MIP – Office 365 Weekly

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-21

Welcome to the May 24 – 30, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were forty-three additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Planner, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Microsoft 365 Compliance, Microsoft Information Protection, Stream, and Yammer.

There is one new event – an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) session for Microsoft Viva on Wednesday, June 23rd. A few new sessions for existing event series have also been added. This week’s spotlight event of the week is the Microsoft Virtual Security and Compliance Summit on Thursday, June 3rd from 9am – 12pm Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include a look at what’s new in Microsoft Teams for May 2021, information on what’s new in Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise in April/May 2021, a video walkthrough on how to implement Microsoft Viva Connections, details on improvements to shared calendars in Outlook for Windows, and lots of resources for accelerating your Zero Trust journey.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as the general availability of Office Scripts, information on how Microsoft enables multi-cloud compliance, new Conversation Insights in Yammer, the public preview of Conditional Access authentication context, and details on Data Consistency Score (DCS) for Office 365 migrations.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

In order to keep the length of the blog post to a minimum, the roadmap updates for last week are available via download as listed below:

EXCEL:

O365-Roadmap-2021-21 Download

PDF:

O365-Roadmap-2021-21 Download

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

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).

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: 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.

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.

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.

Tuesday, June 1, 2021 at 12:00pm PT

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: 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: 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.

Microsoft Virtual Security and Compliance Summit

When: Thursday, June 3, 2021 from 9:00am – 12:00pm PT | The realities of widespread remote and hybrid work scenarios pose new challenges for organizations. Security, compliance, and identity are more complex—and more critical—than ever. Join us on Thursday, June 3rd 2021, for the Microsoft Virtual Security and Compliance Summit to hear some of the industry’s leading voices speak on mitigating risks and strengthening your security posture. At this event, you’ll gain fresh insights on: (1) Perspectives on what’s top of mind for CISOs – cloud-first security, training, resiliency, (2) Get an inside look at how we secure Microsoft today, (3) Securing the remote and hybrid workplace, (4) Trends and best practices from Microsoft defenders, detection & response teams, (5) Strategies for protecting against insider risk, and (6) Tactics to protect and govern data across your digital estate. | Resource: Detailed Agenda

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.

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.

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: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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.

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.

Thursday, June 17, 2021 at 9:00am PT

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.

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft Viv a

When: Wednesday, June 23, 2021 from 9:00am – 10:00am PT | Join this Microsoft Viva ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ on Wednesday, June 23, 2021, 9:00-10:00 AM PT! Microsoft Viva – the first Employee Experience Platform (EXP) built for the digital era – brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources and insights into an integrated employee experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere. Post questions and feedback about Microsoft Viva, and the four Viva Modules (Viva Learning, Viva Connections, Viva Topics and Viva Insights) during this AMA. Members of the Viva team will be on hand to respond. An AMA is a one-hour online forum similar to “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. There is not an audio or video component included. To post a question or comment, click on ‘Start a New Discussion’ in the Microsoft Viva AMA Space. Be sure to add this event to your calendar – we hope to see you there!

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: 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.

Thursday, June 24, 2021 from 12pm – 2pm PT

BLOG ROUNDUP

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | May 2021

Welcome to What’s new in Teams for May! We are excited to share all the features and innovation that we have made available in Microsoft Teams in the last month. Before we get to the updates, this week at Microsoft Build 2021, we announced several new capabilities and tools for developers. These are designed to help you build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work using Microsoft Teams. Now, let’s check out all the new features such as: (1) Dynamic View, (2) Presenter mode, (3) Large meeting support, (4) Custom attendee registration, (5) New Calling experiences, (6) Group chat with external users, (7) Microsoft Viva Insights, and many more!

In this month’s edition of the What’s New blog, we’re excited to share news regarding the availability of Microsoft Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), OneDrive Admin Sync Reports (ADR), and updated Configuration Manager ADRs. We also point you to the latest admin-focused Microsoft Docs articles for Microsoft 365, as well as Amesh Mansukhani’s appearance on two new videos on the Office Deployment Insider’s YouTube channel and an interview on the Practical 365 Podcast!

How to implement Microsoft Viva Connections with Microsoft Mechanics

We’re in the midst of our Microsoft Mechanics series on Microsoft Viva, the first employee experience platform (EXP) built for the digital era. In our last video, we dove into Viva Topics, which delivers company knowledge and expertise in the context of your work. Today, we’re taking a look at Viva Connections. The Microsoft Mechanics video walks through the user experience, as well as the steps for IT admins to setup and implement the module, including options for personalizing information sharing by role. You can start using Viva Connections now on Teams desktop as we continue to work on delivering the mobile experience and Dashboard capabilities later this year. Get started by building your SharePoint home site with global navigation enabled, adding Yammer Communities and modern pages, and connect Viva Connections to your Teams environment. This is Part Three of our Microsoft Mechanics video series about Microsoft Viva. If you’d like more information on Viva in the meantime, head over to aka.ms/Viva.

Outlook for Windows Shared Calendar Public Notificat i ons

It is with great excitement that we are announcing that we have graduated the shared calendar improvements in Outlook for Windows out of preview! This new shared calendar experience dramatically improves the reliability and sync latency for shared calendars & delegated calendars in all Outlook clients. The improvements have been released in Outlook on the web, the new Outlook for Mac, and mobile for a while now, and we’re excited that Outlook for Windows is now enabled as well. Right now, about 10% of Outlook for Windows users in Current Channel with version 2103 have been enabled for those improvements, and we’ll keep expanding gradually throughout the spring and summer. This is one of those improvements that should be invisible because it eliminates issues but doesn’t change the core product functionality. Calendars will sync faster, and we have eliminated any reliability issues when managing a calendar. Delegates might only notice that things are smoother but no specific, obvious changes.

Resources for accelerating your Zero Trust journey

For many organizations, 2020 was the year that finally saw remote work become a reality on a global scale. As many people begin transitioning back to the office, many organizations are thinking about how they can transition from a remote workforce to a more permanent hybrid workplace. We recently conducted a study with over 900 chief information security officers (CISOs) on the state of Zero Trust and found that 81 percent say their organization has started or currently has a hybrid work environment in place and that 91 percent plan for their organization to be fully transitioned to hybrid work within the next five years. The era of hybrid work is here to stay. However, as recent events have shown us, the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve. Bad actors are getting more sophisticated and the need for a stronger security model has never been more important. Zero Trust is no longer an option, it’s now imperative for organizations that want to protect themselves while providing employees the flexibility they need to be productive.

Related:

NOTEWORTHY

Office Scripts is now generally available

We are happy to announce that Office Scripts in Excel for the web is now generally available for all eligible users! Office Scripts is an automation feature-set in Excel for the web that allows users with all levels of programming experience to automate their repetitive workflows. To get started, use the Action Recorder to record the actions you take in Excel. These actions are then translated into a script that you can run at any time. No programming experience required! Need to modify your scripts? Use the Code Editor! It’s a TypeScript-based editor directly within Excel for the web. Use it to edit your existing scripts or to create new ones using the Office Scripts API.

Enabling Multi-Cloud Compliance

We know that the vast majority of enterprise customers have multi-cloud strategies. Our customers want and need to integrate Microsoft compliance solutions – including Information Protection and Governance, Insider Risk Management, eDiscovery as well as Compliance Management – with their other existing security, compliance, and identity-related investments. That is why we are building our Compliance platform to be extensible and address our customers’ multi-cloud reality. To that end, we see extensibility as a horizontal capability and developers as a key enabler of this across all compliance solutions. To enable our customers to apply Microsoft Compliance value to their entire data landscape including Microsoft and non-Microsoft systems we have an extensible data connector platform.

New Conversation Insights help you measure the reach and impact of Yammer discussions

Analytics and data are key to understand the impact of our efforts. Over the last few months, we’ve shipped new ways to measure activity happening in Yammer across Communities, Knowledge, and Live Events. We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Conversation Insights. These insights empower authors and community managers to measure the reach and engagement of their conversations and announcements to understand what content resonates best with audiences. Conversation Insights is available on Yammer.com on the web, and through the Yammer Communities App in Microsoft Teams. These new conversation insights provide a new way for corporate communications teams to track their internal campaigns and announcements. And partnered with the Yammer Communities app for Microsoft Teams, it paves the way for communicators to reach everyone wherever they work, and track the effectiveness of their messages in a whole new way.

Conditional Access authentication context now in public preview

We’ve heard from many of you that you want to trigger a Conditional Access policy when sensitive content in your apps is accessed. This includes requiring multi-factor authentication, a compliant device or even GPS-based location. Existing app-level Conditional Access policies don’t support this level of resource granularity, so we’ve added support for authentication contexts. Now that Conditional Access authentication context is in public preview it’s great to be able to go deeper into some of the details. You can modify your line of business apps, or, thanks to integration with Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS), Microsoft Information Protection (MIP), and SharePoint Online, use it with all kinds of cloud apps right away!

Migrations with Data Consistency Score (DCS) – more than you ever wanted to know!

Data Consistency Score (DCS) is a (somewhat) new feature for Office 365 migrations that scores the fidelity of migrated data, allowing admins to identify inconsistencies and integrity issues between source and target data when performing a migration to or from Office 365 (onboarding and offboarding). DCS is meant to replace the existing Bad Item Limit and Large Item Limit (BIL / LIL) model and related shortcomings. The DCS model identifies and tracks data that cannot be successfully migrated from an on-premises source environment to Office 365 (e.g., corrupt data, items larger than the service allows, or data that is found to be missing in the target but present in the source). The DCS model examines this data based on quantity (count of the items that cannot be migrated and must be skipped by the MRS service) and quality or importance (DCS differentiates between user data and metadata / system data). We then calculate a score based on the total amount of data that might be skipped during migration and how significant it is for the user. This means that the admin is no longer required to guess the number to use for Bad Item Limit (BIL) or Large Item Limit (LIL) in advance, as the DCS mechanism takes care of this automatically. The admin is therefore better informed of the possibility of data loss during migration and can take necessary actions when appropriate. DCS allows admins to only have to deal with approvals at the end of the migration, when they have all of the information that they need to make an informed decision.

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

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

On-Demand Session

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

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

Explore teams and channels in Microsoft Teams

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

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

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

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

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

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

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

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

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

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

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

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

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 | 2021-12

Welcome to the March 22 – 28, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Twenty-two features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Microsoft Viva, Outlook, Office App (Desktop), M365 Compliance, and Microsoft Information Protection.

