Office 365 Weekly Digest | December 16 – 22, 2018

Season's Greetings, and welcome to the December 16 - 22, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

There were thirteen features added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including several for Outlook Mobile (Android / iOS), and Office 365 Information Protection, along with additions for SharePoint and Teams.

There are no events scheduled for the remainder of 2018, but there are a couple of Teams events planned for the second week in January 2019. Also, a reminder about the Healthcare & Life Sciences Virtual Conference that will be held the week of January 7, 2019 with one 90-minute session per day.

Highlights from last week's blogs include a recap of what's new to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams in December 2018, along with information on updates to SharePoint, Workplace Analytics and PowerApps.

Noteworthy items from last week include new admin settings for internal sharing in Microsoft Forms, custom tags coming soon to OneNote, fluent design updates coming to OneDrive, an update on AI-powered features for Microsoft Stream, and the second post in the "Top 10 actions to secure your environment" series.

NOTE: Typically, there isn't much content published during the holiday week. As a result, there will not be a weekly digest post on Monday, December 31, 2018. I am going to take a little extra time and spend it with my family. Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season!

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

Below are the items added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week…

UPCOMING EVENTS

Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

When: Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 10am PT | This 60-minute session introduces you to the key activities needed to get started with Microsoft Teams today. From setting your profile, to running a meeting, users will leave this session with the foundation needed to use Teams with confidence. Check here for sessions in different time zones and other dates.

Make the switch from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams: End User Guidance

When: Thursday, January 10, 2018 at 10am PT | Designed specifically for Skype for Business end users, this course offers everything you need to help make the transition to Microsoft Teams. We'll focus on the core communication capabilities you use today, chat and meetings, as well as provide an orientation to additional collaboration functionality Teams has to offer. Check here for sessions in different time zones and other dates.

Modern Workplace Transformation Healthcare & Life Sciences Virtual Conference

When: Monday, January 7, 2019 – Friday, January 11, 2019 at 9am – 10:30am PT daily | Today's Healthcare & Life Science (HLS) organizations face a myriad of challenges from security threats, inefficiencies in communications/collaboration, and increased competition. Ultimately HLS orgs are seeking to leverage technology to improve diagnostics, patient outcomes, and more. Learn how to digitally transform your HLS organization by attending our Modern Workplace Transformation (MWT) Virtual Conference the week of January 7th, 2019. See how the Microsoft Modern Workplace platform securely enables employee engagement and collaboration across locations and devices. The Microsoft team welcomes you to an opportunity to explore beyond Envision and Ignite. We've lined up some top topics from these events, along with the speakers from Microsoft Corporate, to deliver a series of rich interactive session. This event will include Microsoft's latest innovations for Intelligent Communications, Security, and Modern Collaboration solutions. We have a separate session and focus each day starting at 12 noon eastern and lasting for 90 minutes. Please review the sessions and use the provided links to meeting invites to add to your calendar.

BLOG ROUNDUP

New to Microsoft 365 in December—AI-powered tools to help you create your best work

In December 2018, we released new features in Microsoft 365 that enable you to reach broader audiences, increase your efficiency, and focus on your most important tasks. Features such as: (1) Live captions and subtitles in Microsoft PowerPoint, (2) Get tricky acronym definitions automatically in Microsoft Word, (3) Reuse existing slides in new PowerPoint presentations, (4) New design of Outlook for iOS, (5) New features in Microsoft Bookings, and (6) New Graph APIs in Teams. | Related: You can now do more with Microsoft Bookings

What's new in Microsoft Teams – December round up

Microsoft Teams continues to evolve as the hub for teamwork in Office 365 helping you achieve more. People across your organization communicate in different ways depending on their work style, role, and preferences. Microsoft Teams is bringing new voice features to help you address your company needs, such as Group Call Pickup, Call Park, and Location-Based Routing. From improved visibility and control of all teams across your organization to streamlining key parts of the Teams lifecycle, we are bringing new manageability and automation capabilities to help you better support teamwork across your organization. We are constantly adding new and improved apps to our Teams experience and plan on highlighting a few of our apps that have been making major waves to further enable collaboration - Disco, Q, and Trello.

SharePoint web part updates – Yammer Conversations, My Documents, YouTube, and more

SharePoint web parts in Office 365 are the building blocks of your pages and sites – as you create, broadcast and engage others with content and information throughout your modern, intelligent intranet. We now mark the roll out of several new and updated SharePoint web parts – with significant updates from Yammer Conversations, personalized web parts, and YouTube embed. Let's dive into the details of each new and updated SharePoint web part, plus a few new Office 365 IT tricks you can put up your cloud admin sleeves. | Related: New Yammer conversations web part!

Workplace Analytics - December 2018: Notifications and new navigation

The Workplace Analytics team is excited to announce our feature updates for December. In this update, you'll discover the latest, including Workplace Analytics Notifications, and a new navigation pane. Based on system updates and user actions, Workplace Analytics will display timely notifications about resources, statuses, and events that can help people work more effectively. Notifications will appear in a Notifications panel on the right of the Workplace Analytics pages. Workplace Analytics now has a new navigation pane. The menu choices in this pane depend on the role you have. For example, admins can use the Settings pages and analysts can use the Analyze pages, as well as some pages under Settings.

