The Loop components are rolling out to desktop and mobile Teams users via its chat function. They are like little applications within Teams, letting users create notes, task lists and tables on the fly, which can be messaged to collaborative team members. Microsoft’s “@mention” messaging capability can be used to send these materials. Coauthoring is supported with the Loop components, and users can see any changes as they get made.

Possible uses for Loop components might include tracking the status of projects or “crowdsourcing” ideas. They also can be used for breakout discussions within conversation threads, the announcement suggested.

Users can start up a Loop component via an icon, which is located under the text box that’s used for Teams chats.

The Loop components have a full version history capability, which lets users go back to an earlier version, if wanted. They also can be discovered through a Teams search, which will also work for Office.com and Office Mobile App users.

Microsoft 365 ‘Breakthrough’ Product

Microsoft Loop was one of the products highlighted by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, during a recent Microsoft Ignite keynote talk. During this month’s Microsoft Shareholder event, Nadella described Microsoft Loop as the next Microsoft Office365 Vietnam breakthrough product, according to a Nov. 30 Microsoft transcript:

Microsoft Loop is the next big breakthrough in Microsoft 365. It’s a new application for a communication-first and AI-first world that composes people’s content into a collaborative canvas and reimagines how anyone can contribute.

The Loop components are just one aspect of the product, which also includes Loop pages and Loop workspaces. Loop pages are described as “canvases” for organizing Loop components, as well as “files, links or data” for collaboration purposes. Loop workspaces are described a “shared spaces,” used for group projects.

More To Come

Microsoft earlier this month described building specific Loop components, such a “voting table” used to achieve consensus, a “status tracker” for monitoring projects and business workflow components that will work with Dynamics 365 records.

Back then, Microsoft promised to share more on the ability of “third-party application developers” to make Loop components using Microsoft Graph connectors. The details are being reserved for the 2022 Microsoft Build developer event, apparently as yet unscheduled, but which in the past kicked off in May.

The addition of Loop components to Teams chat is just part of Microsoft’s plans. Loop components were also said to be coming to Outlook and OneNote, too, starting as early as this month, although they weren’t mentioned in Microsoft’s Tuesday announcement.

Besides Microsoft 365, Microsoft also have other solutions such as Sharepoint, Azure solutions, Power BI development that can help you improve your enterprise performance.

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As usual, we have divided this recap into different sections to highlight different Microsoft 365 apps and services, including OneDrive, Teams, Microsoft Outlook/Word/Excel, and more. Here’s a look at what you need to know.

OneDrive

We’ll start with Microsoft’s file hosting and sharing service OneDrive. The firm added lots of features, most notably, the announcement of new Microsoft Teams integrations. OneDrive gained new file-sharing capabilities in Teams to provide a consistent sharing experience across Microsoft 365. Microsoft also made it possible to store Teams meeting and call recordings in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Intranet.

This month, OneDrive picked up a new feature called “Add to OneDrive” that makes it easy for users of the service to add shared folders into their private OneDrive folder list. Microsoft also increased the upload file size limit from 15 GB to 100 GB in OneDrive and SharePoint for all users. Other important features added to OneDrive can be seen below.

• Improved new first-run experience in OneDrive
• The company delivered a new OneDrive widget for iOS 14
• OneDrive on iOS got a new home experience
• Enhanced file protection and governance capabilities in OneDrive and SharePoint
• The new file detail pane and activity feed allows users to see file activity and comments in a single view.
• OneDrive for iOS now supports uploading and viewing Live Photos
• OneDrive family and group sharing, which allows users to predefine their family or friend group for sharing photos, albums, or documents.

Though not included in the year’s news, there’s still more coming for OneDrive in 2021. The company announced that it’s bringing Dark Mode to OneDrive for the web across personal and commercial accounts. The update is expected to go live in January 2021.

Microsoft Teams

The Covid-19 pandemic might be upon us, but Microsoft Teams shows no signs of slowing down in terms of new features. In 2020, Microsoft rolled out a bunch of big updates for Teams. The first of them is the ability to create Virtual Breakout rooms during meetings.

