The Yammer Embed feed, which is currently part of classic Yammer, is being upgraded to the new Yammer. Use an Embed to display a single My feed, Group feed, Topic feed, User feed, or Open Graph object feed on a web page.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (0)
Rolling out (0)
In development (2)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – November 2020
SharePoint: Migration Manager: Teams and OneDrive destinations in Migration Manager – SharePoint Migration Manager now lets you select a Teams channel or a OneDrive username when setting your migration destination. Roadmap ID: 68884
👀 Configure header, footer and body of a form for lists/ libraries – This feature allows users in SharePoint lists and libraries to add a custom header and a footer to the associated form. Roadmap ID: 63519
Currently, 1:1 Call recording is controlled by the -CsTeamsMeetingPolicy / AllowCloudRecording attribute. Microsoft are now changing it so that 1:1 Call recording can be controlled by its own policy.
Microsoft Lists: ready- made templates – Create a new list from ready-made templates that accelerate list creation, structure, forms and flows. There will be 8 templates at initial launch. Roadmap ID: 64166
Microsoft Lists: home page – The Microsoft Lists home page is your home for all your lists across Microsoft 365. Roadmap ID: 64160
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – November 2020
👀 SharePoint: Migration Manager: Teams and OneDrive destinations in Migration Manager – SharePoint Migration Manager now lets you select a Teams channel or a OneDrive username when setting your migration destination. Roadmap ID: 68884
Release – December 2020
Updates to site header options – You will be able to choose to show/ hide the site title and a choice between a square site logo thumbnail or a non-square site logo. Roadmap ID: 63776
SharePoint and Teams: updated Add a Team to a site wizard – Choose the SharePoint content that you want to add as tabs in Teams when you first connect them via the “Add a Team” flow from your site. Roadmap ID: 46990
This post is more a re-telling of a series of events I observed recently, which at first led me to believe I was going mad until I found a conclusion which I was somewhat happy with!
In my organisation we have created an org-wide Team in which the General channel is moderated, as described in my post on how to restrict posts in org-wide teams. Owners of the org-wide Team are also limited to global admins and members of the internal communications team, so only a very small number of people are able to post messages within the Team.
So imagine my surprise when one evening when a new message had been posted in the general channel by a standard user!
Example of the ‘Scheduled a meeting’ message as appeared within moderated channel in org-wide Team.
Just delete the post…not so fast
Naturally the internal communications team were asking questions as to how this happened also. Whilst I was working that part out they also wanted to delete the post from the org-wide team’s general channel. Easy enough if you’re the Teams Owner and a Teams Admin to boot right? Wrong!
The ability for Teams Owners to delete sent messages is switched off by default and is a relatively recent feature. If you want to enable Teams Owners to be able to delete sent messages you will need to be a Teams Admin and do the following:
Teams admin center > Messaging policies
Either create a new or configure the org-wide default policy
Enable Teams Owners to be able to delete sent messages
Wait up to 24 hours
Turn on ‘owners can delete sent messages’ via messaging policies in the Teams Admin Center.
However, even if you do this any replies to the message post won’t be deleted as part of this, nor will the message post completely disappear. I’ve wrote a separate post about deleting message posts and chats in Teams that goes into much more detail about this plus more.
At first I believed that the user in question must have had some sort of elevated permissions for the org-wide team that enabled them to post. After reviewing the post above and testing differences between what org-wide team owners and members can see I noticed that the Meet Now and Schedule a Meeting buttons were only available to Team Owners.
The ‘Meet’ and ‘schedule meeting’ option becomes available for Teams Owners in org-wide Teams.
After reviewing the audit logs for the user, checking the owners of the org-wide team through the Teams Admin center and Azure AD groups it became clear that wasn’t the issue.
Trying to schedule a meeting with the org-wide team email address
Other ideas I had around what might be the cause of this was that maybe the user had the email address for either the Team or the group behind and had managed to schedule a meeting and include that address. Firstly, if you’re a member and you try to “get email address” for the channel you get an error message.
