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. What's new for Microsoft 365 admins: This session covers the latest updates for Microsoft 365 admins with topics ranging from Copilot for Microsoft 365 admin, the cloud. Microsoft unified domain, managing multi-tenant and cross-tenant environments, to network provider data and actionability Getting your enterprise ready for Copilot for Microsoft 365: Hear from experts on preparing an organization for Microsoft 365 Copilot including information protection, compliance, privacy, deployment prerequisites, information access optimization, and extensibility options. How Copilot for Microsoft 365 works: Go behind the scenes to understand the architecture and dataflows behind Microsoft 365 Copilot including retrieval augmented generation techniques, app commanding, and options to securely connect to external data. Organizations seeking a solution that is always supported are recommended to consider transitioning to Microsoft 365 E3 that comes with not only the Microsoft 365 Apps, but also capabilities like foundational security, streamlined endpoint management, and enhanced productivity and collaboration features. Csv file to power high-value capabilities and new scenarios across Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365, such as Viva Amplify reporting and more personalized experiences in Viva and Microsoft 365. As always, stay current with the latest updates on the Microsoft 365 admin center from the Microsoft 365 roadmap and the message center. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3R0IHyw Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Copilot in Microsoft 365

Today, we're excited to share more about some of our supportability work with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot for Microsoft 365 has been in use by tens of thousands of enterprise customers as part of our Early Access Program for several months and our support teams have been there every step of the way assisting IT Admins with their questions. A small group of senior engineers in our Microsoft 365 Commercial Support Team have been working closely with the Copilot product engineering teams since the early stages of development, well before the first customer ever onboarded, to learn the service and build readiness and training assets for our global support teams. Today, I'm excited to welcome three of these engineers to share their knowledge, insights, and guidance on getting ready for Copilot for Microsoft 365and ways IT Admins can be most effective in deploying, managing, and supporting Copilot with users in their organizations. Brian: Welcome Jason, Rob, and Parth! It's great to have your Copilot expertise here and I know you've been working with Copilot for Office apps, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams for quite a while. We have a Tech Community blog that steps through how to prepare your organization for Microsoft 365 Copilot: How to prepare for Microsoft 365 Copilot - Microsoft Community Hub. In terms of language support, here are the languages currently supported by Copilot for Microsoft 365 for prompts and responses: Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3uEkXbS Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

SharePoint Roadmap Update

A new SharePoint start experience was also introduced for creating personal pages, so there's less overhead in getting started with SharePoint. New Stream Webpart: Video is some of the most important content to highlight within a SharePoint page, and the new Stream video webpart lets you easily highlight a single video, or a set of videos. With this new functionality customers will have the choice of applying existing SharePoint themes or a custom theme to their Connections experience as well as the SharePoint home site hosting the Connections experience. Customers rely on SharePoint to provide site and page templating, UX-layer parts and plug-ins using the SharePoint Framework, and data access via Microsoft Graph. In July we announced the new SharePoint Web UI kit focused on giving designers expert tools to customize SharePoint to meet any design challenge. Between the SharePoint Framework and the new Web UI toolkit, SharePoint is a stronger platform to build on than ever before. We're pleased to announce the public preview of SharePoint Embedded - a new approach to building content-centric apps powered by SharePoint that can go beyond traditional Microsoft 365 user experiences. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3QVEUT3 Source: Microsoft Tech Community SharePoint Blog

Unlocking OneDrive's Potential: Pro Tips for IT Administrators

Whether you need to get up and running quickly with OneDrive, or you're an experienced OneDrive admin, we've gathered a list of quick tips to help you streamline management, ensure your users and data are secure, and provide the best possible user experience. OneDrive helps you define secure virtual perimeters for sharing content, educate people about your policies for secure collaboration, and monitor how people share to discover and address gaps. See OneDrive file usage and activity at a glance In the Microsoft 365 Reports dashboard, you can drill into your users' OneDrive activity to get more information. The OneDrive card on the dashboard gives you a high-level view of the value you are getting from OneDrive in terms of the total number of files and storage used across your organization. OneDrive activity reports give you a high-level view of OneDrive usage in your organization. OneDrive audit logs provide information and shared files in your organization. Lastly, we invite you to join our OneDrive customer office hours where you can ask questions and engage directly with the OneDrive product and engineering team. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3sRY18t Source: Microsoft Tech Community OneDrive Blog

