Your weekly digest for Microsoft 365 News
Lots of Microsoft Teams announcements from the MS Inspire Conference
Build apps, chatbots and visualize data without leaving Teams
Enhancements to the Power Platform experience in Teams make it easier to create, deploy, and manage apps, as well as visualize data, without ever leaving Teams. Microsoft Dataflex gives you a built-in, low-code data platform for Teams, and provides relational data storage, rich data types, governance, and one-click solution deployment.
Also, Micrsosoft announced that the Common Data Service has now been renamed to Microsoft Dataflex Pro, if you need to extend the included version of Dataflex beyond it’s limitatins.
The new Dataflex, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents functionalities in Teams are coming soon to select Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users for no additional cost.
New Power BI app for Teams
The Power BI app for Teams allows reports directly from Teams and makes it much easier to collaborate with data. It also provides sample reports, automation and sharing experiences.
Enrich Teams meeting experiences with 3rd party apps and services
You’re now able to integrate your apps and services with Teams meetings, giving your Team’s users more options to host collaborative and interactive meetings.
For example, an Agenda app could add a tab with an agenda in the pre-meeting window, a button to open agenda items on the meeting control bar, or a summary file or other type of object in the post-meeting chat window.
One place to manage all your Teams devices
Manage all your Teams devices, including Microsoft Teams Rooms, from the Teams Admin Center.
Microsoft Teams Rooms Standard has introduced enhanced management capabilities for Teams meeting devices to make it easier for partners and IT admins to deploy and manage a fleet of devices, including improvements across device set-up, bulk management tasks, and health monitoring.
Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium offering
Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium includes a remote management offering that enables customers to shift the operational responsibility of managing and monitoring Microsoft Teams Rooms to Microsoft.
Track information and organize your work using Microsoft Lists
Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory, and more, using customizable views, rules, and comments to keep everyone in sync.
Microsoft Lists Home (web app) is beginning to roll out with 8 ready-made templates. It will also be available in Microsoft Teams next month along with three additional industry templates. A Lists mobile app for iOS is also expected later this year.
Extend data loss prevention to the endpoint
There is a public preview of the new Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP), which extends data loss prevention to devices.
Quickly identify, detect, and act on insider threats
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the general availability of their toolset for managing insider threats and code of conduct policy violations in your organization.
Today, they’re significantly expanding the quality of signals that Insider Risk Management and Communication Compliance in Microsoft 365 reason over to intelligently flag potentially risky behavior.
They’re also adding new policy templates to customize thresholds to better meet organizational needs, and enabling more effective remediation workflows to push alerts to other systems like Microsoft Azure Sentinel.
More security signals to Azure Sentinel
Using data sources within Microsoft Azure Sentinel, you can build a more complete picture of the threats that your organization faces, conduct deep threat hunts across your environment, and use the power of automation and orchestration in the cloud to help free up your security analysts to focus on their highest-value tasks.
Microsoft have announced several new third-party connectors across Microsoft Azure Sentinel to simplify getting security insights across many leading solutions and partners, including networks, firewalls, endpoint protection and vulnerability management.
Firstline Worker Experience
With the new Firstline Worker Productivity Tools, you can easily manage schedules and start your shift from anywhere and you can make vital messages and live events more discoverable.
This enables Firstline Workers to communicate more safely and efficiently and management of a Firstline Workforce is made much easier.
Make finding people easier with enriched profile cards
Up until now you were limited to the existing attributes of profile cards. Finding the right people in a timely manner wasn’t always easy. Sometimes you’re looking for more than just a name and face, maybe it’s a skill, location, or something else.
You can configure your tenant settings through the Microsoft Graph to enrich an individual’s profile card by adding attributes from Azure Active Directory—including their alias, employee ID, or a custom property. This feature is now available.
This is very similar to extending your AD Schema with new attributes.
Read more about all of the new experiences in Microsoft Teams here.
Announcing availability: New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!
How to turn on the new experience:
Select your profile pic at the top of the Teams app, then Settings > General.
Select Turn on new meeting experience:
Now restart the Teams client.
The new meeting experience provides the following features:
Calls and meetings will pop out into their own window:
Large gallery view lets you see up to 49 video streams at once:
Together mode lets you feel like you’re in the same shared space with everyone in the meeting:
Meeting notes are now taken directly on the meeting’s Meeting notes tab in the main Teams window.
Focus mode is available when content is being shared – focus on the content, not on the videos.
Read more about the new Meeting and Calling Experience.
Public Preview of Universal Print
Universal Print provides a user-friendly, easy print experience that also:
- Eliminates the need to install printer drivers because it is built into the Windows experience
- Helps you to find printers both near and outside of your current location
- Enables print from zero-trust networks via single sign-on (SSO) when connected to the internet and authenticated to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
For IT professionals who are managing print, Universal Print offers:
- A print solution to unblock the move to the cloud and support print for Azure AD users
- Managed printing in zero-trust networks
- Eliminates the need to manage print servers or the need for complex hybrid print solutions
- A centralized portal that enables robust management capabilities.
