Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (0)
Rolling out (0)
In development (4)
🍾 LAUNCHED
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – September 2021
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Send feedback to Microsoft – With this feature, users can send feedback to Microsoft directly on the topic page, manage topics page and my topics page in Viva Topics. Roadmap ID: 85572
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Viva Connections Desktop for GCC – With the new Viva Connection Desktop release for GCC, you can bring your intranet directly into Teams Desktop. The app’s icon and name match your company brand and enable employees to discover, navigate and consume your top sites in Teams. Roadmap ID: 85575
Yammer and SharePoint for Business: Yammer Conversations Web Part V3 – 3 new configurations to the Yammer Conversations SharePoint Web Part: new horizontal layout, new filter option to show only Questions or All Conversations, and a new configuration option to show or hide the Yammer publisher. Roadmap ID: 81998
Release – October 2021
SharePoint: Display images from Microsoft Lists in Power Apps – Power Apps image controls will now display images that are stored in Microsoft Lists Image columns. They can be displayed in four sizes: small, medium, large, or full. Roadmap ID: 81986
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Immersive reader now available in the Teams mobile app.
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.
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.
Headspace integration with Microsoft Viva Insights.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Invoice processing is now generally available in AI Builder.
In Power BI: Security group support for Log Analytics, Report Server Feature Summary, new admin API, Desktop Feature Summary, on-prem data gateway, Insights, embedded analytics playground, auto-install of Power BI in Teams, export report to file API,
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.
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.
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:
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.
Refreshing connected PivotTable in Excel for the web.
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.
Streaming dataflows in Power BI premium now available in public preview.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft Scheduler.
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.
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
Launch Multiple Choice Quizzes in Microsoft Teams meetings in Forms for Education.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (3)
Rolling out (0)
In development (4)
🍾 LAUNCHED
Microsoft Viva: Personal wellbeing insights in Teams – Users can create mental bookends to productively start and mindfully end the work day with a virtual commute, tap into dedicated moments of mindfulness with Headspace and use emotional check-ins to pause and reflect. Roadmap ID: 68748
SharePoint: Scenario-Based Site Templates – Use scenario-based site templates that leverage existing SharePoint capabilities (e.g. pages, lists, libraries, branding) to build your own sites faster and get inspired.Roadmap ID: 70574
New leadership connection site template – The template brings together conversations from Yammer, news, resources, and showcases upcoming events. Roadmap ID: 71752
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – September 2021
SharePoint: SharePoint News Boost – 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. Roadmap ID: 70810
Release – October 2021
🆕 SharePoint: SharePoint site template admin controls in PowerShell – PowerShell cmdlets that allow Microsoft-provided SharePoint site templates to be displayed or hidden in the site template gallery in your tenant. Roadmap ID: 85566
🆕 SharePoint: Navigation Switcher – With the new Nav Switcher feature, users can easily customize their team site by changing navigation’s orientation and visibility to achieve different look and feel, layouts, and alignment styles. Roadmap ID: 85568
Release – November 2021
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Viva Connections – This release will include features such as the dashboard authoring capability, setting a home site via the SharePoint admin center, dashboard and feed web parts for your home site and the Viva Connections app in Teams. Roadmap ID: 86542
This post describes a change to how site designs/ templates are applied to sites in SharePoint Online.
Intro
Microsoft published MC249248 in the Message Center on 7 April 2021 stating the following:
This new SharePoint release of scenario-based site templates will help you expand what’s possible with content, pages, and web parts while helping you quickly get started building your own site. Each template contains pre-populated content and web parts that are fully customizable to meet the needs of your organization. This is rolling out on SharePoint Online and mobile.
This was updated on 23 July 2021 with a new timeline stating that this will be complete for Standard Release in late August 2021. What the message doesn’t detail is how this affects the current process for applying site designs to sites you are creating via the SharePoint admin center.
This change landed in my Standard Release environment around the week commencing 16 August. We first noticed it because we no longer had the ability to apply site designs in the admin center!
Before this change you applied your site designs at the point of site creation:
Before the recent site template change, site designs were applied to SharePoint sites at the point of creation.
Following this change the “choose a design” option is no longer present for team or communication sites through the SharePoint admin center. In order to apply designs you now have to apply a site template within the sites settings after you create it.
How to apply a site template
Navigate to the site you wish to apply the template to
Press the cog > then select apply a site template
Here you are able to choose from Microsoft pre-built templates, or those you have created and deployed into your SharePoint Online environment (from your organization). The experience is slightly different depending on whether you are using pre-built or your own templates.
Using Microsoft pre-built templates
Under From Microsoft > select the template you wish to use > press use template
The wizard below will show you a progress bar as the template is applied
When applying a Microsoft template, a progress bar will appear as the template is applied.
This wizard will disappear once the progress bar reaches 100% and your template will be applied to your site.
A SharePoint site with a Microsoft template applied.
Using custom site templates from your organization
If like me you had already deployed site designs, these are now shown as site templates available from your organization.
