Why (I think) you need a Yealink CP700 Teams Certified Portable Speaker (Phone)

I spend much of time with customers (new and existing) talking about and helping them envisage and recognise the business and worker benefits of adopting a true Modern Workplace.

Modern workplace isn’t really a thing as such. It’s a way of working that supports working where ever and however you need; whether that’s being in the office, your virtual office (anywhere with Internet), customer and partner sites and of course working from home.

The Modern workplace for me consists of a toolkit… For me that’s a Microsoft Surface Device, (I’m currently using a SurfaceProX), MicrosoftTeams and of course my Office Apps and services. It’s also includes my trustworthy Plantronics/Poly 6200 headset and my “carry with me” portable speakerphone the Yealink CP700.

Every agile worker needs a Speaker Phone

Mobility and productivity is always important when I am out and about since I still need to communicate and collaborate in the same way no matter where I am working. MicrosoftTeams makes this really easy but when I’m in a Teams call with a customer who, does have Teams or a decent meeting room/video conferencing solution I find my self using Teams from my Surface.. This is where a portable speakerphone is key.

Late in 2019, Yealink released its CP700 portable speakerphone which since getting hands on one has been simply brilliant. I’m fortunate to get to test out a fair bit of kit from our technology partners and for me a good test of what puts one audio device (in this case a speakerphone/ ahead of another is about 4 things

  • How simple it is to use
  • The build quality and design
  • High Quality Audio (pick up and receive)
  • Clever Connectivity Options

So how did the Yealink CP700 do in my experience?

Introducing the Yealink CP700?

The Yealink CP700 ticks all these boxes and it’s certified for both Teams and Skype for Business.

Yealink CP700

Simple and intuitive to use
The CP700 has Multiple buttons with LED indicators which provide easy-to-understand guidance with no training needed. Since it’s a Teams certified device (meaning it’s not just a USB speakerphone) it has deep integration with Microsoft Teams and even has dedicated Teams button, making it even easier to achieve Teams collaboration with a single touch (whether you are using on your smart phone or connected to your laptop/tablet

Build Quality and Design
This looks and feels like a premium high quality device and it is! It support USB (C) and Bluetooth connectivity (to multiple devices), is extremely light (just 220g) has gently lit LEDs which seem to be ambiant light aware and has a great little pop out stand to allow you to angle the speaker as needed. There’s also a muti colour led ring around the centre of the device for connectivity status and things like volume (a bit like Amazon’s alexa).

Yealink CP700 (Teams)

The CP700 is ideal for on-the-go use but also works really well as for semi-perminant set up in a hone office or break out space for example. The included protective protective pouch comes in handy too.

High quality audio
The CP700 HD audio sound quality is incredible with a perfect balance of bass, mid and treble for clear and natural sound.

It includes omnidirectional microphone and full-duplex allows meeting participants to be heard and involved in the meeting. Feedback from colleagues at the remote end is always really great compared to using your laptop speaker and mic and most say better then when I use a headset.


Clever Connectivity options
The Yealink CP700 is able to pair with not 2 but with 3 Bluetooth-enabled devices simultaneously. This means that calls from two different devices can be merged into one, by connecting the CP700 through Bluetooth on one device, and with USB-C connection on another device.

Summary

If you work remotely or ever need to run or join Teams call from home, customer offices or in break outs/hotels etc, the Yealink CP700 is a must. Yes there’s others from other vendors but this is one of the best I’ve used to date. (Feb 2020)

The attractive price point, high quality and fashionable design with easy to use features offer a high quality user experience for all participants.

You can see more at their website which I’ve included here. https://www.yealink.com/product/speakerphone-cp700-ms-teams

What Microsoft announced at the 2020 RSA Conference.

The annual RSA Conference brings together 50,000 cybersecurity professionals to connect with peers from around the world to uncover new and better ways to keep the digital world safe. Most of the leading Security vendors are there as you expect. As is becoming the annual norm, Microsoft used this opportunity to being more exciting announcements around its ever expanding offerings and capabilities in security.

Inside Risk Management

Insider Risk Management which has been in preview for a couple of months is now widely available.

