As we reflect on this milestone, we want to pause and say thank you to our customers and partners who have inspired us to do our best work. From hospitals to schools to nonprofits and commercial enterprises, we’re humbled that so many of you use Teams to achieve your goals.

Today, more than 270 million people rely on Teams for hybrid work. Over 50 percent of organizations have standardized on Teams, according to a recent Morgan Stanley chief information officer (CIO) survey.¹ With the shift from remote to hybrid work, active Teams Rooms devices more than doubled year over year, and Teams Phone now has nearly 80 million active users. From the office to the frontline worker, Teams supports every employee. In fact, usage of Teams by frontline workers has doubled year over year.

Our work is far from over. We continue to listen, learn, and innovate to enable every organization to thrive in the new world of work. With insights from today’s release of our 2022 Work Trend Index, it’s never been more apparent the ways we work and the expectations we have from work are dramatically different than just two years ago, and our solutions need to evolve, too.

Today, we are announcing new product innovations designed to help make hybrid work work. Whether it’s creating more engaging meeting experiences, enabling collaboration with external partners or customers, or giving you the flexibility to work on your terms, these new features and solutions address the new expectations people have for the workplace.

Let’s dive in.

1. Reimagine the office experience

After two years of hybrid and remote work, our data shows the office still matters for workers and managers. However, business leaders will need to rethink both physical spaces and cultural norms to make office time worth the commute. This means being intentional about the who, why, and where of in-person gatherings and ensuring physical spaces are designed to help hybrid teams feel connected and engaged.

In our survey, 38 percent of hybrid employees say their biggest challenge is knowing when and why to come into the office, while only 28 percent of companies have established team agreements about who will be working from where.  

To help coordinate your office time with your team, we are updating Outlook to allow you to RSVP to meetings and note whether you plan to join in person or virtually. These new RSVP options will be available in public preview in Outlook on the web in the second quarter of 2022.

For those joining hybrid meetings from within a conference room, we’re making it easier and less distracting to establish a personal presence with new enhancements to the companion device experience for Teams Rooms. Today, when you join a meeting in Teams Rooms with your personal device, your audio is automatically turned off to avoid feedback. Soon, you’ll be prompted to turn your laptop video on so you can be clearly seen by remote participants no matter where you are in the room. To avoid distractions, your video will be hidden from the front-of-room screen as well as from the gallery of people joining from companion devices in the room. These enhancements will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022. Learn more from our Tech Community blog Elevating hybrid experiences with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Teams devices.

To bridge the gap between digital and physical workspaces, we’re introducing a new meeting layout for Teams Rooms called front row. Designed specifically for hybrid meetings, it brings the video gallery to eye level at the bottom of the screen so people in the meeting room can see remote colleagues in a more natural face-to-face interaction—similar to as if they were in the same physical space. Content is centered on the screen and surrounded by additional meeting information and attendee sentiment, including chat, raised hands, and live reactions. Front row is now available in preview, with enhanced features to follow later this year. Learn more about front row for Teams.

We’ve been working to bring the latest Microsoft experiences built for hybrid work—across Teams, Microsoft 365, Windows, and Whiteboard—to Surface Hub 2S, a collaborative canvas and meetings device certified for Microsoft Teams. Remote team members now have a dynamic view of in-room interactions, thanks to the new AI-powered Microsoft Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera. Automatic framing technology within the device dynamically adjusts the view of the room, reframing when someone leaves, more people come in, or a person interacts with content on the display. Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera is now available. Learn more from our Devices blog.

Being seen and heard is essential to an inclusive meeting environment, as is being able to collaborate seamlessly. New touch-enabled display solutions for Teams Rooms from Neat and Yealink are in the process of being certified for Teams Rooms on Android and will be available in the second quarter of 2022. These devices combine audio, video, touch display, and compute in a single unit—allowing for easy deployment and enhanced collaboration experiences. Learn more from our new Tech Community blog.

2. Make every meeting matter

We gather trillions of data points to understand how work is changing. Weekly time spent in meetings increased over 250 percent since March 2020. At the same time, more flexible collaboration patterns are emerging as employees are reshaping their days. Meetings are getting shorter and more ad hoc. Users are turning to asynchronous channels like chat to get work done.

We are committed to enabling new ways to work. Whether it’s empowering presenters to be their best, or enabling asynchronous collaboration across different time zones, our goal is to create inclusive and engaging experiences, make your meetings efficient, and ensure everyone sees the impact of your work.

In September 2021, we announced cameo, the PowerPoint experience that seamlessly integrates your Teams camera feed into your presentation, letting you customize how and where you want to appear on your slides. It also offers layout recommendations through Designer in PowerPoint for optimal viewing. Cameo will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022.

We recently released recording studio, which allows you to record your presentation in PowerPoint and deliver on-demand video, enabling your team to consume content on their terms. PowerPoint recording studio is now generally available.

Today, we’re announcing that we’re bringing cameo and recording studio together. You’ll now be able to seamlessly create and produce your presentations, decide how and where you want your video to appear on your slides with cameo, and then record yourself speaking to any slide with recording studio. When it’s time to deliver your message, share your presentation with PowerPoint Live in Teams, whether or not you’re attending the meeting. The combined cameo and recording studio experience will be available in the second quarter of 2022.

It’s not easy to be in the spotlight. It’s especially challenging to deliver impactful presentations without an in-person audience. Speaker coach in Microsoft Teams, which is coming in the second quarter of 2022, uses AI to privately provide guidance on your pace, notify you if you are interrupting someone, and remind you to check in with your audience.

To make sure the impact of your words doesn’t get lost, we are announcing Language interpretation, which allows live interpreters to convert what the speaker says into another language in near real-time. The meeting organizer will be able to assign interpreters from their participant list and select up to 16 source and target language combinations, while attendees will hear the interpretation with the original audio playing at a lower volume in the background. Language interpretation will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022. 

Meetings often serve as collaboration spaces to ideate and solve problems as a team. Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams has evolved to become a valuable visual collaboration workspace where groups come together for effective hybrid brainstorming and learning. It offers a rich set of capabilities that bring visual collaboration to life in Teams, including collaboration cursors, more than 50 new templates, contextual reactions, and the ability to open existing boards and collaborate with external colleagues in Teams meetings. These features will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022.  

3. Collaborate and communicate—your way

More than 50 percent of hybrid workers are considering going fully remote in the year ahead, according to our data. With that demand for more flexibility and mobility, the days of a fixed desk phone in a fixed office are over.

Teams Phone will soon offer a truly mobile-first experience with Operator Connect Mobile in partnership with some of the world’s most innovative telecom operators including BT, Rogers, Swisscom, Telia, and Verizon. This gives you one phone number for your desk number and your mobile number, no matter what network or device you’re on. You also can move calls across networks and devices with no interruptions—as you’re transitioning from your cellular service while on the go to your office Wi-Fi, for example. Operator Connect Mobile for Teams Phone will enter preview next quarter with select operator partners. To learn more, check out the Operator Connect Mobile announcement blog.

Teams Connect is designed for seamless, secure, and easy-to-use collaboration across organizational boundaries, allowing everyone to work as one extended team while staying in their own Teams environment. In late 2021, we announced Teams Connect shared channels, which help enable collaboration with people inside and outside your organization from a shared workspace. For example, a team working on a new product will be able to share a Teams channel with an external design team to create one joint workspace across organizations. Everyone can communicate, schedule a meeting, share files, and collaborate on apps without switching accounts. Shared channels for Teams Connect will enter preview starting at the end of March 2022. To learn more and try out shared channels, read the Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels blog.

To effectively create and collaborate, we need a way to bring distributed information, documents, and teams together. In January 2022, we launched Loop components in Teams chat, offering a new way to ideate, create, and make decisions together. Today, we are introducing Loop components in Outlook mail. Now you can brainstorm, complete action items, and get the latest status from your team without having to switch context or apps. A single component can be updated at the same time whether you are in Teams or Outlook. To get access to the latest Loop components in Outlook, sign up to become an Office Insider.

Our data also shows that positive culture ranks as the number one thing employees want companies to provide, followed by mental health and well-being benefits. A new world of work requires technology to bring company culture to life—digitally.  

Today, we’re announcing the Inspiration library, a new feature available in preview through the Viva Insights app in Teams. The Inspiration library turns insights into action with access to curated content and best practices from top sources like Harvard Business Review and Thrive. The productivity and well-being insights delivered by Viva Insights are enhanced by premium content focused on driving better employee experiences and boosting engagement. The Inspiration library preview will begin rolling out to Microsoft 365 users with the Microsoft Viva Insights app in Teams later in March 2022 and will be available worldwide in 11 supported languages by the end of April 2022. Pin the Viva Insights app in Teams and learn more about the Inspiration library.

Finally, a common challenge of remote and hybrid work is maintaining social capital: the network of relationships that enables people and organizations to thrive. While creating friendships and relationships can be challenging in the hybrid work environment, we are investing in tools that help you express yourself and have fun while doing it.

Now you can bring even more of your personality to the conversation with the new Fluent emojis in Teams. With vibrant and fun styling, over 1800 three-dimensional emojis can infuse expression and playfulness into messages. Select a category and use the skin tone selector to pick an emoji that better represents you. Fluent emojis are now available in preview.

Looking ahead

While so much has changed about work, one thing remains constant: people are at the center. With technologies like Microsoft Teams supporting people, we can make hybrid work really work by bringing everyone—and everything—together.

We want to again thank our customers and partners who have been with us every step of the way over the last five years. To celebrate with us, look for the new custom backgrounds on Teams and check out our anniversary community blog for the behind-the-scenes on how Teams came to life.

¹Weiss, K., Baer, J., and Huang, B. (2021, October 5). CIO Survey Takeaways- Further Solidifying the Leadership Position. (p3). Morgan Stanley Research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Prioritize and modernize training

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Build company culture that includes the frontline

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build collaborative apps with Microsoft Teams

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

Create apps for meetings enabling richer experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enabling cross-platform collaborative experiences

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

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

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

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

Developer toolkits and resources to build and manage Teams apps

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

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

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

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

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

Get started with the Developer Portal today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full Microsoft Graph blog to learn more.

Build modern Windows apps that work seamlessly on any endpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Get started with new features in Windows Terminal.

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

Learn more about our updates on WSL.

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

Learn more about Power Automate Desktop and process advisor.

Learn. Connect. Code.

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

Happy coding!

Additional resources

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

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

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

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

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.

The subscription service for your life to make the most of your time, connect, and protect the ones you love

Now more than ever, as many of us work and learn remotely, we’re acutely aware of all the different ways life can interrupt work and work can interrupt life. It’s never been more important to stay connected and on top of the things that matter. Over the past few weeks, we’ve shared what Microsoft is doing to help organizations, employees, teachers, parents, and students in these challenging times. And most recently we launched a new website for families to discover Microsoft tools and resources to help them connect, learn, and play at home. Aligned with our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, we want to help you and your family across work, school, and life.

Today, we offer a powerful set of free applications and services that help you create, share, connect, and collaborate with your friends and family across the web and on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices. Used by more than a half billion people, free Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive apps enable you to coauthor, video chat, organize, and come together. We are committed to improving and innovating on these experiences every day.

In addition, more than 38 million people subscribe to Office 365, which includes the modern, most up-to-date Office desktop apps, 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage per person (enough to store thousands of high res photos or hundreds of hours of videos), 60 Skype minutes to call mobile phones and landlines, advanced security to protect you from malware and phishing, and ongoing technical support.

Today, we are delighted to announce that on April 21^st, Office 365 will become Microsoft 365, the subscription for your life to help you make the most of your time, connect, and protect the ones you love, and to develop and grow. An evolution of Office 365, Microsoft 365 builds on the foundation of Office infusing new artificial intelligence (AI), rich content and templates, and cloud-powered experiences to empower you to become a better writer, presenter, designer, manager of your finances, and deepen your connection to the people in your life. These experiences start rolling out today and will reach the over 38 million Office 365 subscribers over the next few months.

In addition, today we unveiled two new Microsoft 365 experiences that will roll out in preview in the coming months—a new Microsoft Family Safety app designed to keep your family safe across the digital and physical worlds, and new features in Microsoft Teams that bring you closer to your friends and family to more deeply connect and collaborate on the things that matter most to you.

Finally, the new Microsoft Edge browser takes another step forward with new features to protect you on the web with Password Monitor, and to simplify research with Collections. You can learn more about all the new Edge features here.

