Office 365 Weekly Digest | August 13 - 19, 2017

Welcome to the August 13 - 19, 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.

Of course the week following the debut of the Office 365 Roadmap section, there were no updates posted.  Thanks to those who provided feedback! Based on the feedback received, this section will become a standard section of the digest going forward.

Last week's highlighted blog posts include new messaging enhancements in Yammer, new updates to the OneDrive mobile app for iOS, a new Visio custom visual for Power BI in Public Preview, and the latest volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report which has a significant cloud focus.

The summary document from last week's Office 365 Admin AMA, availability of information for tracking PowerApps that are being built within your organization, and a tool that configures advanced Azure AD Connect permissions are all included in this week's noteworthy items.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

There were no items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week...

UPCOMING EVENTS

Free Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Teacher Academy

When: August 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!

Azure Active Directory Webinars for September

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from September 12 - September 20, 2017 | Sessions include Azure AD Connect Health, Getting Ready for Azure AD, Securing Your Identities with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Azure AD Identity Protection and Privileged Access Management, 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.

BLOG ROUNDUP

New messaging enhancements in Yammer

We are always improving the way users can share their work, ideas and information in Yammer. As an inherently social tool, we are constantly evolving the messaging experience to adapt to the changing way people communicate, continuing to boost activity across networks. In fact, we've seen the average number of messages per network increase over 50% since last year. Through great customer feedback and rigorous testing, we've been learning more and more about how users choose to post and reply in Yammer. Over the coming weeks, we will be exploring different features and functionality within messaging in Yammer to drive further engagement across your Yammer networks. Available now: Express your thoughts easily and visually using GIFs. In testing and development: (1) Know when someone is actively replying through typing indicators, (2) Welcome new members to your Yammer community with a celebration of firsts, and (3) Move conversations between groups.

New updates to the OneDrive iOS mobile app

This release has been in the works for a while, but OneDrive 9.1 for iOS is here! Under the hood, we've completely rewritten the app, so we can bring you bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features faster than ever before. To celebrate this new release, we are rolling out the following features over the next week to our Office 365 subscribers - (1) Multi-page scan, (2) Offline folders, and (3) Discover view.

Visio custom visual is now in Public Preview and available in the store

We are pleased to announce the Public preview of the Visio custom visual for Power BI. With this new visual, you can connect to a Visio diagram hosted on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. The underlying Power BI data is then automatically and intelligently linked to the diagram based on its shape properties, eliminating the need to do this manually. In just a few clicks, Visio diagrams become yet another interactive Power BI visualization that can help you make informed decisions faster. Note: The Public Preview of Visio custom visual is currently supported in the Power BI service and Power BI Desktop. Support for Power BI Mobile apps will arrive soon.

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 22 is now available

The latest volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is now available for free download at www.microsoft.com/sir. This new volume of the report includes threat data from the first quarter of 2017. The report also provides specific threat data for over 100 countries/regions. As mentioned in a recent blog, using the tremendous breadth and depth of signal and intelligence from our various cloud and on-premises solutions deployed globally, we investigate threats and vulnerabilities and regularly publish this report to educate enterprise organizations on the current state of threats and recommended best practices and solutions. Here are 3 key findings from the report: (1) As organizations migrate more and more to the cloud, the frequency and sophistication of attacks on consumer and enterprise accounts in the cloud is growing, (2) Cloud services are perennial targets for attackers seeking to compromise and weaponize virtual machines and other services, and these attacks are taking place across the globe, and (3) Ransomware is affecting different parts of the world to varying degrees.

NOTEWORTHY

Office 365 Admin AMA (Ask Microsoft Anything) - August 15, 2017

On Tuesday, August 15, 2017, the Office 365 product team held an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) session. The summary is now available, in the event you were unable to make it, or you want a consolidated list of the questions and answers.

Get visibility into the apps that your organization is building!

As an environment admin, you can now download a list of apps being created in the environment from the PowerApps admin center. If you are an Office 365 Global admin or an Azure Active Directory tenant admin and you have a PowerApps Plan 2 or Plan 2 trial license, you can download the list of apps for all the environments in your organization. The list contains the app name, the creator of the app, the connector that the app uses to connect to the data source, and other information. | Related:  PowerApps - Be a hero and transform business process, in 10 minutes (and without writing code!)

Advanced AAD Connect Permissions Configuration

This post provides details on a tool available to configure advanced AAD Connect permissions for Device Writeback, Exchange Hybrid Writeback, Office 365 Group Writeback, Password Hash Sync, and Password Writeback. You can choose to run one or more options to configure features.  For any parameters not specified, defaults will attempt to be located from the AAD Connect configuration. If you have not yet configured Group Writeback, you can use the tool to create the GroupWriteBack container using the -GroupWriteBackOU parameter. After running this command, you will need to re-run the AAD Connect setup, modify the configuration, enable Group Writeback, and then select the newly created container. While many organizations have previously configured AAD Connect to use an account that is a member of Domain Admins or Enterprise Admins, it's not a best security practice.  However, for enabling password hash sync to the cloud or write data back to the on-premises environment, the AAD Connect service account needs to have the ability to extract the necessary information from the on-premises directory and update on-premises attributes. | TechNet Gallery - Direct Download