Developers are at the heart of this transformation, and at Microsoft, we’ve seen evidence of this in the apps you’ve built on top of the Microsoft Cloud. Today, we’re sharing new capabilities and tooling for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams that will empower developers to build solutions for the new way of work.

A new class of apps designed for hybrid work: collaborative apps

Hybrid, global work requires structural changes to how we build and interact with apps. We need a new class of apps that are centered around collaboration versus individual productivity. Apps that enable synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaboration with real-time meetings, ad hoc messaging, document collaboration, and the business processes automation—all in a single organizing layer.

Microsoft Teams was built with the very purpose of enabling collaboration. With over 145 million people using Teams every day, Teams has become the digital platform for work and learning. This creates a net new creative and economic opportunity for developers to build the next generation of apps where collaboration is at the core. We call this new class of applications collaborative apps.

With collaborative apps, end users can easily work with others to complete their projects at any time, from anywhere, and stay in the flow of work without needing to switch across multiple apps and data. And with Fluid components, end-users can create live, collaborative experiences that can be edited in real-time and shared across Teams and Office apps.

For developers, we want to make building collaborative apps easy: 

• Use your existing skills: Easily integrate your existing apps solutions with Teams and use standard web technologies, JavaScript, and just a few Teams APIs to integrate into Teams messages, channels, and meetings quickly and easily. Hundreds of independent software vendors (ISVs) like Service Now, Workday, Adobe, SAP, and more are doing this on our platform today.
• Simplify development: When you build an app for Teams, it works across many platforms—Windows, macOS, Web, iOS, Android, and Linux. Our goal is to significantly reduce the learning and work for developers to create the next wave of apps. Build once, deploy anywhere.
• Support developer choice: Microsoft Cloud offers a full stack of technologies to build collaborative apps. For developers building a new app, you can pick and choose technologies across Power Platform, Azure, Graph, and more based on your needs. 

Learn more about our vision of collaborative apps built on the Microsoft Cloud at our technical keynote session led by Jeff Teper and at the Into Focus session with Rajesh Jha.

Build collaborative apps with Microsoft Teams

To further help you build collaborative apps, we are sharing new integration opportunities and enhanced developer tools for the organizing layer, Teams.

Create apps for meetings enabling richer experiences

Providing a first-rate experience to every meeting participant, whether remote or in person, is important. We’re announcing new features that will enable you to build richer meeting experiences into your apps for Teams meetings.

• Shared stage integration: Available in preview, shared stage integration provides developers access to the main stage in a Teams meeting through a simple configuration in their app manifest. This provides a new surface to enable real-time, multi-user collaboration experiences for your meetings apps, such as whiteboarding, design, project boards, and more. 

• New meeting event APIs: Available in preview, enable the automation of meeting-related workflows through events such as meeting start and meeting end—with many more event APIs planned to come out later this year.

• Together mode extensibility: Coming this summer, Together mode extensibility lets you create and share your own custom scenes for Teams meetings. This provides an easy design experience, within the Developer Portal for Teams, so developers can craft custom scenes to make meetings more engaging and personalized for your organization. Here’s a custom scene built by our very own team that you can try out today!

Media APIs with resource-specific consent: Coming this summer, get real-time access to audio and video streams to build scenarios like transcription, translation, note taking, insights gathering, and more. These APIs will have resource specific consent enabled, so IT admins can view these permissions from the Teams Admin Center and validate that such apps have access to just the meetings they have been added to.

With the recently released Azure Communication Services interoperability with Teams, enable Teams users to easily interact with customers, partners, and other key people outside of your organization. When you build custom applications using Azure Communication Services such as voice, video, and chat, take advantage of built-in interoperability with Teams. This will enable Teams users to join meetings and interact with customers and partners using your custom application. Even better, with Azure Communication Services on the back-end connecting to Microsoft Teams, developers enjoy free VoIP and Chat usage for Teams app users.¹

Get started with Azure Communication Services with Teams interoperability available in preview.

Enabling cross-platform collaborative experiences

We built Teams to enable collaboration—so we’re sharing new features and capabilities that will allow users to collaborate together within Teams and across some of our other platforms.

Fluid components in Microsoft Teams is now available in private preview and will expand to more customers in the coming months. Fluid components in Teams chat allow end users to send a message with a table, action items, or a list that can be co-authored and edited by everyone in line and that is shareable across Office applications like Outlook. Quickly align across teams and get work done efficiently, by copy and pasting components across Teams chats. With Fluid components users can ideate, create, and decide together, while holding fewer meetings and minimizing the need for long chat threads.

Message extensions will soon be supported in Outlook: Providing a unified development experience for message extensions that work with Microsoft Teams and Outlook on the web. When users compose a message, they will be able to select a new menu of search-based message extensions to choose from. For example, a user may be able to compose an email and then select a message extension that surfaces tasks from their Teams app to send to teammates.

In addition to making it easier to build low-code apps, bots, and flows in and for Teams, we are making it easier to distribute low-code solutions to end-users. Soon you will be able to share bots built with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents broadly with security groups just like you already can for apps built with Power Apps. We also recently made it easier to take your apps, bots, flows, tables, and associated resources from one Microsoft Dataverse for Teams environment to another, ensuring that you can leverage these assets for new scenarios. We also continue to release more sample apps for Power Apps to help developers and customers get started with Power Apps.

Developer toolkits and resources to build and manage Teams apps

As developers are building the next generation of collaborative apps to support hybrid work, we are investing in tools and resources to help you be more productive.

With the enhanced Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, available in preview, we’re making it easier for any developer to build Teams apps that interoperate with the Microsoft stack and across desktop and mobile. Whether you use React, SharePoint Framework (SPFx), or .NET—the toolkit is meant to meet developers where you are with the frameworks you already know and use. Some of the key updates include: single-line authentication, Azure Functions integration, SPFx integration, single-line Microsoft Graph client, and streamlined hosting to an IDE and CLI.

Learn more about the Teams Toolkit and install it today from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Writing code is the first step, but developers also need to manage and configure your apps—and so we’re happy to announce the preview of the Developer Portal for Microsoft Teams. With the Developer Portal (formerly App Studio), developers receive a dedicated app management console available via web or within Teams, which can be used to register and configure their apps within a single, central location. New features include:

• Access through any web browser and device for easy navigation.
• Manage environment configurations, removing the need to manage multiple manifests in different environments.
• Collaborate with peers by giving read/write access to apps to others to collaborate and update apps.
• Ability for ISVs to link software as a service (SaaS) offers to their apps for new in-Teams purchase experience.
• Gather helpful insights on usage of apps (in preview).

Get started with the Developer Portal today.

As a platform, our success is tied to your success. We thank our partners who have built innovative apps on Teams. We’re committed to enabling our partners to be successful by helping users easily discover, deploy, and adopt apps. And we’re happy to share that coming soon, users will be able to purchase subscriptions of partner apps directly from the Teams Store and the Teams Admin Center (via invoice billing or credit card)—making it even simpler for users to acquire and adopt apps while providing our partners more monetization opportunities for your solutions.

Deliver experiences built around data, insights, and security with Microsoft Graph

While Teams is the organizing layer for collaborative apps, a key aspect of those app experiences is the rich sets of data from Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph manages the data generated from trillions of connections across communications, content, and people—with privacy, security, compliance, and search—powered by advanced machine learning.

Here are some of the exciting new features on Microsoft Graph that we’re happy to share with you today.

Earlier this year we introduced Microsoft Viva, to help organizations around the world optimize workforce experience, and help employees thrive in the new way of work. Viva was built to be a platform, so we’re announcing the first of many planned extensibility points—Viva Connection cards are now available in preview with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for developers who sign up for early access. With this release you can now use out-of-the-box or custom web parts to build Viva Community dashboards, news feeds, and employee-focused resources, optimized for any platform or device.

Sign up to get early access to the next release of SPFx for building native mobile experiences for Viva Connections.

When it comes to who can access your organization’s data, authentication and security are always top of mind—which is why many developers utilize the Microsoft Graph. It’s built with Azure Active Directory’s (Azure AD) enterprise-grade security and authentication capabilities at its core. New features we are sharing today:

• Continuous Access Evaluation: Available for preview, it allows Azure AD to continuously monitor resources for security threats and revoke access tokens based on critical events or policy evaluation, rather than simply relying on a short token lifetime. 
• New authentication methods API so you can manage access to the data and resources in your app, using primary, two-step, or step-up authentication, and invoke a self-service password reset process (SSPR).
• General availability of the external identities APIs so your apps can establish secure business-to-consumer (B2C) user interactions using predefined, configurable policies while your users can use their everyday accounts to register with your solution.

One of the most common requests we’ve heard from customers and partners is how to bring their data into Microsoft Graph to surface it across Microsoft 365. That’s why created Microsoft Graph connectors, which allow developers to onboard, index, and surface metadata to enrich existing data sets within Microsoft 365—unlocking participation in core experiences like Microsoft Search and eDiscovery. We’re excited to announce several updates coming soon to Microsoft Graph connectors including:

• Support for enrichment of people profile from non-AAD sources that will enable admins to map properties from Microsoft Graph connectors to Microsoft 365 people cards in your organization.
• New Jira and Confluence connectors built by Microsoft, available later this year.
• Expansion of Search results to Microsoft Teams mobile and desktop clients and the Windows Search Box.
• eDiscovery support for Graph connectors developer preview will be available in Summer 2021.