Bring out your best writer with Microsoft Editor

Writing doesn’t come easy for many of us. In fact, our research shows that about half of us aspire to become better writers. That’s why today, we unveiled a major expansion to Microsoft Editor, an AI-powered service available in more than 20 languages, now accessible across Word and Outlook.com, and as a standalone browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Whether you’re writing a paper for school or updating your LinkedIn profile, Editor helps you put your best foot forward as you write.

Anyone can access the essential Editor capabilities, such as spelling and basic grammar across Word, Outlook.com, and the web. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers have access to advanced grammar and style refinements to write with more clarity and conciseness. Here are some of the exclusive ways Microsoft 365 subscribers can get even more from the Editor service:

• When you know what you want to say but can’t seem to find the “right” way to say it, just highlight a sentence and right-click for Rewrite Suggestions. Rewrite Suggestions in Word can offer ideas to help you rephrase sentences for more impact or clarity while staying true to your original meaning.
• For the first time ever in Word, Editor’s similarity checker leverages plagiarism-checking capabilities to support writers in creating original content and, when necessary, insert relevant citations right into their document with just a click. This tool allows writers to focus less on the mechanics of writing and more on the content. And teachers love that similarity checker helps students learn how to appropriately cite content.
• Additional style critiques including clarity, conciseness, formality, and inclusiveness assist Microsoft 365 subscribers to write with more confidence across documents, email, and the web. For example, the inclusive language critique can suggest refinements to help a writer avoid unintentional bias by suggesting a writer may want to try a term like “police officer” in place of “policeman.”

Become a better presenter in PowerPoint

One of the most common fears for people around the world is public speaking. Presenter Coach in PowerPoint can help. While you’re rehearsing, Presenter Coach uses AI to detect if you’re talking too fast, saying “umm” too much, or just reading the text from your slides.

Starting today, we’re introducing two new AI-powered features in PowerPoint Presenter Coach exclusively for Microsoft 365 subscribers—monotone pitch and speech refinement. With monotone pitch, Presenter Coach will listen to your tone of voice and give feedback in real-time to suggest adding some variation where needed. With speech refinement, Presenter Coach will give grammar suggestions including how to better phrase your speech. These new Presenter Coach features will be available to everyone through a free preview, and then eventually only to Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Kickstart your creativity in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Everyone would love to be more creative in their presentations and documents to better communicate their message, but often it takes more time than it’s worth. Now PowerPoint Designer helps you be more creative while saving you time. For example, with a simple click, you can transform text into a beautiful timeline. Or when you add a picture to your slide, Designer will auto-generate several slide layouts to choose from. To supercharge your creativity, we’re providing Microsoft 365 subscribers with exclusive access to over 8,000 beautiful images and 175 looping videos from Getty Images, plus 300 new fonts and 2,800 new icons to create high-impact and visually appealing documents. And you can use all this new content in Word and Excel too.

To kickstart your school, work, or family project and save time, Microsoft 365 subscribers also get exclusive access to 200+ new premium templates across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Find great templates to help you design the perfect resume, wedding invitation, newsletter, birth announcement, and so much more. There are even templates for printing coloring books and reward charts to keep kids engaged at home.

Seamlessly manage your finances with Money in Excel

Managing money is one of the top stressors among people and families. People typically track their spending across a variety of apps and spreadsheets. Today, we announced Money in Excel, a new solution for Microsoft 365 subscribers that makes it easy to manage, track, and analyze your money and spending all in one place—Excel.

Through a secure and simple process that connects to your bank and credit card accounts, including major retail banks and community credit unions, Money in Excel lets you import transactions and account balances automatically and customizes your workbook leveraging the rich features of Excel. It can help you improve your spending habits by providing personalized insights on how much you’re spending on categories like groceries each month and proactive alerts about price changes for recurring payments, bank fees, overdraft warnings, and more. Money in Excel gives you the tools to help you achieve your financial goals. Money in Excel will start to become available in the coming months in the U.S. first.

Explore subjects in detail with new data types and smart templates in Excel

Many people use Excel to track and analyze data to make decisions by creating everything from simple lists to elaborate models. Finding, collecting, organizing, and refreshing this data is challenging and time consuming. Today, we are announcing a different way to interact with your data. With new data types, you’ll be able to make sense of your data as Excel provides deeper meaning for over 100 topics. These include food, movies, places, chemistry, and even Pokémon. Save time by converting plain text and numbers into a data type and Excel will surface both rich visual and interactive data cards and images that provide a better representation of your data.

How does it work? Say you want to start keeping better track of your nutrition. Simply enter a food like “avocado” and by converting it to a Food data type, Excel will help you access its nutritional information. Or maybe your family is considering adopting a dog. You can evaluate different types of breeds using the Animal data type, which provides you with images, facts, and their temperaments, so you can easily create a table to compare them. With data types, all information can be easily updated, so you always have the latest and relevant data. Anyone can access the Stocks and Geography data types in Excel for the web. And Microsoft 365 subscribers have exclusive access to the over 100 new data types powered by Wolfram Alpha. As a Microsoft 365 subscriber, data types will give you the opportunity to:

• Easily gather, organize, and analyze the information you need in one place without the hassle of finding, copying, and refreshing the data.
• Use new smart templates with data types to do more. They will help you prepare to move to a new city, track your nutrition, or help your kids learn chemistry.

The new data types and smart templates will be available to Office Insiders this spring and to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers in English in the coming months.

Organize your time across work and life with Outlook

Juggling work meetings with personal appointments can be a struggle, particularly if your work and personal calendars aren’t connected. Today, we announced new features in Outlook on the web that help you manage all your commitments, across your work and life, in one place. With these new features, you can link your personal calendar to your work calendar to show your real availability in your work account, while still maintaining privacy around the details of personal appointments and business meetings.

We also announced the expansion of Play My Emails on Android—where Cortana provides an intelligent read-out of your emails. Play My Emails can help you catch up and act on what’s new in your inbox whether you are mid-commute or getting ready in the morning, so that you can be fully present when you are home. To further enable hands-free activities, you can now use Microsoft Search that recognizes natural language on iOS and Android. Simply find your results faster and easier by using language you use every day to filter and narrow your search—just speak it or type it. The new search functionality and Play My Emails availability on Android will begin rolling out in the coming months.

Deepen your connection to family and friends with Skype and Microsoft Teams

Staying connected with our loved ones has never been more important than it is right now. We’re pleased to offer tools like Skype to help people to stay in touch with family and friends through chat and video calling. Recently, we have seen significant increases in Skype usage. Skype has seen an increase in usage, with 40 million people using it daily, up 70 percent month over month and, we are seeing a 220 percent increase in Skype to Skype calling minutes month over month. To help people get connected even faster, we recently introduced a new feature in Skype called Meet Now. Meet Now lets you easily create video meetings in as little as three clicks for free, no signups or downloads required.

At work, every day more than 44 million people use Microsoft Teams. People love Teams because it’s the only hub for teamwork that lets you chat, do video conferencing, make calls, and collaborate all in one place. And while Teams is great for work, we’re all struggling to manage responsibilities across work and life. We use multiple apps and disconnected tools such as calendars, email, messaging, and documents to manage it all.

To provide one app to help manage work and life and deepen your connection with those who matter most, today we previewed new features coming to Microsoft Teams for your personal life.

With these new features coming to Teams, you can connect, stay organized, and collaborate with family and friends. Create groups to plan trips with friends; organize a neighborhood gathering or your next book club meeting. You’ll be able to connect in a group chat, make video calls, collaborate over shared to-do lists and assign tasks to specific people, coordinate schedules, share photos and videos, all in one place. Teams gives to you the tools to seamlessly manage daily life; share grocery lists, organize across family calendars, store important information like Wi-Fi passwords and account info, and even see location updates when loved ones arrive home or at other locations like work or school.

These new features are coming in preview to the Microsoft Teams mobile app in the coming months. In the meantime, we invite you to connect with friends and family through chat and video calling using Skype.

Protect your family in the physical and digital worlds with Microsoft Family Safety

Many parents use multiple screen-time apps and location-based services to help ensure their families are safe in the physical and digital worlds. Unveiled today, Microsoft Family Safety is a new mobile experience coming on iOS and Android for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Microsoft Family Safety empowers families to help protect their loved ones by giving them the tools and insights to start a conversation promoting healthier habits online and in the real world. The new Microsoft Family Safety app is the only app that manages screen time across Windows PCs, Android, and Xbox while also giving you peace of mind when your kids aren’t home.

Microsoft Family Safety helps you stay connected with location sharing and notifications when a family member arrives or departs a location like home, school, or work, to help give you the peace of mind that your family is where they need to be. And, for inexperienced drivers in the household, you can use driving reports to help build better habits behind the wheel with the peace of mind knowing that we don’t share your information with third parties, such as insurance companies.

You’ll also be able to help protect your kids as they explore and play games online and on their devices. The Microsoft Family Safety app helps you understand how your kids are spending their time across their Xbox, Windows 10 PCs, and Android phones, plus you can set limits to help promote healthy digital habits. Additionally, you’ll be able to help steer them away from content that you feel is not age appropriate as they start browsing the web.

We are starting with a limited preview of the app across iOS and Android that will be available in the coming months.

Access to popular wellbeing, creativity, and enrichment apps

Wellbeing, creativity, and enrichment play important roles in helping you be your best self. So, in addition to all the new value in the Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions, we announced that subscribers will receive limited-time access to popular apps and premium services such as Adobe, Bark, Blinkist, Creative Live, Experian, Headspace, and TeamSnap. In the U.S. these are valued at over $500 USD. Visit this page to learn more about the partner benefits program for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.

Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions broadly available on April 21—more value, same price

The new Office features start rolling out to current Office 365 customers today. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions will be available worldwide on April 21^st. With Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions you get everything in Office 365, like premium desktop Office apps, 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage per person, 60 Skype minutes for calling mobile phones and landlines, advanced security features to protect you from malware and phishing attacks, ongoing technical support, plus all the new features and benefits announced today. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 USD a month. For the best value, a family of up to six people can use Microsoft 365 Family for $9.99 USD a month.

To learn more about Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions as well as the market and language availability of the new features we announced, visit this page. For more information about the changes announced today that are coming to Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise plans, visit this page here.

The post Introducing the new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

In 2013, we established a deep technology partnership with the NFL. Our mission with the partnership was simple: use technology to empower the people who make the game of football great—the coaches, players, officials, and fans.

Nearly seven years later, Microsoft Surface has become a vital tool for the NFL on and off the field, transforming everything from instant replay, game planning, and the fan experience to the NFL Draft and Scouting Combine. With more than 2,000 Surface devices and 170 Windows Servers deployed across 35 global stadiums, Microsoft technology powers 333 events each year for the NFL on game day.

Today, we’re delighted to announce a multi-year expansion of our NFL partnership. We’ll continue developing innovative solutions for the NFL using Surface devices, and now expand our technology collaboration to include Microsoft Teams. With Microsoft Teams, we’ll empower the league and the individual NFL teams with technology to facilitate collaboration and creativity. The combination of Surface and Microsoft Teams will allow us, in partnership with the NFL, to continue to innovate for our collective fans.

“Since 2013, Microsoft has helped transform the NFL through technology around our game. Microsoft Surface has quickly become an authentic tool to the game of football and is vital during all NFL games for coaches, players, and NFL officials. And now by working together to integrate Microsoft Teams across the League, together we aim to improve on communications and collaboration in a modern way.”
—Renie Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Vice President of NFL Partnerships

Launched nearly three years ago, and more than 20 million daily users strong, Microsoft Teams was designed to empower people to get more done together, with less friction and more human connection. Nowhere is the need for teamwork like this greater than in the fast-paced, global game of NFL football.

Rather than using separate apps for chat, calling, meetings, and document collaboration, with Microsoft Teams the NFL can stay constantly and securely connected in one hub for teamwork across all their devices, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

With Microsoft Teams and Surface together, the possibilities are endless. High-fidelity microphones and cameras on Surface devices make Microsoft Teams video calls more immersive. The touchscreen on Surface devices makes the digital whiteboard experience in Microsoft Teams the perfect platform for strategizing plays—no matter where team members are located.

NFL teams are already starting to take advantage of Microsoft Teams in their day-to-day work. For example, the Miami Dolphins used the platform to plan Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium. The New York Jets use Microsoft Teams across their football and business operations, including the NFL Draft process. And Super Bowl Champions Kansas City Chiefs’ scouting staff uses Microsoft Teams to coordinate with the club’s on-the-road scouts.

