IT Showcase – Office 365 Weekly

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-16

Welcome to the April 19 – 25, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Eighteen features added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Search, Azure Active Directory, and Microsoft Information Protection.

Several existing meeting series have had additional sessions listed, and there are two new event series – “Energize your Live Events with Microsoft Teams”, and “Empower your Frontline workforce to do more with Teams”. This week’s spotlight event is “Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams” on Thursday, April 29th at 1:00pm Pacific.

Blog posts from last week include information on Microsoft research regarding meetings, and new Outlook capabilities that can help, a detailed look at enabling modern authentication for Outlook, information on an upcoming change for the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center, and details on the new Email Entity Page in Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

Noteworthy item highlights include new Yammer training videos, several “One Stop Shop” resource pages for Microsoft 365 compliance solutions, the April 2021 updates for Microsoft Forms, and details on iPad support for Microsoft Lists for iOS.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Note: The Estimated Release dates listed below are subject to change. The direct link provided for each item can be used to determine if the estimated release date has been updated since the time of publication.

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Exchange and Outlook for Business: Ability to book time to travel and transportation on web	72231	August CY2021	Added: 19 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange, Outlook Now when you need to go to a different building or place between meetings, Outlook will enable you to book travel time and way of transportation between the places you need to go.
Microsoft Teams: Teams Device Management in GCC-High	81503	June CY2021	Added: 20 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC-High Our customers who have tenants in the GCCH environment can also manage their Teams devices from the Teams Admin Centre. Admins can now control the entire lifecycle of their Teams devices which include an increasing variety of supported device types – IP Phones, Collaboration bars, Teams displays, Teams Meeting Room devices.
Microsoft Search: Attachment search	81922	June CY2021	Added: 21 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Search Include classic attachments from Outlook in search.
Microsoft Search: Azure Cognitive Search results in Microsoft Search	81928	November CY2021	Added: 21 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Search Azure Cognitive Search federation with Microsoft Search provides a cohesive search experience with Azure Cognitive Search to intelligently help business search user find, learn, operate, and navigate information enriched and indexed with Azure Cognitive Search.
Microsoft Search: Microsoft Search in GCC	81929	September CY2021	Added: 21 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Search, GCC Organization-wide Search via Search Box in SharePoint, Office.com, and on Microsoft Search in Bing. Customizable Bookmarks, Acronyms, and QnA Answers.
Microsoft Teams: Live Transcript for Teams Meetings for GCC-High	82230	October CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC-High Teams Meetings now have a real-time transcript during their meetings as well as a post-meeting transcript. This will help users in real-time recall what has been spoken during the meeting as well as review the meeting after the fact.
Microsoft Teams: Live Transcript for Teams Meetings for GCC	82836	May CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC Teams Meetings now have a real-time transcript during their meetings as well as a post-meeting transcript. This will help users in real-time recall what has been spoken during the meeting as well as review the meeting after the fact.
Outlook: Share photos through Outlook for Android	71403	May CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Android Choose how you’d like to share photos through Outlook for Android. Outlook makes it easier to send one or many photos from your gallery or cloud sources: as an attachment or embedded in your message.
Microsoft Information Protection: Teams location picker supports security groups and distribution lists (GCC-H)	72229	May CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP, GCC-High Data loss prevention (DLP) for Microsoft Teams will now support security groups and distribution lists as part of the Teams location picker, enabling more granular control of DLP policy scope (i.e. to include/exclude particular departments, business units, geo-specific security groups, etc.).
Azure Active Directory: GPS based named locations public preview	72238	May CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Azure Active Directory Now, admins will have the ability to create Conditional Access policies to allow/deny access using a new type of Named Location based off GPS data. When the policy is enabled, end users will need to share their GPS location from the mobile device on which Microsoft Authenticator is installed. The user’s mobile device is a good indication of the user’s actual location at the time.
Microsoft Teams: Live Transcript for Teams Meetings for DoD	82838	October CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, DoD Teams Meetings now have a real-time transcript during their meetings as well as a post-meeting transcript. This will help users in real-time recall what has been spoken during the meeting as well as review the meeting after the fact.
Microsoft Teams: Speaker Attribution for Live Captions for GCC	82849	April CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC Teams Meetings in GCC clouds will now have live captions utterances attributed to the speaker of the utterance.
Microsoft Teams: Speaker Attribution for Live Captions	82850	April CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC Teams Meetings in GCC clouds will now have live captions utterances attributed to the speaker of the utterance.
Microsoft Teams: AI-based noise suppression for MAC users	82826	April CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, macOS When your mic is turned on in a Teams meeting or call, background noise around you—shuffling papers, slamming doors, barking dogs, and so on—can distract others. Teams offers four levels of noise suppression (auto, low, high, and off) to help keep meeting participants focused. This feature is now available for all MAC users except for those with new MACs that have the M1 ARM processor.
Outlook: Intelligent Translation	81921	May CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Desktop, GCC, GCC-High Translation is coming to Outlook Desktop for GCC and GCC-H customers.
SharePoint: Admin center – Migration Manager: Google migrations	82014	April CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint With our recent Mover acquisition, we are excited to expand our capabilities to allow moving content from Google into Microsoft 365. When you’re ready to move your content, click on the Migrate tab in the SharePoint admin center to start scan discovery, assessment, and migrate. You’ll get detailed reports and the rest in a seamless transition of files and folders to Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, and/or Teams).
SharePoint: Admin center – Migration Manager: Dropbox migrations	82015	May CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint With our recent Mover acquisition, we are excited to expand our capabilities to allow moving content from Dropbox into Microsoft 365. When you’re ready to move your content, click on the Migrate tab in the SharePoint admin center to start scan discovery, assessment, and migrate. You’ll get detailed reports and the rest in a seamless transition of files and folders to Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, and/or Teams).
SharePoint: Admin center – Migration Manager: Egnyte migrations	82016	June CY2021	Added: 23 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint With our recent Mover acquisition, we are excited to expand our capabilities to allow moving content from Egnyte into Microsoft 365. When you’re ready to move your content, click on the Migrate tab in the SharePoint admin center to start scan discovery, assessment, and migrate. You’ll get detailed reports and the rest in a seamless transition of files and folders to Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, and/or Teams).

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

Microsoft Teams can help your employees stay connected and collaborate with each other, especially in the current unprecedented time where remote work is a reality of employees around the world. Being able to chat, do video meetings and collaborate on Office documents within Teams can help companies stay productive. Whether you are a small business, a non-profit or a large organization, you can get started with Teams within Microsoft 365 or Office 365 suite – even before deploying any other Office app or service. Join Microsoft Teams experts as we review Teams implementation for collaboration, chat and meetings. We’ll share key configurations, considerations, best practices, and resources to get your users up and running quickly. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Recognize key success factors for technical and user readiness, (2) Identify pre-requisites and tenant setup for your environment, (3) Install the Teams clients appropriate for your organization, (4) Configure policies that enable your preferred user experiences, and (5) Leverage collaboration features to enhance remote work scenarios.

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Working from home offers the opportunity to maintain your workflow while allowing flexibility in how and where you get your work done. Shifting to a remote worker status can be an adjustment as you look for ways to balance home and work life, maintain focus and be fully productive. Microsoft Teams can help you stay connected to your team while providing access to all of the tools and resources you need to get your work done. Join us to learn tips that can help set you up for success as you transition into a ‘work from home’ scenario. During this session, we’ll share: (1) Guidance for setting up your home environment for work, (2) Best practices for maintaining your workflow while working at home, (3) Tips for staying connected to your team while remote, and (4) Insights for effectively supporting a remote team.

On-Demand Session

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Do you want to get more done in Teams? Receive targeted and timely updates? Access services directly through Teams? Apps let you complete tasks, receive updates and communicate. This session introduces you to the key activities needed to get started with adding applications, bots and connectors in Microsoft Teams today. Through a series of live demonstrations and best practices, you’ll leave this session with everything you need to start using apps in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) See how applications, bots and connectors can help you be more efficient while working in Teams, (2) Select an application, bot or connector for your workspace, (3) Install an application, bot or connector, and (4) Use an application, bot or connector in your workspace.

On-Demand Session

Use chat and calling features in Microsoft Teams

Join us to learn how to extend your circle of communication and collaboration with Microsoft Teams. Easily connect with your colleagues anywhere, anytime and manage all your conversations from one central platform. In this 1-hour training you will learn how to: (1) Send and reply to chat messages, (2) Use messaging tools to enhance your conversations, (3) Manage your chat conversations, and (4) Use calling features.

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Have you spent significant time and resources to prepare for a meeting and felt it wasn’t productive and not much was accomplished? Join us to learn how to make your meetings engaging, productive, and meaningful. Use Microsoft Teams for your entire meeting experience. In this training, you will learn how to: (1) Schedule and join meetings and initiate calls, (2) Use collaborative tools such as sharing, whiteboards, meeting notes, recording, and more, (3) Easily access important meetings and related content at any time, and (4) Assess which audio and video devices are best for your meeting needs.

Explore teams and channels in Microsoft Teams

Do you need to regularly collaborate with your workgroup where you need to access shared files, apps, and conversation threads? Join us to learn how to extend collaboration, provide visibility, and manage teamwork from a central space. Microsoft Teams is a robust collaboration tool, providing you anywhere, anytime access to your group projects, daily operations, knowledgebase resources, and large scope initiatives. Use teams and channels to collaborate in virtual workspaces with your entire group. In this 1-hour training, you will learn how to: (1) Join and organize your teams and channels, (2) Use channels to streamline projects and operations, (3) Collaborate with your team members, and (4) Create and manage teams as an owner.

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Do you use Microsoft Teams on a regular basis and want to learn more? Are you looking for ways to increase your efficiency and productivity in Teams? Join us to discover ways to enhance communication and increase your efficiency and productivity within Teams. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In this training, you will learn how to: (1) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed and responded to, (2) Integrate tools and best practices to streamline and collaboration process, and (3) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work.

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Are you looking to ensure users have optimal experiences with meetings and voice capabilities in Teams? During this session, we’ll discuss tools, reporting and best practices to help you manage service quality — from establishing a proactive strategy to resolving common quality issues as they arise. We’ll build upon best practices from Teams experts and make it real with examples of common scenarios that may arise as your organization embraces meetings and voice capabilities in Teams. Join us for an expert-led workshop for guidance on key resources and actionable insights to manage audio and video quality with Microsoft Teams. Your users will thank you for it! After this session, you will be able to: (1) Define key service metrics and user experience factors for quality, (2) Recognize concepts and metrics in core tools and resources that help you assess usage and quality, (3) Identify key indicators of poor experience in common scenarios and relevant actions to address, and (4) Establish a proactive quality management strategy to ensure optimal user experience.

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

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).

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Join us to learn how to accomplish the fundamental tasks in Teams. Learn how to easily communicate with your co-workers, save time while working and collaborating, and see how teamwork and projects can be managed in a central space. In this training you will learn how to: (1) Set up your profile and notifications, (2) Use chat and calling for 1:1 and group conversations, sharing and collaboration in Microsoft Teams, (3) Schedule and attend meetings, (4) Align your workgroup and projects, and (5) Collaborate on files and tools.

Energize your Live Events with Microsoft Teams

This 1-hour session will provide an opportunity to learn practical guidance about conducting engaging and energizing large, online virtual events using Microsoft Teams. This session is designed for anyone wishing to organize, produce or speak at a large, virtual event and is open to anyone. During this session, you will: (1) Understand best practices to ensure your large, online virtual event is successful using Microsoft Teams or Teams Live Events, (2) Gain practical, technical production knowledge to ensure your event is engaging, (3) Understand the Attendee experience, (4) Learn before-during-after tactics to build & continue your large, online event momentum with Webinar features, and (5) Leverage and understand step by step virtual event resources as found at aka.ms/virtualeventplaybook.

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

Join Microsoft Teams experts as we review how you can deploy commonly-used applications directly within Teams, enabling your users to work more efficiently and effectively by accessing everything they need in a single interface. This foundational workshop covers basic capabilities across app management and security. With over 400 out-of-the-box applications available (and growing), you’re sure to find an app, or two, that your team can begin using today in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Identify suitable apps to meet the needs for your organization, (2) Recognize common attributes of successful app deployment, (3) Navigate security and compliance considerations for Teams’ apps, and (4) Determine the next steps to deploy an app to your environment.

Teams Chalk Talk: So…you want to make calls with Microsoft Teams?

Are you ready to add PSTN calling capabilities to Microsoft Teams? Join Microsoft Teams Engineering subject-matter-experts as they demystify the options for adding PSTN calling to Teams, provide you with best practices for configuring calling options and show you how to monitor call quality. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Understand the history of voice services in Microsoft products, (2) Identify what calling options in Microsoft Teams are right for you, (3) Configure your calling options in the Teams admin portal, and (4) Monitor and use call quality tools in Teams.

Empower your Frontline workforce to do more with Teams

Do you need to rapidly onboard a large number of Frontline users to Microsoft Teams and configure a streamlined experience for them? Are you struggling with where and how to start? If yes, this is the clinic for you! Join Microsoft Teams customer engineering experts as we review how Microsoft Teams can accelerate your Frontline worker deployment. Featuring examples from manufacturing, retail, hospitality, and transportation industries, we’ll explore how Microsoft Teams provides a single experience for productive conversations, smooth flow of information, simplified schedule management in a compliant and secure environment for your Frontline workers. You’ll leave this highly interactive session with tangible next steps to accelerate your planning. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Identify scenarios that matter to your Frontline workers and the best approach to implementing Teams from pilot to scale across your entire organization, (2) Map scenarios to Microsoft Teams use cases, and (3) Craft the right experience for your Frontline workers in Teams by configuring 1P apps and policies.

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Protect Sensitive Information and Manage Data Risk

As people increasingly shift to remote work, protecting your organization’s information and managing risk should be a top priority. Microsoft Security Virtual Training Day: Protect Sensitive Information and Manage Data Risk teaches you how to take advantage of Microsoft technologies that identify and remediate risks that arise from creating, storing, sharing, and using sensitive data. In addition, you’ll learn how to protect that data throughout its entire life cycle—on-premises and across devices, apps, and cloud services. During this two-part training event, you will explore how to: (1) Understand, identify, and protect your most sensitive data, (2) Identify and take action on insider risks and code-of-conduct violations, and (3) Utilize information protection and governance.

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

Join Microsoft Teams experts as we review high-value scenarios including incident management (help desk), employee engagement, and productivity that can be enhanced through simple integrations in Teams. We focus on popular enterprise applications your users may already be using every day. Come see how easy it is to connect your systems, increase automation, and deliver improved experiences by bringing the apps your organization relies on into Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Understand common app integrations for Teams across multiple scenarios and user personas, and (2) Understand third-party apps available for key scenarios.

Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Do you need an online, collaborative workspace for your project or workgroup? Join us to explore effective, virtual workspaces for projects and workgroups. Microsoft Teams offer the flexibility to set up a workspace that suits your needs. In this training, you will learn how to: (1) Determine the best approach for your collaboration needs, (2) Create workspaces for your team to provide the best teamwork experience, and (3) Determine best practices in Microsoft Teams to enhance productivity.

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enable Remote Work with Microsoft Teams

To be productive in a remote environment, your employees need to be able to safely collaborate from anywhere. Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams helps you provide a remote workforce with the tools, resources and solutions they need to stay connected and productive. Join us to learn how to get the most out of Microsoft Teams online meetings, calling, video and chat, and empower your workforce to work from any location on any device. During this two-part training event, you will explore how to: (1) Enable your people to meet and collaborate from home, (2) Make productivity applications available on any device, and (3) Deliver the best remote user experience.

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 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

Businesses are shifting to a desktop experience that empowers IT and enables employees to be more productive and secure, but not all employees sit in an office or always work from secure locations. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can set up a scalable and flexible environment to unlock mobility, productivity and security. This new 2-hour session will give you the opportunity to get hands-on experience with Windows Virtual Desktop. During this session, you will explore how to: (1) Create your first Windows Virtual Desktop architecture, (2) Create images and assign them to users, (3) Operationalize the virtual desktop infrastructure with monitoring, scaling, and image management, and (4) Explore security best practices within Windows Virtual Desktop. Each session is limited to 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

The workforce relies on Microsoft Teams to chat, meet, and collaborate. But that’s just the beginning. Microsoft Teams can bring the applications and tools you’re already using, into one universal hub your workforce needs to get things done. During this interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Integrate ready-to-use apps into the Teams experience, (2) Maintain control over which apps are accessible for your organization, (3) Create an App that embeds modern SharePoint pages in Teams using App Studio, (4) Manage permission and set up policies through the Admin Center, and (5) Scale business critical apps to your organization. Each session is limited to 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

When employees are confident in their ability to collaborate remotely and securely, they are free to achieve more without worry. Learn how to protect data, devices, and applications while simplifying IT and minimizing the impact on employees at Microsoft Security Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization. During this free two-part learning event and accompanying Q&A, you’ll form the foundations to safeguard your company’s digital footprint. During this training event, you will explore how to: (1) Craft identity synchronization, protection, and management, (2) Utilize security in Microsoft 365, and (3) Integrate cloud app security and device management plans.

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 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Whether you are switching from Skype for Business or brand new, join us to learn the basics of how to use Teams to chat with your colleagues and collaborate on projects. Join us for this session and leave this with everything you need to start using Teams. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Set up your profile and notifications in Microsoft Teams, (2) Use chat and calling for 1:1 and group conversations, sharing and collaboration in Microsoft Teams, (3) Schedule and conduct meetings in Microsoft Teams, and (4) Align your team and teamwork in Microsoft Teams. Each session is limited to 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

To support your efforts to deliver and deploy updates to the Windows 10 devices being used by remote, onsite, and hybrid workers across your organization, and manage those devices effectively, we are continuing our series of weekly “office hours” for IT professionals here on Tech Community. During office hours, we will have a broad group of product experts, servicing experts, and engineers representing Windows, Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Microsoft Intune, Configuration Manager), security, FastTrack, and more. They will be monitoring the Windows 10 servicing space and standing by to provide guidance, discuss strategies and tactics, and, of course, answer any specific questions you may have. Office hours are text-based; there is no audio or virtual meeting component. To post a question, you just need to be a member of the Tech Community. Simply visit the Windows 10 servicing space and click Start a new conversation. At the start of office hours, we’ll pin a post outlining the individuals on hand, and their areas of expertise. Can’t attend at the designated time? Again, no problem. Post a question in the Windows 10 servicing space up to 24 hours in advance and we’ll make sure we review it during office hours.

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 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Building Microsoft Teams Integrations and Workflows

Remote work requires smarter workflows. Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Building Microsoft Teams Integrations and Workflows shows you how the Microsoft Teams developer platform makes it easy to integrate your apps and services to improve productivity, make decisions faster and create collaboration around existing content and workflows. Join us to learn how to build apps for Teams and create integrated, people-centered solutions that can transform productivity in your organization, whether you’re on-site or working remotely. During this two-part training event, you will explore how to: (1) Build modern enterprise-grade collaboration solutions with Microsoft Teams, (2) Transform everyday business processes with Microsoft 365 platform integrations for Power Platform, SharePoint and Microsoft Office, and (3) Use the wealth of data in Microsoft Graph to extend Microsoft 365 experiences and build unique intelligent applications.

