Play of the Week

Outlook on the web will support S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) signature and encryption as sensitivity label outcomes. Admins can define labels to have S/MIME signature, encryption, or both. This feature released this month for outlook in GCC high, DoD, and GCC environments.

In Development

Microsoft 365 admin center: Relevance recommendation for Message Center posts

The new relevance recommendation in Message Center will help you determine how relevant a change is to your tenant. The recommendation (high, medium, or low) will be determined based on multiple factors, such as service usage and the type of change. We have paused the rollout to improve the recommendation, prior to proceeding and have adjusted the status to reflect this. Thank you for your patience.

ID: 96289 Release: Microsoft 365 Admin Center – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Simplified compose box

A simplified compose box UI will make it easier to create and send messages. Edit your message, insert an emoji or call Copilot right from the compose box, or click on the plus button to choose from the extended menu of actions.

ID: 123486 Release: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), DoD, GCC, GCC High Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Loop components in Teams channels

Co-create and collaborate using Loop components in channels. Share a Loop component like a table, a list or a paragraph, so anyone in the channel can view and edit it. Available in classic and new Teams.

ID: 123491 Release: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Management improved search for rooms

The new search for rooms function in the Rooms Pro Management Portal will be available in the room view to allow users to easily search and capture data within small sets of rooms based on specified criteria.

ID: 141821 Release: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Priority account chat controls (Premium)

Administrators will be able to manage priority account chat controls using a policy setting. This enables end users to decide how to handle unwanted internal communications. End users will be notified about chats from new contacts, giving them a choice to accept or block the conversations. If conversations are blocked, all future messages from the sender will no longer be received. Senders can be unblocked at anytime by the users with these policies. This feature is available with a Teams Premium add-on license.

ID: 144367 Release: – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Desktop to web browser join experience for attendees in Virtual Appointments

Schedulers can enable the ‘have attendees join from a web browser’ setting so that attendees joining the virtual appointment on desktop will be routed to the Teams web browser experience. This allows attendees to have access to engagement features including raise hand and live reactions.

ID: 165485 Release: Microsoft Teams – GCC High, DoD, GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Workflows Message Extension: New Default Actions

The Microsoft Teams Workflows Message Extension will include new default actions to assist user collaboration. These actions will simplify collaboration within a conversation by enabling users to kick off common workflows and post adaptive cards to conversations.

ID: 167324 Release: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Outlook: From the new Outlook for Windows, open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments in desktop apps

From the new Outlook for Windows, users can now open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments in their respective desktop apps by double clicking them.

ID: 167891 Release: Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Outlook: Pick a local folder for saving attachments

Users are now able to pick a folder when saving an attachment in the new Outlook for Windows.

ID: 167892 Release: Outlook – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Insider Risk Management – Policy deletion enhancement

With this update, admins with appropriate permissions can delete all associated alerts, cases, and users in scope when deleting a policy to help quickly reset and remove inactive policies. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management correlates various signals to identify potential malicious or inadvertent insider risks, such as IP theft, data leakage, and security violations. Insider Risk Management enables customers to create policies based on their own internal policies, governance, and organizational requirements. Built with privacy by design, users are pseudonymized by default, and role-based access controls and audit logs are in place to help ensure user-level privacy.

ID: 171598 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: February CY2024

Microsoft Teams: Chat button on missed call activity

Easily stay in touch with your contacts after a missed call. A new chat button is added to your activity feed, enabling you to follow up on a missed call and start a chat with just one click.

ID: 176318 Release: Microsoft Teams – GCC High, DoD, GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Intune: MAM Tunnel – Strict tunnel support for iOS and Android via Edge

Only allow internet traffic via Edge when Tunnel is connected on iOS and Android.

ID: 178920 Release: Microsoft Intune – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Insider Risk Management – Progressive alert scoring

With this new feature, user activities that could potentially result in data security incidents will be assessed more frequently within a 24-hour period compared with the current practice of once every 24 hours. Alert insights will now be updated every few hours with this increased frequency, providing designated analysts with timely alerts and continuously evolving insights. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management correlates various signals to identify potential malicious or inadvertent insider risks, such as IP theft, data leakage, and security violations. Insider Risk Management enables customers to create policies based on their own internal policies, governance, and organizational requirements. Built with privacy by design, users are pseudonymized by default, and role-based access controls and audit logs are in place to help ensure user-level privacy.

ID: 179883 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: April CY2024

Word: Copilot in Word

Copilot in Word transforms your writing with efficiency and creativity—create, summarize, ask questions, refine, and elevate your documents. Copilot in Word can now help you to draft content, bring in specific information from other documents into your content, generate summaries, ask questions about your document, get ideas about specific topics, and even transform text into tables or provide suggestions for ways to rewrite your content.

