Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (1)
Rolling out (0)
In development (24)
🍾 LAUNCHED
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
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – February 2021
🆕 SharePoint: Video Webparts and Templates – New SharePoint video webparts and templates to enable users combine video with messaging and other media to tell their story on any page or news post. Roadmap ID: 68715
🆕 250 GB file size support in Microsoft 365 – Users will be able to upload large file sizes up to 250 GB in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. Roadmap ID: 70558
Wow it was over a year ago I wrote the first part in what was intended to be a series documenting my experiences of migrating to Microsoft 365! Better late than never I guess…well in this post we will explore the process of migrating “home” drives or personal user data to OneDrive in Microsoft 365.
The key tenants to the migration approach are fairly commonplace in most organisations, with four distinct phases:
Exchange email migration
Home drive migration
File share migration
SharePoint migration
The plan was migrate all users home drives from on-premise file servers into OneDrive, making the home drives read-only in the process and then finally removing the mapping once all migrations were completed.
Discovery & analysis
Discovery of home drive data
So naturally to start to flesh out how we would migrate all users home drive data to OneDrive we needed to do a little digging to understand our estate and figure out:
(L-R) How many home drives are there? What is the total volume size of all the home drive data? Do all the users have OneDrive to move to?
Also during this discovery phase we began working with Microsoft FastTrack. If you don’t know much about the service, it is something Microsoft offer to assist customers with their migration projects and best of all it’s FREE!
So once you are set up with the FastTrack service, you still need to do all the discovery and analysis as described above before you can provide the migration tracks to them, in order for them to schedule and run the migrations.
Fast Track also require that you create virtual machines (VM’s) to run the migrations. They calculate the number of VM’s you need based on:
The total file count of your file share data or SharePoint environment (if supported)
The total volume of your home drive data
We wanted to multi-purpose our VM’s to also run migrations for other parts of the M365 project. So we had to take the metrics above and provide an average based on what little we knew at the time in order to create enough VM’s (we ended up creating six).
In order to find answers to the above questions, I used the SharePoint Migration Manager. The Migration Manager can be used to create scan-only tasks that will output reports on all your home drive sources and basically enable you to begin scheduling the migrations.
The analysis part of the migration included looking at how we could effectively answer the three main questions above. For the first two questions; how many home drives are there, and how much data do they contain – running the scan-only tasks answered those questions.
How many home drives are there? and how much data do they hold?
To summarise what I did, I created tasks for each top-level home drive folder on each file server that contained the home drive data (for example: \\yourserver\home) and collated the answers to the questions above in one, master spreadsheet.
Example spreadsheet that I created to collate all the home drive info.
The scan-only reports included much more granular information about each home drive within the top-level file share, which I downloaded from Migration Manager into a working folder for further analysis if required.
I also found that the summary reports, or key information provided by Migration Manager around failures to be a bit misleading. For example, if the accounts used to read the home drives don’t have access to a particular folder, that doesn’t flag as a failure. You have to open the ItemFailureReport from each task to find out if there were any issues with access or files/ folders themselves.
Coming from on-premises? Be prepared to compare user data
As mentioned earlier, you are expected to provide FastTrack with a list of home drive locations and OneDrive URL destinations in a migration track in order for them to begin the migration.
Because our estate still has an on-premise Active Directory (AD) that didn’t have all users synced, we had to do some checks to make sure all the users from our on-premise AD had O365 accounts and also had OneDrive sites to migrate to.
We used an export of AD on-premise data, compared against Azure AD data and a OneDrive usage report that you can download from here. We used this to flag any accounts that either didn’t have Microsoft 365 accounts, or OneDrive sites, or both.
Use the usage reports in OneDrive to get a list of total and active accounts in OneDrive.
Migration
Once you get to this point there is no turning back! Well, that’s probably a bit dramatic but I sure wouldn’t want to after doing all the discovery and analysis on the home drive data…
Migration process
When it comes to FastTrack they are the one’s running the migrations for you. So with that there are some limitations that they set out up front:
FastTrack cannot complete more than 50,000 tasks
FastTrack cannot migrate more than 1TB of data in a 24 hour period
The migration process itself was a relatively simple one once your migration spreadsheet has been created for each batch of migrations and provided to the FastTrack team via their portal. With your migration dates scheduled with FastTrack, your role then becomes 1) making sure the user base is informed as to when they are being migrated and what to do, 2) liaise with FastTrack as the migrations complete, 3) then handover to the users after they’ve been migrated and finally 4) remediate any post-migration issues. Easy right?
Inform: make sure users know when they are being migrated. Migrate: work with FastTrack to migrate the date. Handover: handover to the users once migrated. Remediate: post-migration support of any issues.
Lessons learned
Aside from the issues and resolutions described below, the biggest thing I took away from the entire process is not to underestimate how much support your user base will require post-migration. We received lots of queries post migration around the change from home drives to OneDrive, some of which may of been addressed by more training, champions etc. but largely was just reacting to the change and not knowing what to do next.
Issues & resolution steps
#1 Not all users had OneDrive
As mentioned earlier in this post, during the analysis of the user data before migrating to OneDrive we discovered several users did not have OneDrive set up.
