If there is one good thing about the current ongoing pandemic, it’s the fact that home offices and working from home had a serious boost. This also resulted in a boom for solutions like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. While I can’t say which one of these had the biggest growth, I can say that Teams support for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is hot. Hot in terms of the amount of requests for it but also in terms of what Veeam has added in terms of capabilities. Time to dig in!

Teams capabilities

Backing up a Team (or multiple Teams) is straight forward. In the backup job, just add them and you are good to go.

Once the job has finished, with the NEW Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Teams, you will be able to restore the most common things available such as:

• Team Posts
• Team Files
• Team Tabs

There are a few different restore and export scenario’s available.

• Restore a full Team
• Restore a full channel
• Restore all channel posts, files or tabs
• Export one or more specifc posts as a HTML or MSG file
• Export one or more specifc files as (ZIP) file
• Restore one or more specifc tabs

And just like in the other Explorers, you can use the advanced find (eDiscovery) to quickly and easily find what you need.

All of this is also available in the RESTful API and I’ll be posting how to use these new endpoints very soon as part of my RESTful API series.

Besides endpoints for Teams, there are also new endpoints available for license management and optimizations in terms of pagination so retrieving large volumes of data from the VBO server will be lightning fast.

Is that it?

Veeam wouldn’t be Veeam if there wasn’t more to a release than just the main feature(s).

I’ll be honest, Teams support is great but there are smaller features that are (in my opinion) as great or even greater!

The first one is a change to the ability to create proxies (and repositories). Before version 5, it was required to have a domain setup for this. Starting from v5, this now becomes optional and you can use your workgroup environment.

Scalability and performance enhancements

This is probably my favourite part to write about.

Under the hood, a lot has changed and you can find the full list in the what’s new document but there are a few I want to pick and highlight.

• Thousands of backup repositories, OneDrive accounts and Exchange items represented within seconds with the optimized RESTful API calls.
• The information on space used on thousands of backup repositories is delivered within seconds with the optimized PowerShell cmdlets.
• Faster SharePoint and OneDrive restores initiated through optimized REST API calls.
• Improved speed of export to PST achieved through parallel processing of mailbox folders.

As a vivid REST and PowerShell user, these improvements are wonderful! I dare to say a heaven’s gift.

Ever since I created the Unofficial Self-Service Portal, I had to come up with workarounds and solutions to improve certain things. While creativity isn’t a big issue, implementation and more important time are another story. Over the past years, I’ve spoken with organizations and explained to them how to achieve certain faster improvements under the hood by using caching mechanisms or internal DB’s to lower the impact on the VBO RESTful API service.

During the BETA testing of v5, this was the first noticeable thing. Starting OneDrive and SharePoint restores are instant. No more waiting x amount seconds to show the data within the specific restore point.

What a release!

It’s fair to say this is a huge release for Veeam. Teams protection is a must for those who use it and you can start protecting it today using Veeam. For a full list of new features, I will refer to the what’s new document.

All that’s left for me to say is, what are you waiting for? Get started with v5 today and become the hero of your organization!