Tag: Flow

Determine the most suitable approach based on your current Skype for Business implementation and upgrade goals. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Understand common scenarios and upgrade approaches, (2) Visualize the user experience for each approach, and (3) Determine the optimal upgrade approach for your organization. IT Admins are the primary audience for this session.

Design a user readiness strategy to help your users love and adopt Teams. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Recognize factors that influence user acceptance and adoption, (2) Define core value messaging for Teams in your organization, and (3) Outline your awareness, training and support activities. The audience for this session is: User Readiness/Change Manager.

This 60-minute session introduces you to the key activities needed to get started with Microsoft Teams today. From setting your profile, to running a meeting, users will leave this session with the foundation needed to use Teams with confidence. The session is also available on demand at https://aka.ms/teamsgettingstartedondemand.

Have you spent significant time and resources to prepare for a meeting and still felt it wasn’t productive? Have you attended a meeting only to leave feeling like not much was accomplished? Join this class to learn how to make your meetings engaging, productive and effective. Microsoft Teams can help make your meetings worth showing up for. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Use Teams for your entire meeting experience, (2) Record your meeting, making it easy for those who couldn’t attend to get caught up, (3) Keep important meetings at your fingertips by pinning them for easy access, and (4) Assess which audio and video devices are best for your meeting needs. You can access the recorded version of this session on-demand at Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams – On Demand.

Execute your defined upgrade approach as part of your formal upgrade plan. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Recognize the upgrade settings in your O365 tenant admin portal, (2) Understand technical tips and considerations for a successful upgrade, and (3) Apply the appropriate settings in the Portal to execute your upgrade. The primary audience for this session is IT Admins.

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Discover everything you need to facilitate a successful upgrade to Teams. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Understand why a formal plan is crucial for upgrade success, (2) Identify the steps to the upgrade success framework, (3) Recognize common attributes of successful customers, and (4) Create and implement their own upgrade plan. The audience for this session is All (Business Sponsors, IT Admins, User Readiness/Change Manager, Project Lead).

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 1 – Effective Workspaces, you will explore ways to determine the best approach for creating workspaces for projects and workgroups. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Decide if your team is best served by a team and channels or a group chat and meetings, (2) Create a workspace for your team to provide the best collaboration experience, (3) Use a personal team to simplify your productivity, and (4) Determine best practices for Teams. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

Designed specifically for Skype for Business end users, this course offers everything you need to help make the transition to Microsoft Teams. We’ll focus on the core communication capabilities you use today, chat and meetings, as well as provide an orientation to additional collaboration functionality Teams has to offer. The session is also available on demand at https://aka.ms/fromskypetoteamsondemand.

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Are you still sending an e-mail with an attachment to your teammates when you want to collaborate on a file? How fast do they respond? How do you know if they are working on the file? How do you manage version control? With Microsoft 365 tools for teamwork, you can seamlessly collaborate on files with your team members. Using Microsoft Teams, you can invite your teammates into an environment where they can effectively collaborate and engage in a persistent conversation. Join us for this session and explore how to avoid productivity sinkholes and increase productivity. This interactive 2-hour session will give you the opportunity to test drive Microsoft Teams in a live cloud environment. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they can work for you. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices

Identity is at the center of security: don’t compromise when it comes to your company’s valuable information. Join us to explore how to use secure authentication, govern access, get comprehensive protection and set the right identity foundation. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Enable password protection, (2) Bring multi-factor authentication to your Windows 10 users, (3) Protect your users and data through Office 365 multi-factor authentication, and (4) Use conditional access to protect across devices, locations and apps. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Hockey Stick Adoption of Teams utilizing People Manager Framework Webcast

When: Monday, December 9, 2019 9:00am – 10:00am PT | On December 9th 12 noon eastern (9am pacific) join Microsoft’s Michael Gannotti and Pradeep Bethi, as Pradeep presents the opportunities, approaches, and resources available with the People Manager Framework. The framework is designed to help organizations increase adoption of Microsoft Teams. During the session Pradeep will be addressing the following areas: (1) How to make Teams adoption easy for end-users, (2) How and why should we think beyond chat and meeting, (3) How to create a motion for Microsoft Teams as a platform, (4) How to utilize People Manager Framework to create hockey stick adoption of Microsoft Teams, and (5) How to get funded. Along the way Pradeep will field your questions around adoption and the People Manager Framework. Don’t forget to add the event to your calendar!

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional Teams

How do you bring various stakeholders together across multiple teams to achieve your goal? Do you wish you could reduce the number of meetings or e-mails while still being able to solicit feedback, keep everyone informed, and get consensus? Join us to explore how to bring everything together in a shared workspace with Microsoft Teams. Learn how to chat, meet, share files, and work with other business applications to effectively engage others. This interactive 2-hour session will give you the opportunity to try it for yourself and test drive Microsoft Teams in a live cloud environment. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they can work for you. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Your business needs to control how sensitive data is managed. Join us and explore how to assess your compliance risk, protect sensitive and business critical data, and respond efficiently to data discovery requests. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Simplify assessment of compliance risk, (2) Integrate protection and governance of data, and (3) Intelligently respond to data discovery requests. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Today’s workforce can work from anywhere, on any device, and on any app. Security teams need to understand threat signals from disconnected products and optimize security with minimal complexity. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Safeguard users from malware attacks such as phishing and spoofing with Office 365, (2) Use the Windows Defender ecosystem to proactively monitor and protect your users, (3) Utilize Office 365 ATP to help protect users from bad links and attachments, and (4) Let machine learning and automation protect users from threats. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Data needs to be protected wherever it’s stored and whenever it travels, and you need the tools to monitor policy violations and risky behavior. Join us to explore how to implement a comprehensive and integrated approach across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Identify, monitor and automatically protect sensitive information across Office 365, (2) Help classify and protect documents and email, and (3) Use policies to enable BYOD scenarios by protecting data at the app level. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

BLOG ROUNDUP

5 attributes of successful teams

At Microsoft, we’re on a mission to help every team become a successful team. And so, we partnered with IDEO, a global design company known for its human-centered, interdisciplinary approach. Together, we researched successful workplace teams to find out what they had in common. Then we used what we learned to create The Art of Teamwork—a new digital curriculum built around the five attributes of a successful team. And that’s not all. We’re also using the findings from the research to refine Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. What’s clear from the data is that the future of workplace collaboration won’t be defined by any one technology. Instead, successful teams need collaboration tools that combine a wide range of technologies in new and innovative ways. Teams brings together chat, meetings, calling, document collaboration, and workflow into a single app—and this unique combination is catching fire.

What’s new on Microsoft Teams phones | Ignite 2019

Teams phones were first announced just over two years ago, and we are pleased to see the acceleration within this category. With several phones now available from our hardware partners, customers have a wide selection to choose from. We continue to work with our phone hardware partners to help customers transition to native Teams phones by having dedicated partner-led programs. Customers can contact their partner account team to learn more about the various trade-in and buy-back offers available. Following the recent announcement highlighting the end of support for Skype for Business phones, customers are able to begin their device refresh to Teams phones. With a complete range of devices built for common areas and personal office spaces, customers will be able to fit any space with the right phone. The momentum in Teams phones availability solidifies our hardware partners’ commitment to Teams and Microsoft calling services.

Office What’s New Management Preview

Recently at Microsoft Ignite, we announced new capabilities that put you in control of your users’ experience with the What’s New section of the Office desktop app Help pane. These capabilities are currently in Preview, and we plan to make them generally available (GA) early next year. Between now and GA, we’d like to invite you to try the Preview and let us know what you think. Each release of Office includes new and improved features. The What’s New content in the Office desktop apps highlights an editorially curated list of new features being released for that application, with a short description, and often a picture or a video to help customers learn how to use the feature. This content is created by the team that is releasing the feature. An example of this content is shown below. Historically, Microsoft has chosen which set of features are promoted to end users in the What’s New section of Help. The Office What’s New Management Preview puts you in control by allowing your organization to decide which features are shown to or hidden from end users in the Office desktop app. It gives you visibility into new content for each release version and channel, along with the capability to hide or show each feature’s What’s New content.

Ignite 2019 – Catch up on Microsoft Stream sessions

Jump on in and catch up on everything from Ignite 2019 from the Microsoft Stream product team. All the recordings and slides are now available for you to download and watch. Sessions highlighted in this post are: (1) What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Stream, (2) Microsoft Stream under the hood: Architecture, administration and compliance, (3) Customer showcase and Q & A: Enriching culture and driving a more engaged workforce.

Microsoft FastTrack Ignite 2019 recap – plus join us for Microsoft Ignite | The Tour

Our FastTrack and Microsoft 365 adoption experts delivered a combined 17 sessions at this year’s event, covering deployment, migration, and adoption best practices and how FastTrack can help you realize business value from your cloud solutions. If you missed one of our sessions or weren’t able to attend this year’s event, check out the session recordings and presentations below. Our experts were also excited to engage with so many of you at our booths in the Hub about your specific deployment, migration, adoption, and other technical blockers. It was great engaging with so many of you in Orlando at Ignite 2019. Be sure to check out this year’s session recordings and FastTrack resources. We look forward to seeing you during Microsoft Ignite | The Tour, a series of free, two-day events coming to 30 cities across the globe.

NOTEWORTHY

Update history for Office 365 ProPlus (listed by date)

Updated: 22 November 2019 | Office 365 ProPlus is updated on a regular basis with new features, security updates, and non-security updates. These updates are released by using update channels. For each release in each update channel, there is a version and build number assigned to it. The Monthly, Semi-Annual (Targeted), and Semi-Annual channels were updated on November 22, 2019.

Migrate from Slack to Microsoft Teams

Published: 21 November 2019 | This article walks you through the journey of moving to Microsoft Teams from Slack. When planning your organization’s move to Teams from Slack, it’s important to decide what you need to keep (if anything). We’ll start off by describing what types of data can be migrated and then walk you through how to assess your needs, plan your move, and then make the move. Your Slack service plan will determine what you can and can’t migrate. For example, some Slack service plans only let you export public channels history and files, other require a DocuSign request to include Private Channels and Direct Messages.

Workplace Analytics – November 2019: Feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for November 2019. In this update, you’ll discover the latest features, including: (1) Power BI – Workplace Analytics connector, (2) Redesigned Data sources page, and (3) Solutions feature renamed “plans”.

October Updates for Microsoft Flow

At Ignite we announced the new Power Automate name for Microsoft Flow — and the UI flows feature, bringing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) into the platform. But that’s not all — there are several other updates in the month of October that we would like to share! Additional updates include performance adjustments, new Flow checker rules, a new built-in action called “Run a Child Flow”, and improvements to the OneDrive and SharePoint connectors, as well as twenty-eight new connectors!

