Play of the Week

Microsoft is building upon the heavily popular background blur feature in Teams meetings with background effects. This new feature in Teams allow meetings attendees to customize their background from a list of pre-selected images. Microsoft will continue to iterate and enhance this new feature to include the ability for users to upload their own custom images, beginning in May.

In Development

Office 365 user view to Project and Roadmap

The Office 365 user view to Project and Roadmap feature gives users the ability to view only projects and roadmaps in Microsoft Project that have been shared with them. The roll out of the feature will be preceded by the release of a supporting new service plan, Common Data Service.

ID: 60646    Tags: Project – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: May CY2020

Microsoft Teams – raise hands in Teams meetings

The new raise hands feature in Teams allows meeting attendees to identify that they wish to speak by toggling the hand icon in the meeting control bar, making it easier to actively participate in meetings. When a meeting participant has raised their hand, an icon will appear next to their name in the roster view as well as their profile picture or video on the main meeting stage. Both the attendee who raised their hand and any presenter can lower individual hands in the meeting. Raise hands will be available for both PC, Mac, and web-based clients to start, with mobile applications quickly following. We will continue to iterate and enhance this new feature in the coming weeks.

ID: 62755    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Education   Release: April CY2020

Records Management: Regulatory Records (private preview)

Provides customers the ability to declare items in SharePoint Online as regulatory items. These labels are more stringent label vs record labels. Targeted to Financial services or other industries who have WORM compliance requirements. Will update the Cohasset assessment to include SharePoint Online.

ID: 63062    Tags: O365, Admin Center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: May CY2020

Outlook on the web – support for rich text for tasks

We are adding support for rich text formatting in the tasks module powered by To Do in Outlook on the web. With this, you will be able to format the text when you add a note for a specific task. This update also applies to the web version of To Do.

ID: 63230    Tags: Exchange – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Education Release: May CY2020

Outlook on the web – ability to view and assign categories to tasks

From the tasks module in Outlook on the web or in the web version of To Do, users will be able to organize their tasks leveraging the categories they have created in Outlook. Users will be able to view the categories applied to their tasks in the list view for tasks and also assign categories to the tasks using the detailed view. At the initial release, categories can only be created in the mail module of Outlook.

ID: 63231    Tags: Exchange – Education, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: May CY2020

SharePoint lists – New hyperlink field editor in Quick Edit

We are replacing the legacy hyperlink editor when people use SharePoint lists in Quick Edit mode. The new hyperlink editor removes the previous iframe experience with a more modern, fast experience.

ID: 63275    Tags: O365, SharePoint – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

Microsoft Teams – share system audio in live events

With share system audio in live events, your live event attendees will be able to hear the audio of the content that you are sharing on your screen. This feature works just like share system audio in Teams Meetings. Once enabled, any audio that is playing on the user’s machine will be shared in the live event for participants to hear. Note: This feature will only be available for Presenters/Producers in a live event joining from the Windows Desktop Teams client. We will be rolling this out starting in late April and rollout will complete within a week from the initial rollout date, with feature support in GCC, GCCH, and DoD environments following within 30 days.

ID: 63276    Tags: Microsoft Teams, O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

SharePoint lists and libraries – New calendar picker

We are replacing the legacy calendar control with the latest Office Fabric calendar for Gregorian calendars in SharePoint lists and libraries when filling or adjusting the date field. The new calendar experience is faster and delivers a coherent experience across throughout. Note: for non-Gregorian calendars, we have a fall back logic to continue showing our legacy control that offers full non-Gregorian calendar support.

ID: 63277    Tags: O365, SharePoint – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

Microsoft Teams – PSTN participant phone numbers are masked from external users

For customers with Audio Conferencing enabled for their Teams meetings, we will mask the PSTN participant’s phone number to users who have joined from outside of your organization. We expect this feature to begin to roll out beginning in May for PC, Mac, web, and mobile clients.

ID: 63309    Tags: Microsoft Teams, O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: May CY2020

Sync Message Center posts to Planner (Private Preview)

Microsoft is introducing Planner integration for the Message Center to help with workflow management. Lots of information arrives in the Message Center, and you need to decide whether to act on it or not. And if an action is needed, who performs that action, and how do you track that task to completion? Or maybe you want to make a note of something and tag it for later. You can do all of this and more when you sync your Message Center to Microsoft Planner.

ID: 63317    Tags: O365, Planner – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q3 CY2020

Microsoft Teams – easily access meeting options from within a Teams meeting in progress

We are making it easier for meeting organizers to quickly and easily change their presenter and lobby settings once a Teams meeting starts by providing an easy to access link directly in the participants pane. This new functionality will be present for both scheduled and “Meet Now” meetings.

