Office 365

Imagine you want to create a chat bot for Microsoft Teams in order to automate tasks, enhance the discussion or just feeling lonely and want someone to talk to. There’s many ways of doing this; you can start from scratch building a bot, using the Microsoft Bot framework and/or using the Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator, you can use the Azure Bot Service, you can use the FAQ bots to essentially create a no code solution.

A long overdue update of the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator – we’re now up to version 2.5.0! It’s a fairly substantial update both in the generator and in the generated code – this update will make future updates a lot smoother and will allow for enabling more features going forward. Thanks to all who provided feedback and input and has tested the generator over the last few months. You can get the latest generator by running

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a fantastic development model on top of (modern) SharePoint, for user interface extensibility, and it have evolved tremendously over the last year since it became general available. The framework is based on JavaScript extensibility in a controlled manner, compared to the older JavaScript injection mechanisms we used to extend (classic) SharePoint, that comes with a lot of power. Using SharePoint Framework our JavaScript has access to the whole DOM in the browser, meaning that we can do essentially what we want with the user interface – however, of course, we shouldn’t, only certain parts of the DOM are allowed/supported for modification. These areas are the custom client-side Web Parts we build (that squared box) or specific place holders (currently only two of them; top and bottom). For me that’s fine (although there’s a need for some more placeholders), but if you want to destroy the UX it is all up to you.

A couple of weeks back I published a Yeoman generator to build Tabs for Microsoft Teams. Since then I’ve continued to add stuff to it as the Teams team has continued to add features to their extensibility story. So, this generator is not only for creating Tabs, but now also for adding Bots and Custom Bots to Microsoft Teams. With that I decided to rename the generator to yo teams (generator name is generator-teams).

A big round of applause for Microsoft and the team behind Microsoft Teams for now being general available (GA) worldwide. Today, they lit up the Teams icon in the Office 365 waffle for all tenants (unless your admins are being boring and has turned it off). It’s been awesome to be a part of this preview journey, which started last summer. Avanade was selected as one of the TAP members, in a preview program shrouded in a secrecy I’ve not seen at Microsoft before. Our IT department slowly trickled it out, so that we had a chance of learning how Microsoft Teams could fit into our organization and our way of working. A big thanks to David who have mastered the preview program internally.

I’m happy to announce that today at SharePoint Saturday Munich I presented a new Yeoman generator for building Microsoft Teams Tabs projects. Tabs in Microsoft Teams is a great way to extend the user interface and to do integrations to other systems and provide visualizations. Tabs are based on a JavaScript framework, a set of web pages and a manifest describing the Tab. It requires a set of manual steps to both build out the pages, configuring CSS, hooking up the JavaScripts, deploying it all to a web site hosted in the cloud, writing the manifest, packaging the manifest into a zip file and more.

Let me start with congratulating the SharePoint Framework team on an amazing job and an amazing journey reaching this GA milestone. A Big Thanks from the team here in Redmond to everyone who helped us to get to GA! #SPFx #SharePoint #SharePointFramework pic.twitter.com/czo2Duon7z — Chakkaradeep (@chakkaradeep) February 24, 2017 The SharePoint Framework plays a significant part of the SharePoint future, yes - this is only the first version with a lot of new features on the way, and it is a part of the new SharePoint wave. I’ve haven’t seen this interest in SharePoint for many years and I’m glad I’m still in this business. Delivering top notch collaboration solutions for our clients at Avanade. The SharePoint Framework will make it easier for us to customize SharePoint and it will also bring a lot more value for our clients in the end allowing them to stay evergreen and not being tied into “workarounds” and pesky SharePoint Designer hacks or arbitrary JavaScript snippets.

Over the last few days the issue on how to prevent users to create Office 365 Groups has popped up in all sorts of conversations. This blog post will show you how to do it in the correct way, and serve as a future reference. I’m not the only one who have blogged about this, it’s in many places including official documentation. But in many places both scripts and some caveats are either wrong or outdated. One post covers this topic really well, and in a good and correct way and it’s this post by John P. White - Disable Office 365 Groups, part 2. Read it! This post however will show you how to do it in a more direct way, using PowerShell.

As many of you have noticed I have not been posting my What’s new on the Office Roadmap updates. Well, I’ve been on a vacation not trying to think of Office 365 to start with, and then also, I’m ending my series of these posts. Sorry. I have to start with saying that I love the amount of changes we see now in the Office 365 service. The team(s) is/are doing an amazing job with kicking out new features and updates in some areas. Our favorite SharePoint is killing it with features at the moment, and more is to come. And do believe this will continue for the foreseeable future.

Happy Friday and welcome back to another Office Roadmap update. This time the day before the big SharePoint Saturday, here in beautiful Stockholm, where we all are going to indulge on the goodness that was announced a couple of weeks back at the SharePoint Futures event. Lot of new stuff in the mobile space this time around. Changes 2016-05-20 Launched Windows Universal App: OneDrive UWP (Universal Windows App) are now launched and live (new) User Activity Reports: Compliance center improvements for OneDrive/SharePoint on document views/edits/downloads etc (from in development) Intelligent Discover for Android: Discover (Office Graph) view in the Android OneDrive app (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for iOS: Access your SharePoint files from the OneDrive app (new) Office 365 Groups: easily add users from a distribution list to a group: this is cool, now you can add all members from a DL to an O365 Group instead of one user at a time (new) Self-service NGSC setup and goove.exe takeover: Simplified setup for NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client). Finally. Goove.exe (giggles) (new) Rolling out Office 365 Groups: scripts to migrate Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Some sweet scripts for migrating DL’s to O365 Groups (new). Funny it’s listed as rolling out, the script is there! What’s missing. Project Online - Developer Samples: Project Online goes Github: http://aka.ms/pppmapisamples (new) Project Online - OData performance improvements: and when they have some sample code, they of course want it to perform (new) SharePoint home in Office 365: the new SharePoint Home tile is being rolled out. Check /_layouts/SharePoint.aspx in your tenant. (from in development). Office integration added back to NGSC: improved office integration in the NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client) (new) Improved image attachment viewing in Outlook on the web: Always nice to see improvements to the web client, it’s now way ahead of the desktop one, this time big thumbnails and side by side view (new) In Development Annotating and inking for Mac: Draw using your mouse on you Mac - cause you suck and don’t have touch on that shiny thing (new) Copy and move to SharePoint: Intelligent Discovery for iOS: Discover (Office Graph) for the iOS OneDrive app (new) Intelligent Discovery for Windows Phone: Discover (Office Graph) for the Windows Phone OneDrive app (new). Anybody want to buy a couple of Lumias, I have several as paper weights. Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Android: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your Android OD4B app. (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Windows Phone: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your WP OD4B app (new) Office 365 Groups: Exchange Admin Center (EAC) UI for migrating Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Evolution of the migration scripts mentioned above. You will soon be able to migrate from DL’s to Groups using a single button in the Exchange Admin Center. Nice! (new) OneDrive for Business Shared folder Sync: this is a nice new feature. If someone shares a folder with you from their OneDrive you will be able to sync them (new)

Hey, happy Friday the 13th! Here’s a small Office Roadmap update for all of you Jason fans! Not that many changes this time around, but still interesting, and a lot of Outlook 2016 for Mac releases. Changes 2016-05-13 Now Launched eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: the new eDiscovery features are now fully rolled out (from in development) Enter full screen view in Outlook 2016 for Mac: the full screen view for Mac Outlook as announced in January are now out. (new) Find a meeting room in Outlook 2016 for Mac: and so is the possibility to find a meeting room on your Mac (new) Office 365 Groups: ability to update privacy type: you can now as a Group owner change the privacy type of your Groups (public or private) (from rolling out) One-click Archive: The on-click archive feature in Outlook on Mac are now also fully rolled out (from rolling out) Outlook 2016 for Mac two step authentication: And you can also log in using two factor authentication on your Mac (new) Rolling out New editor for Outlook 2016 for Mac: And if you’re lucky you might even be getting the new editor in Mac so you can use “more fonts and colors”. (new) Project Online - Removing the upper limit on number of PWA instances per tenant: after this update you will be able to have unlimited number of PWA instances, was previously only 7. (new) Right to Left language support in Outlook 2016 for Mac: and if you write your stuff from right to left you can now use Outlook 2016 on your Mac, without writing backwards (new) In Development FastTrack | Dropbox to OneDrive for Business Migration: If you are using Dropbox you can soon get help from the FastTrack center to get yer files out of there (new) New usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive and Mailbox Storage: the new admin UI will get better and improved reports for storage usage in SharePoint and Exchange. (new) Office 365 Usage Reporting APIs: and not only that, you can suck that data into your own apps as well (new) SharePoint mobile app for iOS: Nothing new here, it’s just a rename from “The new SharePoint mobile app” to “SharePoint mobile app”

The Office Roadmap updates with the new announcements from the Future of SharePoint event has arrived (they arrived May the 4th to be precise). I’m back from the event and San Francisco and I’m full of the energy that the SharePoint team transmitted. You should specifically take a look at the In Development part here. That’s where we got the new and fresh stuff from the Future of SharePoint event. Changes 2016-06-06 Now Launched Delve Analytics: Do you want all the details on how and when you work Delve Details and an E5 subscription is all you need (from in development) Drive Shipping and Network Based Data Import for Office 365: Fast Track is getting more and more mature with import options (from in development) FastTrack | Box to OneDrive for Business Migration: Still using Box? Get your files over to OneDrive with Fast Track (from in development) FastTrack | Expanded language support: More languages available in the FastTrack (new) FastTrack | Power BI onboarding support: And Fast Track Power BI is now live (from in development) Multiple timeline bars in Project Online: This must be one of the features that’s been jumping back and forth the most on the roadmap (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: multi-domain support: This is one of the most important feature releases of Groups. Read this article for full details and configuration options. (from in development) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: Better reporting in the admin center (from rolling gout) OneDrive for Business Recent Files to Sway: Easier access to your OneDrive docs in Sway (from in development) Skype for Business App SDK: Get your coding skills on and build some Skype Apps (from in development) Skype for Business Mac Preview 1: The long awaited Skype Mac client is not out. Feedback on it has been moderate at best though (from in development) Updated people profile experience in Office 365: The Delve profile page is now fully rolled out. I wonder if Delve will stay as the document discovery feature or if it just will be renamed to “My Profile” or “People” or something, which would make total sense(new) Yammer user profile update from Azure AD: The one-time sync from Azure AD is now launched. Wonder if we ever will see a proper sync? (from in development) Rolling out Basic Chat: Basic Skype chat from the Skype icon in mail - it doesn’t say that it’s web based, but I guess it is(new) Office 365 Groups: usage guidelines: A very important update, this allows you to modify the usage guidelines for Groups (another feature copied from Yammer) (from in development) SharePoint Online - modern document library experience: The new doc lib experience, mayhaps rolled out a bit early and without any guidance (new) In Development eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: more permissions control for eDiscovery and compliance stuff (from rolling out) New AutoCAD file format support in Visio: AutoCAD file support in Visio… (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: search Groups files using Office Delve: Searching should now show documents from Groups (new) SharePoint home in Office 365: Finally Office 365 and SharePoint will get a proper home page. The Sites tile will be renamed and now point to this page. You can read more about this feature here. (New) SharePoint Online – Client-side Web Part for Existing SharePoint Pages: The new customization features announced at the Future of SharePoint Event. Client-side Web Parts created using the new SharePoint Framework on existing SharePoint pages. Read my post about it here (new) SharePoint Online - modern lists experience: A new lists experience, very similar to the new doc lib experience. A great and modern looking UX. (new) SharePoint Online - SharePoint Framework: The new client-side framework that will be used to make the future customizations and development of SharePoint. This is the Framework that Microsoft will build the new “NextGen” portals and the one we will use. There’s much more to read about this here. (new) SharePoint Online - Site activity and insights on the Site Contents page: Each site will get its own set of statistics that shows you how the site is used and what activities are going on (new) SharePoint Online – Webhooks on SharePoint Document Libraries: One of the first new extensions to the SharePoint APIs. I’m glad they are using standardized Webhooks, instead of some weird remote event receivers. Hopefully we’ll get the same for lists (new) The new SharePoint mobile app for iOS: Announced as the “Intranet in your Pocket”. The new SharePoint App will first come for iOS (actually I’m already using it) and then later for Android, and if Windows Phone is still alive by the end of this year those two users might get it as well (new) Cancelled Class Notebook: limit sharing and deletion of section groups: This is just weird, this was rolled out the other week and is now all of a sudden cancelled (from rolling out)

Today at The Future of SharePoint event Microsoft have announced the next iteration in SharePoint development - the SharePoint Framework. As one of the old ones who started with the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, to the COM+ event handlers in SharePoint 2001, over to custom built DDFs, to WSP’s to Apps and Add-ins - this new framework is a very welcome change. For years SharePoint Developers have been forced to walk in shame in the outer rims of the developer guild. It’s been so hard to get over the threshold and once you were over it, there was very few who actually returned to a normal life. I’ve been struggling for years to get ASP.NET or web developers to get on over to SharePoint development with no luck. The Add-in model did not help in any sense here and just introduced new pitfalls and confusions.