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 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

BLOG ROUNDUP

Research shows your brain needs breaks—Outlook and Microsoft Teams can help

One thing is certain: hybrid work is the future of work. People want increased flexibility and a blended work model that grants them the freedom to work when and where it’s most comfortable for them. Hybrid work can deliver a future that people want—but that doesn’t mean the transition to this future will come without its challenges. Our latest Work Trend Index research shows that much of this digital overload is due to back-to-back meetings with no breaks in-between. Wall-to-wall meetings increase stress and make it harder to stay focused and engaged. And our research shows that even just a sliver of time between these meetings can help. So, we’ve created a simple remedy, and a new way to think about meetings, that will give you just a little bit of your time back—time to recharge, grab a glass of water, or simply transition more peacefully from one meeting to the next. | Related: New settings in Outlook give everyone a break between meetings

Enabling Modern Auth for Outlook – How Hard Can It Be?

Since we announced in 2019 that we would be retiring Basic Authentication for legacy protocols we have been encouraging our customers to switch to Modern Authentication. Modern Authentication, based on OAuth2, has a lot of advantages and benefits as we have covered before, and we’ve yet to meet a customer who doesn’t think it is a good thing. But the ‘getting there’ part might be the hard part, and that’s what this blog post is about. This post is specifically about enabling Modern Authentication for Outlook for Windows. This is the client most widely used by many of our customers, and the client that huge numbers of people spend their day in. Any change that might impact those users is never to be taken lightly.

Announcing redirect of compliance solutions from SCC to Microsoft 365 compliance center

The Microsoft 365 compliance center provides easy access to solutions to manage your organization’s compliance needs and delivers a modern user experience that conforms to the latest accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1). From the compliance center, you can access popular solutions such as Compliance Manager, Information Protection, Information Governance, Records Management, Insider Risk Management, Advanced eDiscovery, and Advanced Audit. Over the coming months, we will begin automatically redirecting users from the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center (SCC) to the Microsoft 365 compliance center for the following solutions: Audit, Data Loss Prevention, Information Governance, Records Management, and Supervision (now Communication Compliance). This is a continuation of our migration to the Microsoft 365 compliance center, which began in September 2020 with the redirection of the Advanced eDiscovery solution.

Introducing the Email Entity Page in Microsoft Defender for Office 365!

The new email entity page brings a comprehensive experience that provides an exhaustive view of details critical to investigation. The email entity page gives a 360-degree view of an email in one page, and helps security analysts save time and effort, leading to more effective threat protection. Curious why an email was delivered despite being marked as malicious? Or what the latest location of the email is? What are the rich set of details for a URL or file that was detonated? Was it sent to a priority account? The email entity page brings you the answer to these questions, and the details you need to investigate and analyze an email – overrides, exchange transport rules, latest delivery location, detonation details, tags and a lot more. The email page has information and capabilities for analysts to dig deeper into intricate email details, and headers, look at email preview or email download. The email page also builds on our promise to integrate Defender for Office 365 tightly with other Microsoft 365 Defender experiences like hunting, alerts, investigations and more.

NOTEWORTHY

New Yammer Training Videos & Resources

A lot has changed in Yammer over the past year and we continue to see new growth, new communities, and new users getting started with Yammer. With this in mind, we are excited to share training videos that you can use to share within your own organization. Use these training videos to build momentum in your Yammer communities. The videos include: (1) Microsoft Yammer conversations and discovery, (2) Microsoft Yammer notifications and announcements, (3) Microsoft Yammer communities overview, and (4) Microsoft Yammer network admin highlights.

Microsoft 365 Compliance Resource Pages

The following pages were built to help you easily find all relevant content and resources relating to the compliance solutions in Microsoft 365:

Three New Intelligence and Insights Features from Microsoft Forms | April 2021

Microsoft Forms aims to help you make better decisions with data. As we improve Forms’ intelligence service, we support you in not just creating surveys and polls more easily, but also in extracting key insights from data in an understandable way. Read on to learn about three of these improvements: Estimated Time, the Insights button, and Word Clouds. Estimated Time provides an estimated response time for longer surveys. Word Clouds provide a visual of the key phrases from the response to an open-text question in Forms.

iPad support now available in Microsoft Lists for iOS

Track what matters most from the comforts of a larger touch screen device. We’re pleased to share Microsoft Lists for iOS now supports iPad. AKA, no more lists at 2x. You’ll get a beautiful native experience to track, manage and share your information. We, too, have enabled Conditional Access to Lists for iOS, and updated an important fix when a list is deleted from your iPhone or iPad. The Microsoft Lists iOS app is now configurable as a public app in Intune app protection policy (APP) through the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center. This allows app to be targeted to ensure that the data accessed is protected by app protection policies. The app now also supports conditional access deployment through Azure admin portal. Please note that ‘Require app protection policy’ is supported which provides higher level of assurance. Lists app doesn’t currently support ‘Require approved client app’ grant access.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-15

Welcome to the April 12 – 18, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were eleven features added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, OneDrive, Forms, and Microsoft Information Protection.

More sessions for existing meeting series have been added, and the one new event is the Microsoft Federal Collaboration and Cybersecurity Summit on Tuesday, April 20th at 6am Pacific. The spotlight event of the week is Microsoft 365 Virtual Training, “Secure and Protect Your Organization”, scheduled for Wednesday, April 21st and Thursday, April 22nd.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include details on new frontline workers enhancements in Microsoft Teams, new approval features in Teams, information on dynamic groups in Azure AD and Microsoft 365, and the general availability of the Microsoft Data Loss Prevention Alerts Dashboard.

Noteworthy items from last week include the availability of email notifications in Project for the web, the latest “Inside Microsoft Teams” video focused on security in Teams, information on how Microsoft used location-based routing to enable Microsoft India to move to Teams, and the release of the iOS/iPadOS security configuration framework.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Microsoft Teams: Time Clock APIs	66317	April CY2021	Added: 12 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Now, with new Time Clock APIs, organizations can create rules such as how late someone can clock-in without requiring manager approval or requiring a health screening survey before clocking-in for the day.
Microsoft Teams: Customize your organization’s apps store in Teams for government clouds	81119	August CY2021	Added: 12 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC Now you can customize your organization’s apps store in Teams with your company branding by adding your logo, custom backgrounds, and custom text colors to make it more inviting to end users.
Microsoft Forms: Word Cloud data insights for open text question	81840	April CY2021	Added: 12 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Forms We are introducing new data insight type–Word Cloud–to the open text question in Forms. When users have collected responses for an open text question, word cloud data insight will be available to help them get a quick view on the top text phrases people answered.
OneDrive: Android – Outline for PDF viewing	81917	April CY2021	Added: 12 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive – Android Users of OneDrive for Android will be able to view an outline or table of content that they can use to navigate to.
OneDrive: iOS – Outline for PDF viewing	81918	April CY2021	Added: 12 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive – iOS Users of OneDrive for iOS will be able to view an outline or table of content that they can use to navigate to.
OneDrive: iOS – Jump to Page for PDF viewing	81919	April CY2021	Added: 12 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive – iOS Users of OneDrive for iOS will be able to move through PDF by typing the page number in Jump to Page.
OneDrive: Android – Jump to Page for PDF viewing	81920	April CY2021	Added: 12 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive – Android Users of OneDrive for Android will be able to move through PDF by typing the page number in Jump to Page.
OneDrive: Request Files for GCC High and DoD	72228	April CY2021	Added: 13 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive, GCC High, DoD The Request Files feature is now available for the GCCH and DoD environments.
Microsoft Teams: Templates for creation of a new Team	71635	May CY2021	Added: 14 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams With templates in Teams, users can choose from a variety of customizable templates when creating a new team, helping them get started quickly. IT Admins can also create custom templates for their organization, allowing them to standardize team structures, preinstall relevant apps, and scale best practices.
OneDrive: Android – Night time reading mode for PDF viewing	72230	May CY2021	Added: 15 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive – Android Users of OneDrive for Android will be able to change the appearance of PDFs in three main color modes which are day mode, night mode and sepia to enhance viewing.
Microsoft Information Protection: Teams location picker supports security groups and distribution lists (DoD)	72232	June CY2021	Added: 15 April 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP, Teams, DoD Data loss prevention (DLP) for Microsoft Teams will now support security groups and distribution lists as part of the Teams location picker, enabling more granular control of DLP policy scope (i.e. to include/exclude particular departments, business units, geo-specific security groups, etc.)

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

On-Demand Session

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

On-Demand Session

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Explore teams and channels in Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

Teams Chalk Talk: So…you want to make calls with Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Federal Collaboration and Cybersecurity Summit

When: Tuesday, April 20, 2021 from 6:00am – 9:30pm PT | In the face of unprecedented challenges today, leadership resiliency is paramount.  The high stakes of cybersecurity challenges continue to increase and evolve with no end in sight.  The frequency of cybersecurity threats and their level of sophistication have and will continue to grow and as the threat of cyber-breaches increase, so does the need for intergovernmental collaboration, communications, and data sharing. Please join us for our Federal Collaboration and Cybersecurity Summit, a half-day virtual event at no additional cost designed to advance U.S. Federal agencies collaboration and cybersecurity initiatives. Microsoft is bringing together executives and leaders from U.S. Federal agencies to deliver key insights, lessons learned, and practical guidance on: (1) Advancing Cybersecurity in the Federal Government, (2) Cultural transformations that drive new ways of working and digital modernization, (3) Breaking down silos to facilitate partnership with industry and academia, and (4) Connecting with people and information from the office or in the field to securely share and protect sensitive information.

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Use chat and calling features in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Protect Sensitive Information and Manage Data Risk

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

With the dramatic shift to remote work, we all continue to seek creative ways to stay connected and productive in our jobs. How do we recreate those meetings, calls, and large events that previously brought us together and helped us achieve our business goals? Do we have the right tools and devices to do so? And how do we do all of this while keeping security top of mind? These aren’t easy questions to answer. This one-hour session will give you the opportunity to test drive Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and Power BI in a live cloud environment. A facilitator will guide you as you create a virtual company-wide meeting and explore how to: (1) Build a communication and collaboration hub, (2) Engage employees through chat and polls, (3) Set up automated meeting captioning, translation, and transcripts, and (4) Use analytical tools to make sense of data, categorize it, and make it easier to visualize. Each session is limited to 15 participants, reserve your seat now.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021 from 12pm – 1pm PT

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

We designed Microsoft Teams to be a virtual office you can take anywhere you go. Work seamlessly and transparently with your remote team and discover greater collaboration and productivity. Join us for this session and explore how to avoid communication sinkholes and do more together, no matter where you are. Each session is limited to 15 participants, reserve your seat now. During this interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Work together as a team from anywhere and with more flexibility, (2) Connect instantly with team members for fast-paced decision making, (3) Meet with anyone, anywhere through audio, video, and web conferences, and (4) Boost team culture with the digital equivalent of an open office space.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Building Microsoft Teams Integrations and Workflows

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

BLOG ROUNDUP

New frontline worker enhancements in Teams to communicate, digitize processes and stay secure

Today, we continue to strike a balance between many of our current conditions, where most frontline workers are strained and socially distant, and tomorrow, where there is the possibility of a safe return to the more traditional ways of working. As we continue supporting frontline workers and organizations in this digital transformation balance, we are releasing new enhancements for frontline workers and corporate teams to continue to communicate more effectively, digitize processes and make data and workers more secure no matter the work conditions. These enhancements cover: (1) Richer communication and community, (2) Automated business workflows, and (3) More security with simple management. | Related: How Microsoft Teams is powering hybrid work and the frontline in manufacturing

Streamline requests with new approval features in Microsoft Teams

Getting an approval on your work items is an essential part of almost every workflow. The approval can be a written acknowledgement from your manager, a formal authorization from a diverse group of stakeholders, or an official signature from a customer. Regardless of the type of approval needed, it can be hard to track and manage the requests when many systems and people are involved and often leads to unnecessary delays. Approvals in Microsoft Teams enables everyone, from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees, to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from Teams. We’ve been listening to your feedback and have added new capabilities to streamline your approval request and get faster results. These new capabilities include: (1) Create an approval request with an electronic signature, (2) Create an approval template, (3) New attachment capabilities, (4) Markdown support, (5) Approve or reject an approval request inline, and more.

Microsoft Forms Powers Approvals Templates in Microsoft Teams, and other updates | April 2021

In this blog post, we are excited to share how Microsoft Forms powers Approvals templates in Microsoft Teams, an important product for frontline workers to do their job. As a joint effort between Forms and the Modern Workplace Transformation team, Approvals templates enable you to customize your approvals processes easily. From time off requests to overtime requests, templates provide a repeatable structure for common approvals—which includes a form. Additional updates in Microsoft Forms include the ability to enable Forms in PowerPoint without having to deploy Office add-ins, and the ability to send a form using a shortened URL.

Dynamic Groups in Azure AD and Microsoft 365

Using a query-based membership, when you update the attributes of a user or device they will be added to or removed from the dynamic groups that are now relevant to them, without you having to do any other steps. You might have a dynamic group for people who have the same department name or location specified in their user account. You can combine more than one attribute so, for example, the group members have to both be in the Finance department and be located in Brisbane, Australia. You can even create a “direct reports” dynamic group for people who report to the same manager. Devices can also be group members but you can’t mix both users and devices in the same group. You could create dynamic groups of devices with the same operating system version, Intune device property label or enrolment profile name, for example. Dynamic membership is supported in security groups and Microsoft 365 groups.

Announcing GA of Microsoft Data Loss Prevention Alerts Dashbo a rd

Customers rely on Microsoft Data Loss Prevention(DLP) to enforce policies that identify and prevent risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer or use of sensitive information across cloud, on-premise and endpoints. Alerts, which can be configured as a part of the DLP policy authoring experience are an effective tool for customers to get notified whenever a DLP policy is violated. Microsoft announces the General Availability of the Microsoft Data Loss Prevention Alerts Dashboard. This latest addition in the Microsoft’s data loss prevention solution provides customers with the ability to holistically investigate DLP policy violations across: Exchange, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Devices, Cloud apps, and On-premises file shares. Advance alert configuration options are available in the existing DLP policy configuration flow. These provide eligible DLP customers with the ability to tailor how they organize DLP policy alerts along with exhaustive information that they need to investigate and address DLP policy violations quickly. Historical workflow information for alerts is available in the Management log.

NOTEWORTHY

Email Notifications in Project for the web

Based on the many requests from you, email notifications are now available for you to connect directly with coworkers on the work being tracked in Project. Your team members will get a notification once they have been assigned a task or have been added to a project. To enable notifications, go to Project Home, click on the Settings icon, and then click Notification Settings to select the desired configuration.

Your questions from the Microsoft Ignite Ask the Experts sessions about Microsoft Teams…answered!

Last month many of you joined our Ask The Experts (ATE) sessions at Microsoft Ignite, specifically ATE-FS191 – Ask the Expert: Microsoft Teams Manageability and ATE-FS191-R1 – Ask the Expert: Microsoft Teams Security and Compliance. We promised that we would pull together the questions and answers and post them in a blog post, so here we are making good on that promise.

Inside Microsoft Teams: Let’s talk about security in Microsoft Teams

Format: Video (31 mins) | Inside Microsoft Teams is a live Microsoft Teams webcast series for IT professionals hosted by Stephen Rose. Season 3 is focused on the voice of the IT Pro, which will include shows that focus on real-world customers like Lego, Envision Technologies, and more, to discuss the tips, tricks, and lessons learned on how they deployed, managed, and secured Microsoft Teams. In addition, viewers will get to see the latest innovations for Teams rooms and devices. In this episode, the show dives into the security announcements from Microsoft Ignite March 2021.

Inside Track: Location-based routing enables Microsoft India move to Microsoft Teams

Location-based routing is helping Microsoft overcome the challenge of finally moving its employees in India from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Made more challenging by the outbreak of COVID-19 and by India’s strict telecom regulations, the now-complete shift is the last large group of employees at Microsoft left to move to Microsoft Teams. The daunting task entailed upgrading Skype for Business enterprise voice-enabled employees in India to Microsoft Teams while also enabling location-based routing—all while maintaining compliance with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

Announcing the iOS/iPadOS Security Configuration Framework

As mobile usage becomes more prevalent, so does the need to protect your work or school data on those devices. In March 2020, we introduced the App Protection Policy Data Protection Framework to help organizations determine which Intune app protection policy settings they should deploy to protect work or school account data within the apps. In June 2020, we expanded the framework by including recommendations for enrolled Android Enterprise devices by introducing the Android Enterprise Security Configuration Framework to manage device compliance and device restriction settings. Now, we are happy to announce that we’re expanding the framework to also include recommendations for enrolled iOS/iPadOS devices. iOS/iPadOS supports several enrollment scenarios, two of which are covered as part of this framework: (1) Device enrollment for personally owned devices – these devices are personally owned and used for both work and personal use, and (2) Supervised automated device enrollment for corporate-owned devices – these devices are corporate-owned, associated with a single user, and used exclusively for work and not personal use.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-03

Welcome to the January 18 – 24, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were seventeen additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, Microsoft 365 Compliance Center, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and Microsoft Information Protection.

The “Microsoft 365 Defender: Protect, Detect, and Respond to Solorigate using Microsoft 365 Defender” session on Thursday, January 28th at 11am Pacific, is the only brand new event. There were new sessions added for some of the existing meeting series. This week’s spotlight event is the “Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Meeting Organizational Compliance Requirements” training on Tuesday, January 26th from 10am – 2pm Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include tips for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams, details on automatic email forwarding in Exchange Online, information on how IT leaders are securing identities with Zero Trust, and several deployment acceleration guides for Microsoft 365 Information Protection and Compliance.