New no code solutions for custom formatting in SharePoint

Lists and libraries are the primary containers for data and content, enriched with custom metadata. Previously, we introduced column formatting, which lets you cut and paste JSON scripts into a formatting window to add interactions, color coding, visualizations, or other transformations on data in a list or library column. We also introduced view formatting - which let you use the same JSON techniques to build transformation for every element in a view -- such as multiline displays, Microsoft Flow buttons, or data integrated from Bing maps or other business services. Today, there are dozens of sample scripts you can use in our SharePoint patterns and practices GitHub repository. We recognize, however, that this is a more advanced technique, and most users are unfamiliar with JSON syntax. That's why we're excited to introduce custom formatting. It's like column formatting, since it lets you add conditional coloring based on column values. However, custom formatting requires absolutely no scripting. Custom formatting works on choice, date and Boolean columns. Custom formatting will begin rolling out to targeted release customers in late December, with general release following in January. Later in 2019, we'll add support for more column types. | Related: Column Formatting in SharePoint 2019

PowerApps: Introducing the new WYSIWYG model-driven form designer (Public preview)

Take your model-driven form authoring experience to the next level with the new model-driven form designer. It provides a modern, clean and productive interface for makers when authoring model-driven forms. A live WYSIWYG form preview (Unified interface only) enables makers to see exactly how the form will appear to end-users. An enhanced fields pane with searching and filtering capabilities helps makers quickly find and add fields to their form. An always available property pane makes viewing and updating properties quick and easy. A tree view helps makers easily visualize the hierarchy of a form's fields and controls.

Related:

• Introducing the new view designer for model-driven apps
• PowerApps Canvas App Coding Standards and Guidelines
• Option Sets and Many-to-Many Relationships for Canvas apps

NOTEWORTHY

Microsoft Forms: New administrator setting for internal sharing

We are pleased to introduce better administrator control over Microsoft Forms internal sharing. Administrators can now control whether the default action of a form is to record the name of a signed in responder. This option can also be changed in the form settings by the user. After this setting is turned off, people in your organization will see by default that new forms will not record the names of signed in users by default. They can change the form settings and choose to record name.

Skype Meetings App Improvements on Mac Postponed

In November, we announced a number of improvements to the Skype Meetings App, our web-downloadable meetings app for use when a Skype for Business desktop app is not installed on a Windows or Mac computer. We have shipped all of the planned improvements except one - the replacement of Skype Meetings App download with Skype for Business desktop app on Mac. We heard from customers that they would like more time before we make this change in order to update their documentation and training materials. To help make this a smoother transition for customers, we have decided to postpone this change until the first quarter of 2019. We will post an update in the new year with a more specific timeline.

Custom tags available soon in OneNote

We're extremely excited to bring custom tags to our users in the next few weeks! With this feature, users will be able to name the tag and select an icon to create a custom tag that will sync across devices and show up in app search results. Add custom tags to your pages and stay organized in whatever way helps you achieve more! Custom tags were passionately requested by our customers and starting in January 2019, it will be available on OneNote for Windows 10 and OneNote for Mac. No settings need to be enabled to use this feature. Once you see it in your app, feel free to start using it. For a detailed explanation on how to use custom tags, read on...

Designing a Fluent and Intelligent OneDrive

At BUILD Conference 2017, Microsoft unveiled Fluent. It's a new visual and interaction design system we created for Windows, Office and the Universal apps platform to deliver experiences that are adaptive, empathetic and beautiful across modalities. Fluent Design is now expanding to the web and aligning the entire Office 365 suite on a common color palette, typography, icon systems and elevation styles. You'll notice a shared header across products, with elements thoughtfully aligned to the same grid everywhere, and added depth, to focus on what matters. We're excited to announce that this concept includes OneDrive and will span across multiple devices to offer a unified experience across all platforms starting at the highest level, with the recently announced new Office icons.

Introducing the Office app for Windows 10

In 2017, we updated Office.com with a new experience focused on two simple things: helping users get the most out of Office and getting them back into their work quickly. The streamlined site has clearly resonated with customers, and now more than 40 percent of Office 365 web users start their work by visiting Office.com. Starting now, we're bringing this experience to Windows 10 in the form of an app, simply called Office. It's now available to Windows Insiders (Fast) and will roll out to all Windows 10 users soon. The app itself is free and it can be used with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, or Office Online—the free web-based version of Office for consumers.

AI-powered features now available with all O365 Stream licenses

As part of our commitment to empower people and organizations with AI, we have expanded the availability of intelligent features in Microsoft Stream, including: (1) People timelines that use facial detection to identify who is talking, so you can easily jump to a particular speaker in the recording, and (2) Deep search of transcripts, with highlighted terms and clickable results that let you find and quickly jump to moments that matter in a video. These features are now available in all Enterprise, Firstline Worker, and Education plans of Office 365, helping make content in video more discoverable for all users of these plans.

Top 10 actions to secure your environment: Step 2 - Manage authentication and safeguard access

This series outlines the most fundamental steps you can take with your investment in Microsoft 365 security solutions. We will provide advice on activities such as setting up identity management through active directory, malware protection, and more. In this post, we explain how to enable single sign-on (SSO) in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to manage authentication across devices, cloud apps, and on-premises apps, and then how to set up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to authenticate user sign-ins through a mobile app, phone call, or SMS. Given the frequency with which credentials are stolen, guessed, or phished, both cloud and hybrid customers should enable Azure MFA to add another layer of security to their accounts. MFA protects everything under the SSO identity system, including cloud SaaS and on-premises apps published with AppProxy, significantly decreasing the odds that a compromised identity will result in a security breach.