Before the OneDrive migration started in anger, we ran a few pilot migrations just to test the process out more thoroughly. We had setup the migration VM’s and migration agents some months earlier, so when we came to run the pilot migrations, all the migration tasks failed – pretty much immediately. In the logs for the failed tasks we received this error:
Error, the source file share does not exist.
Suggestion, Ensure the source file is an existing network file share and shared with the current user
SharePoint Migration Manager task error
Microsoft have an article on troubleshooting the Migration Manager here, but in this case the issue was actually related to do with expired account credentials running the migration agents. Although the error logs didn’t tell us this, once we re-ran the migration agent setup and “repaired” the agent, re-authenticating the accounts meant the migration tasks ran successfully thereafter.
#3 Permissions issues with files don’t show as “files scanned with issues”
Again, something I’ve touched on earlier but another issue we encountered during the migration was that any permissions issues that occur during the migration are not highlighted in the summary information for a given migration task.
So in the scenario post-migration, if a user gets in touch to say some files/ folders are missing you need to find the migration task, download the task report then comb through the ItemFailureReport to discover what data hasn’t been migrated due to permissions issues.
#4 “Missing” files and the hidden CSC folder
Kind of related to #3, we also encountered issues when switching off Windows Sync Center as part of our migration process. In some cases we had users who had files/ folders that hadn’t successfully synced from their local machine to their home drive, so following the migration and switch off of Sync Center it appeared their files had gone “missing”.
We resolved this by locating the hidden Windows CSC (client side cache) folder C:\\Windows\CSC, which is a location where Windows keeps offline copies of files and folders. Getting access into this location was a bit of a nightmare for us, but once you get access into the location we were able to find all of the reported “missing” files and copy them over to the users OneDrive.
Navigating to C:\\Windows\CSC with hidden folders enabled shows you this folder, which contains offline copies of files and folders.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (1)
Rolling out (1)
In development (24)
🍾 LAUNCHED
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
🚂 ROLLING OUT
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
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2021
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
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
Microsoft Lists: rules – Create simple if/then rules based on changes to list information to set reminders and send notifications. Roadmap ID: 64163
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 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: mobile app (iOS) built on SharePoint – You’ll be able to create new lists, edit list items and easily share with other people. The Lists app will first come to iOS and Android shortly after. Roadmap ID: 64161
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
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
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
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: 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: 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
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: offline mode – Similar to taking files offline, people will have the ability to take Microsoft Lists offline – so you can work with your information in scenarios where you may have low-to-no internet access. Roadmap ID: 68809
Microsoft Lists: @mentions in comments – Get a colleague’s attention to an item in a list by @mentioning them within list comments. That person will receive a notification and a link that takes them directly back to the item, to review the comment and take the requested action. Roadmap ID: 68811
SharePoint admin center: updated homepage dashboard – Update for the homepage in the SharePoint admin center with more and more cards and graphs appear over time – so you can see insights on files, usage security, recommendations, training and so on. Roadmap ID: 68812
SharePoint admin center: site creation source – SharePoint admins will now be able to see where sites were created from – be it PowerShell, via the SharePoint admin center, from Teams, from SharePoint “Create site” – and to be able to see more clearly who created the site. Roadmap ID: 68813
SharePoint admin center – Migration Manager: Box migrations (public preview) – With their recent Mover acquisition, Microsoft are excited to expand capabilities to allow moving content from third-party cloud storage providers starting with Box.com. Roadmap ID: 68816
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
New leadership connection site template – The template brings together conversations from Yammer, news, resources, and showcases upcoming events. Roadmap ID: 71752
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
Release – February 2021
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
Happy Holidays everyone! 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.
The SharePoint team have made some changes to the site header in modern sites, including changing the default to the compact header instead of the standard header.
Additional header options are also available within “Change the Look”, including minimal and extended header options. Minimal header has a reduced height and extended includes an optional background image, expanded site logo widths, and options for logo alignment – left, middle, right.
New header layout options under “Change the Look”.
Example of the extended header layout in a modern SharePoint site.
You can now send articles from SharePoint directly into Yammer and include questions, polls, praise, and rich text. It’s also possible to upload images and files to the post linked to the share.
The “SharePoint Success” site template is another great offering from the Microsoft Look Book. The “SharePoint Success” site template is a ready to deploy, customizable SharePoint communication site that comes pre-populated with site creation inspiration and training on how to create high quality and purposeful SharePoint sites. You’ll find Microsoft maintained SharePoint training content feed, success stories, and site creation guidelines.
New destinations in the SharePoint Migration Manager
The Migration Manager now has been updated to include OneDrive & Teams as migration destinations. SharePoint admins can enter OneDrive usernames or URLs and/or select various Teams team and channels as migration destinations.
Select a destination in Migration Manager has been updated to include OneDrive & Teams.
Add Microsoft Teams to a SharePoint site – wizard updates
Microsoft wants to make it easier to use the connected value of SharePoint and Teams. When you connect SharePoint to Teams, you can choose what lists, libraries, and pages you want to bring into Teams as tabs in the new, default General channel.
NOTE: By default, your team site home page will be selected, but you can change it to suit your needs. You can fully navigate the primary document library from the Files tab – just follow the new folder breadcrumbs from the channel folder up to the root of the library.
Choose what SharePoint lists, libraries, and pages to bring into Microsoft Teams as tabs in the new, default General channel when adding Teams to your SharePoint team site.
