Office 365 Updates for the Week of February 10th, 2020

Teams meetings updates:
Soon, users will have control over the sound that announces when a user is on a call joins or leaves a meeting. The meeting organizer will be able to decide whether or not to play a sound.
Additionally, meeting organizers will have to option to allow dial in users to bypass the lobby. Previously, a single setting controlled the lobby for attendees joining a meeting via the Teams client and those joining via phone dial-in. Now, there will be two separate lobby settings on the Meeting Options page. One for dial-in users and those joining using the Teams app.

New Global Reader Role: SharePoint admin center will soon support the global admin role. Users assigned this role will have read-only access to all information and settings in the SharePoint admin center. Look for this to begin rolling out to targeted release customers in February.

Teams – Outlook integrations:
Microsoft has announced new Teams and Outlook functionality to help users share information between the two applications.

Share email to Teams
Share a copy of an email and any attachments from Outlook to a channel or chat in Teams
Share conversation via email
Share a copy of a Teams channel or chat conversation via email directly from the Teams app
Replay to Teams missed activity emails
Ability to respond to Teams missed activity emails directly within Outlook app as well as see the latest missed messages.

This functionality will begin rolling out to Targeted release customers in February

Teams – Updated scheduling experience:
Microsoft has made changes to the existing scheduling experience. The new scheduling form will retain all of the existing scheduling functionality. The new form provides an improved view of the available time for meeting participants. It will allow for changing event information from the scheduling assistant tab and will FINALLY include an option for required and optional attendees. The new form also includes search within the location picker.

Additional features for meeting organizers include:

A toggle to convert meetings to an all-day event
Availability status: both people and location search provide a visual clue (red) to indicate non-availability
Cancellation with message: provides a message when cancelling an event if desired
Tabs in edit/view mode: tabs will provide easy access to chats, meeting notes, files, scheduling assistant, and white board
Tie zone picker: meeting schedulers can select the time zone they wish to use for the meeting. By default, the form will use the system time zone
This functionality will begin rolling out to Targeted release customers in February

Teams read receipts: Microsoft has begun the roll-out of this feature. Read receipts will now be part of 1:1 and group chats. Additionally, read receipts in private chats wallow senders to know when a message was read by the recipients.

**Note: Read receipts are not ediscoverable.

There are 3 administrative settings available in the Teams admin center under messaging.:

User Preference (Default): members of the tenant get to decide if they want read receipts ON or Off. The default is ON
Everyone: Everyone in the tenant will have the feature ON with no option to turn it off
Off: No one in the tenant has read receipts nor can they turn it on.

Teams new feature - Legal hold for private channels: Admins and other relevant roles will now be able to apply a legal hold on private channel messages in Microsoft Teams.
Legal hold will be able to preserve all message copies and prevent content tempering.
Look for this feature to roll out to tenants by mid-February

Yammer Live Events:
Microsoft is improving Yammer’s live event capabilities by adding the ability for users to produce an event from their device.
With the coming update, Yammer group admins in an Office 365 connected group will be able to schedule a live webinar-style live event directly from Yammer. Users will be able to broadcast with their webcams and share their desktop files

Visio on the Web: Live co-authoring is now available for Visio on the web

SharePoint page difference visualization: To assist SharePoint page creation, Microsoft will provide more ways to access page version history. Creators will be able to access the version history of a page either through page details or on the command bar.
Editors will have the option to:

See differences between the current and previous version highlighted on the canvas
Delete older versions
Restore older version

Additionally, content creators will have more control over how images are displayed on a page with an updated Image web part.

Custom search results page: Microsoft is providing a way for SharePoint site owners who have specialized search needs to build a custom results page. This page will only work with the modern navigation bar search box

Before enabling a custom search page, an admin or SharePoint site owner must first build the custom page. Once that is done, the custom results page can be enabled for user by going to Site Settings à Site Collection Administration à Search Settings. Then input the new page URL in the Results Page URL field.
The custom search page and the SharePoint site must be on the same domain, but the search page does not need to be in the same collection.

Updating classic SharePoint team site home pages to the modern template: With this update, classic SharePoint team sites home pages that have not been customized will be automatically updated to a modern home page template

On classic SharePoint team sites (STS#0 template only), end users will see a modern home page on their first visit after this feature rolls out to client tenants. This change will only
affect out-of-the-box default web parts such as getting started, document library, and newsfeed.

Classic team sits that contain customized content will not be automatically updated.
**Note** This update will not create an Office 365 Group for the team site.

Administrators will have the option to revert back to their previous classic home page.
This feature will begin to gradually roll out to Targeted Release tenants in early March

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