Here’s a look at what’s new in March.

Collaborate more easily

New features and services give you more ways to collaborate with colleagues and LinkedIn connections across platforms.

Boost meeting productivity and meet compliance obligations with Microsoft Teams updates—Last week at Enterprise Connect, we announced several new features in Teams including the ability to improve the effectiveness of remote meetings by replacing your background during video chats and increasing inclusivity with live captions & subtitles during Teams meetings. We also announced the generally availability of live and on-demand events in Microsoft 365, which enable you to deliver compelling communications to up to 10,000 employees, customers, and partners. We also announced new compliance capabilities in Teams such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations to help you keep information secure and meet your obligations.

Improve whiteboard ideation and collaboration—Two new intelligent inking features in the Microsoft Whiteboard Windows 10 app help improve the collaborative ideation experience. Now, you can easily capture a picture of a physical whiteboard and convert it to digital ink in the Whiteboard app using ink grab. Additionally, the new ink beautification feature can help increase the readability of jotted notes by analyzing handwriting and automatically replacing it with more legible strokes. Together, these intelligent inking features decrease the time spent on managing content, so you can spend more time collaborating on a digital whiteboard. Both are now available in the Whiteboard Windows 10 app.

Work seamlessly with first-degree LinkedIn connections—When you securely connect your LinkedIn account with your Office 365 account, you can now view others’ LinkedIn profiles in Outlook on the web, and in OneDrive and SharePoint in Office 365, and see relevant insights about the people you’re working with, both inside and outside your organization. Now rolling out to Targeted Release customers is the ability to send emails to and coauthor documents with many of their first-degree LinkedIn connections.

To get started, type a connection’s name in the To or Cc field when composing a new message or sharing a document in Outlook on the web, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word Online, PowerPoint Online, and Excel Online.

Create more engaging content and get more done

New Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on the web features help you create beautiful content and save you time.

Make your presentations stand out with 3D objects on your Mac—Create stunning visuals and engaging content on your Mac with 3D embedded animations in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Improve comprehension and retention, increase engagement, and entertain audiences with content that seemingly comes to life. Select scenes and insert 3D models from a vast library of free content and rotate 3D objects to tell your story from every angle. 3D objects on Mac will start rolling out to Insiders next month.

Prepare for and schedule meetings faster with new intelligent features in Outlook on the web—Powered by Microsoft artificial intelligence (AI), Outlook on the web will now help you prepare for meetings by showing you relevant information you might need. It will also automatically suggest that you create a meeting directly from an email conversation and show you available days and times for people you include in a meeting invite. These features will begin rolling out to Outlook on the web users in the next few weeks.

Enhance security and streamline IT management

New capabilities help you better protect your organization and streamline IT management.

Ensure a healthy security posture with updates to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)—Last week, we announced that we’re extending our endpoint protection platform to support additional operating systems with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Mac, available now in limited preview. With this expansion, we’re also renaming the Windows Defender ATP platform to Microsoft Defender ATP. We also announced that we’re making Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capabilities available in Microsoft Defender ATP to discover, prioritize, and remediate threats and vulnerabilities—preview coming soon.

Access your security and investigation tools in the new Microsoft 365 security center—The Microsoft 365 security center is a new unified security experience that provides your security professionals with a dedicated workspace to manage and take advantage of the comprehensive security capabilities of Microsoft Threat Protection. The Microsoft 365 security center is now generally available. Get started with features and capabilities such as Secure Score, Advanced Hunting, and security alerts by visiting security.microsoft.com.

Manage your Microsoft 365 services with the new Microsoft 365 admin center—Last week, we announced that the new Microsoft 365 admin center will begin rolling out as the default experience for all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 admins. The Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to serve as a single entry point for managing services across Windows 10, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) in a more powerful, efficient, and personalized way.

Other updates

• Now, when opening links to Office 365 documents from the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook desktop apps, you will have the option to open them directly in the desktop apps instead of the web.
• Teams users can now add a Yammer tab to a Teams channel that loads a specified group or topic feed from Yammer.
• Microsoft Forms Pro, our new enterprise survey solution to professionally distribute surveys, is now available in public preview.
• OneNote now supports syncing edits of files embedded in your notebooks, eliminating the need to save copies of embedded files.
• The custom policies feature in Azure Active Directory B2C is now generally available and gives you more control over identity experiences to help you deliver personalized user journeys in your customer-facing applications.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in March—tools to enable teamwork and enhance security in the workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

For many companies, the specific needs of their business require a virtualized desktop experience. The reasons for virtualization vary. For example, for regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, a virtualized desktop experience ensures compliance regulations are met and access to sensitive data is securely managed. For mobile workforces and Firstline Workers, desktop virtualization makes managing and provisioning access to corporate data and apps easier. It also gives IT options in supporting scenarios such as giving access to specific apps to certain employees.

Introducing the Windows Virtual Desktop

While desktop virtualization helps in many business scenarios, it has historically been complex and expensive to deploy and manage. To solve some of these complexities, we have developed Windows Virtual Desktop with both IT and the user in mind.

Windows Virtual Desktop includes the following benefits:

• The only service to enable a multi-user Windows 10 experience, including compatibility with Microsoft Store and existing Windows line-of-business apps while delivering cost advantages previously only possible with server-based virtualization.
• The best service to virtualize Office 365 ProPlus running in multi-user virtual scenarios. Microsoft Office is the most virtualized app used, and we are committed to deliver the best possible virtual experience. In the months ahead, we will have more to share on our investments in the Office 365 virtualized experience for the Windows Virtual Desktop service.
• The only service to provide Windows 7 virtual desktop with free Extended Security Updates, giving you more options to support legacy apps while you transition to Windows 10.
• The most scalable service to deploy and manage Windows virtual machines, using Azure for compute, storage, rich diagnostics, advanced networking, connection brokering, and gateway. You no longer need to host, install, configure, and manage these components yourself—so you can deploy and scale in minutes.
• The most flexible service allowing you to virtualize both desktops and apps, meaning you can choose between providing your users the entire desktop experience or delivering only specific apps. When you deliver virtual apps to a Windows 10 endpoint, they are integrated seamlessly into the user experience.
• Deeply integrated with the security and management of Microsoft 365. The Microsoft 365 conditional access, data loss prevention, and integrated management are natively built in—providing the most secure and simplest solution for protecting and managing all your apps and data.

Windows Virtual Desktop ecosystem

Windows Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive virtualization solution. However, we recognize that there is a need for different capabilities to serve our broad set of customers. To accommodate this need, we have built Windows Virtual Desktop as a platform that can be easily extended and enriched by partners in the following ways:

• We will have many partners that extend the service through the Azure marketplace and are already working with leading partners, including Citrix, CloudJumper, FSLogix, Lakeside Software, Liquidware, People Tech Group, and ThinPrint.
• The extensive network of Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers will be able to offer Windows Virtual Desktop to their customers and offer additional value around the service.
• We are also working with partners such as Citrix to deeply integrate and build upon the Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities.

We will have more to share on our ecosystem approach in the near future.

Access to Windows Virtual Desktop

We’re excited to offer this service to Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education customers. Once you sign up for Windows Virtual Desktop, you only need to set up or use an existing Azure subscription to quickly deploy and manage your virtual desktops and apps. The only additional cost to you is for the storage and compute consumption from the virtual machines themselves, which will live in your Azure subscription. You will be able to take advantage of any of your existing Azure compute commitments, including Azure Virtual Machine Reserved Instances (RI).

We are working hard to put the finishing touches on a public preview, which will be available later this year. If you would like to participate in the public preview, you can register your interest now. In the meantime, please visit the Windows Virtual Desktop website to learn more, or contact your Microsoft account team or Microsoft partner.

The post Microsoft 365 adds modern desktop on Azure appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the rollout of recently redesigned and improved parental consent capabilities to our Microsoft account users in the European Union. This is an important step in giving our users the capabilities that are defined in the General Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR).

At Microsoft, we firmly believe that children are an important part of our user ecosystem, whether they’re playing Minecraft, chatting with their grandparents on Skype, or watching Peppa Pig on a Surface Book. We also believe it’s important that parents and guardians have suitable safeguards available. That’s why Microsoft has a long standing commitment to COPPA and similar regulations across the globe.

GDPR requires parents to provide their consent to process the personal data of children younger than 16 years old. EU member states may choose to set a lower age – which some have done – provided it isn’t lower than age 13. The U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and GDPR have a lot of overlap, so we have worked to combine and meet the stricter standards across the board.

To meet this requirement, our systems need to know which Microsoft account users are adults and which are not, using a method which is acceptable under the various legislative requirements.

We will do this by assuring we have a date of birth for all covered accounts. For anyone who has not provided this information, we are now starting to prompt them to provide their country and date of birth. Then, users who are younger than the age of consent for their country are prompted for parental consent when they sign into their account. (Note that they are given a short grace period to allow parents time to complete the verification process.)

To provide consent to their child’s account, parents can prove they are an adult by using a credit card. We also offer alternative age verification methods for parents who don’t have, or don’t want to use their credit card. Parents can contact Microsoft Customer Service and Support to verify age and identity based on appropriate government documents. After the grace period, access to the child’s account will be blocked until the parent completes the consent and verification process.

We realize that completing parental consent may be time consuming. As with many of our counterparts across the industry, we rely on the use of a credit card charge to verify that the user is an adult. The use of a credit card is one of regulatory approved mechanisms for proving adulthood. We have a long-standing commitment to work in the standards industry identity solutions that allow a parent to verify their identity in a secure, private and consistent way across the globe.

We have been closely monitoring the rollout and have been diligently investigating issues as they are raised. One of the trends we have seen is around adults who are being asked to provide parental consent. In all cases we have been able to track this back to the user, who are intentionally or mistakenly, entering a date of birth that classifies them as a minor. We are adding several mechanisms to help in this situation but unfortunately it does force us to verify the user is not a child. We will continue to study ways of improving this experience. Of course, our goal is to enable all users to give us their correct date of birth with as little friction as possible.

I hope you’ll take some time to check this new feature out as we continue to refine and improve our scenarios that support parents keeping their children safe online.

As always, we would love to receive any feedback or suggestions you have.

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Introducing Microsoft account age-related features for GDPR appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.