Office 365 Updates for the Week of September 09th

Office 365 connector to Facebook to be retired:   More to be announced

According to Microsoft’s telemetry, this has been a rarely used connector.

If any of our clients are using this connector, they need to be informed that beginning on September 4, 2019 the connector to Facebook will no longer work.  Scenarios that incorporate this connector will not receive an error message, but for the best experience its recommended that the connector is disabled.  Here are a list of Office 365 services where this connector could have been implemented:

• Microsoft Teams
• SharePoint Online
• Yammer
• Office 365 Groups
• Flow/PowerApps/Logic Apps

Remove a connector from Teams

Enable or disable connectors in Office 365 Groups

Connect app to your groups in Outlook

Microsoft Power Apps and Flow availability for GCC High: Scheduled for late September 2019 PowerApps and Flow will be available for Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Office 365 in GCC High

This environment supports compliance with US government requirements for cloud services including FedRAMP High, CJIS, ITAR and other US government defense industry base customers.

This will be a gradual rollout beginning in September and to be completed by the end of December 2019.

For more information:

Microsoft PowerApps US Government

Microsoft Flow US Government

Teams meeting recordings tab in Microsoft Stream: A new tab for Teams Meetings will be added to Microsoft Stream.  This will make is much easier to locate those Teams meetings recordings.

This feature will be available in both Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans that include both Teams and Stream.

Feature is scheduled to be available worldwide by the end of September.

New Microsoft Teams Feature – Meet Now: Microsoft will be making it easier to start a adhoc meeting using Teams.  Users will be able to click on the “Meet no” button from the Calendar tab in the Teams app.  The mobile app does not currently support this functionality. User will be able to quickly start a meeting without going through the scheduling process.

How it will work is that when a user clicks on “Meet now,” Teams will launch a new meeting where the user can add attendees, whether they be inside outside the organization.

User can look for this feature beginning in mid-September with GCC customers acquiring the feature beginning in mid-October.

Microsoft Planner – New Priority Field: Scheduled to be available to all Office 365 tenants by mid-September, soon users will be able to set tasks in Planner to Low, Medium, Important, and Urgent using the priority field.  Additionally, users will be able to group by priority.

SharePoint Online Site Swap:

• This feature is rolling out to Office 365 organizations with 10,000 or fewer licenses beginning in September
• For organizations with more than 10,000 licenses, Microsoft will announce the schedule at later date

As a reminder for site administrators, you will be able to swap the root site with another site using the PowerShell cmdlet Invoke-SPOSite Swap.  This will require PowerShell version 16.8812.1200 or later. The root site will be automatically archived.

Microsoft Project – Reimagined: Microsoft has announced that the vision for the new Microsoft Project experience, that was unveiled during the Microsoft Ignite conference, will be rolling out to Office 365 tenants beginning in October 2019.

The new Project experience will introduce the new modern work management environment.  A project manager’s new experience will begin with Home, the new service that will allow them to see and manage all of their projects in one place.

The new Project service is built on the Microsoft Common Data Service for Apps platform.  What this means is that its fully cloud ready and will be able to integrate with the entire Office 365 suite of services.

Microsoft is rolling out the new Home service today.  Roadmap will be available early next year with the first release of the new project management service available in the first half of next year.  Office 365 customers with a Project Online Professional or Project Online Premium subscriptions will be able to take advantage of the new services.

For more information, visit Microsoft’s tech blog. T: A new tab for Teams Meetings will be added to Microsoft Stream.  This will make is much easier to locate those Teams meetings recordings.

This feature will be available in both Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans that include both Teams and Stream.

Feature is scheduled to be available worldwide by the end of September.

Site Owners Have a New Way to Manage Access Sharing Requests:  Microsoft is providing a new way for site owners to manage sharing and access requests.  The schedule for the new process:

• Office 365 first release tenants will receive the new feature mid-September
• Roll out will be complete by the end of September

SharePoint site owners can now manage sharing and access request settings from the Site permissions panel by following the “Change sharing settings” link

Site owners will no longer need to go into the Advanced permissions page to view or modify these settings. Site owners can use these settings to, for example, allow only owners to share files, folders, and the site, thus restricting everyone else from sharing.

Office Apps for Windows Native Sensitivity Labeling: Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word will support Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labeling.  This new level of support will roll out as part of the Office 365 Monthly Channel Targeted update.

For Office 365 customers who have defined sensitivity labels and protection policies in the Microsoft Office 365 Compliance center

• A new Sensitivity button will appear in the ribbon with sensitivity options
• Admin-defines policies or Rights Management Service (RMS) templates will not be listed on the existing Encrypt button.