Microsoft made over 100 updates and announcements in the month of September 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.
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 usage in your tenant will be added to the Microsoft Graph API to facilitate the creation of customized reporting and analytics. Metrics included in the Graph API will match those available in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center, including tenant-level count of enabled users and active users, as well as last activity date per user (totals for each Microsoft 365 app and a grand total). A Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 license is required to use this feature.
Last month, we saw two key updates to Microsoft Teams that users have been asking for for years. These are names and timestamps being added when copying a message, and the ability to rename the General channel.
Microsoft received overwhelming feedback of how much additional work it was to simply copy a message and paste it into a destination, only having to fiddle with removing the name and timestamp of the sender.
Additionally, users can finally rename the general channel in Teams! For existing Teams, a user can simply rename the channel as they normally would, however, they will be unable to change it back to "General". When creating a new Team, users will have the ability to set the General channel name.
Microsoft announced the introduction of new APIs that allow organizations to provision FIDO2 security keys (passkeys) on behalf of their users. This new capability aims to simplify the onboarding process for employees by enabling admin provisioning of security keys, providing a secure and seamless authentication experience from day one. The APIs empower organizations to handle the provisioning process, ensuring that users can benefit from phishing-resistant authentication methods without the need for self-service registration. This enhancement is part of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to improve security and user experience in the realm of identity and access management.
The new SharePoint Brand Center is a asset management system to help handle your organization’s colors, fonts, images and other assets all in one place. To enable it, a global administrator must follow steps in the Microsoft 365 admin center to create/activate the Brand center app. The Brand center will use the current organization asset libraries or prompt the creation of a new site if none exist. Enabling the Brand center also activates the custom fonts feature for SharePoint and Viva Connections. The steps to enable it vary based on the tenant configuration so check out the Microsoft documentation for the setup walkthrough
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/brand-center-overview
Microsoft announced the upcoming feature in Microsoft Intune that will allow IT administrators to collect and manage hardware inventory data for devices within their organization. This new capability aims to provide detailed insights into the hardware configurations of managed devices, enabling better decision-making and more efficient IT operations. The feature will be integrated into the Intune admin center, offering a centralized location for viewing and analyzing hardware inventory data. This enhancement is expected to improve the overall management and maintenance of devices, ensuring that organizations can keep track of their hardware assets more effectively.
Currently, there's a dedicated view for chats and a separate view for teams and channels. It's typical for organizations to overutilize the chat feature and underutilize teams and channels, which are much better at centralizing context, conversations, files, and related resources in a structured manner. Most often, this underutilization is partly due to a gap in planning and training and partly due to said view separation, which makes it harder to track activity. Rolling out in October, users will soon see chats, teams, and channels together in a unified view, making it easier to access, monitor, and update all conversation types. If your organization is not already utilizing teams and channels, this update may provide a good opportunity to plan and implement this rich feature set.
7. Microsoft 365 admin center will support continuous access evaluation (CAE)
Microsoft will enable continuous access evaluation (CAE) of tokens in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This feature will proactively terminate active user or admin sessions, require reauthentication, and enforce tenant policy changes in near real-time instead of waiting for an access token to expire.
CAE is the feature that allows user or admin sessions to be revoked when certain critical events occur or the location of the user or admin is not in the allowed IP address range. The access will be terminated almost instantly instead of waiting for a token to expire.
OAuth 2.0 authentication (open authentication) traditionally relies on access token expiration to revoke a user's access to modern cloud services. Users or admins whose access rights have been terminated still have access to resources until the access token expires. For the Microsoft 365 admin center, this access can be as long as an hour, by default. With continuous access evaluation, a user's critical events and network location changes are continuously evaluated.
8. Microsoft Teams: Add location to your presence signal
For more information, see Set your work location in Microsoft Teams.
