Season's Greetings, and welcome to the December 17 - 23, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.
There were no new entries in the Office 365 Roadmap last week.
As expected, all of the events for December have wrapped up, but there are lots of opportunities in the new year with several customer immersion experiences available, as well as new Azure Active Directory webinars.
Included in the roundup from last week's blogs are the general availability of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs, Microsoft Flow Analytics, options for preventing automatic mail forwarding in Exchange Online, and a PowerApps template designed to streamline onboarding new team members.
Highlights from last week's noteworthy items include a detailed Office 365 Information Protection guide, a Microsoft IT technical case study focused on OneDrive for Business, as well as the latest Teams on Air episode with a look at the recently released calling features in Microsoft Teams.
OFFICE 365 ROADMAP
There were no items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…
UPCOMING EVENTS
Transforming your business to meet the changing market and needs of your customers
When: Thursday, January 4, 2018 at 12pm and 3pm ET | This 2-hour hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Use digital intelligence to build personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints, (2) Improve customer service through a single, unified experience that delivers end-to-end service across every channel, (3) Increase customer satisfaction with intelligent scheduling, native mobile support, and remote asset monitoring to help you get the job done right the first time, and (4) Run your project-based business more productively by bringing people, processes, and automation technology together through a unified experience. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Azure Active Directory Webinars for January
When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from January 9 - 18, 2018 | A new webinar, An Introduction to Azure AD B2C, will be available in January 2018. Other sessions include 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.
Visualizing, Analyzing & Sharing Your Data Without Having to be a BI Expert
When: Tuesday, January 9, 2018 and Tuesday, January 16, 2018 at 12pm ET | This 2-hour hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive the latest business analytics tools. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they can work throughout your organization. During this interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Locate and organize large amounts of data from multiple sources, (2) Visualize complex data and identify trends quickly without having to be a BI expert, (3) Find and collaborate with company experts on the fly, even if they work in another part of the country, and (4) Gather colleague's opinions easily and eliminate communication and process bottlenecks. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows
When: Wednesday, January 10, 2018 at 1pm ET | This 90-minute hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Discover how you can keep your information more secure without inhibiting your workflow, (2) Learn how to visualize and analyze complex data, quickly zeroing in on the insights you need, (3) See how multiple team members can access, edit and review documents simultaneously, and (4) Gain skills that will save you time and simplify your workflow immediately. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
Hands-on with security in a cloud-first, mobile-first world
When: Thursday, January 11, 2018 at 12pm and 3pm ET | This 2-hour hands-on session will give you the opportunity to try Microsoft technology that secures your digital transformation with a comprehensive platform, unique intelligence, and partnerships. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Detect and protect against external threats by monitoring, reporting and analyzing activity to react promptly to provide organization security, (2) Protect your information and reduce the risk of data loss, (3) Provide peace of mind with controls and visibility for industry-verified conformity with global standards in compliance, (4) Protect your users and their accounts, and (5) Support your organization with enhanced privacy and compliance to meet the General Data Protection Regulation. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.
BLOG ROUNDUP
Announcing the General Availability of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs
The usage reports in the Office 365 admin center enable admins to understand their company's usage across the Office 365 services. However, many of you have existing reporting solutions such as a company reporting application or a web portal in place. To assure that you can monitor your IT services in one unified location, the usage reporting APIs complement the usage reports and allow organizations and independent software vendors to incorporate Office 365 usage data into their existing reporting solutions. Using these APIs, you can retrieve the data available in all of the usage reports, including organization level summaries per service, entity level (user, sites, accounts) usage information for reporting periods of the last 7/30/90/180 days, and daily activity aggregates. The new APIs are available now, and any user with global admin, product admin rights (for Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint), or a reports reader role can retrieve data through these APIs. | Related: Skype for Business Online: Changes to reporting cmdlets
Announcing Microsoft Flow Analytics
As Microsoft Flow consumption increases in organizations, customers are looking for more insight into the health of flows running within their environment. To address this feedback, we recently launched Microsoft Flow Analytics in all Microsoft Flow regions. This capability allows people building flows, with a Flow P2 license, to gain insight into the health of their flows from an analytics dashboard. In this release, we are providing the ability to view (1) Total flow runs by day, (2) Number of flow runs, and (3) Flow runs trend. | Related: Improvements to the Outlook connectors and more
Cheers to 2017: Yammer takeaways, best practices and resources to achieve more
As 2017 comes to a close, we've rounded up some information you can take advantage of as you enter the holidays. Whether you're taking a relaxing holiday vacation or already gearing up for New Year's resolutions, these recaps, insights and resources can be useful for either passive reflection or active planning.
The many ways to block automatic email forwarding in Exchange Online
"How do I block users from auto forwarding their mail outside my environment?" is a frequent question for our support team. There are plenty of good reasons you may not want auto forwarding: you may have HIPAA laws to follow, regulatory compliance or data privacy concerns or simply because it makes you uncomfortable. As an admin, you have a few different ways to prevent forwarding of emails outside of your environment. This post identifies the primary ways, along with a brief description of their pros and cons.
PowerApps: Office Template - Onboarding Tasks now available
There is another addition to the PowerApps Office Template Series: Onboarding Tasks. Setting up a powerful, versatile, and useful onboarding experience can be one of the most challenging scenarios an admin or team leader will encounter. The Onboarding Tasks app serves as a template starting point for those people looking to quickly streamline their team's onboarding experience. It acts as a one stop shop for new team members to introduce themselves, fill out their Office 365 User profile and photo, track relevant onboarding tasks, and much more. This app utilizes PowerApps connectors that use Microsoft Graph API operations. The Office 365 Outlook connector, Outlook Tasks connector and Office 365 Users connector are all used in this PowerApp template. For PowerApp makers, this means customization with the ability to leverage these productivity scenarios as inspiration for your own apps.
NOTEWORTHY
Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges
December 19, 2017: The Office 365 example PAC files now include the November endpoints updates effective 01/01/2018, and we will announce more changes in mid-January. Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here. | Additional Resources: Managing Office 365 Endpoints, Content Delivery Networks and Client Connectivity.
Microsoft Cloud Architecture: Office 365 Information Protection for GDPR
Format: PDF / Visio | This solution demonstrates how to protect sensitive data that is stored in Office 365 services. It includes prescriptive recommendations for discovering, classifying, protecting, and monitoring personal data. This solution uses General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as an example, but you can apply the same process to achieve compliance with many other regulations.
Format: Technical Case Study | Published: December 22, 2017 | OneDrive for Business is the standard at Microsoft for simple and secure cloud storage and file synchronization. We've deployed OneDrive for Business with a communication strategy that encourages people to opt in to the service, and as they do, we're reducing our storage and infrastructure costs. The OneDrive for Business sync client makes it easy for people to sync files and access them from any device. New authentication and data protection features help to further protect our corporate assets.
Teams On Air: Ep. 59 Intelligent Communications take the next step with Calling Plans in Teams
Format: Video (22 minutes) | Microsoft's new vision for intelligent communications is becoming real with Microsoft Teams support for Calling Plans (formerly PSTN Calling) in Office 365. Now Microsoft Teams users can be enabled with a primary phone number, allowing them to make and receive phone calls to and from your organizations. Join host Delanda Coleman, Sr Product Marketing Manager and Marc Pottier, Principal Program Manager as they discuss the vision for intelligent communications and demo the new calling plan capabilities. Marc will showcase features including dialing capabilities, call history, hold/resume, speed dial, transfer, forwarding, and much more. | Related: Quick Start - Microsoft Teams Planning Guide