The world we work in today with Internet everywhere, multiple devices being carried by employees and a work from anywhere culture means corporate data is likely to be stored or accessed on laptops, tablets phones, and even watches. Where blocking access is not an option, IT need ways to identify, take action on, and prevent insider risks to keep their busienss data safe.

New Insider Risk Management in Microsoft365

Insider Risk Management (part of Microsoft 365) helps tackle this challenge by gathering signals from across Microsoft 365 and other third-party systems, and then leverages the Intelligent Security Graph Insider Risk and machine learning to identify anomalies in user behavior and flag high-risk activities – enabling businesses to more effectively protect and govern their data.

Communication Compliance

Communication Compliance, which extends the existing complaince services within Microsoft 365 can be tuned to leverage machine learning to quickly identify and take action on code of conduct policy violations within all company communications channels. This has also just been generally released.

Microsoft Threat Protection

Over the past year Microsoft has been busy consolidating and harmonising all the various theat protection services and standardising the signalling, risk profile and events. In a world where multiple vendor solutions are no longer the recommended approach to provide end to end security, Microsoft Threat Protection helps simply whilst strengthening protection for the enterprise.


Traditionally, Security and IT have an endless list of alerts coming in from multiple monitoring systems and across their network, cloud, data centre and devices , making it almost impossible to link those at speed, recognise an attack, prioritise, and act quickly on the most critical threats or risks.

The unification of Microsoft’s Threat Protection services means that security/IT teams can now get a correlated, incident-level view of threats rather than having to manage and investigate multiple individual alerts from multiple systems.

The key capabilities in Microsoft Threat Protection include:

  • Investigating threats, automatically (or semi automatically) responding to them, and restoring affected assets to a secured state automatically, while simplifying hunting across the landscape for other signs of attack.
  • Self-healing compromised user identities, endpoints, and mailboxes, allowing security and IT teams to spend more time focussing on projects and policies by using AI and ML to automate remediation.
  • Sharing critical threat insights in real time to help stop the progression of an attack.
  • Azure Sentinel enhancements which are covered below.

Updates to Azure Sentinal

Microsoft Azure Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) solution which allows business of any size to keep pace with the exponential growth in security data, improve security outcomes, and reduce hardware and operational costs.

New enhancements have been announced this week at RSA in San Francisco designed to deliver instant value and increased efficiency for security operations teams. These include

  • New community rewards (bounty program) for contributions to develop dashboards, orchestration, playbooks etc
  • New developer guides and APIs along with GitHub code and data collections
  • Ability to import AWS CloudTrail logs at no cost until June 2020
  • New security campaign views which gives security teams an all-encompassing view of email attack campaigns targeted at their organisation
  • New connectors for easier data collection from a wider range of security appliances and services

Security Campaign Views

Campaign views and compromise detection and response has also been made generally available following a short preview.

This feature gives security teams an all-encompassing view of email attack campaigns targeted at their organisation, along with making it easy to spot vulnerable users or configuration issues that enabled the attack or breach to succeed in the first place.

Early detection and response to compromised users is critical to ensuring that attacks are detected and actioned/remiated as early as possible so that the impact of a breach is minimised.

New Security Awareness Training

Through a partnership with Terranova, a market leader in computer-based training, Microsoft will be including Terranova’s entire phishing-related training set for free for organisations that use or are licensed for Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection Plan 2 (including in Microsoft 365 E5).

This security awareness training, coupled with Microsoft security solutions and risk analytics, will enable and extend Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection to provide a complete solution, encompassing customised user learning paths that enable IT and your compliance teams to create governance around organisational risk and maintain a stronger security posture.

Exchange Online unlimited archiving… What you need to know.

I talk to a lot of customers about Exchange Online and about the need and desire to use 3rd party add on services like backup, DLP threat protection and archiving.

Many don’t realise or are not up to date on the continuous updates and improvements to Exchange Online in particular and it’s unlimited archive feature is just one of the services that could help you save costs and simplify your management. That’s not to say there is never a need for 3rd party complementary services (there is sometimes a use case), but I wanted to highlight the power and extent of this archive feature.

