Tag: #Office365

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Microsoft’s One Outlook is now available to preview for Office Insiders

The new (beta version) of the One Outlook experience is available to paying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 Business and Education customers enrolled on the Office Insiders Beta Channel.

One Outlook is a new “unified email experience”, which will bring together the various versions and experiences from across their platforms into a single unified and consistent experience. This means it will eventually replace the existing Win32 and UWP apps on Windows, Outlook Web Access, and the Apple macOS versions. Microsoft will also be using it to host their Outlook for Web on browsers.

Microsoft’s longer-term goal is to also to replace the built-in Windows 11 Mail & Calendar apps with this version of the client – but this is likely to be someway off, but Windows Insiders are hoping to be able to start testing it in coming week meaning it might make its way into an early 2023 build of Windows 11.

One Outlook takes most of its inspiration and design from the Outlook web version, matching it closely in terms of design, features, and functionality – though there are still more things to come.

“Today, we are taking our next step by sharing a preview of the new Outlook for Windows, designed to bring consistency across our Windows and web codebases to help you be more productive and stay in control of your inbox.”

Microsoft Office Insider Team

Main Differences and Features

The new Outlook is built well and runs super quick (old outlook was a bit heavy on resources). The UX has some really clean lines though out the design too – it looks modern and fresh, and the design overall is a much more minimalistic and feels less cluttered.

New One Outlook Beta Experience

This One Outlook also adds a few new things not found in the Win32 version including: –

  • New look and feel aligned to the Outlook on the Web experience which adds a single view for calendar, email, and to-do items
  • Message reminders which use “AI” to automatically remind users about missed messages that need attention – these reminders appear at the top of the inbox until the user dismisses them,
  • Microsoft Loop components (which was previously confined to just Teams chat)
  • @mention for files – providing the ability to more easily share files using the “@thenameofthefile” convention to more quickly attach files and documents saved in the cloud to email messages without having to browse for the files.
  • New Outlook RSVP feature designed for hybrid work. This allows users to RSVP but also clarify whether they will be attending a meeting in-person or online.

Let’s quickly cover Microsoft Loop…

So I love ‘loop compoents’. Why? Loop will IMO, soon transform (again) modern co-authoring and Collaboration. With Loop, rather than collaborating on a whole documents, you can edit/author in real time components like lists, tables, paragraphs etc.   With this now in Outlook, it should hopefully start to end the endless reply-to-all storms since loop compoents can be edited and changed in real time. I covered loop in a previous blog.

There are some important things missing for Enterprise

Firstly, of course, this is a preview, which means it is not the final version. This is only currently available on the Insiders Beta Channel and as such there are some features (some small and some big) key features missing. The key ones missing for me (which I think will reduce the number of users willing or able to test it) are:

  • Multi-account support
  • Offline / Cached Mode support.
  • Search Folders,
  • Quick Steps
  • Support for Personal accounts & third-party services (like Gmail) – but that’s coming

In addition, this beta release lacks some of the legacy Outlook extensions that many power users need in enterprise environments including older add-ins and COM object support. I suspect some of this is on purpose to get a better feel of what add-ins and extension organisations actually need and use.

Thumbs Up and Thumbs Downs

  • The new design (while missing some features) is really nice
  • Outlook RSVP (though expect to come to the “old” version too)
  • Loop Components – these are awesome
  • @filementions for easy sharing of cloud files

Thumbs up
👍 The new design (while missing some features) is really nice
👍Outlook RSVP (though expect to come to the “old” version too)
👍Support for Microsoft Loop Components – these are awesome
👍@filementions for easy sharing of cloud files

Thumbs Down
👎Menu layout freaks you out a little – and no file menu – this will put people off
👎No Offline use (yet), which in a hybrid world – almost makes it unusable for now

How to get it and test it

To get and test drive the new Outlook experience, your need to be enrolled in the Office Insider Beta builds, ensure you have a minimum Office beta build of 15225.20000 and then enable the “Try the New Outlook” toggle button.

Switching to the new One Outlook preview

Remember, as with anything new or different, user feedback is critical and as Office Insiders Microsoft are expecting feedback (good and bad from its testers). As such it is important (if you are an Office Insider) to provide constructive and useful feedback about things you like that you think are missing or that you love.


