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 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 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.
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: Navigation links open in new tab, manage site access based on sensitivity label, Viva learning cards, Quick Access Teams and Sharepoint Document Libraries in Office Win32 backstage, What’s new SharePoint Server
Configure Navigation Links to Open in a New Tab
With this update, you configure how you would like your navigation links to open. You will have the option to be able to choose to open in the same tab or in a new tab for your site, hub, and global navigation items.
With this update, administrators will be able to use Conditional Access policies and associated sensitivity labels to require additional user authentication for accessing sensitive SharePoint sites when the user’s context does not meet the requirements of the site.
Microsoft Viva Learning cards for the Viva Connections Dashboard
Viva Learning is an enterprise learning and training experience that acts as a one-step solution for all the learning needs of your organization. You’ll be able to integrate Viva Learning and Viva Connections experiences by using the Viva Learning card on the Viva Connections Dashboard. This new feature will enable users to track their learning assignments directly within Viva Connections dashboard.
Quick Access Teams and Sharepoint Document Libraries in Office Win32 backstage
The Quick Access feature will allow users to access shared libraries from both their SharePoint and Teams locations. When the user opens files from shared libraries, these libraries will show up in the form of a list which will encourage users to save and open files to these libraries with ease. This helps deliver a more consistent, coherent storage location experience across M365 apps.
What’s new for SharePoint Server
Microsoft have recently announced updates to SharePoint Server, including: SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, SharePoint Workflow Manager, SharePoint Server 2013, 2016 & 2019 and the SharePoint Technology Adoption Program.
Bitalus-StockQuotes– Show Stock information on your SharePoint Homepage with a couple of clicks.
Poll by WM Reply – Poll easily allows you to create a short and snappy question so that you can engage with your audience. You can use the Poll web part for a daily opinion poll and interact with your employees on what’s happening at your organization or test your user’s knowledge with an end-of-topic question.
Employee Directory Plus – Support | HR365 – Employee Directory Plus displays information of employees in the organization in visually manner and allows you to find any user in fraction of seconds with various filters to select, departments, skills, Job title, manager, location, etc.
Orangehill Birthdays – Birthdays from user profiles. Orangehill Birthdays is a modern web part that shows all upcoming birthdays from user profiles for people in the organization.
In Teams: Cameo in PowerPoint Live, collaborative annotations, music on hold, early media support for compliance recording, block inbound federated VoIP calls, choose preferred download location, intelligent chat translation iOS/ Android, Teams admin center dashboard, user request config, policy propagation
Cameo is a new PowerPoint experience that seamlessly integrates your Teams camera feed into your presentation, letting you customize how and where you want to appear on your slides and offering layout recommendations for optimal viewing. When it’s time to present, use PowerPoint Live in Teams for an immersive remote presentation.
Collaborative Annotations in Teams meetings, powered by Microsoft Whiteboard, lets everyone in a meeting quickly annotate whatever is on a shared screen in a Teams meeting. While you’re sharing your full screen in a meeting, select Start annotation. Everyone in the meeting can begin annotating right away. You can add notes, shapes, text, and reactions to express yourself.
Music on hold is available for calls placed on hold for a call transfer. The music is either the default music provided by Microsoft or custom music that administrators can upload and configure.
Music on hold is available for calls placed on hold for a call transfer. The music is either the default music provided by Microsoft or custom music that administrators can upload and configure.
Reduce interruptions while you’re in the flow of work by blocking inbound calls. Previously, you could only block inbound calls from specific phone numbers. You can now block inbound VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls from Teams users outside your organization.
You can now select the default download location where you would like downloaded files to be saved. Your setting will only for files downloaded in the Teams desktop client. Teams on the web will continue to honor the download setting in your browser.
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. For example, if your preferred language is English and you receive a message in French, Teams detects the language difference.
Administrators can now personalize the Teams admin center dashboard with information that is relevant for them. Simply drag and drop new cards (widgets) on the dashboard. Reposition cards on the page or remove the ones you don’t need.
User request configuration to external systems (URL redirect)
As a Teams admin, you can now customize the instructions someone receives when they request to use a blocked app. You can also configure external request systems. You can provide a URL that opens in a browser when users click the Request approval button to gain access to an app, for example, an IT support ticketing system, user education pages, or corporate policy pages.
The enhanced Activity log now displays more detailed information around policy operation such as activity name, group name, policy type, policy name, submitted by, submitted time, completion time, impacted users, and overall status. The detailed information provides more clarity and understanding on policy operations such as batch policy assignment of more than 20 users, group policy assignment, and group policy removal.
Education
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Timed Quiz support in Assignments – A highly requested feature for those of you that use Form Quiz in Assignments is the ability to set a timed duration for your quiz. This gives your student a set time to complete the quiz. You can define the time for each quiz, and the student will only get the allotted time to complete the quiz.
Hide Comments until assignment is returned to students – We have changed the behavior when a teacher is working with Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents that are submitted by students through Assignments.
Updated Export to Excel – We have updated the Export to Excel feature for Assignments and Grades.
Reading Progress – Phonics Rules Insights dashboard – We know how important it is to start with the fundamentals, that’s why we’re building Insights dashboards that will reflect students’ understanding of phonics rules. Our Reading Progress auto-detect software has the ability to analyze each word at the phoneme level and give an accuracy rating per phoneme.
Reflect – Now a Featured Tab in all Class Teams – Strong relationships and a sense of safety are the foundation of an impactful school year – both for students and educators. Recently, we’ve updated Reflect to appear as a featured tab in each of your classes, and now it is enabled also for each staff member! This way, leaders can support educators in building a school-wide culture of trust and growth and provide opportunities to reflect and be heard.
New distribution experience from Forms to Teams – Teams channel and group chat have become the new popular place for teachers and students to communicate. After creating a quiz or survey, teachers can easily search the chat group or channel they want to share the form in the centralized people picker. For better efficiency, teachers can also share it with the same group of people by using 2 channels at the same time.
New question type – rating, ranking and Instant Poll in Teams meeting – To help teachers gain a better understanding of the opinions of their students, they are now able to add Rating and Ranking questions directly into a class poll. IN these polls, they can add pre-defined Yes/No, Thumbs Up/Down, Like/Dislike choices to quickly identify the point of view of their class.
Parent Connection for Teams mobile – We are enabling Parent Connection through mobile devices to allow teachers to communicate with parents or guardians, whenever or wherever. The Parent App can be found within an individual class team, along with the other apps enabled for your class (Assignments, Grades, Class Notebook, and Insights).
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Power Platform Conference Announcements, Power Fx: named formulas, ParseJSON, Power Platform Administration Planning, Content Security Policy (Public Preview), Creator Kit, Developer Tools monthly update
Three big announcements from the Power Platform Conference 2022
The first ever Power Platform Conference took place this month and three new ways to collaborate were announced:
Cards for Power Apps are a completely new way to design and deliver mini-apps directly inside Microsoft Teams and Outlook using low code. By embedding essential micro-experiences directly in Teams, you can bring your conversation and workflow together like never before.
Coauthoring is coming to Power Apps as well, using the same realtime collab capabilities that millions of people are using in Office 365. This is a big step forward for software development, allowing multiple makers to collaboratively build and edit the same app simultaneously.
Maker matching, delivered with a new integrated virtual agent, will help guide makers to the learning content they need while also connecting them with experienced advisors from within their organization. In-context help together with well-connected internal communities means more successful low code solutions at scale.
Named Formulas derives from Excel, in the “Name Manager.” In Excel, you can name any cell and refer to that name throughout the workbook. Today in Power Fx, you write formulas for the properties of the controls in your app. Named Formulas is a powerful concept that has been in Excel for a very long time, that we are now bringing to Power Fx. With it, you can simplify your app’s initialization, reduce app load time, reuse logic, and improve the maintainability of your apps.
The Power Apps team have announced the experimental release of our ParseJSON function, which can parse JSON strings into Power Fx objects and types. This new function dramatically simplifies working with JSON in Canvas apps.
The Power Apps team have put together a simple solution (Power Platform Administration Planning) that is designed to help you better:
Plan your team structure
Review where you spend time and look for automation or innovation opportunities
The solution is built on Microsoft Dataverse and is a new stand-alone component in the CoE Starter Kit. Admin tasks are defined in a model-driven app and insights are provided in a Power BI dashboard.
Content Security Policy for Power Apps (Public Preview)
Power Apps has had Content Security Policy (CSP) support for model-driven apps since the beginning of the year, which was configured by running script as a System Administrator. With these new capabilities, you can now control the CSP header for model-driven as well as canvas apps in the environment in Power Platform Admin Center. CSP can be configured in both enforced and report-only mode.
In Power Automate: Trigger outputs, Power Automate desktop update, Automation Kit for Power Platform, SAP integration, desktop flow activity, 10 new independent publisher connectors
Trigger Outputs as identifier columns
The Power Automate team have introduced a new way to easily identify and troubleshoot a cloud flow. With this new capability, as a flow author, you can easily distinguish between flow runs with customizable columns in All Runs page and Flow Runs view in Flow Details page.
Once you build a flow, and it starts automating your tasks, you might need to identify to confirm your flow instance ran as expected. Today, by default, a flow owner can look at the Start, Duration, and Status columns in the run history view in Power Automate to help them identify the flow run they want to debug.
The Power Platform team have announced the Automation Kit for Power Platform, now available to the public as an open source GitHub project. The Automation Kit for Power Platform is designed to help organizations manage, govern, and scale automation platform adoption based on industry best practices. The toolkit is a collection of components and tools based on HEAT concepts and built using Power Apps and Power Automate, so you can easily extend and customize the kit to your needs.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Clear Software has led to new functionality for organizations running SAP in Power Apps, Power Automate, and Logic Apps that will enable large-scale adoption of the Power Platform. The Power Automate team have announced the Public Preview of a broad set of new SAP functionality in the Power Platform, including:
Prebuilt Power Apps for Common SAP Processes: order to cash, procure to pay, record to report, make to stock/ make to order (MRP)
Prebuilt Power Automate Flows for Common SAP Processes
The Power Automate team have announced the new desktop flow activity section (in preview) in the Monitor section of Power Automate for all customers. This “desktop flow activity” section provides to RPA users dashboards, tables and graphs to better understand desktop flows usage, measure effectiveness and quick identify issues.
10 New Independent Publisher Connectors in August 2022
10 new Independent Publisher connectors were published in August. These connectors have solutions and tools for Business Management, Productivity, Lifestyle and Entertainment, and much more:
Abortion Policy API by Vivek Bavishi – The Abortion Policy API is an up-to-date tool that categorizes state laws on abortion access for accurate representation.
Climatiq by Troy Taylor – Climatiq helps you calculate the environmental footprint created by a broad range of emission-generating activities.
Datamuse by Troy Taylor – Datamuse is a word-finding query engine for developers. You can use it in your apps to find words that match a given set of constraints and that are likely in a given context.
Moosend by Troy Taylor – The ultimate email marketing software and marketing automation platform that will not break your bank.
Open Charge Map by Troy Taylor – The Open Charge Map service provides access to the world’s largest registry of charging locations.
Refuge Restrooms by Troy Taylor – Refuge Restrooms is a web application that seeks to provide safe restroom access for transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming individuals.
ReliefWeb by Troy Taylor – ReliefWeb is a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Shadify by Troy Taylor – Shadify is a powerful service for generating data and executing various logic to create different applications and games.
SHRTCODE by Chandra Sekhar Malla – With this free Link Shortener, you can make Links shorter and easier to remember.
In Power BI: Power BI feature summary, Report Server feature summary, On-premises data gateway, Horizontal Fusion, USERCULTURE DAX, report/ dataset management in Power Apps Solutions, AAD filtration for Datamarts, Power BI Vue.js
Power BI feature summary September 2022
The Power BI team have announced a variety of new features this month such as hierarchical axis by default, translations for composite models, mobile formatting options and much more.
The Power BI team have announced a new version of Power BI Report Server this Fall! This release introduces Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) for SQL Server 2022. In this new release of PBIRS, we’ve done a lot of accessibility work to make sure we’re empowering people to achieve more. The release includes enhanced Windows Narrator support for the new Windows OS (Operating Systems) and Windows Server, security enhancements, browser performance improvements with Angular, accessibility bug fixes, support for SQL Server 2022 (16.x) Preview instances report server catalog and feature updates.
The Power BI team have released the September update for the on-premises data gateway (version 3000.142.14). This update brings the on-premises data gateway up to date with the September release of Power BI Desktop.
The Power BI team have announced “Horizon Fusion”, which is the initial release of a query performance optimization aimed at processing Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) queries more efficiently than previously possible by reducing the number of data source queries required to generate the results.
