Admins- welcome to the Microsoft 365 admin center

We built Microsoft 365- a complete IT solution including Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security- to enable organizations to create and work together securely. In that same spirit, our goal is to offer a unified toolset to manage and protect those organizations. In March, we announced the Microsoft 365 admin center as your central location for managing and monitoring applications, services, data, devices, and users across your Microsoft 365 deployment.

Today, we are expanding this integrated and intuitive admin experience to users of Office 365. Users of both Office 365 and Microsoft 365 will now have access to the new Microsoft 365 admin center. For Office 365 admins, this means a simpler experience that easily integrates with you other Microsoft services – all without giving up capabilities or control.

What to expect

If you’ve used the Office 365 admin center before, the experience will feel very similar. The navigation is the same, and you’ll have the same granularity of control over your environment. There will be no change to your Office 365 subscription or billing. As you add new apps and services like device management, those will light up in your left navigation pane. Most importantly, you’ll receive all the latest admin center updates and features as they become available.

New URL, same great experience

To access your new admin center experience, point your web browser to admin.microsoft.com. This is your new front door for managing and monitoring all your Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services. Your new admin center still includes links to all your specialty admin tools for services like OneDrive and SharePoint conveniently linked in the left navigation pane. If you’ve previously created bookmarks for the Office 365 admin center or any of the specialty admin centers, those will continue to work.

Over the next few weeks, we will be updating the admin center links across Office 365 to use the new admin.microsoft.com address.

More to come

In the coming months, we’ll continue to evolve the Microsoft 365 admin center to provide a consistent and intuitive experience across all your Microsoft 365 products. As more information becomes available, we’ll post it here on Microsoft Tech Communities. In the meantime, join the conversation on the Microsoft 365 Tech Communities forums and Twitter.

Empower your sales team with the Microsoft 365 Sales Innovation Hub

Microsoft 365 partnered with the American Association of Inside Sales to bring sales end-users content focused on key priorities for sales professionals.

Getting Organized with Outlook

Spend less time drowning in administrative tasks and focus on what’s important: building relationships with your customers, garnering insights, and delivering superior client services. Learn how you can spend more time on selling using Outlook effectively.

Enable Seamless Collaboration with SharePoint

The partnership between marketing and sales is essential. Learn how you can ensure you always have the most up to date content from marketing using SharePoint.

Draw Insights Across Your Organization with Yammer

Learn how to leverage the power of your co-workers: they have worked in similar industries, have similar customers and comparable challenges. Reach across your organization, to find best practices and experts using Yammer.

Strengthen Customer Relationships with Microsoft Teams

Don’t just become an email address for your customer. Create a connection using video calls in Microsoft Teams.

Optimize Sales Performance with PowerBI

Learn how to leverage data visualization to uncover industry and customer insights. You will make smarter business decisions using powerful analytical capabilities within PowerBI.

Discover content to empower effortless sales achievements in the Sales Innovation Hub: https://www.aa-isp.org/sales-innovation-hub

New: Office 365 and Microsoft 365 training for your business

We released new Office 365 training last year. Since then we’ve heard positive feedback and requests for more!  

So now we’ve made it easy to find the latest training direct from the Office 365 or Microsoft 365 admin center – choose the training option that interests you.

New training way-finder

Choose “Train yourself” to get training for business owners, admins, or IT Pros.  You’ll also find new training for Teams and Yammer plus Microsoft 365.

Visit the Admin center or: aka.ms/OfficeAdminTraining.

Office 365 training for small businesses

For small business owners or admins, learn how to set up Office 365 for your business, use communications tools for email and meetings, store and share files in the cloud, and manage your employees and the service in the Admin center.

Visit: aka.ms/365smallbiz

Short videos help you get started with Office 365.

 For routine admin tasks like reassigning licenses, you’ll find a series of short videos under Management tasks.

Visit: aka.ms/OfficeAdminTraining and choose Management tasks.

