Office 365 Weekly Digest | April 8 – 14, 2018

Welcome to the April 8 - 14, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Outlook updates continue to make up the majority of recent additions to the Office 365 Roadmap, with four from last week.

There are no new events to list, but there are several online customer immersion experience sessions available, as well as the monthly Azure Active Directory webinars.

Blog posts in last week's roundup include updates to SharePoint Online integration with Microsoft Teams, the ability to view Planner tasks in Outlook, a FAQ on auto-expanding archives, and rich contact details in Outlook for iOS and Android. In addition, the final part of the phishing-focused blog series announced "internal safe links", which enables Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection Safe Links policies to protect intra-org emails.

Noteworthy item highlights include the Office 365 Update video for April 2018, two new Teams videos, the availability of a Power BI GDPR whitepaper, and information on Exchange Server 2013 entering the extended support phase.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

UPCOMING EVENTS

Azure Active Directory Webinars for April

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from April 3 - 25, 2018 | Are you looking to deploy Azure Active Directory quickly and easily? We are offering free webinars on key Azure Active Directory deployment topics to help you get up and running. Sessions include Getting Ready for Azure AD, Managing Partner and Vendor Access Using Azure B2B Collaboration, Introduction to Azure AD B2C, Choosing the Right Authentication Method for Azure AD, and more. Each 1-hour webinar is designed to support IT Pros in quickly rolling out Azure Active Directory features to their organization. All webinars are free of cost and will include an anonymous Q&A session with our Engineering Team. So, come with your questions! Capacity is limited. Sign up for one or all of the sessions today!  Note: There are also some sessions available on-demand.

Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows

When: Wednesday, April 18, 2018 and Wednesday, April 25, 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.

Visualizing, Analyzing & Sharing Your Data Without Having to be a BI Expert

When: Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at 12pm ET and Tuesday, May 8, 2018 at 1pm 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.

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.

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 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

SharePoint news updates in Office 365, including Microsoft Teams integration

Keep your team up to date! And do it in a way that's easy for anyone to consume and stay engaged. With SharePoint pages and news, you create relevant, content-rich announcements and reports that look great on any device and within other applications, including Microsoft Teams, filled with content from inside and outside Office 365. And news articles are available to all team members even if they join the team weeks or months after publication. We are excited to begin rolling out five SharePoint pages and news capabilities across Office 365: (1) Create news from SharePoint home in Office 365, (2) Add pages and news as tabs in Microsoft Teams channels, (3) Post all your team news into Microsoft Teams automatically, (4) Create and send informative email news digests, and (5) Measure the impact and engagement of your news articles.

Related:

• Coaching your guest users through the External Sharing Experience
  
• SharePoint Migration Tool Beta adds early preview capabilities
  
• SharePoint Site Scripts and Site Designs - April 2018 release
  

View Planner tasks on your Outlook calendar

A few weeks ago, we announced several features to help get organized around a schedule in Planner. Now, we're happy to announce that we've completed roll out of the feature: view Planner tasks on your Outlook calendar. This feature allows you to import Planner tasks into Outlook via an iCalendar feed. You can pick specific plans to publish, as well as just the Tasks assigned to you (via the My Tasks page). You can read more about how to use this feature in the View your tasks on a calendar article.

Office 365: Auto-Expanding Archives FAQ

In recent months we've been receiving quite a few questions from customers regarding auto-expanding archives. Auto-expanding archive are a component that provides customers the ability to grow their mailbox archives over the normal 100GB quota limit. This post clears up some of the misconceptions and answers some of the most frequently asked questions we get on this subject. Think of this as a FAQ on the subject. Before we get going, we strongly advise folks to understand Message Records Management concepts like retention policies and tags. For example - there have been a few cases that we saw where customers enabled auto-expanding archives, but no archiving policies had been configured for the user. | Resources: Overview of unlimited archiving in Office 365 | Enable unlimited archiving in Office 365 – Admin Help

Encryption essentials: Learn how Office 365 uses encryption

With each passing year—even each passing week—companies in all industries rely more and more on data to drive their success. And while this digital transformation offers huge business potential, the security risks have never been higher. As both the quantity and complexity of data keeps growing, so does the need for organizations to protect that data from growing threats, while also maintaining compliance in a rapidly-changing regulatory environment. While companies can—and probably should—use a variety of safeguards, encryption is one key method that most experts agree is a must. That's why it's built into Office 365. This post takes a look at a few key questions about encryption in Office 365. We recommend reading our white paper to see how Office 365 uses encryption to help protect customer data.

