A christmas update to the Office Roadmap! It looks like Microsoft has abandoned their bi-weekly update schedule and is now updating whenever they can (please, I got a job to do!). This time it’s a few new thingies but mostly a clean up of old released stuff.

Happy holidays everyone!

Changes 2015-12-18

Now Launched

  • Analyze Office 365 data with Equivio Zoom: the eDiscovery features now allows you to integrate Equivio machine learning capabilities. This is some cool stuf that I need to experiment with. The compliance and eDiscovery fetaures of Office 365 is just getting stronger and stronger. (From in development)
  • FastTrack | Improving Intune onboarding with MDM: Get on board the Office 365 train even faster with improved Intune onboarding stuff (from in development)

Rolling out

  • Office 365 Protection Center: The Compliance center is renamed to Protection Center. A very good move since the features of the Compliance center is expanding so much. Also a new and improved UI is on the way. (New)
  • Removal of Delivery Reports from Outlook on the web: Delivery reports of mail will be removed from OWA. It will remain in the Outlook client though. I don’t mind if they kill of this feature totally. It’s just annoying and since you can always decline to send a delivery report it has no purpose. (new)
  • Unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business: Unlimed, limited, unlimited…the story goes on. Read the full post here. That post is written by the Office chieftain Jeff Teper, compared to previous OneDrive posts, so it might be true… (from in development)
  • Work Management in Office 365: Planner is rolling out to all First Release customers. Wohoo. Note that it is a preview rolling out. More info. (from in development)

In Development

  • Manage Yammer licenses in Office 365: Yammer licensing on a per user bases. I interpret that as we can turn off Yammer for most of our users. This is not a new thing or changed thing, just a rename of the title and description.
  • New Yammer User Onboarding and Sign Up Experience: Yet another of the things we complained about for years are now being fixed in Yammer. Somehow I think the Yammer team are feeling how they slowly are being drowned and now finally with the last bits of air they have are trying to get their head over the surface, trying to survive… (new)
  • Office 365 Groups: Outlook on the Web and Outlook Groups app user interface improvements: A better UX for Groups – very welcome, especially for large organizations (new)
  • Real time presence for PowerPoint: No description available (new)
  • Real Time presence in PowerPoint for desktop: No descriotion available (new)
  • Skype Meetings: This one is interesting. “Free online meetings from Skype for Business…”. What does this mean? At least I can set up meetings using Skype today…Anyone? (new)

Moved off into the Previously Released list

  • Add-in deployment via Click-to-Run
  • Automatic Relationship Detection
  • Automatic Time Grouping
    Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) integration for Click-to-Run
  • Click-to-Run manageability gaps addressed for IT pros
  • Clutter for your inbox on by default
  • Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience
  • Create and Edit Comments in Excel Modile for iPad
  • Custom Tiles
  • Deferred Updates
  • ExpressRoute for Office 365
  • FastTrack | Providing the customer success service
  • FastTrack | Request Service Onboarding
  • Getting started experience in Visio
  • Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016
  • Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files
  • Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel
  • Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio
  • Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016
  • Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016
  • New and Modern Charts
  • New capabilities for Yammer iOS app
  • October 2015 Improvements in Excel Mobile for Windows
  • October 2015 Improvements in Excel Online
  • Office 365 Groups: mobile app
  • Office 365 Help Pane
  • Office 365 Notification Pane
  • Office 365 Video
  • Office 365 Video – Embed
  • Office 365 Video Update
  • OLAP Connection Support in Power View
  • Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web
  • Organization support card
  • Outlook for Android opens IRM protected emails
  • Outlook for iOS opens IRM protected emails
  • PivotChart Drill-Down Navigation (this one was never on the list previous to this)
  • PivotTable Field Search
  • Producer controls for Skype Meeting Broadcast
  • Purchase & Subscriptions Experience Refresh
  • Quick data linking in Visio
  • Real-time Co-authoring in Skype for Business
  • Real-time Yammer group activity indicators
  • Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio
  • Search Refiners in Outlook Web App
  • SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters
  • Skype for Business for iOS
  • Smart Rename in Power Pivot
  • Subscription Management Experience refresh
  • Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016
  • Sway for Windows Document Import
  • Top teacher-requested features added to OneNote Class Notebooks
  • UserVoice coming to Outlook on the web
  • Video Based Screen Sharing
  • Yammer for Apple Watch
  • Yammer Next Group Notifications
  • Yammer to use Azure Media Services for Video Encoding