Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of November 13 - 19, 2016

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Welcome to the November 13 - 19, 2016 edition of the O365 Weekly Digest. Topics include some new and updated features rolling out to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, the new Service Health Dashboard coming soon to your tenant, multiple items for the newest Office 365 service - Microsoft Teams, a new FastTrack offer for SharePoint on-premises migrations to SharePoint Online and much more. It is also important to note that the last 3 Message Center notifications listed below are targeted for tenants that meet a specific criteria (Outlook 2007/2010 as an example) and may not be posted to your tenant.

MESSAGE CENTER

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

 

New Feature: Download All on OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online web client

Posted: November 14, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Download all (multiple files and folders) is a new, and highly-requested Office 365 feature. You’ll begin seeing this new feature over the coming weeks. When users select multiple files and hit Download, their browser will start downloading a .zip file containing all files and folders. When the user is in a folder and clicks "Download" without selecting any files, it will download all contents of the folder. We'll be gradually rolling this out to First Release customers in mid-November, with rollout expected to be completed by the end of December 2016. Two known issues are: 1) Users cannot download OneNote notebooks. If users download a folder that has a OneNote notebook, the Zip file will contain an error message in the form of a Text File. 2) The Download button may sometimes disappear if user refreshes the web page while looking at a folder. To work around this, users can go up one level in the folder directory and come back OR close the tab and navigate to the folder again.

 

Updated Feature: Modern team site homepage

Posted: November 14, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | This week we are updating the “Start a Site” settings in the SharePoint admin center. The new settings (renamed “Site Creation”) will let you decide if you want your users to get the new site creation experience we’re releasing in late November. The new site creation experience will let users create sites with Office 365 groups by clicking the “Create site” link on the SharePoint home page and following a new form flow. We’re releasing the settings before the new site creation experience to give you time to check and update your settings. If you’ve already set “Start a Site” settings for your users, we recommend that you check out the new settings and make sure you’ve selected the option you want. If you have not already set “Start a Site” settings for your users, then there is likely no action you need to take. To learn more, please see the “Create connected SharePoint Online team sites in seconds” post in the “Blog Roundup” section below.

 

Updated Feature: New Service Health Dashboard

Posted: November 15, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | We’re updating the Office 365 Service health dashboard. We are gradually rolling it out to First Release customers now, and the roll out will be completed by the end of January. We’ll communicate again when we roll this feature out beyond First Release. The new Service health dashboard provides you with more relevant incident insights, and features a new view that separates major, business-critical outages from others and splits them into two categories: incidents and advisories. When you click an incident or advisory, you’ll see a summary that surfaces the most relevant and critical details, including the number of users in your organization who are impacted. More details are included in the announcement blog post - https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/27/office-365-administration-announcements-new-admin-center-reaches-general-availability-and-introducing-the-service-health-dashboard.

 

Updated Features: Web Support for Outlook 2007 and 2010

Posted: November 15, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Plan for Change | Action: Required by December 14, 2016 4:59PM UTC | We’re updating the web support submission experience in the Office 365 Admin Center. Starting December 15, you’ll begin seeing a change in the experience when opening support incidents for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010. When this change takes effect, you will no longer be able to open an Office 365 web support incident for Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010. You are receiving this message because our reporting indicates you have at least one user in your organization connecting to Office 365, using either Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010. Office 365 is designed to work with the latest versions of Office, in mainstream support. Outlook 2007 and 2010 are no longer in mainstream support. We won’t deliberately prevent you from connecting to the service, but the quality of your Office 365 experience will diminish over time. Moreover, we won’t provide code fixes to resolve non-security related problems. We encourage you to get the current version of Office to receive the best possible support and experience with Office 365. We are available to help you through any upgrade questions or issues you may have. Learn more about the Office 365 system requirements at https://products.office.com/office-system-requirements.

 

Potential service disruption for Outlook for Windows users

Posted: November 16, 2016 | Urgency: High | Category: Plan for Change | Action: Required by October 31, 2017 5:59PM UTC | On October 31st, 2017, Exchange Online mailboxes in Office 365 will require connections from Outlook for Windows use MAPI over HTTP, our new method of connectivity and transport between Outlook for Windows and Exchange. In May of 2014, Microsoft introduced MAPI over HTTP as a replacement for RPC over HTTP. RPC over HTTP was a legacy connection protocol that is being deprecated from Exchange Online. Beginning October 31, 2017, Outlook for Windows clients using RPC over HTTP will be unable to access their Exchange Online mailbox. The necessary action depends on the version of Outlook in use in your organization. If you are using Outlook 2007 or earlier, you need to upgrade. Outlook 2007 does not contain support for the MAPI/HTTP protocol. We encourage you to update to the Office 365 ProPlus subscription, or access Outlook via the web browser (which is included in your current subscription plan). Outlook 2010-2016 customers will need to ensure their version of Outlook for Windows is set up to support MAPI/HTTP. At a minimum, you should ensure you have installed the December 2015 update. Lastly, ensure your Outlook clients are not using a registry key to block MAPI/HTTP. Please visit https://support.microsoft.com/kb/3201590 for more information.

 

Known Issue: EX85220 remaining items affected

Posted: November 18, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | We have resolved worldwide incident EX85220, but we are cleaning up email messages impacted during the incident. Affected email messages during the incident had a redundant sender SMTP address, which caused Outlook to not show sender information properly. This incident has been resolved so new items will show the sender correctly in Outlook. In addition, Outlook online mode will show all items correctly, including those previously affected. Outlook cached mode will continue to show the previously affected items without sender information until we repair them in the service. This may take us up to 30 days to complete the repairs to affected emails. The specific repair is to remove the redundant sender SMTP address. This update will cause Outlook cached mode to download the repaired items and then render the sender correctly. Since only a small number of items were affected, this should not significantly increase customer network utilization.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS Modern Workplace: Managing a multi-generational workforce

If you missed last week’s episode of Modern Workplace, you can now view it on-demand. | For the first time in history there are five generations in the workforce. Watch the latest episode of Modern Workplace to understand how to turn this challenge into an opportunity by creating cohesive teams that take advantage of the diversity of multiple generations. Learn from experts Haydn Shaw, speaker and author of “Sticking Points,” and Asha Sharma, COO of Porch.com, as they discuss their experiences in creating organizational cultures that thrive using diverse workforces. Also, hear from Jamie McLellan, CTO of J. Walter Thompson, about how his organization is using technology to take advantage of generational diversity. McLellan discusses his organization’s use of Microsoft Teams—a new capability in Office 365.

 

Online Immersion Experience: Test drive Office 365 and Windows 10

When: December 7th / 14th, 2016 at 10:00am and 12:00pm PT | This isn’t your typical online event: you won’t see any slides, demos or sales pitches. 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 a hands-on experience to see how Microsoft Office 365 and Windows 10 can meet your needs in this collaborative, fun environment. 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 December 14, 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 a new file experience for groups in Outlook on the web

We’ve recently announced a number of enhancements to Office 365 Groups, such as the ability to collaborate via email with external team members and the new Outlook Groups iPad app. Now, we are announcing a new file experience for groups in Outlook on the web. People frequently rely on email to edit and share documents with their teams, and this new experience makes it easier to collaborate on documents in Outlook on the web. The new groups in Outlook on the web file experience is available to Office 365 First Release customers this week. | Additional Resources: User Documentation | Office 365 Groups Tech Community

 

Manage Microsoft Stream: Admin Capabilities

We are pleased to announce the eagerly anticipated update to Microsoft Stream which includes a rich set of IT admin capabilities for managing your company’s video content. Ever since we launched, we were aware that IT admins play a key role in an organization and this is our first step in realizing this capability. These experiences are a direct result of the feedback you all have provided us as you use Microsoft Stream and that helped us guide our designs. In this release, we focus on the 4 core admin experiences – (1) Assigning Stream Admins, (2) Restricting Uploaders in Microsoft Stream, (3) Adding guidelines to Microsoft Stream and Employee Consent and (4) Enabling Stream Admins to manage content.

