In-Person Conferences and User Groups are back
Paul reports LIVE from the European Collaboration Summit where he’s been catching up with many Microsoft 365 experts – including Ingo, Dominic, Tony Redmond and many more.
Mike Weaver will be heading up to Manchester this evening (Tues 30th) to speak at the Microsoft Cloud User Group.
And next week, Steve will be at the Microsoft Cloud User Group in Birmingham. Attend both in-person or if you’re not local, watch live online.
We’ll hold out hope that in-person conferences and events are back for good, as you can’t underestimate the value of the networking aspect. Remote work is here to stay, but if you’ve been working from home then events are great to catch up with colleagues and peers.
Microsoft Lists goes offline – intentionally
You heard that right – but it’s not a bad thing. Offline capabilities for using Microsoft Lists have reached general availability, alongside speed improvements for SharePoint Online.
Microsoft Lists and OneDrive now are PWA (Progressive Web Apps) , which means they have the ability to have offline capabilities and run within the local operating systems. The underlying technology for this is called Project Nucleus, which is a client-side component that allows Microsoft to provide these capabilities to existing SharePoint Online apps.
Alongide the PWA Project Nucleus includes a new SharePoint app, which you might have seen installed onto your PC and is configured to run at startup. It includes a local web server that holds the cache allowing offline editing and accelerated access.
The biggest difference you’ll see in performance is within larger Microsoft List and Lists with views. These could often suffer performance issues – such as a 2-3 second wait when scrolling a formatted list view with several hundred items.
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Information Barriers comes to all – including free – Education Plans
For business, Information Barriers is an E5 feature, useful for large regulated companies who need to segregate users and data – for a quick overview, check out our YouTube video by Patrick and the chat we had on the podcast several episodes back.
Schools, Colleges and Universities have, for a long time, had similar challenges as they have two distinct user groups – staff and students, plus some overlap in the middle for teachers, professors, researchers and lecturers.
Tony Redmond spotted this, and you can read the source documentation on MS Docs
Authenticator knows where you are, and can nudge people to register for MFA
Ever got what seems to be a random Authenticator request, and you deny it only to find maybe OneDrive or Edge actually did request it? Or perhaps you’re getting Authenticator requests in the middle of the night… from your desk phone? Well, you might want to examine the Microsoft 365 config if that’s the case… but in the meantime, you’ll have a way of seeing if it’s actually likely to be you, as Authenticator can be configured to show, via Azure AD, the sign-in location. And trying to get people to register for MFA is hard – another new feature, Authenticator Registration will allow you to encourage users to register before you switch on controls.
New Microsoft Authenticator security features are now available! – Microsoft Tech Community
Roadmap and Message Center
And in the highlights from the Roadmap and Message Center
Paul talks about Compliance Records for Tasks – where a copy of some Planner tasks will be stored in a user’s mailboxes. This means when a task is assigned to at least one user, a secondary copy will be stored in each users mailbox, for eDiscovery purposes – and is designed to allow for deeper integration with To Do. Expect this mid-December in standard tenants, at the latest.
Microsoft Teams gets improvements, this month – though it’s going to be tight – where you’ll be able to show and hide a guest tenant from the Teams client, and leave an org via the client too. This will be a welcome addition.
Expect much more noise about new capabilities to migrate SharePoint 2010 (out of the box) and SharePoint 2013 (designer) workflows to Power Automate. This was first coming in March ’22 then updated to June ’22 – and will be initially performed via PowerShell.
A common ask from education customers and those planning to migrate from Microsoft Stream is the ability to block downloads of videos from OneDrive and SharePoint – and that ability, and the ability to block downloads of audio files – will arrive, hopefully within December.
