Office 365 Weekly Digest | July 9 - 15, 2017

Welcome to the July 9 - 15, 2017 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest. Please see this page for details on a change regarding the inclusion of Message Center notification details in these weekly posts.

A new addition to the upcoming events is an opportunity for educators to attend a Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Academy session in various locations throughout the United States. The first session is on July 21st in San Antonio, TX, followed by a second session in San Diego, CA on July 27th.

The unveiling of Microsoft 365 at Inspire conference was last week's top highlight. Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security to deliver a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees. Three new apps were also announced, providing even more value to Office 365 Business Premium customers. This week's digest also has details on new intelligent search capabilities in OneDrive for Business, updates to the Outlook app on Android and iOS, as well as several new features in Microsoft Flow.

The monthly video update for July from Jim Naroski, a huge collection of free Microsoft eBooks, several Microsoft IT Showcase resources including four Skype for Business studies and a video on managing and governing SharePoint in Office 365 wrap up this week's digest.

 


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.”

 

Free Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Teacher Academy

When: July 21, 2017 through September 29, 2017 at various US locations | Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Trainers are leading fun, professional development sessions this summer and they’re coming to a city near you. Join us for these BYOD workshops showcasing Microsoft’s hottest tools and resources for K-12 teachers, built to empower students to achieve more. Attendees will get to explore tools such as Microsoft Teams, Office Online, OneNote Class Notebooks, Microsoft Forms and Sway, and learn how technology can provide their students with learning experiences beyond the four walls of their classroom, thanks to Skype in the Classroom and the Microsoft Educator Community. Register today and join us at an upcoming Teacher Academy near you!

 


BLOG ROUNDUP

 

Introducing Microsoft 365

Last week at Inspire, Satya Nadella unveiled Microsoft 365, which brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, delivering a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees. It represents a fundamental shift in how we will design, build and go to market to address our customers’ needs for a modern workplace. To address the commercial needs from the largest enterprise to the smallest business, we are introducing Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business. Microsoft 365 Enterprise is designed for large organizations and integrates Office 365 Enterprise, Windows 10 Enterprise and Enterprise Mobility + Security to empower employees to be creative and work together, securely. Microsoft 365 Business is designed for small- to medium-sized businesses with up to 300 users and integrates Office 365 Business Premium with tailored security and management features from Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security. It offers services to empower employees, safeguard the business and simplify IT management.

 

New business apps in Office 365 Business Premium help you run and grow your small business

To make Office 365 more valuable for your small business, we are announcing three new applications coming to Office 365 Business Premium: (1) Microsoft Connections—A simple-to-use email marketing service, (2) Microsoft Listings—An easy way to publish your business information on top sites, and (3) Microsoft Invoicing—A new way to create professional invoices and get paid fast. We’re also introducing the Office 365 Business center, a central place where you can manage these business apps and get an end-to-end view of your business. In addition, we’re adding MileIQ, the leading mileage tracking app, as an Office 365 Business Premium subscription benefit. These new services—along with the recently added Microsoft Bookings and Outlook Customer Manager—help you win customers and manage your business. Connections, Listings, Invoicing and the Business center are rolling out in preview over the next few weeks to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, starting with those in the First Release program. MileIQ Premium is now available to all Business Premium subscribers in the U.S, U.K. and Canada.

 

Digitize your workplace one photo at a time with intelligent search in OneDrive for Business

A picture is worth a thousand words, and now your images uploaded to OneDrive can be just that with our new intelligent detection and search functionality. Taking notes is much harder than snapping a photo with your phone. It's a great way to document a meeting or site visit; the whiteboard image tells the story of shared construction and development. With that in mind, the product team have been hard at work on a feature which we hope helps you every day, to work smarter, faster and with better recollection. We're excited to share some of the steps on the journey with you. We are starting small at first, but have a goal to grow the capability based on your feedback and needs. Releasing this month (July 2017) is the ability to search for photos using the objects that are in them. When you upload an image into OneDrive, whether a snap of a whiteboard, a receipt, a screen shot, a vector graphic, line drawing or even x-ray film, OneDrive will automatically detect it, and make it available in search, without you having to do anything other than upload the image.

