Office 365 Weekly Digest | June 4 - 10, 2017

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Welcome to the June 4 - 10, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest. Please see below for a reminder on a change regarding the inclusion of Message Center notification details in these weekly posts.

Events this week include an option to livestream the keynotes and several major sessions from the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, happening June 12 - 13. This week's Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) session has the Skype for Business team discussing the Skype Operations Framework. Also, a reminder that the next Modern Workplace episode, "GDPR: What you need to know" takes place on Tuesday, June 13th.

New and updated features were the theme for last week's blog posts including updates for the Outlook app, Microsoft Flow, Office 365 Groups, MyAnalytics, Skype for Business, Teams and Yammer.

Noteworthy items include updated Office 365 URLs and IP addresses, the June 2017 Office 365 Update video, the ability to export the Office 365 Roadmap information to Excel, several new infographics, a free eBook, and a story about Microsoft's cloud security and the whopping 1.5 million attempts per day to compromise its systems.

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 Microsoft Data Insights Summit - Live from Seattle!

When: June 12 - 13, 2017 | Can't make it to the Microsoft Data Insights Summit? We’ll bring the conference to you! We’re livestreaming our three keynotes and nine of our most popular breakout sessions, so you can learn alongside attendees. As Microsoft’s conference for business analysts, the Microsoft Data Insights Summit is filled with strong technical content to help you build a data culture at your organization. The full livestream schedule is included at the link above. Mark your calendar and get ready to transform the way you work!

 

Azure Active Directory Webinars for May - June

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled through June 15, 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.

 

Register for “GDPR: What you need to know” on Modern Workplace

When: Tuesday, June 13, 2017 at 8:00am PT | Join us for the next episode of Modern Workplace, “GDPR: What you need to know,” airing June 13, 2017 at 8 a.m. PDT / 4 p.m. BST. We’ll take a closer look at the global impact of this all-encompassing privacy law. Brendon Lynch, chief privacy officer for Microsoft, will share his tips on how to move your organization toward GDPR compliance. Karen Lawrence Öqvist, GDPR expert and CEO for Privasee, will offer an EU perspective on this new law and share what an organization needs to do to be prepared. Plus, we’ll showcase a hands-on demo of powerful security and privacy solutions—such as Office 365 Advanced Data Governance and Microsoft Azure Information Protection—which can help your organizations journey to compliance with the GDPR. Register now!

 

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

When: Wednesdays June 14, 2017 through June 21, 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.

 

Skype Operations Framework: Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)

When: Thursday, June 15, 2017 at 9:00am PT | Please join the Skype for Business product team for an “Ask Microsoft Anything” (AMA) on Thursday, June 15, 2017 from 9am to 10am PST. An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. This AMA gives you the opportunity to connect with the Skype for Business team who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback regarding Skype Operations Framework (SOF). Add the event to your calendar and join us in the Skype for Business AMA group. We hope to see you there!

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from June 5 – June 23, 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 Improving People in Outlook for iOS and Android

Outlook for iOS and Android is on a mission to help you accomplish more with your email and calendar while on the go. With our latest release, we’re addressing one of our most highly requested features with improvements to our People experience. You will now have the ability to add and edit contacts right from Outlook on iOS, coming soon on Android. We’ve also completely redesigned the contact card to show more details—including latest conversations and shared files—and enabled easier calling and messaging with your contacts.

 

Get notified about flow failures, customize columns for tables, and more!

Lots of new features in Microsoft Flow including automatically sending an email when a flow fails, customizing tables using the new Select action, a connector for Microsoft Forms and an easier way to fill out the headers of an HTTP action.

 

New Release: Add Mail Contact as Guest available to First Release

We are happy to announce that now you can add Mail Contacts as guests in O365 Groups. This feature is fully deployed to First Release tenants & associated with Office 365 Roadmap ID 15043. This was top requested feature in Guest Access. If tenant admins have enabled guest access, they don't need to do anything; End users will be able to add mail contacts just like they have been able to add guests before. More details are available at https://aka.ms/mailcntrelease.

 

Update on Focused Inbox rollout for Outlook 2016 for Windows

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've Been Listening—Updates to Your Yammer Notifications

Based on ongoing research, we’re excited to announce some changes to Yammer group notifications that will help users stay on top of their groups, get timely answers to questions, and discover more interesting content across the network. The changes include a move away from the old, weekly digest of group content to a daily digest which will have more fresh content, a new weekly email that captures trending content from across the entire organization and elimination of the "Email Me" feature and addition of a "Copy to Clipboard" to get the URL for a Yammer thread.

