By Stephanie Baskerville on September 29, 2017

Microsoft’s Updates to Office 365 – A Recap

 

During Ignite this past week, Microsoft unveiled new upgrades and updates to Office 365 products. In this post, we’ve summarized some of those important updates for you.


Updates to Office 365 – Security & Compliance

There have been several updates to Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), including enhanced anti-phishing capabilities, expanded ATP to Office 365 workloads, safe links, and safe attachments.There have been several updates to Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), including enhanced anti-phishing capabilities, expanded ATP to Office 365 workloads, safe links, and safe attachments.

  • Enhanced anti-phishing capabilities: new machine learning-based phishing technology will be able to better protect against phishing attacks.
  • Expanded ATP to Office 365 workloads: ATP will now protect SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams.
  • Safe Links: (available later this year for Office clients on iOS and Android platforms) You can now see original URLs when you hover over a link. URL wrapping has been removed.
  • Safe Attachments: You can preview and edit the content of an attachment as if it’s being scanned.

See More about Microsoft’s announcement, or contact us for more information on how Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) can work for you.

 

Updates to Office 365 Threat Intelligence

There are some new updates to Office 365 Threat Intelligence, including attack simulators, threat tracker, threat explorer and enhanced remediation capabilities. There are some new updates to Office 365 Threat Intelligence, including attack simulators, threat tracker, threat explorer and enhanced remediation capabilities.

  • Attack Simulator: Your administrators can now simulate various threat scenarios so that they can see how your users might behave in a real attack.
  • Threat Tracker: This provides you with a trend summary of various categories of threat campaigns, as well as a detailed view of any evolving or trending threats.
  • Threat Explorer: These new reports will document any risky content or your user activities.
  • Enhanced Remediation Capabilities: Administrators will now be able to delete any malicious emails and remediate content malware on users’ systems.

See More about Threat Intelligence.

 

Updates to Office 365 Advanced Data Governance

Microsoft is also bringing Advanced Data Governance to Office 365, in an effort to help customers manage the exploding volume and increasing complexity of corporate data. These updates include:Microsoft is also bringing Advanced Data Governance to Office 365, in an effort to help customers manage the exploding volume and increasing complexity of corporate data. These updates include:

  • Event-Based Retention: You’ll be able to create events that trigger the retention period for data in Office 365. This will allow consistent compliance with industry regulations or your own internal business requirements.
  • Disposition Review: At the end of a data retention period, you can trigger a disposition review, which helps you decide if the data can be safely deleted. This is now available for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and will soon be available for Exchange Online.

See More on Advanced Data Governance.
 

Intelligent Communications in Office 365

Microsoft also announced that there will be a new vision for intelligent communications, focusing on Microsoft Teams and bringing together conversations, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integrations to be able to provide a single hub for teamwork through Office 365.

Microsoft will be bringing comprehensive calling and meeting capabilities into Microsoft Teams (Teams), which will be built on a new, more modern Skype infrastructure that will enable enterprise-grade voice and video communications. It is designed to, over time, replace Skype for Business.

Business Meetings Will Never Be the Same – New, Upgraded Features

  • The Teams upgrade will help you to review relevant documents and information about your clients before you get on the call.
  • Conversations during meetings can be captured, transcribed and time-coded.
  • Conversations will have closed captioning capabilities, and be able to recognize voices to attribute remarks to specific individuals.
  • Post meeting, transcripts and recordings from the call can be automatically added to your relevant channels, keeping all your conversations, documents, notes and action items in one convenient place that the team can access.

New Calling Features

  • Microsoft’s been enhancing communications capabilities within Teams with new features such as scheduled meetings, Outlook calendar integration, meetings on mobile, etc.
  • Guest access is now available, which gives people outside your organization access to Teams.
  • Calling features are being added to Teams, which will be included with both inbound and outbound calls to PSTN numbers. These features include hold, call transfer and voicemail.
  • Messaging and calling interoperability between Teams and Skype for Business will be introduced.

To learn more about the new Intelligent Communications features that have been announced, see Microsoft’s write-up here. If you are currently using Skype for Business and want to know how this is going to affect you, contact us for more information.

 

Let Us Help You Understand These Updates to Office 365

Want to know how you can get one or more of these upgrades added to your current infrastructure? Need help understanding how these updates will affect your set-up? As a Microsoft Gold Partner, ProServeIT is your go-to for understanding what these updates mean to your organization. Contact us today, and we’ll have our team of experts talk to you about what these mean for you.

Published by Stephanie Baskerville September 29, 2017