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Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-24

Welcome to the June 14 – 20, 2021 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Nineteen features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, Viva, Outlook, Whiteboard, SharePoint, and Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

There are no new events, but a few of the existing meeting series have added a session or two for the remainder of June. The spotlight event of the week is the “Ask Microsoft Anything” (AMA) session for Microsoft Viva on Wednesday, June 23rd at 9am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include details on new hybrid work innovations across several Microsoft 365 services, the OneDrive roadmap roundup for May 2021, information on new functionality in Teams to create trackable tasks from Teams messages, and an update on Basic Authentication in Exchange Online.

Noteworthy item highlights include the latest updates for Excel for the web, on-demand workshops for Microsoft Lists, details on automated diagnostics for troubleshooting various Office 365 issues, and the general availability of Essential Announcements in Yammer.

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
Microsoft Teams: Teams Meetings Auto Recording	83054	June CY2021	Added: 15 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams This feature allows users to auto record meetings by choosing auto record option in meetings options.
Microsoft Teams: RTMP Streaming Support	83562	July CY2021	Added: 15 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Enables support for your users to stream their Teams meetings to large audiences through RTMP, including endpoints outside your organization.
SharePoint: Migration Manager content discovery	82000	July CY2021	Added: 15 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Before you move any file or folder from on-premises into Microsoft 365, you need to discover content and plan for the migration. The Migration Manager, from within the SharePoint admin center, will provide content discovery so admins can best understand what content they have, decide what to migrate and what to remediate.
Whiteboard: Web Templates	82030	June CY2021	Added: 15 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Whiteboard Participants in Teams and on Whiteboard for the Web can add a variety of built-in templates for meetings, workshops, decision making, planning, design thinking and more.
Whiteboard: User Experience	82034	August CY2021	Added: 01 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook Participants in Teams and on Whiteboard for the web will see a new, refreshed user experience.
Outlook and Exchange for Business: Microsoft Outlook browser extension for Edge	82036	July CY2021	Added: 15 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook The Microsoft Outlook browser extension brings you the power of mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks using an icon in Microsoft Edge. Quickly access your Outlook work account or your Outlook.com or Hotmail account without switching to another tab or app. The extension will be available in the Chrome Store soon as well.
Microsoft Viva: Control visibility of suggested topics	82050	July CY2021	Added: 15 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Viva This update will empower knowledge managers to enable or prevent general visibility of AI-suggested topics.
Microsoft Compliance center: Information governance – Retention policies for Yammer	82055	July CY2021	Added: 15 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: M365 Compliance This update enables organizations to apply retention policies on Yammer messages.
Microsoft Teams: New default settings when opening Office files	82662	May CY2021	Added: 16 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Users can set a default of browser, desktop or Teams when opening Office files (Word, Excel, and Power Point) that are shared in Teams. The desktop setting can be selected, if the user has Office version 16 or newer installed and activated.
Outlook: Rich Auto Reply Toolbar for Android	83732	July CY2021	Added: 16 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Android Users will now be able to format the text in their autoreplies. Options include bold/italics/underline, numbered/unnumbered lists, font style and links.
Outlook: Rich Event Description Toolbar	83733	July CY2021	Added: 16 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook Users will now be able to format the text in their event descriptions. Options include bold/italics/underline, numbered/unnumbered lists, font style and links.
Microsoft Teams: Pin chat messages	82584	June CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Pin a Teams chat message to drive awareness and provide the chat members with quick access to important content. Pinning will help your team stay in sync on what’s and relevant in a timely manner.
Microsoft Teams: Fluid components in Teams chat	82779	June CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Fluid components in Teams chat allow end users to send a message with a table, action items or a list that can be co-authored and edited by everyone in line.
Microsoft Teams: Paging on Video Gallery	84464	June CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams When you choose Large Gallery, and there are more than 49 videos or in Gallery with more than 9 videos, navigation controls and now appear below the Large Gallery and Video Gallery. You can use these controls to view more video participants.
Microsoft Teams: Live Events in GCC-High, and DoD	82954	June CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCC High, DoD Soon, you will be able to use Live Events in GCCH and DoD for your needs.
Microsoft Teams: Left navigation updates in Teams Admin Center	83320	July CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams To make it easier to find Team’s features and navigate your Teams organization, we reorganized the left navigation based on user studies and customer feedback.
Microsoft Teams: Teams Network planner for government clouds	83471	August CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Gov Network Planner can help you determine and organize network requirements for connecting Microsoft Teams users across your organization. When you provide your network details and Teams usage, the Network Planner calculates your network requirements for deploying Teams and cloud voice across your organization’s physical locations.
Microsoft Teams: EDU tailored deployment plan in Teams Advisor	83509	July CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, EDU EDU IT Administrators can use a tailored plan to deploy Teams to their organization.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Investigation updates for improved email threats and actions	82056	June CY2021	Added: 18 June 2021 Status: In development App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 We have new updates and improvements to the Automated Investigation and Response (AIR) playbooks to better capture the state of the emails and entities that are being investigated. This results in more accurate threat data and actions – which are better for security operations workflows.

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.

Use chat and calling features in Microsoft Teams

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

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: 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

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.

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.

Monday, June 28, 2021 at 12:00pm 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.

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

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

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 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.

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.

BLOG ROUNDUP

New hybrid work innovations in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva

At Microsoft, we believe that hybrid work is the future of work and that to empower their people to succeed in hybrid work, business leaders will need to reimagine their organizations with a new operating model for people, places, and processes. We’re also committed to building experiences that put everyone on equal footing—whether they’re together in a conference room in Atlanta, presenting remotely from a home office, or catching up with a meeting recording once the workday begins in Sydney. Microsoft Teams is mission-critical to this vision for a more flexible world of work. Teams is unique in that it brings together meetings, chat, calls, collaboration, and business process automation in a single app. Since COVID-19 spurred office workers around the world to work from home, we’ve been innovating in Teams to do things like create more natural and engaging meeting experiences—enable people to connect seamlessly with those inside and outside of their organizations and provide ways to make remote presentations richer and more impactful. And as we emerge into this new hybrid reality, we are focused on building experiences in Teams that are designed to ensure all voices are heard including the people not in the room—empowering everyone to connect and engage, from anywhere and at any time. And to make it easier to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously, we’re also announcing new Microsoft Fluid canvas innovations—in Teams and beyond. But COVID-19 also taught us that meeting fatigue and digital overload is real, and remote work has challenged our wellbeing. To help, Microsoft has built Microsoft Viva—our integrated employee experience platform—into Teams, so that employees can find ways to protect time and preserve their wellbeing right in the flow of their work. We are announcing new innovations—in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva—all designed to empower your people for hybrid work. Let’s have a look.

