Welcome to the April 22 - 28, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.
Only a few additions to the Office 365 Roadmap from last week, including public anonymous external video sharing coming to Microsoft Stream in Q4 CY2018, as well as naming conventions in Office 365 targeted for release in May 2018. There was also one cancellation – In product messaging in the Service Health dashboard.
In addition to the ongoing customer online immersion experience events, there are a couple of new events including a free educator-focused webinar for Microsoft Teams and a webcast on safeguarding individual privacy rights with the Microsoft Cloud..
Lots of content in the Blog Roundup including posts on new and upcoming capabilities in Microsoft 365, improvements to the Planner tab in Microsoft Teams, an increase in SharePoint Online storage, updates to the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run, new sharing and collaboration features for OneDrive on Mac, iOS and Android. In addition, MyAnalytics has added new features and resources and Microsoft Forms is now enterprise ready.
Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items on recent updates to Office for Windows, Mac and iOS, a white paper on Office 365 Encryption options, an increase of the public folder limit in Exchange Online to 500,000 folders and a new date for discontinuation of support for Session Boder Controllers in Exchange Online Unified Messaging.
OFFICE 365 ROADMAP
Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week:
|
Feature ID
|
Title |
Description |
Status
|
Added
|
Estimated Release
|
More Info |
|
27728
|
Microsoft Stream: Public anonymous external video sharing |
Allow individual videos in Microsoft Stream to be marked for external public access allowing the video to be embeded in a public website. Anyone in the world can view these external videos without a login. Stream admins will be able to control if this feature is enabled and who within the organization can make videos publicly available. |
In development
|
04/26/2018
|
Q4 CY2018
|
n / a |
|
27740
|
SharePoint web part: Weather |
Site owners and members will now be able to show the current weather on their site home page, within subpages and/or within a news article on team sites, communication sites and hub sites. Simply add the web part to your page or news, add a location and select from Fahrenheit or Celsius (°F or °C). The web part pulls up-to-date information from MSN Weather. |
In development
|
04/26/2018
|
May CY2018
|
n / a |
|
27769
|
Naming conventions in Office 365 |
Admins will have the ability to set up rules around how an Office 365 group is named and will be able to block certain types of words from being included in a group name. |
In development
|
04/27/2018
|
May CY2018
|
n / a |
|
15064
|
Service Health Dashboard Update: in product messaging |
We're adding enhancements to the Service Health Dashboard in the Office 365 admin center: In product messaging —The new Service health dashboard will enable you to make your end users aware of service incidents and inform them about possible workaround solutions through optional in product notifications. |
Cancelled
|
06/13/2017
|
Q4 CY2018
|
Announcing a new Service Health dashboard |
UPCOMING EVENTS
Microsoft Learning Consultants: 6 Steps for building a collaborative classroom with Microsoft Teams
When: Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at 5pm ET | This free webinar is hosted by educators and tailored for educators. In this webinar learn how Office 365 tools like Teams can help you facilitate content creation, collaborative classrooms, and personalized learning in a digital hub experience. Be sure to check out our additional free spring webinars in May and June.
Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows
When: Wednesday, May 2, 2018 and Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 1pm ET | This 90-minute hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Discover how you can keep your information more secure without inhibiting your workflow, (2) Learn how to visualize and analyze complex data, quickly zeroing in on the insights you need, (3) See how multiple team members can access, edit and review documents simultaneously, and (4) Gain skills that will save you time and simplify your workflow immediately. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Transforming your business to meet the changing market and needs of your customers
When: Thursday, May 3, 2018 at 12pm and 3pm ET | This 2-hour hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Use digital intelligence to build personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints, (2) Improve customer service through a single, unified experience that delivers end-to-end service across every channel, (3) Increase customer satisfaction with intelligent scheduling, native mobile support, and remote asset monitoring to help you get the job done right the first time, and (4) Run your project-based business more productively by bringing people, processes, and automation technology together through a unified experience. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Visualizing, Analyzing & Sharing Your Data Without Having to be a BI Expert
When: Tuesday, May 8, 2018 and Tuesday, May 29, 2018 at 12pm ET | This 2-hour hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive the latest business analytics tools. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they can work throughout your organization. During this interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Locate and organize large amounts of data from multiple sources, (2) Visualize complex data and identify trends quickly without having to be a BI expert, (3) Find and collaborate with company experts on the fly, even if they work in another part of the country, and (4) Gather colleague's opinions easily and eliminate communication and process bottlenecks. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Hands-on with security in a cloud-first, mobile-first world
When: Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 12pm and 3pm ET | This 2-hour hands-on session will give you the opportunity to try Microsoft technology that secures your digital transformation with a comprehensive platform, unique intelligence, and partnerships. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Detect and protect against external threats by monitoring, reporting and analyzing activity to react promptly to provide organization security, (2) Protect your information and reduce the risk of data loss, (3) Provide peace of mind with controls and visibility for industry-verified conformity with global standards in compliance, (4) Protect your users and their accounts, and (5) Support your organization with enhanced privacy and compliance to meet the General Data Protection Regulation. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Connecting, Organizing & Collaborating with Your Team