About a year ago I wrote a blog article called SharePoint Team sites are dead. An article that stirred up many feelings in the community and started an interesting (and somewhat harsh) discussion - which was kind of the point. Fast forward to May 2016 and this is a totally different ball game! SharePoint Team Sites are back! Modern team sites Jeff Teper, CVP at Microsoft, writes in the just now published The Future of SharePoint blog post: “Team sites has always been at the heart of collaboration with SharePoint”, a statement I absolutely agree with. Team Sites is what made SharePoint such a successful product. The post I wrote about how Team Sites are supposed to be dead are still true though - Team Sites are not what they used to be, they have transformed and merged with Office 365 Groups into something more powerful - the new Modern Team sites.

Updates, updates and updates. This time around there’s a great deal of clean up on the Office Roadmap. Mayhaps they are adding space for all the neat SharePoint things we expect to see next week at the SharePoint Future event. There’s also a bunch of new stuff added to the In Development category, scroll down and learn something. Also worth noticing is that the Yammer team has started to catch up on the feedback they received over the last few years. I think that in just a few weeks they made more than they actually been able to do for years. Good job - now if you only could focus on some proper integration; with identities, search, threading and stuff that matters.

Here’s some really big updates of the Office Roadmap this time around. Two major themes of this update, part from the now more or less traditional copy paste errors; Planner - the Planner team have tons of nifty and neat stuff coming our way. Edu - Microsoft is all in on school and Edu features at the moment! Check the “In Development” section - you will like it. Wonder how much more good stuff they are saving for the May 4th event!!

Here’s some more updates on the Office Roadmap. A couple of days late due to me being offline and chasing bunnies and chickens. Highlights of these updates are the awesomeness going on in the Office 365 Video team and also that the OneDrive sync team is back! Changes 2016-03-28 Launched Class Notebook Add-in for OneNote: The Class Notebook add-in for Onenote is released. (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Android devices: Android apps received some updates with auto-save and collab authoring in Word and PowerPoint (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for iOS: And iOS got some as well with Box integrations (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Windows devices: And Windows Phone did too (these users can be counted on one hand nowadays); inking and Excel updates was on the menu (NEW) Office 365 Admin app - Group functionality: Group admin options in the admin app, nice but for me the UX works fine with 10-15 groups, imagine an enterprise with thousands (from in development) Office 365 Admin app - Push Notifications for Message Center: Get them push notifications from the admin app and always know when there is Office 365 issues. Great! (from in development) Office 365 Admin app for Windows 10: The Windows 10 Universal App for Office 365 is here. Currently in Beta, but (NEW) Office 365 Video - Choose Your Own Thumbnail: A great video addition (from in development) Office 365 Video - Improved upload experience: easier to upload videos, one step forward to a real video internal Youtube (from rolling out) Office 365 Video - Insert video from SharePoint edit page ribbon: use videos in your SharePoint sites (from rolling out) Office 365 Video - Upload your own subtitle files: Wow! Awesome addition to the video portal! (from in development) Office 365 Video - Video Viewer Statistics: I like this, but I’d like to see better overall statistics. Right now its a copy paste job from many sources (NEW) Office 365 Video - Yammer settings per channel: about time, and the best thing is that you can turn the Yammer integration off! (back from previously launched) Rolling out Manage Yammer licenses in Office 365: To Yammer or not to Yammer - that is no longer the question, but up to you! (from in development) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: This new reporting dashboard is awesome! (from in development) Search on Yammer iOS app: giggles, not commenting on this one (NEW) In Development Allow/Deny list external sharing domains: long awaited feature (NEW) Bitcoin Currency Format Support: Bitcoins is back( NEW, well it was here before but disappeared for a while) Delve People Experiences - Praise: Prais feature is now back in development (from rolling out) Expiring Yammer Announcements: Instead of fixing the read item count issues (any of them) the Yammer team thinks, hey let’s focus on something else instead… (NEW) Improvements to Outlook Add-in Store: better in-Outlook experience when getting Add-ins (NEW) March Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Android devices: RTF support for Android devices and SmartArt editing (NEW) March Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Windows devices: RTF and Sway features in the WinPhone apps (NEW) OneDrive for Business Deny List of File Types for Sync: Allows admins to deny certain file types (NEW) OneDrive for Business Pause Sync: looks like the OneDrive sync team is back from the coffee break (NEW) OneDrive for Business Shared folder Sync: sync someone elses folder (NEW) OneDrive for Business SharePoint Online Document Library Sync: The end of groove.exe? (NEW) OneDrive for Business Windows 8.1 Support for Next Generation Sync Client: Anyone still on 8.1, slackers! (NEW)

I got some news for you. The Office Roadmap is updated, actually it was updated yesterday but I had other stuff to do. Let’s jump right into the changes and look at them Groups thingies!! Changes 2016-03-17 Launched Dark theme for Outlook 2016: Somehow someone thought this was important. Personally I’m not a fan of the dark theme in Office, specifically not in Outlook - it looks all weird and funky since e-mails have a white background. (from in development) Directory pictures in Outlook 2016 search suggestions: When searching in Outlook (on the desktop) you should see profile pics of people - I don’t, and I’m on the Office first release branch… (from in development) Learning Tools for OneNote: There are some new Learning tools in OneNote for people with learning needs. (NEW) Office 365 Groups: dynamic membership: Dynamic membership in groups should be rolled out. Love the feature! You configure the dynamic membership in the Azure AD portal and it also requires Azure AD premium if you wondered (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: files quota management: File quotas for group - one of those things we waited for are here, anyone seen it by the way. The description still says “we plan to” - but it is marked as launched (from rolling out) SharePoint Online uses Exchange Web Services to send mail: SharePoint alerts and mails are no longer marked as spam (from rolling out) In Development Focused Inbox for Outlook for Windows, Mac and web: The focused inbox feature from the Outlook iOS/Android app will come to Outlook for Windows and Mac as well as web (NEW) Message Center improvements Spring 2016: some filtering features and a new weekly digest e-mail incoming for the message center (NEW) Office 365 Groups: guest access support: YES! YES! YES! FINALLY! (NEW) One-click Archive: archive your stuff in Outlook if our using Outlook for Mac with a single click (NEW) Outlook 2016 for Mac two step authentication: Modenr AuthN and two-FACTOR authentication for Outlook for Mac (NEW) Upload local Outlook attachment to OneDrive & OneDrive for Business: automatically upload your attachments to OneDrive when sending e-mail using Outlook for desktop (NEW) Moved off into the previously released list Skype for Business for Android

Ok, let me first start by saying that I might have overreacted in the last blog post about the roadmap. I still don’t think it is ok to have this kind of chaos on such an important and official document/page. But stuff happens, we all know that (I’ve done some pretty serious dumba** stuff with my blog posts over the years). So back to the good news. We have an Office Roadmap update. And this time around it looks all fine! It’s a bit long this time, due to stuff getting back to where they are supposed to be, but there are some really hidden gems in here. Have a nice read y’all.

Spring is closing in, astronauts are returning from a year in space, the US has an election going on and there’s update on the Office Roadmap. The roadmap mess saga continues…with Microsoft making even more fools out of themselves!!! Changes 2016-03-01 Launched No new things are rolling out…instead they are rolling them back! Rolling out All of the following was previously Launched but are now rolling out instead. Microsoft, you need to think about how you update this page. The last month or so has been ver unreliable. Please, if you need help in managing a proper list of changes you have my contact details. Actually in Sweden there is a law that what you publish on your web site is what is included in the service/product/offering (not exactly the legal text) at the time of purchase…

