What’s new in Office 365 this month – May 2020

Round-up

In our second month of working from home during lockdown, here’s CompanyNet’s round-up of what’s new and updated across Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

This month, we’re looking at some updates to Microsoft Teams which will enhance your experience of video meetings – something we’ll all welcome at this time. Plus, an introduction to training artificial intelligence models with Power Platform’s AI Builder and Microsoft 365’s trainable classifiers, and a beautfiul new term store for SharePoint Online.

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

  1. Better video call experiences with Microsoft Teams
  2. A beautiful new Term Store for SharePoint Online
  3. AI Builder
  4. Detecting compliance problems early with trainable classifiers for Microsoft 365

Thanks to our team members James Mackerness and Carl Bennett for their contributions to this 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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What’s new in Office 365 for April 2020

The global coronavirus pandemic means it’s been a difficult start to the spring for everyone, but we’re going to carry on keeping you up-to-date with what’s happening in Office 365, including Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint.

This month we look at tips for getting more productive with Microsoft Teams at home; new translation capabilities in SharePoint Online; file version history in OneDrive on the desktop, and a look at Office 365’s fantastic built-in task management app, To Do.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our monthly update to make sure you never miss a thing.

  1. Working from home with Microsoft Teams
  2. Multilingual Capabilities Coming to SharePoint
  3. Restore files directly from OneDrive on the desktop
  4. Manage your day-to-day tasks directly from Office 365

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

The team at CompanyNet are experts in Microsoft Teams and Office 365. If your organisation is facing challenges at the moment, get in touch with our friendly team.

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What’s New in Office 365 for March 2020

Round-up

Welcome to March’s round-up of key changes and new features coming up in Office 365, SharePoint and our Kira intranet platform.

March is a little quieter than normal, but there’s still lots to cover. There’s a chance to try out Microsoft’s latest collaboration technology, get some empirical evidence on how your organisation is adapting to its digital workplace, discover the new Office app, and more.

  1. Get a preview of Fluid Framework
  2. Microsoft Productivity Score
  3. Microsoft Office app
  4. O365 Yammer-Outlook Integration
  5. Goodbye Office 365 Video… hello Stream

Prefer a video version? Here’s this month’s round-up video on our YouTube channel:

Thanks to our team members James Mackerness, Maria Botha-Lopez and Stuart McLaughlin for their contributions to this 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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Office 365 boosts file size limit to 100GB and improves syncing

Photo of two women looking at a computer

Until recently, the size limit for a single file on SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams was a paltry 15GB – about the same as storing 3,000 copies of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in one file.

That has now been increased to 100GB, which is around twice the size of everything on Wikipedia. So if you’ve ever wanted to store an absolutely enormous file in Office 365, you now can.

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Trello personal information leaks – discover a secure alternative for Office 365 users

Passwords, personal data and more – are your staff sharing more about your business than you think?

Security researchers recently found mountains of personally identifiable information (PII) which had been inadvertently made public through Trello, a web-based task management app.

This included passwords, bank account details, and people’s employment and medical details, all of which could have been exposed to anybody – including competitors and cybercriminals.

Accidental disclosure

Trello lets you organise tasks using ‘boards’, which are initially set to ‘private’ by default. But many users changed their boards to ‘public’ in order to collaborate with colleagues – with the unintended side-effect of making them visible to anyone.

The employees involved didn’t deliberately make the information public, and therefore wouldn’t have realised the information was out there.

To compound the problem, Google’s search bot had thoroughly indexed Trello’s public boards, meaning they could be easily found using a standard web search.

The discovery was made by Craig Jones of cybersecurity company Sophos. It was discovered that one company had accidentally published performance ratings of 900 managers on a public Trello board.

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What’s New in Office 365 for February 2020

Round-up

Welcome to February’s round-up of key changes and new features coming up in Office 365, SharePoint and our Kira intranet platform.

This month, we’re looking at a key change to how files are stored in Office 365, custom search results pages and inline image resizing in SharePoint, and read receipts and tools for frontline workers in Teams.

  1. File size limits increased to 100GB
  2. Custom search results pages in SharePoint Online
  3. Shape up with image resizing in Kira and SharePoint Online
  4. Know when someone’s seen your messages in Teams
  5. Frontline worker tools for Teams

Prefer a video? Watch this month’s full update here, or read on to discover this month’s best new features:

Thanks to our team members Franceska Musat, Stuart McLaughlin and James Mackerness for their contributions to this 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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Get email notifications from the Service Health dashboard

The Office 365 Service Health dashboard is an essential tool for checking whether there are any incidents or advisories happening across Office 365 that might be affecting performance.

Although the dashboard itself is user-friendly, it comes with several limitations: only people with administrative roles can access it, and it requires admins to check the dashboard regularly, rather than any ‘alerting’ functionality being available.

The impact is that it’s difficult to proactively spot issues and notify users of them unless admins continuously monitor the dashboard.

This issue is being addressed with the introduction of email notifications from the Service Health dashboard. This long-awaited feature lets you configure email addresses to receive alerts, so admins can receive notifications on the channel which is most convenient for them.

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What’s New in Office 365 this month – January 2020

Round-up

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2020’s first round-up of key changes and new features coming up in Office 365, SharePoint and our Kira intranet platform.

This month we have some news about data residency for UK organisations, harnessing AI to deliver better presentations, chatbots, Teams and more!

  1. Microsoft moving customer data into the UK
  2. Introducing SharePoint Migration Manager
  3. PowerPoint Presenter Coach
  4. Power Virtual Agents
  5. Copy and paste in Power Automate
  6. Meeting Insights in Outlook Online
  7. Org charts in Microsoft Teams
  8. Add someone to an existing conversation in Teams
  9. Text formatting in SharePoint lists
  10. Get email notifications from the Service Health dashboard
  11. Microsoft Forms gains a file upload field

Prefer a video? Watch this month’s full update here, or read on to discover this month’s best new features:

Thanks to our colleagues Stuart McLaughlin and James Mackerness for their contributions to this 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 SharePoint Migration Manager

Microsoft are getting ready to introduce a new tool to help you migrate on-premises SharePoint data to SharePoint Online. Our Solution Architect, Stuart McLaughlin, takes a look at what’s in store.

Data Geese

The SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) has been around for a few years now, available to all Office 365 customers. It helps IT administrators to migrates files from SharePoint on-premises document libraries or regular file shares to SharePoint Online.

Although it was initially quite limited (and a bit unstable), there have been significant improvements in the years since it was launched.

In the meantime, third-party migration tools such as ShareGate Desktop have provided a richer user interface. They are still arguably better at complex migrations, although the SPMT can be considered alongside them when evaluating migration tools.

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