Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of October 23 - 29, 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.

 

Feature Update: We’re making changes to Clutter

Posted: October 24, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Plan for Change | Action: Awareness | As we begin rolling out our new feature, Focused Inbox, we are making some changes to the Clutter feature. By November 1, we will no longer auto-enable the Clutter feature for new users in your organization. As a result, new users in your organization may have a different Outlook experience than existing users. Moreover, once we complete the roll-out of Focused Inbox, we will begin transitioning existing Clutter users to the Focused Inbox. We will communicate again, via Message Center, when this change happens. There is nothing you need to do to prepare for this change, other than informing your help desk of this change. To learn more about the Focused Inbox, please visit https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2016/10/14/managing-focused-inbox-in-office-365-and-outlook.

 

New Feature: OneDrive will now show you all your files in Office 365

Posted: October 26, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Sites in OneDrive is a new Office 365 feature, replacing Groups in OneDrive. You’ll begin seeing this new feature over the coming weeks. We’re updating the Groups list in OneDrive to show you a list of all your frequent Groups and SharePoint Sites. If you click on the "More Sites" button, you will also be able to see all the Sites that you follow. Notes: (1) this feature requires that you disable scripting in the Personal Site; (2) to see a complete list of your groups (even those that don't contain files) we recommend going to the Outlook Web Application; (3) if a Site or Group isn't showing up, please navigate to that site and follow it; and (4) currently only Sites with a Team Site or Project Site Template will show. If your tenant participates in First Release you will start seeing this change early next week. If you are not in First Release, this will be deploying over the coming weeks and is expected to be complete by the end of January. Update your user training, and notify your helpdesk. Please visit https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/sharepoint-online-sync-preview-headlines-ignite-announcements-for-onedrive/ for more details.

 

Planned Maintenance: Yammer

Posted: October 28, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | On Saturday, November 5, 2016, between 5:00 PM UTC - 6:00 PM UTC, we're implementing database credential rotation. You are receiving this message because our reporting indicates one or more users in your organization are using Yammer. Users may experience a brief service interruption of up to 15 minutes when this change is implemented.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS Online Immersion Experience: Engage virtually using Office 365 and Windows 10

When: November 2nd / 9th / 16th, 2016 at 10:00am and 12:00pm 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.

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled through November 30, 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 Office 365 October news—exciting new value coming to Windows 10

Last week, Microsoft announced the Windows 10 Creators Update coming in early 2017, as well as stunning new devices: Surface Studio, Surface Dial and Surface Book with Performance Base. At our event, Satya Nadella, Terry Myerson and Panos Panay showcased innovations to the Office apps that are coming first to Windows and brought to life on Surface. These advances make using a digital pen even better than traditional pen and paper, offer new ways to interact with your documents, and expand your options for creating rich and interactive content. It’s an exciting set of capabilities the Office apps are bringing first to Windows. Office will continue to fully support the latest innovations in Windows and on Microsoft devices, with more to announce in the future.

 

Skype for Business announces new Mac client and new mobile sharing experiences

We are pleased to announce that Skype for Business Mac is now publicly available for download. The Mac client offers edge-to-edge video and full immersive content sharing and viewing. The result is a great first class experience for Mac users. We’ve also updated the Skype Operations Framework (SOF) assets to help customers plan, deliver and operate the new Mac client. You will find the latest documentation and updated training on the SOF website and you can read more about what has changed in this SOF blog post. We expect the latest help documentation to be available later at support.office.com. We are also announcing new capabilities in Skype for Business apps for iOS and Android—including the ability to present PowerPoint files in a meeting and a faster, more reliable content sharing approach. | Resource: Skype Academy: Clients - Skype for Business on Mac

 

Accelerate your eDiscovery analysis workflow with one click

Does your legal department often complain about how long it takes to run an analysis for eDiscovery investigations? We released two new features for Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery—Express Analysis and Export with analytics to Excel—to make it easier and faster for organizations to quickly find, analyze and review relevant information related to investigations, legal matters and regulatory requests. eDiscovery is applicable for a wide variety of scenarios where you need to sort through a set of unstructured data to find the small number of files which may be relevant. The amount of data you need to sort through is dependent upon the breadth and complexity of the case. For large legal matters or regulatory data requests, the amount of data could be tens of millions of files, while internal investigations could only be a few thousand files. To further improve your eDiscovery process, in the coming months we will be delivering additional eDiscovery enhancements, such as Unified Case Management, Search and Export Analytics, optical character recognition and new intelligent analytics features in the Security & Compliance Center.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: SME Roundtable - Skype for Business at Microsoft (September 2016)

Format: Video (60 minutes) | IT Showcase brought together subject matter experts from our Skype for Business at Microsoft course to answer questions about how Microsoft IT implements, maintains, and supports Skype for Business at Microsoft. In this session, they discuss hybrid deployment, user sentiment, video features, connection issues, user provisioning, and much more. | Skype for Business Network Assessment Tool

 

New Skype for Business 2016 look and feel coming your way…

The user interface on the Skype for Business 2016 C2R (click to run) client will have some changed visual elements. The new client visuals are part of a large amount of work (both visual and internal) Microsoft has done to make Skype for Business 2016 more accessible so that it can be enjoyed by more people around the world.  One example of this effort is the slight variation in color changes which provides greater text-to-background contrast to empower those with low vision to more easily distinguish parts of the interface.  We also improved screen reader support, simplified keyboard navigation and made the keyboard focus easier to see in many places. Early Adopters on the Current Channel and First Release for Deferred channel will see these changes in early November 2016, whereas organization members on the Deferred Channel will see these changes in February 2017 - all dates are an estimate and subject to change.

 

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

October 27, 2016: Updates for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office 365 ProPlus, Office Online, Skype for Business Online and Exchange Online Protection.  Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here. | Additional Resource: Managing Office 365 Endpoints

 

EOP Field Notes: Disclaimers and calendar invites

In the latest EOP Field Notes post, Andrew Stobart provides information on how to resolve an issue caused by adding disclaimers to calendar invites, specifically when sharing a calendar.

 

Office 365 Support Corner: How to use SARA to fix Office Setup

Have you ever had issues with Office setup? This short video provides some quick tips on how to mitigate this issue with the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant (SARA) tool. Be sure to check out the Office 365 Support Corner for other informative videos, such as the recent webcast – Office 365 Labs: Exchange Online Compliance.

 

Making the world more accessible with Sway

This post was written by Brett Bigham, 2014 Oregon State Teacher of the Year and a recipient of the NEA National Award for Teaching Excellence in 2015. I’m the first to admit I’m a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to technology. It’s not that I’m not forward thinking, it’s more that I’ve spent way too many hours learning “the new best thing” only to have my district ditch it six months later for a newer, better best thing that only takes twice as long to learn. But Microsoft did something with their new Sway program that has created something every teacher needs. And they did it by asking teachers what they needed. Some people with autism have great anxiety about traveling to new places. To address this in my classroom I have created “Ability Guidebooks”—a series of step-by-step directions in photobook form on how to access community events and destinations. These guidebooks help students become familiar with an upcoming destination. With each successful community outing, they become less fearful of that unknown making the world easier, safer and less frightening for them. In their original format, the Ability Guidebooks were meant to be read online like a book. If you could not read or were blind, you would have to rely on someone reading the book to you. Sway allowed me to overcome this problem. The program is set up not only to work in multiple languages, making translating the work much easier, but also allows for recordings to be added to the presentation. With the touch of a button a student who does not read can choose to play an audio version. By moving my work into Sway, it is opening doors to every student who cannot read or see the books.