Windows 10: A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang

GHacks · Sep 4, 2021

When Microsoft revealed that upcoming Windows 11 Insider builds were not exactly as stable as previous builds some time ago, it probably did not have this week's Windows 11 stability issues in mind.

Released on September 2, 2021, the latest Insider Builds for the Dev and Beta channels were causing Start menu and taskbar hangs and stability issues on systems the updates were installed on.

Some users may have drawn the connection between Microsoft's earlier announcement regarding the stability of builds and the current stability issues they experienced. Turns out, the stability issues were not caused by the new builds but by an advertisement for Microsoft Teams that Microsoft decided to run on the Insider builds.

Daniel Aleksandersen experienced the broken Windows desktop. Microsoft published a workaround, and Aleksandersen used the information to find out more about the cause of the issue.

Microsoft's workaround:

Step 1: Use CTRL-ALT-DEL and choose to open Task Manager.
Step 2: Choose “More details” at the bottom of Task Manager to expand Task Manager.
Step 3: Go to “File” and choose “Run new task”.
Step 4: Type “cmd” in the “Open” field.
Step 5: Paste the following (everything in bold):
reg delete HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\IrisService /f && shutdown -r -t 0
Step 6: Hit enter, and then your PC should reboot. After rebooting, everything should be back to normal.

According to his analysis of the stability issue, the issue was not caused by the update itself but by a "small file downloaded by a Windows component called IrisService". The component is a part of Windows Spotlight, which powers the wallpaper of the day pulled from Bing, and may display tips, promotions and suggestions on the Lockscreen.

The Registry key provided another clue; it contained an advertisement for Microsoft Teams according to Aleksandersen.

Based on the Microsoft-provided workaround, I narrowed the problem down to a registry key that contained a serialized JSON blob. The blob contained an advertisement for Microsoft Teams. The messaging and imagery in the promotion were identical to the panel you get when you press the Windows key + C on a Windows account not already set up with Teams. It’s unclear if it’s this exact promotion, however.

Despite being an Insider build, a beta or pre-beta version of Windows 11, it is clear that there is a larger issue at hand. How can a promotional message for Microsoft Teams make the entire Windows system unusable? Something like this should never happen; a non-critical activity should never be in the position to destabilize the entire system.

With Windows 11 just a month away, one has to wonder whether it is a good idea to release the operating system at this time. Imagine that the issue did not happen this week but would happen shortly after the release of Windows 11. Millions of home and business systems could have become unusable for a period.

Microsoft increased the number of promotional messages in Windows 10, and it appears that it plans to do the same in Windows 11. Most users don't want these. While they may serve a purpose, highlight a feature to the user that has not been discovered yet, it may also annoy users who know about these features already or have no interest in using these.

Clearly, Microsoft needs to put safeguards in place so that this won't happen again in the future.

Now You: do you plan to upgrade to Windows 11?

Thank you for being a Ghacks reader. The post A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang appeared first on gHacks Technology News.

read more...

CrunchyDoodle · Sep 4, 2021

Adding a user causes EDGE to hang

After a fresh installation of Windows 10 Home 32-bit I added a second user using adding another person, not a family member. That went OK and I went back to some web browsing with EDGE. Within a few minutes EDGE hung and I lost the keyboard and mouse. I had to use the reset button to recover. I did a fresh install again with the one user and the machine is very stable and never hangs. As soon as I add another user, the hang happens pretty quick. *Sad

If anyone has some useful suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

Brink · Sep 4, 2021

Chat from Microsoft Teams begins rolling out to Windows 11 Insiders

Hello Windows Insiders, today we’re beginning to roll out new Windows 11 consumer experiences to bring you closer to the people you love, your friends and family, using Microsoft Teams. This includes a sleek new Chat flyout right off the taskbar as well as an overall Teams desktop experience architected for optimized performance and the Windows 11 design language. You can remain connected to the people you care about with chats and video calls from the convenience of your Windows 11 PC, while they can participate from any device with Microsoft Teams: desktop, mobile, or even just a web browser.

We’re excited to share more information about the experience you’ll see in Windows 11, our staged rollout plan to Windows Insiders and what you’ll be able to try out now. In this first stage, you’ll be able to sign in, add contacts, and connect via individual and group chats. Over the coming weeks, we will enable audio and video calling, meetings, screen sharing and other capabilities. At the end of this blog post we’ll share some tips for Windows Insiders on getting started in this first stage. Note: We are beginning to roll Chat from Microsoft Teams to only a subset of Insiders at first, and over time will increase to more Insiders. Insiders will also need to reboot to see it enabled.

Seamlessly connect with the people you care about

The team has been hard at work building a new way for you to connect with the people who matter to you. A few highlights of the experience you’ll see in Windows 11:

Friends and family at your fingertips. When you want to reach out to someone, it’s as simple as clicking the Chat icon in the Taskbar (or WIN + C for the keyboard shortcut fans out there!). At a glance, you’ll see your most recent individual and group conversations and be able to respond or start a new chat or call. Just like the Start menu, you can pop open Chat at any time – it doesn’t matter what other windows you have up – to kick off a communication and it will then dismiss. You can open the full windowed experience by clicking “Open Microsoft Teams” from the Chat flyout or launching it directly from the Start menu or Search.

