Office 365 for IT Pros Change Log

Chapter Number (bold) and number of changes

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

6

4

7

9

8

4

8

8

4

6

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

8

7

7

8

7

8

6

4

6

6

21

22

23

24

25

5

2

6

8

Date

Chapter

Change

Apr

3

Added a section on branding your tenant. Miscellaneous copy edits.

Apr

4

Added new script to report licenses assigned to users. Updated references to Security & Compliance centers, again; fixed various errors, and added some updated artwork.

Apr

5

Removal of text about Search-Mailbox cmdlet to Chapter 8 in the companion volume in preparation for its deprecation on July 1, 2020.

Apr

7

Site Swap is now available for all tenants. Mover is available for Microsoft 365 tenants at no cost.

Apr

8

Added note about pending SKU rename to “Microsoft 365 Apps”

Apr

9

Teams can now have memberships of up to 10,000.

Apr

10

Notes about switching from text-only classifications to sensitivity labels for groups, teams, and sites. More detail about sensitivity labels.

Apr

11

Teams supports chats and VOIP calls with Skype consumer. Support for local language versions of @Team and @Channel mentions. Teams now has more than 44 million daily active users. Updated section about Teams meeting etiquette. Teams now supports memberships of up to 10,000.

Apr

12

Added notes about using sensitivity labels with Teams.

Apr

13

Version 1.0.4 of the Teams PowerShell module is available. Rewrote section about Office connectors following the sad demise of the Twitter connector.

Apr

14

Stream mobile apps now support a variety of editing capabilities when recording videos.

Apr

16

Background blur now enabled for Teams for iOS clients.

Apr

18

Started integration of new Microsoft Endpoint Manager UI based on MC208118. It’ll be a while before that’s all finished though.

Apr

20

Removal of text about Search-Mailbox cmdlet following its deprecation. Update of information about how to use content search actions to purge messages from mailboxes.

Apr

21

Clarification of how mailbox audit events are transmitted to the Office 365 audit log. Added information about Microsoft 365 compliance communication policies and removed supervision policy coverage to the companion volume.

Apr

23

Added text about Power Automate UI Flows.

Apr

24

Clarification about pre-licensing use by Outlook for Mac. Added PowerShell examples of using PowerShell to work with sensitivity labels and containers. A new OME configuration property for privacy policies is available.

Mar

2

Included Office 365 SLA for Q4 FY2019.

Mar

3

Added information about Office 365 conditional access app; Updated MFA examples and text

Mar

4

New screenshots to reflect new admin center experience; renamed references to admin center; started the laborious work of splitting out security & admin centers even though MS themselves have only just begun.

Mar

5

Change in calendar automatic event control with PowerShell (Set-TxpUserSettings cmdlet).

Mar

6

Added extra PowerShell example for adding members to distribution lists. Outlook mobile now supports delegate access to user mailboxes. Added details about how to report non-standard permissions assigned to user and shared mailboxes.

Mar

7

Rewrote section about PowerShell support for SharePoint Online.

Mar

8

Updated news about Chrome Bing search extension; new Outlook mobile feature coverage; removed one obsolete screenshot.

Mar

11

Added extra detail about tag management. New Files channel tab is rolling out across Office 365. Cross-channel posts can now be edited and removed. Inclusion of new section covering Share to Teams, Share to Outlook, and Reply with IM.

Mar

13

Added section describing how to fetch pages of Graph data with PowerShell.

Mar

14

Clarify that if you remove an Office 365 groups, any linked videos remain in Stream.

Mar

15

Clarified that there’s no longer a tenant-wide way to turn To Do off.

Mar

17

CC to Security Center changes for policies, recipient limits and recipient spam sending limits, enhanced filtering for connectors updates, high confidence phish, quarantine changes, and DKIM selector updates.

Mar

18

Updated references to admin center

Mar

19

Added section about licensing of data governance and compliance services.

Mar

20

Rewrote section on setting a litigation hold on a mailbox.

Mar

21

General updates following split from SCC to separate compliance and security portals. Also made several changes to example scripts for interrogating the Office 365 audit log. Rewrote section about Exchange mailbox auditing.

Mar

23

Revision to graphics to remove some that weren’t essential.

Mar

24

Details of audit log records captured as Office Online apps work with sensitivity labels.

