Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-41

Weekly Digest  1 Comment

Welcome to the October 4 – 10, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were twenty additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Teams, SharePoint, Exchange Online, Yammer, and Project.

Additional dates for existing meeting series have been posted, including new customer immersion experience sessions. This week’s spotlight event is “Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams” on Tuesday, October 13th at 3pm Pacific.

Highlights from last week’s blogs include the general availability of Tasks in Microsoft Teams, detailed information on the lifecycle of an item in SharePoint with a retention label or policy applied, the Top 5 security questions from US Government customers for Teams, Modern Authentication Support in the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, and general availability of Conditional Access Office 365 Suite.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items such as the September 2020 “What’s New with Microsoft 365” video, a reminder about Office 2013 client connectivity to Office 365 services, a reminder about the retirement of SharePoint 2010 workflows, an update on the retirement of site mailboxes in SharePoint Online, some recent training resources, and the public preview of Continuous Access Evaluation in Azure AD.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Note: The Estimated Release dates listed below are subject to change. The direct link provided for each item can be used to determine if the estimated release date has been updated since the time of publication.

DescriptionFeature IDEstimated ReleaseDetails
Microsoft Project: Export to Excel67149December CY2020Added: 05 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Project
Export your project grid into an Excel spreadsheet. Share this information with colleagues so you can analyze your Project data.
Microsoft Teams: Enhanced meeting experiences on Teams phones68943December CY2020Added: 05 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
We are bringing 3×3 gallery layout, background blur for video, and spotlight features to Teams phones.
Microsoft Teams: Branch Office Survivability on Teams phones68944April CY2021Added: 05 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
Teams phone users in a Branch Office can make PSTN Calls to other users even if Branch office loses internet connectivity.
Microsoft Teams: Proximity Join for Teams conference phones68945December CY2020Added: 05 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
Touchless meeting join will be supported with the new capability to add Teams conference phones from Teams desktop or mobile clients.
Microsoft Teams: Better together for calls on Teams phones68946March CY2021Added: 05 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
With this capability, users will be able to use the better together feature on P2P calls and group calls.
Microsoft Teams: Remote Provisioning of Teams Android devices from Teams Admin Center68947March CY2021Added: 05 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
Tenant admins will be able to remotely provision and sign into all their Teams Android devices from Teams admin center.
Microsoft Teams: Full screen support in new meetings experience67171October CY2020Added: 06 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
In Full screen mode, the meeting window fills up the whole screen, the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom of the window hide. On Windows OS, the taskbar is hidden in Full screen mode.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Priority Account Protection67172November CY2020Added: 06 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Microsoft Defender for Office 365
Over the past few years, attackers have increasingly moved from targeting infrastructure or devices to targeting users. As a result, organizations need protection for all users, but even more protection for their most visible and targeted employees. With Priority Account Protection in Defender for Office 365, security teams can now prioritize focus on critical individuals within the organization, offer them differentiated protection and thwart costly breaches in the process. These Priority account tags and filters will surface throughout the product, including in alerts, Threat Explorer, Campaign Views, and reports.
Microsoft Teams: Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)68948October CY2020Added: 06 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams, GCC
We are updating our meeting policies to allow IT administrators more control over how video is managed in Teams Meetings. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video. We are extending the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. This item has been updated to reflect changes to the original plan.
Yammer: Suggested Communities71474October CY2020Added: 06 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Yammer
This new section on the Yammer homepage will suggest relevant communities for people discover and join.
SharePoint: New leadership connection site template71752December CY2020Added: 06 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: SharePoint
The template brings together conversations from Yammer, news, resources, and showcases upcoming events.
MyAnalytics: More granular control to opt users in or out of MyAnalytics features67167October CY2020Added: 07 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: MyAnalytics
Two new PowerShell cmdlets to opt users in or out of MyAnalytics features: Get-MyAnalyticsFeatureConfig and Set-MyAnalyticsFeatureConfig. These new cmdlets will provide more granular control over Privacy Mode and enablement of particular features.
Microsoft Teams: Outgoing screen-sharing support on Safari67174October CY2020Added: 07 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
Teams meetings in Safari 13 and later will now support outgoing screen sharing. A participant can share their screen. No configuration is needed.
Microsoft Teams: Meeting chat moderation settings67175November CY2020Added: 07 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
Meeting organizers can now turn off the chat functionality during a meeting, which is turned on by default.
Excel: Workbook Link Support in Excel for the Web71476October CY2020Added: 07 October 2020
Status: Rolling out
App / Service: Excel
Workbook link support in now available in Excel for the Web. This feature was previously only supported in Excel for Windows and Mac. (aka “External Links”)
Microsoft Teams: Meeting transfers and companion devices67176October CY2020Added: 08 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
End users can transfer meetings between mobile, desktop, and web, and add another device as a companion to their meeting.
Exchange: SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) Support67177December CY2020Added: 08 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Exchange
MTA-STS (RFC8461) helps thwart such attacks by providing a mechanism for setting domain policies that specify whether the receiving domain supports TLS and what to do when TLS can’t be negotiated, for example stop the transmission.
Exchange: Block Sending to Groups on BCC Line67178December CY2020Added: 08 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Exchange
Have you ever created an inbox rule to move incoming messages sent to a Distribution List (DL) you’re on to a specific folder? But then you discover that some senders will add the DL to the BCC line so the rule (for privacy reasons) is ignored and the message lands in your Inbox instead? Ugh! Yep, some of our Transport developers had that happen to them too – and they decided to do something about it. They added the ability to configure a DL or group to reject (NDR) messages when the DL is on the BCC line. It’s been a big hit within Microsoft, and now we’re making it available to Exchange Online customers! We plan to expose this setting to email admins (for DLs) and group owners (for Microsoft 365 Groups).
Office 365: Translate in Word, Excel and PowerPoint67173November CY2020Added: 09 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Office 365
Translate is coming to Word, Excel and PowerPoint for DoD customers.
Microsoft Teams: Include up to 10,000 users in an org-wide team68692November CY2020Added: 09 October 2020
Status: In development
App / Service: Teams
We are raising the upper limit on org-wide team membership from 5,000 to 10,000 users.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Teams Chalk Talk: Get to Teams – Zero to Production

