Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of April 24 - 30, 2016
MESSAGE CENTER
Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants.
Feature update: Planned Maintenance notifications moving to Message Center
Posted: April 28, 2016 | Action: Awareness | We’re changing the way we tell you about Planned Maintenance events. In the old Office 365 Admin center, we notified you about Planned Maintenance in a separate dashboard, under Service Health. Starting June 1, 2016, Planned Maintenance notices will now live in the Message Center, along with the other change notifications about your Office 365 services. Between now and May 31, we’ll continue to publish Planned Maintenance notifications in the Planned Maintenance dashboard of the old Admin center, as usual. Beginning June 1, planned maintenance announcements will appear as a “Stay Informed” post in Message Center, with no action required on your part. You’ll also be able to see these messages on your mobile device, using the Office 365 Admin app. If a planned maintenance was announced prior to the cutover to Message Center, it will remain on the Service Health Dashboard until the notification expires. Keep up to date on changes affecting you, by visiting the Message Center. For additional information, please visit https://support.office.com/article/View-the-status-of-your-services-932AD3AD-533C-418A-B938-6E44E8BC33B0.
Updated Feature: Monthly feature updates for Office 2016 for Office 365
Posted: April 29, 2016 | Action: Awareness | The April feature updates for Office 2016 for Office 365 are now available. This month’s update includes new feature updates, as well as other security and bug fixes. If you have users configured for Current Channel release updates, you may want to get up to speed on the new features this month. Other than that, you do not need to do anything to prepare for this change. Learn more at https://support.office.com/article/What-s-new-and-improved-in-Office-2016-for-Office-365-95c8d81d-08ba-42c1-914f-bca4603e1426.
UPCOMING EVENTS 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.
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 to Office 365 in April—Skype for Business Mac Preview, bringing collaboration to the forefront in Office and more
This month, we’re announcing several new Office 365 investments to help people better collaborate. This includes the much anticipated Skype for Business Mac Preview, new Yammer external groups and improvements in our Office Mobile apps on Windows Phone, iOS and Android. Please read on for details. Also see what’s new in April for OneNote and Office Lens.
First step to the all-new Skype for Business for Mac
We are excited to announce the start of the Skype for Business Mac Public Preview. Commercial customers can request an invite to test the Mac client at www.SkypePreview.com. We’ll start by issuing invites to IT administrators to download the client and gradually expand the preview to everyone in the coming weeks. The preview will release in three cumulative stages leading to public availability, planned for the third quarter of 2016. The initial release lets you see and join your meetings. This post takes a look at the functionality rolling out now and what’s coming in the future.
Introducing Yammer external groups
The Yammer team is passionate about helping people work effectively in teams across their company. But collaboration doesn’t stop at the company boundary. Sometimes you need to work closely with customers, consultants, partners or suppliers outside your organization. We are pleased to announce the new external groups feature in Yammer, enabling you to include people outside your company in a Yammer group—making it easier for extended teams to work together. The external groups capability builds on the existing ways to work with people outside your company, such as external networks and external messaging, which enables you to add people outside your organization directly to a thread in your organization’s Yammer network.
We are pleased to announce support for mobile application management (MAM) and conditional access capabilities for Skype for Business mobile apps for online customers. These capabilities are delivered through integration with Intune, Microsoft’s cloud-based mobile device and application management solution. An integral aspect of enabling true productivity is ensuring that employees can communicate and collaborate from wherever they are, on their favorite devices. At the same time, keeping sensitive corporate information secure is critical. With Skype for Business, we are committed to enabling productivity on the go for end users, as well as providing IT the tools to protect and manage the applications and associated data. This post includes a look at some of the core Intune MAM and conditional access capabilities that can help you enable managed productivity with Skype for Business.
NOTEWORTHY
Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges
April 29, 2016: Updates for Exchange Online, Skype for Business Online, Office Online, Office 365 authentication/identity and more. Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here.
Office 365 Connectors YamJam summary is posted!
On April 19, 2016 the Office 365 Network hosted an Office 365 Connectors YamJam. The live hour of Q&A gave members the opportunity to ask questions and voice feedback about the newly announced Office 365 Connectors. Couldn't make it to the YamJam? At the link above, you will find the YamJam summary.
User Adoption YamJam Summary is posted!
On April 21, 2016 the Office 365 Network hosted a YamJam to answer questions from the community and discuss user adoption with the FastTrack Team. Couldn't make it to the YamJam? At the link above, you will find the summary from the YamJam.
Intune Service Health is now available in the Office 365 portal
In response to customer feedback asking for fewer portals, we are already migrating Intune subscription management into the Office 365 management portal. We have also received feedback from you asking for our service health information to be in a central location with other Microsoft services. In response to this, we are migrating our Service Health dashboard into the Office 365 management portal as well. You will be able to find this under “Service Health” in the left navigational pane. Check out the blog post for additional details...