The Microsoft Teams Admin center is your one-stop shop for any and all settings pertaining to Microsoft Teams. These settings control everything within Teams. So, let's go over them so you can prepare how to manage your new Teams environment. First, we navigate to the Microsoft Teams Admin center and select Teams from the left-hand rail and then click on Teams settings. This is where all of our settings for Teams live and we can adjust them as needed from here. Starting off, we have the notification setting. 

This enables or disables users' suggested feed, which is effectively what Microsoft Teams believes is relevant to the user and important for them to see. Next, we have tagging. Tagging is the feature that enables Teams to group users together under a tag similar to that of a group. However, it's important to remember that unlike groups, tags are not usable outside of the specific Team they are created in. The tag can then be used to disseminate certain Team members or even has the capability to add mention just like the individual users in the Team. Adjusting who can manage tags, enabling custom tags, or even allowing shifts to apply tags, are all able to be adjusted through this menu.

Next, we have Teams email integration. A lesser-known feature of Microsoft Teams is that each channel within a Team has its own unique email address which can be used to email messages to a channel. This can be seen by navigating into Teams, finding the channel, clicking on the ellipses here, and then clicking get channel email address. If I send an email to this address, it will also show up in the related channel. This can be turned on or off as well as restricted by only allowing certain domains. For example, if you only want emails from the Microsoft domain to be added, we simply type that in, or if we have no restrictions we simply leave it blank and we are good to go.

Up next is the file storage settings. As you're likely aware, Microsoft 365 comes bundled with one drive for business. However, there may be scenarios where organizations already have or prefer to utilize other storage solutions like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Ignite. In these cases, Teams can integrate and pull files from those existing accounts. In order to enable or disable any of these, simply click the box for the appropriate storage solution. The organization setting allows you just to simply view an organizational chart of their organization directly within Teams. Next, there's devices, which effectively controls how an account behaves when attending a meeting, utilizing a surface hub device. Search by name utilizes exchange address book policy to create virtual boundaries which control how users find to communicate. And finally, we have safety and communications, which enables role-based chat permissions.

This allows organizations or schools to limit chat capabilities within role-based permissions. Now that we've covered the org-wide Team settings, it's time to take a look at how Teams handles applications. Microsoft Teams has a bunch of different connectors and third-party applications that can integrate directly with the software. But how do you manage what can and cannot access Microsoft Teams? Well, organizations have options depending upon what they need. Every organization with Teams has organization-wide app settings that can be set up and adjusted as needed. To do this, we simply navigate right back to the Teams admin center, and instead of selecting Teams, we click Teams apps and choose permissions policies. From here, we can see all app permission policies for Teams. We can click on our Global(org-wide default) policy to adjust that and then choose what apps we want to be enabled.

We have Microsoft apps, Third Party apps, and Custom apps. Similar to other settings in Microsoft 365, with all of these options we can choose to allow all apps, allow specific apps and block all others, block specific apps and allow all others, or block all apps. Allow all and block all both do what you might expect. But to clarify, if you choose to allow specific apps, then users will only be able to install approved apps. But if you choose to block specific apps, then user will be able to install any apps that aren't specifically blocked. You can see, as I choose these options, I then have another button which opens up a menu for me to choose which apps I would like to select and which would then fall under the policy I just set. Organizations can also choose to make additional policies and assign those policies to specific users as well for more control. For example, if I wanted to make a custom policy disallowing all third-party applications, I would come back to the permission policy page and select add.

From here, I would block all third-party applications, name the policy, and add a description, and then click 'save'. Once that's created, I can go back into the policy and actually add users. Simply click here and type the name of the user I want the policy to be assigned to. If you have multiple custom policies, it's important to remember that if a user is not assigned a custom policy, then they will default to the org-wide default settings.