Office 365 Weekly Digest | June 25 - July 1, 2017

Article
07/03/2017

Welcome to the June 25 - July 1, 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 scheduled for the first full week of July are limited, with only an on-demand webcast focused on informing and engaging employees and the standard monthly Azure Active Directory sessions.

Staying on SharePoint for a moment, the new communication sites feature is now rolling out to Office 365 customers using First Release. Additional SharePoint-related blog posts from last week include a new Site usage page, as well as updated usage reports in the admin portal. An important announcement for Skype for Business customers was also made last week - support for Skype for Business hybrid with Modern Authentication. Other posts highlight new Data Loss Prevention alerts for E5 customers and new Word and PowerPoint previewers for OneDrive and SharePoint.

Two Microsoft IT Showcase studies, updates to the IP addresses for Exchange Online Protection, and a Yammer video playlist round out the noteworthy items in this week's post.

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 Azure Active Directory Webinars for July

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from July 11 – July 19, 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.

SharePoint: Inform and engage your employees

When: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 | On-demand webcast—Farren Roper and Mark Kashman, from the SharePoint team, present the “SharePoint: Inform and engage your employees” business webcast. Sign up today to receive details via email. And in advance, read the new, related eBook, “4 secrets to a connected workplace.”

BLOG ROUNDUP

SharePoint communication sites begin rollout to Office 365 customers

During last month’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled SharePoint communication sites—beautiful, dynamic sites that let you reach a broad internal audience, and that look great on the web, in the SharePoint mobile app, on PC and on Mac. We’re excited to announce that communication sites are now rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers, followed by full worldwide rollout to Office 365 customers in the coming months. Communication sites are perfect for internal cross-company campaigns, weekly and monthly reports or status updates, product launches, events and more.

Establishing a new Site usage page in SharePoint Online

We are establishing a new, dedicated page for Site usage in SharePoint Online. This applies to both team sites and upcoming communication sites. Previously, a site owner would see site usage information at the top of the Site contents page. We have moved that analytics portion to a dedicated page. The Site contents page maintains focus on access and management of content (lists, libraries, pages, etc.). And to gain insights into how your site is being used via this new Site usage page. It’s easy to get to the new Site usage page. When you are visiting a team or communication site, click the gear button in the upper-right portion of the site, and select Site contents. Once on the Site contents page, click the Site usage button in the top-right action bar.

Updated usage reports for SharePoint Online

We continue to update the usage reports in the Office 365 admin center to provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365. The existing SharePoint activity report will be enhanced with additional user activity information (page views). The number of Files Shared internally and externally on the same report are being updated to fix a data issue. The existing SharePoint site usage report will be enhanced with activity information from all site types (in addition to groups and team sites) and additional site activity information (page views: number of pages viewed in a site and number of unique pages visited in a site).

What’s new with OneNote in the classroom—LMS integrations, Researcher and more stickers

We are rolling out updates for the OneNote Class Notebook add-in, including new Learning Management System (LMS) and Student Information System (SIS) assignment, grade integration services, new sticker packs, learning tools updates focused on improving reading comprehension, saving a copy of your notebook to your work or personal OneDrive and a redesigned OneNote for Windows 10.

What Happens to My Data in Office 365?

With Microsoft, you are the owner of your customer data. We use your customer data only to provide the services we have agreed upon, and for purposes that are compatible with providing those services. We do not share your data with our advertiser-supported services, nor do we mine it for marketing or advertising. And if you leave our services, we take the necessary steps to ensure your continued ownership of your data. As part of our ongoing transparency efforts, and to help you fully understand how your data is processed and protected in Office 365, we have published a library of whitepapers that describe various architectural and technological aspects of our service. These whitepapers, along with other content, are aligned to things that we do with customer data.

Introducing Support for SfB Hybrid with Modern Authentication

About a year ago Skype for Business started the journey to provide Modern Authentication (MA) for all of our users by providing MA to our online customers. We are happy to announce an important subsequent step in that journey - full client support for a Hybrid SfB configuration with MA enabled for online only. Previously, this was supported for only the windows desktop client. Now, we also support iOS, Android and MAC clients in this configuration. For security conscious IT admins who are moving their on-prem deployments to the cloud, this configuration is a very important one as they can start to use Modern Auth enabled security features such as Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), Cert Based Authentication (CBA), Conditional Access (CA) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) for users who are homed in the cloud. We are actively working on completely the MA journey by providing support for Hybrid with MA turned on for both online and on-prem, and better support for MA on on-prem. Expect to see more news in the coming months... | Skype for Business topologies supported with Modern Authentication