Noteworthy items highlights include the availability of the Groups feature in the new Exchange Admin Center, updates for Yammer Reactions to make them more inclusive, information on the Microsoft Lists app for iOS, and details on an internal PowerApps “Release Planner” app used internally by Microsoft product teams.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Microsoft 365 Compliance center: Information governance – Auto-labeling of cloud attachments	70580	June CY2021	Added: 19 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update enables organizations to automatically apply retention labels to the version of files shared as cloud attachments, which are live links of SharePoint or OneDrive content that can be shared via emails or Teams messages.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Information governance – Retention policies for Microsoft Teams private channels	70582	March CY2021	Added: 19 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update enables organizations to apply an organization-wide retention policy on Teams private channel messages.
SharePoint: Scenario-Based Site Templates	70574	March CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Use scenario-based site templates that leverage existing SharePoint capabilities (e.g. pages, lists, libraries, branding) to build your own sites faster and get inspired.
OneDrive: Sync Client support for DWG file Version History	70575	March CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive We’re updating OneDrive Sync client to support Version History for DWG files. This change fixes a known issue where Version History is missing for DWG files backed by Sync client.
Exchange: OAuth Client Credential Flow support for POP/IMAP	70577	July CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange Adding support for the Client Credential OAuth flow to the POP and IMAP protocols in Exchange Online.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Information governance – Adaptive retention policies (Public Preview)	70578	June CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update allows admins to create retention policies scoped to geography, department, or other user or site attribute. For example, admins can create a policy specifically for users in the UK’s human resources team by leveraging the adaptive policy scope.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Information governance – Multi-stage disposition review	70579	June CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update allows organizations to use a multi-stage disposition process, including multiple stakeholders and reviews before deleting the content.
Microsoft 365 Compliance center: Information governance – Yammer retention	70581	March CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update enables organizations to apply retention policies on Yammer messages.
Microsoft 365 Compliance center: Advanced Audit – Mail attachments event	70584	June CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update adds a new audit event that specifies if a mail attachment was accessed by the user.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Advanced Audit – Teams reactions on messages	70585	June CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance See new audit activity related to Teams reactions on messages.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Advanced eDiscovery – Hold optimizations	70586	June CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update provides various service optimizations for Advanced eDiscovery, including hold reliability and limits increase.
Microsoft Information Protection: Microsoft Teams location picker supports security groups and distribution lists (GCC)	70587	February CY2021	Added: 21 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP Data loss prevention (DLP) for Microsoft Teams will now support security groups and distribution lists as part of the Teams location picker, enabling more granular control of DLP policy scope (i.e. to include/exclude particular departments, business units, geo-specific security groups, etc.).
SharePoint: App Bar	70576	March CY2021	Added: 22 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint The SharePoint app bar brings a consistent navigation experience to every site on your intelligent intranet, featuring quick access to important sites across the organization with global navigation, personally relevant sites, and the news feed.
Teams: 2×2 video in Gallery view for web meetings in Edge and Chrome browsers	70589	February CY2021	Added: 22 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Gallery view now can show up to 4 participant videos during a meeting in Edge or Chrome browser.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: Threat and vulnerability management for macOS	70691	January CY2021	Added: 22 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Software vulnerability assessment are available for macOS. The same familiar insights are available as for Windows devices in the recommendations, software inventory, weaknesses, and other dashboards.
Microsoft Teams: Align the experience creating a team from different Teams interfaces	70696	February CY2021	Added: 22 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Align the experience for Teams creation in Teams Admin Center to the experience in creating a team in the Teams client.
Microsoft Teams: Moving all PowerShell work items under ITPro-PowerShell	70697	February CY2021	Added: 22 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Migrate from ADAL to MSAL – Moving all PowerShell work items under ITPro-PowerShell.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Whether you are switching from Skype for Business or brand new, join us to learn the basics of how to use Teams to chat with your colleagues and collaborate on projects. Through a series of live demonstrations and best practices, you’ll leave this session with everything you need to start using Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Set up your profile and notifications in Microsoft Teams, (2) Use chat and calling for 1:1 and group conversations, sharing and collaboration in Microsoft Teams, (3) Schedule and conduct meetings in Microsoft Teams, and (4) Align your team and teamwork in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

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.

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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.

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Meeting Organizational Compliance Requirements

Leverage the intelligent and integrated Microsoft solutions to help your organization achieve its compliance goals by joining the Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Meeting Organizational Compliance Requirements free one day online training session. Level 200-300 (Intermediate to Advanced) content. Technology covered: Data classification, labeling, governance, policy violation remediation, eDiscovery, audit, risk assessment. In this session you will: (1) Learn to use intelligence to identify, protect and govern your important data, (2) Learn to intelligently identify and remediate critical insider threats and risks, (3) Learn how to use the latest eDiscovery and audit capabilities to find relevant data and respond efficiently, and (4) Learn how to simplify and automate IT risk assessment.

Teams Chalk Talk: So…you want to make calls with Microsoft Teams?

Wednesday, January 27, 2021 at 8am PT

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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.

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our ‘Go Deeper’ sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. Explore ways to determine the best approach for creating workspaces for projects and workgroups. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Determine the best approach for your collaboration needs (chat versus teams & channels), (2) Create workspaces for your team to provide the best teamwork experience, and (3) Determine best practices in Microsoft Teams to enhance productivity.

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

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.

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our ‘Go Deeper’ sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. Learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (2) Easily find files, chats and projects, (3) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, and (4) Simplify your workday.

Microsoft 365 Defender: Protect, Detect, and Respond to Solorigate using Microsoft 365 Defender

When: Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 11:00am PT | Microsoft security researchers continue to investigate and respond to the sophisticated cyberattack known as Solorigate involving a supply chain compromise and the subsequent compromise of cloud assets. Will review how M365 Defender can detect the various stages of Solorigate and help you formulate your response plan.

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Securing Your Organization

In this training, you will learn how to protect your organization’s identities, data, applications, and devices across on-premises, cloud, and mobile – end to-end using the latest tools and guidance. This event covers intermediate to advanced content (level 200-300) and includes the following technologies: Threat Protection, Information Protection, Identify and Access Management, Security Management. In this workshop you will: (1) Increase level of understanding on how Microsoft delivers security across Microsoft 365, (2) Increase knowledge of security features and solutions, and (3) Connect with local technical experts and FastTrack resources.

Wednesday, February 10, 2021 from 10am – 2pm PT

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Building Microsoft Teams Integrations and Workflows

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Tuesday, February 16, 2021 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

BLOG ROUNDUP

7 tips for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Remote and hybrid work has become the new norm for many employees across the globe as day-to-day collaboration continues to be accomplished virtually. With this shift to online communication, how can you ensure that you’re collaborating safely? Queue Microsoft Teams! Whether you’re hosting virtual meetings, carrying out daily group and 1:1 chat, sharing documents, or coauthoring in a document in real-time – Teams enables safe and secure collaboration! This post outlines seven tips for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams.

We realize that many customers have genuine business requirements to configure automatic email forwarding. On the other hand, email forwarding may lead to data leakage. For example, if we have a compromised account, the attacker might create a forwarding rule for a particular mailbox, and the user might be unaware that their mail is being forwarded. This is a very common tactic used when accounts are compromised. It is therefore important for administrators to know all mailboxes that have forwarding enabled and where the mail is been forwarded to. We have various insights and alerts that help administrators monitor such activities, but prevention is always better than the cure. In this blog post, we thought to revisit (and update) various auto forward controls, how they work together and how they can help you achieve a requirement of allowing automatic forwarding for users who really need this feature.

How IT leaders are securing identities with Zero Trust

The past twelve months have been a remarkable time of digital transformation as organizations, and especially digital security teams, adapt to working remotely and shifting business operations. IT leaders everywhere turned to Zero Trust approaches to alleviate the challenges of enabling and securing remote work. Using Zero Trust to secure users, data, and devices (wherever they may be) has changed from optional to a business imperative overnight. In this short report, we surveyed IT leaders around the world to determine how they’re implementing Zero Trust practices to protect their identities and ensure their employees have secure access to resources. | Related: Using Zero Trust principles to protect against sophisticated attacks like Solorigate

Microsoft 365 Information Protection and Compliance Deployment Acceleration Guides

The guides can be used both independently, but we recommend using all the solutions together for your deployment needs. We are not recommending one solution be implemented before another but have included information in each guide to tie all the solutions together with features to consider during your implementation. The guide covers current released feature as of today and will be updated once additional features progress from beta, or private preview to general availability. In summary, the deployment guides include: (1) One Compliance Story covering how to each solution features complement each, (2) Best Practices based on the team’s experience with customer roadblocks, (3) Considerations to take and research before starting your deployment, (4) Help Resources links to additional readings and topics to gain a deeper understanding, and (5) An appendix for additional information on licensing.

NOTEWORTHY

Groups in new Exchange Admin Center (EAC) brings performance and ease of discoverability

Continuing on our path to release the new EAC, we wanted to tell you that the Groups feature is now available. The experience is modern, improved, and fast. Administrators can now create and manage all 4 types of groups (Microsoft 365 group, Distribution list, Mail-enabled Security group and Dynamic distribution list) from the new portal. We wanted to call out some improvements in Groups experience in the new EAC when compared with classic EAC.

Yammer Reactions are now inclusive

We believe that Yammer, a tool that connects people and helps build communities, has an important role to play for a sense of belonging and inclusion. And we don’t want to simply build for inclusivity, we want to celebrate it. Recently Yammer introduced reactions, and next, we want to bring diverse skin tones to Yammer reactions. We want users to feel a deeper sense of representation when interacting with the new Yammer. Once you select your skin tone (settings available both on web and mobile!), you can react quickly without having to decide every time you reply! Yammer will be the first of the Microsoft 365 products to offer inclusive reactions. We are excited to lead the charge with other product groups at Microsoft in keeping inclusivity at the center of everything we do.

Get the Microsoft Lists app for iOS

Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize your work. They are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team. And now you can track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more to keep everyone in sync from anywhere while on the go with a personalized, mobile-first experience. The Microsoft Lists app for iOS provides access to the lists you own and that have been shared with you. You can create new lists, edit list items, and easily share with other people. While sipping coffee – create an Issue tracker list. In the passenger’s seat zipping from place to place – share a link to the session item from a conference in the Event itinerary list. Or standing in a grocery line waiting to check out – update the status of an item based on information from a team chat. Work and information management don’t have to stop when you’re on the go.

How Microsoft built and adopted a customized “Release Planner” app

Business leaders know the importance of streamlining product releases and updates. Many organizations suffer from disorganized release cycles lacking automated reviews, approvals, notifications and standardization. What is needed is a centralized location for all update and release related actions and communications. Whether you have an internal software development team or produce software for use outside your organization, you will benefit from considering a Power Apps solution to track your updates and releases. A team at Microsoft recently built a low code app to efficiently coordinate hundreds of their own product features. They went from collecting manual input from three hundred product managers to developing one Power Apps app as a central location for release plans. This Power Apps app was so successful that the team released it as a free, open source for the benefit of you and your business. This app is now used internally in Microsoft by six hundred active users every month.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-02

Welcome to the January 11 – 17, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Twenty features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Microsoft Lists, OneDrive, SharePoint, Stream, Excel, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and Microsoft Information Protection.

There’s one new event, the “Get Your New Year Organized with Microsoft To Do” live session on Tuesday, January 19th at 9:30am Pacific. The spotlight event of the week is the “Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams” training on Thursday, January 21st and Friday, January 22nd from 10:00am – 1:45pm Pacific each day.

Highlights from last week’s roundup include information on eight new productivity features for frontline workers, managers and IT pros, the announcement of 250GB file size support in Microsoft 365, a look at the new Yammer features rolling out in 2021, and details on how to simply compliance and manage risk with Microsoft Compliance Manager.

Noteworthy items from last week include details on the latest features in Microsoft Forms, smart backgrounds in Planner, additional services available via FastTrack, and the expansion of Microsoft Defender for Identity to support Active Directory Federation Services.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Excel: Office Macro Runtime Integration with AMSI now includes Excel 4.0 macros	68917	February CY2021	Added: 11 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Excel Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) integration with Office now also includes Excel 4.0 (XLM) macros. AMSI is an open interface available on Windows 10 for applications to request, at runtime, a synchronous scan of a memory buffer by an installed antivirus or security solution. When malicious activity is detected, the user is notified by Excel, and the application session is shut down to avoid any further damage. This can stop an attack in its tracks, protecting both the device and user.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Override Alerts	70567	January CY2021	Added: 11 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 We’re introducing Override Alerts in Microsoft Defender for Office 365. With these new system alert policies, security admins will now be alerted if a message with a high confidence phish or malware verdict is delivered to a mailbox due a policy or configuration override rule.
Excel: Excel Trust Center – Adding a separate Macro Settings option to block Excel 4.0 (XLM) macros	70568	March CY2021	Added: 12 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Excel A new Excel Trust Center settings option will be introduced to further restrict the usage of Excel 4.0 (XLM) macros. With this new macro settings option, choosing to disable XLM macros will no longer impact VBA macro settings. Previously, all of Excel’s macro settings configurations applied to both VBA and XLM macros. This update will not change users’ existing macro settings.
Microsoft Teams: Follow or Mute Conversations in GCC	70569	February CY2021	Added: 12 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams This feature will empower users to have finer controls at a conversation thread level within a channel.
Forms: Specific User Sharing for Response Collection	79246	February CY2021	Added: 12 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Forms Microsoft Forms owners will now be able to send out a survey to collect responses from specific users or security groups. (You now have the new option in the “Send to Collect Responses” dropdown menu to select that “Specific people in my organization can respond.”
OneDrive: 250 GB file size support in Microsoft 365	70558	February CY2021	Added: 13 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams Users will be able to upload large file sizes up to 250 GB in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams.
Outlook: on the web – New files search in compose mode	70570	February CY2021	Added: 13 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web You can now add files from OneDrive, SharePoint, and notes from sticky notes by using the / and getting suggestions from Outlook.
Microsoft Stream: Enhanced video discovery and multi-video deletion for video admins in Stream (Classic)	70571	March CY2021	Added: 13 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Stream New filter parameters to allow video admins discovery based on video type, created date, creator and view permissions. Multi-select and bulk delete capabilities for video admins to allow better storage management.
Microsoft Lists: Grid view keyboard improvements	70670	January CY2021	Added: 13 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Lists When you edit in grid view (previously ‘Quick edit’), you will have a faster editing experience that adheres to greater levels of accessibility. Navigate across rows and columns using the tab key. Plus, pressing Enter enables you to edit that field. Clicking Enter on a new row saves the new item. And pressing the Esc key closes editor.
Microsoft Lists: Number column symbols	70671	January CY2021	Added: 13 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Lists When leveraging a Number column, select common number symbols (dollar, euro, yen, percentage) or create a custom symbol, plus decide if you want the symbol to be on the left or right of the number.
Microsoft Lists: visual UI for read-only fields	70672	January CY2021	Added: 13 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Lists fields will show people when a field is edit-only and screen reader support when a field is read-only.
Microsoft Lists: Configure Person column profile pictures	70673	January CY2021	Added: 13 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Lists When using a Person column (for individuals or groups), you will have more control to show as text-only or using available user’s profile pictures with the visual ‘pill’ formatting.
Microsoft Teams: Simple Periodic review for guest users	70674	March CY2021	Added: 14 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Enable Teams IT admin to schedule a periodic reviews on guests across Teams, discovers every Team that has one or more guests, and triggers a review process for each.
Microsoft Teams: Zero Touch provisioning for Teams devices	70675	March CY2021	Added: 14 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams This will allow Remote Provisioning of Teams Android devices from Teams Admin Center.
Microsoft Teams: Role based Access scoping on devices category	70676	February CY2021	Added: 14 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams This feature allows you to delegate admin roles to specific members.
Microsoft Teams: Enhancement to app usage report – support for Line of Business apps	70677	February CY2021	Added: 14 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Line of business type of Apps were added to the Teams Admin center App usage reports.
Outlook for Android: Weather	71042	February CY2021	Added: 14 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Android Weather in Outlook for Android gives you the latest weather information based on your current location and indicates the forecast on all calendar views except monthly (Agenda, Day, 3 Day and Week).
SharePoint: Site Collection Level permissions for Microsoft Graph	76685	January CY2021	Added: 14 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Applications can now use the new “Sites.selected” permission to request access to SharePoint sites. By default an application that requests “Sites.Selected” instead of a tenant wide permission may not access any SharePoint sites. The tenant administrator can grant or revoke an application’s access to individual sites through new endpoints in the Microsoft Graph API.
SharePoint: Video Webparts and Templates	68715	February CY2021	Added: 15 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint New SharePoint video webparts and templates to enable users combine video with messaging and other media to tell their story on any page or news post.
Microsoft Teams: Large gallery view and Together Mode for web meetings in Edge and Chrome browsers	70573	February CY2021	Added: 15 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams User can change layout to Together mode or Large gallery during a meeting in Edge or Chrome browsers.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our ‘Go Deeper’ sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. Learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (2) Easily find files, chats and projects, (3) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, and (4) Simplify your workday.

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Get Your New Year Organized with Microsoft To Do

When: Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 9:30am PT | Make the most out of your new year resolutions! Join us live to learn how you can use Microsoft To Do to stay on top of your new year resolutions and be more productive in 2021. You can learn how Microsoft To Do can help you stay organized and stick to your new year resolutions. To Do team members would be live to answer your questions and interact with you. You will also get a glimpse of the exciting new features we have planned to launch in 2021.

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: So…you want to make calls with Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Meeting Organizational Compliance Requirements

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Securing Your Organization

Wednesday, February 10, 2021 from 10am – 2pm PT

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

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Building Microsoft Teams Integrations and Workflows

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

BLOG ROUNDUP

8 new productivity hacks for frontline workers, managers, and IT

If there’s one thing we learned in 2020, it is that frontline workers are essential in today’s world. As companies realize how important they are, this time, they are bringing them along the digital transformation journey. There is no excuse for these workers to be left on the sidelines anymore. Here are 8 new features that make frontline workers, managers, and IT’s jobs a little easier, including: Tasks Publishing and SMS sign-in for firstline workers, delegated user management through the My Staff portal for frontline managers, and policy packages and Team templates for IT pros.

With the retirement of Skype for Business Online in sight, we’re working to ensure customers transition to Microsoft Teams by July 31, 2021, including users homed online in hybrid configurations. But Skype for Business Online customers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from upgrading to Teams. Organizations using Skype for Business on-premises have also experienced the transformational impact Teams can have on communication, collaboration, and culture. Though mainstream and extended support continues for versions of Skype for Business Server and Lync Server, our focus is squarely on Teams and its ecosystem of applications, devices, and services. We’re continually developing new capabilities in Teams to meet our customers’ evolving needs, while enabling Teams experiences to scale across devices and varying connectivity.

Gain more flexibility with 250 GB file size support in Microsoft 365

As remote work and learning increases so does the need to reliably and securely share large files-4K or 8K video files, 3D models, CAD files, or large scientific data sets-with co-workers, clients and peers. At Microsoft we’re perpetually working to enable and support workers all over the world. We are always striving to innovate and empower our users to be more productive. At the same time, we are extremely grateful to our customers and partners for all the helpful and insightful feedback – particularly in industries such as heavy manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and media for our latest enhancement. We are pleased to announce that we’re making it easier than ever for you to store, sync, and share large files in Microsoft 365. Our latest improvement will help increase the upload file size limit for Microsoft 365 from 100 GB to 250 GB—which includes uploads of files into SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. So now, you will be able to easily share large files like a 3D model of a new building, a client commercial shot in 8K video, a large dataset for a vaccine trial or research projects or large videos for educational projects. And this change doesn’t just apply to businesses and schools. If you use OneDrive, for personal use, you can easily upload or your family video album to share with your relatives or upload that zip file containing a large PC game with your friends.