Microsoft have created adoption materials to help onboard employees at scale while being confident that you are improving the employee experience. In the adoption center there is an adoption playbook, day-in-the-life guides, a quick start guide, a look book, internal communication templates, pointers to documentation and training, plus materials to help build an internal Lists champion program within your organization.
Breakout rooms are now generally available in Microsoft Teams! Breakout rooms allow organizers to divide the meeting into sub-groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions.
Meeting organizers can create up to 50 breakout rooms and choose to automatically or manually assign participants into rooms. Breakout rooms can be started within a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting.
Master virtual breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams meetings.
Now, Microsoft Teams notifies the participants in a meeting when there are five minutes remaining in the scheduled meeting time. The notification appears on screen for 10 seconds and disappears without any user action. Notifications are triggered for all scheduled private and channel meetings and does not cause the meeting to end automatically.
End-of-meeting notifications in Microsoft Teams Meetings.
The Teams pre-join meeting experience has been updated to including easier discovery of audio, video, and device configurations before joining a meeting. Previously, you had to go to settings to change meeting devices, but now these can be easily adjusted prior to the meeting in the pre-join experience.
New languages supported for real-time translation in live events
Live event attendees can view live captions and subtitles in up to six languages in addition to the language being spoken. Event organizers can select the languages from a list of over 50. New languages supported include: Japanese, Korean, French, French-Canadian, Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Hindi-Indian, Portuguese-Brazilian, and Russian.
With Teams Calling, you are now able to see a split button in the chat header for audio/video calling. This displays multiple numbers for a single contact making it easier to view available numbers to initiate a call.
Live Captions display the text version of the audio in a Teams call. Admins can disable this capability if desired, and users have control to turn these off. For the most accurate captions possible, it is recommended to speak clearly into the microphone and avoid having multiple people speaking at the same time.
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows version 4.7.15.0 is now available in the Teams Admin Center. The latest update includes the following new capabilities:
Cortana Voice Assistance (Preview): In-room meeting attendees can now use voice assistance powered by Cortana to join and end their meetings without touch. Using natural language, people can simply state “Cortana, join/end my meeting” for a seamless hands-free experience.
Control Spotlight from console: People in the meeting room can now control the Teams meeting Spotlight feature from the Teams Rooms console control. Once enabled, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants in the Teams meeting.
Share HDMI audio: Users connecting to a Teams Room via HDMI can now share their PC audio into the Teams meeting.
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows version 4.7.15.0 is now available in the Teams Admin Center.
Teams phones now support new video layouts such as 3×3 gallery view, large gallery view for more participants and Together mode. Several other updates have been released for Teams phones including meet now, screen sharing and spotlight.
Now when searching for messages in Microsoft Teams, the top 3 messages are generated and ordered by a newly developed relevance model – previously messages were ordered chronologically with the most recent messages at the top of the search results.
The Teams mobile app for iOS now allows you to access files even when you are offline or in bad network conditions. Simply select the files you need access to, and Teams will keep a downloaded version to use in your mobile app. You can find all your files that are available offline in the files section of the app.
Now included in Teams is a faster-loading experience for embedded videos. You will now experience up to 25% reduction in the time it takes a Stream embedded video to load, and up to a 90% reduction in the time it takes for the video to start playing. This means a much faster Stream video playback experience within Teams.
Restricting Windows and Mac managed device sign-in to specific tenants
You can now restrict Teams sign-in for Windows and Mac managed devices to help ensure that employees cannot sign-in to another organization’s tenant using the other tenant’s credentials from the device they are authorized to use for work. This policy can also be used to configure access to personal accounts.
Teams Displays are the latest device you can manage from the Teams Admin Center. You can view and manage the device inventory for your organization and do tasks such as update, restart, and monitor diagnostics for devices.
A new lobby setting – called “People I invite” is being added as an option to the “Who can bypass lobby?” setting. Once enabled, only the participants invited by the organizer in the meeting invite can join the meeting directly. Everyone else is sent to the lobby.
Customer Key is built on service encryption and provides an added layer of encryption at the application level for data-at-rest and allows you as the organization to control the encryption keys. Already available in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, Customer Key is now available in Microsoft Teams as a preview.
As mentioned above, Breakout rooms are now generally available in Microsoft Teams! Read more about breakout rooms here.
Teams for Education policy wizard
With the new Microsoft Teams for Education policy wizard, T admins can now easily apply education tailored policies for a safe learning environment.
With the policy wizard you can easily apply the most relevant set of policies for students at a global (Org-wide default) level and apply a custom policy set to a group of educators and staff tailored to their needs. Expected availability, along with more details, will be available on January 7th.
The new Classroom Drop-in app template for Microsoft Teams lets school leaders create “drop ins” to add a user to a Team without the need to bother IT or the instructor. The dropped in user can then check in on conversation, assignments, grades, class meetings and more!
The mConnect app by Skooler lets you use Moodle inside Teams to organize your courses and use Teams to learn and work together. The mConnect app allows you to:
Have one workspace with access to Moodle courses, topics, assignments, and calendar in Teams
Stay organized with collaborative Learning tabs in Teams channels
Save time and be more in control with automated team and membership creation
As mentioned above, Breakout rooms are now generally available in Microsoft Teams! Read more about breakout rooms here.