What is “unlimited archiving”

Exchange Online Archiving is an enterprise-class service that assists these organizations with their archiving, compliance, regulatory, and e-discovery challenges while simplifying their on-premises infrastructure, thereby saving costs and easing the IT management overhead. (source:Microsoft)

In Exchange Online, Microsoft provides archive mailboxes which provide users with additional mailbox storage space. Once a user’s archive mailbox is enabled (it’s not on by default), up to 100 GB of additional storage is made available automatically.

Previously, whilst this feature did exist, it was quite hidden away and the only way to active it was to contact Microsoft and request additional storage space for an archive mailbox. This is no longer required and the process is fully automated (if enabled).

This “unlimited archiving” feature called auto-expanding archiving, provides additional storage in archive mailboxes once the storage quota in the primary archive mailbox is reached. Exchange Online then automatically increases the size of the archive, meaning users won’t run out of mailbox storage space and Exchange Admins don’t need to traukt through storage alterts, respond to help desk requests or contact Microsoft to request additional storage for archive mailboxes.

How auto-expanding archiving works


Once enabled, Exchange Online periodically checks the size of the users archive mailbox. When an archive mailbox gets close to its storage limit, it automatically creates additional storage space for the archive. Should this space also run out (now that’s a lot of mail), more space is automatically added to the user’s mail archive meaning now additional management the archive is needed. Here’s how it works.

Image from docs.microsoft.com
  1. Archiving is enabled for a user mailbox or a shared mailbox. An archive mailbox with 100 GB of storage space is created, and the warning quota for the archive mailbox is set to 90 GB.
  2. Exchange Online admin enables auto-expanding archiving for the mailbox.
  3. When the archive mailbox (including the Recoverable Items folder) reaches 90 GB, it’s converted to an auto-expanding archive, and extra storage space is added to the archive.

What gets moved to the archive storage space?

The process is fully automatic. In order to make efficient use of auto-expanding archive storage, folders may get moved as part of the archive move.

What items and folders are moved is determined by Exchange Online whenever additional storage is added to the archive. Sometimes when a folder is moved, one or more subfolders are automatically created and items from the original folder are distributed to these folders to facilitate the moving process.

When viewing the archive portion of the folder list in Outlook or Outlook Online, these subfolders are displayed under the original folder.

The naming convention used to name these subfolders is <folder name>_yyyy (Created on mmm dd, yyyy h_mm), where:

  • yyyy is the year the messages in the folder were received.
  • mmm dd, yyyy h_m is the date and time that the subfolder was created by Office 365, based on the user’s time zone and regional settings in Outlook.

What about Compliance and Data Governance?

eDiscovery: if your organisation uses Office 365 eDiscovery, such as Content Search or In-Place eDiscovery, the additional storage areas in an auto-expanded archive are also searched.

Retention: When a mailbox is placed “on hold” by using tools such as Litigation Hold in Exchange Online or if an Office 365 eDiscovery case holds and retention policies in the security and compliance center, content located in an auto-expanded archive is also placed on hold.

Messaging records management (MRM): If you use MRM deletion policies in Exchange Online to permanently delete expired mailbox items, expired items located in the auto-expanded archive will also be deleted.

PST Import service: You can use the Office 365 Import service to import PST files to a user’s auto-expanded archivenof up to 100 GB of data.

Common Questions

Can I access my archive at anytime or does need IT input? You can access any folder in thearchive mailbox, including ones that were moved to the auto-expanded storage area.

What about search? Can I search items in the archive? Yep.. But the search process is a little different. You can search for items that were moved these additional storage area but only by searching the folder itself. If the archive folder contains subfolders, you have to search each subfolder separately. This is due to performance and speed since the archive folders are stored on lower tier disks within Exchange Online (well it is an archive).

Can I delete items from the mail archive? Yes, You can delete items in a subfolder that points to an auto-expanded storage area, but the folder itself cannot be deleted manually.

Interested to hear how other Exchange Online Archiving compares and if you see the need for 3rd parties still…?

You can now Share a Teams chat to…..Outlook

What? Sharing from Teams to Outlook?

