O365 Weekly Digest - 02/11/2019

Every week I'll be posting a quick summary of O365 updates included in the admin weekly digest email that you can sign up for via the admin Message Center: https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/MessageCenter -these emails include items posted to the message center over the last week and come out every Monday.

The headline feature this week are the changes to Modern news pages in O365 and the concept of "Organizational News" (Roadmap ID: 30547) rolling out in Q2.

• Deem a specific site as the main news site (Roadmap ID:30694)
• Audience Targeting for News (Roadmap ID:30695)
• Support for Mobile News (Roadmap ID:33469)
• Ordering of news articles (Roadmap ID:44212)

And if your following the road map, which you should be, you will be seeing some new update rolling out over the next 2 months. 

Next there are a few reminder alerts that I've talked about previously, the enhancements to open Word and PowerPoint files faster when they are saved to OneDrive and SharePoint, and also the tenant opt-out for modern lists is retiring in April. Individual sites/lists will still be able to revert back to the classic UI.

Finally, a few Yammer updates starting with planned maintenance starting this weekend on Saturday February 16th. Yammer is also updating the way you can post an update/poll/praise to remove the all Company group by default when posting on the home feed. 

Email Text

Feb 06 New Feature: Microsoft 365 Public Roadmap Updates New feature: Last Modified Date, Enhances RSS and Feedback features coming to the Microsoft 365 Public Roadmap We'll be gradually rolling this out to all customers in early March 2019, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of April 2019. Feb 06 SharePoint tenant opt-out for modern lists is retiring in 2019 Major Update: General Availability Act By: Mar 29 We're making some changes to how environments can opt out of modern lists in SharePoint. Starting April 1, 2019, we're going to begin retiring the ability to opt out of modern lists at the tenant level. Feb 05 Updated feature: Post an Update/Poll/Praise on Yammer home Feed We’ve removed the default group ("All Company") that is selected when a user types into the update box/poll/praise box on Yammer home feed. Feb 05 Planned Maintenance: Yammer database maintenance Planned Maintenance: Yammer database maintenance. This maintenance does not apply to Office 365 subscriptions in GCC.Starting Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 18:00:00 PM UTC.Ending Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 19:00:00 PM UTC. Feb 04 New feature: Changes to PowerPoint and Word to open files faster We’re excited to release a new change to make documents saved to OneDrive and SharePoint open faster. We’ll be rolling this change out soon. Rather than always checking for updates for cloud files prior to opening, Word and PowerPoint will open any existing version on the user’s device and then sync updates immediately afterwards. This is already the behavior today for files saved to local OneDrive and SharePoint sync folders. This change introduces this behavior for files that are stored on... Feb 04 We're releasing multiple updates for SharePoint news We’re updating SharePoint news to enable organizational news site designation, organizational news special visual styling, audience targeting, and the ability to organize news posts so that they display in the order you choose. We'll begin rolling these features out soon. This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap IDs: 30547, 30694, 30695, 33469 and 44212.