This month, we’re adding new features across Microsoft 365 to improve accessibility, support flexible workstyles, streamline routine tasks, and offer more ways to make your voice heard. We’re also launching new capabilities in Windows 11 and Windows 365 to help make hybrid work a little easier. Let’s dive into what’s new.

A more inclusive, seamless working environment

Support neurodiversity in the hybrid workplace

Notification overload can be disruptive, especially for employees with conditions like autism and ADHD. We’ve been working to cut down the noise by providing more ways to customize which notifications Microsoft Teams shows you and when, and new ways to protect time with Microsoft Viva Insights. We’ve also added new capabilities to support and improve reading and writing like text prediction options, voice control tools, and accessible authoring features—great for everyone, but a true game changer for workers with dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Learn about these features and more intelligent tools to support neurodiversity in the hybrid workplace in our what’s new in Microsoft accessibility for spring 2022 blog.

Create tasks with natural language

The To Do Windows app now supports smart recognition of due dates, reminders, and repeat information from the task title.² Now you can simply use natural language—like submit project report on Friday or follow up with client on Tuesday at 1 PM—and To Do will automatically recognize and highlight the dates, times, and repeat information and add it to your task accordingly. Update your Windows To Do app to version 2.66 or above to get started.

Get more out of Yammer

We’ve released a series of updates to Yammer that help make it easier to find what you need, share ideas, and customize to your preferences. First, community members can now upvote a response if it’s a helpful or useful contribution to the question, making it easier for others to find answers. You can now also bookmark a conversation to see the post and its replies later. Finally, dark mode for Yammer web will be available soon.

Switch between accounts in Microsoft 365 web apps with a single click

Switching between user accounts can disrupt your flow of work when you need to sign out and sign back in again. Beginning this month, we have started adding support for multiple work and personal accounts on Microsoft 365 web apps in the same browser, enabling you to seamlessly switch between the accounts with a single click. Just add your accounts to the account manager on the top right of a Microsoft 365 web app to get started. Learn more about this new feature in the Tech Community blog Announcing account switching for Microsoft 365 web apps.

Work securely from anywhere with Windows 11 and Windows 365

Flexible work requires technology that’s built for a hybrid world. Earlier this month, we shared the latest Windows 11 and Windows 365 features that are designed to empower new ways of working. We’re bringing the power of the Microsoft Cloud and familiarity of the PC together, giving you an even more seamless Windows experience without sacrificing security.

Drive productivity and hybrid collaboration with Windows 11

With Windows 11, you can easily organize files you are working with in File Explorer by tagging them as favorites and using tabs to quickly access those you need.

New capabilities like automatic framing, voice clarity, background blur, and eye contact create more natural hybrid meeting experiences.³ Live captions provide a more inclusive hybrid work environment for the deaf or hard-of-hearing communities, as well as language learners. Finally, we added snap assist for touch to help people organize windows in predefined layouts on Windows tablets or two-in-ones.

Empower hybrid work with Windows 365, the world’s first Cloud PC

With Windows 365, employees can stream their entire Windows experience from the Microsoft Cloud, enabling them to access their personal settings, apps, and content securely on any device.

Windows 365 Boot enables users to sign in to Windows 365 at start up—no need to sign in to the local operating system first. Windows 365 Switch will enable users to move between the Windows 365 Cloud PC and the local desktop just like they do between different desktops today in the Task switcher. The Windows 365 app provides users with another way to access their Windows 365 Cloud PC from the taskbar or Start menu. And for those times you need to work offline, like on an airplane or in the field, Windows 365 Offline enables uninterrupted work, with an automatic sync as soon as you reconnect.

Empower IT with modern management

Managing devices for a dispersed workforce and keeping them up to date presents unique challenges for IT departments. To help, we’ve added Windows Autopatch, a new intelligent managed service designed to keep Windows and Office software up to date automatically, to Windows Enterprise E3 at no additional cost. Learn more about this announcement on our Tech Community blog post Get current and stay current with Windows Autopatch.

In addition, we are launching a new communications function in Microsoft Endpoint Manager that empowers IT to send targeted organizational messages directly to employees across various surfaces in Windows 11, including on the desktop or lock screen. Learn about this new cloud-managed capability and more in this Tech Community blog post The endpoint manager’s guide to what’s coming in Windows 11.

Simplify what it takes to protect your endpoints in the cloud

We announced our vision for advanced endpoint management and shared our plans to introduce a series of premium solutions over time in Endpoint Manager that will help organizations increase endpoint security, improve user experiences, and reduce the cost of ownership of your digital estate. Remote help for Windows is the first of these solutions, launched for general availability on April 5, 2022, and is featured in the new Microsoft Mechanics video about Windows cloud management.

Govern data across your entire data estate

To meet the challenges of today’s decentralized, data-rich workplace, we’re introducing Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions that help you understand, govern, and protect your entire data estate. This new portfolio combines the capabilities of the former Azure Purview and the Microsoft 365 Compliance solutions that users already rely on, providing unified data governance and risk management. Learn more about Microsoft Purview in the video Go Beyond with Microsoft Purview.

Empowering the future of modern work

As the future of work unfolds, Microsoft 365 is continuing to help organizations and teams embrace a flexible work model. No solution is better positioned to support the needs of a hybrid workforce than Microsoft 365. Be sure to check back next month, when we’ll be sharing the news from Microsoft Build, our annual developer conference. 

¹ 2022 Work Trend Index, Microsoft. March 16, 2022.

² Feature currently available in English (EN-) languages only.

³ Hardware dependent.

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

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

Let’s dive in.

Focus on what matters and collaborate across boundaries

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

Pin or hide your own video in Microsoft Teams meetings

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

Stay on top of required trainings

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

Get suggestions on Yammer communities and people to follow

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

Auto-renew active Yammer communities

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

Collaborate with people outside of your geography while maintaining compliance policies

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

More flexibility in how you provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs

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

Provision Cloud PCs without an Azure subscription

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

Localizing the Cloud PC experience

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

Looking to the future

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

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

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

Now, let’s dive into the news.

Empowering frontline workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create content that everyone can use

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

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

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

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

Increasing productivity with new features in your favorite apps

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

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

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

Also new this month

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

Looking to the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New updates to the Teams meeting experience

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

Unlock better hybrid meeting experiences

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

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

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

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

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

Make cross-organizational collaboration easier and more secure

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

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

Deliver engaging and memorable events

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

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

Unlock teamwork with collaborative apps

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

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

Streamline the contact center experience

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

Empowering creators everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The digital employee experience is the employee experience

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

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

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

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

Windows for a hybrid world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also new to Microsoft 365

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

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

Deliver more inclusive meetings for everyone

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

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

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

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

Co-author encrypted docs and create more colorful diagrams

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

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

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

Ensure your employees can be productive from day one

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

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

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

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

Looking to the future

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

¹ Work Trend Index, WorkLab, Microsoft. 2021.

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This month, we are continuing to build on our recent announcements, from making Windows 365 available to everyone to introducing new features in Microsoft Teams and across Microsoft 365 designed to empower your people to work from anywhere.

Let’s dive into the details.

Be productive from anywhere with Windows 365

At Inspire, we announced Windows 365, a cloud service that introduces a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when available). Now generally available, Windows 365 gives everyone, from interns and contractors to software developers and industrial designers, the agency to connect to their apps, data, and settings from any device. With Windows 365, you can begin working on a laptop at the kitchen table, pick up where you left off on a tablet in the car between appointments, and finish up on your desktop when you get to the office. Windows 365 is always ready for you to jump back in—even when you switch devices—and makes it easier for organizations to scale to meet annual busy periods by eliminating the logistical complexity and security challenges of issuing new hardware to seasonal workers.

Learn more about Windows 365 or sign up for your plan today.

Work together and personalize your Microsoft Teams meeting experience

This month, we’re introducing additional collaborative apps from our partners, a new Q&A app for Microsoft Teams, a new Communities app, and more.

Take notes and edit records right within Teams with new partner apps—Last month, we announced the general availability of new collaborative apps from our partners. Confluence Cloud by Atlassian in Teams is designed to enable more effective meetings where users can take notes with a Confluence notes panel inside a Teams meeting. Confluence makes team notes digestible and action-oriented and allows users to format notes such as action items, decisions, code snippets, mentions, and tables. These notes are then formatted and automatically shared in a Teams channel.

Salesforce for Teams is also now generally available. With this collaborative app, sales and service teams using Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud can bring account data and records into their Teams workspace for better collaboration and decision making. With the Salesforce for Teams app, users can pin Salesforce records to channels, chats, and calendar meetings to easily keep access to them—with an expanded set of supported Salesforce records, including Custom Objects.

Simplify virtual health workflows for your frontline healthcare workers—To help healthcare workers schedule and manage virtual appointments more effectively, we have added Microsoft Bookings with Microsoft Teams in all Microsoft 365 for frontline workers product licenses. For example, with the Bookings app in Microsoft Teams, healthcare workers can easily schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits for simple telehealth workflows. Microsoft 365 for frontline workers provides an attractive, low-cost licensing option for healthcare providers that are interested in using Teams to support virtual health and care team collaboration.