Also, I noted that you are unable to search the global address list in Outlook for the org-wide team email address, nor are you able to search Groups within Outlook and find it.
Add the org-wide team’s email address as a shared mailbox
One final area I looked into was based on the audit events I’d seen earlier. What was interesting was there was an activity event in the logs called “Sent message using Send On Behalf permissions”, which led me to test adding the org-wide team’s email address as a shared mailbox to see if that might be it.
Audit log details including the ‘Sent message using Send On Behalf Permissions message’.
Again, only an owner is able to do this, but interestingly enough as an owner I was able to see the emails surrounding the scheduled meeting in the mailbox for the org-wide team.
Conclusion/ Resolution
After ruling out all of the above lines of enquiry we did notice within the Teams app, under + New Meeting there is an ability to create a live event.
When you create your live event and press next, you get a “live event permissions” screen. The default is set to org-wide, which is the exact same wording as the org-wide team we’ve set up. I haven’t tested this myself as of yet, but based on the audit information I was able to get around the event that was created, I think there is a high probability that this is how the meeting was created and posted to the org-wide team.
Creating a live event, by default sets the permissions to Org-wide.
As another aside, if you select people and groups, you are able to add the org-wide team as a participant in the meeting, which may also render the same results.
You can select the Org-wide Teams 365 Group from under People and Groups.
So, I want to throw this out to you, loyal reader! Should anyone be in this situation, or be able to test my theory please comment below and let me know what you find.
Q&A – other org-wide team issues
So since I wrote this post (only a week ago!) I’ve had a couple of new issues crop up related to org-wide teams that I wanted to document. So here goes:
#1 Can members can reply to posts in moderated channels?
So with the scenario described above, it was my belief that the org-wide team was pretty much locked down for comments, minus the ability for users to react to posts.
Recently I’d suggested to our communications team to start @ing the org-wide team in posts to send out notifications to all users, which proved successful as engagement on posts where we did this increased massively.
However, in doing this we also quickly noticed that all members of the org-wide have the ability to reply to posts in moderated channels! Needless to say this came as a bit of a surprise, especially since we had been using the org-wide team since April with zero comments on any post until now!
There are no settings within the Member permissions that control whether users can reply to posts or not either, so it cant be controlled at the team level.
Answer: encourage owners who author posts to set who can reply to their posts
So the way I tackled this problem was to encourage the org-wide team owners to consider who they want to be able to reply when they create new posts using the reply settings. You have two choices in the post formatting settings:
Everyone can reply
You and moderators can reply
#2 Can members can upload files in an org-wide team?
Short answer to this is again, yes. As members of the org-wide team users have the ability to upload files in the General channel that are visible to everyone in your organisation.
So how can you stop it?
Answer: Change the SharePoint site permissions
The answer to this for me was an easy one, change the permissions so that all members only have read permissions to the files tab. As everything files in Teams is ultimately SharePoint so for me it was a simple permissions change that did the trick.
There are two ways you can go about changing the permissions in this scenario:
Move the users out of the Members SharePoint group with edit permissions, into a Visitors group with read
Break inheritance on the General folder within the Shared Documents library, add all users to the Visitors group and remove the Members group
In essence, they both do the same thing but I tested both approaches and either work – I chose the first option as I don’t like to break folder inheritance if I can avoid it.
To change the SharePoint site permissions behind a Team, follow these steps:
Open your Team > select the relevant channel (i.e. General)
Press the Files tab > Open in SharePoint
In the SharePoint site > press the cog icon
Site permissions > Advanced site permissions
Open the Members group > make a note & select the objects listed in there (for me I had a members group again and everyone except external users)
Actions > remove users from group
Go back to the main permissions page. TIP: just add /_layouts/15/user.aspx after the name of your Team
Open the Visitors group
Pres New> enter the names of the groups that were previously in the Members group
Press Show Options > untick send an email invitation
Press Share
That’s it! Now when users navigate to the files tab of any channel within your org-wide Team they will no longer have the upload button visible.