New Year, new experiences rolling out for Yammer

The Yammer team has been busy over the past several weeks and we wanted to take a moment to share some updates on previously announced features and experiences that are in the process of rolling out. (1) Share to Yammer from SharePoint – soon, you’ll be able to send SharePoint pages directly to Yammer communities, (2) New Yammer Embed – bring the new Yammer styling and functionality to any webpage, (3) New Yammer tab for Microsoft Teams – get the modern styling and features of the new Yammer in the Yammer tab within Microsoft Teams, (4) Immersive Virtual Event Styling which optimizes the viewing experience, and (5) Hashtags and Topics have visual updates and functionality.

Simplify compliance and manage risk with Microsoft Compliance Manager

Microsoft Compliance Manager is the end-to-end compliance management solution included in the Microsoft 365 compliance center. It empowers organizations to simplify compliance, reduce risk, and meet global, industry, and regional compliance regulations and standards. Compliance Manager translates complicated regulations, standards, company policies, and other desired control frameworks into simple language, maps regulatory controls and recommended improvement actions, and provides step-by-step guidance on how to implement those actions to meet regulatory requirements. Compliance Manager helps customers prioritize work by associating a score with each action, which accrues to an overall compliance score. Compliance Manager provides the following benefits: (1) Pre-built assessments for common industry and regional standards and regulations, (2) Workflow functionality, (3) Detailed guidance, and (4) Risk-based compliance score. | Related: Announcing GA of machine learning based trainable classifiers for your compliance needs

NOTEWORTHY

What’s New in Microsoft Forms | January 2021

Entering 2021, Microsoft Forms’ new features aim to streamline your experience of accessing, creating, and distributing forms. From text formatting, specific user sharing, and creating polls for form creators, to response downloads and immersive reader for form respondents, read on to learn about our latest updates.

Personalize your plans with smart backgrounds

Planner enables us to visualize our work in a fun and flexible way. But it can be difficult to identify which plan you are in, especially when you’re a member of 50 different plans that look the same. That’s why we’re excited to begin rolling out smart backgrounds, which lets you customize your Planner boards to make them your own and help others quickly find the right plan. We’re starting to roll out smart backgrounds in Planner for the web this week. With smart backgrounds, you can choose from a variety of image recommendations to liven up your Planner boards. Smart backgrounds is powered by the same Designer feature that suggests creatively designed templates in PowerPoint. Designer works in the background, trying to match the title of your plan with relevant and unique high-quality background images, like a coffee scene for your Coffee Store plan, a business backdrop for your Online Marketing plan, or a city skyline for your Town Hall Meeting plan. Note: Smart backgrounds is currently only available in the Planner web experience.

FastTrack now assists with more threat protection capabilities

Microsoft FastTrack is committed to helping you realize the value of your Microsoft 365 security solutions by providing remote deployment guidance. FastTrack for Microsoft 365 provides remote deployment guidance at no additional cost for customers with 150 or more licenses of eligible plans. In addition to the baseline security assistance we already offer, FastTrack has expanded the benefit in threat protection to now include Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Cloud App Security, and guidance to leverage Microsoft 365 Defender. FastTrack will provide remote deployment guidance to help eligible customers configure and deploy these Microsoft security products: (1) Microsoft Cloud App Security, (2) Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection), (3) Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (formerly Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection), and (4) Microsoft Defender for Identity (formerly Azure Advanced Threat Protection). In addition, Microsoft FastTrack will show you how to leverage the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Defender (formerly Microsoft Threat Protection), which protects against attacks with automated cross-domain security. You can use your security data to prevent and detect threats, heal affected assets, and proactively hunt across your Microsoft 365 data.

Understanding email scenarios if TLS versions cannot be agreed on with Exchange Online

By now you are hopefully aware of the TLS 1.0/1.1 deprecation efforts that are underway across the industry and Microsoft 365 in particular. Head out to our documentation for more details and references if you need a refresher! Also check out this blog entry to see how you can use reporting in Exchange Online to get an overview about the TLS versions used by mails submitted to your tenant. This topic may be super-relevant to you, because as confirmed by the message center post MC229914, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 deprecation started enforcing for Exchange Online mail flow endpoints beginning January 11th, 2021. The rollout will continue over the following weeks and months. This essentially means, soon this deprecation process will be over, and we will no longer accept TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 email connections from external sources. Also note that Exchange Online will never use TLS 1.0 or 1.1 to send outbound email. We wanted to talk about what this means for SMTP traffic destined to Exchange Online in particular. What happens if a server on your side can only use TLS 1.0 with SMTP? Will sending fail, and if yes, how do you notice TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 is the root cause of your email problems? There are different variables that impact this and we will try to mention most frequent scenarios.

Microsoft Defender for Identity expands support to AD FS servers

We are happy to announce the availability of the Microsoft Defender for Identity sensor for Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) after successfully piloting the feature with customers in Private Preview over the last few months. Microsoft Defender for Identity is a cloud-based security solution that leverages your on-premises Active Directory signals to identify, detect, and investigate advanced threats, compromised identities, and malicious insider actions directed at your organization. Until now, Microsoft Defender for Identity has protected domain controllers in either on-premises or hybrid environments. By installing the sensor on the domain controller, you are gaining access to the core value from our product: (1) Attack surface reduction, (2) Detect, and (3) Investigate. AD FS enables federated Identity and access management by securely sharing digital identity and access rights across security and enterprise boundaries. While we recommend customers upgrade their existing on-premises AD FS systems to Azure AD to gain the protections that a cloud identity solution can provide, we understand that some customers are on different journeys – which is why we are introducing today new capabilities from Microsoft Defender for Identity to protect your AD FS environment.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-01

Welcome to the January 4 – 10, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were fourteen additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Outlook (Android, iOS), Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and Microsoft Information Protection.

Additional events for existing meeting series have been posted, and there are also new dates for the various customer immersion experience sessions. This week’s spotlight event is the “Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Leverage pro tips and tricks” session on Tuesday, January 12th at 8am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include a look at what’s new for Teams and OneDrive in December 2020, the new email-based one-time passcode feature for collaboration in Azure Active Directory, and the latest Zero Trust networking articles from Microsoft IT Showcase.

Noteworthy item highlights include a video demo of the updated FastTrack migration experience, the December 2020 updates for Project on the web, the general availability of attack simulation training in Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and information on how to use Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to minimize the impact of privacy breaches.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Remediation enhancements	70554	January CY2021	Added: 05 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 We’re making changes to remediation capabilities in Defender for Office 365. First, we’re increasing the export limit of records from mail submissions or action log in the action center to 100,000. We’re also adding two new columns to the action log details view within the action center. The first is a column for network message ID, allowing security teams to review based on network message ID. The second is a column for “Already in Destination”. Previously, all records submitted for remediation were remediated based on their original delivery location.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Investigations triggered by manual actions	70555	January CY2021	Added: 05 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 In order to provide the most accurate information in the Action center, we’re making a change that creates an investigation when manual actions are taken by admins. As we converge to the security.microsoft.com portal, this will ensure that all actions are shown in the converged action center.
Outlook for iOS: Increase visibility of messages from people outside your organization	75264	February CY2021	Added: 05 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS Increase the visibility of email messages that were sent from outside the organization in order help identify and report suspicious emails that may be an attempt of impersonation or spoofing.
Outlook for Android: Increase visibility of messages from people outside your organization	75265	February CY2021	Added: 05 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Android Increase the visibility of email messages that were sent from outside the organization in order help identify and report suspicious emails that may be an attempt of impersonation or spoofing.
Microsoft 365 admin center: Global Usage report for Microsoft Teams	70552	January CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Admin A new report will be made available with both tenant level aggregation and per-team level details to enable admins to get an overall picture of how the organization is using teams within Microsoft Teams.
Outlook for iOS: Extending suggested replies in more languages worldwide	70557	January CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS Customers worldwide will be able to see suggested replies to email messages in the following languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German. Suggested replies will appear if people are having a conversation in any of those languages.
Outlook for Android: Extending suggested replies in additional languages world wide	70559	January CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Android Customers worldwide will be able to see suggested replies to email messages in the following languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German. Suggested replies will appear if people are having a conversation in any of those languages.
Microsoft Teams: Revised in-meeting Share experience	70560	February CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams The user interface for the in-meeting Share feature in Microsoft Teams has been redesigned to help presenters find their desired content more quickly and easily.
Microsoft Teams: Revised in-meeting Share experience for GCC-High	70561	March CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC High The user interface for the in-meeting Share feature in Microsoft Teams has been redesigned to help presenters find their desired content more quickly and easily.
Microsoft Teams: Revised in-meeting Share experience in DOD	70562	April CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, DoD The user interface for the in-meeting Share feature in Microsoft Teams has been redesigned to help presenters find their desired content more quickly and easily.
Microsoft Teams: Top hits in Search Autosuggest	70563	March CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Top Hits introduces a new section at the top of the autosuggest suggestions where the most relevant results, across domains, for a given query are represented. This feature is envisioned to reduce time taken for a successful search, as well as benefit the user through better task completion, especially for result types situated lower in the suggestions well.
Microsoft Teams: Teams casting from iOS Teams App	70564	May CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams For quick ad-hoc sessions that don’t necessarily require setting up a formal meeting, people can use Teams casting to wirelessly connect to a Teams Room from their mobile device and display content. Users can broadcast their screen and cast content stored on locally on their device or accessible via Office 365.
Microsoft Teams: Teams casting from Android Teams App	70565	May CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams For quick ad-hoc sessions that don’t necessarily require setting up a formal meeting, people can use Teams casting to wirelessly connect to a Teams Room from their mobile device and display content. Users can broadcast their screen and cast content stored on locally on their device or accessible via Office 365.
Microsoft Information Protection: Changes in display of hierarchical sensitivity labels for Microsoft Teams	70566	February CY2021	Added: 08 January 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP For hierarchical sensitivity labels, channel headers will only display the parent label instead of showing the child label. For example, for a sensitivity label such as Confidential\Finance, Teams will only show “Confidential” in the channel header.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our ‘Go Deeper’ sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. Learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (2) Easily find files, chats and projects, (3) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, and (4) Simplify your workday.

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Teams Chalk Talk: So…you want to make calls with Microsoft Teams?

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Meeting Organizational Compliance Requirements

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Securing Your Organization

Wednesday, February 10, 2021 from 10am – 2pm PT

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

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Building Microsoft Teams Integrations and Workflows

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

BLOG ROUNDUP

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2020

This blog post outlines all the great Teams features released in December 2020, including virtual breakout rooms, end-of-meeting notifications, a new Teams meeting pre-join experience, multiple number dialing, live captions for 1:1 calls, enhanced meeting experiences on Teams phones, proximity join for Teams conference phones, improved search relevance, improvements to video playback experience, enhancements to Yammer communities and conversations in Teams, the ability to restrict Windows and Mac managed device sign-in to specific tenants, an option for only invited users to join directly with a new Lobby setting, and many, many more!

The latest functionalities that rolled out to production in the month of December 2020 are: (1) Full fidelity shared libraries in OneDrive web – you can now view shared libraries with full fidelity from within the OneDrive on the web. This means you can create new documents, pin important ones to the top, add shortcuts to your OneDrive, create views, manage metadata, share and more; (2) Create shared library in OneDrive web – We’re updating the existing experience of creating new Shared Libraries from OneDrive on the web to make it simpler and easier to create collaborative spaces. The new streamlined experience backed by an Office 365 group, allowing you to specify the people you want to share with – and the new shared library appears immediately as a new content collaboration space for your team files; and (3) Exclude specific files from sync – admins can now specify a file name or file extension to exclude from sync at the device level.

Collaborate with anyone in any organization with any email address!

We’ve heard from you that interconnected supply and distribution chains, and vendor models are bringing B2B partners directly into your business, where secure and seamless collaboration is more important than ever. We also know how painful it can be for IT managers to keep track of guest user accounts, and for end users to remember multiple usernames and passwords. We are continually improving our Azure AD External Identities solution with more support for bring-your-own-identity (BYOI) options. We are announcing another enhancement to our BYOI story with the general availability of email-based one-time passcode (email OTP) feature for collaboration. With email OTP, org members can collaborate with anyone in the world by simply sharing a link or sending an invitation via email. Invited users prove their identity by using a verification code sent to their email account. Once authenticated, each session providing access to the shared resource lasts 24 hours. On subsequent sign ins, users receive a new one-time code via email, which they must enter to prove continued ownership of the email account and continue receiving access. | Resource: Email one-time passcode authentication

Microsoft IT Showcase: Zero Trust networking at Microsoft hinges on communication, collaboration, and expert knowledge

Safeguarding corporate resources is a high priority for any business, but how does Microsoft protect a network perimeter that extends to thousands of global endpoints accessing corporate data and services 24 hours a day, seven days a week? It’s all about communication, collaboration, and expert knowledge. Phil Suver, senior director of networking at Microsoft, and his team help champion Zero Trust networking, an important part of Microsoft’s broader Zero Trust initiative. Driven by Microsoft’s security organization, the Zero Trust model centers on strong user identity, device-health verification, application-health validation, and secure, least-privilege access to corporate resources and services. Indeed, this extensive initiative affects all of Microsoft and every employee. To support the Zero Trust initiative, Microsoft’s network engineering team is partnering with the security and end-user experience teams to implement security policy and identity while ensuring productivity for employees and partners. Suver says that his team always aims to minimize those impacts and communicate how they ultimately result in benefits.

Related:

NOTEWORTHY

Demo of the FastTrack for Microsoft 365 migration experience

Format: Video (6 minutes) | FastTrack helps customers deploy Microsoft cloud solutions. Customers with eligible subscriptions to Microsoft 365, Azure, or Dynamics 365 can use FastTrack at no additional cost for the life of their subscription. Learn more about data migrations, how to create and schedule migration events, and reporting.

Project for the web – December Update

Many features that are requested through Microsoft UserVoice appear on the Microsoft 365 Public Roadmap when they are in development and within months of being rolled out. New features include Task attachments, API importing for .mpp files into Project for the web, and “Quick Look” column. Coming soon you will be able to deploy Project to different environments, export timeline to PDF, and turn on email notifications to see when you are assigned new tasks or alert you when a task’s due date is coming up. | Related: Import Project Desktop files to Project for the web API

Announcing Microsoft 365 informed network routing preview

We are pleased to announce the preview availability of Microsoft 365 informed network routing! This feature represents the next step in our efforts to improve the quality of connectivity to our service endpoints and improve the user experience across our suite of productivity applications. The informed network routing feature provides the ability for 3rd-party software defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solutions to receive application-level feedback on network quality, specific to branch locations and individual network circuits which carry network traffic from your users to the Internet and on to Microsoft. This feedback can be used to make better decisions about the best routing path to use to ensure an optimal end-user experience in the face of availability or performance issues within last-mile (customer) or middle-mile (ISP) infrastructure. To take advantage of this feature, you must be using a SD-WAN solution which has integrated with our platform.

Attack simulation training in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 now Generally Available

We are pleased to announce the General Availability (GA) of Attack simulation training in Microsoft Defender for Office 365. Delivered in partnership with Terranova Security, Attack simulation training is an intelligent social engineering risk management tool that automates the creation and management of phishing simulations to help customers detect, prioritize and remediate phishing risks by using real phish and hyper-targeted training to change employee behaviors. To see a demo of the product tune into our announcement video at Microsoft Ignite 2020. As we mentioned in our blog announcing the expansion of public preview to E3 license holders, we will continue to offer a subset of Attack simulation training capabilities to E3 customers as a trial. The trial offering contains the ability to use a Credential Harvest payload and the ability to select from 2 training experiences ISA Phishing and Mass Market Phishing. The trial offering will not include any other phishing techniques, automated simulation creation and management, conditional payload harvesting, and the complete catalog of Terranova Security trainings.

Privacy breaches: Using Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to minimize impact

GDPR, HIPPA, GLBA, all 50 U.S. States, and many countries have privacy breach reporting requirements. If an organization experiences a breach of customer or employee personal information, they must report it within the required time frame. The size and scope of this reporting effort can be massive. Using Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to better understand the scope of the breach can minimize the burden on customers as well as the financial and reputational cost to the organization. The Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit solution makes a range of data available that is focused on what will be useful to respond to crucial events and forensic investigations. It retains this data for one year (rather than the standard 90-day retention), with an option to extend the retention to ten years. This keeps the audit logs available to long-running investigations and to respond to regulatory and legal obligations. These crucial events can help you investigate possible breaches and determine the scope of compromise. There are built-in default alert policies that use the Advanced Audit data to provide situational awareness either through Microsoft 365’s own security and compliance portal, through Microsoft’s Azure Sentinel cloud-native SIEM, or through a customer’s third-party SIEM. A customer can create customized alerts to use the audit data as well.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-34

Welcome to the August 16 – 22, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Eleven features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including items for Teams, Exchange, Forms, Microsoft Information Protection, Search, Word and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

A few events for existing meeting series were added, all in early September. The spotlight event of the week is the “Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Back to School and User Adoption with Microsoft Teams” session on Tuesday, August 25th at 9am Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include a look at four new integrations for Microsoft Teams and Power Automate, an announcement on the support lifecycle for Internet Explorer in Microsoft 365 apps, information on free event support and tech training for educational institutions, and details on new data that shows how the pandemic is accelerating the digital transformation of cybersecurity.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as data protection updates in Power BI, support for Workbook Link in Excel for the web, suggestions on how to boost the discovery of content within your network’s home feed in Yammer, and how Microsoft is empowering employees to securely work anywhere with internet-first thinking.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Word: New Feature – Designer in Word for Word for the web	63455	September CY2020	Added: 17 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Word – Web Designer in Word for the web helps you make your document look and feel consistent by understanding different document constructs and intents. In addition, by providing a variety of document styles you can quickly change the look and feel of your document.
Microsoft Information Protection: Feedback Loop for Trainable Classifiers	65763	August CY2020	Added: 17 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: MIP Customers can report whether classification hits are accurate or not to further improve classification performance.
Microsoft Search: Power BI results with Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com	67103	September CY2020	Added: 17 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Search Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com will now include results from Power BI. Power BI results with Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com will allow you to search for Power BI artifacts (reports, dashboards, workspaces) based on keywords to get results list displayed in a new Power BI vertical.
Exchange: Block sending to a Distribution Group when it’s on the BCC line	67096	November CY2020	Added: 18 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange The high message traffic on some groups can lead to Inbox clutter and noise, especially when many members use Reply All to respond on the thread. To reduce the noise many people will create an Inbox Rule to move incoming group messages to a specific folder. Some well-intended senders will put the group on the Bcc line so recipients can’t Reply All to the whole group. But Inbox Rules doesn’t evaluate any recipient on the Bcc line, so doing so effectively breaks the rule so the message ends up in the Inbox, thus contributing to the inbox clutter the user was trying to avoid. When this feature ships we’ll enable the ability for group and distribution list owners and admins to block sending to a group if the group is put on the Bcc line. If a user puts such a group on the Bcc line and sends the message, it’ll be rejected with a non-delivery report (NDR) saying Bcc’ing this group isn’t allowed.
Microsoft 365 Admin Center: Improving the Message Center user experience	67102	December CY2020	Added: 18 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 Admin Center We are enhancing filter and search to improve discovery of relevant messages. The list view will also be more customizable and interactive, and the message detail panel will be cleaned up for a better reading experience.
Microsoft Information Protection: Double Key Encryption for GCC-High and DoD	67105	October CY2020	Added: 18 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: MIP, Gov Coming soon to government clouds, Double Key Encryption from Microsoft allows you to protect your highly sensitive data while maintaining full control of your key. You can protect your data with two keys – your Azure key and your key in the Double Key Encryption service.
Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams and Power Automate – Simpler automation for everyone	68120	September CY2020	Added: 20 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams A new Power Automate app for Teams will make creating and using automation simpler than ever. New workflow templates will be made available and using those templates to build automation will become easier with a simplified editor experience.
Microsoft Lists: Updated Person column experience – built on SharePoint	67095	August CY2020	Added: 21 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Lists Items within a Person column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new “pill” design format when a person’s photo is displayed. Select one or more people to add to a Person column quickly and they appear with an updated look.
Microsoft Lists: Updated Choice column experience – built on SharePoint	67097	August CY2020	Added: 21 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Lists Items within a Choice column, in and out of Quick Edit mode for both lists and libraries, will support single, multi-choice, and manual fill as you add items. You’ll see updated formatting right away and can update and remove choice fields and formatting selections previously applied.
PowerPoint for Mac: Record Slide Show Updates	67104	October CY2020	Added: 21 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: PowerPoint – Mac With new Record Slide Show updates, users can now record presenter video and inking with PowerPoint.
Forms: Group Forms for GCC	67106	August CY2020	Added: 21 August 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Forms, Gov Recent group Forms will be enabled for all GCC customers. By doing this, when GCC customers access Group forms on Forms portal, they will see the group forms that they have been working recently.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our ‘Go Deeper’ sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. Learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (2) Easily find files, chats and projects, (3) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, and (4) Simplify your workday. Note: This session was previously called ‘Learn tips for taking Microsoft Teams to the next level – Part 2’.