The company released new personal features for preview in the Microsoft Teams desktop and web clients and mobile apps. Thanks to these features, users can now chat with friends or family members who don’t have a Teams account. The personal version of the app provides location alerts when a family member leaves or arrives at designated locations.

Some of the other added features for Microsoft Teams include interoperability between Skype for Business and Teams, and the ability to switch between personal and work accounts. We invite you to check out our in-depth recap post to read more about Teams updates.

It looks like Microsoft Teams will continue its incredible run of innovation and growth. We remind you that there’s still more coming for Teams in early 2021. The popular collaboration platform will soon support native OS notifications on Mac and Windows, meeting reactions, and more.

Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Excel

Third on our list will be Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Excel. In August, Microsoft announced that an audio transcription feature is now integrated into Word for the web. The feature lets users transcribe recorded video/audio files and live meetings. Also falling under the same category is the ability to dictate with voice commands in Office mobile and the web version of Word.

As for Microsoft Excel, the company announced some important updates in June. The first is Forms for Excel, a new experience that makes it easier to gather information from employees within an organization. Money in Excel, is another new consumer-focused solution that helps to manage accounts, including budgets, transactions, credit or debit cards, and much more.

Finally, with Outlook, there was a major change earlier this fall. Microsoft introduced cloud settings and roaming signatures in Outlook for Windows. This means that users can now save some settings to their cloud profile and sync their Outlook signature across devices. Also, Outlook for Mac got updated with a fresh new look to prep for Big Sur.

The new Lists app, Native Office 365 Apps for M1 Macs, and more

To end the recap, we’ll look at some updates for SharePoint and the other Microsoft 365 apps. First of all, the SharePoint Spaces is now generally available, and developers can now create mixed-reality spaces. There’s also a new My Feed web part for SharePoint, which shows relevant content from across Microsoft 365.

As we covered before, the new Lists app, one of the newest apps for Microsoft 365, now helps users track information and organize work. Microsoft Lists supports commenting, and it provides various views in Teams. The list of new additions to Microsoft 365 includes a new version of Microsoft 365 for Mac apps that runs natively on the new M1-powered Apple MacBooks.

Needless to say, Microsoft definitely improved on Microsoft 365 in 2020, and the updates to Microsoft Office365 Vietnam reflect that. The firm has announced many new services, including Project Moca, Universal Print, a Microsoft family safety app, Microsoft Editor, and Microsoft Productivity Score. We remind you that you can keep up to date on all the latest features and news via our dedicated news hub.

Opus Solution is a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in consulting and providing solutions of Microsoft such as Office365 Vietnam, Azure, Power BI, Sharepoint. Do not hesitate to give us a call if you need more advice on these technology solutions.

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If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft technologies, do not hesitate to give Opus Solution a call. We are a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in consulting and providing solutions of Microsoft besides Sharepoint such as Azure solutions, Power BI development.

Microsoft has made continuity of user workflow and collaboration a mainstay of its Microsoft 365 suite of software. This includes making all these apps fully functional and accessible through a web browser whether on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile device. As the Microsoft Teams app continues to become the primary portal for enterprise user collaboration, a modern browser is a must have to continue pushing these abilities.

With that in mind, Microsoft has announced their plans to drop support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) in Microsoft 365 at the end of November. The remaining Microsoft 365 apps will stop supporting IE11 next year:

As Microsoft points out, IE11 was initially released on October 17, 2013, as part of Windows 8.1. The last version of Internet Explorer was also released as part of Windows 10 in July 2015 with Microsoft Edge Legacy set as the default browser.

In other words, IE11 has missed out on all the improvements that make web-based apps and platforms functional today.

Since the company is positioning its Teams app to be the hub for so many aspects of the company’s enterprise productivity and collaboration offerings, dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 in Teams first makes a lot of sense.

“We believe that Microsoft 365 subscribers, in both consumer and commercial contexts, will be well served with this change through faster and more responsive web access to greater sets of features in everyday toolsets like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint Portal, and more.”

With the Teams app leading the way out of IE11, the remaining programs in Microsoft 365 will follow suit in August 2021.

