Mea Blogga

I've failed you, and for that I am sorry. I write a lot, and about a number of topics, but often I wait to write until I find something truly compelling to write about. And usually, working in an industry that's adopted a fever-pitch cadence, that's not a tall order. But while sometimes that cadence brings amazing new products and integrations, at other times it just brings minor tweaks. That doesn't mean the cadence has slowed, it's just shifted a bit. And frankly, I got so accustomed to the big stuff that I failed to realize the aggregate value of the small stuff.

Like the new preview ability to include a poll on a meeting request to external recipients. How many emails go back and forth debating a proposed meeting time? You know you have to meet, and sure you can suggest an alternate time, but I'd never realized the amount of lost work time I had just setting the time for a meeting. I would get an email, see the client's name in the subject line and get excited just to realize it was another metadata conversation. Replace all of that with a poll and roll on? Heck yeah! Not a huge announcement, but it will change the way I work.

And there have been a handful of minor announcements with regards to eDiscovery across Office 365 services. Individually they're not enough to put (digital) pen to (imaginary) paper, but eDiscovery got advanced OCR capabilities to now be able to include attachments in searches. That's pretty cool, and coupled with automatic decryption, deduplication, and the ability to assign eDiscovery rights to specific users, the Legal Department may be able to handle their own cases.

Speaking of which, another fairly recent-ish feature added to eDiscovery is the ability to organize multiple searches into a single case. It adds up, and I missed it in the greater context.

Adjunct to the eDiscovery improvements are a host of DLP improvements (keep the Legal Department from having to get involved in the first place!), including a simplified DLP administration experience, the ability to group conditions and configure logical operators in rules, enhanced HIPAA support, and large pre-configured dictionaries. Plus there are now smart recommendations built into OneDrive and SharePoint to help further protect your sensitive data. Pretty cool. Product announcement cool? Hm.

You'd have to admit it's a bit of a stretch to get all blog-tastic excited about bringing you the latest developments in OneNote's new special ink effects: rainbows, glitter, and gold.

But I will try to do better. You can follow along with Office 365 Roadmap Bingo at your own leisure, too. Microsoft publishes an updated list of features along their various lifecycle stages. But it's not a well-curated list, so if you're looking for something in particular, please don't hesitate to ask!

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap

 

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