We’re also announcing that Microsoft Graph Data Connect is available in preview on Azure. Microsoft Graph data connect is a secure, high-throughput connector designed to copy select Microsoft 365 productivity datasets into your Azure tenant. It’s an ideal tool for developers and data scientists seeking to create organizational analytics, or training AI and machine learning models. While most Microsoft 365 products are offered on a per-user/per-month basis, we’re offering Microsoft Graph data connect as a metered service so that developers only need pay for the data consumed in your solutions.

Learn more about Microsoft Graph Data Connect in our technical docs.

Lastly, we want developers to build people-centric experiences that span across our entire Microsoft 365 platform, but we understand that writing separate code to work across our different products is not optimal. That’s why we’re happy to share the availability of Universal Actions for Adaptive Cards. Now, using Azure Bot Framework, you can build and implement a single adaptive card that is seamlessly synchronized across Teams and Outlook mobile and desktop clients.

Read the full Microsoft Graph blog to learn more.

Build modern Windows apps that work seamlessly on any endpoint

With the shift to remote work and now hybrid work—the PC has never been more essential. With over 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10, modern apps built on Windows have become critical to enabling users to stay productive. Windows is essential to keeping workers connected and productive and the opportunity for developers to push the boundaries and find new innovative ways to help people is now.

If you’re a Windows developer, then you already know the importance of Project Reunion. With Project Reunion, you get access to modern Windows technologies and new features, plus the best of existing desktop (Win32) features. You get coherent, modern interactions and UX with WinUI 3—and great system performance and battery life for your apps. That’s why we’re excited to announce the Project Reunion 0.8 preview so you can create and modernize your Windows apps seamlessly for both client and cloud endpoints. You can build experiences optimized for device hardware with hassle-free app discovery and management and future-proofed for Arm64. Some of the key updates include:

• Down–level support to Windows 10 version 1809 provides a large addressable market in the Windows ecosystem and is a long-term servicing branch.
• .NET 5 support helps meet developers where they are, including WPF and WinForms.
• WinUI 3 and WebView 2 support modern, compatible UI development using the same technologies Windows is built around.

Learn more and start modernizing your Windows apps with the Project Reunion 0.8 preview.

We know that many developers use command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). With Windows Terminal, developers receive a beautiful, sleek, modern command-line experience in Windows—and this year, we’re excited to share that it can now be set as the default terminal emulator, enabling all command-line apps to launch via Windows Terminal. We also released a new feature called Quake mode that allows you to open a new terminal window with a simple keyboard shortcut from anywhere in Windows.

Get started with new features in Windows Terminal.

You can also receive GUI app support on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) so that all the tools and workflows are seamlessly at your fingertips. Windows allows you to work your way with seamless integrations with any workflow with GUI apps, Linux, and GPU accelerated machine learning training.

Learn more about our updates on WSL.

More and more organizations are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline business processes—from simple repetitive tasks to complex workflows. In the month after Ignite, where we announced Power Automate Desktop was available at no additional cost for Windows 10 users, we saw a six times month-over-month increase in downloads. Which is a testament to the untapped opportunity no-code RPA offers to help customers automate repetitive tasks and workflows. Today, we are making it even easier to prioritize the processes best suited for automation. Process advisor, now generally available, is a process mining capability that provides insights into how people work and takes the guesswork out of automation. You can now map workflow tasks, discover organizational bottlenecks, and identify which time-consuming tasks are best suited for automation—all from within Microsoft Power Automate.

Learn more about Power Automate Desktop and process advisor.

Learn. Connect. Code.

We hope you have a wonderful time at Microsoft Build this week. We have a great set of sessions we’ve produced just for you that spans across the entire Microsoft 365 platform.

Happy coding!

Additional resources

Check out these additional resources to learn more about developing on Microsoft 365:

• Watch the Build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work digital Microsoft Build session.
• Take a look at our Microsoft Teams announcements for Microsoft Build blog to see a summary of the new Teams features.
• Take a look at our Microsoft 365 Developer announcements for Microsoft Build blog to see a summary of the new features across Microsoft 365.
• Microsoft Teams Developer Center to access docs, blogs, tools, and more to start building Teams apps.
• Microsoft Graph Developer Center to access docs, blogs, tools, and more to start building Microsoft Graph apps.
• Windows Developer Center to access docs, blogs, tools, and more to start building Windows apps.

¹VoIP and chat usage for Microsoft Teams endpoints are included with Microsoft 365 licenses.

The post Build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Productivity

Microsoft 365’s productivity tools use AI to help people create, collaborate, analyze, write, present, organize, and manage their work. Our innovations in core productivity are focused on two opportunities: creating entirely new experiences that take advantage of the latest innovations and breathing new life into familiar apps and experiences with powerful cloud services.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork. In response to requests from Teams customers, we’re pleased to announce Private channels, Multiwindow chats, meetings and calls, pinned channels, and task integration with To Do and Planner. We’re improving collaboration capabilities between Outlook and Teams, making it easy to send an email thread to a Teams channel for further discussion.

And we’re bringing the Yammer app into Teams, adding the ability for users to pin the app to the left-hand rail and making Teams the hub for both focused team collaboration and broad, open communities. We are also delivering new industry-tailored innovations and experiences including tools for Healthcare and Firstline workers. Healthcare providers can now schedule and conduct B2C virtual consultations through Teams with new Virtual Consults capabilities, and new features like SMS Sign-In and Global Sign-Out make it quick and easy for Firstline workers to securely access Teams from their mobile devices.

The New Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Bing are the web browser and search engine for business. We are pleased to announce that the general availability of the all-new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser is targeted for January 15, 2020. You can download the release candidate today.

The all-new Microsoft Edge offers the enterprise new tab page, where you’ll have direct access to your Microsoft 365 files, sites, and intranet search, making every tab you open a portal to productivity. And with the new Microsoft Search in Bing integration, searching for information at work is as easy as searching the web. You can now access files, people, office floorplans, acronym definitions, and more company information from across your Microsoft 365 ecosystem right from the search bar.

Finally, Microsoft Edge is now available across all your devices—including Windows 10, Windows 8x, Windows 7, macOS, iOS, and Android. Your passwords and favorites will roam seamlessly across all your devices—and with native Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) sign-in, you can search for work files right from your phone.

The Office mobile app

We all want to be able to work on the go from mobile devices and we’re always looking to simplify and improve the experience. Today, we’re announcing a new mobile experience for Office that combines three of the suite’s most popular apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—into a single go-to app for mobile productivity. Now you no longer need to download each app separately and will have everything you need to be productive on the go. And with the new Actions pane, you can intuitively complete a variety of common on-the-go tasks, such as creating and signing PDFs and sharing files between devices.

The new Office app uses the unique advantages of mobile devices to make content creation easier. You can snap a picture of a document and turn it into an editable word file, for instance, or transform tables from a printed page into an Excel spreadsheet. Launched today as a public preview, the Office app is available to Android users through the Google Play Store and to iOS users through Apple’s TestFlight program.

Fluid Framework

At Build 2019, we announced Fluid Framework, a new technology and set of experiences that will make collaboration seamless by breaking down the barriers between apps. It offers three key capabilities. First, experiences powered by the Fluid Framework will support multi-person coauthoring on web and document content at industry-leading speed and scale. Second, it provides a componentized document model that allows authors to deconstruct content into collaborative building blocks, use them across applications, and combine them in a new, more flexible kind of document. Third, the Fluid Framework makes room for intelligent agents to work alongside humans to translate text, fetch content, suggest edits, perform compliance checks, and more.

Today, we are announcing a public preview of the Fluid Framework end user experience and a private preview for developers. Over time, we expect these capabilities to light up in experiences across Microsoft 365, including within chat in Teams, mail in Outlook, portals in SharePoint, notes in OneNote, and documents in Office.

Cortana

We’re using AI to bring you personalized experiences in Outlook and making Cortana your personal productivity assistant. Today, we announced Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS to help you catch up and act on emails hands-free. With new natural voice and language recognition, Cortana can intelligently read out your new emails and share changes to your day. A masculine voice option is also now available with Play My Emails, further customizing your personal productivity assistant experience. We’re also announcing that Scheduler in Outlook is shipping in preview; you can use it to hand off scheduling meetings and coordinating participants to Cortana.

Beginning next month, Cortana can also help you prepare for your day by sending you a briefing email that includes a summary of your meetings, relevant documents for your day, and reminders to follow up on commitments you’ve made in email.

AI in Office

You’re busy and have a lot on your mind—and even more on your to-do list. We get it, and over the past year, we brought the magic of AI to Office to help you get more done. With innovations that include entering data into Excel with a digital pen, audio transcription in Word—which converts a new or existing audio file into a written transcription—and Presenter Coach in PowerPoint (in public preview for the web), which helps business professionals, teachers, and students become more effective presenters, we committed to enlightening Office with AI to help you be more productive.