Microsoft was clear that this does not mean the end of IE11 itself. The Redmond company knows IE11 is a key aspect of many Line of Business (LOB) apps and workflows within enterprises and that support does not change. Support for Internet Explorer 11 on the OS will continue to be connected to the OS’s lifecycle which is laid out on the Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Lifecycle support page.

Alongside the plan to end support for Internet Explorer 11 for the Teams app and the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite, an additional announcement was made concerning Microsoft Edge Legacy.  This is the version of Edge that was default in Windows 10 when the OS was released in 2015 and is now being replaced with new Microsoft Edge which is based on the open-source Chromium rendering engine.

As of March 9, 2021, this legacy version of Edge will no longer receive security updates in Windows 10. Enterprises should begin preparing to replace legacy Edge with either the new Microsoft Edge which is already shipping with a full collection of deployment and management tools for IT pros and admins, or their supported browser of choice.

At some point, expect Microsoft Edge Legacy to be deprecated and removed from Windows 10 in a future feature update. Without receiving security updates, it will eventually become a liability for organizations to keep on their end user systems.

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After its rollout to all Office 265 environments during Q4 2020, the Exchange Online Message Recall feature will allow users of Microsoft’s cloud email to retrieve messages their recipients haven’t yet opened regardless of the email client they use.

“The Outlook for Windows Message Recall feature is extremely popular with users, yet it doesn’t always work so well. Part of the problem is that the recall is client-based, and the recall can only happen if the recipient also uses Outlook,” says the planned feature’s Microsoft 365 roadmap entry.

“With millions of users with mailboxes in Office 365, we’re now able to improve upon that feature by performing the recall directly in the cloud in Office 365 mailboxes, so it doesn’t matter which email client the recipient uses, the recall takes place in their Office 365 mailbox, and when their client syncs their mail, the message is gone.”

Microsoft also intends to provide Office 365 customers who will use Message Recall with an aggregate message recall status report that will make it a lot easier to know exactly what emails were successfully retrieved and which weren’t.

Recall Message in Outlook for Windows (Microsoft)

Recalling email messages is already available for users of Microsoft’s Exchange Server messaging platform through the Outlook for Windows email client.

When they click the “Recall This Message” entry from an email’s menu, they can retrieve any mails sent to recipients who haven’t yet opened them.

The feature is also designed to allow them to replace previously sent emails if they ever need any corrections or adding a forgotten attachment.

The drawback for Outlook Windows users is that recalling messages is only available if both sender and recipient have an Office 365 or Microsoft Exchange email account within the same organization.

Once the “Recall This Message” command has been sent to the server, the users see the dialog below which asks them to choose between only deleting the unread messages or also replacing them with a new message.

Recall This Message dialog (Microsoft)

In related news, Redmond is planning to add protection against Reply-All email storms in Exchange Online during Q3 2020, which is an issue impacting Office 365 customers that are members of improperly locked down mail distribution lists.

Reply-All storms (aka reply-allpocalypses) are huge chain reaction sequences of emails started by one of the members of a large email distribution list who replies to the entire list using the “Reply All” feature. This could lead to an accidental Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) taking down some of the email servers delivering the exchanged replies.

Microsoft also works on developing a feature dubbed ‘Unverified Sender’ that would help users identify potential spam or phishing emails that reach their Outlook client’s inbox a lot easier.

The Office 365 dev team also wants to enhance the way emails secured using the Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) service are seen by mail servers so that they’re less likely to be marked as spam and sent straight to the Trash folder.

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This will allow Teams users to move and share an email (and all of its attachments) into a chat channel. A new “Share to Teams” button will be made available inside Outlook early next year, and it simply moves an email into Microsoft Teams. It will allow employees using Teams to have a private conversation about an email thread or simply bridge the gap between the systems a little easier. It’s not exactly the same as the full bridge that Slack is attempting as you won’t be able to reply to emails and have them show up in Slack. It’s simply a static move of an email into Teams.

Outlook integration has been highly requested, alongside the ability to create private channels and pin channels in the Teams client. Private channels has been in beta in recent months, and it’s finally making its way to all Teams users this week. Microsoft is also planning to enable pinned channels later this year so you can keep important channels at the top of the Teams channel list and reorganize them into your own custom list.

