Office 365–June 2017 Updates

Office 365 received a number of updates throughout June 2017, here is my summary of some of the key updates:

Microsoft Forms

Microsoft released Forms into preview for Office 365 commercial customers. Forms allows you to create surveys, quizzes, and polls to collect information, and then analyse the results using Excel services. Forms is enabled by default and includes external collaboration features.

Skype Updates

Microsoft Pulse is now available in Skype Meeting Broadcast. Microsoft Pulse is a voting app that enables meeting attendees to participate in the event in real time, which keeps them engaged and gives organizers up-to-date information about how event information is being received. Link

Skype for Business from within Yammer; You can now launch and perform some basic Skype for Business tasks right from your navigation bar in Yammer in Office 365. Link

Improving People in Outlook for iOS and Android

Outlook for iOS and Android received an update to enable users to edit contacts direct within the app. Link

Microsoft Stream now available worldwide

Microsoft Stream is now generally available to all Office 365 Tenants; Microsoft Stream builds on the learnings from Office 365 Video to bring intelligence and deeper integration into Office 365 and beyond. Link

Outlook 2016 for Mac

Outlook for Mac is adding several highly requested features for Office 365 customers, including the ability to send an email at the time of your choice and request delivery notifications and read receipts. These additions deliver on four of our top 10 requested features, and are designed to help you get more done quickly and stay in control of the day ahead. Link

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams got a couple of updates in June:

• Cloud storage integrations; Users can now connect Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and ShareFile. These locations can be control from the Teams Organisation settings
• Teams is now available through InTune conditional access

Exchange Online

Exchange Online Remove-CalendarEvents - When a mailbox is removed, the meetings organized by that mailbox continue to exist on conference room calendars or other calendars. The Remove-CalendarEvents cmdlet lets admins cancel all future meetings organized by a specific mailbox, so that the calendars of the meeting attendees (resources & users) can be cleared up. You can use this cmdlet to cancel future meetings organized by a user or a resource mailbox in Office 365. Link

Yammer Updates

• Yammer notifications are being updated based on feedback. Link
• Yammer will now use Office 365 Groups. Link

Microsoft Planner mobile app for iPhone and Android

Microsoft Planner mobile app is now available for iPhone and Android phones. Planner is available to customers with Office 365 Enterprise E1–E5, Business Essentials, Business Premium and Education subscription plans. Link

Microsoft InTune and Conditional Access admin consoles are generally available

Microsoft InTune and Conditional Access is now generally available via the Azure Portal; You can now manage all Intune MAM and MDM capabilities in one consolidated admin experience, and leverage Azure AD grouping and targeting.

Microsoft Mechanics

Microsoft Mechanics give small technical updates to Office 365, here are the key Office 365 updates this month:

• The new unified Enterprise Mobility + Security management experience in the Azure Portal
• Introducing the new enterprise video service - Microsoft Stream
• Advanced Threat Protection across Windows 10 and Office

Exchange Updates–June 2017

The Exchange Team have released the June 2017 quarterly updates for Exchange 2013 and 2016. These Cumulative Updates will require .NET Framework 4.6.2 installed prior to upgrade; .NET Framework 4.7 is still being validated by the Exchange Team and should not be installed until validation is completed.

Updated functionality in Exchange 2016 Cumulative Update 6:

• Sent Items Behaviour Control, This feature enables mailbox delegates who have Send As or Send on behalf of permissions of a mailbox to save a copy of the item in the delegators Sent Items
  
  Note:  This feature is targeted to Exchange Server 2016 only and will not be included in Exchange Server 2013. Exchange Server 2013 already has its own implementation of Sent Items Behaviour Control which is different to the version released in this Cumulative Update.
  
  
• Original Folder Item Recovery, This feature enables deleted items to be restored to their original folder; This feature does require LAPEID MAPI property on the deleted item, which has been stamping items since Exchange 2016 CU1, this means that as soon as CU6 is installed this feature will work.
  
  Note: This feature is targeted to Exchange Server 2016 only and will not be included in Exchange Server 2013.

Release Details:

KB articles that describe the fixes in each release are available as follows:

• Exchange Server 2016 Cumulative Update 6 (KB4012108), Download, UM Lang Packs
• Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 17 (KB4012114), Download, UM Lang Packs

Exchange Server 2016 Cumulative Update 6 does include new updates to Active Directory Schema. If upgrading from an older Exchange version or installing a new server, Active Directory updates may still be required. These updates will apply automatically during setup if the logged on user has the required permissions. If the Exchange Administrator lacks permissions to update Active Directory Schema, a Schema Admin must execute SETUP /PrepareSchema prior to the first Exchange Server installation or upgrade. The Exchange Administrator should execute SETUP /PrepareAD to ensure RBAC roles are current.

Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 17 does not include updates to Active Directory, but may add additional RBAC definitions to your existing configuration. PrepareAD should be executed prior to upgrading any servers to Cumulative Update 16. PrepareAD will run automatically during the first server upgrade if Exchange Setup detects this is required and the logged on user has sufficient permission.

Exchange Online Hybrid Customers:

Reminder: Customers in hybrid deployments where Exchange is deployed on-premises and in the cloud, or who are using Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) with their on-premises Exchange deployment are required to deploy the most current (e.g., 2013 CU17, 2016 CU6) or the prior (e.g., 2013 CU16, 2016 CU5) Cumulative Update release.

.NET Framework 4.7 and Exchange Server

.NET Framework has been released and is available via Windows Update. Support for this version of .NET Framework has not been confirmed by the Exchange Team. It’s important to have the correct version of .NET Framework installed that is supported by the version of Exchange installed:

Temporary Block

.NET Framework 4.7 can be blocked from installation by adding a registry key to your Exchange servers, follow the instructions in the Microsoft KB – Link

Key:

HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\WU\

DWORD:

BlockNetFramework47 

Value:

1 (REG_DWORD)

Note Organizations do not have to modify the registry in environments that are managed through an update management solution, such as Microsoft WSUS or System Center Configuration Manager. Organizations can use these products to fully manage the deployment of updates that are released through Windows Update or Microsoft Update. The procedure that's discussed in this article is necessary only for computers that directly connect to and receive updates from Windows Update.

Reporting:

You can find a script on the TechNet Gallery Link to help check version installed and confirm if the block is in place

Pre registry change:

Post registry change:

Reference Links:

• Exchange Team Blog – Link
• Exchange Support Matrix – Link (Note – .NET Framework 4.7 has not been added yet)
• .NET Framework Block – Link
• .NET Framework report – Link

Disclaimer: All scripts and other PowerShell references on this blog are offered "as is" with no warranty.  While these scripts are tested and working in my test environment, it is recommended that you test these scripts in your own test environment before using in any production environment.

Office 365–May 2017 Updates…

A summary of some of the updates throughout May:

Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI (Preview)

The new Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI combines the intelligence of Office 365 usage reports with the interactive reporting capabilities of Power BI. This means admins can visualize and analyse their organization’s Office 365 usage data, create custom reports and share the insights with Power BI - pivoting by attributes such as location and department. This better understanding of how their users adopt and use Office 365 can help admins drive more targeted end user training and communication

Inform and engage employees with SharePoint communication sites

Introduced at SharePoint Virtual Summit, SharePoint communication sites let you create beautiful, mobile-ready intranet sites. While SharePoint team sites allow sharing of content, knowledge and apps within your group, communication sites let you share resources, news and information with a broad audience, across the organization. Integration with Yammer lets you engage your audience, solicit feedback and encourage best practice sharing. Communication sites are easy to create, customizable and look great on whatever device you use. Learn more about communication sites.