Add open or moderated Q&As to any Teams meeting—To help provide a more structured question and answer experience during larger meetings, we introduced the new Q&A app that enables attendees to ask and reply to questions before and during a meeting. Organizers and designated presenters can mark best answers, filter responses, moderate and dismiss questions, and pin posts. Responses to questions are threaded in a conversation with the original question. Designated presenters can act as co-moderators to help screen questions. The Q&A app will be generally available in September. To add Q&A to a meeting, simply add the app during the scheduling process.

Experience the new Communities app in Teams and Outlook for web—The Communities app for Microsoft Teams brings a full-fidelity community experience, powered by Yammer, into Microsoft Teams. In the coming weeks, we’re updating the app’s design, bringing enhancements to notifications and deep-linking, and adding new capabilities like suggested communities, which uses AI to recommend valuable communities to join.

We also announced the new Communities app for Outlook for the web. Starting next month, you will be able to engage in communities, participate in conversations and live events, and share knowledge openly with your peers without leaving the Outlook web app.

Build in breaks and stay on top of what’s most important

Research has shown that small breaks throughout the day make a big difference in employee wellbeing. This month, we are introducing new features in Outlook and Yammer to help ensure you can plan breaks as needed throughout your day and help you keep track of important messages and critical tasks.

Get a break with speedy events—With increased online meetings and many of us being more sedentary than we would like, it is important to take breaks throughout the day and stretch our legs. In April, we introduced speedy events, which automatically sets events to start “late” or end “early,” helping people carve out essential breaks between back-to-backs meetings. This month, we are expanding support to the new Outlook for Mac.

Pin your most important messages at the top of your inbox—With large inboxes and busy days, finding a specific email you read earlier can be tedious and disruptive to your workflow. We’ve added the ability to pin a message, moving it to the top of your inbox so it’s easy to find later. Pinned messages is now generally available to all users in Outlook for the web, Mac, and mobile.

Get reminders to take action on email messages you might have missed—Message reminders in Outlook on the web help you stay on top of things by bringing messages you might have missed to the top of your inbox so you can easily take action on it. Don’t worry, we don’t want to clutter your inbox so Outlook will only remind you of one message at a time. Log in to Outlook on the web to try it out.

Post on behalf of in Yammer—We also announced that users can now post on behalf of another user in Yammer. Once approval is granted, internal communicators to share news and updates as well as reply to comments on behalf of leaders and their teams. To get started, leaders and teams will first need to setup their delegate in their Yammer settings.

Increase productivity with new features in your favorite apps

This month, we introduced suggested attachments in Microsoft Planner and the ability to create shapes in Visio for the web.

Find your files more effectively with suggested attachments—Planner now supports suggested attachments in tasks. Now, when you want to add attachments to a task, Planner will show you a list of related files for you to select from. No more hunting through your folders, servers, or cloud storage to find the right file to attach. Suggested attachments in Planner automatically recommends files that you might want to attach to the plan, saving you time. To experience the new capability, within a task in Planner for the web, scroll down to the bottom of the task to find the Suggested attachments section and select Add next to the file you’d like to attach.

Create shapes in your diagrams in Visio for the web—Currently, when you select a shape to add to your diagram from the available shape sets, the shape is added with predetermined dimensions. You then have to resize the shape based on their requirements. To help, we’ve added the Draw Shape tool, enabling you to draw shapes, including rectangles, squares, lines, circles, and ellipses, at the size and location you prefer. To create a shape in your diagram from the Insert tab, select the Draw Shape drop-down, select the shape you want, click anywhere in the canvas, and then drag to draw the shape.

Tools for the future of hybrid work

Hybrid work is here. As organizations across the globe navigate the increased complexities of this once-in-a-generation shift in the way we work, we will continue to deliver innovation that enables people to be productive and feel included in this new world of work. 

From Windows 365, which enables people to stream all of their personalized applications, tools, data, and settings from the cloud across any device, to the Q&A app for Teams, all of these capabilities are designed to empower people in this new world of work. And this is all just the beginning. Stay tuned for more. 

The post From Windows 365 to Q&A in Microsoft Teams meetings—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A decade of continuous innovation

Since its launch a decade ago, Office 365 has grown to over 300 million commercial paid seats. Along the way, we have continuously re-invested to meet the changing needs of our customers. Four years ago, we introduced Microsoft 365 to bring together the best of Office, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). That same year we added Microsoft Teams as the only integrated solution where you can meet, chat, call, collaborate, and automate business processes—right in the flow of work.

In fact, since introducing Microsoft 365 we have added 24 apps¹ to the suites—Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Stream, Planner, Visio, OneDrive, Yammer, and Whiteboard—and have released over 1,400 new features and capabilities in three key areas.

1. Communication and collaboration. Microsoft Teams is the new front end across work, life, and learning for more than 250 million monthly active users. We launched Teams in 2017 as the only integrated solution where you can meet, chat, call, collaborate, and automate business processes—with the power of the Office apps—all within the flow of work. In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities including Together mode, background effects, large gallery view, raise hand, live reactions, breakout rooms, live captions with speaker attribution, and Fluid components, just to name a few.

We introduced a new category of collaborative applications in Teams, empowering people and organizations for hybrid work through deep integrations with Power Platform, Whiteboard, Lists, Planner, Shifts, Forms, and SharePoint. Companies like Adobe, Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday have built apps that deeply integrate with Teams, bringing business processes and functions directly into the flow of work.

We continue to innovate on both real-time and asynchronous collaboration. We introduced real-time collaboration in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint desktop apps while a growing set of capabilities like @mentions, assign tasks, modern comments, and auto-save have streamlined the collaboration experience. We’ve added and expanded OneDrive cloud storage and the Exchange Online mailboxes.

2. Security and compliance. The cybersecurity landscape is more complex than ever. With the accelerating volume, sophistication, and scale of cyberattacks, security and compliance are a priority for every organization. Since we first introduced Microsoft 365, we have added new attack surface reduction capabilities to help organizations defend against ransomware and other threats. We have added capabilities like data loss prevention (DLP) for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption to help keep important data within the organization. And we have added powerful compliance capabilities that help organizations reduce risk and respond to increasing regulatory requirements such as Content Search, eDiscovery, and core Litigation Hold. Built-in mobile device management (MDM) and other management tools like Microsoft Endpoint Manager help admins support remote and hybrid workforces.

3. AI and automation. Over the past decade, we have infused AI capabilities across our productivity and collaboration applications to help everyone achieve more. Across Microsoft 365, we have introduced AI-powered innovations to help users be better writers, designers, and presenters. Cloud-powered AI now automatically creates maps, charts, and tables in Excel, and sorts email and removes clutter in Outlook. And AI-powered real-time translation, captions, and transcription make collaboration and communication more accessible and engaging for everyone.

Extending audio conferencing capabilities

And today, we are announcing that we will add unlimited dial-in capabilities for Microsoft Teams meetings across our enterprise, business, frontline, and government suites over the next few months. Even as cloud connectivity increases, we know that people join Teams meetings while they are on the go or struggling with a bad internet connection. Currently included with Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5, we have come to see dial-in as an important part of the complete Teams experience. Available with subscription in over 70 countries and with interactive support in 44 languages and dialects, unlimited dial-in provides peace of mind that users will be able to join their Microsoft Teams meeting from virtually any device regardless of location.

New pricing

The pricing changes we are announcing today will go into effect in six months. On March 1, 2022, we will update our list pricing for the following commercial products: Microsoft 365 Business Basic (from $5 USD to $6 USD per user), Microsoft 365 Business Premium (from $ 20 USD to $ 22 USD), Office 365 E1 (from $8 USD to $10 USD), Office 365 E3 (from $20 USD to $23 USD), Office 365 E5 (from $35 USD to $38 USD), and Microsoft 365 E3 (from $32 USD to $36 USD). These increases will apply globally with local market adjustments for certain regions. There are no changes to pricing for education and consumer products at this time.

As leaders around the world look to empower their people for a more flexible, hybrid world of work, it’s clear that every organization will need a new operating model across people, places, and processes. We’re committed to building on the value we’ve delivered over the past decade to continuously provide innovation that helps our customers succeed and thrive today and well into the future.

¹At launch in June 2011, Office 365 included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Lync, Exchange, and InfoPath. We’ve since expanded to add other apps – in whole or in part – and entirely new capabilities including: Access, Bookings, Delve, Forms, GroupMe, Kaizala, Lens, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote Class Notebook, Planner, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Publisher, SharePoint, Staff Hub, Stream, Sway, Teams, To-Do, Visio, Whiteboard, and Yammer.