Press the cog > then select apply a site template
Select From your organization > select the template you wish to use > press use template
Once you press use template, an orange message bar will appear letting you know that the site template is being applied.
The orange message bar will change to green once the site template has been applied. You have to refresh to see the changes
Recently I had the task of creating, then modifying a few hundred sites in SharePoint Online. In our case we provisioned the Microsoft 365 group connected SharePoint sites using PnP PowerShell, but as part of this we set the primary owner as an individual admin.
During the process of updating the sites manually, it become more and more annoying that other SharePoint admins had to keep adding themselves into the recently provisioned sites in order to do anything – that is until I found the SharePoint Service Administrator group!
What is the SharePoint Service Administrator group?
The SharePoint Service Administrator is a security group that includes everyone that has been assigned the SharePoint Admin role in Microsoft 365. It’s also worth noting there is also a Company Administrator group also, which includes all users with the Global Admin role.
Greg Zelfond has provided a great write up of these roles over at SharePoint Maven. For the purposes of this post I will be focusing on the SharePoint Service Administrator group.
How to assign the SharePoint Service Administrator group to a site
Follow the steps below to add the SharePoint Service Administrator group as an additional admin of a SharePoint site:
Open the SharePoint admin center
Under Sites > Active sites > select the site you wish to add the SharePoint Service Administrator group to
Press Permissions > Manage additional admins
Select your site then press Permissions > Manage additional admins.
Under Add an admin > enter SharePoint Service Administrator
Press Save
Issues and troubleshooting
#1 Cannot add SharePoint Service Administrator as a group owner
If you are creating or editing Microsoft 365 group connected SharePoint team sites, you are unable to add security groups as owners or members of a M365 group. Security group driven M365 group membership has been a long-standing request of Microsoft, but Roadmap ID: 83113 added in May 2021 has group driven membership management as targeted for release in December 2022.
Workaround: When creating new sites, set the group owners/ members as you would normally (i.e. one or more individuals), then edit the site once created to add the SharePoint Service Administrator group as an additional admin.
For existing sites, just update the additional admin as per the guidance above.
#2 No SharePoint Service Administrator group to choose from
If you have not assigned the SharePoint admin role to anyone in your tenant yet, the SharePoint Service Administrator role will not be available to select from when trying to assign it as an additional admin. In the below example, this tenant only had one global administrator, but the SharePoint admin role had not been explicitly assigned.
When I tried to add the company administrator role it worked no problem.
Workaround: Assign the SharePoint admin role to those you want to be included in the SharePoint Service Administrator group, or use the Company Administrator group if you only have global admins in your tenancy.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (3)
Rolling out (0)
In development (2)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint: Portal Launch Scheduler in SharePoint PowerShell – The Portal Launch wizard available via SharePoint PowerShell is designed to configure the deployment waves when launching a new site. Roadmap ID: 66162
SharePoint: Portal launch scheduler UX – The Portal Launch Scheduler is designed to help you follow a wave / phased roll-out approach by managing the redirects for the new portal. Roadmap ID: 70799
SharePoint: Swap root site from SharePoint admin center for customers with 10k+ seats – Customer tenants with more than 10K seats or more can now swap their SharePoint root site from within the SharePoint admin center user interface. Roadmap ID: 72224
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – August 2021
SharePoint spaces: 360° tour annotation icon customization – Customize icons in 360° image tours with choice of icons, colours and size. Roadmap ID: 70733
Release – October 2021
🆕 SharePoint: Document Library ‘View in File Explorer’ support in Microsoft Edge – With this change, you can enable the View in File Explorer capability on SharePoint Online. For this experience to be visible and work for your users, you will need to enable a Microsoft Edge policy “Configure the View in File Explorer feature for SharePoint pages in Microsoft Edge” and update your SharePoint Online tenant configuration. Roadmap ID: 82123
This article describes how you can remove commas (thousand separator) from number columns in Microsoft/ SharePoint Lists.
Introduction
You may have noticed a comma or thousand separator appearing when using the number column in Microsoft/ SharePoint Lists. Commas appearing in number columns in SharePoint have been a long-standing issue, going back as far as SharePoint 2010 and beyond.
In classic SharePoint, a common way to solve this problem was to convert the number column into a text column and validate it to remove commas using a formula such as =ISNUMBER([ColumnName]+0). However, with modern SharePoint, plus the advent of Microsoft Lists it’s now become easier to manipulate columns using column formatting to achieve the desired result.
I personally encountered this issue when importing data from excel into a modern SharePoint list. In my situation, the preview offered when importing from Excel did not show the commas in my data. It was only once it was imported into SharePoint that the commas appeared.
Remove commas from number columns
Left-click on your number column
Under Column Settings > select Format this column
Ensure the Format Columns tab is selected, scroll down and press Advanced mode
Remove the text from the box and add the following JSON:
How to add JSON formatting to number columns to remove commas.
