Microsoft 365 News 04-08-2021: Microsoft 365 Apps Health Dashboard Now Generally Available

In Microsoft 365 news this week, the supplier announced that the Microsoft 365 Apps health dashboard is now generally available. Additionally, the supplier plans to implement new features for Teams, Outlook on the Web, and other apps. Keep reading to learn more about updates and improvements coming soon to Microsoft 365 apps.

New Features

• • Teams Meeting ID
    • What’s happening: End users will soon be able to join Teams meetings with a digital ID. This change is rolling out for the Teams desktop, mobile and web apps.

• • Teams app customization
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is introducing the ability to rebrand some Teams apps.

• • Guided authoring experience in Lists
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is introducing a new authoring experience that will allow end users to easily create Power BI reports based on list data and schema.

• • New Outlook on the Web calendar board view
    • What’s happening: An upcoming calendar board release will include a new view for Outlook on the Web end users. This new expanded view will allow you to manage workloads such as files, tasks, goals, calendar and flagged emails.

• • Data loss prevention (DLP) overview page
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is adding a new Overview page in the Microsoft 365 compliance center for the DLP solution.

• • Essential Announcements in Yammer
    • What’s happening: The Essential Announcements feature will give Yammer community admins a way to ensure all community members receive important news.

• • Public preview: Microsoft built on-prem Graph connectors
    • • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced the availability of graph connectors for Windows file share, Oracle DB, MSSQL and Enterprise websites to all Targeted release tenants.

• • Video feed option in PowerPoint Live Presentations
    • • What’s happening: End users will soon have the option to add a video feed during a Live Presentation. This feature will be available via the Teams desktop app for Mac and Windows.

• • General availability: Microsoft 365 Apps health dashboard
    • What’s happening: The Microsoft 365 Apps health dashboard – which gives admins the ability to monitor metrics related to performance and reliability – is now generally available. The dashboard also delivers customized guidance regarding Microsoft 365 Apps troubleshooting and optimization.

• • New Teams breakout room features
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is enhancing Teams breakout rooms with the option to reassign participants when rooms are open and persistent breakout rooms. Additionally, organizers will soon be able to set timers for breakout sessions.

• • Option to present to Teams from the PowerPoint Web App
    • What’s happening: With the introduction of this PowerPoint for the web capability, end users will be able to access PowerPoint Live in Teams with a single click. This will streamline the process of presenting from PowerPoint directly to remote audiences.

• • Related content in Teams mobile app
    • What’s happening: Microsoft plans to expand access to related content for meetings to the Teams mobile app.

Updated Features

• • Enhanced Spoof intelligence experience
    • What’s happening: Microsoft plans to update the Spoof intelligence experience to allow Security Admins to better manage spoofing activity. These improvements will include a new “Tenant allow/block list policy” that will streamline the configuration of domain spoofing for external and internal email messages.

• • Exchange Online Protection (EOP) process for moving emails to the Junk folder
    • What’s happening: EOP currently utilizes the junk email rule to move suspicious messages to the Junk folder in accordance with the spam confidence level established by EOP. Microsoft is updating this process so that EOP will leverage its own mailflow delivery agent to move malicious messages based on the policy specified by security admins in Antispam policy. Please note that this only impacts EOP customer who have Exchange online mailboxes.

• • Activity explorer role-based permissions
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced plans to change the permissions requirements for Activity explorer in the Microsoft 365 compliance center. These updates will limit access to data sets to only specific roles and explicitly assigned role groups.

• • SharePoint auto news digest experience
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is enhancing the SharePoint automatic news digest experience with improvements such as the ability to brand your digest with custom colors and your organization’s logo, as well as intelligent ranking to better surface relevant news for end users.

• • Updates to Microsoft 365 Apps
    • What’s happening: The supplier has released updates to Microsoft 365 Apps for the Current Channel.

Announcements

• • Banner announcing new Teams features
    • What’s happening: To inform Teams mobile app end users about new features (including productivity-related capabilities and the option to sign in with different accounts), Microsoft will display a banner in the activity feed.

• • End of zip file partial downloads
    • What’s happening: Effective May 2021, OneDrive and SharePoint on the web end users will no longer have the ability to download subsets of files or individual files in .zip file previews. Microsoft recommends downloading the .zip file in its entirety and extracting the files you need instead.

• • “In development for Microsoft Intune” page updated
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has issued an updated “In development for Microsoft Intune” page. This page includes a list of features that will be included in future releases of Intune.

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