September Updates

AMT’s Monthly Office 365 Updates keep you up to date with new features and important announcements from Microsoft. Office 365 has a continuous roll-out of changes. We filter out the announcements that we think will be most relevant to our customers, and send them out in an easily digestible form. If you would like to receive the condensed version of these updates on a monthly basis, please click the subscribe button.

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Have you updated your iPhone or iPad to iOS 11? 

Never miss a Yammer notification:

Yammer’s new design for iPad means that users can sign in automatically and perform universal searches within the app, improving the mobile experience. This means that you can keep up to date with company news and find everything you need, without having to be sat at your desk. Users can now, also, subscribe for push notifications in Yammer Groups meaning Yammer notifications will never go unseen.

Yammer Desktop App is available now!

You can now receive real time notifications and alerts through the new Yammer app. This can be downloaded onto Mac or Windows providing they meet these specified requirements; the user must have an active Yammer account using Office 365 identity and the operating system must be Windows 7 or later, or Mac OS 10.9 or later.

 Find out more.

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Class and Staff Notebook: Microsoft Teams improvements.

Users can now view Class and Staff Notebooks in full screen with the full notebook structure allowing everyone to be on the same page. Adding to this, classroom management is now a lot easier and simpler since notebook settings can be accessed within the Teams app.As well as this, students can now access third party resources and links through Microsoft Teams in class assignments, and grades and scores for assignments can also be imported from a school’s management system. This ensures that grades correlate between the school system and Microsoft Teams, meaning that the grades are received directly from a single trusted source.Secure and safe learning is highly valued in educational environments and IT managers and administrators can now improve this within their schools, by having control over third party apps in Teams. This means private chats and class assignments can be enabled or disabled according to the school’s requirements.

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Guest Access for Microsoft Teams

A new update for Microsoft Teams means that anyone with an Azure Active Directory account can be added into Teams as a guest. This means that anyone with an account across Microsoft commercial cloud services or Azure Active Directory integrated apps (870 million users) can be added as a guest, into your Team.You may be wondering how secure this is and whether it would pose a risk to your company by adding a guest to your team, however, guest accounts are securely managed within Azure Active Directory B2B Collaboration. This means that certain factors, such as suspicious incidents, can trigger mitigation or remediation actions such as multi-factor authentication. IT managers will also have access to guest user insights which monitor usage and activity through sign-in and access reports. IT administrators will also be able to quickly view, add and revoke guest access meaning that company security can be controlled at all times.

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Meetup – the new calendar app connected to Outlook for Android.

Meetup is the new app to be connected to the Calendar App. With Calendar Apps, you can see all your digital life events, tasks and notes from apps such as Facebook and Evernote, in your Outlook calendar. For more information on add-in Apps for Outlook, visitApps in Outlook

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Expanded Microsoft and Adobe partnership.

Microsoft’s key mission is to help every person in every organisation achieve more, and a new announcement made by Microsoft and Adobe certainly builds on this. The announcement explains how Microsoft Teams is the preferred tool used for collaboration with Adobe Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud and Document Cloud. Similarly, Adobe Sign has partnered with Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform, and Adobe sign is now Microsoft’s preferred e-signature tool.

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Excel – Co-authoring

Work together at the same time on spreadsheets stored within SharePoint and OneDrive. By doing this, you can have a live view of who is updating the spreadsheet, and when.Added alongside this feature, is autosave. You will never have to worry about whether your document has been saved or not, again. Autosave updates any changes made to the document and stores it straight to the cloud without physically having to press the save button.

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Multi page scan is now available for Android with Office Lens:

Office Lens now allows users to scan more than one page of a document at a time which can then be collated into a PDF bundle and shared. The new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can extract and export text from multiple pages into a Word document, which can also be saved as a PowerPoint or OneNote file.

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Groups expiration in public preview

If you are an Azure Active Directory premium customer, you will soon be able to manage the timeline of Office365 groups. By selecting a group, you can set an expiration duration where owners will receive a notification to renew the group, 30 days prior to expiration. If they wish to continue using it after the set time, the owner will simply have to click a button and it’s done. If they do not renew the group, it will be deleted.What if the group gets deleted unwillingly? This is where soft-delete and restore comes into play. If the owner wishes to restore a group and all its content, there will be a buffer period of 30days where the group will only be soft-deleted, therefore enabling restoration. If, however, the group expires more than 30 days prior, there will be no restore option. This feature is in public preview now and Microsoft will update all Azure AD premium members when it becomes available.

Find out more.

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Office 365 for Android

Updates for Office 365 on Android went live on the 15th September. In the update, you can expect to see it available in 44 languages as well as adjustments for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. One of the main updates for Office 365 is the fact that it is now more secure and blocks malicious links in documents, workbooks and presentations, keeping you and your files, safer.

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ROLLING OUT UPDATES – not yet available for all customers

Microsoft are continuously updating their programs and ensuring that their products run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Because of this, there are features that are being developed and are soon to be rolled out to Microsoft 365 customers. Here are some updates that will be introduced in the next few months. Please make sure you subscribe to our Office 365 update email that will confirm when these have been rolled out.

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‘#%’ File names

‘Character not supported’ will no longer be appearing when naming/renaming files. Document names will soon be able to include the hashtag and percentage symbol.

StaffHub

Outlook integration – Company news and announcements made in Outlook will be available to view in StaffHub, enabling consistent communication and connection to the organisation.Task assignment and tracking – StaffHub can now be used to manage tasks by creating, assigning and tracking activities that arise in day-to-day work. This will be rolled out in early October.Integrate schedule details with Kronos – Kronos is a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. StaffHub will now be able to import team schedules from Kronos, allowing users to clock in and out and also view holiday accruals.Microsoft flow integrations – As well as integrating with Kronos, Microsoft Flow will also be added to the mix. This will enable automating workflows for teams, schedules and tasks meaning that business processes and activities are more easily digitized.