Published 22 December 2022
The year is finally coming to an end – and what a big one it’s been with a whopping 407 updates across the Microsoft 365 suite, Power Platform and Windows to date.
At Engage Squared, our mission is to provide <people> friendly technology. This includes ensuring our customers are aware of, understand, and can focus effort on updates that will improve the Microsoft platform to suit the needs and requirements for their organisation to provide a better employee experience. So, if you’re wondering how we decide which 10 updates to cover each month, they were selected based on the following criteria:
- New product announcement
- Major delay in product launch schedule
- Changes to a product that may affect security and app compliancy, physical device settings, and/or training materials
- An interesting update we wanted to share with you
Evergreen offerings
We understand how challenging it can get with the inundating number of updates, time-poor resources allocated to prioritise the updates, and updating quickly out-of-date documents – we saw a gap in the market and within companies as they realised they couldn’t keep up with the continual release of updates, launches, and delays.
So, let us do the heavy lifting and help you sift, triage and manage updates from Microsoft on a regular cadence. Suitable for any organisation that has M365 licences, we have four offers available now where you can leverage our Evergreen as a service:
- Bronze: Evergreen reporting
- Silver: App and update triage
- Gold: App, update triage and support bucket
- Platinum: App, update triage support & framework
For more information on which service is right for your organisation, chat to us at info@engagesq.com.
Our top 10 updates from 2022
To celebrate the end of 2022, here are 10 of our favourite Microsoft 365 updates in order of release date:
- Microsoft 365: Introducing Microsoft Purview (April)
- Microsoft Teams: Video filters (April)
- Microsoft Stream: On-Demand Caption and Transcript Generation (May)
- Microsoft Teams: Pairing the channel and the corresponding SharePoint folder name (June)
- SharePoint: Multilingual user interface streamlining (June)
- PowerPoint: Cameo in PowerPoint Live (July)
- Microsoft Teams: Delay delivery of chat messages (September)
- Yammer: Storyline in Microsoft Viva Engage (October)
- SharePoint: Private drafts for SharePoint pages and news (October)
- Microsoft 365: Introducing Teams Premium (November)
However the year isn’t over just yet and it wouldn’t be a M365 blog without providing any new monthly updates, so we have 3 bonus updates we think you’ll enjoy…
Bonus #1. Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva: New Service Plans
What’s new?
New service plans for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva SKUs have been announced and will be released soon. These plans will be used to provision the new features and experiences in Viva Engage and Answers in Microsoft Viva in 2023. You may see these service plans ‘enabled’ for the users in your organisation, however that will not enable any new features / experiences for them. Once these have been rolled out, Microsoft will share further information including how you can control the feature enablement that is best for your organisation.
Why is this important?
It’s important to understand what the new service plans will include as part of their ‘basic’ features such as Storylines and Communities. The new service plans are Viva Engage Core, Viva Engage Communities and Communication, and Viva Engage Knowledge.
Unsure if your licence covers these new plans? Contact us here. Additionally, read more about Microsoft Viva here. Learn more about the new experiences coming to Viva Engage here.
When is it coming?
- Rollout commences mid-December with an expected completion by late December 2022.
Bonus #2. Microsoft Teams: Mention Everyone in chat
What’s new?
Users will now have a new type of mention within their group and meeting chats, removing the hassle of mentioning each person’s name one by one or missing someone.
Why is this important?
In line with the current experience of @ mentioning individuals, tags, or channels – this update will be great when wanting to notify everyone in a group chat (minimum 2 users) without the risk of your message getting lost amongst other messages.
When is it coming?
Rollout commences late January with expected completion by late February 2023.
Bonus #3. Microsoft Intune: Feature and expedited update management generally available
What’s new?
Admins can now easily manage updates and accompanying reports have having greater control over specifying updates to devices.
Why is this important?
These new feature updates allows admins to better manage feature rollouts across a specified and controlled scenario by scheduling a deployment across various user groups, expediting quality updates for a certain set of devices, and receiving a report with an overview of the policies results.
When is it coming?
This update is now generally available if you use the Windows Update for Business deployment service.
We hope you have enjoyed our monthly Microsoft 365 updates written by consultant, Sarah Pak throughout 2022. We can’t wait to share more updates from the Microsoft roadmap next year and would love to be part of your journey of improving your employee experience. As always, if you have any questions on what was covered today, or are keen to learn more about our Evergreen offer, please get in touch.
Happy Holidays!