Category: Microsoft 365 General

Microsoft 365 Feature Updates

The following are updates of particular interest or use for staff and students within College. Many have been demonstrated or discussed at the regular Microsoft 365 Ask Me Anything sessions (find out more at Ask Me Anything Sessions for the 2023 / 24 Academic Year – Office 365 News and Updates (imperial.ac.uk)).

Microsoft Teams Updates


Private Channels – Tags and Channel Links

Private channels will support the use of tags that are generally available in MS Teams. You can use Tags for grouping people with similar responsibilities, grouping students into learning sets or dividing a large team into smaller sub teams for notifications, etc.

By the end of March 2024 you will also be able to create a link to the private channel(s) in your team. You can then use the link to direct people to the correct channel – as long as they are a member or owner in the private channel concerned.

Archiving of Team Channels

From end of February, Channel owners and teams admins will be able to archive a channel in a Team, making it read only for all. This will help people with using only the active channels while leaving information in the archived channels for cross-reference purposes.

Website tab in Teams

From April 2024, the website tab will cease to function. This change is being deployed by Microsoft to ensure security and privacy while improving the reliability of access to websites.

You will only be able to choose to open the website from the tab once the change has been applied.

Unification of Emojis, GIFs and Stickers in one picker

From the end of March 2024 you’ll find a single “picker” to choose emojis, GIFs and stickers. This simplifies the experience for all users and should be easier to use going forwards.

New Gallery view in Meetings

From March 2024 you will find a new Gallery experience and will be able to choose from 4, 9, 16 or 49 attendees per page.

At the same time both video and audio only meeting attendees will appear in a single sized window for easier identification of who is speaking and for spotlighting, etc.

Hide General Channel in Teams

From late March 2024 users will be able to hide the General channel in teams.

The General channel is always created when a new team is provisioned and by default is always visible for users added to the team.

Now users will be able to turn off / hide the General channel to allow focus on specific channels in the Team.

Team owners (admins) can always set the General channel to only allow owners to post in the General channel thus giving a clear admin announcements channel that doesn’t get cluttered with messages and chats that should be in appropriate channels.

Recap Tab

The Recording and Transcription tab for meetings will be replaced with a tab titled Recap.

The recap tab will contain the meeting recording with “in live viewing possible” along with a copy of the transcript.

Users with Teams Premium licenses will also find the AI generated meeting notes and actions in the Recap tab.

FindTime is Dead. Long Live Scheduling Poll

What?

Microsoft are ending FindTime, the add-in for Outlook that allowed you to offer options for a meeting and have attendees vote for their preferred meeting option(s).

When?

With effect from 11 December 2023 you will no longer be able to create meeting polls using FindTime.

What do I do now?

Instead of FindTime you should use Scheduling Poll which is the new option for meeting polls.

Scheduling Poll is built into Outlook for the Web and Outlook for Mac. It is also available for Outlook for Windows, but may not immediately appear depending on the update channel to which you are subscribed. Monthly update channels will see Scheduling Poll with immediate effect. Semi-Annual Enterprise Update channel users may not see Scheduling Poll until after January 2024.

If you need to use Scheduling Poll but don’t see it in your Outlook for Windows then head to your Outlook on the web and create your scheduling poll there.

Note: The create of polls is deprecated in FindTime but the visibility of polls remains available at https://outlook.office.com/findtime/dashboard

Additional Support

For more information and support articles on the change from FindTime to Scheduling Polls please visit Microsoft’s support pages at Scheduling Poll articles – Microsoft Support

Microsoft Copilot with Commercial Data Protection (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise)

What is Microsoft Copilot with Commercial Data Protection (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise) ?

Microsoft Copilot with Commercial Data Protection (MS Copilot)  uses the Chat GPT 4 AI model to interrogate and deliver search results based on access to the data that you have.  Your data is protected and the chat results are NOT saved or made available for Microsoft, so the data does not pass outside of the organisation.

 

MS Copilot is grounded in data from the public web and provides complete, verifiable answers with citations, along with visual answers that include graphs and charts.

 

MS Copilot is designed by Microsoft in line with Microsoft’s AI Principles.

 

MS Copilot has no access to organizational data in the Microsoft 365 Graph.

 

How do I use MS Copilot?

Head to https://www.bing.com/chat and sign in with your College ID (username@ic.ac.uk).  NOTE Only Staff with an A3 or A5 license for Microsoft 365 services can access Bing Chat Enterprise at the present time.

 

Once signed in you will see a “Protected” flag beside your name indicating that you are using the secure version of Microsoft Copilot with Commercial Data Protection.

