A quick note before you read on: These tips are part of our ongoing effort to help everyone stay connected and productive during this challenging time. Last week, I shared how individuals and organizations can get Teams for free, along with our comprehensive plan for keeping services running smoothly through this crisis. We’ve also shared incredible stories from customers and employees around the world, including teachers and students in Hong Kong using technology for amazing e-learning innovations and customers in and around China who’ve found smart ways to keep work moving as well. But our customers are also asking for guidance on switching to remote work. We’ll continue to provide tips, information, and inspiring customer stories throughout the outbreak, so check back here for those in the days to come.

Getting started

As you move to remote work, a few key habits will set you up for success.

Set up your workspace

If you don’t have a home office, don’t worry. You can still work from home productively. In fact, we designed Teams as a virtual office you can take anywhere you go. While you may not have a printer, physical files, or a desk phone at home, you can pull up documents directly in Teams, securely store files where the right people can access them, and quickly jump into calls and meetings. That said, it’s important to have a dedicated home workspace where you can be productive and signal that you’re in do-not-disturb mode. A breakfast nook, a quiet corner of the bedroom, an underused game table in the rec room—any focus-friendly area can double as a workspace. And don’t worry if it gets a little messy throughout the day, you can always use background blur during videoconferencing meetings so your teammates focus only on you.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

While many of us work from home at least part of the time, we still rely on rhythms and core hours that are built around our physical presence at the office.  When working from home, your daily rhythm may change. This is especially true for those of us balancing work and childcare. Clearly communicate your working hours with your teammates and collaborators so that they know when to reach you. You can also set a status message in Teams to share this information proactively.

Also, make it a habit to offer frequent progress reports to your teammates. Fully remote companies tend to emphasize documentation, since it’s a key way to stay connected when you work apart. We recommend posting updates, insights, and helpful resources you’ve discovered in Teams channels, so your teammates can stay connected with what you’re up to even without the benefit of a chance hallway conversation. Later, they can search within the channel for ideas or content when they need them.

Maintain healthy boundaries 

Without the usual workday signals—a walk to grab lunch, for instance, or a commute—unplugging can be a challenge. Remote workers sometimes find themselves working for long stretches without breaks for exercise, socializing, or a proper meal. This will quickly lead to stress and burnout. Remember: your health comes first. Make time for meals, drink plenty of water, and remind yourself to mentally “clock out” from remote work at the end of the day. These behaviors won’t just keep you healthy, they will also help you be more productive in the long run.

Running effective meetings

Embrace online meetings

In the absence of a physical conference room, bringing everyone together can feel like the biggest remote-work challenge of all. As you move meetings to Teams, make sure all meetings have a virtual “join” option to create an online conference room. Also, we suggest that all participants turn on video if they are comfortable doing so. The face-to-face interaction goes a long way to help everyone feel connected. Teams has a wide selection of certified cameras to choose from, as well as devices like headsets and speakerphones to make sure you and your coworkers can always communicate clearly.

Be mindful and inclusive

Moving to online meetings may remove some of the visual cues we rely on to see if a colleague has something to say in a meeting. And overcrowded conference calls can make it difficult for people to share their opinions. Meeting organizer should pause frequently to invite questions and remind attendees that they can also use the meeting chat window to share their thoughts.

Record your meetings

To compensate for lack of face time, some remote workers schedule extra meetings in order to stay connected with customers, partners, and coworkers. Double-bookings can be hard to avoid. If your organization allows it, record meetings in Teams so coworkers can catch up later. If you can’t attend yourself, remind the organizer to record the meeting or webinar in your absence. The automatically generated transcript is also super-useful when you’re trying to remember information covered in a meeting you attended. Want to learn more about Teams Meetings? Learn more tips here.

Staying connected

Make up for missing hallway talk

A lot of remote workers find the thing they miss the most about the office is casual conversations. Chats at the watercooler or snack shelf not only keep us connected, they often surface important information or insights we wouldn’t have guessed. Be deliberate about reaching out and connecting with your co-workers. Think of chat messages as your virtual watercooler and set yourself a reminder to check in with people regularly via instant messaging. Emojis, GIFs, and stickers are a fun way to keep the chatter fun and light.

Bring the team together

Working remotely can feel isolating. As a leader, it’s important to create opportunities for the whole team to get together virtually. Maintain your regular team meeting cadence or team lunches, just make them online. Use the “General” channel in Teams for discussions that might be of interest to everyone. For large brainstorms you can use the Microsoft Whiteboard app, which provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to ideate and collaborate directly in Teams. We also suggest team leaders download the Crisis Communication Power App. You can use this customizable app to inform yourself and your team on everything they need to know throughout this outbreak.

Have fun!

With all the changes that come with moving to remote work, it’s important to foster and maintain team morale. There are many things you can do within Teams to keep people feeling positive and engaged. Share news and stories in your team chat, or hold a photo contest. One of our education customers in China hosted a cooking challenge for students that proved particularly popular.

I understand that every individual and team works differently. But I hope the tips from our team helps you stay productive and connected as you adjust to a new way of working. And remember, you can start using Teams today by signing in or signing up for free.

Be remote-work ready! Download our remote work checklist and share with your teammates.

Remote work checklist:

• Set up your workspace
• Communicate often
• Maintain healthy boundaries
• Embrace online meetings
• Be mindful and inclusive
• Record your meetings
• Make up for missing hallway talk
• Bring the team together
• Have fun!

The post Staying productive while working remotely with Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

At Microsoft, we’re on a mission to help every team become a successful team. And so, we partnered with IDEO, a global design company known for its human-centered, interdisciplinary approach. Together, we researched successful workplace teams to find out what they had in common. Then we used what we learned to create The Art of Teamwork—a new digital curriculum built around the five attributes of a successful team.

And that’s not all. We’re also using the findings from the research to refine Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. What’s clear from the data is that the future of workplace collaboration won’t be defined by any one technology. Instead, successful teams need collaboration tools that combine a wide range of technologies in new and innovative ways. Teams brings together chat, meetings, calling, document collaboration, and workflow into a single app—and this unique combination is catching fire.

In fact, today Teams has more than 20 million daily active users. What’s more, while these users start with simple text-based chat, they quickly move on to richer forms of communication and collaboration. For instance, last month Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Teams.

The five attributes

Partnering with IDEO, we researched diverse workplace teams—including astronauts, chefs, television producers, and nurses—to understand what high-performing collaborators have in common. With a variety of workplace teams as our subjects, we used in-context observation, expert interviews, secondary research, and prototype activities to identify the specific dynamics that high-performing teams had in common. We found that successful teams shared five attributes:

1. Team purpose—Keeps teams focused, fulfilled, and aligned on achieving their objectives.
2. Collective identity—Fosters a sense of belonging and helps team members work together as a unit.
3. Awareness and inclusion—Enables teams to navigate interpersonal dynamics and value everyone’s perspective.
4. Trust and vulnerability—Encourages interpersonal risk-taking in teams.
5. Constructive tension—Serves as a generative force for new ideas, driving better outcomes.

To learn more about the framework, check out the video below:

Teams customer success stories

With Teams, our customers are breaking through the artificial boundaries created by standalone or loosely coupled collaboration tools and working together in new ways. Their stories bring the five attributes of successful teams to life and paint a picture of what is possible.

Bold beauty: L’Oreal

At L’Oreal, the global beauty company, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, Barbara Lavernos explains, “Our momentum is driven by people interacting, putting ideas on the table, and jumping on them through spontaneous discussion. The new technology that allows for personality, contributions, and real innovation is Microsoft Teams.” With Teams, L’Oreal employees have a space to be creative while moving at the speed and scale needed to deliver over 7 billion products to customers annually.

From the factory floor to the C-Suite: Alcoa

Firstline Workers at Alcoa, a global leader in bauxite, alumina, and aluminum production, have embraced Teams to access business information on their own mobile devices while working at their remote Iceland facility. Before using Teams, when managers needed someone to come in for a shift, they had to call them, often late at night. Now with Teams, managers schedule plant employees using Shifts, which they can access on their mobile devices. With Shifts, the problem of workers missing scheduled assignments has resolved, with the absentee rate falling to nearly zero. “Shifts in Teams is much more efficient for organizing people,” says Friopjófur Tómasson, a plant supervisor. “If I had to use one word to tell you what Teams means to me, it’s ‘efficiency.’ Shifts saves me at least an hour a day.”

Simplified collaboration: Telefónica

At telecommunications company Telefonica, employees conduct business-building projects in Teams. An offsite meeting of executives can now be coordinated in a highly secure, centralized hub. This simple meeting used to be a coordination nightmare, with up to 20 colleagues from several departments focusing on various workstreams. “Before Teams, we had to integrate different aspects of a project that had been created in isolation from each other. Now, a group of colleagues can build on the documents in a collaborative way and edit the project directly. This process used to take four weeks, now we can accomplish it in a matter of days,” says Jamie Rodriguez-Ramos Fernandez, Director of Strategic Analysis at Telefónica.