Updates! Updates! Updates! Yup, that would happen if Stevie B was still in the house rocking the Office Roadmap. Another round of updates, this time it looks like a fixup of the mess that happended last time. So some things are reported as NEW in here, but they aren’t really new, they just disappeared for a week or two… Changes 2016-02-13 Launched Apps for Project Pro for Office 365 write support: If you’re building Apps, sorry Add-ins, you can now do write back for Project Apps/Add-ins (from Rolling out) Auto Generated Project IDs in Project Online: more control of the ID’s generated in Project (from Rolling out) Cloud PBX in Skype for Business: Enterprise voice is now live (from In Development) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in SharePoint Online: DLP features in SPO is now Launched, from Rolling out Designer: The new Designer feature in PowerPoint should be in your desktop application by now (from rolling out) DLP in SharePoint - Policy Management: It says private preview only and public in september 2015, we’re already way beyond that, so I guess nobody bothered update the text. Anyways - this is a great feature that allows you to control DLP and actions, triggers, reports etc for SharePoint Online and OneDrive. (from ROlling out) Events from email: Exchange Online will now automatically detect flight information (just like Cortana) and automatically block the time in your calendar (from In development). Note: this feature is ON by default but can be turned off. FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive for Business from File Shares: File share to OneDrive FastTrack is live. (from in development) FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online Team Sites from File Shares: File share to Team Sites is also live (from In development) FastTrack | FastTrack Center services coming to smaller customers: Great change for smaller customers, minimum number of seats are now 50 for FastTrack, instead of 150. (NEW) FastTrack | Office 365 ProPlus Upgrade Assistance: FastTrack for Office (from in development) First Release: Select People support for SharePoint & OneDrive for Business: SPO and OD4B is now first release enabled (from rollingout) Mobile offline files (read-only) for iOS: Offline support for the OneDrive app (from rolling out) Mobile PDF annotation support for iOS: Another great feature on IOS and not on Windows Phone (I’m just waiting for Satya to can this huge failed experiement). (from rolling out) Morph for iOS: Support for the new Morph PowerPoint animation on IOS (and not Windows Phone) (NEW) Multiple timeline bars in Project Pro for Office 365: I think this is one of the things that changes every time on the roadmap, it’s probably a huge deal for the Project people. (from rolling out) Next-generation OneDrive for Business sync client (PC & Mac): NextGen (LOL) sync engine is now fully launched. I sure hope they don’t think that this is a finished product!!! (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: dynamic membership: Dynamic memeberships for Office 365 Groups. This is really awesome. It requires Azure AD premium though. (from Rolling out) Office 365 Groups: files quota management: support for file quota managment for the Office 365 Groups SPO sites (from In Development) Office 365 ISO 27001 and 27018 Audit Report: Some new reports in the Service Trust Portal, I’m not sure if they are new or just updated. Not that descriptive information (From Rolling out) Office 365 local datacenter in India: The 365 datacenter in India has opened its doors for tenants. Check your Message Center for information about when you are being moved (from In Developemnt) Office 365 Video - Yammer settings per channel: This new settings allows you to specify a Yammer Group for the Video Channel or even better you can disable it. (from rolling out) Office Online multi-user coauthoring in Yammer: Co-authoring in Yammer! When will they implement a feature that allows you to NOT store documents in Yammer? Prolly never. (from In Development) OneDrive for Business Web UX refresh: New UX in OneDrive for Business. It’s a great addition and I’m looking forward to see this new concept coming to other parts of SPO PowerPoint Designer - Desktop: This is exactly the same feature as above “Designer”. (from rolling out) PowerPoint Morph - Desktop: The Morpth animation on the desktop edition of PowerPoint. I actually like it (from rolling out) Preview_Office 365 Customer Security Considerations Refrence Guide: I’m not 100% sure on what this exactly is, but it’s a new “Security Consideration Guide” linked to the Service Trust Portal. Gotta find it and read it (from Rolling out) PSTN Calling in Skype for Business: US only, call real phones from Skype. (from in development) PSTN Conferencing in Skype for Business Online: conferencing dial in option, US only so far (from in development) Real time presence for PowerPoint: You can see in real time who’s editing the same doc as you in PowerPoint (I guess this is for online, and the next one for desktop). (from in development) Real Time presence in PowerPoint for desktop: see above (from in development) Red Alert Autoposting: automatic detection of issues in Office 365, about time (from rolling out) Set an expiry date for a guest share: This one has jumped back and forth from rolling out and launched. But I have yet not seen it in any tenant! SharePoint Online uses Exchange Web Services to send mail: SharePoint e-mails should no longer be spam (from rolling out) Skype for Business One-time search notification: First time a user does a search in S4B they will get a help message (NEW) Skype Meeting Broadcast: Skype Meeting Broadcast is launched! Love it! (From in development) Sway recycle bin: Get yer Sways back (from in development) Task Notifications in Project Online: notifications from project, title says it all (from rolling out) Rolling out Embedded video in Universal app: When pasting a YouTube, Vimeo or Office Mix Video in OneNote (the Universal app only) you can directly in OneNote check out the video. Sounds cool, couldn’t verify since it doesn work… (NEW) Manage Yammer licenses in Office 365: I’m should just shut up on this one since there are to many sensitive people that would sacrifice their kids for this emabarrasing service. You knwo what, you can unassign licenses now for Yammer and it just removes the Tile from the Waffle. Users can still go to Yammer. Epic failure!!! (from in developemnt) Office 365 Groups: multi-domain support: One more of my requested features for Office 3365 Groups are now being rolled out (from in development) Office 365 ProPlus Consumption Reports: awesome reports for Office, including Visio and Project, activations (NEW) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: the new admin portal will contain a highly customizable reporting center (from in development) Search on Yammer iOS app: No comments… (NEW, well it was there, then it wasn’t and now it’s back) In Development Allow/Deny list external sharing domains: white/blacklisting of external sharing domains. A welcome addition (NEW) Bitcoin Currency Format Support: fire up your Azure VM’s to mine some bitcoins (NEW) Delve People Experiences - Praise: This is one of the features that is actually being rolled back from In development. This is a good thing. I hope they add features so that you can control the Praise experience; that is turn it on/off, and also that you can delete Praises from an administrative side (from rolling out) Expiring Yammer Announcements: This should reduce the number of unread items in your Yammer inbox (NEW) FastTrack | Expanded language support: the additions of simplified chinese, Thai and Vietnames to the FTC (NEW) Improvements to Outlook Add-in Store: an in-client experience for finding Apps/Add-ins for Outlook. Great new feature (NEW) Intune Mobile Application Management and Conditional Access for Skype for Business: More control of Skype for Business on mobile devices (NEW) Office 365 Groups: guest access support: My number one feature I’m waiting for for Groups. When finally launched I see no single reason whatsoever to use Yammer. (NEW) Office Delve updated profile experience: The profile part of Delve will be improved over the next few months (NEW) Removal of Delivery Reports from Outlook on the web: Delivery Reports will no longer be a part of Outlook on the web (who uses that anyways!?) (rolled back from Rolling out) Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition: Connect your on-premises Skype for Business to the PBX/PSTN in Office 365! (NEW) Yammer service on by default: I complained about this stupid idea previously and now they moved it from Rolling Out to In Development! Not going to do a sarcastic comment this time, but if that is true that someone reconsidered this change it is a good thing for all enterprises that would like to control what their users use and what not to use. (From Rolling out) Cancelled Azure departmental template availability: Yup, it’s being cancelled over and over again (from in development)

Here we go again! The Office team keep a steady pace of updates coming to the Office Roadmap. This time it’s a bit weird, but we have a lot of things being rolled back!? Also I noticed that the site was down today for maintenance. So, is this just a DR solution and they lost data or have they just messed things up? I smell that someone actually MANUALLY updates this list, but hey, they can’t be that crazy, can they?

Time for some updates on the Office Roadmap again, these updates was actually published yesterday, but since writing these blog posts isn’t what pays for the bread on my table I needed to do other stuff before writing this. Last week the location of the Roadmap changed and today there seems to be some issues with the site; you can now find it at https://fto365siteprod.azurewebsites.net/roadmap. There are some real highlights here and as usual some Yammer funkiness…

Hello and welcome back to an awesome new year – 2016 is here and we have our first Office Roadmap update. First things first; the Office Roadmap URL has changed. The new home for the Office 365 Roadmap is: http://fasttrack.office.com/roadmap. As usual when it comes to changes on the Office level - the communication is kinda poor. Ye olde URL just now gives you an error. Didn’t someone think about having a redirect or something from success.office.com to the new home at fasttrack.office.com. Anyways, let’s take a look on what has changed since the last post in December.

A christmas update to the Office Roadmap! It looks like Microsoft has abandoned their bi-weekly update schedule and is now updating whenever they can (please, I got a job to do!). This time it’s a few new thingies but mostly a clean up of old released stuff. Happy holidays everyone! Changes 2015-12-18 Now Launched Analyze Office 365 data with Equivio Zoom: the eDiscovery features now allows you to integrate Equivio machine learning capabilities. This is some cool stuf that I need to experiment with. The compliance and eDiscovery fetaures of Office 365 is just getting stronger and stronger. (From in development) FastTrack | Improving Intune onboarding with MDM: Get on board the Office 365 train even faster with improved Intune onboarding stuff (from in development) Rolling out Office 365 Protection Center: The Compliance center is renamed to Protection Center. A very good move since the features of the Compliance center is expanding so much. Also a new and improved UI is on the way. (New) Removal of Delivery Reports from Outlook on the web: Delivery reports of mail will be removed from OWA. It will remain in the Outlook client though. I don’t mind if they kill of this feature totally. It’s just annoying and since you can always decline to send a delivery report it has no purpose. (new) Unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business: Unlimed, limited, unlimited…the story goes on. Read the full post here. That post is written by the Office chieftain Jeff Teper, compared to previous OneDrive posts, so it might be true… (from in development) Work Management in Office 365: Planner is rolling out to all First Release customers. Wohoo. Note that it is a preview rolling out. More info. (from in development) In Development Manage Yammer licenses in Office 365: Yammer licensing on a per user bases. I interpret that as we can turn off Yammer for most of our users. This is not a new thing or changed thing, just a rename of the title and description. New Yammer User Onboarding and Sign Up Experience: Yet another of the things we complained about for years are now being fixed in Yammer. Somehow I think the Yammer team are feeling how they slowly are being drowned and now finally with the last bits of air they have are trying to get their head over the surface, trying to survive… (new) Office 365 Groups: Outlook on the Web and Outlook Groups app user interface improvements: A better UX for Groups – very welcome, especially for large organizations (new) Real time presence for PowerPoint: No description available (new) Real Time presence in PowerPoint for desktop: No descriotion available (new) Skype Meetings: This one is interesting. “Free online meetings from Skype for Business…”. What does this mean? At least I can set up meetings using Skype today…Anyone? (new) Moved off into the Previously Released list Add-in deployment via Click-to-Run Automatic Relationship Detection Automatic Time Grouping Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) integration for Click-to-Run Click-to-Run manageability gaps addressed for IT pros Clutter for your inbox on by default Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience Create and Edit Comments in Excel Modile for iPad Custom Tiles Deferred Updates ExpressRoute for Office 365 FastTrack | Providing the customer success service FastTrack | Request Service Onboarding Getting started experience in Visio Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016 Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016 Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016 New and Modern Charts New capabilities for Yammer iOS app October 2015 Improvements in Excel Mobile for Windows October 2015 Improvements in Excel Online Office 365 Groups: mobile app Office 365 Help Pane Office 365 Notification Pane Office 365 Video Office 365 Video – Embed Office 365 Video Update OLAP Connection Support in Power View Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web Organization support card Outlook for Android opens IRM protected emails Outlook for iOS opens IRM protected emails PivotChart Drill-Down Navigation (this one was never on the list previous to this) PivotTable Field Search Producer controls for Skype Meeting Broadcast Purchase & Subscriptions Experience Refresh Quick data linking in Visio Real-time Co-authoring in Skype for Business Real-time Yammer group activity indicators Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio Search Refiners in Outlook Web App SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters Skype for Business for iOS Smart Rename in Power Pivot Subscription Management Experience refresh Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016 Sway for Windows Document Import Top teacher-requested features added to OneNote Class Notebooks UserVoice coming to Outlook on the web Video Based Screen Sharing Yammer for Apple Watch Yammer Next Group Notifications Yammer to use Azure Media Services for Video Encoding

Third update in about a week on the Office Roadmap, and just as the last update this one isn’t that big. A couple of “fixes” and two new things Changes 2015-12-11 Rolling out Multi-select Attachments in Outlook 2016: This was “Launched” a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s not. Perhaps a new category – “Rolling Out”? (from Launched) Public Folder eDiscovery & In-Place Hold: Compliance search on public folders. Wasn’t public folders dead? (from In Development) In Development Office 365 Connectors: One of my absolute favorite new features as of lately. I blogged about this one a couple of weeks back. Keep an eye on this one peeps! (new) Yammer user profile update from Azure AD: “All key properties from Azure Active Directory users will be one way synchronized to Yammer. “. I quoted it directly. So, is this a one way, as in one time, or can you override the profile properties? At least they are listening on stuff we asked for years ago… (new)

More updates on the Office Roadmap! This time around just a few ones but also some interesting things to notice. But before we list the updates let’s take a look at the actual roadmap site that has received an update which should make it easier for you to filter and find out what’s new. This is a very welcome update and could possibly make the roadmap site useful, but I’m sad to say unless they have a proper change log. I’m not going to bother that much but instead rely on my own blog :-)

