OneDrive Message Center Updates for June 1-15, 2018
Published Jun 18 2018 09:47 AM 44.9K Views
Microsoft

We are always looking for better ways to help ensure communication between you (OneDrive users and Admins) and us (The OneDrive Team).

 

One of the key areas of feedback we have received from customers is that it’s sometimes hard to keep up on Message Center (MC) posts, especially if you have been out of the office for a few days. 

 

Starting today, we will publish a blog post around the 15th and 30th of each month that will cover the key Message Center posts. This includes:

 

  • What's coming
  • What has been released
  • A timetable of when these features might be hitting your tenants

(Please note that it can take several weeks for a feature to fully roll out to First Release or production tenants)

 

Release Features

  • Customer branding is now displayed in OneDrive and SharePoint sharing mails
    • Begins rolling out to customers on June 26, 2018
    • Organizations will now be able to apply their branding to sharing emails in OneDrive and SharePoint! OneDrive will use the same logo that you may already be using for your organization’s branding in Azure Active Directory. If you have not already configured this, you can do so by going to the Azure portal and navigating to “Azure Active Directory à Company branding”. Once you have configured the “banner logo” option, sharing emails from OneDrive & SharePoint will also include the image. This feature is available to all organizations with paid Office 365 licenses. You can learn more about Azure Company Branding here. This feature will begin rolling out in the next few weeks and should be available to all production customers by the end of August.tenant-branding@2x.png

  • External sharing mails will now use the latest sharing mail templates
    • Begins rolling out to customers on June 18th, 2018
    • We are making a few changes to ensure that external recipients receive the best experience when collaborating in OneDrive and SharePoint. Going forward, external sharing mails for files and folders will use the new sharing mail templates as well as the best mail-sending behavior possible. In particular, mails sent to external recipients will now come from the sharing user’s Exchange Online mailbox instead of from no-reply@sharepointonline.com. Users who don’t have Exchange Online will still share with the new mail template but will still share from no-reply@sharepointonline.com. This feature will begin rolling out in the next few weeks and should be available to all production customers by the end of August.

  • Updates to secure external sharing
    • Begins rolling out to customers on June 18, 2018
    • Earlier this year, we launched the new secure external sharing experience using one-time passcodes and we’ve heard lots of great feedback from our community and users. While many of you loved the new end-user experience, you felt that some of the management capability of our old external sharing platform was missing. The team is committed to bringing our end users and IT admins the best of both worlds.

    •  We are now rolling out our first update to the secure external sharing experience to improve the management story. Going forward, recipients of secure external sharing who also use Office 365 in their organization will be able to sign-in using their credentials to access the document. After they have entered the one time passcode for verification the first time, they will authenticate with their O365 account and have a full guest account created in the host’s organization. This means that IT admins can manage them like any other guest account in their directory. This feature will begin rolling out in the next few weeks and should be available to all production customers by the end of August.

secure-sharing-update.png

All the updates mentioned above are also listed in your Office 365 message center. To learn more about accessing or using the message center, please click here.

 

21 Comments
Silver Contributor

This is really welcome, such a good idea, it will help customers stay informed and better prepared for change, summarizing these OneDrive highlights from recent Message Center posts.

Iron Contributor

The update to external sharing is much appreciated. Do they still go through the same kind of sign up as if they had been invited through the B2B AAD flow where they see links to terms and policies? And is this only for organizational accounts? Why not at least let us decide for ourselves whether we want to allow Microsoft accounts to be added automatically too?

 

A normal user in our organization does not understand the difference between sharing with someone who has an organizational account, a Microsoft account or none of those. Thus they don’t understand why different external people get different features when they sign in to the folder that was shared with them. External users should have the same features available, regardless of whether or not they have been added as a guest. I mean we’re talking about the ability to create new files in Office online, copy/move files, etc. If I share a folder with someone and give them “Write” permission, I expect them to be able to do this, given how things work right now. That is not to say that rights couldn’t be distinguished between create, delete, read and write, though.

Hi @Allan With Sørensen, thanks for your interest in the feature and your questions!

 

With respect to your question around whether the recipients get the same kind of sign-up as if they had been invited through AAD B2B invitaiton manager, I assume you're referring to the invitation acceptance flow? If so, the answer is no. This update does not take the user through the B2B invitation acceptance flow. Instead, the experience will be such that if the external recipient does not already have a Guest account in your organization's directory then they will go through the one time passcode experience we released earlier this year (just like before this update). The difference is that after they've entered the passcode, if we detect that they already have an Office 365 account then we will ask them to sign-in if they aren't already signed-in and then create a Guest account in your directory. Once they have a Guest account, they'll never again be asked for a one-time passcode.

 

 

If you have configured a link to your privacy statement then they will see that link as part of the one-time passcode flow.

 

Yes, this is currently only for organizational accounts. We absolutely understand the desire to have the same behavior for Microsoft accounts. We have nothing to announce right now, but hope to share more about this in the future. Please stay tuned!

 

In general, external users *should* have the same features available to them whether they signed-in to an account or whether they gained access via a one-time passcode. The primary exception to this is the ability to open and edit Office documents using the desktop apps. With that said, I just gave this a try and am noticing that one-time passcode users are in fact unable to create new Office documents in a folder while Guest accounts can, just like you said. Let me follow up with the team on that. I was however able to successfully copy/move as the one-time passcode user. Feel free to PM me with more details or differences in capabilities you're noticing between both types of users.

