Play of the Week

We have all been in the middle of the storm – the Reply All Email Storm! Microsoft has started to rollout some new features that are specifically designed to reduce the pain of these reply all storms and manage the chaos that typically follows. With these new features time delays will be automatically introduced to help reduce the back and forth in emails and allow administrators to better respond to the incidents as they occur.

In Development

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: April 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: April CY2020

Microsoft Compliance Score reaches general availability

With Microsoft Compliance Score, you can now continuously assess and monitor data protection controls, get clear guidance on how to improve your score and thus reduce compliance risks, and leverage the built-in control mapping to scale your compliance effort across global, industrial and regional standards. We announced the public preview back in November 2019.

ID: 60771    Tags: O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)    Release: April CY2020

EOP/ATP Rescue portal

One of the ways Office 365 ATP protects customers is by blocking malicious attachments and URLs from reaching end users. We understand that from time to time, customers may want to ensure delivery of certain messages containing malicious content for specific reasons, such as phishing simulations and training. In order to provide a way for our customers to easily reconcile this at time of click and during mail flow, we’re developing a Rescue portal. This portal gives admins the opportunity to explicitly allow or block attachments and URLs in your Office 365 tenant.

ID: 61352    Tags: O365, Microsoft Information Protection – All environments    Release: April CY2020

Profile Card Customization through Microsoft Graph Beta

Profile Card Customization through Microsoft Graph Beta allows you to add custom information to a person’s profile card through the Microsoft Graph Beta. This allows an administrator to customize people’s profile cards by adding properties according to your business needs.

ID: 61502    Tags: Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)    Release: April CY2020

Shareable address bar links

Tenant admins can specify whether the link that shows up in address bar for files is sharable within organization or not.

ID: 61529    Tags: OneDrive for Business – All environments    Release: April CY2020

Pin Microsoft Teams apps in more places

Administrators can now pin Apps more broadly across Microsoft Teams, including the expanded Apps area of the Microsoft Teams App Bar. This makes featuring the right apps for your organization more discoverable by users.

ID: 61332    Tags: Microsoft Teams – All environments    Release: March CY2020

Poll added to Outlook (Windows)

A new polling add-in will soon be pre-installed in Outlook for Windows by default, meaning end users will no longer need to install the Quick Poll add-in from the store.

ID: 61372    Tags: Microsoft Forms – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)     Release: March CY2020

Company branding now supported on SharePoint Mobile App

Configure company branding in O365 admin center and receive a co-branded experience on the SharePoint iOS and Android Apps. Please ensure an SVG logo is uploaded in the admin center for it to appear on the Mobile App. Logos of other format will not be supported on the App.

ID: 61374    Tags: SharePoint – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)    Release: March CY2020

Version history in desktop

You will now be able to view and restore previous versions of your files directly in your desktop via your File Browser or Mac Finder.

ID: 61527    Tags: OneDrive for Business – All environments   Release: March CY2020

Microsoft Stream search vertical in Microsoft Search

The new Microsoft Stream search vertical in Microsoft Search allows for discovering media content stored in Microsoft Stream with Microsoft Search.

ID: 61503    Tags: O365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)    Release: Q3 CY2020

Rolling Out

Reply-All Storm Protection

When a Reply-All mail storm happens in your organization it can disrupt business continuity and even cause unexpected throttling of your organization’s mail flow within Office 365. While Exchange Online has several features designed to help prevent Reply-All storms (e.g. Distribution List (DL) allowed sender lists and recipient limits) that reduce the severity and impact of reply-all storms, they can still happen, especially if the DLs haven’t been locked down tightly. Reply-All Storm Protection in Exchange Online will detect when a Reply-All storm is happening (or likely to happen) and will temporarily block users from replying to everyone on the thread. During this “cool down” period the service will send anyone who tries to reply to everyone a bounce message (or NDR) that effectively tells them to not try to reply all to the message. The temporary block will be active for several hours, usually enough time to dampen end-user enthusiasm to reply to the thread, and thus curtail the storm before it gets started or before it gains much momentum.

ID: 59440    Tags: Exchange – All environments Release: April CY2020

New default background image for Microsoft 365 and Azure AD login

We are updating the default background image for the Microsoft 365 and Azure AD login screens. The new image is 1% the size of the previous default image which will reduce bandwidth requirements and improve perceived page load times. This change will not affect users if you have configured a custom background image in Company Branding for your tenant; users will continue to see your custom image.

ID: 61054    Tags: Azure Active Directory – All environments Release: March CY2020

Dark Mode – OneDrive for Android

You will be able use Dark mode in OneDrive for Android.

ID: 61355    Tags: OneDrive for Business – All environments   Release: March CY2020

PDFs and scans included in “Recent View”

Now, in your “Recent list”, uploaded scans and recently viewed PDFs will automatically surface at the top.

ID: 61356    Tags: OneDrive for Business – All environments   Release: March CY2020

OneDrive for Business: Save for later

Save for Later will allow you to bookmark files and folders from your OneDrive, files shared to you and those in Shared Libraries to a “Saved for Later” list that you’ll be able to easily access

ID: 49095    Tags: OneDrive for Business – All environments   Release: Q4 CY2019

Launched

Adding Campaign Views to Office 365 ATP

We’ll be adding the ability to see details of phishing campaigns, how they progressed over a period of time and the impact they had on your organization. This is critical in analyzing various campaigns, investigating attacks and assessing the policies that are configured to protect your users against sophisticated attacks such as phishing and zero day threats.

ID: 53661    Tags: O365, Microsoft Information Protection – All environments   Release: Q1 CY2020

Microsoft Teams – Phone System Additions for GCC, GCC High, and DoD

5 additions for Phone System for GCC customers which helps enhance Teams Calling. These features were initially available in commercial and now are available to GCC customers. This includes (1) Teams users being able to screen share to SFB users, (2) Callers can transfer directly to voicemail, (3) Caller ID for Teams Users (AAD), (4) GCC users can use the powerbar slash command to make PSTN calls, (5) and GCC users of Teams in Chrome can send and receive video.

ID: 59663    Tags: Microsoft Teams – GCC, GCC High, DoD   Release: Q1 CY2020

Microsoft Teams – App catalog

Confidently enable apps from the Microsoft Teams admin center. The Manage apps page provides administrators with a view into all available apps in the tenant catalog and includes information to help them decide which apps to allow or block across the organization.

ID: 61403    Tags: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)   Release: Q1 CY2020

Service Health Dashboard Update: Report an Outage

We’re adding enhancements to the Service Health Dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center. If you are impacted by an issue that is not showing up on your Service health dashboard, the Report an Outage feature will provide you with a quick and easy way to let us know.

ID: 24153    Tags: O365, Admin Center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Release: Q3 CY2019

Canceled

No cancelations to announce in this week’s update.