Each month Microsoft releases new updates to Office 365. I keep an eye on those for you and periodically gather them into a blogpost when there are some interesting and significant ones. Here’s a run down of what I think you’ll find useful.
OneDrive Hovercard. The File Hover Card quickly displays file access statistics that help you gain valuable insights into who in your organization has accessed Office files that you’ve shared. In OneDrive for Business, when hovering over a file you’ll be able to see total views, the number of colleagues who’ve viewed, and the list of colleagues who’ve viewed. In SharePoint Online document and page libraries, you’ll be able to see the number of views and number of colleagues who’ve viewed files and pages. Another aspect of this feature allows file owners the ability to see if their colleagues have viewed their files. This feature is only available when files are stored in OneDrive for Business. This is rolling out now which means you will see this functionality begin sometime between now and the end of February.
StaffHub improvements. You’ll be able to get to Microsoft StaffHub from the Office 365 portal, making it easier to discover and access StaffHub. Use StaffHub to assign and track tasks for multiple users, making it easy to monitor team progress against shared activities such as training and onboarding. The webapp experience is also getting a face-lift so staff accessing it from their phones will have more functionality. This is rolling out now which means you will see this functionality begin sometime between now and the end of February. Few of our clients are using this app in Office 365 but I think more of you will over time. It’s very nice for managing hourly employees.
Improved File Moving in OneDrive and SharePoint. The new feature gives team members across your organization the ability to move files while preserving version history and metadata, and unlocks scenarios for file and content management. Users are prompted to accept or cancel before moving files to any location that doesn’t support a file’s custom metadata. Previously the previous versions could be lost depending on where a file moved from or to. This is rolling out now.
Outlook for Android. It got a major update recently. Be sure to update the app on your phones. For security reasons it is a good idea to always keep you apps up to date on your phone. Update often please!
SharePoint news items now are also seen in Teams. It is possible to publish news articles within team sites, and when you configure a new connector for a Microsoft Teams channel for the group, you’ll see each published article automatically flow into the chat workspace as a new thread of the discussion. This helps with both awareness of team news, plus it helps as a discussion starter for topics being pushed as important news to all team members. Let us know if you need help getting this going. Teams is the winning technology to mostly replace Outlook for communications within your office.
New OneDrive restore option. Files Restore lets you restore your OneDrive for Business to a previous time within the last 30 days. It helps you undo all the actions that occurred on both files and folders using existing features, such as version history and recycle bin. You can continue to use version history and recycle bin to restore individual files today. This is beginning to roll out now and will be complete by the end of February. This feature will be great for restoring “accidentally cleaned” OneDrive accounts or restoring from infection. Do note the 30 day limitation. Further back than than and we will have to go to the Office 365 backup (which is an optional purchase)
SharePoint bulk metadata editing. Meta data is used to tag files to aid in search. You could tag them with job #’s for example. Any tag can be created but it was previously tedious. Now we can do it in bulk! This feature allows you to edit the metadata of several items at once by selecting those items in the modern list view, and using the details pane to edit their metadata. This is currently rolling out and will be completed in February.
TLS 1.2 Enforcement. Starting on March 1, 2018, all client-server and browser-server combinations must use TLS 1.2 or later protocol versions to be able to connect without issues to Office 365 services. This may require certain client-server and browser-server combinations to be updated. Problems are mostly likely to occur with Line of Business applications that send mail or copiers that send mail. Those vendor may need to provide an update.
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