Note
Microsoft added roadmap item 68716 in October 2020 for Microsoft/ SharePoint lists to include support for thousand separator in number columns. As this time of writing, the roadmap states this feature is due for release in June 2021 which will allow List owners/ members to choose if the comma should appear or not.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (1)
Rolling out (0)
In development (3)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint: Updates for Microsoft Teams connected team sites – Every Microsoft Teams team is connected to a SharePoint team site. If you create a private channel, it gets a unique team site. You will see specific updates, including updates to site features, site permissions alignment, site classifications and sensitivity labels, and improvements to the user interface. Roadmap ID: 81945
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – August 2021
🆕 SharePoint Syntex: Advanced metadata search – Users licensed for Syntex will soon be able to select an icon in the search box that will unlock a metadata-based search experience in Syntex & SharePoint document libraries. In the first release, this search experience will have 5 fixed fields – keyword, people, name, type, and modified. Roadmap ID: 85549
Release – September 2021
🆕 SharePoint: Updates to options for disabling subsite creation –This new update will improve the options for subsite creation settings in the SharePoint admin center. Roadmap ID: 82122
Release – November 2021
SharePoint: Drag and drop row reorder in Microsoft Lists – You will now be able to reorder rows in Microsoft Lists. Just click the row you want to move, and then drag it to where you’d like it to appear in your list grid view. Roadmap ID: 82070
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (9)
Rolling out (3)
In development (57)
🍾 LAUNCHED
Schedule SharePoint pages & news posts – You will be able to schedule a page or news post to be published at a specific date and time in the future.Roadmap ID: 62892
SharePoint admin: Improved edit panel to manage site settings – Microsoft releasing a new panel experience which will make it easier to view and manage more site properties, like how you would edit from within the site itself. Roadmap ID: 57314
Increased site collection limit – You can now have up to 2,000,000 site collections per tenant, up form 500,000. Roadmap ID: 57316
Easy page and news publishing experience from sitepages library – Adding the ability to easily publish and republish a page or news post from the sitepages library in a site via the command bar or the file card experience. Roadmap ID: 61191
SharePoint and Teams: folder in site visibly connected to channel – It will be easier to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel & chat associated to it – right from within the SharePoint user interface. Roadmap ID: 30686
Save for later web part – New web part to display a user’s saved for later items. Roadmap ID: 57810
SharePoint: Stock Images – Free to use stock images will be available in the SharePoint image file picker. Roadmap ID: 59834
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
SharePoint: Audience Targeting capability for Events Web Part – We are adding the ability to target specific audiences per event within the Events Web Part. With it, you target specific events to different audiences, helping you provide more personalized experiences on SharePoint pages. Roadmap ID: 70815
🚂 ROLLING OUT
SharePoint Syntex: Content type synchronization enhancements – Changes to the way content type publishing works in SharePoint, moving from a “push everywhere” model to a “pull as needed” model to help improve reliability and performance of the service. Roadmap ID: 70795
SharePoint: Email notification settings – With this feature, users can unsubscribe or re-subscribe to their favourite SharePoint email notifications. Their preference will be respected for these email notifications. Roadmap ID: 81993
SharePoint: New experience to add an app – You can extend the working experience with out-of-the-box SharePoint Framework web parts and extensions in SharePoint Online as normally but using a brand-new modernized store. Roadmap ID: 82031
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – August 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
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 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
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
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
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
Microsoft Lists: column settings in Grid view – The capabilities when in Lists “Grid” view (previously Quick Edit) will now allow people to pin a column to the filter’s pane, format the column, show/hide columns, and hide their column(s). Roadmap ID: 68714
Microsoft Lists: Support for thousands separator in Number column – When Lists owners and members leverage the Number column, they can now choose if the comma should appear or not. Roadmap ID: 68716
SharePoint spaces: 360° tour annotation icon customization – Customize icons in 360° image tours with choice of icons, colours and size. Roadmap ID: 70733
Microsoft Lists app in Teams: Rules – Create simple if/then rules, based on changes to list information, to set reminders and send notifications directly from within Microsoft Teams. Roadmap ID: 70749
SharePoint: Calendar view in Lists web part – The List web part for SharePoint in Microsoft 365 allows you to display a list from your team or site on a page and customize it with your own title, view, and even size. Roadmap ID: 70750
Microsoft Lists: Custom list templates – Microsoft have announced that they will be supporting custom list templates – the ability for organizations to define custom list templates. Note, you will be able to manage which templates are available to which people, based on their job role. Roadmap ID: 70753
SharePoint: Events web part will display event images – Page authors in SharePoint who use the Events web part will be able to turn on an option to show event images within the web part. Roadmap ID: 70791
