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.

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SharePoint

In SharePoint: Teams meetings saved to SharePoint/OneDrive, SharePoint spaces text/ annotation styles, new SharePoint store/ app catalog, Lists iOS column width, Lists iOS scan QR code

Teams meeting recordings are now saved to OneDrive and SharePoint 

With this switch away from storage in Azure Media Services, meeting recordings become more integrated with Microsoft 365, which equates to faster availability of the meeting on-demand playback, improved sharing controls including external sharing capabilities, improved video management, advanced compliance, and more.

Find out more: Use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or Stream for meeting recordings

SharePoint spaces text and annotation styles

SharePoint spaces is an immersive page style which lets you create and share, secure and extensible mixed reality experiences. The SharePoint spaces Text web part now has a broader canvas for you to adjust the look and feel of your text. You can now choose from various styles, bold it, adjust colors, alignment, and more.

Find out more: Add text to a SharePoint space

Modernized experience for SharePoint Store & apps/ app catalog

It is now easier to both acquire and deploy apps in SharePoint. The modernized experience for SharePoint Store and acquire experience on the SharePoint side makes it easier and faster to get apps from a variety of sources. You can easily find more popular apps built on SharePoint Framework on the store homepage. You can also search for an app in the search bar or select a category on the left to scroll through available apps.

Find out more: Explore and deploy SharePoint Framework solutions from partners in SharePoint (Microsoft 365)

Adjust a columns width in Microsoft Lists for iOS

The resizing of columns gives you the ability to control the information density on your iPhone or iPad screen. Simply tap and expand or contrast the width to see more, or less, information.

Search via QR code in Microsoft Lists for iOS

This enables a unique way to discover more about an item – say something like a mouse you want to check out from your IT team. Just start up the Lists app for iOS, go to the list, search for that item by scanning the device QR code, the corresponding list item gets highlighted, open the item, and update the entry.

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Teams

In Teams: Reporter/ side-by-side options, additional languages for live captions & live transcripts, start recording & live transcript, dual-tone multi-frequency support, Teams Rooms update on Android, Teams panel updates

Teams (Education)

Teams (Government)

Teams

Reporter/ Side-by-Side options in Presenter Mode for desktop and window sharing

In addition to the previously offered Standout option, two new presenter modes are available when sharing your desktop and window in the Teams desktop app. Reporter mode places content as a visual aid above your shoulder like a news story. Side-by-side mode displays your video feed next to your content.

Find out more: Engage your audience with presenter modes

Live Captions and Live Transcript in additional spoken languages for Teams Meetings

Meetings held in one of the supported languages are now also supported by real-time captioning and transcription. Microsoft have expanded to 27 new spoken languages including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi.

Find out more: Live Captions and Live Transcription

Starting recording and live transcript simultaneously

Teams now automatically also start live transcription for you when you start recording. To ensure this works for your users, both Allow Transcription and Allow cloud recording policies must be turned on. After your meeting, the recording and transcription continues to be accessible through the Recordings & Transcripts tab of your meeting details.

Find out more: View live transcription in a Teams meeting

Dual-tone multi-frequency support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Citrix Workspace-only)

Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) dialing is now available for Teams users within the Citrix Workspace app. DTMF enables the Citrix Workspace user to be admitted into the meeting using the Teams dial pad as an alternative to clicking the “join” link.

Find out more: DTMF interface in Exchange Online

Teams Rooms update on Android

The latest app update for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, version 1449/1.0.96.2021070803, is now available in the Teams Admin Center. This update includes a New remote provisioning and sign-in experience, support for sharing via HDMI ingest, Auto answer for Meet Now and 1080p resolution for outgoing video.

Find out more: What’s new in Microsoft Teams devices

Teams panels updates

Teams panels have recently received updates including extensibility/ line of business app support, remote provisioning and sign in, plus the ability to hide meeting names for sensitive spaces.

Find out more: Teams Extensibility and Line of Business apps, Provisioning Microsoft Teams Devices

Teams (Education)

Create, edit, and join Microsoft Teams meetings in Canvas

Educators and students can access and edit Teams meetings for their courses directly from their Canvas course. You’ll be able to view past and upcoming meetings at a glance on your agenda and schedule, edit, and join meetings from within your LMS course. Plus, you’ll get all the great capabilities available in Teams, including security and meeting settings that help you create a safe and focused classroom environment.

Using these capabilities depends on per-user meeting policies set by your IT administrator and will be supported across desktop and web.

Find out more: Partner Listing: Microsoft Education

Communicate and collaborate with class teams from Blackboard

Microsoft Teams plays an important role in student-educator collaboration, and up until now there has been no easy way for educators to create a team for their LMS course. Educators can now create class teams based on the enrollment roster of their courses with appropriate user roles.

Educators and students can navigate to their respective class teams directly from their Blackboard courses using desktop, mobile, or web platforms.

Find out more: Microsoft Teams classes Integration

Reading progress

Reading Progress enables readers to practice their skills in a safe, student-centric environment. Educators pick a reading passage and can choose to assign it to the entire class, a specific reading group, or an individual student. After the student reads the passage aloud, educators review the recording and either manually identify and code errors or use the Auto-detect feature to identify and code potential errors.

The recordings grant students and educators more flexibility to practice remotely or in the classroom. This helps bring the right support at the right time to each learner and makes it easier to plan regular reading fluency checks.

Find out more: Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams to improve student reading fluency – now rolling out globally!

Simplified navigation in class teams

Now educators can easily access Assignments, Grades, Class Notebook, and Insights from any channel within a class team. Just open up your class team and you’ll see the updated-and-improved navigation. You’ll still be able to add tabs to the General channel and other channels you create.

This new view is available for all educators and students using our grid view layout for teams, and IT Admins will have the option to remove any of the pre-pinned navigation. (Students will only see Class Notebook, Assignments, and Grades, not Insights.)

Education Insights

With Education Insights built directly into your digital classroom, you can. Make informed instructional decisions with data such as online class attendance, assignment engagement, class activity, and more. 

Find out more: Introduction to Education Insights in Microsoft Teams

Teams (Government)

These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

Reporter and Side-by-Side Presenter Mode in desktop or window sharing
Two new presenter modes are available when sharing your desktop or window in the Teams desktop app. Reporter mode places content as a visual aid above your shoulder like a news story. Side-by-side mode displays your video feed next to your content. You can now select a mode that fits your needs and promotes a more engaging presentation and experience. Available in GCC. Learn more.