 

The font page will appear with options to select a particular style of conversation (Creative, Balanced or Precise).  

Image of Bing Chat Enterprise home page
Bing Chat Enterprise homepage

You can provide simple questions or more complicated multiple point paragraphs.  MS Copilot will then interpret your request and deliver results which you can then refine as needed.

 

MS Copilot also incorporates DALL-E for image creation – this can take a little while to respond depending on how complicated your request is.  You should also be careful to ensure that any image that you create correctly attributes any copyright for partial use from other published images.  Failure to do so may result in image copyright infringement and subsequent demands for payments or charges being levied through legal action.  If in doubt then adopt the premise of “don’t publish”!

 

Five Things to Try to Get Started

  1. Summarise a long document or article.
    Navigate to a long article or document (PDF) on the internet, then use the Chat sidebar in Microsoft Edge to ask MS Copilot to summarise the document in 5 bullet points.

  2. Draft emails and content that’s ready to send.
    Navigate to your Outlook on the web (https://email.imperial.ac.uk) then use the Copilot icon in Microsoft Edge to ask MS Copilot to draft an email, e.g. “Draft an email alumni students asking them to consider leaving Imperial a gift in their will”.

  3. Create an image.
    In MS Copilot ask “Create an illustration of a shark jumping out of a coffee mug”.
    Try changing the shark to a dolphin.

  4. Learn new and useful information easily.
    In MS Copilot ask “Explain how large language models work  in simple terms”.

  5. Get answers to complex and specific questions.
    Try “Give me a table that compares Imperial’s undergraduate Medicine course to that of UCL”  

 

More information

You can find out more about MS Copilot and how it works with your data and information by watching the Microsoft Mechanics video (https://aka.ms/BCE/MechanicsVideo)

 

There is also a recording of the Imperial Ask Me Anything session where we looked at BCE (now MS Copilot).  This is available from our AMA Video library (The Microsoft 365 Ask Me Anything Pages – Home (sharepoint.com)).  This information is only available to Internal users in Imperial College London.

 

This page was updated on 1 February 2024 to reflect naming changes in the Microsoft estate.

 

Outlook for iOS (iPhone and iPad devices)

Apple will shortly release iOS 17. This is expected to happen by the end of September 2023.

At this point Microsoft will cease issuing updates for Outlook running on iOS 15 systems.  Outlook will continue to run on iOS 15 devices but will not receive any feature or security updates.

In order to remain secure and compliant, ICT recommends that you update your device to the newest available iOS release for your system.

If you continue to run iOS 15 on your device after the release of iOS 17, but then update your system to iOS 16 or 17, your version of Outlook will be updated to the latest release to include any new security or feature updates.  Once using iOS 16 or 17 your Outlook for iOS will continue to receive new feature and security updates.

Microsoft supports Outlook for iOS for the current and one previous major version of the operating system. In order to maintain security and feature availability in Outlook and other Microsoft apps for iOS you should keep your device up to date with iOS updates.

Ask Me Anything Sessions for the 2023 / 24 Academic Year

After the finish of the 2022 / 23 Ask Me Anything sessions, we wanted to let you know that we will be back for the 2023 / 24 Academic Year.

Following on from the polls run during July 2023, we are continuing to run these, on the second Tuesday at 10.00 and the fourth Tuesday at 09:00, each month.

How do I join the sessions?

We’re making it simpler to get signed up for these sessions / add them to your calendar this year.

 

  1. Head over to The Microsoft 365 Ask Me Anything Pages at https://imperiallondon.sharepoint.com/sites/M365AMAPages

  2. On the home page, scroll down until you see the “Ask Me Anything Sessions – 2023 / 24” section.

  3. The section will display a message about the group being deleted – it hasn’t (it’s a SharePoint quirk!).  Click on the link “The Microsoft Ask Me Anything Pages” to join the membership group …

    Screenshot showing the message about the group being deleted.
    Initial “deleted group” message


    You will be automatically added to the group and see a page as follows …

    Screenshot showing successful joining of the group
    Successful joining of the group


  4. Now close the tab with the “You’ve joined this group” message and refresh the SharePoint page.  You will then see the next 6 upcoming sessions.

  5. Click on the title for a session and then in the window click on “Add event to your calendar” and choose whether you want to add the single occurrence or the series.

    Screenshot showing how to add the event to your calendar
    How to add the occurrence or series to your calendar


  6. If you add the series then you need to just go to one entry for each series (2nd Tuesday vs 4th Tuesday) and add that series.