Related:

OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – May 2021

Here are the latest functionalities that rolled out to production in the month of May 2021 – (1) Updated file picking experience for Yammer, (2) Immersive reader in OneDrive and SharePoint, (3) Link settings to Quick Permissions, (4) Expiring access for external users, (5) Exclude specific files from sync on macOS, (6) PDF viewing updates on iOS and Android, and (7) Request files for GCC High and DoD. | Resource: OneDrive release notes

Create trackable tasks from your ad hoc Teams messages

Tasks happen everywhere. They can pop up in an email thread, working file, or team chat—really, wherever you work most often. But ad hoc tasks like this are disruptive and often forgotten. We’ve all been there: you promise yourself (maybe even out loud) that you’ll definitely remember so-and-so’s request only to forget it a minute later. That’s why one of our goals at Microsoft is to help you quickly capture those kinds of informal tasks the moment they happen. We’ve done this for emails in Outlook and comments in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint docs—and starting today, you can create tasks from Microsoft Teams messages on desktop and web. This update also addresses one of the most requested asks from customers. Before, lots of people were using third-party apps or creating Power Automate flows to convert Teams asks to tasks; now, that conversion is natively built into the Teams experience. This new way to capture tasks is perfect for tracking requests that come out of informal Teams messages and gives your team additional control and confidence over ad hoc requests. Tasks from Teams messages automatically appear alongside your other tasks in the Tasks app and To Do or Planner, so you can nix the sticky notes and instead manage all your tasks together. Plus, creating tasks out of ad hoc requests relieves the stress of trying to remember (or find) what was asked of you—all those requests are in one place. Bonus coverage! Creating tasks from Teams messaging isn’t the only Tasks app news this month. You can now delete and rename any task from Planner and To Do directly in Tasks. Before, you had to do this from each standalone app.

Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – June 2021 Update

It’s been a few months since our last update on Basic Authentication in Exchange Online, but we’ve been busy getting ready for the next phase of the process: turning off Basic Authentication for tenants that don’t use it, and therefore, don’t need it enabled. We have millions of customers who have Basic Auth enabled in their tenant, but only use Modern Auth. Many of them don’t know Basic is enabled, and the risks that it presents – so we are going to do our bit to help secure their data by turning it off for them. Over the last few months, we have been building the supporting process and tools we need to do that at scale, and now we’re ready to start rolling it out. As we’ve said before, we’re only currently planning to turn off Basic Auth for those customers who are not using it. For customers that use still Basic for some or all the affected protocols, we are not touching authentication settings for those protocols (for the time being). We have been busy analyzing Basic Auth usage data for our customers and now have a solid understanding of who uses it and who does not. And we’re going to start turning it off for those who are not using it. The process is: We’ll randomly select customers with no usage in any, or all affected protocols, send them a Message Center post informing them that in 30 days we’re going to turn off Basic Auth. 30 days later, we’ll turn it off and send another Message Center post to confirm it was done. Just to reiterate – the program for disabling Basic Authentication for active in-use protocols has been paused for the time being, but will be coming back.

NOTEWORTHY

What’s New in Excel for the web

Delivering rich, delightful experiences to our customers continues to be a top priority for our Excel team. A few weeks ago, we shared how to easily format your data with color and style, and more. Now we bring you a set of new features and improvements to help you better analyze your data, specifically: (1) Text to columns, (2) PivotTable improvements, (3) Sort improvements, (4) Interactive charts, and (5) Additional keyboard shortcuts. These are just some of the latest improvements, many more are coming soon!

Microsoft Lists workshop – now available on-demand

Go further with Microsoft Lists. You know you want to. And now you can – on-demand. We recently delivered five live workshops across multiple time zones – and we learned a lot. We’ve refined the content based on feedback and tightened up a few additional things – mindful of your time and ease of consumption. The result: We’ve got a great two-part, on-demand workshop – two videos wrapped in a single page with additional resources. Dig in and learn how you and your team can best utilize Microsoft Lists. We teach you how to use and create views, configure conditional formatting, adjust forms, use rules, and more. Plus, we highlight no-code and low-code solutions leveraging integrated tools from the Power Platform. You’ll also find materials to deliver the Lists workshop to your organization (PowerPoint, speaker notes, demo materials).

Did you know? Automated diagnostics are available to troubleshoot various Office 365 issues

Seeing that this is a relatively new development, I wanted to share information about automated diagnostics that customers can run inside of the Microsoft 365 admin center. The goal of these is to help you to solve various support-related issues that you might encounter, without having to open a support ticket. Currently, the way to interact with available diagnostics is via the Need help? button in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Seeing that this is the Exchange blog, here is the article that lists currently available related diagnostics. But wait, there is more! Various other teams (including SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams) have also created diagnostics and documents listing what is available.

Essential announcements in Yammer are now generally available

Keeping your employees informed and engaged is critical in today’s rapidly changing workscape. Over the past 18 months, we’ve continued to build capabilities in Yammer to help corporate communicators and leaders share their message at scale. Some announcements are crucial to keeping employees up to date – whether it’s regarding safety, protocols, policies, or other priority news. In these instances, corporate communicators and leaders need ways to guarantee that messages are delivered to every employee. This feature allows Yammer community admins to set an announcement as ‘essential’ to ensure that it’s delivered via email to every member of that community, even if it is outside of their preferred notification settings. By sending an announcement in Yammer, it will appear as an interactive conversation in Outlook. This helps accelerate the time to consumption and drive engagement, so members can see, react, and comment on the post right from their Outlook inbox. This works for desktop, web, and mobile experiences. And for those that have the Yammer Communities app for Teams installed, announcements and @mentions made in Yammer will also appear in your Microsoft Teams activity feed.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-12

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

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

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

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

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

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

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

Excel: O365-Roadmap-2021-12 Download

PDF: O365-Roadmap-2021-12 Download

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

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

On-Demand Session

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

On-Demand Session

Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

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

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

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.

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 Team s Fundamentals

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

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

Choosing the right tools for your Microsoft 365 migration

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

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.

Best practices for data migrations to Microsoft 365

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

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

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

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

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

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.

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

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

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

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

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

Best practices for migrating to SharePoint and OneDrive

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

Block BCC Messages to Distribution Groups in Exchange Online

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

NOTEWORTHY

Introducing Yammer Live Events Insights

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

Windows release health now available in the admin center

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

Azure AD Ignite 2021 Recap: Securing your application ecosystem

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

Get started with trials for Microsoft Viva Topics

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

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

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

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2021-10

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

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

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

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

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

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

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

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

On-Demand Session

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

On-Demand Session

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

On-Demand Session

Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Teams Cha l k Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Teams Chalk Talk: Supercharge key workflows with apps in Teams

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Teams Chalk Talk: Apps in Teams Fundamentals

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft App Assure

When: Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft App Assure ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA)! The AMA will take place on Tuesday, March 16th, 2021 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT in the Microsoft FastTrack AMA Space. An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. This AMA gives you the opportunity to connect with members of the product engineering team who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Be sure to add the event to your calendar!

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

Microsoft 365 Virtual Training Day: Secure and Protect Your Organization

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams Summit: March 2021 | Online Event

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

Getting Started with Windows Virtual Desktop

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

Customer Immersion Experience: Integrate Your Business into Microsoft Teams

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

BLOG ROUNDUP

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

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

Introducing the Project Accelerator

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

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

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

Azure Active Directory External Identities is Generally Available

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

NOTEWORTHY

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

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

Now in Teams public preview: Out of Office Scheduling

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

What’s new in the Microsoft 365 admin center

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

Azure AD: Granular Conditional Access for sensitive data and actions

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

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

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

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-32

Welcome to the August 2 – 8, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Thirty-three features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, with updates for Teams, OneNote, Whiteboard, Word, Outlook (iOS) and Azure Active Directory. Due to the large number of items, all of the roadmap items are in a separate post this week, Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-32.

