Microsoft Office 365 News 11-11-2019: Teams to Offer New Meeting Roles, Gmail User Guest Access

In this week’s Microsoft Office 365 news, we cover new and updated features for Teams, OneDrive for Business on the web, and more.

New Features

• • New Microsoft Teams roles
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced the introduction of attendee and presenter roles for Teams meetings.
    • Rollout start: Mid-November 2019
    • Rollout finish: End of November 2019

• • Request files command for OneDrive for Business folders
    • What’s happening: There will soon be a “Request Files” command for folders on OneDrive for Business on the web.
    • Rollout start:  Early November 2019
    • Rollout finish: End of 2019

• • Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) for Office 365 hosted mailboxes
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced the introduction of ARC for Office 365 hosted mailboxes.
    • Rollout start: Already in progress
    • Rollout finish: End of November 2019

• • Teams guest access for Gmail users
    • What’s happening: Guest Access in Teams will soon natively support Google accounts.
    • Rollout start: Early November 2019
    • Rollout finish: Mid-December 2019

• • Option to give end users access to Office Insider via Group Policy setting
    • • What’s happening: It’s now easier to allow selected users the choice of using Office Insider builds on devices with Windows. This feature is already in place in Administrative Template files for Office 365 ProPlus.

     

Updated Features

• • Zero-hour auto purge (ZAP) update
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is updating ZAP so that messages identified as infected with malware after delivery will be moved to quarantine.
    • Rollout start: Mid-November 2019
    • Rollout finish: Mid-December 2019

• • Updated Teams self-service access for users in hybrid tenants
    • What’s happening: Microsoft plans to update self-service access for Teams users in partially synced tenants.
    • Rollout start: Late November 2019
    • Rollout finish: Early December 2019

• • Page performance optimization for classic publishing portals via structural navigation caching
    • What’s happening: Microsoft will take additional steps to improve page performance for classic publishing portals that use structural navigation.
    • Rollout start: Targeted release planned for Q1 of calendar year 2020

• • Safe Links extended to Office Online
    • What’s happening: Safe Links – which was already enabled to protect links in Office Apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android – will be extended to also safeguard links in Office Online.
    • Rollout start: Late November 2019 for all Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (Plan 1 and Plan 2) and 365 E5 customers
    • Rollout finish: End of December 2019

• • New Office 365 admin portal updates
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is updating the Office 365 admin portal. Security & privacy, Services & add-ins and Organization profile will now be consolidated onto one page.
    • Rollout start: Early November 2019 for Targeted Release customers
    • Rollout finish: Beginning of December 2019

New Resources

• • Released Versions site for Dynamics 365
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced the launch of a Released Versions site, which shows information about organizational updates – including current version, schedule date for update, and next version. Users can click on each version for details on the update.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our blog series about the Microsoft Office 365 suite. Our team of IT experts can also answer any questions you might have about this solution and the news included in this post. Just call 877-599-3999 or email sales@stratospherenetworks.com to connect with our team.