The post New pricing for Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View and edit Dynamics 365 records right within your Teams workflow

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

Add a Teams meeting to appointments and capture notes

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

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

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

Break down barriers with collaborative apps from our partners

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

Manage your Teams app purchasing across the enterprise more easily

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

Windows 365 Cloud PC: Hybrid Windows for a hybrid world

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

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

Log on to your Cloud PC from any device

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

Provision Cloud PCs in minutes with no virtualization experience

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

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

Stay protected wherever you access your Cloud PC

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

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

Microsoft Viva: Employee experience in the flow of work

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

Enrich your employee experience with new Viva partner integrations

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

Bring your solutions into Viva

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

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

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

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

Secure your digital transformation

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

Manage customers’ security posture at scale

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

Protect end customers against fraud

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

Get visibility across more applications

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

Identify risky activities for users with critical positions

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

Customize regulatory assessments to fit unique requirements

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

The future of work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Collaborate in the flow of work

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

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

Protect time and prioritize wellbeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two new resources for navigating the shift to hybrid work

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

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

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

People 

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

Places

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

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

Processes

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.

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

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

Let’s dive in.

Make meetings more engaging, inclusive, and productive

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

Expand access and streamline the management of polls in Teams Meetings

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

Make meetings more inclusive and productive with live transcription

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborate with confidence with Show Changes in Excel Workbooks

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

Transform Word documents to PowerPoint presentations with just a few clicks

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

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

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

Categorize similar tasks with more editable labels

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

Making hybrid work environments more secure

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

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

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

Protect unmanaged devices with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

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

Also new this month

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take a look at each.

Create policy to empower people for extreme flexibility

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

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

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

Reimagine your physical spaces

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

Purposeful design

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

Connecting the physical to the digital

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

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

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

Invest in technology that connects people—anywhere and anytime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s dive in.

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

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

Improve collaboration and knowledge management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New meeting experiences for the hybrid workplace

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

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

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

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

Ensuring secure communications

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

Reimagining the employee experience for a hybrid workplace

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

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

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

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

Helping you on your Zero Trust Journey

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

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

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

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

Also new to Microsoft 365 

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

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

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

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Earlier today, we announced new capabilities that enable customers to unlock the value of Microsoft 365 even if they rely on shared workstations or devices that must be offline for months at a time. We also reviewed new management capabilities that have come to Microsoft 365 over the past 18 months to help IT admins ensure their businesses are secure, and their people can work with confidence from anywhere. And now, I’m pleased to provide an update on Microsoft Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), the next perpetual release of Office. A commercial preview of Microsoft Office LTSC will be available in April.

A specialty product for specific scenarios

We have built Office LTSC for a limited set of specific situations: regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems that must stay locked in time and require a long-term servicing channel.

We expect that most customers who use Office LTSC won’t do it across their entire organization, but only in specific scenarios. The good news is that you can deploy both Office LTSC and the Microsoft 365 version of Office with the same deployment tools.

About this release

With this release, we will bring Office and Windows into alignment in support of the same limited scenarios. Both Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will remain governed by the Fixed Lifecycle Policy. Both products will be supported for five years, and both the next perpetual version of Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will be released in the second half of this calendar year.

Without access to the cloud, Office LTSC will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 Apps, building on the features included in past releases. New Office LTSC features will include accessibility improvements, capabilities like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, dark mode support across multiple apps, and performance improvements across Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. The next version of Office will not ship with the Skype for Business client app, which will be available as a download in the Microsoft Download Center. It will ship with the Microsoft Teams app, allowing customers to enable and trial this experience if they so choose.

In contrast, Microsoft 365 will continue to get the latest innovations in modern collaboration, advanced security, and intelligent capabilities and ship them as soon as they are available.

As with previous releases, Office LTSC will still be a device-based “perpetual” license. We designed it as a specialty product intended for specific scenarios and will increase the price of Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and the individual apps by up to 10 percent at the time of general availability. And, because we are always asked at release if there will be another one, I’m happy to confirm our commitment to another release in the future.

We will provide additional information about the next version of on-premises Visio, Project, Exchange Server, Skype for Business Server, Project Server, and SharePoint Server in the coming months.

Office 2021 for consumers and small businesses

We also plan to release Office 2021 for personal and small business use later this year. Office 2021 will also be supported for five years with the traditional “one-time purchase” model. We do not plan to change the price for these products at the time of the release. We will announce more details about new features included in Office 2021 closer to general availability.

Our commitment to customers

To fuel the work of the future, we need the power of the cloud. The cloud is where we invest, where we innovate, where we discover the solutions that help our customers empower everyone in their organization—even as we all adjust to a new world of work. But we also acknowledge that some of our customers need to enable a limited set of locked-in-time scenarios, and these updates reflect our commitment to helping them meet this need.

FAQ

Q. Will the next version of Office have a Mac version?

A. Yes, the next version of Office will have both Windows and Mac versions for both commercial and consumer.

Q. Will the next version of Office include OneNote?

A. Yes, the next version of Office will ship with the OneNote app.

Q. Will the next version support both 32- and 64-bit?

A. Yes, the next version of Office will ship both 32- and 64-bit versions.

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Microsoft Viva

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

A new kind of employee experience

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

Let’s begin with Viva Connections.

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

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

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

Next, Viva Insights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now onto Viva Learning.

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

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

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

Finally, Viva Topics.

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

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

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

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

Together with our partners

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

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

Just getting started

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

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

Experience Microsoft Viva today

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

The post Microsoft Viva: Empowering every employee for the new digital age appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Before I get to this month’s product news, I want to point out some new resources that support this effort. Recently, we published a webpage called Resilience at work to help demonstrate how Microsoft solutions can help you strengthen resilience in people, teams, and your broader organization. We also published a Remote teamwork guide to share how you can enable your people to be productive and secure from anywhere with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. And earlier this week, we launched WorkLab, a digital publication devoted to illuminating the future of work, grounded in research and the lessons of the pandemic a year in. Be sure to check all three resources out and let us know what you think.

Okay, on to the news!

Breakout rooms, Tasks publishing, Approvals, and more in Microsoft Teams

New announcements in Microsoft Teams make it easy for everyone to engage in large meetings, help connect organizations, empower frontline retail workers, and more.

Help people to connect meaningfully in large virtual meetings—We’re excited to announce that one of our most requested Microsoft Teams features is now generally available! Breakout rooms make it easy to divide your meetings into smaller groups to facilitate discussions, brainstorming sessions, and learning groups. Organizers can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. All meeting assets, including meeting files, whiteboards, recordings, and transcripts are available for the organizer to review and use.

Connect your organization from the corporate office to the frontlines with Tasks publishing—With the new publishing feature for Tasks in Teams, customers can now drive consistent execution of tasks at scale across all of an organization’s locations. Corporate and regional leadership can create and send tasks to configurable relevant locations—including specific retail stores—and track their progress through automatic real-time reports. Managers have tools to easily direct activities within their stores, and frontline workers have a simple prioritized list showing them exactly what to do next. Tasks targeting, publishing, and reporting are now generally available. To set Tasks up in your organization, visit our documentation page for setting up your team targeting hierarchy.

Unify workforce management in Microsoft Teams through our new partnerships—We are excited to announce new workforce management capabilities with our partners, Blue Yonder and Reflexis. With this new integration, Microsoft Teams can now provide a richer, more unified workforce management experience, enabling employees to see and swap shifts, review their schedules, make changes, and more, without ever having to leave Teams.

Track and manage approvals right within Microsoft Teams to get faster results—Now generally available, Approvals lets you easily create, manage, and share approvals right in Teams. Quickly start an approval flow from the same place you send a chat, in a channel conversation, or from the Approvals app itself. Just select an approval type, add details, attach files, and choose approvers. Once submitted, approvals can be reviewed and responded to as needed. Install the Approvals app today to get started.

Simplify tasks, lists, and functions

New capabilities help make it easier to prioritize and organize tasks, access lists on the go, and use custom functions in Microsoft Excel workbooks.

Take your lists anywhere with the Lists mobile app for iOS—A new Lists mobile app for iOS now provides you access to your lists with full functionality from your iPhone. This new experience makes it easier than ever to open an existing list for quick reference, add or edit list items as you think of them, or create a new list from scratch or a ready-made template. Download the app now from the Apple App Store.

Manage your tasks more easily with intelligence—Available to To Do web English users, Microsoft To Do will use AI to help you plan your day better and focus on tasks that matter to you. AI in To Do will help identify tasks that seem important based on keywords and deadlines and suggest them in My Day to ensure that you stay on top of your key tasks and get more done each day. Get started with Microsoft To Do today. 

Turn Excel formulas into custom functions: Our new LAMBDA function makes it easy to convert your formulas into re-usable functions. Turn formulas into custom functions with unique names that can be easily re-used throughout your spreadsheet. Join the Office Insider Program and choose the Beta Channel to get early access to LAMBDA in Excel.

Create beautiful diagrams

Visio capabilities bring new and familiar icons to your diagrams.