August sessions for existing event series continue to be added. There are several new events, most as part of the new “Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams” series that kicks off on Tuesday, August 11th at 9am Pacific. It is also the spotlight event of the week.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include details on new offerings in Microsoft Teams, numerous updates for Microsoft Whiteboard, availability of SharePoint site templates for Education, the ability to customize recipient limits at the tenant level, and the August 2020 feature updates for Workplace Analytics.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as a video overview of Microsoft 365 network connectivity principles, an announcement about Microsoft Ignite 2020, July 2020 feature updates for Project on the web, and the general availability of Azure AD “My Sign-Ins”.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Thirty-three 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 | 2020-32.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

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’.

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’.

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.

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Managing iOS and macOS devices with Microsoft Endpoint Manager

When: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 at 8:00am PT | An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. Join us for a one-hour AMA event to get answers to questions about managing iOS and macOS devices using Microsoft Endpoint Manager. We’ll be here to help you with everything from setting up automatic enrollment and remotely managing user-owned devices to custom configurations and troubleshooting. Join in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager AMA space, and don’t forget to add this AMA to your calendar.

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Real Work Experts / Real World Stories

When: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. Join us for Episode 1, as we sit down with members of our IT pro community to discuss their Teams customer stories. You’ll hear about what worked and what didn’t work so you can avoid the same pitfalls with your own rollouts. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft Information Protection and Endpoint DLP

When: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 at 9:00am PT | 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. providing the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of Microsoft experts taking questions about Microsoft Lists, SharePoint list, Lists + Teams integrations, Lists + Power Platform integrations, and more. Join in the Microsoft Security and Compliance AMA space, and don’t forget to add this AMA to your calendar.

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

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

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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

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.

Microsoft Teams: Do more with apps

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 Your Sensitive Information

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.

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

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

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams Security

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

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

Take your communications to the next level with new offerings in Microsoft Teams

When it comes to communications, there is a broad spectrum of needs that are required to connect employees from the worksite to the main office to the home office—across locations and time zones. The spectrum starts with the most basic 1:1 meetings and calls with colleagues, to larger group meetings, all the way to large events and conferences. During the crisis response to the pandemic, many organizations transformed rapidly in group meetings first, as evidenced by Microsoft Teams reaching 200 million participants in a single day. Organizations looking to create more sustained transformation are seeing that Teams serves communications needs well beyond group meetings, taking communications to the next level with broad scale company-wide events. At the other end of the spectrum, Teams modernizes 1:1 calling with a cloud-based phone system in the same Teams app that keeps you in the communications flow. We’re excited to announce new offerings and capabilities across all ends of the communications spectrum.

Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams Adds Sticky Notes and Text, Improves Performance

Whether you’re working remotely or in the office, your team can use Whiteboard to run effective meetings, brainstorm, plan and think creatively. We’re excited to announce that some of the most loved Microsoft Whiteboard features on Windows 10 and iOS, such as Sticky Notes and Text Objects, are now available to use in Teams and Whiteboard on the Web. These new features make it easier than ever to keep the creative process moving forward virtually with your team or class. Our updated Whiteboard features in Teams enable students who don’t have access to a touch or pen device to participate in whiteboarding sessions during Teams meetings. Plus, educators will also have the option to present the digital whiteboard without students having access to drawing on the board during class. For business customers, we have all have been in a meeting where we are using a dry erase board, adding sticky notes to a wall, and taking pictures of the material we write, draw, and discuss. We have brought the physical board to you via Whiteboard in Teams.

Inform and engage students and staff with SharePoint site templates for Education

The SharePoint team is excited to launch site templates for schools and universities, available via the Microsoft Look Book. The templates bring together news, events, highlighted content, quick links and more. Each has been designed with a specific scope and audience for our Education customers: (1) School home page: a central, institution-wide landing experience for students and staff with the latest school happenings and important resources, (2) Staff home page: a dashboard for staff members with time-saving links, documents, and calls-to-action. This template is designed to be used with a Staff team or a Professional Learning Community (PLC) team in Microsoft Teams for Education, and (3) Class home page: a dashboard for a class with resources, updates, and learning content. This template is designed to be used with a Class team in Microsoft Teams for Education. While planning and designing the templates, we listened to school leaders and educators all over the world. Armed with this feedback, we went to work to provide rich, effective site templates that help students and staff stay connected and up-to-date on school life and class work. Plus, the sites look great on any device by default, so students and educators can use them on desktop, tablet and mobile.

Customizable Tenant-level Recipient Limits

Controlling the number of recipients per message that your users can send to is one of several measures email admins can use to help curtail the risk of email abuse and spamming from compromised accounts. Earlier this year the Exchange Online Transport team introduced customizable Recipient Limits in Exchange Online. With it you can customize the setting on a mailbox or mail user object, you can bulk edit multiple existing mailboxes or mail users at the same time, and you can even set the default for new ones. Yet, that update didn’t offer a single, master tenant-wide setting. It gave Exchange Online admins more control than they had before, but it still wasn’t as comprehensive as what Exchange Server on-premises offers. We’re announcing the immediate availability of a super useful extension of the mailbox customizable recipient limits feature that helps deliver a more complete solution: The ability to use Remote PowerShell to customize a tenant-wide recipient limit with the MaxRecipientEnvelopeLimit property on the TransportConfig object (Set-TransportConfig -MaxRecipientEnvelopeLimit).

Workplace Analytics August 2020 feature update

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature update for August 2020. This month’s update gives you a preview of something to come – Teams metrics! Workweek Span and Person and Person-to-Group Network Metrics will now include Teams chat and data. With the recent shift to remote work, large numbers of users are relying on Teams for much of their remote collaboration. In other words, communication over Teams is at an all-time high. To improve the accuracy of metrics within Workplace Analytics, we are soon adding Teams chat and call data to Workplace Analytics metrics. Data about calls and chats will now be reflected in several metrics, including Workweek Span. This will improve the quality of data that’s available to analysts by more truthfully delineating the actual workweek span of users. By using these new metric values, you’ll be able to more accurately analyze connectedness across the company, analyze changes in the workweek span, gauge the effect of Teams in improving organizational connectivity, and support Business Continuity scenarios. Note: We are planning to release this change on August 20, 2020. If you want early access to the updated metric values complete the Teams metric changes preview form and we’ll activate the new metric values for your organization. It might take up to four business days to activate the new metric values and we will send you a confirmation email after they’ve been activated.

NOTEWORTHY

Overview of Network Connectivity Principles

Format: Video (24 mins) | Learn about the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Principles, which serve as foundational elements to achieve optimal network connectivity and most performant user experience with Microsoft 365. Learning about these key principles can help ensure your network strategy and design choices are optimal for your Microsoft 365 users, competitive in the marketplace, and future proof to the constant evolution of the cloud.

Microsoft Ignite 2020: Empowering the technical community to help customers innovate and rebuild in a changing world

Because the world is in unchartered territory with COVID-19 impacting people, organizations and economies this year, we’re excited to announce that we’ve pivoted Microsoft Ignite from a week-long, in-person event to two global events that are free, 48-hour digital gatherings. The first event is Sept. 22-24, and registration will open on Sept. 3. We’ll be adding a second Microsoft Ignite in early 2021 to create an additional opportunity to connect with our technical communities, and to share the latest product developments. We’ve learned from the global digital events we’ve held this year that we now have the opportunity to bring the whole global community together in one place to create a truly worldwide event. For this reason, we’re not going to be holding Microsoft Ignite Tour events in different cities around the world this year; instead Microsoft Ignite will bring all global participants together and include the opportunity for local community meetups, will have language localization, and participants will also be able to get skill building with Microsoft Learn and certifications.

