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Microsoft 365 Insights

Updates from the
Simply Office 365 laboratory

Office 365 Insights - Dec 2019

10/12/2019

 
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Outlook on the web - Meeting Insights

MC191699
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Meeting Insights makes it easy to prepare for meetings. When you click on a meeting event in  Outlook on the web calendar, Outlook will suggest content (like emails and files) that it feels is related to the event or the attendees.

Content is tailored for each user and users will only see content they are authorised to see. Therefore, meeting participants may not see the same suggested content.

This is a nice feature as it may suggest content you are not aware of or provide quick access to related content. The limitation is that the feature will only be useful to those individuals  who use Outlook on the web instead of the Outlook desktop app or even Teams Calendar! 




Sharing Reports for OneDrive

MC191782
 
We all know how difficult it is to keep track of which of your documents in your OneDrive for Business have been shared externally. This change enables you to generate a report that shows how your OneDrive for Business content is being shared outside the organisation and therefore be able to take action should any of the content sharing need to be cancelled.

You  can generate the report from the OneDrive Settings -> "More Settings" page.

OneDrive Settings is the cog icon in the ribbon when you open OneDrive via a browser. The report outputs a CSV file that contains a row for every unique user, permission, link, and item on that site. 




Microsoft To-Do - Notifications for shared lists 

MC195304 

Microsoft To-Do has supported the ability to create a task list and then share it and all the tasks within with other people.

More from Microsoft on creating and sharing lists:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-and-share-lists-4e5aeac6-8649-4813-aae5-2c2ddea2f292

This is a great additional feature that enhances the usability of To-Do. One drawback however was that when someone you shared the list with updated a task, you were not notified. Well this is all changing, during December 2019 Microsoft is rolling out automatic push notifications informing you of any changes in any of the task lists you share. 



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Form customisation in SharePoint lists and libraries

MC192839

You can now customise the order and visibility of fields on SharePoint forms in lists and libraries without the need to convert the form to a PowerApp.

To use this new feature, click "Show/Hide Fields" in the "Edit Form" menu on the Form details pane - if you cannot see the "Edit Form" option and instead just see "Customize with PowerApps" then your Office 365 tenant has not been updated yet.

Why is this useful?
​

Overtime you may have columns on SharePoint lists and libraries that you no longer need, but you do not want to remove them from the List or Library as they contain useful legacy data. This new feature allows you to easily hide the redundant columns on the Form and also change the order of the remaining columns to make it more efficient for users to capture and edit information.  Although this could be achieved by converting the Form to a PowerApp, this was a daunting process for many site owners and members.
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Guest access to Microsoft Teams using a Gmail address

MC194386

You will now be able to invite new external guests to your Team who only have a Gmail email address without needing them to create a Microsoft Account or an Office 365 Account. This will greatly increase the flexibility of teams when working with external guests.
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This change does require your IT department to change the settings in the Admin Center to enable this.

More from Microsoft on Google federation:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/active-directory/b2b/google-federation

Author: SO365 Insights

Top technology tips for compliance consultants

9/12/2019

 
Microsoft's Office 365 cloud has all the tools a compliance consultant needs to help you work more efficiently and productively.

​We've picked 4 of our favourites to give you a quick insight into how using Office 365 can improve your business, both internally and in collaboration with your clients.
tip number 1

Did you know Office 365 makes a great client extranet for consultants?

One of the key interactions a compliance consultancy firm has with its clients is the constant creation and reviewing of client documents and the interaction with the client to finalise and agree the documents.

Undertaking this process using email is cumbersome, prone to error and can lead to privacy and security breaches. What do I mean by this exactly?
 
  • Email is a poor tool to control multiple revisions of documents between multiple parties, each of which make their own amendments in isolation that often contradict or duplicate feedback and changes from others in the email chain.
  • How many times has there been confusion about which email is the latest version, especially where multiple consultants might be involved in the process.?
  • Email makes it all too easy to inadvertently send confidential and private documents to the wrong recipient and once sent - there is no "recall". ​
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For those consultants using Office 365, you can easily turn this into a secure extranet with your clients, where both parties can upload, share documents and work on them together, without the document ever leaving the "source" environment. Office 365 will even version control and audit every change, so it is easy to track who has amended a document and when, or if you need to, you can recover an accidentally overwritten version.

Clean, simple and secure exchanging of information with your clients. If you use Office 365, you already have what you need to do this today.

tip number 2

You can use Microsoft Teams to share, discuss and reply to client emails 

One of the perennial problems a team of consultants faces is ensuring everyone has visibility of key emails and interactions between clients, especially when a consultant is on holiday and a colleague has to cover for them.

Our approach using Office 365 - we create a Microsoft Team for each client.
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Not only is this a great environment to create and share documents, but each Team has its own email address that enables us to forward and reply to client emails, providing other members of the team with full visibility of the interaction. Better still, once we have forwarded the email to Teams we can internally have a quick and easy discussion without the need to send the email to everyone and then wait for their response. Even the discussion is visible to colleagues and auditable.

Microsoft Teams provides a clean, simple and secure way of storing, sharing, discussing and responding to client emails - whilst helping to keep unnecessary clutter out of everyone's inbox.

tip number 3

Maintain oversight of all client service activities

How do you keep visibility over who's working on which clients and which client service activities are running late?

Office 365 has an easy to use and configure "events" feature that enables you to create and schedule client events and activities, which can then be allocated to the appropriate consultants.
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  • Email reminders and escalation workflows can then keep everyone informed of pending or overdue events.
  • The overall schedule of events can be securely accessed via the browser or synchronised to your Outlook as just another calendar.
  • Consultants can have their own views of events allocated to them, or perhaps access a view of all events for a specific client regardless of the owner.

​Using Office 365 gives you a quick, simple solution to increase visibility, management and oversight of this critical part of the service you provide to your clients.

tip number 4

Simplify the management and communication of regulatory news and information 

The amount of regulatory change information that a consultancy must manage is forever increasing. What is worse, is that the activity is often duplicated across all consultants, who each keep and maintain their own set of records.

This is not a result of some sort of hubris, but because the central storage area for such information is often unavailable or makes it impossible to find information. Add to this the need to save and store documents multiple times because they logically apply to different regulations (or different folder structures) and it is easy to see how much wasted time this duplication of work costs a consultancy.
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  • SharePoint, part of Office 365, provides many tools and techniques to let you create rich document libraries full of navigable filters that let you quickly locate information.
  • These filters use metadata which not only allows documents to be tagged across multiple regulations, but also add to the searchable content, making search a much richer and rewarding experience.

Office 365 provides clean, simple and easy to use document repositories that all consultants will use and benefit from.

Author: Chris Kaye

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