#79: Do you bother taking notes?

Posted on June 6, 2025 (Updated June 4, 2025) by ewand

When you’re in a meeting or even a phone call, do you write everything down? Whether you listen attentively and then record a summary of events later (mentally or in other form), or you furiously annotate what is happening in real time, it’s a matter of preference which one works.

Some say the act of writing notes help cement things in your memory, like doing revision at school where you’d write a summary of what you were supposed to learn. Or is note taking a mental distraction where you concentrate on the notes more than the nuance of what is happening in the meeting? Or maybe just live in the presence, wing it, and try to remember what occurred later.

Linear people like writing a list of bullets, grabbing key points, comments or decisions as things flow. Other, more visual types might prefer a mind map (or are they just doodling?) The Cornell method prescribes a way of taking notes during the meeting, then revisiting them to take cues and action items, with a summary for later recap. There are many online guides explaining different approaches – in truth, you’ll probably need to try them and see which works best for you.

Whichever one you land on, it’s worth making sure you actually read the notes back – or like some computer programming languages, you’ll end up with write-only notes: they might have made sense at the time, but even their author could look back later and have no idea what they mean.

Perhaps the best way to run a meeting (as well as having an agenda, not making it too long, having everyone stand up to keep them attentive, etc) is to nominate one or two people to take notes and circulate them after the meeting, rather than have everyone taking their own. That deals with the “oh, I’m taking notes on my laptop/phone” excuse too.

Digital Note Takers

If you’re prepared to pay money then there are many options for having an automatic note taker in your meeting; Microsoft pitches both Teams Premium and M365 Copilot as ways of making recordings or transcriptions of Teams meetings, and looking for topics, actions etc.

The idea is that you can go back into a meeting after the event and see a summary of what happened, with the ability to jump back to a specific point in the recording or transcription (so you can check the note-taker got the gist correctly). You’ll get a list of identified actions and who they’re assigned to.

There are pros and cons to Teams’ approach, though – the recording process is non-intrusive and the analytics takes place in the background, and all the data about the meeting is stored in the M365 tenant of the host.

It’s the organiser of the meeting, however, who normally gets to decide if it’s recorded or transcribed, and only (licensed) users within their organisation will get to see the summary. So, if you’re joining a customer meeting which they arranged, you get no auto-notetaking even if you have a Copilot license on your own tenant. If they share the transcript or recording with you, then you could feed it into Copilot (see Kat Beedim from CPS’s excellent process, repurposed in #47: Using Copilot for (consistent) meeting notes) but that won’t have the same fidelity as a full recording.

Un-Fathomable

Another approach besides having Teams or Zoom make the summary, is to use a 3^rd party agent which will do it for you. The market leader is probably Fathom, though there are plenty of other upstart alternatives.

Fathom works by being external to whatever the meeting platform is; you invite Fathom’s “notetaker” to your meeting and it shows up as an additional attendee. This means you may be able to join “your” Fathom to an external Zoom, Teams etc meeting, if the organiser allows attendees to bring additional invitees.

In a similar vein to Teams Premium, it lets you revisit your meeting with audio/video summary linked to extracted notes. You can also share meetings with colleagues who were not present, so they can review actions from events they missed.

One downside to Fathom’s approach is that it needs to be in the meeting to be able to work; that might be obvious, but it lacks the ability to consume a recorded meeting and generate notes after the event. If you forget to invite Fathom or start it recording, tough.

Also, the very appearance of “so-and-so’s Fathom notetaker” in a meeting which you’re organising can be a bit passive/aggressive; normally you’d be expected to ask if anyone minds you recording a meeting, but having someone bring their eavesdropping sidekick in unannounced can be a bit weird.

The media

Reverting to the old-school activity of people sitting in a meeting, listening, contributing and writing their own notes… what’s the best way to do that?

Pad and pen? OneNote on a laptop? ReMarkable tablet? Ah, that is another can of worms to be opened on another occasion.

#76: What might have been, Microsoft?