SharePoint: Scoping Control for SharePoint Online – Scoping control is available for SP page, site, list and library, for users to search faster with specified scope. Roadmap ID: 70792
SharePoint: SharePoint News Boost – 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. Roadmap ID: 70810
SharePoint Syntex: Form processing – support for custom Power Platform environments – When using Form Processing model, you’ll be able to specify that AI Builder and Dataverse storage can be hosted in custom Power Platform environments. Previously, this was limited to the default tenant environments. Roadmap ID: 72176
Microsoft Viva: Topics in Microsoft Search in Bing – Display topic cards in search results when Microsoft Search is invoked from a Bing search. Roadmap ID: 72180
Microsoft Viva: Support for types of topics – Support for categories or types of topics, such as projects, products or organizations. Roadmap ID: 72181
Microsoft Viva: Improvements for Topic Management – This update will empower Knowledge Managers, providing additional metadata for sorting and filtering through the list of topics, including additional quality and usage columns, and segmentation to help manage topics at scale. Roadmap ID: 72182
SharePoint: Editing Modern Pages in Teams Experience – Edit Modern SharePoint Pages that are pinned to Teams channels & conversations. Roadmap ID: 82969
Azure Active Directory, OneDrive, and SharePoint for Business: Azure B2B integration with OneDrive and SharePoint is now generally available – The Azure B2B Integration with OneDrive and SharePoint is now generally available. This integration is currently disabled by default but can be enabled using the SharePoint Online Management Shell. Roadmap ID: 81955
Microsoft Lists: Export Microsoft Lists to Excel – You’ll now have the option to open the list as an Excel Workbook or CSV file – giving you the ability to analyze your data in Excel no matter your OS platform – Windows or macOS. Roadmap ID: 81962
SharePoint Syntex: Automatically set sensitivity labels in document understanding models – You can now tag documents automatically with MIP sensitivity labels in document understanding models. Roadmap ID: 81975
SharePoint Syntex: Use regular expressions to match patterns for extracting metadata in document understanding models – You can now use regular expressions (RegEx) in explanations, allowing model trainers to provide more complex metadata extractor and recognition patterns. This addition includes a set of regex explanation templates that can be used or edited like the other templates. Roadmap ID: 81976
SharePoint: Display images from Microsoft Lists in Power Apps – Power Apps image controls will now display images that are stored in Microsoft Lists Image columns. They can be displayed in four sizes: small, medium, large, or full. Roadmap ID: 81986
OneDrive and SharePoint for Business: Library Dropdown – We’re adding a dropdown that allows you to easily switch between multiple document libraries associated with a Team or Site. Roadmap ID: 81990
SharePoint: Page details updates – This update to the page details panel will allow page authors to delete a page and change the page’s URL. Roadmap ID: 81994
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
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: Page Analytics – View rich page analytics on SharePoint Pages, including page views, page viewers and page traffic. Roadmap ID: 70635
Microsoft Lists: Grid view keyboard improvements – When you edit in grid view (previously ‘Quick edit’), you will have a faster editing experience that adheres to greater levels of accessibility. Roadmap ID: 70670
Microsoft Lists: Number column symbols – When leveraging a Number column, select common number symbols (dollar, euro, yen, percentage) or create a custom symbol, plus decide if you want the symbol to be on the left or right of the number. Roadmap ID: 70671
Microsoft Lists: visual UI for read-only fields – Lists fields will show people when a field is edit-only and screen reader support when a field is read-only. Roadmap ID: 70672
Microsoft Lists: Configure Person column profile pictures – When using a Person column (for individuals or groups), you will have more control to show as text-only or using available user’s profile pictures with the visual ‘pill’ formatting. Roadmap ID: 70673
Microsoft Lists: Commenting (iOS) – Bringing web commenting experience to Lists iOS mobile app. Add/delete a comment on list items to collaborate and share better. Roadmap ID: 70705
Microsoft Lists: Enabling commenting to Lists app in Teams – Bringing web commenting experience to Lists app in Teams. Add/delete a comment on list items to collaborate and share better within the Teams canvas. Roadmap ID: 70707
SharePoint: People cut out tab for stock images – The stock images tab inside the image file picker will now include images of people without a background. Roadmap ID: 70720
Yammer and SharePoint for Business: Yammer Conversations Web Part V3 – 3 new configurations to the Yammer Conversations SharePoint Web Part: new horizontal layout, new filter option to show only Questions or All Conversations, and a new configuration option to show or hide the Yammer publisher. Roadmap ID: 81998
SharePoint: Migration Manager content discovery – Before you move any file or folder from on-premises into Microsoft 365, you need to discover content and plan for the migration. The Migration Manager, from within the SharePoint admin center, will provide content discovery so admins can best understand what content they have, decide what to migrate and what to remediate. Roadmap ID: 82000
Microsoft Lists: Support for Progressive Web App (PWA) – You can now install the web version of Microsoft Lists as a Progressive Web App (PWA) in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox or other browser that supports Progressive Web Apps. Roadmap ID: 82041
Microsoft Viva: Refinements to related sites displayed on topic pages – Differentiate between sites that have been pinned by a person, and those that have been suggested for the Topic. Roadmap ID: 82042
