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: Syntex pay-as-you-go, search transcript for Stream (on SharePoint), add apps to teams when enabling, sensitivity labels inside the sharing dialog, OneDrive sync reports in admin center, sites coverage in search usage analytics
Microsoft Syntex Pay-as-you-go (Preview)
This preview allows you to track unstructured document processing events at no cost to assess usage and estimate costs for a future pay-as-you-go license. Start by entering your Azure subscription in the Microsoft 365 admin center, you will join the preview of the pay-as-you-go functionality for unstructured and prebuilt document processing (formerly document understanding).
Processing events will be sent to the Azure meter in your account so that you will be able to view the pages processed for unstructured and prebuilt document processing models. For the duration of the preview, you will not be charged anything. The billing meter will function only to show you pages processed in your organization.
Search video transcript for Stream (on SharePoint)
This feature allows users who are viewing a video to search for keywords contained in the video transcript. Users can navigate through the search results and click on a portion of the transcript to be taken to the respective spot in the video.
Note: This feature is for searching the transcript of a single video AND people need view or edit permissions on a file to search the transcript.
SharePoint Apps: Add to teams when enabling an app
As a SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator in Microsoft 365, you can acquire solutions from the SharePoint Store or distribute custom apps that can be used across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Connections. Microsoft are also improving the process of adding SharePoint Framework solution app to Teams in the modern SharePoint apps site (formerly known as App Catalog).
File sharing experience – sensitivity labels inside the sharing dialog
Sensitivity labels are used to classify and protect your organization’s data. These labels are completely customizable, and admins can apply a label to a specific file based on the organization needs. Microsoft have now added sensitivity labels inside the Sharing dialog, to provide you the ability to see what labels have been applied to your files before sharing them.
If the Admin chooses to set Sensitivity labels for the organization, users who interact with the OneDrive / SharePoint share control will be able to see these labels displayed inside the sharing dialog.
SharePoint sites coverage in Search usage analytics
Microsoft have announced that SharePoint sites are now included within Usage Analytics in the Microsoft 365 Search & Intelligence Admin Center. Visualize insights from queries from your SharePoint-based intranet and other hub and communication sites.
On the ‘Query analytics‘ page, you can now see the top queries, abandoned queries and 0-result queries. SharePoint sites include both classic and modern SharePoint queries, aggregating search query data across Hub sites, Communication sites, team sites, and various search centers in classic mode: at the Enterprise, Site and Basic levels.
OneDrive sync reports in the Apps Admin Center (GA)
Admins now can use the OneDrive sync health dashboard in the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center to get an executive summary of everything happening with OneDrive so that you can resolve common issues quickly and focus on other strategic tasks as an administrator.
The dashboard provides you with sync health reports for tracking relevant health issues and advisories, checking the sync status and app version of individual devices, and monitoring Known Folder Move roll out across devices throughout the organization.
In Teams: Teams Premium, Delete chats, expanded reactions, add people to chats @mention, recommended people, receive group chat with RSC, sign language view always-on, approvals as PDFs, Acrobat improvements
Microsoft have announced that Teams Premium is broadly available for preview as a limited trial for commercial customers through the Microsoft 365 admin center. The features under this offering began rolling out this December and will continue to roll out through January 2023. With Teams Premium, you can:
Extend your organization’s brand and company culture across meetings with branding, organization backgrounds, and organization together mode scenes.
Use AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful through live translation for captions to remove language barriers and intelligent recap features that offer smarter recordings with autogenerated chapters, AI-suggested action items, and insights to quickly catch up on missed meetings where your name was mentioned.
Apply advanced meeting protection such as Watermark, End-to-end encryption for meetings, and Sensitivity labels for meetings with prevent copy/paste of meeting chat to better protect your virtual meetings.
Deliver a high-quality webinar experience through advanced capabilities to streamline event workflows with registration waitlist and manual approval, facilitate behind-the-scene actions through virtual green room for presenters (separate from attendees) before the event begins, and manage the attendee experience so they only see shared content and participants brought on-screen.
Manage the end-to-end virtual appointment experience with advanced features like text reminders, custom branded virtual appointments, and a centralized Virtual Appointment dashboard for a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics to keep track of key usage insights such as no-shows and wait time information per appointment.
Organize and easily remove chat conversations you no longer need without impacting other participants in the same chat. Users can now delete 1:1 chats, group chats, and meeting chats if they are a participant in Microsoft Teams. This permanently deletes the chat only for the user, other people in the chat and conversation history for them is not impacted.
Expanded reactions allows users to apply any emoji as a reaction to chat messages! Pick from over 800 Teams emojis to react the way you want. Communicate reactions to celebrate, express your agreement, or emphasize the completion of tasks.
Add new participants to the chat with @mention, removing the need to navigate to the add-dialog. When adding new participants, you can control how much of the chat history to share.
Using AI, Teams chat will assist you in initiating new conversations by recommending colleagues based on your previous collaborations.
Receive all group chat messages with resource-specific consent
The resource-specific consent (RSC) permissions model, originally developed for Teams Graph APIs has been extended for chat and channel scope. Using RSC, you can request team owners to consent for a bot to receive user messages across standard group chats without being @mentioned.
Sign Language View and always-on captions in meetings
Prioritize up to two other participants’ videos for sign language in meetings so they stay visible even while content is shared. Additionally, you can set captions to stay on across all meetings.
Approvals as PDFs can be saved, printed, and transferred
Approval creators can save a completed approval request to a PDF file and have the option to print it. This feature allows customers to easily transfer their proof of approval as a PDF to another system or store it as a file.
Adobe Acrobat streamlines the PDF experience in Teams
Building on the momentum of collaborative apps in Teams, Adobe has released the new integration of Adobe Acrobat into Microsoft Teams. Adobe Acrobat can now be set as the default PDF app in Teams. This makes it easier to share and review PDFs, collaborate with comments and annotations, easily access PDFs stored in Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive, and more.
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD):
View meeting transcripts on Microsoft Teams on Android and iOS for Government clouds – You can now start transcription for your meetings and view meeting transcripts on Microsoft Teams for iOS and Android.
Frontline workers
Frontline workers using shared devices can use Edge and Yammer apps on Android alongside Teams – Microsoft’s shared device mode allows frontline workers to easily authenticate by automatically signing users in and out of all the apps that have enabled this feature. In addition to Microsoft Teams and Managed Home Screen being generally available, Edge and Yammer apps on Android are now in public preview.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Delegate mailbox approval process, pipelines (preview), Developer tools update
Delegate the mailbox approval process
The Power Apps team have announced that that the mailbox approval process can now be delegated to another user instead of always requiring a Global or Exchange admin. A new security role named Delegated Mailbox Approver is now available. A Global or Exchange admin can assign (delegate) this role to one or more users. A user with this role will be able to approve a mailbox without being a Global or Exchange admin.
Pipelines aims to democratize application lifecycle management (ALM) for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 customers by bringing deployment automation capabilities into Managed Environments in a manner that’s more approachable for all makers, admins, and developers.
Pipelines can be setup and run entirely within Power Platform – with governance, visibility, and safeguards automatically built in so that your business solutions can come to market faster with less effort and higher quality. The system handles all the heavy lifting and ongoing maintenance so you don’t have to.
In Power Automate: Deeper SAP integration, 10 new verified, 13 independent publisher connectors, Power Automate Desktop December 2022 update
Deeper SAP Integration for the Power Platform
The Power Automate team have recently announced the General Availability (GA) of a broad set of new functionality in the Power Platform that will make it easier for organizations running SAP to digitally transform and automate their business processes. Here’s a look at what this entails:
Prebuilt Power Apps for Common SAP Processes
Prebuilt Power Automate Flows for Common SAP Processes
10 new verified and 13 independent publisher connectors
In November, Microsoft launched 10 new verified connectors and 16 updates from different service owners, as well as 13 new Independent Publisher connectors. These connectors have solutions and tools for Commerce, Human Resources, Data, Content and Files, and much more.