Breakout Room Timer, Room Retention, and Participant
You can now set a timer from 5 to 60 minutes for Breakout rooms from the Breakout Room settings. Once the timer has expired, rooms are automatically closed, and participants are returned to the main meeting. Organizers can also reassign participants when rooms are opened. Breakout room assignments now persist over multiple sessions. These features are useful for efficiently managing discussions and ensuring the right participants are in each breakout. Available in GCC-High. Learn more.

Live Captions and Live Transcript in additional spoken languages for Teams Meetings
Meetings held in one of the supported languages are now also supported by real-time captioning and transcription. We have expanded to 27 new spoken languages including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi to name a few. This provides flexibility and additional clarity for your participants to engage in the meeting. Available in GCC. Learn more about Live Captions and Live Transcription.

Live Transcription with speaker attribution in Teams Meetings
Live transcription allows you to follow conversations (in English-US) alongside the meeting video or audio in real time, promoting inclusivity for participants who are deaf/hard of hearing or different levels of language proficiency. Attendees who joined late or missed the meeting can easily catch up by reading what was discussed and searching the transcript by speaker. Admins must turn on Allow transcription policy to enable this feature. Available in GCC. Learn more.

Starting recording and live transcript simultaneously
When you turn on recording, Teams now automatically also start live transcription for you. this conveniently captures the discussion and detailing what was spoken in the transcript with one click. To ensure this works for your users, both Allow Transcription and Allow cloud recording policies must be turned on. After your meeting, the recording and transcription continues to be accessible through the Recordings & Transcripts tab of your meeting details. Available in GCC. Learn more.

Lower all raised hands
When at least one hand is raised, meeting organizers and presenters can now lower all raised hands with a single click. Simply navigate to the participant pane and click on the Lower all hands option. This helps quickly lower all hands when associated questions have been resolved to make way for new raised questions. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.

Include computer sound when sharing on Mac
Mac desktop users can now include audio when sharing their desktop or window during a Teams meeting. This is great when sharing a video with voiceover and music. It allows everyone to watch simultaneously without echoes or sync issues. You can find this setting in the share content. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.

Updating settings for attendees’ video
We have added additional ways to manage attendee audio and video permissions in Teams meetings to help prevent disruptions and create a safer meeting environment. Now, you can configure the permissions to have all attendees’ camera-enabled or disabled before the meeting. You can also enable or disable the ability for individual attendees to use their cameras. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.

Dual-tone multi-frequency support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Citrix Workspace-only)
Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) dialing is now available for Teams users within the Citrix Workspace app. DTMF enables the Citrix Workspace user to be admitted into the meeting using the Teams dial pad as an alternative to clicking the “join” link. Available in GCC. Learn more about DTMF.

Windows 10 Native Notifications in Teams
You can now choose the style of your notifications: built-in Teams or Windows native notifications. The latter brings a suite of benefits, like respecting focus assist mode which enables you to avoid distracting notifications when you need to focus, and integrating with Windows 10 action center to helps you review your notifications in one place. If you have a Windows build 10.0.17763.288 or higher, you can make this change in Teams notifications settings. Available in GCCH and DOD. Learn More.

MacOS native notifications in Teams
Users can now choose to deliver Microsoft Teams notifications, either via Teams built-in notifications or via macOS native notifications. When choosing native notifications, Teams inherits the OS notifications settings and supports quiet hours, action center triaging and more native features. This is only available on MacOS 10.15 or later.  Available in GCC and GCCH. Learn more.

Chat preview notification settings
Have you ever shared your screen, or had someone looking over your shoulder at your screen and you found yourself wishing you could hide your notifications? Now, you can change your settings and control whether the message previews show up on your screen. Available in GCC-H and DoD. Learn More.

Customize your organization’s apps store in Teams for government clouds
Now you can customize your organization’s apps store in Teams with your company branding by adding your logo, custom backgrounds, and custom text colors to make it more inviting to end users. Available in GCC.

Device management capabilities
Device management capabilities in Teams admin center are now included in the DoD environment.

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Power Apps

In Power Apps: In-app notifications in model-driven apps, Sample custom connector for ServiceNow, Power Apps Ideas public preview, connection references support in Power Platforms Tools public preview, canvas components app scope, Int, Trunc, WeekNum, and ISOWeekNum in Power Fx, ILogger Interface, VNet Connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows, Power Apps October release wave 2, Application Insights (Preview)

In-app notifications in model-driven apps (Public Preview)

Model-driven apps now have the ability to notify users while working within the web or mobile app.  You will see all received notifications in a notification center with an indication of new notifications shown on the bell in the header and a new notification count.

When new notifications arrive, the a badge count is shown on the bell icon in the header. Clicking the bell icon opens the notification center to show latest notifications first. To enable this feature, makers need to opt-in to show the notification center and toasts to users for each model-driven app.

Find out more: Announcing public preview for in-app notifications in model-driven apps

Sample custom connector for ServiceNow using OAuth authentication

The Power Apps team have created a sample Power Apps canvas application and Power Automate flow that show how to use the custom connector. The sample custom connector for ServiceNow that provides OAuth authentication and support for attachments. You can find the source code for the sample custom connector on GitHub. The sample custom connector supports OAuth authentication, attachments, and CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on an example entity.

Find out more: A sample custom connector for ServiceNow using OAuth authentication

Power Apps Ideas (Public Preview)

Announced at this year’s Microsoft Build conference, Power Apps Ideas, an AI-powered assistance to help anyone create apps using natural language is now in public preview. Power Apps Ideas lets you tell Power Apps what you’d like to see—for example, “show me customers from the US whose subscription expired”—and a set of formulas will be presented along with an explanation of how they work. Simply select one to apply the logic to your app.

Find out more: Writing Power Fx formulas with natural language

Connection references support in Power Platform Build Tools (Public Preview)

The Power Apps team have announced the July refresh for the Power Platform Build tools and the Public Preview for the connection references and environment variable support in the Power Platform Build Tools and PAC CLI. The July refresh includes changes to solution pack & unpack, pac auth create and pac plugin int.

Find out more: Announcing the public preview for connection references support in Power Platform Build Tools

Canvas components can now access app scope directly

The Power Apps team are enabling a canvas component to directly access variables, collections, controls, and tabular data sources from its host app.  No longer do you need to pass everything in and out through component properties.

Until now, canvas components have been properly encapsulated and could not access information and resources from the app.  Everything needed to be passed in to the component through input properties. But sometimes you want to define a component just for this app. There is a newly introduced component setting that does exactly this Access app scope.