ID: 63334    Tags: Microsoft Teams, O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)  Release: April CY2020

Microsoft Teams – increase in the number of simultaneous videos in Teams meetings

We are increasing the number of participants who can be viewed simultaneously on the Teams meeting stage from 4 to 9. This new experience optimizes for attendees who have enabled video and places the remaining audio-only participants below the meeting stage. To provide a high audio and video quality experience, the layout logic will consider user bandwidth and alter the number of videos shown to provide the best meeting experience. We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers near the end of April and expect the rollout to be completed in early May.

ID: 63341    Tags: O365, Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: May CY2020

Microsoft Teams – download a participant report in a Teams meeting

Meeting organizers, especially teachers, often need to know who joined their Teams meetings. Soon you will be able to download a participant report, found in the roster view that includes join and leave times for participants. Available in the roster view, meeting organizers can download the report that includes those users who joined while the organizer was present. This feature is only available within the meeting while the meeting is active. Available on desktop (Windows and Mac) and the web.

ID: 63351    Tags: O365, Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

Microsoft Teams – change in meeting join experience

We currently allow anyone within an organization to start a Teams meeting. Moving forward, we will restrict the ability to start a meeting to only those users who have been assigned a policy to create a meeting. Meeting attendees without the ability to create a meeting will see a pre-join screen indicating that the meeting hasn’t started. These individuals and will be automatically admitted into the meeting once a user with permissions joins and starts the meeting.

ID: 63355    Tags: Microsoft Teams, O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

Rolling Out

Microsoft Information Protection Labels – Classification Driven Policies with Office 365 Groups

We are developing consistent Office 365 Groups classification to make it easier to protect sensitive data. Tenant administrators can now better govern groups created in their respective tenants by enforcing policies on those groups using classification labels in a streamlined and proactive manner.

ID: 50293    Tags: O365 – DoD, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC, Education   Release: April CY2020

Outlook for iOS: Speller in Search

Outlook will suggest a relevant search term in the event of a typo or misspelled word or very few results based on the keyword search entry.

ID: 56819    Tags: Outlook – Education, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: May CY2020

Outlook for Android: Speller in Search

Outlook will suggest a relevant search term in the event of a typo or misspelled word or very few results based on the keyword search entry.

ID: 59023    Tags: Outlook – Education, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: May CY2020

Microsoft Teams – background effects in Teams meetings

We are building upon the heavily popular background blur feature in Teams meetings with background effects. This new feature in Teams allow meetings attendees to customize their background from a list of pre-selected images. We will continue to iterate and enhance this new feature to include the ability for users to upload their own custom images in May.

ID: 62890    Tags: Microsoft Teams, O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

Microsoft Teams – New experience for launching instant channel meetings

Meet Now buttons in Teams channels will have a new home. You will soon find them in the Channel header where you can easily find and launch the meeting.

ID: 62904    Tags: O365, Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) support for SharePoint Server 2016 Site Migrations (Public Preview)

The SharePoint Migration Tool has enabled migration of content from SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013 and from on-premises file shares and easily move them to either Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or OneDrive in Office 365. This update to the SharePoint Migration Tool provides support for site migrations from SharePoint Server 2016. This includes files, folders, lists, pages, permissions, metadata, versions, and more.

ID: 63258    Tags: SharePoint, O365 – All environments   Release: April CY2020

New Microsoft 365 admin center experience available for Office 365 operated by 21Vianet

The new Microsoft 365 admin center experience is rolling out soon to Office 365 operated by 21Vianet. The new Microsoft 365 admin center is built for IT teams as a simplified way to manage your Microsoft 365 and Office 365 services. The admin center provides a tailored experience based on the unique needs of your role or organization, improves efficiency for everyday tasks, and provides actionable insights that help you make data-driven decisions to deliver a better experience for your users.

ID: 63268    Tags: Admin Center, O365   Release: April CY2020

Launched

Service Health Dashboard Update: Email Notifications

Stay informed through your preferred channel- service health dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center will enable you to sign up for notifications via email so that you can monitor the service and track issues through the channel you prefer.

ID: 24231    Tags: O365, Admin Center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q4 CY2019

SharePoint Integrations with Power Automate and Power Apps to GCC Tenants

In this update, we are enabling you and your users to create/manage custom flows with Power Automate and custom forms/apps with Power Apps for SharePoint lists and libraries in the GCC environment.

ID: 33770    Tags: SharePoint – GCC   Release: Q1 CY2020

Roadmap and the new Project for Education coming soon!

We are pleased to announce the upcoming roll out of the reimagined Microsoft Project and Roadmap to our Education customers. Redesigned from the ground up, Project provides a simpler, fresh and intuitive user experience. You can quickly build a team by adding new members and setting up tasks easily, and then effortlessly shift views between grids, boards and timeline (Gantt charts) to track progress. Roadmap enables you to aggregate your different projects into a visual and interactive view to stay on top of work being done across your organization.