Iron Contributor
Hello Rafael Thank you for the quick reply. You are correct in assuming that I was referring to the B2B invitation acceptance flow. With regard to what features external users have available, I have been looking at this article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/external-sharing-overview-c8a462eb-0723-4b0b-8d0a-70feafe4b... And I have also corresponded with MS technical support. My understanding is that when I share a folder or a file with an external user, who is not part of the AAD, that user does not get added as a guest. Every time the user logs in, he or she receives a one-time code to sign in even if he or she is using a Microsoft Account (or an organizational account such as it is right now). When that happens, the user is treated as if he or she is anonymous and gets the same features as an anonymous user and thus does not have the right to create a new document in the browser, etc. And let me just add to that, while I'm at it: It has been a big nuisance to our users, that external users cannot open shared documents in their existing desktop versions of Office (and that they cannot sync files to their own computers). Is this something we can expect being remedied as well? At this point the above article is hinting that we need to assign licenses to our guest users, in order for them to open documents in their existing Office applications (which they have already paid for). This, frankly, does not seem quite fair to me. Thank you for listening!
Deleted
Not applicable

This is really a welcome(d) feature.  Improving communication with the user community and admin community helps tremendously.  I am looking forward to more open communications like this

Brass Contributor

Hope to see more.

Iron Contributor

Can you confirm this feature would not impact configurations where the setting to "only allow pre-registered accounts in AAD" is selected ? E.g. as we have tight control of external users creation processes, e.g. with approval procedures, this would not generate unexpectedly Guest accounts.  

Copper Contributor

Hi

 

I think during the invite redemption process, MS asks the user to select whether they are redeeming invite for Microsoft A/c or Organisational a/c, instead why cant you check it internally this way we can avoid lot of confusion and issues around the redemption, some of the external users d'nt understand which account they are using.

 

Also, while redeeming the invite, why cant you force the user to enter the email id instead of just picking up from their already logged in details as people will be using their public domains, work ids, school ids, outlook, hotmail etc it just picks up randomly and gives unrelated errors and in some cases it expires the invite.

 

Need to simplify this process a bit as many of our external users are getting it wrong and causing confusion

 

rgds

Prasanna

Microsoft

Hi @Marius Constantinescu,

 

If you have your organization configured to only allow sharing to guest users who are already in your directory, then this change will have no impact on you whatsoever. It only applies to sharing to new external users. Thanks!

 

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

Brass Contributor

The news about the enhancements to the external sharing process is great progress. I understand not everyone has Office 365 accounts... Would the same process be used for users who use a personal account? 

 

The reason I ask, is on the Introducing a new secure external sharing experience blog, guest users who are not in AAD were not able to edit documents on the desktop, if shared a document from another tenant. It sounds like if users have an Office 365 account, AAD will add them and should be able to edit documents on their desktop. Will this apply to guest accounts who have personal Microsoft accounts and not Office 365 accounts?

Copper Contributor

This is terrific new functionality.  Is this available to GCC customers too?  Our company branding including the company banner in AAD has been in place for over a year and we're using Exchange Online exclusively.  I'm not seeing our banner and sharing emails aren't using address/domain.  Can you confirm when this will make it to GCC?

Brass Contributor

Maybe I am off topic....Just to check anyone get this in their O365?

 

New feature: Support for third party storage providers in Outlook on the web
MC141695
Stay Informed
Published On : 12 June 2018
Microsoft

Hi @Michael Royer, this has not been rolled out in GCC just yet. Stay tuned!

 

@Andrew Woo, I'd suggest checking out the Outlook community to learn more!

 

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

Copper Contributor

Thanks for the confirmation, @Stephen Rice.  Eagerly awaiting this for GCC to support the needs of municipal government.

Copper Contributor

@Stephen Rice The "External sharing mails will now use the latest sharing mail templates" was working for me and them sometime in between 10 January 2019 and 14 February 2019 - the sharing emails reverted to being sent fron no-reply@sharepointonline.com and I get a cc of the sharing email.

 

Did the feature changed back or have I got some setup issue?

Microsoft

Hi @Bipin Kotecha , 

 

This should still be around (I'm not aware of any regressions or changes). Can you share some screenshots of what you are seeing? Thanks!

 

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

Copper Contributor

Hi @Stephen Rice 

 

I've taken screen shots of before and after.  Sending to the same person - one in December 2018 and behaviour is as expected but sending in February 2019 it is reverted to being sent from noreply@sharepointonline.com  and I am being cc'd.

 

Hope you can help!

 

Bipin

 

BeforeR.jpg

 

AfterR.jpg

 

Microsoft

Hi @Bipin Kotecha ,

 

Do you see this happen regularly? Mails should come from the user's mailbox but in the event of an issue, we fall back to the no-reply address. That should be very rare though. Thanks!

 

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

Copper Contributor

Hi @Stephen Rice 

 

Yes it was happening all time. I've tested it again today with several emails.

 

I've had to switch to pasting links into emails to minimise risk of spam filters blocking the email (which did start happening).

 

Happy to supply any info needed to get to the bottom of this.

 

Bipin

 

Microsoft

Hi @Bipin Kotecha,

 

If you are still seeing this, please shoot me a private message & attach an example e-mail so I can help troubleshoot. Thanks!

 

Stephen Rice

OneDrive Program Manager II

Copper Contributor
Hi @Stephen Rice, Sorry been busy and was not able to revert back to you earlier, Will send you a pm now. Thanks, Bipin
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