Office 365 Weekly Digest | March 26 - April 1, 2017

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Welcome to the March 26 - April 1, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest. March is not going out quietly with twelve Message Center notifications last week!  New and updated features make up the majority of notifications, but there are a few that admins will want to review and take action, if required.  The event momentum from March rolls into April with several Teams focused opportunities, as well as options for Skype for Business, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. "What's new?" was the theme for blogs last week, with information on updates and enhancements for Office 365, Skype for Business and Office 365 administration. Numerous URL/IP address updates and a couple of Microsoft IT Showcase technical case studies round out this week's post.

MESSAGE CENTER

Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants. The Message Center ID for notifications could also be slightly different than those posted in your tenant.

 

New Feature: Skype for Business Online Voicemail Transcription

MC97355 | Posted: March 27, 2017 | Expires: April 26, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Roadmap ID: 55889 | Skype for Business Online Voicemail Transcription is a new Office 365 feature. This feature will be released to all customers on March 31, 2017. Voicemail Transcription will be enabled by default for all customers. Once it is released, users will receive a transcription of their voicemails in the email body. You can disable this feature at any time from your configuration. You might consider updating your user training and notifying your helpdesk. Please visit Set up Cloud PBX voicemail – Admin Help to learn more. | Additional Resources: Skype Academy – Voicemail Transcript

 

Updated Feature: Office 365 community forum selections

MC97356 | Posted: March 27, 2017 | Expires: April 10, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | On April 3, 2017, we’re updating the “Office 365 for Admins” forum selections to make it easier for you to find solutions and submit questions. These selections align with the Admin Support Portal and include categories such as Deploy Office 365, Upgrade to Office 365, Security and Compliance, Identity Management and more. The forum will be online during the changes, but you may notice some existing threads move to the new categories. Since some of the existing threads will move to the new categories, we recommend that you bookmark any threads that you’d like to read later. Note that you can always find the discussions that you’ve started under your community profile, and you can also search for other threads in the community. Please submit your feedback to let us know your thoughts. While we won’t be able to reply to all questions and comments, we definitely read all of them to help us improve the community. The community is located at https://answers.microsoft.com/msoffice.

 

New Feature: Microsoft Bookings

MC97357 | Posted: March 27, 2017 | Expires: April 23, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Roadmap ID: 27953 | Microsoft Bookings is now available to all Office 365 Business Premium customers. All users in a Business Premium tenant will see Bookings in the App Launcher. Users can now manage customer appointments with Bookings by publishing a self-service page online or use it to manually enter service appointments. Every user in a Business Premium account can create a Booking calendar, but only users added to that calendar can see and manage it. Additional information is available in our recent blog post, New reasons to make Microsoft Bookings the go-to scheduling software for your business.

 

New Feature: Recover deleted Office 365 Group via PowerShell

MC97406 | Posted: March 28, 2017 | Expires: April 26, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Roadmap ID: 72284 | Recover deleted Office 365 Group via PowerShell is a new Office 365 feature. You’ll begin seeing this new feature on March 28, 2017. If you've deleted an Office 365 group, it's now retained by default for a period of 30 days. Within that period, you can now restore the group and its associated apps and data via a new PowerShell cmdlet, with details at Restore a deleted Office 365 Group. | Related: Microsoft Planner: Now you can recover deleted Plans and Groups

 