Microsoft is also adding some other important productivity-focused improvements to Teams. A new tasks pane will be available early next year, and it will include a single view of your personal tasks and those assigned within Teams. Tasks across Microsoft To Do, Teams channels, Planner, and Outlook will all be visible in this single view, which you can customize to show boards, charts, a list, or schedules.

Teams is also getting the ability to pop out into a separate window. This option will work for chats, meetings, calls, or documents, and the separate windows can sit side-by-side with other apps and services you’re using. These multiwindow features will arrive early next year, but they won’t automatically hover on your desktop and remain always on top like the Movies & TV apps is able to do in Windows 10 or picture-in-picture modes in browsers like Chrome and Edge.

Alongside these features, Microsoft is also planning to bring Yammer integration into Teams. The app will be available on the main left-hand side of the navigation bar in Microsoft Teams, and provide quick access to Yammer communities, events, and conversations. Later this year, Teams will also get new Polls and Surveys features to add to messages or channels.

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The new policy, now at “general availability,” slightly alters the current Office 365 groups expiration policy that was established last year within the Azure Active Directory Admin Center portal. Under the current arrangement, organizations set a time for Office 365 groups to expire. If “group owners” (typically certain end users) don’t renew their groups before this expiration deadline, then they’ll get sent a series of e-mail reminders at 30 days, 15 days and one day before end. If there’s no response, though, the group gets automatically “soft deleted” but it can still be restored within 30 days’ time. After that 30-day period, though, the group gets permanently deleted.

With the new policy, groups will get automatically renewed if certain user activity has occurred before the group’s expiration date. These activities might include members of a group uploading a SharePoint document, sending an e-mail to the group via Outlook or visiting a Microsoft Teams channel, according to the announcement.

The new policy applies to organizations that have set up Office 365 group policies via the Azure AD Admin Center portal or Azure AD PowerShell. It works across various Office 365 applications, such as the groups used for “Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer and others.”

One catch for organizations is that the ability to set expiration policies for Office 365 groups depends on having an Azure AD Premium subscription for all group members. Here’s how this Microsoft document expressed the point:

Configuring and using the expiration policy for Office 365 groups requires you to possess but not necessarily assign Azure AD Premium licenses for the members of all groups to which the expiration policy is applied.

Right now, it’s just possible to set one expiration policy for “all Office 365 groups in an Azure AD organization,” according to Microsoft’s document.

The types of user actions that have the effect of automatically renewing Office 365 groups with the new policy are described in the following list:

• SharePoint — View, Edit, Download, Move, Share, Upload Files
• Outlook — Join group, Read/write group message from group space, Like a message (OWA)
• Teams — Visit a Teams channel

This list of actions likely will get updated at some point, though, Microsoft indicated.

Microsoft came up with the new Office 365 groups expiration policy in response to user feedback. The policy change aims to “strike a balance between cleaning up unused groups and ensuring any valuable groups do not get deleted unintentionally, causing data loss,” the announcement explained.

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Check out the Office 365 Dashboard

One of the first things you should check out with Office 365 is the main dashboard. This is the hub for all Office 365 activities. You can find links to your apps, a list of your most recent files, a search bar to reach out to your contacts, and a SharePoint section for other internal files. Like the Start Menu in Windows 10, this is the place to go for everything Office 365 related.

Try out Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner

Another element of Office 365 worth checking out is Microsoft Teams. As we’ve highlighted before, this service allows you to collaborate with your employees, regardless of their location. The user interface is very friendly, and there are many apps and services you can integrate with it. By trying out Teams, you can boost your productivity levels, and check up on what your employees are doing, and give them central channels and hubs to chat and stay healthy. You might also be able to replace your internal phone-lines, and PBX platforms with Teams, as Microsoft itself has done.

Secondly, tying in with Teams is Microsoft Planner. This service lets you reduce chaos at work, and create different buckets and lists for tasks. You can track and assign tasks, set due dates, put your details in cards, and create groups to pick tasks that matter. You also can enjoy a chart-view to give you an analytic look at your progress on the days work.