Putting patient care first: St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN)

St. Luke’s University Health Network providers are replacing different third-party collaboration apps with Teams, simplifying their lives with a single workspace for anytime, anywhere conversations about patients. “Even as we look to secure text messaging as one of the advantages of the ubiquitous cellphone, we still have to comply with HIPAA and other privacy requirements,” says Dr. James Balshi, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vascular Surgeon at SLUHN. “But we don’t have to worry about that with Teams. It’s equally functional on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer. I use the camera technology on the phone to share patient information in a more secure and HIPAA-compliant manner with colleagues during a Teams video call. I’ve also shared EMR notes and X-ray images.”

Connecting across the globe: Trek

Trek is a leading bicycle designer, manufacturer, and retailer that is adapting quickly to a fast-changing environment. Some U.S.-based employees work in locations other than the company’s Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters, including at other facilities, home, or retail locations. Trek’s international business has also grown quickly with the company expanding its operations to 17 established offices around the world. “Having good connectivity and digital meeting experiences is critical in making the way we work a success,” says Nathan Pieper, IT Business Applications and Collaboration Manager at Trek. The meetings capabilities in Teams “was the carrot that got people in,” says Pieper. “Teams adoption grew because people used it, told other people to use it, and invited them to online meetings on it.”

A high-performing team can do what otherwise would be impossible. And with Teams, there’s no limit to what you and your team can achieve at work. To improve teamwork in your organization, check out the digital teamwork guide at the Art of Teamwork home page. And if you’re not using Teams yet, get started today!

Note: Customers are ultimately responsible for their own HIPAA compliance.

The post 5 attributes of successful teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Productivity

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

Microsoft Teams

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

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

The New Microsoft Edge

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

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

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

The Office mobile app

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

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

Fluid Framework

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

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

Cortana

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

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

AI in Office

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

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

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

Microsoft Project

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

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

Knowledge

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

Project Cortex

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

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

The new Yammer

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

Microsoft Search

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

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

Microsoft Stream

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

Workplace Analytics

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

Workflow

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

Power Platform integration with Teams

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

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

Office Scripts

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

Security

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

Microsoft Authenticator

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

New value in Azure AD

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

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

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

Application Guard for Office

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

Compliance

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

Insider Risk Management

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

Compliance Score

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

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

Management

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

Microsoft Endpoint Manager

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

Microsoft Productivity Score

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

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

Managed Meeting Rooms

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

Global reader

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

Onboarding Hub

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

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

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

Office 365 Groups

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

Send us your feedback

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

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

Meet Personal Vault

Personal Vault is a protected area in OneDrive that can only be accessed with a strong authentication method or a second step of identity verification, such as your fingerprint, face, PIN, or a code sent to you via email or SMS.¹ Personal Vault gives you an added layer of protection for your most important files, photos, and videos—for example, copies of documents such as your passport, driver’s license, or insurance information—should someone gain access to your account or device.

Plus, this added security won’t slow you down. You can quickly access your important documents, photos, and files with confidence wherever you are, on your PC, OneDrive.com, or your mobile device.²

Beyond a second layer of identity verification, Personal Vault also includes the following security measures:

• Scan and shoot—Using the OneDrive app, you can scan documents or shoot photos directly into your Personal Vault, keeping them off less secure areas of your device, like your camera roll.
• Automatic locking—No need to worry about whether you left your Personal Vault or your files open—both will close and lock automatically after a period of inactivity.³
• BitLocker encryption—On Windows 10 PCs, OneDrive automatically syncs your Personal Vault files to a BitLocker-encrypted area of your local hard drive.⁴
• Restricted sharing—To prevent accidental sharing, files in Personal Vault and shared items moved into Personal Vault cannot be shared.

Taken together, these security measures help ensure that Personal Vault files are not stored unprotected on your PC, and your files have additional protection, even if your Windows 10 PC or mobile device is lost, stolen, or someone gains access to it or to your account.

Personal Vault is the latest advancement in OneDrive’s suite of security features, which also includes file encryption at rest and in transit, suspicious sign-in monitoring, ransomware detection and recovery, mass file deletion notification and recovery, virus scanning on downloads for known threats, password protected sharing links, and version history for all file types.

Personal Vault is now available worldwide

To start using Personal Vault, look for the Personal Vault icon in your OneDrive and simply click or tap it. If you’re using OneDrive’s free cloud storage or standalone 100 GB plan, you can store up to three files in Personal Vault. Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home subscribers can store files as they want in Personal Vault, up to their storage limit.

Learn more in this Personal Vault podcast on Intrazone.

Backing up your folders just got easier

We made it easy to back up your important folders to OneDrive—so your files are protected and available even if something happens to your PC. With PC folder backup you can choose to automatically back up files in your Desktop, Documents, or Pictures folders to OneDrive. Now you don’t have to worry about protecting your work—with a cloud storage for business, OneDrive will do it for you.

You can also access your backed-up files even when you’re away from your PC—just use the OneDrive mobile app or go to OneDrive.com. Plus, saving your files to OneDrive allows you to view and restore previous versions of your files up to 30 days in the past.

PC folder backup is now more deeply integrated with the newest version of Windows 10, so you can easily enable it during Windows setup or updates. The feature is included with all OneDrive consumer plans and is available on Windows 7, 8, and 10 PCs with the OneDrive sync app. Learn more about PC folder backup.

OneDrive fans rejoice—additional storage is now available!

In June, we announced that we would deliver on one of the most requested OneDrive features of all time—more storage options. Now you can add storage to your existing Office 365 subscription in 200 GB increments, starting at $1.99 per month.⁵ Learn more about OneDrive additional storage.

Dark mode is now available on OneDrive iOS

We’re also thrilled to announce that the OneDrive mobile app on iOS 13 now supports dark mode. This dramatic new look is both easy on the eyes and lets you take full advantage of an OLED screen to save battery life. To try it out, simply set your iOS 13 device to Dark Appearance in Settings > Display and Brightness and then open the OneDrive app.

Let us know what you think

To let us know what you think or share your thoughts and ideas, visit OneDrive UserVoice. To learn more about all the advanced protection features included in Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscriptions, see our support page.

Notes:
¹ Face and fingerprint verification requires specialized hardware including a Windows Hello capable device, fingerprint reader, illuminated IR sensor, or other biometric sensors and capable devices.
² OneDrive for Android requires Android 6.0 or later; OneDrive for iOS requires iOS 11.3 or later.
³ Automatic locking interval varies by device and can be set by the user.
⁴ Requires Windows 10 version 1903 or above.
⁵Additional storage only available to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers. For Office 365 Home subscribers, only the primary subscription holder may purchase additional storage, and only for that user’s account.

The post OneDrive Personal Vault and expandable storage now available worldwide appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As part of extending Teams to every worker across all industries, today we’re announcing new capabilities in four areas that make it easier for customers to use Teams to communicate and collaborate.

1. Prioritize time-sensitive communication

Two new features in Teams will ensure that important messages get through.

• Priority notifications alert recipients of time-sensitive messages, pinging a recipient every two minutes on their mobile and desktop until a response is received.
• Read receipts in chat displays an icon to indicate when a message you sent has been read by the recipient.

Priority notifications and read receipts are starting to roll out this month.

2. Easily manage communications within and across teams

• Announcements allow team members to highlight important news in a channel and are a great way to kick off a new project, welcome a new colleague, or share results from a recent marketing campaign.

• Channel cross posting allows you to post a single message in multiple channels at the same time.

• Channel moderation allows moderators to manage what gets posted in a channel and whether a post accepts replies.

Announcements is rolling out now. Channel moderation and channel cross posting are coming soon.

3. Make it easier for Firstline Workers to manage their schedules and receive updates

• The new time clock feature in the Teams Shifts module allows workers to clock in and out of their work shifts and breaks right from their Teams mobile app. Managers have the option to geo-fence a location to ensure team members are at the designated worksite when clocking in or out.

• Targeted communication allows team members to message everyone in a specific role at the same time by @mentioning the role name in a post. For example, you could send a message to all cashiers in a store or all nurses in a hospital.

Time clock is rolling out now. Targeted communication will start rolling out in August 2019.

4. IT administrators: Easily deploy the Teams client and manage policies for everyone in your organization

• The Teams client is now available to existing installations of Office 365 ProPlus on the Monthly Channel.
• Policy packages in the Teams admin center enable IT admins to apply a pre-defined set of policies across Teams functions, such as messaging and meetings, to employees based on the needs of their role.

Policy packages in the Teams admin center is coming soon.

Building a robust partner ecosystem with Teams

Partners play a critical role in helping customers use Teams to streamline business processes, and today we’re announcing four new partner initiatives.

1. Contact center solutions—Contact centers are an important part of customer service operations at many companies. We’re working with Five9, Genesys, NICE inContact, and other leading contact center solution providers to enable integration between Teams and contact center solutions.
2. Call recording for compliance—Since many industries have regulatory policies that require the recording of calls and meetings, we’re partnering with compliance recording partners, including ASC, NICE, and Verint to add this capability to Teams.
3. Workforce management—Microsoft has teamed up with retail IT solutions provider REPL to develop an integration between Teams and JDA’s workforce management solution. The integration enables shift schedule information to be viewed with near real-time accuracy in the Teams Shifts module. This gives Firstline Workers the ability to access and request changes to their existing shift schedules via the Teams app.
4. Partner-led Teams trial—To support partners in helping customers realize the power of Teams, we are launching a new Partner-led Teams trial. This new trial will enable Microsoft 365 partners to offer their customers a free six-month trial to provision the full Teams experience for customers with Exchange Online Only or who haven’t yet moved to the cloud. The trial will be available to eligible customers through Microsoft Cloud Service Provider partners starting August 1, 2019. Read Microsoft Partner Guidance for Partner-initiated Microsoft Teams Trial for more details.

