Play of the Week

Microsoft Teams wants to reduce the howling sound in a meeting when multiple users join simultaneously. Teams Ultrasound Howling Detection will automatically mute the mic and speakers of users who have joined the meeting after it has started. Be on the lookout for this new feature rolling out soon.

In Development

Access: Modern Web Browser Control

Access will provide a new web browser control to support Chromium Edge. This provides an updated browser experience within Access.

ID: 69743 Tags: Access – GCC, GCC High, DoD Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Information Protection – Optical character recognition (OCR) support for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

With this update, you will be able to detect and protect sensitive content in images in SharePoint Online and OneDrive and subsequently apply DLP policies to prevent exfiltration of that sensitive data. This release supports key file types like JPG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and BMP.

ID: 93233 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: June CY2023

Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Quarantine asynchronous update [stage one]

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is working to enable additional quarantine enhancements, like partial string search functionality and 1,000 message bulk operation support in quarantine. As a result, we’ll be making adjustments to the release process through an asynchronous approach. the first stage will be the introduction of the asynchronous updates and the second stage will the introduction of enhancement features such as partial string search and 1,000 message bulk support.

ID: 93303 Tags: Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Exchange – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: June CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Teams Button to Join Meeting from Pre-Join Screen

Starting today, users can successfully join and participate in a meeting directly with their Teams Button on their Microsoft Teams certified peripheral. After a user receives a meeting start notification, the user can press the Teams Button to bring up their Meeting Pre-Join Screen. Now, a subsequent press of the Teams Button will allow the user to join the meeting!

ID: 95632 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Support for Stream Deck to interact with Microsoft Teams within a meeting

Teams users can connect a Stream Deck device to their Teams desktop client and utilize it to mute/unmute themselves, turn on/off their camera or send reactions during a Teams meeting.

ID: 96112 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Attach cloud files in chat and channel from teams mobile

Introducing ability to upload files from OneDrive from Teams Mobile chat and channel. Also, view Recent files and attach most used files upfront from the Recent section.

ID: 98321 Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Intune: Advanced Endpoint analytics

Data science and AI powered automation, recommendations and insights enable IT to proactively improve user experiences based on endpoint health and performance.

ID: 109536 Tags: Microsoft Intune – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: September CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Data Loss Prevention – Protect sensitive content on Citrix and Windows Virtual Desktop

With this capability you will be able to protect sensitive information in files stores in virtualized environments such as Windows Virtual Desktop.

ID: 109587 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: June CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Profanity filtering on/off control for Live Captions

With the newly introduced toggle for turn on/off profanity filtering, user will now be able to control whether they want to continue to leverage the profanity filtering capability provided out of box, or, if they want to see every word as-is.

ID: 113412 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: May CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Data loss prevention – | Configure Power BI DLP policies to automatically detect upload of sensitive data to Power BI premium workspaces

DLP policies can be configured to automatically detect upload of sensitive data to Power BI premium workspaces and trigger custom policy tip for data owner and/or alert to security admin.

ID: 115474 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal, Power BI – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Excel Live

Collaborate easily in Teams with our new Excel Live feature. With this feature, you can easily collaborate with all meeting participants on your Excel worksheet during the meeting. Select the file you want to share, grant permissions to meeting participants, and enable all meeting participants to edit the document from the meeting window.

ID: 116897 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC High, DoD Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Data Lifecycle Management – Scope the administration of retention and retention label policies (U.S. government clouds)

Organizations can leverage Administrative Units in Azure Active Directory to define who can configure and manage policies in Microsoft Purview. This update will include the ability to set a Records Management admin for a specific geography, department, or other unit, who can manage retention and retention label policies for their unit.

ID: 117353 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC, GCC High, DoD Release: August CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Data Lifecycle Management – Scope the administration of retention and retention label policies

Organizations can leverage Administrative Units in Azure Active Directory to define who can configure and manage policies in Microsoft Purview. This update will include the ability to set a Records Management admin for a specific geography, department, or other unit, who can manage retention and retention label policies for their unit.