Feb

1

Updates for Microsoft FY20 Q2 results, including EMS now has 127 million subscribers.

Feb

3

Baseline policies will be removed this month. Several other changes in the chapter.

Feb

4

Introduced naming split of Security & Compliance center. Added section on new self-service “view account” feature. Updated coverage of self-service license purchase. Renamed “Report an Issue”.

Feb

5

Search-Mailbox cmdlet will not be available after April 1, 2020. Microsoft reversed the decision to impose a 1TB limit on auto-expanding archive mailboxes. Customizable recipient limits are now available for Exchange Online mailboxes.

Feb

6

OWA room card and Outlook mobile use information from the Outlook Places service to display information about meeting locations (rewritten text).

Feb

7

SharePoint Admin Center now has a sites detail panel to allow admins to manage site settings more easily. Per-site link expiration can now be set in the admin center. Added section about OneDrive synchronization of read-only files and permission inheritance.

Feb

8

Added coverage of controls for “what’s new” feature card display. Added description of new Microsoft Search/Bing extension for Chrome.

Feb

10

Addition of section about Groups admin role. Moved information about Site mailbox migration to the companion volume.

Feb

11

Teams now supports read receipts for personal and group chats. Tags now available to address subsets of members in a team.

Feb

12

Teams app setup policies now have a setting to control if users can pin apps to the app bar in the left navigation rail.

Feb

13

New example cited for posting message cards to Teams channels via the incoming webhook connector.

Feb

14

Added detail about capture of Teams meeting recordings in Stream.

Feb

15

Added mention of forthcoming organizational-tasks support in Teams. Bravely resisted pointing out the obvious, that Planner as a standalone app is probably doomed to be replaced by Teams.

Feb

16

A new Forrester Research report is available to help organizations understand the cost and economic advantages of Teams calling. Updates for assignment of cloud voice licenses to users.

Feb

19

Updated notes about Teams retention policies.

Feb

22

Sensitive by default feature is now GA to allow tenants to block external sharing of files until they have been processed by DLP policies.

Feb

23

Changes in licenses for Power Automate and Power Apps.

Feb

24

Clarification about support of decryption for protected messages copied by journal rules. Auto-label (sensitivity label) policies to process at-rest data are in preview. Rewrote section about creating sensitivity labels to reflect new UI in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center.

1 Jan

1

The Switzerland Office 365 datacenter region is now operational.

1 Jan

4

Added note about the Enable–CsOnlineSessionForReconnection cmdlet for Skype for Business Online. Added section on blocking self-service purchases for Power Platform-family SKUs.

1 Jan

5

Added note about using Search-Mailbox to clean out very large utility mailboxes. Added some extra notes about synchronizing mailboxes to the OST. Some clarification about SMTP authenticated submissions. Added note about how Exchange Online auto-processes some calendar meeting notifications.

1 Jan

7

General updates, including a note about the new Request Files feature.

1 Jan

8

Added notes about Teams inclusion in Jan 14 semi-annual channel release; updated guidance on running OWA as a PWA; added note about “Share to Teams” add-in. Added plaintive complaint about lack of sync control slider in Outlook for macOS.

1 Jan

9

Many changes to prepare for the replacement of classifications defined in the AAD policy for Groups by Office 365 sensitivity labels.

1 Jan

10

Rewrote section on classifying groups to reflect how Office 365 sensitivity labels can be used instead of classifications.

1 Jan

11

Teams trial version is being replaced by the Teams Exploratory experience in January 2020. Added note explaining workaround using website tab to point to resources in SharePoint site not belonging to a team. The Teams Linux client is now available in preview.

1 Jan

13

Updated example about blocking guest access to selected groups to explain what happens when a sensitivity label blocks this access.

1 Jan

14

Dates announced for the final migration phase from Office 365 Video to Stream.

1 Jan

16

Details about the Citrix VDI and VMware announcements. Details added about roles in Teams meetings.

1 Jan

19

Note that org-wide retention policies for SharePoint cover the sites created for Teams private channels.

1 Jan

20

Exchange in-place hold and eDiscovery tool will be retired in mid-2020.

1 Jan

21

Updated script to track creation of Office 365 Groups.

