February in M365
Table of Contents
Copilot for Microsoft 365 coming to Teams App on mobile
If you’ve been lucky enough to be licensed to use Copilot for Microsoft 365, you’ve probably already fallen in love with the ability to quickly summarize things, draft messages and a like, soon these features will be coming to the Teams Mobile app!
Granular restore coming to M365 Backup
As someone who’s been waiting forever for better backup tooling in M365 I was super stoked about M365 backup, not really for the Microsoft side of things, but more for the partner APIs, we all know that good backup strategy like 3-2-1 would prescribe that you keep your backup off-site, this could be with a third party partner who backs-up to somewhere like AWS.
Unfortunately at the current state of M365 backup you can only restore a full site at a time, not a single file, however, it was “announced” that this will be coming later down the line.
Loop components in Microsoft OneNote
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been playing around with loop, thinking “where does this put OneNote” - for me personally loop replaced OneNote for me in an instant, Loop components where like that, but on steroids.
Well now you’ll be able to use loop components in OneNote, placing OneNote as a product in an even more awkward place 😅
Limit presenter role
Up until now When talking roles in a team call, you were either a presenter, or not, now some orgs don’t want presenters to have the option to disable attendees mics, or cameras.
This is a tenant setting that admins can enable/disable depending on the organizations preferences.
Removing NoScript
This change won’t affect a lot of users, but it’s a very important change - when doing certain “not-really-supported” customizations you have to use PowerShell to disable “noScript” - this is a feature designed to prevent ungoverned code from running in your environment, so SPFx solutions will be unaffected by this, unless they have set the requiresCustomScript property in the manifest, this means some community samples like the “modern script editor” will no longer be addable to a SharePoint site
Note it’s possible to enable noscript for 24 hours at a time until March
Microsoft Graph SharePoint APIs now supports delegated Sites.Selected authentication
SharePoint has since forever been very broad in their permissions scopes, however, back in 2022 we got an update that allowed us to scope application permissions - now that’s more important with application permissions, but maybe you have an app that uses delegated permissions (where the app acts on behalf of the user) you’re now able to limit the apps permissions to a few select sites, this is great for those cases where you might have access to a site, but don’t want your email archive app to be able to read data in your HR site.
SharePoint Premium Translations
Honestly, I have no words, this is just cool! - using generative AI, you’re now able to translate files stored in SharePoint to over 100 languages, just simply right click the file and select translate, choose your language, and it’s off to the races! - all it takes is a SharePoint Premium subscription
Show hide buckets in Microsoft lists board view
This is a very minor change, but ever since the launch of the Board view in Microsoft lists I’ve heard the same request from every one of my clients that use the feature!
“Can we hide xyz bucket” - well now you can, I love these kinds of updates, very minor change, but very big impact to the users.
Viva Topics retirement
Viva Topics is going to be retired on February 22, 2025 - I don’t particularly like this, viva topic is a really cool concept allowing you to organize organizational knowledge, well Microsoft believes so much in Gen-AI that they’re retiring topics in favor of Gen-AI.
Time will tell if this was a good idea - I have my opinions.
Microsoft Lists in SharePoint new layout
Another minor change that caused a lot of stir in my various channels was the updates to SharePoint lists that finally started to roll out, we saw this a bit last summer on some targeted release tenants, but that for whatever reason started to roll back about as fast as it had appeared.
This new layout is more like what we’re used to from Microsoft lists, with more icons, and more space - and views now being tabs - I personally really like this change, but I have heard a bit of fuzz about some things, like view formatting breaking a bit, but I’m sure that’ll all be ironed out in the coming weeks.
TL;DR
The Microsoft cloud is as always moving full steam headed! - and we’re not going to see that slow down any time soon, and as much as I hate the phrase 2024 really does look to be the year of AI!
With that said, it’s obvious that Microsoft still has a huge focus on those small value things like the performance of Microsoft lists - it’s awesome to see they haven’t lost their focus!