More sessions for existing meeting series have been added for March and April. There are two new events focused on migrating files to OneDrive / SharePoint Online, taking place on April 6th and April 13th. The spotlight event of the week is the Customer Immersion Experience sessions for “Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices” scheduled at 9am Pacific and 12pm Pacific on Thursday, April 1st.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include a look at 7 urgent trends for leaders in the shift to hybrid work, availability of live transcription with speaker attribution in Teams meetings for English (US), best practices for migrating to SharePoint and OneDrive, and a new option to block Bcc messages to distribution groups in Exchange Online.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as information on Yammer Live Events Insights, the availability of Windows release health in the M365 admin center, details on how to get started with trials for Microsoft Viva Topics, and a new export to PowerPoint from Microsoft Word for the Web.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Twenty-two features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Microsoft Viva, Outlook, Office App (Desktop), M365 Compliance, and Microsoft Information Protection.

Due to some issues with table formatting in the WordPress editor, the roadmap updates for last week are available via download as listed below:

Excel: O365-Roadmap-2021-12 Download

PDF: O365-Roadmap-2021-12 Download

Note: The Estimated Release dates listed in the files 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.

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

Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

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

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Leverage pro tips and tricks for 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 Team s Fundamentals

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

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

Choosing the right tools for your Microsoft 365 migration

When: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 at 9:00am PT | Moving to Microsoft 365? There are several tools and methods offered by Microsoft to help you through this journey. In this webinar we will demonstrate the various options available to enable you to successfully migrate your organizational data to Microsoft 365 so that you can empower your users for collaboration and productivity. The agenda is as follows: (1) Introduction, (2) Migration from file shares and SharePoint servers, (3) Migration from cloud providers, (4) Future investments, and (5) Conclusion and QA.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Best practices for data migrations to Microsoft 365

When: Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 9:00am PT | If you are evaluating , kicking off or in the process of moving your organizational data to Microsoft 365 here are some recommendations from the subject matter experts based on their learnings post managing large scale migrations for multiple organizations. Tune in to learn more about the best practices that will help you run an effective, speedy and seamless migration to OneDrive and SharePoint irrespective of the tools you choose to use. The agenda is as follows: (1) Introduction, (2) How to prepare data for migration, (3) How to plan and communicate about the migration, (4) How to run a successful migration, and (5) Conclusion and QA.

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 from 12pm – 1pm PT

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

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

One year in: 7 urgent trends for leaders in the shift to hybrid work

We’ve published our first annual Work Trend Index: “The Next Great Disruption is Hybrid Work—Are We Ready?” We surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries, analyzed trillions of productivity and labor signals across Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn, and talked to experts who have studied collaboration, social capital, and space design at work for decades. Our research uncovered seven key trends leaders need to know now to make hybrid work, work. One thing is abundantly clear: We are no longer bound to traditional notions of time and space when it comes to how, when, and where we work. It’s a big mental shift—one that will require leaders and organizations to fundamentally reexamine and rewire their operating model. And there are big changes ahead. Our research indicates that nearly half (41 percent) of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this year, and 46 percent say they’re likely to move because they can now work remotely. Your approach to hybrid will ultimately impact who stays, who goes, and who seeks to join your company. We hope this research-backed guide can help business leaders on their own hybrid-work journeys. The next phase will bring challenges and opportunities, but we’re optimistic about the future. If we take what we’ve learned from overcoming a once-in-a-hundred-year challenge and use it to chart a path forward that gives people the flexibility they need, together we can build a better world of work for everyone. | Related: The philosophy and practice of our hybrid workplace

Live transcription with speaker attribution now available in Teams meetings for English (US)

We’ve all been in situations where we’re double-booked or joined a meeting late. You don’t want to interrupt the flow but need to catch up quickly. Or, for accessibility reasons or ambient noise situations, you need help following the conversation and understanding who’s speaking. Wouldn’t it be great to have transcription with speaker attribution built into the meeting? We’re excited to now offer live transcription in Microsoft Teams meetings for English (US). Live transcription is a written record of the spoken text that occurs during a meeting. It identifies each speaker, is captured automatically in near real time, and is available during and after the meeting. Live transcription in Teams uses a meeting’s invitation, participant names, attachments, etc. to improve the accuracy and recognize meeting-specific jargon for each transcript automatically, without any human involvement. This means no one at Microsoft ever sees the meeting’s content, and the models are automatically deleted immediately after each meeting. In addition, Microsoft doesn’t use or store this data for improving its own AI.

Best practices for migrating to SharePoint and OneDrive

Last year, many IT organizations found themselves scrambling to quickly get people access to tools and information they needed to work from home effectively. Now, they’re in a position to think more strategically about the best ways to support a remote workforce. For organizations who’ve deployed Microsoft 365, one of those ways is by migrating content to SharePoint and OneDrive. No matter what your reasons for migrating to SharePoint and OneDrive, the process can seem overwhelming. You have so much to consider: What content do you have, and where is it stored? What will you move? What needs extra consideration, like regulatory compliance? How will you get data from file shares or third-party cloud apps into SharePoint and OneDrive? And those are just some of the logistical aspects—you also need to think about things like timing for the migration and how to communicate what’s happening to the rest of the organization. To help, we’ve outlined some critical steps for you to consider for a successful migration.

Block BCC Messages to Distribution Groups in Exchange Online

We all know that email distribution groups (DGs) are great for easily sharing information or engaging in discussions with a large group of people. Whether it is a DG for business-related discussions or a DG about upcoming yard sales this weekend, DGs have been a helpful part of email life since the beginning of… well… email. Yet, the amount of traffic for some DGs can overload your inbox and become a distraction from all the other important tasks of your job. How do you handle this torrent of enticingly distracting DG messages? One way is to create an Inbox rule to move messages sent to the DG to a specific folder, so instead of a flood of messages in your inbox, you can automatically store them in a folder for later review. However, sender behavior can break this process. To reduce the noise generated by Reply All’s to a DG message, some senders add the DG to the BCC line. This stops Reply All’s to the DG but is also considered bad email etiquette. And for privacy reasons, Inbox rules don’t evaluate anything on the BCC line, so the message ends up as noise in your inbox instead of going to special folder you created. Twice a year at Microsoft we let our developers go wild and come up with innovative features or new tech outside of their normal work. A few Exchange Transport engineers who were dedicated members of an internal “for sale / want to buy” DG had this exact problem: people would BCC the DG so these emails would bypass Inbox rules and land in inboxes as unwanted noise during the business day. So, these devs-gone-wild came up with a solution to block messages when the DG is on the BCC line. Admins can now thwart people from adding a DG to the BCC line with a new “-BccBlocked” switch on the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet.

NOTEWORTHY

Introducing Yammer Live Events Insights

Over the last year, there has been a massive rise in the number of Yammer Live Events. Understandable. With so many people working remotely, Yammer Live Events are an awesome medium for organizations to connect with employees. Because of this, one of the recurring things we’re hearing from customers is the ability to understand the impact of these events. We’re thrilled to announce Yammer Live Events Insights. This gives organizations the insights they need to measure reach and engagement and build more powerful events. | Related: Guest Access in Yammer is now Generally Available

Windows release health now available in the admin center

We have started the rollout of Windows release health to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Windows and Microsoft 365 IT admins now have easy, integrated access to essential information about monthly quality and feature updates, the latest features and enhancements for IT, servicing milestones, and lifecycle updates. The Windows release health experience on the admin center also offers insights into known issues, workarounds, and resolutions related to Windows updates. This will be a phased rollout and we expect this information experience to be available to all applicable customers by the end of April. In addition, you can also see Windows-related notifications in the Message center and customize your notification preferences just as you would for any other product or service in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Azure AD Ignite 2021 Recap: Securing your application ecosystem

In case you missed Microsoft Ignite earlier this month, we’ve been busy adding new capabilities to help you secure and manage your apps in the cloud and on-premises with Azure AD. These updates will help: (1) Increase IT efficiency with new enterprise app management capabilities, (2) Modernize your app authentication from Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) to Azure AD, and (3) Secure your on-premises apps with Azure AD application proxy. Read on to learn more about these new capabilities!

Get started with trials for Microsoft Viva Topics

It has been awesome to watch customer excitement growing since last month’s launch of Microsoft Viva Topics. Viva Topics applies AI to empower people with knowledge in the apps they use every day, automatically organizing content and expertise across your systems and teams to create topics with built-in security, compliance, and workflow. Across the team we’ve been humbled by the enthusiasm and uptake. We know many of you are eager to start working with Viva Topics, and we want to provide answers to some of the most frequently asked questions. | Related: Resources for setting up Viva Topics and Viva Connections

Microsoft Word and PowerPoint for the Web announce Export to PowerPoint presentation

Have you ever wished you could easily export your Microsoft Word document into a PowerPoint presentation with just a few clicks? Now you can! We are excited to announce this feature is now available in Word and PowerPoint for the Web with your Microsoft 365 subscription, and we cannot wait for you to try it out! This feature uses artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to save you time and provide you with slide suggestions powered by Designer in PowerPoint. The slides are derived from your section headers in the document, so make sure to organize your Word document accordingly for optimal suggestions. Based on key words in your document, Designer in PowerPoint will suggest imagery, icons, videos, themes and fonts to arrange your content. You can always change the suggested content if needed. | Related: PowerPoint for the web introduces Auto Fix: A new time-saving feature to clean up your slides!

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-11

Welcome to the March 15 – 21, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Please see the Office 365 Roadmap section for more details on the latest features added to the roadmap.

There were lots of sessions added for existing meeting series, primarily for next month (April). The spotlight event of the week is the “Secure and Protect Your Organization” Virtual Training Days on Thursday, March 25th and Friday, March 26th.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include a spotlight on how to use Office apps with Microsoft Teams to enhance collaboration and creation, new features and platform expansion for PowerPoint Presenter Coach, a recap of Ignite 2021 announcements regarding Cortana integration with Microsoft 365, and new features for Azure Active Directory Domain Services.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as information on the latest features for Workplace Analytics, Microsoft IT Showcase articles on Company Communicator app and implementing a Zero Trust model, and a look at the different types of encryption keys used in Microsoft Information Protection.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Forty-four features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft Information Protection, Microsoft 365 Compliance, and Yammer.

