April in M365
Table of Contents
Exchange high volume emails
If you’ve ever built a system that sends out a lot of individual emails, using Graph (or exchange), I’m sure you’ve inevitably run into the throttling limits, suddenly your app breaks because the user has sent too many emails, and you’re stuck with a broken app for the next couple of hours.
And with nothing much to do, other than wait, and hope that the throttling limits are lifted.
Well I’ve sometimes moved my solutions to third parties like SendGrid, but that’s always frustrating, because you’re now paying for the same service twice, and you’re also now managing two different services.
Well no more, going into preview now is Microsofts take on high volume emails, and while it’s still in preview, I’m looking forward not having to manage two different services in the future.
Copilot in stream rolling out
Have you ever wanted to get a quick summary of a video, before you decide to watch it, or maybe you remember watching it, but can’t remember the exact phrase, that was said?
Well fear not rolling out now is Copilot in Stream, ask Copilot about that video you don’t have time to watch, or that meeting recording where you missed the first 15 minutes, or had to drop off early!
Interact with content while annotating teams
As a heavy user of ZoomIt, I’ve never really used the annotate feature in Teams, as I just couldn’t see the value.
Well that changes now! - when annotating with teams, you’ll now have the option to press a button and interact with your “background” without losing your annotations.
Just imagine circling parts of a document, while talking about it, and then being able to edit the document, while the circling stays in place, that’s a game changer!
SharePoint Pages Graph API GA
Basically since the launch of Modern SharePoint pages, we’ve been waiting for a proper pages API, there’s some features in CSOM, but not perfect, and while the PnP community has done an awesome job revere engineering the API, it’s always a balance act, especially when you’re building solutions for clients, where you really don’t want to use unsupported APIs.
Well, the wait is over, the SharePoint Pages Graph API is now GA, and while it’s a limited release, only supporting a few select Web Parts, it’s a start, I’m certanly looking forward to seeing what the future holds for this API.
Power BI Premium licensing updates
Previously you could purchase Power BI Premium per capacity, this is now moving towards Microsoft Fabric capacity, in Microsofts endless pursuit to push users to the latest and greatest.
Honestly I’m not aware of any negative impacts this will have, other than you needing to move your workspaces from one capacity to another.
Viva Connections personalized view
Viva Connections is great for bringing better communications to the frontline workers in your org, but I’m sure you’ve had the request to change the layout, or the order for 1 or 2 users, well now the users can do that themselves, I’m not really looking forward to how IT admins will handle this, but I’m sure it’s going to be a great feature for the users!
Brand center and custom fonts rolling out
The number one request that I have been able to “hack”, but always, always, always have managed to talk clients out of is custom fonts in SharePoint, and while I don’t fully get the point of custom fonts, I do understand that it’s a branding thing, and that it’s important to some clients.
So I really appreciate that Microsoft is rolling out custom fonts in SharePoint, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this will be used in the future.
But personally I’m even more excited about the brand center, and what’s to come in the future, for SharePoint, Viva connections, and the rest of the M365 suite in the coming years!
TL;DR
Microsoft seems to have slowed down a bit, but we’re also looking at the M365 conference and Microsoft Build coming up, so I’m sure we’ll see a lot of new features in the coming months, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for M365!