Configure your OneDrive

When you run a small business, storage space is important. Be it emails, photos, invoices, receipts, and other documents, you’ll need to put things in the cloud for easy access. Luckily, with certain Office 365 plans, you can get up to a 1TB of storage on OneDrive. This will allow you to share files both internally and externally, as well as back up PCs to the cloud. You even can save email attachments to OneDrive. And, for collaboration, you also can send Office files via OneDrive links, to make things easier for those within your organization.

Get the most out of Outlook

Emailing is the core part of the modern world, especially if you’re running a small business. Luckily, most Office 365 subscription includes access to Microsoft Exchange. This means you’ll get to create your own domain name, and enjoy the abilities to manage calendars, share meeting times, schedule meetings, and more. Of course, with Microsoft Exchange, you also can recall en email, if you happen to make a mistake. And, you can enjoy all the capabilities of the dedicated Outlook app on Windows or macOS included with Office 365.

Install the Office apps

Finally, if your subscription allows it, you should download and install the Office 365 apps. Once you’ve downloaded, you can create professional-looking PowerPoint presentations, crunch numbers easily in Excel, and even create newsletters and mass emails in Publisher. Of course, you also can enjoy all the features of Microsoft Word,  and auto recover lost files with the power of OneDrive.

Other tips and tricks

There’s so much more that you can accomplish with Office 365, and we’ve just touched the surface. You can convert to PDF files in Office, and try out Microsoft’s video streaming service. Your workers can even use MyAnalystics as part of Office 365 to stay healthy on the job. How are you using Office 365 to be successful? Let us know in the comments below.

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Last Wednesday, the company released version 1905 (Build 11629.20196) of Office 365 for Windows Desktop to subscribers. This release includes a few improvements for end users, as detailed in Microsoft’s announcement. For instance, users can now see their personal and work accounts in one place within a new account manager, which lets them easily switch accounts. Microsoft also made it easier for Outlook users to “add Outlook.com and Gmail accounts that use 2-factor authentication.”

PowerPoint now has a “live captions and subtitles” feature that transcribes a presenters word’s into text. The text can appear in either the same language or a different language. Twelve spoken languages are currently supported for transcription.

Excel, PowerPoint and Word all have “@Mentions” collaboration support. It lets end users send e-mails to others from within a document. The e-mails point recipients back to a document.

Excel users now have an improved coauthoring collaboration experience with regard to “conditional formatting, cell styles, range protection, view gridlines, and cross-sheet cut/paste.” Microsoft also added the ability to change the background color of Word’s “Learning Tools” feature, which permits users to make text changes for better reading comprehension.

Improved Setup and Branding
IT pros also got Office 365 improvements. There’s a new setup experience in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center that’s being delivered to subscribers over a period of “several weeks,” according to a May 24 Microsoft announcement. This enhancement will create “a logical group of tasks related to your admin function” within the Setup page, Microsoft explained. It’s a more filtered view for IT pros, and will show their completed setup tasks, as well as tasks still requiring attention.

Microsoft also made it easier for organizations to add their logos and branding on the Office 365 navigation bar seen by end users. Now it’s possible to add “any file size and any format” for logos within the navigation bar across Office applications, including Office.com, according to Microsoft’s Thursday announcement.

Free DMARC E-Mail Monitoring
San Francisco-based Valimail, a provider of e-mail authentication services, is offering its Valimail Monitor for Office 365 at no cost to Office 365 subscribers. It verifies that communications are actually coming from an organization’s end users. The solution serves to ward off potential e-mail fraud generated by “shadow IT” applications (unauthorized use of services by end users) and phishing attempts (impersonated e-mails). Using Valimail Monitor, Office 365 e-mail traffic gets checked using “domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance” (DMARC) technology, Microsoft explained, in a Monday announcement.

DMARC is an open standard used for e-mail authentication. It works with an e-mail system’s Sender Policy Framework and DomainKeys Identified Mail functions, according to this Microsoft document description. However, the XML-based log information that gets generated by DMARC can be difficult to figure out. Valimail Monitor for Office 365 helps IT pros interpret this information, according to Microsoft:

“Instead of manually parsing the massive amount of XML-based IP address data you get in DMARC reports, Valimail Monitor for Office 365 digests DMARC aggregate reports and turns them into an easily readable list of named services. In addition, for each of these services, Valimail shows how many messages are passing authentication and how many are failing and provides overall stats on DMARC authentications and authentication failures.”

