Your weekly digest for Microsoft 365 News
Internet Explorer 11 is dead – long live the modern Edge
STEVE: The first one this week of note is that Microsoft 365 is going to be removing support for IE11, so if you’ve been following Twitter and other announcements this week, then you’ll know that Microsoft are actually putting an end to IE. Internet Explorer is dying and there’s not going to be. Many people are not going to be sorry to see IE’s demise.
Obviously in the wider Windows context then this is something that’s going to be important to you. If you’re supporting Legacy Line of business applications that rely on it, but from a Microsoft 365 perspective, this means a couple of things. This means later this year, so from November 30 the teams web app.
Microsoft is no longer going to support IE11, which to be honest I didn’t know many people were still using that with Teams, to be honest. If you’ve got clients that are using IE11 then well really. If they are running windows then install the windows client. If you if you can.
But really, if even if you’re using the legacy version of Edge, you should be moving to the modern Chrome-based version of Microsoft Edge, as it’s the one that supports all of the latest up and coming in-browser features for Microsoft Teams.
Other Microsoft 365 applications have got a little bit longer until the end of support, up until August 17th, 2021.
Microsoft Introduce EDR in block mode for Defender ATP
STEVE: An interesting one for Microsoft defender. This week a new public preview for Defender ATP has been released. The Advanced Threat Protection piece of Microsoft defender is an add-on that you get with E5 or the advanced security addons on top of your Microsoft 365 subscription.
More recently I’m seeing a lot of organizations moving from other solutions on the market over to this, both for the Defender component for anti-virus and the ATP component as a replacement to their EDR solution.
In this latest preview, Microsoft now allow EDR to run in block mode and they’ve got a few examples of how they’ve been developing this with customers where the endpoint antivirus solution hasn’t detected a threat, but Defender ATP would have been able to block it.
This new functionality is able to stop those threats based on their behaviors in their tracks. EDR in block mode is now going into public preview.
Message Center Items of Interest
STEVE: Now in the message center this week, we’ve got a few things that I wanted to call out.
Sway will no longer be audited in the Microsoft 365 admin center
STEVE: Now the first one here was a bit of a surprise, and this did cause a little bit of a storm on Twitter. Over the last week when people saw this with varying views.
If you don’t know what Sway is – it is half a PowerPoint alternative and half a web page creation tool. You could use it in an organization to replace both creating a PDF newsletter and emailing out to staff and creating a presentation. You could use a single Sway to present that same content, depending on whether you are presenting it or whether you want people to read through it.
So it’s a good way of being able to bring together content in an interesting way where you only had to do it once, but it never took hold – people didn’t move on mass from PowerPoint. And of course, PowerPoint has continued to get a lot of investment since.
Earlier this week with little notice, support has been retired for auditing Sway activities via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
They’ve apologized for the late notice, and of course if you’re an organization who allows Sway, but you must allow every activity to be audited and you allowed this application to be used because it was audited, then of course you may need to consider revoking access to Sway immediately. However, most organization are not going to be affected by this.
A reminder – Teams support for older versions of Android is coming.
STEVE: Next, we’ve got a reminder that Microsoft Teams is retiring support for older Android devices running on version 4.4. Microsoft have clarified a little bit in addition to previous announcements to state what type of devices this affects.
If you are affected, your way forward is to update to a newer build of Android. Obviously, you can’t just do that. And that does mean that most of the time you’ll need to replace those older devices that users have with the more button device.
Now, of course, Android devices are reasonably cheap on the market, then it’s reasonably easy to get those validated if you’ve got security process is that you need to go through. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t really be running an Android build that old.
Obviously, when this was first mentioned by Microsoft a little while ago, there was confusion as to whether this might also cover Teams phones – as in a desk phone running Teams. This clarifies that this announcement is solely for smartphones that run Android.
Teams Message Translation will be enabled by default this month
STEVE: Teams message translation is going to be enabled by default during this month, so that should be completing about now.
Teams Notification Settings will be Simplified
STEVE: And they’re going to be rolling out a simplified way to manage notification settings inside teams as well.
That is an area where if you’re going to need to give people some tips and tricks on how to get the most out of Teams notifications; because it is quite a complicated area and can be a bit of a pain.
I have to admit when I’ve configured my Teams notifications then I still get occasional notifications that I didn’t expect to have.
This rolls out early next month in September and it’s going to be very welcome.
Microsoft 365 Roadmap Items of interest
STEVE: This week it has been a quiet week, probably because everybody is trying to take a bit of holiday. I expect the most interesting one is going to be for Exchange Admins.
Exchange Online will be able to block people BCCing a Distribution Group
STEVE: Exchange Online will receive the ability to block people from sending to a distribution group when it’s on the BCC line. So I get this quite a lot and you’ve seen this before, you’ll know what it’s like.
You might have a rule set up for a distribution group to put it into a folder, so it might be something that you’re not interested in, but you’ll look at maybe once a week, and then somebody will move the distribution group to BCC and you’ll get it in your inbox, which is quite annoying. So this new feature is aimed at trying to reduce that kind of noise which is, in the main, annoying for most people, so that’s quite welcome on the road map.
It’s schedule for November this year, so we’ve still got a couple of months.
A new Power Automate App is coming to Teams
STEVE: Next on the road map, we’ve got Teams and Power Automate. The power automate app for Teams is going to be coming in September.
This is going to make it easier to build out your flows inside the Teams application itself. With the recent change of Planner being re-launched as Tasks in Teams, there’s been a change of wording to how applications are presented, so I’ll be interested to see whether this arrives as some sort of “automate” tool “or whether they call it “Power automate”.
Microsoft Search will now find items from Power BI
STEVE: If you’re using Microsoft Search, then it is now going to include results from Power BI. So as well as bringing back results about relevant documents, relevant sites, Teams, messages, Yammer threads, then this is also going to bring back your Power BI dashboards and it’ll search through those artifacts based on your search keywords and display those in a separate vertical alongside all of those other results.
This is coming next month, in September.
Microsoft Compliance Center: Expanded support to search and export items in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business Recycle Bin in Core eDiscovery and Advanced eDiscovery
STEVE: We’re getting some better functionality inside the Microsoft Compliance Center.
Coming in December this year this new functionality makes it easier to export items from SharePoint and OneDrive with expanded support to export items that are in the Recycle bin.
STEVE: Lots of good news there this week.
This was a shorter show this week, but we do have one final announcement.
We’re going to be moving to every two weeks, which is going to allow us a little bit more time to get under the hood of some of the biggest announcements and arrange guests to join us on the show.
We want to get a bit more in-depth, not just talk about the features but also talk about the best way to use and deploy them too.
And of course, if you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe either on your favorite podcast app or keep tuned in over on practical365.com. Thanks for listening.
Steve is a Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services. He enjoys getting hands-on, solving some of the more complex problems associated with migrating to the cloud or to newer versions of Exchange Server.
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