Overview of Teamwork Features
Summary¶
In this section, we go through Valo Teamwork features.
Logging in¶
Since version 1.15.1, popups will be displayed to the user only when using Valo Teamwork with the Safari browser. To use Teamwork with Safari browser, popups need to be allowed.
Groups Summary Page¶
The summary page displays all the Office 365 Groups that the user is a member of. For performance reasons shown groups and sites are limited to max 100 each. Users can use the search or filters to narrow down the results.
The Groups summary page includes:
- Search (by Groups title)
- Metadata filters
- default: type, active/inactive, country, language
- Display single group metadata and members
| Open group Info | Show group metadata and members |
|---|---|
 |
 |
- Group owners can edit group metadata
- Group owners can choose which applications are accessible from the context menu or add external links
- Specify the default app from group's applications including external links (i.e. the app that users are redirected to when clicking on the Group title)
My Favorites¶
My Favorites view displays user's favorite groups and sites. User can set group or site as a favourite by clicking the heart icon in the group card. Clicking the heart icon again will remove the group or site from My Favorites. For performance reasons shown groups and sites are limited to max 100 each. Users can use the search or filters to narrow down the results.
Documents (hidden by default)¶
Documents view displays the documents from OneDrive for Business, from across all Groups the user is a member of.
Documents can be filtered by the same (Group-level) metadata as the Groups.
My latest documents displays the documents the current user has last modified, both from personal OneDrive and Group OneDrive.
Documents from my Groups displays documents modified by others.
Each document includes a reference to the Group it belongs to. Clicking on the Group title takes the user to the corresponding OneDrive For Business document library.
The Documents tab is hidden by default and it can be enabled from Teamwork web part settings.
Discussions (hidden by default)¶
Displays discussions from Office 365 Groups the user is a member of.
The Discussions tab is hidden by default and it can be enabled from Teamwork web part settings.
Discover Groups¶
In Discover Groups view the user can discover all Groups he/she is not yet member of. User can see Group metadata and join the Group (those that are Public)
Filtering and Finding Groups¶
When filtering Groups the new query against Microsoft Graph is made with filter values.
Searching Groups limits results from the UI and it is not querying Groups with searched value. Discovering Groups will do query instead of limiting visible results. Searching affects to Group titles and on discussion tab to title and body.
Teamwork also supports predefined filters. Please see Dynamic Filters for more information how to use these.
3rd Party Links¶
In addition to the Office 365 services, groups can also be enhanced with up to five 3rd party links which will be shown alongside the other group links. The Group Owner can define these links from the Group Info Panel.
Configuring Teamwork web part¶
- Categories: Control what Group Templates can be ordered through this Teamwork web part, what they are called and whom they should be visible to
- The 'Label' refers to the name of the category, as visible to the end user.
- The Id refers to the Category configuration, as found in the 'TeamworkWebTemplates' library in your Teamwork Admin site.
- 'Groups allowed to order' can be used to restrict to whom the Category is shown. If the field is left empty, the Category is shown to everyone. If you define a SharePoint Group here, the Category is only shown to those people who are members of that Group.
- Privacy Settings
- For 'Permissions for Order button', enter the SharePoint Group(s) whose members should be allowed to order new Groups / Sites through Teamwork. If the field is left empty, everyone is allowed to place an order.
- Enable or disable 'Hide Private Groups from Discovery', based on if you want to hide or show private groups in Discovery View.
- Choose 'Enable archiving', if you want Group Owners to be able to archive Groups and Sites in Teamwork.
- UI Settings
- Hide ‘New Group’ button: New Group button is not shown on the page. Allows you to replace the order from with e.g. a PowerApps or Microsoft Forms form.
- Saved filters hash: If you have saved specific filter settings for your web part, the value is stored here.
- Customize labels: See Brand/customize labels for more instructions.
- Hide ‘Groups’ tab: The Groups tab is not shown on the page.
- Hide ‘Documents’ tab: The Documents tab is not shown on the page.
- Hide ‘Discussions’ tab: The Discussions tab is not shown on the page.
- Hide ‘Discover groups’ tab: The Discover groups tab is not shown on the page.
- 'Combine Groups, Sites and Workspaces': If enabled, Groups and Sites and Workspaces will all be shown in a single view. Please note that enabling this will decrease the page load speed.
- Default app: The application that will be open from group card if there isn't any default app selected for the group.