Helping our customers transform the way work is done

Lexmark uses Teams to power project efficiency. From the legal department to supply chain to co-creating marketing content, Teams is part of Lexmark’s transformation with Microsoft 365.

With 130,000 employees across 70 countries, DXC chief technologists use Teams to collaborate on customer proposals and share best practices.

Canine officers in the Belgian Federal Police use Teams to stay connected in the field and with operational support.

One of the largest real estate management companies in India, Godrej Properties uses Teams to bring together employees, vendors, and contractors and keep project stakeholders up to date.

Get started with Teams

Teams is transforming workplace collaboration and helping streamline business processes all over the world. But don’t take our word for it—try it for yourself. Get started with Teams for free today!

The post Microsoft Teams reaches 13 million daily active users, introduces 4 new ways for teams to work better together appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

More than 500,000 organizations, including 91 of the Fortune 100, use Teams to collaborate across locations, time zones, and languages, including Cerner, Cox Automotive, dm-drogerie markt, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Hendrick Motorsports, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, Mitsui & Co., National Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Razer, Ricoh, and Trek Bicycle. Teams is currently available in 44 languages across 181 markets, and soon we’ll roll out support for nine additional languages, including Hindi, Filipino, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Teams makes collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure

Microsoft Teams is improving workplace collaboration by helping organizations move from an array of disparate apps to a single, secure hub that brings together what teams need, including chat, meetings, and calling, all with native integration to the Office 365 apps. Users can customize and extend their experience with third-party apps, processes, and devices, giving them the tools they need to get work done.

Following the customizable mobile Teams experience announced in January, today we’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make meetings more inclusive and effective while delivering new levels of security and compliance.

1. Customized backgrounds takes our intelligent background blur technology further, allowing participants to select a custom background, such as a company logo or an office environment when working from home, to appear behind them during a meeting or video call. This improves the effectiveness of remote meetings by encouraging the use of video while minimizing distractions. Coming later this year.

2. Content cameras and Intelligent Capture in Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analog whiteboards. Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see whiteboard brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard. Coming later this year.

3. Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together directly in Teams. With upcoming support for Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams Rooms, in-person attendees can also contribute. You can even add content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch. Whether you choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely, Whiteboard in Teams enables everyone to actively participate in the conversation. Now in public preview.
4. Live captions & subtitles make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location. Improve meeting effectiveness by allowing attendees to read speaker captions in real-time, so they can more easily stay in sync and contribute to the discussion. English preview coming soon.

5. Secure private channels allow you to customize which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams to limit visibility. This is one of our top requested features and we’re excited to be actively testing this internally and with select customers. Coming later this year.
6. Information barriers avoid conflicts of interest within your organization by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other in Microsoft Teams. This helps limit the disclosure of information by controlling communication between the holders of information and colleagues representing different interests, for example, in Firstline Worker scenarios. This is particularly helpful for organizations that need to adhere to Ethical Wall requirements and other related industry standards and regulations. Coming soon.
7. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations enables customers to detect, automatically protect, and screen for sensitive information in chats and channel conversations. By creating DLP policies, admins can help prevent sensitive information from unintentionally being shared or leaked—either inside or outside of the organization. Now generally available in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that include Office 365 Advanced Compliance.
8. Live events in Microsoft 365 enables anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver compelling communications to employees, customers, and partners. Live events use video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer and can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time from anywhere, across their devices, or catch up later with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) features—such as automatic transcription—to unlock the content of the event recording. Now generally available.

To learn more about these announcements and more, read our detailed blog on the Teams Tech Community.

Hear it from our customers

All around the world, in businesses of every size and industry, people are using Teams as their hub for teamwork. With the help of Teams, airline crews stay connected, marketing agencies prepare pitches, teachers give all students a voice, financial analysts beat deadlines, patients receive better care, and employers find the right talent. We are thankful to all our customers, partners, and those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us.

NASCAR racing team Hendrick Motorsports gains competitive edge

Legendary race team Hendrick Motorsports chose Teams as the hub for its race communications and decision-making. While the cars speed along the racetrack, race engineers, mechanical experts, and strategists take their positions in the Team Operations Center in Concord, North Carolina—hundreds of miles away. They gather and analyze massive amounts of data and communicate in real-time with the team at the track. “Quick, clear, effective communication is of the utmost importance in racing,” says race engineer Zac Brown. Zac relies on Teams to stay in constant contact with his driver, his crew chief, and pit crew at the track. He uses Teams to share large files and says that because Teams is integrated with the full Office 365 suite, it saves critical seconds otherwise lost in toggling between apps.

Razer wins in the gaming industry with constant, clear communication

Razer dominates the fast-moving gaming lifestyle industry where speed of execution and quality keeps them ahead. Managing dual headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore and an international team spread across the globe, Razer requires the best tools for rapid communication, fast decision-making, and real-time collaboration. They chose Teams to meet this need and gain a competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry. “We use Teams for the rapid-fire burst of communications we need to be super productive, and we’ve really changed the workplace culture, accelerating efficient communications to speed time-to-market—from innovation to manufacturing to marketing,” says Patricia Liu, chief of staff at Razer.

Read more about how Razer users Teams to accelerate collaborative product development.

Cerner’s empowered workforce adopts Teams with enthusiasm

Cerner is one of the world’s largest providers of health information technology solutions and services. Cerner’s associates work across the world in different shifts, different time zones, and different languages. Communication and content creation historically happened using disparate tools, making it difficult for employees to work together effectively. Now, Teams allows them to connect and collaborate intuitively. “You know a solution resonates with a workforce when it is adopted without any prompting from IT. This is the case with Teams,” says Bill Graff, CIO at Cerner. “In just a few months, our associates formed more than two thousand teams across the organization—and it all happened organically.”

Read more about how Cerner is consolidating communications in one modern experience with Teams.

Konica Minolta accelerates communication and collaboration

Konica Minolta is renowned for pioneering flexible work arrangements. It empowers employees to telework and do their best creative work from anywhere. Konica Minolta decided to embrace a new form of communication centered on chat, to make communication easier and speedier. With Teams, information workers have all their day-to-day tools in one place. Go Kawakami, IT infrastructure manager, says, “We manage tasks with Planner, report the status of projects with OneNote and Excel, and use SharePoint calendars as bulletin boards. With Teams, we can do this seamlessly.” The ability to invite people outside the company to a Teams channel has streamlined cooperation with partner companies. The company has seen many tangible efficiency improvements, from the PR division to the IT Help Desk.

Read more about how Konica Minolta is enabling remote working from anywhere with Teams.

These are just a few examples of how Teams is delivering an intelligent workplace for everyone—whether you’re a team at headquarters, a remote employee working from home, or a Firstline Worker serving customers each day. If you’re not using Teams yet, be sure to try it now.

To see what’s next in our vision for Teams, watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

The post Microsoft Teams wins Enterprise Connect Best in Show award and delivers new experiences for the intelligent workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Starting today, we’re bringing this experience to Windows 10 in the form of an app, simply called Office. It’s now available to Windows Insiders (Fast) and will roll out to all Windows 10 users soon. The app itself is free and it can be used with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, or Office Online—the free web-based version of Office for consumers.

A few key reasons to use the app include:

• Quickly switch between apps. See all your Office apps in one place and switch between them with a single click.
• Get back into your work. Jump to your most recently used documents, pinned documents, and documents shared with you—whether they’re on your local machine or stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.
• Find what you need. With Microsoft Search integrated prominently, you can quickly find the apps, documents, people, and sites you need to get your work done.
• Tailor it to your organization. Organizations can apply company branding and integrate other line of business applications through single sign-on to customize the experience for their users.

The Office app will replace the My Office app, which currently helps users manage their Office 365 subscriptions. If you already have the My Office app, you will get the new Office app through an automatic update in the coming months. Otherwise, you can download it from the Microsoft Store. Starting this summer, new Windows 10 devices will come with the Office app already installed—making it easier than ever to start using Office on a new PC.

Let us know what you think

We are excited to share this initial release with the Windows Insiders, and we’ll continue to improve the experience based on your feedback. Please let us know what you think via the feedback link under Settings within the app.

The post Introducing the Office app for Windows 10 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what’s new in October.

Create content that stands out

We’re excited to introduce new capabilities that help enhance the visual look and feel and overall impact of your documents and presentations.

Bring your content to life with Embedded 3D Animations—Earlier this month, we announced that you will be able to insert Embedded 3D Animations in Word and PowerPoint to help easily illustrate more complex ideas in your presentations using 3D. Simply insert and play embedded 3D animated models, so you can improve the comprehension and retention of your content. This feature will available beginning November 2018.

Convert ink to text and shapes at the same time—We’re enabling more natural ways to work with Ink in PowerPoint. You’ll be able to easily convert your digital pen ink into text on a slide. And when you draw a more complex diagram with words and shapes, you can select everything in the slide and convert it to text or shapes all at once. The feature requires a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription and a touch/ink-compatible device. This feature will be available beginning November 2018.

Build impactful content with curated slide recommendations in PowerPoint—Now, regardless of whether your words are handwritten or typed, Designer in PowerPoint uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to convert text into curated slide recommendations. These recommendations include multiple design themes and intelligent SmartArt and icons—based on words in your slide—to bring your ideas to life. You’ll save time, stay in the design flow, communicate more clearly with imagery, and create better slides. This feature is now available to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscribers.

Easily edit documents with a digital pen—New gestures in Ink Editor enable you to edit documents using familiar shorthand with a digital pen while in tablet mode. Now, you can insert new lines, add missing words, and delete and highlight content quickly and naturally while on the go. These capabilities are available with a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription when using a touch-enabled device and a digital pen.

Convert Word documents into beautiful webpages using Transform to Web—With Transform to Web, you can easily transform your Word documents into interactive, easy-to-share webpages with just three clicks. Transform to Web offers a variety of styles that look great on any device, helping you easily publish a wide variety of polished content, including newsletters and training manuals. You can also view analytics on the page, including who has viewed or read your content. To transform a document, go to File > Transform and select a style. This feature will be available for Word with an Office 365 subscription and Word Online beginning November 2018.

Easily transition to and work in the cloud

We’re introducing capabilities across Microsoft 365 to help you move your files and applications to the cloud and help your users easily get help and support when they need it.

Migrate your files to the cloud with the SharePoint Migration Tool—The new SharePoint Migration Tool is a simple and intuitive way for commercial customers to migrate their existing SharePoint, OneDrive, and File Share content to SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. To take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions in Microsoft 365, download the SharePoint Migration Tool at no added cost to bring your on-premises content to the cloud.

Ensure app compatibility with Desktop App Assure—Desktop App Assure is now available through FastTrack to assist customers who encounter app compatibility issues when deploying Windows 10, Office 365 ProPlus, and feature updates. Desktop App Assure for FastTrack customers is currently available in North America and will be available worldwide by February 1, 2019.

Access help and support when using Office.com—The new help and support pane for Office.com will provide you access to the latest support information and support articles, and give you help with the common issues for the app you’re using without leaving the app. For commercial customers, you’ll be able to search your organization’s help desk information, if enabled by your admin. The new experience will launch next month on www.office.com and will roll out across Office 365 web apps over the next six months.

Other updates

• Office 365 has earned HITRUST CSF Certification, helping health and life sciences organizations meet their compliance requirements, while building capabilities to transform patient care and patient experiences.
• Office 2019 servers are now available, including Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019.
• New SharePoint admin center updates, including simplified controls and an improved site management experience, allow you to more easily and effectively manage SharePoint sites in Office 365.
• Microsoft was recently recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Access Management and Content Collaboration Platforms (CCP), as well as a Leader in the Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant for 2018.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in October—tools to create impactful content and help transition to the cloud appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Microsoft 365 is growing quickly, built on the strength of more than 135 million commercial monthly Office 365 users. Windows 10 has approximately 200 million commercial devices in use, and there is an install base of over 82 million for Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS). Today, at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, Florida, we are introducing new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that make it possible for every person to do their best work.

1. Microsoft Teams is the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history

After less than two years in market, more than 329,000 organizations worldwide use Microsoft Teams, including 87 of the Fortune 100 companies. In fact, 54 customers now have more than 10,000 active users of Teams, and Accenture just crossed the 100,000 active-user mark in Teams. Further growth has been spurred by the recently announced free version of Teams.

We continue to add powerful new capabilities to foster teamwork and collaboration. New artificial intelligence (AI) powered meeting features are now generally available—including background blur and meeting recording. Background blur uses facial detection to blur your background during video meetings, and meeting recording allows you to playback recorded meeting content at any time with captions and a searchable, timecoded transcript.

General availability of new live event capabilities will begin to roll out worldwide in Microsoft 365 later this year. These new tools allow customers to create and stream live and on-demand events in Teams, Yammer and Microsoft Stream to inform and engage customers and employees, wherever they are. Beginning in October, employees can watch videos on the go with the Stream mobile app for iOS and Android, with support for offline viewing. And we’re working with our ecosystem of device partners to deliver new devices optimized for Teams meetings and calling, including the new Surface Hub 2. Surface Hub 2 is perfect for dynamic teamwork and features a light, sleek, and intelligent design that’s easy to move around and fit in any workspace. The first phase of Surface Hub 2, Surface Hub 2 S, will start shipping in the second quarter of 2019.

Blur your background during meetings.

2. Extend the power of Teams to empower workers in all roles and across industries

As an example of how Teams can enable secure workflows for regulated industries, we’re delivering a new care coordination solution, now available in private preview, that gives healthcare teams a secure hub for coordinating care across multiple patients. It provides for integration with electronic health records (EHR) systems and enables care providers to communicate about patient care in real-time within Teams’ secure platform. We are also releasing two new secure messaging features with particular relevance in healthcare settings—image annotation, now generally available, and priority notifications, which will roll out by the end of this year to all Teams commercial customers. These capabilities support HIPAA compliance and enable doctors, nurses, and other clinicians to communicate about patients while avoiding the privacy risks that arise when healthcare professionals use consumer chat apps.

Easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working.

3. Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search, a new cohesive search capability, makes it easier for you to find what you need without leaving the flow of your work. We’re putting the search box in a consistent, prominent place across Edge, Bing, Windows, and Office apps, so that search is always one click away. We’re also supercharging the search box so you can not only quickly find people and related content, but you can also access commands for apps and navigate to other content wherever you need to get work done—even before you start typing in the search box. Recognizing that you work in an ecosystem of information, we’re extending Microsoft Search to connect across your organization’s data, inside and outside of Microsoft 365. Learning from your everyday work patterns and acting as a brain for your organization, the Microsoft Graph personalizes your experiences everywhere. We’re pulling together the power of the Microsoft Graph and AI technology from Bing to deliver future experiences that are more relevant to what you are working on. This will include automatically answering questions such as “Can I bring my wife and kids on a work trip?” by using machine reading comprehension that takes knowledge of the world and pairs it with understanding of your organization’s documents. Preview the Microsoft Search capability it as it rolls out to Office.com, Bing.com, and in the SharePoint mobile app today, with many more experiences to come in Edge, Windows, and Office.

Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search.

4. Create content that stands out with Microsoft 365

Three new features in Microsoft 365 use the power of AI to help you create content that shines. Ideas is a new feature that follows along as you create a document and makes intelligent suggestions. In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images. In Excel, Ideas recognizes trends, suggests charts, and identifies outliers in your data. Ideas is generally available in Excel today and will begin rolling out in preview to the other apps starting with PowerPoint Online. Additionally, new data types in Excel turn references to stocks and geographies into rich entities that can be used to build powerful, interactive spreadsheets. The Stocks and Geography data types are generally available today and make it easy to get updated stock prices, company information, population, area, and more. Finally, new image recognition capabilities in Excel take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table and turn it into an Excel spreadsheet, making data entry as easy as taking a picture.

In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images for your presentation.

5. Office loves the Mac

Office empowers everyone to achieve more on any device. And Office loves the Mac. We’re committed to the Mac as a first-class endpoint and have made significant investments in the platform over the past year—including moving the Mac and Windows versions of the apps onto a single code base and releasing new features for the Mac every month. We also tailored new experiences for the Mac, like the new Touch Bar integration.

Today, we’re announcing OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac, a way to access all your personal and work files from the cloud in Finder without using storage space and only download them when you need them. Files On-Demand gives the Mac an intelligent connection to the cloud and is just one more example of the power of Office on the Mac platform. Preview it before it rolls out to all Mac users.

OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac displays all your OneDrive files in Finder but only downloads them when you need them.

6. Work together with your entire network with LinkedIn in Outlook and Office web apps

We’re announcing two new ways to use the power of the LinkedIn network within your daily workflow. Soon, when you connect your LinkedIn account to Office 365, you’ll be able to coauthor documents with people in your LinkedIn network in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and send emails to them directly from Outlook. This brings your corporate directory and your LinkedIn network together, so you never lose touch with the contacts who can help you succeed, inside or outside your organization. You’ll also see LinkedIn highlights about the people in your meeting invites, providing you with insights about attendees, so you can prep for important meetings quickly and easily. These features help you focus on what’s important by providing information and connections directly in your flow of work and will be coming soon in a staged rollout.

7. Deliver a modern desktop with Azure

For many companies, the specific needs of their business demand a virtualized desktop experience. Today, we are introducing Windows Virtual Desktop, the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, which is optimized for Office 365 ProPlus and includes free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale Windows and Office on Azure in minutes with built-in security and compliance. Sign up to be notified of the preview availability.