Microsoft Viva: Updates to multi-geo support – We can process content that is in all regions and query from all regions. We support region moves. We keep the data in the corresponding regions according to data sovereignty. Roadmap ID: 82044
Microsoft Viva: Exclude content from topic discovery based off applied sensitivity labels – Use Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels to control which files should not be included in topic discovery. Roadmap ID: 82047
Microsoft Viva: Control visibility of suggested topics – This update will empower knowledge managers to enable or prevent general visibility of AI-suggested topics. Roadmap ID: 82050
SharePoint Syntex: Collect related layouts in a single form processing model – A new experience to support collections (a named group of documents sharing a similar layout – a new feature in preview allowing one to compose several models into a single one) and extractable table item data. Roadmap ID: 82064
SharePoint Syntex: Tenant-wide model publishing and discovery – Models will be able to be published more broadly – to a site or whole tenant. This makes them available for viewing and selection directly from the document library. You’ll also be able to evaluate several models against your content to aid in selecting the most appropriate one. Roadmap ID: 82065
SharePoint: Microsoft List creation from Office.com – Now you will be able to create a Microsoft Lists list directly from Office.com. Click the ‘Create new’ ‘plus sign’ button and select “List”. Roadmap ID: 82068
SharePoint: Show and remove active filters in Microsoft Lists – As you apply and adjust filters to narrow or expand what appears in the current view, you’ll now see which filters have been applied and you can remove them without going back into the column filter pane – you will now do this at the top-left portion of the list. Roadmap ID: 82069
SharePoint: Drag and drop row reorder in Microsoft Lists – You will now be able to reorder rows in Microsoft Lists. Just click the row you want to move, and then drag it to where you’d like it to appear in your list grid view. Roadmap ID: 82070
SharePoint: Tenant setting to disable the creation of new SharePoint 2013 workflows – SharePoint tenant admins and global admins may disable the creation of new SharePoint 2013 workflows in their tenant by using a new parameter in the Set-SPOTenant PowerShell command. Roadmap ID: 82078
SharePoint Syntex: Content Center site template for non-licensed users – The Content Center is a new site template that provides the creation and management interface for SharePoint Syntex document understanding models. To increase awareness of these product capabilities and the time to train and evaluate a model’s effectiveness with your own content, we’re enabling this site template to all licensed SharePoint tenants. Users without a Syntex license will be able to build and test models in the Content Center but will not be able to publish models for live usage. Roadmap ID: 82080
SharePoint: Ability to remove the title region gradient – We are adding a new toggle for the title region that allows page authors to remove or add a gradient to the title region. Roadmap ID: 82091
Microsoft Viva: User opt-in as suggested experts – To meet some customer governance and privacy standards, we now allow users to control being displayed as potentially associated with the topic. For these circumstances, you’ll be able to empower users to opt-in to be added to topic pages and cards. Roadmap ID: 82103
Release – September 2021
SharePoint spaces: Embed Web Part and Annotation – Show SharePoint pages or HTML embed content as an interactable overlay on a SharePoint space. Roadmap ID: 70732
SharePoint: Admin center – Migration Manager: Egnyte migrations – Microsoft have expanded their capabilities to allow moving content from Egnyte into Microsoft 365. Roadmap ID: 82016
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.
In SharePoint: Auto news digest, new info columns in SP admin center, homepage insights dashboard, Internet Explorer 11 EOL, @mentions in comments, delete from within page details
SharePoint Auto News Digest updates
You can now brand your news digest with your organization’s theme colours and logo. If your organization site is already branded, that branding will automatically be applied to automatic news digests. The news digest uses built-in Intelligent ranking so that users see the news most relevant to them. The news digest is sent on a weekly basis, displaying only published news posts. If there are no news posts that are relevant for the user then no email gets sent to the user.
The SharePoint auto-news digest sends an automated, customized email to users about the latest news posts that are relevant to them, but that they may not have viewed yet.
New information columns on Active sites page in the SharePoint admin center
In the SharePoint admin center, the Active sites page will provide new informational columns. The “Created from” column will show the apps that were used to create sites. And the “Teams” column will show which sites are connected to Microsoft Teams. The “Created from” and “Teams” information will also be available in the details panel when you select an individual site.
The ‘Created from’ and ‘Teams’ status columns provide key information for admins directly on the Active sites page.
New homepage insights dashboard in the SharePoint admin center
Take an administration-at-a-glance approach with actionable charts and insights as cards on the SharePoint admin center homepage. And it’s customizable—you can add, remove, and rearrange cards to suit your needs.
As a SharePoint or Global admin, you can choose to see and use new cards such as:
SharePoint storage usage
SharePoint site usage
SharePoint file activity
OneDrive usage
OneDrive file activity
Search active sites
Sensitivity labels
Term store operations
You can also add relevant cards from the Microsoft 365 admin center, such as:
Service health
Message center
Microsoft 365 active users report
Examine OneDrive and SharePoint usage and activity via insightful cards on the SharePoint admin home page.
