GCC High Update January 2020

Microsoft has put considerable effort into adding features which will bring Teams in GCC High closer to the Office 365 Commercial service levels.

Time to take Teams seriously in GCC High

For many companies who use GCC High, the addition of Microsoft Teams was a long-awaited improvement in collaboration. Over the last month or so, Microsoft has been adding new features – and tweaking others to make Teams even more robust, increasing both functionality and productivity.

Microsoft has put considerable effort into adding features which will bring Teams in GCC High closer to the Office 365 Commercial service levels. Following this past summer’s announcement that Skype for Business Online was ending, functionality has now been added to make Teams more useful in the GCC High environment. These include:.

• OneNote Tabs
• Teams Meetings with external users

OneNote – OneNote is a very powerful tool that you can use to keep track of meeting notes, projects, and anything else you want to document. OneNote was recently rated by PC Magazine as one of the best apps for productivity. Now with OneNote as part of Teams, you can add OneNote to tabs or save them as files in the document library. In the picture below you see OneNote added as a Tab so the entire Team can collaborate together in.

To see all the OneNote files you have access to, simply click on the “More Added Apps” button on the bottom left navigation. These are your Personal apps, below you see the links for OneNote, Planner, and Wiki.

The OneNote app provides the ability to see your own personal OneNote, plus the Team OneNote files that have been shared with you. You also can search to see which OneNote files you have opened recently.

Team Meetings – The key to Teams has always been the ability to collaborate with others, and that requires the ability to have online meetings with both co-workers, as well as external guests. Now that functionality has been added to the GCC High tenants. With the end of Skype for Business coming for Commercial this July, we would expect GCC High to follow shortly afterward. In the meantime, companies will have time to get used to using Team Meetings more in their environments, and enjoying a more robust collaborative experience.

Team Meetings features are similar to the Commercial version, including screen sharing (as shown above), apps, and chat. A key difference with the GCC High version is that adding PSTN is more difficult (and there is currently no ability to send GIPHY’s to people…sorry everyone!) We at C3 are still reviewing viable options for PSTN for our clients; as of this writing, there is not currently anything we would recommend. We’ll keep you posted!

Be sure to follow our ongoing review of GCC High updates; we’ll help analyze and sort out all the new features, benefits and more as GCC High features continue to evolve!