The latest Microsoft Office 365 news includes new features for Teams and temporary adjustments made to streamline Microsoft services performance. The increase in employees working from home due to COVID-19 stay at home orders has resulted in unprecedented pressure placed onto IT infrastructure, including networks and cloud based services. Microsoft also released a blog post about resources and support for global customers impacted by COVID-19.
New Features
- Microsoft Teams
- What’s happening: Increasing team membership limit to 10,000
- Rollout start: End of April 2020
- Rollout finish: End of May 2020
- What’s happening: Multi-Window Chat will be initially rolled out for Windows clients only and will provide support for Mac and Linux clients in the coming weeks. It enables users to multitask more efficiently by popping out their chat conversations into separate windows.
- Rollout start: Early April 2020
- Rollout finish: End of May 2020
- What’s happening: Increasing team membership limit to 10,000
- OneDrive
- What’s happening: New Authentication method for OneDrive on MacOS: OneDrive on MacOS is incorporating new methods for authentication.
- Rollout start: Mid-April 2020
- Rollout finish: Mid-May 2020
- What’s happening: New Authentication method for OneDrive on MacOS: OneDrive on MacOS is incorporating new methods for authentication.
Temporary Changes
Teams:
- Presence: Reduced the frequency with how often checks are made for changes in presence
- Typing indicator: Reduce the interval for how often the typing indicator displays within a teams conversation. This indicator is displayed when a chat participant is typing.
- Video resolution: Reduction in video resolution during video calls to free up resources for other Office 365 services and applications.
OneNote:
- OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, excluding EDU. Users can go to OneNote for the web for editing.
- Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed.
- You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates as http://aka.ms/notesupdates.
SharePoint:
- We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image.
- Reduced video resolution for playback videos.
Stream:
- People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted.
- Meeting recording video resolution adjusted to 720p
Updated Features
- Co-editor chat access directly from Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents has been retired
- What’s happening: Moving forward, to communicate with others working in Office documents, we recommend using document Comments when you want to attach a comment to a specific selection within a document (on the Review tab on the ribbon), and Microsoft Teams Chat when you want to communicate with others immediately.Once the change is implemented, when multiple people are in a document at the same time, you will continue to see names of co-editors at the top right of the document window, but the ability to initiate a Chat with one of the co-editors from this location will no longer be available.
- Business subscriptions to be renamed
- What’s happening: Microsoft announced that it would be updating the names of its Office 365 subscriptions for small and medium businesses (SMBs) on April 21, 2020.
- Office 365 Business subscriptions are becoming Microsoft 365 for business subscriptions. This includes Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, and Microsoft 365 Business.
- Standalone commercial desktop client subscriptions are becoming Microsoft 365 Apps subscriptions. This includes Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus.
Announcements
- Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 1 Rescheduled: As organizations respond to the ongoing, unprecedented situation and grapple with disruptions across their workforce due to the evolving global health crisis, Microsoft decided to reschedule the automatic enablement of the 2020 release wave 1 update for organizations. Rescheduling this update will provide administrators and users the flexibility to familiarize themselves and their workforce with the 2020 release wave 1 updates before enablement. Please visit our blog for details surrounding this change.
- Maintenance window: May 22-24, 2020
If you’d like more information about Microsoft Office 365, feel free to check out our blog series about the suite. Our senior technology advisors can also answer any questions you might have about Office 365 and other leading IT solutions. Learn more today by calling 877-599-3999 or emailing sales@stratospherenetworks.com.
