Office 365 Updates for the Week of September 23rd
Teams Pinned Channels: Team is steadily improving with another new feature, pinned channels. With this feature, users will be able to pin channels that are important to them at the top of the sidebar. This will be above the user’s “Your teams” and “Hidden teams” lists.
To pin a channel, simply select “…” next to the channel and select “pin”
This feature will gradually roll out this September with this feature available worldwide by the end of October
Teams Voicemail: A feature that Skype for Business has had is finally making its way to Teams. For our clients that have the PSTN voice services such as Trout, users will be able to see and update their voicemail settings in the Teams client.
For Administrators, there will be new Teams reports that show PSTN blocked users and general PSTN usage.
In related news, Skype for Business external access setting is being retired from the Microsoft Admin center. This feature will now be found in the Teams admin center.
New SharePoint Reports: Another highly requested feature is coming to SharePoint Online, Sharing Reports. With this new feature site owners will be able to see all the items in their site that has been shared with any user.
The report can be generated from the “Shared with External Users” section of the Site Usage page. The report will output a CSV file with user, permission link and the shared item.
This feature will begin rollout late this September with the feature available worldwide by the end of November
New Flow Approval: Microsoft is updating Flow service in Office 365 to introduce hub site approvals. With this feature, hub site owners will be able to create approval workflows that determine who can approve a SharePoint site association request.
Administrators will have the ability to enable or disable hub join approvals for all SPO site administrators in the tenant. By default, this feature is turned off.
Look for this feature beginning in October. Users worldwide will have this new ability by the end of November 2019. This new feature does not apply to GCC clients.
Office 2013 Client News: For our customers running Office 2013 and older, as of October 13th, connections from these older clients will no longer be supported.
Microsoft will not block connections from older office clients such as Office 2013 and Office 2010, but users may begin to experience performance and reliability issues when connecting from older clients.
Exchange Online Retiring Legacy Protocols: Beginning in October 13th, 2020, Microsoft will retire Basic Authentication for EWS, EAS, IMAP, POP and RPS to access Exchange Online. SMTP AUTH will remain unaffected and any application using OAuth 2.0 to connect to these protocols will continue to work without any changes or interruption.
1131