New blog articles in Microsoft 365

PowerPoint’s presenter coach expands to Microsoft Teams and takes on the new name speaker coach

Derek Johnson — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Today, we announced speaker coach is coming soon to Microsoft Teams! Bring your best self into every meeting with speaker coach, your own private, personalized meeting coach. Speaker coach uses AI to provide you with guidance on your pace, notify you if you are interrupting someone, and remind you to check in with your audience. This capability helps empower you to be more confident whether you are presenting or participating in any meeting and also fosters inclusivity, where all voices are heard in every meeting.

This experience may sound similar to PowerPoint’s presenter coach – and it is – presenter coach in PowerPoint is now referred to as speaker coach in both, PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams!

Speaker coach in Microsoft Teams will be available in early 2022, but you can use speaker coach in PowerPoint today! Take a look at how speaker coach in PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams are similar.

Speaker coach in PowerPoint

Speaker coach in PowerPoint is currently available across all platforms and leverages AI to help anyone—professionals, students, and even those who just want to practice a speech for a wedding or graduation. Especially in this hybrid work and learning environment, presentation skills are more important than ever, with more meetings and presentations than ever before. Speaker coach provides users with feedback on their pace, use of monotone pitch, use of filler words, poor grammar, lack of originality, use of sensitive phrases, and more while they rehearse their presentations. At the end of each rehearsal, speaker coach users receive a summary report highlighting the key pieces of feedback to help them become better, more confident presenters.

Availability: Speaker coach in PowerPoint is available across all platforms today.

Speaker coach in Microsoft Teams

Speaker coach in Microsoft Teams will be available in early 2022. It is your private, personalized coach helping you bring your confident and best self into every meeting. When you turn speaker coach on in a meeting, the experience will privately assist you by highlighting moments and providing you with the following:

Help you take a breath and slow down if you begin to speak too quickly.
If you accidentally speak at the same time as someone else, speaker coach will help you identify who else is talking so you can recognize them and hear what they want to say.
Understand a comprehensive view of your data post-meeting with a private report of the moments speaker coach captured to reflect and internalize for the next meeting.

It is important to know that speaker coach in Microsoft Teams is designed for anyone in the meeting – not just the presenter – as there are many people who hold a speaking role in meetings. Even if you are simply saying a couple sentences – speaker coach can be there for you privately, to empower you and help give you greater confidence.

Availability: Speaker coach in Microsoft Teams is coming early 2022.

Continue the conversation by joining us in the Microsoft 365 Tech Community! Whether you have product questions or just want to stay informed with the latest updates on new releases, tools, and blogs, Microsoft 365 Tech Community is your go-to resource to stay connected!

Privacy changes to Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics

James_Bell — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 16:32:43 GMT

At Microsoft, we’re committed to both data-driven insights and user privacy. As part of that commitment, we’re making a change to Microsoft 365 usage analytics on September 1st to pseudonymize user-level information by default. This change affects the following products and APIs, and will help companies support their local privacy laws:

Microsoft 365 Reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center
Microsoft 365 usage reports in Microsoft Graph
Microsoft Teams analytics and reporting in the Microsoft Teams admin center
The reportRoot: getSharePointSiteUsageDetail API (1.0 and beta) for SharePoint site detail

Global administrators can revert this change for their tenant and show identifiable user information if their organization’s privacy practices allow. This can be achieved in the Microsoft 365 admin center by going to Settings > Org Settings > Services and selecting Reports. Under Choose how to show user information, uncheck the statement In all reports, display de-identified names for users, groups, and sites, and then save your changes. Showing identifiable user information is a logged event in the Microsoft 365 compliance center audit log.

When user identification is enabled, administrative roles and the report reader role will be able to see identifiable user level information. Global reader and Usage Summary Reports Reader roles will not have access to identifiable user information, regardless of the setting chosen.

These changes to the product will bolster privacy for users while still enabling IT professionals to measure adoption trends, track license allocation and determine license renewal in Microsoft 365.

New minimum Outlook for Windows version requirements for Microsoft 365

Microsoft_365_Team — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 17:39:29 GMT

We are quickly approaching the November 1st deadline when the minimum version requirements for connecting Outlook for Windows to Office 365/Microsoft 365 services will change. So, we thought we’d share more information on why we’re doing that.

After November 1, 2021, only Outlook 2013 Service Pack 1 (with latest fixes) and later will be able to connect to Microsoft 365 services. It’s worth noting here that Outlook 2007, 2010, and Office 2013 versions earlier than 15.0.4971.1000 aren’t supported now, but we know some customers just can’t quit them.

The deadline is approaching!

Since our Message Center post last fall, we’ve seen a drop in the usage of the unsupported versions of Outlook for Windows – great job! If you’re still running older versions, please start working on a plan to move by November 1st.

Our Customer Support team is actively reaching out to tenants that have the most usage on Outlook 2007 and 2010 to help them meet the deadline. If you have questions or concerns about getting all users off these unsupported builds, please reach out to your support teams.

Why are we blocking old versions?

Older versions of Outlook such as Outlook 2007 and 2010 are incompatible with the following upcoming service changes, which is prompting this controlled block:

Support for basic authentication is ending to increase the security of Microsoft 365 by relying on modern authentication protocols, which are not only more secure, but also provide compliance and policy controls to help you manage your data.
We’re working on adding support for HTTP/2 in Microsoft 365. HTTP/2 is a full duplex protocol, which decreases latency through header compression and request multiplexing. On the service side, we’ll be able to better prioritize requests and more effectively push data to clients.

It can be a challenge to stay current, but there are many reasons why staying current is a good idea:

Security fixes will protect your devices against known vulnerabilities.
Reliability – over the last five years we’ve eliminated 75% of crashes in Outlook!
Updated versions have all the coolest new features to make your life easier!

Upgrade guidance

For Office 2007 and 2010, use the roadmaps listed below to move to Microsoft 365 Apps. If your organization is highly regulated or uses devices that can’t take updates, consider Office 2019
For Office 2013, move to Version 15.0.4971.1000 of Office 2013 (Service Pack 1 with the October 2017 Update)
For Office 2016, move to Version 16.0.4600.1000 of Office 2016 (With the November 2017 Update, KB 4051890)
Office 2007 end of support roadmap 
Office 2010 end of support roadmap 
Office versions and connectivity to Office 365 Services (See section specific to Outlook for Windows)
Deployment guide for Microsoft 365 Apps

Introducing File Cards in the Office app for Android

Sudheender — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 16:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce that File Cards in the Office app for Android will start rolling out in August.

File Cards offer a rich and modern way of consuming your Office content with inline previews, contextual information, such as the person who shared the file along with the context with which it was shared with you, and quick actions on the card that allow you to share and keep the file offline.

As part of this rollout, File Cards with previews will be available for your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files stored in your OneDrive Business and Personal accounts. Word and PDF files stored directly on your Android device will be supported in a future update.

How to Try

Update to Office version 16.0.14228.20138 on your Android device and sign in to the app. After you’ve successfully signed in, tap the File Card view icon in the Files section on the Home screen to switch to the File Card view.

Your view preference will be retained if you switch between the ”Recent” and ”Shared” tabs or when you leave and return to the Office app in the future. You can switch back to the default List view at any time by tapping the List icon in the view switcher.

Download the Microsoft Office app today and keep it up-to-date to ensure you always have the latest features and improvements. File Cards will be rolling out to users worldwide over the next few weeks, so if you don’t see it in your app just yet, you can expect to receive the update soon.  

What’s Coming to OneNote

OneNotePM — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 19:06:32 GMT

Update 8/10: A question was added to the FAQ section based on feedback in the comments.

We’re excited to share that OneNote on Windows will get a series of updates over the next 12 months. These updates include a visual refresh, the latest Microsoft pen and ink advancements, a new navigational UI layout option that can flex for customer preferences, and more!

If you're wondering which OneNote app on Windows will receive the updates, here's the best part: no matter which OneNote app you use today, we have a path for you to get these updates. Today, OneNote supports two apps on Windows: the OneNote app installed with Office and the OneNote for Windows 10 app available in the Microsoft Store. Advances in Windows and Office will allow us to unify the two apps so that you'll have the simplicity of a single OneNote app on Windows while enjoying the interface and features you're already familiar with.

Figure 1: Mock-up of updates coming to the OneNote app on Windows.

Figure 2: Mock-up of updates coming to the OneNote app on Windows.

What you'll start seeing:

The OneNote app will get new features and key existing features currently unique to OneNote for Windows 10.
OneNote for Windows 10 users will get an in-app invitation to update to the OneNote app. We anticipate invitations to start in the second half of 2022. We will have a future announcement dedicated to IT pros that will detail the available controls over the timing and experience of updating users to the OneNote app.

What this announcement means for you and your organization:

If you currently use the OneNote app, there is no action to take as you are on the fastest path to new features.
If you currently use OneNote for Windows 10, there is no action to take today as the OneNote team is working to build features that will help you move over to the OneNote app more easily in the future. Until we have completed that work, you can continue to use OneNote for Windows 10.
If you plan on newly deploying OneNote to your organization, we recommend deploying the OneNote app.

We're excited about the future of OneNote and look forward to hearing your feedback to make OneNote the best place for your notes. Please continue to tell us what you think through the in-app feedback and in the comments below!

For more information on the future of OneNote on Windows, see the FAQ below.

Frequently Asked Questions about the OneNote app on Windows

Q: Are you making a third OneNote app separate from the two existing ones?

A: No, the current OneNote app is evolving to include new features and key existing features from OneNote for Windows 10. Once the team has done the necessary work for a smooth update, users on OneNote for Windows 10 will get the invitation to update to the OneNote app.

Q: How do I tell which OneNote I'm using today?

A: What's the difference between the OneNote versions? - Office Support (microsoft.com)

Q: What's new for OneNote in Windows 11?

A: Both OneNote apps will continue to run in Windows 11. Upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 will not affect your OneNote apps. If you're starting Windows 11 from a clean installation or new device, OneNote for Windows 10 will not be installed by default, but will be available to download for free in the Microsoft Store app.

Q: Do I need to buy Office to use the updated OneNote app?

A: No, the OneNote app is also available as a free standalone version: https://onenote.com/download.

Q: What if I'm using OneNote 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, or 2016?

A: The latest OneNote app is available as part of Microsoft 365 as well as a free standalone version from: https://onenote.com/download.

Q: I'm an IT professional managing OneNote users. What does this announcement mean for my organization?

A: No action is required if all your users are already using the OneNote app. For organizations with OneNote for Windows 10 users, we will follow up with guidance for a smooth transition for your users.

Q: Will the updated OneNote app support my existing notebooks?

A: Yes, all notebooks you use today in OneNote and OneNote for Windows 10 will continue to work in the updated app.

Q: As a OneNote for Windows 10 user, when will I need to update to the OneNote app?

A: After the in-app invitation is available, we recommend updating to the OneNote app by October 2025 when both Windows 10 and OneNote for Windows 10 will reach end-of-support.

Q: If I'm using both apps today, should I uninstall OneNote for Windows 10?

A: We recommend keeping OneNote for Windows 10 for now as we plan to provide extra checks for the integrity of your notebooks before moving to a single app. To keep OneNote for Windows 10 from launching when you click on notebook links, you can change default apps here: Change the default version of OneNote on your computer - OneNote (microsoft.com).

Q: I'm currently using OneNote for Windows 10. Can I get the OneNote app before I receive the in-app invitation?

A: We recommend waiting for the in-app invitation to ensure a smooth experience. For those who want the OneNote app earlier, the fastest way is by installing the OneNote app here: https://onenote.com/download.

Q: Will you be adding all the features unique to OneNote for Windows 10 that are missing in the OneNote app?

A: While we won't be incorporating the entire list of features from OneNote for Windows 10 into the OneNote app, we are working to ensure that all the most loved features will continue to be a part of OneNote. We will follow up with the full list of features in a future announcement.

Q: Will you be removing any existing features in the OneNote app?

A: No. All existing functionality in the OneNote app, such as local notebook support, will continue to be supported on future updated versions.

Q: Am I impacted if I use OneNote for macOS, iOS, Android, or Web?

A: The OneNote team will continue to invest in OneNote for macOS, iOS, Android, and Web. There's no impact from this announcement on OneNote for these platforms.

Watch Videos on Office Mobile for Android

Arpit_Agarwal — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:26:32 GMT

Video content is becoming increasingly common and important in our professional lives. Whether it’s a training video, a recorded work meeting, an idea pitch from a colleague, or an executive conference, you want the right tools so you can access and play videos with ease. With the new Stream player in Office Mobile for Android, you can seamlessly find, access, and view your organization's videos any time you want from within Office Mobile!

How to find videos

There are two ways to find and play videos with the Stream player in Office Mobile for Android:

Recommended Videos: We use intelligence to recommend videos from your immediate network, such as videos that have been shared with you and need to catch up on. This curated list appears right on your home screen.

Recently Watched Videos: There are various places where you might watch your organization's videos, such as Office.com, OneDrive for Business, or Microsoft Teams. In the Recently Watched section, all videos that were recently opened or watched will appear here. On the Home tab, select the Filter button > select Media, then select the Videos tab to view the list. (Note: The list will appear empty until you have watched a video from the Recommended section, Microsoft Teams, or OneDrive for Business.)

Features

Aside from the usual pause-play options and a scrubber to navigate through the video, the Stream player boasts a wide range of tools to give you the right viewing experience, such as:

Quick seeker: Quickly fast forward or rewind by 10 seconds.
Captions: Currently only present for Teams Meeting Recordings, which are stored on OneDrive for Business, this option allows users to turn captions on or off.
Playback Speed: Control the playback speed - This is handy if you want to slow down a complex topic or increase the speed to catch up on a missed team meeting.
Playback Quality: Choose between different resolutions for video playback (depending on bandwidth).

Requirements

To use this feature, you must:

Be signed in with your organization’s account (OneDrive for Business)
Have a stable internet connection

Availability

This feature is available to all users running the latest version of Office Mobile in the Google Play Store.

Try it out!

Open and play any existing Microsoft Teams meeting recording or any video on your OneDrive for Business app. Then, open Office Mobile and go to the Media section, and select Videos. The meeting recording you started watching will now appear in the Recently Watched section for quick access!
Use the built-in tools to change settings while watching your video, such as adjusting the playback speed or the video quality.

Coming Soon

Videos in Shared with Me: All videos that have been shared with you will soon appear in the Shared with Me section. Currently, only Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents appear in this section.
Picture-in-Picture: Minimize the video into a mini player at the bottom of your screen - Continue working on other tasks within or outside of the Office Mobile app.

Feedback

We want to hear from you! In Office Mobile, click on your profile icon, then select Send Feedback. To send us your thoughts, select I like something, I don’t like something, or I have an idea. 

What’s new for admins in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise – June 2021

Microsoft_365_Team — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 19:34:48 GMT

We’ve rounded up the latest and greatest news on Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and we're excited to share it all with you! In this month's blog, we discuss the General Availability (GA) of the new Inventory for Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, a new customer story from Microsoft partner and customer Avanade, the availability of a new Microsoft 365 licensing option, tricks and tips for onboarding devices in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, our latest Microsoft 365 Apps AMA session, and new Office Deployment Insider videos to help you get the most out of Microsoft 365 Apps capabilities.

General Availability of Inventory on Microsoft 365 Apps admin center

In a recent announcement, we shared the General Availability release of a new experience designed to provide IT admins with instant answers regarding the status of their organization's Microsoft 365 Apps in the enterprise environment. With the new Inventory on Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, IT pros can quickly identify potential issues, determine how many devices are running the latest security updates, and more. Check out this blog written by one of the Microsoft 365 Apps Rangers, Martin Nothnagel, to learn all about the new capabilities!

Microsoft Customer Story: Avanade

Avanade, Microsoft Global Alliance SI Partner of the Year, recently shared a story of how shifting their Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise to the Monthly Enterprise channel is helping to keep employees up to date with every new feature that Microsoft releases and reducing help desk tickets for IT. Additionally, as an innovator in the Microsoft ecosystem, Avanade keeps their employees up-to-date with the latest features, which helps them build confidence and trust with their own customers as they modernize their IT environments to ensure remote and hybrid workers have the latest features to be productive. To learn more, read the full Avanade customer story here.

Microsoft 365 E3: Unattended License option availability

We’re excited to announce the availability of the Microsoft 365 E3: Unattended License! As a new license option for Office apps, the Unattended License allows the usage of Office apps with service accounts or other non-user accounts, which is common for automation process execution and can operate unattended.  IT admins deploying new or existing solutions that use this unattended license can choose to update Office apps via the Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel or Monthly Enterprise Channel. Check out this blog to learn more about enabling automation for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise.

Tips and tricks for onboarding devices to the new Microsoft 365 Apps admin center

In this blog, the Microsoft 365 Apps Rangers share troubleshooting tips and tricks for what to do when devices don’t appear in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center after the new Inventory feature has been enabled. They cover root causes as well as steps to take to help identify and resolve the issue. You asked, we answered!

Microsoft 365 Apps AMA featuring the Office Rangers

We had some great questions during our latest Microsoft 365 Apps AMA session, such as which Microsoft 365 subscriptions include Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and the Teams Live Events feature for Microsoft Teams, when Outlook Spaces may be released via General Availability, and how to manage updates via update channels in Microsoft 365 Apps.

New videos on the Office Deployment Insider YouTube channel

Amesh Mansukhani, Principal Marketing Manager, is excited to introduce two new videos to the Office Deployment Insider YouTube channel where he gives in-depth, expert advice on the latest Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise features. Check them out below!

Introducing the new Monthly Enterprise Servicing Profile! In this video you will learn more on how Microsoft is developing a new way to use automation to service your Microsoft 365 Apps with insights and control Amesh as he introduces innovative tips, tricks, and insider best practices to make the most of your device updates.

Interested in using the newly available Servicing Profile in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, but don't know how to get started? Join Amesh as he shares step-by-step guides to streamline the setup process, including tips and tricks to building a servicing profile that works for you.

Microsoft 365 Certification is here to ease your concerns about data security while using 3P Apps

Krishna_Mawani — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 19:24:13 GMT

Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program is designed to provide assurance to organizations and enterprise IT admins like you, that when your data interacts with a certified application, that application has undergone a security and privacy review. Microsoft 365 Certification requires a thorough assessment of an app and its underlying infrastructure against a series of security controls under these security domains:

Application Security
Operational Security
Data Handling Security and Privacy
Optional External Compliance Audit Review

When an app undergoes Microsoft 365 Certification, a third-party assessor validates and assesses the app and its supporting infrastructure. An ISV must pass the controls in each of the following security domains to be awarded a certification:

1. Application Security:
The application security domain focuses upon the following three areas:

GraphAPI Permission Validation - GraphAPI permission validation is carried out to validate that the app/add-in does not request overly permissive permissions and the analyst ensures that the permissions requested are essential for the functionality of the app.
External Connectivity Checks - Analyst will perform a walkthrough of the applications functionality to identify connections outside of Microsoft 365. Any connections which are not identified as being Microsoft or any direct connections to a service will be flagged and discussed during the assessment.
Application Security Testing - Application security testing in the form of penetration testing MUST be carried out if the application has any connectivity to any service not published by Microsoft. If the app operates standalone without connectivity to any non-Microsoft service or backend, then penetration testing is not required.
Learn More!

2. Operations Security:
This domain measures the alignment of an app's supporting infrastructure and deployment processes with security best practices. There are various controls assessed in this layer like malware protection, patch management, vulnerability scanning and firewalls, account management and incident management, and change control to name a few.
Learn More!

3. Data Handling Security and Privacy:
Data in transit between the application user, intermediary services, and app developer's systems will be required to be protected by encryption through a TLS connection. If an application retrieves and stores customer data, the app developer will be required to implement a data storage encryption scheme that follows the specification as defined Here. This domain also tests controls like data at rest, data retention and disposal, data access management and GDPR.
Learn More!

4. Optional External Compliance Audit Review
If external compliance audit reports have been included within the Publisher Attestation, certification analysts will check the validity of those reports as part of the Microsoft 365 Certification assessment. Evidence for these following external compliance audit reports can be leveraged in the certification assessment:

ISMS/ IEC - IS0/IEC 27001 specification
PCI DSS
SOC 2
Learn More!

If you have questions, please reach out to appcert@microsoft.com.

See the following resources to learn more about the Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program:

Inventory on Microsoft 365 Apps admin center goes GA!

Martin Nothnagel — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 19:07:35 GMT

Today, we are happy to announce the General Availability (GA) of the new Inventory in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center; a new experience specifically tailored to provide admins instant answers on the state of Microsoft 365 Apps in the enterprise environment.

Using the new dashboards, you as an admin can quickly identify potential issues. By getting a view of the build spread in your organization, you evaluate if you need to consolidate and update devices running unsupported Office app versions. You can see detailed information about add-ins installed on devices across the organization. You also have access to the raw Inventory, so you can drill through the device-level details and use filters to create views based on your requirements.

We also are happy to release the Security Update Status feature to GA. Based on inventory data, you as an IT pro can get an overview of how many devices are already running the latest security updates. You can slice and dice the data per channel or drill down to a list of devices missing security updates for the Microsoft 365 Apps. The report can be customized by setting your own goals for security currency and get a near-real time view of how close you are to these goals, such as having 90% of all devices running the latest security update within five days.

Both features are true cloud services providing you, as an admin, unparalleled insight into channels, releases, security and support status. Paired with the fact that both features span all Microsoft 365 Apps instances activated by your tenant, regardless of the management or directory domain of the device, this gives admins a more complete picture.

Overview

As mentioned, the Inventory in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center is loaded with detailed reports and insights which are specifically built for the Microsoft 365 Apps. Onboarding is simple. Just visit Inventory on config.office.com and click, "Get started." This enables devices to register to the service, and admins can get a full overview of their devices with Microsoft 365 Apps installed within a few hours. The landing page highlights key insights, flagging how many different releases are deployed, which update channels are in use, what the architecture split looks like, and what the most installed add-ins are:

Inventory - Providing easy overview of e.g. different releases of the Microsoft 365 Apps

Each insight has rich data behind it, which you can explore in greater detail by navigating into the different sections. You can get a full breakdown of all releases down to the device level. Or, see additional information about a given device and its Microsoft 365 Apps installation:

Detail pane of a devices, showing device name, memory, installed version of Windows and Office and more

Maybe you are interested in getting a better understanding of which Component Object Model (COM)-based add-ins are installed in your environment or how many installs of different versions are out there:

Add-in view in Inventory, showing a list of add-ins and version breakdown

Based on the same near-real time data from devices powering Inventory, you can also assess your security stance using the Security Update Status page:

Security Update Status page giving an overview how many devices are running the latest updates as well as a detailed breakdown by channel

On a high level, you get an immediate insight into the share of devices which are already running the latest security update. You then can drill through this data by breaking the status down per channel or getting a full list of devices missing important security updates.

As mentioned before, this not only includes managed devices, but all devices which have a Microsoft 365 Apps installation that has been activated and used by an Azure Active Directory (AAD) user from your tenant. This way, you could also identify Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD), which would pose a risk to your tenant by missing important security updates.

From our early adopters

Since Ignite 2020, when these features were released into preview, our engineering and Microsoft 365 Apps Ranger teams have partnered with customers around the world, ranging in size from 10,000 to 300,000 seats across the enterprise and education spaces. While we shaped and improved the service during the preview phase, we consistently heard the following feedback from those early adopters:

Putting the new Inventory as well as the Security Update Status feature to work is as easy as can be. As true cloud services, there is no need to set up on-premises infrastructure, deploy software agents or policies to devices. Within minutes after the activation, admins were able to see the inventory populate automatically. Leveraging the unified integration into the Office product, it can be run side-by-side with other inventory solutions. For example, a device can report to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager while the Microsoft 365 Apps installation reports its inventory directly to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center.

The second important aspect was that Inventory, as well as the Security Update Status page, are specifically tailored to the Microsoft 365 Apps and are available in one place. Instead of having to build custom reports in a management solution which might be operated and owned by another team, the admin team owning the Microsoft 365 Apps get pre-build reports which they can access at any time.

Finally, customers valued the deep insights into which add-ins and versions are installed on devices. Often, add-ins can influence the user experience dramatically when it comes to performance and stability of the Microsoft 365 Apps. Several customers used this data to consolidate a wide version spread for an add-in or kicked off uninstall campaigns for add-ins which are out of support and should no longer be used.

Get started today

We encourage you to start evaluating the Inventory and the Security Update Status page. It only takes a few minutes to enable the new feature. It does not block other management solutions and the registration into Inventory is silent to the user. Just navigate to the Inventory overview page, enable the feature and see devices trickle in within minutes. To learn more, check out our documentation or watch the video from Ignite.

This is just the starting point

Today, there are more than 18 million devices registered into Inventory. We’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback on today’s capabilities, but we’re not stopping anytime soon . We are working on even more features built on top of Inventory, like security vulnerability reporting, historical uptake trends for the Security Update Status, insights into add-in usage as well as cross-update channel comparisons, to name a few.

Enabling automation with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

MattPhilipenko — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 22:16:42 GMT

Robotic Process Automation (RPA), also known as unattended use, allows an organization to license certain account types that are designed to be used in process automation.

There are two types of RPA:

Attended RPA - The collaboration between the user and the bot, which is also known as the Virtual Assistant.
Unattended RPA - The execution of tasks and interactions independent of the user. With unattended RPA, the bot can run automation on its own.

Over the years organizations have used automation within Office apps, but the process always had to be done with volume license versions of Office due to licensing limitations and feasibility of an organization licensing RPA accounts. Microsoft 365 E3: Unattended License now enables IT admins to automate and use the same version/build of Office that their end users are running. Keep in mind that Office was developed with the end user in mind and not automation. Although this new license allows for amazing automation, we suggest you follow the considerations for RPA outlined here: https://aka.ms/unattendedofficeconsiderations.

Requirements for using unattended RPA

The following are the requirements for using unattended RPA with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise:

Microsoft 365 E3: Unattended License - Required on any account running an RPA unattended task. The account can be a user account, a system/service account, or a robot account.
Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, version 2009 or later.
RPA is currently only available for Office apps for Windows.

Enabling RPA scenarios

If you want to enable RPA in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, click here for step-by-step instructions.

What does it look like?

To validate if the Microsoft 365 E3: Unattended License is active from a Microsoft 365 App, navigate to File > Account. Here's an example in the screen shot below:

Another way to validate if the license is active is under, "%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Office\Licenses\5\Unattended."

If user is signed in, but there is no RPA entitlement (Unattended License) assigned or activated on the account, users may see the following message within their Microsoft 365 Apps:

Assigning licenses to devices in Microsoft 365 admin center 

To deploy an Unattended License, you simply purchase the required number of Microsoft 365 licenses and assign the license to a user in the Microsoft 365 admin center. To enable this functionality on a device, use the group policy for currently installed devices and/or the command line.

For more information on unattended RPA with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, check out this Microsoft Docs article.

How Microsoft 365 encryption helps safeguard data and maintain compliance

John Gruszczyk — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 21:29:31 GMT

Meeting the demands of a hybrid workplace

While the increase in work-from-anywhere capabilities have been crucial to enabling productivity, they can be met with concerns from Security Operations (SecOps) teams around data protection and governance. Employees need to have frictionless collaboration, both inside and outside the company, as well as being empowered to access internal resources from endpoints outside organization boundaries. With organizational data and files roaming across devices, apps, and services, IT admins and SecOps teams must ensure it remains protected and meets the organization’s security and compliance requirements. An effective security and compliance strategy protects people, data, and endpoints across the organization without restricting end user productivity.

The importance of a robust data protection and governance strategy

Data protection and governance is critical for organizations – it helps keep sensitive business information from being improperly shared while also ensuring external compliance obligations are met. To formulate a robust data protection and governance strategy, business stakeholders need to adequately assess both internal and external data requirements. For many organizations, this means involving IT, SecOps, legal, human resources, apps and tooling, and various other teams to ensure all stakeholders have shared any data handling requirements they operate under. This effort can be complex and challenging to understand how to create strong internal security standards, while meeting external compliance obligations without impacting end user productivity. In this blog, we'll discuss some helpful tips on how to take advantage of data protection and governance across Microsoft 365 to meet your business needs.

Encryption and how it works in Microsoft 365

Encryption is a key component to protecting files and organizational information, but it’s important to understand the details of how encryption works. Encryption by itself doesn’t prevent content interception. Organizations need to have a larger data protection strategy to ensure only authorized parties can use the encrypted data. Encryption can, and more importantly should, co-exist in multiple layers operating at the same time - such as encrypting both the email message and the channel it flows through. Different layers of encryption can help achieve different business goals, such as safeguarding sensitive content or helping meet regulatory obligations. A robust business strategy uses multiple layers of encryption together enabling the business to meet both internal and external data protection requirements.

Microsoft uses industry standard technologies such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP) to encrypt all data in transit between users’ devices and Microsoft datacenters, and between Microsoft datacenters. Data in transit includes, mail messages in the process of being delivered, files shared and in transit between users, and conversations in online meetings. Microsoft also helps keep data safe by encrypting it while at rest in Microsoft datacenters, starting with volume-level encryption enabled through BitLocker while service encryption ensures that content at rest is encrypted at the application layer. In order to help organizations meet security and compliance obligations, data encrypted at rest in Microsoft datacenters is done in a way that enables organizations to decrypt the content if needed. On top of our standard encryption in transit and at rest, Microsoft also provides additional encryption solutions and layers that customers can manage and control to ensure security and compliance requirements are met.

Meeting security and compliance requirements with Microsoft 365

One of the top questions we hear from organizations is – what type of encryption does my organization need? The answer depends on many factors, such as the type of business information being handled, sensitivity of the data, industry or regional requirements, and even internal standards. While the answer may seem complex, Microsoft provides a portfolio of encryption and compliance solutions that help businesses meet their data protection and governance needs while being in full control. Let’s dive into how Microsoft supports customers with additional security and compliance needs.

Microsoft 365 Customer Key – including Microsoft Teams!

Customer Key is built on service encryption, providing a layer of encryption at the application level for data-at-rest and allows the organization to provide and control the encryption keys used to encrypt customer data in Microsoft’s datacenters. Customer Key assists customers in meeting regulatory or compliance obligations for controlling root keys. After providing the keys, the organization can create a data encryption policy (DEP) and assign it to encrypt the following data for all tenant users:

Teams chat messages (1:1 chats, group chats, meeting chats and channel conversations)
Teams media messages (images, code snippets, video messages, audio messages, wiki images)
Teams call and meeting recordings stored in Teams storage
Teams chat notifications, Teams chat suggestions by Cortana, Teams status messages
User and signal information for Exchange Online
Exchange Online mailboxes that aren't already encrypted using mailbox-level DEPs
Microsoft Information Protection exact data match (EDM) data – (data file schemas, rule packages, and the salts used to hash the sensitive data)

For customers currently using Customer Key for Exchange Online and SharePoint, data encryption policies add broader control and now includes support for Microsoft Teams! You can create multiple DEPs per tenant, but only one DEP can be assigned at a time. When a DEP is assigned, encryption begins automatically, but will take some time to complete depending on size of the tenant.

For more details on using Customer Key for tenant-level encryption, please see the following articles:

Customer Lockbox

Customer Lockbox is a solution that provides an extra layer of control to customers by offering the ability to give explicit access authorization for service operations. This additional control can help customers meet certain compliance obligations, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), and supports requests to access data in Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive. A foundational principle of Microsoft 365 is that the service operates without Microsoft access to customer content. However, a Microsoft engineer may need access to customer content when the customer makes a support request. While issues are usually fixed through extensive telemetry and debugging tools, some cases may require a Microsoft engineer to access customer content to determine the root cause and fix the issue. Customer Lockbox requires the engineer to request access from the customer as a final step in the approval workflow, giving organizations the option to approve or deny these requests and providing direct-access control to the customer. Customer Lockbox is included with Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions and can be added to other plans.

Communication Compliance

Organizations need to be able to manage risk in communications to protect company assets and identify concerning content that may violate internal code of conduct standards. Communication Compliance is an insider risk solution in Microsoft 365 that helps minimize communication risks by helping detect, capture, and act on inappropriate messages within the organization. Communication Compliance helps organizations remain compliant with regulatory requirements and detect internal violations without disrupting the business.

Communication Compliance policies can assist with detecting policy matches in several important compliance areas, such as corporate policies, risk management, and regulatory compliance. IT admins can take advantage of pre-defined policies or build custom policies to detect violations in both internal and external communications covering email, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or even third-party communications. Since there may be a separation of duties between IT admins and the team that manages organizational compliance, Communication Compliance supports the separation between configuration of policies and the investigation of messages through rules based access controls.

Microsoft recently announced some exciting new Communication Compliance capabilities, including a deeper integration with Microsoft Teams. In accordance with helping customers meet privacy and compliance obligations, strong safeguards and controls are built into the solution by default on all the new features highlighted in the article above. This includes items like, pseudonymization, rules-based access control, admin explicit opt-in of users, and audit trails.

Selection of optical character recognition to extract printed or handwritten text from images

Compliance Manager

Available in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center for all Microsoft enterprise customers, Compliance Manager helps simplify compliance and reduce risks. Compliance Manager translates complex regulatory requirements to specific controls, and through compliance score, provides a quantifiable measure of compliance. It offers intuitive compliance management, a vast library of scalable assessments, and built-in automation. Customers can see step-by-step implementation guidance, recommended solutions to implement controls, and the controls with most impact – empowering them to act quickly to improve their organization compliance. Customers can select from 300+ out-of-box assessments for common industry, regional, and global standards and regulations, or create custom assessments to meet specific organizational needs. Compliance Manager is available for all Microsoft 365 customers – get started today!

Compliance Manager dashboard

Using content encryption for sensitive data protection

As previously mentioned, encryption is a component of a larger data protection strategy that should include using multiple encryption layers working in parallel. Part of an effective data protection and governance strategy includes safeguarding sensitive business information by classifying and protecting content itself. Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) and sensitivity labels are a core part of Microsoft Information Protection, enabling organizations to protect organizational data without interrupting end user productivity. Sensitivity labels help protect content in Microsoft 365 apps across platforms and devices, third-party apps and services, and even common collaboration containers, like Teams and SharePoint. When a sensitivity label is assigned to content, it acts as a stamp enforcing the conditions of the label wherever the content goes. While a document or email can only have a single sensitivity label applied, they can have both a sensitivity label and a retention label applied to support compliance obligations. Sensitivity labels can be configured to apply watermarks to content, encrypt the content restricting access to specific groups, and protect content in site and group containers. As organizations continue to push the boundaries of external collaboration, another great capability sensitivity labels provide is the ability to restrict access for external members in Teams and SharePoint containers. For instance, the finance department may have a team for internal employees only that has a sensitivity label applied restricting guest access to the team.

Sensitivity labels and message encryption are important tools to help protect sensitive business data and are designed to not disrupt the way end users work. Now available in preview, documents encrypted with sensitivity labels fully support co-authoring across devices and platforms, making it easy to collaborate in encrypted documents in real time. For even greater proactive data protection and governance, organizations with a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription can take advantage of automatic labeling with sensitivity labels to automatically assign a label to content that matches specified conditions.

Example of a Highly Confidential sensitivity label applied to an Excel file

Additional considerations for data protection and governance

Microsoft’s encryption in transit and at rest is the service-layer protection needed for most organizations who don’t face key arrangement requirements. Organizations should develop and put in place a content encryption strategy leveraging Microsoft Information Protection to safeguard content. Some additional data protection and governance capabilities customers should consider in their strategy are:

Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo assists customers in meeting data residency requirements by enabling IT admins to provision and store data at rest in the geo location of their choice.
Data loss prevention works across Microsoft 365 workloads to detect sensitive information using deep content analysis, helping organizations meet regulatory and compliance obligations.
Conditional Access and multi-factor authentication (MFA) are access and authorization control capabilities to help keep corporate data secure while enabling end users to work on any device in any location.

Next Steps:

Assess security and compliance obligations with business stakeholders, including both internal and external requirements to form an organizational data protection and governance strategy.
Leverage Compliance Manager for insights and guidance on managing your organization’s compliance with regulations, policies, and standards.
Start protecting and governing data across Microsoft 365 with Message Encryption, sensitivity labels, and data loss prevention (DLP).
Set-up and enable advanced compliance features to help minimize insider risk such as, content retention, eDiscovery, auditing, and communication compliance.

Microsoft Lists workshop – now available on-demand

Mark Kashman — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 21:02:02 GMT

Go further with Microsoft Lists. You know you want to. And now you can – on-demand.

We recently delivered five live workshops across multiple time zones – and we learned a lot. We’ve refined the content based on feedback and tightened up a few additional things – mindful of your time and ease of consumption.

The result: We’ve got a great two-part, on-demand workshop – two videos wrapped in a single page with additional resources. Dig in and learn how you and your team can best utilize Microsoft Lists. We teach you how to use and create views, configure conditional formatting, adjust forms, use rules, and more. Plus, we highlight no-code and low-code solutions leveraging integrated tools from the Power Platform. You’ll also find materials to deliver the Lists workshop to your organization (PowerPoint, speaker notes, demo materials).

Jump into the Microsoft Lists on-demand workshop now! [for ease of copy/pasting and sharing with others: https://aka.ms/MSLists/workshop]

What you’ll find on the Lists workshop page…

Watch the two-part Microsoft Lists workshop on-demand (https://aka.ms/MSLists/workshop).

Microsoft Lists workshop, part 1: “Creating and collaborating”

We’ll start with the basics – clarity on what Lists is and what it isn’t - including addressing numerous frequently asked questions (FAQs). We’ll then focus on a variety of ways to create lists from the new Lists home page and from within Microsoft Teams – inclusive of using new ready-made templates. Lots of demos – lots of insight.

Microsoft Lists workshop, part 2: “Make Lists work for you”

Continuing from part 1, we turn to making lists work for you using filters, views, rules, and formatting. We end with a look at how Lists integrates with the Power Platform to take lists even further with custom forms, flows and reporting. We wrap up with the roadmap to share what’s coming next for Microsoft Lists.

BONUS | Host a Microsoft Lists workshop within your organization

Interested in conducting a Microsoft Lists training within your organization – to kick off a pilot or help ramp up your future list pros? We’ve provided a few helpful, downloadable resources to assist your internal Lists evangelism (commonly delivered in 3-4 hours) – PowerPoint with speaker notes and demo suggestions + content for demo’ing creating a list from Excel.

Jump into the Microsoft Lists on-demand workshop now! (if you haven’t yet already)

We, too, have updated our Lists resource and adoption centers – our core public destinations to learn and consume all things Microsfot Lists (blogs, videos, demos, podcasts, deployment resources, and more). Let us know what you think.

Happy workshopping!

Thank you, Mark Kashman – senior product manager (Microsoft Lists)

P.S. did you jump into the Microsoft Lists on-demand workshop yet? Just checking ;)

Meet the new Microsoft Whiteboard designed for Hybrid Work

Ian Mikutel — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 15:15:03 GMT

We introduced Microsoft Whiteboard with the goal of bringing people together for visual collaboration, working across a range of devices and ecosystems including Microsoft Teams.

Over the past 18 months, while many people were working remotely, we learned that customers needed virtual-first tools to creatively problem solve with others. To help people thrive in a more flexible work environment, we have reimagined the Whiteboard experience to help our customers collaborate, wherever and whenever.

Today we’re excited to announce a completely new Microsoft Whiteboard, the visual collaboration workspace in Microsoft 365, designed for hybrid work.

With the new innovations in Microsoft Whiteboard, we’re providing better hybrid work and collaboration experiences, whether or not you’re physically in the room together. To achieve this, our innovations focus on five key areas: guided collaboration, new content types, new user interface, improved inking experience and expanded Microsoft 365 integration. Let’s look at what’s new in each key area.

Make real-time collaboration easier

Collaboration that just works is core to the new Whiteboard experience, and we’re introducing a number of new features to make this a reality. Collaboration Cursors help you be remote, but feel together, by showing where and what other collaborators are doing on the whiteboard. Get other people’s attention as you share your best ideas with the new Laser Pointer. Reduce distractions while guiding users through ideas with Follow Along. And finally, easily get started with the most common scenarios like problem-solving, planning, and workshops, with our wide array of new Templates. Together, these features improve collaboration, engage all participants, and reduce hybrid work barriers—no matter where you are.

Boost creativity with rich and interactive content

Collaboration powered by rich content is a key part of the new Whiteboard experience. This allows everyone to contribute in the way that best suits their idea, device type, or personal preference. Combine shapes, lines, text and ink to create Collaborative Diagrams. Make connections, annotate, and iterate together across multiple types of content with our new Insert Image and Document capabilities. Organize related thoughts, ideas or solutions in an auto-layout grid with Notes Grid. Provide lightweight, contextual feedback via a range of engaging and fun Reaction Stickers. Collaborate across apps by bringing in Fluid Components like tables or task lists. Yes, you can still use Whiteboard for inking, but all of these new capabilities transform Whiteboard into a rich visual collaboration workspace that lets you and your team be more creative together.

Experience a unified modern look and feel

With the introduction of so many new collaboration features and content types, we’ve created a new user interface to support our ever-growing capabilities. Our new Fluent Toolbar adds a modern visual refresh to our expanded set of visual collaboration tools. The new Creation Gallery provides a highly discoverable, intuitive and responsive layout across devices as large as a Surface Hub and as small as a phone. See who is on the board and collaborating with you at all times in the new Top Bar. The new Whiteboard provides a Single Unified User Experience across all devices, operating systems, and platforms. Ultimately, the new Whiteboard user interface emphasizes what matters most—people and content—so you can do your best work.

Experience a unified modern look & feel in the new Microsoft Whiteboard

Maximize creativity with ink for everyone

Digital ink is an important part of whiteboarding, whether used to express your own ideas or to comment and annotate on others’ ideas. The new Whiteboard is empowering everyone, no matter if you have a pen or not, to leverage the unique visual expression capabilities that ink can offer. Improved Mouse Inking smoothes ink, making it easier than ever for those with a mouse or trackpad to visually communicate ideas that are hard to write in words. Pen Support for Whiteboard in Teams allows you to ink automatically or get the unique benefits of using a pen, such as the tail eraser. Quickly draw shapes and watch them automatically straighten with Shape Recognition. Spark the imagination and creativity of your team with Rainbow & Galaxy Ink.

Integrate seamlessly across Microsoft 365

The new Whiteboard is now integrated into even more areas across Microsoft 365 to more seamlessly fit into your existing workflows. Whiteboard is now available in Teams Channels & Chats. The new Share Content experience in Teams Meetings allows you to easily start a collaborative whiteboard for everyone in the meeting with just one click. Pre-prep or reuse whiteboards across multiple Teams Meetings with the new Open Existing Board functionality. Search and discover whiteboards on Office.com and SharePoint, and leverage the rich content management features of OneDrive for Business.

The new Microsoft Whiteboard is integrated seamlessly across Microsoft 365 such as Teams, Office.com, OneDrive and SharePoint.

We hear from customers every day that while the future of work may be evolving, one thing remains clear—it's never been more important for people to be able to collaborate effectively wherever and whenever. We’ve created the completely new, hybrid work focused Whiteboard experience to meet this need, so both remote and in-person attendees can visually collaborate across the same digital canvas. To get started, try the new Whiteboard today. Note: All features in the new Whiteboard are rolling out throughout this summer as they are generally available.

To learn more, visit the Whiteboard product page or read the FAQ.

Diagnostics for Social Good

Sam Larson — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 23:10:32 GMT

As IT Administrators, we all face daily challenges solving problems for our constituents. As we have seen over the last year, the world can use our help. In our small corner of the world, we would like to do our part to give back. When we, as IT Admins, use self-help resources to fix issues without opening support cases, we enable Microsoft to repurpose a portion of these savings towards social good. 

Therefore, we invite you to join us in our effort to give back to communities in need! The Diagnostics for Social Good campaign is designed to help solve your technical issues while at the same time helping support global communities.  

How it Works 

IT admins run customer diagnostics in the Microsoft 365 admin center to resolve issues without logging a support request and Microsoft will donate to global non-profits that support COVID-19 relief efforts in India as well as vaccination supplies across the world. (Read more about the Microsoft 365 admin center here.) Learn more about covered scenarios and how to run the diagnostics below: 

SharePoint and OneDrive: Self-help diagnostics for SharePoint Online and OneDrive  
Microsoft Teams: Self-help diagnostics for Microsoft Teams administrators 
Exchange: Self-help diagnostics for issues in Exchange Online and Outlook

Why we are focused on Diagnostics for Social Good 

We all have an opportunity to change the world. In the technology industry, we are privileged to be able to have a broad impact on millions of people. We know what’s possible and we know that we can contribute to help.  As we introduce our new Diagnostics for Social Good initiative, we want to recognize the opportunity we all have to support others. As we move forward, we are looking for feedback and areas where we can help IT admins keep their technology environment healthy while giving back. 

Microsoft has demonstrated a passion for giving to address critical issues facing local communities and abroad. Giving has become part of our culture, and one way we live our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

Our business practices and policies reflect our commitment to making a positive impact around the globe, and we work continuously to apply the power of technology to earn and sustain the trust of our customers and partners, and the communities in which we live and work.  

Introducing Microsoft Dictation for iOS

Dan Parish — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Dictation just got better

We're constantly on the go, and there never seems to be enough time in the day. Fortunately, we don't need our computers to stay on top of things—our mobile devices get the job done! We're pleased to announce that Dictation for Outlook is now available for iPhone and iPad devices, making it even easier to be productive throughout the day.

With the Dictation feature, you can use speech-to-text to author content in Office with a microphone and a reliable internet connection. Using your voice is faster than typing and simplifies work on-the-go. It also helps capture the right tone by allowing the natural flow of your voice to be articulated on your device quickly and effortlessly!

