Play of the Week

No Play of the Week update this week.

In Development

Excel: Office Scripts for task and workflow automation in Excel

In January, we released Office Scripts, a feature that enables users to automate their repetitive tasks in Excel Online, for public preview. The feature will now be available by default to all M365 Enterprise, Business, and EDU SKUs that have access to the O365 desktop apps.

ID:61687    Tags: Excel – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: August CY2020

Office 365 ATP Request Release workflow

We’ve added a way for end users to triage quarantined phish messages. We understand that managing false positives is important to ensuring email is delivered appropriately, and in the past, end users weren’t granted access to the quarantine to view messages. We’ve introduced an option to grant end users read-only access to the quarantine to view quarantined messages and request that an admin release messages to the inbox.

ID:62449    Tags: Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection – GCC, Germany, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD   Release: August CY2020

Quarantine – Custom Policy and Folder

Previously, quarantine behavior was configured through each individual filtering policy. To reduce complexity, we’ve moved new and existing quarantine parameters into a standalone Quarantine policy.

ID:62450     Tags: Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection – DoD, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Germany, GCC Release: August CY2020

OneDrive: Updates to comment notifications

Users who create or upload Word, Excel, PowerPoint or any other type of file to OneDrive or SharePoint will now get email notifications whenever someone else leaves a comment on their file.

ID:66192   Tags: OneDrive – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD   Release: September CY2020

Microsoft Teams: File Viewer Upgrades for Gov Clouds

Teams file viewer is being upgraded for Gov clouds from legacy to OneUp for non Office file types and to unified app for Office file types(Word, Powerpoint and Excel).

ID:66200   Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, DoD, GCC High   Release: September CY2020

Microsoft Lists: Updated Person column experience: built on SharePoint

Items within a Person column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new “pill” design format when a person’s photo is displayed. Select one or more people to add to a Person column quickly and they appear with an updated look.

ID:67095    Tags: SharePoint – GCC, Germany, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD   Release: August CY2020

Microsoft Lists: Updated Choice column experience – built on SharePoint

Items within a Choice column, in and out of Quick Edit mode for both lists and libraries, will support single, multi-choice, and manual fill as you add items. You’ll see updated formatting right away and can update and remove choice fields and formatting selections previously applied.

ID:67097    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Education, GCC, Germany, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), DoD   Release: August CY2020

Office 365: Application Guard for Office

Files from the internet and other potentially unsafe locations can contain viruses, worms, or other kinds of malware that can harm your users’ computer and data. To help protect your users, Office cam open files from potentially unsafe locations in Application Guard, a secure container that’s isolated from the device through hardware-based virtualization. When Office opens files in Application Guard, users can securely read, edit, print, and save those files without having to re-open files outside the container. This functionality is available as a Preview to organizations with Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 Security license or Users (in the above enterprise) who use Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise on Beta Channel

ID:67101    Tags: Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Office 365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC   Release: December CY2020

PowerPoint for Mac: Record Slide Show Updates

With new Record Slide Show updates, users can now record presenter video and inking with PowerPoint.

ID:67104    Tags: PowerPoint – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Education   Release: October CY2020

Forms: Group Forms for GCC

When GCC customers access Group forms on the Forms portal, they will see the group Forms that they have been recently working on.

ID:67106    Tags: Forms – GCC   Release: August CY2020

SharePoint spaces: Touch device support

SharePoint spaces will enable users to interact with a space using touch interactions in addition to the mouse and keyboard based interactions currently supported.

ID:67107    Tags: SharePoint – GCC, Germany, Education, DoD, GCC High   Release: December CY2020

Microsoft Teams: Incoming video support on Safari

Teams meetings in Safari 13 and later will support incoming video. A participant can see the video of an active speaker. No configuration is needed.?

ID:67109    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: September CY2020

Yammer: Edit attachments in a post

When editing a posting in Yammer, a user can now also edit the attachments in the post.

ID:67239    Tags: Yammer – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: September CY2020

Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams and Power Automate – Simpler automation for everyone

A new Power Automate app for Teams will make creating and using automation simpler than ever. New workflow templates will be made available, and using those templates to build automation will become easier with a simplified editor experience.

ID:68120  Tags: Microsoft Teams, Power Automate – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: September CY2020

Rolling Out

OneDrive: Expiring access for external users

Admins and end users can expire shares to external users.

ID: 43797    Tags: OneDrive – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: August CY2020

Meeting recording storage for areas where Stream is not available

Teams meeting recordings are currently disabled for customers whose Teams data is stored in-country, if Microsoft Stream is not available in that country. A new admin setting will allow customers to turn on meeting recordings if Microsoft Stream data residency is not yet in country. If this setting is turned on, Teams meeting recordings will be saved in the data center closest to the region.