In order to keep the length of the blog post to a minimum, the roadmap updates for last week are available via download as listed below:

Excel: O365-Roadmap-2021-11 Download

PDF: O365-Roadmap-2021-11 Download

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

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams Summit: March 2021 | Online Event

In 2020, remote and hybrid working became the new normal. Through Microsoft Teams, we came together; connecting, collaborating – and keeping our teams productive, creative and secure. Microsoft is hosting a three-day digital event, The Microsoft Teams Summit, commencing the week of March 22, 2021. It’s an event you won’t want to miss. You’ll hear from experts on how Teams can supercharge the way you and your organization work and discover best practices from customers who’re using Teams to achieve amazing successes. To make sure you’re getting information tailored to your needs, each of the three days will be dedicated to a different group of Teams users: Business leaders, IT professionals, and our everyday users.. So, however you’re using Teams, join us to discover new ways to enhance your skills, and bring your teams closer together to achieve more.

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!)

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

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

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

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

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

How to use Office apps with Microsoft Teams to collaborate and create today

Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot about working remotely, but recognize that spontaneous creativity and rich collaboration can be a challenge. A lot of us miss the hallway conversations that took place on our way to and from meetings that sparked new ideas, huddling around a whiteboard to visually capture the conversation, and the luxury of “reading the room”. We need solutions designed for extreme flexibility so people can collaborate from anywhere and at any time. According to research conducted for Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, more than 80 percent of managers say they expect more flexible work from home policies post-pandemic, and more than 70 percent of employees say they expect to take advantage of them. Relying on tools that require everyone to be physically present simply isn’t viable anymore. We’ve seen the growing need for virtual team creativity solutions usage of our products. Over the past year, we’ve seen a 12 fold increase in monthly active users of Microsoft Whiteboard, a clear signal that our customers are hungry to digitally connect and create together.

Improve your presenting skills with additional platforms and new features for PowerPoint Presenter Coach

We’re excited to announce that PowerPoint Presenter Coach is now available on all platforms. PowerPoint Presenter Coach was first introduced in PowerPoint for the web, and both students and professionals have been utilizing this feature to become more confident presenters. Now, you can use this beloved feature on all platforms—on the web, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android—when and where you need it, on the go, or at home. Presenter Coach leverages AI to help anyone—professionals, students, and even those who just want to practice a speech for a wedding or graduation. Especially in this hybrid work and learning environment, presentation skills are more important than ever, with more meetings and presentations than ever before. Presenter Coach provides users with feedback on their pace, use of monotone pitch, use of filler words, poor grammar, lack of originality, use of sensitive phrases, and more while they rehearse their presentations. At the end of each rehearsal, Presenter Coach users receive a Summary Report highlighting the key pieces of feedback to help them become even better, more confident presenters.

Find, do, and discover with Cortana & Microsoft 365

Time is priceless and while we can’t own it, we can make the best use of it. Balancing work and life continues to challenge us daily. Over half of working parents surveyed, said it’s been difficult balancing household demands while working from home. Using Cortana, your personal assistant in Microsoft 365, you can take back control of your day, organize your work, and plan ahead to achieve more. Why? Because work should be impactful, seamless, and fluid. AI in Microsoft 365 lets you take control of your time. At Microsoft Ignite in March 2021, we demonstrated our continued investments in bringing natural, voice-driven experiences to Microsoft 365 apps and services to help you work smarter in addition to new innovation to help individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. In this article we’ll recap announcements from Ignite and where you can learn more from the sessions.

Accelerate your move to the cloud with new capabilities in Azure AD Domain Services

New capabilities in Azure Active Directory Domain Services will make it easier for you to move your legacy, on-premises apps to the cloud. The additional capabilities in our managed domain services solution include: (1) geo-redundancy, (2) faster sync, and (3) resource forests. With replica sets, your Azure AD Domain Services applications gain enhanced performance and disaster recovery for your business by adding geo-redundancy in different regions. To improve the sync experience, we’ve made changes to the synchronization engine between your managed domain and Azure AD. You can now create a resource forest-based managed domain without password hash synchronization. In a resource forest, user objects and credentials exist in the on-premises Active Directory Domain Services forest, while still enabling you to lift your resources that use legacy authentication protocols onto Azure. This is great for customers who use smartcards to sign in to their applications.

NOTEWORTHY

Workplace Analytics March 2021 feature updates

Last month (February 2021), we used this space to announce Microsoft Viva Insights, part of the broader Microsoft Viva initiative that’s empowering and connecting employees in new ways in our evolving digital age. In addition to Viva Insights, the Workplace Analytics team has introduced other feature updates over the past few weeks. This update describes expanded support of worldwide languages in query results (UTF-8 encoded characters allowed in metric names), and the release of an R package for Workplace Analytics.

Microsoft IT Showcase: New Microsoft Teams app helps Microsoft communicate with employees at scale

Microsoft is rolling out an application that will directly connect employees with company announcements and feature updates they need—all through the new Microsoft Teams app. Called Company Communicator, the new app enables leaders and communications specialists to send messages directly to multiple teams, employees, or any subset of an internal audience, over chat or in a Teams channel. This decision was supported by survey data from Microsoft employees, who rely on Microsoft Teams as a hub for all their teamwork and communication needs like video meetings, chat, phone calls, and critical business applications. Additionally, 77 percent of survey participants said they wanted to receive communications over Microsoft Teams chat, which kickstarted the implementation of Company Communicator.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft

The increasing prevalence of cloud-based services, mobile computing, internet of things (IoT), and bring your own device (BYOD) in the workforce have changed the technology landscape for the modern enterprise. Security architectures that rely on network firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs) to isolate and restrict access to corporate technology resources and services are no longer sufficient for a workforce that regularly requires access to applications and resources that exist beyond traditional corporate network boundaries. The shift to the internet as the network of choice and the continuously evolving threats led Microsoft to adopt a Zero Trust security model. The journey began a few years ago and will continue to evolve for years to come.

Understanding Microsoft Information Protection Encryption Key Types

Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) is a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data across your enterprise – in Microsoft 365 cloud services, on-premises, third-party SaaS applications, and more. MIP provides a unified set of capabilities to know your data, protect your data, and help prevent data loss across Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) and services (e.g., Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange). Microsoft offers a variety of encryption keys that support various customer scenarios. While it could be a daunting task to understand various encryption key types and their applications in the context of the environment, we will describe the various Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) encryption key types through this blog. This blog expands on each key offering, highlights unique aspects, differences, benefits, challenges, typical use cases, and a high-level architectural overview of each key type. Our intent is to keep the right level of technical depth that will help readers get a good understanding of the various key options. Refer to NIST 800-57 for best practices of key management. The blog outlines key elements that enable encryption, discusses rights management services, various key types and concludes with a comparison tables that helps to choose the appropriate key types.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-10

Welcome to the March 8 – 14, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

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

There aren’t any net new events for this week’s post, but there are additional sessions now listed for several existing meting series. This week’s spotlight event is the “Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)” session for Microsoft App Assure on Tuesday, March 16th at 9am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include the launch of Microsoft Whiteboard for Microsoft Teams channels and chats, a Project Accelerator tool that extends Microsoft Project, and the general availability of Azure Active Directory External Identities.

Noteworthy item highlights include the public preview of Out of Office scheduling in Microsoft Teams, a recap of what’s new in the Microsoft 365 admin center, granular conditional access for sensitive data and actions, and the introduction of a Microsoft 365 Solution for Legal.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Microsoft Information Protection: Configure external sharing for sensitivity labels in Teams and SharePoint sites	70735	March CY2021	Added: 09 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP With this update, you can set controls on external sharing while configuring a Team or site protection policy. For example you can set a very restrictive one for a Team or site labeled ‘confidential’—restricting sharing with people outside the organization or set a very relaxed one for a Team or site labeled ‘general’—allowing anyone with a link to access without requiring sign-in.
Microsoft Information Protection: Migrate legacy exchange DLP policies to the M365 compliance center	70790	April CY2021	Added: 09 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP The Exchange DLP migration wizard will enable you to seamlessly migrate the exchange DLP policies managed in the exchange admin center to the compliance center. M365 compliance center provides access to advanced classification capabilities like EDM, ML etc. along with rich alerts, incident management features and more.
Microsoft Teams: Availability of Praise for GCC	80913	April CY2021	Added: 09 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC GCC support for Praise.
Microsoft Teams: Tasks and Task publishing for GCC	80914	April CY2021	Added: 09 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC GCC support for Tasks and Task Publishing.
Microsoft Teams: Walkie Talkie on iOS (Preview)	80915	June CY2021	Added: 09 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Walkie Talkie, a push-to-talk experience that enables clear and secure voice communication over the cloud, enables teams to communicate instantly and always stay on the same page. This native built-in app in Teams turns employee or company-owned iOS smartphones and tablets into a walkie-talkie, reducing the number of devices employees must carry and lowering costs for IT.
Yammer: New Yammer experience as default for all users	70689	March CY2021	Added: 10 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Yammer Default to new Yammer experience for all users on web.
SharePoint spaces: Embed Web Part and Annotation	70732	March CY2021	Added: 10 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Show SharePoint pages or HTML embed content as an interactable overlay on a SharePoint space.
Microsoft Teams: Get Template Graph API	70793	April CY2021	Added: 10 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Get team templates list and team template details via Graph API.
Microsoft Teams: Customized Website Tab Apps in Team Templates	70794	April CY2021	Added: 10 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams This feature enables Admins to add customized website tab apps in custom team templates.
Forms: Forms response receipt – GCC/GCC High/DoD support	70803	March CY2021	Added: 10 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Forms, GCC, GCC-High, DoD A new approach for form responder to get their response receipt in GCC/GCC High/DoD environment.
Forms: Forms Design Page Printing – GCC/GCC High/DoD support	70804	March CY2021	Added: 10 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Forms, GCC, GCC-High, DoD This feature allows form designer to print a blank form/quiz to responder who cannot fill the online form.
Microsoft Teams: Policy package assignment to groups	80241	March CY2021	Added: 10 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Streamline assignment of policy package with group assignment. Group assignment empowers admins to assign a policy package to a group instead of individual users.
Microsoft Planner: Move tasks to any of your plans	70738	April CY2021	Added: 12 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Planner You can now move tasks to any plan you’re a member of. Comments cannot move to a plan in a different group, and labels do not move across plans.
SharePoint: Focus mode for modern SharePoint pages	70800	March CY2021	Added: 12 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint SharePoint page authors and viewers will be able to focus on page content by using the Expand content button on the command bar to hide the site header, site navigation, and global navigation bar. Focus mode will persist when page viewers select links to pages within a site, but not when they select links to pages outside of the site (even if they are within a hub site).
OneDrive: Quickly change permissions in OneDrive/SharePoint share controls	70806	March CY2021	Added: 12 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive Users can now have the ability to change permissions more easily from the OneDrive/SharePoint share controls.
Microsoft Teams: Manage meeting options for GCC-High	72168	April CY2021	Added: 12 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC-High Organizers will now be able to modify the user experience, or customize the safety and security settings for their meetings using the new “Meeting Options” feature.
Microsoft Teams: Manage meeting options for DoD	72169	April CY2021	Added: 12 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, DoD Organizers will now be able to modify the user experience, or customize the safety and security settings for their meetings using the new “Meeting Options” feature.
Microsoft Teams: Improvements for managing attendee audio permissions in Teams Meetings	80261	April CY2021	Added: 12 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Meeting presenters and organizers can manage attendee audio permissions with greater flexibility. Attendees no longer must request to speak for the organizer or presenters to allow them to unmute, and presenters and organizers can prevent individual attendees from unmuting instead of all attendees at once.
Forms: Poll in teams meeting support 1k meeting/webinar	80619	April CY2021	Added: 12 March 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Forms For the large meeting, Forms poll will support the overall user experience and to help presenter could improve the meeting engagement.