Posted on May 22, 2025 (Updated May 22, 2025) by ewand

Firstly, sympathy goes out to the 3% of Microsoft workers who are leaving sooner than planned – best of luck in whatever comes next, and remember the old saying that when you step out from under the umbrella, you might realise it wasn’t actually raining.

Let’s not shed too many tears for the world’s most valuable company: Microsoft Corp is doing “not bad”. Back in Redmond, those AI chips won’t buy themselves and that shiny new office Campus (with such world-beating things as public transport to reach it) might expect everyone who is nominally based there to be physically present a bit more often, even while publicly saying that’s not the plan.

(by market capitalization, at time of writing, investments can go down as well as up, blah blah blah).

Microsoft has been successfully riding the AI hype wave, with the largest revenue source being a solid second-place in the public cloud market. They also have the benefit of other well-established and highly profitable businesses like Office/Microsoft 365, Xbox and LinkedIn. Oh yes, and Windows.

Coulda Woulda Shoulda

But what of all the others that could have been contenders? Well, proof that dominance in one market does not always translate into outright success in an adjacent one, there’s …

Windows Phone 7 Launch Round-up | Windows Central

In many ways, Microsoft led the early Smartphone wave, alongside some long-forgotten players like Symbian; the idea that the millions of Windows developers could use the same tools and languages to write applications for the growing range of Windows-based handheld devices was quite a compelling one.

Sadly, the devices were a bit too limited in capability in the days of Windows CE software (also, a bit too clunky for small form factors), and application distribution was finicky. Microsoft wanted to shackle everything to “Windows”, even charging OEMs a per-device license model to buy the software, just like on the PC.

The early Pocket PC Phone and “Microsoft Smartphone” era ultimately hit the skids when Apple’s iPhone arrived with better hardware, a stoic resistance to the mobile operators calling the shots, and eventually, with easy-to-distribute apps.

Windows Phone 7 was an attempt to tear up the existing ecosystem and take a leaf from Apple’s (and increasingly, Android’s) book – and even though it grew from Windows Phone 7 through Windows Phone 8.x and the short-lived Windows 10 Mobile, there was no room in the market. Some fans still bemoan its death and there are tools to try to replicate some of the nicer bits of WinPhone on Android. Sometimes, even the best don’t win – see BetaMax vs VHS. And Windows Phone was V2000. RIP.

Could it have succeeded or even survived? Not really. Although the app model was almost an accidental afterthought by Apple, by the time Windows Phone 7 was due to launch, Android was already established – especially outside of the US – as the alternative. Even if Microsoft had almost perfect execution, it would still have been waiting for Google and/or Apple to drop the ball.

The entire Windows App model was predicated on the same apps being written for phones, tablets and desktops/laptops – leaving aside that people don’t really want giant touch-first apps on their desktop. Remove the phone platform and the whole raison d’être of the UWP model fell apart.

There are many other “Killed by Microsoft” topics previously covered on ToW – some in #24: Googly Embalmer, and others from years ago, 350 – Killing me Softly, part I (and part 2).

One recent high-profile closure is…

Yep. If you have the Skype app already, you’ll be told to use Teams and going to web.skype.com redirects straight away to a Teams web login page. The web UX for Skype is fairly recent – previewed in 2018 and launched 6 months later.

In fact, Skype was still being actively updated until only a few months ago – see the blog here, and the 2023 post celebrating 20 years since Skype arrived. It’s certainly more active than some other official blogs, like OneNote – which has tumbleweed blowing through by comparison, if you take out the “wooohooo, Copilot!” type posts.

Skype’s 1:1 video calling should have been a USP when people started having mobiles with forward-facing cameras, but it was outmanoeuvred by Apple’s FaceTime and WhatsApp.

Skype was a big-deal acquisition by Microsoft – costing $8.5B back in 2011, and the company’s largest to date. The then-popular MSN Messenger service was killed a couple of years later, trying to migrate to users to Skype, but that was the beginning of the end for the consumer messaging business which has now been ceded to Facebook, WhatsApp et al.