ID: 59665    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: August CY2020

Microsoft Bookings web app available to GCC customers

Microsoft Bookings web app will be released as a Microsoft 365 app to GCC G3 and G5 customers. This release will not include capabilities associated with the Bookings API in Microsoft Graph, including the Bookings app in Teams. Bookings API capabilities will be available to GCC at a later date.

ID: 64386    Tags: Bookings – GCC Release: August CY2020

Yammer: New reactions for post

Users will be able to react to posts in Yammer. New reactions include Like, Love, Laugh, Sad, Celebrate, and Thanks.

ID: 64931    Tags: Yammer – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: August CY2020

Advanced eDiscovery: Direct download export

We’re updating the experience of downloading content from a review set in Advanced eDiscovery. Instead of using Azure Storage Explorer, we’re moving to a model where content is downloaded directly through a web browser. After an export is completed, an eDiscovery manager can download a single zip file from the Exports tab in the review set. With this experience, we are also adding a new export format that places email messages in a PST and all other files in their original directory structure.

ID: 65004    Tags: Microsoft Information Protection – DoD, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC Release: August CY2020

Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: Office 365 Security & Compliance Alerts

We are adding new capabilities to the Office 365 Security & Compliance alerting feature, focusing on enriching the existing alerts and extending operation coverage in the Office 365 Management API. In the Office 365 Management API, we are enriching an existing set of SOC focused alerts with additional details of the impacted entities (e.x. email, file and Url) in each alert. Additionally, adding a new operation to appropriately encapsulate the AlertStatus changes in the API operations.

ID: 65344    Tags: Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Security and Compliance center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD, GCC    Release: August CY2020

OneDrive: Selective sync in KFM

KFM is now possible even if the Desktop, Documents, or Pictures folder were previously selected not to sync down to the device. Instead of blocking KFM, we will support syncing those folders at time of KFM.

ID: 66186    Tags: OneDrive – DoD, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC Release: August CY2020

OneDrive: OneDrive Home in mobile

New landing tab in the app to make it easier to find your important files (featuring Recent, Offline, and shared libraries)

ID: 66190    Tags: OneDrive – DoD, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC   Release: September CY2020

Microsoft Information Protection: Support for Double-byte Character Set languages (Preview)

Microsoft Information Protection solutions such as Data Loss Prevention, Exact Data Match and Communication Compliance will benefit from the ability to detect double-byte language characters found in East Asian languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, improving the ability to understand, label, and protect customer data.

ID: 66363    Tags: Microsoft Information Protection – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: August CY2020

Microsoft Teams: GradeSync to OneRoster API

With this API, grades entered in Assignments can be automatically pushed to a OneRoster-compliant school information system (SIS).

ID: 66576    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Education   Release: August CY2020

Microsoft Teams: New File Viewer released for for GCC- High

GCCH will have a new file viewer – OneUp

ID: 67087    Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC High Release: August CY2020

Microsoft Search: PowerBI results with Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com

Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com will now include results from PowerBI. PowerBI results with Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com will allow you to search for Power BI artifacts (reports, dashboards, workspaces) based on keywords to get results list displayed in a new PowerBI vertical.

ID: 67103    Tags: Microsoft Search – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: August CY2020

Launched

Excel on mobile (iOS): XLOOKUP and XMATCH

XLOOKUP and XMATCH are successors to the iconic VLOOKUP and MATCH functions.

ID: 54948  Tags: Excel – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q4 CY2019

Excel on Universal: XLOOKUP and XMATCH

DESCRIPTION XLOOKUP and XMATCH are successors to the iconic VLOOKUP and MATCH functions.

ID: 54949   Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC   Release: Q4 CY2019

Excel on Windows: XLOOKUP and XMATCH

XLOOKUP and XMATCH are successors to the iconic VLOOKUP and MATCH functions.

ID: 54951    Tags: Excel – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q4 CY2019

Excel on Mac: XLOOKUP and XMATCH

XLOOKUP and XMATCH are successors to the iconic VLOOKUP and MATCH functions.

ID: 54952    Tags: Excel – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q4 CY2019

Microsoft Teams – Phone System Administration Enhancements

As part of our ongoing process to bring additional workloads to the Microsoft Teams admin center, the following new or improved features will be available: Microsoft Calling Plan customers will be able to search, acquire, and assign phone numbers to end-users. Admins will also be able to create and assign emergency addresses for those end-users. Additionally, customers will be able to create / test / manage custom dial plans, configure Dynamic Emergency Calling, and use improved configuration for Auto Attendants and Call Queues.

