To the Harvard Chan School community:
Microsoft has made some temporary changes to MS Teams to accommodate new growth and demand during these unprecedented times. See below for details provided by Microsoft and contact the IT help desk if you have questions or require further information.
Of particular interest for departments that are actively using MS Teams: Anyone using MS Teams for document editing will notice that these capabilities have been impacted by the changes.
MS Teams training is available.
Organization: HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Update to Office documents in Microsoft Teams
To best support our Microsoft 365 Education customers worldwide and accommodate new growth and demand during these unprecedented times, we are making a temporary adjustment to Office document behavior within Microsoft Teams for students and teachers.
“How does this affect me?”
For students and teachers working with Office documents in Microsoft Teams, we are beginning to roll out a temporary change where there will be an additional step in order to edit a document. This is a change from current behavior that allows users to go straight to edit mode when clicking on a document in the “Files” tab of a channel, a conversation, or from inside an assignment.
In all cases, upon clicking on the document, users will first see the document in view mode – they will be able to see the document content, but not make changes.
In order to edit the document, users need to click on the options in the top right of the white bar above the document content and select “Open in Browser” or (for users with Office for Windows installed on their device) “Open in Desktop App”. This will open the document in Office in a separate window from Teams and allow the user to make changes.
“What do I need to do to prepare for this change?”
No action is necessary, this change will happen automatically.
Organization: HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Awareness of Microsoft 365 temporary feature adjustments
To best support our Microsoft 365 customers worldwide and accommodate new growth and demand during these unprecedented times, we’re making temporary adjustments to select non-essential capabilities. We do not expect these changes to have significant impact on the end users experience but wanted to make you aware.
Examples of changes we may make include:
- how often we check for presence
- the interval in which we show when the other party is typing
- video resolution
We will provide further updates to this post should the situation change.
Organization: HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Awareness of Microsoft 365 temporary feature adjustments
We are sharing a few other temporary changes you can expect.
OneNote:
- OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, excluding EDU. Users can go to OneNote for the web for editing.
- Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed.
- You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates as http://aka.ms/notesupdates.
SharePoint:
- We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image.
- Reduced video resolution for playback videos.
Stream:
- People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted.
- Meeting recording video resolution adjusted to 720p
We will continue to monitor our Microsoft 365 services on an ongoing basis and share any further updates.
