Microsoft: Email Outage, SharePoint Changes & More
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:
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IoT operating systems
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Cloud storage platforms
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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 10th 2018 by C3 IoT via blog post and Tweet:
After a massive power outage on Friday, April 6th 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.
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.