This week’s topics:
Exchange 2010-2019 Security Updates Released
Somewhat similar to earlier in the year, vulnerabilities have been discovered in Exchange 2010 and above. Whilst rare, it’s concerning that a second bug has been found so soon; but of course, with Exchange 2010 leaving support in October and many servers remaining exposed to the internet – it’s not a surprise.
As we understand it, this vulnerability requires credentials and works using a malformed PowerShell cmdlet, and can allow an attacker to gain privileges. It is serious enough that although Exchange 2010 is out of support, it receives an update rollup. However, the updates are also available for Exchange 2013, 2016, and 2019.
Holiday backgrounds for Teams
Microsoft and Crayon have both released holiday backgrounds for Teams. This is a useful trend—it’s nice to see professionally-produced backgrounds to help spice up the steady diet of Teams meetings we’re all forced into.
Breakout Rooms are generally available
First expected back in October, Breakout rooms reach Microsoft 365 tenants this week. Breakout rooms emulate the in-person experience in workshops or when a facilitator or teacher asks the attendees to go and work in small groups.
Breakout rooms are in preview but are fully functional. You can create breakout rooms and assign people automatically, rename each breakout group, and manually place attendees into each breakout group. As the organizer automatically move attendees into their groups, you can drop into each “room” to check how they are doing, then bring everyone back to the main meeting.
SharePoint hits 200 million users
We’ll dive into more detail in the next podcast on this – but a big announcement this week from Microsoft shows the scale of usage of SharePoint in the last year, up from 100 million to 200 million.
Microsoft confirmed that this is due to adoption across all services – intranets, applications built on SharePoint, Microsoft Lists as well as usage via Microsoft Teams – so it’s a big milestone.
Teams gets a new meeting join experience and new together mode experiences
On the podcast we discuss the difference the new meeting join experience makes. You’ll see it below in action and we take note that it’s not just about making it easy to see your current settings before you start a meeting.
In particular, we call out how it makes it easy to support newer scenarios, like using your IP phone as an audio device, calling you back on a landline if you haven’t got a decent speaker, and making the Microsoft Teams Rooms “Proximity join” functionality easily discoverable. That means if people go into a meeting room or attempt to join the meeting on their laptop, they will be able to automatically discover the Microsoft Teams Room device next to them and use it as the meeting room device.
In addition to this – Microsoft are releasing the new together mode scenes this week. In the seasonal spirit, these include festive scenes like this:
Teams IP Phones receive new features and updates
If you deploy desk phones to users then the typical use-case is for traditional calling. However, as we move to more meetings, then Teams IP Phones become more useful within a meeting as well. New features include:
- Together mode, 3×3, and background blur on supported phones
- Meet now button on phones
- See screen-sharing content
- Request to speak in a hard-muted meeting
- Sidecar support for add-on units showing contact groups
- Proximity-based join on conference room phones
This comes in addition to the better together updates which allow the Teams desktop client to use the IP Phone as an audio device.
Webinar – How to Increase First Call Resolution with Paul
As discussed on the podcast, join Paul for a live webinar on December 16th