Fusing data queries together and avoiding unnecessary roundtrips is a tried and proven approach to boost query performance in Power BI. Several performance optimizations in the query engine aimed at reducing the number of data source queries per DAX or MDX query, known as DAX Fusion and MDX Fusion, significantly improved query performance for DAX and MDX clients regardless of a dataset’s storage mode. Horizontal Fusion now takes things to the next level.
USERCULTURE DAX function now supported in Power BI Premium
The Power BI team have nnounced support for the DAX UserCulture function in Power BI Premium. Combined with the field parameters feature, customers can create reports that natively translate table data to the locale defined by the viewer’s preferences in the Power BI service. Although this support is limited to Power BI Premium (for architectural reasons), the team are hoping to support customers on non-Premium workspaces at some point in the future.
Power BI report and dataset management in Power Apps Solutions
Now App makers can add Power BI reports and datasets as Dataverse components in Power Apps solutions, improving the export, import, and customization process. Solutions are a Power Platform tool that enables users to deploy applications built using Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, and other Power Platform services.
When you add a Power BI report or dataset to a solution, it will stay connected upon deployment across environments and tenants. The report or dataset can also be seamlessly managed as part of your Application Lifecycle Management process across environments and tenants.
The Power BI team have announced the introduction of AAD-based filtration to the Power BI Datamart preview tenant setting, enabling Power BI Service Admins to limit the ability to create Datamarts to certain groups or individuals.
The Power BI team have announced a new component for embedding Power BI content in Vue.js applications is now available. Vue is an increasingly popular JavaScript framework for building front-end user interfaces and websites. The new component for Vue makes it possible to embed Power BI content in your Vue application in a simple way, allowing you to make the most of both Vue and Power BI embedded for bringing analytics to your users wherever they are quickly and easily.
The new component supports embedding of reports, dashboard, Q&A and more, and is now publicly available on npm and GitHub.
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: New site templates, new/ updated web parts, new site theme, Lists MSA Preview, most used SPFx solutions
New site templates for SharePoint team sites
Microsoft are introducing three new SharePoint team site templates so you can quickly create sites for your IT helpdesk, crisis communication team, and new employee onboarding team. These site templates expand what’s possible with content, pages, and web parts while helping you quickly get started building your own site.
SharePoint site templates, left-to-right: IT Help Desk, Crisis communication, and New Employee Onboarding.
There is one new and three updated SharePoint web parts this month, including:
Assignments web part | Customers using Teams Assignments will be able to add the assignments web part to pages to provide students with a one-stop, personalized resource for all their class needs. The assignments web part can also be used on communication sites like a home site to display the upcoming assignments due across multiple classes.
Group calendar updates | The Group calendar web part is getting visual updates, an indicator informing users when a meeting is a recurring meeting, and the capability to join upcoming Teams meetings online.
Quick links in the toolbar | Users are now able to easily explore the different layouts available for the Quick links web part. We’re surfacing layouts as a dropdown option in the toolbar to make it easier for authors to get the look and feel they want.
Highlighted content web part | This dynamic web part now adheres better to a two-column section if you chose the ‘Compact’ layout – aka, the layout preference it retained.
New site theme
There is now a new, Periwinkle site theme in SharePoint. When applied, this new site theme option brings a ‘lavender blue’ visual site theme to your SharePoint site. It adjusts to dark or high-contrast mode when viewed in Teams, too.
This month Microsoft are introducing Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview access from your iOS device – via a beta version of the app installed through TestFlight; once installed, it brings the lightweight version of the Microsoft Lists app designed for small business and individual use in conjunction with your Microsoft account (MSA).
Track home improvements on your iOS device using Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview for iOS (beta).
In Teams: Teams optimised for Apple silicon, language interpretation, together mode for everyone, pre-assign channel members to breakout rooms, transcription created automatically, ranking poll to re-order items, in-meeting notification improvements, leave a meeting on all devices, one-click convert Word/PDF to Forms,
Microsoft are rolling out a production grade universal binary version of Teams, which means it will run natively on the entire Mac lineup, including those with Apple silicon. For Mac users, this means a significant boost in performance, ensuring efficient use of device resources and an optimized Teams experience even when using multiple high-resolution monitors during calls or meetings.
This feature allows language interpreters to translate what the speaker says into another language in real time without disrupting the flow and delivery of the speaker. This allows for more inclusive meetings where participants who do not speak the same language can still fully collaborate with each other.
Together mode makes virtual meeting participants feel more like they’re in the same room together during virtual meetings. Now, meeting organizers and presenters can also select Together mode for everyone in the meeting to have the same view.
Transcription created automatically during recordings
You can now create meeting transcriptions automatically during meeting recordings. If IT admins enable transcriptions for the organization and the meeting organizer sets the Record automatically meeting option to on for a meeting, transcription of the meeting will start when the meeting starts.
Respond to a poll by clicking the up or down arrow or by dragging and dropping a selection. If you’ve enabled the results sharing, everyone can see the updated results as they come in.
Usability improvements to in-meeting notifications
Notifications show up in the top center of the meeting stage and notification bubbles stack on top of each other as new notifications pop up. This avoids notification overlaps, and you have a cleaner visual experience. In addition, you can also snooze repeat notifications like chat bubbles.
Leave a meeting on all my devices
When you join a Teams meeting using multiple personal devices, you typically want to leave the meeting from all of the devices. With just one click, you now can leave a meeting from all your devices.
One click convert a Word/PDF form or quiz to Microsoft Forms
Save time by converting your existing Microsoft Word or PDF surveys or quizzes into Microsoft Forms. Simply upload a PDF or Word document directly into Microsoft Forms and continue to edit until you’re ready to collect responses.
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Parent Connection – With Parent Connection, educators can initiate a Teams chat with student guardians (information provided by School Data Sync) with a single click. Instead of the twice-yearly parent-teacher conference or sporadic email, educators and guardians can have more iterative conversations through Teams chat to help manage and track student progress.
LTI apps integration with Schoology LMS – Schoology’s Learning Management System (LMS) integration with Teams provides teachers and students an easy way to create, access, and collaborate using Teams meetings within the Schoology LMS.
Brightspace (D2L) LMS integration with Microsoft 365 – Microsoft has partnered with Brightspace (D2L) LMS to deliver more seamless integrated learning experiences. Educators can create a team for their Brightspace course using the roster information using the Teams Classes LTI.
Home page for Teams for Education class teams – With Home page, educators and students have a centralized an customizable place for announcements, resources, upcoming assignments, class files, and meetings for their specific class.
Activate a class from inside the Teams Classes LTI app within your Learning Management System (LMS) – Now educators can activate a class from the Teams Classes LTI app without leaving the LMS. Activation is intuitive and easy to discover. A notification banner highlights classes that have not been activated.
View video recordings and attendance reports inside LMS – Teachers and students can access video recordings and attendance reports directly in their LMS. The feature is available all the Learning Management Systems incorporating the Teams Meeting LTI app.
Timed quiz – Use a digital timed quiz instead of pen and paper to save time and increase consistency. A teacher sets a timer for a quiz which gives all students the same constraints, but allows them to take the quiz on their own schedule. Students learn time management and the experience is fair and consistent to all. Learn more about enabling time limits for students in your test.
Frontline
Deploy Microsoft Teams at scale for frontline workers – Deploy a large workforce of frontline workers in significantly less time. As a Teams admin, you can deploy up to 500 teams and add 25 users per team using one Teams PowerShell command and 2 csv files. You can also use add and remove members from existing teams at scale.
Additional filters added to the Approvals list – Within the Approvals app, you can use additional filters on approval lists. For example, you can filter on approval status or keyword in the title to find the right approval more quickly.
Government
Isolated audio feed for GCC-High and DoD – When using NDI or hardware-out in Teams, you can access an isolated audio feed along with the isolated video feed from any Teams meeting.
Attendance Dashboard for GCC-High and DOD – Measure meeting and webinar registration and attendance data in the Attendance Dashboard.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Azure B2B maker, Experimental Application Insights Features, ESLint rules, canvas apps as dataverse solutions, table designer, Power App from REST API, modern command bar, install apps via CLI
Build apps across multiple tenants with Azure B2B maker
Makers can now build apps as a guest in another tenant: apps can be built in the Azure Active Directory tenant it is expected to be hosted. For example, it is now possible for maker@contoso.com to build apps directly in the ContosoSubsidiaryA.com tenant.
Two new experimental features are now available for canvas apps connected to Application Insights. The first feature reports unhandled errors experienced by end-users. The second enables correlation tracing across canvas apps and connected custom connectors. Both features can be enabled in the upcoming features menu.
The Power Apps team have announced the public preview of ESLint rules for Power Apps model-driven apps and Dynamics 365 CE. ESLint rules are configured in the eslintrc file, any violations in the code will be caught and listed in the problems console automatically. Hovering over the issue in code will show a detailed description of the violation, corrections needed, and a link to a document that provides more details.
The Power Apps team have announced the release of canvas apps creation as Dataverse solutions by default in public preview. Solutions are used to transport apps, flows, tables and other components from one environment to another and are a key mechanism for implementing healthy application lifecycle management (ALM) in the Power Platform.
You can now create new Dataverse tables and edit them using the table designer in the standalone model-driven app designer. This new feature allows you to have a one stop shop for all your table creation and data editing needs by saving you the time it takes moving between designers.
With this feature, a single command line function will let developers generate a canvas app from their API definition. The app can then be imported into Power Apps Studio for further edits or customization. Makers and developers alike can benefit from the productivity of low code and Power Apps to quickly build rich user experiences over their APIs.
The modern command bar is now officially available behind the preview toggle in Settings for canvas page authoring. 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.
This capability enables automation of install and update experiences that are offered only through the Power Platform Admin Center experience today. Installs can also be automated for applications available from AppSource provided at least one such install of the said application has been made to another environment within the tenant.
In Power Automate: New Android app GA, desktop update – August, 2 verified, 10 independent publisher connectors, SharePoint cloud actions in desktop
Power Automate Android app generally available
A new version of the Power Automate Android app is now available. The app has been redesigned to deliver a new UI that is more consistent with the look and feel of the Power Automate web portal, while also improving some existing experiences. You will also noticed some upgrades like quicker response times, easier navigation, and improvements to previous login issues that some of you encountered.
The August 2022 update of Power Automate for desktop (version 2.23) has been released with updates including a new excel action, cropping text action, SharePoint connector actions and much more.
2 verified, 10 new independent publisher connectors
New verified connectors:
Microsoft Bookings – Booking connector is a solution for these asks. With this connector we are exposing all appointment booking actions – like Create/Update/Delete of Bookings.
Secret Server – With Secret Server, you can automatically discover and manage your privileged accounts through an intuitive interface, protecting against malicious activity, enterprise-wide.
New independent publisher connectors:
ConvertKit by Troy Taylor – ConvertKit is the go-to marketing hub for creators that helps you grow and monetize your audience with ease.
CPSC Recalls Retrieval by Troy Taylor – The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission provides accessibility to recalls via this recall service.
Every by Troy Taylor – Use Every.org’s free fundraising services to create innovative nonprofit experiences.
File.io by Troy Taylor – Simply upload a file, share the link, and after it is downloaded, the file is completely deleted.
OK dokument by Solitea Slovensko a.s. – OK dokument delivers an easy to use and customizable electronic signature and digital document distribution platform that integrates seamlessly into your existing systems.
OneNote Consumer by Troy Taylor – Microsoft OneNote is your digital notebook. One cross-functional notebook for all your notetaking needs.
RescueGroups by Troy Taylor – Since 2002, RescueGroups.org has provided animal welfare organizations with easy to use, free and low-cost services like the Pet Adoption Portal to help maximize animal adoptions.
SchoolDigger by Troy Taylor – Get detailed data on over 120,000 schools and 18,500 districts in the United States.
SignUpGenius by Troy Taylor – SignUpGenius simplifies scheduling, volunteer and member management, event planning and fundraising.
Zenler by Troy Taylor – Zenler is an all-in-one course creation, delivery, and marketing platform.
Power BI
In Power BI: What’s new in Datamarts, Multiple Audiences Public Preview, DLP updates, PostgreSQL connector, Power BI August 2022 feature summary, Power BI app in Teams mobile
What’s New in Datamarts
Datamarts are a preview feature in Power BI Premium (and Premium Per User) that enable self-service users to securely collect, store, analyze, and share their data in a unified, low code, solution – delivering SQL and unified analytics – all in a web-based experience, for the first time.
Updates to Datamarts are shipped monthly, and several updates launched in May 2022, including: Datamart availability in new regions, Data connectivity and preparation updates, Collaboration enhancements and more.
Multiple Audiences for Power BI Apps (Public Preview)
The Power BI team have announced the public preview of Multiple Audiences in the Power BI Apps, one of the highly requested features from the community. With multiple audiences for an App, now Power BI App author can create multiple audience groups within the same App and assign different permissions to each group.