Sign-in with Google social IDs is now generally available for Azure AD B2B Collaboration

Yet another Ignite follow up blog to share with you today! Sign-in with Google social IDs for B2B users is now generally available—making the experience for your invited Gmail users more seamless and secure. Azure AD B2B Collaboration continues to be a hugely popular tool for organizations of every size to collaborate with guest users. Azure AD’s support for Google social IDs makes collaboration even more seamless, enabling your partners to securely use their existing Google identities to collaborate with you. No need for them to create and manage a new account! Some additional enhancements include: (1) Invited @googlemail.com users can also sign-in with their Google social IDs, (2) Google users can seamlessly sign-in and collaborate on all four clients of Teams: desktop, web browser, iOS, and Android, and (3) Teams support for Google users across common and tenanted authentication endpoints, like teams.microsoft.com.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | October 27 – November 2, 2019

Welcome to the October 27 – November 2, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

In the week prior to Ignite 2019, there were only two features added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including Sensitivity Labels for Microsoft Teams. Based on previous years, this is likely the “calm before the storm” with numerous updates expected in the coming weeks.

There are no new events, but a few new sessions for existing event series. This week’s spotlight event is the Microsoft Ignite Live Show, kicking off on Monday, November 4th at 9:00am ET.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include information on the new file and sharing experiences in Microsoft Teams, the October 2019 roadmap recaps for OneDrive and SharePoint, the general availability of user activity based expiration policies for Office 365 Groups, and some additional product-specific Ignite sessions.

Noteworthy item highlights include the recording for a recent Microsoft IT webinar on upgrading from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, the worldwide rollout of the new Microsoft Project, FastTrack assistance for Microsoft Defender ATP and Office 365 ATP, and the public preview of staged rollout to cloud authentication.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Cortana Briefing email	57204	Q2 CY2020	Added: 30 October 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 Cortana Briefing email helps users be better prepared for their meetings, stay on top of their tasks and protect time for independent work.
Microsoft Teams – Sensitivity Labels	57275	November CY2019	Added: 01 November 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Regulate who can access teams in your organization. Sensitivity labels created in the security and compliance admin center can now be used to control the privacy and guest access settings of the team. Users can select the appropriate label when creating a new team.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Microsoft Ignite Live Show

When: Monday, November 4, 2019 – Thursday, November 7, 2019 | Watch the Microsoft Ignite live show on the event website: https://www.microsoft.com/ignite. Catch announcements on the latest technologies, view the most popular talks, get behind-the-scenes interviews with product engineers and see how to access to the 1,000+ technical sessions being streamed live during Microsoft Ignite. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, kicks things off on Monday, November 4th at 9:00am ET with his Vision Keynote. There are additional live show sessions on Tuesday, November 5th and Wednesday, November 6th. Microsoft Ignite will be brought to you with all the sessions you want to see and exclusive interviews with leaders you want to hear from. Stream select sessions live and deep dive in the future of technology. Don’t forget to add the Microsoft Ignite Live Show to your calendar!

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional Teams

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Our transformation to Microsoft Teams

When: Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:00am – 11:00am PT | A cultural change is taking place at Microsoft with the implementation of Microsoft Teams as the new hub for collaboration and communication. During this roundtable, you will learn how CSEO systematically drove the adoption of Teams across the company by implementing a change management plan that actively engaged executive sponsors as well as end users, creating training and evangelism programs, and promoting the transition to Teams through a comprehensive channel strategy—all supported by metrics-driven analytical tools.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

BLOG ROUNDUP

Rich, new file and sharing experiences throughout Microsoft 365, now in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 is the best place to put your files. It delivers intelligent files experiences across apps – including SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Yammer, and Office – on the web, desktop, and mobile apps. Individuals, teams, and organizations share and work together from a single source of truth seamlessly, across applications and devices – turbocharged with AI and protected by industry-leading security and compliance. We’re excited to announce numerous file experiences and sharing updates for Microsoft 365: (1) New file experiences in Microsoft Teams, (2) New sharing experience in Microsoft Teams, and (3) New file experiences and sharing in Outlook (web and mobile). The rich, new files experience now appears within Teams when working within the Files tab of a channel.

Protect your highly regulated files in Teams with Microsoft 365 Enterprise

With Microsoft Teams, you can actively connect and collaborate in real time to get things done. Have a conversation right where the work is happening, whether coauthoring a document, having a meeting, or working together in other apps and services. Teams is the place to iterate quickly on a project, work with team files, and collaborate on shared deliverables. However, some places need additional security. For example, places for collaboration within departments dealing with sensitive information or groups of people need to restrict access, prevent others from even requesting access, and protect the files stored there even if they leave the team. The new Teams for highly regulated data scenario (https://aka.ms/m365esecureteams) steps you through: (1) Creating a private team, (2) Configuring additional restrictions on the underlying SharePoint site, (3) Creating a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy for a retention label and to block sharing outside the organization, and (4) Configuring a sensitivity label for the team for encryption and permissions.

OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – October 2019

The OneDrive team is busy preparing for Ignite and we can’t wait to share some amazing announcements with you next week. In the meantime, here are the latest functionalities that landed in production in the month of October-2019: (1) File sharing experience in Outlook Web app, (2) Markup capabilities for Office on Android, (3) External Sharing Reports, (4) Cross volume moves with PC folder backup, and (5) Per machine install of Sync Client- GA.

SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: October 2019

This post includes all the SharePoint and related tech updates that rolled out in October 2019. This is the all-inclusive roadmap release recap for all things SharePoint and related technology. Highlighted features include the SharePoint Site URL rename capability, the new, redesigned SharePoint start page, information on the Microsoft acquisition of Mover, support for SharePoint Server 2010 in the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT), the ability to trim the beginning and end of videos in Microsoft Stream, differential sync for all file types in OneDrive for Business, and many more. All the features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of October 2019 (possibly early November 2019).

User Activity based Expiration Policy for Office 365 groups is now generally available!

We are happy to announce the general availability of User Activity based Expiration Policy for Office 365 groups. This means any active groups covered by the expiration policy will be automatically renewed. The current Expiration policy allows you to set an expiration time frame for selected or all Office 365 groups. After the defined group lifetime, owners are asked to renew them if they are still needed. With this newly added intelligence, groups which are being actively used will be automagically renewed. This preempts the need for any manual action on the part of the group owners. This is based on user activity in groups across Office 365 apps like Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and others. Group owners will continue to have the manual “delete”, “renew” option for granular control. Like before, groups which aren’t renewed (either automatically based on activity or manually) will be soft deleted. Groups in “Soft-delete” state can still be restored within 30 days, after which the content is deleted permanently. | Resource: Office 365 Groups Expiration Policy

Microsoft Ignite 2019 — Outlook

If you’re one of over 25,000 individuals attending Microsoft Ignite and interested in learning what’s new in Microsoft security, productivity and IT, come discover the latest in Outlook. Explore new ways your leading productivity app and personal organizer helps you stay in control of your day with intelligent technology and updates across Email, Search, Calendar and Security. There’s over 15 sessions dedicated to Outlook on the web, Windows, Mac and mobile, in addition to related sessions in AI, Security and Microsoft Teams. To kick things off, don’t miss the Modern Workplace keynote address for a special announcement about what’s new in your inbox. We are introducing two labs where you can come and try out the latest from Outlook and Exchange. The Outlook product group and MVPs are excited to share what they’ve been working on. And don’t forget these sessions will be streamed live, recorded and available on demand.

Related:

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft IT Showcase: Expert Roundtable – Upgrading to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business

Microsoft IT is meeting the needs of an evolving, increasingly modern workplace by upgrading employees from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: the new hub for calls, chat, meetings, and file sharing in Office 365. After introducing users to Teams by configuring it to run alongside Skype for Business, we began upgrading employees to Teams-only mode. In this webinar, our experts answered questions on how we used a phased approach emphasizing readiness and productivity to accelerate adoption and help ensure a smooth transition.

The new Microsoft Project rolls out to customers worldwide

With Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud, we’re using the power of the cloud to help people and organizations achieve more. Last year, we shared our new vision for work management designed specifically to help teams collaborate on projects more efficiently and achieve more together. We’re announcing a major step toward achieving this vision with the general availability of the new Microsoft Project along with a new subscription plan! Collaborating in teams and projects has become an integral part of our work experience. Businesses increasingly rely on project teams to advance strategic initiatives, drive change, and solve tough problems. But keeping projects on track isn’t easy, especially when teams are working on multiple workstreams to achieve aggressive goals on tight deadlines. The new Project is designed to be both simple and powerful, so anyone can get started quickly and take control of any project right away. Project offers a redesigned user experience that is simple and intuitive. Teams can quickly add new members and set up tasks, and then easily switch between grids, boards, or timeline (Gantt) charts to track progress. And because Project is part of the Microsoft 365 family, project teams can save time and do more with built-in connections to familiar apps like Microsoft Teams and Office.

Introducing remote deployment guidance for Microsoft Defender ATP and Office 365 ATP

Microsoft Defender ATP and Office 365 ATP are two critical components of the suite of Microsoft security products that work seamlessly together to provide protection across the entire attack kill chain, using built-in intelligence from the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to protect identities, email, applications, endpoints, and data from evolving threats. At Microsoft, we are fully committed to helping customers realize the value of our Microsoft 365 security solutions by deploying them more quickly to address their business needs. FastTrack is responsible for making this commitment a reality by advising and supporting customers during the deployment of their technologies. We are now expanding the support we already provide for securing identities to email and endpoints with remote deployment guidance for customers that want to leverage advanced tools to secure their email and endpoints. Together, identity, email and endpoints represent the three most common entry points for attackers. The FastTrack team provides remote guidance, engaging directly with customers or partners. This is an ongoing benefit throughout the life of the subscription, delivered by Microsoft and approved partners. This service is initially available in English only. Worldwide availability and additional language support is scheduled for early 2020.

Conditional Access is now part of Microsoft 365 Business!

Over the past several months you’ve told us that adding Conditional Access to Microsoft 365 Business would help it secure SMB customers more comprehensively. We are excited to announce the availability of Conditional Access for Microsoft 365 Business subscribers, enabling small and medium-sized businesses to enforce granular control on how company resources are accessed. Conditional Access policies and configurations available to Microsoft 365 Business subscribers are the same as those available to Azure Active Directory Premium P1 subscribers. By configuring Conditional Access policies you can maintain control over how and where your company data is accessed, making your business more secure. You can define exact criteria for who can gain access and block those who don’t meet the criteria. The criteria can be based on factors like the type of device, app and location. | Related: Windows Virtual Desktop now available for Microsoft 365 Business Subscribers

Outlook in the Apple ecosystem

Microsoft understands that people have choices when it comes to their preferred apps as well as the devices they carry in their pocket. For those who go for Apple devices, we recently introduced Outlook for iOS updates for iOS 13, the WatchOS as well as the iPadOS that takes productivity to a whole new level for scenarios best suited to larger displays. Our goal is for Outlook to be your email and calendar app of choice on your Apple mobile devices. As your trusted organizer, to help balance your time and easily stay on top of what matters, Outlook for iOS is uniquely crafted to make you feel at home on your device of choice. Built for power and simplicity, we continue to carefully design mobile user experiences that are fluid and aligned with the elements core to the device, building upon the native design patterns. If you choose Apple devices, we hope you love these Outlook updates and choose Outlook for iOS as your preferred email and calendar app. With your email, calendar, and Office 365 documents in one secure app on your Apple device of choice, Outlook is more than an inbox.