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

When: Tuesday, August 25, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Bring conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place with Microsoft Teams. Build collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and connect with colleagues — all from a single Office 365 Education experience. Learn how IT can enable these capabilities for users while maintaining the necessary configurations to align with required organizational business and security requirements. Join us for this webinar to learn: (1) Administration capabilities to enable and govern Microsoft Teams, (2) Allow for frictionless user Teams creation while enforcing business rules and addressing IT concerns, (3) Understand the Teams lifecycle and recommended practices for long term management of the environment, and (4) Security and compliance capabilities for Teams integrated in the Office 365 tools you are already using today. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Back to School and User Adoption with Microsoft Teams

When: Tuesday, August 25, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. Join us for Episode 2 to learn about the latest features and functionalities to help educators make the most of Microsoft Teams and how IT pros can secure these features in a variety of environments. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Do more with apps

Thursday, August 27, 2020 at 8am PT

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams Security

When: Tuesday, September 8, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. Let’s talk security in Episode 3. The top challenge IT pros are facing right now is securing data. Join our product expert for a deep dive discussion on identity and authentication. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

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.

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Upcoming Changes to Office Support

When: Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 9:00am PT | Join us for an opportunity to “Ask Microsoft Anything” (AMA) about upcoming changes to support for Office 2016 for Mac, Office 2010 and Office 2013 connectivity to Office 365 services. To join, simply visit the Office End of Support AMA space at 9:00am Pacific and submit a question. An AMA is a live, online, text-based question-and-answer event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. Note: While we’ll only be answering questions in real-time from 9am – 10am Pacific, you can post your questions for the AMA to the Office End of Support AMA space up to 24 hours in advance. We look forward to seeing you there!

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Ignite 2020 Pre-Show

When: Tuesday, September 15, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. In this special episode, you’ll get a preview of what’s coming up at Microsoft Ignite. Hear about upcoming sessions you don’t want to miss, as well as new resources that will help you make the most of your experience. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Ignite 2020 Wrap-Up Part 1

When: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. Join us for a wrap-up of day 1 at Microsoft Ignite. You’ll hear all the highlights and we’ll talk about what’s coming up on day 2. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Ignite 2020 Wrap-Up Part 2

When: Friday, September 25, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. Join us for a complete wrap-up of day 1 and 2 at Microsoft Ignite. You’ll hear all the highlights and talk with product experts. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: The New World of Virtual Events

When: Thursday, October 8, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. The events industry transformed overnight, and Microsoft Teams played a big part in this transition. In Episode 7, we’ll sit down with members of the Microsoft Teams product group and learn how they are building the future of high-scale communication with Microsoft Teams. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: New Resources for Microsoft Teams Admins

When: Thursday, October 22, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. In Episode 8, learn about new Teams deep dive help videos for administrators as well as other resources to get your support teams and help desk up to speed. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Manage Guest Access in Microsoft Teams

When: Thursday, November 5, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. In Episode 9, which is one of the most requested episodes, we’ll feature tips, tricks and gotchas on managing guest access in Microsoft Teams. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

BLOG ROUNDUP

Four new ways to simplify your work with Microsoft Teams and Power Automate

Microsoft Teams can help people stay connected while working apart with capabilities like chat, meetings, and calling, but users often ask how it can help streamline the work they do. Fortunately, Teams and Microsoft Power Automate work seamlessly together to simplify how you and your team work – whether you’re on the Sales team, the Product team, the HR team, or just the office ping pong team. Power Automate allows you to create low-code workflow automation for yourself and your entire team using logic-based building blocks, starting with a trigger that sets one or more actions in motion. The new “for a selected message” trigger is unlocking new ways to drive business processes, starting from a message in Teams. This post provides four examples of how teams are doing this, but the possibilities are endless. Templates are now available for each of these scenarios to help you get started right away! | Related: Trigger flows from any message in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 apps say farewell to Internet Explorer 11 and Windows 10 sunsets Microsoft Edge Legacy

We’re announcing that Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) by this time next year. Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11. Beginning August 17, 2021, the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11. This means that after these dates, customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11. For degraded experiences, new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may cease to work when accessing the app or service via IE 11. While we know this change will be difficult for some customers, we believe that customers will get the most out of Microsoft 365 when using the new Microsoft Edge. We are committed to helping make this transition as smooth as possible. Customers have been using IE 11 since 2013 when the online environment was much less sophisticated than the landscape today. Since then, open web standards and newer browsers—like the new Microsoft Edge—have enabled better, more innovative online experiences. We believe that Microsoft 365 subscribers, in both consumer and commercial contexts, will be well served with this change through faster and more responsive web access to greater sets of features in everyday toolsets like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and more.

Get ready for the new school year with free event support and tech training

As we head toward a new school year that will be largely remote or hybrid, educators are faced with new challenges: creating safe and healthy learning environments and designing welcoming, engaging experiences that are accessible for all students. Like graduations at the end of the year, new student orientation is an especially important experience that connects students, faculty, and administrators and sets the tone for the year. With the current need to limit in-person interaction, schools are recognizing that orientation shouldn’t be one single event, but an ongoing program that keeps students engaged. So, how will institutions present all their welcome and informational sessions when classes may be online or hybrid, and when many students may not physically travel to campus? Online events will be their best bet. Starting today, the Microsoft Store team is offering free support to help institutions drive engaging online orientations and help staff and students make the most of their tech for online learning. Just tell us what you need to help your students thrive in an online or hybrid learning environment, and our team of nearly 3,000 talented Store associates will help you get the tech training you need to start the new school year with confidence. | Related: Virtual campus tours in Microsoft Teams make back-to-school feel more familiar | 9 Back to School Updates for OneNote and Class Notebooks – August 2020

New data from Microsoft shows how the pandemic is accelerating the digital transformation of cyber-security

The importance of cybersecurity in facilitating productive remote work was a significant catalyst for the two years-worth of digital transformation we observed in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this era of ubiquitous computing, security solutions don’t just sniff out threats, they serve as control planes for improving productivity and collaboration by giving end-users easier access to more corporate resources. Microsoft recently concluded a survey of nearly 800 business leaders of companies of more than 500 employees in India (IN), Germany (DE), the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) to better understand their views of the pandemic threat landscape, implications for budgets and staffing, and how they feel the pandemic could reshape the cyber-security long-term. Among the key insights are data showing that an alarming number of businesses are still impacted by phishing scams, security budgets, and hiring increased in response to COVID-19, and cloud-based technologies and architectures like Zero Trust are significant areas of investment moving forward.

NOTEWORTHY

Power BI data protection updates

Following the Sensitivity Labels in Power BI GA announcement back in June, we’re happy to update you about new Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels features available now in production. The updates are: (1) Excel file to inherit the Power BI dataset’s sensitivity label when using a PivotTable connection, (2) Sensitivity labels in embedded reports and dashboards – public preview, and (3) Label inheritance upon creation of new content.

Workbook Link support coming to Excel for the web

When collecting data from multiple workbooks, it’s often desirable to link directly to the data. Why? It provides a record of where the data was sourced and, if the data changes, you can easily refresh it. This has made Workbook Link support a highly requested feature for our web users. We are excited to announce that Workbook Link support is beginning to roll out to Excel for the web. This was previously only available in Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac, and is an important step on our journey to meeting one of our key goals: “Customers can use our web app for all their work and should never feel they need to fall back to the rich client”.

Yammer Discovery – What is in my feed?

With the new Yammer comes a new Yammer home feed. This is the place for you to catch up on conversations happening in the communities you belong to today and what’s most important to you. Additionally, one superpower of Yammer is discovery – discovering new communities and new conversations that help broaden your perspective, includes viewpoints, deepens experiences that may not come across you path otherwise directly in your home feed. What we have learned through the years is that our Yammer customers are curious – you want to know what is in your feed and why it’s there. Plus, we know that you want to be able to educate the rest of your organization when they have questions. This post shares some ideas of how to use tools in Yammer to continue to boost the discovery of content within your network’s home feed.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Empowering Microsoft employees to securely work anywhere with internet-first thinking

For most people, hybrid working means having employees split time between their home offices and their work offices. That rings true at Microsoft, where most employees are predominantly working remotely in response to COVID-19. The company is currently exploring what the near future will look like, and it’s clear that when employees go back their offices, they will likely be brought back in a thoughtful and deliberate hybrid approach. The digital security team in Microsoft’s Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) has thought through how a hybrid connectivity model would work for employees. They used Zero Trust principles to set up systems that ensure Microsoft employees have access to applications and resources from any location. Employees can be productive from anywhere, whether they’re at home or at the office. Microsoft is embracing Zero Trust by adopting an internet-first model. This approach allows employees to access corporate applications primarily using direct internet connections rather than requiring that an employee initiate a virtual private network (VPN) connection to the company’s private corporate network. Internet-first is a reality due to the security protections that exist to verify an employee’s identity, strong authentication, and device health verification using Microsoft’s mobile device management program, Microsoft Intune.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-25

Welcome to the June 14 – 20, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Thirteen features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including items for Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Admin, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Outlook (web), and Yammer. The updates for Teams include Virtual Breakout Rooms, one of the current Top 10 most requested features on Teams UserVoice.

Existing event series had a few sessions added, but we should see lots of updates next week with the July schedule. The spotlight event of the week is the “Azure Active Directory Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)” session on Tuesday, June 23rd at 9am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include information on the new “What’s New in Office Apps” card available in the Microsoft 365 admin center, a look at how Teams operates at pandemic scale using Azure, details on recent updates for Teams for Education, the general availability of PowerPoint Live, and new All Company features in Yammer.

Noteworthy item highlights include details on new features in Microsoft Forms, an upcoming change in Exchange Online device access and conditional access in Outlook mobile, a curated list of Microsoft 365 self-guided wizards, and steps on how to configure selective password synchronization with Azure Active Directory Connect (AADConnect).

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Microsoft Teams: improvements in meetings experience for Safari browser users	65090	June CY2020	Added: 15 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams We are bringing improvements to the browser-based meetings experience for those who join Teams meetings with Safari browsers. Users will no longer be required to use Audio Conferencing to dial into the meeting for audio needs, but rather, can use their device to speak and listen. As was prior, participants can continue to view meeting content being shared in their browser.
Templates in Teams	63175	August CY2020	Added: 15 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams When creating a new team, users can now choose from a variety of customizable templates including event management, crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates like hospital ward and bank branch. Microsoft will publish a set of first-party templates and customers can also create new templates for their own organization.
Outlook on the web: New tasks experience	64940	July CY2020	Added: 16 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web Outlook on the web will update the classic Tasks experience with a new experience powered by To Do.
SharePoint: SharePoint spaces 360° image annotations and tours	65072	July CY2020	Added: 16 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint 360° tour web part in SharePoint spaces allows creation of immersive virtual tours for SharePoint sites.
Yammer: Live event carousel on home feed in the new Yammer	65021	June CY2020	Added: 16 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Yammer Make your Yammer live events more discoverable and encourage participation with the new discovery carousel. Attendees can see relevant events right in their discovery feed and easily click to join the event. Users will see the live events in their discovery feed when using Yammer on the web and on their mobile phones. This functionality is enabled by default unless organizers turn off event promotion.
Outlook on the web: New tasks experience for GCC, GCC-High and DoD	65091	September CY2020	Added: 16 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web, Gov Outlook on the web will update the classic Tasks experience with a new experience powered by To Do.
CJK/Double Byte support for Advanced eDiscovery	62593	September CY2020	Added: 16 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 CJK/Double Byte support for Advanced eDiscovery – adding CJK/Double Byte characters to review set.
Microsoft Teams: new policy to prevent upload of profile picture for GCC customers	63312	June CY2020	Added: 17 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Gov Teams desktop and web experiences will honor the Outlook on the Web mailbox policy setting that can control whether users are able change their profile pictures. This applies to GCC, GCC High, and DoD tenants.
SharePoint lists and libraries: Rename title column	65146	July CY2020	Added: 17 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Users will be able to rename the title field column and see the name change appear consistently in grid view, when in Quick Edit and on the associated view and edit forms.
Microsoft 365 admin center: User storage limit management for OneDrive	65148	June CY2020	Added: 17 June 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: M365 Admin, OneDrive We’re enabling admins to manage storage limits for OneDrive-enabled users in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Microsoft Teams: Virtual Breakout Rooms	65332	Q4 CY2020	Added: 18 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Meeting hosts can create breakout rooms to be used by meeting participants for smaller group discussion. They can assign participants to a room and call them back to the larger group when the breakout is complete.
Microsoft Teams: Group Calling for Safari Browser	65330	Q3 CY2020	Added: 18 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Group call functionality for the Safari browser.
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: Office 365 Security & Compliance Alerts	65344	Q1 CY2021	Added: 19 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 ATP We are adding new capabilities to the Office 365 Security & Compliance alerting feature, focusing on enriching the existing alerts as well as adding six new alerts related to Phish and Malware threats.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Microsoft Teams: Learn to use apps

This session introduces you to the key activities needed to get started with adding applications, bots and connectors in Microsoft Teams today. Through a series of live demonstrations and best practices, you’ll leave this session with everything you need to start using apps in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) See how applications, bots and connectors can help you be more efficient while working in Teams, (2) Select an application, bot or connector for your workspace, (3) Install an application, bot or connector, and (4) Use an application, bot or connector in your workspace.

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Teams EDU Special: Online classes & lectures with all your students

When: Tuesday, June 23, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Microsoft Teams allows up-to 250 students and educators to meet online for free. There are many reasons why schools may need to leverage remote communication tools to function. Whatever they may be, Microsoft Teams for Education makes connecting virtually seamless for members of any school, college or university. This webinar is designed to help first time users of Microsoft Teams get started hosting online meetings with their students. This webinar is for educators who need to create an persistent online space for their class: (a) Classrooms, (b) Lectures & courses, and (c) Module course groups. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Azure Active Directory

When: Tuesday, June 23, 2020 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft Teams ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA) for Azure Active Directory! 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 team who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Join in the Azure AD AMA space, and add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

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

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.

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.

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Flexible and intelligent intranet experience

When: Tuesday, June 23, 2020 at 10:00am PT | Having 100% of Microsoft’s intranet portals moved to SharePoint in Microsoft 365 has contributed to our seamless transition to a work-from-home environment. Join Microsoft experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO), Corporate Communications, and the SharePoint product group as they answer questions about how we managed the massive migration to SharePoint in Microsoft 365. They will discuss what it took to create an intelligent intranet for 220,000 users, how SharePoint keeps employees connected, and how simple it is for them to create, and update intranet portals, so information is accessible and easy to find.

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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.

Azure AD Webinar: Azure AD as the new Security Control Plane

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, you will learn how to assess and implement a modern approach to a secure your organization identities with Azure AD.

Do more with apps in Microsoft Teams

Many organizations leverage a variety of apps and tools to get their work done. Often installed and managed separately, this requires a user to continually switch context/applications as they navigate their daily activities. Join Microsoft Teams experts as we review how you can deploy commonly-used applications directly within Teams, enabling your users to work more efficiently and effectively by accessing everything they need from a single interface. With over 300 out-of-the-box applications available (and growing), you’re sure to find an app, or two, you can begin using today in Teams.

Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 8am PT

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Cloud-first file management and collaboration

When: Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 10:00am PT | Now, more than ever, it is important for users to be able to access files from any location and on any device. Join Microsoft experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) and the SharePoint product group as they answer questions about our cloud-first file management strategy, using Known Folder Move to redirect employees files to OneDrive for Business, multi-geo capabilities in OneDrive for Business that help keep data compliant with regional data residency requirements, and nurturing collaboration with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Yammer.

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

When: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Bring conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place with Microsoft Teams. Build collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and connect with colleagues — all from a single Office 365 Education experience. Learn how IT can enable these capabilities for users while maintaining the necessary configurations to align with required organizational business and security requirements. Join us for this webinar to learn: (1) Administration capabilities to enable and govern Microsoft Teams, (2) Allow for frictionless user Teams creation while enforcing business rules and addressing IT concerns, (3) Understand the Teams lifecycle and recommended practices for long term management of the environment, and (4) Security and compliance capabilities for Teams integrated in the Office 365 tools you are already using today. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

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

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

BLOG ROUNDUP

What’s New in Office Apps card available in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Previously, you told us that you want the ability to control communication of new Office features to your users. A few months ago, we announced the generally availability of Office What’s New management capabilities that give you control of your users’ experience with the What’s New section of the Office desktop app Help pane. We’re now excited to announce that a What’s New in Office Apps (also know as Office What’s New management) card is now available in the Microsoft 365 admin center. The Home page of the Microsoft 365 admin center is customizable, and it allows you to add cards for tasks that you perform frequently, such as user management, reviewing Message center posts and service health information, and working with Microsoft Teams. The Office What’s New management card shows the latest versions for each channel, and it provides an easy way to access the Office What’s New management page. | Resource: What’s new in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Advancing Microsoft Teams on Azure—operating at pandemic scale

Scale, resiliency, and performance do not happen overnight—it takes sustained and deliberate investment, day over day, and a performance-first mindset to build products that delight our users. Since its launch, Teams has experienced strong growth: from launch in 2017 to 13 million daily users in July 2019, to 20 million in November 2019. In April, we shared that Teams has more than 75 million daily active users, 200 million daily meeting participants, and 4.1 billion daily meeting minutes. We thought we were accustomed to the ongoing work necessary to scale service at such a pace given the rapid growth Teams had experienced to date. COVID-19 challenged this assumption; would this experience give us the ability to keep the service running amidst a previously unthinkable growth period?