1 Jan

24

Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) supports PDF attachments for protected messages. OME is updating the email domains it uses to make sure that its messages are not blocked by anti-spam checks. Users with access to shared mailboxes can now use any Outlook client to access protected content. Outlook for Mac can now consume pre-licenses for protected messages attached by Exchange. Added details of the preview of sensitivity labels being used to mark groups, teams, and sites.

1 Dec

1

Added text to describe the Office 365 substrate. Rewrote section on the user numbers for Office 365.

1 Dec

2

Updated Table 2-2 with Office 365 SLA performance for Q3 CY19.

1 Dec

3

Added discussion of security defaults feature; Updated various statistics; Added conditional access report-only mode; Added staged rollout for password hash sync, PTA, and seamless SSO.

1 Dec

4

Added more admin roles and restructured discussion thereof; described new Service Assistant and SHD notification features; various updates and fixes.

1 Dec

5

Archive mailboxes are now limited to 1 TB. A set of REST-based cmdlets introduced for Exchange Online.

1 Dec

7

Several updates after Ignite 2019, including differential synchronization and SharePoint Online now supporting 2 million sites per tenant.

1 Dec

8

Description of new macOS Outlook interface, along with a few other fixes.

1 Dec

9

Yammer groups are now Yammer communities (and other updates to that section).

1 Dec

11

Teams supports private channels. Native rich federated 1:1 chat is now rolling out worldwide.

1 Dec

12

Teams now supports a minimum retention period of 1 day. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery can present complete Teams conversations from the individual records recovered by a search. Added section on compliance records for Teams private channels. Updated section on messaging policy.

1 Dec

13

Updated section to include PowerShell support for Teams private channels. Example provided of using REST-based PowerShell cmdlets with Office 365 Groups.

1 Dec

14

Added section about Stream architecture. Refreshed section about Stream admin settings. Trim feature is available to edit videos.

1 Dec

15

Added mention of forthcoming Teams-Planner integration.

1 Dec

16

Update on Microsoft Business Voice. Note about the planned Cisco-Teams interoperability for meetings.

1 Dec

17

Information added about skiplisting (enhanced filtering), the ORCA utility, and SMTP Auth protection.

1 Dec

19

Teams now supports a minimum retention period of 1 day. Information Barriers are now supported by SharePoint Online.

1 Dec

20

Added section on how to include Teams private channels in content searches. Microsoft has fixed the problem that allowed OneDrive for Business users to exclude their site from search results.

1 Dec

21

Some changes made to scripts to make them perform better when large numbers of audit events are processed.

1 Dec

22

DLP events available through Office 365 Management Activity API. Also, some updates from Ignite 2019.

1 Dec

23

Flow is now Power Automate. Updated the section about how to block self-service purchases for Power Platform apps.

1 Dec

24

Preview of SharePoint Online support for Office 365 sensitivity labels is now available.

1 Nov

1

Office 365 Monthly Active User count is now over 200 million.

1 Nov

3

Add MFA statistics; Add new My Sign-Ins page; Add CA policy example for Outlook Mobile; Control for managing MFA registration from a CA policy; Discuss MFA registration policies; Add information on new MFA enrollment reporting; Fix various typos

1 Nov

4

Fixed error in script. Updated list of admin roles; updated some screen shots to reflect changes to the Admin center. Also added a section explaining how to discover what service principals exist to allow app access to Office 365 resources.

1 Nov

7

General refresh, including information about new sharing reports for SharePoint sites and OneDrive for Business accounts.

1 Nov

8

General refresh, including clarification of the Modern Lifecycle support policy that applies to the Teams client and a few notes on OWA and Outlook mobile improvements.

1 Nov

10

Content about Azure AD Naming policy refreshed. The activity-based renewal processing for groups covered by the Group Expiration policy is now generally available.

1 Nov

11

Added note about filter feature for Teams chats. Update for number of active Slack users and other minor changes in the chapter (like Teams has now moved to Azure CosmosDB for its message store). Teams now supports Microsoft’s Modern Lifecycle Policy and won’t allow connections from desktop clients running software older than three months. Teams now supports posting to multiple channels. Added a bunch of observations about how different aspects of Teams work. Added warning about the side effect of the SharePoint site rename feature on the Files tab.

1 Nov

12

Change in the display format of preview items found by Office 365 compliance searches mean that Teams items no longer show team and channel name. Rewrote section about creating new teams.