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

Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Teams Cha l k 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

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft App Assure

When: Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft App Assure ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA)! The AMA will take place on Tuesday, March 16th, 2021 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT in the Microsoft FastTrack AMA Space. 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. Be sure to add the event to your calendar!

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

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams Summit: March 2021 | Online Event

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

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

BLOG ROUNDUP

Introducing Microsoft Whiteboard for Android and Whiteboard for Microsoft Teams channels and chat

We are pleased to announce the Public Preview of the Microsoft Whiteboard app for Android and the launch of Microsoft Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams channels and chat. For projects and longer-term discussions, you can now create a whiteboard associated with a Teams channel or chat. Members of the channel or chat can iterate and collaborate on the whiteboards over time. Leveraging the completely rebuilt Whiteboard for Web and Teams experience we announced in 2020, Whiteboard for Android moves us one major step closer to achieving our vision of a collaboration space for ideation that is accessible from any device and integrates seamlessly into the collaboration workflows teams already use. Whether on Teams, Web, Windows 10, iOS, or now Android, Microsoft Whiteboard provides an infinite canvas where imagination has room to grow. You can draw, type, add a sticky note, stack things up, and move them around.

Introducing the Project Accelerator

For a lot of people, a project is more than a set of tasks with the team members assigned to work on them. You may need to track issues or risks or a process to decide which projects even get funded. This all can be done by extending Project for the web through Power Apps. To make it easier for you to get started, we are providing the Project Accelerator, which builds out these kinds of scenarios for you. The Project Accelerator enables several scenarios in Project: (1) Proposals, (2) Programs, (3) Risks, (4) Issues, (5) Changes, and (6) Status.

Label and Protect your sensitive information: discover, classify and deploy policy

Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security are a dynamic duo, here to protect data wherever it resides in your applications. If you’ve never been introduced, Microsoft Information Protection gives you the ability to take your files through the many stages of your workloads: Google Drive, Workday, Salesforce, Box, Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more. Regardless of your platform, we’ve got you covered. Information protection is a key component of a CASB, and should deliver an integrated, nuanced understanding of your organization’s sensitive-labeled data as it’s leveraged in your cloud environment.

Azure Active Directory External Identities is Generally Available

Last Spring (2020), we shared our vision for Azure Active Directory External Identities and encouraged customers to preview self-service sign-up, our first step toward unifying Microsoft’s identity offerings for employee, partner, and customer identity. During the past year, we’ve made significant improvements to Azure AD External Identities with the help of our preview customers, who view this work as critical to making their workflows more flexible, secure, and scalable. We are now taking additional steps on this journey with the general availability (GA) of several External Identities features and a few new previews for B2B and B2C scenarios.

NOTEWORTHY

Bring your ideas to life with new capabilities in Visio for the web

At Visio, we are constantly working on new features to enhance the Visio for the web experience. In this blog, we provide a step-by-step guide on how to design a flowchart leveraging some of the latest capabilities in Visio for the web. Learn how to create and coauthor professional-looking flowcharts for effective decision making and process execution.

Now in Teams public preview: Out of Office Scheduling

Out of Office scheduling in Teams is now in public preview! Set up a message to let others know you’re on vacation or not available to reply. Your out of office status will also sync with your Outlook calendar, your presence and contact card information. This feature is rolling on Desktop and Web, starting March 14, 2021. This feature is supported on Windows, Linux, macOS, Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

What’s new in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Updated: March 10, 2021 | This update covers a few of the things talked about at Ignite 2021: (1) We’ve revamped the Message center to help you discover relevant messages and added a more flexible reading experience. We’ve added a new Service column to help you scan which Service a message applies to and filter messages by Service and other metadata. You can favorite a message to mark it for follow up, choose which columns appear in the message list, and navigate between messages with the back and next buttons. We’ve also improved the process to make it easier to give feedback on Message center posts. To learn more about the new features, check out Manage messages in Message center. (2) We’ve made improvements to how you view the “What’s new” features for users in the Office apps. You can now see the rich content in the What’s new pane that your users can see. You can also learn more about the feature before you decide to let your users know about the feature. For more info, check out Manage which Office‎ features appear in What’s New.

Azure AD: Granular Conditional Access for sensitive data and actions

We are incredibly excited to introduce Conditional Access authentication context, because it really empowers you to apply policies in exactly the ways you’ve told us you want to. Your HR handbook and secret plans in SharePoint can have different access policies, and your company’s financials app can apply a different standard between reading balances and wiring funds. Conditional Access authentication context lets you target policies for data and actions within an app so you can refine your Zero Trust policies for least privileged access while minimizing user friction. With the public preview, which will start soon, we are adding support to several Microsoft services as well as support for SaaS apps and line-of-business apps. Look for the public preview in April!

Law Firms We Hear You! Introducing Microsoft 365 Solution for Legal

At Microsoft, we understand the importance of data privacy. Law Firms have the additional burden of protecting Client Matter Data as a commitment to the customers that they serve. At Microsoft, our mission is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”. The goal of Microsoft 365 Solution for Legal is to address the concerns over blind subpoenas while helping Law Firms realize their full potential using the most secure cloud and leverage Microsoft Teams in a way that is curated and configurable to meet those requirements. For as long as Microsoft has had a cloud offering, it may have felt like we were ignoring these concerns that law firms have. In many ways, we lacked some of the controls that were needed. Indeed we are listening! We recognize the value of Document Management Systems (DMS) providers and are working with many of the core software solution providers in this space to guide Client Matter Data to the DMS and keep it out of SharePoint and OneDrive when necessary. If data accidentally lands in SharePoint or OneDrive, we can leverage our file encryption technology to ensure that it is illegible to Microsoft (rendering it worthless to the blind subpoena) and only usable by you. The solution recognizes that each Law Firm is unique and have their own level of comfort with the cloud. So we also created an approach that can be modified to accommodate the needs and unique requirements that each Law Firm feels ready to adopt. We have developed a 4-phased approach to 1) Enable, 2) Empower, 3) Differentiate, and 4) Transform your journey to Microsoft Teams leveraging Microsoft 365 security and compliance tools.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-09

Welcome to the March 1 – 7, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Last week everyone was focused on Microsoft Ignite March 2021. There’s a ton of content in this week’s digest, so the intro will be short. You can find recordings, and related content at Microsoft Ignite On-Demand.

Note: Lots of new dates for existing events have been added since last week. There are also a couple of new events – the “Ask the Expert: Microsoft 365 Networking” session at 10am Pacific on Wednesday, March 10th, and an “Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) for Microsoft App Assure” on Tuesday, March 16th at 9am Pacific.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

With Ignite March 2021, there were lots of updates to the Office 365 Roadmap last week – 63 new features to be exact! Microsoft Teams had the highest number of features by far with 35 total, followed by Microsoft 365 Compliance (9) and Microsoft Lists (6).

In order to keep the length of the blog post to a minimum, the roadmap updates for last week are available via download as listed below:

Excel: O365-Roadmap-2021-09-Ignite Download

PDF: O365-Roadmap-2021-09-Ignite Download

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

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Build collaborative workspaces 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

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

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

Ask the Expert: Microsoft 365 Networking

When: Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 10:00am PT | Network connectivity in the Microsoft 365 admin center includes aggregated network connectivity metrics collected from your Microsoft 365 tenant and measurements from Office desktop and web clients that use Microsoft 365. Informed network routing enables third-party SD-WAN solutions to receive application-level feedback on network quality to make better decisions about the best routing path to use. Come learn about these new network-related features from the engineering teams that built them. Be sure to add the event to your calendar!

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft App Assure

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Microsoft Teams Summit: March 2021 | Online Event

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

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

BLOG ROUNDUP

Flexible work is here to stay: Microsoft 365 solutions for the hybrid work world

Note: If you’re looking for one post to summarize Ignite 2021, this is it. | For some people, 2020 felt like the year work and learning moved home. For others, work continued to happen on-site—with the added challenges of staying safe on the job and learning new ways to connect to remote colleagues. But the reality is: 2020 is the year work and learning moved to the cloud. And it’s clear that flexible work is here to stay: According to research conducted for Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, over 80 percent of managers say they expect more flexible work from home policies post-pandemic, and more than 70 percent of employees say they expect to take advantage of them. So we can anticipate some pretty significant changes in the weeks and months to come. To thrive in this new hybrid world, people and organizations need solutions that are fluid, dynamic, and cloud-powered. At Microsoft, we’re building experiences to help everyone thrive in this new hybrid world of work and learning. At Microsoft Ignite March 2021, we announced new features designed for a hybrid world. From new digital event experiences in Microsoft Teams designed for internal and external attendees to new availability announcements about Microsoft Viva, there’s so much to share. | Resource: Microsoft Ignite 2021 Book of News

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2021

We announced innovation coming to Microsoft Teams to help people connect, collaborate, and accomplish more together! This blog post provides details for all the Microsoft Teams announcements from Ignite March 2021. This post outlines what’s new in: (1) Meetings, (2) Webinars, (3) Chat and collaboration, (4) Security, compliance, and privacy, (5) Calling, (6) Devices, (7) Power Platforms and custom development, (8) Management and more.

