Your weekly digest for Microsoft & Office 365 News
Microsoft Build Conference Announcements:
Lots and lots of Microsoft Teams announcements
Templates in teams are leveled-up. Building on existing, basic, templating functionality, the functionality of the new templates for Teams includes 12 default templates to meet common needs – and IT admins will be able to create organization templates to publish.
More Teams Announcements
- Building on top of pop out chats (available now), pop-out meetings (coming soon) apps will soon be able to pop-out as well – a step closer to Teams being effectively the front-end to all Microsoft 365 productivity services.
- Teams app management improvements: allowing admins to review, approve, and publish custom applications directly from the Teams admin center, and to review, manage, and purchase applications provided by third-parties.
- Visual Studio and VS.Code extensions for Teams App Studio and the App Studio get an update to version 1.4.0
- Streamlined process to add Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents to Teams in one-click
- New functionality for Teams in Power Automate
- @ mentions in Flows
- Shifts integration to trigger based on Shifts for workflow automation
- PowerBI sharing to Microsoft Teams
- Activity Feed notifications for Teams Apps
- Granular Permissions for Graph APIs
- Mobile capabilities (such as camera and location) for apps
- Teams Graph API improvements to allow sending messages to channels, replying to messages, GA of the Graph API for Shifts and admin controls to allow consent of permissions across the tenant for applications.
A new first-party app, Microsoft Lists was announced
Microsoft Lists is built upon SharePoint (but as far as we know, it’s not purely SharePoint Lists) and is not a replacement for To Do, Planner or Tasks in Teams.
It is a new user-friendly list management application for Microsoft 365. This makes it easier to create lists like new starter on-boarding, performance review lists and is aimed at teams organizing their work.
Whereas SharePoint Lists require some customization, often with JSON to look end-user friendly, a lot of that harder work is done for you with common templates included and a dashboard for organizing all of your lists.
As well as it’s own web-based and mobile applications, Microsoft Lists will (as you might imagine) be available in Microsoft Teams as well. Dates for Microsoft List features are in he roadmap – and to save waiting for later in the show, here’s the key dates:
- Microsoft Lists in it’s web-view version with ready-made templates, sharing and rules – June 2020
- Teams integration, calendar view, forms customization and comments – Q4 2020
- Mobile application for iOS and Android – Q1 2021
SharePoint blog announcement and more information
Read more about the SharePoint announcement here.
Sync Message Center posts to Microsoft Planner
Already announced, now generally available.
Fluid Framework
Read more about the Microsoft Fluid Framework here.
Exchange Team Blog: How to configure the new Room Finder in Outlook
The new room finder experience is available in Exchange Online Outlook on the web – soon available in other Outlook clients over the next few months.
Room Finder is based on room lists, which are collections of room mailboxes. Room lists are specially marked distribution groups that you can also use the same way you use normal distribution groups.
The Room Finder can be used for the following:
- List of recent room lists that user used or rooms that user booked that belong to those room list.
- List of all cities where room list (buildings) are located.
This article describes how to configure the new Room Finder in Outlook.
Exchange Team Blog: On provisioning mailboxes in Exchange Online when in Hybrid
When you’re running an Exchange hybrid deployment, you can create mailboxes in Exchange by using the Exchange Admin Center or by using the New-RemoteMailbox cmdlet.
If you ever need to offboard this mailbox back to on-premises, it is recommended to add the EXO Exchange GUID to the on-premises user object:
- Set-RemoteMailbox “user identity” -ExchangeGuid “value from Exchange Online”
Communication Compliance comes to Yammer
One of the biggest worries’ organizations have with the use of Yammer – an enterprise social network is that people will forget it’s all in the work context and sometimes things can become a little… not safe for work.
The new Communication Compliance functionality now extends to Yammer and allows IT admins and compliance teams to detect inappropriate language and conduct on the service
New on the Roadmap / Message Center News
- Outlook for iOS – Retiring support for 27 languages
- Outlook for iOS is retiring support for 27 languages, such as Lao, Slovenian, Albanian, etc.
- This is (according to Microsoft) to maintain consistency across the Microsoft 365 apps for iOS
- If you currently use Outlook for iOS with one of these languages, you need to change the language in order to continue to use Outlook until the end of June.
- Option to create all meetings online for Outlook on the web and Outlook mobile
- Configure Outlook to setup all their meetings as “online meetings” when they use Skype or Teams as their online meeting provider.
- Available to all clients including mobile clients until End of July
- Outlook on the web – In-product notification of full inbox
- When a user reaches 90% of their inbox capacity, Outlook will show a message on the bottom left (down on the left nav or folder column) warning the user and linking to the settings where they can address this.
- Planned for June 2020.
- Microsoft Teams: Third-party single sign-on (SSO) for apps in Teams
- Users will soon be able to enjoy the benefits of Azure Active Directory Single Sign-On (SSO) for supported Teams apps on both desktop and mobile.
- After they’re signed into Teams, users won’t have to sign in again on apps that integrate with single sign-on for both desktop and mobile. Developers will also enjoy a simplified authentication process through a single API call.
- Planned for May 2020
- Microsoft Teams: Rooms Management with Teams Admin Center
- Remotely update the settings for any Teams room device, inspect the health status of the device as well as peripherals like camera and microphone, or troubleshoot issues using restart or download logs functionality.
- Planned for June 2020
- Microsoft Teams – new lobby setting: only the organizer joins the meeting directly
- A new lobby setting is coming to Teams Meeting Options. We are adding “Only me” as an option to the “Who can bypass lobby?” setting. Once enabled, only the organizer will be able to join the meeting directly. Everyone else, including people from within the same organization, will be sent to the lobby.
- Planned for June 2020
- Microsoft Teams meeting limit increases
- The meeting limit inside a Teams meeting increases to 350 from 250. This will be available in June – but is only a temporary increase at the moment until September this year.
- Planned for June 2020
- Teams Mobile: Organization allowed accounts configuration for Teams
- Teams administrators with be able to push allowed account configurations to Teams mobile for iOS and Android.
- These configurations will work with any mobile device management provider that uses managed app configuration channels (for iOS) and the Android enterprise channel (for Android).
- The devices must be managed for this allowed account configuration to work.
- Planned for June 2020
- Teams Mobile: Android and iOS On-Demand Chat Translation
- With a click, people can translate posts in channels and chat to their language.
- Planned for May 2020
- Teams: Suggested Replies
- Similar to what is already available in Outlook mobile, Suggested Replies will show 3 different responses for a user to choose from for select messages.
- You can quickly reply to a given message by tapping on the suggested reply.
- Planned for Q4/2020