 Training options

Office 365 training for IT pros

For enterprise admins or IT pros, ramp up on critical skills for Office 365 deployment, administration, and internal help desk support. Choose the LinkedIn Learning option in the admin center to view over 7 hours of premium video training for free in partnership with LinkedIn Learning. There you will find the option to get a LinkedIn Learning trial or paid subscription if you like.

Choose Advanced training in the Admin center, or visit: aka.ms/365enterprise

 Video training brought to you by LinkedIn Learning

Office 365 training for end users

For everyone else, including employees and end users, get the most out of Office 365 with training, Quick Start guides, templates, infographics, cheat sheets, and more. Choose Train your people in the Admin center or visit: aka.ms/learn365

 Office 365 Training Center

Let us know what you or your customers think. What did we miss? What could be better?

Thank you! Susan Potter & Tom Werner, Office 365 Content

Setting preferences for Office 365 ProPlus using the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run

Today we are announcing a preview update to the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run, which provides desktop admins with a simple user interface to customize their deployment of Office.

With this update, you can now customize Office application settings as part of your configuration file, which means you can build a single configuration file that installs Office and configures preferences for Office applications.  You can search for Office application settings based on Office application, category, and title to quickly find the settings you’re interested in:

For this preview release, we’ve provided a limited set of Office application settings to choose from.  We plan to include the full set of application settings later this summer.

In addition to application settings, we have been listening to your feedback and since we introduced the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run we have made a few changes to the preview experience; adding Organization Name as a setting that is included as part of the deployment configuration, an update to the language selection experience, and an update to the Automatically accept the EULA option.

In our next update we plan to add many additional enhancements including; an update to the product selection experience to allow you to have more control over the products you can select from and the apps that you exclude, an update to the language selection experience including support for MatchOS, AllowCdnFallback, Proofing Tools and more.

Please try out the new application settings feature as well as the new enhancements and let us know what you think using the Send-a-Smile feature (button in the upper right-hand corner or this web page) — your feedback helps us plan future updates.

As always, make sure you download the latest version of the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) to enable this new feature during deployment.

Chris Hopkins

Senior Program Manager – Office Engineering

Use custom domains in Office 365 to build your brand and empower your work force

Organizations of all sizes win customers and create trust with a consistent and recognizable brand. Web and email addresses that match your organization’s name build brand equity and establish credibility. If your business is called Fourth Coffee, a web address of fourthcoffee.com makes you easy to find online, and email addresses that end in @fourthcoffee.com reassure your customers that they are dealing directly with you.

Microsoft makes it easy to integrate your custom domain with comprehensive collaboration tools like email from Office 365. Let’s look at your options.

Purchase a custom domain with your Office 365 subscription

For organizations creating their online presence for the first time, Microsoft makes it easy to purchase a custom domain and integrate it with Office 365. This new domain will instantly be linked with your Office 365 account, meaning that all your email addresses will include your new custom domain where you can also host your website. You can purchase this new custom domain from Microsoft at the same time as your subscription to Office 365 or later.

We’ve posted step by step instructions on how to purchase a custom domain directly from Microsoft in our support documentation.

Automatically join your own GoDaddy or 1&1 domain with Office 365 (UPDATED)

Many organizations will purchase a domain as soon as they have a name. As they grow and implement more advanced IT solutions, it can be challenging to integrate that custom domain. Microsoft makes it easy to join some domains to Office 365 services through an open standard called Domain Connect. Domain Connect automates many of the manual processes typically required for configuring web hosting and email service. Microsoft has enabled this standard in Office 365 to make it easy to integrate your Domain Connect enabled domains with your Office 365 subscription.

We’re excited to announce today that 1&1, a leading domain provider, has integrated the Domain Connect standard. This new partnership makes it easy to integrate your custom domain from 1&1 with your Office 365 subscription. 1&1 and GoDaddy are the first domain providers to offer compliance with the Domain Connect standard, with more on the way.

If you’re currently using another provider for your organization’s email service, it’s easy to migrate those email addresses and messages to your Office 365 subscription.