8. Manage your environment with the Microsoft 365 admin center

Following our recent release of the new Microsoft 365 admin center, we’re announcing new features to help you to monitor and manage applications, services, data, devices, and users across your Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including Office 365, Windows 10, and EMS. The Microsoft 365 admin center has several new capabilities to help you better manage your environment, including insight-based recommendations, a more consistent UI, and customized views for each of your admins. The public preview of these features is rolling out now to targeted release admins and soon to all admins. To get started, visit admin.microsoft.com.

Manage your environment more easily with the Microsoft 365 admin center.

9. Achieve modern compliance easily for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and more

In the world of complex regulations and evolving privacy standards, customers consistently tell us they need the built-in, intelligent capabilities of Microsoft 365 to proactively achieve compliance in their organizations. We’ve expanded Compliance Manager to now include 12 assessments across different industries. The unified labeling experience is also now available in the Security & Compliance Center as a single destination where you can create, configure, and automatically apply policies to ensure protection and governance of sensitive data.

Compliance Manager now includes 12 assessments across different industries.

10. Advancing security for IT professionals

The work we do in security at Microsoft gives us the broadest perspective on the challenges and a unique ability to help. We focus on three areas: running security operations that work for you, building enterprise-class technology, and driving partnerships for a heterogeneous world. Today, we’re announcing several new enterprise-class capabilities that leverage the Microsoft intelligent cloud and operational learnings to help organizations secure their people, devices, and data.

New support for passwordless sign-in via the Microsoft Authenticator app is now available for the hundreds of thousands of Azure Active Directory connected apps that businesses use every day. Nearly all data loss starts with compromised passwords. Today, we are declaring an end to the era of passwords. No company lets enterprises eliminate more passwords than Microsoft.

Microsoft Secure Score is the only enterprise-class dynamic report card for cybersecurity. By using it, organizations get assessments and recommendations that typically reduce their chance of a breach by 30-fold. It guides you to take steps like securing admin accounts with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), securing users accounts with MFA, and turning off client-side email forwarding rules. Starting today, we’re expanding Secure Score to cover all of Microsoft 365. We are also introducing Secure Score for your hybrid cloud workloads in the Azure Security Center, so you have full visibility across your estate.

Finally, we are announcing Microsoft Threat Protection, an integrated experience for detection, investigation, and remediation across endpoints, email, documents, identity, and infrastructure in the Microsoft 365 admin console. This will save analysts thousands of hours as they automate the more mundane security tasks.

Microsoft Secure Score is expanding to cover all of Microsoft 365.

We look forward to bringing you these new ways to achieve more from unlocking creativity to advancing security. You can learn more about our announcements, see all of our Microsoft Ignite sessions live streaming or on-demand, and connect with experts on the Microsoft Tech Community.

The post 10 new ways for everyone to achieve more in the modern workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This momentum is driven by customers—in every industry—who are transforming their organizations to enable high performance from a workforce that is more diverse, distributed, and mobile than ever before. Microsoft 365 is designed to empower every type of worker—whether on the first lines of a business, managing a small team, or leading an entire organization.

Today, we are introducing four new ways Microsoft 365 connects people across their organization and improves collaboration habits, including extending the power of Microsoft Teams and new AI-infused capabilities in Microsoft 365.

1—Try Microsoft Teams, now available in a free version

To address the growing collaboration needs of our customers, last year we introduced Microsoft Teams, a powerful hub for teamwork that brings together chat, meetings, calling, files, and apps into a shared workspace in Microsoft 365. Now, more than 200,000 businesses across 181 markets use Teams to collaborate and get work done.

Beginning today, Teams is available in a free version worldwide in 40 languages. Whether you’re a freelancer, a small business owner, or part of a team inside a large organization, you can start using Teams today.

The free version includes the following for up to 300 people:

• Unlimited chat messages and search.
• Built-in audio and video calling for individuals, groups, and full team meetups.
• 10 GB of team file storage plus additional 2 GB per person for personal storage.
• Integrated, real-time content creation with Office Online apps, including built-in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
• Unlimited app integrations with 140+ business apps to choose from—including Adobe, Evernote, and Trello.
• Ability to communicate and collaborate with anyone inside or outside your organization, backed by Microsoft’s secure, global infrastructure.

This new offering provides a powerful introduction to Microsoft 365. Teams in Microsoft 365 includes everything in the free version plus additional storage, enterprise security, and compliance, and it can be used for your whole organization, regardless of size.

As we advance our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, what’s most exciting are the stories of customers taking on big projects with a small workforce, such as The Hustle Media Company—who helps movers, shakers, and doers make their dent in the world. Their popular daily email provides their audience with the tech and business news they need to know.

“As a media company that nearly quadrupled in size over the last year, it became apparent we needed a solution to connect all of The Hustle’s offices. As previous Slack users, we found that Microsoft Teams has all the features that other chat-based apps bring, but the teamwork hub allows everything to live in one place.”
—Adam Ryan, vice president of Media at The Hustle

Or, take it from Urban Agriculture Company, a small business specializing in organic, easy-to-use grow kits of vegetables, flowers, and herbs. After landing on Oprah’s favorite things, founder Chad Corzine turned to Microsoft 365 Business and Teams to manage communication among his rapidly growing departments, onboard employees, and protect customer data.

2—Use new intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365

Today, we’re also introducing new capabilities that allow anyone in your organization to create live and on-demand events in Microsoft 365. Events can be viewed in real-time or on-demand, with high-definition video and interactive discussion.

AI-powered services enhance the on-demand experience with:

• A speaker timeline, which uses facial detection to identify who is talking, so you can easily jump to a particular speaker in the event.
• Speech-to-text transcription, timecoding, and transcript search, so you can quickly find moments that matter in a recording.
• Closed captions to make the event more accessible to all.

Events can be as simple or as sophisticated as you prefer. You can use webcams, content, and screen sharing for informal presentations, or stream a studio-quality production for more formal events.

3—Leverage analytics to build better collaboration habits

We’re rolling out the preview of a new Workplace Analytics solution, which uses collaboration insights from the Microsoft Graph, to help teams run efficient meetings, create time for focused work, and respect work/life boundaries. Organizations can use aggregate data in Workplace Analytics to identify opportunities for improving collaboration, then share insights and suggest habits to specific teams using MyAnalytics.

We’re also rolling out nudges, powered by MyAnalytics in Microsoft 365, which deliver habit-changing tips in Outlook, such as flagging that you’re emailing coworkers after hours or suggesting you book focused work time for yourself.

4—Work with others on a shared digital canvas with Microsoft Whiteboard

Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available for Windows 10, coming soon to iOS, and preview on the web. Whether meeting in person or virtually, people need the ability to collaborate in real-time. The new Whiteboard application enables people to ideate, iterate, and work together both in person and remotely, across multiple devices. Using pen, touch, and keyboard, you can jot down notes, create tables and shapes, freeform drawings, and search and insert images from the web.

The post 4 new ways Microsoft 365 takes the work out of teamwork—including free version of Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what we brought to Microsoft 365 in May.

Empowering creative teamwork

Create accessible content in Office 365—We enhanced the Accessibility Checker to streamline the process of creating quality content that is accessible to people with disabilities. Now, the Accessibility Checker identifies an expanded range of issues within a document, including low-contrast text that is difficult to read because the font color is too similar to the background color. The checker also includes a recommended action menu and utilizes AI to make intelligent suggestions for improvements—like suggesting a description for an image—making it easier to fix flagged issues from within your workflow.

Accessibility Checker alerts you in real-time of issues that make your content difficult for people with disabilities to access.

Work in mixed reality with SharePoint—This month, we unveiled SharePoint spaces—immersive, mixed reality experiences built on SharePoint—which enable you to interact with and explore content in new ways. Now, Microsoft 365 subscribers can work with 3D models, 360-degree videos, panoramic images, organizational charts, visualizations, and any information on your intranet to create immersive mixed reality experiences. SharePoint spaces make it easy to create virtual environments with point-and-click simplicity to help viewers digest information that might be too numerous or too complex to experience in the real world or in a two-dimensional environment.

Create immersive virtual environments in seconds with SharePoint spaces.

Find relevant content faster in SharePoint—The new Find tab in the SharePoint mobile app makes it easier to access the information you need when looking for expertise, content, apps, or resources on the go. The Find tab uses AI to automatically surface sites, files, news, and people relevant to you without having to search—including documents and sites that you were recently working on from across your devices. The Find tab also refines search results as you type, and leverages AI to provide instant answers to questions you ask based on information from across your intranet.

By learning from your existing content and organizational knowledge, AI provides instant answers, transforming search into action.

Run efficient meetings with Microsoft Teams—This month at Build, we demonstrated a range of future capabilities in Microsoft Teams that utilize AI to make meetings smarter and more intuitive over time—including real-time transcription, Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices, and automatic notetaking. Today, we’re announcing new capabilities for mobile users that make it easier to participate in meetings on the go. Now, you can quickly share your screen with others in the meeting directly from your mobile device, or upload images and video from your library. These improvements make everyone a first-class meeting participant—regardless of location or device.

Source video.