Microsoft Teams can help your employees stay connected and collaborate with each other, especially in the current unprecedented time where remote work is a reality of employees around the world. Being able to chat, do video meetings and collaborate on Office documents within Teams can help companies stay productive. Whether you are a small business, a non-profit or a large organization, you can get started with Teams within Microsoft 365 or Office 365 suite – even before deploying any other Office app or service. Join Microsoft Teams experts as we review Teams implementation for collaboration, chat and meetings. We’ll share key configurations, considerations, best practices, and resources to get your users up and running quickly. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Recognize key success factors for technical and user readiness, (2) Identify pre-requisites and tenant setup for your environment, (3) Install the Teams clients appropriate for your organization, (4) Configure policies that enable your preferred user experiences, and (5) Leverage collaboration features to enhance remote work scenarios.

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Whether you are switching from Skype for Business or brand new, join us to learn the basics of how to use Teams to chat with your colleagues and collaborate on projects. Through a series of live demonstrations and best practices, you’ll leave this session with everything you need to start using Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Set up your profile and notifications in Microsoft Teams, (2) Use chat and calling for 1:1 and group conversations, sharing and collaboration in Microsoft Teams, (3) Schedule and conduct meetings in Microsoft Teams, and (4) Align your team and teamwork in Microsoft Teams.

Integrate apps to do more in Microsoft Teams

Do you want to get more done in Teams? Receive targeted and timely updates? Access services directly through Teams? Apps let you complete tasks, receive updates and communicate. This session introduces you to the key activities needed to get started with adding applications, bots and connectors in Microsoft Teams today. Through a series of live demonstrations and best practices, you’ll leave this session with everything you need to start using apps in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) See how applications, bots and connectors can help you be more efficient while working in Teams, (2) Select an application, bot or connector for your workspace, (3) Install an application, bot or connector, and (4) Use an application, bot or connector in your workspace.

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).

Teams Chalk Talk: Do more with apps

Join Microsoft Teams experts as we review how you can deploy commonly-used applications directly within Teams, enabling your users to work more efficiently and effectively by accessing everything they need in a single interface. This foundational workshop covers basic capabilities across app management and security. With over 400 out-of-the-box applications available (and growing), you’re sure to find an app, or two, that your team can begin using today in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Identify suitable apps to meet the needs for your organization, (2) Recognize common attributes of successful app deployment, (3) Navigate security and compliance considerations for Teams’ apps, and (4) Determine the next steps to deploy an app to your environment.

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Leverage pro tips and tricks for Microsoft Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our ‘Go Deeper’ sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. Learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (2) Easily find files, chats and projects, (3) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, and (4) Simplify your workday. Note: This session was previously called ‘Learn tips for taking Microsoft Teams to the next level – Part 2’.