Project for the web – July 2020 Update

This post is a summary of the latest features for Project on the web. For July 2020, updates include: (1) Project Operations – The Project team has been working with Dynamics 365 to build Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations. This product aims to help teams predict, adapt, and rapidly respond to change across their projects and organizations, (2) Documentation – The materials to help you leverage Project for the web for your team have been updated, (3) Scheduling Changes – Our scheduling changes to effort and duration are now available to all organizations using Project for the web. New projects should be scheduled with these changes. We’re working on converting old projects to this new scheme for the next month. The article also has a few soon-to-be-released features including Teams Integration for Project and Roadmap, and Custom Fields at the Task level.

End users can now report “This wasn’t me” for unusual sign-in activity

We are excited to announce the General Availability of Azure AD My Sign-Ins—a new feature that allows enterprise users to review their sign-in history to check for any unusual activity. As we discussed in the Public Preview blog post, the My Sign-Ins page empowers users to see: (1) If anyone is trying to guess their password, (2) If an attacker successfully signed in to their account from a strange location, and (3) What apps the attacker accessed. The newest addition to this page allows end users to report “This wasn’t me” or “This was me” on unusual activities. | Related: How the Microsoft Mission Critical Team Helped Secure AAD | Microsoft Authenticator app lock now enabled by default

How to organize your security team: The evolution of cybersecurity roles and responsibilities

With billions of people around the globe working from home, changes to the daily practice of cybersecurity are accelerating. Organizations are shifting from defending a traditional network perimeter (keeping business assets in a safe place) to more effective zero trust strategies (protect users, data, and business assets where they are). This transformation brings technology changes and also opens up questions of what people’s roles and responsibilities will look like in this new world. At the same time, continuous delivery models are requiring security teams to engage more closely during business planning and application development to effectively manage cyber risks (vs. the traditional ‘arms-length’ security approaches). This requires security professionals to better understand the business context and to collaborate more closely with stakeholders outside of security. While each organization and each person will have a unique journey, we have seen common patterns for successfully transforming roles and responsibilities. To help security leaders and practitioners plan for this transformation, Microsoft has defined common security functions, how they are evolving, and key relationships. In this blog, we’ll provide a summary of our recommendations to help you get started.

Office 365 Roadmap Update | 2020-28

Due to numerous announcements regarding new features for Microsoft Teams, there were thirty-two items added over the last week. So in an effort to keep the weekly digest post from being extraordinarily long, I have separated the Office 365 Roadmap updates out for this week.

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Exchange: Linux and PowerShell v7.0 Support to the Exchange Online V2 PowerShell Module	65759	January CY2021	Added: 07 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Exchange Managing Exchange Online with Modern Authentication and EXO V2 module is currently restricted to Windows machine and PowerShell Version 5.1 or lower. With this change we are adding support for Linux and Windows PowerShell 7.0 or higher to the EXO V2 module.
Microsoft Information Protection: Information Protection and Governance: Trainable Classifiers	65764	December CY2020	Added: 07 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: MIP Customers can use machine learning through built-in and build-your-own models to classify sensitive content.
Microsoft Information Protection: Exact Data Match will support data configuration	65880	September CY2020	Added: 07 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: MIP Exact Data Match will support data configuration, allowing text case and character delimiters to optionally be ignored, helping reduce the need for manually defining minor variations in the hashed and uploaded data being protected.
OneDrive: Move and keep sharing	65907	Q3 CY2020	Added: 07 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: OneDrive Business users can choose to keep sharing with collaborators when they move their files between shared libraries or from OneDrive to a shared library.
OneDrive: Sync admin reports	65909	Q4 CY2020	Added: 07 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: OneDrive New dashboard to check sync app versions, sync status, top sync errors on individual devices and monitor deployment progress of Known Folder Move.
OneDrive: Consolidation of OneDrive-SharePoint admin centers	65911	Q4 CY2020	Added: 07 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: OneDrive All OneDrive admin capabilities, including controls for sharing, access, sync, and storage, will be available in the SharePoint admin center, consolidating admin tools in one place.
OneDrive: Mute comment notifications	65912	Q3 CY2020	Added: 07 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: OneDrive We’re adding the option to turn off comment notifications for individual files.
Microsoft Teams: Cortana in Teams	65346	August CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Cortana is coming to the Teams mobile app, using AI and the Microsoft Graph to provide voice assistance in Teams. These voice assistance experiences are delivered using Cortana enterprise-grade services that meet Microsoft 365 privacy, security and compliance commitments. Cortana will be available in the Teams mobile app on iOS and Android in the coming weeks for Microsoft 365 Enterprise users in the U.S. in English.
Microsoft Teams: Change notification API for Microsoft Teams messages	65981	Q3 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Developers will have the ability to subscribe to change notifications for Microsoft Team messages, including channel messages, 1:1/group chats, and all messages in a tenant.
Outlook for iOS: Option to reply with your availability or an event invitation	65441	July CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Outlook – iOS Quickly reply to an email message by selecting a suggested reply such as schedule a meeting or send your availability for a preferred time to meet.
Microsoft Teams: Together mode	65942	Q3 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Together mode uses of AI segmentation technology in meetings to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else.
Microsoft Teams: Dynamic view	65943	Q3 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Dynamic view user AI in meetings to dynamically optimize shared content and video participants. New controls let you personalize the view to suit your preferences and needs, such as the ability to show shared content and specific participants side-by-side.
Microsoft Teams: Video filters	65944	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Before joining a meeting, you can use the filters to subtly adjust lighting levels and soften the focus of the camera to customize your appearance.
Microsoft Teams: Reflect messaging extension	65945	July CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Gives managers, leaders or teachers an easy way to check in with how their team or students are feeling — either in general, or about a specific topic like work-life balance, the status of a project, current events, or a change within the organization. IT administrators will be able to install the Reflect extension from GitHub, and then make it available to employees in their organization in the message extension menu.
Microsoft Teams: Live reactions	65946	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams React during a meeting using emojis that will appear to all participants.
Microsoft Teams: PowerPoint Live Presentations to Teams	65947	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams PowerPoint Live Presentations can assist users in making their presentations engaging and inclusive. Everyone in the audience can navigate their view of the slides, provide instant feedback in the form of live reactions, and provide comments and rate the presentation at the end. Live Presentations are generally available on PowerPoint for the web. We plan to bring this to Teams further enabling audience engagement right from Teams.
Microsoft Teams: Chat bubbles	65948	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Chats sent during a Teams meeting will surface on the screens of all meeting participants, making the chat more central to the conversation.
Microsoft Teams: Live Captions with speaker attribution (EN-US)	65949	July CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Teams already provides live captions as a way to follow along with what is being said in the meeting, we’re also adding speaker attribution so captions will specify who is speaking.
Microsoft Teams: Large meeting support	65951	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Hold interactive meetings with more attendees—up to 1,000.
Microsoft Teams: Overflow meetings	65952	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams When attendees exceed the meeting attendee limit, the meeting will scale to accommodate up to 20,000 in an experience where they can watch.
Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Whiteboard updates	65953	Q3 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Whiteboard in Teams will soon be updated with new features including sticky notes, pen and ink, and drag and drop capabilities. These features enable team members who don’t have access to a touchscreen or Surface Hub to participate in whiteboarding sessions during Teams meetings.
Microsoft Teams: Suggested replies	65954	July CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Suggested replies in Teams chat uses assistive AI to create short responses based on the context of the previous message.
Microsoft Teams: Room Remote for Microsoft Teams Room and collaboration bar	65960	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams This experience in Teams mobile, will provide meeting device controls, such as the ability to join and leave the meeting, mute and unmute the room, adjust audio volume, and turn cameras on and off.
Microsoft Teams: Support for Cortana voice assistance on Microsoft Teams Room devices	65961	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Cortana voice assistance gives users the ability to manage controls on Microsoft Teams Room devices using spoken commands.
Microsoft Teams: Wirelessly cast to Teams devices	65962	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Wirelessly cast to any Teams Room, collaboration bar or Surface Hub device, enabling seamless ad-hoc in-person collaboration for people in a shared space.
Microsoft Teams: Coordinated Meetings with Microsoft Teams Room and Surface Hub	65963	Q3 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Enables a coordinated meeting experience between Surface Hub and Microsoft Teams Room devices, enabling users to operate both devices in the same room, in the same meeting.
Microsoft Teams: Proximity Join on Surface Hub	65964	Q3 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Allows users to join a meeting on a Surface Hub, using their own personal device. Proximity Join also allows users to add a Surface Hub as a resource to their scheduled meeting.
Microsoft Teams: Meeting room capacity notifications for Microsoft Teams Room	65965	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Alerts in-room meeting participants if the room is over-capacity based on data defined in a room account. Not all cameras will support this feature.
Microsoft Teams: Live Transcription with speaker attribution (EN-US)	65967	Q4 CY2020	Added: 08 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Live transcripts provide another way to follow along with what has been said and who said it. After a meeting, the transcript file is automatically saved in the chat tab for that meeting.
Microsoft Teams: NDI for Teams	66009	August CY2020	Added: 09 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Teams NDI for Microsoft Teams converts a meeting participant’s video into a discrete source that can be used in the production tools for professional broadcasts.
Visio: People gallery and modern presence	61431	Q4 CY2020	Added: 10 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Visio Easily see who is collaborating on your Visio diagram and where they are in the drawing.
Visio: While you were away and catch-up highlights	61432	Q4 CY2020	Added: 10 July 2020 Status: In development App/Service: Visio Know who edited your shared document since your last visit, and see what’s changed.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | November 17 – 23, 2019