In Power BI: Power BI December 2022 feature summary, unified v-cores, dataset refresh cancellation, subscribe to filtered report, enterprise scorecards
Power BI Feature Summary – December 2022
This month’s update includes a variety of new features including: updated DAX functions, updated slicer type formatting, and brought Metrics to the Windows app.
Simplifying capacity management with unified v-cores
The Power BI team have announced a platform update that will simplify the way customers manage Power BI Premium capacities. Starting on December 11th 2022, the team are rolling out changes to unify the concepts of front-end and back-end virtual cores for capacity management.
This change will simplify the model used by customers to both manage capacities and rationalize usage metrics against capacity sizing decisions.
Dataset refresh cancellation now available in Power BI Premium
Earlier this year, the Power BI team released the Enhanced refresh with Power BI REST API, that – in addition to XMLA based refreshes – allows refresh cancellation. However, it requires the refresh operation to be triggered by the API. Today, users can cancel an ongoing scheduled or on-demand refresh using a contextual button in the Power BI service.
The Power BI team have announced a highly anticipated update to subscriptions: you can now create a subscription to a view of a Power BI report uniquely relevant to you. When creating a new subscription, you’ll see a new Include my changes option if you have made changes to the report (e.g., applied filters or selected a slicer value).
Enterprise scorecards with hierarchies and linked metrics in Power BI Metrics
The Power BI team have announced two much anticipated releases in the Metrics experience. With hierarchies and linked metrics, it’s easier than ever to automate your metric values so you can spend less time crafting multiple scorecards and connections, and more time analyzing your metric performance.
Hierarchies is a premium or PPU feature, and linked metrics is a Pro feature. These two features enable easy, large scale enterprise scorecard deployment, allowing automated views of cascading scorecards and linked metrics that show up and are sync’d on multiple scorecards.
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (1)
Rolling out (4)
In development (7)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint: Adding an app to Teams – As a SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator in Microsoft 365, you can manage apps that can be used across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Connections. Some apps can be added to Teams, you can add them on the Apps site. Roadmap ID: 103610
🚂 ROLLING OUT
SharePoint: New site templates – We are introducing 3 new SharePoint site templates dedicated to helping you create sites for your HR department, to showcase Events, and a template powered by Microsoft Syntex to do contract management. Roadmap ID: 102380
Microsoft Syntex: new rules actions – move and copy – Create rules to move or copy files processed by Syntex models based on the extracted value. Roadmap ID: 98111
Microsoft Viva: New landing experience for Viva Connections desktop – Help people in your organization manage their daily flow of work using a customized landing experience in Teams that displays the most important tasks, tools, news, and resources in one central place. The new landing experience offers expanded navigational tools between Viva apps and acts as the home base for Viva experiences in Teams. Roadmap ID: 99917
Microsoft Viva: Meeting category insights coming to the Digest email – The Digest email from Microsoft Viva will include a summary of meeting category insights for users with a Viva Insights subscription, highlighting up to 3 categories in which users spent the most time over the last 4 weeks. Roadmap ID: 98164
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Goals Audit Logs – Audit Logs will be available in Compliance Center. Roadmap ID: 115480
Release – February 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Goals Bulk OKR Import – Viva Goals allows bulk importing of Objectives, Key Results and Projects using a standard Excel template. Bulk import allows you to take pre-existing lists of OKRs and Projects and quickly add them to Viva Goals. Roadmap ID: 115477
Microsoft Viva: Praise highlights in profile card in Teams and Outlook – With updates coming in February, praises received will be highlighted on a user’s profile card in Teams and Outlook. There are user settings available that prevent praise highlights from being visible on their profile card. Roadmap ID: 109551
Release – March 2023
Microsoft Viva: Topics Adoption Metrics Dashboard – Topics will include a new analytics page, where knowledge managers and admins will have access to a set of metrics that details the health of their adoption. Tenants will have health targets to reach to keep them on track for adopting Viva Topics, as well as recommended actions to perform to drive each metric to healthy. Roadmap ID: 100028
Release – April 2023
Microsoft Viva: Connections News Notifications – Mobile users of Viva Connections will receive a push notification from Teams when SharePoint news is published from sites they follow or visit frequently. They’ll also receive notification if they are @ mentioned in a comment on a news post, or if someone likes or comments on news they have published. These notifications will honor Teams notification settings including fully disabling them and quiet hours. Roadmap ID: 98112
Release – June 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Increased Language Availability for Viva Goals – Viva Goals will support a total of 37 languages. Roadmap ID: 115478
Microsoft Viva: Create more than one Connections experience in the same tenant – This new capability enables customers to create multiple distinct Connections experiences and corresponding home sites within the same tenant. Common scenarios include conglomerates or subsidiaries that require different Connections experiences for different users, each with its own dashboard, feed and resources. Roadmap ID: 99916
The SharePoint Success Site is an extension of the great Microsoft 365 learning pathways site, which allows you to use and create curated playlists within a SharePoint site to offer training and support for users. The SharePoint Success Site is a fairly recent introduction to the learning pathways family and is offered as a standalone deployable option from the SharePoint look book.
How to provision
There are two ways to provision the SharePoint Success Site, either directly from the SharePoint look book, or via the learning pathways site itself.
Provision via the SharePoint look book
The SharePoint Success Site is dependent on the learning pathways site, so you will need to provision that first, or make sure that it is updated to the current version. More information on how to update the learning pathways solution can be found here.
You will need to be a global administrator to provision the SharePoint Success Site (described as tenant admin in the look book)
You will need to have an app catalog site in your SharePoint environment. More details on how to create an app catalog site can be found here
You will need to be an app catalog administrator to provision the SharePoint Success Site
Provision via the learning pathways site
Navigate to the learning pathways site in your SharePoint environment
From the navigation menu > select Learning Pathways Administration
Press the ellipsis … > add content pack
Select the SharePoint Success Site
This will then take you through to the SharePoint look book to follow the steps as described above
Once provisioned, the SharePoint Success Site will be deployed as a separate communication site within your environment. The site uses a content pack installed in the learning pathways site, which will be displayed within the site.
Issues and troubleshooting
Learning pathways errors in the SharePoint Success Site
When I tried to provision the SharePoint Success Site it didn’t work as seamlessly as I expected. For me, after provisioning the site via the SharePoint look book I received the following error across all pages displaying the learning pathways web part:
“Microsoft 365 learning pathways has a configuration issue. Ask your administrator for assistance. [Administrators: Please see the browser console for detailed logs. For technical assistance check out the issues list at https://github.com/pnp/custom-learning-office-365/issues.%5D“
Microsoft 365 learning pathways error.
To resolve this:
Navigate to the learning pathways administration page
Press the ellipsis … > add content pack
Select the SharePoint Success Site
A message will appear asking if you have already provisioned the SharePoint Success Site > press complete
This will configure your SharePoint Success Site to consume the newly added content pack and will display correctly.