Check out the support documentation for more on how you can automatically join your existing domain to your Office 365 subscription and migrate your messages.

Manually join your domain with Office 365

You can still join your custom domain with your Office 365 services if you did not purchase it from Microsoft or a Domain Connect compliant provider. There are a few more steps to take, but it’s straight forward. The outcomes and benefits are the same.

The support documentation contains a step by step procedure for manually joining your domain to your Office 365 services.

Easier to manage; easier to focus on your goals

Automatically connecting your custom domain with your Office 365 services is another example of how we want to simplify your IT management experience so that you can focus on your actual work. Join the Office 365 Tech Community to stay up to date on the latest news and releases.

Office 365 and the Dept of Homeland Security Binding Operational Directive 18-01

The best version of OneNote on Windows

We’re incredibly lucky to have millions of passionate OneNote users around the globe, and we love learning how we can help you remember, think, and organize better. In spending time with you, we heard a recurring theme: you want a single version of OneNote on Windows that combines all the benefits of the modern Windows 10 app with the depth and breadth of capabilities in the older OneNote 2016. We took that feedback to heart, and over the last few years we’ve been focused on making OneNote for Windows 10 the best version of OneNote on Windows.

Beginning with the launch of Office 2019 later this year, OneNote for Windows 10 will replace OneNote 2016 as the default OneNote experience for both Office 365 and Office 2019. Why OneNote for Windows 10? The app has improved performance and reliability, and it’s powered by a brand new sync engine (which we’re also bringing to web, Mac, iOS, and Android). You don’t need to worry about being on the latest version since it’s always up-to-date via the Microsoft Store, and it lets us deliver updates faster than ever before. In fact, over the last year and a half we’ve added more than 100 of your favorite OneNote 2016 features based on your feedback (thank you!), with more improvements on the way including tags and better integration with Office documents.

We’d love for you to start using OneNote for Windows 10 today, however we know some of you might not be ready yet. Maybe you rely on a feature we don’t yet support on Windows 10 (please let us know using the Feedback Hub), or you don’t want to store your notebooks in the cloud. If so, you’re more than welcome to continue using OneNote 2016.

What’s happening to OneNote 2016?

While we’re no longer adding new features to OneNote 2016, it’ll still be there if you need it. OneNote 2016 is optionally available for anyone with Office 365 or Office 2019, but it will no longer be installed by default. If you currently use OneNote 2016, you won’t notice any changes when you update to Office 2019. We’ll continue to offer support, bug fixes, and security updates for OneNote 2016 for the duration of the Office 2016 support lifecycle, which runs through October 2020 for mainstream support and October 2025 for extended support. For more details, please refer to this FAQ.

A preview of what’s to come

We’ve been listening to your feedback about what you like—and what you don’t—and working hard to address it in the product. Your opinions, feature requests, and, yes, complaints have been critical in helping us shape the current experience. Today, we’d like to walk you through some of the work we’ve done to bring your favorite features from OneNote 2016 to OneNote for Windows 10, highlight some of the capabilities that are only available in the Windows 10 app, and give you a sneak peek at a few of the improvements coming this year.

Your favorite features, improved

OneNote for Windows 10 was designed to feel natural with any input method, from mouse and keyboard to pen and touch, and it contains numerous improvements under the hood for better performance, reliability, and battery life. It also has a number of new features not available in OneNote 2016, including ink effects* and dramatically improved ink-to-text (check it out—it’ll even preserve your ink color, size, and highlights!), Researcher*, a notification center, deep integration with Windows 10, and much more. 

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For many of you, shifting our focus to the Windows 10 app won’t come as a surprise. Aside from a handful of targeted improvements, we haven’t added any new features to OneNote 2016 in some time. Instead we’ve been focusing on consistency, ensuring that nearly all your favorite features in OneNote 2016 are also available in OneNote for Windows 10. We’re almost there, and in the coming months we’ll be adding even more top-requested features.

