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Over the years, we’ve heard feedback from customers and IT Admins about the difficulty in managing Office activation for subscription-based Office clients, such as Office 365 ProPlus. We’re excited to announce upcoming changes to Office that will help simplify activation management and streamline the Office activation experience for users.

In August, we’ll start slowly rolling out these changes to commercial customers on Monthly Channel. The roll-out will continue to Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted) in September, and Semi-Annual Channel in January 2020.

For your users, here’s what stays the same:

• Sign in to activate Office: Users will continue to sign in to activate Office on their devices. When single sign-on is enabled, Office detects the user’s credentials and activates Office automatically.
• Sign-in limits: Users can sign in to activate Office on five desktops, five tablets, and five mobile devices.

Here are the changes that your users may notice:

• No more prompts to deactivate: Users can install Office on a new device without being prompted to deactivate Office on another device.
• Automatic sign out: When a user reaches the sign-in limit, instead of being prompted to deactivate, the user will be automatically signed out of Office on the device where Office has been least recently used. The next time the user starts Office on that device, the user will be prompted to sign in to activate Office.

Here are the changes that you as an admin may notice when managing devices where Office is installed:

• Improved device reallocation: Previously, users who received reallocated devices could receive an error if the previous user deactivated the device from the portal or if you removed the Office 365 license from the previous user. Going forward, users will not receive the error because the activation and deactivation is user specific.
• Improved activation reporting: Previously, when one user activated Office on a device and a second user later signed on to that device, the second activation was not displayed in the Admin Center’s Activation Reports. Going forward, both activations will be identified and displayed in the Activation Report.

Keep an eye out for these improvements as we start to slowly roll them out for our commercial customers. No additional action is required on your part.

The above information provided from Office365 Blogs!

O365 Groups power collaboration across Office 365 

Collaboration is a key ingredient for the success of any organization. Office 365 groups, of the most used collaboration features in Microsoft 365 today, power the collaboration features across apps, including Outlook, Teams, Yammer, and SharePoint. Employees can create groups quickly and start collaborating with co-workers by sharing group documents, emails, and calendars.

The twin problems of Groups Lifecycle Management 

As the number of Office 365 groups increases, an organization needs to strike a balance between cleaning up unused groups and ensuring any valuable groups do not get deleted unintentionally, causing data loss. Many of you have shared feedback about these challenges in groups lifecycle management.

You say, we listen and act

We heard your feedback, and we’ve made some changes! We are excited to announce the new version of expiration policy which ensures any group being actively used continues to . This feature makes life easier for users, including admins, group owners and members, by automating the expiration and renewal process by tracking groups for user activity across different apps, like Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, tied to the group.

The new expiration policy puts group lifecycle management on autopilot 

The current Expiration policy allows you to set an expiration timeframe for selected or all Office 365 groups . After the defined group lifetime, owners are asked to renew them if they are still needed. With this newly added intelligence, groups which are being actively used will be automagically renewed. This is based on user activity in groups across Office 365 apps like Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and others.

Example:  At Contoso, the administrator has configured the Group lifetime to be 180 days. Megan is the owner of the Contoso Marketing O365 Group, with Enrico and Alex as its members. Her group is set to expire in 45 days. If an owner or a member performs actions like uploading a document in SharePoint, visiting Teams channel or sending an email to the group in Outlook, the group is automatically renewed for another 180 days, and she does not get any expiry notifications.

Manual Controls: Group owners will continue to have the manual “delete�, “renew� option for granular control.

Soft Delete: Like before, groups which aren’t renewed (either automatically based on activity or manually) will be soft deleted. groups in “Soft-deleteâ€� state can still be restored within 30 days, after which the content is deleted permanently.

User actions for group auto-renewal: Following user actions will lead to automatic renewal of groups

• SharePoint – View, Edit, Download, Move, Share, Upload Files
• Outlook – Join group, Read/write group message, Like a message (OWA)
• Teams – Visit a Teams channels

We will continue to update this list to fine tune group auto-renewal experience.

Auditing and reporting: Administrators can get a list of auto-renewed groups from audit logs on the azure portal.

Here are quick steps to get you started.

Getting started

Office 365 groups expiration policy can be configured from the Azure Active Directory portal, as well as programmatically via Azure Active Directory PowerShell. Please note you need an Azure AD Premium license. Below is a quick tutorial on how to get started with the functionality in the new Azure portal experience.

1. Create Expiration Policy: Sign into the Azure portal, select Azure Active Directory, go to the Groups tab and select Expiration under Settings. (More details here) .

2. Set Group Lifecycle: Specify the group lifetime in days and select which groups you want the expiration settings to apply to.

Group owners will receive a renewal notification 30 days before the expiration date, and from that notification they can renew their group with a single click!

If there is no user activity in the group (and the owners don’t manually renew their group) within the required timeframe, their group will expire. Upon expiry it will stay in a “soft deletedâ€� state for 30 days. Owners of deleted groups will receive a notification letting them know their group has been deleted and giving them the opportunity to restore their group within 30 days after its deletion date. The Group will be permanently deleted after 30 days.

3. Auto-renewal based on user activity: No explicit action is required to enable activity-based auto-renewal. If an the expiration policy is set for Office 365 groups, auto-renewal will be enabled by default.