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (7)
Rolling out (2)
In development (12)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint Syntex: Provide a document card view for applied Syntex document understanding models – A new library view setting to display extracted model information in a tile view. Roadmap ID:88704
SharePoint Syntex: Content center site design available in Look Book – A Syntex content center site design will be available for provisioning from the SharePoint look book online. Roadmap ID:88705
SharePoint Syntex: Import sample contracts library – This feature enables customers to import a sample contracts library with a document understanding model already applied. They can use this library as is or explore and adapt it for their scenario. Roadmap ID:88707
SharePoint Syntex: Flow template to send customized email after file classification – Flow template to send customized email when file is classified by a Syntex model. Roadmap ID:88709
SharePoint Syntex: Manage contracts in Syntex with automatic tagging and lifecycle management – Manage contracts in Syntex with automatic tagging and approval workflows, automatic clause generation and lifecycle management. Roadmap ID:88713
SharePoint Syntex: Content assembly – Convert your existing docs into templates and generate new docs from list data or manual entries. Roadmap ID:88717
SharePoint Syntex: Content type to advanced metadata search – Use content type classification to find files using advanced metadata search. Roadmap ID:88714
🚂 ROLLING OUT
SharePoint: Private drafts for SharePoint pages and news – We’re adding the ability to create private drafts for pages and news posts. A private draft is visible only to the page author, the people the author chooses to share it with, and site admins. It’s great for creating and editing content that’s not ready for others to see except the people you want to collaborate with. Roadmap ID:85629
Microsoft Viva: Topics in Yammer – Display topic highlights and access topic cards in Yammer conversations. Roadmap ID:72184
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Power BI and Viva Goals integration – Automatically update Viva Goals (Key Results, Projects) with data from Power BI Report. Roadmap ID:109490
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Elevated Teams Integration – Fully featured Viva Goals app in Team, complete with check-ins within the app. Roadmap ID:106126
Microsoft Stream: Create, view and share playlists in SharePoint – This feature will allow users to organize their video and audio files into a playlist for easy organization, sharing and playback. Users can add any video and audio files to a playlist that they have edit access to. People with access to the playlist and to the files in the playlist can view the videos in order or skip back and forth between items in the playlist. Roadmap ID:109564
Release – February 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Leadership Corner in Viva Engage – this space is an employee’s personalized hub to discover (leader discovery & suggested leaders), see content from (leader stories, activity feed, & sponsored campaigns), and engage with (AMAs & AMA history) their leaders. For more on leadership corner in Viva Engage. Roadmap ID:109575
SharePoint: External File Request in SharePoint Document Library – With the file request feature in SharePoint Document Library, you can choose a folder where others can upload files using a link that you send them. People you request files from can only upload files; they can’t see the content of the folder, edit, delete, or download files, or even see who else has uploaded files. Roadmap ID:103625
SharePoint: Updates to site themes – We are implementing an update for the Office theme in Classic SharePoint will align the presentation with the application experience. Roadmap ID:101150
SharePoint Syntex: Contracts Management In-product site template – This template will enable licensed Syntex users to apply a Contracts Management site template directly from the in-product apply a template UX. This site template include automatic data classification and extraction, a preconfigured content assembly model, templates and preconfigured workflow. It also includes learning material around how to use and extend this template to customize it for your own use case! Roadmap ID:98138
Release – March 2023
🆕 Microsoft 365 admin center: Send email notifications from your own domain – Notifications that cannot be sent from a user’s email account can now be configured to use your own custom verified domain instead of the Microsoft default domain. Roadmap ID:103628
SharePoint:Create pages and news from the SharePoint app bar – Now you’ll be able to start creating pages and news as an action from within the SharePoint app bar. This means, no matter where you are in SharePoint you can jump right into the content creation process and stay in the flow of work. Roadmap ID:98143
Release – April 2023
SharePoint Syntex: Image tagging – Automatically recognize thousands of standard objects and automatically tag the file with recognized items. Roadmap ID:88715
Release – July 2023
SharePoint on Stream: Inline playback of videos in SharePoint Highlighted content web parts for grid, carousel and filmstrip layouts – When users click to play a video in a Highlighted content web part (Grid, Carousel or filmstrip layouts) section of a SharePoint site, the video will play inline. This feature allows users to watch a video without being taken off the SharePoint page and keeps the video playing while users to browse/scroll through the other contents of the page. Roadmap ID:98091
SharePoint: Create more than one home site – Create customized landing experiences for all audiences in your organization with the ability to create up to 10 distinct SharePoint home sites. Multiple home site experiences in SharePoint means you’ll be able to target content to specific groups more seamlessly for scenarios like conglomerates, different departments, roles, and regions. Roadmap ID:99916
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (0)
Rolling out (1)
In development (5)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
Microsoft Viva: Topics in Yammer – Preview – Display topic highlights and access topic cards in Yammer conversations. Roadmap ID: 72184
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2023
Microsoft Viva: Viva Connections Customer Facing Analytics – The customer facing analytics module will allow customers to understand the usage metrics for their instance of Viva Connections. and will help them gauge the health of their VC deployment. Roadmap ID:93367
Release – February 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Praise highlights in profile card in Teams and Outlook – With updates coming in February, praises received will be highlighted on a user’s profile card in Teams and Outlook. There are user settings available that prevent praise highlights from being visible on their profile card. Roadmap ID: 109551
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Engage Premium Analytics – New advanced personal, community, and leader analytics to better understand engagement, reach, insights, and sentiment in communities and storyline posts in Viva Engage. Roadmap ID: 109574
🆕 Microsoft Stream: Create, view and share playlists in SharePoint – This feature will allow users to organize their video and audio files into a playlist for easy organization, sharing and playback. Users can add any video and audio files to a playlist that they have edit access to. People with access to the playlist and to the files in the playlist can view the videos in order or skip back and forth between items in the playlist. Roadmap ID: 109564
Microsoft Viva: Discover experts and answers from Topics – Questions on topics will receive automated answers or get referred to subject matter experts. Feature ID: 72188
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: Tenant URL rename GA, New site templates, streamline site info SP admin center,
SharePoint Tenant URL Rename – General Availability
This capability is now generally available to organizations that have less than 10,000 total sites (including OneDrive and SharePoint sites). With the tenant rename capability, you will be able to have the SharePoint domain in all site URLs updated to the new name you choose and continue with that new name going forward.
The SharePoint team are introducing 3 new SharePoint site templates dedicated to helping you create sites for your HR department, to showcase Events, and a template powered by Microsoft Syntex to do contract management.
SharePoint admin center: Streamlining management of site information across Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups
SharePoint is updating the site detail panel to include Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups information. Admins that have permissions to SharePoint, Teams and Groups admin centers can now manage all related attributes (membership, group name, description, etc.) from a single site detail panel in the SharePoint admin center ‘Active Sites’ tab.
Note: SharePoint admins with SharePoint only permissions will have read-only access to the new attributes.
Modern FAQ – The Modern FAQ app provides users a better way to search for the answers to the questions they have in mind.
Smarter Event Booking – Smarter Event Booking allows you to create events and offer them to your users for registration.
Teams
In Teams: Accept/ block chat invite, scheduled send, start chat with groups, view chat history via search, unread toggle, upload documents via e-signature approvals, 1-click instant poll, PSTN dial-in breakout rooms, 7×7 videos, modern meetings on web, screen pop for incoming PSTN, transcription for calls on Android
Accept or block a group chat invitation from an unmanaged user
This feature brings the ability to accept or block a one-on-one chat from an unmanaged user that already exists in Teams. Microsoft are extending and additional safety layer for Teams users to also accept or block a group chat invitation from an unmanaged user.
Similar to delaying the delivery of emails in Outlook, you now can manually select the future date and time you would like a chat message to be delivered. Users can simply right-click the send button to schedule send and have the confidence their message will be delivered as scheduled.
Start a Teams Chat with Distribution Groups, Mail-enabled Security Groups, and Office 365 Groups
You will now be able to start a Teams Chat with Distribution Groups, Mail-enabled Security Groups, and O365 Groups. This feature will respect the limits on members in a group chat, currently set to 250 members.
Click on search message results to view the entire chat conversation history
Users who click on the chat message search result will now be presented with the entire message thread, regardless of the age of the message. This update creates efficiency as it ensures the user has the full context of the conversation.
Users will now find it easier to view, triage and catch up with their unread chat message notifications by easily turning on the unread toggle button in their activity feed panel. Alternatively, users will also be able to turn off the unread toggle to view both read and unread notifications.
Upload documents from OneDrive for E-signature Approvals
When creating an e-signature request in Approvals, users can now upload a document to be signed from OneDrive for Business directly. This enables access to your document from anywhere and on any device.
Defined binary responses to get immediate answers to your spoken poll question (yes/no, thumb up/down, heart/broken heart). Presenters can launch these polls without preparing in advance – say your question out loud then click the corresponding response icon.
Admins can enable this policy in the Teams Admin Center, so that on acceptance of a PSTN call, an automatic browser launch can happen alongside Teams, displaying relevant information (CRM data, case data, etc.) to the user. This feature can also now be turned off in user settings.