Today, we’re excited to announce Dictation is now available on iOS

Microsoft 365 users can now take advantage of the same dictation functionality previously available exclusively on desktop and Word with Office Mobile. Now, you can use your voice in Outlook to respond to email or write new email messages, or in Word to draft documents on your iPhone or iPad. Coming soon to Android. Dictation lets you use speech-to-text and simple voice commands to author content in Office with the simple click of a microphone. Outlook also leverages Microsoft Graph to recognize the names of your colleagues so you can add that personal touch.

Take a look at what we announced today.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Windows: You can pause and resume dictation using Alt+` (same as the ~ key)
Mac: You can pause and resume dictation using ⌥ (Option) + F1

Settings

Auto Punctuation - Not sure where to place the comma? Let the app edit as you speak.
Profanity Filter - By default, dictation masks some words that could be considered profane with ****. This is to ensure that any errors in speech recognition don’t incorrectly attribute potentially sensitive phrases to a speaker. You can disable this feature by unchecking the setting.
Voice Commands - You can now say phrases like “new paragraph”, “delete that”, “bold last sentence” and more to take action between dictating text.
In-App Help - Quickly see all the punctuation, symbols, and voice commands you can say by clicking on the question mark icon in the new dictation toolbar.
Expanded Locale Support - We've added Dictation support for seven new locales: Hindi, Thai, Chinese (Taiwan), Korean, Polish, Russian, and Portuguese (Portugal).
Additional language support is planned in the future.
Outlook mobile is currently only for EN-US.

Updates in Dictation for Office for the web

Office also features dictation capabilities in Microsoft Word online at Office.com:

New tooltips - Hints will appear during dictation to help you learn useful voice commands.
Microphone help - Easily check which microphone is being used and if it can hear you.

Ready to get started? Check out these resources for more information:

Maximize results with collaborative work management in Microsoft 365

Andrea_Lum — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 16:24:48 GMT

People today aren’t working so much as they are managing work. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’re experiencing it firsthand. “Burnout” often describes what’s happening. Countless studies over the past year have found employee burnout became “rampant, seemingly overnight” in 2020. With work shifted to a remote or hybrid model, there is more information to process than ever, and digital overload is real.

Despite burnout, or the reason for it, 69% of respondents in a recent study said they’re not using a formal work management tool. Let’s face it: work management happens wherever and whenever it’s most convenient. We sock away emails in a “Follow-Up” folder, save shared files on our desktop, and manage tasks on sticky notes, spreadsheets, across multiple mobile apps—all for the same project! When it comes time to make sense of it all, it sometimes doesn’t make sense.

So, we’re stuck managing work instead of working. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the face of a tectonic shift in information, collaborative work management (CWM) with Microsoft 365 helps you save time and maximize results. CWM is a concentrated effort to streamline work management through a set of purpose-built apps. These apps add structure to all the unseen parts of business productivity: tasks, status updates, files, and the like. With a more efficient approach to the process of work, your team gets more time to collaborate on the work itself.

The apps that comprise the Microsoft CWM offering are Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do, Tasks in Teams, and Microsoft Lists, which are for managing work; and, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Office, which are for collaborating on that work—all of which are brought together by Microsoft Teams, the central hub for CWM. All these apps are already included in your Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions [1], so you don’t have to worry about adding anything to get started.

Collaborative work management apps diagram

We know that a collection of apps won’t solve burnout on their own. That’s why the bulk of this blog is focused how you can use them together to address three distinct areas: organizing your work, tracking your information, and collaborating with your team. It’s also why we have created this pamphlet, which highlights CWM tips and use cases.

Organize your work: manage work more effectively

The trick to successful collaborative work management is organization. You can’t effectively run, say, this season’s store rebranding if you can’t locate the branding requirements. With all the chaos around work these days, it can be hard to keep track of tasks, important documents, information, and people if they all exist in siloes. Keeping all your work in the right place and making it easy to share is where the CWM story starts—and that story starts in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams is your hub for collaborative work. It’s where you can spin up a dedicated channel for each work effort and add all the apps you’re using as integrated channel tabs. In addition to consolidating individual and team tasks, your channels provide shared locations for your team’s files. These can live either in the channel itself as uploaded files, or as an attachment in one of the work management apps. In fact, you can add attachments, labels, and comments directly to a list item or task, so your team is looking at all relevant information for whatever they’re working on.

You can see why we call Teams the CWM “hub”: it connects all the “spokes” of your work in one place, making it efficient for your teams to get exactly what they need when they need it. Each of the apps make it easy to group, sort, and filter information. And if you still can’t find that one small, necessary detail, like an email attachment in Outlook or a specific information item in Lists, unified search across Microsoft 365 has you covered.

Getting your work organized is like keeping a tidy house: it’s easier to maintain the clean, than cleaning a dirty house. The same is true for your work: if your tasks, files, and other information are all over the place, it’s a chore to get them organized. Once they are organized, managing them is second nature.

The Recruitment Tracker template from Microsoft Lists as a tab in Microsoft Teams

Track your work: stay on top of action items

Tasks can originate from anywhere. And when they come from anywhere, they can end up anywhere: a notepad, a Word doc, the back of your hand. The goal of CWM is to bring your tasks and information into the proper place, along with the right prompts and notifications to help you prioritize and stay on top of things. The enabling apps for tracking your work are Planner, To Do, Tasks in Teams, and Lists. Let’s take a moment and highlight each app’s core intent:

Planner is for team tasks. With a shared plan, you can monitor tasks across your team and assign different tasks to the right people. Use it to manage task-based teamwork, like planning a corporate event with HR or launching a new campaign with your sales team.
To Do is for individual tasks—those you’re personally responsible for. These can be tasks that only affect you, like completing an online seminar, or tasks assigned to you as part of a team. In fact, To Do integrates with Planner, so you can view assigned tasks alongside your other individual to-dos.
The Tasks app in Teams is for both: it brings your shared team tasks from Planner and individual tasks from To Do into a single place in Teams. If you want just one app for every task, the Tasks app is it.
Lists is for tracking ongoing initiatives with lots of information items. These can include tracking work progress, maintaining an onboarding list for new employees, or managing assets. Lists can be used individually or shared with your team, so everyone is up to date with the latest details. Lists can be customized and extended to support your business processes.

These apps keep you and your team on top of your workstreams by providing structure. You can even enable notifications to avoid missing upcoming deadlines—no matter where you manage that task. Once everything is prioritized, managing your responsibilities gets easier.

The Tasks app in Microsoft Teams on desktop (left) and mobile (right).

Work management in action

Let’s consider a quick example of how you can use all the Microsoft 365 work management apps together to take control of your workday. Assume you’re in HR and are leading a regional college recruitment campaign with a couple colleagues. You kick off the campaign in Planner, creating a new plan called “Southeast Recruitment” and assigning some tasks to your team, like “Send out recruitment day sign-ups” and “Book rooms for interviews.”

As the campaign grows, so does the plan—and it now includes lots of tasks assigned to you. That’s when you start using the Tasks app in Teams. Not only does the app give you a view of the overall recruiting effort; it also lists all your personal work tasks from To Do.

The Southeast Recruitment campaign is wildly successful (of course—you ran it), and the company is receiving a ton of job applications as a result. Enter Lists. You create a list to track recruitment progress and organize information for each applicant. Every student has their own line item in the list, where you can update their status in the application process, attach their resume, assign interviewees to different colleagues, and more.

CWM guided simulation and Day in the Life guides

Looking for more CWM scenario resources? Check out the Collaborative Work Management guided demo (left) and Microsoft Day in the Life guides (right).

The take-away

You will notice a few things about that short scenario. First, the entire recruitment campaign—and the subsequent ongoing effort—is managed in an app designed for that kind of work. Tasks for the team get assigned from Planner, not a chat message. Your own tasks are in To Do, not on a sticky note. And the continuous stream of applicants is managed in Lists, not a spreadsheet.

Second, each app is inherently collaborative. Unlike sticky notes or a local spreadsheet, the work management apps in Microsoft 365 sit in a shared location. Everyone on your team has visibility into Planner, Tasks in Teams, and Lists.

Third, and most importantly, CWM sets you up for actual work. You know everything that’s required of you because it’s in one place, with all the relevant resources you need—attachments, comments from others, due dates, etc. You don’t need to sift through emails or local folders to find your assignments. You just saved a ton of time and headache—now you’re ready to get work done.

Work with your team: share and collaborate with others

Quality teamwork starts with efficient collaboration to chat, meet, iterate, edit, and the like. Because of this, it’s critical that you and your colleagues can work together on your deliverables in real time. Enter OneDrive and SharePoint, which power the secure file sharing across Microsoft 365. That means no matter where you’re working—in Teams, an Office doc, or a List —you can securely share a file without switching apps. You can even set access permissions as you’re sharing the file, so you can help ensure only the right people are working in your files.

The files you share are secure and collaborative - and Teams makes it all easy. Open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from right within Teams, and work with team chat side-by-side directly in that document. Plus, comments and @mentions give everyone necessary context and keep them on the same page. Every @mention prompts an email notification too, so no one misses important in-doc asks.

Coauthoring a Microsoft Word document in Microsoft Teams

Just like organizing all your work assets in one place and managing your tasks in one place, CWM keeps all your collaboration in one place, too. You don’t need to send a link to an Excel spreadsheet in an email so your peers can edit —you can do that directly in Teams alongside all your other work management activities.

Getting started with CWM

There’s no need to buy an additional plan or app to get started with CWM. You already have everything you need as part of your Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions [2]. Try planning your next team campaign in Planner, replacing your notepad with To Do, or tracking a simple batch of information with Lists. Here are the direct web links for each of those, as well as instructions for adding the Tasks app to Teams.

Planner: tasks.office.com
To Do: todo.microsoft.com
Tasks app: select the ellipses (…) on the left-hand side of your Microsoft Teams dashboard, search for “Tasks” (or “Planner” or “To Do”) and select to add the app
Lists: aka.ms/listsweb

And don’t forget to download the pamphlet! We’ll be compiling more CWM resources throughout the year to keep you organized, on track, and back to work.

[1]Not included in Microsoft 365 Apps plans

[2] Not included in Microsoft 365 Apps plans

Choose the right Microsoft tool for managing your work

Shin-Yi — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 19:17:20 GMT

The launch of Microsoft Lists and Tasks in Microsoft Teams last year added new options to an already robust catalog of Microsoft work management tools. They seemed to overlap with Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project, causing a lot of (understandable) confusion and questions, all of which boiled down to, “Which tool should I use?”

Today, we’re answering that question with three aptly named when-to-use guides. These one-page documents, which are linked below, focus on different work management scenarios and the Microsoft tools that enable them:

Tracking tasks and information for individuals: To Do, Planner, and Lists
Tracking tasks and information for teams: Planner, Lists, and Project for the web
Managing tasks in general: To Do, Planner, and the Tasks app in Teams

The goal of these guides is to help you determine the best tool for managing your work and its associated tasks and information; they are not meant as comprehensive fact sheets. Those details are available on the associated support pages, which are linked in the guides. Instead, the when-to-use guides focus on the best use for each tool and its distinguishing features. All in all, the guides are broken up into four main sections:

General tool description
How should I use it? Overall purpose of the tool
What’s it best for? Scenarios where the tool excels
How’s it different? Features that distinguish the tool from others

There’s also a pair of sections about where each tool is available (How do I get them?) and how you can find more information (Where can I learn more?).

It’s important to note that the four main sections describe each tool in the context of the others. For example, you’ll see Planner is for “visually managing simple, task-based efforts” in the guide focused on team-based work. Both Lists and Project for the web can support simple, task-based efforts too—but compared to Planner, it’s not where they excel. Lists is for tracking information and Project for the web is for managing more complex work initiatives—scenarios where Planner is not the best fit.

This approach is worth remembering as you’re reading through these guides. If you find a tool is missing a feature or obvious use case, it’s because there’s another one that’s better suited for that scenario. Again, our goal is to help you decide which tool is best for managing your work, not providing a comprehensive run-down of those tools.

The when-to-use guides are part of our ongoing journey/effort for task management. Work is more disorienting than ever these days, but Microsoft 365 helps streamline all the competing to-dos, resources, and collaboration requirements. For all the latest task management in Microsoft 365 news , continue visiting our Planner Tech Community.

Organize and Track Frontline Work with Microsoft Lists

Andrea_Lum — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 15:00:00 GMT

The frontline of any industry is fast-paced and always changing, so we know that keeping frontline workers connected to the business is crucial. With platforms like Microsoft Teams, frontline workers can communicate, assign tasks, and schedule shifts whether on a factory floor or in retail store, all in one app. But what about tracking business processes and organizing work? Many organizations are still relying on paper and clipboards or a messy spreadsheet to track routine processes. As organizations continue to digitally transform their frontline workforce, we wanted to share how to make the daily flow of information more mobile and trackable.

Factory employees using a Surface tablet

Enter Microsoft Lists: your smart information tracking app, part of the Microsoft 365 suite. Microsoft Lists is a simple, smart, and flexible way to track information and routines – and it’s integrated right in Microsoft Teams so you have everything in one place. Lists works just like you’d expect any list app to work, with extensible features to customize and format your information as you see fit. Quickly create a list from scratch, a pre-made template, or an existing Excel spreadsheet, and populate rows and columns with details. Add milestone dates and progress columns, assign people to individual list items, and attach relevant files. Color formatting and automated notifications are also built-in, so nothing goes overlooked. Lists is optimized for mobile use, so you can access and update your list on-the-go from any device. We are also adding support for custom list templates, available soon, so you can customize a List template for your own organization.

Lists home screen and sample list on tablet

Lists is already included in your Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, so you can start tracking right away. Let’s dive into some more Lists features and use cases for frontline scenarios.

Organize and track information

With how complex teams and business are today, it can be easy for information to get lost in the weeds. Luckily, Lists provides a single source of truth for your team by organizing information in a shared location: your Microsoft Teams channel. Rather than keeping a binder of contacts or asset information and passing it around, anyone on the team can open a Lists tab in their Teams channel instantly from a phone or tablet, updated in real time. Relevant content is right at the source with links and attachments in each line item, and ownership is shared across team members so no information exists in a silo.

Scenarios where Lists help organize information:

Keep a list of contacts for your store so you can quickly check inventory at other store locations
Maintain a supplier list for your factory to keep track of who supplies what and relevant contact information
Track inventory levels and format the list to notify the team when levels are low
Manage assets by keeping a list of repair history, checkouts, and status
Track customer reviews by connecting a customer survey form to send results directly into a list

Inventory tracking list on tablet and list home screen on mobile

Manage ongoing efforts and processes

What happens when you have a more extensive business process that’s more than just tasks? You can use Lists to keep an ongoing process in one central place with records of the project, what needs to be done, who’s doing it, and relevant notes, files, and attachments. With the fast-paced environment of manufacturing, retail, and the like, automations and quick filters mean less time managing work and more time getting things done.

You can use Lists to manage a variety of processes, including:

Managing an equipment repair or installation project with milestone dates, owners, and status
Tracking employee onboarding or recruiting including status tracking, resume/CV attachments, adding interviewers, and candidate notes
Maintaining a routine list like store closing procedures
Checklist for factory clean-up or inspection

Factory manager and Store Associate Lists day in the life guides

For more on Lists scenarios for frontline organizations, check out the Lists Day in the Life – Manufacturing and Lists Day in the Life – Retail guides, or watch the Manufacturing day in the life with Microsoft Teams video to see how Lists fits in with the broader Teams picture.

Learn more about Microsoft Lists at the Microsoft Lists Resource Center including demos, adoption resources, training material, and more.

Happy tracking!

Andrea Lum, Product Manager - Microsoft

What's new for admins in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise - April and May 2021

Microsoft_365_Team — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 23:54:35 GMT

In this month’s edition of the What’s New blog, we’re excited to share news regarding the availability of Microsoft Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), OneDrive Admin Sync Reports (ADR), and updated Configuration Manager ADRs. We also point you to the latest admin-focused Microsoft Docs articles for Microsoft 365, as well as Amesh Mansukhani’s appearance on two new videos on the Office Deployment Insider’s YouTube channel and an interview on the Practical 365 Podcast!

Faster at-a-glance views with OneDrive Sync Admin Reports

In April, we announced the public preview for OneDrive Sync Admin Reports. Available in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, these reports give you an at-a-glance view of everything happening with OneDrive Sync across the organization, including visibility into who is running the OneDrive Sync client and any errors they might be experiencing. Insights like these can help you proactively reach out to educate people and resolve common issues quickly to improve user experience and increase OneDrive adoption.

Easier targeting for Microsoft 365 Apps updates with updated Configuration Manager ADRs

Coming in June, we’re releasing an update to Automatic Deployment Rules (ADR) for Microsoft 365 Apps in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager that adds release type to the Title property in the update catalog. You will be able to use the Title property within the search criteria of your ADR definition to easily target the necessary updates for your environment. In addition, you’ll no longer need to continually update your search criteria with each new release. The version number and architecture values will also trade places.

Amesh Mansukhani talks about the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center on Practical 365 Podcast

At the end of April, Amesh Mansukhani, Office Deployment Insiders lead at Microsoft, joined the Practical 365 Podcast to talk about the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center. Listen to hear Amesh talk about the importance of keeping your Microsoft 365 Apps up to date and how you can benefit from using the Admin Center to help ensure your users and devices are getting access to the latest updates and to gain better visibility and control over application health. You can watch the video podcast on the Practical 365's YouTube channel or listen to the audio-only version to learn more.

We're excited to bring you two brand new videos on the Office Deployment Insiders YouTube Channel!

Get the most out of Microsoft OneDrive with brand new insight capabilities into your overall OneDrive deployment. Explore these new features with Amesh as he dives into fresh ways to analyze OneDrive client reports, sync issues, known folders to leverage KFM's, and much more.

Introducing Microsoft 365 Apps Inventory, the Apps Inventory service recently added to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center. Join Amesh as he shows how Inventory can help you gain deep insights and a real-time view of Office apps in your organization.

Commercial Preview of Microsoft Office LTSC

Recently, we announced the Commercial Preview of Microsoft Office LTSC, which is built specifically for organizations running regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for long periods, devices that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems that must stay locked in time and require a long-term servicing channel.

Catching up: New Microsoft Docs articles for April

You can catch up on some of the latest Microsoft 365 Apps best practices from the field in these articles:

Network guidance for deploying and servicing Microsoft 365 Apps - This article covers topics such as available options for managing Microsoft 365 apps for remote workers or employees in the office, split tunneling for workforces that frequently connect using VPN, deploying Microsoft 365 Apps using Intune, using Servicing Profiles to manage monthly app updates, and optimizing your network via Configuration Manager. You can also read further guidance on deploying Microsoft 365 Apps.

Build dynamic collections for Microsoft 365 Apps with Configuration Manager - This article shares best practices for using Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager's dynamic collections to simplify management. This month we added a new best practice for setting up a collection that captures all devices running outdated builds, so you can quickly identify devices that lack updates or must be updated to a certain minimum build.

Visualize and contextualize people and teams with a new organization browser in Outlook

Bill Baer — Tue, 25 May 2021 16:08:39 GMT

It’s the places and faces we remember and today we’re making it easier than ever to visualize and contextualize people and teams across your company with a new addition to Outlook.

This new application available to Office Insiders allows you to find, discover, and explore people and relationships through a delightful organizational browser experience.

Org Explorer screenshot

What’s Next

We’ll continue to evolve this experience over the next few months with some exciting new changes and features.

Availability

We typically release features over some time to ensure that things are working smoothly. This is true for Insiders as well. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Similarly, sometimes we remove elements to improve them. Though rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product.

Sign up for the Office Insider newsletter and get the latest information about Insider features in your inbox once a month.

Introducing Dark Mode in Microsoft Office for Android

sourabnagpal — Thu, 20 May 2021 16:00:00 GMT

You asked, we listened! Dark Mode is now rolling out in the Office app for Android phones. It’s been a highly requested feature by many of our customers, and we’re proud to begin releasing it today. Many people prefer using Dark Mode as they find it provides a more comfortable visual experience for reading and working on mobile devices.

The Office app helps you get work done on a mobile device by combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app and adding many rich capabilities for creating and working with PDFs, images, scanning, capturing notes, and much more. Now you can do all this using a theme of your choice — based on the time of day, your surroundings, or your device settings. Dark Mode ensures that you can adjust the Office app to low-light environments, while providing you with better viewing options and keeping battery consumption low.

How to enable Dark Mode

The newest version of the Office app for Android will automatically adjust to Dark Mode if your device is already set to that preference. You can also turn Dark Mode on or off by tapping your profile icon on the Home tab in the Office app, selecting Settings, and then selecting Light, Dark, or System Default from the Theme options.

Download the Microsoft Office Mobile App today and always keep it up-to-date to ensure you have the latest features and improvements. The feature will be rolling out to users worldwide over the next few weeks, so if you do not see it in your app yet, you can expect to receive an update in the near future that will have it.

Please share your feedback with us about Dark Mode right from the app by tapping your profile icon on the Home tab, and then select, “Send Feedback.” For more information about Dark Mode investments across Microsoft apps, check out this “Designing Dark Mode” article on Medium.

Microsoft 365 Apps: Enhancement for Configuration Manager ADRs

BobClements — Wed, 19 May 2021 17:24:21 GMT

Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise offers three production update channels for you to choose from: Current Channel, Monthly Enterprise Channel and Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel. The channel(s) you choose to support in your environment will determine the update frequency, features, and support duration between versions. There are a number of ways for you to manage these updates, including our latest addition: Servicing Profiles.

Today, we are pleased to announce an update for Microsoft 365 Apps that will improve update manageability in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager. Up until now the use of Automatic Deployment Rules (ADR) with Microsoft 365 Apps has been a challenge to manage, depending on the update channel(s) you support. Starting in late June, all future updates for Microsoft 365 Apps, including 2019 and 2021 volume license products, will receive an updated naming convention via the Title property. With this change you will be able to utilize the Title property within the search criteria of your ADR definition to easily target the necessary updates for your environment. This improvement should eliminate the need for IT admins to continually update their search criteria with each new release.

Overview

The updated Title property in the update catalog for Microsoft 365 Apps will include the following changes:

The release type will be included in the title, enabling you to easily specify which update you want to select without needing to include the specific version.
The Version number and architecture values have traded places.

Adding release type to the Title property should help simplify update management with your ADRs. If we look at the update history for Microsoft 365 Apps, there are three different release types:

Feature Update. This is the first release of the most recent fork. Feature updates will include new features, along with security and non-security updates.
Quality Update. These are subsequent releases of the most recent fork. Quality updates will include security and non-security updates.
Extended Quality Update. These are subsequent releases of the previous fork. Extended quality updates will include security and non-security updates.

A closer look at the upcoming changes

Refer to the following list of updates to illustrate what the upcoming changes look like on release:

Note that this list of updates is for demonstration purposes only and that the announced changes will apply starting in late June.

Before - Channel Name, Release Version, Architecture, Build.Version

Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Current Channel Version 2104 for x64 based Edition (Build 13929.20386)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Current Channel Version 2104 for x64 based Edition (Build 13929.20372)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Monthly Enterprise Channel Version 2103 for x64 based Edition (Build 13901.20516)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Monthly Enterprise Channel Version 2102 for x64 based Edition (Build 13801.20638)

Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Version 2008 for x64 based Edition (Build 13127.21064)

Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Version 2008 for x64 based Edition (Build 13127.21624)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Version 2002 for x64 based Edition (Build 12527.21912)

After - Channel Name, Release Type, Architecture, Release Version, Build.Version

Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Current Channel Feature Update for x64 based Edition Version 2104 (Build 13929.20386)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Current Channel Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 2104 (Build 13929.20372)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Monthly Enterprise Channel Feature Update for x64 based Edition Version 2103 (Build 13901.20516)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Monthly Enterprise Channel Extended Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 2102 (Build 13801.20638)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Feature Update for x64 based Edition Version 2008 (Build 13127.21064)

Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 2008 (Build 13127.21624)
Microsoft 365 Apps Update - Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Extended Quality Update for x64 based Edition Version 2002 (Build 12527.21912)

Updating your Automatic Deployment Rules

With Configuration Manager, one of the best ways to automate update management for Microsoft 365 Apps is through the use of Automatic Deployment Rules (ADR). This feature helps reduce administrative overhead by automatically selecting, downloading and deploying updates based on the criteria you define. If you have implemented Monthly Enterprise Channel or Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel for Microsoft 365 Apps, an ADR can be challenging to manage due to the fact that both channels have a minimum of 2 versions available at any given time.

The following examples will illustrate how to use the updated Title property to simplify your ADR rules.

ADR search criteria for Monthly Enterprise Channel

Monthly Enterprise Channel offers 2 releases: current and extended. You can leverage the release type value to select your desired update version. The screenshot below illustrates a set of search criteria that can be used to identify the current updates for Monthly Enterprise Channel by excluding the extended tag. If you require extended updates for this channel use the following value in the Title property: Monthly Enterprise Channel Extended.

The results from this search criteria will include the x86 and x64 non-extended updates for Monthly Enterprise Channel.

ADR search criteria for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel

Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel offers 4 releases: preview, current and extended. You can leverage the release type value to select your desired update version. The screenshot below illustrates a set of search criteria that can be used to identify the current updates for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel by excluding the preview and extended tags.

The results from this search criteria will include the x86 and x64 non-extended updates for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel, along with monthly quality updates.

Note: If you are on the current version of Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel and can maintain feature updates every 6 months, the search criteria outlined above will ensure devices update to the next version automatically without the need to update your ADR.

If you are on an extended version of Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel and need to remain on the extended release, you will need to update your ADR search criteria between the months of January-February and July-August as the updates reach end of life.

To select an alternate release type for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel, update the Title property search criteria with a value from the following table:

Release	ADR Search Criteria - Title Property
Preview	Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel (Preview)
Quality	Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Quality
Extended	Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Extended

Additional Resources

For more information on the different update channels available for Microsoft 365 Apps, refer to the following articles:

Change Log

05.14.2021 Initial Release

05.19.2021 Updated before/after examples for SAEC. There is only 1 "Feature Update" every 6 months.

This blog post is brought to you by Bob Clements, a Senior Customer Engineer and “Office Ranger” at Microsoft. Feel free to share your questions and feedback in the comments below.

Microsoft 365 admin center network connectivity is now generally available

Paul Andrew — Tue, 18 May 2021 00:24:09 GMT

We frequently hear from customers that they are concerned whether their users are getting the best possible performance and experience with Microsoft 365, which is often determined by the quality of connectivity that their users have and how Microsoft 365 connections are handled by the networks and network solutions between the client and Microsoft. Customers ask how they can measure and see the quality of network connectivity for their Microsoft 365 users and get insights how to optimize it further. That’s why we are excited to announce the General Availability of Microsoft 365 Admin Center Connectivity and the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool!

Using existing network connectivity tests in Microsoft 365 can provide network assessments and insights. They are aggregated to represent the network connectivity of a work location in use by an Microsoft 365 customer. This can be very valuable in identifying potential network connectivity improvements that would improve performance and provide a better user experience for Microsoft 365 users.

Microsoft 365 admin center network connectivity

Overview tab for Microsoft 365 admin center network connectivity

After configuration, the page for network connectivity in the Microsoft 365 admin center shows office locations where network connectivity is evaluated. Each location shows relative number of users connecting from the office and indicates the impact to user experience from network connectivity at that location. We show you a map of global performance, tenant-wide network assessment scores and location-specific network assessment scores for offices and remote workers in a city. You can view the network insights for each location to take action or research further. You can also drill down to each location for the detailed list of network connectivity tests and insights.

Summary of an office location in Microsoft 365 admin center network connectivity

Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool

Summary result for Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool

The Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool allows for similar network tests to be run on demand and results to be viewed immediately. It The connectivity test tool allows users at remote locations to run networking tests in their web browser and the downloadable executable. It identifies common network design issues that violate Microsoft 365 network connectivity principles. The tool can be run anonymously or by signing in to a Microsoft 365 account to share results your administrator and other stakeholders.

Details results tab for Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool

Actionable network insights supporting improved user experience

Microsoft describes guidance for securely optimizing Microsoft 365 network connectivity in Microsoft 365 network connectivity principles. The goal of the two tools is to help test for how closely that guidance is followed and provide recommendations for getting better performance and user experience.

Insight: Backhauled network egress – this is shown for a location when the users are more than 500 miles away from the network egress. It is recommended that users have local network egress so that connections can be made to the closest Microsoft network point of presence.

Insight: Network intermediary device – this is shown for a location when the users are connecting to Microsoft 365 through a proxy server or similar packet interception device. It is recommended that these be bypassed for critical Microsoft 365 network connections.

Insight: Better performance detected for customers near you – this is shown for a location where a number of other Microsoft 365 customers in the same geographic area have significantly better performance. More investigation would be required, but this indicates that the local telecommunications infrastructure is capable of providing a better Microsoft 365 user experience than your users are getting.

Insight: Low download speed from SharePoint front door – this indicates that the download speed for OneDrive for Business or SharePoint users is very poor in this location. Further investigation may be required to identify the cause, but often bandwidth can be increased to improve user experience.

Other network insights can be found in Microsoft 365 Network Insights.

Finally, it’s worth noting that all these tests and insights are generated in strict compliance with Microsoft security and privacy practices. Security and privacy sensitive customers will appreciate that those tests do not collect user or device identifiable information and thus can’t be attributed back to a specific person.

To learn more about Microsoft 365 admin center network connectivity, click here.

To learn more about the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool, click here.

Behind the scenes on Microsoft Viva with Microsoft Mechanics

Seth Patton — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 18:21:58 GMT

By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience

As work evolves rapidly into hybrid work, we need to do more to empower people to feel connected and bring their best self to work. Microsoft Viva, which we announced in February, brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated employee experience through the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day. Your response to Viva, the first employee experience platform (EXP) built for the digital era, has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re just getting started on this journey and excited to help you learn more about Viva through a new Microsoft Mechanics series.

Watch our Microsoft Mechanics host, Jeremy Chapman (), introduce Microsoft Viva and explain the underlying technology and core options for enabling and configuring the platform. In upcoming videos from this series, Jeremy will be joined by our Viva engineering leaders to take deep dives into each of the Viva modules as well as how to set up and manage the experiences for your organization.

Here are the highlights from this first overview show in the series.

Microsoft Viva modules. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, Viva is experienced through Microsoft Teams and the other Microsoft 365 apps you use every day. For now, Microsoft Viva includes four modules—Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics—with more on the way.

Viva Topics uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise, making it easy to discover information and put knowledge to work.
Viva Connections is a gateway for your digital workplace. It provides a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.
Viva Learning centralizes your learning resources in Teams to help you quickly discover and share learning content across your organization.
Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights to improve productivity and wellbeing.

Differentiated experiences. Microsoft Viva relies on information from groups in Azure Active Directory—like roles, departments, and geographies—to give you a tailored experience, from targeted information in Viva Connections to curated learning courses in Viva Learning. If you’re a Microsoft 365 admin, you can customize those experiences further using granular but intuitive controls, like segmenting Viva Insights details for different roles or assigning knowledge managers in Viva Topics to ensure knowledge topics are accurate and appropriate.

Privacy and security. As you would expect, privacy and security are built into all Microsoft Viva experiences. Any information protection and compliance controls you have configured in Microsoft 365 are respected when you access content. Viva protects employee privacy and fully complies with local regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For example, personal insights in Viva Insights are visible only to the individual, while insights for managers and leaders have built-in aggregation, de-identification, and differential privacy to protect individual privacy.

Platform extensibility. Designed to be an open and extensible platform with a strong and growing ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Viva is easy to integrate with the systems and tools your company already has in place. Integrations with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and third-party products and services can deliver a complete employee experience in the flow of your everyday work. For example, you can build custom web parts for your home site and topic pages using the SharePoint Framework and you can use adaptive cards for your Viva Connections dashboard to expose specific content and target the right employees with the right resources.

If you’ve read through this blog without watching the video, scroll to the top and check it out. The video has more details about each of the sections in this post. This is Part One of our Microsoft Mechanics video series about Microsoft Viva. Keep visiting this site or aka.ms/VivaMechanics for the rest of the series, where we’ll go in-depth on each of the Viva modules. If you’d like more information on Viva in the meantime, head over to aka.ms/Viva.

As always, we want to hear from you! If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments, please visit us on our Microsoft Viva Tech Community page. We will also be hosting our first Microsoft Viva Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) event on June 23, 2021. Join us then to post your questions about Microsoft Viva, where members of the Viva team will be available to respond.

Learn more:

Documentation for Viva Topics
Documentation for Viva Connections
Documentation for Viva Insights (personal insights, manager insights, and leader insights)
Documentation for Viva Learning (coming soon)

New ways to use Microsoft Whiteboard for Education

Ian Mikutel — Wed, 05 May 2021 23:02:18 GMT

Today, on the Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 product announcement blogs, we announced a number of new features that are coming to Microsoft Whiteboard this summer, specifically for our education users. If you are an educator looking to keep your students more engaged, or if you haven't checked out Whiteboard in a while, keep reading!

Microsoft Whiteboard is a visually rich and interactive education tool that supports creative teaching and learning. With its infinite canvas and focus on teamwork, Whiteboard provides a place for teachers and students to develop ideas together in an ad hoc or in a formulated way, whether the class is taught remotely, in hybrid mode, or in person.

Create Visually Engaging Class Material

We understand that one of the hardest things for an educator to do, is to keep a student's attention throughout the class. Microsoft Whiteboard gives you tools to create beautifully engaging content for your class. Coming this summer to our Whiteboard web client and Whiteboard in Teams app, you'll be able to pull in images, content from other documents, shapes, and stickers to add fun and life to your lessons. You can save time by creating the boards ahead of class and then simply opening the previously created whiteboard during class to get going.

Focused, Dynamic Lessons

Microsoft Whiteboard can help your class get focused on the right things. Right now, educators have full control over who can edit the whiteboard and when. Annotate over your lesson with digital ink, highlighters, stickers, sticky notes, and text boxes for special emphasis. This summer, you will also be able to use the laser pointer to draw attention to important concepts. As whiteboards are inherently non-linear, you have the flexibility to dynamically change the flow of the lesson depending on the conversations that come up and where those discussions take you. For a more guided experience, you will be able to lock your students' view so that they see what you see. Run your lessons with a video conferencing application like Microsoft Teams for the best experience.

Group Projects and Interactive Lessons

When it comes to group projects and interactive lessons, you may want a little more structure. This summer, Microsoft Whiteboard will make it simpler to upload digital worksheets that you already have to the board, or create new ones using structured organizers that will come with the app. Add your content to the board, open it in a Teams meeting, or invite your students to the board and see their creativity blossom. With everyone on the same Whiteboard, live cursor identities will allow you to see where students are, who is actively engaged with the work, and which students might need additional help or clarification on the tasks.

Keep Focused with Microsoft Teams

If you use Microsoft Teams in your classrooms, life just got easier as Microsoft Whiteboard is directly built into Teams. While in a Teams meeting, open the share tray to share a new or an existing Whiteboard with the class at any time without needing to switch between apps and without losing the participant video feeds and context. This saves you time, keeps everyone focused on the lesson, and allows you to stay connected with the class. This feature is available right now.

Assignments

All those Whiteboard lessons you created, whether previously prepared or created through ad hoc discussions, are now even more useful as they can be uploaded to Teams Assignments as homework or reference material. Assignments in Teams will duplicate the whiteboards for you and students can submit their work for grading when they are done. Whiteboard is especially useful with Microsoft Teams’ new Group Assignments feature as it allows students to work and create together in real-time.

Microsoft Whiteboard is an intuitive app that students can quickly grasp. Pick up and draw with a pen, finger, or mouse, or select something from the toolbar to add, which means that students can spend their time on adding creative content as opposed to learning the tool. The wide range of tools from adding simple reaction stickers to creating full blown works of art, means that students can choose the level of engagement they're comfortable with. Microsoft Whiteboard is available on Windows, iOS, Android, and the Microsoft Whiteboard web client.

Updates to Organizational Theming in Microsoft 365 admin center

Maha Alam — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 22:56:16 GMT

We are so excited to announce an enhanced theming experience for tenants. We have started rolling out the improvements and will be generally available by late May 2021. Through the Microsoft 365 admin center, start playing around with colors and logos and assign custom themes to different Microsoft 365 groups in your organization! The organizational theme is what appears in the top navigation bar for people in your organization.

Creating a new theme dialogue

How to get started

To get started, in the Microsoft 365 admin center navigate to Settings > Org Settings > Organizational profile click on Organizational Themes. From there you can add up to 4 custom themes. Each theme can be customized with different logos and colors. Admins can specify theme logos and specify the URL where users will navigate to when they select the logo.

Applying a custom theme

What is exciting about these improvements?

Specify a different logo for dark mode
Create themes for different groups
Get instant accessibility feedback on your theme

Read more about the exciting updates here!

Go further with Microsoft Lists – five free virtual workshops

Mark Kashman — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 17:00:06 GMT

Pick your time zone and join in. Learn all you can do with Microsoft Lists - your smart information tracking app in Microsoft 365.

See how Lists evolve from SharePoint lists to empower individuals and teams to create, share and track information – including innovation in Microsoft Teams, information side-by-side your team conversations. We will teach you how to use and create views, configure conditional formatting, adjust forms and more. Plus, we will highlight extending lists with the integrated Power Platform and answer all frequently, or infrequently, asked questions.

Get ready to become a Microsoft Lists pro, for free.

Dates: May 10 – 14, 2021 | Pick the virtual workshop closest to your time zone

Register today | Submit a question in advance (answered in the time zone you select)

Microsoft Lists virtual workshops, "Go further with Microsoft Lists" - delivered five times across various regions.

Track what matters most.

Select a virtual workshop in your time zone now!

Date and time	Target region	Presenter(s)	Add to calendar (.ics file)
Monday, May 10 11:00 AM PT	AMER time zone	Andrea Lum, Miceile Barrett, and Paul Diamond	Save the date (AMER)
Tuesday, May 11 9:00 AM IST	India (presented in Hindi)	Niket Jain, Saurabh Sood, and Bharath Manoj Manda	Save the date (India)
Wednesday, May 12 10:00 AM CEST	EMEA time zone	Andrea Lum and Harini Saladi	Save the date (EMEA)
Thursday, May 13 10:00 AM BRT	LATAM time zone	Mark Kashman	Save the date (LATAM)
Friday, May 14 11:30 AM CST	APAC time zone	Shreyas Sundararaman and Mark Kashman	Save the date (APAC)

Register today | Submit a question in advance (answered in the time zone you select)

What you’ll learn

Creating a list and using ready-made templates.
Working with Lists in Microsoft Teams.
Customizing a list that works for you.
Extend lists with integrated Power Platform.

Why attend?

Learn | Gain a better understanding of Microsoft Lists and learn how easy it is to create, share, and track lists with anyone on any device.
Connect | Hear from product experts and ask them questions about how to create and organize lists to track information within your organization.
Inspire | Adopting what you’ve learned from this workshop to quickly simply your workflow and inspire your colleagues to easily collaborate on Microsoft Lists.

Microsoft Lists virtual workshop proposed agenda (3 hours)

Register today | Submit a question in advance (answered in the time zone you select)

Get more done with Microsoft Lists.

Cheers and see you there, Mark Kashman, senior product manager – Microsoft

Commercial Preview of Microsoft Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is Now Available

Microsoft_365_Team — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 23:40:59 GMT

Today we’re pleased to announce the commercial preview of Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) for Windows and Office LTSC for Mac.^[1] The next perpetual version of Office for commercial customers is built specifically for organizations running regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices that are not connected to the internet in manufacturing facilities, and specialty systems that must stay locked in time and require a long-term servicing channel. Office LTSC will provide the familiar productivity tools you have experienced with Office 2019, now with faster performance and expanded accessibility. You can preview Office LTSC and Office LTSC for Mac starting today.

Office LTSC will include features from past Office releases as well as a subset of new features already available in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise. As we announced in February, Office LTSC, like Windows 10 LTSC, will be supported for five years and continue being governed by the Fixed Lifecycle Policy. To learn more about other changes for Office LTSC, see our February announcement.

Office LTSC will be deployed using Click-to-Run exclusively, just like Office 2019, so IT admins can take advantage of modern deployment technology to help reduce costs. Office LTSC for Mac will use the standard Apple Package format (pkg) - the same technology that we have used for previous perpetual releases, including Office 2019 for Mac and Office 2016 for Mac. To understand additional system requirements for Office LTSC and Office LTSC for Mac, read the FAQ.

Microsoft 365 Apps continues to deliver the most productive and most secure Office experience, offering the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for deployment and management. In another recent announcement, we shared how Microsoft 365 Apps can also be used in organizations with employees going offline for longer periods of time or using shared devices or workstations. However, Office LTSC will be a valuable upgrade for customers who need to keep their Office apps on-premises.

This is the first in a series of preview announcements for the on-premises wave, and in the coming months we’ll also announce commercial previews for SharePoint and Project Server. For instructions on how to install the Office LTSC and Office LTSC for Mac preview, go here.

^[1]Product name has been updated since blog's original publication date.

iPad support now available in Microsoft Lists for iOS

Mark Kashman — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Track what matters most from the comforts of a larger touch screen device. We’re pleased to share Microsoft Lists for iOS now supports iPad. AKA, no more lists at 2x. You’ll get a beautiful native experience to track, manage and share your information. We, too, have enabled Conditional Access to Lists for iOS, and updated an important fix when a list is deleted from your iPhone or iPad.

Get Microsoft Lists for iOS today.

Let’s dive into all the updates below.

Microsoft Lists for iOS: iPad support [Roadmap ID: 70748]

Microsoft is expanding device support on iOS to now include iPad. Microsoft Lists for iOS looks great on iPhone and iPad, scaling the user-friendly user interface to give you the best access to create, edit, and share your information from your iOS device.

Microsoft Lists for iOS on an iPad, showing the main home screen with Search, and Favorites and Recent lists (left), and working on an individual ‘New Candidates’ list (right).

With the extra screen real estate, you can easily search for lists, list items, and tap directly into your favorite and recent lists – directly from the home screen. Lists looks great in both portrait and landscape modes. And it mirrors the Lists Web experience, blended within the common design of iOS.

Microsoft Lists for iOS on an iPad, showing the main home screen with Search, and Favorites and Recent lists (in landscape mode)

Once in a list, you’ll swipe up and down, left to right to navigate your list. You’re able to tap into a specific list item to see it’s full view form. And you can refine the view of information using filter, group by, and tapping into individual fields to make changes to drop-down menus or enter text.

Microsoft Lists for iOS on an iPad, working on an individual ‘New Candidates’ list (in landscape mode)

Admins: Manage Microsoft Lists for iOS using InTune app protection policies (APP)

The Microsoft Lists iOS app is now configurable as a public app in Intune app protection policy (APP) through the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center. This allows app to be targeted to ensure that the data accessed is protected by app protection policies.

The app now also supports conditional access deployment through Azure admin portal. Please note that 'Require app protection policy' is supported which provides higher level of assurance. Lists app doesn't currently support ‘Require approved client app’ grant access.

Learn more how to enable InTune app protection policies (APP) for Lists for iOS, which includes how to create and assign app protection policies (via docs.microsoft.com).

Bug fix update for lists deleted from an iPhone or iPad

Lists deleted from Lists for iOS can now be restored from the corresponding site recycle bin. We appreciate everyone who brought this to our attention, and for your patience while our development team addressed the issue.

Additional resources

"Get the Microsoft Lists app for iOS" [related blog]
Watch Bharath Manoj Manda, senior program manager on the Microsoft Lists engineering team, as he provides a 5-minute demo of what you can do with the Lists app on iOS
Microsoft Lists resource center
Microsoft Lists adoption center
Microsoft Lists help and ‘how to’ pages
Microsoft Lists for iOS (get it today)
Microsoft Lists product web page
Microsoft Lists look book

To learn more about Lists throughout the year, please visit our updated Microsoft Lists resource center for blogs, demos, videos, podcasts, and more.

Get more done with Microsoft Lists on the go.

Thanks, Mark Kashman – senior product manager – Microsoft 365

Introducing Modern Comments in Microsoft Word

Katie Sullivan — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 21:33:30 GMT

Workplace collaboration is evolving—and so is Microsoft Word. Today, we're pleased to announce expanded availability of our new modern commenting experience across Word platforms.

Modern comments sets the stage for a richer Word collaboration experience for you and your teams by enabling modern features such as @mention notifications and more. It aligns how comments work across Office on different endpoints, so that you and your team can rely on a consistent experience regardless of whether you’re using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint on any platform.

Modern comments was first introduced on the mobile and Web versions of Word where we iterated based on feedback. Now it is rolling out to Production on Word for Windows, and Current Channel (Preview) on Word for Mac!

Here's a look at what to expect:

Stay in control

With modern comments, you no longer have to worry about your comments being seen by others before you’re finished editing them. After you draft a new comment or reply, click the Post button or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Enter (Windows) or Cmd + Enter (MacOS) to share your thoughts with others. Now, a comment or reply can only be edited by the person who created it.

Click the Post button to share your comments

Flexibility in how you view and interact with comments

In Word you'll find comments to the right of your page, by default. In this view, contextual comments are side-by-side with the page content, to help you focus on the feedback that’s most relevant to the part of the document you’re working on.

In the Comments pane, you can see a single list of all comments in your document, including resolved comments. To switch between the contextual view and the Comments pane, simply click the Comments button in the upper right corner of your Word window.

Switch between contextual view and the Comments pane

Resolve comment threads

Comments in documents generally represent questions, ideas, or concerns about the content. When those have been addressed, comments allow you to mark that thread as resolved. Resolved comment threads won't appear in the contextual view (though you can still find them in the Comments pane) to help you stay focused on what’s active.

