Office 365 Weekly Digest | May 7 - 13, 2017

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Welcome to the May 7 - 13, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest. Please see below for a reminder on a change regarding the inclusion of Message Center notification details in these weekly posts.

A webinar focused on using Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) to secure access to Office 365 and an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) session on how to accelerate your move to Skype for Business Online with Microsoft FastTrack are new events for this week. Also, a friendly reminder that the SharePoint Virtual Summit happens on Tuesday, May 16th!

Lots of content related to our Build 2017 conference last week, along with Microsoft Flow, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business feature announcements highlight last week's blog roundup.

Noteworthy from last week are additional updates to the Office 365 URLs/IP addresses, a look into how Microsoft leverages Office 365 eDiscovery capabilities, as well as training for Microsoft Teams Bandwidth Planning and Skype Meeting Broadcast.

MESSAGE CENTER

As Office 365 increases the relevance of change communications to be more tenant-specific, a broad publication of this information becomes less useful and potentially inaccurate. Please be sure to check the Message Center in your Office 365 tenant for details on changes for awareness or that may require admin attention. Additional resources are included below:

Note: A Message Center weekly digest email is currently available for Office 365 admins set to First Release.

Also see: Send weekly Message Center email to Microsoft Teams

 

UPCOMING EVENTS EMS: Securing access to Office 365 and beyond

When: Monday, May 15, 2017 at 10:00am PT | See Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) in action. Join this webinar to learn how EMS extends and adds new capabilities to Office 365 to enable secure, simplified access to your Office Mobile Apps and other resources in your portfolio. This webinar will also cover: (1) Secure single sign-on to Office 365 and beyond, (2) Risk-based conditional access, (3) Azure Active Directory B2B: Secure collaboration capabilities through cross-organizational identity and access management, and (4) Identity protection, advanced monitoring, and Privileged Identity Management. See you in the session!

 

Accelerate your move to Skype for Business Online with Microsoft FastTrack AMA

When: Wednesday, May 17, 2017 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce an upcoming opportunity to 'Ask Microsoft Anything' (AMA) about Accelerate your move to Skype for Business Online with Microsoft FastTrack! The AMA will take place on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT in the Accelerate your move to Skype for Business Online with Microsoft FastTrack AMA space. An AMA is a live online event similar to a "YamJam" on Yammer or an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit. The Accelerate your move to Skype for Business Online with Microsoft FastTrack AMA will give you the opportunity to connect with members of the Skype for Business and FastTrack teams, who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Don't forgot to add the event to your calendar. We hope to see you there!

 

Announcing the SharePoint Virtual Summit

When: Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 10:00am PT | A connected workplace empowers you to securely connect to the people and content you need, to transform business process, to inform and engage your employees and to harness the collective knowledge of your organization. At this year’s SharePoint Virtual Summit—a free, online event on May 16, 2017—you’ll learn how to create a connected workplace in Office 365 with OneDrive and SharePoint and integrated with Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Windows, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper will unveil the latest product innovations and roadmap. You’ll also hear from industry-leading customers on how they are leveraging these technologies as part of their digital transformation. Jeff will be joined by Microsoft corporate vice presidents James Phillips and Chuck Friedman to discuss how Office 365, connected with Windows and Azure, is reinventing productivity for you, your teams and your organization. We hope you’ll join us at this year’s event, so register now to save your space on May 16, 2017.

 

Explore Microsoft Teams, Windows 10 and Office 365 in an interactive online session

When: Wednesdays May 17, 2017 through May 31, 2017 at 10am PT & 12pm PT | Today’s fast-paced workplace requires you to transition between tasks seamlessly and find things quickly. As work and collaboration evolve to become more web-based and complex, changing professional styles call for tools that provide agility across the full span of a workday. Instead of wasting time searching for your most-used features and content, you need technology that allows you to transition from email to collaboration to project work and back again with ease. Microsoft is now offering hands-on live sessions where you’ll have the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and our hottest new collaboration tool: Microsoft Teams. During these small-group sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. Each 90-minute session starts with an online business roundtable, discussing your biggest business challenges with a trained facilitator, and then transitions into a live environment in the cloud. You will receive a link to connect your own device to a remote desktop loaded with our latest technology, so you can experience first-hand how Microsoft tools can solve your challenges.

 

Azure Active Directory Webinars for May

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled May 16 - 24, 2017 | 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.

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled through May 26, 2017 | Ask questions, learn shortcuts and find out how Office 365 can make you and your team more productive. Each webinar is a live, instructor-led session offered at multiple dates and times. Facilitated discussion follows each session, with opportunities to ask questions and discuss specific scenarios to you. Direct registration links for each webinar are provided below.

 

BLOG ROUNDUP Office at Build 2017—announcing new opportunities for developers

At Microsoft Build 2017, we announced new opportunities for developers in three areas—updates to the Microsoft Teams developer platform, new capabilities in the Microsoft Graph and better ways to connect Office users with partner integrations. With over 100 million monthly commercial active users, Office 365 is the largest productivity service available. Office 365 offers an incredible opportunity for developers, with its business-critical data and millions of users, combined with a platform designed to keep people in the flow of their work. | Related: Microsoft Teams Update #4 | Skype for Business at Build 2017 | Azure Active Directory at Build 2017 | Channel 9: Office as a Platform

 

Introducing OneDrive Files On-Demand and other features making it easy to access files

As people create and collaborate on more files, take more photos and work across multiple devices, it’s increasingly important to access your important content, both from your work and personal life—all in one place. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether there is enough storage on your device or if you can access your files on an airplane. We are excited to share a set of new features that will allow you to see and access all your files on Windows 10, be more productive offline on your mobile devices and quickly share files on iOS. OneDrive Files On-Demand, announced at Build 2017 and available in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, allows access to all of your files without using up your device storage. OneDrive Offline Folders, which provides the ability to save entire folders for offline access on Android and iOS, and OneDrive for iMessage, enables you to quickly share OneDrive files on iOS devices, are both available now.

 

New MAXPATH limits in SharePoint and OneDrive

Last month we announced support for # and % across SharePoint and OneDrive and now in addition to adding support for # and % we’re also increasing MAXPATH or otherwise SharePoint and OneDrive's Url path length restrictions from 256 Unicode code units to 400. This new limit section applies to the total length of the URL path to a folder or a file in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business but not to the length of any parameters. Also, these limitations apply only to un-encoded URLs, not to encoded URLs. There is no limit to encoded URLs in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Additional information on SharePoint Url composition is provided in the post.

 

Skype for Business settings portal: Reset your pin and more

In order to allow users to self-service some of their settings for Skype for Business Online, we recently introduced the Skype for Business settings portal. While we plan to include more settings in the future, currently there are two things users can configure on their own: (1) PIN reset enables users to reset their conference PIN themselves - so from now on users will not require help-desk or administrators to reset their conference PIN, and (2) Control caller ID allows users to call phone numbers without showing their caller ID. The administrator of an organization has to enable users to change this setting. Details can be found in this support article: How can caller ID be used in your organization. While https://mysettings.lync.com/pstncalling can be used to access the page, we do not expect users to remember the URL. Instead there are multiple places in the client where users are pointed to the portal, as detailed in the post.

 

Introducing Microsoft Flow integration for SharePoint Document Libraries

Last year, we released an integration in SharePoint Online that enabled you to create Flows for modern lists. This week, we are pleased to announce our integration for modern SharePoint document libraries and an enhancement to our lists integration. With these new features, you can: (1) Run a flow on demand for a selected file. You can select any file in a document library and send it to your manager for approval, ask for feedback over email or Yammer, and even add a reminder in Outlook Tasks, Wunderlist, or Trello, (2) Run a flow on demand for a selected list item. Just like the above, you can also invoke on-demand flows for individual list items, and (3) Run flows for a folder. You can now set up flows like save your email attachments to a folder in SharePoint or copy files from OneDrive to SharePoint directly from a given folder.

 

Microsoft Planner is now supported in Flow, and introducing the PowerApps Community plan and admin access to all user licenses

We're excited to announce that the number one request on our ideas forum has been completed: a connector to Microsoft Planner! With the Planner connector you can create tasks based on any of the hundreds of different triggers that Microsoft Flow supports today. Also new this week -if you’re an Office 365 Global admin or an Azure Active Directory tenant admin, you can now download a list of users in your organization who not only are licensed to use PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, or both but also have accessed either of those products. The list contains each user’s name, email address, license type, and other information. In response to questions about ways to develop Microsoft Flow skills for more than 90 days, we are announcing the PowerApps Community Plan (which includes Microsoft Flow) and supports exactly that. More details on the PowerApps Community Plan are provided here. | Related: More Microsoft Flow updates - Introducing the new Azure AD connector, Shared Mailboxes support, and much more!

 

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

May 8, 2017: Updates for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online. 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.

 

Video: How Microsoft leverages Office 365 eDiscovery capabilities

Format: Video (9 minutes) | EJ Bastien, Principal eDiscovery Program Manager in Microsoft’s Litigation and Competition Law Group explains and demos how his team leverages Office 365 eDiscovery capabilities our eDiscovery process.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Microsoft PowerPoint - Beyond the basics (productivity demo)

Format: Video (58 minutes) | Published: May 9, 2017 | Brian Moring, productivity trainer with Microsoft IT Showcase, demonstrates how to use Microsoft PowerPoint and share presentations in the cloud. Find out how to make a PowerPoint template, create presentations, design interactive content with the Office Mix add-in, and save it all to OneDrive. Learn how to access PowerPoint from your Windows, iOS, or Android device. Brian answers questions about best practices for using PowerPoint.

 

ICYMI: Recorded Training on Bandwidth Planning for Microsoft Teams

As we have discussed in our previous blog article: The Bandwidth Calculator for IT Departments Planning Teams Deployments, bandwidth is crucial for audio and video conversations in Microsoft Teams. The SuccessWithTeams Bandwidth Calculator will help to estimate your bandwidth needs when implementing and fine tune for Microsoft Teams. If you want to learn more on how to use the bandwidth calculator, please review the following webinar: Teams Academy: Bandwidth Calculator. The key learnings of the training are: (1) calculating bandwidth is important, (2) a well-prepared network helps deliver great quality, and (3) the Bandwidth Calculator will help you do the calculations.

 

Auto Attendant and Call Queues Interactive Guide

We are happy to announce that we have released our Configuring Auto Attendant and Call Queues Interactive Guide. The interactive guide allows to walk through a simulation to experience the setup of Auto Attendant and Call Queues. Walking through the scenarios should take about 15 minutes. | Related: Advanced Calling Features - Broadcast Series: 4/28/17 -FAQ

 

SOF: Skype Meeting Broadcast

The latest SOF release addresses Skype Meeting Broadcast's considerations as part of the SOF journey, by incorporating Skype Meeting Broadcast throughout relevant SOF assets.  From the Plan phase to the Deliver phase, content was added to the Envisioning Architecture workshop, Client and Device Readiness workshop, Network Readiness workshop and Campaign Launch Event Planning. These additions allow SOF to introduce and discuss in detail, Skype Meeting Broadcasts features and functionality, infrastructure and network requirements, client and device readiness, and campaign launch and event planning.  Leveraging the updated SOF assets for Skype Meeting Broadcast will help support you in achieving your intended success outcomes. If you are about to, or are currently working on a plan to utilize Skype Meeting Broadcast for your organization, then we recommend that you take advantage of the updated SOF assets.