Automatically view up to 49 videos (7×7) in Teams meeting
With this update, users will be able to automatically see up to 49 videos (7×7) on their screen by default without an explicit action. The actual number of videos seen by a user will depend on hardware/device capabilities.
The modern meeting and calling experience will be available for Teams on the web in Chrome and Edge browsers – including improved pre-join, dynamic view, and the updated control bar.
Transcription for calls on Microsoft Teams for Android
Transcription for 1:1 calls and group calls is now available on the Teams app for Android for whenever you’re on the go or just don’t have a notepad handy.
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Updated Assignment List view for Teachers/ students – The Assignments list for teachers and students has been updated to a set of tabs for easy view of upcoming and past assignments.
Grade Trends and Distribution view in the Gradebook – In the Gradebook for Assignments, we’ve added the average grade for the class, all assignments, and for each student.
OneNote Class Notebook viewer for Teams Mobile – Through this new feature, users will be able to open and view OneNote notebooks right within their Teams Mobile apps.
Instant Poll in Teams Meeting – With Instant Poll, users can launch a pre-defined binary question (Yes/No, Thumbs Up/Down, Heart/Heartbroken) with just a single click in the Polls side pane during a meeting.
Intelligent chat message translation in Teams for iOS and Android – When you receive a message in Teams that is not in your preferred language, Teams asks if the text should be translated to your preferred language
Open Existing Whiteboards in Teams Meetings – Pull up the whiteboard you prepared before class with Open existing board in Teams meetings, and save time by no longer having to start your whiteboard from scratch.
Embed online videos in Whiteboard in Teams – Avoid fussing with Tab and Window switching that interrupts the flow of a meeting by including supplemental videos directly on the whiteboard with embedded online videos.
View Parent Contact Details on Teams Mobile – From the Parent App, teachers can now view a list of each student’s parent or guardian contact details listed in a Contact Card.
Assign Seats in Together Mode – With this latest innovation, meeting organizers and presenters can now assign seats to participants in Together mode.
Career coach updates – A few steps within the Career Coach set up and customization requirements in Teams Admin Center (TAC) have been reduced and transitioned into optional steps to simplify upfront configuration load on IT admins.
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):
Connectors in GCC – Teams Connectors, which support webhook integrations, will be made available in GCC.
Casting from Teams desktop client to Microsoft Teams Rooms in GCC-H – For quick ad-hoc sessions that don’t require setting up a formal meeting, users can leverage Teams casting to wirelessly connect to a Teams Room and display content from the Teams desktop client (Windows and Mac). Users can broadcast their screen and cast content stored locally on their computer or accessible via Office 365.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Formula repair (preview), 25% of new customer licenses, new ways to share ideas, release of modern learn page, developers tool update, table support for message/ individual publish, SharePoint virtual table updates, custom/ new views & forms on AAD user table, custom multi-table lookups support virtual tables, locked tabs on mobile apps, optimised command bar on tablet apps
Formula repair now in preview
With formula repair, now you may skip some of the troubleshooting effort as whenever you have a formula error, Power Apps will try to come up with a fix suggestion leveraging the power of AI. Once there’s a fix, a single click on the apply button will help you get rid of the error.
Power Apps licenses 25% off for the first year for new customers
There is a new 25% off offer on Power Apps Per user licenses. New customers of Power Apps, who don’t have any Per user licenses already, can save 25% on their first year. The offer is available now through March 31st, 2023. To purchase, speak with your Microsoft representative, or contact a Microsoft specialist or CSP partner from the Power Apps pricing page. Click on Contact Sales.
New ways to share Power Apps community forum ideas
As of November 29th 2022, Power Apps Ideas is now on a brand-new platform powered by Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community. On top of providing our community with a brand-new interface to share ideas, the migration will enable our product teams to be much more responsive to user feedback and better integrate your ideas into our product roadmap.
The Power Apps team have announced the release of the modern Learn page in Power Apps. The new Learn experience has consolidated content from all Microsoft resources to help with your onboarding and upskilling journey.
Power Platform Developers tool – October 2022 update
The Power Apps team have shared the October update for the Power Platform Developer tools. With this update, we are releasing some capabilities that have been in high demand by the developer community including: command line updates, solution pack, unpack and sync, Azure DevOps/ GitHub actions and more.
Tables now support configuring Messages and individual Publish
Messages (also known as displaystrings) are messages seen in the Dynamics apps built on Power Apps. You can now configure these messages to match your own names for tables and direct users to do the right thing in various situations when they are presented with these tailored messages. You can also translate these messages into any of the languages installed in your environment.
With this update we’re also bringing a Publish command to the table level, meaning you can publish changes made to Forms, Views or Messages at the table level – avoiding a Publish of the whole solution (or all customizations). This will mean you can publish just your changes and complete that faster than publishing everything all at once.
Improvement to SharePoint Virtual Tables – Multi-Select choice fields and Boolean fields
Multi-Select choice fields and Boolean fields in SharePoint Lists are now fully functional in Dataverse virtual tables. You can see all options labeled properly, Dataverse allows for multiple option selection, filtering of the column to display rows now works properly.
Customize or create new Views and Forms on the AAD User Table
The AAD User virtual table previously did not allow users to modify which fields are displayed in views and forms, and users were unable to build custom views and forms. This restriction has been relaxed and users can modify forms and views or create new forms and views using any of the available AAD User fields.
Custom Multi-Table Lookups now support Virtual Tables
Custom Multi-table lookups allow users to build a lookup that retrieves data from multiple tables at once. An out of the box example is Customer that looks up data from Account and Contact. Users can build their own lookups using SDKs or the APIs to have custom multi-table lookups.
Tables can only participate in one of these lookups if they are not already part of an existing multi-table lookup.
Until now, only local tables could be one of the referenced tables. Now Virtual Tables can be used as a referenced table. This includes the out of the box AAD User Virtual Table.
App makers can now choose to lock the form tabs at the top as they scroll. Form tabs will always be visible and will help users to visualize and update data in larger form context. This also provides ability to switch tab at any time.
The command bar for tablets mobile application is at the bottom of the screen and can only display four commands. With this change app makers can configure tablet command bar to be displayed at the top and utilize full space to show more commands.
In Power Automate: 7 new verified, 16 new independent connectors, Power Automate Desktop update, new process mining capabilities
7 new verified & 16 independent publisher connectors released in October 2022
There were 7 new verified connectors and 7 updates from different service owners released in October, as well as 16 new Independent Publisher connectors. These connectors have solutions and tools for Commerce, Finance, Social Media, AI, Lifestyle and Entertainment and much more.
New process mining capabilities within Power Automate (Preview)
Microsoft have announced the preview of new process mining capabilities from Minit available in process advisor within Microsoft Power Automate. In this update, the process advisor powered with Minit introduces templates that enable customers to seamlessly drive powerful business process insights from cloud flows in Power Automate as well as insights from Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and other systems of records like SAP.
In Power BI: On-premises data gateway release, Power BI November 2022 feature summary, paginated reports support in Power BI Pro, new cache refresh settings Power BI Premium, save copy of report & collapse navigational pane
On-premises data gateway November 2022
The Power BI team have announced the release of the November update for the on-premises data gateway (version 3000.150.11). 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 November version of Power BI Desktop.
The Power BI team have announced support for paginated reports in Power BI Pro. Now, Microsoft Power BI customers have the flexibility to create and consume interactive reports as well as paginated reports using Power BI Pro.
Paginated reports are traditional operational reports best used for multi-page list-type reports for operational processes with document-like output requirements. One key benefit of paginated reports is that they are programmable which gives report authors more flexibility and control of the structure and formatting of their reports.
The Power BI team have announced that ClientCacheRefreshPolicy is now a configurable property for your Power BI Premium workspaces. Admins can override scheduled cache refresh settings for an entire workspace, improving the performance of their semantic models.
The default behavior in the Power BI service is to automatically cache dashboard, tile, and report queries upon refresh to provide an optimal report viewing experience. For enterprise semantic model deployments, where hundreds of reports and artifacts are built from a single Power BI dataset, automatic caches may cause performance issues. With the ClientCacheRefreshPolicy property, admins can disable the automatic cache refresh setting to optimize the behavior of their Power BI datasets.
