 This month Microsoft is introducing new features across many of the Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, To-Do, OneDrive and Stream. As ever, there's a lot to take in, so we've chosen to highlight the most impactful for helping your productivity and improving the user experience. Pick of the bunch are the new screen recording features in Stream, the superb updates for task management in To-Do, and even more improvements to the calling and meeting experience in Teams. An honourable mention too for the updates to OneDrive's mobile scanning features, something that's super useful but often overlooked. Create internal training videos using the new Stream Screen Recording capabilities Category Stream What is this all about? Microsoft Stream is a powerful video streaming service that comes with your office 365 subscription that enables you to create, upload and share videos securely across your company. Do you record your meetings in Teams? If so then these recordings are also stored in Stream. Microsoft has now released an enhancement that enables you to create a video and at the same time capture whatever you are presenting on your screen. How does this affect me? The new screen recording tool in Microsoft Stream gives everyone a way to create videos for sharing knowledge, remote learning, leadership updates and other communications across your company. You can now easily create new videos with the web-based tool - no need to download anything to get started. Just open the latest version of Edge or Chrome and your Stream portal then, from the Create dropdown list, select Record screen. Perfect for internal company training videos when combined with a PowerPoint presentation or a demo of a new system. You have options to record any window or screen on your PC, add mic or system audio, and include webcam for a personal touch.  What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, the capability is already available. To access stream sign into office.com with your company account and locate Stream in your list of Apps. More from Microsoft https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-stream-blog/now-available-screen-recording-for-training-videos-and/ba-p/1362099 Task management and planning just got easier with Microsoft To-Do Category To-Do What is this all about? Microsoft To-Do had rapidly become the single task manager application that we have needed for a long time. Fully integrated into Outlook task management, Microsoft Planner tasks and the ability to create personalised lists. To-Do is available on all platforms so accessible when and where you need it. Now Microsoft have just released a whole bunch of useful features to help you get more organised and productive.
Updated Today and Week view One of our most exciting new updates is rolling out now, starting with Android this week and coming soon to other platforms. To-Do will now give you a Today, Tomorrow, and Week view in your Planned list. Our lives are complicated. We have work, home, that side project, and much, much more. It’s not always useful to see one long list of tasks, without any context. Now you can group by list, so you can see everything due today from each different list. If you don’t want to see your home tasks while you’re at work, then you can close that section, and reopen it when you get back home. Print your lists From this week, printing is now available on all platforms. So, if you prefer taking a paper list to your meeting or keeping a physical copy next to you while you work, now you can. Want to email a copy to someone? Save it as a PDF and add it as an attachment. You can print a list by clicking on the three dots next to the list’s name and selecting Print list.
See your completed tasks more easily Finally, Microsoft haven’t just given you a Completed smart list, they have also made it a lot easier to look at your completed tasks within your lists. Now you’ll find all your completed tasks at the bottom. So, if you like to mark your checked-off grocery items as incomplete for your next shopping trip, it’s now a lot easier to access them. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, these features should now be available. New ability to schedule the sending of emails MC212344 Category Outlook What is this all about? Many of us are adapting to different working patterns including the need to work around home life. This might result in you working unnormal hours such as late in the evening or early morning. Sending emails at this time to colleagues or even clients can cause unnecessary stress to the recipient. Receive an email from your boss at 23:00, then even if not urgent you might feel the need to reply to show you are committed to your job. If you use Outlook on the web as your email client, then you will have the ability to schedule emails to be sent at a later date and time. How does this affect me? When working unsocial hours consider if there is a need to send an email immediately, or to schedule it so that it sends during normal business hours the next day. This way the recipients will not feel pressurised to reply immediately or wake up in the morning with a full inbox. You will be able to delay the delivery of an individual message or use rules to delay the delivery of all messages using Outlook on the web. This feature is already available in Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac.  What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Look for the update to reach you during June and then when it arrives consider how you can best use it to minimise the impact on recipients when working unsocial hours. Consistent Outlook settings across all your machines MC214927 Category Outlook What is this all about? If you use Outlook for Windows on multiple machines, then you will know that you have to configure Outlook on each machine individually. So if you prefer your email font to be "Calibri 12pt italic" then you must make the change on every instance of Outlook. Well no more, soon your Outlook settings will automatically sync between your different Outlook installations - so make a change on one machine and it will automatically appear on your other devices. How does this affect me? When this feature rolls out, the following list of settings will roam across other computers running Outlook for Windows that you are logged in to using the same Office account.
