Office

You can connect LinkedIn to Office 365 so that Office 365 users are able to look up LinkedIn contacts from applications like OWA and SharePoint Online. Some privacy concerns have been expressed about the connection, but there’s really nothing to worry about because users are in control of what they see and what they share with others.

At the Ignite conference last week, GM Murali Sitaram laid out a new vision for Yammer and explained how the product will be better integrated with Office 365 and Azure. At first blush, the vision addresses the obvious deficiencies that have afflicted Yammer for years and sets out a path for Yammer to become the social layer for Microsoft 365. Time will tell.

With Ignite happening last month, there was a lot of Office 365 news and Shane distills it down into an easy to read format.

Because hazy, hot, and humid doesn’t even begin to explain the weather in Orlando, this edition of Short Takes looks some of the other news that came out of TechEd, er ah, Microsoft Ignite this week.

Microsoft is making Office 2019 available starting today but only for a small group of customers; consumers will have to wait a few more weeks.

In news gently leaking out, Microsoft says that new Office 365 tenants with 500 or fewer licensed seats will have to use Teams. These tenants won’t have the option to use Skype for Business Online. Then again, you have to ask the question whether they want or need to use Skype for Business Online? Existing tenants aren’t affected by the news.

To make things easier for Office 365 tenant administrators, Microsoft has released four new administrative role for Teams. You can now assign these roles to other people and have them take care of areas like Teams general admin or the more complicated area of voice and audio meetings and calling. It’s a sign of increased maturity in the Teams product.

Microsoft has scheduled 1,500+ sessions for the Ignite 2018 conference in Orlando next week. What’s happening for Office 365? Well, there are many sessions to attend, but the interesting thing is the huge number of sessions assigned to Teams compared to other workloads. SharePoint does OK, but Exchange is low, and Yammer gets a surprising allocation.

When someone leaves your company, you might need to preserve their Office 365 data. Email, OneDrive, and SharePoint are straightforward, but what about Teams? As it turns out, a content search or an Office 365 DSR is a good way to retrieve information about Teams messages and information about their activities can be found in the audit log.

SharePoint Online makes it easy to publish news items, but people might miss the news if it only exists there. Publishing to Teams spreads your message and there’s three ways to get the job done. Choose from email, a connector, or linking to news with a tab.