ID: 117354 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: June CY2023

Microsoft Viva: Send Praise from your Viva Connections Dashboard

Site owners/authors can add the Praise card from Microsoft Insights on the Viva Connections dashboard, allowing employees to send out praises to their colleagues.

ID: 117378 Tags: Microsoft Viva – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Data Lifecycle Management: New retention actions in Power Automate integration (U.S. Government clouds)

We will release additional retention actions as part of the Power Automate integration with Microsoft Purview Records Management. You can now relabel a file or an email at the end of its retention period or apply a retention label to a file in SharePoint. You can also delete items in SharePoint, OneDrive, or Exchange with all executed retention actions recorded in the Microsoft Purview Audit log.

ID: 117425 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC, GCC High, DoD Release: July CY2023

Microsoft Viva: Enhanced Viva Goals Azure DevOps data integration

This enhanced version of the Viva Goals ADO data integration enables users to directly link work items to projects and Key Results and eliminates the dependency on shared queries.

ID: 117473 Tags: Microsoft Viva – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Viva: Designated Viva Goals Admin Center Console

Viva Goals IT Administrator will have an admin page that will enable them to enable/ disable integrations, configure organization permissions and manage organizations by granting admin access.

ID: 117475 Tags: Microsoft Viva – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Information Protection – Improved Resume OOB Built-in Trainable Classifier

The new enhanced Resume Classifier is equipped with better technology. It has a higher accuracy and is able to identify resumes that were not previously detected. The classifier has been upgraded to handle challenging False Negative and False Positive cases.

ID: 117486 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: April CY2023

Outlook: Support of sensitivity labels scoping to emails

Microsoft Purview Information protection now allows to configure labels to be scoped for files only or emails only. Outlook on the web will show those email-scoped labels in emails and will not show non-email-scoped labels.

ID: 117510 Tags: Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

Office 365: Support for new information protection configuration for labels based on files vs. emails

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on iOS and Android will support admin settings to have different set of sensitivity labels.

ID: 117512 Tags: Outlook, Excel, Office 365, PowerPoint, Word – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: February CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Information Protection – New contextual predicates in service-side auto-labeling

This feature will support adding the following new contextual based predicates to auto-labeling: Document property is; File extension is; Document size equals or is greater than; Document created by (only available in advanced rules in OneDrive and SharePoint locations); Document name contains words or phrases.

ID: 117536 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: June CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Information Protection – New contextual predicates in service-side auto-labeling (U.S. Government clouds)

This feature will support adding the following new contextual based predicates to auto-labeling: Document property is; File extension is; Document size equals or is greater than; Document created by (only available in advanced rules in OneDrive and SharePoint locations); Document name contains words or phrases.

ID: 117537 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC, GCC High, DoD Release: September CY2023

Exchange: Microsoft multi-geo admin operation auditing

We are pleased to announce that Exchange Online Multi-Geo will be introducing a new feature release in early March, allowing admins to audit operations across all locations with the help of Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet and Microsoft Purview portal. Once the feature has been rolled out to tenants, users can begin testing it by using either Microsoft Purview portal or Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet(not Search-AdminAuditLog) to track admin operations. Please note that this feature is limited to admin operations only and does not include other types of audit logs.

ID: 117543 Tags: Exchange – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Syntex: Combine two or more PDF files into a new PDF file with the Merge PDFs action in OneDrive for Android

Users of Microsoft Syntex can now combine PDF files into one PDF file with the Merge PDFs action in OneDrive for IOS. The Merge PDFs action lets you quickly combine multiple PDF files into a new PDF file stored in SharePoint or OneDrive.

ID: 117547 Tags: OneDrive – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), DoD Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Syntex: Split PDF pages into new PDF files with the Extract action in OneDrive for iOS

Users of Microsoft Syntex can now split a PDF file into multiple PDFs with the Extract file action in OneDrive for iOS. The Extract file action lets you quickly split and extract multiple pages of a PDF into a new PDF file stored in SharePoint or OneDrive.

ID: 117548 Tags: OneDrive – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), DoD Release: May CY2023

Microsoft Syntex: Combine two or more PDF files into a new PDF file with the Merge PDFs action in OneDrive for iOS

Users of Microsoft Syntex can now combine multiple PDF files into one PDF file with the Merge PDFs action in OneDrive for iOS. The Merge PDFs action lets you quickly combine PDF files into a new PDF file stored in SharePoint or OneDrive.

ID: 117549 Tags: OneDrive – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), DoD Release: May CY2023

Microsoft Search: Video Search in Bing, Office.com, SharePoint, and Stream

Our new Video vertical on Bing, Office.com, SharePoint, and Stream will provide better search capabilities for videos in your organization.

ID: 117552 Tags: Microsoft Search – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

SharePoint: New SharePoint site templates

We are introducing 3 new SharePoint site templates dedicated to helping you create sites for your portal home site, to provide guidance and assets for your brand, and a template powered by Microsoft Syntex for your Accounts payable team.

ID: 117554 Tags: SharePoint – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Data Lifecycle Management – Cloud attachments support for Viva Engage / Yammer messages

Previously, cloud attachments worked only for links and link attachments shared in Outlook and Microsoft Teams. Now, cloud attachments will also work with Yammer/Viva Engage user and community messages.

ID: 117561 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: May CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Green screen in Teams meetings

Green screen improves the sharpness and definition of the virtual background effect around your face, head, ears, and hair. It also allows you to show a prop or other object in your hand to be more visible to other participants in a call. The virtual background with a green screen provides the best virtual background effect, consuming fewer system resources, allowing your Teams to run smoother.

ID: 117941 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Express yourself in Teams meetings on VDI

While in a Teams meeting on a virtual desktop, you can express yourself using emojis that will appear to all participants to help make Teams meetings more inclusive, engaging, and fun.

ID: 118470 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: May CY2023

Outlook: New Outlook for Windows Preview

The toggle to try the preview of the new Outlook for Windows will be available to customers with access to the classic Outlook for Windows and a Microsoft 365 subscription. The toggle has been available for Insiders since May 2022.

ID: 118476 Tags: Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: April CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Enable second video stream with “Teams Content Camera on Desktop”

Users will be able to enable a second video stream to support both their Personal Video and Teams Content Camera on Desktop feature.  When enabling the Teams Content Camera on Desktop feature, the Personal Video is expected to be maintained so long that the user selects a separate Camera to support the two video streams.

ID: 118580 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Invoke Content Camera on Desktop feature

Currently, users must turn on sharing from a content camera in Microsoft Teams via the Share tray on the Teams Meeting stage. Moving forward, users will be able to start and stop sharing content directly from a certified Teams device. This feature enables presenters to share a Whiteboard, document, or video more quickly during a meeting.

ID: 118587 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Teams: GCC-H support for Teams Panels

Teams Panels already support Government Community Cloud (GCC) tenants and now will meet Government Community Cloud High (GCC-H) account requirements.

ID: 119618 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC High Release: March CY2023

Rolling Out

Microsoft Teams: Ultrasound Howling Detection

When multiple people join a meeting in the same room then a feedback loop is created which causes echo and in most cases the echo quickly escalates to howling (like when a musician holds the mic too close to a loudspeaker). If multiple users on laptops join from the same location, we share with the user that another Teams Device is detected in the vicinity and is already joined with audio to the current meeting. We will automatically mute the mic and speakers of the person who has joined post a user who has joined with audio on.

ID: 92391 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: March CY2023

Microsoft 365 admin center: Experience insights for Microsoft 365 admins

The Experience insights in the Microsoft 365 admin center offers admins consistent data across usage, feedback, Net Promoter Score, and Help articles consumption. Admins can use such data to increase user satisfaction by launching relevant trainings and awareness campaigns in the organization. This experience would be particularly valuable to those roles in the IT organization who are responsible for understanding and improving the user experience for Microsoft 365.

ID: 93395 Tags: Microsoft 365 Admin Center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Walkie Talkie Transmission Usage Report

Walkie Talkie, a push-to-talk experience that enables clear and secure voice communication over the cloud, enables teams to communicate instantly and always stay on the same page. Through this new capability, customers can download Walkie Talkie Usage and Transmission Quality related data to build insights for understanding product usage in stores and making investment decisions.

