Office 365 Weekly Digest | April 30 - May 6, 2017

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Welcome to the April 30 – May 6, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest. Please see below for information on a change regarding the inclusion of Message Center notification details in these weekly posts.

There are no new events, but there are plenty of opportunities to learn more about and even test drive Microsoft Teams. Also, please be sure to check out the Azure Active Directory and FastTrack webinars.

Last week started with a bang, following announcements from the #MicrosoftEDU event on May 2nd. An update on the Focused Inbox rollout for Outlook 2016, guidance on Office 365 connectivity, Skype for Business server requirements for Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN connectivity and the latest post in the Modern Service Management blog series are also included.

Most of the noteworthy items focus on updates - Office 365 URLs and IP addresses, Microsoft Teams, Office 365 overall and Microsoft Stream. Also of note is an announcement regarding support for Alternate Login ID for Skype for Business, as well as information on a script to assist with mailbox recovery in Office 365.

MESSAGE CENTER

As Office 365 increases the relevance of change communications to be more tenant-specific, a broad publication of this information becomes less useful and potentially inaccurate. Please be sure to check the Message Center in your Office 365 tenant for details on changes for awareness or that may require admin attention. Additional resources are included below:

Note: A Message Center weekly digest email is currently available for Office 365 admins set to First Release.

Also see: Send weekly Message Center email to Microsoft Teams

 

UPCOMING EVENTS Outlook Customer Manager: Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)

When: Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 9:00am PT | Join us for an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) session, hosted by the Microsoft Tech Community on May 9, 2017 at 9 a.m. PDT (UTC-8). An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. This live online event will give you the opportunity to connect with members of the product and engineering teams who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Add the event to your calendar and join us in the Outlook Customer Manager AMA group.

 

Explore Microsoft Teams, Windows 10 and Office 365 in an interactive online session

When: Wednesdays May 17, 2017 through May 31, 2017 at 10am PT & 12pm PT | Today’s fast-paced workplace requires you to transition between tasks seamlessly and find things quickly. As work and collaboration evolve to become more web-based and complex, changing professional styles call for tools that provide agility across the full span of a workday. Instead of wasting time searching for your most-used features and content, you need technology that allows you to transition from email to collaboration to project work and back again with ease. Microsoft is now offering hands-on live sessions where you’ll have the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and our hottest new collaboration tool: Microsoft Teams. During these small-group sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. 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 technology, so you can experience first-hand how Microsoft tools can solve your challenges.

 

Azure Active Directory Webinars for May

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled May 16 - 24, 2017 | Sessions include Azure AD Connect Health, Getting Ready for Azure AD, Securing Your Identities with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Accessing Your Organization’s Internal Applications via Azure AD App Proxy and more. 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!

 

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 May 26, 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 Modern Classroom Collaboration with Office 365 for Education

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe that education unlocks potential and that technology can play a decisive role in helping the students of today create the world of tomorrow. At our event in New York City on May 2, 2017, we announced a set of new strategic investments in education, including exciting new innovations in Office 365 for Education, such as Microsoft Teams in Office 365 for Education, and a preview of Office in the Microsoft Store for Education. | Additional Resources: #MicrosoftEDU Event Site

 

Automatically create process diagrams in Visio from Excel data

We’re excited to announce Data Visualizer, a new Visio feature that automatically converts process map data in Excel into data-driven Visio diagrams. This update, which is available to Visio Pro for Office 365 users, helps reduce manual steps while giving business analysts even more ways to create process diagrams in Visio. You can do this by either using a premade Excel template or an existing spreadsheet of your own design. The premade templates—there’s one for basic and one for cross-functional flowcharts—provide a sample mapping table to populate with diagram metadata. The table includes predefined columns for process step number, description, dependencies, owner, function, phase and more. You can also customize the table with your own columns to meet specific business requirements. Once the table is populated, Visio’s wizard helps you complete the remaining steps to transform your Excel data into a Visio process diagram. If you customize the premade template or create one of your own, the wizard helps you map certain flowchart parts, like swim lanes and connectors. The resulting diagram is linked to the Excel table, so if the underlying process data is modified, the diagram updates accordingly. Likewise, shape modifications in Visio are preserved if the Excel data changes.

 

Update on Focused Inbox rollout for Outlook 2016 for Windows users

Focused Inbox is coming to an Outlook near you! Here is an update on our status for Outlook 2016 for Windows. If you want to see our latest for other platforms, see our blog post, as these details haven’t changed. Note: we have provided admins the ability to control the rollout of Focused Inbox in their organizations. For more details, read our blog post on admin controls. As a reminder, there is a client and service side component required for Focused Inbox to appear in Outlook. The user’s mailbox in Office 365 must receive a service side update to be Focused Inbox enabled. Secondly, the user must have a build of Outlook that includes the client-side updates necessary for Focused Inbox to appear. We deployed to 100% of First Release mailboxes and 25% of Standard Release. We are continuing rollout to the rest of Standard Release and expect 3-5 more weeks for complete deployment.

