4 What’s New

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In This Chapter

• Introduction
• Office 365 Roadmap
• New Features
• Rolling Out Now
• Canceled Features
• In Development
• Desktop Clients

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Introduction

When you deal with on-premises servers and applications for your job and those responsibilities transfer to a cloud based solution, there certainly is some hesitation to be had. What helps is some sort of direction or information that you may not get on a timely basis with an on-premises solution. Microsoft, with their Office 365 product, has made an effort to help those administrators who support Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business and more and have had their responsibilities and functions moved to the cloud.

This effort has led what is collectively known as the Office 365 Roadmap. The roadmap provides an insight into the flow of features into Office 365. This includes old features, newly released features, soon to be released ones as well as ones that are in development. By providing this, an administrator can now prepare for the features that are newly released as well as soon to be released. The official site for the roadmap can be found here:

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap

In addition to the Roadmap, Microsoft also publishes the changes are published on the Dashboard for the Office 365 tenant’s admin page. The publishing of the list on your tenant is a reminder that Microsoft would like you to log into your tenant at least once a day to see what changes are occurring and also to verify the health of all of your services in their cloud.

In this chapter we will talk about the changes that Microsoft is making, where they announce the changes and how this may affect your experience with PowerShell in your tenant. We will not cover the features in depth due to the sheer number of changes and modifications there are to the cloud. We will cover the changes and focus more on those that affect PowerShell in terms of new cmdlets or changes to where to access the cmdlets.

Office 365 Roadmap

Like any company who constantly enhances their product, Microsoft likes to advertise their enhancements and and features that could potentially increase a users productivity. More importantly, the Roadmap and Dashboard information is to prove that Microsoft is an innovative companies and a competitor to consider in the cloud services market. If the bundling of services in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, known as Office 365, isn’t enough of an advantage then the feature roll-out may tip the scale for potential clients.

The problem with change is not always the speed, although with any fast moving object, speed bumps do tend to occur No, the problem is visibility. If the changes are visible and end users / administrators are educated on the changes then the usage of the new features tends to increase. So what do these announcements look like?

Office Roadmap for Office 365:

As you can see, there are quite a few features and not all of them are released yet. What’s nice about the page is that we can get a quick summary of what has change, or even just want is coming in Office 365. The only part that may not help is that not all features are self-explanatory as to which workload is affected or enhanced by these feature releases.

As mentioned above, Microsoft also provides notifications of the changes that are occurring in Office 365 on the Dashboard. Simply log into your tenant at https://portal.office365.com and look on the main page. There is a ‘Message Center’ that lists all of the changes. If you click on this, a more detailed list will be provided. This list is a summary of not only the new features that are coming to each Office 365 Workload, but also other changes in the service itself. Not all of these changes are end user facing. Some of the changes are actually aimed at the Administrator as well.

Here is a sample of a current Dashboard as of the books publication:

In this chapter we will analyze any features in the lists that affect Exchange Online and dig into any features that affect PowerShell for Exchange Online.

Launched Features

Take for example the current list (as of the writing of this chapter):

• Large dictionary and unique match support in DLP policies and custom sensitive types
• Outlook for Windows: Improved add account experience
• Enhanced HIPAA protection in Office 365 DLP and Retention
• Microsoft Teams on iOS: Meeting join capabilities
• Yammer Groups Activity Reporting in O365
• Microsoft Teams on Android: Meeting join capabilities
• Office Lens: Multi page scan on Android
• Advanced Security Management – Power BI Activity Support
• Yammer iPad Relaunch
• Outlook for Windows: Improvements to OneDrive attachment handling
• Outlook for Windows: A smarter To: line
• Outlook for Mac: Delivery Confirmation and Read Receipts
• Outlook for Mac: Email templates
• Outlook for Mac: Delay Send
• Outlook for Mac: Improved add account experience
• Outlook for Mac: Favorite Folders
• DLP Policy Recommendations
• DLP alerts enhanced to provide more streamlined notifications
• General Availability of Office 365 Tasks API
• Outlook for Windows: Cloud attachment support for SharePoint Server 2016
• Microsoft Forms new grading feature