When: Tuesday, May 15, 2018 and Tuesday, May 22, 2018 at 12pm ET | During this session, you will have the opportunity to experience Windows 10, Office 365 and Microsoft's newest collaboration tool: Microsoft Teams. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will explore how to use Microsoft Teams and Office 365 to: (1) Create a hub for team work that works together with your other Office 365 apps, (2) Build customized options for each team, (3) Keep everyone on your team engaged, (4) Coauthor and share content quickly, and (5) Gain skills that will save you time and simplify your workflow immediately. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Safeguarding individual privacy rights with the Microsoft Cloud
When: Friday, May 25, 2018 from 3:00pm – 5:00pm ET | Join Alym Rayani, Director of Microsoft 365, for our May 25 webcast where he will: (1) Show how you can use GDPR fundamentals to assess and manage your compliance risk, (2) Discuss how you can help protect your customers' data with built-in, intelligent security capabilities, and (3) Cover how you can meet your own compliance obligations by streamlining your processes.
BLOG ROUNDUP
Making IT simpler with a modern workplace
There is a simple way to explain one of the biggest threats to any organization's infrastructure. It's just one word: complexity. Complexity is the absolute enemy of security and productivity. The simpler you can make your productivity and security solutions, the easier it will be for IT to manage and secure—making the user experience that much more elegant and useful. We've learned from building and running over 200 global cloud services that a truly modern and truly secure service is a simple one. Microsoft 365 is built to help you solve this problem of complexity so that you can simplify. But let me be clear, simpler doesn't mean less robust or less capable. From thousands of conversations with customers, we heard clearly how important it is for IT to simplify the way it enables users across PCs, mobile devices, cloud services, and on-premises apps. Microsoft 365 provides that all with an integrated solution that's simpler, yet also more powerful and intelligent. Because the way you work and do business is so important to us, our work will never be done—we will constantly innovate, improve, and discover new and better ways to help your organization do more. We are excited to announce some new capabilities and updates coming soon to Microsoft 365, including: (1) A modern desktop, (2) Solutions for Firstline Workers, (3) Streamlined device management with lower costs, (4) Integrated administration experience, and (5) Built-in compliance. Each of these new capabilities will allow you to simplify your modern workplace, which means delighting and empowering your users, while enabling IT to protect and secure the corporate assets.
Planner tab in Microsoft Teams now includes the Schedule view and Charts view
When we released the first version of the Planner tab in Teams, we noted that our goal was to support the same feature set in Teams as we do in the Planner web app. We recently took another step towards our goal and have completed the roll out of a few more popular features from the web: (1) Schedule view - get an overview of upcoming tasks and drag and drop them to set dates, (2) Charts view - stay up to date on the status of your plans, and (3) Filter and Group by options - focus on key tasks and group by Assigned To, Progress, Due Date, and Labels. For more information about using Planner in Teams, check out this article.
Increase in SharePoint Online storage allocation
Global digital transformation is driving growth across Microsoft 365 and SharePoint as organizations invest in technology to empower employees to do their best work. More than 350,000 organizations now have SharePoint and the data they are storing over doubled last year alone. We're hearing customers want to put even more content into SharePoint to take advantage of new team collaboration and enterprise content management experiences, while moving off on-premise servers, file shares, and 3rd party cloud offerings. We are announcing a 20x increase in the SharePoint Online per user license storage allocation. This will increase to 1 TB plus 10 GB per user license purchased, up from 1 TB plus .5 GB per user license purchased. Note this does not include SharePoint Online kiosk plans including Office 365 F1 and Microsoft 365 F1. All Office 365 services that use SharePoint for content services, including Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups, will benefit from this substantial storage increase. This change will start rolling out on July 1, 2018 and will be completed by the end of August 2018. Once complete, you'll see this increased storage in your SharePoint Online admin center. If you are currently paying for additional storage you can decrease this as needed after this change is reflected in your tenant. | Resource: SharePoint and OneDrive Security and Compliance Resource Center
Setting preferences for Office 365 ProPlus using the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run
We are announcing a preview update to the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run, which provides desktop admins with a simple user interface to customize their deployment of Office. With this update, you can now customize Office application settings as part of your configuration file, which means you can build a single configuration file that installs Office and configures preferences for Office applications. You can search for Office application settings based on Office application, category, and title to quickly find the settings you're interested in. For this preview release, we've provided a limited set of Office application settings to choose from. We plan to include the full set of application settings later this summer. In addition to application settings, we have been listening to your feedback and since we introduced the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run we have made a few changes to the preview experience; adding Organization Name as a setting that is included as part of the deployment configuration, an update to the language selection experience, and an update to the Automatically accept the EULA option. In our next update we plan to add many additional enhancements including: an update to the product selection experience to allow you to have more control over the products you can select from and the apps that you exclude, an update to the language selection experience including support for MatchOS, AllowCdnFallback, Proofing Tools and more. As always, make sure you download the latest version of the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) to enable this new feature during deployment.