1 Nov

13

Specify the set of EXO cmdlets that support the GroupMailbox parameter. Expanded and rewrote the discussion about finding old/stale guest user accounts by consolidating material from 13 and 21 into one place. Included a new script to find potentially unused guest accounts based on their activity.

1 Nov

15

Updated references to Microsoft To Do. Added reference to new Project web client; changeover of To Do as Outlook tasks UI. Added link to example script for Planner access through Graph. Added note about ongoing rollout of “Move task” feature.

1 Nov

16

Added information about buying and assigning Phone system numbers to Teams users.

1 Nov

17

Updated information about Quarantine role group, custom outbound spam policy, Outlook safelink processing, and changes in ZAP. Added section about how OWA highlights unauthenticated senders.

1 Nov

18

Minor updates, including clarification of which Azure AD roles have Intune privileges.

1-Nov

19

Added note about problem adding new guest accounts to Teams when information barriers are in place.

1 Nov

21

Moved discussion about identifying old guest user accounts to Chapter 13. The MailItemsAccessed audit event is now due to be available in a separate Microsoft 365 Audit package.

1 Nov

24

Added note to warn people that it will take some time before changes to sensitivity label policies replicate out to clients. OWA now uses Office 365 sensitivity labels rather than AIP templates to protect and mark messages. Outlook for Mobile now supports Office 365 Sensitivity Labels. OWA will support automatic application of sensitivity labels in November 2019.

1 Oct

1

Reminder that you can’t rename an Office 365 tenant.

1 Oct

2

Office 365 SLA for Q2 CY19 available.

1 Oct

3

Added examples of conditional access policies for legacy authentication and SharePoint Online, guidance for third-party federation products, guidance for self-service password reset configuration.

1 Oct

4

Added description of the new Roles section in the Microsoft 365 admin center, plus brief descriptions of new roles (including Global reader, Quarantine administrator, Search administrator, and Search reader). Other minor fixes.

1 Oct

5

Corrected bug in script to detect forwarding rules set in mailboxes and added check to report if mail forwarding address is set. Also noted the intention of Microsoft to disable basic auth connections for multiple mailbox connection protocols in October 2020. Added script to report mailbox quota usage over set threshold.

1 Oct

7

Added script to report OneDrive for Business storage usage. Added new section about managing comments for non-Office documents. Added section about the intelligent file card. Added section about modern OneDrive for Business user settings.

1 Oct

8

Updated note on release of dark mode for Outlook mobile; added two new OWA feature examples.

1 Oct

9

Clarifications about directory synchronization between AAD and EXODS.

1 Oct

10

Give extra information about the mail user objects created when guests are added to groups or teams. Added note about AAD risky sign-in policy blocking guest access to Teams or SharePoint Online.

1 Oct

11

Added text covering restricting replies to a topic to the author and moderators. Pinned channels are now available. Following multiple requests, we added a section to describe the basic structure of the Teams desktop and browser client.

1 Oct

12

Added section about reporting Teams usage, including the new Analytics option available in the Manage team menu.

1 Oct

13

Note that Get-Mailbox supports the -GroupMailbox switch to return group mailboxes. Exchange Online cmdlets now perform dual writes against EXODS and AAD, so some changes might be needed for error handling routines in scripts. Changed the example used for a webhook connector because Microsoft has deprecated the service communications PowerShell module.

1 Oct

14

Stream now has a recycle bin to allow users and admins to recover deleted videos.

1 Oct

15

Added coverage of task priority support.

1 Oct

16

General updates for Teams voice calls.

1 Oct

17

Added text about Authenticated Receive Chains (ARC). Other smaller updates, including fixing some typos. Updates also for sections on ZAP, S/MIME, and quarantined messages.

1 Oct

18

Fixed typos. Removed outdated material about SCCM; removed and updated screenshots to reflect portal changes; added link to Android Enterprise setup documentation for Intune.

1 Oct

20

Added information about how to fetch the URLs for OneDrive for Business sites to include in content searches. Add note about users blocking search for their OneDrive for Business sites.

1 Oct

24

Introduction of native support for sensitivity labels in Office ProPlus version 1909 [MAJOR UPDATE]. Slight change to information about registry setting controlling use of AIP client when a workstation runs the version of Office apps with native support for unified (sensitivity) labels. Added text explaining how to use an EXO transport rule to block outbound messages stamped with a specific sensitivity label.

