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Office 365 Weekly Digest | September 16 – 22, 2018

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Welcome to the September 16 - 22, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Four features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, all related to SharePoint Online - including modern document sets and the ability to automatically apply retention labels based on content types and metadata.

Microsoft Ignite starts on Monday, September 24th so be sure to review the details on how to view sessions remotely or once completed. New this week is the September 2018 "V-Meetup" for Women IT Pros, taking place on Friday, September 28th.  

Blog posts in last week's roundup include the second part of the "Staying ahead of modern day attacks" series, the announcement of pre-built Office 365 screens in PowerApps, and new "Nudge" features for Outlook in MyAnalytics.  In addition, the Modern Desktop is highlighted with the announcement of the Microsoft Managed Desktop service, as well as a new series on how to shift to a modern desktop with Microsoft Mechanics content to guide you through the process.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items on what's new in September for EDU and Workplace Analytics, as well as information on how Microsoft Forms is committed to inclusive design and accessibility. Please also note the upcoming changes to Office 365 IP address range and URL publication on October 2, 2018.

 

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

 

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

 

Feature ID

App / Service

 Title Description

Status

Added

Estimated Release

 More Info

33755

SharePoint

 Automatically apply retention labels based on content types and metadata Use content types, taxonomy or any document metadata column to automatically apply retention/record management labels

In development

09/17/2018

Q1 CY2019

 n / a

33752

SharePoint

 Hierarchical file plans Import from Excel and manage hierarchical file plans for retention and records management

In development

09/17/2018

Q1 CY2019

 n / a

33765

SharePoint

 Label analytics Centralized reporting and analysis for content labeling activities through Office 365

In development

09/17/2018

Q1 CY2019

 n / a

33761

SharePoint

 Modern document sets Integrate the document sets with the rest of the modern SharePoint user experience

In development

09/17/2018

Q1 CY2019

 n / a

 

 

 

UPCOMING EVENTS

 

Teams Tuesdays

When: Tuesdays, August 21, 2018 – October 30, 2018 from 10am – 11am PT | Whether you're managing a new project or starting your own business, it helps to have a team behind you to brainstorm ideas, tackle the work together, and have some fun along the way. Now you can use Microsoft Teams to do just that. Join our team LIVE every Tuesday from 10-11am PDT to learn how you can get started with the free version of Teams. In this hour, we'll walk you through the product and key features, share best practices for getting started, and answer any questions you may have. We look forward to meeting you!

 

Tune into Microsoft Ignite remotely!

When: September 24 - 28, 2018 | Microsoft's Ignite Conference is Microsoft's premiere event for interfacing with customers around "the latest insights and skills from technology leaders and practitioners shaping the future of cloud, data, business intelligence, teamwork, and productivity." With the event sold out, you can no longer attend in person but there is still a great opportunity to attend the sessions of your choice remotely as they will be streaming live! With 700+ sessions taking place there is something for everyone at this year's Ignite.  To facilitate remote attendance Microsoft has enabled folks to leverage the event schedule builder to begin adding key sessions to be streamed. Individuals not registered and wishing to attend remotely can log in to the MyIgnite portal with just their Microsoft Tech Community credentials. Once logged in you can then read through the sessions and add those you are interested in to your schedule.

Related:

 

Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows

When: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 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.

 

September 2018 V-Meetup for Women IT Pros

When: Friday, September 28, 2018 at 3pm ET | Ignite kicks off September 24 and promises to be a great week for #WomenITPros. Whether you were at the conference, watching via Tech Community, or are waiting to see the recordings later, come join us for a wrap up discussion about highlights and lowlights from the event. Our meetings are open to anyone who wants to support women in the IT Pro field.

 

BLOG ROUNDUP

 

Staying ahead of modern-day attacks Part 2: Defense-at-Scale approach with Office 365 ATP

In this blog, we'll delve into the scale of threat signals leveraged by Office 365 ATP and highlight how that scale bolsters our ability to detect and protect against advanced threats quickly and accurately. Our strength of signal is one of the important elements helping Office 365 ATP provide the best security for emails, documents and collaboration. The foundation of Office 365 ATP is the Microsoft Intelligent Security graph which provides 6.5 trillion signals per day. This number is so large, it is hard to put into perspective but if you could analyze each of the 6.5 trillion signals at one signal per second, it would take roughly 200,000 years to analyze all the signals. With the power of machine learning, Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Office 365 ATP do this analysis every day. Clearly, the information, learning, and intelligence gained from the Intelligent Security Graph is an impressive differentiator for our security services. Our approach to security has been so effective, currently, Office ATP has a malware catch rate greater than 99.9%. The rich data set helps fine tune our machine learning algorithms so that we can constantly enhance coverage for unknown and emerging threats in-real time.

