Office 365 Weekly Digest | September 10 - 16, 2017
Welcome to the September 10 - 16, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.
The Office 365 Roadmap has been updated with twenty new items, most for StaffHub. Other items of note include updates for SharePoint news features, Office 365 Secure Score and multi-factor and federated authentication support for PowerShell connectivity to the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center.
If you weren't able to register before Microsoft Ignite sold out, you can watch online on Monday, September 25th. There are also new customer immersion experience sessions that have been added for October.
All of the buzz last week was about the announcement of guest access in Microsoft Teams. Also included in the roundup are posts related to public folder migrations to Exchange Online, a podcast featuring one of Microsoft's engineering leaders on how Office 365 security is built and managed, as well as a couple of new, cloud-focused content pieces from Microsoft IT Showcase.
News about an updated Office 365 App Launcher and more Ignite sessions listings for SharePoint, OneDrive and Analytics wrap up the noteworthy items in this week's post.
OFFICE 365 ROADMAP
Items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week:
eDiscovery Legal Hold Notices
Feature ID: 20750
Status: In development
Date Added: September 11, 2017
Description: Issue and track legal hold notices and the responses received back from custodians for eDiscovery
More Info: n / a
eDiscovery Export to compressed folder (zip file)
Feature ID: 20752
Status: In development
Date Added: September 11, 2017
Description: Provides an alternate export format that reduces truncation of files paths that exceed 260 characters
More Info: n / a
eDiscovery Case Holds modernization
Feature ID: 20751
Status: In development
Date Added: September 11, 2017
Description: eDiscovery Case Holds UI modernization to matches the user experience of the Security & Compliance Center, also includes elimination pop-up windows
More Info: n / a
Exchange: Poll for time to meet
Feature ID: 20990
Status: In development
Date Added: September 11, 2017
Description: When creating a calendar invite, Poll for a time to meet will give you the option to send convenient time slots for your invitees to vote on the most convenient for them, when a time is agreed on, Outlook will automatically send invites and add it to the organizer's calendar. This new feature will be available through Outlook on the web.
More Info: Microsoft Tech Community
StaffHub: Stay Connected with Outlook integration
Feature ID: 20714
Status: Rolling Out
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Team members can access important company news or announcements made in Outlook directly in StaffHub - allowing Firstline Workers to stay up to date and connected to the organization.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Enables Task Assignment & Tracking
Feature ID: 20704
Status: Rolling Out
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Team members can now use StaffHub to create, assign and track tasks from co-workers and management- making it easier to manage and communicate work that comes up during shifts.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Integrate Schedule Details with Kronos
Feature ID: 20707
Status: Rolling Out
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Microsoft StaffHub will support connections to Kronos, a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. This integration will enable managers to import team schedule information from Kronos’s Workforce Central platform directly into Microsoft StaffHub. It will also allow employees to clock in/out from the app, and view their vacation accruals.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Benefit from Microsoft Flow Integration
Feature ID: 20710
Status: Rolling Out
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Microsoft StaffHub plans to integrate with Microsoft Flow. This support will focus on automating basic workflows for teams, schedules and tasks - making it easier to digitize business process and activities.
More Info: n / a
SharePoint news - newsletter rollup email
Feature ID: 21047
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Users will be able to quickly create a clean newsletter by selecting the desired news articles they wish to roll up into a consolidated email, to be sent to the users/groups of their choosing. The news articles appear as article previews with thumbnail and a glimpse at the body text of each article, with of course links to take a reader to the full article they are interested to read in full.
More Info: n / a
SharePoint news - aggregation into Microsoft Teams chat
Feature ID: 21045
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: It is possible to publish news articles within team sites, and when you associate a Microsoft Teams channel for the group, you'll see each published article automatically flow into the chat workspace as a new thread of the discussion. This helps with both awareness of team news, plus it helps as a discussion starter for topics being pushed as important news to all team members.
More Info: n / a
Office 365 Secure Score - Active Seat Average Score
Feature ID: 20994
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Secure Score will add the ability for you to see the average score of organizations that have a similar number of Office 365 active seats.
