The Microsoft 365 monthly update includes updates and recently recent features across all of Microsoft 365. Press a button to read about an individual technology or continue reading for more. You can take a look back at previous monthly updates here, plus take a look at our weekly roadmap roundup.
SharePoint
In SharePoint: Teams meetings saved to SharePoint/OneDrive, SharePoint spaces text/ annotation styles, new SharePoint store/ app catalog, Lists iOS column width, Lists iOS scan QR code
Teams meeting recordings are now saved to OneDrive and SharePoint
With this switch away from storage in Azure Media Services, meeting recordings become more integrated with Microsoft 365, which equates to faster availability of the meeting on-demand playback, improved sharing controls including external sharing capabilities, improved video management, advanced compliance, and more.
Find out more: Use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or Stream for meeting recordings
SharePoint spaces text and annotation styles
SharePoint spaces is an immersive page style which lets you create and share, secure and extensible mixed reality experiences. The SharePoint spaces Text web part now has a broader canvas for you to adjust the look and feel of your text. You can now choose from various styles, bold it, adjust colors, alignment, and more.
Find out more: Add text to a SharePoint space
Modernized experience for SharePoint Store & apps/ app catalog
It is now easier to both acquire and deploy apps in SharePoint. The modernized experience for SharePoint Store and acquire experience on the SharePoint side makes it easier and faster to get apps from a variety of sources. You can easily find more popular apps built on SharePoint Framework on the store homepage. You can also search for an app in the search bar or select a category on the left to scroll through available apps.
Find out more: Explore and deploy SharePoint Framework solutions from partners in SharePoint (Microsoft 365)
Adjust a columns width in Microsoft Lists for iOS
The resizing of columns gives you the ability to control the information density on your iPhone or iPad screen. Simply tap and expand or contrast the width to see more, or less, information.
Search via QR code in Microsoft Lists for iOS
This enables a unique way to discover more about an item – say something like a mouse you want to check out from your IT team. Just start up the Lists app for iOS, go to the list, search for that item by scanning the device QR code, the corresponding list item gets highlighted, open the item, and update the entry.
Teams
In Teams: Reporter/ side-by-side options, additional languages for live captions & live transcripts, start recording & live transcript, dual-tone multi-frequency support, Teams Rooms update on Android, Teams panel updates
Teams (Education)
Teams (Government)
Teams
Reporter/ Side-by-Side options in Presenter Mode for desktop and window sharing
In addition to the previously offered Standout option, two new presenter modes are available when sharing your desktop and window in the Teams desktop app. Reporter mode places content as a visual aid above your shoulder like a news story. Side-by-side mode displays your video feed next to your content.
Find out more: Engage your audience with presenter modes
Live Captions and Live Transcript in additional spoken languages for Teams Meetings
Meetings held in one of the supported languages are now also supported by real-time captioning and transcription. Microsoft have expanded to 27 new spoken languages including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi.
Find out more: Live Captions and Live Transcription
Starting recording and live transcript simultaneously
Teams now automatically also start live transcription for you when you start recording. To ensure this works for your users, both Allow Transcription and Allow cloud recording policies must be turned on. After your meeting, the recording and transcription continues to be accessible through the Recordings & Transcripts tab of your meeting details.
Find out more: View live transcription in a Teams meeting
Dual-tone multi-frequency support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Citrix Workspace-only)
Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) dialing is now available for Teams users within the Citrix Workspace app. DTMF enables the Citrix Workspace user to be admitted into the meeting using the Teams dial pad as an alternative to clicking the “join” link.
Find out more: DTMF interface in Exchange Online
Teams Rooms update on Android
The latest app update for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, version 1449/1.0.96.2021070803, is now available in the Teams Admin Center. This update includes a New remote provisioning and sign-in experience, support for sharing via HDMI ingest, Auto answer for Meet Now and 1080p resolution for outgoing video.
Find out more: What’s new in Microsoft Teams devices
Teams panels updates
Teams panels have recently received updates including extensibility/ line of business app support, remote provisioning and sign in, plus the ability to hide meeting names for sensitive spaces.