Where would we be now, if these plans had worked out? Running around with Surface Phone Copilot+ Mobile 15 Edition devices, using MSN (it’s back after all) Video Messenger to keep in touch with our friends?

#49: Managing Multiple Messaging

Posted on October 18, 2024 (Updated October 17, 2024) by ewand

It used to be easy: you had an inbox (real or electronic) and new mail arrived. You’d check the inbox for anything that needed your attention, otherwise just get on with whatever it is that you were doing otherwise. Now, there are so many messaging apps that it can be a headache to not only keep on top of all the inbound contact, but to recall in which app you were having a conversation you want to go back to.

It might be easy if your professional comms is all done via email, but if you’re an itinerant consultant working with several companies, you might even have numerous professional email addresses too so keeping an eye on them all can be a chore.

There’s always a chance you’ll be dealing with LinkedIn or SMS messages with work connections as well, and with friends and colleagues there might be Facebook, WhatsApp and many more.

Two quick tips this week might help to get on top of things, if only a little.

Finding work-related messages in M365

If you use Teams and Outlook for work, with Microsoft 365, then you might already experience discombobulation when looking for something a colleague sent, or some comment discussed in the context of a project… was it in the status email, or in the chat of a meeting? Or a direct message in Teams?

Fortunately, the “Work” search options might be able to help. If your organization has it enabled, go to either Bing.com/work or look at the search option in Office.com while you’re signed in, and you’ll be able to search documents and other sources of data within your M365 environment.

One such is Messages – and the handy shortcut to jump there is aka.ms/messages. Type a search term in there and it will look across both your Outlook mailbox, but also in any Teams messages you might have been part of. Once you get used to checking it – and using the Work search for documents and other stuff – it’s a game changer.

Another trick, for finding documents in your work context, is to search from Windows Search directly by pressing the WindowsKey and typing work: followed by something you’re looking for.

Search across OneNote

Though it’s not strictly messaging, you might have taken notes during a meeting (or even had your friendly Copilot overlord do it for you), potentially spread across several OneNote notebooks.

The search box in OneNote lets you choose if you want to perform a query across the current page, section, notebook etc – but the results you get back can be a bit clumsy to interpret as it doesn’t give any details on which are really old pages and which might have been written recently.

If you haven’t discovered the obscure ALT+O to pin search results, try it out – it lets you group by section, page title or date, and you can expand and collapse the groupings to help locate the most likely page more quickly.

Now, where did you put your glasses?

#47: Using Copilot for (consistent) meeting notes

Posted on October 4, 2024 (Updated October 1, 2024) by ewand

“GenAI” like Copilot and ChatGPT has been evolving quickly over the last year or two, and the more experience people have in using it has also changed their approach. Just as providing better questions to get more accurate search queries from Google / Bing, getting the best results from Copilot or the like might depend on being specific enough with your questions.

Here’s a tip courtesy of Kat Beedim, Microsoft 365 MVP from Microsoft partner, CPS. Kat is using Copilot to summarise the output of a Teams meeting, in an alternative way to the built-in Copilot for Microsoft 365 method which generates a pretty decent summary (and was recently discussed in context of the OneNote integration). While the content is generally good, using the standard approach, you will likely get differing formats of notes from one meeting to the next, depending on what was said.

Kat’s approach is to download the transcript from a meeting that you’ve attended; this may be available to anyone who joined the meeting, even if the tenant hosting the meeting doesn’t itself have Copilot provisioned. In other words, if you have access to Copilot and you can get the transcript from a meeting (which you didn’t organise, maybe even one organised by a different company) then you can generate the meeting notes.

To see if the meeting was transcribed, go back to the Chat or the Recap from the meeting within Teams and you might be able to download the transcript (as a .DOCX file).

Save the transcript file to OneDrive in the same tenant where your Copilot for M365 is, and within a Copilot prompt you can reference it… if you go to Copilot (Work) and press “/” in a prompt, it will let you choose a file (or other source of data).

Kat has provided a very polite and detailed prompt for Copilot to generate meeting notes; by using the same prompt after every project or team meeting, the same format of notes will be preserved.