Top-requested features coming soon to OneNote for Windows 10

Here’s what you can expect later this summer:

• Insert and search for tags: OneNote 2016’s popular tags feature is coming to OneNote for Windows 10! Soon you’ll be able to insert, create, and search for custom tags, making it easy to mark key information and find it later. Tags you create will now roam with you to across your devices, and OneNote will even show you tags other people have used in a shared notebook so you don’t have to recreate them yourself. The new tags experience was designed based on your feedback, and it will be available later this summer.

• View and edit files: See live previews of Office files in OneNote, work together on attached documents, and save space in your notebooks with cloud files. You’ll get all the benefits of saving a file on OneDrive with the context and convenience of an attachment or preview on a OneNote page.

• Additional Class Notebook features: The full slate of Class Notebook features available in the add-on for OneNote 2016 will be available in OneNote for Windows 10 this summer. Best of all, you no longer need to install a separate add-in—it’s all built-in!

These are just a few of the improvements coming soon to OneNote for Windows 10. The app is updated every month with new functionality, and we have a lot of cool stuff in the works—including page templates. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements.

An improved sync experience

We’ve been hard at work making sync faster and more reliable on OneNote for Windows 10, as well as on Mac, iOS, Android, and web. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a look at the new sync engine in action:

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You can try the first set of improvements today by opening a OneDrive notebook in OneNote for Windows 10, Mac, iOS, or Android. These improvements will be rolled out to OneNote Online in the coming months, as well as notebooks on OneDrive for Business and SharePoint.

Improving the user experience

Last year, we unveiled a new look and feel for OneNote on Windows 10, Mac, iOS, Android, and OneNote Online that aligned the disparate designs into a single, unified interface. In addition to bringing consistency to our apps, the new user experience scales much better for large notebooks and significantly improves accessibility for those who rely on assistive technologies. To learn more about the new design, check out our help article.

This is just a quick look at OneNote for Windows 10, but we’re not done yet. We’ll continue listening to your feedback and incorporating it into our future plans, so leave us a comment below or add your feature request using the Feedback Hub. You can also join the Office Insider program for early access to the latest updates. And before we sign off, we want to say a huge thank you for your support. We really hope you love the new OneNote for Windows!

—OneNote Team

*Requires Office 365 subscription

New Apps and Services in Office 365 US Government

By meeting compliance requirements of the US and State Governments, Office 365 US Government empowers agencies to realize a modern workplace supported by devices and services. Increased collaboration breaks down siloes within and across agencies, and secure mobility allows civil servants to remain productive in the field and away from desks. Cost savings and data center footprint reduction can be re-invested into digitizing citizen services.

Microsoft delivers Office 365 secure productivity and communication services like email, document creation apps and storage, intranet sites, and instant messaging/telephony to the US Government from three environments designed to meet the unique data handling regulations for controlled unclassified information. Architected according to NIST controls, FedRAMP requirements, and the DISA Security Requirements Guidelines, these environments store content in the continental United States, are operated by US citizens, and are authorized to hold Federal, criminal justice, Federal tax, and covered defense information.

We want to answer a few questions about the Office 365 US Government environments and offerings: What services and applications are included, why is the roadmap different from Enterprise offerings, and what services will be released in the future and when?

To answer this question in a meaningful way, we must explain the compliance commitments, audit process, and accreditation requirements. But if you want to skip ahead, the roadmap for Office 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC), Government Community Cloud (GCC) High, and DoD can be found at the end of this post.

The Office 365 GCC environment is designed for Federal, State, and Local government and has been available for about five years. With millions of monthly active users, agencies across the country are benefitting from cloud productivity and security services that meet their compliance requirements.

The Office 365 GCC High environment is designed for Federal agencies, defense industry, aerospace industry, and other organizations holding Controlled Unclassified Information. Introduced more recently, the GCC High offerings are ideal for national security organizations and companies with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) data or Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement (DFARS) requirements.

