Office 365 Weekly Digest | July 16 - 22, 2017
Welcome to the July 16 - 22, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest. Please see this page for details on a change regarding the inclusion of Message Center notification details in these weekly posts.
Office Hours: SharePoint, a new event this week, is a live chat taking place on Tuesday, July 25th. The focus for this session is SharePoint lists and libraries. While there are no live Azure AD webinars until early August, there are several available for on-demand viewing. The Azure AD team has also planned a new webinar for August - Azure AD Identity Protection and Privileged Access Management.
Last week, there were important change announcements regarding site collection admin audit logs in SharePoint Online and the discontinuation of support for Session Border Controllers in Exchange Online Unified Messaging. An introduction to eDiscovery in Microsoft Teams and improvements to the column creation experience in modern SharePoint lists and libraries round out the Blog Roundup section.
SharePoint is the focus of last week's noteworthy items with the "SharePoint: Inform and Engage Your Employees" webinar available on-demand, as well as a comprehensive summary of the July 13th panel webinar with Shire to discuss best practices for planning and building a modern digital intranet workspace using SharePoint and Office 365. A video overview of the admin tools available in Office 365 and updated Microsoft Cloud IT architecture resources are also highlighted.
UPCOMING EVENTS
When: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 10am PT | Join Microsoft's Tom Resing, Mark Kashman, and Chris McNulty at 10am PDT on Tuesday, July 25 for a live chat about SharePoint Lists and Libraries! Want to check it out? The Mixer.com feed for this event will be streaming live, beginning at 9:30am PDT on July 25. See you then!
Free Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Teacher Academy
When: July 21, 2017 through September 29, 2017 at various US locations | Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Trainers are leading fun, professional development sessions this summer and they’re coming to a city near you. Join us for these BYOD workshops showcasing Microsoft’s hottest tools and resources for K-12 teachers, built to empower students to achieve more. Attendees will get to explore tools such as Microsoft Teams, Office Online, OneNote Class Notebooks, Microsoft Forms and Sway, and learn how technology can provide their students with learning experiences beyond the four walls of their classroom, thanks to Skype in the Classroom and the Microsoft Educator Community. Register today and join us at an upcoming Teacher Academy near you!
Azure Active Directory Webinars for August
When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from August 8 - August 17, 2017 | New for August - Azure AD Identity Protection and Privileged Access Management! Sessions include Azure AD Connect Health, Getting Ready for Azure AD, Securing Your Identities with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Accessing Your Organization’s Internal Applications via Azure AD App Proxy and more. Each 1-hour or 75-minute 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.
BLOG ROUNDUP
SharePoint Online Site Collection Admin Audit Log Changes
Site Collection Admin Audit Logging enables administrators to keep a reliable log of what is happening with important content on a site collection. Administrators are able to retrieve the entire history of actions taken by a particular user and can also retrieve the entire history of actions taken during a particular date range. For example, site administrators can use auditing to track how documents and items are used throughout a site collection. Beginning July 24th, 2017 for First Release enabled Office 365 Tenants, we will be making changes to the SharePoint Online Site Collection Administration Audit Log feature by enforcing a 90-day retention period. Customers who used this feature previously will be automatically updated to the new retention policy and settings. New customers who subscribed to Office 365 after this change will be forced to use the 90-day retention period. Customers can either accept the default of 90 days or input a smaller number of days. Important: This change does not impact the Unified Auditing experience from the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center.
Creating new column types in modern SharePoint lists and libraries
As we continue to improve custom experiences in modern SharePoint, we are pleased to announce improvement to the column creation experience in modern SharePoint lists and libraries. In addition, to creating columns in the setting page for a list or a library, users will be able to create and customize the following additional column types by clicking the plus (+) sign after the rightmost column on modern list or library views - Choice, Hyperlink, Picture, Single line of text, and Multiple lines of text. Administrators can choose to remain in classic mode in advance of the rollout by implementing the steps in this support article. We expect to start the rollout of this feature around July 25, 2017.
eDiscovery and Content Search in Microsoft Teams
When a new Team in Microsoft Teams is created, it automatically creates an Office 365 Group and because Office 365 Groups exist within Office 365, they can be subject to Security and Compliance policies in Office 365. In addition, content posted in Microsoft Teams can also be subject to these policies and enables organizations to perform Content Search and eDiscovery on this stored content. This article will walk an administrator through how to perform this task. Disclaimer: This article is not an extensive nor exhaustive "how to" for eDiscovery in Office 365. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the simplicity of performing eDiscovery on Microsoft Teams content, but we will not go in-depth into the process.
Discontinuation of support for Session Border Controllers in Exchange Online Unified Messaging
In July 2018, we will no longer support the use of Session Border Controllers (SBC) to connect 3rd Party PBX systems to Exchange Online Unified Messaging (UM). We’re making this change to provide a higher quality of service for voicemail, using standard Exchange and Skype for Business protocols. Customers considering a new deployment of this scenario should be aware that they will have a little less than a year to complete one of the migrations below. Customers with existing deployments remain fully supported until July 2018, including moving voicemail-enabled mailboxes from Exchange on-premises and voicemail-enabling new mailboxes. Although only a small number of customers are affected by this change, we know that planning for changes to voice platforms requires time to evaluate options, and to implement the selected option. We encourage you to start this process soon.
Welcome to the Modern Methodologies for Classroom IT Management blog series from Microsoft Education. This is the first in a five-part set of posts examining today’s best practices for purchasing, deploying and managing school information technology. Each post has links to helpful resources on how to set up and deploy education technology in the classroom. In this first part, we examine how schools are taking advantage of cloud-based services and apps, and the measures they’re taking to protect sensitive data and enforce proper access rights. Next, in the second post of the series, we’ll cover the challenges of managing today’s range of devices in a multi-platform, access-from-anywhere world.
NOTEWORTHY
Video: Managing Office 365 - An Overview
Format: Video (3 minutes) | Moving to Office 365 means a different way of doing things for your IT department. Learn about the admin tools included in Office 365 so you can be in control of your environment! Resources: https://www.office.com/it
Video: SharePoint - Inform and Engage Your Employees
Format: Video (24 minutes) | Mark Kashman from the SharePoint Team demos how SharePoint keeps everyone on the same page, allowing seamless collaboration through secured access.
Microsoft Cloud IT architecture resources
Updated: July 19, 2017 | These architecture tools and posters give you information about Microsoft cloud services and platforms, including Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Dynamics 365, private cloud datacenter, and hybrid on-premises and cloud solutions. IT decision makers and architects can use these resources to determine the ideal solutions for their workloads and to make decisions about core infrastructure components such as identity and security.
On July 13th, Microsoft held a panel webinar with their customer, Shire – a recognized leader in rare diseases, along with numerous Office 365 MVPs. Shire provided details on how they planned, built and use their beautiful and engaging digital workspace – The Hub – to help inform and engage everyone throughout the company in a consistent, sustainable way. The panelists highlighted the importance of governance throughout the project, described numerous business cases, and covered the use of innovations including SharePoint communication sites, leveraging the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), multi-column page support, new web parts and page capabilities – all used to create rich and compelling sites to achieve their desired outcomes. This post includes both the full, on-demand webinar video (a fun, informative 60 minutes), plus expanded written thoughts across some of the top-level items covered, with links provided by our MVPs to additional materials for further learning.