Copilot, please assist me in converting the attached /(start typing the file name to select it)
into detailed meeting minutes.

Here’s what I need:

1. Identify Key Sections: Break down the transcript into distinct sections: attendees, apologies, introductions, summary of concerns, previous actions discussed, further discussions, recommendations and actions, date of next meeting. Keep to that order.

2. Summarise Discussions: Provide a detailed summary of the discussions for each agenda item, capturing the main points and any consensus reached.

3. Highlight Decisions: Clearly state any decisions made, including the rationale behind them and any dissenting opinions if applicable.

4. List Action Items: Enumerate the action items that came out of the meeting, specifying the responsible party and the deadline for each task

5. Note Attendees: Include a list of attendees and their roles or titles, as well as any apologies for absence.

6. Format for Clarity: Use full sentences and paragraphs, tables, and bold text for emphasis where necessary to enhance readability. Do not use bullet points.

7. Review for Accuracy. Ensure that the minutes reflect an accurate and impartial record of the meeting, and make any necessary edits for clarity and conciseness. Please format the minutes in a professional and presentable manner. suitable for distribution to all meeting participants and for record-keeping purposes. Thank you.

You could also open the transcript directly in Word and enter the gist of the prompt above in Copilot within Word, though formatting is a bit nicer when done from the Copilot for M365 prompt. It might be possible some day to tell it to generate a new document using a set template, but that appears to be a manual process for now.

Feel free to have a play with the prompt to get the format and the answers you want; you have 2,000 characters to give your instructions so be as descriptive as you like.

Kat’s video demo is on Write meeting minutes with Copilot – YouTube.

#41: New ≠ better

Posted on August 30, 2024 (Updated August 30, 2024) by ewand

Tip o' the Week

Last week’s tip talked about product Roadmaps and the search for new features; this week’s focuses on two evolving applications that readers may have a fondness for or perhaps an aversion to.

As previewed in Tip o’ the Week #678, both Outlook and Teams have been getting some New-ness by having completely re-written applications with the goal of taking the baton from the old one. This model doesn’t always turn out to be successful – see the confusion that was OneNote supposedly transitioning from a classic Windows app to a Store / UWP app, then giving up and moving back. Or the slow-motion car crash that is Sonos’ new app rollout.

As an aside: LinkedIn really doesn’t make it easy to search previous newsletter articles; that’s one reason why these are also published at www.tipoweek.com, providing a nicely tagged way of re-locating stuff that you might have seen before.

Sometimes, the effort that goes into keeping an old application fresh, secure and performing well can be more than just re-writing it from scratch and phasing the old one out. But Better does not always come with New, at least not in the early stages.

One Teams to Rule Them All

Three years before its pandemic-fueled usage explosion, Teams was launched as a kind of amalgam of Skype for Business and the technologically separate and consumer-oriented Skype (which still exists, to some degree). Teams came along with added collaborative stuff that had been brewing for some years, to try to offer an alternative to Slack.

To help the development cycle, and to keep a degree of parity between Windows, Mac and web apps, the original Teams app used a variety of technologies which caused a pretty high memory overhead on Windows. Later acknowledge by Microsoft, the decision was taken to rearchitect completely with the goal of reducing memory usage by half whilst doubling performance.

After releasing “New Teams” in October 2023, that left Microsoft with 3 separate Teams clients – the original, resource hog one, then the New Teams one which did more-or-less the same things, and the inexplicable “Teams for Home” which was a different version that could only use a Microsoft Account to sign in.

Fortunately, Microsoft has updated New Teams (now just “Microsoft Teams”) to fold in the “Teams (free)” / “Teams for Home” functionality, so there’s only really a single version of note. If you still want to make sure all your PC’s memory gets a good workout, the original Teams app is still available as “Teams classic (work or school)”, at least for now. Phew.

The Old Dog and the New Pup

Outlook has a much longer legacy, dating 20 years before Teams and with some of its innards back to the early 1990s and the original Exchange “Capone” client (and Exchange was dubbed “The Big Dog of BackOffice“).