Welcome to the November 17 – 23, 2019 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Six features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Outlook on the web, FindTime, Whiteboard, and Teams, specifically the Teams client for Linux.

There are no new events, but a few new sessions for existing event series. This week’s spotlight event is “Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams” webinar on Tuesday, November 26th at 11am Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blog posts include the release of the “Art of Teamwork” for Microsoft Teams, the “Office What’s New” Management Preview, and Ignite 2019 recaps for Stream and FastTrack.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items on the latest releases for Office 365 ProPlus, details on how to migrate from Slack to Microsoft Teams, and recent updates for Microsoft Flow and Workplace Analytics.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Teams for Linux client	56219	December CY2019	Added: 23 November 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams The Teams client for Linux will facilitate collaboration by extending capabilities like chats, meetings, and calling to people who are operating in a Linux environment. It will also facilitate collaboration by allowing users to open and edit Office files in the Teams app.
FindTime now stores data in the user’s mailbox	58210	December CY2019	Added: 23 November 2019 Status: In development App / Service: FindTime We listened to your feedback! We have re-written FindTime’s back-end service to now store collected data in the organizer’s mailbox! The voting website will now be hosted in Outlook on the web, instead of Azure. No more concerns around the data in FindTime being stored in North America outside of your tenant environment.
New Tenant Admin Privacy Controls for Microsoft Whiteboard Clients	58252	December CY2019	Added: 23 November 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Whiteboard New privacy controls are available for Tenant Admins to manage organization privacy levels for Microsoft Whiteboard client applications.
Outlook on the web – Access to TeamSnap accounts in calendar	57277	November CY2019	Added: 23 November 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web You will be able to connect your TeamSnap account to Outlook on the web so you can see those events in your Office 365 calendar.
Outlook on the web – Suggested locations	56795	November CY2019	Added: 23 November 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – Web When you click on the location bar to search for a room or location, Outlook will suggest available rooms that you have used before so you can quickly find the most convenient room.
Class Insights in Teams	58277	Q2 CY2020	Added: 23 November 2019 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Class Insights, powered by Education Analytics, is an analytics experience for educators who are using Teams as a digital classroom experience.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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.

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

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. Access the consolidated on-demand version of Tips and Tricks here: https://aka.ms/teamstipsandtricksondemand.

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

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

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

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

Hockey Stick Adoption of Teams utilizing People Manager Framework Webcast

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

BLOG ROUNDUP

5 attributes of successful teams

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

What’s new on Microsoft Teams phones | Ignite 2019

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

Office What’s New Management Preview

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

Ignite 2019 – Catch up on Microsoft Stream sessions

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

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

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

NOTEWORTHY

Update history for Office 365 ProPlus (listed by date)

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

Migrate from Slack to Microsoft Teams

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

Workplace Analytics – November 2019: Feature updates

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

October Updates for Microsoft Flow

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

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

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

Office 365 Weekly Digest | November 3 – 9, 2019

Welcome to the November 3 – 9, 2019 (aka Ignite Week) edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Last week, all eyes (and ears) were focused on Microsoft Ignite 2019 in Orlando, Florida. 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.

One note: There were forty-seven features added to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap last week, so for this week I have moved the roadmap updates into a separate post, Office 365 Roadmap Update | November 3 – 9, 2019.

UPCOMING EVENTS

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

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional 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 IT Showcase: IT Expert Roundtable – Our transformation to Microsoft Teams

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

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

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

Hockey Stick Adoption of Teams utilizing People Manager Framework Webcast

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

BLOG ROUNDUP

Use the power of cloud intelligence to simplify and accelerate IT and the move to a modern workplace

We live and work in a time in which there is more change happening at a more rapid pace than ever before. The way in which organizations empower employees across all their devices is changing rapidly as they deliver work experiences that are more empowering and transformative for their users. Organizations desire to move to a consistent and unified way to enable their users across all their devices and are looking for guidance on the best way to do this that is both empowering and secure. Core to modern management and security is delivering users the modern workplace that empowers them to achieve more across all their devices, while providing the required security and protection of the organization’s assets. The modern workplace delivered through Microsoft 365 is loved by users, loved by IT, and trusted by everyone. Users love this experience because they can work how, when, and where they want without reduction in functionality or experience. IT loves this experience because it provides a common and consistent method and tool to manage and enable users across all their devices while also delivering the security and protection they require. Users and IT trust this solution because both the user’s privacy and the organization’s data and assets are secure.

