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: Navigation links open in new tab, manage site access based on sensitivity label, Viva learning cards, Quick Access Teams and Sharepoint Document Libraries in Office Win32 backstage, What’s new SharePoint Server

Configure Navigation Links to Open in a New Tab

With this update, you configure how you would like your navigation links to open. You will have the option to be able to choose to open in the same tab or in a new tab for your site, hub, and global navigation items.

Find out more: Customize the navigation on your SharePoint site

Manage site access based on sensitivity label

With this update, administrators will be able to use Conditional Access policies and associated sensitivity labels to require additional user authentication for accessing sensitive SharePoint sites when the user’s context does not meet the requirements of the site.

Find out more: Conditional access policies for SharePoint sites

Microsoft Viva Learning cards for the Viva Connections Dashboard

Viva Learning is an enterprise learning and training experience that acts as a one-step solution for all the learning needs of your organization. You’ll be able to integrate Viva Learning and Viva Connections experiences by using the Viva Learning card on the Viva Connections Dashboard. This new feature will enable users to track their learning assignments directly within Viva Connections dashboard.

Find out more: Create a Viva Connections Dashboard and add cards

Quick Access Teams and Sharepoint Document Libraries in Office Win32 backstage

The Quick Access feature will allow users to access shared libraries from both their SharePoint and Teams locations. When the user opens files from shared libraries, these libraries will show up in the form of a list which will encourage users to save and open files to these libraries with ease. This helps deliver a more consistent, coherent storage location experience across M365 apps.

What’s new for SharePoint Server

Microsoft have recently announced updates to SharePoint Server, including: SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, SharePoint Workflow Manager, SharePoint Server 2013, 2016 & 2019 and the SharePoint Technology Adoption Program.

Find out more: What’s new and what’s next for SharePoint Server

Teams

In Teams: Cameo in PowerPoint Live, collaborative annotations, music on hold, early media support for compliance recording, block inbound federated VoIP calls, choose preferred download location, intelligent chat translation iOS/ Android, Teams admin center dashboard, user request config, policy propagation

Education

Cameo in PowerPoint Live

Cameo is a new PowerPoint experience that seamlessly integrates your Teams camera feed into your presentation, letting you customize how and where you want to appear on your slides and offering layout recommendations for optimal viewing. When it’s time to present, use PowerPoint Live in Teams for an immersive remote presentation.

Find out more: Presenting with cameo

Collaborative annotations in Teams meetings

Collaborative Annotations in Teams meetings, powered by Microsoft Whiteboard, lets everyone in a meeting quickly annotate whatever is on a shared screen in a Teams meeting. While you’re sharing your full screen in a meeting, select Start annotation. Everyone in the meeting can begin annotating right away. You can add notes, shapes, text, and reactions to express yourself.

Find out more: How to use the annotation mode in Microsoft Teams

Music on hold for call transfer

Music on hold is available for calls placed on hold for a call transfer. The music is either the default music provided by Microsoft or custom music that administrators can upload and configure.

Find out more: Music on Hold

Early media support for compliance recording

Music on hold is available for calls placed on hold for a call transfer. The music is either the default music provided by Microsoft or custom music that administrators can upload and configure.

Find out more: Policy-based recording solutions certified for Microsoft Teams

Block inbound federated VoIP calls

Reduce interruptions while you’re in the flow of work by blocking inbound calls. Previously, you could only block inbound calls from specific phone numbers. You can now block inbound VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls from Teams users outside your organization.

Find out more: Block inbound calls

Choose preferred download location for files

You can now select the default download location where you would like downloaded files to be saved. Your setting will only for files downloaded in the Teams desktop client. Teams on the web will continue to honor the download setting in your browser.

Find out more: Custom download location for files in Teams

Intelligent chat message translation in Teams for iOS and Android

When you receive a message in Teams that is not in your preferred language, Teams asks if the text should be translated to your preferred language. For example, if your preferred language is English and you receive a message in French, Teams detects the language difference.

Find out more: Announcing intelligent message translation in Microsoft Teams for mobile devices

Dashboard customization in Teams admin center

Administrators can now personalize the Teams admin center dashboard with information that is relevant for them. Simply drag and drop new cards (widgets) on the dashboard. Reposition cards on the page or remove the ones you don’t need.