Today our journey continues. Now Excel supports natural language queries, so users can now ask a question of their data, just like they would if they were talking to a person, and get quick answers—all without having to write a formula. Available to Office Insiders, this new natural language ability is another step towards making data insights and visualization more approachable and accessible to users with various levels of Excel experience.

We’re also making it easier for you to plan time away from work and continue to improve your work best practices. For example, MyAnalytics can help you prepare for time off by automating out of office notification setup, informing collaborators of your time away, resolving meetings you’ll miss, and more. Integrated into the Insights pane in Outlook, MyAnalytics is now able to encourage best practices like booking meetings promptly, adding an agenda, and meeting follow ups, and adding new AI-powered suggestions in Outlook that allow you to delay email delivery when working outside the recipient’s working hours.

Microsoft Project

Last week, we announced a major step toward achieving our new vision for project management with the general availability of the new Microsoft Project. The new Project offers a redesigned user experience that is simple and intuitive. Teams can quickly add new members and set up tasks, and then easily switch between grids, boards, or timeline (Gantt) charts to track progress. And because Project is part of the Microsoft 365 family, project teams can save time and do more with built-in connections to familiar apps like Teams and Office. In addition, the new service provides greater visibility into your projects and powerful tools to help you anticipate future needs. Create stunning interactive reports in Power BI, so you can visualize every aspect of each project at a glance. And get the big picture view of all your projects across your organization with visual, interactive cards.

Over the next year, we’ll release more exciting capabilities in the new Project, including resource management, budget analysis, and time and expense tracking. These powerful features will enable you to streamline more complex initiatives and help your business maximize ROI.

Knowledge

We’re excited to announce a brand-new investment area for Microsoft 365—knowledge. Moving your productivity infrastructure to the cloud has many benefits, including cost savings and streamlined operations. But it also unlocks new scenarios. Using AI, Microsoft 365 will now be able to identify, organize, and deliver knowledge across your organization—providing just the right information at just the right time. Productivity isn’t just about being more efficient. It’s also about aggregating and applying the collective knowledge of your organization so that together you can achieve more.

Project Cortex

Today, we’re announcing Project Cortex, the first new service in Microsoft 365 since the launch of Teams. Project Cortex uses AI to create a knowledge network that reasons over your organization’s data and automatically organizes it into shared topics like projects and customers. It also delivers relevant knowledge to people across your organization through topic cards and topic pages in the apps they use every day.

In addition, Project Cortex enables business process efficiency by turning your content into an interactive knowledge repository—with innovations in smart content ingestion—to analyze documents and extract metadata to create sophisticated content models; machine teaching, to allow subject matter experts to teach the system how to understand semi-structured content; and knowledge retrieval, to make it easy for people to access the valuable knowledge that’s so often locked away in documents, conversations, meetings, and videos. Building on the content you already have in SharePoint, Project Cortex connects content across Microsoft 365 and external systems and enables you to manage information and streamline processes with built-in security, compliance, and workflow.

The new Yammer

Yammer has been completely redesigned, with dozens of new capabilities that empower people to connect, build communities, and share knowledge across the organization. The new Yammer delivers a beautiful, intelligent experience across devices and introduces new integrations with Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. You can now use Yammer to broadcast live and on-demand events with a streamlined production option that uses webcams and desktop sharing. And you can also share video shorts directly from the Yammer mobile app. In addition, we’ve now centralized e-Discovery, data governance, and Yammer administration in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Microsoft Search

Today, we announced new innovations for Microsoft Search to enhance productivity; empower greater discovery of information, insights, and people; develop search driven applications; and extend the benefits of Microsoft Search to content outside of Microsoft 365. We recognize search works best when it brings together information from across your organization. Now with over 100 new Microsoft Search connectors from Microsoft and our partners, you can consolidate information from disparate system into a single search experience in Microsoft 365.

In addition, you can use our new Graph APIs to develop custom applications on top of Microsoft Search to tailor search to your organizations’ needs. We’re also bringing more powerful search experiences to Microsoft 365, including advanced people search using attributes and skills, video search, acronym search, and semantic search.

Microsoft Stream

Video is an increasingly powerful medium for capturing and sharing knowledge and learning. Microsoft Stream applies AI to unlock the content in video—including meeting recordings—with automatic transcription. AI also powers the new voice enhance feature, allowing you to focus on the spoken word by reducing background noise. And now people can create short videos from mobile devices and share in Yammer, Teams, and PowerApps, mainstreaming video as the new content type for communications and learning.

Workplace Analytics

Workplace Analytics is making it even easier to gain knowledge about the way people work and its impact on business and organizational outcomes. Business leaders will get at-a-glance insights to quickly understand and improve meeting culture, manager practices, organizational networks, and customer relationships. Industry benchmarks help contextualize common patterns that influence productivity, such as focus time and the ability to unplug outside of working hours. We also enriched the analyst toolset. AI-driven process analysis uses key words like “quarterly business review” to shed light on time and resources invested in specific business activities, enabling improvement over time.

Workflow

Workflow innovations empower you to streamline and improve business processes with little or no code. This approach not only saves time and money, it also ensures process automation is done by the people who are closest to the way things actually work.

Power Platform integration with Teams

With Power Platform, users can automate routine tasks, create custom apps, and easily engage with data. Power Platform integration with Teams makes these tools more discoverable and accessible to users and unlocks a conversational approach to streamlining productivity scenarios—from managing approvals directly in chat to pinning a custom app where a team needs it.

Today, we announced new features to enhance these capabilities. Power Apps creators can now publish their apps as Teams apps, and users will be able to pin those apps to their left rail in Teams. We’re also adding new Power Automate triggers and actions, allowing users to streamline the completion of common team and personal tasks, such as setting custom message actions and sending notifications. And coming soon, rich Power BI previews in Teams chat and an enhanced Power BI tab will allow users to see all their data in Teams and effortlessly discuss data, to speed data-driven decision making.

Office Scripts

Office Scripts simplifies clunky processes and automates repetitive tasks so you can work less while doing more. Today, we introduced scripting in Excel, a new process automation feature that allows you to record your actions inside a workbook and save it to a script. The saved script can then be integrated with Power Automate and scheduled to run automatically or integrate with a larger flow. Office Scripts will be available as a public preview by the end of the year.

Security

New AI-powered features make it easy for you to secure your organization’s valuable assets while empowering employees to collaborate freely.

Microsoft Authenticator

Any customer with any Azure AD plan, including a free plan, can now use the Microsoft Authenticator app for secure, passwordless access to both Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps. Passwords continue to be the weakest link in cybersecurity. With Azure AD and Microsoft Authenticator, enterprises can go passwordless for a great user experience and lower support costs while also implementing two-factor or multi-factor authentication (MFA) for greater security. Deploying MFA reduces the risk of phishing and other identity-based attacks by 99.9 percent and is the best thing you can do to improve your security. Customers with more than 150 seats can also now contact Microsoft to set up the capability via FastTrack.

New value in Azure AD

Azure AD Cloud Provisioning now makes it easier to move identities to the cloud by eliminating the need for an on-premises sync server though a lightweight on-premises agent. This enables provisioning from multiple, disconnected on-premises Active Directory (AD) forests and harnesses the power of the cloud to tackle common directory challenges like sync complexity and data transformation logic. This capability addresses one of the top needs for large enterprise customers that manage complex organizations or mergers and acquisitions and enables greater availability and decreases implementation and operation costs.

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

Microsoft Defender ATP endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities are now available in preview for Mac OS devices. We’ll be adding support for Linux servers next. This is part of our commitment to extending multi-platform coverage in our threat protection solutions. Our customers depend on Microsoft for world-class endpoint protection and EDR capabilities for Windows, and most large organizations manage a complex mix of technology platforms, including several operating systems. They need coverage for the full breadth of their environment. This ongoing investment gives them the breadth of coverage they need, with a single unified view for administrators and security operations professionals, enabling enterprise-wide investigation and response to security incidents.

Application Guard for Office

Now available in private preview, Application Guard for Office provides hardware-level and container-based protection against potentially malicious Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. It utilizes Microsoft Defender ATP to establish whether a document is either malicious or trusted.

Compliance

Simplify and automate risk management with new innovations that use AI as a force multiplier to keep you one step ahead of the increasingly complex compliance requirements and ever-evolving insider threats.

Insider Risk Management

A staggering 53 percent of organizations have experienced an insider attack in the last 12 months. The effort required to identify these risks and violations is not trivial, and it requires effective collaboration across security, human resources (HR), and legal—as well as a balanced approach across privacy and risk management. Today, we announced Insider Risk Management in Microsoft 365 to help organizations quickly identify and remediate insider threats, risks, and code of conduct policy violations across Office, Windows, Azure and third-party apps such as HR systems. Insider Risk Management leverages the Microsoft Graph and other services to intelligently correlate multiple signals to identify hidden patterns and potential risks, and provide real-time insight into file activity, communications sentiment, and abnormal user behaviors. Insider Risk Management includes a set of configurable playbooks tailored specifically for risks—such as digital IP theft and confidentiality breach—to help you effectively identify threats and take action. We also designed for privacy, so display names for risky users can be anonymized by default at early stages of investigation.