Extend meeting capabilities with Surface Hub 2—Earlier this month, we introduced Surface Hub 2, a device built from the ground up to be used by teams in any organization. Surface Hub 2 integrates Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard, Office 365, Windows 10, and the intelligent cloud into a seamless collaboration experience, which extends the capabilities of any meeting space and allows users to create—whether in the same room or separated by thousands of miles.

Creating a secure and compliant workplace

Achieve GDPR compliance with the Microsoft Cloud—This month marked a major milestone for individual privacy rights with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that took effect on May 25, 2018. Over the last few months, we introduced new capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud to help you effectively demonstrate that your organization has taken appropriate steps to protect the privacy rights of individuals. To learn more about these capabilities, read our summary of Microsoft’s investment to support GDPR and the privacy rights of individuals.

Microsoft 365 customer INAIL leverages Azure Information Protection to classify, label, and protect their most sensitive data.

Work securely with external partners in Microsoft 365—We introduced several new capabilities in Azure Active Directory Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration that make it easier to work safely and securely with people outside of your Microsoft 365 tenant. B2B collaboration allows administrators to share access to internal resources and applications with external partners while maintaining complete control over their own corporate data. Starting this month, first-time external users are welcomed to your tenant with a modernized experience and improved consent flow, making it easier for users to accept the terms of use agreements set by your organization.

We also improved Business-to-Consumer (B2C) collaboration, making it easier to invite external partners who use consumer email accounts like Outlook and Gmail while protecting your organization’s data and improving the process of setting access policies.

Track terms of use agreements in Azure Active Directory B2B by tracking when users consent.

Other updates

As companies seek to empower people to do their best work, a cultural transformation isn’t just inevitable—it’s essential. This month, we released a white paper outlining how Microsoft is partnering with customers to foster a modern workplace that is productive, responsive, creative, and secure. To learn more, read the New Culture of Work white paper.

Check out these other updates from across Microsoft 365:

• Resume Assistant in Word is rolling out for free in Word Online.
• Risky IP Reports for Active Directory Federation Services help you monitor and audit your infrastructure to defend against extranet attacks.
• Office Lens now includes support for inking on top of images.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in May—empowering and securing users appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Despite these concerns, only 41 percent of SMBs say they have the ability to remotely remove data from a lost or stolen device, and only half said they use email encryption—two capabilities considered essential by larger enterprises. SMBs say they lack the expertise to implement sophisticated IT solutions, which many of them see as unaffordable and too complex. You can explore the survey data further in our interactive infographic below.

Microsoft 365 Business—built for SMBs

To further protect SMBs from cyberthreats and safeguard sensitive information, today we’re announcing the addition of advanced security features in Microsoft 365 Business, which gives businesses with up to 300 employees an affordable, comprehensive solution for empowering employees and safeguarding business data. Microsoft 365 Business includes Office 365 for productivity and collaboration, plus device management and security capabilities to protect company information across the devices people use for work. Now we’re adding new ways to protect against phishing and ransomware and prevent unintentional leaks of business data.

SMB security survey—interactive infographic

Protect your employees from phishing and ransomware

Cyber criminals use phishing and ransomware attacks to get people to download viruses and malware or unwittingly give out sensitive information. These attacks can cause significant issues for a business, ranging from loss of customer trust to financial woes.

To help bolster your defenses against phishing, malware, and viruses, Microsoft 365 Business now includes advanced protection from cyberthreats, including:

• Sophisticated scanning of attachments and AI-powered analysis to detect and discard dangerous messages.
• Automatic checks of links in email to assess if they are part of a phishing scheme and prevent users from accessing unsafe websites.
• Device protection to prevent devices from interacting with ransomware and other malicious web locations.

Prevent unintentional leaks of business data

Most SMBs handle sensitive information, with over half collecting and storing social security numbers, and 29 percent handling bank account details. Preventing unintentional leaks of these types of sensitive information can be a challenge, despite the best efforts and good intentions of employees.

To help you protect your sensitive business data, we’re adding the following capabilities to Microsoft 365 Business:

• Data loss prevention policies to identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information such as social security and credit card numbers.
• Information protection in Outlook to let you and your employees manage access to sensitive data in emails. For example, you can set encryption rules to prevent an email from being forwarded, copied, or pasted into other programs.
• Email archiving and preservation policies to help ensure data is properly retained with continuous data backup and compliance.
• The ability to enforce BitLocker device encryption on all Windows devices to help protect against data theft or exposure if a protected device is lost or stolen.

Microsoft 365 Business also offers industry-leading privacy protections. You remain the sole owner of your data, with controls over who in your business can access which data.

Comprehensive protection in a single subscription

CEO of Solace IT Solutions, Chris Oakman, works with SMBs to help them get up and running with the right technology. He says it doesn’t have to be complicated and expensive to keep your team productive and your business data secure.

“I work with a lot of small businesses that have historically had to pay for individual security services like spam filtering and anti-phishing,” said Oakman. “For these businesses, Microsoft 365 Business could save them up to $3,000 per year while including these and many other data protection capabilities in a more integrated way.”

With the addition of these new capabilities, Microsoft 365 Business offers your business a complete solution for productivity, security, and device management. Watch this video to learn how iSalon Software, a U.K.–based developer of software solutions for hair salons, uses Microsoft 365 Business to be more productive and secure:

Learn more

The threat protection, archiving, and information protection features are available to new Microsoft 365 Business customers and will roll out to existing customers over the next few weeks. Data loss prevention and support for features dependent on the Office desktop applications will roll out in the coming months. Read our support article for Microsoft 365 Business to learn more about how to enable the security enhancements.

Microsoft is committed to helping empower and safeguard SMBs across the globe. To learn more about how Microsoft 365 Business can help your business, take a guided tour. You can also contact your Microsoft Partner, or visit a Microsoft Store to sign up for a Microsoft 365 Business: Safe and Secure or Cybersecurity for Small Business free in-store workshop.

The post Safeguard your business with new security features for Microsoft 365 Business appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Teams for Intelligent Communications and Collaboration

Over the last year, Teams has evolved to become the ultimate hub for teamwork. Built on the strength and scale of Office 365 with over 120 million users, Teams delivers chat-based collaboration, meetings, calling, and soon, full enterprise voice features. All of this is underpinned by the Microsoft Graph, allowing for rich AI capabilities. As part of Office 365, Teams uniquely delivers these capabilities at scale, with enterprise-grade security and compliance standards to meet the needs of a global business.

To advance our vision for Intelligent Communications, we are announcing new Teams features coming later this year, including:

• Cloud recording—Will provide one-click meeting recordings with automatic transcription and timecoding, enabling all team members the ability to read captions, search within the conversation, and playback all or part of the meeting. In the future, it will also include facial recognition, so remarks can be attributed to specific meeting attendees.
• Inline message translation—People who speak different languages will be able to fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.
• Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices—Will enable you to easily make a call, join a meeting, or add other people to a meeting in Teams using spoken, natural language. This functionality will extend to IP phones and conference room devices.
• Background blur on video—The ability to blur your background during video calls will allow other meeting attendees to focus on you, not what’s behind you.
• Proximity detection for Teams Meetings—This feature will make it easy for you to discover and add a nearby and available Skype Room System to any meeting.
• Mobile sharing in meetings—Meeting attendees will be able to share a live video stream, photos, or the screen from their mobile device.

These new capabilities build on the breadth of new features that have come to Teams in the last year, including guest access, new ways to interact with apps, and new meeting and calling capabilities.

Today, we are also announcing new enterprise-grade calling features in Teams, including consultative transfer and call delegation and federation. In addition, we’re introducing Direct Routing, which will enable customers to use their existing telephony infrastructure with Teams for calling. When you combine a Microsoft Calling Plan or Direct Routing with our Phone System for Office 365, Teams becomes a full voice service. These new capabilities are expected to be available in the second quarter of 2018.

Intelligent Communications for your devices

Hardware plays a critical part in delivering consistent, high-quality video and voice experiences. We are announcing that Teams is now enabled for a full spectrum of calling and meeting room devices, including:

• Microsoft collaboration devices—Microsoft Surface Hub is a powerful all-in-one large-screen team collaboration device. Microsoft Teams will be natively supported on Surface Hub, enhancing the capabilities of Teams in huddle spaces and meeting rooms equipped with Surface Hub.
• Meeting room systems—Lenovo and HP join existing partners Logitech, Crestron, and Polycom to transform the conference room experience with rich audio, HD video, center-of-room control, and one-touch join. All Skype Room Systems will support Teams meetings.
• Connections to existing equipment—Teams will certify new solutions from BlueJeans, Pexip, and Polycom to support interoperability for meetings in Teams with existing hardware investments.
• Desk and conference phones—New desk phones from AudioCodes and Yealink—and new conference room phones from Crestron, Polycom, and Yealink—run a native Teams application for consistent and streamlined calling experiences.
• Mobile phone stations—New mobile phone stations from Plantronics combine the Teams experience with desk phone capabilities for the mobile user.

To learn more about the portfolio of Teams-powered devices and the roadmap dates, visit the Microsoft Tech Community blog.

