Windows 10: Announcing new Office Insider Group Policy setting Office

Brink · Oct 29, 2019

Hi, I’m Susan Cockrell, a Senior PM for the Office Insider team, with an exciting new update about the program to share with you.

We’ve been listening to your feedback and have heard from IT Admins that they’d like an easier way to give end-users the ability to opt-in to the Office Insider program. So, if you’re an IT Admin and you already use Group Policy, you can now give a select group of Windows users the option to install Office Insider builds for themselves by using the Show the option for Office Insider policy setting. When you enable this new policy setting, the Office Insider option will appear under File > Account for those users.

Learn more about how to give your users the option to install Office Insider builds by using Group Policy here.
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Source: Announcing new Office Insider Group Policy setting - Office Insider Blog

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Brink · Oct 29, 2019

What’s new in Office 365 Groups administration

Last December, we announced that Office 365 Groups are now supported by eDiscovery. Since then, we’ve delivered a number of updates to help administrators govern and manage Office 365 Groups, which provides cross-application group membership to enable teams to easily collaborate in their favorite apps.
The following capabilities are available today to all Office 365 commercial and education customers:

Ability to update privacy type—When you create an Office 365 group, users have two privacy options: public (anyone within your organization can access the group’s content) and private (only approved members can access the group’s content). This update enables group owners to change the privacy setting from public to private or vice versa by editing the group properties in Outlook on the web. Administrators can also leverage the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlets to change the privacy type. Read “Make Office 365 groups public or private” for more information.

Easily edit a group’s privacy setting.

Multi-domain support—Larger organizations use separate email domains to reflect different parts of their businesses. Office 365 groups that are created by users in one domain will share that domain (as opposed to using a common domain across the tenant). Administrators now also have control to create groups in specific domains of their choosing. Read “Multi-domain support for Office 365 Groups” for more information.

Guidance to configure Office 365 Groups with on-premises Exchange mailbox users—If you’ve configured a hybrid deployment between your on-premises Exchange organization and Office 365, you can make groups created in Office 365 available to your on-premises users by following the steps outlined in “Configure Office 365 Groups with on-premises Exchange hybrid.”

Allow users to send as the Office 365 group—If you want to enable your group’s shared mailbox to “Send As,” you can now use the PowerShell cmdlets to configure this. Once you enable this setting, your Office 365 group users can use Outlook or Outlook on the web to send and reply to email as the Office 365 group. Users can go to the group, create a new email and change the “Send As” field to the group’s email address. See “Use PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups” for more information.

In addition to the above improvements, the following capabilities are starting to roll out today and expected to be fully deployed by the end of July:

Creation policy in Azure Active Directory—We’ve implemented policy in Azure Active Directory that allows administrators to restrict group creation to certain users. This ensures that the creation of Office 365 groups through all endpoints, such as Planner and Power BI, can be given to selected users. The existing Exchange Mailbox policy only applies to creation in Exchange.

Usage guidelines—You’ll be able to define usage guidelines for Office 365 Groups—to educate your users about best practices that help keep their groups effective and educate them on internal content policies.

Data classification and extensible policy—You’ll be able to create a customizable data classification system for Office 365 Groups that allows separation of groups by policy type (e.g., “unclassified,” “corporate confidential” or “top secret”). In this manner, your groups can exhibit the policies of other content in your organization. Extensible policy allows your organization to configure an endpoint that is called whenever a group is created or changed—and you can then implement your own policies for group creation or change.

Mobile application management—To protect users’ data on the go, we’re working on exposing the Outlook Groups mobile apps in Microsoft Intune as policy-managed apps.

We are continually investing in Office 365 Groups to improve the administration experience. See the key items below that are on our roadmap:

Exchange Admin Center (EAC) UI for migrating Distribution Lists (DLs) to groups—Building on the scripts we released (mentioned above) for DL migration, you will soon be able to migrate a DL to a group directly from the Exchange Admin Center with one click!

Naming policy in Azure Active Directory—Administrators will be able to configure a policy for appending text to the beginning or end of a group’s name and email address no matter where the group is created (e.g., Outlook, Planner, Power BI, etc.). Administrators can also configure a list of specific blocked words that can’t be used in group names and also rely on the native list of thousands of blocked words to keep their directories clean.

Ability to search for private Groups files—By integrating Groups files (stored in a SharePoint document library and surfaced in OneDrive for Business) and Office Delve, users will be able to search content from both public and private groups as long as they’re a member.

In addition to the governance and administration innovations mentioned above, we plan to deliver the following key features in the second half of this year to continue helping you work across teams and organizations: the ability to add external members to a group, a SharePoint team site for every group and integration of Yammer groups with the Office 365 Groups service.

For more information about upcoming improvements to Office 365 Groups, please visit fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap. We also look forward to seeing you at Ignite, September 26–30 in Atlanta, where we’ll be sharing details on these recent Office 365 Groups innovations and more.

—Christophe Fiessinger, @cfiessinger, senior product manager for the Office 365 marketing team
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Source: What's new in Office 365 Groups administration—June 2016 update - Office Blogs

Ahhzz · Oct 29, 2019

Office 2019

Only supported on Win10. Sorry, 8.1 users, only 4 years old, gotta go.

Microsoft Office 2019 will only work on Windows 10

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...-to-office-and-windows-servicing-and-support/

Spoiler Office 2019
Last year at Ignite, we announced Office 2019 – the next perpetual version of Office that includes apps (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and Skype for Business) and servers (including Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business). Today we’re pleased to share the following updates:

Office 2019 will ship in H2 of 2018. Previews of the new apps and servers will start shipping in the second quarter of 2018.