Rich contact details in Outlook for iOS and Android helps you collaborate and get things done

Knowing who's who in your company is key for collaboration and getting things done. So, we're excited to bring the details of your organization to contact cards in Outlook for iOS. Now, by connecting your company data with Azure Active Directory, Outlook for iOS users can quickly see who's who at any time. All of this insight is quickly available whether you search for a contact or tap an email address in a message to open their contact card details, you will have the option to Show Organization information for all the people in your company. No need to go the Global Address List on your desktop to know who's who - access that information exactly when you need it on your iOS device with Outlook! We have also made a few additional improvements to contact management features on iOS and Android including options to reconcile and clean up duplicate contacts and removing a contact from the native contacts app when the contact is deleted in Outlook. We are gradually rolling out all these changes in the coming days and will continue over the next several weeks.

Schooling A Sea of Phish Part 3: Intra-Org Email Link Scanning and Detonation of Phish Lures

We conclude our phish blog series by announcing some exciting capabilities that further enhance the anti-phish stack in Office 365. In our previous blogs, we announced enhanced anti-impersonation capabilities and anti-spoofing capabilities which help stop sophisticated spear phishing and email spoofing campaigns. We're now excited to announce new capabilities augmenting our protection against content based phish lures. To help customers eliminate impact from phishing campaigns launched via compromised accounts, we're also excited to launch 'Internal Safe Links', which enables the Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Safe Links policy to protect intra-org emails. With Safe Links now protecting intra-org emails, Office 365 ATP helps greatly reduce if not eliminate this lethal and widespread phishing technique. Also, Office 365 ATP is the only threat protection service that can provide intra-org email scanning without routing emails outside the compliance boundary of Office 365. | Related: Microsoft IT Showcase - Office 365 helps secure Microsoft from modern phishing campaigns

NOTEWORTHY

Video: Office 365 Update for April 2018

Format: Video (11 minutes) | Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Hub Sites, Power BI, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Flow and more. The video transcript, complete with links to additional information on everything covered, is available at http://aka.ms/o365update-blog.

Video: Introduction to Microsoft Teams (L100)

Duration: 58 mins | Join us for our online onboarding to Microsoft Teams. Learn what Teams is and how it can improve your collaboration and productivity. We review chatting, setting up Teams, channels, collaborating on files and more. | Related: Video – Microsoft Teams Best Practices

New Enhancements in Workplace Analytics

The Microsoft Workplace Analytics team is excited to share details about our latest product updates: (1) Multi-select for Base Metrics in Flexible Queries, (2) Favorite Meeting Exclusions, and (3) OData Endpoint.

Power BI GDPR Whitepaper is now available

In May 2018, a European privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is due to take effect. The GDPR imposes new rules on companies, government agencies, non-profits, and other organizations that offer goods and services to people in the European Union (EU), or that collect and analyze data tied to EU residents. The GDPR applies no matter where you are located. The Power BI team has released a whitepaper to provide you with some basic understanding of the GDPR and relate that to Power BI. This whitepaper will help you understand options for how to configure Power BI as one part of your overall strategy to meeting the requirements of the GDPR across your organization, which will likely include a variety of different tools, approaches, and requirements. | Related: Power BI Service and Mobile March Feature Summary

Delegate scheduling of Skype for Business meetings on Mac now available!

With our recent release of Outlook 2016 for Mac (version 16.12.18041000), Skype for Business Online users on a Mac who are configured as delegates can schedule Skype for Business meetings on behalf of their delegators. When using the latest release of Outlook, a delegate can create or edit a meeting in the delegator's calendar and make it a Skype for Business meeting. The online meeting will be set up using the delegator's policies and join information. Note that this is for Skype for Business Online users only. Support for delegate scheduling by Skype for Business 2015 server users will be available in a future server update. Until that time, on-prem users can schedule Skype for Business meetings in the delegator's calendar, but the meeting will be set up using the policies and join information of the delegate, not the delegator.

Exchange Server 2013 Enters Extended Support Lifecycle Phase

Exchange Server 2013 enters the Extended Support phase of product lifecycle on April 10th, 2018. During Extended Support, products receive only updates defined as Critical consistent with the Security Update Guide. For Exchange Server 2013, critical updates will include any required product updates due to time zone definition changes. With the transition of Exchange Server 2013 to Extended Support, the quarterly release schedule of cumulative updates will end. The last planned cumulative update for Exchange Server 2013, Cumulative Update 21, will be released in June 2018. Microsoft may at its discretion release a future cumulative update to aggregate previously released critical updates or to address unforeseen future O365 Hybrid connectivity requirements. At this time there is no explicit plan to exercise releasing future cumulative updates. Microsoft encourages Exchange Server 2013 customers to adopt Cumulative Update 21 as soon as possible to ensure uninterrupted delivery of any future security related fixes. This includes customers who may still be running Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1. After September 19, 2018, only Cumulative Update 21 or its successors will receive critical updates. During the Extended Support phase, only the latest cumulative update is eligible to receive critical updates once the standard 3-month transition period of the prior cumulative update has lapsed.