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 Do you need your Office 365 data to be based in the UK? MC190854 Category Administration What is this all about? Microsoft has had UK Office 365 data centres since September 2016, prior to that, UK based businesses probably selected an EU based data centre (typically Ireland). Given that the UK is now leaving the EU and with other data privacy concerns you may have, you can now request at no cost, that Microsoft moves your data at rest to a UK data centre. How does this affect me? There is no impact on your business, apart from being confident that your core business data is stored in your preferred geographic location and that you are complying with regulations such as GDPR or meeting customer contractual commitments regarding data you control or process. If you take no action, your core customer data may still be moved to a United Kingdom datacentre over time as part of Microsoft's service management and optimisation as the United Kingdom is the default datacentre geo for all customers with a UK signup address associated with their Office 365 tenant. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? You need to review the location of your core Office 365 data - you can do this through the Office 365 Admin centre or ask your IT service provider. If your data is located outside of the UK, and your environment was created prior to September 2016 and your business preference is to have all your data within a UK data centre, then you should request early migration of your Office 365 data to a UK data centre. Your Office 365 Administrator can submit the request through the Office 365 Admin centre. But hurry, Microsoft are only offering this free service until July 1, 2020. Once you have submitted your request, Microsoft will complete the migration of your core "Customer" data to a United Kingdom datacentre by July 1, 2022. Core customer data is a term that refers to a subset of data including:
More from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/Office365/Enterprise/request-your-data-move Greater control managing the "Lobby" in Microsoft Teams meetings MC199245 What is the Lobby? When you use Microsoft Teams to schedule meetings, you can choose to have the attendees to wait in a virtual "Lobby" until you, as the meeting organiser, admit them. This can be useful when sharing your screen to ensure no one joins and views your screen until you are fully ready. The use of the Lobby can be controlled per meeting - i.e. Lobby is on or off. How does this affect me? Currently, the only control is to switch the Lobby on or off for everyone regardless of whether they are joining by phone or the Teams client. With this change, anyone who uses a phone to dial in to a meeting will now bypass the lobby by default. The default for users attending via the Team client is to wait in the Lobby, but the meeting organiser can override this. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? This will be the new default when it is rolled out to your environment. If you do not want the default for those joining by phone to bypass the lobby, then your Administrator can change this for everyone. Microsoft will gradually roll this out in early February 2020 and it is expected to be completed by mid-February. More from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/meeting-policies-in-teams Control announcements when dial-in users join/leave a Teams meeting MC19924 Category Teams What are Announcements? Microsoft Teams allows you to globally configure if an announcement should be made to all attendees when someone joins or exits the Meeting by telephone. How does this affect me? Currently this is a global setting and individual meeting organisers cannot override this. So, say you have organised a meeting with a large number of optional attendees who may join or leave during the meeting, then the constant announcements are disruptive to the main meeting attendees. With this change, tenant admins will continue to configure the default sound made when telephone dial-in users enter or leave a meeting. However, meeting organisers can now decide whether or not to play a sound on a per-meeting basis. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? If you have not already done so, consider asking your Teams Administrator to customise the default announcement sound when telephone dial-in users enter/exit a meeting and the inform the meeting organisers in your company, that after the roll-out they will be able to turn the announcement on or off on a per meeting basis. Microsoft will be gradually rolling this out in mid-January 2020. The rollout will be completed by the end of January. More from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/MicrosoftTeams/turn-on-or-off-entry-and-exit-announcements-for-meetings-in-teams New Global Reader Administrator role MC198602 Category Administration What is a Global Reader? There are several Office 365 Administrator roles, which provide powerful access to the services and features available. As such, it is recommended best practice that these Administrator roles are not assigned to a day to day users account. This means that individuals often have two accounts, one their normal account and the other an administrator account with greater security switched on. The SharePoint admin centre will soon support the global reader admin role. Users who are assigned this role will have read-only access to all info and settings in the new SharePoint admin centre. How does this affect me? If you are someone in the company who often wants to check certain settings in the Administrator centre, but is fining it cumbersome to keep signing in and out with your Admin account, then this new Global Reader role will safely give you the access you need from within your normal business account. If you then do need to change anything then you will need to sign in using your dedicated Admin account. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? To get the most value from this new feature, we suggest that you identify the admins in your company who should have the global reader role assigned to them. Assign the global reader role to individuals in your company who don't have admin centre access today and are either dependent on co-workers or their IT service provider for getting the administrative information they need for their work, or need to sign in and out of their dedicated admin account. Microsoft will be gradually rolling this out to Targeted Release customers in early March 2020. The roll out will be complete by the end March 2020. Combine work and personal calendars in Outlook on the web MC201582 Category Outlook What is this about? Quite simply, your end users will soon be able to add a personal calendar to Outlook on the web providing a single view of business and personal commitments. Currently you cannot easily connect a personal calendar through Outlook on the Web.  How does this affect me? By adding your personal calendar, it will "block out time" in your calendar so other people can see you are not available. However, as this is a personal calendar it will not let other people see the title or details of the event. Personal events will show as tentative, busy, or away in a work or school calendar. No details will be shared from a personal event, even if you have your work or school calendar set to "share all details" and even if a user has a personal event set to "public" rather than "private." This will stop you having to constantly replicate events between your personal and business calendars. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? This feature will be On by default, but can be disabled by your Office 365 Administrator. Microsoft will begin gradually rolling this out to all customers in April 2020, the rollout will be completed in July 2020. More from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/powershell/module/exchange/client-access/set-owamailboxpolicy Improved capabilities when scheduling meetings in Teams MC200243 Category Teams What is this all about? Microsoft Teams has overtime provided more and more outlook style capabilities to manage and schedule meetings. This enables individuals to stay within Teams if this their default collaboration tool. However, there has still been several deficiencies in Teams compared to Outlook and this change seeks to address a number of these. The new features rolling out to Teams are:
How does this affect me? This change provides your employees with greater choice as to which product they want to use and when, knowing that whichever they chose they will have access to similar functionality to manage and schedule their meetings. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? There is no action you need to take to prepare for this change, but you might consider communicating the new features to your employees. Microsoft will roll this feature out during February 2020. More from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/meeting-policies-in-teams Greater control over default sharing option in SharePoint MC200127 Category SharePoint What is the change? Your SharePoint administrators can set the global default "sharing" option for all new SharePoint sites. These are currently: "Anyone", "People in my organisation", or "Specific People". Post this change, your SharePoint Administrator will have another global option available which is "People with Existing Access". How does this affect me? Your staff can self-service create sites that may hold sensitive or confidential information. They then selectively add members to the site so that only people that should have access can see the information contained within the site. When they create a site, it inherits the default global sharing option set by your Administrator. If you then look at the need to share a document or folder within the site even to existing members, the default sharing option becomes important. For example: a member of the site wants to share a new document with all members of the site and so clicks the share button. If the default is "Anyone", then although they might only send the link to the existing site members, there is nothing to stop a member accidently forwarding the email, even to people external to the organisation, who will suddenly get access to that confidential or sensitive document. If they choose "People in my organisation", then again you have just opened the security of the document to anyone in your company. That leaves them with "Specific People". But now, I must type everyone's name and I cannot be bothered with that, so I will choose one of the other "open" and less secure options. The new default setting, "People with Existing Access" should always have been the default setting as this the most secure method and the option most people want to use. Remember, the default sharing option can be changed per site by a SharePoint administrator. Also, members when sharing a document, can select one of the other options if these are available within that site. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? You might want to discuss with your Administrator the current global default and when this change is released, decide to make this the new default. Microsoft will be rolling this out during Q1 2020 and will be completed by the end of March 2020. More from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-sposite New ways to empower and transform first line workers Category Teams What are First Line Workers? First Line Workers are typically the first person a customer deals with at a company. You will see First Line Workers in sectors such as retail, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, travel & hospitality and government. Traditionally, First Line Workers have limited access to company technology, often being limited to receiving occasional emails and announcements via their personal email address. This causes barriers to communication, collaboration and productivity, and can make First Line Workers feel alienated from the core company and the brand. What is Microsoft changing? Microsoft has positioned Teams as a hub for First Line Workers. It provides First Line Workers with chat and communication capabilities and also online access to their "Shifts" with the ability to request time-off and changes to their schedule. This year, 2020, Microsoft is introducing greater capabilities to Teams to help company engage, communicate and manage First Line Workers, here are the headlines:
What do I need to do to prepare for this change? Most of these new features are expected to roll out by the middle of 2020. Ask your Office 365 Administrator to check for updates and then plan how your company can use and take advantage of these if you have First Line Workers. More from Microsoft https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/01/09/8-new-capabilities-microsoft-365-empower-firstline-workers/ Keep control of Office 365 groups Category Administration What is this all about? First, what is an Office 365 Group? A Group is a set of connected Office 365 services that enable members of the group to securely access those services and the owners of the group to control membership. For example, when you create a new Team in Microsoft Teams, in the background a suite of connected Office 365 services are enabled that have the same permissions and security access. One such service is a connected SharePoint site that has the same Members and Owners as the Team, additionally you might create a Planner within the Team and again access to the plan is governed by the same Owner and Member model. Now, the issue has been that most companies do not lock down the creating of Groups and as well as creating a Group and connected services via Teams, you can also create a Group via Outlook, SharePoint, Planner and Yammer. It is therefore very easy for staff to create lots of groups either in a planned or unplanned way and this can cause an explosion in SharePoint sites, plans etc. How does this affect me? If you are responsible for the governance and control of your Office 365 environment, and concerned that there are too many groups getting created, or redundant / historical groups are never deleted, then you now have two options:
Of course, you can implement both options. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? You need to consider if the creation and use of Groups is an issue for your company, and if so talk to your IT / Office 365 Administrator to consider how you can use these new features to implement policies and controls that are right for you. More from Microsoft https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/office-365-blog/user-activity-based-expiration-policy-for-office-365-groups-is/ba-p/942877 Meet Edge Chromium - the new Microsoft browser Category Office Products What is Chromium Edge? Microsoft Edge was hailed as the best browser for Windows 10 – by Microsoft at least! However, it has never really taken-off and development of apps and new features for Edge by 3rd parties have been limited. Issues with Edge and its lack of compatibility with 3rd party apps, has also restricted companies moving from Internet Explorer which is now reaching end of life and becoming a potential security risk. For this reason, Microsoft has completely rebuilt Edge and based it on the same open source platform that Google Chrome uses. How does this affect me? If your company is currently restricted to Internet Explorer, then the new Edge might be the way forward. Also, if you are currently a Chrome user then the new Edge should be a viable alternative, and over time you can expect to see greater productivity, collaboration and security integration to Windows 10 and Office 365. What do I need to do to prepare for this change? At this stage, it looks like the new Edge will be rolled out in the spring of 2020 as part of a Windows 10 update and will more than likely simply replace the current version of Edge on your machine. You might want to look at the new features available and decide if this should be the company default browser. More from Microsoft https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge?form=MO12GE&OCID=MO12GE Are you using the compliance features of Office 365 to secure your business? MC202599 Category Security and Compliance What is this all about? Office 365 has always had an incredibly powerful Compliance and Security centre that enables you to protect your environment from external threats (Security) and to implement controls and policies to ensure your information is only accessible by those who need it and is only retained for as long as needed to meet you record keeping rules or external regulations (Compliance). However, having one single centre for managing all of this was confusing and not always aligned to the structure of the business. IT are typically responsible for Security and the Management \ Data Protection Officer \ Compliance individuals for internal governance of the company's information. This change splits the security and compliance centre into two separate centres, and access to each can be allocated to different individuals or departments. How does this affect me? Currently, the "Security & Compliance" link in the left navigation bar of the Microsoft 365 admin centre connects customers to the Office 365 Security & Compliance Centre. Microsoft are changing the Admin Centres links in that left navigation bar.
What do I need to do to prepare for this change? There is nothing you need to do to prepare for this change. However, if you are not aware of the capabilities of the compliance centre (compliance.microsoft.com) or if you click the link and cannot access it, then talk to your Office 365 Administrator to find out more about its capabilities and how it can help your company to stay compliant and better manage risk. More from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/compliance/microsoft-365-compliance-center Author: SO365 Insights |
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