Updates to the ‘Records Management’ default role group to include roles that will provide Record Managers access to all facets of the Records Management solution in the Microsoft 365 Compliance suite including disposition review.
SharePoint spaces: Touch device support – SharePoint spaces will enable users to interact with a space using touch interactions in addition to the mouse and keyboard based interactions currently supported. Roadmap ID: 67107
👀 Microsoft Teams: Improvements to the “Create a Microsoft Team from SharePoint” experience – Enhance existing Microsoft 365 Groups with Teams functionality, directly from SharePoint team sites. Roadmap ID: 68861
Release – December 2020
SharePoint: Portal Launch Scheduler in SharePoint PowerShell – The Portal Launch wizard available via SharePoint PowerShell is designed to configure the deployment waves when launching a new site. Roadmap ID: 66162
SharePoint: Share a page to Yammer – The ability to share a modern SharePoint Online (SPO) page to a Yammer community will be available in the page actions bar. Roadmap ID: 66183
In this post we will look at what options are available to enable deletion of messages and chats in Teams, more specifically how you can enable owners to delete messages posted in the general channel.
Contents
Delete at the tenant level
Delete at the Team level
Delete at the individual level
Delete at the tenant level
At the tenant level, there are no permissions or special powers set by default to enable Teams Owners or Teams Admins to delete messages or chats.
However, there is a setting within a Messaging Policy in the Teams Admin Center that allows you to change this.
Under Messaging policies > either create a new custom policy or edit the Global (org-wide default)
Set Owners can delete sent messages to On
This can take up to 24 hours to take effect (it took 24 hours in my tenant)
Set owners can delete sent messages to yes to enable tenant-wide deleting of sent messages in Teams.
Things to note
Enabling this will only allow Teams Owners to delete the initial message, not the entire thread. There is a Teams UserVoice suggestion that relates to private chat threads, but does relate to public messages in threads too.
Even after the message has been deleted, any replies will still be visible.
Delete at the Team level
At the Team level, Teams owners have the ability to configure channel settings that will apply to all channels within the Team. As you would imagine, any settings configured by a tenant-wide policy will be hidden at the Team level.
Within Manage Team, you are able to switch on/ off member permissions which control their ability to delete or edit messages.
The settings to call out here specifically are:
Give members the option to delete their messages
Give members the option to edit their messages
Delete at the individual level
As an end user, you are able to delete in the following ways:
You can delete you own messages* and chats
You can hide threads in your own private chats
You are able to mute threads in your own private chats
* You can delete your own messages where moderation isn’t in place, or any Team level settings don’t stop you from doing so.
Example of how an individual has the ability to delete their own messages posted within channels in Teams.
Things to note
You can’t currently delete entire threads within your own private chats, as above this is on the backlog in the UserVoice community.
If a user within your tenant is given an active Microsoft Teams license, they will have access to Microsoft Teams. No additional access checks will be made.
List creation from SharePoint sites will get a visual refresh and users will get the additional capability to create lists from eight built-in templates.