Updates to Microsoft Purview data loss prevention policies in Power BI
Data loss prevention (DLP) policies help you govern the sensitive information managed in your Power BI tenant. Two significant enhancements to DLP policies have recently been released in Power BI:
CPU metering for DLP policy evaluation
Overriding policy tips and reporting false positives
PostgreSQL connector for the virtual network data gateway
The Power BI team have announced a new PostgreSQL connector for the virtual network data gateway! You can now connect to all your PostgreSQL workloads in the cloud using basic authentication. Just select PostgreSQL in the connection type dropdown menu when creating a new connection to your virtual network data gateway from the manage gateways page on the PBI service.
The Power BI August 2022 feature summary is out now with updates including conditional formatting for data labels, new “Select sensitivity label” dialog, DAX editor improvements and more.
Power BI app is available in Microsoft Teams Mobile
Power BI in Microsoft Teams is available for Teams mobile. This helps users stay up to date and never miss activity in their Power BI reports and scorecards. Users who have the Power BI app for Microsoft Teams installed and have Teams Mobile installed on their phone or tablet will automatically get the new capability.
In this post we describe how to use a hidden taxonomy list to allow us to change the format and store metadata terms, plus their parents in SharePoint Online.
Intro
Lists and libraries in SharePoint Online have the ability to show a term or the term plus parents within a managed metadata column by editing said column and changing a neat little option called display format.
You can configure managed metadata columns in SharePoint to show terms plus parents.
However, when you turn on this option your term plus parents displays in the following way: Parent:Term. What if you wanted to change the way the parent plus child terms are displayed into either a different or user friendly format? Let’s do exactly that:
The taxonomy hidden list
There is a secret list within each SharePoint site called the taxonomy hidden list that, as the name suggests is a hidden list that stores cached managed metadata terms used within site. The taxonomy hidden list is unique to the site and each time terms are used within the site, they get stored within the taxonomy hidden list.
This list contains a lot of repeated stuff that might look confusing, but it does specifically contain the full path of a term including it’s parent, which is what we are looking for.
Solution
So in my example I want to replace the colon in the parent plus term with a comma and a space, so it looks like this: Parent, Term. In the below example my managed metadata column is called Department. Here’s how I did it step-by-step:
In your target list/ library, create a new single line of text column to store you formatted parent plus term (DeptCopy in my example).
Create a new flow in Power Automate based on the when a new item is created SharePoint trigger, making sure your site address and list name are added and configure the actions below:
Get item action
Set the site address as the target SharePoint site and the list name as TaxonomyHiddenList. Note: you will need to enter a custom value here and type this in.
Set the Id to equal the managed metadata column (Department) WssId from the when a new item is created trigger.
Initialize variable
Create a new variable to store the full path of the term from the get items action. Give the variable a name set the value to equal Path from the get items action.
Compose (optional)
Use the compose data operation to create an expression to replace the colon with a comma and space. You don’t have to do this step, I just use it for troubleshooting to easily see what the outputs are of my input value.
replace(variables('varDept'),':',', ')
Update item
Update your previously created column to show the newly formatted term plus parent with the output from the compose action. Note: If you don’t use the compose action from the previous step, just write the expression above directly in the column you want to update.
Notes
There is quite a bit online about seeing empty values in your managed metadata column. Although I’ve not personally noticed this, the taxonomy hidden list is set to have unique permissions by default and has the following permissions:
Anonymous users: view items
Everyone: read
There is a good write up of the taxonomy hidden list here.
Although there are a number of dynamic content options available, none of them seem to contain the parent + term like they do in the hidden taxonomy list. For example the path column that’s available from the ‘create an item’ trigger, outputs ‘null’.
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: Video collection page, one-time passcode change, nested security groups in AAD, flows from list templates, calendar view conditional formatting, review mode for Word documents, top ten SPFx solutions June 2022
Video collections page
Whenever people create a new site, the service auto-generates a static layouts page for video collections. This is a collection of all videos from the site’s document library. For now, to access this new page, you need to append /_Layouts/15/Video_Collections.aspx to the end of the site url. You can then edit and publish this page as you would any other, it will start appearing in the site pages as well.
The new video collections page in SharePoint Online.
To improve reliability for delivery of the one-time passcode e-mails that are sent as part of the external sharing flow, Microsoft will be updating the sending address for these mails from no-reply@sharepointonline.com to no-reply@notify.microsoft.com.
NOTE: If your organization is using Azure B2B Integration with SP in Microsoft 365, this change will not impact your organization. No other e-mails sent from OneDrive or SharePoint are being changed at this time.
a: “Nested” groups in Azure Active Directory (Public Preview)
The ‘memberOf’ component of dynamic Azure Active Directory, or Microsoft 365 groups allows you to “nest” groups within a group. The groups that define the membership of the dynamic group can be any group type represented in Azure Active Directory – user or device security groups, Microsoft 365 groups, and groups synced from on-premises, or a mix of all three. And, unlike existing nested security groups today, memberOf dynamic groups return a flat list of members, so can be used for licensing assignment and application assignment.
memberOf “Nested” groups allow you to create Dynamic-Group-A with members of Security-Group-X and Security-Group-Y. Members of the groups inside of Security-Group-X and Security-Group-Y don’t become members of Dynamic-Group-A.
Create Power Automate flows embedded within Microsoft Lists templates
To help improve automation of information, you now have the option to install pre-created Power Automate reminder flows whenever you create a list from select list templates: Work progress tracker, Content scheduler, and the Recruitment tracker.
You’ll be prompted to install the included Power Automate reminder flow after the list has been created. The reminder flow is an automated flow that runs on a schedule in the background, so it does not appear in the Lists menu, and you can further refine it using the Power Automate flow designer. With a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license, or a Power Automate per-user plan, you can create and use the reminder flow that is included with these select ready-made Lists templates.
Some list templates, such as the Work progress tracker shown above, come with flows that are automatically created when you create a list from that template.
Calendar view conditional formatting in Microsoft Lists
Now you can better customize the calendar view by colour coding items based on conditions or rules. You manage the rules and colouring within the ‘Format current view’ in the top-right section of Calendar view.
Color-code list items as they appear within Calendar view when they meet certain rules by your design through conditional formatting.
When sharing a link to a document in SharePoint or OneDrive, you can assign someone to ‘Review Mode’ in the Share Dialog by using the new ‘Can Review’ option in the permission dropdown. They’ll then have access to review the document – to make edits with tracked changes intact and leave comments.
Select “Open in review mode only” when sharing Word documents to ensure the recipient can add comments or make edits that have tracked changes on by default.
These are the most widely used solutions and their providers last month:
Ichicraft Widgets: Your Digital Workplace – Ichicraft Widgets allows users to personalize their digital workplace in SharePoint or Microsoft Teams. It offers the user a canvas that can be filled with configurable widgets (blocks) that clearly display up-to-date and personalized information.
Cerkl Broadcast for SharePoint – Ensure your internal communications are seen with SharePoint push alerts and newsfeed. Cerkl Broadcast for SharePoint provides unique notifications to employees through your existing SharePoint.
Employee Directory Plus – Support | HR365 – SharePoint Employee Directory Plus is free, fully featured 30 days trial for one office 365 tenant up to 999 users. Employee Directory Plus displays information of employees in the organization in visually manner.
Image Map – APPS 365 LTD – Supercharge your processes and navigation by using any image to deliver interactive visual content. Create hotspot navigation with image maps.
My Links – Dalikoo – My Links is a SharePoint app where you can add and manage your web links through an intuitive interface.
HM Munich GmbH – Table of Contents– This Web Part helps you to create high-quality documentation. The Modern Pages are ideal for your documentation of content (as a kind of Wikipedia) in Office 365.
Modern FAQ – The Modern FAQ app provides users a better way to search for the answers to the questions they have in mind. It also helps the organizations to prepare the frequently asked questions, and answers categorized and presented in a readable format.
Qualtrics Feedback – Add a way for your employees to easily give you feedback from within Viva Connections. Easily add a card to your Viva Connections surface to allow your employees to give you feedback in their flow of work.
Announcements Carousel – Compass365 – The Announcements Carousel by Compass365 allows you to display announcements in an automatic sliding carousel on your SharePoint team site.
In Teams: Forms enhancements for meetings, LinkedIn integration, remove call from history, call recording announcement, common area phone license updates, DECT device integration with SIP, Teams panels updates, automatic groupings for channel posts, UX updates for iPad, bulk removal for policy assignments, export API support for message reactions
Microsoft Forms is excited to introduce a number of new features and improvements to existing features within Teams meeting polls. Here’s a quick summary:
The “Forms” app within Teams is being replaced with a new app named “Polls” – making it much easier for people to find and add polls to their chats and meetings.
UI improvements to the poll suggestions pane, including the ability to:
Re-position the list of suggested polls from the bottom to the side pane
Provide an entry point in the polls portal page, where users can show/hide the side pane as needed
Provide the poll results view (previously, it only showed the voting view), which allows the poll creator to see how the poll will look to the meeting audience after it’s launched
You can now see a list of your recently created polls so that you can re-use your past polls created in new meetings and save time.
A new poll animation appears after people have entered a response, providing a dynamic confirmation that their votes have been successfully submitted.
A new poll question type, Rating, which allows you to provide feedback by rating on the scaled symbols.
We’ve improved the poll result view to be a more intuitive and easy-to-read experience, with enrichments such as color indication and dynamic results.
Use LinkedIn profiles, now integrated with Teams, to get to know your colleagues, connect directly and build deeper relationships. From Teams chat, channels, calls, or meetings, you will now be able to view your colleague’s LinkedIn profile, including their current role, past experiences, and other insights.
When creating a message post in a team channel, users are now able to notify owners of the team all at once by mentioning “@Team Owners,” removing the need to mention team owners individually. “Team Owners” is automatically grouped and doesn’t require any manual maintenance.
Streamline your view with the ability to hide calls from your call history list on Teams for desktop and mobile. NOTE: Your call history is available if you have an Enterprise Voice or Business Voice license as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription.
Remove a call from call history in Microsoft Teams.
Call recording announcement played in your default language
Call recording announcements will now be played in your default language for Teams calls to or from a phone number. Both parties will hear the announcement in the same language, at the same time, for both standard and compliance recording scenarios.
Spectralink Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) device integration with SIP Gateway
DECT devices from Spectralink have been integrated with SIP Gateway, allowing frontline workers to use Teams calling functionality on DECT devices to communicate with colleagues on the go. DECT device integration with SIP Gateway is available on the following compatible handset models from Spectralink:
IP-DECT 200/400/6500/Virtual IP-DECT/IP-DECT Base Station
Admins can clean up individual policy assignments from users in bulk so that those users can inherit the correct policy either via a group policy assignment or global organization-wide default. Individual policies are always prioritized, in order to clean those induvial policies and make sure that users are getting the correct policy we created this procedure to clean them all in one operation.
The Teams Export API allows organizations to support Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) for Teams to solve for retention, indexing, e-discovery, classification, and regulatory requirements. Teams Export API also will now support Teams reactions (heart, thumbs up, laugh, surprised, angry, sad) on a message using the Export API. This is in addition to Teams Messages (1:1 and group chat), attachments (file links and sticker), emojis, GIFs, and user @Mentions.
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Reflect is now a featured tab in your class team – To help foster social emotional learning in your class, we’ve updated Reflect to appear as a featured tab in each of your classes – just like Assignments or Grades! Get started with the updated version of Reflect in Teams.
Additional enhancements to Assignments and Grade Reports – The Insights team has been working to highlight student learning data in Assignments and Grade Reports in a richer, more informative, and easier to use format. Find out more:Changes to Assignments and Grades view in Insights
Summary Average Grade for Teachers – In the Gradebook for Assignments, you’ve been able to view a summary of all assignments and student grades for each course. Now, we added an average grade for each student, assignment, and all-up class view. As a teacher, you can change the date filter to see updated average grades for your selected date period. Find out more:What’s new in Teams
Adding Images in Assignment Instructions – A picture is worth a thousand words, and a GIF even more (some say). Now, you can embed pictures and GIFs into your Assignment instructions on both mobile and desktop to make them more engaging and easier to understand for students. Find out more:What’s new in Teams
Updated Video Options for Students and Educators – This last year we have added the ability to add Video recording to the assignments for both educators and students and added the ability to do Video Recording when given grades or feedback for an assignment. We have updated the video recorder to now support ink and images in your recording, and added options for Mirror recording and Audio recording. Find out more:Video in the Flow of Work
Challenging Words assignment improvements – Extend your students’ learning by creating a rigorous assignment from the most challenging words. When you navigate to Reading Progress reports in Insights, you can see which words students missed most frequently, select words from the passage, or additional challenge words recommended based on data from students with similar reading challenges. Find out more: create a challenge assignment from Insights.