Save a copy of a report/ collapse navigation pane in organizational app
After listening to customer feedback, the Power BI team have decided to bring back the feature in the org app that allowed you to save copies of reports. App consumers who have build permissions can now save copies of reports to their “My workspace” from the app. Further, app authors can now by default collapse the app navigation pane for their app consumers. Enabling this feature would allow your app consumers to land on full screen mode.
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (0)
Rolling out (0)
In development (1)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – February 2023
SharePoint: External File Request in SharePoint Document Library – With the file request feature in SharePoint Document Library, you can choose a folder where others can upload files using a link that you send them. People you request files from can only upload files; they can’t see the content of the folder, edit, delete, or download files, or even see who else has uploaded files. Roadmap ID: 103625
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (5)
Rolling out (0)
In development (7)
🍾 LAUNCHED
Microsoft Stream: Generate captions for a video uploaded to SharePoint and OneDrive for DoD – Users with edit permissions to a video file uploaded to SharePoint and OneDrive can click a button in the player to generate closed captions in English. Roadmap ID: 85645
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: Update to the experience for collecting feedback on AI quality and correctness through the Topic Card – Experience updates on the Topic Card to better request feedback from users on the quality of a suggested topic. Roadmap ID: 98113
Microsoft Viva: Topics action cards in Viva Connections – Starting in November 2022, Viva Topics will have two different action cards that can be used on the Viva Connections Dashboard. One is a discover card that can be used to explore topics and knowledge areas across the company for people who could be interested in learning more or contributing to a topic. Topics and knowledge areas are dynamically displayed in the card based on your interests, current projects, and expertise. Roadmap ID: 100253
Microsoft Viva: Viva Insights web app in Government Community Cloud (GCC) – A new web interface for the Viva Insights app will be discoverable via the web, and the Microsoft 365 app launcher on Office.com. This will offer an additional way to access the personal productivity and wellbeing experiences currently in the Viva Insights app in Teams, and will include a link to the MyAnalytics dashboard for users who want to reflect on insights related to their work habits. Roadmap ID: 100496
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2023
Microsoft Syntex: new rules actions – move and copy – Create rules to move or copy files processed by Syntex models based on the extracted value. Roadmap ID: 98111
Microsoft Viva: Topics in Your Briefing Email – As part of bringing topics to where you work, Viva Topics will now appear as an adaptive card in Your Daily Briefing. Similarly, to the Topic Center, this first card surfaces suggested topics based on your activity and will ask you to confirm your connection to the topic. Roadmap ID:100246
Outlook: View and navigate the organization chart with Org Explorer – Org Explorer for Outlook helps you to visualize and explore your company’s internal structure, work teams, and individual roles. Roadmap ID: 103605
Release – March 2023
🆕Microsoft Viva: Briefing and Digest emails for GCC-H – The daily Briefing email and the semi-monthly Digest email, automatically delivered to your Outlook inbox, will be available for GCC-H. The daily Briefing email is a personalized, actionable email from Microsoft Viva to help you start the day on track and stay on top of tasks. Twice a month, you’ll also receive a Digest email that summarizes data about your work patterns and ways to improve them. Roadmap ID: 109529
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Briefing and Digest emails for DoD – The daily Briefing email and the semi-monthly Digest email, automatically delivered to your Outlook inbox, will be available for DoD. The daily Briefing email is a personalized, actionable email from Microsoft Viva to help you start the day on track and stay on top of tasks. Twice a month, you’ll also receive a Digest email that summarizes data about your work patterns and ways to improve them. Roadmap ID: 109530
Microsoft Viva: Display connected topics on people profile cards – Profile cards displayed through Outlook will display Topics associated to an individual. Roadmap ID: 88697
Microsoft Viva: Viva connections support for iOS tablet – Microsoft Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern engagement experience designed to keep everyone engaged and informed. This release brings the experience of Viva connections to iPad, thus extending the set of devices you can access it on. Roadmap ID: 101167
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: Stream (on SharePoint), Storyline for Viva Engage/ Yammer, OneDrive folder backup for macOS, Conditional Access Improvements for Lists app on Android, Lists support for Android tablet, rules in custom List templates, create list from CSV, RAC policy for OneDrive GA, Conditional access policies for SharePoint sites, default sensitivity label for libraries (preview), anti-malware scan on file download, Forensic malware identification and extraction, migration manager updates, SPMT improvements, SharePoint data access governance (DAG) insights V1, Tenant rename, OneDrive Cross-tenant User Data Migration
Stream (on SharePoint) is now generally available
Stream (on SharePoint) is deeply integrated with Microsoft 365. Now, video can be a part of your everyday work and school apps: you can search, discover, play, share, embed, and record videos directly in Microsoft Office.
Storyline for Microsoft Viva Engage and Yammer generally available
Storyline is a new way for people to share, connect, and contribute to their organization through Yammer and the Viva Engage app. Previously, the only way to share broadly through Yammer was through communities, but communities aren’t always a perfect fit for what people want to share. In some cases, there may not be a community that matches the subject the person wants to discuss.
Note: Storyline is supported only in Microsoft Viva Engage and Yammer enterprise networks that enforce Office 365 identity.
older Backup enables an admin and/or end-user to redirect the local macOS Desktop and Documents folder to OneDrive. This allows you to keep using those folders to save their content while delivering the protection and access anywhere promise that OneDrive offers. The feature and relative list entries are very similar to the Folder Backup experience that has been on Windows for a while.
Conditional Access Improvements for the Microsoft Lists App for Android
Microsoft recently announced the launch of the Microsoft Lists app for Android. The app was launched with App Protection Policy (APP, also known as MAM) and its support for the Require app protection policy grant control. Microsoft Lists will now also support the Conditional Access (CA) grant control, like other Microsoft 365 apps, such as SharePoint.
You can create rules to automate tasks such as sending someone a notification when data changes in the list or a new file is created in the library. You’ll choose a condition that triggers the rule and the action that the rule will take. Some list templates will soon come with rules pre-packaged into them to help you keep you and your team members notified of changes to data in the list. This is just another way to help keep data in Lists complete, accurate, and up to date.
Create a list from comma-separated values (CSV) files
You can now create new lists from data inside CSV files –often used for exchanging complex data between different applications. In Lists, select the “From CSV” option when creating a new list. When you use the Export to CSV command in a list, you get a special CSV file that includes information about the list you exported. That means if you import that same CSV into another site, you get a list that has the same column types, formatting, and data as your original list.
Restricted access control (RAC) policy for OneDrive in your organization – General Availability
The OneDrive team have announced that restricted access control (RAC) policy for OneDrives is now generally available. With this policy, you can now restrict access to all OneDrives in your organization to a set of users, say all your employees only and no one else. You simply create security groups in Azure Active Directory that contains all your employees, then in SharePoint admin center configure the Limit OneDrive Access to those groups.
Conditional access policies for SharePoint sites, OneDrives, and Teams – General availability
Microsoft have announced the general availability of conditional access policies for SharePoint sites, OneDrives, and Teams. Simply use the SharePoint Online PowerShell to set appropriate access policy for a site, which dictates the conditions required for accessing that site. For example, for your 2025 Strategy site that is expected to have business critical content you can configure the policy to require MFA (multi-factor-authentication) for all users.
The key benefit of this capability is that users need to go through additional credential gates only when they try accessing sites or teams that contain business critical information. If your organization already has sensitivity labels deployed, then you can also associate this policy with the sensitivity labels and simply label the sites or teams appropriately.
Default sensitivity label for document libraries (Public Preview)
The SharePoint team have announced default sensitivity label for SharePoint Document Libraries comes to public preview. With this new capability you can now protect your Office documents from the day they are created or uploaded to SharePoint document libraries. Simply set the appropriate sensitivity label for your document libraries using the Library Settings in the information panel. From that point onwards all documents, newly created or modified, in that library will be automatically labelled.
