M365 Roundup, August 2021: Azure AD Graph Gets a Death Date While Teams Ships Eight Updates

The August 2021 item most likely to break something is buried at the bottom of the message center: Azure AD Graph has a retirement date, and every script and integration still using it stops getting answers on June 30, 2022. Around that, Teams ships eight separate updates, including an auto-expiration default for meeting recordings that compliance-minded customers will want explained. Admin platform changes first, then the Teams stack.

Admin: a deprecation, a redirect, and a governance win#

Azure AD Graph retirement is now on the calendar (end of life)#

End of support for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Graph lands on June 30, 2022. Apps still calling Azure AD Graph after that date no longer receive responses from the endpoint.

Because the Azure AD Graph APIs are being retired, Microsoft is also retiring the license assignment operations in the MSOnline and Azure AD PowerShell modules. If your onboarding or licensing automation leans on those cmdlets, the migration to Microsoft Graph belongs on next quarter's roadmap, not next June's.

Role assignment to Azure AD groups reaches GA (new feature)#

Assigning roles to Azure Active Directory groups is now generally available, for tenants with an Azure AD Premium P1 or P2 subscription. It simplifies role management two ways:

• Instead of stacking role assignments on individual users, a Privileged Role Administrator or Global Administrator assigns the role to a group, and your existing governance workflow handles approval and auditing of the group's membership so only legitimate users are members.
• A group assigned to a role can have an owner, who then manages membership and controls who gets the role. That delegates Azure AD role administration and reduces dependency on the Privileged Role Administrator and Global Administrator roles.

Available now as of August 2021.

The SCC starts redirecting to the Defender portal (admin impact)#

Users opening security solutions in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center (protection.office.com) get automatically redirected to the corresponding solution in Microsoft 365 Defender (security.microsoft.com), consolidating Defender security management in one portal.

• Redirection is enabled by default and affects all users of the tenant.
• Global Administrators and Security Administrators can turn it off in the Defender portal under Settings > Email & collaboration > Portal redirection.

Rollout: mid-September 2021, expected complete by late October.

Teams: the two changes to brief customers on#

Meeting recordings now expire at 60 days by default (compliance)#

New Teams meeting recordings automatically expire 60 days after recording if no action is taken. Microsoft picked 60 days because, on average across all tenants, most recordings are never watched again after that point.

Modifying the default is not yet possible. Microsoft will update the message center post when it is, with instructions for PowerShell or the Teams Admin Center, and the setting will be modifiable before the feature goes live.

The clarifications that matter:

• The expiration setting is not a retention setting. A 30-day expiration triggers auto-deletion 30 days after file creation, but it does not prevent a different system or user from deleting the file sooner.
• When a recording is deleted by expiration, the end user is notified by email. The SharePoint tenant or site admin, or an end user with edit or delete permissions, can retrieve the file from the recycle bin for up to 90 days.
• Any retention, deletion, or legal hold policy designated in the Compliance center overrides this feature. When the compliance policy and the expiration setting conflict, the compliance policy timeline always wins.
• Admins cannot override end-user modification capabilities.
• Existing recordings created before the feature deploys are not affected, and changes to the default only apply to recordings created afterward.
• MeetingRecordingExpirationDays accepts a minimum of 1 day and a maximum of 99,999 days (roughly 273 years).
• Recordings in classic Microsoft Stream are not affected; recordings in the new Stream, built on OneDrive and SharePoint, are.
• The feature applies only to Teams meeting recordings created by the Teams service in OneDrive and SharePoint, not to other file types.

Rollout: late September through mid-November 2021.

Channel renames now rename the SharePoint folder (new feature, sharing links can break)#

Renaming a Teams channel now simultaneously renames the corresponding folder in the SharePoint site. Be aware this may break existing sharing links.

• Standard channels: the corresponding SharePoint folder is renamed.
• Private channels: the corresponding SharePoint folder is renamed.
• Legacy channels renamed before this rollout keep their existing folders, but renaming them after the release syncs the folder name.
• The new folder name only appears in the OneDrive sync client once the whole document library has synced; syncing just the channel folder does not pick up the new name.

Rollout: mid-September through mid-October 2021.

Teams: the rest of the August batch#

Large Gallery adds paging up to 98 videos (new feature)#

Paging arrives in Large Gallery, raising the viewable count from 49 videos to 98 on Windows, desktop, and Mac. With more than 49 videos, navigation controls < and > appear below the gallery for moving between pages.

Rollout: Large Gallery (9x9) is complete; Video Gallery (3x3) lands mid-September, completing late September 2021.

Background effects reach the web client (new feature)#

Web users get background effects for video calls, previously a desktop-client exclusive. The video effects policy is manageable via PowerShell or the tenant admin dashboard.

Rollout: early September 2021, completing late September.

Breakout rooms can be built before the meeting (new feature)#

Organizers of channel and private meetings get a new Breakout rooms tab in the scheduling form to configure rooms before the meeting starts:

• Bulk creating and deleting rooms
• Adding, deleting, and renaming individual rooms
• Configuring meeting options per room
• Adjusting breakout session settings (timer, selecting breakout room managers, and more)
• Pre-assigning participants, manually or automatically

Rollout: mid-September 2021, completing late September.

Presenters can manage breakout rooms (new feature)#

Organizers configuring breakout rooms on the Teams desktop client can appoint presenters as breakout room managers. Currently only named presenters from the same tenant qualify. Managers see the breakout rooms icon in the toolbar when they join, and must take control to manage rooms, with only one manager in control at a time.

Rollout: mid-September 2021, completing late September.

Dynamic e911 extends to remote US workers (new feature)#

Dynamic e911 detects a Teams user's location for emergency calling. Until now it covered admin-configured locations on enterprise networks only; this extends it to users working remotely from dynamic locations. To enable lookup for non-admin-configured locations:

• Admins must enable the ExternalLocationLookupMode attribute in the TeamsEmergencyCalling policy.
• Users must consent to location detection.
• Users must be enterprise voice and emergency calling enabled.

Rollout: late October 2021, completing mid-November.

Likely-spam calls get labeled (new feature)#

The spam notification label automatically appears on incoming calls that are likely spam, saving users from answering them.

Rollout: late August 2021.