Office 365 Updates for the Week of November 4th
Teams Private Channels: After a bit of a delay, Microsoft has begun rolling out this feature to Office 365 tenants. I’ve checked our tenant and we do not have this feature yet, but soon.
Private channels will give organizations a secure collaboration area among a subset of a team. A lock icon will indicate a private channel. A couple things to keep in mind:
- Team owners can see all private channels in a team
- Team members can only see those private channels that they have been added to.
To create a private channel:
- In a Team, begin to create a channel in the normal way
- Select the privacy setting for the channel
Microsoft plans that the rollout for this feature to be complete by early November
Native Federation for 1:1 Chats in Teams: Previously announced at Microsoft Ignite Spring 2019 is a feature is native federation for chats in Teams. Microsoft goal to is to make it easier to chat with people outside of your organization.
MadWolf’s policy already allows for external communication through Teams, but our experience will be upgraded soon.
You will know if you are in full native chat when you have formatting, @mentions, emojis, etc. available to you.
Presenter and Attendee Roles in Microsoft Teams: Microsoft is bringing a feature that is currently in Microsoft Stream to Teams. Now meeting organizers will have the option to define who is a presenter or an attendee. Attendee cannot share content, take control, mute or remove other participants in a meeting, admit people waiting in a lobby, or start/stop a meeting. Presenters will have full permissions in the meeting.
Before or during a meeting, organizers can specify who is an attendee or presenter through the meeting options panel. The new choices are:
- Everyone (default)
- People in my organization
- Specific people
- Only me
New Feature “Request Files” for OneDrive for Business: Microsoft is beginning to roll out this new command for folders in OneDrive for Business on the web.
When enabled, this feature allows a user to ask another user to place files into a specific folder that they own. The folder must be in their own OneDrive for Business.
- To request files, select the folder you want the recipient to use and click Request Files.
- Add a description of the files you’re requesting, click Next.
- Type the email of the person from whom you are requesting files or copy the link.
After the recipient clicks on the invitation link, she selects her files to upload. The original requestor will be able to see all the collected files, but recipients will only be able to upload files. They won’t be able to access any contents within the selected folder and won’t be able to modify their own uploads once the upload is submitted.
The original requestor will get an email when recipients submit files to the folder.
This feature will be enabled by default for tenants that have enabled Anyone edit links for folders.
New Microsoft Project: The new Microsoft Project is now rolling out to Office 365 customers. With this new release customers will be getting a redesigned user experience that is simple and intuitive. Teams can quickly add new members and set up tasks, and then easily switch between grids, boards, or timeline (Gantt) charts to track progress. And because Project is part of the Microsoft 365 family, project teams can save time and do more with built-in connections to familiar apps like Microsoft Teams and Office.
Collaborating is now easier. Project works with Teams to support collaboration and make it easy to manage all aspects of a team project, including file sharing, chats, meetings, and more. Team members in dispersed locations can even edit tasks simultaneously. To help teams stay on track, Project offers an automated scheduling engine based on effort, duration, and resources.
Power BI is now integrated with Project. You can now create interactive dashboards in Power BI that will help you visualize every part of your project.
Project Plan 1 is the new offering. Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium are now renamed to Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 respectively.
For more information on the upgraded Project, please Click Here