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: Syntex pay-as-you-go, search transcript for Stream (on SharePoint), add apps to teams when enabling, sensitivity labels inside the sharing dialog, OneDrive sync reports in admin center, sites coverage in search usage analytics
Microsoft Syntex Pay-as-you-go (Preview)
This preview allows you to track unstructured document processing events at no cost to assess usage and estimate costs for a future pay-as-you-go license. Start by entering your Azure subscription in the Microsoft 365 admin center, you will join the preview of the pay-as-you-go functionality for unstructured and prebuilt document processing (formerly document understanding).
Processing events will be sent to the Azure meter in your account so that you will be able to view the pages processed for unstructured and prebuilt document processing models. For the duration of the preview, you will not be charged anything. The billing meter will function only to show you pages processed in your organization.
Find out more: Configure Microsoft Syntex for pay-as-you-go billing in Azure (Preview)
Search video transcript for Stream (on SharePoint)
This feature allows users who are viewing a video to search for keywords contained in the video transcript. Users can navigate through the search results and click on a portion of the transcript to be taken to the respective spot in the video.
Note: This feature is for searching the transcript of a single video AND people need view or edit permissions on a file to search the transcript.
Find out more: View, edit, and manage video transcripts and captions
SharePoint Apps: Add to teams when enabling an app
As a SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator in Microsoft 365, you can acquire solutions from the SharePoint Store or distribute custom apps that can be used across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Connections. Microsoft are also improving the process of adding SharePoint Framework solution app to Teams in the modern SharePoint apps site (formerly known as App Catalog).
Find out more: Manage apps using the Apps site
File sharing experience – sensitivity labels inside the sharing dialog
Sensitivity labels are used to classify and protect your organization’s data. These labels are completely customizable, and admins can apply a label to a specific file based on the organization needs. Microsoft have now added sensitivity labels inside the Sharing dialog, to provide you the ability to see what labels have been applied to your files before sharing them.
If the Admin chooses to set Sensitivity labels for the organization, users who interact with the OneDrive / SharePoint share control will be able to see these labels displayed inside the sharing dialog.
Find out more: Enable sensitivity labels for Office files in SharePoint and OneDrive
SharePoint sites coverage in Search usage analytics
Microsoft have announced that SharePoint sites are now included within Usage Analytics in the Microsoft 365 Search & Intelligence Admin Center. Visualize insights from queries from your SharePoint-based intranet and other hub and communication sites.
On the ‘Query analytics‘ page, you can now see the top queries, abandoned queries and 0-result queries. SharePoint sites include both classic and modern SharePoint queries, aggregating search query data across Hub sites, Communication sites, team sites, and various search centers in classic mode: at the Enterprise, Site and Basic levels.
Find out more: Microsoft Search Usage Reports
OneDrive sync reports in the Apps Admin Center (GA)
Admins now can use the OneDrive sync health dashboard in the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center to get an executive summary of everything happening with OneDrive so that you can resolve common issues quickly and focus on other strategic tasks as an administrator.
The dashboard provides you with sync health reports for tracking relevant health issues and advisories, checking the sync status and app version of individual devices, and monitoring Known Folder Move roll out across devices throughout the organization.
Find out more: OneDrive sync reports in the Apps Admin Center
Teams
In Teams: Teams Premium, Delete chats, expanded reactions, add people to chats @mention, recommended people, receive group chat with RSC, sign language view always-on, approvals as PDFs, Acrobat improvements
Education
Government
Frontline workers
Teams Premium preview now available
Microsoft have announced that Teams Premium is broadly available for preview as a limited trial for commercial customers through the Microsoft 365 admin center. The features under this offering began rolling out this December and will continue to roll out through January 2023. With Teams Premium, you can:
- Extend your organization’s brand and company culture across meetings with branding, organization backgrounds, and organization together mode scenes.
- Use AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful through live translation for captions to remove language barriers and intelligent recap features that offer smarter recordings with autogenerated chapters, AI-suggested action items, and insights to quickly catch up on missed meetings where your name was mentioned.