Find out more: Teams Extensibility and Line of Business apps, Provisioning Microsoft Teams Devices
Teams (Education)
Create, edit, and join Microsoft Teams meetings in Canvas
Educators and students can access and edit Teams meetings for their courses directly from their Canvas course. You’ll be able to view past and upcoming meetings at a glance on your agenda and schedule, edit, and join meetings from within your LMS course. Plus, you’ll get all the great capabilities available in Teams, including security and meeting settings that help you create a safe and focused classroom environment.
Using these capabilities depends on per-user meeting policies set by your IT administrator and will be supported across desktop and web.
Find out more: Partner Listing: Microsoft Education
Communicate and collaborate with class teams from Blackboard
Microsoft Teams plays an important role in student-educator collaboration, and up until now there has been no easy way for educators to create a team for their LMS course. Educators can now create class teams based on the enrollment roster of their courses with appropriate user roles.
Educators and students can navigate to their respective class teams directly from their Blackboard courses using desktop, mobile, or web platforms.
Find out more: Microsoft Teams classes Integration
Reading progress
Reading Progress enables readers to practice their skills in a safe, student-centric environment. Educators pick a reading passage and can choose to assign it to the entire class, a specific reading group, or an individual student. After the student reads the passage aloud, educators review the recording and either manually identify and code errors or use the Auto-detect feature to identify and code potential errors.
The recordings grant students and educators more flexibility to practice remotely or in the classroom. This helps bring the right support at the right time to each learner and makes it easier to plan regular reading fluency checks.
Find out more: Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams to improve student reading fluency – now rolling out globally!
Simplified navigation in class teams
Now educators can easily access Assignments, Grades, Class Notebook, and Insights from any channel within a class team. Just open up your class team and you’ll see the updated-and-improved navigation. You’ll still be able to add tabs to the General channel and other channels you create.
This new view is available for all educators and students using our grid view layout for teams, and IT Admins will have the option to remove any of the pre-pinned navigation. (Students will only see Class Notebook, Assignments, and Grades, not Insights.)
Education Insights
With Education Insights built directly into your digital classroom, you can. Make informed instructional decisions with data such as online class attendance, assignment engagement, class activity, and more.
Find out more: Introduction to Education Insights in Microsoft Teams
Teams (Government)
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).
Reporter and Side-by-Side Presenter Mode in desktop or window sharing
Two new presenter modes are available when sharing your desktop or window in the Teams desktop app. Reporter mode places content as a visual aid above your shoulder like a news story. Side-by-side mode displays your video feed next to your content. You can now select a mode that fits your needs and promotes a more engaging presentation and experience. Available in GCC. Learn more.
Breakout Room Timer, Room Retention, and Participant
You can now set a timer from 5 to 60 minutes for Breakout rooms from the Breakout Room settings. Once the timer has expired, rooms are automatically closed, and participants are returned to the main meeting. Organizers can also reassign participants when rooms are opened. Breakout room assignments now persist over multiple sessions. These features are useful for efficiently managing discussions and ensuring the right participants are in each breakout. Available in GCC-High. Learn more.
Live Captions and Live Transcript in additional spoken languages for Teams Meetings
Meetings held in one of the supported languages are now also supported by real-time captioning and transcription. We have expanded to 27 new spoken languages including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi to name a few. This provides flexibility and additional clarity for your participants to engage in the meeting. Available in GCC. Learn more about Live Captions and Live Transcription.
Live Transcription with speaker attribution in Teams Meetings
Live transcription allows you to follow conversations (in English-US) alongside the meeting video or audio in real time, promoting inclusivity for participants who are deaf/hard of hearing or different levels of language proficiency. Attendees who joined late or missed the meeting can easily catch up by reading what was discussed and searching the transcript by speaker. Admins must turn on Allow transcription policy to enable this feature. Available in GCC. Learn more.
Starting recording and live transcript simultaneously
When you turn on recording, Teams now automatically also start live transcription for you. this conveniently captures the discussion and detailing what was spoken in the transcript with one click. To ensure this works for your users, both Allow Transcription and Allow cloud recording policies must be turned on. After your meeting, the recording and transcription continues to be accessible through the Recordings & Transcripts tab of your meeting details. Available in GCC. Learn more.