Microsoft has a long-held desire to move away from the old design and architecture, to something more “Modern” and webby. Just as Teams was built using technology that could span different client architectures, the intent is to create a new Outlook family centered around the same Web UX as seen in Outlook Web App.

Having been in preview for a while, the now-released “New Outlook” was being developed to replace Windows’ built-in Mail & Calendar app(s) in the near future, though not to universal approval. Plus ça change and all that.

Some reviewers want to hold on to the Mail & Calendar apps

Building an app which is effectively a web experience but looks like a desktop one, has its own challenges that Microsoft is trying to address before the inevitable full retirement of Old Outlook in favour of the new one.

If you’re an existing Outlook (classic) user, do not be tantalized by the Try the new Outlook option on the top right – press the button only if you’re already prepared for the consequences.

Actually, you can run classic Outlook and New Outlook side by side if you like; selecting the “Try the new…” button just means that trying to start Old Outlook will just bring up the new one instead; if you go through the routine of Trying the new, it will set up your profile and when done, you can switch it off and have both clients set up to connect to the same accounts.

There are some downsides. Web Applications aren’t typically very good at being offline, and email is one of those things that you might like to use when on a plane or even being on a slow network. New Outlook is getting some offline capabilities but don’t expect it to be the same as the old one.

And don’t even think about using local archives, not for a while…

Most users of Teams would see the New version as an improvement, even if it doesn’t match all the functionality of the original. It’s certainly easier when switching around between tenants, such as when you’re working with several different companies. Almost everyone will automatically get the new version in place of the old, with a few diehards holding out before eventually being subsumed.

New Outlook is going to take a bit more time to get used to. There is a feature comparison which gives some idea of the differences; if you don’t get vast amounts of email, then New Outlook is OK. If you have multiple email accounts to deal with, it makes a reasonable fist of showing them in one place rather than needing a separate browser window for each, but then Old Outlook did that too. Somewhat annoyingly, New Outlook can’t combine mailboxes into a single Inbox view, like the mobile Outlook client does, and it won’t let you search across different mailboxes either.

It looks like Old Outlook will still be with us for at least 5 years – maybe it’ll live on while email has not yet been replaced by other messaging apps like WhatsApp and Teams.

#34: Bringing AI to the Whiteboard

Posted on July 5, 2024 (Updated July 4, 2024) by ewand

One of the joys of in-person group meetings is when someone grabs a whiteboard marker and starts laying out their still-forming thoughts to the enthralled audience, almost as popular as the person who always asks a question 2 minutes before the meeting is due to end. Thankfully, there is a digital whiteboard for use in virtual and hybrid Teams meetings, too. And like seemingly everything else, it’s getting a sprinkle of Copilot-y Goodness.

The Whiteboard app has appeared in previous ToW’s (before the Great Reset) – here. As a quick summary: if you’re a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you’ll find the Whiteboard tucked under More apps in the grid on the top left on numerous sites…

… or available directly on https://www.microsoft365.com/apps/ or just launch it directly from https://whiteboard.office.com/. A Windows app is available in the Store, though it’s really just a wrapper for the web experience.

Whiteboard is intended as a multi-user collaboration tool, available in the browser as above, or in Teams, by using the Share button (NB: if you look under the Apps button to the left of Share, you won’t easily find this Whiteboard, but there are other “Whiteboard…” 3^rd party apps which will show up: YMMV).

One very cool new feature is the ubiquitous Copilot option; it can help get you started on a brainstorming exercise, for example. Start by giving it an idea of what you’re trying to work on

… and it will come back with headings which can be quickly added as Post-it style notes

Selecting one of them and choosing Categoris|ze …

… will arrange them into subject blocks.

And selecting any one and selecting Suggest will go a level deeper and bring up some additional points.

As a discussion starter, it’s brilliant. Give it a try and see what kind of inspiration you might find.

The main Whiteboard info page is here. There are some cool templates available for getting started with some pretty detailed layouts for workshops, Kanban boards etc; more info here.