ID: 180179 Release: Word, Microsoft 365 Copilot – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Excel: Copilot in Excel

Copilot in Excel helps you do more with your data in Excel tables by generating formula column suggestions, showing insights in charts and PivotTables, and highlighting interesting portions of data.

ID: 180180 Release: Excel, Microsoft 365 Copilot – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: February CY2024

PowerPoint: Copilot in PowerPoint

Copilot in PowerPoint is a tool that can help you create, edit and understand presentations. It can draft a presentation based on your topic or Word doc, or add slides and images for you. It can design using your template, organize your slides, and summarize and extract the main points from a longer presentation.

ID: 180181 Release: PowerPoint, Microsoft 365 Copilot – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Outlook: Copilot in Outlook

Copilot in Outlook helps you stay on top of your inbox and create impactful communication in a fraction of the time. Copilot can now summarize an email thread and quickly jump to the source of the summarized content, suggest action items, and draft new messages or replies. Copilot also coaches you on how to best get your message across and you can adjust the tone and length of your message. These features will be available in Outlook for Mac, web, iOS, Android, and the new Outlook for Windows.

ID: 180185 Release: Outlook, Microsoft 365 Copilot – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Whiteboard: Copilot in Whiteboard

Copilot in Whiteboard helps you kickstart and accelerate your ideation process to generate, categorize, and summarize your ideas.

ID: 180186 Release: Microsoft 365 Copilot, Whiteboard – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

OneNote: Copilot in OneNote

Copilot in OneNote helps you revolutionize the way you plan and organize by staying better prepared and proactively taking action from notes. Now you can gain deeper insights on your notes by asking comprehensive questions, generating summaries of your content, asking Copilot to generate content for you, and helping make your writing clearer.

ID: 180189 Release: Microsoft 365 Copilot, OneNote – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft 365 app: Copilot in Microsoft 365 Loop

Copilot in Loop helps you unlock the power of shared thinking—co-create, get up to speed, and stay in sync with your teammates. Now you can iterate with Copilot collaboratively as a team, co-create prompts, generate tables to help organize team projects, catch up where your teammates left off, summarize page content, and generate a recap for a teammate you’re handing work off to.

ID: 180191 Release: Microsoft 365 app, Microsoft 365 Copilot – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft 365 Copilot: Microsoft 365 Chat

Your single destination to take on any task. It combines the power of Large Language Models with your work content and context, and other apps, to help you draft content, catch up on what you missed, and get answers to questions via open prompts. It’s available via multiple surfaces, including microsoft365.com, Teams, and Bing.

ID: 180204 Release: Microsoft 365 Copilot – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Viva: Search in Viva Connections Mobile for Android

Adding a search entry point and a new tailored experience for Viva connections users on mobile in Android.

ID: 180518 Release: Microsoft Viva – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: December CY2023

Outlook: S/MIME support for sensitivity labels

Outlook on the web will support S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) signature and encryption as sensitivity label outcomes. Admins can define the label to have S/MIME signature, encryption, or both and emails with those labels will enforce S/MIME accordingly.

ID: 180732 Release: Outlook – GCC High, DoD, GCC Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Audit – New Stream Logs for Microsoft Purview Audit Standard Users

Microsoft Purview is expanding access to wider cloud security activity events for Microsoft Stream. As part of the changes, standard users of Purview Audit will begin to generate 5 new Microsoft Stream events that were previously generated only for Audit Premium licensed users. The following events will now be provided for all Audit Standard users: 1. StreamInvokeGetTranscript; 2. StreamInvokeChannelView; 3. StreamInvokeGettExtTrack; 4. StreamInvokeGetVideo; 5. StreamInvokeGroupView

ID: 180738 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Audit – New Stream Logs for Microsoft Purview Audit Standard Users

Microsoft Purview is expanding access to wider cloud security activity events for Microsoft Stream. As part of the changes, standard users of Purview Audit will begin to generate 5 new Microsoft Stream events that were previously generated only for Audit Premium licensed users. The following events will now be provided for all Audit Standard users: 1. StreamInvokeGetTranscript; 2. StreamInvokeChannelView; 3. StreamInvokeGetTextTrack; 4. StreamInvokeGetVideo; 5. StreamInvokeGroupView

ID: 180739 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC High, DoD, GCC Tags: December CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Audit – New Yammer / Viva Engage Logs for Microsoft Purview Audit Standard Users

