My top 10 Office 365 features that are currently rolling out & In development

The Office 365 team did a great job with sharing information on the upcoming features for Office 365 subscribers as well a list of the all the features that already launched and others which are in development.

Below is my top 10 list of features which are currently rolling out and also in development taken from the Microsoft Office 365 road map website

Top #10:

1. Document Conversations for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online – “Document conversations enable people to share ideas and expertise around Office documents, images and videos, directly in the context of editing or reviewing. When opening a file stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business in your browser, the file is opened on the left and a contextual Yammer conversation is shown on the right, side by side. You can collapse and expand the Yammer pane as needed. You can start Yammer conversations around content, @mention coworkers on files, and publish to Yammer groups—either public or private. You can also view and participate in conversations outside your document, on your mobile device, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM or any app where a Yammer feed is embedded.”
   
2. Groups in Office 365 for Outlook Web App and OneDrive for Business – “Groups in Office 365 connects users with the colleagues, information and applications they need to get more done together. Groups is launching in stages, with the first set of experiences rollingout to Outlook Web App and OneDrive for Business. Groups are open by default to enhance discoverability and sharing, but users can also create private Groups for sensitive content.”
   
3. MAPI over HTTP for Outlook 2013 and Exchange Online – “MAPI over HTTP is a new transport used to connect Outlook and Exchange. It is the long term replacement for RPC over HTTP connectivity (commonly referred to as Outlook Anywhere). MAPI/HTTP removes the complexity of Outlook Anywhere’s dependency on the legacy RPC technology.”
4. Preserving DL Membership & BCC for Exchange In-Place Hold – “This update will make DL membership & BCC searchable for users placed on In-place Hold.
   
5. SharePoint Online storage usage model – “Administrators can now more easily manage SharePoint Online team sites’ storage quota based on real usage, and are no longer required to set fixed storage allotments per site collection. If an admin opts-in to the storage usage model, by selecting “Auto” within the SharePoint Online Admin Center, every site collection will utilize storage from the broad tenant pooled storage and will continue to ‘auto’-grow up to a maximum of 1TB per site collection. If an admin chooses not to opt-in, and to manage storage “manually” per individually per site collection, they will now set usage caps instead of allocating fixed amounts. Whether you select “Auto” or to “Manual,” SharePoint Online site collection quota management becomes simpler by removing management overhead and/or ‘loss of storage’ that has been allocated but not used.”
   
6. Clutter for Outlook Web App – “Clutter is a separate view in the inbox where lower priority email appear. These items are removed from the standard inbox view so that the user can focus on the higher priority messages in the inbox.”
   
7. DirSync tool with password hash sync as backup for Federated Sign-in – “Office 365 customers who use federated sign-in can now use DirSync with password hash sync as a backup in case there is a failure with any part of the on-premises identity provider. In case of failure you can reconfigure the Azure AD tenant from federated to standard in a matter of hours to enable sign-in.”
8. Office 2013 client update to support passive authentication using SAML – “Office 2013 rich client applications currently use the MS Sign-in Assistant to log into Office 365. This only supports the WS-Trust protocol and is not usable with any identity providers that require passive authentication with web page redirects such as WS-Federation and SAML/P. This feature is to enable Office rich client applications to work with third party Identity Providers and to work with the Windows Azure Multi-Factor Authentication implementation.”
9. Unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business – “Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes. In the meantime, get started using your 1 TB of storage today by backing up all those work files kicking around on your PC – with the knowledge that even more storage is on its way!”
10. Workload-specific admin roles – “Workload-specific admin roles will provide more flexibility to organizations that want to structure admin access to Exchange Admin Center, SharePoint Admin Center, and Lync Admin Center. For example, an Exchange admin will no longer require Office 365 global admin rights to manage Exchange Online.