Staged rollout to cloud authentication now in public preview

We’re excited to announce that the staged rollout to cloud authentication is now available in public preview. This feature allows you to migrate your users’ authentication from federation—via AD FS, Ping Federate, Okta, or any other federation on-premises system—to cloud authentication in a staged and controlled manner. More than 100 customers have used this feature to successfully cutover to cloud authentication during our private preview. Moving your Azure AD authentication from federation on-premises to the cloud allows you to manage user and device sign-in from your control plane in Azure AD. You’ll benefit from reducing the dependency on on-premises infrastructure, which typically includes a farm of servers and proxies that need to be accessible from the internet. You won’t need to worry about patching of servers, availability and reliability of the authentication service, or managing ports on a firewall. In addition, you could also use staged rollout to move from a federated cloud identity provider to Azure AD authentication. This helps you to avoid a cutover of your entire domain and selectively testing on a group of users to use cloud authentication capabilities like Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Conditional Access, Identity Protection for leaked credentials, Identity Governance, and others.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | September 8 – 14, 2019

Welcome to the September 8 – 14, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Seven features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Exchange Online, Project, SharePoint Online, and Outlook. Also of note is the introduction of the new built-in Global Reader role for Azure Active Directory, which is rolling out now.

There are several new events, as well as added sessions for existing events. The new events include “Syncing Up with OneDrive”, an upcoming OneDrive webinar followed by an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) session, and three Teams-related Ask Microsoft Anything sessions. This week’s spotlight event is the “Protecting Your Sensitive Information” Customer Immersion Experience on Thursday, September 19th from 12pm – 2pm Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include a look at the top 5 advantages of syncing your files with OneDrive, the General Availability of Security Policy Advisor for Office 365 ProPlus, a new version of Microsoft To-Do, and updates for Yammer, MyAnaltyics and sensitivity labels in Office apps.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as the recap of the 2019 Microsoft Flow Conference, information on end of support for Office 2010 clients (and Windows 7), recent enhancements to Exchange Online for replication in Azure Active Directory, and the general availability of Automated Incident Response in Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Updated SharePoint start page experience	54821	October CY2019	Added: 10 September 2019 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint The SharePoint start page, previously known as SharePoint home is getting a UX refresh. We are also adding new experiences to the start page to help users discover and get back to their content.
Introducing the reimagined Microsoft Project!	54641	Q3 CY2019	Added: 10 September 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Project We are pleased to announce the rollout of the new Project to our existing Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium customers. Designed to be visual, easy to use, and collaborative, you can manage your work flexibly – from ad hoc projects to complex initiatives.
Addition of New File Types to Default Block List	55100	October CY2019	Added: 11 September 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange Online We are adding some additional file extensions to the BockedFileTypes list. The BlockedFileTypes parameter specifies a list of attachment file types (file extensions) that can’t be saved locally or viewed from Outlook on the web.
Enhancements to Office 365 Quarantine Notifications and Alerts	55102	October CY2019	Added: 11 September 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange Online With this change, the email template used for end-user-spam notifications will be modified to conform with other Microsoft email templates. As part of the change, end-users will need to navigate to the Quarantine Portal within the Security and Compliance Center to take actions, such as release message. Also with this change, a new alert is being added for Malicious email detected. With this, admins will be able to configure an alert to notify them when an end-user has a malware or phishing message quarantined. We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in early October 2019, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of October 2019.
Azure Active Directory Global Reader Role	55096	September CY2019	Added: 11 September 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Azure Active Directory We are introducing a new Azure AD built-in role called Global Reader. A Global Reader can read everything that a Global Administrator can, but not edit anything. Global Reader role encompasses all Microsoft 365 workloads.
Outlook on the web – New Search suggestions	55138	September CY2019	Added: 12 September 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web The new suggestions will help you easily find emails and files in your inbox when using Search. When searching for a keyword, Outlook will show relevant people, emails, and files that contain the keywords.
Outlook for iOS: Move messages to suggested folders	54449	October CY2019	Added: 13 September 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook – iOS Effortlessly move emails to folders using Outlook folder suggestions

UPCOMING EVENTS

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

Azure AD Webinar: Take your apps to the next level with provisioning

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how to simplify identity lifecycle management with Azure AD automatic user and group provisioning for SaaS applications.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft Teams and Network Considerations

When: Monday, September 23, 2019 9:00am – 10:00am PT | This September and October Microsoft HLS will be hosting a series of 3 Microsoft Teams AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions. Each session will kick off with a brief update on any Teams news followed by a short 10/15-minute topic of consideration with Teams. The remaining 40-45 minutes will be wide open Q&A where our panel Microsoft Teams Technical Specialist will be on hand to answer your questions. Each session will begin at 12 noon eastern (9am pacific) and last for one hour. The focus of the first AMA session is on network considerations for Microsoft Teams. Be sure to add the event to your calendar!

Webinar: Syncing Up with OneDrive

When: Tuesday, September 24, 2019 at 9:00am PT | To get work done from anywhere, across your devices, you need ubiquitous access to all your files – online and offline. Business information needs to be up to date and in reach, without compromise. Digital natives and mobile professionals expect this. And OneDrive does not disappoint. OneDrive is the intelligent files app for Microsoft 365 – your conduit to access, share and collaborate on all your files anytime, from anywhere, and across all your devices. In this webinar, we will demonstrate the advantages of OneDrive sync client that can help you be productive and stay connected to all your files without using the storage space on your device. We will also showcase the ease with which admins can manage and protect their organization’s data with effective sync policies. Don’t forget to add the event to your calendar!

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Syncing Up with OneDrive

When: Tuesday, September 24, 2019 at 10:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Syncing Up with OneDrive ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA). An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. This AMA gives you the opportunity to connect with members of the product engineering teams who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Join in the OneDrive AMA space, and be sure to add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Azure AD Webinar: Upgrade your security with multi-factor authentication

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how to protect your users by leveraging Azure AD and 3rd-party multi-factor authentication.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional Teams

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Our transformation to Microsoft Teams

When: Wednesday, October 9, 2019 10:00am – 11:00am PT | A cultural change is taking place at Microsoft with the implementation of Microsoft Teams as the new hub for collaboration and communication. During this roundtable, you will learn how CSEO systematically drove the adoption of Teams across the company by implementing a change management plan that actively engaged executive sponsors as well as end users, creating training and evangelism programs, and promoting the transition to Teams through a comprehensive channel strategy—all supported by metrics-driven analytical tools.

Azure AD Webinar: Starting your journey to Zero Trust with Conditional Access & Identity Protection

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how to shore-up your environment by following zero trust methodologies and Azure AD technologies.

Azure AD Webinar: Empower your users with better IT scalability

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how Azure AD enables your users to reset their passwords securely and manage their own IT security and allows you to scale IT management of groups.

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Non-native Teams Room Systems and Microsoft Teams Meetings

When: Monday, October 21, 2019 9:00am – 10:00am PT | This September and October Microsoft HLS will be hosting a series of 3 Microsoft Teams AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions. Each session will kick off with a brief update on any Teams news followed by a short 10/15-minute topic of consideration with Teams. The remaining 40-45 minutes will be wide open Q&A where our panel Microsoft Teams Technical Specialist will be on hand to answer your questions. Each session will begin at 12 noon eastern (9am pacific) and last for one hour. The focus of the second AMA session is on non-native Teams Room Systems and Microsoft Teams Meetings. Be sure to add the event to your calendar!

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Upgrading to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business

When: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 10:00am – 11:00am PT | Microsoft CSEO is meeting the needs of an evolving, increasingly modern workplace by upgrading employees from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: the new hub for calls, chat, meetings, and file sharing in Office 365. After introducing users to Teams by configuring it to run alongside Skype for Business, we began upgrading employees to Teams-only mode. In this webinar, our experts will answer questions on how we used a phased approach emphasizing readiness and productivity to accelerate adoption and help ensure a smooth transition.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft Teams and End User Preparedness

When: Monday, October 28, 2019 9:00am – 10:00am PT | This September and October Microsoft HLS will be hosting a series of 3 Microsoft Teams AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions. Each session will kick off with a brief update on any Teams news followed by a short 10/15-minute topic of consideration with Teams. The remaining 40-45 minutes will be wide open Q&A where our panel Microsoft Teams Technical Specialist will be on hand to answer your questions. Each session will begin at 12 noon eastern (9am pacific) and last for one hour. The focus of the third and final AMA session is end user preparedness for Microsoft Teams. Be sure to add the event to your calendar!

BLOG ROUNDUP

Top 5 advantages of syncing your files with OneDrive

To get work done from anywhere, across your devices, you need ubiquitous access to all your files – online and offline. Business information needs to be up to date and in reach, without compromise. Digital natives and mobile professionals expect this. And OneDrive does not disappoint. OneDrive is the intelligent files app for Microsoft 365—your conduit to access, share and collaborate on all your files anytime, from anywhere, and across all your devices. Let us look at the top 5 benefits when using the OneDrive sync client: (1) Be productive and stay connected, (2) With more files, comes more space, (3) Access beyond your individual files and folders, (4) Monitor your files and sync actions, and (5) Admins – customize sync experience with effective policies. | Related: Sync Up – a OneDrive podcast, Episode 1 – “Files, Files, Files”

Security Policy Advisor for Office 365 ProPlus is now Generally Available!

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Security Policy Advisor, a new service that can help enterprises improve the security of Office 365 ProPlus clients in their organization. Security Policy Advisor has been in preview for the past few months and we wanted to first thank all our previewers who have evaluated this service and provided us with feedback that has helped us improve the service. Security Policy Advisor enables IT admins who have deployed Office 365 ProPlus to manage the security of their Office applications with confidence by providing the following capabilities: (1) Tailored recommendations, (2) Rich data insights, (3) One-click deployment of policies, and (4) Monitoring and reporting. This service is now generally available and supported for customers with Office 365 ProPlus. | Related: Office 365 ProPlus Deployment and Proxy Server Guidance

Announcing the new version of Microsoft To Do—we’ve come a long way!

