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Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-23

Welcome to the June 7 – 13, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were forty-six additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Microsoft 365 Compliance, Exchange, Planner, OneDrive, Stream, Lists, and Viva.

No new events have been listed, but there are additional sessions for most of the existing event series. There are some event series that only have on-demand sessions available, and these are all listed at the top of the section. This week’s spotlight event of the week is the “Empower your Frontline workforce to do more with Teams” session on Tuesday, June 15th at 11am Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include an inside look at how Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world, information and resources to get started on Microsoft Viva Learning, the announcement on bringing Visio to Microsoft 365, and details on how Microsoft is working to ensure a great OneDrive experience on Apple products.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as the June 2021 feature updates for Workplace Analytics, the announcement of the ability to import Project desktop files into Project for the web, a look at three new voice features for Outlook mobile on iOS, details on Scheduler, a new Microsoft 365 service, and the public preview of Azure AD access reviews for service principals.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

There were forty-six additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Microsoft 365 Compliance, Exchange, Planner, OneDrive, Stream, Lists, and Viva.

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-2021-23 Download

PDF:

O365-Roadmap-2021-23 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

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.

On-Demand Session

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.

On-Demand Session

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.

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.

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.

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings 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.

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.

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.

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.

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started 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.

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.

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

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.

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 Viva

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!

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: 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

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.

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.

BLOG ROUNDUP

Inside Track: How Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world

One of the most challenging aspects of leading the Employee Experience team at Microsoft is the deployment, maintenance, and support of thousands of conference rooms around the globe. Since employees often encounter different conference room technology—even within the same building—it can lead to frustration, delay, and even support calls. As a result, employees have consistently identified that experience as an area for improvement. With the advent of Microsoft Teams and the amazing innovation being driven by the product team, we saw an opportunity to transform Microsoft employee and customer meetings from a weakness to a strength. By investing in the meeting experience with Microsoft Teams and by reimagining the physical and virtual spaces where meetings take place, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help Microsoft employees and our customers thrive in the emerging hybrid world of work. We’ve already seen satisfaction with meetings increase, while also making the migration to hybrid work more seamless for Microsoft and for our customers. How are we doing it? Read on to find out!

Get started on Microsoft Viva Learning with Microsoft Mechanics

In May, we launched a new Microsoft Mechanics series on Microsoft Viva with an introduction to the employee experience platform (EXP), followed by deep dive videos on Viva Topics and Viva Connections. On the latest episode of Microsoft Mechanics, Jeremy Chapman, our Microsoft Mechanics host, and Swati Jhawar, Senior Product Manager, are excited to dive into Viva Learning to cover the personal and social learning experiences, as well as the IT admin experience for set up and configuration. Viva Learning is currently in preview, with general availability coming later this year. | Resource: Microsoft Mechanics – Microsoft Viva Learning | Personalized learning experience through Microsoft 365

Bringing Visio to Microsoft 365: Diagramming for everyone

Visio has long been available only as a standalone app for purchase for people with specialized diagramming needs. But this is changing. We are recognizing an increasing need for a diagramming solution for everyone to convey information more effectively, which is why we’re excited to announce that we’ll be bringing core Visio capabilities to Microsoft 365 for all commercial license subscribers. In July, we’ll start rolling out a lightweight version of the Visio web app in Microsoft 365 to bring visual diagramming and collaboration to all teams—both of which are especially important in this hybrid work environment. But the best part? It’ll be available, at no additional cost, for all commercial license subscribers. This lightweight version of the web app will offer core Visio functionalities and allow business users to create, edit, and share professional diagrams. While users with more specialized diagramming needs will continue to derive value from the standalone plans—Visio Plan 1 and Visio Plan 2—the web app in Microsoft 365 subscription is intended to be a powerful tool for essential needs. It will soon be available in your Microsoft 365 suite, but if you can’t wait to get started, then we invite you to sign up for Visio in Microsoft 365 early access. Let’s take a closer look at how this Visio web app in Microsoft 365 can help teams everywhere create professional diagrams effortlessly, collaborate with others and share diagrams seamlessly, and create diagrams from data to make decisions quickly.

Microsoft works to ensure a great OneDrive experience on Apple products

As hybrid and remote work continue, many organizations are giving employees flexibility to choose not only where they work but also the devices they use to get work done. We have been working closely with Apple to ensure we’re providing a great user experience in OneDrive on Apple products, whether people are using OneDrive to keep their work files synced and protected or to store and share their personal files and photos in the cloud. We’re excited to share some of the updates and improvements we’re in the process of making to OneDrive running on Apple products to help people be more productive no matter where they are. These updates and improvements include: (1) OneDrive support for M1-powered Macs, (2) Known Folder Move (KFM) support for macOS, (3) Updates to Files On-Demand and Finder on macOS, (4) Sync Admin Reports support for macOS, (5) Exclude syncing of specific file types, and more.

NOTEWORTHY

Workplace Analytics June 2021 feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for June 2021. This month’s update describes the following features: (1) Expanded support for plans, (2) Updated wpa R package, (3) Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) updates, (4) Organization data uploads for licensed employees, and (5) Expanded support for mailboxes in datacenters globally.

Import your Project Desktop files to Project for the web

The Project team is excited to announce that you can now import your Project Desktop files to Project for the web. Once imported, your .mpp files will act as normal Project for the web projects. Project for the web does not have all the same features as Project Desktop. However, we try to import all your relevant information so you can still effectively work on your projects. Any .mpp files from Project Desktop 2016 or later should be importable into Project for the web. Keep in mind that Project for the web has lower limits than Project Desktop. To learn more about Project for the web limits, you can check out our documentation. Any .mpp files that violate a limit will not be importable.

Three new voice features for Outlook mobile—now on iOS, and coming soon to Android

At Microsoft, we’re investing in voice capabilities that transcend the challenges of small screens and tiny keyboards to help people communicate and manage tasks when they’re working on the go. We’re powering these capabilities with Microsoft Graph, which aggregates and organizes billions of signals across your organization as people work in Microsoft 365 all day. And the true magic happens when we layer AI on top of the Graph to get really valuable insights, so that when you use your voice to do things like request “the 2022 budget report” or “email Kim’s boss” the correct document or name appears in a snap. We are announcing new enhanced voice capabilities in Outlook mobile for iOS (and coming soon to Android) that make using voice to schedule meetings and compose emails simpler for everyone. These new AI-enhanced voice capabilities quickly contextualize your voice requests and provide a rapid response, making it more easy and natural to work on the go. Let’s take a look. | Related: Introducing Microsoft Dictation for iOS

Scheduler, a new Microsoft 365 service, makes scheduling meetings easier and faster

It’s not just you: weekly meetings have increased by 148% and the time that employees spend trying to schedule meetings both inside and outside of their organization is climbing. With the average time to schedule a meeting taking 6 to 29 minutes, Scheduler aims to give you back time to focus on the important things by making it easier, faster, and being available 24/7 to schedule meetings for you, and it’s available now. Let’s dig into what makes Scheduler work. Scheduler understands what you write, so you can word your requests to Cortana just as you would when asking any person for assistance scheduling a meeting in an email. As simple as “Cortana, please find a time to meet next week,” to something more detailed like “Cortana, please find us 45 minutes in the last week of the month in the morning for Pacific time and make it a Teams meeting.” As Scheduler learns, you may receive responses from Cortana asking you to clarify certain asks or to provide more details in order to complete your request.

Introducing Azure AD access reviews for service principals

With the growing trend of more applications and services moving to the cloud, there’s an increasing need to improve the governance of identities used by these workloads. We’re announcing the public preview of access reviews for service principals in Azure AD. Many of you are already using Azure AD access reviews for governing the access of your user accounts and have expressed the desire for extending this capability to your service principals and applications. With this public preview, you can require a review of service principals and applications that are assigned to privileged directory roles in Azure AD. In addition, you can also create reviews of roles in your Azure subscriptions to which a service principal is assigned. This ensures a periodic check to make sure that service principals are only assigned to roles they need and helps you improve the security posture of your environment.

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

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

On-Demand Session

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

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

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Explore teams and channels in Microsoft Teams

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

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Energize your Live Events with Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

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: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

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

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft Viv a

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

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

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 | 2021-09

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

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!

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

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.

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

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.

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: 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 | 2020-51

Season’s Greetings and welcome to the December 14 – 20, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were thirty-one additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Outlook (web), Microsoft 365 Compliance, Forms, Excel, and Microsoft Information Protection. Due to the large number of items, all of the roadmap items are in a separate post this week, Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-51.

A few pre and post holiday sessions have been added for a few of the Teams related event series. One brand new event has also been added have been added, the “Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop” customer immersion experience. This week’s spotlight event is the “Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams” webinar on Monday, December 21st at 2pm Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include the general availability of breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams, information on the launch of the Microsoft Teams preview experience, details on new ways to celebrate holiday festivities with Microsoft Teams, and an update on the name changes for the Planner app in Teams.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items details on changing to search in SharePoint Online, a recap of what’s new in Teams phones for December 2020, information on securing remote work by embracing Zero Trust, and recommendations for delivering a productive and seamless user experiences with Azure Active Directory.

NOTE: Typically there isn’t much content published during the holiday week. As a result, there will not be a weekly digest posted on Monday, December 28, 2020. I am going to take a little extra time and spend it with my family. Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season!

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Thirty-one features were added to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap last week, so for this week the roadmap updates are detailed in a separate post, Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-51.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

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: Master working from home

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

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. Note: This session was previously called ‘Learn tips for taking Microsoft Teams to the next level – Part 1’.

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

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, January 6, 2021 from 10am – 2pm PT

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

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

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.

Tuesday, January 26, 2021 from 10am – 2pm PT

BLOG ROUNDUP

Get the most from your meetings and calls with Microsoft Teams | Part 2: Re-setting the bar for meeting and call quality

This is the second in a series of blog posts focused on helping you get the most out of your meetings and calls with Microsoft Teams. Millions of people around the world rely on Teams to collaborate via meetings, calls, and chat. In this series, we share best practices and highlight new features in Teams and the Microsoft 365 service designed to help your teams achieve more together. As many of us have experienced, meetings often get derailed by unintentional distractions. An echo or unidentifiable background noise cuts in. Someone’s audio breaks up while they’re making an important point. A person suddenly gets booted off the call. Poor audio and visual quality can hijack a meeting, inhibiting focus, wasting time, and in the long term, causing meeting fatigue. However, in the moments when technology fails us, it seems there’s nothing we can do but keep going and hope the problem resolves quickly. With Microsoft Teams, we want to give people more control over the digital quality of their meetings. Born in the cloud and built with Microsoft AI at its core, Teams uses AI to remove unwanted sounds, monitor quality and adapt as needed, give users more information and proactive actions, and provide insight into issues before they disrupt meetings.

Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) is a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data in documents and emails across your organization. MIP provides a unified set of capabilities to know and protect your data and prevent data loss across Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook), services (e.g., Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, Power BI), on-premises locations (e.g., SharePoint Server, on-premises files shares), devices, and third-party apps and services (e.g., Box and Dropbox). We are excited to announce availability for new MIP capabilities: (1) General availability of Exact Data Match user interface in Microsoft 365 compliance center and configurable match, (2) External sharing policies for Teams and SharePoint sites, in public preview, (3) Customer key support for Teams, in public preview, and (4) Expansion of MIP sensitivity labels support to Power BI desktop application (PBIX), in public preview.

Announcing Power BI Search in SharePoint home, Office.com, Microsoft Bing, and Windows

Power BI is the Magic Quadrant Leader among analytics and business intelligence platforms and over 200,000 customers around the world use Power BI and bring 40 petabytes of data into Power BI every month 1 and now, we’re building on that momentum with Power BI in Microsoft Search. Microsoft Search transforms the way people in your organization find the info they need—no matter where you are in your cloud journey. Either integrated with Microsoft 365 or as a standalone solution, Microsoft Search is a secure, easily managed, enterprise search experience that works across all of your applications and services to deliver more relevant search results and increase productivity. With Power BI search in Microsoft Search we’re making it easier to find Power BI artifacts such as reports and dashboards, by expanding the ability to search across these artifacts in your favorite productivity apps including , Office.com, Microsoft Bing, and the search box in.

4 ways Microsoft 365 is improving the experience for Mac users

In this atypical year, many of us have discovered a new sense of appreciation for our computers as critical tools to get work done. Now more than ever, we are all looking for new ways to be productive on our laptops and desktops. At Microsoft, we are committed to delivering great Microsoft 365 experiences that help our customers work easier and faster on their favorite devices. With this in mind, we want to share some of the latest Microsoft 365 innovations that can make you even more productive on a Mac. We are excited to announce that we are releasing new versions of many of our Microsoft 365 for Mac apps that run natively on Macs with M1. Over the past months, we have redesigned the experiences in our flagship apps for Mac with a focus on simplicity to improve ease of use. Another area of focus is to make our Microsoft 365 apps work the way you do. Through many new innovations on our Mac apps, our goal is to help you get work done in more simple and intuitive ways. The shift to remote work highlights the need for teams to collaborate with agility, while ensuring sensitive data stays secure and meets compliance requirements. Our Microsoft 365 app teams have been busy getting modern collaboration and compliance capabilities ready so you can work from home more effectively on your Mac.

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft’s digital security team answers your Top 10 questions on Zero Trust

Our internal digital security team at Microsoft spends a fair amount of time talking to enterprise customers who face challenges similar to the ones we do when it comes to managing and securing our globally complex enterprise using a Zero Trust security model. While every organization is unique, and Zero Trust isn’t a “one size fits all” approach, nearly every CIO, CTO, or CISO that we talk to is curious to learn more about our best practices. We thought it would be useful to share our answers to the Top 10 Zero Trust questions from customers across the globe.

Simplified Ribbon is now available in Excel for the web

We are excited to announce that the Simplified Ribbon is now Generally Available in Excel for the web. The Simplified Ribbon has a refreshed modern design which makes it easy to use while retaining all the functionality and power of the classic Excel Ribbon. Going forward both the Simplified and Classic ribbon are available, and you can choose your preferred experience with a single click.

Now Available: Improved Embed Video Experience & Webcam-only Recording

Microsoft Stream (Classic) now includes new features that deliver better video experiences across all of Microsoft 365. The Microsoft Stream team has replaced our old embed player with an improved version called Fast Embed. This means users will experience faster-loading times for all Stream videos embedded across Microsoft 365 applications. We’ve rolled out webcam-only recording to Stream (Classic) customers. This update gives everyone an additional way to create videos for training, knowledge sharing and communications across the organization without downloading additional tools or software.

Protecting Microsoft 365 from on-premises attacks

Many customers connect their private corporate networks to Microsoft 365 to benefit their users, devices, and applications. However, there are many well-documented ways these private networks can be compromised. As we have seen in recent events related to the SolarWinds compromise, on-premises compromise can propagate to the cloud. Because Microsoft 365 acts as the “nervous system” for many organizations, it is critical to protect it from compromised on-premises infrastructure. This document will show you how to configure your systems to protect your Microsoft 365 cloud environment from on-premises compromise. We primarily focus on Azure AD tenant configuration settings, the ways Azure AD tenants can be safely connected to on-premises systems, and the tradeoffs required to operate your systems in ways that protect your cloud systems from on-premises compromise. We strongly recommend you implement this guidance to secure your Microsoft 365 cloud environment.

99.99% uptime for Azure Active Directory

Because our identity services are vital to keep customer businesses running, resilience and security are and always will be our top priority. In the last year, we’ve seen a surge in demand as organizations moved workforces online and schools enabled study from home—in fact, some national education systems moved entire student populations online with Azure AD. We are pleased to announce that we are taking the next step in our commitment to the resilience and availability of Azure AD. On April 1, 2021, we will update our public service level agreement (SLA) to promise 99.99% uptime for Azure AD user authentication, an improvement over our previous 99.9% SLA. This change is the result of a significant and ongoing program of investment in continually raising the bar for resilience of the Azure AD service. We will also share our roadmap for the next generation of resilience investments for Azure AD and Azure AD B2C in early 2021. In conversations with our customers, we learned that the most critical promise of our service is ensuring that every user can sign in to the apps and services they need without interruption. To deliver on this promise, we are updating the definition of Azure AD SLA availability to include only user authentication and federation (and removing administrative features). This focus on critical user authentication scenarios aligns our engineering investments with the vital functions that must stay healthy for customers businesses to run. | Related: A “quick wins” approach to securing Azure Active Directory and Office 365 and improving your security posture

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-39

Welcome to the September 20 – 26, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Last week, all eyes (and ears) were focused on Microsoft Ignite 2020, the first ever virtual Ignite. 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.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

With Ignite 2020, there were a ton of updates to the Office 365 Roadmap last week – 158 new features to be exact! Microsoft Teams had the highest number of features with 68 total, followed by Search (30) and Outlook (28 – all platforms).

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-2020-39-Ignite Download

PDF: O365-Roadmap-2020-39-Ignite Download

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Teams Chalk Talk: Do more with apps

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

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

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Teams Chalk Talk: So…you want to make calls 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. Note: This session was previously called ‘Learn tips for taking Microsoft Teams to the next level – Part 2’.

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

Seven ways we’re empowering every person and every organization to thrive in a new world of work

Note: If you’re looking for one post to summarize Ignite 2020, this is it. | Throughout 2020, as we’ve navigated the equivalent of a year of digital transformation every month, it’s IT pros who’ve led the way. When COVID-19 caused a sudden shift to remote work, IT pros brought entire organizations online—sometimes over a single weekend. They trained individuals and teams on essential new tools, quickly deployed custom apps, and vigilantly protected organizations from increasingly complex security threats. Now, as business leaders look to build resilient organizations and find new opportunities for expansion, they’re looking to IT pros for sustainable solutions to support them for the long haul. We want to help. At Microsoft, it’s our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. At Microsoft Ignite we announced scores of new features and capabilities that aim to do just that. But in this age of accelerated transformation, helping our customers achieve more also requires a broader view. So we’ve committed to becoming the world’s best students on the future of work, closely studying our own telemetry, and working closely with customers and researchers across every field, to understand our challenging new reality. This unique vantage point has shaped our understanding of where leaders and organizations need to focus today and in the future, and guided our innovation investments to build tools to support them. Here are seven keys to success for every IT and business leader to empower people for the new world of work—plus innovation in each area to deliver human ingenuity at scale – (1) Reimagine teamwork, culture, and social capital – digitally, (2) Prioritize wellbeing to help people focus and be their best, (3) Create a trusted, secure, modern experience for every employee, (4) Unlock the data, knowledge, and expertise of the entire organization, (5) Automate process and workflows to increase discontinuous innovation, (6) Include everyone in digital transformation, and (7) Help people learn, reinvent, and grow with the pace of change. | Resource: Microsoft Ignite 2020 Book of News

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2020

At Microsoft Ignite 2020, we announced a ton of new capabilities to help people stay connected, collaborate, and build solutions in Teams. This post outlines what’s new in: (1) Meetings, (2) Meeting room experiences, (3) Calling, (4) Chat and collaboration, (5) Microsoft 365 integrations, (6) Firstline Workers, (7) Healthcare, (8) Security and compliance, (9) Management, and (10) Power Platform and custom development.

2020 will be remembered as a year of historic transformation. The pandemic has changed the way businesses operate and people work. One thing that has not changed is our basic human nature and the need to feel safe. Being safe and feeling safe is what allows us to do more, create more, and have trust in the technology that connects us all. It’s no wonder, then, that cyber-security is so important right now. Digital security is about people—it’s about empowering defenders to defend and protect employees, data, work, and personal safety. It’s about making people and organizations resilient in an environment of unexpected change, like widespread remote work. Nearly overnight, organizations worldwide have had to enable remote workforces, support rapidly evolving business requirements, and steer to the next normal without knowing what that normal would be. All of this takes place against a backdrop of advanced threats and adversaries. For those responsible for securing their organization’s digital infrastructure, this has all come on top of what they were already navigating—levels of complexity that often translate into barriers for companies, their people, and the customers they serve. We’re delivering a new set of security, compliance, and identity innovations to help all customers simplify and modernize their environments by embracing the reality that the past seven months have likely reshaped the next 10 years of security and digital transformation.

In many organizations, world events have transformed technology adoption more in the past few months than in the past few years. Remote work and learning in virtual classrooms have accelerated the adoption of cloud services beyond anybody’s wildest expectations. Some organizations are now transitioning from remote work to hybrid work. Whatever the future holds, however, the workplace will no longer be either the home or the office but a fluid experience that spans both. At Microsoft, we’ve been intensely focused on our customers during this rapid transition—the teachers, the health care workers, the IT leaders who are trying to help their small business or global enterprise adjust to and thrive in a global pandemic. To support you through this transformation, we are moving faster than ever to bring you Microsoft 365, delivering a broader set of features than when we launched Office 365 in 2011. How will our capabilities come together to provide a holistic solution for organizations? First, we provide collaboration services with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Lists. Second, we provide employee engagement and communication services through SharePoint, Microsoft Stream, and Yammer. Third, we connect people to knowledge and expertise through Microsoft Search and Project Cortex. All these tools are part of an integrated experience and platform.