The Office 365 DoD environment is designed for the US Department of Defense exclusively.

Office 365 US Government environments and associated compliance commitments

Every service introduced into the US Government offerings has undergone a third party review to ensure that we meet our compliance commitments to you. We complete audits regularly to make new capabilities available as frequently as possible. Release cycles differ from Enterprise offerings for new services, but once available, the service will align with the commercial user experience.

The October audit is complete, and Microsoft has received the 3PAO report, so we can confirm what will be released in the coming weeks. We will be sharing an updated roadmap at the Microsoft Government Tech Summit taking place in Washington DC on March 5-6, so stay tuned and don’t hesitate to register to attend! Information will be published online also.

Upcoming Events:

• Microsoft Government Tech Summit (Washington DC on March 5-6)
• SharePoint Fest (Washington DC on March 26-30)

Learn More:

• Ignite 2017: Office 365 for the US Government and defense industry
• Office 365 US Government Service Description
• Microsoft Trust Center
• Microsoft Tech Community
• Case study: County enhances employee interactivity (King County, WA)
• Case study: City improves operational efficiency (City of Chicago)

Engage:

• Microsoft US Government Cloud eligibility validation
• Office 365 GCC Trials (Gov only)
• Microsoft Cloud for Government contact
• Customer Immersion Experience

Technical:

• Microsoft US Government Cloud Identity: On-Premises, Cloud, and Hybrid
• Endpoints:
  • Office 365 GCC Endpoints
  • Office 365 GCC High Endpoints
• Office 365 GCC High DNS Records
• Power BI US Government Documentation
• Multi Factor Authentication (including PIV/CAC cards)

Brian Levenson is the product manager for Microsoft 365 for US Government. Follow him on Twitter (@brian_levenson) and LinkedIn (Brian Levenson) for the latest in government technology and Microsoft 365 news.

Azure AD Expiration Policy for Office 365 Groups is Generally Available

Office 365 groups expiration policies allow administrators to set an expiration timeframe for any Office 365 group. Once that timeframe is set, owners of these groups get notification emails reminding them to renew these groups if they still need them. Groups not renewed will automatically be deleted.  

Starting today, this feature is now Generally Available! 

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We’ve listened to your feedback and made it even more intuitive for users to decide whether they want to renew their group. The newly redesigned notification emails now provide one-click access to the group content, and also allow the group to be deleted if it’s no longer needed.  

Office 365 groups expiration can be configured from the Azure Active Directory portal, as well as programmatically via Azure Active Directory PowerShell. Learn more about how to configure Office 365 groups expiration. For more information head over read the full announcement by Alex Simons over on the EMS Blog.

The Office 365 groups expiration policy feature will require an Azure AD Premium license for every user who is a member of an Office 365 group configured for expiration. Visit Office 365 Support for more licensing details.

Introducing the Microsoft 365 Admin Center

Last year, at Inspire, we unveiled Microsoft 365, bringing together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, to deliver a complete, intelligent and secure solution for the modern workplace. In October Microsoft 365 Business reached general availability, representing an integrated solution designed to simplify IT for small and medium-sized businesses.

We know that our customers, from small businesses to large enterprises, rely on the admin center for a broad set of activities. From an administration perspective, our vision for Microsoft 365 is to help simplify IT by unifying management across users, devices, apps and services. Today marks an important step in that vision as we are rolling out a new admin experience for Microsoft 365 enterprise customers. This will be a single place for admins to get started with Microsoft 365 and discover the breadth of management capabilities and experiences available to them.

Integrated into this admin center is both the new Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center, dedicated to providing security and compliance specialists with integrated management capabilities across Office 365, Windows, and EMS, as well as Microsoft 365 Device Management, dedicated to providing integrated device management capabilities across Intune, Office, and Windows. The Security and Compliance Center will be available shortly, with Device Management to follow afterwards. Please look forward to additional details.