Find out more: Manage teams in the Microsoft Teams admin center

User request configuration to external systems (URL redirect)

As a Teams admin, you can now customize the instructions someone receives when they request to use a blocked app. You can also configure external request systems. You can provide a URL that opens in a browser when users click the Request approval button to gain access to an app, for example, an IT support ticketing system, user education pages, or corporate policy pages.

Find out more: Manage user requests

Policy propagation in Activity log

The enhanced Activity log now displays more detailed information around policy operation such as activity name, group name, policy type, policy name, submitted by, submitted time, completion time, impacted users, and overall status. The detailed information provides more clarity and understanding on policy operations such as batch policy assignment of more than 20 users, group policy assignment, and group policy removal.

Education

These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:

Timed Quiz support in Assignments – A highly requested feature for those of you that use Form Quiz in Assignments is the ability to set a timed duration for your quiz. This gives your student a set time to complete the quiz. You can define the time for each quiz, and the student will only get the allotted time to complete the quiz.

Hide Comments until assignment is returned to students – We have changed the behavior when a teacher is working with Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents that are submitted by students through Assignments.

Updated Export to Excel – We have updated the Export to Excel feature for Assignments and Grades.

Reading Progress – Phonics Rules Insights dashboard – We know how important it is to start with the fundamentals, that’s why we’re building Insights dashboards that will reflect students’ understanding of phonics rules. Our Reading Progress auto-detect software has the ability to analyze each word at the phoneme level and give an accuracy rating per phoneme.

Reflect – Now a Featured Tab in all Class Teams – Strong relationships and a sense of safety are the foundation of an impactful school year – both for students and educators. Recently, we’ve updated Reflect to appear as a featured tab in each of your classes, and now it is enabled also for each staff member! This way, leaders can support educators in building a school-wide culture of trust and growth and provide opportunities to reflect and be heard.

New distribution experience from Forms to Teams – Teams channel and group chat have become the new popular place for teachers and students to communicate. After creating a quiz or survey, teachers can easily search the chat group or channel they want to share the form in the centralized people picker. For better efficiency, teachers can also share it with the same group of people by using 2 channels at the same time.

New question type – rating, ranking and Instant Poll in Teams meeting – To help teachers gain a better understanding of the opinions of their students, they are now able to add Rating and Ranking questions directly into a class poll. IN these polls, they can add pre-defined Yes/No, Thumbs Up/Down, Like/Dislike choices to quickly identify the point of view of their class.

Parent Connection for Teams mobile – We are enabling Parent Connection through mobile devices to allow teachers to communicate with parents or guardians, whenever or wherever. The Parent App can be found within an individual class team, along with the other apps enabled for your class (Assignments, Grades, Class Notebook, and Insights).

Power Apps

In Power Apps: Power Platform Conference Announcements, Power Fx: named formulas, ParseJSON, Power Platform Administration Planning, Content Security Policy (Public Preview), Creator Kit, Developer Tools monthly update

Three big announcements from the Power Platform Conference 2022

The first ever Power Platform Conference took place this month and three new ways to collaborate were announced:

Cards for Power Apps are a completely new way to design and deliver mini-apps directly inside Microsoft Teams and Outlook using low code. By embedding essential micro-experiences directly in Teams, you can bring your conversation and workflow together like never before.
Coauthoring is coming to Power Apps as well, using the same realtime collab capabilities that millions of people are using in Office 365. This is a big step forward for software development, allowing multiple makers to collaboratively build and edit the same app simultaneously.
Maker matching, delivered with a new integrated virtual agent, will help guide makers to the learning content they need while also connecting them with experienced advisors from within their organization. In-context help together with well-connected internal communities means more successful low code solutions at scale.

Find out more: Power Apps brings collaboration to center stage with 3 big announcements

Power Fx: Named Formulas

Named Formulas derives from Excel, in the “Name Manager.” In Excel, you can name any cell and refer to that name throughout the workbook. Today in Power Fx, you write formulas for the properties of the controls in your app. Named Formulas is a powerful concept that has been in Excel for a very long time, that we are now bringing to Power Fx. With it, you can simplify your app’s initialization, reduce app load time, reuse logic, and improve the maintainability of your apps.

Find out more: Power Fx: Introducing Named Formulas

Power Fx: ParseJSON

The Power Apps team have announced the experimental release of our ParseJSON function, which can parse JSON strings into Power Fx objects and types. This new function dramatically simplifies working with JSON in Canvas apps.