Forensic malware identification and extraction – General availability
Microsoft have anounced the general availability of malware identification and extraction capability. With this capability, using simple SharePoint PowerShell cmdlet administrators can find out what type of malware is present in a file that was marked as infected and extract that file from the site to perform further analysis. All this is possible without needing to elevate their access to the SharePoint or OneDrive site where the content is present.
Migration Manager was made generally available in 2019 and now enables you to migrate content from file shares, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte. Several new features were announced during Microsoft Ignite 2022 and include: Bulk download reports, Migration filters, and Estimated time to migrate. All these new features are planned to be made generally available by the beginning of the calendar year 2023.
The SharePoint Migration Tool can help you migrate from on-premise server sources including SharePoint 2010, 2013 and 2016. Now you can streamline scan and migration jobs within one tool. Secondly, the page navigation flow is revamped to make it intuitive for you to manage your migration jobs and create migration-by scenarios.
SharePoint data access governance (DAG) insights V1 – General Availability
The SharePoint team have announced that V1 of data access governance (DAG) insights feature is generally available. DAG insights empower you to discover top-100 and top-10,000 sites that matter the most among millions of sites you may have and monitor/validate/tailor sharing and access policies for those sites.
The SharePoint team have announced the general availability of SharePoint Tenant Rename, for tenants with less than 10K sites. This allows you to rename your tenant’s SharePoint URL let’s say from contoso.sharepoint.com to fabrikam.sharepoint.com. In future, we are looking to expand this support to large tenants that have more than 10K sites.
OneDrive Cross-tenant User Data Migration – General Availability
The OneDrive team have nnounced the general availability of OneDrive cross-tenant user data migration. With this capability you can now move users’ OneDrives across two tenants using a simple set of SharePoint PowerShell cmdlets. You can also move users’ mailboxes across tenants.
One another notable capability is, upon OneDrive move although the URL of the OneDrive has changed the sharing links to old URLs will continue to work! This is made possible by the cross-tenant redirect capability that ensures any hit to old URLs is redirected to new URL.
In Teams: Assign seats in together mode, pop out shared content, live translated captions, updated companion mode, call history, contact groups in calls app, M365 connected templates, PDF experience, suggested replies in group chat, video clip, delete/ rename files in a channel or OneDrive folder, calendar includes scheduling form, upgraded usage analytics for admins, app usage report update
Together mode makes meeting participants feel more like they’re in the same room during virtual meetings. With this latest innovation, meeting organizers and presenters can now assign seats to participants in Together mode.
Previously, you could pop out individual Teams chat conversation, meeting, and calling experiences into a separate in window to help streamline the workflow. We are now bringing the ability for users to also pop out shared meeting content in a separate window so you can see both shared content and meeting participants with ease.
Live translated captions for Microsoft Teams delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. This helps break down language barriers for your global meetings and calls to be productive and effortless.
Microsoft have updated companion mode in Teams mobile to give in-room attendees quick access to engagement features like chat, live reactions, and Microsoft Whiteboard. We are making it easier to access meeting and device controls, like the ability to join a meeting, cast a PowerPoint, mute the room, turn room cameras on and off, and more. Here are some areas companion mode in Teams mobile makes hybrid meetings better:
Users can use a single tap to join a meeting on both their device and Microsoft Teams Room.
Users can easily access chat, participant list (see who’s in the meeting), live reactions, and raise hands to easily participate from the room
Audio on the mobile device will automatically turn off to ensure echo doesn’t happen.
Get a more comprehensive view of your call history to see how calls arrived, whether calls were transferred or forwarded, and how they were controlled once received. This detailed call history, combined with the ability to access call recordings and transcriptions from within call details, gives you the context you need to be efficient and productive.
Creation of Contact Groups is now available in the right rail pane of the Calls App. Users can now create new groups, and edit the membership of existing groups via the Calls App.
We are combining the best of Microsoft Teams templates with SharePoint site templates – into the same flow of creation. When you create a new team using a default template – for example the Manage a Project template, the project management channels and apps, and the connected SharePoint template gets applied automatically.
Tenant admins can set Adobe Acrobat as the default app in Teams admin center to view and edit PDF files in the Microsoft Teams. End-users can view, search, comment and annotate PDF files without an Adobe Acrobat subscription or an Adobe ID. This feature is in public preview.
Instead of spending time typing a routine response to an incoming message, simply reply with one click by choosing a suggested response to your group chat. Suggested replies uses machine learning to generate responses that are most relevant to the conversation.
You can now create short, lightweight, rich video clips allow you to express yourself, deliver a more personal touch and strengthen your connections. Simply record, send and view a video clip in chat. The recipient of the video clip can easily reply with a chat message or a video clip of their own. Generally available in desktop and will be in public preview in mobile by end of the year.
Delete or rename files in a channel and in your OneDrive folder in Teams
To rename or delete a file in a channel, go to the files tab and find the file you want. Then select More options (the three dots) on the file. To rename or delete a file from your OneDrive, select More at the bottom of the app, then select Files. Once you find the file you want, select the three dots and choose to rename or delete it.
Teams calendar now includes scheduling form pop-outs
In a Teams calendar, users will now be able to pop-out an existing meeting using the pop-up icon in a Teams calendar scheduling form. Users will be able to pop out the meeting and have it visible while creating a new meeting. This feature will allow users to view multiple meetings in separate windows while also being able to check their chats or edit their files without the need to switch apps.
Upgraded usage analytics for Teams administrators and users
Updates and improvements were made to Teams related usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center (and corresponding graph APIs) to be more accurate and upgraded. Microsoft are bringing consistency across different reporting surfaces, updating the Teams admin center usage reports and end user analytics in Teams with same underlying data source as Microsoft 365 Admin Center Teams usage reports.
Enhancement to app usage report - support for Line of Business apps
An updated version of Teams app usage report with support for Line of Business (LoB) apps in alignment with Teams app usage in M365 admin center. The new enhancements includes the support for usage of Line of Business apps, Tenant level install trend, enhanced quality of metrics reported, tenant wide usage of Microsoft, 3rd party and LoB apps etc. These enhancements will help the admin measure the usage of the Teams app across their organization and to categorize them.
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Education Insights – Student Support Card – New AI-based Student Support spotlight in Education Insights helps educators better support students before they fall behind.
Frontline workers
These features are currently available for frontline worker customers:
Approvals as a PDFs can be saved, printed and transferred – Approval creators will be able to save a completed approval request to a PDF file and have the option to print it. This feature will also allow customers to easily transfer their proof of approval as a PDF to another system or store as a file.
Approvals in integrated SharePoint Lists – List users will now be able to create and manage simple approval requests directly within integrated SharePoint Lists.
Assign Approvals to a Tag in Teams – For an approval assigned to a tag, the tag will expand and send to the correct members when the approval requestor hits submit.
Rich notes in Tasks field – Tasks will also support rich text support in the notes field, so you can include more detailed instructions with the help of rich formatting such as bold, italic, and underlined text, bulleted and number lists, and hyperlinks. Learn more about how to get started with Tasks in 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):
Enhancement to app usage report – support for Line of Business apps – An updated version of Teams app usage report with support for Line of Business (LoB) apps in alignment with Teams app usage in M365 admin center. This will help admins track all app usage metrics over time.
Music on hold for Voice over IP calls, consultative transfer, and call transfer for GCCH and DOD – Music on hold is available for Voice over IP (VoIP) calls placed on hold, as well as VoIP and PSTN placed on hold for a call transfer and consultative transfer.
Live Share SDK support for meeting extensions – Live Share is a new developer capability designed to transform Teams meeting apps into collaborative multi-user experiences without writing any dedicated back-end code. Support for meeting extensions in the Live Share SDK enables general-purpose collaboration features, including turn-key media synchronization to co-watch videos, inking, cursors and annotations in meetings.
Text prediction for Teams mobile in GCC-High and DoD – When you compose or reply to a message in Teams, Editor Text Predictions anticipates your writing and suggests a suitable word or phrase inline. This saves time and helps you reduce typos.