When Wunderlist became part of the Microsoft family, our mission was to bring the delightful, simple, and elegant daily task experience and build it into Microsoft’s intelligent, interconnected, and security-centric ecosystem to create a new app—Microsoft To Do. We’re unveiling the new version of To Do, which includes a fresh new design, access from wherever you are, and more integration with Microsoft apps and services. With To Do, we’re on a mission to bring everything you need to do—from anywhere tasks appear in your favorite Microsoft 365 apps and services—into one centralized view. Flag messages you need to follow up on and see them in the Flagged Email list (with Microsoft work or school accounts or Microsoft-hosted email accounts like Outlook, Hotmail, or Live). The Assigned to Me list shows you the tasks assigned to you in your shared lists and those from Microsoft Planner. From there you can add them to My Day to give you a holistic view of what you need to do today. But that’s not all—with our Cortana integration, you can also add tasks from your Amazon Echo.* Love Microsoft Launcher on Android? Guess what! To Do is integrated there too.

Announcing rollout of MyAnalytics Digest email to Microsoft 365

MyAnalytics in Microsoft 365 helps you to work smarter with personal productivity insights in Microsoft 365 by allowing you to explore your work patterns with MyAnalytics and learn ways to work smarter— improving your focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration. Earlier this year, we announced a plan to make MyAnalytics broadly available to Microsoft 365 enterprise and business customers. Since then, we have rolled out Insights add in in Outlook and MyAnalytics dashboard. We’re excited to share that in the next couple of weeks we’ll start to roll out the MyAnalytics weekly digest email to E3, E1 and Business SKUs and based on customer feedback, we’ll continue to expand to 100% worldwide over the next few months. NOTE as with previous milestones, end users as well as tenant admins continue to have the ability to opt out of any component of MyAnalytics. Targeted Release refers to users or organizations who have been opted in by their admins as early recipients of new Microsoft 365 features.

New conversation experience for Yammer Mobile

Yammer mobile iOS and Android apps keep you connected from anywhere – driving employee engagement and participation across the entire company. Earlier this year, we announced a preview of upcoming changes to the mobile experience, and now, Yammer’s superpowers are getting even stronger. Here’s a look at how we’re building beautiful new mobile experiences to help you connect, discover, and share in a way that’s easy on the thumbs and the eyes. A new card-based design sharpens content in the feed and helps you focus on the discussions that matter most to you. This is combined with a refreshed icon set, additional fonts and typography, new color palettes, and smoothed out spacing & indentations that create a delightful interface and encourages effortless scanning and comprehension. A new bubble layout organizes replies for mobile allowing the user to read more as desired. Similarly, we’ve added a “Read more” option in the feed to see additional conversations and expand threads. | Related: Bringing new Yammer Users into Active State

Sensitivity labeling now built into Office apps for Windows to help protect sensitive information

Microsoft Information Protection solutions help you better protect your sensitive information, wherever it lives or travels – across devices, apps, cloud services and on-premises. Our goal is to provide a consistent and comprehensive approach to discovering, classifying, labeling and protecting sensitive data. Earlier this year we released built-in sensitivity labeling in Office apps for Mac, iOS and Android. These capabilities enable users to easily apply sensitivity labels to documents and emails – based on the policies defined by your organization. The built-in labeling experiences are integrated directly into Office apps – there’s no need for any special plugins or add-ons. We’re expanding to additional Office apps, and now sensitivity labeling is available in Office apps for Windows. With this release, end-user driven sensitivity labeling is now available in Office for Windows: Word, PowerPoint, Excel & Outlook. The labeling experience in Office apps for Windows is similar to the labeling experience on other platforms – making it easy and familiar for your end-users. Once you define and configure your sensitivity labels and policies, the same labels are published out and made available across the supported Office apps.

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft Flow Conference 2019 Recap

WOW! Flow Conference 2019 was Amazing!! 18 Sessions from 18 of the best teachers! So many new skills acquired, so many new people inspired, this event was truly amazing because it was for the community, by the community! For those unable to join the live conference, all of the content is available on-demand! You can watch the entire conference as it was presented, or individual sessions. Links to both are included in the blog post, along with a list of speakers.

Move from Office 2010 clients and servers and Windows 7 to Microsoft 365 Enterprise

Some important Microsoft products are going to end of support in 2020, which include: Windows 7 and Exchange Server 2010 on January 14, 2020, and SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010, and Office 2010 on October 13, 2020. End of support means that Microsoft will no longer provide free security updates. If you haven’t already, you should be planning and acting to upgrade or replace these products soon. For each product, there are multiple options. For a visual summary of the products and their options, see the new Office 2010 clients and servers and Windows 7 end of support poster.

My user has a mailbox both on-premises and in Exchange Online. Help!

In support, we hear from people in this “duplicate mailbox” situation relatively often. When this happens, our customers ask us for the best way to recover. There are typically two main scenarios under which accounts can get into this situation – (1) Duplicate (new) mailbox in Exchange Online, and (2) Duplicate (new) mailbox on-premises. No matter how you get into this situation, the recommended recovery process will be the same. You can find that recently documented process here: How to recover when a mailbox exists in both Exchange Online and on-premises. In this blog post, we did want to acknowledge that we know there might be other ways to recover from this scenario. We spent quite a bit of time discussing how to best approach this and document a process that repeatedly gives you the best chance of success with no data loss.

Foundations of Microsoft Flow—secure and compliant automation, part 2

More organizations are seeking automation solutions and there will be many options. As security professionals, you’ll have to recommend the service offering all the benefits of automation, while ensuring the organization remains secure and compliant. Flow is natively integrated with best-in-class authentication services, offers powerful data loss prevention and an enhanced IT experience ranging from broad visibility and control to automating IT functions, and is built on rigorous privacy and compliance standards. We’re confident that Flow will be the right choice for your organization, so let’s get started on showing you why.

Exchange Online Improvements to Accelerate Replication of Changes to Azure Active Directory

As part of continued improvements to the Exchange Online service we are releasing an improvement to the User object management experience. Currently, when you create or modify user’s properties via Exchange Admin Center (EAC), Exchange Online PowerShell or other API, you might not see the result of your change in AAD for a while. The Exchange Online and AAD teams have worked together to provide a new mechanism to synchronize the changes that originate in EXO and need to replicate to AAD without relying on the current back-sync mechanism. Once this improvement is deployed to your tenant, when you make user object changes in Exchange the changes will now be dual-written to AAD and EXO. The end result is that the replication of those properties should be close to immediate and changes made in EXO will immediately reflect in AAD when the cmdlet completes successfully. Note, that this change should be transparent to all the Exchange management operations you are doing today. There is absolutely no need to change your scripts or your usage of EAC or other Exchange APIs. You may see new errors, but they should be treated the same as you do today: re-run the cmdlet. If the issue persists when you open a support ticket, just mention that the error in Exchange is due to AAD and support should be able to help you redirect to the correct teams.

Automated incident response in Office 365 ATP now generally available

Security teams responsible for investigating and responding to incidents often deal with a massive number of signals from widely disparate sources. As a result, rapid and efficient incident response continues to be the biggest challenge facing security teams today. The sheer volume of these signals, combined with an ever-growing digital estate of organizations, means that a lot of critical alerts miss getting the timely attention they deserve. Security teams need help to scale better, be more efficient, focus on the right issues, and deal with incidents in a timely manner. This is why we’re excited to announce the general availability of Automated Incident Response in Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). Applying these powerful automation capabilities to investigation and response workflows can dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your organization’s security teams.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | September 1 – 7, 2019

Welcome to the September 1 – 7, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were four additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Office 365 ProPlus, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online.

New Azure Active Directory webinars and Customer Immersion Experience sessions have been added. The spotlight events of the week are the “Microsoft Flow Online Conference” and the “Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey” Customer Immersion Experience, both on Thursday, September 12, 2019.

The August 2019 recap posts continued last week with the latest OneDrive and SharePoint features. Also included are posts on building dynamic, lean and universal packages for Office 365 ProPlus, managing your Skype to Microsoft Teams transition with Yammer, and information on upcoming changes to Yammer profiles that will merge into the Office profiles.

Noteworthy item highlights from last week include information on the availability of Planner for all F1 commercial plans and government offerings starting in October, August 2019 updates for PowerApps, and the first of a two-part series on the foundations of Microsoft Flow.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Security Policy Advisor is now available	54813	September CY2019	Added: 03 September 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Office 365 ProPlus Security Policy Advisor for Office 365 ProPlus is now available. Learn more at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployOffice/overview-of-security-policy-advisor.
Manage sharing and access request settings from the Site permissions panel	54983	September CY2019	Added: 04 September 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: SharePoint Site owners can now manage sharing and access request settings from the Site permissions panel. Site owners can use these settings to, for example, only allow owners to share files, folders and the site and restrict everyone else from sharing. Previously these settings were only available in the Advanced permissions settings page.
Exchange Online Improvements to Accelerate Replication of Changes to Azure Active Directory	55023	October CY2019	Added: 06 September 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange Online We’re updating Exchange Online to accelerate replication of changes to Azure Active Directory. With this change, modifications to Exchange properties will be written immediately to AAD reducing the replication time.
Tenant Customizable Recipient Limits	55025	Q1 CY2020	Added: 06 September 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange Online In Exchange Online a mailbox user is allowed to send to a maximum of 500 recipients per message. This default value currently can’t be changed by the tenant admin. Yet, many admins would like to raise this limit on at least a few mailboxes (for monthly newsletters for example). Others want to significantly lower it (to, say, 50 or some such) for most or all mailboxes in their organization, as part of a perceived defense-in-depth strategy to reduce the potential impact should a hacker compromise a user account and start blasting out spam, or a disgruntled employee tries to air their grievances company-wide. With the upcoming customizable recipient limits, you’ll now be able to customize this setting between 1 and 1000, for a single mailbox, multiple mailboxes, and for the default setting for new mailboxes that you create in the future. Single and bulk edit will be available in the Exchange Admin Center UI, while customizing the default setting for new mailboxes can be done via Remote PowerShell.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

Microsoft Flow Online Conference 2019

When: Tuesday, September 10, 2019 6:00am – 3:00pm PT | Come and join some of the best teachers, trainers and Microsoft Flow MVP’s from around the world as they bring 9 hours of back-to-back Microsoft Flow training and tutorial sessions live and on-demand to you! The day will consist of 18 unique 30 minute sessions ranging from beginner at the start of the day all the way to advanced content toward the end of the day. This ensures that no matter what the viewer’s skill set is, they will be able to get valuable insights and new skills to help take their Flow game to the next level. Join us and take your Microsoft Flow skills to the next level! View the full schedule, and don’t forget to add the event to your calendar.

