Welcome to the September 24 - 30, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.
Last week, all eyes (and ears) were focused on Microsoft Ignite 2017 in Orlando, Florida. There's a ton of content to review this week, so the intro will be short. I do want to highlight the numerous enhancements announced for Office 365 admins, and the news that Teams will eventually evolve to replace Skype for Business Online.
All of the sessions will be posted in the Microsoft Ignite 2017 Content space of the Microsoft Tech Community.
OFFICE 365 ROADMAP
Items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week:
LinkedIn Profile + Office 365
Feature ID: 16667
Status: Rolling Out
Date Added: September 25, 2017
Description: You can see information from LinkedIn public profiles in Microsoft apps and services. If you connect your LinkedIn and Microsoft accounts, you may see additional LinkedIn profile information. You will also be able to send invitations to connect on LinkedIn directly from Microsoft apps and services.
More Info: n / a
Collab activity for files / folders (mobile)
Feature ID: 16614
Status: Rolling Out
Date Added: September 27, 2017
Description: Users will be able to see any kind of updates or activity that has been performed on their shared files and folders.
More Info: n / a
Office 365 Message Center improvements
Feature ID: 23761
Status: Launched
Date Added: September 27, 2017
Description: When new services are available, capabilities change, or admin action is required, Microsoft posts notifications in the Office 365 Message Center. The tenant specific information can be found in the Admin Center via browser, the Admin Mobile App, Service Communication API, and emails. Until recently, formatting was simple text, but starting now, Message Center communications can include videos, images and rich text.
More Info: n / a
Message Center "Major Updates"
Feature ID: 23785
Status: Rolling Out
Date Added: September 27, 2017
Description: Major update to the Office 365 services require administrator attention. They impact the way users engage with the software, and Office 365 customers need to be aware of the plans, the general timing, and have control to ensure that information is protected. In the weeks following MSIgnite, the Message Center communications – web UI, weekly digest, and new emails – will flag “Major Updates” so that admins can receive email notifications and know how long that capability will be in Targeted Release before reaching Standard Release. During Targeted Release (new name for First Release), the capability will be enabled for any tenant or user set to Targeted Release, and tenant admins can configure or disable the feature. Settings that are applied during Targeted Release carry forward to Standard Release so that you can comfortably prepare for new releases. For organizations that want to allow the evergreen service to update seamlessly, no action is required, and Major Update emails can be disabled.
More Info: Message Center in Office 365 > Messages
Outlook for iOS & Android: Create and Manage Groups
Feature ID: 23812
Status: In development
Date Added: September 27, 2017
Description: We’re bringing group creation and management to Outlook for iOS and Android. Users will be able to create/edit/delete a group and add/remove group members.
More Info: n / a
Outlook for Mac: Create and Manage Groups
Feature ID: 23813
Status: In development
Date Added: September 27, 2017
Description: We’re bringing group creation and management to Outlook for iOS and Android. Users will be able to create/edit/delete a group and add/remove group members.
More Info: n / a
UPCOMING EVENTS
Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows
When: Wednesdays in October (4th, 11th, 18th, 25th) 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.
Connecting, Organizing & Collaborating with Your Team
When: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 at 12pm ET and Thursday, October 19, 2017 at 1pm 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.
Visualizing, Analyzing & Sharing Your Data Without Having to be a BI Expert
When: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 and Tuesday, October 31, 2017 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.
BLOG ROUNDUP
Advancing intelligence, management, and security to empower the modern workplace
Building on our vision for the modern workplace, at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, we announced the expansion of Microsoft 365 as well as a number of new product capabilities that empower everyone to be creative and work together, securely. We're expanding Microsoft 365 to new audiences in offerings for Education and Firstline Workers. Microsoft 365 provides new capabilities to unlock employee creativity such as intelligence in Excel and search, as well as LinkedIn profile integration. Microsoft 365 also delivers the universal toolkit for teamwork with Microsoft Teams, enhanced content sharing in OneDrive and SharePoint, and cross-org connections with Yammer. Microsoft 365 is designed to simplify IT management with automation of new device deployment and configuration, new migration capabilities and enhanced proactive insights via Office 365 Usage Analytics. Last, but certainly not least, updates to Microsoft 365 provide broad security and compliance tools. | Related: Microsoft Mechanics: Microsoft 365 updates to boost teamwork, creativity and your network | Introducing FastTrack for Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Mechanics: New FastTrack tools, deployment and user adoption help – Going from plan to reality with Microsoft 365 | Maximizing IT’s impact with Microsoft 365 Powered Devices | Announcing Microsoft 365 for Education | All workers welcome with Microsoft 365
What's new in Office 365 Administration - Ignite Edition