Multi-select of words in Teacher Review – Save time with the ability to select multiple words to adjust the error category or mark as correct in bulk. Select any word, then from the dropdown choose Text tools then Select multiple words to manage several words at once. Find out more:What’s new in Teams
Improvements to Timed Passage – Now, whenever a timed passage is set and the student doesn’t finish their reading in the allotted time, a small marker will show on the page and gray out the words the student didn’t reach. Find out more:What’s new in Teams
Create and Review Assignments on iPad and Android tablets – In the past, educators have been able to create and review Reading Progress assignments on Teams for Desktop PC, Mac and Web Browser, but not on Teams for iPad or Android tablets. Support for assignment creation and review on these two mobile platforms is now available. Find out more:What’s new in Teams
Frontline
Easily deploy frontline teams at scale – Administrators can deploy up to 500 teams with 25 users per team using one PowerShell command. This enables your organization to roll out teams at scale within a day so your frontline workforce can collaborate and be productive across different stores, locations, and roles. Learn more about deploying frontline teams at scale.
Device Test for virtual appointments – Device Test allows virtual appointment users to validate and configure hardware components before joining an appointment through Microsoft Teams. Users will be able to validate camera, microphone, and browser compatibility, as well as the internet connection at any moment before the scheduled appointment start time. Learn more about device testing.
Virtual appointment SMS notifications for UK customers – Now UK customers can send and receive SMS confirmations and reminders with a Teams Meetings link for any virtual appointments that are created from the Bookings app in Teams. Learn more about SMS notifications.
Government
These features are currently available to in multi-tenant cloud environments: US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD):
Manage Meetings options for DoD – Organizers are now able to modify the user experience or customize the safety and security settings for their Teams Meetings using the new “Meetings options” feature.
Large Gallery for Teams on VDI in government clouds – By default, Teams Meetings supports up to nine videos in Gallery. Now, using Large Gallery, users can view up to 49 videos at once in Meetings on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). This is available for GCC and GCCH.
Together Mode for Teams on VDI in government clouds – Together Mode lets you see all your colleagues against a shared background, making you feel like you are all together in a virtual online room. This is now available in Meetings on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for GCC and GCCH.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Managed environments, auto updates, app insights, find/ replace, review feedback, more components, Power Apps on Windows GA, embed an app in Teams, NFC/ markup support, Dependent assemblies for plugins, ESLint rules, formula columns in Dataverse, visualising views
Managed Environments (Preview)
This month Microsoft announced the preview of Managed Environments, a set of built-in governance capabilities that will simplify and automate IT administration of the Power Platform at scale. Managed Environments offers out-of-the-box simplicity with premium administration capabilities for low-code asset management at scale. It is designed to streamline governance, increase IT trust, and significantly reduce the burden on IT.
Simplify and streamline Power Platform governance with Managed Environments.
Auto updates for Power Apps & Dynamics CE (Preview)
The new feature allows automatic updates of third-party apps installed through AppSource, helping both ISVs and customers keep software up to date in a simple and controlled way, with minimal administrative overhead. Customers can control whether to opt-in to enable the feature and indicate which publishers are permitted to automatically update apps in their environment, providing flexibility to pause auto updates based on their needs.
Application insights generally available for Dataverse plugins
The Power Apps team have announced that Application insights is now Generally Available for Dataverse plugins. To ensure that you can monitor your production workloads anywhere in a trustworthy manner, Microsoft have enabled state-of-art monitoring solution built on the Azure Monitor ecosystem designed to help prodevs to diagnose plugin timeouts, create custom alerts and reports, monitor global usage, and automatically detect patterns and anomalies in the telemetry data using the built-in Smart Detection feature, thus helping you to keep it always available, reliable and performant.
Improve monitoring of Dataverse plugins using Application insights.
Find and replace in the Power Apps Studio (Preview)
In July, the Power Apps team introduced the “Replace” capability to the Search Pane, now in preview. This new addition to the Search Pane means you can now find and replace variables, collections, media, flow, formula content and more. This new pane allows you to be as broad or as granular with your search as you need – find all of the things you’re looking for in your canvas app or exactly the thing you are looking for.
This feature is currently available only for model-driven apps as part of preview. The mechanism to capture feedback for the apps is completely managed by Microsoft and is compliant with all international privacy and security standards. The feedback is processed to generate satisfaction score of an app on a scale of 0 to 200 which is displayed to makers for their apps.
You can now add more components to your model-driven forms through the modern form designer! Try customizing the look and feel of your forms with custom components built by Microsoft or other providers available through the marketplace.
Allow your Dynamics users to easily locate information from Bing.com, Office.com, and Sharepoint.com by enabling the Dynamics 365 connector. Make your Dynamics users more productive by eliminating switching apps to get to quickly needed business data.
Find all your canvas and model-driven apps in one place. Just sign in, choose an app, and you’re ready to go! Use your apps wherever you are with or without network thanks to offline support. It works just like it does on iOS and Android. With Intune for application management, you can manage the devices and people in your organization that have access to Power Apps on Windows.
Currently, customers can add their favourite apps to Teams by using the “Add to Teams” button at make.powerapps.com/apps. Now, they can launch their favourite canvas apps and pin these apps in Teams straight from the Web Player’s header. This capability prevents a user from having to leave the app context & return to make.powerapps.com/apps to add the app to Teams.
Expanded support for NFC, and markup support in MR controls
The ReadNFC() function has been improved to return all records on the NFC tag as well as the identifier. These records and identifier make it easy to build Power Apps around asset tracking, inventorying, and attendance tracking.
The Markup in MR control enables users to paint 3D lines and draw arrows in context of physical space on top of a device’s camera feed. These mixed reality markups can be used during inspections, audits, walkthroughs and more to point out features of the environment and certain objects anchored in space.
Expanded support for NFC, and markup support in MR controls.
This feature is designed to boost developer productivity by eliminating the overhead of using ILMerge to manually merge dependent assemblies. With dependent assemblies, rather than register an individual .NET assembly, you will upload a NuGet Package that contains your plug-in assembly AND any dependent assemblies. Unlike ILMerge, you can also include other file resources, such as JSON files containing localized strings.
ESLint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365 (Preview)
The Power Apps team have announced the public preview of ESLint rules for Power Apps model-driven apps and Dynamics 365 CE. In 2019, Solution Checker launched helping customers analyze solution for any issues. The ESLint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365 takes this a step further, bringing these validations to your development environment to help you find and fix issues in your JavaScript code before being added to a solution.
Announcing public preview of ESLint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365.
Formula columns are based on Power Fx. Power Fx provides a much richer set of functions than were previously available with calculated columns, especially for text processing and also provides a lowcode way to perform app extensibility. Now you are empowered with the same capability inside Dataverse where you can express your business logic on top of existing columns and reference column from other tables.
As calculations are done at the Dataverse level, results can be seen and used in all Dataverse endpoints, including the Dataverse for Teams table view, canvas and model-driven Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, the Dataverse APIs, to name just a few.
Visualize views in Power Apps with Power BI generally available
The Power Apps team have announced that Power BI quick reports in Power Apps are now generally available. Power BI quick reports in Power Apps represent a seamless integration of Power Apps, Power BI and Dataverse into a single experience to enable every business user turn data into insights inside business apps.
Power BI quick reports in Power Apps.
Power Automate
In Power Automate: Power Automate desktop update, two new bot actions, 44 new verified connectors, 19 new independent publisher connectors, pay-as-you-go, ideas
Power Automate Desktop – July 2022 update
The July 2022 update of Power Automate for desktop (version 2.22) has been released and can be downloaded here. Here is a roundup of all the new features and updates:
UI automation in a Citrix or RDP virtual desktop is now supported (Preview)
New datatable actions are introduced in Power Automate for desktop
Flow details are now available in the desktop console
Detailed release notes will now be available for each new version
UI automation in a Citrix or RDP virtual desktop is now supported (Preview).
The Power Automate team have announced two new bot actions that have been highly requested which will help take your flows a step further:
Update adaptive card messages in Teams – This action allows makers to update a Flow bot message which contains an adaptive card . Allowing you to make updates to reflect the latest changes in near real time to Microsoft Teams.
Trigger a flow when an adaptive card action is submitted – A new trigger that lets you collect inputs from multiple users across a group chat or channel.
Update Adaptive card in a chat or channel message.
The Power Automate team launched a huge number of verified connectors in June 2022, including 44 new and 19 updates from different service owners. These connectors have solutions and tools for Content and Files, Productivity, Collaboration, Business Intelligence, IT Operations, Security, and much more. Here are just a few:
Azure AD App Registration – Azure Active Directory is an Identity and Access Management cloud solution that extends your on-premises directories to the cloud and provides single sign-on to thousands of cloud (SaaS) apps and access to web apps you run on-premises.
Azure AD Identity and Access – A connector for Azure AD Identity and Access. This connector will contain multiple actions to manage Azure AD Identity and Access.
Azure Communication Services Chat – Azure Communication Services Chat allows you to add real-time text communication to your cross-platform applications.
Azure Communication Services Email – Azure Communication Services Email allows you to send high volume transactional, bulk and marketing emails enabling Application-to-Person (A2P) use cases.
19 New Independent Publisher Connectors in June 2022
The Power Automate team have announced that 19 new Independent Publisher connectors were published in June 2022. These connectors have solutions and tools for Human Resources, Social Media, Lifestyle and Entertainment, Data, Finance and much more. Here are a few examples:
BitlyIP by Troy Taylor – Bitly is the most widely trusted link management platform in the world. By using the Bitly API, you will exercise the full power of your links through automated link customization, mobile deep linking, and click analytics.
DHL Shipment Tracking by Woong Choi – The Shipment Tracking API provides up-to-the-minute shipment status reports. Users of this API can: Retrieve tracking information for shipments, Identify the Deutsche Post DHL (DPDHL) service provider involved with the shipment, Verify DPDHL is using the correct delivery address.
Nationalize.io by Tomasz Poszytek – Nationalize.io predicts the nationality of a person given their name. Use the API for analytics, ad segmenting, demographic statistics etc. The API is free for up to 1000 names/day.
The Power Automate team have announced pay-as-you-go for Power Automate. A easy way for users to only pay for what you use, giving you more flexibility to get started with Power Automate with low risk and then scale your investments over time based on the usage patterns.
Currently, admins must predict licensing needs in advance, purchase licenses and assign them to makers for them to start using premium features of Power Automate. While it works for situations where admins understand the licensing needs in advance, we’ve heard from customers that there are many scenarios where they don’t yet know their needs, or where they need to scale up/down usage.
Between July 18 and July 20, 2022, Power Automate Ideas was migrated to 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.
In Power BI: New license purchase/ management via AppSource, metric visual, desktop feature summary, data in space, improved Power BI in Excel
Purchase and manage licenses of licensed visuals through Microsoft AppSource
You can now purchase and manage licenses of licensed visuals through Microsoft AppSource. Now, when you look at licensed visuals in AppSource, you can see all the available licensing plans for each visual. Licensed visuals are visuals marked with price tag “Starts at Free” and has the “Plans + Pricing” tab.
You can now purchase and manage licenses of licensed visuals through Microsoft AppSource.
The Metric visual is now available in preview in the Power BI Service. You can now include individual metrics instead of the entire scorecard and create report pages showcasing metrics alongside other visuals, in the context of the rest of the report data.
You can either create a new metric or add a metric from an existing scorecard as a visual in the report.
The July 2022 update for Power BI desktop is out now and includes Error Bars general availability, Metric visuals, Datamarts updates and much, much more!
Data in space is a new Power BI Mobile feature that uses augmented reality to create spatial anchors in the real world and attach Power BI data to them, so that data can be connected to the physical environment it describes. Using Data in space, you can connect your business data to your real-world scenarios, such as facility management, manufacturing, or retail.
The Power BI team have announced several improvements to the Power BI experience in Excel that will help business users easily search data artifacts (including Power BI datasets and Power BI datamarts) and uncover better data insights all inside a spreadsheet environment.
Better Search in User-Friendly Interface for Power BI in Excel.
Microsoft Viva Sales reimagines the selling experience, giving salespeople AI-driven insights and data automation right in the flow of work. Sellers will be able to automatically capture, access, and register data into any customer relationship management (CRM) system. Enriched with data from Microsoft 365,
With Bookings with me in Outlook, you can create, customize, and share a personal Bookings page where people can book time with you based on your personal preferences. Start customizing your Bookings page in the web calendar by clicking on Create bookings page.