 

Introducing Outlook Customer Manager—relationships made easy for small businesses

With Office 365, we’re eager to help your small business achieve more. That’s why we are expanding the value of Office 365 to include not only essential productivity and collaboration tools, but also new services to help you run your business. The launch of Bookings earlier this year introduced a new way to schedule appointments with your customers. Now, we are adding a new tool to help you manage your customer relationships more effectively. As a business owner, you know that getting repeat business starts with knowing your customers well, remembering the conversations you’ve had, and following through on their requests. That can be a challenge when you have many customers to keep track of and not enough time in the day. To make it easier for you to track and grow your customer relationships, we are introducing a new Office 365 service called Outlook Customer Manager. Outlook Customer Manager gives you a complete view of your interactions with each customer, helps you track tasks and deals in progress, and surfaces timely reminders. You can stay on top of customer relationships right from Outlook, with no need to install or learn separate tools.

 

New FastTrack offer to migrate SharePoint 2013 customers to Office 365

It’s no secret that the pace of digital transformation is accelerating across all industries. Information Technology (IT) is right at the forefront of this trend. We built Microsoft FastTrack to help IT organizations embrace this change by making it easier for them to move to the cloud and realize their business value faster. Included with Office 365 at no additional charge, Microsoft FastTrack is the Office 365 customer success service for our business customers. To date, Microsoft FastTrack has enabled more than 22,000 customers, migrated 2.45 PB of data and is currently taking on more than 4,000 new customers every month. We have over 800 FastTrack engineers worldwide, available to assist you and your partner in 12 languages, providing best practices, insight and guidance. FastTrack helps IT teams plan, onboard and drive adoption of Office 365 within their organizations—across Exchange, SharePoint, Skype, Yammer and Office apps. To help even more customers, we added migration support for Notes, Gmail, GroupWise, file shares, Box and Google Drive. we are pleased to announce a limited-time offer of migration services from on-premises SharePoint 2013 to Office 365—available at no additional cost to eligible Office 365 customers until March 31, 2017. This offer is available to customers with at least 150 licenses for an eligible service or plan for their Office 365 tenant. For customers who take advantage of this offer, the FastTrack team will assess your SharePoint 2013 environment, and help you build and execute a plan to migrate from your on-premises team sites and MySites to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, respectively. Refer to the offer FAQs for a complete list of items available for migration. To get started, sign in to FastTrack and request the offer from the list of available offers.

 

NOTEWORTHY Summary: Ask Microsoft Anything - Microsoft Teams

On November 10th, 2016, the Microsoft Tech Community and the Microsoft Teams product team hosted an action-packed Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) to answer questions about the newly launched chat-based workspace in Office 365.  This post is a summary of what was discussed during the AMA, including availability, data, external access, feature requests, groups, integration, roadmap and much more! | Additional Resource: Microsoft Teams Customer Success Kit

 

Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner–what to expect

With the release of Microsoft Teams there is a new experience with Microsoft Planner – plans are one of the items that can be added within a team – and you can add multiple plans!  There are a few differences between the way these ‘Team Plans’ behave – but they are real ‘Planner Plans’ and are stored in exactly the same service.  First a little background that will help understand why they behave as they do. With Planner currently there is a one to one relationship between Plans and Groups.  Create a Plan and it creates a Group – Create a Group and it creates a Plan.  Same with Teams – create a Team and it creates a Group – which creates a Plan.  So how do the plans created within Teams fit in to all this?  Let's walk through a scenario…

 

Microsoft Tech Community: Online Interactive Guides

Formerly known as Office Guides for IT Pros, these click-through demos provide a guide for IT Pros and IT enthusiasts through the latest Office features and functionality.  Recent releases include demos on deploying and configuring Office telemetry components, administering Office 365 groups and more.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Cloud at Microsoft - SME Roundtable (October 2016)

Format: Video (59 minutes) | IT Showcase brought together subject matter experts from our Cloud at Microsoft course to answer questions about how Microsoft IT designs, develops, implements, and monitors cloud solutions at Microsoft. In this session, they discuss cloud security, monitoring the cloud, choosing between software as a service and platform as a service, Azure, the Internet of Things, and trends in cloud adoption.