If you are a tester, want to shape it’s future (and you can) – go test it and feedback to Microsoft on your experience.

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New Office 365 updates to improve hybrid work experiences.

Microsoft announced a number of key new features to the core apps across Office 365 aimed to further improve the working from home and working hybrid scenarios, easier and more productive.

Whiteboard

The much loved Whiteboard app is getting a chunk of new features too, which includes 50 new templates, new collaboration cursors, and will finally support Whiteboard collaboration in Teams Meetings with external people (yay).

Teams

Teams is no stranger to regular updates; these new updates are centred around the hybrid Meeting Room Experience.

  • A new companion device experience will prompt you to turn on your video when you enter a room, and will hide your video from the front-of-room screen as well as from the gallery view of other people also joining from companion devices within in the room
  • A new front row meeting layout, will bring remote meeting members into a spevial “front row” at the bottom of the screen. This will also include additional meeting info including  chat, raised hands, and live reactions. Front row is now available in preview.

Outlook

Outlook will soon receive a new feature to meetings RSVPs, allowing you to indicate whether you’ll be attending the meeting in person or remotely to help meeting organisers plan and coordinate meetings effectively.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is getting a big update (available in the Office Insider build today) designed to make remote and pre recorded sessions better.

PowerPoint cameo is an experience that brings your camera(s) directly into your PowerPoint presentation, and recording studio, which lets you easily record your  presentation and deliver it later “on demand” with your embedded video. With cameo, you can seamlessly create and produce your presentations, decide how and where you want your video to appear on your slides with cameo, and then record yourself speaking to any slide with recording studio.

Viva

Finally, the Viva Insight app within Teams will soon receive a new Inspiration library feature that will give “thought leadership” tips, advice and best practices from sources including Microsoft and the Harvard Business Review.

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Office.com is getting a huge AI powered overhaul

Microsoft are releasing a huge overhaul and new look for the Office.com (and the office app) experience.  This will make it even easier to find all the content associated with you and your teams, simplify and enhance the search experience and bring all your apps, tasks, templates and actions together in one place.

New Office.com experience

AI Overhaul

The main thing you notice first off is how much more simple and intuitive the Office.com pages now look.

Microsoft goal here has been to put you and your most important work at the forefront of the experience. The power of Microsoft 365 will anticipate which files (and people) are most important to your work at a given moment based on your habits and routines, the docs or projects you are working on, the activity happening within them and what you need to do to accomplish your work.

On the left pane, is a familiar navigation pane where users can quickly get to things like the new My Content page and Create Pages making it simple and easy to search for or create new content across Microsoft 365. As new fluid components like Loop (also annouced last week), these will also surface themselves here.

Home page updates includes new or overhauled sections around providing:

  • Recommended Actions
  • Quick Access
  • My Content
  • Creating content

Recommended Actions

Recommended actions analyse and bring together anything that needs (or may need) your attention or action. From here you can jump into your upcoming meeting, add (or complete) a To-Do or Planner task, reply to recent comments in documents, and see potential actions you have discussed in an email.

In addition to the Recommended Actions on the home page, you can also find content actions in line on any of the content lists within Office.com by clicking on the “triple dot” menu.

Quick Access

The Quick Access section let’s your easily collaborate on content by Sharing via Teams or booking time to review content with your team or manger. This section is all about helping you jump into and review content that’s important to you.  This content can be viewed as either a list or adaptive cards for a more visual layout depending on your preference.

Microsoft have made it really easy to filter this content by recently opened content, content you have shared with others, content around a particular topic, or person and group and even your favourite content.

My Content

Here you can view all your content and again view it by recently opened, shared, and favourites or custom filters to find what you need. As with quick access, you can leverage the powerful filters to quickly find the content you need.

As above, you can easily filter by type of document, activity and time and unlike most searches there no need to set a number of results as it the results like just adapts as you scroll.

The power and depth of search filters is very extensive and even contains specific filters like document you are @mentioned in or where an action was assigned.

You also have the ability to browse by People and Meetings. When you click on People for example you can view an easy to digest card view of people and documents that have been shared. When you click on Meetings, you can find all meeting content like recordings, shared documents or adaptive components, notes, and chat from your previous meetings.