“In Microsoft Teams we can easily collaborate on files, manage shared calendars, host meetings, and utilize existing integrations. Teams made cooperation with the NFL possible throughout the regular season and with Super Bowl planning.”
—Kim Rometo, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for the Miami Dolphins

As part of the partnership expansion, we’ll continue supporting the NFL with innovations like the Microsoft Surface Sideline Viewing System and Microsoft Surface Instant Replay. We’ll also continue collaborating with every NFL team and their partners to develop unique business and consumer integrations ranging from Surface devices as playbooks, to film reviews being conducted on the Surface family of devices, to in-stadium usage on game days, to business operations teams using Surface devices in their front office.

This partnership extension, and the addition of Microsoft Teams, is just the beginning. We’re excited by the opportunity to continue collaborating with the NFL to develop new, custom technology solutions that transform the way the league communicates using a powerful combination of hardware and software.

The post Empowering the NFL with Microsoft Surface and Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Download for Android | Download for iOS

Hundreds of millions of people use Office to achieve more at work, home, and school. We know many people save rich document creation or editing for their computer or laptop and work on their phones in limited ways. We took this as a challenge for Office to find a better overall productivity experience that would change perceptions of how you could work on a mobile device to create an experience that was simpler, more integrated, harnessed the unique strengths of mobile devices, and truly put mobile needs at the forefront.

The Office app delivers several key benefits including:

• Combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in a way that simplifies the experience with fewer apps to download or switch between. It requires far less phone storage than installing individual apps while maintaining virtually all the capabilities of the existing mobile apps people already know and use.
• Integrating our Lens technology to unlock the power of the camera with capabilities like converting images into editable Word and Excel documents, scanning PDFs, and capturing whiteboards with automatic digital enhancements to make the content easier to read.
• Adding new functionality for common tasks people often encounter when working on a phone—things like making quick notes, signing PDFs, scanning QR codes, and transferring files between devices.

Altogether, the Office app is a powerful tool that is intuitive and familiar yet still uniquely different.

We’ve been thrilled and humbled to see the response to the public preview of the Office app since introducing it at the Microsoft Ignite conference last November. After the announcement, tens of thousands of people immediately rushed to get the Android and iOS apps, causing us to hit the 10,000-user limit in Apple’s TestFlight program in just a few hours. The feedback we received through customer conversations, social media, and the press has been very positive and encouraging— with the Office app seen as part of a new wave of innovation for Office and Microsoft. This inspired us to work hard to get this app ready for full release as soon as we could.

We have made several enhancements since the public preview—such as support for third-party storage services including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud; templates to help you create new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; and general performance improvements.

Today’s release is also available for download on Android tablets with limited support. The Office app for Android is fully optimized for tablets when working with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and we are committed to making the rest of the Android app as well as the iOS app fully optimized for tablets soon.

More features coming soon

But we’re not stopping here. We’re constantly thinking about ways to enrich the Office mobile experience to help people be more productive on a phone. We want people to think of the Office mobile experience as a tool they would turn to for content creation and more sophisticated work—not just for light editing and information consumption.

In the next few months, we’ll add three new exciting features that will help us deliver on that promise:

• Word Dictation—Let Word turn your voice into written text and use voice commands and simple toolbars to easily apply the right formatting and punctuation you need.

• Excel Cards View—View and edit data in an Excel table row in a simple, digestible card format so you do not have span across columns that extend beyond the limits of the screen.

• Outline to PowerPoint—Write your presentation content as a simple outline and let PowerPoint Designer turn it into presentable slides with the proper styling, formatting, and iconography of your content.

Get started with the Office app

Anyone can now download the Office app on phones for Android and iOS. The app is free to use, even without signing in. However, signing in with a Microsoft Account or connecting to a third-party storage service will enable you to access and store documents in the cloud. An Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscription will also unlock various premium features, consistent with those in the current Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps.

Download the Office app now and discover a whole new way to organize your work and get things done for work, for home, and for school.  

Download for Android | Download for iOS

The post The new Office app now generally available for Android and iOS appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Productivity

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

Microsoft Teams

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

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

The New Microsoft Edge

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

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

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

The Office mobile app

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

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

Fluid Framework

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

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

Cortana

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

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

AI in Office

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

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

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

Microsoft Project

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

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

Knowledge

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

Project Cortex

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

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

The new Yammer

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

Microsoft Search

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

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

Microsoft Stream

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

Workplace Analytics

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

Workflow

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

Power Platform integration with Teams

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

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

Office Scripts

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

Security

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

Microsoft Authenticator

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

New value in Azure AD

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

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

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

Application Guard for Office

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

Compliance

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

Insider Risk Management

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

Compliance Score

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

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

Management

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

Microsoft Endpoint Manager

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

Microsoft Productivity Score

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

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

Managed Meeting Rooms

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

Global reader

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

Onboarding Hub

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

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

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

Office 365 Groups

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

Send us your feedback

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

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

Meet Personal Vault

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Vault is now available worldwide

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

Learn more in this Personal Vault podcast on Intrazone.

Backing up your folders just got easier

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

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

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

OneDrive fans rejoice—additional storage is now available!

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

Dark mode is now available on OneDrive iOS

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

Let us know what you think

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

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

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

I’m especially energized by Microsoft’s opportunity to empower the people who are in the best position to represent hotel and travel brands with their customers—Firstline Workers. These are the employees behind the front desk, from the concierge who delivers a knowledgeable recommendation, to the committed staff working behind the scenes from check-in to check-out.

Transforming the Firstline Worker experience

By giving Firstline Workers modern tools that enable them to access information, stay connected, and communicate with coworkers in real-time, hospitality companies can create a more connected organization, and address guest needs on the spot.

Here are just a few ways hotels are integrating Microsoft solutions to improve the employee experience:

• Using Microsoft Teams’ mobile-first capabilities, Firstline Workers can easily communicate, collaborate, and share best practices across the organization. Earlier this year, we announced new capabilities—including urgent messaging, location sharing, and image annotations—which enable hotels to act with agility, leading to a superior guest experience.

• Using PowerApps and Shifts, organizations can digitize everyday activities—from repetitive and administrative to more personalized and role-specific tasks. For example, housekeepers use it to keep track of room tasks, helping reduce costs and freeing up time to focus on delighting guests.

• Using Microsoft Stream hotels can deliver dynamic, role-based content to increase engagement and retention of training programs—as well as support peer-to-peer information sharing.

Helping our customers succeed

Leading hotel brands, including Marriott International and Red Lions Hotel Corporation (RLH), are at the forefront of empowering their Firstline employees with digital communication and collaboration. In doing so, they’re building cultures of employee engagement, and meeting the needs of their guests in new ways.

Marriott recently selected Microsoft 365 to enhance productivity, collaboration, and workflows. Sales specialist Peter McDermott says, “In a world where guests demand answers, it’s more important than ever to connect with your teams… With Teams, whether my coworkers are across the hall or across the country, we can always stay connected to exceed customer expectations.”

RLH is also using Microsoft 365 to help accelerate innovation and enable new capabilities inside the company. The company has rolled out Teams to its entire workforce to make it easier for employees to connect with coworkers in other departments and streamline processes.

“The persistence of communication is what distinguishes the Teams solution. The style is somewhere in between, where IM might be too loose, and email, which is much more formal. It’s much more of a conversation; it’s much more efficient. We don’t have people saying where’s this or where’s that because they haven’t lost it in the noise of email,” says John Edwards, CIO for RLH Corporation.

Join us at the HITEC conference

This week, members of the Microsoft team will be at HITEC, the annual hospitality tech conference. Visit us at the Microsoft booth (#1634) and learn how Microsoft is enabling intelligent hospitality.

The post Why hospitality industry leaders are focusing on employee engagement to enhance the guest experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

To address these challenges, today we are announcing new capabilities in Microsoft Teams that empower care teams and enable healthcare organizations to securely collaborate and communicate. Built on the secure, compliant Microsoft 365 cloud, Teams gives all healthcare workers a familiar way to communicate in real-time, coordinate patient care, and improve operational efficiencies.

New advanced messaging features include priority notifications for urgent messages and message delegation to securely manage urgent patient care. In addition, new platform enhancements provide the ability to integrate electronic health records for care coordination and make Teams an even more powerful hub for health team collaboration.

New messaging features allow care teams to securely coordinate patient care

Good patient care begins with a clinician who is empowered with unfettered access to the right information, the ability to communicate swiftly, and the peace of mind that all of this communication is secure and compliant with patient data protection regulations. This balance of convenience and compliance has been difficult for care teams to achieve. As a result, many clinicians have resorted to using consumer chat apps as part of their patient care. This can pose significant risks to security, compliance, and patient data privacy. And in a highly regulated industry, this can also result in heavy fines for inappropriate data governance and protection.

To help address these unmet needs, we are expanding Teams to enable additional secure communication and collaboration workflows. Building on the customizable mobile Teams experience announced last month, today we’re introducing new advanced messaging features. Priority notifications (now in private preview) alerts a recipient to an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. Message delegation (coming soon), enables a recipient to delegate messages to another recipient when they’re in surgery or otherwise unavailable.

Clinicians get repeated notices about critical information that needs to be treated differently than other messages.

With message delegation, clinicians and staff can assign another recipient to receive their messages when they’re not available.

These new capabilities come on the heels of new features, such as shifts, a smart camera with image annotation and secure sharing, so images stay in Teams and are not auto-stored to the care providers’ devices, and new Teams templates for wards and hospitals to enable administrators to deploy consistent healthcare experiences in Teams across their wards, departments, and hospitals.

With Teams, clinical staff can now quickly communicate and collaborate in a secure, compliant environment that brings together messaging, voice and video calling and meetings, as well as access to patient information and apps in one hub for teamwork. With Teams, customers can manage hospital operations like shift scheduling, safety processes, supplies, bed capacity, length-of-stay, and other critical operations.

New platform enhancements support healthcare data interoperability

As the healthcare industry moves to digitize patient data, enabling the interoperability of data has become a top priority. Microsoft is addressing the challenges of interoperability through emerging standards such as FHIR, providing new opportunities for digital transformation across the care continuum. Teams provides a hub to access digital health records and collaborate in real-time—streamlining workflows for clinical and operational professionals to help create better patient outcomes.

Today, we’re announcing the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams. Now, hospital and clinical staff on-the-go can securely access patient records, chat with other team members, and even start a video meeting, all without having to switch between apps. The ability to view EHR data in Teams is enabled through partnerships between Microsoft and leading interoperability providers, including Infor Cloverleaf, Dapasoft, Datica, Kno2, and Redox.

By integrating with electronic health records, Teams enables healthcare teams to use a secure hub for coordinating patient care.

Leading healthcare organizations choose Teams for secure collaboration

Today, 420,000 organizations, including 89 of the Fortune 100 and many of the most innovative healthcare providers, are empowering their employees with Microsoft Teams. Organizations including New York State’s largest healthcare provider Northwell Health; South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust; and Saiseikai Kumamoto Hospital in Japan have all chosen Teams to enable secure productivity and collaboration for their medical staff.

In addition, Microsoft commissioned the global research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan to complete an evaluation of Microsoft 365 for healthcare organizations, concluding that Teams directly addresses the top challenges facing healthcare providers with a modern, chat-based communication tool that doesn’t require compromising on security and compliance.

“Based on our research, Microsoft Teams directly addresses the top challenges facing healthcare providers in electronic messaging in hospitals and health systems.”
—Greg Caressi, Frost & Sullivan

Join us at HIMSS19 and learn more

Next week, members of the Microsoft team will be at HIMSS19, the annual Health Information Management Systems Society conference. Visit us at Microsoft booth #2500. Also, please visit Microsoft 365 and health page and partner site to learn more about how Teams and Microsoft 365 can empower your healthcare teams.

The post New capabilities in Microsoft 365 empower healthcare professionals appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Design is becoming the heart and soul of Office, something reflected in the Office 365 user experience updates announced this summer and the new icons we revealed last week. Outlook mobile will be among the first app to adopt its new icon, and, much like the entire Office 365 suite, design thinking and craftsmanship have been driving Outlook mobile forward. It’s a key reason why we’ve exceeded more than 100 million iOS and Android devices and our app store ratings are consistently above 4.5.

