Office 365 Weekly Digest | 2020-23

Welcome to the May 31 – June 6, 2020 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Nineteen features were added to the Office 365 Roadmap last week, including items for Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, Planner, and Outlook (Android, iOS).

Additional June sessions for existing event series have been added. “Enabling remote work at Microsoft”, a four-part series from Microsoft IT Showcase, is new since last week. The spotlight event of the week is the “Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Migrating Content Into Microsoft 365” on Wednesday, June 10th at 9am Pacific.

Blog posts in last week’s roundup include the May 2020 SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop, details on the new multilingual publishing feature for news posts in SharePoint, remote working tips for IT Pro admins, and guidance on how to optimize Stream and Live Events traffic in a VPN scenario.

Noteworthy item highlights from last week include information on the June 2020 update for Outlook for Mac, a couple of recent Microsoft IT Showcase articles, and general availability of the Exchange Online PowerShell v2 Cmdlets.

OFFICE 365 ROADMAP

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

Note: The Estimated Release dates listed below are subject to change. The direct link provided for each item can be used to determine if the estimated release date has been updated since the time of publication.

Description	Feature ID	Estimated Release	Details
Outlook for Android: Gallery Support	60393	June CY2020	Added: 01 June 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Outlook – Android Browse your photo gallery from Outlook when you want to add a photo to your email message.
Microsoft Teams: Support for native device camera and location capabilities for Personal apps and tabs	64615	July CY2020	Added: 02 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams App developers will be able to use mobile native capabilities like capturing an image through camera and providing location coordinates through GPS.
Microsoft Teams: increase in the number of simultaneous videos in Teams meetings for GCC High and DoD customers	64611	July CY2020	Added: 02 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, GCCH, DOD We are increasing the number of participants who can be viewed simultaneously on the Teams meeting stage from 4 to 9. This new experience optimizes for attendees who have enabled video and places the remaining audio-only participants below the meeting stage. To provide a high audio and video quality experience, the layout logic will consider user bandwidth and alter the number of videos shown to provide the best meeting experience.
Office 365 Message Encryption (OME): updates for mail servers	64532	Q1 CY2021	Added: 02 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 We are rolling out a series of updates to Office 365 Message Encryption aimed at creating a more authentic OME email experience. The capabilities rolled out in this update include improvements to reduce the likelihood of mail servers marking OME OTP mails as spam.
Outlook for iOS: Create task from an email message	60722	Q4 CY2020	Added: 03 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Outlook – iOS Use the option to create a task from an email message and have it sync with tasks in Microsoft 365.
Planner: Copy a plan within an existing Group or Teams	49429	July CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Planner You will be able to select an existing group or team that you’d like to copy an existing plan into. You will also be able to select what should be copied over from the original plan.
Microsoft Teams: Priority Notifications in Gov Clouds	64689	July CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Gov Share urgent messages and time-sensitive information more effectively with Teams. Priority notifications alert a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. IT Admins will be given reporting on priority notification usage to support appropriate user licensing. IT Admins can manage this feature as part of messaging policies in Teams.
Search Yammer from the Communities app in Teams	64691	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Yammer Search Yammer communities and content from within the Communities app in Teams.
SharePoint: Auto-News Digest	64685	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: SharePoint SharePoint Auto-News Digest sends automated email to employees in you company about the latest News posts that they have not yet read. Using Microsoft intelligence, a curated selection of News posts are shared with employees through an email that comes from SharePoint. This is a great way for employees to catch up on News that they may have otherwise missed. Only published news posts are sent in the digest, and employees will have access to all the news posts that they are sent so rest assumed that employees won’t see news that they don’t have permission to see. If employees want to opt-out of receiving the Auto-News Digest, they can click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email.
We’re improving Bookmarks administration in Microsoft Search	64686	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: Rolling out App / Service: Search In Microsoft Search, when adding or editing a Bookmark, a new category field will be displayed as a dynamic dropdown. When entering information in the category field, the dropdown data will keep filtering to match what is being typed. Microsoft Search Administrators or Editors will be able to select from one of the dropdown options or enter new text as category. Once a Bookmark has been added, the category (if it is new) will get added to list of unique categories and become available for future Bookmark additions or edits. The categories will be visible in the list view for Bookmarks and can be filtered based on the categories through the Filter Pane.
Microsoft Teams: Queue sent messages when offline	64687	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams When attempting to send messages while offline, Teams will queue messages and send once a network connection is re-established. If the message is in an unsent state for more than 24 hours, the message will fail and the user will be prompted to resend or delete the message.
Notifications added to the Yammer Communities App in Teams	64015	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Yammer Yammer notifications will be available from with the Yammer Communities app in Teams.
Yammer Communities now available in Teams Mobile apps	64016	June CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams, Yammer Access all your Yammer communities from within the Teams mobiles app.
New Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365 for Gov clouds	64288	Q3 CY2020	Added: 04 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 Gov The Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365 builds on the existing eDiscovery and analytics capabilities in Office 365. This new solution, called Advanced eDiscovery, provides a workflow to identify, preserve, collect, review, analyze, and export content that’s responsive to your organization’s internal and external investigations. It also lets legal teams manage the entire legal hold notification workflow to communicate with custodians involved in a case.
Office 365 ATP: Customization for Quarantine Notifications and Alerts	64781	July CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 ATP With this update, tenant administrators will be able to add various customized components to quarantine notifications and alerts, such as an organization logo, a custom display name, and custom disclaimer.
Microsoft Teams: Time clock in Shifts for web & desktop	64782	July CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Teams Time clock, the ability to clock in and out of your shifts, in Shifts in Teams will be available on web and desktop.
Safe Documents is available worldwide	64678	June CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Office 365 With Safe Documents, we’re bringing the power of the Intelligent Security Graph down to the desktop to verify that documents are safe at the endpoint itself. Although Protected View helps secure documents originating outside the organization, too often users would exit this sandbox without great consideration and leave their networks vulnerable. Bringing a minimal trust approach to the Office 365 ProPlus clients, Safe Documents automatically checks the document against known risks and threat profiles before allowing to open. Users are not asked to decide on their own whether a document can be trusted; they can simply focus on the work to be done.
Microsoft Planner: Filters in Planner iOS	63464	June CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Planner Use the keyword filter to quickly find tasks on the board.
Microsoft Bookings web app available to GCC customers	64386	Q4 CY2020	Added: 05 June 2020 Status: In development App / Service: Bookings, GCC Microsoft Bookings will be released as a Microsoft 365 app to all GCC customers. This release will only include the Bookings web app. The Microsoft Bookings API in Microsoft Graph will not roll out at this time.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 1 – Effective Workspaces

