Microsoft 365 Admin Monthly Digest

Welcome to the Microsoft 365 IT admin blog, your monthly source of tips, insights, and best practices for managing and optimizing your Microsoft 365 environment. In this edition, the latest on Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise, and learn about enhancements to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Ms/TurnOffBCE. You will also need to ensure Microsoft Search in Bing setting in the Microsoft 365 admin center is turned on. Let's check out some of the latest features we launched in the Microsoft 365 admin center and how they can help you get things done. Admins can configure this from the Microsoft 365 admin center in the Viva Pulse admin experience. As always, stay current with the latest updates on the Microsoft 365 admin center from the Microsoft 365 roadmap and the message center. We also highlight new feature releases and enhancements released each month in our What's new in the Microsoft 365 admin center article. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3L2lxFH Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Now available: interactive Custom Production Virtual Event Playbook

‎Aug 30 2023 04:24 PM. We're excited to share with you the launch of the interactive version of the Microsoft Custom Production Virtual Event Playbook. This playbook builds on the foundational knowledge in our core Virtual Event Playbook and provides guidance for seasoned event producers to deliver more highly produced events using additional tools. Example scenarios can include executive panels, internal or public conferences and events that include pre-recorded content or multiple remote presenters with a single host as you might see on the nightly news. This document has been reviewed and approved by our joint engineering groups, Microsoft Studios, our marketing partners and by those of us involved in the day to day production of events of all kinds. We intentionally led with our event/audience engagement model and commitment to accessibility. Virtual events are about more than features; they are opportunities to engage and connect. This new interactive version is also localized in nine major languages. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3R08cRW Source: Microsoft Tech Community Driving Adoption Blog

Introducing new SharePoint news for email feature

We are excited to announce that we are currently rolling out a new feature called SharePoint News for Email. This feature enables you to convert your SharePoint News Posts intro distributions that can be read fully in email inboxes. Four pictures - showing the news article in SharePoint - sending email feature - news in the email client - statistics for the view. Selection of the templates for new news article - showing the email ready templates. SharePoint News visible in the SharePoint portal and in the email client. Authors of SharePoint News will now be able to send news posts as emails. View counters for your news articles will include also views of the news article through the email client. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/44uBknB Source: Microsoft Tech Community SharePoint Blog

Add and Explore Office Add-ins easily with our new entry point

We're excited to announce that a more easy-to-access entry point for Office Add-ins is now available online. By accessing the new entry point in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you'll have an upgraded experience without worrying about managing all your add-ins or choosing the fit right add-in among the thousands available in AppSource and the Office marketplace. If you already use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint add-ins, the entry point has moved! Now you can find and activate your installed add-ins in two locations, on the Home tab and File tab. You can also find the Word, Excel, PowerPoint Get Add-ins entry point on the File tab as shown in the following image. If you've never used any Word, Excel, and PowerPoint add-ins before, no problem! The new recommendation mechanism provides targeted, expert help no matter which application you use. If at first you don't find the add-in to suit your needs, we encourage you to explore and search apps in the marketplace. If you're interested in building a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint add-in and allow users from all over the world to use it, simply out the Microsoft Office Add-ins registration form to consult with our team. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3YUcsVg Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Updated content for the SharePoint Web UI kit!

‎Aug 24 2023 09:00 AM. We're excited to announce that our UI kit has been updated with some great new additions! The goal of this update is to help you design a broader selection of SharePoint sites and pages quickly and easily. We have updated the guidance across the SharePoint Web UI kit to reflect the additions of team site navigation and smaller view ports including tablet and mobile. You should evaluate if Figma is the right solution for mocking up sites and pages for SharePoint. This UI kit provides SharePoint users with another tool in their toolbox. While building a page in SharePoint is easy, we wanted to provide the ability to mockup sites and pages. To get started with our updated UI kit, simply download the latest version from the Figma Microsoft Community website: SharePoint Web UI Kit - Figma. Please tell us what's missing, what doesn't work for you, and where your biggest challenges are by leaving a comment on the Figma SharePoint Web UI kit page or by visiting the SharePoint Community. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3YLtNiZ Source: Microsoft Tech Community SharePoint Blog

Adaptive Card-based Loop components

Adaptive Card-based Loop components are live and actionable units of productivity that stay in sync and can move freely across Microsoft 365 apps, starting with Microsoft Teams and Outlook. We're excited to announce that Adaptive Card-based Loop components are now available in public preview! In this article, we want to give you a sneak peek into how you can build your own first set of live, actionable, portable Adaptive Card-based Loop components to bring your business content directly into Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps. Adaptive Card-based Loop components let you build experiences which will allow your users to share and act upon business content across Teams and Outlook. There are three distinct stages in your journey to building Adaptive Card-based Loop components -. ServiceDesk Plus - an IT Service Management solution by the Zoho Corp., is leveraging the power of Adaptive Card-based Loop components to optimize its incident and ticket management use cases. Once you have taken care of the pre-requisites, the next step is to add the special ingredient which makes Adaptive Card-based Loop components live and portable. Weburl property to turn your existing Adaptive Card experiences to Loop component. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3QSnTdU Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Microsoft Viva Connections adoption best practices The Intrazone SharePoint product team podcast