Targeted release: Complete
Standard release: Gradually rolling out mid-November
Microsoft Lists: forms customization – Adjust what information shows on the out-of-box forms and include custom header and footer imagery and information. Roadmap ID: 64165
Microsoft Lists: sticky first column – As you scroll left and right, the first column of your list remains in place; similar to the sticky header that is already a part of Lists. Roadmap ID: 64168
Microsoft Lists: new ‘Integrate’ drop-down menu – Introduction of a new top-level menu item: ‘Integrate.’ To start, existing command buttons for Power Apps and Power Automate will move into Integrate – as they are integrated technologies and experiences. Roadmap ID: 64869
Microsoft Lists: rules – Create simple if/then rules based on changes to list information to set reminders and send notifications. Roadmap ID: 64163
Microsoft Lists and SharePoint document libraries: Gallery view – Configure your lists and library items using a dynamic Gallery view – choosing how your documents and list items appear. Roadmap ID: 57304
Microsoft Lists: comments – Add a comment on a list or list items, including @mention capabilities to draw a person’s attention. Roadmap ID: 64169
Microsoft Lists: updated Yes/No column experiences – powered by SharePoint – List items with a Yes/No column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new experience design format – making it easier to create and more accessible to consume. Roadmap ID: 67119
Microsoft Lists: column settings in Grid view – The capabilities when in Lists “Grid” view (previously Quick Edit) will now allow people to pin a column to the filter’s pane, format the column, show/hide columns, and hide their column(s). Roadmap ID: 68714
Microsoft Lists: Support for thousands separator in Number column – When Lists owners and members leverage the Number column, they can now choose if the comma should appear or not. Roadmap ID: 68716
Microsoft Lists: undo / redo – As you work across rows and columns within Microsoft Lists, mistakes will happen and it needs to be easy to recover information. Similar to how you can remove sentences and phrases in a Word document, you will be able to do this in Lists by using the undo button. The same is true in reverse with the redo button. Roadmap ID: 68810
Microsoft Lists: Updated Choice column experience: built on SharePoint – Items within a Choice column, in and out of Quick Edit mode for both lists and libraries, will support single, multi-choice, and manual fill as you add items. Roadmap ID: 67097
SharePoint: Auto-News Digest – SharePoint Auto-News Digest sends automated email to employees in you company about the latest News posts that they have not yet read. Roadmap ID: 64685
Set Default Page Templates – This feature will allow site owners to set a page template as the default when a user creates a new page or news post on the site. Roadmap ID: 64529
SharePoint and Teams: updated Add a Team to a site wizard – Choose the SharePoint content that you want to add as tabs in Teams when you first connect them via the “Add a Team” flow from your site. Roadmap ID: 46990
New SharePoint admin center home page – Updates to the SharePoint admin center to align it to the Microsoft admin center, including more tiles and graphs. Roadmap ID: 57318
Improved page/ news publishing experience – A new pre-publish panel that gives authors an overview of key information about their pages or news posts. Roadmap ID: 63257
Improved page/ news publishing experience – A new pre-publish panel that gives authors an overview of key information about their pages or news posts. Roadmap ID: 63257
SharePoint Online search query volume limits when using app-only authentication – When this change is implemented, queries using the Site.Read.All permissions level or greater will be throttled at 25 QPS. The search query will return with a 429 response and you can simply retry the query. Roadmap ID: 64963
SharePoint: Share a page to Yammer – The ability to share a modern SharePoint Online (SPO) page to a Yammer community will be available in the page actions bar. Roadmap ID: 66183
New ways to add SharePoint images – Page authors can now copy and paste images on the canvas to automatically create a new image webpart. Roadmap ID: 65599
Microsoft Lists: Updated Person column experience: built on SharePoint – Items within a Person column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new “pill” design format when a person’s photo is displayed. Roadmap ID: 67095
SharePoint spaces: Touch device support – SharePoint spaces will enable users to interact with a space using touch interactions in addition to the mouse and keyboard based interactions currently supported. Roadmap ID: 67107
SharePoint: Text web parts automatically added to new sections in modern pages – Microsoft are now adding text web parts automatically for you when you add new sections to a modern page. Roadmap ID: 67146
SharePoint: My Feed web part – Make your page or site in SharePoint more dynamic and relevant to individual users by adding the My feed web part. The My feed web part will show a mix of content from across Microsoft 365, based on what’s likely to be most relevant to the current user at any given time. Roadmap ID: 67148
SharePoint: new experience to add content types to lists and libraries – Custom content types that are available to your SharePoint sites can easily be added to lists & libraries that allow multiple content types. In those SharePoint lists & libraries that allow multiple content types, a new ‘Content type’ option will be available in the ‘Add column’ menu. Roadmap ID: 67164
Now rolling out worldwide, SharePoint Syntex amplifies human expertise, automates content processing, and transforms content into knowledge. Syntex mainstreams machine teaching, enabling your experts to capture their knowledge about content in AI models they can build with no code.
