MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams – Deploying and Managing Microsoft Teams Endpoints Part 1

1. Deployment Options for Teams clients. Windows, MacOS, Linux, Web and Mobile

Does provide a variety of ways to get teams out in your environment so that your users can get on and start having meetings and messaging and all that. Microsoft provides some downloadable clients, windows, Macintosh as well as Linux and we’ll talk more about that coming up here in a minute. As well as a web based version to deal with teams, which I’m a big fan of. I really do love their web based version. I love I can just connect right in and use it from pretty much anywhere. Although you’re going to find that not every web browser supports the web app version of this. So we’ll talk more about that too. And then finally we’ve got mobile support which is Android and iOS. All right, so those are your two mobile sides of teams that you can use.

Now another thing we’ve got is we have Microsoft Teams for VDI environments. So it does have support for virtual desktop infrastructure environments if you’re familiar with that. And we’ll also be talking a little bit more about that coming up as well. All right, if you don’t know what VDI is, well I’ll explain what it is so don’t worry. Okay? And the other thing of note is that all clients do require an active internet connection and they do not support offline mode. That is one of the I would say if you want to pick something that’s a little bit annoying, it’s that lots of people like to be able to kind of go through and peruse their chat messages and things like that while they’re offline.

That’s not an option in teams. Okay? If you disconnect from the internet while the team’s app is open, you’ll find that you can’t view your chat messages. Maybe they’ll add support for that eventually. But as of right now you have to be online, actively online, have an active internet connection in order to view the messages and obviously look at things through teams. Okay, so let’s take a look at our different clients. We’ll start with the Windows client. So Windows has support for 32 bit and 64 bit architecture. So they do have that backwards compatibility if you’ve got some older computers out there and there is a lot of places in the world that are still using some 32 bit architecture. So Microsoft is still providing support for that.

But most everybody nowadays is using 64 bit. Now teams. Also when you deploy it on a Windows machine it’s going to get thrown down on the user’s profile on the machine. So you may know, generally speaking in Windows if you go to the C drive there’s a folder called Users and inside that folder is what we call the user profile which contains all of their settings and documents and stuff by default. As well as there’s a folder called App Data and that is where the team’s settings are all going to get deployed and be utilized. So they mentioned down here too. It tells you that the Windows client, when it gets installed, it’s going to be the app data that’s inside the user’s profile. So when you see that variable there percent local app data. They’re talking about the local app data that’s in the user’s profile.

So there’s a folder called Microsoft Teams and then you have Teams meeting ad in and then app data, Microsoft Teams and then local app data. So they have what’s called squirrel temp. So these are going to be the main folders that are going to be tied to your Microsoft Teams. I wouldn’t worry too much about having to memorize these folder locations, but it is important if you’re backing up stuff, it’s great to know that these four places are going to be where teams are going to be tied. The good news is most Windows admins, when they back up users data, they use a program called the User State Migration Tool, microsoft Deployment Toolkit and it’ll back all that stuff up anyway.

But pretty straightforward if you’re using a tool that knows how to do a backup. But if you’re backing up stuff manually, then those are your four folders. Okay? We’ve also one consideration to note about Teams when you use Microsoft Teams on a Windows computer you have the Windows Defender Firewall there by default unless you have third party Firewall. But Windows Defender Firewall comes with Windows and as soon as you try to make a call or something like that with Teams, you may get a pop up message like this. Now oddly enough, you can allow it, but you can also ignore it. Believe it or not, it will allow you to continue making a call with Teams regardless of whether or not you get that pop up.

So just wanted to point that out. And you can also instruct your users the same thing. Okay? Now as far as Macintosh goes, we do support Windows. Microsoft Teams does support Macintosh. It’s going to use a Pkg file in order to do this, all right? And it’ll get installed in your Applications folders. So basically the steps for that you’ll go to their download page for the Mac download it, you’ll click on the Pkg file, it’ll have a little wizard and then it gets installed in that application folder. Okay? They also tell you that if a user has a DMG file installation of Teams and wants to replace that with the Pkg version, then they tell you to basically make sure the user exits out of Team, the Teams app, uninstall the Teams app and reinstall or install the Pkg.

Okay? Another thing of note, if you are a Macintosh administrator having to deal with Macintosh teams is supported. You can deploy teams using software, MDM based software and all that, such as Jamf Pro if you’ve got that. And that’s a pretty powerful product when it comes to Dylan Macintosh. But don’t forget to microsoft has a product called Intune which is their official MDM product, which you also can utilize for deployments. Now for Linux, they have two different deployment packages. There’s a dev version and then there’s an Rpm. Okay? So those are your two different formats for Linux that you can get. And I’ve got the links up on the slide here for you.

