Microsoft made over 100 updates and announcements in the month of June 2023 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.
This new functionality in Intune makes it easier to keep drivers on your Windows devices up to date in two main ways. First, you'll no longer have to do the manual work of downloading, repackaging, and deploying drivers using generic tools. Instead, you can take advantage of driver update management policies and reports built on the Windows Update for Business deployment service.
These new capabilities are part of our Windows Enterprise offerings, providing you with multiple benefits:
- Intelligent servicing helps identify which driver updates are available for devices in the policy.
- Trusted quality is brought to you by prior certification and validation by many device manufacturers.
- More granular controls allow you to pause a deployment of a particular driver.
- Optional drivers and firmware are also available to complement recommended updates.
- Detailed reporting is built into Intune to help you monitor device status, alerts, and recommendations for remediation.
- Windows Autopatch automatically creates driver policies that allow you to roll out drivers and firmware across your deployment rings (unless you opt out of the service), with more granular controls coming later this year.
Introducing Alert Tuning, a powerful tool that enhances how organizations monitor alerts and incidents. This feature empowers analysts to automatically resolve alerts based on specific criteria, such as user, device, file, or app, across all Microsoft 365 Defender sources. By doing so, it enables security teams to maintain a focused list of active incidents, concentrating on the most relevant and critical issues.
The screen capture above showcases the new alert tuning experience in Microsoft 365 Defender, highlighting its benefits for incident response. With alert tuning, security teams can automate the handling of common and repetitive alerts, freeing up analysts to concentrate on addressing the most crucial security threats rather than being burdened with routine tasks. This streamlined approach also enables organizations to respond swiftly to potential threats.
Moreover, the feature's ability to set precise criteria for alert notifications tailored to the organization's environment enhances the overall accuracy of the alerts. This helps in reducing false positives and minimizing noise, ensuring analysts can effectively investigate and prioritize significant security incidents.
By incorporating the new alert tuning feature, Microsoft 365 Defender empowers organizations to bolster their digital estate's protection against cyber threats. It optimizes the incident response process, leading to a considerable reduction in false positives and further strengthening overall security.
As the Viva Suite continues to expand, Viva Pulse is being rolled out over the next month. Viva Pulse is targeted towards helping managers and leads gain insight on how team members or groups are doing through confidential feedback requests. Surveys can be created from research-based templates, or from newly created custom templates, through the Microsoft Teams app or the Viva Pulse web experience. Managers and leads can then use the feedback to better understand and quickly address their team’s needs. All users must have a Viva Pulse license or have a Viva Suite license. Global admins can enable the Viva Pulse public preview today.
Microsoft Teams on Apple CarPlay will be adding a new calling feature. Starting mid-July, Microsoft will be rolling out a new feature that will allow easy calling of speed dial Teams contacts and recent through recent calls when using the app in a vehicle that supports Apple CarPlay. The rollout is expected to complete by early August. GCC-High and DoD tenants will begin rollout in early September and are expected to complete by early October.
InfoPath has been in extended support mode since 2021 and the final retirement date is now set for July 14, 2023. This deadline applies to both InfoPath 2013 and InfoPath Forms Services for SharePoint Online. For the latter, Microsoft will remove InfoPath from existing tenants. If your organization is still using InfoPath, it’s recommended to start planning for migration to Power Apps, Power Automate, and/or Microsoft Forms as soon as possible to ensure a successful transition.
Microsoft has announced that the Wiki’s feature will be retired from Teams. Note-taking capabilities will be replaced with Teams Channels powered by OneNote. Users currently have the option to export all Wiki content to OneNote notebooks in Teams and should begin doing so prior to the feature being fully deprecated. Users will need to export wikis one by one per wiki tab. New channels will come with a OneNote notebook which will offer additional features and enhancements.
As of March 2023, users are unable to create new Wikis but can still access and edit existing Wiki content. Once users export the Wiki content to OneNote, the Wiki will convert to a read-only format. Microsoft’s timeline projects that mid-2023 calendar year the Wiki tab in a Teams channel will not be supported however existing content will still be accessible and any content not yet exported can still be edited. The Wiki tab and App in Teams is scheduled for complete removal by January 2024. Any remaining Wiki content can still be accessed through SharePoint after the feature is deprecated.
To assist in the implementation of security best practices, Microsoft Purview is introducing a new way to assign administrative privileges in the Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and Microsoft Purview Records Management solutions that will provide admins the least privilege access required for their job duties.
With this change (currently in public preview), organizations can leverage Administrative Units in Azure Active Directory (AAD) to define who can configure and manage policies in Microsoft Purview. This update will include the ability to set up a Data Lifecycle Management or Records Management admin for a specific geography, department, or other unit, who can manage retention and label policies for their unit.
Rollout to general availability will begin in late August (previously late June) and is expected to be complete by early September (previously late July).
Once this feature rolls out, Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management administrators in your organization will have the ability to use administrative units to granularly define access to who can manage retention policies and label policies for different parts of the organization.
Previously, you were only able to assign a tenant-wide admin for Data Lifecycle Management. These people would configure and administer retention and label policies for every part of the organization. Now, you can associate Data Lifecycle Management administrators to one or more admin units. This enables administrators who can view and manage policies for only part of an organization to do so confidently without affecting other units. For example, you can designate an administrator for the Finance Admin Unit. This person can then create policies that apply only to Finance users, groups, or sites.
Currently available in preview, this feature enables you to extend your DLP policies for Endpoint to network file shares and mapped network drives which allows you to detect and protect sensitive data in these locations as part of your digital ecosystem. Rollout will begin in mid-June and is expected to be complete by the end of June.
With this update, you can configure DLP policies to prevent your users from taking egress actions such as copy to USB, copy to clipboard, and more for sensitive files stored on network shares. Admins will also get an alert once any policy is matched against such actions.
Expected with Microsoft Intune’s July (2307) service release, Microsoft will update device compliance policy reports in Intune to improve data accuracy, performance, and the user interface (UI). Additionally, the device compliance policy reports will now support scope tags.
If you are using reports within device compliance policy in the Intune admin center (Devices > Compliance policies > select a policy), you will need to be aware of the following changes:
- Important: Scope tag support means that some admins may no longer have access to view reporting for all compliance details, numbers of compliant or noncompliant devices, or compliance settings for their organization.
- The pane navigation for a selected compliance policy will be replaced by a single pane split into two tabs, Overview and Properties. The Overview tab will contain a bar chart summary for device compliance policy status and links for the Device status report and Per-setting status report. The Properties tab will contain the same information as today, including the “Essentials” section, and can continue to be used to edit existing policies.
- The User status report (currently located on the Overview page) will be removed as the same information will be discoverable in the updated Device status report.
- Additionally, new versions of the Setting compliance and Policy compliance reports (Devices > Monitor > Compliance) will be added to Device compliance reports (Reports > Device compliance) which will have the same information but with better performance and accuracy. The old reports under Devices > Monitor will be removed at a later date.
The new Post-delivery activities report will provide you with information on all things Zero Hour Auto-Purge (ZAP). From the report, you can view messages that were initially delivered but were later moved due to a threat.
The new report will display all the ZAP events that occurred in your organization. If the verdict assigned to a message has been changed, the new report will display this updated data, making it easier to investigate the messages.
You can find the Post-delivery activities report under Email & collaboration reports.
