Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of March 13 - 19, 2016

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Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants.

 

What’s New: February 2016

Posted: March 14, 2016 | Action: Awareness | Another busy month! An enhanced Office experience on mobile devices makes it even easier to get things done on the go, and with the ongoing improvements in accessibility, Office is now even easier to use for people with disabilities. Business users can check out the new scenario-based Office 365 trainings to help them get the most out of Office. New deployment opportunities include the new FastTrack offer for small and midsized businesses and the Office 365 Deferred Channel build for Office 365 for Windows. Security and compliance improvements include the ability to export Advanced eDiscovery data to third-party review apps and new auditing and reporting capabilities for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The big news for Education users is a new API that enables you to automate OneNote Class Notebook creation and roster changes. To learn more about the new features and improvements released for Office 365 during February, please visit https://blogs.office.com/2016/03/01/whats-new-february-2016/.  | Update Video

 

SharePoint and OneDrive for Business external sharing invitations expiration change

Posted: March 15, 2016 | Action: Awareness | Effective March 15, 2016, we've increased the invitation expiration to 90 days to help improve the sharing experience in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for business. This change ensures that links are still cleaned up in a timely manner while giving external users a little more time to accept invitations, particularly after vacations or longer absences. Additional Information is available at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Share-sites-or-documents-with-people-outside-your-organization-80e49744-e30f-44db-8d51-16661b1d4232.

 

New reporting portal in the Office 365 admin center

Posted: March 16, 2016 | Action: Awareness | In the new Office 365 admin center, we have created a new reporting portal that provides you with valuable insights about how the Office 365 services are being used and delivers details down to the individual user level directly in the new Office 365 admin center. We are starting to roll this out now, and you should begin seeing this feature over the next month. The first version of the reporting portal includes a variety of new reports that provide consistent insights across all Office 365 services with a highly improved user experience. Try the new reporting portal and let us know what you think using the feedback widget. More reports will be incrementally added over time. More details are available in the blog post linked below in the “Blog Roundup” section.

 

New Feature: OneDrive for Business user experience

Posted: March 18, 2016 | Action: Awareness | You can now opt-in to the new web user interface (UI), for OneDrive for Business! Based on your feedback, we’ve updated this feature to better serve your needs. You will experience a clean, intuitive, and beautiful interface. You can switch between tile or list views while easily organizing with drag-and-drop functions, and many other improvements. You can switch back to the existing “classic” experience, with a link on the bottom left of the screen. Eventually the “classic” experience will go away, but not until we’ve been able to listen to your feedback and ensure everyone is ready for the change. Go to your settings page in the Admin Center, to opt-in. | Original blog post - https://blog.onedrive.com/new-odb-browser-experience

 

New Feature: Office 365 Video (for Government Community Cloud)

Posted: March 15, 2016 | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Video, an enterprise video service and portal, is now available to tenants in the Office 365 US Government Community Cloud. Users with a G1-G4 license and SharePoint Online service plan assigned to them will see the “Video” tile in their Office 365 app launcher.

If appropriately licensed users do not see the “Video” tile please make sure the following setting is enabled in the SharePoint Online admin center:

  1. Login as a SharePoint Online administrator > Go to SharePoint Online admin center > Settings
  2. Look for the setting “Streaming Video Service” > Select the radio button to “Enable streaming video through Azure Media Services and enable the Video Portal.”

Please visit https://support.office.com/article/ca1cc1a9-a615-46e1-b6a3-40dbd99939a6 for more information about the Office 365 Video portal solution within Office 365.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS Azure Active Directory Webinars for March

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!

 

Data Insights Summit - free online Excel and Power BI sessions

When: March 22 – 23, 2016 | If business data matters to you, here’s where to dig in deep—and at no cost. The Microsoft Data Insights Summit, the inaugural Power BI and Excel user conference, lets you participate virtually—your device is your free pass to the two-day event. The Data Insights Summit takes place on Tuesday, March 22 from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. PT and Wednesday, March 23 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. PT. Save the dates and then watch the live streams of the keynote and select sessions at PowerBI.com. The two-day summit is designed for you to learn the latest about Microsoft Power BI and Excel from our product development teams and offers 12 online sessions to help you gain the most insight from your organization’s data. While the event is aimed at business analysts, we welcome all who want to deepen their understanding of prediction science and technologies.

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

The best productivity experience? It’s already in your Office.  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.

  • Use Office 365 to achieve more: Discover how to get work done more efficiently with Office 365
  • Your files anywhere: Discover new ways to achieve more by getting work done with your documents from anywhere
  • Make meetings matter: Discover how Office 365 can help you get the right people achieving more together by connecting online through Skype for Business
  • Work like a network: Discover new ways to use Yammer to create conversations and quickly communicate answers
  • Get it done from anywhere: Discover how to access Outlook from anywhere and share your files to get things done in real time
  • Key roles in making Office 365 successful: Discover how different roles work together to execute a successful launch
  • Build awareness: Foster adoption of Office 365 in ways that matter to end users; understanding training resources and develop champions

 

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.