RIght, now there’s only 5 mins to go, the meeting is starting to wrap up – for goodness’ sake, keep your hands down.

#26: Further Outlook Calendar Fun

Posted on May 10, 2024 by ewand

Following on from last week’s tip on New Outlook and its addition of the “In-person” switch to designate a meeting as taking place in actual 3D, here’s a quick look back at another calendary thing that’s been in Exchange and Outlook since the year dot – the meeting status.

When you create an entry in your calendar, you can set whether it shows you as busy or not – the original status choices being free/tentative/busy/OOF. Microsoft added the new “Working elsewhere” more than a decade ago, though it never really took off. It wasn’t helped by the lack of support on some clients, and an initial gnarly bug in Exchange 2013 which meant Working Elsewhere appointments sometimes disappeared. It does work pretty well now, though – Think of it like a soft Out of Office which doesn’t get in the way of people booking time with you, but it does signify that you’re not physically in the office. That’s a lot more likely these days than it was 11 years ago.

Showing your actual availability is a bit more nuanced than it was when Outlook was launched in 1997; you might be technically Out of Office but still able to be contacted in some ways. You could set a status message in Teams to add context to where you are or how available you might be.

Of course, making sure other people can see your calendar (at least sharing the high level view of where you are and what you’re doing) will help, and do tell people to use the scheduling assistant in Outlook when trying to book meetings with you. Maybe also set your Work Hours to make it clear if you habitually work at different times to your colleagues, take Friday afternoons off etc.

If you have a group of people who work closely together, you could try using a variety of other tools to track whereabouts and make it easier to meet – check out TeamLink, a free Power App that runs inside of Teams, or perhaps the supposedly forthcoming feature set formerly introduced as Microsoft Places.

Finally, there are two stages of Out of Office – there’s the automatic message you might set to respond to emails to say you’re away; the best OOF messages might just apologize that you’re gone so will probably never read these emails. Alternatively, you could set the status of your appointment to show OOF and then people who can see your calendar will know you’re just gone for a while, such as away for the afternoon, but you haven’t gone to the extent of setting up an auto-response.

Both of these can also help with voice messaging, either external telephone calls if you’re using Teams Phone or just “calls” directly into Teams from colleagues or other external contacts. Look in Teams settings, and you can set up how you want to handle calls that go unanswered. You can record your own greeting, or just type in a message and have the system say that to the caller.

Note the granularity where you could have a message played only during times when your calendar is showing Out of Office.

#23: Licensing the overlords

Posted on April 19, 2024 by ewand

People might be using AI to create new art and for writing^† but most would prefer it to take the drudgery out of their life; and that doesn’t just mean summarizing your emails. One day, technology might fulfil that Keynesian idyll of having more leisure time than we know what to do with, but for now we’re reduced to automating a few tedious tasks while replacing them with new ones.

Robotics pioneers dreamt of having autonomous domestic servants. Aside from pervasive advancement made in manufacturing, most have been somewhat underwhelming, despite some amazing looking machines. Boston Dynamics recently unveiled the frankly terrifying new Atlas humanoid robot…

… as a replacement to the previous variant which had been the star of many videos (including the “Do You Love Me” viral hit)…

… even if its cost and complexity meant it was good for little more than making fancy videos. Why make a machine that looks and acts vaguely like a human if all it needs to do is move things around, where a machine dedicated to that specific task could be built more simply and with less money?

If the rise of AI and robots is giving you cause for concern, allay some of those fears with the Reddit group, /r/sh**tyrobots, which showcases epic fails of people with perhaps too much time on their hands. (The same could be said of much of Reddit but that’s another topic altogether).

One aspect of AI and robots that is conveniently overlooked is the huge cost of doing them well; don’t expect future technologies to do everything and answer all your questions without something in return, whether that’s sharing all your information with them or handing over all your money and other stuff.

Software robotics

In current times, using software to take care of tedious tasks imposed by other software can bring immediate benefits without costing the earth. Collectively known as RPA or Robotic Process Automation, the field varies from simple If-This-Then-That type logic which can knit different systems together, to altogether more engineered solutions that are part of a much bigger development.

