Tracker Approval Process
Last week it was reported that Microsoft would be moving away from UserVoice as a means to collect public feedback and votes. This has been a useful tool in applying pressure to Microsoft product teams and a place to direct end-users requesting key features. The loss is deafening quite literally.
The Hafnium attack on thousands of on-premises Exchange servers is a wake-up call for their administrators and the organizations using the email service. Ten years ago, it was a reasonable decision to stay on-premises. Five years ago, you could argue the same case and companies with bad network connectivity to the internet or specific security requirements were happy to stay on-premises. Now? In a world of increasing threat, staying on-premises looks a lot more risky. For most, it's time to move to the cloud.
Microsoft is closing down the UserVoice sites created to allow customers submit ideas and feedback about products. Some sites are already closed and others will close in the near future. There's no news about what the replacement platform will be or if Microsoft will be able to migrate existing content from UserVoice.
This week read or listen to find out about why it's time to patch your Exchange Servers; and learn about the new features announced this week at Microsoft Ignite that are rolling out now and will have the biggest impact. We talk Teams new features, and the a feature in AIP people have eagerly anticipating.
Two recent updates for Microsoft Teams and Office (Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise) allow you to self-select whether you want to use Beta (Insider), Current, Monthly and Bi-Annual features within the client, and toggle Teams Preview features. Find out how to switch this on for your copy of Office and Teams, and how as an admin you can enable this for your users.
New presentation features in Teams, coming later this month and announced at Microsoft Ignite 2021, are all designed to make it easy to look more professional in meetings and build in advanced effects into Teams itself. Presenter Mode adds features to allow you to add yourself into the presentation, PowerPoint Live makes life easier when showing slides, and webinars finally become a core part of Teams.
Microsoft has released a preview of co-authoring for protected (encrypted) Office documents using the desktop apps. While it might seem straightforward to enable co-authoring (and the online apps have been able to do this for over a year), making it work for the Office desktop apps requires a complex mix of Office, SharePoint Online, the OneDrive sync client, and sensitivity labels. Once everything lines up, it works beautifully, even if you can't take a screenshot to prove that it works.
Microsoft has issued critical security updates for Exchange on-premises servers. The fixes close off four known vulnerabilities which expose Exchange to day-zero attacks. It's important to apply these updates ASAP.
Microsoft Teams Connect, a new way of collaboration based on federated shared channels, is now in private preview and should be available later in 2021. The best thing about shared channels is that you don't need to switch tenants to access a channel in another tenant. Azure B2B collaboration (guest accounts) is still important, but this is a brand new way of working that should be very popular.
At the Ignite 2021 event, Microsoft announced that Teams will have multi-geo capabilities later this year. The same $2/user/month uplift as used for other multi-geo workloads applies to Teams. The announcement is not unexpected. Teams consumes services from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft 365 Groups, all of which are already multi-geo capable.
In Part 3, Peter covers how to create forms processing models from SharePoint document libraries by using AI Builder, a feature of Microsoft PowerApps. Before plunging into the detail, it is important to understand how forms processing models compare and differ to document understanding models.
Microsoft has introduced a first file delete warning in the OneDrive sync client. The new warning is flagged after a user deletes a file in a synchronized location and continues until they turn the warning off. The idea is that people might not realize how the OneDrive recycle bin works. Also in the OneDrive world, Microsoft confirmed that OneDrive for Business supports the 250 GB limit for file uploads some six weeks after the feature was originally announced with some confusion if it applied to business users. Now it does, so all is well.