Resolve comment threads

Improved @mentions in comments

Users have been adding names to comments for years. Now, if you’re an enterprise user working on cloud files, you can more easily use an @mention to call out to one or more of your colleagues in your organization or school. Just highlight some text, click the Comment button, type your comment, and @mention anyone you want to see it.

When you post your comment, anybody that you've @mentioned in it will get an email notification. Whoever started the comment thread will also be notified. Notification emails let your collaborators know there’s been new activity in the comment thread, gives them a preview of the document content where the comment was made, as well as the comment you left. They can reply to your comment from the email, or they can click a link in the notification email to open the document and go straight to the comment if they want to see more context.

Better collaboration practices for today's remote world

These new commenting experiences are ideal for today's remote teams who may be working together from across town or around the world. Comments eliminate the need to coordinate schedules or conduct in-person discussions, providing greater flexibility and enabling collaborators to provide better insights. A consistent experience across applications makes everything flow smoothly.

What we have heard

As we have rolled out the new Modern Comments experience in Word, you have shared valuable feedback about how it affects your workflows and what is and isn’t working for you. Your feedback enables us to improve the experience for all users.

Here’s some of what we’ve heard:

Concern that comments created Modern comments are not backwards compatible – We want to ensure you are aware that any comment created with Modern comments can be consumed and interacted with by users on earlier or non-Microsoft 365 versions of Word and vice versa.
Reduced efficiency in working with comments, particularly in posting or editing comments
Not all formatting is supported in comments, such as font color
Not all content is supported in comments, such as images
Autocorrect is not supported, including custom autocorrect shortcuts used to save time
Comments and tracked changes layout takes up screen real estate and pushes comments further from the page
Grammar checking is not available in comments
It is more challenging to see where comments are connected to, without the dotted lines

What’s next?  

(Updated as of August 9, 2021)

As previously noted in this post, we have been working on bringing a set of changes to the experience to address the feedback from this community.

Quick Edit:  we will make it easier to enter edit mode for a comment such as showing the edit button on hover. 
Ctrl+Enter & Cmd+Enter awareness: we will promote keyboard shortcut usage for post. 
Comment anchor connection: we will make it easier to see what a comment is referring to.
Tracked Changes: Show Revisions Inline: we will promote using the “Show All Revisions inline” setting to show track changes on the canvas instead of between the comments (see the FAQ link below to try this out today). 
Image support: support to display existing images (note: support to add new images to comments will come in a subsequent update). 
Selection interaction improvements: we will make it easier to expand and read another comment while a draft comment is in progress. 
Reported bug fixes such as printing PDFs with comments.

In addition to these planned updates, we have also heard your broader feedback about the current ability for Modern comments to support more complex workflows and are making the following additional changes.

Opt-out: we are adding support for a new opt-out toggle in Word’s Options dialog. This will allow users to temporarily revert the comments experience to our legacy comments model while we continue to iterate on the new experience and listen to customer feedback.
Font colors: display font formatting.

Unless noted otherwise, these changes will be released with the October 2021 monthly update.

Note: due to additional compatibility issues discovered with 3rd party screen readers we will be temporarily turning off Modern comments for all Current Channel non-preview users. We plan to turn Modern Comments back on, with the updates described above, for customers with the October monthly update.

We have additional updates planned beyond these as well, and we will let you know more in the future. 

What you can do

We have outlined a set of FAQs that give guidance and tips on the most common questions we hear from customers, including workarounds available to you today. Please visit the help article and scroll to the bottom to view these: Using modern comments in Word - Word (microsoft.com).

Please continue to leave in-app feedback about the experience. We actively review this feedback to prioritize improvements.

If you don’t have Modern Comments yet but can’t wait to try it, join our Office Insider Program.

See our support page for more information: Using Modern Comments in Word.

Microsoft Graph Fundamentals now on Microsoft Learn

williamsrabia — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:44:01 GMT

We are excited to share that we have released a new learning path on Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Graph Fundamentals, which is a multi-part series that teaches you basic concepts of Microsoft Graph. It will guide you with hands-on exercises on how to use Microsoft Graph Application Programming Interface (API) requests to start developing or enhancing your applications with Microsoft 365 data.

What is Microsoft Graph?

Microsoft Graph is the API for Microsoft 365. It is the culmination of most of the data you have in Microsoft 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security all readily available to be accessed and used in your application by consuming its unified programmability model.

Why use Microsoft Graph?

Microsoft Graph helps you take advantage of a secured, unified API that can be used to connect applications to data located in various Microsoft 365 services. Developers can get started with Microsoft Graph quickly and access data across an organization without having to learn how individual Microsoft 365 services work. Security is a critical part of any organization, and Microsoft Graph helps provide built-in security to control access to various services.

Ready to get started?

Go to aka.ms/learn-graph and complete the learning path to understand the fundamentals of Microsoft Graph with lots of exercises to involve you in the learning process.

About the learning path

There are three modules that will take you on a journey through Microsoft Graph and how to use it in an application:

In the first module, What is Microsoft Graph? you will be introduced to Microsoft Graph and basic concepts.
In the second module, Configure a JavaScript application to retrieve Microsoft 365 data using Microsoft Graph, you will start configuring a sample JavaScript application to connect to Microsoft 365.
In the third module, Access user photo information with Microsoft Graph, you will be able to extend the sample JavaScript application to access a user’s photo information in Microsoft 365.

What do I need to know to complete the learning path?

The following are some basic prerequisites that will help you complete the Microsoft Graph learning path:

Basic understanding of Microsoft 365.
Basic knowledge of Representational State Transfer (REST) services and APIs.
Ability to develop JavaScript applications.
Basic understanding of Azure Active Directory (AAD) and Microsoft Identity concepts (preferred, but not mandatory).

For the exercises you will need:

Administrator access to a Microsoft 365 tenant via the Microsoft 365 Developer Program. (For exercise purposes, use a dev tenant.)
Node.js installed.

If you are not familiar with Microsoft 365 tenants or dev tenants, we’ve got you covered! Take a look at Julie Turner's blog, What is a Dev tenant and why would you want one?

Want to learn more about Graph? Join us for a two-hour livestream event created by developers, for developers. Let’s talk app development with Microsoft Graph!

Go to aka.ms/learntogether-graph and RSVP to start learning how to build apps with Microsoft Graph and connect with our developer community!

What’s new for admins in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

Microsoft_365_Team — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 23:53:58 GMT

March was an exciting month for the Microsoft 365 Apps community. We know that IT admins like you are continuing to play a critical role in keeping your organizations focused and productive, which is why we’re always innovating new features and services for Microsoft 365 Apps. Read on to discover more about the latest capabilities, including Microsoft 365 Apps health, extended offline access, and device-based subscription. And if you missed any of our Microsoft Ignite sessions, watch the on-demand videos to learn more about what we’re developing to help make your role easier.

General availability of Microsoft 365 Apps health

Earlier this month we announced the general availability of Microsoft 365 Apps health, a dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center that provides visibility and actionable guidance about the ongoing health of Microsoft 365 Apps. You can quickly spot anomalies that might need investigation, identify the number of devices running unsupported Office builds, view a list of advisories for your organization, and keep track of the number of devices covered by Apps health. You can also see trends over the last 60 days and discover correlations between current advisories and those that have occurred in the past. Microsoft processes diagnostic data from your environment to produce these valuable insights and gives you confidence that the Microsoft 365 Apps in your organization are secure, up to date and behave properly.

Microsoft 365 Apps Ignite sessions recap

We were excited to share the latest developments for Microsoft 365 Apps at Microsoft Ignite 2021 earlier this month. If you weren’t able to join us live, check out our on-demand sessions to learn about all the ways we are making it easier for you to manage your Microsoft 365 Apps environment:

Manage Office apps deployments with new tools and services

In this session, Amesh Mansukhani, Principal Program Manager for Office Engineering, and Javier Carrillo, Senior Program Manager for Office Engineering, share how our latest cloud tools and services for Microsoft Office apps provide improved insights into your inventory and app health, along with tools for automated deployments and control to increase your workload efficiency and lower your total cost of ownership.

Insights and controls for Microsoft 365 Apps in admin center (Click to watch the session)

Rebecca Keys, Program Manager for Release and Delivery Experience, and Reshma Kapoor, Senior Program Manager for Release and Delivery Experience, explain how we’re empowering admins like you with actionable insights and effective controls in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This session focuses on how we’re helping you use feedback from end users to understand and improve your organization’s health, and how delivering Microsoft 365 Apps updates in a monthly cadence can improve end-user satisfaction and productivity.

How to onboard devices to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center (Click to watch the session)

To help you better manage the lifecycle of your Office applications, Microsoft 365 Apps Rangers Bob Clements and Martin Nothnagel walk you through installing Office on end-user devices, onboarding devices to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, registering devices with inventory, and how to use servicing profiles.

Office hours: Q&A with Office experts on deploying and managing Microsoft 365 Apps

We held four Office Hours Q&A sessions to discuss topics such as moving from legacy Office to Microsoft 365 Apps, migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit versions of Microsoft 365 Apps, benefits of moving to the Monthly Enterprise Channel, and the new cloud-based management features available in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center.

Microsoft 365 Apps for offline and shared devices

At the end of February, we introduced two new features for Microsoft 365 Apps—extended offline access, and device-based subscription. These capabilities help to ensure that employees who are offline for months at a time or rely on shared devices benefit from the same user experience and stay productive and secure no matter where they’re working. With extended offline access, devices can stay activated without connecting to the internet for up to 180 days, so workers continue to have access to Microsoft 365 Apps. With device-based subscription, we’ve extended coverage to employee-shared devices, which are common in industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, retail, and hospitality, ensuring they have access to the latest and most secure productivity tools that are available on desktop. Because the license is assigned to the device, workers aren’t required to have their own Azure Active Directory identity.

Catching up: New Microsoft Docs articles for March

You can catch up on some of the latest Microsoft 365 Apps news in these articles on Microsoft Documents:

PowerPoint for the web introduces Auto Fix: A new time-saving feature to clean up your slides!

aneoanou — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:19 GMT

It costs time and effort to perfectly align and manually position multiple elements on a slide. To help simplify the process, we are pleased to introduce Auto Fix: a new feature that enables easier, precise, and faster editing of slide content alignments. Available in PowerPoint on the web with your Microsoft 365 subscription.

Applying Auto Fix via right-click menuThis Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered feature automatically aligns, uniformly resizes, and distributes elements, and straightens the connectors between them leaving the user with a polished slide in just a few clicks. So, the next time you're creating a custom diagram or flow chart, instead of manually aligning and resizing each element, simply select the elements and click Auto Fix to save time and effort.

To use Auto Fix – simply follow these steps:

Select two or more elements on a slide.
Do one of the following:
1. Right-click one of the elements and, from the context menu, select Auto Fix.
2. On the Home tab, in the Drawing group, click Arrange, and then select Auto Fix.

Tip: Depending on what you have selected, you may also see the Arrange menu in the Shape or Picture tabs.

Auto Fix will align, distribute, and uniformly resize all the selected elements and straighten any connectors between them.

Auto Fix works independently and will not activate if you are using SmartArt, group shapes, and elements that overlap. We plan to expand this scope once we have a better understanding of user intent behind various visualizations.

Example 2a: Elements overlap and there is a group shape; b) there are no overlaps or group shapes

Pro Tip: In scenarios of more complex visualizations, large numbers, and a variety of elements, we recommend using Auto Fix on a smaller set of elements, and then gradually polishing the elements until the entire visualization is perfectly aligned.

Get started

We are excited about the new experiences in PowerPoint and hope you will love them too! Have questions or want to leave feedback? Let us know in a comment below.

Microsoft Word and PowerPoint for the Web announce Export to PowerPoint presentation

aneoanou — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:56 GMT

Have you ever wished you could easily export your Microsoft Word document into a PowerPoint presentation with just a few clicks? Now you can! We are excited to announce this feature is now available in Word and PowerPoint for the Web with your Microsoft 365 subscription, and we cannot wait for you to try it out!

Export to PowerPoint presentation enables users to export their document to a professional looking PowerPoint presentation from Word for the Web!

This feature uses artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to save you time and provide you with slide suggestions powered by Designer in PowerPoint. The slides are derived from your section headers in the document, so make sure to organize your Word document accordingly for optimal suggestions. Based on key words in your document, Designer in PowerPoint will suggest imagery, icons, videos, themes and fonts to arrange your content. You can always change the suggested content if needed.

Let's see it in action:

Export to PowerPoint presentation right from Word for the web

How to use Export to PowerPoint presentation:

Open any document you want to convert into a presentation in Word for the web.
Click File > Export > Export to PowerPoint presentation.
When prompted choose a design theme for your presentation.
Click Open presentation to review the results in PowerPoint for the web.
The presentation will be created and saved in the OneDrive root folder on the user's computer.

Tips & Tricks 

This feature is currently only available in English.
This feature is not available on the Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.
This feature only supports text content; support for other media content is not currently available.
You can add your own media to the presentation after you have exported your Word document to a PowerPoint presentation.

Get started!

We are very excited about this new experience in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and we hope you will love it too. For further assistance with this feature, please visit our support page. Want to share your feedback? We would love to hear it! Share your feedback with us here.

Get started with Microsoft Graph Toolkit at Microsoft Learn

aycabas — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:00 GMT

Today, we’re excited to announce the Get started with Microsoft Graph Toolkit module is available on Microsoft Learn for all learners.

If you’ve never heard of Microsoft Graph Toolkit before, you are in the right place! Microsoft Graph Toolkit is for developers interested in building web-based productivity and collaboration solutions in a simple way. Basically, Microsoft Graph Toolkit is a set of HTML components and authentication providers that help you build a complete experience with three lines of code.

To make it easy to understand here's an example: Let’s say you want to implement Microsoft Planner tasks in a web page. You can easily do that by using the Tasks component available in Microsoft Graph Toolkit. The beauty of these HTML components is that you don’t need to worry about back-end or front-end. A single HTML tag <mgt-tasks> handles all processes of getting the data and showing it in a pre-built UI.

Here is how you can use the Tasks component:

<mgt-tasks></mgt-tasks>

And here is how the result will look like right out of the box in your web page:

Tasks component in Microsoft Graph Toolkit

There are a lot of other components and providers in Microsoft Graph Toolkit! Are you ready to discover more?

What will you learn in the Get started with Microsoft Graph Toolkit module?

The Get started with Microsoft Graph Toolkit module will help you address questions, such as:

What is Microsoft Graph Toolkit?
Why should you use Microsoft Graph Toolkit and what are the benefits?
How can you use Microsoft Graph Toolkit in web apps?

This module will help guide you through the learning process through hands-on experience that is designed for beginners who have zero knowledge about Microsoft Graph Toolkit. And, it's no more than a couple lines of HTML!

Give it a try; by the end of the module you will understand how to build the experience shown below with only four lines of HTML:

Before you start, let's setup your environment

Before we begin, there are a few basic tools and requirements needed to complete the exercises and practice units. Here's a step-by-step guide for what you'll need to set up your environment:

Step 1: Get a free tenant from Microsoft 365 Developer Program

The Microsoft 365 Developer Program provides a free Microsoft 365 tenant for everyone! The program provides a free sandbox, tools, and resources to build solutions for the Microsoft 365 platform.

Go to the Microsoft 365 Developer Program website and select JOIN NOW.
Login with a Microsoft account (work, school or personal). Once logged in, you will be directed to a page to fill out the following details:
1. Country/Region
2. Company
3. Language Preference
Make sure to select Terms & Conditions and click Next.
When your profile is successfully created you will be directed to the program page. Select SET UP E5 SUBSCRIPTION to create your free tenant (as shown below):

5. Fill in the following details and select Continue:

Username
Domain – must be globally unique
Password

6. Add a phone number for security purposes and select Set up.

7. Congratulations! Your tenant and administrator account are successfully created.

Now you can use your Administrator account to build and test your solutions for Microsoft 365 Platform.

Step 2: Install Visual Studio Code

You will use Visual Studio Code while working on practice units in the learn module. Install Visual Studio Code by visiting: https://code.visualstudio.com/download.

Step 3: Install Visual Studio Code Live Server

You will need the Visual Studio Code Live Server extension to run and test your project at the end of each practice unit in the Microsoft Learn module. Install the Visual Studio Code Live Server extension from the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ritwickdey.LiveServer.

Let's start your journey with Microsoft Graph Toolkit!

Now that you have all the pre-requisites squared away...are you ready to begin your journey with Microsoft Graph Toolkit? Visit the Get started with Microsoft Graph Toolkit module and start learning how to build productivity & collaboration solutions today.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Graph Toolkit?

Join us for a 2-hr livestream event on April 14 to learn together, more information coming soon via aka.ms/learntogether-graph!

Find, do, and discover with Cortana & Microsoft 365

Bill Baer — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:03 GMT

Time is priceless and while we can’t own it, we can make the best use of it. Balancing work and life continues to challenge us daily. Over half of working parents surveyed, said it’s been difficult balancing household demands while working from home. Using Cortana, your personal assistant in Microsoft 365, you can take back control of your day, organize your work, and plan ahead to achieve more.

Why? Because work should be impactful, seamless, and fluid… AI in Microsoft 365 lets you take control of your time.

At Microsoft Ignite we demonstrated our continued investments in bringing natural, voice-driven experiences to Microsoft 365 apps and services to help you work smarter in addition to new innovation to help individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. In this article we’ll recap announcements from Ignite 2020 and where you can learn more from Ignite 2021 sessions.

Rule your day

Never miss a beat with your daily briefing email. Planning is one of those important things we don’t have time not to do. Daily briefing emails from Cortana help you start your day on track. You get a glanceable summary of your important requests, follow-ups, and info related to upcoming meetings. Currently available in English and Spanish, briefing emails will start rolling out next quarter to users with Exchange Online mailboxes in French, German, Portuguese, Italian. And updates, including in-line action links to easily book time in the week ahead to recharge, catch up on email, or prioritize learning are now generally available in English and Spanish. Additional updates unveiled at Microsoft Ignite 2020 including an integration with Microsoft To Do and actionable reminders to improve meeting effectiveness are now rolling out in targeted release.

Learn more about how your daily briefing can help save you time and keep you focused here.

Catch up on what’s new in your inbox – while even when your hands are full –so you can get time back in your day. With Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS you can get up to speed even when you don’t have time to read. With an intelligent read out of your emails, natural language interaction with Cortana and a user interface designed for people on the move, you can stay organized, on top of what matters and get back to living life outside your inbox, so whether you’re just walking your dog, or commuting to work, Play My Emails helps keep you focused and informed. Learn more about Play My Emails in Outlook.

Use spoken or typed natural language to complete tasks on Windows. With the latest update Cortana can help you retrieve your Microsoft 365 files across not only your device but also cloud locations such as SharePoint and OneDrive. The Cortana experience in Windows 10 enables you to type or speak natural language commands to save time finding what you need, stay on schedule, connect with people, set reminders, and more. You can also invoke the experiences hands-free using the wake word “Cortana”.

Use Cortana to open or search files by:

Parts of file names - “Hey Cortana, open marketing deck”
Author names - “Hey Cortana, open budget Excel from Anthony”
Document type - “Hey Cortana, find my recent pdfs”

Learn more about what you can do with Cortana in Windows here.

Some things are easier said than done

Interact with your calendar and email naturally. Cortana integration with Outlook gives you a natural language productivity assistant that helps you easily get things done on an iPhone or iPad. Cortana can help schedule new events and customize the event details on screen with language that you use every day—instead of tapping or typing. You can simply ask Cortana in Outlook to “Schedule a Teams meeting with Megan and Adele for next Tuesday at 2 PM to discuss the launch.” Or find out “When is my next meeting with Nestor?” You’ll also be able to quickly compose emails using requests like “Create an email to Megan and Diego.”. We’ll start the roll out of conversational AI in Outlook for iOS in the coming weeks. Initially, this new conversational AI capability with Cortana will be available in English for customers in the United States using Outlook for iOS with a Microsoft 365 work account. This experience will roll out later this year in Outlook for Android.

Make the most of your meetings

Running late and need to send a quick message to your next Teams meeting? Cortana in the Teams mobile app helps you streamline communication, collaboration, and meeting-related tasks using your voice. Simply click the microphone in the upper right of the Teams app and say, “Send a message to my next meeting that I’ll be there soon”. Ask Cortana to check your calendar, join a meeting, make a call, share files, or find messages or chats from a particular person, topic, or time range. For example, “What’s on my calendar tomorrow?”, “Call Adrian King”, “Find the Marketing deck from last month” or “Search for messages from Megan.”  Currently available in the U.S., the experience will soon be available to English speaking customers in Australia, Canada, U.K., and India.

Get the latest on what’s new for Microsoft Teams from Microsoft Ignite here.

Go hands-free with Cortana on Microsoft Teams Devices. Introduced last fall at Ignite, Microsoft Teams Display is a category of all-in-one dedicated Teams devices featuring an ambient touchscreen, with a hands-free experience powered by Cortana. Using natural language, you can effortlessly join and present in meetings. You can make requests to Cortana like "What’s on my calendar today?", "Share this document with Megan", "Join my next meeting", “Add Joe to the meeting", or "Present the quarterly review deck". We will soon make answers from Bing available, so you can check what time it is for your colleague in Europe before calling or get a quick weather report before you leave the house. Currently available in the US, Cortana on Teams displays will be expanding to more regions including Australia, Canada, the UK, and India. For folks heading back to the office, we are adding Cortana to Microsoft Team Room Devices so you can join meetings hands-free and stay safe.

Learn more about AI and Cortana in Microsoft 365 and get more productivity tips at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2131191.

Introducing Microsoft Whiteboard for Android and Whiteboard for Microsoft Teams channels and chat

Ian Mikutel — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:26 GMT

Today we are pleased to announce the Public Preview of the Microsoft Whiteboard app for Android and the launch of Microsoft Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams channels and chat.

Whiteboard in Teams Channels and chat

For projects and longer-term discussions, you can now create a whiteboard associated with a Teams channel or chat. Members of the channel or chat can iterate and collaborate on the whiteboards over time. To enable, simply click the “+” button at the top of any Teams channel or chat to Add a tab, search "Whiteboard,” and follow the prompts to name your whiteboard and optionally post to notify the channel or chat that Whiteboard is now enabled.

Microsoft Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams channels and chat

Whiteboard for Android

Leveraging the completely rebuilt Whiteboard for Web and Teams experience we announced last year, Whiteboard for Android moves us one major step closer to achieving our vision of a collaboration space for ideation that is accessible from any device and integrates seamlessly into the collaboration workflows teams already use.

Whether on Teams, Web, Windows 10, iOS, or now Android, Microsoft Whiteboard provides an infinite canvas where imagination has room to grow. You can draw, type, add a sticky note, stack things up, and move them around.

Microsoft Whiteboard for Android

To start using Whiteboard on your Android device running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or later, download the app from the Google Play Store or managed Play store if your tenant admin requires you to sign in with work or school account. Currently, Whiteboard for Android requires login with a Work or School account. To learn more, visit the Whiteboard product page, or read the FAQ.

New Endpoint analytics page for Microsoft Productivity Score

Anthony Smith (A.J.) — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:53:49 GMT

Critical to any digital transformation effort is understanding how your devices contribute to your end-user’s experience and enable them to reach their goals. This is why Endpoint analytics is a critical category to Microsoft Productivity Score. The visibility and insights it provides in areas like device boot times and application reliability can help your users quickly capture an idea or join that first meeting on Monday morning on time and not suffer through an endless login process or lose the work they just did as an application unexpectedly shuts down.

The problem was that some of you could not see all these great insights. Some of this detailed information was in the Endpoint analytics section of the Microsoft Endpoint Manager console. If you were an Intune Admin or a Global Admin, you could see this, but the rest of you who were using Productivity Score to drive your transformation efforts were in the dark. Well, not anymore. Based on your feedback, we have created a new Endpoint analytics page that shares these organizational insights with the other roles that already have access to Productivity Score.

New Endpoint analytics page

This new page looks very similar to the other pages you see in the people experiences, making it easy to dive right in. You can see your Endpoint analytics score and your score over the at the top of the page. Below that, you can see the startup insight showing your boot and sign-in scores. If you click the link under the startup insight you will get additional details about the startup performance. In the future, we will add the other insights you see in the Endpoint analytics console.

Details panel for the startup performance insight

To check out the new page which is rolling out over the next few days, head over to https://aka.ms/productivityscore. If you want to learn more about the new page, you can read the documentation at https://aka.ms/ea-ps. As always, feel free to leave any questions or thoughts you have below!

Adding more cloud-based Microsoft 365 Apps admin capabilities

ales_holecek — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:29 GMT

In my blog post last September, I called out the herculean work of the IT admin community in shepherding organizations through the new era of remote work in response to the pandemic. Five months later the role of the IT professionals is no less critical, especially as we begin to shape what the “new normal” looks like.

In talking with many of you, we overwhelmingly hear about your challenges balancing the need to stay focused on strategy and business problems, with the work that often gets in the way of that—managing deployments, security updates, and support calls from users. That’s why we are excited to share new features to make this easier!

In May and September 2020, we announced new cloud-based capabilities in the following three areas: intelligent insights, servicing automation with controls, and Microsoft 365 Apps health. Since then, we’ve seen over 11 million devices running Microsoft 365 Apps onboard to Inventory. We’ve also provided IT admins with over eight million app health metrics and delivered servicing updates to over 500,000 devices with our new Servicing Profile, keeping them continuously secure with the latest security improvements and up to date with improvements for collaboration and remote work.

Today, we are excited to announce improvements and more new capabilities to keep devices up to date, give you greater control and enable you to more easily manage Office as a service:

New in Microsoft 365 Apps Inventory and Servicing Profiles
General availability of Skip and Rollback
General availability of Microsoft 365 Apps health

Gain comprehensive insights with the new Microsoft 365 Apps Inventory

When it comes to understanding the Office apps environment in your enterprise, we know you need answers quickly. By using the apps Inventory service available in preview today, you gain deep insights into Microsoft 365 Apps in your organization. With these details, you can quickly identify anomalies, such as version sediment across your apps and add-ins. We have learned what is important from the feedback of partners and customers who helped us define and design these capabilities. We heard that understanding the versions of Office builds deployed across your organization, the number of devices with Microsoft 365 Apps, and the most installed add-ins are important to help you quickly assess and make decisions about security posture, quality of employee experience and expediting deployments. You can even view the last time a device checked into the service. Learn more about Inventory in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center.

Inventory overview in Microsoft 365 Apps admin center

Managing positive security posture is the top priority for all of us. Keeping Microsoft 365 Apps current with the latest patches contributes to positive security posture in a rapidly evolving security landscape. We included security update status by device (currently in preview) as a key metric that IT pros can monitor across the estate. This metric helps you assess the coverage of your enterprise with the latest security updates for Microsoft 365 Apps, share with your Security team, and take appropriate actions to remediate imminent threats.

You can also set goals for applying updates, tracking update progress, and identifying where your IT organization can improve processes to ensure devices stay up to date with Microsoft 365 Apps. Finally, you can also export all of this data for internal reporting or for sharing information with auditors and regulators. Learn more about security update status report.

Automate for more efficient Office updates with Microsoft 365 Apps Servicing Profiles

Since announcing the preview of Servicing Profiles last September, we’ve serviced more than 500,000 devices with Microsoft 365 Apps to keep them continuously updated. Now you can use the Servicing Profile feature (currently in preview for Monthly Enterprise Channel) to efficiently manage and automate how devices receive monthly updates directly from the Office Content Delivery Network (CDN). To ensure IT admins are at the helm, we built a set of explicit controls that enable you to pause and resume the updates with a click of a button. Additionally, we have heard that many organizations want the ability to automatically pause updates from being delivered during specific times, typically during tax or holiday seasons, to reduce the possibility of disruption for critical business processes. You can easily schedule these with our exclusion dates feature.

"From previously managing updates from ConfigMgr, using the Servicing Profiles from within the Apps Admin Center is a breath of fresh air."

– Matt B, Technical Systems Engineer, Cisco

Coming soon to preview, you’ll be able to set Servicing Profiles by using Azure Active Directory (AD) user or device groups. If an issue is detected post update, you will be able to restore the device to the previous Office build and pause the rollout until the issue is resolved. For broader issues affecting a larger number of devices, you will be able to restore and pause updates using Azure AD groups. Today, Servicing Profile is only available in preview for the Monthly Enterprise Channel and will be available in preview for the other channels at a later date. Learn more about our update channels to help you deliver the latest value to the business.

Streamline servicing of Microsoft 365 Apps with Skip and Rollback

We designed Servicing Profiles to meet the needs of all organizations regardless of their complexity. But we believe that many environments will be sufficiently served by using Skip and Rollback in Version management* based on your preselected default channel. With Version management, you can easily roll back all your devices to a previous version of Office or skip an upcoming update. You can find this feature, now generally available**, in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Settings > Org settings > Services > Office installation options.

Skip and rollback are now generally available in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Increase performance, reliability, and security with Microsoft 365 Apps health

We’re excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Apps health is generally available this month. Since we first previewed this capability, we’ve provided insights for over eight million devices through the dashboard. Now, via the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, you can see reliability and performance trends by app and channel, and features like Reliability advisories, advisory history and diagnostic data coverage to help you easily monitor, optimize, and discover issues with Microsoft 365 Apps in their environment.

Microsoft 365 Apps health is generally available this month

Like the Inventory and Servicing Profile dashboards, the Apps health dashboard provides at-a-glance views for quickly spotting anomalies that might need investigation and troubleshooting. You can identify devices running unsupported Office builds, a list of advisories for your organization, and devices covered by Apps health. You can also see trends over the last 30 days to view trends by channel and see any correlation between current advisories and those that occurred in the past.

The Microsoft 365 Apps health dashboard provides visibility and actionable guidance about the health of the deployment of Microsoft 365 Apps. Microsoft processes diagnostic data from your environment to produce these valuable insights and give you confidence that the deployment of Microsoft 365 Apps in your organization is secure, up to date and behaves properly.

A frequent request we receive from IT admins is to help them assess the quality of their Office deployment and compare it to similar companies. To deliver on this need, we are introducing aggregate industry benchmark to evaluate performance, currency, and reliability and other key metrics of your deployment with your industry peers. We will be gradually rolling out this feature in the coming weeks.

To preview and start using all these new features, log in to Microsoft 365 Apps admin center. Check out our Guide to Microsoft 365 Apps deployment and servicing at Microsoft Ignite to learn more about all the new features coming your way soon. Have a question? Join our Office deployment experts on March 3 and March 10 for live Office Hours Q&A sessions to ask any questions you have about deploying and servicing Microsoft 365 Apps. Or head over to the Microsoft 365 Tech Community discussion space to continue the conversation!

Footnotes:

*If you’re already using another method to manage Office updates on devices in your organization, such as Group Policy or Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, then the choices on the Office installation and the Version management tabs won’t apply to those devices.

**The skip and rollback functionalities are now available in the Microsoft 365 admin center, but are not available to customers who have the following plans: Office 365 operated by 21Vianet, Office 365 Germany, Office 365 GCC, or Office 365 GCC High and DoD.

What’s new for Microsoft Lists - Microsoft Ignite 2021 [Mar.2-4] announcements

Mark Kashman — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:31 GMT

Microsoft completed rolling out Microsoft Lists in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams last year (2020) – along with the release of Microsoft Lists for iOS earlier this year. We have received a lot of positive feedback and usage is growing fast. Today, we are pleased to share future Lists innovation, as announced at Microsoft Ignite March 2-4, 2021.

Hear from Omar Shahine, VP of Product OneDrive and SharePoint (Microsoft 365), as he talks with sharing and showing all of the new Lists innovation, in addition to new features and capabilities he and team are working on (the Lists segment starts at 4:45):

Note: Click on the roadmap ID links per announcements to best track Targeted Release dates and additional information on the public Microsoft 365 roadmap).

Create and use your own custom list templates

Today, we have several ready-made list templates designed to make it easy to get started tracking and managing information – like events, issues, and requests. We’re pleased to announce that you will soon be able to design and deploy custom list templates.

When you create a new site using the Lists app in Teams (shown above) or from the Lists app in Microsoft 365, you can choose from built-in templates or from custom templates designed and deployed by your organization (“Northwind Traders” in the above example).

Like the above Northwind Trader’s custom Recruitment template, you will be able to define preferred column layout, predefined views, related rules and column and row formatting. Give it a name and it’s ready for use.

Note, you will be able to manage which templates are available to which people, based on their job role.

Microsoft Lists: Custom list templates | Roadmap ID: 70753.

Updated Lists capabilities in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Lists app in Teams: Rules | Roadmap ID: 70749

Create simple if/then rules, based on changes to list information, to set reminders and send notifications directly from within Microsoft Teams. Users with edit permissions on the list can create and manage rules. Users with read-only permissions can’t create or manage rules. Once the feature is available to your users, they’ll be able to create a rule by selecting the Automate menu, and then click "Create a rule" in the list command bar near the top of the page.

Build helpful list rules to notify yourself and others when information changes - now available inside Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Lists app in Teams: Comments and @mentions | Roadmap ID: 70707

Within the Web interface for Microsoft Lists, people can add or delete a comment on individual list items, including the ability to @mention someone, to collaborate and share insights. We are pleased to announce that we will bring the same comment capabilities to the Microsoft Lists app within Microsoft Teams. Make a comment, @mention a colleague, and that colleague receives a notification bringing them right to the list item – in context of your comment.

Add comments and @mentions that live inside the lists schema and storage - now available in Microsoft Teams.

Note: Microsoft is also working on a new admin control to enable and/or disable comments. More below in the Lists admin section.

Microsoft Lists app in Teams: Calendar view (already available)

Visualize any list with items that use date column information in a calendar view. This capability originally shipped in the Lists app for Microsoft 365 only, and now will show in Microsoft Teams when you add a list as a tab in Teams and have created a calendar view – or create one from directly within Teams.

If you've configured a Calendar view for your list, you can now select it and view it in Microsoft Teams.

Let’s take a pause on feature updates and dig into a new Lists use case for our Canadian education customer, Brock University.

Customer story: Brock University uses Microsoft Lists to manage student exchange agreements with partner schools

To best manage their student exchange program, Brock University faculty turned to Microsoft Lists. They needed a solution to improve information accuracy and automate the renewal process. It all started with an import from an Excel data table. And then, they added numerous views, groups, etc. with several Power Automate flows triggered off important changes. The list is prominently featured on team’s home page along other important content.

Official Brock University logo.

Brock University improved data integrity and with greater visibility to overall trends – all to the success of the student exchange program.

Read the full Brock University + Lists case study, visit the Brock University Exchange Program site and follow them on Twitter: @BrockUIntl.

Additionally, we have recently published education specific information for Lists for teachers and students:

Organize School and Class Information with Microsoft Lists [blog]
Day in the life - Teacher and students [PDF guide]

And now back to our regularly scheduled Lists feature announcements…

Improved people picker and rich-text editing (RTE)

With simple, inline experiences, you can quickly update your information or add new items easily. Features like drag to fill, undo/redo, new field editors (text, date, people, yes/no, choice), and copy/paste make grid view the best place to get your information, quickly and organized. And we’re pleased to announce new capabilities coming your way soon.

Rich-text editor (RTE) for text fields | Roadmap ID: 57305

When you turn on rich text editing in your multi-line text fields, you can now edit directly inline in grid. You’ll be able to bold, italicize, underline, create bulleted text, hyperlink and more. Make the text and the list look and feel exactly as it needs to.

When entering text into a Text column, you'll see a new rich-text editor (RTE) with options to bold, italicize underline, bullet and more to make your text come alive.

Learn more about working with numerous field types using Edit in grid view.

Microsoft Lists: Smart people picker | Roadmap ID: 70751

When you type in the people picker, the autofill suggestions will come from Microsoft Graph. This makes the people picker experience more personalized and relevant based on who you work with most often.

Now when typing in a name for a Person column, the results as you type will be based more on who you work with, coming from Microsoft Graph.

SharePoint: Calendar view in Lists web part | Roadmap ID: 70750

The List web part for SharePoint in Microsoft 365 allows you to display a list from your team or site on a page and customize it with your own title, view, and layout. And now, if you have created a Calendar view for your list, it will show properly in the List web part.

The SharePoint List web part showing a calendar view within a SharePoint communication site home page in Microsoft 365.

New updates for Microsoft Lists mobile apps

Microsoft Lists for iOS: Comments | Roadmap ID: 70705

Today within the Web interface for Microsoft Lists, people can add or delete a comment on individual list items to collaborate and share insights. We are pleased to announce that we will bring the same comment capabilities to Microsoft Lists for iOS.

Microsoft Lists for iOS, showing a list item on the left, and adding a comment on the right after tapping the lower-right Comment button.

Microsoft Lists for iOS: iPad support | Roadmap ID: 70748

Microsoft Lists for iOS on an iPad, showing the main home screen with Search, Favorites and Recent lists.

Working on Microsoft Lists for Android | Roadmap ID: 70704

Microsoft recently released Microsoft Lists for iOS, and we're pleased to disclose that we are working on a version for Android. Microsoft Lists for Android will provide access to the lists you own and that have been shared with you. You can create new lists, edit list items, and easily share with other people. Work and information management doesn’t have to stop when you’re on the go.

Microsoft Lists for Android - early design mockup of the Home and the My Lists screens – subject to change.

Note: The above image is an early design mockup of the Microsoft Lists for Android user interface– subject to change.

New admin controls and information recovery settings

Versioning lists on by default

Your users will soon be able to track and manage SharePoint list information over time with list versioning. After this feature rolls out, when a user creates a new list in SharePoint, that list will have versioning enabled by default. End users will be able to view and recover previous versions from the list item history. By default, new lists will retain the 50 most recent major versions. Users can change how many versions are retained or disable versioning on any list they manage.

Learn more: Enable and configure versioning for a list or library
Note: No roadmap ID, already rolled out mid-February 2021.

Enable/disable commenting | Roadmap ID: 70706

Beyond tenant-level list controls, Microsoft is adding a list-level setting to enable or disable comments within Microsoft Lists. When enabled, people can add or delete a comment on individual list items to collaborate and share insights. Users can view all comments on a list item and filter between views that show comments or activity related to an item. Note: comments follow the permission settings inherent in SharePoint and Microsoft Lists. Users with read-only permission can only view comments. Those with list edit permission can make comments as well as delete comments; editing comments is currently not possible.

Additional resources

Microsoft Lists resource center
Microsoft Lists adoption center
Microsoft Lists help and ‘how to’ pages
Microsoft Lists for iOS (get it today)
Microsoft Lists product web page
Microsoft Lists look book
Additional related session videos on-demand:
- “Organize business information with Microsoft Lists” presented by Miceile Barrett and Niket Jain
- “Designing the Microsoft Lists experience” presented by Ben Truelove and Christopher Wymer
- “Microsoft Teams ❤ Microsoft Lists” presented by Ansuman Acharya and Michael Lam
- “Customize productivity apps with lists and libraries, Power Apps, and Power Automate” presented by Chakkaradeep Chandran

In closing…

Millions of SharePoint users have benefitted from using lists over the years. Microsoft Lists builds on this trusted information platform – bringing new user experiences and capabilities to the foundational innovation of SharePoint lists. Rest assured that all your lists, including lists that you have inside SharePoint sites today, will benefit from all the innovations described here. Lists are lists are lists and we’re constantly improving lists across all fronts. Additionally, the value of existing integrations with the Power Platform continue when you need to further customize list forms with Power Apps and design robust workflows with Power Automate. And for developers, the power and value of the Lists API extends custom solutions to connect the list data as a source via Microsoft Graph. And because it’s part of Microsoft 365, you can rely on enterprise-ready security and compliance while building lists as core content within your governance plans.

To learn more about Lists throughout the year, please visit our updated Microsoft Lists resource center for blogs, demos, videos, podcasts, and more.

Track what matters most. Make a list and let it flow.

Thanks, Mark Kashman – senior product manager – Microsoft 365

Microsoft Viva announcements at Microsoft Ignite

Seth Patton — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:33 GMT

By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience

Last month we announced Microsoft Viva, the first Employee Experience Platform for the digital era. Today we are pleased to share a set of exciting news and updates across the four Viva modules, summarized below.

For details on all the Microsoft Viva sessions at Microsoft Ignite, March 2-4, 2021, please read the Viva Guide to Ignite blog post.

Microsoft Viva Learning

We’re excited to announce that Viva Learning will enter public preview in April 2021.

We are also showcasing a set of new Viva Learning features, such as: How to use the Teams Admin Center to manage Viva Learning across an organization, how Viva Learning leverages data from the Microsoft Graph to surface relevant recommendations and search results, the latest walkthrough of Viva Learning in a live tenant environment, and more.

For details on these announcements read the Viva Learning Ignite blog and watch the Viva Learning Ignite on-demand session.

Microsoft Viva Connections

Starting in March, the Microsoft Teams desktop experience for Viva Connections - which provides a curated, company-branded experience including news, conversations and other resources for employees - will begin rolling out to all customers as part of their existing Microsoft 365 license. Viva Connections provides a personalized experience that centralizes relevant news and conversations. Deploy easily as it's fully integrated in the apps and devices your teams are already using, like Microsoft Teams. SharePoint, and Yammer. Discover how you can shape culture and foster communication to help your teams thrive and how you can get started now.

For details on these announcements read the Viva Connections Ignite blog and watch the Viva Connections Ignite on-demand session.

Microsoft Viva Insights

Viva Insights, now in public preview, gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. Starting next month, the virtual commute experience we announced last year will begin rolling out as part of the Microsoft Viva Insights app to help you mindfully wrap up your workdays. Also rolling out starting April, the new Home tab will make it seamless to stay on top of pending tasks, reflect on your feelings, send praise to your colleagues and take a breathing break anytime during the workday—all without leaving Teams.

For details on these announcements read the Viva Insights Ignite blog and watch the Viva Insights Ignite on-demand session.

Microsoft Viva Topics

Viva Topics, now available, applies AI to empower people with knowledge in the apps they use every day, automatically organizing content and expertise across your systems and teams to create topics with built-in security, compliance and workflow.

We’re continuing to innovate, and our next updates will add new capabilities to surface topic answers inside Microsoft Search via Microsoft Bing. We’ll also begin introducing topic cards and highlights to Microsoft Teams through pages in the Viva Connections desktop app for Teams.

For details on these announcements read the Viva Topics Ignite blog and watch the Viva Topics Ignite on-demand session.

Introducing PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams

aneoanou — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:35 GMT

PowerPoint Live transforms your presenting experience - only in Microsoft Teams

PowerPoint is used around the world to share compelling stories—from personal to professional. As the world shifted to working remotely, we all faced new challenges presenting without a live audience. Reading the room, seeing people’s expressions, and natural interactions all became more difficult to do from behind a screen.

We created an entirely new remote presenting experience with PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams. This exclusive and unique experience benefits both presenters and audience members, offering the rich presenting capabilities of PowerPoint and the collaboration of Microsoft Teams.

Discover PowerPoint Live in the new Share content experience in Microsoft Teams meetings

To get started, simply launch a Teams meeting. Then, instead of opening a PowerPoint deck and sharing your screen, unlock the benefits of PowerPoint Live by picking a file under the PowerPoint Live section of the new and improved Share content in Teams. (Note: this new and improved Share content experience is coming soon).

Share content in Microsoft Teams meetings

Present with confidence on your own or as a team

When presenting, being able to share your content is just one of your needs. To be successful, you want to be able to “read the room” while presenting so you can not only deliver your content but also adapt based on the reactions and body language of the audience. With PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, you see everything that is happening in one place, while also being able to see what’s ahead to make transitions seamless.

Presenter view gives you all the tools to present confidently - With PowerPoint Live, you have full control over your content. The view you see as the presenter is yours only – review notes, engage in chats, and see your audience – all in one panel view. This private view allows the presenter to see everything in one place while the audience sees only the active slide. For example, view a slide, and next to it your slide notes—so your talking points are never far away. Using the thumbnail strip, you can see what slides are coming next and jump to one. The Grid view enables you to easily find your place in a large presentation.

Seamless transition between presenters - If you have co-presenters, they can seamlessly “Take control” and instantly get access to the Presenter View as well. Control can also be easily shared between any number of presenters, so no more fumbling during the presentation to give control to someone else, or worse, asking someone to move to the next slide for you.

The new Presenter mode helps you feel like you’re in the room together – Presenter mode is the latest innovation in Microsoft Teams that empowers you to customize how your video feed and content appear to the audience. Seeing the speaker can reduce the cognitive overload for your audience since they can read your non-verbal cues and stay more focused with you as their visual guide. Presenter mode is a great companion to PowerPoint Live in Teams that makes your presentation immersive and engaging. This will begin to roll out to customers soon, and you can learn more about the options here.

PowerPoint Live in Teams enables inclusive and engaging experiences for your audience

It’s just as important for audiences to feel engaged and included during a presentation. Often, people in the audience have different needs – some want to be able to see what’s ahead, while others need to refer to the previous slides or change the view to high contrast view so they can see better. With PowerPoint Live in Teams, we want to ensure that you have the right tools to interact, engage, and follow along in a way that fits your needs.

Interactive presentations help to engage your audience - PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams encourages attendees to interact with content like hyperlinks and videos. This redefines the way people engage with presentations. It not only helps keep viewers’ attention, but also allows attendees to consume the content at their own pace.

Also, with the latest Live Reactions in Microsoft Teams meetings, all attendees can use emojis to share reactions to the presentation in real time. These reactions help promote inclusivity in the meeting while keeping the tone upbeat and interactive.

