December 2022 - Office 365 News and Updates

New Features and Updates in Microsoft 365 – December 2022 and January 2023

22 December 2022

A number of new features and updates have been announced affecting several Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Viva Insights

Viva Insights brings you a daily email briefing before you start your day, helping to ensure that you have the right information in advance of your meetings and reminders which are pertinent to you. The Viva Insight briefing email is personal to you and cannot be seen by anyone else.

In January 2023, Microsoft will be pausing the briefing emails while they implement improvements and additional personalisation. The current update states that briefings should return at the end of February following the “make over”.

During the period when there are no emails, you can still view your personal insights by using the Outlook add-in or adding the Viva Insights app to Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams Updates

Everyone Mention

Commencing in late January 2023, a new feature will roll out allowing Teams users to mention everyone in a group chat or meeting chat in one simple way. Currently you can @ mention each person individually, which is fine in a small group chat or meeting chat, but if you have a large meeting chat or group chat running and want to alert everyone there is currently no simple way to do this.

Once the new feature is live you will be able to type @everyone and then everyone in the chat will receive a notification just like they do when they are individually @ mentioned at the moment.

Breakout Rooms

From late December ’22 or early January ’23 depending on roll out, Teams Breakout Rooms will support co-organiser management. So if you create a meeting and set a “co organiser” on the meeting then the co-organiser will have full management rights over Breakout Rooms.

More Reactions in Teams

A greatly expanded set of reactions are currently rolling out in Teams for use in Chat and Team conversations. The reactions for meetings remain limited for simplicity, but for chat and threaded conversations there are now over 800 “emojis” to choose from. These are available from December 2022.

Multi Factor Authentication Improvements

Commencing at the end of February 2023, Microsoft will begin roll out of enhanced Multi Factor Authentication replacing the push notifications with number matching. Many organisations are seeing an increase in attacks due to MFA fatigue due to users just hitting approve without thinking about what they are approving.

Number matching requires the up to date Microsoft Authenticator app to be installed from either the iOS App store or Google Play store fro Android devices. If you have been approving MFA requests via an Apple watch then you should uninstall the apple watch app and approve all authentication requests via the phone – the watch app does NOT support number matching.

Number matching works by displaying a number following successful username and password verification. The authenticator app will then provide information on what app is being accessed and the location of the access request (including a map display) and require the user to enter the number as displayed on the login screen of the app.

Number matching display during login

Number matching on Authenticator App

One Drive for Business – Basics

Adrian Mannall

6 December 2022

One Drive for Business (ODfB) is the personal storage area assigned to each user as part of their Office 365 license.

One Drive for Business is delivered as a “personal SharePoint site”. You get all the great SharePoint features such as collaboration and co-authoring if you choose to share a file (see below for some guidance), but it is a personal site.

If you look at the address for your One Drive for Business, you’ll see that it has “-my” after the tenant name but that it sits on SharePoint, and the address also contains your User Principle Name (but with the @ and . characters replaced with _).

Quota

Within Imperial College London, every user gets an initial quota of 5 Terra Bytes (5TB) of storage space. If you manage to fill that (and there’s no competition to try!), then we can extend your quota further should you need it. We can only do that once your One Drive for Business is consistently using more than 90% (4.5TB) of the quota.

OK – so how much is 5TB really?

85,000 CD quality MP3 tracks – roughly equivalent to 1,000,000 hours of listening, which is about 114 years of back to back listening.

or

1.5 million photos

or

2,500 DVD quality movies

File Versioning

OneDrive for Business and SharePoint both support automatic file versioning. So you don’t have to add version numbers onto documents any more, nor do you have to remember where you are up to.

When you open a file from your ODfB the default is to open the current version.

You can see all the versions of a file by clicking on the vertical dots to the right of the file name (when you hover over the file in the browser) and then choosing Version History.

Screenshot showing how to access version history.

Once you have the version history open you can choose to delete a version or restore an earlier version. Alternatively you can open a version so that you can compare it against the current version.
Note – you can only Open the current version (you can’t restore it because it is the most up to date version and you can’t delete the current version).