Office 2019 apps will be supported on:

Any supported Windows 10 SAC release

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2018

The next LTSC release of Windows Server

The Office 2019 client apps will be released with Click-to-Run installation technology only. We will not provide MSI as a deployment methodology for Office 2019 clients. We will continue to provide MSI for Office Server products.

Brink · Oct 29, 2019

What’s new in Office 365 Groups for April 2017

With over 85-million monthly Office 365 users, there’s no such thing as a typical customer. That’s why we built Office to embrace the diverse needs of the modern workplace by giving teams their choice of tools. Even within a single organization, different teams often have different demands for the productivity tools they use every day. What’s unique about Office 365 is the ability to deliver tools that meet these diverse needs—all on a single, manageable platform.Supporting these teams is Office 365 Groups, a membership service leveraged by millions of users, which helps teams collaborate in their app of choice, including: Outlook, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Planner, Yammer, OneNote and Microsoft Teams. Office 365 Groups helps to structure, format and store information in a way that is accessible across different applications, but remains secure and easily manageable.

Enhancements to help admins manage groups

A key benefit of Office 365 Groups is that any user in your organization can create a group and start collaborating with others in seconds. Self-service creation is great for users, but we know IT admins need to be able to easily manage groups, gain insight into their use, control their directories and ensure compliance of group data. Today, we are announcing new enhancements for administering Office 365 Groups to support these needs:

Restore deleted groups—If you deleted an Office 365 group, it’s now retained by default for a period of 30 days. Within that period, you can restore the group and its associated apps and data via a new PowerShell cmdlet.

Retention policies—Manage group content produced by setting up retention policies to keep what you want and get rid of what you don’t need. Admins can now create Office 365 Groups retention policies that apply to the group’s shared inbox and files in one step using the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center.

Label management—With labels, you can classify Office 365 Groups emails and documents across your organization for governance, and enforce retention rules based on that classification.

This adds to our broad set of group management tools recently rolled out to Office 365 customers:

Guest access—Guest access in Office 365 Groups enables you and your team to collaborate with people from outside your organization by granting them access to group conversations, files, calendar invitations and the group notebook.

Upgrade Distribution Groups to Office 365 Groups—The Exchange Admin Center now offers an option to upgrade eligible Distribution Groups to Office 365 Groups with one click.

Data classification*—You can create a customizable data classification system for Office 365 Groups, such as unclassified, corporate confidential or top secret.

Usage guidelines*—You can define usage guidelines for Office 365 Groups—to educate your users about best practices that help keep their groups effective, and educate them on internal content policies.

Azure AD Connect*— Enables group writeback to your Active Directory to support on-premises Exchange mailboxes. See “Configure Office 365 Groups with on-premises Exchange” for more information.

Dynamic membership*—Admins can define groups with rule-based memberships using the Azure Management Portal or via PowerShell. Group membership is usually updated within minutes as users’ properties change. This allows easy management of larger groups or the creation of groups that always reflect the organization’s structure.

Hidden membership—If you want group membership to be confidential (for example, if the members are students), you can hide the Office 365 group members from users who aren’t members of the group.

Creation policies—There may be some people in your organization that you don’t want to be able to create new groups. There are several techniques for managing creation permissions in your directory.

Office 365 Groups activity report—These reports includes group properties, messages received and group mailboxes storage over time. Note you can also leverage the SharePoint site usage report to track groups’ file storage.

A look at upcoming features

Because Office 365 is a subscription service, we’re able to continue improving the admin capabilities based on customer feedback. Here’s a look at some of the enhancements on our Roadmap for the next three months:

Expiry policy*—Soon, you will be able to set a policy that automatically deletes a group and all its associated apps after a specific period. The group owner(s) will receive an email notification prior to the expiration date, and they will be able to extend the expiration date if the group is still in use. Once the expiration date is reached, the group will be soft deleted for 30 days (and hence can be restored by an administrator if needed).

Azure AD naming policy*—Admins will be able to configure a policy for appending text to the beginning or end of a group’s name and email address no matter where the group is created, such as Outlook, Planner, Power BI, etc. Admins will be able to configure a list of specific blocked words that can’t be used in group names and rely on the native list of thousands of blocked words to keep their directories clean.

Default classification and classification description—Will enable admins to set default Office 365 Groups classification at the tenant level using PowerShell cmdlets. In addition, admins will be able to provide a description for each of the defined classifications.

Classification is available when creating or modifying a group across apps—Selecting a group classification will be available when creating or editing a group across the following Office 365 applications: Outlook, SharePoint, Planner, Yammer and StaffHub.

Learn more

See this recent presentation from Ignite Australia to learn more about Office 365 Groups, and join our Ask Us Anything session on the Microsoft Tech Community on April 13, 2017 at 9 a.m. PDT (UTC-7) to discuss these recent administration updates.

Get started with the Office 365 Groups online resources today.

—Christophe Fiessinger, @cfiessinger, senior program manager for the Office 365 Groups team
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Source: What's new in Office 365 Groups for April 2017 - Office Blogs

Windows 10: Announcing new Office Insider Group Policy setting Office

Announcing new Office Insider Group Policy setting Office

Announcing new Office Insider Group Policy setting Office

Announcing new Office Insider Group Policy setting Office

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