Microsoft have also added some cool quick access tools, for example you can convert docs to PDF, Share docs straight into  Teams, Add things to your Calendar, and Add to To Do lists.

Creating content

This update makes it easier than ever to create new content across all the Office suite. As well as being able to create new blank documents, users can so create content using an extensive set of new tools and templates. Everything from surveys and brainstorming sessions, Power BI reporting dashboards, project plans and dynamic presentations. IT can also customise the templates to allow employees to have quick access to templates from your organisations  branded content by having all corporate templates in one place central place.

Availability and Release

At Ignite last week, Microsoft said this new experience would start rolling out in the coming  weeks to insiders and then targeted release channels before making its way to everyone BY January 2022.

You can watch a video from Ignite on the new experience here.

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Ensuring the best online meeting experience when working from home during COVID-19

With COVID-19 now dominating our lives and forcing most of us to work from home with lock-downs now in place across most major metropolitan cities around the globe, we (through Cisilion where I work), have been helping our customers either get started with, or rapidly increase their use and adoption of Microsoft Teams to ensure they can stay connected, work collaborately, co-author documents and most importantly get face-time with the people they work with

The focus of this blog is around meetings since I’m sure like me online meetings is something you are doing lot of now we are confined to our homes..

So whether you are brand new to Teams or an experienced Teams Champion, this blog shares my own experiences and tips on how to have the best online meetings in Teams.

1. Use Teams to stay connected with anyone, not just those in your organisation

As the “Hub for Teamwork”, you can use Microsoft Teams to host online meetings with up to 250 people, just like you would a normal in-person meeting.  For external guests, just invite them in the same way you would normally in Outlook or Teams.  It doesn’t matter if your external attendees don’t have Teams either – they can simply click on the link (no need to download a plugin or install Teams) enter their name, and join the meeting from their web-browser or mobile phone.

Teams Guest Join Browser


Note: Teams also features Teams Live events which allow for broadcast style town-hall type presentations with Q&A, Sentiment analysis and on-demand play back for up to 10,000 (which has today been extended to 100,000 participants).

2. Built in dial-in conferencing keeps everyone connected

For users that cant get on-line or have poor internet for example, or those that just “prefer” to “dial” into a meeting, the Teams meeting invite (assuming the meeting organiser has a Audio conferencing License assigned) also includes audio-only dial-in instructions. Users can simply click on the dial-in number from their mobile phone and their phone should automatically launch the dial-pad, dial the number, and even enter the conference bridge ID. 

Teams Dial-in Conferencing

Of course, for the best experience I’d suggest everyone joins the full Teams experience – especially if you are planning to share content. 

 

3. Video,  Video, Video :  This makes a real difference when we can’t do physical face-to-face.

Since you can’t meet people in person anymore due to COVID-19 lock-downs or when just working from home / remotely anyway, meeting online with video makes a a huge difference and I strongly advise to make all calls video by default.  Encourage everyone in your Teams meeting to turn on their video. If your device supports it, I also suggest turning on background blur to keep the focus on you instead of what’s behind you (especially if your home office is a “make shift” space). 

4. Share Share Share – screen, apps or presentation.

When in a Teams call or meeting, you can share/present content in Teams. You are in control at all times as to what others can see. You can decide whether you wish to share

  • Your entire desktop (or screen)
  • A specific window/application
  • Upload a PowerPoint presentation directly into Teams – so attendees can review/mark-up and event advance slides
  • Start / Open a digital whiteboard for real-time collaboration like you would on a normal pen and ink board in a meeting room – more this next.
Sharing in Teams

If you or someone else is sharing their desktop or an application, any one else can “request” that the presenter gives control – you can also take it back at any time!

If you are sharing content that has audio/video within it, you can also choose to have the system audio shared/included.

5. Whiteboard the hell out of your meetings

I love a whiteboard me! When I’m in a face-to-face meeting, I cant help but draw and scribble on a whiteboard and usually find other meeting attendees love to draw and annotate on a board when planning a project or approach to something.

This is where Office 365 and Teams come to life – Microsoft Whiteboard, as well as being available on the web and via a App on Windows and iOS, is also integrated and available in every Teams meeting, enabling meeting attendees to join in with their pen and touch (our mouse and keyboard) and collaborate / contribute in real time with digital ink.