Find out more: Canvas components can now access app scope directly

Power Fx: Int, Trunc, WeekNum, and ISOWeekNum functions

The Power Apps team have added four new functions to Power Fx formulas, straight from their definitions in Excel:

• Int and Trunc fill out our rounding functions.  These are common functions in Excel that until now one would need to translate to one of our Round functions.  They are the same for positive numbers, but for negative numbers Int rounds away from zero and Trunc rounds toward zero.  For example, Int( -2.4 ) returns -3 while Trunc( -2.4 ) returns -2.
• WeekNum and ISOWeekNum have been common customer requests.  These functions return the week number in the current year which is helpful for many business date calculations.   WeekNum starts with the week containing January 1, while ISOWeekNum starts with the first Thursday of the year.  For example using August 11, 2021, WeekNum( Today() ) returns 33 while ISOWeekNum( Today() ) returns 32 as we haven’t made it to Thursday of this week yet.

These functions are rolling out now and are available in version 3.21074 or later.

Find out more: Power Fx: Int, Trunc, WeekNum, and ISOWeekNum functions

Write Telemetry to your Application Insights resource using ILogger

When you opt-in to the Application Insights integration described in the earlier Announcing Monitor model-driven apps using Application Insights (Preview) post, you can also use the new Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.PluginTelemetry.ILogger Interface in your plug-in code.

You should use ILogger because it allows telemetry for events that occur within a plug-in to be integrated with the larger scope of data captured with the Application Insights integration. When you use the ILogger interface, the telemetry is written directly to the same Application Insights resource that you choose to have your Dataverse and model-driven app telemetry exported to. The plug-in telemetry you write is never sent to Microsoft. If you use ILogger in a plug-in that is not running in an environment using the Application Insights integration, nothing happens.

Find out more: Log plug-in telemetry to your Application Insights resource

VNet Connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows (Public Preview)

Earlier this year, we introduced VNet (Azure Virtual Network) connectivity for Power BI Datasets and we are now excited to announce the public preview of VNet connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows. The new VNet connectivity feature enables secure outbound connectivity from Power Platform dataflows to data sources within your Azure VNet.

Find out more: Announcing VNet Connectivity for Power Platform Dataflows (Public Preview)

Power Apps October 2021 Release Wave 2 updates

The Power Apps October release wave 2 makes discovering data much easier and comes with enhanced UI experiences that are modern; take advantage of these now for your Model-driven apps. Updates include:

• Discovering data: new global search, advanced lookup, Power Apps grid,
• Usability improvements: accessibility updates, sharing records, bulk edit, app-level panes
• Modern experiences: custom pages, app designer, modern browsers

Find out more: 2021 release wave 2 features available for early access

Monitor model-driven apps using Application Insights (Preview)

Now available in the Power Platform admin center, this new Data Export option is geared towards those customers interested in directly interacting with the service telemetry data. This option offers customers an all-encompassing Self-Serve solution for monitoring user activity, diagnosing performance issues, and troubleshooting errors.

Use Application Insights to monitor & analyze service telemetry data produced by UCI page and form loads, Platform API calls, custom plug-ins, and more.

Find out more: Preview: Set up exporting to Application Insights

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Power Automate

In Power Automate: Desktop update, 13 new connectors, add code to your custom connector

Power Automate Desktop August 2021 update

The August 2021 update of Power Automate Desktop has been released! You can download the latest release here. Here is a summary of the new features in this release:

• Actionable connectivity error messages in console and designer
• Introduction of new Excel related actions
• Improvement of the action ‘Set screen resolution’

Find out more: Power Automate Desktop August 2021 update

13 new connectors

Microsoft partnered with thirteen new partners to include their services in Power Platform in July, here’s a look at the newly added connectors:

• HR Cloud – Use this connector to easily connect the employee data from HR Cloud with other applications that support Power Automate integration and vice versa.
• DeskDirector – Use the DeskDirector connector to automate the creation and processing of our native Tickets, Forms, Chat sessions, Email, and more.
• nps.today – nps.today binds customer loyalty insights and NPS surveys together across all your tools and platforms so you always have the full customer overview at hand with a single unifying platform. 
• Lang.ai – Lang.ai is a no-code platform for free text classification and auto-tagging. Thanks to our patented unsupervised AI algorithm that learns only from your historical data, ang.ai makes it incredibly easy to customize a model for your own business and use case.
• Secplug Scan – The Secplugs Malware Scan connector lets you scan files, URLs and emails to identify and block malicious content. Integrate at your workflow boundaries to ensure your cloud storage/application remains secure. 
• Gratavid – Gratavid is a tool for collecting and sending personalized videos via email and text. The Gratavid connector allows organizations to send video thank you cards (i.e. – Gratavids) based on events in their CRM or other apps. 
• Assently E-Sign – With Assently E-Sign on the Microsoft Power Platform you can automate e-signature workflows on documents, forms, and smart contracts. 
• WenDocs Linker – WenDocs is a brand-new force growing from the traditional CCM/CEM (customer communication/experience management) domain. We provide a professional-level template designer and a lightweight publishing service to increase your document productivity. 
• Harness PDFx – Harness PDFx is a SaaS platform, automating the extraction of data from the most complex and varied PDFs in the commercial real estate and financial services industry. 
• Document AI Konfuzio – Build Document AI with Konfuzio to categorize and extract information (such as first name, last name, or date of birth) from any document or image. 
• LAWLIFT – LAWLIFT offers its customers one of the simplest ways to automate documents, use them and update them with ease.
• Waaila – We have one goal with Waaila – give everyone the tools needed to raise the standard of online marketing data quality. 
• IN-D Face Match – Detect human faces and match it against the photos from ID cards for identity verification process in onboarding.

Find out more: July Updates on Power Automate Partner Connectors

Add code to your custom connector

Custom connector developers can now add C# code directly within the Custom Connector wizard! Now available in public preview supports more transformation scenarios without having to worry about hosting your code. Some examples include:

• sending external requests to fetch additional data
• complex body, query, header, and status transformations
• handling pagination

Find out more: Create a custom connector from scratch

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Power BI

In Power BI: Admin APIs to Determine Access Rights, visualise SharePoint lists now GA, July 2021 Feature Summary, PivotTable refresh, Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium, On-premises data gateway July 2021, free virtual workshops

Expanded Feature Availability for Power BI Free License Users

Microsoft have announced that in the coming weeks they are expanding the availability of Power BI and Excel connected features such as PivotTables from Power BI datasets and Organization data types to Power BI free license users.

Users who have a Power BI free license can connect from Excel to datasets hosted in a Power BI Premium workspace. These users can now:

• Build PivotTables connected to Power BI datasets, including certified and promoted datasets, from the Data ribbon in Excel
• Lookup and refresh values in Power BI datatypes from the Data Types gallery.

