The June Updates forOffice 365had tough shoes to fill this month. Riding the coat tails of the exciting announcements from the SharePoint Virtual Summit on May 16th, this video touches on a few SharePoint updates, but mainly focuses on other areas of Office 365.
SharePoint– Kicking off with SharePoint updates. Jim Naroski touched on a few updates that were included with the SharePoint Virtual Summit.
- Users can expect to see a simplified way of sharing a file using file explorer.
- Existing team sites can now connect with Office 365 Groups, allowing team sites to take advantage of features in Groups such as conversations, group calendar, and Planner.
- Personalized search brings the Microsoft Graph and machine learning to enhance and improve your search experience. It provides suggestions and also suggests people based on user interests, department, and activity.
From a feature standpoint, these updates are the most notable that grabbed my attention:
OneNote – As of May 18th essentially all of the OneNote apps are getting a new navigation. You’ve probably started to notice it. The navigation is completely left bound and is designed with accessibility in mind. The navigation has not changed for the Windows desktop client, it will remain the same.
Yammer –Yammeris getting some well-deserved enhancements. The Yammer embed feature to add a Yammer feed to a SharePoint site is getting improved and will be easier to use. Additionally, the release will allow embedding other apps within Yammer groups, allowing you to add the rich capability of document libraries in the Yammer interface. This is a great feature that also includes the ability to embed up to 90 different connectors with other platforms. The last enhancement coming to Yammer this month is dynamic group memberships, which allows for rule based membership to Yammer groups. Members can be added or removed based on attributes in Active Directory. So if a new employee joins the company, they can be dynamically added to the appropriate Yammer groups based on the creation of their user account in Active Directory.
OneDrive for Business – Files on Demand will be included with a Windows 10 Fall update. This will allow you to access your content on any device whether you’ve downloaded it or not. This is a great feature that allows for improved access to content stored in OneDrive for Business. Additionally, an off-line folder feature will be coming for mobile devices, allowing users to work on docs offline and have those changes automatically synchronized when they regain connection.
Office 365 Adoption Pack – This feature is for Administrators. It provides a dynamic console that provides four areas of usage analytics that are grouped in these areas: adoption of Office 365, communication usage for Skype for Business and Exchange, collaboration usage for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, and workload activation. There are more enhancements coming to this in the future, particularly for workloads, like Planner, that currently aren’t tracked.
Watch the Full Video
This wraps up the feature updates. The last update focuses on Office ProPlus and updates to the system requirements, update to the ProPlus enhancement model, and tools to manage ProPlus compatibility. These important administrator and IT service updates are important to understand to know how they affect you and your organization. Check out this blog postto learn more.
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