The newly designed Office.com sign-in and sign-up page greets you with a modern entry point to get your day started on the web. We are introducing a new onboarding experience that helps you understand how to better use and engage with Office. Additionally, with the new Create experience, you can access new creation templates in a single location.
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: Inline playback of videos in Hero web part, control vertical section reflow, updated site logo management, streamlining the multilingual user interface, Planner cards in activity feed, SharePoint 2013 Workflows migration assessment tool, LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group site template
Inline playback of videos in Hero web part
When you create a Communication site, the Hero web part is included on your page by default. It is pre-populated with default content that you change to display your own images, text, pages, links, documents, or videos. When someone clicks to play a video in the Hero web part section of a SharePoint site, the video will now play inline. No launch out of your established context, watch inline, return, browse, and continue to scroll through the other contents of the page uninterrupted.
When you add a video to a Hero web part on a communications site, it now plays inline (no longer launching out to the video’s Stream page).
Currently the vertical section in pages goes to the bottom of the page when viewed on smaller screens. We’re adding the ability for page authors to control this reflow and choose whether the vertical section goes to the top or bottom of the screen when the screen is condensed to a smaller size.
When you click to edit a vertical column, you’ll now see a new option to have the vertical column appear on the top or bottom when the full page resizes to a single column on smaller devices or low resolutions.
The SharePoint team are centralizing the management of your site logo. To update or manage your site logo, you will now exclusively visit the Header panel under the ‘Change the Look’ settings. Site owners will be able to navigate to the ‘Header’ panel from the ‘Change the Look’ settings, and then scroll to the bottom of the panel where the site logo options will be located.
Control all header options within the ‘Change the Look’ settings.
Streamlining the multilingual user interface when editing team sites
This new release includes other improvements to the navigation and site title editing experience for users whose preferred language differs from the site’s default language:
Additional language information is available when editors update navigational labels, site descriptions, footers, and the site’s name.
The new language information displays even if multilingual settings have not been enabled for the site.
When editors change site content that is not in their preferred language, it will modify the label instead of creating a translation.
Additional information appears in tool tips next to the content that’s being edited to confirm the language.
Streamlining the SharePoint multilingual user interface when editing team sites.
Planner cards now appear within the team site activity feed
Now, when a team member assigns a task to you within a plan, beyond the Planner user interface, a card will show up on your site activity feed if you are within two days of the due date. Timely tasks are visible when you need to see them.
When a task in Planner nears its due date, it will appear to your view in the team site activity feed.
The SharePoint team have developed a new, open-source Microsoft 365 Assessment tool – available to help you identify and evaluate your existing use of SharePoint 2013 workflows within your tenant and generating a Power BI report to help plan your migration of 2013 workflows to a modern workflow orchestration service.
By embedding Teams chat within Dynamics 365, Teams users can now seamlessly exchange ideas and collaborate directly and in context right in the workflow. You’ll be able to link existing or new chats to your Dynamics 365 records, such as sales opportunities and service cases, for convenient access for all participants.
Microsoft Teams chat embedded within Dynamics 365.
E-sign approvals fully embedded within Team Approvals
Users can now seamlessly create, view, review and e-signature approval requests that require a signature right from Teams. This update removes the need for users to log into each e-sign provider website. The login process has also been improved with users no only needing to login every 30 days.
E-signature approvals on mobile – view & take action.
E-signature approvals on mobile – view & take action
Users can now easily action e-signature approval requests from any mobile device. As a recipient users can view or review them, as a creator they can edit or cancel them.
DocuSign e-signature approvals in chats & channels
Users can now create DocuSign e-signature requests directly from the compose extension within a chat or a channel maintaining the context for the request. When users review the request, any updates will be shown in the adaptive card in the chat or channel meaning users respond faster as they understand the context of the request.
DocuSign eSignature for Approvals in Microsoft Teams
You can view and edit Adobe Acrobat PDF files right in Teams, removing the need to open another window which disrupts your workflow. This setting is in private preview and IT administrators can set Adobe as a default setting through the Teams admin center.
Users will be able to find the apps they use regularly via app flyouts, and just @mention their favourite bot to start using it seamlessly in a new chat/team. This capability will ensure that regularly used apps show up first and that the user doesn’t have to install them every time.
iPad users will have an updated Teams mobile meeting experience via a multitasking panel. Users will see a collapsible right panel during meetings, which enables richer experiences such as chat alongside the ongoing meeting, faster roster views, and more.
Chat bubbles are now available for iOS and Android users. When chat bubbles are enabled, chat messages appear on the mobile screen where you can preview the two most recent messages. You can temporarily turn them off in the current meeting by tapping on the snooze icon. Otherwise, you can also turn them off permanently by tapping on Don’t show chat bubbles on the More Actions (…) menu.
Organizers can share control by assigning the new “co-organizer” role to up to 10 meeting attendees. Co-organizers have most of the same capabilities as the organizer, including management of Meeting Options. Limitations of the co-organizer role include an inability to create and manage breakout rooms, manage meeting recordings, and view or download attendance reports. Organizers can add co-organizers through Meeting Options. Only invitees within the same tenant as the organizer are eligible for the co-organizer role.
Disable chat write access for anonymous/ unauthenticated users
IT administrators can disable chat write access for non-federated users and unauthenticated users who join Teams meetings through a shared link. This provides an added layer of security, especially in the financial sector where chat messages can be used as part of a data security breach.
Disable the chat write access via PowerShell using syntax [-MeetingChatEnabledType = Enabled, Disabled, or EnabledExceptAnonymous]. You can also do this through the admin portal under Chat in Meetings policy > Turn it on for everyone but anonymous users. This setting can be applied to a subset or all tenant users. Once this is set by an IT administrator, a meeting organizer cannot override this setting through meeting options.
Web users can view captions coming from a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) provider within the Microsoft Teams meeting window instead of a secondary window. Users can follow along with what is being said without having to choose between the captions and presentation.
Live Captions and transcriptions for Teams meetings on Web
Real-time captioning and transcription are now available for web users in Teams meetings in 27 spoken languages. To enable, click on the More Actions menu […] and select Turn on live captions and/or Start transcription. Web users can see who is speaking along with what’s being said during and after the meeting, making meetings more inclusive and easier to follow.
Live Captions and transcriptions for Teams meetings on Web.
Additional spoken languages available for Live captions and transcriptions for Teams Meetings
Microsoft have added six more spoken languages for live captions and transcriptions, including Czech, Thai, Hebrew, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Turkish. Speakers of these languages will be more comfortable in a meeting, enabling a more inclusive environment.
Usability improvements to notifications in meetings for Android
Microsoft have added a notification drawer, which users will see at the top of their screen for in-meeting system messages. Users can preview, collapse, and clear all notifications with just one tap using the Clear All button. This helps reduce distracting clutter on your mobile device while you’re in a meeting.
Usability improvements to notifications in meetings for Android.
Support of Transcription for Teams on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop
Transcription is available on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for Azure Virtual Desktop users. Live transcription allows you to follow conversations alongside the meeting video or audio in real time, promoting inclusivity for participants who are deaf/hard of hearing or different levels of language proficiency. After a meeting, the transcript file is automatically saved in the chat tab for that meeting.
Give and Take Control for Teams on VDI for VMware and Azure Window Desktop
Give and Take Control for Microsoft Teams is now available on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for VMware and Azure Window Desktop. Give and Take Control allows a meeting participant to control the presenter’s shared content during screensharing. A presenter can give control of the shared content to another meeting participant to take actions such as present or modify files. Both the presenter and the meeting participant have control of the sharing. The presenter can take back control at any time.
A meeting participant can request control while another participant is sharing content. The participant sharing content can approve or deny the request. When the requester has control, they can make selections, edit, and make other modifications to the shared screen.
Updates in Teams is an out-of-the-box app that enables users to create, submit, and review all their updates, check-ins, and reports in the flow of work. These can be recurring processes that happen on a regular basis, like a weekly update, store opening, or facility inspection. They can also be in the moment updates that might be needed at any time, like a shift handoff, maintenance request, or incident report.
These features are currently available to in multi-tenant cloud environments: US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD):
Suggested Replies on mobile for Government Clouds – Quickly respond to an incoming message by tapping one of the three suggested reply options. Suggested replies in Teams chat uses assistive AI to create short responses based on the context of the previous message.
Sensitivity labels for Teams templates for GCC – Sensitivity labels are supported when creating teams with templates in GCC. Sensitivity labels allow Teams administrators to protect and regulate access to sensitive organizational content created during collaboration within Teams.
Manage meeting options – Organizers can modify the user experience by using the new Meeting Options to customize their meeting safety and security settings. Meeting Options can be accessed in the Teams meeting invitations details in Outlook and Teams Calendar. Available in DOD.
Attendee restriction to remove another attendee from chat – Only meeting organizers can remove an attendee from chat. If a user has an attendee role from the participant roster, they will not be permitted to remove other attendees from the chat window. Available in GCC.
Channel owner(s) can delete meeting chat messages within channel meetings – Currently, Teams channel owner(s) are unable to delete chat messages in the meeting chat window. Now, IT administrators can enable Owners can delete sent messages and assign this Messaging policy to a user or group of users. Once this is completed, channel owner(s) see this option on Member Permissions through Manage Teams > Settings. Available for GCC. Learn more.
Anonymous meeting join across clouds – Join meetings in other clouds anonymously from your Teams desktop app. Previously, if you wanted to join a meeting hosted in a cloud different from your tenant’s, you were directed to use the Teams web experience. Now, GCC and GCC-High users will be able to join meetings in Commercial, GCC, DOD, and GCC-High clouds from their desktop, enabling an improved meeting experience. Available in GCC and GCC-High. Learn more.
Music Mode – High-fidelity music mode enables Teams users to experience richer sound experiences when sharing non-speech content such as live music, songs through other applications, or medical signals during a virtual appointment with a physician. High-fidelity music mode enables significantly improved audio quality in Teams calls and meetings. Available in DOD. Learn more.
Presenter mode: Controls to move and resize presenter video – There is a new enhancement to the Presenter mode feature. Now, a presenter can choose whether to show up on the left or right side of the content and resize their video feed while automatically adjusting content size accordingly. This can be applied to all modes on Desktop or Window sharing, including standout, side-by-side, and reporter. Available in DOD.
Integrated Communication Access Realtime Translation CART captioning in meetings – You can now view captions coming from a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) provider within the Teams meeting window instead of a secondary window. Follow along with what is being said without having to choose between the captions and presentation. Meeting organizers and participants can enable CART captions from their meeting options. Available in GCC-High. Learn more.
Usability improvements to notifications in meetings for Android and iOS – A notification drawer, which you will see at the top of your screen for in-meeting system messages, allows users to preview, collapse, and clear all notifications with just one tap using the Clear All button. This helps reduce distracting clutter on your mobile device while you’re in a meeting. Available for GCC.
Improved meeting support in Firefox browser – Firefox browser users now experience the full audio and desktop and window screen sharing support in Teams meetings. Available in GCC.
Large Gallery Teams Meetings on Web – Web users can change the Teams meeting layout to Large Gallery. With Large Gallery, you can see up to 49 participants in a single screen, enhancing your overall virtual meeting experience. Available in DOD.
Together Mode in Teams Meetings on Web – Web users can change the Teams meeting layout to Together mode. In Together mode, participants are digitally placed in a shared background, making it feel like they are sitting in the same room with everyone else, even when participants are remote. Available in DOD.
Give and Take Control for Teams on VDI for VMware and Citrix – Give and Take Control for Microsoft Teams is available on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for VMware and Citrix. Presenters are able to give control of their shared content to other meeting participants, allowing them to take actions such as presenting or modifying files. The presenter and the meeting participant both have control of the sharing and the presenter can take back control at any time.
Support of Live Caption for Teams on VDI for VMware – Live captions are now generally available in Teams on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for VMware. Teams on VDI for VMware can detect what’s being said and who is saying it with real-time captions. See use live captions in a Teams meeting on how to get started. Available in GCC.
Multi-window support for Teams for VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365 and Citrix – Teams multi-window support is available for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for Azure Windows Desktop, Windows 365, and Citrix. Multi-window capability allows users to pop out chats, meetings, or calls into separate windows to help streamline their workflows.
Dynamic Emergency Calling for work from home on VDI for VMware – Dynamic Emergency Calling is now enabled for Teams on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for VMWare, allowing users to make emergency calls (E911) while working from home. It also lets users validate (and if necessary, edit) the address that emergency responders receive. Learn more how to configure dynamic emergency calling. Available GCC and GCC-High.
Support of Transcription for Teams on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop – Transcription is available on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for Azure Virtual Desktop users. Live transcription allows you to follow conversations alongside the meeting video or audio in real time, promoting inclusivity for participants who are deaf/hard of hearing or have different levels of language proficiency. Available in GCC and GCC-High.
