A Method to track current and upcoming changes to M365 Products
Good evening (from Ireland at least), I've spent most of today traipsing down a variety of dead-ends and soon-to-be-discontinued features looking to create a useful location where I can find/send all new updates to products that I can peruse and ultimately highlight ones that may be of particular importance in my organisation. I've had a long chat with Copilot today and while I've made significant progress in some areas (had upwards of 30 great questions according to Copilot! ;P), when it comes to the final product, there's always some missing connector, or some RSS feed that is no longer supported. What I'm looking for here is any input on how you manage to stay ahead of changes and I'll share everything I'm doing and have learned as well, in the hope that the discussion is somewhat mutually beneficial. What I do: Message Centre: Manually check the Message Center (under Service Health in M365 Admin Center). You can sort by product here and by relevance which is quite handy. Link: https://admin.cloud.microsoft/?#/MessageCenter (Access to the M365 Admin Center on your tenant is required for this). Today I found out you can also send emails to yourself (and Teams channels) here so awaiting the next message to see if this has worked. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way of migrating past messages over so I'll have to go through these myself first. Road Maps: These have been the bane of my day. Currently, I actively check the road maps of the products I manage but going forward, I'd like to be able to track major changes to products used in my organisation so I can give users a heads up. I initially tried Power Automate to send updates to myself, however, it's not a feature widely used in our org yet and isn't well supported, so I wasn't too surprised when my efforts were blocked by existing policy. Not long after, I found RSS feeds, which seemed to be the answer to my problems. I created RSS Feeds for each of the Road Maps that I found useful, assured by Copilot that these would work. The assurance wasn't fell founded however as, true to form, once I showed Copilot by errors, they remembered that they were there all along! :') I'm yet to find a useful solution here beyond my current efforts so any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Community Blogs The final recommendation was these Community Blog posts which, to be fair, I've had immense success with to date. However, there is a slight issue with filtering. While I did finally get the RSS Feed to work on something (the Tech Comm M365 RSS Feed), it did then proceed to send me a mass of emails on every topic under the Sun & Moon. I've decided to return to the drawing board tomorrow with this, but I'm content in knowing that RSS isn't just a myth at least. I think what I'd like here is just to receive notifications when approved Blogs are posted (i.e., Monthly OneDrive Updates and the equivalent for other products). OneDrive Office Hours: This is a fansastic resource I do use every month as it gives you the opportunity to get in contact with the people who know the most about the product and the issues you're facing. I've spent weeks in a ticket before, only to raise it in one of these meetings and get a solution that took half an hour to set up. You'll get a yes or a no, but at least you'll have an answer. Copilot Chat: I don't have the full Copilot license because I haven't had a need for it yet. Everything I've wanted to do, I've been able to do in Copilot Chat. We haven't yet looked too much into Agents, and as a Public body, aren't going to rush into it until we know it's viable and can be supported. In the interim, I'm happy to test the waters with Copilot Chat asking it for Monthly Summaries on a variety of products, time frames, etc. It isn't perfect but it's faster than I am. It can find the sources for me and I can take it from there. As an organisation, we'll be pushing out all users on the most recent version (-1) on the Monthly Enterprise Channel. This means that they'll be supported whilst also being shielded from any brand new features. Our team will be on the most recent version and will be able to note any upcoming changes ahead of time. These are what I'm using so far but would be very grateful for any further input. Thanks in advance, Chris Martin
Has Your Organization Set Up a Viva Engage Community for Microsoft 365 Collaboration?
Hi everyone! As a trainer, I often get great questions during my Microsoft 365 sessions. While I share answers live, only the attendees benefit—leaving many others without that valuable info. I’ve already set up a Microsoft Learning Pathways SharePoint site as a resource, but I’m exploring ways to extend knowledge-sharing beyond the classroom.Has anyone created or participated in a Viva Engage community to share tips, answer questions, and collaborate around daily Microsoft 365 tools? I’d love to hear about your experiences, best practices, or ideas on how to maximize impact and reach across your organizations. Thanks in advance for sharing! Let’s empower everyone to get more from Microsoft 365.😃
Outlook MacOS - Email-section display issue
Since the latest Outlook update for MacOS - Version 16.105 (25120324) - there is a display error in the email-section. There is a large empty space between the "Search"-Header and the "Email"- Header This issue only occurs in the email section. All other areas (Calendar, Contacts, etc.) are looking normal:
Outlook failure
Since yesterday, December 6th, for some unknown reason I can no longer access Outlook from either the desktop or Start Bar I can only open it through Edge or some other similar sites. I have gone through the repair mode - still nothing. Any ideas as to why and how to get back to normal. Rgds, Dave R.Does MC1189663 Impact Standard Power Automate Approvals?
Hi everyone After reviewing the change described in MC1189663 (retirement of external access tokens for actionable messages), I'm unsure wheter this also affect the out-of-the-box Standard Approval action in Power Automate. My question is specifically about the default "Start and wait for an approval" / "Standard Approval" action with no special configuration. Does this change impact approval emails or actionable messages generated by the Standard Approval action for internal usage (mails to internal accounts), or will those continue to work without modification? Thanks in advance for any clarification.Bloated, clunky and slow
From the title I guess you could assume I'm talking about any of the 365 products.. but specifically I'm just about at the end of my patience with outlook. I'd be happy if MS offered a stripped down featureless 365 office suite, specifically an email program that is just an email program. I have a 12 Gen i7 210Mhz 12 core processor with 64Gig RAM and RTX 4070Ti GPU and all solid state drives. Outlook email feels like I'm using a remote desktop on the other side of the world kind of lag, stuttering. Deleting emails is an exercise in patience, it gets confused about read and unread, it generally feels like its just barely holding on. If I wasn't a gamer I'd switch to linux today. This crap is really not worth the thousands of dollars I've paid for. Pretty sure MS just vibe coded the entire 365 suite, it has that kind of feel to it.Can't add Viva Engage community calendar to Outlook
We would like to experiment with using the SharePoint Online Web part that allows you to display a group calendar on a SharePoint Online page. Our idea is to use a Viva Engage community as a means to create that group calendar so that the features of a community can also be used for this scenario. I assumed that it worked similarly to Microsoft Teams whereas along as the "HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled" property is FALSE for the connected group, that either all community admins/members would see the group calendar show up in Outlook automatically OR you could manually add the calendar in your calendar lists in Outlook. Neither seem to be the case. What's interesting about the group that connects to a Viva Engage community is the ""HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled" property is FALSE by default. However, the group calendar does not appear in Outlook. As a community admin, I tried to manually add the calendar and I get an error message "Couldn't add [group]. You may not have permissions". Does anyone know why I'm running into that error and/or why the group mailbox is not showing up in Outlook by default since the property states that it is not hidden? Is it not possible to view Viva Engage group calendars in Outlook? Thanks!