In the recent months, we’ve witnessed sophisticated attacks, like the recent SolarWinds incident, as well as the devices and online experiences have become more central to the way we work, learn, and live. Working alongside customers and partners, Microsoft takes cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance to the next level with innovation and a unique comprehensive approach. At Microsoft Ignite Spring 2021 we are excited to announce the following new security and compliance capabilities in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams that help you to secure and govern your data holistically in this remote work era. Here is what’s new in: (1) Secure external collaboration, (2) Securing access with contextual and conditional policies, and (3) Comprehensive compliance. | Related: OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – February 2021 | SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop – February 2021

What’s new for Microsoft Lists – Microsoft Ignite 2021 [Mar.2-4] announcements

Microsoft completed rolling out Microsoft Lists in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams last year (2020) – along with the release of Microsoft Lists for iOS earlier this year. We have received a lot of positive feedback and usage is growing fast. We are pleased to share future Lists innovation, as announced at Microsoft Ignite March 2-4, 2021.

Microsoft Viva announcements at Microsoft Ignite

Last month (February 2021), we announced Microsoft Viva, the first Employee Experience Platform for the digital era. At Microsoft Ignite March 2021, we are pleased to share a set of exciting news and updates across the four Viva modules (Connections, Insights, Learning & Topics), summarized in this post.

The past year has led to an evolution in not only how we think about work, but more importantly, where work gets done. Arguably, gone are the days that your organization’s data is limited to the protected confines of your corporate network as your people continue to work remotely, return in some capacity to the office, or even adopt some hybrid of the two. With your people working across networks, devices, clouds, and apps, how do you ensure your data remains not only secure but compliant? A culture of security starts by securing data where people get work done. We have been investing in innovation to make this easier, and we’re sharing with you some additional capabilities that enable you to extend data protection and governance across apps, clouds, endpoints, and on-premises file repositories that keep your people collaborative and productive while ensuring your most valuable asset—your data—remains secure and compliant wherever it lives.

More than ever, organizations need to strengthen their defenses to give employees, partners, and customers the flexibility to work from anywhere using apps that live inside and outside the traditional corporate network perimeter. That’s why Zero Trust, a security strategy that combines maximum flexibility with maximum security, is so crucial. For IT pros and security professionals, the implementation of Zero Trust should be simple and straightforward. For users, it should never get in the way, and it should fit into familiar workflows and habits. This week, on the virtual Microsoft Ignite stage, we announced several Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) innovations that will help make life easier for you and your employees now—and help you stay prepared for whatever comes next.

Related:

NOTEWORTHY

The Next Phase For the New Version of Stream

In the past year, we’ve seen explosive growth for video in the workplace. Video has become central to engagement, communication, and productivity as more organizations than ever before embrace asynchronous work. Leading the evolution of workplace video, the Microsoft Stream team embarked on a journey to integrate fast, intelligent video across Microsoft 365. We announced a new vision for Stream—one in which users can create, share, discover, and manage video —just as they would any other file in Microsoft 365. We’re glad to announce we’ll be entering the next phase of our journey to the new version of Microsoft Stream in Q3 2021. In this phase, we’re on track to start bringing new experiences for sharing, discovery, and video playback on top of the Microsoft 365 file experience.

What’s New in Excel for the web

Delighting our customers with faster, smoother, and richer experiences in Excel for the web is an uncompromised goal across our Excel team. Recently we shared how we’ve continued to improve performance to make opening workbooks, navigating a workbook, and other interactions faster and smoother for you. We’re introducing several additional features to help you better navigate and manipulate your Excel files in a browser: (1) Easier worksheet navigation, (2) Multiple range selection, (3) Zoom in/out, (4) Excel keyboard shortcuts by default, (5) Version history, and (6) Regional settings.

Everyone needs some extra time

In July last year we mentioned that time is one of the most precious and scarce resources we have, and 9 months later that still seems to hold true with people still struggling to effectively prioritize and organize their time, manage meetings, and find time to focus. Almost 2/3 of information workers have had their typical work routines highly affected, add to that how their personal space has also been disrupted and so makes sense why people are struggling to organize their time. To help you organize your time and meetings, we are bringing 2 new capabilities to Outlook – (1) Organize everything your way with the new Outlook calendar board, and (2) Get intelligent scheduling assistance for your meetings.

Windows release health coming to the Microsoft 365 admin center

To help you keep your devices protected and productive, in the coming weeks, Microsoft is launching Windows release health on Microsoft 365 admin center. Microsoft 365 and Windows administrators will now benefit from an expanded version of the Windows release health hub, with more in-depth information about Windows updates, known issues, safeguards, lifecycle updates, and related news. With life and business more virtual than ever and dependent on healthy large-scale environments, it is essential to make IT administrators’ work easier. Windows release health in the Microsoft 365 admin center will be available for organizations with applicable Microsoft 365 and Windows subscriptions. Windows release health will appear as a new menu item (image below) under the Health section.

Adding more cloud-based Microsoft 365 Apps admin capabilities

In May and September 2020, we announced new cloud-based capabilities in the following three areas: intelligent insights, servicing automation with controls, and Microsoft 365 Apps health. Since then, we’ve seen over 11 million devices running Microsoft 365 Apps onboard to Inventory. We’ve also provided IT admins with over eight million app health metrics and delivered servicing updates to over 500,000 devices with our new Servicing Profile, keeping them continuously secure with the latest security improvements and up to date with improvements for collaboration and remote work. We are excited to announce improvements and more new capabilities to keep devices up to date, give you greater control and enable you to more easily manage Office as a service: (1) New in Microsoft 365 Apps Inventory and Servicing Profiles, (2) General availability of Skip and Rollback, and (3) General availability of Microsoft 365 Apps health.

Help employees transition to hybrid work using a new SharePoint site template and end-user training

As we return to the workplace, moving to a hybrid work model will not just be about continuing the great work-from-home experiment many of us have been participating in for almost 12 months now. We will need to change our behavior by developing new skills and habits to help us stay healthy, finding new ways to engage and stay connected as we adopt this new way of working. It is going to take a collective effort for organizations to make a successful transition to a hybrid workplace. There are big changes ahead for those of us moving to a hybrid work model. Like any organizational change initiative, we must be thoughtful about how we guide people through the journey. If not, organizations face risks such as decreased productivity, increased turnover, or employees that are just not engaged. To help our customers lead their organization’s transition to a hybrid workplace we have launched a SharePoint site template on the SharePoint look book called the Workplace transformation site as well as new end-user training to help employees learn new habits and skills that support hybrid work.

Azure AIP Portal Label & Policy Management Admin Experience – Post March 31st Deprecation

To provide a unified and streamlined customer experience, the Azure Information Protection labeling and policy management in the Azure Portal, and the AIP classic client, will be deprecated on March 31st, 2021as announced in our previous blog. We highly recommend customers on classic AIP labeling to migrate to unified labeling before this sunset timeline for a seamless transition to unified labeling. Note: This deprecation does not apply in the following scenarios: (1) For customers who have already been approved for extended support. Customers with extended support will continue using the AIP area in the Azure Portal with no impact until the end date of their extended support, and (2) For GCC/GCC-H/DoD customers. Support is extended for GCC/GCC-H/DoD customers until the end of September 2021. The deprecation does not affect the Azure Information Protection areas in the Azure portal related to the on-premises scanner and analytics. AIP analytics is still available in the Azure Portal, but we encourage customers to start using the Microsoft 365 Compliance center Activity Explorer.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-07

Welcome to the February 15 – 21, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were eleven additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Planner, SharePoint, Outlook, Microsoft 365 Compliance Center, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and Microsoft Information Protection.

There is one brand new event, the Microsoft Teams Summit from March 23 – 25, 2021. This week’s spotlight event is the Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams sessions on Wednesday, February 24th and Thursday, February 25th at 10am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include an overview of the capability to pop out apps and tabs in Microsoft Teams, details on two new features for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, information on how to use Microsoft Endpoint DLP to protect sensitive information on devices, and the February updates for Azure Active Directory.

Noteworthy item highlights include information on updating federation with Microsoft due to an upcoming change to online federation service in early summer 2021, details on the upcoming commercial preview of Microsoft Office LTSC, and the next Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release in the second half (H2) of CY2021.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Word: Dictation in Word for the Web now available for GCC and GCC-High Tenants	79599	February CY2021	Added: 17 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Word – Web, GCC, GCC-High Dictation is now available for those in government GCC and GCC-High Tenants.
Outlook and Word: Dictation in Desktop and Mac now available for GCC and GCC-High Tenants	79600	February CY2021	Added: 17 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Word – Desktop/Mac, GCC, GCC-High Dictation is now available in Outlook and Word for both Desktop and Mac in GCC and GCC-High Tenants.
Word: Dictation in Word for iOS and Word for Android now available for GCC and GCC-High Tenants	79606	February CY2021	Added: 17 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Word – Android/iOS, GCC, GCC-High Dictation is now available in Word for Android and Word for iOS in GCC and GCC-High Tenants.
Planner: More labels for GCC-High and DoD	80456	March CY2021	Added: 17 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Planner, GCC-High, DoD Add up to 25 labels to your tasks in Planner.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Insider Risk Management analytics	70633	March CY2021	Added: 19 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance The Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management solution will now provide aggregated and anonymized analytics to help identify potential insider risk activity within the organization.
Excel: Natural Language Queries in Ideas	60775	March CY2021	Added: 19 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Excel With Natural Language Queries, Ideas in Excel allows you to ask questions about your data, whether it is retrieving a specific fact or summarizing the data in your preferred way. For example you can ask ‘total number of products’, ‘top 10 products by sales’, or even more complicated questions like ‘what percentage of products have sales higher than 2000 in 2018?’
Microsoft Information Protection: OneDrive for Business location picker supports security groups and distribution lists	70708	March CY2021	Added: 19 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP Data loss prevention (DLP) for OneDrive for Business will soon support user accounts and groups as part of the policy scoping location picker, enabling more granular control of DLP policy scope (i.e. to include/exclude particular departments, business units, geo-specific security groups, etc.)
Visio for the Web: Organization Charts	78150	April CY2021	Added: 19 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Visio – Web Build your organization charts in Visio for the Web.
Microsoft 365 admin center: Improvements to Service Health Dashboard and Incident Communications	80175	April CY2021	Added: 19 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Admin Center Microsoft is updating the Service Health dashboard to make it quicker and easier to find out about active issues of the services. Incidents and advisories will be now be displayed directly on the landing page of the Service Health dashboard. For high impacting incidents we will continue to provide the regular updates but now in addition to those Microsoft will also provide smaller and more frequent updates intermixed with the regular updates labeled as quick updates in the details panel.
Word for Windows: Text Predictions	80179	March CY2021	Added: 19 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Word – Windows Text Predictions in Word for Windows helps users write more efficiently by predicting text quickly, timely and accurately.
SharePoint: Page Analytics	70635	March CY2021	Added: 20 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint View rich page analytics on SharePoint Pages, including page views, page viewers and page traffic.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

On-Demand Session

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.

