What’s New? A List Of December’s Exciting Office 365 Updates

Before 2016 ends, here are some exciting Microsoft Office 365 updates that will surely enhance your admin experience. New additions to the Office 365 suite include a new OneDrive for Business admin center, new settings to manage Microsoft Teams and GigJam, and upgrades to the new Service health dashboard. In the past two months, the Office 365 Team’s efforts focused on enabling admins to manage new workloads and improving the monitoring and the OneDrive administration experience.

Here’s a rundown of the recent updates:

New OneDrive for Business Admin Center Launched for First Release Customers

In 2016, OneDrive for Business has evolved at an extremely fast pace – introducing new features for users and IT admins – across sync, web and mobile. As the number of users continues to increase, Office 365 customers have asked for an easier way to administer their company’s OneDrive for Business settings and policies. The new OneDrive admin center delivers this, making it easier and more efficient to manage OneDrive for Business.

Control Microsoft Teams from the Office 365 Admin Center

Microsoft Teams – in preview since November – is the chat-based workspace in Office 365 that helps teams be more productive. Office 365 admins can now enable and manage Microsoft Teams directly from the Office 365 admin center.

On the Services & Add-ins page, you will find a new Microsoft Teams section where you can enable the service for their organization, as it is disabled by default during the preview period. After enabling, admins can configure Microsoft Teams for their organization, including notifications, feedback, bots, and screen sharing in meetings.

GigJam helps you get work done across your network by sharing just the bits of information you want – with who you need – both inside and outside your company. GigJam, currently in preview, is off by default for organizations with Office 365. You can now enable GigJam directly from the Services & add-ins page in the Office 365 admin center and let your biz try using GigJam.

Updated Service Health Dashboard will be Launched to First Release Customers

The new Service health dashboard has started rolling out to First Release customers – providing you with a new level of service health insights that are personalized for your organization. The dashboard makes it easier to identify relevant issues by separating major business critical outages from others and splitting them into two categories: incidents and advisories. A new summary view surfaces the most important details and allows you to quickly understand the effects on your organization by showing the number of impacted users. This allows admins to stay on top of service incidents, improve internal support experience and improve the Office 365 user experience.

Office 365 is planning to roll out the new dashboard to all admins in February 2017.

More to Come in 2017!

In the coming months, the Office 365 team will add more reports that focus on which clients are used to accessing SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Yammer. They are also working on making the Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI available to all customers and providing new public APIs that will enable you to programmatically access the usage data and integrate it into custom applications, like a company reporting portal.