Bots in GCC-High – GCC-High customers will be able to build and deploy bots in their Microsoft Teams environment through Azure bot Service. This release supports custom, line-of-business bots.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Power Apps for Windows GA, Dataverse Service Client GA, Dataverse experiences GA, Wrap GA, modern commanding GA, canvas components/ component libraries GA, portals update, developer tools refresh, command line updates v1.15.x
Power Apps for Windows General Availability
The Power Apps team have announced the general availability (GA) of our new Power Apps application for Windows. With Power Apps for Windows you can find all your canvas and model-driven apps including your Dynamics 365 apps and use them online or offline just like you can on iOS and Android! You can configure model-driven apps to work automatically offline by creating an offline profile. For canvas apps, you can use the LoadData/SaveData functions to create a seamless offline experience.
With the new Power Apps for Windows, you get device capabilities like camera, microphone, file picker, barcode scanning, geo-location and many others.
The Power Apps team have announced that the Dataverse service client is now Generally Available for developers to use. Dataverse Service client has been in preview for a while, which is why the team can provide developers with a Generally Available version of this SDK. This new Dataverse Service Client SDK has the following capabilities, which enables the community to extend the value of their applications:
Dataverse experiences on Power Apps General Availability
The Power Platform team announced the general availability of new data focused experiences for Dataverse, including:
Updated list of tables: An updated the list of tables to make it simpler to find what you need with extensive support for filtering, sorting, search and have provided some key pivots on this list.
Table hub: When you open a table, you’ll see a hub layout giving you an overview of the table with its properties and grouped links for related table components (like forms, views or columns).
Table designer: When you need to dive into the full data set, you can edit the table in a full-screen experience that gives you access to all the data in the table.
Create an app quickly: Now that you have found or built your table, it is just one-click away to create a new modern app over that table, whether you’re on the table hub or in the full-screen experience.
What’s using this table: You can select a command on the table hub to view the list of apps and flows that are using this table.
Columns, data types and formats: Focused on columns as they are key to storing meaningful data – the majority of columns created are text, whole number or date/time so these are all readily available in a single-click.
Choice columns: Enhanced management of these column types to make it easy to sort, drag/drop reorder, set colors and get access to all the other properties of the choice, including support for extending out-of-the-box Status Reasons.
Wrap for Power Apps – empowering makers to create secure, custom-branded, standalone Android and iOS enterprise mobile apps with Power Apps – has reached general availability (GA). Wrap for Power Apps is the next step, integrating low-code enterprise apps with Power Apps mobile technology to produce secure (Intune managed) enterprise mobile apps with rich native mobile experiences and seamless end-to-end branding suitable for customer-facing frontline worker scenarios.
The Power Apps team have announced modern commanding with Power Fx is now generally available (GA). Modern commanding provides a maker friendly low-code/no-code experience for customizing model-driven app command bars – with the first ever in-product command designer and the ability to use Power Fx (or JavaScript) for expressing business logic.
General availability of Power Apps modern commanding.
Canvas components/ component libraries general availability
The Power Apps team have announced the general availability (GA) of canvas components and component libraries. Canvas components enable low code/no-code developers to build reusable UX components using default Power Apps controls as core building blocks. These custom components can then be shared across app screens or multiple apps both within and across Power Apps environments.
Makers can now package their apps and component libraries inside a single or multiple solutions and import them into a different environment. If a canvas app is using a component library, it is now tracked as a solution dependency. ALM support ensures that the dependency relationship is maintained in the target environment and any further library versions imported via solutions can deliver the updated components to the app.
With the announcement of Power Pages, several capabilities within Power Apps portals are now been optimized, or depreciated. Changes include: OAuth 2.0 implicit grant flow, list OData feed, Portal content editor and more.
The Power Platform team have announced the release of a new update (Version: 1.16.5+gba7d6a4) for the Power Platform Command line. This refresh comes with capabilities ranging from support for single sign-on to things like showing whether solutions are managed or unmanaged when listing out the solutions.
You can now reassign a solution flow to a new owner from the Power Automate portal. This feature enables owners, co-owners, and admins to change the owner of a solution flow to enable business continuity when the original owner is switching teams or leaving the organization.
In May 2022, the Power Automate team launched 13 new verified connectors and 14 updates from different service owners. Let’s take a look at some of the new connectors:
Alkymi – Alkymi transforms enterprise workflows by placing machine learning and automation technology into the hands of business users, turning operational data headaches into a source of efficiency.
Cascade – Cascade is a cloud-based strategic planning and execution platform for teams to plan, execute, measure, and adapt their strategy all in one place.
Cyberday – Cyberday splits chosen security frameworks (e.g. ISO 27001, NIST CSF, ISO 27701) down to prioritized security tasks and guides you in implementing them directly inside Microsoft Teams.
DomainTools Iris Enrich – The DomainTools Iris Enrich API supports high query volumes of domain name attributes including Whois, DNS, SSL certificate, and risk scoring elements to help build out the needed context for appropriate disposition of indicators.
DomainTools Iris Investigate – The Iris Investigate API delivers dozens of domain name attributes on every result including Risk Score, DNS, Whois, SSL, and more.
Exasol – Exasol’s analytics database delivers next-level performance, ease of use and choice of deployment for diverse analytics use cases.
InQuba Journey – inQuba Journey offers a deep understanding into your customer journeys across channels and the ability to guide customer behaviour using real-time and personalised interventions.
My Acclaro – My Acclaro is a portal that streamlines translation workflows for your enterprise from order creation through review.
Progressus Advanced Projects – Use Progessus Advanced Projects connector to make OData calls to Progresssus Advanced Projects data.
Tribal – Tribal Edge modules, such as Tribal Admissions, provide staff and students the tools they need to succeed in the world of education.
TuxMailer – TuxMailer is a tool for email validation and marketing services.
Uber Freight – Uber Freight is a logistics platform providing 24/7 access to truckload freight with instant quoting + booking, price transparency, and real time visibility.
Vineforce – The Vineforce Power Automate Connector helps you build workflows by automating task creation and notifications triggered by actions in your favorite productivity apps.
15 new independent publisher connectors
In May 2022, the Power Automate team launched 15 new independent publisher connectors. Let’s take a look at some of the new connectors:
Aviationstack by Troy Taylor – The aviationstack API was built to deliver accurate data about global flights both in real-time as well as for historical flights.
BIN Checker by Troy Taylor – Checks and verifies BIN (Bank Identification Number). Available for both credit card and debit cards.
CDC Content Services by Troy Taylor – Content syndication allows CDC to offer web content to other sites and applications. Media, topics, and organizations data is available.
Lit Ipsum by Troy Taylor – Lit Ipsum is a dummy text generator for web designers and developers. As an alternative to boring old Lorem Ipsum generators, it chooses passages from copyright-free literature courtesy of the Gutenberg Project.
NHTSA vPIC by Troy Taylor – The NHTSA Product Information Catalog Vehicle Listing (vPIC) Application Programming Interface (API) provides different ways to gather information on Vehicles and their specifications.
OpenAI by Robin Rosengrün – OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory. The company conducts research in the field of AI with the stated goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole.
ProPublica Campaign Finance by Troy Taylor – The Campaign Finance API includes information about electronic filings, which are submitted to the Federal Election Commission on nearly every day of the year. ProPublica Congress by Troy Taylor – Using the Congress API, you can retrieve legislative data from the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Library of Congress.
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer by Troy Taylor – ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer provides summaries of 3 million tax returns from tax-exempt organizations and see financial details such as their executive compensation and revenue and expenses.
Reachability by Troy Taylor – Check reachability of any site/webpage from any country in the world.
Sessionize by Nanddeep Nachan – Sessionize is the smart way to manage Call for Papers, Speakers and Agenda for your conference.
Storm Glass by Paul Culmsee – The Storm Glass API allows you to fetch weather data for any coordinate on the globe in a simple, programmatic way using conventional HTTP requests.
Udemy by Nanddeep Nachan – The Udemy helps one to get the information about Udemy learning courses.
WorldTime by Andras Fordos – A simple API to get the current time based on a request with a timezone.
XSOAR by Landon Chelf – Provides the ability to submit content to XSOAR integrations when using instance.execute.external to expose integration instances over HTTPS. Tested to work with the Generic Webhook integration.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the end-to-end lifecycle management of applications and automations, considerations like governance, development, and maintenance. Based on your feedback, Power Automate has two categories of enhancements that are improving the ALM story:
Solution cloud flow improvements
Core ALM improvements
Making application lifecycle management (ALM) easier in Power Automate.
In Power BI: Preview data in dataset details page, Power BI Desktop Feature Summary, email subscription updates for Premium Gen2, SQL Server Reporting Services 2022, Enhanced refresh Power BI REST API GA
Preview data is now available in the dataset details page
The dataset details page helps you explore, monitor, and leverage datasets. When you click on a dataset in the data hub, a workspace, or other place in Power BI, the details page for that dataset opens. A new feature – preview data, lets you select data from dataset’s tables on the side panel. If you do not see a side panel, click on “Show tables” from the action bar.
In this month’s desktop feature summary is the announcement of the general availability of the new Format Pane, error bars and information protection updates, table navigation improvements, Connect to datamarts, plus lots more!
SQL Server Reporting Services 2022 (Public Preview)
This release introduces the public preview of SQL Server 2022 Reporting Services (SSRS). In this new release of SSRS, Microsoft have done lots of accessibility work to make sure we are empowering people to achieve more. It includes enhanced Windows Narrator support, security enhancements, performance improvements, bug fixes, and reliability updates.
Reminder of features being removed with the next release of SQL Server.
Enhanced refresh with the Power BI REST API generally available
Enhanced refresh with the Power BI REST API (formerly asynchronous refresh) from public is now generally available in Power BI Premium, Power BI Premium per User, and Power BI Embedded. As noted in the public preview announcement, this feature not only eliminates the need for synchronous client connections to perform a refresh, but also unlocks enterprise-grade refresh capabilities.
The Microsoft Forms team have updated creating, editing and tracking experiences for educators, here are 4 new features:
Quickly create a form/quiz for your daily workflow – With this feature, teachers can quickly select and create templates including feedback surveys from students, daily workflow requests forms and assessment quizzes based on different needs through forms.office.com.
Convert paper tests into online ones – You can now import and convert paper tests into Microsoft Forms by using our latest “Smart convert” functionality.
Quiz is fully supported across all devices, including mobile – Whether you are creating a Form or Quiz from scratch, want to edit an existing one, or want to analyze the results, now you can do this fully end-to-end across your various devices.
Keep track and remind non-response people by one click – If you want to share a form or quiz directly to your class or anyone in your organization, you can easily use the invitation channel.
Microsoft have announced an improved Office.com experience with updates that will allow users to create, share, and collaborate all in one place with their favourite apps. A new sign-in and sign-up page greets you with a modern entry point to get your day started on the web. Additionally, with the new Create experience, you can access new creation templates in a single location.
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: Site template history panel, page section templates, calendar view item drag and drop, Mover.io to be retired, view & edit video/ file info in Stream, Inspiration Library in Microsoft Viva Insights
SharePoint site template history panel
The site template history panel is new to site settings for site owners to view the history of any site templates applied to their site, along with the ability to review related site script actions. Site owners simply go to the Site information panel and then select View template history.
Click into Site information and then click “View template history” to view all templates that have been applied to your site.
Authors of SharePoint Pages and News will now be able to access section templates from the plus menu in a new tab next to the sections tab. Users will be able to choose and add templates at the section level instead of just at the page level. Although users will still have access to blank sections, there are six templates to make section design easier and faster.
When adding a new section to your SharePoint page or news article, you can now use predefined section templates to save time and better organize your posts.
Now it’s easy to reorganize list items in a calendar view. Users will be able to reschedule items – changing the date – by dragging and dropping them from one day to another, or by pulling an item from the ‘Unscheduled’ pane that appears on the right, within Calendar view.
Easily drag and drop list items when in Calendar view. Moving items updates the Date column to the date you drag to.
On July 1st, 2022, Microsoft will be retiring the legacy Mover tool’s ability to migrate from Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and Egnyte. If you are currently in the middle of a Mover migration, you may continue using Mover until you finish your migration. However, you will not be able to create new moves. FastTrack led migrations are not impacted at this time.
The Microsoft Migration Manager now has the ability to move files and folders from third-party storage providers into Microsoft 365. This is Microsoft’s recommended tool for file migrations to OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
View and edit of video and/or audio file information in Stream
Now it’s even easier to adjust things like title, description, and thumbnails for people who have owner permissions for a video or audio file.
About will enable users, with edit permissions, to add and edit a title/description on their video or audio file. Viewers will be able to see this information along with non-editable fields like upload date, owner name, filename, and area path.
