Office 365 Updates for the Week of October 21st
Outlook Web Access Task Update: Microsoft is updating the name of tasks module and Tasks tab located in My Day to "To Do". This will reflect the updates that Microsoft is making to the integration between their Office 365 apps. Tasks in the web are already powered by To Do. Microsoft To Do is Microsoft's personal planning application.
New Teams Feature – Activity Based Team Renewal: Currently, Administrators can create an expiration policy for some or all Teams. How this works is that when the defined expiration timeframe is reached, Team owners are notified, and they will have the opportunity to renew the team. The new Activity Based Team Renewal adds intelligence to this process. Now, Teams that are being actively used will be automatically renewed. This removes the need for any manual action on part of the Team owner.
For information on how to configure the expiration policy for Office 365 groups click here. This link explains the process for Groups but remember that they are the foundation for Teams and the same settings will also control Teams auto-renal policies.
Teams Update – Teams Management: Microsoft is continuing to streamline the management of Teams. To that end, Microsoft will be retiring the ability to disable Microsoft Teams for all users of a particular license category.
*Note* Education and Edu Faculty licenses will not be affected by this change.
What this means in practice is that users who were preciously disabled for Teams by this option will now be become enabled for Teams. Admins will now be required to disable users via the “Manage Product Licenses” option in the Office 365 Admin Portal Active Users page.
Updated Feature: Changes to the address that is used to send notification email messages from SharePoint Online: Microsoft updating the address that is used to send select notification email messages from SharePoint Online. Currently, emails are sent from no-reply@sharepointonline.com. Microsoft will segregate some tenant emails by domain to reduce the risk of email being sorted into a recipient’s junk folder and to segregate tenant spam scores. Microsoft will provide a new default ‘from’ address for the email address that's used in notification messages. These notifications will now come from a tenant-specific mailbox like no-reply-sharepointonline@madwolf.onmicrosoft.com.
By segregating tenants into their own domains, no single tenant can negatively impact the reliability of email delivery for other tenants. With this change, tenants should witness improved reliability of SharePoint email delivery.
- This change will primarily affect document and page collaboration email scenarios like page likes, share link open receipts, and share reminders as well as comment and comment reply notifications for both OneDrive documents and SharePoint pages.
- This will not typically affect emails that are sent on behalf of a user’s mailbox like file sharing, page promotion via email, or comment @mentions.
- Legacy SharePoint alerts on document libraries or lists will continue to use the sharepointonline.com domain for the foreseeable future.
Admins can continue to modify the default smtp address of the no-reply mailbox.
Message posts from UTC to Local Time: This is purely a convenience update for Administrators. The posts that contain UTC timestamps will be converted to your local time. The types of posts that will see this change.
- Advisory posts
- Incident posts
- Message Center posts
OneDrive / SharePoint Email Localization: A small but nice update for OneDrive and SharePoint. Email’s receive from this service will now automatically delivered in the language preferred by the recipient. The language preferences are located in Azure Active Directory and Exchange settings.
Look for this change to be delivered in early November 2019
Microsoft Secure Store – new share experience announced: One of the big topics from Microsoft inspire was the ability for security administrators to more easily assign security actions to co-workers for investigation, implementation and remediation
With this in mind, Microsoft has introduced a new share experience in the Microsoft Secure Store with the ability to share improvement actions directly to Microsoft Teams. To take of the new functionality you will use the Share button which has been added to the upper right hand side of the Improvement Action’s details page
When the administrator selects the Share button, they will be given several options which include Copy Link, Email, Microsoft Team and Microsoft Planner
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