With more than 270 million monthly active users, Microsoft Teams offers developers an unmatched opportunity to build collaborative apps. Since the beginning of 2020, monthly active users of custom-built or third-party apps in Teams have grown more than tenfold. There are more than 1,400 Teams apps, with more and more independent software vendors (ISVs) generating millions in annual revenue from customers using their apps built on Teams and Microsoft 365 services. Looking ahead, we expect emerging technologies that bring the digital and physical worlds together, like Microsoft Mesh for Teams, to open new engaging possibilities for collaborative experiences on Teams. 

This year at Build 2022, we are sharing several enhancements and new capabilities for developers building collaborative apps for Teams and Microsoft 365. Watch my keynote with Charles Lamanna, Innovate with collaborative apps and low code, to view the highlights. Read on to get a full recap of our Build announcements, which are organized here in three sections: new ways to help you delight your users with rich collaborative experiences, scale your productivity and grow user engagement, and monetize your apps. We can’t wait to see what you will build with these innovations!

Delight users with rich collaborative experiences

Introducing Live Share: Interactive app experiences in Teams meetings

We are introducing Live Share, a capability for your apps to go beyond passive screen sharing and enable participants to co-watch, co-edit, co-create, and more in Teams meetings. Developers can use new preview extensions to the Teams SDK to easily extend existing Teams apps and create Live Share experiences in meetings. Live Share is backed by the power of Fluid Framework, which supports sophisticated synchronization of state, media, and control actions with only front-end development. This synchronization will run on Teams hosted and managed Microsoft Azure Fluid Relay service instance—at no cost to you. Our early partners building Live Share experiences include Frame.io, Hexagon, Skillsoft, MakeCode, Accenture, Parabol, and Breakthru. Watch our Live Share on-demand session and try out the new Teams SDK extensions.

Figure 1. Hexagon Live Share prototype enables engineers to annotate and edit 3D models and simulations, while they brainstorm together in Teams meetings.

Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay general availability

Fluid Framework is a collection of open-source, client-side JavaScript libraries that underpin the Live Share real-time collaboration capabilities. Azure Fluid Relay is a fully managed cloud service that supports Fluid Framework Clients. Developers are using Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay to enable real-time interactivity on their apps beyond Microsoft Teams meetings. Fluid Framework, the Azure Fluid Relay service, and the corresponding Azure Fluid client-side SDK will be ready for production scenarios and available in mid-2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs for updates. Watch the on-demand session to learn more about building collaborative web apps with Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay.

Create Loop components by updating Adaptive Cards

Microsoft Loop components are live, actionable units of productivity that stay in sync and move freely across Microsoft 365 apps starting with Teams chat and Microsoft Outlook. Today, we are announcing the ability for developers to create Loop components. Now you can easily evolve an existing Adaptive Card into a Loop component or create a new Adaptive Card-based Loop component. Additionally, Adaptive Card-based Loop components can be surfaced with Editor using Context IQ, our set of intelligent capabilities working in the background of Microsoft apps and services, to stay directly in the flow of composing an email. Zoho Projects is using these Adaptive Card-based Loop components to help its customers improve incident response times, reduce outage durations, and improve overall performance against service-level agreements (SLAs), by enabling users to complete these tasks across Teams and Outlook. Zoho Projects and ServiceDesk Plus Cloud are among the first products integrated with Microsoft 365 apps to implement Microsoft Loop. Developer private preview for this capability starts in June 2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs or follow us on Twitter @Microsoft365Dev for updates.

Figure 2. Zoho Projects is extending adaptive cards to be live, actionable Loop components that work across Teams and Outlook.

Introducing Microsoft Azure Communication Services sample app builder

Microsoft Azure Communication Services interoperability with Teams enables you to create experiences that support seamless communications between customers on any custom app or website and employees working in Teams. For example, Teladoc Health built the first-of-its-kind custom fully integrated clinical and administrative virtual healthcare solution that allows care team collaboration and access to relevant clinical data directly within Teams, and the ability to seamlessly deliver virtual care to patients who join from a custom app.

Figure 3. Teladoc Health is enabling care providers to work and connect from Teams while patients join from a custom app built using Azure Communication Services.

Today, we are introducing the Azure Communication Services sample app builder, enabling developers to easily build and deploy a sample application for virtual appointments in just a few minutes, with no coding needed. Through the sample app, customers can book appointments powered by Microsoft Bookings and join a Teams meeting through a custom web app with a company-branded experience, while staff use Teams to join scheduled appointments. The sample app is fully open source and developers can tap into the code for more customization. Visit Github to learn more.

Microsoft Graph API enhancements to embed chats and channel messages into your apps

Microsoft Graph chat APIs enable developers to embed Teams chats into their applications, enabling their users to collaborate seamlessly without having to switch back and forth across apps. We are introducing several new APIs in preview with capabilities such as enabling chats with federated users (like users outside your tenant), identifying which messages are read and unread by the current user, and subscribing to user chats and membership changes. These new APIs will be generally available in mid-2022. Visit our chat message resource type docs page and view the on-demand session to learn more.

SharePoint Framework and Microsoft Viva Connections

SharePoint is the most flexible content collaboration platform powering experiences across Microsoft 365. SharePoint Framework now lets you create parts and pages in SharePoint sites, Teams apps, and more. It is at the center of our extensibility capabilities for the new Microsoft Viva Connections employee experience platform. Check out the how-to session on building tailored employee experiences for Viva Connections that directly integrate with Teams apps.

Figure 4. A sample Microsoft Viva Connections app running in both Teams and on a mobile device.

Approvals extensibility

Approvals in Microsoft Teams help everyone—from frontline workers to office workers—to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly in the flow of work. We are introducing create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) APIs for Approvals. Developers can use the Approvals APIs to enable approvals within line of business apps and use webhooks to track changes and drive workflows with Approvals in Teams. The Approvals APIs will be available for preview in mid-2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs for updates. View the on-demand session to learn more.

Scale developer productivity

Build once and deploy anywhere across Teams and Microsoft 365

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the new Teams SDK that enables you to build apps for Teams, Outlook, and Office using a single application and deployment model and build collaborative apps that make use of the capabilities relevant to each product. Developers can now upgrade to the latest Teams JS SDK v2 and App manifest v1.13 to build production Teams apps, and run full-scale pilots with users on the preview channels of Outlook and Office. This will enable developers to get feedback and prepare for the distribution of their apps on Outlook and Office later this calendar year.

These updates are backward compatible so all your existing Teams apps will continue to work as-is in Teams with production-level support. Our Teams developer experience including our Microsoft Teams Developer Documentation, tooling, support, and code repository has been updated to support extended apps. You will be able to distribute both single-tenant and multi-tenant apps using existing Teams experiences. To learn more, check out our on-demand session about extending Teams apps across Microsoft 365.

Figure 5. MURAL is extending its Teams app’s personal tabs and search-based message extensions to other Microsoft host apps.

MURAL is among the early partners bringing the connected experience across Teams, Outlook, and Office to life with their apps, like the example above showing a search-based message extension inserting a MURAL directly into the Outlook message as an interactive Adaptive Card. In addition to MURAL, several other partners, including Adobe, eCare Vault, go1, monday.com, Polly, ServiceNow, SurveyMonkey, and Zoho have helped us get these new tools ready and we are excited to make them generally available to everyone at Microsoft Build.

Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and CLI now generally available

Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and command-line interface (CLI) are tools for building Teams and Microsoft 365 apps, fast. Whether you’re new to Teams platform or a seasoned developer, Teams Toolkit is the best way to create, build, debug, test, and deploy apps. Today we are excited to announce the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and CLI is now generally available (GA). Developers can start with scenario-based code scaffolds for notification and command-and-response bots, automate upgrades to the latest Teams SDK version, and debug apps directly to Outlook and Office. Get started building apps with Teams Toolkit today.

Figure 6. Building a notification app for Microsoft Teams using the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

Collaboration Controls in Power Apps

We are announcing Collaboration Controls in Power Apps to let developers drag and drop Microsoft 365 collaboration features like Teams chats, meetings, files, Tasks by Planner, and more right inside custom apps built with Power Apps. Collaboration Controls will be available in preview in mid-2022. View the on-demand session to learn more. Subscribe to the Power Apps blog for updates.

Grow user engagement and monetize your apps

App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program is designed to evaluate and showcase the trustworthiness of application-based industry standards, such as SOC 2, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 for security, privacy, and data handling practices. We are announcing the preview of the App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365 for applications built on Azure to help them accelerate the compliance journey of their apps. With this tool, developers can automate a significant number of tasks to achieve the certification faster and easier. This tool also produces reports that can be easily shared by developers to help IT gain visibility of app security and compliance. Learn more from our App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365 docs page.

Improved app management and discoverability

The Teams Store helps users find the right apps through updated app categories, curated app collections, featured top apps, and intelligent recommendations based on what colleagues and peers are using. This Microsoft Build, we are making available a central experience within the Teams Store to help users track the apps they are using across various Teams and group chats, and see what permissions are required by these apps. We are also making the discovery of apps through tabs, message extensions, and connectors more contextual to help users find the right apps and grow usage of the ISV apps in Teams. For example, in the context of composing messages, the message extension suggestions will be organized by tasks and actions users can take with it. Lastly, users on mobile devices can now add your apps right from the mobile device, such as from a link or QR code.

In-app purchasing for Teams apps

A top request from partners and developers is to provide the ability to include a paywall experience directly from within your Teams app. This gives you the ability to turn a free app into a freemium version, where you can choose when to prompt your users when to subscribe to your app. The new in-app purchase functionality is available today and can be invoked with a few lines of code. Learn more from our in-app purchases docs page.

Figure 7. Developers can enable freemium upgrades directly within Teams with a few lines of code.

Teams app license management

Another area we are making advancements in is enabling users to manage and assign purchased licenses. It’s previously been up to developers to build the license management component into their solution, whether on their landing page or directly within the app. To help streamline the license management experience, we will soon be offering the ability for you to offload the license management capabilities to Microsoft where users can manage and assign licenses—directly in Teams. License management in Teams will be available in preview in mid-2022.

New collaborative apps coming to Teams

We are excited to see ISVs bringing innovative collaborative apps to Teams across a broad range of scenarios. Here are just a few examples of the new apps available now or coming soon:

• MURAL app for Teams gives teams everywhere the ability to bring a shared collaboration space directly into Microsoft Teams. Users can improve teamwork with asynchronous visual collaboration, and transform disengaged conversations into productive, engaging meetings and workshops using hundreds of templates and proven, guided methods that empower teams to deliver breakthrough results. MURAL is a Microsoft preview partner, and the MURAL app now works across Teams, Outlook, and Office for a single, connected experience.
• Observable app for Teams allows companies to bring their data, context, and logic together in one place to uncover insights collaboratively and accelerate data-driven decision-making across the organization. New updates coming to the Observable app in June 2022 will offer Microsoft Teams notifications when collaborating through comments in Observable.
• SAP S/4HANA operational purchaser chatbot provides collaborative capabilities of Microsoft Teams to SAP S/4HANA users within a conversational user experience. It uses Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication and leverages Microsoft Graph APIs to allow users to call other parties or schedule Teams meetings with business partners directly from the bot in the context of the authenticated business user. This provides tight integration of the Teams collaboration experience in a standalone app in SAP, bringing connectivity and collaboration where users need them.
• ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app from ManageEngine, Zoho’s enterprise IT management division, leverages Microsoft Teams to streamline business and IT service delivery, manage and accelerate IT incident resolutions, and improve service experience across the enterprise. Coming soon, the ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app will enhance its existing static Adaptive Cards with Loop components, which will allow everyone working on the ticket to get the latest updates and trigger service desk tasks without switching tabs.
• Figma, the collaborative design platform, is introducing a new app that will enable teams to share, present, and collaborate in real-time on Figma and FigJam files within a Teams meeting. The app also leverages the new Adaptive Card functionality so when a user shares a link to a Figma or FigJam file in a Teams chat, the card unfurls, allowing users to open the file from within Teams. Users can also view and respond to file notifications directly from Teams. The Figma app will be available later in 2022 in the Teams app store.

Learn more

Here’s a recap of the key resources to learn more about developing collaborative apps on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365:

• Catch up on all the collaborative apps keynotes, breakouts, and into-focus sessions at Microsoft Build.
• Deep dive into the announcements with the Build on-demand sessions.
• Visit the Microsoft Teams Developer Center to start building collaborative apps with Teams.
• Visit the Microsoft Graph Developer Center to connect your apps with the data and AI in Microsoft 365.
• Read our Live Share blog to learn more about the technology and what you can do with it.
• Read more about how Power Platform is redefining low-code with new products and features from Charles Lamanna.
• Join our Microsoft 365 ISV program to get one-on-one support and other benefits.

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Not only do employees want to feel more connected, more aligned to their company’s purpose and mission, but they also want to grow, make an impact, and make a difference. Organizations, likewise, are at their best when people and teams have clarity and a shared understanding of their goals and can execute in sync to achieve the desired business outcomes. A clear, consistent business goal-setting process is the missing link between employee experience and business outcomes.

Today, we are excited to announce Microsoft Viva Goals, a new module for business goal setting and management, is now available in private preview. Powered by the acquisition of Ally.io,² a leading objectives and key results (OKR) company, Viva Goals brings purpose and alignment to Viva customers—alongside culture and communications, wellbeing and engagement, growth and development, as well as knowledge and expertise.

Introducing Viva Goals

Viva Goals aligns teams to your organization’s strategic priorities and unites them around the mission and purpose. It helps provide clarity on employees’ work and how that work makes an impact on the business’s most important priorities. With that alignment in place, teams then can focus on doing the work, making sound decisions, and driving the desired results for the business.

In addition, Viva Goals brings business goals into the flow of everyday work, making it easier to stay up to date with connected data and automated reminders as well as to share OKRs and their progress across the organization with customized dashboards and quick links. Viva Goals integrates with Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, and other work management and data tools that customers are already using—as well as more integrations to come with Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Power BI, and other Microsoft 365 apps and services. With Viva Goals, OKRs no longer exist in a silo separate from the employee experience and where people work.

Viva Goals will be included with the current Microsoft Viva suite subscription when it becomes generally available later in Q3 Calendar Year (CY) 2022.

Business goals connecting employee experience and business outcomes

Having clear goals and measures of success at the highest levels of the organization helps everyone understand what’s important and align their work to the most valued priorities. It sets the context for the work of the team and creates a shared vision and a common language, which is especially important in a hybrid work environment. This gives departments and teams a framework to focus their own priorities and define what success looks like together in connection with the business goals.

With clarity around organization-wide and team-wide goals, employees are empowered to think, collaborate, and act at the team and individual level, informed and aligned to the priorities and what others are working on, thus everyday work is moving the business forward in a more agile way. This connection and visibility to the bigger picture enables flexibility and purpose-driven work as employees can determine the best way to reach those goals. Knowing why you show up for work every day, taking a collaborative approach to defining goals, and understanding the progress you are making are all important to enhancing the employee experience.

It also encourages a culture of innovation and growth: according to an Ally.io survey, 73 percent of people who use a goal-setting framework like OKRs feel empowered to take risks at work (compared to 53 percent who do not)—and calculated risk leads to innovation.³

OKRs for everyone

With Viva Goals, we seek to empower teams to use OKRs at all levels. OKRs can help get everyone pulling in the same direction, but not when used only as top-down directives. Whether you are a C-suite leader, team lead, or individual contributor, you can incorporate OKRs as part of your one-on-one meetings with managers, progress updates to stakeholders, or regular planning process to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what should change.

In this new fourth installment of our blog series about Microsoft’s own employee experience journey, we share how teams at Microsoft are using Viva Goals and the OKR framework across the company at different levels to support new hires, define partnerships between teams, and drive innovation.

Looking ahead

We’re very excited about the opportunity to help customers build alignment and bring increased meaning and purpose-driven work into the employee experience as part of Viva. To learn more, explore Microsoft Viva Goals and watch the video below.

¹The Work Trend Index survey was conducted by an independent research firm, Edelman Data x Intelligence, among 31,102 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets between January 7, 2022 and February 16, 2022. This survey was 20 minutes in length and conducted online, in either the English language or translated into a local language across markets. At least 1,000 full-time workers were surveyed in each market, and global results have been aggregated across all responses to provide an average. Each market is evenly weighted within the global average. Each market was sampled to be representative of the full-time workforce across age, gender, and region; each sample included a mix of work environments (in-person, remote vs. non-remote, office settings vs. non-office settings, etc.), industries, company sizes, tenures, and job levels. Markets surveyed include: Australia and New Zealand (ANZ): Australia, New Zealand; Asia-Pacific (APAC): China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam; Europe: Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom; Latin America (LATAM): Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico; North America: Canada, United States.

