New Office 365 File Sharing Features in Outlook 2016

With the release of Office 2016 with Office 365, there are new amazing simple features that have been added to the service that will change the way you share Office documents. Sometimes it is these little things have huge impact on how you collaborate.

Up to this point, when you want to share files via email or SharePoint you have had to take a number of steps to share that file. In that past, if you need to solicit feedback on an Office file you have had to take clumsy steps to get that feedback. Sometimes people will take that file, rename, edit it and then email that file back to you. Then you are stuck with multiple versions of a file and you need to bring in all the comments from people back into your file. Worse yet, people will review the wrong versions of the file. You can resolve this issue by simply putting the file in SharePoint however sometimes configuring SharePoint to share a file can be a chore.

So what has changed?

Let’s look at some of these new features.

In Office 2016 there is a new Share button. All you need to do is save your Word, Excel or PowerPoint file to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint. Then press the Share button in Office 2016. You have the ability to select who you want to share the file with, what permissions they have and provide them a message. If you noticed, you no longer need to open a browser to OneDrive for Business, SharePoint or even an email application (Outlook) to share that file; the entire sharing experience is done through Office 2016. Awesome!

Plus moving you can see all the people who have access to the file and modify their permissions right there inside of Office 2016. You do not need to leave Office and navigate to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint to change the permissions making life really easy.

Plus if other people are co-authoring you will see their changes in real-time. Very cool.

Additionally in Office 2016 there is a new Share a Link option. Once you have saved your file to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, you can press the Share button and get a link to the file right out of Office 2016. You can then provide that link out to a broader audience through whatever mechanism you want versus having to type in tons of names.

Another really simple option you have is in file explorer you can right click on a OneDrive for Business or SharePoint file and click the Share button. This will open the browser where right to the location so you can share that file.

Now let’s pivot the conversation over to some new awesome options available in Outlook 2016 that help you with sharing email file attachments.

First thing you should know about is new capability added to the Attach File button in Outlook 2016. You no longer need to dig around to find the file you were just editing. If the file is saved to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, you will see that file immediately to easily attach it to your email. Even better, the list is cross device smart. So if you built the file on one device and then try to email it from a different device, you will see that file as a recent edited file for attachment. Frankly I love the ability of not having to go back to SharePoint through the browser to find the file; I can stay in Outlook 2016.

Now here is where things start to get really cool.

Once you have the file from OneDrive for Business or SharePoint attached, you have the ability to set the permissions of the file right there inside of Outlook 2016. Wow! Before I would have to go the location where the file was stored, set the permissions and then come back to Outlook and complete sending of the email. Now I just change the permissions right there on the spot as I am selecting the names of the people that I want to email the file to.

In conclusion these simple examples of new capabilities added to Office 2016 will change the way you share and collaborate with Office documents.

References

https://blogs.office.com/2015/10/05/share-with-the-click-of-a-button-in-office-2016/

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/thenewoffice/

https://blogs.office.com/2015/11/09/attachments-in-outlook-2016-ready-for-collaboration/

Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 GA

Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 went Generally Available (GA) late Sept 2015. This was a big announcement that I had been waiting for publically.

Azure ExpressRoute allows Office 365 customer to make a private / managed network connection to Office 365. Up this point customers have to connect over the Internet or establish their own peering connection to Microsoft. With ExpressRoute Office 365 customers get a predictable network performance, SLA for that connection and additional privacy of their data (as the Office 365 traffic is being taken off the public Internet).

There are several ways to establish a connection. First if you are already using Azure ExpressRoute for Azure services, this can be used for Office 365. Second you can us IP VPN for WAN where by Office 365 can appear as a node on your WAN. In this case Office 365 will just seem as an offsite datacenter. Third ExpressRoute supports large or point-to-point network connections to a co-location facility.

There are some good FAQs:

• ExpressRoute is available from where your network operator has locations available. This will require coordination with your providers and determining how you want to allow your users to connect.
• Not all Office 365 services are supported with Azure ExpressRoute. For the initial release the following is supported: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business Online, Azure Active Directory, Office 365 Video, Power BI, Delve and Project Online.
• There is a tool called Office Client Performance Analyzer (OCPA) which has new performance metrics.

Public Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/29/announcing-general-availability-of-expressroute-for-office-365/

Office for iPad Pro

Office for iPad Pro is coming. You will have Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote apps available. This is part of Microsoft’s strategy to provide a rich Office experience across all major platforms. Very exciting.

Public Announcements - https://blogs.office.com/2015/11/11/microsoft-office-apps-are-ready-for-the-ipad-pro/

Office 365 Service Trust Portal

If you have not seen it, Office 365 has released a new portal inside of the administration area called the Office 365 Service Trust Portal. In the past to get access to compliance reports, organizations would reach out to the support or account team to gain access to reports. Now such reports as SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc. are available right through this portal.

If you are a US Federal Customer, and need access to FedRAMP reports associated to NIST 800-53, it is best to go directly to the FedRAMP web site and make a request for that information through their repository.

References

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/15/announcing-the-office-365-service-trust-portal/

https://blogs.office.com/2015/10/21/announcing-the-enhanced-office-365-soc-audit-reports-with-new-trust-principles/

https://www.fedramp.gov/

https://www.fedramp.gov/marketplace/compliant-systems/microsoft-office-365-multi-tenant-supporting-services-including-azure-active-directory-leveraging-microsoft-azure-and-cloud-infrastructure/

New SharePoint and Office 365 Hybrid Search

I am super excited to see the new Hybrid Cloud Search coming. Why? A ton of reasons. The biggest for me are:

• Simplified On-Premises Deployment – If you have ever had to manage SharePoint on-premises before, the search servers require the most care and management. No more search crashing on you because you did not put enough resources to manage it. No more having to worry about timer jobs and full index crawls.
• No More Having to Run Search Servers On-Premises - Moving this entire search workload to the cloud will significantly make your on-premises deployments smaller and easier to manage.