Over the last few months, schools and institutions have been working tirelessly to enable distance learning. We’ve heard directly from many of you about engaging students in lessons, encouraging student-to-student collaboration, and facilitating staff professional development, all while remote. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas about how to improve Microsoft Teams for distance and hybrid learning. We continue to be inspired by you and are always exploring and implementing new ways for Teams to support student engagement and professional development. We pulled together key learnings we’ve heard from customers, and announced new features designed to support you and your class. This post covers the following: (1) Getting back-to-school ready with 4 top-requested features, (2) What is available now, what’s coming soon, (3) Resources for educators, and (4) Guidance for IT admins.

Earlier this year, we announced that Live Presentations was coming soon, and we are excited to share that it is now generally available on PowerPoint for the web. When we first announced PowerPoint Live, we saw excitement from both enterprise and education customers around how this feature could be utilized during in-person events—conferences, lecture halls, corporate all hands, town halls, and more. Of course, the world has changed a lot since then. We know that as more physical events and meetings take place, PowerPoint Live will prove to be a very useful tool for connecting with your audience and communicating more effectively, which we are excited to show you. However, we also have tips below on how to use this capability now in remote work and learning scenarios. | Related: PowerPoint Presenter Coach on Android

Engage your entire organization with new All Company features

Organizations are rapidly transforming to meet the needs of a virtual workforce and respond to changing industry conditions. Yammer has been repowered to enable two-way communication between leaders and employees to ensure everyone has the information they need to stay safe, align on priorities and get their work done, together. We’re excited to share several changes to the All Company experience that give corporate communicators the tools to keep the entire organization informed and engaged, wherever they are. The new composing experience provides new ways for admins to share announcements at scale, including using questions and polls in the All Company community to spark engagement and feedback. Customize your All Company with a unique name, description, and image to create a strong identity for your All Company community. Upload a cover photo to All Company to drive campaigns across your organization or just reinforce your culture and values. Host townhalls and company meetings in All Company using live events to align the organization and celebrate milestones. Control and co-curate conversations that take place in All Company by restricting who can post in the community with the new restricting post feature.

NOTEWORTHY

What’s New in Microsoft Forms | Integrations | May-June 2020

This month, we have new integrations with your favorite Microsoft apps to ensure your teams’ voices and opinions are heard, no matter where you’re working from. Now you can create a real time poll in seconds when composing an email in Outlook. Once sent, recipients vote directly in email or click on an included link and vote in a browser window. You can then check poll results in real-time using the voting card. Poll is now pre-installed to your Outlook mailbox so you no longer need to install the add-in yourself. During this time many companies are working remotely and need to collect information from their employee base while planning for their eventual return to the office. We’ve received feedback that many Teams users are looking for an app that enables them to push pulse surveys to their employees on a regular basis. Based on this feedback, we have designed several templates for common scenarios to help teams create and share surveys in their Teams channels. Previously, we launched the preview of Forms in Excel. In addition to releasing general availability and removing the ‘Preview’ label of Forms in Excel, we have improved the performance and reliability of the app.

Upcoming Exchange Online Device Access and Conditional Access changes with Outlook mobile

Beginning in August 2020, we are rolling out changes in Exchange Online to ensure that only certain Conditional Access policies bypass Exchange’s mobile device access rules for Outlook for iOS and Android devices. Specifically, only Conditional Access policies configured with the following grant access controls will prevent Exchange mobile device access rules being applied to Outlook for iOS and Android: (1) Require device to be marked as compliant, (2) Require approved client app, and (3) Require app protection policy. The good news is that if you are utilizing one (or more of) these grant access controls, your Outlook for iOS and Android users will not be affected. However, if you are utilizing Conditional Access policies that do not leverage the above grant access controls and have configured the mobile device access level within Exchange Online to block or quarantine devices, users using Outlook for iOS and Android will be blocked or quarantined by Exchange Online after this change is implemented. By default, the mobile device access level in Exchange Online is set to allow. You have a few different options on how you can remediate this prior to the change…

Microsoft 365 self-guided wizards: Curated assets to meet customer needs

Microsoft is continuously looking for ways to make things easier and more efficient for our customers. We’re happy to introduce our new Microsoft 365 self-guided wizard for business and enterprise customers, based on scenario and product selections for deployment, migration, adoption, learning, and security. The self-guided wizards also include a new remote work and learning path, in response to COVID-19, for business use, plus education and government entities. We’ve collected our best resources, based on your unique and specific needs. Look for regular monthly updates to our wizards, including additional scenario and user coverage. You can select whether you are looking for resources for Microsoft 365 for Business (small and medium business plans) or for Enterprise, along with the new COVID-19 path to address a variety of remote work and learning scenarios. Based on your selection, the wizard will guide you through a set of simple questions to help you identify the top resources for guidance and implementation.

Configure Selective Password Synchronization With AADConnect

We generally see two sets of customers, the first who want to use the modern identity for cloud applications and have decided to synchronize the hashes from on-premise identity systems (Active Directory) and the second who are not comfortable with password hash synchronizations to public cloud and hence use the traditional methods for accessing the cloud applications like ADFS. This blog especially focuses on the 2nd set of customers who would like to take a gradual approach to modern identity and would like to start slow in their adoption by only targeting a small set of users for synchronizing password hashes.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-24

Welcome to the June 7 – 13, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were twenty-seven additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including items for Teams, SharePoint, Lists, Microsoft 365 Admin, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), To Do, and Search.

A few sessions have been added for existing event series. A new Azure Active Directory Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) session will take place on Tuesday, June 23rd at 9am Pacific. This week’s spotlight event is the “Enabling Remote Work at Microsoft: Teamwork and meetings” session on Thursday, June 18th at 10am Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blog posts include the availability of custom backgrounds in Microsoft Teams, a look back at OneDrive updates in May 2020, information on what’s new in Microsoft 365 Compliance and Risk Management, and 11 security tips to help stay safe in the COVID-19 era.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items on recent updates for Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics, expanded migration services from Microsoft FastTrack, and a compilation of answers to frequently asked questions about device-based Conditional Access.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Microsoft Lists: new ‘Integrate’ drop-down menu – powered by SharePoint	64869	July CY2020	Added: 08 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists As part of updating the command bar at the top of Microsoft Lists, we are introducing a new top-level menu item: ‘Integrate.’ This is the home for features that help extend list experiences. To start, existing command buttons for Power Apps and Power Automate will move into Integrate – as they are integrated technologies and experiences.
Microsoft Lists: visual updates for Quick Edit	64871	June CY2020	Added: 08 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists When in Quick Edit, we are introducing a number of new and refined user interface updates. You’ll see new grid lines, an improved on-hover experience when using your mouse around the grid, themed color bars on the side of list items – including error messaging, a “Create New Item” button at the bottom of quick edit for creating new items inline, and updated column header drop-downs.
Acronyms answers with Microsoft Search are coming to SharePoint and Office.com	64865	June CY2020	Added: 08 June 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Search We are increasing the number of participants who can be viewed simultaneously on the Teams meeting stage from 4 to 9.
SharePoint lists and libraries: Sticky column in Quick Edit	64866	June CY2020	Added: 08 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint As users scroll horizontally across a list in Quick Edit mode, the far-left column remains in place – improving context while viewing and editing.
SharePoint lists and libraries: Fixed row height in Quick Edit	64867	June CY2020	Added: 08 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint When in Quick Edit, you will see a new layout option “Fixed Height” within the view drop-down menu. This layout will adjust the height of all rows in the list or library to the same height to optimize the vertical spacing.
SharePoint lists and libraries: updated Quick Edit row selection	64868	June CY2020	Added: 08 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint When in Quick Edit, people will see an updated way for selecting single or multiple items in a list or files in a library. This selection update supports existing copy/paste and drag-to-fill, applicable to multiple rows when using shift+selection. This, too, improves navigating and interacting with a list or library via keyboard key strokes.
SharePoint lists and libraries – Improved Image columns	64872	August CY2020	Added: 08 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Upload a new image – including mobile camera support. You can add a new Image column to lists and libraries. When creating or editing items in that list or library, you can upload an image for that list item of file.
Microsoft Teams: Safe Transfer	64779	July CY2020	Added: 10 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Teams users will be able to transfer a call safely, between Teams and Skype For Business. If the target user does not answer the call, it will ring back to the transferrer. The person transferring the call must be a Teams user. The person the call is being transferred to must be either a Teams or Skype for Business user in the same tenant or in a federated tenant.
Microsoft Teams: Tagging by Shifts	64972	July CY2020	Added: 10 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Tagging by shift connects you to the right people faster. This new feature automatically assigns users with tags matching their schedule and shift group name from the Shifts app in Teams.
We’re updating SharePoint Online search query volume limits when using app-only authentication	64963	August CY2020	Added: 10 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint When this change is implemented, queries using the Site.Read.All permissions level or greater will be throttled at 25 QPS. The search query will return with a 429 response and you can simply retry the query. When waiting for 429 recovery, you should ensure to pause all search query requests you may be making to the service using similar app-only permission. Making additional calls while receiving throttle responses will extend the time it takes for your app to become unthrottled. As we scale our system, we realize the importance of hardening the system to run it efficiently and also to protect the system and hence this change. This change is expected to rollout beginning August 2020 into the Fall of 2020.
Working on multiple pages now gets more convenient in Visio for the web	55725	July CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Visio Multi-page operations is easier in Visio for the web. You can now drag pages and position them anywhere in your file. There is also a page navigation list, which will give you an one-shot view of all the pages in the current file and can be used to navigate non-sequentially through the pages. Also, you can create a copy of any existing page or insert a blank page anywhere in your file.
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: Mail Flow Status Summary Report	64907	July CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 ATP We’re working on a way for you to see how much mail was caught by various layers of our filtering stack. This report will allow customers to see how messages pass through the different layers of protection that we offer.
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: Mail Latency Summary Report	64908	July CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 ATP We’re adding a report that will show the time it takes for messages to traverse the full filtering stack, including detonations.
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: Enhancements to the Threat Protection Status Report	64912	July CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 ATP The additions to the Threat Protection Status Report will help educate customers about the effect their configurations have on their security posture. We’re adding an Override Allows view on the Threat Protection Status report to show customers threats that were allowed in due to configurations they’ve made, allowing customers to evaluate the effectiveness of their configuration and address any unintentional gaps in their protection.
Microsoft 365 Admin center: Exchange Online Basic Authentication Settings	65007	July CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 Admin, Exchange Online We are adding Exchange Online Basic Authentication settings to Microsoft Admin center. This will enable an administrator to easily disable Basic Authentication within their tenant.
Microsoft Information Protection: Using sensitivity labels in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 groups, and SharePoint sites	64965	June CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Information Protection When you create sensitivity labels in the Microsoft 365 compliance center, you can apply them to the following containers: Microsoft Teams sites, Microsoft 365 groups (formerly Office 365 groups), and SharePoint sites. The following apps and services support the new sensitivity labels for Microsoft 365 groups: SharePoint Teams Admin centers: SharePoint Azure Active Directory(AAD) Security & Compliance Outlook for the web Outlook for the Mac Outlook desktop app for Windows Outlook mobile app for Android and iOS Forms Stream.
Microsoft Teams: Teams meetings background effects and policy administration for GCC, GCC High, and DoD tenants	65009	June CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Gov We are building upon the heavily popular background effects feature in Teams meetings with custom upload capabilities. This new feature in Teams allow meetings attendees to customize their background by uploading their own images. As part of this we are enabling tenant administrators to assign a user-level policy to control how users engage with background effects in Teams meetings. Options include: offer no filters; background blur only; use background blur and default provided images; and all, which includes the ability for users to upload their own custom images. This applies to GCC, GCC High and DoD tenants.
“Integrated apps” in the Microsoft 365 admin center Settings page is being changed to “User consent to apps”	64478	June CY2020	Added: 11 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 Admin We’re changing the name for the “Integrated apps” setting on the Settings > Org settings page in the Services tab to better reflect what policies admins can manage in the setting.
Microsoft To Do: Support for Sharing Personal Lists	64658	June CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: To Do Microsoft To Do will now allow you to share lists from personal to work accounts.
Microsoft To Do: List Prediction	64659	July CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: To Do As you add tasks, Microsoft To Do will suggest what list, the task should go to.
Microsoft 365 Admin Center: Usage Report in DoD tenants	64906	July CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 Admin, DoD A set of usage reports will be available for DoD tenants. The reports that will be available are: Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint user activity, Email activity, Email app usage, Office activation report, Mailbox usage report, OneDrive for Business user activity report, Microsoft Teams user activity report, Microsoft Teams device usage report, Microsoft 365 active users report.
Microsoft Teams for RealWear	65038	July CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Teams FirstLine Workers using RealWear HMT-1 and HMT-1Z1 can now collaborate with a remote expert using video calling on Teams. Through a voice-controlled user interface, Teams for RealWear allows field workers to remain 100% hands-free while maintaining situational awareness in loud and hazardous environments. By showing what they see in real-time, field workers can accelerate the time to resolve issues and reduce the risk of an expensive downtime.
Microsoft 365 admin center: Business Continuity Report added to Microsoft Productivity Score	65035	June CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 Admin A new business continuity report will be made available in Microsoft Productivity Score. This report will provide visibility and insights into how collaboration norms have changed due to the recent global shift to working remotely. Organizations that are part of the Productivity Score preview and have at least 100 users will get this report.
Microsoft To Do: Support for Outlook Categories in To Do	64657	July CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: To Do If you have categorized your Outlook emails, those categories will also be available in the To Do web app.
Microsoft Teams: Push-to-talk voice communications	57157	July CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Microsoft Teams, will provide instant voice communication using push to talk.
Microsoft Search is coming to Windows 10 with Microsoft 365	64994	September CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Search Microsoft Search is an enterprise search experience in Microsoft 365 that increases productivity and saves time by delivering more relevant search results for your organization. Get blazing fast search for people, bookmarks, locations, and Q&A in Windows search. With Microsoft Search in Windows, you can now get answers across both work and web integrated into the search panel.
Advanced eDiscovery: Direct download export	65004	Q3 CY2020	Added: 12 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 We’re eliminating the need to use the Azure Storage Explorer to download exported content from a review set in Advanced eDiscovery. We’re moving to a model where content is downloaded directly through a web browser. After an export is completed, an eDiscovery manager can download a single zip file from the Exports tab in the review set.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Learn to use apps

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Our remote infrastructure design and Zero Trust

When: Monday, June 15, 2020 at 10:00am PT | Join our experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) organization for this informative session where they will answer frequently asked questions around how VPN, modern device management, and Zero Trust come together to deliver a world class remote work platform. During this webinar, our experts will discuss our infrastructure design and the device management we have deployed to support remote and hybrid work. They will also go into detail around our Zero Trust security framework.

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

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Teams Advanced for IT Pros

When: Tuesday, June 16, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Learn how IT can enable Microsoft Teams capabilities for users while maintaining the necessary configurations to align with required organizational business and security requirements. Agenda: (1) Automated team and policy provisioning strategies, (2) School Data Sync, and (3) Programmatically interacting with Teams. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Teams for Education

When: Tuesday, June 16, 2020 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft Teams ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA) specific to Teams for Education! 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 team who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Join in the Microsoft Teams AMA space, and add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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.

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Tuesday, June 16, 2020 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Azure AD Webinar: Getting started with Azure AD Reporting and Insights

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, you will learn how to interpret Azure AD logs, integrate with your SIEM tools, and gather insights about your Azure AD service.

Do more with apps in M i crosoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Teamwork and meetings

When: Thursday, June 18, 2020 at 10:00am PT | After moving to Microsoft Teams last year, Microsoft employees rely on Teams as a central hub for chat, calls, meetings, and collaboration. When it became essential for employees to work from home, this foundation made the transition easier. Join Microsoft experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) as they answer questions about how Teams fosters collaboration, how CSEO upgraded Microsoft employees to Teams, and how Microsoft uses Teams to power inclusive, modern meetings.

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Teams EDU Special: Online classes & lectures with all your students

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Azure Active Directory

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

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Flexible and intelligent intranet experience

Azure AD Webinar: Azure AD as the new Security Control Plane

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Cloud-first file management and collaboration

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

BLOG ROUNDUP

Custom backgrounds in Microsoft Teams make video meetings more fun, comfortable, and personal

Video capabilities, once a nice to have, have become a critical component of collaborative work. In fact, when the world moved to remote work earlier this year, Microsoft Teams customers turned on video in Teams meetings two times more than they did before many of us began working from home full-time. We also saw total video calls in Teams grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March. These trends, along with daily conversations with customers navigating remote collaboration, inspired us to accelerate new features to customize your video experiences and make meetings more productive, comfortable, and fun. We are announcing the rollout of new custom background effects in Teams, along with new features in the free version of Teams. It’s all about enabling you and your team to work productively, collaboratively, and with everyone’s well-being in mind. Let’s get into the details.

OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – May 2020

The OneDrive team is hard at work to maintain service uptake as well as roll out features to provide quality product performance and experience. Here are the latest functionalities that landed in production in the month of May-2020. Updates to sharing links that block download – We are expanding the list of supported file types that users can create block download links for. This update includes support for PDF files, Images, Audio, and other non-text and non-video file types. Open in “Review mode” in Word Online – Users can now choose to share Word documents with the new “Open in Review mode” option. When enabled, recipients can only open the Word file in the Word web app with the “Reviewing” mode enabled. While in Reviewing mode, users can suggest changes (using the track changes feature) and make comments but they may not make edits that can’t be tracked. Owners of the document have the option to accept or reject the suggestions made by the recipient. | Related: Top 4 tips to protect your remote workforce with data compliance in OneDrive

11 security tips to help stay safe in the COVID-19 era

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our daily routines, the ways we work, and our reliance on technology. Many of us are now working remotely, students are attending classes virtually, and we’re relying more on social media and social networks to stay connected as we define what our new normal looks like. As we spend more time online, it’s important to remember that the basics of online safety have not changed. These guidelines provide a strong foundation for digital security, but as we think about the “new normal” and how the internet is woven into the fabric of our lives, extra steps may be necessary to further reduce risk. So, in addition to the security policies implemented by your work or school, here are a few more practices we recommend you—and your family and friends—adopt to further increase personal cybersecurity resilience. These practices are divided into four categories: (1) Keep devices secure and up to date, (2) Secure your identity, guard your privacy, (3) Protect business data while at home, and (4) Be aware of phishing and identity scams.