High fidelity viewing experience tailored to match your audience needs - Whether they join via a mobile phone or 8k monitor, each attendee experiences the presentation optimized for their screen type. The text and graphics are crisp, animations and transitions are smooth—all while using significantly less bandwidth than typically needed in screen sharing. So, even participants with poor network connections can still enjoy the presentation. Using less bandwidth also allows participants to turn on videos and see each other, which is especially important while working remotely.

Accessible content enables better comprehension for your audience - PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams allows attendees to access the shared content through screen readers. Additionally, a high-contrast mode for all content is available to each participant to choose privately on their device. This high-contrast mode within PowerPoint Live is coming soon.

PowerPoint Live takes presenting in Microsoft Teams to a new level of professionalism, personalization, and inclusivity. It brings together the creative capabilities of PowerPoint and collaboration features of Teams meetings, to deliver an unparalleled remote presentation experience that’s engaging for both presenters and attendees.

Brock University uses Microsoft Lists to manage its student exchange program

Andrea_Lum — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:21 GMT

Brock University is a leading post-secondary institution in the Niagara Region of Canada. The University has a robust international exchange program, which is widely popular among students. Every year, students participating in the program spend one or multiple terms at one of Brock University’s international partner institutions. At the same time, students from partner institutions come to Brock University to study. To maintain the program, Brock University administrators manage exchange agreements with their partner schools, keeping an eye on contract deadlines and starting a renewal process when these deadlines approach. At an elevated level, leadership also tracks operational data to gauge the success of the program and make improvements, such as the number of students participating and overall trends.

Brock University logo

The challenge: Keeping everyone informed along the way

The IT (Information Technology) team at Brock University primarily focuses on supporting learning management systems, student information systems, and traditional Finance and HR (Human Resources) operations. Unfortunately, this leaves a gap in support for business processes in teams like the one managing the student exchange program.

Originally, a single Brock University staff member used an Excel spreadsheet on a desktop PC (Personal Computer) to track everything, including partner institution names, contacts, agreement types, and end dates. The process was entirely manual without any measures in place to share insights across the whole team. The spreadsheet was difficult to manage, and agreements often expired due to oversight and lack of ownership. Plus, managing multiple renewals with different end dates was not intuitive in the spreadsheet format and caused additional operational strain.

“We needed to get off isolated desktops and into a shared environment that worked for us all.”

– David Cullum, Associate Vice-President, Brock University Information Technology Services

Brock University needed a solution to modernize their student exchange process. They needed everyone to be able to view and share status updates, centralize the tracking system, and automate reminders ahead of agreement expirations so they can start the renewal process earlier and on time. They also wanted it to be easier to view expired agreements, track inbound and outbound student headcount totals, and summarize insights by country.

A single, ongoing list to modernize program tracking

Brock University sought the help of data architect, and Microsoft MVP, Norm Young. Upon review, he helped Brock University implement Microsoft Lists to move an isolated, manual task, to an automated exchange student agreement process.

Norm first guided the university to leverage the Create List from Excel feature to easily import data from the old Excel spreadsheet into a new Exchange agreement list.

A Status choice column indicates current state of an agreement, with conditional formatting to visually highlight statuses/expirations.
An Owner person column assigns staff members to each agreement. The column connects to the associated member’s Azure Active Directory information, so notifications can be set up automatically.
A Comments column allows coworkers to provide free form, multi-line updates in each list item.
Calculated columns are used to calculate total agreements, total outbound students, total inbound students, and inbound minus outbound students – each displayed in their own column.
A Power Automate flow is used to check for expired agreements and automatically change the Status column to Expired. Owners are sent a reminder email 30 days (about 4 and a half weeks) before the end date.
A Custom view is created to group items by geography, so faculty can get insight into how many agreements they have for each country and the respective city breakdowns.

Screenshot of Exchange Agreement list

While packing a powerful solution, the list is still easy to use – like the previous spreadsheet for entry and edits. The design was kept simple with new views and visuals, added automation, calculated columns, and colorful choice fields – all to lessen the workload and errors by eliminating mundane work.

"Moving from Excel to Microsoft Lists made it easier for the team to work together on the exchange program details, while making our processes more open with fewer errors."

– David Cullum, Associate Vice-President, Brock University Information Technology Services

Norm also set up a SharePoint site for the team to establish a digital home for all important documents and information created and used by the program’s staff. The Exchange agreement list is easy to find on the team site, and it appears within everyone’s Lists app in Microsoft 365.

Screenshot of list in SharePoint site

A small investment with large returns

Now in Lists and accessible in SharePoint, the exchange program information has a simplified and more user-friendly design. The list reduces the time it takes the team to organize and input data. A shared-source location in SharePoint allows all program owners across Brock to own and adopt the process rather than relying on one single point of failure. The solution was built in just a few hours, with a few additional hours to drive widespread adoption. Leadership loved the small investment that provided a large, ongoing return. Plus, it allows staff to be more self-reliant, increasing their comfort level using Microsoft 365 to modernize their digital workplace within the University’s modernized IT system.

To see it in action, review “A 50-minute digital transformation”, an on-demand training session with Microsoft MVP, Norm Young, explaining and demoing all details of the student exchange program’s modern and automated business process – moving from Excel spreadsheets on the desktop to Microsoft Lists and SharePoint content services powered by Power Automate flows:

Video: 50 minute digital transformation with Norm Young

Read about more Lists scenarios and use cases in the Lists Day in the Life guides, amongst other Microsoft 365 solutions. And for more customer stories, head to the Microsoft Customer Stories page.

Happy tracking!

Andrea Lum, Product Manager - Microsoft

Manage and deploy Microsoft 365 Apps from partners in the Microsoft 365 admin center

snigdhav — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:46 GMT

Since we introduced Microsoft 365 Apps at Microsoft Ignite 2019, we’ve made investments to further enhance the deployment and management experience for Microsoft 365 Apps from the Microsoft 365 admin center. We introduced the unified deployment experience to SMB customers in March 2020, and now we’re bringing it to enterprise customers as well. The new experience is rolling out in phases and will be available to all customers by February 2021. The experience started with web apps, Teams apps, and Office Add-ins that integrate with Microsoft Graph, then expanded to include SharePoint apps built on the SharePoint Framework.

When this feature is rolled out to your tenant, you will see Integrated apps on the left nav under the Settings section in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Discover Microsoft 365 Apps

To discover Microsoft 365 Apps, sign-in to the Microsoft 365 admin center, and under Settings, go to Integrated apps. All Microsoft 365 Apps provided by partners that have been deployed in your organization are displayed, including information about existing solutions, and the option to deploy more apps.

You can search for more apps via the Settings -> Integrated apps -> Get apps option. This opens Microsoft AppSource in a popup window. You can then search by the publisher or app name.

Acquire/purchase Microsoft 365 Apps

After searching Microsoft AppSource, you can either acquire or purchase more apps. If your organization already has a license for the app, you can acquire it by choosing Deploy now. Otherwise, you can buy a license directly.

When you choose Buy it, you go to a Purchase page where you can enter payment information.

Deploy Microsoft 365 Apps to multiple workloads

After selecting the app, you are redirected to the Integrated apps page, where you can:

Deploy Microsoft 365 Apps or choose which app to deploy.
Deploy to the entire organization or choose specific users or groups to deploy to.
Test the app by deploying it to your own tenant.

We recommend that you deploy Microsoft 365 Apps from partners, including both web apps and add-ins, to maximize the value to your organization.

Manage Microsoft 365 Apps

When new add-ins are made available for Microsoft 365 Apps that can be deployed, you will see More apps available in the UI and you can choose to deploy the new add-in.

For details about deploying and managing Microsoft 365 Apps, see Test and deploy Microsoft 365 Apps in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Going forward

We are continuously building capabilities that will meet the needs of specialist and global admins for enterprise customers. We are also making ongoing improvements to help you complete tasks faster and more easily, so that you can bring greater value to your organization and business stakeholders.

Guide to Microsoft 365 Apps deployment and servicing at Microsoft Ignite

Meenah_Khosraw — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:55 GMT

In May 2020, we discussed how to modernize servicing by introducing a new Monthly Enterprise Channel, and in September, we introduced new cloud-based admin capabilities to help IT admins service Microsoft 365 Apps for their organizations.

This time at Ignite, we’re bringing you more! Learn what’s new and ask our Microsoft 365 Apps deployment experts any questions you have during one of our Office Hours Q&A sessions, or head over to the Microsoft 365 Apps discussion space and post your question there. Be sure to also check out the on-demand sessions, blogs, and Microsoft Docs articles below to learn more.

Office Hours
Q&A with Office experts on deploying and managing Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise To support your efforts deploying and managing Microsoft 365 Apps, our team of experts will be hosting a Q&A series for IT professionals. We’ll discuss the new cloud-based management features available in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, such as inventory, apps health, security update status, and servicing profiles.	Wed. March 3 9:00 AM CET	Wed. March 3 9:00 AM PT	Wed. March 10 9:00 AM CET	Wed. March 10 9:00 AM PT

Office Hours

Q&A with Office experts on deploying and managing Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

To support your efforts deploying and managing Microsoft 365 Apps, our team of experts will be hosting a Q&A series for IT professionals. We’ll discuss the new cloud-based management features available in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, such as inventory, apps health, security update status, and servicing profiles.

Wed. March 3
9:00 AM CET

Wed. March 3
9:00 AM PT

Wed. March 10
9:00 AM CET

Wed. March 10
9:00 AM PT

On-demand sessions
Featured session: Manage Office apps deployments with tools & services Speakers: Amesh Mansukhani & Javier Carrillo Managing Office apps updates can be challenging. End-users demand shorter downtime, network admins want lower bandwidth consumption, and operations teams need dependable insights on deployments. Satisfying these requirements was a distant dream, until today. In this session, learn how new cloud services provide improved insights into your inventory and app health, along with tools for automated deployments and control to increase your workload efficiency and lower overall management TCO.
Insights and controls of Microsoft 365 Apps for admins Speakers: Rebecca Keys & Reshma Kapoor With the increasing speed and complexity of moving to the cloud, IT admins are in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. We want to put our admins in the driver's seat. In this session, you'll learn about actionable insights and effective controls we're developing in the Microsoft 365 admin center to make it easier for admins to manage monthly Office updates and leverage the user feedback signal on Microsoft 365 products to improve the health of their organization.
How to onboard devices to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center Speakers: Bob Clements & Martin Nothnagel In this session, learn how to manage the life cycle of your Office applications. We will walk you through the Office installation, onboarding devices to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, registering with Inventory, and how to utilize Servicing Profiles.

On-demand sessions

Featured session:
Manage Office apps deployments with tools & services
Speakers: Amesh Mansukhani & Javier Carrillo

Managing Office apps updates can be challenging. End-users demand shorter downtime, network admins want lower bandwidth consumption, and operations teams need dependable insights on deployments. Satisfying these requirements was a distant dream, until today. In this session, learn how new cloud services provide improved insights into your inventory and app health, along with tools for automated deployments and control to increase your workload efficiency and lower overall management TCO.

Insights and controls of Microsoft 365 Apps for admins
Speakers: Rebecca Keys & Reshma Kapoor

With the increasing speed and complexity of moving to the cloud, IT admins are in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. We want to put our admins in the driver's seat. In this session, you'll learn about actionable insights and effective controls we're developing in the Microsoft 365 admin center to make it easier for admins to manage monthly Office updates and leverage the user feedback signal on Microsoft 365 products to improve the health of their organization.

How to onboard devices to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center
Speakers: Bob Clements & Martin Nothnagel

In this session, learn how to manage the life cycle of your Office applications. We will walk you through the Office installation, onboarding devices to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, registering with Inventory, and how to utilize Servicing Profiles.

Additional resources

Microsoft 365 Apps health - Deploy Office | Microsoft Docs

Inventory - Deploy Office | Microsoft Docs

Security Currency - Deploy Office | Microsoft Docs

To keep up with the latest news, live events and on-demand sessions during Microsoft Ignite, be sure to subscribe to the Microsoft 365 Tech Community blog! Or if you have a question, head over to the Microsoft 365 Tech Community discussion space and start a conversation.

Announcing Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo coverage in Brazil

John_Mighell — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:01 GMT

We are excited to announce the availability of Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo in Brazil! With the addition of Brazil, you can now utilize Multi-Geo to extend your Microsoft 365 tenant to store users’ Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint data in one or more of our 16 available geographies:

Asia Pacific	European Union	Japan	Switzerland
Australia	France	Korea	United Arab Emirates
Brazil	Germany	Norway	United Kingdom
Canada	India	South Africa	United States

This is the latest announcement as part of the Microsoft More for Brazil plan that supports inclusive growth through technology, sustainability and skilling programs, including the expansion of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure in Brazil.

Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo enables customers to reduce their on-premises footprint and meet data residency obligations by allocating user data at rest to our available geo locations in the Microsoft 365 cloud, all within a single tenant. For more details, check out this Microsoft Docs article Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo.

For in-depth information on the overall Microsoft 365 data center strategy and Multi-Geo, check out this video from Ignite 2020:

Pricing and Licensing

Multi-Geo is available as an add-on to the following Microsoft 365 subscription plans for EA customers with a minimum of 250 seats in their Microsoft 365 tenant, and a minimum of 5% of the Microsoft 365 seats within a tenant having corresponding Multi-Geo Capabilities for Microsoft 365. Please contact your Microsoft account team for details.

Microsoft 365 F1, F3, E3, or E5

Office 365 F3, E1, E3, or E5

Exchange Online Plan 1 or Plan 2

OneDrive for Business Plan 1 or Plan 2

SharePoint Online Plan 1 or Plan 2

Licensing

Resource mailboxes (Rooms/Equipment) and Shared mailboxes need to be licensed for Multi-Geo
Microsoft 365 Group Mailboxes that have moved to Satellite Geos will not need to be licensed for Multi-Geo

How can I get Multi-Geo?

Reach out to your Microsoft representative to purchase Multi-Geo Capabilities for Microsoft 365.

Questions?

If you have any questions, include them in a comment on this thread and we'll be happy to answer them!

Building better products together with our customers

Jeff Teper — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:05 GMT

How do teams at Microsoft learn from our customers? How do we know that we’re building products in a way that will meet our customers’ needs?

I’m excited to share with you how our Microsoft 365 engineering teams are working to get better customer insights to build products that delight customers and help them be successful. This journey began about two years ago and has been a great partnership across the leaders in our Microsoft 365 engineering organization that builds productivity experiences and devices for people at home, work, and school. The products we build include Teams, Office, OneDrive, SharePoint, Windows, Surface, Search, Microsoft Graph, and Admin experiences including Analytics, Endpoint management, and more.

What does this look like in practice? We believe it is imperative that we incorporate input and feedback at every stage of product development. We want to make sure that we surface the critical assumptions we have about customers and hold ourselves accountable to check those assumptions with them. All of our engineers, regardless of whether they are an early in career software engineer or a seasoned design leader, are encouraged to make a habit of meeting directly with customers and consulting data and insights along the way.

Customer-driven behaviors in practice

We have been sharing stories of individuals and teams who are positively impacting culture, products, and customers. These stories serve as a source of inspiration for those who have yet to embrace the vital behaviors of customer-driven culture. One story we have told that has resonated with many comes from the Surface Packaging team, in which customer feedback forced them to rethink what ‘premium’ meant to their customers.

Better insights on what customers need, greater empathy for the challenges they might face with our products, and more advanced methodologies for having experimentation-based software development lead to better products for our customer. These elements also contribute to employees feeling more energized and excited by the purpose of what we're doing for our customers – you feel like you're not making the big sales pitch for Microsoft; instead, you're just listening to what a customer needs from us. Being a curious listener to a customer builds awareness, empathy, and excitement and creates energy. We’ve focused not only on driving excitement through grassroots efforts amongst individual contributors and new hires to the organization, but are also empowering our people managers with tools and resources to help them work with their teams to ensure customer voice is at the forefront of how we are building our products.

We’ve made it easy for anyone in our 30,000 person organization to talk to and have a dialogue with a customer. Now that we can’t travel to conferences and have on-campus customer engagements, we’ve been running virtual customer engagements for almost a year, and have learned a lot. We are able to engage with an even more diverse set of customers than we would be able to do in-person, because attendance is remote and friction such as travel is removed. For example, in September 2020, the Microsoft Ignite conference was all-virtual and the audience significantly increased in size; we had more opportunities to listen to small business than we typically get during the conference. Requirements from large enterprises can vary significantly other smaller organizations, and it’s important that we are hearing from everybody, and our teams are challenged to pivot their perspectives with new information that challenges outdated data or biases.

Microsoft 365 engineering teams highly value these opportunities to engage in conversation with our customers, and we hear from our customers that they do too. They say things like: “It's refreshing to feel like we're being heard, and that our inputs matter”, “The two-way forum (yields) great technical input and output. Feels like true collaboration”, “It used to be that only MVPs and large clients had access to this … getting feedback from folks across industries is extremely helpful”.

How can you get involved?

During the upcoming Microsoft Ignite conference March 2-4, join a Product Roundtable meeting to get your voice heard, in small group discussion, with the engineers building the products you use. The Product Roundtables meetings can be accessed through the Microsoft Ignite Connection Zone.
If you can’t make it to the Microsoft Ignite conference, or you want to stay connected on an ongoing basis: join an ongoing customer insider panel to share your experiences and provide input on new designs that engineering are iterating on for future investments.

As we in Microsoft continue on our journey of being customer-driven, we are thankful for all the opportunities we have to learn from our customers so we can do our best work. Everything we do, from the pixels we paint on the screen to the compiler changes we make to get higher quality code out to customers faster do impacts customers and makes a difference.

Enabling remote work and new scenarios with Microsoft 365 E3

Microsoft_365_Team — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:43:56 GMT

IT decision makers are being asked to ensure their businesses are secure and their end users are productive – regardless of where they are working. To support this need, our customers are looking to accelerate their growth in the cloud with Microsoft 365. The Microsoft 365 E3 plan provides the flexibility to adapt and thrive through societal and economic disruptions because it combines best-in-class productivity apps with core security and compliance capabilities. One of the most powerful tools in the Microsoft 365 toolkit is Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

In the last eighteen months, customers and partners have taken advantage of several product innovations to not only simplify the consumption of the latest technologies in their organizations, but also adapt to changing demands of remote work without missing a beat.

Stay protected when working remotely

Here are some highlights of recent announcements, with even more coming very soon:

Microsoft Tunnel virtual private network (VPN) capabilities, extending Conditional Access to workers to use Android and iOS devices to remotely access on-premises data - a key principle of Zero Trust security.
Broadened endpoint management, including adding support for virtual desktops and kiosks and shared devices, in addition to Windows PCs, Macs, and mobile devices.
Expanded MacOS management to deliver more apps securely, collect better telemetry to improve management decisions, and improve security with enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) and file encryption.
Endpoint analytics to help you understand how performance and health issues with your organization’s hardware and software may be impacting your end-user’s productivity. Further, Endpoint analytics connects insights from Productivity Score with Microsoft Endpoint Manager to ensure everyone can do their best work with Microsoft 365.
Unified endpoint security management that reduces the friction between end-user computing teams and security operations by providing deep integration between Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as well as enabling specialized security roles for security managers to view and manage their day-to-day tasks within the Configuration Manager Console.
Modernize your IT by bringing intelligent security value to all endpoints, whether managed on-premises or in the cloud.

Microsoft 365 helps foster a culture of collaboration with connected experiences while protecting company data, increasing employee satisfaction, and optimizing the administration of security and management.

Given these significant investments in Microsoft Endpoint Manger and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) over the past 18 months – with even more to come in the coming weeks – we plan to increase the price of these standalone products: EMS E3 from $9 to $11 per user per month, and Intune standalone from $6 to $8 per user per month effective August 1, 2021.* The price for Microsoft 365 E3 will not change.

*The pricing availability date updated from July 1, 2021 to August 1, 2021.

Enabling productivity for everyone with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

MattPhilipenko — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:28 GMT

Enabling productivity for everyone with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

A huge benefit to being in the cloud with Microsoft 365 is having the flexibility to provide employees working across different roles and locations with the latest features and updates—a critical task for any IT organization. That’s why we’re excited to announce two new features for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise—extended offline access and device-based subscriptions—that remove critical blockers and enable customers to deploy Microsoft 365 across their entire environment, streamlining deployment and administration. These capabilities will help you ensure that employees who are offline for months at a time or rely on shared devices and workstations can benefit from the same user experience and stay productive and secure no matter where they’re working.

Enabling extended offline access scenarios

To ensure Microsoft 365 Apps stays up to date, devices must connect to the internet at least once every 30 days. However, we’re aware that in industries, including government, oil and gas, manufacturing, agriculture, and scientific research, some people work in secure or remote environments where they have limited or no internet connectivity for longer periods of time.

To address this, we’re now providing extended offline access* to enable devices to stay activated without connecting to the internet for up to 180 days. Workers in secure or remote environments who are offline for long periods of time can continue using Microsoft 365 Apps to stay productive on-the-job without worrying about being cut off from the tools they need most after 30 days.

Setting up and running Microsoft 365 Apps for offline use

For organizations with workers who need to run Microsoft 365 Apps offline for an extended period, IT administrators can enable extended offline access when they install Microsoft 365 Apps on a device. The worker signs into Windows with their Microsoft 365 account by viewing the expiration date that appears in a Product Information window on their device. After that, the worker can continue using Office with no internet for up to 180 days. Fifteen (15) days before offline access expires, they will receive an in-app notification. At that point, the worker can either reconnect the device to the internet before the expiration date or the IT administrator can generate a license in the Office portal from a second, connected device and copy the license to the other device.

In order to enable Extended Offline Access on a device, IT admins need to deploy the group policy on that device

Setting up device-based subscriptions for shared devices

For organizations, whose employees are mostly information workers, user-based licensing for Microsoft 365 covers most use case scenarios. But for organizations in industries, such as manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, retail and hospitality, many employees may share one device. In those cases, users that rely on shared devices have not been able to have access to the latest and most secure productivity tools that are available on desktop, to address this scenario we’re introducing device-based subscriptions for Microsoft 365 Apps.

Assigning licenses to devices in Microsoft 365 admin center.

Having device-based subscriptions for Microsoft 365 Apps enables you to extend coverage to commonly used devices on loading docks, at nurses’ stations, on the manufacturing floor, or in a breakroom. Because the license is assigned to the device, workers aren’t required to have their own Azure Active Directory identity. Workers can sign into the device as many times as needed and access all Microsoft 365 Apps, including Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word.

To deploy a device-based subscription, you simply purchase the required number of Microsoft 365 licenses and assign a license to a device group in the Microsoft 365 admin center. To enable this functionality on a device, use the group policy for currently installed devices and/or the configuration.xml attribute.

Learn more about device-based licensing for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise here.

*Eligible customers should contact their Microsoft account representative to determine if extended offline access for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise is the right solution for them.

New Microsoft Edge to replace Microsoft Edge Legacy with April’s Windows 10 Update Tuesday release

Microsoft365_MicrosoftEdge_Product — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:52:30 GMT

Editor's note: This article was originally published on February 5, 2021.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 24, 2021 to reflect new update timelines for specific versions of Windows 10.

In August 2020, we announced that support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop application ends on March 9, 2021. After this date, Microsoft Edge Legacy will no longer receive security updates.

To replace this out of support application, we are announcing that the new Microsoft Edge will be available as part of the Windows 10 cumulative monthly security update—otherwise referred to as the Update Tuesday (or “B”) release—on April 13, 2021. When you apply this update to your devices, the out of support Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop application will be removed and the new Microsoft Edge will be installed. The new Microsoft Edge offers built-in security and our best interoperability with the Microsoft security ecosystem, all while being more secure than Chrome for businesses on Windows 10.

Note: This replacement will also occur if you apply the optional Windows 10 March Preview (or “C”) release.

What Windows 10 versions will be impacted?

This will be a part of the Windows 10 Update Tuesday (or “B”) release on April 13, 2021 for the following Windows 10 versions (other versions will follow):

This will also be part of the optional Windows 10 March Preview (or “C”) release for the versions below unless otherwise indicated.

Windows 10, version 1803, all editions (April 2018)
- Note: This version will not be included in the optional Windows 10 March Preview release. Microsoft Edge will now be included with the Windows 10 Update Tuesday (or “B”) release on May 11, 2021 for version 1803.
Windows 10, version 1809, all editions (October 2018)
- Note: This version will not be included in the optional Windows 10 March Preview release. Instead, Microsoft Edge will be included in the optional Windows 10 April Preview release, followed by the Windows 10 Update Tuesday (or “B”) release on May 11, 2021, for version 1809.
Windows 10, version 1903, all editions (May 2019)
- Note: This version is out of support for desktop
Windows 10, version 1909, all editions (October 2019)
Windows 10, version 2004, all editions (May 2020)
Windows 10, version 20H2, all editions (October 2020)
- Because Windows 10, version 20H2 already uses the new Microsoft Edge as its default browser, it will not be reinstalled; only Microsoft Edge Legacy will be removed.

Will this impact Windows 7 or Windows 8.X?

No, Microsoft Edge Legacy was not available for Windows 7 or Windows 8.X. This will only impact the Windows 10 versions listed previously.

What if the new Microsoft Edge is already installed?

If the new Microsoft Edge is already installed, applying this update will not reinstall the new Microsoft Edge and will only remove Microsoft Edge Legacy.

Can I still run Microsoft Edge Legacy and the new Microsoft Edge as a side-by-side experience after this update?

Because Microsoft Edge Legacy will no longer be on devices after you apply this update, the side-by-side experience will no longer be available.

Can I skip this update?

We do not recommend skipping this update. Windows cumulative monthly security updates provide critical updates to the Windows 10 operating system.

What will the end user experience be like?

Your Windows 10 defaults and personalization, such as your default browser or taskbar pins, will be respected (e.g. if you had Microsoft Edge Legacy pinned to the taskbar, this would be replaced with the new Microsoft Edge).

I use kiosk mode in Microsoft Edge Legacy—how will this affect me?

You will need to set up kiosk mode in the new Microsoft Edge. Please see this blog for details and recommendations for kiosk mode.

Will this affect other apps that use EdgeHTML?

EdgeHTML—the rendering engine for Microsoft Edge Legacy—will continue to be supported. To develop apps for the new Microsoft Edge, use WebView2, the Chromium-based version of Microsoft’s WebView.

If I use a private WSUS server for updates, how can I keep the new Microsoft Edge up to date?

After the update is installed, the new Microsoft Edge will check for and install updates automatically via its own updater. This requires an internet connection. If you manage devices that connect to a private WSUS server, you can use the updates for the new Microsoft Edge in the WSUS catalog to keep these devices up to date. See our guide for managing Microsoft Edge with Configuration Manager for more information.

What do I need to do?

We recommend that you update to the new Microsoft Edge prior to support ending for Microsoft Edge Legacy on March 9, 2021. For guidance, please refer to this Docs page. If you use kiosk mode in Microsoft Edge Legacy, you will also need to set up kiosk mode in the new Microsoft Edge.

If you decide to wait, Microsoft Edge Legacy will be replaced with the new Microsoft Edge when you apply the Windows 10 Update Tuesday (or “B”) release.

Note: This replacement will also occur if you apply the optional Windows 10 March Preview (or “C”) release.

How can I prepare? What support options are available?

To prepare, we recommend that you first read this article about how to plan for deployment. This article is a great starting point to help you with key questions and will offer a path forward for major steps in the transition to the new Microsoft Edge. There is also a dedicated Docs page for this transition.

To get help, we offer a variety of support options. If you have Microsoft Unified Support, you can reach out to that support service for help with the transition. There’s also FastTrack which is available at no additional charge to customers with 150 or more paid seats of Windows 10 Enterprise. And if you prefer to get started on your own, we have self-guided deployment and configuration materials, complete with a series from Microsoft Mechanics, ready for you on our Docs site.

Finally, if you run into compatibility or app issues as you transition to the new Microsoft Edge, there’s App Assure. The App Assure promise is this: if your web apps and sites work on IE 11, supported versions of Google Chrome, or any version of Microsoft Edge (including Microsoft Edge Legacy), those web apps and sites should work on the new Microsoft Edge. If not, you can contact App Assure at no additional cost for remediation support or by email if you experience any challenges submitting your request (ACHELP@microsoft.com). You can also read more about App Assure and Microsoft Edge in this blog.

Where can I learn more about the Windows 10 release as it becomes available?

Find more information about April’s Windows 10 Update Tuesday release (or the Windows 10 March Preview release) on the Windows message center Docs site.

The new Microsoft Edge offers built-in security and works with the Microsoft security ecosystem to help customers realize a holistic approach to security. We are excited for everyone to see the benefits of the new Microsoft Edge and we are thankful for your valued partnership.

- Microsoft Edge Team

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Microsoft 365 apps say farewell to Internet Explorer 11 and Windows 10 sunsets Microsoft Edge Legacy

Microsoft365_MicrosoftEdge_Product — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 16:21:04 GMT

August 17, 2021: Support is now unavailable for Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE11. Additionally, you should expect no new features when accessing Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE11 and that the daily usage experience for users could get progressively worse over time until the apps and services are disconnected. Banners will be used to communicate and alert users to upcoming changes in experience, such as app or service disconnection and/or redirection.

July 23, 2021: Beginning August 17, 2021, Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) and users may have a degraded experience, or be unable to connect to, those apps and services. These apps and services will phase out over weeks and months to ensure a smooth end of support, with each app and service phasing out on independent schedules.

If you encounter issues while accessing Microsoft 365 apps and services from IE11 after August 17, 2021, support will be unavailable. Additionally, you should expect no new features and that your daily usage experience could get progressively worse over time until the apps and services are disconnected.

Application experiences in IE11 beginning August 17, 2021:

Outlook Web App: Users logging in with AAD accounts will still receive the full OWA experience but will not receive new features beginning August 17, 2021, while users logging in with Microsoft Accounts (MSA) will be redirected to the Outlook Web App Light experience.
Open with Explorer/View in File Explorer (SharePoint): We understand that some customers may continue to use Open with Explorer and View in File Explorer (only accessible in IE11) to access document libraries. To avoid disruption, these customers will be able to use these features for now when they go to a document library in IE11. These features remain in maintenance mode and aren't receiving further development. We encourage all customers to move to a modern browser and OneDrive sync for a better user experience and easier access to files. For more information on how to prepare your SharePoint environment for end of support on IE11, please read this Docs article.
All other apps and services will phase out over weeks and months to ensure a smooth end of support with each app and service phasing out on independent schedules.

June 23, 2021: The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge. Please refer to this blog to learn more about the retirement announcement.

February 5, 2021: A new announcement has been made regarding support ending for Microsoft Edge Legacy. Please refer to this new blog for more information.

This article was originally published on August 17, 2020.

Today, we’re announcing that Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) by this time next year.

Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11.
- Update: The Microsoft Teams web app no longer supports IE 11 as of November 30, 2020. To access Microsoft Teams, use the desktop app or a supported modern browser like the new Microsoft Edge.
Beginning August 17, 2021, the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11.

This means that after the above dates, customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11. For degraded experiences, new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may cease to work when accessing the app or service via IE 11. While we know this change will be difficult for some customers, we believe that customers will get the most out of Microsoft 365 when using the new Microsoft Edge. We are committed to helping make this transition as smooth as possible.

Customers have been using IE 11 since 2013 when the online environment was much less sophisticated than the landscape today. Since then, open web standards and newer browsers—like the new Microsoft Edge—have enabled better, more innovative online experiences. We believe that Microsoft 365 subscribers, in both consumer and commercial contexts, will be well served with this change through faster and more responsive web access to greater sets of features in everyday toolsets like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and more.

Respecting investments in IE 11 web apps

We understand the need to “do more with less” in the new business environment. By the dates listed above, customers should no longer access Microsoft 365 apps and services using IE 11, but we want to be clear that IE 11 isn’t going away¹ and that our customers’ own legacy IE 11 apps and investments will continue to work. Customers have made business-critical investments in IE 11 legacy apps and we respect that those apps are still functioning.

In this moment of bridging between modern and legacy apps, many customers may feel there is no choice but to rely on a two-browser workaround of using IE 11 alongside a modern browser. However, with the new Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer mode, customers don’t need an awkward workaround of one browser for some apps and another for other apps. They can standardize on one browser and seamlessly experience the best of the modern web in one tab while accessing a business-critical legacy IE 11 app in another tab – all housed within the new Microsoft Edge.

With native integration in Microsoft management, security, and productivity tools, we recommend the new Microsoft Edge to address our customers’ compatibility and secure remote work needs. Microsoft Edge has SmartScreen built-in and has the highest-rated phishing and malware protection as measured by two independent studies. We will also support our customers’ transition to the new Microsoft Edge with app and site compatibility assistance. As part of the App Assure promise, we have Microsoft engineers ready to help customers in case they run into compatibility issues. For more information, see the ‘Help is available’ section below.

Note: Using Internet Explorer mode in the new Microsoft Edge will not help to extend IE 11 access to Microsoft 365 apps and services beyond the dates listed above. Microsoft 365 apps and services will stop supporting IE 11 on the dates listed.

Microsoft Edge Legacy makes way for the new Microsoft Edge

Nearly two years ago, we started working on the new Microsoft Edge, listening to our customers’ needs for world-class compatibility (including legacy app support), security, privacy, easy and unified manageability, and productivity. The result is a whole new Microsoft Edge from the inside out: a browser built on the Chromium open source engine with the latest in Microsoft enterprise capabilities. Since its release in January, millions of users have upgraded their home and work browsers to the new Microsoft Edge. Additionally, new devices and future Windows feature updates (starting with Windows 10, version 20H2) will contain the new Microsoft Edge.

Now that we’ve shipped the new Microsoft Edge, and upgraded most of our Windows 10 customers to the new browser, we’re ending support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app on March 9, 2021.

After March 9, 2021, the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app will not receive new security updates.

The new Microsoft Edge is our best expression of a modern browser—we’re excited for customers to experience it. Apps and sites created for Microsoft Edge Legacy will continue to work in the new Microsoft Edge, but if a compatibility issue does arise, we have our App Assure promise to provide support. For more information, see the section below.

Help is available

For customers using IE 11 to access Microsoft 365 apps and services, or using Microsoft Edge Legacy as their preferred browser, we recommend the new Microsoft Edge and offer a range of support options to help transition.

To begin, we recommend that customers first read this detailed article about how to plan for deployment. The article guides customers through key questions and offers a path forward for major steps in the transition to the new Microsoft Edge.

Next, customers should determine what type of support they are looking for, if any.

Customers with Microsoft Unified Support can reach out to that support service for help transitioning to the new Microsoft Edge.

For customers who would like guidance on how to plan, deploy, or adopt the new Microsoft Edge, there’s FastTrack. FastTrack is available at no additional charge to customers with 150 or more paid seats of Windows 10 Enterprise. To get started, submit a Request for Assistance through the FastTrack site.

And for those customers who prefer to get started on their own, we have self-guided deployment and configuration materials, complete with a series from Microsoft Mechanics, ready on our Docs site.

Finally, it is natural for customers to be concerned about compatibility when it comes to business-critical apps and sites. This is why we offer compatibility “peace of mind” with App Assure. The App Assure promise is this: if customers’ web apps and sites work on IE 11, supported versions of Google Chrome, or any version of Microsoft Edge (including Microsoft Edge Legacy), those web apps and sites should work on the new Microsoft Edge. If not, they can contact App Assure for remediation support here or by email (ACHELP@microsoft.com). Assistance is provided in Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese (support specialists speak Mandarin only), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish.

Higher performance, simpler security on a single browser standard

At a time when IT professionals are being asked to do more with less on an unprecedented level, we want to make it simple for our customers to balance productivity, security, privacy, and cost.

To learn more about the new Microsoft Edge, customers can check out our website and the How to Get Started End User Guide.

We’re grateful for the trust you have placed in Microsoft through the years. We’re here to help and can’t wait for you to experience Microsoft 365 on the new Microsoft Edge.

¹ Internet Explorer 11 is a component of the Windows operating system and follows the Lifecycle Policy for the product on which it is installed.

Introducing Microsoft Viva

Seth Patton — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:21 GMT

By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience

Microsoft Viva

Today we are announcing Microsoft Viva, the first Employee Experience Platform (EXP) built for the digital era. Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated employee experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere.

For all the details on Microsoft Viva, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/Viva/Blog

Microsoft Viva Connections

Viva Connections offers a new way for leaders to shape culture and invite employees to participate in building an inclusive workplace that helps everyone succeed by giving people a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.

Viva Connections is personalized and appears in the apps and devices employees already use every day, such as Microsoft Teams.

For all the details on Viva Connections, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/VivaConnectionsBlog

Microsoft Viva Insights

To help people achieve balance, build better work habits, and find focus wherever and whenever they need it, we’re excited to introduce Viva Insights – available in Microsoft Teams starting today in public preview. Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. In addition to new productivity and wellbeing experiences and insights in Microsoft Teams, Viva Insights will, over time, bring the power of Microsoft Workplace Analytics and Microsoft MyAnalytics together under the Microsoft Viva brand.

Viva Insights is designed to protect privacy. Personal insights are visible only to the individual, and for manager and leader insights, customers can rely on safeguards like de-identification, aggregation, and differential privacy by default.

For all the details on Viva Insights, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/VivaInsightsBlog

Microsoft Viva Learning

Viva Learning empowers everyone to gain targeted skills in the flow of their work by creating a central hub for learning in Microsoft Teams where people can discover, share, assign, and learn from content libraries available across the organization.

For all the details on Viva Learning, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/VivaLearningBlog

Microsoft Viva Topics

Viva Topics uses artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day and to connect, manage, and protect content across systems and teams.

We’re pleased to announce that today, Viva Topics has reached general availability for our commercial customers.

For all the details on Viva Topics, read our official announcement blog at aka.ms/viva/topics/announce

Update information at the speed of type: Edit in grid view

Miceile Barrett — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:23 GMT

The new Microsoft Lists grid view is now available worldwide, including SharePoint lists and libraries that share the same technology platform in Microsoft 365.

We’ll cover all new features and capabilities below – including screenshots and links to learn more, starting here with an in-depth demo video I produced to showcase all the goodness our Lists engineers have been working on and refining:

Let's dive into the details...

The ‘Quick edit’ button is now ‘Edit in grid view’

Previously, when users bulk edited list items in a list or a document library, they select the Quick edit button in the top action bar. We are renaming Quick Edit to Edit in grid view.

The Quick Edit button for all lists and libraries in Microsoft 365 will be renamed “Edit in grid view” [bottom]; previously “Quick edit” [top].

The newly named view provides an inline editing experience with lots of improvements, making it easy to quickly update list items in bulk within grid view. We’ll cover all of this beyond the button rename below.

Roadmap: 67136

And, if you love grid view, make it your default view. That's right, you can save a view in grid for any SharePoint list or document library. Note: when a user saves a view in Quick Edit, the list or document library will always render in quick edit for easy inline editing.

Roadmap: 64229

Edit with confidence, for those accidental ‘oops’ moments

As you work across rows and columns within Microsoft Lists, mistakes will happen, and it needs to be easy to recover information. Like how you can remove sentences and phrases in a Word document, you will be able to do this in Lists by using the undo button. The same is true in reverse if there was something in a field previously that you want to bring back - just click the redo button.

Click Undo or Redo to revert changes or remove mistakes within Microsoft Lists.

Roadmap: 68810

Improved inline editing experience

The team has been working hard to improve the inline editing experience and release the new grid view. Our priority is providing the most effective inline editing experience by delivering new field editors and features designed to make editing data better than ever.

New inline field editors

Person	Items with a Person column can now be rendered using the new "pill" design format with a profile person’s photo also displayed. Select one or more people to add to a Person column quickly, and the entry will display an updated look. To turn this on, you can select “show profile picture” from the column setting. Roadmap ID: 67095
Choice	Items within a Choice column 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. Roadmap ID: 67095
Date and Time	The legacy calendar control is replaced with Office Fabric calendar for Gregorian calendars in SharePoint lists and libraries when filling or adjusting the date field. The new calendar experience is faster and delivers a coherent experience across throughout. Roadmap ID: 63277
Yes/No	Items with a Yes/No column will appear with a check mark when the value is selected. Roadmap ID: 67119
Multi-line Rich text editor	When you turn on rich text editing in your multi-line text fields, you can now edit directly inline in grid. Roadmap ID: (coming soon)

Improvements to the overall editing experience throughout the grid

As you can see, what was ‘Quick edit’ is now Edit in grid view, and one of the biggest innovations is simply improving the speed and accuracy for how you input and update information. The grid itself is a feature, and we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing feedback and improving both technology and performance – to keep up with the speed at which you work AND not slow you down.

The new Quick Edit experience showing some of the innovation: updated grid lines, fixed row height, new selection, sticky first column, Add new button, visual cues and more.

Fixed row height | When in grid, you will see a new layout option “Fixed Height” within the view drop-down menu. This layout option will adjust the height of all rows to the same height to optimize vertical spacing.

Roadmap ID: 64867

Sticky first column | Easily navigate you list with a sticky column. As you scroll horizontally across a list or documentary library in grid, the far-left column remains in place. You can see this in the main graphic of this section – the “Session name” column remains in place as you scroll to the right.

Roadmap ID: 64866

New Visuals | You'll see new grid lines, an improved on-hover experience when using your mouse around the grid, themed color bars on the side of list items - including error messaging, a “Create New Item” button at the bottom of quick edit for creating new items inline, and updated column header drop-down menus.

Roadmap ID: 64871

Selection | You will see an updated way for selecting single or multiple items. This, too, supports existing copy/paste and drag-to-fill, applicable to multiple rows when using shift + selection. And when navigating and interacting via keyboard keystrokes - like what we talked to John Sanders about - a consistent keyboard navigation approach.

Roadmap ID: 64868

Expanding the default grid view from 30 items to 100 | You will now see 100 items per page on SharePoint document library or list when using Quick Edit; aka, less need page through items - noting that many lists are greater than 30 items and less than 100 - a nice data-driven outcome based on real customer use.

Roadmap ID: 64231

Keyboarding consistency | When you edit in grid view, you will have a faster editing experience that adheres to greater levels of accessibility. Navigate across rows and columns using the tab key. Plus, pressing Enter enables you to edit that field. Clicking Enter on a new row saves the new item. And pressing the Esc key closes editor.

Roadmap ID: 70670

Visual and verbal read only field cues | Lists fields will show people when a field is edit-only and screen reader support when a field is read-only.

Roadmap ID: 70672

Configure your schema, aka – make lists your own especially when in grid view

You no longer need to leave inline editing to configure schema on your list – to do things like filter, sort, create new columns, hide columns, and save views… yep, do all that now directly from grid edit mode.

Create all column types directly from Quick Edit | You’ll be able to create all the same columns types when you need to start tracking additional information without have to leave Quick Edit.

Roadmap ID: 63277

Create all column types directly from Quick Edit.

Learn more how to create all column types when in Edit in grid view mode.

Edit all columns directly from grid | The capabilities when in Lists "grid" view will now allow people to pin a column to the filter's pane, format the column, show/hide columns, and hide their column(s). You used to have to exit out of grid edit to accomplish these common tasks. Exit edit mode less – that’s the new motto.

Roadmap ID: 68714

Access list forms while editing in grid view

We have brought the form into grid view so you can easily view your content vertically or create new items. This is useful if certain columns are hidden from the view or you have lots of columns requiring horizontal scrolling.

View and edit items in forms inside of grid | Get full visibility on the whole of information per list or file item by viewing its form (instead of scrolling to the right on the row).

View and edit items in forms inside of Quick edit.

Roadmap: 64232

“New” button on the command bar | Alongside adding a new row below the last, you can now click the New button to add a new item or file – the same “New” experience when not in Quick Edit.

Roadmap: 64230

Learn more about editing list items.

In summary…

So, go ahead, Edit in grid view. We know you’re going to like the depth of capability when in edit mode, including the performance and bulk capability improvements.

To learn more about lists, check out the additional resources:

Microsoft Lists support (training articles/videos)
Microsoft Lists resource center
Microsoft Lists adoption center
"Microsoft Lists announcements at Ignite 2020" [blog]
"6 Microsoft Lists on-demand session videos" [blog + videos]

Track what matters most. Make a list and let it flow.

Thanks for checking out the new grid view,

Miceile Barrett, senior program manager – Microsoft (@MSFTmiceile on Twitter)

Evolution of Microsoft Lens

saumitraagarwal — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:46 GMT

Microsoft Lens logo

Recommended by Wirecutter as one of the best mobile scanning apps in 2020, we're taking the next step in our evolution by changing our name and logo from Office Lens to Microsoft Lens and adding some dynamic new features.

Along with the new identity, we are bringing intelligent actions into the camera, including: Image to Text, Image to Table, Image to Contact, Immersive Reader, and QR Code Scan.

Image to text

We are releasing an improved scan experience allowing you to re-order pages, re-edit scanned PDFs, apply a filter to all images in the document, scan up to 100 pages as images or PDFs, easily switch between local and cloud locations while saving PDF, along with an easy way to identify local and cloud files.

We will be rolling out these new features and improvements on Android first and then follow up with iOS in the coming months! Please refer to our support documentation for Android and iOS for further details.

Since Microsoft Lens powers the camera in Microsoft 365 mobile apps, including Office, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive, you can rely on Microsoft Lens to capture and intelligently enhance, and work with your documents, photos and videos with the same ease and dependability of Microsoft Lens app.

Now you can be more organized and productive at work or at school!

Download: Android

Download: iOS

New Microsoft Lists adoption center

Andrea_Lum — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:56 GMT

What’s more fun than adopting Microsoft Lists at your organization? Leveraging prepared resources from Microsoft to help scale your Lists adoption - of course!