Find out more: Power BI and Excel: Expanded Feature Availability for Power BI Free License Users (Coming Soon)

Goals for Power BI Mobile

Goals is a great addition to Power BI. Built directly on top of Power BI data, Goals provides a data-driven, collaborative, adaptable way of measuring and tracking progress on key business metrics. Now, Goals is enabled in the latest update of the Power BI mobile apps!

Having Goals in your Power BI mobile app lets you monitor the health of your business directly from your smart phone, no matter where you are. You can also check in and update progress for goals from the app, helping you to ensure that the status of your KPIs are always up to date.

Find out more: Power BI Mobile apps now support Goals!

Automatic aggregations (Public Preview)

Automatic aggregations in Power BI Premium are now in public preview! Unlock massive datasets without having to copy large volumes of data or manage data loads. Automatic aggregations are managed automatically by Power BI, accelerating time to insight, and reducing TCO.

Find out more: Announcing public preview of automatic aggregations!

Default sensitivity label policies, plus other Information Protection features added to Power BI (Public Preview)

The Power BI team have announced the public preview of default label policies in Power BI Desktop together with some of the top asked MIP features in Power BI:

• MIP sensitivity labels in Power BI desktop – general availability!
• Support for Get data from protected Excel files in Power BI Desktop – preview
• Data source MIP sensitivity label inheritance in Power BI Desktop preview, and extend data source label inheritance to support Excel files
• MIP Sensitivity label support in paginated reports – preview
• Mandatory label setting available in the M365 compliance center
• MIP label activities in Microsoft 365 Activity Explorer preview

Find out more: Announcing Default sensitivity label preview and other top asked MIP features in Power BI

August 2021 on-premises data gateway update

The Power BI team have announced that they have released the August update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.93.3). This version of the gateway will ensure that the reports that you publish to the Power BI Service and refresh via the Gateway will go through the same query execution logic/run-time as in the August Power BI Desktop version.

Find out more: On-premises data gateway August 2021 update is now available

Premium Metrics App (Public Preview)

The Power BI team have announced that the all new metrics app for premium capacities is available here as public preview. The new app is built to serve as an out-of-the-box one-stop-shop for whatever capacity admins will need to know in order to manage their Power BI Premium capacities.

Find out more: New Premium Metrics App preview now available

Automated statuses and improved filtering for Power BI Goals

Scorecard authors are now able to automate status updates based on rules that govern that goal or subgoal. By entering the edit experience and navigating to the status rules tab of the settings pane, users will be able to precisely set when goals are on track or falling behind.  

The Power BI team have also improved filtering so that users can easily view all the goals labeled as a particular status by clicking on the summary cards at the top of the scorecard, making it easier than ever to see at a glance what’s at risk and what’s on track.  We have also included a keyword search, making it easy to search for specific goals and see how they’re doing at a glance, without losing context of the parent/child relationships. 

Find out more: Announcing automated statuses and improved filtering for Power BI Goals

Scanner API now generally available

The Power BI team have announced that the Scanner APIs for extracting tenant-level metadata using Power BI Admin REST APIs are now in general availability (GA). Power BI Admin APIs, along with a .NET SDK, enable administrators to create their own custom-made solutions based on Power BI metadata and lineage.

Find out more: Scanner API is now in GA

Enhanced experience for browsing visuals

The Power BI team have introduced a new look for the Power BI in-product store coming with August desktop release.  In the store you can browse all the visuals authorized by your organization. The store contains:

• AppSource visuals: more than 300 stunning visuals created by Microsoft or partners.
• Organizational visuals: private or AppSource visuals managed by your Power BI admin.
• A unified view (“All visuals”) where you get access to all visuals available in your organization in one page. 

Find out more: Enhanced experience for browsing visuals

Power BI August 2021 Feature Summary

The August update for Power BI Desktop update and includes enhancements for Q&A as well as for Shapes, plus automatic aggregations for DirectQuery.

Find out more: Power BI August 2021 Feature Summary

Power BI Angular Component

The newly released Power BI component for Angular lets you easily embed your Power BI reports, dashboards and more into your Angular web application. Using this library, you can embed Power BI reports, dashboards, tiles, visuals, Q&A and paginated reports. You can also optimize your report’s performance using the available bootstrap integration or phased embedding, set and edit event handlers, and take advantage of the available client-side APIs.

Find out more: Announcing Power BI Angular Component

Refresh history updates for models utilizing XMLA endpoints

The general availability of read/write XMLA endpoints in Power BI Premium enables customers to leverage enterprise BI tools directly on Power BI datasets. In addition to the existing data refresh features listed in the documentation, the data refresh history view will reflect changes made utilizing XMLA endpoints.

For a dataset updated via XMLA endpoints, the Power BI service will display last updated date, timestamp, duration, and status in the following locations: datasets contents list, overview page, settings page, refresh history, lineage view, report header, and report information cards.

Find out more: Refresh history updates for models utilizing XMLA endpoints

Power BI REST API support for DAX Queries (Public Preview)

The Power BI team have announced the public preview of a new REST API to query datasets in Power BI by using Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). The new DAX REST API avoids dependencies on Analysis Services client libraries, requires no connection to XMLA endpoints, and works in Power BI Premium as well as in Power BI shared capacity.

Find out more: Announcing the public preview of Power BI REST API support for DAX Queries

Data gateway support for Single Sign-On (SSO) with Azure Active Directory

The Power BI team have announced General Availability (GA) for Single Sign-On (SSO) through the data gateway to cloud data sources that rely on Azure Active Directory (AAD)-based authentication. In addition to Kerberos-based and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)-based SSO to on-prem data sources, you can now get seamless AAD SSO connectivity to Azure-based data sources, such as Azure Synapse Analytics (SQL DW), Azure SQL, Azure Data Explorer, and Snowflake on Azure through an on-premises data gateway. 

Find out more: Announcing data gateway support for Single Sign-On (SSO) with Azure Active Directory

General availability of backup and restore for Power BI datasets

Backup and Restore for datasets in Power BI Premium and Premium per User (PPU) are now generally available. Whether you are migrating Azure AS workloads to Power BI or must consolidate Power BI tenants due to a merger or acquisition or simply want to backup Power BI datasets on a regular basis to meet the data retention and disaster recovery requirements of your organization, you can now rely on the Backup and Restore capabilities of Power BI as a fully supported feature.

Find out more: Announcing general availability of backup and restore for Power BI datasets

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BONUS! Even more updates!

Congratulations if you have made it this far through the monthly update! For getting to the end you will be rewarded with other related titbits from around Microsoft 365…

Windows 365 generally available

Now generally available, Windows 365 combines the power and security of the cloud with the versatility and simplicity of the PC. From contractors and interns to software developers and industrial designers, Windows 365 enables a variety of new scenarios for the new world of work.

