Happy August everyone! “August is like the Sunday of summer”. This unattributed quote resonates here in Texas with quick final vacations before school (and bad traffic) starts again next week here in Austin.
We are also busy keeping up with changes to the M365 Productivity stack.
SharePoint News Boost
You should soon see an opportunity to “boost” your news posts, and the boost button will be visible in the command bar. When you select Boost, your news articles will have a lightning bolt icon and users will see boosted news at the top of their news feeds. This feature should be in all tenants by mid-August.
SharePoint News Boost
SharePoint Events web part will display event images
SharePoint page authors who use the Events web part can enable an option to show event images within the web part. When enabled, each Event shown in the web part will display the image used in the title area of the Event page.
Existing Event web parts will not be updated. However, new web parts added to pages and news will default to show images.
This feature is slated to be in your tenant by the end of August (updated from end of June)
SharePoint updates to options for disabling subsite creation #HubNotSub
Expect to see this rolling out mid-September.
This new update will improve the options for subsite creation settings in the SharePoint admin center. Currently, SharePoint admins can control the ability for site owners to create new subsites. This update makes the setting options for new subsite creation easier to understand and prevents users from being able to create subsites using alternate paths when the subsite setting is disabled.
Admins in the SharePoint admin center can choose to either enable or disable subsite creation across sites or enable for classic sites only. Now, when disabling subsite creation, not only will the subsite option be hidden from the command bar including classic but also users will not be able to create new subsites directly through an URL or API.
- The option: Hide the Subsite command has been renamed to Disable subsite creation for all sites and will also hide the subsite creation command (including classic) and disable users from being able to create new subsites through a URL or API.
- The option: Show the Subsite command only for classic sites, has been renamed to Enable subsite creation for classic sites only.
- The option: Show the Subsite command for all sites, has been renamed to Enable subsite creation for all sites.
What you need to do to prepare
Review the subsite creation options for your organization. You might want to notify users, update your user training, and prepare your help desk if users were relying on creating subsites using the URL or API previously.
Note: Instead of using subsites, we recommend that you use hub sites. SharePoint hub sites allow you to group similar topics and content together using modern architecture design. Plan to create hub sites and share hub site planning guidance with site owners instead of using subsites.
MIcrosoft Viva Connections Apps in Teams
On August 12th you should see Viva Connections visible in the Teams admin center and app store. This means you can manage your Governance for Viva Connections by applying appropriate app policies to the app, but it’s not quite ready for you to install via GUI.
If you have already installed Viva Connections via powershell there will be no impact to your experience.
(Updated) Microsoft Teams: meeting recordings saved to OneDrive and SharePoint
Microsoft is changing the storage for new Teams meeting recordings to be stored on and served from OneDrive and SharePoint instead of Microsoft Stream.
As of August 16th no new meeting recordings can be saved to Stream. All meetings records will be saved to OneDrive and SharePoint even if your meeting policies are still set to Stream.
(Updated) Teams Meeting Recordings Auto-Expiration in OneDrive and SharePoint
Even though the timing for this isn’t until late September through mid-November, it’s important to begin the conversation about how long you should keep recorded meetings in your organization.
As part of the evolution of the new Stream (built on SharePoint), we are introducing the meeting recording auto-expiration feature, which will automatically delete Teams recording files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint after a preset period of time.
Note: The cmd to preemptively change the MeetingExpirationDays setting in Teams is not available yet, we apologize for the inconvenience. It will be available for all tenants to set by September 1st before the expiration feature is enabled.
Key points
- Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 84580.
- Timing: late September through mid-November
- Roll-out: tenant level
- Control type: user control and admin control
- FAQs: https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/cloud-recording#auto-expiration
- Action: review, assess and decide what you want the default expiration period to be for your organization
How this will affect your organization:
New recordings will automatically expire 60 days after they are recorded if no action is taken. The 60-day default was chosen as, on average across all tenants, most meeting recordings are never watched again after 60 days. However this setting can be modified if a different expiration timeline is desired.
To change the default expiration days at the tenant level, there will be two methods available.
- You can use PowerShell to modify “MeetingRecordingExpirationDays.” This can be done after September 1st, once the setting is present in PowerShell today even though the feature is not yet enabled. An example command is: “Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -MeetingRecordingExpirationDays 50”
- As this feature is rolled out, a new setting will be available in the Teams admin center.
Users (except for users with A1 licenses) can also modify the expiration date for any recordings on which they have edit/delete permissions, using the files details pane in OneDrive or SharePoint. A1 users will receive a 30-day expiration default that can be reduced but not increased. To retain recordings for longer than 30 days A1 users will need to download the file to a non-synced folder.
At either the tenant or user level (excluding A1 users as noted above), the expiration timeline can range from one day to several years, or even set to never auto-expire.
Additional clarifications:
- The expiration setting is not a retention setting. For example, setting a 30-day expiration on a file will trigger an auto-deletion 30 days after the file was created, but it will not prevent a different system or user from deleting that file ahead of that schedule.
- When a recording is deleted due to the expiration setting, the end user will be notified via email. The SharePoint tenant or site admin, or the end user with edit/delete permissions will be able to retrieve the file from the recycle bin for up to 90 days.
- Any retention/deletion/legal hold policies you have designated in the Compliance center will override this feature. In other words, if there is a conflict between your designated Compliance policy setting and the expiration setting, the compliance policy timeline always wins.
- The admin does not have the ability to override end-user modification capabilities.
- This will not impact any existing meeting recordings created before the feature is deployed. Also, any changes to the default date in the admin console will only apply to newly created meeting recordings after the change is made.
- The expiration days setting in Teams is controlled only via MeetingRecordingExpirationDays. CallRecordingExpirationDays is currently being ignored.
- The min number of days that can be set on MeetingRecordingExpirationDays is 1 and the maximum is 99,999 (e.g. 273 years).
- This feature does not impact meeting recordings stored in Microsoft Stream (classic Stream) but will affect recordings stored in the new Stream (built on OneDrive and SharePoint).
- This feature is only available for Teams meeting recordings created by the Teams service in OneDrive and SharePoint. It is not available for other file types in OneDrive and SharePoint.
What you need to do to prepare:
If you want the default expiration to be different than 60 days, please modify it via PowerShell or (once available) in the admin center.
If you are going to specify a tenant level expiration standard, inform your user base about the change before we deploy it so that they are aware they will need to take action to retain their new recording files past the specified time period once the feature is enabled.
Learn more about the feature in these FAQs.
(Updated) Microsoft Search: Find a meeting recording based on what was said
Updated rollout timeline: Standard release rollouts should be complete by late September.
If you record a meeting and have transcription enabled, you will be able to search for the content of what was said in the meeting, not just the title of the title of the meeting. Only the attendees of the Teams meetings will have the permission to view the recordings in the search results and playback the meetings.
If you don’t want these meetings to be discoverable in Microsoft Search or eDiscovery via the transcripts, you will have to disable Teams transcription. Read more
Bonus! If you got to the end…
Here is a great place to go to get some fresh backgrounds (like the one featured at the top of this page) for your Teams meetings!
Custom backgrounds gallery for Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Adoption