This web part allows page authors to generate an organization chart based off of a specific individual – just by typing their name. The page author will have the option to determine how many levels up this org chart goes, and as you navigate, you’ll see who reports to who.
You will soon be able to add and delete comments on list items. Users can view all comments on a list item and filter between views that show comments or activity related to an item.
Information on how and where comments are stored:
Comments follow the permission settings inherent in SharePoint and Microsoft Lists
Users with read-only permission can only view comments. Those with list edit permission can make comments as well as delete comments; editing comments is currently not possible
Comments are stored in the schema for each list, which is based on the SharePoint storage platform
If you are using a classic list template, it will not have this commenting feature
Commenting on lists in Teams is not yet available; currently leverage Teams chat for lists in Teams
Comments are not indexed by Microsoft Search
Add and delete comments on list items in Microsoft Lists.
Tasks in Microsoft Teams lets you manage your team tasks from Planner and individual tasks from To Do in your hub for teamwork. Tasks in Teams is now generally available for all non-government tenants.
You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation.
Microsoft Teams added speaker attribution to live captions so that you can see who is speaking along with what’s being said, making meetings more inclusive and easier to follow along.
Presenters can now pin an individual video feed for all attendees to see during a Teams meeting. Once pinned, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants.
Spotlight an individual video participant for all attendees in a Teams meeting.
Meeting organizers and presenters can now prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands.
Transform your Teams Meeting into a virtual stage with a new advanced production option for broadcasts. Network Device Interface (NDI) support for Teams allows event producers to convert each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the video streaming production tool of your choice.
This functionality enables you to use Teams meetings in new ways, including bringing speakers into Together Mode or customized views, to deliver professional broadcasts to the end point of your choice and reach audiences wherever they are.
Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode is available in Teams allowing for more flexibility for you to either present the digital whiteboard in read-only mode, or to allow others to edit and collaborate when given access.
Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode is available in Teams.
Meeting & Calling recordings stored in OneDrive and SharePoint
Teams meeting and call recordings can now be stored in your OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint, providing the ability to share recordings with guests or external users, access meeting recordings faster, and manage recordings with security and compliance controls available to other file types in Microsoft 365.
Teams Admins can select their recording storage location by updating policies using PowerShell.
Teams meeting and call recordings can now be stored in your OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint.
Enhancements for downloading participant reports in Teams meetings
Now you can easily download a participant report after the meeting within the meeting chat. Microsoft have also added new data into the report that allows you to better manage your attendance.
Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)
Microsoft have extended the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video.
You can now change your presence to “Appear Offline”. This allows you to have full access to Teams while signalling to colleagues that you are unavailable.
If you write different messages in different languages, you now see spellchecking relevant to the language you use when typing a message in the Teams desktop app.
When creating a new team, you can now choose from a variety of customizable templates including event management, crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates like hospital ward and bank branch.
The updated SharePoint pages app in Teams lets you add published SharePoint pages or lists as a tab in a Teams channel. SharePoint pages let you share ideas using images, video, links, and documents.
You can now change your notification settings through an updated notification settings section. To access, go to your profile picture > Settings > Notifications.
New and simplified global notification settings in Teams.
Off-shift access controls allows IT admins the ability to configure Teams to alert you when you are accessing the app on your personal device outside of working hours.
The feature does not require active usage of the Shifts app, but it does require Shifts being configured and schedule data being inside the app; either added natively with Excel import or including workforce management API connectors.
