Microsoft Office 365 News 02-18-2021: Microsoft Introduces Teams Pro Service Plan

In Microsoft Office 365 news this week, the supplier has announced plans to introduce a new service plan, Teams Pro, in mid-March. Keep reading to learn about more new features and updates for Outlook, SharePoint and other Office 365 apps.

New Features

• • Ability to directly add taxonomy columns in modern SharePoint libraries
    • What’s happening: In modern SharePoint libraries, end users will soon be able to add taxonomy columns directly to library views. Prior to the addition of this feature, users needed to establish managed metadata columns via More options in Add columns.

• • New Outlook reactions and notification experience
    • What’s happening: End users will soon gain the ability to react to email messages via Outlook for Android, Outlook for iOS and Outlook on the web. Outlook for iOS and Outlook for Android end users will also have the ability to see other users’ reactions via an in-app notification experience.

• • Microsoft Viva Topics
    • What’s happening: Viva Topics empowers Teams and Microsoft 365 app end users by utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to group content across teams and systems into related topics.

• • SharePoint image lightboxes
    • What’s happening: End users will soon be able to view larger versions of images on SharePoint pages with the addition of support for lightboxes.

• • Teams Pro service plan
    • What’s happening: In mid-March 2021, Microsoft will introduce a new service plan, Teams Pro. This new plan will include webinar functionalities and meeting intelligence. The supplier will automatically add Teams Pro to Microsoft 365 Business Standard/Business Premium licenses and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 E5/E3/A5/A3.

• • New 1:1 Call recording policy
    • What’s happening: Microsoft will change the enablement of 1:1 Call recording in mid-March 2021 with the introduction of its own policy.

• • Coming to Preview: Additional Communication Compliance capabilities
    • What’s happening: Several new Communication Compliance features are coming to preview soon, including the ability to extract and analyze images in messages with optical character recognition as well as support for more languages for Profanity, Harassment and Threat classifiers.

Updated Features

• • Stricter Exchange receiving limit enforcement
    • What’s happening: Beginning in April 2021, Microsoft plans to update Exchange receiving limits and implement stricter enforcement for all mailboxes. The former soft limit of 3,600 messages per hour will become a hard limit, and emails will be throttled for any recipients who go over that limit.

• • Alignment of the team creation experience across Teams interfaces
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is standardizing the user experience for teams established with Teams desktop and web clients and those created through the Teams admin center.

• • Outlook “share to Teams” capability
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced plans to update the “share to Teams” ability in Outlook on the web, Outlook for Windows, and Outlook for Mac preview. Outlook mobile doesn’t have this capability yet.

• • Word and Outlook dictation
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is enhancing the user experience by adding the Dictation toolbar, auto punctuation support and voice commands to Word for Mac, Word (Win32) and Outlook (Win32).

• • Suggested replies for Outlook iOS and Android
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced the global implementation of suggested replies in Outlook for iOS and Android in these languages: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French.

• • Excel for the web enhancements
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced planned improvements to Excel for the web. These updates will enhance performance in various areas, such as general interface navigation, opening workbooks and navigating workbooks.

• • SharePoint list versioning enablement
    • What’s happening: New SharePoint lists will soon have versioning enabled by default to allow for better management of information over time.

• • SharePoint Syntex updates
    • What’s happening: Microsoft plans to make improvements to building document understanding models as well as additional actions for files classified by form processing models. Additionally, the supplier will consolidate content understanding models from various content centers in the Microsoft SharePoint Syntex content center.

• • Updates issued for Microsoft 365 Apps
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has made updates available to the following channels for Microsoft 365 Apps: Current Channel, Monthly Enterprise Channel, Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel, and Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel (Preview).

Announcements

• • Updated rollout timeline for Microsoft Search personal query history
    • What’s happening: Microsoft previously announced plans to give end users the option to view and manage their personal query history in Microsoft Search. Based on customer feedback, the supplier has performed alterations that delayed the implementation of this feature.
    • Rollout start: Late March 2021 for Targeted Release customers (previously November 2020); April 2021 for Standard Release customers (previously December 2020)
    • Rollout finish: Late April 2021 for all customers (previously March 2021)

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