From new Microsoft Teams experiences to the all-new Project Cortex—here’s what’s coming soon to Microsoft 365

At the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida, we announced new Microsoft 365 innovations in six key investment areas: productivity, knowledge, workflow, security, compliance, and management. Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud, and the consistent theme across these new features is how we’re using artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver amazing new experiences that push the boundaries of productivity. This section will focus on the Microsoft 365’s productivity tools. These tools use AI to help people create, collaborate, analyze, write, present, organize, and manage their work. Our innovations in core productivity are focused on two opportunities: creating entirely new experiences that take advantage of the latest innovations and breathing new life into familiar apps and experiences with powerful cloud services.

The intelligent intranet powered by Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Ignite 2019 announcements

Over the past three years ago, SharePoint has been on a journey to reinvent the intelligent intranet across browsers, devices and in the mobile app, to allow organizations to work across teams and siloes to harness collective knowledge. Along this journey we have been excited to learn from customers both how they are moving to the cloud with SharePoint and also to hear how we can continue to innovate to deliver new value. Our focus has been on responding to that feedback and many of the announcements we made at Microsoft Ignite 2019 are based on that.

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Ignite 2019

At Microsoft Ignite 2019, we announced a ton of new capabilities in Teams to help customers in all industries work in new ways and better respond to the evolving needs of their business. These enhancements fall into the following categories: (1) Customize your Teams conversations and experience, (2) Easily manage conversations, tasks, and files from other Microsoft 365 apps within Teams, (3) Conduct more inclusive and effective meetings, (4) Give your Firstline Workers easier access to Teams, (5) Enable industry-specific scenarios in healthcare and other industries, (6) New planning and administration tools to easily manage Teams and protect your data, and (7) Automate workflows, integrate custom apps and data insights within Teams using Power Platform.

Microsoft announces new innovations in security, compliance, and identity at Ignite

At the Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference, we announced new innovations designed to help customers across their security, compliance, and identity needs. These new innovations include: (1) Microsoft information protection and governance, Microsoft Compliance Score, new value in Azure Active Directory, and many, many more.

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft IT Showcase: Leading a successful transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams

Organizations need to plan ahead when upgrading key business software. That’s why Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO, formerly known as Microsoft IT) created a robust plan to guide our transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. CSEO paved a clear path for the upgrade process, providing an exceptional experience and driving early adoption along the way. In this content collection, we share how we approached the technical upgrade, implemented change-management and adoption strategies, and trained our global organization on using Teams as a hub for teamwork and communication. Learn from our journey at Microsoft and customize our resources and training materials to make your own organization’s transition to Microsoft Teams smooth, productive, and powerful.

Microsoft IT Showcase: How Microsoft migrated 99.9% of internal mailboxes to Exchange Online

Microsoft migrated hundreds of thousands of internal, on-premises Exchange servers to Exchange Online and Office 365 to deliver a secure, robust email experience built for a modern, mobile workforce. This staged migration required transparent communication, proactive coordination with stakeholders, and meticulous planning. Learn the steps Microsoft CSEO took, the challenges we faced, and best practices for a smooth, seamless transition to a cloud-first, mobile-ready mailbox platform.

Microsoft announces general availability for Microsoft 365 learning pathways

Earlier this year we released a Beta Preview of Microsoft 365 learning pathways, to help you increase usage and adoption of Office 365 and other services in your organization. We’re pleased to announce the general availability of this solution in November, 2019. Microsoft 365 learning pathways (M365LP) is a customizable, on-demand training solution easily provisioned from the SharePoint Provisioning Service into your own Office 365 tenant. M365LP provides customers with content streamed from Microsoft for key services such as Office applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), Microsoft Teams, Planner and others. Once installed this solution can be customized to your own company brand and service usage. Custom playlists for your own business processes can be included and the entire experience is configured in SharePoint Online giving you maximum familiarity and flexibility. Based on your feedback and our desire to empower end user training around the world we are also announcing our multi-lingual capability will be available in Q1 of CY20. Nine languages will be supported as part of this release, including Chinese (Simplified), Dutch (Netherlands), French, German, Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan), Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian (Russian), Spanish.

What’s New in Microsoft Stream – Ignite 2019

Video is how we learn, share ideas, and build personal connections. Microsoft Stream continues to expand on the promise of delivering intelligent video to organizations using video to communicate, inform and engage employees. New Stream innovations help infuse AI driven productivity, easier expertise sharing and better accessibility into the modern workplace, including: (1) AI powered voice enhance eliminates background noise in recorded videos – generally available Q2 CY20, (2) Additional languages for transcripts and captions – generally available now, (3) Record, edit and personalize videos with the Stream mobile app – generally available Q1 CY20, and (4) PowerApps integration to support Stream videos – generally available Q1 CY20. Also, the option to migrate your Office 365 Video content to Microsoft Stream is now available! If you have not started to transition to Stream, we encourage you to begin soon. As we continue to invest in Stream and enable customers to migrate from Office 365 Video, we are committed to helping you be successful with video adoption.

The Future of Yammer: Microsoft Ignite 2019

At Microsoft Ignite 2019, we unveiled new Yammer capabilities that power leadership engagement, company-wide communication, communities, and knowledge sharing in Microsoft 365. Building on a decade of customer success and feedback, the new Yammer delivers a beautiful, intelligent user experience across devices along with deep integration with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook, and new administration and compliance capabilities. We’ll be rolling out the new Yammer to a select number of private preview customers starting in December and expanding the preview beyond that in the coming months. The new Yammer is due to roll out to all customers in 2020. Sign up to request early access for your organization: https://aka.ms/TheNewYammer.

Microsoft Ignite 2019: Upcoming features for richer, more actionable insights

Productivity isn’t just about being more efficient. It’s also about applying the collective knowledge of your organization so that together you can succeed and achieve more. Knowledge about how people connect, share information, and spend their time reveals the impact of the way people work on the business outcomes your organization cares about. At Ignite, we introduced new capabilities in Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics that make these insights richer and more actionable for organizations and employees. These new capabilities include productivity insights, topic analysis, manager deployed plans, improvements for meetings and time away, etc.

Office 365 Roadmap Update | November 3 – 9, 2019

With all the news and announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2019, the natural result is a significant update to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. There were 47 items added over the last week, so in an effort to keep the weekly digest post from being extraordinarily long, I have separated the Office 365 Roadmap updates out for this week.