Insert icons into your Visio files and more—This month, we’re announcing a couple of updates you’ve been asking for! First, you can now access a rich content library of icons and images that you can easily insert directly into your Visio diagrams. Rotate, recolor, and resize the selected content with no loss of image quality. This feature is available in both Visio for the web and the Visio desktop app. Second, you can now easily adjust the size of a page to fit your Visio drawing. The Fit to Drawing feature is now available in Visio for the web.

Visually represent your Azure architectural diagram using the latest shapes in Visio—Representing your infrastructure architecture through a diagram can be invaluable to your team during redesigns, implementations, documentation, and more. Two years ago, we added Azure shapes in Visio, making it easy to build diagrams for network topologies, virtual machine configurations, operations, and more. We are excited to announce that we have now released more than 250 of the latest Azure shapes. These refreshed icons are better aligned with the Microsoft Fluent design and let you create IT diagrams that accurately represent modern cloud services, tools, and frameworks from Azure. To get started, go to the Visio web app homepage and select your preferred diagram template to quickly start visualizing your Azure infrastructure. In the desktop app, select File > New > Templates > Network > Azure Diagrams.

Also new this month

Application Guard, which helps desktop users stay safer and more productive by opening Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files in a virtualized container, is now generally available for everyone with Microsoft E5 or E5 Security subscriptions.

From helping everyone engage in larger virtual Teams meetings with breakout rooms to enabling a more unified workforce management experience with a new partnership to helping you stay focused and in the flow with AI in To Do, all of these experiences were designed to help empower your people for the new world of work. And stay tuned—we’ve got all sorts of exciting announcements coming your way in the next few weeks.

The post From breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams to AI in To Do—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in January appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This month, we’re thrilled to announce that many of your top requested features—like background noise suppression in meetings—are coming to Teams and other Microsoft 365 services. Read on for details on those, plus the highly anticipated Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention and other new features across Microsoft 365 to help make it easier to pick up where you left off, keep track of your notes and tasks more easily, sketch out Amazon Web Services (AWS) application architectures in Visio for the web, and more.

New apps, noise suppression, and more for Teams

This month, we’re announcing the general availability of Teams apps for meetings, expanded Forms integration, and new capabilities that make it easier to build apps and bots right within Teams.

Enrich your meeting experience with Teams apps—Typically, collaborating with an app during a meeting required someone sharing their screen while they updated tasks, set reminders, managed requests, and more. This month, we’re excited to announce that you can now bring the capabilities of many of these apps directly into the meeting experience for everyone to interact with, making the time your team spends together more effective and collaborative before, during, and after your meetings. Checkout the new Teams apps for meetings now available in the Teams app store, including Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect (with more on the way), as well as familiar apps built by Microsoft such as Forms. If you’re a partner or developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings in our documentation.

Quickly gather feedback in Teams meetings with polls—Polls are a great way to turn passive listeners into active participants. Forms’ integration with Microsoft Teams now brings the power of polls to meetings, helping you conduct more engaging, informative, and productive meetings. Meeting presenters can prepare polls in advance and launch the polls during meetings that attendees can easily view and answer. The new Forms polls for meetings is currently rolling out and will reach you soon. You can get started by updating your Teams app and adding the Forms app to your meeting tabs.

Remove unwelcome background noise in Teams meetings—Earlier this year, we released the ability to minimize distracting background noise in videos on Microsoft Stream. We are excited to share that we’re bringing this technology to Teams meetings. This real-time noise suppression will help remove unwelcome background noise during your meetings, making easier to hear speakers in loud and distracting environments. Noise suppression is rolling out to all users now.

Automate routine tasks without leaving Teams—Also new this month is the Power Automate app for Teams. The app provides a lightweight designer experience and a number of templates to help you quickly get started building workflows right within Teams. This new app makes it even quicker and easier to automate routine tasks within Teams. To get started, make sure you’re running the latest version of Teams.

Easily build and deploy apps and intelligent chat bots in Teams—In September, we announced a new Power Apps and a new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams, running on a built-in low code data platform, now called Microsoft Dataverse for Teams— making it easy for creators to quickly build and deploy apps and bots for Teams—now those apps are generally available. Teams users can easily build applications and bots directly within Teams without needing to deal with connecting to storage, managing integrations, or switching applications. Dataverse for Teams makes the back-end tech logistics of creating and deploying business process solutions in Teams easier than ever. Built-in security and governance features provide seamless control of access to apps, bots, and flows, as well as their underlying data.

Find and share information more quickly

New capabilities help make it easier to find notes while working across Microsoft 365, capture and share content, and pick up where you left off.

Easily reference your notes when working on a OneNote page—Last month, we announced the OneNote feed for Outlook on the web, which conveniently combines your notes across Sticky Notes, recent OneNote pages, and even Samsung Notes so you can easily reference them while composing your mail. This makes it easy to reference your notes when working in a OneNote page and capture any new thoughts you have by creating a Sticky Note in your feed without having to leave OneNote. The OneNote feed is available in OneNote, OneNote on the web, OneNote for Windows 10, Outlook on the web, and Outlook.com. To get started in OneNote, click the Open feed icon in the top right corner of the OneNote app window to display the feed pane.

Capture and share web content and more in Microsoft Edge—This month, we released two new features to help make you more productive and find information more easily. First, Web capture in Microsoft Edge lets you easily capture and mark up web content, and then save or share it—simply drag a box to select what you want to capture even if you need to scroll. Second, we’ve added news and information from your favorite content providers in a new “My Feed” section within the enterprise new tab page. This customizable feed sits alongside your Office 365 content and is designed to keep you connected to information most relevant to your industry or your company.

Quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and more in OneDrive for iOS—A new home experience on the iOS mobile app for OneDrive will help you quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and easily re-discover memories from the past. Plus, you can now add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen that displays your photo memories on this day across previous years. See your recent files and On This Day photos as soon as you open the OneDrive app. To get started, update your OneDrive iOS app.

OneDrive family and group sharing now available

OneDrive family and group sharing now available—OneDrive has always made it easy to share docs, photos, videos, albums, and folders. But until now, sharing to a group of people meant typing in the names of all the people you wanted to share with. Last month, we simplified the process with one-click sharing to family and groups. Once you predefine your family or friend group, you’ll be able to share a photo, album, or important document to your group with one click. Family and group sharing are available in OneDrive for the web and included in all free and paid OneDrive consumer plans, as well in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans.

Hear Office documents read aloud to you on Android phones—As you move through your busy day, sometimes it’s easier to hear your document read aloud to you. Now you can use Read Aloud to do exactly that in Word for Android phone and in Word on the Office app for Android. New voices offer a more natural and pleasant listening experience. You can easily pause and resume Read Aloud as well as adjust the voice speed. To get started, open the Word or Office app on your Android phone, go to the Review tab, then tap Read Aloud.

Get Yammer notifications in your Teams activity feed and more—This month, we’re announcing several new and upcoming features in Yammer. Coming soon, notifications from your Yammer announcements and mentions will show up in your Microsoft Teams activity feed if you have the Communities app installed. We’re also now rolling out an updated experience in the Yammer Tab for Teams that brings modern capabilities like pinning, cover photos, live events, and more. Finally, also released this month is support for Yammer Q and A insights in Microsoft Productivity Score, an interactive guide to get the most out of Yammer, and an updated experience for topics and hashtags in Yammer.

Prevent data loss and diagram your IT solutions

New capabilities make it easier to prevent data loss on endpoints and sketch out IT solutions build on ASW.

Protect sensitive information on your endpoints—In July, we announced the public preview of Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP) which extends our data protection capabilities to devices. Now generally available, Endpoint DLP enables organizations to enforce policies that identify and prevent risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer, or use of sensitive information consistently across cloud, on-premises, and endpoints. We’re also adding new capabilities to a public preview based on feedback from customers—such as adding enforcement actions and locations-based sensitivity, a new dashboard in Microsoft 365 compliance center to manage DLP alerts, and more.

Watch this mechanics video or visit our documentation to learn more.

Sketch your Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture in Visio for the web—Diagrams are a great way for cloud architects to visualize the design, deployment, and topology of IT solutions built on AWS. We’re excited to announce that we’ve added support to build AWS diagrams for various topologies and service interactions in Visio for the web. More than 400 shapes are available to help architects redesign existing infrastructure diagrams, conceptualize application architecture, or visualize the current state of your cloud environment and plan for the future. To help you get started easily, we’ve provided a few starter diagrams using various AWS services. Go to the Visio web app homepage and select your preferred diagram template to quickly start visualizing your AWS infrastructure.

As you continue your navigation to a more sustainable, hybrid workplace, we are committed to developing technologies that help your people and teams thrive. From building low code apps right within Teams to new AI capabilities to help you manage tasks more easily, all of these updates are aimed at enabling your people to collaborate productively, securely, and safely from anywhere.

