Whats new in Microsoft 365 | May Updates

0:00 Hey guys, it's Nick. Welcome to another episode of Tminus 365. If you're looking to get all the updates for Microsoft 365 from the past month, but don't want to sift through the hundred or so announcements like me, stay tuned because in this episode, we're going to be covering all the highlights, including the feature updates, changes, new releases that you don't want to [Music] miss. Okay, guys. Okay, so diving in here, just a quick reminder, I do supplement these videos with a blog post down below with more helpful information about all these announcements. So, be sure to check that out after you watch this video. We're going to start off here today with some of the spiciest announcements from Microsoft. This first one brought a lot of controversy here as Microsoft is discontinuing the free grants to nonprofits for business premium and E1. Effectively, nonprofits

0:47 were able to get 10 free licenses of this type in the past and they're discontinuing that. They're still going to offer all licenses at 75% discount over the commercial plans, but they're going to discontinue this on July 1st. This is some of the email template they are providing to notify customers. So, if you do have customers with nonprofit and they are subscribed to these licensing, you will need to provide a path forward. Next one here is also controversial for CSP partners as part of the Microsoft incentives of being an indirect reseller. There's some changes across the board for direct distributors as well. Effectively, Microsoft's changing the requirements for resellers here, which I don't think is the bigger deal, but the one here that I highlighted in those three asterisks is

1:32 that they are going to not count movement between CSP partners as part of your incentive revenue. So, this is actually pretty huge here. It's already hard here, I think, to get these incentives and get paid. Microsoft is making this even harder now. And these changes are going to go effect in Q4 of this year. Last one here also caused a lot of uproar, but I also think was blown way outside of proportion just due to the nature of when users are going to be prompted. But this is effectively saying if a user has some type of personal account, Microsoft's automatically going to prompt them to sync their personal one drive in conjunction with their work one drive on that device. Now, I think the big thing here is that most of these devices that we're going to have rolled out to our customers are not going to have a personal account already signed in on

2:19 it. So, they're not going to get prompted to begin with. But in my blog post, I do link some steps there that you can take to push out a policy or what's legacy go that would block users from syncing a personal account. This will happen mid June, be completed by early July. Hey guys, speaking of updates, we've been making a lot of updates to Cloud Capsule, which is the automated security assessment platform I built for Microsoft 365. It allows you to run an assessment against the tenant in under 90 seconds. Collects over 100 data points and maps to baselines that relate to regulatory standards such as CIS and NIST. We've been working on a lot of these playbooks which act as project templates you can use to increase the security in the tenant proactively over time. And we've recently come out with a token theft playbook that provides you access into

3:07 information with a tenant that you would typically investigate as part of one of these incidents. Gets into all of the proactive protections that you can put into place as well as some of the licensing considerations for the posture management that you'd want to have to prevent these types of attacks in the future. So, if this looks interesting and you want to run a free assessment, go to cloudcapsule.io and run your free assessment today. Shifting into Microsoft Teams here. This first one's related to having a webinar or live meeting where you can send messages to attendees in the meeting lobby with the meeting chat. You can see that with the screenshots here provided in that righth hand panel. Timelines for this one's June and be complete by mid July. Next one here is specifically for teams premium users or tenants that have Teams

3:52 premium licensing. This is support for the polls app and town halls. I think this is a good feature to include. I'm not sure why it wasn't included before, but effectively here, this allows you to pull your audience there. So, you can get that dynamically during those meetings. This will have a mid July be complete by late July. Last one here for teams is also if you are using Teams premium and leveraging an integration with Microsoft Places, which is effectively a application that comes part of your licensing that allows you to place meetings into certain rooms. This is a room recommener which is using AI generated room suggestion and it's going to send this to the users like you can see here in the screenshot to recommend a location for them to meet. This will happen mid June be complete by

4:38 late June. Shifting into Outlook here. This is giving users the ability to jump to the first message based off of a sender in the list. It's giving a quicker way to filter and search. You can see that here within this screenshot. This will happen late May and be complete by late June. Shifting into the Microsoft 365 apps here. This first one is related to One Drive and being able to export this as a PDF. Honestly, thought this was always included. So, I was surprised to see that, but it's obviously a nice feature there to be able to export Word documents and so forth into PDFs directly from within your one drive experience. This will happen midmay and be complete by mid June. Last one here also for Sharepoint and One Drive is a PDF compression feature. I think this is going to be important for customers that have a lot of PDF files that they have within their one drive and sharepoint

5:25 that's taking up a lot of storage causing them to look at additional pricing for increased storage. So this will happen late May and be complete by early June. Shifting into Edge here. This was an announcement from the Microsoft Build Conference. This is being able to translate languages in PDFs directly within the browser experience. You can see that as part of this video. It's going to support over 70 languages and it's supposed to be GA next month in June. Another announcement here as we shift into C-Pilot was around Copilot tuning which is providing users and organizations that leverage co-pilot studio the ability to tune AI models using their own company data workflows and processes. a lot of powerful functionality that they showed here at the build conference, giving users more flexibility to tailor those types of

6:12 models without needing specialized types of expertise like data scientist. No timelines yet on general availability. Next one here for co-pilots related to the phone experience and being able to get a summary from co-pilot without turning on transcription or recording. This is important. And I think I would love to see them extend this in the meetings. You don't necessarily want to record and transcribe, but you still want to get the summary at the end of that call or that meeting. Timelines on this one for phone though is early June and be complete by late June. The next two announcements here are related to Microsoft starting to leverage AI in an audio summary. This first one here, these screenshots a little blurry. Apologize for that. But effectively, this is being able to take your meeting transcriptions and turn them into audio summaries that a user can listen to. The

6:59 cool part I think here is that this is not just for one meeting, but it aggregates the selection of meetings that you choose and then you can listen to the highlights that it's going to summarize as well too. So interested to see the effectiveness of this. This will happen late June and complete by mid July. Similar fashion here. This is extending audio into summarization of Word and PDF files in Microsoft One Drive. You can see that here in screenshots where a user can generate an audio overview and then they're able to listen to that versus having to read it for the summary. This will happen early May, be complete by late May. So probably generally available by the time you're watching this video. Next one here is giving users the ability to have access into this prompt gallery which I think is a really cool aspect where internally you can create your own prompts and publish them where other

7:46 users can like them and so forth. So you're getting a lot of crowdsourced activity within your organization not only to drive adoption but to improve the effectiveness of the responses that you're getting maybe you could use across teams. It's giving you a whole dashboard view of that um within teams experience itself. This will happen late May and be completed by mid June. Next one here is related to PowerPoint. I think this is a really important one. Just if you've ever used Copilot within PowerPoint to generate a presentation, it's honestly it looks like it was built in the 90s when PowerPoint first came out. It's pretty rudimentary. It's not something I'd want to put in front of my customers and so forth. But this is able to capture your branding that you can provide to it as far as any templates to improve that overall experience. This will happen in midMay, be complete by

8:31 mid June. This next one here is another quick nice feature to have here where you can highlight text as you can see in the screenshot and provide immediate spelling and grammar effects all at once without having to go one by one as you do in the traditional experience. This will happen midmay and be complete by mid June. So last one here for copilot is an outlook being able to summarize email attachments within co-pilot. So expanding the existing summarization functionality of the body of the email which I think is a cool feature. This will happen midmay and be complete by late July. Okay guys, that's everything I had for you today. Definitely comment below with the features you're most excited about. Otherwise, if you want to get these updates each month, be sure to subscribe to the channel.