Microsoft Purview is expanding access to wider cloud security events for Microsoft Viva Engage (formerly known as Yammer). As part of the changes, standard users of Purview Audit will begin to generate 6 new Microsoft Viva Engage events that were previously generated only for Audit Premium licensed users. The following events will now be provided for all Audit Standard users: 1. ThreadViewed; 2. ThreadAccessFailure; 3. MessageUpdated; 4. FileAccessFailure; 5. MessageCreation; 6. GroupAccessFailure

ID: 180740 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Audit – New Yammer / Viva Engage Logs for Microsoft Purview Audit Standard Users

Microsoft Purview is expanding access to wider cloud security events for Microsoft Viva Engage (formerly known as Yammer). As part of the changes, standard users of Purview Audit will begin to generate 6 new Microsoft Viva Engage events that were previously generated only for Audit Premium licensed users. The following events will now be provided for all Audit Standard users: 1. ThreadViewed; 2. ThreadAccessFailure; 3. MessageUpdated; 4. FileAccessFailure; 5. MessageCreation; 6. GroupAccessFailure

ID: 180741 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC High, DoD, GCC Tags: December CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Teams Connect shared channels in GCCH & DoD

Work seamlessly and securely with those inside and outside your organization. With Microsoft Teams shared channels, multiple organizations can work together in a shared space – have conversations, schedule a meeting, share, and co-author files, and collaborate on apps, without ever switching tenants.

ID: 180742 Release: Microsoft Teams – GCC High, DoD Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft 365 admin center: Manage ownerless Microsoft 365 groups and teams

Teams, Outlook groups, Team Sites etc. powered by Microsoft 365 Groups supports two roles: members and owners. Members can collaborate with others in the group through files, emails, messages etc. Owners manage the group membership and monitor content and conversations. When employees leave an organization or switch projects internally, it results in their existing user accounts getting deleted. If such employees were group owners, keeping track of their groups becomes critical to ensure accountability within the organization. We have introduced a new ownership governance policy to help automate the management of ownerless groups by requesting active members to become owners of the group. Admins can define who is eligible for these notifications and configure what notifications and how often these notifications are sent to active group members. Users, who are members of the ownerless groups can simply accept or decline request via the actionable email message.

ID: 180749 Release: Microsoft 365 Admin Center – GCC Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Viva: Apply brand colors across all Connections endpoints using SharePoint themes or custom themes.

Viva Connections will offer a new set of theming options to reflect brand colors consistently across desktop, tablet, and mobile experiences. With this new functionality, customers will have the choice to apply existing SharePoint themes or a custom theme to their Connections experience as well as the SharePoint home site hosting the Connections experience.

ID: 180793 Release: Microsoft Viva – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023

Microsoft Stream: Add a hyperlink or text callout to a video at specific times

Make your video interactive and more engaging by adding annotations that can include hyperlinks and text. Call out important moments or share documents and other links to additional resources. You can add text and links anywhere in the video timeline to help guide your viewers to the right information.

ID: 180795 Release: Microsoft Stream – GCC High, DoD, GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: December CY2023

Microsoft Stream: Add a survey, poll, or quiz to a video at specific times

Make your video interactive and more engaging by adding a survey, quiz, or poll using Microsoft Forms. You can add forms anywhere in the video timeline for videos you own. Go to Microsoft Forms to view responses and share a summary link with answers and scores in Microsoft Forms.

ID: 180796 Release: Microsoft Stream – GCC High, DoD, GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: December CY2023

Outlook: Classic Outlook for Windows – Summarize by Copilot

Copilot combines the power of LLMs and Outlook data to help you do more. Copilot can summarize email threads and extract key points.

ID: 180900 Release: Outlook, Microsoft 365 Copilot – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: March CY2024

Microsoft Syntex is available in the non-primary region of multi-geo tenants

With this release, Syntex capabilities such as document processing, image tagging, taxonomy tagging, content assembly, and OCR are available in the non-primary region of multi-geo tenants.

ID: 181409 Release: Microsoft Syntex – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Rolling Out

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Information Protection – Optical character recognition (OCR) in Exchange Online and Teams DLP

Optical character recognition (OCR) support extracts text from images and will help discover and protect sensitive data in images being shared in Exchange Online (EXO) and Teams Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies.

