25-January-2026 Below you will find a collection of news published yesterday. This news consists of Microsoft’s Roadmap when it is updated it will be below with items. Then there will be a section with the message center, if there is anything new there, this will be automatically included. And it contains a piece from blogs that I follow myself and would like to share with you. If I miss something in the blogs that do have an RSS feed, please let me know.
This entire post was automated via Microsoft Flow
have fun reading!
Items from the MessageCenter in Microsoft 365
| (Updated) Microsoft Viva Engage: Smarter delivery of Community Announcement notificationsCategory:Microsoft VivaNummer:MC1143276Status:planForChange | Updated January 23, 2026: We have updated the timeline. Thank you for your patience. Introduction We hear your feedback about ways we can improve the notifications experience in Viva Engage. It’s always a fine balance between ensuring your users are notified of relevant content without notifications feeling too overwhelming or noisy. In response to your feedback, we’re rolling out an intelligent notifications experience. Specifically, this change will improve how Community Announcement notifications are delivered. This smarter delivery approach optimizes notifications delivery based on a user’s engagement behavior, helping to reduce notifications fatigue while ensuring timely visibility of announcements. When this will happen General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out this change in mid-September 2025 and expect the rollout to reach GA (General Availability) by February 6, 2026 (previously end of January). How this affects your organization Previously, when an admin created a new Community Announcement, this would send a notification in Teams and Mobile Push immediately, followed by an email notification two hours later if the announcement was not opened already in Teams and/or Mobile Push. With this new update:
We will continue to respect all user notification preferences and settings where applicable. If a notification channel is disabled or the app is not installed, it will not be selected as a potential notification channel for the Community Announcement delivery. Note that this change applies only to regular Community Announcements in Viva Engage and does not affect the “immediate” Community Announcement feature (where admins can still select the checkbox to send emails immediately —this functionality remains unchanged). Can I still notify Community users via email immediately (along with other notification channels)? Yes! In Viva Engage, we offer an option to send an “immediate” Community Announcement. With this feature, Community admins can choose to send email notifications immediately after posting a Community Announcement, even if a user has opted out of receiving emails. All other notification channels will also send immediately along with email, including Teams and Mobile Push. Therefore, we recommend admins to use this feature when there is a Community Announcement that requires immediate attention from users. Community Admins can find this “immediate” Community Announcement option by firstly navigating to the announcement publisher and selecting the hyperlinked “option to send emails immediately” at the bottom of the publisher. Upon clicking this option, an additional pop-up box will open called “Immediate email delivery”. By selecting this checkbox, this will ensure that all three notification channels – Email, Teams, and Mobile Push – will send to customers immediately after a Community Announcement is made. What you can do to prepare No admin action is required. However, we recommend:
| ||||||||
| (Updated) Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents: A new Copilot experience for content creationCategory:Microsoft 365 apps Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365) Microsoft 365 Copilot ChatNummer:MC1187799Status:stayInformed | Updated January 22, 2026: We have updated the timeline. Thank you for your patience. [Introduction] We’re introducing new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help users create documents, workbooks, and presentations more efficiently in Copilot Chat within the Frontier program. These agents assist with creating documents, workbooks, and presentations by using web and enterprise grounding. Each agent supports multi-turn chat, enabling user to refine content through an interactive back-and-forth conversation. [When this will happen:]
[How this affects your organization:] If your organization is part of the Frontier program and has enabled Anthropic usage in your tenant, users will be able to access Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents via the navigation pane in the M365 Copilot app or within the Tools menu in Copilot chat across Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Additionally, users can invoke these agents by typing “@” followed by the agent name (for example, @PowerPoint). Who is affected:
What will happen:
[What you can do to prepare:]
Learn more: Get started with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot (Frontier) [Compliance considerations:] No compliance considerations identified, review as appropriate for your organization. | ||||||||
| (Updated) Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Admins can block external users in Microsoft Teams from Defender PortalCategory:Microsoft Teams Microsoft Defender XDRNummer:MC1200058Status:stayInformed | Updated January 23, 2026: We have updated the timeline. Thank you for your patience. [Introduction] We’re introducing an integration between Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 that allows security admins to manage blocked external users in Teams through the Tenant Allow/Block List (TABL) in the Microsoft Defender portal. This centralized approach enhances security and compliance by enabling organizations to control external user access across Microsoft 365 services. This message is associated with Roadmap ID 542189. [When this will happen:] General Availability (Worldwide): Rollout begins mid-February 2026 (previously early January) and is expected to complete by end of February 2026 (previously mid-January). [How this affects your organization:] Who is affected: Organizations using Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 or Plan 2. What will happen:
Screenshot 1: Image showcasing the teams block sender and block domain list in Microsoft Teams [What you can do to prepare:]
Screenshot 2: Image showing the teams toggle for blocking sender email addresses in Microsoft Teams [Compliance considerations:] No compliance considerations identified, review as appropriate for your organization. | ||||||||
| Dynamics 365 Contact Center – Customize transfers and consults for queues, representativesCategory:Dynamics 365 AppsNummer:MC1221931Status:stayInformed | We are announcing the ability to customize transfers and consults for queues and customer service representatives in Dynamics 365 Contact Center. This feature will reach general availability on January 26, 2026. How does this affect me? This feature allows administrators to manage the queues or customer service representatives who are available during a consult or transfer action. On the Consult and transfer page in the Copilot Service admin center, administrators can configure FetchXML queries for the following scenarios:
What action do I need to take? This message is for awareness, and no action is required. | ||||||||
| Message Trace support on Graph API is now in Public PreviewCategory:Exchange Online Microsoft 365 suiteNummer:MC1221939Status:planForChange | [Introduction] We’re introducing Message Trace support on Microsoft Graph to provide a modern, REST‑based API experience for tracing email across your Exchange Online organization. This update aligns with our ongoing effort to move message trace support from the legacy Reporting Web Service to Microsoft Graph. Public Preview is now available, and General Availability roll-out begins January-end. [When this will happen] Public preview (worldwide): Available now. General availability (worldwide): Rollout begins in late January 2026 and is expected to complete by early February 2026. [How this affects your organization] Who is affected: Admins and developers who use automated or programmatic message trace capabilities in Exchange Online. Admins and developers who use Reporting Web Service for message trace. What will happen:
[What you can do to prepare]
[Compliance considerations] No compliance considerations identified. Review as appropriate for your organization. | ||||||||
| Take Action: Out-of-band update to address cloud‑backed storage application issuesCategory:WindowsNummer:MC1222123Status:preventOrFixIssue | Microsoft released today a resolution for an issue observed after installing the January 2026 Windows security update. This issue may cause applications that open or save files stored in cloud‑backed locations to become unresponsive or display errors. Some installations of Outlook may also become unresponsive and fail to open when PST files are stored in cloud‑backed storage such as OneDrive. An out-of-band (OOB) update was released today, January 24, 2026, to address this issue. This cumulative update includes all protections and improvements from the January 2026 Windows security update released January 13, 2026, as well as from the OOB update released on January 17, 2026 (which introduced fixes for two known issues: remote desktop connections and hibernation failures). This OOB update is available through Windows Update for Windows 11 devices running the updates released this month. To install it, open Settings > Windows Update, and select Download and install. Note that this update will show up in Windows Update only if you have installed one of the updates released in January that caused this issue. Some devices may install the update automatically. For supported versions of Windows Server and Windows 10, the OOB update is available from the Microsoft Update Catalog. Refer to the KB articles below for detailed information and installation steps.
IT administrators using Microsoft Intune or Windows Autopatch should follow the guidance below for installing the OOB update via Windows Update. |
