Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of May 1 - 7, 2016

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MESSAGE CENTER

Note: The information below may not be posted to your Office 365 tenant as not all notifications apply to all tenants.

 

New feature: Skype for Business experience in Office 365

Posted: May 2, 2016 | Action: Awareness | We're rolling out a new Skype for Business experience in Office 365. You’ll begin seeing this new experience over the coming weeks. You can now use Skype for Business instant messages (IM) right from your navigation bar in Outlook on the web (Outlook Web App) in Office 365. You can also view and manage contacts and active conversations. Update your user training documentation as needed, but you don’t need to do anything for this change. Please visit Use Skype for Business from within Outlook on the web to learn more.

 

New Feature: Office 365 Education Roadmap

Posted: May 03, 2016 | Action: Awareness | The Office 365 Education roadmap is now available. Office 365 Education roadmap was created due to popular demand from teachers and administrators for visibility into features coming that are relevant for education. We are committed to a great education experience and now you can see what we are working on so you can prepare over the summer! To access the new Office 365 Education Roadmap, visit https://roadmap.office.com and open "Filters", then select "Education" under "Services". Once in "Services", click on the launch status (i.e. "in development") to see product/feature items. You can then click on the item for a description and other available information.

 

New SharePoint Online features coming soon

Posted: May 4, 2016 | Action: Awareness | We’d like to inform of the initial disclosure of several SharePoint items coming to Office 365 and the App Store: the new SharePoint mobile app, a new SharePoint home in Office 365, refreshed team site experiences, responsive page authoring within team sites, a refreshed Site Contents page bringing activities and insights, plus updates to document libraries and lists experiences. In addition, we’ll make available new extensibility opportunities with a simple set of APIs through the Microsoft Graph, Web Hooks to enable custom callbacks, and support for client-side Web Parts enabled through the SharePoint Framework. We’re committed to evolving your intranet to be more accessible on the go, and more personal with intelligence-driven content based on user activities across sites, the people they work with, and the content they work on. This message is to inform you of new SharePoint capabilities coming soon, the first to begin rollout to First Release on May 11th. On/Starting May 11th, 2016, we will begin to rollout the new SharePoint home, the refreshed Site Contents page, and updated document library and list user experiences. We will send individual message center posts per item when each begins rollout to First Release. For more details, please see "The Future of SharePoint" post in the "Blog Roundup" section below.

 

New feature: Office 365 Groups multi-domain support

Posted: May 4, 2016 | Action: Awareness | Office 365 Groups multi-domain support is a new Office 365 feature. You’ll begin seeing this new feature starting today. Larger organizations use separate email domains to reflect different parts of their businesses. Office 365 Groups that are created by users in one domain will share that domain (as opposed to using a common domain across the tenant). Administrators now also have control to create groups in a specific domain of their choosing. For additional information, please visit the Multi-domain support for Office 365 Groups support article.

 

Updated Feature: What’s new in Office 365 admin center

Posted: May 05, 2016 | Action: Awareness | In April, we continued our work to improve the new Office 365 admin center to make it faster, easier and more efficient for you to manage the service. The latest updates include dashboard customization, new reporting capabilities, and user management improvements. Please log into the new admin center and try the new functionality. Also be sure to provide feedback using the feedback button in the admin center. Learn more in the "What's New in Office 365 Administration - April Roundup" post in the "Blog Roundup" section below.

 

Updated feature: Guests can now sign-up for an account in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Posted: May 05, 2016 | Action: Awareness | We’re updating the external sharing redemption flow for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. You will see this in the next couple weeks. Previously, guests who wanted to create an account during the redemption flow were required to enter ten or more fields of information, to create an account. This proved to be a huge barrier for guests who are trying to access a resource shared with them. These users will now see the lightweight sign-up flow which only requires a minimal amount of information. There is nothing you need to do to prepare for this change. External sharing will continue to work as expected, but guests will find the sign-up process easier to complete. Additional information is available at https://blogs.office.com/2016/04/12/onedrive-for-business-recognized-as-an-efss-leader-and-continues-momentum-with-spring-updates/.

 

New Feature: Office 365 Groups ability to update privacy type

Posted: May 06, 2016 | Action: Awareness | The ability to update privacy type for Office 365 Groups is a new Office 365 feature. You’ll begin seeing this feature today. When you create an Office 365 Group, users have two privacy options: public (anyone can access the Group's content) and private (only approved members can access the Group's content). This update enables Group owners to change the privacy setting from public to private or vice versa by editing the Group properties in your favorite browser. Learn more in the following support article  https://support.office.com/article/Make-Office-365-groups-public-or-private-c0a991b3-9c56-48b8-bf0f-05530f836b1b.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS MTC Mid-Day Cafe: Accessibility in Office 365 Video

When: May 9, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | In today’s fast paced Enterprise environment, the use of video for communications, training, tacit knowledge capture and re-use, is exploding. But as the use as a means of reaching and empowering employees and organizations increases questions around accessibility arise. How can an organization ensure that its media content is inclusive in its accessibility? What kind of an effort is required to provide accessibility? Thankfully the folks working on Office 365 Video have taken this in to account and have simplified the process of providing closed captioning, in a variety of languages, for organizations employees.  Join host Michael Gannotti for a special Mid-Day Café session as he covers closed captioning in Office 365 Video. During this “hands on” broadcast Michael will provide sample content that will enable attendees to actually go through the process, step by step with him, to create the necessary closed captioning files then apply that against their Office 365 Video content. If your organization is looking to leverage media in Office 365 then this is a session for you and your colleagues.