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!)

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

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: Staying connected with your team while remote

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.

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

Wednesday, February 24, 2021 at 8am PT

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 Virtual Training Day: Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Ignite – March 2021

When: Tuesday, March 2, 2021 – Thursday, March 4, 2021 | Join our digital experience on March 2–4, 2021 to learn, connect, and explore new tech that’s ready to implement. All skill levels welcome. Save the date! Registration is now open.

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

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

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

Thursday, March 11, 2021 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Thursday, March 18, 2021 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Microsoft Teams Summit: March 2021 | Online Event

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

Enhance productivity in Microsoft Teams with pop out apps and tabs

For millions of users, Microsoft Teams is the digital workspace where work gets done. It’s where we come together to collaborate with teammates and where we integrate apps and processes to work on projects. And in this digital workspace, we rely on multiple apps and windows to work through tasks whether independently or with others – so having access to the tools we need without context switching is essential. That’s why we’ve expanded the capability to pop out multiple windows over the past several months – starting with chats and meetings to now personal apps and tabs! In this post, we’ll show you how you can use these capabilities and stay focused to keep your workflows ongoing.

A huge benefit to being in the cloud with Microsoft 365 is having the flexibility to provide employees working across different roles and locations with the latest features and updates—a critical task for any IT organization. That’s why we’re excited to announce two new features for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise—extended offline access and device-based subscriptions—that remove critical blockers and enable customers to deploy Microsoft 365 across their entire environment, streamlining deployment and administration. These capabilities will help you ensure that employees who are offline for months at a time or rely on shared devices and workstations can benefit from the same user experience and stay productive and secure no matter where they’re working. | Related: Enabling remote work and new scenarios with Microsoft 365 E3

Protecting sensitive information on devices

On November 10, 2020, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Endpoint DLP (Data Loss Prevention). Endpoint DLP is a native integrated experience that identifies and protects sensitive information accessed by information workers in the applications they use every day. It is part of Microsoft Information Protection, an intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to know your data, protect your data, and prevent data loss across all the touchpoints within an enterprise – including Microsoft 365 apps and services, on-premises file stores, endpoint devices, and third-party SaaS applications and services. As a Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customer, you can take advantage of a seamless onboarding to Endpoint DLP.

February identity updates – GA of Azure AD My Apps user-based collections and more

We’re excited to share the latest Active Azure Directory news, including feature updates, support deprecation, and new capabilities that will streamline administrator, developer, and user experiences. These updates show our commitment to simplifying identity and access management, while also enhancing the customization and controls you need. With the general availability of user-based collections in Azure AD My Apps, users can now create and manage their own personalized app collections while freeing IT resources and time for other tasks. Three new risk detections—the Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) New Country, Activity from Anonymous IP Address, and Suspicious Inbox Forwarding Rules—are now generally available. Reminders regarding support for unmanaged Azure Active Directory accounts ending in October 2021, and the deprecation of old versions of Azure AD Connect sync.

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft IT Showcase: Update your organization’s federation with Microsoft

Federation, or external access, is a way for Microsoft Teams users to find, call, chat, and set up meetings with users at other organizations in Teams. You can also use federation to communicate with people from other organizations who are still using Skype for Business (online and on-premises). Microsoft is preparing to retire our internal Skype for Business on-premises infrastructure. To support this change, we will move our federation service online in early summer 2021. When we make this change, federation with Microsoft will break for organizations that use Skype for Business on-premises and do not allow partner discovery. This document provides guidance on how to add Microsoft as an allowed domain and retain federation.

Flexible Deployment for Project for the web is here!

We are pleased to announce the availability of Flexible Deployment for Project for the web. As a part of the Microsoft Dataverse (formerly known as Common Data Service (CDS)) platform, Flexible Deployment enables you to create different environments based on organizational, business unit, or team needs. In addition to the existing Default environment, you now have more choices to spin up different kinds of Dataverse environments for the Project for the web: Production and Sandbox. With Production, your organization can create specific environments such as limiting access to data for the HR department, deploying different customizations for different sets of users, or staying compliant on data residency requirements if your users and tenant are not located in the same country. The Sandbox environment allows for Application Lifecycle Management to develop and test customized solutions for Project before rolling out to production.

Upcoming commercial preview of Microsoft Office LTSC

We’re pleased to provide an update on Microsoft Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), the next perpetual release of Office. A commercial preview of Microsoft Office LTSC will be available in April. We have built Office LTSC for a limited set of specific situations: regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems that must stay locked in time and require a long-term servicing channel. We expect that most customers who use Office LTSC won’t do it across their entire organization, but only in specific scenarios. The good news is that you can deploy both Office LTSC and the Microsoft 365 version of Office with the same deployment tools. With this release, we will bring Office and Windows into alignment in support of the same limited scenarios. Both Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will remain governed by the Fixed Lifecycle Policy. Both products will be supported for five years, and both the next perpetual version of Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will be released in the second half of this calendar year. Without access to the cloud, Office LTSC will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 Apps, building on the features included in past releases. New Office LTSC features will include accessibility improvements, capabilities like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, dark mode support across multiple apps, and performance improvements across Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. As with previous releases, Office LTSC will still be a device-based “perpetual” license.

The next Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release

Windows 10 introduced Windows as a service, a method of continually providing new features and capabilities through regular feature updates. Semi-Annual Channel versions of Windows, such as version 1909, version 2004, and version 20H2, are released twice per year. In addition to Semi-Annual Channel releases of Windows 10 Enterprise, we also developed a Long Term Servicing Channel for Windows, known as Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, and an Internet of Things (IoT) version known as Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. Each of these products was designed to have a 10-year support lifecycle, as outlined in our lifecycle documentation. We are announcing that the next version of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC will be released in the second half (H2) of calendar year 2021. Windows 10 Client LTSC will change to a 5-year lifecycle, aligning with the changes to the next perpetual version of Office. This change addresses the needs of the same regulated and restricted scenarios and devices. Note that Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC is maintaining the 10-year support lifecycle; this change is only being announced for Office LTSC and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-06

Welcome to the February 8 – 14, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Twenty features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, OneDrive, Lists, Microsoft 365 Compliance Center, Outlook (Windows), Word and Microsoft Information Protection.

There are a few additional sessions for existing meeting series, but there were no brand new events added. The spotlight event of the week is the Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Meeting Organizational Compliance Requirements session on Wednesday, February 17th at 10am Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include two new PowerApps for Microsoft Teams that help you track projects and share news, information on why threat protection is critical to a Zero Trust security strategy, and a look at how partners are fueling growth and innovation on Microsoft Teams.

Noteworthy items from last week include the availability of Microsoft To Do widgets on iOS 14, the general availability of the Exchange Online V2 PowerShell module on Linux and macOS, and a couple of reasons to love passwordless authentication.

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: Increased set of first-party indicators for Insider Risk Management	68924	March CY2021	Added: 09 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance The Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management solution will now recognize an increased set of first party indicators, including Endpoint (Windows 10), Microsoft Teams, Azure Active Directory, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Cloud Access Security.
Microsoft Teams: Disable/Enable a Single Attendee’s Video	70620	April CY2021	Added: 09 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Ability to disable and enable a single attendee’s video in a Microsoft Teams meeting.
Microsoft Teams: Disable/Enable all Attendee’s Video	70621	April CY2021	Added: 09 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Ability to disable and enable video for all attendee’s before, or during, a Microsoft Teams meeting.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Enhanced support for domains in Insider Risk Management	70631	March CY2021	Added: 09 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance Insider Risk Management now support enhanced classification of unallowed, allowed, and third-party domains leveraging wildcards. This helps improve classification of detections.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Content explorer enhancements for Insider Risk Management	70632	March CY2021	Added: 09 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance The Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management solution will have an improved performance and experience within the content explorer, including transparency of document loads and completeness.
Microsoft Teams: Disable/Enable all Attendees’ Video	80221	May CY2021	Added: 09 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC High, DoD Ability in GCC-High and DoD to disable and enable video for all attendees before or during a Microsoft Teams meeting.
Microsoft Teams: Disable/Enable a Single Attendee’s Video	80224	May CY2021	Added: 09 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC High, DoD Ability to disable and enable a single attendee’s video in a Microsoft Teams meeting.
Syntex: Model usage analytics in content center	70626	February CY2021	Added: 10 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Syntex The SharePoint Syntex content center provides model usage analytics to provide more information about how your models published from the content center are being used. The “How your models are performing in the last 30 days” section of the content center includes a 30 day roll-up of usage analytics data provided in the following charts and lists: Classification by model, Classification by library and Model usage.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Insider Risk Management recognizes sensitivity label downgrade	70630	March CY2021	Added: 10 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance Insider Risk Management will now be able to identify documents where the user successfully downgrades the sensitivity label applied on it.
Microsoft Teams: PowerShell Support for Team Templates	70698	May CY2021	Added: 10 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams PowerShell support for team templates operations including creating a new team template, viewing all available team templates, etc.
Microsoft 365: Apps will require Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime	70699	March CY2021	Added: 10 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft 365 Apps Microsoft 365 Apps is starting to provide new or improved features that rely on Microsoft Edge WebView2. WebView2 Runtime will be installed starting on March 8, 2021. Only devices that are running Windows and that have Version 2101 or later of Microsoft 365 Apps installed are affected.
Microsoft Search: Actionable items in search	70700	June CY2021	Added: 10 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Search A new action menu with search results will allow an item not only to be opened in the web experience, but directly opened in the client application, downloaded, shared or copy the link to the item.
Microsoft Teams: Manage team templates with template policies	70701	June CY2021	Added: 10 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Choose which team templates are shown to your users by setting a policy.
OneDrive: Dialog on First-Time deletion of File(s)	70702	February CY2021	Added: 11 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive When a user deletes a file(s) for the first time, they will be shown a dialog to educate them that their file is in the OneDrive recycle bin where it can be restored. This will show up on subsequent deletes until the user checks the box stating they do wish to see it again. Admins can turn off this notification all together with a group policy setting.
Microsoft Lists: Commenting (iOS)	70705	March CY2021	Added: 11 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Lists – iOS Bringing web commenting experience to Lists iOS mobile app. Add/delete a comment on list items to collaborate and share better.
Microsoft Lists: List Setting to disable/enable commenting	70706	March CY2021	Added: 11 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Lists New list-level settings to disable/enable commenting
Microsoft Lists: Enabling commenting to Lists app in Teams	70707	May CY2021	Added: 11 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Lists Bringing web commenting experience to Lists app in Teams. Add/delete a comment on list items to collaborate and share better within the Teams canvas.
Outlook for Windows: Every meeting online for Government Clouds	80164	March CY2021	Added: 11 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC Update your settings to make every meeting you create a Teams Meeting by default so you no longer need to remember to click the Teams Meeting option.
Outlook for Windows: Every meeting online for Government Clouds	80365	April CY2021	Added: 12 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC High, DoD Update your settings to make every meeting you create a Teams Meeting by default so you no longer need to remember to click the Teams Meeting option.
Microsoft Information Protection: Data loss prevention for Microsoft Teams for DoD	80375	May CY2021	Added: 12 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: MIP, DoD Data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities in Microsoft 365 government clouds will be extended to include Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages, including private channel messages. If your organization has DLP, you can now define policies that prevent people from sharing sensitive information in a Microsoft Teams channel or chat session.