Teams meeting pre-join experience
The improved meeting pre-join experience is now available for GCC customers. Find out more about the updated experience here.
PowerPoint file sharing
Available for GCC and GCC-High, PowerPoint file sharing in Teams allows you to share a PowerPoint file within a Teams Meeting without having to use Desktop or Window sharing. Participants can view the presentation at their own pace, navigate through slides on their own and sync back to the presenter at any time.
As mentioned above, GCC customers can now see a split button in the chat header for audio/video calling. Find out more here.
Inline message translation (DoD)
Inline message translation is now available for DoD customers so that people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.
Set presence status duration (GCC)
Let others know when you are available in Teams by managing your presence status. GCC customers can now change their presence status for a specific period.
New offline presence status (GCC)
GCC customers can now change your presence to “Offline”. This allows you to have full access to Teams while signaling to colleagues that you are unavailable.
Linux Client available (GCC-High)
The Microsoft Teams Linux client is now available in GCC-High.
Data loss prevention for Microsoft Teams
Data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities in Microsoft 365 government clouds is now extended to include Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages, including private channel messages.
GCC support for devices management in Teams Admin Center
Device management support in Teams Admin Center is now available in the GCC cloud environment. Admins can now control the entire lifecycle of their Teams devices, which include an increasing variety of supported device types – IP Phones, Collaboration bars, Teams displays, and Teams Meeting Room devices, all from one place.
The OneDrive team have announced that the OneDrive iOS app now uploads and supports Live Photos. When you take a Live Photo, you capture a still image along with several seconds of before and after video.
OneDrive now stores and plays back the full motion and sound of your Live Photos, bringing your memories to life.
The Add to OneDrive feature is now generally available. Add to OneDrive makes it easy to add a shortcut to the shared folders directly to our OneDrive. Shared folders include content that others have shared with us through their OneDrive, which surfaces in the “Shared with me“ view or content that is a part of a shared library in Microsoft Teams or SharePoint.
Add to OneDrive makes it easy to add a shortcut to the shared folders directly to our OneDrive.
The Power Apps team have announced that two AI builder preview capabilities are now generally available; multiple outcome prediction and numerical prediction. Both are children of the Prediction model card in AI Builder, but enhance the model substantially. For example, multiple outcome prediction can be used it to predict more than 3 outcomes, like will a shipment arrive early, on-time or late. You can also predict a number, like how many days it would take to close a customer ticket.
Now in preview, the Power Automate Dataflow connector comes with templates and sample scenarios that let you get started right away. The new connector provides a new way to react to dataflow events to take action on dataflows.
Dataflows are a self-service, cloud-based, data preparation technology available in Power Apps, Power BI and Dynamics Customer Insights products and portals. ataflows keep your data up to date, so it can be leveraged by Power Apps applications, Power BI reports and Dashboards, Dynamics Customer Insights and many more products and solutions that leverage Data stored in Dataverse or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 accounts.
Trigger dataflows and Power BI datasets sequentially with the Dataflows Power Automate Connector.
Power BI dashboard in a model-driven app now generally available
The Power Apps team have announced the general availability of Power BI reports as system dashboards in model-driven apps.
System and user dashboards in model driven apps support specific reporting features with predefined visualization and are more suited for transactional data that needs to be updated directly on the report, an action occurs on a record or fields are updated on a record in real time.
Power BI reports bring a host of visualization and data manipulation that we have all become accustomed to using with a Power BI report. The ability to quickly build reports using the Power BI tools, publish those reports and extend them to model-driven apps makes it easy to provide your organization with data in one place, removing the need to go outside your model driven or Dynamics application.
Power BI embedding in Power Apps builds on existing capabilities giving users access to shared reports governed by you through standard Power Bi practices that include who you share the report with and licensing.
Power Apps admins can now get visibility of their Power Apps portals logins and page views consumption by downloading new reports from the Power Platform admin center. These Excel-based reports allow you to look at the capacity consumed in a 30-day period preceding the selected date.
Power Apps portals capacity consumption reporting is now available.
Microsoft Dataverse support for Power BI Direct Query
The Power Apps team have announced that Microsoft Dataverse support for Power BI Direct Query is now generally available. With the combination of the new Dataverse connector for Power BI and tabular data stream (TDS) endpoint Power BI users have more options when connecting to Dataverse environments, including Dataverse for Teams.
The new connector supports Direct Query providing real-time data and support for the Dataverse security model. In addition, complex data types, such as lookups, choices, and currency are flattened for easy consumption in the model.
Microsoft Dataverse support for Power BI Direct Query is now generally available.
New way to configure Azure AD B2C provider for portals (preview)
Now in preview, A unique preview experience is available now to setup Azure AD B2C with portals using a wizard for a quick and complete configuration directly from the Power Apps portals authentication settings. With the new configuration wizard you are able to choose to add an Azure Active Directory login provider, create or select existing Azure AD B2C tenant, register your portal as an application (new or existing) with the selected tenant and Configure Sign-up & sign-in and Password reset user flows (new or existing).
Configure Sign-up & sign-in and Password reset user flows (new or existing) in the new experience.
Process advisor is a process mining capability in Power Automate that provides a deeper understanding of how people work and provides insights about time-consuming processes best suited for automation. With process advisor, you can visualize, identify bottlenecks, and gain insights into the various processes being created across your organization.