Reminder: SharePoint Online Public Websites are going away

MC97418 | Posted: March 28, 2017 | Expires: October 31, 2017 | Urgency: High | Category: Prevent or Fix Issues | Action: Required by April 30, 2017 at 5:59PM UTC | As we originally communicated in March 2015, new Office 365 subscription plans no longer include the SharePoint Online public website feature. We notified all Office 365 customers that currently use this feature that they could continue using this feature for a minimum of two years. Beginning May 1, 2017, existing SharePoint Online organizations will no longer have access to the public website feature. Then, on September 1, 2017, we will be deleting the public site collection in SharePoint Online. Beginning May 1, 2017, people outside your organization will no longer have access to your public facing website.  People inside your organization may be required to login to view your website. On September 1, 2017, when we delete the public site collection in SharePoint Online, you will no longer have access to the content, images, pages or any other files that reside on your public website. You are receiving this message because our reporting indicates your organization has the SharePoint Online public website feature enabled. Alternative public website solutions from industry leaders are now available, and you should begin investigating these alternatives to integrate your public presence within the Office 365 environment.  Do this prior to May 1, 2017. Before September 1, 2017, you should make a backup copy of all your public website content, images, pages and files, so you don’t lose them permanently. If you need more time to move your public website, you have a one-time postponement option for up to one year. You must select the postpone option by May 1, 2017. | Information about changes to the SharePoint Online Public Websites feature in Office 365

 

New Feature: Focused Inbox

MC97483 | Posted: March 29, 2017 | Expires: May 31, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Roadmap ID: 41638 | Focused Inbox is a new feature coming to Office 365. Focused Inbox helps you take control of your inbox and focus on the emails you need to act on right away. This is coming to all versions of Outlook to give you one consistent view of the important items in your inbox. Moreover, this feature comes with administrator controls. Focused Inbox is continuing to roll out to all Office 365 users. All First Release users are now Focused Inbox enabled. We will begin rolling it out to Standard Release, the first week of April, and deployment will complete in 6-8 weeks. In addition to getting the Office 365 service-side update, users must be using a build of Outlook that includes the client-side updates necessary for Focused Inbox to appear. We have provided robust controls to control on how Focused Inbox is rolled out in your organization, and to enable or disable this feature for your users. These controls can ensure you have full control over your organizations experience, and you have time to properly prepare communications and training. These controls are available to all customers, even if your users do not yet have Focused Inbox. If you are looking forward to Focused Inbox, there is no action you need to take. Get yourself familiar with Focused Inbox, update your user training, and notify your helpdesk, as needed. If you would like more control on how Focused Inbox is rolled out in your organization, please visit Managing Focused Inbox in Office 365 and Outlook to learn more about the feature, supported clients, and administrative controls.

 

Updated Feature: Version History experience in OneDrive for Business

MC97509 | Posted: March 29, 2017 | Expires: April 28, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | We’re updating Version History web user experience on OneDrive for Business. You’ll begin seeing this change over the coming weeks. We are updating the visuals of Version History to use the modern pane-based experience. We have also cleared up the interaction models to align with the modern user experience (which users are already accustomed to) in the rest of the suite. There are several small bug fixes and performance improvements in the experience. This experience is only available for users taking advantage of the Modern UX. We'll be gradually rolling this out to customers in early April, and the rollout will be completed by the end of April. | Restore a previous version of a document in OneDrive for Business

 

Updated Feature: New export capabilities in usage reports in the Office 365 admin center

MC97512 | Posted: March 29, 2017 | Expires: April 29, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Roadmap ID: 80029 | We’re adding new export capabilities to the usage reports in the Office 365 admin center. We've begun rolling this out and the rollout will be completed in the following weeks. Admins can now export the data from the organization-wide activity charts at the top of each usage report. The data for the selected time period will be exported into an Excel .csv file by clicking or tapping the export link. This will enable Admins to further analyze data, or to easily share the chart data with others. To access the reports please click “Usage reports” from the Admin Center homepage, then click on the export button at the top of the graph to download the data. Additional information is available at Activity Reports in the Office 365 admin center.

 

Planned Capacity Balancing Maintenance

MC97605 | Posted: March 30, 2017 | Expires: May 29, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | We have maintenance planned for SharePoint Online. In order to increase datacenter capacity, we'll be conducting planned balancing operations during the month of April. During this scheduled maintenance, your SharePoint content will be read-only for up to 60 minutes during off-peak hours. No action is required on your part.