 

YamJam: Security and Compliance

When: May 10, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | We are happy to announce a Security and Compliance YamJam. Please join us for a live hour of Q&A and the opportunity to voice your feedback. We hope to see you there!

 

YamJam: Delve Analytics

When: May 11, 2016 @ 10:00am PT | Powered by Office Graph, Delve Analytics provides a personal analytics dashboard and Outlook add-in that helps you maximize your time. This YamJam is an opportunity to ask questions, share your feedback and discuss Delve Analytics directly with the product team. We look forward to seeing you there! | Video: Delve Analytics – focus on network insights  | Video: Delve Analytics – focus on time insights

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

The best productivity experience? It’s already in your Office.  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 Future of SharePoint

Last week, at our Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco, we unveiled a new cloud-first, mobile-first vision and roadmap for SharePoint, along with innovations that empower people, teams and organizations to intelligently discover, share and collaborate on content from anywhere and on any device. We also announced general availability of SharePoint Server 2016, which includes new hybrid capabilities that enable on-premises customers to tap into the innovation we’re delivering in Office 365. We are thrilled to share our vision for SharePoint Online in the cloud and SharePoint Server on-premises, along with progress to date and our roadmap across four areas of innovation: (1) Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device, (2) The mobile and intelligent intranet, with modern team sites, publishing and business applications on your desktop and in your pocket, (3) An open and connected platform that evolves SharePoint extensibility to embrace modern web development and (4) Investments in security, privacy and compliance across Office 365. More information on these innovations and other SharePoint-related updates are detailed in the following blog posts and videos:

 

What's new in Office 365 administration - April roundup

April was a busy and exciting month for the Office 365 admin center team. We started to roll out a variety of new features in the new admin center, including new reporting capabilities, customization options and user management improvements. Since we started our work to rebuild the admin center in September 2015, our goal—to build a more intuitive management solution that provides additional functionality while making it easier, faster and more efficient for you to manage Office 365—hasn’t changed. It’s great to see it all come together as admins around the world start using the new admin center. We could not have done it without you! We can’t thank you often enough for the detailed and highly valuable feedback that you share with us every day. Your feedback continues to help us prioritize our work, fix bugs and improve the overall experience and performance of the new admin center. Please keep it coming!

 

Office Online Server now available

We are excited to announce the release of Office Online Server (OOS), which allows organizations to deliver browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, among other capabilities. Microsoft recognizes that many organizations still value running server products on-premises for a variety of reasons. With OOS, you get the same functionality we offer with Office Online in your own datacenter. OOS is the successor to Office Web Apps Server 2013. OOS scales well for your enterprise whether you have 100 employees or 100,000. The architecture enables one OOS farm to serve multiple SharePoint, Exchange and Skype for Business instances. OOS is designed to work with SharePoint Server 2016, Exchange Server 2016 and Skype for Business Server 2016. It is also backwards compatible with SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013 and Lync Server 2013. You can also integrate other products with OOS through our public APIs. While OOS runs on your own servers, we are working hard to give you the same experiences you would get if you used our cloud service. For example, real-time co-authoring will now be enabled in Office Online Server. We will deliver most of the new Office Online features to OOS through regular updates.

 

NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

May 3, 2016: Updates for Skype for Business Online and OneNote.  Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here.

 

Video: Office 365 Updates for May 2016

Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based solution for the modern workplace.

 

Microsoft Cloud Identity for Enterprise Architects

The Identity for Enterprise Architects visual model is newly updated with fresh content on using Azure Ad as your ID-as-a-Service provider. In addition, learn when to use Azure AD Domain Services instead of extending your on-prem AD environment to Azure for Infrastructure-as-a-Service workloads.  And, be sure to check out the other Microsoft cloud IT architecture resources such as security, storage, networking, information protection and change management for Office 365 clients.

 

Protecting Identities in the Cloud: Mitigating Password Attacks

We just released a new volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report. Included in the report, for the first time, is security data from the Microsoft cloud that reveals how we are leveraging an intelligent security graph to inform how we protect endpoints, better detect attacks and accelerate our response, to help protect our customers. In November we outlined Microsoft’s new approach to how we Protect, Detect and Respond to security threats. We have been evolving our ability to get real-time insights and predictive intelligence across our network so we can stay a step ahead of the threats and protect customers. The challenge is to correlate our security data with our threat intelligence data. To do this, we collect trillions of signals from billions of sources to build an intelligent security graph that can learn from one area and apply across the Microsoft platform. The intelligent security graph is powered by inputs we receive across our endpoints, consumer services, commercial services and on-premises technologies. The new Security Intelligence Report contains many insights from this data and analysis.