Lists is available 100% worldwide across all commercial, government, and education plans. Within Microsoft 365, Lists enables intelligent information tracking, with features to make organizing simple, smart, and flexible. And now that it’s here, it’s time to adopt it – at scale – across your entire organization. And we’re here to help.

Screenshot of the new Microsoft Lists adoption center within adoption.microsoft.com.

Visit the new Microsoft Lists adoption page – your hub of resources to help increase Lists awareness and usage in your organization, including:

Adoption playbook: Review best practices for the entire adoption process, from recruiting champions and building out scenarios to growing awareness and running training.
Day-in-the-life guides: Want to know how Lists is being used by Product Managers, Human Resources, Marketing, and Educators alike? The Lists Day in the Life Guides bring different use cases to life through a diversity of roles, scenarios, and industries to show how your organization can fully take advantage of Lists.
Quickstart guide: If you’re ready to start playing around with Lists, the Quickstart Guide is your map for navigating the basic interface and features of the app, both standalone and integrated in Microsoft Teams.
Adoption Templates: Begin your Lists rollout already equipped with a folder of email, flyer, and announcement templates, all written and designed to show off the main features of Microsoft Lists.

Screenshot of the Lists Day in the Life flyers within adoption.microsoft.com.

Additional resources

In addition to adoption guidance, you can learn more about Microsoft Lists and the rest of the Microsoft 365 collaborative portfolio:

Microsoft Lists help and 'how to': Step-by-step guidance on how to use Lists - support articles and video tutorials.
Lists resource center: Customer stories, blogs, podcasts, demos, and videos.
Collaborative Work Management Demo: Guided Microsoft 365 walk through showcasing solutions across Planner, Tasks, Lists, OneDrive, and Sharepoint - to help you organize, share, and track business.

Screenshot of the Collaborative Work Management Guided Simulation.

Start today. Implement a few key scenarios – like an issue tracker, an internal event schedule, or a new hires dashboard. The above will help accelerate the ‘what’ and ‘how’ so you can get more done with Microsoft Lists.

Happy tracking!

Andrea Lum, product manager – Microsoft

Configure forms and rules in Microsoft Lists

Mark Kashman — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:03 GMT

Going beyond the out-of-box experience doesn’t always require coding or separate tools. With Microsoft Lists, you can further customize forms and notifications with a few clicks, or a copy/paste of JSON code. Both capabilities are now rolling out into Microsoft 365.

Watch , senior program manager on the Microsoft Lists engineering team, as he provides a 10-minute demo of what you can do with Lists rules and forms customization:

Writing rules as easy as point-and-clicking structured sentences [Roadmap ID: 64163 – rolling out]

Create simple if/then rules, based on changes to list information, to set reminders and send notifications. Users with edit permissions on the list can create and manage rules. Users with read-only permissions can’t create or manage rules. Once the feature is available to your users, they’ll be able to create a rule by selecting Automate and then Create a rule in the list command bar near the top of the page.

Click the Automate drop-down menu, and then select “Create a rule” to begin creating rules for your list.

Create your rule(s) is like writing a sentence. Select each of the underlined portions of the rule statement to customize the condition by choosing a column, the value of the column, and who to notify.

Learn more:

JSON list form customization: footer, header, body text [Roadmap ID: 63519 – rolling out]

You can configure the list form in a list or library with a custom header, footer, and the form body with one or more sections with fields in each of those sections. The form configuration does not change the data in the list item or file; it only changes how the form is displayed to users who browse the list or library. Anyone who can create and manage views in a list can use form configuration to configure the form with header, footer, and body with sections.

A Microsoft Lists form configured with a custom header (the calendar icon plus text incorporating Title field), a custom layout (expanded left-to-right to show more), and a custom footer (here adding a link to a related site). Small meta-note: this is the list item from our internal roadmap list to track this exact roadmap feature and Chakkaradeep is our lead PM.

Edit form > Configure layout. To configure a form, you will use JSON formatters that you are already familiar with when formatting a column or a view in a list or library. Form configuration allows for certain predefined elements and attributes to build the custom header, footer, and body with one or more sections.

Learn more (docs.microsoft.com) including sample JSON for header, footer, and body sections for your forms. Plus, Microsoft senior partner technical architect, April Dunnam, recently published a ‘how to’ blog + video + samples, "Customize SharePoint Forms with JSON" (April’s 'ListFormatting' repository in GitHub).

To learn more about Lists throughout the year, please visit our Lists help and learning site, plus our updated Microsoft Lists resource center (adoption materials, blogs, demos, videos, podcasts, and more).

Track what matters most. Make a list, and let it flow.

Thanks, Mark Kashman – senior product manager – Microsoft 365

Get the Microsoft Lists app for iOS

Mark Kashman — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:08 GMT

First things first: Get the Microsoft Lists app for iOS from the App Store.

Note: To sign in, the Microsoft Lists app for iOS requires a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription plan where SharePoint is included. You cannot sign in with consumer Microsoft account credentials.

Second things second: Take all your lists, and create new ones, on the go.

Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize your work. They are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team. And now you can track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more to keep everyone in sync from anywhere while on the go with a personalized, mobile-first experience.

The Microsoft Lists app for iOS provides access to the lists you own and that have been shared with you. You can create new lists, edit list items, and easily share with other people. While sipping coffee - create an Issue tracker list. In the passenger’s seat zipping from place to place - share a link to the session item from a conference in the Event itinerary list. Or standing in a grocery line waiting to check out – update the status of an item based on information from a team chat. Work and information management don’t have to stop when you’re on the go.

Watch Bharath Manoj Manda, senior program manager on the Microsoft Lists engineering team, as he provides a 5-minute demo of what you can do with the Lists app on iOS:

You can start a list in several ways - from scratch with ready-made templates, from an Excel file, or from an existing list. Beyond creation, you’ll see all your favorited and recent lists – ones you own or that have been shared with you. You’ll be able to create both personal lists you own and can share, and team lists owned by members of your teams. And as a bonus, the Lists app for iOS supports offline data consumption and dark mode – lights out, lists on!

The Microsoft Lists app for iOS provides direct access to your favorite and recent lists, offline, capture photos, edit items, configure views, create using ready-made templates, and more.

Summary of all list actions while on the go:

Track and manage lists wherever you’re working
See recent and favorite lists
View lists, even when offline
Edit your lists and list items
Capture and add photos with QR code support
Create, share, and track lists with anyone
Start quickly with ready-made templates
Customize your views using sort, filter, and group by
Dark mode and landscape orientation support
Built-in enterprise-grade data security and compliance
Intune device management support with Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile App Management (MAM) policies (coming soon)
- Learn more how to enable Intune app protection policies (APP) with Microsoft Lists; Microsoft is currently working on getting the Lists app for iOS into the Intune console.

Left-to-right: screenshot examples of the Microsoft Lists app for iOS: Home screen, creating a new list – including from a ready-made template, editing an item (showing dark mode), and editing a person field using global address lookup (GAL).

Notes: To sign in, your organization needs to have an Office 365 commercial subscription that includes SharePoint. iPad specific improvements coming soon. And, we are working on a Microsoft Lists app for Android and will have more to share later this year.

Learn how to get started with Microsoft Lists for iOS and broader help articles for Microsoft Lists (web).

To learn more about Lists throughout the year, please visit our updated Microsoft Lists resource center for adoption materials, blogs, demos, videos, podcasts, and more – including these new training videos.

Third things third: Track what matters most. Make a list, on the go, and let it flow.

Thanks, Mark Kashman – senior product manager – Microsoft 365

Oh, and don’t forget: download and sign in to Microsoft Lists app for iOS.

Aggregated Views of Service Health Across Partner-managed Tenants

Scott Schnoll — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 23:36:55 GMT

Admins who manage multiple Microsoft 365 tenants have told us that one of their top challenges is understanding the impact of service incidents and advisories across all their managed tenants. Signing into tenants individually and navigating through Service Health to understand the issues requires additional time and ultimately, it degrades the quality of end user support by making support reactive instead of proactive.

To address this challenge, we created an experience for these admins that includes aggregated views of service health incidents and advisories across multiple tenants. This view is designed to help admins that support multiple tenants to proactively support their customers. The multi-tenant Service health combines all incidents and advisories affecting your managed tenants and allows you to monitor the health of Microsoft 365 services across your managed tenants. You can see how many and which tenants are affected by a specific incident or advisory. This helps you ascertain the impact across tenants and allows you to proactively communicate to the affected users.

The landing page in the new experience is a start your day view that provides an aggregated view of service health. It shows you the total number of incidents, the total number of advisories affecting any of the managed tenants, and the number of services with active incidents. You can also see how many of your tenants are affected by incidents and advisories.

When you select an incident or advisory, a flyout provides important details about its cause and current status.

The Tenants affected tab lists the tenants that are currently affected by the selected incident. This enables you to take actions, such as informing your customers, sharing workarounds, and the like. The list of affected tenants can be exported to CSV format so that admins can share it with support teams.

This new experience also includes filter options that can be used to view issues by issue type or by service.

We’re excited to release this feature to everyone, but initially support will be limited to partner admins with delegated administration privileges relationships for managing multiple tenants. See How to request a reseller relationship from a customer in Partner Center for information about delegated administration privileges for partners. If you’re a partner admin, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this new experience. Feel free to let us know using the built-in feedback in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

--The Release and Delivery Experiences Team

Cozy up in one of three Microsoft Lists sweater backgrounds for Microsoft Teams

Ben Truelove — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:01 GMT

It might get cold as you make your lists, and check ‘em twice. So, we suggest wearing one of three Microsoft Lists-themed winter holiday sweaters to back you up and keep you warm – in Microsoft Teams, or to use as wallpaper on your desktop.

Ben Truelove's Teams background – Microsoft Lists holiday sweater (Christmas theme).

Make your information tracking festive and nice! Grab the below png’s and follow the ‘how to’ link below.

Download Microsoft Lists holiday sweater background – abstract.

Download Microsoft Lists holiday sweater background – Hanukkah.

Download Microsoft Lists holiday sweater background – Christmas.

Learn how to change your background for a Microsoft Teams meeting.

Special thanks to our design team for creating the fun. They pair well with the Lists app in Teams.

Stay safe and happy holidays,
Ben Truelove

How to Host a Virtual PowerPoint Party!

aneoanou — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:05 GMT

What is a PowerPoint Party?

Yes, it is a real thing! The PowerPoint party has been growing in popularity since COVID required social distancing began, but PowerPoint parties have been entertaining people long before 2020. PowerPoint Parties are a great way to interact with your family this holiday season! Everyone invited to your party is asked to prepare a short presentation on a topic of their choice, or assigned in advance by the group, and they will present their PowerPoint to the group on their The topics can be fun and lighthearted – we all need that in unprecedented times like this!

How to get a PowerPoint Party planned…

Below are some steps for you to follow to successfully throw an online gathering like this!

Plan a theme: Throw a virtual game night, online happy hour, formalized “vent session” or watch party!
Create your deck (and help inspire your friends to create their PowerPoint with these easy templates and tools….

This is an accessible PowerPoint Party template to get you started: PowerPoint party (office.com)

Here are some additional fun templates that may get your creative

Make it more visually appealing – this isn’t your Father’s PowerPoint

You can use additional PowerPoint features like zoom and morph to make your slides more visually appealing and compelling for your virtual audience!

Get your party started!

Naturally, we share our presentations via Microsoft Teams. But, you can host a PowerPoint party on the video conferencing platform of your choice. For the best Teams experience, share using PowerPoint sharing in Teams via the share tray. This will provide you with the best experience for both you and your audience: Share content in a meeting in Teams - Office Support (microsoft.com)

Have Fun!!

Repeat often!

All in all, PowerPoint Parties are a great way to connect with friends, family, or colleagues over the holidays. Whether you’re planning an online shower, virtual birthday party, or just hanging out, PowerPoint has got you covered.

Introducing the Admin Simplified View

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:16:11 GMT

While organizations of all sizes use Microsoft 365, very small businesses (VSBs)—those with 10 or fewer people—have very different needs from medium and enterprise customers. When it comes to using cloud services, VSBs tend to focus on the productivity essentials like using Office to share information, using calendars and email, and using Teams to communicate with their customers.

To help VSBs also focus on the administrative essentials, we are introducing a new experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center called the admin simplified view. This experience can be used by Global admins in any organization that has Microsoft 365, but it is designed primarily for VSBs.

The experience provides you with access to users, teams, and billing information in one view, and it guides you through simplified flows of top actions to take, such as adding users, installing Office, and enabling Teams, email, and calendaring. To revert to the complete admin center experience, you can click Dashboard view.

We are testing this simplified experience over the next few months. An early version is shipping first to targeted release customers starting early next month. We plan on adding more scenarios around onboarding and ongoing subscription management. As always, we are listening to your feedback, so please feel free to reach out using the feedback option in the Microsoft 365 admin center at any time!

Using Priority Accounts in Microsoft 365

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:40 GMT

Many organizations have people that are considered priority accounts for IT, such as executives, leaders, managers, and others. To help IT ensure a high quality of service and protection for these people, we have introduced capabilities in Microsoft 365 that enable an admin to tag specific users as priority accounts and then leverage app-specific features designed for them. To start with, we’ve announced two capabilities: priority account protection and premium mail flow monitoring.

Priority account protection These users are common targets of phishing campaigns and other cyber-attacks because they often deal with sensitive or secret information and have the added advantage (from an attacker’s point of view) of being extremely visible and researchable. Some users can also have access to critical tools and information, making them targets, as well. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (formerly Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection) supports priority accounts as system tags that can be used in filters in alerts, reports, and investigations. Priority account protection can be configured using the Security & Compliance Center.
Premium mail flow monitoring Healthy mail flow can be critical to business success, and delivery delays or failures can have a negative impact on the business. You can monitor mail flow for priority accounts and choose a threshold for failed or delayed emails, receive alerts when that threshold is exceeded, and view a report of email issues for priority accounts. Premium mail flow monitoring can be configured using the modern Exchange admin center.

Let’s have a closer look at the app-specific features for priority accounts.

Priority account protection

In response to the reality of an increasingly sophisticated and targeted threat landscape, organizations need differentiated protection for their most visible and targeted employees. These accounts require more protection and attention from security teams. Monitoring these priority accounts closely can yield early warning and important threat intelligence signals that help protect the organization. With the public preview of priority account protection in Defender for Office 365, security teams can now provide extra protection for these accounts, as described here.

Priority accounts are treated as a tag that can be used in filters in alerts, reports, and investigations in Defender for Office 365, as shown below.

Over the next few months, priority account protection in Defender for Office 365 will be expanded. It will be integrated with the quarantine experience, and any email targeted at a priority account will be tagged as such. It will also be easy to filter the view to see only malicious emails targeted at priority accounts. Priority accounts will also be integrated with Submission explorer; submissions from any priority account will be tagged and filterable, allowing security teams to focus first on these submissions over others.

You can learn more about priority account protection in Defender for Office 365 in this Ignite on-demand session.

Requirements for priority account protection in Defender for Office 365

Priority account protection is available in Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, including those with Office 365 E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security.

Premium mail flow monitoring

Exchange Online provides premium mail flow monitoring for priority accounts. For this scenario, you can use the Microsoft 365 admin center or the modern Exchange admin center to tag a user as a priority accounts.

After adding users to the priority accounts list, you can use the Exchange admin center to monitor mail flow for them You can choose a threshold for failed or delayed emails, receive alerts when that threshold is exceeded, and view a report of email issues for priority accounts. The report allows admins to view failed events from the last 15 minutes and delayed email messages from last 6 hours that were sent to or from priority accounts (note, if no issues are found, the report will be empty).

Requirements for premium mail flow monitoring

Premium mail flow monitoring requires Office 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E3, Office 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5, along with at least 10,000 licenses and at least 50 monthly active Exchange Online users.

Availability of priority accounts

Priority accounts are available to all Microsoft 365 customers. A priority account is a property setting on a user account, and you can see and modify the priority accounts list using PowerShell.

Scenario	PowerShell command
View list of priority accounts	get-user -IsVIP \| select Identity
Add user to list of priority accounts	set-user -VIP:$true -Identity <Identity>
Remove user from list of priority accounts	set-user -VIP:$false -Identity <Identity>

You can use priority accounts only if your organization meets the app-specific requirements. If your organization meets the requirements for using priority account protection or premium mail flow monitoring, then you will see the above experiences in the admin centers. If your organization does not meet either of these requirements, you won’t see these experiences in the admin centers. In the future, more apps and services will support priority accounts, and new experiences and requirements will emerge.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Let us know if you have any scenarios you’d like to see us support for priority accounts.

Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program helps admins in creating a secure app ecosystem

Krishna_Mawani — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:25 GMT

Here in our Microsoft 365 App Compliance Team, the focus is to protect our customers’ data by creating a trusted ecosystem of secure and compliant apps. Our program also helps customers like you to distinguish and filter out apps, based on their own risk tolerance.

The Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program consists of 3 tiers:

Publisher Verification helps admins and users understand the authenticity of app developers integrating with the Microsoft identity platform.
Publisher Attestation is where developers share general, data handling, security and compliance information about their app service.
Microsoft 365 Certification offers assurance and confidence to organizations that data and privacy are adequately secured and protected when using Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Office Add-ins, SharePoint Add-ins, OneNote and Project apps.

Check out our previous blog to learn how these tiers benefit you.

What do we do?

Our program is designed to provide assurance to organizations and enterprise IT admins like you, that when your data interacts with a certified application, that application has undergone a security and privacy review. Microsoft 365 Certification requires a thorough assessment of an app and its underlying infrastructure against a series of security controls. This involves validating a variety of things such as updated antimalware signatures, proper data encryption at rest and in-transit, and many more. All controls span four domains:

Application Security
Operational Security / Secure Deployment
Data Handling Security and Privacy
Optional External Compliance Frameworks

In the Certification tier of the program, we verify the evidence and documentation provided, and attest to its completeness and accuracy prior to awarding a certification.

How does this help you?

This program provides you with the capability to identify trust-worthy apps as we make visible the following app information through AppSource and Microsoft Docs:

Information about the app’s security, privacy, and data handling practices
Customer reviews and compliance information in AppSource
Consent screens and Certification status of an app

Example of Microsoft 365 Certification badge in Microsoft docs

Example of Microsoft 365 certification badge in AppSource

Example of MCAS report on security, compliance and legal practices followed by the app.

You can find more examples here.

This valuable app information provides rich insights and empowers you to make timely and knowledgeable decisions.

And that is not all. We have now expanded the scope of our program from Teams apps to include Outlook, Office Add-ins, SharePoint Add-ins, OneNote and Project. That means more application options for you to choose from.

Some new apps who have undergone Publisher Attestation and/or Microsoft 365 Certification are HeyTaco!, Coco, Klaxoon, SheetGo, SalesTim.

As customer’s data security is of utmost importance to us, we strive to build and grow our program. While doing so, we are working on standardizing the process for annual re-certification of apps. Identifying significant app updates that call for a re-certification is another milestone we plan to achieve.

If you have questions about our program, please reach out to appcert@microsoft.com.

What does it mean to empower IT?

Meg Muran — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:21:25 GMT

We’re excited to share a new animated video depicting common endpoint management tasks as they would unfold in a Microsoft Managed Desktop environment.

You’ve probably been waiting for this if you’ve seen our explainer videos sharing how we deliver on our service promises of fantastic device experiences and expert security monitoring.

This 4-minute “day in the life” narrative, gives you a glimpse of how Microsoft Managed Desktop empowers IT pros to add value to core business objectives.

Whether you’re a seasoned endpoint manager or a curious business professional, we think you’ll enjoy getting to know Remy, an IT pro responsible for provisioning, maintaining, protecting, and supporting more than 5,000 user devices in an enterprise environment.

How will Remy address the urgent requirements of stakeholders throughout the organization? How does Microsoft Managed Desktop streamline the effort?

You’ll have to watch the video.

Careful observers may also notice a few Easter eggs. Okay, more than a few. The IT experts in our engineering organization were deeply involved at every stage of production, and suffice it to say, we had fun putting this together.

What was your favorite part of the narrative? Did you catch any Easter eggs? Are there other scenarios you’d like to see Remy resolve in a future narrative? Please leave comments so our engineers know you appreciate their creativity and sense of humor.

Announcing Multi-Geo coverage in Germany and Norway

John_Mighell — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:43:33 GMT

We are excited to announce the availability of Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo in Germany and Norway! With the addition of these two countries, you can now extend your Microsoft 365 tenant to store your users’ Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online data in one or more of our 15 available geographies:

Australia	India	United Kingdom
Asia Pacific	Germany	United States
Canada	Japan	United Arab Emirates
European Union	Korea	South Africa
France	Norway	Switzerland

For in-depth information on the overall Microsoft 365 data center strategy and Multi-Geo, take a look at our video from Ignite 2020 below.

Pricing and Licensing:

Multi-Geo is available as an add-on to the following Microsoft 365 subscription plans for EA customers with a minimum of 250 Microsoft 365 seats in their Microsoft 365 tenant, and a minimum of 5% of the Microsoft 365 seats within a tenant have corresponding Multi-Geo Capabilities for Microsoft 365. Please contact your Microsoft account team for details.

Microsoft 365 F1, F3, E3, or E5

Office 365 F3, E1, E3, or E5

Exchange Online Plan 1 or Plan 2

OneDrive for Business Plan 1 or Plan 2

SharePoint Online Plan 1 or Plan 2

Licensing

USD $2/user/month for users in Satellite Geos
Resource mailboxes (Rooms/Equipment) and Shared mailboxes need to be licensed
Microsoft 365 Group Mailboxes moved to Satellite Geos will not need to be licensed for Multi-Geo

How to buy Multi-Geo?

Please talk to your Microsoft representative to buy Multi-Geo Capabilities for Microsoft 365.

Questions?

Please comment on this thread with your questions

PowerPoint Updates: Record Slide Show in PowerPoint for Mac coming soon, plus additional updates!

aneoanou — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:43:41 GMT

Record Slide Show in PowerPoint for Mac – Updates coming soon!

Record Slide Show is an easy to use tool that allows you to create narrations to go along with your slides. During a time of remote meetings and learning, alternate methods of presenting are becoming more and more important in our day to day lives. 

We’re excited to announce that new updates are now available on PowerPoint for Mac that allow users to record presenter video and inking during their Record Slide Show sessions. These new capabilities will enable you to create more robust recorded presentations. We hope that this feature can help simplify your presentation recording process and better engage your audience. 

Here are some features that will be new in Record Slide Show on PowerPoint for Mac:

Presenter video recording 

You can now record a video of yourself to go along with slides that you are presenting. Draw your audience’s attention by making it feel like you are giving the presentation live. 

Use the new recording toolbar right under your camera to configure, start, pause, and stop your recording. Playback what you’ve recorded and re-record when necessary. 

Presenter drawing recording 

You can also now record notes taken with the pen or highlighter tool using the new annotations toolbar. Any drawing done in the recording state will be captured. When you or your audience member plays the presentation back, it will seem like you are drawing on the slides in real time. 

Laser pointer recording  

Similar to recording for the pen tool, you can now record your laser pointer movements while using Record Slide Show. Motion towards different portions of your slides to pull the audience’s attention. 

Want to be among the first to use the new feature? Make sure you join our Office Insiders Program to get the first look at new features from Office. 

Additional new PowerPoint features available today:

Record Audio

Recording audio for your PowerPoint presentation is easier than ever. Recent upgrades to PowerPoint for Mac make recording audio and inserting it into your slides simple with the new Record Audio pane.

Learn more about the experience here.

Export PPT as Animated GIF

Have you ever had an idea for an animated GIF but didn’t know where to get started? With the Export/Save As Animated GIF feature, you can create your ideas in PowerPoint! Use shapes, images, ink, animations, and transitions to create a wide variety of GIFs.

Learn more about how to use the experience here.

Link to this Slide

Have you ever been working with a colleague on a PowerPoint presentation, and wanted to send them a link to a particular slide? With the Link to this Slide feature, you can save time and avoid any confusion by creating a link that will open the file and take them directly to a specific slide in your presentation. Save your file to OneDrive, right-click on the slide you want to link to and select “Link to this Slide” to help your colleagues quickly access the location you’d like to reference.

Learn more about this feature here.

Thank you for reading! For more information on additional capabilities we have coming to PowerPoint, please see our Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

Update: Retirement of SharePoint Site Mailboxes in Microsoft 365

Scott Schnoll — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:41:34 GMT

Back in 2017, we announced SharePoint site mailboxes in Microsoft 365 were being deprecated, and that new organizations would no longer have access to the feature and existing organizations would no longer be able to create site mailboxes. Since that announcement, we have seen site mailbox usage drop consistently as customers move to alternative solutions. There are still a few customers who have site mailboxes with some activity, as well as customers who want to archive and delete site mailboxes that are no longer in use.

As an alternative to site mailboxes, we had previously recommended Microsoft 365 Groups (formerly Office 365 Groups) and today, when you create a team site in SharePoint, a Microsoft 365 Group is created automatically. You can also connect classic team sites to a new Microsoft 365 Groups group. This gives you a shared inbox all team members can leverage among the other group apps. It will also modernize your classic site.

Before we retire (and ultimately delete) all SharePoint site mailboxes from Microsoft 365 (April 2021), we’ll publish another update as a reminder. In the meantime, you can back up the data in your existing site mailboxes using this instruction guide.

Microsoft 365 All Tenants list is rolling out

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:14 GMT

Did you know that more than one-third of admins that use the Microsoft 365 admin center manage multiple tenants. This applies to two-thirds of enterprise customers and the majority of partners that manage Microsoft 365 tenants for their customers. Historically, the Microsoft 365 admin center was built for single-tenant admins, but recently we began creating experiences for admins who manage multiple tenants.

We’re thrilled to announce that a new multi-tenant management experience called All tenants is now rolling out to Microsoft 365 customers. The All tenants list is specifically for admins that manage two or more Microsoft 365 tenants, including:

Partners who manage on behalf of
Merger and acquisition scenarios
Separate test and production environments
Regulatory requirements for multiple tenants

We have created a unified form of management that allows admins the ability to manage multiple tenants from a single pane of glass, helping them to save time every single day; in fact, the more tenants they manage, the more time they’ll save. We’re also extending support of our multi-tenant management features to include Azure Active Directory B2B In the coming months. Our goal is to help admins and partners with multiple tenants spend less time juggling, and more time doing.

The experiences we have built enable admins with multiple tenants to:

move quickly between tenants using the Organization Switcher (also called the Tenant Switcher);
assess service health, service requests, products, and billing across multiple tenants; and
understand admin setup task activity across multiple tenants.

All tenants provides insights about tenants which need your attention:

Along with the tenant switcher, the multi-tenant management experience adds the ability to switch between tenants efficiently.

The All tenants list is rolling out now, and once available, you will need to log in with a partner admin account and soon will include admin accounts that have been invited to manage multiple tenants through Azure B2B.

We will continue to work on scenarios and experiences specifically for admins that manage multiple tenants. You can learn more about why we’re investing in these experiences in our recent video, Multi-tenant management in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Let us know what you think of the new experience using the feedback button in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and let us know what else we can do for you.

As an aside, if you're a partner, check out the announcement for Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, a new experience in private preview that makes it easier for partners to deliver managed services at scale to small and medium-sized customers.

6 Microsoft Lists on-demand session videos

Mark Kashman — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:23 GMT

During Microsoft Ignite 2020, we announced several new Microsoft Lists innovations coming later this year. In addition to this news, we produced six on-demand videos to provide a clear first look at these announcements plus showcase the broader context and value Lists brings to your productivity cloud investment.

Microsoft Lists is your smart information tracking app for Microsoft 365 and in Microsoft Teams. The below videos – including a few bonuses at the end – cover the breadth and depth of what Lists are and how it benefits individuals and teams track what matters most.

Microsoft Lists on-demand session videos [embedded]

1 | "Get started with Microsoft Lists" by Lincoln DeMaris and Bharath Manoj Manda

In this session, Lincoln and Bharath zero in on how Lists evolve from SharePoint lists to empower individuals and teams to create, share and track information – including innovation in Microsoft Teams. You’ll see lots of demos highlighting numerous entry points and capabilities:

Learn more how to use Microsoft Lists.

2 | "Microsoft Teams ❤ Microsoft Lists" by Ansuman Acharya

Content collaboration meets information management meets conversation flexibility. Lists plus Teams brings it all together. Ansuman walks you through how you and your colleagues can best create, share and track lists and list items all from within the comfort of Microsoft Teams:

Learn how you can get started with Lists in Teams.

3 | "Organize business information with Microsoft Lists" by Miceile Barrett and Niket Jain

It’s time to make a list your own. Miceile and Niket show you how to use and create views, configure conditional formatting, adjust forms and more. You’ll come into this session new to Lists and leave a list maker:

Learn more how to create, change, or delete a view of a list.

4 | "Customize productivity apps with lists and libraries, Power Apps, and Power Automate" by Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran

No-code and low-code apps have been essential in SharePoint for a long time. Additional tools from the Power Platform - Power Apps and Power Automate - provide additional umph and capability. In this demo-heavy session, Chaks shows you how Microsoft Lists can connect with external data sources and help keep business on track:

Learn more how you can customize list forms with Power Apps and build custom workflows with Power Automate (approval example).

5 | "Designing the Microsoft Lists experience" by Ben Truelove and Christopher Wymer

Join in and learn how the Microsoft Design team behind Lists approached designing the Lists app. You'll learn more about the problems, principles and approaches to the simple, beautiful user experience that helps people be productive every day, with a strong focus on accessibility and inclusion:

Learn more about Microsoft Design and the Fluent Design System.

6 | “Working with files and lists in Microsoft Teams” by Mark Kashman

Get the most of working with lists and files directly inside Microsoft Teams. I take you thru numerous scenarios when using the new Lists app in Teams and benefiting from the Files tab integration with the power of content services (powered by SharePoint) - access, share and collaborate on lists and files within your Teams channels:

Learn more about collaborating on files in Teams and using Lists in Teams.

Bonus related session | "Embrace a New Way of Work with Microsoft 365" Presented by Angela Byers, Shin-Yi Lim, and customers: Edward Kopp, Magnus Lidström.

In an unprecedented time of workplace transformation, opportunities to thrive belong to those who embrace and adapt to the new normal. How do we collaborate remotely, stay connected and produce excellent work as a team? How do we stay productive while working from home? Join Angela and Shin-Yi to learn a new way to think about and manage work with Microsoft 365. Learn how Microsoft 365 makes it easier for your team to organize, share and track lists, files and tasks all in one place – Microsoft Teams – so you save time and accomplish more together:

Watch it on the Microsoft Ignite website + the related Ask The Experts (ATE) sessions: ATE-DB136 & ATE-DB136-R1.

Bonus innovation snippet | “Project Nucleus” for Lists - “offline mode”

Take a “no audio” peek at Project Nucleus, as shown during Jeff Teper’s overview session, "Enabling collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Project Cortex, and more" [DB158].

In the future, you’ll be able to work with lists both online and offline with a faster user experience. The below video shows enhanced performance, first in online mode. The person then puts their device into "airplane mode" (offline) and can still perform actions like sorting, filtering, grouping, search and add new items to the list. [Note: related Microsoft 365 roadmap ID: 68809]

Project Nucleus will power the next generation of our web apps and portals. It will use intelligent sync to a database to keep a cache on the client that our web apps use to deliver a leapfrog in performance. All changes are synched with the local cache so Project Nucleus will enable you to work even when offline; changes are uploaded when you reconnect to Internet.

Additional Lists resources

Microsoft Lists resource center
Microsoft List Look Book
Microsoft Lists help documentation (docs.MS.com)
New LinkedIn Learning course, “Get running with Microsoft Lists"
The Intrazone podcast episode, "Ignite news with Omar Shahine" (covers Lists, SharePoint Syntex, Stream 2.0, and more)

And like that, you and Your lists just got a whole lot smarter. :)

Thanks,

Mark Kashman, senior product manager – Microsoft Lists

Network connectivity in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center preview available

Paul Andrew — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:33 GMT

In a cloud services world the quality of your network connectivity can make or break user experiences. Microsoft publishes best practices and principles of network connectivity to support customers with this work. We are making a broadly available preview available today for test tooling that identifies how well these principles are followed in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and in the standalone Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool.

Microsoft 365 Admin Center network connectivity functionality is available as public preview from today. Any customer in the worldwide commercial service can go to the Health -> Network Connectivity menu blade and request access to the preview. Preview acceptance is typically immediate, and participation has no impact to your organization outside access to these new pages.

Network connectivity page in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center

In the network connectivity pages you can see a network assessment that evaluates the impact of your network design on user experience in a 0 – 100 scale. This is calculated based on network attributes which have been proven through support cases to affect user experience the most. The network assessment is best evaluated at a specific office location, but an organization wide network assessment is also provided. The organization wide network assessment is also included in your productivity score. In addition, specific network insights are provided which identify network design improvements that could be made to align with the published network connectivity principles and improve network performance.

Office location identification options

It’s important to have network design configured well at each office location. We have three alternatives for you to associate the network tests with your office locations.

Location detection icon

You can enable Windows Location Services and consent to it on each client machine. The network telemetry in Microsoft 365 clients will detect this and will round it to a maximum accuracy of 300m x 300m before use. Reports are provided for your organization aggregated to the city resolution. This method of office location detection is relatively automatic but does require your corporate policy to allow for Windows Location Services to be enabled on client machines.

Location LAN subnet entry icon
Alternatively, you can enter each office location and specify the LAN Subnet used at that location. Because LAN Subnets need to be unique within your WAN for routing purposes, we can correlate network test measurements with the office locations you have entered. This has the added advantage that you are not limited to a single office location in each City, but you can monitor multiple so long as you enter the LAN Subnets separately.

Location user-submitted report icon
A third method for office location identification is more manual where you can have a user at each office location run a set of tests which are submitted back to your organization. This single test result collected by the Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool is then used to be representative of the office location. One advantage of the stand-alone test tool is that the test will show up immediately in the admin center because there is no overnight aggregation required.

Whichever method you choose for office location identification, you will get the same rich reporting, network assessments, and network insights provided to help improve your network design.

Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool

Microsoft 365 network connectivity test (http://connectivity.office.com) is also now in preview and enables sign-in to the users tenant and several ways to share test reports.

Home page of connectivity.office.com

The Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool is a standalone web site that allows users to test network connectivity between a user and Microsoft 365 service front doors. It runs at the user location and is run by someone at that location from their computer. It identifies common enterprise customer network design issues that violate published Microsoft 365 network connectivity principles and that impact user experience. It includes JavaScript based testing and a downloadable advanced test tool. These tests can be run anonymously, and the report is shown to the user only. The tool can be run while signed into the Microsoft 365 tenant and test reports run while signed in are shared to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, they are shared with Microsoft employees, and may be shared with other users through an anonymous report link.

Release timeline

We are planning for a supported general availability release of these tools in the North American winter. Please share your feedback with us as we continue to improve on them.

SD-WAN configuration

As announced at last year's Ignite conference, we've partnered with Cisco to bring a new feature to Microsoft 365 which we are calling "informed network routing." This feature will allow for SD-WAN branch routers to select the best possible path for Microsoft 365 traffic, going beyond the traditional simplistic ping or HTTP probe, and now allowing direct integration of a feedback channel directly from the major applications that make up the Microsoft 365 service including Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint. This means that branch routers can now understand the end-user experience across these applications within the scope of the branch, allowing for quick response to any network quality issues that may occur on an individual path. An initial private preview of this technology is now in progress, and we look forward to announcing a broader preview in the coming weeks, as well as further industry partnerships to extend the availability of this technology.

References

Watch our network connectivity Ignite 2020 videos

http://aka.ms/netvideos

Discuss these features on our forums

http://aka.ms/netforums

Link back to this blog post

http://aka.ms/netignite

Mail Flow Monitoring for Priority Accounts in Microsoft 365

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:43 GMT

Timely email is critical for certain people within an organization, such as the CEO and other leaders and managers. These people are often considered to be priority accounts, as they are essential to running your organization and often have access to sensitive and high priority information.

We are thrilled to announce that organizations that meet both these requirements can now monitor failed or delayed email messages sent to priority accounts:

Office 365 E3 or Microsoft 365 E3, or Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5; and
At least 10,000 licenses and at least 50 monthly active Exchange Online users.

Setting up priority accounts is quick and easy, and you can enable the feature in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Once enabled, you can designate specific users as priority accounts in Active users area of the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Once you have designated your priority accounts, they are monitored for mail flow issues. When an issue occurs, an alert will be generated to notify the admin. You can then view detailed information about the issue in the Exchange admin center.

In a brand new video, titled "Improve IT efficiency and agility and stay informed as you enable self-service tasks," Karissa Larson, a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft 365 admin center team, demonstrates how to use this feature.

Details on monitoring mail flow for priority accounts starts here (37:42), but sure to check out the whole video, as it's packed with strategies that Microsoft 365 admins can use to speed through everyday management tasks, and demos that include new and improved global fuzzy search, how to empower users to reset their own passwords, how admins can use Microsoft Planner and the Message Center for change management in Microsoft 365, how to deal with ownerless Groups, how to use instant-on PowerShell on the web, and more.

Be sure to review the documentation for priority accounts, and then let us know what you think. We look forward to your feedback!

Improve IT efficiency and agility and stay informed as you enable self-service tasks

Scott Schnoll — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:44:12 GMT

Earlier this year, we did a survey to find out how IT departments are being affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, besides the obvious effect of organizations shifting to a remote workforce. 2/3 of respondents told us that their IT budget was decreasing. Yet at the same time, years of digital transformation are taking place in a timespan of months. Many organizations also told us that they see an opportunity to consolidate onto Microsoft products; but it’s difficult to find the time to plan these moves. They told us that their time is split between many things today: managing their tenant, providing end-user support, troubleshooting and resolving issues, managing change, and discovering features.

In a brand-new video, Karissa Larson, a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft 365 admin center team, talks about how you can improve IT efficiency and agility and maintain visibility through delegation. For example, you can empower users by enabling features such as self-service password reset (SSPR). We’ve been promoting SSPR for a while because we know it saves time and money for every organization that enables it. In fact, it can potentially save your organization a lot of time and money. That’s just one form of delegation that makes an admin’s life easier.

In addition to delegation, we’re focused on reducing the amount of time it takes you to perform every day and not so everyday actions. You told us that you spend a lot of time in the Microsoft 365 admin center looking for things instead of doing things. So we built a whole new search experience that shows you not just new results such as navigation items in the admin center, but also relevant and recommended documentation related to your search. Karissa describes the new search experience and gives a look at what’s coming for search by the end of 2020. Karissa also talks about the work we’re doing to enable you to monitor VIP, or priority accounts, and to help you with domain and DNS records management.

Flexibility is all about seamless integration with tools you use today. Karissa describes integrations that provide you with quick admin access across Azure, Teams, and Exchange through Microsoft Cloud Shell, the ability to sync message center posts to Microsoft Planner, and service incident integration with ServiceNow.

I don’t want to steal any thunder from Karissa and team, so watch the video, which is packed with demos on everything I’ve mentioned. Then, complete our survey and give us feedback and help us prioritize our work. You can also register your interest in joining a virtual roundtable session that will take place in October.

Message Center sync to Microsoft Planner now Generally Available

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:27 GMT

The message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to help you keep track of upcoming changes to Microsoft 365, including new and changed features, planned maintenance, and other important announcements. It’s where we post official announcements to help you take a proactive approach to change management. Each post provides you with a high-level overview of planned changes along with links to detailed information to help you prepare for and manage the change. Organizations typically see an average of 140 messages per month.

Customers have given us feedback on the challenges they face with the Message Center. You’ve told us that:

It’s not easy to triage message center posts; and
There’s no way to assign posts for action and accountability; and
That you spend your time managing content, instead of change.

To help you navigate the myriad of information that arrives in the Message Center, to help you decide whether or not to act on that information, and to help you manage change and not content, we’ve introduced the ability to sync Message Center posts to Microsoft Planner. This feature is now generally available to all customers worldwide!

Planner syncing includes the ability to choose which type of messages are sync’d and to sync messages on a set cadence. Once a message has been sync’d to Planner, it will show up in Planner as a task.

As illustrated above, all message center post titles are prefixed with the associated service in brackets (e.g., [SharePoint]. When a message center post is updated, the sync process will add a new task to Planner; thus, you could have multiple tasks associated with one post. To distinguish the update, the updated message center post title will be prefixed with (Update). For example, (Update) [SharePoint]. For each task that is created, the Start Date will be set to when the task was created, and the message center post publication date is captured in the Notes field.

Get Started

In a brand-new video, Paolo Ciccu, a Senior Program Manager on the Release and Delivery Experiences team, talks about this new feature and how to use it to manage change instead of content. Paolo also provides tips and tricks for maximizing the use of this new feature that came directly from customers in our preview program. Paolo starts by discussing the feedback we heard from customers, and the challenges they face. He then describes our solution—the ability to sync Message Center to Planner, as well as why we chose to use Planner as our change management platform. He also talks about the particular challenges around change management and provides Microsoft’s best practices for change management in Microsoft 365. Paolo also demonstrates how to setup the Planner sync feature, how it works, and how to configure and organize Planner to meet your needs.

In addition to Paolo’s video, be sure to check out the documentation.

We’d love to hear directly from you on how we can enhance and improve this feature, not just to meet your needs, but to make your life easier. You can provide direct feedback to us via email, and we’d love to have you complete our survey.

Cross-tenant mailbox migration in now in Public Preview

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:48 GMT

Historically, when an Exchange Online admin needed to move mailboxes from one tenant to another, the typical way to do that was to offboard the mailbox from the source tenant and import it into a target tenant.

Today, we are thrilled to announce the Public Preview of a built-in cross-tenant mailbox migration service that enables you to move mailboxes between tenants with minimal on-premises infrastructure dependencies (the new service eliminates some but not all on-premises components). The new cross-tenant mailbox migration service eliminates the need to offboard and onboard mailboxes, resulting in a faster and lower-cost migration. This is particularly beneficial for organizations undergoing mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, or splits.

The new move process includes enhanced security, as well as the ability to scope moves. It uses an Enterprise Application in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Azure Key Vault, allowing tenant admins to manage both authorization and the scoping of mailbox migrations from one tenant to another. Cross-tenant mailbox migrations use an invitation and consent model to establish the Azure AD Enterprise Application used for authentication between tenants.

Prerequisites

Azure Key Vault is used to securely store and access the certificate/secret used to authorize and authenticate mailbox migration. For this reason, an Azure Key Vault subscription is required on the target tenant to perform cross-tenant mailbox migrations.

For the Public Preview, it is a recommended best practice to run the Microsoft-provided scripts with Global admin permissions to configure the Azure Key Vault storage and certificate, the move mailbox app, the migration endpoint, and the organization relationship.

In the source tenant, a mail-enabled security group is required prior to running setup. This group is used to scope the list of mailboxes that can move from the source tenant to the target tenant, which helps prevent unintended users from being moved.

You will also need the Tenant IDs for the source and target tenants, which you can find using these instructions.

Moving mailboxes

After setting up the necessary prerequisites, including tenant relationships and configuration settings, admins with the Move Mailbox management role can use the New-MigrationBatch cmdlet to move mailboxes between tenants. The move process performs the necessary tenant authorization checks, and in all cases, the admin of the target tenant initiates the move (which we refer to as a pull move), just like the on-premises to cloud migrations. Currently, all moves are triggered using PowerShell, but support for the Exchange admin center is coming soon.

Be sure to read this article (documentation available soon), which covers the necessary prerequisites, walks you through the steps needed to use perform cross-tenant mailbox migrations, and it details about the Microsoft-provided scripts on GitHub.

We’re excited to have you try out this new feature, and we’d love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think!

Productivity Score Spotlight: Network Connectivity

John_Mighell — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:55:14 GMT

In the cloud era, SaaS solutions for productivity are king, but they all have an Achilles Heel – the configuration of your network infrastructure. The latest cutting edge solutions will fail without a dependable connection, and even the best products will result in frustrated users if they perform at a snail’s pace. After all, slow is the new broken.

So how can you avoid the searches that take forever, the files that won’t download, or the conference calls with fuzzy audio and booted participants? You can use the latest Microsoft tools to help understand how your organization is working, how technology enables your employees, and how you can get more from your Microsoft 365 subscription. Within the new Microsoft Productivity Score is the Network Connectivity category, which assesses the strength of your network and compares against a benchmark of similar organizations, all from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

Not only can you see an aggregate view of your organization’s network performance, but you can drill down to specific office locations and specific workloads – SharePoint, Exchange, Teams – to identify network related pain points that are negatively influencing the productivity of your teams. The tool also provides specific recommendations for how to course correct, all aligned to Microsoft’s published best practices and principles of network connectivity.

The Network Connectivity component just entered broad preview, so you can sign up now. Use this free tool to gain an unprecedented level of transparency to the backbone of your day-to-day operations, and the next time you’re in a conference call that can’t handle video sharing – consider checking the Network Connectivity tool for solutions.

How Microsoft Productivity Score can help you build a more resilient business

Anthony Smith (A.J.) — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:01 GMT

No matter the size of your organization or your industry, it’s almost certain that you’re doing things differently today than you were just a few months ago. Few among us could have anticipated at the beginning of this year just how much would change in such a short time. In our conversations with customers, it’s fascinating—and inspiring—to hear about their journeys from the crisis-driven early days of the pandemic to where they are today.

This was a moment for heroics from IT pros and digital transformation leaders like you: keeping people in your organization connected, enabling remote work on a previously unimagined scale, and overcoming challenge after challenge to maintain security and keep up to date. It was a moment where both the virtues and the shortcomings of your technology investments became crystal clear. And it’s been incredibly gratifying to hear again and again from customers how Microsoft 365 enabled them to meet this moment successfully. We heard loud and clear that those who were further along in their digital transformation journey had an easier transition to remote work and realized more value from Microsoft 365. Indeed, in a survey of more than 2,000 customers globally, those with the most complete adoption and use of Microsoft 365 had 66 percent higher confidence in their organization’s ability to adapt and thrive amidst uncertainty than those less far along.