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Azure AD Webinar: Integrating your applications with Azure Active Directory

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how integrating your line of business and SaaS apps using Azure Active Directory enables advanced security, single sign-on, and convenience for you and your users.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Azure AD Webinar: Take your apps to the next level with provisioning

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Azure AD Webinar: Upgrade your security with multi-factor authentication

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how to protect your users by leveraging Azure AD and 3rd-party multi-factor authentication.

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional Teams

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Our transformation to Microsoft Teams

Azure AD Webinar: Starting your journey to Zero Trust with Conditional Access & Identity Protection

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how to shore-up your environment by following zero trust methodologies and Azure AD technologies.

Azure AD Webinar: Empower your users with better IT scalability

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, learn how Azure AD enables your users to reset their passwords securely and manage their own IT security and allows you to scale IT management of groups.

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Upgrading to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

BLOG ROUNDUP

OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – August 2019

The OneDrive team has been hard at work releasing features that will further enhance the collaboration experience with OneDrive. Here are the latest functionalities that landed in production in the month of August-2019: (1) Comments on non-Office files, (2) Popular Around Me, (3) Direct sharing link to individual PowerPoint slide, (4) Virtual Desktop updates. | Related: Sync Up – a new OneDrive podcast from Microsoft

SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: August 2019

August was a busy delivery month. And we hope some of that busy output has crept into your work day-to-day already, to help you be more productive and connected with your projects and peers. This is the all-inclusive roadmap release recap for all things SharePoint and related technology. The coolest update is site swap, which magically changes the root site for your SharePoint Online tenant. Other updates include the option for site owners to join their site to a SharePoint hub site, the ability to comment on non-Office files, getting a direct link to individual PowerPoint slides, and more. All the features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of August 2019 (possibly early September 2019).

Building dynamic, lean & universal packages for Office 365 ProPlus

As an admin, you might have been tasked with the deployment of Office 365 ProPlus to your organization. But such a deployment is more than just Office. After the initial migration to ProPlus, you might have to provide ways for your users to acquire automated installs of additional Language Packs, Proofing Tools, products like Visio and Project or other components. This blog post will walk your through a concept of building dynamic, lean & universal packages for Office 365 ProPlus, greatly reducing long-term maintenance costs and effort needed in managed environments.

Manage your Skype to Microsoft Teams transition with Yammer

You may have already read about Microsoft retiring Skype for Business Online in 2021. One way that customers are successfully managing this transition is by using Yammer to support and communicate this change widely within their organization. Changing from one IT system to another is a daunting task and can create disruption and uncertainty throughout the organization. Luckily, Yammer can help. Using a community-based approach encourages your coworkers to help each other, solve problems, and share tips in a public way that benefits everyone. Having a community such as this to support one another also helps to ease the load on the IT department. Yammer is a great platform for this because you don’t know who will be affected most by this change, where your best feedback might come from, or who else might be passionate enough to volunteer to participate in the change efforts with you… and Yammer makes it easy to find experts and share knowledge quickly. A few of our best practices are: (1) Create a specific community to support the change, (2) Encourage employees to use this space to ask questions, (3) Share trips and tricks, (4) Collect feedback, (5) Communicate the change, and (6) Host a live event and encourage Q & A.

One Identity across Yammer and Office

We’re continuing to strengthen the integration and experiences between Yammer and Office 365, with recent announcements about the app launcher and header, the new SharePoint web part, and Microsoft Teams integrations, and now we’re excited to announce that we are simplifying the profile and identity experiences within Yammer to better align with suite and enhance security. Later this quarter, Yammer profiles will be merged into the Office profile. We will write over the Yammer profile with their Office identity to create a single source of truth. At that time, we will also remove the profile tab from the Settings menu. Users that want to change their photos, phone numbers, and other data will need to do so from Delve or ask their IT administrator to assist, just as you would across the rest of Office. This also means that we’ll remove some otherwise un-used or antiquated fields like your MSN or AOL account information. If the user does not have an Office identity, this change won’t impact them. They can continue editing their Yammer profile directly in Yammer. While this change does remove the ability to change your Yammer name to reflect campaigns or out of office messaging, it brings a greater coherence to the suite and allows admins to better manage policies, improve data accuracy, and streamline the profile experience for their users.

NOTEWORTHY

Modernize employee experience with this no-code chatbot in Teams

As organizations grow, they amass tons of tribal knowledge that often sits within documents, SharePoint sites and FAQ manuals. Not everyone is interested in everything and it becomes tricky to find the information quickly. This forces employees to switch context between applications or deal with the specialists / subject matter experts directly which causes frustration for both. An FAQ bot can solve the problem and with Microsoft’s QnA Maker tool it is simple to create a powerful chatbot rather quickly without writing a single line of code. We’re excited to bring to you the FAQ Plus app template that capitalizes on both the areas of opportunities above to deliver a rich employee experience. In addition, creating your own employee facing bot using the template requires no coding and deploys in minutes.

Planner is coming to all F1 commercial plans and government offerings starting in October

Planner has always been for people like you—people who manage work on a daily basis without being in a formal work management role. And it’s with people like you in mind that we’re releasing Planner for all F1 commercial plans and government offerings starting in October. Microsoft’s F1 plans are specifically designed for Firstline Workers, who are the first people to interact with customers and see their company’s products and services in action. Planner will start backfilling for the below plans at the beginning of October, with availability through the app launcher in early November. It will be turned on by default as it’s released, so there’s nothing for you to do to start using it. Once released, Planner will be available alongside your other F1 productivity tools, like Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, and the web versions of Office. Planner in F1 commercial will be fully functional, inheriting all the same features as Planner in other enterprise SKUs. Planner for all F1 government plans will come with some limitations at its initial launch. Please visit our Planner for Office 365 US Government website for a full list of feature limitations and current status. In addition to F1 availability, Planner is coming to all available DoD government offerings. This includes Microsoft 365 F1 and G3 and Office 365 F1, G1, G3, and G5. The release schedules for F1 and DoD are the same: Planner will begin rolling out for all applicable plans at the beginning of October and become available through the app launcher in early November.

August 2019 updates for Microsoft PowerApps

The PowerApps developers have definitely made up for lost time being at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit shipping over 19 features this month! While all the PowerApps developers went above and beyond the Unified Interface team really delivered the goods with 8 suites of enhancements (with each suite containing multiple features!). If you aren’t familiar with the Unified Interface, it provides a consistent and accessible user experience across devices—whether on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone. The apps scale by reflowing the components on the screen. The responsive design adapts to your environment based on screen size, so the more available space that you have, the more information can be displayed. If you don’t want to wait for the end of month post you can always can view a roll up of the upcoming features at https://aka.ms/businessappsreleasenotes and more fine grained PowerApps weekly release information here: https://aka.ms/PAWeeklyReleaseNotes.

Foundations of Microsoft Flow—secure and compliant automation, part 1

Automation services are steadily becoming significant drivers of modern IT, helping improve efficiency and cost effectiveness for organizations. Automation is no longer a theme of the future, but a necessity of the present, playing a key role in a growing number of IT and user scenarios. In our two-part series, we share how Microsoft delivers on the promise of empowering a secure, compliant, and automated organization. In part 1, we provide a quick intro into Microsoft Flow and provide an overview into its best-in-class, secure infrastructure. In part 2, we go deeper into how Flow secures your users and data, as well as enhances the IT experience. We also cover Flow’s privacy and certifications to give you a glimpse into the rigorous compliance protocols the service supports. Let’s get started by introducing you to Flow.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | August 25 – 31, 2019

Welcome to the August 25 – 31, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Eleven features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week. Most of the updates are for Outlook (Windows, Android, iOS) and Planner.

A few brand new events have been added, including the return of the Azure Active Directory webinars and a couple of Microsoft IT Expert Roundtable sessions focused on the transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. The spotlight event of the week is the “Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here)!” session on Wednesday, September 4th at 11am Pacific.

What’s new in August 2019 is the theme for last week’s blog roundup, with posts for Microsoft 365 overall, Teams, and SharePoint. There is also a post with details on how Microsoft has scaled live events in Yammer.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items including information on dark mode rolling out to Outlook mobile, as well as feature updates to Workplace Analytics and PowerApps.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Ability to select a Product or Service when creating a service request in the new M365 Admin Center	54599	August CY2019	Added: 26 August 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Microsoft 365 Admin We’re updating the service request creation experience in the new M365 Admin portal to enable customers to choose an affected product or service when creating a service request This will be used to enhance case routing and may help to reduce time to resolution and overall transparency and effectiveness of the support process. We are constantly looking to improve our features and this was one of the most requested asks. Customers must opt-in to the new Microsoft 365 Admin Center to have access to this new feature. The feature is only available to Premier, Unified and Japanese Language customers.
Microsoft Whiteboard Web App General Availability	54596	Q1 CY2020	Added: 26 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Whiteboard Microsoft Whiteboard, the digital infinite canvas is coming soon to Office for the web.
Outlook for Windows: support for native sensitivity labeling	53147	September CY2019	Added: 26 August 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook – Windows Support Microsoft Information Protection native labeling of sensitive messages with justification for changes with company administrators.
Outlook for Android: Time-zone support	54733	Q1 CY2020	Added: 28 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Android You can schedule events and meetings with co-workers in a different time-zone.
Outlook for iOS: Time-zone support	54450	Q1 CY2020	Added: 28 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS You can schedule events and meetings with co-workers in a different time-zone.
Outlook for Windows: Advanced Room Finder with filters	54517	Q2 CY2020	Added: 28 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Windows Adding an Advanced Room Browse functionality as a replacement for the existing Room Finder add-in in the meeting form leverage similar functionality that will be used in Outlook on the web.
Outlook for Android: Dark Mode	45779	September CY2019	Added: 28 August 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook – Android You can turn on Dark Mode by choosing your theme for Dark, Light or on Battery Saver in Settings under Preferences. Virtually every screen is designed and engineered to help you be even more productive where you couldn’t before. The true black color palette takes full advantage of your OLED screens to help reduce eye strain and optimize battery life.
Outlook for iOS: Dark Mode	50479	September CY2019	Added: 28 August 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook – iOS You can choose to turn on Dark Mode in Settings under Preferences. Virtually every screen is designed and engineered to help you be even more productive where you couldn’t before. The true black color palette takes full advantage of your OLED screens to help reduce eye strain and optimize battery life.
Planner for Office 365 F1 and Microsoft 365 F1	54748	August CY2019	Added: 29 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Planner Microsoft Planner is a simple, intuitive, and collaborative work management tool that helps teams visually organize their work and reach shared goals. Planner will be available for Office 365 F1 and Microsoft 365 F1.
Planner for Office 365 Government F1	54747	August CY2019	Added: 30 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Planner Microsoft Planner is a simple, intuitive, and collaborative work management tool that helps teams visually organize their work and reach shared goals. Planner will be available for Office 365 Government F1.
Priority Field for Planner Tasks	54786	August CY2019	Added: 30 August 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Planner Microsoft Planner is adding a new field to all tasks: Priority! Users will be able to choose one of the following priority levels to further organize tasks: Low, Medium, Important, and Urgent. In addition, users can Group by Priority and filter tasks of a certain priority.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Azure AD Webinar: Getting started with hybrid identity

Learn how and why to integrate your on-premises identities with Azure Active Directory.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices

Thursday, September 5, 2019 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Microsoft Flow Online Conference 2019

Azure AD Webinar: Integrating your applications with Azure Active Directory

Learn how integrating your line of business and SaaS apps using Azure Active Directory enables advanced security, single sign-on, and convenience for you and your users.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Thursday, September 19, 2019 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Our transformation to Microsoft Teams

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Upgrading to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business

BLOG ROUNDUP

New to Microsoft 365 in August—updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Yammer, and more

This month, we’re rolling out improvements to help you build a more productive, collaborative, and secure work environment for you and your organization. The new XLOOKUP formula for Excel helps you find data and improve calculation time. OneNote and Yammer mobile updates help you work on the go and find the answers you need more quickly. And the new FastTrack guidance will help ensure seamless Windows 10 migrations.