SharePoint Add-In retirement in Microsoft 365

As part of this evolution of Microsoft 365 solutions we will be retiring the SharePoint Add-In extensibility model and believe Microsoft 365 customers will be better served by modern SharePoint extensibility models. SharePoint hosted Add-Ins primarily bring UX elements to the site the Add-In was installed into and the app web that was created for the Add-In. A common use case is showing SharePoint Add-In web parts on pages of the host web, using SharePoint Framework based web parts is the recommended alternative here. Provider hosted SharePoint Add-Ins run outside of SharePoint and typically have their own UX. They use Azure ACS as auth layer to enable calling back into the host web where the SharePoint Add-In was installed. The auth model for these will be based on Microsoft Entra ID. If there are requirements to integrate in the SharePoint UX then SharePoint Framework can be used as calling into external application APIs can be done from SharePoint Framework solutions. The retirement of SharePoint Add-Ins applies to Project Online as well, any SharePoint Add-In used in Project Online will follow the same retirement path as SharePoint Add-Ins used in SharePoint Online. To understand if your organization is using SharePoint Add-Ins or begin planning migration to SharePoint Framework based solutions or alternatives, we recommend that customers run the Microsoft 365 Assessment tool to scan their tenants for SharePoint Add-In usage. SharePoint hosted Add-Ins can be replaced by SharePoint Framework web parts, for the provider hosted Add-Ins any software as a service application platform in combination with Microsoft Entra ID for auth can be used as alternative development model. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3sTQmGF Source: Microsoft Tech Community SharePoint Blog

Azure ACS retirement in Microsoft 365

As part of this evolution of Microsoft 365 solutions we will be retiring the use of Azure ACS for SharePoint Online auth needs and believe Microsoft 365 customers will be better served by modern auth offered via Microsoft Entra ID. Azure ACS will stop working for new tenants as of November 1st, 2024 and it will stop working for existing tenants and will be fully retired as of April 2nd, 2026. To learn more about the provider hosted Add-In use case please check out the respective retirement articles, granting applications access to SharePoint Online will need to be transitioned to Microsoft Entra ID. Azure ACS usage by SharePoint Server. Project Online is an extension on top of SharePoint Online and Project Online custom developments could also have used Azure ACS. The retirement of Azure ACS applies to Project Online as well, any Azure ACS usage in Project Online will follow the same retirement path as Azure ACS usage in SharePoint Online. To understand if your organization is using Azure ACS or begin planning transition to Microsoft Entra ID, we recommend that customers run the Microsoft 365 Assessment tool to scan their tenants for Azure ACS usage. Identify all used Azure ACS application principals with their key properties such as permission scopes and whether app-only was allowed or not For each identified Azure ACS application principal see a list of all sites that can be accessed via the Azure ACS application principal. Using the Azure ACS Report along with site information, tenant administrators together with developers can plan the transition of Azure ACS to Microsoft Entra ID as authentication model. We recommend tenant admins to turn off the usage of Azure ACS app-only access once they've ensured there is no business relevant Azure ACS usage anymore. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3sRzNuW Source: Microsoft Tech Community SharePoint Blog

Troubleshooting the Cloud Policy service

Many customers have switched from Group Policy as a means for managing policies for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise on Windows devices, to the Cloud Policy service which allows administrators to configure policies for a large number of Microsoft 365 apps and services, including full support for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise on Windows as well as the other platforms, from a single administration experience. If an application calls the Windows API, the policy will be included as some of the Office apps running on Windows support that policy. Part 1 for troubleshooting Cloud Policy service was written when the Cloud Policy service only supported Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise running on Windows. While this information is still useful for that scenario, especially for the information regarding how Cloud Policy uses the registry, you may want to call the check-in APIs directly so you can review the responses that are being provided to the applications that call the service. Important: Policy configurations in the Cloud Policy service are targeted to users using group membership. Multiple policy configurations can be targeted to multiple groups and conflicting policy settings are managed by the priority values, so make sure you have reviewed the user's group memberships before troubleshooting. The Cloud Policy service uses a cache on the service side to improve performance for multiple calls for the same user from multiple applications. -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3RdGTna Source: Microsoft Tech Community Microsoft 365 Blog

Upcoming November 2023 Microsoft 365 Champion Community Call

‎Nov 20 2023 11:08 AM. Join our next community call on November 28 will be a recap on all the exciting announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2023. We will be starting the call at 5 minutes past the hour for both of our sessions, and it will still end at the top of the hour. Reminder: this is our last community call of this calendar year. We will take a break in December and see everyone back online in January! Happy holidays to those who celebrate and may you all get lots of rest and have a wonderful new year! -------------------- Read more at https://bit.ly/3G6VKcr Source: Microsoft Tech Community Driving Adoption Blog