Lower all raised hands
When at least one hand is raised, meeting organizers and presenters can now lower all raised hands with a single click. Simply navigate to the participant pane and click on the Lower all hands option. This helps quickly lower all hands when associated questions have been resolved to make way for new raised questions. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.
Include computer sound when sharing on Mac
Mac desktop users can now include audio when sharing their desktop or window during a Teams meeting. This is great when sharing a video with voiceover and music. It allows everyone to watch simultaneously without echoes or sync issues. You can find this setting in the share content. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.
Updating settings for attendees’ video
We have added additional ways to manage attendee audio and video permissions in Teams meetings to help prevent disruptions and create a safer meeting environment. Now, you can configure the permissions to have all attendees’ camera-enabled or disabled before the meeting. You can also enable or disable the ability for individual attendees to use their cameras. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.
Dual-tone multi-frequency support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Citrix Workspace-only)
Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) dialing is now available for Teams users within the Citrix Workspace app. DTMF enables the Citrix Workspace user to be admitted into the meeting using the Teams dial pad as an alternative to clicking the “join” link. Available in GCC. Learn more about DTMF.
Windows 10 Native Notifications in Teams
You can now choose the style of your notifications: built-in Teams or Windows native notifications. The latter brings a suite of benefits, like respecting focus assist mode which enables you to avoid distracting notifications when you need to focus, and integrating with Windows 10 action center to helps you review your notifications in one place. If you have a Windows build 10.0.17763.288 or higher, you can make this change in Teams notifications settings. Available in GCCH and DOD. Learn More.
MacOS native notifications in Teams
Users can now choose to deliver Microsoft Teams notifications, either via Teams built-in notifications or via macOS native notifications. When choosing native notifications, Teams inherits the OS notifications settings and supports quiet hours, action center triaging and more native features. This is only available on MacOS 10.15 or later. Available in GCC and GCCH. Learn more.
Chat preview notification settings
Have you ever shared your screen, or had someone looking over your shoulder at your screen and you found yourself wishing you could hide your notifications? Now, you can change your settings and control whether the message previews show up on your screen. Available in GCC-H and DoD. Learn More.
Customize your organization’s apps store in Teams for government clouds
Now you can customize your organization’s apps store in Teams with your company branding by adding your logo, custom backgrounds, and custom text colors to make it more inviting to end users. Available in GCC.
Device management capabilities
Device management capabilities in Teams admin center are now included in the DoD environment.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: In-app notifications in model-driven apps, Sample custom connector for ServiceNow, Power Apps Ideas public preview, connection references support in Power Platforms Tools public preview, canvas components app scope, Int, Trunc, WeekNum, and ISOWeekNum in Power Fx, ILogger Interface, VNet Connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows, Power Apps October release wave 2, Application Insights (Preview)
In-app notifications in model-driven apps (Public Preview)
Model-driven apps now have the ability to notify users while working within the web or mobile app. You will see all received notifications in a notification center with an indication of new notifications shown on the bell in the header and a new notification count.
When new notifications arrive, the a badge count is shown on the bell icon in the header. Clicking the bell icon opens the notification center to show latest notifications first. To enable this feature, makers need to opt-in to show the notification center and toasts to users for each model-driven app.
Find out more: Announcing public preview for in-app notifications in model-driven apps
Sample custom connector for ServiceNow using OAuth authentication
The Power Apps team have created a sample Power Apps canvas application and Power Automate flow that show how to use the custom connector. The sample custom connector for ServiceNow that provides OAuth authentication and support for attachments. You can find the source code for the sample custom connector on GitHub. The sample custom connector supports OAuth authentication, attachments, and CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on an example entity.
Find out more: A sample custom connector for ServiceNow using OAuth authentication
Power Apps Ideas (Public Preview)
Announced at this year’s Microsoft Build conference, Power Apps Ideas, an AI-powered assistance to help anyone create apps using natural language is now in public preview. Power Apps Ideas lets you tell Power Apps what you’d like to see—for example, “show me customers from the US whose subscription expired”—and a set of formulas will be presented along with an explanation of how they work. Simply select one to apply the logic to your app.
