Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of April 17 - 23, 2016

MESSAGE CENTER

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

 

We are removing the RSS feature from the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard

Posted: April 24, 2016 | Action: Awareness | We will be removing the RSS feature from the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard, in June. This feature is currently only available in the classic Office 365 Admin Center experience, and will not be added to the new Admin Center. You will no longer be able to subscribe to RSS alerts for service health incidents, when this change is implemented. Instead of using the RSS feeds, we recommend you use the Office 365 Admin app, which now contains push notifications. If you do not have the Office 365 Admin app on your mobile device, please go to your mobile app store and download. If you do have the Office 365 Admin app on your mobile device, go into settings and ensure it is configured to receive push notifications for service health incidents. Please visit https://support.office.com/article/View-the-status-of-your-services-932AD3AD-533C-418A-B938-6E44E8BC33B0 for additional information. |  Download the Office 365 Admin Mobile App

 


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!

 

YamJam: How to YamJam

When: April 26, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | On Tuesday, April 26, 2016 from 9:00am to 10:00am PDT the Office 365 Network community team is hosting a YamJam on how to host a YamJam. Please come with your questions and comments on how to YamJam. We will discuss best practices from planning to execution. We hope to see you there!

 

SME Roundtable on Cloud at Microsoft

When: April 28, 2016 @ 10:00am PT | IT subject matter experts from our Cloud at Microsoft IT Showcase course will answer your questions on how Microsoft IT designs, develops, implements, monitors, and supports cloud solutions at Microsoft. Get candid answers from our experts as they share their insights and best practices.

 

MTC Mid-Day Cafe: Knowledge Management with Office 365

When: May 2, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | As organizations deploy Office 365 and other new solutions challenges may arise around training, organizational preparedness, and on-going support. Fortunately, all the pieces needed to create a self-sustaining knowledge solution that prepares, and empowers employees is available through an organizations Office 365 investment. The Office 365 Knowledge Solution provides for anytime anywhere any device access for your employees. All this can be done with the appropriate layers of security and compliance your organization requires. Join host Michael Gannotti as he introduces the software and services provided by Office 365 that can facility knowledge management capture and re-use from tribal informal conversations to structured knowledge capture and access. Included within this presentation will be coverage of asynchronous knowledge capture and dissemination, synchronous knowledge dissemination and capture. Finally, attendees will also learn about extensions to training and also how to secure knowledge for anytime, anywhere, and device access.

 

The Future of SharePoint

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.

 


BLOG ROUNDUP

Expanding FastTrack to help Office 365 customers with end-user adoption

We are announcing the addition of user adoption services to the evolving array of FastTrack services, providing comprehensive guidance, content and best practices for a successful Office 365 rollout to all customers that use FastTrack . These resources include guidance on how to generate awareness, gain executive buy-in and implement end-user training. This is in addition to the technical guidance, onboarding and migration services already provided through FastTrack. We are also introducing end-user awareness kits and end-user training for some of the most fundamental usage scenarios, to help you launch Office 365 and begin readying your employees. Demonstrating how Office 365 is relevant in the context of your business, roles and functions will help people in your organization to understand how to achieve more with Office 365. You can also now browse through new industry-based and role-based scenarios to identify new ways of supporting your business stakeholders with Office 365. We will help you get started, and if you need further assistance, we’ll connect you with our qualified cloud partners to help you do more user adoption activities. We even have an Office 365 Adoption Offer that provides funding* to Office 365 customers for eligible user adoption engagements with partners.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Monitoring and protecting sensitive data in Office 365

With Office 365, Microsoft corporate users can access and share data from anywhere, on any device, and be more productive by using all of its collaboration features. On the other hand, it’s easier to inadvertently share sensitive information with others both inside and outside of the company. To manage security risk, Microsoft IT created a solution that uses the Office 365 Management Activity API and the data loss prevention (DLP) features of Office 365. The solution gathers data about sharing from Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Azure Active Directory. It also includes a custom governance solution to help protect data. Microsoft Power BI dashboards visualize the data to show how Microsoft corporate users share information.

 

New Office 365 Project Portfolio Dashboard apps are live

The Project Portfolio Dashboard apps announced last fall are now available in the Apple and Office app stores! These apps come pre-configured with powerful dashboards allowing business leaders, portfolio managers and project managers to gain insights into areas such as resource utilization, project portfolio performance, costs, active risks/issues and key milestones. While the rich, out-of-box reports are designed to be immediately useful for many customers, the web app also allows customization of your portfolio dashboard to help meet specific organizational needs. Choose from a variety of project, task and resource-based reports, including issues/risks/deliverables reporting. Choose from several filtering options, including filtering by custom fields. Reports can be customized with just a few clicks without leaving the app.

 

Yammer external groups are here!

Whether you need to work closely with customers, vendor partners, or suppliers, there will be times when you need to collaborate with people outside your organization. To help improve the way these extended teams get work done, we are very pleased to announce a new feature that will allow users to create external groups in Yammer. External groups provide a seamless and secure way to collaborate across organizational boundaries, allowing members from outside your company access to all conversations and content in the group. The external groups feature will begin rolling out to Yammer networks this week.  Click the link above for details on the features of external groups, along with list of some of the most frequently asked questions. Additional support documentation with more in-depth materials on how to create and manage external groups in Yammer are also provided.

 


NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

April 20, 2016: Updates for Office 365 ProPlus, SharePoint Online, Office 365 portal and shared and more.  Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here.

 

Microsoft introduces free resources to help IT pros build a career in the cloud

Over the last 20 years there have been many technology transitions led by IT professionals. With each technology transition, the role of IT professionals changes. We are in the middle of the cloud technology transition and IT professionals are not always leading this transition. Microsoft is here to support IT professionals as they lead their companies to adopt the cloud with two new programs – Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials and the Microsoft IT Pro Career Center. There is a significant opportunity for IT professionals to adopt the cloud. IDC believes that while IT employment worldwide will grow about 4% every year from 2015 to 2020, cloud-related positions will grow at more than three times that rate. By 2020, more than 1 in 3 IT positions will be cloud related.[1] To capture this opportunity, IT professionals need to rapidly familiarize themselves with cloud technologies, and evolve their skills. Microsoft is listening to the needs of IT professionals and today is addressing the most common questions we hear: “How do I to get started with cloud?” and “How can I advance my career using cloud?”

 

Microsoft Trust Center adds new cloud services and certifications

We launched the Trust Center in November 2015 to create a central point of reference for cloud trust resources and to detail our commitments to security, privacy and control, compliance, and transparency. It is here that we document our adherence to international and regional compliance certifications and attestations, and lay out the policies and processes that Microsoft uses to protect your privacy and your data. Here, too, you’ll find descriptions of the security features and functionality in our services as well as the policies that govern the location and transfer of the data you entrust to us. The Microsoft Trust Center is expanding, and we’re adding more of our enterprise cloud services—Microsoft Commercial Support, Microsoft Dynamics AX, and Microsoft Power BI. These services join Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Office 365 into the Trust Center. Additionally, we are adding two new compliance attestations, ENS in Spain and FACT in the UK. These two new certifications, added to those announced in March—CS Mark in Japan and MPAA— bring our total to 37—the most comprehensive of any major cloud service provider in the world.