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Outlook for Android: Visual cues for work and personal accounts	56452	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Outlook – Android Provides clear visual cues in across email and calendar experience when in either your work or personal accounts so that email and events are always created from the correct account.
Teachers get early access to class teams created with SDS	57291	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Teams New class teams created with School Data Sync now allow Teachers time to prep and build their team before students join—clicking ‘Activate’ allows students in and signals the start of their collaboration in Teams.
Record, edit and personalize videos with Stream mobile app	57297	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Stream Easily create personalized videos including annotations, text and emojis directly from your Stream mobile app.
SharePoint lists – Expanded view	57302	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint It’s subtle and powerful, a feature that gives you more visual space to see and dig into data. We’re introducing the ability to expand lists to fill the screen – to allow you to focus on what you’re doing and see more rows and columns at once. Click the expand button and see more, do more. One click clears the chrome of left-hand navigation and site header.
SharePoint – PowerApps integration with SharePoint libraries	57303	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint Now, citizen developers configure and customize default document library forms with built-in PowerApps. You’ll be able to use PowerApps to build custom forms for document libraries, extending metadata-enriched experiences throughout SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
SharePoint lists – Card view design formatting	57304	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint SharePoint allows you to tailor your view for document libraries and lists by dragging the column header to a new location. Configure dynamic card views of your documents and data to adjust the view for what looks best.
SharePoint lists – Conditional formatting rule builder with new rich-text capabilities	57305	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint You will have the ability to use If/Then logic to format rows and columns based on attributes like numerical, date, etc. to apply color formatting across SharePoint lists and libraries. You, too, will have greater flexibility for how your text appears within your items by using the enhanced rich text editor – to bold, color, underline, etc. more closely to how you wish your text to appear.
SharePoint lists – Alternate row formatting	57306	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint Provide a cleaner, more visual view of your documents and data with column formatting that alternates every other row. Click into Format view, select your color preference for Odd and Even rows and watch it take effect in real time. Once you’re satisfied with how it looks – dare I say how it pops – click the Close button and know your data comes across intact with clarity and style.
SharePoint – lists and libraries web parts consume dynamic data	57307	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint Let web parts talk to other web parts and your pages and experiences become more dynamic with data and interactive. You will be able to configure web parts to get or give their property values from other web parts, including updating those values based on what is selected. And now, both SharePoint List and Library web part can consume dynamic data from other source web parts.
SharePoint admin – Increased site collection limit: 2 million site collections per tenant	57316	December CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint You know that thing we said about increased limits over time that match Microsoft 365 customer usage…? Well, here’s another. We know you may bring a lot of sites as you transition from on-premises, and then IT-managed self-service roll out in the cloud – this equates to a lot of sites to support everything from collaborative team sites, cross-company portals and document centers across disciplines. So, today, we announced support of a single tenant having up to 2,000,000 site collections across their Office 365 tenant. That’s up from the previous limit of 500,000.
Sensitivity labels for Teams, Office 365 Groups, and SharePoint Sites (public preview)	57310	November CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Office 365 Groups, SharePoint, Teams With a sensitivity label you can now associate privacy, external user access, and unmanaged device policies for Sites and Groups. Users can simply select a sensitivity label when creating or updating a Team, Office 365 Group, or SharePoint Site, and the right security policies will be automatically applied. Simple, seamless, and consistent labels experience across Microsoft 365 experiences. To learn more, check out this site. Public preview starts on Nov. 20th, 2019.
Support for sensitivity labels with protection in SharePoint and OneDrive (public preview)	57311	November CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: OneDrive, SharePoint SharePoint and OneDrive now support sensitivity labels with protection i.e. Microsoft Information Protection-based encryption setting can be associated with a sensitivity label. The encrypted files are treated much like regular files and users can open and edit them in Office on the Web and get modern productivity experiences like co-authoring. You can govern these encrypted files with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies and eDiscovery too. To learn more, check out this site.
Microsoft Whiteboard integration with Microsoft Teams	57293	November CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Teams, Whiteboard Microsoft Whiteboard integration into Microsoft Teams will allow people to ideate and collaborate on a range of workplace scenarios, and enable people to bring ideas to life together, whether they’re in the same room or working remotely. Add a whiteboard to your next meeting by selecting via the share tray.
Outlook for iOS: Play My Emails	50544	November CY2019	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Outlook – iOS Play My Emails on the go to get time back in your day. Cortana provides a voice forward, intelligent experience for reading new email in your focused inbox when you’re on the move or when your hands are busy doing other things. A new experience includes an optional touch interface designed to easily take action on important new emails or offers the option to respond with your voice.
Stream: Voice enhance	57301	Q2 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Stream Voice enhance eliminates distracting background noise, so you focus on the person speaking, not what’s happening around them.
SharePoint admin – Migration manager	57308	Q2 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint The migration manager, now a key part of the SharePoint admin center (preview), helps orchestrate and simplify management of large-scale migrations. Admins can add and manage multiple migration machines to centrally orchestrate all migration activities. The new task view in the SharePoint admin center provides one location to create and monitor progress. For each task, there is a task detail pane to download reports and change settings for individual tasks – all centrally managed within the SharePoint admin experience.
SharePoint admin – Root site swap (now a task within the SharePoint admin center experience)	57309	Q2 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint Swap the location of a source site with another target site using the new Swap site button in the SharePoint admin center. Once swapped, the source site becomes the new SharePoint root site for your tenant. The previously designated root site automatically gets archived along with any subsites that may have existed.
SharePoint auto classification with sensitivity labels (private preview)	57312	Q2 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint Not only manual labeling, we are also expanding to automatically detect and label the sensitive files in SharePoint and OneDrive so that even if users forget or neglect to label the sensitive files the intelligent engine will catch the sensitive files. You can create an auto labeling policy in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center selecting the rules you like to evaluate to determine sensitivity files with few clicks.
Information barriers (private preview)	57313	Q2 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: OneDrive, SharePoint Not only in governance, we are also evolving our Compliance controls for highly regulated verticals like Finance, Healthcare, etc., FINRA like compliance regulations for finance vertical require controls in place to avoid insider trading between different department users in the organization. You can now achieve these advanced regulations with the Information Barriers scenario in SharePoint and OneDrive.
SharePoint admin – Improved edit panel to manage site settings	57314	Q2 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint We are releasing a new panel experience which will make it easier to view and manage more site properties, like how you would edit from within the site itself – through an edit pane that overlays the page you are working from. Select a site you wish to manage, and in the edit pane you will see several panels. The General panel displays a lot of the main site characteristics – and this is where you can rename the site name and URL. The Activity panel showcases site usage for file and people insights. The Permissions panel enables management of site admins, owners, members and visitors. The Policies panel provides visibility and access to manage site policies like external sharing, sensitivity labels and more. And finally, the Hub panel lets you know if the site is a hub site or associated to one.
SharePoint admin – Modern term store and terms analytics dashboard	57315	Q2 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint Use the updated term store to create and manage terms and term sets in SharePoint to enter data consistently. The new experience, within the SharePoint admin center, offers an enhanced set of analytics and make it easier to manage your company’s taxonomy and content types. And within the term store update, you’ll now find analytics to view insights related to the Term Store, to see the breakdown of regular and managed terms, general use of terms across your sites and apps, and any additional management suggestions to ensure healthy, useful managed metadata.
SharePoint admin – new SharePoint admin center home page	57318	Q3 CY2020	Added: 04 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint When you first land in the SharePoint admin center, we want it to be both familiar and useful at a glance. The idea is to provide a familiar experience, taking a similar design approach as the Microsoft admin center. You’ll see more and more cards and graphs appear over time – so you can see insights on files, usage security, recommendations, training and so on. Better see what’s happening, and then take the appropriate action.
Dark Mode for OneNote 2016	57417	November CY2019	Added: 06 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: OneNote We are rolling out Dark Mode for OneNote 2016. This will be available for Office 365 subscribers and non-volume licensing Office 2019 customers. Dark Mode changes the app’s interface elements from light to dark. Using OneNote in this mode can improve readability in low light environments, increase legibility of the user interface as well as your notes, provide better contrast, and reduce eye strain. You might also use OneNote in Dark Mode simply as a personal preference. The choice is yours!
