Office 365 Weekly Digest | June 17 – 23, 2018

Welcome to the June 17 - 23, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Only four additions to the Office 365 Roadmap additions last week, with updates for Outlook on iOS and Mac, as well as the official entry for the SharePoint Online storage increase and a policy to block basic authentication in Exchange Online.

An Ask Microsoft Anything session on Azure Active Directory password protection is the only new event, and it is scheduled for Thursday, July 28, 2018 at 9am Pacific. The Azure Active Directory webinars for July are now open for registration, although there are fewer offered in July due to upcoming holidays and conferences.

Blog posts in last week's roundup include the announcement of the ability to collaborate on Visio files in Microsoft Teams, updates to Mail Flow Insights reporting, important corrections for shared and resource mailbox storage limits, a new organization configuration transfer capability in the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard, and the public preview of baseline security policy for Azure AD admin accounts.

Noteworthy item highlights include the June 2018 feature updates for Workplace Analytics and Office 365 for Android, a summary of OneDrive updates posted to the Message Center in the first half of June 2018, the Page Diagnostics tool for SharePoint Online, and the public preview of Azure Active Directory password protection and smart lockout.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week:

UPCOMING EVENTS

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Azure Active Directory password protection

When: Thursday, June 28, 2018 from 9am PT | Join the Azure Active Directory team on the Microsoft Tech Community to discuss the recently announced public preview of Azure AD Password Protection and Smart Lockout. The AMA will begin on Thursday, June 28th at 9am PT. Don't forget to add it to your calendar, and we look forward to seeing you there!

Azure Active Directory Webinars for July

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from July 10 - 12, 2018 | Note: Fewer sessions are being offered in July due to upcoming holidays and conferences. | Are you looking to deploy Azure Active Directory quickly and easily? We are offering free webinars on key Azure Active Directory deployment topics to help you get up and running. Sessions include Getting Ready for Azure AD, Managing Enterprise Apps with Azure AD, and more. Each 1-hour 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

Updates to Adobe Document Cloud bring integrated PDF services to Office 365

Last September, we expanded our strategic partnership with Adobe to focus on integrations between Adobe Sign and Office 365 products such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and more. We've seen our customers make great use of the combination. Building on this success, the Adobe Document Cloud team announced new capabilities that deepen the integration with Office 365 and can save you and your team time. PDF services integrations provide new fidelity when working with PDF documents as part of Office 365. Once integrated by your administrator, PDF services provide rich previews of PDF documents right within OneDrive and your SharePoint sites. In addition to many reporting, sharing, and collaboration scenarios, PDF files are frequently used to create final or archived versions of content spanning across many different files. With PDF services and the newly introduced Combine Files by Adobe functionality, you can select several files and pull into one PDF with just a couple of clicks within SharePoint document libraries. PDF services are now available in the ribbon for online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—making the creation of high-quality, full fidelity PDFs from these applications even easier.

Collaborate on Visio files inside Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365 and is the simple way to create and share diagrams in your favorite browser. Until now, there was no easy way to collaborate on your Visio files inside Teams. You can now view, edit, and collaborate on your Visio diagrams from inside Teams. Together, Visio and Teams can help you coordinate on diagrams more efficiently by keeping all Visio files and colleague feedback in one place. All Team sites come with a dedicated file library for storing all your workgroup's content. You can now upload Visio files to this library from your desktop or preferred cloud storage site, like This way, all your team's assets are in one place for anyone with the right permissions to access as needed. And like with other stored files, you can link to Visio diagrams directly from team conversations. | Related: Microsoft Teams Release Notes – June 23, 2018 | New! Karmabot for Microsoft Teams

Update on Mail Flow Insights

Last month, we announced the release of mail flow insights in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center in this blog post. We're making changes to the mail flow insights dashboard to make it more intuitive. These changes are currently in deployment, and will be available in the week of June 25, 2018. We've changed some widgets in the mail flow dashboard, and we have combined the TLS report for inbound and outbound email traffic and the connector report into one widget. We've also changed the "Forwarding overview report" widget to "Auto-forward messages" to give you a quick summary of the auto-forwarding status for your organization.

Correcting Shared Mailbox provisioning and sizing

We are correcting how shared (and resource) mailboxes are created in Exchange Online. As per our documentation, shared and resource mailboxes in Exchange Online should be created with the size of 50GB and if a larger size is desired, a license should be assigned to the mailbox. For some time now, though, while our documentation has (correctly) stated this, the Exchange Online system would, for many of our customers, create both new shared and resource mailboxes with a default size of 100GB even if a license was not assigned. We knew that this was happening, and we were working to address this in our mailbox provisioning system. This is what is now being corrected to the documented behavior. The new shared or resource mailbox creation behavior (starting end of July) will by default be 50GB, as per our documentation – and if you require a shared mailbox that is larger than 50GB, an Exchange Online Plan 2 license will need to be assigned to it. Once a license is assigned, the mailbox size should quickly increase to 100GB (equivalent size for an Exchange Online Plan 2 licensed user mailbox). The post also includes a section with answers to commonly asked questions.

