(Music)
Welcome to the Office 365 update for March of 2018. In the next few minutes I'll be giving
you a quick rundown of the latest Office 365 updates, with the goal of helping you get the
most out of the service. Yammer helps organizations drive open conversations. It enables you
to collaborate, share updates, and crowdsource answers from your coworkers around the globe.
I sometimes come across situations where one Yammer group can expand to involve more people
and topics than originally planned. For example, a conversation that started between product
marketers may branch out into topics related to product support.
Another example is when someone posts a question in one group, but the question could be better
addressed by experts in another community. I've experienced that second situation quite a
bit, myself. To address these scenarios, the Yammer team recently added a feature that lets
you move conversations between groups in Yammer. Here's how it works: First, identify the
post you want to move, then click on the ellipses at the top of the first message in the thread.
You'll see a Move Conversation option. Click on that, then select destination group to move
the conversation to. You can add a note for context, letting everyone know why the conversation
is being moved to the new group. Then simply click the Move button and the conversation will
be moved to the new group. I've found this feature to be very handy in the communities
I manage here and Microsoft, and if you're a regular Yammer user, I'm sure you will too.
Ever wonder if anyone is actually looking at your Yammer posts? Then you'll love the new seen
counts feature. This new capability helps me better understand the impact my posts are having,
for better or for worse, by displaying the number of people who have seen the message.
Note that, at the time of this recording, seen counts is currently visible only to the original
creator of the post. However, the Yammer developers are experimenting with letting you see
the counts for any conversation that you have access to, so these new seen counts may be visible
more broadly in Yammer by the time you watch this video. While Yammer facilitates broad communication
with people in your organization across workgroups, Microsoft Teams can be more suitable for
collaboration within a specific team or workgroup. New features in Microsoft Teams make it
an even more powerful hub for teamwork by enabling you to use apps in new ways, including
the ability to command apps and take quick actions from the command box.
You can now also include specific content from an app in a conversation.
Up until now, you had to add screenshots and hyperlinks to your posts in Microsoft Teams.
Now you can bring rich information from apps into a chat or channel message with a simple
click. For example, you can search for a specific task in Trello, a work item in Wrike, or
a weather forecast, and include an interactive card with that information right into your
message. The new personal apps space in Microsoft Teams makes it easy for you to access the
apps you care about and see all the items that you have been assigned to across apps.
You can view tasks in Planner, issues in Jira Cloud, or requests in Bitbucket Cloud, all right
within Teams. You can also easily see items you have recently accessed, such as OneNote notebooks
or videos from Microsoft Stream. Search is one key way people navigate in Teams to get to
the information they're looking for, and now it's even better.
Slash commands are now integrated with search so you both search and take quick actions right
from the same command box at the top of the screen. For example, you can use a slash command
to set your status to "away," or call a coworker. To get started with slash commands, just
type a slash in the command box to see the list of commands currently available.
These updates to Microsoft Teams mark the biggest release of new functionality since Teams
launched last March. You can read all the details in the January 29th Microsoft Teams blog
that I link to in the transcript and resources document. Keeping your files safe and secure
is Microsoft's top priority. Office 365 administrators are empowered to safeguard their organization's
data using capabilities such as Data Loss Prevention, eDiscovery, service level encryption,
and data retention controls with consistent management across Office 365.
Even with this level of sophistication, files could still be compromised due to accidental
end-user deletion, file corruption, or malware infection. Until now the recovery process from
such an event could take time and potentially result in data loss.
I'm excited to share the news that the OneDrive team recently announced a new feature called
Files Restore for all OneDrive for Business customers. Files Restore is a complete self-service
recovery solution that allows administrators and end users to restore files from any point
in time during the last 30 days. Now both users and administrators can rewind changes, using
activity data to select the exact moment to revert to. Files Restore for OneDrive for Business
can save time and stress when file loss occurs, putting end users and administrators in control.
This capability started rolling out to all OneDrive for Business users in late January and
should be available by the time you watch this video. For step-by-step instructions on how
to use this new feature, consult the January 22nd OneDrive blog post we link to in the transcript
and resources guide. In our continued effort to bring the best in class experiences
on all devices, Microsoft recently released new functionality in Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
and OneDrive on iOS that will make iPad and iPhone users more productive.
Now, using real-time co-authoring, you and your colleagues can contribute to, and edit, documents
simultaneously in the iOS apps for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
You can see who else is working with you in a document, see where they're working, and view
changes automatically within seconds. This means that co-authoring is available to you in
Office Online, the latest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint on both PC and Mac, and now
on iOS. One of the most common and powerful tasks when creating content is pulling in text,
photos, graphs, and other objects from different sources. Now you can pull in content with
ease on your iPad with drag and drop support in Office and OneDrive.
In addition, Microsoft recently announced native support for the Files app in iOS 11.
OneDrive integration with the Files app allows you to access, upload, edit, and save your
content to OneDrive or SharePoint from apps that support Files app integration.
You can also tag and favorite your OneDrive and SharePoint files from within the Files app
for seamless integration. The February Power BI blog announced several new features, including
many new capabilities requested by Power BI users. They include the ability to multi-select
data points across multiple charts and, a feature I'm going to use immediately, the ability
to sync slicer values across multiple pages of your report. In Power BI a slicer narrows the
portion of the dataset shown in the other visualizations on the page.
Up until now, Power BI slicers only applied to a single page, but with this update, you can
sync slicer values across multiple pages of your report. The Power BI Team has added a new
"Sync slicers" pane that enables you to select slicers to stay in sync across multiple pages.
You can reach the new Sync slicers pane from the View tab. Once you've opened the pane, select
a slicer to see the options. You can quickly make the slicer apply to every page by clicking
the "Add to all' link. You'll find additional details on this and other features, including
some great videos, in the February 5th Power BI blog. In last November's Office 365 update,
I covered Planner's new Schedule view. The schedule view also supports drag-and-drop, enabling
you to not only quickly add tasks but to move the start and due dates right on the calendar.
The February 5th Office Blog post announced several Planner enhancements, including new Group
and Filter options that give you deeper insights into your tasks to help you meet key deadlines.
For example, you can filter your tasks by due date to better understand approaching deadlines.
New due date notifications via email summarize tasks due in the coming week, helping you stay
on top of your approaching deliverables. And, coming soon, a new iCalendar format feed that
enables you to finally publish Planner tasks to your Outlook calendar.
I'm really looking forward to that. Haven't used Planner yet? You can get started easily by
visiting tasks.office.com. That's all we have time for. Remember, you can download the transcript
and resources document from the Office 365 Guy blog at aka.ms/o365update-blog. I love reading
your comments so post them on the blog or send them to Office365UpdateSeries@microsoft.com.
I'm Jim Naroski, thanks for watching, and I'll see you again soon!