Written by: Shaloo Singh, David Rosenthal, Mike RothKugel, Will Dixon, and Way Vadhanasin
Users depend on Teams for collaboration from quick chats to mission critical meetings; however, this experience can occasionally be disrupted by environmental or configuration challenges, resulting in issues such as application crashes, launch failures, update failures, and more. In these instances, users often seek assistance from their administrators and helpdesk function, disrupting administrators and placing them in a reactive position with limited information to start diagnosis. We have been engaging closely with our customers to understand their evolving requirements and address their pain points in these scenarios and improve their operational efficiency.
We’re excited to announce the first step in our journey to empower Teams administrators and their Helpdesk teams to manage Teams clients proactively and efficiently with the new ‘Teams client health’ dashboard . This advanced tool is designed to fundamentally improve how administrators manage Teams by being the first tool in Teams Admin Center that proactively gives the details needed to best ensure the health of Teams desktop clients in their organization.
Admins can now access this through the Microsoft Teams Admin Center. The new Teams client health dashboard shifts the paradigm by offering a centralized view of client health and update metrics, actionable insights, and remediation tools—all within the Teams admin center. It is designed to help admins quickly identify and resolve problems that impact end user productivity. It’s the kind of dashboard you’ll want to bookmark and visit often.
3 Core Principles for Teams Client Health
We’ve designed the Teams client health dashboard to be focused on admin actionability and is rooted in these core principles.
- Actionable – Teams client health shows only issues requiring admin involvement, excluding those that Microsoft handles. By surfacing only the issues that require administrator action - and filtering out those already managed by Microsoft - this approach ensures administrators can focus their attention where it matters most.
- Qualified – Uses client data to reflect users' real experiences, even outside of calls or meetings. We display only user-impacting issues and avoid scenarios like crashes that self-heal and don't require admin attention. This prevents admins from chasing non-issues.
- Recurring – Highlight regularly recurring issues for the same user or machine, focusing on problems needing intervention rather than one-off occurrences. By filtering out isolated, one-off events - administrators can focus their attention on persistent problems that truly require attention, thereby saving time and allowing for effective prioritization.
Proactive by design: How can Teams client health experience help you
- Imagine the scenario where you receive feedback from a few users who might be experiencing an application crash, traditionally you would reach out to the user, ask them to replicate the issue and gather client logs to try and diagnose. It may take hours just to begin assessing the issue, and even then, you might miss other users silently experiencing crashes without ever reporting to IT.
- Now, with the new ‘Teams client health,’ you can log into the dashboard and look at the ‘Client health’ trend to see if there was any spike in Client Health (crashes or launch failures). Additionally, you can delve deeper into this section to examine the Insights.
- These insights can assist in identifying the root cause of the issue and rooted in our core principles of actionability, this dashboard allows you to review the mitigation guide and address the problem effectively.
Ensure Users are on the latest version of Teams
- Keeping Teams client current is critical to ensure users have the latest updates for security, performance, reliability, and consistency in end user experience. But despite the automatic updates, many organizational policies could prevent users from updating to the latest versions. Auditing this is currently very tedious and almost impossible to confirm until a user experiences an issue.
- To streamline this and empower admins to monitor client version proactively before their users experience an issue, we are adding comprehensive update monitoring in the Teams client health dashboard.
- This enables administrators to quickly audit their organization’s update status, identify which devices are still running outdated versions and gain insights into what might be blocking those updates.
Get started today
- All Teams administrators can try Teams client health dashboard today and bookmark for easier future access.
- Learn more about these tools:
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