Hello!  This month we have new major announcements from Microsoft, and several important updates in Plan for Change status.

First, did you hear about Microsoft Viva?

Microsoft Viva

This is exciting news! Teams is not just the place for collaboration anymore, it’s also the spot for communication, learning, knowledge, and culture.  Viva brings the whole employee experience into Teams.  Learn more about Viva here.  It’s all about empowering and engaging employees.

Topics:  Knowledge & Expertise

Viva Topics uses AI to:

• Empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.

• Help people learn, develop new skills, and innovate faster while they work.

• Automatically connect, organize, and protect content across teams and systems

Insights: Productivity & Wellbeing – Available Soon  

Roll-Out:

• Insights app with “Stay Connected” and “Protect Time” tab will be available as a Teams Personal app in the Teams app store but will not be directly installed for your users.
• Starting March 08, 2021, unless disabled by admin, Insights Teams app will be pre-installed for users and available directly in the Teams left navigation app bar under “…”(More apps)

Learning: Skilling** and Growth

• 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development

Connections:  Culture and Communications

• Organizations with highly engaged employees have 21% greater profitability

We’ll be watching for more updates on VIVA!

**This is not a typo!  Microsoft mentioned skilling in the announcement video and this is now on the website.  I looked it up and the definition is “To make a difference:  matter, avail”.

Here are your important Plan for Change items this month:

Microsoft Teams: Custom layouts for meetings (FEB 2021)

Presenters will be able to customize how content shows up for meeting participants, including overlaying their video on content or moving their content box to a corner of the video view – allowing for a more dynamic content viewing experience where presenters can easily direct their audiences’ attention through hand gestures and facial cues, without making the viewer choose between the speaker and the content.

Microsoft Teams: Get a “Meet Now” Meeting link (FEB 2021)

Users can now copy a “Meet Now” meeting link without starting the meeting from the Calendar tab which can be used later.

Microsoft Teams: Meeting Recap (FEB 2021)

Meeting recap will help teams stay on track and keep their work moving forward after the meeting is over. Coming this year, a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files and more will be shared with participants in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab for each meeting.

Microsoft Teams: Recording 3×3 gallery view for Microsoft Teams Rooms (FEB 2021)

View up to nine meeting participants during a Teams meeting recording in the 3×3 gallery view.

Microsoft Teams: Meeting attendee registration (MAR 2021)

Add a custom attendee registration page to any meeting to better manage attendance before and after any engagement. Following registration, attendees receive an email confirmation with calendar invite.

OneDrive: 250 GB file size support in Microsoft 365 (FEB 2021)

Users will be able to upload large file sizes up to 250 GB in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams.

Microsoft Lists: rules – built on SharePoint (FEB 2021)

Create simple if/then rules based on changes to list information to set reminders and send notifications.

SharePoint admin: New SharePoint admin center home page (MAR 2021)

When you first land in the SharePoint admin center, we want it to be both familiar and useful at a glance. The idea is to provide a familiar experience, taking a similar design approach as the Microsoft admin center. You’ll see more and more cards and graphs appear over time – so you can see insights on files, usage security, recommendations, training and so on. Better see what’s happening, and then take the appropriate action.

SharePoint: new experience to add content types to lists and libraries (FEB 2021)

Custom content types that are available to your SharePoint sites can easily be added to lists & libraries that allow multiple content types. In those SharePoint lists & libraries that allow multiple content types, a new ‘Content type’ option will be available in the ‘Add column’ menu.

SharePoint: App Bar (MAR 2021)

The SharePoint app bar brings a consistent navigation experience to every site on your intelligent intranet, featuring quick access to important sites across the organization with global navigation, personally relevant sites, and the news feed.  Read More

MICROSOFT SEARCH

Microsoft Search: Semantic search (FEB 2021)

With intelligent, natural language search capabilities in Microsoft Search, you will experience improved search accuracy as the search engine can now understand intent and contextualize the meaning of the terms typed – leading to more relevant search results.