Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of September 4 - 10, 2016

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MESSAGE CENTER

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

 

We’ve made a change to the Office 365 Trust Center

Posted: September 07, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | As you might be aware, Office 365 security, compliance and privacy information is located in the Office 365 Trust Center. As a commitment to transparency, anytime we materially change the data maps, we disclose this information in the Office 365 Trust Center and send you a notification about this change. The Office 365 data maps were recently revised to include a new datacenter region for the United Kingdom. Please visit https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=401277 for additional information.

 

New Feature: Guest access for Office 365 Groups

Posted: September 08, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Guest access is a new feature for Office 365 Groups. You can now include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group. You’ll begin seeing this new feature over the coming weeks. Office 365 Groups is the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group. For more details, please see the "Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups" post in the "Blog Roundup" section below.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS Azure Active Directory Webinars for September

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: Preparing for Azure AD, Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication, Self-Service Password Management and more. 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!

 

Online Immersion Experience: Boost  your productivity with Windows 10 and Office 365

When: September 28, 2016 at 10:00am – 11:30am PT or 12:00pm – 1:30pm PT | Boost your productivity with Office 365 and Windows 10. An online immersion session is not your typical online event. These 90-minute interactive sessions start with an online roundtable discussing your business challenges and then launch into a live environment in the cloud. A skilled facilitator guides you through simulated business scenarios that are customized to your interests. We will send you a link to connect your own device to a remote desktop loaded with our latest and greatest technology, so you can experience first-hand how Microsoft tools can solve your biggest challenges in a collaborative, fun environment. Please note: Each session is only open to 20 participants. Reserve your seat now and learn how you can be more productive anywhere, anytime with Office 365.

 

Modern Workplace: Data Defense - An inside look at your secure cloud

When: September 13, 2016 at 8:00am PDT | Join us for the season premiere of Modern Workplace! In this episode, get an exclusive look inside the new generation of Microsoft datacenters and see firsthand how they seamlessly make trillions of transactions every day to help make your organization safer and more efficient by leveraging the power of cloud computing. Doug Hauger, General Manager of Cloud Programs, shares why Microsoft is the leading trusted cloud provider and how customers are taking advantage of everything the cloud has to offer. Plus, get a rare look into the cloud with Microsoft’s General Manager of Cloud Infrastructure Strategy, Christian Belady. See where and how your information is stored and learn about the incredible security measures keeping your data safe.

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled through September 28, 2016 | 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 Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups

Sometimes you need to work closely with customers, partners, suppliers or consultants outside of your organization, and you need collaboration tools to make this possible. We are pleased to announce the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups—the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group. We are rolling out guest access functionality in phases. Starting now, group owners can add guests to a group in Outlook on the web. Once added, guests receive a welcome email, are granted access to group files in SharePoint Online, begin receiving email messages and calendar invites sent to the group, and can access the group in Office on the web and the Outlook Groups mobile application. They also have automatic access to cloud-based file attachments. Guests have the option to leave the group at any time and visual indicators remind all members of guest participation in the group across all Outlook experiences. Guest access works for any email accounts including corporate and consumer domains (such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com). If the guest email identity is associated with a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 or Outlook.com accounts, for instance), the user is directed to a sign-in page to identify themselves. If the guest doesn’t have a Microsoft account, they will be directed to a sign-up page to create an account.

 

Introducing the Mailbox Recovery Troubleshooter

There are times when the deletion of a user account or a mailbox needs to be undone. It could be that you accidentally deleted the wrong user or maybe you are not really sure what happened to a mailbox, but want to attempt a recovery. Regardless of the reason, we have created a troubleshooter that will guide you to the best possible recovery option (https://aka.ms/MailboxRecovery). We will ask you few questions about the current state of the user and mailbox you want to recover, then we will provide a solution based on the answer provided. For the most part we provide a solution that can be handled by a Tenant Administrator, but there are a couple of instances where we recommend calling support.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Automation and update channels help deploy Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus

Format: Video (14 minutes, 37 seconds) | Steve Reay, Senior Program Manager, talks about how Microsoft IT approached the upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus 2016 across the company and recommends key considerations to keep in mind when planning a deployment. He addresses using System Center Configuration Manager to automate the upgrade process and discusses how update channels make it easy to deploy ongoing Office updates.

 

Office 365 local datacenters now available in the United Kingdom

Reflecting our deep and continued commitment to make Office 365 the most trusted cloud service for productivity, we are announcing the general availability of Office 365 from multiple local datacenters in the United Kingdom. We are pleased to be the first global cloud productivity provider offering U.K. data residency for core customer data at rest. Since October 2014, we have rapidly expanded our global cloud footprint and opened new datacenter regions in Japan, Australia, India, Canada and now the U.K. In addition to the highly secure productivity capabilities already enjoyed by Office 365 customers all over the world, these new data center regions add in-region data residency, failover and disaster recovery to help effectively address the legal, regulatory and compliance needs of customers in industries like banking, government, public sector and healthcare.

 

NOTEWORTHY Video: Office 365 Updates for September 2016

Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, including Modern SharePoint Lists, updates to Outlook and Yammer, Service Assurance and Secure Score Preview.

 

Social media tips for converting customers into friends

Your brand’s long-term social media strategy could use a more personal touch. As you plan, consider one thing: How do you make friends in your own life? Do you spam strangers with long-winded reasons to accept your friendship or do you show value by starting a two-way conversation? Making a friend in the real world is equivalent to gaining a follower in the brand world. It has to be approachable, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, authentic. And it shows—63 percent of consumers prefer to buy from brands that are more authentic than their competitors. The more you socialize your brand, the more likely customers will develop a bond and engage with your business, sticking with you for the long term. According to Convince & Convert, a digital marketing consulting agency, 53 percent of Americans who socially follow brands are more loyal to those brands.

 

Reminder: Office 365 Network Shutdown on Yammer - September 15th

Thank you for all of your feedback on the Office 365 Network. We are on track to release the new community on the evening of September 1st. We are excited to be welcoming communities representing Azure, Windows Server and SQL Server to our new community and you will be able to join them on September 1st. As such, we will be re-branding the Office 365 Network and this calls for a URL change. There will be redirects in place on network.office.com to the new URL and to ease the transition to our existing community to the new destination, we are extending the shutdown of the network by two weeks - the Office 365 Network will shut down on September 15th.  The URL of the new community will change to https://techcommunity.microsoft.com and redirects will be in place for any existing URL on the https://network.office.com domain.