Microsoft’s own Power Automate – formerly known as “Microsoft Flow” – starts off with an easy-to-use editor not unlike IFTTT but can encompass web-based logic or can be run on a PC to help automate repetitive tasks within installed applications. There’s a Copilot for Power Automate (of course) and AI can help to figure out what you’re trying to automate locally too.

Keep up to speed with what’s new in Power Automate on the Release Wave documentation or on the fairly frequently updated blog.

Licensing for dummies

Power Automate is free for some things, but costs money for others. Some external systems are free to connect to, while others need you to pay directly or have an existing license. If you were designing a licensing scheme, you certainly wouldn’t start from here, in fact you could make a profession out of understanding Microsoft licensing.

Dynamics 365 pricing is going to rise pretty significantly in October 2024, though it’s the first such hike in 5 years. Still, the recent Business Applications Launch Event showed where some of the money is going; the tl;dr summary is, “Ooooh, isn’t Copilot GREAT!”.

Sometimes, Microsoft’s licensing complexity is due to external factors, though. Various competitors have also been complaining about how unfair it is that Redmond has bundled Teams in with Office 365 rather than making customers pay for it separately, and the EU pressured Microsoft to remove it from Office suites sold in Europe.

Remember the EU forcing Microsoft to ship separate versions of Windows that didn’t include a media player, because Real Networks complained? Consumers all over the world must have rejoiced.

Rather than offer a specific version to EU customers alone, Microsoft has decided to revamp the M365 suite worldwide into “with Teams” and “without Teams” versions. What this means in practice is that if you do use Teams already, you can carry on running for the same money – for now at least – depending on how you license your M365. Details are set out here.

Some customers might welcome that they can now buy their M365 subscriptions for a few $/user less than before, if they don’t currently use Teams and especially if they do subscribe to Slack, Zoom, Webex (yes, it’s still there) etc. For anyone currently using Teams it either makes no difference, or it raises the prospect of one day having to pay a $/user fee on top of the core M365 suite, and at least on the plans for M365 Enterprise for new subscribers, that will cost them more than they’d pay today.

Currently, personal/family plans are unaffected, and “business” subscriptions for M365 are available as previously or newly-discounted without Teams. Enterprise users will need to get to grips with the idea of paying for Teams separately unless they’re existing subscribers, in which case for a while, at least they don’t need to. Easy as that.

Someone has to pay the ferryman.

^† No automated wirting here. If you enjoy the process of writing and the creativity it can unleash, the last thing you’d want is to have it machine-generated. AI drafting is for boring documents which will probably only get summarized by AI at the point of consumption, so who cares if they are dry and dull? Tip of the Week remains a 100% hand-crafted endeavour. Well, apart from some of the banner images because, you know, DALL-E et al can draw some groovy stuff.

684 – Teams, Countdown, Go!

Posted on June 2, 2023 by ewand

The word “Go” has so many connotations for such a couple of letters. It’s typically upbeat & positive, forward-looking and action-oriented. You get £200 for breezing past it in Monopoly, it’s the oldest board game known, it’s a popular open-source programming language and it’s what the Thunderbirds do.

Back in April 2021, ToW #574 talked about sharing a countdown timer in Teams, if you want to make it clear in a meeting that it’s about to get underway. That was by sharing the application window of a countdown clock, meaning that it would replace any other desktop sharing/slides etc being shown.

Also, the timer will loom very large on the screen of everyone watching, which could well be effective though maybe lacking some of the subtlety you’d prefer.

A more nuanced tip would be to overlay a timer on your own video feed, so you could make the point that things are about to change, and it could be shown alongside other content or whatever else might be happening in the meeting.

Depending on how you do it, the timer could disappear altogether when it has finished, and you’d carry on with the video as before. You might even want to replace your own camera feed with a backdrop and timer until you’re ready to go and show your face.

One recommended way to achieve this effect is to use OBS Studio, open source software which started life as a kind of video manipulation tool aimed at recording or streaming, and has grown to offer a host of features and plugins to modify and manipulate video in real time. It can look a bit scary to start with, but the basics can be picked up quickly.