Clicking the Chat icon in the Taskbar (or WIN + C) puts friends and family at your fingertips.

Notifications with inline replies. When others contact you, you’ll receive beautiful, native notifications and even be able to respond directly inline to text chats. You can accept or decline calls directly from the notifications and decide whether you want to pick up as audio-only or with video, too. Notifications will respect the Windows 11 focus assist settings, putting you in control.

You’ll receive beautiful, native notifications and even be able to respond directly inline to text chats.

Add contacts via an email address or phone number. You won’t need to ask your friends and family for any special codes to connect with them. Simply send a message to their email address or phone number and if they’re not already using Teams, they’ll receive your message via email or SMS along with an invitation to join the Teams network if they wish.*

Automatically sync existing contacts. If you’ve used Skype or Outlook for personal communications with your Microsoft Account in the past, you’ll have the option to sync those contacts to start using them from day one. You can also sync contacts from your mobile device by installing the Teams mobile app and turning on contact sync, further saving you time.

Group chat and meeting links. You can easily invite others to a group chat or video call. Just copy the link and send it or share via email no matter if they have Teams installed. They can click the link it to join.

Tailored for Windows 11 and open to people on any device

We’ve worked to optimize the experience for Windows 11 so you can connect to friends and family across any device with Microsoft Teams:

All the comfort of your PC. It can be more comfortable to hold video calls or chat with your friends and family through your Windows 11 PC than having to pick up your phone. You can maximize meeting windows to make use of your larger screen and see people more clearly. You can more easily type chat messages with your physical keyboard (or the large touch keyboard when in tablet posture). You can use panning gestures on your touchpad to quickly scroll through conversation lists.

Take advantage of multi-tasking. The experience lets you take advantage of the multi-tasking capabilities of Windows 11 to have richer communications with others. You can share your whole screen or any window on your screen with others in a meeting to, for example, view a website together or collaborate on a trip itinerary in real time. You can copy-and-paste across different apps easily into chats and meetings. You can simply drag-n-drop photos, videos, and other files to share them with others instantly.

Looks and feels at home on Windows 11. The design of the experience features rounded corners, effects, and visuals coherent with the rest of the Windows 11 experience. The experience respects system themes and supports both light and dark modes.

The design of the experience features rounded corners, effects, and visuals coherent with the rest of the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft Teams across devices. While you take advantage of the Windows 11-optimized experience, others can participate directly in chats and meetings from any device with Microsoft Teams. There are native clients available for Android, iOS, Windows 10, Mac, and Linux and you can also use Microsoft Teams in a web browser!

The capabilities of Microsoft Teams for your personal life

Millions of people know and love using Microsoft Teams at work and school, and earlier this year Microsoft announced availability of Microsoft Teams for your personal life. With the re-architected Teams client on Windows 11, you’ll get the latest support for those same rich capabilities, including: immersive meeting experiences with Together Mode and ability to send live emoji reactions; make plans with the ability to include polls and assign tasks directly in your chats; calendar integration and ability to schedule and share meetings; rich views for files and photos shared with a chat; search over chat history; and more. and more.

The re-architected Teams client on Windows 11.

Some tips for getting started

Click the Chat icon in the taskbar and get started!

Sign-in with your Microsoft Account. If you’ve already signed into Windows with your personal Microsoft account, then this will be automatic. If you haven’t associated a phone number yet with your personal Microsoft account, you may be prompted to do so.

Check the box to sync your Skype and Outlook contacts if you’ve been actively connecting with them! Uncheck it if you don’t use those contacts or they are out of date or not relevant to you. (You can always change this later in Settings!)

Start a new chat by entering someone’s email or phone number in the to field of a new chat. They will get your message and an invite to join the Teams network if not already a member.

Create a group chat. Start a new chat and add some contacts in the to field to begin a group chat. Name the group. React to messages. Send emoji and GIFs. You can copy a link to the group chat and pass it along to others to invite them to join you, too.

A few known issues and limitations in this first flight

Experience is localized for English (US) only. Additional languages and locales forthcoming.

Offline is not yet supported. You must be connected to the Internet to use the experience.

Not all features are available yet. Additional features flighting to Windows Insiders in future weeks include individual and group audio and video calls and meetings, presence and status settings, screen sharing, and others.

When syncing contacts from Outlook, Skype, or your mobile devices, if a contact has more than one phone number or email address only a primary contact alias will be shown. Sync may also take up to 24 hours.

In some cases, users may find the Chat flyout gets stuck open. As a workaround, go to the Settings app > Accessibility > Visual Effects > Animation Effects and toggle the setting off and then on.

We’re excited for you to try out the first phase of Chat from Microsoft Teams. As we update this experience over time, we’ll continue to let you know of those changes so you can try them out and continue to give us your feedback.

—

*For details on SMS support see: Learn more about chatting via SMS
Click to expand...