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 1 – Effective Workspaces, you will explore ways to determine the best approach for creating workspaces for projects and workgroups. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Decide if your team is best served by a team and channels or a group chat and meetings, (2) Create a workspace for your team to provide the best collaboration experience, (3) Use a personal team to simplify your productivity, and (4) Determine best practices for Teams.

Learn Tips for Taking Teams to the Next Level: Part 2 – Get More from Teams

Designed for those who are already familiar with Microsoft Teams, our Tips & Tricks sessions offer insights and best practices. Learn how Teams can help organize your workday and make it easier to stay connected with colleagues. In Part 2 – Get More from Teams, you will learn tips and tricks for managing and organizing work and communications in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Implement strategies to manage and organize your work, (2) Leverage formatting best practices to help get your messages noticed (and responded to), (3) Easily find files, chats and projects, and (4) Simplify your workday.

Microsoft Teams: Master working from home

Working from home offers the opportunity to maintain your workflow while allowing flexibility in how and where you get your work done. Shifting to a remote worker status can be an adjustment as you look for ways to balance home and work life, maintain focus and be fully productive. Microsoft Teams can help you stay connected to your team while providing access to all of the tools and resources you need to get your work done. Join us to learn tips that can help set you up for success as you transition into a ‘work from home’ scenario. During this session, we’ll share: (1) Guidance for setting up your home environment for work, (2) Best practices for maintaining your workflow while working at home, (3) Tips for staying connected to your team while remote, and (4) Insights for effectively supporting a remote team.

Run Effective Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Have you spent significant time and resources to prepare for a meeting and still felt it wasn’t productive? Have you attended a meeting only to leave feeling like not much was accomplished? Join this class to learn how to make your meetings engaging, productive and effective. Microsoft Teams can help make your meetings worth showing up for. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Use Teams for your entire meeting experience, (2) Record your meeting, making it easy for those who couldn’t attend to get caught up, (3) Keep important meetings at your fingertips by pinning them for easy access, and (4) Assess which audio and video devices are best for your meeting needs.

Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Whether you are switching from Skype for Business or brand new, join us to learn the basics of how to use Teams to chat with your colleagues and collaborate on projects. Through a series of live demonstrations and best practices, you’ll leave this session with everything you need to start using Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) Set up your profile and notifications in Microsoft Teams, (2) Use chat and calling for 1:1 and group conversations, sharing and collaboration in Microsoft Teams, (3) Schedule and conduct meetings in Microsoft Teams, and (4) Align your team and teamwork in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams: Learn to use apps

This session introduces you to the key activities needed to get started with adding applications, bots and connectors in Microsoft Teams today. Through a series of live demonstrations and best practices, you’ll leave this session with everything you need to start using apps in Teams. After this session, you will be able to: (1) See how applications, bots and connectors can help you be more efficient while working in Teams, (2) Select an application, bot or connector for your workspace, (3) Install an application, bot or connector, and (4) Use an application, bot or connector in your workspace.

Galactic Collaboration Summit – upcoming online training event

When: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 | The Galactic Collaboration Summit is about to hit warp speed 10, to help you explore a Milky Way Galaxy full of sessions. Set your phasers on fun, to learn, and engage! Jeff “Captain” Teper (CVP, Microsoft) will be giving a keynote that’ll be out of this world, plus Microsoft speakers delivering breakout sessions among thought leaders and members of the community from around the world. The Galactic Collaboration Summit has something for everyone in all reaches of the Microsoft 365 galaxy: far, far away. You’ll find no star or cluster uncharted: modern workplace, remote working and distance learning topics on Microsoft’s technologies, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, Microsoft Azure topics relevant to the modern workplace, as well as different Business App topics (Power Apps, Logic Apps, Power Automate, Planner, Yammer), and more.

Teams Introduction for Educators and Staff

When: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 at 8:00am PT | You are invited to a free webinar tailored for education. Learn how universities and schools are using Microsoft Teams for course delivery with students and staff collaboration. Hosted by the Microsoft Product Group, this webinar covers an introduction and best practices for academics using Microsoft Teams. Agenda: (1) Overview of Microsoft Teams for Education, (2) Best Practices for communication and collaboration, and (3) Using Class Teams with your students for assignments, online learning and digital skills. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Microsoft Teams: Plan your upgrade (Start here!)

Discover everything you need to facilitate a successful upgrade to Teams. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Understand why a formal plan is crucial for upgrade success, (2) Identify the steps to the upgrade success framework, (3) Recognize common attributes of successful customers, and (4) Create and implement their own upgrade plan. The audience for this session is All (Business Sponsors, IT Admins, User Readiness/Change Manager, Project Lead).

Microsoft Teams: Identify your upgrade approach

Determine the most suitable approach based on your current Skype for Business implementation and upgrade goals. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Understand common scenarios and upgrade approaches, (2) Visualize the user experience for each approach, and (3) Determine the optimal upgrade approach for your organization. IT Admins are the primary audience for this session.

Microsoft Teams: Ready your end users

Design a user readiness strategy to help your users love and adopt Teams. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Recognize factors that influence user acceptance and adoption, (2) Define core value messaging for Teams in your organization, and (3) Outline your awareness, training and support activities. The audience for this session is: User Readiness/Change Manager.

Microsoft Teams: Enabling Real-time Collaboration for Cross-functional Teams

How do you bring various stakeholders together across multiple teams to achieve your goal? Do you wish you could reduce the number of meetings or e-mails while still being able to solicit feedback, keep everyone informed, and get consensus? Join us to explore how to bring everything together in a shared workspace with Microsoft Teams. Learn how to chat, meet, share files, and work with other business applications to effectively engage others. This interactive 2-hour session will give you the opportunity to try it for yourself and test drive Microsoft Teams in a live cloud environment. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they can work for you. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Migrating Content Into Microsoft 365

When: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 at 9:00am PT | This will be a 1-hour Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) within the Microsoft Tech Community. An AMA is like an “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” on Reddit, providing the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of Microsoft experts taking questions about the SharePoint admin center Migration Manager, SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT; content from on-premises, Mover (cloud-to-cloud), FastTrack, and our 3rd-party migration ecosystem. This AMA is to answer your questions about the products, tools, and services. We, too, will share details around the above announcements. And as always, we appreciate your input on what you want to see next – aka, what is missing to make your migrations smooth and successful. Join in the Migrating Content into Microsoft 365 AMA space. We look forward to seeing you there!

Azure AD Webinar: Identity Governance for Modern Organizations

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, we will introduce tools to govern the lifecycle of user and guest identities in your Azure AD and Office 365 deployment.