 

Updated Feature: Skype for Business on Mac

MC97654 | Posted: March 31, 2017 | Expires: April 30, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Roadmap ID: 68512 | We’re releasing an update for all Skype for Business on Mac clients. We've begun rolling this out, and the rollout will be completed in the following weeks. The update includes several bug fixes as well as new enhancements for contact management, USB Devices, and delegation. We recommend this update for all Mac users. For more details, please visit What’s new in Skype for Business 2016 for Mac. | Additional Resources: Microsoft Tech Community: Skype for Business on Mac releases 4th update | Skype for Business on Mac: March 2017 readiness update

 

New Feature: Public preview of Microsoft Graph Reporting APIs

MC97665 | Posted: March 31, 2017 | Expires: October 31, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Required by September 30, 2017 at 5:59PM UTC | The usage reports in the admin center enable admins to understand usage of the various services within Office 365. Today we are announcing the public preview of the Microsoft Graph reporting APIs that enables you to retrieve the usage data programmatically. Using this API, you can retrieve the data available in the usage reports including organization level summaries per service as well as entity level (user, sites, accounts) detail usage information for different reporting periods of last 7/30/90/180 days. With this announcement, we’re also providing notice to the removal of the following existing APIs available within the Office365 Reporting Web Service: ConnectionbyClientType, ConnectionbyClientTypeDetail, CsActiveUser, CsAVConferenceTime, CsP2PAVTime, CsConference, CsP2PSession, GroupActivity, MailboxActivity, MailboxUsage, MailboxUsageDetail, StaleMailbox, StaleMailboxDetail. We will be removing these APIs on October 1 ,2017. Any user with global admin or product admin rights (Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint) can retrieve data through these APIs. When we remove the existing API’s, on October 1, your apps may be impacted. Please try out the new Microsoft Graph reporting APIs and submit feature requests by asking or voting on an idea on UserVoice. Please submit questions by posting them on Stack Overflow and tagging them with 'microsoftgraph'. If you are currently using APIs from the Office 365 Reporting Web Service that are going to be replaced by the new API’s, you should start planning the migration of any subsystems within your organization. For more details, please see the What’s new in Office 365 administration—public preview of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs post in the Blog Roundup section below.

 

Updated Feature: Manage Permissions in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online

MC97707 | Posted: March 31, 2017 | Expires: April 30, 2017 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | We’re updating the Manage Permissions pane in the Details Panel for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online to help users better understand and manage who has access to their content. You’ll begin seeing this change on March 31, 2017. When users are sent a sharing link (like an anonymous access link or an internal link), the recipient's access is tied directly to the link. This means that these users' permissions cannot be managed independently, nor can they be removed without removing the link as a whole. With this change, we will now show these users underneath the link, instead of as a separate entity. This should make it more clear which users are accessing via link, and which users have direct permission. Please visit Stop sharing OneDrive files or folders or change permissions for additional information.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS Azure Active Directory Webinars for April

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled April 4 - 20, 2017 | New for April – Azure AD Connect Health!  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: Getting Ready for Azure AD, Streamlining Password Management, Securing Your Identities with Multi-Factor Authentication, Managing Enterprise Applications and Accessing Your Organization’s Internal Apps. Each 1-hour or 75-minute webinar 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 include an anonymous Q&A session with our Engineering Team. So, come with your questions!  Capacity is limited. Sign up for one or all of the sessions today!  Note: There are also some sessions available on-demand.

 

Introducing Microsoft Teams: Smart Collaboration in Office 365

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled through May 18, 2017 | Note: These sessions are being held at several locations across the United States | Microsoft Teams has arrived to Office 365, bringing a chat-based workspace to your fingertips. See how Microsoft Teams can pull together everything you need to collaborate - schedule and conduct meetings, share notes and files, have threaded conversations - all in one place. Sessions are 4 hours in length. Availability is limited, so don't delay! Sign up and see the power of Microsoft Teams!

 

Skype Academy: What's new in Skype Operations Framework (SOF) - April 2017 edition

When: Tuesday, April 4, 2017 at 8:00am PT | Audience: CTOs, Architects, partner portfolio leads | Level: 200 | Customer Journey: Get Deployed, Cloud Migration | The Skype Operations Framework (SOF) team is excited to announce that, in April 2017, we will release the latest update for Skype Operations Framework. Together with the release of our new assets, we will host a webcast to talk about all the changes since our previous release – register on Skype Academy now! This overview session covers what’s new in SOF since January 2017. This session introduces both new and updated assets and training to keep you informed of progress.