  7. You will get an ICS file downloaded which will either be for the single date or the session depending on your choice in step 3.

  8. Open the ICS file that has downloaded and accept the invitation to add the event or series into your calendar. Repeat for the second series or for as many sessions as you wish to join individually!

 

Once you’ve done that check your calendar for the entries to the meeting including the join link for Teams.

 

We look forward to welcoming you in September 2023 and, in the meantime, you can check out recordings from some of the sessions run during 2022 / 23 on the same pages.  See Recordings by Subject Area (sharepoint.com) for a listing of recordings by subject area covered.

Present Local PowerPoint files as PowerPoint Live in Teams

The “Present in Teams” button in the PowerPoint app is being extended to PowerPoint files that are not stored in Microsoft 365 Clouds.

You will be able to use the “Present in Teams” button in the PowerPoint for Window app to present via PowerPoint Live in your Teams meetings, even if your file is not stored in Microsoft 365 Clouds. This is a new PowerPoint Live entry point for those files, in addition to the “Browse my computer” button in Teams Share tray. Clicking the “Present in Teams” button first leads you to the Save As dialog to store the file to the Microsoft 365 Cloud. Once the file is saved, we’ll automatically trigger PowerPoint Live to present your file in your current Teams meeting.

 

Image of the "Present in Teams" button in PowerPoint
Image of the “Present in Teams” button in PowerPoint

 

Screenshot showing the save to cloud function invoked when using Present to Teams on a local file.
Image showing the save to cloud function


For whom?

This update is only available currently to the PowerPoint app for Windows and is not available in the Mac app yet.

When?

Release is planned for the end of July 2023.


Yammer rebranding to Viva Engage

Yammer will be rebranded to Viva Engage. Microsoft are beginning the web rebranding exercise in late June and expect it to be complete by mid-July.

Rebranding has already completed for the mobile apps – so if you had the Yammer app on your phone or tablet then it will already have been updated and rebranded to Viva Engage.

When you sign in to Yammer following the completion of the rebranding exercise you will see a notification like this …

 

Image of the Yammer to Viva Engage rebranding message
Yammer to Viva Engage message that will be seen on completion of the rebranding.



There is no work required by users for this to happen – it will automatically update.  All the existing Yammer features will continue to work in Viva Engage.

 

Integrations with other ares of Microsoft 365.

If you are looking to utilise Yammer in Teams then you may need to look for Viva Engage instead.

The Power Automate integration to Yammer will soon be updated to reflect the rebranding to Viva Engage,

Work Hours and Location

Setting your Work Hours and Locations for “Hybrid Working”

Did you know that you can now set your work hours and location (Office vs Remote) in Outlook on the web?

This can be really helpful for your colleagues who when organising meetings will be able to see whether you are working remotely or in the office and plan accordingly.

 

To set your hours and location head to Outlook in a web browser (Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge give the best experience). Once in Outlook on the web click on the cog wheel near your profile photo or initials and choose “View all Outlook Settings”.

 

In the resulting settings box choose Calendar and at the bottom of the Calendar options you will find Work Hours and Locations. Click on this and then you can set your work hours and locations. You can even set up “split days” with part remote and part office based locations.

 

Screenshot showing setting of work hours and locations in Outlook Web Access
How to set your work hours and locations



Once you have set your options and clicked Save, your location will appear beside your name in the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook on the Web. There are plans to roll this out to Outlook Desktop and Mobile clients in the future, but for now it just shows up in Outlook on the Web.

Screenshot showing what others see when using the scheduling assistant in Outlook Web Access and where a user has work location set
How work locations show up in the scheduling assistant in OWA

 

Pronouns in Microsoft 365

The new Pronouns feature has arrived for Teams and will be rolling out across contact cards in Microsoft 365 more widely in the coming months.

Using the Pronouns option allows you to easily add your preferred set of Pronouns, either from the suggested set, or by creating your own.

Adding Pronouns is easy to achieve by following these few steps …

1. Click on your profile picture / initials in MS Teams

2. Click on your name to go into the profile “card” where more information about you is available.

3. Underneath your display name there is a “+Pronouns” button (or your chosen pronouns if you have already done this at least once.

 

Screenshot showing how to get to the pronouns feature on your M365 digital contact card
Where to find the pronouns feature


4. Click on the Pronouns button and choose the prnouns that you wish to add.

 

Screenshot showing how to set the pronouns of your choosing
Pronoun setting page



5. Click Save to complete the update of your Pronouns.

SharePoint – Essentials

The Microsoft 365 suite contains many powerful tools and services.  SharePoint is the most fundamental in delivering storage to support almost all these services.