Great mobile experiences don’t just shrink desktop designs, they rethink the process by understanding mobile’s unique design opportunities and constraints. Unlike a desktop, our phones live with us in our pockets and purses. This proximity and immediacy create the need for more personal, efficient, and even playful experiences that require a mobile-first approach.

Mobile productivity increasingly happens through a series of micro-tasks that take place in seconds, not minutes. This makes it vital to design experiences with less typing and taps, where your attention is brought to what matters most, and where key context is always available at a glance.

By creating resonant experiences that cater to these micro-moments, Outlook mobile offers delightful, simple, and powerful experiences that ensure you get in and out of the app quickly, gracefully, and with ease. We do this by following our core mobile-first design principles:

• Deliver uncompromised craftsmanship and attention to detail.
• Create fast and focused experiences.
• Provide key context at a glance.

Let’s explore these principles in practice.

Quality and delightful craftsmanship

Great experiences are felt as much as they are seen. When we craft them, we pay attention to the details that make Outlook mobile feel faster.

With the new design in Outlook for iOS, we’re introducing new sensory feedback to create a resonant experience with the device cradled in your hand. When you swipe right or left on an email, subtle changes in color, shape, and iconography unfold. The corners of the message transform from hard-edged to soft and round, metaphorically pulling that item away from the message list and sending it where you want it to go—with haptic feedback.

Delight is brought to you through moments that happen within milliseconds, like the new animated calendar icon that fans forward or backward as you scroll through your agenda, or the instant insight provided in your inbox by signaling a potential meeting conflict. This craftsmanship makes Outlook mobile a gratifying, powerful experience as you quickly move on with your day.

Fast and focused

The first thing most will notice as we roll out the Outlook for iOS changes over the next few weeks is the bold color that creates a more vibrant experience. We recognize that people use many apps on their devices and quickly switch between apps to complete tasks.

A strong app header with bold color and typography helps you easily find your way to Outlook while rapidly switching between monochromatic apps to quickly complete your task and get back to what matters. The experience is consistent across mobile email, search, and calendar; and for those who use Outlook on a large screen, the blue header connects you to your familiar inbox and calendar no matter which Outlook you use.

As a native app, we embrace the native font and use of typography, so Outlook feels perfectly at home on your device of choice. The bolder, larger iOS typography, however, shouldn’t compromise the experience, which is why as you scroll on your iPhone and iPad, the size of the header is dynamically reduced to maximize your message list to view and find what you’re looking for.

Contextually relevant

With the new iOS refresh, we improved the usability of more core experiences. The Focused Inbox toggle and message list filtering experience now orientate you to your content and accounts in a way that provides clarity and confidence.

If you’re a single account user, the app is personalized with your avatar. If you have multiple accounts and calendars added to the app, new account icon cues help you easily switch between them. Bright, bold avatars are also added to your contacts, so you’ll instantly recognize senders in the message, top contacts in search, and attendees in meeting invites.

In addition, did you know you can schedule an event when you know your team’s availability without typing a single letter? When designing the scheduling experience in Outlook mobile, we brought forward all people, dates, and place elements required into context so you could simply slide the options around the calendar to quickly find the time and place that works, no typing required. Through iterations on both iOS and Android, Outlook mobile delivers a powerful experience that helps you achieve your goals and save you time—so you can get back to what matters in your day.

Send us your feedback

We’re humbled every day by the support and feedback we receive from our customers that help us improve the app. We’re excited about the new experiences in Outlook for iOS and hope you’ll love them too as we start rolling them out today. Download Outlook mobile so you can experience the updates that will help you get things done faster and save you time. We’re sincerely interested in your feedback as we strive to create the best products to help you achieve your goals. Please don’t hesitate to tell us what you think!

The post Power and simplicity: new Outlook mobile design helps you get things done faster appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

With Microsoft Search, we’re introducing new organizational search experiences into the apps you use every day, including Bing.com and Windows, and our vision to connect across your organization’s network of data.

We’re also evolving the notion of what search means. Getting pages of results with hyperlinks to other information is simply not enough. Faced with ever decreasing attention spans, and an explosion of data, we recognize that the challenge is to find and deliver answers to your questions, suggest insights, and enable you to take action on your tasks. This makes search a powerful capability that stretches across your work to make you more productive and take advantage of the collective knowledge from your organization.

Our vision is a cohesive and coherent search capability, prominent in every experience, providing the way to search across all your organization’s data—both inside and outside of Microsoft 365.

Over the next few months, you’ll experience these first steps:

• Search will move to a prominent, consistent place across the apps you work with every day. From Outlook to PowerPoint, Excel to Sway, OneNote to Microsoft Teams, Office.com to SharePoint, the search bar will be in the same place—across desktop, mobile, and web.
• Personalized results as soon as you click in the search box, such as people you share with the most and documents you were working on recently. No query is required to get suggestions.
• The search box itself will also command the application where you are working. For example, begin typing “acc” in Word to get list of suggested actions such as Accept Revision or Accessibility Checker. You no longer need to hunt through toolbars to look for a command.
• Search results will include results from across your organization. For example, within Word, you can find not only other Word documents, but also a presentation you were working on. You can navigate straight to that presentation or you can choose to incorporate slides from that file directly into your document.
• Extending that same organizational search experience wherever you are working—in Bing.com (when signed in with your Office 365 account), Edge or Windows. Search wherever you want to and get the same experience.
• Unified administration of your organizational search results, including admin-curated results such as bookmarks.

Experience Microsoft Search today

Key to delivering the Microsoft Search capability is the ability to have consistent scope of results anywhere you are searching. Even if the interface looks different, the goal is to have the same experience, personalized and contextualized for that specific interaction point.

Microsoft Search in Bing.com

Over the last year, 180 companies participated in our private preview, with files, sites, people, locations, and groups based on Microsoft Graph data. Based on the private preview feedback, we’re announcing the ability to search across conversations in both Teams and Yammer simultaneously.

Searching in Bing returns both your organizational results and web results, making it an easy destination for broad searches to get the best of your work world and secure your web searches. Public preview begins rolling out today. Tenant admins must opt in to the experience for their organization. Visit bing.com/business/explore for details.

Microsoft Search in Office.com

Get back to your work faster with Office.com, surfacing the same search scope across Microsoft 365. Find documents you were recently working on, as well as recommended documents that your colleagues have mentioned you in, and keep up to date with what has been worked on since you last looked at it. Microsoft Search in Office.com goes into targeted release today.

Microsoft Search in SharePoint mobile app

The new version of the SharePoint mobile app includes search as the default experience when you enter the app. It lists common questions, personalized results, and frequent searches that organizations can curate. The new SharePoint mobile app is available for download today.

Microsoft Search in the Outlook mobile app

The Outlook mobile app also highlights search as an important element of the user experience, providing access to commands, content, and people. With “zero query search,” simply placing your cursor in the search box will bring up recommendations powered by AI and the Microsoft Graph. The Outlook mobile app for iOS and Android are available for download today.

Outlook will also bring zero query, fuzzy search, and top results based on intelligent technology to other endpoints as we drive towards coherence. Enhancements to search in Outlook for Windows, Mac, and on the web started to roll out to targeted release mid-September.

Connect and curate data across your organization’s systems

Boundary-less search is only as good as the sources it has access to. We recognize that organizations have a wealth of data in other third-party services and applications. In 2019, we will build native connectors for popular third-party applications that will surface search results inline with Microsoft data into all the search experiences you have, including Office, Windows, Edge, and Bing.com. Administrators will be able to select which connectors they wish to use for their organizations based on which investments they’ve already made in third-party applications. Further extensibility with APIs will also be possible. Organizations will be able customize the search sources and the display of search results with custom refiners and verticals, and control the display of how sources of information look in result pages.

Coming in the first half of 2019

Microsoft Search in Office

Our new suite-wide search in the ribbon offers the same consistent experience and results across your favorite Office apps—across desktop, mobile, and web. Find, command, navigate, and discover directly from the same search box.

Microsoft Search in Windows

Right from your taskbar, perform searches that include local and organizational search results; whether that is people, the location of an office, or your files, you can find it all in Windows.

What’s coming next?

The Microsoft Graph gleans insight from the people, sites, devices, and documents you work with and is the basis for consistent learning across your organization, wherever you and your colleagues work. Microsoft Graph ranks search results relevant to your needs. You can see all the results that satisfy your query, but personalized search prioritizes the results that are most likely to achieve your objective.

Supercharging the Microsoft Graph with advanced AI technology from Bing and its knowledge of the world, we can extend our vision for insightful technology to make it simple to ask natural language questions and get real answers, without manual intervention. For example, a question such as “Can my brother work for me at my company?” means that not only syntactic parsing of the question is necessary but semantic understanding. Your organization’s HR policy probably specifies “close family relationships,” so we use Bing’s knowledge of the world to expand and match “brother” and couple that with searching your organization’s intranet to derive the answer.

Using this machine reading comprehension technology is just one of the many ways we’ll be continuously improving Microsoft Search in the future.

The post Microsoft Search—cohesive search that intelligently helps you find, discover, command, and navigate appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Empowering creative teamwork

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

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

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

Create immersive virtual environments in seconds with SharePoint spaces.

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

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

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

Source video.

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

Creating a secure and compliant workplace

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

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

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

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

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

Other updates

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

Check out these other updates from across Microsoft 365:

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

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

With over 400,000 customer organizations, SharePoint leads the industry in content services and collaboration. SharePoint pioneered combining document management and web publishing, bringing enterprise content management to the cloud and infusing AI into content collaboration with the Microsoft Graph. Today, we take our next, innovative step forward with SharePoint spaces.

SharePoint spaces bring immersive, mixed reality experiences to anyone, on any device

Mixed reality is one of the most important technological trends in the modern workplace, with the power to transform work for everyone, from the executive suite to the front line. Earlier this month, we announced two powerful mixed reality applications: Microsoft Remote Assist and Microsoft Layout.

Today, we unveiled SharePoint spaces—immersive, mixed reality experiences—which enable you to view and interact with content from every angle and visualize and manipulate data and product models in real-time. SharePoint mainstreams mixed reality, empowering everyone to create visually compelling spaces that are available to anyone, on any device.

Mixed reality experiences immerse you, focus your attention, engage your senses, and spark your curiosity and imagination to unlock new scenarios for communication, learning, and collaboration, including:

Recruiting and onboarding​—Recruits or new employees can learn about a company in a compelling, 360-degee virtual welcome and orientation, including a 360-degree video message from leadership. They can navigate the campus or building with 3D maps, learn the organizational structure with an interactive organization chart, or explore rich information about coworkers and the organization’s products.

Learning—With mixed reality, learning comes to life by captivating your focus and attention. Gain broad perspective with a panoramic view of a topic and learning objectives. Then explore personalized, relevant, and dynamic content. Ignite your curiosity by discovering new insights, and dive deep into topics that matter to you. Learn not just by reading or watching, but by experiencing, with your senses engaged.

Product development—Create an inspiring space for your team to spark innovation. Surround yourself with experts to look at data, content, and processes from every angle. Explore a prototype in 3D to identify new opportunities, attach annotations, and visualize improvements.

Until now, it has been prohibitively expensive and complex to develop customized mixed reality apps to address these and other business scenarios, and to make mixed reality apps broadly accessible in the workplace, because most require costly headsets.

SharePoint spaces empower creators to build immersive experiences with point-and-click simplicity. You can get started with smart templates to create a mixed reality environment complete with beautiful surroundings, ambient sounds, rich textures, and lighting. You then add content, which can include files you already have in SharePoint, allowing you to repurpose your existing data, documents, and images. Our customers already store over a petabyte of 3D content, including 360-degree videos created with mobile phones. SharePoint spaces are the most natural way to view and interact with 3D content, empowering people to interact with objects that might be too numerous, too large, or too dynamic to experience in the real world or in a two-dimensional environment.

Authors use familiar skills to add web parts to a SharePoint space.

Anyone can immerse themselves in a compelling virtual space to view and interact with content, information, and video on any device—in a browser, mobile browser, or headset. SharePoint spaces will be available in all Office 365 commercial plans, enabling new scenarios for information workers and Firstline Workers alike.

SharePoint spaces are infused with Microsoft AI, unlocking knowledge from Microsoft Graph and driving rich, personalized experiences that let you explore connections between people and content, gain insights from data, and find relevant information and expertise.