 

Office 365 live demo series: Work efficiently with SharePoint and OneDrive for Business

When: Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 9:00am PT | Take your productivity to the next level and become a file, sync and share Office all-star with OneDrive for Business Next Generation Synchronization and SharePoint 2016’s wide array of collaboration tools. This demo will help: (1) Find out when and why to use a particular tool for file sharing, storage and collaboration, (2) see how OneDrive for Business can help you get the most out of personal file storage, (3) discover how to use some of the newest features to securely store, edit and share your documents and (4) learn how to make professional team sites in minutes. Can’t make the scheduled live session? All webinars are available on demand. Registration is required.

 

Online Customer Immersion Experience: Get more done faster with Microsoft Teams

When: Wednesdays through April 5, 2017 at 10:00am PT & 12:00pm PT | Around the world teamwork is on the rise. Research suggests employees now work on nearly double the number of teams than they did just five years ago. This means more than ever people are reliant on their peers to help get things done. But a “one size fits all” approach does not work when it comes to group collaboration—different tools appeal to different groups and address unique needs. Join Microsoft to test drive Office 365 and our hottest new collaboration tool: Microsoft Teams. Each 90-minute session starts with an online business roundtable, discussing your biggest business challenges with a trained facilitator and then transitions into a live environment in the cloud.  You will receive 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. Space is limited: each is session is only open to 12 participants.  Reserve your seat now.

 

Announcing the SharePoint Virtual Summit

When: Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 10:00am PT | A connected workplace empowers you to securely connect to the people and content you need, to transform business process, to inform and engage your employees and to harness the collective knowledge of your organization. At this year’s SharePoint Virtual Summit—a free, online event on May 16, 2017—you’ll learn how to create a connected workplace in Office 365 with OneDrive and SharePoint and integrated with Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Windows, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper will unveil the latest product innovations and roadmap. You’ll also hear from industry-leading customers on how they are leveraging these technologies as part of their digital transformation. Jeff will be joined by Microsoft corporate vice presidents James Phillips and Chuck Friedman to discuss how Office 365, connected with Windows and Azure, is reinventing productivity for you, your teams and your organization. We hope you’ll join us at this year’s event, so register now to save your space on May 16, 2017.

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled through April 27, 2017 | 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 New to Office 365 in March—co-authoring in Excel and more

Office 365 provides the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration between individuals, teams and entire organizations. Updates this month make the experience even better with co-authoring in Excel, the general availability of Microsoft Teams and more. We’ll also be announcing the latest roadmap for SharePoint and OneDrive at the SharePoint Virtual Summit on May 16th. Read on for the details. Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office 2016 | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office on Android Phones and Tablets.

 

What’s new in Office 365 administration—public preview of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs

Since March 2016, the usage reports in the Office 365 admin center have been providing admins with insights about how their users adopt and use Office 365. We’re pleased to announce the public preview of the new Microsoft Graph reporting APIs, enabling customers to programmatically access the data available within the usage reports. The post also includes information on additional Office 365 administration updates for March including additional mailbox settings in the admin center, Dynamics 365 (online) admin role, a new employee quick start guide, managing Microsoft Teams in the Office 365 admin center and many more!