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.

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.

Go Deeper with Microsoft Teams: Build collaborative workspaces in Microsoft Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our ‘Go Deeper’ sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. Explore ways to determine the best approach for creating workspaces for projects and workgroups. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Determine the best approach for your collaboration needs (chat versus teams & channels), (2) Create workspaces for your team to provide the best teamwork experience​, and (3) Determine best practices in Microsoft Teams​ to enhance productivity. Note: This session was previously called ‘Learn tips for taking Microsoft Teams to the next level – Part 1’.

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.

Teams Chalk Talk: Taking charge of AV quality experiences

Are you looking to ensure users have optimal experiences with meetings and voice capabilities in Teams? During this session, we’ll discuss tools, reporting and best practices to help you manage service quality — from establishing a proactive  strategy to resolving common quality issues as they arise. We’ll build upon best practices from Teams experts and make it real with examples of common scenarios that may arise as your organization embraces meetings and voice capabilities in Teams. Join us for an expert-led workshop for guidance on key resources and actionable insights to manage audio and video quality with Microsoft Teams. Your users will thank you for it! After this session, you will be able to: (1) Define key service metrics and user experience factors for quality, (2) Recognize concepts and metrics in core tools and resources that help you assess usage and quality, (3) Identify key indicators of poor experience in common scenarios and relevant actions to address, and (4) Establish a proactive quality management strategy to ensure optimal user experience.

Teams Chalk Talk: So…you want to make calls with Microsoft Teams?

Are you ready to add PSTN calling capabilities to Microsoft Teams? Join Microsoft Teams Engineering subject-matter-experts as they demystify the options for adding PSTN calling to Teams, provide you with best practices for configuring calling options and show you how to monitor call quality. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Understand the history of voice services in Microsoft products, (2) Identify what calling options in Microsoft Teams are right for you, (3) Configure your calling options in the Teams admin portal, and (4) Monitor and use call quality tools in Teams.

Office Hours: Managing Windows 10 Devices & Updates

To support your efforts to deliver and deploy updates to the Windows 10 devices being used by remote, onsite, and hybrid workers across your organization, and manage those devices effectively, we are continuing our series of weekly “office hours” for IT professionals here on Tech Community. During office hours, we will have a broad group of product experts, servicing experts, and engineers representing Windows, Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Microsoft Intune, Configuration Manager), security, FastTrack, and more. They will be monitoring the Windows 10 servicing space and standing by to provide guidance, discuss strategies and tactics, and, of course, answer any specific questions you may have. Office hours are text-based; there is no audio or virtual meeting component. To post a question, you just need to be a member of the Tech Community. Simply visit the Windows 10 servicing space and click Start a new conversation. At the start of office hours, we’ll pin a post outlining the individuals on hand, and their areas of expertise. Can’t attend at the designated time? Again, no problem. Post a question in the Windows 10 servicing space up to 24 hours in advance and we’ll make sure we review it during office hours.

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.

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Working from home offers the opportunity to maintain your workflow while allowing flexibility in how and where you get your work done. Shifting to a remote worker status can be an adjustment as you look for ways to balance home and work life, maintain focus and be fully productive. Microsoft Teams can help you stay connected to your team while providing access to all of the tools and resources you need to get your work done. Join us to learn tips that can help set you up for success as you transition into a ‘work from home’ scenario. During this session, we’ll share: (1) Guidance for setting up your home environment for work, (2) Best practices for maintaining your workflow while working at home, (3) Tips for staying connected to your team while remote, and (4) Insights for effectively supporting a remote team.

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: New Resources for Microsoft Teams Admins

When: Thursday, October 22, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. In Episode 8, learn about new Teams deep dive help videos for administrators as well as other resources to get your support teams and help desk up to speed. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

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: Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

Whether you are switching from Skype for Business or brand new, join us to learn the basics of how to use Teams to chat with your colleagues and collaborate on projects. Join us for this session and leave this with everything you need to start using Teams. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Set up your profile and notifications in Microsoft Teams, (2) Use chat and calling for 1:1 and group conversations, sharing and collaboration in Microsoft Teams, (3) Schedule and conduct meetings in Microsoft Teams, and (4) Align your team and teamwork in Microsoft Teams.

Enabling Remote Work with Microsoft Teams: Manage Guest Access in Microsoft Teams

When: Thursday, November 5, 2020 at 9:00am PT | The recent shift to remote, hybrid and on-premise work has IT professionals across every industry looking for more solutions and support for deploying Microsoft Teams. That’s why we’re excited to launch this new live webcast series. In Episode 9, which is one of the most requested episodes, we’ll feature tips, tricks and gotchas on managing guest access in Microsoft Teams. Be sure to add this event to your calendar!