SharePoint spaces are integrated and extensible. You can augment a space with content from across Microsoft 365 and from other data sources and services. You can customize a space to reflect your brand. And you can build new capabilities for SharePoint spaces with the SharePoint Framework. We expect partners to embrace SharePoint spaces and to develop powerful web parts and experiences that will drive a new wave of innovation for customers.

SharePoint is the first unified content collaboration and services solution to span files, websites and, soon, mixed reality spaces. Customers and partners can apply to be part of an early, limited preview by visiting SharePoint spaces.

SharePoint brings AI to content collaboration

SharePoint powers content collaboration in Office 365, and we have infused SharePoint with AI. So, when you store your files, images, and data in Office 365, AI unlocks valuable content and enables new scenarios.

AI builds an understanding of what you work on, how you work, and how your colleagues’ work relates to you. AI uses this intelligence to process the ever-growing quantities of information, helping to prioritize what matters to you in personalized, time-saving experiences.

Personalized, intelligent search in the SharePoint mobile app—When you need expertise, content, apps, or resources when you’re on the go, the new Find tab in the SharePoint mobile app is a great place to start looking.

The Find tab, coming to the SharePoint mobile app, lets you find people, content, and answers to your questions while on the go.

You’ll see links to documents and sites you were recently working on, across your devices. You’ll see recommendations of sites, files, news, and people that have been identified as relevant to you. You might find what you need without having to search at all. And when you perform a search, the results are refined as you type, returning personalized results based on your role, your work, and the people you work with. Search history and queries curated by your organization make it easy to find things. And instant answers to your questions showcase the power of AI, transforming search into action.

New, personalized Office.com—Office.com saves you time, so you can start work and get back to what matters most to you. In the Recommended section, you’ll see files that AI has identified as most likely to need your attention. In the Discover section, you can see the files your colleagues are working on and files available to you that you may not even know existed.

The new Office.com helps you get to work on what matters most, with a list of Recommended files powered by AI.

AI also unlocks the value of complex content, such as images and videos, providing new opportunities to automate image- and video-based processes.

Enhanced image capabilities—More and more content is image-based, and AI unlocks the value of photos stored in Office 365. AI can determine where photos were taken, recognize objects, and extract text in photos. You can search for images as easily as you search for documents. For example, you could search a folder of scanned receipts for the receipt that mentions “sushi.”

We’ve also made it easier than ever to capture photos, documents, whiteboards, and business cards with the new Scan button in the OneDrive mobile app. As a business user, you can configure OneDrive to upload photos automatically to Office 365.

Cognitive services for business process automation—Today, we also demonstrated using Microsoft Flow to streamline processes that integrate cognitive services, including geolocation, image recognition, text extraction, machine translation, and sentiment analysis. Now, anyone can harness the power of AI to transform business processes.

Other announcements at the SharePoint Virtual Summit

At the SharePoint Virtual Summit, we also shared innovations that make it easier for you to share and work together, inform and engage people across the organization, support compliance, and create a seamless journey for users, from on-premises to the cloud.

New files experience in Microsoft Teams—We are bringing the full power of the SharePoint document library experience to Microsoft Teams. On any Files tab, you’ll able to create custom views, pin documents to the top, add and format custom columns, and gain insights into file activities. The new experience features the document library command bar, which, among other things, lets you launch flows and sync files to your Mac or PC.

Organizational news and page management—Open, transparent communication is critical to employee engagement. SharePoint pages and news are a powerful tool for internal communications, distributing news and announcements to targeted audiences across the organization, on any device. SharePoint pages let you communicate news and information with rich web parts that integrate content from across Office 365 and outside sources. Today, we announced that SharePoint will power organization-wide news communications, with new page management capabilities such as scheduling, approval, page metadata, and audience targeting.

SharePoint news uses pages and web parts with rich, dynamic content to keep people up-to-date.

GDPR and multi-geo data residency for SharePoint—Office 365 empowers you to support sophisticated requirements for security and compliance, including tools that will help you stay compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect May 25, 2018. Today, we announced that Multi-Geo Capabilities for Office 365 will be extended to SharePoint, beginning with a public preview this summer.

On-premises, hybrid, and migration announcements featuring SharePoint Server 2019—Organizations of all sizes, from all industries and all corners of the world, are rapidly adopting Office 365, where they can leverage the integration, scale, and intelligence of the cloud to provide maximum value to their employees, IT admins, and developers. We remain committed to supporting customers who maintain SharePoint and OneDrive workloads on-premises, and today we announced that SharePoint Server 2019 will enter public preview in June. SharePoint Server 2019 supports powerful, integrated hybrid scenarios out-of-the-box, and delivers user interface improvements, including modern team sites, communication sites, lists, libraries, pages, and news. By bringing the modern user experience and extensibility support with the SharePoint Framework to SharePoint Server, customers can facilitate user adoption of the cloud, and eliminate sharp differences between sites on-premises and in Office 365. And to facilitate your journey to the cloud, we announced that customers can automate migration using PowerShell support for the SharePoint Migration Tool.

SharePoint powers content collaboration for the modern workplace, giving you anywhere access to all your files with OneDrive, real-time document collaboration with Office applications, teamwork with Outlook and Teams, intelligent intranets with Yammer and Stream, and streamlined business processes with PowerApps and Flow.

To learn more about the innovations announced today at the SharePoint Virtual Summit, see these resources

• New capabilities for OneDrive announced today at SharePoint Conference North America
• What’s new for your intranet in Office 365
• Enrich your SharePoint content with intelligence and automation
• A look back at the first half of 2018 for Microsoft Stream
• Welcome to SharePoint Server 2019

The post SharePoint innovations transform content collaboration with mixed reality and AI appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what’s new and coming soon:

New in Outlook Calendar

Bill pay reminders—We are adding bill payments to the events we automatically help you track. Just like travel reservations and package delivery information presented in Outlook with a summary card at the top of your email today, we added support for bill payments. Outlook will identify bills you receive in email, show you a summary at the top, and automatically add a calendar event on the due date. You will also receive an email reminder two days before the due date so you can always pay your bills on time. Available for Outlook.com. Learn what other events and providers we support.

Suggested event locations and meeting rooms—Adding a meeting or event location just got easier and faster in Outlook. Even before you start typing, Outlook offers suggestions for your meeting location, including recently used (and available) conference rooms and other common locations such as “my office.” Once you start to type in the location field, Outlook suggests options based on Bing and then autocompletes your meeting location with the necessary information. For public locations, the rich location feature in Outlook adds the full address to your Outlook calendar event. Outlook for iOS will then use your current location, your destination address, and traffic updates to send you a notification to let you know when it is time to leave for your next event, to make sure you get there on time. Coming soon in Outlook for Windows.

We also added this location and context aware approach to further personalize the suggested locations when creating a calendar event on your mobile device. Suggestions are based on machine learning models that take into consideration your location, the list of attendees, the proposed meeting time of day, and other elements of your meeting. If you need a conference room, Outlook shows your organization’s room availability, so you can pick the best option for your meeting with just a tap. Reserving a meeting room from your mobile device will continue to get easier and faster as it learns your preferences. Available in Outlook for iOS.

Meeting RSVP tracking and forwarding—Keeping track of events you’ve organized or plan to attend is key to time management. But managing who is attending can be even more effective for everyone. Outlook now allows you to see the tracked responses and RSVPs for your meetings—even the ones you didn’t organize. With this insight, invited attendees can better manage their time and decide if they should attend based on the plans of others. For example, knowing who’s going can save you some time if you decide the meeting can be addressed by other teammates who are planning to attend.

Additionally, if you are planning a meeting that requires a tight control of the attendee list, Outlook gives you the option to allow or prevent the forwarding of your calendar invitation. Under Response Options, select New Meeting and then check or uncheck Allow Forwarding. Coming soon in Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web.

Outlook has also adjusted the tracking of RSVPs for meetings with large attendee lists or big meetings. If you use a distribution list to reach over 500 recipients, Outlook now tracks the responses for everyone individually. Now you can update the details for big meetings at any time if changes are required, outside the Office 365 email and calendar recipient maximum of 500. Available across Outlook.

Multiple time zones—Outlook reduces the complexity of managing events across times zones. You can now define the start and end times of appointments and meetings across different time zones. Set up a travel event with your departure in one time zone and arrival time in the local time zone of your destination. Plus, on the main calendar grid, you can now show multiple time zones in Outlook. In Windows, you can add up to three time zones under File > Options > Calendar Time Zones. In Mac, add one additional time zone under Outlook > Preferences > Calendar Time Zones. For Outlook on the web, click the Time Zone drop-down arrow in your Calendar meeting invite to add an additional time zone. Now, at a glance, you can simply understand what’s happening and when around the globe with Outlook.

New in Outlook Mail

Show organization directory details—In case you missed it, Outlook now adds the details of your organization directory to your Outlook contact information. We recently announced this new feature under Show Organization, so you can quickly learn who’s who in your company. If your company data is connected to Azure Active Directory, you can see who your contact reports to, their chain of command in your company, and even other colleagues they work with most. Knowing more about who might help you take care of business is right there in Outlook. You can simply tap search in your Outlook mobile app once to quickly identify your key contact, open their contact card, and view their organizational information. Available in Outlook for iOS.

Proxy support—Some organizations have adopted the use of proxies to block direct access to the internet from mobile devices. Now Outlook supports companies that use SOCKS proxies for added protection between their company data and the internet. Available in Outlook for iOS and Android.

Bcc warning—On occasion, you may be blind copied on an email message and you’d like to respond. Just in case you didn’t notice the subtle addressing, Outlook protects you if you reply to that message by alerting you that you were blind copied—you might choose not to reply to everyone on the recipient list but only reply to the sender, with all due respect. Available in Outlook for Windows.

Coming soon to Outlook for iOS and Android

Sync draft folders—We’re adding the ability to draft a message in Outlook on one device and finish it on another. Start a message on your mobile device and finish it when you’re back at your desk—or the other way around! Outlook helps you get things done when the time is right for you. Coming to Outlook for iOS May 2018. Available in Outlook for Windows, Mac, and Android.

Office Lens technology in Outlook for Android—When you need to capture and share details in the form of an image, such as a whiteboard, photo, or document, we’ve added a new photo icon to Outlook integrated with Office Lens technology. Simply start a new message in Outlook and touch the new photo icon to capture a whiteboard, document, or photo and get a trimmed and enhanced image instantly embedded in your email message. Outlook integrates the apps and services you need to be productive, so you can quickly and easily share what you need, when you need it, with fewer taps and apps! Coming to Outlook for Android May 2018.

Quick reply—We’re making it easier to respond quickly and more meaningfully in Outlook. By keeping your message content in view, and a new reply box at the bottom of your screen, Outlook helps you keep the conversation going with a modern, chat-like experience. Coming to Outlook for Android May 2018 and later this summer to Outlook for Mac. Available in Outlook for iOS.

Favorite people—We recently announced the ability to identify groups and email folders in Outlook, and soon we will add the ability to tag your favorite people. Keeping your key contacts front and center in your mobile search experience, as well as on top of your message folders, helps you quickly identify the right people to help you get more done. You will also be able to identify favorite people from Outlook on your mobile device, just as you can today from the web, and these favorite people tags will remain consistent, so you can find them on the web or on the go. Coming to Outlook for iOS and Android June 2018.

Office 365 Groups for OneNote and meeting events in Outlook—Staying on top of what’s going on with your Office 365 Groups is made even easier with the ability to view your group events in Outlook, as well as access the group’s OneNote Notebook. You will be able to track events in the group’s contact card and simply launch OneNote from Outlook to access the notes your group compiled in its OneNote. Coming to Outlook for iOS June 2018.

Block external content—Images embedded in emails may contain content that alerts the sender that you’ve opened their email. Tracking which emails are opened can be important to digital marketers. But if you don’t want this to be tracked, Outlook now helps to protect you and your inbox and block this external content. Coming to Outlook for Android May 2018.

Single Office 365 account in Outlook—Respecting the data security and compliance policies of our largest and highly regulated customers is a key pillar to the Office 365 value. Some companies have a requirement to capture all communications information within their corporate environment. For company managed mobile devices, Outlook will help customers mitigate the risk of users copying information from their company’s Office 365 account to a personal account on a mobile device, or accidentally sending company information from personal accounts. Companies will soon be able to enforce corporate policies on their managed mobile devices to allow a single account in Outlook. Coming to Outlook for iOS and Android June 2018.