Access all your files in File Explorer

Introduced at Build, OneDrive Files On-Demand allows you to access all your work and personal files in the cloud without having to download them to your device and use up storage space. This helps you work the way you’re used to, with all your files—even online files—visible in File Explorer and available whenever you need them.

Availability: OneDrive Files On-Demand is coming to Windows 10 Insider Preview early this summer and will be publicly available with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

SharePoint and Microsoft PowerApps integration

As announced at SharePoint Virtual Summit, you’ll soon be able to use PowerApps to easily create custom forms and rich, digital experiences right from within a SharePoint list or library. This will help your company transform team and organizational processes, with users creating, viewing and interacting with data from your custom form or app, rather than default SharePoint forms. Learn more about PowerApps integration with SharePoint.

Availability: Custom SharePoint forms built with Microsoft PowerApps will be available starting this summer, for Office 365 commercial customers.

Office 365 Centralized Deployment service

Office add-ins help Office users to personalize their work experience and streamline data access. Late last year, we announced the Centralized Deployment service in preview, which allows administrators to deploy Office web add-ins. Today, we are excited to announce general availability of Centralized Deployment. Learn more on Office Blogs.

Automatically create process diagrams in Visio from Excel data

A new Visio feature that automatically converts process map data in Excel into data-driven Visio diagrams. This update, which is available to Visio Pro for Office 365 users, helps reduce manual steps while giving business analysts even more ways to create process diagrams in Visio. Learn more on Office Blogs

Exchange Online – Direct to Calendar Invites

With the Direct to Calendar feature in Exchange Online, administrators can configure mail flow rules (also known as transport rules) that allow designated users to add meetings to calendars. TechNet

Other Updates:

• PowerApps
• PowerApps Newest Feature Releases Link
• PowerApps and Microsoft Flow now available in Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan Link
• Stream
• Microsoft Stream general availability Link
• Yammer
• Dynamic Groups in Yammer Link
• Office 365 Connectors Link
• Exchange
• Distribution list owners can upgrade the DLs they own to Office 365 Groups Link

Office 365 – April 2017 Updates…

Office 365 received a number of updates throughout April 2017, here is my summary of some of the key updates:

 

Outlook Customer Manager

Outlook Customer Manger makes it easy for small businesses to track and grow customer relationships within Microsoft Outlook. Outlook Customer Manager is available direct from the Office Ribbon to allow quick and direct access to the service. Outlook Customer Manger allows you to keep track of emails, meetings, calls, Tasks, Notes, Files, and Deadlines within the application, to help you keep on top of those important customer engagements.

Like all modern services within Office 365 there is also an Outlook Customer Manager mobile application for when users are mobile between meetings.

Outlook Customer Manager

 

Microsoft To-Do (Preview)

Microsoft To-Do in Preview, an intelligent task management app that makes it easy to plan and manage your day. To-Do helps you stay organized and prioritize your most important to-dos for each day with intelligent Suggestions. Outlook Tasks also sync so you can stay on top of all your to-dos in a single view, wherever you go, across your devices.

Microsoft To-Do is built by the team that developed Wunderlist, who was acquired by Microsoft in 2015. Microsoft To-Do brings the much-needed Outlook tasks and to-do list to your mobile devices with the Microsoft To-Do app.

Microsoft To-Do

 

Security and Compliance

Office 365 Threat Intelligence, now generally available, leverages the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to help you stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Safe Links is now available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to protect users from clicking malicious links. ATP also includes new reports to help you understand your organization’s health. Advanced Data Governance, also now generally available, applies intelligence to help you retain high value data while reducing your risk profile. Lastly, a new Data Loss Protection (DLP) policy management page helps you configure and enforce sensitive data policies across your organization.

The new Security and Compliance Admin portal brings all settings to a single console.

Security and Compliance Updates

 

More Office apps support Office 365 Groups

Support for Office 365 Groups to more Office apps, making it easier for you to access shared team material and work better together. Office 365 Groups is now supported in:

• Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Groups in Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android

With this functionality of Office 365 Groups being added to these applications it does not matter which application you choose to use, modern collaboration at your fingertips.