The post From new apps in Microsoft Teams meetings to Endpoint DLP—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in November appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A note to developers before we begin: Whether building your own apps or solutions that are designed to be used in Microsoft Teams or Outlook, we have a whole host of new innovations for you. At Build this week, we’re announcing many new capabilities that you can use to make your apps more integrated, powerful, and intuitive. We’re also introducing new developer and management tools that make creating and discoverability even easier. Find out more about all of the new opportunities for developers using the Microsoft 365 platform announced at Build. Let’s get to it!

News from Build 2020

Microsoft Teams

Teams is the hub for teamwork combining meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration into a single tool that preserves context and keeps everyone up to speed.

Productivity

From customized templates to new tasking capabilities, we’re introducing fresh ways to stay productive in Teams.

Create teams quickly with customizable templates—When creating a new team, you’ll soon be able to pick from a variety of customizable templates. Choose from common business scenarios, like event management and crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates, like a hospital ward or bank branch. Each template comes with pre-defined channels, apps, and guidance. Admins will also be able to create new custom templates and templatize existing teams in their organization, allowing them to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices. Templates in Teams will roll out in the next few months and appear automatically.

Automation

We’re excited to announce enhancements to the Power Platform that make it easier to integrate and scale with Teams.

Easily create and manage chatbots in Teams—Integrating with Teams is also easier than ever: Just select the bot you want to use and then click Add to Teams. For additional convenience, Power Virtual Agents now supports single sign-on (SSO), so users will no longer have to reauthenticate when using Teams for the first time.

Quickly add custom apps and automated workflows to Teams—Developers and admins will soon be able to add their custom applications from Power Apps to Teams with a single click of the Add to Teams button. To get started, open make.powerapps.com, click “…“ next to the canvas app you’d like to publish, and select Add to Teams.

Meanwhile, new Power Automate business process templates for Teams will allow creators to streamline workflows using pre-built templates, or as a base to customize their own. Finally, new Teams-specific triggers and actions will enable you to create custom message extensions, automate @mentioning and message posting to channels, and customize bot names. These features are coming soon.

Share Power BI reports in Teams—Power BI users can now share reports, or specific charts in reports, to Teams with the new Share to Teams button. Senders can also direct the recipient’s attention to a specific chart in a report or share to an entire team. To get started, select Send to Teams from the Power BI portal and type in the team name you’d like to share with.

Meetings and events

Across time zones and social-distancing scenarios, organizations need to connect and collaborate in gatherings large and small. New Teams capabilities help you design the best experience for every occasion.

Schedule virtual appointments via Bookings in Teams—Organizations will now be able to schedule, manage, and conduct business-to-consumer virtual appointments through the new Bookings app integration in Microsoft Teams. With a single scheduling experience, you can manage multiple departments or locations and securely host everything from candidate interviews and student office hours to financial consultations and medical visits. Teams support HIPAA compliance and is HITRUST certified. In healthcare alone, there were more than 34 million Teams meetings in the past month, including virtual visits. Today, you can learn how Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will make it easier for healthcare organizations to remain agile and focus on what they do best – delivering better experiences, insights, and care.

Broadcast events and create studio productions from a virtual stage in Teams—With so many organizations working remotely, and travel at a record low, how do you recreate the magic of an in-person presentation or interview for an all-remote audience? Introducing new Network Device Interface (NDI) support and Skype TX interoperability for Teams. It offers a more advanced set of production options for both public and private, customized, high-scale broadcasts.

Coming soon, NDI for Microsoft Teams will transform a Teams meeting into a virtual stage by converting each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the production tool of your choice: OBS, Wirecast, Xsplit, StreamLabs, and many more. This functionality enables you to use Teams meetings in other ways, including hosting a professional broadcast.

Secure and remote scheduling

Shifts lets Firstline Workers and their managers use mobile devices to manage schedules and keep in touch.

Extend the Shifts app in Teams—New capabilities in the Shifts app extends functionality and enables integration with existing systems. First, the Graph APIs for Shifts are now generally available, so can you integrate them with any other external workforce management tool, including custom workforce management systems. Plus, new Power Automate actions enable developers to take information from Shifts and create customized workflows with other apps or perform operations at scale. Finally, new triggers and templates will help support a variety of timesaving and process-optimization scenarios, like enabling auto-approvals for shift requests in scenarios where a manager’s approval is not needed.

Fluid Framework

At Ignite 2019, we announced the public preview of Microsoft Fluid Framework, our new technology and set of experiences designed to make collaboration seamless by breaking down barriers between apps.

Collaborate with Fluid components and workspaces in Outlook and Office.com—The Fluid Framework is on a journey to make work more adaptable and focused. The first Fluid Framework integrations in Microsoft 365, coming to Outlook and Office.com, will enable you to collaborate on dynamic content and create connected components that can be shared simultaneously and seamlessly across apps. Tables, charts, and task lists can be easily inserted in Outlook for the web, so your sales numbers, project tasks, and research reports are always up to date. Within Office.com, Fluid workspaces can be created and managed, including within your document activity feed, Recommended list, and @mentions—or search for them across Office.com. And, because Fluid Framework components are lightweight, edits are instantaneous, empowering work to be fast and flexible. These experiences will be available to those with a Microsoft 365 enterprise license in the next few months.

Use key infrastructure from Fluid Framework—now open source—in your applications—The web-based framework of Fluid can be used to instantly make your apps collaborative. It includes data structures that perform low-latency synchronization and a relay service to connect endpoints. If you replace your static data structures with Fluid data structures, your app instantly supports real-time collaboration.

Discovering the full potential of the Fluid Framework can only be accomplished through creating a diverse, open, and vibrant developer community. For this reason, Microsoft will be making the Fluid Framework open source, allowing developers and creators to use key infrastructure from Fluid Framework in their own applications. Along with the release of additional developer documentation and tooling, this is an invitation for developers to work alongside Microsoft as Fluid Framework is built and released.

Project Cortex

We introduced Project Cortex at Ignite 2019 and are happy to announce it will be generally available in early summer 2020. This powerful new service applies artificial intelligence (AI) and the Microsoft Graph to create a knowledge network that connects your content in Microsoft 365, along with external sources, to organize content and expertise across systems and teams. You can then manage your information and streamline processes with advanced security and compliance controls, along with automated workflows.

Work with new developer tools now in private preview—Today, we are introducing new developer APIs for Project Cortex and Managed Metadata Services (MMS) in Microsoft Graph, along with new integration with Language Understanding services in Azure. Currently, our private preview program has expanded to include more than 75 organizations delivering knowledge from millions of documents and videos, including Unilever, Arla Foods, and Siemens Healthineers. We will keep you all informed as new milestones are achieved.

Outlook

Around the world, our customers rely on Outlook to help organize their days and stay in touch. New capabilities let them do more within the app to be more productive.

Save keystrokes in Outlook—Now, Outlook on the web can help compose email messages with text predictions. Using intelligent technology to infer meaning and intention, Outlook can help you compose faster, avoid typos, and craft polished email messages.

Keep up with Yammer in Outlook—Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook mobile users can now view and reply to Yammer conversations, polls, questions, and praise without leaving their inbox. This feature will automatically become available for users who have email notifications from Yammer turned on.

Microsoft Edge

This year at Build, we’re announcing several new capabilities in Microsoft Edge that add customization options and improved tooling for web developers.

Quickly explore relevant Pinterest collections—Pinterest can now deliver suggestions at the bottom of your collection, making it easier to find additional similar content. Clicking on a suggestion will open a board of similar, trending Pins so you can quickly find and add ideas relevant to you. Collections will also soon support “Send to OneNote,” making it easy to export collections to OneNote pages.

Save time while searching—We’re also introducing sidebar search so you can search for things without opening a new window or tab. And for those who use Microsoft Edge for both work and personal use, we’re excited to introduce Automatic Profile Switching, which will detect that the link you’re trying to open needs work credentials, and then switch you to your authenticated work profile.

Check out expanded developer options during preview—Because we love developers, we’re expanding the preview with new options for .NET and UWP (WinUI 3.0) development, enabling you to embed a Chromium-based Edge WebView in WinForms, WPF, and UWP/Win UI 3.0 applications. We’ve also added a 3D View in DevTools. Check out our documentation and Getting Started guide, or simply open Visual Studio and download the WebView2 package to get started.

Microsoft Lists

Microsoft Lists is your smart information tracking app across Microsoft 365. With Lists, you can easily track data and information to stay updated on the latest status.

Track information with Microsoft Lists—Now, you can create, share, and track data and information—like issue tracking and status reporting—directly within Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and the soon-to-be-released Lists mobile app. Lists are easy for anyone to create and customize with templates, color coding, If/Then workflows, and more. Learn more about Microsoft Lists.

At a time of unprecedented change, we are all rapidly adjusting to a new era of work. From software developers to healthcare workers, government first responders to multinational c-suites, everyone is finding new ways to stay productive and connected, whether they are working together or apart. The features and enhancements we announced today are all designed to support the incredible achievements of our customers around the world. We are committed to continuing to build the tools that keep the world’s work moving, through this crisis and beyond.

