Welcome to the November 12 - 18, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.
Last week's updates to the Office 365 Roadmap include updates for Microsoft Teams in Office 365 Education, StaffHub, Yammer, and OneDrive for Business. One update to highlight is the Message Center Reader Role, which only provides assigned users access to the Message Center. This feature is currently in development and targeted for release by Q2 2018, based on the roadmap presented at Ignite 2017 and subject to change.
Recently added events are focused on Microsoft 365, with a free webinar on December 5, 2017 and an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) scheduled for December 12, 2017.
Last week's blog roundup includes posts regarding the Compliance Manager Preview, the second post of the "Four Success Factors for Driving Microsoft 365 Adoption" series, and details on SharePoint mobile notifications. There are also a couple of Teams-focused posts, one related to conditional access for the Teams macOS app and the other on enhancements to Teams in Office 365 Education.
A reminder about DirSync and Azure AD Sync connectivity, recently released Microsoft 365 Security and Teamwork videos, as well as the latest episode of Teams On Air are included in the noteworthy items from last week. There are also a couple of Azure Active Directory posts to highlight with a post sharing the numbers behind Azure AD, and an announcement that the new Azure AD sign-in and "Keep me signed in" experiences have reached general availability and are now rolling out.
OFFICE 365 ROADMAP
Below is a list of items recently added to the Office 365 Roadmap:
| Feature ID | Title | Description |
Status |
Added |
More Info |
| 24709 | Microsoft Teams in Office 365 Education updates to Assignments experience | Ability to create an assignment with a OneNote page and pull up OneNote page assignments in the quick grading view. Ability to create Teams assignments, plus grading, all from within OneNote desktop app. Advanced assignments notifications, collaboration and search. Initiate work using Office apps in context of the assignment submission flow. Ability to switch into full screen view while working on assignments. |
Rolling out |
11/13/2017 |
n / a |
| 20715 | StaffHub: Available in Select SMB SKUs | Microsoft StaffHub is coming to select business SKUs including Office 365 Business Premium and Microsoft 365 Business - allowing customers of all sizes to empower their Firstline Workers. |
Rolling out |
11/13/2017 |
n / a |
| 23937 | StaffHub: Terms and Conditions now available | Microsoft StaffHub will now support customer defined terms and conditions - helping to address application usage within Firstline Workers. |
In development |
11/13/2017 |
n / a |
| 24239 | Yammer: Move threads between groups | Yammer will enable users to move threads from one group to another. |
In development |
11/13/2017 |
n / a |
| 21063 | Centralized Deployment of Outlook add-ins | Following the launch of Centralized Deployment of Word, Excel and PowerPoint add-ins in June we will now be rolling out support for Centralized deployment for Outlook add-ins, initially in preview in the next few weeks. Centralized Deployment will allow administrators to deploy add-ins to users or groups through the Office admin center. Add-ins could be assigned to entire org, selected user-ids or to a distribution group (DL), security group or an Office 365 group. |
Rolling out |
11/15/2017 |
Announcing general availability of the Office 365 Centralized Deployment Service |
| 23758 | OneDrive for Business: Files Restore | Enable self-service recovery from disastrous events such as mass deletes, ransomware, corruption, and other data loss scenarios. |
In development |
11/15/2017 |
n / a |
| 24818 | Message Center Reader Role | The new Message Center Reader role will allow admins to set users in their organization to only get access to Message Center within the admin portal. The Message Center Reader role permits users to read Message Center posts and share them, set their preferences, and receive email communications from Message center. |
In development |
11/17/2017 |
n / a |
UPCOMING EVENTS
Transforming your business to meet the changing market and needs of your customers
When: Tuesday, November 28, 2017 and Wednesday, November 29, 2017 at 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.
Hands-on with security in a cloud-first, mobile-first world
When: Thursday, November 30, 2017 at 12pm ET & 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.
Visualizing, Analyzing & Sharing Your Data Without Having to be a BI Expert
When: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 12pm ET & 3pm ET and Tuesday, December 12, 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.