 

Office 365 Enterprise K1 provides new value

Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan designed to enable your frontline workers to do their best work with tools for schedule and task management, communications and community, training and onboarding, and identity and access management. Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan now includes the following additional products:

• Microsoft StaffHub—Helps frontline workers manage their workday with schedule management
• OneDrive for Business with 2 GB of cloud storage—Provides employees a secure environment to store
• Skype for Business presence and instant messaging—Enables employees to communicate in real-time
• Microsoft Teams—A hub for teamwork that connects employees to the people
• Office 365 Video—Provides employees with a secure, company-wide destination for discovering and accessing video content
• Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow—Eases the automation of repetitive tasks and workflows

These additional products build upon the core value already offered with the Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan and unlock important scenarios for frontline workers, including the ability to view and swap shifts, take advantage of video-based employee training and onboarding, exchange best practices across the company and even participate in live, company-wide town hall meetings. The Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan gives companies the tools they expect to manage employee access and the digital identity to meet today’s complex and constantly changing security and compliance requirements.

New value in Office 365 Enterprise K1 for frontline workers

 

Other Office 365 Updates

A list of other office updates from April:

• Designer is now available in PowerPoint on iPad – Link
• Planner now supports assigning multiple users to a task – Link
• A MyAnalytics Outlook add-in update is rolling out worldwide – Link
• Yammer post can now be edited – Link
• Office 365 ProPlus updates – Link
• Add parallel branches in flows and five new services - Link

Modern Collaboration

Modern collaboration enables users to consume numerous resources to get the most from Office 365. Often, I’m asked where or what resources I should be using for any given collaboration… Not wanting to give The Consultant answer but it really does depend, no longer is it easy to say you do this with Exchange Online, you do this with SharePoint Online and you do this in Yammer. You need to look at the audience or the team you will be working with, and then select the correct tool to undertake the task or project. Remember just because you used one tool for one project, it doesn’t make it the correct tool for the next.

With Office 365 Groups Microsoft makes Modern Collaboration easier, providing the ability to be share the resources and functionality over several applications (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1: Modern collaboration

From this point on I will refer to an Office 365 Group simply as a Group. When you create a Group within Office 365 it can be used in all applications except for Yammer (expected to added to Yammer by March 2017). It’s important to note that you don’t need to create the group before creating the resource, so if you’re using Planner, Office 365 Groups (EXO), and or Microsoft Teams, when you require a new group the application will create it for you.

At the start of the blog I said you need to know your audience; for instance, if you need to collaborate with external users you need to use Office 365 Groups or Yammer, as Microsoft Teams currently does not have the ability to be shared with identities outside of your tenant. This then leads to the questions what functionality is available to each resource and identity scenario. For a recent team meeting I created this infographic (Figure 1-2):

Figure 1-2: Office 365 Group functionality matrix

Exceptions:
* Link through to application
** Can’t open via Outlook Calendar section, need to open via Outlook Mailbox section
*** Hybrid conversation in via local inbox, not the Group section as per Office 365 Mailbox
**** No direct access to calendar, but can participate via inbox

Note: On-premises access requires Azure AD Connect Group writeback (Currently in preview) to enable this functionality. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt668829(v=exchg.150).aspx

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft have now released Microsoft Teams (Currently in preview), which is a chat-based Workspace, the functionality is close to Office 365 Groups with a couple of changes (Figure 1-3).

Figure 1-3: Microsoft Teams compared to Office 365 Groups

The main area of difference is with Conversations, both Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups have this functionality, for example the conversations are not synchronised as Office 365 Groups stores these in EXO and Microsoft Teams stores these in SfB, so a conversation in Microsoft Teams will not appear in Office 365 groups and vice versa.

