Everything You Need to Know about Office 365 – January 2020

Office 365 Hero

Hey, guess what? This month all of my updates are positive and happy. Is that some weird new better Shane for 2020? Nope. I think it is the fact it is 60 degrees outside. Whatever it is, enjoy the features. Nothing major here but lots of little things as usual that I don’t think I knew I needed till I read about them.

OneDrive for Business makes requesting files super easy

This is interesting because I never thought about using OneDrive like this, but I think I love it. Microsoft added functionality to allow you to send out OneDrive links requesting files. So that way, when the person uploading files for you, they put them where you want them instead of in the same random spot, or worse yet, they try to send you a 50 MB email. This seems like a great way to get files from customers/vendors/external people instead of leaving things up to chance. I am literally emailing this to my team now. Read how to use the feature; it does a lot; in this article, Tony put together.

PowerPoint Live Presentations

As a guy who does a lot of presentations for people from across the globe, I am looking forward to trying out this new feature that is rolling out soon. When using PowerPoint for the web, you will be able to “go live.” This will generate a QR code the audience can click to follow along from their device. Oh, and they also get the ability to get closed captions as you speak and real-time translations.  And then they can also go back to review a slide and provide feedbacks and surveys at the end. The article of what is to come has me pumped up, and I hope it lives up to it. You can read about the features here.

Power Platform added an SAP connector

My favorite platform and yours got even more enterprise-capable this month with the release of the SAP connector. Getting connected to SAP opens up a vast ERP system to the power of Power Apps and company. Now, this connector and data source isn’t for the faint of heart but, if you have the chops to navigate the data structure hot mess that is SAP, then you have some really cool functionality at your fingertips.

Make sure to check out the rest of Office 365 news this month on Petri too.

The New Edge is getting rave reviews

What a weird headline to write, but it turns out that new Edge is being much better received than new Coke was back in the 80s. If you didn’t know Microsoft started over with Edge and built it on top of the same engine as Google Chrome AND it turns out they did a pretty amazing job. Lots of my nerd friends, who have been using Chrome for a long time, are making the switch because they say it is faster and has more features they want to use. New things like there are Outlook and Teams apps you can install into ChrEdge (that is its unofficial nickname) are head turners. It seems weird to be writing about a browser but ChrEdge is all the rage so be sure to check it out.

SharePoint continues to push you to modern with auto-update coming

I know you don’t want to hear it, but you really need to get out of Classic SharePoint sites on SharePoint Online. For the most part, Modern SharePoint sites are better, faster, more user-friendly and just the reality of where Microsoft is. To “help” you move along, Microsoft is planning to start auto-updating Classic sites that haven’t been customized. So they will not break anything, but that might freak your customers out. They have also said you can stop the auto-updates if you really want to. I know Classic is comfortable, but they keep making it harder and harder to stay, so try to start moving to Modern. You will be happier after you do.