This is the very definition of resilience. The move to enable remote work was not the end of journey, but the beginning. There is a new set of challenges coming as we move into a fluid, hybrid work environment where some people are working on-site, and others are still remote. Flexibility and adaptability will be key to success. More than ever, it needs to be easier for you to understand how your organization is working and how your transformation is progressing, how technology enables your users, and how you can get more from your Microsoft 365 licenses. That's why we built Microsoft Productivity Score, and we are excited to share that there are a new set of features available today (in preview) and when it becomes generally available on October 29.

How can Productivity Score help me on my digital transformation journey?

To help you build a more resilient business and meet future challenges, Productivity Score leverages the depth and breadth of Microsoft 365 to give you insights that transform how work gets done. It does this by providing visibility into how your organization works, helping you understand the employee experience in five categories: content collaboration, meetings, communication, teamwork, and mobility. You also need to see how technology can better assist you in optimizing productivity. That’s why you also get visibility into your technology experience focusing on your endpoints, network connectivity, and Microsoft 365 apps.

You need more than just visibility into how your organization works. That’s where the insights come in. Insights help you to enable improved experiences across the employee and technology experience. Lastly, Productivity Score assists you in enabling everyone to do their best work by taking action. This is through actions like optimizing your client configurations and implementing end-user training to help people understand the benefit of a specific feature, or documentation that enables you to optimize Microsoft 365 services' configuration.

Expanding on the visibility, insights, and actions we already announced, here are some of the new ways that Productivity Score can help you with your transformation starting today and on October 29.

Creating more productive and engaged teams

Many organizations tell us that it has been harder to work in teams when everyone is remote. As many people are now just getting used to working this way, it will change again when some go back to the office, and others stay remote. With Microsoft 365 you already have the tools to help meet this change with the shared workspaces that SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 Groups provide. These shared workspaces help create a common purpose, provide context for previous discussions, find related documents, and quickly ramp new team members. The use of these workspaces is what the new Teamwork category is focused on.

Available at GA, this category provides a score based on the percentage of people who engage in teamwork within these shared workspaces. You will also see how this has changed over the past six months and how this compares with the number of people who are engaging in similar activities but not within the context of a shared workspace.

To help you better see the benefit of these workspaces, you also get additional information like the level of engagement in these workspaces so you can clear up older ones not in use anymore. You will see a breakdown of the number of people engaged in each type of workspace and the number of days in a week that people are engaged in them. Lastly, you can see the number of shared workspaces using Microsoft Teams, helping you encourage people to try it out and get the benefits of staying a well-connected team.

As in all the other employee experience categories, you also get the details of which people, departments, or locations are engaged in teamwork (note that we have built privacy controls into Productivity Score, and you can read more details on that below). Unique to this category though, is that we also show you data on the workspaces. This helps you better understand the level of engagement in them.

Teamwork category home page

Making meetings more effective

The days of having the quick hallway chat or asking a question while you and a colleague went to the water cooler seem like a distant memory. The questions that drove those chats still exist, and now we try to use email or chat messages to get them answered. At times though, these modes are insufficient, and you need to have a meeting. This along with other factors driven by remote work, have added more meetings to our already busy calendars, and we want to help make sure that the meetings you do take are as effective as they can be.

The new Meetings category available at GA will help you improve the quality and effectiveness of meetings through the use of industry best practices. Some of the best practices show how meetings can be more engaging and inclusive by turning on video and screen sharing. We also know that it's top of mind for you to understand how much time people spend in meetings each week and whether they are using these best practices. We also show what percentage of the meetings are scheduled ahead of time or on an ad-hoc basis and the typical length of these meetings. You’ll also learn what percentage of people engage different types of meetings like the use of Meet Now in Microsoft Teams channels versus schedule one-offs or recurring meetings. This visibility can help you devise the right action plan to drive change in the organization's meetings.

Meetings category home page

Additional updates to existing employee experience categories and the business continuity report

Along with the new categories, we are also making some minor changes to a few existing categories at GA. In Communications, we are changing the chart associated with what we score to help clarify what exactly was being scored and the detailed communication channels chart is being moved to the “Explore how your org communicates” section. Based on feedback, we are also adding information on the number of people working remotely and onsite to the Mobility category. Lastly, we updated the business continuity report at the beginning of August to show a rolling 180-day period. This helps you focus on a more current timeframe and maintains the relevancy of the report.

Optimizing the user experience and reducing friction to enable people to do their best work

Hopefully it’s clearer now how Productivity Score can help you move your digital transformation goals forward, by giving you visibility into how your users are adopting and using your productivity investments, and helping you to focus your efforts for highest impact. But user behavior is only half the picture. If the underlying technology that enables users to get work done isn’t performing optimally or doesn’t work as it should, you have friction that works against users harnessing digital tools to do their best work.

Incorrect or sub-optimal configurations, legacy hardware components, out-of-date software versions, misbehaving software, and changes in the environment (security/feature updates, administrative changes, Group Policy changes, etc.) all can contribute to this friction and lie at the root of the vast majority of endpoint performance and health issues.

By giving you visibility into the root causes of friction at the network, endpoint and application/service levels, providing insights to help you prioritize improvements, and automated actions to help you detect and fix problems, Technology Experience not only can help you improve productivity, but it can also be part of a program to lower support costs, accelerate time-to-close support tickets, improve user satisfaction, and raise the profile and perception of IT.

With that, let’s take a look at what’s new within Technology Experience.

Microsoft 365 Apps Health

Microsoft 365 apps are the core of your user’s digital productivity; making sure they’re up to date and working properly is the goal of Microsoft 365 Apps Health. Our research shows that giving users the best features results in higher satisfaction, with an NPS (net promoter score) increase of ten points. Research results also showed keeping up to date gives you the best application performance. For example, we have improved Outlook boot speed by 45 percent year on year. Results also showed that there is higher usage of collaboration features when the apps are kept current.

The best way to get the full value of the apps is via the recommended monthly channels, either Current Channel or Monthly Enterprise Channel. These monthly incremental updates help people absorb changes more gradually and avoid larger disruptive changes. They also provide the most consistent cross-platform experience across Microsoft Teams, PC, Mac, web, and mobile.

Microsoft 365 Apps Health, available starting today, helps you achieve these benefits by providing you with a breakdown of how many devices are on a supported version for each channel and how this has progressed over the past 180 days. You also can see how many devices are running supported releases and latest releases in each channel. In addition, you can see how many total devices are on supported and current release regardless of channel, and how this has trended over time.

Microsoft 365 Apps Health category home page

Network Connectivity

Customers tell us that overcoming connectivity problems has been one of the most consistent challenges they’ve faced throughout the shift to work from anywhere. Sub-optimal network configuration negatively impacts team collaboration across performance sensitive scenarios including search, document co-editing, video/audio conferencing, and more. The Network Connectivity category is included in Technology Experience to help you understand and improve your connectivity to SharePoint, Exchange and Teams and compare this against a benchmark of similar organizations.

In addition to the ability to see a map of network locations for your organization with details on service front door connectivity, you can now use LAN subnet information, and manually submitted test reports along with Windows Location Services to define your locations. To learn more about Network Connectivity, view the blog post here.

Endpoint Analytics

You can have a great employee experience and great networking, but if it takes four minutes for your end users’ PCs to boot up, or a problematic service continually disrupts your users’ workflow, people will not be able to do their best work. Productivity killers like these—related to the endpoints themselves—are exactly what Endpoint Analytics is all about. Endpoint Analytics is a powerful feature of Microsoft Endpoint Manager (or MEM) that goes GA at Ignite for licensed MEM customers. It supports data collection from both Intune and Configuration Manager-managed endpoints.

Endpoint Analytics currently focuses on three areas to help you analyze and improve endpoint performance and health problems: Startup Performance, Recommended Software, and Proactive Remediations. A fourth major feature, App Reliability, will become available in the near future. To learn more about Endpoint Analytics, view the GA announcement in the MEM Tech Community.

How Productivity Score protects user data and privacy

With the visibility, insights, and actions available across the employee and technology experiences, Productivity Score gives you a holistic picture of how your organization works in a way that helps meets your privacy requirements. We have a strong commitment to privacy across all of our services, which you can learn more about here.

To give you an understanding of how people are leveraging Microsoft 365 solutions and features, Productivity Score provides user-level data, which is updated daily. In talking to organizations in the preview, some expressed sensitivity about this level of detail. That is why we previously announced the ability to anonymize this data. At general availability, we will provide additional controls with the introduction of a new permissions role called the Usage Summary Reports Reader. Assigning a user this role will give them access only to the organizational-level summary information. We will provide more information about this change at general availability.

To be clear, Productivity Score is not designed as a tool for monitoring employee work output and activities. In fact, we safeguard against this type of use by not providing specific information on individualized actions, and instead only analyze user-level data aggregated over a 28-day period, so you can’t see what a specific employee is working on at a given time. Productivity Score was built to help you understand how people are using productivity tools and how well the underlying technology supports them in this.

How to learn more and get ready for Productivity Score

We designed Productivity Score to provide insights that transform how work gets done and to help you see how your technology can be an enabler for productivity. We are excited for you to try out Productivity Score, and for you to see how you can get the most from Microsoft 365. If you want to learn more about Productivity Score and all the categories, check out our resources guide. This will be updated regularly with new content, especially as we get closer to GA so check back periodically. Also, don't forget to enable the preview to get a head start on measuring your transformation.

Thanks for the interest in Productivity Score and feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

Collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Project Cortex

Jeff Teper — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:10 GMT

In many organizations, world events have transformed technology adoption more in the past few months than in the past few years. Remote work and learning in virtual classrooms have accelerated the adoption of cloud services beyond anybody’s wildest expectations. Some organizations are now transitioning from remote work to hybrid work. Whatever the future holds, however, the workplace will no longer be either the home or the office but a fluid experience that spans both.

At Microsoft, we’ve been intensely focused on our customers during this rapid transition—the teachers, the health care workers, the IT leaders who are trying to help their small business or global enterprise adjust to and thrive in a global pandemic. To support you through this transformation, we are moving faster than ever to bring you Microsoft 365, delivering a broader set of features than when we launched Office 365 in 2011.

I’m often asked to explain the product strategy for Microsoft 365. How will our capabilities come together to provide a holistic solution for organizations?

When I assumed responsibility for Microsoft Teams—our hub for teamwork—and SharePoint, which powers many Microsoft 365 experiences, my objective was to make sure that we had a clear, bold plan for taking our productivity cloud to the next level.

First, we provide collaboration services with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Lists. Second, we provide employee engagement and communication services through SharePoint, Microsoft Stream, and Yammer. Third, we connect people to knowledge and expertise through Microsoft Search and Project Cortex. All these tools are part of an integrated experience and platform.

Join me as we dive into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem as part of Microsoft Ignite:

“Enabling collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Project Cortex, and more”
Tuesday, September 22 | 12:15 PM to 12:45 PM PDT

Collaboration

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. It uses the breadth of Microsoft 365 services, including SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Lists, to help people come together and get work done. This one app helps you stay connected, collaborate seamlessly, and simplify your work—all while staying secure and compliant.

We will make many announcements about Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Lists. Here are just a few:

Microsoft Teams templates. Help your team get started faster and be more effective. Choose from common business scenarios, such as event management or crisis response, and industry-specific templates, such as a hospital ward or bank branch. Each template comes with predefined channels, apps, and guidance. You can also create custom templates for your organization, enabling you to standardize team structures, reveal relevant apps, and apply best practices.
Info pane. Provide an at-a-glance summary of active members, important posts that team members have pinned, and other relevant information in each channel. Info pane is great for helping new members get up to speed or keeping current members in the know.
New search results experience in Microsoft Teams. Powered by Microsoft Search and available in late 2020, this feature makes finding messages, people, answers, and files faster and more intuitive. This redesigned search results page provides better context and faster results, with artificial intelligence (AI)–powered relevance based on how you work and whom you work with most in Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
Add to OneDrive. Add any shared folder in Microsoft 365 to your OneDrive so that you spend less time looking for files and more time collaborating.
Microsoft Lists app for iOS (preview). Brings mobile access to the lists you own and the lists others share with you. Create new lists, edit list items, and easily share lists with other people. The Microsoft Lists app for iOS also supports offline and Dark Mode. Preview it today.
Microsoft Lists—offline mode. View and edit your lists, regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet. With offline mode, you can instantly sort, filter, group, add, and adjust items—especially long lists—with performance gains all around.

Microsoft Teams templates help your team get started faster and be more effective.

To learn more about these and other announcements, check out the individual blogs on the Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Lists.

For more great Ignite content, be sure to watch:

“Creating a resilient, inclusive, and hybrid workplace with Microsoft Teams”

Tuesday, September 22 | 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM PDT

Employee engagement and communications

With rapidly changing work environments and growth in remote or hybrid working, communicating and engaging with your employees are critical for building and maintaining a resilient organization. With Microsoft 365, you can connect all your employees, from the top floor to the shop floor, including the vital first-line workers who help your customers, your patients, and your students.

Microsoft 365 is a holistic solution: SharePoint powers your intranet and information sharing, the new Yammer connects and engages people across organizational silos, and Microsoft Stream unlocks video as a powerful tool for communication and training. These apps work together on the web, on mobile devices, and connected with Microsoft Teams.

I am excited today to announce a new wave of capabilities across Microsoft 365 that better enable your employees to engage with company news and announcements, connect to leadership, and be part of a tighter workplace community:

News boost in SharePoint. Prioritize important news and announcements to appear at the top of feeds and other locations in Microsoft 365, such as your SharePoint home and web parts, auto news digest emails, the new tab page in Microsoft Edge, and more locations coming. You can boost the visibility of a news article for a set time, until an employee has viewed your content, or until an employee has seen the item in his or her feed a set number of times.
Share news to email, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer. Share a news article directly to your audience’s team, community, or inboxes.
Priority announcements. Admins can increase the visibility of important Yammer announcements by sending notifications to the inboxes of all community members.
Delegate posting. This highly requested feature enables designated users to communicate key company messages and announcements to the organization on leadership’s behalf.
Featured conversations. Improve visibility and engagement and add emphasis and longevity to news and campaigns by setting a conversation as featured in All Company or any other community. Featuring a conversation also increases its prominence in the Yammer discovery feed for people outside the community.
Home site app for Microsoft Teams. Bring the power of your SharePoint-based intranet home site directly into Microsoft Teams—seamlessly. The home site app gives your users global navigation across sites, communities, and teams; quick access to sites they use regularly; and a personalized news feed.
Built-in templates. Quickly deploy robust scenarios by using predefined sites that integrate the superpowers of Microsoft 365. Easily customize built-in templates to your needs, such as the template for Leadership Connection, and apply them to any existing SharePoint site to give it a beautiful makeover.
Insights for communicators. Understand your reach, impact, and engagement across Microsoft 365 by using new analytics in SharePoint, such as dwell time on content, heatmap views of interaction, and automatic analytics digest powered by AI. Combined these insights with analytics in Yammer, such as enhanced Community Insights, Live Events, and Question and Answers.
The home site app for teams brings the power of your SharePoint-based intranet home site seamlessly into Microsoft Teams.

Dive deeper into all these announcements and more: Visiting the SharePoint and Yammer blogs.

For additional session content, I recommend viewing:

“Employee engagement and communities in Microsoft 365”

Wednesday, September 23 | 12:15 PM to 12:45 PM PDT

“Supercharging communications and employee engagement with Microsoft ”

On demand—ready when you are

“The Intranet is Dead. Long Live the Intranet. The SharePoint Intranet Vision and Strategy”

On demand—ready when you are

“SharePoint Communication Sites & the Modern Intranet: What's New”

On demand—ready when you are

Connect people to knowledge and expertise

In 2019, we introduced our investments in knowledge powered by AI and human expertise, code named Project Cortex. These investments unlock the knowledge and expertise of the entire organization, empowering everyone to make more informed decisions, take actions faster, and contribute their knowledge while respecting security and privacy at every step.

Project Cortex is coming to our customers as a set of innovations. In July 2020, we shipped enhancements to taxonomy services as a foundational capability.

We’ve also begun to ship to preview customers new capabilities that apply AI to organize knowledge and expertise into topics and to deliver that knowledge in the apps people use every day. We look forward to sharing Project Cortex topic capabilities with all our customers later this year, so stay tuned.

Today, I’m pleased to introduce the latest innovation from our investments in Project Cortex: SharePoint Syntex, coming to customers in October 2020. SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine learning to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge.

SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine learning to amplify human expertise.

Learn more about Project Cortex, including SharePoint Syntex, as well as enhancements in Microsoft Search.

For a complete overview of Project Cortex check out:

“Project Cortex: Knowledge discovery and content intelligence in Microsoft 365”

Tuesday, September 22 | 1:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

To learn more about Microsoft Search I recommend:

“Search where you’re already working with Microsoft Search: Vision, Strategy, Roadmap”

On demand—ready when you are

Integrated experience and platform

Microsoft continues to invest in SharePoint as the foundation of many Microsoft 365 experiences. You already know the power of SharePoint sites, but SharePoint is also the backbone of Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Office, and Microsoft Lists; it enables custom Power Apps; and more is coming.

Today, I am excited to announce that Microsoft Teams Meetings recordings and Microsoft Stream will be built on new storage innovations in SharePoint. SharePoint will bring consistent capabilities for sharing, search, analytics, compliance, and developer extensibility to these experiences. Your employees will be able to easily access their recordings in OneDrive after the meeting.

Read more about the new Microsoft Stream, and check out this Ignite session:

“What’s new for Microsoft Stream and video in Microsoft 365?”

On demand—ready when you are

SharePoint provides the platform to powering more of your applications with the building blocks of lists, files, groups, sites on this rich storage, all inside of SharePoint sites, in Microsoft Teams, and custom experiences.

As with the rest of the Microsoft service, you can access the data through the Microsoft Graph API with REST APIs and webhooks.

To simplify custom experiences, we are making a big investment in the SharePoint Framework which enables end users customize pages from components built by Microsoft and 3^rd-party developers. SPFX is one of Microsoft’s fastest growing modern developer platforms - reaching millions of end users every day. And we are taking this to the next level by enabling you to build Microsoft Teams apps with SPFX.

To learn more about using the SharePoint Framework in your next application I encourage you to watch:

“Developing solutions across Microsoft 365 with SharePoint Framework”

On demand—ready when you are

Last year, the team and I brainstormed what it would take to make a huge breakthrough in the performance and reliability of all web applications with large amounts of content. We came up with a marriage of today’s progressive web apps and the intelligent sync and database technologies that we worked on in optimizing OneDrive. But brought to more data and app types. From that effort came

Project Nucleus, which you will see coming initially to Microsoft Lists.

Project Nucleus will allow you to accomplish common tasks, like column sorting and grouping, at blazing fast speeds on lists of any size regardless of your Internet connection speed.

All changes are synched with the local cache so Project Nucleus will enable you to work even when offline! All changes made are uploaded when you reconnect to Internet.

Thank You

Thank you for the opportunity to share what we are learning about the future of work and how our investment in Microsoft 365 will help business leaders and IT professionals deliver experiences that drive collaboration in remote and hybrid work environments with even greater security and compliance. Please continue to share your feedback: It inspires us to do our best work.

Working together, we have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine work so that people and organizations alike can navigate a rapidly changing world. These past few months have reminded us that people are capable of extraordinary things, and Microsoft is honored to help empower and support them. Thank you.

Microsoft Lists announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2020

Mark Kashman — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:15 GMT

Microsoft began rolling out Microsoft Lists in Microsoft 365 back in July, 2020 – along with the new Lists app in Microsoft Teams. We have received a lot of positive feedback and usage is growing fast. Today, we are pleased to share, as announced at Microsoft Ignite 2020, future Lists innovation – to help you be productive on the go, take information offline and stay connected:

Microsoft Lists app for iOS (preview)
Take your lists offline
Recover from mistakes with Undo / Redo
Notify people with @mentions in list comments

Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team. Track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more using customizable views and smart rules to keep everyone notified and in sync. With ready-made templates, you can quickly start lists online, on our new mobile app, or with Microsoft Teams. And because it is part of Microsoft 365, you can rely on enterprise-ready security and compliance.

Microsoft Lists app for iOS (preview)

Early adopters, this one is for you. The Lists app for iOS is ready for preview. It brings mobile access to the lists you own and that have been shared with you. You can create new lists, edit list items, and easily share with other people. While sipping coffee - create an Issue tracker list. In the passenger’s seat zipping from place to place - share a link to the session item from the Event itinerary list. Or standing in grocery line waiting to check out – update the status of an item based on information from a team chat. Work and information management don’t have to stop when you’re on the go.

The Microsoft Lists app for iOS, showing various screens from left-to-right: Home page with favorite and recent lists, creating a list from ready-made templates, viewing lists items in a list, and editing a list item.

Microsoft Lists – Lists app for iOS | Roadmap IDs Roadmap ID: 64161.

Take your lists offline

You will be able view and edit your lists, whether you have a connection to the Internet, or not. Offline is both a state of mind and an opportunity to remain productive. Whether you are on or offline, you’ll be able to instantly sort, filter, group, add, and adjust items – especially those large lists. Access is important whether you have low or no internet. What’s more, offline mode not only causes no harm to performance, it enhances performance.

The same list header shown three times (top-to-bottom) indicating status of connection: when syncing data, changes awaiting to be synced, and all changes in sync. Note: I volunteer to be on the Galaxy Exploration crew.

The same underlying technology - "Project Nucleus" - that will power offline lists will also improve the experience when you’re connected to the Internet. Offline-powered lists operate against a local cache of your data, so operations no longer must make synchronous round trips between your device and the Microsoft 365 service. So, when you do things like sort, filter, group, or scroll in a large list, these things happen instantly, without any throttling.

Microsoft Lists – offline mode | Roadmap ID: 68809. [preview by EOY 2020]

Recover from mistakes with Undo / Redo

Oops is no longer a four-letter word. It is simply a state you can recover from. As you work across rows and columns within Microsoft Lists, mistakes will happen, and we’re making it easy to recover your information with a brand-new Undo button. The same is true in reverse if there was something in a field previously that you in fact liked – just bring it back by clicking Redo.

Click Undo or Redo to revert changes or remove mistakes within Microsoft Lists.

Microsoft Lists – undo / redo | Roadmap IDs: 68810.

Notify people with @mentions in list comments

Get a colleague's attention to an item in a list by @mentioning them within list comments. That person will receive a notification and a link that takes them directly back to the item, to review the comment and take the requested action.

@mention a colleague within list comments to notify them and bring them into the discussion.

Microsoft Lists – @mentions in comments | Roadmap IDs: 68811.

Additional resources

“Getting started with Microsoft Lists” breakout session presented by Lincoln DeMaris and Bharath Manoj Manda:

Listen to The Intrazone episode, "Ignite news with Omar Shahine" - VP of OneDrive and SharePoint program management (engineering); Omar discusses new Microsoft Lists innovation among several other topics like Project Cortex, Microsoft Stream v 2.0, education templates, and more:

Additional related session videos on-demand:
- “Organize business information with Microsoft Lists” presented by Miceile Barrett and Niket Jain
- “Designing the Microsoft Lists experience” presented by Ben Truelove and Christopher Wymer
- “Microsoft Teams ❤ Microsoft Lists” presented by Ansuman Acharya and Michael Lam
- “Customize productivity apps with lists and libraries, Power Apps, and Power Automate” presented by Chakkaradeep Chandran
- “Working with files and lists in Microsoft Teams” presented by Mark Kashman

In closing…

To learn more about Lists throughout the year, please visit our updated Microsoft Lists resource center for blogs, demos, videos, podcasts, and more.

Track what matters most. Make a list and let it flow.

Thanks, Mark Kashman – senior product manager – Microsoft 365

What's new with Cortana, your personal productivity assistant

Malavika Rewari — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:07 GMT

Last year at Microsoft Ignite 2019, we unveiled our vision to deliver transformational AI-powered experiences in Microsoft 365 through Cortana, your personal productivity assistant. Today, as we kick off Microsoft Ignite 2020, we’re excited to give you a closer look at Cortana enterprise-grade experiences now available as an integral part of Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Windows 10, and what’s coming next.

With the ongoing pandemic and rise in remote and hybrid work, many of us are seeking assistance to stay on top of the increased volume of virtual communications. And we are looking for new ways to collaborate effectively while working flexible schedules and juggling personal responsibilities. By putting the power of AI and the Microsoft Graph to work for you, Cortana can help you make the most of your time. From helping you prepare for an upcoming meeting by intelligently surfacing related files and tasks, to enabling you to use natural language to seamlessly find the right file, connect with the right person, or join your next meeting – your personal productivity assistant has you covered.

Your daily Briefing email from Cortana

This personalized, actionable brief in Outlook, automatically delivered to your inbox to help you start your day on track, is becoming generally available starting this month for Microsoft 365 users with Exchange Online mailboxes in English. And with updates coming by the end of the year, the Briefing email will streamline meeting preparation. Actionable reminders will make it easy to add an agenda or a Teams link for an upcoming meeting if you forget, and to spot if a meeting is missing quorum. Integration with Microsoft To Do will make it seamless to follow up on a suggested task later.

In addition to helping you prepare for the day ahead with the Briefing email, we are also lighting up scenarios to help you achieve your long-term productivity goals. In the coming months, we’ll add a weekly card to the Briefing email to make it easier to carve out time for what you want to accomplish in the week ahead – so you can seamlessly book time for catching up on emails, learning, or taking a break to recharge.

Weekly card coming in the Briefing email from Cortana

We’re also working on bringing specialized insights for people managers to help boost your team’s productivity and wellbeing, such as prompts to schedule regular one-on-one time with your direct reports and reminders to follow up on key asks.

Actionable insights for people managers coming in the Briefing email from Cortana

Play My Emails in Outlook

This Outlook mobile experience, designed to enable you to listen and respond to what’s new in your inbox hands-free, is already available in Outlook for iOS and Android in English in the U.S. and will start rolling out in the coming months in English in Australia, Canada, U.K., and India. We’ve loved hearing how many of you are using Play My Emails to get organized while making your daily morning coffee, to stay connected while taking a break from screen time, or to get more done during your commute.

With updates coming this month in Outlook for iOS in English in the U.S., you can use Play My Emails with multiple accounts. When connected to an audio device such as headphones, users can now keep the phone in their pocket or on a countertop once the experience starts and continue to interact with their inbox through their headphones. To move a conversation forward in real time, you can now use this experience to initiate a call with the sender of an email.

Initiate a call with Play My Emails

To dig deeper on a specific conversation, you can ask Cortana to play emails from a specific person, time, or topic. You can also customize the experience to read emails just from your favorite people. With new car settings, once you connect to your car and open Outlook for iOS, you can initiate and navigate the experience using the buttons on your steering wheel.

Customize to play emails from your favorite people

Cortana in Teams

To help you stay connected to your team even when you have your hands full, Cortana is now available in English in the U.S. in the Teams mobile apps on iOS and Android. We’re excited to share how some of our customers are using Cortana voice assistance to streamline collaboration, and we hope you’ll try it for yourself soon. Just click the microphone button on the top right and speak in natural language to make a call, join a meeting, send chat messages, share files, and more.

In the upcoming weeks, Cortana will also become generally available in Microsoft Teams displays, a new category of all-in-one dedicated Teams devices, to offer hands-free experiences in English in the U.S. Availability will expand in the coming months to English in Australia, Canada, U.K., and India. And later this year, Cortana will be introduced in Microsoft Teams Rooms devices in English in the U.S., offering touchless experiences to join and end meetings in shared spaces.

Cortana in Windows 10

With the Windows 10 May 2020 update, we released a new chat-based Cortana experience in Windows 10 that enables you to type or speak natural language commands to save time finding what you need, stay on schedule, connect with people, set reminders, and more. This experience can now be invoked hands-free using the wake word “Cortana” and with updates coming soon, will also support additional productivity-focused natural language commands for file search and email composing for Microsoft 365 users with Exchange Online mailboxes in English in the U.S.

Today, we’re excited to give you a first look at our future plans to more proactively assist you with Cortana in Windows 10 – for instance, by surfacing relevant emails and documents to help you prepare for an upcoming meeting.

Cortana intelligently surfaces an upcoming meeting and prep materials

Learn More

For a more detailed look at how Cortana can help you start your day on track, stay connected and get time back on your busy schedule, watch our Microsoft Ignite 2020 session on-demand.

Workplace devices are the new “free snacks”

ChrisSweeneyMSFT — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:21:23 GMT

Onsite gyms. Stocked refrigerators and gourmet cafeterias. Catered morale events and offsite retreats. Hallway conversations and conference room whiteboarding sessions. If workplace facilities and perks help people feel more comfortable, productive, and valued, those investments stop paying off when most people work remotely.

Let’s face it: the sudden global migration from on-premises to work-from-anywhere computing has transformed the device user experience into the entire workplace experience.

Many organizations have understandably deprioritized user experience in the face of economic pressures and security threats that have strained IT bandwidth during the transition.

What does that look like? Devices that hang or crash, taking 10 or more minutes to reboot. Disruptive remote troubleshooting sessions. Important files getting lost in email – and worse: version control issues – as colleagues adopt digital collaboration tools.

When the device is the only conduit for literally all workplace experiences, there are no free snacks to balance out the inconveniences, disruptions, and frustrations adding up over the course of months.

More likely than not, your organization can relate. Analyst Josh Bersin finds the #1 employee concern is tech for remote work. IDG reports that 44% of organizations say they need new tech to address the new work dynamic. And AppDynamics says that 61% of IT professionals feel more pressure at work than ever.

Accelerating the journey to modern management

As a senior program manager with the Microsoft Managed Desktop customer acceleration team, I help customers modernize endpoint management to delight end users, protect data, and reclaim IT bandwidth for digital transformation..

If you share these goals, I encourage you to check out my session at Microsoft Ignite 2020, Accelerating the journey to modern management, which covers the following:

How work evolution strains IT bandwidth, security, device user experience, especially in the context of economic uncertainty,
How modern management is shown to help organizations resolve those issues,
What Microsoft Managed Desktop does to accelerate the journey to modern management,
Technical and non-technical considerations that affect deployment timelines, and
Real Microsoft Managed Desktop customer onboarding journeys ranging from six weeks to six months.

As promised at the end of my session, this docs page will help you get ready for Microsoft Managed Desktop enrollment. It covers prerequisites, readiness tools, app preparation, environment configuration, and other tasks you’ll encounter as you work to modernize.

Additional modernization resources

Wherever you are on your journey to modern device management, you’ll want to check out this guide to Microsoft Endpoint Manager at Ignite.

Here are several additional promising sessions on topics about managing the new workplace:

Everyone can access these virtual sessions, which are available on-demand at your convenience. If you find them useful, please let me know in comments.

And if you’d like to start planning your enterprise journey to Microsoft Managed Desktop, please reach out to your Microsoft account team. My colleagues and I on the customer acceleration team look forward to helping you deliver a secure device experience that helps your people – and your IT organization – feel productive and valued in the work-from-anywhere environment.

How has the evolution of work affected your organization? Which customer deployment story best resembles your situation? Please share your comments below.

Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Guide to Ignite 2020

John_Mighell — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:47:13 GMT

2020 has been a year of change, including our approach to Microsoft Ignite. The event will be entirely virtual this year, taking place over 48 hours from September 22-24.

To help you manage this change in approach and navigate the hundreds of videos published during this timeframe, please review the below guide for important content related to Network Connectivity. While this content is being made available during the Ignite timeframe, it is meant to serve as foundational learning material beyond the scope of the event. As a result you will not see Ignite specific branding, but rest assured this is the most up to date and in-depth content; all delivered by our Microsoft subject matter experts as you have hopefully come to expect from Microsoft Ignite.

As you review the content below, make sure to add the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Office Hours to your calendar. It’s on Wednesday, Sept 23^rd from 8am – noon PST. Please drop in any time to ask our panel of network experts your questions. Set a reminder on your calendar now, and visit aka.ms/nettalk for details on how to join.

Pages to know:

Optimizing Microsoft 365 network connectivity - Aka.ms/netvideos

If you are interested in the Microsoft 365 network connectivity topic – you should bookmark this page. Not only will all the latest video content from Ignite be posted here, but you’ll find links to the most important Microsoft network configuration resources and guidance on how to handle critical topics like remote work or Zero Trust security. This is a recently launched page and going forward will serve as the central hub for updates and information regarding Microsoft 365 network connectivity.

Interactive guide: Configure your network for Microsoft 365 and Teams - aka.ms/MSLearnNetworkM365

Launching on Sept 18^th, this interactive guide provides step by step instructions to configure your network for optimal connectivity to the Microsoft 365 suite, with a focus on Teams. As more organizations adopt Microsoft Teams, we’ve seen increasing demands for guidance on how to get the best experience with native in-platform experiences that are performance sensitive – like video/audio conferencing, document co-editing, chat, and search. Use this guide to ensure your users have the best Teams experience possible.

Network connectivity discussion forum

Use this discussion forum to ask questions, see hot topics from your peers, and engage directly with our Microsoft 365 networking experts. See the latest post from Paul Andrew, Microsoft 365 Principal Program Manager, on the new features of the connectivity.office.com network assessment tool.

Core content videos:

Topic: Overview of Network Connectivity Principles

Speaker: Konstantin Ryvkin, Microsoft 365 Partner Architect

Location: aka.ms/netvideos

Learn about the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Principles, which serve as foundational elements to achieve optimal network connectivity and most performant user experience with Microsoft 365. Learning about these key principles can help ensure your network strategy and design choices are optimal for your Microsoft 365 users, competitive in the marketplace, and future proof to the constant evolution of the cloud.

Topic: Microsoft’s enterprise network design for the cloud era

Speaker: Paul Collinge, Microsoft 365 Senior Program Manager

Location: aka.ms/netvideos

This video discusses why a traditional enterprise network built for the on-premises world isn’t a good fit for a cloud-first world. We’ll look at some of the common modern enterprise network design models which our customers are using to achieve great performance, agility, security—and often cost savings. We will also cover how Microsoft 365’s design and network principles lend themselves well to this approach.

Topic: Microsoft 365 network connectivity for remote users

Speaker: Roshan Padmanabhan, Microsoft 365 Senior Program Manager

Location: aka.ms/netvideos

In this video we will discuss Microsoft 365 network connectivity best practices for remote users working from home, we will go through remote connectivity strategies like VPN split-tunneling to facilitate continued user productivity during large scale work from home events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Topic: Microsoft 365 Networking Partner Program

Speakers:

John Mighell, Microsoft 365 Senior Product Marketing Manager

Fraser Street, Silver Peak, VP Technical Alliances

Ritesh Mukherjee, 128 Technology, Vice President Product Management

Joseph Chung, VMWare, Director Strategic Alliances

Location: aka.ms/netvideos

Customers often ask Microsoft if partner solutions work with Microsoft 365 and whether they align with Microsoft’s Network Connectivity Principles. This session will review our Networking Partner Program and explain how we designate verified partner solutions that can help optimize your network connectivity.

Topic: How Microsoft does Zero Trust

Speakers: Mark Simos, Microsoft Lead Cybersecurity Architect; Lesley Kipling, Microsoft Chief Security Advisor

Location: aka.ms/netvideos

Learn about Microsoft's approach to Zero Trust within the context of network configuration. Research shows that the Zero Trust concept is used to discuss very different approaches to the same problem and it is often left to the organization to determine which approach is best for their environment. In this session, we’ll outline an approach that details 4 critical categories that evolve the discussion from “Trust but verify” to “Verify everything, trust nothing” including the network.

Topic: Managing connections using the IP/URL web service [NOTE: will be available 9/22]

Speaker: Jeff Mealiffe, Microsoft 365 Principal Architect

Location: aka.ms/netvideos

In this video, we will explain how Microsoft publishes details on the service endpoints across Microsoft 365 workloads, and how you can consume these details to keep your infrastructure configuration up to date and ensure the best possible experience for your users.

Topic: Microsoft 365 network connectivity testing tools [NOTE: will be available 9/22]

Speaker: Paul Andrew, Microsoft 365 Principal Program Manager

Location: aka.ms/netvideos

For large enterprises Microsoft 365 connectivity often requires different network perimeter design than generic Internet connectivity. We publish connectivity principles and best practices for optimizing network perimeters for Microsoft 365. This session will show tooling that is available for testing against those connectivity principles and it will evaluate network connectivity for impact on Microsoft 365 user experience. Passive network measurements from Microsoft 365 clients are shown in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Active testing can be run using the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Test tool which is available at https://connectivity.office.com. This talk will review the test tools, describe when you would use them, and explain the output and what you can learn from them using demos. We will look at network latency, DNS configuration, download speed, network media elements, home VPN configuration, and more. Take a look and you’ll learn how to get the most out of your network perimeter supporting Microsoft 365 user experience.

Enable a Seamless Remote Work Experience for your Users

Roshan_Padmanabhan — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:50 GMT

If you are not familiar with the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Principles, you should be. Refer to the video Overview of Network Connectivity Principles as a prelude to this topic.

For many companies, providing remote work options was already a rapidly growing movement (+173% since 2005 according to Global Workplace Analytics). That was before the COVID-19 crisis, which has massively accelerated that trend and highlighted a number of remote work problems that require immediate remediation. The need to maintain security without sacrificing performance has generated unprecedented demands on enterprise IT to support work-from-anywhere productivity at a massive scale.

Microsoft 365 is well positioned to help customers fulfill that demand, but high concurrency of users working from home generates a large volume of Microsoft 365 traffic which, if routed through forced tunnel VPN and on-premises network perimeters, causes rapid saturation and runs VPN infrastructure out of capacity. In this new reality, using VPN to access Microsoft 365 is no longer just a performance impediment, but a hard wall that not only impacts Microsoft 365 but critical business operations that still have to rely on the VPN to operate.

For many years enterprises have been using VPNs to support remote experiences for their users. Whilst core workloads remained on-premises, a VPN from the remote client routed through a datacenter on the corporate network was the primary method for remote users to access corporate resources. VPNs, network perimeters, and associated security infrastructure were often purpose built and scaled for a defined volume of traffic, typically with the majority of connectivity being initiated from within the corporate network, and most of it staying within the internal network boundaries.

VPN models where all connections from the remote user device are routed back into the on-premises network (known as forced tunneling) were largely sustainable as long as the concurrent scale of remote users was modest and the traffic volumes traversing VPN were low. The use of forced tunneled VPNs for connecting to distributed and performance sensitive cloud applications is extremely suboptimal. This problem has been growing for a number of years, with many customers reporting a significant shift of network traffic patterns. Traffic that used to stay on premises now connects to external cloud endpoints.

For customers who connect their remote worker devices to the corporate network or cloud infrastructure over VPN, Microsoft recommends that key Microsoft 365 scenarios including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online are routed over a VPN split tunnel configuration. This becomes especially important as the first line strategy to facilitate continued employee productivity during large scale work-from-home events such as the COVID-19 crisis. The essence of this approach is to provide a simple method for enterprises to mitigate the risk of VPN infrastructure saturation and dramatically improve Microsoft 365 performance in the shortest timeframe possible.

This VPN split tunnel guidance is in alignment with the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity principles, which are designed to work efficiently for remote users whilst still allowing an organization to maintain security and control over their connectivity. These connectivity principles can also be implemented for remote users very quickly with limited work yet achieve a significant positive impact on the problems outlined above.

Microsoft's recommended strategy for optimizing remote worker's connectivity is focused on rapidly alleviating the problems with the traditional approach and providing high performance with a few simple steps. These steps guide you to split tunnel Microsoft 365 traffic for a small number of defined endpoints to bypass bottlenecked VPN infrastructure and leverage cloud-based security services natively available within the Microsoft 365 stack.

For the latest information on how to plan network connectivity for your remote users and provide the best possible cloud experience watch the Enable a seamless remote work experience video below. This is one video from the 7-part Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Video Series, which you can find at aka.ms/netvideos.

Microsoft 365 Admin Guide to Ignite 2020 (Part 3) - Investments in Complex Organizations

Scott Schnoll — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:42:21 GMT

Microsoft Ignite, our yearly flagship event for Microsoft products and technologies, is a 48-hour digital event experience taking place from September 22-24, 2020. Ignite, of course, is a very different event this year. On the one hand, it is a single global event where everyone gets the same news, information, content, and experience at the same time. But on the other hand, I will miss the many personal connections that take place at our in-person events. I look forward to the day when in-person events resume, but until then, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to share with you now an amazing collection of video content covering the incredible work being done across Microsoft 365.

Last year, the admin track at Ignite had several breakout, theater, and learning path sessions from a variety of engineering teams, including:

the Microsoft 365 admin center team—the team that builds the Microsoft 365 admin center and admin mobile app;
Release and Delivery Experiences—the team that builds, among other things, Office.com and Office What’s New;
Microsoft 365 Groups—the team that builds the Microsoft 365 Groups platform, membership service, and user experiences; and
Microsoft 365 Complex Orgs—the team that builds features and experiences to support customer mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, and cross-tenant collaboration.

Since last Ignite, each of these teams has been immersed in customer feedback and working hard to deliver your most-wanted admin experiences. At an in-person Ignite, they’d be up on stage telling you all about what they’ve been up to for the past year. But since we can’t do that, I am thrilled to announce that we’ve done the next best thing – a digital admin track!

The Microsoft 365 Admin Tools and Experiences track has a slew of new videos that announce new features and ways to connect with Microsoft 365 engineering teams. These videos detail the new features and experiences we have delivered and are delivering to you. They talk about what we’ve done over the past year and why we’ve done it, and they give you a glimpse into what we’re doing next and why. Watch these videos not just for the content, but also for the opportunities they give you to engage directly with these feature teams and register your interest for upcoming previews, roundtables, and other product team engagements.

There are 18 across three broad themes:

IT efficiency and agility;
Modern cloud management; and
Investments in complex organizations

This post covers our investments for organizations that, as part of their normal business routine, engage in merger, acquisition, split and divestiture activities, and for organizations, partners, and admins that manage multiple Microsoft 365 tenants. We refer to these types of customers as complex organizations. And we’re doing work across multiple engineering teams to support these complex organizations.

Meet the Speakers

Let's meet the speakers first!

Microsoft 365 admins at Microsoft Ignite - https://aka.ms/Admin10052

Calling all Microsoft 365 admins and IT Pros! This Ignite session describes the slew of new learning videos that discuss new and recent improvements to the Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft 365 Groups, and the investments we're making in complex organization/multiple tenant scenarios.

Supporting Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures in Microsoft 365 – https://aka.ms/Admin1002

Customers undergoing mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures often need to migrate their data between Microsoft 365 tenants. When a customer acquires a company with their own tenant, they are faced with the decision around what to do with that tenant. Sometimes, it makes sense to keep the tenants separate, such as in the case of conglomerates where there is a lot of autonomy and independence between business units.

In other cases, customers need to transfer the acquired users and data to their existing tenant. This is for a variety of reasons. First, users in the same tenant have the most feature-rich collaboration experiences. In a single tenant, you automatically get a common directory, the best Teams experience, etc. because everything is in one tenant. While we are investing heavily to improve cross-tenant collaboration, users in the same tenant will always get the richest experience across the suite.

Other reasons include a size mismatch between the existing tenant and the acquired tenant. In most cases, it doesn't make sense to keep small tenants around in a large company. Companies with large well-managed tenants with tens or hundreds of thousands of users usually don’t want to manage a bunch of very small tenants, in part because each tenant adds management overhead.

Finally, there are also scenarios in which the whole tenant is not being divested or acquired. Some acquisitions and divestitures involve “carve ups,” where only a subset of users and data are acquired and migrated. Or some users are divested to one company and other users are divested to another company. In these partial acquisitions and divestitures, migration is the only option.

In a brand-new video, Rob Lowe and Sesha Mani, members of the Microsoft 365 complex orgs team, talk about some of the challenges encountered by complex orgs around data migration, branding, and so forth. They also discuss Microsoft’s vision for mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, where we see mergers and divestitures as two sides of the same coin, where data can be migrated seamlessly and securely between tenants, and key experiences, such as People Search, have the same experience across tenants that we have within a single tenant.

In their video, Rob and Sesha have some fantastic demos showing new experiences we have for cross-tenant mailbox migration and cross-tenant SharePoint and OneDrive migration. There’s also a great demo on domain sharing for email, and cross-tenant People Search, two of the top cross-tenant features that customers have been asking for.

Finally, Rob and Sesha talk about our plans for future improvements for complex orgs, and they talk about the preview programs for these features. Check out the video and use the links in it to indicate your interest in the preview programs.

Multi-tenant management in the Microsoft 365 admin center – https://aka.ms/Admin1004

Did you know that more than 1/3 of all Microsoft 365 tenants are managed by admins who manage multiple tenants? In fact, this applies to 2/3 of our enterprise customers, and the majority of our partners, as well. Multiple tenant scenarios arise a number of ways. For example, in the partner space, there are Cloud Solution Providers and Managed Service Providers who manage tenants on behalf of their customers. And in the enterprise space, there are merger and acquisition scenarios, separate test and production environments, and in some cases, regulatory requirements that drive multiple tenant scenarios.

Historically, the Microsoft 365 admin center was built for single tenant admins and only recently did we start supporting admins who manage multiple tenants. These admins face the same challenges as admins with single tenants, except they have the additional complexity of having to switch between tenants, and often the additional tasks of performing the same work. Our goal is to help multi-tenant admins spend less time juggling tenants and more time doing meaningful work for them.