Find out more: Writing Power Fx formulas with natural language
Connection references support in Power Platform Build Tools (Public Preview)
The Power Apps team have announced the July refresh for the Power Platform Build tools and the Public Preview for the connection references and environment variable support in the Power Platform Build Tools and PAC CLI. The July refresh includes changes to solution pack & unpack, pac auth create and pac plugin int.
Find out more: Announcing the public preview for connection references support in Power Platform Build Tools
Canvas components can now access app scope directly
The Power Apps team are enabling a canvas component to directly access variables, collections, controls, and tabular data sources from its host app. No longer do you need to pass everything in and out through component properties.
Until now, canvas components have been properly encapsulated and could not access information and resources from the app. Everything needed to be passed in to the component through input properties. But sometimes you want to define a component just for this app. There is a newly introduced component setting that does exactly this Access app scope.
Find out more: Canvas components can now access app scope directly
Power Fx: Int, Trunc, WeekNum, and ISOWeekNum functions
The Power Apps team have added four new functions to Power Fx formulas, straight from their definitions in Excel:
- Int and Trunc fill out our rounding functions. These are common functions in Excel that until now one would need to translate to one of our Round functions. They are the same for positive numbers, but for negative numbers Int rounds away from zero and Trunc rounds toward zero. For example, Int( -2.4 ) returns -3 while Trunc( -2.4 ) returns -2.
- WeekNum and ISOWeekNum have been common customer requests. These functions return the week number in the current year which is helpful for many business date calculations. WeekNum starts with the week containing January 1, while ISOWeekNum starts with the first Thursday of the year. For example using August 11, 2021, WeekNum( Today() ) returns 33 while ISOWeekNum( Today() ) returns 32 as we haven’t made it to Thursday of this week yet.
These functions are rolling out now and are available in version 3.21074 or later.
Find out more: Power Fx: Int, Trunc, WeekNum, and ISOWeekNum functions
Write Telemetry to your Application Insights resource using ILogger
When you opt-in to the Application Insights integration described in the earlier Announcing Monitor model-driven apps using Application Insights (Preview) post, you can also use the new Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.PluginTelemetry.ILogger Interface in your plug-in code.
You should use ILogger because it allows telemetry for events that occur within a plug-in to be integrated with the larger scope of data captured with the Application Insights integration. When you use the ILogger interface, the telemetry is written directly to the same Application Insights resource that you choose to have your Dataverse and model-driven app telemetry exported to. The plug-in telemetry you write is never sent to Microsoft. If you use ILogger in a plug-in that is not running in an environment using the Application Insights integration, nothing happens.
Find out more: Log plug-in telemetry to your Application Insights resource
VNet Connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows (Public Preview)
Earlier this year, we introduced VNet (Azure Virtual Network) connectivity for Power BI Datasets and we are now excited to announce the public preview of VNet connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows. The new VNet connectivity feature enables secure outbound connectivity from Power Platform dataflows to data sources within your Azure VNet.
Find out more: Announcing VNet Connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows (Public Preview)
Power Apps October 2021 Release Wave 2 updates
The Power Apps October release wave 2 makes discovering data much easier and comes with enhanced UI experiences that are modern; take advantage of these now for your Model-driven apps. Updates include:
- Discovering data: new global search, advanced lookup, Power Apps grid,
- Usability improvements: accessibility updates, sharing records, bulk edit, app-level panes
- Modern experiences: custom pages, app designer, modern browsers
Find out more: 2021 release wave 2 features available for early access
Monitor model-driven apps using Application Insights (Preview)
Now available in the Power Platform admin center, this new Data Export option is geared towards those customers interested in directly interacting with the service telemetry data. This option offers customers an all-encompassing Self-Serve solution for monitoring user activity, diagnosing performance issues, and troubleshooting errors.
