Your weekly digest for Microsoft & Office 365 News
Announce: OAuth 2.0 authentication for IMAP and SMTP AUTH protocols to Exchange Online mailboxes
To continue Microsoft’s path to disable Basic Authentication in Exchange Online, another milestone was met: Now IMAP, POP and SMTP Auth can authenticate using OAuth 2.0. IMAP and SMTP Auth is available now, POP will follow shortly.
The following OAuth flows are supported:
- OAuth2 authorization code flow
- OAuth2 Device authorization grant flow
OAuth2 client credentials grant flow (enables access without a user account) is not supported. If your application needs access to all mailboxes in Exchange Online, it is recommended to use the Microsoft Graph API.
Unlimited SSO and new Azure AD features to simplify secure access management
This week, Brad Anderson announced there will be “Azure AD single sign-on (SSO) for an unlimited number of cloud apps at no extra cost”. This means if you have a Microsoft subscription, you can enable SSO for all their cloud apps, even with Azure AD Free.
In the same post, also a number of Azure AD enhancements have been announced:
- Streamline identity management
- Dynamic groups rule validation (Public Preview)
- Administrative units (Public Preview)
- Bulk operations for users and groups (GA)
- Improve application configuration and security
- Token configuration (GA)
- SAML token encryption (GA)
- Seamless and secure collaboration
- Invite internal users to B2B collaboration (Public Preview)
- Redesigned B2B collaboration invitation emails (GA)
- Secure access to SAML-based applications with Azure AD B2C (GA)
- Safeguard identities with industry-leading security
- Report-only mode for Azure AD Conditional Access (GA)
- Combined MFA and password reset registration (GA)
- Continuous Access Evaluation (GA)
As you see, a lot of improvement in the Azure AD authentication space, we surely cover some of these features in more detail in a future podcast or blog post.
Windows Virtual Desktop Updates
These are simple to deploy and manage with the Azure Portal. You will now have the ability to add groups of users to Windows Virtual Desktop using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) groups. There is support for static or dynamic conditional access policies, and also for mandating multi-factor authentication (MFA).
The Windows Virtual Desktop integration with Azure role-based access control (RBAC) and analytics will give you greater administrative control over user permissions. You’ll now have the ability to choose the geography you want to store your service metadata for the best possible regulatory compliance and performance.
You can expect an upgraded Microsoft Teams experience coming soon, and also support for cross-platform operating systems.
Cross-Account Sharing Improvements in App Protection Policies
The new improvements allow you to send Org data to other apps, receive data from other apps and also prevents cross-account sharing.
Introducing new Teams certified devices
A new range of certified personal devices aims to help those working remotely. Also for a meeting room experience, Microsoft intend on continuing to expand their certified room devices to ensure Teams rooms can scale to the needs of any size space.
Certification highlights for headset and speakerphones:
- Teams button – provides you with deeper integration with Teams from your device
- Premium microphone for open office – premium microphone optimized for us in an open office.
There are also new Teams headsets and phones available.
New Yammer resources and an updated Yammer Adoption Center
There are now new Adoption Kit resources available in the Yammer Adoption Center. This gives you access to:
- New user guidance
- Templates for communications
- Guidance for comms teams and IT admins
- New guidance on creating live events
New Feature: Outlook introduces Incident Notification for IT Admins
Microsoft 365 tenant global administrators and Office Apps Administrators will be notified about incidents affecting their users with a new right-side panel notification in Outlook for Windows.
New on the Roadmap & Message Center News
- Updates to Outlook for iOS and Android
- New Roadmap items:
- Automated certificate delivery for SMIME in Android (59644)
- Soon you will be able to use Microsoft Intune to deliver certificates to Outlook for Android.
- This will allow your users to digitally sign messages or decrypt encrypted messages using S/Mime.
- Visual cues by account in iOS (57767)
- When a user is logged in to a work or school account, the Office or Exchange icon will appear at the top of the New Message or New Event creation pages.
- When a user is logged in to a personal account, the display icon will represent the account type (Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.).
- Work and personal contact separation in Android (56759) and iOS (56758)
- Soon you will be able to differentiate personal contacts from work/school contacts.
- Automated certificate delivery for SMIME in Android (59644)
- When will these feature appear?
- New Roadmap items:
- New Feature: Introducing Planner integration for Message Center
- The Message Center will get a “Planner syncing” button.
- This allows you to enable synching messages between a Planner plan and Message Center. You can also choose which types of messages are synched.
- Roll-out starts mid-May, should be finished in the summer.
- The Planner app in Teams will be renamed with an updated experience powered by Planner and To Do
- The Planner app in Teams will become the Tasks app
- You will see your tasks and team tasks in a single app directly in Teams
- This includes a new list view and a new mobile tasks experience within the Teams app for mobile devices
- Roll-out begins in May, completed by mid-July
- Yammer: The New Yammer (Public Preview)
- Yammer is being rebuilt from the ground up and will become Microsoft’s first application to fully leverage the Fluent Design system – resulting in a fast, modern, interface for web and mobile.
- Availability date: May CY2020