The post From Microsoft Teams to Fluid Framework—here’s what’s new and coming soon to Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This month, we have new features and capabilities designed to help keep your business moving during COVID-19 and beyond. New capabilities in Microsoft Teams, for instance, help you host more effective, inclusive, and focused online meetings and offer virtual solutions for one-on-one consultations. A crisis management site in SharePoint helps your organization quickly share information during emergencies. And an improved search experience in Outlook allows you to quickly find what you need in your email and calendar.

Below, we will get into all the Microsoft 365 news this month. But before we do, I want to once again point you to the monthly Modern Workplace podcast. This time, host Alex Bradley and I chat about what we’ve learned about remote work, both from our experiences at Microsoft and the experiences of our customers. Have a listen.

Host more inclusive, focused, online meetings

This month, we announced a host of new Teams capabilities that reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers, and bringing technological solutions to Firstline Workers and healthcare employees.

We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression minimizes distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.

In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

Industrial workers need to communicate and collaborate effectively while staying safe. Through a new integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, Firstline Workers will be able to access information and communicate hands-free with remote experts from their job site.

Conducting virtual meetings is a common requirement for situations such as healthcare patient consults, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.

Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and navigate more easily between ongoing conversations.

Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.

We’re also adding new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, delivers a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that’s simple to install and manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphones 700 UC will be available for purchase in late spring.

Finally, Microsoft 365 Business Voice in Teams is now available in the U.S., enabling small and mid-sized businesses to make and receive phone calls from anywhere. We also have a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that includes additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.

Check out new Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses

This month, we debuted Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, an evolution from our Office 365 for individuals and families offering. We also announced named changes to several of our small and medium-sized business and Enterprise offerings. Office 365 Business Essentials is now Microsoft 365 Business Basic; Office 365 Business Premium is now Microsoft 365 Business Standard; and Microsoft 365 Business is now Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Meanwhile, Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will be called Microsoft 365 Apps. While today this is a change in name only, we’re excited about the new apps and services we’ve added to our subscriptions over the last few years and the new innovations we’ll be adding in the coming months. These changes reflect our ambition to continue to drive innovation in Microsoft 365 that goes well beyond what customers traditionally think of as Office.

Respond to emergency events

Quickly build an emergency management site to connect people and information—Unexpected events like COVID-19 highlight the importance of establishing and keeping the lines of communication open. A new crisis management site in SharePoint enables your organization to consolidate news, related resources, and topical Q&A in response to emergency events in under two hours. Just head to your SharePoint start page and select Create site > Communication site to start configuring news, links, Q&As, site navigation, highlighted people, and more.

Connect and collaborate with new app updates

We’re announcing new app updates to help streamline conversations, create professional content, and maximize productivity.

Engage with Yammer conversations directly within your inbox—The new interactive Yammer emails in Outlook on the web enable users to interact with Yammer conversations, polls, and questions, and deliver praise. Now you can see the full Yammer thread and reply, like, vote, attach files, share GIFs, and even watch videos right from your inbox. These features are now available to all Enterprise tenants with releases in Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook for iOS and Android coming next quarter.

Create professional-looking content more easily with Office mobile—You can now view and edit data in Excel in a simple, digestible card format, eliminating the need to span across columns that extend beyond the limits of the screen. Also new to Office mobile, PowerPoint Designer helps you create professional presentations with design, formatting, and iconography ideas for your content. These features will be available in the next few months in the Office app for Android and iOS.

Collaborate on documents and assign tasks—Now, users can easily assign tasks to document collaborators in Word and Excel for the web. Simply @mention your teammates in the comments of your online Word or Excel document, check the box to assign it, and they’ll receive an email letting them know a task was assigned to them with a link directly to the document. This feature will be available in April with Tasks in PowerPoint for the web coming in June.

Enjoy a new connection experience in Visio for the web—A new feature in Visio for the web lets users move the connection point on a shape for better alignment. Users can also easily add multiple arrows between shapes to distinctively represent to-and-from relationships, and more. To get started, hover over the edge of the shape until green circles highlight the possible connection points, then click on the desired point and drag the connector to the desired destination point. This feature is now available to all Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users.

Search your email and calendar more easily

We are announcing new innovations in Microsoft Search that recognize natural language as a helpful way to find what you need in Outlook for iOS and Android. Simply find your emails, calendar events, contact information, and files faster and easier by using everyday language to narrow your search. You can either speak it or type it. Learn more in this blog.

Streamline common IT tasks

This month, we’re announcing two new services to help streamline common resources for IT.

Modernize your print infrastructure with a cloud-based print solution—We’re announcing the private preview of Universal Print, a new cloud-based print infrastructure that creates a simple, secure print experience. Now, organizations no longer need to maintain on-premises print servers or install printer drivers on devices, reducing the time and effort needed by IT to maintain the print environment. And users get a straightforward print experience that makes it easy to discover and print to nearby printers. Customers can register for participation in the private preview.

Seamlessly move your cloud files into OneDrive and SharePoint—We’re pleased to announce that Mover, a cloud-to-cloud file migration tool, is now available to Microsoft 365 customers worldwide. Mover supports migration from over a dozen cloud service providers—including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive—into OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling seamless file collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps and services. Mover makes it easy and inexpensive (it’s free!) to manage files that currently exist outside of Microsoft 365 in other cloud service provider offerings. To get started, sign in with your Office 365 credentials and follow the prompts.

From new meetings capabilities in Teams to updates that make storing files on the cloud easier, the announcements above reflect our ongoing commitment to continuing to improve and evolve the tools you rely on. But we also want to be here for you at this critical moment when so many organizations are adjusting to full-time remote work. In addition to these monthly updates, we are using this blog as a space to exchange remote-work tips, information, and customer stories, so check back here for frequent updates.

The post Improve virtual meetings and bring consultations online—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in March appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This is a natural evolution. Microsoft 365 began in 2017 as a licensing bundle for enterprise customers—a combination of Windows, Office, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). It has come a long way since then. Today, we call it “the world’s productivity cloud” and it represents our vision for the future of Microsoft productivity tools—an integrated set of apps and services that puts artificial intelligence (AI) and other cutting-edge innovations to work for you. And for small and medium-sized businesses, that includes new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to help you host rich meetings and events online; cloud file storage and sharing capabilities so you can collaborate from anywhere; and security and identity solutions to safeguard your business. At a moment when businesses are facing extraordinary health and economic challenges, we are pleased to bring our consumer and small and medium-sized business customers into this growing Microsoft 365 family.

New product names

The new product names go into effect on April 21, 2020. This is a change to the product name only, and there are no pricing or feature changes at this time.

• Office 365 Business Essentials will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic.
• Office 365 Business Premium will become Microsoft 365 Business Standard.
• Microsoft 365 Business will become Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
• Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will both become Microsoft 365 Apps. Where necessary we will use the “for business” and “for enterprise” labels to distinguish between the two.

Note that the changes to these products will all happen automatically.

Today, we’re simply announcing name changes. But these changes represent our ambition to continue to drive innovation in Microsoft 365 that goes well beyond what customers traditionally think of as Office. The Office you know and love will still be there, but we’re excited about the new apps and services we’ve added to our subscriptions over the last few years and about the new innovations we’ll be adding in the coming months. For questions, please refer the FAQs below and then head to the What is Microsoft 365 page for more details.

Frequently asked questions

Q. What Office 365 plan names aren’t changing?
A. The following Office 365 plans will have no changes:

• Office 365 for Enterprise
  • Office 365 E1
  • Office 365 E3
  • Office 365 E5
• Office 365 for Firstline Workers
  • Office 365 F1
• Office 365 for Education
  • Office 365 A1
  • Office 365 A3
  • Office 365 A5
• Office 365 for Government
  • Office 365 G1
  • Office 365 G3
  • Office 365 G5

Q. Why are you making these changes?
A. First, we want our products to reflect the range of features and benefits in the subscription. Microsoft 365 is an integrated set of apps and services that puts AI and other cutting-edge innovations to work for you. And for small and medium-sized businesses, that includes new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to help you host rich meetings and events online; cloud file storage and sharing capabilities so you can collaborate from anywhere; and security and identity solutions to safeguard your businesses. Second, we’re always looking for ways to simplify. This new approach to naming our products is designed to help you quickly find the plan you need and get back to your business.

Q. How does Office fit into Microsoft 365? Will I still be able to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?
A. The Office suite is core to the Microsoft productivity experience, and that’s not changing. But over the last several years, our cloud productivity offering has grown well beyond what people traditionally think of as “Office.” Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are more important than ever before. But in Microsoft 365 we’re breathing new life into these apps with the help of the cloud and AI, and we’re adding new, born-in-the-cloud experiences like Teams, Stream, Forms, and Planner. All of this is underpinned by a set of common services that keep your data safe and secure. It’s Office and a whole lot more.

