Microsoft 365 Admin Monthly Digest – Aug 2023

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Welcome to the Microsoft 365 IT admin blog, your monthly source of tips, insights, and best practices for managing and optimizing your Microsoft 365 environment. In this edition, the latest on Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise, and learn about enhancements to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Read on to catch up about all things Microsoft 365 administration. 

Join the next AMA on Microsoft 365 Copilot  

We’ll be hosting the next AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Microsoft 365 Copilot on Wednesday, September 6 in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Tech Community. The event is a great opportunity to hear from members like you and have the team of experts answer questions. You can send in your questions to the event page now, and a team of experts will join us to help answer them during the event. You can catch up on the previous AMA that was focused on Microsoft 365 Copilot here. 

Bing Chat Enterprise now default on 

Bing Chat Enterprise is generally available and on by default for users with Microsoft E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium licenses. It is turned off by default for Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 for faculty users but will be turned on by default later this fall.  
 
At this year’s Microsoft Inspire, Microsoft announced Bing Chat Enterprise, giving organizations AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. Chat data is not saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data is not used to train the models. This model gives users access to better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative. Users can access Bing Chat Enterprise using their work account wherever Bing Chat is supported – Bing.com/chat and Microsoft Edge sidebar. 

Admins can disable Bing Chat Enterprise by going to https://aka.ms/TurnOffBCE. You will also need to ensure Microsoft Search in Bing setting in the Microsoft 365 admin center is turned on. Learn more about managing Bing Chat Enterprise here. You can about Bing Chat Enterprise and product terms here. 

Have questions about Bing Chat Enterprise? Check out the FAQ. 

What the latest work trend research means for IT  

Microsoft recently released a new work trend report highlighting key moments where in-person engagement matters most in the workplace as companies progress through the era of flexible work. Onboarding a new role, team, or company, kicking off a new project, and strengthening team cohesion. Research also shows that employees want the best of both worlds—flexible work and in-person connections—and recognizes that organizations have become increasingly distributed over the last four years. 

This points to some of the current trends and challenges in IT management, such as the increasing demand for IT services and the need to balance innovation and maintenance, the growing complexity and diversity of IT systems and the need to integrate them effectively, and the rising importance of data and analytics and the need to leverage them for business insights. 

In the past, we’ve discussed how IT leaders can seize these opportunities, including aligning IT strategy with business strategy and communicating it clearly to stakeholders, adopting agile and DevOps methodologies to improve collaboration and efficiency, investing in cloud-based services and platforms to enhance scalability and flexibility, and implementing data governance and security policies to protect data assets and comply with regulations. 

In particular, implementing data governance and security policies to protect data assets is an integral part of getting your organization ready for the era of AI. We discuss that in more depth in our blog.

Highlights across Microsoft 365 administration 

Let’s check out some of the latest features we launched in the Microsoft 365 admin center and how they can help you get things done.  

Add internal links to policies in Viva Pulse 

Soon, global admins or Viva Pulse admins can add links to internal policies in the general disclaimer when customizing surveys. This helps users find your specific internal policies explaining survey governance. Admins can configure this from the Microsoft 365 admin center in the Viva Pulse admin experience.  

Collaborate more seamless in Microsoft Teams in multi-tenant organizations 

New features are being rolled out in Teams that will make collaboration more seamless across multi-tenant organizations. Users can search for coworkers in another tenant, have a single chat thread with other users, receive real-time notifications, join meetings and calls in another tenant, and multitask from their home tenant. Read this blog for more details about what’s rolling out. 

Migrate DLP-related Exchange Transport Rules (ETRs)  

Following this announcement, support for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules within Exchange Online ETRs has been discontinued. Admins should re-validate any existing legacy DLP rules, and either consolidate or migrate them to the compliance portal if not done so already.  Consolidating these rules to the compliance portal brings benefits of unified management, and features like advanced classification and labelling, near real-time alerts, and a built-in incident management experience. To help accelerate the migration process, the compliance portal has a built-in wizard to help migrate your policies with a few clicks. You can review the entire process here Migrating from Exchange Transport Rules to Unified DLP - The complete playbook.  

Stay updated 

As always, stay current with the latest updates on the Microsoft 365 admin center from the Microsoft 365 roadmap and the message center. In addition, we also highlight new feature releases and enhancements released each month in our What's new in the Microsoft 365 admin center article.  

Comment below if there are IT admin or change management topics you would like us to explore in the future!