Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of June 26 - July 2, 2016
MESSAGE CENTER
Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants.
Updated Feature: What’s new in Office 365 admin center
Posted: June 30, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | In June, we continued our work to improve the new Office 365 admin center to make it faster, easier and more efficient for you to manage the service. The latest updates include additional user management options, enhanced export capabilities, and better guidance on next steps. Log into the new admin center and try the new functionality. Provide feedback using the feedback button in the admin center. To learn more, please see the "What's new in Office 365 administration - June update" post in the "Blog Roundup" section below.
Updated Feature: Yammer Email Notification Improvements
Posted: June 30, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Plan For Change | Action: Awareness | We've made changes to the design and the delivery rules for the emails we send when a user receives a high priority message in their Yammer Inbox. There is nothing you need to do to prepare for this change.
In regards to design, we’ve made the following improvements:
- Made it easier to parse and triage the Yammer notification.
- Made it explicit why people actually receive the email.
- Highlighted who triggered the email.
- Increased the prominence of the group and network name.
- Created an onramp to Yammer that leads to more active network engagement.
- Made it obvious that the email originated from Yammer.
- Included a strong call to action (CTA) providing users with very clear direction for what to do with the email
- Balanced the amount of content shown in the email between providing enough context and leading the user to engage in their Yammer network.
From a delivery perspective:
- Increased the signal and decreased the noise by delivering only messages that we believe are highly relevant and interesting.
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!
Bring Your Team Together with Yammer
When: Multiple sessions starting July 12th and ending August 31st | Discover how to use Yammer to tap into the network that is your organization. Learn how to use Yammer to create conversations and quickly communicate answers. In this session you will learn about Yammer, from setting up your Yammer network to identifying use cases, gathering a project team and driving ongoing usage. Facilitated discussion will follow, with opportunities to ask questions and discuss specific scenarios to you. This course is a live, instructor-led session offered at multiple dates and times. To register, click on the link above and find the session that best fits your schedule.
When: Multiple sessions starting July 12th and ending August 31st | Foster adoption of O365 in ways that matter to end-users; understand training resources and develop champions. This session will show you ways to encourage adoption of Office 365 through meaningful communication of change. The session will highlight the importance of training, awareness and communications, including how to develop Office 365 champions. It is also an opportunity to meet other people at similar stages of their Office 365 journey. This course is a live, instructor-led session offered at multiple dates and times. To register, click on the link above and find the session that best fits your schedule.
Rolling out Microsoft Office in one of the most demanding environments - Microsoft
When: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 @ 10:00am PT | IT subject matter experts will discuss the Office 365 ProPlus 2016 deployment, how we used System Center Configuration Manager to streamline the upgrade process, and how we use channels to deliver updates to users. Get candid answers from our experts as they share insights and best practices developed by Microsoft IT.
Microsoft IT enables information discovery with enterprise search and Delve
When: Wednesday, July 20, 2016 @ 10:00am PT | Microsoft IT hosts more than 350 million Office 365 documents and other content, serving 200,000 users around the globe. Helping employees find what they need to be effective in their jobs required new approaches to deliver integrated search experiences. Program managers David Johnson, Sam Crewdson, and Rene Sanchez Almaguer will share how we used Delve, SharePoint 2016 with hybrid services, and Office 365 Search to deliver rationalized search and discovery experiences.
June has been another busy month of updates across our Office apps on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. We reached new milestones for Microsoft Planner and GigJam. We are also introducing Office 365 Advanced Security Management, new datacenter regions and the next cumulative feature update to Office 2016.
What’s new in Office 365 administration—June update
Additional user management options, enhanced export capabilities and better guidance on next steps are some of the improvements we focused on in June to improve existing features in the new Office 365 admin center. Of course, we all love completely new features, but we want to make sure that the new admin center really makes it easier, faster and more efficient for you to manage Office 365. Based on your feedback, we took a critical look at the existing features to see how we can further improve them to provide you with the best management experience possible.
Microsoft Planner hands-on demonstration
Earlier this month, we launched Microsoft Planner, which offers you a simple and visual way to organize teamwork. Today, we take a deeper look at Microsoft Planner—a new experience in Office 365 to organize work, manage and assign tasks and collaborate within your teams. In the show, we demonstrate where to find Planner, how to get started with creating plans, assigning tasks and the things you can do while working through a plan. We walk through the integrated experiences with Office 365 Groups, board and chart views to visualize tasks and monitor progress—and finally what the team is building in the coming months.
3 new Sway capabilities for Office 365 subscribers
In the 10 months since Sway’s general availability, we’ve seen great interest in our digital storytelling app, with millions of Sways created to date! We’ve seen music companies, design firms and small businesses use Sway for company presentations, client pitches and employee newsletters. We’ve watched teachers use Sway to advance student learning in dynamic and engaging ways in their classrooms. And Sway has become an easy and enjoyable way to share travel, dining and personal experiences with others. We make sure to listen to the Sway community and continually add relevant and enjoyable experiences for you. As we work toward this goal, we are excited to release three new features for Office 365 consumer, work and education subscribers based on feedback we’ve heard from you. These features are now available in Sway on the web, and they will roll out to the Sway app for Windows 10 in the coming months.
Stay on top of your travel and deliveries with Outlook
Places to go, people to see. Pack your bags. Travel can be stressful, even when you’re planning to go somewhere for fun. Staying on top of travel plans and package deliveries can become time-consuming and a hassle. We now have more new experiences to help you stay on top of your travel plans and package deliveries, including the ability to: (1) Verify your travel reservations and package delivery details with ease using simplified summary cards in your inbox and calendar, (2) Check in for flights, change hotel and rental car reservations or track packages at the touch of a button and (3) Stay on top of your flights with reliable reminders. These features are rolling out to Outlook for Mac and Outlook on the web today and will soon be coming to Windows, iOS and Android, as well as the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar apps.
Exchange Online increases its URL filtering
One of the ways in which Exchange Online detects spam, malware, and phishing is through URL filtering. We use a variety of sources, you can find them here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn45854(v=exchg.150).aspx. We publish all the URL lists that we use at the link above. However, going forward, we may or may not publish every list. For you see, we recently expanded the number of URL sources we pull from. Whereas before with our lists we were going for volume, nowadays adding more and more URL lists does not necessarily give you better coverage. Just stuffing more and more links into a list gives diminishing returns because spammers and phishers churn through them so rapidly. The result is a list that is 10 million entries, 99% of which are never seen. Instead, we’ve been looking to shore up our lists by quality. We are not necessarily targeting the size of the list, but rather are diversifying based upon origin.
NOTEWORTHY
Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges
July 1, 2016: Updates for Exchange Online, ProPlus, O365 portal and shared, Planner, AAD Connect, O365 authentication and identity, OneNote and Skype for Business Online. Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here.
Auditing and Reporting in Microsoft Office 365
Technical White Paper | Published: June 27, 2016 | This document describes the various auditing and reporting features available in Office 365 and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). This document also provides an overview of internal logging that is available to authorized Microsoft engineers for detection, analysis, troubleshooting, and providing Office 365 services.
Microsoft IT Showcase: Deploying and updating Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus
Technical White Paper | Published: June 28, 2016 | New capabilities make it easier than ever to deploy Office 365 and manage ongoing updates. Microsoft IT used System Center Configuration Manager to automate the upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus 2016. We also used update channels, now available for Office 365, to specify the cadence for ongoing Office updates. They are delivered on a schedule that works best for users’ business needs. As a result, our users enjoyed one of the smoothest upgrade experiences ever.