Q. Is there anything new or different in Microsoft 365 Apps for business or Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise plans that wasn’t in Office 365 Business or Office 365 ProPlus plans? Any new features?
A. There are no price or feature changes to plans at this time.

Q. When will the Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise plans be available?
A. All plans will become available for customers on April 21, 2020.

Q. Are all of the Office 365 plans going away? What isn’t changing?
A. None of the plans are going away. The same plans are available, only with updated names. And in the case of Office 365 Enterprise, the name will remain the same and there will be no changes.

Q. I’m an existing SMB or ProPlus customer. Do I need to take any action?
A. Customers with the Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, or Microsoft 365 Business plans do not need to take additional action. The above changes will happen automatically.

Q. My company uses Office 365 ProPlus, and I have questions about this change. Where can I learn more?
A. Customers with the Office 365 ProPlus plan should consult this site for further details.

The post New Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A quick note before we dive in: We have been using this space to share tips, customer stories, and information throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. This post is a follow-up to one we shared last week detailing tips for moving to remote work with Microsoft Teams. We’ve also offered guidance on moving live events online—with details on using Microsoft tools as well as insights from our events leader at Microsoft. And we’ve shared advice for IT departments and CISOs from leaders in those areas as well. We’ll continue to post more remote-work content here in the days to come, so please check back often. Okay, on to our lessons from the last two weeks.

1. Share work from home guidance

Most organizations have training manuals for how employees should navigate their office environment. When we moved to remote work, we quickly realized that employees need guidance for this type of work as well. So many of us are experiencing remote work for the first time, and with very little time to prepare for the change. Our team has questions: How do you set up a space where you can focus? How do you stay connected when you can’t meet face-to-face? Why does it feel like it’s never the right moment to take a break? Add in the challenge of kids or other dependent family members at home—a reality for many of us during this outbreak—and it’s inevitable that some employees will struggle.

To address this need, last week we distributed a comprehensive work-from-home guide to employees. We thought you might find it useful, so we created a customer version for you to share with your employees as you see fit. It’s full of concrete tips on everything from setting up your physical and virtual workstations to best practices for communicating availability to teammates.

2. Manage back-to-back meetings

In the office, back-to-back meetings have natural pauses between them. There’s the walk down the hallway, those first few moments at the table when you wait for everyone to arrive, and the casual conversation that happens as teammates greet one another and quickly catch up. Often, we barely notice these little breathers as we move through our work week. Then we switch to remote work and realize just how much we needed them to punctuate the rat-a-tat pace of a multi-meeting day.

How can you make sure you and your team meet as often as you need to, but are able to take a break in between? We are encouraging employees to schedule meetings to conclude five minutes before the end of the hour or half hour. This shortens your time together slightly but goes a long way towards avoiding potential burnout from uninterrupted back-to-backs.

3. Create space for people to disconnect

When we’re working in the world, we find daily ways to disconnect, often without having to try. Making dinner for your family, meeting friends at an after-work exercise class, or a daily zone-out on the bus ride home help us separate from the events of the day so we can get ready for the next one. Even in the best of circumstances, disconnecting when you work remotely can be a challenge. To help our employees, we’ve started offering virtual meditation sessions they can join when they need a moment to unwind from work.

If you opt to do the same, here are a few practical tips to share with employees new to online meditation classes. First, find a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted. Next, set your microphone to mute so others can enjoy the silence. And finally, use your camera to watch the session leader for guidance on breathing techniques. Once you feel like you’ve got those down, you can switch off your camera to fully focus on calming your mind.

4. Continue driving team culture

From all-hands meetings to celebrating small milestones, healthy team cultures depend on frequent get-togethers. With so many of us moving suddenly to remote work, it’s tempting to switch into “essentials only” mode, postponing important events and fun team moments alike until we can get back to normal.

We’ve found that whenever possible, it’s best to keep building team culture even when you need to build it apart. Scheduled a birthday party for a teammate? Jump into a Teams meeting and fire up the HBD GIFs. Big onsite sales conference coming up? Start figuring out how to hold it virtually instead. And if it’s time for your quarterly team-building off-site, just go for it. Your team will be more than ready to share ideas and connect. The get-togethers that help drive team culture may seem challenging to pull off remotely at first, but it’s worth the extra effort to keep everyone connected and moving forward.

5. Practice key management skills

Employees rely on their managers to check in, coach them through changes, and show curiosity to help them problem-solve and create. As your team navigates a whole new way of working—while also navigating a global health crisis—they need your support as a manager more than ever. But how can you manage successfully when you’re working apart?

We share what we’ve learned about managing remotely in the work-from-home guide. This includes reinforcing inclusion, checking in often, and coaching your teammates to help discover their own best practices for remote work. Every employee faces unique challenges right now, and every employee will approach this situation differently. As managers, it’s so important to try to understand and react to their individual needs as much as possible.

These lessons reflect some of our early takeaways after two weeks of remote learning. From scheduling meetings to allow for breathers to effectively managing remote teams, we’re discovering so much about this new way to work. I am certain that these lessons will have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak, as organizations everywhere continue to prioritize remote work. But we want to hear about what you and your team are thinking about and learning, too. Please join the conversation in our Enabling Remote Work Community.

The post 2 weeks in: what we’ve learned about remote work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We understand that as an SMB you can’t afford to be out of touch. We know that you need to continue to service your existing customers, pitch new business, meet with employees, and do whatever it takes to keep your company running. That’s why we’re making Microsoft Teams available for everyone, even organizations that don’t have Office 365. Read on to learn more about Teams and how you can start using it today.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a software solution that enables SMBs to perform many essential business tasks remotely. With Teams, you can virtually chat, collaborate, and meet with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. The Microsoft Office apps are built right into Teams, so you can use and share the files you create in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook without leaving the tool. Recently, I shared tips for our team on how to start working remotely with Teams. If you are new to the tool or to working remotely, it can help you acclimatize to both.

Making Teams available for everyone

Teams is a part of Office 365. If your organization is licensed for Office 365, you already have it and you can log in here. Even if you don’t have Office 365, we want to help ensure that everyone has access to Teams during these challenging times. Here are some simple ways to get Teams for all users in your company right away—even if you don’t have Office 365.

For individuals and businesses who purchase directly from Microsoft.com

If you want to get Teams directly from Microsoft, you can do so in the following ways:

• Sign up for a free trial of Office 365 Business Premium, which includes a full-featured version of Teams.
• If you’re using a consumer email address such as Gmail or Outlook, you can sign up for the freemium version of Teams by following this link.

For businesses served by partners

If you are a new or established Microsoft customer who does not currently have licenses that include Microsoft Teams (such as Exchange Online or Office 365 Business), you can work with your partner to receive a free six-month Teams trial. If you don’t have a partner already and would like to work with one, you can search for partners with expertise in Microsoft Teams by using this link. This offer is good for companies with up to 1,000 users.

At a time when so many of us are switching to remote work, we hope that Teams can help enable you to keep moving your business forward. Below you will find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions from SMBs about getting started with Teams. Once you’re up and running, check back here for tips, customer stories, and informative articles designed to help you adjust to remote work. We are in this together, and we are committed to helping all our customers keep their businesses running throughout this challenging time.

Frequently asked questions about Teams

Q. What happens when an individual signs in with work credentials?
A. If the individual is licensed for Teams, they will be logged into the product. If the individual is not licensed for Teams, they will be logged into the product and automatically receive a free license of Teams that is valid through January 2021. This includes video meetings for up to 250 participants, live events for up to 10,000, recording and screen sharing, along with chat and collaboration. Details for IT can be found in this document.

Q. What does the freemium version of Teams include?
A. This version gives you unlimited chat, built-in group, one-on-one audio or video calling, 10 GB of team file storage, and 2 GB of personal file storage per user. You also get real-time collaboration with the Office apps for web, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. There is no end date. Get details here.

Q. Is there a user limit in the freemium version?
A. No, there are not restrictions on user limits.

Q. Can I schedule meetings in the freemium version?
A. In the future, we will make it possible for users to schedule meetings. In the meantime, you can conduct impromptu video meetings and calls.

Q. What are your tips for working from home?
A. As mentioned above, our team recently published a list of Teams tips. Also, Lola Jacobson, one of our senior technical writers, posted four additional tips last week. And we have updated the Support remote workers using Microsoft Teams page on docs.Microsoft.com. We have more content on the way, so stay tuned.

The post Helping small and medium-sized businesses work remotely with Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As we have read through your responses to Lily’s letter, it has become clear that there are two big questions on your minds. First, how can people access the free Teams offerings that Lily referenced? Second, what is our plan for avoiding service interruptions during times of increased usage? Below, you’ll find detailed answers to both. And over the next few days we’ll be sharing more tips, updates, and information related to remote work here. So check back often.

Making Teams available for everyone

Teams is a part of Office 365. If your organization is licensed for Office 365, you already have it. But we want to make sure everyone has access to it during this time. Here are some simple ways to get Teams right away.