Screenshot showing version history for a file.

Screenshot showing actions that can be carried out on a version of a file.

Recycle Bin

You can delete a file or version of a file and then restore it for yourself.

This works for 90 days, after which you will need to ask ICT for assistance, up to 180 days.

If you deleted it more than 180 days ago, then it’s gone for good.

Use the Recycle Bin link in the navigation bar on the left side of your ODfB to see the files and folders that you deleted.

How to access the Recycle Bin in One Drive for Business.

Select a file or version of a file to then be able to restore the file.

Screenshot showing how to restore a file or file version from the recycle bin

Sharing

Do NOT share files with large numbers of people or for long term sharing. Use a SharePoint site for long term group access or sharing.

Sharing from your One Drive for Business is designed for short-term, small-scale collaboration. It is NOT designed for you to deliver long term access or to run a group or department file share.

N.B. If you have shared files and are leaving College then you need to give those files to someone else – when you leave College your license to access Microsoft 365 will be revoked and your personal One Drive for Business data will be deleted automatically.

Imperial College London do NOT allow “anyone” sharing. Anonymous links are dangerous and can lead to serious GDPR data breaches.

Screenshot showing how to start sharing wizard

The sharing controls

Advanced sharing controls

You can share directly with people, either by selecting them from the internal directory, or with external people by entering their email address or institution UPN.

Screenshot showing how to add people to sharing

When you choose to share you can control what level of access is provided (Edit, Review or Read).

Sharing access levels

You can also see what you have shared by using the Shared link in the left navigation bar in ODfB. You can then choose between the files that have been “Shared with you” (i.e. shared by others for you to read, review or edit) or “Shared by you” (your files which you have shared).

Screenshot showing shared files

You can control the access at any time. Select the file or folder and then click on the menu and choose “manage access”. You can stop all access by clicking on the “Stop sharing” option at the top, or you can change the access for individuals who no longer need access.

Access to manage access

Managing access

What’s a UPN?

Your UPN is your User Principle Name. At imperial we use username followed by the domain (which means it is different from our primary email address). Other institutions may well also have a UPN which is different to the primary email address.

If you are sharing with others then ask them if they have a Microsoft 365 UPN (i.e. do they login with something other than their primary email address).

UPNs are also used when adding people to Microsoft 365 groups to ensure that the user is correctly authenticated and access is granted appropriately.

If you are being added to a group (Team or email group) at another institution, make sure that you have given them your UPN for seamless access.

Do you know who are you sharing with? Profile pictures make life easier.

Adrian Mannall

1 December 2022

Office 365 is an amazing set of tools and it makes it very easy to share and collaborate on documents, BUT do you know with whom you are sharing a file?

We usually use a user’s email address or look them up in the address book by typing their name, but what happens when you have multiple people with similar names?

Here at Imperial we’d suggest that adding a photo to your profile will really help you and your colleagues to connect successfully. Your profile photo is only visible within College, so external users won’t see your profile photo. Having a profile photo on your account can really help avoid those “oops, I sent it to the wrong person” type errors.

How do I set or update a Profile Picture?

Log in to https://office.imperial.ac.uk using your username and password and MFA if required.
Click on the icon at the top right where your initials (or current picture are visible)
Hover over the initials or icon and a camera image will appear – click on this to bring up a Change or Upload picture window (if you have pop ups turned off in your web browser then you will
need to allow these before you can change your profile picture).
Choose to upload a picture – select your profile picture using the file explorer window and click open to upload the picture.
Use the zoom controls and the cursor to move the picture so that it is centred in the frame
Click Apply – the new picture will be applied
Click Done – and see your new profile picture against your account.

What “rules” apply to Profile Pictures?

Imperial ICT recommends that your profile picture should be a genuine likeness of you.

College has professional profile photo shoots held at different campuses throughout the year (see Staff photoshoot | Administration and support services | Imperial College London for details), or you could just ask a colleague to take a photo for you on your phone and then upload that.