Compliance Score

It’s more important than ever to have the knowledge and tools you need to work across compliance and risk management teams to effectively assess and monitor risks. To help you implement more effective data protection controls, we’re announcing the public preview of Microsoft Compliance Score, which enables you to simplify and automate risk assessments. With Microsoft Compliance Score, you can now continuously assess and monitor data protection controls, get clear guidance on how to improve the score, and leverage the built-in control mapping to scale your compliance efforts across regulations and standards.

Even if you’re not an expert in complex regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or ISO 27001, you can still quickly learn the actions needed for compliance and contribute towards progress. We also introduced new assessments for California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and for other GDPR-style regulations. Compliance Score is available now in public preview for all Microsoft 365 enterprise plans in the Microsoft 365 compliance center.

Management

With new management innovations, Microsoft 365 puts the cloud and AI to work to help you set-up, secure, monitor, and manage all your devices.

Microsoft Endpoint Manager

Microsoft Endpoint Manager is an integrated solution to centrally and securely manage all the endpoints in your technology estate. Bringing together Microsoft Intune and System Center Configuration Manager functionality and data—plus new intelligent actions and analytics—Endpoint Manager delivers seamless, end-to-end management for Windows, Android and Apple devices, apps, and policies without the complexity of a migration or disruption to productivity. Look for Microsoft Endpoint Manager features and experiences to appear in the product over the coming months. And, to help ensure that all our customers are able to take advantage of Microsoft Endpoint Manager, we’re making Intune available to our existing SCCM customers for Windows PC management. Starting December 1, 2019, you can co-manage these devices in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and start using cloud-powered features like Autopilot and Desktop Analytics.

Microsoft Productivity Score

Microsoft Productivity Score focuses on two areas: the Employee experience and the Technology experience. Both provide visibility into how your organization works, insights to identify where you can enable improved experiences, and actions you can take to update skills and systems—so everyone can do their best work.

The Employee experience shows you how Microsoft 365 is helping to create a productive and engaged workforce. By quantifying how people are collaborating on content, working from anywhere, developing a meeting culture, and communicating with each other, you can see the different ways that work gets done. Meanwhile, the Technology experience provides insights by assessing policies, device settings, and hardware and application performance within the organizational environment and recommends actions in Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Managed Meeting Rooms

Productive meetings are essential to success in the modern workplace. Coupled with the rise in remote collaboration, business leaders increasingly associate more effective meetings with having the right meeting room technology and environment. Today, we’re announcing a private preview of Managed Meeting Rooms from Microsoft, a new offer for managing meeting rooms. This cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service ensures that Teams meeting rooms are secured, up to date, and proactively monitored for a great in-room experience. To date, we’ve been working with more than 100 customers to manage more than 1,500 meeting rooms. Now, a private preview is opening this experience to more of you! If you’re interested in participating, let us know.

Global reader

You told us you want to improve your security posture by scoping admin permissions to only those needed to do their jobs. In fact, this is one of our top customer requests. We’re announcing new admin roles in Azure AD and the Microsoft 365 admin center to help you reduce the number of Global admins in your organization. For example, the Global reader role lets an admin view information across Microsoft 365, but does not allow the admin to change any settings or data. Now you can assign the Global reader role to admins in your organization to support reporting, planning, audits, and investigations, without having to grant a higher level of privileges than is necessary. The Global reader role can also be combined with other administrative roles (for example, Exchange admin) to more granularly control and scope the assignment of admin privileges in your organization.

Onboarding Hub

You also told us that you want guidance from Microsoft for improving security and increasing admin efficiency. The Onboarding Hub, in the Microsoft 365 admin center’s setup area, includes new experiences to help you discover, learn about, and use features across Microsoft 365, including Azure AD and other admin portals such as the Security and Compliance Center. We provide intelligent recommendations—based on your current configuration and admin activities—to help you improve your security posture, maintain compliance with data regulations, keep apps up to date, and reduce costs.

New recommendations in the Microsoft 365 admin center (admin.microsoft.com).

Using the Global reader role to access the Onboarding Hub is a powerful and safe way to perform planning and auditing activities for Microsoft 365, as a Global reader can view and assess the recommendations, learn about implementation steps and user impact, and see current administrative assignments without making any tenant or configuration changes.

Office 365 Groups

Office 365 Groups is the membership service that powers collaboration and drives teamwork across Microsoft 365. It’s a core underpinning of more than 20 applications, including Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, and more. We’re pleased to announce a number of improvements to the Groups admin experience with new lifecycle management and compliance capabilities, including the ability to quickly create teams for a group, browse and restore deleted groups, edit the group email alias, and use sensitivity labels. You can also enable self-service group creation and management, which empowers users to create teams and Yammer channels that are controlled with guardrails and policies set by IT.

Send us your feedback

Every innovation we make with Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud, is designed to help you and your organization unlock new forms of productivity to achieve more. We’re excited to share these new features with you, and look forward to your feedback and insights.

The post From new Microsoft Teams experiences to the all-new Project Cortex—here’s what’s coming soon to Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Underpinning all of this innovation is the Microsoft Graph, our customers’ secure and compliant record of their productivity activity in the Microsoft Cloud. It helps developers create people-centered, cross-platform experiences by providing context about an organization’s work that flows across documents, apps, and devices. The Microsoft Graph powers the most important components of Microsoft 365, from “born in the cloud” experiences like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Search, and MyAnalytics, to modern, cloud-connected collaboration in existing apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Read on for the latest updates to these experiences and the underlying developer technologies that make them possible.

Leverage the power of the open web with Microsoft Edge, whether you’re browsing or developing

In December, we announced our intention to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop. We’re excited to work with the larger Chromium open source community to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers. Today at Build, we’re announcing a host of new features for the next version of Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 that address some of the fundamental frustrations with browsers today, including:

• Internet Explorer mode—Internet Explorer mode integrates Internet Explorer directly into the new Microsoft Edge via a new tab. This allows businesses to run legacy Internet Explorer-based apps in a modern browser.
• Privacy Tools—Additional privacy controls which allow customers to choose from 3 levels of privacy in Microsoft Edge—Unrestricted, Balanced, and Strict. Depending on which option you pick, Microsoft Edge adjusts how third parties can track you across the web, giving customers more choice and transparency for a more personalized experience.
• Collections—Addressing the information overload customers feel with the web today, Collections allows you to collect, organize, share and export content more efficiently and with Office integration.

And for developers who have built Chromium compatible websites or extensions, we’re ensuring they’ll see the same compatibility in the Edge browser without additional work. These features and more will begin to roll out over time as we get closer to the broader launch of the next version of Microsoft Edge. To download the latest preview builds, visit the Microsoft Edge Insider site. For more detail on today’s announcements, please visit our developer blog.

A new class of shared, interactive web experiences powered by the Fluid Framework

We’re also committed to making the web more productive and collaborative for all browsers. Today we’re announcing the Fluid Framework, a developer technology for building a new class of shared, interactive experiences on the web. It offers three key capabilities. First, experiences powered by the Fluid Framework will support multi-person coauthoring on web and document content at a speed and scale not yet achieved in the industry. Second, it provides a componentized document model that allows authors to deconstruct content into collaborative building blocks, use them across applications, and combine them in a new, more flexible kind of document. Third, the Fluid Framework makes room for intelligent agents to work alongside humans to translate text, fetch content, suggest edits, perform compliance checks, and more. We’ll make this technology broadly available to developers and integrate it into Microsoft 365 experiences like Word, Teams, and Outlook to transform the way that you work with these tools. We will launch both the software developer kit and the first experiences powered by the Fluid Framework later this year.

Moving from commands to conversations: a new approach to intelligent agents

At Build this morning, we demonstrated a new approach to virtual agents that moves beyond the restrictions of self-contained commands to a truly conversational experience. The traditional approach to virtual agents relies on a manually curated set of skills or intents to map what a person says to the appropriate action in a back-end system. As a result, virtual agents today can’t combine skills or carry the context of one interaction into the next.

Last year, Microsoft acquired a company called Semantic Machines, bringing with it some of the world’s leaders in conversational AI. Together with Microsoft researchers, we’ve built breakthrough new conversational AI technology that will power a new class of multi-turn, multi-domain, and multi-agent experiences. Our technology builds up memory from turn to turn to let you get more done. It crosses skill boundaries, connecting together back-end services, both within Microsoft and externally. And it’s aimed towards a future where every organization has their own agents with their own unique contexts, just like they have their own websites and apps today, and where those agents can seamlessly interoperate.

This new conversational engine will be integrated into Cortana and made available to developers through the Bot Framework, as well as other Azure surfaces and beyond, powering conversational experiences across the company and our customer ecosystem.

Derive deep insights about effective work patterns with Microsoft Graph data connect

Data can be a powerful enabler of cultural change and new ways to work. Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Graph data connect, a service that helps organizations bring together productivity data from the Microsoft Graph with their own business data securely and at scale using Azure Data Factory. The Microsoft Graph is an incredible resource to help individuals and organizations understand how they work. But without data on the context and outcomes of their work—like sales or line of business performance—it’s an incomplete picture. By allowing organizations to maintain control of their data, while bringing it together in a secure and compliant way, data connect lets organizations derive deep insights about effective work patterns that they can promote throughout their organization. Visit this blog post to learn more about all of the Microsoft Graph announcements at Build 2019.