Learn more about how you can restore you group to recover all its content, including SharePoint, Planner, and Outlook – how to restore deleted Office 365 groups.

Note: The new version of Office 365 groups expiration feature is available in private preview today for select Azure AD Premium customers.

Let us know what you think!

We would love to hear your feedback! If you have any suggestions for us, questions, or issues to report, please leave a comment below. We’re always looking for ways to improve.

User Voice: Add security groups to Office 365 groups

Support & feedback: groupsarfeedback@microsoft.com

Best regards,

Salil Kakkar                                                               Yuan Karppanen

Program Manager                                                    Program Manager

Microsoft O365 Groups                                           Azure Active Directory

  @salil_kakkar

The above information provided from Office365 Blogs!

The following is provided from Microsoft Security and Compliance blogs at TechCommunity:

One of the frequent requests we hear from Office 365 customers is the ability for security teams to easily report suspicious email messages or content to Microsoft and get feedback. Today I’m super excited to announce that we’re rolling out this capability to customers world-wide. This builds on a powerful capability Office 365 already supports – the ability for end users to report suspicious emails to their security teams and Microsoft. With the feature set we’re announcing today, security teams that want to defer reporting issues to Microsoft until after they have reviewed the messages themselves can now do so. What’s more – security teams can get immediate feedback on these submissions within the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center, dramatically reducing the time to investigate and response to issues and take corrective actions.

One of Microsoft Threat Protection‘s most important elements is the ability to secure emails and collaboration services with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). Office 365 ATP’s strength of signal offers comprehensive and best-in-class protection against sophisticated, targeted and zero-day phishing and malware attacks. To give you a sense of the scale that we deal with, in the course of 1 year in 2018, Office 365 ATP blocked 5 billion phish emails and analyzed 300k phish campaigns, protecting 4 million unique users from advanced threats. Analyzing such a huge amount of data helps continuously improve the machine learning algorithms, leading to the highest accuracy and effectiveness in the industry.

Phish email statistics from Office 365 from January 2018 to September 2018.

The impact to end users in 2018 from the enhanced anti-phish capabilities in Office 365

As proud as we are about the effectiveness offered by Office 365 ATP, we also know that no solution is 100% effective. For this reason, we also offer powerful feedback loops through which suspicious emails can be reported by end users to Microsoft to feed into the overall intelligence and continually improve the service to better protect customers.

End users can report suspicious messages they see in their inbox to Microsoft using the  Report Message plug-in in Outlook and Outlook Web Access. Organizations’ security teams can also review these user-reported messages in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center to better understand the attacks users are seeing and update their security policies.

Real-time report showing all user-submitted emails

From the SecOps perspective, these submissions form an important source of intelligence and can trigger investigation and remediation workflows to significantly reduce the time to detect and respond to an attack and therefore limit the scope of impact of an attack within the organization.

The Report Message plug-in is therefore an invaluable tool for users to flag suspicious content to not only their security teams, but directly to Microsoft as well. But some organizations don’t want their users to submit emails directly to Microsoft, as they may contain sensitive information. They want these submissions to first be reviewed by their security teams before being submitted to Microsoft.

Today we’re excited to announce that the email submission experience will now be available to security teams and admins from the same place where they review user-reported messages within the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center.

With this new capability, admins can easily submit emails and content, provide more details, and receive immediate feedback. The feedback provided by Microsoft will also offers valuable insights into configurations that may have caused a false positive or a false negative, reducing the time to investigate issues and improving the overall effectiveness.

With this new submission process, admins can: 

• Submit suspicious emails, files, and URLs to Microsoft for analysis
• Receive immediate feedback on their submissions
• Find and remove rules allowing malicious content into the tenant 
• Find and remove rules blocking good content into the tenant 

Here’s a quick run through of the experience:

Step 1 – Log in to the Security and Compliance Center or the M365 Admin Center as Global Admin, Security Admin, or Security Reader. Click on the ‘Submissions’ node under ‘Threat Management’. You will see all the end user reported messages here. Under the ‘User Reported’ tab. To create a new admin submission from the portal, click the ‘New Admin Submission’ on the top left.

Step 2 – Enter all the details related to the submission such as submission type, recipients, reason for submission and submit.

Step 3 – Review the status of your submission. You can see the progress of the submission after it is submitted. You can also drill down into specific submissions and see what was submitted, what it was submitted as, and reason for submission, as well as what verdict was issued.

Step 4 – Take actions to fix the suggested configuration.

This can be a great tool to manage false positives and help fix configurations issues that may result in EOP/Office 365 ATP not performing optimally. In the future we’ll not only present the config-related issues but also automatically fix them.

To whom is it available?

All Office 365 customers will be able to use this feature. However, customers using Office 365 ATP will benefit most from it. Customers using third-party reporting tools can also use this capability.

As you look to implement this solution, it’s important to know it provides valuable data for more than Office 365 ATP. Microsoft Threat Protection services in general can leverage it to fine tune the machine learning algorithms and better protect, detect, and respond to threats across different threat vectors. Get started with an MTP trial if you want to experience the comprehensive and integrated protection Microsoft Threat Protection provides. Learn more about Microsoft Threat Protection by following our monthly blog series.

The above was provided from Microsoft Security and Compliance blogs at TechCommunity