Find out more: Power Fx: Introducing ParseJSON

Power Platform Administration Planning

The Power Apps team have put together a simple solution (Power Platform Administration Planning) that is designed to help you better:

Plan your team structure
Review where you spend time and look for automation or innovation opportunities

The solution is built on Microsoft Dataverse and is a new stand-alone component in the CoE Starter Kit. Admin tasks are defined in a model-driven app and insights are provided in a Power BI dashboard.

Find out more: Power Platform Administration Planning

Content Security Policy for Power Apps (Public Preview)

Power Apps has had Content Security Policy (CSP) support for model-driven apps since the beginning of the year, which was configured by running script as a System Administrator. With these new capabilities, you can now control the CSP header for model-driven as well as canvas apps in the environment in Power Platform Admin Center. CSP can be configured in both enforced and report-only mode.

Find out more: Announcing public preview of Content Security Policy for Power Apps

Power Automate

In Power Automate: Trigger outputs, Power Automate desktop update, Automation Kit for Power Platform, SAP integration, desktop flow activity, 10 new independent publisher connectors

Trigger Outputs as identifier columns

The Power Automate team have introduced a new way to easily identify and troubleshoot a cloud flow. With this new capability, as a flow author, you can easily distinguish between flow runs with customizable columns in All Runs page and Flow Runs view in Flow Details page.

Once you build a flow, and it starts automating your tasks, you might need to identify to confirm your flow instance ran as expected. Today, by default, a flow owner can look at the Start, Duration, and Status columns in the run history view in Power Automate to help them identify the flow run they want to debug.

Find out more: A new way to troubleshoot cloud flows – Trigger Outputs as identifier columns

Power Automate Desktop – September 2022 update

The September 2022 update of Power Automate for desktop (version 2.24) has been released! Here is a summary of this month’s new features:

Improved performance and design of the recorder
A new option to create desktop shortcuts for desktop flows has been introduced

Find out more: Power Automate for desktop – September 2022 update

Automation Kit for Power Platform

The Power Platform team have announced the Automation Kit for Power Platform, now available to the public as an open source GitHub project. The Automation Kit for Power Platform is designed to help organizations manage, govern, and scale automation platform adoption based on industry best practices. The toolkit is a collection of components and tools based on HEAT concepts and built using Power Apps and Power Automate, so you can easily extend and customize the kit to your needs.

Dashboard showing the complexity score and list of projects

Find out more: Introducing the Automation Kit for Power Platform

Deeper SAP Integration for the Power Platform

Microsoft’s acquisition of Clear Software has led to new functionality for organizations running SAP in Power Apps, Power Automate, and Logic Apps that will enable large-scale adoption of the Power Platform. The Power Automate team have announced the Public Preview of a broad set of new SAP functionality in the Power Platform, including:

Prebuilt Power Apps for Common SAP Processes: order to cash, procure to pay, record to report, make to stock/ make to order (MRP)
Prebuilt Power Automate Flows for Common SAP Processes
Advanced SAP System Connections
New On-Premises Data Gateway
New SAP Connector and Action
New Logic Apps Functions

an example of the Purchase Orders Power App template, where a user can search for, display, create, and change SAP Purchase Orders

Find out more: Announcing Deeper SAP Integration for the Power Platform

Desktop flow activity (Preview)

The Power Automate team have announced the new desktop flow activity section (in preview) in the Monitor section of Power Automate for all customers. This “desktop flow activity” section provides to RPA users dashboards, tables and graphs to better understand desktop flows usage, measure effectiveness and quick identify issues.

Find out more: Introducing desktop flow activity (preview)

10 New Independent Publisher Connectors in August 2022

10 new Independent Publisher connectors were published in August. These connectors have solutions and tools for Business Management, Productivity, Lifestyle and Entertainment, and much more:

Abortion Policy API by Vivek Bavishi – The Abortion Policy API is an up-to-date tool that categorizes state laws on abortion access for accurate representation.
Climatiq by Troy Taylor – Climatiq helps you calculate the environmental footprint created by a broad range of emission-generating activities.
Datamuse by Troy Taylor – Datamuse is a word-finding query engine for developers. You can use it in your apps to find words that match a given set of constraints and that are likely in a given context.
Moosend by Troy Taylor – The ultimate email marketing software and marketing automation platform that will not break your bank.
Open Charge Map by Troy Taylor – The Open Charge Map service provides access to the world’s largest registry of charging locations.
Refuge Restrooms by Troy Taylor – Refuge Restrooms is a web application that seeks to provide safe restroom access for transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming individuals.
ReliefWeb by Troy Taylor – ReliefWeb is a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Shadify by Troy Taylor – Shadify is a powerful service for generating data and executing various logic to create different applications and games.
SHRTCODE by Chandra Sekhar Malla – With this free Link Shortener, you can make Links shorter and easier to remember.
SOS Inventory by Harold Anderson – Retrieves and updates information in SOS Inventory