Use Application Insights to monitor & analyze service telemetry data produced by UCI page and form loads, Platform API calls, custom plug-ins, and more.
Find out more: Preview: Set up exporting to Application Insights
Power Automate
In Power Automate: Desktop update, 13 new connectors, add code to your custom connector
Power Automate Desktop August 2021 update
The August 2021 update of Power Automate Desktop has been released! You can download the latest release here. Here is a summary of the new features in this release:
- Actionable connectivity error messages in console and designer
- Introduction of new Excel related actions
- Improvement of the action ‘Set screen resolution’
Find out more: Power Automate Desktop August 2021 update
13 new connectors
Microsoft partnered with thirteen new partners to include their services in Power Platform in July, here’s a look at the newly added connectors:
- HR Cloud – Use this connector to easily connect the employee data from HR Cloud with other applications that support Power Automate integration and vice versa.
- DeskDirector – Use the DeskDirector connector to automate the creation and processing of our native Tickets, Forms, Chat sessions, Email, and more.
- nps.today – nps.today binds customer loyalty insights and NPS surveys together across all your tools and platforms so you always have the full customer overview at hand with a single unifying platform.
- Lang.ai – Lang.ai is a no-code platform for free text classification and auto-tagging. Thanks to our patented unsupervised AI algorithm that learns only from your historical data, ang.ai makes it incredibly easy to customize a model for your own business and use case.
- Secplug Scan – The Secplugs Malware Scan connector lets you scan files, URLs and emails to identify and block malicious content. Integrate at your workflow boundaries to ensure your cloud storage/application remains secure.
- Gratavid – Gratavid is a tool for collecting and sending personalized videos via email and text. The Gratavid connector allows organizations to send video thank you cards (i.e. – Gratavids) based on events in their CRM or other apps.
- Assently E-Sign – With Assently E-Sign on the Microsoft Power Platform you can automate e-signature workflows on documents, forms, and smart contracts.
- WenDocs Linker – WenDocs is a brand-new force growing from the traditional CCM/CEM (customer communication/experience management) domain. We provide a professional-level template designer and a lightweight publishing service to increase your document productivity.
- Harness PDFx – Harness PDFx is a SaaS platform, automating the extraction of data from the most complex and varied PDFs in the commercial real estate and financial services industry.
- Document AI Konfuzio – Build Document AI with Konfuzio to categorize and extract information (such as first name, last name, or date of birth) from any document or image.
- LAWLIFT – LAWLIFT offers its customers one of the simplest ways to automate documents, use them and update them with ease.
- Waaila – We have one goal with Waaila – give everyone the tools needed to raise the standard of online marketing data quality.
- IN-D Face Match – Detect human faces and match it against the photos from ID cards for identity verification process in onboarding.
Find out more: July Updates on Power Automate Partner Connectors
Add code to your custom connector
Custom connector developers can now add C# code directly within the Custom Connector wizard! Now available in public preview supports more transformation scenarios without having to worry about hosting your code. Some examples include:
- sending external requests to fetch additional data
- complex body, query, header, and status transformations
- handling pagination
Find out more: Create a custom connector from scratch
Expanded Feature Availability for Power BI Free License Users
Microsoft have announced that in the coming weeks they are expanding the availability of Power BI and Excel connected features such as PivotTables from Power BI datasets and Organization data types to Power BI free license users.
Users who have a Power BI free license can connect from Excel to datasets hosted in a Power BI Premium workspace. These users can now:
- Build PivotTables connected to Power BI datasets, including certified and promoted datasets, from the Data ribbon in Excel
- Lookup and refresh values in Power BI datatypes from the Data Types gallery.
Find out more: Power BI and Excel: Expanded Feature Availability for Power BI Free License Users (Coming Soon)
Goals for Power BI Mobile
Goals is a great addition to Power BI. Built directly on top of Power BI data, Goals provides a data-driven, collaborative, adaptable way of measuring and tracking progress on key business metrics. Now, Goals is enabled in the latest update of the Power BI mobile apps!
Having Goals in your Power BI mobile app lets you monitor the health of your business directly from your smart phone, no matter where you are. You can also check in and update progress for goals from the app, helping you to ensure that the status of your KPIs are always up to date.