In a brand-new video, Tim Heeney, Principal Program Manager on the Microsoft 365 admin center team, talks about the specific challenges faced by admins who manage multiple tenants. He talks about who these admins are, and where we are making investments in the multi-tenant management space. Equally important is why we are making these investments, and as Tim explains in the video, we have prioritized our work items based on direct customer feedback.

Tim also goes into detail about the most pressing issues around multi-tenant management, such as switching between multiple tenants, assessing the health and status of multiple tenants, performing repetitive tasks against multiple tenants, and understanding configuration differences between multiple tenants. He also describes Microsoft’s vision to create a unified management experience that allows for multi-tenant administration from a single pane of glass.

Finally, Tim walks you through our plans to deliver on that vision.

Multi-tenant management: Service Health and Message Center – https://aka.ms/Admin1006

We publish a lot of information about Microsoft 365 services. For example, the service health dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center provides a comprehensive view of the health of your services. If you are experiencing problems, you can check service health to determine if the issue you are seeing is a known issue before you call support or spend time troubleshooting. The Message Center helps you keep track of upcoming changes, including new and changed features, planned maintenance, and other important announcements. As I mentioned before, you can access both using the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Microsoft 365 admin mobile app.

The feedback from admins who manage multiple tenants is clear: service-related info and communications in the Service Health Dashboard and the Message Center are critical to multi-tenant admins to provide quality support to their users and to manage service changes.

In a brand-new video, Micky Saini, a program manager on the Release and Delivery Experiences team, talks about the investments we are making in these areas to provide multi-tenant admins with visibility into the service health of their tenants and richer, actionable insights to comprehend the impact to their tenants. We also want to improve productivity for these admins by helping them to proactively support their users by staying up to date on service incidents.

Micky talks about the admins we are serving with our multi-tenant management investments, and why we are making those investments. He talks about work we’ve already done, such as the awesome Tenant Switcher in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and gives us a glimpse of what’s coming next in this space, such as a snapshot view for admins that provides insights across service health, support requests, products & billing, and setup recommendations.

Micky also provides you with details on how you can partner with Microsoft to shape the multi-tenant experiences we are creating, and details on how you can connect directly with the engineering teams that are developing these features. Finally, in his demo, Micky walks you through the new features in Service Health that are now part of the multi-tenant admin experience.

If you manage multiple Microsoft 365 tenants, be sure to watch the video and let us know what you think of our roadmap, and if there’s anything else we should focus on that can make your life easier.

Next Steps

Now that we’ve covered our Investments in Complex Organizations, check out the great content we have for IT Efficiency and Agility, and Modern Cloud Management.

Here’s the complete list of available videos and their URLs. We hope you enjoy them!

Improved IT Efficiency and Agility
Role-based Access Control in Microsoft 365	https://aka.ms/Admin1008
Microsoft 365 admin mobile app: administration on-the-go with productivity with flexibility	https://aka.ms/Admin1009
Improve IT efficiency and agility and stay informed as you enable self-service tasks	https://aka.ms/Admin1010
Making IT more efficient with improvements to Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1011
Leveraging user feedback about Microsoft 365 in your organization	https://aka.ms/Admin1015
Drive external collaboration for your organization using Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1007
Modern Cloud Management
How to manage Microsoft 365 in a remote work world	https://aka.ms/Admin3010
Transform change management by syncing Message Center posts to Planner	https://aka.ms/Admin1019
Managing updates of Microsoft 365 Apps using servicing automation	https://aka.ms/Admin1016
Microsoft 365 Groups roadmap updates	https://aka.ms/Admin1013
Microsoft 365 Groups architecture overview and deep dive	https://aka.ms/Admin1017
Governance and management best practices for Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1018
Effective controls for Microsoft 365 Apps in the Microsoft 365 admin center	https://aka.ms/Admin1120
Managing work and life with Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1022
How Microsoft manages Microsoft 365 Groups for its employees	https://aka.ms/Admin1003
Investments in Complex Organizations
Multi-tenant management in the Microsoft 365 admin center	https://aka.ms/Admin1004
Supporting Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures in Microsoft 365	https://aka.ms/Admin1002
Aggregated views of Service Health and Message Center for admins that manage multiple tenants	https://aka.ms/Admin1006

One last takeaway: Your call to action. Please remember that we don’t just want you to watch our videos; we want you to use the new features, we want to engage with you; we want your feedback, and your help to prioritize our work. Although these teams work on different features and functionality, all of them have the same goals: to bring you features and experiences that delight you, and to make the Microsoft 365 admin experience the most-loved cloud admin experience in the industry. We can’t do that without your help, so please engage with us and let’s get to work!

Microsoft 365 Admin Guide to Ignite 2020 (Part 2) - Modern Cloud Management

Scott Schnoll — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:43:20 GMT

Last year, the admin track at Ignite had several breakout, theater, and learning path sessions from a variety of engineering teams, including:

the Microsoft 365 admin center team—the team that builds the Microsoft 365 admin center and admin mobile app;
Release and Delivery Experiences—the team that builds, among other things, Office.com and Office What’s New;
Microsoft 365 Groups—the team that builds the Microsoft 365 Groups platform, membership service, and user experiences; and
Microsoft 365 Complex Orgs—the team that builds features and experiences to support customer mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, and cross-tenant collaboration.

There are 18 across three broad themes:

This post covers Modern Cloud Management. Prior to the pandemic, the modern workplace was already evolving at lightning speed, with distributed teams, brand-new business models, and complex security issues. It’s undergoing transition—a digital transformation, if you will—where your organization, your users, and your customers are more connected and mobile than ever. Successfully navigating this digital transformation is likely one of your highest priorities.

Modern cloud management embraces your users’ needs and the changing environment. Modern cloud management is the foundation of the modern workplace, and by adopting new approaches to IT management, including cloud technologies, you can simplify management, improve security, and provide better user experiences while lowering TCO.

Meet the Speakers

Let's meet the speakers first!

Microsoft 365 admins at Microsoft Ignite - https://aka.ms/Admin10052

Managing Remote Work with Microsoft 365 – https://aka.ms/Admin3010

Like Microsoft, organizations around the world are putting the safety of their employees, customers and communities first. In fact, we’ve all had to adjust to a new remote world this year.

Even as things settle down, a degree of remote work will remain. In time, as employees begin to return to the workplace, remote security, productivity, and management will continue to be a primary focus. Working remotely can push the boundaries of security, and the stakes are incredibly high for organizations working through today’s new remote reality that includes remote buying and selling, remote learning, telemedicine, remote teamwork and development, and remote management.

Enabling remote work raises some important questions, such as:

How can we work better remotely?
How can we maintain security?
And how can we simplify operations?

These questions can be particularly difficult to answer for small and medium-sized businesses. In a brand-new video, Paty Carlos and Ishaan Agarwal, program managers on the Amplify team, help you answer those questions about how to run your small or medium business remotely.

Paty and Ishaan start with details on how to setup and manage Microsoft Teams using the Microsoft 365 admin center, including Microsoft 365 Business Voice. Next, they walk you through how to configure policies for Teams in the Teams admin center using policy packages. A policy package is a collection of predefined policies and settings that can be customized and applied to a group of users that have similar roles within your organization. You’ll see how to use an app setup policy that includes the apps for a business voice experience for users.

They also show you how you can enable additional security for remote work in the Microsoft 365 admin center, including a new Remote Work Essentials page that is coming soon. You can use this single page to set up all the recommended essential remote work features. The page includes a collection of actions you can take to help your organization stay safe, secure, and productive, such as protecting your organization using security defaults, or enabling self-service password reset, or protecting data in mobile apps.

Finally, Paty and Ishaan will show you how to simplify your operations by doing things like promoting OneDrive, Teams and Office use through recommendations and Microsoft curated content.

This video is packed with demos and ways for small and medium businesses to modernize cloud management, so be sure to check it out.

Transform change management by syncing Message Center posts to Planner – https://aka.ms/Admin1019

The Message Center in the Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to help you keep track of upcoming changes to Microsoft 365, including new and changed features, planned maintenance, and other important announcements. Each post provides you with a high-level overview of planned changes along with links to detailed information to help you prepare for and manage the change. Organizations typically see an average of 140 messages per month.

Customers have given us feedback on the challenges they face with the Message Center. You’ve told us that:

It’s not easy to triage message center posts; and
There’s no way to assign posts for action and accountability; and
That you spend your time managing content, instead of change.

In a brand-new video, Paolo Ciccu, a program manager on the Release and Delivery Experiences team, talks about this new feature and how to use it to manage change instead of content. Paolo also provides tips and tricks for maximizing the use of this new feature that came directly from customers in the preview program.

Paolo starts by discussing the feedback we heard from customers, and the challenges they face. He then describes our solution—the ability to sync Message Center to Planner, as well as why we chose to use Planner as our change management platform. He also talks about the particular challenges around change management and provides Microsoft’s best practices for change management in Microsoft 365.

Paolo also demonstrates how to setup the Planner sync feature, how it works, and how to configure and organize Planner to meet your needs.

Finally, Paolo details how you can connect with the feature team for deeper interaction and for providing feedback. We’d love to hear directly from you on how we can enhance and improve this feature, not just to meet your needs, but to make your life easier.

Effective controls for Microsoft 365 Apps in the Microsoft 365 admin center – https://aka.ms/Admin1120

Microsoft’s vision when it comes to helping you deploy and manage Microsoft 365 Apps, is to empower admins to make informed decisions. We want to help accelerate your modernization, build your confidence and trust, and increase your satisfaction and productivity. Earlier this year, we released Office What’s New Management in the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Office 365 Client Configuration Service (config.office.com) that allows admins to choose which new features are shown to or hidden from end users in the Help area of the Office desktop apps.

Next is channel management for Microsoft 365 Apps. That means choosing the right update channel that best fits the needs of your organization. You can control how often users in your organization get updates to Microsoft 365 Apps by specifying which update channel to use. There are three primary update channels: Current, Monthly Enterprise, and Semi-Annual Enterprise.

Generally, we recommend the Current Channel, especially for small and medium businesses and education customers, because it provides your users with the newest Office features as soon as they are ready. If you want predictability of when the features are available to your users, we recommend the new Monthly Enterprise Channel. In cases where you require extensive testing before deploying new features, we recommend the Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel.

In a brand-new recording, Patrice Mélékian, Principal Program Manager on the Release and Delivery Experiences teams, describe Microsoft’s vision for deploying and managing Microsoft 365 apps. He talks about channel management, and how to choose the right channel for your organization. He also describes the new Monthly Enterprise Channel and the new installation option controls that allow you to roll back to your previous version of Office or skip an upcoming update to the next version.

Patrice talks about the Office What’s New Management feature and how to manage new feature communication and end-user education for your organization, as well as the Office What’s New management card you can add to the home page of the Microsoft 365 admin center. In case you haven’t seen it, we added release dates to the card to ensure that you have visibility into when each version is released across all channels.

Be sure to check out this video for all this great stuff, as well as opportunities to directly engage with the team by email and to join a customer panel.

New admin capabilities to modernizing servicing of the Office client – https://aka.ms/Admin1016

One of the benefits of cloud-based software is that users always have the latest version. But we know for software that is deployed to clients, such as Microsoft 365 Apps, a lot of organizations struggle to keep their Office clients up to date. Many are unable to update within 30 days of release.

When it comes to Microsoft 365 apps, customers have told us that they want the ability to easily stay current, that they want to reduce the burden on admins, and that they don’t want on-premises infrastructure to be required for deployment.

Microsoft’s vision for enterprise health with respect to the deployment and management of Microsoft 365 Apps is to provide admins with intelligent insights and controls, predictable and automated servicing, and optimal app health and performance.

In a brand-new video, Amesh Mansukhani, a principal program manager on the Office Engineering team, provides details on that vision. Amesh talks about the challenges around staying current, as well as the reasons for staying current. He also describes the fundamentals of our update experience, which include delivery optimization, network optimization, and experiences that minimize disruptions.

Amesh also describes the intelligent insights and controls we are delivering, such as Office inventory, which allows you to drill into detailed views of Device and Add-in information. He also debuts a new dashboard showing your organization’s security update status across all app update channels.

Amesh then talks about how we’re delivering predictable and automated servicing. This includes the new Office Apps Servicing Profile, which automatically delivers updates based on your needs.

Finally, Amesh describes the new insights and alerting we are delivering that provide Office app health at a glance.

Each of these new features will enter public preview starting next month, so be sure to check out the video to get the details on these new features and the previews.

Microsoft 365 Groups overview and architecture deep dive – https://aka.ms/Admin1017

Microsoft 365 Groups is the membership service that powers collaboration across Microsoft 365. There are more than 20 Office apps that leverage groups inside their experiences for capabilities such as sharing, and there is a thriving partner ecosystem with apps that provide additional governance tools on top of what we provide. Easily the most common question we get from customers is how does the Group creation and provisioning process work. A related and often asked question is why do we see Outlook Groups in Teams but not in Yammer?

In a brand-new video, Arunkumaran Varadharajan, a Principal PM Manager on the Microsoft 365 Groups team, answers these common questions and more. Arun provides an overview of Groups, and dives deep into the internal architecture of Groups in both the enterprise and consumer spaces. Next, he covers the Group creation and provisioning process to help you better understand what happens when you create a Group in, say for example, Outlook, versus Teams or Yammer. Arun walks through the lifecycle and flow for Groups, including creation and naming policies, using sensitivity labels with Groups, and data residency considerations.

Arun then discusses Group activity tracking, Group deletion, and deleted Group restoration and retention, as well as the differences between soft-delete and hard-delete. Next, Arun shares what happens when someone joins a Group from both inside and outside your organization. Finally, Arun discusses Groups governance, including both app-specific policies across Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint, and tenant-wide policies, such as naming, creation, and expiry, and security and compliance across the suite.

Governance and management best practices for Microsoft 365 Groups – https://aka.ms/Admin1018

Microsoft 365 Groups include a variety of governance controls to help you manage Groups in your organization, including as I mentioned, expiration policies, naming conventions, blocked words policies, and self-service capabilities.

Groups can be created by users from a variety of endpoints, such as Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. You can control who can create groups but be aware that limiting group creation can hinder productivity because many Microsoft 365 services require Groups to function. Other governance options include limiting group creation to members of a dynamic security group containing, for example, all full-time employees. In this scenario, you may also want to consider requiring users to complete training on your organization’s policies for Groups before they can become members of the security group.

To limit group sprawl, you can use expiration policies to automatically delete groups that are not being used. You can specify an expiration period begins when the group is created, or on the date it was last renewed, and any group that reaches the end of that period, and is not renewed, will be deleted. Note that any group that is deleted can be restored within 30 days by the group owners or an admin.

In a brand-new video, Vinay Jagannatha Rao, a program manager on the Microsoft 365 Groups team, provides Microsoft’s recommended guidance and best practices for managing and governing the Groups lifecycle. In it, Vinay talks about a variety of governance tools and our latest best practices.

Support for sensitivity labels on Groups, which we announced at Ignite last year, is now generally available, and Vinay talks about the benefits of using labels on Groups and how it can help you protect high value information. Vinay also provides guidance for migrating any existing Azure Information Protection labels to sensitivity labels, and details how to restrict who can create public or external groups.

Next, Vinay talks about support for Information Barriers that allow you to create ethical walls and block communication and collaboration as needed to prevent any conflicts of interest within your organization. Vinay also talks about a survey we are conducting around your information barrier needs.

Vinay provides a sneak peek at Ownership Governance, a new feature in development and expected in early 2021, and he shows you how you can sign up for the preview program.

If you are wondering how to effectively govern groups, or how to manage groups at scale, or whether you should enable groups self-service, this video is for you!

Microsoft 365 Groups roadmap updates – https://aka.ms/Admin1013

Last year at Ignite 2019 and on the Ignite Tour, we spoke about the Office 365 Groups platform and how it powered collaboration across Microsoft 365. We showed you how Groups can help you share knowledge and information using email, calendaring, documents, among other things. We described the Groups lifecycle that moves from exploration to pilot and from pilot to a controlled rollout. We explained how to deploy groups at scale, how to empower end users, and how to control who can create Groups.

Finally, we talked about the roadmap for Groups. We provided a progress report over where we were since Ignite 2018, and we described how upcoming investments would help you drive new levels of collaboration. Since we were covering roughly a year’s worth of work, we discussed a lot of innovation that had taken place between 2018 and 2019. The session was packed with demos and information, which is why it was one of only five sessions in the admin track on the Ignite tour.

Well buckle up because it’s back again this year! And with a new name! To reflect the fact that Office 365 Groups power collaboration across Microsoft 365, Office 365 Groups became Microsoft 365 Groups.

And in a brand-new recording covering Groups roadmap updates, Venkat Ayyadevara and Mike McLean, program managers on the Groups team, provide the team’s yearly roadmap update that includes various usage metrics, and details on the evolution of the Groups platform, which now crosses work and life.

Once again, it’s been a busy year for Microsoft 365 Groups. In addition to rebranding, Venkat and Mike recap their roadmap update from Ignite 2019, and then they cover the abundance of Groups innovations we’ve made since then across three areas: governance, management at scale, and work and life. These improvements include general availability of support for sensitivity labels, Microsoft 365 admin center support for exporting groups, managing Group email addresses, support for application authentication in Microsoft Graph, and support for Teams for personal use, to name a few.

As always, Venkat and Mike’s roadmap update is packed with information and demos, so be sure to check it out, and give us your input and feedback on how we’re doing. Do you like what we’ve done since last year? Do you like where we’re headed with Groups? Watch the video and let us know what you think.

Managing work and life with Microsoft 365 Groups – https://aka.ms/Admin1022

If this year has done anything, it’s blurred the lines between work and life like never before. We’ve now reached an inflection point. As the global response to COVID-19 evolves, communities around the world have moved from an era of “remote everything” into a more hybrid model of work, learning, and life. We’ve always known that technology isn't only for work. Technology can help you stay connected to friends and family even when you're apart. It can help you make the most of your time so you can focus on what matters. You can’t create more hours in the day, but you can make the most of your time.

In a brand-new video, Sandra Vargas and Rahul Rai, program managers on the Microsoft 365 Groups team, explain our vision for a unified Groups platform across Microsoft 365 for enterprises, businesses, family, and home. For Enterprises, Microsoft 365 Groups is a true membership service built on Azure Active Directory that powers all teamwork scenarios in Microsoft 365. In the consumer world, Groups is an identity and membership service built on top of the Microsoft Account experience (MSA) that aims to powers all Group scenarios in Microsoft consumer apps, like Outlook.com. So just like in the enterprise world, on the consumer side, Microsoft 365 Groups power intelligent apps that bring together groups of people with the resources they need to achieve amazing outcomes. These Groups can be used by families, social and professional groups, and self-directed workers, such as contractors.

In the video, Sandra and Rahul explain why we have extended the Groups platform, and how this extension can help you find new balance in this blending of work and life. They’ll introduce you to Alex, a persona we created to illustrate the new normal. Alex is the IT admin for Contoso. She’s also a wife and the mother of 2 children. As the admin at work, Alex uses the Microsoft 365 admin center to manage features such as Groups and Teams. She also uses Outlook, Teams, and Groups extensively. Alex is also the IT admin at home where she manages her family’s devices, apps, and calendar.

With COVID restrictions in place, both Alex and her husband Mark have been working from home and with all the overlapping meetings, they finally decide that they need another home office. To help manage this project, they decide to use Microsoft 365 Groups, which allows them to coordinate tasks and schedules across their family, and the contractors involved in the project.

Check out the video and see for yourself how Groups can help you with work and life, providing whole day experiences that make your life easier.

How Microsoft manages Microsoft 365 Groups for its employees – https://aka.ms/Admin1003

Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations, or CSEO, formerly Microsoft IT, began embracing digital transformation and the culture changes that go with it a few years ago. CSEO is very much a global IT organization, with a significant amount of data, people, services, and devices to manage. Their vision for seamless teamwork is to use Microsoft 365 to create productive and aligned teams, and to engage employees with leadership and the company.

Today, nearly all our IT infrastructure is in the cloud using Azure as our primary platform, and Microsoft 365 as our platform for productivity. Microsoft’s IT environment is quite expansive, with nearly 9 petabytes of data being managed across more than 100 countries, and dozens of cloud services. We have hundreds of thousands of users, guests, mailboxes, sites, and teams, along with thousands of Yammer communities. And we have more than 350,000 Microsoft 365 Groups.

One of CSEO’s guiding principles is to enable employee self-service throughout the company. For example, any full-time employee at Microsoft can create a Microsoft 365 Group. We know firsthand that by enabling self-service we are:

Reducing IT overhead;
Discouraging shadow IT; and
Discouraging large groups, which can sometimes lead to oversharing.

In a brand-new video, David Johnson, a Principal Program Manager on the CSEO team, talks about how Microsoft manages Microsoft 365 Groups for its employees. David provides answers to the questions we get around how we empower employees, enable collaboration, and manage data. David talks about how CSEO decided to invest on container ownership, which is critical in a self-service environment, and content identification, which enables Microsoft to protect content and reduce the chances of oversharing.

David talks about Microsoft’s principles of container and content governance, which involve several important focus points to help ensure that Microsoft data is safe and secure. He also talks about group driven membership at Microsoft, as well as the Group Membership Management tool I mentioned earlier. David also talks about the custom solutions CSEO developed to protect assets and ensure employee accountability.

David’s video helps to assuage the fears often held by IT around data protection and compliance, perceived chaos and sprawl resulting from employee empowerment, content overexposure or oversharing, and employees introducing shadow IT, so be sure to check it out.

Next Steps

Now that we’ve covered Modern Cloud Management, check out the great content we have for IT Efficiency and Agility, and Investments in Complex Organizations.

Here’s the complete list of available videos and their URLs. We hope you enjoy them!

Improved IT Efficiency and Agility
Role-based Access Control in Microsoft 365	https://aka.ms/Admin1008
Microsoft 365 admin mobile app: administration on-the-go with productivity with flexibility	https://aka.ms/Admin1009
Improve IT efficiency and agility and stay informed as you enable self-service tasks	https://aka.ms/Admin1010
Making IT more efficient with improvements to Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1011
Leveraging user feedback about Microsoft 365 in your organization	https://aka.ms/Admin1015
Drive external collaboration for your organization using Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1007
Modern Cloud Management
How to manage Microsoft 365 in a remote work world	https://aka.ms/Admin3010
Transform change management by syncing Message Center posts to Planner	https://aka.ms/Admin1019
Managing updates of Microsoft 365 Apps using servicing automation	https://aka.ms/Admin1016
Microsoft 365 Groups roadmap updates	https://aka.ms/Admin1013
Microsoft 365 Groups architecture overview and deep dive	https://aka.ms/Admin1017
Governance and management best practices for Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1018
Effective controls for Microsoft 365 Apps in the Microsoft 365 admin center	https://aka.ms/Admin1120
Managing work and life with Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1022
How Microsoft manages Microsoft 365 Groups for its employees	https://aka.ms/Admin1003
Investments in Complex Organizations
Multi-tenant management in the Microsoft 365 admin center	https://aka.ms/Admin1004
Supporting Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures in Microsoft 365	https://aka.ms/Admin1002
Aggregated views of Service Health and Message Center for admins that manage multiple tenants	https://aka.ms/Admin1006

Microsoft 365 Admin Guide to Ignite 2020 (Part 1) - IT Efficiency and Agility

Scott Schnoll — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:40:09 GMT

Last year, the admin track at Ignite had several breakout, theater, and learning path sessions from several engineering teams, such as:

the Microsoft 365 admin center team—the team that builds the Microsoft 365 admin center and admin mobile app;
Release and Delivery Experiences—the team that builds, among other things, Office.com and Office What’s New;
Microsoft 365 Groups—the team that builds the Microsoft 365 Groups platform, membership service, and user experiences; and
Microsoft 365 Complex Orgs—the team that builds features and experiences to support customer mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, and cross-tenant collaboration.

The Microsoft 365 Admin Tools and Experiences track has a slew of new videos that announce new features and ways to connect with Microsoft 365 engineering teams. These videos detail the new features and experiences we have delivered and are delivering to you. They highlight what we’ve done over the past year and why we’ve done it, and they give you a glimpse into what we’re doing next and why. Watch these videos not just for the content, but also for the opportunities they give you to engage directly with these feature teams and register your interest for upcoming previews, roundtables, and other product team engagements.

There are 18 across three broad themes:

This post covers IT efficiency and agility. Improved IT efficiency and agility means, in part, helping you to become a more efficient admin by allowing you to do things like delegate tasks, to increase the speed of task completion, and to improve your productivity. It also means greater flexibility for you in your work. It means giving you rich admin experiences when you’re on the go. It means having insight into the health of your organization. And it means using that insight to improve productivity.

Meet the Speakers

Let's meet the speakers first!

Microsoft 365 admins at Microsoft Ignite - https://aka.ms/Admin10052

Improve IT efficiency and agility and stay informed as you enable self-service tasks – https://aka.ms/Admin1010

We want to help you spend more time on high value projects. So, we are building features that increase efficiency across every part of your admin journey. We’re focusing on delegation, speed, and flexibility.

In a brand-new video, Karissa Larson, a senior program manager on the Microsoft 365 admin center team, talks about how you can improve IT efficiency and agility and maintain visibility through delegation. For example, you can empower users by enabling features such as self-service password reset (SSPR). We’ve been promoting SSPR for a while because we know it saves time and money for every organization that enables it. In fact, it can potentially save your organization a lot of time and money. That’s just one form of delegation that makes an admin’s life easier.

I don’t want to steal any thunder from Karissa and team, so go watch the video, which is packed with demos on everything I’ve mentioned. It also includes a survey you can fill out to give us feedback and help us prioritize our work, and a link to register your interest in joining a virtual roundtable session that will take place in October.

Making IT more efficient with improvements to Microsoft 365 Groups – https://aka.ms/Admin1011

Karissa’s video also includes details on what we’re doing to eliminate the pain of ownerless groups, but we’re also doing a lot more with Groups to make admins more efficient. In case you aren’t aware, Microsoft 365 Groups is a platform and membership service that powers collaboration and drives teamwork across Microsoft 365. With Groups, you can give a team of people access to a collection of resources to share, such as a mailbox, calendar, document library, notebook, and more. The best part is, you don't have to manually assign permissions to each of these resources because adding people to the group automatically gives them access.

Admins have a variety of controls for managing Groups, but they are wanting greater efficiency with Groups and visibility into how Groups are being used.

In a brand-new video, Mike McLean and Ramya Rajasekhar, program managers on the Microsoft 365 Groups team, talk about the many improvements we’ve made to Microsoft 365 Groups that span the Microsoft 365 admin center, Azure Active Directory, Yammer, and more. For example, we’ve enabled key scenarios in the admin center, such as the ability to export Groups with a simple button click, and you can restore deleted Groups and edit Group email addresses in the admin center. You can also manage ownerless Groups and Teamify a Group in the admin center, including Groups created in Outlook.

Mike and Ramya discuss the admin experiences for Groups, including new capabilities around group-driven membership. They describe the improvements we’ve made around exporting Group membership from Azure AD, and how you can now validate dynamic Groups rules. In addition, Groups can now be assigned roles in Azure AD, allowing you to manage roles at scale.

In the video, Ramya also talks about Groups improvements in Yammer. As of last month, the All Company community experience in Yammer is now backed by Groups. All Company is the default community that is created in Yammer, and it contains all users in the organization. All Company is now a Microsoft 365 Group, which enables new capabilities, such as editing the Group name, description, avatar, and so forth. Posts can be restricted to admins only, and admins can promote others to be admins. And now you can host Live Events from the All Company community.

Finally, the video covers Group Driven Membership (sometimes referred to as nested groups), which is one of our top requested features. Customers want to nest security groups in Microsoft 365 groups, and Ramya talks about a new open source Group Membership Management tool that is now available to manage nested groups. The tool is based on .NET and uses Azure functions and Azure table storage, and the Microsoft Graph API as a data source. We’ve been using this tool at Microsoft for over a year where we currently manage more than a hundred of these Groups, some of which have tens of thousands of members. You can send an email to request the tool from Microsoft.

The video includes details on the other Groups improvements for IT efficiency.

Role-based access control in Microsoft 365 – https://aka.ms/Admin1008

As you may know, Microsoft 365 uses a role-based access control permissions model. Referred to as RBAC, it is a conceptual model for admin permissions in which access is granted by assigning a role to an object. This model is used by the various workloads across Microsoft 365. For example, Exchange Online includes a large set of predefined roles which you can use to easily grant permissions to admins and users. Each admin role maps to common business functions and gives people in your organization permissions to do specific tasks.

When it comes to assigning roles and permissions, we have published some best practices. Because admins have access to sensitive data and files, we recommend that you follow these best practices to keep your organization's data more secure. If you are new to managing Microsoft 365, be sure to review the most commonly used Microsoft 365 admin center roles, and if you are working with a Microsoft partner, be sure to check out the section on delegated administration.

In a brand-new video, Tim Heeney, a Principal Program Manager on the Amplify team, talks about Microsoft’s North Star vision for RBAC in Microsoft 365, which is based on feedback we’ve received from admins. The vision includes enabling customers to administer with the least privilege, and to reduce the number of permanent global admins within the organization.

In the video, Tim describes our continuing journey to this North Star, which includes providing fine-grained delegation of administration, a single point of management integrated with governance, and a system designed to intelligently guide you to least privilege use. As we have said before, we will continue to add roles to the admin center, and Tim talks about recently added roles, roles that are coming soon, and custom roles. He also talks about upcoming integration between the Microsoft 365 admin center and Azure Active Directory Administrative Units. Administrative Units are a common way to define structure and scope resources across Microsoft 365 services, and gain clarity into who is managing what resources.

The admin center already supports administrative unit-scoped management of user properties, passwords, licenses, and administrative unit-scoped blocking and unblocking of user sign-ins. Tim’s video goes into detail about what’s coming next and how you can help prioritize our work in this area.

Tim also talks about Azure AD Privileged Identity Management integration that’s coming soon to the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as our plans for unified role management within the admin center. Finally, Tim covers the intelligence built into the admin center that compares access granted with access used and suggests changes that can improve the security posture of your organization.

Microsoft 365 admin mobile app: administration on-the-go with productivity with flexibility - https://aka.ms/Admin1009

Are you an admin who is always on the go? Even if you aren’t, there may be times when you need to manage Microsoft 365 from your phone or tablet. That’s why there’s the free Microsoft 365 admin mobile app, the perfect companion to the web-based admin center. Our goal is to empower Microsoft 365 admins of tenants of all sizes to be productive and happy through mobile experiences.

We’ve made a lot of improvements to the mobile app, which you can use to perform more than 90 tasks to help you manage Microsoft 365. You can customize your dashboard and get the information you need to maintain service quality for your users delivered directly to your device. You can manage users, groups, and passwords, and create service requests. You can unblock users and protect sensitive data with on-the-go access to common tasks such as adding users, resetting passwords, removing company data, assigning product licenses, and more. And now, you can even view Intune-enrolled mobile devices, view billing related alerts, and report incidents.

And if you're responsible for more than one tenant, you can sign into multiple tenants and quickly switch between them. The app isn’t just mobile; it’s also global. It supports all 39 languages that are supported by the Microsoft 365 admin center.

In a brand-new video, Harish Kumar Agarwal, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, talks about the latest innovations in the Microsoft 365 admin mobile app, including support for Intune’s mobile application management and conditional access policies, and notifications related to service health, message center posts, and billing notices.

Harish describes our focus on three areas:

Start the day tasks, which include views of key aspects of your tenant to help you plan your day ahead;
Save the day tasks, which enable you to perform urgent actions that address blocked productivity or security risks; and
Notifications to help you stay informed about information and events across your tenant and organization.

Harish explains why we’re investing in mobile admin scenarios, and he demos several “start the day” and “save the day” tasks.

Finally, Harish gives you a glimpse into the roadmap for the Microsoft 365 admin mobile app, including work items currently under development, and items under consideration. Be sure to check out the video, as it provides details on how you can share your input with the team and help us prioritize our roadmap.

Drive external collaboration for your organization using Microsoft 365 Groups – https://aka.ms/Admin1007

Guest access for Microsoft 365 Groups is enabled for all tenants by default. As an admin, you can control whether to allow guest access to groups for your entire organization or a selective subset. When enabled, group members can invite guest users to a Microsoft 365 group. Invitations are sent to the group owner for approval, and once approved, the guest user is added to the directory and the group. Guest access in groups is often used as part of a broader scenario that includes SharePoint or Teams, and those services have their own guest sharing settings.

Within Microsoft 365, we see millions of guests have been provisioned through Microsoft 365 Groups. And we know that the need for cross-organization collaboration is increasing. But it can be a bit of a challenge for admins to achieve the right balance between preventing unauthorized access and allowing unfettered collaboration. But there are several benefits to be gained by enabling guest access. For example, guest access enables safe teamwork outside your organization’s firewall. It works with any email address, and it’s based on the Azure B2B platform.

In a brand-new video, Salil Kakkar and Nandini Bhavasar, program managers on the Microsoft 365 Groups team, provide Microsoft’s latest guidance on enabling guess access for external collaboration, managing the lifecycle of external collaboration, and best practices for managing guest access at scale. They discuss the benefits of enabling guest access and how to enable guest it, as well as our best practices for governing guest access, including best practices around granting permissions and restricting domains.

Salil and Nandini show you how to track guest user activity using audit logs and guest access reviews, and how to use guest policies effectively in your organization. They walk you through the process of entitlement management, where guests can be automatically invited after being approved, provisioned with time-limited access across Groups, Teams, sites, and apps, and automatically removed when access is no longer needed. They also talk about the guest lifecycle and adoption.

Finally, the video also briefly covers how we manage guest access here at Microsoft. Be sure to check out this video and start enabling safe and secure guest access for your organization.

Leveraging user feedback about Microsoft 365 in your organization – https://aka.ms/Admin1015

Did you know that you can directly influence change at Microsoft by providing feedback and by participating in our surveys and other connection points? We have built several collection and response experiences, including the ability to collect ad hoc feedback, as well as systems that enable user-initiated feedback and system-initiated user feedback. We also have send-a-smile, which allows you to tell us if you like something, or if you don’t.

Each month we collect ~5 million feedback signals through these main systems, and another ~7 million feedback signals through support, forums, and other feedback channels. While we can't respond to every suggestion, we are committed to reading everything.

Microsoft 365 admins have also given us feedback on feedback. You’ve told us that you want visibility into and transparency around the feedback provided to us by your users, and that you want to use feedback to gain insight into product satisfaction within your organization. You’ve let us know that you want to leverage user feedback to understand and improve the health of your organization.

In a brand-new video, Reshma Kapoor, a Senior Program Manager on the Release and Delivery Experiences team, provides details on the investments we are making around customer feedback in Microsoft 365 that provide admins with more control: control over the feedback process, control over feedback data, and control over communications within their tenant. Reshma also talks about work we are doing to enable admins to view data, status, and insights from feedback, and what admins can to do take action on feedback provided by their users.

Finally, Reshma describes the private preview that is launching in late 2020 where customers can co-build feedback controls and systems directly with Microsoft. This will initially start as a small program, with perhaps 20-30 customers, so go watch the recording, and follow the instructions to indicate your interest in the preview program.

Next Steps

Now that we’ve covered how you can increase IT efficiency and agility by enabling self-service, leveraging the improvements in the Microsoft 365 admin center and Microsoft 365 Groups, and by using feedback within your organization to measure and manage health, check out the great content we have for Modern Cloud Management and Investments in Complex Organizations.

Here’s the complete list of available videos and their URLs. We hope you enjoy them!

Improved IT Efficiency and Agility
Role-based Access Control in Microsoft 365	https://aka.ms/Admin1008
Microsoft 365 admin mobile app: administration on-the-go with productivity with flexibility	https://aka.ms/Admin1009
Improve IT efficiency and agility and stay informed as you enable self-service tasks	https://aka.ms/Admin1010
Making IT more efficient with improvements to Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1011
Leveraging user feedback about Microsoft 365 in your organization	https://aka.ms/Admin1015
Drive external collaboration for your organization using Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1007
Modern Cloud Management
How to manage Microsoft 365 in a remote work world	https://aka.ms/Admin3010
Transform change management by syncing Message Center posts to Planner	https://aka.ms/Admin1019
Managing updates of Microsoft 365 Apps using servicing automation	https://aka.ms/Admin1016
Microsoft 365 Groups roadmap updates	https://aka.ms/Admin1013
Microsoft 365 Groups architecture overview and deep dive	https://aka.ms/Admin1017
Governance and management best practices for Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1018
Effective controls for Microsoft 365 Apps in the Microsoft 365 admin center	https://aka.ms/Admin1120
Managing work and life with Microsoft 365 Groups	https://aka.ms/Admin1022
How Microsoft manages Microsoft 365 Groups for its employees	https://aka.ms/Admin1003
Investments in Complex Organizations
Multi-tenant management in the Microsoft 365 admin center	https://aka.ms/Admin1004
Supporting Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures in Microsoft 365	https://aka.ms/Admin1002
Aggregated views of Service Health and Message Center for admins that manage multiple tenants	https://aka.ms/Admin1006

Microsoft 365 is ready for Apple's new systems

Eugenie Burrage — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:05 GMT

Apple’s new operating systems open the door for Microsoft to deliver more capabilities that help Microsoft customers achieve more and bring the best of Microsoft 365 to their preferred devices. These updates make it easier and faster to access the apps you use every day, create and share great content and personalize your experience in a secure way. Microsoft continues to invest in solutions that feel at home across the ecosystem of devices as Microsoft customers continue to adopt Apple products for their personal productivity and business needs in the modern workplace and at home.

At home with your preferred apps on Apple devices

iOS and iPadOS 14 bring a new Apple App Library that will automatically organizes your apps. Now imagine setting apps you use every day such as your email and browser from Microsoft as the default apps. When you update your iOS device with the new Apple operating system and the new version of Microsoft Outlook and Edge, once available in the Apple appstore, you will be able to choose Outlook and Edge as default apps. This way, you can personalize your experience to stay connected and organized in one app for your email and calendar, and when opening links to the web, you can get the privacy and productivity you expect from Microsoft while you browse.

Choose Outlook as your default email app with iOS and iPadOS 14

Personalization of your mobile experience helps you stay in control. Microsoft Outlook and OneDrive will give you the option to add widgets to your iOS and iPad home screen. With the flexibility to pick your widget size and location, you can stay on top of what matters at a glance with an Outlook Calendar widget to see what’s next in your day with your work, school and personal account. When using OneDrive with your personal account, you can see your photo memories from the On This Day feature, highlighting photos taken on this day across previous years. If you don't have any On This Day photos for today, you'll see your most recent photos that you've saved to the cloud.

OneDrive and Outlook Calendar widgets - medium size

If your iPhone is in your pocket and your iPad is on your desk, you can still stay on top of what’s important to you at a glance on your Apple watch. watchOS 7 enables Outlook to introduce new complication improvement for email and calendar. This way, not only can you choose from either or both email or calendar complications, but the calendar complication will now include an indication of your free or busy status based on the color you’ve chosen for your Outlook Calendar color as well as the email complication will display how many unready messages you have in your Outlook Focused Inbox.

New mail and Calendar complications for Outlook

Compose and share your creations

With iPadOS 14, Apple Pencil and Outlook, users will be able to write their emails and their handwritten message will be converted to text automatically with Scribble. You can add hand drawn illustrations or diagrams to your emails for added color and context, or you can use the Pencil to write your keyword Search or fill in the text fields to quickly schedule a meeting. Outlook also supports rich formatting on iPad so once your handwriting is converted to text, you can add additional structure and dimension to your email communications – just touch the symbol with the pencil above your keyboard to view formatting options. Together with Outlook, the iPad has gone beyond being used solely for data consumption through reading, viewing and browsing but increasingly ideal for content creation and sharing.

With iPadOS, you can use Apple’s Multitasking feature to open two apps at the same time. This means that you can open Outlook and Edge to copy and drag text and links to your email, helping you create and send compelling and informative emails. Microsoft is pleased to now introduce the ability to drag and drop files and photos into Outlook. For example you can open your Photos app at the same time as Outlook for iOS on iPad to drag and drop a selection of pictures as email attachments, such as receipts to be emailed to your expense management solution.

Drag and drop images from OneDrive to Outlook on iPad

If you want to select multiple documents from OneDrive, iCloud or another storage location and add them to your emails, just have Outlook open at the same time as the app with your files and drag and drop it into location and the files will be added as attachments to the email. Access permissions to Microsoft 365 files are assigned by your organization and will be automatically applied to further protect your data.

This fall, OneDrive will be able to support offline editing of your Office files. You will be able to download your Word, Excel or PowerPoint files on your iPhone or iPad so that when you’re offline, you can open and edit them in Office or the relevant iPad app. Rolling out in September, OneDrive introduces the new Home experience which brings your most recently used files, shared libraries as well as offline files together regardless if you last accessed them on your mobile device, PC or mac.

New capabilities are coming to Big Sur and OneDrive on macOS. Soon OneDrive will support automatic renaming files and folders that may contain invalid characters or errors.

macOS and OneDrive renames files with unsupported characters

Be sure to join us at Microsoft Ignite 2020 on September 23^rd. We’re looking forward to sharing more news about the new Outlook for Mac and more.

Across the Apple ecosystem of devices, Microsoft 365 uses the new capabilities from the Apple systems to connect you to the apps, files and experiences that are relevant to you so you can easily create and share.

Microsoft is committed to delivering the best Microsoft 365 to customers who choose Apple devices for their business and personal use. When the new systems from Apple start to roll out, Microsoft is ready with updated experiences to help you feel at home on your device of choice and drive your productivity, helping your organize your day and stay on top of what’s important to you in a secure way.

The Shiproom: Prioritizing user experience with security

Bradley Dupay — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:21:21 GMT

Keeping up with The Shiproom is always worthwhile, but I’m especially excited to share this episode highlighting IGM Financial and its path to modernization via Microsoft Managed Desktop.

Keran McGuire, VP of Infrastructure Services at IGM Financial, shares how the organization of 5,000 decided to outsource desktop management, and why user experience and security were essential to their vendor selection.

I helped introduce Microsoft Managed Desktop as a possible solution for IGM, so I’m biased, but any of our blog readers should make a point of watching this episode. And it’s not only because Brad Anderson interviews are both insightful and distinctly hilarious.

IGM exemplifies key market segments where the Microsoft Managed Desktop value prop resonates.

Starting fresh: We see traction among mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, divestitures, and well-funded startups. IGM Financial was likewise divesting its IT services from a sister company, Canada Life, and had a chance to start fresh. These organizations typically have mature leadership, a desire to be modern from the start, and a strong preference to scale IT investments over time instead of incurring technical debt at the outset.

UX-obsessed: IGM’s prioritization of user experience in the managed desktop solution is a clear trend among a growing number of organizations that recognize device productivity as a driver of job satisfaction.

Security-minded: Highly-regulated market segments like financial services, healthcare, and government are rarely on the bleeding edge of technology adoption. But, as Keran describes with IGM, the unique combination of security and productivity is a game changer. I’ve been lucky to tap the expertise of my colleague, technical specialist Eric DeLorme, to help such customers evaluate Microsoft Managed Desktop against their stringent security requirements.

If your organization fits any of those trends, you owe it to yourself to learn about Keran’s experience leading IGM to Microsoft Managed Desktop.

What’s your favorite moment between Brad and Keran? Share your feedback in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to our blog for more great content about Microsoft Managed Desktop.

What expert security monitoring looks like

Emilio Matt — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:21:20 GMT

As a Microsoft Managed Desktop sales specialist, I regularly meet with 5,000-seat organizations that invest heavily in security expertise, training, tools, and services to keep their endpoints secure and up-to-date. I also talk with 20,000-seat organizations that invest precious IT resources elsewhere, as they perceive a low risk of attracting the notice of hackers.

Wherever a given organization falls on this spectrum, there’s usually a moment when the discussion turns to security monitoring – a “magic” moment when executives and IT pros alike truly begin to realize the scale of the security expertise and infrastructure protecting Microsoft Managed Desktop customers.

I’m excited to share this engaging 4-minute video about Microsoft Managed Desktop security operations because it makes that magic moment accessible to organizations beyond our individual customer conversations.

The video does a great job of explaining how Microsoft Managed Desktop:

extends Microsoft’s own protections to improve the security of user devices
supports customers in protecting the rest of their IT environment, and
helps customers improve their protection against security risks over time.

I think you’ll enjoy this animated video. I’m especially interested to hear if you reach the same magic moment my customers experience in our live conversations. If so, I hope you’ll connect with your Microsoft account team to find out whether Microsoft Managed Desktop could be a fit for your organization.

If you’re interested in Microsoft Managed Desktop, be sure to share the video with your colleagues, subscribe to our blog, and contact us to learn more. What do you think about Microsoft Managed Desktop’s sophisticated security? Please leave a comment and join the discussion!

Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Principles

John_Mighell — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:58 GMT

If you are not familiar with the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Principles, you should be. At this stage of cloud powered digital transformation, it has become a well-recognized fact that efficient user connectivity and network architecture that is cloud ready and cloud optimized is one of the most critical decisions that customers should make to achieve best application performance and delightful user experience. For rich cloud-based productivity solutions, such as Microsoft 365, optimal end user connectivity to the cloud becomes especially important.

To help customers modernize their network architectures, Microsoft has developed 4 Network Connectivity Principles. These principles can help customers evaluate their existing network architectures and its readiness for Microsoft 365; inform future network design choices for in office and remote users; and modernize their networks to achieve both security and optimal user experience, instead of trading one versus another. These principles can also be helpful to evaluate different network partner solution architectures for Microsoft 365 alignment and provide confidence that customer network choices are not only optimal, but future proof for the dynamic and evolving nature of the Internet and Microsoft 365 cloud.