- Apply advanced meeting protection such as Watermark, End-to-end encryption for meetings, and Sensitivity labels for meetings with prevent copy/paste of meeting chat to better protect your virtual meetings.
- Deliver a high-quality webinar experience through advanced capabilities to streamline event workflows with registration waitlist and manual approval, facilitate behind-the-scene actions through virtual green room for presenters (separate from attendees) before the event begins, and manage the attendee experience so they only see shared content and participants brought on-screen.
- Manage the end-to-end virtual appointment experience with advanced features like text reminders, custom branded virtual appointments, and a centralized Virtual Appointment dashboard for a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics to keep track of key usage insights such as no-shows and wait time information per appointment.
Find out more: Microsoft Teams Premium preview now available
Delete chats
Organize and easily remove chat conversations you no longer need without impacting other participants in the same chat. Users can now delete 1:1 chats, group chats, and meeting chats if they are a participant in Microsoft Teams. This permanently deletes the chat only for the user, other people in the chat and conversation history for them is not impacted.
Find out more: Microsoft roadmap
Expanded reactions
Expanded reactions allows users to apply any emoji as a reaction to chat messages! Pick from over 800 Teams emojis to react the way you want. Communicate reactions to celebrate, express your agreement, or emphasize the completion of tasks.
Find out more: Microsoft roadmap
Add people to a group chat with @mention
Add new participants to the chat with @mention, removing the need to navigate to the add-dialog. When adding new participants, you can control how much of the chat history to share.
Find out more: Microsoft roadmap
Recommended people when creating a new message
Using AI, Teams chat will assist you in initiating new conversations by recommending colleagues based on your previous collaborations.
Receive all group chat messages with resource-specific consent
The resource-specific consent (RSC) permissions model, originally developed for Teams Graph APIs has been extended for chat and channel scope. Using RSC, you can request team owners to consent for a bot to receive user messages across standard group chats without being @mentioned.
Find out more: Receive all conversation messages with RSC
Sign Language View and always-on captions in meetings
Prioritize up to two other participants’ videos for sign language in meetings so they stay visible even while content is shared. Additionally, you can set captions to stay on across all meetings.
Find out more: Use Sign Language View in Microsoft Teams
Approvals as PDFs can be saved, printed, and transferred
Approval creators can save a completed approval request to a PDF file and have the option to print it. This feature allows customers to easily transfer their proof of approval as a PDF to another system or store it as a file.
Find out more: Approvals in Microsoft Teams
Adobe Acrobat streamlines the PDF experience in Teams
Building on the momentum of collaborative apps in Teams, Adobe has released the new integration of Adobe Acrobat into Microsoft Teams. Adobe Acrobat can now be set as the default PDF app in Teams. This makes it easier to share and review PDFs, collaborate with comments and annotations, easily access PDFs stored in Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive, and more.
Find out more: Adobe Acrobat streamlines the PDF experience in Microsoft Teams
Education
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
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):
- View meeting transcripts on Microsoft Teams on Android and iOS for Government clouds – You can now start transcription for your meetings and view meeting transcripts on Microsoft Teams for iOS and Android.
Frontline workers
- Frontline workers using shared devices can use Edge and Yammer apps on Android alongside Teams – Microsoft’s shared device mode allows frontline workers to easily authenticate by automatically signing users in and out of all the apps that have enabled this feature. In addition to Microsoft Teams and Managed Home Screen being generally available, Edge and Yammer apps on Android are now in public preview.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Delegate mailbox approval process, pipelines (preview), Developer tools update
Delegate the mailbox approval process
The Power Apps team have announced that that the mailbox approval process can now be delegated to another user instead of always requiring a Global or Exchange admin. A new security role named Delegated Mailbox Approver is now available. A Global or Exchange admin can assign (delegate) this role to one or more users. A user with this role will be able to approve a mailbox without being a Global or Exchange admin.
Find out more: Delegate the Mailbox Approval Process
Power Platform pipelines, now in preview
Pipelines aims to democratize application lifecycle management (ALM) for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 customers by bringing deployment automation capabilities into Managed Environments in a manner that’s more approachable for all makers, admins, and developers.