December updates incoming! The Office Roadmap has once again been updated and this time with quite a few new additions to the roadmap. Note that there is very anticipated and important updates to Office 365 Groups - have a read and enjoy!! Changes 2015-12-14 Now Launched Capacity Management capabilities in Project Online: Colored heatmaps and stuff in Project Online (from Rolling out) Compliance Search Conditions: Improved search experience in the compliance center (from Rolling out) Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: Data loss prevention features in the Office client (Excel, PowerPoint and Word). Cool! (from Rolling out) DKIM Outbound for Exchange Online Protection: outbound validation of e-mails (from Rolling out) FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive from Google Drive: Fast track center now offers migration from Google Drive to OneDrive (from In Development) FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion: onboarding guidance for PSTN Conferencing and Calling Plans, Cloud PBX etc (from In Development) FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding: RMS Onboarding, isn’t this just checking a check box? (from In Development) FastTrack | Project Online Onboarding: Get them projects in the cloud (from Rolling out) New per-user licensing for Sway: license Sway per user! Which essentially means, we can now shut down Sway on a per user basis. (from In Development) Office 2013 Windows client modern authentication public preview: ADAL based sign in for ye old Office client (2013) is now in PUBLIC PREVIEW. (From Rolling out) Office 365 Groups: auditing: Office 365 audit reports now includes changes in Office 365 Groups. This is huge in making Office 365 ready for enterprises. Go Groups! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: Support compliance requirements: Another awesome Groups update. You can now put holds on Groups - which will put a hold on mailboxes, files, calendars etc in the Group! (From In Development) OneNote Online: Record Audio clips & Insert File: OneNote Online is a bit more pimped with Audio clips (NEW) Project Online content pack for PowerBI: Project Online data in PowerBI - a match made in the clouds (from In Development) Resource Engagement Workflow in Project Online: improvements for Resource Managers in Project Online (from Rolling Out) Sway admin controls over Insert tab content sources: Important enterprise focused update of Sway that allows admins to control from where the Sway users can insert data (from In Development) Sway in Service Health Dashboard: Sway traffic lights in the admin portal (from In Development) Rolling out Multiple timeline bars in Project Online: a new and pimped and more efficient timeline bar in Project Online (from In Development) Office 365 Groups: creation policy in Azure Active Directory: A new policy option in Azure AD that allows admins to restrict group creation to certain users. Previously this could only be controlled through the Exchange policy settings - but that policy only affected creation through Exchange, Outlook and the Outlook Groups app. This new policy applies to all endpoints (read Microsoft Graph, PoSh etc). (NEW) Office 365 Groups: dynamic membership: AWESOME! We will be able to create Office 365 Groups and base them on dynamic memberships, for instance have all users with the value “Project Manager” in their title in one group etc. (NEW) Office 365 Groups: naming policies for aliases: the naming policies only applied to the display name of the group previously, now it will also apply to the e-mail alias. (NEW) Office 365 Multi-Channel Catalog Support:: Improvement to the Education, Government (Public), and Charity sections allowing them to purchase any commercial service (NEW) In Development FastTrack | Office 365 ProPlus Upgrade Assistance: Onboarding center will help ProPlus customers to upgrade to the 2016 version. **giggles** (NEW) Office 365 Admin app - Group functionality: Group Administration is coming to the Admin App (from In Development, previously this one was called Office 365 Admin app updates October 2015) Office 365 Admin app - Push Notifications for Message Center: opt-in or out to push notifications (NEW) Office 365 Groups: data classification & extensible policy: This one is HUGE folks. And it just explains how important Office 365 Groups is for Microsoft and Office 365. This update states that we will be able to classify Groups (secret, confidential, unclassified etc) AND we will have the option to specify an endpoint that is called whenever a Group is created! BOOM! Take that Yammer! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: deletion recovery: get them Groups back from the dead with a single click (NEW) Office 365 Groups: expire inactive groups: Awesomeness just keep coming! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: files quota management: Get better control of the amount of data your groups use (NEW) Office 365 Groups: general usage reporting: Usage and Engagement reports in the Admin Center (NEW) Office 365 Groups: hidden membership support: Currently the membership is open, this update will allow you to have hidden memberships, very good for privacy reasons (NEW) Office 365 Groups: mobile application management: The Outlook Groups app will be a managed app in Intune (NEW) Office 365 Groups: multi-domain support: This one has been high on my whish list. Have control of the e-mail domain used by the Groups (NEW) Office 365 Groups: naming policy in Azure Active Directory: the description on this one is a copy of the dynamic membership one, see above, but I do think it is about having the naming policies not only in Exchange but also in AAD. (NEW) Office 365 Groups: Office Delve discovery & insight: Groups in Delve! Can’t beat that! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: usage guidelines: Better options for you to have guidelines about the usage of Groups within your organization. I’m thinking like the TOU in Yammer. So one more feature from Yammer is moving into Groups (NEW) Outlook on the web: Addition of “Distribution Groups” Option and Removal of “Other” link: Just a re-org of the menus in OWA. (NEW) Per user licensing for Yammer: I see this as we can now turn of Yammer and only let the handful of people that still likes it use it… (NEW) Project Online - Portfolio Dashboard: More reports based on best practices and industry standards (NEW) Project Online - Portfolio Dashboard for iPad: Same as above but for the illiterate. (NEW) Skype for Business Mac Client Preview: Them Appleheads will love this, we gotta give them a chance to participate in our meetings sometime :). (NEW)

Updates! Yes, updates! After some awesome announcements at the Connect(); 2015 conference the Office Roadmap is updated with some news, and a decent bunch of additions, specifically some nice new stuff in the In Development bucket. Love the Yammer updates - looks like someone has been listening after all, or have they - read the fine prints… Changes 2015-11-20 Now Launched Contact sync for Outlook for Android: Outlook for Android now syncs contacts to the native contacts application. Finally, this is great news. (New) Enforce Office 365 Identity in Yammer: An important and long anticipated (it only took a couple of years) update to Yammer and identities. No need for separate Yammer SSO settings. Click here for more information. (New) EU Model Clauses and HIPAA BAA Availability for All Yammer Customers: Another Yammer update, also this one is VERY important. With this update Yammer is getting aligned with the rest of Office 365 in terms of customer data protection. (New) Likes Coming to Outlook on the web: No more +1 e-mails? We’re certainly on the right path at least (From Rolling out) Mentions Available in Outlook on the web: Make it possible to @mention people in OWA. (From Rolling out) Multi-select Attachments in Outlook 2016: Surprised this feature actually wasn’t in there. Use Ctrl to multi select attachments (New) Persian calendar support in Outlook 2016: More calendar options, now with Persian support (New) Set Automatic Replies in Outlook for iOS & Android: You can now set Automatic replies in Outlook on your fruitphones or droids. (from In Development) Rolling Out Designer: Described as “a feature that will essentially allow you to deliver beautiful and impactful presentations with little to no experience”. This is a bit weird, it is the same description as the new “PowerPoint Designer - Desktop” feature below. (New) New Office 365 Admin Center Preview: The new Admin center rolls out. For more info see Marcs great post on IT-Unity. (From Launched!) November Improvements in Excel Mobile for Windows: This is something you don’t see often, updates to mobile apps on Windows (New) Office 365 ISO 27001 and 27018 Audit Report: information security reports. I doubt any other cloud productivity provider are even close to what Microsoft and Office 365 is doing now (New) Office 365 Video - Yammer settings per channel: Finally! No more posts of secured video details onto public Yammer groups… (New) PowerPoint Designer - Desktop: The PowerPoint people get some love, it’s not all Sway yet. For more information see blogs.office.com (New) PowerPoint Morph - Desktop: The second part of the new PowerPoint awesomeness. For more information see blogs.office.com (New) Preview_Office 365 Customer Security Considerations Refrence Guide: A new part of the Service Trust Portal in form of a security considerations reference guide. (New) In Development Add-in only authorization policy for Project Online: AppOnly policies for Project Online. This opens up quite a few new Project Online opportunities. (New) Archive button in Outlook 2016: The Outlook 2016 client will get the same nifty archive button as the mobile Outlook clients have. Browse and join Groups in Outlook 2016: You will in the future not only see your Groups in Outlook 2016. You will now also be able to see the ones you have not joined, and then join them. Hooray! (New) Circular Yammer User Profile Pictures: One of these important Yammer updates! I’m glad they are spending money on A/B testing a circular picture instead of a square one. Seriously, just do it and move on with more important stuff, such as USING THE PICTURE FROM OFFICE 365!!! (new) Dark theme for Outlook 2016: Get your darker sides on in Outlook 2016. (New) Directory pictures in Outlook 2016 search suggestions: This is a nice feature, see profile pictures when searching for people (New) Exchange Online Protection- Zero Day auto-purge: The Exchange team continues to impress with handling different kind of threats. (New) New Yammer group experiences: More Yammer UX updates. Each Group will now have its own inbox - wow… (New) Office 365 Video - Analytics, phase one: Insights on your videos - awesome (New) Office 365 Video - Channel Recycle Bin: Channels are just site collections and we will be able to recover the channels just as normal site collections Office 365 Video - Choose Your Own Thumbnail: choose one of several auto-generated thumbnails or upload your own (New) Office 365 Video - Deploy in US Government zone (GCC) & China datacenters: China and US Government can soon build their own Video portals. (New) Office 365 Video - Improved upload experience: The video portal will get a centralized upload center, with more details about the upload (New) Office 365 Video - Owner and People Metadata: This will be great improvement to the service and hopefully make search even more interesting. (New) Office 365 Video - Upload your own subtitle files: Subtitles! Office 365 Video is becoming a real video portal (webvtt format). This will also be integrated with search so you can search in videos. Cool! (New) Optimizing Yammer Inbox for Team Collaboration: Yammers attempt to change the way the inbox works. Removal of the “Mark as Unread” and replace it with a “Read Later”. Holy crap! So they didn’t listen to the massive feedaback on a “Mark all as read” feature. I think I just the last little hope for Yammer… (New) Sites Tile Page Update - Recent and Suggested Sites: The Sites tile in the App Launcher and Sites page will get a long anticipated face lift with the inclusion of a “Recent sites” feature. (New) Yammer Group Administrator Onboarding: A Yammer group admin guide. Is this really necessary? If it is needed then something else in creating a group is wrong. (New) Yammer Group Inbox View: Third update on basically the same topic. Yammer is redoing the Inbox… (New)

Wow, what a day for developers in the Office 365 land! Tons of new features was announced at the Microsoft Connect(); 2015 virtual conference. We’ve seen the GA of the Microsoft Graph and a bunch of new API’s added to the Microsoft Graph beta end-point and more. One of the features that I really have been waiting for is the Office 365 Connectors for Groups and the Office 365 Connector Cards. The Office 365 Connectors for Groups allows users of Office 365 Groups to add integrations to their Office 365 Groups. Connectors can be seen as services and events that you subscribe to and then the services when certain events happens posts information to the Group activity feed. There are a set of pre-configured Connectors that anyone can add or you can create your own Connector and customize it for your needs. For instance there are built-in Connectors for Twitter, Github, RSS feeds and Trello. The possibilities for this is endless!

Office Roadmap updates again! This time I’m reporting this from the MVP summit in Redmond. A couple of new and exciting things added to the In Development list! Changes 2015-11-05 Now Launched Clutter for your inbox on by default: For tenants/users that have the Clutter feature it will from now on be on by default Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: Visio is getting even sexier with dark themes, Delve and High DPI support FastTrack | Providing the customer success service: Get Microsofts help to start your Office 365 experience Getting started experience in Visio: Visio n00b improvements Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: We now have direct support in Visio to protect our most valuable assets Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: use F6 to work faster in Visio Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web: Pretty soon OWA will be favored over Outlook Outlook for Android opens IRM protected emails: Really important feature rolled out for Android Quick data linking in Visio: Make your Visio diagrams rock Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: New and slick stencils for architecture draqwings SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters: internal service change but a really important one Sway for Windows Document Import: Something with Sway Yammer to use Azure Media Services for Video Encoding: Ooops, a Yammer update Rolling out Compliance Search Conditions: Improved Compliance search is rolling out Delve People Experiences - Praise: The Praise features is now rolling out in the Delve experience. FastTrack | Project Online Onboarding: FTC will now start onboarding Project projects Inline OneDrive attachment preview for Outlook on the web: Awesome new OWA features Mentions Available in Outlook on the web: Another of the social features are now in OWA Office 365 detailed usage reports: Even more detailed reports are rolling out. I can’t wait to see how we can use this to improve the adoption rate Office 365 My Account updates: The new My Account page gives you great details and control of you Office 365 accounts OneNote Online: Record Audio clips & Insert File: New OneNote features are being rolled out. New on the Roadmap PowerPoint Online: Ongoing improvements: New on the road map and it promises to make formatting better, include more symbols and faster slide interaction Word Online: Improving feature capabilities: Also new on the road map. Improvements in Word that includes image resize handlers, improved autosave and more, but most interestingly a lot of improvements in co-authoring performance In Development Delve Analytics: Brand new addition on the road map and a really cool one. For E5 customers (or E1/E3 with an add-on) you will get awesome analytics on how you organization collaborates FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive from Google Drive: New option get the h**l out of Google Drive FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive for Business from File Shares: New FastTrack migration option from file share to users OneDrives FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online Team Sites from File Shares: Same as above but for Team Sites (Groups?) FastTrack | Improving Intune onboarding with MDM: FastTrack will support Intune when doing onboarding. Multiple timeline bars in Project Online: I have no idea how this is supposed to work but it looks like you can add heatmaps and other stuff… (was previously called New Timeline view in Project) Project Online content pack for PowerBI: Bring Project Online data directly into PowerBI. Sounds neat SharePoint/OneDrive for Business file activity report: Admin reports that allows you to see what your users do in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business Moved off into the Previously released list Inline Service Health for Support Request Creation Proactive notification of Outlook version - weird, this is moved from In Development! Did it ever roll out?