Below are the 4 principles at a high level. To dive into the details please watch the first video in our Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Video Series, embedded in this blog. Please watch out for additional videos that dive deep into the details on how those principles can be applied to network design, network configuration, remote user connectivity, and achieving Zero Trust security.

For the latest information on how to configure your Microsoft 365 network components to maximize performance and provide the best possible user experience visit: https://msft.it/6003To3vP

Principle #1: Optimize Microsoft 365 traffic

Use the Microsoft published endpoint categories to differentiate Microsoft 365 traffic from generic Internet traffic for more efficient routing.

Principle #2: Enable local egress

Egress Microsoft 365 data connections through Internet as close to the user as practical with matching DNS resolution.

Principle #3: Enable direct connectivity

Enable direct egress for Microsoft 365 connections. Avoid network hairpins and minimize network latency (RTT) to Microsoft’s global network.

Principle #4: Modernize security for SaaS

Avoid intrusive network security for Microsoft 365 connections. Bypass proxies, traffic inspection devices, and avoid duplicating security controls already available in Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams Adds Sticky Notes and Text, Improves Performance

aneoanou — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:46:38 GMT

Whether you’re working remotely or in the office, your team can use Whiteboard to run effective meetings, brainstorm, plan and think creatively.

We’re excited to announce that some of the most loved Microsoft Whiteboard features on Windows 10 and iOS are now available to use in Teams and Whiteboard on the Web.

These new features make it easier than ever to keep the creative process moving forward virtually with your team or class.

Let’s go through each of these features to give you a better understanding of the use cases for both Enterprise and Education.

Sticky notes

Sticky notes let you quickly add ideas and feedback to the canvas, especially if you’re using a device without a digital pen.

Sticky notes can be added through the toolbar or by right-clicking on the canvas to insert one in a specific place.

Text

Text objects are a great way to add structure to the canvas, such as adding an agenda or details.

Text objects can be added through the toolbar or by right-clicking on the canvas to insert one in a specific place.

Select and move objects

You can move and re-order objects when organizing ideas, tasks or other content on the canvas.

Whiteboard’s Improved Performance

To support these new capabilities the Whiteboard web app has been completely rebuilt and is now faster than ever. This new foundation will allow us to bring more capabilities to Teams and the web, like the ones offered today on Windows 10 and iOS. And you can use the Whiteboard web app on any of your devices including PCs, Macs, Android and iOS devices by visiting http://whiteboard.microsoft.com.

Now let’s put it all together and go through some use cases across school and work:

Educational Institutions: Real-time visual collaboration in online classes, with control over when students can add to the Whiteboard

Visual collaboration tools can make meetings and teaching environments more effective and inclusive. Our updated Whiteboard features in Teams enable students who don’t have access to a touch or pen device to participate in whiteboarding sessions during Teams meetings. Plus, educators will also have the option to present the digital whiteboard without students having access to drawing on the board during class.

Enterprise Use Cases: Inclusive collaboration in the hybrid workplace

We are all in a new norm of working in a hybrid workplace. Though teams are not physically in person these days, there is still a need to be inclusive and collaborate via brainstorming and creative thinking sessions. We all have been in a meeting where we are using a dry erase board, adding sticky notes to a wall, and taking pictures of the material we write, draw, and discuss. We have brought the physical board to you via Whiteboard in Teams.

Additional Capabilities:

We are excited for you to start collaborating on Teams and Whiteboard on the Web! For more information on additional capabilities we have coming to Whiteboard, please see our Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

Please remember - you can continue to access all of Whiteboard’s feature-rich experiences – such as templates and hyperlinks – on the Windows 10 app and iOS app.

Success story: SA Power Networks

Andrew Lowson — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:21:18 GMT

I’m excited to showcase a digital transformation story that shows what can happen when you give your brightest IT talent room to focus on strategic innovation.

SA Power Networks, an energy company I’ve partnered with here in Australia the past couple of years, is using Microsoft Managed Desktop to move endpoint management and security to the cloud for Microsoft experts to manage.

This approach to modernization has made desktop management evergreen, dynamic, and better able to keep pace with evolving business needs.

But there are even more dramatic impacts to user satisfaction, IT agility, and even a “digital utility of the year” award – all of which directly stem from the transition to Microsoft Managed Desktop. If your business needs modernization or you have an increasingly mobile workforce, I hope you’ll read and share the case study, and then reach out to your Microsoft account team to request more information about Microsoft Managed Desktop.

What endpoint management challenges are holding you back from achieving your innovation roadmap? Please share in the comments and be sure to subscribe to our blog to keep current with the latest information.

Connecting tasks experiences across Microsoft 365

Shin-Yi — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:45:42 GMT

This new world of work can feel scattered. Even if you’re an old pro at working from home, things have changed. Your calendar is filled with meetings, you’re constantly managing requests from your team—not to mention your actual work. At times (or all the time), it can feel impossible to manage your ever-growing list of priorities, especially since those too are scattered across your calendar, Word docs, spiral notebooks, and sticky notes.

In this new normal, Microsoft’s vision for a unified tasks experience, which we first announced at Ignite last year, is more relevant than ever. Since then, we’ve made significant progress in creating a coherent, integrated, and intelligent experience to help you stay organized. Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do, and Office—specifically, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—all play a role in the Microsoft 365 tasks experience.

We’re celebrating progress in this space with the launch of a dedicated Microsoft 365 tasks experience webpage, where you can read about all the app connections that bring unified task management to life. But don’t go yet! Read on to see what we’ve been up to since Ignite and to learn more about our vision for this effort.

Teams: manage all your individual and team tasks in one place

If you’re like us, Teams is the nucleus of your workday, especially now that so much of our work is done remotely. So, it’s no coincidence that our unified tasks effort also centers around Teams, which brings tasks from both Planner and To Do into Tasks in Teams. First announced at Ignite last year, Tasks in Teams started rolling out to our customers today and will continue through the end of September. You can read more about the rollout here.

We’ve made some exciting additions to the Tasks in Teams experience since the Ignite announcement. Here’s short summary of those changes, which are covered more extensively on our dedicated Microsoft Docs page.

Task publishing. Designed for companies that need strong communication between corporate and a large, geographically dispersed Firstline Workforce, task publishing lets you create tasks at the corporate level and push those tasks to targeted locations of their Firstline Workforce. Store managers can easily assign tasks to individual employees, while Firstline Workers can see a simple prioritized list of those tasks on their personal or company-issued mobile device. This task flow delivers an easy way for corporate and Firstline Workers to drive the right actions like sales promotions needed for business success. If you’re interested in task publishing—this feature is currently in private preview—please fill out this form to nominate your company.

List view. Tasks in Teams includes the traditional Board, Charts, and Schedule views from Planner, plus the new List view, adding another option for visually managing all your tasks.
Edit multiple tasks at once. List view also comes with bulk editing capabilities, where you can select multiple tasks and make the same edits to all of them simultaneously. This feature supports changes for progress, priority, due date, and more depending on what task list you're looking at.
APIs and Power Automate. You can use Graph API and Power Automate integrations for Planner and To Do to surface tasks created in other apps in Tasks in Teams. Read more about these APIs on our respective Planner and To Do pages, but note that the existing To Do API will soon get updated to a new one. For Power Automate, search “Planner” or “To Do” on the homepage for a host of premade workflow templates.

Outlook: take control of your entire day

Outlook is more than email and calendar: it’s your personal organizer, where you manage your day around work and life commitments—often in the context of tasks. Like Tasks in Teams, Outlook is another hub for the Microsoft 365 tasks experience, where integrated task management capabilities leverage familiar and intelligent solutions to streamline your workday’s commitments.

My Day. Through My Day in Outlook, you can quickly see what your day looks like without disrupting your email workflow. My Day has two tabs: a calendar for creating and viewing meetings and events, and the To Do tab, lets you manage your individual tasks and lists. Any changes are synced to all your task lists across Microsoft 365.
Tasks from email. Turn an email into a task or event by dragging and dropping it into My Day, flagging it in your Outlook message list, or selecting the Create a Task option in the email itself. For help while you’re away from your computer, use Play My Emails in Outlook mobile to flag emails for your To Do list or ask Cortana to add an email to your tasks list.

Tasks from To Do in Search. When you open Search in Outlook mobile, it will proactively pull your top three tasks, regardless of where you created them, and add them to the Search home page. You can easily check them off your list as you go, or quickly open the To Do app to edit or add new tasks.
Cortana Briefing email. To help you prepare for upcoming meetings and stay on top of commitments, the personalized Cortana Briefing email appears automatically in your Outlook inbox around the start of your workday. In that email, Cortana recommends action items from previous threads that you can add as tasks to To Do.
MyAnalytics. If you’re using the MyAnalytics Insights add-in in Outlook, the “View outstanding tasks” insight reminds you of tasks that you've agreed to do during the last 14 days. You can also see inline suggestions to review suggested outstanding tasks for the person who sent the email or calendar invitation.

Planner and To Do: powering the Microsoft 365 tasks experience

The sub-headline says it all: Planner and To Do power the Microsoft 365 tasks experience. It’s from these apps that your team and individual tasks appear in Teams and Outlook. But that doesn’t mean they’re going away; on the contrary, Planner and To Do are critical to the success of this task management motion, so we’re as dedicated as ever to their evolution.

Planner is your go-to app for team tasks. Built around the Kanban approach to task management for teams, Planner lets you easily create plan boards and populate them with information-rich task cards that include files, checklists, labels, and more—everything you need to see tasks through to completion. The entire board can be organized around buckets and filtered based on priority, assignee, and other details. As your plan gains momentum, you can check the entire effort’s progress in the visual Charts view, where premade pie and bar charts provide quick status for all your plan’s tasks and team members.

On the personal side of tasks is To Do, your go-to app for individual tasks. The perfect tool for homing in on your day’s top priorities, To Do helps create sanity in this new world of work. The To Do experience starts with My Day, where you can enter tasks you’d like to focus on for the day. These tasks can be manually added on your tablet or phone, or by asking Cortana to add one for you, and then tracked in Outlook. Added tasks are synced across Microsoft 365. This integration extends to Planner: tasks assigned to you there show up in the Assigned to you smart list. You can easily switch between your work and personal accounts on Android and Windows devices, too. But the best part? The To Do app is free, which means your family and friends with a Microsoft account can use it to coordinate on everything you love in your personal life. You can even share lists between your personal and work accounts, a highly requested feature that we’ve started rolling out this month.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint: capture tasks without switching apps

Tasks can originate from anywhere at any time. This is particularly problematic if you need to break concentration from whichever Office document you’re in to assign that task through another app. But those were the old days; these days—these new Microsoft 365 tasks experience days—you can assign tasks using comment @mentions directly in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

This capability is now rolling out in Word and Excel for the web, with PowerPoint for the web availability coming soon. In the future, these tasks will also show up in Planner and To Do.

@mention task assignments trigger email notifications with a link to the comment in the document. The email notification shows your comment alongside the associated Word sentence, Excel cell, or PowerPoint slide. Add to that Microsoft’s threaded comments experience, and task assignees have all the context they need to get started on the assignment. The person you @mentioned can also respond to the comment directly from their email notification without opening the associated doc.

@mention task assignments, which are a logical extension of a familiar feature (i.e., in-app comments), are a perfect example of the work we’re doing around the Microsoft 365 tasks experience. As we build out this motion, look for similar capabilities that bring task management coherence and integration to your everyday productivity apps.

Continuously connecting the dots

This unified tasks experience is a year old, but we’ve only just begun. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and organization to achieve more, and we believe streamlining task management advances this goal. This starts with what you’ve read here: connecting the apps and services you use most into a coherent, integrated, and intelligent experience. This is especially important in this new, often-scattered world of work.

We hope you’ll continue to follow us on this journey through the Microsoft 365 tasks experience webpage. This experience is part of a larger collaborative work management initiative that we just launched last week at Microsoft Inspire. You can watch the 30-minute presentation video about that effort here. And as always, if you have ideas for improving your productivity, drop us a line on the various product UserVoice pages (Teams, Outlook, Planner, To Do, Word, Excel, PowerPoint).

Webinar & AMA: Working with Microsoft Lists (August 5th)

Mark Kashman — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:44:29 GMT

Learn how to get started with Microsoft Lists from the Microsoft Lists engineers themselves - lots to learn and lots of demos. And if you have any questions or feedback for the team, please join us right after the webinar for an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) event within the Microsoft Tech Community. Train your brain and the tech will follow.

On-demand WEBINAR | 'Working with Microsoft Lists'

Learn how to get started with Microsoft Lists from the Microsoft Lists engineers themselves. Start a list from a template, add your information, and then use conditional formatting, rules, and key collaboration features to make the list your own - to make it work across your team. Lots to learn. Lots of demos. [below Lists AMA directly after for all your questions]

Original air date: Wednesday, August 5^th, 2020 at 9am PST (12pm EST; 5pm CET) [60 minutes]
Presented by: Harini Saladi, Miceile Barrett, Chakkaradeep Chandran and Mark Kashman

AMA | “Microsoft Lists AMA”

This was a fast-paced hour Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) within the Microsoft Tech Community. Our panel of Microsoft experts answered questions ranging from Microsoft Lists, SharePoint list, Lists + Teams integrations, Lists + Power Platform integrations, and more.

Go to the Microsoft 365 AMA space within the Microsoft Tech Community site

Microsoft Lists webinar and AMA (August 5th, 2020 starting at 9:00 AM PST)

Thanks, Mark Kashman (Microsoft Lists PMM -- @MKashman)

Microsoft Inspire: Multi-tenant management in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:43:29 GMT

Microsoft Inspire is the annual event where Microsoft joins the global partner community from over 130 countries. It’s also a chance to recognize the many achievements of our partners. To learn more about these outstanding achievements, check out the winners of our Microsoft 2020 Partner of the Year awards.

This year’s all-new virtual Inspire experience includes keynotes in three time zones and interactive breakout sessions to enable us to connect, learn, and collaborate with our partners. And as you might expect, a lot of announcements around Microsoft 365.

In the Microsoft 365 admin center space, we talked about and demonstrated several new features and improvements that are specifically designed from the ground up for partners that manage multiple Office 365/Microsoft 365 tenants.

Timothy Heeney, a Principal Program Manager on the Microsoft 365 admin center team starts things off with a great discussion of the investments we've made and are making in the multi-tenant management space. Justin Lam and Vivek Raigaga, who are both Program Managers on Tim's team, give us a fantastic demo of the multi-tenant features we have introduced and are introducing, and a fantastic demo of the role-based access control (RBAC) improvements we've made.

We hope you enjoy these new features, and as always, please send us your comments, feedback, questions, and suggestions.

--The Microsoft 365 admin center team

Intune role management in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Scott Schnoll — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 23:30:54 GMT

One of the best ways to protect your organization from security threats is to make sure that your staff uses the appropriate level of access to perform their job, ideally following the concept of least privilege. Like other services in Microsoft 365, Intune uses a role-based access control (RBAC) model that helps you manage who has access to your organization's resources and what they can do with those resources. By assigning roles to your Intune admins, you can limit what they can see and change.

We have added Intune role management to the Microsoft 365 admin center, where you can also leverage features such as the ability to search for roles and view role permissions. This means you don’t need two separate tools to manage roles for Microsoft 365 and Intune. When you sign into the Microsoft 365 admin center, you’ll see that there are two pivots on the Roles page, one for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and one for Intune.

Intune pivot on the Roles page in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Search for the right role

As with the Azure AD pivot, the Intune pivot also includes Search, which allows you to use keywords to find roles bases on the role name, description, or the permissions associated with the role. This allows you to find the right role with the least amount of privileges necessary for the role tasks.

Search for the right role

Assigning a Role

Assigning a role is quick and easy. The wizard in the Microsoft 365 admin center walks you through a series of steps to identify who is being given access and what they will be able to manage.

Assign an Intune role in the Microsoft 365 admin center

The wizard also supports assigning scope tags from Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Roles determine what access admins have to which resources, and scope tags determine which objects admins can see.

Use optional scope tags when assigning an Intune admin role

Our hope is that the wizard gives a clear path to getting the right Intune roles assigned to the right people. We’d love to get your feedback, so please try this new experience and use the in-product feedback button in the bottom right corner to let us know what you think.

We have a lot more in store for role management in the Microsoft 365 admin center, so stay tuned!

--The Microsoft 365 admin center team

Microsoft Lists begins general availability roll out to Microsoft 365

Seth Patton — Thu, 06 May 2021 18:43:44 GMT

Microsoft Lists icon

[Availability update | In July 2020, Microsoft Lists began roll out to Targeted Release (TR) customers in Microsoft 365. We released the Lists app for Microsoft Teams in August 2020. And now, we are pleased to report that Microsoft Lists has completed 100% worldwide roll out to all commercial, education and government plans.]

At Build 2020, we introduced Microsoft Lists, a smart information tracking app in Microsoft 365. Today, we’re thrilled to announce Microsoft Lists begins roll out to Microsoft 365 business customers worldwide, starting this month with the Lists app in Microsoft 365 and next month with the Lists app in Microsoft Teams.

We are excited to share more details in the blog sections below:

Create and use Microsoft Lists within Microsoft Teams
Make lists smarter to get more done in Microsoft 365
Lists for every team and every situation (customer stories)
Want to learn more? (upcoming webinar, AMA, and new The Intrazone podcast episode)
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Create and use Microsoft Lists within Microsoft Teams

Starting a list is easy. Create and manage lists from any browser by clicking Lists in the Microsoft 365 app launcher. Get going quickly with one of our ready-made templates for issue tracking, asset management, employee onboarding, and more. Review the Microsoft Lists “Look Book” to learn more about the ready-made templates.

Create a new list inside Teams with conversations side-by-side. The above shows using the Asset manager template.

For Microsoft Teams users, simply add a list to a channel or create a new list directly in Teams. The Teams mobile app also gets a Lists update so you can view any list you added a tab in Teams – even on the go. Available later this year on iOS, the new Lists mobile app enables customers to create, view, and manage all their Lists from their mobile devices.

Make lists smarter to get more done in Microsoft 365

Keeping track of information is part of everyday life. Writing things down or using spreadsheets works for simple things. But when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of items and need to coordinate with others on your team and mapped to recurring business processes, it can quickly get overwhelming. And as the global pandemic has made remote work the new normal for many of us, we’re also facing the added challenge of staying in sync while staying at home.

Easily create a new list from the Lists home using one of many ready-made templates. The above shows using the Event itinerary template.

We built Lists to help you save time and reduce hassle. As simple to use as a spreadsheet, Lists helps you easily track any information, invite others to collaborate, and use rules to keep everyone in sync – in addition to being able to customize forms and flows with the Power Platform. It’s a simple, smart, flexible way to track information and get more done.

Lists for every team and every situation

Millions of people use SharePoint lists and libraries every month in Microsoft 365 to track issues, manage inventory, report status, onboard new hires, build out event agendas, manage FAQs, and more. With flexible columns, forms, and views, you can build your own solution to meet your specific needs without knowing how to code.

For example, Lauren Taylor, the vice principal of Manitou Park Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington, created a custom list to track students’ reading abilities. Now teachers can quickly determine what each student needs without going through spreadsheets or reams of paper.

Assistant school principal, Lauren Taylor, works with students (Manitou Park Elementary School in Tacoma, WA). [Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures]

Read more how teachers can now easily access the data through Teams.

The Jim Henson Company created a list to track celebrity and production visitors at their Los Angeles studio. What used to be a manual process done on a clipboard, this new approach using lists has saved time, giving security guards a simple, mobile-friendly way to track current visitors, flag unexpected guests, and make decisions more quickly.

Read more how security guards improved onsite security with increased visitor tracking accuracy.

Avanade, a global professional services firm with 29,000 employees, now can rapidly prototype, iterate, and publish solutions that better connect employees with critical information, without expensive planning, development, and IT maintenance costs.

With corporate data available on their mobile devices, Avanade sellers are now more productive and better able to serve and attract clients.

Read more how Avanade uses lists with Power Apps to simplify … everything.

Fully integrated with Microsoft 365, Lists works seamlessly with other apps, such as Excel, SharePoint, Power Apps (custom forms), Power Automate (customer flows) and Power BI, enabling our customers to build powerful information tracking solutions at a fraction of the time and effort it typically takes to create custom apps from scratch.

Example productivity app utilizing a list-item view form customized using Power Apps to bring in additional data from Power BI – all as a tab in Microsoft Teams.

Want to learn more? (webinar, AMA and podcast)

On-demand WEBINAR | 'Working with Microsoft Lists'

Title: Working with Microsoft Lists
Description: Learn how to get started with Microsoft Lists from the Microsoft Lists engineers themselves. Start a list from a template, add your information, and then use conditional formatting, rules, and key collaboration features to make the list your own - to make it work across your team. Lots to learn. Lots of demos. Lists AMA directly after for all your questions.
Original air date: Wednesday, August 5^th, 2020 at 9am PST (12pm EST; 5pm CET) [60 minutes]
Presented by: Harini Saladi, Miceile Barrett, Chakkaradeep Chandran and Mark Kashman

AMA | “Microsoft Lists AMA” within the Microsoft Tech Community

This was a fast-paced hour Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) within the Microsoft Tech Community. You can review all questions and answers about Microsoft Lists, SharePoint list, Lists + Teams integrations, Lists + Power Platform integrations, and more.

What: Microsoft Lists AMA
Where: Go to the Microsoft 365 AMA space within the Microsoft Tech Community site

PODCAST | The Intrazone episode “A home for all your lists”

We chat with Harini Saladi (Lists senior program manager) and Lyndsey Gill (Lists designer) about Lists home, the eight ready-made templates and the new list creation experience:

To learn more about Lists throughout the year, please visit our updated Microsoft Lists resource center for blogs, demos, videos, podcasts, and more.

Track what matters most. Make a list and let it flow.

Thank you,
Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: When can I expect to see Lists app and the Lists app in Teams for my Microsoft 365 tenant?

A: [Updated Nov.23.2020] Microsoft Lists completed 100% worldwide roll out (review the tweet); the Lists app for iOS is on track for preview later this year. Note, Microsoft started to release Microsoft Lists at the end of July 2020. We released the Lists app for Microsoft Teams in August 2020. All of the above is for all commercial plans, education, and government (GCC, GCC-High and DoD).

Q: What will happen to SharePoint lists moving forward?

A: Your investments to date in SharePoint lists carry forward. We are building off the 20+ years of innovation within SharePoint and taking steps to make them even more accessible within other apps. The tens of millions of people using lists today will see new list capabilities like updated user experiences, creation in Teams, improved Quick Edit and more. Learn more about how Microsoft Lists evolve from SharePoint lists.

Q: What subscriptions do I need to use Microsoft Lists?

A: Lists is available through Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription plans where SharePoint is included. Learn more about Microsoft 365 business plans.

Q: How does Lists differ from Microsoft To Do and Planner?

A: Microsoft Lists is an information tracking app that enables teams and organizations to manage a process or workflow. While To Do and Planner are purpose-built apps, specifically designed to help individuals and teams manage their work using tasks. Commonly, when a task is completed, it becomes hidden from view. Microsoft Lists, on the other hand, enables users to collect, view, filter, sort, collaborate, and share structured information across status, life cycle, ownership, and more. Lists integrate with the Power Platform to design, build, and extend productivity apps alongside Power Apps (custom forms) and Power Automate (custom flows). Learn more about Microsoft Lists, and learn more about To Do and Planner.

Managing your availability in Microsoft Teams

Darrell Webster — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:09:16 GMT

Our ability to work deeply is diminishing. We face an increasing number of interruptions in a constantly connected world. Some interruptions are within our power to manage. Others are unavoidable due to our role and our environment. As the world grows to accept the need for more remote work, it becomes more important to manage our availability while we work.

Those of us who have the choice to work from home used to do so to create more focus time and reduce interruptions. Being out of the office means we aren’t available to visit at our desks, and be interrupted when we’ve just managed to get in a deep work flow-state. But now that more of us have to work remotely, we see two behaviours developing.

We get a lot of work done but we become isolated. When we need connection with our team members, we find it difficult to make connection. We have less indicators of when someone is available, or don’t trust those indicators whey they constantly show ‘Busy’. The time we spend connecting with people is more deliberate and needs to be scheduled. When squished between scheduled work, it can feel rushed and insufficient.
We are frequently interrupted because people want to connect but can’t or won’t respect our availability. We can’t trust availability indicators when they appear to constantly show as ‘Busy’. Whether due to urgency of a task, or a self-focused drive to complete a task, availability is ignored and we send a chat message or make a call. When this culture is prevalent, people become reactive in their work and planned work is laid aside.

Both isolation and interruption impact productivity. Isolation affects morale, feeling disconnected from the team and leads to disengaged team members. Interruption’s impact on morale is through feeling less productive, tasks take longer to complete or are left unfinished.

Managing our availability has positive impacts to our productivity, sense of connection and engagement with our team. We can achieve more through planned periods of deep work when concentration is required. We can plan time to be available to connect, when we need to collaborate or just be available in the moment, when someone wants to connect with us.

The principles I’ll outline in this post will be helpful in any modern workplace environment. While I’ll use Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 services to discuss practical ways to manage availability, the principles can be applied to tools from other productivity platforms.

Define your availability

Set the expectation and let people know about your working style and how to determine your availability. If I can communicate how best to reach me, when it’s best to collaborate with me, the times of day that I work, I’m giving your a better chance at connecting with me, and I give myself a greater opportunity to work deeply on a task.

Write an overview of your availability and publish it where team members and people across your organisation can find it, and where you can reference it.
What do we have available in Microsoft 365 for doing this?

What is your role at work? Does it require you to be available to help and communicate with others for most of the day, such as a service desk role? Are you a people manager who needs to check-in with your team, guide and direct?
Your role will affect how much time you should be available. A manager who say’s “my door’s always open” also needs to consider how to leave room for those opportunities in a remote work setting.

What do the different online statuses mean for engaging with you?

Your online status is the most effective way to show your availability right now. I’ll discuss future and planned availability later in this post. Microsoft Teams offers a few online statuses and by the name of their label, the meaning appears to be clear. But how many times is your status showing “Busy” or “In a Meeting”, and you’re actually available? You probably have your preferences for how you want to be contacted. Your definition of urgent and important are more specific to the way you work and your role.

State your communication preferences, so that when people need to contact you while you status is “Busy”, “Away”, or “Do Not Disturb”, they know how to reach you.

I'm available and you can talk to me now about anything
I'm busy, but available to talk about the project I'm working on. (However, I have my exceptions. Ask me.)
I’m away. Send me a message, include the level of importance and I’ll respond as soon as I can.
Please Do Not Disturb. I'm working on something and need complete focus to make progress. (I will be available later. Leave me a message.)

Define what urgency means to you, the factors that would allow someone to interrupt your focus.)

How many people it impacts
The value of the task in relation to it's urgency

Is there anyone else in your team that can help if you’re unavailable right now? Share those details so your contacts can still get help and their queries answered when they’re urgent.

Plan your availability

Your availability is directly related to the tasks you’re working on and the activities you’re engaged in. We can plan our time out in detail to complete tasks, make a simple plan to get a few things done, or go through our day with no plan. Some where in that range is a balance that suits your role, your working style and aides your ability to focus. I encourage you to plan your availability and make time for those tasks that you need to complete, leaving room for meetings and “office hours” for opportunistic collaboration and for people to can connect.

But there’s another benefit to planning your availability and scheduling time for tasks in your calendar. Microsoft Teams will change your online availability automatically, letting others know if you can be contacted now and letting you focus on work. It sounds simple, but when you automate changes in your availability, you’re more likely to get quality focus time. However, it also relies on keeping your appointments with yourself - the scheduled time to complete tasks.

If you’re using a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plan that includes MyAnalytics Insights, take a look at the Focus Plan. This simple service schedules 2 hours of “Do Not Disturb” time called “Focus Time” into your calendar for the day. During that time, your online status is changed to “Focusing” and behaves like “Do Not Disturb”, preventing messages, @mention notifications and calls from being received. If you have set exceptions to this and listed people who can interrupt DND, Focus Time will follow the same exceptions.

I use Focus Time to make sure I get 2 hours of uninterrupted time each day. I slide it to different positions in my day as I plan my tasks around meetings and other exceptions. Then I schedule time for tasks as a seperate appointment, alongside the Focus Time. This gives me a reminder of how I plan to use my Focus Time.

I choose to share more than just my free/busy information in my calendar with the whole organisation. I share the subject of my appointments and meetings. When someone in my org wants to schedule time with me and they use the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook or Microsoft Teams, they can see the subject of my scheduled time. It’s clear to them where I have scheduled Focus Time. It doesn’t prevent them from scheduling a meeting when I plan to focus, but it provides more information to negotiate my time with me.

Remember, someone can send you a meeting invite and ignore (or fail to check) scheduled time for tasks and focus. But it’s your calendar. Suggest another time if you need to. Keep the appointments you’ve made with yourself and make exceptions only when necessary.

Out of office: what does it really mean?

As I schedule time for activities out of the office, such as visiting a customer for half a day, I have another option while setting my meeting. Outlook defaults to show the time as “busy” and that will change my presence in Microsoft Teams at the time of the meeting. But I can also choose to show as “Out of office”, which will change my presence to show Out of office. This has the effect that in Microsoft Teams, my presence can appear to be “Available, Out of office” or “On a call, Out of office”. Team members can see that I’m available but only for a while. Once I go offline, my presence will show as “Out off office”, much like the auto-reply you set in Outlook when you take annual leave.

As more of us work remotely, the concept of “In office” changes to include our remote place of work. It might be quite acceptable to set customer visits to “Out of office”. Another option while creating the meeting or appointment is to show as “Working elsewhere”, but this doesn’t appear to have any effect on automatically changing your presence.

Change your availability

Plans change and so does your planned availability. Something happens and requires you to stop and change your priorities. So take a moment to change your availability in Microsoft Teams.

If you’ve finished a meeting early, change yourself to busy if you’re making time for follow-up tasks. Or change to available if you wan’t to let your team know they can contact you. Your contacts can tag you for status changes. They may be waiting for your meeting to finish before sending a chat or calling you. Changing your status manually from “In a meeting” to “Available” will send a pop-up notification letting your contact know you’re free to talk.

Conversely, you might be working in the office on some simple procedural tasks and have your presence set to “Available”. A team member walks over to talk with you about a problem they need help with. Take a moment to change your presence to “Do no disturb” to give your team member full attention. Though remember to change it back once your conversation has concluded, or you might have an unusually quite day receiving no notifications.

I’m in the habit of locking my computer every time I step away. A quick Windows key + L will lock and Microsoft Teams will set my status to away. However, when I’m stepping out for lunch, I’ll use “Be right back” and set a status message… which leads me to my last topic.

Tell me more about your availability

“Be right back” is a clear message. It suggests I’ll be back soon. But how long is soon? When I step out to lunch, I’ll take a moment to set a status message. “Grabbing some lunch”. Going one step further, I set the message to show for about an hour. Microsoft Teams removes my status message automatically.

When we leave a status message, even if it’s short message, we provide more information for a team member to decide how they will contact you when you are available. Or they may use another method, send the message and leave it up to you to reply.

Other way’s to use the status message in Microsoft Teams

If you’re working in the office for the day, add it to a status message and set it to show for the full day.
If you need to work in a long period using “Do not disturb”, use a status message to tell people how you want to be contacted, how to reach you if the matter is urgent, and any team member that could help with the query while you’re unavailable.
When you’ve blocked half a day in your calendar to work on site with a customer, set a status message so your team and organisation know why you’re not as responsive as you might usually be. This will help you focus on your customer’s needs and help to reduce the interruptions

I mentioned early in “Plan your availability” that I set my calendar permissions to share the subject of my meetings. This information tells my team and organisation more about my availability.

Reading the signs

I’ll finish by changing perspective to our team members, our organisation and our contacts. Our availability and presence indicators are becoming more important as remote work increases. But their effectiveness relies almost entirely on us taking the time to read the indicators and making considerate decisions.

When I want to start a chat with a contact to ask a question, I glance at their presence. If it show’s a red light, that could mean a number of things. I discussed earlier that some of our contacts appear to be “Busy” all the time. So I could send my question in chat and leave it up to them to reply when they can. But if I look closer at the presence, or hover over their name to show the contact card, I might see they are “In a meeting” or “On a call”. Will it help my team member to receive a message during their meeting or call? It will distract the momentarily. Sure, my contact could just ignore the message and get back to me later. But I might not be the only person sending chat messages to them during their meeting or call. It’s a conscious decision to be considerate, consider the signs, the presence indicator and any additional info before interrupting a meeting or call.

On the other hand, a culture has developed in many organisations that Microsoft Teams Chat is like email. I send a private message just like I send an email. Whether you’re available at the time to answer is not my concern. You can ignore it and answer after your call or meeting. It’s up to them to manage their presence and if the meeting or call requires more focus, to change their status to “Do not disturb”. However, I’m sure you’ll have reservations sending a chat to your CEO when they are in a meeting, interrupting their focus.

I encourage you to read the signs before sending a chat message or calling. Use the information that’s available. Consider whether you will just send the message and leave it up to the receiver to manage the interruption, or tag them for a status change and get in touch when they are available. Or use another method to send a message they can deal with later.

I’ve heard email has a good track record for that sort of thing.

Originally published at https://modernworkplacescenarios.com on July 12, 2020.

Enabling Remote Work Roundup 6/23-7/7

ERICA — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 19:01:07 GMT

Check out some amazing content in our Enabling Remote Work roundup!

Enable Remote Work

Drive effective meetings with Teams apps while working remote

Over the past few months, we’ve seen tremendous transformations take place as companies adapt to remote work environments. One key trend has been the rise of virtual meetings, as companies look to maintain their rhythm of business and keep human connections while working remote. However, as the volume of meetings increase, teams face challenges with management, efficacy, and engagement. To overcome some of these challenges, we’ll highlight a few popular Teams app integrations that can help you drive effective meetings while working remote.

Premier Offerings; WorkshopPLUS Azure Security Best Practices

G ‘day, I am Vic Perdana, Sr. PFE based in Melbourne, Australia. As COVID-19 forces people to work from home, the number of bad actors is ramping up as demonstrated by the increase of cyber-attacks globally, it is becoming *very* important to educate ourselves with ways we can protect our IT assets from being compromised.

Resources for Remote Workers

Bring back ad hoc meetings to your remote workers!

I’ve had entire projects and my career pivot around who I’ve bumped into at the office at any given time. Whether it was the time a thoughtful co-worker shared why they were leaving the company or the time an Account Executive revealed a resource who could solve my customer’s exact problem, chance 1:1 encounters play a big part in our success.

Enabling remote work for IT pros

If you want to effectively manage your organization's devices—and ensure a secure, productive user experience—with the increased focus on remote work, check out our on-demand web series titled Enabling remote work for IT pros in the Business Continuity community. Each episode offers an in-depth look at what you can do immediately, in the next few weeks, and over the next few months to maintain control over, and help ensure the security of, your organization's devices while users are working away from your corporate networks. They also address frequently asked questions and offer links to step-by-step resources to help you implement the strategies and best practices discussed.

Godshall Recruiting moves to an all-remote workstyle in just a day with Microsoft 365

For more than 50 years, Godshall Recruiting in Greenville, South Carolina has successfully paired job candidates with employers using a proven process of phone screening and in-person interviews. Just a day after a statewide quarantine order in 2020, however, all 30 employees suddenly had to pivot to a new way of working: from home, with company-owned devices, and with all their documents and communication in Microsoft Teams.

Upcoming Events

July Webinars & Remote Work Resources

Check out webinars and remote work resources for July for the public sector!

Learn how business norms are changing and how endpoints affect productivity with Productivity Score

Anthony Smith (A.J.) — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:51:19 GMT

One of the goals of Microsoft Productivity Score is to enable business decision makers and IT to have conversations around driving productivity through insights into how the organization works and how technology enables productivity. In a world where many people are working remotely, we heard from you that these conversations are more important than ever, and that you need to understand the impact this has on your organization. In the Productivity Score private , you have insights into areas like how people communicate, collaborate, and how their device experience and network connectivity contribute to productivity. To help you get even more insights and drive a more in-depth and relevant conversation in this new world of work, we are happy to share two new features: a special report focused on business continuity, and new features in Endpoint Analytics to help you diagnose and fix common support and performance issues and optimize software for best user experience, on Microsoft Endpoint Manager managed devices.

How are your devices contributing to productivity?

Of course, the key to understanding and improving your organization's effectiveness at working and collaborating remotely are insights into the technology that underpins these experiences. That's one important area where the Technology Experience side of Productivity Score shines. One of the key categories in Technology Experience is Endpoint Analytics, which helps you understand how your users’ productivity can be impacted by performance and health issues with your endpoint hardware and software, while providing recommended actions to remediate them.

Endpoint performance and health issues persist because IT admins don’t have adequate visibility into their root causes and level of impact. The majority of these issues can be attributed to a combination of:

Legacy or under-spec’ed hardware
Software configurations that aren’t optimized for the end user experience
Issues caused by configuration changes and updates

To give you the visibility, insights, and actions you need to tackle these productivity killers, we are excited to announce additional enhancements to Endpoint Analytics and make them available in public preview!

As we shared in April, Endpoint Analytics currently focuses on three areas to help you address endpoint related user experience problems. The first area is startup performance, which evaluates the time it takes the PCs in your environment to go from power-on to a responsive desktop. It gives you a score and a benchmark that allows you to quickly see how you compare to other organizations, along with recommended actions to improve startup times. Endpoint Analytics also provides recommended software advice to help optimize OS and Microsoft software versions for best user experience. This includes management and deployment services such as Configuration Manager, Intune, and Autopilot, as well as Azure Active Directory and Windows 10. Lastly, there are proactive remediation scripts - packages that can detect and fix common support issues on your endpoints, often before users realize there’s a problem.

These insights and actions empower you to improve the user experience, lower help desk costs, demonstrate business impact, and make informed device procurement decisions.

Endpoint Analytics Startup Performance screen

We are also happy to announce the public preview supports both Intune and Configuration Manager managed devices. So wherever you are in your management journey, we’ll meet you there. In addition, we’ve simplified the process for enabling endpoint analytics to a single button in the Microsoft Endpoint Management (MEM) admin console, making it even easier and faster to get into the preview.

How are people adapting to remote work?

Due to the global shift to working remotely, you’ve told us that your organizations’ collaboration norms have changed, but you are not exactly sure how and by how much. The new business continuity report can help you answer this with visibility and insights at an organizational level into these changes. Using data from the Microsoft Graph, the report complements information in Productivity Score and usage analytics with insights into collaboration and work patterns to help you answer questions like “How is ‘business as usual’ changing?” and “How are employees adapting to the disruption of working remotely?”

One way to measure how “business as usual” is changing is to analyze how employees are collaborating. The report provides you with visibility on how the use of in Microsoft 365 has changed, giving you a better picture of the “new normal.” Another way to see this change is to understand employee engagement and measuring how working hours are shifting. Without the physical separation between home and work, employees may experience difficulty adapting, with the potential for burnout. The report also provides insight into the effectiveness of remote meetings, content collaboration, and employees’ sense of community and belonging.

Home page of business continuity report

Want to get started and learn more?

To learn more about the business continuity report, check out the documentation at https://aka.ms/bcrps. The report is rolling out to tenants that have at least 100 active Exchange users over the next few days. Please note that this report is temporary and will not be a permanent feature of Productivity Score.

For details on Endpoint Analytics, visit the public preview page at https://aka.ms/uea. To enable Endpoint Analytics follow the instructions within the card in Productivity Score or you can visit https://aka.ms/endpointanalytics to take you to the MEM admin console and click the start button. The list of permissions needed to access Endpoint Analytics can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/mem/analytics/overview#permissions.

Enabling Remote Work Roundup - 6/7 - 6/20

Eric Starker — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 20:17:36 GMT

Check out some amazing content in our Enabling Remote Work roundup!

(We've moved this to an every two week cadence.)

Enable Remote Work

20 updates for Microsoft Teams for Education, including 7x7 video and Breakout Rooms

Over the last few months, schools and institutions have been working tirelessly to enable distance learning. We’ve heard directly from many of you about engaging students in lessons, encouraging student-to-student collaboration, and facilitating staff professional development, all while remote. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas about how to improve Microsoft Teams for distance and hybrid learning. We continue to be inspired by you and are always exploring and implementing new ways for Teams to support student engagement and professional development.

Resources for Remote Workers

Why remote workplaces remain a challenge for large enterprises

Many organizations – small, large, medium – across the world are having their employees work from home due to COVID-19. For many of these companies, this was something they had never prepared for. Moving to the cloud and using online tools sounds simple and easy, but when it comes to meeting regulation and compliance regulations, you need to take extra care. Enabling your workforce with cloud-enabled collaboration tools is not only a technical challenge but also brings about legal and cultural considerations. Luckily, I have seen many of the challenges that IT faces when moving to the cloud. In this article, I will address some common challenges brought about by remote work, but showcase some of the ways they can be addressed without impacting your employees’ ability to collaborate effectively and stay productive while maintaining security, compliance and privacy.

Upcoming Events

June Webinars & Remote Work Resources

Check out the latest webinars and remote work resources for June in the public sector!

Top Conversations

How can I export Attendee list from Microsoft Teams Live events session using Microsoft Graph API?

@marcelocasaca wondered about how to use Microsoft Graph APIs to extract a attendee list from a live session from Microsoft Teams. Microsoft employee Val Ramos and MVP Reza Ameri offered helpful advice.

Change default meeting length in Outlook - Avoid Back-to-Back meetings!

Karl Vietmeier shared a piece from their VP’s all up blog posting specific to changing meeting length on how to schedule meetings to conclude five minutes before the end of the hour or half hour. This shortens your time together slightly but goes a long way towards avoiding potential burnout from uninterrupted back-to-backs.

Tasks in Teams - when is it coming?

Mike Landry wanted to know when Tasks was coming in Microsoft Teams. While a release date is still forthcoming, he was referred to this thread and other contributors shared their processes that worked in a similar manner.

Building A Highly Available Remote Desktop Gateway Farm integrated with Azure MFA

Mahmoud A. Atallah shared a how-to article on building a RD Gateway with Azure MFA for secure work and familiar experience across a variety of devices or web browsers.

The BIG WFH Office pictures!

MVP Simon Binder asked the community to post pictures of their work from home setup, receiving quite a few responses.

New blog articles in Microsoft 365

PowerPoint’s presenter coach expands to Microsoft Teams and takes on the new name speaker coach

Speaker coach in PowerPoint

Speaker coach in Microsoft Teams

Privacy changes to Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics

New minimum Outlook for Windows version requirements for Microsoft 365

The deadline is approaching!

Why are we blocking old versions?

Upgrade guidance

Introducing File Cards in the Office app for Android

How to Try

What’s Coming to OneNote

Frequently Asked Questions about the OneNote app on Windows

Watch Videos on Office Mobile for Android

How to find videos

Features

Requirements

Availability

Try it out!

Coming Soon

Feedback

What’s new for admins in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise – June 2021

General Availability of Inventory on Microsoft 365 Apps admin center

Microsoft Customer Story: Avanade

Microsoft 365 E3: Unattended License option availability

Tips and tricks for onboarding devices to the new Microsoft 365 Apps admin center

Microsoft 365 Apps AMA featuring the Office Rangers

New videos on the Office Deployment Insider YouTube channel

Microsoft 365 Certification is here to ease your concerns about data security while using 3P Apps

Inventory on Microsoft 365 Apps admin center goes GA!

Overview

From our early adopters

Get started today

This is just the starting point

Enabling automation with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

Requirements for using unattended RPA

Enabling RPA scenarios

What does it look like?

Assigning licenses to devices in Microsoft 365 admin center

How Microsoft 365 encryption helps safeguard data and maintain compliance

Meeting the demands of a hybrid workplace

The importance of a robust data protection and governance strategy

Encryption and how it works in Microsoft 365

Meeting security and compliance requirements with Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 Customer Key – including Microsoft Teams!

Customer Lockbox

Communication Compliance

Selection of optical character recognition to extract printed or handwritten text from images

Compliance Manager

Compliance Manager dashboard

Using content encryption for sensitive data protection

Example of a Highly Confidential sensitivity label applied to an Excel file

Additional considerations for data protection and governance

Next Steps:

Microsoft Lists workshop – now available on-demand

Meet the new Microsoft Whiteboard designed for Hybrid Work

Make real-time collaboration easier

Boost creativity with rich and interactive content

Experience a unified modern look and feel

Maximize creativity with ink for everyone

Integrate seamlessly across Microsoft 365

Diagnostics for Social Good

How it Works

Why we are focused on Diagnostics for Social Good

Introducing Microsoft Dictation for iOS

Dictation just got better

Today, we’re excited to announce Dictation is now available on iOS

Updates in Dictation for Office for the web

Ready to get started? Check out these resources for more information:

Maximize results with collaborative work management in Microsoft 365

Organize your work: manage work more effectively

Track your work: stay on top of action items

Choose the right Microsoft tool for managing your work

Organize and Track Frontline Work with Microsoft Lists

What's new for admins in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise - April and May 2021

Faster at-a-glance views with OneDrive Sync Admin Reports

Easier targeting for Microsoft 365 Apps updates with updated Configuration Manager ADRs

Amesh Mansukhani talks about the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center on Practical 365 Podcast

We're excited to bring you two brand new videos on the Office Deployment Insiders YouTube Channel!

Commercial Preview of Microsoft Office LTSC

Enabling automation with Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise

Assigning licenses to devices in Microsoft 365 admin center 

How it Works 

Why we are focused on Diagnostics for Social Good 

What’s next?  