Please be sure to watch the Office 365 roadmap for more information about our plans to roll these features out across additional Outlook experiences. And send us your ideas and suggestions on our UserVoice channel—we read all your feedback.

The post New Calendar, Mail, and mobile Outlook features help you get things done appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

With an Office 365 Home or Office 365 Personal subscription, you already get best-in-class apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as well as powerful cloud services like OneDrive and Outlook.com. Office 365 lets you create, share, and communicate anywhere, on any device.

The new protection capabilities offer subscribers additional peace of mind with:

• File recovery from malicious attacks like ransomware.
• Tools to help keep your information secure and private.
• Advanced protection from viruses and cybercrime.

Recover files from malicious attacks like ransomware

Ransomware has become an increasingly pervasive attack method in which cybercriminals “lock up” and prevent access to files in an effort to extort money from their victims. To help protect customers we are introducing two new capabilities that allow you to recover your files if they are affected by a malicious attack like ransomware.

Files Restore—We’re bringing our powerful Files Restore feature from OneDrive for Business to your personal OneDrive account, so it doesn’t matter if they’re work or personal files—they’re protected in OneDrive. Files Restore allows you to restore your entire OneDrive to a previous point in time within the last 30 days. You can use this feature to recover from an accidental mass delete, file corruption, ransomware, or another catastrophic event.

With Files Restore, you can recover from an accidental mass delete, file corruption, ransomware, or another catastrophic event.

Ransomware detection & recovery—Office 365 can now detect ransomware attacks and help you restore your OneDrive to a point before files were compromised, so you don’t have to submit to cybercriminal demands. We know this is important to our customers and a top request on UserVoice. If an attack is detected, you will be alerted through an email, mobile, or desktop notification and guided through a recovery process where you’ll find the date and time of attack preselected in Files Restore, making the process simple and easy to use. As these threats evolve, we are continuously improving detection capabilities to help keep you safe from the most advanced ransomware.

Notification of ransomware detected on your mobile phone, so you can immediately take action and restore your files.

Tools to help keep your information secure and private

Sending confidential or personal information online, like tax documents, family budgets, or a new business proposal, can be worrisome. Whether you’re sending an email or sharing a link, you want your information to reach only the intended recipients. Office 365 is adding three new capabilities to help keep your data secure and private in these cases.

Password protected sharing links—We’re adding an additional security option for links you share in OneDrive. You will now be able to set and require a password to access a shared file or folder. This prevents others from accessing your files if your intended recipient accidentally forwards or shares the link.

Set a password to access shared files or folders for an additional layer of protection.

Email encryption—Email encryption in Outlook.com offers an added layer of protection and ensures end-to-end encryption of your email. Unlike Outlook.com, some email providers don’t encrypt their connection, making it easy for hackers to intercept and read your communication. When you use Outlook.com email encryption, your email remains encrypted over a secure connection—minimizing the threat of your information being intercepted or leaked to cybercriminals.

Encryption is particularly useful in cases where it is unclear what level of security your intended recipients’ email providers offer. Recipients receive a link to a trusted Office 365 webpage where they can choose to receive a one-time passcode or re-authenticate with a trusted provider before viewing the email. Outlook.com email recipients who view the encrypted email in Outlook.com, the Outlook for iOS and Android app, or the Windows Mail app can read and reply just like they can with any other email—no extra steps needed. When composing an email in Outlook.com, sensitive information like social security numbers can be detected to provide you with a suggestion to send with encryption.

Prevent forwarding—You can now restrict your email recipients from forwarding or copying emails you send from Outlook.com. Additionally, Microsoft Office documents you attach to these emails are encrypted even after downloading, so if the recipient shares or forwards your attachment, the recipient of the forwarded email will not be able to open the attachment. Emails sent with the prevent forwarding option are also encrypted.

Select Encrypt and Prevent Forwarding so recipients can’t forward or copy the email.

Advanced protection from viruses and cybercrime

In October, we announced advanced link checking and attachment scanning in Outlook.com to protect you from previously unseen viruses and phishing scams in real-time. As cybercriminals resort to tricking people into giving away their sign-in credentials or downloading viruses through malicious emails and links, these advanced protections help keep Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers safe with enterprise-grade security.

Advanced link checking in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—We know it’s also important to provide this advanced protection in other places you encounter links. Starting later this year, links you click in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will also be checked in real-time to determine if the destination website is likely to download malware onto your computer or if it’s related to a phishing scam. If the link is suspicious, you will be redirected to a warning screen recommending you don’t access the site.

If you click an unsafe link, you’ll see a warning screen recommending not to continue.

Additional security protecting your account

Today’s announcements have focused on new, advanced protection capabilities for our Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers. However, those who use our free services also have strong protections in place. This includes robust Microsoft account security like two-factor authentication and anomalous sign-in detection. In addition, all Outlook.com attachments and links in emails are scanned for known viruses and phishing threats. OneDrive scans files on download for known threats, provides file versioning for all file types, and sends notifications if a mass file deletion is detected. We also implement industry standards with encryption at rest and in transit. These core capabilities align with the Microsoft promise to offer a high degree of security and protection for all our users.

Availability and feedback

We’re excited to provide these new advanced protection capabilities to our subscribers. Ransomware detection & recovery and Files Restore start rolling out today and will be available to all Office 365 subscribers soon. Password protected sharing links, email encryption, and prevent forwarding will start rolling out in the coming weeks. Advanced link checking and advanced attachment scanning is already available in Outlook.com, and advanced link checking in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will be coming the second half of 2018. Visit our support page to learn more about all the advanced protection features included in Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscriptions.

Let us know what you think of our new features. Share your thoughts and ideas in the OneDrive UserVoice, Outlook UserVoice, Word UserVoice, Excel UserVoice, and PowerPoint UserVoice.

The post Defend yourself from cybercrime with new Office 365 capabilities appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Get more done in Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

Work together more effectively with updates to iOS and Mac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional updates

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

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

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

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

Earlier today in San Francisco, Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft AI & Research, demonstrated how Microsoft is infusing intelligent technologies across our core products to make artificial intelligence (AI) available to everyone, with the simple goal of helping people deliver their best work.

Office 365 is built on Microsoft’s powerful platform for AI that makes advancements in machine learning and AI accessible to every developer and organization. From document translation to intelligent threat detection, AI is already enhancing the productivity experience of over 120 million commercial Office 365 users.

New Office 365 AI capabilities this month help subscribers discover insights from data, leverage organizational knowledge, arrive on time for events, and more. Read on for details.

Automatically unlock rich insights with AI (preview)

Every day, millions of Office 365 subscribers rely on Excel to perform complex analysis and derive value from their organizations’ data with intelligent tools like Flash Fill and advanced data transformation. For many, however, extracting key insights from a new data set can be intimidating. Today, we’re announcing the preview of Insights in Excel—a new service that automatically highlights patterns it detects, which makes it easier for everyone to explore and analyze their data. Powered by machine learning, Insights helps identify trends, outliers, and other useful visualizations, providing new and useful perspectives on data. Insights begins rolling out in preview to Office insiders this month.

Excel will provide automatic insights.

Master company lingo with machine learning

Every workplace is unique, and understanding the internal acronyms in use across an organization can be essential to success. Today, we announced a new Microsoft Word feature called Acronyms. Powered by machine learning, Acronyms helps people understand shorthand that is commonly used in their own workplaces by leveraging the Microsoft Graph to surface definitions of terms that have been previously defined across emails and documents. Acronyms will begin rolling out to Word Online for Office 365 commercial subscribers in 2018.

Master company acronyms in Word Online.

Get to events on time with Outlook

In 2017, we rolled out several new capabilities in Outlook that help users automatically detect trips and deliveries, triage email, schedule meetings, and more. Today, we’re expanding this set of AI-powered tools by bringing Cortana to the Outlook mobile app to help users stay on top of their day. When it is time to leave for appointments, Outlook will now send a notification—with directions for both driving and public transit—taking into account current location, the event location, and real-time traffic information. Time to leave in Outlook is rolling out to iOS users this month in markets where Cortana is available.

Outlook will notify you when it’s time to leave for your next event.

Bring people, ideas, and content together with Microsoft Whiteboard Preview

This month, we also announced the preview of Microsoft Whiteboard for Windows 10 devices—a freeform digital canvas where people, ideas, and content can come together. Microsoft Whiteboard Preview is built for teams who ideate and work together across multiple devices and locations. Unlike traditional whiteboards, the app uses AI to recognize freeform drawings and turn them into standard shapes, so it’s easier to create great-looking tables, diagrams, and flowcharts using only a pen. Users can work together in real-time on shared content and automatically save to the cloud to pick their work up later from another device. Microsoft Whiteboard is now available in preview from the Windows Store.

Find text in images with intelligent search

Earlier this year, we introduced the ability for OneDrive and SharePoint to automatically recognize the content within images and detect whiteboards, screenshots, receipts, and more. Today, we are expanding this capability to automatically extract searchable text from those images, making it easier to find a wide range of content, including receipts and business cards, using memorable search terms and without needing to know where the images are stored. Text in image search is currently rolling out and will be available to all Office 365 commercial subscribers by the end of December.

Search for text in images stored in Office 365.

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability:

• Insights in Excel is starting to roll out in preview to Office 365 commercial subscribers enrolled in Office Insiders, in the United States this month. Because this feature is powered by machine learning, it will provide increasingly advanced analysis as usage of the feature grows over time.
• Acronyms will be rolling out to Word Online for Office 365 commercial subscribers enrolled in Office Insiders in 2018.
• Time to leave is rolling out to Outlook for iOS users in our Insider program this month, and then to all Outlook for iOS users in coming months. We also plan to make it available in Outlook for Android 2018.
• Microsoft Whiteboard Preview is now available for Windows users in the Windows Store.
• Text in image search is currently rolling out to Office 365 commercial subscribers and will be available worldwide by the end of 2017.

The post New to Office 365 in December—extending human ingenuity with everyday AI appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

An ad-free experience

The Outlook.com interface is now free of ads for Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers. This includes banner ads as well as advertisements in the message list—commonly referred to as native ads. Without ads, you’ll have less distractions and faster page load times, so you can be more focused and have a better email experience.

Sophisticated protection against email threats

Email is one of the most popular ways that criminals trick people into giving away their passwords or downloading viruses and ransomware. That’s why all Outlook.com accounts already feature robust spam and virus filtering and support from a global security team that works tirelessly to stop these threats.

For Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers, we now offer additional security against the most sophisticated types of threats in two ways:

• Scanning attachments—Sophisticated techniques detect new types of malware previously not seen, giving you protection against today’s most advanced threats.
• Checking links—When you click a link in an email, it is checked in real-time to determine if the destination website is likely to download viruses or malware onto your computer. If the site is found to be malicious, a warning screen alerts you not to access the site.

More mailbox storage

In our new Office 365–based infrastructure, a free Outlook.com account now receives 15 GB of email storage space. Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers enjoy even larger amounts of storage: 50 GB of space in total. Today, we’re also boosting storage limits to 50 GB for all our loyal Outlook.com users whose mailbox size is 12 GB or larger.

Premium support

If you need help on an Outlook.com account issue, you’ll receive free technical support as an Office 365 subscriber. Whether you call us on the phone or reach out via in-app support, you get our highest levels of care and support.

How to get started

Getting started and using these premium features in Outlook.com is easy.

• It’s automatic—We activate the premium Outlook.com benefits based on the email address you used to sign up for your Office 365 subscription. Addresses ending in @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com, and @msn.com all qualify. Please note that if you use the Connected Accounts feature to access a @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or other third-party account from Outlook.com—the advanced email security features do not apply to these accounts.
• You can share the benefits—If you have an Office 365 Home subscription and share your Office 365 benefits with others, they will get these benefits for their Outlook.com mailboxes—including the advanced security, ad-free experience, and 50 GB of email storage.
• The rollout is underway—We’ve already begun rolling these capabilities out to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers worldwide. The process of updating all accounts will take about one month. So if you don’t see them right away, don’t worry—they are on the way.

To learn more about the features and see a list of frequently asked questions, please check out the Premium Outlook.com features for Office 365 subscribers help topic.

We hope you enjoy these new benefits, and we look forward to bringing even more premium value to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers in the months ahead!

