Microsoft / Office 365 News
Microsoft Teams, Circuit, Zoom and other tools suffered meeting issues earlier in the week
- Incident TM206556 caused several issues, mostly in Europe including problems signing into meetings, a failure to be able to switch tenants and performance issues when sending IMs.
- Other services like Circuit and Zoom are suffering too – with Zoom failing particularly badly and receiving lots of bad reviews in app stores – often the only place people can vent their anger.
- After issues earlier in the week performance has been good.
Cumulative Updates for Exchange 2016 and 2019 for March are released
- These are the latest CUs for Exchange 2016 and 2019 – Cumulative Update 16 and 5 respectively.
- These include the security patches released last month, which we hope you were aware of – if not, read this article ‘Why Exchange Admins should be worried‘ now.
- In addition, there’s an important update to the Exchange 2019 sizing calculator, version 10.4 which should be used to size deployments.
- Read more here.
Exchange Team Blog: FindTime scheduling add-in for Outlook just got better
- Most recent improvements:
- The organizer’s FindTime poll data is now stored in the mailbox
- It’s now available in 13 more languages – Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, Italian, French, German, Portuguese (Brazilian), Korean, Japanese, German, Turkish, Russian, and Spanish
- You can access FindTime from the Office add-in store or deploy it in your tenant.
Tools to make identifying legacy clients and assessing the impact of blocking them are available
- Sign in logs for 7 days showing the user agent used to sign-in and group sign-ins by different types of authentication and different clients.
- Combine this with Conditional Access Report Online mode, Microsoft’s guidance for getting sign-in logs into Azure Monitor and then use the Conditional Access Insights workbook to identify which clients would be blocked by your CA policies.
- Read more here.
Focus plan now available for all MyAnalytics users
- The focus plan is Microsoft’s AI-based offering in MyAnalytics – Microsoft’s “Fitbit for work” that helps identify times that you should reserve in your calendar to give you time to focus.
- https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/workplace-analytics-myanalytics/focus-plan-now-available-for-all-myanalytics-users/ba-p/1225397
New Microsoft 365 Security Previews
- Microsoft Information Protection & Compliance Preview Programs
- Trainable classifier auto-labeling with sensitivity labels preview
- Office 365 service-based auto-labeling for EXO (Data in transit) and SPO/OD (Data at rest) preview
Resources from Microsoft and elsewhere to help with adoption of Teams in your org
Microsoft continue to provide some updated or collated guidance on Teams for organizations adopting it for the first time. We saw the following released this week:
- Updates to Adoption Assets for Microsoft Teams
- Helping teachers and students make the switch to remote learning
- Quick Start: Setting Up Your COVID-19 Health Bot
- How to get your team ‘on Teams’
There’s a number of new pre-integrated Apps available in Azure AD
- A number of new additions – in general this makes it easier to get these onboarded as organizational applications
- Federated sign-in only
- Barracuda Email Security Service
- Code 42 – DLP and insider threat detection
- TicketManager
- EAB Navigate – a educational tool
- Hive – enterprise collaboration tool
- Sign-in and provisioning
- Zapier
- TeamViewer
- Azure Databricks
- Mixpanel
- Purecloud
- Read more here.
Introducing Microsoft Call Quality Power BI Connector
- This is useful if you are using the Call Quality Dashboard V2 and want to provide better reporting and dashboard of data to your organization.
- This will give you the tools to provide pie charts, graphs and other visual data showing call and meeting volumes and data to help you pro-actively identify issues people are having when reliant on meetings.
- Read more here.
New on the Roadmap
Notable this week:
- Windows Virtual Desktop support for Microsoft Teams
- A/V redirection is on the way – great news and will arrive in April
- Office 365 ATP, Secure by Default: Do not Allow for domains that fail authentication
- Device Management support for Collaboration Bars
- This will be coming to the Teams admin centre with a new classificaiton of device – these are Android based devices for management
- Expected this month!
- Collaboration just got easier: Real time co-authoring now available in Visio for the web
- Visio Plan 1 or Plan 2 will be able to create and edit using co-authoring, in Q1 this year
Message Center Updates
- Wording for Quarantine messages changes from “Quarantine” to “Review these messages”
- Awareness of Microsoft 365 temporary feature adjustments
- Microsoft will be limiting some features, such as how often presence updates to improve performance
- SharePoint mobile app to support customized themes