Over the coming months we will continue investing in more integrated, streamlined administration experiences across Microsoft 365 to help organizations become more productive and secure while optimizing their IT resources. We will also continue to improve the admin’s user experience, so admins can complete their tasks faster and easier and get more done with their day.

For Microsoft 365 customers, once this is rolled out to your tenant, you will automatically have the new admin experience. You can login as you usually do, or navigate to admin.microsoft.com to try out the new admin experience.

Shared Office codebase for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android means more features for more users faster

Our most-popular Office 365 apps—Excel, PowerPoint, and Word—are designed for the modern workplace, with cutting-edge features like real-time co-authoring, AutoSave, and more. With our newest version of Office for Mac, version 16.9.0, we’ve extended these capabilities to Apple users; in fact, this release marks the first time in 20 years that Office shares the same codebase across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android for core functionalities.

This achievement means users across platforms will gain access to new Office capabilities faster than ever. We’ll prioritize the release of these capabilities based on top customer requests and feedback, along with integration and validation considerations for each platform. All Office capabilities will be tailored to the platform’s specific UI, giving them a native feel, and take advantage of certain unique features, like the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar.

Read on to learn more about new Mac capabilities available with this release, and in our latest release on iPad. Please note, some of these features require an Office 365 subscription. Such features are marked with an asterisk below.

Boost collaboration and ease-of-use across the core Office apps

With this release, co-authoring in PowerPoint and Word is more powerful than ever. You and your colleagues can create a PowerPoint presentation or edit a Word document on Mac in real-time, seeing each other’s changes as they happen. User flags indicate exactly which slide or sentence your colleagues are editing. For Excel, we’re excited to bring basic co-authoring to Excel for Mac users for the first time. In all the core Office apps, presence thumbnails show you who else is currently working in the file. We’ve extended these capabilities to Office Online, too, so you and your team can work together on files from virtually anywhere. Co-authoring is only available in files stored on OneDrive or SharePoint Online.

AutoSave*—All core Office apps are now equipped with AutoSave for files stored on OneDrive or SharePoint Online. AutoSave is exactly what it sounds like: Your file is automatically saved every few seconds. Plus, if other people are working in the same file, they can see your changes almost instantaneously. And if you need to roll back, simply check your file’s version history for a list of changes and access earlier copies. AutoSave can be switched on and off using a dedicated toggle button in the ribbon.

Get more data insights faster in Excel

New chart types—Excel’s multitude of charts and graphs has made it one of the world’s premier data analysis tools. Excel 2016 for Mac now includes even more chart types, including sunburst, treemap, histogram, waterfall, and more, to help you visualize your data in new, meaningful ways.

New worksheet functions*—We’ve introduced a pair of new worksheet functions, IFS and SWITCH, for Excel users on Mac to simplify data calculations. The IFS formula takes the place of multiple nested IF statements, making formulas with multiple conditions easier to comprehend. The SWITCH formula evaluates one value against a list of values, and returns the result corresponding to the first matching value.

Table slicers—Using slicers, you can filter table and PivotTable data to quickly curate only the information you need. Slicers also indicate the current filtering state, making it easy to understand what exactly is shown in a filtered table.

Faster calculations—We first introduced multithreaded recalculations in Excel 2007, and have since refined it to help calculations in Excel 2016 for Mac run even faster. To speed up formula outputs, Excel tries identifying parts of the calculation that can be recalculated concurrently on different threads. Read the article on multithreaded recalculations in the Microsoft Dev Center for examples and formula restrictions.

Keep your audience engaged with new PowerPoint features

Trim media*—The best PowerPoint presentations are those that use powerful imagery, instead of words, to convey a message. But what if that imagery is video or audio that’s too long to sensibility include in your presentation? The Trim tool in PowerPoint addresses this issue. With it you can cut unwanted content from the beginning and end of video and audio clips. This feature is only available for media you’ve inserted from your computer and not from the web.