Connectors in GCC – Teams Connectors, which support webhook integrations, will be made available in GCC.
Firefox Meeting Support for Outgoing Screen Sharing – Extend outgoing screen sharing capabilities for Teams Meetings from the Firefox browser.
Updated companion mode for Android users for GCC, GCC-High and DoD – For a better hybrid meeting experience, we have updated companion mode in Teams mobile to give in-room attendees quick access to engagement features like chat, live reactions, and Microsoft Whiteboard. We are making it easier to access meeting and device controls, like the ability to join a meeting, cast a PowerPoint, mute the room, turn room cameras on and off, and more.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Test engine, dynamic group members in Dataverse, content security policy GA, ESLint rules GA, modernized business units, coauthoring public preview, maker matching public preview, communication site template, Ideas GA, modern command bar, PDF function, Teams link unfurling, read barcodes, model-driven UI updates, mobile commanding updates, Power Platform Tools, Managed Environments GA
Test Engine: An open platform for automated testing of canvas apps
Test Engine is an evolution of Power Apps testing tools. Test Engine builds upon the key use cases of Test Studio, but takes it in a new, powerful direction through open source collaboration and use of the Playwright browser testing platform. The goals of Test Engine are to provide customers with a robust testing platform for all types of Power Apps, and to make it super easy to integrate automated testing into your app development processes.
This initial release supports the ability to author tests for Power Apps canvas applications, with plans to add support for model-driven apps, as well as enhanced tooling to facilitate integration into your CI/CD systems like GitHub and Azure DevOps. We welcome you to exercise this tool and give us feedback as we continue to build out the platform.
Azure AD Dynamic user membership group in Dataverse group teams support
Microsoft Dataverse supports Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) security and office groups, including the ability to differentiate Owners, Members, and Guests. To complete the full Azure AD group functionality, Microsoft have extended the Azure AD group support to include dynamic user membership group type.
The dynamic user membership type leverages business rules to manage the group membership. Group members are added/removed dynamically based on the business rules, eg where Department = “Sales” for all users from the Sales department. Power Platform Dataverse authentication and authorization were extended to support this Azure AD group type.
Content Security Policy for Power Apps now generally available
In September this year, Microsoft announced the public preview of Content Security Policy. When you turn on Content Security Policy for an environment, you can enable protection for clickjacking attacks for apps in that environment and receive policy violation reports to your custom reporting endpoint. You can control the Content Security Policy for Model-driven apps and Canvas apps separately.
Content Security Policy for Power Apps is now generally available. It is recommended you turn on the Content Security Policy in production environments after testing your apps in a sandbox environment with this setting turned on.
ESLint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365 now generally available
In July this year, Microsoft announced the public preview of ESlint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365. This brought the solution checker rules to your development environment, which helped you find and address issues in your JavaScript and TypeScript code directly in your VSCode before packing them into the solution file.
ESLint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365 is now generally available. It is strongly recommended you include the ESLint for Power Apps npm package in your development environment to improve the quality of your customizations and avoid packaging unsafe customizations to the solution.
Microsoft have extended the business unit security model by allowing security roles from different business units to be assigned to a user/team. This allows a user/team to access data from different business units based on their security roles to support the Matrix data access structure vs the traditional hierarchical data access structure.
User can update the Owning Business unit column to set the record’s ownership, and other users who are assigned with a security role from this Owning Business unit can access the record. User can also change the record ownership to another user without the need for the new record owner to have a security role from the record’s Owning Business unit. This reduces the operation overhead to manage and assign security role from different business units for easier collaboration while maintaining the high level of security compliance.
Coauthoring in Modern app designer (Public Preview)
The Power Apps team have announced that Coauthoring is now available in most of the regions allowing fusion teams to build better apps faster. With coauthoring you can see who is working on the same app at the same time, and you can see their applied changes in real-time. You don’t need to worry anymore about your changes, because coauthoring helps you avoid the unintentional overwrite of each other’s changes.
Connect with experienced makers in your organization to help you during app development! The virtual agent will also surface your organizations internal community channels and resources to help you stay connected.
The Power Platform team launched the Power Platform communication site template this month. The Power Platform communication site template is a SharePoint communication site that provides you with a starting point of content and page templates as you’re setting up your internal Power Platform wiki and hub site.
This communication site is designed to be the place where the Power Platform maker and user community within your organization can find the news and resources they need, including digital governance and compliance guardrails, upcoming events, success stories and more.
Power Apps Ideas are now generally available. Now you can easily write a Power Fx formula using natural language or examples.
We know that Power Fx is a low code programming language, makes it possible for hundreds of millions of people with the Excel-like skills to add advanced logic to their apps. However sometimes it’s not easy to write a formula, even for the most experienced Power Fx users, as it may sometimes take a lot of time searching for, learning about and debugging complex formulas.
Modern command bar is on by default for existing apps in Canvas
The modern command bar will be enabled by default for all existing apps in Canvas in North America on 11/07/22. The new command bar not only has a modern look and feel, but is also designed to improve your authoring experience. It allows a seamless customization experience of editing common controls by dynamically displaying the common properties directly within the command bar.
In 2021, the Print function was released to accommodate scenarios where app users needed to print physical copies of a screen’s contents. We’re taking that concept a step further this month with our release of the PDF function.
This experimental release unlocks many scenarios where app users need to send screen content. The PDF can be configured to include an entire screen’s contents or a specific part, and they can expand to include tabular data that extends beyond the visible area of the screen, extending onto multiple pages.
The Power Platform team have announced the launch of link unfurling in Teams for canvas apps. Previously, when a user copied an app URL & pasted the link into a Teams message to send to colleagues, users would only receive the app’s full link or a shortened vanity URL. Additionally, a click on the app’s link would launch the app in a browser, forcing the user to leave Teams to view and use the app. Now, starting with canvas apps, the Power Apps app link will unfurl into an adaptive card from which recipients can directly add the app to Teams or open the app in a browser.
Scan barcodes – include QR, data-matrix, CODABAR, and more – on Android and iOS devices using the new experimental Barcode Reader control. This new control supports more types of barcodes and enables users to select which barcode in view to read instead of automatically reading the first detected barcode.
Mobile commanding improvements provide easy access to contextual commands when you’re using Power Apps mobile via opt-in settings. Delete and process commands are only displayed when they are relevant. Global injected commands such as Edit columns, Edit filters, and Show Chart have been moved from the main set of commands to overflow menu.
The command bar on Power Apps mobile for tablets is now located at the top like to the web app. This helps with more commands available to user utilizing the larger tablet viewport.
Power Platform Developer Tools monthly release (September Refresh)
The Power Platform team have announced a new update for the month of October i.e., “September Refresh”. Those of you who have been following us already know of this trend, because the work our team does in the prior month gets released in the following month. Hence in October, we release the September Refresh. With that statement aside, here is what’s included in this release:
Integrating PRT, CMT, PD into the Power Platform CLI
solution export with “_managed” added to the name
Package deploy defaults to async for solution import
Managed Environments are now generally available. Enabling people with diverse technical and nontechnical skills to contribute to the development process through low-code tools has unlocked an explosion of apps. While low-code has accelerated companies’ abilities to innovate, it has also introduced new dimensions to scaling and managing your developer community.
In Power Automate: 14 new verified, 10 independent publisher connectors, Power Automate Desktop update, automate document processing, Ignite 2022 updates
14 new verified, 10 independent publisher connectors released in September 2022
There were 14 new verified and 10 new independent publisher connectors released through September 2022 for Power Automate. Let’s take a look:
Verified connectors
Centrical – Brings together real-time performance management, personalized micro-learning, augmented coaching, and advanced gamification to personally guide employees and their managers to success.
ConsenSys Ethereum – A fully-managed proxy service that allows power apps and flows to integrate with the Ethereum blockchain and the Quorum Blockchain Services (QBS).
DQ on Demand – A complete suite of functions providing you with easy access to a data quality marketplace through the Microsoft Power Platform.
