December 2020 Newsletter – Week 3

(Updated) New Microsoft Teams meeting pre-join experience

Updated December 10, 2020: This feature has completed rolling out.

Microsoft’s new pre-join experience makes it easier for users to select audio and video sources before joining a Teams meeting.

(Updated) Reminder of Upcoming IE11 Retirement in Microsoft 365 Apps

Updated December 10, 2020: Microsoft will not be moving forward with rolling out the notification banner at this time.

On August 17, 2020, Microsoft officially announced, the timeline for retiring support for Internet Explorer 11 in Microsoft 365 apps. Microsoft would also like to take this opportunity to remind you of the upcoming Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop application retirement, which was announced in parallel with the IE 11 change.

Update to Microsoft 365 and Outlook for Windows connectivity

To ensure that Microsoft meets performance expectations, they are updating the supported versions of Outlook for Windows that can connect to Microsoft 365 services.

Effective November 1, 2021, the following versions of Outlook for Windows, as part of Office and Microsoft 365 Apps, will not be able to connect with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services.

(Updated) Updates to meeting chat membership

Updated December 8, 2020: Based off of feedback from early rings Microsoft has decided to make some changes prior to proceeding with the rollout. Microsoft will update this post with more details on the timing when they are ready to proceed.

Microsoft is updating a meeting participant’s access to meeting chat. These changes will manage a users access to a meeting chat based on how they were invited to the meeting.

Translation in Outlook for Windows is a new set of translation features that enable users to translate full messages or specific words and phrases.

Teams is built on the Microsoft 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud, delivering advanced security and compliance capabilities. These capabilities can be managed across Microsoft services including Teams through a single pane of glass experience in Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance centers.

Currently these capabilities are available in Teams for chat and file content. Microsoft is excited to announce that the following Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities will now be available for card content generated through apps in Teams messages in addition to chat and file content:

• Legal hold: Preserve card content
• eDiscovery: Identify, collect and produce card content in response to an investigation
• Audit: Audit user activity on cards for forensics
• Retention: Manage card content lifecycle in Teams

Text predictions help Microsoft 365 users write more efficiently by using intelligent technology to suggest text during composition. This feature is available for Outlook on the web (October 2020).

Microsoft is now extending support for text predictions to Outlook for Windows.

With this update, your users will be able to choose their preferred means of Teams notifications delivery, either via the Teams built-in notification system or via their native OS notification system.

Microsoft will soon be alerting Teams meeting participants when there are five minutes remaining in a scheduled meeting. This is an informational notification and will not automatically end the meeting.

The presenter, in control, can now see a presenter view during Teams Presentation Sharing in a meeting.

Microsoft Teams will soon support multiple numbers for a given user when dialing from the chat header.

Microsoft has released updates to the following update channels for Microsoft 365 Apps:

• Current Channel
• Monthly Enterprise Channel
• Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel (Preview)
• Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel

You will soon be able to manage Exact Data Match (EDM) from Microsoft 365 compliance center, providing an alternative to using PowerShell.

Text formatting (bold, italics, and underline) is coming to Microsoft Forms to help survey and quiz designers differentiate and emphasize content.