ID: 96972 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: February CY2023

Whiteboard: Timer

Adding a timer to Whiteboard to help enable users to run timed activities, such as a timed brainstorm.

ID: 98082 Tags: Whiteboard – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: February CY2023

Outlook: iOS – Forward an email as an attachment

Easily forward an email as an attachment to another email.

ID: 100690 Tags: Outlook – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: February CY2023

Microsoft Purview | Information Protection: Exact Data Match to support up to 500 EDM evaluations

Organizations will be able to configure policies for solutions where EDM is supported, such as Data Loss Prevention, with Min and Max unique instance counts up to 500, aligning instance count supported with other Sensitive Information Types, such as U.S. Social Security Number (SSN). Note that there is no change for the support of the value Any, which remains an option for Max instance count.

ID: 100712 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: February CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Power Automate Connector – Updates App (Microsoft 365)

Updates App (Microsoft 365) connector enables creation of Power Automate flows which trigger when an update is sent to the flow owner. Currently, the connector supports two triggers, 1) When a new update is received, 2) when a new update tied to a specific request is received.

ID: 104397 Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery (Premium) – Review set: List page usability enhancements

Get a detailed view of all the jobs, collections and exports associated with a review set. Group and filter by columns such as date range to quickly take action on the review set of your interest.

ID: 106104 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: March CY2023

SharePoint: Export Microsoft Lists as a dataset for Power BI Data Hub

Today, you can visualize a list as a report in Power BI, from within the list itself. Soon, it will be possible to export a dataset from Microsoft Lists for use in Power BI Data Hub. Once your list is in Power BI Data Hub, you can take advantage of its rich data visualization features to create powerful, custom reports based on your list data.

ID: 117379 Tags: SharePoint, Power BI – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: February CY2023

Launched

Microsoft Stream: IT admin-led migration tool to move videos from Microsoft Stream (classic) to new Stream (on SharePoint)

The Stream migration tool helps admins migrate video and audio files and related metadata from Stream (classic) to new Stream (on SharePoint). With this tool admins can select some, or all, video and audio files in Stream (classic) and then move them to SharePoint folders, SharePoint site collections, or specific OneDrive folders. We expect the migration tool to start rolling out under public preview in late August’22 and to GA in February’23.

ID: 93361 Tags: Microsoft Stream – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: February CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Simulcast for Teams on VDI

Simulcast support for Teams on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) enables multiple video call streams at the same time, even in the event of low network quality.

ID: 99865 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Stream: Variable playback speed support (0.5 – 2x) for all video on OneDrive & SharePoint

This feature allows users to control the playback speed of videos stored OneDrive & SharePoint. Users will be able to slow down or speed up the playback (0.5x -2x) while watching the video. Note: Teams meeting recordings already have this functionality, we are now adding it to all other videos stored in OneDrive and SharePoint.

ID: 99914 Tags: Microsoft Stream – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: February CY2023

Microsoft Project: Assignments view

This feature provides more precision in project planning and estimation by letting you edit resource work schedule.

ID: 103626 Tags: Microsoft Project – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC High, DoD Release: March CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Enabling new call controls with Survivable Branch Appliance

In the event of a network outage, users will now have access to new call controls with Survivable Branch Appliance. Users will now be able to use contact search, dial by name, and initiate a call from their call history. When connected to the same SBA and network, VoIP calls to peers will be routed through PSTN if the call recipient has an associated phone number.

ID: 111421 Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: February CY2023

Canceled

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Audit – Support for Customer Key (U.S. Government clouds)

[This feature is postponed indefinitely.] Given the sensitivity of Audit log data, many organizations want to add additional layers of protection, including encryption. Microsoft Purview Customer Key allows organizations to use their own keys giving them control over their encryption. With this update, admins will have the ability to encrypt their Audit log data using Customer Key.

ID: 106097 Tags: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC, GCC High, DoD Release: June CY2023