Here’s my weekly review of the best of TechCommunity:

You can do more with OneNote for the web and in Teams

OneNote was somewhat abandoned for a while, but Microsoft are now working to make it better. Nice to see that particularly the web based version of OneNote is getting some new features, so you don’t need to install the app. Looking forward to a lot more movement in the OneNote space.

Microsoft Teams performance improvements reduce power consumption in meetings by up to 50%

Back in 2020, Teams CPU and RAM usage was high by the app. So much so, that for me, the standard laptop build went from 8GB of RAM to 16GB. Staff would complain of their device running slow when in a meeting. Improvements had to happen – which they have, and it’s nice to see the transparency now from Microsoft on how they’ve come along this journey. Teams 2.0 came out with Windows 11 with the promise of being rewritten from the ground up and better in many ways, but it’s not a direct replacement for Teams (at least yet).

New Microsoft Viva Adoption Resources are here!

Microsoft have released the Viva Adoption Page where you can get guidance on how to start, or continue, your company’s journey in rolling out Viva. Resources like this are very useful, even if it’s a sanity check to know you haven’t missed something. Keep in mind, Viva has 4 main aspects – Viva Learning, Viva Connections, Viva Topics, and Viva Insights. Check out the pricing page to see what Viva bits you get with existing licenses, and what needs an extra license.

All Microsoft Defender for Identity features now available in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal

I’m still liking these self descriptive titles. This is the continuation of the plan to combine portals, particularly in the Defender space, with the goal of having everything in once place (*cough* msportals.io). That portal is of course https://security.microsoft.com and great to see more and more of these things go together in one pane of glass.

Introducing the new Overview page for Test Base for Microsoft 365

Microsoft seems pretty serious about Microsoft 365, although I think they should have called it ‘Microsoft Cloud 365’ for a bit less confusion around names, but for any admin wanting to get going with Microsoft 365, the Test Base page is somewhere you can start to work out how Microsoft 365 might work for you with documenation, guides, package testing, and metrics – as well as showing failures.

What’s New: Consolidating Apache Log4j-related insights across Multiple Tenants and Workspaces

That nasty Log4j vulnerability is going to be around for a long time – and just because you did a spot check of your environment when the sirens went off, doesn’t mean someone won’t deploy an old version of it in the future (have you ever seen a vendor give you a package that includes the absolute latest release of all other open source software?). If you’re a SOC or looking after multiple customers/tenants, then you’re going to want to check this out.

Make Sustainability Part of Everybody’s Job

Something a bit less technical, but also something we probably all have some power over improving where we work. General wastage has both an environmental and business impact, and could be as simple as changing printer defaults to double sided printing rather than single sided, or choosing environmentally friendly powered options for your datacentres on the next refresh (maybe under the sea?). At least make yourself aware of some of the possibilities, and invite an open conversation with others on what could be done to improve sustainability.

That’s it for this week, as always you can see the entire feed of TechCommunity posts at https://twitter.com/MSITTechNews and you can see my previous TechCommunnity picks here https://www.adamfowlerit.com/tag/techcommunity/