Wednesday, November 4, 2020

There are changes coming to Office 365 products and services, including Outlook and Microsoft Teams. If you use either of these Microsoft products – free to UGA students, faculty and staff – please be aware of these key updates:

• Update your Mac to Mojave to continue receiving Office 365 updates: As of the November 2020 Office 365 for Mac update, macOS 10.14 Mojave or later is required to receive updates to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. If you continue with an older version of macOS, your Office apps will continue to work but you will no longer receive any updates, including security updates. To continue receiving the most up-to-date Office 365 features on Mac, make sure you are running one of the three most recent versions of macOS. If you have questions, please contact Ashley Henry, ashenry@uga.edu.
• Update your iOS to receive updates to Outlook on your iPhone or tablet: With the release of iOS14 for iPhones and iPads, Microsoft is changing the minimum iOS system requirements for updates to Outlook for iOS and watchOS. Outlook for iOS is supported on the two most recent versions of iOS, and Microsoft is preparing to remove support for older versions. This means that phones older than an iPhone 6s and any iOS devices running iOS 12 or older will no longer receive Outlook app updates.  Additionally, Microsoft will remove support for watchOS 4 and 5. WatchOS 6 and 7 will be the only supported versions for Apple Watch.  At this time, customers will be able to continue using older versions of the app. Over time, Outlook for iOS on iOS 12 devices will eventually stop synchronizing email and calendar data, unless they have a supported version of iOS. This change does not affect anyone using Outlook for iOS on iOS 13 or above, or Android users. For questions, contact Ashley Henry, ashenry@uga.edu.
• Virtual breakout rooms coming to Microsoft Teams: By the end of November, Microsoft will enable a new breakout room feature in Microsoft Teams, allowing meeting organizers to split main meetings into smaller sessions for focused discussions. To see the breakout rooms option, meeting organizers and participants must turn on the new Teams meeting experience. This can be done by clicking on your profile image within Teams, selecting Settings, checking “Turn on new meeting experience,” and then restarting your Teams client. All meeting organizers and participants must have the new meeting experience turned on for the virtual breakout rooms to work. After they join the meeting, meeting organizers can set up breakout rooms via a Teams desktop client and assign participants to each room.  For more information on Teams or to request a Team, visit teams.uga.edu.  
• Changes coming to Microsoft Teams recording settings: During the first half of November, Microsoft is rolling out a change to all of their environments that will set the default save location for recorded meetings to be the recorder’s Microsoft OneDrive.  You will still have the option in your recording settings at that time to select other save locations.  In early 2021, Microsoft will permanently remove the ability to save Microsoft Teams recordings into the Microsoft Stream service; new recordings at that time will automatically save to the recorder’s Microsoft OneDrive. For more information, contact Jonathan Hardy, jhardy66@uga.edu.

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