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.

Customer Immersion Experience: Creating a Secure Online Meeting

With the dramatic shift to remote work, we all continue to seek creative ways to stay connected and productive in our jobs. How do we recreate those meetings, calls, and large events that previously brought us together and helped us achieve our business goals? Do we have the right tools and devices to do so? And how do we do all of this while keeping security top of mind? These aren’t easy questions to answer. This one-hour session will give you the opportunity to test drive Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and Power BI in a live cloud environment. A facilitator will guide you as you create a virtual company-wide meeting and explore how to: (1) Build a communication and collaboration hub, (2) Engage employees through chat and polls, (3) Set up automated meeting captioning, translation, and transcripts, and (4) Use analytical tools to make sense of data, categorize it, and make it easier to visualize.

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

We designed Microsoft Teams to be a virtual office you can take anywhere you go. Work seamlessly and transparently with your remote team and discover greater collaboration and productivity. Join us for this session and explore how to avoid communication sinkholes and do more together, no matter where you are. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

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.

Customer Immersion Experience: Running Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Whether you are switching from Skype for Business or brand new, join us to learn the basics of how to use Teams to chat with your colleagues and collaborate on projects. Join us for this session and leave this with everything you need to start using Teams. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Set up your profile and notifications in Microsoft Teams, (2) Use chat and calling for 1:1 and group conversations, sharing and collaboration in Microsoft Teams, (3) Schedule and conduct meetings in Microsoft Teams, and (4) Align your team and teamwork in Microsoft Teams.

BLOG ROUNDUP

Tasks in Microsoft Teams is now generally available!

We have exciting news that’s more than a year in the making: Tasks in Microsoft Teams desktop and web is now 100% rolled out to everyone with a Microsoft 365 subscription across all non-government tenants. There’s more information about government cloud availability later in this post. Tasks in Teams lets you manage your team tasks from Planner and individual tasks from To Do in your hub for teamwork. This announcement also moves us to the next stage in our naming sequence, where the app name in Teams changes to Tasks by Planner and To Do in desktop and Tasks in mobile. We will make this change over a weekend to reduce the likelihood of users seeing different names as the name change rolls out, and we expect to make the change by the end of October. We will make an update to our Message Center post when we kick off this change. We’re also excited to report that Tasks in Teams for the Teams mobile app will soon begin rolling out to all users in non-government clouds and is scheduled to be completed in November.

Lifecycle of an item in SharePoint: Where does it go?

Once you understand the difference between a retention label and a retention policy, our team is ready to take you through a visual representation of the different containers in which an item may reside throughout its lifecycle in SharePoint. The scenarios will show what actions are taken on the item based on each potential retention scenario. We already know that retention takes precedence over deletion and that the longest retention period always wins. What happens if I have a 2-year delete policy applied to a site alongside an item that has a 3-year retention label? What happens if I apply a 3-year delete label to an item that resides in a site with a 10-year retention policy? While the principles of retention will always be your north star, it can help to have some visual guidance to understand where these items move and when.

Top 5 Security Questions Asked by our US Government Customers for Microsoft Teams

This past summer was extremely busy for the Microsoft Teams Engineering team, especially in the US Government space. They helped customers with a record number of net new deployments in the M365 US Gov Clouds; GCC, GCC High and DoD. End users wanted to collaborate with outside agencies but in a way that meant their data was secure. IT Admins wanted to know which configuration options best fit their organization’s security posture. CIO’s wanted to lean in and give their workforce the best in class technology, all while following US Government accreditation standards. The common theme in most questions asked by our customers was around security. Note: While this post is focused on questions asked by our US Government customers, they also likely apply for other customers.

Modern Authentication Support comes to Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Since December 2019, we’ve been making a lot of investment into the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer site. If you’ve used the website in the past couple of months, you probably saw the website has had a face lift with a modern UI for all pages as well as that we added the ability to switch languages/locales at any point during your connectivity testing. While these are exciting changes, we have been quietly working away on a huge functionality improvement. We’re thrilled to announce that our Office 365 tests now have modern authentication capabilities! In the past, customers would have to run tests by temporarily exempting an account from modern authentication (if it was possible) or simply had to engage Microsoft support since there wasn’t a good workaround for connectivity testing. For the O365 tests, Modern auth will be selected by default, but you can opt to use basic auth wherever needed. Note: The two tests that still don’t support modern auth are POP and IMAP tests.