 

Office 365 Connectivity Guidance: Part 2 - Localized network egress as close to the user as possible

This is the second post in a blog series that aims at defining some standard connectivity principles to Office 365, with the goal to achieve the 'north star' of optimal, flexible and abstract connectivity to Microsoft cloud services. The first post detailed optimized connectivity to Microsoft's global network and this post will look at localized network egress as close to the user as possible, so they can take full advantage of Microsoft's global network. Also be sure to check out Part 3 - Unhindered access to the endpoints required and Part 4 - Local DNS resolution.

 

Skype for Business Server requirements for Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN connectivity

Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN connectivity allows companies to leverage their existing Skype for Business Server infrastructure to home users in Skype for Business Online while using their local PSTN breakout. Recently we received several questions around the requirements for Skype for Business Server versions. While this is documented on TechNet in Prerequisites for using Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN connectivity, we want to use this article to highlight the requirements regarding server versions. Other requirements are not discussed in this blog article but can be found in the same TechNet article. Please note that this blog article is specific to leverage Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN connectivity. If you want to enable “just” hybrid without Cloud PBX, the requirements are not as strict. | Related: SfB Broadcast Episode 41 - Cloud PBX - Organizational Auto Attendant and Call Queues

 

Modern Service Management Blog Series Part 5: Evolving IT for Cloud Productivity Services

In this installment of the blog series, we will dive into the "Business Consumption and Productivity" topic.  The whole point of the "Business Consumption and Productivity"? category is to focus on the higher-order business projects for whatever business you are in. If you are in the cookie-making business, then the focus should be on making cookies. The opportunity is to use Office 365 to drive productivity for your cookie-making users, to increase market share of your cookie business, or to reduce costs of producing or selling your cookies. This category is about the business rather than about IT. We all want to evolve IT to be more about driving those business-improvement projects. However, in order for IT to help drive those programs with (and for) the business, we need to make sure that the IT Pros and the IT organization are optimized (and are excited) to drive the business improvements. We all need to look at the opportunities to do new things by using the features and the data provided by the Office 365 service to drive business value rather than looking at what we will no longer do or what we will do differently. I always say that none of us got into IT so we could manually patch servers on the weekends, and none of us dreamed about sitting on outage bridges in the middle of the night. On the contrary, most of us got into IT so we could drive cool innovation and cool outcomes with innovative use of technology. I like the idea of using Office 365 as a conduit to get back to our dreams of changing the business/world for the better using technology.

 

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

May 5, 2017: Updates for Microsoft Teams, Office Online 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.

 

Video: Office 365 Update for May 2017

Format: Video (10 minutes) | Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, including Microsoft To-Do, Sway updates, Office 365 Groups, Groups in Outlook, Reporting APIs and more! The course transcript, complete with links to additional information on everything covered, is available at https://aka.ms/o365update-transcripts. | Additional Resource: Microsoft Mechanics – Collaboration updates across Office apps

 

Updates to Microsoft Teams - May 3, 2017

The following features were added or enhanced in the latest release of Microsoft Teams: Trello tab - This new tab lets your team work more collaboratively and get more done. You'll be able to pin your Trello boards so you can manage your lists and cards right from Microsoft Teams. This gives you some more flexibility when it comes to staying organized and prioritizing your projects. To add a Trello tab, click the + next to your existing tabs at the top of a channel.

 

Announcing Support for Alternate Login ID for Skype for Business

Please note that it is now possible to configure an alternate login ID (in some circumstances) for Skype for Business/Lync. This will most likely be of interest in cases where end users have email or SIP addresses that differ from their UPN and/or a UPN that is non-routable (jdoe@contoso.local). You can read full requirements and other important technical details in Configuring Alternate Login ID.

 

Scripting a mailbox recovery

The Office 365 service provides a couple of methods to recover mailboxes that were deleted (by mistake or not), but some Exchange Online administrators are struggling or simply prefer a script. This small script is the first bit from a larger project. The final goal is to have a script that can enable administrators to recover soft deleted mailboxes while being in a hybrid environment. As you can imagine, a hybrid environment is a very complex one and recovering a mailbox living in such a complex configuration can become difficult to put into a script, so this first part will only recover mailboxes for Cloud only Customers. Additionally, the script is not intended to be used for archive mailboxes as well. This post explains the details of the script logic and the prerequisites needed for it to run.

 

Microsoft Stream: Downloading original videos

Based on your great feedback, we have added the capability to download the original video file from any videos you have uploaded! If you are the owner of a video, you will see the new “Download Original Video” option in the action menu for your video. Furthermore, you can download the video from the Edit Video page. Added bonus: this can help you find the original video to send over to our Support team in order to get help diagnosing any issues you may be experiencing with a given video!