SharePoint can, however, be confusing so in this blog post we’ll aim to try and clear up some of the confusion.

If you take only one thing from reading this post it should be this …

    • One Drive for Business is for Personal file storage.
    • SharePoint is for group files.
    • SharePoint is for much more than just storing group files.

So let’s dig into this a bit more …

 

1. Fundamentals.

SharePoint is NOT just another file share (or the place where your group files are going to be moved to)!  SharePoint contains many useful elements and for some it is the versatile swiss army knife of collaboration.

A SharePoint site can not only deliver file storage so that you and your work group, department or faculty can work together on files.  It can also deliver pages of information, news, and act as a landing page for your team where they can discover what’s happening and see updated information.

For this to work, you are going to need to understand some other concepts and have people who are prepared to manage and update the site and pages.

 

2. OneDrive for Business vs SharePoint.

 

As already stated, OneDrive for Business (ODfB) is for personal file storage.  ODfB is NOT for long term sharing or storage of group files.

You can see our One Drive for Business Basics blog here.

SharePoint is the place for Group files and group working.

 

3. What’s a Site, a Page, a Document Library and a Web Part?

 

SharePoint Site – is the collection of pages, documents and information delivered as a managed area where you can set specific access rights for a group of users.

Page – is a webpage in the SharePoint site.  You can deliver information and dynamic access using “web parts”.  A web part is a function which can help you to show information such as a time in a different location, weather or a collection of files or other useful elements.

Document Library – this is a storage space where you can group files and then grant access to a group of people to the whole library.  So for example you might want to include different sets of useful information or files into a discreet document library – e.g. finance files in a separate document library from HR files or work instructions, or maybe you want a more easily accessible video library of meeting recordings or training videos.

Web Part – this is a small piece of pre-written code that is built to work on a SharePoint page to allow you to deliver some specific information.

 

4. Security in SharePoint

 

When a SharePoint site is created it comes with three default groups – the Owners, Members and Visitors groups.

Owners – these are the people responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the site.  They have the ability to add people to the other groups (Members and Visitors), create new groups and add people to those groups, change the access controls and generally have a large range of controls.

Members – these are the regular collaborating users in the group / department / faculty.  They generally have edit access to the site so can potentially add and update new pages, add, edit and delete files from document libraries and see what is in the site.

Visitors – the people added to the visitors group usually have “read only” permission – so they can read pages of information and view files within the document library, but they can’t edit the files.

So the default permissions are …

Site Owners = Full Control
Site Members = Edit
Site Visitors = Read

It is possible to change the access for a page or a file so that a restricted set of people have access, or to grant additional people access to a resource within the SharePoint site.

The other permissions that can commonly be granted to users or groups of users are as follows:

Full Control – Has full control
Design – Can view, add, update, delete, approve, and customize
Edit – Can add, edit and delete lists; can view, add, update and delete list items and documents
Contribute – Can view, add, update, and delete list items and documents
Read – Can view pages and list items and download documents
View – Can view pages, list items, and documents but not download

NOTE the difference between Read and View – a user with view access cannot download a document but someone with Read access can!

 

5. Metadata

 

Metadata is a means of filtering or refining a data set.  So in SharePoint that might be a list of recordings, but with metadata you can filter based on the subject covered, etc.  In the exaple shown below we have added a column to contain metadata about the subjects covered in some videos.

 

Image of a SharePoint library showing metadata

 

6. Syncing

 

The simple rule here is … DON’T Sync SharePoint libraries.

SharePoint document libraries are generally VERY large.  When you sync a document library (or add a shortcut to OneDrive for Business) then the library or shortcut linked area get synced using the OneDrive for Business sync client.

If you have a whole department’s or research group’s files in a SharePoint document library then you also run the risk of accidental deletion and potentially then not being able to recover files.

As an example, after syncing just 35,000 files from a library containing 230,000 files,  it took over 2 hours to “un-sync” the library!  That’s on a VERY fast (1.2Gbps) fibre optic internet connection with zero contention.

Microsoft’sown documentation has limits and guidance on the total number of files that you should sync across One Drive for Business and synced SharePoint libraries (your “sync set”).  Many SharePoint libraries would breach this recommendation in their own right, let alone as part of a larger “sync set”.

Imperial ICT do NOT recommend syncing of SharePoint document libraries and in fact on many SharePoint sites the functionality is disabled to prevent offline file storage (synced files).