At Microsoft Ignite 2020 we announced that the next versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Skype for Business Server and Project Server will be available in the second half of 2021, and are only available with the purchase of a subscription license. Subscription entitles access to support, product updates, security and time zone patches. Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021. We also announced updates for the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard, Exchange Admin Center, lots of features for Outlook, and much more!

Related:

NOTEWORTHY

We heard you! Diagramming is much easier now in Visio for the web

Over the past few months, we’ve addressed several major asks from our Visio for the web users. We’re announcing some of these for this first time, like hyperlinks and copy diagrams across files, and recapping others that were released earlier this year, like export as image and multipage operations. Each of these is available for licensed users, although certain limited capabilities are available for Visio Viewer and unlicensed users. Read on for a quick overview of each feature.

Reminder: Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services

As previously announced, Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020. After this date, ongoing investments in the Office 365 cloud services – including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business – will proceed based on post-Office 2013 requirements. We recommend that organizations with Office 2013 clients consider migrating to Office 365 ProPlus. Support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 connections to Office 365 cloud services will continue until October 2023. Up to date information on current system requirements can be found under on the Office system requirements page, with related timelines available in the Office system requirements matrix.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Deploying Microsoft Teams across Microsoft hinged on good governance

When Microsoft moved to Microsoft Teams for all communications, it needed a good plan. More than 250,000 employees and licensed vendors would be affected by the shift, as would 600,000 guests that the company collaborates with on a regular basis. Too much was at stake to allow anything to go wrong. “Our foundation for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams governance within Microsoft is tied to how we manage and govern Microsoft 365 Groups inside the company,” Johnson says. “Groups are the common layer under Teams, SharePoint team sites, Yammer Communities, Outlook groups, and a lot more.” Governance refers to the policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that a company like Microsoft uses to help ensure their IT resources are being effectively deployed and managed, and that data security and compliance standards are in place while still allowing employees get their work done. An effective governance framework can streamline deploying solutions like Microsoft Teams, ensure all systems are secure and compliant, and generally make sure its technology does what it’s supposed to do. Put simply, governance is setting things up so people can be their most productive selves.

Enhancing the Planner web and mobile experience with a pair of updates

To tide you over until Ignite 2020, we’ve got a pair of feature enhancements to announce that improve the Planner web and mobile experiences. The first is the Filter by Progress (Completed) option for Planner web. As you know, completed tasks in Planner get moved to the bottom of your plan board and hidden under a disclosure widget—the official name of that twisty triangle. But those same completed tasks disappeared entirely from the Schedule view, and you couldn’t filter on them in the Charts view. We’ve now addressed both issues by adding completed tasks as a Progress filter option in both the Schedule and Charts view. In the Schedule view, completed tasks appear as a green bar; in the Charts view, you’ll see them in green in both the pie and bar chart. You can filter completed tasks alongside not started and in progress tasks, too, to see how your team is tracking against deadlines. You can also filter by completed tasks in the Board view. The second is the Copy links feature for Planner mobile. This feature works exactly like its name implies: in the Planner mobile app, you can copy a plan or task link and paste it anywhere else. This makes sharing your plans and tasks much easier, especially if you need input from others who aren’t actively members of your plan.

Best practices to simplify governing employee access across your applications, groups and teams

In the modern workforce, the emergence of hybrid cloud deployments and collaborative applications make it easy for employees to share information, data, and files with other internal as well as external users, helping them collaborate easily with vendors, business partners, contractors and customers. Managing all the access across different resources – Office groups, Teams, SharePoint sites, as well as your own applications and SaaS applications – is challenging. As requirements change with new applications being added, or users needing additional access rights, IT staff may not know who should have access or to which applications. To succeed at scale, an identity governance process must enable all users’ access to be able to change with their needs, without burdening IT staff to be involved in each access request. Azure AD entitlement management, a feature of Azure AD identity governance, helps organizations manage their access lifecycle at scale by automating request workflows, assignments, reviews, and expiration. You can empower users to request access to the resources they need. These requests and the resulting access can be approved and regularly reviewed by people across the organization who know whether someone should still have access.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-38

Welcome to the September 13 – 19, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were twenty-six additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Microsoft 365 Compliance, Yammer, Visio, and Outlook. Due to the large number of items, all of the roadmap items are in a separate post this week, Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-38.

There are a couple of new events listed in this week’s post. The “Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production” only has an on-demand session available for now. The Office 365 network connectivity team will hold office hours on Wednesday, September 23rd from 8am – 12pm Pacific. The spotlight event of the week is Microsoft Ignite, which runs from Tuesday, September 22nd – Thursday, September 24th.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include information on how to enable a seamless remote work experience for your users, a summary of the OneDrive roadmap updates for August 2020, the introduction of reactions in Yammer, the availability of the Microsoft Virtual Event Playbook, and lots of guides to Ignite 2020 for various services including Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, Stream, Outlook, Microsoft 365 Admin, Power Platform, and more.

Noteworthy items from last week include diagramming updates for Visio for the web, a friendly reminder regarding Office 2013 client connectivity to Office 365 services, a Microsoft IT Showcase on Teams governance, updates for Planner on the web and mobile app, and some best practices for simplifying governance for employee access across applications, groups and teams.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Twenty-six features were added to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap last week, so for this week the roadmap updates are detailed in a separate post, Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-38.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

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

Microsoft Ignite 2020

When: Tuesday, September 22, 2020 – Thursday, September 24, 2020 | Because the world is in unchartered territory with COVID-19, Microsoft Ignite will be launched as a complimentary digital event experience this year. Please join us to learn innovative ways to build solutions, migrate and manage your infrastructure, and connect with Microsoft experts and other technology professionals from around the globe. Registration is required. The session catalog and agenda builder are now available.

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Teams Chalk Talk: Do more with apps

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Office 365 Network Connectivity Office Hours – Online Edition

When: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 from 8:00am – 12:00pm PT | On Wednesday September 23 from 8am to 12noon PST the Office 365 network connectivity team will be online to take your questions. Set yourself a meeting request and come back here on Wednesday morning when this post will have been updated with a Teams link to connect. You can talk about our features, new Ignite announcements, or about our tooling for improving Office 365 network connectivity.

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

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Teams Chalk Talk: How to enable Teams for Firstline Worker engagement

Are you ready to start enabling Microsoft Teams as a single experience for productive conversations, smooth flow of information, simplified schedule management in a compliant and secure environment? This interactive workshop is designed to help you prioritize your starting scenario and develop a plan for a pilot for the tailored experience to suit the needs for your firstline co-workers. We’ll build upon best practices from Teams experts and make it real with examples from manufacturing, retail, hospitality, and transportation industries. Join us for an expert-led workshop for guidance on key decision points and implementation steps for digitally enabling your firstline workers with Microsoft Teams. In this workshop, you will learn: (1) How to identify scenarios that matter to your firstline workers and the best approach to implementing Teams from pilot to scale across your entire organization, (2) How to map scenarios to Microsoft Teams use cases, and (3) How to craft the right experience for your firstline workers in Teams by configuring apps and policies.

Wednesday, September 23, 2020 at 11am PT

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

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

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

Enable a Seamless Remote Work Experience for your Users

For many companies, providing remote work options was already a rapidly growing movement (+173% since 2005 according to Global Workplace Analytics). That was before the COVID-19 crisis, which has massively accelerated that trend and highlighted a number of remote work problems that require immediate remediation. The need to maintain security without sacrificing performance has generated unprecedented demands on enterprise IT to support work-from-anywhere productivity at a massive scale. Microsoft 365 is well positioned to help customers fulfill that demand, but high concurrency of users working from home generates a large volume of Microsoft 365 traffic which, if routed through forced tunnel VPN and on-premises network perimeters, causes rapid saturation and runs VPN infrastructure out of capacity. In this new reality, using VPN to access Microsoft 365 is no longer just a performance impediment, but a hard wall that not only impacts Microsoft 365 but critical business operations that still have to rely on the VPN to operate. For customers who connect their remote worker devices to the corporate network or cloud infrastructure over VPN, Microsoft recommends that key Microsoft 365 scenarios including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online are routed over a VPN split tunnel configuration. This VPN split tunnel guidance is in alignment with the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity principles, which are designed to work efficiently for remote users whilst still allowing an organization to maintain security and control over their connectivity. These connectivity principles can also be implemented for remote users very quickly with limited work yet achieve a significant positive impact on the problems outlined above. | Related: Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool now with report sharing is released to preview

OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – August 2020

We hope all of you are taking care of yourselves and staying safe. Here are the latest functionalities that rolled out to production in the month of August 2020, including: (1) Tasks in Word and Excel, (2) Update to comment notifications, (3) Mute comment notifications, and (4) OneDrive app for Surface Duo. | Related: OneDrive helps connect teachers and students in the new world of remote learning

Introducing Yammer Reactions

People come to Yammer to have meaningful conversations, to share knowledge, and to build communities. Conversations on Yammer can inform you about a colleague’s personal milestone, help you seek information from a colleague who is more than one degree away in your organization and help you recognize the amazing accomplishments of your team. You may need more than a ‘like’ to express yourself on these conversations. That is why we are rolling out reactions for every conversation or reply in the new Yammer. You can now express yourself through gratitude and celebration, laughter, and sadness-just like in real life. This gives you more ways to respond or express your feelings in the conversations you care most about, while gaining insight about how others feel about your content and conversations.

The Microsoft Virtual Event Playbook and Community are here!

Over the course of recent months, we have all embraced virtual events as an essential way to communicate and connect. Executive townhalls, employee training, digital conferences and customer engagements are just a few examples of popular scenarios. To simplify and accelerate your usage of Microsoft 365 for these scenarios we are delivering to you the Virtual Event Playbook. This comprehensive guidance provides you with information and tools to deliver seamless events easily and quickly for your audiences. This initial playbook covers the most common scenarios that we have seen and the guidance within it has been gathered from product engineering, field consultants, MVP’s, Microsoft Partners and others across our company. It is the comprehensive and official guidance from Microsoft for these services. We are currently working on additional modules for large scale custom events, device integration and industry specialties. We will be rapidly updating this content as new features become available.

Your Guide to Microsoft Teams @ Ignite 2020

This will be the first ever digital Microsoft Ignite, and Microsoft Teams is bringing you an amazing lineup of content all-digital event experience. Given we’re doing things a little bit differently this year, we want to walk you through what your journey will look like. We’ve created over 40 sessions that span the breadth of Teams so you can hear about the newest product capabilities, get your questions answered, and learn how to create a resilient, inclusive, and connected workplace with Microsoft Teams. For a full list of sessions, check out the Teams digital brochure embedded at the bottom of this blog and bookmark this brochure link for future reference.