Use Microsoft Search to tap into your organization’s collective knowledge

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Search, rolling out to customers now. The collective knowledge of your organization is one of its most powerful tools, and Microsoft Search provides the ability to tap into it without leaving the flow of your work. You’ll now find the Search box in the same prominent place across Microsoft 365 experiences you use daily, including Office, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Windows, and Bing. And through a deep connection to the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Search will help you discover relevant people, content, commands, and activities from across Microsoft 365 where and when you need them—from your desktop at work to your mobile device when you’re on the move. Visit this blog post to learn more about Microsoft Search.

Minimize distractions and stay focused at work with MyAnalytics

In a modern workplace where back to back meetings and urgent requests are the norm, you might have difficulty finding the time, space, and concentration required to do your best work. This summer, we’re launching a preview of new Microsoft 365 capabilities to help you prioritize focus time—blocks of time reserved on your calendar for deep, uninterrupted work. Through the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft 365 experiences like Microsoft Teams will automatically protect scheduled focus times by holding notifications, so you can work without distractions. And to help you establish a focus time routine, MyAnalytics will offer a focus plan that gives you the flexibility to have daily focus time booked automatically based on your availability and surfaces AI-powered suggestions to book focus time for outstanding tasks as you work in Outlook.

Shareable video.

Act swiftly with Actionable Messages in Outlook and inline tasks in Word

Prompt action is essential in an increasingly fast-moving world. Available now, developers can build Actionable Messages for Outlook mobile by taking advantage of Adaptive Cards in Outlook. Actionable Messages enable people to take action now, without having to switch apps—making it faster to get things done. With an Actionable Message, you can approve expense reports, grant document access, book focus time, or answer quick surveys right from your inbox. In addition, you can now give others a digital tap on the shoulder with an @mention inline in a Word document assigning colleague a task, asking a question, or prompting a quick review without ever leaving the document. Look for inline tasks in Word Online in late summer.

Ideas in Word: your AI-powered editor in the cloud

Throughout Microsoft 365 we use AI to make people more productive by extending their capabilities and supporting their work. Today we’re announcing Ideas in Word, giving every Word user an AI-powered editor in the cloud. Ideas follows along as you write and provides intelligent suggestions to make your writing more concise, readable, and inclusive. It can even use machine learning to suggest a rewrite for a tricky phrase. Ideas will also help when you’re reading documents by providing estimated reading times, extracting key points, and decoding acronyms using data from the Microsoft Graph. A preview of Ideas is coming to Word Online this June. To learn more about AI in Office and throughout Microsoft, read the Microsoft AI blog.

Microsoft Teams: a hub for all your teams’ apps

Microsoft Teams will also be a central topic in the Microsoft 365 presence at Build this year—both as an app and as a developer platform. It plays a crucial role as the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365, and it’s now used by more than 500,000 organizations as a result. We continue to innovate with Teams, adding recent features like live captions, customized backgrounds, data loss protection, and a magical whiteboard camera. And today we’re announcing support for new policies that allow IT administrators to customize their users’ Teams experience by deploying and pinning third-party and line-of-business apps to specific roles or departments.

New developer tools for Microsoft 365

Finally, none of this would be possible without developers creating experiences for the future of work. Kevin Gallo, Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Developer Platform, talks about the new developer tools across Microsoft 365 in more depth in this blog post. We’re delivering exciting new tools for developers, like the brand-new Windows Terminal that’s modernized to support how developers build today. The new React Native for Windows delivers a simple way for developers to write cross platform web code with a native feel. And Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 improves Linux compatibility, and can run Docker containers natively to simplify development.

We’re excited to share the latest updates to Microsoft 365 experiences and the developer platform. To see these technologies in action, watch the Vision Keynote, Microsoft 365 Tech Keynote, and a host of Microsoft 365 sessions on the Build 2019 site. We can’t wait to see what you build.

The post New people-centered experiences in Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We’re expanding Teams with new capabilities to digitally empower the Firstline Workforce. Today’s news includes: a customizable mobile experience with mobile-only features such as location sharing, a Graph API for the Shifts scheduling tool, which provides integration between Teams and workforce management systems, and the new Praise feature that makes it easy for managers and employees to recognize their coworkers right within Teams.

Here’s a look at what’s new:

Enable Firstline Workers to communicate and collaborate effectively with a customizable Teams mobile experience and new mobile features

For Firstline Workers, such as retail associates, flight crew members, and field service workers, being mobile is the nature of the job. Because these employees often need to share information with others inside their organization, many have resorted to using unsecure consumer chat apps to communicate with coworkers. But this poses security and compliance risks, as well as process inefficiencies. Today, we are announcing a new customizable mobile Teams experience that gives Firstline Workers the tools they need to communicate and collaborate effectively on the go. It’s simple, familiar, and secure, with several new mobile-only features that have particular relevance for Firstline Workers, including location sharing and smart camera, as well as the ability to record and share audio messages. The customizable mobile experience is available starting today.

Workers need different capabilities depending on their role. While some might need access to private chats, calendars, and calls, others may only need access to teams and channels. IT administrators can now give each employee role-based access to the primary Teams features they need. This capability can be used for employees in any role, with the option for IT to create a custom policy or use the newly available Firstline Worker configuration policy template. Employees can further customize their experience by pinning the modules they need most from their module tray to their navigation bar.

Customizable mobile Teams experience and new mobile features: Keep all conversations in one place (left), share location and record audio messages (middle), and customize the navigation menu (right).

Integrate workforce management systems with Teams using a new API

Many companies rely on workforce management systems to handle important operational tasks related to their Firstline Workforce, such as shift scheduling, payroll, benefits, time, and attendance. We’re working on a set of new APIs that enable organizations to integrate their existing workforce management systems with Teams.

The first API is the Graph API for Shifts, the schedule management tool in Teams. With Shifts now available in Teams for all customers, the new API makes integration between Shifts and enterprise scheduling systems possible, enabling seamless access to workforce management systems for managers and employees, right from Teams. The Graph API for Shifts will be in public preview this quarter.

With Shifts, managers can easily plan shift schedules, and team members can review schedules and make schedule change requests, all in real time.

Keep your Firstline Workers engaged and motivated with new Praise feature

Firstline Workers such as retail associates play a key role in representing a company’s brand, but this segment of the workforce experiences some of the highest turnover rates. Taking steps to engage and recognize employees can go a long way to improving their satisfaction and reducing turnover. The new Praise tool, rolling out this quarter, gives managers and employees a simple way to recognize coworkers, right in the Teams app where the whole team can see it.

With Praise, share badges to celebrate every success, communicate your appreciation with your team members, and foster greater comradery.

Next week, members of the Microsoft team will be at NRF 2019, the annual retail industry conference. Visit us in booth #3301. Also, please visit our Teams for Firstline Workers page to learn more about how Teams can empower your Firstline Workforce.

The post 3 new ways Microsoft Teams empowers Firstline Workers to achieve more appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we are announcing upcoming capabilities that, along with our recent investments, combine the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with content stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint to help you be more productive, make more informed decisions, and keep more secure.

Be more productive

A key to being productive is leveraging existing content so you’re not reinventing the wheel. Historically this has been challenging due to the exponential growth of digital content, particularly with image, video, and audio files. Until now, these rich file types have been cumbersome to manage and painful to sift through to find what you need, when you need it.

Video and audio transcription—Beginning later this year, automated transcription services will be natively available for video and audio files in OneDrive and SharePoint using the same AI technology available in Microsoft Stream. While viewing a video or listening to an audio file, a full transcript (improving both accessibility and search) will show directly in our industry-leading viewer, which supports over 320 different file types. This will help you utilize your personal video and audio assets, as well as collaborate with others to produce your best work.

Once you’re ready to make a video broadly available across the organization, you can upload and publish to Microsoft Stream. You’ll continue to get transcription services plus other AI driven capabilities, including in-video face detection and automatic captions. Importantly, your audio and video content never leaves the Microsoft Cloud; it is not passed through potentially costly and insecure third-party services.

Searching audio, video, and images—Announced last September, we are unlocking the value of photos and images stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. Using native, secure AI, we determine where photos were taken, recognize objects, and extract text in photos. This recognition and text extraction allows you to search for images as easily as you search for documents. For example, you could search a folder of scanned receipts for the receipt that mentions “sushi.” Video and audio files also become fully searchable thanks to the transcription services described earlier.

Intelligent files recommendations—Later this year, we’ll introduce a new files view to OneDrive and the Office.com home page to recommend relevant files to you. Suggested files are based on the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph and its understanding of how you work, who you work with, and activity on content shared with you across Microsoft 365. This deep understanding of user behavior and relationships among coworkers is unique to Microsoft 365 and continues to be enriched as you collaborate on content in OneDrive and SharePoint.

