Office 365 Weekly Digest | August 12 – 18, 2018

Welcome to the August 12 - 18, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Only four additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, with two each for Access and SharePoint Online, including the ability to bring in content from external links in SharePoint News.

The recording from last week's "Fire Away Friday" is now available, and don't miss "Teams Tuesdays" every week until the end of October 2018.

Highlights from last week's blogs include a recap of the latest Message Center notifications for OneDrive for Business, VSTS dashboard integration in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Flow integration in Excel, and a couple of posts on auditing/reporting and compliance in Office 365.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items on governance in Microsoft Flow and PowerApps, themes in PowerApps, and using Compliance Manager to assess HIPAA compliance.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

UPCOMING EVENTS

Microsoft 365 Engineering Webcast: Improvements in Office 365 endpoint publishing and network connectivity guidance

When: On-demand, registration required | Microsoft is updating the publishing of Office 365 network endpoints and has new guidance about optimizing network connectivity for end users to achieve optimal performance. In this talk we will describe the new network principles and guidance and share how the updated endpoint publishing makes end user performance easier to achieve. We will outline the timeline and transition from the current manually published data to the new system and how customers can take advantage of this. | Resource: Office 365 endpoint categories and Office 365 IP Address and URL web service

Recording - HLS Modern Workplace Fire Away Friday 08-17-2018

When: On-demand | In this edition of HLS Modern Workplace Fire Away Friday we took a look at this week's top 3 announcements/posts. Then we dove in to coverage of Microsoft Sway. We covered what it is, built one out using a template (the scenario was a Nurse Monthly Newsletter on cutting edge medical advances). Finally, we covered where Sway data is stored and where Sway fits in the compliance picture. Lastly, we wrapped things up with some Q&A and announced our next broadcast for August 31st.

Teams Tuesdays

When: Tuesdays, August 21, 2018 – October 30, 2018 from 10am – 11am PT | Whether you're managing a new project or starting your own business, it helps to have a team behind you to brainstorm ideas, tackle the work together, and have some fun along the way. Now you can use Microsoft Teams to do just that. Join our team LIVE every Tuesday from 10-11am PDT to learn how you can get started with the free version of Teams. In this hour, we'll walk you through the product and key features, share best practices for getting started, and answer any questions you may have. We look forward to meeting you!

Productivity Hacks to Save Time & Simplify Workflows

When: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 12pm ET and 3pm ET | This 90-minute hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Discover how you can keep your information more secure without inhibiting your workflow, (2) Learn how to visualize and analyze complex data, quickly zeroing in on the insights you need, (3) See how multiple team members can access, edit and review documents simultaneously, and (4) Gain skills that will save you time and simplify your workflow immediately. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

BLOG ROUNDUP

OneDrive Message Center Updates for August 1 - 15, 2018

This post is a recap of OneDrive Message Center posts from the past two weeks. We'll be releasing some great improvements to the OneDrive iOS app, including the much-requested Camera upload for OneDrive for Business feature and a dialog box update to make granting file or folder access in OneDrive and SharePoint easier. We have also added functionality to make finding past OneDrive searches easier on iOS.

New! VSTS Dashboard integration in Microsoft Teams

VSTS dashboards provides flexibility to configure charts and widgets to view status, monitor progress, share information and improve workflow processes. VSTS dashboards are now available to be configured in Microsoft Teams channels using the VSTS Extension. Once configured these dashboards will be available to all members who have permissions to see the dashboards in VSTS. Once configured dashboard will automatically update whenever you open the dashboard tab in Teams. Top right corner you've an option to refresh manually as well. You can also have a conversation about the embedded dashboard within the dashboard view. | Related: Teams – Inline Message Translation

Introducing Microsoft Flow integration in Excel

We're pleased to announce that Microsoft Flow is now integrated into Excel. With this integration that uses the For a selected row trigger and the Flow launch panel, you can create and trigger on-demand flows for selected rows in any Excel table on spreadsheets hosted in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. The Microsoft Flow for Excel add-in enables you to connect your data to a wide range of services such as SharePoint, Outlook 365, Dynamics 365, Teams, Visual Studio Online, Twitter, Approvals, etc. In this post, we'll walk you through this new capability with a hands-on example. | Related: Flow of The Week - Advanced Approval Write back

Auditing and Reporting Against Various Office 365 Services

This post provides details on reporting and auditing of a range of Office 365 services, that did not fall under the Content Adoption Pack or base Office 365 reports. Some of the services covered include: Stream, Flow, PowerApps and Sway.

Compliance Management Part 2 : Retention Policies with Data Classification

Office 365 Labels can be used to classify documents and emails by declaring them a record and assigning retention and deletion policies. Labels are configured in the Classification section of the Security and Compliance Center. There are two steps to creating labels. The first step is to create the label, giving it a Name, Description and retention settings. The second step is to publish the label as a policy and applying it to users and groups, making it available to be applied to the content. Another option to setup Retention outside of Labels and Label Policies is to configure retention policies within the Data Governance area in the Security and Compliance Center. Policies for Teams cannot be combined with any other locations. It's also worth noting that Teams chats have a minimum deletion setting of 30 days.

NOTEWORTHY

PowerApps and Microsoft Flow Governance and Deployment Whitepaper is now available

The PowerApps team has released a whitepaper to provide guidance to those administrators responsible for planning, securing, deploying, and supporting applications built on the PowerApps platform. In this whitepaper, we will cover key concepts, platform architecture, and decisions that will be necessary. Where possible we will help you develop best practices for your organization to ensure successful deployments and high productivity for users using the platform. In the end, this paper will help give you a better understanding of what currently is in your environment, how to proactively plan for applications being developed and deployed and finally how to handle day to day administrative tasks to manage deployments.

Using Compliance Manager to Assess HIPAA Compliance

Many of our healthcare customers are required to attest to their adherence to various frameworks and in-turn, would like to better understand which aspects of Office 365 that Microsoft provides as a part of its shared responsibilities with our customers. We understand that organizations have internal controls and requirements of their own as well. To improve our transparency and our customer's abilities to respond to various auditors and regulators, we introduced Compliance Manager. Compliance Manager includes an at-a-glance summary of the shared responsibility model reflecting both Microsoft's and your organization's data protection and compliance posture for standards and regulations such as ISO 27001:2013, NIST 800-53, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and others. It also provides risk assessment workflow and management tools that include task assignment and verification to help Governance, Risk & Compliance teams and IT departments work together to streamline internal compliance activities. Because we understand that you may have to work through several of these regulations, we provide intelligent tracking that understands common and similar compliance activities across multiple standards and regulations to reduce your organizations costs and efforts from regulation to audit by applying a single activity to multiple Assessments or controls.

Themes update adds new Office themes and contrast compliant colors

There are 8 new Office themes which make embedded apps inside of SharePoint feel like they belong. The existing PowerApps standard themes have been given a more modern and fresh feel through updating them with contrast compliant colors. Part of an app's identity is its theme- not only the colors that are chosen, but also where they are applied. Each design language is slightly different. By introducing new and updated themes, we can give the users of our applications a better experience. The new Office themes have a different look and feel than the PowerApps standard themes. They apply color more minimally and use the Segoe UI font. They allow a more natural feeling when embedding apps inside of SharePoint. There are 8 new Office options based on the out of the box SharePoint List themes: Blue, Orange, Red, Purple, Green, Gray, Dark Yellow and Dark Blue.