Planner

When Microsoft Planner was first released I thought this was a great tool to help manage projects and task, but my biggest complaint was when you created a new Plan you couldn’t have isolated plans within the plan for projects. I know you could have different boards to separate the plans, but the overall status of the plan would include all boards… This might just be the way I work. But now with Microsoft Teams you can have a single Team with multiple Plans within single or multiple channels (Figure 1-4). 

Whilst this works for me, this might not work for everyone. One thing I notice about Planner within Microsoft Teams is that it appears not to use the initial or default plan from the Office 365 Group, so whilst you can work with the plan via Microsoft Teams you only see your My Tasks via https://tasks.office.com and not the complete Plan; Also Teams doesn’t show the charts that you get when using Microsoft Planner, this maybe a current limitation of Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Teams.

Figure 1-4: Microsoft Teams with multiple plans

When you browse to https://tasks.office.com or access Planner via the Office 365 waffle, you will not see the individual Plans, but you see your assigned tasks (Figure 1-5):

Figure 1-5: Microsoft Planner and My Tasks

Conclusion

Modern collaboration is dynamic, agile and cross platform, which enables teams to work across multiple teams and multiple platforms, it no longer matters if you’re working in the office or remotely, if you’re using a computer. laptop, tablet or mobile device; Office 365 with Office 365 Groups gives you the ability to work more efficiently. There is no longer a single workload or workspace in which you must collaborate in for any particularly task. Morden Collaboration enables or allows you to work across all platforms whether its Exchange Online, Skype for Business, SharePoint Online, Yammer or Microsoft Teams.

I for one really think the modern collaboration is constantly evolving to give additional functionality and services to the end user. I can’t wait to see what’s added to this space next.

Office 365–Update users UPN

Catching up on the latest updates in the Office 365 for IT Pros, there was an update to the behaviour of licensed synchronised users User Principal Name (UPN). If this book isn’t part of your library I fully recommend adding it. This change means that licensed synchronised users will have their UPN updated upon change.

Note: In a change, Microsoft made to its synchronization service, tenants created after 15th June 2016, automatically update the UPN of a synchronized account in Office 365 through the directory synchronization process –even if it's licensed. Tenants created before that date must enable the feature. This update does not apply to federated identities.

Like any change/feature I test in my test Office 365 Tenant, here are my notes on the change, using Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell, run the following cmdlet:

[PS] Get-MsolDirSyncFeatures

To update this setting run the following cmdlet:

[PS] Set-MsolDirSyncFeature -Feature SynchronizeUpnForManagedUsers -Enable $true

Checking the Metaverse for my test user Lisa Simpson we can see the UPN is currently set to simpsonl@skitttech.co.uk

Looking in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) you can see this is how the account was setup:

Note: When making any changes to Active Directory, ensure you know what you’re changing and the reason for the change. In my lab and with clients I only change the UPN and not the Windows 2000 name, as users tend to login to Domain joined workstations with this identity.

Simply changing the UPN:

Will result in the Metaverse being updating the UPN to lisa.simpson@skitttech.co.uk:

Which in turn after the Azure AD Connect server has synchronised to Azure AD will update the UPN within Office 365:

Summary

After making these changes to the Office 365 Tenant will enable changes to the UPN to be updated; From my tests, I found that any changes that were been made prior to the configuration change the UPN will not be updated. Just update the AD object again will result in the UPN being updated in the Metaverse and synchronised to Azure AD.

This will not result in any changes to the user’s email address as these should be controlled by the Email Address Policy from Exchange, but I did find that this change did result in a change the users SIP address for Skype for Business Online.

Pre-Change:

Post Change:

I’m not a Skype for Business Online expert and will double check this change with one of my colleagues on the impact to the Skype for Business Online services.

Disclaimer: All scripts and other PowerShell references on this blog are offered "as is" with no warranty.  While these scripts are tested and working in my test environment, it is recommended that you test these scripts in your own test environment before using in any production environment.