 

Redesigned navigation, conversations and search in Outlook for iOS and Android

We’re launching exciting new changes to Outlook on iOS and Android. It’s the Outlook you know and love, with a redesigned conversation experience and the ability to quickly switch between accounts and browse folders. In addition, new intelligent search capabilities, powered by Microsoft Graph, are coming soon. The new accounts navigation and conversations experiences are available now in Outlook for iOS with Outlook.com and Gmail accounts. Support for Office 365 accounts will be rolling out in the coming days. The new search experience is coming soon to Outlook for iOS. We’re working hard right now to bring all three of these new experiences to Outlook for Android over the next couple of months.

 

Easily publish your flows to the public gallery, improved custom connector experience and more!

It's now easy to publish any flows you create to the public gallery. Simply select the More... menu when you are looking at a flow and then choose the Submit to Gallery option. You can choose the set of categories for the template that will be in the gallery. We have also released a new action for the Office 365 Outlook and Outlook.com connectors called Get calendar view of events. This action takes a start time and end time and inputs, and returns a list of the events, including instances of recurring events, that happen during that time window. There is a new Run now option on the mobile app when you select a flow that has Recurrence as the trigger. This means you can quickly kick off flows that normally run on a schedule. There are several new capabilities in the Custom Connector experience. First, you can create dynamic dropdowns. Dynamic dropdowns are used when the set of items in a list can change depending on the user. The second new feature is you can add polling triggers. The third new feature for custom connectors is there is a rich experience for testing.

 


NOTEWORTHY

 

Video: Office 365 Update for July 2017

Format: Video (11 minutes) | Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, including the Planner mobile app, Outlook for Android, iOS and Mac, Microsoft Forms, Microsoft Stream, Security and Visio + Power BI. The course transcript, complete with links to additional information on everything covered, is available at https://aka.ms/o365update-transcripts.

 

Largest FREE Microsoft eBook Giveaway including: Office 365, Office 2016, Power BI, and many more!

An annual post with a list of over 350 eBooks covering a wide array of subjects, including Office 365, Office 2016, Power BI, PowerShell and many, many more! Most of the eBooks are available in multiple formats such as PDF, EPUB, DOC and MOBI. Also included is a PowerShell script to download all of the eBooks so you don’t have to do so individually.

 

SharePoint Online: Coming soon - new capabilities from Site Information panel (change site icon and delete site)

We wanted to share a couple of new features that will be enabled on the Site information panel (accessible from the gear menu) that site owners will soon be able to take advantage of: (1) Change the site icon: For group connected sites this will update the icon for the group and reflect in other group workloads, and (2) Delete site: This will allow site owners to delete site. For group connected sites, this will trigger the deletion of the group as well.  Owners will be prompted with a confirmation dialog requiring an explicit acknowledgement via checkbox that content will be deleted before proceeding. We plan to start rolling this feature out in the next couple of weeks, starting with First Release.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Sharing content securely - Managing and governing SharePoint and Office 365 at Microsoft

Format: Video (52 minutes) | Published: July 13, 2017 | In business, employee collaboration with colleagues inside and outside of the company is the name of the game. Finding a balance between readily sharing files and protecting corporate assets is crucial. At Microsoft IT, we get it. With over 400,000 SharePoint team sites, intranet portals, and OneDrive for Business sites, we have a lot to manage. Learn how we use custom solutions, organizational policy, Office 365, and Azure Active Directory to help manage, govern, and protect our data in a highly collaborative environment.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Cutting costs in the cloud with Skype for Business

Format: Business Case Study | Published: July 14, 2017 | Migrating enterprise unified communications to cloud-based Skype for Business services at Microsoft proved to be an ambitious undertaking for Microsoft IT, but we reaped the rewards. As business groups adopted the services, they significantly reduced operating expenses, capital expenses, legacy third-party carrier fees, and travel. Our journey to the cloud has also led to increased productivity—our people can communicate and collaborate from any location on any device. | Related: How cloud-based PBX and PSTN save Microsoft IT more than $120,000 per day with Skype for Business

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Deploying Skype for Business in the cloud

Format: Technical White Paper | Published: July 14, 2017 | With the hybrid cloud architecture of Office 365 Enterprise E5 as our foundation, Microsoft IT migrated our global workforce to Skype for Business in two stages. First, we gave some people limited cloud-based conferencing, and then we eventually moved whole user groups to complete cloud-based unified communications. With careful planning, we helped teams maintain productivity during deployment and upgraded our network infrastructure to support capacity requirements. | Related: How Microsoft IT planned and deployed Skype for Business to the Office 365 Enterprise E5 cloud