Conditional Access Office 365 Suite now in GA!

We’re announcing general availability of Conditional Access for the Office 365 Suite! This makes it a whole lot easier to configure Conditional Access policy for Office 365. With a single click, you confidently set policy on all of the Office 365 apps, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams, as well as micro-services used by these well-known apps. Using the Office 365 Suite ensures your users will have consistent policy requirements across Office 365. Office 365 apps use shared services for an integrated experience, like access to files, calendar, and contact information. Inconsistent policy across these services result in end-users being interrupted or blocked at unexpected times with additional security prompts. Targeting the Office 365 Suite also means you don’t need to watch for new apps and manually update your policy as they become available—Conditional Access does that for you.

NOTEWORTHY

What’s New with Microsoft 365 | September 2020

Format: Video (16 mins) | This month, we recap some of the biggest news to come out of Microsoft Ignite 2020 including the general availability of Tasks in Microsoft Teams, what’s new with Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and the general availability of Endpoint Analytics, security updates for Microsoft Defender, and Compliance Manager, and more!

Reminder: Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services

As previously announced, Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020. After this date, ongoing investments in the Office 365 cloud services – including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business – will proceed based on post-Office 2013 requirements. We recommend that organizations with Office 2013 clients consider migrating to Office 365 ProPlus. Support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 connections to Office 365 cloud services will continue until October 2023. Up to date information on current system requirements can be found under on the Office system requirements page, with related timelines available in the Office system requirements matrix.

Reminder: SharePoint 2010 workflow retirement

As part of the evolution of the Microsoft 365 service, we periodically evaluate the capabilities of the service to make sure that we’re delivering the utmost value to customers. After careful consideration, we concluded that for SharePoint 2010 workflows, Microsoft 365 customers would be better served by modern workflow solutions. SharePoint 2010 workflows have been retired since August 1, 2020 for new tenants and will be removed from existing tenants on November 1, 2020. This applies to all environments where Power Automate is available as a replacement solution (excluding the Department of Defense until Power Automate availability). If you’re using SharePoint 2010 workflows, we recommend migrating to Power Automate or other supported solutions. A retirement announcement banner has been introduced on multiple workflow pages: “Starting 11/1/2020 6:00:00 AM, SharePoint 2010 workflows will be retired and users will no longer have the ability to run or create 2010 Workflows.”

Update: Retirement of Site Mailboxes in SharePoint Online

Back in 2017, we announced that site mailboxes in SharePoint Online were being deprecated, and that new organizations would no longer have access to the feature and existing organizations would no longer be able to create site mailboxes. Since that announcement, we have seen site mailbox usage drop consistently as customers move to alternative solutions. There are still a few customers who have site mailboxes with some activity, as well as customers who want to archive and delete site mailboxes that are no longer in use. As an alternative to site mailboxes, we had previously recommended Microsoft 365 Groups (formerly Office 365 Groups) and today, when you create a team site in SharePoint, a Microsoft 365 Group is created automatically. You can also connect classic team sites to a Microsoft 365 Group. This gives you a new shared mailbox and other group features and modernizes your classic sites. Before we retire (and ultimately delete) all site mailboxes in SharePoint Online, which will happen in April 2021. We’ll post another update as we get closer to April 2021. | Resource: Retirement of site mailboxes

Training Resources

There have been several training resources posted over the last week, including videos for SharePoint admin, migration and security, on-demand session videos for Microsoft Lists, a playbook for migrating from Exchange Transport Rules to Unified DLP, and end user training for sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365.

Continuous Access Evaluation in Azure AD is now in public preview!

A few months back, we introduced Continuous Access Evaluation (CAE) for tenants who had not configured any Conditional Access policies. CAE provides the next level of identity security by terminating active user sessions to a subset of Microsoft services (Exchange and Teams) in real-time on changes such as account disable, password reset, and admin initiated user revocation. CAE is now available in public preview for Azure AD tenants who have configured Conditional Access policies. Microsoft services, like Exchange and SharePoint, can terminate active user sessions as soon as a Conditional Access policy violation is detected. More Microsoft services, such as Dynamics and Azure, will be enabled in the future. You can turn on CAE to improve the security posture in your tenant with just a few clicks! | Resource: Continuous Access Evaluation documentation

TC Finney

One thought on “Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-41”

  1. Pingback: Weekly digest: Office 365 changes – 5 to 9 October News #Office365 #186 – Nuno Árias Silva Website

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