Office 365 Updates for the Week of August 5th

Teams new feature – Private Channels: Private channels will allow Office 365 clients to create a secure channel for Teams. A lock icon will indicate which channels are private. This feature will not be available to GCC tenants.  Private channels security will have the same security philosophy as SharePoint.

• Team owners will have complete control over all private channels in a team
• Team members will only see the private channels that they have been assigned.

This feature will begin rolling out to first release tenants in early September.  All Office 365 clients will have this feature by the end of September.

New SharePoint feature - Site Swap:  This is a feature that SharePoint Administrators and site builders have been waiting for ever since the new Modern era of SharePoint arrived.  A way to replace the root SharePoint site with a new modern site.  For now, this is only possible using SharePoint Admin PowerShell version 16.0.8812.1200 or later.  The PowerShell cmdlet is Invoke-SPOSiteSwap.   This will archive the current root site and replace it with the desired new site.  The new site cannot be associated with a Hub site prior to the swap but can be re-associated after the swap.  Microsoft will take a gradual approach to its rollout to Office 365 customers

• First wave: Organizations with ~50 licenses or less
• Second wave: Organizations with ~1,000 licenses or less
• Third wave: For organizations with more than 1,000 licenses, Microsoft will provide more information on their rollout schedule.

New and updated web parts for modern page authoring.  Here is a list on the new and updated web parts:

• Button & Call to Action: Fairly self-explanatory, it’s a button web part that will allow you to engage your users
• World clock & Weather updates: A new web part to show time and weather from around the world. You will be able to add a collection of cites and or locations to either web part
• News: This web part has been updated with a newly available Hero layout.
• Hero: The hero web part has been updated to allow for two links per large tile.  The primary link will still go to the content, but the second link can be used as a “call to action”.
• Highlighted content with custom query filtering: Web part designers will now be able to add AND/OR clauses within their queries and reference custom SharePoint properties.  Using KQL or CAML code will also be an option.
• Divider web part: Page designers will be able to control the length and weight of the divider.

These new and updated web parts will be available to targeted release tenants beginning in early August with a general release by the end of October.