ID: 43892    Tags: Project – Education Release: May CY2020

Microsoft Teams – Share system audio in a Teams meeting

Do you need to share a video or audio clip as part of a presentation? Sharing your system audio lets you stream your computer audio to meeting participants through Teams.

ID: 50692    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q2 CY2019

FindTime now stores data in the user’s mailbox

We listened to your feedback! We have re-written FindTime’s back-end service to now store collected data in the organizer’s mailbox! The voting website will now be hosted in Outlook on the web, instead of Azure. No more concerns around the data in FindTime being stored in North America outside of your tenant environment.

ID: 58210    Tags: O365, Outlook – Education, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q1 CY2020

New experiences for scheduling and attending Live Events in Yammer

Schedule and produce a Live Event in Yammer using webcams and desktop and file sharing from Microsoft Teams. Create and manage the entire event in just a few clicks and broadcast from your device.

ID: 59993    Tags:   Yammer – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q1 CY2020

Custom Mailbox Submissions and improvements to the Admin Submissions

We’re adding some enhancements to the admin submissions functionality of Office 365. You’ll now be able to submit .msg files, plus view more details about submitted content and policies or settings that may have allowed the message to bypass our filters. A new User Submission Policy will enable you to customize the message displayed to users before and after a submission, as well as choose the destination of a reported message. You can choose to send the message to your security team, a Microsoft expert, a custom mailbox of your choice, or a combination of these. The custom mailbox you choose will now be viewable in the Security center, and you’ll be able to trigger admin submissions from the custom mailbox as well.

ID: 60407    Tags: Microsoft Information Protection, O365 – All environments   Release: April CY2020

URL Threat Protection report and Compromised Users report

We’re adding two new reports to the Security & Compliance center. The URL Threat Protection report will be a new report that covers linked threats detected inside email, Office apps and Teams. This report will be based on per URL click, as opposed to a traditional report where it’s usually based on per email message. The Compromised Users report will be a new report that shows the state of any suspicious or restricted user accounts, to give the admin visibility of any account compromise that might have happened inside the tenant.”

ID: 60486    Tags: Microsoft Information Protection, O365 – All environments   Release: Q1 CY2020

Updates to the Threat Protection Status Report

The Threat Protection Status report will be enhanced with several new changes: – More detailed categorizations of threats caught by threat detection technology – New way to breakdown threats caught by associated policy type – New ways to breakdown threats caught by delivery status – Additional filter of data by EOP vs. ATP (ATP customers only) – Enhanced and refined details view with additional investigation and diagnostic information

ID: 60590    Tags: O365, Microsoft Information Protection – All environments)   Release: Q1 CY2020

Updated Feature: Update to Security and Compliance center link in Admin center

For users who do not have M365 E3/E5, we’re updating the link to “Security and Compliance Center” in the Microsoft 365 admin center. It will split into two separate links for Security and Compliance.

ID: 60606    Tags: O365, Admin Center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q1 CY2020

Improved SharePoint Tab and new SharePoint Pages Tabs allow users to paste link to tab pages & lists in Teams Channels

We are making improvements to the SharePoint tab in Teams to help users easily find the pages & lists that you want to tab. Now, you can also paste a link to a page or list from any team-site to tab it in your channels. We are also introducing a new “SharePoint Pages” tab in Teams specifically focused on allowing users to find pages and news posts or paste a link to them from any team-site in order to tab them in Teams. This feature has no impact on page or list permissions. Users who did not have access to that page/list before it was added as a tab will continue to be unable to access it in Teams.

ID: 60614    Tags: Microsoft Teams   Release: Q1 CY2020

Manage organization access to Project for the web

Turn on or off Project for the web for your organization through a new lever found in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

ID: 60644    Tags: Project – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q3 CY2020

Enhancements to guided hunting experience

We’re working on the following improvements to the guided hunting experience: – Addition of details, filter and export capability for: delivery location, special action, directionality, overrides, URL threat – NOT filter for a recipient, sender, sender domain – Time filter modified to allow filtering by hours – Incident widget renamed to Action center in Threat Management Review

ID: 60797    Tags: Microsoft Information Protection, O365 – All environments   Release: May CY2020

Local Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams

Local Media Optimization selects the optimal IP address of the SBC, based on the Teams client location and provides it to the client in Session Descriptoin Protocol (SDP). Customers can configure which Session Border Controllers are used for calling.

ID: 63259    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)    Release: April CY2020

Microsoft Teams – end meeting for all participants within a Teams meeting

Meeting organizers will be able to end the meeting so that all participants within the meeting exit and the call officially ends. Within the meeting control bar, only meeting organizers will see an item that says “end meeting,” clicking this will perform those actions. This action is only available for meeting organizers within the Teams Desktop App (PC and Mac) and on the web.

ID: 63286    Tags: Microsoft Teams, O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: April CY2020

Canceled

No cancellation updates to announce in this weekly edition.