MESSAGE CENTER
Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants.
We’ve made a change to the Office 365 Trust Center
Posted: May 10, 2016 | Action: Awareness | As you might be aware, Office 365 security, compliance and privacy information is located in the Office 365 Trust Center. As a commitment to transparency, anytime we materially change the data maps, we disclose this information in the Office 365 Trust Center and send you a notification about this change. The Office 365 data maps were recently revised to include a new datacenter region for Canada, supported by two new datacenter locations we recently brought online in Canada. To learn more, please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=401277.
New SharePoint home experience in Office 365 rolling out starting today
Posted: May 11, 2016 | Action: Awareness | As announced at the “Future of SharePoint” event on May 4th, we are starting to rollout the new SharePoint home experience in Office 365, starting today, to First Release. The rollout will be completed to all tenants within the course of the next several weeks. We’re committed to evolving your intranet to be more accessible on the go, and more personal with intelligence-driven content based on user activities across sites, the people they work with, and the content they work on. Starting May 11th, 2016, we will begin to rollout the new SharePoint home experience in Office 365. What was the ‘Sites’ page is now the ‘SharePoint home’ and the “Sites” tile becomes the “SharePoint” tile – same logo, redesigned for a modern, responsive user experience. Additional details can be found at https://support.office.com/article/Find-sites-and-portals-in-Office-365-6b85097a-87e0-4611-a29a-dfd49b1a1220.
New app: Microsoft Forms Preview for Office 365 Education
Posted: May 12, 2016 | Action: Awareness | Microsoft Forms Preview for Office 365 Education allows students and teachers to quickly create quizzes, surveys, questionnaires and more. Starting May 12, 2016, Office 365 Education users can create quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, registrations and more. Forms authors can invite others to complete forms via a link and Forms are embeddable in Sway and 3rd party portals. Authors can view results in real-time via built-in analytics and data can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis. Teachers can create quizzes, including defining the right answers and students get real-time feedback. In a few weeks, we’ll be adding Microsoft Forms to the app launcher within the Office 365 experience. Get familiar with Microsoft Forms by logging in at http://forms.microsoft.com and reviewing https://support.office.com/article/What-is-Microsoft-Forms-Preview-6b391205-523c-45d2-b53a-fc10b22017c8 for additional information.
UPCOMING EVENTS
FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together
The best productivity experience? It’s already in your Office. Ask questions, learn shortcuts and find out how Office 365 can make you and your team more productive. Each webinar is a live, instructor-led session offered at multiple dates and times. Facilitated discussion follows each session, with opportunities to ask questions and discuss specific scenarios to you. Direct registration links for each webinar are provided below.
- Use Office 365 to achieve more: Discover how to get work done more efficiently with Office 365
- Your files anywhere: Discover new ways to achieve more by getting work done with your documents from anywhere
- Make meetings matter: Discover how Office 365 can help you get the right people achieving more together by connecting online through Skype for Business
- Bring your team together with Yammer: Discover new ways to use Yammer to create conversations and quickly communicate answers
- Get it done from anywhere: Discover how to access Outlook from anywhere and share your files to get things done in real time
- Key roles in making Office 365 successful: Discover how different roles work together to execute a successful launch
- Build awareness: Foster adoption of Office 365 in ways that matter to end users; understanding training resources and develop champions
BLOG ROUNDUP
New tool for helping resolve Office 365 issues
Office 365 is an extremely reliable service, with service availability that typically exceeds 99.9 percent. So if an occasional issue occurs with, for example, getting your email, you may not know where the difficulty lies. Is it your network connection? Has your colleague inadvertently removed your access to that shared mailbox? In these situations, wouldn’t it be nice if you had an automated assistant to help you troubleshoot—and resolve—the problem? Now, there is! The Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 is an easy-to-use app that asks you some simple questions, tests for some of the most common Office 365 support issues and attempts to implement resolutions on your behalf. While the current version is focused on some the more common scenarios people encounter with Outlook, the Support and Recovery Assistant will gain new troubleshooting and resolution capabilities in the future. The Support and Recovery Assistant is built to automatically update itself as these new capabilities become available.
May Office 365 security and compliance update
Over the last month, the Office 365 team has continued to introduce new security features and capabilities while gaining accreditation around the world for upholding the highest standards in cloud security. This post contains a roundup of some key security and compliance-related news items from the last several weeks, including automation of eDiscovery tasks, email safety tips and more!
Announcing the GigJam Invitation Preview – a new way to work
Last fall, we unveiled the Private Preview of GigJam, a new product coming to Office 365 later this year that helps break down barriers between devices, apps and people. There has been a lot of progress since then and now we’re excited to announce that we’re expanding from the Private Preview to the GigJam Invitation Preview—now available to everyone who signed up for early access on the GigJam site. If you’ve already registered, look for an email inviting you to download the app. GigJam helps you spontaneously and momentarily involve others in your work. You just summon all the live information you need, divvy it up by circling what you want to share and crossing out what you don’t and control what others can see or even co-work with you in real time. Now you can finally involve others inside and outside your organization to help you get work done in the moment.
Office 365 datacenters now available in Canada
This announcement strengthens our commitment to making Office 365 the most trusted cloud service for productivity by delivering security, compliance and control to Office 365 customers around the globe. Our new datacenter region is comprised of two geographically distributed datacenters located in Toronto and Quebec City. Providing data residency for customers in Canada will accelerate the growth and potential of Canadian industries and public sector organizations by providing more opportunities to innovate, collaborate and flourish in our increasingly mobile world by using the power of the Microsoft cloud. Both Office 365 and Microsoft Azure customers in Canada can now benefit from enterprise-grade reliability and performance combined with in-country data residency, including data replication within Canada. For details, read “Accelerating the Canadian Cloud.”
NOTEWORTHY
Seven things to know about (Outlook) Safety Tips
As was posted on the Office blog in April, Office 365 is going to be releasing Safety Tips over the next few weeks. This blog post provides more details on how they work and how you can think of them as “Safety Tattoos”.
MTC Mid-Day Cafe: Accessibility in Office 365 Video
In today’s fast paced Enterprise environment, the use of video for communications, training, tacit knowledge capture and re-use, is exploding. But as the use as a means of reaching and empowering employees and organizations increases questions around accessibility arise. How can an organization ensure that its media content is inclusive in its accessibility? What kind of an effort is required to provide accessibility? Thankfully the folks working on Office 365 Video have taken this in to account and have simplified the process of providing closed captioning, in a variety of languages, for organizations employees. On this episode of Mid-Day Café host Michael Gannotti covers closed captioning in Office 365 Video. If your organization is looking to leverage media in Office 365 then this is a session for you and your colleagues.
How we protect Azure AD and Microsoft Accounts from lists of leaked usernames and passwords
Last week there was a lot of news coverage about a list of 272 million stolen username and passwords that were available from a Russian hacker named “The Collector”. Given all the attention this list received, we thought you might be interested in how we protect user accounts from being hacked when something like this happens. This kind of thing happens with alarming frequency, so we’ve developed a standard set of processes and an automated system to protect user accounts from this kind of threat. To share the details on how this works and what we learned from this specific list, Alex Weinert, the Group Program Manager who leads our Identity Protection team has authored this guest blog post. We hope you’ll find this information useful and interesting!