More Info: n / a
Multi-factor and federated authentication support for connecting to the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center through PowerShell
Feature ID: 21013
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Users who use PowerShell to connect to Office 365 Security & Compliance center can now use multi-factor authentication for additional layer of security. In addition, companies that have on-prem directory can now use federated authentication in PowerShell to connect to Office 365 Security & Compliance Center.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Communicate across platforms with Teams interop
Feature ID: 20713
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Microsoft StaffHub will adopt the Microsoft Teams chat experience, allowing users to communicate across services.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Broadcast Open Shifts to Employees
Feature ID: 20701
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Team members can now use StaffHub to broadcast open shifts - making it easier for Firstline managers to fill schedules and for Firstline workers to pick up an extra shift.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Supports in-app clock in / out
Feature ID: 20702
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Team members can now use StaffHub to clock in and out - providing a simple to use and GPS-enabled tool to streamline time and attendance.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Enables Training Assignment & Tracking
Feature ID: 20703
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Team members can now use StaffHub to assign and track employee training and onboarding activities - making it easy to deliver effective development programs from one central and secure location.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Extending Security with Intune
Feature ID: 20716
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Microsoft StaffHub will benefit from Intune and Mobile App Management - helping to extend security across every endpoint and employee.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Simplify Integrations with General APIs
Feature ID: 20709
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Microsoft StaffHub plans to make available and support public APIs. Initially, these APIs will focus on shift and schedule data management at the team level. Stay tuned for more!
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: New Simplified Web Experience
Feature ID: 20711
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Team members can now take advantage of an updated StaffHub web experience - making it easier use and to have a great experience no matter how you access StaffHub.
More Info: n / a
StaffHub: Coming to Office 365 App Launcher
Feature ID: 20712
Status: In development
Date Added: September 13, 2017
Description: Microsoft StaffHub is expected to be in the Office 365 app launcher by October 2017. Making it easier to discover and access StaffHub from inside the Office 365 experience.
More Info: n / a
UPCOMING EVENTS
Free Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Teacher Academy
When: September 19, 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 September
When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from September 12 - September 20, 2017 | Sessions include Azure AD Connect Health, Getting Ready for Azure AD, Securing Your Identities with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Azure AD Identity Protection and Privileged Access Management, 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.
When: Monday, September 25, 2017 at 9am ET | If you didn’t register before Microsoft Ignite sold out, you can still be part of Microsoft Ignite and learn about the future of tech.
Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows
When: Wednesdays in October (4th, 11th, 18th, 25th) 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: Thursday, October 19, 2017 at 1pm 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
Expand your collaboration with guest access in Microsoft Teams
Since Microsoft Teams became generally available six months ago, more than 125,000 organizations have discovered how teamwork comes to life in Teams. Now, Teams is getting even better with the rollout of guest access to all Office 365 commercial and education customers. Now Office 365 users can add people from outside their company to a team, so guests can participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents, and more. We also announced new developer tools for Teams, which you can read more about over on the Office Dev blog. Guest access has been one of the top requested features for Teams among our customers, and we’ve been working hard to get it right. We designed guest access in Teams with three principles at the forefront: (1) Teamwork, (2) Security, and (3) IT Manageability. | Resource: Support Article – Guest Access in Microsoft Teams | Related: Azure AD B2B Collaboration in Microsoft Teams
Last September, we announced a beta program to validate onboarding of public folder data from Exchange 2010 on-premises to Exchange Online with large public folder hierarchies (100K – 250K public folders). We are glad to announce that Exchange Online now officially supports public folder hierarchies of up to 250K public folders in the cloud – more than double the previously supported limit of 100K public folders! In line with our efforts to help larger customers onboard to Exchange Online, we would like to additionally announce support for the migration of public folders from on-premises Exchange 2010 to Exchange Online, for customers with folder hierarchies up to 250K. All existing customers using Exchange Online who would have been constrained by the limit of 100K public folders, can now expand their Exchange Online public folder hierarchy up to 250K folders. Any on-premises customers running Exchange 2010 with up to 250K public folders, who would like to onboard to Exchange Online, can now do so. Note: At this point in time, Exchange 2013/2016 customers with over 100K folders can still only migrate up to 100K public folders to Exchange Online. However, once they have migrated to Exchange Online, they can expand their hierarchy up to 250K public folders. We are working to resolve this limitation for our Exchange 2013/2016 customers in the future.
The Immense Challenge of Protecting Office 365 Podcast
Many of you are aware of the threat protection services offered in Office 365. These services include Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Advanced Security Management (ASM), and Office 365 Threat Intelligence. Countless users leverage the daily protections offered by each of these services. However, few realize the depth, breadth, and enormous scale of the Office 365 ecosystem. Each month, we analyze 450 BILLION emails for malware. Very few (if any) platforms have such a significant volume of emails that flow through it. Despite this scale, we manage to prevent most cyber threats from ever impacting our millions of customers. We also rapidly respond to any threats that do get through our initial defenses to ensure that there is minimal to no impact or interruption to our customers. Recently, the Director of Office 365 Information Protection, Rudra Mitra sat down with the hosts from Down the Security Rabbit Hole, one of the most popular and well-regarded podcasts in the cybersecurity industry. Rudra manages the teams that develop security for Office 365 and thus he has unique visibility into the back end of different aspects of Office 365 and how Microsoft focuses on providing the most secure Office 365 environment for our users. It's a rare opportunity to gain perspective from one of Microsoft's engineering leaders on how Office 365 security is built and managed.
