New capabilities for Teams Management | July 2020

by Scott Muniz | Jul 31, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

New management features and capability improvements for Microsoft Teams rolled out in July.

Device management enhancements in the Teams Admin Center to manage your Teams devices in one location

This month we introduced new capabilities for device management in the Teams Admin center, enabling customers to manage their Teams devices from one location, now including Microsoft Teams Rooms. Advancements include simplified devices setup, new granular device management capabilities, improvements across bulk management tasks with better tagging, troubleshooting and health monitoring of devices, as well as the ability to delegate these responsibilities to external partners. Find out more details in the Device management new capabilities blog.

App configuration in Team Admin center

App configuration is now available in Teams Admin Center for Teams and Microsoft apps. This new manageability experience enables you to configure App specific settings that will streamline your management tasks and enable simple customization of apps to the organization needs.

For example, the Praise app (an app that allows users to call out the great work of a teammate or co-worker) in Microsoft Teams, now allows for customization of badges that reflect your company’s values and culture, all while leveraging tools you are already familiar with.

Advisor for Teams is now in GA (General Availability)

Advisor for Teams is a new onboarding tool to help you plan the best possible Teams deployment in your organization. Advisor offers a customized recommend plan for you to streamline the roll out of all the Teams workloads, including messaging, meetings, calling as well as Skype for Business upgrade workloads.

We have learned that organizations who use this tool increase their deployment velocity by 300%.

Enhancements for Teams life cycle:

Support for sensitivity labels – To ensure secure collaboration in a scalable way with Microsoft Information Protection Sensitivity Labels now can be applied to teams created within the Teams Admin Center, allowing for the consistent application of policies across your M365 environment.

In addition, you can now associate a sensitivity label with policies related to privacy, external user membership, as well as unmanaged device access.

The first step to securing sensitive content in teams, sites and groups is to create sensitivity labels with policies. For example, you can create a sensitivity label called “Confidential” and specify that any team, site, or group created with this label will be private. This means that a team or site owner cannot add users external to the organization and unmanaged devices will be allowed web access only.

Filtering in Teams summary table – To simplify your work, we are enhancing the tooling across all list tables within Team Admin Center. This means when filtering large data sets as the Teams, you will now find the information you need much more quickly. The Teams summary table is the place where you can view & manage all the Teams configured in the tenant. Currently available for filtering name & classification and will be extended to include more filtering fields in the future.

App Lifecycle Announcements
We are constantly looking for ways to streamline the process of developing, validating, publishing, and managing custom apps in Teams, including the increased automation for the app lifecycle process.

We are excited to announce the following new capabilities to ensure that users can more easily leverage the key business apps they use every day inside of Microsoft Teams.

Custom apps Submission to Approval – Building an app is just the beginning of the journey for app developers. Now developers and admins will enjoy a streamlined custom app submission process and enhanced app management capabilities – providing a connected experience through the development, publishing, and end user discovery process. You will now be able to submit Teams apps through any of these clients and trusted sources (e.g.: Visual Studio Code, Power Virtual Agents, Power Apps and more) via our App Submission Microsoft Graph API – streamlining the process of submitting apps directly to the Teams Admin Center for IT admins to review and approve.

Custom app publishing – You will be able to leverage a streamlined process to manage – review, approve and publish custom apps directly from the Teams Admin Center. These apps will be automatically available on the Teams Admin Center with no need to manually upload them. An admin can view the custom apps publishing status, manifest details, and update their status from ‘submitting’ to ‘publishing’ so that end users will be able to access those apps.

Install app to a team from Teams Admin Center – To create a customized, more productive environment for the users, you can now install an app for any team in your organization.

Application monetization and bringing the purchase to Team Admin Center – A new third-party subscription purchase experience will enable you to view and purchase subscriptions associated with the 3rd party Teams apps. You can view app licensing status and link to purchase the app all within the Teams Admin Center.

This new subscription purchase experience will enable you to view and purchase subscriptions associated with the third-party Teams apps. Now you purchase licenses right within the Teams Admin Center. Where you can see offers, plans and pricing information, it is also integrated with Microsoft AppSource to purchase licenses and with Microsoft 365 admin center to manage and renew licenses over time.

Policy Management Announcements

Enhancement on assign policies to your users in Microsoft Teams – package batch assignments are now GA

To help IT administrators assign policies, based on the organizational needs, we introduce the Bulk assignment of policies.

PowerShell module now supports:

• Policy assignment to O365 groups
• Batch assignment of policies (up to 5K users)
• Batch assignment of policy packages (up to 5K users)

A New Audio and Video Policy – Changes in Incoming IP video policy

To help you better manage bandwidth, we are updating meeting policies to allow you more control over using IP video in your Teams meetings. While the current capability can only prevent outgoing video, we are extending the policy to also allow you to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. You can update the new policies in the meeting policies:

As we strive to build the best end user and administrator experiences, we continue to ask for your continued input on what is important to you and your users.

Have an idea for a feature or functionality missing from Teams? Please be sure to add or upvote it on the Teams UserVoice page.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The New Outlook for Mac is now available in Insider Slow

by Scott Muniz | Jul 30, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We are excited to announce the availability of the new Outlook for Mac for our Insider Slow users. The updated and revamped new Outlook is available via a toggle switch on the top right corner of your Outlook main window. The new Outlook for Mac is built on Microsoft sync technology that is fast, reliable, and allows us to bring you the latest and greatest functionality from Microsoft 365. An updated user experience and added features enable you to customize your email, all while keeping things simple and efficient. 

In order to try the new Outlook for Mac, first you will have to join Insider Slow. The default experience will be the current version of Outlook. To navigate to the new experience, simply click the “New Outlook” toggle in the top right corner of the Outlook window. You can switch quickly between the new Outlook for Mac and the current version to compare the differences for yourself and see everything it has to offer. 

