Office 365 Updates for the Week of October 7th

Windows 7 and Office 365 End of Support Date: This is important news for our clients that still have Windows 7 installed.  Microsoft has announced the date when Windows 7 support for Office 365 ProPlus will end.  On January 14^th, 2020, customers will no longer receive support for Office 3565 running on Windows 7 machines.

According to the Office 365 terms of service, customers are required to stay current.  Microsoft will continue to deliver security updates for Windows 7 customers through January 2023, but they will not receive any further feature updates.  During this period, however, Windows 7 customers may begin to experience performance and reliability issues. With this in mind it is highly recommended that a migration plan for these users is implemented as soon as possible

Yammer GDPR Update: On November 4^th, Microsoft will be updating the process for handling Yammer GDPR data subject requests.  This is in response to customer feedback that the current process is too complicated.  The new specific process that will be updated are:

• Remove a User Workflow
• No longer required to place your Yammer network in Hard Delete mode to honor GDPR data subject request
• Reviewing and deleting messages
• Administrators will have access to a link in the network data access export that will call the hard delete api and permanently delete the message.
• Any GDPR data subject requests received after November 4^th will no longer require you to update your network retention settings.

Office 365 Incident Notifications: Scheduled to be rolled out to Targeted Release clients, a great new feature for O365 administrators, Office 365 incident emails.  Previously, administrators needed to rely on the Office 365 Admin app to receive notifications about outages and other O365 incidents.  Now, an admin will have the option to sign up for email notifications of new incidents affecting their tenant as well as any status changes for active incidents.

OneDrive / SharePoint Email Localization: A small but nice update for OneDrive and SharePoint.  Email’s receive from this service will now automatically delivered in the language preferred by the recipient.  The language preferences are located in Azure Active Directory and Exchange settings.

Look for this change to be delivered in early November 2019

New Teams Feature - Live captions: In order to improve the accessibility of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft will be rolling out live captions for Teams meetings this November

Live captions give participants who are deaf or hard of hearing, users who may not be proficient in the group’s default language, or participants in loud places another way to follow the conversation.  The option to turn on live captions will be available to users in the “…” menu.

This feature will be enabled by default via the DisabledUserOverride policy.  Here are some new PowerShell commands to manage the feature:

• If you want to disable the option of live captions for Teams meeting attendees, run this command in PowerShell: PolicyName -LiveCaptionsEnabledType Disabled>
• If you want to re-enable the option of live captions for Teams meeting attendees, run this command in PowerShell: PolicyName -LiveCaptionsEnabledType DisabledUserOverride>
• Where PolicyName is any custom policy you may have created. Global would refer to tenant-wide global policy.