You could go to those links if you wanted to, and that’s basically where they post everything for both dev and Rpm. Another thing is for people that want to do auto updating, the signing key that’s used for doing auto updating in Linux is going to automatically get installed when you install these versions. But you can also get it manually if you want to get it manually. And I’ve got a link there for you that you can use. Okay? But again, if everything gets installed correctly, the package manager with Linux should handle auto updating and all that with no problem. Now we have a Web client as well. And as I said earlier, I’m a big fan of the Web Client. I really do love the fact that I can just pull my browser up. I probably use the Web client more than I use the download client personally.

But there are some things to consider. First off, it has support for Microsoft Edge Rs two or later. It’s sort of the original version of Edge. And then the new version of Edge is called Edge Chromium, which I’m a huge fan of. It’s actually a really good browser. It’s built off of Google Chrome’s code, oddly enough, but it works fantastic. And it actually is a very secure web browser. So it works great. You have Google Chrome, obviously it works perfectly as well, and Safari. But Safari does have some limitations on it. There’s an article about that. If you go out there and Google running teams in Safari, you can learn about those limitations. Some of the limitations involve things like calls and meetings. Chat is not really a problem, but currently they do not have full support for Safari.

Now unsupported browsers currently, well, Internet Explorer is not supported, as you may know. Microsoft is they’ve deprecated Internet Explorer and they’re slowly trying to move away from it, or maybe they’re trying to run away from it, I’m not sure, but basically it’s not supported. Okay. And then firefox. Now that’s the one that kind of blows everybody’s mind because Firefox is still a very popular browser, but currently, at least at the creation of this lesson, this video, Firefox is not supported. So I encourage you, if you’re a fan of Firefox or your users may be using Firefox, you may want to go out there and search to see.

Maybe it’s been updated also, if it has, please send me a message and I try to stay on top of things too, on this. But I’ll be glad to update this video if and when it gets added. But currently it’s not okay, lastly, we have the mobile client. Okay, so Microsoft has two different options for mobility when it comes to phones and tablets and all that, and that’s Android and Apple. Now, I will say that Microsoft has a Surface tablet, but that’s basically a full blown version of Windows Ten. So you can run the full blown version of teams on that if you’ve got the newer Surface tablets. But as far as like smartphones and all that, Android and Apple, those are your two options.

It no longer supports the Windows phones. So if you have users that have the older Windows phones, microsoft has deprecated all of that technology. So you have android. Now, the other thing of note is that with Android, they tell you that support for it is limited to the last four versions of Android. So when a new version comes out, then basically the new version and the previous three versions are officially supported. For iOS, it’s the two most recent versions. So when a major version of that comes out, the new version is supported, and then the previous version are officially supported, they stop support for the one before that. So that’s how they handle that. And you can download these by going into the App Store. So Android, that would be the Google play store.

And then with iOS, that would be the Apple app store. Right? So this is going to be where you’re going to grab those mobile clients. And they work pretty well also, as far as utilizing teams and chat and all of that, they can do one to one calls and things like that, but there are a few limitations I also encourage you to look up. If you got a lot of that going on, you can get out there and look at some of the limitations that they’ve got. There’s an article on the team’s mobile apps and what their limitations are, but most of the features are there that you can support there. All right, well, hopefully that gives you a good understanding now of the different possibilities when it comes to deploying apps and getting those applications out to your users and what your different options are as far as teams content goes.

2. VDI (Virtual Desktop) Support for Teams

VDI goes virtual desktop infrastructure. This technology has actually been around for quite a while. And what virtual Desktop infrastructure involves is, first off, you have to have a server, all right? And your server is often called a virtualization host. Microsoft actually has what’s called Remote Desktop and Remote Desktop Services can actually support a virtualization host as well. So essentially what you’re doing with this is with a virtualization host, you also have virtualization through in Microsoft’s world that would be HyperV. But one of the biggest partners of Microsoft that does this virtualization is also called Citrix. Citrix is a company that’s been around for quite a while as well.

And they have a very premium name when it comes to dealing with virtualization and all. I wouldn’t say that they are as big as, say, VMware is in regards to the virtualization arena, but Microsoft has a good partnership with Citrix and they recommend Citrix as being one of the main ways to get this done. So you’ve also got the possibility, too, of handling all of this through Citrix. And I’ll talk more about that coming up. But what you’re basically going to do is you will be setting up virtual machines. You can have virtual machines with operating systems installed on them, right? And these virtual machines can be installed on your virtualization host.

