Office 365 Weekly Digest | June 11 - 17, 2017

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Welcome to the June 11 - 17, 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.

Don't miss an opportunity to test drive Microsoft Teams with Office 365 and Windows 10 in one of the two remaining immersion sessions, details are included in the Upcoming Events section below. Microsoft FastTrack also has several webinars available through June 23, 2017.

A new Enterprise Update Ring and Files On-Demand availability were announced last week for OneDrive for Business. There were also a few key Skype for Business posts including simplified port requirements, Open Preview for Call Analytics and a list of questions and answers from a recent webcast on Skype for Business Hybrid PSTN.

The latest feature updates to Microsoft Teams, a new demo for Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection and a recap of last week's Microsoft Data Insights Summit highlight the noteworthy items from last week.

 

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 Explore Microsoft Teams, Windows 10 and Office 365 in an interactive online session

When: Wednesday June 21, 2017 and June 28, 2017 at 10am PT & 12pm PT | Today’s fast-paced workplace requires you to transition between tasks seamlessly and find things quickly. As work and collaboration evolve to become more web-based and complex, changing professional styles call for tools that provide agility across the full span of a workday. Instead of wasting time searching for your most-used features and content, you need technology that allows you to transition from email to collaboration to project work and back again with ease. Microsoft is now offering hands-on live sessions where you’ll have the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and our hottest new collaboration tool: Microsoft Teams. During these small-group sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. Each 90-minute session starts with an online business roundtable, discussing your biggest business challenges with a trained facilitator, and then transitions into a live environment in the cloud. You will receive a link to connect your own device to a remote desktop loaded with our latest technology, so you can experience first-hand how Microsoft tools can solve your challenges.

 

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.

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled from June 5 – June 23, 2017 | Ask questions, learn shortcuts and find out how Office 365 can make you and your team more productive. Each webinar is a live, instructor-led session offered at multiple dates and times. Facilitated discussion follows each session, with opportunities to ask questions and discuss specific scenarios to you. Direct registration links for each webinar are provided below.

 

BLOG ROUNDUP The New Enterprise Update Ring for OneDrive

The OneDrive Sync Team is happy to announce with the R9 payload, which will unblock a set of regulated enterprises to use OneDrive Sync. A key requirement that was blocking heavily regulatory enterprises was the need to be able to manage their updates and audit when new versions will be deployed. As such, we've repositioned the enterprise update ring to provide the control necessary to unblock customers. | OneDrive sync client update process

 

OneDrive Files On-Demand now available for Windows Insiders

We are excited to announce that OneDrive Files On-Demand is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring who are on Build 16215. The updated OneDrive client will be rolling out over the next few days but can also be installed from here. With Files On-Demand, you can access all your files in the cloud without having to download them and use storage space on your device. All your files—even online-only files—can be seen in File Explorer and work just like every other file on your device. You’ll be able to open online-only files from within any desktop or Windows Store apps using the Windows file picker. And you’re covered in both your home and professional life since it works with your personal and work OneDrive, as well as your SharePoint Online team sites.

 

Answers to your common questions from the SFB Broadcast on Skype for Business Hybrid PSTN

Bill Verthein and Oliver Chiu recently sat down to present Skype for Business Hybrid PSTN. During that live webcast, we had over 30 questions come in about Microsoft's Hybrid PSTN offering!  You can View the webcast here and see the answers to your questions about Hybrid PSTN in this post.

 

Skype for Business: Call Analytics now in Open Preview

We are happy to share that we moved Call Analytics from "Public Preview"? to "Open Preview"?. This means, while the feature still has preview state, there is no need to sign up for the program - all you need is to go to https://adminportal.services.skypeforbusiness.com/ and sign-in with your administrator account. Call Analytics allows you to look at quality indicators of individual calls. For more details, please see Introducing Call Analytics.