On this episode, we chat with Liz Sundet and Luis Enrique Torres who work directly with Microsoft customers to help them best land a variety of technology in the category of 'Corporate Communications excellence' - especially when it comes to leveraging Microsoft Viva tailored to internal communications. We got into common patterns, best practices, and key resources to both assess, plan, and successfully deploy Viva Connections - the gateway to the overall employee experience from Microsoft for business leaders and developers. We also dig into Viva Amplify and how it will complement and extend the overall management and reporting for internal communications excellence. Important on-demand recordings, articles, and events mentioned in this episode. Be sure to visit our show page to hear all episodes, access the show notes, and get bonus content. Stay connected to the SharePoint community blog and the Viva community blog where we'll share more information per episode, guest insights, and take any questions or suggestions from our listeners and SharePoint users. The Intrazone, a show about the Microsoft 365 intelligent intranet. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3OMJJwF Source: Microsoft Tech Community SharePoint Blog

Introducing Python in Excel: The Best of Both Worlds for Data Analysis and Visualization

Today, we are excited to introduce the Public Preview of Python in Excel - making it possible to integrate Python and Excel analytics within the same Excel grid for uninterrupted workflow. Python in Excel combines Python's powerful data analysis and visualization libraries with Excel's features you know and love. Now you can do advanced data analysis in the familiar Excel environment by accessing Python directly from the Excel ribbon. Using Excel's built-in connectors and Power Query, you can easily bring external data into Python in Excel workflows. Python in Excel leverages Anaconda Distribution for Python running in Azure, which includes the most popular Python libraries such as pandas for data manipulation, statsmodels for advanced statistical modeling, and Matplotlib and seaborn for data visualization. Teammates can refresh Python in Excel analytics for the most up-to-date information, even if they don't have Python in Excel activated. Super charge your data analysis and tell better stories with Python in Excel. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/47JXaWQ Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

What's New in OneNote Android

You can now capture notes at the speed of your thought with a refreshed notetaking canvas - that is easy to use and has a lot of new editing capabilities that you have been asking for. 1.Command Bar optimization - All the text mode commands you need, such as checklists, bullet lists and text formatting, are available to you as you start typing a new note. 3.Real time note sharing - Click on the three-dot menu on the top right to access note level actions. You can now apply a page style, file the note to a different notebook, add the note to your home screen, delete, share your note in real time, enhancing collaboration and knowledge sharing and more. 5.Insert tables - As you are typing a note, click on the table icon within your contextual command bar. You can change the style, color and size of your text, heading as per your choice to format your notes. We're excited about the future of OneNote and look forward to hearing your feedback to make OneNote the best place for your notes. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3P0z9nk Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Use Deployment Tasks and Quarantine Email to help protect your managed tenants' inboxes.

Use deployment tasks and quarantined email to help protect your managed tenant's inboxes. Microsoft 365 Lighthouse allows you to both quickly configure policies that help protect your managed tenants from potentially dangerous or unwanted messages but also get a single pane of glass view into the quantity and type of messages filtered by Exchange Online Protection and Microsoft Defender for Office policies. Configure protection for your managed tenants via the default baseline. Lighthouse helps you secure and manage your customers' tenants with a set of deployment tasks using our default baseline. With our deployment tasks for EOP and MDO, you can configure policies that turn on standard security measures for both EOP and MDO. Exchange Online Protection helps protect your customers' tenants against spam, malware, phishing, and other email threats. Once enabled, you can use our Quarantined messages page to help manage quarantined emails across your customer tenants. By deploying our EOP and MDO tasks, you can begin providing better protection to your managed customers' tenants. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3EeidUh Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Business Blog

Deep Dive: How User Experience Research Shapes OneDrive

The new OneDrive for Web Home experience delivers a number of enhancements that make it easier and quicker to find your files. After working on SharePoint Pages for three years, she joined the OneDrive team last year to focus on understanding how people organize and find their files, and how they use OneDrive for work and school across different platforms and devices. She's been instrumental in driving UX research for the OneDrive visual refresh, which aims to provide a quick-to-use, consistent, and accessible user interface. One of the challenges of doing UX research for OneDrive is to understand and represent the needs and perspectives of our customers in a way that both accommodates a range of perspectives and use cases and ensures a unified experience across the platform. We were able to leverage that body of research when working on the OneDrive refresh. It's really a testament to how OneDrive is committed to keeping a high bar on craft. Lastly, for a deeper look into the new OneDrive design and all the went into it tune into the Sync Up Podcast episode: Behind the Blue - OneDrive's New Design. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3QBqPLV Source: Microsoft Tech Community OneDrive Blog

