Everything You Need to Know About Office 365 – March 2019

Microsoft.com

Okay, people. Look, there is a lot of Teams and related Teams content this month. Don’t shoot the messenger. Just accept Teams is a big deal and you need to care more. On the bright side this month I am back to a little more of my attitude to go with the news. I got bored with behaving for the last couple of months so enjoy.

Microsoft Flow gets a new entry into Teams

Rolling out in April, a new endpoint will be available to have Microsoft Flow interact with Teams. This endpoint will let you end a Flow with “messaging someone in my tenant with Teams”. This compounds upon the previous announcements made around Flow and Teams. If you are a regular reader you know I keep reminding you “Teams will be the center of the Office 365 ecosystem.” So, quit ignoring it and go learn about it. And if you aren’t using Flow… well, you and I aren’t friends.

Teams gets more features

Did I mention you should be learning Teams? This monthly Teams roundup has some cool new features listed as coming. The one that excites me the most is updates to the Meetings portion of the app. As a hardcore Skype user, the Meetings functionality in Teams has left me wanting. So I have high hopes they finally catch up. There are other cool features like Private Channels and Information Barriers but I want meetings to work better. Finger’s crossed.

Use LinkedIn to share Office 365 content

So much sharing. Whatever happened to the only child of “MINE”? Anyway, as Microsoft continues to leverage their LinkedIn purchase, they have decided to make it possible to external share easier. In their words “The ability to share and co-author documents with LinkedIn connections directly from OneDrive, SharePoint, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Online” is coming to Office 365 soon. I don’t know if this is a game changer or not but I am guessing it is a peek into their master plan for leveraging all of your connections everywhere. Facebook is probably pretty jealous.

Make sure to check out everything Tony covered this month as well.

Azure opens the first major cloud in Africa

Yes, I know this isn’t Office 365 news, but I think it paves the way for Office 365 appearing there also. Give this article a quick read on the announcement and just sit back and think how glad you are that you backed the Microsoft horse instead of that shopping site cloud. Ha ha ha! But seriously, this is cool and an important step in continuing to drive our interconnected world. Better technology options always leads to more opportunities.

You can now add Yammer to Teams

This is filed under news I don’t get. I guess in keeping with the theme Teams is going to be the center of the Office 365 ecosystem they had to integrate Yammer also. You can read about it here. As someone who never got into the Yammer thing, I don’t get it but if you like Yammer it probably makes a lot of sense to you. Don’t let it ever be said I skip news on topics I don’t care about.

Do you like to Govern Microsoft 365

Then this new resource center page, Plan for governance to transform teamwork with Microsoft 365, is for you. It is full of customer evidence and other planning documents for creating governance strategies for Office 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, and our friend SharePoint. Even if you aren’t into governance I think this type of content is always good to give a quick glance. Just reminds you of features you may not use often or why some of the features act as they do.