STEVE: Welcome to this week’s Practical 365 podcast – the podcast that keeps YOU up to date with what’s new in Microsoft 365 – whether that’s the latest announcements and latest Message Center news.
I’m your co-host, Steve Goodman and I’m joined today – the 6th December 2019 – by Sigi!
SIGI: Hi Steve! Yes, as usual, I am your co-host and like Steve, Chief Editor of the WORLD’s best Microsoft 365 website – Practical 365!
In this weekly podcast, keep an eye on all the announcements and news so you don’t have to. And it’s not been a quiet week!
First up, let’s talk about the most important news in Office 365 this week…
Office 365 News
Two new Office 365 Centers are live in Europe
On 3 December, two brand new Office 365 data center locations went live in Germany and Switzerland.
This started with Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Then the following day, Teams also went live in those data centers. Below are the details:
DE (German signup location)
CH (Swiss signup)
LI (Lichtenstein)
Note: Cloud Recording and Live Events are currently disabled due to the dependency on Microsoft Streams.
How to use the new data center:
New tenants: If you create a new tenant this week, and select for example Germany as your country, you will automatically be created in the new data center.
Existing tenants: You can create a request to have your data moved to a different datacentre, but allow some time for Microsoft to have this done
Roles in Teams meetings are GA
Another long-awaited feature from Skype for Business is now available in Teams. Presenter & Attendee roles in Teams meetings are live on Desktop, Web, and Mobile clients.
The Surface hub device needs to wait until the beginning of the next year when their production builds are unblocked.
Presenters can do just about anything that needs doing in a meeting, while the role of an attendee is more controlled. For example, attendees cannot mute other participants, share content or admit people from the lobby.
A full list of all roles and capabilities is also available here.
Auto-Renewal for Office 365 groups is now available
This is the activity-based renewal for expiration policies. Traditionally, if you expire a group after (for example) 30 days, the user will need to confirm it’s still in use.
With this change – actions like visiting a Teams channels, working on files in SharePoint, joining a group and sending Outlook Group messages will trigger automatic renewal.
This won’t need any special configuration and will apply to existing groups with expiration policies.
More information on the tech community here.
Upcoming changes in the way that Migration Batches for Public Folders are created
A new parameter, SourcePfPrimaryMailboxGuid will be mandatory when creating a New Migration batch for PF migrations for Modern Public Folder migrations to Exchange Online.
This change is designed to make sure that the Mailbox Replication Service, in Exchange Online, can find the correct Mailbox Server hosting the active DB with the Primary Public Folder mailbox.
More information on the tech community here.
Intune – or Microsoft Endpoint Manager/Device Management gets a centralized Audit Log location
This is coming in the December update – we’ll tell you when it’s available but will provide a view of all Audit logs for Intune within the Tenant admin blade. This will also show in Azure, if that’s your preference for Intune Management, under Monitoring>Audit logs.
More information on the tech community here.
Microsoft Defender ATP endpoint and detection response (EDR) capabilities are now GA for MAC OS
This provides context on the detections so that if malware is detected then we can view the timeline of what led up to a detection.
It also provides the integration for advanced hunting capabilities for your security team performing investigations. More information on the tech community here.
Message Center Updates
Retirement of SharePoint classic and Delve blogs (MC197403)
On July 17th, existing Delve blogs will be deleted, and no classic blogs can be created.
New Feature: Meeting chat notifications (MC197293) by default, meeting chats will be muted until a user either sends a message in the chat or joins the online meeting.
Updated Feature: Handling repeated phishers in forms – we mentioned this last week – it’s now hit the message center after being on the roadmap (MC197185)
STEVE: And – that’s all we’ve got time for today!
SIGI: That’s right Steve. We’ll be back next week for more Microsoft 365 news – so make sure you subscribe either at your favorite podcast app – or over on Practical365.com. Thanks for joining us.