OneDrive Brings New Sharing and Collaboration Features to Mac, iOS and Android
Over the past year, we have worked hard to bring new sharing features to OneDrive and SharePoint, including real-time collaboration for Office for Mac as well as to iOS and Android. We have several announcements that reinforce our commitment to deliver a first-class experience to our Mac, iOS and Android users. We consistently hear that users are more confident and comfortable sharing files when given a simple, consistent experience across their devices. Over the past year, we've focused on delivering that with a unified sharing experience to Office, OneDrive, and SharePoint across desktop and web. Now, we take our next step in that journey by bringing the same, successful sharing experience that you currently see in our other clients to our OneDrive app for iOS and Android. This feature is available now for Android users and is currently rolling out for iOS users so, make sure to keep your OneDrive app updated to the latest version when prompted. There are also new updates for Mac Office users. The OneDrive client for Mac will now be part of the Office 2016 for Mac Click-to-Run installer. This means that the OneDrive standalone client will be automatically installed as part of your Office installations rather than having to install it separately. For customers currently running the Mac App Store version, OneDrive will now automatically migrate your settings to the standalone version. Finally, this update will also bring requested functionality to the Mac OneDrive client: Office for Mac will work with OneDrive to intelligently open your files locally if it has already synced the file rather than download a new copy, so your files will open much more quickly. We will announce more features and functionality coming to our customers in May at the SharePoint Conference North America.
New in MyAnalytics: manager 1:1 insights, adoption resources, and shortened onboarding time
As the demands on our time at work grow, MyAnalytics helps people get back in control and build better work habits. This month, we're excited to announce the following updates and releases: (1) Manager 1:1 insights, (2) New user adoption resources, and (3) Shortened onboarding time. Manager 1:1 insights will surface in the MyAnalytics personal dashboard when you've gone 3 or more weeks since your last 1:1 with your manager, with a friendly tip to book a 30-minute check-in. If you're a manager, you'll also see a similar insight if you've gone 3+ weeks without booking a 1:1 with one of your direct reports. Managerial relationships are determined using Azure Active Directory. Our new adoption resources will help map out a path in advance and include resources for individuals and teams. The MyAnalytics onboarding process is now faster than ever. Within 3 days of being assigned a MyAnalytics license by their Office 365 Administrator, users will receive a "Welcome to MyAnalytics" email and have access to their personal dashboard and Outlook add-in. The personal dashboard will populate 80 days retroactively, assuming the user has been active on Exchange Online for that duration. Users will receive a weekly email digest starting on the first Monday after the Welcome email sends.
Microsoft Forms is Enterprise Ready now!
We are excited to announce that Microsoft Forms, a simple app for creating surveys, quizzes, and polls, is generally available to all Office 365 commercial customers. Used by more than 3 million users in education, Forms was brought to commercial preview by customer demand last year. Thanks to more than 50,000 companies participating in the Preview program, Microsoft Forms is now enterprise ready, and, hence, we are removing the "Preview" label. With Microsoft Forms, your employees can easily solicit client input, measure customer satisfaction, and organize team events, within minutes. The app is simple to use and works on any web browser, so it can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. With real time responses and automatic charts built in, Microsoft Forms makes it easy to understand the data right away. And for companies that want to custom brand their surveys, Forms supports the addition of themes, logo, and images. We also know that many users work in teams, so users can collaborate on a single form. Forms can be used within applications you know and love, such as Excel, SharePoint, Teams, Flow, and Sway. Most recently, Microsoft Forms added many features that enterprises requested, such as SOC compliance, ability for IT admins to manage user licenses, and controls to enable sharing of Forms outside of their organization. For more complex surveys, we also added support question branching and Likert scales, plus an ability to collect 50,000 survey responses per form.