 

Announcing pre-built Office 365 screens in PowerApps

We're very excited to announce new screen templates available in Preview, which allow you to insert pre-built screens directly within PowerApps Studio! Now it's quicker and easier than ever to add Microsoft Office capabilities to your custom apps. Simply insert one of these new screens and all the required components, data sources, and expressions will be added for you. Ready to step up your game? Customize the screens further to take full advantage of Microsoft Graph and the 200+ connectors available in PowerApps. These screens are fully themeable and are meant to work together. For example, add the People screen, the Email screen, and the Meeting screen. People selected will automatically populate across all 3 screens. | Related: New training app for building Microsoft Office components

 

New to MyAnalytics: nudges in Outlook

MyAnalytics is like a fitness tracker for the workplace. It uses data from everyday work in Microsoft 365 to help you find time to focus, get better work-life balance, and strengthen your most important relationships. All insights surfaced in MyAnalytics are private and visible only to you. Now, MyAnalytics will help you stick to your productivity goals by showing brief, data-driven collaboration tips as you get work done in Outlook. MyAnalytics users will see three nudges in Outlook on the web and the latest version of Outlook for Windows while reading and composing emails and meeting invites. The nudges include: (1) Get more focus time, (2) Reduce your after-hours impact on coworkers, and (3) Stay on top of to-do's.

 

Collaborating with customers and partners to deliver a modern desktop: Microsoft Managed Desktop

We have consistently heard from our customers—both large and small—that they struggle to keep up with the pace of changes in technology. They feel pulled between the requirement to stay secure and up to date against the need to drive more business value. They are challenged to deliver the great user experiences that employees want and expect. And the sophistication of today's security threats requires organizations to re-think how they deploy, manage, and secure assets for their users. The cloud has dramatically changed the way in which we can deliver, manage, and update devices, which creates an opportunity to think about how we deliver a modern desktop with Microsoft 365 in new and different ways. We are announcing Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD), a new initial offering that brings together Microsoft 365 Enterprise, device as a service, and cloud-based device management by Microsoft. MMD enables customers to maximize their IT organizations' focus on their business while Microsoft manages their modern desktops.

 

How to shift to a modern desktop

Moving to a modern desktop with Microsoft 365 – across Windows, Office 365 ProPlus and Enterprise Management + Security – gives you an empowering and secure workspace that is powered by the latest productivity, teamwork, and collaboration experiences from the Cloud. The modern desktop allows you to connect anything and everything to the Cloud. Windows, Office, management, security – you name it. As modern desktop reduces complexity and makes you more agile thanks to things like: (1) Simplified management of your desktops, devices, Cloud services and compliance, (2) Updates that enhance security, (3) Advanced data protection, and (4) the Cloud-connected capabilities that you can deliver to your users. While these benefits are significant, we also know that making the shift to a modern desktop environment is one of the most significant responsibilities facing IT today. The good news, if you haven't deployed a new desktop in a while, is that a lot of things have improved since you last had to do it. Many factors which made problems like application compatibility so problematic in the past have been solved with the Cloud. Now, you really can move forward with confidence faster than ever before – and your organization will see the benefits immediately.

Related:

 

NOTEWORTHY

 

REMINDER: Changes to Office 365 IP address range and URL publication

The current XML file and the old RSS feed will be available until October 2nd, 2018. If you have automation that uses the XML format, you should update that to use the JSON format data. If you are using the old RSS feed you should either move to the new RSS feed, or use the sample Microsoft Flow we have published for getting emails on changes. Developer usage documentation for the IP Address and URL web services are detailed in Managing Office 365 Endpoints – Web Service. | Resource: Microsoft 365 Engineering Webcast: Improvements in Office 365 endpoint publishing and network connectivity guidance

 

What's New in EDU: Immersive Reader comes to Teams as inclusivity comes into focus

For our September episode of What's New in EDU, we're helping bring inclusivity into focus and announcing several new updates coming to Learning Tools. We're also bringing a popular Learning Tools feature, Immersive Reader, over to Microsoft Teams for more personalized communication. In the same episode, parents and teachers can learn about how Microsoft Store and Microsoft Education are teaming up to offer free literacy workshops this fall, using Microsoft Learning Tools to create dedicated curriculum for those with literacy challenges.

 

New! POPin Integration for Microsoft Teams

We are excited to announce a new POPin integration for Microsoft Teams! Now, you can connect with your team even easier by leveraging POPin's full capabilities right inside Microsoft Teams. POPin replaces the traditional survey with an anonymous, single, focused "crowdsourced" question to get honest feedback and immediate, actionable results. With POPin, your team can anonymously answer questions and interact with teammates' answers using votes and comments.

 

Workplace Analytics - September 2018: Teamwork solution, Admin onboarding, and more

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for September. In this update, you'll discover the latest, including: (1) Admin onboarding, (2) Visualize external collaboration, (3) New chart capabilities, (4) Filter by activity status, (5) Teamwork solution, and (6) Power BI templates.

 

Microsoft Forms is committed to inclusive design and accessible content

Microsoft Forms allows users to quickly and easily create custom quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, registration forms, and more. In our commitment to provide inclusive design and accessible content, we continue to improve the Forms experience for all customers by following Microsoft Accessibility Standards (MAS). Users with visual impairments rely on a screen reader to help them detect and read elements on the screen. We want to ensure every element is clearly understood by providing better context without abundant messaging. For example, "Private" in a group form is no longer read a single word but expressed more clearly as "This is a private group" when you move focus to group forms name. For people with low or impaired vision, Forms colors meet the 4.5:1 contrast requirement for both text and background. Under high contrast mode, we provide adapted user interface for Microsoft Forms. We provide full navigation capabilities for all elements so that customers can successfully accomplish any task with a keyboard. Additionally, we provide keyboard shortcuts for key actions, such as deleting a photo by pressing the "Delete" key on the keyboard.