Office 365 Weekly Digest | Week of November 20 - 26, 2016

Welcome to the November 20 -26, 2016 edition of the O365 Weekly Digest. This week's content includes information on the integration of PowerApps and Microsoft Flow with SharePoint, the new Microsoft Tech Community, Skype for Business on Mac, updates to Microsoft Flow and Microsoft Stream as well as videos on Active Directory Federation Services with Multi-Factor Authentication and Microsoft IT's recent SME Roundtable on Enterprise Mobility.


MESSAGE CENTER

New Feature: PowerApps and Flow Integration with SharePoint

Posted: November 23, 2016 | Urgency: Normal | Category: Stay Informed | Action: Awareness | As part of your Office subscription, we've recently made two new services available to our Office 365 customers: PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. In addition to adding these services as a benefit of your Office 365 subscription, we've also made them available to end-users through the Office 365 App Launcher. Both PowerApps and Microsoft Flow offer a direct benefit to end-users, while still enabling IT organizations to control for example access to data through Data Loss Prevention capabilities in the IT-admin center of these services. More specifics around the IT-admin center and Data Loss Prevention for PowerApps can be seen here: https://aka.ms/powerappsadmincenter. For Microsoft Flow, more information can be seen here: https://aka.ms/flowadmincenter. However, if you choose to further disable these features for your Office 365 subscription, you may turn off ‘PowerApps for Office 365’ and ‘Flow for Office 365’ services for your users from the Office 365 Admin portal. If you want to bulk update this setting for a set of users or your entire organization, please see Disable access to services with Office 365 PowerShell for details relevant to standard deployments of Office 365. If you are using your own scripts for Office 365 license management, please use those to disable ‘PowerApps for Office 365’ and ‘Flow for Office 365’ service plans. Please note that if you also signed up for preview, you will need to disable that subscription as well.

 


UPCOMING EVENTS Online Immersion Experience: Test drive Office 365 and Windows 10

When: December 7th / 14th, 2016 at 10:00am and 12:00pm PT | This isn’t your typical online event: you won’t see any slides, demos or sales pitches. These 90-minute interactive sessions start with an online roundtable discussing your business challenges and then launch into a live environment in the cloud. A skilled facilitator guides you through a hands-on experience to see how Microsoft Office 365 and Windows 10 can meet your needs in this collaborative, fun environment. We will send you a link to connect your own device to a remote desktop loaded with our latest and greatest technology, so you can experience first-hand how Microsoft tools can solve your biggest challenges in a collaborative, fun environment. Please note: Each session is only open to 20 participants. Reserve your seat now and learn how you can be more productive anywhere, anytime with Office 365.

 

Office Small Business Academy: New Year Inspiration - Taking the Leap into Entrepreneurship

When: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 @ 9:00am PT | Are you finally ready to be your own boss?  Take the leap into entrepreneurship with advice and business-minded motivation from our team of experts. In this episode, get strategies and expert advice for starting your new business in the new year. Plus, learn how to bring your presentations to life in a fraction of the time with PowerPoint Designer and Zoom—the newest additions to PowerPoint. | Episode Preview | Registration (direct link)

 

FastTrack Webinars: Learn how to do more, together

When: Multiple sessions currently scheduled through December 14, 2016 | 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 A lightning tour of the new Microsoft Tech Community

On the latest Microsoft Mechanics episode, community manager Anna Chu gives a lightning tour of the Microsoft Tech Community. If you haven’t seen or joined the community, it’s the single place where experts in the community can share, collaborate and learn about products and services across Microsoft. In this demonstration, Anna shows how to sign up to become a member of the community, search for answers to questions, personalize your experience to just the products and services that you want to follow, post new conversations and reply to conversations, view member status and build your community status, and access popular event content within the community. We’ve recently added communities and spaces for Microsoft Teams and Surface Devices with more on the way. | Video (direct link)

 

Microsoft Tech Community: Office 365 Roadmap Update

We are making some improvements to the Office 365 Roadmap and wanted to share it here first! By popular request, we are introducing unique Feature IDs to roadmap items. These will be displayed on the Office 365 Roadmap website, and we'll include the relevant Feature ID in associated Message Center notifications. This is possible because we are also migrating the site from the Fast Track Center to products.office.com. (Don't worry, we will redirect the URL and provide you with the new one.) By changing platforms, we have greater control and flexibility with the roadmap website. While moving the website, we're also taking the opportunity to refresh the interface and improve the mobile experience. It is familiar enough to be intuitive but different enough to be refreshing. The site transition will occur in early December, but no action is required in advance since we'll put a redirect in place. As soon as the new URL is defined, we'll share it as well.