While we know this change may be difficult for some, we believe that they will get the most out of Microsoft 365 apps when using the Microsoft Edge browser. Microsoft 365 users will be well served with this change through faster and more responsive web access to greater sets of features in everyday toolsets.
“Mention” people you work with while adding a new comment to a list Item. As a result, the person will receive an email notification with a direct link to the list item. It’s a terrific way to notify, share and collaborate directly from within the list itself.
In the list item’s Comments box, type @ and a name, then pick the name you want.
Delete from within page detailsin SharePoint pages
Instead of going several clicks in beyond the site contents page and into the Pages library, now you can click the Page details button at the top of the page or news article and delete in one click from within the page details pane.
Click the Page details button at the top of the page or news article and delete in one click from within the page details pane.
Headspace mindfulness content comes to Microsoft Viva Insights
You’ll start to see a curated set of guided meditations and focus music from Headspace. The goal is to help disconnect from work in the evening, relax your mind before a big meeting, or find focus before starting an important project. In just a few minutes a day, meditation and mindfulness with Headspace can help users lower stress, increase focus and ease teamwork.
Introducing Headspace, a new focus mode, and quiet time settings with Microsoft Viva InsightsHeadspace integration with Viva Insights is rolling out default on and, unless disabled by admin, the curated set of Headspace mindfulness content will be available to any user with the Viva Insights app installed.
After finishing a meeting or webinar, organizers can view an attendance report that helps you understanding how many registered vs. attended, who attended the meeting, and whether they engaged for all or part of the meeting. This is now embedded directly within the Teams UI for your reporting and analytics needs.
Teams Webinars integrate with Dynamics 365 Marketing
You are now able to follow up with webinar participants through the attendance tab after a webinar, if you as a webinar organizer have a Dynamics 365 Marketing license. From there, you can export your attendance data into Dynamics 365 Marketing, so you can create customer journeys and send personalized follow-up emails to your webinar attendees.
Teams Webinars integrate with Dynamics 365 Marketing.
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.
Organizers and presenters can now spotlight up to 7 participants simultaneously during meetings. Previously, while an attendee can pin multiple participants for their own private view, only one participant can be spotlighted for all attendees.
Once a single participant has been spotlighted, simply click on the context menu of your additional participant(s) and select Add Spotlight. For meetings that have multiple speakers or presenters, this is great to focus all attendees’ view on those specific video feeds. Feature is available in both Desktop and Mobile.
Spotlight multiple people’s video in a Teams meeting.
Chats sent during a Teams meeting now surface on the screens of all meeting participants, making the chat more central to the conversation. You no longer need to manually open the chat window within a meeting to see what participants are typing. This feature is on by default. To turn off this feature, select Don’t show chat bubbles under more actions.
Inking and Laser Pointer in PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams
Virtual laser pointer and ink annotations are now available in PowerPoint Live. Presenters can engage more with their audience by drawing attention or clarifying certain sections of the PowerPoint deck.
Just as you would use a physical laser point in a room, PowerPoint Live allows you to effectively point at different places in the presentation so the audience can easily follow along what’s on the slide. Only the active “in control” presenter is able to see and make annotations via the annotation toolbar.
Inking and Laser Pointer in PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams.
When selecting Large gallery in meetings, we are introducing a mobile-optimized layout for Teams mobile users that allow you to swipe through all the participants in a meeting. With up to 10 participants per page on your screen, you can now see all participants clearly on your mobile device.
Note: This is available in iOS 13+ and Android OS 9+ or any version with more than 4GB RAM. All other devices continues to see the current Large gallery experience.
Include device audio when sharing on iOS and Android
Now you can include audio when sharing on iOS and Android devices 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.
Note: You can find this setting under More actions, Share screen with audio. It is available to devices with Android 10+ or iOS 13+.
Include device audio when sharing on iOS and Android.
Live Transcription with speaker attribution for additional licenses
Live transcription allows you to follow and review conversations (in English-US) alongside the meeting video or audio in real time. Attendees who joined late, or missed the meeting, can easily catch up by reading what was discussed and searching the transcript by speaker.
This feature was initially available to users with Office 365/Microsoft 365 E3/E5, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses. This feature has been now expanded to users with Office 365 E1, Office 365 A1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A3/A5, Microsoft 365 F1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 F3, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic licenses.
Live Transcription with speaker attribution for additional licenses.
The Teams mobile app on Android 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.
Note: This feature was made available earlier this year for iOS.
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.
Note: This is only available on MacOS 10.15 or later.
The Large gallery feature is now available in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Now VDI users are able to expand their gallery, viewing up to 49 participants on the same screen during a Teams meeting.
Join Microsoft Teams meetings on the go with a global dial-in number or dial out to help others join a meeting with Audio Conferencing. Eligible customers purchasing Microsoft partners and web can take advantage of the free Audio Conferencing offer now extended through December 31, 2021.
Business Voice is a cloud-based telephony solution built into Teams that combines essential telephony components into a single package. It is designed for businesses with up to 300 users and includes a phone system, audio conferencing and a domestic calling plan.