—The Outlook.com team

The post Premium Outlook.com features now available to Office 365 subscribers appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Extending Visio to new audiences

Information workers today want a simple yet powerful way to work visually. As a web-based, lightweight diagramming tool, Visio Online is the perfect solution: with it you can create, edit, and share diagrams online, helping you visualize information in new ways from anywhere. Plus, diagrams are available for anyone in your organization to view—even those without a Visio Online license—so you can get feedback on critical diagrams from all important stakeholders.

Visio Online comes with a host of templates for a variety of audiences, including starter diagrams for basic flowcharts, process diagrams, timelines, business matrixes, SDL diagrams, and many more. Visualizing information is easy—just drag and drop shapes onto the canvas, change a shape’s color or the overall diagram theme, and quickly link one shape to another with connectors. Plus, you can securely share web-based diagrams through OneDrive for Business. (Visio Online Plan 1 and Plan 2 include 2 GB of OneDrive storage. See below for more details about these plans.)

Visio Online comes with diagramming templates to help you get started fast.

“All in all, Visio Online is fantastic, especially for me. Normally, I just make quick drawings to use in documentation, etc., and I think that will be a lot easier with this product.” —Graves Kilsgaard, systems developer at KMC Foods

Cloud-first innovations

Since the beginning of last year, Visio has been committed to releasing innovative, cloud-first capabilities that unlock creativity for professional diagram creators. This continuous, accelerated innovation has resulted in a host of major releases that, in addition to Visio Online, extend Visio’s diagramming tool set.

Here’s a look at each of the capabilities that are only available in the cloud:

• Power BI is Microsoft’s cloud-based data visualization tool that helps companies gain actionable insights from complex datasets. Today, Power BI includes a new visual—Visio diagrams—which can be linked to live data and embedded within a Power BI dashboard. The Visio and Power BI integration is currently in public preview and planned for release next year. Learn more about this new Power BI feature.
• Data Visualizer converts process map data in Excel into data-driven diagrams in Visio. Using highly visual diagrams instead of table-based numbers, you can surface new process insights that lead to creative solutions for complex problems.
• Visio Viewer for iOS allows you to view and interact with Visio diagrams on both iPad and iPhone. You can easily share diagrams through OneDrive or SharePoint and then access them on your favorite iOS device.
• PowerPoint Slide Snippets enables you select specific diagram parts, give them a title, and export them as slides in PowerPoint. In this way you can create an entire PowerPoint presentation to break down complex diagrams into individual pieces for easier comprehension.

New innovations, new subscription models

Visio Online is available in Visio Online Plan 1. It is also included in our most comprehensive Visio cloud offering, Visio Online Plan 2 (previously Visio Pro for Office 365). Viewing diagrams is free for most Office 365 customers. The innovations described above are only available in Visio Online Plan 2. You can compare Visio versions to learn more about each Visio offer.

Please visit the Visio website for more details on each plan, as well as options for trying the Visio Online experience and our cloud-first innovations for free. We also invite you to submit ideas for more cloud innovations on our UserVoice site. For questions about our latest releases, please email us at tellvisio@microsoft.com. To stay informed of the latest Visio releases, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, as well as check in with the latest Visio news.

—The Visio team

Frequently asked questions

Q. Do I need to install anything to start using Visio Online?

A. No. Visio Online is a web-based application. Customers can also sign in directly at microsoft.com/visio.

Q. Do I need a Visio Online subscription to view Visio Online diagrams?

A. No. Anyone with an Office 365 subscription can view diagrams created and shared through Visio Online. This way the entire organization can be involved in the diagramming process.

Q. Where can I read more about starting Visio Online?

A. Please read this support article to learn more.

Q. Are there more differences between Visio Online Plans 1 and 2 than mentioned here?

A. Yes. Please visit the Visio website for more details on each plan.

Q. Does Visio Online Plan 2 include more than 2 GB of OneDrive storage?

A. Both Visio Online Plans 1 and 2 come with 2 GB of OneDrive for Business storage. Customers can buy additional OneDrive storage if needed.

Q. How do the new capabilities and plans affect Visio Services and Visio Pro for Office 365.

A. Visio Online is replacing Visio Services for SharePoint Online customers, and Visio Online Plan 2 is the new name for Visio Pro for Office 365.

Q. I own a Visio Pro for Office 365 (now Visio Online Plan 2) license but am not able to access Visio Online to create diagrams in a browser. When and how can I access this functionality?

A. In the coming months, current Visio Pro for Office 365 (now Visio Online Plan 2) customers will have access to Visio Online to create, edit, and share diagrams in their favorite browser. These users will have access to Visio Online from the landing page and have a Visio entry point in Office.com. Until then, you can access Visio Online from the Create New menu in OneDrive or SharePoint Online if the Preview switch is turned on in the SharePoint Online tenant admin settings.

The post Visio Online and Visio’s new cloud innovations help you unlock creativity appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we’re announcing a redesigned web experience for Office.com, an easy-to-remember URL to help you sign in to Office 365 and get to all your apps, documents, sites, and people. We’ve also simplified the Office 365 app launcher to help you open and switch between your web apps easier. Finally, we’re introducing the new Office 365 gallery to provide Office 365 users with personalized information about the apps, tools, and services already in their subscription.

Get started faster with Office.com

Office.com is the fastest and easiest way to get started with Office 365—by getting to your favorite app quickly, opening your Office documents, starting a new project, or seeing the activity across your shared files. We are also improving the Office.com search experience to allow you to find Office 365 documents, apps, people, and sites directly from Office.com.

Office 365 app launcher

Updates to the Office 365 app launcher make opening and switching between your web apps easier than ever by highlighting the most used apps in Office 365. The simplified design provides smarter defaults that are relevant to the type of work you do and allows you to access recent online Office documents from anywhere in Office 365.

Explore your apps

You can now explore and learn about the full range of applications you already have access to with the new Office 365 gallery. Based on your subscription and usage patterns, the gallery provides suggestions on the right app to use for what you are trying to accomplish. You’ll see descriptions, resources, and quick access to install desktop or mobile versions. Click Explore all your apps from Office.com or the Office 365 app launcher to access the gallery.

Office 365 customers will see these changes roll out soon. Watch the Microsoft Mechanics session below to learn more. If you’re attending Microsoft Ignite this year, be sure to check out BRK1050—New web experiences in Office 365 that empower your users to get an inside look at these new experiences.

—The Office 365 team

The post New Office 365 app launcher and Office.com help you be more productive on the web appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Create a beautiful communication site in seconds

Communication sites are perfect for internal cross-company campaigns, weekly and monthly reports or status updates, product launches, events and more. To help you jumpstart getting your message out fast, communication sites provide configurable templates for the sites and pages within. When you click Create site from the SharePoint home in Office 365, you have a choice of three initial site designs:

• Topic—Select the Topic design when you have a lot of information to share, such as news, events and other content.
• Showcase—Use the Showcase design to feature a product, team or event using photos or images.
• Blank—Start with a blank site and make your design come to life quickly and easily.

Communication site designs (from left to right): Topic, Showcase and Blank.

And it is easy to tell your story. Once your new site is created, simply drag-and-drop to reorganize web parts on the page to bring your use cases and scenarios to life. News and pages allow for multi-column layouts to represent your message in a meaningful, intuitive fashion.

Learn how to create a communication site in Office 365, add a page and work with column layouts.

Share your plans and updates in engaging, interactive ways

Communication sites allow people to create and share recurring updates beyond email. When you create a page on a communication site, you can embed documents and video, and dynamically pull in real-time data from across Office 365, including documents from SharePoint, Power BI reports, Microsoft Stream videos and Yammer discussions. The resulting page is a rich and dynamic communication. And the page persists on the site, so people can refer to it easily, even as the membership of your team changes, so new members can more easily get up to speed.

The new capabilities for the rich section layouts and new web parts can be utilized on SharePoint team sites as well.

Consume, create and connect from your mobile device via the SharePoint apps

It’s easy to access, engage with and create content for communication sites from any device. The full site, pages, news, navigation, search and more are natively viewable, functional and engaging. Read a page, create a news article, engage in a Yammer conversation—all in the context of the site—from within the SharePoint mobile app experience.

You can download the SharePoint mobiles apps for iOS and Android today, and the new features will be available in the coming weeks. Learn more about the SharePoint mobile app for iOS, SharePoint mobile app for Android and SharePoint app for Windows 10 Mobile.

Communication sites help further refine and enhance your message

Beyond what we shared during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, communication sites have additional capabilities to further refine and enhance your message.

Make your home page and sub-pages look great

• Full-width layouts—The Hero and Image web parts can be placed in a section layout that spans the page from left to right, giving you ways to emphasize your most essential information.
• Enhanced title region with custom header image—Visually represent your home page, news and subpages with a compelling header graphic and title. You control what portion of the image is the most important, so it looks great, and as intended, across web and mobile experiences.

Continue the discussion in context to ensure reach, retention and engagement

• Comments on pages—Each news article and page can have its own set of comments. It is possible to use the Yammer web part for broad discussion scenarios as well as targeted responses to engage your viewers on the sole message and content on the page—all keeping within the context of the page.
• Share news via email—When you share news via email from a communication site, it’s not just a blue link; it’s a visual, informative preview that adds context to both the email and the news article itself. Within the email, the recipient(s) will see a thumbnail, title, description and an optional message from the sender.

Dynamically pull in and display data, documents and information via web part improvements

• Power BI and Microsoft Stream—Bring in interactive reports using the Power BI web part, and embed single videos or full channels from Microsoft Stream—the single destination within Office 365 for your cross-company video management. Both Power BI and Microsoft Stream are now generally available.
• GIF support—When you add an Image web part into a news article or page, you can now include animated GIFs in your layout.
• New “See all” pages—When there is more content than can be shown within the first view the Highlighted content and Site activity web parts, you can click See all to go to a full-page experience to see all the content and activity.
• Updated News web part—Showcase your news using multiple layouts to highlight what’s important with greater flexibility. You can use the default Top story layout, view news as a list or side-by-side.

Learn more about using web parts on pages and news, which highlights all web parts available in SharePoint Online.

Mark your calendars

Join us for one or more of our events in the coming days and weeks to share and explore the value of communication sites.

• SharePoint communication sites AMA—On Wednesday, June 28, 2017 from 9–10 a.m. PDT, bring your questions and feedback to the SharePoint communication sites AMA within this dedicated SharePoint community space of the Microsoft Tech Community for SharePoint. We’re inviting our deepest business and technical subject matter experts for an active, informative hour—driven by YOU!
• Jeff Teper takes over @SharePoint—On Tuesday, July 10, 2017 from 9:30–10:30 a.m. PDT, Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for SharePoint, OneDrive and Office, will take over the @SharePoint Twitter handle. He’ll tackle your questions and feedback both with written responses and video snippets as only he can—no tweet left behind!
• LIVE customer + MVPs panel webinar—On Wednesday, July 13, 2017 at 8 a.m. PDT, join in to hear how one of our customers, Shire, successfully planned and implemented their new digital workspace—inclusive of communication sites. You will hear both from Shire employees and Office 365 MVPs. Register today.
• On-demand webcast—On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, Farren Roper and I present the “SharePoint: Inform and engage your employees” business webcast. Be the first to be notified when it’s available: sign up today. And in advance, read the new, related eBook, “4 secrets to a connected workplace.”

Throughout the lifecycle of your projects, launches and internal campaigns, let the SharePoint intranet help you move seamlessly from concept to final product. The powerful, dynamic SharePoint user experiences let you clearly communicate your message throughout your company.

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How can I expect communication sites to roll out to Office 365 customers?

A. Communication sites will begin to roll out to First Release customers within the coming week—starting with First Release Select Users—and will be completed within 2–3 weeks. We are targeting end of August 2017 for complete worldwide rollout.

Q. When will the SharePoint mobile apps get updated to natively view communication sites?

A. We are planning to push updates to the SharePoint mobile app for iOS within a few days, and to the SharePoint mobile app for Android in the coming weeks. Install today. Update often.

Q. Can I use a communication site in an extranet scenario with external users?

A. Yes, communication sites will support external users for extranet use cases. Initially, Office 365 admins would need to enable it at the site level via PowerShell. We are working on the admin user interface to enable external sharing in a similar fashion as is done today for team sites.

The post SharePoint communication sites begin rollout to Office 365 customers appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Outlook for iOS and Android is on a mission to help you accomplish more with your email and calendar while on the go. With our latest release, we’re addressing one of our most highly requested features with improvements to our People experience.