What’s new in Microsoft 365 Compliance and Risk Management

The world has dramatically changed over the past three months. As Satya shared in our recent quarterly earnings, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. With that significant amount of rapid change, it’s more important than ever to make sure your business-critical data is kept private and secure while ensuring you remain compliant with privacy laws and regulations. As the world continues to adjust, many of the customers I’ve been talking with lately have started to focus on cost optimization—how to do more with what they already have or even consolidate the number of systems they have to maintain. Within Microsoft 365 Compliance, we have been working alongside many of you to help you through the crisis, as well as continue to evaluate the implications of tech decisions on security, privacy, and compliance. With that in mind, here’s a summary of some of the investments we’ve made in the last two months in Microsoft 365 Compliance to help you to get the most out of Microsoft 365 and take a more integrated approach to secure, protect, and manage your data, while mitigating risk. These investments are across four categories: (1) Data protection, (2) Data governance, (3) Compliance and security in Microsoft Teams, and (4) Managing insider risk and maintaining your culture.

NOTEWORTHY

Workplace Analytics feature updates: Power BI dashboard edition

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for June 2020. A Power BI dashboard is a set of visualizations in Power BI that provide information about a particular workplace theme. This month, we have released four Power BI dashboards: (1) Influence insights – gain insights into influencers – people who are well connected in your company, (2) Teams insights – highlights where a shift to remote work could have the largest impact and help leaders understand where they might use tools and processes to support and sustain new ways of working, (3) Collaboration assessment – highlight collaboration patterns for different groups and organizational levels and to identify opportunities for improvement, and (4) Collaboration tracker – helps analysts track changes in collaboration over time.

New in MyAnalytics: Insights to improve wellbeing

It has never been more important than now to focus on your own and your co-workers’ wellbeing. As mentioned in this blog post, increased demands placed on our work and personal lives due to remote work are leading to increased after-hours collaboration and longer workdays. To support our users’ sense of wellbeing, we are pleased to share the rollout of the following features: (1) Delay Delivery Inline suggestion in Outlook, (2) Set Lunch Hours with MyAnalytics Insights Outlook add-in, and (3) Plan your time away with MyAnalytics Insights Outlook add-in. The Delay Delivery inline suggestion is now available for MyAnalytics users with an M365 E5 license and will soon be available to all MyAnalytics users. The Set Lunch Hours feature is now available for all MyAnalytics users. Plan your time away insight is currently rolling out to all MyAnalytics users.

Expanded migration services from a dependable team you can trust

FastTrack has helped thousands of organizations—from 500 users to over 900,000 users—successfully migrate to Microsoft 365, and we’ve moved over 26 petabytes of data for some of the world’s largest organizations across a variety of industries. By having FastTrack perform your Microsoft 365 migration, you can lower the impact on your IT department by giving your team more time to handle other critical tasks. FastTrack has best practices and organizational excellence that can help accelerate your migration to Microsoft 365. FastTrack has expanded our service and we now offer support for the following migrations: (1) Google Drive to SharePoint team sites, (2) Google Shared Drives to SharePoint team sites and/or OneDrive for Business, (3) Dropbox to OneDrive for Business and/or SharePoint Online. Microsoft FastTrack assists with planning and migrating data to Microsoft 365, for tenants with 500 or more seats, at no additional cost. For more information, refer to the FastTrack data migration service description.

Azure AD Mailbag: Frequent questions about using device-based Conditional Access for remote work

We’re back with another mailbag, this time focusing on your common questions regarding device-based Conditional Access scenarios. Lately, we’re seeing more customers implementing device-based Conditional Access (a way of configuring Conditional Access policy) and Hybrid Azure AD Join to enable secure remote work. Our Azure AD Devices team would like to share best practices and tips that we’ve assembled while working closely with customers. | Related: “Why are my users not prompted for MFA as expected?”

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-23

Welcome to the May 31 – June 6, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Nineteen features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including items for Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, Planner, and Outlook (Android, iOS).

Additional June sessions for existing event series have been added. “Enabling remote work at Microsoft”, a four-part series from Microsoft IT Showcase, is new since last week. The spotlight event of the week is the “Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Migrating Content Into Microsoft 365” on Wednesday, June 10th at 9am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include the May 2020 SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop, details on the new multilingual publishing feature for news posts in SharePoint, remote working tips for IT Pro admins, and guidance on how to optimize Stream and Live Events traffic in a VPN scenario.

Noteworthy item highlights from last week include information on the June 2020 update for Outlook for Mac, a couple of recent Microsoft IT Showcase articles, and general availability of the Exchange Online PowerShell v2 Cmdlets.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Outlook for Android: Gallery Support	60393	June CY2020	Added: 01 June 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook – Android Browse your photo gallery from Outlook when you want to add a photo to your email message.
Microsoft Teams: Support for native device camera and location capabilities for Personal apps and tabs	64615	July CY2020	Added: 02 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams App developers will be able to use mobile native capabilities like capturing an image through camera and providing location coordinates through GPS.
Microsoft Teams: increase in the number of simultaneous videos in Teams meetings for GCC High and DoD customers	64611	July CY2020	Added: 02 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCCH, DOD We are increasing the number of participants who can be viewed simultaneously on the Teams meeting stage from 4 to 9. This new experience optimizes for attendees who have enabled video and places the remaining audio-only participants below the meeting stage. To provide a high audio and video quality experience, the layout logic will consider user bandwidth and alter the number of videos shown to provide the best meeting experience.
Office 365 Message Encryption (OME): updates for mail servers	64532	Q1 CY2021	Added: 02 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 We are rolling out a series of updates to Office 365 Message Encryption aimed at creating a more authentic OME email experience. The capabilities rolled out in this update include improvements to reduce the likelihood of mail servers marking OME OTP mails as spam.
Outlook for iOS: Create task from an email message	60722	Q4 CY2020	Added: 03 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS Use the option to create a task from an email message and have it sync with tasks in Microsoft 365.
Planner: Copy a plan within an existing Group or Teams	49429	July CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Planner You will be able to select an existing group or team that you’d like to copy an existing plan into. You will also be able to select what should be copied over from the original plan.
Microsoft Teams: Priority Notifications in Gov Clouds	64689	July CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Gov Share urgent messages and time-sensitive information more effectively with Teams. Priority notifications alert a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. IT Admins will be given reporting on priority notification usage to support appropriate user licensing. IT Admins can manage this feature as part of messaging policies in Teams.
Search Yammer from the Communities app in Teams	64691	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Yammer Search Yammer communities and content from within the Communities app in Teams.
SharePoint: Auto-News Digest	64685	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint SharePoint Auto-News Digest sends automated email to employees in you company about the latest News posts that they have not yet read. Using Microsoft intelligence, a curated selection of News posts are shared with employees through an email that comes from SharePoint. This is a great way for employees to catch up on News that they may have otherwise missed. Only published news posts are sent in the digest, and employees will have access to all the news posts that they are sent so rest assumed that employees won’t see news that they don’t have permission to see. If employees want to opt-out of receiving the Auto-News Digest, they can click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email.
We’re improving Bookmarks administration in Microsoft Search	64686	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Search In Microsoft Search, when adding or editing a Bookmark, a new category field will be displayed as a dynamic dropdown. When entering information in the category field, the dropdown data will keep filtering to match what is being typed. Microsoft Search Administrators or Editors will be able to select from one of the dropdown options or enter new text as category. Once a Bookmark has been added, the category (if it is new) will get added to list of unique categories and become available for future Bookmark additions or edits. The categories will be visible in the list view for Bookmarks and can be filtered based on the categories through the Filter Pane.
Microsoft Teams: Queue sent messages when offline	64687	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams When attempting to send messages while offline, Teams will queue messages and send once a network connection is re-established. If the message is in an unsent state for more than 24 hours, the message will fail and the user will be prompted to resend or delete the message.
Notifications added to the Yammer Communities App in Teams	64015	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Yammer Yammer notifications will be available from with the Yammer Communities app in Teams.
Yammer Communities now available in Teams Mobile apps	64016	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Yammer Access all your Yammer communities from within the Teams mobiles app.
New Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365 for Gov clouds	64288	Q3 CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 Gov The Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365 builds on the existing eDiscovery and analytics capabilities in Office 365. This new solution, called Advanced eDiscovery, provides a workflow to identify, preserve, collect, review, analyze, and export content that’s responsive to your organization’s internal and external investigations. It also lets legal teams manage the entire legal hold notification workflow to communicate with custodians involved in a case.
Office 365 ATP: Customization for Quarantine Notifications and Alerts	64781	July CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 ATP With this update, tenant administrators will be able to add various customized components to quarantine notifications and alerts, such as an organization logo, a custom display name, and custom disclaimer.
Microsoft Teams: Time clock in Shifts for web & desktop	64782	July CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Time clock, the ability to clock in and out of your shifts, in Shifts in Teams will be available on web and desktop.
Safe Documents is available worldwide	64678	June CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 With Safe Documents, we’re bringing the power of the Intelligent Security Graph down to the desktop to verify that documents are safe at the endpoint itself. Although Protected View helps secure documents originating outside the organization, too often users would exit this sandbox without great consideration and leave their networks vulnerable. Bringing a minimal trust approach to the Office 365 ProPlus clients, Safe Documents automatically checks the document against known risks and threat profiles before allowing to open. Users are not asked to decide on their own whether a document can be trusted; they can simply focus on the work to be done.
Microsoft Planner: Filters in Planner iOS	63464	June CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Planner Use the keyword filter to quickly find tasks on the board.
Microsoft Bookings web app available to GCC customers	64386	Q4 CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Bookings, GCC Microsoft Bookings will be released as a Microsoft 365 app to all GCC customers. This release will only include the Bookings web app. The Microsoft Bookings API in Microsoft Graph will not roll out at this time.

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.

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Learn to use apps

Galactic Collaboration Summit – upcoming online training event

When: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 | The Galactic Collaboration Summit is about to hit warp speed 10, to help you explore a Milky Way Galaxy full of sessions. Set your phasers on fun, to learn, and engage! Jeff “Captain” Teper (CVP, Microsoft) will be giving a keynote that’ll be out of this world, plus Microsoft speakers delivering breakout sessions among thought leaders and members of the community from around the world. The Galactic Collaboration Summit has something for everyone in all reaches of the Microsoft 365 galaxy: far, far away. You’ll find no star or cluster uncharted: modern workplace, remote working and distance learning topics on Microsoft’s technologies, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, Microsoft Azure topics relevant to the modern workplace, as well as different Business App topics (Power Apps, Logic Apps, Power Automate, Planner, Yammer), and more.

Teams Introduction for Educators and Staff

When: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 at 8:00am PT | You are invited to a free webinar tailored for education. Learn how universities and schools are using Microsoft Teams for course delivery with students and staff collaboration. Hosted by the Microsoft Product Group, this webinar covers an introduction and best practices for academics using Microsoft Teams. Agenda: (1) Overview of Microsoft Teams for Education, (2) Best Practices for communication and collaboration, and (3) Using Class Teams with your students for assignments, online learning and digital skills. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Migrating Content Into Microsoft 365

When: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 at 9:00am PT | This will be a 1-hour Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) within the Microsoft Tech Community. An AMA is like an “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” on Reddit, providing the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of Microsoft experts taking questions about the SharePoint admin center Migration Manager, SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT; content from on-premises, Mover (cloud-to-cloud), FastTrack, and our 3rd-party migration ecosystem. This AMA is to answer your questions about the products, tools, and services. We, too, will share details around the above announcements. And as always, we appreciate your input on what you want to see next – aka, what is missing to make your migrations smooth and successful. Join in the Migrating Content into Microsoft 365 AMA space. We look forward to seeing you there!

Azure AD Webinar: Identity Governance for Modern Organizations

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, we will introduce tools to govern the lifecycle of user and guest identities in your Azure AD and Office 365 deployment.

Do more with apps in Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Data Privacy and Compliance Journey

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Our remote infrastructure design and Zero Trust

Teams Advanced for IT Pros

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Teams for Education

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Azure AD Webinar: Getting started with Azure AD Reporting and Insights

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, you will learn how to interpret Azure AD logs, integrate with your SIEM tools, and gather insights about your Azure AD service.

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Teamwork and meetings

Teams EDU Special: Online classes & lectures with all your students

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Flexible and intelligent intranet experience

Azure AD Webinar: Azure AD as the new Security Control Plane

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Cloud-first file management and collaboration

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

BLOG ROUNDUP

SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: May 2020

This post includes all the SharePoint and related tech updates that rolled out in May 2020. This is the all-inclusive roadmap release recap for all things SharePoint and related technology. Highlighted features include availability of SharePoint home sites to all, the Saved for later web part is now available for modern pages, an update to the Yammer Conversations web part, the ability to schedule pages and news posts, an extended site footer, the public announcement of Microsoft Lists, and much more! All the features listed began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of May 2020 (possibly early June 2020).

New SharePoint feature: Multilingual publishing for pages and news posts

With organizations around the world enabling remote work for their teams, it is essential now, more than ever, to ensure that information on your intranet is readily available to your users. Using communication sites in SharePoint for Microsoft 365, you can now create a flexible, intelligent intranet in multiple languages! The multilingual publishing feature for SharePoint communication sites, now rolled out worldwide, enables you to create and translate pages, set translator roles, and get email alerts when pages are ready to be translated, updated, and published. All of this comes on top of the rich and flexible pages and news creation experience in SharePoint. Everything is built to give the user the best experience possible. Let’s jump in to see how multilingual publishing for modern SharePoint works.

Remote working for IT Pros

It’s natural for IT workers to first ensure that frontline and supporting workers in an organization have a secure and productive way of performing their usual tasks remotely. After all, a reduction in the business’ ability to provide its products and services correlates pretty quickly to a drop in revenue, cashflow and profitability. Without this financial sustainability, the IT department has no organization to support. But if your IT Pros are also working remotely, what additional considerations and tools are available that are relevant to them? This post outlines five considerations and tools to help IT Pros. With their high levels of access to critical systems and data, secure work methods and tools are important for IT Pros, regardless of where they are working from. It is possible to provide both an increased level of security and the access and productivity that your IT workers need. Investing the time to review this now will help to protect your organization from future malicious access attempts. | Related: Remote Working: Fewer people working on-premises doesn’t mean less risk to their identities

How to Optimize Stream & Live Events traffic in a VPN scenario

During this current COVID-19 crisis, many organizations have had to rapidly implement a work-from-home model for the majority of their users. For many, this means an enormous increase in load to the VPN infrastructure as all traffic is traditionally sent via this path that was invariably not designed for the volume or type of traffic now reliant on it. To improve performance, and also reduce load on the VPN infrastructure, many customers have achieved significant results by following the Microsoft guidance to implement split tunneling (or forced tunnel exceptions to use the correct technical term) on the Optimize-marked Office 365 endpoints. This traffic is high-volume and latency-sensitive traffic, and thus sending it directly to the service solves the problems outlined above and is also the designed best practice for these endpoints. Microsoft 365 Live Events (Teams-produced live events and those produced with an external encoder via Teams, Stream, and Yammer) and on-demand Stream traffic are not currently listed within the Optimize category with the endpoints listed in the ‘Default’ category in the Office 365 URL/IP service. The endpoints are located in this category as they are hosted on CDNs that may also be used by other services, and as such customers generally prefer to proxy this type of traffic and apply any security elements normally done on diverse endpoints such as these. Microsoft is working to provide more-defined and service-specific URL/IP data to help simplify connectivity to the service for the VPN connection model but as you can imagine for a global SaaS service like Office 365, this is not something which can be achieved overnight. Therefore, in the interim we’ve been working on interim methods to meet customer demand for this information. As a result of some changes we were able to perform relatively quickly, we are able to provide the following steps to allow for direct connectivity for the service from a client using a forced tunnel VPN.

NOTEWORTHY

What’s New in the New Outlook for Mac? – June Update

Over the past few months, we have continued to introduce new features and capabilities to the new Outlook for Mac in Insider Fast. We have listened to your feedback and are introducing even more updates so you can get the most out of Outlook. This month we released many new features that will help you: (1) make the most of your inbox, (2) focus on what matters with enhancements to contacts and people, and (3) manage your email and calendar with ease. We also provide a sneak peek at what’s coming soon. As a reminder, the new Outlook for Mac is only available for Office 365, Outlook.com, and Google accounts using macOS 10.14 Mojave and above.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Using Yammer to improve the employee workplace experience at Microsoft

Gina Dyer is passionate about all things “workplace” at Microsoft, which encompasses everything from workspace design and building construction to employee services like dining, transportation, events, and catering. Dyer’s email inbox was often flooded with questions from employees about facilities issues, feedback, and requests for dining changes. This meant that she often received duplicate emails about similar facilities problems and answered each message individually. She began to look for a central tool to solicit feedback from employees, answer commonly asked questions, and share her team’s work. That’s where Yammer came in. Created to build community across an organization, Yammer is a Microsoft 365 social networking tool that enables users to share knowledge, build trust, and engage with leaders and managers about company values and strategy. As Microsoft’s primary internal networking tool, Yammer communities are set up for different organizations, roles, and affinity groups across the company.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Redefining the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft

At Microsoft, we’re creating a seamless, effortless workday experience for our employees, enabling them to manage their workday, find information, and get things done quickly and easily. We’re transforming our search and task-completion experience into a unified, informed, and automated digitally assisted workday that improves our employees’ productivity and helps them achieve more. The digitally assisted workday is rooted in a functional vision—our employees have the unified, highly informed, assisted, and automated experiences that they need to be empowered, productive, innovative, and satisfied. Our vision is to help our employees save time during their day so that they can focus on more critical, complex work responsibilities. The unified employee experience creates an empowering, productive, and personalized workday with consistent tools and a centralized access hub. Great search experiences enable our employees to find relevant information in whatever context they need it, including proactively delivered information and insights that fit their needs and interests. Personalized assistance and automated task completion provide simple, accessible help for routine tasks and the capabilities to automatically complete those tasks when applicable. We envision all these experiences working together to help Microsoft employees get the most out of their day.

Announcing General Availability of the Exchange Online PowerShell v2 Cmdlets

At Microsoft Ignite 2019, we announced new Exchange Online management cmdlets and showed how they can be used to perform fast and highly reliable data retrieval operations. We’re delighted to be able to announce the general availability and full support of these cmdlets in all Exchange Online environments. The V2 module is now available in the PowerShell Gallery and we recommend all Exchange Online customers start using these new cmdlets right away. The new EXO V2 module contains all the existing Remote PowerShell cmdlets, as well as 9 new V2 cmdlets. So you can use the new module with no impact or change to your day to day tasks or scripts. The new module is entirely Modern Authentication based. If you start using this, you are getting off Basic Authentication for your admin tasks, and as you know, that’s a good thing because Basic Auth is going away in Exchange Online. So just switching to this module means your connection is more secure and you have one less thing to worry about. And, there are (currently) 9 new REST based cmdlets for the most commonly executed tasks and they are considerably faster and more reliable than their v1 counterparts.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-21

Welcome to the May 17 – 23, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

As a result of Microsoft Build 2020, thirty-two features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including items for the new Lists app, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook (web), Groups, and Office 365 Admin.