  • March 24, 2016 – What’s Next in SharePoint 2016
  • March 31, 2016 – Reinventing Customer Experience: Field Service and the Modern Dispatch Technician

 

BLOG ROUNDUP New reporting portal in the Office 365 admin center

Understanding how your users are using Office 365 is extremely important to you as an Office 365 admin. It allows you to efficiently monitor your service, identify issues, plan support and training and to report back on the investment to your management. Today, we’re excited to announce the new reporting portal, which provides you with valuable insights about how the Office 365 services are being used and delivers details down to the individual user level directly in the new Office 365 admin center—and it’s rolling out now! When we started the process of revamping reports in Office 365 about a year ago, it was extremely important for us to include customer feedback into the development process from the very beginning. The first version of the new reporting portal includes a new activity dashboard and a variety of new reports that provide consistent insights across all Office 365 services with a highly improved user experience.

 

IT Showcase: SharePoint to the cloud - Learn how Microsoft ran its own migration

Microsoft employees rely on SharePoint, so we in Microsoft IT asked ourselves the same questions when it came time to move to the cloud. When we started our migration in 2011, employees were maintaining more than 70,000 SharePoint on-premises team and publishing sites, and 114,000 personal MySites. Divisions and groups within our company had built and were operating 240 custom portals handcrafted to do things like share news with employees, find information from groups like IT and Human Resources, and search for campus maps. So when it was time for us to migrate to the cloud, it was clear it wouldn't be simple. See what Microsoft IT learned when it migrated the company to SharePoint Online on Office 365...

 

IT Showcase: Mobile device management at Microsoft

Bring your own device is no longer just a trend—it is arguably the dominant workplace culture. More employees are using personal devices for work, creating a unique set of challenges for IT teams that must balance user convenience and data security. Microsoft IT uses Enterprise Mobility Suite and other services to manage identity, devices, and applications. Now, simplified and integrated IT solutions enable employees to be productive on any device.

 

MTC Mid-Day Cafe: Office 2016 Deployment Unleashed!

With the release of Office 2016 the considerations around deployment have changed and the options increased. On this episode of Mid-Day Café host Michael Gannotti is joined by Microsoft Senior Architect Todd Furst for a special Office 2016 deployment session. If your organization is on older versions of Office, including Office 2013, then you NEED to watch this session. Todd and Michael cover the how's and why's of deployment as well as answered questions live on air. Be sure to have your relevant colleagues watch as well!

 

SharePoint 2016 RTM and the Future of SharePoint event

Billions of documents are stored on SharePoint sites—making it the center of content management and collaboration for over a decade. Whether enabling students to work together or helping a company transform its entire intranet, we have continually evolved SharePoint to meet the changing needs of the digital workplace. As work teams become more dynamic and digital content growth continues to skyrocket, SharePoint will play an ever increasing role in enabling content collaboration for the new way of working. As a part of Microsoft’s broader ambition to reinvent productivity, we are on a mission to make SharePoint more simple, mobile, intelligent and secure to help customers unlock the value of having it as an integrated part of Office 365. This year, we will release significant new innovations spanning user experiences, document collaboration, mobile enhancements and platform improvements that will redefine modern content collaboration. | Microsoft Mechanics: What’s new for admins in SharePoint Server 2016

 

NOTEWORTHY The Sway YamJam Summary is posted!

On March 9, 2016 Microsoft hosted an action-packed YamJam with the Sway product team with lively Q&A, valuable feedback and discussion on how to make the most of Sway in your organization. Review the linked summary for a summary of what transpired.  We hope you can join us live next time!

 

Office 365 admin learning center (Sway)

Office 365 is a continuously improving service, providing innovation for the modern workplace. Based on customer data and feedback, Office 365 wants to help you and your organization be the most productive you can be. But we also understand that change is hard, and you're looking for guidance on how to effectively manage through changes in the service and enable your users get the most out of the technology.  In response to your feedback we are creating new resources to prepare Office 365 admins, like you, to more confidently manage Office 365. Starting with two common scenarios, change management and service incidents, this Sway is designed to help you understand what is happening during these types of events, as well as how to approach, plan and communicate to your users.

 

REMINDER: Important notice about certificate expiration for Exchange 2013 Hybrid customers

If you’re running Exchange 2013 and you’ve configured a hybrid deployment with Office 365, this post contains important information that might impact you. Please evaluate this information and take any necessary action before April 15, 2016. The Office 365 TLS certificate will be renewed on April 15, 2016. This certificate is used by Office 365 to provide TLS encryption between Office 365 and external SMTP servers. The new certificate, which will help improve the security of mail sent to and from Office 365, will be issued by a new Certificate Authority and it will have a new Issuer and Subject.