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

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Office Scripts

When: Tuesday, February 16, 2021 at 9:00am PT | We’re so excited to announce our first-ever Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) for Office Scripts! The AMA will take place on Tuesday, February 16, 2021, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT in the Excel AMA space. Add the event to your calendar and view it in your time zone here. During this AMA, you will have the opportunity to share your questions and feedback about Office Scripts and receive responses directly from our product team. Facing trouble with automating on Excel for web? Have an idea that would make our feature better? Let us know- we’re eager to hear and learn from you! Looking forward to seeing you at the AMA.

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

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

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

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

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.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021 from 10am – 2pm PT

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.

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

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

Microsoft Ignite – March 2021

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

BLOG ROUNDUP

Track projects and share news in Teams with two new Power Apps

Within the Teams app store, you’ll now find two brand new applications published by Microsoft: Milestones and Bulletins. With the Milestones app, you can seamlessly track projects across your company, and with Bulletins, you can quickly publish news articles to the rest of your company. Both are deeply integrated within Teams, but what makes them unique is that they are built with Power Apps on top of the recently released Dataverse for Teams. By shipping them on top of Dataverse for Teams, we’re making it possible for you to fully customize these apps from top to bottom and to leverage them as inspiration to build your own apps! | Related: Communicate broadly and collaborate effectively with two new Power Apps

Why threat protection is critical to your Zero Trust security strategy

There’s been a significant increase in identity-based attacks. As IT leaders rely more heavily on identity in their security strategies, cybercriminals have increased their efforts on this threat vector. And with the shift to remote work in response to COVID-19, we’ve seen a notable number of pandemic-related phishing attacks. IT leaders need more visibility and protection. With the increase in threats, security professionals and admins are being overwhelmed with alerts. IT leaders are looking for more effective ways to manage alerts and better tools to proactively prevent attackers from being able to compromise accounts. Preventing identity compromise is more critical than ever. As IT leaders evolve their security strategies, people increasingly working remotely, and the number of identity-based attacks are rising, it’s vital for organizations to implement real-time, AI-based protections that prevent identity compromise.

How partners are fueling growth and innovation on Microsoft Teams

Teams not only enables you to meet, chat, call, and collaborate with your team, but it also serves as a platform that brings together the apps and workflows that help you get your work done. In fact, users utilizing third-party apps and custom-built solutions in Teams every month grew over seven times year-over-year. We also know that a workplace platform is only as good as the ecosystem of relevant and useful applications and custom integrations available. Because of this, we continue to invest in Teams platform capabilities to enable and empower our partners to continue to build new, innovative solutions. When our partners succeed, we succeed, and together we bring more value to our customers. The beauty and strength of Microsoft Teams is that it’s designed as a surface where partners can interweave capabilities to create innovative, productivity-enhancing solutions. With the broadest canvas to build upon—from bots, messaging extensions, cards, and apps across chat and meetings to name a few—partners have created amazing solutions that reach people where they are and fit the needs of customers in this digital, post-pandemic business environment. We are proud to have such a strong and thriving ecosystem of partners who are continuously pushing the bounds of innovation with the solutions they’ve built on Microsoft Teams. From the more than 800 Teams apps built by independent software vendors (ISVs) and published in our store to the thousands of systems integrators (SIs) who are developing custom Teams solutions—our partners are growing their business and finding immense value from building on Teams. Most importantly, our customers are benefitting from all of these solutions that increase employee productivity and enhance collaboration.

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft To Do iOS 14 widgets are now available

With the launch of iOS 14, you can now add widgets to your home screen. We’re excited to announce that To Do widgets for iOS 14 are now available! We’ve added three new types of widgets for you – read on to learn more. The Your Tasks widget helps you select and view tasks from a list of your choice. The widget is available in two sizes: the medium widget shows a list of your tasks, while the large widget shows a list of your tasks along with due dates and other details. By default, the Your Tasks widget shows the Tasks list. In the My Day widget, you can view the first task on your My Day list. The Add Task widget allows you to quickly add a task to a list of your choice without having to open the To Do app.

EXO V2 PowerShell module is now Generally Available on Linux & macOS

At Microsoft Ignite 2020, we announced the preview of support for Linux and Windows PowerShell Core in Exchange Online management using EXO V2 Module. We are delighted to announce general availability of this feature along with the support for macOS. Officially supported distributions of Linux are Ubuntu versions 18.04 and 20.04 (native installations – not WSL). For macOS, supported versions are Mojave, Catalina & Big Sur. Read more in the detailed release notes here. In addition to cross platform support, we added support for longer session timeouts in interactive scripting scenarios. The module is now more secure with real time policy and security enforcement in all interactive cases with the help of Continuous Access Evaluation provided by Azure AD. Version 2.0.4 of EXO V2 module is available at PowerShell Gallery and we recommend all Exchange Admins start using this version of the module.

10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #3: Why biometrics and passwordless are a dream combination

The Microsoft identity team recently launched a series explaining why they love passwordless authentication (and why you should too!).The series kicked off with posts on FIDO and NIST compliance. Alex Weinert continues the series with this post speaking to biometric authentication. Rather than having to memorize a password (you can’t) or security answers (quick! What was your 6th grade teacher’s best friend’s pet’s maiden name when you had your first crush?), you can use what’s always with you – you! Biometrics let you use your face, fingerprint, or even heartbeat on some devices. Biometrics also provide terrific accessibility benefits, making it possible to sign in when typing in a password is not viable. It is really exciting to think about the technology in use by people or in situations where secure digital identity was previously out of reach. With biometrics, once a device is “bound”, almost any gesture can be used to authenticate. Think about the implications for folks who interact with technology in non-conventional ways, or whose job requirements make manual interactions impossible (e.g. a surgeon after scrubbing in) – with NFC and FIDO2, a tap of the token can sign you in securely. | Related: 10 Reasons to Love Passwordless #4: Secure your digital estate, while securing your bottom line

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-05

Welcome to the February 1 – 7, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were twenty-five additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Compliance Center, Outlook (Web, iOS), Word and Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

The customer immersion experience sessions for Microsoft 365 and for Teams are back with new dates. Registration for the Microsoft Ignite (digital) experience is now open – the conference is scheduled for March 2 – 4, 2021. This week’s spotlight event is the “Ask Microsoft Anything” (AMA) for Microsoft Lists on Thursday, February 11th at 9am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include lots of information on Microsoft Viva, details on an upcoming change to the default setting for Guest access in Microsoft Teams, a look at what rolled out for SharePoint in January 2021, and the announcement of Windows 10 in cloud configuration.