In process advisor you can run simple process recorders, create rich process maps and get in-depth analytics simply and easily.
The Power Automate team have launched a series of documents to help understand how to automate business processes with Power Automate. In the articles, you’ll learn about the five basic steps of automating with Power Automate, using the best practices and knowledge from Power CAT (Customer Advisory team).
The articles focus on the non-technical aspects of automating business processes with Power Automate, such as how to plan your Power Automate project, how to discover automation areas, how to assess business value, etc.
Power Automate Desktop December 2020 release update
The December 2020 release of Power Automate Desktop is now generally available. This month’s update has several updates including; Execution logs are now available for console runs, input variables of sensitive text type availability, password fields now support the use of variables plus lots more!
Input variables of sensitive text type are now available to be used in Power Automate Desktop (December 2020 release).
The Power Automate team have announced the introduction of a new prebuilt AI model in AI Builder: Invoice processing. With the new AI Builder invoice processing prebuilt model, you can minimize pain points usually found in traditional invoice processes and speed up your invoice processing time, delivering real value back to your business.
Quickly create reports in the Power BI service (preview)
The Power BI team have announced there is a new way to quickly create reports in the Power BI service. Rather than downloading Power BI Desktop and importing the data, you’ll now be able to paste data straight into Power BI on the web and have visuals automatically generated for you.
Quickly create reports in the Power BI service (preview).
The new datasets hub makes it easy to find, explore, and use the datasets in your organization. It provides information about the datasets as well as entry points for creating reports on top of those datasets or for using those datasets with Analyze in Excel.
Anomaly detection (preview) now supported in Power BI mobile apps
Report consumers can now view and understand anomalies directly from the Power BI mobile app. This capability is available on all apps (iOS, Android, Windows), in all supported form factors (phone, tablet, iPad, and laptop/desktop, including Surface Hub).
When you view a report that has anomaly detection enabled, you’ll see the same detected anomaly indications on the visual that you see in the Power BI service and in Power BI Desktop.
Anomaly detection (preview) is now supported in Power BI Mobile apps.
This month’s Power BI feature summary is out now and includes updates in data preparation, data connectivity as well as some new visuals and template apps.
DirectQuery for Power BI datasets and Azure Analysis Services (preview)
The Power BI team have announced that DirectQuery for Power BI datasets and Azure Analysis Services is now in preview. This new feature allows report authors to use DirectQuery to connect to Azure Analysis Services or Power BI Datasets and, if they want to, combine it other DirectQuery and imported data.
Small multiples, or trellising, splits a visual into multiple versions of itself, presented side-by-side, with its data partitioned across these versions by a chosen dimension (e.g., splitting a “sales by category” column chart across product lines or country). This feature is now available in preview.
Microsoft Information Protection Sensitivity Labels in Power BI Desktop (Public Preview)
The Power BI team have announced that they have extended Power BI’s sensitivity label capabilities by bringing Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels into Power BI Desktop, allowing creators to apply sensitivity labels just as they start building their datasets and reports in Power BI Desktop.
New Admin APIs and Service Principal authentication
The Power BI team have announced that now release new Power BI Admin APIs along with a .NET SDK that enable administrators to create their own custom-made solutions based on Power BI metadata and lineage.
They have also added service principal support for the scanner Admin APIs. Service principal is an authentication method that can be used to let an Azure AD application access Power BI APIs. With this authentication method, you no longer have to maintain a service account with an admin role. Rather, to allow your app to use the Admin APIs, you just have to give your approval once as part of the tenant settings configuration.
On-premises data gateway December 2020 now available
The on-premises data gateway December 2020 update is now available for Power BI. This months release includes; Azure Cosmos DB connector on Gateway, December Version of the mashup engine, .Net Framework Update plus lots more.
Large model support in Power BI Premium generally available
Power BI Premium support for large models is now generally available. With large model support, a dataset in Power BI Premium is limited in size only by the Premium capacity that hosts the dataset. Excluding memory for query execution and processing, this typically means a dataset can grow up to 70-80% of the capacity’s total memory.
Full report attachment for subscriptions for Power BI Premium
You can now now subscribe to any Power BI report in a premium workspace or app and choose to include the full report as a PowerPoint or PDF attachment. You can either create a new subscription for your report or simply update an existing one.
Full report attachment for subscriptions for Power BI Premium reports now available.
Earlier this year the Power BI team announced a roadmap for upgrading classic workspaces to the new workspace experience. Now, Workspace upgrade has reached general availability, with tools being rolled out to Power BI admins to upgrade classic workspaces. The Power BI team are also providing a roadmap, including dates for removing the ability to create, update, and use content packs in classic workspaces.
Automate configuration of a template app installation
A a new capability is coming to Power BI that enables template app publishers to automate the configuration of a template app installation for their customers. Template app publishers can preconfigure the template app installation, making life much easier for your customers by eliminating that frequently encountered source of frustration.
