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Microsoft 365 Insights

Updates from the
Simply Office 365 lab

Microsoft 365 Insights - Apr 2021

8/4/2021

 
This month we hear from our Head of Consulting Services and Microsoft 365 champion, Chris Kaye, who shares his top picks from the latest Microsoft 365 updates.
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Have you ever sent an email suggesting a meeting or call and forgot to set a reminder to follow it up? Or even received an email asking you to do something that you parked for tomorrow and is now lost in your inbox?!

​Well, the new daily Briefing reminder email 
may just come to your rescue.

Each morning you can receive a list of potential actionable items that you may have forgotten about and that enables you to either dismiss each item or to quickly create a To-do task.

​This is just one of the new features announced by Microsoft during March and although I was initially sceptical of more email clutter, so far it has proved really useful – although you do need to be using Microsoft To Do to get the best out of it (and who isn’t).
Teams

Improved Microsoft Teams meeting stage

I'm not sure I really like the term “stage” but Microsoft does, so we'll continue to use it.

The “stage” is basically the meeting window where you can see all the participants in your meeting, and this has come a long way in the last 12 months. It's hard to believe, but this time last year you could only see 4 faces at one time. Now that number seems to grow each quarter.

However, this growth has come with the need to better organise the “stage” and these latest enhancements will certainly help.

So, if you are used to holding meetings with more than a handful of people, then you should read this latest update to understand all the latest capabilities.
MORE DETaIL
Dynamically optimised Teams meeting stage

MC242824

Category

Teams

Microsoft Teams is introducing Dynamic view, a redesigned "meeting stage" that will optimise your meeting experience.

Dynamic view will enable:
​
  • Video and audio participants to be shown separately,​ with audio only participants appearing as smaller circles​.
  • Shared content to appear larger, with more participants being visible.
  • Users to pin or spotlight particular people in the meeting and make them appear larger than other participants.
  • You to view Together Mode alongside content.
  • Users to dock the participant gallery to the top of their screen.​
New Teams enhanced Dynamic view
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More from Microsoft

https://aka.ms/MSIgnite2021/WhatsNewInTeams
New Teams breakout room features

The enhancements to Teams does not stop with the stage improvements.

Breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams landed at the end of last year and Microsoft is now releasing the following additional features to make breakout rooms more useful. I can certainly see these changes being beneficial at the school where I am a governor:

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  • If you need participants to drop in and out of breakout rooms during a meeting, then their assignment to a room follows them, preventing the need to constantly allocate them to a room each time. 
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  • If you start a breakout session and realise the participant assignment is unbalanced, you can reassign participants whilst the breakout session is open. 
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  • A timer can be set for each breakout room session and participants are alerted when there are only 60 seconds remaining. 
MORE DETaIL
New breakout room functionality coming to Microsoft Teams

MC247659

Category

Teams

​1.  Room assignment retention (new default behaviour)

Participants remain assigned to their breakout rooms unless the meeting organiser chooses to change them. The assignment persists across subsequent sessions or recurring meetings.

2.  Participant reassignment while rooms are open

Organisers may reassign joined participants across rooms and the main meeting room when the breakout rooms are open. Currently reassignment works only when breakout rooms are closed.

3.  Set timers for breakout sessions

Organisers can set a timer for all breakout rooms created in a meeting session via the Breakout rooms settings panel.​
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​When the organiser has set a timer, the clock will show participants the time left in the room (countdown) rather than time elapsed.

The timer alerts participants that the breakout room session will close in 60 seconds. The organiser can then choose:


  • To automatically redirect participants to the main meeting room (auto-move On).
  • To provide participants with the option to return to the main meeting room or disconnect. Should the timer expire before participants take action, they will see an alert informing them that the session has ended which contains a button to return to the main meeting.

More from Microsoft

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/using-breakout-rooms
SharePoint

Immersive reader capabilities in SharePoint pages

As SharePoint pages become more important as your internal communication tool, then you need to make your pages not only visually pleasing but equally accessible to people with learning differences such as dyslexia.

Immersive reader has been available in office applications such as Word for a number of years and recently Microsoft rolled the capability out to Teams, to be used with chat and conversations. Well soon the same capability will be available to your people when they are reading your beautifully curated SharePoint news and intranet pages.
MORE DETaIL
Immersive Reader is coming to SharePoint pages and news posts

MC243944

Category

SharePoint

​The Microsoft Immersive Reader, which is currently built into Word, OneNote, Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft apps, will soon be available for SharePoint pages and news posts. 

The Immersive Reader uses proven techniques to improve reading and writing for people regardless of their age or ability. This feature will be available on all modern pages and news posts except for home pages.

Viewers of SharePoint pages and news posts will see a button on the page command bar to open the Immersive Reader. In this initial release, the Immersive Reader will only read content contained in text web parts.​
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More from Microsoft

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/immersive-reader/overview
Focus mode for SharePoint pages

Yes, two enhancement this month when it comes to SharePoint pages.
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In addition to immersive reader capabilities, rolling out now is the ability for your people to expand the view of a news or communication page, thereby removing the clutter of headers and menus so readers can just focus on the content in full page mode.

There really is no excuse now not to look at how you can easily transform internal communication from bland emails to rich news and communication pages.
MORE DETaIL
Focus mode in SharePoint communication pages

MC244912

Category

SharePoint

​​Your SharePoint page authors and viewers will now be able to clean their field of vision and focus on page content by clicking the Expand content button on the command bar to hide the site header, site navigation, and global navigation bar. 

This larger content viewing pane in Focus mode will continue as viewers navigate and select other links to open pages within the same site.

​The larger content viewing pane will not continue when viewers select links to pages outside of the site, even if they are within a hub site.​​
Focus mode collapsed view
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Focus mode expanded view
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What you need to do to prepare

​You might want to notify your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.
Images for company events
No, make that three useful SharePoint enhancements this month!

One of the most common uses of a SharePoint intranet or communication page is to publish upcoming company events that your people can subscribe to.

Currently, although the format of the event on your SharePoint page is really clean and modern, it is only capable of containing and displaying text. Well, no more – now you can embed rich images into your events bringing them to life.
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MORE DETaIL
Publish company events complete with images

MC243945

Category

SharePoint

​The Events web part on SharePoint pages and news posts will now have an option to show images.

SharePoint page authors who use the Events web part can enable an option to show event images within the web part. When enabled, each Event shown in the web part will display the image used in the title area of the Event page.
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Existing Event web parts will not be updated. However, new web parts added to pages and news will default to show images. 
Current events view
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New events view
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What you need to do to prepare

​You might want to notify your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.
Outlook

Daily actionable email

We started off this month’s Insights referring to this new feature that uses Microsoft’s artificial intelligence capability to help discover email correspondence that you may need to action.

Read on to discover more about this productivity feature coming soon. Remember though, this is just one more tool in the productivity armoury and is no substitute for not using all of the great Outlook tools and integrations available to you to track, plan and keep on top of your important emails.
MORE DETaIL
New daily actionable items briefing email

Category
Outlook

​The Briefing email is a personalised list of possible tasks and actionable items that have been detected at the end of your previous working day.

This could be an email reply from you informing the sender that you will deal with their request, or details of upcoming meetings and outstanding tasks.

All of these items appear in a briefing email so you're prepared for the day ahead. The email provides actionable buttons against each item to enable you to create a quick To Do task.

If there is relevant content, you will receive the Briefing email at the beginning of each workday; at least one actionable insight for the current day must be detected for there to be a Briefing mail delivered on that day.


Author: Chris Kaye


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