What is coming for Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, and Exchange Online.
This past month that many of us around the globe are in-home office collaborative tools has turned our life/work easier, so as a consequence of this big change for most of the companies and users Microsoft is pushing so new features on 365 products.
Microsoft is improving Teams functionalities at a fast pace to keep following the market tendencies and bring new possibilities for their clients. Teams meetings improvements are a great proof of this new fast-paced deployment, the platform gets more features this month than on any other month of this year.
Exchange has also some improvements but on this renowned messaging platform the improvements focus are in security, to bring more protection against spam, information thief, and data leaks.
SharePoint as the base for collaboration workspace is getting new features that make it easier to use or to customize, here we see that the focus is on how to better view and share information inside your company.
Let’s see below some of these new features that are coming now.
Sharepoint Online
One new tab called stock images will be created in the file picker will soon give users access to thousands of high-resolution stock images to use while authoring pages and news.
Web Part “Saved for later”
Will be added a new Web Part called “Saved for later” where the users will view your saved pages.
Page authors can determine the source of Saved items that will show on the page: All saved items (to show all of the page viewer’s items across SharePoint) or Saved items from this site (to show all of the user’s saved items from the site on which the page is located)
Click here for more information
New Conditionally show or hide columns in a SharePoint list or library form
Now the users can hide/show columns based on the condition in other columns.
This is a new conditional expression capability for configuring lists or library forms. It builds upon existing ability to show or hide columns in a list or library form.
As soon as the feature is rolled out to your organization, list and library users will be able to begin editing conditional formulas to show or hide columns in the list or library form.
The formula is made up of equations that perform conditional checks on values in a list or library. For example, you could hide a column for FOO based on values calculated in column FOO.
Ex:
To specify a conditional formula for a column, in the Edit columns pane:
1 — Navigate to the desired column for which you want to set a conditional formula and find the more options menu (…) next to that column
2 — In the more options, select Edit conditional formula.
3 — In the Edit conditional formula dialog:
- To determine whether this column is shown or hidden, specify a conditional formula based on the value of another column.
- To clear the condition, leave it blank.
4 — When you are finished, select Save.
Formulas are equations that perform conditional expressions on column values in a list or library.
A formula starts with an equal sign (=) followed by an if in the function that returns either a true or a false result.
For example, the following formula checks if the value for the Category column is Product Management.
=if([$Category]==’Product Management’,’true’, ‘false’)
Microsoft Teams
Increase in the number of simultaneous videos in Teams meetings
Microsoft is increasing the number of participants that can be viewed at the same time during a Teams meeting from 4 to 9. Microsoft’s plan is to increase this limit even further so that more participants can be viewed simultaneously.
When?
The rollout started in June.
Multi-Window Meetings and Calling experiences
When available this feature will be possible to view meetings and calls in a separate window from the Teams client. Additionally, the meeting and call controls will now be located at the top of the meeting screen so they will be always available. The rollout will start in June and at the beginning, it will be OFF by default and users can enable under Settings>General> Turn on new meetings and calling experiences. In July these settings will come by default and users can disable through settings and in August it will come enabled by default and users’ controls are no longer available.
At this first moment there are currently some known limitations:
• Meeting notes will launch to the main Teams client
• Support for full-screen content viewing will be coming in the future
• Support for Invision Freehand Whiteboard will be coming in the future
End the meeting for all participants
Meeting organizers will be able to end the meeting with a push of a button. Within the meeting control bar, only meeting organizers will see an item that says, “end meeting.” All participants exit the meeting when the organizer selects this button.
When?
End meeting for all is already launched
New Meeting Controls
These two new features it will make easier for users to manage their Team meetings.
Default lobby setting — We changed the default Teams policy to make external users wait in the lobby before joining a Teams meeting to ensure that only the right people are in the meeting. This policy change will only impact those tenants who have not modified the default meetings policy.
Lobby settings for PSTN participants — Any user who schedules a Microsoft Teams meeting will now see a separate setting to control the lobby for Audio Conferencing (PSTN) participants in the Meeting Options page of a given meeting. Additionally, they will also see a new option to control the announcement sound when a PSTN/dial-in participant joins or leaves the meeting
When?
Both of these features are expected to be rollout soon
Change in meeting join experience
Currently, anyone is allowed within an organization to start a Teams meeting. Moving forward, Microsoft will restrict the ability to start a meeting to only those users who have been assigned a policy to create a meeting.
Meeting attendees without the ability to create a meeting will see a pre-join screen indicating that the meeting hasn’t started. These individuals and will be automatically admitted into the meeting once a user with permissions joins and starts the meeting.
When?
It’s under development and it is expected to be released soon.