Find out more: 10 New Independent Publisher Connectors in August 2022

Power BI

In Power BI: Power BI feature summary, Report Server feature summary, On-premises data gateway, Horizontal Fusion, USERCULTURE DAX, report/ dataset management in Power Apps Solutions, AAD filtration for Datamarts, Power BI Vue.js

Power BI feature summary September 2022

The Power BI team have announced a variety of new features this month such as hierarchical axis by default, translations for composite models, mobile formatting options and much more.

Find out more: Power BI September 2022 Feature Summary

Report Server September 2022 Feature Summary

The Power BI team have announced a new version of Power BI Report Server this Fall! This release introduces Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) for SQL Server 2022. In this new release of PBIRS, we’ve done a lot of accessibility work to make sure we’re empowering people to achieve more. The release includes enhanced Windows Narrator support for the new Windows OS (Operating Systems) and Windows Server, security enhancements, browser performance improvements with Angular, accessibility bug fixes, support for SQL Server 2022 (16.x) Preview instances report server catalog and feature updates.

Find out more: Power BI Report Server September 2022 Feature Summary

On-premises data gateway September release

The Power BI team have released the September update for the on-premises data gateway (version 3000.142.14). This update brings the on-premises data gateway up to date with the September release of Power BI Desktop.

Find out more: On-premises data gateway September release

Announcing “Horizontal Fusion”

The Power BI team have announced “Horizon Fusion”, which is the initial release of a query performance optimization aimed at processing Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) queries more efficiently than previously possible by reducing the number of data source queries required to generate the results.

Fusing data queries together and avoiding unnecessary roundtrips is a tried and proven approach to boost query performance in Power BI. Several performance optimizations in the query engine aimed at reducing the number of data source queries per DAX or MDX query, known as DAX Fusion and MDX Fusion, significantly improved query performance for DAX and MDX clients regardless of a dataset’s storage mode. Horizontal Fusion now takes things to the next level.

Find out more: Announcing “Horizontal Fusion,” a query performance optimization in Power BI and Analysis Services

USERCULTURE DAX function now supported in Power BI Premium

The Power BI team have nnounced support for the DAX UserCulture function in Power BI Premium. Combined with the field parameters feature, customers can create reports that natively translate table data to the locale defined by the viewer’s preferences in the Power BI service. Although this support is limited to Power BI Premium (for architectural reasons), the team are hoping to support customers on non-Premium workspaces at some point in the future.

Find out more: USERCULTURE DAX function now supported in Power BI Premium

Power BI report and dataset management in Power Apps Solutions

Now App makers can add Power BI reports and datasets as Dataverse components in Power Apps solutions, improving the export, import, and customization process. Solutions are a Power Platform tool that enables users to deploy applications built using Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, and other Power Platform services.

When you add a Power BI report or dataset to a solution, it will stay connected upon deployment across environments and tenants. The report or dataset can also be seamlessly managed as part of your Application Lifecycle Management process across environments and tenants.

Find out more: Announcing Power BI report and dataset management in Power Apps Solutions

AAD-based filtration for Power BI Datamarts

The Power BI team have announced the introduction of AAD-based filtration to the Power BI Datamart preview tenant setting, enabling Power BI Service Admins to limit the ability to create Datamarts to certain groups or individuals.

Find out more: Introducing AAD-based filtration for Power BI Datamarts

Power BI component for Vue.js applications

The Power BI team have announced a new component for embedding Power BI content in Vue.js applications is now available. Vue is an increasingly popular JavaScript framework for building front-end user interfaces and websites. The new component for Vue makes it possible to embed Power BI content in your Vue application in a simple way, allowing you to make the most of both Vue and Power BI embedded for bringing analytics to your users wherever they are quickly and easily.

The new component supports embedding of reports, dashboard, Q&A and more, and is now publicly available on npm and GitHub.

Find out more: Power BI component for Vue.js applications is now available