Public Preview of Fluid Framework for Office 365 customers	56781	November CY2019	Added: 06 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Office 365 We announced Fluid Framework, a new technology and set of experiences that will make collaboration seamless by breaking down the barriers between apps. Over time, we expect these capabilities to light up in experiences across Microsoft 365, including within chat in Teams, mail in Outlook, portals in SharePoint, notes in OneNote, and documents in Office. In the coming weeks, check out the public preview of the Fluid Framework’s end user experience rolling out in your commercial tenant. To access simply login with your org-ID. Available in English (US) in worldwide environments only.
SharePoint – OneDrive – Teams – file upload limit to 100GB	49368	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams As requirements grow, so, too, must the content service that you depend on for your day to day content and files use. We are increasing the file upload limit in Office 365 to 100GB (up from 15GB). That means you can bring bigger files into SharePoint document libraries, OneDrive and Teams files – all based on the same, robust content store.
Search scoping controls with Microsoft Search	57098	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Search We’re adding support for more flexibility in Microsoft Search with SharePoint with support for search scoping controls in modern document libraries, lists for site, hub or organization wide.
Spelling suggestions in Microsoft Search	57127	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Search Spelling suggestions in Microsoft Search suggests plausible replacements for words that are likely to have been misspelled. If a user enters a word in a search query that appears to be misspelled, the search results page displays query spelling corrections. For example, if someone enters a query that contains the word “ampitheater”, the query spelling correction would be “amphitheater”.
Microsoft Search in classic SharePoint sites	57131	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search, SharePoint Microsoft Search in classic SharePoint sites brings the Microsoft Search experience to classic SharePoint sites and moves the search box to the application header in Office 365.
Custom results page template in PnP	57133	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Search Custom results page template in PnP, allows developers to develop and deploy custom results pages that can be presented from the Microsoft Search box.
Query alterations using SPFx for custom results page	57135	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Search Query alterations using SPFx for custom results page allows for query alterations in Microsoft Search for custom results pages with the SharePoint Framework.
Outlook on the web – new experience in DoD	57431	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Outlook – Web, DoD Following the roll out of the new experience for Outlook on the web, it will be made available for DoD level customers.
Microsoft Teams: “Colleague joined Teams” notifications	57455	December CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Connect with new team members faster. Users will receive a notification in their activity feed when a new colleague joins Teams for the first time.
Semantic search in Microsoft Search	57063	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Search With intelligent, natural language search capabilities in Microsoft Search via Bing, SharePoint, and Office.com, users experience improved search accuracy as the search engine can now understand a user’s intent and contextualize the meaning of the terms typed – leading to more relevant search results.
Acronym search in Microsoft Search	57064	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search Acronym search in Microsoft Search enables Microsoft Search users to discover Acronyms via Microsoft Search. Acronym search will initially be available to Bing prior to becoming available to additional Microsoft Search entry points such as SharePoint, Office.com, etc.
Microsoft Search Connectors	57065	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search Microsoft Search Connectors provide a set of out-of-the-box search connectors to allow for Microsoft 365 customers to connect Microsoft Search to disparate data sources outside of Microsoft 365. Microsoft Search Connectors will include the following connectors available within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center: Windows File Share; ServiceNow; MSSQL DB; Intranet websites; MediaWiki; ADLS v2; Salesforce and ingestion API.
People search on attributes in Microsoft Search	57067	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search People search on attributes available in Bing makes it easy for people to query someone’s name + title, for example, without having to remember their entire name and correct spelling.
Microsoft Search API in the Microsoft Graph	57068	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search The Microsoft Search API in the Microsoft Graph allows for developers to build custom applications the leverage Microsoft Search results.
Microsoft Search in Bing and Edge mobile applications	57069	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search With Microsoft Search in the Bing and Edge mobile applications (iOS and Android), you can now authenticate with your organizational account and search across information in Microsoft 365 and connected experiences with Microsoft Search.
Bing Enterprise Homepage with Microsoft Search	57070	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search The enterprise focused Bing Homepage with Microsoft Search experience offers company branding, Office content, quick links to top queries as well as company updates from their admin.
Bing industry news with Microsoft Search	57071	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search Industry news gives users a targeted set of news content specific to their company and industry. In addition, it offers access to news content for free, that would otherwise be behind a paid subscription wall, such as Wall Street Journal and more.
Power BI results in Microsoft Search	57072	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search, Power BI With Power BI results in Bing using Microsoft Search people at work can simply search for a report using a keyword and immediately view Power BI reports or dashboard results inline. For frequently used Power BI reports, users can submit a request to create a bookmark for a specific security group, title, and URL, and sample keywords to their admin. Once created, the bookmark will contain the tile/report embedded directly into the bookmark answer card for easy viewing.
Floorplan search in Microsoft Search	57073	November CY2019	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: Rolling out App/Service: Search Floorplan search in Bing with Microsoft Search allows people to pinpoint a colleague’s office visually on a floorplan based on engineering diagram data indexed by Microsoft Search.
Outlook on the web – personal calendar affects work availability	54970	Q2 CY2020	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Outlook -Web Outlook is making it easier for you to manage and protect your time across your work and personal life. As noted in Roadmap Item 54015, Outlook on the web allows you to connect your personal calendar so that you can view both your work and personal calendars in one place. Once you add your personal calendar, you will have the option to make it block time in your work availability. Don’t worry though: when others see your work availability (free/busy), your personal events will only appear as free or busy. Details of personal events, such as title and location, won’t ever be shown regardless of how you share your work calendar. This feature is currently in private preview.
Custom verticals and refiners in Microsoft Search	57054	Q3 CY2020	Added: 07 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Search New support for custom verticals and refiners in Microsoft Search allows you to customize out of the box verticals for Microsoft Search, add custom refiners, create new verticals for SharePoint and OneDrive, and create modern result types with modern display templates with adaptive cards for OneDrive and SharePoint content.
SharePoint and Teams – updated Add a Team to a site wizard	46990	December CY2019	Added: 08 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: SharePoint, Teams Microsoft wants to make it easier to use the connected value of SharePoint and Teams. People use SharePoint team site home pages with dynamic web parts as mini-dashboards for group content: pages, news, links, documents, group activity and more – and it’s configurable. Choose the SharePoint content that you want to add as tabs in Teams when you first connect them via the “Add a Team” flow from your site.
Microsoft To Do: push notifications for shared lists – AAD users	56872	December CY2019	Added: 08 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: To Do Customers who use list sharing in Microsoft To Do will begin receiving push notifications for activity in shared lists, such as task creation and completion.
Target communications in Microsoft Teams	57651	December CY2019	Added: 08 November 2019 Status: In development App/Service: Teams Targeted communication allows team members to message everyone in a specific role at the same time by @mentioning the role name in a post. For example, you could send a message to all cashiers in a store or all nurses in a hospital.

Office 365 Weekly Digest | August 25 – 31, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

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

UPCOMING EVENTS

Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

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

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

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: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Azure AD Webinar: Getting started with hybrid identity

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

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

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

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Microsoft Flow Online Conference 2019

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

Azure AD Webinar: Integrating your applications with Azure Active Directory

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

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

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

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

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

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

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

BLOG ROUNDUP

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

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

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | August 2019

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

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

Behind the Scenes: Scaling Live Events in Yammer

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

NOTEWORTHY

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

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

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

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

Workplace Analytics – August 2019: Feature updates

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

Back to School 2019 – Microsoft Forms for the school year

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

Catch-up on the PowerApps October release wave updates!

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