Office 365 Updates for the Week of July 15th

With everyone using smart devices and computers to access their mail, Microsoft may be forgiven for not keeping their web only experiences up to date, but that is not the case here.

Outlook on the web or OWA as its affectionately (?) known is updating the experience of sharing cloud documents from OneDrive and SharePoint.  Now when pasting a link to a file that is stored in SharePoint or OneDrive, it will automatically be changed to the actual name of the file and use the appropriate Office icon.  You will also have the opportunity to manage the share permissions for the file before you send the message. 

OWA authentication session management. Microsoft is now giving administrators the ability to manage the time between when users must enter their credentials.  By default, users are required to enter their credentials every 90 days.  Administrators will be able to configure session periods using Azure AD.  Sign-in frequency can be set anywhere from 1 to 365 days.  Persistent browser sessions can be configured to “always persist” or “never persist”.

Outlook for IOS has been updated with improvements to office file discovery. When using the search function in Outlook, a new area called Discover will be available.  This will show the popular documents in your organization’s Office 365 tenant.

Shared calendars for Windows have received an update.  Microsoft is promising faster and more reliable sync of shared calendars.  For more information on additional changes, please visit this Microsoft blog post.

Microsoft is enabling automatic phishing detection for public Microsoft forms created.  Public forms are those configured with the “Anyone with the link can respond”.  Any suspicious content included in the form such as “what’s your password” will be detected and blocked from sharing and response detection.  This will not be permanent and the for can be unblocked if the form designer removed the suspicious phishing question.  Additionally, Office 365 administrators will be informed via the Message Center notifications about these potential phishing detection results.