You can check out our top Microsoft Ignite 2020 announcements from Day 1 here.
Microsoft Ignite Day 2
Paul and I caught up again today to talk through some more of the announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2020, including, as promised some of the Security and Compliance news. Watch the video above to hear our take on these items and read more in the blog below, and tune in tomorrow for our final Ignite 2020 roundup.
What’s changing in Microsoft Stream?
Stream has grown 10x since Ignite 2019, 6 x Feb, uploads of 300 hours per minute with 5 x increase due to COVID. However, Stream had lacked the same compliance, governance, analytics and APIs available to the rest of Office 365 and it’s design doesn’t match the IA of Microsoft 365
Announced at Ignite 2020 comes the news that Stream will follow the model of Office Web Apps in the future and store video in OneDrive and SharePoint Online
In the new model, all videos in SharePoint and OneDrive will be Stream videos and follow the same model for sharing; and SharePoint will be used as the front-end for customised video portal.
The new Stream will have an Office files like view to find and discover videos, though watching videos will be similar to the existing Stream video player. For organising and curating video, Stream portals will be used.
We’ll see this come to Teams first, in Q4 2020 with Teams meeting recordings being stored via an opt-in capability to store video in OneDrive and Teams.
Sharing permissions will follow the same model and allow sharing outside the organization. They’ve heard that people want to block download of videos and will be working on that.
The new Stream rollout will be via a phased migration with an admin-led and an end-user led migration, with tooling available inside Microsoft 365 to migrate content across and allow people to curate it. There will then be a retirement date before which you’ll need to migrate content.
APIs will come via the Microsoft Graph and will build upon file APIs, but include metadata for video, like thumbnails, transcripts and subtitles.
You can read the Roadmap for Stream here.
More SharePoint features of note
Project Nucleus uses a local cache to improve the performance of using List Views in SharePoint, including Microsoft Lists, Teams and traditional SharePoint sites. As well as improving the performance of lists, it also provides offline access – which sounds similar to OWA allowing people to work on list data offline and sync when they have an internet connection.
A big ask for many organisations has been to have a landing page for SharePoint inside Teams. Often the Intranet is the hub for beginning organization-wide communications and comms teams want their message to reach people inside Teams. The new app provides not only the Intranet home page but a Teams-native navigation experience for the Intranet.
Read more about SharePoint announcements here.
Table Talk: Wanted: A Career Jumpstart
Earlier today I was joined by Carole Rennie Logon, Roma Gupta, Rik Hepworth, Alex Mang, and around 60 of our closest friends to talk about how to jump-start your career. You’ll see a few familiar faces including Practical 365 writer MVP Drago, and fellow MVP and my former UC Architects co-host Michel.
In the session myself and other shared our experiences either as IT pros, developers, managers or people coming from a business background and chatted with others who joined us about their experiences and as a group aimed to provide some good advice and answers.
One great tip from me if you want to jumpstart your career is to start contributing your knowledge to the community. You can use this effectively as a portfolio to show you are more than your current job; and don’t get disheartened if you get rejected from your first job applications – it’s an experience we’ve all went through.
Microsoft Defender becomes Microsoft’s XDR brand and gets new features
XDR – cross-layered detection and response is a good way of describing how many organisations use multiple capabilities in Microsoft 365 to provide a full solution. It makes sense then that Microsoft have (in a Forefront style) branded a range of security products in both Microsoft 365 and Azure under the Defender Brand:
The benefit this is intended to bring is that all of the signals from these services will intentionally be shown in one location, allowing IT pros and cyber teams to see threats as they emerge across the estate, rather than in disparate services.
The intention is then that organisations investing in Microsoft 365 E5 and Azure will use these technologies as their cloud-native XDR and combine this with Azure Sentinel as their SIEM solution.
Having seen many organisations move to a “best of suite” approach with Microsoft 365 versus picking overlapping “best of breed” solutions this makes sense, as one area that can be complex to explain is where Microsoft 365 tools combine together to form one cohesive solution. Branding them under Defender makes that easier to explain.
In addition to Defender re-brands, “Defender for Endpoint” completes protection for all platforms, including GA for Android and a preview for iOS – in addition to Windows, Mac and Linux.
Endpoint DLP and Microsoft Cloud App Security DLP integration launches into Public Preview
A re-announcement and a big announcement for Data Loss Prevention. Endpoint DLP effectively replaces the need for WIP (Windows Information Protection) on Windows devices to track and prevent sharing of sensitive data on user devices.
The new preview allows devices to consume DLP policies defined in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center. Another big new announcement is that this also extends to Microsoft Cloud App Security, which is potentially very big news for organizations using third-party cloud products that MCAS can interface with.
Read more about Security and Compliance updates here.
Endpoint Manager Receives more new features
Some unexpected updates have been announced for Endpoint Manager (MEM/Intune) including some big asks from customers looking to replace legacy MDM solutions. MS Tunnel in particular solves the need from some customers who need to deploy a VPN solution to mobile devices to access line-of-business applications:
Another big ask has been for the ability to manage Windows Virtual Desktop devices – and one I was asked about just a week ago from a retail customer was the ability to have shared logins to iPad devices. Shared iPad for Business provides a separate partition on the device that can be logged in via Azure AD identities and sits alongside similar capabilities for Android.
Read more about Microsoft Endpoint Manager updates here.
And don’t forget to enter Quadrotech’s tech giveaway for your chance to win a Microsoft Surface Go 2, JBL Speakers, Amazon Echo Dot’s, and more!
Stay tuned on Practical 365 for the updates from Day 3.