Related:

NOTEWORTHY

We heard you! Diagramming is much easier now in Visio for the web

Reminder: Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services

Microsoft IT Showcase: Deploying Microsoft Teams across Microsoft hinged on good governance

Enhancing the Planner web and mobile experience with a pair of updates

Best practices to simplify governing employee access across your applications, groups and teams

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-28

Welcome to the July 5 – 11, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were thirty-two features added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, with the vast majority for Microsoft Teams. Due to the large number of items, all of the roadmap items are in a separate post this week, Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-28.

Sessions for the various Teams-focused events continue to be added here and there, so check again if you haven’t been able to find one that lines up with your schedule. An “Ask Microsoft Anything” (AMA) for the New Yammer on Thursday, July 23rd at 9am Pacific is the only brand new event. This week’s spotlight event is “Integrate apps to do more with Teams” with four sessions this week – 2 on Monday, July 13th, and one each on Wednesday, July 15th and Thursday, July 16th.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include major announcements for Microsoft Teams, some new on-demand training for several Office 365 services, a new RecoverableItems experience in Exchange Online, the June 2020 updates for Project on the web, and a look at how to protect your remote workforce from application-based attacks.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as a couple of reminders about upcoming planned service changes (Office 2013 client connectivity to Office 365 services and discontinuation of Classic usage and popularity reports), an announcement regarding the end of support for SharePoint 2010 workflows in Microsoft 365, and the July 2020 feature updates for Workplace Analytics.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

There were thirty-two features added to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap last week, so for this week the roadmap updates are detailed in a separate post, Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-28.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Do more with apps

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

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

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): The New Yammer

When: Thursday, July 23, 2020 at 9:00am PT | Bring all your questions and feedback about the new Yammer (available in public preview) to this ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA) on Thursday, July 23, 2020, 9:00-10:00 AM PT. AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. Members of the Yammer team will be online during this one-hour event to respond directly to your posts. Join in the Yammer AMA discussion space, and add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Webinar: What’s new and upcoming in OneDrive?

When: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 at 9:00am PT | As the business world shifts to a new normal, digital transformation is taking place at a faster pace than ever before. Safely accessing, collaborating and sharing content remotely is becoming increasingly important. Files are often the starting point for getting work done and staying connected. Memos, presentations, photos, videos—these are the conduit for more fruitful interactions. OneDrive is a foundational product in our effort to build a seamless, connected experience in Microsoft 365. It cuts across Microsoft products so you can access and share your files from most endpoints, like Microsoft Teams. We’re excited to announce new OneDrive features for a more connected, flexible and secure files experience across Microsoft 365 . Join us for a free webinar to learn about new and upcoming innovations in OneDrive like Add to OneDrive, Sync admin reports, File sharing in Teams, Information barriers and more. This session is followed by an “Ask me anything” session at https://aka.ms/OneDriveAMA.

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

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

Teams Introduction for Educators and Staff

When: Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 8:00am PT | You are invited to a free webinar tailored for education. Learn how universities and schools are using Microsoft Teams for course delivery with students and staff collaboration. Hosted by the Microsoft Product Group, this webinar covers an introduction and best practices for academics using Microsoft Teams. Agenda: (1) Overview of Microsoft Teams for Education, (2) Best Practices for communication and collaboration, and (3) Using Class Teams with your students for assignments, online learning and digital skills. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

BLOG ROUNDUP

Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning

We’ve reached an inflection point. As the global response to COVID-19 evolves, communities around the world have moved from an era of “remote everything” into a more hybrid model of work, learning, and life. And as we all scramble to keep up, the future of work and education is being shaped before our eyes. At Microsoft, we’ve spent the last few months learning from our customers and studying how they use our tools. We’ve also worked with experts across virtual reality, AI, and productivity research to help understand the future of work. We’re announcing a set of new features in Microsoft Teams that make virtual interactions more natural, more engaging, and ultimately, more human. These features offer three key benefits for people at work and in education. First, they help you feel more connected with your team and reduce meeting fatigue. Second, they make meetings more inclusive and engaging. And third, they help streamline your work and save time. It’s all about enabling people everywhere to collaborate, to stay connected, and to discover new ways to be productive from anywhere.

Train your mind and the tech will follow. This series of training videos covers the value and recent updates across SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Teams, Project Cortex, Yammer, and Stream – including information for employees, admins, and developers – all in the context of scenarios supported within Microsoft 365 across teamwork and employee engagement. It is all here in one blog post, inline… consume at your leisure. Scroll down and learn about all as you go or click each title in the grid below to jump down the page to watch specific sessions – each with related links to learn more.

Project for the web – June 2020 Update

This post is a summary of the latest features for Project on the web. For June 2020, updates include: (1) Copy Project – You can copy an existing project and use it to create a new project. This feature should now be available to all Project for the web users, (2) View persistence – Collapsing summary tasks and custom column width in Grid view will remain the same when you reload or reopen your projects, (3) Office 365 user view to Project and Roadmap – All O365 users should be able to access Project and Roadmap as guests. The article also has a few soon-to-be-released features including custom fields at the task level, the ability to add roadmap reports to the Power BI template, and Teams integration for Project and Roadmap.

A New RecoverableItems Experience Comes to Exchange Online!

We are excited to announce that RecoverableItems, a tenant admin PowerShell cmdlet, has shipped to the preview version of Exchange Admin Center with a new UI! RecoverableItems has proven itself time and time again to be a fantastic cmdlet for tenant admins to quickly manage mailbox item deletion scenarios. Our team received feedback that because this functionality only existed in PowerShell, it only catered to power admins who have the expertise to write PowerShell commands, leaving out smaller customers who may not have such a user as a tenant admin. This left a big gap between the cmdlet’s potential and usage. We felt we didn’t have to sacrifice one for another, and there could be a win-win outcome that gives power users the freedom to directly use our PowerShell cmdlet, while unlocking the potential to reach more admins. Furthermore, we believe UI functionality for RecoverableItems will generally make life easier for all.

Protecting your remote workforce from application-based attacks like consent phishing

The global pandemic has dramatically shifted how people work. As a result, organizations around the world have scaled up cloud services to support collaboration and productivity from home. We’re also seeing more apps leverage Microsoft’s identity platform to ensure seamless access and integrated security as cloud app usage explodes, particularly in collaboration apps such as Zoom, Webex Teams, Box and Microsoft Teams. With increased cloud app usage and the shift to working from home, security and how employees access company resources are even more top of mind for companies. While application use has accelerated and enabled employees to be productive remotely, attackers are looking at leveraging application-based attacks to gain unwarranted access to valuable data in cloud services. While you may be familiar with attacks focused on users, such as email phishing or credential compromise, application-based attacks, such as consent phishing, is another threat vector you must be aware of. We wanted to share one of the ways application-based attacks can target the valuable data your organization cares about, and what you can do today to stay safe.

NOTEWORTHY

Reminder: Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services

Reminder: Classic usage and popularity reports to be discontinued

Classic usage and popularity reports are in the process of being removed and will no longer be available after August 7, 2020. Instead, users will be able to find site usage data through the modern Site Usage report. The data that’s represented in the modern Site Usage report includes data from both classic and modern sites. The data from the classic popularity reports will not be available after August 7, 2020. If it’s required, you can download and save historical data from these reports before August 7, 2020.

Support update for SharePoint 2010 workflows in Microsoft 365

Modern business process is essential for transforming organizational productivity in Microsoft 365. Since the release of SharePoint workflows, Microsoft has evolved workflow orchestration to not only encompass SharePoint, but all the productivity services you use with Microsoft 365 and beyond. Microsoft Power Automate connects to all Microsoft 365 services and over 220 services to let an enterprise build custom workflows. With the continued investment in Power Automate as the universal solution to workflow, Microsoft is retiring SharePoint 2010 workflows. For customers using SharePoint 2010 workflows, we recommend migrating to Power Automate during 2020 to maintain continuity in any business process. Starting August 1st, 2020, SharePoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for newly created tenants. Starting November 1st, 2020, Microsoft will begin to remove the ability to run or create SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants. | Resource: SharePoint 2010 Workflow Retirement

Announcing GA: Mark new files as “sensitive by default” in OneDrive & SharePoint

When new files are added to SharePoint or OneDrive in Microsoft 365, it takes a while for them to be crawled and indexed. It takes additional time for the Office Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy to scan the content and apply rules to help protect sensitive content. If external sharing is turned on, sensitive content could be shared and accessed by guests before the Office DLP rule finishes processing. Instead of turning off external sharing entirely, you can address this issue by using a new PowerShell cmdlet. The cmdlet prevents guests from accessing newly added files until at least one Office DLP policy scans the content of the file. If the file has no sensitive content based on the DLP policy, then guests can access the file. If the policy identifies sensitive content, then guests will not be able to access the file. It is worth mentioning that we have the scan performance much better so that external users do not have to wait long before accessing a non-sensitive file. In 95% of the cases the entire process should be done in less than 5 minutes. | Resource: Mark new files as sensitive by default

Workplace Analytics July 2020 feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for July 2020. (1) Updated Business continuity report – This report now appears in the Microsoft Productivity Score area of the M365 admin center. It is available to any M365 customer tenant that has at least 100 active M365 users. Microsoft admins can access the report and they can share it with their business leaders. In addition, if you’re an admin or a senior leader, the Business continuity report helps you understand how Workplace Analytics can help you learn and do more. Selecting Take action on any of these reports opens a pane that describes both general best practices and the benefits of diving deeper into information that Workplace Analytics can provide. (2) New organizational network analysis person-to-person query and metrics – Workplace Analytics now offers a new organizational network analysis (ONA) query and two new accompanying metrics. Measuring the quality, or strength, of an employee’s connections can help improve organizational functioning in various ways. (3) Increased number of non-global partitions – Based on feedback from multiple customers, we are now increasing to ten the number of non-global partitions, each of which can contain 10,000 licensed users. This feature is available to customers who have a current engagement with Workplace Analytics Customer Solutions.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-19

Welcome to the May 3 – 9, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Nineteen features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including items for Teams, SharePoint, Outlook (Web), Azure Active Directory, Azure Information Protection, Excel, Project, and Visio.

The events keep coming! Numerous sessions for existing Teams-related event series have been added – even since last week’s post. New events added include more EDU-focused Teams training sessions, and an “eDiscovery for Microsoft Teams” webinar on Thursday, May 14th with EMEA and US options. The spotlight event of the week is “Microsoft Teams Security” at 9am Pacific on Wednesday, May 13th.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include the OneDrive Roadmap Roundup for April 2020, details on a new Reply All Storm Protection feature in Exchange Online, the latest updates for Microsoft To Do, and several Teams articles.