Hybrid Organization Configuration Transfer

We are very happy to announce a new feature that will help you the admin reduce the amount of time needed to configure config objects once hybrid setup is complete. This feature enables a one-time transfer of key organization policy objects during the onboarding process from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online. This feature is tightly integrated into the existing Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW). The administrator running the HCW can choose to migrate either all the detected objects while onboarding from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online or choose not to transfer any. This is only a one-time transfer though, to avoid the need to have you set them up manually. Once the one-time transfer is complete, you will need to manually update values in either On-prem or Online to keep them in sync if you change anything. We're supporting this config transfer whether you are migrating from Exchange Server 2010, Exchange Server 2013 or Exchange Server 2016, and we're delivering this feature in phases. Phase 1 will be launched at the end of June 2018. Related: Announcing the support for modern public folder migrations without dumpster data

Baseline security policy for Azure AD admin accounts in public preview!

Identity attacks have increased by 300% in the last year. To protect our customers from these ever-increasing attacks, Microsoft is embarking on a journey to rollout baseline protection. To that end, we're excited to announce the public preview of the first baseline policy to protect privileged Azure AD accounts. This baseline policy will be available by default to all Azure AD tenants and will require MFA for privileged Azure AD accounts. Attackers who get control of privileged accounts can do tremendous damage, so it's critical to protect these accounts first. The following Azure AD roles are covered by this policy: (1) Global administrator, (2) SharePoint administrator, (3) Exchange administrator, (4) Conditional access administrator, and (5) Security administrator. During the public preview phase, we've made it easy for you to opt into the baseline policy with a "one-click" experience. After general availability, we're going to opt you into the policy by default but provide you the configuration to opt out at any time. We highly recommend you opt into the policy immediately.

NOTEWORTHY

New Workplace Analytics Feature Releases - June 2018

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for the month of June. In this update, you'll hear about several exciting new releases, including: (1) Use person-to-group queries, (2) Change the base metric in a query, (3) Measure time in self-organized meetings, and (4) Filter by meeting-organizer attributes.

Office 365 for Android - June 2018 release details

On June 14th, 2018, Microsoft released an updated version of Office for Android (Excel, PowerPoint & Word) build # 16.0.10228.20049 in 68 languages. Our Office International team translated this latest update. Some of the new features available for the first time to Office 365 subscribers using Office for Android on their tablet or phone include: (1) In Word, see your word count as you scroll, and (2) In PowerPoint you can now apply any font color you like to hyperlinks in your presentations. More information and help content on this release can be found in the Android section of the What's New in Office 365 page.

OneDrive Message Center Updates for June 1-15, 2018

We are always looking for better ways to help ensure communication between you (OneDrive users and Admins) and us (The OneDrive Team). One of the key areas of feedback we have received from customers is that it's sometimes hard to keep up on Message Center (MC) posts, especially if you have been out of the office for a few days. Starting now, we will publish a blog post around the 15th and 30th of each month that will cover the key Message Center posts. This includes: (1) What's coming, (2) What has been released, and (3) A timetable of when these features might be hitting your tenants. The post for June 1 - 15, 2018 includes information on the following features: (1) Customer branding in OneDrive and SharePoint sharing emails, (2) External sharing emails will now use the latest sharing email templates, and (3) Updates to secure external sharing.

Use the Page Diagnostics tool for SharePoint Online

This article describes how you can use the Page Diagnostic tool to analyze your classic publishing pages and pages on classic team sites, against a subset of recommended practices in SharePoint Online. Team sites that do not have Publishing enabled cannot make use of CDNs, but all of the remaining rules are applicable. Publishing adds additional overhead so do not turn on Publishing just to get the CDN functionality as it will negatively impact page load times. Important: The Page Diagnostics tool will not run against document libraries or system pages, as the tool is designed to review SharePoint site pages.

Azure AD Password Protection and Smart Lockout are now in Public Preview!

We're really excited to announce the public preview of Azure AD Password Protection and Smart Lockout. Azure AD Password Protection helps you eliminate easily guessed passwords from your environment, which can dramatically lower the risk of being compromised by a password spray attack. Specifically, these features let you: (1) Protect accounts in Azure AD and Windows Server Active Directory by preventing users from using passwords from a list of more than 500 of the most commonly used passwords, plus over 1 million character substitution variations of those passwords, (2) Manage Azure AD Password Protection for Azure AD and on-premises Windows Server Active Directory from a unified admin experience in the Azure Active Directory portal, and (3) Customize your Azure AD smart lockout settings and specify a list of additional company specific passwords to block.