Almost a month has passed since we had the last update on the Office Roadmap and quite a lot of things has happened. There are some new things this time and also some clean up of the items. Make sure you read through the In Development section, there are some hidden gems as well as the stuff that has disappeared!! Changes 2015-10-20 Now Launched Automatic Relationship Detection: Make it easier to detect relations between two models with no relationships configured Automatic Time Grouping: All these new Power* are rolling out now. Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) integration for Click-to-Run: A great update to optimize network traffic for C2R. New. Click-to-Run manageability gaps addressed for IT pros: More of the Office 2016 updates to optimize C2R is now “officially” launched. Configurable push notifications for Office 365 Admin app: What no Apple Watch integration yet? Custom Tiles: A fantastic idea but worst implementation ever. Yes, you can create custom Tiles for the App Launcher - but each and every user needs to manually pin it to their App Launcher #fail Deferred Updates: Only allow monthly security updates and defer feature upgrades ExpressRoute for Office 365: Improve the SLA of your network connection to Office 365 by having a dedicated route for your traffic Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016: Sync slider, just the name of it sounds cool. Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel: You can now use the keyboard with pivot tables and slicers in Excel! Keyword & People search suggestions in Outlook 2016: Better search in Outlook 2016. Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016: Directly tag e-mails as Clutter from Outlook 2016, if your inbox has Clutter enabled. Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016: Best productivity feature in the Office 2016 suite New and Modern Charts: Modern charts, such as Waterfall… New Office 365 Admin Center Preview: Interesting. This preview is said to be launched - that is ON ALL TENANTS - but I have yet not seen it on any of mine. Mayhaps one of the US only things. Office 365 Help Pane: I really like the “What’s new” thing. Keeps you and your users up to date with changes. Office 365 Notification Pane: Notifications everywhere in Office 365 - now if only we had an API for this. OLAP Connection Support in Power View: OLAP and PowerView - a wet dream for the BI people Organization support card: Get your helpdesk details into the Office 365 Help pane. Really great feature. PivotTable Field Search: Can’t get enough of these PivotTable and BI stuff… Producer controls for Skype Meeting Broadcast: A surprise to me. Is this really launched? Purchase & Subscriptions Experience Refresh: I’ve said it before, the refresh is not as fresh as you want, specifically it is not very user friendly Real-time Co-authoring in Skype for Business: co-author like a champ! Search Refiners in Outlook Web App: Not only better search in the Outlook 2016 client but also in Outlook on the web. Skype for Business for iOS: I’ve seen people cheer in joy for this! Smart Rename in Power Pivot: Rename stuff smart… Subscription Management Experience refresh: A good and intuitive UI Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016: Great update for all you Windows 10 7" screen users Top teacher-requested features added to OneNote Class Notebooks: I have not tried the OneNote class things, but I’m sure this is really awesome! Video Based Screen Sharing: P2P sharing of video content Rolling out Advanced administrative controls for archiving: Support for SEC 17a-4 record retention (new) Android: Android for Work compliance with multi profile support: support for Android for Work (don’t know what this is, but I bet it’s useful) (new) Android: Android M Enterprise compliance: More Android stuff (new) Android: Easy Sign-in, Sign-up: Never a bad idea to make things easy, especially when it comes to the Android platform (new) Android: Presenter view: Present your deck from your Droid (new) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in SharePoint Online: This has been in the works for a long time, now finally rolling out. DLP in SharePoint - Policy Management: Public preview targeted for September 2015 Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web: A smarter file picker that allows you to automate steps when saving attachments Task Notifications in Project Online: Project Online gets task notifications and daily digests Unique Project IDs in Project Online: Auto generated unique and readable Project IDs (new) In Development Android: Deeper Integration with Outlook: quick edit of e-mail attachments (new)

And is Yammer dead? It is now three and a half years since Microsoft acquired Yammer and I think this is the end of Yammer, as a product/service. Let me explain myself, to avoid the flame war and hate mails that happened when I shared that my thoughts in the Team Sites are dead post. I think Yammer as a brand will stay for a while, it’s a strong brand and it’s worked into so many PowerPoint decks from Microsoft that it would be hard to wash that away. But as a product or service Yammer is no longer of interest. I claim this due to a number of facts and observations over the last few years. People who follow me on social media cannot have avoided how I’ve been pretty aggressive in my comments about this product and I’m by no means alone.

Hey, look at that - a surprise update of the Office Roadmap! This time around we just have a couple of minor updates AND a couple of features that actually is removed from the Roadmap - all related to FastTrack. My guess someone was to trigger happy earlier this month when releasing this… Changes 2015-09-28 These features are no longer listed on the roadmap! FastTrack | Yammer Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Project Online onboarding FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding FastTrack | Adoption planning services FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business All that is left of the FastTrack items are

The second update of the Office Roadmap this months is now live. This time a huge set of features that are rolling out, most of them has to do with the updated Office ProPlus client (2016). There are some hidden gems in this such as the “Likes” in OWA, huge Sway licensing changes and (the not so hidden) announcement of Office 365 Planner. Changes 2015-09-25 Now Launched Cortana & Office 365 Productivity Scenarios: The Cortana and Office 365 feature should now be launched (from rolling out). I’ve yet to seen what it actually does. Office 365 Groups: mobile app: Love it! We have the Office 365 Groups mobile app, called Outlook Groups available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone (on some platforms only available on select markets). Office 365 Service Trust Portal: A new portal with even more information about trust, compliance, certifications etc. Important for Company admins can log in to the portal, Service Trust Portal, to give other users access to the portal. It is implemented as an Azure AD app and it actually requires some interesting permissions on your Azure AD to be able to use it. Brand new on the roadmap. Office 365 Setup Enhancements: the new migration options are now fully launched Office 365 Setup Wizard: the more streamlined getting-started and setup guide is live. Office 365 Video: most likely the service that has taken the longest time to fully roll out. Video! It’s here… Office 365 Video - Embed: The video embed features should be available for everyone Office 365 Video Update: Everyone should also have the updated Video experience in their tenants by now. Yammer for Apple Watch: Yawn! If you are the one user using this, please contact me so I can find out why… Rolling out Automatic Relationship Detection: PivotTable stuff, for those who are interested I guess this is a big del. Automatic Time Grouping: Same here, but for PivotCharts… Colorful Office theme: This sounds like a small thing, but it is actually huge. Each Office ProPlus/2016 client application now has it’s own color scheme (Word - blue, PowerPoint - red, Excel - green etc). One of the feedbacks I heard from customers about Office 2013 was the white theme - no one liked it. I really fancy this new colorful theme, with a subtle color on each app which makes it much easy on the eyes. Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: Anything with Visio is a good thing Dark theme: Welcome to the dark side. If you liked to old app Darkroom, you’ll like this. Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: DLP on the desktops for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Nice addition! Deferred Updates: If you don’t want to be on the latest and greatest you can now defer feature updates for the Office client. Easy Enable for Data Analysis Add-Ins: More Power[View|Pivot|Map] improvements Getting started experience in Visio: Visio for everyone! Higher DPI support for 250% and 300%: Ok, this must be in preparation for Surface Pro 4 (Staffan, I just dropped my Surface 3…) Improved conflict resolution in PowerPoint: Conflict resolution in PowerPoint has been a mess, especially with those Management Consultant slides… Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016: How about that, think about being the PM for the “sync slider”. Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: RMS and Visio! Gotta keep those drawings secure! Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel: The Excel BI team has been on fire Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: Visio is getting closer to be one first class citizen in the Office family Keyword & People search suggestions in Outlook 2016: better integration with the Office 365 backend in Outlook 2016 for search to give you even better and more relevant results Likes Coming to Outlook on the web: This is a new feature on the Roadmap and I think I like it! You can give an e-mail “Thumbs up” and this will be preserved. This is likely to prevent all those “+1” e-mails. Making it easier to share files and collaborate: This is one of the better improvements in Office 2016 - the updated Share pane which combines sharing and co-authoring information Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016: I occasionally see this feature in the new 2016 client. For instance yesterday when doing a demo of that feature, it was not there… Math Input Control: A cool feature for students and scientists Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016: The number one productivity improvement in Outlook 2016. Attach you recent documents in a few clicks without actually sending attachments. More secure translation options: I’m surprised this hasn’t been in there before, but now the information from your documents is sent of SSL to services such as Bing and MS Research. Multi-factor authentication: Makes all users cry but security officers jump in excitement New and Modern Charts: How many different chart types can there really be? New capabilities on Yammer Android app: The Yammer people are still struggling to entice the Android crowd - ever heard of Office 365 Groups and the new Outlook Group app? New Chinese and Japanese Default Fonts: New updated modern fonts New Forecasting Capabilities: Excel again! New Office 365 Admin Center Preview: Another new addition to the roadmap. All Office 365 Admins will soon have the new admin center experience in their tenants. During the transition you will have a link in the old portal to the new one OLAP Connection Support in Power View: More PowerView Optimized file picker in Outlook Web App: A really good file picker in OWA that allows you to more easily add attachments from your OneDrive for instance Pan and zoom while loading large charts/SmartArt: SmartArt improvements PivotTable Field Search: No comments needed, more Excel stuff Quick data linking in Visio: Make it easier to hook up data to your VIsio shapes Quick Shape Formatting: More style presets in Word, Excel and PowerPoint Read-only mode for Excel: Open Excel more faster Real time co-authoring in Word: Microsoft is catching up with other services, this is a neat feature - and it actually works Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: About time…I’m dead tired of the 3D server shapes Smart Lookup for Office: Contextual research options in Word, Excel and PowerPoint Smart Rename in Power Pivot: PowerPivot… Support for multi-selection of Slicer items using touch: Touch my Excel! Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016: Optimizations of Outlook 2016 for small screen devices. Tell Me: It’s like Cortana but for Office, use Tell me to find that function you need instead of clicking like crazy in the myriads of menus in Office In Development eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: No update on this one, except removal of a comma in the text New per-user licensing for Sway: New on the roadmap and this is a significant one. “Sway will soon switch to a per-user licensing model, so that organizations no longer have to choose whether to have Sway enabled for the entire organization vs. nobody at all”. A good move and all you Service Managers out there you need to plan for this one. So you don’t get the same confusion as when Microsoft initially launched this product to everyone (that is a dumb move that we will just have to get used with,…) Office 365 Admin app updates October 2015: We will see Groups administration in the next wave of the admin app. Like it! Real-time Co-authoring in Skype for Business: First of all - whoever wrote this description need to read it again - worse English than mine. Ok, this is a new thing on the Roadmap and my interpretation of the lousy description is that it could be something really cool Reassign Sways from deleted user: New on the roadmap. With this update you should be able to actually reassign the ownership of Sways to users that is removed from your tenant Video Based Screen Sharing: New on the roadmap: P2P based Video Based Screen Sharing. Work Management in Office 365: The Office 365 Planner announcement,. I can’t stress how excited I am about this one. Think of it like Trello in Office 365 Groups. Can’t wait to start using it!!! Read the full Planner announcement here.

Almost a month has gone since Microsoft did an update to the Office Roadmap. But fear no more, it is here stuffed with new and interesting stuff. It’s quite a long list this time around. A lot of them are just Office 2016 features that we’ve known about for some time, but now added to this Roadmap. But also some really interesting FastTrack features, with very sparse descriptions. Changes 2015-09-09 Now Launched About Me Update and New Authoring Tool: The updated About Me, part of Delve, is now fully launched, including the new Stories authoring tool. Unfortunately totally missed out on communicating this new and actually really great way of composing content - kind of like a mix of Sway and a blog tool. (Started rolling out in April) Azure AD Sync for Yammer: Finally Yammer is in some way in sync with Azure AD and disabled/deleted accounts will now be suspended in Yammer (new on the roadmap) Major update to Outlook Web App: Outlook on the web has a new UX (from In development) Office 365 Admin app updates: the regular admin app updates, this time support for logging in to multiple tenants Office 365 Admin App Updates for June: the admin app June updates Outlook for iOS opens IRM protected emails: the iOS version of Outlook now supports reading, managing and creating IRM protected e-mails. (new) Search Suggestions in Outlook Web App: type ahead with recommendations in OWA (from rolling out) UserVoice coming to Outlook on the web: provide user feedback to UserVoice directly in the OWA interface (from in development) Weather Bar in Outlook Web App: now shows the local weather in OWA (from in development) Rolling out Apps for Project Pro for Office 365 write support: write-back support fro Apps for Project Pro for Office 365. Nice enhancement! (from in development) Capacity Management capabilities in Project Online: heatmaps and colors in Project Online for better predictions of resource utilization (from in development) FastTrack | Request Service Onboarding: you can now request setup help directly from within the admin center and get on board the Office 365 train fast and for free. (new) Multiple timeline bars in Project Pro for Office 365: more GUI stuff for all them project managers (from in development) Office 365 Setup Enhancements: improvements in the setup wizard for mail migrations (from in development) Resource Engagement Workflow in Project Online: better management for resource management and planning (from in development) Subscription Management Experience refresh; a new card view when working with subscriptions. In my opinion a far worse experience than before, the card view is just annoying. (from in development) In Development Add-in deployment via Click-to-Run: a few add-ins/apps can now be deployed via the C2R method (new) Archiving in Office 365 for 3rd-party data: Office 365 will support archiving of Twitter, Yammer, Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleTalk, DropBox, Box, SalesForce, Chatter, SMS and more and more. This is huge for compliance and regulatory business! Big thumbs up! (new) Automatic Relationship Detection: PivotTables and data and relationships. Some magic for all BI and Excel lovers. (new) Azure departmental template availability: department specific RMS/IRM templates. (new) Click-to-Run manageability gaps addressed for IT-pros: improvements to make the already stream-lined (pun intended) deployment even more streamlined (new) Colorful Office Theme: Not really new, just new on the roadmap. Office (C2R and 2016) has a new default Colorful Theme. I love this small but significant UX change. (new) Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: been here a while, previously it was rolling out, now it’s not… Dark Theme: an improved Dark theme in Office (C2R and 2016) (new) Data Gathering and Shaping Capabilities: Power Query, previously an add-on, is now included in Excel 2016. (new) Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: This is really cool, DLP is not just a cloud feature, it will be on our desktops as well. (new) Deferred Updates: Office 365 commercial customers can defer Office patches to allow more time for testing (new) Easy Enable for Data Analysis Add-Ins: BI, BI, Power this and Power that. All BI features will be enabled by just you thinking about them (new) FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business: No info yet but probably free migration to SPO (new) FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion: more free stuff (new) FastTrack | Adoption planning services: being just a migration and onboarding consultant is probably not the smartest move at the moment… (new) FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding: no info (new) FastTrack | Project Online Onboarding: no info (new) FastTrack | Providing the customer success service: no info (new) FastTrack | Yammer Onboarding Expansion: no info (new) Getting Started experience in Visio: no longer rolling out :-( Higher DPI support for 250% and 300%: Makes Office work better on high DPI screens (new) Improved conflict resolution in PowerPoint: making co-authoring even better, and for PowerPoint the conflict resolution has been really bad… Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016: who doesn’t like improved sliders!!! (new) Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: also rolled back from rolling out Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel: more Excel BI improvements (new) Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: new key to start use in Visio - F6 (new) Keyword & People search suggestions in Outlook 2016: simpler and more effective search in Outlook 2016 (new) Making it easier to share files and collaborate: one of my fav features in Office 2016 - sharing is easy!! (new) Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016: get rid of those annoying e-mails that you don’t care about (new) Math Input Control: for all you math geeks (new) Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016: if sharing is my fav feature this is way better - avoid attachments and sharing at the same time (new) More secure translation options: document translation, research pane and others now use SSL for transport security - about time!!! (new) Multi-factor Authentication: support for MFA in Office client (new) New and Modern Charts: new charts in Excel (new) New Chinese and Japanese Default fonts: Wingdings? (new) New forecasting capabilities: improved Excel 2016 forecasting (new) New timeline view in Project: improved timeline view in Project 2016 (new) Office 365 content pack for Power BI: combine Office 365 usage and user information and get some insights (new) Office 365 detailed usage reports: more and better reports (new) Office 365 Groups: Support compliance requirements: support for Office 365 Groups in the compliance center with retention and holds (new) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: new aggregated dashboard in the admin center (new) OLAP Connection Support in Power View: OLAP support in PowerView (new) Outlook for the web inline OneDrive attachment preview: better preview options in OWA (new) Pan and zoom while loading large charts/SmartArt:: no explanation needed (new) PivotTable Field Search: search and you will find (new) Quick data linking in Visio; one step connectivity for real time data (new) Quick Shape Formatting: more presets in Office 2016 (new) Read-only mode for Excel: open up an Excel document in SharePoint in read-only mode - what’s new with that!?? (new) Real time co-authoring in Word: it’s been said before but this is now real time co-authoring for real (new) Refresh stencils and smart shapes in Visio: another Visio thing that was in the rolling out section earlier Set Automatic Replies in Outlook for iOS & Android: get your OOOF’s rolling on the fruitphones and droids (new) Smart Lookup for Office: contextual lookups (new) Smart Rename in Power Pivot: rename stuff in PowerPivot, probably really good feature, I don’t know (new) Support for multi-selection of Slicer items using touch: Slicers, BI and touch - sounds like a wet dream to many (new) Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016: looking forward to testing this on my 7" Windows 10 tablet (new) TellMe: Kindof Cortana but limited to the Office Ribbon :-) (new) Moved off to the Previously Released list NDR backscatter protection Office 365 ProPlus user activation management Public Folder calendar and contact access in OWA SharePoint Online storage usage model Skype for Business - Windows Phone Skype for Business Preview - Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling (US Only) Skype for Business Preview - PSTN Conferencing (US Only) Skype for Business Preview - Skype Meeting Broadcast Workload-specific admin roles That’s it. Twas a long post this time…

Updates to the roadmap, again! This time around it is all about Yammer. This major update of Yammer features that’s already rolled out or in development just shows how disconnected the Yammer and Office 365 teams are. Changes 2015-08-13 These are the changes since yesterday. Now Launched New Capabilities for Yammer iOS app: better photo and file sharing, better search, better this and better that. Directly to launched Real-time Yammer group activity indicators: a feature that’s been rolling out for a while, but still new on the roadmap. Tiny profile pics when people post stuff in groups. Directly to launched Yammer Next Group Notifications: another thing that’s been out there for a while, but new on the roadmap. Directly to launched Rolling Out Yammer for Apple Watch: if I had a Apple Watch this is one of the things I would never install on it. Most likely for all the cool kids (new) In Development Group Updates feed for Yammer mobile apps: Mobile Apps = Android or iOS, not win phone. This update allows for better possibilities to catch up on conversations Groups in Office 365 for Yammer: the long rumored Yammer integration with Office 365 Groups. One really interesting new thing that I for sure will keep an eye on! New capabilities on Yammer Android app: “…new capabilities that boost team collaboration”. If they say so,.., (new) Office Online multi-user coauthoring in Yammer: sigh - thou shalt not store and edit documents in yammer. (new) Yammer Discovery Feed: smells like Facebooks (annoying) algorithm to surface relevant conversations. (new) Yammer External Groups: allows you to invite external users to a group. Nice improvement, way better than external networks or the flexternals. (new) Yammer Group UI Redesign: “cleaner look to focus attention on high impact activity..:”, overall a good thing (new)

We have updates, and quite a few of them, to the Office Roadmap. Some clean up, some awesome Visio features rolling out and a set of new features in the In Development segment. Also noticeable quite a few of the “refresh” features and one cancelled item. Changes 2015-08-12 Now Launched NDR backscatter protection: has been rolling out for a while Office 365 Admin Center June Updates: the June stuff is launched Office 365 Store: launched. Verdict from customers - why does it have to be there, can’t we remove it? Office Online Edit in Yammer: Really dump feature that allows users to edit documents in Yammer - documents should never ever be stored in Yammer to start with! Public Folders: adding and removing favorites in OWA: Public folders? Didn’t someone say they were to be removed :) Rolling out Adding IRM protection to Visio file: sweet feature that now is rolling out and allows to protect your most important files. Coming from In Development Create and collaboration on Visio diagrams using Office like experience: more of them Visio goodies rolling out DKIM Outbound for Exchange Online Protection: better protection in ExO by digitally signed message headers Getting started experience in Visio: Visio, nuff said Office 365 Domain Purchase Experience: from in development Office 365 Settings pane: the third “pane” to be rolled out (Help, Notification and Settings). I just wonder when we are allowed to hook into these? Office 365 User Purchases: just buy it yourself if your IT department says no. From in development. Office 365 Video Embed: I don’t know about you but I’m getting confused. Rolling out, Launched, Rolling out… Purchase & Subscriptions Experience Refresh: a new user experience for the purchase and subscriptions pages are rolling out. Personally I had hard to find what I needed… Rapid data connectivity in Visio: Now, if only everyone had access to Visio Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: Metro? From In Development. Search Refiners in Outlook Web App: make it easier to find your stuff using refiners in OWA Search Suggestions in Outlook Web App: more OWA search goodness In Development Auto-Expanding Archives: new item on the roadmap that allows archives to automatically expand as needed. No mention of any specific service but I guess it is an Exchange Online thing :) Major update to Outlook Web App: Outlook Web App, or should I say Outlook on the web, will have major UX update coming (new) Mobile PDF annotation support for iOS: offline access and PDF editing support on iOS - those fruit fone users get all the fun… (new) Office 365 Admin app updates: focus this month is on… GROUPS! I’ve said it before - Groups is the future folks! (new) Office 365 app launcher refresh: New on the list! App launcher will be more like the Windows 10 Start menu with different sized tiles. Save to OneDrive for Business in Outlook for iOS and Android: new on the roadmap, wonder if these things get added to the Modern Mail client in Windows 10 (phone)? Subscription Management Experience refresh: even more modern design I presume… (new) Supervisory Review for financial and regulatory compliance: Wow, really cool and scary. This feature will allow auditors to look into a subset of users communications. (new) Uservoice coming to Outlook on the web: a link directly in OWA, sorry Outlook on the web, so users can give feedback to the OWA, sorry Outlook on the web, team. Cancelled Evolving the Outlook Web App options page: added in April, but no info on why this is cancelled Moved off the list into the Previously released Azure AD Reports Disable OneDrive for Business sync for unmanaged PCs Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection MDM for OneDrive for Business Mobile device management Office 365 Groups: Dynamic CRM integration Office 365 Groups: files improvement Office 365 Groups: improving visibility and management Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations Office 365 services hosted in Microsoft Australia datacenters Office Online Preview in Yammer Quarantine Message Body Preview Skype for Business Online Unified OneDrive API

It has been a while since Office 365 introduced the suite wide themes. These themes are applied on all services within the Office 365 suite, or at least the ones using the Suite Bar navigation. Up until the very last few weeks the suite wide theme has been something you can set but your SharePoint site owners and all end-users has been able to override them. Finally these things has been resolved and fixed (no info about this on the Office Roadmap, hence this blog post)!

