Microsoft 365 Updates for the Week of May 11th. Hello WolfPack. Hello WolfPack. Despite the current Covid-19 situation, Microsoft is continuing to push new updates to their Microsoft 365 service. This week sees several updates for Teams and a notable new feature for Outlook on the Web. Updated Feature: Microsoft to rebrand Planner app in Teams Tasks in Team, the new branding for the Planner app in Teams, is coming this summer and will consolidate tasks across To Do, Teams Channels, Planner and Outlook Tasks. Users will see personal tasks powered by To Do (which also powers Outlook tasks) and team tasks powered by Planner. Existing Planner tabs will behave the same as they do today but will show an additional list view. Users will be able to add new Tasks tabs to the channels in teams they belong to. Users can also access the Tasks app in the same ways they previously accessed the Planner app. **Note** As Microsoft rolls out the Tasks experience on Teams desktop clients, the app name will initially appear as Planner to users. The name will then temporarily change to Tasks by Planner and To Do, and later on, it will be renamed to Tasks. On Teams mobile clients, users will always see the app name as Tasks. There may be a short delay in the availability of the mobile experience after the desktop experience is available. Look for this new feature to be available to Targeted release customers from mid-April to the end of April Standard Release customers can expect to see this feature appear at the beginning of May to mid-May Microsoft Teams new calling and meeting experience Microsoft is enabling a feature that allows to view meetings and calls in separate windows along with other recently announced features. Meetings and call controls such as mute, video, chat, leave and others will now never block the underlying content. The new experience will also include recently announced features such as 3x3 video, raise hands, and custom backgrounds. To enable the new Microsoft Teams calling and meeting experience: Click on the Avatar on the top right of Teams and click Settings. Check the Turn on new calling and meeting experiences check box and then restart the Teams client June – New experiences are available and users can enable through settings. July – Experiences are enabled by default and users can disable through settings. August – Experiences are enabled by default and user controls are no longer available. Microsoft Teams support for Egnyte as a Third party cloud storage provider Microsoft Teams is adding support for Egnyte as a a Third-party cloud storage provider, taking the total number of supported integrations to five (Citrix Files, Box, DropBox, Google Drive and Egnyte). This feature will begin rolling out to all customers in mid-June New Feature: Global reader experience in SharePoint admin center Microsoft is introducing a new role named Global Reader. You can consider this role as a companion role to the Global Admin role. Here are the circumstances for using this new role: Assign the global reader role instead of the global admin role to users who need to view all your organization’s settings but not edit them. For example, to plan, audit, or investigate. Use the global reader role in combination with other limited admin roles like the SharePoint admin role to allow specialists to perform admin tasks. New Feature: New rich-text editor for text fields with SharePoint lists Users can enable the RTE on any multi-line field. Once the user enables RTE, the Notes field will display a pencil icon in the list form. Click the pencil to edit text and adjust appearance, such as font, size, color, highlight, bold, italics, underline, and bulleted or numbered lists. PIC Targeted release customers can expect a gradual rollout from mid-April to the beginning of May. Standard release customers can expect to see this feature in mid-May to mid-August. Outlook on the Web feature update – Send later Outlook on the web is rolling out the ability to schedule emails to be sent at a later date and time. Users will be able to delay the delivery of an individual message or use rules to delay the delivery of all messages using Outlook on the web. This feature is already available in Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. When this will happen The feature will start rolling out Targeted Release customers in early May. The rollout will be completed worldwide by the end of June 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