Find out more: Welcome to your Windows 365 Cloud PC

Microsoft Bookings with Microsoft Teams in all Microsoft 365 for frontline workers product licenses

To help healthcare workers schedule and manage virtual appointments more effectively, Microsoft have added Microsoft Bookings with Microsoft Teams in all Microsoft 365 for frontline workers product licenses. For example, with the Bookings app in Microsoft Teams, healthcare workers can easily schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits for simple telehealth workflows. 

Find out more: Virtual visits are now even simpler with Microsoft Bookings

Q&A in Microsoft Teams meetings

Microsoft are bringing a new experience for questions and answers in meetings with the Q&A app, which allows meeting organizers and presenters to add open or moderated Q&As to any Teams meeting. The Q&A app enables attendees to ask and reply to questions before and during a meeting.

Organizers and designated presenters can mark best answers, filter responses, moderate and dismiss questions, and pin posts. Responses to questions are threaded in a conversation with the original question. Designated presenters can act as co-moderators to help screen questions.

Find out more: New communities experiences bolster employee engagement in the age of hybrid work

New Communities app in Teams and Outlook for web

The Communities app for Microsoft Teams helps you stay connected to what’s happening in your communities, tap into knowledge across teams and departments, and crowdsource solutions and best practices from frontline workers. And in the coming weeks, we’re updating the app to inherit Microsoft Teams styling, further incorporate notifications and deep-linking, and include new capabilities like suggested communities.

Find out more: Enhancements to Communities app for Microsoft Teams

Speedy events in Outlook

Speedy events automatically sets events to start “late” or end “early,” helping people carve out essential breaks between back-to-backs meetings. This month, we are expanding support to the new Outlook for Mac.

Find out more: New settings in Outlook give everyone a break between meetings

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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.

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SharePoint

In SharePoint: Boost SharePoint news, collapsible sections, custom list templates, SharePoint Server Subscription Edition

Boost SharePoint news

The SharePoint news service now lets you can prioritize important news and announcements, so they appear at the top of employee news feeds across Microsoft 365. You can boost the visibility of a news article for a set time, until an employee has seen your content, or until a viewer has seen the item in their feed a set number of times.

• You can boost news posts from organization news sites only.
• Boosted news posts are currently shown in auto news digests only.
• A maximum 10 news posts can be boosted at one time.
• You must have edit permissions on the organization news site to boost news posts.

Find out more: Boost news from organization news sites

Collapsible sections

Collapsible sections allow users to show page in an accordion view (collapsed or expanded) or as tabs.

NOTE: The accordion view will be collapsed by default, but can be set to show expanded.

Find out more: Roadmap ID 67147

Custom list templates

Microsoft Lists now supports custom list templates! You can create and manage custom list templates using Microsoft PowerShell – leveraging the Add-SPOSiteScript cmdlet. When users create new lists, they can select one of your custom list templates from the new “From your organization” tab. This new tab will appear next to the “From Microsoft” tab that showcases the out-of-box ready-made templates from Microsoft.

Find out more: Creating custom list templates

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition represents the next step in the SharePoint Server journey emphasizing the specific needs of our on-premises customers. This new way of staying up-to-date with SharePoint Server means new levels of reliability and performance, delivering features and capabilities that simplify administration, protect communications and information.

Find out more: A new day for SharePoint Server

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Teams

In Teams: Find recordings based on what was said, lock meetings, slide translate, auto recording, video gallery paging, org-wide backgrounds, real-time telemetry, related content for mobile, hard audio mutes PSTN, Human Interface Device support, call transfer, speed dial, emoji picker, immersive reader, inline message translation, Headspace integration, share-to-stage support, app risk evaluation, multi-geo support, safe links

Teams (Education)

Teams (Government)

Teams

Find a meeting recording based on what was said

You can now find meeting recordings in Microsoft Search based on the meeting transcript. This feature is available to all users by default and makes it easier to find videos in Microsoft 365. You can access this feature through the search bar in Teams you use to find other file types.

Find out more: Teams cloud meeting recording

Lock a meeting from additional joins

You can now choose to lock their meetings to prevent subsequent join attempts. Anyone attempting to join a locked meeting from any device is informed with a message that they are not able to join as the meeting is locked. This helps avoid distractions from late joiners during the meeting. This feature is currently available in Desktop app only.

Find out more: Manage meeting settings in Microsoft Teams

Slide translate in PowerPoint Live in Teams

Make your slides more inclusive with slide translate in PowerPoint Live in Teams. This private setting allows you to see a personalized view of the slide where text is translated in your chosen language. Now you can better understand the presented content privately. This feature supports 19 languages with more to come.

Find out more: Share PowerPoint slides in a Teams meeting

Meeting auto recording

Meeting organizers are now able to set a single meeting occurrence or series to auto-record by enabling the “Record automatically” setting from Meeting Options. The meeting automatically starts recording once the first participant from the same organization joins the meeting. The recording is saved to initiator’s OneDrive (privately scheduled meetings) or SharePoint (channel meetings).

This feature is available in Desktop and Mobile and not available to an A1 user.

Find out more: Manage meeting settings in Microsoft Teams

Paging on video gallery

When you are in gallery view mode, and there are more videos than what can be shown at once on the meeting stage, navigation controls < and > now appears below the Video Gallery. You can use these controls to view more video participants. The maximum number of videos on the meeting stage can vary depending on your device configuration and internet bandwidth.

Find out more: Using video in Microsoft Teams

Organisation wide backgrounds

You can now tailor your Teams meetings background to your organization. To enable this feature, simply upload images in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center under Meeting policies and they are available to all your users. You can add up to 50 images.

NOTE: Organization-wide backgrounds is now temporarily available and will require an Advanced Communications license when it becomes generally available by the end of the year. 

Find out more: Change your background for a Teams meeting

End user real-time telemetry for meetings

Call health panel provides Teams end-users functionality that helps identify issues during a Teams meeting or a VOIP call. This empowers your users with diagnostics to investigate audio, video, content sharing or network related issues.

The real-time metrics are updated every 15 seconds, providing the ability to trace issues as they occur.

Find out more: Monitor call and meeting quality in Teams

Related meeting content on mobile

Related Content makes meetings more effective by providing you with important information from your mailboxes, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint sites. This helps you prepare before meetings by offering content you haven’t had a chance to read or may want to revisit. You can find this content on the Meeting Details page.

Find out more: Set up your Teams mobile apps

Hard audio mute includes PSTN attendees in meetings

Meeting presenters and organizers can now prevent PSTN participants from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hand. The PSTN participant can request to speak by raising their hand in a meeting via dial-pad command (press *5).