There is one new event, the “Galactic Collaboration Summit” on Tuesday, June 2nd and Tuesday, June 9th. Additional June sessions for existing event series are also now available. The spotlight event of the week is the “Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon, which is a free, online training event running on Wednesday, May 27th and Thursday, May 28th.

Information on releases from Build 2020 are the focus of last week’s blog posts, such as numerous updates for Microsoft Teams, the announcement of Microsoft Lists, and details on enhanced programs to help Microsoft 365 admins verify third-party apps. Details on a brand new capability to sync Message Center posts to Planner and upcoming changes to the SharePoint default site themes are also included.

Noteworthy item highlights from last week are the new Deployment Acceleration Guide for Microsoft Information Protection and Compliance, enhancements to the Business Continuity Dashboard, how to troubleshoot Out of Office replies, and guidance on provisioning mailboxes in Exchange Online when in Hybrid.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
[iOS] Teams Mobile On-Demand Chat Translation	63227	June CY2020	Added: 18 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams – iOS Inline message translation will ensure that every worker in the team has a voice and facilitate global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat. This feature will now be available on iOS.
Android On-Demand Chat Translation	63226	May CY2020	Added: 18 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams – Android Inline message translation will ensure that every worker in the team has a voice and facilitate global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat. This feature will now be available on Android.
Microsoft Teams: Third-party single sign-on (SSO) for apps in Teams	59369	May CY2020	Added: 18 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams End users will soon be able to enjoy the benefits of Azure Active Directory Single Sign-On (SSO) for supported Teams apps on both desktop and mobile. After they’re signed into Teams, users won’t have to sign in again on apps that integrate with single sign-on for both desktop and mobile. Developers will also enjoy a simplified authentication process through a single API call.
Simplified way to manage your channel notification settings	64139	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Teams Through the teams and channels list or from the channel header, the users can quickly manage their notification settings by the means of a new fly-out design. Users can turn on all activity on or off with a single click or diving deep into custom to set their preferred permutations.
[Teams Mobile Clients] Organization allowed accounts configuration for Teams	64143	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Teams Teams for iOS and Android now provides Teams administrators with the ability to push allowed account configurations to Teams. These configurations will work with any mobile device management provider that uses managed app configuration channels (for iOS) and the Android enterprise channel (for Android). The devices must be managed for this allowed account configuration to work.
Microsoft Lists: home page – built on SharePoint	64160	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists The Microsoft Lists home page is your home for all your lists across Microsoft 365. You can start a list easily from scratch or with ready-made templates. Create new lists and access ones recommended to you, plus see all your favorited and recent lists – on the web. People will see the new Lists app icon in the Microsoft 365 app launcher that will then take them to the Microsoft Lists home page.
Microsoft Lists: rules – built on SharePoint	64163	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Create simple if/then rules based on changes to list information to set reminders and send notifications.
Microsoft Lists: sharing – built on SharePoint	64164	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Share entire lists, or individual list items, to individuals or groups with view or edit and the ability to manage access by expiration and password protection.
Microsoft Lists: ready-made templates – built on SharePoint	64166	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Create a new list from ready-made templates that accelerate list creation, structure, forms and flows. There will be 8 templates at initial launch: Issue tracker, New hire checklist, Event itinerary, Business trip approvals, Team evaluations, Asset tracker, Project planning, Social media calendar.
SharePoint lists and libraries: Bulk edit your list items and file properties in the form	64228	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint People will be able to select multiple items and edit their list items or documents properties all at once in the default form.
SharePoint lists and libraries: Save a view in Quick Edit	64229	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint People can save their view in Quick Edit for any list or document lib in SharePoint for Microsoft 365. When a person saves a view in Quick Edit, the list or library will always render in quick edit for easy inline editing.
SharePoint lists and libraries: Open a list or document library item within the view form from Quick Edit	64230	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Users will see their list and document library view forms inside of the Quick Edit experience.
SharePoint lists and libraries: Quick Edit page size expanding from 30 items to 101	64231	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint People will now see up to 100 items per page on their document library or list when using Quick Edit.
SharePoint lists: Create a new list item via a form in Quick Edit	64232	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Users will see the “New” button on their command bar in lists when they are in Quick Edit to create new items via the default form.
Outlook on the web: In-product notification of full inbox	64275	June CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web When a user reaches 90% of their inbox capacity, Outlook will show a message on the bottom left (down on the left nav or folder column) warning the user and linking to the settings where they can address this.
Update to sharing links that block download	64278	May CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive We are expanding the list of supported file types that users can create block download links for. This update includes support for PDF files, Images, Audio, and other non-text and non-video file types.
Settings Gear on your Activity Feed	64135	May CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Teams Users can now directly access activity feed and notification setting from the feed left rail by the means of a settings gear.
Microsoft Lists: mobile app (iOS) – built on SharePoint	64161	Q1 CY2021	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Access all lists you own and that have been shared with you – all on the go. You’ll be able to create new lists, edit list items and easily share with other people. The Lists app will first come to iOS and Android shortly after.
OneDrive: Sync reports	64289	Q1 CY2021	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive Ability to monitor the heath of OneDrive sync app across your organization.
Microsoft Lists: forms customization – built on SharePoint	64165	Q4 CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Adjust what information shows on the out-of-box forms and include custom header and footer imagery and information.
Microsoft Lists: calendar view – built on SharePoint	64167	Q4 CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Visualize any list with items that use date column information in a calendar view.
Microsoft Lists: sticky first column – built on SharePoint	64168	Q4 CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive As you scroll left and right, the first column of your list remains in place; similar to the sticky header that is already a part of Lists.
Microsoft Lists: comments – built on SharePoint	64169	Q4 CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Add a comment on a list or list items, including @mention capabilities to draw a person’s attention.
Microsoft Lists: Lists app in Microsoft Teams- built on SharePoint	64162	Q4 CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Team members will be able to both create new lists and add existing ones as tabs in Teams’ channels. The new Lists app in Microsoft Teams can be accessed by clicking “+” to add a new tab, and then select “Lists” to get started.
Outlook on the web: Admin control to remove the option to search for GIFs when composing a message	64237	Q4 CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web We are providing admin controls to remove the option for users to search and insert a GIF using the native controls in the ribbon.
Taxonomy service Graph APIs	64185	Q4 CY2020	Added: 19 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 New Graph APIs that allow developers to work directly with Managed Metadata Services, which provides a common taxonomy for tagging and classifying content across Microsoft 365.
Office 365 Groups are being renamed to Microsoft 365 Groups	64336	June CY2020	Added: 20 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Groups To reflect the fact that Office 365 Groups power collaboration across Microsoft 365, Office 365 Groups will become Microsoft 365 Groups. These changes will happen over time and will be reflected in all the connected endpoints over the upcoming quarters.
Microsoft Teams: new lobby setting: only the organizer joins the meeting directly	64343	June CY2020	Added: 20 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams A new lobby setting is coming to Teams Meeting Options. We are adding “Only me” as an option to the “Who can bypass lobby?” setting. Once enabled, only the organizer will be able to join the meeting directly. Everyone else, including people from within the same organization, will be sent to the lobby.
Power BI: Excel data types from Power BI	57141	June CY2020	Added: 21 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Excel, Power BI Using data types in Excel, you can quickly retrieve data from featured tables in Power BI and load it in the Excel grid. Discover available tables in Excel’s data types gallery and analyze your data in a familiar and simple way.
Power BI: PivotTables from Power BI Datasets	63806	June CY2020	Added: 21 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Excel, Power BI You can create PivotTables in Excel that are connected to datasets stored in Power BI with a few clicks. Doing this allows you get the best of both PivotTables and Power BI. Calculate, summarize, and analyze your data with PivotTables from your secure Power BI datasets.
Office What’s New management card available for Microsoft 365 admin center	64337	June CY2020	Added: 21 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 Admin Global or Office Apps administrators can select which new items to display in their end-users’ Office desktop applications’ “What’s New” section of Help. The Office What’s New Management card will be available in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Microsoft Teams: live captions in Teams meetings for GCC tenants	64368	June CY2020	Added: 21 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC This feature enables meeting participants to view captions during a Teams meeting. Supported spoken languages in 1st release: English. Note this release is for our GCC tenants, and does not yet include GCC High and DoD environments.

UPCOMING EVENTS

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

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

When: Tuesday, May 26, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Bring conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place with Microsoft Teams. Build collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and connect with colleagues — all from a single Office 365 Education experience. Learn how IT can enable these capabilities for users while maintaining the necessary configurations to align with required organizational business and security requirements. Join us for this webinar to learn: (1) Administration capabilities to enable and govern Microsoft Teams, (2) Allow for frictionless user Teams creation while enforcing business rules and addressing IT concerns, (3) Understand the Teams lifecycle and recommended practices for long term management of the environment, and (4) Security and compliance capabilities for Teams integrated in the Office 365 tools you are already using today. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Learn to use apps

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

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.

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon – free, online training event

When: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 – Thursday, May 28, 2020 | Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon is a free online, 36-hour event happening May 27-28, 2020. We will have sessions going the whole time with speakers from around the globe. This event is free for all wanting to attend. Come join us as we talk about the many different pieces of Microsoft 365 including Azure. Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon is a joint effort with SPC and members of the Office 365 community. There will be keynotes from key Microsoft employees and sessions from thought leaders and members of the community from around the world.

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft 365 Apps

When: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 at 9:00am PT | On May 12 we made an announcement about modernizing of servicing Microsoft 365 Apps (formerly known as Office 365 ProPlus). Learn more about these announcements, and discuss any other questions you have about deploying Microsoft 365 Apps with the Microsoft 365 Apps experts. An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. Join in the Microsoft 365 Apps AMA space, and be sure to add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft IT Showcase: Keeping Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus up to date at Microsoft

When: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 at 10:00am PT | During this webinar, you’ll learn how Microsoft automated the upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus using System Center Configuration Manager. You’ll also hear our experts talk about how we used update channels in Office 365 to specify our cadence for delivering Office updates to users.

Do more with apps in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Teams EDU Special: Online classes & lectures with all your students

When: Thursday, June 2, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Microsoft Teams allows up-to 250 students and educators to meet online for free. There are many reasons why schools may need to leverage remote communication tools to function. Whatever they may be, Microsoft Teams for Education makes connecting virtually seamless for members of any school, college or university. This webinar is designed to help first time users of Microsoft Teams get started hosting online meetings with their students. This webinar is for educators who need to create an persistent online space for their class: (a) Classrooms, (b) Lectures & courses, and (c) Module course groups. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Galactic Collaboration Summit – upcoming online training event

When: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 & Tuesday, June 9, 2020 | The Galactic Collaboration Summit is about to hit warp speed 10, to help you explore a Milky Way Galaxy full of sessions. Set your phasers on fun, to learn, and engage! Jeff “Captain” Teper (CVP, Microsoft) will be giving a keynote that’ll be out of this world, plus Microsoft speakers delivering breakout sessions among thought leaders and members of the community from around the world. The Galactic Collaboration Summit has something for everyone in all reaches of the Microsoft 365 galaxy: far, far away. You’ll find no star or cluster uncharted: modern workplace, remote working and distance learning topics on Microsoft’s technologies, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, Microsoft Azure topics relevant to the modern workplace, as well as different Business App topics (Power Apps, Logic Apps, Power Automate, Planner, Yammer), and more.

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Windows Autopilot

When: Wednesday, June 3, 2020 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft Teams ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA) for Windows Autopilot! An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. The Microsoft Endpoint Manager team will answer questions and help you more easily set up and configure Windows 10 devices so end users can work productively (and securely) from anywhere. Questions about things like: (1) Using Windows Autopilot with user-owned devices, (2) Using Windows Autopilot to upgrade your Windows 7 devices to Windows 10, (3) Deploying applications with Windows Autopilot, and (4) your question here! Join in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager AMA space, and be sure to add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Teams Introduction for Educators and Staff

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Data Privacy and Compliance Journey

Teams Advanced for IT Pros

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

BLOG ROUNDUP

From Microsoft Teams to Fluid Framework—here’s what’s new and coming soon to Microsoft 365

Last week was Microsoft Build, and for the first time we held our annual developer conference entirely online. In this era of remote everything, technology is enabling us to keep providing experiences like Build even though we can’t meet in person. As CEO Satya Nadella put it recently, “We’ve seen two years’ of digital transformation in two months.” And as a company, we are so excited to translate what we’ve learned into new features and enhancements that help our customers stay productive and connected. At a moment when we’re all adapting to an evolving reality, these experiences are designed to enable you to keep work moving, no matter what. At Build, we announced new features and capabilities in Microsoft Teams, Fluid Framework, Project Cortex, Outlook and Edge and introduced the new Microsoft Lists app. They represent the latest innovations in our ongoing effort to build tools that enable our customers to stay connected and productive from everywhere.

The Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to help you keep track of upcoming changes to Microsoft 365, including new and changed features, planned maintenance, and other important announcements. It’s where we post official announcements to help you take a proactive approach to change management. Each post provides you with a high-level overview of planned changes along with links to detailed information to help you prepare for and manage the change. To help you navigate the myriad of information that arrives in the Message center, and more importantly, to help you decide whether or not to act on the information, we are introducing the ability to sync your message center to Microsoft Planner. This feature will be entering Targeted Release in mid-May 2020 and released to General Availability this summer and it will include the ability to choose which type of messages are sync’d and to sync messages on a set cadence.

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Build Edition 2020

Microsoft Teams has seen tremendous growth, with more people on Teams than ever. At Microsoft Build 2020, we announced many new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to continue to provide a rich canvas for developers to build, engage, and transform workflows. This allows Teams to address the full app development journey. These new capabilities make it easier to build and publish apps, improve IT admins’ ability to manage apps, enhance the end user experience, and facilitate connections with external audiences.

Over the last year, SharePoint has embraced the new Microsoft Office icons that were announced in late 2018. A large part of this change is the transition of the SharePoint identity from blue to teal, signaling a shift in the identifying color scheme. In order to best embrace this shift, we are now working to complete an update from blue to teal across the product more broadly. Updating the SharePoint default theme from blue to teal is the final step to adopting the new SharePoint identity. With this update, you will see classic and modern SharePoint communication sites and team sites (new and existing) update to the teal theme if they have not been customized. A site is considered customized when a custom theme has been selected in the Change the look panel or customizations have been made for classic. This will not impact your sites in any way beyond changing colors from blue to teal as seen in the images below. All new sites from the time of change to teal will be created with teal as the default theme color. This change will happen for any communication site, regardless of modern or classic and for classic team sites. Any modern team site that is group connected will still be created in the existing color selection associated to the M365 group. Note: This update will not impact custom themes, settings, or the content and structure of sites. This update will only change the theme of new and existing sites that have not been customized. | Related: Now Live – SharePoint home sites: a landing for your organization in the intelligent intranet

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft Information Protection and Compliance Deployment Acceleration Guide

The Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) and Compliance Customer Experience (CXE) team are part of M365 Security Engineering at Microsoft. We work with Microsoft’s largest enterprise customers to help them accelerate deployment of our features by providing deployment guidance and advisory services. An important part of our function is to gather customer feedback and present this back internally to the team to improve our MIP and Compliance products. We can’t work with every customer, so we have combined all these experiences into a deployment acceleration guide. This document will guide our customers on their information protection and compliance journey, learn best practices and key benefits to help get the most out of their Microsoft 365 investments. Download the guide at https://aka.ms/mipc/dag.

Measure remote work impact with the enhanced Business continuity dashboard

Last month, the Workplace Analytics team released the Business continuity dashboard to provide you insights about the impact of shifting to remote work. We have listened to your feedback since that initial release, and we are excited to announce an update to this experience. With the new Business continuity dashboard, you are able to identify opportunities to improve remote work effectiveness, track the evolution of remote collaboration over time, and customize your report to suit your organization’s needs. With this release, the dashboard now includes: (1) New ways to customize and pivot insights in the report, (2) A simpler and clearer dashboard design, (3) A summary page highlighting five key focus areas for remote work improvement and best practice recommendations, and (4) Rolling average trend lines to track remote work impact over time.

Understanding and troubleshooting Out of Office (OOF) replies

Out of Office replies are also known as OOF replies or automatic replies. They are Inbox rules that are set in the user’s mailbox by the client. OOF rules are server-side rules, so the response is sent regardless of whether a client is running, or not. Out of Office replies can sometimes be a bit of a mystery to people; how do they work? What do you do if they don’t work? In this blog post, we will discuss the bits and pieces of Out of Office and some of the main reasons why an Out of Office (aka. OOF) reply might not get delivered to users. Note that while we are writing this from the viewpoint of an Exchange Online configuration, many of same things can be applied to on-premises configuration also.

On provisioning mailboxes in Exchange Online when in Hybrid

In this blog post we will cover a very common scenario faced by customers who have moved all of their mailboxes from on-premises to the cloud. How do you create mailboxes directly in the cloud? The task might seem simple, but in support we see a fair amount of confusion around it. And there are certainly opportunities to do wrong things here! You have set up Exchange hybrid configuration with Exchange Online (EXO) and have started or even completed your mailbox migrations. At some point, you decide that you want to have new mailboxes created as EXO mailboxes instead of creating them on-premises (and then migrating them to Office 365). But you quickly learn that if you create on-premises users, allow them to sync, and then just license them for Exchange Online, you’ll be unable to manage the Exchange attributes because there is no mail-enabled user in the on-premises Exchange organization. If you’ve ever been in that position, this is the post for you. The process detailed in this post will enable you to correctly provision mailboxes in EXO.

AI at Scale in Microsoft 365 with actionable search-driven experiences

Businesses worldwide are learning AI is incredibly useful to deriving insights from massive data sets and therefore helping reduce repetitive tasks; however, with that there is also the realization that is only half of the equation. The other half, is that of maximizing employee’s ability to take these AI-driven insights and use them in creative ways to solve challenges, identify opportunities, and democratize knowledge. It’s about empowering people to effectively use the time that’s freed up by AI taking on more repetitive tasks. This is precious time that can be spent with customers, collaborating with colleagues and focusing on professional development. With Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud, we’re bringing world class productivity experiences across apps services. Thanks to new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, we can build experiences across devices to connect organizations from the shop floor to the top floor. Through our deep learning models, we’re able to bring new, innovative experiences across the products you’re already using. | Related: Take Microsoft Search further with Microsoft Graph connectors | New capabilities coming to the Microsoft Graph