Microsoft & Office 365 News
6.12.2019: FAQs from Exchange and Outlook booths at 2019 Microsoft Ignite
During Microsoft Ignite 2019, Sigi and Steve were ‘on duty’ at the Exchange booth and received a lot of interesting on-premises questions.
Common questions Sigi was asked were ‘How to remove the last Exchange Server?’ and there were also a few questions around public folders, which is surprisingly still a hot topic.
There are still a lot of on-premises deployments, and the long-term hybrids are people who have not had enough time to move to Office 365. Also, there are people who are running Exchange 2008, which runs out of support in January 2020, and also Exchange 2010, which has still got until October next year. Lately, there have been some people going for that big last push to Exchange 2016 and above, and there are people who are sticking with on-prem as well.
For more information on FAQs at the Exchange and Outlook booths follow this link.
5.12.2019: Public Preview: Azure AD Connect Cloud Provisioning
Provision identities from multiple disconnected AD forests to Azure AD.
There will be support for synchronizing to one Azure AD tenant from multiple disconnected Active Directory forests. The common scenarios include merger & acquisition, where the acquired company’s AD forests are isolated from the parent company’s AD forests, and companies that have historically had multiple AD forests.
You can expect a simplified installation with light-weight provisioning agents. These agents act as a bridge from AD to Azure AD, with all the sync configuration managed in the cloud.
You can use multiple provisioning agents to simplify high availability deployments, which is particularly critical for organizations relying on password hash synchronization from AD to Azure AD.
This will also easily sync from multiple on-premise forests to one AAD Tenant.
For more information on bringing identities from disconnected ADs into Azure AD with just a few clicks, you can check out the tech community blog here.
10.12.2019: The Microsoft Teams Client is now available on Linux (in preview)
The preview for Linux is now available – in .deb and .rpm binary format.
When you install it in preview, it should automatically add the repository, so updates for the client will come from your package manager (e.g. yum update/yum upgrade). This works well on Ubuntu 18.04 minimum and above. Remember though – Conditional Access policies for compliant machines or Azure AD registered won’t work at this time.
It’s important to note that several core features aren’t in it yet – like fast user switching, and sadly, background blur. Our experience over the past couple weeks has been pretty good – Office Online works well within it, it’s very fast and stable.
For Administrators, you’ve got some advantages over users using Chrome/Chromium – you can check diagnostics and see information not only about the OS, but drivers used for audio and video, the devices in use and network information – this is crucial if you allow this in a corporate environment.
Target markets are Education, and some larger enterprises – this isn’t necessarily Microsoft acknowledging it’s the “year of the Linux desktop”.
You can find more information on Microsoft Teams now being available on Linux here.
13.12.2019: Spotted in the Wild – The Microsoft Teams client on mobile is getting Sensitivity Labels
We initially saw this on iOS this morning, you can now assign sensitivity labels in Teams – this feature has been spotted in tenants over the last week or so as well. We’ve covered this before for configuring it in your tenant, but you’ll now be covered on mobile as well.
You can find out more about this feature here.
Message Center Updates
- Reminder: Introducing a ‘High confidence phishing email’ to the spam filter policy (MC198013). As communicated in MC193076 we added a High confidence phishing email to the spam filter policy. Starting January 6, 2020, Microsoft will enable the policy.
- Updated: Clutter for Outlook is being retired (MC173616). As we previously announced in December 2017, on the Outlook blog, we will be retiring the Clutter feature from Outlook beginning January 31, 2020. To help our users manage their mail and be productive, we are leading with the Focused Inbox experience which provides a similar benefit as Clutter by showing less important and urgent mail in Other
- New Feature: Add participants to Teams Meeting chat (MC197451)
- New Feature: Advanced Threat Protection campaign views public preview (MC197802)
- Microsoft Flow is becoming Power Automate (MC197722)
New on the Roadmap
- Teams for Linux client Preview (ID 56219)
- GA: Outlook on the web – room feature card (ID 59430)
- GA: OneNote integration in Teams (ID 57708)
- Users will see the ability to add a OneNote notebook tab to their Teams channels
- Added to the Roadmap: Teams-Outlook Email Integrations (ID 57389) – release planned for January 2020
- Teams-Outlook Email Integrations – this makes it easy to share information between email and chat with three new features:
- Share email to Teams – Share an email from Outlook, including any attachments, to a channel or chat in Teams
- Share conversation via email – Share a Teams conversation via email without leaving the app
- Reply to missed activity emails – See the latest messages and respond to Teams missed activity emails from within Outlook
Ironically on the day of your broadcast, Microsoft announced: “In February 2019 we communicated MC173616 Clutter for Outlook is being retired beginning January 31, 2020. We received feedback from our customers and in response, we are going to postpone the retirement of Clutter at this time.”
I have a lot of users that would like to continue using the Clutter feature but I’m not sure how to re-enable it. The setting to toggle Clutter in Outlook web access is no longer available.