Office 365 Updates for the Week of August 26th

Create users with templates in the Microsoft 365 admin center:  These templates will allow administrators to quickly create many users using shared settings. Options that are available in the template:

• Roles
• Licenses assigned
• Contact information
• Location
• More to be announced

When an administrator uses a template to create a new user these values will automatically be saved.

Use case Example: I know that I have a large group of level 1 engineers starting in for MadWolf, in the IT department, and in the D.C. office.  I can use this template to prepopulate all of these values.

Templates will start rolling out in September.

Automatic phishing detection in Microsoft Forms: In order to make Microsoft’s Forms application a more secure service, they are adding automatic phishing detection on all public forms.  This feature will eventually be added to enterprise organization forms in the future as well for even better protection

Anonymous link expiration: Now Office 365 Administrators can set a custom expiration policy on site collections that differ from the default Office 365 tenant policy.  Each modern SharePoint site is it’s own site collection, so this will be of great benefit for site owners who want to set their own sharing policies.

Updated Feature - Mac files on-demand:  For OneDrive users who are running macOS Mojave and later, File On-Demand will be enabled by default.

What is files on-demand?  This feature allows OneDrive users to access all their OneDrive files without having to download and store them locally on their hard drive. Two key benefits of this feature are:

• Save space on their devices by making files online only
• Set files and folders to be always available locally on their device.

Unless otherwise configured by Office 365 administrators, macOS Mojave users will have File On-Demand enabled by default.

Look for this change to be available to Office 365 tenants beginning in mid-September as part of the OneDrive client update (version 19.123.0624.0005 or higher).

New Feature – Office 365 Admin Submissions and Quarantine File Previewer: As part of the renewed security focus here at MadWolf I wanted to highlight this new feature. 

Administrators and other users responsible for security in the Office 365 Tenant will now find it easier to report suspicious email messages and or content to Microsoft and get feedback.

So, in practice what does this mean?  Well, admins will be able to make email submissions from the same place where they review user-reported messages within the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center.  Here are the new features of the submission process:

• Submit suspicious URLs, files, or emails to Microsoft for scanning and analysis
• Receive immediate feedback on their submissions
• Find and remove rules allowing malicious content into the tenant
• Find and remove rules blocking good content into the tenant

The updated submissions section still includes user-reported messages and is available to all customers using Exchange Online Protection

Users can now preview files within Quarantine with a richer format than what was previously available.

This update will be rolling out to Office 365 tenants in early September and scheduled to be complete by the end of September.

For more information about submitting suspected spam, phish, URLs, and files to Microsoft for Office 365 scanning please see this article

New Feature – Dark Mode and Suggested Calendar Locations in Outlook for Windows: A feature that is great for saving battery power and late evening viewing will soon be release by Microsoft and that is full support for Black Office Theme with dark mode.  The Black Office Theme will provide a black background (instead of white) for the message window

• Users can disable dark mode in the black theme so that the window default color is white.
• Users can toggle the message windows background from black to white for individual messages.

This feature will be available soon to targeted release tenants.

Event Locations In Calendar: For Office 365 customers connected to Exchange Online, suggested locations will automatically show in the location field in the New Meeting or New Appointment forms based on the available conference rooms or locations.

New Teams Feature:  Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business screen sharing interop.  With this update, Teams Only users will be able to share their desktop with users in chat and or calls with Skype for Business users. This feature has also been expanded