Source: First Preview of Chat from Microsoft Teams begins rolling out to Windows Insiders

Brink · Sep 4, 2021

Microsoft Lists in Microsoft Teams is now generally available

Today, we are proud to announce the general availability of the Lists app in Teams for all our commercial and GCC customers. As you might already know, Microsoft Lists, which we announced at Build 2020 is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize your work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team. Track patients, loans, issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more using customizable views and smart rules and alerts to keep everyone in sync. With ready-made templates, you can quickly create lists from directly within Teams and access them on the Teams mobile app by accessing the Lists tab you added as a channel.

Introducing the Lists app in Teams

The vision of the Lists app in Teams is to bring all the collaboration and communication modalities to lists and list items, so it is easy to get work done.

The new Lists app experience in Microsoft Teams, for mobile on the left and for Web and desktop on the right.

Lists in Teams is supported as a team based tab app built on top of the Microsoft Teams platform and supports the following features:

New list creation from scratch, from templates (8 standard templates and 3 industry specific ones: Patients, Loans, and Incidents), from Excel table data and from an existing list.

Importing existing team lists as new tabs.

All standard list features that you can access in SharePoint web: column types, view formatting, Quick Edit, exporting to Excel, sorting, filtering, etc.

The ability to have a channel conversation about a list item (see below for more details).

All user actions on the list are audited and available in the Security and compliance center audit logging.

How do I get started?

To get started, simply go to any channel where you would like to start tracking a list and hit the “+” button to explore the tab gallery and select the Lists app. Once the tab is added you can either create a new list or bring in an existing list (from another team or an older SharePoint site, but not a personal list from Lists home) into the channel as a new tab.

Create a new list inside Teams with conversations side-by-side. The above shows using the Asset manager template.

The Lists app in Teams includes 3 new industry-specific templates – Patients, Loans and Incidents. Team members start managing and tracking these key entities. Here are some examples of how these templates can be leveraged.

Create a new list from within Microsoft Teams and choose from numerous ready-made templates, including the new industry-specific ones.

Healthcare organizations can use the Lists app in Teams to support patient rounding, multi-discplinary huddles and discharge planning. The Patients template is an easy way for all health teams to track patient progress and keep in touch with their peers. If you have questions about storage of PHI in Teams, Lists, or Office 365, please see more documentation here.

Government agencies can use the Lists app in Teams to track incidents and coordinated incident response. The Incidents template helps people quickly setup a list and get started.

Loan officers at a morgtage broker or bank can use the Lists app to track a set of loans and informally collaborate on advancing a them to approval. The Loans template helps them get started with plenty of scope for further customization.

How do I start a conversation alongside a list item?

Once you have configured the tab and have a list with list items, you can start a conversation about an individual list item. Go to the details view (or form) for the list item by clicking into the title field and then click on conversation to start a conversation about the list item on the channel. With this feature, you can collaborate with your team about the list item (your key business entities) and get work done, faster.

Since the conversation is a channel message in Teams, all the messaging features like @mentions, rich text, giphies, stickers, emojis, mentions, tagging, and attachments are available for use! The conversation shows up in the right rail for the list item and also on the channel for those who might not have viewed the list as yet.

You can chat side-by-side individual list items within Teams.

See more about getting started with the Lists app in Teams “Create a list in Microsoft Teams” click-thru demo. And do not forget to try the Lists app experience in the Teams mobile app to track your lists within Teams on the go. Just go to your Teams android or iOS mobile apps and go to the channel where you have added the Lists app and click on more and tap on the tab name to open up the list.

Learn more about the Lists app in Teams

If you are unable to see the Lists app in your channel, please contact your Teams Admin because applications in the Teams app store can be disabled or enabled by app permission policies. For more information, see the Manage the Lists app in Teams article. If you are looking for more resources and guidance, please review the help article here. For general help content and resources on Microsoft Lists, check out the Microsoft Lists resource center.

Note: Users of the existing SharePoint tab app in Teams that have pinned a list will see their experience inside the tab get upgraded to the latest Lists in Teams experience. This change will be rolling out today as well.

Millions of people use SharePoint lists and libraries every month in Microsoft 365 to track issues, manage inventory, report status, onboard new hires, build out event agendas, manage FAQs, and more. With flexible columns, forms, and views, you can build your own solution to meet your specific needs without knowing how to code. All these great capabilities now come to you inside the Lists app in Teams.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read about Lists in Teams! We’d love to hear any feedback or ideas you might have. Do submit suggestions on user voice. We are listening!
Click to expand...

Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...e/ba-p/1621979

Tweet

— Twitter API (@user) View on Twitter
Click to expand...

Windows 10: A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang

A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang

A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang

A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang

A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang - Similar Threads - Microsoft Teams caused

Windows 11 system hangs

Windows 11 system hangs

Microsoft Teams Meetings cause audio stutter and eventual hang

Microsoft Teams Meetings cause audio stutter and eventual hang

Microsoft Teams Meetings cause audio stutter and eventual hang

Microsoft Teams Meatings cause audio stutter and eventual hang

Microsoft Teams Meatings cause audio stutter and eventual hang

searchUI.exe causes Windows 10 Pro system to hang

Adding a user causes EDGE to hang