A quick analysis of these features reveals that there are quite a few of features that may be relevant to Exchange Online:

• Large dictionary and unique match support in DLP policies and custom sensitive types
• DLP Policy Recommendations
• DLP alerts enhanced to provide more streamlined notification

Now the question you may be asking is what this has to do with PowerShell and the purpose of this book? Well, it depends. Some of the features directly relate to PowerShell - changes to DLP and DLP data types - can directly affect what can be added or scoped in a DLP Transport role or it may force us to use the Security and Compliance Center (SCC). Changes in the SCC can directly affect Exchange Online because they can be inserted into the flow of email internally or externally depending on how the rules are configured.

For the first item in the above consolidate listed which deals with large dictionaries and DLP are configurable with a set of PowerShell cmdlets with a noun of ‘DlpKeywordDictionary’. The caveat is that these cmdlet, like most of Microsoft’s efforts with DLP, are present in the Security and Compliance Center’s PowerShell. This means a different connection point to get access to these cmdlets:

Get-DlpKeywordDictionary

New-DlpKeywordDictionary

Remove-DlpKeywordDictionary

Set-DlpKeywordDictionary

Microsoft has documented this information here:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-keyword-dictionary-c8a95d1b-c3b6-4613-98ab-0331d1872cf3

We will cover these in depth in Chapter 11.

Rolling Out Now

In the development cycle for Office 365, before a feature is Fully Launched Reviewing the 82 features that are listed in the ‘Rolling Out’ section of the Roadmap, it appears that only thirteen are Exchange or Outlook related. These features are as follows:

• Meeting Poll
• Events from email
• Microsoft Bookings
• Outlook on the web: OneDrive Sharing Tips
• Outlook on the web: OneDrive Sharing Improvements
• Outlook Customer Manager - two of these
• Mailbox Plan Enhancements
• Calendar events for groups in Outlook
• Outlook for iOS and Android back-end update
• Outlook on the web: New First Run Experience
• Office 365 Groups: Invite To Join
• Focused Inbox for Outlook for Windows, Mac and web

As you can see there are quite a number of new features being added to the Exchange Online workload. These features that are in the Roll-out phase will slowly make it from the early adopters of Office 365 (First Release) to those who are on the traditional release path and not on the bleeding edge. These features will light up in a rolling upgrade of the various tenants in Office 365.

Some of these enhancements do have PowerShell components.

In addition these user facing features, the cmdlets used in Exchange Online PowerShell have also changed over time. In fact, since February 2017, Exchange Online cmdlets went from 631 to 658.

Removed Cmdlets ExO

Get-DataRetentionReport

New-MailboxRelocationRequest

Remove-MRSRequest

Resume-MRSRequest

Set-MailboxRelocationRequest

Suspend-MRSRequest

Get-CaseHoldPolicy

Get-CaseHoldRule

Get-HoldCompliancePolicy

Get-HoldComplianceRule

Get-RetentionCompliancePolicy

Get-RetentionComplianceRule

Set-SafeLinksPolicy

Get-ClassificationRuleCollection

Canceled Features

Like any other software product or hosted service, feature sets can change. In the case of Microsoft’s Office 365, sometimes new, desired features need to be pulled back or canceled due to deployment issues or undesirable results. As of the writing of this book, there are currently 4 canceled features. However, by the time you read this book the list could be smaller or larger. It is guaranteed to change, just like the other lists contained in this chapter.

• Admin App Launcher Customization Tools
• Outlook for iOS: Likes and Reactions
• SharePoint - News and pages: comment on news articles
• SharePoint app for Windows 10 Mobile - team news rollup

Out of these features, only the Outlook for iOS is relevant to Exchange Online and even this feature has no PowerShell component. It specifically has to do with options an end user has when it comes to emails that are displayed in Outlook Apps.