Noteworthy item highlights include information on Microsoft Edge Legacy and the April 2021 Windows Update release, an update on the timeline for disabling Basic Authentication in Exchange Online, a reminder that Skype for Business Online retires on July 31, 2021 with available assistance/resources, and details on the ability to edit Microsoft Lists in grid view.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Outlook for iOS: Conversational AI with Cortana	79865	February CY2021	Added: 01 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS Ask Cortana to provide assistant to schedule meetings, compose short email messages, and find files, emails, and people that are relevant to you, all using your voice and natural language.
Outlook for iOS: Expandable new message and event buttons	79866	February CY2021	Added: 01 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS The button for new event and message buttons on your Calendar and Inbox hat will expand to provide quick actions that are available in Outlook. By long pressing these new buttons, you’ll have easy access to commonly needed email and calendaring capabilities.
Office 365: Office is now available on iPad	60685	February CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 With this release, we are bringing the Microsoft Office app to the iPad, combining the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps you know, plus additional tools to keep you more productive than ever. Optimized for iPadOS, use your keyboard, mouse, and trackpad to create and collaborate on Office documents, or create using your camera, sign PDFs, jot down notes, and more.
Office 365: Intelligent Suggestions	70597	March CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 Intelligent Suggestions will help you quickly find, work on, and collaborate on the files that matter most to you.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Hunting for Impersonated domains and users	70613	February CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 We are adding new filters called Impersonated user and Impersonated domain to enable Security Operations teams to explicitly hunt for specific users or domains within their organization that are targets of impersonation attacks. This additional information related to Impersonated domain(s) and Impersonated user(s) will surface in existing Impersonation insight pages and our new Email Entity page.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Updates to post-delivery detections and investigations	70614	February CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 We are rolling out updates to alerts and investigations including new alert policies and post-delivery detections related to Zero-hour auto purge (ZAP). There will also be updates and improvements to the AIR playbooks for the post-delivery detections to capture the state of the emails and entities that are being investigated.
Outlook: on the web – React to an email message	70615	March CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web Compliance Manager is the next generation of the existing Compliance Manager and Compliance Score solutions, which have been in commercial public preview since November 2019.
Microsoft Project: API Support for extensibility	70618	June CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Project API support to create, update and delete Projects, Tasks, Task Dependencies, Resource Assignments, Team Members and Project Buckets.
OneDrive: Updates to the sync app on Mac available in .pkg format	70693	March CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive – Mac Updates to the sync app on Mac will be available in the .pkg format which allows for faster updates and better security.
Word: Better collaboration with modern comments for Mac	76166	May CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Word – Mac Share your comments with co-authors only once they’re complete, enjoy improved @mention notifications, and be more productive with a consistent commenting experience between Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Word: Better collaboration with modern comments	76186	March CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Word Share your comments with co-authors only once they’re complete, enjoy improved @mention notifications, and be more productive with a consistent commenting experience between Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Microsoft Teams: Branded Lobby	79957	March CY2021	Added: 03 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Admins will now be able to add a custom logo to the Teams experience, for display in the lobby and meeting pre-join experience. The logo will be displayed for meetings where the organizer has the Advanced Comms SKU.
Microsoft Search: reports in modern sites	70616	June CY2021	Added: 04 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Search Microsoft Search reports in modern sites will allow for site administrators to view usage analytics related to Microsoft Search in modern sites in SharePoint Online.
Microsoft 365 Compliance Center: Communication Compliance can now leverage optical character recognition to extract and evaluate messages	70622	March CY2021	Added: 04 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance Introducing the ability to extract printed or handwritten text from images using Azure’s Computer Vision Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Text extracted will then be evaluated against Communication Compliance policies conditions.
Microsoft 365 Compliance Center: Communication Compliance now support 7 languages for the Threat, Targeted Harassment and Profanities classifiers	70623	March CY2021	Added: 04 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance Communication Compliance can now detect threat, targeted harassment, and profanities in the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.
Microsoft Teams: Together mode for DoD	70625	March CY2021	Added: 04 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, DoD Together mode uses AI segmentation technology in meetings to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: Audit retention dashboard for government clouds	70627	March CY2021	Added: 04 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance Create and manage audit log retention policies within the new Audit retention dashboard in the Microsoft 365 compliance center.
Forms: New Forms Start Page in GCC, GCC-High and DoD	80044	March CY2021	Added: 04 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Forms, Gov This update replaces the existing Forms Portal page with a new Forms Start page on Office.com (Office.com – Forms). Users who access forms via Office.com will get this experience first, then users accessing forms via the Forms website will get the experience soon after.
Azure Active Directory: Authenticator Code Match for MFA	70617	March CY2021	Added: 05 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Azure Active Directory Admins will be able to turn on code match for MFA notifications in Authenticator and apply the behavior by user/group.
Microsoft Teams: New file sharing experience	70629	February CY2021	Added: 05 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Streamline sharing with Microsoft Teams. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation.
Microsoft 365 compliance center: “Watch-the-watchers” audit trail for Insider Risk Management	68921	March CY2021	Added: 06 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance Audit and review activities of IRM Analyst, IRM Investigator, and IRM Admin roles within the Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management solution. The audit trail will be available for a new role (IRM Auditor) to maintain integrity of an independent audit control.
Microsoft Teams: Integrated CART Captioning in Meetings	70588	July CY2021	Added: 06 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Users will now be able to view captions coming from a CART provider (real-time captioning) within the Microsoft Teams meeting window. Meeting organizers and participants will be able to ask their captioning providers to stream captions to Microsoft Teams.
SharePoint: Company-Branded Auto News Digest	70606	March CY2021	Added: 06 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint For SharePoint news users, we are launching an update to the Auto-News Digest feature. Now users will receive a company branded Auto-News Digest.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Potential Nation State Activity Alerts	70624	February CY2021	Added: 06 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Nation state threats are defined as cyber threat activity that originates in a particular country with the apparent intent of furthering national interests. These attacks represent some of the most advanced and persistent threat activity Microsoft tracks. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center follows these threats, builds comprehensive profiles of the activity, and works closely with all Microsoft security teams to implement detections and mitigations to protect our customers. We’re adding an alert to the security portal to alert customers when suspected nation-state activity is detected in the tenant.
Outlook: on the web – New location for Outlook modules	70628	March CY2021	Added: 06 February 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web We are changing the way you access Mail, Calendar, People, To Do, and other Outlook experiences. We are adding a way to easily access additional Microsoft 365 applications that are available to you.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Run Effective Meetings with 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!)

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

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

Get Started with 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.

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

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

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft Lists

When: Thursday, February 11, 2021 at 9:00am PT | Please join us for an ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA) on Microsoft Lists – Your smart information tracking app in Microsoft 365 – has several new updates and resources to help you track information, organize work and get things done. An AMA is a one-hour online forum similar to “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. Post any questions or feedback you have about Microsoft Lists for this event in the Microsoft 365 AMA space. The Microsoft Lists experts will be available during the hour to respond. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

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

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Office Scripts

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Meeting Organizational Compliance Requirements

Wednesday, February 17, 2021 from 10am – 2pm PT

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

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

Microsoft Ignite – March 2021

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

BLOG ROUNDUP

Microsoft Viva: Empowering every employee for the new digital age

Today, organizations spend over $300 billion a year on employee experience. That number includes employee development and training, benefits and wellbeing, and a whole host of employee experience technologies. But too often, these technologies are fragmented, hard to find, and disruptive to the flow of work. As digital tools become more crucial to a great employee experience, business leaders across every industry are embracing the opportunity to learn, and they’re re-evaluating both their spending and their approach. We believe what’s needed is a new approach and a new category of technology solutions called employee experience platforms (EXP). We’re introducing Microsoft Viva, the first EXP built for the digital era. Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, it is experienced through Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use every day.

We want to make everyone aware of an upcoming change to the default setting for Guests in Microsoft Teams. With the large increase in organizations looking to use Teams to expand collaboration beyond the boundaries of their tenant, we want to make it easier for customers to get started. This has also been announced in Message Center post MC234252. As a result, starting on February 8th we are turning on Guest access in Microsoft Teams by default for any customers who have not already configured this setting. This will bring the control for Teams Guest capability into alignment with the rest of the suite, where the setting is already on by default. When this change is implemented, if you have not already configured Guest access capability in Microsoft Teams, that capability will be enabled in your tenant. With guest access enabled, you can provide access to teams and other resources to people outside your organization while maintaining control over your corporate data. Prior to this change taking effect beginning on February 8th, if you want Guest access to remain disabled for your organization, you will need to confirm that the Guest access setting is set to “Off” instead of “Service default”. Instructions for how to configure the Teams guest access settings can be found here: Teams guest access settings.

This post includes all the SharePoint and related tech updates that rolled out in January 2021. This is the all-inclusive roadmap release recap for all things SharePoint and related technology. To start the year, January 2021 brought many new offerings: Yammer notifications in Teams, inclusive Yammer reactions, OneDrive settings in SharePoint admin center, 250GB file uploads, Microsoft Lists app for iOS, Lists rules, Lists forms customization, task publishing, and more. All the features listed began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of January 2021 (possibly early February 2021). | Related: Designing SharePoint sites with beautiful headers

Windows 10 in cloud configuration: The cost-effective, secure, and simple solution for the new digital workforce

Every day, Windows helps millions of people around the world get their work done. Now, more than ever, Windows is critical to keeping business moving, as organizations look to empower their people by enabling them to work from anywhere. It’s clear that customers need to equip people with devices that enable everyone, across every role in the organization, to do their best work. To do that, we need to empower them to deploy and update from a single dashboard, deliver essential apps to every user, provide secure access to corporate networks and resources, and get the necessary data storage to make it easy for users to access their data from any device. And given their many competing demands, customers need this solution to be cost-effective, secure, and simple to deploy. They need it to work seamlessly with Windows and other tools and experiences—including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Edge, and OneDrive for Business—that people know and want. And they need it today. That’s why we developed Windows 10 in cloud configuration. Cloud config is a set of recommended configurations that uses the technology infrastructure you already have—Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Windows 10, and apps—to save you time and money while getting your people the right device to get their work done. With cloud config, your users get a familiar Windows interface and productivity apps while your admins get a familiar management experience. All it takes is a Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise PC, Endpoint Manager, and to apply the cloud configuration apps and settings. And in addition to Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Edge, and OneDrive for Business, cloud config gives you the flexibility to securely deploy Win32 and critical line-of-business (LOB) apps either directly to the device or via virtualization.

NOTEWORTHY

New Microsoft Edge to replace Microsoft Edge Legacy with April’s Windows 10 Update Tuesday release

In August 2020, we announced that support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop application ends on March 9, 2021. After this date, Microsoft Edge Legacy will no longer receive security updates. To replace this out of support application, we are announcing that the new Microsoft Edge will be available as part of the Windows 10 cumulative monthly security update–otherwise referred to as the Update Tuesday (or “B”) release–on April 13, 2021. When you apply this update to your devices, the out of support Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop application will be removed and the new Microsoft Edge will be installed.

Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – February 2021 Update

We previously announced we would begin to disable Basic Auth for five Exchange Online protocols in the second half of 2021. Due to the pandemic and the effect it has on priorities and work patterns, we are announcing some important changes to our plan to disable Basic Auth in Exchange Online. Please read this post carefully, as there’s a lot of detail. The first change is that until further notice, we will not be disabling Basic Auth for any protocols that your tenant is using. When we resume this program, we will provide a minimum of twelve months notice before we block the use of Basic Auth on any protocol being used in your tenant. We will continue with our plan to disable Basic Auth for protocols that your tenant is not using. The next change to the previously announced plan is that we are adding MAPI, RPC, and Offline Address Book (OAB) to the protocols included in this effort to further enhance data protection. | Related: Application Access Policy Support in EWS

Skype for Business Online retires in six months – what you need to know

Eighteen months ago, we announced the July 31, 2021 retirement of Skype for Business Online. With six months until the service ends, we’re focused on helping each of our customers upgrade to Microsoft Teams and enabling more ways to come together and get things done. Skype for Business Online has been a critical communications tool for millions of organizations across the globe. Once customers experience the way Teams brings together chat, calling, meetings and more, they realize the amazing potential to collaborate seamlessly and simplify work in a secure and compliant way. Regardless of where you are on the journey from Skype for Business to Teams, this is an important checkpoint to make sure your organization is on track to upgrade to Teams before Skype for Business Online retires and access to the service ends.

Microsoft Lists: Update information at the speed of type – Edit in grid view

The new Microsoft Lists grid view is now available worldwide, including SharePoint lists and libraries that share the same technology platform in Microsoft 365. With simple, inline experiences, you can quickly update your information or add new items easily. Features like drag to fill, undo/redo, new field editors (text, date, people, yes/no, choice), and copy/paste make grid view the best place to get your information, quickly and organized. We’ll cover all new features and capabilities in this post – including screenshots and links to learn more, starting with an in-depth demo video to showcase all the goodness our Lists engineers have been working on and refining.

The evolution of mobile productivity, even when we’re a little less mobile

What’s the one essential you’d go back home for if forgotten? Maybe it’s your mask. But also, your mobile phone, right? Your personal organizer, your digital wallet, your instant camera—your mobile device has become the most essential tool you use to stay connected to the people and things that are important at home, at the office, and everywhere in between. It has evolved from being a companion to your desktop computer to being your personal, daily companion. We’ve explored the evolving needs of people’s mobility and connectivity and we are announcing a number of new Microsoft 365 mobile-first capabilities that help people bring balance to their day. This includes organizing and transforming their physical world such as documents, photos, and live-action video into digital assets, and offer secure ways to help protect sensitive information. | Related: Start a conversation with your personal productivity assistant in Outlook with Cortana