Microsoft / Office 365 News
Basic Authentication in Exchange Online is going to be around for a little bit longer
Legacy Authentication methods were going to be removed from Exchange Online in October 2020. This has been delayed until the second half of 2021 – a long way off it might seem, but so did October 2020 when it was first announced. Office 2010 still goes out of support in October, so this won’t give you breathing room if this was your blocker – so we advise you upgrade now. If you are delayed by your vendors though, then this will be helpful. Speaking to some customers – they are disappointed as it’s removed the push to get this done – but many are going to continue to try and meet this target anyway, as security attacks against the service are partly mitigated by removing Legacy Auth. Find out more here.
Exchange Team Blog: Support of DANE and DNSSEC in Office 365 Exchange Online
DNSSEC and DANE are two ways to make spoofing your email addresses by taking over for example your SPF or DKIM records even harder.
Here are the implementation plans:
- DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions): digitally sign records for DNS lookup using public key cryptography. This ensures that the DNS records you receive have not been changed by anybody that is not authorized.
- DANE for SMTP (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities): uses the presence of DNS TLSA resource records to securely signal TLS support to ensure sending servers can successfully authenticate legitimate receiving email servers. This makes the secure connection resistant to downgrade and man in the middle (MITM) attacks.
- TLS-RPT: TLS reporting to upports monitoring and troubleshooting of TLS connectivity issues
Phases of implementation:
- 1st phase: only outbound support (mail sent outbound from Exchange Online) – goal is to implement this by the end of calendar year 2020.
- 2nd phase: add inbound support for Exchange Online – goal is end of 2021
Find out more here.
Background effects in Teams meetings
This new feature allows you to choose a background picture from a pre-defined list of pictures for your Teams meeting.
Mentioned in our Podcast last week, roll-out is beginning this week:
You can find out more in my post on Practical 365 here.
A new experience for launching instant channel meetings
In a channel you can click the Meet button to start an instant meeting with all members of the channel.
Improved Teams meeting join launcher experience (saw that one in my tenant)
When you click on a Teams meeting link, you can see the web site has been updated in the following way:
- You can download the app
- Continue in the browser
- Open your Teams app
Multi-Window Chat for Microsoft Teams rolling out
Pop out chat windows while you chat – useful if you are in a meeting in the main window or editing a document and you need a side chat going for one on one or group chat.
End Meeting for all button
This is useful in a range of scenarios but in particular, Education customers have been keen to see this, so that they can “end” a meeting and not leave students chatting.
Raise Hands in Teams Meetings
This new experience provides a “Raise Hand” button in your meeting for attendees to show that they have a question – they can lower it if they change their mind as well. When someone raises their hand, you’ll see a little hand emoji next to their name in the meeting.
A new diagnostics tool for Skype for Business Server 2015 and 2019 has been released
It might be that you’ve rolled out new capacity on-premises to support home workers using Skype for Business Server – many organizations, for example have put in Edge capabilities they didn’t have before.
This new tool is based on the experiences of support escalation engineers and covers scenarios including contact list issues, federation, hybrid and services not working correctly.
Find out more here.
Public preview of auto classification with sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365 services
Using Microsoft Information Protection (MIP), you can label your documents or files in Office apps and also in other M365 services such as OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online.
Now public preview of automatic classification with sensitivity labels for documents stored on OneDrive and SharePoint Online, and for emails in transit in Exchange Online.
Automatic classification allows you to setup sensitivity labels and apply them automatically to your Office files such as Word documents and emails on organizational policies.
Also, you can configure auto classification policies in Microsoft 365 services like OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online. These policies can automatically label files at rest and emails in transit based on the rules you’ve set.
Find out more here.
New on the Roadmap
- Local Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams
- This new local media optimization feature is designed for people that have Direct Routing configured. What it will allow, in summary, is to select the optimal IP address of the session border controller to use based on the client’s location. It will be provided to the client using SDP (Session Description Protocol).
- It’s useful to support core scenarios like Media Bypass.
- Full details are available here.
- Share System Audio in Teams Live Events
- Just like Teams Meetings, you’ll soon be able to share system audio when you share your screen in Teams Live Events.
- This is rolling out at the end of April.
- Changes to the way Teams policies are controlled for screen sharing in chat
- Screen share from chat allows you to immediately start sharing your screen in a 1-1 chat or group chat. This entry point was previously governed by the AllowPrivateCalling policy. If this policy was disabled, users couldn’t screen share from chat.
- The option to start a screen share from chat will now be governed by the ScreenSharingMode policy.
- This is planned for May.
- Tenant wide defaults for who can present in Teams Meetings
- Rather than leave it solely to meeting organizers to choose who can and cannot present (versus be just an attendee) in meetings, a new policy is coming to Teams to allow people to choose at an admin level, across the tenant who can and cannot present.
- This is expected to roll out the first week of May.
- Retention Policies for Yammer
- Very little about this new roadmap item, but it is important as it appears that it will be possible to configure retention policies for how long Yammer messages are stored within Office 365
- This is expected to be released in May.
- Yammer App for Microsoft Teams
- Mentioned at Ignite 2019, this is expected very soon – this will add an App within Microsoft Teams so that you can see your Teams (projects, teams you are in) alongside Yammer (communities and enterprise social networks)
- This is expected later this month – April.