FactSet – Delivers superior content, analytics, and flexible technology to help more than 170,000 users globally and is continuing to open up its powerful workstation content and analytics with API access.
iManage Work – Industry-leading provider of document and email management solutions for knowledge workers.
IN-D Invoice Data Capture – IN-D Invoice Data Capture connector converts static documents (scanned, PDFs, screenshots, etc.) into usable information to fuel your business processes.
Power Assist – Elevate Digital’s Power Assist connector offers actions to manipulate data in familiar ways that are currently difficult or unsupported within Power Automate and Power Apps.
SmartCOMM Doc-Gen ap10-sb – Allows businesses more control over their business-critical customer communications.
Talkdesk – Global cloud contact center leader for customer-obsessed companies.
Tesseron ASM Ticket – This connector allows you to create, edit and search Tickets in your Tesseron ASM Instance.
Text Request – Text Request is a service to help businesses reach customers through texting and conversation management. Use
Tikit – Tikit is a Microsoft 365 Service Desk that matures with your Microsoft 365 technology adoption and revolves around the center of where you work every day – Microsoft Teams.
Vocean – Retrieve the insights gathered within Vocean for further use with programs already tightly involved in your organization.
Yarado – Helps Power Automate users increase productivity, using RPA to connect users to processes outside the Power Automate environment
Independent Publisher connectors
Connpass by Miyake Hideo – Using the connpass, you can search and collect information about IT workshops and events.
HTTP Garden by Troy Taylor – Gardening for every Hyper Text Transfer Protocol response status code. Provides an image for each status code.
Mapbox by Simone Lin – Mapbox allows you to access its navigation, location search and static map generation services to create interactive/static maps in your application.
Mockaroo by Rick Wilson – Mockaroo can be used to generate realistic sample data to help test applications.
Owlbot by Troy Taylor – Owlbot searches the internet to index information and making them accessible.
PrexView by Troy Taylor – PrexView makes it simple to convert your data to different formats.
USGS Earthquake Hazards by Troy Taylor – The United States Geological Survey (USGS) monitors and reports on earthquakes, assesses earthquake impacts and hazards, and conducts targeted research on the causes and effects of earthquakes.
You Need A Budget by Troy Taylor – You Need A Budget (YNAB) allows you to build a personal application to interact with your own budget or build an application that any other YNABer can authorize and use.
Automate Document Processing end-to-end with AI Builder
At Ignite 2022, the Power Automate team shared advances in Intelligent Document Processing as well as new AI capabilities that will allow you to automate more scenarios with better performance, using Power Automate and AI Builder:
Unstructured Document Processing
Improved accuracy and language support with Azure Form Recognizer 3.0
AI and Power Automate updates from Microsoft Ignite 2022
At Ignite 2022, the Power Automate team shared some exciting innovations for Microsoft Power Automate, empowering makers and pro-coders with new ways to automate and scale enterprise-wide with AI, including:
Describe it and let AI build it – Creating flows is the foundation of Power Automate, and now you can describe what you want to automate in a sentence, and an AI-based copilot will build your flow in seconds.
Format data by examples – Now, we’ve made this super simple for users by allowing them to format data by examples. Like what we’ve done with Power Apps Ideas (preview), we’re bringing this similar experience to Power Automate, powered by PROSE.
Advancements in AI Builder – Document processing has been the most frequently used feature in AI Builder due to how mundane and time consuming the nature of processing documents can be. We are pleased to share that we are improving the experience even further with our newest feature updates to Intelligent Document Processing.
Automate through conversation with Power Virtual Agents – Starting November 10, 2022, a new bot authoring experience will automatically turn on in preview for users. This new experience unifies the sophistication of low-code and pro-code capabilities, which is a fusion of the Microsoft Azure Bot Framework Composer and Power Virtual Agents’ bot building experience. Pro-code and low-code users can build together with multi-authoring and commenting capabilities, while taking advantage of the latest functionalities, such as Power Fx and code views.
Automate SAP with reimagined connect and new solution – Microsoft announced details about the enhancements that have been made to the SAP ERP connector that support SAP system connectivity to Power Platform and the ability for a flow maker to work with SAP’s complex application program interfaces (APIs) within Power Automate flows.
Automate natively in Excel Online – The Power Automate team are integrating Power Automate natively into Excel Online, letting you create custom flows using pre-built templates, tailored to what you can accomplish with Excel. Excel Online now has an “Automate” tab in the ribbon.
Automate with embedded experiences – WorkFusion and DocuSign are joining the Cloud Embed program for Power Automate. Cloud Embed allows independent software vendors (ISV) to embed Power Automate directly into their user experience (UX).
Scale with the hosted RPA bots – Hosted RPA bots allow you to run unattended RPA at scale and is fully hosted in the cloud. It’s easy to setup your hosted RPA bots, just provide a few parameters: Just give it a name, the maximum number of parallel bots allocated to this group, which base image and account to be used and you’re all set.
Power BI
In Power BI: Power BI feature summary, Power BI Ideas site updates, on-premises data gateway, submetric roll ups, Ignite 2022, cross-tenant dataset sharing, Power Query SDK for VS Code, development history for deployment pipelines,
Power BI October 2022 Feature Summary
This month’s update includes updates to features like Power BI metrics, Modeling, Deployment pipelines, and more.
The Power BI team have announced a much anticipated release in the Metrics experience: With submetricroll ups, it’s easier than ever to aggregate your metric values so you can spend less time crafting multiple scorecards and connections, and more time analyzing your performance.
With the release of current and target roll ups, you can set automatic aggregations of your submetric values to show in your parent metric. You can select from aggregation types of sum, average, min and max values.
This is an oldie but a goodie in my opinion, this post will show you how to use library filters in SharePoint to only show items/ files created, or modified by the current user.
The steps below will guide you through the process of updating the view of a list or library to only show items created or modified by the current, logged in user.
Open the list or library you wish to update
From the library actions ribbon > select the current view (for example: all documents)
Press edit current view
Scroll down the edit view page until you get to the filter section
Create the following filter:
NOTE: this example will only show items that were created by OR modified by the current, logged in user. If you want your filter to only show items where both these values are true, change OR to AND.
Press OK to save your changes
Now your view should have updated to only show items created by, or modified by the current, logged in user.
Considerations
This example is really simple and easy to implement and there isn’t any real impact on your users as nothing is technically being restricted, just filtered out of the default view.
The flip-side of this is that in of itself could be considered a limitation if there is information stored within the list/ library that requires limited permissions. I’ll go into the options available for this later in this post.
However with that said, depending on what permissions you have in place for your list/ library, you could use this approach to secure the contents too.
Consideration #1 – Views don’t change permissions
A “back door” to gaining access to all contents stored in the list/ library would be to use a different view than the set default view to access all items (for example: if you created a new view to follow the below method, but left the default view set to show everything).
The solution to this would be to apply this filter approach to the default view, make sure any other public views follow the same approach and make sure end users don’t have elevated permissions.
Consideration #2 – Ensure permissions are set correctly
The only way an end user could bypass this approach without any “all items” views available, would be if they had the permissions to do so. The permission that controls this is called the Manage Lists permission, which is only granted via the Edit, Design, Full Control, Manage Hierarchy permission levels by default.
If end users aren’t in these groups, your in luck!
Consideration #3 – list/ library contents is not searchable
If you are using views to filter who can see contents within your list/ library then you will need to ensure this setting is updated if the contents needs to be hidden (below example is a document library):
Press the cog button > library settings
Press advanced settings
Under Search > change allow items from this document library to appear in search resultsto No
Press OK
Update the allow items from this document library to appear in search results advanced setting to ensure items aren’t visible in search.
Consideration #4 – If it’s a list, enable item level permissions
With lists, in advanced settings there is an additional configuration option – item level permissions which allows you to specify which items users can read and edit.
As the heading implies, this consideration only works for lists in SharePoint as the functionality isn’t available out the box for document libraries. SharePoint Maven have written up what the two different levels of item level permissions you can set mean, which you can find here.
SharePoint Stuff 