Microsoft Viva: Automatic Topic Relationships available in GCC

The ability for AI to suggest relationships between topics will be available for customers in our Government Clouds. These suggested related topics appear on the topic card, page and answers.  This is already available for standard worldwide customers.

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Microsoft Viva: Meeting prep inline suggestions coming to Outlook with Viva Insights

Users with a Viva Insights subscription will receive inline suggestions in Outlook to book meeting preparation time. Meeting invite recipients will receive the inline suggestions if the meeting is between 30 and 60 minutes long, it has fewer than 12 attendees, it is not recurring, and the user has time on their calendar for prep time.

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Microsoft Teams: Bots and Message Extensions in DOD

DOD customers are able to build and deploy Bots and Message Extensions in their Microsoft Teams environment. This release supports custom, line-of-business bots.

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Announcing Ability to Digitally Sign VBA Projects in Microsoft Access Databases

When creating a Microsoft Access database, authors will be able to use a code signing certificate to digitally sign the database. The signature will cover VBA code and other elements of the database such as Access macros and action queries.  This will enable databases to execute VBA code and other active elements when the Trust Center Macro Settings are set to only enable digitally signed VBA macros to run.

When this will happen:

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New Service Plans for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva SKUs

As previously announced, we will be releasing our new experiences for Viva Engage and Answers in Microsoft Viva in early 2023.

When this will happen:

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Microsoft Project: Advance Dependencies in Project for the Web

Set non-default dependencies between tasks, such as Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish and Start-to-Finish dependencies.

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OneNote: iOS Home Tab

Quickly view all of your notes in a new grid style format.

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Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Evaluations in audit mode

We are adding several new capabilities to our audit mode, which is used to evaluate Defender for Office 365 through a trial or a subscription that includes Defender for Office 365 Plan 2. 1) Security Administrators can now turn on/off specific evaluation policies. 2) You can now evaluate domain and user impersonation protection in audit mode where no action on messages will be taken. 3) If your organization’s MX is pointed to a 3rd party email filtering provider and you want to evaluate spoof filtering in Defender for Office 365, you will be able to do so in audit mode where no action, such as send to junk/quarantine, on messages will be taken.

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Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Information Protection and Data Loss Prevention – User scoping RBAC

Delegate management and remediation authority for different people in different regions or organization units with role-based access control (RBAC). The RBAC controls will extend to
the Microsoft 365 Defender portal for Information Protection and DLP related events.

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Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Information Protection – Maintain label and protection when creating PDF files from VBA in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (U.S. Government clouds)

This feature is for VBA developers who use Office fixed format export functions to create PDFs from documents with sensitivity labels and encryption. By default, all PDFs created using Office’s fixed format export functions will automatically inherit the source document’s label or encryption. Some VBA add-ins may need to be updated to avoid issues when post-processing an encrypted PDF.

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I've been working with Microsoft Technologies over the last ten years, mainly focused on creating collaboration and productivity solutions that drive the adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace.