Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-09

Welcome to the February 23 – 29, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Twelve features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Project, Exchange, and Office 365.

More Azure AD webinars, as well as new customer immersion experience sessions, have been added. The spotlight event of the week is the “Meet the new Yammer!” webinar on Thursday, March 5th at 9am Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include the February 2020 “What’s New” posts for Microsoft 365, Teams and SharePoint. There is also updated information on an upcoming change to the Office 365 sign-in page, and an update on Basic Auth and Exchange Online.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items on the business benefits and cost savings of deploying Outlook mobile, the February 2020 updates for Workplace Analytics, the updated Fluent design for OneDrive on Android, and a Microsoft IT Showcase article on “Reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft”.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
OAuth Support for POP3 / IMAP4	61303	March CY2020	Added: 24 February 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Exchange We are adding OAuth support to POP3 and IMAP4 to improve security of these legacy protocols.
Dark Mode – OneDrive for Android	61355	March CY2020	Added: 27 February 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: OneDrive – Android You will be able to use Dark mode in OneDrive for Android.
PDFs and scans included in “Recent View”	61356	March CY2020	Added: 27 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: OneDrive Now, in your “Recent list”, uploaded scans and recently viewed PDFs will automatically surface at the top.
Poll added to Outlook (Windows)	61372	March CY2020	Added: 27 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Forms A new polling add-in will soon be pre-installed in Outlook for Windows by default, meaning end users will no longer need to install the Quick Poll add-in from the store.
Company branding now supported on SharePoint Mobile app	61374	March CY2020	Added: 27 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint Configure company branding in O365 admin center and receive a co-branded experience on the SharePoint iOS and Android Apps. Please ensure an SVG logo is uploaded in the admin center for it to appear on the Mobile App. Logos of other format will not be supported on the App.
Manage organization access to Project for the web	60644	Q3 CY2020	Added: 27 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Project – Web Turn on or off Project for the web for your organization through a new lever found in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
EOP / ATP Rescue Portal	61352	Q3 CY2020	Added: 28 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 One of the ways Office 365 ATP protects customers is by blocking malicious attachments and URLs from reaching end users. We understand that from time to time, customers may want to ensure delivery of certain messages containing malicious content for specific reasons, such as phishing simulations and training. In order to provide a way for our customers to easily reconcile this at time of click and during mail flow, we’re developing a Rescue portal. This portal gives admins the opportunity to explicitly allow or block attachments and URLs in your Office 365 tenant.
Pin Microsoft Teams apps in more places	61332	March CY2020	Added: 28 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Administrators can now pin Apps more broadly across Microsoft Teams, including the expanded Apps area of the Microsoft Teams App Bar. This makes featuring the right apps for your organization more discoverable by users.
Microsoft Compliance Score reaches general availability	60771	Q3 CY2020	Added: 28 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 With Microsoft Compliance Score, you can now continuously assess and monitor data protection controls, get clear guidance on how to improve your score and thus reduce compliance risks, and leverage the built-in control mapping to scale your compliance effort across global, industrial and regional standards. We announced the public preview back in November 2019.
Profile Card Customization through Microsoft Graph Beta	61502	Q3 CY2020	Added: 28 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 Profile Card Customization through Microsoft Graph Beta allows you to add custom information to a person’s profile card through the Microsoft Graph Beta. This allows an administrator to customize people’s profile cards by adding properties according to your business needs.
Microsoft Stream search vertical in Microsoft Search	61503	Q3 CY2020	Added: 28 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Search The new Microsoft Stream search vertical in Microsoft Search allows for discovering media content stored in Microsoft Stream with Microsoft Search.
Roadmap and the new Project for Education coming soon!	43892	Q3 CY2020	Added: 28 February 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Project – EDU We are pleased to announce the upcoming roll out of the reimagined Microsoft Project and Roadmap to our Education customers. Redesigned from the ground up, Project provides a simpler, fresh and intuitive user experience. You can quickly build a team by adding new members and setting up tasks easily, and then effortlessly shift views between grids, boards and timeline (Gantt charts) to track progress. Roadmap enables you to aggregate your different projects into a visual and interactive view to stay on top of work being done across your organization.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Discover everything you need to facilitate a successful upgrade to Teams. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Understand why a formal plan is crucial for upgrade success, (2) Identify the steps to the upgrade success framework, (3) Recognize common attributes of successful customers, and (4) Create and implement their own upgrade plan. The audience for this session is All (Business Sponsors, IT Admins, User Readiness/Change Manager, Project Lead).

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Have you spent significant time and resources to prepare for a meeting and still felt it wasn’t productive? Have you attended a meeting only to leave feeling like not much was accomplished? Join this class to learn how to make your meetings engaging, productive and effective. Microsoft Teams can help make your meetings worth showing up for. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Use Teams for your entire meeting experience, (2) Record your meeting, making it easy for those who couldn’t attend to get caught up, (3) Keep important meetings at your fingertips by pinning them for easy access, and (4) Assess which audio and video devices are best for your meeting needs. You can access the recorded version of this session on-demand here.

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Determine the most suitable approach based on your current Skype for Business implementation and upgrade goals. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Understand common scenarios and upgrade approaches, (2) Visualize the user experience for each approach, and (3) Determine the optimal upgrade approach for your organization. IT Admins are the primary audience for this session.

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 1 – Effective Workspaces, you will explore ways to determine the best approach for creating workspaces for projects and workgroups. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Decide if your team is best served by a team and channels or a group chat and meetings, (2) Create a workspace for your team to provide the best collaboration experience, (3) Use a personal team to simplify your productivity, and (4) Determine best practices for Teams. You can access the recorded version of this session on-demand here.

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

This 60-minute session introduces you to the key activities needed to get started with Microsoft Teams today. From setting your profile, to running a meeting, users will leave this session with the foundation needed to use Teams with confidence. The session is also available on demand.

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Execute your defined upgrade approach as part of your formal upgrade plan. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Recognize the upgrade settings in your O365 tenant admin portal, (2) Understand technical tips and considerations for a successful upgrade, and (3) Apply the appropriate settings in the Portal to execute your upgrade. The primary audience for this session is IT Admins.

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday. You can access the recorded version of this session on-demand here.

Azure AD Webinar: Your journey to passwordless

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, you will learn about options to minimize the use of passwords today and how to work toward a passwordless future.

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Design a user readiness strategy to help your users love and adopt Teams. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Recognize factors that influence user acceptance and adoption, (2) Define core value messaging for Teams in your organization, and (3) Outline your awareness, training and support activities. The audience for this session is: User Readiness/Change Manager.

Webinar: Meet the new Yammer!

When: Thursday, March 5, 2020 at 9:00am PT | Join the Yammer product team as we dive deeper into the new Yammer – a completely redesigned UI packed with new features and integrations. This webinar will focus on the new interface and showcase upcoming integrations with Microsoft 365, including using Live Events and a deep dive on the recently available Native Mode and eDiscovery capabilities. Attendees will also have the opportunity for Q&A with the Yammer engineering + marketing team to help prepare for the arrival of the new Yammer. Be sure to add the event to your calendar and join the webinar here.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Identity, Apps, Data and Devices

Identity is at the center of security: don’t compromise when it comes to your company’s valuable information. Join us to explore how to use secure authentication, govern access, get comprehensive protection and set the right identity foundation. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Enable password protection, (2) Bring multi-factor authentication to your Windows 10 users, (3) Protect your users and data through Office 365 multi-factor authentication, and (4) Use conditional access to protect across devices, locations and apps. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Thursday, March 5, 2020 from 12pm – 2pm PT

Using Sensitivity Labels with Microsoft Teams, O365 Groups and SharePoint Online Sites

Please join us for this Microsoft Information Protection webinar that will review how to use sensitivity labels with Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Groups, and SharePoint Online sites. Note: The link below is for the calendar invite, which includes the attendee link.

Insider Risk Management & Communications Compliance

Please join us for this compliance webinar which will cover the new Insider Risk Management and Communications Compliance features. Note: The link below is for the calendar invite, which includes the attendee link.

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional Teams

How do you bring various stakeholders together across multiple teams to achieve your goal? Do you wish you could reduce the number of meetings or e-mails while still being able to solicit feedback, keep everyone informed, and get consensus? Join us to explore how to bring everything together in a shared workspace with Microsoft Teams. Learn how to chat, meet, share files, and work with other business applications to effectively engage others. This interactive 2-hour session will give you the opportunity to try it for yourself and test drive Microsoft Teams in a live cloud environment. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they can work for you. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Microsoft IT Showcase: IT expert roundtable – Modern meetings with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams Rooms

When: Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 10:00am PT | At Microsoft, modern meetings give employees the right tools to share ideas and make decisions across locations, environments, and devices. In this webinar you will learn about our modern meeting strategy and how Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) deploys, manages, monitors, and supports services for the collaboration application Microsoft Teams and the smart meeting-room solution Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Azure AD Webinar: Manage partner access with B2B

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, you will learn about how to collaborate with your partners in a secure manner.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Privacy and Compliance Journey