Find out more: Power BI Mobile apps now support Goals!
Automatic aggregations (Public Preview)
Automatic aggregations in Power BI Premium are now in public preview! Unlock massive datasets without having to copy large volumes of data or manage data loads. Automatic aggregations are managed automatically by Power BI, accelerating time to insight, and reducing TCO.
Find out more: Announcing public preview of automatic aggregations!
Default sensitivity label policies, plus other Information Protection features added to Power BI (Public Preview)
The Power BI team have announced the public preview of default label policies in Power BI Desktop together with some of the top asked MIP features in Power BI:
- MIP sensitivity labels in Power BI desktop – general availability!
- Support for Get data from protected Excel files in Power BI Desktop – preview
- Data source MIP sensitivity label inheritance in Power BI Desktop preview, and extend data source label inheritance to support Excel files
- MIP Sensitivity label support in paginated reports – preview
- Mandatory label setting available in the M365 compliance center
- MIP label activities in Microsoft 365 Activity Explorer preview
Find out more: Announcing Default sensitivity label preview and other top asked MIP features in Power BI
August 2021 on-premises data gateway update
The Power BI team have announced that they have released the August update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.93.3). This version of the gateway will ensure that the reports that you publish to the Power BI Service and refresh via the Gateway will go through the same query execution logic/run-time as in the August Power BI Desktop version.
Find out more: On-premises data gateway August 2021 update is now available
Premium Metrics App (Public Preview)
The Power BI team have announced that the all new metrics app for premium capacities is available here as public preview. The new app is built to serve as an out-of-the-box one-stop-shop for whatever capacity admins will need to know in order to manage their Power BI Premium capacities.
Find out more: New Premium Metrics App preview now available
Automated statuses and improved filtering for Power BI Goals
Scorecard authors are now able to automate status updates based on rules that govern that goal or subgoal. By entering the edit experience and navigating to the status rules tab of the settings pane, users will be able to precisely set when goals are on track or falling behind.
The Power BI team have also improved filtering so that users can easily view all the goals labeled as a particular status by clicking on the summary cards at the top of the scorecard, making it easier than ever to see at a glance what’s at risk and what’s on track. We have also included a keyword search, making it easy to search for specific goals and see how they’re doing at a glance, without losing context of the parent/child relationships.
Find out more: Announcing automated statuses and improved filtering for Power BI Goals
Scanner API now generally available
The Power BI team have announced that the Scanner APIs for extracting tenant-level metadata using Power BI Admin REST APIs are now in general availability (GA). Power BI Admin APIs, along with a .NET SDK, enable administrators to create their own custom-made solutions based on Power BI metadata and lineage.
Find out more: Scanner API is now in GA
Enhanced experience for browsing visuals
The Power BI team have introduced a new look for the Power BI in-product store coming with August desktop release. In the store you can browse all the visuals authorized by your organization. The store contains:
- AppSource visuals: more than 300 stunning visuals created by Microsoft or partners.
- Organizational visuals: private or AppSource visuals managed by your Power BI admin.
- A unified view (“All visuals”) where you get access to all visuals available in your organization in one page.
Find out more: Enhanced experience for browsing visuals
Power BI August 2021 Feature Summary
The August update for Power BI Desktop update and includes enhancements for Q&A as well as for Shapes, plus automatic aggregations for DirectQuery.
Find out more: Power BI August 2021 Feature Summary
Power BI Angular Component
The newly released Power BI component for Angular lets you easily embed your Power BI reports, dashboards and more into your Angular web application. Using this library, you can embed Power BI reports, dashboards, tiles, visuals, Q&A and paginated reports. You can also optimize your report’s performance using the available bootstrap integration or phased embedding, set and edit event handlers, and take advantage of the available client-side APIs.
Find out more: Announcing Power BI Angular Component
Refresh history updates for models utilizing XMLA endpoints
The general availability of read/write XMLA endpoints in Power BI Premium enables customers to leverage enterprise BI tools directly on Power BI datasets. In addition to the existing data refresh features listed in the documentation, the data refresh history view will reflect changes made utilizing XMLA endpoints.