In this post, in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series, I will leverage what we learned in the previous posts, combine it with some PowerShell magic and create some basic reports. You can use these reports as a base for your Office 365 Groups reporting in your organization. Note: all these reports require that you have connected to your Exchange Online tenant with appropriate permissions, see this post about more details.

As you might have noticed I’m a big fan of Office 365 Groups, aka Unified Groups. I do think they will play a major role in the future of Office 365 Collaboration. Office 365 Groups consists of many moving parts, some that are half baked, some that are not working at all and some that is a bit difficult to understand. In this series of posts, will be published over the next few weeks and after that when needed, I will describe how you as an Office 365 Admin can and should work with Office 365 Groups.

In the last post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I showed you how to manage the Unified Groups using PowerShell. Let’s continue on that journey and take a look at how you can manage the Group memberships using PowerShell. All membership management are done using the *-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlets, you can access them using PowerShell and connecting to Exchange Online as shown in the previous post. The cmdlets is at the moment that well documented. If that changes I’ll make sure to update this post (and please remind me).

One of the loudest complaints I hear from people when we talk about Groups is the lack of management features, so in this post in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you can manage your Unified Groups using PowerShell. In the previous post I actually already showed you how to use PowerShell to create Groups, but let’s take a step back. Connecting PowerShell to Exchange Online To start working with the Unified Groups in PowerShell we need to connect to Exchange Online and we do that by establishing a PowerShell session to a specific Uri, see code sample below, and then import that session to our local session. This means we do not have to install any PowerShell module or similar. This is how it should look like:

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you as an admin and your end-user can create Office 365 Groups. The option to allow end-users to create Unified Groups or not are determined by the Mailbox Policy, as described in a previous post. End-user creation of Office 365 Groups End-users have two ways of creating new Groups; either use the Office 365 web interface or using Outlook 2016 (works on the PC edition, not sure about Office on Macintosh). This is option is by default available for ANYONE within your organization, there is no granularity at all, there is no approval or anything.

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will talk about the small but important policies we can apply to Group creation. At the moment there is very little control of the actual Office 365 Group creation in Office 365. And this tends to be one really important aspect of the Unified Groups discussion - can we allow them or not? I do hope that I over the time can update this post with new and improved governance features.

This is the third post in my Office 365 Groups for Admins series and it will focus on one of the primary tasks an Office 365 Admin has to do once their tenant is up and running; should we allow our users to create Office 365 Groups or not? I’m not going to give you an answer to this. It is something you need to evaluate properly within your organization, but I do recommend that you initially always turn off Groups, so that you can get some governance into the game before promoting it to everyone.

In this first post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will show you where you have the different entry points for the Unified Groups. It’s important to understand this as it is important in the posts to follow. Office 365 Mail (end users) The first and perhaps the most obvious point of Office 365 Groups is in the Office 365 Mail application (Outlook Web App, OWA). On the left hand side you will see the Groups heading. Under that heading 10 of the Groups you are member of are shown, with your Favorites on top.

Some “small” updates this week on the Office Roadmap Changes 2015-07-22 Now Launched Office 365 Groups: Power BI Integration: A new and easier way for teams/groups to collaborate in Power BI. Directly to launched. In Development Office 365 User Purchases: An interesting new option for the Store. Individuals can with this feature in place “purchase and individually own a subscription to additional software”. Looks like if your manager doesn’t approve of your Visio request, you can buy it on your own :)

A week has gone since last update to the Office Roadmap and it looks like the Office 365 team is on a good pace. Changes 2015-07-16 These are the changes I’ve noticed on the Roadmap, including my personal comments/take on some of them. One big shocker here and it’s in the Cancelled section, check it out! Now Launched Multi-Tier Cloud Standard for Singapore: something brand new that is just for Singapore that is launched? No description at all on the Roadmap - I’ll get back with details. Quarantine Message Body Preview: last week rolling out and now fully rolled out. Exchange admins can now really easy preview stuff in quarantine. SharePoint Online storage usage model: “Auto” quotas are now fully rolled out Workload-specific admin roles: Also the new admin roles are fully rolled out Rolling Out Office 2013 Windows client modern authentication preview: new ADAL based AuthN is rolling out In Development Office Online Edit in Yammer: Allows you to edit documents directly in Yammer. New on the roadmap PSTN Calling in Skype for Business: US Only, more countries coming up, PSTN Call in feature. More awesome S4B features! Public Folders: adding and removing favorites in OWA: Who said Public Folders was dead! Cancelled Document Conversations for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: CANCELLED! No surprise to me. Another Yammer feature that is going in to the bin. If Microsoft can do a big write-down on Surface, they sure should do it on Yammer as soon as possible. From Rolling Out. Moved off into Previously Released (Added since original post)

Hello everyone and hope you’re not reading this, it’s summer time and great weather, except in Sweden of course. We have some updates to the Office Roadmap today, the first set of updates in FY16 for Microsoft. Last week I complained about Microsoft changing URL’s to the roadmap site - they are now fixed ;-) Changes 2015-07-09 This are the changes I’ve noticed since the 26th of June including my take on the additions and changes. A lot of Skype for Business stuff has been launched this time!

Some interesting summer news on the Office Roadmap this week. But first of all something that is not very cool at all; the Office roadmap URL has changed. I’ve used and linked to http://success.office.com/roadmap/, http://office.com/roadmap and http://success.office.com/roadmap/en-us but the only one that is working right now is http://success.office.com/en-us/roadmap/. Booh! Thou shalt not change URL’s without redirects… Changes 2015-06-26 This is the detected changes in the Roadmap. If you use the newly released feature on the Roadmap that shows the Recently Updated Features, you will see that it states about 50 changed features, since we don’t know their “algorithm” behind the feature, just ignore it and keep reading…

No updates to the Office Roadmap today! But - a new huge feature to the actual Roadmap page that might make these posts obsolete A new button has been added to the Roadmap page, called “Show only recently updated features”: Once you toggle the button it will show you only what has been updated since sometime (this is not specifically clear at the moment). Currently it only shows the last update from last week.

Updates to the Office Roadmap today as well. Changes 2015-06-11 Since yesterday, only one item has change, or rather been added to the Roadmap. In Development Office 365 Settings pane: the unification of all Office 365 services continue (time to forget SharePoint, Exchange etc). A new Settings Pane is in the works that contextually adjusts the settings depending on where you are in Office 365.

More updates to the Office Roadmap! This time around we have a few interesting new additions to the roadmap. Changes 2015-06-10 This is what has been added to roadmap since the last couple of days. Notice that all of these are new things on the Roadmap. Now Launched DMARC Support in EOP: DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, http://dmarc.org/) in EOP. Directly to launched! Rolling out OAuth and MFA for Outlook for iOS & Android: just as it sounds, the new ADAL based authentication is rolling out for iOS and Android In Development Advanced administrative controls for archiving: Enables SEC 17a-4 record retention. Allows you to make sure that policies as such are not turned off or removed Skype for Business conversations in the web experience: This was shown in a video the other day. Nice additions to the web UX. Office 365 Domain Purchase Experience: a better experience to get your hands on and purchase new domains without any 3rd party services Office 365 Video - Embed: Allows videos to be embedded outside the video portal, for instance in a team site. But the big news here is that this allows Kiosk users rights to view videos. Office 365 Store: This update will make it easier for users to buy third party applications directly from within Office 365. Users will see a new “store icon” in the Waffle. Finally some updates to the pretty lame and boring Office store. Moved off into the previously released Skype Developer platform

Summer is almost here, and I’m currently in the air over Hungary after a short but great weekend in Budapest. And the Office team in Redmond and all around the world keeps on pumping out updates. This is the summary of what has changed since the last update in May. If you’re into compliance or a Vision fans, there’s a great amount of new stuff added to the In Development category.

SharePoint Team Sites are dead, there you have it! The era when SharePoint Team Sites was the king of SharePoint and web based collaboration are over. SharePoint Team Sites are dead, I said it again. Ok, you might think this is a link bait, a scam or something else - it’s not. This is how I foresee the future of online collaboration in SharePoint Online/Office 365. Team Sites are based on a decade old construct in SharePoint. They allow a great flexibility and extensibility for the end users, but… …it requires a lot of training …it drives a lot of support …it drives a lot of consultancy hours (yes, I am/was one of those) …historically upgrades are extremely expensive …[fill in your own here] …do the end-users really need that much power?

Both Build and Ignite has passed and we finally have the first update on the Office Roadmap in a month. It’s quite a few new interesting things in the pipe this time and but no new Yammer features :) Changes 2015-05-15 Since the 15th of April the following items has changed on the Office Roadmap. Now Launched Change copy/paste behavior in the Outlook Web App: brand new updates directly to production. Changing how mixed content (images and text) are pasted in OWA. DLP in Office 365 to protect Externally classified content: from rolling out Edit Office 365 profile details page update: now fully launched Enhanced NDRs: from In Development Increase Message Size limit to 150 MB: from In Development Lync Web App support for Mac and Windows Chrome users: from Rolling Out MDM for OneDrive for Business: From Rolling Out Office 2013 client update to support passive authentication using SAML: from Rolling Out Office 365 Groups : Dynamics CRM integration: A brand new feature to Office 365 Groups! And it’s a good one. This new feature in CRM allows you to create Office 365 Groups to collaborate with team members that don’t have access to CRM. Read more here. Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: from In Development Partner Admin Center New Customer List Filters: from Rolling Out Recommend OneDrive for Business for Large Attachments: from In Development Rolling Out First Release Select people: directly to production. One of the best new enhancements, announced at Ignite, that allows you to have First Release per user instead of per tenant. Office 365 Groups : files improvements: new on the roadmap. Necessary improvements to Office 365 Groups, now if only content types were available in groups… Office 365 Notification Pane: did they do this properly this time? Office 365 Video Update: HTML5… we listened to your feedback… SharePoint Online storage usage model: from in development, allows you to have “Auto” quotas SharePoint Online uses Exchange Web Services to send mail: new kid on the block, will improve how the shared items e-mails are sent and perhaps not being classified as spam SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters: perhaps not the most exciting new feature, but a good one. Also a feature that will be available on-premises in SharePoint 2016 Skype for Business Online: from in development - just ye ole re-branding of Lync. Save to OneDrive for Business: from in development. Save to OD4B directly from OWA (Outlook Web App, not Office Web Apps). (Updated since the original post) In Development Custom Tiles: a new and highly requested feature. Once this one is rolling out you will be able to add links to the App Launcher Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection: Something new that will make all your Exchange admins excited. Read more. Inline Service Health for Support Request Creation: new feature that supposedly should help you not submitting requests to Microsoft. Office 365 Groups: mobile app: The roadmap doesn’t have much to say on this feature, but I guess the title says it all. Oh, did I hear someone say that Team Sites are dead? Update since the original post: “We’ll be delivering a mobile app that surfaces Outlook Group conversations and files across iOS, Android and Windows Phone by the end of 2015. “ Organization support card: new feature that allows you to add you own contact support details in the help pane of Office 365 Proactive notification of Outlook version: admins will now know if you are lazy and don’t update Outlook… Moved off to the list into Previously released Clutter control and admin capabilities Compliance Center for Office 365 DKIM Outbound for Exchange Online Protection Exchange Transport Rule: Recipient Notification Action Improved Yammer thread visuals with Card View for iOS/Android Lync Online Active User Activities Report MAPI over HTTP for Outlook 2013 and Exchange Online New preview features for Power BI Office 365 Admin App Update Office 365 Groups Notebook OneDrive for Business Sync for Mac Outlook Web App options update Removing Deleted Items Retention Period RMS support for document libraries Sign-In Page Branding and Self Service Password Reset Skype for Business desktop application update Touch Design Enhancements for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Yammer groups prioritization Yammer support for Android Wear devices