Do more with apps in Microsoft Teams

Many organizations leverage a variety of apps and tools to get their work done. Often installed and managed separately, this requires a user to continually switch context/applications as they navigate their daily activities. Join Microsoft Teams experts as we review how you can deploy commonly-used applications directly within Teams, enabling your users to work more efficiently and effectively by accessing everything they need from a single interface. With over 300 out-of-the-box applications available (and growing), you’re sure to find an app, or two, you can begin using today in Teams.

Customer Immersion Experience: Simplifying Your Data Privacy and Compliance Journey

Your business needs to control how sensitive data is managed. Join us and explore how to assess your compliance risk, protect sensitive and business critical data, and respond efficiently to data discovery requests. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Simplify assessment of compliance risk, (2) Integrate protection and governance of data, and (3) Intelligently respond to data discovery requests. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Microsoft Teams: Implement your upgrade approach

Execute your defined upgrade approach as part of your formal upgrade plan. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: (1) Recognize the upgrade settings in your O365 tenant admin portal, (2) Understand technical tips and considerations for a successful upgrade, and (3) Apply the appropriate settings in the Portal to execute your upgrade. The primary audience for this session is IT Admins.

Microsoft Teams: Staying connected with your team while remote

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Our remote infrastructure design and Zero Trust

When: Monday, June 15, 2020 at 10:00am PT | Join our experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) organization for this informative session where they will answer frequently asked questions around how VPN, modern device management, and Zero Trust come together to deliver a world class remote work platform. During this webinar, our experts will discuss our infrastructure design and the device management we have deployed to support remote and hybrid work. They will also go into detail around our Zero Trust security framework.

Teams Advanced for IT Pros

When: Tuesday, June 16, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Learn how IT can enable Microsoft Teams capabilities for users while maintaining the necessary configurations to align with required organizational business and security requirements. Agenda: (1) Automated team and policy provisioning strategies, (2) School Data Sync, and (3) Programmatically interacting with Teams. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA): Teams for Education

When: Tuesday, June 16, 2020 at 9:00am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft Teams ‘Ask Microsoft Anything’ (AMA) specific to Teams for Education! An AMA is a live online event similar to a “YamJam” on Yammer or an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. This AMA gives you the opportunity to connect with members of the product engineering team who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Join in the Microsoft Teams AMA space, and add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Microsoft Teams: Seamless Collaboration with Microsoft 365

Are you still sending an e-mail with an attachment to your teammates when you want to collaborate on a file? How fast do they respond? How do you know if they are working on the file? How do you manage version control? With Microsoft 365 tools for teamwork, you can seamlessly collaborate on files with your team members. Using Microsoft Teams, you can invite your teammates into an environment where they can effectively collaborate and engage in a persistent conversation. Join us for this session and explore how to avoid productivity sinkholes and increase productivity. This interactive 2-hour session will give you the opportunity to test drive Microsoft Teams in a live cloud environment. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they can work for you. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

Azure AD Webinar: Getting started with Azure AD Reporting and Insights

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, you will learn how to interpret Azure AD logs, integrate with your SIEM tools, and gather insights about your Azure AD service.

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Teamwork and meetings

When: Thursday, June 18, 2020 at 10:00am PT | After moving to Microsoft Teams last year, Microsoft employees rely on Teams as a central hub for chat, calls, meetings, and collaboration. When it became essential for employees to work from home, this foundation made the transition easier. Join Microsoft experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) as they answer questions about how Teams fosters collaboration, how CSEO upgraded Microsoft employees to Teams, and how Microsoft uses Teams to power inclusive, modern meetings.

Teams EDU Special: Online classes & lectures with all your students

When: Tuesday, June 23, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Microsoft Teams allows up-to 250 students and educators to meet online for free. There are many reasons why schools may need to leverage remote communication tools to function. Whatever they may be, Microsoft Teams for Education makes connecting virtually seamless for members of any school, college or university. This webinar is designed to help first time users of Microsoft Teams get started hosting online meetings with their students. This webinar is for educators who need to create an persistent online space for their class: (a) Classrooms, (b) Lectures & courses, and (c) Module course groups. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Flexible and intelligent intranet experience

When: Tuesday, June 23, 2020 at 10:00am PT | Having 100% of Microsoft’s intranet portals moved to SharePoint in Microsoft 365 has contributed to our seamless transition to a work-from-home environment. Join Microsoft experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO), Corporate Communications, and the SharePoint product group as they answer questions about how we managed the massive migration to SharePoint in Microsoft 365. They will discuss what it took to create an intelligent intranet for 220,000 users, how SharePoint keeps employees connected, and how simple it is for them to create, and update intranet portals, so information is accessible and easy to find.

