Looking back at Teams again and how Azure AD groups can assist in managing what policies a user receives. This is all great, but how then without using PowerShell, or when you really don’t have time to fire up PowerShell as admin and then MFA using “Connect-MicrosoftTeams” to your tenant like most admins do, can you get information out of the Teams Admin Centre that gives you similar results?
Once you have applied a policy to 100’s or 1000s of users you could really do with a simple quick way of getting the information you need quickly, especially if you have a user or a member of a different department requesting some information that’s vital to solving a ticket/helpdesk request. I had a similar experience and needed to get the users of a particular group out of the Admin Centre whilst assisting a co-worker on a support issue, the problem was I only had my ipad with me. Oh no, no PowerShell!!
Filter the results
It might be a little or well known fact , but the Teams Admin Centre (TEC for short so I can save space in my article), pretty much like all Admin Consoles in the Microsoft stack gives you, the user, the ability to filter out the results of users assigned to Teams Policy Groups based on a number of different Filters. Yep, that’s right. The little coffee filter shaped icon at the top of the users console within the TEC allows you to filter out the information against all users that populate the list.
This is Timothy, Tim works in the HR department for his company and regularly attends meetings that also involve his employer’s legal team. Sometimes these
meetings have to be recorded and up until a few weeks ago this was done by a audio to text typist. The typist is not available and the company he works for has just rolled out Microsoft teams.
Tim has to attend a meeting that requires recording and he doesn’t really feel like using his personal mobile device to record the meeting. A ticket/approval process is raised with HR and the IT Helpdesk enables recording within Teams Meetings. His recording access is granted through an Azure AD Group that is linked to a Teams Group Policy. Tim’s Azure AD user object is placed within the Azure AD Group, but after a few restarts of the Teams application he still does not have recording rights, a few other users are also experiencing the same issue.
What’s going on, how do we check this without PowerShell
As I previously mentioned you can filter results displayed in the “Users” Blade within the TAC. This means its really easy to see what users have got a particular policy applied and start to investigate the truth. We start here and open up the users blade within the TAC
Using the “Filter” icon as highlighted above, choose the relevant criteria to filter out the users that you need to identify and ensure they are getting the policy that you assigned to them.
Choose the conditions as anything from Name or more importantly “Meetings Policy” as we know that live recording exists in a meeting policy.
Once the specific meeting policy has been selected you can click apply, or go ahead and choose an additional filter that might include the Live Events Policy or where a user has a phone policy applied.
Let’s add few filters in to make sure we are hitting the right people and getting the right results.
So there we have it, I was able to give HR and the IT helpdesk an answer within a few minutes from my ipad as to what policy this user was in for Teams Meetings. It turns out the user was in the right policy, but was just been a little impatient and Teams had not yet picked up the changes.
Microsoft do say it can take up to 24 hours for changes to be represented in the Teams desktop App! Happy Filtering