Webinar: Embrace modern IT with Microsoft 365-powered devices
When: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 1pm ET | Microsoft 365-powered devices—devices running Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus, managed by Enterprise Mobility + Security—are the best way to experience the benefits of Microsoft 365. By combining the latest protection from advanced threats and proactive insights with a servicing model that's predictable and updates that are easy to deploy, you can ensure that your devices are always up to date and your users are always benefiting from the latest productivity enhancements and new features. In addition, embracing Microsoft 365 enables you to make the transition to cloud-based management at your own pace. Join this webinar to: (1) See how you can embrace both user-owned and business-owned devices without sacrificing security or control, (2) Discover how you can simplify the setup process for new devices and manage devices in the cloud instead of on-premises, and (3) Learn how to roll out updates for Windows and Office in a streamlined, predictable, reliable way—without disrupting user productivity. You'll also hear how you can accelerate your journey to Microsoft 365 with the FastTrack program. Engineers and product experts will be standing by to answer your questions, so don't miss this opportunity to get the answers you need to make the move to modern IT. | Related: Windows 10 for IT Pros Webinar Series (most available on-demand) | Microsoft Mechanics: Microsoft 365 Powered Devices
Microsoft 365 Powered Devices: Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)
When: Tuesday, December 12, 2017 at 12pm ET | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft 365 Powered Device 'Ask Microsoft Anything'! What is a Microsoft 365 powered device? It's a device running Windows 10 with Office 365 ProPlus and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EM+S). The AMA will take place on Tuesday, December 12th from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT in the Microsoft 365 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 Windows, Office and EM+S product and engineering teams who will be on hand to answer questions and listen to feedback.
Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows
When: Wednesday, December 13th & 20th 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, December 19, 2017 at 12pm ET and Thursday, December 21, 2017 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.
BLOG ROUNDUP
The evolution of technology and cloud innovation are democratizing data and in turn fueling digital transformation. Embracing every facet of this digital transformation offers organizations an opportunity to better engage with customers, empower employees, and optimize the creation and delivery of products and services. However, with the increased use of personal data to customize user experiences, new compliance laws—such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—are a logical policy component of our technology landscape. Compliance Manager is a cross–Microsoft Cloud services solution designed to help organizations meet complex compliance obligations like the GDPR. It performs a real-time risk assessment that reflects your compliance posture against data protection regulations when using Microsoft Cloud services, along with recommended actions and step-by-step guidance. Learn more about Compliance Manager and how to access the preview. We are thrilled to announce that the Compliance Manager Public Preview program is now available for organizations with a paid or trial subscription for Microsoft cloud services (e.g., Office 365, Microsoft Azure, etc.). | Resource: Compliance Manager Preview Demo | Related: Microsoft Tech Community: Compliance Manager Preview is now available
Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption
This is the second post from our blog series on how to help your organization accelerate time to value with its Microsoft 365 adoption. In the initial blog post in this series, we shared our viewpoint on the opportunity Information Technology (IT) teams have with solutions, such as Microsoft 365, to enable business value for their organization and I outlined the four success factors for adopting Microsoft 365. This blog post will focus on the first success factor – Stakeholders, and their importance in driving the change necessary to realize the full value of Microsoft 365. There are two stakeholder groups whose participation is critical: (1) Executive sponsors whose influence can help drive the change required for your organization to achieve its business goals with Microsoft 365, and (2) Champions whose passion for this new way of working will help bring their colleagues along.
SharePoint mobile notifications keep you up-to-date
Take your intranet with you to stay connected and informed about content, news, sites and people while on the go – for those in-between moments. Neither you or your business stands still, thus the SharePoint mobile journey continues – all to keep you informed and to promote work moving forward. We're pleased to announce a new, important update for the SharePoint mobile apps (iOS & Android): notifications – available now in their respective app stores. SharePoint is tightly integrated across the overall productivity experience – a pervasive content service – especially while you're on the go. And it is important be alerted to timely, relevant information when you're away from your desk. Many of the announcements and demos we shared at Microsoft Ignite 2017, specific to SharePoint mobile capabilities, were released during Ignite. Let's dive into the details of what's new and recently released for the SharePoint mobile apps...
Teams macOS app now supports Azure AD conditional access
We have been constantly hearing feedback from you about support for conditional access on macOS clients. With the latest announcement from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Intune on support for conditional access, the Teams team also decided to join the party! We're pleased to announce that our macOS app (beginning with v1.0.00.28451; it should always auto-upgrade to the latest version, of course) is fully integrated with the latest ADAL (Azure AD Authentication Library) and provides support for Azure AD conditional access policies on the macOS platform. With this milestone, Microsoft Teams finishes adding support for conditional access for all the supported platforms. | Related: Conditional access in Azure AD: macOS support plus two more features now generally available!
