Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of January 31 - February 6, 2016
MESSAGE CENTER
Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants.
Updated Feature: Yammer is being activated in your Office 365 tenant
Posted: February 1, 2016 | Action: Awareness | After significant security and compliance investments, we are proud to announce that Yammer now meets Office 365's industry leading compliance commitments. As a result, all Office 365 tenants with a subscription that includes Yammer, will gain the full benefits of Yammer, without any action required by administrators. The rollout starts now, and you should see this change in the subsequent weeks.
- Once this change is complete, users with a license that includes Yammer can start accessing Yammer from Office 365. For example, they can access Yammer via the Yammer tile in the Office 365 app launcher, or start a Yammer conversation from other Office 365 apps.
- This change will either create a new Yammer network or connect to an existing Yammer network that has all or a subset of domains managed on the Office 365 tenant.
- Existing Yammer users who are also Office 365 users would start logging in with their Office 365 credentials, unifying their login experiences. Existing Yammer users who do not have Office 365 credentials will continue to login with their email and password; their experience is not disrupted.
- Administrators can manage key aspects of the Yammer service from Office 365, including identity, user and license management.
There is no action needed from you. If you are not ready to adopt Yammer in your organization, you can un-assign Yammer licenses for those who should not access Yammer from Office 365. Please visit https://aka.ms/yamo365 to learn more.
New Feature: Dropbox integration with Office Online
Posted: February 4, 2016 | Action: Awareness | We’re releasing a new feature to enhance your Office 365 experience. You can enable third-party storage for your users in Office 365 so they can store and share documents using services like Dropbox in addition to OneDrive for Business and team sites. You may opt out of third-party storage integration anytime between now and March 4, 2016. After March 4, 2016, you will be able to enable and disable at any time. There is nothing you need to do to prepare for this change. For additional information and for steps you can take to turn this feature on or off, please visit https://support.office.com/article/59302e31-e05b-4855-8c51-e980112ce0b9.
UPCOMING EVENTS Azure Active Directory Webinars for February
Are you looking to deploy Azure Active Directory quickly and easily? We are offering free webinar briefings on key Azure Active Directory deployment topics! Sessions include: Pre-requisites, SSPR, MFA, SaaS Application Integration and Reporting. Each 1-hour briefing 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 be followed by Q&A with our Engineering Team. Capacity is limited. Sign up for one or all of the sessions today!
When: February 10, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | Join Reuben Krippner and the OneDrive for Business team for an hour of live Q&A. This is an opportunity to voice feedback, ask questions and learn about what's next directly from the people behind the product.
Achieve More - Learn Key Functions of Office 365
When: Wednesdays, February 10 – March 23, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | Want to understand how Office 365 can help you achieve more in your work? This session will show how you can use Office 365 to accomplish particular tasks during your working day. Viewers will understand how to use Office 365 to take effective notes, work together on documents, discuss projects with co-workers and understand what's happening around the rest of their organization. Facilitated discussion will follow, with opportunities to ask questions and discuss specific scenarios to you. This course is a live, instructor-led session offered at multiple dates and times, detailed at the registration link above.
Microsoft Technology Centers: Drive Business Results with Intelligent Tools Series
When: Thursdays, February 11 – March 31, 2016 @ 10:00am PT | Join us for a virtual event series, live from a Microsoft Technology Center, covering sales and cloud productivity solutions. We are thrilled to announce that in partnership with MTC studio our live events during the months of February and March will revolve around Driving Business Results with Intelligent Tools. Covering both Office and Dynamics solutions this event proves to be exciting, as organizations can increase customer satisfaction by creating intelligent workplace by utilizing intelligent tools. With a great line up of speakers, this eight-part MTC webcast series will allow customers to see how innovations can help them drive maximum impact across multiple teams, impacting customer loyalty, agent efficiency, employee satisfaction, and cost savings to their organization. Join us on Thursdays in February and March, and we’ll show you how to do more with less using new solutions that increase customer loyalty, boost employee satisfaction, and cut costs.
- February 11, 2016 - Modern Team and the Evolution of Work
- February 18, 2016 - Reinventing Productivity: Enterprise Knowledge from Microsoft
- February 25, 2016 - Intelligent Insights Create Intelligent Organizations
- March 03, 2016 - Power to the Customer with Omni-Channel Service
- March 10, 2016 - Security is Not a Privilege, It's a Right
- March 17, 2016 - Reinventing Customer Experience: Create Agent "Superheroes" via the Modern Service/Call Center
- March 24, 2016 - What's Next in SharePoint 2016
- March 31, 2016 - Reinventing Customer Experience: Field Service and the Modern Dispatch Technician
BLOG ROUNDUP Get ready for Yammer!
