Build 2020 had some nice bits of M365 related news. Microsoft deserves commendation for sticking to the schedule and pulling this off (remotely) during the COVID-19 lockdown – Apple has delayed WWDC and Google just gave up on I/O. I’ve summarised (bullet points!) my favourite updates below. I will update it I find I’ve missed something good.
Azure AD
- Publisher Verification lets developers verified through the Microsoft Partner Center stick a verified badge on their AAD apps. There is a new setting in AAD > Consent and permissions to Allow for apps from this organisation and verified publishers, which is Microsoft’s recommendation (as opposed to allowing user consent for all/none).
- External Identities is now in public preview. This allows invited external users to ‘bring their own identity’ (BYOI) and sign in with a federated service like Google, Facebook, or another SAML2/WS-Fed IdP.
- Microsoft Authentication Libraries (MSAL) now support Angular and the ASP.NET web libraries are in public preview.
Development
- There are Graph API improvements to filtering, counting and sorting in the beta endpoint. For example, objects such as users and groups didn’t support $count, but now do.
- The new To Do API opens up feeding tasks into To Do across third parties, Teams, Outlook, Edge, Word, and Github (nice!). The associated app shows as a linked source in the To Do app with a deep link to it. For example, you could be taken straight to a Jira issue.
- The new Teams Activity Feed API allows devs an improved way to send notifications in Teams but details are scarce so far.
Edge
- Sync now supports extensions and IT will be able to manage the types of data that can sync. It’s even being extended to on-prem which is both shocking and welcomed.
- Windows Information Protection support has been added, presumably as an enlightened app.
- A feature called Automatic Profile Switching will switch between profiles depending on the URL. This has been in Firefox for a while under Containers and is a great feature in it.
- There is new native integration with page collections to Pinterest, because it’s 2020 and your browser can’t just be a browser.
Teams
- Templates can be created in the Teams Admin Centre with channels and apps already determined. Users select the template when creating a team.
- If you are signed into a mobile or desktop app, you can SSO into the app’s Teams tab. This is in developer preview.
- Conditional Access tabs in Teams will be fixed to resolve the problem of, for example, SPO sites that require CA failing with the “cannot access this resource” error.
- On mobile, more actions will be added to messages. For example, creating tasks.
Other bits
- The Fluid Framework – for which all we’ve seen so far is marketing fuzz all about improving app collaboration – will be open-source (available on GitHub shortly) and soon make its first appearance in Outlook.
- Project Cortex will be GA in summer. This is the first major new service in M365 since Teams and uses the Graph to “map knowledge to people, content, and modern work, and uses Microsoft Graph to deliver personalized knowledge”. From what I can tell, this just means it automates topic centres.
- Microsoft Lists is a new organising app that also works with Teams and is an “evolution on top of SharePoint lists“. It’s all about work management and tracking and can integrate with Power Apps and Power Automate. Apparently there are no plans to deprecate classic lists in favour of it. Click here for a product video or here for an interactive demo.
- Outlook on the web will get predictive text, much like Gmail.
- Bing Work has reached GA. This is the Microsoft Search tab in Bing search that extents it to M365. A good Microsoft Mechanics video on this by @deployjeremy is available.