Get caught up with updates across Mail, Search, Calendar and People 

The new Outlook for Mac has numerous new features and enhanced capabilities to experience. Here are some highlights of what to expect when you try it out: 

• Improved sync – Built on top of Microsoft sync technology, which also powers Outlook Mobile, the new Outlook for Mac syncs your messages with improved speed and reliability. 
• Search enhancements – Search is now built using the same engine that powers other Office 365 experiences so you can quickly find exactly what you’re looking for. 
• New mail and event compose experiences – Entirely new mail and event compose experiences that help improve your productivity with enhancements such as an easy to access formatting bar, suggested times, and locations. 
• My Day – A new addition that brings you a view of your agenda or calendar events right from within your main mail canvas, and includes a 2-week calendar view to give you a quick glance at your upcoming events. 
• Customizable toolbar – The new toolbar puts your most used commands front and center and is fully customizable. 
• Mail Tips – Get more information about your mail, like a heads up if you’re messaging people with automatic replies turned on, sending an email to recipients outside your organization, or sending an email to a large audience.  
• Snooze  – For those moments when you don’t have time to read or respond to an email, simply  “snooze”  it and select the time that works best for it to show up in your Inbox  again  as an unread email.

Easily snooze messages or perform quick swipe actions directly in the message list.

• Unified inbox – Combine the multiple mailboxes you manage into one single inbox, making it easier for you to view everything that is important in one place.   
• Sensitivity labels – Protect sensitive information across your organization. Classify messages based on their confidentiality and sensitivity to ensure those viewing your email understand how they should treat the information enclosed. 

• Add-ins – Install and use your favorite add-ins and enhance your productivity within Outlook. Add-ins that work with Office JavaScript  API 1.6 and below are fully supported. We are currently working on support for API 1.7+.  
• Actionable Messages – The new Outlook for Mac supports the familiar experience of Actionable Messages created with Adaptive Cards, enabling quick actions directly from your inbox, such as filling out a survey or approving an expense report. 
• People view  – The new Outlook for Mac comes with a completely revamped People view. Explore contacts that are important to you, you collaborate with often, and even those you may want to follow up with – all from the same place. Easily create new contacts and make updates to existing entries directly from this new view.  

Create new contacts and view them alongside other important colleagues.

• Teams meeting toggle  – This toggle will be available when you quickly create a new calendar event. By switching the toggle on you can more easily make any meeting a Teams meeting. 
• Meeting Insights  –  Outlook helps you show up prepared to your meetings by suggesting emails and files that are relevant to the event or attendees.  

Explore the most recent feature releases 

Since the release of the new Outlook for Mac in Insider Fast last fall, we have been continuously updating the experience to bring you brand new capabilities and an updated look and feel. The past couple of months have been no different, with our most recent updates including: 

• Rules – Easily manage your inbox by setting preferences to automatically flag, move, delete, or take other actions on specific email messages you receive. 
• Access Tasks and Notes – Keep track of what’s important by flagging an item for follow-up, adding to your to-do list, or jotting something down on a sticky note. 
• Send button updates – After testing and gathering user feedback, we have moved the send button to the top of the mail canvas for an improved experience when composing a message. 
• Additions to People search – Quickly take action when searching for a contact by starting an email, chat, or call with someone directly from the search results. 
• Group header view – Tailor your message list to fit your needs with the ability to show or hide group headers based on your preferences. 
• Every meeting online – Set your Calendar preferences to ensure all your newly scheduled meetings are online via Teams or Skype.

Edit your preferences to ensure every meeting you schedule is online.

Coming soon… 

• S/MIME – Enhance the security of your email with digital message encryption, extra protection that ensures emails can only be opened by recipients that have the correct key. 
• Mailbox delegation – Allow others in your organization the ability to manage your calendar and edit, schedule, and respond to meetings on your behalf. 
• Shared mailboxes – Access all mail from shared mailboxes that you have added to Outlook. 
• Open shared calendars – See all your commitments in one place with the ability to open shared calendars you have been added to and see them alongside your personal schedule. 

Stay up to date 

Experience the new Outlook for Mac firsthand by signing up for Insider Slow and enabling the “New Outlook” toggle. Check back on Tech Community for regular updates and receive detailed information on new features and fixes by visiting our Release Notes.  Let us know what you think about the new Outlook for Mac and tell us what you want to see next by providing us feedback on UserVoice.  

As a reminder, the new Outlook for Mac is only available for Office 365, Outlook.com, and Google accounts using mac OS 10.14 Mojave and above. We are planning to add new supported account types, including IMAP, in the coming months. If you are having account issues, do not see your account, or cannot access it in the new Outlook for Mac, visit the support page. 

See how consolidated incidents improve SOC efficiency through this attack sprawl simulation

by Scott Muniz | Jul 30, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Microsoft Threat Protection continuously and seamlessly scours endpoints, email and docs, cloud app, and identity activities for suspicious signals and uses deep correlation logic to automatically find links between related signals across domains. It connects related existing alerts and generates additional alerts for suspicious events that could otherwise be missed.

Correlated signals, alerts, and relevant entities are collected and consolidated into a single comprehensive incident representing the whole attack.

We put Microsoft Threat Protection’s incident feature to the test by simulating an end-to-end attack chain that involves various attacker techniques across multiple domains, including spear-phishing, credential theft, overpass-the-hash attack, lateral movement, and other techniques observed in actual investigations.

Learn how automatic correlations in Microsoft Threat Protection detected the initial access, lateral movement, and lateral phishing stages of the attack sprawl simulation. Read our latest blog: Inside Microsoft Threat Protection: Solving cross-domain security incidents through the power of correlation analytics.