We're excited to announce that we are activating Yammer for every eligible Office 365 tenant—new and existing—without requiring additional action on the part of admins. This allows all Office 365 customers to gain the full benefits of Yammer. It also marks the culmination of our foundational efforts—including moving Yammer into Microsoft managed datacenters and undertaking identity work with Azure Active Directory—to bring Yammer fully into Office 365. With this groundwork laid, we’re poised to provide a new set of high-value user and admin scenarios. Every Office 365 user with a Yammer license will be able to easily access Yammer from the Office 365 app launcher or start a Yammer conversation from SharePoint, Office 365 Video Portal and, coming soon, Delve and Skype Broadcast. This enables you and your coworkers to share ideas and work together in the open using Yammer’s flexible workspaces.
Planner preview expanded to include more plans and additional First Release types
A few months ago, we began rolling out the preview of Office 365 Planner to Office 365 First Release customers with enterprise plans. Today, we are making the Planner preview available to customers with Education and Nonprofit plans, as well as to Government tenants in the multi-tenant environment. (Planner preview is not currently available to customers on Government Community Cloud). In addition, we are expanding the preview to tenants that are configured with the “Select people” option for First Release. Previously, the Office 365 Planner preview was only available for tenants that are configured with the “Entire organization” option for First Release. To verify how your organization is configured for First Release, your Office 365 admin can navigate to the Office 365 Admin Portal, expand Service Settings and select Updates.
Stay secure with Advanced Threat Protection in Office 365
Office 365 already provides robust email protection against spam, viruses and malware. But as hackers around the globe launch increasingly sophisticated attacks, many organizations are seeking tools that provide increased protection. Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) in Office 365 is your solution! ATP is an email filtering service that provides additional protection against advanced threats. ATP provides you with: (1) Protection against unknown malware/viruses, (2) Real-time, time-of-click protection against malicious URLs and (3) Rich reporting and URL trace capabilities.
Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery now enables export to third-party review apps
In early December, we released Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery, which integrates Equivio machine learning, predictive coding and text analytics capabilities to reduce the costs and challenges that come along with sorting through large quantities of data for eDiscovery purposes. These new capabilities further strengthen the rich set of eDiscovery in-place retention, preservation and search capabilities already present in Office 365—helping our customers quickly identify relevant data while decreasing cost and risk. We're now happy to announce the ability for customers to export eDiscovery data from their Office 365 tenant to third-party review applications. This new capability is in addition to the existing export capabilities already present in Office 365, which allow you to download the data directly to your local computer. The new export capability enables secure eDiscovery data export from Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery to a secure Azure Blob storage controlled either by the organization or by the third-party review application. We are initially working with four review application partners to build integrated solutions that take advantage of the new export capability in Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery.
NOTEWORTHY
Exchange Public Folder Mailbox Limit Increased from 100 to 1,000
We are happy to reveal that we’re increasing the number of public folder mailboxes in Exchange from 100 to 1,000. More Public Folder mailboxes means more storage space capacity for public folders. This increase will facilitate the migration of very large Public Folders from on-premises Exchange Server to Exchange Online. This increase has already begun rolling out to Exchange Online tenants, and should be completely deployed by mid-February.
Driving financial insights and agility with BI at Microsoft
Published: February 2, 2016 | Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics help empower business leaders and decision makers throughout Microsoft. Those who need BI must be able to access it quickly—and in a way that they can both understand and trust the underlying data they use to support their decisions. Microsoft IT has undertaken a multi-year journey to transform how the company works with BI. As part of this initiative, Microsoft IT is developing a solution for Finance that supports mature data reporting, while simultaneously adding agile, self-service capabilities that open up BI analysis to thousands of business users across the company.
How to assess security, compliance and privacy capabilities in Office 365
In keeping with our commitment to provide customers the utmost transparency, we have released a detailed overview of how Office 365 controls map to the security, privacy, compliance and risk management controls defined in the Cloud Security Alliance Cloud Control Matrix (CSA CCM). The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a nonprofit organization led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, associations, governments and corporate and individual members who are dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices that help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. The CSA CCM Security, Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR) is considered the gold standard while performing risk assessment and due diligence against cloud service providers. As part of our efforts to provide customers with in-depth insights into our security, compliance and privacy controls, we regularly publish self-assessments of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365.