Custom thumbnail, located in Video Settings, will allow users with edit permissions to change the default thumbnail by uploading an image or selecting a frame from the video. This custom thumbnail will be used throughout Microsoft 365.
You can also add and/or update the thumbnail of a video or audio file.
The Inspiration library is a new feature available in preview through the Viva Insights app in Teams. It turns insights into action with access to curated content and best practices from top sources like Harvard Business Review and Thrive.
The Inspiration library turns insights into action with access to curated content and best practices from top sources like Harvard Business Review and Thrive.
In Teams: Choose your own status for a meeting, Mandatory Comments for Approvals App, Data export within Approvals App, additional language support for suggested replies, Together mode for everyone, brightness/ soft-focus video filters, VDI improvements, Direct Guest Join for Teams Rooms on Android, Horizontal participant gallery, enhancements to app usage report/ activity log
Organizers and participants of Teams meetings can choose a Calendar Show As status feature such as free, busy, or OOF to reflect their status for scheduled meetings. In addition, organizers can select private meeting functionality, which will allow users to hide meeting details from other users when their calendar is shared.
Teams admins and approval template creators can enable mandatory comments for when an approver responds to a request. Team admins can go through the Teams Admin Center under Managed Apps and select the corresponding setting.
Additional language support for Suggested Replies for mobile
Suggested replies are now supported in Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Korean, Czech, Danish, Turkish, and Polish. The auto replies are on by default but can be turned off.
Together mode creates a virtual shared space in which attendees feel like they are sitting in the same room. Now, meeting organizer and presenters can start Together mode for all of a meeting’s participants. Previously, this view could only be enabled for your own personal view.
To enable this feature, simply check the Select Together Mode for Everyone option after you choose a scene. All meeting participants can then join this immersive experience together. This is currently only available for Teams Desktop users.
Enhance the video quality when lighting is poor by turning on the Adjust brightness filter. You also can use Soft focus to apply a subtle smoothing effect. Both filters are now available before joining meetings, as well as during meetings. Simply navigate to the device settings to enable these filters. Currently, Soft focus is not available for EDU tenants.
Multi-window support for Teams for VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365 and VMware – Teams multi-window support is available for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for Azure Windows Desktop, Windows 365 and VMware.
Background Blur for VDI on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 – Background blur effects are now available for VDI on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. Users on Teams for VDI on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 can make meetings more personalized and avoid unexpected distractions by applying background effects.
Give and Take Control for Teams on VDI for Citrix – Give and Take Control allows a meeting participant to control the presenter’s shared content during screensharing.
Dynamic Emergency Calling for work from home on VDI for VMware – Dynamic Emergency Calling is now enabled for Teams on VDI for VMWare, allowing users to make emergency calls (E911) while working from home. It also lets users to validate (and if necessary, edit) the address that will be communicated to emergency responders. Learn more how to configure dynamic emergency calling.
Direct Guest Join for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android
Zoom meetings can now be joined directly through Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android devices. To use this feature, simply schedule a new meeting on Zoom or forward an existing meeting to your Microsoft Teams Room, and it will appear on the calendar. Click on “Join” from your Teams Rooms device to enter the meeting.
At this time, support is limited to controls such as camera and microphone, but additional functionality will be integrated in the future. Supported devices are currently the Poly Studio X30 and Poly Studio X50, with support for additional device manufacturers coming soon.
This feature is available as part of the May 2022 update (App version – 1449/1.0.96.2022051102).
To increase the flexibility of the meeting stage, the orientation of participant video feeds can be displayed horizontally and located below the meeting stage when content is shared, or participants are spotlighted. You can change the location of the participant gallery through the layout chooser experience on the Teams Rooms console.
Horizontal participant gallery for Teams Rooms.
This feature is available as part of the May 2022 update (App version – 1449/1.0.96.2022051102).
These features are currently launched, or rolling out to Microsoft Teams for Education customers:
Reading Coach – Reading Coach builds on Reading Progress by identifying the five most challenging words for each individual student and presenting those words with tools to support the learner in practicing independently.
Setting Language or Locale for a Reading Progress passage – Microsoft have now added an Edit Language feature to make changing a language or locale from, for example, French (France) to French (Canada), as easy as a couple of clicks.
Fifteen new auto-detect languages – Microsoft have announced that we have added support for fifteen new auto-detect languages in Reading Progress, bringing our total to 116. To see the full list of supported languages, please visit this site.
Assignments and Grades support for up to 1000 students – The Assignments and Grades features, Teams has now added support for classes up to 1,000 students and has updated the functionality to allow educators to return all submissions to their students, without needing to wait for the work to be complete.
Rubrics updated for Educators & Students on mobile devices – With this new upgrade, you can now create and edit rubrics directly from your mobile devices, and students can more easily read rubrics on their mobile devices, as well.
Apps Support in Grading Pane – Microsoft have now updated the Grading pane in Assignments to also support apps. This allows the educator to launch the app directly from the Grading pane if there is work the student has done within that particular app. Whenever there is an app added to an assignment, it will now be shown in the Grading pane.
Improved Educator Dashboard navigation – To create an easier entry point for drilling into this student data and reports, Microsoft have created a more intuitive navigation bar to the Insights tab app. To learn more, please check out this video.
Moodle LMS integration with M365 – In addition to integration with Canvas and Blackboard, Microsoft has now partnered with Moodle to deliver more seamless integrated learning experiences. Microsoft Teams Classes LTI and Teams Meeting LTI apps are now available within Moodle.
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 Defence (DoD):
Together Mode in Teams Meetings on Web – Web users are now able to change the Teams meeting layout to Together mode by clicking the more options ellipsis […] in their meeting control bar. With Together mode, participants are digitally placed in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room even when you are apart. Available in DOD.
Anonymous meeting join across clouds – Join meetings in other clouds anonymously from your Teams desktop app. Previously, if you wanted to join a meeting hosted in a cloud different from your tenant’s, you were directed to use the Teams web experience. Now, DOD users will be able to join meetings in Commercial, GCC, and GCC-High clouds from your desktop, enabling an improved meeting experience. This feature leverages your existing Allow anonymous users to join meetings settings. If you already have these settings configured, no additional changes are required. Available in DOD. Learn more.
Presenter mode: Controls to move and resize presenter video – There is a new enhancement to the Presenter mode feature. Now, a presenter can choose whether to show up on the left or right side of the content and resize their video feed while automatically adjusting content size accordingly. This can be applied to all modes on Desktop or Window sharing, including standout, side-by-side, and reporter. Available in GCC and GCC-High.
Mirror my video – You no longer have to see the text in your video flipped. Imagine a primary school teacher with a small whiteboard in hand, or you have a virtual background with text in it. While the meeting audience sees the text correctly, you see the text flipped. By providing you with the option to un-mirror, you will be able to see the text correctly. Go to your Device Settings and toggle off “Mirror my video.” Available in GCC-High and DOD.
Music Mode – High-fidelity music mode enables Microsoft Teams users to experience richer sound experiences when sharing non-speech content such as live music, songs through other applications, or medical signals during a virtual appointment with a physician. High-fidelity music mode enables significantly improved audio quality in Teams calls and meetings. The optimized experience in Teams applies to signals captured by microphones, as well as audio played while sharing an application or desktop. Available in GCC-High. Learn more.
Support of Live Caption for Teams on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix – Live captions are now generally available in Teams on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix. Teams on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix (pre-requisite required) can detect what’s being said and who is saying it with real-time captions. See use live captions in a Teams meeting on how to get started. Available in GCC and GCC-High.
New default settings when opening Office files For Government clouds – Users can set their default preference as Browser, Desktop, or Teams when opening Office (Word, Excel, and Power Point) files that are shared in Teams. Desktop setting can be selected if the latest Office clients are installed and activated. The process of updating default settings is fairly simple. Learn how to set it up here.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Express Design, Power Pages, RTE for portals, Power Platform command line updates, modern app designer GA, Access migration GA, new data sources for the virtual connection provider
Express Design
The Power Apps team have announced the preview of express design in Power Apps: the ability to instantly generate low-code apps directly from design files and images. Power Apps express design is like an AI-powered co-pilot helping create apps alongside you. Here’s how it works:
Get going with a variety of content types: Start with a paper form, PowerPoint, PDF, a screenshot of a UI from a legacy app, or even a picture of a hand-drawn app that you’ve sketched out on paper. Or point to a design file in Figma.
Advanced AI will scan your file: Using cognitive AI models that are trained to recognize common application elements, Power Apps will automatically generate an app with a working user experience and data schema in Microsoft Dataverse.
Tune the model to get exactly what you need: From the AI-generated starting point, make quick inline adjustments. Need a dropdown control, or maybe a date picker? No problem.
Seamlessly connect to all of your data: Easily adapt and configure the application using low code. Use more than 675 prebuilt connectors to integrate with your existing systems including SAP, Salesforce, and SQL.
Add as many screens as you like: If you want to add more screens to the app, simply upload additional files, or create them easily in the low-code Power Apps Studio.
The Power Apps team have announced the preview of Microsoft Power Pages, the fifth product in the Microsoft Power Platform family. Power Pages empowers anyone, regardless of their technical background, with an effective platform to create data-powered, modern, and secure websites.
In addition to being low-code, Power Pages extends far beyond portals former capabilities to enable organizations of any size to securely build websites with exciting new aesthetic features such as a versatile Template Hub, Design Studio, and other advanced capabilities for customization with pro-dev extensibility.
Power Platform command line updates (April refresh) v1.15.x
Here are the new and updated features as part of the April refresh of Power Platform command line:
Solution command updates – In this release pac solution unpack and pack will also unpack Canvas apps using the parameter –processCanvasApps.
Packaging updates – The packaging construct within Power Platform allows a user to bundle multiple solutions into a package and can be deployed all together as one unit.
Administration improvements – For the administration commands, you can now create, update, and delete Microsoft Teams environments.
Power Apps modern app designer general availability
The Power Apps team have nnounced the general availability of the modern app designer, enabling a seamless, intuitive way to build robust model-driven apps with Dataverse grids, forms, and custom pages with just a few clicks. The modern app designer is now the default designer for model-driven apps and is at full feature parity with the classic designer.
Announcing the general availability of the Power Apps modern app designer.
Access Migration to Power Apps and Dataverse general availability
Microsoft Access users can migrate their data into Power Apps and Dataverse. Customers who have the current or monthly channel for Microsoft 365 and Office can update their Microsoft Access to build 16.0.15128.20248 or later to make use of the Dataverse Connector and migration tool.
The Access migration tool and connector provided within MS Access streamlines the process of migrating tables, relationships, and data with setup taking just a few minutes, and migration handled for you.
The workflow of migrating data from Access to Dataverse, with synchronous usage by Access forms and Power Apps.
New data sources for the Virtual Connection Provider
The Power Apps team have announced they are adding Excel and SharePoint to the virtual connection providers for virtual tables. Virtual tables connect to existing data outside of Dataverse allowing Power Apps and the Power Platform to treat it like local data. If you have a list that stores all of your product data in SharePoint, a virtual table lets you access that data within an app and also provide relationships between Dataverse tables and the SharePoint lists.
In Power Automate: New capabilities for AI Builder, Power Automate pane, process advisor updates, restore deleted flow, doubled chatbot coverage, 14 new verified. 36 independent publisher connectors, desktop update May 2022, bulk resubmit & cancel for cloud flows
New capabilities for AI Builder
Announced during Microsoft Build 2022, the following new and upcoming capabilities are coming to AI Builder:
Unstructured document processing: Microsoft are expanding Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) capabilities for Power Automate by adding support for unstructured document processing.
Model performance metrics for structured documents: A re-designed and re-structured document model page to include a global accuracy score.
General availability of Image Classification: Now generally available, Lobe is a free, easy-to-use app from Microsoft that helps you build image classification models on your own computer.
To improve transparency of AI Builder credits and facilitate capacity management, the Power Platform Licensing guide has been updated to include individual credit consumption rates for each AI Builder scenario.
AI Builder learning and training materials have been updated in the AI Builder in a day Lab. New training courses come complete with sample code and data sets to get you started building your first AI models easily.
Text Recognition: Support for up to 164 languages. The pre-trained model allows you to extract printed or handwritten text from images, such as photos or street signs and products, as well as from documents.
AI Builder is now available in South Korea
Extracting key-value pairs from a contractual agreement.
The new Power Automate pane in the Power Apps Canvas Studio is now available. Without leaving your app, you can now create, edit, view, or add an already built flow from the Power Automate pane.
Introducing the new Power Automate pane in Power Apps.
Take a look at the following new and upcoming capabilities are coming to process advisor:
Seamlessly generate Cloud flow Insights: With a few easy clicks, you can visualize your flow’s performance, identify bottlenecks and optimization opportunities, and monitor for business drifts.