Microsoft IT Showcase: From systems to people - rethinking service management
Format: Technical Case Study | Published: September 13, 2017 | Moving to the cloud requires more than just technology—it demands a new approach to managing services. For the Office 365 service management team at Microsoft, the employee experience is our top priority. We’re focusing on end-to-end services and aligning IT skills with strategic roles. We deliver frequent Office 365 updates in shortened release cycles with new governance models to help protect corporate assets while promoting collaboration. It’s paying off—we’re seeing employees adopt the services and enhance productivity.
Microsoft IT Showcase: Microsoft thwarts phishing attempts with Office 365
Format: Article | Published: September 12, 2017 | Cyberattacks, malware, and phishing are becoming more sophisticated, but at Microsoft we won’t let our guard down. We constantly improve our security framework—which includes Office 365 and other Microsoft technologies—to help detect, prevent, and respond to threats. Using powerful anti-phishing algorithms, machine learning, and anomaly detection, Office 365 services like Exchange Online Protection and Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection help organizations thwart email-based phishing attacks and boost protection.
NOTEWORTHY
We are introducing a number of changes to Office 365 in the web to simplify and personalize the user experiences for you and your users. The new Office 365 app launcher will be rolling out over the next couple months. Here's an early look on how it'll work so you can prepare the people in your organization for the change. The new app launcher is personalized and will help users open and switch between the apps they use most. The apps users see are still based on the licenses their admin has assigned. However, the redesigned main view now emphasizes the most used applications across Office 365. It also highlights additional apps relevant to your users. For example, teachers and students may see education-specific apps. The embedded video will also show how www.office.com is an easy to remember URL to share with your users to help them get started with all things Office 365 and specifically, working with their online documents. We are also introducing a new Office 365 gallery page, accessible from www.office.com, that will help users better understand the apps, tools and services that are part of their Office 365 subscription.
Yammer Time - Episode 2 with Kaleem Rahman
In the latest episode, Steve Nguyen sat down for a short conversation with Yammer Product Manager, Kaleem Rahman. Kaleem has been leading up a number of Yammer efforts related to helping remove technical barriers related to adoption of Yammer. Most recently, Kaleem has been working on an initiative that we know will be very popular amongst customers: Yammer analytics. In this short interview, Kaleem talks about what we've learned along the way and what you might expect to hear at Ignite.
Top five solutions from August's Community AMA
At the end of August, the Microsoft Flow Team hosted its second Ask Microsoft Anything community event -- and it was a huge success! During the Q&A hour, the Flow Team answered over 100 questions asked by our community members. The AMA discussion produced over 20 solutions written by members of the Flow Team. To celebrate, we've shared the top five solutions below. To view more solutions, check out the AMA discussion board in the Microsoft Flow Community. Missed the event? Keep an eye out for the next AMA event and get your answer live! | Related: Flow of the Week – Tracking Changes in a Deployment
The SharePoint and OneDrive Guide to Microsoft Ignite 2017
With less than two weeks until Microsoft Ignite 2017, the SharePoint and OneDrive team and MVP speakers are firing on all cylinders to finalize their sessions for this year's conference. And while the Ignite session catalog is live at https://myignite.microsoft.com, choosing from over 1,400 sessions can take some time even for the veteran attendee. But have no fear, we are here to help! If you're passionate about SharePoint and OneDrive here are the recommended sessions to get you started along with a full list of 70+ SharePoint and OneDrive sessions in the attached guides. | Related: Microsoft Ignite OneDrive Session Primer | Can’t miss Analytics in Microsoft 365 sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2017
32-bit Outlook will soon be Large Address Aware
We'd like to tell you about an upcoming change in the Office 365 subscription version of Outlook 2016 for Windows that may affect you. Starting in version 1710, the 32-bit version of Outlook will be Large Address Aware (LAA). What does this mean and how will it impact you? In Windows, normal 32-bit executables have a maximum address space of 2GB. This has been the case for many years. In those years, however, hardware has moved on and has massively increased its capability. In particular, machines today have much more memory as well as increasingly higher resolution displays. In particular, the resolution of displays is the motivating factor for enabling LAA for Outlook. As displays get larger, the amount of graphics memory required to compose, render, and display applications increases dramatically. The 2GB limit described above puts pressure on Outlook’s ability to draw all the pixels to the screen—enough pressure that some re-draw glitches might result in some situations. LAA enabling allows Outlook to have a full 4GB of address space and reduce the chances of those re-draw glitches happening. Keep in mind that the application won’t necessarily use all of that memory at once, the gains are in having larger contiguous blocks of address space to use in our graphics subsystem.