Automate configuration of a template app installation.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (2)
Rolling out (1)
In development (0)
🍾 LAUNCHED
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 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
🚂 ROLLING OUT
Information barriers – Information barriers are policies that can be configured to prevent individuals or groups from communicating with each other. Roadmap ID: 57313
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (1)
Rolling out (0)
In development (3)
🍾 LAUNCHED
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
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2021
🆕 SharePoint: Page Authoring First Run Experience – The page authoring First Run experience is an interactive tutorial that walks users through the editing process the first time that they create a page or news post. Roadmap ID: 70667
🆕 SharePoint: Web Part Toolbox Updates – We are rolling out several changes to the web part toolbox; featured web parts will be replaced with a users most frequently used web parts, the categories from the large toolbox will also appear in the small toolbox, and the size of the small toolbox has increased. Roadmap ID: 70668
🆕 SharePoint: Image Lightbox – This feature lets users click on an image web part while in view mode to see a larger version of the image. Roadmap ID: 70669
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (0)
Rolling out (0)
In development (1)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2021
SharePoint: Audience Targeting capability for Quick Links Web Part – Microsoft are adding the ability to target specific audiences per link within the Quick Links Web Part. With it, you target specific links to different audiences, helping you provide more personalized experiences on SharePoint pages. Roadmap ID: 67115
The new site performance page gives insights into the what impacts the viewing experience on a given page, as well as getting actionable feedback on things like how certain page or site assets would benefit from a content delivery network (CDN), what web parts and their usage might be impact page load times etc.
The my feed web part shows 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. The feed is personal. Different users will see different content.
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 if there was something in a field previously that you want to bring back – just click the redo button.
Click Undo or Redo to revert changes or remove mistakes within Microsoft Lists.
You can now use the SharePoint tab experience to pin any page, news, list or document library as a separate tab in their Teams channel. Just go to the “+” button from any channel in Teams, select SharePoint and start pinning resources that your team needs to collaborate better.
The updated SharePoint tab experience when adding pages, lists or document libraries to a channel in Teams.
Microsoft Forms for polls in Microsoft Teams meetings
Forms polls for Teams meetings provides an easily discoverable and seamless experience that will help you conduct more engaging and productive meetings. With Forms polls, meeting presenters can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls before, during, and after meetings, respectively, all from one place under a tab in the Teams meeting.
Additional options for polls, surveys & checklists in Teams
There are now new templates for polls, surveys, and checklists in Teams from the OfficeDev GitHub repo. Once installed and configured by the Teams administrators, these messaging extensions provide a simple and intuitive experience for users across all platforms without the need to use 3rd party apps.
Easily create surveys to gather feedback to improve your processes.
The AI-based noise suppression analyzes your audio feed filtering out the noise and retaining only the speech signal. You can also control how much noise suppression you want, including a high setting to suppress more background noise.
Microsoft have introduced new Together mode scene selections to transport your team to a variety of settings. Choose a scene to set the tone and create a unique experience for your meeting, whether it be a smaller conference room meeting, or an all-hands meeting held in an outdoor amphitheater.
With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention.
The Meet Now icon is now available on mobile devices from the calendar tab and in the Teams channel helping you connect with your team instantly.
Once you start your meeting, you can use any messaging app on your mobile device to share the invite or add participants directly to the meeting, and anyone in the Teams channel can join without an invite.
Microsoft have improved the Teams experience on iOS devices with a new presentation mode, the ability to see more participants, and the ability to see shared content and a spotlighted participant concurrently.
Inline message translation gives all your team members a voice and facilitates global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.
The new Power Apps app for Teams is now generally available. It allows you to build and deploy custom apps without leaving Teams. With the simple, embedded graphical app studio, it has never been easier to build low code apps for Teams.
The new Power Apps app for Teams can be backed by a new relational datastore – Dataverse for Teams.
New Power Automate App for Teams generally available
The new app makes it easier than ever to automate workflows within teams. With the simplified flow designer, you can easily build flows by selecting from a number of templates and simply selecting your options from drop down menus.
The new Power Automate app for Teams is now generally available.
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) for Teams generally available
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) for Teams is now generally available. Microsoft are also providing additional features including native authentication, where bots can be designed to provide information to users based upon their identity. You can now also easily make your bot available to your teammates and have admin approval to make it available for the whole organization.
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) for Teams is now generally available.
Teams apps for meetings are now generally available with nearly 20 new apps in the Teams app store, such as Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect, as well as familiar Microsoft apps such as Forms. Learn more. If you’re a developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings.
Call Merge gives end users the capability to merge their Teams VoIP and PSTN active 1-1 calls into another 1-1 call or another group call. You can merge your calls, simply by choosing the “…” (more actions) button from the call controls and select “merge calls”.
To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows you to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a WAN outage. This SBA is now available to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network.
Ericsson has completed the Session Border Controller (SBC) certification process, which ensures that their SBC supports Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams, joining the list of certified SBCs.
Microsoft Teams displays is a new category of all-in-one dedicated Teams devices that features an ambient touchscreen and a hands-free experience powered by Cortana. These devices seamlessly integrate with your PC, providing easy access to Teams chat, meetings, calling, calendar, and files.
New features rolling out to Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hub
The latest app for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, version 1.0.94.2020102101, is now available through the Teams Admin Center. New features have also begun rolling out to Surface Hub, including:
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android:
Support for dual screens: Now you can use Teams Rooms on Android in spaces with a dual screen configuration.
New gallery views: Teams Rooms on Android now supports the 3×3, large gallery, and Together Mode gallery views.
Auto-answer for meetings: Now, Microsoft are providing a setting that allows calls to be answered automatically. This new feature can be enabled through the Admin settings.
Surface Hub:
Together mode: view meeting participants in the new Together mode, which brings everyone into a shared virtual space.
Large gallery: view up to 49 meeting participants simultaneously in full screen mode,
in the new 7×7 video grid.
Single Sign-On (SSO) for Bots
SSO authentication in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) minimizes the number of times users need to enter their login credentials by silently refreshing the authentication token. If users agree to use your app, they will not have to consent again on another device and will be signed in automatically.
Device management automatic alerting in Teams Admin Center
Device management automatic alerting provides more efficiency in identifying devices issues by triggering notifications that can be turned into an immediate correction action.
Device management automatic alerting in Teams Admin Center
Shifts schedule assistance will alert managers if conflicts occur anywhere in the schedule and they will receive conflict warnings when approving schedule change requests. This alerting saves managers time, makes shift scheduling more efficient and reduces inaccuracies that lead to employees not turning up for their shift.
Insights across classes and spotlight student activity (Education)
New capabilities in Insights helps you as an educator to understand engagement and progress of students over time and across your classes. Now, educators can see high-level trends across classes, like inactive students, active students per day, missed online classes and missed assignments.
And within a class, new spotlight cards show trending student behaviours an educator may want to take action on.
Meeting organizers and presenters can now prevent attendees from unmuting during their online class and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands. This can be helpful in class where you want to be in control of who’s speaking when.
Assignment Settings allow educators to set default due times, set preferences on what happens when a new student is added to the class, change the default location where notifications for an assignment will be posted (like an Assignments specific channel), and turn off turn-in celebrations if they’re not age-appropriate for older students.
The Parent /Guardian Weekly Email setting has also moved from the Teams Settings to Assignment Settings. (Settings changes will apply to new assignments created after the updated setting selection has been saved.)
New Assignment Settings give educators more control.
Add your favourite apps to virtual classes and courses
ow you can use some of your favorite apps before, during and after your virtual classes. Educators can incorporate Buncee and Wakelet and have students work together on content, share and discuss topics, and ask questions during class.
Discover How to Add a Buncee as a Tab in Teams Meetings, Ask Questions, and Save them in Buncee.
With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window, and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention. GCC only in November.
You can now add new or existing OneNote Notebooks tab to your Teams channels if you’re a DoD customer. You can also go to Files or add OneNote Personal App to open your OneNote notebooks directly.
Meeting organizers and presenters in the US Government Community Cloud can now prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands.
Microsoft are updating the existing experience of creating new Shared Libraries from OneDrive on the web. The end goal being a simpler and easier way to create collaborative spaces for your shared files and folders for team members to access and collaborate on files from anywhere on any device.
Users will now be able to set familiar sharing and access controls directly in Teams with the added option to share a link with a specific private or group chat. This means only people in that chat have access to the shared content. Shared links intelligently reconcile to file name and all sharing follows the admin settings and configured policies.
The new first run experience in OneDrive now allows you to select which Windows known folders you would like to sync to OneDrive. Moving your important folders to OneDrive allows you to have the power of cloud in your most productive folders on Windows.
Known Folder Move in the first run experience in OneDrive.
Manage page permissions from Power Apps Portals Studio
The Power Apps team have recently announced a new and improved way to mange web page permissions from within the portals Studio. Now, you can do so with just a toggle to either allow anonymous access for everyone or restrict access to users in certain web roles only.
Manage page permissions from Power Apps Portals Studio.
Azure API Management connector on the Power Platform
Microsoft are introducing Azure API Management connectors as a way to quickly publish Azure API Management backed APIs to the Power Platform for easy discovery and consumption, dramatically reducing the time it takes to create apps connecting to Azure services.
Developers can leverage Microsoft Azure API Management in Dataverse for Teams, which will further amplify their pro-code component and unlock access to any Microsoft cloud hosted Service with just a few clicks.
Developers can now leverage Microsoft Azure API Management in Dataverse for Teams.
Microsoft Dataverse for Teams – generally available
The Common Data Service has been renamed Microsoft Dataverse. The low-code data platform is now generally available and comes with a suit of embedded Power Platform tools that make it easy to be apps, automate processes and build chatbots without leaving Teams.
Now in preview, horizontal and vertical container layout controls help automatically reflow and resize controls within them to enable easy, no expression responsive layouts in canvas apps. These are available in mainline and Teams authoring experiences.
New Layout containers in canvas apps make responsive apps easier.
The Power Apps team have announced the release of the rich text editor (RTE) control, which can be used for any multi-line or single-line text field across Dynamics 365.
New rich text capabilities in model-driven apps in Power Apps.
Now generally available, the new intelligent search experience in model-driven Power Apps includes a series of usability enhancements and core relevance search improvements to deliver quality results quickly. Usability improvements for things such as the search bar, suggested results, results page enhancements just to name a few.
Suggested results, as you type are just one of several improvements made to the search experience in model-driven Power Apps.
Power Automate Robotic Process Automation (RPA) UI flows Analytics
The Power Automate team have announced there are now two different options to monitor the analytics for RPA UI flows, either from the Power Platform Admin Center or using the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit.
Usage reports show you which UI flows are being used most so you can get a good idea about your automation inventory.
New to ISV Studio is a feature which allows SVs to view failures their customers encounter when installing an app via AppSource. Once logged into ISV Studio, a user can see a summary of the recent failures for all their apps on the home page.
AI Builder form processing models train using documents with different layouts
, You can now create a unique form processing model that will extract the same information from up to 100 different document layouts in AI Builder. To get started, just create a new Form Processing model and gather at least five sample forms for each layout that you want to process.
Upload at least five sample forms to get started with the form processing models in AI Builder.
AI Builder credit consumption reporting lets you choose the date of a report and download an Excel file showing the consumption in your tenant by environment, during the 30 days preceding the selected target date.
Download consumption reports in the Power Platform Admin Center.
The Power BI team have announced new admin settings which provide more granular control over export options in Power BI, and extend export settings to control also export from paginated reports.
Download report – Controls downloading .pbix files and paginated reports.
The November update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.66.8) is out now. Included in this month’s release are updates to the Hive LLAP Connector on Gateway, November’s mashup engine plus lots more.
Another month, another jam packed Power BI feature summary! This month’s update includes a preview of the new Field List and Model View as well as the Visual Zoom Slider.
Now in preview, anomaly detection helps you enhance your line charts by automatically detecting anomalies in your time series data. It also provides explanations for the anomalies to help with root cause analysis.
Power BI Premium per user public preview now available
Now, Power BI users have access to all the Power BI Premium capabilities, on a per user basis, for the entire public preview period for free. The public preview of Power BI Premium per user has been enabled in all public tenants that requested priority access, and will be rolling out to all tenants worldwide throughout the month of November.
Several updates have been released for paginated reports in Power BI for November 2020 including new paginated reports samples, in-product parameter updates and more.
When users share Word files, the sharing e-mail will include information about the estimated time it will take a user to read the document as well as a list of the key points in the document. People will now see a short three-bullet point summary of the document, helping them quickly determine if the file is relevant to them.
Web capture in Microsoft Edge lets you easily capture and mark up web content, and then save or share it—simply drag a box to select what you want to capture even if you need to scroll. Another improvement to Edge is the a new “My Feed” section within the enterprise new tab page.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (3)
Rolling out (1)
In development (2)
🍾 LAUNCHED
Active time spent reports on SharePoint Site Usage – You can now get reports with aggregated data on the amount of time that users are spending on your intranet sites. Roadmap ID: 57159
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
Microsoft Lists: ‘Quick Edit’ is becoming “Edit in grid view” – When you want to bulk edit lists items in a list, you would click the ‘Quick edit’ button in the top action bar. We are renaming this button to read. “Edit in grid view”. Roadmap ID: 67136
🚂 ROLLING OUT
Microsoft Lists: comments – Add a comment on a list or list items, including @mention capabilities to draw a person’s attention. Roadmap ID: 64169
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2021
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
Release – March 2021
SharePoint: Collapsible sections on modern pages – You’ll have the ability to show page sections in an accordion view (collapsed or expanded) or as tabs. The accordion view will be collapsed by default, but can be set to show expanded. Roadmap ID: 67147
This post details a potential issue observed with Teams user status, some considerations and how it the issue was resolved.
The situation
I recently had several instances of users Teams status either being slow to update, or in some cases showing as ‘offline’ or unavailable. There is an amount of information if you search for it online, but I couldn’t find a definitive answer on how to resolve it through my googling.
I dealt with one user for whom this issue was particularly persistent, their status was stuck as ‘offline’ 100% of the time in Teams, but also Teams showed all their colleagues status as ‘offline’ too.
The image above is an example of how a users status was set to ‘offline’, whilst team mates in their chat were showing as ‘offline also, and active participants in a chat also showing as ‘offline’.
Things to try
So I wrote a post last year, in which I covered many of the troubleshooting steps involved in getting set up with the desktop app. However I’ll summarise what I tried to do (and failed), before finally resolving the issue.
#1 Reset status
/available in the search bar within the Teams app, or;
Press your photo icon > click on your status > reset status
Try resetting your Teams status to set it back to available.
In my users case this did absolutely nothing, didn’t change the status within the Teams app whatsoever.
#2 Logging in using web browser
In my experience Microsoft generally advise logging in via the browser to either a) clear whatever cache is causing the status to get stuck, or b) verify it is a local issue and not one with the Teams app. Just ask the user to login to teams.microsoft.com and verify if their status changes.
In my case, the users status updated to available whilst in the browser, but when closing it reverted back to ‘offline’.
#3 Clearing the Teams cache
As documented here, clearing the Teams cache fixes many of the issues users have with the desktop app, but in my case this didn’t work either.
What worked for me
They always say the simplest solution is the best right? Another saying I like is why use a hammer when a screwdriver will do…well in this case the hammer was needed!
After trying all of the above, what fixed the issue was to uninstall and re-install the Teams desktop app…that was it!
Before uninstalling/ re-installing, I got the user to try logging into Teams desktop on a different machine, which low-and-behold worked. After a fresh version of Teams was installed on the users machine, all the status problems disappeared, so if anyone else has the same problem – try uninstalling & re-installing the Teams app!
Don’t forget the new Offline Presence status!
During my investigations I also remembered reading this from the Microsoft roadmap regarding a new offline presence status coming to Teams this month. So if you do find yourself in a similar situation as me, be sure to include this in your thinking too…