Easily onboard data with Templates: With templates like Azure Dev Ops, Power Apps and Desktop Flows you can now visualize and manage the processes that are central to running your organization in a matter of clicks.
Visualize your process and act with deeper insights: With the new time analysis report you can drill down into time bottlenecks to understand the root cause and take the best action to optimize and automate your process.
Collaborate to amplify impact from learnings: For data processes, the viewer role grants the invited user read access to the process analytics and the ability to invite others with the viewer role. Recording-based processes have roles focused on managing recordings.
Get to Insights faster with Auto generated grouping: Process advisor now supports auto creating activities from the recording.
The Power Automate team have announced the capability to restore a flow (outside of a solution) with the latest version of the PowerApps Administration cmdlet. As an admin, you can now use PowerShell to restore a flow you deleted or on behalf of someone in your company without having to file a support ticket with Microsoft.
Doubled Power Virtual Agent chatbot content coverage
The Power Virtual Agents chatbot in the left navigation of the web site can answer even more of your questions! With this update, if the chatbot cannot find the answers to the questions you asked, it now provides a dropdown with all the topics and scenarios in Power Automate for you to get help from.
Doubled Power Virtual Agent chatbot content coverage.
BuildingMinds DigitalTwin Core – empowers customers to build a resilient and data-driven future for their real estate businesses.
CyberProof Actions – next generation incident management and response platform for building Security Operations Centers (SOCs).
IA-Connect JML – easy and robust automation solution for your Joiner, Mover, Leaver processes.
Jedox OData Hub – the world’s most adaptable planning and performance management solution.
Knowledgeone RecFind6 – RF6Connector, was designed specifically to integrate RecFind 6’s powerful EDRM functionality with SharePoint On-premises and Online
Lansweeper App For Sentinel – Integration of Lansweeper app on the MS Sentinel Platform implements the investigative actions.
nunify – nunify is a DIY Event Tech & Event App Builder Platform.
Replicon – self-driving professional services automation solution that uses advanced technology to analyze real-time data,
Revelation helpdesk – create and update items in your helpdesk such as tickets.
TrueDialog SMS – integrate text messaging (sending & receiving) into your business processes in a couple of clicks.
Verified – Automated and integrated solutions for e-signing enables smoother sales processes.
YakChat – Add SMS to your automated flows with the YakChat Power Automate Connector.
Datamotion – bridges Power Automate’s capabilities with our secure message delivery API functionality.
SurveyMonkey – automate critical workflows for a wide range of use cases and flow feedback data into key business apps.
Timeghost – includes the option for users to set up time tags and project tags.
Corporate Buzzword Generator by Troy Taylor – This generator randomly picks out phrases, which can help your application get ahead in an industry where spin and vagueness reign supreme
CraftMyPDF by Troy Taylor – CraftMyPDF’s drag & drop editor lets you design PDF templates in any browser and generate pixel-perfect PDF documents from reusable templates and JSON data.
Decentraland by Roy Paar – for connecting to the Decentraland API to search for metaverse LAND parcels.
DigitalHumani by Troy Taylor – A RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) which easily integrates with your products to reforest the planet.
Do Not Call Reported Calls by Troy Taylor – provides data every weekday about Do Not Call and robocall complaints reported to the Federal Trade Commission.
GeoDB by Troy Taylor – The GeoDB API focuses on getting global city and region data.
GitLab by Roy Paar – A connector for GitLab DevOps platform.
GlobalGiving Project by Troy Taylor – GlobalGiving connects nonprofits, donors, and companies in nearly every country in the world.
Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) by Troy Taylor – Ice And Fire is the world’s greatest source for quantified and structured data from the universe of Ice and Fire (and the HBO series Game of Thrones).
Mintlify by Troy Taylor – Hate writing code documentation? Save time and improve your codebase by letting Mintlify generate documentation for you.
Mondaycom by Woong – monday.com is a cloud service provider to manage schedules and inventories.
National Park Service by Troy Taylor – designed to provide authoritative NPS data and content for internal and external developers creating apps, maps, and websites.
U.K. Government Check VAT by Andras Fordos – perform unverified and verified checks of UK VAT numbers and view additional details of the VAT registration such as name and address of business.
URLBae by Troy Taylor – seamlessly track your audience with simple and easy-to-remember yet powerful links.
Xkcd by Troy Taylor – webcomic created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe.
Power Automate for desktop update – May 2022
The May 2022 update of Power Automate for desktop (version 2.20) has been released. Take a look at some of the new features and updates below:
All types of clicks are now supported in browser automation
A timeout value is now available for all browser automation actions
Tabular data extracted from a PDF file can now maintain their structure
Enhanced experience in the console for users with limited permissions
GA of ‘Display custom form’ action
All types of clicks are now supported in browser automation.
Now you can go to the Run history page, select the runs you would like to resubmit or cancel in the ribbon, and resubmit or cancel the runs. That’s it! Once you have resubmitted or canceled the flow run, you will be able to see your canceled and successful resubmitted flow runs.
In Power BI: On-prem data gateway, Power BI May 2022 feature summary, Report Server May 2022, ExecuteQueries REST API, automatic aggregations, Composite models on SQL Server Analysis Services, datamart, SQL Server 2022 Analysis Services CTP 2.0, Power BI integration for PowerPoint, Goals becomes Metrics, Exportable Formatted Data Tables (Preview), Action bar for interactive reports, SandDance Power BI Custom Visual updates, New Power BI Known Issue page, New data source and gateway management experience
On-premises data gateway May 2022 update
The Power BI team have announced the release of the May 2022 update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.126.8).
Updates include the general availability of Canvas zoom and Data point rectangle select features, Field parameters and Error bars for columns and line combination charts new preview features, plus lots more.
The ExecuteQueries REST API is now generally available. By using this REST API, you can query datasets in Power BI from practically any modern environment on any platform, as long as you can authenticate with Azure Active Directory (AAD) and construct a Web request.
Automatic aggregations is now generally available. By using automatic aggregations in Power BI Premium, you can unlock cloud-scale data volumes for interactive analysis. The fundamental idea is to import data into the dataset only at the aggregated level while leaving the detail data at the source to minimize data duplication.
Announcing general availability of automatic aggregations.
You can now create composite Power BI models by connecting to SQL Server 2022 Analysis Services tabular models. SQL Server 2022 is available now for public preview and when you upgrade or deploy tabular models to SQL Server 2022 Analysis Services. This DirectQuery connection becomes available in Power BI Desktop starting with May 2022 release. Existing or new tabular models hosted on SQL Server 2022 Analysis Services can be joined with other data in Power BI Desktop to create a composite model.
Datamart in Power BI is a new self-service capability included with Power BI Premium that enables users to uncover actionable insights through their own data without any help from IT teams. For the first time, we are empowering everyone with the right-sized ability to build a relational database for analytics using no code experiences for workloads up to 100GB, without compromising enterprise security and governance demands.
What’s new in SQL Server 2022 Analysis Services CTP 2.0
The public CTP 2.0 of SQL Server 2022 is now available at aka.ms/getsqlserver2022. This public preview includes the following enhancements for Analysis Services tabular:
Power BI support for SQL Server 2022 Analysis Services tabular models as a DirectQuery connection for composite models
Improved MDX query performance
Improved resource governance
Query interleaving now includes short query bias with fast cancellation
The Power BI team have announced the preview of Power BI data storytelling in PowerPoint. The team are thrilled to be shipping an add-in that lets you add Power BI reports and bookmarks to your slides and enjoy the delightful interactive experience of Power BI inside your presentations.
Goals in Power BI is becoming ‘metrics’ and is moving to general availability
Now generally available, metrics in Power BI (feature formerly known as ‘goals’) along with a ton of new features to make scorecarding in Power BI even more effective.
The Power BI team have announced the public preview of a low-code web authoring experience for exportable formatted data tables. You can use the formatted table feature to create paginated reports in any modern workspace, including workspaces that aren’t in a Power BI Premium capacity.
Action bar for interactive reports in the Power BI tab for Microsoft Teams
The Power BI tab in Microsoft Teams is getting a new action bar for interactive reports. The action bar enables users to use all the capabilities they have for interactive reports in the service when they’re added to channels, chats, or meetings as tabs in Microsoft Teams.
New action bar for interactive reports in Microsoft Teams.
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In this post we step through how you can use Power Automate to convert modern SharePoint pages into PDF files and save them to a document library.
Intro
Recently I got asked to come up with a way to turn SharePoint pages into PDF files for use in an offline scenario. The converted SharePoint pages didn’t need to be formatted as it was only the body content of a SharePoint page that was needed. Also part of the brief was that when the SharePoint page is updated, the corresponding PDF file also updates.
There are several posts online that cover very topic this that I’ll reference at the end, but they didn’t quite do exactly what I wanted – so here’s my take on how to convert SharePoint pages into PDF files!
What you’ll need
A modern SharePoint site pages library (these come with every SharePoint site!)
A OneDrive location to temporarily store the SharePoint page outputs
Power Automate to build the automation
A document library to store the output PDF files
A note on the site pages library
In my example I didn’t want all the site pages to be converted into PDF files, so I added a choice column to ‘tag’ all the pages that should be converted. I set the default value of the choice column to be ‘Site Page’, so that the only pages that get converted are the ones I’m interested in. This is reflected in the flow below with the condition step.
Add a choice column to ‘tag’ the pages you wish to convert to PDF.
Building the flow
The trigger action for our flow is when a file is created or modified (properties only). This allows us to re-run the flow when SharePoint pages are updated to also update the PDF files.
Select the site you are using to create the SharePoint pages in site address (If you don’t see it listed just press enter custom value and paste the URL in)
Select the Site Pages library under library name
Next, I’ve added a condition to only convert pages that have been tagged ‘Runbook’ to PDF.
Condition: if Document type value is equal to ‘Runbook’.
Note: make sure you select the Value dynamic content for your choice column, rather than the choice column itself as that will break your flow.
If yes, next is a send an HTTP request to SharePoint step. Here I’m using a REST API call to get the body content of the SharePoint page.
Use a send an HTTP request to SharePoint step to get the body content of your page.
Set the site address to the site in question
Set method to GET
Enter the following in Uri:_api/web/lists/GetByTitle('Site%20Pages')/items('ID')/CanvasContent1
Replace ‘ID’ with the dynamic content ID from the when a file is created or modified step
Note: The output of this step generates some additional stuff you probably won’t want in your PDF like this:
"d": { "CanvasContent1": "}}
I used the parse JSON step to remove the unwanted mark up and just get the plain text from the body content.
I added the body dynamic content from the send an HTTP request to SharePoint step in the content field in the parse JSON step
I copied the the output body from send an HTTP request to SharePoint of a successful run in flow history and pasted it into the parse JSON step
Output body from send an HTTP request to SharePoint to paste into the parse JSON step from a successful flow run.
I then pressed generate from sample, which output the following:
From this I then used a create file action to create a temporary HTML file in OneDrive (more on this later), with the following config:
Folder path: / (root of the OneDrive account)
File name: Name from when a file is created or modified step
File content: CanvasContent1 from the parse JSON step
Create file action to create temporary HTML page in OneDrive.
Next, a convert file step to convert the HTML page into a PDF file:
File:ID from the create file step
Target type: PDF
Now we can use a create file action to create a PDF in our output document library in SharePoint:
Set the site address to the site you want to store the PDF files in
Set the folder path to the document library, or navigate to the relevant folder within that library
Set file name to file name from the convert file step
Set file content to file content from the convert file step
The create file action creates the PDF file in the destination document library.
I then used an update file properties action to pass metadata from the site pages library to the destination document library – this step is optional. Finally, a delete file action to delete the temporary HTML file from the OneDrive we created earlier:
Delete file action to remove the temporary HTML file.
Here’s the flow in it’s entirety:
Issues & troubleshooting
Formatting issues with the send an HTTP request to SharePoint
As mentioned above, when just using the send an HTTP request to SharePoint action, the output contains mark up that isn’t going to make sense within the PDF. The parse JSON action cleans this up and just leaves the body content of the page.
Create file action creates corrupt PDF files
When testing this flow out I originally didn’t have the convert file action in place. In the file name I added ‘.PDF’, but every time the output PDF was corrupt and errored like this when trying to open:
The flow also failed on this step and the error said that “Conversion of this file to PDF is not supported. (InputFormatNotSupported / pdf)”. I decided to scrap this approach and create a HTML page and add in the convert file action which worked around this issue.
Overwriting existing PDF files causes flow to fail
During testing of this flow I also noticed that when triggering the flow based off updating a site page, the create file create file action would error with a status 400 error saying “A file with the name [file name] already exists”.
SharePoint Stuff 