Your business needs to control how sensitive data is managed. Join us and explore how to assess your compliance risk, protect sensitive and business critical data, and respond efficiently to data discovery requests. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Simplify assessment of compliance risk, (2) Integrate protection and governance of data, and (3) Intelligently respond to data discovery requests. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Are you still sending an e-mail with an attachment to your teammates when you want to collaborate on a file? How fast do they respond? How do you know if they are working on the file? How do you manage version control? With Microsoft 365 tools for teamwork, you can seamlessly collaborate on files with your team members. Using Microsoft Teams, you can invite your teammates into an environment where they can effectively collaborate and engage in a persistent conversation. Join us for this session and explore how to avoid productivity sinkholes and increase productivity. This interactive 2-hour session will give you the opportunity to test drive Microsoft Teams in a live cloud environment. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they can work for you. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Azure AD Webinar: Enable New Customer Experiences with B2C

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, you will learn how to enable new customer experiences with Azure AD B2C..

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Your Sensitive Information

Data needs to be protected wherever it’s stored and whenever it travels, and you need the tools to monitor policy violations and risky behavior. Join us to explore how to implement a comprehensive and integrated approach across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Identify, monitor and automatically protect sensitive information across Office 365, (2) Help classify and protect documents and email, and (3) Use policies to enable BYOD scenarios by protecting data at the app level. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Today’s workforce can work from anywhere, on any device, and on any app. Security teams need to understand threat signals from disconnected products and optimize security with minimal complexity. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Safeguard users from malware attacks such as phishing and spoofing with Office 365, (2) Use the Windows Defender ecosystem to proactively monitor and protect your users, (3) Utilize Office 365 ATP to help protect users from bad links and attachments, and (4) Let machine learning and automation protect users from threats. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Azure AD Webinar: Identity Governance for Modern Organizations

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, we will introduce tools to govern the lifecycle of your user and guest identities in your Azure AD and Office 365 deployment.

Azure AD Webinar: Getting started with Azure AD Reporting and Insights

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, you will learn how to interpret Azure AD logs, integrate with your SIEM tools, and gather insights about your Azure AD service.

Azure AD Webinar: Azure AD as the New Security Control Plane

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, you will learn how to assess and implement a modern approach to secure your organization identities with Azure AD.

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Microsoft 365

When: Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft 365 ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA). 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 product engineering teams who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Join in the Microsoft 365 AMA space, and be sure to add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

BLOG ROUNDUP

Improve collaboration across apps and customize experiences—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in February

This month, we’re introducing capabilities to help you work on the go, collaborate on content more easily, interact with apps in more ways, and customize your productivity experiences. The new Office app is now generally available for Android and iOS. We added collaboration capabilities to PowerPoint comments and brought coauthoring and Microsoft Teams integration to Visio. Word now has an improved speech-to-text functionality that supports more languages, while added inking features and Dark Mode make it easier to capture and read notes in OneNote for Android. Meanwhile, organizations can now customize their employees’ productivity experience—from search results pages and All Company Yammer feeds to a private preview of the new Microsoft Fluid Framework. | Related: Video – What’s New with Microsoft 365 in February 2020 | We ❤ OneNote for Android

What’s New in Microsoft Teams | February 2020

February may be the shortest month of the year, but we were still able to bring plenty of new functionality to Microsoft Teams! From the new Outlook integrated experience to enhanced compliance controls, we are constantly improving to help people do their best work. Read on to learn about everything that is new to Teams in February across chat and collaboration, calling and meetings, for IT admins, security and compliance, apps and workflows, Education, and in the Government Community Cloud environments.

SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: February 2020

This post includes all the SharePoint and related tech updates that rolled out in February 2020. This is the all-inclusive roadmap release recap for all things SharePoint and related technology. Highlighted features include worldwide availability of Mover migration, the public preview of the Microsoft 365 Live Events Assistance Program, availability of the Global reader experience and updates to the sharing page in the new SharePoint admin center, and updating the classic SharePoint team site home pages to the modern experience. All the features listed began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of February 2020 (possibly early March 2020). | Related: Mover migration now available worldwide

Update to the background image of the Office 365 sign-in screens

We’d like to give you an early heads up on a visual design update that is coming to the Office 365 sign-in experience. We’re updating the default background image on our sign-in screens to something that’s fresher and more performant. The new image is just 1% the size of the previous one, which reduces bandwidth requirements and improves perceived page load times, especially on slower networks. This is solely a visual user interface (UI) change with no changes to functionality. There is no change to your users if you have configured a custom background image in Company Branding for your tenant. We plan on rolling this out globally in early-April. If this change affects your users, we recommend updating any documentation that contains screenshots and to give your help desk a heads up.

