Office 365 Updates for the Week of July 29th

Teams Moderation: Microsoft will be deploying a new update that will give Team owners more control over their respective team.  Beginning in late July, Team owners will have more control over team chats.  New moderation controls are being added to Teams that will allow Owners to control who can start new chats and reply to posts in a channel.  Additionally, Team owners will be able to add team members as moderators so that they can moderate team conversations.

Picture this scenario.  A marketing team has a specific channel strictly for announcements and deliverables.  The team owner will want to keep team members from posting content to that channel that should belong in other channels.  The team owner will be able to restrict information sharing in the channel to only announcements so that team members can stay on top of what’s new and or important.

Teams moderation for a channel will be off by default and you can restrict new posts to only team members or allow anyone (including guests), to start new posts.

New SharePoint page and news authoring options: Page designers will have more options available to them when designing Modern site pages including:

• Drag and drop files to the canvas – Page designers will be able to upload images to the canvas using drag and drop.  SharePoint will now automatically add the file viewer and upload the file to the document library
• Link preview – Microsoft has added a “rich preview” for links pasted in the text editor to embed videos from Microsoft Stream and YouTube.  Images will title and description from those sites will automatically be added
• Page anchors – Similar to DNN and Wordpress, SharePoint will now support anchor links, which allow readers to jump to a specific location on the page.
• Undo/Redo Tool – SharePoint page authors will have the option to und changes prior to saving or publishing
• Vertical sections – Currently, when designing a modern site page, authors only had horizontal page elements available. Now, expected to be available to all tenants in October, vertical elements will be available.

Stream update #1: User will be able to replace existing uploaded videos or live events with a new video while maintaining the current URL, embed link, title, description, view counts and likes. Microsoft has created a Flow for trimming an uploaded video will be available in Stream.

Stream Update #2: Many users may not have realized this, but currently a recycle bin is not available for Microsoft Stream. Deleting a video is a permanent action.  Now, a 30 day recycle bin for deleted videos will be available soon for all Office 365 customers.  Targeted release customers will begin seeing this feature in September 2019 and worldwide by the end of October.

Link Expiration Policy: Currently, administrators can configure anonymous links to expire after a certain number of days.  It can be as few as 1 day or as many as 720, but this was a global setting. Now, administrators will be able to configure the policy on a site by site basis.  Administrators can still set a global policy, but the local site settings will override the tenant setting.  Initially this will only be configurable with PowerShell, but Microsoft will bring this feature to the SharePoint Admin center in the future.  Details on the PowerShell scripts are located here.

Joining SharePoint hubs: Previously, joining a site to a Hub Site requires SharePoint Admin privileges.  Now Microsoft is updating this permission so that site owners will be able to join their site to a hub.  This is very timely.  We just had this issue come up with Trout, one of our clients.  I had to give a user SharePoint admin rights so that she could associate several sites with a Hub.  When this feature has completed rolling out to all Office 365 tenants, I will be revisiting that security change for that user.

Save for later on Files: A very interesting new feature, announced at this year’s SharePoint conference, that will be available to all Office 365 customers by August is the ability for users to keep documents that are interesting to them in an easily accessible list across all of O365. The Save for Later command will be available on files within Personal and Shared libraries.  Documents that the user has saved for later will be accessible from the Saved tab in OneDrive on the web (see below).