Unless your administrators block this, you will be able can change your preferences via the “Store my Outlook settings in the cloud” checkbox under File > Options > General. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? This feature will be on by default however your administrator can override this. Microsoft have started rolling this out and expect it to be completed by late June. Organising a Teams meeting? Have greater control of the lobby MC214522 Category Teams What is this all about? When you organise a Microsoft Teams meeting, the use of the lobby is controlled centrally by your administrator, so maybe internal participants autojoin the meeting but external guests must wait in the lobby and be admitted when the organiser is ready. Well now the meeting organiser can decide on a meeting basis to make everyone wait in the lobby until they are ready to admit them. How does this affect me? After scheduling a new meeting, you as the organiser, will be able to configure meeting options so that only you can bypass the lobby. After changing the meeting option to Only me, you can then manage who is allowed into the meeting. So, if you are running an internal presentation and want to make sure you are fully set up and ready before colleagues join, then now you can.  What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, this feature is automatically rolling out now and will be completed by the end of June. Quick Edit in SharePoint is now easier to use MC214047 Category SharePoint What is this all about? Quick Edit is a SharePoint facility that enables you to edit List and Library columns in an almost spreadsheet style mode. Microsoft are now updating two Quick Edit features to facilitate faster inline editing on SharePoint document libraries and lists.
How does this affect me?
You can now save your view in Quick Edit for any SharePoint list or document library. When you save a view in Quick Edit, the list or document library will always render in quick edit for easy inline editing. Currently you create a normal view and then have to click the Quick Edit button.
You will now see 100 items per page on your SharePoint document library or list when using Quick Edit. The current limit is 30 items. Great for when you need to bulk change a lot of information. Want to learn more? What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, Microsoft is rolling this change out now and should be completed by the end of June. Ability to once again edit OneNote in Teams MC214011 Category OneNote Teams What is this all about? Back in March, Microsoft announced that OneNote in Teams would be read-only, and users should use OneNote for the web or the OneNote desktop app. With this change, OneNote still opens in Teams as read only, but you can now click a button to go straight to Edit mode. How does this affect me? If you use OneNote in Teams, then rather than popping out to OneNote on the web or using the desktop app to Edit your OneNote you can now just click the "Edit Notebook" button. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, this feature is automatically rolling out now and will be completed to all customers by the end of April.  What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, this change has already rolled out. When sharing, block downloads of PDF and other file types MC213970 Category OneDrive SharePoint What is this all about? When you share documents from SharePoint or OneDrive, you can block the recipient of the link from downloading the document if it is an Office document (Word, etc.). Now you can block the download of other file types such as a PDF. How does this affect me? You can currently create SharePoint and OneDrive sharing links that block the download of Office files. This sharing link allows recipients to read the file but not download it. This update expands the list of supported file types to include PDF files, images, and audio files, for example. The experience of creating a read-only or download-blocked sharing link is unchanged. You must uncheck “Allow editing” for the “Block download” toggle to be accessible.  What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, this change is rolling out now and will be completed by the end of June. Invite a group or distribution list to a Teams meeting MC213330 Category Teams What is this all about? Currently, when you schedule a meeting in Teams you have to individually add the participants even if all you want to do is invite everyone on a distribution list or an Office 365 Group. With this change, you will soon be able to invite a group (Teams and Microsoft 365 groups) or distribution list to a scheduled Teams meeting. This feature will be available with the Teams web app as well as the desktop app (Windows and Mac). How does this affect me? When scheduling a meeting in Teams, you will be able to invite both distribution lists and modern groups as well as individuals. After adding a list or group, Teams will:
Both distribution lists and modern groups will be discoverable within the people picker when scheduling Teams meetings.  What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Nothing, this change is rolling out now. Microsoft Teams new calling and meeting experience MC212453 Category Teams What is this all about? Currently, when you join a meting or call through Teams, it takes over your whole Teams window making it difficult to get to other information or closing the document you were working on. Recently, Microsoft added the ability to pop out a chat into a seperate window which you can move around your desktop, and now they are adding the same capability to Teams meetings and calls. How does this affect me? Once available, you will be able to view meetings and calls in separate windows from the main Microsoft Teams client. Additionally, meeting and call controls such as mute, video, chat, leave and others will now be located at the top of the meeting window so that they are always available and never block the underlying content. This new experience will also include recently announced features such as 3x3 video, raise hands, and custom backgrounds.  New Teams meeting experience  New meeting / call control location
Step 2 - Check the Turn on new calling an meetings experiences check box and then restart the Teams client.  What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Initially, this change will roll-out "OFF" by default and you will have the ability to turn on the new experience via the user setting: General > Turn on new meetings and calling experiences (if you cannot see this then the change has not reached you yet). To get to User settings, click your picture or initials in the top right-hand corner of Teams. Note: In the future, Microsoft will enable this functionality by default, but they want to provide users extra time to become familiar with having meetings open in their own seperate window.
Multi-page scanning via your phone for everyone Category OneDrive What is this all about? With so many people now working from home, few of us have access to office equipment like printers and scanners. Scanning documents from home, or outside the office, should be easy. Microsoft OneDrive has long offered a free scanning feature from the OneDrive mobile app which lets you scan and digitise single documents, receipts and more. Up until now, scanning multiple pages and saving them as a single document was a premium feature that required a Microsoft 365 subscription. Today Microsoft are making multi-page scanning available for everyone using a OneDrive personal account. What is OneDrive scanning? With the OneDrive mobile app you can scan physical documents, business cards and whiteboards simply by opening the app and touching the camera icon. Once scanned, OneDrive digitizes the image into a PDF file, which you can then save, share or mark-up with text, pictures, or freehand drawing and writing. Once you scan items into OneDrive, you’ll be able to access them anywhere from any device. Tips for scanning with the OneDrive app The OneDrive scanning feature can help keep you organized, simplify tasks, and keep your digital files secured in one place. Here’s a list of some of the many ways you can use the OneDrive app to scan:
What you'll need to use multi-page scan Multi-page scan is rolling out now and will be available to everyone, everywhere OneDrive is available. Author: SO365 Insights  Some of these features are available today but others are due to roll out soon, so they might not be immediately available in your own Office 365 environment. Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 Services MC190854 From the 13th October 2020, Microsoft have warned that users accessing Office 365 services with older versions of Office products (e.g. Office 2013 or Office 2010) may suffer performance, instability or security issues. It is therefore critical that users of Office 365 ensure they are using the latest Office Products. This could impact clients with an Office 365 Business Essentials plan, who are using their own legacy office products or clients that are not upgrading to Windows 10. The other main Office 365 commercial products include the right to download and use the latest versions of Office so they should not be impacted. Use Tags in Microsoft Teams to organise and control large groups of users MC195755 Rolling out in Q1 2020 is the ability to tag users in a Microsoft Team – this is really applicable to Teams that have large memberships and you want to categorise or group individuals in the team so that you can target messages and conversations at them. Using tags, team owners can organise users based on a common attribute, such as role, project, skill, training, or location. After team members have tags, the team owner or a tagged team member can create a channel post, @tagName, that notifies only the users who have that tag (in this case @tagName). Tags are team-based; you have to a be a member of a team in order to use an associated tag. For example, you could send a message to all cashiers in a store or all developers in a software specific release stream. To manage tags, click on the Team name (not the general channel) and then select Settings. Tags should appear at the bottom of the list of settings once it has been enabled by Microsoft New Team Tag Settings Subscribe individuals in your company to be notified about Office 365 incidents MC196504 Microsoft is now rolling out the ability to subscribe up to 2 individuals to receive notifications of new incidents affecting you Office 365 service. Previously, only your admins could view incidents by signing into the Office 365 Health dashboard – often this would only occur after users started complaining that something was not working. To subscribe to the new service, you will need to sign into the Office 365 Admin service and then navigate to the Service Health Dashboard, then:
Add totals to your modern SharePoint views MC196871 Finally, a long-lost favourite has returned, column totals on modern SharePoint views. This allows you to specify different types of totals and calculations depending on the type of column you apply it to. For instance, you could sum the values in a number column or just count the number of rows in a view. A very simple feature that can add so much value to you SharePoint deployment. To add totals, simply edit or create a view and scroll down to the Totals section on the left. New OneDrive "Request Files" feature provides a secure area for external parties to submit documents MC194601 This feature allows you to ask another user to place files into a specific folder that you own. The folder must be in your own OneDrive for Business. To request files:
 After the recipient clicks on the invitation link, she selects her files to upload. You will be able to see all the collected files, but recipients will only be able to upload files. They won’t be able to access any contents within the selected folder and won’t be able to modify their own uploads once the upload is submitted. This is different to just sharing a folder in your OneDrive where the recipient can see and edit all documents in that folder. This could be useful if you are requesting suppliers to upload a tender proposal and you would not want suppliers seeing other supplier proposals or be able to modify their proposal once uploaded. More from Microsoft on creating a OneDrive file request https://support.office.com/article/create-a-file-request-f54aa7f8-2589-4421-b351-d415fc3b83af?storagetype=stage Greater control over presenter and attendee roles in Microsoft Teams meetings MC194602 Meeting organisers will now have an option to define presenter and attendee roles for meeting participants. Presenters will have full permissions in the meeting, whereas attendees cannot share content, take control, mute or remove other participants, admit people waiting in the lobby, or start/stop recording. Before or during the meeting, organisers can specify who is an attendee or a presenter through the meeting options panel. The available choices are as follows:
 To access the Meeting options panel:
The organiser and presenters will also be able to change the role of any individual participant (“Make an attendee” or “Make a presenter") during the meeting. Microsoft has backtracked on the future of OneNote 2016 MC194800 In 2018 Microsoft announced that it was no longer going to support the OneNote 2016 Windows App and removed it from the Office download centre in Office 365. However, and one can only assume that this is due to industry pressure, they have backtracked and confirmed that it will now be supported. From the 10th March 2020 it will once again be included in the Office download suite. Get more insights into your documents with File Hover Card extensions MC194911 When you hover over a document in a SharePoint library or the web portal for OneDrive for Business, you see a "File Hover Card" which provides insights into the document such as when it was last modified. Microsoft are now adding new features to show a Teams conversation or a meeting invite that references the document. The conversations displayed on the file card will only be visible to those users who took part in them. This means that you won’t see another person’s conversations that are not related to the file in question, and they won’t see yours.  In addition, the new File Hover Card feature will show you who has viewed your files. When someone views a file you own, SharePoint displays the people information and profile image of the viewer in the file hover card. Combined, you can now easily and quickly get real insights into your documents. Replace your classic SharePoint root site with a modern communication site MC196377 Until recently, your Office 365 environment had its main SharePoint root site (which should form the natural landing page for your company intranet) stuck in old classic SharePoint mode and therefore could not benefit from all of the new great features that SharePoint modern sites offer. Well no longer. Now you can create a new modern communication site and then ask your IT Admin to promote that as the new root site. Your root site is https://contoso.sharepoint.com (where contoso is replaced by your domain name. If you have data in your existing root site then do not worry. The old root site in not overwritten, it is simply given a new URL. More from Microsoft on modernising your root site https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/modern-root-site Bookmark and save files for later With this feature you will now be able to bookmark files and folders across OneDrive and SharePoint for later access. To bookmark a document, just select it in the SharePoint library or through the OneDrive web portal and on the Ribbon click the new "Save for Later" icon. You will then see an aggregate of everything you have saved in the "Saved for later" section in the left-hand menu of your OneDrive web portal, making it easy for you to quickly get back to your important documents that you did not have time to read or those you regularly need to access. Easily add and share emails from Outlook to a Microsoft Teams channel MC198124 New integration between Outlook and Teams makes it easy to collaborate no matter where the conversation is taking place. Teams has always allowed you to forward an email to a Teams channel so that it can be visible to all members of the channel and also to enable internal channel discussions related to the email. For example, you receive an email from a client related to a project you are working on and you need to share this email with the project team. Previously, the only option was to forward the email to everyone "who might be interested". With Teams, you could forward the email to the correct project channel and then start a conversation with the specific project team members who need to be engaged, whilst making it visible to any other project team members to keep them informed. Much more efficient for everyone, reduces email clutter and makes the email and surrounding conversation discoverable both during and after the project closure. With this new enhancement rolling out in 2020, rather than forwarding the email to the channel, you can move and share the conversation from Outlook, including attachments, into a Teams chat or channel conversation simply by clicking on the ‘"Share to Teams" button in Outlook. However, this is not just a one way process, you will also be able to take a Teams conversation and share this as an Outlook email by clicking on the more options ("…") icon in a conversation. As mentioned, these changes will start rolling out early next year, however there is nothing to stop you preparing for this improved way of working by planning your use of Teams and how you can use the current "forward an email" feature. More from Microsoft on what's new in Microsoft Teams https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-microsoft-ignite-2019/ba-p/937025 Microsoft again recognised by Gartner as a Leader in Content Services Platforms Concerned about the future of SharePoint as your companies central document store? Then, for the 3rd year in a row Gartner has identified SharePoint as the leading content management platform. Gartner measures and compares the leading platforms using the following characteristics:
More from Microsoft on Gartner's report https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/12/12/microsoft-again-leader-2019-gartner-content-services-platforms-magic-quadrant-report/ Simplify access to key applications from within Office 365 MC198313 The Office 365 app launcher (the 9 dots in the top left when signed into Office 365) provides each user with access to all the applications they are licenced or authorised to use. Your users can also access the list of applications from the Office 365 home page. Currently, your users can pin their favourite applications via the Office 365 app launcher by viewing all apps and then clicking the three vertical dots to open the sub-menu against a specific application. The pinned applications always appear at the top of the Office 365 app launcher and the remaining applications will be shown for each user in the order in which they have been most frequently accessed by the user. In addition, a feature that has existed in Office 365 for a while, allowed administrators to create company specific items on the Office 365 app launcher that could open other line of business applications or external websites. However, there was no way to control where these appeared on each individual user's Office 365 app launcher and therefore could disappear off the initial view and be "hidden" behind the "All apps" menu. This could cause confusion and training issues as each user may have a different view and not easily know where to find the key company applications. With this change, only administrators can pin applications (maximum of 3) and this will apply to all users, who will no longer be able to override this. So, what are the benefits? You company now selects and pins the three key applications to everyone's Office 365 app launcher, and this will consistently show no matter if the user uses the Office 365 app launcher or the Office 365 Home page. Secondly, administrators can now make better use of creating company specific "apps" to open other line of business applications or resources. Together, these should simplify the training of users on the use of the Office 365 app launcher and provide for a more consistent implementation. More from Microsoft on customising the app launcher https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/manage/customize-the-app-launcher?view=o365-worldwide Outlook on the web - improved access to attachments MC198342 This change only applies to your users who use Outlook on the web and not the desktop version. The change will allow your users to quickly and easily see all files they have sent and received as attachments.  Once this change has been rolled out, a new paperclip icon will appear at the bottom of the left navigation column in Outlook. When users go to the Files view, they'll see all the files they have sent and received as attachments from their inbox without having to filter emails for those with attachments and then open each email to see if it contains the correct attachment. More control over your intranet pages with modern SharePoint image resizing MC198528 SharePoint enables great intranets to be built using out-of-the-box features and now Microsoft is introducing, from February 2020, the ability to resize an image from within the modern page.  The modern SharePoint site is comprised of web parts, the building blocks of the page. The Image web part lets an editor insert an image on a page, whether from their SharePoint site, their computer, or an external web location and with this update, page editors will also be able to resize images in the image web part. Powerful addition to the comments capability in Word, Excel and PowerPoint MC198554 The ability to add comments within the Office Product suite has come a long way from those early days. Comments are now threaded allowing greater collaboration and Microsoft then introduced the ability to "@mention" a colleague from within the comment, and this would send them an email with a link to open the document to view and respond to the comment. With this change, when a user gets an email notification that someone has @mentioned them or who has replied to their comment, the email may now show both the comment thread and the surrounding document context, without requiring them to open the document.  In addition, users who receive the email will be able to reply to the comment without needing to open the document. However, please note that this capability will roll out to the web version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint first and then the windows desktop versions later in the year. More from Microsoft on using @mention in comments https://support.office.com/article/use-mention-in-comments-to-tag-someone-for-feedback-644bf689-31a0-4977-a4fb-afe01820c1fd Integrate Office 365 To-Do with Siri shortcuts During the last few months of 2019, Microsoft launched a suite of new To-Do features for iPhone and iPad users. To-Do is the Office 365 all-in-one task management app that consolidates your tasks from Outlook, Planner and personal tasks you enter directly into the app. Microsoft has now integrated To-Do into the Siri shortcut capability available on iOS. Not familiar with Siri shortcuts? Siri shortcuts are designed to take the normal actions you use in various apps and allow you to add them to Siri. Through the Shortcuts app you can also run a variety of automations, such as "open a list when I get to a particluar location". More from Microsoft on how Siri shortcuts can be integrated to the Office 365 To-Do app https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-to-do-blog/discover-all-our-latest-features-on-ios-siri-shortcuts-share/ba-p/1082376 Author: SO365 Insights |
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