Anonymous grading, when enabled in the assignment detail view removes students’ names and avatars are temporarily removed, presenting a random list of students. This allows you as an educator to review work with identities hidden, no shuffling of paper involved.
Now both educators and students can once again view upcoming and turned in assignments by class or view them across all classes. Just visit Assignments in your app bar on the left-hand side of Teams to view assignments across all classes.
View assignments across all classes in Teams for Education.
These features currently rolling out to customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).
Priority notifications (GCC, GCC High, and DoD)
Priority notifications alert a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. IT admins can manage this feature as part of messaging policies in Teams.
Read receipts in private chats allow senders to know that a message was read by the recipients. IT admins can configure messaging policies from the Microsoft Teams admin center to enable or disable this feature for users.
Teams file viewer is being upgraded for Gov clouds from legacy to OneUp for non-Office file types and to unified app for Office file types (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Together mode, now available in GCC, uses AI segmentation technology in meetings to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else.
Improvements to meeting notes (GCC, GCC High, and DoD)
Meeting notes now support 100 users by default. Also, if anyone joins your meeting past after it is scheduled and, doesn’t have access to notes, they can now request access from the note’s owner in one click.
Makers and administrators can now configure apps to be available offline on a user’s device, and users can continue to complete their tasks against the local cache on their phone even with intermittent or no network connectivity. When the network is re-established, the users’ changes are seamlessly synchronized back to the cloud.
Custom API is a new code-first approach that extends the concept of Custom Actions to provide capabilities that will make life easier for developers.
With Custom API, there is no workflow and some of the limitations of Custom Actions can be avoided providing new capabilities for developers. Instead, Custom APIs require that the developer create a plug-in which will provide the main operation for the message.
Power Apps portals simplified identity provider configuration
Now generally available, Microsoft are introducing a simplified experience to create and manage authentication settings and identity provider configuration. The experience aims to provide better discovery of supported providers, in-app guidance for makers / administrators to do this quickly and reduce common configuration errors.
Simplified identity provider configuration in PowerApps portals.
Relevance Search API, now available for Common Data Service (CDS) environments provides access to exciting new search capabilities in environments with Relevance Search enabled. Three types of search experiences can be powered by the API, including; search results page, Suggestions-as-you-type and autocomplete.
Now in public preview, app usage analytics now allows ISV to monitor your published applications. With the release of this feature, in addition to seeing the total number of installations a user will now be able to see the Monthly, Weekly and Daily active usage of their app.
RPA Playbook for SAP GUI Automation with Power Automate
The Power Automate team have released the first enterprise automation playbook for Microsoft Power Automate – SAP GUI Automation.
The playbook show you how to apply simple to advanced, no-code to pro-code SAP automation techniques, leveraging Power Automate, UI flows and the recently announced public preview of Power Automate Desktop.
Microsoft have announced several AI Builder preview model types are now generally available. These include: explicitly tag fields in form processing, text translation, predict a number, realtime prediction, receipt processing (preview) plus many more.
Nine brand new connectors were released for Power Automate through September 2020, taking the total number of connectors to 400! Here’s what was released:
Azure AD Identity Protection – Azure AD Identity Protection is a tool that allows organizations to discover, investigate, and remediate identity-based risks in their environment.
CDK Drive Customer – CDK Drive Customer is an API published by CDK Global to help you manage your CDK Drive Dealer Management System (DMS) customer records.
CDK Drive Service Vehicles – This connector will help you maintain vehicle details on the service vehicle record and keep it up to date.
Cloudmersive Video and Media – Cloudmersive Video and Media Service was created to enable customers to effortlessly convert videos, audio files, and media between different file formats at scale and on-demand.
GetAccept – The GetAccept sales enablement platform can help sales teams close more deals faster with AI powered dealscore and sales coaching, coupled with sales automation and e-signing.
IN-D Payables – IN-D Payables is an AI-based invoice processing bot that can smartly extract things that matter most, like PO number, invoice number, and more, from millions of invoices in no time.
