Microsoft Teams Connect (Shared Channels) Public Preview

 Microsoft Teams Connect (IE Shared Channels) is coming to Public Preview in commercial cloud enabling richer cross organizational collaboration experiences.  This new feature allows for secure and seamless collaboration between tenants without tenant switching and enables streamlined sharing with trusted tenants. 

I am so happy and ecstatic to see this feature come to public preview.  This feature has been such a high demand request with so many Microsoft customers.

Announcement: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-connect-shared-channels-is-rolling-out-to-public/ba-p/3252901  

Microsoft Teams Loop

There is a pretty new feature now available in Microsoft Teams called Microsoft Loop.  This feature allows you to have chat entries that everyone in the chat can actually edit.  This is super cool because it allows users to collaborate on thoughts and content without having to leave chat itself.  

Reference

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/transforming-creation-and-collaboration-with-microsoft-loop/ba-p/2972240?ocid=usoc_LINKEDIN_M365_spl100002931841213

Azure AD Certification Based Authentication (CBA) Public Preview

Azure AD Certification Based Authentication (CBA) is now in Public Preview.  This is really exciting because this will allow customers to meet their PIV/CAC card multi-factor auth requirements without having to maintain ADFS servers for federated authentication.

Reference: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-directory-identity/azure-ad-certificate-based-authentication-now-in-public-preview/ba-p/2464390

AAD Cross-Tenant Access Public Preview

The AAD team has put in a new public preview for cross-tenant access settings for external collaboration.  With this new feature, you have the ability to trust security claims from external AAD organizations.  A good example is, if an external user from a partner organization has already completed a MFA claim in their tenant, your tenant will trust that claim and allow the user to have access to approved resources in your tenant without requiring the external user to perform an additional MFA check within your tenant.  

Reference: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-directory-identity/collaborate-more-securely-with-new-cross-tenant-access-settings/ba-p/2147077

Microsoft 365 Adaptive Policy Scopes for Retention

There is a new feature called Adaptive Policy Scopes is coming available soon that allows administrators the ability to apply retention policies and labels by user, site and groups.  This will allow you to create more granular rules that appropriate to for specific scenarios.  For instance, you may have exception policy where a retention policy may not apply or could be different based on set of criteria.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/security-compliance-and-identity/announcing-adaptive-policy-scopes-for-microsoft-365-records/ba-p/2857532 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/security-compliance-and-identity/using-adaptive-policy-scopes-to-apply-m365-retention-to-shared/ba-p/3053641

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/retention-settings?view=o365-worldwide#configuration-information-for-adaptive-scopes 

Microsoft Teams End to End Encryption

Microsoft Teams has not made End-to-End encryption Generally Available.  Here are some good articles and FAQs if you seek to utilize it.

GA Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/end-to-end-encryption-for-one-to-one-microsoft-teams-calls-now/ba-p/3037697

Preview Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/use-end-to-end-encryption-for-one-to-one-microsoft-teams-calls/ba-p/2867066

Teams Security - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-security-guide#encryption-for-teams 

Microsoft Teams Information Protection

I have been getting lots of questions over past few months about protecting an organization’s data within Microsoft Teams.  These two posts were just made by Microsoft Teams and are a good introduction with additional references….

Protect your data across Microsoft Teams: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-community-blog/protect-your-data-across-microsoft-teams/ba-p/2945757 

Use sensitivity labels in your Microsoft Teams: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-community-blog/use-sensitivity-labels-in-your-microsoft-teams/ba-p/2945736