Growing ecosystem of Teams apps

No ecosystem would be complete without the apps that make it thrive. We recently released a new store in Teams featuring a wide array of tools and services from our partners. Some of the most popular apps among Teams customers include Adobe Creative Cloud, Hootsuite, InVision, Polly, SurveyMonkey, Trello, Wrike, Zoom.ai, and many others.

Hear it from our customers

As we celebrate our first birthday, what’s most exciting are the stories of companies like RLH Corporation, Technicolor, and General Motors, for which Teams is truly changing the way people come together, innovate, and move business forward.

• RLH Corporation—In 2014, when Greg Mount took on the role of CEO at RLH Corporation, parent company to hotel brands like Red Lion Hotels, GuestHouse, and America’s Best Value Inn, he shifted the company’s strategy to move from being a Pacific Northwest regional brand to being a nationwide one. Since then, RLH Corporation has acquired multiple hotel brands, growing from 62 to over 1,100 hotels in just three years. To address change management and help drive a consistent culture within the company, RLH Corporation started using Teams last year. They looked at other chat-based collaboration tools, but because they were already using Office 365 and Power BI, Teams was the clear choice. Now, all corporate employees use Teams. The leadership team has moved from a more in-person and paper-based process for communications to more real-time interaction and data flow.
• Technicolor—A leader in the media and entertainment sector, Technicolor has used Teams within the Production Services CTO office to provide a new way for employees to collaborate around all things technical—from strategy to purchasing and everything in between. Technicolor Production Services business units are also starting to use Teams for high profile projects that require greater transparency and collaboration across many time zones and global offices, reducing the number of recurring meetings and flow of information internally and benefiting from a sole source of truth with cloud documents. Technicolor Production Services plans to expand its usage within other parts of its organization.
• General Motors—Here’s what Fred Killeen, CTO at General Motors, had to say about Teams: “Our mission to transform transportation relies on strong teamwork across every aspect of our business. Teams enables our employees to connect across geographical and organizational boundaries through a single place to access all the conversations, files, and content. Teams’ integration with the rest of Office 365 and third-party applications and services makes it easier for our employees to find relevant information and do their best work on their own and as a part of a team.”

As we celebrate our first year in market, we are thankful to our customers, partners, and of course those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us. We look forward to continuing to bring you experiences that enable your teams to achieve more together.

Tune in to Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect this week to hear what’s next in our vision for Intelligent Communications. Watch it live Wednesday, March 14, 2018, at 10 AM ET or watch on-demand at: Enterprise Connect keynote.

—Lori Wright, general manager for Microsoft Teams and Skype

The post Microsoft Teams turns 1, advances vision for Intelligent Communications appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A big part of our prioritization of new features and enhancements comes from the votes and feedback we receive from you on Outlook UserVoice. We thank you all for your feedback and are excited to hear what you think of our new additions!

Here’s a look at what’s new:

Sync shared calendars to Outlook

You will now be able to view and edit shared Office 365 or Outlook.com calendars, just like you can with your own calendars. Better yet, you can also share your own calendars with others and accept sharing invitations easily right from the app.

If you don’t see your shared calendars right now, don’t worry. We are in the process of upgrading existing shared calendars so that they start syncing to Outlook. However, if you just can’t wait and want the new experience immediately, simply re-accept the sharing invitation from Outlook on iOS or Android. Once you do this, your shared calendar will appear. If you cannot find the original calendar sharing invitation, ask the calendar owner to re-share and accept the new invite from Outlook. And voila!

Manage delegate calendars on the go

For those of you who manage someone else’s calendar at work, you’ll now be able to do this from the palm of your hand. Manage your delegates, accept a delegation request, and fully view and edit the delegated calendar all from Outlook on iOS or Android. And when you receive meeting invitations and responses, we will more clearly indicate if they are for your or your manager’s calendar, so you don’t get them confused.

Get your Meetups added directly to your calendar

Following up on our launch of Facebook and Evernote in Outlook on iOS and Android this year, we are releasing support for Meetup—a new Calendar app in Outlook. Meetup brings people together in thousands of cities to do more of what they want to do in life. Now, when you connect your Meetup account to Outlook, you can see your upcoming Meetups directly on your calendar.

Managing your events is even easier

We are bringing the best of what Outlook has to offer on the web and desktop to your phone, so you can make the most of your busy day while on the go.

These updates are available for both iOS and Android:

• Create events with daily, weekly, monthly or yearly recurrences.
• RSVP to a single occurrence of a recurring event series (e.g. decline one instance without removing the entire series from your calendar).
• See your coworkers’ availability when scheduling meetings (available previously on iOS, now available on Android).

These features are now available on iOS, coming soon to Android:

• Add a message when responding to a meeting invite (e.g. explain why you are declining a meeting invitation.)
• Set an event as private, to keep the details to yourself when sharing your calendar.
• Mark your calendar events as Busy, Free, Out of Office, or Tentative.

And there’s even more to come!

Let us know what you think of our new calendar features! If you have other ideas for what would make the calendar experience even better for you, let us know on UserVoice right from Outlook by going to Settings > Help & Feedback > Suggest a Feature.

—The Outlook team

Frequently asked questions

Q. I don’t see my shared or delegated calendars on in Outlook for iOS and Android yet. What should I do?

A. As noted above if you don’t see your shared or delegated calendars right now, don’t worry. We are in the process of upgrading existing shared calendars so that they start syncing to Outlook. However, if you just can’t wait and want the new experience immediately, simply re-accept the sharing or delegate invitation from Outlook on iOS or Android. Once you do this, your shared calendar will appear. If you cannot find the original calendar sharing invitation, ask the calendar owner to re-share and accept the new invite from Outlook.

Q. How do I add Calendar apps like Meetup to my calendar?

A. To add a Calendar app, such as Meetup, navigate to settings, and then click Calendar Apps in the Connected Apps and Add-ins section. Meetup is available on Android today, coming soon to iOS.

The post Outlook for iOS and Android is adding your most requested calendar features appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today I am excited to let you know that we’ve just enabled Guest Access in Microsoft Teams, built on the B2B collaboration features of Azure AD!

You can now enable partner collaboration in Teams for interactions across chat, apps, and file sharing, all with the ease of use and enterprise-grade protection Azure Active Directory has long enabled for your employees.

Now anyone with an Azure Active Directory account in any organization can be invited as a guest user in Microsoft Teams!

Customers have already created more than 8 million guest users using the B2B features of Azure AD and we’re only getting started. Adding support for Microsoft Teams has been a top customer request, so we’re excited to turn on this new capability to keep the momentum going. I hope you’ll give it a try today!

So, go ahead, log in to Teams today and invite your partners to work with you.

And as always, connect with us for any feedback, discussions, and suggestions. You know we’re listening!

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (@Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

P.S.: We are already working to add additional Azure AD capabilities in Teams, including support for external users with any corporate or consumer email account. Look for more news on that soon!

The post Azure AD B2B collaboration in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Customers can schedule your business directly online

Bookings provides your business a unique web page that your customers can use to schedule appointments, even when you’re not around to pick up the phone or respond to an email. The web page is simple to use: the customer first selects the service they want and, based on availability you provide, chooses a day and time when you or one of your staff is available, enters their contact information and books the appointment.

The web page looks great on both larger screens and mobile devices. It’s easy to link to your scheduling page from an email that you send to customers or from your business’s website or Facebook page.

Customers can book with your business from any device.

Reduce missed appointments with confirmations and reminders

When a customer doesn’t show up for an appointment, it can mean wasted time and money for you. To reduce no- shows, Bookings sends your customer an email confirmation right after they book, with an option to quickly add the appointment to their calendar. But we all know how busy people can get. So to help customers remember to show up, Bookings allows you to set up a reminder email, which is sent based on how much notice you want to give before the appointment.

Make it easy for your customers to reschedule or cancel bookings

Sometimes your customers need to reschedule or cancel a booking they’ve made. With Bookings, it’s easy for them to make a self-service change. They simply click the link in the confirmation email or the appointment in their calendar, which then takes them back to the scheduling web page where they can pick a different day and time or cancel the appointment. Want to avoid last minute cancellations? No problem. You can control how much advance notice is required, whether it’s one hour or one week.

Your customers can easily reschedule or cancel the booking.

Manage bookings and customer information from anywhere

All customer bookings are visible in a centralized booking calendar, giving you a complete view of upcoming appointments. You can reschedule, cancel or re-assign an existing booking to another available staff member. You can also quickly create a new booking if you’re talking with a customer in-person or on the phone and use the day “split view” to quickly see which staff is available at a given time.

Bookings provides a clear view of your staff’s daily schedule on the web and mobile.

Bookings also provides you with a customer list to help stay in touch with your customers. Each time a customer creates a booking using your scheduling page (or you create one for them in your booking calendar), Bookings automatically creates a contact for them in your Customers list inside Bookings.

You can manage all of these capabilities on the web, with easy access from the Office 365 navigation bar. For those times when you’re out of the office, in the coming months Bookings will have a mobile app that lets you manage your bookings or contact your customers with a few taps.

Get appointment details and customer information in the Bookings app.