Find out more: Manage attendee audio and video permissions in Teams meetings

Support for Human Interface Devices on Windows Virtual Desktop

Now you can connect external devices like a headset or mouse to interact in Teams on the Windows Virtual Desktop platform. For example, if you have a mute or unmute button on your headset, the controls are now recognized when using it in a Teams meeting in WVD.

Find out more: What is Azure Virtual Desktop?

Transfer Calls between desktop and mobile

Teams makes it easy to place and receive calls from several different endpoints, including desktop and mobile devices, but sometimes you need to move locations or devices to finish your call. The new endpoint transfer capability allows you to seamlessly move your calls between different devices, such as from your laptop to mobile phone, without any interruption in call service or quality.

Find out more: Join a Teams meeting on a second device

Speed dial for mobile

Calling users on mobile devices can now access their Speed Dial contacts that were available on Mac, Windows and Teams devices. You can also add or remove speed dial contacts. This feature gives mobile users one tap access to reach their most important contacts.

Find out more: First things to know about calls in Microsoft Teams

Expanded emoji picker

Now with more than800 emojis, select a category and easily find the emoji you need and use the skin tone selector to pick an emoji that better represent you. Quickly add emojis directly when composing a chat, use the short code picker to add emojis using text.

Find out more: Send an emoji, GIF, or sticker in Teams

Immersive reader support for Mobile

Immersive Reader, which uses proven customization techniques to support reading across ages and abilities, is coming to Teams iOS and Android apps. You can now hear posts and chat messages read aloud using Immersive Reader on the Teams mobile apps. This functionality was previously available only on the web and desktop apps.

Find out more: Use Immersive Reader in Microsoft Teams

Inline Message Translation in channels for Android and iOS

Inline message translation in Channels lets you translate Channel posts and replies into your preferred language. To translate a message, press-and-hold the channel post or reply and then select “Translate”. The post/reply will be translated to your UI language by default. If you want to change the translation language, go to Settings > General > Translation.

Find out more: Translate a message in Teams mobile

Headspace integration with Microsoft Viva Insights

A curated set of guided meditations and mindfulness exercises from Headspace are now available in the Viva Insights app in Teams to help you start your day grounded, relax your mind before a big presentation, or disconnect from work in the evening.

Find out more: Mindfulness content from Headspace

Share-to-stage support for meeting apps

Developers can now configure their Teams meeting apps to use the “main stage” – enabling several collaboration scenarios. This integration allows the app content from the meeting side panel to take full screen and allow users to interact with it. 

Find out more: Configure your app for meeting scenarios

App risk evaluation

Teams admins are now able to view the security, compliance, and data privacy details for apps coming from Microsoft Cloud App Security. This helps Teams admins save time on security reviews and enable a more focused selection-based security specifications, resulting in increased app quality.

Find out more: Ensuring security of your Microsoft Teams apps with Microsoft Cloud App Security

Multi-Geo support

To help customers meet data residency requirements, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo has been extended to include Microsoft Teams. This allows organizations to specify where their Teams core customer data sits, down to the team and end user. 

Find out more: Multi-Geo capabilities in Microsoft Teams

Safe links in Teams

Safe links are now available to protect users in Microsoft Teams. You can enable or disable Safe Links protection for Microsoft Teams within Safe Links policies. Specifically, you use the Select the action for unknown or potentially malicious URLs within Microsoft Teams setting.

Find out more: Safe Links settings for Microsoft Teams

Teams (Education)

Class Teams from Canvas

Educators can now create class teams based on the enrolment roster of their courses in Canvas. Each class team will have the appropriate user roles and students and educators can navigate to their respective class teams directly from their Canvas courses using desktop, mobile, or web platforms.

Find out more: Teams integrations with Canvas and other Learning Management Systems

Group assignments

With the new group assignment feature, groups of students can work together to create, collaborate, and submit one assignment for the whole group. Educators can give individual comments and grades or group grades, and all students in the group will receive credit. This makes it easy to encourage student collaboration and for the educator to grade group work. 

Find out more: Assignments and grading class work

“Return for edit” Assignment option

Now, educators can return an assignment to students for edits. This way it’s easy to share feedback and allow students to learn from and incorporate that feedback into the original assignment. If you’re an educator just select the More options next to return and select “Return for edits”.

Find out more: Grade, return, and reassign assignments

Filter assignments by class in main assignment view

Now educators and students can filter their Assignments by the class in the main assignment view. It’s a small tweak, but a great one if you like things organized and visible by class.

Find out more: Assignments in Teams for Education

Teams Advisor Education deployment

For IT admins looking to set up Microsoft Teams in their tenants for the first time, now there is an education tailored plan in Teams Advisor. The Teams Advisor helps IT plan their overall deployment, and helps bring the project team together to create a cohesive strategy to deploy Teams in their education institution.

Find out more: Use Advisor for Teams to help you roll out Microsoft Teams

Education policy wizard now automatically incorporates new features and policies

IT admins can now easily apply education tailored policies for a secure learning environment for students, educators and staff in few clicks. With the new improvements, whenever a new feature is added to Teams, the appropriate policy for that feature will be automatically added by default without any admin’s intervention.

Find out more: Introducing new policy wizard to easily apply admin policies in Teams for Education

Cortana for Education

Cortana voice assistance is now available in the Microsoft Teams for Education mobile app. With this new capability, you can perform a variety of tasks with the click of the microphone button and a voice command such as check your class schedule, join a class and much more.

Find out more: Cortana voice assistance in Teams

Suggested Replies in chats now available for educators

Now, educators using the Teams mobile app can easily see up to three recommended responses to choose from while in chat, helping you save time and respond quickly. This is enabled by default for educators and faculty and disabled for all students.

Find out more: Use suggested replies to respond to messages without typing

Teams (Government)

These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

Virtual Breakout Rooms – Breakout rooms allow meeting organizers to divide the meeting into smaller groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions. 

Guest Access – You can invite users in other DOD tenants to collaborate on documents in Teams channels, resources, chats, and applications while still maintaining control over your data.

Together Mode for Teams Rooms – Together Mode for Teams Rooms uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting or class. Available in GCC-High.

Teams Meetings Auto Recording – Meeting organizers are now able to set a single meeting occurrence or series to auto-record by enabling the “Record automatically” setting from Meeting Options. Available in GCC.

Live reactions in Teams Meetings – All attendees can now use emojis to react during a meeting. Available in GCC and GCC-High

End user real-time telemetry for meetings – Call health panel provides Teams end-users functionality that helps identify issues during a Teams meeting or a VOIP call. Available in GCC, GCC-High, and DOD.

