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Retirement of SharePoint 2010 workflows: Don’t panic!

On 6 July 2020, Microsoft announced the retirement of SharePoint 2010 Workflows within Office 365. This is part of Microsoft’s drive towards encouraging use of Power Automate, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which lets you connect Microsoft 365 services together (as well as many popular third-party services).

So what does this mean for people still using SharePoint 2010 workflows? Well, from 1 August 2020, no newly-created tenants will have SharePoint 2010 workflows switched on. So, if you had been planning to move any SharePoint 2010 workflows to a new tenant, as of now that won’t be possible.

Clock ticking on SharePoint 2010 workflows

For those who already have SharePoint 2010 workflows created within an existing tenant, you have until 1 November 2020 to recreate these workflows within Power Automate.

From the start of November, Microsoft will begin to remove the ability to run or create new SharePoint 2010 workflows. This suggests that, while you can’t run the existing workflows, they will still be accessible. Exactly for how long, though, we don’t know.

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Time’s running out: Move from Skype to Teams now

With less than 12 months to go until Microsoft retires Skype for Business, we look at the options for migrating your users to the ‘new world’.

The clock is ticking. Microsoft will be ending Skype for Business support on 31st July 2021. To avoid this change impacting your day-to-day business, you must move all your users to Microsoft Teams by then.

Islands mode

With many organisations shifting to remote working in recent months, a great number have been forced to roll out Microsoft Teams to enable users to collaborate and communicate online. For those who were already using Skype for Business Online, enabling Teams didn’t impact the functionality of Skype. Instead, the two services continue to coexist in what’s called ‘islands mode’.

Islands is the default way for Teams and Skype to coexist, and lets users use both apps simultaneously. From Microsoft’s point of view, this is ideal, as Teams can be switched on without an organisation needing to prepare for an immediate cutover.

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Introducing Microsoft Lists

We’re looking forward to discovering the ways the new Microsoft Lists app will improve the business processes of our customers using Office 365. Under the hood, Microsoft Lists is an evolution of SharePoint lists – a new way to create, view and manage lists of data. Information published by Microsoft so far shows a promising range of …

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What’s New in Office 365 – July 2020

Our monthly round-up of what’s new and updated across Office 365 and Microsoft 365. This month Microsoft have made further improvements to Microsoft Teams, including upping the number of participants in calls from 250 to 300. There’s improved information security for those with Microsoft 365 E5 licences, thanks to sensitivity labels. We look at the …

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Multilingual intranet publishing with SharePoint Communication Sites

Good communication is essential for any organisation, but it’s even more important where staff speak several languages. Microsoft has now launched multilingual capabilities for Communication Sites in SharePoint Online to let you create flexible sites where staff can collaborating in multiple languages. The features, rolled out over the last month, let you have multiple translations …

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Daily briefing emails in Microsoft 365

A new daily briefing email will start dropping into Microsoft 365 users’ Outlook inboxes from this month.

Microsoft are releasing a new feature for Office 365 users called the Briefing. This is an email which automatically gets sent at the start of each workday, giving a personalised view of the day ahead.

With insights based on the user’s own email and calendar, tasks and documents, the Briefing helps you prepare for meetings, keep commitments with tasks and actions, and block out focus time for deep work.

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Automatic classification with Sensitivity Labels in SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Exchange

Microsoft are making automatic classification available across Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions, providing a welcome boost to the platform’s information protection capabilities.

Sensitivity Labels are a central part of Microsoft’s information protection capabilities in Microsoft 365. They let organisations define meaningful labels for content (such as “Internal”, “Public” and “Personal”), then associate these labels with protection like encryption and visual markings.

Addressing the governance overhead

Sensitivity labels are applied to the file rather than where it is held, so protection can persist even if the file is shared outside of the organisation.

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New features in Microsoft Teams for July 2020

With working from home becoming the default during the COVID-19 crisis, Microsoft is continuing to focus on making the Microsoft Teams experience easier and more pleasant.

Participants upped to 300

Soon you’ll find the maximum number of participants in Teams meetings and chats increases from 250 to 300.

If your organisation has any training materials or documentation that reflects the 250 maximum, once this update has been rolled out, you’ll want to update that information.

Channel summaries

Coming in July, you’ll notice a Channel Info icon in the channel header which will open a new Information pane that displays a channel summary.

This will include the channel description, as well as visual indicators for who has recently posted in the channel.

It will also be the new home for any system messages, which we hope will tidy up the General channel where these system messages currently end up.

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What’s New in Office 365 – June 2020

Welcome to CompanyNet’s monthly round-up of what’s new and updated across Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

This month, we’re seeing various tweaks and improvements to SharePoint, PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams that will continue to make life easier for those of us working from home.

In a hurry? You can also view a potted summary of this blog on YouTube:

Thanks to our team members James Mackerness, Maria Botha-Lopez and Stuart McLaughlin for their contributions to this month’s round-up.

If you would like to find out more about these changes, or would be interested in help getting more out of Office 365, get in touch with CompanyNet.

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Introducing AI Builder for Microsoft Power Platform

Want to use artificial intelligence to get insights about your business data? Discover AI Builder, Microsoft’s low-code artificial intelligence platform.

What is AI Builder?

AI Builder is Microsoft’s new artificial intelligence platform. As part of the Power Platform suite, it takes a ‘low-code’ approach, with a simple, wizard-style interface which lets you introduce real artificial intelligence into your projects without needing a serious coding background.

What can AI Builder do?

AI Builder comes with a number of ‘models’, which offer different types of AI experience:

Text recognition: this model automatically processes text from images. This uses advanced optical character recognition (OCR) to find and read any text in photographs or scanned documents.
Object recognition lets you train an AI to recognise specific types of objects. This could be used in inventory management, or to identify a piece of equipment which is difficult to identify by sight.
Prediction analyses large amounts of data, discovering patterns and using that knowledge to predict the future. It can answer questions about your business data with binary options such as yes/no, true/false, pass/fail or go/no go.
Form processing, which can quickly import data from paper or PDF documents into usable tables. Unlike other models, which require a lot of training, AI Builder only needs five example forms to create a functioning application.
Category classification recognises the patterns in language, tagging and classifying the contents. Example applications include sentiment analysis, spam detection and correctly routing customer requests.

How do I create an app with AI Builder?

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