3 Ways Microsoft is Shaping the Future of Frontline

Between fluctuating team schedules and staying up to date with their often large and dispersed frontline team, maintaining end-to-end visibility on operations can get time-consuming for frontline managers. Soon Microsoft 365 Copilot can ground prompts and retrieve insights for frontline managers leveraging data from the Shifts app in addition to user and company data it has access to such as Teams chat history, SharePoint, emails, and more. Microsoft 365 Copilot can help understand open items for a frontline manager by pulling from files, chats, and open shifts. Microsoft 365 Copilot can help onboard a new frontline worker by pulling together relevant documents and resources. Frontline workers can benefit from generative conversations which provide answers and takes actions via a chat bot, while frontline managers can also use generative assistance to more easily build chat bots using Copilot in Power Virtual Agents. Today, Microsoft Intune enables organizations to enroll Android devices into Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, shared device mode, so they can provide sharable mobile devices to their frontline workers. Instead of the common hassles that come with sharing physical PCs, Windows 365 Frontline provides personalized Cloud PCs freeing your frontline employees to work from anywhere, helping to boost their productivity and job satisfaction. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3OrFeHJ Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Clean up Inactive users with Microsoft 365 Lighthouse

You can search for any user across all your customers' tenants to make changes to that user account, look at which users have been flagged for risky sign-in behavior, identify users yet to register MFA and more. If you've ever dealt with managing user accounts, you've probably encountered inactive users already. Inactive users are those user accounts that have had no activity for a long time. Inactive user accounts can complicate the already challenging task of managing users across all of your customer tenants. Security- It's possible some of these inactive user accounts need to be protected with MFA, as there's no real user behind the account to register a second factor for authentication. You can now easily see all the inactive user accounts across your customer tenants on a single pane of glass! Once you have visibility into inactive user accounts, the next step is to ensure these accounts are properly offboarded. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/47jR0wz Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Business Blog

New ways to discover Microsoft Graph connector content securely across Microsoft 365

Microsoft Graph connectors enables your organization to index content from on-premises or cloud-based line-of-business and 3rd party applications in Microsoft Graph. Once connected to Microsoft Graph, indexed content can provide enriched search results and interactions with Microsoft 365. We are rolling out a new capability for users that shows content from Microsoft Graph connectors in the Microsoft 365 web app. This feature expands the types of content sources that are displayed in your Microsoft 365 productivity apps and the broader Microsoft ecosystem. The Microsoft 365 web app is home to all your favorite productivity apps that provides a secure, integrated, experience built on Microsoft Graph. With the addition of Microsoft Graph connector content from third party data sources, users can now discover third party content across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem with the Microsoft 365 web app. Below is an example of the Fabrikam Purchase agreement from the Adobe Sign Graph connector appearing under 'Quick Access' within Microsoft 365. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/457VXHv Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Microsoft SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop July 2023 The Intrazone

You can always rely on July to bring goodness to for SharePoint and Microsoft 365: New SharePoint site creation experience, Viva Pulse GA, Viva Connections platform updates, new Search layouts for results, OneDrive: Simplified sharing, Lists UX update, Stream playback in Teams chat and channels, AAD > MSeID, Inspire announcements highlights, and more. All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of July 2023. This update will allow Microsoft Search administrators to change result layouts for select SharePoint content using adaptive cards with Result Type feature in Microsoft Search administration. Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. Azure Active Directory is becoming Microsoft Entra ID. Yes, we are moving your cheese: AAD > MSeID. The name change to Microsoft Entra ID represents the evolution and unification of the Microsoft Entra product family, and a commitment to simplify secure access experiences for everyone. Microsoft Entra ID Free, Microsoft Entra ID P1, and Microsoft Entra ID P2 will be the new names of standalone offers, and all capabilities included in the current Azure AD plans remain the same. Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer and Stream roadmap items. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3rUclwq Source: Microsoft Tech Community SharePoint Blog

Cloud Policy update to group targeting options

Today we begin rolling out a few changes that will make the targeting of policies more flexible. Earlier this year we provided a new feature that allows you to easily target policies to all users on the tenant. The latest updates will allow you to add multiple groups to a single policy configuration and add the same group to multiple policy configurations. Continue the conversation by joining us in the Microsoft 365 Tech Community! Whether you have product questions or just want to stay informed with the latest updates on new releases, tools, and blogs, Microsoft 365 Tech Community is your go-to resource to stay connected! -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3QnPVhk Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog