M365 Changelog: Insert Links/URL support for Microsoft Whiteboard

MC443901 – The ability to insert links with rich preview is coming soon to Whiteboard web, Teams and Windows App.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 98080

When this will happen:

This functionality will start rolling out to Whiteboard web, Teams and Windows App experiences for users by early October 2022 and expect to complete by mid/late October 2022. 

How this will affect your organization:

This service can be controlled by optional connected experiences policy, which controls whether users have access to the functionality. Today this policy applies to:

  1. The ability to see a link in Whiteboard where users can provide feedback using Microsoft’s Feedback portal
  2. The ability to insert a single or multiple images onto a whiteboard using Bing Search

What you need to do to prepare:

No change is necessary, unless you wish to disable the Insert Links functionality (and other optional connected experiences) in Whiteboard. To do this, you can use the Office cloud policy service in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center.

  1. Sign in to https://config.office.com/ with your Microsoft 365 admin credentials
  2. Select Customization from the left pane.
  3. Select Policy Management
  4. Create a new policy configuration or edit an existing one.
  5. In Choose the scope, choose the security group for which you want to apply the policy.
  6. In Configure Settings, choose Allow the use of additional optional connected experiences in Office.
  7. In configuration setting, choose either – enabled, disabled, or not configured. The implication of each of these options is mentioned below:
    • Enabled: Optional connected experiences are available to users
    • Disabled: Optional connected experiences aren’t available to users
    • Not configured: Optional connected experiences are available to users
  8. Save the policy configuration.
  9. Reassign priority for any security group if required. (If two or more policy configurations are applicable to the same set of users, the one with the higher priority is applied)
  10. In case you create a new policy configuration or change the configuration for an existing policy, there will be a delay in the change being reflected as mentioned below:
    • If there were existing policy configurations prior to the change, then it will take 90 mins for the change to be reflected
    • If there were no policy configurations prior to the change, then it will take 24 hours for the change to be reflected

Additional information