Office 365 Updates for the Week of September 16th

Teams Private Channels - Update: We’ve been hearing that the private channel feature has been in the works for a while, now Microsoft has given us a release date.  Private Channels is scheduled to begin rollout to tenants in October 2019.

Here is a refresher on why this is such a much-requested feature.  Private Channels Limit which team members can see the conversation and content within a particular channel. You can right-size channel participation and exposure without having to create discrete teams to limit visibility.

Private Channels will have a lock icon to differentiate them from normal channels.

Note:

• Team owners can see all private channels in a team
• Team members can only see those private channels that they have been added to

Again, look for this new feature to roll out to Office 365 tenants begging in October.

Upload Center News: The Microsoft Upload Center will be retired from Office beginning in mid-October 2019 and will be replaced by the new Files Needing Attention experience.  This new experience promises to be a more integrated experience and less intrusive when compared to the Upload Center.

For those who may not have seen or know what the Upload Center was, it is an application installed with Office where you can find Microsoft cloud files that are saved to your Office cache, including files that did not save to the cloud successfully.

In the new experience, when a file has not successfully saved to the cloud the user will go to File à Open à Files Needing Attention to find the file.  Each application will only show files for their specific app.  For example, to find a PowerPoint file that did not save to the cloud, you will find it in PowerPoint. See picture below.

For more information about the new, Modern, Files Needing Attention experience please visit this Microsoft FAQ.  This new feature is scheduled for roll out to be complete by the end of December 2019.

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.