1 Sept

3

Added information about leaked credentials reporting. Discuss interaction of user risk policy and password writeback. Various minor updates and tweaks.

1 Sept

4

Added information about new “Report an Incident” option.

1 Sept

5

Revised description of the last activity properties available through mailbox diagnostics. Make point that conditional access policies are processed post-authentication, so authentication policies should be used to block most basic auth attacks.

1 Sept

6

Added information about the Outlook Places service.

1 Sept

7

Added information about how to use PowerShell to track the connection between a SharePoint Online site and its Office 365 group. Add text about the Site Swap feature. General updates throughout the chapter.

1 Sept

8

Added information about Outlook Mobile updates.

1 Sept

10

Clarify how automatic renewal for Office 365 groups works. Updated text for DIY Azure B2B Collaboration invitations.

1 Sept

11

Teams now served from South Korea datacenters. Clarify that the maximum message size posted to a Teams conversation is 25 KB.

1 Sept

12

Extra detail about Teams compliance records captured in EXO. Teams app and setup permission policies control user access to apps in the Teams App Store.

1 Sept

13

You get a HTTP 413 error if you try to post a message larger than 25 KB to Teams via the webhook incoming connector. Added information about calling Teams Graph API from PowerShell.

1 Sept

14

Added detail about how the migration process from Office 365 Video to Stream works.

1 Sept

15

Added note about integrating the Office 365 roadmap with Planner via a Graph app.

1 Sept

16

General refresh to bring chapter up to date. Lots of new features covered!

1 Sept

19

Minor clarification about how to remove a retention label from Office 365.

1 Sept

20

Additional context about what preview results mean for an Office 365 content search. Clarifications about including Teams hybrid and guest data in content searches.

1 Sept

23

Added section about guest user participation in Flow.

1 Sept

24

The AADRM PowerShell module is deprecated and replaced with the AIPService module. Some changes to the text about protecting email with rights management.

1 Aug

1

Microsoft FY19 Q4 results for cloud products included. Several other tweaks. South African datacenters begin operation. Announcement of the retirement of Skype for Business Online.

1 Aug

3

1 Aug

4

Updated section about Microsoft Secure Score.

1 Aug

5

Microsoft intends to deprecate the Search-Mailbox cmdlet. Section on Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration rewritten and expanded. Section on inactive mailboxes rewritten. The ThirdPartyFileProvidersEnabled setting in OWA mailbox policies is being deprecated.

1 Aug

6

Users can now maintain their distribution group with the new OWA, so we changed Figure 6-14 and removed the note saying that they can’t.

1 Aug

7

Sections added about Manage Access, password-protected sharing links, and SharePoint Search. New details in other sections.

1 Aug

8

The new OWA is now the OWA; new semi-annual channel release. Favorite people in OWA and Outlook mobile.

1 Aug

10

Microsoft introduced activity-based checking for the group expiration policy (in preview).

1 Aug

11

Added note about Teams service messages @-less mentions are now supported. Added note about disabled Active Directory accounts and why they don’t show up in team membership. Numbers release for daily and weekly active Teams users.

1 Aug

12

Teams now supports moderation for channels.

1 Aug

13

Slight modification to script reporting group expiry dates to sort groups so that groups about to expire are at the top of the list.

1 Aug

14

Noted that you can’t print the transcript from a Stream video. You must extract and assemble the bits of the transcript needed.

1 Aug

15

Added some notes about Planner integrations.

1 Aug

16

Note that Skype for Business Online is retired from July 31, 2021. We’ll have more to say about this next month.

1 Aug

17

New section covering LegacyExchangeDN related errors. Update to section about reporting spam and phishing attempts to Microsoft.

1 Aug

18

Minor adjustments and updates to several sections.

1 Aug

19

Expanded discussion about Information Barrier policies.

1 Aug

20

Some clarifications about using content search actions to hard delete mailbox items. Added note that soft-deleted (disconnected) mailboxes are inaccessible to content searches.

1 Aug

21

Added note that not all audit events show up in the Security and Compliance Center Audit log search GUI. Added note about using Out-GridView for generated audit reports.

1 Aug

23

Added section on GDPR for PowerApps.

1 Aug

24

OME now treats guest user accounts like other external recipients, so you can revoke protected email sent to these accounts.