Microsoft 365 compliance – Microsoft 365 compliance solutions help you discover, protect, and govern your data, address regulations and standards, and mitigate insider risks.
MotaWord Translations – MotaWord enables professional translation of your documents into 95+ languages with blazing speed. It’s a pioneer of collaborative translation and works with 18000+ professional translators to empower your business in the international stage.
Nitro – Nitro Sign is an eSigning tool that allows you to get your documents electronically signed faster and more securely.
Data Loss Prevention capabilities now generally available
A range of new Power Platform Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy capabilities are now generally available, including; a new enhanced user interface in the Power Platform admin center for defining DLP policies, which additionally enables the ability to block connectors as well as user interface support for including HTTP Connectors in DLP policies.
With the rise of the need for standardized, authoritative data across organisations, the Power BI team recently released endorsements for datasets and dataflows. This has now been extended to provide similar endorsement capabilities for reports and apps.
Certified and Promoted reports and apps in Power BI.
Power BI Connector to Azure Databricks Public Preview
In September, the Power BI team announced the availability of an enhanced Connector to Azure Databricks in Power BI Desktop in public preview. Now the Azure Databricks connector has also been deployed to the Power BI service.
Azure Databricks is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform optimized for the Microsoft Azure cloud services platform. It can consume data at cloud scale from multiple data sources such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Azure Cosmos DB. And thanks to the enhanced Azure Databricks connector, you can now deliver breakthrough insights at cloud scale in a self-service fashion in Power BI.
Power BI Connector to Azure Databricks Public Preview.
Power BI Report Server October 2020 Feature Summary
With October’s Power BI report server feature summary, several new features have been released including the modern ribbon, slicer improvements, enhanced dataset metadata and more.
To improve the scale of dataflow analysis in Power BI, Microsoft are turning on the enhanced compute engine for all new dataflows by default in all new capacities provisioned. This premium dataflow feature allows you to:
Speed up refresh operations when computed entities or linked entities are involved
Enable DQ connectivity over dataflows leveraging the compute engine
Achieve improved performance in the transformation steps of dataflows when entities are cached within the compute engine
The Power BI team have announced several updates to the Power BI publish to web functionality including improved web dialog experiences, ability to add a placeholder image, a new data refresh experience plus many more.
The ‘new look’ of the Power BI service begins rolling out soon
All the improvements of the ‘new look’, from navigation updates to the simplified action bar for reports and dashboards, begins rolling out next week and will be generally available to all tenants and users by early November.
The ‘new look’ of the Power BI service begins rolling out soon.
Personalize visuals are now generally available, this new feature can can empower your end-users to explore and personalize visuals all within the consumption view of a report. For example, your end-user can change a measure, a dimension, or the visualization itself.
Several updates are included in this months Power BI feature summary including new visuals, the introduction of canvas watermarks, new icons plus much more.
On-premises data gateway October 2020 update is now available
The October update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.63.6) is now available. Updates include OAuth Support for the gateway, Google BigQuery Connector on Gateway, Performance Monitoring On By Default plus many more.
ow, when you run iOS14 on your device, you can add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen. The widget displays your photo memories “on this day” across previous years.
Microsoft Productivity Score can help measure and improve how your organisation uses Microsoft 365 by giving you visibility into how your organization works, insights to identify where you can make improvements, and actions you can take to update skills and systems so that everyone can do their best work.
You can now easily create, share, and analyze your forms, alongside your other Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, all from the Office mobile app.
Forms creators can easily create and send out a form, and from the “Home” page of the app, quickly check to see the number of respondents and insights from the information collected.
Create forms easily on-the-go in the Office mobile app.
Microsoft Productivity Score, a new analytics solution that helps you understand how work gets done in your organization, is transitioning from preview to general availability.
Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) after November 30, 2020. After November 30, 2020, users will be unable to access the Teams web app from IE 11 and be notified to use the desktop app or access the web app from Microsoft Edge.