Basic Auth and Exchange Online – February 2020 Update

It’s been a few months since we announced changes we will be making to Exchange Online to improve security. We’re pleased to provide an update today and to try and answer some of the questions we’ve received since that post. We do understand a change like this can be disruptive. The first piece of news is that the improved Azure Sign-In report which can help you understand Basic Auth usage in your tenant is available. We still have work to do on it, but we decided we’d rather get the word out now as we continue to work on it than wait until it’s all complete. The report has recently been extended to include data you’ll find helpful for identifying clients and apps still using Basic Auth, and we have more updates coming soon. Switching to Outlook, we want to try and answer a few questions we received after our last post. We didn’t explicitly mention Outlook for Windows or for Mac in our previous post – and we’re sorry for any confusion that might have caused. Both Outlook for Windows and for Mac are impacted by our turning off Basic Auth in Exchange Online. Both clients rely upon Exchange Web Services (EWS) and so if they are still using Basic Auth, they will be affected. Both clients need to be switched to use Modern Auth before October 2020.

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft IT Showcase: Reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft

Microsoft employees are the company’s greatest asset. Our investments in a reimagined employee experience are enabling Microsoft employees to innovate, create, and collaborate seamlessly among the teams in which they work. We’re moving our entire organization toward a digitally assisted workday in an interconnected and integrated digital workplace, to provide the most productive employee experience possible as we continue our digital transformation.

Workplace Analytics – February 2020: Feature updates

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for February 2020. This month’s update covers our latest features: (1) CRM upload, analysis and extrapolation, and (2) Seller success plan. Workplace Analytics has always used Office 365 (collaboration) data and organizational data to support analysis and generate insights. Now, you can upload CRM data as well. After you do, you can use this data for filtering and grouping in person queries, person-to-group queries, and group-to-group queries to expand your data-analysis options. Workplace Analytics offers the seller success plan to help salespeople reflect on the ways they use their limited time. This, in turn, helps them make decisions that align their use of time with the company’s strategic priorities.

Cost savings and business benefits of deploying Outlook mobile in the enterprise

We are releasing a Forrester Total Economic Impact study of Microsoft Outlook for iOS and Android. Forrester interviewed four large enterprise customers and surveyed over 100 users to develop a financial analysis that found organizations experienced benefits of $5.3 million over three years versus costs of $950,940, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $4.4 million and an ROI of 459%. The article explains the benefits of reduced risk of a potential data breach, productivity benefits enabled by Outlook mobile and cost savings from eliminating former security tools and standardizing on a single app for their email and calendar needs. Any customers impacted by the upcoming retirement of Basic Authentication in Exchange Online benefit also immediately by moving to Outlook mobile as it supports Modern Authentication natively.

Expanding the Fluent design to OneDrive for Android

It has been little over a year since we rolled Office Fluent Design to OneDrive for the web. This change aligned OneDrive with the entire Office 365 suite on a common color palette, typography, icon systems and header. As we continued to roll out the Fluent Design system and the revamped Office brand icons, we also updated the file folder representation, unveiling golden folders across web and mobile. A few months ago, we rolled out a similar design refresh to the OneDrive for iOS. We are now carrying forward this design overhaul to OneDrive for Android and we’re excited to share the refreshed look and feel.

Cortana in the upcoming Windows 10 release: focused on your productivity with enhanced security and privacy

Microsoft is announcing an updated Cortana experience in Windows 10 that will deliver more help from your assistant in Microsoft 365. This next step in Cortana’s evolution will bring enhanced, seamless personal productivity assistance as a free update to the latest version of Windows 10 coming this spring. The upcoming update to Windows 10 will include access to a new Cortana experience with an emphasis on productivity, helping you quickly find the information you want across Microsoft 365. The new Cortana experience in Windows 10 features a chat-based UI that gives you the ability to interact with Cortana using your voice or the keyboard. For English (United States) users, Cortana will assist you in better managing your schedule and tasks by staying on top of your calendar and focusing on what matters with meeting insights. You can speak or type requests to find people or files, or quickly create or query emails. You can also easily check your calendar, set a reminder, or add to your lists in Microsoft To Do.

Office 365 Weekly

Office 365 news, notes and tips

Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-09

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

UPCOMING EVENTS

BLOG ROUNDUP

NOTEWORTHY

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OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

UPCOMING EVENTS

BLOG ROUNDUP

NOTEWORTHY

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