²Microsoft acquires Ally.io to improve employee experience by aligning people’s work with team goals and company mission, Kirk Koenigsbauer, Official Microsoft Blog, Microsoft. October 7, 2021.

³2021 Report: A New Perspective on Goal Management and Company Culture, Kevin Shively, Ally.io. June 8, 2021.

The post Microsoft Viva Goals brings purpose and alignment to the employee experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We’re excited to share that for the fifth consecutive year, Gartner® has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms. Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.

Figure 1. Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, Tim Nelms, October 18, 2021.

Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms report to learn more.

In its report, Gartner lists core, optional, and critical capabilities for content services platforms. After detailing the critical capabilities, Gartner goes on to state, “Of these critical functions, it is the last—PaaS/SaaS deployment—which has seen the greatest growth in importance over the last few years.”

We believe this recognition demonstrates our commitment to providing innovative content platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more, including:

• Managed content: Your organization’s content is what drives decisions and action. Utilizing AI to turn unstructured content into organized information, SharePoint Syntex helps you find, protect, and automate business practices. Learn more about how organizations like Northumbrian Water and London Stock Exchange Group captured knowledge and reduced inefficiencies with SharePoint Syntex. Our more recent updates to add: content assembly, contract management, and advanced metadata search.
• Knowledge management: Microsoft Viva Topics turns content into knowledge by automating content organization, making information easier to find. Leverage existing content and turn it into an advantage for faster learning and development. Learn more about how companies like Avanade discover and share knowledge easier with Viva Topics.
• Employee productivity: Microsoft 365 empowers customers with applications, like Microsoft Viva, that encourage collaboration and productivity. Allow people to work flexibly and stay connected from anywhere.
• Extensive third-party partner network: The Microsoft Partner Network offers a wide array of solutions designed to enhance our customer’s Microsoft 365 investments. In addition, we maintain the Microsoft Viva Engineering Partner Community/Content Services Partner Program to help content services partners deliver solutions that accelerate customer success.
• Integration with Microsoft 365: Our third-party partner ecosystem offers solutions and services built for integration that enable you to customize and enhance Microsoft 365 based on your organization’s needs. We also have tools to help partners and developers integrate with, build on, and extend their solutions into Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex, and Viva. Learn more about our growing Microsoft Content Services Partner Program (CSPP).

Do more with Microsoft 365

Visit the new Microsoft Viva and SharePoint Syntex adoption pages for resources to help increase Viva and SharePoint Syntex awareness and usage in your organization. On these sites, you’ll find helpful guides, tools, and templates, for getting started, building champions, and deploying solutions.

To learn more about the many content services features in SharePoint Syntex (and even get started training a model using your own content) or get a jump-start with a contract management solution, check out the SharePoint Syntex-powered site templates in the SharePoint look book. The look book lets you provision code-free solution templates on demand to your tenant. The instructional Content Center template can be provisioned without a license, while the Contracts Management solution will require a SharePoint Syntex license.

Figure 2. Contracts Management site provisioned from the SharePoint look book.

Finally, we’ve heard your requests to couple content and knowledge for faster ways to build out your knowledge base. Our new integration between SharePoint Syntex taxonomy and Viva Topics can help. You’ll be able to use SharePoint Syntex to automatically tag content and build out taxonomies—and dynamically turn taxonomy tags into managed topics for Viva Topics. This integration is rolling out now.

Figure 3. Topics built dynamically from the taxonomy term store.

Learn more

We’re consistently working to improve our content platform offerings and empower our customers for the new digital age. Here’s how you can learn more about Microsoft 365 Content Services and get started:

• Get more information about Microsoft 365 Content Services:
  • SharePoint product page.
  • SharePoint Syntex product page.
  • Viva Topics product page.
• Download the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms report.

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, Tim Nelms, 18 October 2021.

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.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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As we enter year three of the pandemic, more organizations are welcoming their employees back to the office, marking a move from remote to hybrid work. This shift is a return to a new kind of normal, and it poses an entirely new set of challenges. We are excited to share some product innovations helping to make this transition a little easier.

Stay tuned for a lot of product and research news next month, when we’ll release our second annual Work Trend Index, along with a series of innovations designed to make hybrid work work.

Let’s dive in.

Focus on what matters and collaborate across boundaries

This month we’re happy to release some of your most requested features across Microsoft Teams, Viva, and Yammer.

Pin or hide your own video in Microsoft Teams meetings

Seeing your own video feed in meetings has its benefits, but some find it distracting. Now, users can select to hide their own video in a Microsoft Teams meeting, while remaining visible to other participants. Users can now also pin their own video on the meeting stage.

Stay on top of required trainings

Microsoft Viva Learning can now sync with learning management systems (LMS) like SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Saba Cloud. With this new generally available integration, employees can view required learning assignments from their LMS in their My Learning view in Viva Learning as well as launch the courses directly. Employees will get Teams notifications when they receive a new assignment and a reminder when the assignment is due.

Get suggestions on Yammer communities and people to follow

We want you to discover communities and conversations that help you work better. Now, Yammer will suggest communities and followers based on previous interactions. Find and join new communities and follow people right from your feed. 

Auto-renew active Yammer communities

Community admins will no longer need to manually review communities that have views or engagement. Now, Yammer communities can be set to auto-renew when someone posts, reacts, or any file activity happens from within the community (including viewing the Yammer posts through actionable emails).

Collaborate with people outside of your geography while maintaining compliance policies

Members from Yammer networks located in the European Union can soon join Yammer external networks hosted in the United States. Rollout will begin mid-February 2022 and finish in late March 2022. Read our Tech Community blog Cross-geo external collaboration support on Yammer External Networks for the EU to learn more.

More flexibility in how you provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs

Hybrid work means organizations need more flexibility to provide access to Windows across different types of devices. Windows 365 Enterprise provides a powerful, simple, and secure full Windows 10 or Windows 11 experience that you can use to empower your workforce, regardless of location or device. In February 2022, we released a preview of Windows 365 Enterprise support for native Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Join and localized first-run experience.

Provision Cloud PCs without an Azure subscription

In February 2022, we announced the preview of Azure AD Join in Windows 365 Enterprise, enabling organizations to provision Cloud PCs without requiring an Azure subscription or Azure connectivity to your on-premises environment. General availability will be announced soon. 

Localizing the Cloud PC experience

Organizations around the world use and love Windows 365, and we want to give them a familiar and natural user experience. In February 2022, we announced the preview for a localized first-run experience, empowering organizations to choose from an expanded list of languages when creating Cloud PCs for their teams in Windows 365 Enterprise.

Looking to the future

From offering the option to pin or hide your video in a Microsoft Teams meeting to Yammer community suggestions, these updates are designed to give everyone more flexibility for when and how they work. We’ve got a lot more in store for you next month. Stay tuned.

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Microsoft Viva empowers organizations to foster a culture where people thrive

In just a year, Viva now has more than 10 million monthly active users. Over 1,000 paying customers—including Blum, Nationwide, Old Mutual, PayPal, REI, and Unilever—are using Microsoft Viva to build a better employee experience, from promoting growth and wellbeing in the digital office to building a connected culture for frontline workers.

Since our initial announcement a year ago, Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning are all generally available. Later this year, Viva customers will also benefit from a new Viva-based objective and key results (OKRs) service powered by our acquisition of Ally.io.

Together with our partners

To help customers realize value from Viva, we’ve recruited more than 200 Viva solution partners, including global firms like Accenture/Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC, and Tata Consultancy Services, and we’ve trained more than 5,000 partner individuals—both business consultants and technical architects. We’re committed to growing our Viva partner capacity and capabilities in the years to come.

Microsoft Viva is an open and extensible platform that integrates with and enhances your existing HR systems, learning management systems, content providers, and employee workflows. We have established a broad range of partnerships including ServiceNow, Qualtrics, Headspace, Cornerstone OnDemand, Workday, Espressive, OpenSesame, and EdCast, and will continue to bring new partners to the platform. In addition, we are working closely with our LinkedIn colleagues to integrate LinkedIn Learning and Glint into Viva.

At Microsoft, we’re on the same journey as our customers in adopting Viva for our own use. In our blog series about the development of Viva, we describe our early envisioning of an EXP as well as the recent progress on our own deployment here at Microsoft. It’s our hope that these experiences, which we’ll continue to share, will help you discover new ways to empower and support your people.

Looking to the future

Today, as we reflect on our first anniversary, we’re both inspired and humbled to see so much passion and enthusiasm from customers as they invest in their own employee experiences—and how Microsoft Viva is playing a pivotal role to help them transform as the world’s employee experience platform for the hybrid era.

¹Microsoft and LinkedIn share latest data and innovation for hybrid work, Jared Spataro, Microsoft. September 9, 2021.

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Technology has the power to unlock collaboration, streamline processes, and if used the right way, improve wellbeing and growth for critical parts of the global workforce. From technology that helps frontline workers communicate, learn, and serve customers to improvements that make content more accessible across Microsoft 365, we’re innovating to help organizations achieve better outcomes for everyone.

Before we jump into the latest product news, I’d like to highlight the new flexible work resources we’ve made available for you. Our redesigned hybrid work page demonstrates how Microsoft solutions can help you build flexibility across your organization and enable your employees to thrive in this new world of work. Please check out the new resources and let us know what you think.

Now, let’s dive into the news.

Empowering frontline workers

For the last two years, the nearly two billion global frontline workers have played a critical role in supporting our communities and economies, all while weathering health risks, supply chain issues, and labor shortages.

Nearly 90 percent of all organizations employ frontline workers. This means nearly every organization across every industry has faced the same challenge: balancing the needs of this critical workforce while also achieving business results.

Our latest research shows there is a tremendous opportunity for business leaders to drive positive outcomes for employees, customers, and the bottom line by prioritizing culture and communication while investing in technology that enables frontline workers to thrive.¹ This month, we announced several new capabilities aimed at addressing the pain points being felt on the frontline, and to help with wellbeing, growth, productivity, and engagement.

Technology like Microsoft Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams can play a critical role in bridging cultural and communication gaps between leadership and the frontline workforce. This month, we added new integrations in the Viva Connections app with strategic partners Workday and Espressive, enabling workers to easily access important company resources and actions, like payroll and HR resources, in one location.

Setting employees up for success requires providing the right resources and training. To help make training more accessible, we have updated the Viva Learning app to streamline the workflow for assigning learning from partner solutions like SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Saba Cloud. And new partnerships with learning providers like EdCast and OpenSesame connect workers to an extensive content library that can help them upskill and train, all in the flow of work.  

To help make communication on the frontlines easier, we’re deepening our strategic partnership with Zebra Technologies, a world leader in software and hardware for frontline workers. Earlier this month, we announced the general availability of the Walkie Talkie app in Microsoft Teams, with a dedicated push-to-talk button on a wide range of Zebra mobile devices, as well as general availability on any iOS mobile device.

To help remove friction from managing appointments, we’ve updated the Bookings app in Microsoft Teams to a comprehensive view of virtual appointments in one location, including real-time updates on wait times, queueing, missed appointments, and staffing delays to create a first-class experience for customers and patients.

To help provide workers with the flexibility to own their schedule, we’ve enhanced Teams’ integration with  Reflexis Workforce Scheduler (RWS)to create a seamless, real-time sync for viewing, assigning, and managing shift requests right within Teams.

Earlier this month, my colleague Steve Dispensa wrote about how we’re helping provide workers on the frontline with protected devices that make their lives and daily jobs easier. Read the blog, Using technology to reduce the load on frontline workers, for more information.

Create content that everyone can use

Making content accessible enables employees to more easily collaborate and contribute, which is why we’re simplifying accessible authoring and bringing it into the flow of work across Microsoft 365 Apps.

Keeping accessibility front and center throughout the creating and editing process helps make remediating accessibility issues more manageable. We are currently rolling out a new option to run Accessibility Checker in the background while you work within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows. This will help flag accessibility issues for you to correct right in your flow of work.

Alternative text (alt text) makes image-heavy, digital documents accessible to screen reader users. Recently, we rolled out the ability for users to provide alt text for images they share in Microsoft Teams Chat on Windows, with macOS coming soon. And Excel now provides screen reader users with automatic alt text for charts and PivotCharts, generated on-demand at the point the screen reader reaches the object to ensure that it’s based on the most recent data.

Creating content is a highly collaborative process, and in a hybrid world, that often means communicating asynchronously with each other. We’ve introduced several updates to Microsoft Teams to help enable flexibility in when and how you collaborate. Now, you can catch up or refresh yourself on what happened in unscheduled meetings or channel meetings with Live Transcript. For those who prefer to listen to the full recording, you can now adjust the variable playback speed (0.5 to 2 times) for Teams meeting recordings in Stream and view indexed recordings based on slide transitions to make it easier to listen at your own pace and quickly navigate to relevant content.

Increasing productivity with new features in your favorite apps

This month, we’re adding the ability to see the order of raised hands to Teams as well as bringing core Microsoft Visio capabilities to the Microsoft 365 suite.

The raised hands feature in Microsoft Teams enables meeting participants to inform presenters they want to speak or have a question without interruption. Now, Teams can show the chronological order of raised hands, helping presenters know the order of who to call on first to speak so that no participant is missed.

With the shift to hybrid work, business processes often need to be transformed and diagrams are a great way to illustrate how work gets done. To help make diagramming more accessible, we’re bringing core Visio capabilities to Microsoft 365, enabling you to create, edit, share, and coauthor diagrams with team members across your organization. With access to popular diagram templates and shapes, you can easily visualize any business process. The Visio web app in Microsoft 365 is now available to all users with a Microsoft 365 commercial subscription.

Also new this month

We launched a new Microsoft Edge training for business users. Register to learn how the fast and secure Microsoft Edge browser can help simplify your workday with intelligent search and innovative Microsoft experiences.

Looking to the future

Whether it’s helping frontline workers feel connected and empowered or making content more accessible for everyone, we’re committed to enabling every employee to thrive. We’ve got a lot more in store for 2022. Stay tuned.

¹The Work Trend Index, WorkLab, Microsoft. January 12, 2022.

The post From empowering frontline workers to accessibility improvements—here’s what's new in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There has never been a better time—or greater need—for new strategies and solutions that help build the frontline for long-term success by both prioritizing their well-being and maximizing their productivity. Successful organizations recognize that empowering the frontline is key to their bottom line, which creates a more balanced approach to business and achieves better results. Based on the Work Trend Index Special Report, here are three areas companies can focus on:

1. Equip workers with technology to reduce stress and system friction.
2. Prioritize and modernize training.
3. Build company culture that includes the frontline.

Microsoft builds solutions to empower frontline workers to communicate, schedule shifts, execute tasks, and much more. It has long been a part of our mission, whether it is helping customers like Kendra Scott more deeply connect their corporate headquarters with their frontline or creating simple and integrated employee experiences for customers like Blum. Today, with the Work Trend Index research launching, we are also releasing new technology innovations and deepening partnerships to help reduce stress, modernize training, and rebuild culture for those on the frontline.

1. Equip workers with technology to reduce stress and system friction

New data shows a shift towards optimism for technology to improve life on the frontline—63 percent of frontline workers are excited about the job opportunities technology creates and rank it third on the list of factors that could help reduce work-related stress, just behind better pay and vacation time. In Microsoft’s own productivity data, we’ve seen how the pandemic accelerated that change and drove a 400 percent increase in Microsoft Teams usage among frontline workers from March 2020 to November 2021.

As the frontline faces continuous constraints from labor shortages and supply chain disruptions, they want technology that saves them time, helps them communicate more seamlessly, and maximizes their efficiency when completing repetitive tasks.

Beyond our partnership with Samsung’s rugged device portfolio, today we’re deepening our strategic partnership with Zebra Technologies. We are announcing the general availability of Walkie Talkie app in Teams on a wide range of Zebra mobile devices, such as the rugged take-it anywhere TC-series, the sleek customer-facing EC-series, and the ultimate scanning device MC-series. The collaboration brings Teams’ digital Walkie Talkie functionality with a dedicated push-to-talk (PTT) button on Zebra devices so frontline workers can enjoy clear, instant, and secure communication at their fingertips. Walkie Talkie is now also available on all iOS mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads, in addition to Android mobile devices.