Through December 31, 2021, Microsoft customers can purchase Business Voice at a 25 percent discount for 12 months.
Microsoft have changed how 1:1 Call recording is enabled. By creating its own policy, Administrators can now delineate recording configurations between meetings and calling.
Previously, 1:1 Call recording has been controlled by the CsTeamsMeetingPolicy / AllowCloudRecording attribute. Now, it is controlled by the CsTeamsCallingPolicy / allowCloudRecordingForCalls attribute. This feature is only available via PowerShell.
To streamline workflows, new out of the box templates provide a repeatable structure for common approvals like filling out expense reports or requesting overtime. Admins and team owners can use these as is, customize, or create new templates for their organization and teams to use.
Use the structured form to input all the necessary information and eliminate back and forth on missing data for a faster approval.
Create trackable tasks from your ad hoc Teams messages
Tasks happen everywhere – in an email threads, working on files, or within team chats. And before you forget to make a note of a task, simply click in, and create tasks from Microsoft Teams messages on desktop and web. Like you’ve seen for emails in Outlook and comments in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint docs.
Create trackable tasks from your ad hoc Teams messages.
Microsoft Whiteboard updates within Microsoft Teams to support hybrid work
The new Whiteboard is now integrated into more areas across Microsoft 365 – now available in Teams channels and chats. Start a collaborative whiteboard for everyone in the meeting with just one click. You can also pre-prep or reuse whiteboards across multiple Teams meetings.
This update brings a lot of great user interface capabilities: improved real-time collaboration to make it easier to follow along with what others are doing, new interactive content with sticky notes, fluid components, and insert images and documents via new sharing controls connected to OneDrive. Plus, a lot more.
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.
Device management automatic alerting in Teams Admin Center
The feature enable IT Admin to identify devices issues by triggering notifications on device problem and device health check status that can be turned into an immediate correction action.
Security, compliance, and data protection capabilities for apps
For Microsoft 365 Certified Teams apps, admins can view security, compliance, and data protection capabilities in a new tab on the app’s detail page in the Teams Admin Center. This transparency gives Microsoft customers trust in the applications that run their organizations and ISVs an opportunity to showcase their hard work in becoming M365 Certified.
Here are the features released this month for customers in in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD):
Together mode: 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. Available in GCC and GCC-High.
Updating settings for attendees’ video: Meeting attendees can turn their camera on or off to share video by default, plus configure to have all attendees’ cameras disabled, also reverse it and set it enabled/ disabled for individual attendees.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Image display from Lists, GitHub actions GA, canvas app layout containers GA, NFC tags on iOS/ Android, image/ file support for Dataverse CMK, VS Code extension + Power Platform command line, rename action-based data sources, Power Apps component framework for canvas
Power Apps can now display images from Microsoft Lists
This improved experience allows images stored in Image columns in Microsoft Lists can be displayed when designing custom forms in the Power Apps design canvas. You can choose to display the images in four sizes: small, medium, large, or full.
If you add one or more images to your list, you can show individual images directly in Power Apps – here using a Power Apps app to customize the view form.
General Availability of GitHub Actions for Microsoft Power Platform
GitHub actions for Microsoft Power Platform are now generally available. This capability expands the coverage for enterprises that want to implement CI/CD with Power Platform Applications driven from a source code first view. To support fully automated build/ release pipelines, this capability was first released with the Power Platform Build Tools, an extension for Azure DevOps – and now as part of GitHub Actions for Power Platform.
The container, horizontal container and vertical container layout controls in canvas apps are now generally available. These controls help you automatically reflow and resize controls within them to enable easy, no expression layouts in canvas apps. Containers make responsive apps much easier.
Get started with these controls by navigating to “Insert” under the Layout category, to insert these controls into the canvas. Navigate to Settings, select Display, and turn off the Scale to fit setting to enable your canvas app to be responsive. Responsive expressions with X, Y, Width and Height will continue to play a complimentary role in the building of responsive apps.
Power Apps already offers robust, camera-based barcode scanning when running in the Power Apps Mobile app for iOS and Android, but barcodes are often only useful in clean, well-lit consumption scenarios. Power Fx now supports reading NFC and HF-RFID tags when running in the Power Apps Mobile app for iOS and Android.
Power Fx is now able to read the first record from a NFC standards-compliant tag, support Text and URI datatypes and provide record type information.
Image and file data type support in Dataverse customer managed key (CMK) environments
Dataverse customer managed key (CMK) environments can now support the use of the Dataverse file column (a.k.a. File data type) and image column (Image Data Type) as of version: 9.2.21052.00103. Files and images uploaded will be encrypted at rest and secured using the customer’s provided key.
Note: At present, files within CMK environments are limited to a maximum size of 128MB per file. All files within CMK environments will be stored in the Dataverse data storage, instead of Dataverse file blob storage. This will be enabled by default if you have a CMK environment with a version equal to or greater than 9.2.21052.00103, and you have provided a key.