Get notified when new Connectors are deployed in your Flow Environment
A recent ask from customers is to be notified when new connectors are provisioned within a Microsoft Flow environment. These requests may be related to updating Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies or provide opportunities to take advantage of new connectors to drive more value for their business. For example, we recently released the popular ServiceNow and Workday connectors. Customers were very interested to know when these connectors were becoming available. While our team is consistent in blogging about new capabilities, we have had requests for more direct communication about these types of events. Last week, the Flow team blogged about a new Flow Management connector. This connector provides many useful operations for Flow Administrators and power users. Using this connector, we are able to retrieve a list of all connectors within a specific Flow environment and send email notifications to interested stakeholders when a new connector has been deployed. We have created a template to accelerate the amount of time it takes to use this functionality, but will walk through the steps to create this flow in this post.
Microsoft Teams in Office 365 Education updates rolling out, with more coming soon
Over the course of debuting Microsoft Teams in Office 365 Education, we've been privileged to have educators from across the globe join us in creating technology to foster collaborative classrooms and improve student learning outcomes. Whether it's through events like Hack the Classroom, or message boards on the Microsoft Educator Community (MEC), or in conversations over social media with our product team members, we've been listening to your feedback and incorporating your ideas and diversity of needs into the Teams experience. We're taking time to share the latest updates from that continuous feedback, and we're eager to share the excitement around how teachers have discovered ways to transform their classrooms and workflows with Teams, the hub for teamwork in Office 365 Education. It's clear that Teams saves valuable teacher time and fosters a more modern classroom experience, and we see it in conducting virtual PLC meetings with the meet-now feature, and organizing group projects via channels. | Related: Video – What's New in EDU for November 2017
NOTEWORTHY
REMINDER: DirSync and Azure AD Sync Communication to Azure Active Directory - December 31, 2017
On December 31, 2017, Azure AD will no longer accept communications from Windows Azure Active Directory Sync ("DirSync") and Microsoft Azure Active Directory Sync ("Azure AD Sync"). The last release of DirSync was released in July 2014 and the last release of Azure AD Sync was released in May 2015. Details on upgrade paths to Azure Active Directory Connect are included at the link above.
Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges
November 16, 2017: The Office 365 example PAC files now include the October endpoints updates effective 12/01/2017. 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.
Microsoft Mechanics: Microsoft 365 Security
Format: Video (9 minutes) | Microsoft 365 Director, Jeremy Chapman, shows you Microsoft's approach to security with Microsoft 365. Learn about the spectrum of built-in security defenses that protect your users, information and devices. This rich capability set spans Windows 10, Office 365, enterprise mobility and security, while leveraging a number of services within Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Mechanics: Microsoft 365 Teamwork
Format: Video (8 minutes) | Microsoft 365 Director, Jeremy Chapman, covers the teamwork essentials to Microsoft 365. Starting with tools built for teamwork using apps designed for easy file sharing and co-authoring experiences. As well as tools to make your team's work broadly discoverable by your intranet while engaging with other teams across the organization via Enterprise Social. All connected with a shared foundation of built-in security and compliance controls, discovery and intelligence via the Microsoft Graph, and Office 365 Groups with an Azure Active Directory.
Teams On Air: Ep. 56 Behind the scenes of Skype Meeting Broadcast
Format: Video (46 minutes) | Join host Delanda Coleman, and guest Jeff Tyler, Digital Media Experience lead at Microsoft Studios as they discuss how Microsoft engages employees and customers with Skype Meeting Broadcast. Skype Meeting Broadcast is a feature of Office 365 that enables you to schedule, produce, and broadcast meetings or events to online audiences up to 10,000 attendees. During this episode, we'll go behind the scenes of one of Microsoft's Tier 1 events. In addition, Delanda and Jeff will share some best practices on how your team can start using Skype Meeting Broadcast today.
As we had announced earlier and demoed at Ignite, the ability to create custom forms for your SharePoint lists is now available for SharePoint First Release tenants. In addition, we are also enabling support for multi-value choice, lookup, and person column types, and read-only support for attachments in PowerApps. Note: These changes are rolling out incrementally for SharePoint First Release tenants and are not generally available from SharePoint yet. So, if your tenant is already on first release, you should already have them and if your tenant is not on first release, to enroll please follow the instructions here.
How organizations are connecting their on-premises identities to Azure AD
The updated numbers, presented in this blog post, tell a pretty clear story. We've designed Azure AD to be open and standards-based so our customers can use a wide variety of third-party options. However, the majority of customers find that our "off the shelf" identity solutions meet their needs. And this number continues to grow. Additionally, the data also shows that the level of simplicity we've delivered with Azure AD Connect is having a big impact. The solution is being widely adopted and is far and away the fastest growing option for connecting Windows Server AD and Azure AD/Office 365. | Related: The new Azure AD sign-in and "Keep me signed in" experiences rolling out now!