 

Simplified port requirements for Skype for Business

Earlier this year we talked about making simplification for network connectivity for Skype for Business Online. We are happy to announce that the 50,000-59,999 port range (UDP and TCP) is no longer a requirement for Skype for Business endpoints to communicate with Skype for Business Online. This change applies to all clients supported against Skype for Business Online. No clients are excluded and there are no specific minimum version required (although we always recommend to run the latest version). | Related: Accelerate your move to Skype for Business Online with Microsoft FastTrack

 

The new MyAnalytics add-in for Outlook - a closer look

Individuals and organizations use data every day. Gathering and harnessing data is one of the most important functions within many organizations. However, access to data and acting on data can be two very different things. We are excited to share a bit more about how the new MyAnalytics add-in helps you act on the data and insights from MyAnalytics. The add-in now provides a live feed of personalized insights and recommendations based on your work habits. For example, if you don't have much focus time during work hours, the add-in reminds you to book some. If you have unread email from your important people, the add-in shows you just those emails. If you have committed to do something in email recently, the add-in reminds you to complete those items. And, the add-in now provides additional insights into email read rates and actual time spent reading your emails.

 

NOTEWORTHY Release Notes for Microsoft Teams: Updated June 14, 2017

The following features have been added for this release of Microsoft Teams: (1) Disable calling, 2) New actionable cards for connectors, and (3) Bug fix for desktop app + Mac users.

 

Microsoft Cloud - Financial Services Compliance Program

Published: June 16, 2017 | Financial services and other regulated organizations are typically required to conduct risk assessments and perform due diligence before committing to a cloud service, and they must maintain valid risk assessments and appropriate oversight of the cloud vendor for as long as they use it. The Microsoft Cloud Financial Services Compliance Program (FSCP) was specifically created to help financial services and regulated financial affiliates assess the risks of using Microsoft’s cloud services. The FSCP offers deep insights into Microsoft cloud services’ capabilities, risks, and performance. The FSCP is available to customers using Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Intune.

 

New demo: Advanced Threat Protection across Windows 10 and Office

Find out how to prevent and contain cyberattacks across email and endpoints with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) and Office 365 ATP. This new demo from Microsoft Mechanics explains how these technologies work together to help detect and prevent attacks, and how—if an attack makes it through your defenses—they can help you contain the threat and take immediate action. Using real-world scenarios, you’ll learn about: (1) the filters in place to stop known threats in real time, (2) near real-time threat removal, and (3) how to discover, investigate, contain, and respond to any threats that do make it through your defenses.

 

Microsoft Data Insights Summit 2017: Day 1 Recap

The big announcement in the opening keynote was for the general availability of Power BI Premium. The new service offering is geared towards enterprise users, and enables the distribution of reports broadly across an enterprise and externally, without requiring recipients to be individually licensed. Along with this announcement, Phillips shared in his keynote that Power BI Report Server is also generally available as part of Power BI Premium. Additionally, Power BI Premium advances how Power BI content is embedded in apps by converging Power BI Embedded with the Power BI service. Customers, partners and the broad developer community can take advantage of one API surface, a consistent set of capabilities and access to the latest features with Power BI Premium. Also, don’t forget to check out the Day 2 Recap and you can view all the sessions on-demand with the Microsoft Data Insights Summit 2017 playlist. | Related: What’s hiding in your data?

 

Azure AD makes the "leader" quadrant in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Access Management!

Gartner released their 2017 Magic Quadrant for Access Management (AM MQ), which shows that Azure Active Directory is placed in the “leaders” quadrant and is positioned very strongly for completeness of vision. The AM MQ is the evolution of the Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) MQ, which was discontinued last year, and Azure AD has been in the leaders quadrant two out of the three years the service has been generally available! This amazing placement validates our vision of providing a complete identity and access management solution for employees, partners, and customers, all backed by world-class identity protection based on Microsoft’s Intelligent Security Graph. Gartner’s analysis says a lot about our commitment to the identity and access management space. More importantly, though, it says a lot about our customers, implementation partners, and ISV partners who have worked with us, sharing their time and energy every day to ensure the products and services we build meet their needs and position them to thrive in a world increasingly driven by cloud technology.