Noteworthy item highlights updates for Workplace Analytics and Azure Active Directory, availability of screen recording in Microsoft Stream, and information on the timing of opt-in Microsoft Search in Bing through Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise (formerly known as Office 365 ProPlus).

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
Excel backstage: Add-in ready templates now enabled	54964	June CY2020	Added: 05 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Excel, Visio Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel templates are now enabled in the Excel backstage. There are category-specific templates for basic flowchart, cross-functional flowchart and org chart. These add-in ready templates make discoverability easy.
Export your Visio diagrams as images with Download as Image in Visio for the web	61492	June CY2020	Added: 05 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Visio With the Download as Image feature in Visio for the web, you can now save your Visio diagrams locally in PNG or JPEG format with just a few clicks. Various customization options allow you to specify the diagram area (current page vs. multiple pages), resolution, format, and whether to have a transparent background.
Office 365 G5 GCC High and DOD offering name update	63967	May CY2020	Added: 05 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365, GCC High, DOD Office 365 G5 GCC High, and DOD offerings will be rebranded to specify the inclusion of Audio Conferencing with BYOT (Bring Your Own Trunk) calling capabilities. Previous offering names: Office 365 GCC High G5 and Office 365 DoD G5. New offering names: Office 365 GCC High G5 with Audio Conferencing – BYOTOffice 365 and DoD G5 with Audio Conferencing – BYOT.
Microsoft Teams supports Egnyte as a cloud storage provider	63706	May CY2020	Added: 05 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams We are adding support for Egnyte as part of our growing list of third-party cloud storage providers.
Visio Data Visualizer Add-in for Excel now available in multiple languages	62950	Q4 CY2020	Added: 05 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Excel, Visio You can now create diagrams using the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel in different languages. The add-in is supported in all languages currently supported in Visio for the web.
Single sign-on enabled for the Visio Data Visualizer add-in	62455	Q4 CY2020	Added: 05 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Visio Single sign-on (SSO) is now enabled for the Visio Data Visualizer add-in. If you are already signed into Excel, you will not have to sign in separately to the add-in, you will automatically be signed in with the same account.
Azure AD Connect cloud provisioning	63538	(not listed)	Added: 05 May 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Azure AD As a complement to Azure AD Connect sync, seamlessly provision identities from multiple disconnected on-premises AD forest to Azure AD with Azure AD Connect cloud provisioning. Lightweight agents move the heavy lifting for provisioning to the cloud, granting high availability in your hybrid identity environment and ensuring you can manage identities across all of your organizations from a single cloud control plane.
Microsoft Teams: Multi-Window Meetings and Calling experiences	57294	June CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Multi-window experiences are coming to Teams meetings and calling. Users will have the ability to pop out meetings and calling into separate windows to help them optimize their workflow. These experiences can be turned on directly within Teams for PC and Mac clients.
AIP scanner for on-premises available for Government clouds	63657	June CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: AIP, GCC Azure Information Protection Scanner helps you manage and protect your on-premises data. The scanner can be configured to periodically scan your on premises repositories such as File Servers and on-premises SharePoint servers to discover, label and protect sensitive data based on company policies. This is particularly important in scenarios where you’re planning data migration from on-premises to cloud storage or working towards meeting regulatory and compliance requirements such as GDPR.
Office 365: Office 365 Advanced Message Encryption for Government clouds	63658	June CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 With Advanced Message Encryption in Office 365, you can control sensitive emails shared outside the organization with automatic policies. You configure these policies to identify sensitive information types such as PII, Financial, or Health IDs, or you can use keywords to enhance protection. Once configured, you can pair policies with custom branded email templates and then add an expiration date for extra control of emails that fit the policy. Also, admins can further control encrypted emails accessed externally through a secure web portal by revoking access to the mail at any time.
AIP Unified Labeling client for Windows available for Government clouds	63660	June CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: AIP, GCC The Azure Information Protection unified labeling client for Windows is a downloadable client for organizations that use sensitivity labels to classify and protect documents and emails. This client also has a viewer for organizations that don’t have their own information protection infrastructure but want to consume content that has been protected by other organizations that use a Rights Management service from Microsoft.
Outlook on the web: Suggested replies	63974	May CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web We are expanding suggested replies in Outlook on the web to customers in Europe with support for French and Italian.
Microsoft Teams: Ability to add distribution lists and modern groups to scheduled meetings	63987	May CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams We will soon release the ability to add distribution lists and modern groups to scheduled meetings in Teams. With this change, both distribution lists and modern groups will be discoverable from the people picker when scheduling meetings in Teams.
Outlook on the web: Text predictions	63795	May CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web Using smart technology, Outlook will predict text while you type. Just use the Tab key to accept the text prediction.
Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard: Support for full hybrid to two or more tenants	63991	Q4 CY2020	Added: 06 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Exchange We are adding support to allow the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard to establish full hybrid from a single on-premise organization, to two or more tenants.
Microsoft Teams: raise hands in Teams meetings for GCC	64044	June CY2020	Added: 08 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC The new raise hands feature in Teams allows meeting attendees to identify that they wish to speak by toggling the hand icon in the meeting control bar, making it easier to actively participate in meetings. When a meeting participant has raised their hand, an icon will appear next to their name in the roster view as well as their profile picture or video on the main meeting stage. Both the attendee who raised their hand and any presenter can lower individual hands in the meeting. Raise hands will be available for both PC, Mac, and web-based clients to start, with mobile applications quickly following. We will be rolling this out starting in mid-June for GCC, followed by GCCH two weeks later, and finally DoD environments two weeks following.
Custom fields at the Task level	43296	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: (not listed) Task custom fields enables you to add details to your tasks so you can manage your project more effectively. Fields such as numbers and dates can be created for tasks and shown in the Grid view and Task Details pane.
Project and Roadmap app in Microsoft Teams	51138	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Project The Project and Roadmap app in Microsoft Teams makes it easy to track, manage, and collaborate on all aspects of a team project in one place.
Office 365 Advanced Message Encryption: Email revocation by end user	63992	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 May 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 As part of Office 365 Advance Message Encryption, we are extending the email revocation capabilities to the end user. Previously, you had to be an admin to revoke an already sent message; with this update, end users will have this capability as well.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Meet the new Yammer Webinar

When: Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at 9:00am PT | Join the Yammer product team – discover how Yammer has been rebuilt to power community through leadership engagement, corporate communications, knowledge sharing, and a modern employee experience. This webinar will show you UI and capabilities, All Company updates, the new Yammer app for Microsoft Teams, and more! Be sure to add the event to your calendar.

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

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

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

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft 365: Part 5 – Managing Windows 10

When: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 9:00am PT | Organizations everywhere are pivoting to a remote work environment, putting the needs of their employees, customers, and communities first. In an effort to continue supporting individuals and organizations each day, we’ve created a new three-part webcast series focusing on enabling remote work. As technology plays a vital role, now more than ever, we’ve paired the webcast series with helpful videos and guidance, to enable you to provide your employees with access to the right tools, resources, and expertise they need to become experts at working remotely. Join us for practical advice on managing Windows 10 devices, monthly updates, and user-owned devices for your remote workforce. Be sure to add the event to your calendar. Note: The recordings for previous parts of this series are available on the same page linked above.

Webcast: Microsoft Teams Security

When: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 9:00am PT | Wherever you are in your Microsoft Teams journey, we want to be sure that your users have a secure environment to communicate and collaborate. On Wednesday, May 13th, at 12 noon eastern, Microsoft’s Craig Eidelman and Pete Anello will walk us through securing Microsoft Teams. This webcast will include: (a) Ensuring that user identities are secure to access Teams, (b) Protecting the Teams Application, (c) Securing the data coming in and out of Teams, and (d) Security around Teams Meetings. Also, be sure to add the event to your calendar.

Microsoft Teams: Learn to use apps

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

Microsoft 365 Training Day: Journey to Teams | Virtual Event

When: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 from 10:00am – 2:00pm PT | See how Microsoft Teams meets the requirements of a connected workforce with a cloud-based communication solution that combines chat, video meetings, file storage, and app integration. Learn to deploy, configure, and administer Microsoft Teams to optimize your company’s collaboration strategy. Sessions include: (1) What’s new in Microsoft Teams, (2) Intelligent communication in Microsoft Teams, (3) Path from Skype for Business to Teams, (4) Managing Microsoft Teams effectively, and (5) Streamline business processes with the Teams development platform.

Do more with apps in Microsoft Teams

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

eDiscovery for Microsoft Teams

While eDiscovery provides a range of search, hold, and export functionality, advanced eDiscovery gives compliance administrators more tools to identify data sources and analyze their contents. Need to conduct an internal investigation of Teams content? We’ve got you covered. Join us to learn how to complete common eDiscovery processes on Teams content.

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Teams Introduction for Educators and Staff

When: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 at 8:00am PT | You are invited to a free webinar tailored for education. Learn how universities and schools are using Microsoft Teams for course delivery with students and staff collaboration. Hosted by the Microsoft Product Group, this webinar covers an introduction and best practices for academics using Microsoft Teams. Agenda: (1) Overview of Microsoft Teams for Education, (2) Best Practices for communication and collaboration, and (3) Using Class Teams with your students for assignments, online learning and digital skills. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft 365: Part 6 – Devices (Surface, Partners, Teams)

When: Wednesday, May 20, 2020 at 9:00am PT | Organizations everywhere are pivoting to a remote work environment, putting the needs of their employees, customers, and communities first. In an effort to continue supporting individuals and organizations each day, we’ve created a new three-part webcast series focusing on enabling remote work. As technology plays a vital role, now more than ever, we’ve paired the webcast series with helpful videos and guidance, to enable you to provide your employees with access to the right tools, resources, and expertise they need to become experts at working remotely. Join us to hear how modern devices from Surface and Partners plus Teams peripherals will enable your employees to collaborate, stay productive and work remotely securely. Be sure to add the event to your calendar. Note: The recordings for previous parts of this series are available on the same page linked above.

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

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

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

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Windows Autopilot

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

Teams Introduction for Educators and Staff

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

Teams Advanced for IT Pros

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

BLOG ROUNDUP

OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – April 2020

We hope all of you are taking care of yourselves and staying safe. The OneDrive team is hard at work to maintain service uptake as well as roll out features to provide quality product performance and experience. Here are the latest functionalities that landed in production in the month of April-2020: (1) Sensitivity labels with protection for Office files in OneDrive and SharePoint, (2) Version history in desktop, and (3) Ability to delete a locked file.