QuickStarter*—If you’re building a research-heavy presentation, using QuickStarter is the perfect way to begin. QuickStarter creates an outline for you based on your presentation’s subject. After conducting initial research, the tool builds out several slides—a title slide, a table of content slides, one slide for each sub-topic, and more—that you can choose to keep or delete. The result is a set of slides that gives you a strong foundation for developing a detailed and factually accurate presentation.

Highlighted changes*—Part of the newly introduced co-authoring feature, PowerPoint automatically highlights changes others made to a shared presentation while you were away. This way, you can quickly see what was updated, when, and by who.

Laser pointer—Turn your mouse into a laser pointer to draw attention to specific parts of your PowerPoint while presenting. You can also change the color of the laser pointer to match the style of your presentation or company.

Do more on mobile in Word

Learning Tools*—Learning Tools in Word for iPad and Word Online was designed to help you improve your reading skills and word pronunciation. Perfect for students or non-native speakers, Learning Tools comes with a variety of features: Read Aloud lets you hear your document; Syllables breaks down words into syllables; Text Spacing increases the space between characters; Column Width reduces visual crowding so you can just focus on the words; and, Page Color gives you the option to change the background to a softer color.

Your feedback is important to us—it’s the primarily reason these capabilities were chosen for this release. Please visit our UserVoice sites for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word to submit your ideas for future features. We invite you to follow Microsoft Office on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and helpful tips for getting the most out of your Office apps. You can also follow the social feeds for Excel (Twitter and Facebook) and PowerPoint (Twitter) for more specific updates.

* Feature requires an Office 365 on Mac subscription.

Announcing the General Availability of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs

General Availability of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs for retrieving Office 365 product usage data

The usage reports in the Office 365 admin center enable admins to understand their company’s usage across the Office 365 services. However, many of you have existing reporting solutions such as a company reporting application or a web portal in place. To assure that you can monitor your IT services in one unified location, the usage reporting APIs complement the usage reports and allow organizations and independent software vendors to incorporate Office 365 usage data into their existing reporting solutions. Using these APIs, you can retrieve the data available in all of the usage reports, including organization level summaries per service, entity level (user, sites, accounts) usage information for reporting periods of the last 7/30/90/180 days, and daily activity aggregates.

Get started with the new APIs

The new APIs are available now, and any user with global admin, product admin rights (for Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint), or a reports reader role can retrieve data through these APIs.

You can leverage the Microsoft Graph documentation for the reporting API and submit feature requests by asking or voting on an idea on UserVoice. Please submit questions by posting them on Stack Overflow and tagging microsoftgraph.

With this announcement, we are announcing the deprecation of the following APIs within the Office 365 Reporting Web Service: ConnectionbyClientType, ConnectionbyClientTypeDetail, CsActiveUser, CsAVConferenceTime, CsP2PAVTime, CsConference, CsP2PSession, GroupActivity, MailboxActivity, GroupActivity, MailboxUsage, MailboxUsageDetail, StaleMailbox and StaleMailboxDetail.

We will remove these APIs, as well as any related PowerShell cmdlets, on January 29, 2018.

If you are currently using APIs or any of the related PowerShell cmdlets from the Office 365 Reporting Web Service, please start planning the migration of any subsystems within your organization.

Below is a summary of the APIs and cmdlets that will be deprecated.

Data protection beyond backup and recovery with Office 365

Protecting your data against file corruption , data loss, and malicious intent is a top priority for Microsoft, and an integral part of the Office 365 service. Our approach to data protection goes beyond high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. Resiliency and recoverability are built into the service.

Even if a traditional backup solution provides recovery options to address file corruption, deletion, and malicious attacks, it won’t necessarily help you recover quickly from such incidents. Research shows that it can take months to detect the presence of an attacker an organization’s network. Given this, a backup and restore solution could be a potential area of attack, and could further broaden the scope of attack into your disaster recovery environment. Additionally, all backup data would need to be throuroughly cleansed before it could be leveraged as a viable restore option. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 30% of organizations targeted by major cyberattacks will spend more than two months cleansing backup systems and data, resulting in delayed recoveries.[i]

With this in mind, Office 365 has moved beyond the backup and restore solutions that were first established in on-premises environments. Microsoft invests deeply in providing a holistic in-place solution that both keeps multiple copies of your data across multiple locations, and enables you to develop upfront policies for prevention and detection. These policies can be enforced manually and automatically at multiple levels of granularity, including via intelligent location-based classification, patterns, or sensitive types of content.