Okay? So let me just move that over here. All right? We’ll have this virtual machine put right here. And so you could have multiples of these virtual machines sitting on this virtualization host. So from there, the great thing about it is you can have clients that can remote into that virtualization host and get access to those virtual machines. You can have basically teams installed on all these virtual machines, all right? And the great thing about that is your clients, it really doesn’t matter which VM they get access to when they remote in. They’ve all got teams, they authenticate with teams and at that point, they are able to utilize the team’s application from anywhere.

So you could be dealing with somebody who’s running a desktop computer and they are connecting in. You could be dealing with somebody who is running what is called a thin client. A thin client is a computer that is very lightweight as far as having processor, memory, all that on it. Companies a lot of times will buy thin clients because they’re very affordable. Also, thin clients are a great way to provide security in a company. They’re used a lot in banks in the medical world. They’re very affordable because, well, they’re cheap, number one. But the other reason they’re great is because they’re very secure. So, for example, if you go to a bank and there’s a person in their office with one of these thin clients sitting on their desk and you’re like, I’m going to steal that thin client.

So you run into the office, you grab it and run off. Well, the thin client doesn’t really know anything. The Thin client just simply remotes into something, okay? And that’s all it does. It remotes into something and at that point gets access to whatever it is in question that the person is wanting to access. But what’s really happening within clients is it’s all happening over on the server. So it’s not actually occurring on the Thin clients. So if you still want from a bank or from a hospital or something, it doesn’t know anything, so it doesn’t have any data on it, okay? And then as far as other devices, you could have laptops, you could have tablets for mobility, you could have smartphones, they can all support the ability to essentially connect directly in and utilize Teams. All right, draw an arrow right there. Not very pretty, but hopefully you guys get the idea and they can remote in to that VDI environment and they can access those VMs and they can utilize teams remotely. Okay? And they have access, they have access to the full scope of the Teams app.

Okay? So what I want to do now, let’s jump over and take a look at the Microsoft knowledge based document on this topic as well and talk about how all that’s going to work. Okay? So opening up my web browser here, if we go to like a search engine like Google or something, if we search for Teams for VDI, if you Google that, Microsoft has an article called Teams for Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure, and I encourage you to check this article out because it kind of breaks everything down for you. Goes through what VDI is, which is what I did. Talks about their main partner with VDI, which is Citrix. Okay? Citrix is an app they tell you, formally known as Zen Desktop. And then it gets into installing.

So basically what you can do, you can set up if you got a virtualization host, like I was describing before, you can go through and install the Teams app as an all user multi user environment app. What that means is that people can remote in and they can utilize multiple instances of teams. So Teams, they can support what is known as a remote app based system, where you’ve got the ability for people to remote in and utilize teams through a virtual machine. Another option is with Zen app, I can support the ability for different instances of the team’s applications to pop up on people’s screens. And you don’t necessarily even have to have a virtual machine set up in order to do that.

It just runs on their machine as though the app was locally installed, even though the app is not installed. Now in order to do that on a Windows server is important to understand. And this is what I really wanted to show you, is that you got to download the Team’s MSI package and they’ve got the links on this article, okay? You install that on the server and then you can use this basically this syntax here to install the application on that server. And this is the key and this is what you’ll remember. You are going to take exam here. You want to remember this. All user equals one.

Okay? That’s very important. Not just for the exam, also for the real world, if you’re doing this as well. Okay, so if you want to get this installed and you want people to be able to remote in and utilize teams, that’s going to be a big part of this. As far as doing a multi user environment, this MSI executive, the pack, the path, sorry. And then the installation where you want the log file to be. And then this is the key right here. You got to have that all user equals one put in there in order for that to happen. Okay? So very important. Make sure you read through this article too, because it sort of gets into if you are implementing this, this is important.

Now, it also has uninstall instructions too, if you ever want to remove it. But essentially this article kind of goes through and walks you through setting up this in a VDI environment. Okay. From a test perspective, you are taking the exam. There’s not really too much there to worry about. Definitely remember this, but other than that, nothing much there I would really be stressing over. But definitely for the real world. Go down this article, you can use it as sort of a checklist for setting this up in your environment. They’ve got a lot of support for this that you can use to help you with getting VDI working in your environment. Environmentals.