August 2022 Microsoft 365 Announcement Highlights

Microsoft made 88 updates and announcements in the month of August for the Microsoft 365 platform. Don’t have time to read them all? We’ve gone through all of them and put together what we feel are the most important updates for you to be aware of.

1. Outlook Mac Support for Retention Policies  – Rollout Timeline Updated 

   Microsoft has begun rolling out support for retention policies for Outlook users on Mac OS.  Retention policies allow users the ability to define how long Exchange Online should save their emails.  The policies are defined by the Exchange Administrator, and the Outlook user can choose which policies to assign to their folders. To be able to use this Mac OS feature, your users must be using the new Outlook for Mac and will see them in either the message list view context menu or the message item context menu.  Microsoft has now updated the rollout timeline of this feature to finish at the end of August 2022.

2. Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management

   Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management scans the internet and its connections daily, building a complete catalog of a customer’s environment, discovering internet-facing resources, and agentless and unmanaged assets. It gives security and admin teams the ability to discover unknown and unmanaged resources visible and accessible from the internet—basically the same view an attacker has Continuous monitoring, without the need for agents or credentials, prioritizes new vulnerabilities. With this complete view of the organization, customers can take recommended steps to mitigate risk by bringing these resources under secure management within tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

3. Deploying Teams at Scale (preview) 

   Microsoft is rolling out the ability to deploy Teams at Scale which includes the following.

   • Create up to 500 teams using pre-built templates or your custom templates via Teams PowerShell cmdlet. 
   • Add up to 25 users to teams as owners or members. 
   • Manage teams at scale by adding or removing users from existing teams. 
   • Stay notified through email, including completion, status, and errors (if any). You can choose to notify up to five people about the status of each batch of teams you deploy. Team owners and members are automatically notified when they're added to a team. 

    The rollout started in late August and is expected to be completed by mid-September. 

4. Convert Word/PDF files into Microsoft Forms  

   Microsoft Forms makes it easy to create appealing forms for gathering many types of information.  Previously, these forms, surveys, and quizzes had to be created from scratch.  With this new feature, if you happen to have these items already in Word or PDF format, you can now automatically convert them into Microsoft Forms, saving you valuable time.  You’ll still be able to make changes and adjustments before publishing and sharing. 

5. Data Retention: Inactive Mailbox Deletion 

   When a Microsoft 365 account is unlicensed, the mailbox is converted to inactive and by default, all its content is placed in a soft-delete state for 30 days before it is permanently removed. Organizations that applied retention policies or legal holds to the mailbox before license removal will ensure the content is kept and retrievable to meet company requirements. Currently, when a legal hold or retention policy is removed from the inactive mailbox, the content is placed into a soft-delete state for 183 days. As part of ongoing efforts to improve and standardize service features, Microsoft has announced that it will change this soft-delete period of inactive mailboxes with retention and holds removed to 30 days. Roll out of this change started in late August and is expected to be completed by the end of September 2022.  

6. Data Loss Prevention: Support for complex conditions

   Coming soon to public preview for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Microsoft is introducing support for complex conditions as part of a new DLP rule authoring experience. 

   With this new DLP rule authoring experience, you will be able to create complex conditions while configuring your Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies. You will be able to create conditions with AND/OR combinations with the ability to create groups to achieve condition combinations like A AND (B OR C).