ID: 88860 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Insider Risk Management – Forensic evidence (U.S. Government clouds)

The forensic evidence capability is an opt-in add-in to Insider Risk Management, helping customers’ security teams get visual insights into potentially risky user actions that might lead to a data security incident. Forensic evidence is off by default and policy creation requires dual authorization. Customers determine what triggers the feature and manage investigation processes. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management correlates various signals to identify potential malicious or inadvertent insider risks, such as IP theft, data leakage, and security violations. Insider Risk Management enables customers to create policies to manage security and compliance. Built with privacy by design, users are pseudonymized by default, and role-based access controls and audit logs are in place to help ensure user-level privacy.

ID: 117565 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – DoD, GCC, GCC High Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Collaborative notes on Teams mobile

Collaborative notes allow meeting attendees to co-create and collaborate on their meeting agenda, notes, and action items. Since Collaborative notes are a Loop component, it is always in sync regardless of how many places they live in. Assigned Tasks in Collaborative notes automatically sync with ToDo & Planner.

ID: 128652 Release: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Engagement information in Teams Attendance Report (Premium)

Enables meeting organizers to view meeting engagement data such as total reactions, raised hands, cameras turned on, and more in the ‘Attendance’ tab after a meeting.

ID: 162171 Release: Microsoft Teams – GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Conversational bot in meetings now supported in GCC-H and DoD

Microsoft Teams is now adding conversational bot and meetings extensibility support for meetings and calls in GCC-H and DoD.

ID: 166985 Release: Microsoft Teams – GCC High, DoD Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Teams: Town halls (Premium)

Set up and host large scale events across an organization with the familiar Teams app you use for webinars and meetings. Advanced town hall capabilities as a part of Teams Premium includes capabilities available in town hall plus capacity for up to 20K attendees, first-party eCDN support, additional language support for live translated captions, email customization, and more.

ID: 173182 Release: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – PowerShell hold removal cmdlet for legacy and orphaned holds

This Cmdlet will be available in the Security & Compliance PowerShell and will enable users to get a list of holds stamped on a location (Mailbox/SPO) and remove a given hold from the location by specifying the ID.

ID: 174597 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – PowerShell hold removal cmdlet for legacy and orphaned holds

This Cmdlet will be available in the Security & Compliance PowerShell and will enable users to get a list of holds stamped on a location (Mailbox/SPO) and remove a given hold from the location by specifying the ID.

ID: 174604 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC High, GCC Tags: October CY2023

Launched

Universal Print: GCC and GCCHigh cloud support

Universal Print with all existing features will be available to the GCC and GCC High cloud.

ID: 93404 Release: Universal Print – GCC, GCC High Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Viva:  Viva Glint enabled under Viva Admin

Viva Glint Admin enabled under Viva Admin. 

ID: 163983 Release: Microsoft Viva – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: December CY2023

Microsoft Edge: v.118 – Find on page

Searching for a word or phrase on a webpage has become easier with the new smart find update to Find on page. Now when you search with Find on page, we’ll suggest related matches and synonyms making it effortless to find what you’re looking for, even if you misspell a word in your search query. When you search, simply select the suggested word to quickly locate the desired word or phrase on the page. Data is sent to Microsoft for processing. For more information, see Microsoft Edge’s Privacy Whitepaper. Administrators can control the availability using the RelatedMatchesCloudServiceEnabled policy.

ID: 165696 Release: Microsoft Edge – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Insider Risk Management – SharePoint site selection enhancement

With this update, Insider Risk Management admins can add any SharePoint sites as priority content or exclude certain SharePoint sites in Insider Risk Management policies by searching the site names or using the exact URLs. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management correlates various signals to identify potential malicious or inadvertent insider risks, such as IP theft, data leakage, and security violations. Insider Risk Management enables customers to create policies based on their own internal policies, governance, and organizational requirements. Built with privacy by design, users are pseudonymized by default, and role-based access controls and audit logs are in place to help ensure user-level privacy.

ID: 169880 Release: Microsoft Purview compliance portal – GCC High, DoD, GCC, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: December CY2023

Canceled

Microsoft Teams: Two-way lobby chat in Virtual appointments

Provide a seamless client experience with an interactive lobby that allows facilitators to send messages to customers prior to the meeting. Note: This feature is being removed from the roadmap and will be republished with updated information if applicable.

ID: 122395 Release: Microsoft Teams – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: October CY2023

Microsoft 365: Israel datacenter region and Advanced Data Residency availability

Microsoft 365 will launch a new local cloud region in Israel. The Advanced Data Residency add-on (“ADR”) will be available in Israel and provide eligible customers with committed data residency in the Israel local cloud region, prioritized tenant migration services, and expanded coverage of Microsoft 365 workloads and Customer Data. This item is cancelled. 

ID: 149270 Release: Microsoft 365 – Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) Tags: November CY2023