Up to this point, the only way to achieve a hybrid search experience by setting up query federation with SharePoint 2013 on-premises with SharePoint Online. This really did not make your SharePoint on-premises deployments any easier. Now we can do away with that configuration.

Here are some specific technical considerations.

• You now have the ability with your SharePoint 2013 and 2016 on-premises farms to get the entire SharePoint search experience from the cloud. This is being termed as SharePoint Server with Cloud Search service application.
• Scenario: If you have not leveraged SharePoint Online yet, you can use this as an opportunity to remove all your SharePoint on-premises search servers and use the cloud.
• Scenario: If you have move some or a large portion of your SharePoint on-premises to the cloud, you now have the ability to get a unified hybrid search and that entire search experience is delivered by the cloud.
• Scenario: If you have specific reason (i.e. legal, compliance) that you have to keep some search servers on-premises, you can still do that have query federation (picture below) between your on-premises SharePoint and SharePoint Online.
• Hybrid search can go across the following content sources: SharePoint Server 2007, 2010 or 2013, File shares, BCS connectors*. This basically means that user in SharePoint Online can retrieve search results from all these locations.
• Recommend that you get your SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint 2013 or higher to get the most advantage of these features.
• Recommend you seriously considered using search from the cloud. Why? With the amount of data organizations is acquiring and maintaining, using an elastic cloud to deliver those search results will only make your life easier J
• Delve Search experience will also be supported as part of this new search experience. So Delve can find files not just in SharePoint Online, but also in SharePoint on-premises.
• eDiscovery and new SharePoint DLP capabilities will be able to go across SharePoint Online, SharePoint on-premises and OneDrive for Business. This is a big deal.
• Configuration with Azure AD is required. You will do this anyways as an Enterprise Office 365 customer.
• If you need to do customer IFilters, BCS connectors or Partner connectors, those will remain on-premises.
• Cloud will not support: Site collection level schema mapping, Custom security trimming, Custom entity extraction and Content enrichment web service.

Here is a high level logical architecture diagram

Getting the point across that this makes your on-premises deployment so much simpler. It is hard to argue that you SharePoint on-premises life will be made better.

References

https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/24/announcing-availability-of-sharepoint-server-2016-it-preview-and-cloud-hybrid-search/

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3134

Outlook on the web

There was a major announcement for Office 365 Exchange Online customers this past week. Microsoft is changing Outlook Web App (OWA) to “Outlook on the web”. I have a couple ideas of why this was done from a marketing perspective. With this change to Outlook on the web, there was a release of whole bunch of new features and capabilities to come with it. Most notable:

• A new Action Bar to allow you to perform actions across mail, calendar, contacts and tasks much easier.
• The ability to Pin an email to the top of your mailbox. Man I love the idea of this feature and will use it a lot. See picture below…
• Sweep which is a new capability to allow you to manage emails from specific senders.
• New features to email to your archive folders easier.
• Several new features around views and reading panes to give you more flexibility like in Outlook rich client.
• New capabilities to for working with embedded images.
• Plus the mobile experience web has been enhanced. I have actually had to use this every once and a while. If you are on a mobile device and you do not have a mobile app installed, this is the next best thing. Several new capabilities have been introduced.

Public Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/04/new-features-coming-to-outlook-on-the-web/

OneDrive for Business Sync Blocking

There have some features that I have been following closely and very excited to see that they are being introduced into the Office 365 service.

First there is a new announcement about new controls that are being added to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. One of the biggest questions I have had from customers coming to Office 365 is how can document data be controlled such that documents are not synchronized to un-managed devices. Specifically this questions as in reference to the Document Sync capability which allows a user to press the Sync button on a document library that will sync all those files in that document library to a PC (and MACs). A new PowerShell command has been added that will allow administrators to block sync to all unmanaged PCs. I am really excited to see this become available for enterprise customers.

Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/16/new-it-management-controls-added-to-onedrive-for-business/

Additionally there were some other announcements / reminders around enterprise control of data.

• Auditing capabilities are being expanded so that administrators can see how documents in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. Now you be able to see download and read events along with a ton of other data points - https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/08/announcing-new-activity-logging-and-reporting-capabilities-for-office-365/.
• Remember that OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online are integrated into the Office 365 MDM capabilities. So again, documents doing down to mobile devices can be managed through the Office 365 service - https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/21/explore-the-built-in-mobile-device-management-mdm-feature-for-office-365/.

Another new capability that was announced which I found really interesting is that OneDrive for Business can now have quota limits placed on it, just like SharePoint Online or even an Exchange Online mailbox. Why is this important? There are several compliance reasons why I have seen organizations wanting to limit the amount of data storage available to each individual user even though OneDrive for Business has a roadmap to provide unlimited storage. Most commonplace issue is data retention regulations or data storage policies. Even though OneDrive for Business an amazing solution that empowers end users, is it appropriate to store TBs of personnel video and music in a OneDrive for Business site? Depending on the company this may not be appropriate and quotas can be used as a way to control data storage.

As a SharePoint guy, I am super excited to see the features come into the service. I am now seeing concepts for data storage and control becoming consistent across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. This type of alignment is a key differentiator.