 

Skype for Business on Mac CU1 Released!

We are happy to announce our first update for the new Skype for Business on Mac client just 3 weeks after the announcement of general availability. The enhancements in this update include (1) Contact group management features for Office 365 / Skype for Business Server 2015 customers, (2) Contact tagging for status changes and (3) Improvements to meetings reliability, sign-in, and chat. Microsoft is committed to enhancing the Skype for Business on Mac client at a regular pace. To read more about these updates, see (and save as a favorite!) our What’s New Office article. | Additional Resources: Readiness Update Training | Known Issues

 

Create flows triggered by Power BI alerts and eight other new services

This post details recent updates to Microsoft Flow such as Power BI alert support in Flow, improvements to the Microsoft Flow mobile apps (for iPhone and Android) and integration with 8 new services including Azure Resource Manager, Azure Document DB, Disqus and WordPress.

 

Bringing Office 365 to new markets

We have announced the availability of Office 365 in 10 new markets: Bhutan, Cambodia, Greenland, Guadeloupe, Laos, Maldives, Martinique, Mozambique, Myanmar and Vatican City. With this launch, Office 365 is now available in 150 markets and 44 languages. More than 1.2 billion people around the world use Office—at school, at work and in their personal lives. As our service expands, we are mindful of the incredible and increasing diversity of Office users. This latest market expansion required innovative engineering work to create new languages, cultures and currencies. Our team works tirelessly to meet the highest levels of security, compliance and feature parity so that we can deliver the same first-class experience in Office 365 to every market where it’s offered. We plan to launch a further 97 markets over the next year. Stay tuned for more updates.

 


NOTEWORTHY

Updated: Office 365 URLs and IP Address Ranges

November 21, 2016: Updates for Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Endpoints and Exchange Online Protection. Details on the updates are available on the RSS feed and the complete list is located here. | Additional Resources: Managing Office 365 Endpoints, Content Delivery Networks and Client Connectivity.

 

Microsoft Stream: What’s new - Custom Channel Cover

One of the top asks on Stream Ideas forum was to have the ability to set custom channel covers and last week we delivered this feature and now you can make the stream channels more personal and have a unique visual identity for your team or group. The post lists the 2 ways you can assign custom channel covers and provides recommended guidelines for channel cover images.

 

Skype Academy: Meeting Migration Service training now available!

We’ve just published the latest Skype Academy training on Meeting Migration Service (MMS). Meeting Migration Service automatically sends meeting updates to all meeting invitees when an admin moves the user who is hosting the meeting from on-premises to online or when those users are enabled for Cloud PSTN Conferencing. The new service removes the need for users to run the Meeting Migration tool locally to send meeting updates for all future meetings. Watch the readiness presentation to learn more about the scenarios when the Meeting Migration Service is invoked, when the Meeting Migration Tool is still required, how to plan for the best user experience, and reporting capabilities to report on the result of Meeting Migration Service processing.

 

O365 Support Corner Webcast: Office 365 Labs - AD FS and MFA

Format: Video (72 minutes) | In this webcast we will look into Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). We touch on several topics, concentrating on how to read a SAML token and tricks on how to efficiently troubleshoot potential issues using appropriate tools. Most of this webcast consists of live demos.

 

Microsoft IT Showcase: Enterprise Mobility at Microsoft - SME Roundtable (October 2016)

Format: Video (59 minutes) | IT Showcase brought together subject matter experts from our Enterprise Mobility at Microsoft course to answer questions about how Microsoft IT designs, deploys, and supports mobility at Microsoft. In this session, they discuss Microsoft Intune, mobile device management, mobile application management, Microsoft PowerApps, rights management services, agentless device management, and more.