Pipelines can be setup and run entirely within Power Platform – with governance, visibility, and safeguards automatically built in so that your business solutions can come to market faster with less effort and higher quality. The system handles all the heavy lifting and ongoing maintenance so you don’t have to.
Find out more: Automate deployments with pipelines in Power Platform, now in preview
Power Platform Developer Tools November update
The November update for Power Platform CLI, Azure DevOps, and GitHub actions is out now. This month’s update includes:
- Support for Managed Identities in Azure DevOps
- Assign groups to environments
- Support for Power Platform Pipelines
- Virtual Agents
Find out more: Power Platform Developer Tools November update
Power Automate
In Power Automate: Deeper SAP integration, 10 new verified, 13 independent publisher connectors, Power Automate Desktop December 2022 update
Deeper SAP Integration for the Power Platform
The Power Automate team have recently announced the General Availability (GA) of a broad set of new functionality in the Power Platform that will make it easier for organizations running SAP to digitally transform and automate their business processes. Here’s a look at what this entails:
- Prebuilt Power Apps for Common SAP Processes
- 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
Find out more: Announcing Deeper SAP Integration for the Power Platform
10 new verified and 13 independent publisher connectors
In November, Microsoft launched 10 new verified connectors and 16 updates from different service owners, as well as 13 new Independent Publisher connectors. These connectors have solutions and tools for Commerce, Human Resources, Data, Content and Files, and much more.
Find out more: 10 New Verified Connectors | 13 New Independent Publisher Connectors in November 2022
Power Automate desktop update – December 2022
The December 2022 update of Power Automate for desktop (version 2.27) has been released and includes the following new features/ updates:
- Selector parsing is now available
- Edge and Chrome extensions for browser automation are now migrated to Manifest V3
Find out more: December 2022 update of Power Automate for desktop
Power BI
In Power BI: Power BI December 2022 feature summary, unified v-cores, dataset refresh cancellation, subscribe to filtered report, enterprise scorecards
Power BI Feature Summary – December 2022
This month’s update includes a variety of new features including: updated DAX functions, updated slicer type formatting, and brought Metrics to the Windows app.
Find out more: Power BI December 2022 Feature Summary
Simplifying capacity management with unified v-cores
The Power BI team have announced a platform update that will simplify the way customers manage Power BI Premium capacities. Starting on December 11th 2022, the team are rolling out changes to unify the concepts of front-end and back-end virtual cores for capacity management.
This change will simplify the model used by customers to both manage capacities and rationalize usage metrics against capacity sizing decisions.
Find out more: Simplifying capacity management with unified v-cores
Dataset refresh cancellation now available in Power BI Premium
Earlier this year, the Power BI team released the Enhanced refresh with Power BI REST API, that – in addition to XMLA based refreshes – allows refresh cancellation. However, it requires the refresh operation to be triggered by the API. Today, users can cancel an ongoing scheduled or on-demand refresh using a contextual button in the Power BI service.
Find out more: Dataset refresh cancellation is now available in Power BI Premium
Subscribe to a report with filters applied
The Power BI team have announced a highly anticipated update to subscriptions: you can now create a subscription to a view of a Power BI report uniquely relevant to you. When creating a new subscription, you’ll see a new Include my changes option if you have made changes to the report (e.g., applied filters or selected a slicer value).
Find out more: Subscribe to a report with filters applied
Enterprise scorecards with hierarchies and linked metrics in Power BI Metrics
The Power BI team have announced two much anticipated releases in the Metrics experience. With hierarchies and linked metrics, it’s easier than ever to automate your metric values so you can spend less time crafting multiple scorecards and connections, and more time analyzing your metric performance.
Hierarchies is a premium or PPU feature, and linked metrics is a Pro feature. These two features enable easy, large scale enterprise scorecard deployment, allowing automated views of cascading scorecards and linked metrics that show up and are sync’d on multiple scorecards.
Find out more: Announcing: Enterprise scorecards with hierarchies and linked metrics in Power BI Metrics
SharePoint Stuff 