Reply All Storm Protection in Exchange Online

When a reply all mail storm happens in your organization, it can disrupt business continuity and in some cases even throttle the rest of your organization’s email for a period of time. At Microsoft Ignite 2019 we announced the Reply All Storm Protection feature to help reduce the impact that reply all storms can have on large organizations. Now we’re pleased to announce that the feature is now rolling out in Office 365 worldwide. Initially the Reply All Storm Protection feature will mostly benefit large organizations who have large distribution lists. When the feature detects a likely reply all storm taking place on a large DL it will block subsequent attempts to reply all to the thread and will return an NDR to the sender. The reply all block will remain in place for several hours. Initially the Reply All Storm Protection feature will use the following condition to detect a reply all storm: 10 reply all-s to over 5000 recipients within 60 minutes. It will then block subsequent replies to the thread for 4 hours.

New features come to Microsoft To Do

We’ve been a little quiet on the blog recently, because we’ve been hard at work delivering updates for you. We thought we’d take some time to let you know all that we’ve been up to. One of your top-requested features is here – we now have both All and Completed smart lists. Head to your settings to turn them on. One of our most exciting new updates is rolling out now, starting with Android this week and coming soon to other platforms. We’ll now give you a Today, Tomorrow, and Week view in your Planned list. Other new features include: (1) See your notifications on the iOS app badge, (2) Print your lists (available on all platforms), (3) Change how you add your tasks (new at top or bottom), and (4) we’ve also made it easier to see your completed tasks within your lists.

Announcing general availability of sensitivity labels with protection in SharePoint and OneDrive

At Microsoft, our goal is to provide a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data across your digital estate – in Microsoft 365 cloud services, on-premises, third-party SaaS applications, and more. With Microsoft Information Protection (MIP), we are building a unified set of capabilities for classification, labeling, and protection not only in Office apps, but also in Microsoft 365 productivity services like OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Exchange Online. Sensitivity labels are central to how your business-critical data is protected using Microsoft Information Protection (MIP). We are excited to announce general availability of sensitivity labels with protection for Office files in SharePoint and OneDrive. This is one more step to providing you comprehensive protection across documents and emails in Microsoft 365 services. Now your users can apply sensitivity labels, with protection policies, not just in Office apps on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android but also in Office on the web. Users will see sensitivity as an option on the ribbon of the Office on the web, and as the applied label name on the status bar.

Joining an online meeting: 9 reasons it’s better to click the link than use the dial-in phone numbers

As businesses around the world have transitioned to working from home, people are conducting online meetings more than ever to connect with others and get work done. Many Teams meeting invites include both a “Join Teams Meeting” link and dial-in phone numbers. Dialing into a meeting is enabled by the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the same network that handles “landline” phone calls. Joining an online meeting via the meeting link is enabled by Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which enables meetings through an internet connection. If you have a reliable internet connection, joining via the meeting join link will provide you a richer experience in your meeting. Here are nine ways VoIP provides a great experience that helps you get the most out of your online meetings.

Related:

NOTEWORTHY

Networking while working from home VPN split tunnel, OneDrive download speed, and buffer bloat

We published an update for https://connectivity.office.com today which adds a new test for OneDrive download speed and for buffer bloat. These support common networking tests for Office 365 users working from home. 1) OneDrive download speed – this shows the megabytes per second available to the user from the OneDrive and SharePoint service front door. 2) Buffer bloat – this shows a measurement of the increased latency due to congestion in your home router when the ISP bandwidth is full. VPN split tunnel testing was previously added as described here.

Workplace Analytics May 2020 Feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for May 2020. This month’s update covers our latest features: (1) Power BI – Workplace Analytics connector now supports people and meeting queries, (2) Workplace Analytics insights for people managers, (3) Differential privacy, (4) Standardize working hours for query output, and (5) Analyst experience when auto-refresh queries can’t run.

Screen Recording For Training Videos and Communications with Microsoft Stream

The new screen recording tool in Microsoft Stream gives everyone a way to create videos for sharing knowledge, remote learning, leadership updates and other communications across your organization. Easily create new videos with the web-based tool—no need to download anything to get started. Just open the latest version of Edge or Chrome and your Stream portal then, from the Create dropdown list, select Record screen. Video creators can use options to record any window or screen, add mic or system audio, and include webcam for a personal touch. Screen recording is beginning to roll out to customers and will continue to roll out over the new few weeks. More functionality, including editing capabilities, will be coming soon!

Update on timing of opt-in Microsoft Search in Bing through Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

We’re updating Microsoft 365 IT Admins on availability of the Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension for Chrome. Based on customer feedback, this capability will be opt-in and for AD-joined devices only. As we’ve stated previously, unless an admin chooses to install the extension it will not be deployed. Once deployed by opting in through Microsoft 365 Admin Center, the user remains in control and can revert to their original search engine settings at any time. With Version 2005 of Office, we are starting to roll out the admin capability to easily deploy this extension to Insider builds through Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise on Windows devices. Note: Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise is the new name for Office 365 ProPlus. | Resource: Microsoft Search in Bing and Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

Updates to Azure AD Conditional Access report-only mode, insights & reporting, and troubleshooting

As organizations adjust to employees working from home, they’ve told us their priority is enabling employees to work remotely while maintaining security, productivity, and collaboration. Azure AD Conditional Access can ensure that the right people have the access to resources they need from wherever they are. Earlier this month, we answered some frequently asked questions about using Azure AD Conditional Access to secure remote access, and we’re now announcing three updates to help you understand the impact of Azure AD Conditional Access policies from testing through deployment. These updates are: (1) Report-only mode is now generally available, (2) Insights and reporting workbook is now generally available, and (3) New policy details blade is now in public preview.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | December 15 – 21, 2019

Season’s Greetings and welcome to the December 15 – 21, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were twelve features added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Yammer, and Kaizala.

New January 2020 sessions have been added for most existing event series. This week’s spotlight event is the “Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance” session on Thursday, December 26th at 12pm Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blog posts include a summary of what’s new in Microsoft Teams for December 2019, updated guidance for organizing Teams channels, details on the retirement of Office 365 Video and migration timelines to Microsoft Stream, and the December 2019 feature updates for Workplace Analytics.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as the “What’s New with Microsoft 365” video for December 2019, the latest updates to the Microsoft 365 admin center, guidance on troubleshooting the Office Client Policy Service, and information on how the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Identity team is advancing Azure AD availability.

NOTE: Typically there isn’t much content published during the holiday week. As a result, there will not be a weekly digest posted on Monday, December 30, 2019. I am going to take a little extra time and spend it with my family. Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season!

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Outlook for Android: Discover relevant files in Search	58733	Q2 CY2020	Added: 16 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook -Android In Search, find a feed of Office 365 files that are connected to you based on ongoing collaboration activity within your company.
Website tabs in Teams GCC High	59839	December CY2019	Added: 17 December 2019 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Teams This feature lets users in GCC High add a website tab in Teams.
Outlook on the web – view and edit Sticky Notes	59840	January CY2020	Added: 17 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web From Outlook on the web, view and edit the notes you create in Outlook for Windows and Sticky Notes right in the “Notes” folder, now with a new look. If you sign in with the same account across apps, your notes will sync across them like Sticky Notes for Windows 10, OneNote for iPhone and Android Phone, and Microsoft Launcher for Android Phone.
Outlook on the web – Add a personal calendar	54015	January CY2020	Added: 17 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web Your time includes both personal and work events, so you should be able to see both in one place. Outlook on the web will give you the option to connect a personal calendar (Outlook.com or Google Calendar) to your Office 365 account. With this, you can see both kind of events in one place.
SharePoint: Stock Images	59834	Q2 CY2020	Added: 17 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Free to use stock images will be available in the SharePoint image file picker.
Usage Analytics Report for Office 365 ProPlus and Forms	59845	Q2 CY2020	Added: 17 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 ProPlus, Forms Usage analytics in Microsoft 365 will add a new report that will help you better understand how Office 365 Pro Plus and Forms is be used in your organization.
SharePoint admin – Azure Active Directory Global Reader Role	59984	January CY2020	Added: 19 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint We have introduced a new Azure Active Directory (AAD) built-in role called “Global Reader.” Global Reader is the read-only counterpart to Global admin. Users in this role can read settings and administrative information across Microsoft 365 services, but cannot take management actions. When the Global Reader role initially launched, it did not support the SharePoint admin center. And now, a “Global Reader” will see ‘SharePoint’ listed in left pane under Admin Centers in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Users who are assigned this role will have read-only access to all info and settings in the new SharePoint admin center. Note: This feature is related to the global admin role introduced in Message Center post: MC191391 (September 2019); roadmap ID: 55096.
Announce when PSTN participants join/leave the meeting	59919	January CY2020	Added: 19 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Any user who schedules a Teams meeting will now see a new setting in Meeting Options page of a meeting to control the announcement sound when a PSTN/dial-in participant joins or leaves the meeting.
Enable organizers to change lobby settings for PSTN meeting participants	54418	January CY2020	Added: 19 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Any user who schedules a Microsoft Teams meeting will now see a separate setting to control the lobby for PSTN participants in the Meeting Options page of a given meeting.
New experiences for scheduling and attending Live Events in Yammer	59993	Q2 CY2020	Added: 20 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Yammer Schedule and produce a Live Event in Yammer using webcams and desktop and file sharing from Microsoft Teams. Create and manage the entire event in just a few clicks and broadcast from your device.
Kaizala – Consent for Custom Actions	59705	December CY2019	Added: 21 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Kaizala This will allow users to provide consent before accessing a custom action card. A permission dialogue will be activated when the user uses a Custom Action either from the action palette or chat via the “Discover” tab in Kaizala. It will only be shown for the first time to the user per custom action card.
Kaizala – User Admin Role Deprecation	59706	December CY2019	Added: 21 December 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Kaizala The user admin role will no longer be able to manage Kaizala for their organization. Instead, the Kaizala admin within the admin portal will be able to manage Kaizala in their organization, and have full access to all Kaizala management features and data.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

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

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

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

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT expert roundtable – Modernizing our SharePoint experiences

When: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 10:00am PT | In this webinar, experts from both the product group, and the IT side of Microsoft will share candid insights and best practices around modernizing employee experiences including Enterprise Search, Microsoft’s home site (MSW), and the latest on how we manage our authoritative portals. Our experts will also take your questions about our strategy for delivering targeted communications and enabling employees to find the content they need.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT expert roundtable – Transforming how employees collaborate on files

When: Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at 10:00am PT | For today’s mobile workforce, providing users with access to the content they need at any time, from any place, and on any device is important. During this webinar, experts from the Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) team answers audience questions about our strategy for file management across mobile web, sync and sharing using OneDrive, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

BLOG ROUNDUP

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2019

As we near the end of 2019, we can’t help but reflect on all of the incredible ways that Teams has evolved this past year, and how so many of our customers were able to use Teams to help them transform their own workplace collaboration. And a big thank you to all of you who have implemented Teams at your own organizations, and shared feedback with us along the way! Read on to learn what’s new in Teams in the month of December, including: (1) Teams for Linux client, (2) Native federation for 1:1 chats with users outside your organization, (3) Add additional participants to meeting chats, (4) Meeting roles – presenter or attendee, (5) Video calling on Chrome, (6) Citrix VDI support general availability, and much more. | Related: Microsoft Teams Rooms December Update | Jira Server App for Microsoft Teams

Updated Guidance for Organizing Teams and Channels, including Private Channels

With the release of private channels in Microsoft Teams we wanted to update our guidance for organizing your hub for teamwork. Bringing people together across your organization is powerful and we want you to have the best experience with our product. With the release of private channels you can now have focused conversation areas with a subset of members of your team alongside the standard channel conversations that drive collaboration across the broader team. Our TechTip video will guide you through a variety of examples of team and channel structure, remind you of the differences between chat and channel conversations and help you to get the most from private channels in Microsoft Teams.