NOTEWORTHY
Office 365 for Windows Desktop – April 2018 Release details
On April 25th, 2018, Microsoft released Office for Windows Desktop version 1804 (Build 9226.xxxx). Our Office International team translated this update into 44 languages. Here are a few of the new features that are included in this release: (1) In PowerPoint convert your ink to text or shapes, (2) Listen to your emails in Outlook, (3) Encrypt option in Outlook using Office 365 Message Encryption, (4) Task board filtering in Project, and (5) Find and fix proofing issues in your language in Word. More information and help content on this release can be found in the What's New in Office 365 page.
Office for MAC 2016 - April 2018 Release details
On April 11th, 2018, Microsoft released Office 2016 for Mac Version 16.12 (Build 180410) in 27 languages. Our Office International team was responsible for translating this release. There are several new features in Outlook including a more actionable calendar and the ability for delegates to schedule Skype for Business Online meetings on behalf of principals using principals' email addresses. Also, in most client applications including Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word you can now insert and edit Scalable Vector Graphics. In addition, locally synced OneDrive documents open directly from the cloud, allowing users to AutoSave, share, and collaborate easily. More information and help content on this release can be found in the MAC section of the What's New in Office 365 page.
Office 365 for iPad & iPhone - April 2018 release details
On April 9th, 2018, Microsoft released an updated version of Office for iPad & iPhone to Office 365 subscribers - Version 2.12 (18040200) in 35 languages. Our Office International team translated this release. Here are some of the new features included this month in Excel, PowerPoint and Word: (1) Rotate, resize, and add color to SVG images in your documents, worksheets, and presentations to better convey your ideas, (2) Perform common calculations in Excel on a selected range of data using functions, and (3) In Excel, have quick access to contextual commands like expand selection, sort, filter, and more! More information and help content on this release can be found in the iOS section of the What's New in Office 365 page.
Using encryption in Office 365 to help protect data and meet your compliance needs
With digital data growing exponentially, and threats becoming more advanced, laws and regulations are evolving to protect individuals and their personal information. Encryption is one method that can be used to help ensure the confidentiality of certain sensitive information, reduce the risk of data compromise and help you meet your compliance needs. When organizations use Office 365, they can expect customer data to be encrypted both in transit and at rest by default. Additional encryption capabilities can be added for increased protection. Encryption technologies available in Office 365 to help protect your data include: (1) TLS, (2) BitLocker, (3) Service Encryption, and (4) Office 365 Message Encryption. For customers who have data security or privacy requirements that are driven by compliance, Office 365 offers flexible encryption key management options to further help organizations meet their compliance needs as they move to the cloud. You can read more about these options in our white paper.
Announcing the increase of the Public Folder limit in Exchange Online from 250,000 to 500,000 folders
In September 2017, we officially announced the increase of the supported limit of Public Folders in Exchange Online from 100,000 to 250,000. In line with our efforts to scale Public Folders even further, we are glad to announce that Exchange Online now officially supports public folder hierarchies of up to 500K public folders in the cloud – double the previously supported limit of 250K public folders! All existing customers using Exchange Online who are currently constrained by the limit of 250K public folders, can now expand their Exchange Online public folder hierarchy up to 500K folders. Note about migrations: Exchange 2013/2016 customers can still only migrate up to 100K public folders to Exchange Online, and Exchange 2010 customers can only migrate up to 250K public folders to Exchange Online. However, once folders are migrated to Exchange Online, you can expand the hierarchy up to 500K public folders. We are working to resolve these limitations in the future.
New date for discontinuation of support for Session Border Controllers in Exchange Online Unified Messaging
In July 2017, we announced that support for Session Border Controllers (SBC) that connect 3rd Party PBX systems to Exchange Online Unified Messaging (UM) would be discontinued as of July 2018. After feedback from customers and partners concerned about this change, we are announcing additional time for customers to prepare. The new date for discontinuation will be April 30, 2019. Customers with existing deployments remain fully supported until this date. However, Microsoft strongly advises all customers to begin their voicemail transition now. There are different alternatives (outlined in this post) for customers currently using an on-premises PBX system that connects to Exchange Online. We recognize that customers may also choose a combination of these options for their organization. We know these changes can be challenging in the near-term. But we believe that continuing to identify areas where we can evolve the service we provide while taking full advantage of the cloud is the right answer. We will continue to evaluate emerging needs as customers make the transition from legacy dedicated voice to Microsoft's Intelligent Communications solutions. | Microsoft Tech Community Announcement
