Microsoft Begins Rolling Out The New 'Briefing' Feature
Microsoft has begun rolling out the new Briefing feature to Office 365/Microsoft 365 Administrative users. Briefing is a service that sends a daily email alerting you to upcoming items on your calendar. In this article, you will learn how you can use Briefing to prepare better for your workday.
Who Gets Briefing?
Eventually, Microsoft will make Briefing available to all Office 365/Microsoft 365 users with a subscription that includes Exchange Online services. However, the initial roll-out of Briefing will be for Administrative users only. This will allow them to prepare to answer any questions that ultimately might arise from end-users. Further, if desired, Administrative users can disable the Briefing service for a single user, a group of users, or the entire organization.
How Does This Feature Help Me?
Briefing analyzes information that is recorded on your Outlook calendar to help you prepare for and stay in control of your workday. Within the first two hours of the start of your workday (as you have it established in Outlook), Briefing sends an email to you that alerts you to relevant issues to help you prepare for the workday. Included in the content of that email are the following items.
- Any outstanding commitments, requests, and follow-ups that you might own to other team members or they might owe to you.
- Links to documents that are related to meetings scheduled for the current day, to facilitate review before the meeting.
- Suggested “focus time” that you can schedule to work on items where collaboration is not required.
For each task identified in the Briefing email, you can indicate that it is not something that you need to address, in which case it will not appear in future Briefing emails. Additionally, once a task is complete, you can mark it as “done.” Similarly, you can mark documents linked in the Briefing email as either “not related” or “done.”
What If I Do Not Want To Receive Briefing Emails?
If you do not want to receive emails generated by the service, you can click Unsubscribe to opt-out of the service. Alternatively, you can ask someone with Administrative rights in Exchange Online to unsubscribe you.
Is The Briefing Feature Secure?
Briefing sends your daily email to you and only you. Further, your daily email only summarizes information that already resides in Outlook. Other team members cannot see any information about you that is not already in their mailboxes. Moreover, regarding privacy, Microsoft asserts that this complies with GDPR requirements.
Summary
Microsoft’s Briefing feature is yet another in a series of Office 365/Microsoft 365 Cloud-based tools that can enhance personal and team productivity. By reminding team members about items on their calendars and providing information that can help them to prepare for each of these events, Briefing offers great promise to ensure that team members are as productive as possible. And, as an optional service, team members who do not wish to utilize the service can opt-out. So, if you are an Office 365/Microsoft 365 subscriber with access to Exchange Online, be on the lookout for the new feature, as it is arriving soon.
You can learn more about Office 365/Microsoft 365 tools such as Briefing by participating in K2’s Microsoft Office 365 — All The Things You Need To Know.