 

Skype for Business drives digital transformation

As communication and collaboration become increasingly vital to the way work gets done, customers are turning to Skype for Business in Office 365 for all of their conferencing and calling needs. People around the globe conduct over one billion meetings per year on the Skype network, and usage of Skype for Business Online has doubled in the last year. At the annual unified communications industry conference Enterprise Connect, we were pleased to announce several new enhancements and partner solutions for Skype for Business in Office 365, which advance our goal of putting communication at the heart of productivity with Skype: (1) Availability of Auto Attendant and Call Queues, (2) Preview of the new Skype for Business Call Analytics dashboard, (3) New meeting room solutions from our partners, and (4) Availability of Enghouse Interactive’s TouchPoint Attendant, the first attendant console for Skype for Business Online. | Additional Resources: Skype Academy – Call Queues and Auto Attendant Training | Microsoft IT Showcase: Driving Skype for Business adoption through service improvements

 

Sent Items behavior control comes to Exchange Online user mailboxes

It has been a while since we blogged about the ability to control the behavior of Sent Items for shared mailboxes when users either send as or on behalf of shared mailboxes. We are glad to share with you that this feature is currently rolling out for User mailboxes also! We have heard this request more than once, and now we are rolling it out to an Exchange Online mailbox near you! The configuration and behavior of the feature is the same as for the shared mailbox. Note, you can use the Office 365 Portal to configure this for shared mailboxes, but to configure user mailboxes, you’ll need to use PowerShell (the team would like to hear if you feel it should be in the Portal too! ). For various other details of behavior please see the shared mailbox post.

 

Modern Service Management Blog Series Part 2: Monitoring and Major Incident Management

In the initial blog post in this series, we framed the Office 365 Service Management discussion into five categories, with the first being Monitoring and Major Incident Management - knowing if your users are impacted (regardless of root cause) and ensuring that the right things happen without heroics when users are impacted. This blog post focuses on Monitoring and Major Incident Management for Office 365 in the following areas: (1) Major Incident Management Scenarios and Portal Specificity, (2) Monitoring Scenarios, (3) Balancing Investment and Reward, and (4) What should you go do? For more thoughts on overarching cloud monitoring, read the eleven posts in this blog series that Microsoft wrote for ITIL.

 

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

March 31, 2017: Updates for Exchange Online, Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Teams, Office 365 portal and shared, and Skype for Business Online. Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here. | Additional Resources: Managing Office 365 Endpoints, Content Delivery Networks and Client Connectivity.

 

Bring a Plan into Microsoft Teams

This video demos how you can import an existing Plan into Microsoft Teams. Note: In order to import a plan, you must create a Team from an existing Office 365 Group.

 

Infographic: Comprehensive protection of Office 365 data on any device with EMS

Published: March 27, 2017 | See how Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) can provide comprehensive protection of your company's Office 365 data on any device. Learn more about how EMS protects access on devices, selectively wipes company data while leaving personal data intact, provides conditional access, and protects data at the app and file level.

 

Shipped to First Release: Flow integration for SharePoint document libraries

On March 28, 2017, we shipped Flow integration for SharePoint document libraries as well as the ability to launch flows interactively to our First Release users. If you are a First Release user, or have your tenant marked as a First Release tenant, you should see a Flow button in the command bar of your modern document libraries. This integration helps your users automate repetitive tasks such as moving an email attachment into a document library folder, sending a selected item for feedback, posting to Yammer, or integrating files with other Microsoft or third-party services that Flow can access.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Transforming the Microsoft boardroom with Windows 10 and Office 365

Format: Technical Case Study | Published: March 28, 2017 | Microsoft products make board meetings at Microsoft successful. Between Outlook scheduling, OneNote collaboration tools, and secure storage for agenda content in SharePoint Online, the Office of the Corporate Secretary efficiently organizes meetings. Quality and feature updates in Windows 10 make it easy for Executive Support Services to keep executives’ devices up to date. Surface Hub with Windows 10, apps like Whiteboard and Skype for Business, and integrated AV technologies make a flexible, easy-to-manage collaboration workspace.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Using Azure AD Privileged Identity Management for elevated access

Format: Technical Case Study | Published: March 28, 2017 | Microsoft IT uses Azure Active Directory (AD) Privileged Identity Management (PIM) to manage elevated access for users who have privileged roles for Azure services. We manage privileged identities for on premises and Azure services—we process requests for elevated access and help mitigate risks that elevated access can introduce. With Azure AD PIM, we can implement just-in-time access for privileged roles in Azure and view audit logs. Before Azure AD PIM, privileged roles in Azure were always elevated.