Welcome to a brand-new month full of new technological opportunities and challenges. As always, Microsoft has been busy updating and improving the Microsoft 365 Platform. Here’s our list of those changes we think are significant, fun, and timely. We provide these updates to (hopefully) make your life easier. You have our permission to share this link with anyone at all and we even give you explicit permission to cut and paste so you can show off that new knowledge to your coworkers! (You might want to change this paragraph, however!)
Outlook Reactions
Last month, we told you about 800 new emoticons you can use in Teams to react to a message. This month brings the ability to react to email messages if the email came from within your own organization. You can choose to react with Thumbs up, Heart, Celebrate, Laugh, Surprise, or Sad and your response will be seen by the sender of the email. If the email went to a group, everyone in the group will see your response. There are not exactly 800 choices, but just about! It is a great way to let the sender of an email, or the group you are working with know that you’ve seen an email while controlling inbox clutter at the same time. It may be a little change but little changes add up to a more effective workplace over time! This change is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of February.
Teams Presenter View Enhancement
This new view moves the sharing controls to the top of the Teams window, giving presenters more awareness of what is happening in the meeting. It also makes speaker faces visible and better shows raised hands and other important notifications. This change is already released worldwide and should reflect in your tenant today.
Microsoft Lists Calendar: Week View Layout
If you are using Microsoft Lists to manage events and have the calendar view, you can now choose either a month view or a week view to show your data. In both views you will be able to drag and drop your events to reschedule them and have the new information stored in your list. This change is rolling out now and should be available to everyone by mid-February.
SharePoint External File Request in SharePoint Document Library
This update will be dependent on a couple of choices made by individual tenant administrators, but if allowed will give you a way to invite external users to upload documents to a SharePoint folder without letting them see what else is in the folder. Think of it as a SharePoint drop-off library for external users, something that will prove very useful for some organizations. This will replicate the ability to request files already present in OneDrive, allowing you to have a file import process in SharePoint. This is rolling out throughout this month.
Viva Goals
Recently, Microsoft announced enhancements to Viva Goals “making it even easier to accelerate OKR adoption.” If you use Dynamics 365 to run your business, Viva Goals now integrates with Sales, Field Service, Human Resources, and other facets of Dynamics to give you “a comprehensive view across business operations” within Viva Goals. Goals is also now fully integrated into Microsoft Teams allowing you to stay in Teams while working on your OKRs. All these changes are available now!
How to Update Microsoft 365?
Most Microsoft updates will happen within your tenant and technologies automatically when they are released. For more information on those releases, when they happen, and how to incorporate them best, check out this link. If you are looking for Microsoft 365 adoption tips or training, contact a JourneyTEAM specialist.
This concludes our review of the new features in Microsoft 365 for February 2023. Come back in March to learn what new features arrived this month!