Yes – you read that correctly.  At Ignite in November 2019, Microsoft announced a new set of features to provide tighter integration between Microsoft Teams and Outlook aimed to:
  1. Help ensure conversations that are meant for Teams can be easily “moved” to Teams and

  2. To ensure that users/groups that aren’t yet using Teams can still be included in conversations by allowing chats/discussions to be “shared” to Outlook.

Teams to Outlook

 
 

The Outlook-WebApp window will open up and you can add any comments, customise the email and of course add the recipients to the email message. You can add/do all the other things you’d expect in an email message (it is an email message) and can even apply sensitivity information if configured.

When you are happy with your email, just click send!

What the recipient sees

The recipient (yes I did email myself for this example), sees the email and the Teams conversation thread in their email box. From here, they can click on “Go To Teams” to join and carry on the conversation within Teams or can of course, respond to the email directly in email. 

When and Why should I use this?

I have been asked this three times today since making people aware of this nice (or not feature), but this wouldn’t have been added to Teams unless there is a need and demand for it.

As far as I see it, there will always be a time/situation when you need to share some information that is within Teams to people who are not in your Team site – or of course there will be those users that may well be in the Team but still live their life in email and simple “don’t use teams”

This feature makes this really easy to do without the need to try to copy and past or take screen shots of your Teams Chat.  

Be careful..

Whilst a useful feature, please be careful….as this can lead to chats moving outside your Teams chat and breaking the very heritage of that concept of chat….. 

Another…. since this feature makes it really easy to share information that is within Team to an email thread and therefore potentially to people outside of this Team or chat.

Therefore, IMO it is important to make sure that sensitivity labels and DLP are enabled to help ensure your business can still protect sensitive information and prevent chats meant from Teams from being shared in the right way.

Oddly….

At the time of writing, there seems to be no way of “replying directly into a Team” from the email message other than a link to “Go to Teams“. As Microsoft add more context based replies to Outlook, this might be a feature that lights up.

I also cant see a way to turn this feature off? 

Major software updates coming for SurfaceHub 1 and 2 but Hub 2X upgrade is cancelled for now.

Microsoft has announced that they are no longer planning to release the Surface Hub 2X processor upgrade cartridge originally planed for released this year that would have allowed existing SurfaceHub2S owners to upgrade the processor and Graphics Processing Unit through a special cartridge upgrade that would enable a host of new cool features including advanced tiling, multi device tiling and fluid device rotation, essentially turning the Surface Hub 2S into what they called the SurfaceHubX

For the record, Microsoft has said they will still be developing the promised tiling and rotation features which “might not require an upgrade for Surface Hub 2S customers, or they might not require a paid compute cartridge swap,”. “We don’t have plans to release a compute cartridge in 2020, because the best way to release those capabilities — tiling and rotation – may not require us to take that path.” Microsoft have said in a leaked partner webinar.

Is not all doom and gloom though as there is actually some long awaited good news still coming for all existing SurfaceHub owners.

Huge software coming instead for SurfaceHub 1 and 2S

Microsoft are planning to release a “major software update” for Surface Hub 1 and Surface Hub 2 customers which will be based on the first 2020 release of Windows 10. This will include much needed deployment, and manageability features as well as new features for users. Microsoft have said they will be releasing this update free of charge for all Surface Hub v1 and Surface Hub 2S devices, whereas the (un unnouced) price-tag 2X processor cartridge upgrade would have only been available for Surface Hub 2S devices.

No Windows 10X OS upgrade though yet

While this update will be based on the latest Windows 10 release, it will not get (for the time being at least) Microsoft’s upcoming modern Windows Core OS platform that will power new Windows 10X devices like the upcoming Surface Neo and other manufacturer mid form and fold devices.

Microsoft’s plans to release both Surface Hub 2S display monitor for other devices to connect to is still planned for 2020, though as is the release of a new 85″ Hub 2S

Reaching out to Microsoft for an update yesterday we have been told that “The top two priorities for Hub in 2020 are deploying the 85” device and rolling out an OS update that includes many top features customers have been requesting since Surface Hub 2S launched, including improving IT integration, deployment and management capabilities at no cost for all version 1 Hubs and Hub 2S devices. We’ll have more to share in the coming months

That’s it for now.. . What are your thoughts? Do you use Hub1? What updates do you hope for the most?