Microsoft claims that Valimail Monitor for Office 365 lets IT pros “easily see all third-party services sending on their behalf, as well as potential imposters that are spoofing their brand,” without having to wade through XML reports,

Office 365 Tools
Microsoft also recently announced various Office 365 tools that may be helpful.

IT pros using the Azure Cloud Shell now have support for Exchange Online, according to Microsoft’s announcement last Tuesday. The added support lets IT pros access the entire Exchange Online PowerShell library from a browser.

The Azure Cloud Shell is “a browser-based, authenticated shell experience, hosted by Microsoft,” that gives IT pros access to PowerShell or Bash command line interfaces. Users can access Azure Cloud Shell from within the Azure Portal interface or via “shell.azure.com, the Azure Mobile App, [or] the Azure Extension in Visual Studio Code.” Using Azure Cloud Shell requires having an “an Azure subscription and an Azure Storage account,” but Microsoft suggested that the cost from using Azure Storage “is typically very low.”

Developers who create Office 365 applications now have access to the Office365APIEditor tool, Microsoft announced on Monday. It’s an open source tool, not supported by Microsoft, that lets developers test sending requests to REST-based application programming interfaces (APIs). It supports Microsoft the Graph API, Outlook API and Office 365 Management Activity API, according to a Microsoft video.

Microsoft also announced a new Exchange Server 2019 Sizing Calculator tool late last month. It’s for organizations using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 or Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus products. The Exchange Server 2019 Sizing Calculator helps IT Pros choose disk types, including the “just a bunch of disks” (JBOD) low-cost option, when using virtualization. It also lets IT pros estimate things like CPU requirements, metacache database support and database sizes (up to 2TB).

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New icons

Microsoft unveiled the new icons back in November, five years after the last redesigned occured for the launch of Office 2013. At the time, the company explained that “our design solution was to decouple the letter and the symbol in the icons, essentially creating two panels (one for the letter and one for the symbol) that we can pair or separate. This allows us to maintain familiarity while still emphasizing simplicity inside the app.”

The first apps to get redesigned icons on Office.com are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, SharePoint, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive. It remains to be seen if other Office 365 apps like Delve, Forms and Sway will follow, but we also know that the Skype icon will also get some love in the near future.

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The new Outlook calendar app for Slack is designed to bring all of your meetings and calendar invites into the messaging service. It will message you when a meeting invite arrives, allowing you to respond with a single click. It will also include reminders to join Skype, Webex, or Zoom meetings. The Outlook calendar app will even set your Slack status automatically based on your calendar, and it will add “out of office” to a status if you’ve enabled it in Outlook.

Slack is also adding Outlook mail integration, with the ability to bring emails straight into Slack channels. Previously, you needed a third-party solution to enable this. You’ll be able to forward emails from Outlook directly into a Slack channel or direct message alongside adding a note and even including mail attachments. Similar email functionality already exists for Gmail, and the Outlook add-in will be available today.

Outlook add in

Slack’s OneDrive app is also getting updated to allow users to quickly import files from Microsoft’s cloud storage service. Much like the existing Dropbox and Google Drive integration, OneDrive users will be able to click the + icon to browse files and add them into a channel or direct message.

Alongside these OneDrive improvements, Slack is also enabling full previews of Office files like PowerPoint slides, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets. You’ll be able to preview Office files without even opening them, and Slack is aiming to bring similar functionality to OneDrive files, too.

All of these app improvements will be welcome additions for any businesses or teams that rely on a mix of services. Both Slack and Microsoft Teams have been going head-to-head to try to win over businesses that are interested in using chat services, but it’s clearly better for their mutual customers for the companies to integrate instead of fighting it out.

Microsoft has shown in the past that it’s willing to partner with rivals like Dropbox, but Slack’s Office 365 integration was created using public APIs and with no special help from Microsoft. This Slack integration comes just months after Microsoft launched its free version of Teams to rival Slack, just weeks after the company unveiled creative new conference call features for its Slack competitor.

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