All of the updates to the Microsoft 365 services can be found in your admin centre, but here is a summary of the important changes from the last week.
Microsoft 365 Name Changes
One of the bigger announcements recently are the upcoming name changes in Microsoft 365. The following products will rename, but the features will not change.
| Old Name | New Name |
| Office 365 Business Essentials | Microsoft 365 Business Basic |
| Office 365 Business Premium | Microsoft 365 Business Standard |
| Microsoft 365 Business | Microsoft 365 Business Premium |
Microsoft Teams Updates
Calling between Teams and Skype
Teams users in your organization can chat with and call Skype users by using their email address and vice versa. Note that this is Skype consumer, rather than Skype for Business (which has been available for some time).
It will be disabled by default. To enable it, you need to go to the Microsoft Teams Admin Center -> Org-wide settings -> External Access, and enable it:
This feature will be rolling out throughout April (Roadmap ID 53935)
Background effect in Teams meetings
Users will be able to select Microsoft provided background images for their calls. Custom images are coming in May! This is Roadmap ID 62890 and is rolling out mid-April.
New experience for launching instant channel meetings
You will see the Meet Now button in the Channel header in the top-right corner. This is Roadmap ID 62904, and is coming late April.
Improved Teams meeting join launcher experience
When launching a Teams meeting from a link, users will be provided with clearer options for how they would like to join the meeting. This is Roadmap ID 62905 and will roll out in late April.
Raise a Virtual Hand in Teams Meetings
The new raise hand feature in Teams allows meeting attendees to identify that they wish to speak by toggling the hand icon in the meeting control bar, making it easier to actively participate in meetings. Raise hand will be available initially for PC, Mac, and web-based clients. Support for mobile applications will follow. This is Roadmap ID 62755 and will roll out mid-April.
PowerApps Data Loss Prevention Changes
PowerApps will start enforcing Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies when applications are launched. This enforcement is in addition to the DLP enforcement that occurs when connections are added to applications in Power Apps Studio.
This will ensure that any new DLP policies apply to all PowerApps.
Outlook Web – Files View
This roll-out has been delayed due to some required code changes and further updates will come.
Modern experience for managed metadata services, tagging and filtering
Microsoft will be gradually enabling modern experiences for SharePoint managed metadata services (MMS) which will include:
- A modern term store manager in the SharePoint admin center
- A modern content type gallery in the SharePoint admin center for creating and managing content types stored in the content type hub
- New tagging and filtering options for end users as well as a new tree view
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 57315.
Full details are available in this blog post: Modernizing SharePoint Managed Metadata Services (MMS)
Sharepoint content query web part performance banner
On a classic page, the Content Query web part is a tool for finding and displaying information. However, this web part can affect page performance. Consequently, we are adding an alert for classic publishing portals that use Content Query web parts.
The banner will automatically display under either of these conditions:
- If it takes >500 ms for the Content Query web part to load, or
- If the webpart is set up to be cross-list, i.e. selected the source “show items from all sites in this site collection” or “show items from the following site and all subsites”
Summary
For full details of these updates, and more, head to the Microsoft Message Center. Log in to your admin portal, and select Health, Message Center.
Always Networks are a Microsoft Silver partner, specialising in supporting Microsoft 365 services – if you need any help then contact us today.