In addition to the inherent versioning and recycling capabilities provided by applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive, Office 365 provides comprehensive solutions to help keep your data safe from both human error as well as malicious attacks:

• Data Loss Prevention helps customers to identify, monitor and protect sensitive data through deep content analysis.
• Exchange Online Protection provides robust email protection against spam, known viruses and malware.
• Advanced Threat Protection extends Exchange Online Protection by safeguarding your Office 365 environment (email, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams) from today’s most sophisticated unknown threats leveraging behavioral analysis and machine learning techniques to mitigate malicious content. ATP also provides real time, time-of-click protection against malicious URLs, and rich reporting and tracking capabilities, so you can gain critical insights into who is being targeted in your organization and the category, volume, and frequency of attacks you are facing.
• Threat Intelligence provides interactive tools to analyze prevalence and severity of threats in near real-time, real-time and customizable threat alert notifications, and remediation capabilities for suspicious content.
• Auditing helps monitor and investigate actions taken on your data, intelligently identify risks, contain and respond to threats, and protect valuable intellectual property.
• Advanced Data Governance provides smart policy recommendations and automatic data classifications that allow you to take actions on data- such as retention and deletion -throughout its lifecycle. Built-in and custom alerts help you identify data governance risks like unusual volumes of file deletion.

The multiple built-in security capabilities of Office 365 in combination with the above services and controls help ensure your data is protected in-place and incidents like file corruption, deletion, and malicious intent are minimized at all times.

More information:

• Data Protection on the Microsoft Trust Center
• Data Resiliency in Microsoft Office 365
• Overview of retention policies

[i] From Gartner Foundational Research: Prepare for and Respond to a Business Disruption After an Aggressive Cyberattack, ID: G00275607

Customizing Office 365 ProPlus using the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run

Today we are announcing a preview of the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run, a simple to use web application that enables desktop administrators to customize Office 365 clients.

Until today, Windows desktop administrators would use notepad or an equivalent text editor to compile various XML statements to define the Office edition, feature update frequency, version, language and other number of available settings. This somewhat tedious task, in most cases, would result in installation errors from fouled up manual entries or copy-and-paste actions into the text editor.

With the new Office Customization Tool, desktop admins can leverage the rich user interface that intuitively shows all available options to build the desired Office configurations. The configuration tool groups the commonly used settings in the following categories:

• software & language
• installation & update
• licensing & display

Each of these areas provide admins with options to help meet their security and regulatory needs.

One of our favorite additions, is the configuration builder. Desktop admins can quickly see a list of all configuration settings being chosen on the right-hand side of the screen, giving the desktop admin a quick and easy way to see the result of their selections without jumping through multiple screens.

When all the desired settings have been selected, desktop admins are provided with the option to download the resulting configuration.xml file which is to be used in conjunction with the Office Deployment Tool for the settings to take affect during installation time of the Office 365 client.

Desktop Admin also have an option to upload any previously configured XML files to the configuration tool and modify them with new or existing settings.

For those of you who are familiar with the old Win32 Office Customization Tool which came with your perpetual (MS Installer) bits, you’ll notice the new customization tool has a lack of install-time user preferences. Over the next several months we will be enhancing the tool to enable desktop admins to select many configurable user preferences that are currently being offered with the perpetual counterpart. We encourage you to try out the new Office Customization Tool which is available in preview today, by clicking on the link or typing http://config.office.com in your browser. Send us feedback and let us know what you think by using the send a smile feature, located on the top right of the web application.

Amesh Mansukhani

Senior Program Manager – Office Engineering