Azure AD Webinar: Azure AD as the new Security Control Plane

Please join us for the Azure AD Webinar Series. Our engineering team is hosting these (free) sessions on deploying and configuring Azure Active Directory. In this webinar, you will learn how to assess and implement a modern approach to a secure your organization identities with Azure AD.

Customer Immersion Experience: Protecting Assets and Empowering Your Defenders

Today’s workforce can work from anywhere, on any device, and on any app. Security teams need to understand threat signals from disconnected products and optimize security with minimal complexity. During this 2-hour interactive session, you will explore how to: (1) Safeguard users from malware attacks such as phishing and spoofing with Office 365, (2) Use the Windows Defender ecosystem to proactively monitor and protect your users, (3) Utilize Office 365 ATP to help protect users from bad links and attachments, and (4) Let machine learning and automation protect users from threats. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

[Microsoft IT Showcase] Enabling remote work at Microsoft: Cloud-first file management and collaboration

When: Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 10:00am PT | Now, more than ever, it is important for users to be able to access files from any location and on any device. Join Microsoft experts from Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) and the SharePoint product group as they answer questions about our cloud-first file management strategy, using Known Folder Move to redirect employees files to OneDrive for Business, multi-geo capabilities in OneDrive for Business that help keep data compliant with regional data residency requirements, and nurturing collaboration with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Yammer.

Teams EDU Introduction for IT Pros

When: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 at 8:00am PT | Bring conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place with Microsoft Teams. Build collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and connect with colleagues — all from a single Office 365 Education experience. Learn how IT can enable these capabilities for users while maintaining the necessary configurations to align with required organizational business and security requirements. Join us for this webinar to learn: (1) Administration capabilities to enable and govern Microsoft Teams, (2) Allow for frictionless user Teams creation while enforcing business rules and addressing IT concerns, (3) Understand the Teams lifecycle and recommended practices for long term management of the environment, and (4) Security and compliance capabilities for Teams integrated in the Office 365 tools you are already using today. Note: You can also find this session, and more, on-demand here.

BLOG ROUNDUP

SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: May 2020

This post includes all the SharePoint and related tech updates that rolled out in May 2020. This is the all-inclusive roadmap release recap for all things SharePoint and related technology. Highlighted features include availability of SharePoint home sites to all, the Saved for later web part is now available for modern pages, an update to the Yammer Conversations web part, the ability to schedule pages and news posts, an extended site footer, the public announcement of Microsoft Lists, and much more! All the features listed began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of May 2020 (possibly early June 2020).

New SharePoint feature: Multilingual publishing for pages and news posts

With organizations around the world enabling remote work for their teams, it is essential now, more than ever, to ensure that information on your intranet is readily available to your users. Using communication sites in SharePoint for Microsoft 365, you can now create a flexible, intelligent intranet in multiple languages! The multilingual publishing feature for SharePoint communication sites, now rolled out worldwide, enables you to create and translate pages, set translator roles, and get email alerts when pages are ready to be translated, updated, and published. All of this comes on top of the rich and flexible pages and news creation experience in SharePoint. Everything is built to give the user the best experience possible. Let’s jump in to see how multilingual publishing for modern SharePoint works.

Remote working for IT Pros

It’s natural for IT workers to first ensure that frontline and supporting workers in an organization have a secure and productive way of performing their usual tasks remotely. After all, a reduction in the business’ ability to provide its products and services correlates pretty quickly to a drop in revenue, cashflow and profitability. Without this financial sustainability, the IT department has no organization to support. But if your IT Pros are also working remotely, what additional considerations and tools are available that are relevant to them? This post outlines five considerations and tools to help IT Pros. With their high levels of access to critical systems and data, secure work methods and tools are important for IT Pros, regardless of where they are working from. It is possible to provide both an increased level of security and the access and productivity that your IT workers need. Investing the time to review this now will help to protect your organization from future malicious access attempts. | Related: Remote Working: Fewer people working on-premises doesn’t mean less risk to their identities

How to Optimize Stream & Live Events traffic in a VPN scenario

During this current COVID-19 crisis, many organizations have had to rapidly implement a work-from-home model for the majority of their users. For many, this means an enormous increase in load to the VPN infrastructure as all traffic is traditionally sent via this path that was invariably not designed for the volume or type of traffic now reliant on it. To improve performance, and also reduce load on the VPN infrastructure, many customers have achieved significant results by following the Microsoft guidance to implement split tunneling (or forced tunnel exceptions to use the correct technical term) on the Optimize-marked Office 365 endpoints. This traffic is high-volume and latency-sensitive traffic, and thus sending it directly to the service solves the problems outlined above and is also the designed best practice for these endpoints. Microsoft 365 Live Events (Teams-produced live events and those produced with an external encoder via Teams, Stream, and Yammer) and on-demand Stream traffic are not currently listed within the Optimize category with the endpoints listed in the ‘Default’ category in the Office 365 URL/IP service. The endpoints are located in this category as they are hosted on CDNs that may also be used by other services, and as such customers generally prefer to proxy this type of traffic and apply any security elements normally done on diverse endpoints such as these. Microsoft is working to provide more-defined and service-specific URL/IP data to help simplify connectivity to the service for the VPN connection model but as you can imagine for a global SaaS service like Office 365, this is not something which can be achieved overnight. Therefore, in the interim we’ve been working on interim methods to meet customer demand for this information. As a result of some changes we were able to perform relatively quickly, we are able to provide the following steps to allow for direct connectivity for the service from a client using a forced tunnel VPN.

NOTEWORTHY

What’s New in the New Outlook for Mac? – June Update

Over the past few months, we have continued to introduce new features and capabilities to the new Outlook for Mac in Insider Fast. We have listened to your feedback and are introducing even more updates so you can get the most out of Outlook. This month we released many new features that will help you: (1) make the most of your inbox, (2) focus on what matters with enhancements to contacts and people, and (3) manage your email and calendar with ease. We also provide a sneak peek at what’s coming soon. As a reminder, the new Outlook for Mac is only available for Office 365, Outlook.com, and Google accounts using macOS 10.14 Mojave and above.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Using Yammer to improve the employee workplace experience at Microsoft

Gina Dyer is passionate about all things “workplace” at Microsoft, which encompasses everything from workspace design and building construction to employee services like dining, transportation, events, and catering. Dyer’s email inbox was often flooded with questions from employees about facilities issues, feedback, and requests for dining changes. This meant that she often received duplicate emails about similar facilities problems and answered each message individually. She began to look for a central tool to solicit feedback from employees, answer commonly asked questions, and share her team’s work. That’s where Yammer came in. Created to build community across an organization, Yammer is a Microsoft 365 social networking tool that enables users to share knowledge, build trust, and engage with leaders and managers about company values and strategy. As Microsoft’s primary internal networking tool, Yammer communities are set up for different organizations, roles, and affinity groups across the company.

Microsoft IT Showcase: Redefining the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft

At Microsoft, we’re creating a seamless, effortless workday experience for our employees, enabling them to manage their workday, find information, and get things done quickly and easily. We’re transforming our search and task-completion experience into a unified, informed, and automated digitally assisted workday that improves our employees’ productivity and helps them achieve more. The digitally assisted workday is rooted in a functional vision—our employees have the unified, highly informed, assisted, and automated experiences that they need to be empowered, productive, innovative, and satisfied. Our vision is to help our employees save time during their day so that they can focus on more critical, complex work responsibilities. The unified employee experience creates an empowering, productive, and personalized workday with consistent tools and a centralized access hub. Great search experiences enable our employees to find relevant information in whatever context they need it, including proactively delivered information and insights that fit their needs and interests. Personalized assistance and automated task completion provide simple, accessible help for routine tasks and the capabilities to automatically complete those tasks when applicable. We envision all these experiences working together to help Microsoft employees get the most out of their day.

Announcing General Availability of the Exchange Online PowerShell v2 Cmdlets

At Microsoft Ignite 2019, we announced new Exchange Online management cmdlets and showed how they can be used to perform fast and highly reliable data retrieval operations. We’re delighted to be able to announce the general availability and full support of these cmdlets in all Exchange Online environments. The V2 module is now available in the PowerShell Gallery and we recommend all Exchange Online customers start using these new cmdlets right away. The new EXO V2 module contains all the existing Remote PowerShell cmdlets, as well as 9 new V2 cmdlets. So you can use the new module with no impact or change to your day to day tasks or scripts. The new module is entirely Modern Authentication based. If you start using this, you are getting off Basic Authentication for your admin tasks, and as you know, that’s a good thing because Basic Auth is going away in Exchange Online. So just switching to this module means your connection is more secure and you have one less thing to worry about. And, there are (currently) 9 new REST based cmdlets for the most commonly executed tasks and they are considerably faster and more reliable than their v1 counterparts.