- SharePoint Site Settings
- Search query for showing additional sites in ‘Groups’ tab: If a search query is entered, sites matching this search query will be shown in the ‘Sites’ listing. If a value is entered, additional category ‘SharePoint Site (using Search)’ is shown under filter categories.
- Category name for: SharePoint Site (using search query): Use this property to override default filter category name for SharePoint sites returned from search
- Hide Valo Workspaces from ‘Groups’ tab: Valo Workspaces (Projects, Teams, Products) is not shown. If this is set to off, additional category ‘Valo Workspace’ is shown under filter categories.
- Legacy Settings
- Valo Schema Override: Name of custom schemaExtension if needed. Use with extra care.
- Styling
- Specify custom styles: this field is provided for additional styling/branding of the web part. It can be used to override the web part's default CSS styles and defining additional ones.
Creating new Group (or Site) templates¶
When new Group is provisioned, it is initially just O365 Group. What Valo Teamwork does to Groups is that it adds custom metadata to groups and allows extending / customizing basic Group implementations.
- Templates are for defining how new Group is customized. SharePoint site can be modified by using PnP templates, Theme and background image can be changed. Default metadata is set based on order values and default template values.
- Groups can have either Yammer or Teams defined but not both.
If you want to have Yammer provisioned automatically, you need to have a
All the Group templates creating Office 365 Groups need to start with “GroupTemplate”.
If you have Teamwork Enterprise license, you can also create SharePoint Sites without an Office 365 Group. These templates need to start with ’SiteTemplateModern’ or ‘SiteTemplateClassic’ depending on if you want to create a Modern SharePoint site or a Classic SharePoint site.
You can suppress the Welcome email that is sent to all the group members by setting the SuppressWelcomeMessage attribute to true for the respective UnifiedGroup element. No welcome message is sent to Teams-enabled groups or Yammer-enabled groups regardless of this setting.
Note
Please note that if you have installed Teamwork (up until version 1.19) into multiple site collections with different templates, you should use unique names for different template names.
Site Designs¶
Site Designs is an out-of-the-box capability for provisioning in Office 365 that could be used along with Valo Teamwork starting from version 1.21.
For more information, please see Site Designs
Dynamic placeholders¶
From version 1.21 onward Teamwork supports dynamic placeholders. These are values that can be used in Valo Teamwork Teams templates. Once correctly configured, those placeholders will be replaced during runtime with the corresponding values from the target team which is created based on a Valo Teamwork Teams template. For more detailed information, please see Dynamic Placeholders
Team extraction¶
From version 1.21 onward Teamwork supports extracting an existing Microsoft Team as a Valo Teamwork Teams template. For more detailed information, please see Team Extraction
Teamwork as an personal app in Teams¶
These days, Teams is where the collaboration happens. Increasingly, people turn to Teams when they want to collaborate within the context of Microsoft 365 platform. To be where the users are, we are now bringing Teamwork as a personal app into Microsoft Teams. Every user (or specified groups of users, if you wish) will have Valo Teamwork accessible as a personal app directly on the left-hand side navigation of their Teams Client.
This integration works on Microsoft Teams Client in Windows, Mac and Linux as well as on the browser on all platforms supported by Microsoft Teams. Mobile phones will also be supported as soon as personal apps become available for Microsoft Teams.
See manual install section for instructions how to add Teamwork app package to Teams after creating app package with InstallTeamwork.ps1 script.
To enable Teamwork personal app in Teams without a separate login prompt, you will need to approve separate permissions. If you don't do this, the user will be prompted for password when logging in. Please see Teams authentication Manual for more information.
Teamwork Admin UI¶
Teamwork Admin UI will allow you to easily approve and decline pending orders, create new Teams templates, view all groups as an administrator as well as view statistics about Teams and Groups. For more information, please see Admin UI Manual.
The Admin UI is available on the front page of the Teamwork Admin site from Teamwork version 1.21 onwards.
Support for users without Exchange Online mailboxes¶
Valo Teamwork now works with users who do not have a mailbox in Exchange Online. They can use the full functionality of Valo Teamwork, with the following two exceptions that are due to limitations in Microsoft’s implementation:
- It is not possible to mark groups as ‘Favourite’
- The ‘Documents’ tab is not visible
These two functionalities are automatically hidden if the user does not have an Exchange Online mailbox.