“With this partnership, we’re excited to be able to provide frontline workers with the ability to use these devices to seamlessly communicate, collaborate, and stay productive in any conditions.”—Anders Gustafsson, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Zebra Technologies.

Walkie Talkie integrated on Zebra devices and Walkie Talkie iOS is now generally available.

With continued labor shortages in most industries, strains over shift scheduling have worsened for teams to not only cover shifts as usual but to now do so with fewer people. When asked what technology solutions could help with reducing workplace stress, the number one choice was team scheduling (37 percent).

To continue providing workers with the flexibility to own their schedule, their own way, today we are announcing the general availability of the Reflexis Shifts connector for Teams which integrates with the Reflexis Workforce Scheduler (RWS) to create a seamless, real-time sync for viewing, assigning, and managing shift requests. As a leading workforce management solution, RWS provides targeted and flexible scheduling management. Together with Teams, RWS helps drive worker autonomy, delivers optimized scheduling, and gives organizations a new opportunity to provide frontline workers with access to their schedules in a consistent and flexible manner. 

Reflexis Shifts connector for Teams will be generally available January 2022.

Another one of the top five technology solutions believed to relieve stress on the frontline is managing appointments, which has experienced massive transformations as more and more in-person appointments have moved to virtual ones. Now workers can have a comprehensive view of virtual appointments in one location, including real-time updates on wait times, queueing, missed appointments, and staffing delays to create a first-class experience for customers and patients. 

Scheduled queuing in virtual visits will be generally available January 2022.

Additionally, to enable workers to stay in the flow of work and reduce stress around approval updates, we are integrating the Approvals app directly into the industry processes that frontline workers rely on. Now workers can manage and request approvals in their line of business with Power Apps component framework (PCF) controls, as well as require details like mandatory comments or group approvals to make sure approvals, and the processes that depend on them, run smoothly.

Approvals mandatory comments will be generally available this month, and PCF controls and group approvals will be available in February 2022.

Finally, our suite of identity and endpoint management solutions can help take the stress out of sharing a device on the frontline. On top of using a GPS-powered map for locating a misplaced device with Microsoft Endpoint Manager, IT will soon be able to trigger an audio notification to help frontline workers easily find their misplaced device. Plus, when devices are enrolled in shared device mode through Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), workers can easily sign out of all supported applications—like Teams and Managed Home Screen, as well as other applications, like Workday—with a single tap on Android devices to make them ready and compliant for the next worker.

2. Prioritize and modernize training

While the data shows improved optimism from frontline workers about the ability for technology to improve life on the job, more than 50 percent of those surveyed say their company hasn’t provided the training needed to do their job effectively. Frontline workers are eager for training and companies will need to prioritize training initiatives and ensure it is accessible for everyone in the organization. With tools to onboard new teammates ranked as the second most important technology to help frontline workers with workplace stress, this is especially important as staffing continues to fluctuate.

Microsoft Viva Learning enables frontline employees to discover, access, share, and track learning content right from Teams. Companies can keep the entire workforce up to date and quickly onboard new employees on training, policies, and general learnings with the latest learning management system (LMS) integrations. The LMS assignment feature enables corporate employees to assign training and learnings from partner solutions like SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Saba Cloud to enable workers to easily access these assigned learnings on any device through Teams.

Learning management system assignment feature will be generally available January 2022.

Plus, new partnerships with learning providers, like EdCast and OpenSesame, will join existing partners like Go1 and Coursera to offer a depth and breadth of frontline learning content. This extensive partner content library, along with any organization-created learning content through the SharePoint integration, will help frontline workers train and upskill with relevant learning content whether on mobile, tablet, or desktop.

EdCast will be generally available January 2022 and OpenSesame will be generally available February 2022.

“We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Microsoft and extend the value of Viva Learning by offering organizations the full EdCast skilling smartcards, pathways, and journeys to share, bookmark, and integrate into broader learning journeys.”—Karl Mehta, CEO, EdCast.

“Our partnership with Microsoft Viva Learning allows companies to curate the perfect list of courses for every learner, all while in the flow of their work.”—Don Spear, CEO and Cofounder, OpenSesame.

3. Build company culture that includes the frontline

A strong culture is often what separates successful companies from the rest, impacting not only business performance, but also motivating, retaining, and attracting the best people to an organization. But company culture is not trickling down to the frontline. The frontline workforce cites a culture and communication disconnect from leadership, with 68 percent of frontline managers saying leadership does not prioritize building workplace culture and 63 percent of frontline workers noting messages from leadership often get lost and do not reach them.

Technology like Microsoft Viva Connections can play a critical role in bridging that culture and communication gap—allowing leadership to share messages, company updates, and kudos to the frontline while empowering frontline workers to share thoughts and ideas back. Now with new Viva Connections strategic partners Workday and Espressive, workers can easily access important company resources and actions in one location.

Espressive will be available in February and Workday card within the calendar year 2022 in Viva Connections

Joint customers will be able to leverage the power of Workday directly within Viva Connections, furthering the experience for employees to access Workday insights and actions when and where they naturally work, without requiring employees to leave Teams. Using Workday employee self-service capabilities, such as an intelligent clock in and clock out experience, a frontline worker, for example, can be notified that their break is nearly over, and with a tap, clock back in from their mobile device.

Espressive provides a single place for employees to go for immediate, personalized self-help in nine languages across 14 enterprise departments (like IT, Human Resources, and Payroll) through Viva Connections, with pending requests and issues accessible through dashboard cards. Espressive Barista is an AI-based virtual support agent (VSA) that helps automate the resolution of employee questions, issues, and requests with personalized responses, so workers get the answers they need.

Looking forward

A strong frontline means a better bottom line. From team scheduling and onboarding to automating tasks and managing appointments, companies can ease the daily burden on their frontline workforce by providing the right technology tools and creating a strong company culture. The right solutions can not only maximize frontline workers’ productivity, but also enable a consistent sense of culture that leads to stronger retention, better customer interactions, and deeper alignment to company missions.

At Microsoft, in partnership with industry leaders, we continue to innovate around solutions that help reduce stress, modernize training, and rebuild culture for those on the frontline. For more findings on the opportunities to empower frontline workers, read the full Work Trend Index Special Report. And check out our Look Book and our new Mechanics show for a closer look at the new Microsoft 365 product innovations to power the frontline.

The post 3 ways technology can help rebuild your frontline workforce appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

These innovations pull directly from our thinking around the Hybrid Work Paradox, ¹ which demands rethinking the operating model for every organization, and learnings from early Viva customers like Unilever, Humana, and REI.¹ Viva helps organizations transform their employee experience, which really is the digital experience of working for a company, to retain and attract talent in the Great Reshuffle.²

As a single solution, Viva ensures every employee is connected to their organization’s culture, personal productivity insights, expert knowledge, and key learning resources. And with the addition of Ally.io, it will be even easier to align employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities. In all, Viva empowers every level of the organization to address key challenges of hybrid work and employee burnout.

The Microsoft Viva suite: One plan for an integrated EXP   

With the Microsoft Viva suite, customers get an integrated EXP that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into the flow of work. The suite comes at a promotional price of $9 per user per month through August 2022, which is 25 percent less than purchasing the three premium modules individually (a total of $12). Customers who purchase the suite subscription now will also receive the new Ally.io module next year at no additional cost.

Since Microsoft Viva provides an integrated experience, IT administrators can now leverage the centralized Microsoft 365 admin center experience to access guided set-ups for deploying Viva. The admin center experience comes with a setup guide and list of tasks for each Viva module and related partner solutions to simplify the initial setup. A complete step-by-step set of deployment instructions for each module is also available in the documentation hyperlinks at the end of this blog.

Viva Connections: Culture and communications

Viva Connections is a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in the applications and devices you use every day—and later this month, those devices will include your mobile phone.

Starting today, you can engage with integrations from many industry leading partners to extend your culture and communications experience, including Workday, ServiceNow, Qualtrics, UKG, and more.

In addition to these partner integrations, you are now also able to add cards for Approvals, Shifts, and Tasks from Teams into your Viva Connections dashboard. These integrations will also allow you to engage in Viva Connections with new partner functionality, such as Adobe Sign and DocuSign for Approvals and Zebra-Reflexis and Blue Yonder for Shifts.

Finally, we are happy to announce that Espressive will be joining the Viva Connections partner family. Dashboard cards from Espressive will allow employees to get immediate, personalized self-help later this year.

Learn about all the new Viva Connections partners, including those coming on board soon, in our on-demand session. We’re also excited to announce that new module webparts are now available in SharePoint. You can learn about those in the on-demand session too.

Figure 1. Connect with your organization from wherever you’re working—including your mobile phone later this month. 

Viva Insights: Productivity and wellbeing

Viva Insights helps improve productivity and wellbeing through data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations. Today, we are announcing expanded capabilities to help managers and team leads navigate hybrid work and to help everyone in an organization run more effective meetings. For details on these and other upcoming features, read the Viva Insights blog.

• New manager insights and tools will help managers and team leads stay connected with team members, track outstanding tasks, explore personal habits that impact team culture, recognize accomplishments, and foster team norms such as no-meeting days—all through actionable recommendations. These insights will be available soon for any team size from the My team tab in the Viva Insights app for Microsoft Teams.
• A new effective meetings experience in the Viva Insights app for Teams will help meeting organizers get personalized insights and suggestions to improve their meeting habits. Users will also be able to create and share meeting plans to set team meeting norms such as shorter meetings by default and always including Teams links.
• Guided meditations from Headspace will be generally available in November 2021 in four additional languages: French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Figure 2. Empower managers to define no-meeting days for their teams.

Viva Topics: Knowledge and expertise

Viva Topics applies AI to automatically organize content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics, like projects, products, processes, and customers. That content appears as topic pages and topic centers—created and updated by AI—that enable experts to cultivate and share knowledge with wiki-like simplicity. It also pops up as topic cards that deliver knowledge just in time across Outlook, SharePoint, and Office. Soon, Viva Topics, which is now generally available, will make it easier to unlock that knowledge from even more sources. To learn more about these and other enhancements, read our Viva Topics blog or watch our on-demand session for Knowledge and Content Services.

• We’re unlocking adoption of knowledge across more of Microsoft 365 by integrating Viva Topics into Outlook, Yammer, Bing, and people profile cards. Available by the end of 2021.
• Our early adopter customers will soon be able to add Viva Topics directly to chats and channels in Microsoft Teams. Rolling out early next year.
• More ways for topic managers to oversee knowledge at scale, including automatic grouping of related topics into segments, usage analytics, and a streamlined topic center. Rolling out at year end.
• Support to crawl knowledge from content written in French, German and Spanish. Rolling out at year end.

Figure 3. Get context about organizational terms, projects, or team names directly in Outlook with integrated topic cards. 

Viva Learning: Skilling and growth

Viva Learning brings enterprise learning into the flow of work by connecting content from your organization, Learning Management Systems, third-party providers, and Microsoft. As of today, the module is generally available in Teams desktop and mobile. During the next couple weeks, Viva Learning will be available in your Microsoft 365 tenant—simply search “Viva Learning” in the Teams app menu to find it—with additional capabilities to expand your personal and social learning. Just a handful of these new capabilities are listed below. For a complete list of feature releases, partner integrations, and SKU details for enabling more advanced capabilities, read our Viva Learning blog.

• See assignments from integrated Learning Management Systems to easily stay up to date on required learning.
• Search across all the learning sources connected to Viva Learning and filter by interests, provider, or duration to find the exact content you need.
• Make learning recommendations to your team and colleagues and track the recommendations you’ve made. You can filter recommendations by status and the user’s reported completion rate.
• Add a curated set of learning resources as a tab in your Teams channels to bring learning directly into the flow of teamwork.

Figure 4. The Home view provides a personalized learner snapshot and access point for all connected learning content.

Ally.io: A new module for objectives and key results

We are excited to bring Ally.io, a leading objectives and key results (OKR) company, into the Microsoft Viva family as a new module during the second half of the calendar year 2022. This new module will help revolutionize how organizations use technology to bring deeper connection to work, purpose, and results in the hybrid world.

Aligning employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities is top of mind for every organization. To do this, leaders need to invest in tools that communicate transparency around big company bets and create ways to cascade aspirational goals and report results at all levels of an organization. Ally.io helps give everyone in the organization visibility and clarity into the entire work process, connecting everyday work to the company’s strategic objectives.

Figure 5. Enhancements to the Ally.io app in Microsoft Teams, as well as an official Microsoft Viva module based on the OKR solution, are on the way.

To learn more about the Ally.io solution, read our announcement blog and visit Ally.io.

The Microsoft Viva platform

Viva is easily customizable and extensible, accessible from anywhere you work, and integrates with tools you already use to fit your unique needs. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Viva now supports the following partner integrations, giving you access to industry-leading apps in the natural flow of work.

• Viva Learning: SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, Coursera, Skillsoft, Pluralsight, edX, Udemy, Go1, Infosec, Josh Bersin Academy, Udacity,* Harvard Business Review,* OpenSesame,* and EdCast.*
• Viva Connections: Qualtrics, ServiceNow, UKG, Talentsoft, StandOut by ADP, Adobe Sign, Moveworks, Lifeworks, Limeade, Tribute, Blue Yonder, Zebra-Reflexis, Workday,* DocuSign,* EdCast,* and Espressive.*
• Viva Insights: Qualtrics, Glint, and Headspace.

We are also offering a new joint plan for the Microsoft Viva suite with LinkedIn Glint to our enterprise customers. Together, Viva and Glint capture valuable employee feedback and translate insights into actions, allowing managers and teams to measure and improve the employee experience.

Microsoft Viva is an open and extensible platform and soon partners and developers will be able to leverage toolkits and APIs for each of the four modules. The Viva Connections toolkit is available now, while the 3P content support for Viva Topics is coming to private preview in 2022. The Viva Insights and Viva Learning APIs will be available in 2022 as well. Read our blog for additional details about Viva partners and extensibility.

EXP for every organization—including Microsoft

Through all the ups, downs, and profound changes of the past year, our mission is still to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—including every person at Microsoft. We’re on the same employee experience journey as our customers with Microsoft Viva, using it throughout our worldwide offices to promote connection, growth, and wellbeing at work.

We’re shedding light on that journey in a new blog series about the development of Microsoft Viva. The first installment recaps our early decisions around employee satisfaction; the realization that individual employee experience apps are great—but a centralized platform is better, and the shift we made to respond to the pandemic and reimagine our internal solutions for customers.

But like you, our journey has only just begun, and we’re excited to share our progress in the second blog installment that was just published today.

We’re humbled and excited that Microsoft Viva has already had such a profound impact on our employees and the employees at other global organizations. To learn how the world’s leading companies use Viva to empower their people, select the logos.

Get started on your employee experience journey

Our own journey with Microsoft Viva has helped us understand the kinds of resources needed to get started on this employee experience path. Since Viva was first announced in February, we’ve been continuously adding to our documentation to deploy, adopt, and manage Viva. Here’s a list of our most helpful resources, no matter where you are in the EXP journey. If you need even more information (or just want to bounce ideas off someone), talk to your Microsoft representative.

• Microsoft Viva
• Microsoft Viva pricing
• Microsoft Viva Tech Community
• Microsoft Viva Connections overview
• Microsoft Viva Insights documentation
• Microsoft Viva Topics introduction
• Microsoft Viva Learning introduction
• Visit Ally.io and read our acquisition announcement
• Microsoft Mechanics videos for IT admins
• Microsoft Viva Developer Page

¹ 73%: The Hybrid Work Paradox, Jared Spataro, Microsoft WorkLab. 8 September 2021.

² Microsoft and LinkedIn share latest data and innovation for hybrid work, Jared Spataro, Microsoft. 9 September 2021.

*Coming by the end of January 2022

The post Microsoft Viva is now generally available to help transform your hybrid work experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

The established patterns of work we relied on for years are undergoing monumental changes. Asynchronous communication is the new norm. Meetings transcend time and space. The promise of AI is being realized—amplifying human ingenuity in ways that feel like magic.

To thrive in this new world, every organization needs a digital fabric that binds the organization together with secure communication, collaboration, and creation. This digital fabric will enable flexibility and strengthen connections across people and teams. It will seamlessly weave together data, automation, and AI—all in the flow of work. It needs to extend beyond organizational boundaries to customers and partners. And it needs to include every type of worker—information, frontline, and flexible workers.

