Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of June 19 - 25, 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.

 

New Feature: Skype for Business user session data PowerShell cmdlet

Posted: June 20, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Get-CsUserSession PowerShell Cmdlet for Skype for Business is a new Office 365 feature. You’ll begin seeing this new feature immediately. This PowerShell Cmdlet enables all Skype for Business Online tenant admins to retrieve user session data. It exposes user activities and modalities including registration, Instant Message, Audio, Video, Application sharing, and conference events. Tenant admins can query for the activities of a specific user during a period of time for diagnostics and troubleshooting efforts. There is generally a 5-minute delay from the activity and the data being available. Learn more at https://technet.microsoft.com//library/mt715516.aspx.

 

The new SharePoint mobile app for iOS is available today in the App Store

Posted: June 21, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | As announced at the “Future of SharePoint” event on May 4th, we are working on the new SharePoint mobile app. Today marks the release of the SharePoint mobile app for iOS. Now you can untether and take your intranet with you—your intranet in your pocket. Stay connected to important content, sites, portals and people from across your intranet while on the go. We are also working on Android and Windows Universal versions, which we expect to release before the end of this year. Starting today, the new SharePoint mobile app is available in the Apple App Store. You can then sign in with SharePoint Online or SharePoint on-premises (2103 & 2016 version support). We would appreciate your feedback and ideas - send us input via in-app "Shake for feedback.” For additional information, please see the "Your intranet in your pocket—the SharePoint mobile app for iOS is now available" post in the "Blog Roundup" section below.

 

New feature: Class Notebook Tools for OneNote 2016 for Mac

Posted: June 21, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | We’re excited to announce Class Notebook Tools for OneNote 2016 for Mac, which helps teachers work even more efficiently with their Class Notebooks—on the Mac platform some teachers already know and use. These tools help you distribute assignments to students, review their work, and get quick access to the Class Notebook App. With this update, the Class Notebook tab is visible if you are teacher in a Class Notebook for which you have administrative rights and have downloaded the app from the Mac App Store. Please visit https://blogs.office.com/2016/06/13/announcing-onenote-class-notebook-tools-for-mac/ for more details.

 

What’s coming soon to Microsoft Intune

Posted: June 22, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Plan For Change | Action: Awareness | We plan to start rolling out the monthly service update for Microsoft Intune in the next five business days. The latest updates include improvements in app management, device management, conditional access, as well as updates to the Company Portal. There is nothing you need to do as there is no expected downtime. We will notify you once you've been updated so that you can start using the new features and functionality. To see what changes are coming to Microsoft Intune, please visit https://aka.ms/intunewhatsnew.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS Azure Active Directory Webinars for July

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!

 

Insights to Action: PowerApps & Microsoft Flow

When: June 30, 2016 @ 10:00am PT | Microsoft Power BI provides insights into your data, helping bring it to life. With PowerApps and Flow you can now also take actions on that data. PowerApps is a service for building and using custom business apps that connect to your data and work across the web and mobile - without the time and expense of custom software development. Microsoft Flow is a service for business users and specialists to work smarter by automating processes across applications and services that are used every day. This webinar will introduce the vision behind PowerApps and Flow and demo key scenarios. Product team members will be available throughout the presentation to take questions from the audience. You can also view on-demand webinars and register for other upcoming webinars at the Power BI webinars page.

 

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 Your intranet in your pocket—the SharePoint mobile app for iOS is now available

Last month, we unveiled a new vision for the future of SharePoint, and now we’re pleased to release the new SharePoint mobile app for iOS. Install it now and take your intranet with you—your intranet in your pocket. Stay connected to important content, sites, portals and people from across your intranet while on the go. The SharePoint mobile journey starts now. This is a first step, and we are excited to continue to build on what we’ve started. The new SharePoint mobile app helps you keep your work moving forward by providing quick access to your team sites, organization portals and resources, and even a view into what the people you work with are working on. And this new app is infused with the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph, which applies machine learning to activity in Office 365 to connect you to the relevant documents and people around you. The SharePoint mobile app works with SharePoint Online in Office 365, SharePoint Server (2013 and 2016) on-premises and your hybrid environment. Once you launch the app on your iPhone, you’ll be prompted to sign in with your SharePoint credentials. The SharePoint mobile app lets you easily switch between accounts.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Improving service quality in Skype for Business

Technical White Paper | Published: June 24, 2016 | When Microsoft IT deployed Skype for Business 2015 to support our highly mobile global user base, our goal was to provide the best user experience in the industry. We learned valuable lessons about hardware requirements, managing our complex network, accommodating diverse and remote clients, and running a unified communications platform in a hybrid cloud environment. We also helped develop a Call Quality Dashboard to help other organizations optimize the user experience.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Protecting and managing Microsoft data with SharePoint governance

Business Case Study | Published: June 21, 2016 | Microsoft IT manages a complex SharePoint environment that includes hundreds of internal portals, various search experiences, corporate taxonomy, and internal applications—as well as support for sharing and collaboration. Building on Office 365 and SharePoint Online controls, we have created IT governance policies and processes for managing our complex environment and helping to keep our data secure in the cloud.