These Whiteboard sessions are saved as part of every meeting and available for future use and reference and can even be opened outside of the meeting directly in the Whiteboard app – which provides a host of additional features too.

6. Make the meeting on demand too – Record it live!

Teams can also (if enabled by your admins) record your meetings for you. Instead of relying on a summary email only or “I’ll update you later” conversation – you can simply record your Teams meeting.

The recording captures everything, video, screen share, presentations, whiteboard, everything and unlike Skype for Business (RIP), the meeting is stored in Office 365 Cloud with a link provided within the meeting chat / or Teams space.

What’s more, attendees of the meeting can also search the meeting (yes it transcribes the audio to text) and jump to the point in time of the meeting where a particular phrase or topic was talked about.

7. Live Captions helps with Accessibility

While today only available in English, every call and meeting in Teams support real-time live captioning allowing participants to read subtitles. 

This is a game changing feature for any attendees who may be hard of hearing,  or have different levels of language proficiency. More languages are rolling out shortly we are told.

8. Finally – Secure and Control your meetings

Making sure only the people you intend to join your meeting can join, participate and see content is key – after all you wouldn’t let a random person into your office and into your in-person meetings unless they were invited.

Teams provides meeting organisers with options to allow them to define the roles and permissions for attendees of their meetings. These can also be set and controlled in part by IT admins at a organisation level if needed.

Meeting organisers can choose to (or not to):

  • Enable the meeting lobby feature (its on by default), which lets the organiser define when and who is admitted into the meeting  – this can include automatically people from your organisation but not guests, allowing or not allowing PSTN dial-in users to automatically join etc.
  • Designating who can present, mute attendees, and start/stop recordings.

Privacy is a right within Teams and is always secure

Teams does not disclose things like IP addresses or computer names or any other information that could identify the machine or user to anyone not specifically invited and all recorded content is under the control and access by the organiser / presenters.

Finally – if your organisation uses technology like Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to protect sensitive or GDRP type data, then these polices also flow into Teams, meaning confidential or sensitive data not allowed to be shared outside your business still cant – even in Teams! – this is not covered in depth here by the way!

Stay safe, stay in doors and work smart!

Thats it from me – hope you find this useful. Look forward to hearing how you are getting on during COVID-19 lock down.

Thanks

Rob

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Exchange Online unlimited archiving… What you need to know.

I talk to a lot of customers about Exchange Online and about the need and desire to use 3rd party add on services like backup, DLP threat protection and archiving.

Many don’t realise or are not up to date on the continuous updates and improvements to Exchange Online in particular and it’s unlimited archive feature is just one of the services that could help you save costs and simplify your management. That’s not to say there is never a need for 3rd party complementary services (there is sometimes a use case), but I wanted to highlight the power and extent of this archive feature.

What is “unlimited archiving”

Exchange Online Archiving is an enterprise-class service that assists these organizations with their archiving, compliance, regulatory, and e-discovery challenges while simplifying their on-premises infrastructure, thereby saving costs and easing the IT management overhead. (source:Microsoft)

In Exchange Online, Microsoft provides archive mailboxes which provide users with additional mailbox storage space. Once a user’s archive mailbox is enabled (it’s not on by default), up to 100 GB of additional storage is made available automatically.

Previously, whilst this feature did exist, it was quite hidden away and the only way to active it was to contact Microsoft and request additional storage space for an archive mailbox. This is no longer required and the process is fully automated (if enabled).

This “unlimited archiving” feature called auto-expanding archiving, provides additional storage in archive mailboxes once the storage quota in the primary archive mailbox is reached. Exchange Online then automatically increases the size of the archive, meaning users won’t run out of mailbox storage space and Exchange Admins don’t need to traukt through storage alterts, respond to help desk requests or contact Microsoft to request additional storage for archive mailboxes.

How auto-expanding archiving works


Once enabled, Exchange Online periodically checks the size of the users archive mailbox. When an archive mailbox gets close to its storage limit, it automatically creates additional storage space for the archive. Should this space also run out (now that’s a lot of mail), more space is automatically added to the user’s mail archive meaning now additional management the archive is needed. Here’s how it works.

