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Microsoft Teams: App Templates

February 19, 2020 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

Microsoft have kindly announced that they have released open source app templates for Microsoft Teams. These templates are available via GitHub and come with everything needed to get started – documentation and a deployment guide. This morning I’ve scanned through the list of app templates that are available and the stand out ones for me are: FAQ Plus Conversational Q&A bots are an easy way to provide answers to frequently asked questions by users. However, most bots fail to engage…

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Channel Moderation in Microsoft Teams

September 12, 2019 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

As some of you may be aware, Microsoft recently announced that channel moderation was coming to Microsoft Teams. Well, guess what… it’s now here! This means you can now specify who you allow to post new messages to channels, giving you the ability to create channels or even whole Teams without the worry of what messages might be posted. It will enable companies and institutions the opportunity to setup organisation-wide Teams where only a select few users can post, keeping…

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Introducing Microsoft Teams Grid View

August 1, 2019 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

Today sees the official launch of the new Microsoft Teams grid view. It gives users an overview of the Teams that they are a member of in a nice organised view. But what else does the new grid view give us? Filtering Teams One new feature that I’m really liking is the ability to filter the Teams that are displayed in your All Teams view. This is a great way to differentiate the types of Teams you are a part…

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Channel Notifications Within Microsoft Teams

July 29, 2019 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

Rollback a few months and getting post notifications from channels within Microsoft Teams was always a little hidden. We would need to follow a channel, which would then enable us to receive notifications for every activity on that channel. Finally, Microsoft has resolved this and we are greeted with a nice new way of getting notifications from a channel, and what’s better is that we can personalise these notifications so they only appear in our activity or we can turn…

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Call test in Microsoft Teams

July 19, 2019 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

Microsoft Teams has seen quite a few updates over the past month. One that I think has gone unnoticed is the test call feature in the Teams app. How many times do we go to do a call through Teams and worry about our tech working? Sometimes we are even unaware if our tech is working correctly or not. Microsoft Teams now has an option that lets you run a test call; a feature I never knew existed until recently….

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Why is OneDrive Important?

July 19, 2019 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

As training consultants, we are often asked what is OneDrive and why do we need it? Before I go into why I think it’s essential in our everyday lives – both working and personal – I think we need to understand what OneDrive is. For me, OneDrive is your My Documents but deposited in the cloud on Office 365. It offers a simple, single way to store, share and synchronise files of different types. The files stored within OneDrive are…

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Northampton Primary Academy Trust empowers staff and students with Office 365

April 18, 2019 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

Northampton Primary Academy Trust (NPAT) is a vibrant Trust comprising 11 schools, 4,500 students and 750 staff across Northampton Town. The Trust uses a range of Microsoft 365 Education products, including OneNote, Teams, Sway, Skype for Business, OneDrive, SharePoint and Windows 10 to provide a consistent experience for Teachers and drive better outcomes for children. Julia Kedwards OBE, CEO of NPAT explains, “All of the resources, time savings and teaching strategies that we use, we do to enrich children. Microsoft…

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Device Encryption

May 13, 2018 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

What is encryption? In computing, encryption is where data is converted from a readable form to an encoded version that can only be opened or read if it’s been decoded by a decryption key. How it works? Data, whether a single file or all your files, is encrypted using an algorithm and an encryption key. This process then codes your files into an unreadable state of random characters. The process of decrypting your files is to simply reverse the encryption,…

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I’ve become a Microsoft Innovative Expert and Trainer

August 30, 2017 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

As the new school year approaches, I am happy to announce that I have been accepted to be a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert (MIEE) for the 2017-18 academic year. This will be my 3rd year of being a MIEE and it is still a great honour to be apart of this exclusive program. For those of you that don’t know how to become a MIEE, you have to apply directly to Microsoft stating why you want to become an…

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The Surface Book

August 30, 2017 Paul Dredge Comments 0 Comment

After the success of the Surface Pro series, Microsoft have developed their first ever laptop, the Surface Book. When I received the email from Microsoft asking me to review a Surface Book, the excitement was a bit like the one of a child on Christmas eve! Since the Surface Book was released I had been eager to get my hands on one. When agreeing to trial a Surface Book I was given the opportunity to trial one for 4 weeks;…

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