Spotlighting multiple users in a meeting – Organizers and presenters can now spotlight up to 7 participants simultaneously during meetings. Available in GCC.

Organization-wide background – You can now tailor your Teams meetings background to your organization. Available in GCC.

Live Events with Live Caption – You can now schedule and host a live event in the DOD environment – broadcasting video and meeting content to large online audiences. Available in DOD

Large meeting support – Hold interactive meetings and webinars with more attendees—up to 1,000 people, including chats and polls. Available in GCC-High and DOD.

Windows 10 Native Notifications in Teams – You can now choose the style of your notifications: built-in Teams or Windows native notifications. Available in GCC.

Chat preview notification settings – Now, you can change your settings and control whether the message previews shows up on your screen. Available in GCC.

Missed activity email – You can now continue and monitor your Teams’ notifications via email. Available in DoD.

Device management capabilities – Device management capabilities in Teams admin center are now included in the GCC-High environment.

Tags – Tags in Microsoft Teams let users quickly and easily connect with a subset of people on a team. Available in GCC-High. 

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Power Apps

In Power Apps: Command designer with Power Fx (preview), custom pages, performance insights, Portals & Power BI enhancements, multi-table lookups, pricing changes

Command designer with Power Fx (preview)

You can now customize command bars in model-driven apps without code! These new capabilities play a major role in the convergence of canvas and model-driven apps. These new capabilities are built on a new, modern infrastructure that’s conducive to both model-driven and canvas app technologies and will scale into the future. Key improvements include:

• Enhances custom pages (or the convergence of canvas and model-driven apps), open custom pages as dialogs, trigger cloud flows from a button
• Power Fx support for visibility and action logic, or use JavaScript for advanced logic
• Command designer simplifies customization – whether low-code or pro-code
• Better ALM support along with standardized localization and presence in the solution interface
• Better app level control – commands are applied to individual apps
• Simple, flat data model
• Classic commands remain supported, Apps can run both classic + modern commands side by side

Find out more: Announcing command designer with Power Fx (preview)

Custom Pages for converging model-driven apps and canvas apps

Custom pages are now in public preview. A custom page can be used in places where all pages are supported including main area, dialogs, and the new app side pane. This allows scenarios like a pixel perfect landing page with data pulled from across the organization, data driven pages that use a record’s data to change the experience, dialog designed to optimize specific business actions, and productivity tools that support the main tasks for the app.

Find out more: Announcing public preview of Custom Pages for converging model-driven apps and canvas apps

Performance Insights (preview) for Model-driven apps

Performance Insights, now in preview is a self-service tool for enterprise app makers that analyzes runtime user data and provides a prioritized list of recommendations to help improve the performance of Model-driven apps. With this feature, raw telemetry data is converted into actionable work items for you to tackle.

Find out more: Introducing Performance Insights (preview) for Model-driven apps

Power Apps portals/ Power BI integration enhancements

Power Apps portals has native support for Power BI reports and dashboard. Portals with version 9.3.4.x have additional support for more Power BI functionality, including:

• Dashboards and report from Azure Analysis Services using live connections.
• Dashboards/Single tile with role-based security. You can use roles parameter for Dashboard/Single tile.
• Dashboard with different data sources having different role-based security.

Portals with version 9.3.6.x or later support the following capabilities:

• Azure AD guest user support for “Embed for organization” access type (i.e., authentication_type:”AAD”)

Find out more: Power Apps portals and Power BI integration enhancements

Multi-table lookups (preview)

Multi-table lookups are now available in preview for use via API. Multi-table lookups (also sometimes known as polymorphic lookups) allow the creation of a lookup in one table that looks up records in multiple other tables at once.

With multi-table lookups, you can perform a lookup on 2 or more tables at the same time and locate the record you want from the referenced tables. For the current preview:

• Lookups can be constructed and managed through API only
• Model driven apps currently provide the best experience with the lookups

Find out more: Multi-table Lookups

Updates to Power Apps pricing and licensing

Microsoft have announced the following changes to Power Apps pricing and licensing coming into effect on October 1, 2021:

• The Power Apps per user plan will be priced at $20 per user/month, a decrease from the previous price of $40 per user/month. The plan will be available across Microsoft’s commerce channels – Volume Licensing (VL), Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and web direct – without license minimums or other purchase requirements. Plan entitlements remain unchanged, including the ability for users to run unlimited apps and portals.

• The Power Apps per app plan will be priced at $5 per user/app/month, a decrease from the previous price of $10 per user/app/month. Like the per user plan, the per app plan will also be available across the same commerce channels without license minimums or other purchase requirements.

Additionally, Microsoft are simplifying entitlements for the per app plan by providing users with the ability to run one app or access one portal, in contrast with the current entitlement of two apps and one portal. This approach more directly aligns with the plan’s intent of providing flexibility for customers seeking to license users one app at a time. Customers with existing per app plan subscriptions purchased prior to Oct 1, 2021 will maintain the current entitlement for the duration of their agreement term.

Find out more: Pricing and licensing updates coming to Power Apps

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Power Automate

In Power Automate: Desktop update, new connectors via independent publisher program, 7 new connectors, AI Builder update

Power Automate Desktop July 2021 update

The July 2021 update of Power Automate Desktop has been released and this month’s offering includes the following new features and updates:

• Silent registration for machines
• Automatic detection of Windows proxy settings
• Ability to remove unused UI elements and images from a flow
• Introduction of new action ‘Take screenshot of UI element’
• Improvement of the action ‘Convert datetime to text’
• The ‘Set variable’ action now supports multi-line text input

Find out more: Power Automate Desktop July 2021 update

New connectors through the Independent Publisher connector program

Independent Publisher connectors are connectors developed, tested, published, and supported by connector developers that are independent from the end service or API. Independent Publishers include Microsoft employees, MVPs, developers, and other community members focused on helping the community make the best use of Microsoft Power Platform connectors. 

As part of the new Independent Publisher connector program, you can view and use connectors to the following services: Airtable, HubSpot Marketing, Jira Search plus more.