Office 365 Video Retirement & Migration Timelines

We are excited to announce that Office 365 Video customers in most regions are now able to migrate their video content to Microsoft Stream using an administration migration tool. Microsoft Stream builds on learnings from Office 365 Video to bring intelligence and deeper integration into Office 365 and beyond. Since the launch of Microsoft Stream, we’ve been busy improving the platform in preparation for Office 365 Video migrations. Customers who are currently using Office 365 Video should begin planning their migration to Microsoft Stream. Office 365 Video and the associated iOS app will eventually be retired, all timelines and details can be found in this post.

Workplace Analytics – December 2019: Feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for December 2019. This update covers our latest feature, an update to the query-visualization feature. In August 2019, we introduced the capability to visualize Person query results without having to leave Workplace Analytics. Analysts could create charts, modify them, and examine the new visualizations in real time. However, they could not save their work, create and retain modified versions, or recover changes following a crash. All these things are now possible!

Data governance and retention in your Microsoft 365 tenant—a secure and highly capable solution

Data governance has relied on transferring data to a third-party for hosting an archive service. Emails, documents, chat logs, and third-party data (Bloomberg, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) must be saved in a way that it can’t be changed and won’t be lost. Data governance is part of IT at the enterprise level. It serves regulatory compliance, can facilitate eDiscovery, and is part of a business strategy to protect the integrity of the data estate. However, there are downsides. In addition to acquisition costs, the archive is one more system that needs ongoing maintenance. When data is moved to another system, the risk footprint is increased, and data can be compromised in transit. An at-rest archive can become another target of attack. When you take the data to the archive, you miss the opportunity to reason over it with machine learning to extract additional business value and insights to improve the governance program. The game changer is to have reliable, auditable retention inside the Microsoft 365 tenant. This way, all the security controls and visibility in Microsoft 365 and Azure remain in effect. There is no additional archive to be attacked, protected, or monitored. In addition, there is no third-party archiving system to be purchased or maintained. All the machine learning and correlation tools—always on and native to Microsoft 365—are reasoning over your data estate. Dark data can be illuminated.

NOTEWORTHY

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

Format: Video (16 minutes) | This video recaps what’s new with Microsoft 365 in December 2019, including: (1) Microsoft Fluid Framework, (2) Mobile Productivity, (3) Microproductivity, and (4) Fluent for iOS and Android.

What’s new in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Updated: 20 December 2019 | The November and December 2019 updates for the Microsoft 365 admin center are combined, as there were very few announcements following the Ignite 2019 conference. A few highlights include: (1) broader rollout of the Global Reader role, (2) a new Settings page, and (3) lots of newly available training, this month from Microsoft Learn.

Update to the Power Apps and Power Automate Administration and Governance Whitepaper is now available

The whitepaper, first released in Aug 2018, has been updated to include latest features as well as best practices for planning, securing, deploying, and supporting applications built on the Power Platform. The whitepaper includes the following sections: (1) Platform Architecture, (2) Secure, (3) Monitor, (4) Alert & Act, (5) Deploy, ALM and Azure DevOps, and (6) Educate and Support. This whitepaper will help give you a better understanding of what currently is in your environment, how to proactively plan for applications being developed and deployed and finally how to handle day to day administrative tasks to manage deployments.

Troubleshooting Office Client Policy Service (OCPS)

The Office cloud policy service (OCPS) is a cloud-based service that enables you to apply policy settings for Office 365 ProPlus on a user’s device. The policy settings roam to whichever device the user signs into and uses Office 365 ProPlus. As end users become increasingly mobile, IT Pros need a single approach to secure Office 365 ProPlus for traditional on-premises domain devices, Azure AD registered devices, Azure AD Joined, and Hybrid Azure AD joined devices. OCPS applies to all scenarios above without the need to download and replicate any content such as Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) on-premises. The goal of this blog is to provide some transparency of how the service works to help IT Pros during their validation phase and to encourage transition from classic domain-based policy to OCPS service for Office 365 ProPlus.

Advancing Azure Active Directory availability

Our customers trust Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to manage secure access to all their applications and services. For us, this means that every authentication request is a mission critical operation. Given the critical nature and the scale of the service, our identity team’s top priority is the reliability and security of the service. Azure AD is engineered for availability and security using a truly cloud-native, hyper-scale, multi-tenant architecture and our team has a continual program of raising the bar on reliability and security. Our resilience investments are organized around the following set of reliability principles: (1) Highly Redundant, (2) No single points of Failure, (3) Multiple levels of isolation, (4) Elastically scales, (5) Safe Deployment, (6) Modern Verification, (7) Fine-grained, physically separate domains, and (8) Decorrelated backup authentication service.

Office 365 Planned Service Changes for 2020

*** The content below is no longer being updated ***

Please visit https://wiki.office365weekly.blog for the latest information regarding Planned Service Changes for Office 365.

The goal of this post is to compile all publicly announced Office 365 service changes for 2020, especially those that may require admin action, into a single source. These changes are listed below in chronological order, based on the “Action Required” or “Effective” date. Additional information and resources related to these changes are provided where applicable. Updates will be made to this post as new service changes are announced, or updates to announced changes are provided.

Notes:

All changes may not have been communicated to your tenant / environment.
Note: If there are discrepancies between the information posted here and the linked source articles and/or Message Center, these other sources are authoritative.

Update Log:

Added Kaizala Administration Roles – action required by February 1, 2020
Added Changes to Quarantine Permissions – effective February 10, 2020
Added Configuration Change for Microsoft Teams Cloud Recordings in Microsoft Stream – effective February 15, 2020

Introducing ‘High confidence phishing email’ to the spam filter policy

Action Required By: January 6, 2020

Details: ‘High confidence phishing email’ has been added to the spam filter policy. This policy will be enabled starting January 6, 2020.

By default, the action is set to Quarantine message for all new and existing policies. Just as with the existing Phishing email Quarantine behavior, only admins will be able to access these messages within Quarantine.

If you have already verified the appropriate action for High confidence phishing email, your settings will be honored and there is no action at this time. If you want to take a different action other than Quarantine message for High confidence phishing email then you should change this selection before January 6, 2020.

Additional Information: Configure your spam filter policies

One Identity across Yammer and Office

Effective: January 10, 2020

Details: We’re updating how Yammer uses Office profiles. User profiles in Yammer will now use the Office profile rather than the standalone Yammer profile.

We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in early January 2020, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of March.

If a Yammer user does not have a corresponding Office identity, they will not be affected by this feature.

For Yammer users who do have a corresponding Office identity, we will perform a sync so that the Yammer and Office profiles match. Going forward, Yammer users will need to contact their IT administrator, as with other Office 365 apps, in order to change their profile information.

Note: Any Yammer profile fields that cannot be synced with an Office profile, such as a link to a Facebook profile, will be removed during the sync process.

Additional Information: One Identity across Yammer and Office

Microsoft Search change to suggested Q&As

Effective: January 10, 2020

Details: For the last year, we’ve been providing a set of suggested Q&As to help you set up Microsoft Search. We learned from customer feedback that customers prefer to create their own Q&As, so we are removing the suggested set on January 10, 2020 to clean up the list. The ability to create, edit, and publish your own Q&As will remain unchanged.

Additional Information: Manage Q&As

Windows 7 End of Support and Office 365 ProPlus

Action Required by: January 14, 2020

Details: Windows 7 will be out of support after January 14, 2020. Because Office 365 is governed by the Modern Lifecycle Policy, customers are required to stay current as per the servicing and system requirements for the product or service.

Even though Windows 7 will no longer be supported after January 14, 2020, we understand Office 365 customers may need more time in their migration to a supported operating system. Through January 2023, Microsoft will provide security updates for Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 7. But, during that time, as long as the device is still running Windows 7, Office 365 ProPlus won’t receive any new feature updates.

Additional Information: Windows 7 end of support and Office 365 ProPlus

Windows Server 2008/R2 and Windows Server 2012/R2 end of support and Office 365 ProPlus

Action Required by: January 14, 2020

Details: Windows Server 2008/R2 will also go out of support on January 14, 2020. We understand that Office 365 ProPlus customers may need more time in their migration to a supported operating system. Through January 2023, Microsoft will provide security updates for Office 365 ProPlus on Windows Server 2008/R2. But, during this time, as long as customers are still running Windows Server 2008/R2, Office 365 ProPlus won’t receive any new feature updates.

For Windows Server 2012/R2, we also previously announced and stated in a support article, that Office 365 ProPlus will no longer be supported on Windows Server 2012/R2.

While Microsoft will not take any measures to block users with this configuration from connecting to Office 365 services, Office 365 ProPlus on Windows Server 2012/R2 will not be a supported configuration. While Microsoft does not anticipate any change to Office 365 ProPlus compatibility with Windows Server 2012/R2, customers may experience changes to performance or reliability issues. Microsoft Support will continue to accept calls from customers, however we may not be able to resolve issues that arise if those issues are determined to be unique to this configuration.

Additional Information:

Microsoft Teams coming to existing installs for Semi-Annual Channel customers

Effective: January 14, 2020

Details: The Microsoft Teams desktop app will be added to existing installations of Office 365 ProPlus on the Semi-Annual Channel on January 14, 2020. Teams will then auto-update on a regular cadence.