New Office 365 DLP alerts are now available

We’re pleased to announce the availability of new Data Loss Prevention (DLP) alerts in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center. DLP in Office 365 makes it easy for you turn on and customize policies that help you keep your sensitive information secure, and prevent inappropriate sharing with others – either inside or outside your organization. With the new alert feature you can generate a system alert that informs you when a policy violation has occurred, such as when a high volume of sensitive content is shared externally. The alert functionality expands upon the capabilities provided by our email-based Incident Reports to ensure you have all the information you need to start investigating – who shared the content, who they shared it with, what kind of sensitive information was detected, etc. Alerts are available today if you an E5 license, and you can turn it on for any new or existing DLP policy – just select “Send an alert to an admin when a rule match occurs” from within the DLP Policy Advanced edit view.

Announcing new Word and PowerPoint previewers for OneDrive and SharePoint

We are excited to announce a new, streamlined web experience for instantly viewing Word and PowerPoint files in OneDrive and SharePoint document libraries. In April, we announced viewer support for over 250 file types and we are building on top of that momentum with an optimized viewing experience for two of our most popular file types: .docx & .pptx. You will notice a few new things with our viewers. First, they load instantly in line with your files, just like you're used to with popular file formats like PDF, photos, and videos. You'll also notice that we've reduced as much clutter on the screen as possible so you can focus on reading the content. You can still open a document for editing in your browser or in Word and PowerPoint clients. In addition, we have just moved the edit function to an Open button that's more similar to what users see in Word and PowerPoint. Finally, you can also share, rename, download, or use the details pane to see more information about the file you're viewing. Along with these new viewers, there are two more updates to the experience. First, company shareable links for Word and PowerPoint files are now available from this new experience. Second, you will notice that our viewing canvas is getting a fresher look and feel. The lighter colors and more purposeful spacing helps you focus on the content, and aligns our viewers closer to the modern web experiences across the Office 365 experiences.

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

June 30, 2017: Updates for Exchange Online Protection. 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.

Office Videos: Yammer Playlist

A new Yammer playlist is available with 18 videos ranging from improving employee engagement and retention and creating a two-way dialogue with employees to working together as a group in Yammer, managing IT services with users in Yammer and building learning communities online with Yammer. All videos are less than 2 minutes in duration.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Protecting files in the cloud with Azure Information Protection

Published: June 26, 2017 | Microsoft IT migrated from Active Directory Rights Management Services to Azure Rights Management, the protection technology used by Azure Information Protection. Azure Information Protection uses encryption, identity, and authorization policies in Azure Rights Management to help secure files and email in the cloud. It enables protected sharing in Office 365 on a variety of platforms including Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Cutting through the noise of digital transformation

Published: June 28, 2017 | If there’s one thing the digital transformation guarantees, it’s this: speed. Faster improvements, faster deployments, faster change. How do you keep up with this pace and still ensure employees have exceptional experiences? You need fast, quality feedback from passionate early adopters before rolling changes out to the rest of your company, thoughtful and proactive communications that connect with your employees and inspire them to take action, and post-deployment training and materials that make them feel confident and productive. In the materials presented here, we’re going to show you how Microsoft IT built a community of global early adopters who want to give that critical feedback, and introduce you to our robust marketing, communications, and readiness framework and resources that you can use to plan and deliver exciting and informative campaigns.

New Governance Action in Office 365 Advanced Security Management

If you have looked at Advanced Security Management you understand the visibility and control it can provide when it detects activities that you might consider suspicious. When one of these alerts are triggered you have been able to suspend the users account automatically or as part of your investigation activity. We have heard from some organizations that they wanted other options. We are happy to introduce the option of requiring a user to sign-in again. In case of a suspicious user behavior, which may or may not be a compromised account, the new action allows the admin to take an immediate action and ask the user to sign-in again. If the admin thinks the account is compromised this action is best done in combination with the suspend user option so it would lock the attacker out of the account and would force the refresh tokens and the session cookies (in the user’s browser) expire.

Announcing Hybrid Search availability for Office 365 Government community cloud (GCC)

Hybrid search has been widely adopted by SharePoint Online customers. Hybrid search makes finding content easy, wherever the content lives be it in On-premises SharePoint or in SharePoint Online. Office365 customers have been leveraging the benefits of this service for some time, however it was not possible to configure cloud Search service application for Office 365 US Government community cloud. SharePoint engineering has just enabled this capability which means that the cloud Search service application can now be configured for US Government community cloud (GCC) Office 365 tenants. Read on for more details on the configuration guidelines, as well as a link to the updated onboarding script.