AI also makes it easier to create new documents by reusing existing content. The Tap feature in Word 2016 and Outlook 2016 intelligently recommends content stored in OneDrive and SharePoint by understanding the context of what you are working on. This allows you to leverage and repurpose a paragraph, table, graphic, chart, or more from another file while working on a new document or email.

Make more informed decisions

OneDrive and SharePoint make your life easier thanks to innovative AI that helps you make more informed decisions while working with content.

File insights—Earlier this year, we rolled out an updated file card, providing access statistics for any file stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. This allows you to see who has looked at the file and what they have been doing, and it helps you decide your next action. Later this year, we’ll bring these valuable file statistics directly into the native Office application experience.

Additionally, we’ll introduce additional insights to the file card with “Inside look,” giving you important information at a glance—including time to read and key points from the document, so you can choose to dive in deeper or save it for later.

Intelligent sharing—Later this year, you’ll have the option to easily share relevant content with meeting attendees. For instance, if you just presented a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll be prompted to share it with the other attendees once the meeting is over. In the OneDrive mobile app, we’ll automatically prompt you to share photos taken during the same meeting, perhaps of a whiteboard where you brainstormed new ideas with your colleagues—all based on your Outlook calendar. This type of real-world intelligence allows you to quickly keep everyone informed and move on to your next task and is exclusively available when you store your content in OneDrive and SharePoint.

Data insights—Earlier this year at the SharePoint Virtual Summit, we showed you how you could immediately enrich your OneDrive and SharePoint content with intelligence by leveraging the flexibility of Microsoft Flow and the power of Azure Cognitive Services. Since these services are powered by Microsoft Azure, you can get sentiment analysis, key word extraction, and even custom image recognition—all while keeping your content secure in the Microsoft Cloud and away from potentially costly and insecure third-party services. Additionally, you can use information provided by these cognitive services to set up custom workflows to organize images, trigger notifications, or invoke more extensive business processes directly in OneDrive and SharePoint with deep integration to Microsoft Flow.

Keep more secure

When your files are stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, AI also helps to protect your content, keep you compliant, and thwart malicious attacks.

OneDrive files restore—Earlier this year, we released OneDrive files restore including integration with Windows Defender Antivirus for business and personal users to protect you from ransomware attacks by identifying breaches and guiding you through remediation and file recovery. With a full 30 days of file history and sophisticated machine learning to help us spot potential attacks early, OneDrive gives you peace of mind for every file you store. Best of all, moving your files to OneDrive has never been easier thanks to Known Folder Move.

Intelligent compliance—In addition to being able to apply native data loss prevention (DLP) policies and conduct native eDiscovery searches on textual content stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, with the innovations discussed above, we’re making it even easier to use these key compliance capabilities with audio, video, and images later this year. Soon you’ll be able to leverage the text extracted from photos and audio/video transcriptions to automatically apply these policies and protect this content.

Get started

As you can see, by leveraging Microsoft’s industry-leading investments in AI we believe we have made OneDrive and SharePoint in Microsoft 365 the smartest place to store your content. In fact, Microsoft is recognized as a Leader by Gartner in both their Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms and Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms reports. It was also recognized by Forrester in both their cloud and hybrid Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms Q4 2017 reports.

You can start realizing these benefits and more by moving your content to OneDrive and SharePoint today, just as Fortune 500 customers MGM Resorts International, Walmart, Johnson Controls International, and Textron are doing. You’ll automatically get more value as we continue to invest in these and other new AI capabilities to help you achieve more.

Microsoft has a bold vision to transform content collaboration for the modern workplace inclusive of files, dynamic web sites and portals, streaming video, AI, and mixed reality, while reducing costs and improving compliance and security. Be sure to join us at Microsoft Ignite from September 24–28, 2018 in Orlando, Florida, or on-demand, where we’ll continue to unveil how AI will accelerate content collaboration in the modern workplace.

Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms, Monica Basso, Michael Woodbridge, Karen Hobert, July 3, 2018.
Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Karen Hobert, Michael Woodbridge, Joe Mariano, and Gavin Tay, October 5, 2017.

Gartner Disclaimer:
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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For years, we have been at Build talking about the huge opportunity with Windows and Office as developer platforms. In fact, today we have 135 million commercial monthly active users of Office 365 and nearly 700 million Windows 10–connected devices.

But Microsoft’s mission is fundamentally dependent on how well we TOGETHER can harness the power of both Windows and Office in the Microsoft 365 platform.

Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) as a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees.

In case you’re not already familiar, Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) as a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees. As the largest productivity platform in the world, it’s a vital part of the intelligent edge—and it enables developers to create beneficial experiences that work elegantly across many different device types and many different computing “senses”—including vision and voice.

Today, many of you would consider yourselves Windows or Office developers. Or web developers who target Windows and Office users. Or even mobile developers asking how you might align a mobile experience with other devices. When you leave Build 2018 this week, we hope you consider yourselves Microsoft 365 developers.

New Microsoft 365 experiences empower customers to achieve more

This week, we’re introducing a set of features and updates across a variety of devices and platforms and a better blending between web and application environments for users and developers. Last year at Build, you heard us talk about our commitment to meeting our customers where they are—across platforms. We’re expanding this work to not only bring more Microsoft 365 services across platforms and into applications, but to better connect customers’ existing PC experiences with their phones, helping to increase engagement for developers. These announcements include:

• A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos, and notifications. Imagine being able to quickly drag and drop your phone’s photos into a document on your PC in one swift movement—without having to take your phone out of your pocket. This new experience will begin to roll out in the Windows Insider Program soon.

A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos, and notifications.

• The updated Microsoft Launcher application on Android that will support Enterprise customers with easy access to line of business applications via Microsoft Intune. Microsoft Launcher on Android will also support Timeline for cross-device application launching. Today, your Microsoft Edge browsing sessions on your iPhone or iPad are included in the Timeline experience on your Windows 10 PC. Tomorrow, we’ll show how later this year you’ll be able to access that same timeline on your iPhone with Microsoft Edge.

The updated Microsoft Launcher application on Android will support Enterprise customers with easy access to line of business applications via Microsoft Intune.

Timeline is coming to Microsoft Launcher on Android and to Microsoft Edge on iPhone and iPad.

• Updates to Sets, an easier way to organize your stuff and get back to what you were doing. With Sets, what belongs together stays together, making it easier and faster to create and be productive. As developers, your Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application will work with Sets from the start, helping to keep your customers engaged. And with a few simple changes, your Win32 or web applications are supported within Sets as well.

Updates to Sets, an easier way to organize your stuff and get back to what you were doing.

• Microsoft 365 support of Adaptive Cards, helping developers create rich interactive content within conversations. As a result, end users can approve expense reports or comment on an issue in GitHub directly within an Outlook email or Teams chat. Building on Adaptive Cards, we’re also bringing payments to Outlook. With Microsoft Pay, you’ll be able to quickly and securely pay bills and invoices right from your inbox. Several Microsoft partners will announce support for Microsoft Pay at Build.

Microsoft 365 support of Adaptive Cards helps developers create rich interactive content within conversations.

New opportunities for developers with Microsoft 365

Core to the Microsoft 365 platform is the Microsoft Graph. It helps developers connect the dots between people, conversations, schedules, and content within the Microsoft Cloud. We encourage you to tap into the power of the Microsoft Graph to gain unprecedented context and insights to build smarter apps. Tomorrow, we will talk about new opportunities with the Microsoft Graph and new tools with Microsoft 365 that give you the flexibility to design and create in the languages and frameworks of your choice, empowering you to create smarter ways for people to work. These announcements include:

• New and updated Microsoft Teams APIs in the Microsoft Graph and support for organization-specific applications in Teams, allowing developers to create tailored, intelligent experiences based on the unique needs of a business or industry. Companies can also publish custom apps to the Teams app store.
• Deeper SharePoint integration into Microsoft Teams, enabling people to pin a SharePoint page directly into a Teams channel to enable deeper collaboration. Developers can use modern script-based frameworks like React within your projects to add more pieces that can be added and organized within SharePoint pages.
• Updates helping you support the Fluent Design System, so you can create immersive, deeply engaging experiences with Microsoft’s updated design language. Now every organization can make beautiful solutions that empower your customers to do more. With UWP XAML Islands, you can access the more capable, flexible, powerful XAML controls regardless which UI stack you use—whether it’s Windows Forms, WPF, or native Win32.

• .NET Core 3.0, which allows developers to use the latest version of .NET and have your application run in a standalone .NET environment, so you can build amazing app experiences that don’t impact your broader organizational infrastructure. This allows desktop developers to take advantage of side-by-side install of their applications. That means that system-wide updates of .NET will not impact running applications.
• MSIX, a complete containerization solution providing a simple way to convert large catalogs of applications. It inherits all the great features from UWP, including reliable, robust installation and updating, as well as a managed security model and support for both enterprise management and the Microsoft Store.
• New Azure Machine Learning and JavaScript custom functions that let developers and organizations create your own powerful additions to Excel’s catalog of formulas.
• Windows Machine Learning, a new platform, which enables developers to easily develop Machine Learning models in the intelligent cloud—and then deploy them offline and in high-performance to the PC platform.