OBS Studio can apply a series of effects to one or more video sources – could be the real-time recording of windows showing a live demo or a physical camera, with some other stuff like a video file, overlaid on top. You can go down a rabbit-hole of effects (like put a real-life green screen behind you, then chroma key a backdrop or video onto your own video feed – see Scott Hanselman’s tutorial for inspiration).

OBS also includes a virtual camera driver, so while you’re running the software and combining several sources – like a real camera and one or more media sources overlaid on top (along with selected effects) – OBS will combine everything to look like it’s a camera feed that can be selected in Teams, Zoom or any other software that could use a video input.

A simple trick could be to add only a countdown video to OBS and then choose the OBS Virtual Camera in Teams; it will display the video instead of your camera feed, and then when you’re ready to get going, just change the video settings in Teams to go back to your own webcam.

There are plenty of sources online for free countdown videos – here or here for example; download the file, add it to OBS as a Media Source and you’re off. If you’d like to take it up a level, here’s a more in-depth tutorial, and you can even script your own custom ones if you like to delver deeper into OBS features.

678 – New Old Things again

Posted on April 21, 2023 by ewand

In ToW 632 – New Old Things, the topic of the old version of OneNote getting some spiffy new features was raised. This week carries on the same theme in a different direction – some altogether new versions of old applications, which might be worth taking a look at, even if they’re not quite fully featured yet.

In the beginning there was Skype. Well, actually, before that there was MSN Messenger and its variants. Business environments then got Live Communications Server, Office Communications Server, eventually Lync, and finally the confusingly branded Skype for Business.

Teams came along from the left field around 6 years ago and from a real-time collaboration product point of view, swept all before it (at least in Microsoft), eventually replacing Skype for Business, as the pandemic turbocharged its adoption and appeal. Skype is still with us, with reasonably recent releases and even integration of the new Bing and GPT driven AI.

The thing is, the original Teams client grew up pretty quickly and though it has had lots of improvements, it’s never been especially resource-light, or quick. The Teams team (herein lies one challenge with its name) took the decision to start over and build a new Teams client, shiny and slick and running like greased lightning.

If you feel like giving it a try, you may see a Try new Teams slider on the top left of the main Teams client window; clicking that will restart Teams by closing the old app and starting the new. There are some features not quite there yet, but the list is being updated frequently as functionality improves. If you switch to the new Teams preview and don’t like it, you can quickly switch back – but you’re either/or running one or the other.

Outlook has a longer heritage – it came out first with Office 97 so has its roots in early/mid-90s code, and even if the core of the app has been re-engineered and the UX has had numerous polishes over the years, there are still occasional peeks at a Windows 95 era application lurking beneath.

There has been a push for some time to make the Outlook Web client a more viable alternative for many users, including showing Outlook Web in an Edge sidebar even when clicking a link from the PC desktop client. Functionality differs between the full-fat desktop, the web client and the various mobile apps.

There’s a “new Outlook” on the way, now too – previously codenamed “project Monarch” it’s supposedly been in the works for years, yet looks a lot like the web client that happens to run in a window – it’s available in preview now. It may end up replacing the variety of desktop, web and mobile apps, though that could take a while. In near terms, the new Outlook will likely supplant the default Mail & Calendar apps in Windows 11.

You may see a Try the new Outlook slider on the top right of the main Outlook window; flicking that will restart Outlook in its new guise, however unlike the new Teams, it is possible to run both new and old, side-by-side.

One way would be to make the switch, then on the new “Outlook PRE” icon that appears on the taskbar, choose to Pin it. Then flick back and you’ll now have both old and new Outlooks available together. You could configure the New one to remove your main M365 email account, and just have your Outlook.com / Hotmail or now even a Gmail account, while leaving all your work emails in the old Outlook UX.

If you want to keep old and new Outlook with different account setups – business in the old, private in the new, for example – go straight to the Store and install the New Outlook app, then configure it as you like when it starts.