Microsoft: Email Outage, SharePoint Changes & More

By Gabriella Pirrone

April 13, 2018

AI, Artificial Intelligence, C3, Internet Of Things, IoT, Microsoft, Office 365, SharePoint, Yammer

With Microsoft being heavily involved in the news this week, I decided to recap their highs and quite possibly their lows that hit headline news across the world.

Let’s start with this - Early last week, Microsoft announced that they are planning on narrowing options for Office 365 tenancies by effectively ending the “native” Sharepoint Online public newsfeed - This change is set to take effect in June 2018.

It’s said that this change will affect the “public newsfeed” used by various organizations, which is also known as the “company feed” by many.

As of June, the “public newsfeed” will become “read only” for organizations that are currently using it, which basically means that it can be read but not modified or updated. Having said that, Microsoft wants organizations to use Team News, Communication Sites or Yammer feeds as their main means for company posts and communication.

Here’s what they mean in a statement from Microsoft: “Team News should be used for broadcasting key events and accomplishments with members of a team. A Communication Site is for sharing news, reports, statuses and other information. Yammer is a chat-based service for improving engagement with everyone in your organization." 

Bill Baer, Senior Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint commented on the upcoming change in a Friday announcement stating: “In June 2018, we're making changes to the native social capabilities in SharePoint Online.
 
Office 365 includes two options for enterprise social features: Yammer and the SharePoint Newsfeed. 
The native SharePoint social features in SharePoint Online were designed to let people work together in ways that are most effective for them through providing great collaboration tools that anyone can use to share ideas, find people and expertise, and location business information. 
 
Over the course of the past 18 months we've introduced new capabilities designed to take advantage of the latest innovations across intelligence, mobile and more to deliver solutions that allow people to communicate more effectively from Office 365 Groups to Team News, Communication Sites, and Yammer.  
 
With these new innovations deployed globally we'll be making changes to the native social features in SharePoint Online.  In June 2018 we'll make the company feed read-only in SharePoint Online and remove the option to implement the Newsfeed feature in navigation and through Tenant Administration.
 
The company feed is an organization’s public newsfeed. All posts appear to the company, including those created by people that users might not be following.” says Baer.

Microsoft Prioritizes IoT in Budget Reshuffle

In other news, Microsoft announced that they will be investing $5 billion USD into research and building out their IoT services and products arm over a four-year period. What this means is they will develop products and services for three of the four years in these three areas:

• IoT operating systems

• Cloud storage platforms

• AI-based analytics tools

These efforts are likely a supporting strategy that’s part of the new restructuring that was also unveiled by Microsoft early this week.

The new technology developments and go-to-market initiatives that will accelerate enterprise AI and IoT application development is said to be a strategic partnership between C3 IoT and Microsoft which was released on April 10^th 2018 by C3 IoT via blog post and Tweet:

We're excited to announce our strategic partnership with @Azure. This partnership will enable customers to rapidly deploy AI-based applications such as predictive maintenance, dynamic inventory optimization, precision healthcare, and CRM. https://t.co/AcUBPXRNgQ

— C3 IoT (@C3IoT) April 10, 2018

Here is a look at their announcement:

“As part of this partnership, both companies will create a “better together” solution, comprising the C3 IoT Platform™, a low-code, high-productivity PaaS for scaling AI and IoT across enterprises, fully integrated to operate on Microsoft Azure. C3 IoT will leverage Microsoft Azure as a preferred cloud platform and tap into the power of its intelligent capabilities. The companies will conduct co-marketing and co-selling strategies that rapidly scale distribution globally, as well as intensive training for dedicated teams to speed customers’ time to value.

Close collaboration between Microsoft and C3 IoT will help enable customers to more rapidly develop and deploy AI-based applications for transformative use cases, such as AI predictive maintenance, dynamic inventory optimization, precision healthcare, and CRM.”

Erik Betz, Vice President, Architecture, Platforms, and Data, Shell commented on the news and said: “The partnership between Microsoft and C3 IoT is significant in that it allows us to optimize our existing investments in data infrastructure while accelerating time to value of AI-based applications that enable Shell to better serve our customers with even more agility and efficiency,”

Thomas M. Siebel, CEO at C3 IoT also commented to say:  “With this partnership, two market leaders are joining forces to drive digital transformation at the world’s leading organizations.

Combining the market reach of Microsoft, the amazing power of Microsoft Azure, and the capability of the C3 IoT AI platform, we will dramatically accelerate the adoption of AI, IoT, and elastic cloud computing globally.”

H.C. Shin, 3M Vice Chair and Executive Vice President also chimed in:“C3 IoT has an exciting vision, proven technology, and demonstrated customer success across industries, making them a great partner for implementing 3M’s digital transformation initiatives,”

With tangible business results from the initial predictive healthcare and supply chain analytics applications, we plan on scaling the C3 IoT and Microsoft Azure solution across our enterprise. In this way, 3M is combining data science into material science, transforming how we design and deliver products and better serve our customers.”

Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft commented to say “AI is one of the most transformative technology paradigms of our time in its ability to empower companies, societies, and economies to achieve more,” and went on to say “C3 IoT’s proven technology and strong customer relationships make them an ideal partner in helping drive forward AI-based solutions built on the intelligent cloud.”

According to their blog post, C3 IoT Platform is now available on Microsoft Azure and is also fully integrated with a rich set of Azure services. This includes Azure IoT Hub, Azure Machine Learning, big data and advanced analytics solutions.
 

After Massive Global Outage, Microsoft Email And Office 365 is Back

After a massive power outage on Friday, April 6^th 2018, that left millions of users without email throughout Europe, the Asia-Pacific as well as multiple states in the US, Microsoft Office 365 is now back up and running.

We're analyzing diagnostic data to isolate the root cause of the Office 365 portal access issue. Admins check MO133518 for more details.

— Office 365 Status (@Office365Status) April 6, 2018

It began when an account holder apparently tried to access their email and were then informed of the outage when they were greeted with the message: “Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.”

When you have hundreds of email’s and deadlines to get to in a day, this is definitely a message that you do not want to encounter.

The UK was reportedly hit the hardest according to Down Dector: “Uk based -- no emails received or able to send for 14 hrs now” and. They also posted a map showing casing the outage across Europe.

Once service was restored, Microsoft reported the restoration via Twitter, "We've completed all recovery actions related to MO133518 and this issue is fully resolved as of Friday, April 6, 2018, at 11:30 AM UTC. Thanks to everyone who confirmed service restoration."

According to several users, it may not be coincidental that this power outage came a day after Microsoft announced it was rolling out changes to Office 365 and stated: "You can use this feature to recover from an accidental mass delete, file corruption, ransomware, or another catastrophic event," said Microsoft.

Although the outage was a terrible nuisance to millions of users, Microsoft was quick to resolve the issue. 

Ending Notes

With Microsoft being in the spotlight quite a few times this past week, it’s interesting to see how committed they are to helping their customers for not only a multi-disciplinary effort to span their cloud development but also in machine learning, AI, security and privacy and so forth. I’m curious to see what more they will have to share throughout the year. Don’t worry, we have you covered here on CMS-Connected and will be sure to fill you in on any other exciting Microsoft news that hits headlines!
 

Gabriella Pirrone

Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.