It was a couple of weeks since last, but this time we got some major updates on the Office Roadmap, following the recent announcement on the Office blogs. Changes 2015-04-15 Since the 26th of March, these are the changes. Quite a few of them… Now Launched Bulk Updates in Project Online: Directly to launched status Improvements to Demand Management in Project Online: Another Project thingie, directly to launched Changing support for LinkedIn in Outlook: LinkedIn connections in Outlook no longer supported, another that went directly to launched Clutter Control and admin capabilities: from rolling out Document deletion policies for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: A really interesting and important feature, now live Lync Online Active User Activities Report: previously rolling out MAPI over HTTP for Outlook 2013 and Exchange Online: one of the oldest things on the roadmap now rolling out More control over Sent Items for Shared Mailboxes: from in development New preview features for Power BI: from rolling out Option for Passwords to Never Expire: new on the list the last time, but now launched Removing Deleted Items Retention Period: from in development. This one is a huge one! Now Rolling out About Me Update and New Authoring Tool: Big news yesterday on the Office Blogs. From In development. Lync Web App support for Mac and Windows Chrome users: from in development. Everyone is now invited to the party! MDM for OneDrive for Business: Another great OneDrive feature now rolling out Mobile Device Management: Changed name from “Mobile Device Management for Office 365” to “Mobile Device Management”. From In Development. NDR backscatter protection: more Exchange goodies, new on the list Office 365 Groups: improving visibility and management: new on the list. Finally some improvements in this feature for enterprises. We might not need to turn it off at every client anymore. Public Folder calendar and contact access in OWA: from in development Skype for Business desktop application update: New Skype for Business is now rolling out since yesterday. In Development Evolving the Outlook Web App options page: OWA is evolving. New on the list Improved image attachment viewing in Outlook Web App: OWA team is on fire. New on the list Optimize File Picker in Outlook Web App: Keep it coming OWA team! New on the list Recommend OneDrive for Business for Large Attachments: Go OWA! New on the list. Save to OneDrive for Business: Speechless! New on the list Storage and file upload improvements for Sites and OneDrive for Business: Yay! Let’s upload those big video files… New on the list Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: Ooops. This was just rolling out the other week - back to the drawing board? Office 365 Help pane: A new and better way to introduce features for the end-user. I like it. New on the list Office 365 Notification pane: Another Ooopps. This was also previously Rolling out, with mixed feelings in the community. Better make it work and look good before launching… Task Notifications in Project Online: Another new Project thingie Moved off the list into Previously released eDiscovery Center Scale Increase My apps for Office 365 app launcher Office 365 Admin Center for Business Office 365 ISO 27018 Privacy Compliance OneNote Staff Notebook for Education Outlook for iOS & Android Partner admin mobile app PIN lock and other updates for Outlook for iOS & Android Quarantine Bulk Release RMS Departmental Templates No longer at the list at all Forms on SharePoint Lists - bye bye, for good? Phew! Good Job Microsoft!

Here we go, another round of updates of the Office Roadmap. Don’t we love them! And sometimes they roll out even before the roadmap is updated ;-) Changes 2015-03-26 These are the change since yesterday. Now Launched Office 365 Admin App Update: Directly to launched status Features now rolling out Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: New stuff on the roadmap. Seems like the Office 365 (Exchange) team is building a whole new Yammer… Office 365 Notification Pane: (from development) This feature seems to cause some disturbance in the force. It’s rolling out, but it seems like it is just half finished… It does not (at the time of writing this) work and the user experience is…confusing. Worth mentioning here is that it is rolling out for Groups to start with (something that was changed today as well from yesterday ;-) Option for Passwords to Never Expire: (new on the list) Allows admin to use the UI to configure this rather than only PowerShell Tighter Yammer Integration with Delve: (new on the list) More Yammer in Delve. Why not more Groups in Delve? Features now In Development Office 365 Setup Wizard: (new on the list) The replacement for the basic and advanced setup options. The wizard will include migration from on-premises, Google Apps and more! Really neat!

Another day with some changes in the Office Roadmap, and some really interesting ones actually! Changes 2015-03-25 These are the changes since last time. Now launched Compliance Center for Office 365: From rolling out. Now no one can be less compliant than anyone else, or… Office 365 Groups Notebooks: Coming from nowhere direct to launched. Each Office 365 Group now has a OneNote Notebook. Features now rolling out Edit Office 365 profile details page update: Another newcomer on the list, only this one didn’t make it directly to production :). By clicking on the Gears in the upper-right corner, choosing Office 365 Settings, then choosing Me you will (if your tenant has this feature rolled out) find the new responsive page (https://portal.office.com/profile)

One very common requirement in SharePoint, and other portal solutions for that matter, is to have the possibility to target content to a dynamic audience of users and even secure information based on dynamic rules. Traditionally this has been done with Audiences in SharePoint. Audience is a dynamic set of users that is compiled, usually once a day, and at compile time the rules of the Audience is evaluated. A SharePoint Audience is used to target information, but cannot be used to protect content - ie as a security group.

Some small but interesting additions on the roadmap today. Changes 2015-03-19 New stuff on the roadmap Yammer support for Android Wear devices: (Directly to Launched) Yammer on your wrist! Ok, where’s the Microsoft Band app? Enhanced NDRs: (In Development) Microsoft will now help you understand the cause and reason of NDRs in a much easier way. ExpressRoute for Office 365: (In Development) You want your own redundant fat pipe to the Office 365 Data Centers - then this is your feature. Will be launched this fall.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

Here’s a little nugget that I’ve planned to blog about for some time, that I needed today for a small task. I needed to do a background job to SharePoint Online that at a scheduled interval downloads list data, process them and optionally updates some data in my site. This can of course be done by creating an executable storing username and password combos, and with the help of the TokenHelper.cs class from the App for SharePoint Web Toolkit NuGet package and some stored username and password combos we can make the Auth pieces quite easy. I don’t like that approach. There’s two big drawbacks with that approach. The first one is storing the username and password – we can solve that with an AppOnly policy, which I blogged about in the SharePoint 2013: Using the App Only policy and App Principals instead of username and password combos post. The second issue is that I very much prefer to script these kind of tasks, it makes it more flexible. Problem with that approach is that we need to manually do the Auth pieces. But from now on you just copy and paste from this post.

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long. Some hesitate to pass the bridge, thinks it is to steep down, some people are running across it in fear, some take it just easy and some pass it half-ways and then stalls there not knowing which direction to go. Microsoft has already passed the bridge to the other side, they ran as fast as they could. But, they dropped so many things on the way over, things that I and others need to pick up and fix and very often even remind Microsoft that they dropped it at all!

You should mark the 29th of October at 1pm EST (18:00 CET) in your calendar. The MVP Chats are back! A couple of years back we regularly held MVP chats where anyone could ask SharePoint MVPs anything (almost at least). These chats was really successful and we received really good feedback. Unfortunately the tool we used for the chats was abandoned and we have been looking for a new way to do this. We think we’ve found a really interesting format for this by using the AMA format at Reddit (/r/sharepoint).

I’m thrilled to be presenting at TechDays 2014 in Stockholm the 19-20 November. This is the 5th time the TechDays conference is held here in Sweden and I know that this years edition will be even more awesome than the previous times. As usual the best speakers from Sweden will be there and some international really interesting speakers, such as the well-known Mary Jo Foley. I will be presenting a session about the new and interesting Office 365 APIs. We will walk through what these new APIs do, what they can be used for, how to do authentication and why you should invest your time in these APIs. It will be a developer focused session and we will look at code as much as possible – and we will have as much fun as possible.

There’s a lot of stuff happening right now at Microsoft, they innovate, create great software and services, the new CEO accepts and wins almost all challenges and the SharePoint and Office team is listening! This is the Microsoft that I like and this is how I want Microsoft to continue to be. But Microsoft and the SharePoint team can’t just listen in blind – they listens to us out here in the real world, customers, clients etc. and we need to make our voice heard. This can be done in several ways, we can talk to our Microsoft representatives, we can whine on our blogs and on social networks OR we could make ourselves heard at UserVoice.

This year has barely started but the conference season is already running at full speed. The first conference for me of this year will be the TechX Office 365, here in Stockholm, Sweden. This is a conference organized by Microsoft with sole focus on Office 365. There will be national and international speakers of top class. I will do two presentations, one about Building Apps for SharePoint [Online] 2013 and one about Building Apps for Office 2013.

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

Only one day and a few hours left of the year of 2012 and the time has come for me to make my (now traditional) summary post. I’ve done it now for six years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006) and it’s always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months. This year has been an interesting year to me and contained some really interesting milestones, happenings and events.

YES! I’m finally alive with a new hosting provider - this time it’s Microsoft (who could have guessed that!). Thanks to the just released Azure Web Sites I have now moved my blog from my old custom blog implementation (that has been a fun project though), to running Orchard on Azure Web Sites using SQL Azure. This finalizes my cloud migrations - last year I moved e-mail and everything but the site to Office 365 and started with a hosted service for this site, but for running this little blog that was a bit to expensive (you’re not clicking the ads enough).

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available for download für alles and it does not only include the Windows 8 stuff like the previous preview did - this one contains the thing we all want - the SharePoint Developer tools. Overall the performance of Visual Studio 11 is blazingly fast! I regret I tested it - since I will go back to 2010 tomorrow (or even tonight). They team has done a great job and included a lot of the PowerTools natively; such as the new Solution Explorer, the improved search feature etc.

It was some time since I did a real blog post and I have been fiddling with a specific topic, which I’m going to write about, for quite some time now. I’ve been working an Office 365 Intranet and been doing two conferences lately where I’ve demonstrated Office 365 and Windows Azure integration. One of the challenges (and boy, there are many) of Office 365 and SharePoint Online are access to External Data or services. In a few blog posts I will describe how you can work around these issues using some very simple techniques. All that is to it is that you have to “think outside the box” and not always go down the traditional SharePoint way of doing things.

Post is updated, see comments at the end of the post. We’re really getting close to the go live of Office 365 and I am, and I guess a lot of you are as well, preparing to launch a couple of Intranets and sites. As you know by now there are some major differences between SharePoint 2010 on-premise and SharePoint Online in Office 365. And there are also some more subtle ones that jumps up right in your face.

This is a post detailing how you perform active authentication to SharePoint Online in Office 365. Active authentication is required when you need to authenticate in code to programmatically access SharePoint objects, using for instance Client Object Model, web services or WebDAV from outside of Office 365. When you are “in” SharePoint Online or using the web browser this is not needed since you are either already authenticated and the web browser handles the authentication using active authentication.

Back in the saddle from another TechDays event here in Sweden. This year it was all about the cloud! It was as always a great show and an awesome party. Thank you Microsoft, all presenters, all attendees and sponsors. I did two sessions - or actually one session divided into two segments about Office 365 and Windows Azure. I tried to squeeze in as much cloud technology as I could in a one big demo. For those who attended - I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to go back to the slides or take a look at the demo code you can find them below. The sessions were also recorded so you can enjoy them in full glory (keep an eye on the TechDays site for more information).