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | August 2019

In August 2019, we saw updates in Teams that help improve your personal productivity experience, as well as several updates that help Teams of all kinds have effective calls and meetings. Read on for a round-up of exciting features that have launched in Teams over the past month including “focus time” integration with MyAnalytics, sharing system audio during a Teams meeting, Microsoft Teams Rooms, etc.

Pages deliver great content and news to your organization. We’ve heard your feedback for more ways to create rich, beautiful experiences through SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. In addition to our out-of-the-box page templates, you can easily add interactivity and automation with SharePoint web parts. Here are our latest updates starting targeted release in summer 2019. The Button and Call to Action web parts allow you to engage page viewers through guided experiences. For example, you can provide focused text on a button. Clicking it brings viewers to their next content experience. Furthermore, with the Call to Action web part you can add explanatory text or even a background image to further draw viewers’ attention. We’re also adding a World Clock web part and updating the Weather web part. You can now add individual cities/locations, or a group of locations to a web part. In the hero web part, you’ve asked us for two links on larger tiles. The primary link connects to content, while the secondary link can help with other initiatives, such as employee engagement and discussion. The Highlighted Content web part is a great multi-gadget tool for modern pages. It lets you filter for selected sets of documents by time or relevance.

Behind the Scenes: Scaling Live Events in Yammer

In March of 2019, Microsoft announced the general availability of Live Events in Microsoft 365 a video and townhall solution for enterprises to host live and on-demand events at scale across Yammer, Stream, and Microsoft Teams. As we continue to build features and experiences that improve live events, we wanted to spend some time to talk about how we embarked on this mission and how we’re continuing to test and scale Live Events in Yammer to unprecedented levels. The modern workplace requires a modern video event experience that scales to the size of enterprises and supports worldwide viewership and traffic without lag or overload. This is where Live Events in Yammer comes in. The initial goal was to support up to 5 concurrent live events per tenant, with each event supporting up to 10k attendees, or in other words, 50k concurrent users per tenant. We began by trying to better understand the traffic pattern and the potential spikes that Yammer would need to support, thus we looked at the past Skype for Business broadcast distribution of attendees as they connected to the broadcast. It seemed that for an event with 50k attendees, about 10k of those users would join over a one-minute timespan near the beginning of the event. Managing such an intake would be a challenge. The way our architecture is designed generated additional difficulties. In Yammer, when a notification is received by the clients to notify them of a message being posted in a Live Event a storm of requests ensues. That means 50k requests would be issued in a second to reload the feed and display the new message(s) for all users. Fortunately, our clients implement jittering which helped distribute that 50k load over a window of 2 minutes. Thus, the highest actual requests per second (rps) we had to support in this initial iteration was 830 requests per second, quite higher than our usual pattern at approx. 200rps (which would also need to be supported throughout the event).

NOTEWORTHY

Video: What’s New with Microsoft 365 | August 2019

Format: Video (9 minutes) | This month, we’re rolling out improvements to help you build a more productive, collaborative, and secure work environment for you and your organization. The new XLOOKUP formula for Excel helps you find data and improve calculation time. OneNote and Yammer mobile updates help you work on the go and find the answers you need more quickly. And the new FastTrack guidance will ensure seamless Windows 10 migrations. Learn more about what’s new in August 2019 at http://msft.social/f5w8nL.

Outlook mobile is rolling out Dark Mode and exemplifies Microsoft 365 Design

We are starting to roll out dark mode in Outlook for iOS and Android. For added comfort or when a bright screen may not be appropriate, we’re bringing people the choice and flexibility to adapt their experience with a simple and powerful Microsoft 365 Dark Theme experience. Adapting to work life flow, Outlook focuses its design on the context of where people want to use Dark Mode. When asked, people found the experience comfortable and aesthetically pleasing while keeping their email and calendar content crisp and clear. This way, Outlook helps you stay connected and organized so you can get things done wherever you are such as dimly lit living rooms, home offices or airplanes. Note: It’ll take several weeks to complete the full roll out of Dark Mode in Outlook for iOS or Android worldwide. | Related: Video – Dark Mode in Microsoft 365

Workplace Analytics – August 2019: Feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for August (see past blog articles here). In this update, you’ll discover the latest, including: (1) Solutions scan, which uses machine learning and automation to uncover hidden opportunities for effective and timely intervention; (2) Customize network metrics, which lets users customize the organizational data (HR) attributes of employees who are involved in a network connection; (3) Peer analysis – this capability helps analysts unlock this hidden value in an easy-to-use interface, with the goal of using these insights to benefit the broader population; and (4) Visualize person queries provides a view of a person query results (in the form of charts) without leaving Workplace Analytics. Further, the results view can be customized by having the charts focus on any of the metrics that they used in the query or on organizational data attributes that have been uploaded.

Back to School 2019 – Microsoft Forms for the school year

Technology in the classroom continues to be critical as we head into the next school year. At the ISTE 2019 conference, some trends heavily emphasized were digital learning via interactive technologies, accessibility, and the need for immediate feedback. Microsoft Forms is one such technology that allows all students to participate in learning, engages them for deeper understanding, and provides a timely feedback loop to facilitate faster improvement. To make the upcoming school year even more effective, Microsoft Forms has many new and improved features spanning across creation, responses, analysis, and integration with other productivity apps. | Related: What’s New in EDU—Back to School Edition: Start the year off with how-to videos, professional learning opportunities and innovative classroom tools

Catch-up on the PowerApps October release wave updates!

In the PowerApps October release wave we have some amazing new features landing that you have been asking for! Below are directions to find out about all the new features but highlighting the four that we have been getting the most requests for: (1) PowerApps Guest access, (2) Solution checker enhancements, (3) Building with components, and (4) Unified interface enhancements.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | August 18 – 24, 2019

Welcome to the August 18 – 24, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were five additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Outlook on Windows, Forms, Stream, Teams and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

New sessions are listed for most of the regular events series, including the Customer Immersion Experience events. This week’s spotlight event is the Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) and follow up session for how to “Simplify Collaboration with OneDrive” on Tuesday, August 27th starting at 9:00am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include a new feature in the Office Deployment Toolkit that allows changes without changing the version, updates to MyAnalytics, enhancements to Desktop Analytics, and information on the one simple action you can take to prevent 99.9% of account attacks.

Noteworthy item highlights include 100 suggestions on how to use Yammer, upcoming changes to the Outlook connector in Microsoft Flow, a new Microsoft Graph Security API add-on for Splunk, and tips for Azure Active Directory reporting, monitoring, and using self-service password reset.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Outlook for Windows: calendar sync protocol transition to REST API	53191	Q2 CY2020	Added: 20 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Windows The new sync protocol will make your RSVP responses to meetings visible in the Tracking Status for organizers and attendees, even if you chose not to send a response, as well as the details of past events of a recurring meetings will not change if the end date of a series is updated.
Recommendation to re-use historical forms	54465	September CY2019	Added: 20 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Forms When a user starts to type in the forms title field, Microsoft Forms will recommend questions based on the user’s historical forms. The user would see only their own forms and questions.
Teams meeting recording tab	54528	August CY2019	Added: 21 August 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Stream Easily locate your Teams meeting recordings with the new meetings tab in Stream. In Stream, simply navigate to ‘My Content’ and select the ‘Meetings’ option to access all your recorded Teams meetings.
Create users with templates in the Microsoft 365 admin center	54434	August CY2019	Added: 23 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 Admin We are adding support for templates in user management in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Templates allow you to quickly create many users by saving and reusing the shared settings for these users. You can save values for roles, licenses assigned, contact information, location, and more. When you use the template to create a new user, they will automatically get the saved value for these settings. Example: I have a large group of engineers starting in Redmond. I know that they will all be users with no admin role, Microsoft 365 Business, be located in the United States, be Engineer 1, be in the engineering department, and be in the Redmond office. I can save all of these values to a “Redmond engineer” template. When I go to create the users, I can use this template to prepopulate all these values. Templates will be rolling out slowly over starting in the beginning of September. We will be looking at expanding the scenarios and functionality for templates over the next few months.
Microsoft Teams – Meet now	54028	September CY2019	Added: 23 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Not all meetings can be scheduled in advance. Some happen spontaneously. Select ‘Meet now’ to start a new meeting instantly–no calendar, no scheduling, no fuss.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Demystifying Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams Migration

When: Monday, August 26, 2019 at 9:00am PT | With the recent announcement around end of life for Microsoft’s Skype for Business Online, the transition from SfB to Microsoft Teams is top of mind for many organizations. Organizations that have not already started down the migration route are now taking a long hard look at how to prepare and execute on a migration. To help customers prepare join this interactive session that will cover: (1) What are the Teams Modes and why do they matter?, (2) A “simple” vision of transition using a phased approach that works well in the real world, and (3) Real world examples of transitions from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Add the event to your calendar, or alternately you can join the broadcast event.

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

Webinar: Simplify collaboration with OneDrive

When: Tuesday, August 27, 2019 at 9:00am PT | Strong teamwork is the foundation of most successful businesses, whether the team is located in a single office or working together virtually across the globe. Whether you are engaging with third-party vendors or telecommuting co-workers, having the right tools for collaboration makes all the difference. OneDrive is the files app for Microsoft 365, and it is a powerful sharing tool, too. OneDrive helps your organization embrace the transformation to a digital workplace as well as enable modern productivity without compromising on user experience or data security. In this session we will demonstrate how OneDrive makes it easy to share files securely within and outside our organization as well collaborate on them in real-time with your colleagues. Don’t forget to add the event to your calendar!