Image from docs.microsoft.com
  1. Archiving is enabled for a user mailbox or a shared mailbox. An archive mailbox with 100 GB of storage space is created, and the warning quota for the archive mailbox is set to 90 GB.
  2. Exchange Online admin enables auto-expanding archiving for the mailbox.
  3. When the archive mailbox (including the Recoverable Items folder) reaches 90 GB, it’s converted to an auto-expanding archive, and extra storage space is added to the archive.

What gets moved to the archive storage space?

The process is fully automatic. In order to make efficient use of auto-expanding archive storage, folders may get moved as part of the archive move.

What items and folders are moved is determined by Exchange Online whenever additional storage is added to the archive. Sometimes when a folder is moved, one or more subfolders are automatically created and items from the original folder are distributed to these folders to facilitate the moving process.

When viewing the archive portion of the folder list in Outlook or Outlook Online, these subfolders are displayed under the original folder.

The naming convention used to name these subfolders is <folder name>_yyyy (Created on mmm dd, yyyy h_mm), where:

  • yyyy is the year the messages in the folder were received.
  • mmm dd, yyyy h_m is the date and time that the subfolder was created by Office 365, based on the user’s time zone and regional settings in Outlook.

What about Compliance and Data Governance?

eDiscovery: if your organisation uses Office 365 eDiscovery, such as Content Search or In-Place eDiscovery, the additional storage areas in an auto-expanded archive are also searched.

Retention: When a mailbox is placed “on hold” by using tools such as Litigation Hold in Exchange Online or if an Office 365 eDiscovery case holds and retention policies in the security and compliance center, content located in an auto-expanded archive is also placed on hold.

Messaging records management (MRM): If you use MRM deletion policies in Exchange Online to permanently delete expired mailbox items, expired items located in the auto-expanded archive will also be deleted.

PST Import service: You can use the Office 365 Import service to import PST files to a user’s auto-expanded archivenof up to 100 GB of data.

Common Questions

Can I access my archive at anytime or does need IT input? You can access any folder in thearchive mailbox, including ones that were moved to the auto-expanded storage area.

What about search? Can I search items in the archive? Yep.. But the search process is a little different. You can search for items that were moved these additional storage area but only by searching the folder itself. If the archive folder contains subfolders, you have to search each subfolder separately. This is due to performance and speed since the archive folders are stored on lower tier disks within Exchange Online (well it is an archive).

Can I delete items from the mail archive? Yes, You can delete items in a subfolder that points to an auto-expanded storage area, but the folder itself cannot be deleted manually.

Interested to hear how other Exchange Online Archiving compares and if you see the need for 3rd parties still…?

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Microsoft announces ‘Fluid Communication Experiences’ coming soon to Office 365

This week at Build (Microsoft’s annual developer conference), Microsoft announced the “Fluid Framework” a new software development kit (SDK) designed to help developers build faster and more flexibly distributed apps that will fundamentally change the way people think about document and collaborative editing and will help keep it ahead of the competition.

What is it?

In short, Fluid is a framework for building collaborative editing experiences.

Unlike the current Co auhtorsing capabilities of Office Online and Office Pro Plus though, since Fluid Framework can can be integrated across applications, that also means that users will be able to, for example, create and edit a document in an app such as Word and then share just an abstract or element of that document, say a table, in Microsoft Teams (or even a third-party application that supports Fluid Framework. All of the changes to the element sync in real time as a full document would in Office 365.

In one of the build demos, Microsoft’s demoed users could use formulas to calculate a cell in a spreadsheet inside the text document to calculate a number that is then automatically updated.

In another example Microsoft demoed how a document can be created and shared and then automatically translated in real-time to a variety of languages, while still allowing everybody to edit it in their own language.

Whilst in another demo, and element of a word document was inserted into Teams for review and edit without the actual document being uploaded or shared.

A Microsoft First?

Not in a tradional sense… but Microsoft has said that it’s Fluid Framework will sync faster than anything else currently on the market today whilst also providing developers the tools to deconstruct and reconstruct documents into different modular components so that they can then be integrated into different applications.

Microsoft PR head honcho Frank X. Shaw described the Fluid Framework as a way to “break down the barriers of the traditional document as we know it, and usher in the beginning of the free-flowing canvas.”

The Fluid Framework isn’t just about collaborative editing but it’s really a rethinking of how modern documents should work.

Microsoft already plans to integrate Fluid into some of its Office 365 applications later this year.

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