ID: 56786   Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q1 CY2020

Outlook for Android: Play My Emails

Play My Emails on the go to get time back in your day with a voice forward, intelligent experience for reading new email in your focused inbox when you’re on the move or when your hands are busy doing other things. The optional touch interface is designed to allow you to easily take action on important new emails and offers the option to respond with your voice. Available to eligible accounts in the United States.

ID: 58736    Tags: Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Education Release: August Y2020

Word: Transcription in Word for the Web

Whether you are a researcher, reporter, lawyer, teacher or anyone else who records and transcribes audio, you know how much time and effort it takes. Transcription in Word for the web enables you to easily record audio and transcribe directly in Word for the web. Transcription allows you to playback timestamped audio and you can quickly pull the whole transcript or specific quotes into your Word document.

ID: 59747    Tags: Word – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: August CY2020

Advanced eDiscovery tenant reports in preview

The Advanced eDiscovery tenant reports feature aggregates information around custodians, data sources, communications, and cases. You can filter your view based on various criteria and export the aggregated information for further analysis.

ID: 60435    Tags: Security and Compliance center, Microsoft Compliance center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: December CY2020

SharePoint: Default site theme color is changing from blue to teal

SharePoint’s new teal theme will automatically update new and existing communication sites and team sites. Group connected team sites, and sites that have been customized, will not be impacted. Moving forward, new sites will automatically default to the new teal theme. The new teal theme can be changed to the former blue theme at any time in the Change the look panel.

ID: 60592    Tags: SharePoint – All environments Release: Q2 CY2020

Outlook for iOS: Create task from an email message

Use the option to create a task from an email message and have it sync with tasks in Microsoft 365.

ID: 60722   Tags: Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Education   Release: September CY2020

Microsoft Teams – change in meeting join experience (education tenants only)

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 will be automatically admitted into the meeting once a user with permissions joins and starts the meeting. This change will only apply to education tenants.

ID: 63355   Tags: Microsoft Teams – Education Release: Q2  CY2020

Word: Voice Commands in Dictation for Word for the Web

Dictation enables you to use the power of your voice to conquer the blank page. Now you can use additional Voice Commands to structure, edit, and format your content using Dictation. Commands are based on the way people naturally speak so that you can capture your ideas easily. Try saying “delete that” or “start list”. You can even dictate a “smiley face”.

ID: 63644    Tags: Word – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)    Release: August CY2020

Word: Voice Commands in Dictation for Word for iOS

Dictation enables you to use the power of your voice to conquer the blank page. Now you can use additional Voice Commands to structure, edit, and format your content using Dictation. Commands are based on the way people naturally speak so that you can capture your ideas easily. Try saying “delete that” or “start list”. You can even dictate a “smiley face”.

ID: 63645    Tags: Word – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: August CY2020

Word: Voice Commands in Dictation for Word for Android

Dictation enables you to use the power of your voice to conquer the blank page. Now you can use additional Voice Commands to structure, edit, and format your content using Dictation. Commands are based on the way people naturally speak so that you can capture your ideas easily. Try saying “delete that” or “start list”. You can even dictate a “smiley face”.

ID: 63646   Tags: Word – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: August CY2020

Microsoft Graph: [TO DO TASKS] Tasks API (Preview)

Microsoft Graph Tasks API for To Do will enable partners to taskify items in their apps. For example: flag an email to a task or to collect their apps’ native tasks in To Do.

ID: 63734   Tags: Microsoft Graph – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)  Release: August CY2020

SharePoint: Fluent design updates for coherence

Microsoft uses the Fluent design system to ensure a cohesive and accessible design for all Microsoft product users. Fluent will be applied to modern SharePoint which will result in some visual changes. You will notice larger and bolder typefaces, increased opacity for drop shadows, and rounded corners for square graphical elements.

ID: 63777    Tags: SharePoint – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD, Germany, GCC Release: July CY2020

Outlook on the web – Text predictions

Using smart technology, Outlook will predict text while you type. Just use the Tab key to accept the text prediction.

ID: 63795   Tags: Exchange, Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Education Release: Q2 CY2020

Microsoft Teams: Support for native device camera and location capabilities for Personal apps and tabs

App developers will be able to use mobile native capabilities like capturing an image through camera and providing location coordinates through GPS.

ID: 64615   Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, DoD, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: July CY2020

Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: Mailflow Status Summary Report

We’re working on a way for you to see how much mail was caught by various layers of our filtering stack. This report will allow customers to see how messages pass through the different layers of protection that we offer.

