Welcome to the July 1 - 7, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.
There were six additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including new Yammer features in SharePoint Online and Teams, new integration between Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project, a combined password reset and multi-factor authentication registration experience, and adding a link for the Security and Compliance Center (SCC) in the Exchange Admin Center.
New online customer immersion experiences are now open for registration, with sessions starting in late July through late August. There are a few Azure Active Directory sessions this week, which will complete the July 2018 round of webinars.
Microsoft Teams was the focus of several blog posts last week, including a roundup of new features for July 2018 and the availability of eDiscovery for calls and meetings in Teams. In addition, idle-session timeout policies for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online are now available. Upcoming changes to the Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Office 365 were also announced, with support for Basic Authentication access for EWS ending in October 2020.
Noteworthy items wrapping up this week's post include updates to the Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges effective August 1, 2018, the new Driving Adoption blog and Office 365 Teamwork Champions community, OneDrive Message Center updates for the last half of June 2018, and new capabilities for financial services and US government customers.
OFFICE 365 ROADMAP
Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week:
|
Feature ID |
Title | Description |
Status |
Added |
Estimated Release |
More Info |
|
31503 |
Rich Yammer feeds in SharePoint | New web part to add a fully functional native Yammer feed to any modern SharePoint site. |
In development |
07/03/2018 |
Q4 CY2018 |
n / a |
|
31502 |
Yammer tab in Microsoft Teams | Easier access to Yammer communities with a built-in tab in Microsoft Teams. |
In development |
07/03/2018 |
Q4 CY2018 |
n / a |
|
27755 |
Microsoft Project & Microsoft Planner – Create a new plan | When connecting a Planner plan to a Project task, create a new plan quickly instead of linking to an existing one. |
In development |
07/03/2018 |
August CY2018 |
n / a |
|
20614 |
SharePoint Online communication sites for sovereign datacenters | Bringing SharePoint communication sites to all sovereign datacenters, including government tenants. |
Launched |
07/06/2018 |
Q4 CY2017 |
SharePoint Communication sites begin rollout to Office 365 customers |
|
31548 |
Combined Password Reset & MFA Registration | We are releasing a preview of a new user experience that will allow users to register security info for multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password reset in a single experience. Now when a user registers security info such as their phone number for receiving verification codes, that number can also be used for resetting a password. Likewise, users can change or delete their security info from a single page, making it easier to keep information up-to-date. |
Rolling out |
07/06/2018 |
July CY2018 |
n / a |
|
31546 |
Make the Action Center easier to find | When administrators need to unblock a blocked sender(s), due to compromise and/or sending spam, they could go to the Security and Compliance Center (SCC) Admin Center, but that wasn't easy since you had to type it into the browser. So, we're making it easier to find if the admin is already in SCC and also adding a link in the Exchange Admin Center to point directly to it. |
In development |
07/06/2018 |
Q4 CY2018 |
n / a |
UPCOMING EVENTS
Azure Active Directory Webinars for July
When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from July 10 - 12, 2018 | Are you looking to deploy Azure Active Directory quickly and easily? We are offering free webinars on key Azure Active Directory deployment topics to help you get up and running. Sessions include Getting Ready for Azure AD, Managing Enterprise Apps with Azure AD, and more. Each 1-hour 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, July 31, 2018 at 12pm ET and 3pm 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.
Connecting, Organizing & Collaborating with Your Team
When: Wednesday, August 1, 2018 at 12pm ET and 3pm 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, August 2, 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.
Hands-on with security in a cloud-first, mobile-first world
When: Thursday, August 9, 2018 at 12pm ET 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.
Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows
When: Wednesday, August 22, 2018 at 12pm ET and 3pm 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.
BLOG ROUNDUP
What's new in Microsoft Teams – July Roundup
The July Roundup for Microsoft Teams details the latest enhancements across the following areas: (1) Communicate more seamlessly, (2) Collaborate more effectively, (3) Customize and extend your workspace, with third-party apps and processes, (4) New features available for mobile, (5) Experience Teams across devices, and (6) Learn how customers are using Teams. Some of the specific enhancements referenced in the post include Direct Routing in Teams, Teams availability in US Government Community Cloud, View and edit Visio files in Teams, Office 365 app launcher in the Teams web client, several new apps in Teams, support for eDiscovery, archiving a team, etc.
Microsoft Teams launches eDiscovery for Calling and Meetings
We're proud to announce that starting July 2nd, 2018 Microsoft Teams now supports eDiscovery for calling/meeting. With this feature launch, Microsoft Teams delivers on its Q2CY2018 commitments towards the Skype and Teams convergence roadmap. Now, compliance admins who are used to performing eDiscovery searches for Microsoft Teams messages and files will now be able to search and discover summary records for every Microsoft Teams meeting or call in their tenant. Microsoft Teams Clients participate in Meetings and Calls that run on the next generation calling and meeting infrastructure services from Skype and Teams. These services will collect information about every meeting and call in Teams. This information is used by the Call Record Processing services to generate a record of the call or meeting, referred to as a call detail record (CDR). This CDR is sent into a special folder (not discoverable by Exchange clients like Outlook or OWA) located within the mailbox storage of all participants who dialed into the call/meeting. This data is indexed and made available to the eDiscovery functionality in the Office 365 Security and Compliance center. So, when compliance admins search for Teams content by including user mailboxes are included in the scope of the search, meeting and call summaries for Microsoft Teams are going to be included in the output of the search.
Idle-Session Timeout Policy in SharePoint Online & OneDrive is now Generally Available
SharePoint and OneDrive include a set of controls to help keep your data safe no matter where people are when they access or share data, what device they're working on, and how secure their network connection is. These controls can help you customize the level of access granted to people while making sure the resulting constraints meet your organizational security requirements. They also allow you to balance security and user productivity and prevent overexposure, leakage, and oversharing of your sensitive data. To help safeguard your information on these systems, we're pleased to announce idle session timeout policies are now generally available. Session lifetimes are an important part of authentication for Office 365 and are an important component in balancing security and the number of times users are prompted for their credentials. Idle session timeout provides an Office 365 administrator to configure a threshold at which a user is warned and subsequently signed out of SharePoint or OneDrive after a period of inactivity. Idle session timeout policies allow Office 365 administrators to automatically sign out inactive sessions preventing the overexposure of information in the event a user leaves a shared system unattended.
Microsoft Teams: Protecting against advanced threats
How well do you trust your employees? What about your vendors? I'm constantly coming across organizations that are storing intellectual property and other sensitive data in Microsoft Teams, so they can collaborate with that data in a centralized manner. I'm also learning that most of those organizations are enabling guest access and allowing outside vendors to have access to that data and the resources within the team. A good example of this is an outside marketing agency that you contract with for event marketing, online marketing, etc. What if a guest of that team (or employee), accidently (or intentionally) uploads malware to the team (but masks it as a file called MarketingRoadmap.pptx), and an employee of the organization opens the file? The malware could now spread throughout your environment. This is where Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) comes in. ATP can help to safeguard your organization from this threat by "detonating" (executing) files uploaded to Microsoft Teams (specifically the SharePoint/Office 365 Group on the back-end) to validate it is a legitimate file and contains no malicious code that can cause harm. This feature comes with Microsoft 365 E5, Office 365 E5, or available as an add-on to an existing Office 365 subscription. In this blog, I'm going to describe how to enable this feature, perform a test, and show you alerting.
Upcoming changes to Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Office 365
Over the last few years, we have been investing in services that help developers access information in Office 365 in a simple and intuitive way, specifically through Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph and the use of OAuth 2.0 provide increased security and seamless integration with other Microsoft cloud services and is rapidly expanding developer access to the rich data sets behind Microsoft applications. As we make progress on this journey, we have continued to evaluate the role of Exchange Web Services (EWS). We are sharing our plans to move away from Basic Authentication access for EWS over the next two years, with support ending Oct. 13, 2020. Note: These plans apply only to the cloud-based Office 365/Exchange Online products; there are no changes to EWS capabilities of on-premises Exchange products. Also starting today, Exchange Web Services (EWS) will no longer receive feature updates. While the service will continue to receive security updates and certain non-security updates, product design and features will remain unchanged. This change also applies to the EWS SDKs for Java and .NET as well. While we are no longer actively investing in it, EWS will still be available and supported for use in production environments. However, we strongly suggest migrating to Microsoft Graph to access Exchange Online data and gain access to the latest features and functionality.
NOTEWORTHY
Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges
July 2, 2018: Updates for Exchange Online, Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Portal and Shared, Office Mobile, Office Online, SharePoint Online, and Skype for Business Online effective August 1, 2018. 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, Client Connectivity, and Office 365 endpoint categories and Office 365 IP Address and URL Web Service.
The Office 365 Teamwork Champion's community is Open!
You're the Go-To person in your organization for Office 365, among other things. Curious by nature and ready to help, you're motivated by learning new things and ready to lead. You believe that technology can transform the way people work. We're here to connect you with other Champions that share your passion for working better together! You'll meet like-minded passionate thought leaders—so you can share and learn from each other. The Office 365 Champion Program will bring you the latest updates and Microsoft insider views. You'll get exclusive access to Microsoft product experts, and pre-release tools and resources you can use to be a Champion with your peers at work. More details on what is provided and what is coming are included in the post. You can join the program at https://aka.ms/O365Champions. | Related: Welcome to the Driving Adoption Blog!
OneDrive Message Center Updates for June 16-30, 2018
This post is a recap of OneDrive Message Center posts from the past two weeks. Around the 15th and 30th of each month we will post information on: (1) What is coming, (2) What has been released, and (3) A timetable of when these features might be hitting your tenants categorized into web features, mobile features and sync features. The post for June 16 – 30, 2018 includes information on the following features: (1) Weekly Trends for access statistics for files on OneDrive, (2) File Hover Card now available in Shared by Me View, (3) Mandatory use of TLS 1.2 in Office 365, (4) Mac OneDrive sync client support for IRM content, and many more.
Take your summer back and automate your Office 365 migration
Get this summer started off on the right foot and accelerate your migration to Office 365. More than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people have SharePoint for intranets, team sites and content management, join the ranks of those transforming their workplace with the SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft. Helping people share files and collaborate on content has always been central to SharePoint. At the core of these principles is the content itself, the documents you create, the documents you manage, the documents you share and now we're making it easier than ever to take advantage of the power content management and collaboration capabilities in SharePoint and OneDrive so you can share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information, and seamlessly collaborate across your organization. Based on your feedback, we're pleased to share that we're adding new support for Windows PowerShell to the SharePoint Migration Tool. With these new capabilities you'll be able to address scale migrations and deliver automated, programmatic migration solutions through the SharePoint Migration Tool.
Proposal Manager for financial services helps increase proposal win rates
The commercial and corporate lending environment is increasingly competitive and squeezing interest margins for banks and lenders. Bank lending teams must navigate a stream of documents—such as client financials, collateral assets, and regulatory attestations. They must follow protocols that thoroughly analyze the risk attached to a credit facility and income potential of business loans and capital investments. Since lending proposals contain sensitive client information, strict privacy, security, and compliance measures are required. In addition, financial services institutions are hampered by disjointed systems and manual processes that are costly and slow—often leading to inconsistent results, higher error rates, and increased costs. To win business in this competitive market, lending teams need the right tools to deliver tailored proposals quickly and easily. Built on the Microsoft 365 platform, the Proposal Manager solution is designed specifically for corporate and commercial banks to: (1) Streamline, automate, and speed up the lending process, (2) Create more effective proposals, and (3) Collaborate across the bank with strict confidentiality. The solution was developed by the Microsoft Financial Services team and developers as part of their focus to build vertical-specific solutions. No other cloud productivity providers offer a true banking-specific, end-to-end proposal management solution—architected from the ground up using the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. The solution is fully customizable and adaptable by your enterprise development team.
Customer Key now available in GCC, GCC High, DoD for Exchange Online
At Ignite last year, we announced several new encryption capabilities including Customer Key, which enables customers to provide and control their own keys that are used to encrypt their Office 365 data at-rest. Customer Key was designed for customers that have certain compliance obligations that require the ability to control their own encryption keys. With Customer Key, you can control your organization's encryption keys and then configure Office 365 to use them to encrypt your data at-rest. Data at-rest includes customer data from Exchange Online and Skype for Business that is stored in mailboxes and files that are stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. We are announcing that Customer Key is now generally available for Exchange Online in Office 365 government cloud instances: GCC, GCC High and DoD. We plan to make available Customer Key for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business in Office 365 government cloud instances by end of Q3 2018. Customer Key is offered for Exchange Online in the Office 365 Government Community Cloud suite, "E5", and the Advanced Compliance SKU. Additionally, customers must also purchase Azure Key Vault.