Microsoft September 2022

This month Microsoft has lots of new features and feature enhancements.

2. Schedule Send for Teams Chat

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

All users within your organization will be allowed to schedule chat messages. All scheduled messages can only be delivered no more than 7 days in the future and cannot be flagged as urgent or important. Inline images and attached files will only be accessible by others in the chat once the message has been delivered.

When this will happen:
Early November

3. Collaborate in Teams meetings with Excel Live

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

With “Excel Live”, you can share and collaborate with Excel workbook in a meeting. This is handy when you want to get work done with your colleagues in a meeting, it seamlessly turns the meeting window canvas to an Excel workbook collaboration without having to move between windows and screens. For e.g.: Budget sheet which needs input from all participants to collaborate, contribute, review and finalize.

When this will happen:
Mid-October and expect to complete by late November.

4. Quick Access Teams and SharePoint Document Libraries in win32 backstage

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

Currently, users experience some frustration when using Office products because of all different routes that they must use to access all their content. The Quick Access feature will allow users to access shared libraries from both their SharePoint and Teams locations. When the user opens files from shared libraries, these libraries will show up in the form of a list which will encourage users to save and open files to these libraries with ease. This helps deliver a more consistent, coherent storage location experience across M365 apps. This new backstage experience won’t show up in Teams, SharePoint, or OneDrive but does include storage locations from OneDrive and Teams (sites/channels) which are stored on SharePoint.

When this will happen:
Early January and expect to complete by late January 2023

5. View the Full Chat conversation thread after clicking on search message results

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

When users search for a chat message in Teams and click on a message result, they are taken to a view that contains only the selected message, rather than the entire chat thread. This fix will now land the users on the full chat thread once the message search result is clicked, thereby providing full context of the conversation around the message result.

When this will happen:

Early October and complete late October 2022.

6. Music on Hold for Call Transfer

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

Microsoft Teams users can now play music to callers on hold when a call transfer is initiated. This feature ensures that music can be played to caller on hold when call transfer is initiated, feature applies to 1-1 VoIP and PSTN calls.

When this will happen:

Mid-September and expect to complete rollout by late September.

7. Video Clips in Teams Chat

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

Video Clips are a new way of working and connecting with coworkers using short video in Teams. Users can capture, send, and playback video messages in Chat on all Teams endpoints. Recording limited to 1min across all platforms.

When this will happen:

Late September and complete by early October

8. Automatically view up to 49 videos (7x7) in Teams meeting

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

Microsoft Teams Meetings currently supports a maximum of 9 videos (3x3) on the screen by default (in Gallery view). For seeing more than 9 videos, user needs to manually select the ‘Large Gallery’ view. With this update, users will be able to automatically see up to 49 videos (7x7) on their screen by default without an explicit action. However, Large Gallery view will still continue to exist as an option.

When this will happen:

Late September and complete by early October

Viva Updates

1. Meeting effectiveness surveys and plans coming in the Microsoft Viva Insights app in Teams

NEW FEATURE

How this will affect your organisation:

Meeting effectiveness surveys offer a new way to provide feedback to meeting organizers and help improve future meetings. The surveys are displayed at the end of select meetings in Teams with 5+ attendees and feature the following questions:

When this will happen:

Meeting effectiveness surveys will begin rolling out end of September, 2022 and Meeting effectiveness Plan will begin rolling out mid October, 2022 making them both available WW by end of October, 2022.

Admin Updates

1. Basic Authentication Deprecation in Exchange Online – September 2022 Update

POTENTIAL ACTION REQUIRED

How this will affect your organisation:

As we communicated last year in blog posts and earlier this year in MC375736 , we will start to turn off basic authentication in our worldwide multi-tenant service on October 1, 2022. We will randomly select tenants, send 7-day warning Message Center posts, post Service Health Dashboard notices, and turn off basic auth in the tenant.

We’re turning off basic auth for the following protocols: MAPI, RPC, Offline Address Book (OAB), Exchange Web Services (EWS), POP, IMAP, Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) and Remote PowerShell.

Ensure that no users or services are using basic auth within your environment.