Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of April 3 - 9, 2016
MESSAGE CENTER
Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants.
Message Center Posts read/unread working again in Portal and Mobile App
Posted: April 5, 2016 | Action: Awareness | On April 1, 2016 at 3:00 AM UTC, a backend change in the Office 365 messaging infrastructure caused a reset in the state of all messages posted to Message Center. As a result, users of Message Center in the Office 365 Admin Mobile App and the Admin Center preview version were unable to mark messages as read/unread or dismiss them. After the functionality was restored on Monday April 4 at 9:00 PM UTC, all old messages that were previously dismissed or marked as read reappeared again in the unread message list. We apologize for any inconvenience this change has caused. You will see messages you had marked as read or dismissed reappearing in Message Center. You will need to triage your old messages again if you would like them dismissed or marked as read.
New SharePoint Document Library Experiences
Posted: April 6, 2016 | Action: Awareness | We are changing the experience for SharePoint Online document libraries. You’ll begin seeing this new feature starting April 6. In the new document library, documents can be displayed using classic or thumbnail views for a graphic look and feel. Libraries now support uploading folders and links in addition to single files. Documents can be grouped with views directly from the library home screen, and selected documents can be pinned to a highlighted section at the top of the library. A new document information panel displays in concert with the document library, and allows easy access to previews, activity history, sharing, and metadata editing. Document management functions are moved to a clean, responsive menu pane and the Ribbon is removed from the UI. Please inform your help desk staff of this change. Visit https://support.office.com/article/3b5976dd-65cf-4c9e-bf5a-713c10ca2872 for more information.
UPCOMING EVENTS Azure Active Directory Webinars for April
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!
MTC Mid-Day Cafe: Get A Handle On Group Projects With Office 365 Planner!
When: April 11, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | Want to get a better handle on your collaboration group projects? If so then you need Office 365 Planner! This Mid-Day Cafe join host Michael Gannotti with special guest Mike McLean (Microsoft Senior PM Project) for a special session focused on Office 365 Planner, which offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.
YamJam: Office 365 Security and Compliance
When: April 12, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | The Office 365 Network will host a YamJam focused on security and compliance in Office 365. Please join us for a live hour of Q&A and the opportunity to provide your feedback. We hope to see you there!
When: April 14, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | The Office 365 Network will host a YamJam for Office 365 Connectors. Members of the product engineering team will be on hand to answer your questions. We look forward to seeing you there!
When: May 4, 2016 @ 9:30am PT | Come celebrate SharePoint and see Jeff Teper, CVP OneDrive and SharePoint, unveil our new vision and roadmap for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, both on-premises and in the cloud with Office 365. Following the live keynote from San Francisco there will be a number of on-demand sessions detailing our upcoming innovations. Whether you’re a user, IT pro, or developer, we’ll have a lot to share as part of this historic moment. Be sure to register and join us for this must attend event!
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
- Bring your team together with Yammer: 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
BLOG ROUNDUP New usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer and Skype now available
For IT, understanding how people in your organization are using Office 365 is an important step in driving more usage and ultimately getting the utmost value from your investment in Office 365. That’s why we introduced the new reporting dashboard in the Office 365 admin center. The reporting dashboard and usage reports make it easy for you to monitor your service and identify issues and opportunities, such as the need for user training. It also gives you metrics to use in reporting to management on your Office 365 investment. We’re pleased to announce the rollout of usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and Yammer, which give IT greater visibility into usage across these services in Office 365. With the new reports added today, the reporting portal now provides you with a complete picture across all main Office 365 services.
April Office 365 security and compliance update
Over the last month, the Office 365 team announced the expansion of Customer Lockbox to new workloads and new features coming to Office 365, such as capabilities that improve security management and reduce eDiscovery costs. This post is a roundup of the key news items from the last several week including the expansion of Customer Lockbox, third party archiving and more.
March brought a new tool for migrating your Evernote notes to OneNote, PowerPoint Designer enhancements and new language support in Office for Mac and Skype Translator, plus collaboration and Power Pivot updates. For business users, Skype for Business meetings experiences and voice services are being expanded, video viewer statistics are rolling out in Office 365 Video, a new reporting portal in the admin center is rolling out, new update options are available for Office 365 ProPlus and Office 365 Connectors is here. The redesigned OneNote Class Notebook—designed and built with teachers—is available worldwide. And for developers, there’s a new site for keeping up with the latest news and resources. | Video
Take back your time with Delve Analytics
Last week, business leaders from some of the most forward-thinking companies in the world gathered in New Orleans for the Microsoft Envision conference. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about the digital transformation of society and business, and how the use of intelligent systems can empower organizations by helping people understand more about the way they work. So, we wanted to provide a deeper look at one of the newer capabilities in Office 365 that does just that—Delve Analytics. In today’s modern workplace, we have more ways to communicate and collaborate with others throughout the course of our workday than ever before. In Office 365, you email and chat, have audio and video calls and meetings, collaborate on documents and share them with colleagues in the cloud. The Office 365 service processes millions of these interactions every day. Meanwhile, the Office Graph organizes these signals and applies sophisticated machine learning to them, all while maintaining strict privacy controls. As a result, Delve Analytics delivers you insights about how you work, ultimately helping you to work smarter, not harder.
NOTEWORTHY
Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges
April 8, 2016: Updates for SharePoint Online and Office 365 endpoints. Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here.
MTC Mid-Day Cafe: What's New With Delve?
Microsoft's Delve helps you to discover the information that's likely to be most important to you right now - across your organization. In the April 4, 2016 episode, Mid-Day Café's host Michael Gannotti is joined by special guest Cem Aykan (Microsoft Senior Program Manager) for this special Delve focused episode. Cem covers what's new in Delve as well as how it can impact organizations. Delve is changing the way people and organization discover information and connect with organizational assets.