We are innovating across the Microsoft Cloud to deliver this digital fabric to empower everyone in this new era. And at the center of it all is Microsoft Teams.

At Ignite, we are introducing exciting new apps and capabilities that in one year will be just as integrated into your daily workflow as Teams is today. Let’s dive in.

Collaboration that transcends boundaries and keeps you in the flow of work

As computing becomes embedded in the real world, the real world is being embedded in computing—that’s Microsoft Mesh, the metaverse platform. We’re taking that experience and building Mesh right into Teams, recreating a lot of what we value about being together and extending productivity beyond what was previously possible.

Mesh for Microsoft Teams introduces a new generation of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) meetings. How you project yourself in an immersive space really matters. Personalized avatars give you control to customize your avatar and use AI to imitate movements and gestures that enable you to bring your physical presence into the conversation, even when your camera is off.

Organizations will also be able to create immersive spaces that resemble physical spaces such as conference rooms, design centers, and networking lounges to enhance camaraderie, spark creativity, and foster serendipitous water-cooler connections. Learn more about Mesh for Microsoft Teams.

New updates to the Teams meeting experience

We are bringing new updates to the Teams meeting experience to foster more inclusive and productive hybrid meetings. Users can now assign roles from the scheduling form and see the order of raised hands to ensure that all the voices are heard. Also, we’re revamping the mobile overflow menu to prioritize key actions, like viewing chat and adding a notification drawer for in-meeting system messages, so users can preview, collapse, and clear all notifications with one tap.

Unlock better hybrid meeting experiences

In partnership with some of the world’s best hardware partners, we’re working to deliver Teams experiences on devices that help people stay connected and participate fully in meetings regardless of where they are attending from.

Upon certification, the Yealink desk Vision AIO24 with its new 24-inch display can be used as a standalone device for Teams collaboration or connected to a PC as a second screen.

Logitech Tap Scheduler is joining the Teams panels portfolio pending certification, enabling people to easily view meeting room availability, location information, and meeting details at a glance.

Direct Guest Join allows users to join a third-party meeting, with basic controls, from their Teams Rooms. Similarly, it allows people to join Teams meetings from their third-party room systems. Today, this is available with Zoom and Cisco. Next year we will expand this to include Bluejeans and GoToMeeting.  

Surface Hubs can now be managed from the Teams admin center alongside other Teams devices. In the coming months, Microsoft Teams Room managed services will be expanded to include Surface Hub in the cloud-based IT management and monitoring service.

Make cross-organizational collaboration easier and more secure

Work doesn’t happen in a silo—it requires communication and collaboration with individuals both inside and outside the organization. We’re delivering new capabilities to Microsoft Teams Connect that remove barriers and make it easier and more secure to collaborate with anyone.

Share a channel with individuals and teams across multiple organizations, schedule a meeting, collaborate in real-time on apps, and share channels with up to 50 teams and as many organizations as you need (available in public preview in the first quarter of 2022). Meanwhile, we are extending Teams chat capabilities, enabling you to chat with team members outside your organization with a Teams personal account (available by the end of 2021).

Deliver engaging and memorable events

A host of new webinars and broadcasting capabilities will make it easy to set up and deliver professional, engaging experiences to internal and external audiences. The virtual green room will enable organizers and presenters to socialize, monitor chat, conduct Q&As, manage attendee settings, and share content before the event starts. Organizers and presenters will be able to manage what attendees see to ensure that attendees will only see shared content and participants that are brought on screen. Both of these capabilities will be available in preview in early 2022.

Leading events and hospitality management platform, Cvent, is now integrated with Teams. Starting in early 2022, customers can use Cvent to manage the event lifecycle, including registration and agenda management, and to deliver the virtual meeting and event experience via Teams.

Unlock teamwork with collaborative apps

Collaborative apps are a new generation of applications with collaboration at the core. Designed and optimized for the flexibility of hybrid work inside Teams, they bring the relevant processes, data, and people together to accomplish more. New collaborative apps from partners including Atlassian, SAP, and ServiceNow enable customers to engage with these apps across chat, channels, and meetings. Meanwhile, new experiences between Dynamics 365 and Teams bring more data and connectivity right into your workflow.

The redesigned Teams Store, now available, makes finding the right app for your needs simple and streamlined.

Streamline the contact center experience

A new all-in-one digital contact center solution, powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Teams, brings together traditional contact center, unified communications, and customer service capabilities into a single, integrated software as a service (SaaS) solution. With this new all-in-one solution, you’ll be able to deliver chat and voice connectivity, extensibility with other business applications, and intelligence embedded at every step of the customer service experience.

Empowering creators everywhere

We’re completely reimaging Office to go beyond the traditional confines of a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, spilling over to entirely new mediums. Just like Teams transformed collaboration and productivity, Microsoft Loop is the next big breakthrough in Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Loop is a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that move freely and stay in sync across applications—enabling teams to think, plan, and create together. Microsoft Loop has three elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces.

Loop components are atomic units of productivity that help you collaborate and complete work right within chats, meetings, emails, documents, and more. You can build your own Loop components, or leverage ours, including:

• Voting table makes it easy for teams to brainstorm, drive consensus, and finalize decisions together.
• Status tracker will help you gather information from your team, track progress towards all aspects of your project, and always maintain an up-to-date view of the project across your team.

Loop pages are flexible canvases where you can organize your components and pull in helpful elements like links, files, or data in ways that suit your specific project needs.

Loop workspaces are shared spaces that allow you and your team to see and group everything important to your project. And workspaces make it easy for you to catch up on what everyone is working on, react to others’ ideas, and track progress toward shared goals.

Microsoft Loop components are rolling out in preview across Microsoft 365 apps, such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneNote in the coming months, with more Microsoft Loop functionality to follow.

The promise of AI has always been about augmenting human capability in ways that feel like magic. That’s becoming reality with Context IQ. Context IQ turns insights into action, harnessing the power of Microsoft Graph to glean insights about your work throughout the day, then predicting, seeking, and suggesting information you need, right when you need it—at the point of action.

For example, Context IQ takes Microsoft Editor, to the next level, helping with things like suggesting a relevant file or document, finding available calendar times with collaborators, suggesting colleagues to tag in emails, or suggesting related Loop components for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales opportunity records.

We’re boosting our support for video creation with the recent inclusion of Clipchamp to the Office family. Clipchamp empowers people to create beautiful, professional-looking videos easily and quickly. Its fun and intuitive interface combined with powerful capabilities and a large stock library help ensure people can bring their video visions to life.

We are launching new experiences on Office.com and the Office app for Windows with new Home, My Content, and Create pages. These new experiences make it easier to find all of one’s content and files across apps and storage locations, see what needs attention, and get to the apps and templates needed for work—all in one place.

The new experience will begin rolling out to users next week. Learn more about these updates in the Office blog.

The digital employee experience is the employee experience

The employee experience is no longer defined by or tethered to a physical location. We need new ways to keep employees engaged and informed, all in the flow of work. That’s where Microsoft Viva comes in.   

Microsoft Viva is now available for purchase as a suite that includes the Insights, Learning, and Topics modules. The Viva suite will also include a new goals management module in 2022 based on our recent acquisition of Ally.io. Viva Learning is now generally available for everyone. Finally, we are launching new experiences for Viva Connections mobile and desktop.  

Viva Insights will offer a new effective meetings experience and manager insights to help employees build new habits and norms that boost connection, productivity, and wellbeing.  

Finally, we’re happy to share that several of the partner integrations we announced for Viva Learning and Viva Connections earlier this year—including SAP SuccessFactors, Qualtrics, ServiceNow, Cornerstone OnDemand, and UKG —are now generally available. Learn more about all of our Microsoft Viva announcements.

Windows for a hybrid world

Each of these exciting new innovations are built for and powered by Windows—the only OS designed for hybrid work. The launch of Windows 11 means easy, zero-touch deployment and the ability to tune devices and tools to meet the unique needs of individual teams and employees:

• To make it easier for organizations using Intune to take advantage of the Windows Update for Business deployment service, we are integrating controls for scheduling and deploying Windows feature updates directly into Intune. Learn more in our blog post.
• Microsoft Test Base for Microsoft 365, now generally available, is a cloud service that enables independent software vendors, enterprise partners, and organizations to test their line of business applications against versions of Windows Client and Server. Read more about Test Base for Microsoft 365.

• Universal Print is a cloud service that allows users to securely print to any printer in the organization without a need for print servers. Learn more about Universal Print.

Read about 11 things we like about Windows 11 in this Tech Community blog.

New enhancements to Windows 365, including Windows 11 support on Business Edition

We’ve taken the PC to the cloud with Windows 365, so businesses of all sizes can securely stream a full Windows experience to any device. You can now choose to experience Windows 11 in the cloud with the Windows 365 Enterprise edition today. Support for the Business edition is coming soon.

There are several new updates being made to provide an optimal Windows 365 experience, including:

• Enhanced security and support via a virtual Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip to enable Windows 11.
• Web client improvements for faster load times, better performance, local resource settings, accessibility features, and more.
• Support for Azure Active Directory joined Windows 365 eliminates the need for on-premises or Azure infrastructure.
• Endpoint analytics resource reports in Microsoft Endpoint Manager provide metrics on central processing unit (CPU) and random access memory (RAM) performance in Windows 365.

For customers who want a modern cloud service for desktop and application virtualization but also need to support some apps and data on-premises, we are announcing the preview of Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI. Learn more about Azure Virtual Desktop announcements.

Also new to Microsoft 365

According to our research, more than 60 percent of small businesses said they didn’t feel equipped to handle cyberthreats. Microsoft Defender for Business is a new endpoint security solution that helps organizations with up to 300 employees protect themselves against cyberattacks. It will be available as a standalone solution and will be included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Learn more about Microsoft Defender for Business.

Looking ahead

From redesigning physical meeting spaces to include those not in the room to reinventing the way you create digitally in the world of hybrid work, we’re committed to enabling every employee to thrive in this new world of work. This is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months. Stay tuned.

The post What’s new in Microsoft 365—How we’re empowering everyone for a new world of hybrid work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As hybrid work shifts from “new” to “the new normal,” we’re continuing to learn how to successfully navigate the transition. One thing remains clear: hybrid work is about providing flexibility. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. One of the latest findings from our Work Trend Index¹ illustrates this perfectly: when we surveyed our own employees, we found those who plan to spend the most and least time in the office are doing so for the same reason: focused work. Through the launch of new technologies, like Windows 11 releasing on October 5, 2021, we’re empowering employees to contribute and be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

This month, we’re adding more spoken languages to live captions and transcripts in Microsoft Teams. And in preparation for a season of new operating systems, from Windows 11 to Apple iOS and macOS, we are adding new capabilities to Microsoft Endpoint Manager to help ensure your employees have a great experience on day one. Let’s dive into these, and our other announcements, for more details.

Deliver more inclusive meetings for everyone

Earlier this month, we shared several new Teams announcements to help organizations prepare their physical office spaces for hybrid work, make remote meetings as effective as being in person, and enable employees to stay in the flow of work.

We’re now introducing enhanced support for live captioning and transcripts and Microsoft Viva Topics integration between Microsoft Yammer and Microsoft Viva.

• Turn on live captioning and transcripts in more languages: Now, meetings held in one of the supported languages are also supported by real-time captioning and live transcripts. We have expanded to 27 new spoken languages including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi to name a few. Users on mobile can view captions in the supported languages, and desktop users will be able to switch the spoken language. This provides flexibility and additional clarity for your participants to engage in the meeting. Customers can access this via a Teams Meeting on the desktop app by clicking the More Actions option.

• Discover knowledge with Topics integration between Yammer and Viva: Yammer is integrating with and adopting Viva Topics to make community-sourced knowledge easily accessible across an organization and support a consistent experience in Microsoft 365. With this new integration, Topics will refer to the same thing whether in Yammer, Viva, or elsewhere in Microsoft 365. For example, users will see topics in Yammer enhanced with Viva Topics experiences, such as Viva Topic cards, and Viva Topics experiences like pages and cards will include content from Yammer—such as questions and answers and conversations. To get started, download the Yammer Topic API Changes documentation.

Co-author encrypted docs and create more colorful diagrams

This month, we’re adding support for co-authoring in encrypted documents and custom colors in Microsoft Visio for the web. 

• Co-author in encrypted documents in Microsoft 365 Apps: In 2019, we added support for sensitivity labeling in OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling labeled and encrypted documents to be opened, edited, and AutoSaved in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on the web for the first time. This month, we’re extending co-authoring and AutoSave to include Microsoft 365 apps on the desktop for both Windows and macOS. Now, multiple people can co-author Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents simultaneously, frictionlessly, with auto-save, while maintaining the sensitivity labeling and document protections, across the web and desktop applications. This capability helps enhance organizations’ ability to keep their sensitive content protected while empowering users to be more productive while working remotely. This feature is available for Current and Monthly Enterprise channels following our channel release cadence.

• Expand your color palette with custom colors in Visio for the web: Until recently, Visio for web users were limited to Theme Colors, Standard Colors, and the option to change the transparency for objects in their diagram. With the addition of Recent Colors and More Colors, you can now quickly access recently used colors in your diagram or choose from a full spectrum of colors. View the Recent Colors and More Colors documentation for details.

Ensure your employees can be productive from day one

This month, we’re releasing new capabilities to help ensure you’re prepared for your employees to be working from new versions of Windows, Apple iOS, and macOS.

• Understand device readiness for Windows 11 with Endpoint analytics: With Windows 11 nearing release, you’ll need to know which of your devices are ready for an upgrade. The Endpoint analytics service in Microsoft Endpoint Manager offers a new Windows metric that helps you measure the number of devices running older versions of Windows, and then provides remediation steps to upgrade your Windows OS version.

The digital employee experience plays a huge role in overall satisfaction and productivity. Our Endpoint analytics service provides your organization with meaningful metrics and insights for measuring the quality of your users’ experience, while also helping you assess the performance and health of various endpoints managed by Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Learn more about Endpoint analytics and how the recent enhancements can help you assess digital employee experience.

• Manage iOS 15 and macOS 12 with Endpoint Manager on launch day: Apple announced several changes coming to iOS 15 and macOS 12 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2021. This month, we announced that Microsoft Endpoint Manager will be able to support many of your endpoint management needs on day zero release of the new versions of Apple’s operating system to help keep your endpoints secure and protect company data. You can learn more about these and other new iOS, iPadOS, and macOS endpoint management capabilities that can improve the experience of workers on the frontline and hybrid work environments. These updates are rolling out now in line with the rollout of the new Apple operating system and through the October 2021 release of Endpoint Manager.

Looking to the future

From the upcoming launch of Windows 11 to the updates in Microsoft Teams that help every attendee feel more included, we’re committed to supporting the work-from-anywhere model required for hybrid work. And there’s more to come. Our next blog will cover announcements from Microsoft Ignite, our biannual product announcement event, which we’ll be brought to you digitally this year.

¹ Work Trend Index, WorkLab, Microsoft. 2021.

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With 145 million daily active users (and growing) Microsoft Teams is where people start their day and stay in the flow of work. Over the past 18 months, people have come to rely on Teams to meet, chat, call, collaborate, and—increasingly—automate business processes. In a very real way, Teams has become the new front end for a new world of work. But empowering people for flexible work isn’t easy. Every organization will need to build a new operating model across people, places, and processes.

This year at Inspire, we shared three ways that we are innovating to create new categories for a new world of hybrid work with the Microsoft Cloud:

• A new Dynamics 365 + Microsoft Teams experience demonstrates the power of collaborative apps and enables organizations to activate this capability at no additional licensing cost.
• Windows 365, which takes the PC to the cloud, gives people the ability to connect to their content, applications, data, and settings without limiting them to any single device.
• New partner integrations with Microsoft Viva enhance the employee experience.

We’re also announcing additional innovations across Microsoft 365—including new security capabilities, new app monetization capabilities in the marketplace, and Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. In a changing world of work, these announcements bring opportunities for our partners and customers. Let’s take a look.

Collaborative apps: Activate the flow of work with Dynamics 365 in Teams

Hybrid work requires a new class of apps that surface in rich ways across all the places people work – within chat, channels, and meetings. These apps are a fusion of people and business process, and we call them simply “collaborative apps.” They also present an incredible opportunity for our partners to connect with the 145 million daily active users in Teams and expand their total addressable market.

Together, Dynamics 365 and Teams offer powerful new ways for everyone across an organization to seamlessly exchange and capture ideas right in the flow of work. Today we announced a new collaborative app that brings together the best of Dynamics 365 and Teams. We’re also eliminating the licensing tax that has historically held organizations back from this kind of integration, making these experiences available within Teams to any user, at no additional cost.

No other technology vendor offers this kind of integration and accessibility across the organization without the need to pay for multiple underlying software licenses.

View and edit Dynamics 365 records right within your Teams workflow

Dynamics 365 users can now invite anyone in the organization to view and collaborate on customer records right within the flow of a Teams chat or channel, ensuring the right individuals can take the next best action—faster and more efficiently without needing to switch context across multiple apps and data sources. For sellers, this includes sharing information like details on the sales opportunity, customer history, health of the customer relationship, key contacts, and more. For customer service representatives, this could include sharing the customer case record, sourcing troubleshooting steps, and tracking follow-up tasks.

Add a Teams meeting to appointments and capture notes

Dynamics 365 users can now add a Teams meeting when creating an appointment, enabling access to key customer information during a Teams call. Users can also capture notes directly with the Teams call, which is automatically saved in the timeline of the Dynamics 365 record. Only users with appropriate permissions can access the data, helping to ensure the most appropriate employees are viewing, interacting with, and sharing customer records. 

Stay up to date on records with automated notifications and connected workflows

With more employees collaborating on records, it’s critical for stakeholders to know when colleagues make key changes as they happen. Automatic notifications keep stakeholders alerted to updates. Users can select specific chats and channels through which notifications are sent, as well as the frequency of notifications. In addition, specific adaptive cards can be sent based on the notification type, enabling more connected workflows.  

Break down barriers with collaborative apps from our partners

Our new integrated experiences between Teams and Dynamics 365 represent just one example of a collaborative app. Today, we also announced a host of new and enhanced collaborative apps from market-leading independent software vendor (ISV) partners including Atlassian Confluence, SAP Sales Cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday. All these integrations bring structured business processes and data together into the context of collaborative work.

Manage your Teams app purchasing across the enterprise more easily

ISVs will also soon be able to sell their apps directly within Teams, offering new economic opportunities and providing a simplified experience for Teams IT admins to purchase apps and subscriptions directly from the Teams admin center on behalf of their organization.

Windows 365 Cloud PC: Hybrid Windows for a hybrid world

The past year has shown us the PC’s central role in keeping people connected, productive, and secure while they work, create, and learn. Last month, we introduced Windows 11, which reimages everything from the operating system to the store to provide real choice to users.

Today, we introduced Windows 365—a cloud service that offers a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when it becomes available later this year). From interns and contractors to software developers and industrial designers, Windows 365 gives users agency to connect to their apps, data, and settings from any device and any endpoint. It creates a new category called Cloud PC, which uses both the power of the cloud and the capabilities of the device to provide a full, personalized Windows experience, anywhere.

Log on to your Cloud PC from any device

With an instant-on boot experience, users can stream all their personalized applications, tools, data, and settings from the cloud across any device. The Windows experience—whether you’re using Windows 10 or the upcoming Windows 11 available later this year—is consistent, no matter the device. You can pick up right where you left off, because the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices.

Provision Cloud PCs in minutes with no virtualization experience

A Cloud PC can be provisioned from the Microsoft Endpoint Manager dashboard. With provisioning policies, a group of Cloud PCs can be provisioned within minutes—including defining which version of Windows, assigning specific users or groups, and more.

Windows 365 is not just for enterprises; it has been designed to be approachable for businesses of all sizes. In fact, for small to medium-sized businesses, there are simple to use tools for helping citizen admins choose and configure their own cloud environments, ensuring everyone gets the opportunity to pick the right PC and bring the power of the cloud to their users.

Stay protected wherever you access your Cloud PC

Windows 365 is built on the principles of Zero Trust and is secure by design, helping solve today’s critical security challenges. Information is stored and secured in the cloud, not on the device. Windows 365 utilizes multifactor authentication (MFA) to explicitly verify any login or access attempt to a Cloud PC through integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). And within Microsoft Endpoint Manager, you can pair MFA with dedicated Windows 365 conditional access policies to assess login risk instantly for each session.

With Windows 365, you can bring collaborative apps, Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform—plus your security and identity credentials—with you anywhere, anytime. Access your Cloud PC no matter where you are—at home, the office, worksite, or on the go. Windows 365 will be generally available on August 2, 2021, and you can learn more in the Microsoft 365 blog from Wangui McKelvey.

Microsoft Viva: Employee experience in the flow of work

Microsoft Viva puts people at the center, connecting them to company information, communications, workplace insights, knowledge, and learning to help them achieve their very best. Powered by Microsoft 365, Viva is an employee experience platform designed to work with your existing solutions and can be easily customized and extended to be part of any company’s portfolio to help drive its culture transformation. Today, we shared new partnerships, development tools, research on employee experiences, and more. Read more about the news across the Microsoft Viva modules—Viva Learning, Viva Connections, and Viva Topics.  

Enrich your employee experience with new Viva partner integrations

Earlier this year, we announced a number of Viva partner integrations, ranging from content providers to learning management systems to wellbeing tools that make it easy for customers to connect employees with the solutions they use every day. Today, we announced 21 new partner integrations including Workday, Qualtrics, and ServiceNow. These partner integrations, in addition to the ones we announced earlier this year, will be available later this year.

Bring your solutions into Viva

We also introduced new tools to help our partners and developers integrate with, build on, and extend their solutions into Viva. Available later this year, Viva Connections APIs enable partners to integrate with the Viva Connections dashboard enhancing the discoverability and engagement of their tools directly within the Viva experience. Viva Learning APIs, available later this year as a preview, can be used to integrate content from learning providers, as well as due dates and assigned content from learning management systems where they can be accessed in Teams, Office.com, SharePoint, and Microsoft Search in Bing.

We are excited by the momentum we are seeing from our customers in their adoption of Viva. Customers like Old Mutual in collaboration with PwC are using Viva to empower managers to better understand employee behavior so they can foster a more inclusive and connected experience.

To help our partners build and market apps for Teams and Viva, we are also introducing a new set of benefits to build Microsoft 365 apps. These benefits include access to Microsoft technology, one-to-one consults with Microsoft experts to help our partners design, and build collaborative applications and employee experience solutions—marketing resources to scale to new customers, and support to achieve co-sell status to increase visibility with our 15,000 plus Microsoft field sellers.

As hybrid work becomes our new normal, ensuring your people feel engaged, achieve balance, and are empowered to be their best from anywhere is critical to success. In a recent study, we found that companies with best-in-class Employee Experience programs were 2.2 times more likely than peers to exceed financial targets and 5.1 times more likely to engage and retain employees. Read an executive summary of the report we commissioned with the Josh Bersin Academy for more information.

Secure your digital transformation

We are also empowering our partners to build trust with customers through new security offerings that prioritize inclusion, accessibility, and sustainability. Highlights are below—read our colleague Vasu Jakkal’s blog for full details.

Manage customers’ security posture at scale

We announced today that Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is entering preview. It provides managed service providers with one central location and standard security configuration templates to secure devices, data, and users for small and medium business customers that are using Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Specifically, Microsoft 365 Lighthouse empowers partners to quickly identify and act on threats, anomalous sign-in, and device compliance alerts. Reducing management complexity as our partners scale, and driving standardization across customers will allow partners to proactively manage risks and improve the security posture for the customers. You can learn more about Microsoft 365 Lighthouse in today’s Tech Community blog post.

Protect end customers against fraud

For partners who already help Azure AD business-to-consumer (B2C) customers manage identity and access for their customer apps, we are extending the scope of protection to include fraudulent activities by integrating Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection with Azure AD B2C.

Get visibility across more applications

We have built the app governance add-on feature to Microsoft Cloud App Security, entering preview today. Partners, who already manage Microsoft Cloud App Security for customers, can use app governance to monitor, protect, and govern Microsoft 365 apps and quickly identify, alert, and prevent risky behaviors.

Identify risky activities for users with critical positions

We extended the priority user group capability in Insider Risk Management to include fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC), now also in preview. It adds permissions to priority user groups to further limit alerts and cases to specific individuals instead of the whole group.

Customize regulatory assessments to fit unique requirements

New universal regulatory templates for non-Microsoft cloud in Compliance Manager enable partners to utilize the more than 300 templates available to manage customers’ compliance posture across different clouds and apps.

The future of work

As we emerge from this time of incredible challenges, we are optimistic that together we can empower people across the world for the flexible work of the future. We see an era ahead where people can have breakfast with the kids and quickly catch up on any missed meetings. Where organizations of all sizes—from a locally owned bike shop to a massive multinational corporate—can harness the full power of the cloud, from anywhere. And where every employee feels included and engaged, whether they’re working onsite, remotely, or some combination of the two.

The post From collaborative apps in Microsoft Teams to Windows 365—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365 at Inspire appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As workplaces open in many regions around the world, I hear from customers every day that they can’t wait to get back to in-person collaboration. I feel it myself—and look forward to seeing many of my coworkers in person one day soon. But even more than that, I look forward to finding new ways to help people connect and engage regardless of location and time zone. At Microsoft, we believe that hybrid work is the future of work and that to empower their people to succeed in hybrid work, business leaders will need to reimagine their organizations with a new operating model for people, places, and processes.

We’re also committed to building experiences that put everyone on equal footing—whether they’re together in a conference room in Atlanta, presenting remotely from a home office, or catching up with a meeting recording once the workday begins in Sydney.  

Microsoft Teams is mission-critical to this vision for a more flexible world of work. Teams is unique in that it brings together meetings, chat, calls, collaboration, and business process automation in a single app. Since COVID-19 spurred office workers around the world to work from home, we’ve been innovating in Teams to do things like create more natural and engaging meeting experiences—enable people to connect seamlessly with those inside and outside of their organizations and provide ways to make remote presentations richer and more impactful. And as we emerge into this new hybrid reality, we are focused on building experiences in Teams that are designed to ensure all voices are heard including the people not in the room—empowering everyone to connect and engage, from anywhere and at any time. And to make it easier to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously, we’re also announcing new Microsoft Fluid canvas innovations—in Teams and beyond. 

But COVID-19 also taught us that meeting fatigue and digital overload is real, and remote work has challenged our wellbeing. To help, Microsoft has built Microsoft Viva—our integrated employee experience platform—into Teams, so that employees can find ways to protect time and preserve their wellbeing right in the flow of their work.

Today we are announcing new innovations—in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva—all designed to empower your people for hybrid work. Let’s have a look.  

Participate on equal footing—at home, onsite, or on the go

Unlocking better hybrid meeting experiences for everyone begins with designing for the people who aren’t in the room, so that everyone feels like they have a seat at the table, whether they’re joining in the room, at home, or on the go. Today, we’re announcing enhancements to Teams meetings and Microsoft Teams Rooms built to create engaging experiences for every participant.



Over the course of this year, we will roll out front row in Teams Rooms, an immersive room layout that makes interactions feel more natural and gives in-room participants a greater sense of connection to remote participants. We’ve moved the video gallery to the bottom of the screen so remote participants are face-to-face with those in the room. And to help everyone stay engaged, meeting content is surrounded by contextual meeting information like the agenda, tasks, and notes. Meeting chat will also be clearly visible to those in the room, so they can see and respond to comments shared through chat.

To help remote participants establish their presence in the room and maximize inclusion, Teams Rooms will expand screen real estate using new video layouts that disperse the video gallery across multiple displays when content isn’t shared. The increased space means remote participants show up larger and more true to life. We’re also bringing more features from desktop to Teams Rooms this summer, to help bring attention to the remote participants engaging in the meeting. These features include live reactions, spotlight, and the ability to pin multiple video streams (coming this fall) and chat bubbles when using the classic video grid layout.

Remote participants should also be able to see who is in the meeting room, and what’s happening. Jabra, Logitech, Poly, and our newest Teams device partner Neat are using advanced AI-powered camera technologies to provide new video views optimized for hybrid meetings, allowing every person in the room to be seen more clearly.

We’re also making sure those who speak in meetings are clearly identified. The Teams intelligent speakers from EPOS and Yealink are now generally available and are built for Teams Rooms and use Microsoft’s voice recognition technology in Teams to attribute remarks to the meeting room speaker in the transcript. With speaker attributed—meeting transcription, people can focus on contributing to the conversation instead of taking notes, and those who missed the meeting can see a record of the conversation after the meeting.



And we’re thrilled to announce the new Teams Rooms on Surface Hub experience. Surface Hub is purpose-built for teams to meet and co-create, wherever they work, and the next generation of Teams on Surface Hub brings more of your favorite meetings features and controls from the desktop to the meeting room—including a modernized meeting stage, Together Mode scenes, and PowerPoint Live. Coming this fall, the new Microsoft Whiteboard experience will also be available on Surface Hub, so everyone can draw and ink on the same digital canvas.   

You can find more information on these Teams Rooms and partner announcements on our Teams Tech Community Blog.

To empower remote participants to initiate and facilitate whiteboard sessions, we’ve created a completely new, hybrid work-focused Whiteboard experience where all attendees can visually collaborate across the same digital canvas. Available in summer 2021, new features will enable anyone to bring existing content to Whiteboard to co-author; and new templates will help groups start ideating faster, improving their ability to follow along with contributors, and more.

Effective hybrid meetings require every participant to be able to present, and experience a presentation in a way that’s engaging and inclusive. New PowerPoint Live features help create a shared space for collaboration and contributions from everyone in the meeting. Slide translate allows attendees to see the presentation in their chosen language, for instance. And with our new inking experience, you can annotate your PowerPoint as you present—or use a laser pointer to call attention to key points. 

And look for these latest features in the Teams mobile app as well. You can now access PowerPoint Live and Dynamic view on your mobile devices. Custom background is also now on iOS and coming soon to Android.

Collaborate in the flow of work

To work effectively in hybrid and asynchronous models, people need a super-rich canvas that both creates and maintains context before, during, and after the meeting. Fluid components are atomic units of productivity that help you get your work done in the context of chat, emails, meetings, and more. Recently, we announced new Fluid components in chat to create live, collaborative experiences that can be edited in real-time and shared across Teams and Office apps. And today, we’re announcing the expansion of Fluid components for Teams meetings, OneNote, Outlook, and Whiteboard that make it easier to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously across Teams and Office apps. We’re also announcing new chat features that further support asynchronous collaboration, so you can keep the work moving forward in between meetings. Pin a message, providing your chat members with quick access to critical content anytime, and reply to a specific chat message maintaining context within the ongoing conversation.

Meetings have increased significantly over the past year, along with unstructured communications. Research from our Work Trend Index shows the average Teams user is sending 45 percent more chats per person per, week than they did one year ago. And ad-hoc, unstructured meetings are on the rise as well. To help manage this digital overload, new Fluid components in Teams meetings make it easy to co-create an agenda, take notes, and assign tasks, right within the Teams meeting, and access persistent recap content whenever you need it. And the note, agenda, and tasks from meetings will be automatically “placed” in the new meeting notes home of OneNote. While the meeting is underway, take the discussion a step further by ideating and brainstorming together by creating and editing live Fluid components in Whiteboard. Fluid components can also be leveraged across Outlook—in email or the calendar—making it easier to manage your time, agenda, notes, and tasks across apps.

Protect time and prioritize wellbeing

Weekly meeting time for Teams users has more than doubled since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back-to-back meetings increase stress and make it harder to stay engaged and focused. In just a few minutes a day, meditation and mindfulness with Headspace can help you reduce stress and improve focus. Starting later this month, we’re bringing a curated set of guided meditations and mindfulness exercises from Headspace to the Viva Insights app in Teams to help you start your day grounded, relax your mind before a big presentation, or disconnect from work in the evening.

Building upon the Viva Insights ability to schedule daily focus time to work uninterrupted with Teams notifications silenced, we are introducing a new focus mode in the Viva Insights app later this year. This will feature Focus music from Headspace and implement timers to help you make progress on important tasks in regular intervals with breaks planned in between.

Remote work has eliminated physical boundaries between work and life leading to an increase in after-hours chats, and a feeling of being always-on. We want to help your people find balance and protect personal time. Later this year, Viva Insights will offer the ability to configure quiet time to silence mobile notifications from Outlook and Teams outside your working hours as well as provide personalized insights on how well you are disconnecting. Quiet time settings will also be available for users in Teams and Outlook mobile and accompanied by IT administrator controls in Microsoft Endpoint Manager to support the creation of organization-wide policies to mute after-hours notifications.

As we all navigate this new world of work together, we will discover new ways to help people work both flexibly and effectively. At Microsoft, we’re committed to bringing you experiences that empower people to work from anywhere, at any time. By studying the research and the usage patterns in our apps—and talking to customers every day—we are continuing to hone our understanding of what people need, to bring their best selves to work every day. This understanding guides our innovation as we work to bring you and your people experiences that help them achieve more.

The post New hybrid work innovations in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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.

Nearly every day, my team sits down with organization leaders and partners from across the world who are doing the hard work to ready their people for the coming future of work. Naturally, in these meetings, we are often asked: What is Microsoft doing? And the first thing I tell them is: Just like you, we’re learning as we go—studying data, listening to our employees, and responding with agility to what works and what doesn’t. Because a growth mindset is the key to charting a path forward in any moment of uncertainty. 

There’s no doubt that this shift to a more flexible approach to work will be an enormous undertaking for every leader and every organization. That is certainly true for us as we create a plan to implement a hybrid work model for our more than 160,000 employees across the globe. We know that no one person or organization will have all the answers, but we believe that, as part of a growth mindset, each of us will be better off if we share what we’re learning with each other. 

Two new resources for navigating the shift to hybrid work

That’s why we recently released two resources that detail what we’re learning as we adopt a hybrid work model at Microsoft, in hopes that we can help you create the hybrid work plan that best fits your organization. At their core, these resources reflect our belief that leaders will need to come together to create a new, flexible operating model—spanning people, places, and processes—to fundamentally rewire their organization for hybrid work.  

The first resource I want to point you to is our Hybrid Workplace Flexibility Guide—which we originally created for Microsoft employees. In it, you’ll find sample team agreements, templates, and tools for hybrid work. There are also detailed plans that encompass everything from strategies to keep your people healthy, to exact roadmaps for how to help divide your people’s time between a physical or remote workplace. And there’s much more to come soon. 

The second is called Hybrid Work: A Guide for Business Leaders, and it wraps up much of what we’ve learned about how to reimagine people, places, and processes for a hybrid world. Here’s a quick summary of the highlights:

People 

To help people thrive in a more flexible work world we need to rethink the entire employee experience—from creating culture to attracting and retaining talent and building listening systems. Every organization needs a plan and policies that put us on the path to extreme flexibility and help us build digital empathy into every aspect of our culture. At Microsoft, we’re giving employees a clear flexible work policy—any employee can work remotely up to 50 percent of the time. We’re also we’re building privacy-backed listening systems to capture digital signals with tools including Workplace Analytics, part of Viva Insights, which lets managers and leaders check in on the wellbeing of their teams and organizations empowering managers and leaders to “hire talent from everywhere” and create their own team norms.

Places

Our approach to places hinges on bridging the gap between the physical and digital, and evolving with employee needs. This starts with putting employee safety first. For instance, we’re analyzing data from multiple inputs across public and private sources in a Microsoft Power BI dashboard to determine when people should be allowed at the worksite and how many. And we’re using a simple app built with Power Apps to help employees self-attest to their health and wellbeing when they come into the office.  

And when it comes to meeting spaces, we’re turning our pre-pandemic design philosophy on its head and designing for the people not in the room. By combining new design patterns with Microsoft Teams Rooms innovations, we’re giving everyone a seat at the table so they can fully participate, no matter where they are. 

Processes

The shift to hybrid work gives business leaders a rare opportunity to transform key business processes in bold new ways. If you’re thinking of the next few months simply as “a return to the office,” you’re missing the big picture. Instead, take some time to identify and prioritize digital transformation processes that leverage and scale what you’ve learned over the last year. If you don’t, your competitors will. The winners of the future are being decided today.   

At Microsoft, we’re taking the opportunity to reimagine our key business processes—from operations to sales. For example, we’re transforming our inside sales team; using Microsoft Power Platform—Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Apps—to automate order-to-cash; and investing in a centralized Global Demand Center to increase lead gen and customer engagement through automated digital marketing. 

There’s a lot more on what we’re learning, and what we’re changing, in the guide, and I’d encourage you to download it to get all the details.  

The thing I love most about the growth mindset is that it encourages you to be open to the best ideas—no matter where they come from. I’m excited to share these two resources with you and hope that they’ll be useful for you. But I’m even more excited to hear about what you’re learning on your journey. Together, we have the opportunity to create a new world of work that can be better for everyone.

More to come soon.

The post How Microsoft approaches hybrid work: A new guide to help our customers appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

From viewing live transcriptions during Microsoft Teams Meetings and tracking changes in Microsoft Excel documents to discovering and securing unmanaged devices, this month we’re announcing new features across Microsoft 365 designed to enable the flexibility that hybrid work requires. Other highlights include the ability to transform Microsoft Word documents into beautiful PowerPoint presentations using AI, expanded polling capabilities in Teams, and an updated Remote Desktop for Mac app.

Let’s dive in.

Make meetings more engaging, inclusive, and productive

This month, we’re announcing live transcriptions for Teams Meetings, new capabilities for polls, and the general availability of Meetings recap.

Expand access and streamline the management of polls in Teams Meetings

Last month, we announced several new features to help you deliver a seamless, engaging meeting experience using polls. We have expanded access to polling so meeting attendees who are external guests or are joining from Teams mobile app have the same quality experience. And meeting presenters and organizers can soon launch two new poll types—open text and multiple-choice quiz—providing more options to help ensure your attendees are heard and engaged. We’ve also released intelligent poll suggestions, which help minimize the effort it takes to create polls, and post-meeting poll insights to help uncover meeting engagement metrics and enable you to take action on your gathered information. These features will become available in the next few weeks.  

Make meetings more inclusive and productive with live transcription

Live transcription allows meeting participants to follow and review conversations (in English-US) alongside the meeting video or audio in real-time. This promotes inclusivity for participants who have hearing disabilities or different levels of language proficiency. Attendees who joined late, or missed the meeting, can also easily catch up by reading what was discussed and searching the transcript by speaker. Participants can also choose to not be identified in meeting transcripts. To enable live transcriptions, tenant admins will need to turn on the Allow transcription policy.

Stay on track and keep work moving forward after meetings are over with meeting recap

Microsoft Teams now will provide a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, and attached files being shared with participants in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab. Those who missed the meeting, joined late, or want to revisit what was discussed can play the recording or review the transcripts respectively. Meeting recap is now rolling out.

Collaborate more easily in Excel workbooks, stay organized, and save time creating presentations

This month we’re announcing several long-requested features to Microsoft 365 apps.

Collaborate with confidence with Show Changes in Excel Workbooks

One of our most requested features for Excel is finally here—the ability to track changes. Now, you’ll see the details of who changed what, where, and when, along with the previous value of the cell for quick reversion. You can narrow down the list of changes by selecting any sheet, range, or individual cell to see all changes that were made, including bulk edits. Show Changes is now available.

Transform Word documents to PowerPoint presentations with just a few clicks

Last month, we announced a new capability in Word for the Web that enables you to export a Word document as a professional-looking PowerPoint presentation. This new capability uses AI to suggest imagery, icons, videos, themes, and fonts to arrange your content. This feature is now available to all users.  

Connect, organize, and get things done more seamlessly with updates to Outlook for the web

This month, Outlook for the web is rolling out an update to make it even easier to navigate Outlook and access your favorite apps. We’re updating the experience with a new location for your core Outlook capabilities such as email, calendar, and contacts, as well as providing easy access to launch other Microsoft 365 applications like To Do, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Yammer, and Bookings, all from the left side of Outlook. Start a presentation after checking your mail by simply clicking PowerPoint—one click, and you’re on your way. In the next couple of months, we will also be offering this update to Outlook for Windows to those who wish to try it.

Categorize similar tasks with more editable labels

Labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks in Planner and Tasks in Teams. Currently, you might use labels to tag tasks with the same completion requirements, dependencies, or issues, and then filter your plan on those labels to zero in on related tasks. But we’ve heard from you that you need more label options, and we’re happy to announce we’re increasing the number of available labels from six to twenty-five. This update is now available on all platforms.

Making hybrid work environments more secure

This month, we’ve added the ability to discover and secure unmanaged endpoints and network devices to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and released an updated Remote Desktop for Mac app.

Remain productive and protected on M1 and Intel-based Macs with Remote Desktop

Given today’s remote work scenarios and the shift to hybrid work, more and more businesses rely on virtual desktops to help ensure their employees can remain productive and secure wherever they work. We’ve updated the Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac to add native universal support for macOS, making it easier for those using M1-powered Macs to have an optimized remote desktop experience. This update also provides Kerberos integration and support for East Asian keyboard input.

Protect unmanaged devices with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

As we have entered into new hybrid work environments, businesses need to think about how they will proactively protect their organizations from the influx of new or “bring your own” (BYO) connected devices. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now provides a new set of capabilities that empower organizations to discover and secure unmanaged workstations, mobile devices, servers, and network devices on their business networks. No need to deploy new hardware or software or make changes to the network configuration to get protection. This new capability is now in preview—turn on preview features to try it out today.

Also new this month

• Microsoft Viva Connections is now available for the Teams desktop experience, providing a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.
• Microsoft Viva Learning is now available in preview. Sign up to test out the app in Teams which creates a central hub for learning where people can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries across an organization.
• The Microsoft Visio desktop app now includes support for sketching Amazon Web Services (AWS) architectures, offering more than 400 infrastructure shapes to help visualize the design, deployment, and topology of IT solutions built on AWS.

As we all navigate a new world of work, we’re committed to helping every organization embrace flexibility in when, where, and how people work. From live transcriptions that make Teams meetings more inclusive to remote desktop updates that help make hybrid work more secure, all of these new capabilities reflect that commitment. There’s so much more on the way, so stay tuned. And be sure to check back here next month when we’ll be sharing the news from Microsoft Build, our annual developer’s conference.  

The post View live transcripts in Microsoft Teams meetings, track Excel changes, and increase hybrid work security—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Now, manufacturers around the globe are straddling a bridge between yesterday, when most employees were physically present at work, and tomorrow, when hybrid work and the possibility of a safe return to the traditional factory floor will enable a path back to normalcy.

As Hannover Messe 2021 Digital Edition kicks off, it’s clear the manufacturing industry is accelerating its digital transformation—and the workforce and the workplace have changed forever.

Hybrid work is the new norm

To some extent, we can bank, shop, and even meet our doctors online, but a manufacturing frontline worker must continue to make what we need at the factory, and hence can’t stay at home. Manufacturers are increasingly talking about the ‘new normal’ of hybrid work and adapting new practices for ensuring safe and secure work in their factories.

When the pandemic hit, we saw customers accelerate their plans drastically, with two years of digital transformation occurring in just two months, and throughout the year we saw daily usage of Microsoft Teams double multiple times. Specifically, in the manufacturing industry, the daily active usage of Teams increased over 230 percent year-over-year. The need to digitally communicate and collaborate across an organization, while always important, is now essential.

Frontline workers have emerged as the heroes of the past year and business leaders are increasingly realizing the need to deploy tools that connect their entire organization, from corporate to the factory floor. Microsoft Teams is enabling new ways of working—from connecting the manufacturing workforce with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and digitizing business processes, to streamlining onboarding and skilling the workforce.

The need for all workers to be connected to mission-critical information remains real. In many manufacturing scenarios, the expectation is that everyone should be able to call for remote support.

Teams is also empowering the frontline workforce with purpose-built solutions to enable them to succeed and be safe. Microsoft’s partnership with RealWear is key in making that happen by allowing heads-up and hands-free collaboration.

Typically, factories and frontline workers haven’t always been the first to see digital transformation investments, partially because both software and hardware need to come together to provide optimal experiences. Customers like Honeywell are conducting virtual inspections and factory acceptance tests using Microsoft Teams and RealWear with hands-free video calling. Remote experts can provide real-time guidance to the factory floor, leading to decreased machine downtime and cost savings plus ensuring worker safety in rugged environments.

Mars Petcare, for example, has been redefining how it’s upskilling its associates on the frontline to handle day-to-day preventative maintenance on their pet food manufacturing machinery and equipment. They’re using the RealWear hands-free wearable to connect to remote experts working from home today. Mars expects a hybrid model in the future with 80 percent of work travel being eliminated.

Coming soon, Microsoft Teams and RealWear will have voice commands to use the device flashlight and adjust zoom level for your outgoing video, making it easier for those on the plant floor to show what they see hands-free.

Extend and digitize manufacturing workflows

Microsoft Teams is unique in that once you connect your information and frontline workers on the same communications platform, you can digitize your workflows—bringing the tools and processes you already use right into the flow of work. Customers are using Teams and Power Platform to perform factory quality assurance, and Toyota has digitized their continuous improvement (Kaizen) process, accelerating it from months to days.

Approvals are a critical component of how manufacturing frontline workers get their job done. To streamline workflows, new templates in Teams provide a repeatable structure for common approvals, like requesting overtime. And integrations with key partners, like Adobe Sign and DocuSign, allow for an electronic signature approval natively within the Approvals app for contracts and permits on the factory floor that require formal attestation.

Just like how coffee to some is fundamental to starting the day, clocking-in to one’s shift is fundamental for factory workers. Now, with new Time Clock APIs, organizations can create rules such as how late someone can clock-in without requiring manager approval or requiring a health screening survey before clocking-in for the day.

Foster culture and learning in your team

Reskilling and upskilling the workforce through ongoing learning and development has become a top priority for manufacturers. Connect your corporate office to the factory floor, share important information with the right audience so that everyone is on the same page. New essential announcements in Yammer allows publishers to guarantee every frontline employee will see important community announcements, even if it’s outside of their preferred notification settings. Corporate teams can now also monitor, manage, and improve content they share with their frontline workforce, like new training or safety policies, with Yammer communities’ insights.

Additionally, Viva Learning provides easy access to training content for job-related learning to quickly onboard operators and constantly build their skills. Continue to learn more about the value coming in the Microsoft Viva roadmap here.

Learn more

For a deeper dive and a demo of Teams for manufacturing workflows, check out the Manufacturing day in the life with Microsoft Teams video.

Join us in a LinkedIn Ask-me-Anything conversation between Emma Williams, Corporate Vice President, Modern Workplace Transformation, and Andrew Chrostowski, CEO of RealWear, facilitated by Julie Sanford, General Manager of Global Industry Marketing. Tune in as they talk about what they’re hearing from manufacturing customers on the frontlines. 

To learn more about how to empower your frontline workforce to do more with Microsoft Teams, register for the upcoming webinar, check out this blog on virtual Kaizen Events, dig deeper into each product announcement in the tech community blog, and stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing to learn how you can help manufacture a more resilient and sustainable future.

The post How Microsoft Teams is powering hybrid work and the frontline in manufacturing appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

And it’s clear that flexible work is here to stay: According to research conducted for Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, over 80 percent of managers say they expect more flexible work from home policies post-pandemic, and more than 70 percent of employees say they expect to take advantage of them. So we can anticipate some pretty significant changes in the weeks and months to come.

To thrive in this new hybrid world, people and organizations need solutions that are fluid, dynamic, and cloud-powered.

At Microsoft, we’re building experiences to help everyone thrive in this new hybrid world of work and learning. Today at Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing new features designed for a hybrid world. From new digital event experiences in Microsoft Teams designed for internal and external attendees to new availability announcements about Microsoft Viva, there’s so much to share.

Let’s dive in.

Break down boundaries to make it easy to connect and collaborate across organizations

Now more than ever, rich, engaging digital events are critical for successful collaboration—whether you’re inviting internal participants, external participants, or a combination of the two. We’re introducing new features that make it easier to collaborate across organizations and event sizes. 

Improve collaboration and knowledge management

Microsoft Teams supports a spectrum of communication needs, from small internal meetings to large virtual events. Now with Teams, you can easily organize and conduct interactive webinars for people inside and outside of your organization with up to 1,000 attendees. Webinars include end-to-end experiences—like custom registration, rich presentation options, host controls such as the ability to disable attendee chat and video, and post-event reporting. And if your webinar grows to over 1,000 attendees, Teams will seamlessly scale to accommodate a 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience. Plus, during this time of increased remote work, take advantage of even larger 20,000-person broadcasts through the end of this year. These new event capabilities are included with many of the Office and Microsoft plans your organization uses today!

Coming soon, new integrations will bring together Teams events with the robust attendee management experiences from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. Managing attendee information across Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 Marketing to nurture attendees before, during, and after the event is now easier than ever before.

And we’re announcing Microsoft Teams Connect, which allows you to share channels with anyone, internal or external to your organization. The shared channel will appear within an individual’s primary Microsoft Teams tenant alongside other teams and channels, making it easy for everyone to access it in their workflow. In the shared workspace, you can leverage Microsoft Teams rich collaboration capabilities: chat, meet, collaborate on apps, share, and co-author documents in real-time. Admins have access to granular controls, allowing their organization to stay in control of how external users access data and information. Microsoft Teams Connect is available today in private preview and will roll out broadly later this calendar year.

Better meetings and presentations for a work-from-anywhere world

With hybrid work and learning, we need meetings that offer a first-rate experience to every participant whether they’re in the room, remote, or on the go. And as education continues to evolve, so does the technology used to enable digital and hybrid classrooms. New experiences in Microsoft Teams help speakers create more impactful, dynamic presentations while connecting with everyone in the meeting more naturally.

Presenters often share their desktops in virtual meetings, creating an inconsistent presentation experience and limiting the ability of the audience to interact. Today, we’re announcing Microsoft PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, which will enable presenters to deliver more impactful and engaging presentations. Presenters will now be able to lead meetings more confidently with notes, slides, meeting chat, and participants all in a single view. Meanwhile, attendees can personalize their experience by privately navigating the content at their own pace or using the screen reader to make content accessible. PowerPoint Live is now available in Teams. Learn more about PowerPoint Live.

The new Presenter mode empowers presenters to customize how their video feed and content appear to the audience. Our first mode, Standout, shows the speaker’s video feed in front of the shared content. Next, Reporter will show content as a visual aid above the speaker’s shoulder, just like during a news segment. Third, Side-by-side will show the presenter’s video feed alongside their content as they present. Presenter mode will be available soon.

Today, we are also announcing Dynamic view, which intelligently arranges the elements of your meeting for an optimal viewing experience. As people join, turn on video, start to speak, or begin to present in a meeting, Teams automatically adjusts and personalizes your layout. We’ve also added a new option to place the participant gallery at the top of the meeting window, helping you maintain a natural eye gaze. Dynamic view will be rolling out soon.

New meeting experiences for the hybrid workplace

Historically, meeting rooms were designed to facilitate in-room collaboration. As meetings evolve around hybrid work norms, room experiences must be inclusive so everyone can be seen and heard clearly, and fully participate in the meeting.

We are bringing new gallery views to Microsoft Teams Rooms, including Together Mode and large gallery, to make it easier to see everyone in the meeting. And whether the room has one screen or two, you’ll be able to see meeting content, along with everyone joining from home, at the same time.

We’re also announcing new Microsoft Teams Intelligent speakers that can identify and differentiate the voices of up to 10 people talking in a Microsoft Teams Room. These speakers were created in partnership with EPOS and Yealink, and allow attendees to use the transcription to follow along or capture actions, by knowing who in the room said what. Whether you are working remotely or following the meeting in the conference room, you can effectively see who said what during the meeting. To enable privacy and security, users are in full control and can turn attribution on or off at any time.

We’re expanding our portfolio of devices that users can choose from when building out their home offices. Today, we’re announcing the first monitors certified for Microsoft Teams, the new Dell Video conferencing monitor, and the Poly 21. These new monitors integrate critical conferencing hardware like a microphone, speaker, camera, and light right into the monitor, so employees can simply attach their PC via USB to get started on collaboration and maximizing productivity. The new P15 video bar from Poly is an easy-to-mount peripheral that transforms an existing monitor into a high-quality Teams endpoint. Lastly, the new Cam 130 by Aver integrates lights as well, allowing users to present their best selves in video meetings.

Ensuring secure communications

To further address our customers’ security and compliance requirements, Teams will support end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for one-to-one Microsoft Teams calls, providing an additional option for conducting sensitive online conversations. IT will have full discretion over who can use E2EE in the organization. E2EE for Microsoft Teams one-to-one ad hoc VoIP calls will be available to commercial customers in preview in the first half of this calendar.

Reimagining the employee experience for a hybrid workplace

As hybrid work models become the norm, reimagining how we nurture employee development and training—along with how we access benefits and wellbeing opportunities for digital workers—becomes critical to success. Last month, we launched Microsoft Viva, our new employee experience platform built to empower people and teams to be their best from anywhere. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, it is experienced through Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use every day. Learn more in our Microsoft Viva announcement blog.

Our first module, Viva Connections, gives you a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources. Today, we’re announcing that the desktop experience for Viva Connections is now generally available. Viva Connections will be available to all customers as part of their existing SharePoint license.

Viva Insights, now in preview, gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. Starting next month, the virtual commute experience we announced last year will begin rolling out as part of the Microsoft Viva Insights app to help you mindfully wrap up your workdays. The new Home tab will also be available next month, providing a seamless way to stay on top of pending tasks, reflect on your feelings, send praise to your colleagues, and take a breathing break anytime during the workday—all without leaving Microsoft Teams. Learn more in our Viva Insights blog.

Finally, Viva Learning provides a central hub in Microsoft Teams where people can discover, share, recommend, and learn from best-in-class content libraries across the organization—including LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third-party content providers, and an organization’s own custom content. The Viva Learning app for Microsoft Teams will be entering preview starting in April, and we expect to make it generally available later this year. We encourage you to sign up to learn more about Viva Learning, including further details about new experiences, partner APIs, and preview as they become available.

Helping you on your Zero Trust Journey

At Microsoft, our approach to digital safety is unique in our industry because we bring two superpowers to security. The first: an integrated, end-to-end approach. The second: incredible AI and automation. We can use these together to tackle security from all angles, at scale in the cloud—combining security, compliance, identity, and management as an interdependent whole for total protection. Since you can’t stop what you can’t see, we put world-class artificial intelligence (AI) to work for you, analyzing more than eight trillion threat signals every single day to give you enhanced visibility and always-on vigilance that helps catch what others miss.

We build these protections into our platforms for a seamless experience that won’t slow users down or stifle business innovation. This week at Microsoft Ignite, we are making several important announcements across all of these areas to help you on your Zero Trust journey. A few quick highlights include:

• Co-authoring of documents protected with Microsoft Information Protection. This enables multiple users to work simultaneously on protected documents while taking advantage of the built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible protection for documents and emails across Microsoft 365 apps. 
• Threat Analytics in Microsoft 365 Defender. Now in preview, the new Threat Analytics provides a set of reports from expert Microsoft security researchers that help you understand, prevent, and mitigate active threats, like the Solorigate attacks, directly within Microsoft 365 Defender.
• Passwordless authentication is now generally available for cloud and hybrid environments. Now you can deliver a more secure, seamless sign-in experience for all employees where they no longer need to enter passwords to sign in and access data. Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) passwordless supports sign-ins with biometrics or a tap using Windows Hello for Business, the Microsoft Authenticator app, or a compatible FIDO2 security key from Microsoft Intelligent Security Association partners such as Yubico, Feitian, and AuthenTrend. You can customize policies for different users, groups, and types of credentials and track your progress with new reporting tools. With Temporary Access Pass, now in preview, you can generate a time-limited code to set up or recover a passwordless credential.

But there’s so much more. Please check out the Security blog post from my colleague Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President of Security, Compliance, and Identity, for all security announcements.

Also new to Microsoft 365 

Last year, we announced our Microsoft 365 cloud print solution, Universal Print, which offers simple and secure printing in zero-trust environments. Now generally available, Universal Print enables workers with workplace-joined Windows devices to easily discover printers based on location and print without installing any additional software. Later this summer, users will also be able to print documents from the OneDrive for Business web experience on any device using the browser of their choice. Learn why other customers and partners value the solution in our Universal Print blog.

To help customers meet data residency requirements, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo allows customers to provision and store data at rest in the geographic locations they’ve specified. We are announcing that Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo will be extended to include Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to specify where their Teams customer data is stored down to the team and end-user. Microsoft Teams support for Multi-Geo will be rolling out in Spring 2021.

From physical spaces to digital solutions to employee experiences—we’re working alongside our customers to reimagine work and learning for a hybrid world. While we’re always so happy to share our latest innovations with you, we know that this is just the beginning. We can’t wait to share more with you in the weeks and months to come. 

The post Flexible work is here to stay: Microsoft 365 solutions for the hybrid work world appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Every customer I talk to wants to empower people for a world of work that is dynamic, fluid, and cloud-powered. They want to find ways for people to work not just from anywhere but at any time, with solutions that allow both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. And it’s a ‘whole organization’ shift. From IT, to HR, to operations, to marketing and manufacturing—this is a conversation that requires leaders across the entire organization to come together to rethink work. 

As students of the new world of work, we’ve been experimenting and sharing what we learn as work evolves. Today, I want to share our approach to empower your employees around the world for a flexible work world. It’s a three-part strategy: First, create policy to empower people for extreme flexibility. Second, reimagine physical spaces. And third, invest in technologies that connect people anywhere and anytime.

Let’s take a look at each.

Create policy to empower people for extreme flexibility

The choices you make today will impact your organization for years to come. It’s a moment that requires a clear vision. You need a plan and policies that put you on the path to extreme flexibility. These decisions will impact everything from how you shape culture to how you attract and retain talent to how you respond to changes in the environment to future innovation.

Many organizations have already stepped forward with strong stances on flexible work. Twitter declared its workers could work remotely “forever.” Dropbox announced it will essentially eliminate office space for focused work, transforming physical locations to cater to meetings and collaboration. Spotify hopes to lure talent with New York and San Francisco-level salaries for employees working remotely anywhere in the world. And at Microsoft, employees can now work from home up to 50 percent of the time. 

Empowering people for extreme flexibility begins with answering critical questions: Who will be able to work remotely? Who will need to come into the office, and for what amount of time? When people do focused work, where will they do it? What about collaborative work? And in a world where ongoing disruption is part of the new normal—with natural disasters, geopolitical events, and global health crises—you need to be prepared to respond to sudden changes. New, flexible policies take the answers to these questions and codify them, providing clarity and guidance to employees as they experiment. 

Reimagine your physical spaces

Once you’ve determined your policies for extreme flexibility, use them to guide your approach to physical space. From here on out, we will no longer rely solely on physical spaces to collaborate, connect, and build social capital. But space will still be important. We’re social animals and we want to get together, bounce ideas off one another, and experience the energy of in-person events. Moving forward, office space needs to bridge the physical and digital worlds and meet the unique needs of every team—and specific roles.

Purposeful design

At Microsoft we’re surveying employees and looking at everything from social graphs to employee traffic patterns to understand how to equip teams with the spaces they need, knowing those needs will evolve over time. Sales teams who need to come to the office infrequently can use a hoteling model to book workstations for the day or hour, while engineering teams may need dedicated collaboration spaces and workstations. To accommodate remote workers, we’re exploring offsite coworking hubs. Because we know how we work will continue to evolve, we’re building flexibility into every space we design.

Connecting the physical to the digital

It’s also critical to think about bridging the gap between in-person and remote experiences. Working together when everyone is in the office is fairly straightforward. And over the last 12 months, we’ve figured out how to get things done when everyone is at home. It’s how to handle that messy middle—when some people are physically together and others are joining virtually—that’s going to be a challenge. 

Today’s state-of-the-art Microsoft Teams Rooms include high-quality audio and video to help everyone be seen and heard. Meeting room cameras deliver high-definition video streams and optimize the view by framing the people in the room or following the active speaker. Intelligent speakers identify who in the room is speaking, and individual names and profiles are represented in meeting transcripts. Features like live captions, live transcription, raise hand, reactions, and chat help people follow along and offer opportunities to chime in non-verbally or without interrupting the speaker. Digital whiteboards—accessible both in the room and at home—foster collaboration and co-creation. People onsite can ink directly on a Surface Hub or from their own phone or laptop and remote participants can draw on the same shared digital canvas. In addition, our Intelligent Capture cameras can capture, focus, resize, and enhance analog whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard.

All of this is available today in Microsoft Teams Rooms, but we’re just getting started. We see a not-so-distant future where meetings become immersive experiences that allow us to ‘be there’—from anywhere and at any time. Our vision for the future includes changes to meeting room layouts; the addition of multiple screens create dynamic views of participants, chat, whiteboards, content, and notes; and enhancements to in-room technologies to help remote participants track and participate in the flow of the meeting. 

Invest in technology that connects people—anywhere and anytime

Along with physical spaces, your plan for extreme flexibility should include technology that enables teamwork and creates a new digital employee experience that follows your employees no matter where they go.

When the pandemic compelled people everywhere to shift to remote work, videoconferencing was the primary tool that people used to connect and keep work moving. Within months, people were participating in 55 percent more digital meetings compared to pre-COVID-19—and we all felt the related stress and burnout. Videoconferencing will always be important, but it’s just one tool, and doesn’t provide the communication and collaboration infrastructure needed to power hybrid work. Microsoft Teams is the only solution that combines meet, chat, call, and collaborate in a single place—all integrated with the Office apps and business process automation tools. What’s more, it opens up collaboration between knowledge workers and frontline workers and blends synchronous and asynchronous work naturally. It’s the only app that does it all, providing an organizing layer that supports the flow of work across the organization. 

We’ve introduced more than 100 new features in Teams over the past year, all built with extreme flexibility in mind—and there are many more on the way. But we need to go even further to support the new emerging patterns of distributed work. Microsoft Viva, is the first integrated employee experience platform designed for hybrid work. Taken together, Teams and Viva deliver a technology platform that will connect your people and help them navigate the new reality.

Work is evolving rapidly, and there’s just no going back to our pre-pandemic world. As vaccines begin to roll out globally, business leaders everywhere need a plan for the new operating model—extreme flexibility. While we’re all still learning as we go, it’s clear that every organization is going to need three things: new policies, re-configured physical spaces, and technology that binds it all together. There are challenges ahead but we are optimistic about creating a future that empowers people to connect from anywhere, at any time, and to be and bring their best each day.

The post Hybrid work is here. Are you ready? appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

In my role at Microsoft, I get the chance to talk to our customers every day about their experiences in this new digital era. It’s exhilarating to work on the tools that have unlocked new forms of connection and collaboration for their people—even as they navigate the challenges of the pandemic. We built Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 as the organizing layer for all the ways people work, learn, and collaborate. Microsoft Teams is the only solution with meetings, calls, chat, content collaboration, and business process workflows—all in a secure, integrated user experience. This fall, we saw the daily active users number in Microsoft Teams climb to 115 million, while Microsoft 365 users around the world generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day as people communicated, collaborated, and co-authored content. And in our new hybrid work reality, Microsoft Teams is empowering everyone in organizations—from information workers to frontline workers, and everyone in between.

But to truly empower people to feel connected, supported, and able to bring their best selves to work we need to do more.

Today, organizations spend over $300 billion a year on employee experience. That number includes employee development and training, benefits and wellbeing, and a whole host of employee experience technologies. But too often, these technologies are fragmented, hard to find, and disruptive to the flow of work. 

As digital tools become more crucial to a great employee experience, business leaders across every industry are embracing the opportunity to learn, and they’re re-evaluating both their spending and their approach. 

We believe what’s needed is a new approach and a new category of technology solutions called employee experience platforms (EXP). In the past few months, my team and I have been talking with analyst Josh Bersin, who closely studies this space. These conversations helped solidify our vision of EXP as a digital platform that provides people with the resources and support they need, seamlessly integrated within the same tools they use to do their work, so they can succeed and thrive no matter their location.

Introducing Microsoft Viva

Today we’re introducing Microsoft Viva, the first EXP built for the digital era. Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, it is experienced through Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use every day.

A new kind of employee experience

To start, Microsoft Viva will include four modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics—with more on the way. I’ll walk you through each one.

Let’s begin with Viva Connections.

Research from our Work Trend Index shows nearly 60 percent of workers feel less connected to their team since the move to remote work. And we’re struggling to replace the comradery once created by things like company town halls, offsites, and events. This is challenging for all of us, but especially impactful on new hires—imagine how it feels for an employee who has never been to the office or ever met anyone face-to-face.

Accessed in Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections provides a single-entry point for employee engagement and internal communications. You can think of it as a gateway to your digital workplace.

Viva Connections is built on Microsoft 365 capabilities like SharePoint to provide a curated and branded employee destination. Leaders can connect with employees via company town halls, and employees can access everything from company news, policies, and benefits to employee resource groups or communities they want to join with Microsoft Viva’s integration to Yammer. It provides a personalized feed and dashboard to help you find all the helpful resources you need from Microsoft Viva and from other apps across your digital workplace. The content can also be customized for specific roles within the company—including frontline workers—so that they have a comprehensive view of just the resources they need.

Next, Viva Insights.

At a time when over 30 percent of workers say the pandemic has increased their sense of burnout, it has never been more important to help people unplug and make the most of their scarcest resource: their time.

Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. It brings new personal wellbeing experiences, insights, and recommended actions from Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics into the flow of people’s work in Microsoft Teams.

Accessed in Microsoft Teams, Viva Insights for individuals help employees stay connected with their colleagues and protect time for regular breaks, focused work, and learning. Experiences we announced last summer, like virtual commute and integration with Headspace, kickstarted our work here. They will now be part of Microsoft Viva and will start rolling out in the coming months. 

For managers, Viva Insights provides data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations to foster healthy, successful teams. For instance, Viva Insights can help a manager see if their team is at risk of burnout and provide recommendations like encouraging your team to turn off notifications, set boundaries in their calendar, and set daily priorities to focus on what matters most. 

For company leaders, Viva Insights helps address complex challenges and respond to change by shedding light on organizational work patterns and trends. These could include wellbeing opportunities, but also things like space planning as companies reimagine their offices for hybrid work. Viva Insights also provides leaders with organizational network analysis to understand the connectedness and cohesion between and across teams.

These organizational insights are even more powerful when combined with other data sources. Today, we’re excited to introduce a new dashboard for Microsoft Viva and LinkedIn’s Glint customers that maps insights about how people work to employee survey data about how people feel. In addition to using data and signals from Microsoft apps and services, Microsoft Viva builds on an organization’s existing investments. A customer can also leverage data from third-party tools like Zoom, Slack, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors.

To help ensure privacy and security, Microsoft Viva uses aggregation, de-identification, and differential privacy. This means personal insights are visible only to the employee, while insights for managers and leaders are aggregated and de-identified by default to protect individual privacy.

Now onto Viva Learning.

Organizations need to develop a culture of learning to keep up with the pace of change and to retain great talent. Specifically, a recent report from LinkedIn found that 94 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development.

Viva Learning helps make learning a natural part of both every employee’s daily work and company culture.

With Viva Learning, employees can easily discover and share everything from training courses to microlearning content. And managers get the tools they need to assign learning and to track the completion of courses to help foster a learning culture. Viva Learning creates a central hub for learning in Teams, with AI that recommends the right content at the right time. It aggregates content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, your organization’s own custom content, and trainings from leading content providers like Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight, and edX. Viva Learning also works with leading learning-management systems. Today we’re announcing partnerships with Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, and SAP SuccessFactors. And there are more are on the way.

Finally, Viva Topics.

As we have all experienced, finding an expert, understanding company acronyms, or surfacing the content you need can be tedious, especially when you’re a new employee or working remotely. In fact, our research shows that people spend the equivalent of seven weeks per year searching for or re-creating information.

Viva Topics enables you to harness the knowledge of your organization, and connect people to that knowledge, in the apps they use every day. Think of Viva Topics as a Wikipedia with AI superpowers for your organization. It uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise into relevant categories like “projects,” “products,” “processes,” and “customers.” 

When you come across an unfamiliar topic or acronym, just hover. No need to search for knowledge—knowledge finds you. Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards as people work in apps like Office, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. When employees click on a card, a topic page appears with documents, videos, and related people. Experts at the company can also help curate the information shown in Viva Topics by sharing knowledge through simple, highly customizable web sites called Topic Pages.

Along with content from the Microsoft Cloud, Viva Topics also surfaces information from third-party services like ServiceNow and Salesforce and builds on integrations made by partners like Accenture, Avanade, BA Insight, Raytion, and ClearPeople. And Graph connectors make it easy to connect to even more content that employees would find helpful. 

Together with our partners

Designed to be an open and extensible platform, with a strong and growing ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Viva is easy to integrate with the systems and tools a company already has in place. Integrations with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and third-party products and services will deliver a complete employee experience in the flow of work. In addition to our integration ecosystem, we’re joined in this mission by our global network of services partners who provide strategic guidance, advisory services, implementation, adoption and change management, and more.

You can hear from some of our partners in this video:

Just getting started

We all know that engaged, healthy employees who feel a sense of ownership, purpose, and belonging have a greater impact on our organizations. And at Microsoft, we’re committed to helping our customers empower all their people, whether they’re working onsite, in the field, at home, or on the go. Today, we begin the journey of creating an entirely new employee experience designed for the digital era.

With Microsoft Viva, we aim to make it easier and more natural for everyone to stay connected, access knowledge, learn on the job, and use privacy-protected insights—to enable individuals to prioritize wellbeing, empower managers to lead more effectively, and help leaders drive better decision-making across the organization. But while we’re so excited to introduce you to Microsoft Viva today, there’s so much more to come. We believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build people-centered experiences that help our customers drive extraordinary outcomes. And we’re just getting started.

Experience Microsoft Viva today

Want to help your people experience Microsoft Viva right away? As of today, Viva Topics is generally available. We’re also announcing the public preview of Viva Insights and a private preview of Viva Learning. And we’ll be announcing more innovations throughout 2021. To learn more and get started, check out the Microsoft Viva website.

The post Microsoft Viva: Empowering every employee for the new digital age 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.

Via a personal dashboard, an Outlook add-in, and weekly emails, MyAnalytics summarizes how you spend your time at work, then suggests ways to work smarter—from cutting unproductive meeting time to reducing time spent working after hours. It even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you stay on top of your to-dos by flagging commitments you’ve made in email.

The MyAnalytics dashboard.

New insights give a more complete picture of how you spend time at work

As we continue to evolve the product, today we’re also making MyAnalytics insights more well-rounded. MyAnalytics currently provides insights based on time spent in Outlook emails and meetings, and Skype for Business calls and chats. This month, we’re adding new insights based on your Microsoft Teams calls and chats, as well as signals from documents you’re working on that are saved in OneDrive and SharePoint. With 329,000 organizations and 87 of the Fortune 100 using Teams, this takes us one step closer to providing you with a more complete picture of how you’re spending time at work.

MyAnalytics Outlook add-in and weekly email.

A recent Gallup study found that two-thirds of full-time employees say they experience burnout at work. Multiple factors are contributing to burnout—such as the increased pace of work, a rise in collaborative work like chats, emails, and meetings, and the continuing trend of technology blurring the lines between work and life. Our customers tell us they’re looking for ways to address these challenges by helping employees find time to focus, improve work-life balance, build better meeting habits, and create deeper connections with their colleagues. By making MyAnalytics features more broadly available to our millions of customers, it is our goal to make work days around the world a little more balanced and fulfilling.

Availability: MyAnalytics insights from Microsoft Teams and documents saved in OneDrive or SharePoint will begin rolling out to existing customers with MyAnalytics in January 2019. With today’s updates, MyAnalytics features will be available for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business, and Office 365 E5, E3, E1, Business Premium, and Business Essentials plans. MyAnalytics functionality will roll out in phases, beginning with the Outlook add-in. Beginning mid-March, 2019, MyAnalytics licenses will be assigned and activated; however, users will not be able to see any MyAnalytics functionality. In mid-April, admins will begin to see a toggle in the Exchange Admin Center that supports tenant-level management of MyAnalytics functionality. The add-in functionality will begin rolling out on May 15, 2019.

Note: Today, we’re also announcing new security and compliance packages for our enterprise customers. Please read Introducing new advanced security and compliance offerings for Microsoft 365 to learn more.

Editor’s note 3/15/2019:
This post has been updated to reflect the most current availability of MyAnalytics features.

The post MyAnalytics, the fitness tracker for work, is now more broadly available appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we are announcing two new features—Workplace Analytics solutions and MyAnalytics nudges—designed to put individuals and teams at the center of change.

Workplace Analytics solutions—empower teams to master their time

Workplace Analytics uses data from everyday work in Office 365 to identify collaboration patterns that impact productivity, workforce effectiveness, and employee engagement.

Today, we are introducing solutions to help turn organization-wide insights into action plans for individuals and teams. The first solution—Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork—helps teams build better collaboration habits and master their time by guiding organizations through three steps:

Discover collaboration challenges—Use data from everyday work in Office 365, like emails and meetings, to discover challenges like meeting overload, minimal time for focused work, or high after-hours workload. Combine these insights with engagement survey results to find connections between work patterns and indicators of team health like engagement and innovation scores.

Analysis shows that the marketing team spends far more time in meetings than other teams and could benefit from being enrolled in a change program to help reduce meeting hours.

Empower teams to change—Enroll teams in change programs to help them build better habits like bringing agendas to meetings and blocking time for daily focused work. Participants receive personal productivity insights and action plans powered by MyAnalytics.

When teams are enrolled in a change program, members get access to an action plan in MyAnalytics that shows progress towards meeting team goals.

Measure and improve—Make sure your change programs are successful by measuring progress against goals over time. Iterate and improve as you see which action plans succeed or fail in changing teamwork habits.

This team is four weeks into their change program and has already decreased average weekly meeting hours by 11 percent.

The Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork—accessed via the Solutions tab—is now available in preview for customers using both Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics. Learn more about the Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork.

MyAnalytics nudges—work smarter with data-driven collaboration tips in Outlook

Building better teams starts with transparent, data-driven dialog—but no one is perfect and sticking to good collaboration habits can be challenging in a fast-paced job. Nudges in MyAnalytics can help close the gap by providing friendly, data-driven collaboration tips that surface as you get work done in Office 365.

User sees a notification on a meeting invite that nudges them to set aside time for focused work.

Starting this summer, four types of MyAnalytics nudges will start to surface in Outlook as you read and compose emails and meeting invites.

Get more focus time—Challenging, innovative work requires deep focus and undivided attention. As your calendar fills up with meetings, MyAnalytics will remind you to set aside time for focused work before accepting new invites. You can see available times and block them off without leaving your inbox. MyAnalytics will also notify you when a meeting invite conflicts with a block of focus time that you’ve already scheduled.

Run more effective meetings—Meetings are necessary to get work done, but they often take up the entire week, leaving little time for other work. As you create and receive meeting invites, MyAnalytics will nudge you to put good meeting habits into practice and save precious hours. For example, MyAnalytics will nudge you to delegate coworkers to cover a meeting for you if your schedule is already busy.

Reduce your after-hours impact on coworkers—We announced last year that MyAnalytics summarizes your after-hours impact on coworkers. Now, MyAnalytics will actively nudge you to avoid sending after-hours emails as you draft them to coworkers that you’ve recently impacted outside of regular working hours.

Stay on top of to-do’s and unread email—MyAnalytics already uses AI to remind you of tasks you promised over email to complete for coworkers (and tasks they asked you to get done). Now, MyAnalytics surfaces these reminders as you read emails from coworkers, so you can close out important tasks before taking on new ones. MyAnalytics will also remind you of unread email for your important contacts.

Starting this summer, MyAnalytics users will see nudges on the latest version of Outlook on the web. Users can turn off nudging using the MyAnalytics add-in for Outlook. Read our support article to learn more.

MyAnalytics comes with Office 365 Enterprise E5 and is available as an add-on to other Office 365 enterprise plans. Learn more about MyAnalytics.

The post Introducing Workplace Analytics solutions and MyAnalytics nudges appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.

Office 365 provides the broadest and deepest set of apps and services with a universal toolkit for teamwork, giving people flexibility and choice in how they connect, share, and communicate. Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of 96 new global markets, bringing Office 365 to over 246 markets worldwide in 44 languages. This month, new apps and features help organizations of all sizes around the globe accelerate their digital transformation and allow every user to produce compelling content that is accessible to all.

New features power content creation

This month, we continued to improve the intelligent services in Office 365 with a new set of cloud-powered features designed to save you time and produce better results.

Translator in Word—We’ve revamped the translation tools available within Word. You can now translate sections of text, or your entire document, and review or save the result as a regular document file. Translator supports 60 languages, including 11 that use neural machine translation, providing superior quality and fluency to help you work more confidently. To get started, navigate to the Review tab in Word and select Translate.

Tell Me support for people and documents—We’re making it even easier to access the information you need while working in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Now Office 365 commercial subscribers can search across their organization, share current files with colleagues, and preview and re-use slides, graphs, and tables from previous documents with support for people and document search in Tell Me. To get started, simply sign in to your Office applications using an Office 365 commercial account and search for a person or file in the Tell me what you want to do box.

Learning Tools in Word on iPad—Word on iPad now supports Immersive Reader and Read Aloud, new mobile tools that 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.

Cloud enhancements make file management easier

As people create and work together on more files across multiple devices, it’s increasingly important to be able to access your important content—both from your work and personal life—all in one place. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether there is enough storage on your device or if you can access your files on an airplane.

OneDrive Files On-Demand—With the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you can access your OneDrive and SharePoint files just like any other file on your PC without filling up your disk space. “Online-only” files download on demand with a double-click, and you can switch them back to “online-only” again to free up space at any time and limit the impact to your corporate network. Files On-Demand works with your personal and work OneDrive, as well as your SharePoint Online team sites.

3D files in OneDrive—We’re continuing to expand the types of content you can interact with in Office 365. New 3D support in OneDrive helps you organize, share, and increase your visual and creative impact with 3D objects. Now you can open and view your 3D files in the OneDrive app and at OneDrive.com without any browser plug-ins before importing them into Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Expanding our online toolkit

We’re continuing to make Office.com and our browser-based applications more powerful, so you can do more with whatever device you have in your hand.

Visio Online—Earlier this month, we introduced Visio Online, a web-based version of the popular Microsoft diagramming tool, to provide a simple yet powerful way to work visually on the web. Visio subscribers can create, edit, and share diagrams online, making it easier to visualize complex information in new ways.

Visualize your network in MyAnalytics—MyAnalytics helps you and your team build better work habits with personal analytics and intelligent coaching. This month, we introduced new features in MyAnalytics that help you visualize the time you spend with individuals and groups so that you can better match your time investments to your priorities.

LinkedIn profiles in Outlook.com—At Ignite in September, Satya Nadella previewed the ability for commercial Office 365 subscribers to view LinkedIn profile information within Microsoft apps and services. Starting today, this new experience begins rolling out to consumer users of Outlook.com, providing rich insights, profile pictures, work history, and more, right from within your personal inbox.

Other updates

• One billion downloads of Skype for Android—Last week Skype reached one billion downloads on the Google Play Store.
• Office 365 gallery—This month, we rolled out a new Office 365 gallery to provide subscribers with personalized information about the apps, tools, and services available to them.
• Office Lens multi-page support—Now you can scan large, multi-page documents and save them as a single file, allowing you to seamlessly store and search all your documents in the cloud.
• Updates to SharePoint—This month, we made it easier to create beautiful, mobile-friendly forms for SharePoint with PowerApps. You can also now create and digest news items from across your organization right within the SharePoint Mobile app on Android and iOS.
• Group insights in Yammer—We’re rolling out new group insights to help community managers better understand and nurture their groups in Yammer.
• Office + Surface—Today at Future Decoded, Panos Panay spoke to attendees about how devices + software are transforming the way people work, create, and thrive in the modern workplace.
• Inclusion in action—Leading up to International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we’re unveiling a new video series celebrating individuals using accessible technologies to help transform their lives.

Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office on Windows desktops | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office on 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 Current Channel and Deferred Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through First Release. This site explains more about when you can expect to receive the features announced today.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability: 

• Translator in Word is available for Office Insiders on Windows with support for other platforms coming soon.
• Custom functions Developer Preview is rolling out to Office Insiders today on Windows and will soon be available on Mac, iPad, and Excel Online.
• OneDrive Files On-Demand is available as part of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.
• Visio Online is available in Visio Online Plan 1 and the more comprehensive Visio Online Plan 2 (previously Visio Pro for Office 365). Viewing diagrams remains free for most Office 365 customers.
• LinkedIn information in Outlook.com will begin rolling out in November.

The post New to Office 365 in October—online tools, Microsoft AI, and more appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.