 

Microsoft Teams: New Feature - Integrate PowerApps as a Tab

Microsoft is pleased to announce that you can embed PowerApps as a tab in a channel in Microsoft Teams. Now you can bring the no-code custom app experience right into your Teams workspace to elevate your team productivity. PowerApps gives you the ability to quickly build apps that suit your needs - building on skills you already have without the need to write any code. You can create apps that connect to data on the cloud or on-premises. You can also share your apps with your co-workers across the web, and mobile devices. Since PowerApps is included in most Office 365 plans, you can get started with it today. PowerApps can help business users extend the data that they use everyday, to automate processes or just make the data more actionable.

 

Sharing is now available in MyAnalytics!

We are excited to announce that sharing is now available within MyAnalytics! Have you ever tried to do something new? Most of us have been there.. training for a marathon, a new approach to your work, or a new-found commitment to regular practice of a favorite hobby? We know that when you share your new goal with others you are much more likely to stick with it. Sharing your analytics to create better work habits works the same way. You can now select a portion, summary or full overview of your personal productivity insights from MyAnalytics and share it with others in your organization. Whether a peer, mentor or manager – sharing can help drive change with others, help you get support for your goals, or drive critical conversations around priorities, load balancing and work life balance.

 

Skype for Business: New PSTN Conferencing Enhancement Features

We are happy to announce that we are opening a preview for the following feature enhancement for PSTN Conferencing for Skype for Business Online: providing administrators with additional user-level controls for toll-free and dial-out destinations for Skype for Business meetings. These two features can be leveraged only by tenants that are enabled for PSTN Consumption billing. We invite customers to join the preview of these two services before general availability. Please go to www.skypepreview.com and sign-up for the PSTN Conferencing Feature Enhancements Preview Program and learn more.

 

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

June 5, 2017: Updates for Microsoft Teams and Remote Connectivity Analyzer. 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 June 2017

Format: Video (11 minutes) | Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, including OneNote, Office 365 ProPlus, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Yammer and the Power BI Adoption content pack for Office 365. The course transcript, complete with links to additional information on everything covered, is available at https://aka.ms/o365update-transcripts.

 

Brand New Office 365 Roadmap Capability

The Office 365 Roadmap website now allows an export to Excel for download. Each item also includes "First Added" and "Last Modified" dates. With a simple download and filter, you can easily determine which features are new and which ones have been updated since the last time you reviewed. Also, as an Excel file, it can be easily imported into other systems for additional actions.

 

Switch to Office 365 Guides

Moving from Google G Suite to Office 365 or from Box to OneDrive for Business? Use one of these guides to help you quickly find your way around Office 365 for business. Each guide provides useful tips, shortcuts, and a list of differences between the products to get you started. | Related: Free webcast – Migrating to Office 365 from Google

 

Office 365 Infographics and eBook

A variety of Office 365 related infographics were released last week, as well as a free eBook on how companies have reinvented their workplace culture to compete in an information-intensive, interconnected world, where innovation happens in real-time, around the clock, across time zones and geographies. Check them out at the links below!

 

Inside the high-tech, high-stakes race to keep the cloud secure

At any point in time on any day of the week, Microsoft’s cloud computing operations are under attack: The company detects a whopping 1.5 million attempts a day to compromise its systems. Microsoft isn’t just fending off those attacks. It’s also learning from them. All those foiled attacks, along with data about the hundreds of billions of emails and other pieces of information that flow to and from Microsoft’s cloud computing data centers, are constantly being fed into the company’s intelligent security graph. It’s a massive web of data that can be used to connect the dots between an email phishing scam out of Nigeria and a denial-of-service attack out of Eastern Europe, thwarting one attack for one customer and applying that knowledge to every customer using products including the company’s Azure computing platform, Windows 10 operating system or Office 365 productivity service.

 

Azure AD Conditional Access now supports Microsoft Teams & the Azure Portal

We're excited to share that Microsoft Teams and Azure portal now support Azure AD Conditional Access. Till now, the only way to secure access to Azure portal was to require Multi-Factor Authentication all the time for an administrative account. Leveraging the power of Conditional Access, customers can allow access to Azure portal only under certain conditions (sign-in risk, location, device) and from trusted devices. And making news is also Microsoft Teams, one of the newest members of the Office 365 family, which is now available as its own Cloud app for IT admins to configure Conditional Access policies on. This allows organizations to secure the data in Teams and prevent leakage on untrusted devices. The policy applies to Teams app on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It’s important to note that Conditional Access policies created for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online cloud apps also affect Microsoft Teams as the Teams clients rely heavily on these services for core productivity scenarios such as meetings, calendars and files.