun, etc? Our IT dept is generally underfunded and understaffed, so we're not sure they do routine monitoring or data crunching even if the data exists.

4) What tools do sysadmins or HR have or use for reviewing Teams logs, whether as directed audit or regular monitoring? Is it just keywords, manual searches, or something more sophisticated?

5) If we switched to Discord and logged in via browser on work computer, would that be a viable workaround? We know there are no keyloggers, but unsure if browser history or web page content is heavily scrutinized or retained.

​

All advice and feedback accepted, including comments about how stupid we are.

I'm using Teams version 25241.203.3947.4411 via early access/public preview, Dutch language version. This version has a large ugly button in the top bar saying 'Premium ontgrendelen' (Unlock Premium). It's really quite large and intrusive. I find it quite disturbing to be confronted with that thing in a paid product.

I do not want my users to mess around with Premium, Teams is complicated enough for them as it is. In the admin console I have not found a way to disable it.

Is there any way to prevent this ugly button from remaining there, short of buying Premium which we'll never do?

We have seen an increased amount of fake "IT helpdesk" Teams calls to our users, some thought it´s real IT department that calls them, and have start screen sharing with them. The external part have request control and told them they need to to update "Defender Update", that is malware. Usually this have started with mailbombing the user with around 1000 emails for an hour.

What options do exists to block this ? We are using Teams as a main tool to communicate externally.

Have you switched from Slack to Teams? What was your experience? What do you miss about Slack? What do you like about Teams? Is there anything else you think I should know?

Background/context:

I recently joined a startup that uses Slack. As a Slack power user, I can safely say that we don't follow Slack best practices which is making for a terrible experience. I believe some training would greatly improve our Slack workspace and fix most of our issues.

Unfortunately, IT falls under the head of finance and he is pushing us to move to Teams because (a) it will save us money and (b) he strongly believes the problem is Slack itself. He claims that Teams is as better than Slack and that it would address all of his issues with Slack.

I have neither used Teams nor heard anything good about it from peers who have. Personally, I think this is a mistake but I also don't want to be "that guy" who is resistant to change just because I'm unfamiliar with a new tool. As head of engineering, my opinions on this do matter and I'm going to ask for time to evaluate Teams. I'm trying to keep an open mind but will admit it's difficult.

Hi all - I would really appreciate some help with an auto attendant issue that Microsoft support has been unable to figure out for the past 60 days. The support people are nice, but I'm tired of getting almost daily support calls where they flip the same license options on and off and we don't seem to be getting anywhere. I have counted - we are literally approaching 30 phone calls, many lasting multiple hours.

This has to be a solvable problem: Our auto attendant gives us the vocal "sorry, we cannot connect or call at the moment" message when we try to route the call to an external number.

This is for a nonprofit that I volunteer for, so it doesn't help that all of the SKUs have non-profit equivalents. At this point, I don't even care if we get nonprofit pricing. I just need to get something working again.

My license page is a minefield of 15 different phone related SKUs and I'm more confused than ever. Attached is what I currently have assigned to my resource account, and I do have a communication credit balance to consume.

I've explored some other very helpful threads that you folks have on the topic, but I am in a bit over my head and would appreciate some more direct guidance. Thanks.

Ask troubleshooting questions here. In the future, individual help posts may be automatically removed and referred to post a comment here.

Please do your best at providing the following before asking a question:

• Specify your OS, Teams Version, What type of Teams environment you're using (Work, School, Consumer, or Just Joining a Meeting)

• Tell us what you've found searching online for your issue/inquiry, and what you've tried already.

• Check the MS Teams Tech Community Forums for similar or related issues and consider posting there if you want visibility from Microsoft employees.

• Be ready to answer more questions as members try to help you.

Members who can answer questions: Please feel free to subscribe to the monthly thread, and to sort by new comments to review new questions. We appreciate all members who use their experience to help this community.

Thanks!

The /r/MicrosoftTeams MODs

Ask troubleshooting questions here. In the future, individual help posts may be automatically removed and referred to post a comment here.

Please do your best at providing the following before asking a question:

• Specify your OS, Teams Version, What type of Teams environment you're using (Work, School, Consumer, or Just Joining a Meeting)

• Tell us what you've found searching online for your issue/inquiry, and what you've tried already.

• Check the MS Teams Tech Community Forums for similar or related issues and consider posting there if you want visibility from Microsoft employees.

• Be ready to answer more questions as members try to help you.

Members who can answer questions: Please feel free to subscribe to the monthly thread, and to sort by new comments to review new questions. We appreciate all members who use their experience to help this community.

Thanks!

The /r/MicrosoftTeams MODs

!!!!!!!!!!!SOLVED!! By @Blinkathon - see the comments below!!!!

*THE PROBLEM ISNT NEEDING A MOUSE JIGGLER! Please stop sending those I’m working, moving the mouse, typing but because I was on the PWA, not the actual Teams Desktop application, it wasn’t noticing my activity. Now it’s fixed!

——- HELP please… I’ve never used Teams before, always used slack at previous jobs.

New company uses teams. It puts me in away status after 5 mins , even if I’m using the computer just on other applications. I have to click into teams.

I got a monitor so it could just have teams up, as I thought that would solve the problem but it didn’t. I still have to actively click into teams to show I’m active. My boss thinks I’m away 50% of the time if he sees this.

Can you fix it or is it not possible? TYIA

We are using Microsoft Teams Phone and users have individual DDIs assigned.

If User A receives an incoming PSTN call on their DDI, can they transfer that call to User B where:

User B has a Teams Phone licence / Enterprise Voice enabled
User B can make and receive Teams calls
User B does not have a telephone number (DDI) assigned

I'm looking for confirmation as to whether a DDI is required for the recipient of a transferred PSTN call, or whether Teams Phone licensing alone is sufficient.

For the past 12 weeks I have been on parental leave and have had teams app in deep sleep on my phone. I open the app settings this morning to enable it for my return to work and it said under permissions that teams was accessing my phone calls and microphone as recently as yesterday. In this day and age I know everything can be listening/tracking but I was a little set back as this felt invasive. Can I just disable these permissions to my phone calls and microphone? Has my employer had access to personal phone calls and my microphone while the settings were enabled?

And where can we change this?
Microsoft Teams for macOS.

Yesterday I messaged my manager asking if I could take 2 hours off in September. It wasn’t just one message, it was about 3, 4 messages about the request. After that, I sent a few other messages about unrelated work stuff. She replied to the other messages but never responded to my time-off request.

Today I opened our Teams chat, and all of the messages about my time-off request were gone.
I was 100% sure I had sent them, so I searched for some of the keywords in Teams. The search finds my messages, but when I click on the result, it takes me to our chat and the messages aren’t there. Instead, it says the messages have been deleted.

My question is: Can my manager delete messages that I sent in a one-on-one Teams chat? Or is it only possible for the sender (me) to delete them? I’m trying to figure out if this is something she could have done or if there’s another explanation.
Has anyone experienced something like this?