 

3 ways Power BI can help your sales team succeed

With an ever-evolving market and a massive amount of data available, your sales team’s job of knowing their customer base isn’t easy. A multitude of information streams in every day. Sorting through data sets, spreadsheets and a dozen apps can slow them down—hindering the growth and success of your company. In fact, 90 percent of sales reps associate missed opportunities with the inability to leverage all available information. Instead of solely focusing on dissecting the customer data in front of them, sales reps should be looking to data visualization to pull out insights not apparent at first glance. Microsoft Power BI in Office 365 can help by enabling your sales reps to collect, unify and visualize all their data in one place. It’s cloud-based and compatible with 59 different applications, which simplifies the process.

 

Why secure email is essential for your business

Malware most commonly reaches your business through email. As attacks become more sophisticated, your business could be vulnerable. A malware attack means more than just a security risk. If attacked, your business runs the risk of lost intellectual property, productivity, business reputation, time and money. In fact, the average total organizational cost of a data breach in the U.S. is $6.5 million, and an average of 250,000 malware variants are detected every day. As attacks become more sophisticated, advanced security, privacy, encryption and anti-virus technologies from Office 365 can be your best defense. To learn more about the protection that Exchange Online can offer your business, check out our infographic, “Guarding against email attacks.”  | Related: Enterprise email – what a new business needs to know

 

Educators, increase collaboration and professional development with new Office 365 Education updates

As part of Microsoft’s Education announcement in April, we announced new experiences and updates to Office 365 Education coming this summer that will make it easier for teachers to manage their classroom and collaborate with peers, and for them or their IT administrators to set it all up. As part of this announcement, we mentioned there’d be even more updates coming this summer! We’re thrilled to share these with you now—all are teacher inspired and student focused. Today, we are announcing enhanced educator collaboration with PLC groups, better content sharing with Docs.com, easier formative assessments with Microsoft Forms and additional Learning Management System (LMS) and Student Information System (SIS) partners with OneNote Class Notebook.

 

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

June 22, 2016: Updates for Exchange Online, Exchange Online Protection, OneNote and Skype for Business Online.  Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here.

 

Azure AD Conditional Access for Office 365 Exchange & SharePoint preview!

We're super excited to announce preview of Azure AD Conditional Access policies for Exchange and SharePoint Online is now available. These policies can be used to require multi-factor authentication (MFA) or block access based on network location. We’ve heard over and over again how critical it is for organizations to apply additional security to Exchange and SharePoint, while not impacting access to other services. Now, as part of the Conditional Access public preview, rules can be applied to Exchange or SharePoint Online. This is a big step forward as we continue to build up the Conditional Access policy framework. As part of this release we are adding support for the following rules to Exchange and SharePoint Online: (1) Always require MFA, (2) Require MFA when not at work and (3) Block access when not at work.

 

HCW Improvement: The Minimal Hybrid Configuration option

Over the past several years, we have received feedback from all sorts of customers on how the Hybrid Configuration Wizard can be improved. One highly requested piece of feedback has been focused around providing an option to allow a customer to configure the bare essentials to support a hybrid configuration with Office 365. We are pleased to announce that the Minimal Hybrid Configuration feature is available. When you launch the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (for the first time), you will be presented with a new dialog option, entitled Hybrid Features. This dialog allows you to choose between a Minimal Hybrid Configuration or a Full Hybrid Configuration. What’s the difference? In a nutshell, the Minimal Hybrid Configuration allows you to just to perform migration and administration in a hybrid deployment. The Minimal Hybrid Configuration excludes configurations of secure email and any Exchange Federation related features, such as free/busy. This new configuration allows a customer to have the user experience benefits tied to a Hybrid migration: when a mailbox is moved you will not have to recreate the user’s Outlook profile; online mailbox moves are performed, unlike in a staged or cutover migration (users are for the most part not disconnected from the mailbox during the move); user account credentials are synchronized; and you get to enjoy uninterrupted mail flow.