In Development

This set of features is Microsoft’s wish list. Not all of the features here will actually exist in the cloud. Some will be removed, most will be implemented, and some will be postponed. Just remember

• Office 365 Groups: default classification and classification description
• Compliance Boundaries
• Cross premises permissions for “send on behalf of”
• Client Access Rules for Exchange Online
• Office 365 Germany: Information Rights Management and Message Encryption
• Office 365 Germany: Information Rights Management and Message Encryption
• Office 365 Germany: Usage reports in the admin center
• Office 365 Germany: Drive Shipping and Network Based Data Import for Office 365
• Removal of Safe Links Re-write for Outlook Client(s)
• Document Preview for Safe Attachments
• Safe Links in Office 365 ProPlus
• Microsoft Teams - Outlook scheduling add-in
• Groups of conditions and configurable logical operators in DLP rules
• Find and upgrade eligible Exchange Online Distribution Lists
• Distribution List owners can upgrade the DLs they own to Office 365 Groups
• Outlook on the web: Share Calendar Availability
• Office 365 Groups: naming policy in Azure Active Directory
• Recover deleted Office 365 Group from Office and Exchange admin centers
• Office 365 Groups: expiring groups
• Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Exchange Online Protection phishing protection
• Outlook for Android: Quick Reply
• Outlook for Android: search improvements
• Outlook for Android: Draft sync
• Outlook for Android: Improved conversations
• Outlook for iOS: Draft sync
• Outlook for the web: Attach OneDrive Consumer Files
• Introducing the new Office 365 Group Card
• Change in entry point for add-ins for Outlook in Modern Conversation View
• Outlook for Windows: Improvements to Contact Card
• Outlook for Android: Set status for calendar events
• Outlook for iOS: Set status for calendar events
• Outlook for Android: new RSVP options
• Outlook for iOS: new RSVP options
• Outlook for Android: Scheduling Assistant
• Outlook for Android: Improved account and folder navigation
• Outlook for Android: Likes and Reactions
• eDiscovery Legal Hold Notices
• eDiscovery Export to compressed folder (zip file)
• eDiscovery Case Holds modernization
• Poll for a time to meet
• Outlook for iOS: search improvements
• Service Health Dashboard Update: text/ email notifications (preview)
• Outlook on the web: Sweep Enhancements
• DLP availability in sovereign cloud environments
• Outlook: Drag and drop emails into group mailbox
• Mail tile change in Office 365 App launcher
• Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365
• Outlook for Windows: Improved calendar attendance tracking
• Multi Geo Private Preview
• Outlook.com beta includes Calendar and People
• Outlook for iOS & Android: Create and Manage Groups
• Outlook for Mac: Create and Manage Groups
• Outlook for Windows: Redesigned conversation view

From the above list, we can see there are quite a few enhancements for Outlook whether it is for a mobile platform (iOS, Android or Windows Phone) and compliance enhancements (DLP, eDiscovery and Geo boundaries). Additionally Office Groups are being enhanced.

Desktop Clients

Most organizations use Outlook, even if the web interface from Outlook Web App is getting more and more usable for day to day operations with each version of Exchange. The following versions are supported with Exchange Online:

Outlook 2011 for MAC

Outlook 2013

Outlook 2016

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/outlook-updates-472c2322-23a4-4014-8f02-bbc09ad62213

One large caveat is coming for those who are either connecting to or thinking about connecting to Office 365 is that in 2020, the support for non-mainstream clients connecting to Office 365 will be dropped. What does this mean? Well, here are some examples of support dates for various Office suites:

This effectively means that near the end of 2020 Outlook 2013 and 2016 will no longer be able to connect to Office 365. Your only option will be Outlook 2019. While this is not out quite yet from Microsoft, it has been announced for release later in 2018:

https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/26/the-next-perpetual-release-of-office/