Microsoft 365 Updates: New Microsoft Teams features, Microsoft 365 Usage Reports, SharePoint, Power Automate and Yammer

Date:Friday, Apr 24, 2020
Author: Paul Maggs
Reading Time: 24 minutes
Tags: Microsoft Teams Sharepoint Online Office 365 Yammer OneDrive for Business Power Automate
Categories: M365 Updates

Key Updates and Announcements

Happy Friday everyone, here’s this weeks updates.

  • Microsoft Teams 1:1 convenience recording is now available and allows Teams calls containing two people to be recorded. This only allows for calls between two Teams clients, it doesn’t allow recording when one of the call participants is from the PSTN network, such as a mobile phone or land line. If you are recording a 1:1 call and then add an additional participant then the recording will cease and the original participants are automatically given access to the recording. Disabling this feature is via the AllowRecording policy setting, which also controls group chat and meeting recordings, an additional policy to single 1:1 call recording will be made available at a later date.

  • New Microsoft 365 admin center updated reports have added statistics to highlight remote work which highlights changes over time. Existing reports will also see additional data points added to capture more usage statistics, including total activity across all services, and calendar invite activity.

  • A change for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business will see the command bar menu updated for Power Automate, this is only a branding change renaming Flow to Power Automate from drop down menus.

  • The year of Yammer continues, with SharePoint Online to receive an update for the Yammer conversations web part to change from the existing view to the new Yammer experience. The rollout for targeted release is expected to be completed by mid-May, whilst standard release will be completed by mid-June. Also, a new Yammer for Microsoft Teams app will allow users to install and pin the Yammer app to the left side rail of their Teams client allowing Yammer to be used from Teams!

  • Who’s opened a document via shared Word for the web which someone has asked you to review and made unintended changes? Whilst file Office 365 file versioning assists in these scenarios if you need to restore to a previous version, this is time wasted better used for other tasks. Microsoft is currently rolling out a change, Review mode in Word for the web preventing unintended edits, enabling an additional setting to allow sharing in review mode only. This mode allows for comments or for tracked changes. A great way to ensure document reviews are just that and all changes are easily tracked.

  • Several Teams meeting and chat improvements are expected to complete rolling out by early May. The changes include an improved method for meeting organisers to update presenter and lobby settings once a meeting has started, the ability to download a participant report providing an overview of who joined a meeting including join and leave times, the ability for Live Events presenters to share system audio, and additional policies governing screen sharing to control whether screen sharing sessions may or may not add audio.

– New Tags in Microsoft Teams have been delayed and were to be rolled out by January 2020, however, the new target date for the completion of this rollout is end of June 2020. Tags provide an additional method to target conversations for a subset of people within a Teams, tags are created per team and may target a topic, role, or word used to group people together. These types of tags provide an additional way to reach people within a team, the existing method, @ mention, is great when targeting a person, a group of people, a team, or a channel, however the new tagging method allows subsets of people. Think of tagging as the Venn diagram of communicating with people within a team!

List of Updates

Note: Please ensure you’re signed into your Office 365 Administration portal to access the links referenced below. Also note, some tenants may not have all the below updates currently published to them

Updated - New Feature: Tags in Microsoft Teams

Click here for more information

MC195755, Stay Informed, Published date: Nov 14, 2019

Updated April 17, 2020: We are extending the roll-out timeline to ensure the proper experience. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Tags enable targeted communication by allowing users to message members of a tag.

  • We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in early January 2020.
  • The rollout will be completed by the end of June (previously March).

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 57651.

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Updated - New Feature: OneDrive Sync Version History

Click here for more information

MC205517, Stay Informed, Published date: Mar 5, 2020

Updated April 17, 2020: We have extended the roll-out timeline to ensure the best experience. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Your Windows and Mac users will now be able to view and restore previous versions of their files directly in the desktop via File Explorer or the Mac Finder.

  • We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in mid-March.
  • The rollout will be completed by mid-May (previously April).

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 61527.

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OneDrive for Business Activity column is being retired

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MC209708, Plan For Change, Published date: Apr 17, 2020

We are retiring the Activity column in OneDrive and Shared Libraries. The feature, in its current state, is not providing the intended value and experience. If your organization is not using the Activity column you can safely disregard this message.

Teams meeting and chat experience improvements

Click here for more information

MC209710, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 17, 2020

We are pleased to announce the following updates to improve the Teams meeting and chat experience:

  1. Easily access meeting options from within a Teams meeting in progress, Roadmap ID 63334 - Rolling out at the end of April
  2. Download a participant report in a Teams meeting, Roadmap ID 63351 - Rolling out early May
  3. Audio playing on presenter device will be shared in the live event, Roadmap ID 63276 - Rolling out at the end of April
  4. Screen Share from Chat, Roadmap ID 63193 - Rolling out early May

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New feature: Review mode in Word for the web prevents unintended edits

Click here for more information

MC209728, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 17, 2020

Your end users will soon be able to share Word for the web documents in Review mode, which limits recipients to adding comments or leaving tracked changes in the document.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 27017.

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Updated Feature: Yammer Conversations web part for SharePoint

Click here for more information

MC209666, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 17, 2020

We’re updating the Yammer Conversations web part for SharePoint to contain the new Yammer experience. SharePoint pages that use the existing Yammer Conversations web part will begin to display the new experience.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 63385 and Roadmap ID 63530.

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New Feature: Yammer app for Microsoft Teams

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MC209916, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 20, 2020

The new Yammer App for Microsoft Teams brings a fully interactive Yammer experience into the hub for teamwork, helping your users stay connected to what’s happening across the organization.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 63163.

Prepare for update to the new My Apps and My Account experiences

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Prepare for update to the new My Apps and My Account experiences

We will be updating the current Azure AD Apps and Profile experiences on July 20th 2020. This means that on July 20th all users will be automatically switched over to the updated My Apps and

My Account experiences. We recommend you migrate your users to the new experiences prior to the July date to allow them to try the new interface as soon as possible. Please note that the updated My Apps and My Account offer the same functionality as the current experiences, but with an improved user interface on top of new capabilities to enable your users to be productive.

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Updated- Feature update: Command bar menu updates for Power Automate (formerly Flow)

Click here for more information

MC208356, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 1, 2020

Updated April 20, 2020: This change is gradually rolling out to standard release customers. Roll-out will be completed by the end of April.

?The Command Bar in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business is being reorganized to group automation features together. Branding is also being updated to reflect the product name change from “Flow” to “Power Automate”.

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New Feature: Third party online meeting providers in Outlook for Android

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MC209945, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 21, 2020

Outlook for Android is introducing the ability to support add-ins for third party online meeting creation.

This feature is related to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 52558.

  • This update will roll out in late April 2020 in Outlook for Android
  • Support in Outlook for iOS is planned for a later update.

Updated - Office 365 will retire TLS 1.0 and 1.1 postponed for Worldwide and GCC Environments

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MC186218, Plan For Change, Published date: Jul 19, 2019

Major Update: General Availability started Applies To: All customers

Updated April 22, 2020: To ensure the best possible experience for our customers during these unprecedented times we are postponing the retirement of TLS 1.0 and 1.1, which was scheduled to begin June 1, 2020. We will deliver a new Message center post when we are going to move forward with the retirement.

Original messaging below for reference.

As previously communicated (MC124104 in Oct 2017, MC126199 in Dec 2017 and MC128929 in Feb 2018), we are moving all of our online services to Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2+ to provide best-in-class encryption, and to ensure our service is more secure by default.

Keeping on track with this promise – Office 365 will be retiring TLS 1.0 and 1.1 starting June 1, 2020.

New and updated usage reports in Microsoft 365 admin center

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MC210158, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 22, 2020

We are adding a card to the usage reports homepage in the Microsoft 365 admin center to highlight application use that reflects remote work. We are also releasing a new report for Microsoft 365 Apps (formerly Office 365 ProPlus) usage and adding new data points to some of the usage reports.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap IDs 59845 and 63209.

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Microsoft Teams 1:1 Convenience Recording is now available

Click here for more information

MC210451, Stay Informed, Published date: Apr 23, 2020

We are excited to officially announce the release of Microsoft Teams 1:1 Convenience Recording. Users will now be able to record their 1:1 calls, just like meetings and group calls. We have worked to ensure that the experience in recording 1:1 calls remain consistent to what is already available in meetings and group calls. We apologize for not communicating sooner and we are making improvements in our processes to ensure future announcements come out in a timelier manner.