Automatically add bookings on staff calendars

Your customers aren’t the only ones who can forget appointments, so Bookings automatically adds new or updated customer appointments on your calendar or your staff’s calendars. Bookings works great with your Outlook calendar in Office 365. If you or your staff use an Outlook.com or Google calendar, no problem—it integrates with those calendars as well.

You work to grow your business; we want to grow with you

You work hard to build your business, and as your company expands, Bookings grows with you. You can create different booking pages and easily add new staff members as your workforce grows. There is no additional cost for creating multiple booking pages, and additional staff members aren’t required to have Office 365 subscriptions.

How to get Bookings

Bookings is now rolling out in First Release to customers who subscribe to the Office 365 Business Premium plan and will roll out to all Business Premium customers worldwide in the coming months. Once it rolls out, anyone with an Office 365 Business Premium subscription can access Bookings in the app launcher within the Office 365 web experience. Bookings doesn’t require your business email to be routed through Office 365, so you can keep using your current business email service with no changes.

To get started, sign in to Office 365, open Bookings from the app launcher and then click the Get it now button. You’ll need to provide a bit of information about your business and the services you want your customers to book. After that, just click the Save and publish button in the booking page tab to publish your scheduling web page. Your customers will now be able to start booking appointments with your business. It’s that easy!

We hope Bookings will free up time for you to grow your business, help you reduce missed appointments and no-shows and keep you on top of your business wherever you are. As you use Bookings, please tell us what you think by providing feedback in the Bookings home page.

Frequently asked questions

Q. When will Bookings be available?

A. It is currently rolling out to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers who are in the First Release program and will roll out to all Business Premium subscribers worldwide in the coming months.

Q. Which Office 365 subscriptions have access to Bookings?

A. Bookings will be available with an Office 365 Business Premium subscription.

Q. As a business owner, do all my staff need to be Office 365 subscribers?

A. No. You only need one Office 365 Business Premium account to set up and manage Bookings. Your staff can use any email service.

Q. How do I manage the appointments while I am away from the office?

A. In the next few weeks, Microsoft Bookings will deliver a companion app that will allow designated users with an Office 365 subscription to manage and see all appointments as well as all customers’ information.

Q. Will my customers see my personal or business calendar?

A. No. Your customers will only see the Bookings calendar that you publish online. You specify the services, times and staff that are visible on that calendar.

Q. Do my customers need a Microsoft account or an Office 365 subscription to be able to book with me?

A. No. Your Bookings page is publicly available. To book an appointment, your customers only need to provide their name and email so that Bookings can send the confirmation email and reminder.

Q. Do my customers need to download an app to book an appointment?

A. No. Your customers access your web-based booking page from any browser in a mobile device, tablet or laptop. The upcoming Bookings mobile app is only for the business owner to manage their Bookings calendar.

The post Bring in business 24/7 with Microsoft Bookings appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

What’s new

Helping people share files and collaborate on content has always been central to our mission. That’s why we’re creating a better experience for document libraries that’s faster, more intuitive and responsive.

Here’s a look at what’s new:

The new, modern document library experience, showing two documents and a link pinned to the top.

User interface

Modern document libraries combine the power of SharePoint with OneDrive usability—Modern document libraries have an updated user interface that offers an experience similar to OneDrive, so it’s more intuitive to create a new folder and upload files in the browser. The ribbon has been replaced with a trim command bar, which provides intelligent commands relevant to the tasks at hand. If your organization has customized the ribbon with buttons that map to critical business functionality in your enterprise, those buttons will appear in the command bar as well. With this update, each new Office 365 group now gets a full modern document library, replacing the former “Files” page.

Important documents easily highlighted—Click Pin to top to add documents “above the fold” in any onscreen view.

Copy and move files from the command bar—Copying isn’t new, but the copy and move gestures are intelligent about displaying your information architecture and letting you create new folders on the fly.

Copy files from SharePoint command bar.

Import files from other libraries—You may not have to make as many copies any more. Document libraries are also intelligent about remembering other files you’ve been using in SharePoint. That’s why you can import other files from other libraries as links, without having to duplicate files between multiple sites. You still see thumbnails and metadata for native files. And SharePoint shows your list of most recent documents, so you don’t have to cut and paste a link.

Create a link in modern document libraries.

Personalization

Personalized views simplified—The new document libraries let you group files directly in the main page without clicking to a separate admin screen. You can also click and drag to change the size of your columns, as well as sort, filter and group from any column header. To make the view available to everybody else in the library, just click Save View.

Responsive and accessible design—Mobile browsers have the same features as the desktop, making SharePoint productive for every user—whether they interact via mouse, keyboard, touch or screen reader.

Metadata

Document metadata now available inline—You can now edit metadata directly from the main view in the information panel. No more clicking into multiple screens to apply an update! If you’re in a view that groups files by metadata, you can drag and drop files between groups to update the metadata. And if you miss something required, the document is no longer hidden behind enforced checkout—you just receive a reminder to enter the data when you can.

One-stop shopping for everything about your documents—Thanks to Office Online integration, you can navigate a complete document preview at the top of the information panel. The panel offers metadata, including the history of recent activity, updates to the file and who received a share to the file. You can also add more users or immediately stop all sharing. Finally, all other file properties are displayed, in case there’s anything else not already covered.

The document information panel.

Keeping it authentically SharePoint—While we enhanced the document libraries to make them as intuitive and productive as possible, we know that the power of SharePoint has always been in your ability to customize document libraries to work for your team. At the same time, there’s a rich tradition of using content types, check-in/check-out, versioning, records management and workflows in SharePoint. Modern document libraries inherit all of these.

Navigation

Modern libraries come to Office 365 Groups—To bring enhanced content management to group files, libraries belonging to an Office 365 group have a new header control at the top of the page. Unlike the old control, which included links to the group’s conversation, calendar and member management, the new control has a single link to the group’s conversation, from which users can navigate to calendar and member management.

Getting started with modern document libraries

As we roll out modern libraries into production, we know it’s important to focus on several key aspects of managing the overall user experience.

Since usability requires manageability, we keep IT in control of the experience. You may be ready to adopt this across the board or you might want to stay in classic mode until you can prepare your users. We give you full control of using classic or modern looks at the tenant, site collection and library level.

When we bring modern document libraries into production later in June, it will become the new default for all libraries in most cases. However, we will add the tenant and administrative controls in advance of the actual library rollout, so if you choose to opt out, you can do so before users start seeing the new experience. We also included customization detection, so if we see certain features and customizations that don’t work in the modern experience, we automatically drop back to classic mode.

And we’ll keep classic mode running well into 2017 while users and developers adapt and adopt the new capabilities. See the support.office.com article “What is a document library?” for more details.

There’s more to come

First Release customers have been actively using many of these features since April and their feedback has guided our improvements announced today. You can join that conversation on the Office 365 Network on Yammer and weigh in on the improvements that will be part of our general release. For more context on the future of team sites beyond the new, modern document library experience, read “SharePoint—the mobile and intelligent intranet.”

We heard your feedback on extensibility and customization in particular, and we’ll have more to share in a future update. We plan to add support for customizing the page using modern techniques. Until then, customized library pages should stay in classic mode.

In the meantime, learn more about using and supporting libraries in “What is a document library?,” try out the new document libraries in SharePoint Online and give us feedback directly inside the modern document library experience with the Feedback button.

Thanks for using SharePoint.

—Chris McNulty, @cmcnulty2000, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

Frequently asked questions

Q. Will new document libraries support customization?

A. Yes, modern document libraries will continue to support declarative CustomActions that represent menu and command actions. Solutions that are currently deployed that make use of this mechanism should continue to work as before, with actions appearing in the new command surface in addition to the ribbon in classic mode. CustomActions that deploy script, JSLinks and additional web parts on the page are currently not supported. Environments that require these unsupported features should continue using classic mode for the time being.

Q. How long will classic mode be supported?

A. We recognize the need to test and prepare for any disruption to user experiences such as document libraries. We expect to run the two modes in parallel into 2017.

Q. Will these modern experiences come to on-premises servers?

A. Bringing modern experiences to SharePoint Server 2016 is central to our vision and is very much a part of the roadmap. At this time, we have no information to share yet about how or how soon this will happen.

Q. Which versions of Internet Explorer work best with modern libraries?

A. SharePoint Online supports the latest version of the Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Edge browsers, along with Internet Explorer 10 and 11. Older versions of Internet Explorer are already out of support generally. Internet Explorer 8 and 9 were previously noted as a “diminished experience” in SharePoint Online. Users of these older browsers should remain in classic mode or, preferably, upgrade to a currently supported version.

The post Modern document libraries in SharePoint appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device

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

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

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

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

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

And before the end of calendar year 2016:

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

The mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

SharePoint mobile app—your intranet in your pocket

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

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

SharePoint home

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

Modern team sites

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps integration

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

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

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

Roadmap for the mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

And during calendar year 2016:

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

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

The SharePoint Framework—open and connected platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the third quarter of 2016, you will see:

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

And by the end of 2016, we will deliver:

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

Security, privacy and compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

To summarize, we currently support:

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

This quarter, we will release:

• Dynamic conditional access policies.

And by the end of 2016, you will see:

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

Learn more about these announcements in this video:

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

Connecting you with innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jeff Teper

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