ID: 64907   Tags: Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection – DoD, GCC High, All environments, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), Germany, GCC Release: August CY2020

Yammer: Advanced eDiscovery in the Microsoft Compliance center

Yammer now supports Advanced eDiscovery within the Microsoft Compliance center. That means organizations can now discover Yammer content in Advanced eDiscovery if their Yammer network is in Microsoft 365 native mode. When a Yammer network is in Microsoft 365 native mode, all messages and files posted in that Yammer network will be available. Within Advanced eDiscovery, you can search by user (custodian) and retrieve their Yammer messages alongside other messages they have sent through Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft applications. Administrators can filter to retrieve Yammer messages based on the author of the message, the recipient of the message, or the community the message was posted in.

ID: 65145   Tags: Microsoft Compliance center, Security and Compliance center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: June CY2020

Access: ODBC Interface Support (without ACE Redistributable Engine)

If you have O365, or click-to-run versions of Access 2016/2019 Consumer installed, you will no longer need to install the ACE Redistributable to use the ACE ODBC provider

ID: 65407   Tags: Access, Microsoft Graph – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC, Germany, DoD, GCC High Release: August CY2020

Outlook for iOS: New location for New Message and Event

Similar to Outlook for Android, the location of the New Message or New Event button will move from a fixed location in the header to a location closer to the bottom right on of the screen, closer to your thumbs.

ID: 65440   Tags: Outlook – DoD, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC, Education   Release: July CY2020

Outlook for Android: Rich text options

Access text formatting options when creating or replying to an email on your phone or tablet such as fonts, font sizes, bold/italics/underline, links and bullet/numbered lists.

ID: 65442   Tags: Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC, Education, GCC High, DoD Release: July CY2020

Word: Transcription in Word for the web with automatically individualized speakers

Transcription now separates out speakers as “Speaker 1”, “Speaker 2”, etc.! Whether you are a researcher, reporter, lawyer, teacher or anyone else who records and transcribes audio, you know how much time and effort it takes. Transcription in Word for the web enables you to easily record audio and transcribe directly in Word for the web. Transcription allows you to playback timestamped audio and you can quickly pull the whole transcript or specific quotes into your Word document.

ID: 65588   Tags: Word – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: August CY2020

OneDrive: Mute comment notifications

We’re adding the option to turn off comment notifications for individual files.

ID: 65912   Tags: OneDrive – Education, Germany, GCC, DoD, All environments, GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: September CY2020

OneDrive: Silent KFM Folder choice policy updates

Admins can now choose which known folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures) they would like to move to OneDrive as part of the silent policy, they no longer have to choose all of them at once.

ID: 66187   Tags: OneDrive – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: August CY2020

Acronym search in Microsoft Search

Acronym search in Microsoft Search enables Microsoft Search users to discover Acronyms via Microsoft Search. Acronym search will initially be available to Bing prior to becoming available to additional Microsoft Search entry points such as SharePoint, Office.com, etc.

ID: 57064   Tags: Microsoft Search – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q4 CY2019

Power BI results in Microsoft Search

With Power BI results in Bing using Microsoft Search people at work can simply search for a report using a keyword and immediately view Power BI reports or dashboard results inline. For frequently used Power BI reports, users can submit a request to create a bookmark for a specific security group, title, and URL, and sample keywords to their admin. Once created, the bookmark will contain the tile/report embedded directly into the bookmark answer card for easy viewing.

ID: 57072   Tags: Microsoft Search – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q4 CY2019

Floorplan search in Microsoft Search

Floorplan search in Bing with Microsoft Search allows people to pinpoint a colleague’s office visually on a floorplan based on engineering diagram data indexed by Microsoft Search.

ID: 57073   Tags: Microsoft Search – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q4 CY2019

Account manager ‘View account’ link change

The ‘View account’ link in the account manager found in the header of Office 365 will now link to a new account management site called My Account. The site will include password reset, security information, privacy, and more.

ID: 57078   Tags: Office 365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q1 CY2020

Spelling suggestions in Microsoft Search

Spelling suggestions in Microsoft Search suggests plausible replacements for words that are likely to have been misspelled. If a user enters a word in a search query that appears to be misspelled, the search results page displays query spelling corrections. For example, if someone enters a query that contains the word “ampitheater”, the query spelling correction would be “amphitheater”.

ID: 57127   Tags: Microsoft Search – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q4 CY2019

Microsoft Teams: Language support for Assignments

Additional supported languages to include: Croatian, Estonian, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

ID: 66573   Tags: Microsoft Teams – Education Release: August CY2020

Canceled

No cancellations to announce in this week’s update.