In a cloud-based workplace powered by Microsoft 365, organizations can enable their employees to be creative and work together securely, by leveraging innovative, always up-to-date services that continuously evolve to meet the needs of the modern workforce. To support the modern way of managing cloud-based services, we believe that IT administration tools need to be personalized and actionable while providing deep enterprise capabilities. IT is at the center of the digital transformation and needs tools that enables administrators to manage all aspects of the service across the entire IT lifecycle, from deployment to day-to-day management tasks and monitoring. This post provides an overview of the wealth of new capabilities that will enable you to manage Office 365 more effectively, including a focused admin experience, assisted guides for offboarding employees, personalized recommendations, usage reporting improvements, Message Center updates, service health notifications via email, new admin and end user training, scoped admin roles, and the new Teams and Skype admin center. | Related: What's new in Office 365 Usage Reporting - Ignite Edition | Learn Office 365 fast with the new Office Training Center
A new vision for intelligent communications in Office 365
At Microsoft Ignite 2017 in Orlando, Florida, we introduced a new vision for intelligent communications, transforming calling and meeting experiences for people and organizations around the world. Intelligent communications go beyond traditional unified communications, enabling you to complete tasks more efficiently with minimal context switching, participate in more productive meetings that cover the entire meeting lifecycle, and better manage your everyday communications overload. Microsoft Teams is core to our vision for intelligent communications—bringing together conversations, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integrations—to provide a single hub for teamwork in Office 365. Teams is now being used by over 125,000 organizations across the world in just six months since its launch. Its strong momentum has proven that teamwork is essential to the way work gets done today. To achieve our vision for intelligent communications, we are bringing comprehensive calling and meetings capabilities into Teams, along with data and insights from the Microsoft Graph, and a strong roadmap of innovation to empower teams to achieve more. All of this is being built on a new, modern Skype infrastructure for enterprise-grade voice and video communications. Our next generation, cloud-born architecture is already powering communication experiences in Teams, and is evolving rapidly. We are excited about this new infrastructure because it will provide both speed of innovation as well as higher quality communication experiences. As we build out these capabilities, Teams will evolve as the primary client for intelligent communications in Office 365, replacing the current Skype for Business client over time. | Related: FAQ – Journey from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams documentation and practical guidance | Audio Conferencing extended to Microsoft Teams and pay-per-minute offering added for more options | The Evolution of Skype Operations Framework (SOF) into Practical Guidance for Cloud Voice
OneDrive announcements at Ignite 2017
At Microsoft Ignite 2017, we announced new innovations that further empower you to share and work together, to inform and engage people, to transform business processes, and to harness collective knowledge. Let’s look at the highlights of the many innovations we unveiled - Files On-Demand, Silent Sync Auto-Account Configuration for OneDrive with ADAL, Microsoft 365 Powered Device with OneDrive, support for synchronization of libraries encrypted with IRM or DRM, simple and secure external sharing without a Microsoft account, user experience updates, seamless universal sharing in Office, Windows and Mac, Multi-Geo support, updates to OneDrive Admin Center, Customer Key encryption, self-service migration toolkit, updates to the OneDrive mobile clients, file restore, zip file support and much, much more! | Related: Day 1 at Microsoft Ignite – Interview with Jeff Teper | Day 2 at Ignite – Meet our OneDrive Engineering Leadership | Day 3 at Ignite – Meet our Sync Team | Security you can trust, control you can count on with SharePoint and OneDrive (Ignite News) | Microsoft Mechanics: Updates to security, compliance and migration for OneDrive for Business
Connecting the Modern Workplace with SharePoint - Announcements at Ignite 2017
At Microsoft Ignite 2017, we announced new innovations that further empower you to share and work together, to inform and engage people, to transform business processes, and to harness collective knowledge. In addition, we announced new capabilities for organizations to protect and manage data, and to build custom solutions with SharePoint. This post highlights many of innovations we unveiled including the ability to connect existing sites to Office 365 groups, deeper integration with Microsoft Teams, a new SharePoint Migration Tool, new web parts, enhancements to SharePoint news, customized themes, site designs and page designs, personalized search results, service-level encryption, new SharePoint Admin Center, visually compelling lists and libraries with column formatting, SharePoint hub sites and much more! | Related: Refine your message and increase your reach with SharePoint communication sites | SharePoint hub sites - new in Office 365 | Work better together with SharePoint team sites Office 365 app integrations | Introducing the new SharePoint Admin Center | Introducing the SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft | Updating content management for the cloud | Reinvent business process in SharePoint and OneDrive | Microsoft Mechanics: OneDrive and SharePoint updates powering collaboration in Office 365
Bringing deeper integration and new capabilities to Office 365 security and compliance
