Office 365 Weekly Digest | January 7 – 13, 2018

Welcome to the January 7 - 13, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were thirteen additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including updates for Bookings, Outlook for Android/iOS, etc. Of note is the entry for the (new) SharePoint Admin Center, which is scheduled to start rolling out to Targeted Release on January 22, 2018.

The events calendar is back in full swing, with numerous opportunities for customer online immersion experiences, as well as Azure Active Directory webinars. A new event, "Share and Work Together with SharePoint Team Sites", is scheduled for January 18, 2018.

The SharePoint Team has started the new year with a bang, with significant updates last week including enhancements to image editing in SharePoint Online sites, the creation of custom site designs, the general availability of the SharePoint Migration Tool, and updates to the SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool. The Office 365 Secure Score tool also has several new features, and there is a preview of the new Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run. 

Highlights from last week's noteworthy items are the January 2018 Office 365 Update video, Outlook Cheat Sheets available in more languages, and a few tech tip videos for Microsoft Teams.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

UPCOMING EVENTS

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 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 17, 2018 and Wednesday, January 24, 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.

Share and Work Together with SharePoint Team Sites

When: Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 11am ET | Join us for a discussion on how investments in SharePoint team sites reimagines collaboration in modern workplace. We will start with articulating the role of SharePoint team sites in Microsoft's universal toolkit, follow it up with key investments in new and enriched capabilities, hybrid scenarios, role of intelligence in helping users to achieve more, and security and compliance capabilities in the platform. Presenter: Mark Kashman, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft

Connecting, Organizing & Collaborating with Your Team

When: Tuesday, January 23, 2018 and Tuesday, January 30, 2018 at 12pm 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.

Transforming your business to meet the changing market and needs of your customers

When: Thursday, February 1, 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.

BLOG ROUNDUP

SharePoint pages and image editing updates in Office 365

At Ignite 2017, we announced the next wave of innovation coming to SharePoint pages to provide faster time to creation, enhanced control of text and images, increased promotion options, commenting and likes, and visibility on how your content is doing. You are in control of your message. Create it and get it out there to raise awareness and engagement throughout your company. We're pleased to share that these features and updates are rolling out to Targeted Release Office 365 customers. Expect them to appear within the coming days and weeks. And soon, beyond Targeted Release, they release to the full production environment.

Create and use custom SharePoint site designs in Office 365

With great sites comes great responsibility and structure. It is the focus of IT and content managers to enable the business to achieve their outcomes while staying in compliance with company guidelines and preferences. And now you can with the ability to further customize the 'modern' SharePoint sites experiences in a repeatable, programmatic way. We are pleased to announce that the ability to create and use custom site designs is rolling out to Targeted Release Office 365 customers. As SharePoint team sites and communication sites become more organized according to the business, they, too, need to best align with the preferred look & feel and structure via use of custom site themes and custom site designs. And a tenant-wide gallery helps to ensure each site can be assigned the right set of themes and designs by the right people; it is possible to assign who can pick and use specific designs at the time when they create new sites. Custom site designs and custom site themes apply to both team sites and communication sites, and provide you with flexibility and choice.

General Availability of the SharePoint Migration Tool & SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool Updates

Taking advantage of cloud services doesn't have to be difficult or a long-phased migration project. We're excited to announce General Availability of the SharePoint Migration Tool, a simple, and fast migration solution to help you migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365. Based on the learning and experience from Microsoft FastTrack, the SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft was designed to help you bring your information to the cloud and take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions with Office 365. With a few simple clicks in the intuitive user interface, you can quickly and easily migrate files from file shares, SharePoint sites, or support bulk migrations. Whether you're looking to migrate from file shares on-premises to SharePoint or OneDrive or from on-premises versions of SharePoint, the SharePoint Migration Tool supports the smallest of migrations to large scale migrations with support for bulk scenarios.

Updates to Office 365 Secure Score

We have received a lot of feedback from the Tech Community on how to make Secure Score better and it is greatly appreciated by the team. We are happy to share that we are adding a couple of enhancements to Secure Score. Many of you like the idea that you can compare your score to the average score of all Office 365 tenants. However, some have concerns about the relevance of this to your organization. Based on this feedback we have a new average for you to compare against. Coming soon we will be introducing an industry average score, this will show you how your score compares to other organizations that have designated the same industry in Secure Score or the Service Assurance page of the Security and Compliance Center. Another enhancement we are adding is around making it easier to find how your score changed between two dates and what the impact was. Along the lines of making things easier, we know that finding controls in the action list can be a challenge when the list is long. To help find controls faster we are introducing a search field for the action queue. And finally, the reporting actions have had an overhaul. The reports in Azure have under gone a significant optimization in terms of making them easier to consume and more relevant.

Customizing Office 365 ProPlus using the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run

We are announcing a preview of the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run, a simple to use web application that enables desktop administrators to customize Office 365 clients. Until today, Windows desktop administrators would use notepad or an equivalent text editor to compile various XML statements to define the Office edition, feature update frequency, version, language and other number of available settings. This somewhat tedious task, in most cases, would result in installation errors from fouled up manual entries or copy-and-paste actions into the text editor. With the new Office Customization Tool, desktop admins can leverage the rich user interface that intuitively shows all available options to build the desired Office configurations. One of our favorite additions, is the configuration builder. Desktop admins can quickly see a list of all configuration settings being chosen on the right-hand side of the screen, giving the desktop admin a quick and easy way to see the result of their selections without jumping through multiple screens. Desktop Admin also have an option to upload any previously configured XML files to the configuration tool and modify them with new or existing settings.

NOTEWORTHY

Video: Office 365 Update for January 2018

Format: Video (9 minutes) | Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, including Whiteboard, PowerPoint, Sway, Yammer, OneDrive, eDiscovery, and more. The video transcript, complete with links to additional information on everything covered, is available at http://aka.ms/o365update-blog.

Outlook Cheat Sheet PDFs available to download in 37 languages

There were some nice Outlook Cheat Sheet PDFs that caught people's attention at Ignite. They show you how to quickly accomplish useful tasks in Outlook Mail and Calendar across the various platforms we ship on. Just recently, our Office International team, localized and published these into 36 other languages. They are available to download from here.

Tech Tips for Microsoft Teams including community management with Yammer

Hello Microsoft Tech Community! We want you to have some quick guidance videos for common tasks in Microsoft Teams. We've published several that we think will be helpful – (1) Community management using Microsoft Teams and Yammer - Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool for enabling collaboration among community managers. Enabling the Yammer connector can ensure you stay up to date on what's happening within the context of your broader team. This video walks you through this scenario step by step; (2) Guest Access Tech Tips: We've now published step by step guidance for enabling Guest Access in Microsoft Teams as well as adding a guest to your team.

Flow of the Week: Send multiple attachments on a single email

Hello, and welcome to another post in the Flow of the Week series. In case, this is the first article you are reading – Flow of the Week is a series of blog posts, which illustrates use cases and scenarios that can be automated using Microsoft Flow – so be sure check out other posts in this series. This week, we are going to be looking at one of the common asked questions by our customers, sending multiple attachments on a single email. To illustrate this, we will be creating an item on a SharePoint list and attach a few files to it. Our flow will trigger, on this new item being added. The flow will get all the attachments on the item, construct an array of all the attachments and finally we will use this "array of attachments" and send it out on an email. Let's dig in to it, shall we?

Data protection beyond backup and recovery with Office 365

Protecting your data against file corruption, data loss, and malicious intent is a top priority for Microsoft, and an integral part of the Office 365 service. Our approach to data protection goes beyond high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. Resiliency and recoverability are built into the service. Even if a traditional backup solution provides recovery options to address file corruption, deletion, and malicious attacks, it won't necessarily help you recover quickly from such incidents. Research shows that it can take months to detect the presence of an attacker an organization's network. Given this, a backup and restore solution could be a potential area of attack, and could further broaden the scope of attack into your disaster recovery environment. Additionally, all backup data would need to be thoroughly cleansed before it could be leveraged as a viable restore option. With this in mind, Office 365 has moved beyond the backup and restore solutions that were first established in on-premises environments. Microsoft invests deeply in providing a holistic in-place solution that both keeps multiple copies of your data across multiple locations, and enables you to develop upfront policies for prevention and detection. These policies can be enforced manually and automatically at multiple levels of granularity, including via intelligent location-based classification, patterns, or sensitive types of content. The multiple built-in security capabilities of Office 365 in combination with services and controls, such as Data Loss Prevention, Advanced Threat Protection, Threat Intelligence, Advanced Data Governance, etc., help ensure your data is protected in-place and incidents like file corruption, deletion, and malicious intent are minimized at all times.