SharePoint: new create list experience – With the introduction of Microsoft Lists, we introduced a new user interface when creating lists from the Lists home page and within Teams. You’ll now see this new experience when creating a new list from within a SharePoint site. Click New List and you’ll see the updated experience to create lists. Roadmap ID: 67137
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – November 2020
Updates to site header options – You will be able to choose to show/ hide the site title and a choice between a square site logo thumbnail or a non-square site logo. Roadmap ID: 63776
👀 Configure header, footer and body of a form for lists/ libraries – This feature allows users in SharePoint lists and libraries to add a custom header and a footer to the associated form. Roadmap ID: 63519
Microsoft Lists: comments – Add a comment on a list or list items, including @mention capabilities to draw a person’s attention. Roadmap ID: 64169
SharePoint: Site Performance Page for Site Owners and Editors – The Site Performance Page will display results from the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool and the information will be available within SharePoint from site settings. Roadmap ID: 66196
Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020. After this date, ongoing investments in the Office 365 cloud services – including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business – will proceed based on post-Office 2013 requirements
Your users will soon be able to add and delete comments on list items. Users can view all comments on a list item and filter between views that show comments or activity related to an item.
Microsoft Lists: calendar view – Visualize any list with items that use date column information in a calendar view. Roadmap ID: 64167
SharePoint: Site Performance Page for Site Owners and Editors – The Site Performance Page will display results from the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool and the information will be available within SharePoint from site settings. Roadmap ID: 66196
👀 SharePoint: Organization Chart Webpart – This webpart allows page authors to generate an organization chart based off of an individual. The page author will have the option to determine how many levels up this org chart goes. Roadmap ID: 67131
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – November 2020
SharePoint: SharePoint spaces General Availability – SharePoint spaces moves from Public Preview to General Availability. Roadmap ID: 67135
As a general rule I’ve found that most users who are in your M365 tenancy should have OneDrive irrespective of whether they are using it or not.
During a project I was involved with, we were compiling a list of all our M365 users home drive source locations to migrate the data into their respective OneDrive’s. Completing this exercise we found that not everyone in our organisation actually had OneDrive provisioned.
Information online as to the reasons why was scant, with much of what others describe around licensing issues not being applicable in this situation.
When you look at a user’s OneDrive information within the M365 admin center, you will see this:
If a user in your tenancy doesn’t have OneDrive, you will see this message.
I’m not 100% sure why these users are without OneDrive as the accounts checked hadn’t been blocked. However they have not had any sign in activity for the last 30 days – although we have set our retention for OneDrive to be 90 days before deleting so it’s still a bit of a mystery.
The solution
Microsoft have provided documentation on how to pre-provision OneDrive for users in your organization which is exactly what we needed. The documentation details two ways in which you can approach the problem:
Pre-provision OneDrive for users – Create a list of users who need OneDrive > save as a txt file > run PowerShell to provision OneDrive for those users
The script should loop through until it completes for all users in your tenancy. You should see it looping through like in the example screenshot below:
Example of once the PowerShell script has been run, the script looping through each user in your tenancy.
Issues & resolution steps
Before I start describing my experiences of running the script, I am a relative PowerShell novice so forgive my ignorance if some of this is elementary. I had some trouble getting the script to run, which I think was more to do with the cmdlets I had installed (I’ve had a new laptop recently) rather than the script.
Issues with Connect-sposervice
I had issues connecting to the SharePoint admin center, I was receiving an error like this:
Issues connecting with the sposervice cmdlet.
I found this post on koskila.net that is really helpful and may help others with similar issues. In the end I got the script to run by removing the $credential variable at the start of the Microsoft script and connecting to the msolservice and sposervice directly.
With the $credential variable removed, I was prompted to login twice, once for msolservice, and again for sposervice, which then authenticated moved on to the next stage of the script.
Example of my changes to the script to allow me to run properly.