PSTN participant phone numbers are masked from external users
Soon Microsoft will mask the PSTN participant’s phone number to users who have joined from outside of your organization. this feature to begin to roll out beginning in May for PC, Mac, web, and mobile clients.
csTeamsMeetingPolicy update to manage access to past meetings
Starting mid-June 2020, Microsoft is changing the behavior of meeting policies which allows users to create and schedule meetings:
•AllowChannelMeetingScheduling
•AllowMeetNow
•AllowPrivateMeetNow
•AllowPrivateMeetingScheduling
This change will impact all the users who are assigned any of the above policies with the value set to “False”.
After this change, the past meetings created/organized by these users impacted will be expired. That means, no one will be able to join the past meetings.
The impacted users can continue to join meetings created/organized by other users. Access to Meeting chat and other artifacts will continue to be unaffected.
Tasks in Teams
The planner app in Teams will become the Teams tasks.
Also, there is a new list view and new mobile tasks experience in the Teams app. Tasks in teams will give the user a unified view of their personal tasks.
Its interim name will be Tasks by Planner and To Do. A few months after the interim name change, the app name on the desktop will be shortened to Tasks and it applies to the Teams planner app. The upgrade will also include task publishing functionality.
When?
Tasks in Teams started the roll-out in June and expect to be complete by mid-July. When the rollout is completed the planner app will be renamed to Tasks.
Ability to add distribution lists and modern groups to scheduled meetings
soon it will be possible to use distribution lists and modern groups to schedule meetings in Teams making discoverable searching for the participants.
The ability to add distribution lists and modern groups to schedule meetings is under development and it’s expected to be released soon.
Exchange Online
What you need to know about FindTime before you think in deploy it to your company.
You can use the Exchange control panel to deploy FindTime to the entire organization using a few simple steps:
- Inside Exchange control panel clicking on Organization and then in Apps
- Click on New + to create a new deployment
- Add from the Office Store and select FindTime
- One remark is: if My MarketPlace Apps is disabled inside the Exchange application policies you may have issues with users on their mobile devices.
- If you have this setting disable it can return ErrorAccessDenied error message on the user mobile device.
- To validate this setting, go to your Exchange online control panel and click on Permission > User Roles.
- More install options can be obtained here.
To be able to create and manage FindTime pools, users will need to use Outlook on the web
if users are not allowed to use Outlook on the web on your organization think in open this access for the ones that will need this feature if possible or FindTime won’t be of any usage inside your organization.
The attendees of a pool don’t have this requirement, as they can vote using the FindTime links
FindTime works with Teams and Skype for Business, but it also works with third-party applications like Zoom or Webex.
You will lose the ability to use the auto-schedule option, but other features will continue to work if you use one of those third-party apps.
You can have a look at this article to check what are the differences using it from Microsoft apps and third-party meeting apps.
FindTime will use your account working hours if you are logged on Office 365
It is interesting to know that for guest users it will use the detected timezone from their browser or Outlook.
I hope these simple tips about FindTime make your life easy when you are trying to decide if, how and when you may deploy it to your organization (or to request it to IT to deploy it for your team).
Security changes on Exchange online, what I must know?
In this second part of our article, I would like to show you what Microsoft is doing for email security on Office 365 and where your Exchange administrators and your security specialists may need to look during the next months.
First of all, Microsoft delayed its “Disable Basic Authentication” project, postpone it to the second half of 2021. This delay is because most organizations in the face of Coronavirus challenges have their priorities changed. Microsoft will provide later a better-estimated date for the change to happen, but for now, we can still work on it inside of our environments without the pressure of the basic authentication is fully disabled by Microsoft.
Now, that I was able to show you that you have more time to be concerned about secure your messages, I will present you 3 more solutions that Microsoft is bringing to supported security features on Exchange online.
- Disable SMTP AUTH protocol
- DANE for SMTP
- DNSSEC
SMTP AUTH protocol is mostly used for clients that don’t support modern authentication protocols, like printers, servers with automated email configurations, legacy web applications, etc.
As this protocol is not so secure as modern authentications methods, like OAuth, and their credentials could also be obtained by attackers, Microsoft is adding some changes, support for OAuth inside SMTP AUTH will be added (for web applications that supports it), the possibility to disable the SMTP AUTH for the entire tenant, this last one was already available for tenant admins.
The next steps will be disabling the SMTP AUTH by default for new tenants and the last step turn it off for all tenants, but for these 2 items, there is no ETA yet.
What are DANE and DNSSEC:
DANE for SMTP provides a more secure method for email transport. DANE uses the presence of DNS TLSA resource records to securely signal TLS support to ensure sending servers can successfully authenticate legitimate receiving email servers. This makes the secure connection resistant to downgrade and MITM attacks.
DNSSEC works by digitally signing records for DNS lookup using public-key cryptography. This ensures that the received DNS records have not been tampered with and are authentic.
These technologies may come only in 2021, as they require big investments in Microsoft infrastructure, but anyway it is good to keep an eye on them and monitor Microsoft advances to secure email services on Office 365.