If you are a developer maintaining Windows desktop applications, you can now use all of these modern tools with your existing investment across Win32, WPF, and Windows Forms applications. I’ll also share tomorrow our commitment to maximize your opportunity with Microsoft Store by providing up to 95 percent share of the revenue for your consumer apps, excluding games. For more details on the updates to Microsoft Store, check out this blog post. For more detail on the developer opportunities I’ve mentioned here, check out Kevin Gallo’s blog post.

Some of the things we’re talking about at Build this week are available for developers to use and try out now, while other experiences will come during the next year.

All of the things we’re talking about give you the power to build applications the way you want, with the most flexibility to make the right choices for your end users. This is an exciting time: Microsoft 365 enables you to achieve more with your current skillset and your current tools. And that in turn empowers you to help your users achieve more.

Thank you for building with us. I can’t wait to see what you’ll build in 2019!

The post Microsoft 365 empowers developers to build intelligent apps for where and how the world works appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We’re launching into 2018 by bringing great new value to Office 365 subscribers, with updates that enhance how teams work together and unlock new ways to create and manage content across devices. Read on for details.

Get more done in Microsoft Teams

New features for Microsoft Teams enable you to interact with apps in new ways, customize your personal workspace, and take quick actions.

Find and use apps in new ways—Now you can include interactive cards from apps in conversations the same way you would add an emoji or GIF. With one click, you can bring important information, like a task from Trello, into a channel conversation or chat. Finding new apps and services in Teams is now easier with the new Store, where you can search for apps by name or category, such as “Project management” or “Analytics & BI.”

Command apps and take quick actions across Teams—We also introduced the new command box in Microsoft Teams, a single point of entry that integrates your search and command experiences. Now you can quickly interact with apps, perform tasks, and navigate throughout Teams directly from the command box, in addition to searching across people, messages, files, and apps.

Work together more effectively with updates to iOS and Mac

New Office 365 capabilities for iOS and Mac enhance how teams create content together, make it easier to produce advanced documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from anywhere, and introduce new ways to search, preview, and interact with files.

Co-authoring for iOS and Mac—We made it easier for individuals to work together across devices with the general availability of co-authoring in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for iOS and Mac. Now, whether you work on a Mac, PC, or mobile device, you’ll know who else is working with you in a document, see where they’re working, and view changes. Co-authoring is already available on the Office desktop applications for Windows, Office for Android, and Office Online. Learn more at the Microsoft Tech Community.

Automatically save your work on Mac—Today also marks the general availability of AutoSave in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Mac for Office 365 subscribers who store their documents in OneDrive and SharePoint. Whether you’re working alone or with others, your latest changes are now automatically stored in the cloud, so you never need to worry about hitting the Save button again. You can also view and restore content from earlier versions of the document at any time with support for version history.

Drag and drop content and files on iOS—The Office and OneDrive iOS apps now support drag and drop for content and files. One of the most common and powerful tasks when creating content is integrating photos, graphs, and other objects from a variety of sources. Now Office 365 subscribers on iPad and iPhone can easily drag and drop content into documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from other Office apps or OneDrive. Support for drag and drop for iOS also enables you to move files to and from OneDrive and other sources—such as SharePoint or iMessage—making it easier to organize content scattered across different apps and services.

Access OneDrive files from more iOS apps—OneDrive for iOS now natively supports the new iOS 11 Files app. This means iPhone and iPad users can upload, access, edit, and save content to OneDrive or SharePoint from any iOS app that supports File app integration—a top requested feature. Users can also tag their favorite OneDrive and SharePoint files from within the Files app, making it easier to find and use the content that matters to you.

Preview more file types with OneDrive for iOS—We redesigned the OneDrive for iOS app with a more detailed list view, making it easier to scan file names, see relevant information, and sort files by specific attributes. The updated OneDrive for iOS app also creates crisp thumbnails and supports previews for over 130 file types, including Adobe Photoshop and 3D objects, so you can open, view, and share the right content without leaving the app.

Search across your organization with Outlook for iOS—The new search experience in Outlook for iOS leverages the Microsoft Graph to surface results from your top contacts, upcoming travel itineraries, package deliveries, recent attachments, and more. Together with proactive search suggestions and a unified design, it now provides consistent, personalized results that enable you to discover information from across your organization faster.

Improve reading skills with Learning Tools for Mac—Word for Mac now supports Immersive Reader and Read Aloud, tools previously available in Word for Windows and mobile apps. These tools enable content to be viewed in ways that are optimized for learning differences and allow documents to be read back with simultaneous highlighting. These features make it easier to recognize and correct errors as you write, improving reading and editing accuracy for everyone—especially users with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

Additional updates

• New ways to share on Yammer—Earlier this month, we introduced new ways for users to share engaging company-wide content from wherever they are with the Yammer mobile app. Users can now post announcements to groups, add animated GIFs, and more.
• Powerful inclusive learning tools—Last week at Bett, we introduced a range of powerful new tools that make teaching and learning in schools more inclusive and collaborative, including built-in dictation across Office 365 and the expansion of Learning Tools to Mac and iPhone.

Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office for Windows desktops | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office for Android. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider to be the first to use the latest and greatest in Office productivity. Commercial customers on both Monthly Channel and Semi-Annual Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through Targeted Release (Clients, Services). This site explains more about when you can expect to receive the features announced today.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability:
All updates in this blog have reached general availability and are beginning to roll out to Office 365 subscribers. Microsoft Teams updates are rolling out automatically and you can expect to see them in your Teams desktop client soon. For iOS and Mac updates, check for updates on your device. Some devices may receive these updates later than others.

The post New in January—enriching teamwork across devices appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, at our Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco, we unveiled a new cloud-first, mobile-first vision and roadmap for SharePoint, along with innovations that empower people, teams and organizations to intelligently discover, share and collaborate on content from anywhere and on any device. We also announced general availability of SharePoint Server 2016, which includes new hybrid capabilities that enable on-premises customers to tap into the innovation we’re delivering in Office 365.

For over a decade, our customers—including Booz Allen Hamilton, Coles and Marks and Spencer—have relied on SharePoint to power teamwork, to automate business processes, to create business applications and to build company-wide intranets. As a core part of Office 365, SharePoint provides content management and collaboration capabilities that are seamlessly integrated with the other applications people use every day to create and co-author documents, meet and work with their teams, brainstorm, analyze and make decisions. SharePoint is also integrated with the powerful cross-suite capabilities of Office 365, such as Office 365 Groups, the Office Graph, and governance controls for security, privacy and compliance.

More than 200,000 organizations use SharePoint today and an extraordinary community of more than 50,000 partners and 1 million developers make up a $10 billion solutions ecosystem around SharePoint.

And the best is yet to come. Microsoft is on a mission to empower every individual and organization to achieve more. Watch this video to hear our CEO Satya Nadella underscore the importance of SharePoint to our ambition to reinvent productivity:

“We are continuing to advance SharePoint, OneDrive and the entire Office 365 service in ways that make productivity even more collaborative, intelligent, mobile and trustworthy.”
—Satya Nadella

We are thrilled to share our vision for SharePoint Online in the cloud and SharePoint Server on-premises, along with progress to date and our roadmap across four areas of innovation:

• Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device.
• The mobile and intelligent intranet, with modern team sites, publishing and business applications on your desktop and in your pocket.
• An open and connected platform that evolves SharePoint extensibility to embrace modern web development.
• Investments in security, privacy and compliance across Office 365.

Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device

Today, we reveal our vision for unified access and intelligent discovery for all of your Office 365 files, making it easier than ever for you to create, share, collaborate on and manage documents from anywhere, on any device. You’ll love that files find you, instead of you having to find files, whether you’re using one of our 4+ star-rated mobile apps or the intuitive browser experience. And when you want files with you on the road, we give you rock-solid, selective sync between your PC and Mac and offline files on your mobile device.

When you’re working in Office applications, you get instant access to rich file sharing and collaboration features. You can co-author documents in real time, compare document versions, update metadata and share with colleagues, without leaving the application.

When you want to share a document you created, it’s as easy as sending an email message—recipients are automatically granted permissions and everyone works on the shared file, eliminating version proliferation and ensuring a “single source of truth.” When you need enterprise-grade content management, document or records management capabilities, we put them at your fingertips. Whether a file is yours, is shared, is the highly collaborative work of your team or is an asset of the entire organization, we make the simple powerful and the powerful simple.

We’re excited to announce that the following capabilities will be rolling out this quarter:

• Access to SharePoint Online document libraries and Office 365 Group files from the OneDrive mobile app.
• Intelligent discovery of documents from both OneDrive and SharePoint.
• Copy from OneDrive to SharePoint in the OneDrive web experience.
• OneDrive Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application.

And before the end of calendar year 2016:

• Document analytics surfaced in OneDrive to provide insight into document usage, reach and impact.
• Synchronization of SharePoint Online document libraries with the new OneDrive sync client.
• Synchronization of shared folders with the new OneDrive sync client.
• Mobile access to SharePoint document libraries in on-premises farms.
• Move and copy files between OneDrive and SharePoint in web experiences.

The mobile and intelligent intranet

The intranet is the nerve center of many organizations. It provides content-centric collaborative spaces that give teams the resources they need to work together. It lets users consume and contribute news and information within their teams and across the organization. It manages knowledge and connects users to content through navigation and search. It hosts applications that support and automate business processes.

SharePoint is now making your intranet more accessible on the go, more intelligent, and more personalized, based on your activities across sites, the people you work with, the content you work on and the business processes you drive.

SharePoint mobile app—your intranet in your pocket

We’re thrilled to announce the SharePoint mobile app, designed for Windows, iOS and Android, to put your intranet in your pocket, with full-fidelity access to company news and announcements, people, sites, content and apps—no matter where you are. And the app will incorporate your on-premises SharePoint sites, as well.

Learn more about the SharePoint mobile app and see it in action in this video:

SharePoint home

The new SharePoint home page in Office 365, rolling out this month, gives you unified access to all of your sites—online and on-premises—and lets you navigate seamlessly through your intranet, as well as catch up with activity across your sites with just a glance.

Modern team sites

Team sites have always been at the heart of collaboration with SharePoint. They connect your team with the content, the information and the apps you rely on. And they enable sharing and communication within the team and across the organization.

We’re bringing the power of SharePoint team sites and Office 365 Groups together, giving every group a team site, and giving team sites the benefit of groups for simple management of membership across Office 365 services. If you are assembling a team or starting a project, you can create a team site from the SharePoint home and provision a corresponding Office 365 Group in just seconds, with integrated information classification and compliance.

You’ll find a modernized team site experience, with an engaging home page personalized by the intelligence of Office Graph. Revitalized libraries and lists enable immediate productivity with an intuitive user experience and provide rich metadata, content management and functionality that can support sophisticated business processes. We’re also introducing a new page authoring and publishing experience that allows you to create beautiful, feature-rich pages that are responsive, mobile and easy to share with your team and the organization.

These new experiences will be beautiful on any device, in the browser, the SharePoint mobile app and the OneDrive app.

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps integration

SharePoint lists give teams the ability to access, share and collaborate around structured data. Customers regularly bring data from other systems into SharePoint lists to support business processes. Last week, we announced Microsoft Flow, a new service for automating workflow across the growing number of apps and SaaS services that business users rely on. Microsoft Flow includes connectors that enable you to exchange data between SharePoint and a variety of Microsoft and third-party services, and store and modify that data within SharePoint. We’re pleased to announce deep integration of SharePoint and Microsoft Flow, which allows you to create and launch Flows directly from a SharePoint list.

We’ve also announced the public preview of PowerApps, our new enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps with team members on any device in minutes. PowerApps is also being integrated directly into the modern team site, so you can create cross-platform PowerApps that utilize SharePoint lists and libraries as a data source. Deep and native integration of PowerApps and SharePoint will also drive rich new experiences with lists and libraries.

To learn more about Microsoft Flow and PowerApps, read “Power to the people—introducing Microsoft Flow and announcing the public preview of PowerApps.” To learn more about integration of Microsoft Flow and PowerApps with SharePoint, read “Flow and SharePoint” and “PowerApps and SharePoint.”

Roadmap for the mobile and intelligent intranet

Here’s what you can expect to see starting this quarter:

• Modern document library experience (currently rolling out to First Release tenants).
• SharePoint mobile app for iOS.
• SharePoint home in Office 365.
• Modern lists experience.
• Site activity and insights on the Site Contents page.

And during calendar year 2016:

• SharePoint mobile app for Windows and Android.
• Integration of SharePoint sites and Office 365 Groups.
• Simple, fast site creation.
• Modern pages experience.
• Team and organizational news and announcements.
• PowerApps and Microsoft Flow integration with SharePoint.

We have a lot of detail to share about modern team sites and how they enable a mobile and intelligent intranet. To learn more, read “SharePoint—the mobile and intelligent intranet.”

The SharePoint Framework—open and connected platform

SharePoint’s rich solutions ecosystem is one of its greatest assets, and we recognize that there are opportunities to meet the evolving needs of developers in the mobile-first, cloud-first world.

We are pleased to announce the SharePoint Framework, a page and part model that enables fully supported client-side development, easy integration with the Microsoft Graph and support for open source tooling.

The SharePoint Framework is an evolutionary step in SharePoint extensibility that delivers a new client-side rendering framework leveraging open source JavaScript technologies. The client-side development framework will allow developers to use modern JavaScript and web templating frameworks across cloud and on-premises SharePoint.

We used the SharePoint Framework to create many of the experiences that we announced today, like the home page of a team site. Our customers can now build similarly powerful, rich apps and experiences in SharePoint, integrating services across Office 365 following the same patterns, practices and process we use to build native SharePoint experiences. Pages and experiences built with the SharePoint Framework will be mobile by default and will be integrated with the SharePoint mobile app.

The SharePoint Framework embraces the tools, frameworks and open source initiatives that developers rely on today, and it extends the scope of solutions that can be built on SharePoint, in the cloud and on-premises.

The SharePoint Framework will be released to Office 365 customers in First Release this summer. Web parts built with the framework can be added to modern pages and experiences and to existing pages.

In the third quarter of 2016, you will see:

• The Files API on Microsoft Graph.
• SharePoint Webhooks (preview).
• Client-side web parts for existing pages (preview).

And by the end of 2016, we will deliver:

• The Sites API on Microsoft Graph.
• SharePoint Webhooks (GA).
• Custom sites on the SharePoint Framework.

Security, privacy and compliance

We operate Office 365 with a commitment to security, privacy and compliance. In SharePoint, we bring together security, privacy, and compliance with a simple and powerful set of administrative controls, policies and reports.

We know there can be no security without usability. That’s why we provide you with IT controls that ensure the right balance between security and user productivity, so that the level of security is commensurate with the sensitivity of the content.

Today, we are announcing dynamic conditional access policies in SharePoint that intelligently define access based on who you are, the app or device you are using and your network location.

We equip you with tools to discover and protect content with data loss protection (DLP) policies, both in Office 365 and in SharePoint Server 2016. We offer more than 80 pre-built definitions of sensitive content, and you can add your own custom policies. These policies can be set once and applied across your tenant and into your on-premises farms. Later this year, you will be able to classify a SharePoint site so that appropriate policies are scoped to all content in a site.

When you need insight into security and privacy, for auditing or compliance purposes, we give you detailed reporting and auditing. Earlier this year, we introduced Advanced eDiscovery that integrates machine learning, predictive coding and text analytics to reduce the costs and challenges that come with sorting through large quantities of data. Later this year, we will release SharePoint Insights, a service which aggregates usage and compliance data from on-premises and cloud into the Office 365 Reporting Center, so you can get a unified view across your entire organization.

And we will continue to lead the fight to protect your data and to ensure privacy. I’m happy to announce that by the end of the year we will allow you to bring and manage your own keys to encrypt your data stored in SharePoint.

To summarize, we currently support:

• Customer Lockbox.
• DLP, mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM).
• Whitelist and blacklist domains for external sharing.

This quarter, we will release:

• Dynamic conditional access policies.

And by the end of 2016, you will see:

• New datacenters in Germany and Canada.
• Bring your own encryption key.
• Granular access controls.
• SharePoint site classification.
• Hybrid SharePoint Insights (preview).

Learn more about these announcements in this video:

You can learn more about the robust security, privacy and compliance fabric of Office 365 at the Office 365 Trust Center.

Connecting you with innovation

At Microsoft, our mission as a company—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—is not only about the products we create, but how we enable customers to get the most value out of those products and services. Office 365 will continue to be where we lead with our newest innovations, and we are partnering with you to help you maximize your investment.

This is why we created Microsoft FastTrack for Office 365—a set of best practices, tools, resources and experts committed to make your experience with Office 365 a success and help you realize business value faster with Office 365. FastTrack is available at every step of your journey, as you discover what is possible, plan for successful rollouts and enable new users and capabilities.

One of the great benefits of FastTrack is migration services. For customers with more than 150 seats of eligible SKUs, we provide no-cost engineering lead services to move your files to Office 365. FastTrack currently supports file migrations from on-premises file shares. We also support file migration from Google Drive. And today, we are introducing a new migration service to help you move your files from Box to Office 365 as a no-cost benefit of FastTrack, so you can take advantage of all that Office 365 has to offer.

To learn more about migration services of FastTrack, watch “Migrate your file shares into OneDrive for Business with help from FastTrack.” To see our latest announcements, watch “Accelerating Innovation with Hybrid: SharePoint Server 2016 and Office 365.”

For our on-premises and hybrid customers, SharePoint Server 2016, Project Server 2016 and Office Online Server reach general availability today, and can be deployed to your datacenter as your foundation for the future. We will be updating SharePoint Online regularly, and SharePoint Server 2016 Software Assurance customers will have the opportunity to enable many of our cloud-born innovations in their on-premises SharePoint farms with new Feature Packs we release in calendar year 2017.

We are humbled by the extraordinary community of customers, developers, partners and enthusiasts whose input has contributed to the vision and innovations we delivered today. On behalf of everyone on our team, I welcome you to the future of SharePoint: simple, intelligent and untethered. The future starts today.

—Jeff Teper

The post The Future of SharePoint. appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.