For a dataset updated via XMLA endpoints, the Power BI service will display last updated date, timestamp, duration, and status in the following locations: datasets contents list, overview page, settings page, refresh history, lineage view, report header, and report information cards.
Find out more: Refresh history updates for models utilizing XMLA endpoints
Power BI REST API support for DAX Queries (Public Preview)
The Power BI team have announced the public preview of a new REST API to query datasets in Power BI by using Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). The new DAX REST API avoids dependencies on Analysis Services client libraries, requires no connection to XMLA endpoints, and works in Power BI Premium as well as in Power BI shared capacity.
Find out more: Announcing the public preview of Power BI REST API support for DAX Queries
Data gateway support for Single Sign-On (SSO) with Azure Active Directory
The Power BI team have announced General Availability (GA) for Single Sign-On (SSO) through the data gateway to cloud data sources that rely on Azure Active Directory (AAD)-based authentication. In addition to Kerberos-based and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)-based SSO to on-prem data sources, you can now get seamless AAD SSO connectivity to Azure-based data sources, such as Azure Synapse Analytics (SQL DW), Azure SQL, Azure Data Explorer, and Snowflake on Azure through an on-premises data gateway.
Find out more: Announcing data gateway support for Single Sign-On (SSO) with Azure Active Directory
General availability of backup and restore for Power BI datasets
Backup and Restore for datasets in Power BI Premium and Premium per User (PPU) are now generally available. Whether you are migrating Azure AS workloads to Power BI or must consolidate Power BI tenants due to a merger or acquisition or simply want to backup Power BI datasets on a regular basis to meet the data retention and disaster recovery requirements of your organization, you can now rely on the Backup and Restore capabilities of Power BI as a fully supported feature.
Find out more: Announcing general availability of backup and restore for Power BI datasets
BONUS! Even more updates!
Congratulations if you have made it this far through the monthly update! For getting to the end you will be rewarded with other related titbits from around Microsoft 365…
Windows 365 generally available
Now generally available, Windows 365 combines the power and security of the cloud with the versatility and simplicity of the PC. From contractors and interns to software developers and industrial designers, Windows 365 enables a variety of new scenarios for the new world of work.
Find out more: Welcome to your Windows 365 Cloud PC
Microsoft Bookings with Microsoft Teams in all Microsoft 365 for frontline workers product licenses
To help healthcare workers schedule and manage virtual appointments more effectively, Microsoft have added Microsoft Bookings with Microsoft Teams in all Microsoft 365 for frontline workers product licenses. For example, with the Bookings app in Microsoft Teams, healthcare workers can easily schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits for simple telehealth workflows.
Find out more: Virtual visits are now even simpler with Microsoft Bookings
Q&A in Microsoft Teams meetings
Microsoft are bringing a new experience for questions and answers in meetings with the Q&A app, which allows meeting organizers and presenters to add open or moderated Q&As to any Teams meeting. The Q&A app enables attendees to ask and reply to questions before and during a meeting.
Organizers and designated presenters can mark best answers, filter responses, moderate and dismiss questions, and pin posts. Responses to questions are threaded in a conversation with the original question. Designated presenters can act as co-moderators to help screen questions.
Find out more: New communities experiences bolster employee engagement in the age of hybrid work
New Communities app in Teams and Outlook for web
The Communities app for Microsoft Teams helps you stay connected to what’s happening in your communities, tap into knowledge across teams and departments, and crowdsource solutions and best practices from frontline workers. And in the coming weeks, we’re updating the app to inherit Microsoft Teams styling, further incorporate notifications and deep-linking, and include new capabilities like suggested communities.
Find out more: Enhancements to Communities app for Microsoft Teams
Speedy events in Outlook
Speedy events automatically sets events to start “late” or end “early,” helping people carve out essential breaks between back-to-backs meetings. This month, we are expanding support to the new Outlook for Mac.
Find out more: New settings in Outlook give everyone a break between meetings
SharePoint Stuff 