Power Platform VS Code Extension and the Power Platform CLI
The Power Platform team have announced an update to the Power Platform VS Code extension, launched as public preview on May 25th and the updated Power Platform Command Line (CLI). The canvas pack and unpack commands have been updated in the current update, plus several updates to the PCF.
Power Apps action-based data sources can now be renamed. This feature can help avoid an extensive rename of formula referenced data sources in a Power App. The feature will reach all regions by the end of this week June 18, 2021.
The Power Apps component framework for canvas apps is now generally available. Now, pro developers can not only utilize power and flexibility of modern web technologies, but also can include their existing IP and external third-party libraries to seamlessly extend industry leading Low-Code Development Platform for Professional Developers.
Four new connectors were released into the Power Automate ecosystem this past May. Take a look at the latest connectors:
Mavim iMprove – The Mavim iMprove connector empowers organizations to create and re-use all process-related content (such as process flows, goals, KPI’s, risk, controls, people, supporting technology) through Power Automate workflows, PowerApps and Azure DevOps.
Ordnance Survey Places – Ordnance Survey Places provides the latest details of over 40 million addresses across the UK connecting the existing OS Places API service to your app.
DocJuris – DocJuris is the simplest way to empower everyone in your company to quickly and consistently close contracts at scale.
Service Objects – The Service Objects’ connectors deliver contact data validation to the Power Automate ecosystem. In real-time, verify and correct your contact record’s name, phone, address and email while appending critical location and device details, ensuring you have genuine, accurate and up-to-date information for every customer.
In Power BI: Security group support for Log Analytics, Report Server Feature Summary, new admin API, Desktop Feature Summary, on-prem data gateway, Insights, embedded analytics playground, auto-install of Power BI in Teams, export report to file API,
Microsoft Teams with Power BI activity feed notifications
Power BI is integrating with the Microsoft Teams activity feed. In Teams, you’ll be notified when someone shares a report to you or requests access to a report you own. This helps you get more done without leaving Microsoft Teams or hunting through your emails.
The activity feed notification capability has started to roll-out to commercial cloud customers. Users need to install the Power BI app for Microsoft Teams to receive the activity feed notifications.
Power BI report sharing notification in Microsoft Teams activity feed.
Microsoft announced new Scanner APIs for extracting tenant-level metadata using Power BI Admin REST APIs in December 2020. Microsoft have now announced further enhancements that includes the items our customers have been asking for most – now, as part of the API response, you can get the metadata of dataset tables and columns, measures, DAX expressions, and mashup queries.
June’s Power BI feature summary includes updates to connectors, plus DirectQuery support for Dataflows, preview release for the paginated reports visual plus many more!
Power BI report action bar available in SharePoint Online webpart
You can now do more with the Power BI webpart in SharePoint Online with the addition of the Power BI report action bar. With the action bar, users can now easily Analyze in Excel, Export to PowerPoint, and Export to PDF.
Long-term usage and performance insights (public preview)
The Power BI team have announced the availability of detailed historical activity information and analytical insights on Power BI operations. This new capability gives you full visibility into Power BI usage and performance so you can confidently manage your environment and comply with organizational policies.
Once user activities and metrics are enabled, Microsoft will provide a Power BI report template allowing you to:
Visualize historical data over long periods to observe usage trends, spot periods of unusual load, and identify performance degradation.
Isolate activities by time range, capacity, dataset, user, report and more.
Investigate internal operations within a query or dataset refresh to see where time is being spent.
Long-term usage and performance insights (public preview).
The Power BI team are extending the timeline for upgrading classic workspaces to new workspaces. The Power BI team are now targeting automatic upgrade of classic workspaces to new workspaces by April 2022.
July 2021
‘Upgrade all’ workspaces tool within Power BI Admin portal released to all tenants
Update as of 7/21/2021 – We are ahead of schedule and ‘Upgrade all’ has been released and is available to all tenant admins.
Ability to create classic workspaces removed for all tenants
April 2022
Automatic upgrade of all classic workspaces to new workspaces will be performed by Microsoft
Paginated report visual for Power BI reports (public preview)
The Power BI team have announced that the public preview of the paginated report visual for Power BI reports is now available in the June release of Power BI Desktop. For the first time, this native Power BI visual allows you to render any paginated report you’ve uploaded to the service in a Power BI report.
Paginated report visual for Power BI reports is now available in public preview.
There are new developer samples for embedding Power BI analytics in Salesforce. You can embed Power BI report, dashboards and more in Salesforce for your organization or for your customers. By embedding Power BI in Salesforce, your users will have access to Power BI interactive data visualizations that can be connected to all the data sources that are supported by Power BI.
The Power BI team have announced the availability of email notifications to non-owners in your organization. This addresses concerns from customers around limitations related to ownership in Dataflows being restricted to one user only.
The June release of the Power BI Report Builder includes a number of new features designed to improve your paginated report authoring experience, plus the addition of the Power BI Report Builder as an app in the Microsoft Store.
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