Find out more: New connectors through the Independent Publisher connector program

7 new connectors

7 new connectors were released in July 2021 for Power Automate, including:

• Amazon S3 – Amazon S3 Connector provides connectivity to the Amazon S3 API, enabling processes to interface with Amazon S3 to store objects, and build applications that require internet storage.
• Amazon SQS – Amazon SQS connector will connect to the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Service provided by Amazon Web Services, allowing queue management, push and get messages.
• CardPlatform – CardPlatform allows users to send Adaptive Cards to Outlook inboxes, other email platforms, as well as service desks and ServiceNow. 
• Elfsquad Data – Elfsquad CPQ enables sellers, or even end-customers to configure complex products. Using the Elfsquad Data connector you can easily integrate your internal IT-systems with Elfsquad.
• Alemba ITSM Azure Connector – Alemba Service Manager is a leading IT Service Management (ITSM) platform that leverages the Azure ecosystem to provide product extensibility and enhanced customer experiences.
• Lasso X – Lasso X makes it easy to connect to Danish public data sources, delivering information about companies and their finances, properties, ownerships, and much more. 
• IN-D Aadhaar Number Masking – Use IN-D Aadhaar Number Masking connector in your process to eliminate risks and ensure compliance by redacting first eight digits of Aadhaar Number and QR Code from Aadhaar images.

Find out more: Introducing Seven New Connectors

AI Builder July 2021 update

Several new capabilities were added in this months AI Builder update, including:

• Invoice processing – Read and save information from invoices which now also include the ability to extract line items.
• Receipt processing – Read and save information from receipts, with support now for sales receipts from Australia, Canada, United States, Great Britain, and India.
• Identity document reader – Read and save information from identity documents.

Find out more: AI Builder July 2021 update

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Power BI

In Power BI: Admin APIs to Determine Access Rights, visualise SharePoint lists now GA, July 2021 Feature Summary, PivotTable refresh, Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium, On-premises data gateway July 2021, free virtual workshops

Admin APIs to Determine Access Rights (Public Preview)

Now in Public Preview, a suite of new admin APIs that provide much-enhanced visibility into user access and permission levels. These new APIs allow you to programmatically retrieve user and permission information for most Power BI assets (reports, dashboards, datasets, dataflows, workspaces, and capacities), or asset permission for any user or security group. 

Additionally, Microsoft are enhancing the read-only scanner admin API by including user permission information in the scan results. With these versatile new tools, you will be able to easily produce access reports for various Power BI assets on demand.

Find out more: Announcing Admin APIs to Determine Access Rights (Public Preview)

Power BI – SharePoint list visualisation available to all users

A few months ago Microsoft launched a new Power BI integration for visualizing SharePoint lists. This feature is now available to Standard release users and is now accessible to everyone! This experience empowers SharePoint list and Microsoft List users to easily explore your data. With just a couple of clicks, you’re able to go from looking at a list of data to interacting with an auto-generated report. You’ll find this new option under the Integration menu on any list.

Find out more: Visualizing SharePoint lists now available to all users

Power BI July 2021 Feature Summary

The Power BI July 2021 feature summary includes making small multiples generally available, as well as the new model view and sensitivity labels in Desktop plus lots more:

Find out more: Power BI July 2021 Feature Summary

PivotTable refresh in Excel for the web now available

PivotTable refresh in Excel for the web is now 100% available to all eligible Office users. This feature is part of a broader investment to enable seamless and secure data sharing and collaboration with Power BI data in Excel for the web.

Connected PivotTable refresh in Excel for the web allows users to work with PivotTables connected to Power BI in a web browser just like in Excel desktop. With the Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) label integration, you can control sharing while keeping your data secure in Excel as an MIP label applied to a Power BI dataset is inherited in Excel.

Find out more: Connected PivotTable refresh in Excel for the web is now 100% available to Office tenants

Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium

Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium is now available in public preview. Streaming dataflows allow authors to connect to, ingest, mashup, model, and build reports but based on continuous streaming, near real-time data. This is done directly in the Power BI service with beautiful, drag and drop, no-code experiences.

Find out more: Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium now available in public preview

On-premises data gateway July 2021

The July 2021 update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.89.6) has been released. This month’s updates include:

• FHIR and Amazon Athena connectors available via the on-premises data gateway
• Compatible with the July PBI desktop

Find out more: On-premises data gateway July 2021 update is now available

Virtual workshops and training to get started with Power BI

Microsoft have announced a series free 60-minute trainings where you will be able to follow along with live demonstrations and ask Microsoft trainers questions in real time. This training is open to anyone curious about Power BI.

There are no required pre-requisites and courses are offered at least once a week. This training provides an overview and demo of Power BI to show how you can get maximum value out of your data in a way that was previously not possible.

Find out more: Virtual workshops and training

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BONUS! Other related updates

Congratulations if you have made it this far through the monthly update! For getting to the end you will be rewarded with other related titbits from around Microsoft 365…

Organisation Explorer

he new Organization Explorer in Outlook allows you to find, discover, and explore people and relationships through a new organizational browser experience. Find colleagues, discover team relationships, explore their skills, see their current availability, and more right within Outlook. Organization Explorer is now in preview and available for Office 365 Insiders. 

Find out more: Visualize and contextualize people and teams with a new organization browser in Outlook

New Microsoft Graph connectors for Microsoft Search

New Microsoft Graph connectors for Microsoft Search enable your organization to bring in information from systems like ServiceNow, so you can find what you need wherever you’re working, whether in one of your favourite productivity apps or one of the many Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint or Office.com. Connectors are now generally available and can be installed in just a few clicks in the Search and intelligence admin center.

Find out more: What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Search

New features for Microsoft Bookings

There are now stricter administrative controls to help ensure each user within Bookings has the appropriate level of access and control. Additional customization and branding options for company logos, coloured themes, and a rich text editor to customize confirmations, cancellations, and reminders have also been added.

Finally, improvements have been made to the appointment scheduling to provide a simpler experience with easier calendar switching, more filtering options, and more. To try out the new experience, toggle on the Try the new Bookings switch on the top right corner of the Bookings web app.

Find out more: A new, more powerful, and customizable Microsoft Bookings is here

Automatic meeting scheduling with Scheduler

Scheduler is a new Microsoft 365 service that works with Cortana to automate meeting scheduling. Just add Cortana to your email and ask something as simple as “Cortana, please find a time to meet next week.” Cortana will then work with the Scheduler service to find times that work best for everyone and send out invites.

Outlook extension for Microsoft Edge

The Outlook extension in Microsoft Edge to quickly read, send, and receive emails, manage your calendar, tasks, and more in any browser tab, no need to go back to Outlook.

Find out more: Microsoft Outlook extension for Edge

New features in Microsoft Forms for Education and Government

The Microsoft Forms team have announced five new features for both education and government customers:

Education – Launch Multiple Choice Quizzes in Microsoft Teams meetings, Create and edit a quiz directly from a Microsoft Teams assignment, Analyze responses with word clouds, rich text formatting in Forms & Send and share your forms more smoothly.

Government – Add a File Upload question to your form, Send a form using a shortened URL, Launch Polls in Teams Meetings, rich text formatting in Forms & Access your forms in a new interface

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