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Simplify Collaboration with OneDrive

When: Tuesday, August 27, 2019 at 10:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Simplify Collaboration in OneDrive ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA). An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. This AMA gives you the opportunity to connect with members of the product engineering teams who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Join in the OneDrive AMA space, or add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices

Microsoft Flow Online Conference 2019

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

BLOG ROUNDUP

New feature: Make changes to Office deployments without changing the version

With the most recent release of the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) we have implemented a new feature based on customer’s feedback. Starting with version 16.0.11615.33602 it is possible to make changes to an existing installation of Office 365 ProPlus while keeping the installed version as is, even when a newer one is available on the Office CDN or in your network share/local folder. The updated “version” handling allows you to add e.g. Language Packs, Proofing Tools, additional products (like Visio or Project) or apps without updating the installed build, even when a newer build is available in the source location (Office CDN or the specified source path). In the past the ODT automatically updated the installation to the latest build while installing the specified product, Language Pack or Proofing Tool.

Deliver Rich Microsoft Teams Meetings with Traditional Whiteboard and Content Cameras

Want to take that conference room outfitted with an old-fashioned whiteboard, whiteboard markers/erasure, and turn it in to a slick Microsoft Teams Meetings space that brings the whiteboard in to the modern collaboration world? Well thankfully you now can and with a minimal investment that will delight your internal users. With the introduction of Content Cameras for Microsoft Teams Rooms organizations can deliver clear, unobstructed, whiteboarding using traditional whiteboards to all attendees, in person and remote. To help simplify hardware setup Microsoft has worked with a number of hardware partners to provide ready to use plug and play equipment. Approved Content Cameras when added to the a Microsoft Teams Rooms System will provide organizations with all the needed pieces to take their collaboration and meetings to the next level while leveraging their existing physical setups.

Insights add in gets two new cards…

MyAnalytics helps you work smarter. To help you be better prepared for your day, we’ve recently added more insights to MyAnalytics Insights pane in Outlook to help you stay on top of your work, whether it’s making the most of your meetings or catching up with colleagues. The first is the Meeting Preparation Card which shows you a list of upcoming meetings that you have organized, and it helps you evaluate whether each meeting is ready to go. We chose to include the following components of a meeting to help you be prepared – the card makes It easy to review if your meeting has quorum, if you have included an agenda, prep docs and suggests prep time if you need it. The second is the Follow Up Card which provides a summary of all requests you made in emails from the last 14 days.

One simple action you can take to prevent 99.9 percent of attacks on your accounts

There are over 300 million fraudulent sign-in attempts to our cloud services every day. Cyberattacks aren’t slowing down, and it’s worth noting that many attacks have been successful without the use of advanced technology. All it takes is one compromised credential or one legacy application to cause a data breach. This underscores how critical it is to ensure password security and strong authentication. You can help prevent some of these attacks by banning the use of bad passwords, blocking legacy authentication, and training employees on phishing. However, one of the best things you can do is to just turn on MFA. By providing an extra barrier and layer of security that makes it incredibly difficult for attackers to get past, MFA can block over 99.9 percent of account compromise attacks. With MFA, knowing or cracking the password won’t be enough to gain access.

Know more about the recent updates on Desktop Analytics!

Desktop Analytics has been available in public preview for over a month. We’re getting some great feedback from our customers and are committed to adding value to our offerings. We’ve added some exciting features in our August update for Desktop Analytics. These features are based on the feedback we heard from you. Here are a few top picks from the features we delivered this release: 1) The App Health Analyzer, which provides compatibility readiness insights for your Line of Business apps, is now retired as a standalone toolkit. The good news is it’s now integrated with the Configuration Manager client in 1906. This integration simplifies deployment and manageability of app readiness insights in the Desktop Analytics portal. 2) We received feedback from customers that sometimes, while onboarding, they selected the wrong workspace or chose a test tenant. Now, a global admin can reset and change the workspace after setting up Desktop Analytics in the environment. 3) From your feedback, we learned that providing user inputs for all your noteworthy apps in the workflow can sometimes be an intensive process. We now have a new feature to help reduce your efforts in annotating certain apps in the workflow. These apps are System apps and components published by Microsoft, and Apps managed and updated from the Microsoft Store.

NOTEWORTHY

100 ways to use Yammer

Because it’s the 100th blog post for Yammer we decided to crowdsource this blog post with our guest bloggers via Yammer to come up with 100 ways to use Yammer. From sharing company news, to posting an inspirational quote or photo to sharing Stream videos and running AMA sessions, there are at least 100 ways to use Yammer. Check it out!

Office 365 Outlook connector: Important upcoming changes

The Office 365 Outlook connector is one the most popular connector in Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. It is also one of the most feature-rich connector we have today. We are making a few important updates to the connector as we migrate the underlying API to use the Microsoft Graph API instead of Outlook REST API. These updates will unfortunately force us to deprecate most of the current set of actions and triggers. We will be rolling out these changes over the next couple of months and we strongly encourage all users to start adopting the new actions and triggers. In this post, you can find the full list of operations that will be deprecated and the new actions and triggers that you can use instead.

Introducing the new Microsoft Graph Security API add-on for Splunk!

A new add-on from Microsoft enables customers to easily integrate security alerts and insights from its security products, services, and partners in Splunk Enterprise. The new Splunk add-on is built by Microsoft, certified by Splunk, and is available on Splunkbase at no additional cost. This add-on, powered by the Microsoft Graph Security API, supports streaming of alerts from the following Microsoft and partner solutions into Splunk using a single add-on and common schema, enabling easier correlation of data across products such as Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Azure Active Directory Identity Protection, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and more. Since the new add-on extends support across a broader set of security products, it will replace the Azure Monitor add-on for Splunk as the preferred method for integrating with the Microsoft Graph Security API.

The Adventure Continues … Azure AD Self-Service Password Reset (SSPR) with AD Writeback

Password resets are a pretty costly and time-consuming endeavor for your users and your helpdesk folks, especially early on Monday mornings (or Tuesday, if Monday happened to be a holiday). In this post, we’ll cover a really great feature of Azure AD Premium services – self-service password reset (SSPR) with password writeback to AD. The focus of this post is “enterprise” SSPR in a hybrid identity model (on-premises Active Directory synchronized to Azure Active Directory via Azure AD Connect). SSPR is available for cloud-only accounts, but that is not covered here, specifically. | Resource: Deploy Azure AD self-service password reset

Azure AD Mailbag: Tips for Azure AD reporting and monitoring your day-to-day activities

One area where we invest a lot of time with our customers is Azure AD logs. Why? Because that’s where all the insights about your environment reside. These logs can be a real treasure trove — you’re only limited by the questions you ask about the data. While working with some of our enterprise customers, they’ve asked what they should be using the logs for from a day-to-day perspective. This post will address some of the most common questions we receive. We’ve also released a new deployment plan for Azure AD monitoring which you will find at http://aka.ms/deploymentplans.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | July 28 – August 3, 2019

Welcome to the July 28 – August 3, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Fifteen features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, with most of them Teams-related.

There are also lots of brand new events added, including a “Back to School with Microsoft Teams” series on Thursday, August 22nd. The spotlight event for this week is the “Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade” workshops on Tuesday, August 6th and Thursday, August 8th.

The major news from last week was the announcement of the retirement of Skype for Business Online on July 31, 2021. The focus of other blog posts from last week was the monthly “What’s New” information for Microsoft 365, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint.

The “What’s New” theme continues in the Noteworthy items from last week, with details on new features/updates for Flow, Forms, Yammer, and Workplace Analytics. In addition, be sure to review the article with information on Windows 7 end of support and Office 365 ProPlus.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Microsoft Teams – Phone System for GCC	53905	August CY2019	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams We are enabling Microsoft Teams Phone System for US Government Cloud Community. We expect the service to begin rolling out in September and complete in October. Capabilities that end users can take advantage of include: Call Handling Enhancements, Teams Calling Improvements for non PSTN Users, Group Call Pickup (GCP), Phone Number Blocking, Multiparty Calling without Conference License, Call Park (CP) can be used in where employees are hard to contact when they are working. Users (such as reception) can assist the caller and help connect them to the at-large employee, Shared line Appearance (SLA), and Microsoft Teams as the TEL/CallTo handler. Together, these features represent a significant milestone in how calls are handled by Microsoft Teams. Users can now easily add these different ways of working and collaborating based on their needs.
Microsoft Teams – Teams Voice Platform	53939	Q1 CY2020	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Enable Contact Center integration, Remote Advisor integration and Graph API for Presence
Microsoft Teams – Teams/Skype Consumer chat and calling interop	53935	Q1 CY2020	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Enable Teams and Skype for Consumers users to chat and make VoIP calls to each other
Microsoft Teams – Shorter Retention	53936	September CY2019	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Enable Compliance Administrators to set a Teams chats retention policy as low as 1 day. Note: complete deletion of the content may take additional few days, on-par with Office 365 Retention standards.
Microsoft Teams – Reverse Number Lookup	53937	September CY2019	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Display PSTN Callers Name based on Azure Active Directory data and/or Telco provided display name
Microsoft Teams – Dynamic E911	53938	September CY2019	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Enables Public Safety Answering Point to receive the current location where a Teams user is making an emergency call
Ability to markup WXP files on OneDrive for Android	53912	September CY2019	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive With this feature, end users will be able to easily convert a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file to a PDF file to leverage the mark up capabilities in OneDrive mobile app.
Microsoft Teams – Screen sharing in Teams/Skype for Business interop	53934	September CY2019	Added: 30 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Enables a Teams user to share their screen in chat or VoIP call with a Skype for Business user
Outlook on the web – recurring series room availability	54013	August CY2019	Added: 31 July 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook – Web Now when creating a recurring series, Outlook will show you the number of instances a room is free for your series so you can book with confidence.
Productivity insights in Outlook powered by MyAnalytics	54010	Q1 CY2020	Added: 31 July 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook, MyAnalytics Productivity Insights in Outlook powered by MyAnalytics shows users insights about their recent collaboration and communication patterns and suggests ways to work more effectively.
Outlook for iOS: Create a new account	53218	September CY2019	Added: 31 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS Updated experience to simplify how you can create a new Outlook.com account from your mobile device
Microsoft Cloud App Security for GCC High Customers	54016	Q1 CY2020	Added: 01 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Cloud App Security Availability of Microsoft Cloud App Security to O365 GCC High customers
Azure ATP for GCC High Customers	54017	Q1 CY2020	Added: 01 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Azure ATP Availability of Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for O365 GCC High customers
Microsoft Teams – Focus Mode	53190	August CY2019	Added: 02 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Stay focused and get more done with Microsoft Teams. When a user schedules Focus Time via MyAnalytics, her presence in Teams will be changed to “Focusing” and notifications will be silenced during the focus period based on her priority access settings.
Enhanced filtering for connectors	53994	September CY2019	Added: 02 August 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange This feature will help organizations that have complex mail routing set ups. This basically means that your MX record does not point to Office 365 EOP and you receive mail through an inbound connector. Properly configured connectors are a trusted source of incoming mail to Office 365, but connectors aren’t necessarily the true source of messages and obfuscates the sender information. Enhanced filtering for connectors is a feature that allows you to filter email based on the actual source of messages that arrive over the connector. This is also known as skip listing and this feature will allow you to overlook, or skip, any IP addresses that are considered internal to you in order to get the last known external IP address, which should be the actual source IP address resulting in improved effectiveness. We believe that this feature will help those customers that aren’t fully leveraging EOP/ATP’s full value to show why you could or should move your MX record to EOP.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

