Microsoft made over 100 updates and announcements in the month of March 2024 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.
Summary: Microsoft Copilot's "work" scope is being upgraded to GPT-4 Turbo model, resulting in faster and more comprehensive responses for users. The upgrade is rolling out to end-users and is expected to be completed in the coming weeks. There will be no impact at the tenant/admin level, and users can continue to use Copilot in the same way. Admins and Adoption leaders are encouraged to connect with users to encourage them to engage with Graph-grounded Copilot. Details: Microsoft is in the process of upgrading Copilot to GPT-4 Turbo. For users, this will result in faster and more comprehensive responses when using Copilot with Graph-grounding. This is the experience that users access via the "work" scope at copilot.microsoft.com, at Bing, etc., and via dedicated experiences in the Copilot Teams app and at microsoft365.com. Microsoft will announce this upgrade as part of a public blog post the week of April 1st.
When this will happen: The upgrade is in the process of rolling out to end users and Microsoft expects it to be completed in the coming weeks.
Microsoft has announced the public preview of High Volume Email (HVE) for Microsoft 365, a new service aimed at facilitating large-scale internal email communications. This service is particularly beneficial for line of business applications and high-volume SMTP Auth submissions, allowing organizations to surpass the current Exchange Online limits. Key Features: Increased Email Volume: HVE enables sending of internal messages beyond the standard Exchange Online limits, without a recipient rate limit.
Transactional Model: The service operates on a transactional model, based on the number of emails sent. Customizable Limits: Administrators can set their own limits on a per-account basis, offering flexibility and control over email volume and associated costs. Public Preview Insights During the public preview, users can create up to 20 MailUsers in Exchange Online that can send messages using a specific SMTP endpoint. The preview includes: An admin experience in the Exchange admin center to manage HVE accounts. A report feature to track usage metrics. A basic SMTP auth to send emails.
The initial rollout of HVE begins on April 1 and is expected to be completed by the end of the month, with the first endpoint located in North America. Future expansions to additional regions are planned in the coming months. For the public preview, the service is free but limited to 100,000 recipients per day per tenant. These temporary limits are designed to provide sufficient volume for customer testing and feedback before the general availability, where expanded limits will be introduced.
March updates brings a combination of new and revamped features to Microsoft Intune. The Endpoint Security blade now shows a summary of all the Connectors setup in the tenant, Endpoint Detection (EDR), and response statuses and actions, New preconfigured policy that helps admins deploy Defender for Endpoint, and a summary of Defender Antivirus agent statuses. Intune has also introduced the ability to manage the BIOS for Dell devices, by allowing you to push configuration files for the Dell command tool to Intune managed devices. This can be done by deploying a "BIOS configurations and other settings" profile template under Devices > Configuration. Lastly, Intune has introduced additional filtering properties with Application Protection Policies (MAM). When creating a Managed Apps filter under Devices > Filters, you'll notice that you can now select Properties for Device Model, Manufacture, etc. This will make it possible to do things such as only apply MAM policies to specific device Manufactures or model numbers.
Previously, changes to site and organization-wide settings in the SharePoint Admin Center were not easy to track or review. Microsoft announced that they are rolling out new change history reports (for Public Preview) in the SharePoint Admin Center starting mid-March 2024 to address these concerns. These reports will allow admins to see up to 10 instances of what changed, when it happened, and who initiated the change.
Microsoft has announced the general availability of Copilot for Microsoft Defender XDR. This article provides an overview of Microsoft Copilot for Security, which is integrated into the Microsoft Defender portal to assist security teams. It offers capabilities such as summarizing incidents, analyzing scripts and files, and generating reports. Users can access Copilot after ensuring proper licensing, and it helps in efficient attack investigation, guided response recommendations, and threat hunting with KQL queries. The article also emphasizes the importance of data security and the option to provide feedback to improve Copilot's effectiveness.
Microsoft recently released native eSignature functionality for SharePoint Syntex and it's now being made available within the Approvals app in Microsoft Teams. This will allow senders and recipients to be notified, view, track, and sign requests without having to leave Teams. Note that this feature is only available in the US at this time..
Microsoft is introducing a new feature for the Outlook Mobile App enabling users to open Teams Meeting chat directly from the meeting event on their Outlook mobile calendar. By selecting the "Chat with Participants button" in the Outlook mobile calendar, the chat will open in the Teams Mobile app. If the Teams Mobile app is not installed, they will be linked to a page allowing them to download the app. No admin action is required for this rollout which is scheduled to begin late April 2024 and scheduled for completion will be completed by end of May 2024. Please note, any Intune mobile device policies restricting Teams chat will be enforced.
What you need to do to prepare:
- Educate users to recognize and expect cloud.microsoft as a key domain for Microsoft cloud experiences. You can refer them to What is cloud.microsoft? - Microsoft Support for more information.
- If your organizational websites, tools, or other materials reference the old URL, those links will be automatically redirected. However, it would be good practice to update those assets to avoid user confusion.
- Partner with developers of in-house Teams apps - including those that run on Outlook and Microsoft 365 - to take the actions described in Action required: ensure your Microsoft Teams apps are ready for upcoming domain changes so the apps continue to function on the new domain.
- Admins should ensure that connections to *.cloud.microsoft are not blocked from their clients and enterprise networks. This should require no action if standard Microsoft network guidance on domains and service endpoints is being followed.
The task publishing experience allows frontline organizations to distribute tasks across employees spread across geographically dispersed locations and then monitor how that work is going. Task publishing is available in Microsoft Teams as part of the Tasks by Planner and To Do app, which will soon be renamed to Planner.
Microsoft is releasing several new task publishing features based on top customer requests and feedback:
- Recurring task lists. You'll be able to set recurrence on a draft task list, which will allow you to choose the cadence (such as every month on the 15th of the month). You can then publish the list and task publishing will automatically send future tasks.
- Training and policy task lists. You'll be able to create a task list for each member of a recipient team. When you publish the list and choose the recipient teams, a copy of the tasks in the list will be created for and assigned to each member of the recipient teams. This is a great option for training tasks or tasks where employees must acknowledge a new policy.
- Form completion requirement. You'll be able to add a form completion requirement to a task, which allows you to create a Microsoft Forms survey that must be completed by a member of each recipient team before that team can complete the task.
- Approval completion requirement. Similarly, you'll be able to add an approval completion requirement to a task, which means that the task cannot be approved until an approval of the completed work is requested and granted.
These features will be enabled as part of the rollout of the new Planner experience (more info at https://aka.ms/thenewplanner).