We’re excited to share several Office 365 security and compliance announcements and updates – as part of the news announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference. These new capabilities and enhancements provide a more complete and integrated set of solutions – enabling customers to better protect, detect and respond to threats. There are several feature updates to Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) that address the evolution and advances in the threat landscape, including enhancements to anti-phishing and domain spoofing capabilities, safe links and safe attachments updates, and expansion of ATP to other Office 365 workloads such as OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. Office 365 Threat Intelligence also has lots of new features on the way, including Attack Simulator, Threat Tracker and Threat Explorer, plus enhanced remediation capabilities. To help customers stay up-to-date with all the regulations that matter to them, we're introducing Compliance Manager which is a new solution that helps manage an organization's compliance posture. There are also updates to Advanced eDiscovery and Advanced Data Governance. There are additional updates regarding GDPR compliance, Office 365 Message Encryption, and the announcement that Customer Key has reached general availability. | Related: Manage your compliance from one place - Announcing Compliance Manager Preview Program | Email Encryption and Rights Protection | Introducing Multi-Geo in Office 365
Build your outer loop: What's next in Yammer
We are excited to share an emboldened vision for Yammer - one that creates greater definition and clarity for the role and future of Yammer as a core part of Microsoft 365. Yammer has always served to help organizations around the globe connect people and information, to make better decisions faster. As an open space to connect and engage across your organization, Yammer is the best tool for driving teamwork in what we call your "outer loop." While your "inner loop" of collaborators work with you to rapidly deliver against important projects and deliverables, it is your outer loop connections that drive diversity of thought and organizational change. Over the coming months you will begin to see innovations in Yammer that accelerate success, in a commitment to help people gain greater value from their outer loop, effectively and efficiently. In addition to a focus on these scenarios, we are innovating on the fundamental enterprise social experience that Yammer delivers by (1) driving productivity through deeper SharePoint integration and the new desktop app, (2) building in enterprise-grade control, security and compliance, and (3) accelerating successful community management through group insights, enhanced reporting and usage analytics. | Related: Engage employees in your intelligent social intranet with Yammer
NOTEWORTHY
Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges
September 29, 2017: Updates for Exchange Online Protection, Office 365 Authentication, Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Shared Services, OneNote Notebooks, Planner, Skype for Business Online and Sway. Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here. | Additional Resources: Managing Office 365 Endpoints, Content Delivery Networks and Client Connectivity.
Video: What's new in Office 365 for Windows - August 2017
If you have an Office 365 subscription, these are some of the new features available to use for Office 365 for Windows including using 3D models, new inking effects and more. For more, see http://aka.ms/new365.
What's new with Azure Active Directory @ Ignite 2017
This post is a quick recap of everything related to Azure AD that was announced last week at Microsoft Ignite 2017, including expansion of conditional access capabilities (devices and apps, session control and information protection, new conditions and custom controls), general availability of pass-through authentication, enhanced cloud app discovery and security, and Azure AD access review.
The next perpetual release of Office
Last week at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, we announced Office 2019 — the next perpetual update for Office. This release, scheduled for the second half of 2018, will include perpetual versions of the Office apps (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) and servers (including Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business). Previews of the new products will start shipping mid-year 2018. Office 2019 will add new user and IT capabilities for customers who aren’t yet ready for the cloud. Office 2019 will be a valuable upgrade for customers who feel that they need to keep some or all of their apps and servers on-premises, and we look forward to sharing more details about the release in the coming months.
Migrate your public folders to Office 365 Groups
Over the last few months, we ran a TAP Program where our customers tested the batch migration process to move their public folders (both online and on-premises) to Office 365 Groups. We want to thank all of the customers who helped us out with the testing by sharing their experiences with us. The TAP program proved successful, and so we are now making this process available worldwide. We encourage you to read Migrate your public folders to Office 365 Groups to learn about the advantages Office 365 Groups offers over public folders in a number of scenarios. Hopefully, you’ll want to migrate your own public folders to Office 365 Groups.
Introducing the LinkedIn connector for Microsoft Flow
We are excited to announce the LinkedIn connector for Flow. LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with more than 500 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The LinkedIn connector for Flow enables you to amplify your content's reach by sharing it with the right audience of professionals. You can share an article on the behalf of your company or from your individual profile. This post walks you through a few scenarios that can benefit from a Flow enabled automation around your LinkedIn posts. | Related: Build more meaningful relationships with Office 365 and LinkedIn | Q3 Update for Microsoft Flow
New in MyAnalytics: long-term trends, network maps, time spent with Groups, and more
MyAnalytics helps you build healthier work habits with analytics and intelligent coaching. Over the next quarter, we're adding several top-requested features to MyAnalytics, including long-term trends, network maps, time spent with Groups, and more. Trends provides a long-term picture of how your work habits have changed over time so that you can more easily identify bad habits, drive culture change on your team, and track progress. MyAnalytics now visualizes your network so that you can identify missing links, improve your relationships, and prioritize the time you spend with co-workers. MyAnalytics now visualizes the time you spend with the members of your Office 365 Groups so that you can better align your time to your priorities.