- Visibility and insights into your print with reporting
- Print data stored in the same manner as other Microsoft Office data, in accordance with Microsoft’s data management guidelines
- Printer deployment and default printer configuration on end-user devices using Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Microsoft Intune)
Roll-out starts now and is planned to be finished in September 2020.
Find out more about Universal Print here.
Microsoft Inspire Session Script
If you missed the fantastic sessions from Microsoft Inspire 2020, our fellow MVP Michel de Rooij’s has created a PowerShell script, “Get-EventSession.ps1”, which allows you to download all the sessions from Microsoft Inspire 2020.
Launch of adoption.microsoft.com: Envision, Onboard and Drive Value with Microsoft 365 Adoption Tools
The new M365 adoption site is live, this includes a ton of resources (adaption guides, checklists, quick start guides and various training videos) to simplify and accelerate your time to value with Microsoft 365.
Sorted in these adoption areas:
- Microsoft 365
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint Adoption
- OneDrive Adoption
- Outlook mobile Adoption
- Yammer Adoption
- Security & Compliance Adoption
Visit https://adoption.microsoft.com/ to follow all of the great new content.
Exchange Team Blog: Book a workspace in Outlook
A new article on how to book a workspace in Outlook was published by Microsoft. Once it’s updated and live, we’ll have Victoria Rodriguez from Microsoft on our podcast to run us through the functionality.
TLS 1.0 and 1.1 retirement date in Office 365 to be October 15, 2020
Microsoft originally paused the retirement of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Office 365 (MC186218 June ’20) due to these unprecedented times. As companies have pivoted their supply chains and countries have started to re-open, they have re-established a retirement date for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Office 365 to be October 15, 2020.
As previously communicated (MC126199 in Dec 2017, MC128929 in Feb 2018 and MC186827 in July 2019), Microsoft are moving all of their online services to Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2+ to provide best-in-class encryption, and to ensure the service is more secure by default.
Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services
As previously announced via our blog and MC175274 (March, 2019), Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020.
After this date, ongoing investments in the Office 365 cloud services – including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business – will proceed based on post-Office 2013 requirements. We recommend that organizations with Office 2013 clients consider migrating to Office 365 ProPlus.
Microsoft will not take any active measures to block older Office clients, such as Office 2013 and Office 2010, from connecting to Office 365 services.
However, legacy clients attempting to connect to a modern, always up- to- date cloud service may experience performance and reliability issues.
Upcoming webinar: Introducing Certificate-Based Authentication for Exchange Online Remote PowerShell
On July 30th, fellow MVP Vasil Michev will provide a Webinar to Introducing Certificate-Based Authentication for Exchange Online Remote PowerShell and will be showing how to automate tasks for Exchange Online PowerShell and other tips and tricks.
It’s free – and you can register here.
On the Roadmap this week
- Microsoft Information Protection: Double Key Encryption
- Double Key Encryption from Microsoft allows you to protect your highly sensitive data while maintaining full control of your key. You can protect your data with two keys – your Azure key and your key in the Double Key Encryption service.
- Expected July 2020
- Microsoft Teams: Multiple Number Dialing
- Teams now supports dialing additional numbers for a given user.
- Expected July 2020
- Microsoft Teams: Call Merge
- Call Merge gives end users the capability to merge their active 1-1 call into another 1-1 call or another group call. This applies to Teams VOIP calls and PSTN calls.
- Expected August 2020
- Microsoft Teams collaboration bar enhancements planned:
- Expected in July:
- Ability to use the raise hands Teams meeting feature from the device and/or console
- Ability to pin the video stream of a participant from the device/console, keeping the pinned user’s video visible in the gallery. This “pinned view” is only applied to the gallery view in the meeting room and not to other meeting participant’s views.
- Allows meeting organizer to assign meeting roles (presenter and attendee) from the device, which enables those users to take specific actions in the meeting (ex: who can mute others, who can present content, etc.)
- Ability to turn on live captions from the device UX
- Expected in December 2020
- 3×3 video (view 9 video streams simultaneously)
- 1080p Resolution – Outgoing Video
- Dual front-of-room screens support
- Center of Room Meeting Console support
- Allows users to project a mirror image of their PC to a screen supported by a Teams device, through a HDMI cable.
- Device UX optimized for use in a personal space scenario (e.g. home office), using personal credentials
- Microsoft Teams displays
- A new category of all-in-one dedicated Teams devices that features an ambient touchscreen and a hands-free experience powered by Cortana. These devices seamlessly integrate with your PC, providing easy access to Teams chat, meetings, calling, calendar, and files. With natural language, users can ask Cortana to join and present in meetings, dictate replies to a Teams chat, and more.
- Expected in Q4 2020