If you don’t want Teams to be added to existing installations of Office 365 ProPlus when you upgrade to a newer version, disable the auto-update via a Group Policy or the Office Deployment Tool.

Alternatively, you can allow Teams to install and use a Group Policy to prevent Teams from automatically starting when users sign into their device. To change this behavior, you must act before Teams is deployed.

Additional Information: Deploy Microsoft Teams with Office 365 ProPlus

Self-service purchasing capabilities for Power Platform products

Effective: January 14, 2020

Details: Beginning January 14, 2020, self-service purchase, subscription, and license management capabilities for Power Platform products (Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate) will be available for commercial cloud customers in the United States.

This capability will not be available to tenants in the United States that are government, non-profit, or education, at this time. Central procurement and IT teams will have visibility to all users buying and deploying self-service purchase solutions through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and will be able to turn off self-service purchasing on a per product basis via PowerShell.

Note: Microsoft is launching self-service purchase for Power BI on January 14, 2020, to customers in the United States, with additional markets becoming available in the coming months. Power Apps and Power Automate will be added in the following weeks.

Additional Information:

Retirement of SharePoint classic and Delve blogs

Effective: January 18, 2020

Details: SharePoint classic blogs and Delve blogs are being retired. Existing SharePoint classic blogs will continue to work as expected, including the ability to create new posts, but you will not be able to create new blog sites after a period of time.

Delve blogs will no longer be available for creation, and existing blogs will eventually be removed, after an extended period of read-only access.

For SharePoint Classic blogs:

Beginning January 18, 2020, the classic blog site template name will change to “Blogs (retired)”.
Beginning July 17, 2020, the ability to create new classic blog sites through the user interface will be turned off.

For Delve blogs:

Beginning January 18, 2020, tenants will not have the ability to create new Delve blogs.
Beginning February 18, 2020, the ability to create new, or edit existing posts, in existing Delve blogs will be disabled
Beginning July 17, 2020, existing Delve blogs will be deleted and removed from Delve profiles.

Additional Information:

Retirement of Unified Messaging in Exchange Online

Effective: February 2020

Details: Microsoft is retiring Unified Messaging (UM) in Exchange Online and replacing it with Cloud Voicemail and Auto Attendant services. This impacts voicemail processing and Auto Attendant in Exchange Online for all customers using these workloads.

Both Lync Server 2013 and Skype for Business Server 2015 connecting to Exchange UM Online will be transitioned by Microsoft to Cloud Voicemail on or before February 2020. Customers will be notified of their coming transition via the Office 365 Message Center. The experience for each customer will be transparent – Microsoft will switch your users over to Cloud Voicemail and perform the necessary validation and testing.

Lync 2010 Servers connected to Exchange Online Unified Messaging will not be transitioned or supported with Cloud Voicemail. Customers using this topology must upgrade to Skype for Business Server prior to February 2020 for continued voicemail support via Cloud Voicemail.

Additional Information:

Kaizala Administration Roles

Effective: February 1, 2020

Details: We’re updating the Kaizala administrative roles. The Kaizala Administrator role will be the primary management role starting February 2020. We expect to complete the roll out by the end of January 2020.

Note: This change is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 59706.

After this change the User admin role will no longer be used to manage Kaizala and the Kaizala Administrator role will be the primary management role starting February 2020. Please verify that your administrative users are assigned to the appropriate Kaizala role, by February 1, 2020, to ensure expected management capabilities.

Additional Information: About Kaizala Administrator Role in Office 365

Changes to Quarantine Permissions

Action Required by: February 10, 2020

Details: On February 10, 2020, we are updating the roles required to access and manage Quarantine. If you use Exchange Online RBAC roles to manage Quarantine then you will need to assign the Security and Compliance Center Security Administrator or Quarantine Administrator role to the user(s) that require access to Quarantine. You do not need to modify the existing Exchange Online roles.

Additional Information: Manage quarantined messages and files as an administrator in Office 365

Configuration Change for Microsoft Teams Cloud Recordings in Microsoft Stream

Effective: February 15, 2020

Details: Meeting recordings are stored in Microsoft Stream cloud storage. Tenant admins have an option to go the Microsoft Teams admin center to turn ON/OFF “Allow cloud recording” setting for Teams meetings.

The recording feature is currently disabled for customers whose Teams data is stored in-country if Microsoft Stream is not available in country. We will be changing this configuration by enabling the recording feature for customers even if Microsoft Stream data residency is not yet in country.

We will begin rolling this change in mid-February and expect to be complete end of March.

If your Teams data is stored in-country and you prefer to store meeting recordings in-country, we recommend that you turn off meeting recordings and then turn it on after Microsoft Stream is deployed to your in-country region. To learn more, see Where your meeting recordings are stored.

Note: This change applies to Teams meeting recordings only. There is a plan for implementing a similar change for Teams live events, and we will communicate via Message center when available.

Additional Information: Teams Cloud Meeting Recording

Retirement of SharePoint Classic popularity reports

Action Required by: February 28, 2020

Details: We are retiring classic usage and popularity reports for Classic sites. This includes reports for site collections, sites, document libraries, folders, and individual items. These usage reports will not be available after February 29, 2020.

If you use classic sites and require usage data, you can download historical data for all these popularity reports until February 29, 2020.

Additional Information: Classic usage and popularity reports to be discontinued

Office 365 Video Retirement & Migration Timelines

Action Required by: March 1, 2020

Details: Since the launch of Microsoft Stream, we have been busy improving the platform in preparation for Office 365 Video migrations. The transition from Office 365 Video to Microsoft Stream will be a phase approach and we will continue to maintain and support Office 365 Video during this time. After we have transitioned all existing Office 365 Video customers and their videos to Microsoft Stream, we will retire Office 365 Video.

Note: You can now migrate at any time, or change your migration timing setting.

On March 1, 2020, automatic migrations will begin if you didn’t delay your migrating timing. Tenant admins will receive several Office 365 Message Center notifications about the upcoming automatic migration, if the migration timing setting isn’t changed.

On April 1, 2020, the Office 365 Video iOS app will be retired and removed from the Apple App Store. This applies to all environments (Commercial, GCC, National clouds Germany & China).

On March 1, 2021, Office 365 Video will be retired and automatic migrations will begin – even if the migrating timing setting was changed to delayed. Tenant admins will receive several Office 365 Message Center notifications regarding the upcoming automatic migrations. Organizations who delay should put a plan in place to migrate to Stream via the migration tool before this date.

On March 1, 2022, redirection for links and embed codes from Office 365 Video to Stream will no longer be maintained.

Note: Timelines for Government Community Cloud (GCC), Germany National Cloud, and China National Cloud are to be determined.

Additional Information:

Configuration Change: OneNote 2016

Effective: March 10, 2020

Details: We’re continuing mainstream support for OneNote 2016. Beginning March 10, 2020, new installations of Office suite products will include OneNote 2016 by default. In addition, config.office.com, SCCM, and Intune will display OneNote 2016 as being included with Office by default.

If your organization already deploys and uses OneNote 2016, no action is needed. Users can continue to use OneNote 2016 without interruption.

Unmanaged installations of Office on or after March 10, 2020 will include OneNote 2016.

If your managed deployments already exclude OneNote 2016, OneNote will continue to be excluded.

Additional Information: Your OneNote

Retirement of TLS 1.0 and 1.1

Action Required by: May 31, 2020

Details: As communicated in December 2017 and in February 2018, we are moving all of our online services to Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2+ to provide best-in-class encryption, and to ensure our service is more secure by default.

As a result, Office 365 will retire TLS 1.0 and 1.1 starting June 1, 2020. This means that all connections to Office 365 using the protocols TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will not work. This applies to all worldwide and GCC environments.

Note: Power BI support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will also retire on June 1, 2020.

Additional Information: Preparing for TLS 1.2 in Office 365 and Office 365 GCC

Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services

Action Required by: October 13, 2020

Details: Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020.

Microsoft will not take any active measures to block older Office clients, such as Office 2013 and Office 2010, from connecting to Office 365 services. However, legacy clients attempting to connect to a modern, always up-to-date cloud service may experience performance and reliability issues.

Customers will also face an increased security risk, and may find themselves out of compliance depending on specific regional or industry requirements.

Note: Support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 connections to Office 365 cloud services will continue until October 2023.

Additional Information:

Changes to Exchange Web Services for Office 365

Action Required by: October 13, 2020

Details: Basic Authentication for Exchange Web Services (EWS) will be retired, beginning October 13, 2020, as we focus our efforts on OAuth 2.0. We are investing our development resources in Microsoft Graph as the future mechanism for accessing Exchange Online data.

Starting October 13, 2020, we will completely remove Basic Authentication for EWS as a way to access Exchange Online. Additionally, EWS will continue to receive security updates and certain performance updates, but product design and features will remain unchanged.

If you have been using Basic Authentication for EWS in your applications, you should plan to use OAuth 2.0 for authentication and authorization, before October 13, 2020. In addition, we strongly suggest that you plan on transitioning to Microsoft Graph based Outlook APIs to continue accessing Exchange Online data.

Additional Information: Upcoming changes to Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Office 365

Office 2016 for Mac end of mainstream support

Action Required by: October 13, 2020

Details: Mainstream support for Office 2016 for Mac will come to an end on October 13, 2020. Although you will still be able to use Office 2016 for Mac, you will no longer receive security updates and bug fixes after October 13, 2020.

Upgrade to a newer version of Office so you can stay up to date with all the latest features, patches and security updates. Newer versions include Office 365 ProPlus for Mac and Office 2019 for Mac. Note: Office 2019 for Mac is for installation on a single Mac, and does not receive feature updates.

Moving to Office 365 enables customers to take advantage of the latest product innovations and ensure uninterrupted support from Microsoft. Microsoft FastTrack services are available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription and provide assistance to help eligible customers move to Office 365 ProPlus.

Additional Information: Office 206 for Mac Product Lifecycle

Basic Authentication Retirement for legacy protocols in Exchange Online

Action Required by: October 13, 2020

Details: Beginning October 13, 2020, we will retire Basic Authentication for EWS, EAS, IMAP, POP and RPS to access Exchange Online. Note: this change does not impact SMTP AUTH. Actions that can be taken to avoid service disruptions on client applications are described in the post linked under “Additional Information” below. If no action is taken, client applications using Basic Authentication for EWS will be retired on October 13, 2020. Any applications using OAuth 2.0 to connect to these protocols will continue to work without interruption.

We are in the process of building reports that will help you identify any impacted users and client applications in your organization. We will make these reports available to you in the next few months and communicate their availability via a follow-up Message Center post.

Additional Information: Improving Security – Together