Updates to the Office 365 Roadmap – 17 Feb 2015

The official Office 365 Roadmap received some updates today. The 5 biggest ones are:

Launched

Office 365 Admin Center for Business
The dashboard experience has been simplified for the new business plans to highlight only the most used tasks including setup, adding new users, resetting passwords and managing subscriptions.The complete set of settings and tools are accessible from the left navigation menu.

Office 365 ISO 27018 Privacy Compliance
In the upcoming Office 365 ISO 27001 audit, Office 365 will be including the ISO 27018 Privacy controls in their assessment. Inclusion of these new controls in the ISO assessment will further help Office 365 validate to customers the level of protection Office 365 provides to protect the privacy of customer data.

Rolling Out

Clutter control and admin capabilities
We are adding capabilities to help you control some aspects for the mailbox Clutter feature. These include the ability to exclude selection communications from Clutter, enabling items such as corporate communications to bypass the Clutter model. It also adds controls to provide customer controlled sending identity for communications from the Clutter feature, such as controlling the sending name and applying a corporate identity to improve trust in the messages. The round of updates also provides admin controls to assign a specific retention tag for the Clutter folder.

In Development

About Me Update and New Authoring Tool
The Office 365 user profile page, aka “About Me,” is getting a significant update. First, it will be more user friendly in its overall presentation and how it looks and responds across all devices. This update also introduces a new page authoring tool – that at first will be used to create stories within the company – then expand to enable creation of new types of dynamic pages. These stories and pages are created within the browser and have built-in hooks to add other Office 365 content (like documents from OneDrive for Business, videos from Office 365 Video and images a document library) in a seamless way. Finally, the new “About Me” page will highlight people and people search in a whole new way – from hierachical views, to showing who people most closely work with, and even a method to send a kudo to a co-worker.

Office 365 Video Update
Office 365 Video went into First Release (FR) on 11/18/14. This update will both move Office 365 Video to the broader worldwide production environment, beyond FR customers, and bring new updates for increased mobility and improved performance. For mobility, Office 365 Video will now have a companion iPhone app in the App Store, responsive Web pages across the video portal for access across devices of all sizes (PC, Mac, Android and iOS), plus extend video playback to non-Flash capable devices via our new HTML5-based player from Azure Media Services. We, too, have taken user feedback to enable more refinement for some of the admin controls available to portal and channel owners.