Joel Rollins / Monday, May 18, 2020 / Categories: Weekly Howl Email Content, Microsoft 365 Updates Microsoft 365 Updates for the Week of May 18th. Hello WolfPack. Hello WolfPack. This week Microsoft is holding it's virtual Build 2020 event, so of course there are many Microsoft 365 updates and features announced. Read on for more information. New Feature: Office.com home page layout and navigation Microsoft is updating the layout and application navigation for the Office.com home page and Office app in Windows 10. Currently the top section of the Office.com home page contains the ‘Start new’ option and a horizontal list of applications. This horizontal top bar is being moved into a vertical navigation bar on the leftside of the page for better visibility Current Office.com view New Office.com view Schedule for release: Microsoft will roll out this new experience to Targeted Release customers in early June. Microsoft will roll out this new experience to Standard Release customers in mid-June. The rollout will be complete mid-July 2020. New Feature: Teams support in the SharePoint Migration Tool The SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) is gaining a key update. SPMT will soon let users migrate to Microsoft Teams in addition to SharePoint and OneDrive. Users will be able to select a team that they own and then define the channel they want to use as the destination. Administrators who manage Targeted Release tenants can expect this update in mid-May. All Microsoft 365 customers can expect this new feature by the end of the month. Feature Update: SharePoint home sites Microsoft has re-introduced this feature after retracting it a couple months ago to troubleshoot the rollout. As a reminder, SharePoint home sites is the new feature that allows organizations to set SharePoint site as their default home page, replacing the out of the box classic root site. SharePoint home sites are designed and designated to serve as the top portal in your organization. They will collect news, conversations, video and other content from around your organization and deliver it in one place. Requirements for the home site is that needs to use the communication site template and not be set as a Hub site. New Feature: Schedule pages and news posts in SharePoint Microsoft is introducing the ability for SharePoint page authors to schedule pages and news posts for publication at a future date and time. SharePoint site owners will have the option to enable scheduling on their sites; it will be disabled by default. When scheduling is enabled, page authors will be able to set a date and time for their pages and news posts to publish. Microsoft will begin gradually rolling this out to Targeted Release customers in late-May; the rollout will be complete in early June. Microsoft will update this post when they have information about the rollout for Standard Release customers. Microsoft Build Updates New Feature: Microsoft Learn TV Learn how to build solutions and use Microsoft products from the experts that built them! Learn TV is the place to find the latest digital content so you can always keep updated on the latest announcements, features and products from Microsoft. New Feature: Teams Templates At Microsoft Build 2020 Microsoft has finally announced that Templates for Teams is coming in the next few months. With Templates in Teams, users can choose from a variety of customizable templates when creating a new team, helping them get started quickly. IT professionals can also create new custom templates for their organization, allowing them to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices. For more information on how templates will be used in Teams, please visit Microsoft’s Blog. New Feature: Automate teams provisioning Microsoft has created a PowerApp template that automates the provisioning process based on core teams and channel options which are relevant to optimizing usage. This enables faster response time for team requests and offers a wealth of personalization options for organizations to implement repeatable best practices on team collaboration. The Request-a-team app template leverages a Power Apps application to surface easy-to-complete forms for the collection of information such as business justification, access scope, and ownership. End users can create teams from scratch, reuse existing internal teams, and/or take advantage of publicly available templates published by Microsoft. Landing screen Set privacy in the first step of the wizard Check availability of desired name and add additional detail to expose value Follow best practices in ownership Review inputs For more information about the availability of this Teams App, please visit the Microsoft Blog post New Feature: Microsoft Lists in Teams Microsoft Lists is coming to Teams! Microsoft Lists helps you track information and organize work. List are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team. Track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more using customizable views and smart rules and alerts to keep everyone in sync. With ready-made templates, you will be able to quickly start lists online, on our new mobile app, and directly from within Microsoft Teams. Create a new list directly inside Teams Create, share, and track list from Microsoft Teams Do you wish to know more? New Feature: Contextual Search in Microsoft Teams Find information faster with contextual search in Microsoft Teams. Users will have the ability to search for content in a specific channel or chat by pressing CTRL + F. Search results will only contain messages and files found in the selected chat or channel. New Feature: Messaging actions for mobile Coming soon from Microsoft, they will have message action support for mobile for preview. Message actions can be triggered directly from a message and can be used to enable scenarios such as creating tasks or work items following a discussion within a chat or channel. New Feature: Microsoft Family Safety app In March, Microsoft announced Microsoft Family Safety. Now, at Microsoft Build 2020 they have announced a limited preview of their Android and iOS apps. Pic With families working and learning from home, many of us are spending more time on our computers and phones and are looking for ways to ensure our loved ones are safe. Microsoft Family Safety helps you to facilitate a dialogue with your kids about the time they are spending on their devices and type of content they are viewing. The app provides transparency on where everyone is spending time online and allows you to create flexible schedules to carve out more time for things like online learning. Additionally, it helps you stay connected even when you’re apart with location sharing. Microsoft is committed to bringing customers additional physical safety features in the coming months, like safe driving, so as we go back to a new normal you can help protect your family across your whole life. Do you wish to know more? Updated: Office 365 Groups are being renamed to Microsoft 365 Groups To reflect the fact that Office 365 Groups power collaboration across Microsoft 365, Office 365 Groups will become Microsoft 365 Groups. These changes will happen over time and will be reflected in all the connected endpoints over the upcoming quarters. Updated: Sharing links that block download Microsoft is expanding the list of supported file types that users can create block download links for. This update includes support for PDF files, Images, Audio, and other non-text and non-video file types. Awareness of Microsoft 365 Temporary Feature Adjustment - Update: OneDrive Customers who use OneDrive Files On-Demand and choose to "display items by using large thumbnails" in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder will see generic icons instead of thumbnails for a subset of file types, such as PDF and video files. Photo file thumbnails (jpeg, jpg, png, etc) are not affected by this change. SharePoint Updated (in bold) to provide additional clarity: Microsoft is rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP, apps that scan the service, and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image. Previously announced: OneNote OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial and education tenants. To edit, please use OneNote for the web or the OneNote desktop app. Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed. You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates as http://aka.ms/notesupdates SharePoint We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image. Reduced video resolution for playback videos. The following blog is now available with some additional information about these temporary changes: Awareness of temporary adjustments in SharePoint Online Teams Frequency of Presence checking. Interval we show when the other party is typing. Reduced video resolution. Stream People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted. Meeting recording video resolution adjusted to 720p Print 1002