Individuals

If you want to get started with Teams, we can get you up and running right away.

• If you have an email address through work or school, sign in using this link. We’ll get you into Teams in no time.
• If you’re using an email address like Gmail or Outlook, you can sign up for the freemium version of Teams by following this link.

IT professionals

The self-service links above work great for individuals, but if you’re an IT professional who wants to roll out Teams centrally, here’s what to do.

• If you work for a business that isn’t currently licensed for Teams, we’ve got you covered with a free Office 365 E1 offer for six months. Contact your Microsoft partner or sales representative to get started today. (Note: the same offer is available in the Government Cloud, but not available in GCC High and the Department of Defense.)
• If you work in education and want to set up teachers, students, and administrators on Teams, use Office 365 A1. This free version of Office 365 is available to all educational institutions. Sign up by following this link.

Keeping Teams up and running

You and your team depend on our tools to stay connected and get work done. We take that responsibility seriously, and we have a plan in place to make sure services stay up and running during impactful events like this. Our business continuity plan anticipates three types of impacts to the core aspects of the service:

• Systems: When there’s a sudden increase in usage, like the surge we recently saw in China.
• Location: When there’s an unexpected event that is location-specific, such as an earthquake or a powerful storm.
• People: When there’s an event that may impact the team maintaining the system, like the COVID-19 outbreak in the Puget Sound area.

We’ve recently tested service continuity during a usage spike in China. Since January 31, we’ve seen a 500 percent increase in Teams meetings, calling, and conferences there, and a 200 percent increase in Teams usage on mobile devices. Despite this usage increase, service has been fluid there throughout the outbreak. Our approach to delivering a highly available and resilient service centers on the following things.

Active/Active design: In Microsoft 365, we are driving towards having all services architected and operated in an active/active design which increases resiliency. This means that there are always multiple instances of a service running that can respond to user requests and that they are hosted in geographically dispersed datacenters. All user traffic comes in through the Microsoft Front Door service and is automatically routed to the optimally located instance of the service and around any service failures to prevent or reduce impact to our customers.

Reduce incident scope: We seek to avoid incidents in the first place, but when they do happen, we strive to limit the scope of all incidents by having multiple instances of each service partitioned off from each other. In addition, we’re continuously driving improvements in monitoring through automation, enabling faster incident detection and response.

Fault isolation: Just as the services are designed and operated in an active/active fashion and are partitioned off from each other to prevent a failure in one from affecting another, the code base of the service is developed using similar partitioning principles called fault isolation. Fault isolation measures are incremental protections made within the code base itself. These measures help prevent an issue in one area from cascading into other areas of operation. You can read more about how we do this, along with all the details of our service continuity plan, in this document.

Adjusting to remote work can be a challenge. We get it, and we are here to provide the tools, tips, and information you need to help you and your team meet that challenge. We’re inspired by the agility and ingenuity that impacted schools, hospitals, and businesses have shown throughout COVID-19, and we are committed to helping organizations everywhere stay connected and productive during this difficult time.

FAQs

Q. What happens when an individual signs in with work or school credentials?
A. If the individual is licensed for Teams, they will be logged into the product. If the individual is not licensed for Teams, they will be logged into the product and automatically receive a free license of Teams that is valid through January 2021. This includes video meetings for up to 250 participants and Live Events for up to 10,000, recording and screen sharing, along with chat and collaboration. Details for IT.

Q. What does the freemium version of Teams include?
A. This version gives you unlimited chat, built-in group and one-on-one audio or video calling, 10 GB of team file storage, and 2 GB of personal file storage per user. You also get real-time collaboration with the Office apps for web, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. There is no end date. Details here.

Q. Is there a user limit in the freemium version?
A. Beginning March 10, we are rolling out updates to the free version of Teams that will lift restrictions on user limits.

Q. Can I schedule meetings in the freemium version?
A. In the future, we will make it possible for users to schedule meetings. In the meantime, you can conduct impromptu video meetings and calls.

Q. How can IT admins access Teams for Education?
A. Teams has always been free to students and education professionals as a part of the Office 365 A1 offer. Access it here.

Q. Do you have any tips for working from home?
A. Lola Jacobson, one of our senior technical writers, posted a few basic tips last week. And we updated the Support remote workers using Microsoft Teams page on docs.Microsoft.com yesterday. We have more content on the way, so stay tuned.

The post Our commitment to customers during COVID-19 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Lily Zheng is a good friend and coworker who lives in Shanghai. We have worked together in person in China but mostly we meet on Microsoft Teams. Recently, Lily wrote a letter to regional customers about what she and her team have learned working remotely while weathering the outbreak. Her letter inspired our team to make Microsoft Teams available for free for people moving to remote work during this challenging time. I wanted to share it with people worldwide who may benefit from our Shanghai team’s experience. I hope you find it as helpful as I did.

Let me turn it over to Lily.

Dear Customers,

My name is Lily Zheng, and I am a Microsoft employee who lives and works in Shanghai. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to affect millions of people here in China, we have experienced a huge spike in remote work. It’s as if every school, hospital, and business in China is now a distributed organization – if only temporarily. From virus outbreaks like COVID-19 to unexpected weather emergencies, there are many reasons that working remotely could become suddenly necessary. So I wanted to share three lessons I have learned over the last few weeks, as well as three lessons we have gathered from our customers as they adapt to remote work.

Like a lot of you, I began hearing about the virus back in January, mostly on social media. But I didn’t realize what a big deal it would be until just before the Chinese New Year. That’s when, due to the Spring Festival travel rush, the number of affected people began to rise rapidly. On January 23, the government sealed off Hubei Province in order to curb the spread of the virus. The next day, New Year’s Eve, my family had planned to go see a movie. When we learned from the press that movie theaters across the city had been shut down, the severity of the outbreak really sunk in. Two days later, the government announced unprecedented cancellations of Spring Festival events, and I cancelled a long-planned family vacation. The kids were crushed, but our health and safety had to come first.

So, what do I say when people ask what it’s like to work in China right now? Well, working remotely has cut down on our commute time, and we’re certainly no longer worried about what we are wearing. And with many restaurants closed, we’re all brushing up on our cooking skills. But with kids out of school – and babysitters stuck at home as well – staying productive can be a challenge.

What I’ve learned from remote work

While our team here is accustomed to working remotely, these past few weeks have really clarified what successful and sustainable remote work requires. Here are my top three lessons.

Stay well.

This move to remote work is all about protecting our physical health by minimizing contact with the virus. That, everyone understands. What is less obvious is that working where you live can create its own kind of stress. Taking time to exercise, eat well, and enjoy real downtime away from screens are all essential to maintaining mental well-being while working from home.

Go all in.

It can be tempting to put things off while working remotely. But teams that thrive remotely find ways to do just about everything online. If you’ve scheduled one-on-ones, keep them. If you’ve planned big meetings, hold them. If you’re ready to brainstorm an upcoming presentation, jump on that video call.

Support your teammates.

I’ve also learned from this experience that supporting others is the best way to stay positive and energized. We use our online tools for more than just work, sharing photos of family and pets and checking in with each other throughout the day. Cheering each other up is not just good for maintaining morale, it also helps keep our team together when we work apart.

What I’ve learned from customers

In the space of a few weeks, we’ve seen customers in China truly transform the way they work. Here are three things I’ve learned from customers to set your organization up for success.

Immediately open the lines of communication.

When your employees are working remotely, it’s more important than ever to ensure everyone stays briefed on the business. One of our customers, a large Asia-based insurance company, started broadcasting video messages to their staff to make sure everyone had access to the latest information. With everyone balancing working from home with childcare and other challenges, recorded videos give people an opportunity to catch up when they can’t make a live meeting or briefing.

Keep it moving.

While it can be tempting to postpone plans until everyone can get together, companies here are finding ways to keep things moving forward. With the government’s encouragement, many schools have been able to start their terms on time by moving everything online. They’ve been supporting their students by creating clear schedules, hosting morale events like cooking challenges, and carefully communicating assignments and other information so students aren’t overwhelmed.

Even big meetings can be moved online.

Many of us are accustomed to quick calls or video chats with a few teammates, but large and formal meetings can also be successfully held online. With so many employees opting to work remotely, hospitals here have been gathering their staff remotely. One hospital in Dalian, for instance, has been holding large staff meetings via Teams. Keys to successful online meetings include setting a clear agenda, practicing inclusion by resolving any audio issues at the start of the meeting, and taking clear notes to share as follow-ups later. Remember, too, that if your organization permits it, you can record meetings for those who can’t attend.

For me, and for many people across the world, this isn’t the way we imagined the kick-off to a new year. But we’ve learned a lot. And Teams has been an incredibly powerful tool for helping us manage through the challenges. Many people aren’t aware, but Teams is already available for free. You can go here to learn more. But no matter what tools you choose to use, I hope these tips prove helpful, and I wish you and your families all the best!

Lily Zheng

Director, Microsoft China

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