Microsoft Teams Tips and Tricks (Part 1)

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips and Tricks sessions offer insights, best practices and advanced functionality to help optimize how Teams can work for you. Each session will also include a few real-world examples of how customers are using Microsoft Teams today. Part 1 is focused on tips for conversations and meetings. Many of our interactions start as a simple chat. Learn how you can take those conversations to the next level, including: (1) Formatting messages to help increase response rates, (2) Managing conversations to easily track and follow-up, (3) Organizing conversations, keeping important and active chats front-and-center, (4) Expanding conversations into a full meeting experience, and more. Prefer to watch this session on your own time or simply want a refresher after attending the live training? Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Microsoft Teams Tips and Tricks (Part 2)

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips and Tricks sessions offer insights, best practices and advanced functionality to help optimize how Teams can work for you. Each session will also include a few real-world examples of how customers are using Microsoft Teams today. Organizing your workflow and projects in Teams can really help simplify productivity. Join us for Part 2 of this series, where you’ll learn tips including: (1) Implementing effective strategies creating and managing teams and channels, (2) Leveraging best practices for channel-based conversations, (3) Utilizing a personal team to manage your own productivity, (4) Designing your workspace to quickly find relevant content in Teams, and more. Prefer to watch this session on your own time or simply want a refresher after attending the live training? Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

Maximizing Teams Meetings

The average employee spends approximately 30% of their working life in meetings. But meetings in Microsoft Teams are designed to be flexible and enable different types of connections for all the ways that work needs to get done. For users who are familiar with Microsoft Teams but want to better understand and optimize the Teams meeting experience, this session provides guidance into how to create spontaneous and scheduled meetings, leverage the pre, during and post-meeting features, identifying supported devices, and more.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Back to School with Microsoft Teams!

When: Thursday, August 22, 2019 from 8:00am – 11:00am Pacific | You are cordially invited to our free Microsoft Teams for Education online event. We will be sharing helpful tips to make the most of Teams in the new school year. We welcome you to attend all or as many of the events as you’d like and don’t forget to share with your friends and colleagues. Each event (listed below) is 30 minutes in duration and hosted directly by the Microsoft Teams Product Group.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Demystifying Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams Migration

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Thursday, August 29, 2019 from 12pm – 2pm PT

BLOG ROUNDUP

Skype for Business Online to Be Retired in 2021

We’re announcing that Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021. This post provides details on the retirement plan, a brief explanation of why we’re making this announcement now, and a summary of what we’re doing to help customers migrate to Teams. Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021, and after that date the service will no longer be accessible. Between now and then, current Skype for Business Online customers will experience no change in service, and they’ll be able to continue to add new users as needed. However, starting September 1, 2019, we will onboard all new Office 365 customers directly to Teams for chat, meetings, and calling. Please note that the Skype Consumer service and Skype for Business Server will both be unaffected by this announcement. And when you’re ready to get started, we offer a comprehensive set of technical guidance and planning resources, including a proven success framework, best practices, planning documents, free instructor-led training, and FastTrack onboarding assistance for eligible subscriptions. | Related: Transitioning From Skype to Teams – How Microsoft Can Help

New to Microsoft 365 in July – updates to Azure AD, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and more

In July 2019, we announced updates to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to help improve your security posture, updates to Microsoft Teams and Outlook on the web to help you be more productive, and updates to Desktop Analytics and Office 365 ProPlus to streamline IT management and improve efficiency.

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | July 2019

Microsoft Teams continues to gain momentum and popularity, with more than 13 million people using Teams on a daily basis. We on the product team couldn’t be happier to continually bring our users exciting features to make their jobs easier. After all, helping to drive workplace collaboration and build inclusive team culture is our job! Highlights include: (1) priority notifications, (2) @-less mentions, (3) channel moderation, (4) live events usage reports, (5) Network Planner preview, (6) time clock in Teams Shifts, and more!

OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – July 2019

Some of the exciting OneDrive features announced at the SharePoint Conference 2019 have started rolling out! This post includes a list of the latest functionalities that landed in production in July 2019, including: (1) 360° image viewer capability for OneDrive, (2) Updates to file card in OneDrive and SharePoint, (3) Per-Site Anyone Link Expiration Policy, (4) Full Microsoft Intune support for OneDrive, and (5) OneDrive mobile updates.

SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: July 2019

July brought the heat to many cities across the world, so we at Microsoft thought we’d bring a little heat of our own via SharePoint and related tech updates that rolled out this month. This is the all-inclusive recap for all things SharePoint and related technology. There are several improvements for SharePoint page/news authoring, site footer controls, and an updated site usage page. Other new features include quick edit improvements for SharePoint lists / document libraries, bulk approvals for SharePoint workflow items, and enhancements to the preservation hold library. There is also a new cloud document sharing experience via Outlook on the web, a OneDrive mobile app refresh for iOS, and more. All the features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of July 2019 (possibly early August 2019). | Related: Enhanced Quick Edit for SharePoint lists and libraries

NOTEWORTHY

Windows 7 end of support and Office 365 ProPlus

Support for Windows 7 will end on January 14, 2020 and your experience may be different depending on your version of Office. Office 365 is governed by the Modern Lifecycle Policy which requires customers to stay current as per the servicing and system requirements for the product or service including using Office 365 on a Windows operating system that is currently in support. Using Office 365 on older, unsupported operating systems may cause performance and reliability issues over time. After January 14, 2020, you won’t receive new feature updates to Office 365 ProPlus. However, Office security updates will continue until January 2023. All Office security updates will stop after this date. As a valuable Office 365 subscriber, we want to continue to provide a stable Office 365 experience. Therefore, if you’re using Office 365 on a computer running Windows 7 we strongly recommend you move to Windows 10.

New resources for data visualization and reporting in Microsoft 365

Delivering data insight and intelligence is essential to reinventing your business processes. SharePoint provides a great system to aggregate data and documents, and to integrate Power BI based reports and dashboards across SharePoint employee experiences and Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re pleased to share these three new white papers to help you learn how to deliver better Power BI reports throughout Microsoft 365: (1) Using SharePoint and Teams as a Modern Dashboarding Platform, (2) Using SharePoint as a data source for Modern Reporting, and (3) Using Power BI with Complex SharePoint Field Types.

New features and a new look for Yammer mobile

Yammer’s mission is to “empower and connect every person across an organization to maximize their impact.” With this in mind, we’ve built a full-featured mobile app with a sleek user experience so you have the tools you need wherever you are. Here are some of the improvements that we have shipped recently and a peek at what’s on the horizon. There is a brand new look for mobile, user friendly feeds and conversations, availability of live events on Android and iOS, Q &A, and more.

Workplace Analytics – July 2019: Feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for July. In this update, you’ll discover the latest, including: (1) Explore page redesigned, (2) Teams collaboration, and (3) Reclassify external domains.

July Updates for Microsoft Flow

We recently released the new Copy and Paste feature and streamlined flow experience, and there are several other key updates that are now available. These updates include the addition of several highly-requested features to the SharePoint connector, the ability to use Flow with Azure DevOps, Guest user support, a couple of authoring improvements, and four new connectors.

What’s new in June-July in Microsoft Forms

Recently we have brought more innovative capabilities to help users create forms faster and more professionally. Microsoft Forms now intelligently offers theme recommendations and supports section branching, one of the most demanded features by the users. We also continue bringing Forms closer to other everyday Office apps to help users stay in the flow and create quizzes and polls right where they are – Quick Poll add-in is now available for Outlook app and users can now create a quiz from Outlook.com. Read on to learn more.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | July 21 – 27, 2019

Welcome to the July 21 – 27, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were five additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week including updates for SharePoint, as well as the much-anticipated secure private channels in Microsoft Teams, currently targeted for Q4 CY2019.

No brand new events for this week’s digest, but lots of new sessions were added to existing event series. This week’s spotlight event is a combo with the “Refining Mobility with OneDrive” webinar, followed immediately by an “Ask Microsoft Anything” session, all on Wednesday, July 31, 2019 starting at 9:00am Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include details on upcoming improvements to Office 365 ProPlus client licensing and activation, the draft preview of the security baseline for Office 365 ProPlus v1907, and a change in branding for Office Online.

Noteworthy items from last week include the announcement of new South African cloud datacenters, recent updates for Microsoft Flow, and a Microsoft Mechanics video series on using System Center Configuration Manager to manage Office 365 ProPlus.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Office 365 license activation changes	53698	August CY2019	Added: 22 July 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Office 365 ProPlus In August, we will start rolling out changes to Office 365 licensing technology to make it more reliable and resilient. These changes will help simplify activation management and streamline the Office activation experience for users. Users will still sign-in to activate Office on their devices, and if single sign-on is enabled, Office will automatically pick up the credentials and activate Office. As part of your subscription, users can still install and activate Office 365 apps on up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets, and five smartphones. Previously, users who reached this limit were prompted to deactivate an existing install before activating Office on a new device. Going forward, Office will automatically sign the user out of the user’s least recently used device when the user exceeds the limit, eliminating unnecessary friction. In August, we’ll start slowly rolling out these changes to commercial customers on Monthly Channel. No additional action is required on your part.
Per site “anyone link” expiration policy	53748	August CY2019	Added: 23 July 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: OneDrive Tenant admins can now set custom anyone link expiration policy on site collections that differs from default tenant policies.
Microsoft Teams – Secure private channels	50588	Q4 CY2019	Added: 23 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Limit which team members can see the conversation and content within a particular channel. You can right-size channel participation and exposure without having to create discrete teams to limit visibility.
Site owners can now associate their sites with a SharePoint hub	53903	August CY2019	Added: 26 July 2019 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Previously, associating with a hub site required site collection admin privileges. We are updating this permission so now site owners can associate their sites to a hub. This provides a more consistent experience across SharePoint.
Add call to action link to hero web part	50806	July CY2019	Added: 26 July 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: SharePoint Using the latest version of the hero web part on SharePoint, authors can add a link to content and an additional call to action link that displays on the tile.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance