Office 365 Weekly Digest | July 8 – 14, 2018

Welcome to the July 8 - 14, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Eleven features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, with several for Exchange Online (Message Encryption, Mailbox Auditing), as well as updates for OneDrive for Business, Planner, SharePoint Online and Outlook for Windows.

Most of the recently opened online customer immersion experiences have reached capacity, with the exception of "Productivity Hacks to Save Time and Simplify Workflows" on August 22, 2018. Also included this week are a few on-demand webinars for PowerApps and Power BI.

The huge news from last week was the announcement of a free version of Microsoft Teams. In addition, there are posts on what's new for IT admins in Teams and the availability of Teams online courses for IT Pros. We also announced intelligent event capabilities in live and on-demand events for organizations via Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Teams and Yammer. Other posts of note include page metadata in SharePoint Online, new Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics features, and default mailbox auditing in Exchange Online.

Noteworthy item highlights include the Office 365 Update video for July 2018, Office 365 updates for Android, iOS and Mac, and the general availability of Microsoft Whiteboard.

 

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
31757 Compliance Manager Manual Control Import Manual Control Import Allows customers to import their own security and compliance controls into Compliance Manager, including controls for corporate policy, local law, industrial standards. Organizations can create risk assessment tiles for on-premises services and non-Microsoft assets, and manage their compliance posture in one place.

In development

07/11/2018

Q4 CY2018

n / a
31754 SharePoint and OneDrive: mass delete notification To help raise awareness of possible uncommon or accidental file deletions (based on a 'higher than usual' number of deleted files per hour), people will be notified if a large number of files are deleted. For OneDrive, if a large number of files are deleted from a person's OneDrive, that person - the *owner* - will be sent an email notification letting them know about it and pointing them to the Recycle Bin in case they want to restore. For SharePoint team sites, if a large number of files are deleted, the *person that deleted them* (site owner or member) will be sent an email notification letting them know about it and pointing them to the Recycle Bin in case they want to restore. Each email notification will include an unsubscribe link at the bottom for those that wish to opt out of this type of notification.

In development

07/11/2018

July CY2018

n / a
31522 Office 365 Message Encryption: customize with company branding New capabilities in Office 365 Message Encryption uses encryption and rights protection to help you protect and control your sensitive emails. We are adding new value into Office 365 Message Encryption, so you can now apply your company branding to customize the look of your organization's Office 365 Message Encryption email messages and the contents of the encryption portal. See link to add your organization's brand to your encrypted messages.

Launched

07/12/2018

Q4 CY2017

Add your organization's branding to your encrypted messages
31526 Office 365 Message Encryption: Default on for new Office 365 tenants Starting February 2018, Office 365 Message Encryption and the protection capability in Azure Information Protection will automatically be enabled for our **new** Office 365 tenants with an eligible subscription.

Launched

07/12/2018

Q1 CY2018

Improvements to the protection stack in Azure Information Protection
31523 Office 365 Message Encryption: Support for protecting PDF attachments New capabilities in Office 365 Message Encryption uses encryption and rights protection to help you protect and control your sensitive emails. In addition to protecting the Office attachments, we are adding support for protecting PDF files as attachments when sending sensitive email messages.

In development

07/12/2018

Q4 CY2018

n / a
30711 MyAnalytics Nudging MyAnalytics nudges in Outlook are brief, data-driven productivity tips that appear within Outlook as you process emails and meeting invites. For example: as your calendar fills up with meetings, MyAnalytics will remind you to set aside time for focused work before accepting new invites in Outlook.

In development

07/12/2018

July CY2018

Introducing Workplace Analytics Solutions and MyAnalytics Nudging
31753 Add more information on your Task Board card Customize the task board cards to show whatever fields you want.

In development

07/12/2018

August CY2018

n / a
31487 Idle Session Sign-out for SharePoint and OneDrive Idle session sign-out is one of a number of policies you can use with SharePoint and OneDrive to balance security and user productivity and help keep your data safe regardless where users access the data, what device they're working on, and how secure their network connection is.

Launched

07/13/2018

July CY2018

Sign out inactive users
32224 Update to Exchange Mailbox Auditing – Mailboxes Audited by Default and New Mailbox Actions to Audit To ensure that our customers have access to critical audit data to investigate security incidents in their tenancy when required, the Exchange Online service will begin introducing a configuration that will automatically enable mailbox auditing on all applicable mailboxes to users of the Commercial service. When this update is complete, Tenant administrators will no longer be required to configure the per-mailbox AuditEnabled setting for the service to begin storing security audit data on their behalf. Additionally, we continue to add mailbox audit actions to the default configuration, most recently UpdateInboxRules and UpdateCalendarDelegation. These actions are of high interest to security analysts to understand the activities that are taking place within the tenant.

In development

07/13/2018

Q4 CY2018

n / a
31171 Service Encryption for Exchange Online Office 365 offers an added layer of encryption at the application level for customer content in Office 365, including SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. We are now rolling out Service Encryption for Exchange Online.

In development

07/13/2018

Q2 CY2019

Encryption in the Microsoft Cloud
26542 Outlook for Windows: Coming Soon preview pane By clicking on a new Coming Soon button, a new pane opens in Outlook for users to preview new features, learn more and provide feedback.  A toggle on/off allows users to try the new features.

In development

07/13/2018

July CY2018

n / a

 

 

 

UPCOMING EVENTS

 

On-Demand Webinars: PowerApps

When: On-demand | These webinars can help you to leverage the features and functions of Microsoft PowerApps. Webinars are listed by series – Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, SharePoint, Model Driven and App Designer. Please note that, in some cases, you'll need to re-enter registration details, and then you'll be sent a link to the recording via email.

 

On-Demand Webinars: Power BI

When: On-demand | These webinars can help you to leverage the features and functions of Power BI. Webinars are listed by category – Featured, Getting Started, Partners, Community, and Advanced Topics. Please note that, in some cases, you will need to register or re-register to access the recording.

 

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

 

Introducing a free version of Microsoft Teams

Beginning July 12, 2018, Microsoft Teams is available in a free version worldwide in 40 languages. This offer was designed for small businesses and groups of coworkers that don't have commercial Office 365 subscriptions. Now with this great introductory experience, any group can use Teams as their hub for teamwork and discover the value of Office 365 as they grow and scale. Whether you're a freelancer, a small business owner, or part of a team inside a larger organization, you can start using Teams today. The free version includes the following for up to 300 people: (1) Unlimited chat messages and search, (2) Built-in audio and video calling for individuals, groups, and full team meetups, (3) 10 GB of team file storage plus additional 2 GB per person for personal storage, (4) Integrated, real-time content creation with Office Online apps, including built-in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, (5) Unlimited app integrations with 140+ business apps to choose from—including Adobe, Evernote, and Trello, and (6) Ability to communicate and collaborate with anyone inside or outside your organization, backed by Microsoft's secure, global infrastructure.

Related:

 

Announcing intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365

You can now produce live and on-demand events for teams and across the organization. Live events enable producers to curate and control the content that is broadcast to an audience. Attendees can participate in real time, with high-definition (HD) video and interactive discussion or catch up later with powerful AI features that unlock the content of the event recording. You can create a live event in Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Teams or Yammer—wherever your audience, team, or community resides. The event can be as simple or as sophisticated as you'd like. For casual presentations and panels, you can use webcams, content and screen sharing. For more formal events, you can stream a studio-quality production. After the event, in the video on demand, with intelligent features including: (1) Speaker timeline uses facial detection to identify who is talking, so you can easily jump to a particular speaker in the recording, (2) Speech-to-text and closed captions, and (3) Transcript search and timecodes let you quickly find moments that matter in a video. Live event capabilities will be available for preview beginning in the coming weeks. During the preview, these capabilities will be rolled out to Stream, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams, we will improve the richness and robustness of the capabilities based on customer feedback, towards general availability later this year.

Related:

 

Structure your intranet – page metadata coming to SharePoint in Office 365

Ensure your content reaches your intended audience. Now you can tag SharePoint pages with properties (metadata) to help best describe them. Plus, use custom Pages library columns to filter and target pages. This allows you to reach the right audience ensuring the right content gets viewed by the right people. Structure your intranet by leveraging the power of page metadata. The balance of a modern intranet rests in between the dynamic display of information and the ability to better curate and target who sees what.

 

Introducing Workplace Analytics solutions and MyAnalytics nudges

We are announcing two new features—Workplace Analytics solutions and MyAnalytics nudges—designed to put individuals and teams at the center of change. Workplace Analytics uses data from everyday work in Office 365 to identify collaboration patterns that impact productivity, workforce effectiveness, and employee engagement. Nudges in MyAnalytics can help close the gap by providing friendly, data-driven collaboration tips that surface as you get work done in Office 365. Starting this summer, four types of MyAnalytics nudges will start to surface in Outlook as you read and compose emails and meeting invites - (1) Get more focus time, (2) Run more effective meetings, (3) Reduce your after-hours impact on coworkers, and (4) Stay on top of to-do's and unread email. Starting this summer, MyAnalytics users will see nudges on the latest version of Outlook on the web. Users can turn off nudging using the MyAnalytics add-in for Outlook. More details are provided in our support article. | Related: Microsoft Mechanics – Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics updates | Video: Microsoft Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork

 

Exchange Mailbox Auditing will be enabled by default

After listening to customer feedback and suggestions, Exchange Online is making some key changes to the mailbox auditing feature for Office 365 commercial users. First, mailbox audits will be stored for all user mailboxes within the commercial service by default. Second, the default audit configuration will change and include more audit events. These enhancements and modifications are a part of Microsoft's commitments to improve the security tooling available to our customers and to ensure that our customers have access to critical audit data to investigate security incidents in their environment when required. In support of Microsoft's commitment to providing our customers with an easy-to-use set of security features, customers will no longer be required to configure mailbox auditing on a per-mailbox basis, and instead will be able rely on a tenant-wide configuration to enable or disable mailbox audit event collection. Mailbox events will be stored on the all user mailboxes automatically without required action. In addition, we plan to expand the default set of audit actions to include more of the currently available Owner and Delegate events. Over the next several months, we will enable the default-auditing configuration on all tenants with a steady ramp-up with all commercial customers to be covered by the end of the calendar year. At that time, there is nothing you need to do for the service to begin storing your user's audit events. And if you have already enabled mailbox auditing in Exchange on your user's mailboxes and are doing so for all new mailboxes - great! Mailboxes that are configured to audit today will continue to do so.

 

NOTEWORTHY

 

Video: Office 365 Update for July 2018

Format: Video (8 minutes) | Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, including Office 365 Admin Center, Planner, Sway, Teams, User Experience, and more. The video transcript, complete with links to additional information on everything covered, is available at https://aka.ms/o365update-blog.

 

Office 365 for Android - July 2018 release details

On July 14th, 2018, Microsoft released an updated version of Office for Android (Excel, PowerPoint & Word) build # 16.0.10325.20043 in 68 languages. Our Office International team translated this latest update. Some of the new features available for the first time to Office 365 subscribers using Office for Android on their tablet or phone include the ability to edit in landscape in PowerPoint. More information and help content on this release can be found in the Android section of the What's New in Office 365 page.

 

Office 365 for iPad & iPhone - July 2018 release details

On July 9th, 2018, Microsoft released an updated version of Office for iPad/iPhone to Office 365 subscribers - Version 2.15 (18070200) in 35 languages. Our Office International team translated this release. Here are some of the new features included this month: (1) Word count shows as you scroll, and (2) Sync draft messages between different Outlook endpoints so you can start a message on your phone and finish and send it on your desktop, or vice versa! This started to roll out to Office 365 customers on July 10th 2018 and it should be with 100% of customers by July 24th 2018. More information and help content on this release can be found in the iOS section of the What's New in Office 365 page.

 

Office for MAC 2016 - July 2018 Release details

On July 11th, 2018, Microsoft released Office 2016 for Mac Version 16.15.18070902 in 27 languages. Our Office International team was responsible for translating this release. You will see the following features once you update: (1) In PowerPoint add live action to your slide with a YouTube video, and then view it without having to leave the app; and (2) Improved security for Google accounts. More information and help content on this release can be found in the MAC section of the What's New in Office 365 page.

 

Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available for Windows

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the Microsoft Whiteboard app for Windows 10. Whiteboard gives teams a freeform, intelligent canvas for real time ideation, creation, and collaboration. Since releasing a preview of the app in December, more than 200,000 customers have helped us fine tune the feature set and end user experience. Based on their feedback we've added a number of new features, including text notes, the ability to add and manipulate images, enhancements to shape and table recognition, accessibility improvements, compliance with various global standards, and more. In addition, the Whiteboard app for iOS and preview on the web will be coming soon. These releases will mark an important milestone in our journey to make Whiteboard the best tool for freeform collaboration across platforms and form factors. | Related: Video - Introducing Microsoft Whiteboard

 

Microsoft OneDrive named as a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms

Enabling secure ways to share and collaborate on content with coworkers and colleagues, both inside and outside your organization, is critical to improving productivity and teamwork. According to Gartner, "By 2022, 50 percent of organizations will use collaborative document editing as the standard interaction method for document creation." Microsoft OneDrive makes this a seamless experience, connecting you to all your files on any device while protecting your work from data loss, malicious attacks, and more. We are honored that Gartner has recognized Microsoft, for the second year in a row, as a leader in the Content Collaboration Platforms Magic Quadrant report. Microsoft placed highest in ability to execute and has made substantial improvements in the completeness of vision over last year's report. Additionally, Microsoft is recognized as a leader in both the Content Collaboration Platforms and Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant reports.