You now have the ability to add and edit contacts right from Outlook on iOS and Android. We’ve also completely redesigned the contact card to show more details—including latest conversations and shared files—and enabled easier calling and messaging with your contacts.

Here’s a deeper look at what’s new.

Add or edit your important contacts while on the go

With our latest update, you can now add and edit contacts for Outlook.com and Office 365 accounts (support for Google contacts coming soon).

To create a new contact in Outlook, simply go to the People tab and tap the + sign. You can also add a new contact directly from a message or event by tapping the name of a person and then tapping Add Contact. Lastly, you can also use the search bar in the People tab to find and add contacts from your company directory.

Once you’ve added a contact, you can edit their information by opening the contact and tapping the Edit button. Any changes made in Outlook for iOS and Android will be synced and available across all versions of Outlook.

View details about your contacts at a glance

The contact card has also been redesigned to put your contacts’ key details front and center. Tap on any name in your messages or events to access phone numbers, email addresses and other details, like Skype IDs, along with your contact’s picture. Tapping a phone number will allow you to choose between calling, messaging or FaceTiming your contact.

The new contact card now also displays your recent conversations, shared attachments and any upcoming meetings you have with that person.

Save contacts to your device

While you can fully manage your contacts in Outlook, you can also save your contacts to the default Contacts app on iOS and Android. This allows you to easily see the name of a contact when you receive a call or text message from them, and view all of their contact information directly in the built-in Contacts app.

Due to the underlying capabilities of iOS and Android, how this works differs slightly by platform.

On iOS, Outlook provides a one-way push of contact information from Outlook to your phone. All newly added contacts and changes should be made in the Outlook app, and these changes will sync to your built-in Contacts app and your email service. However, edits made in the Contacts app will not sync back to Outlook or your email service, and will be overwritten the next time Outlook syncs to the Contacts app. You should avoid making edits in the Contacts app. To enable Caller ID with your Outlook contacts, navigate to your account within Settings and tap Save Contacts.

On Android, Outlook is able to fully synchronize with the Contacts app. Therefore, users can choose to add new contacts or make changes in either the Outlook app or by using the built-in Contacts app on Android. Changes made in either location will sync back to your email service. To enable full contact sync on Android, navigate to your account within Settings and tap Sync Contacts.

If you’d like to remove the contacts at a later time, you can toggle the switch in Outlook and they will be removed from your address book.

Got a feature request?

Let us know what you think of our new People experiences! If you have other ideas for what would make Outlook even better for you, let us know right from Outlook by going to Settings > Suggest a Feature.

—The Outlook team

The post Improving People in Outlook for iOS and Android appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we’re pleased to announce Groups is now rolling out to Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android. Groups is already available in Outlook for Windows and on the web—so now you can access your group conversations and content no matter which platform you use.

With these updates, you can:

• View your group list.
• Read and reply to group conversations.
• Add group events to your personal calendar.
• View unread messages sent to the group.
• View group details within the group card (Outlook for iOS and Android only).

There is more to come as we continue to work on making Groups better in response to your input, so stay tuned.

Recently released updates for Groups in Outlook

In addition to bringing groups to more Outlook apps, we’ve released several new features for Groups in Outlook on other platforms, too.

Give guest access—Last fall, we updated Outlook on the web to give you the ability to set up guest access for people outside your organization, set group classification as defined by Office 365 admins, and view usage guidelines. Now, these same capabilities are available in Outlook for Windows.

Invite people to join—One of our most requested improvements was an easier way to invite multiple people to join a group. We’ve released the Invite to join feature to Outlook on the web, which lets you create invitation links and share them with others via email or other channels, giving them a quick way to join the group.

Multi-delete conversations—Group owners can now multi-select conversations and delete them from the group conversations space in Outlook for Windows.

Send email as a group—Office 365 admins can grant send-as and send-on-behalf-of permissions to members of a group using the Exchange admin center. Group members who have these permissions can then send emails as the group, or on behalf of the group, from Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web.

What’s next

We’re always listening to your feedback as we deliver new Groups capabilities to Outlook. Here are a few of your key requests we are going to tackle next:

• Add appointments to a group calendar in Outlook for Windows—When adding an event to a group calendar, you will have the option to do so without sending an invite to everyone in the group.
• Addition of Mail Contacts as guests—You will be able to easily add Mail Contacts in your company’s directory as a guest in a group.

Thanks for the feedback, and please keep it coming via our UserVoice site.

—The Outlook team

Frequently asked questions

Q. Now that Groups support is being added to Outlook for iOS and Android, what happens to the standalone Outlook Groups app?

A. Customers gave us feedback that they wanted Groups available directly in Outlook for iOS and Android. The Outlook Groups app will still be available while we continue to enhance Groups experiences in Outlook, such as adding support for group files, calendar and notebooks.

Q. Why am I not seeing Groups yet?

A. Groups is rolling out to Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android and will be available for eligible users in the coming weeks. Even if you are using the latest build of Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android, Groups will only be available to those who have joined or been added to a group. Once we add the ability to create and join groups on Mac, iOS and Android, every Office 365 user will see Groups in Outlook.

Q. Is Groups available to Outlook.com users?

A. Groups is for commercial users of Office 365 and is not available for Outlook.com.

Q. Why am I not seeing all my groups in Outlook for Mac?

A. Outlook for Mac currently shows the top 10 most active groups in Outlook for Mac. We’re working on making all groups visible in a future update.

Q. What about Outlook for Windows 10 Mobile?

A. We’re working on the best way to integrate Groups in Outlook for Windows 10 Mobile. In the meantime, the Outlook Groups app for Windows 10 Mobile helps customers stay on top of all group activities, including conversations, files, calendar and notebook.

Q. Where can I find more about managing Groups in Outlook for my organization?

A. If you are responsible for managing and supporting Outlook for your company, take a look at our IT pro documentation and check out our recently released improvements for administering Groups.

Q. What is coming next for Groups?

A. Stay tuned to the Office 365 Roadmap to see what is on the way.

The post Introducing Groups in Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, during a global webcast from Microsoft headquarters, we announced that Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365—is now generally available in 181 markets and in 19 languages. Since announcing the preview in November, more than 50,000 organizations have started using Microsoft Teams, including Accenture, Alaska Airlines, Cerner Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Deloitte, Expedia, J.B. Hunt, J. Walter Thompson, Hendrick Motorsports, Sage, Trek Bicycle and Three UK. We’ve also introduced more than 100 new features to deliver ongoing innovation and address top customer requests.

With more than 85 million active users, Office 365 empowers individuals, teams and entire organizations with the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration. Office 365 is designed to meet the unique workstyle of every group with purpose-built, integrated applications: Outlook for enterprise-grade email; SharePoint for intelligent content management; Yammer for networking across the organization; Skype for Business as the backbone for enterprise voice and video; and now, Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365.

Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365

Microsoft Teams is a digital workspace built on four core promises: chat for today’s teams, a hub for teamwork, customization options and security teams trust.

Chat for today’s teams

Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversations experience, with threaded, persistent chat to keep everyone engaged. We’ve rolled out many new communication features since preview, including audio calling from mobile devices, plus video on Android, which is coming soon to iOS and Windows Phone. And we’ve addressed numerous customer requests, adding the ability to email a channel, including attachments, send messages with markdown-based formatting, and receive notifications about all posts in a channel.

Move a conversation from email into Microsoft Teams with rich formatting, including attachments.

Hub for teamwork

The Office 365 applications and services that people use every day—including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Power BI*—are built into Microsoft Teams, giving people the information and tools they need. We’ve recently added support for open, public teams within an organization. We’ve also enhanced the meeting experience by adding scheduling capabilities, integrating free/busy calendar availability for team members, adding recurrence, and making it easier to transition from chat to high-quality voice and video.

Ad hoc and scheduled voice and video meetings right from within Microsoft Teams.

Customizable for every team

Every team is unique, so we’ve made it easy for teams to customize their workspace with Tabs, Connectors and Bots. More than 150 integrations are available or coming soon, including Bots from hipmunk, Growbot and ModuleQ. We’re also partnering with SAP and Trello to build new integrations. SAP SuccessFactors will help employees and managers track goals and performance as part of the way they work in Microsoft Teams every day. Trello will empower teams to easily get projects done with boards, lists and cards right within Microsoft Teams. These partnerships let users bring important apps and services into Microsoft Teams, truly making it their own hub for teamwork.

New Bots help you to complete tasks within your conversations.

Security teams trust

Finally, Microsoft Teams is built on the Office 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud, delivering the advanced security and compliance capabilities our customers expect. Microsoft Teams supports global standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, ISO27001 and HIPAA. We also added support for audit log search, eDiscovery and legal hold* for channels, chats and files as well as mobile application management with Microsoft Intune.* And starting today, Microsoft Teams is automatically provisioned within Office 365.

These security and compliance capabilities are critical for enterprise customers, but our responsibility at Microsoft goes beyond this. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. With that in mind, we’re working to ensure every team member can participate, with new accessibility features, including support for screen readers, high contrast and keyboard-only navigation. This will enable Microsoft Teams to be more inclusive and tap into the collective brainpower and potential of every person.

Customers achieve more with Microsoft Teams

We’re thrilled by the enthusiasm of customers like Trek Bicycle, who’ve built Microsoft Teams into the way they work every day.

“Across Trek’s global teams, the integrated collection of Office 365 applications serves up a common toolset to collaboratively drive the business forward. We see Microsoft Teams as the project hub of Office 365 where everybody knows where to find the latest documents, notes and tasks, all in-line with team conversations for complete context. Teams is quickly becoming a key part of Trek’s get-things-done-fast culture.”
—Laurie Koch, vice president of Global Customer Service at Trek Bicycle

Start using Microsoft Teams today

Moving forward, we’ll provide a regular rhythm of new features and capabilities. For example, we are targeting to deliver guest access capabilities in June along with deeper integration with Outlook and a richer developer platform. Expect our pace to be rapid and responsive to customer needs.

Start using Microsoft Teams today.

To learn more about Microsoft Teams and how it works, join our Ask Us Anything session on the Microsoft Tech Community on March 22, 2017 at 9 a.m. PDT (UTC-8).

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

*Additional subscription may be required.

The post Microsoft Teams rolls out to Office 365 customers worldwide appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, at an event in New York City, we announced Microsoft Teams—the new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 global, secure cloud. Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.

At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to the mission of helping people and organizations achieve more—and reinventing productivity for the cloud and mobile world is core to our ambition. We built Microsoft Teams because we see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done. Teams are now more agile and organizational structures more flat to keep communications and information flowing. With Microsoft Teams, we aspire to create a more open, digital environment that makes work visible, integrated and accessible—across the team—so everyone can stay in the know.

Microsoft Teams delivers on four core promises to create a digital workspace for high performing teams.

Chat for today’s teams

First and foremost, Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversation experience for today’s teams. Microsoft Teams supports not only persistent but also threaded chats to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations are, by default, visible to the entire team, but there is of course the ability for private discussions. Skype is deeply integrated, so teams can participate in voice and video conferences. And everyone can add personality to their digital workspace with emojis, stickers, GIFs and custom memes to make it their own.

A hub for teamwork

Second, Microsoft Teams brings together the full breadth and depth of Office 365 to provide a true hub for teamwork. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams so people have all the information and tools they need at their fingertips. Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing. Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups—our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others.

Customizable for each team

Third, since all teams are unique, we’ve invested deeply in ways for people to customize their workspace, with rich extensibility and open APIs available at general availability. For example, Tabs provides quick access to frequently used documents and cloud services. Microsoft Teams also shares the same Connector model as Exchange, providing notifications and updates from third-party services like Twitter or GitHub. Further, we are including full support for the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into your team environment.

Today, we are also announcing the Microsoft Teams Developer Preview program, allowing developers to extend Microsoft Teams. We will have integrations with over 150 partners at general availability—including our early partners Zendesk, Asana, Hootsuite and Intercom. This is the first step in providing the customization users want and the tools and support our developer community will need to integrate with Microsoft Teams.

Security teams trust

Finally, Microsoft Teams provides the advanced security and compliance capabilities that our Office 365 customers expect. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Like all our commercial services, we have a transparent operational model with no standing access to customer data. Microsoft Teams will support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more. And, as customers would expect, Microsoft Teams is served out of our hyper-scale global network of data centers, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally, just as any other Office 365 service.

Microsoft Teams joins the Office 365 universal toolkit

Microsoft Teams joins the broadest and deepest portfolio of collaboration applications and services to help solve the diverse needs of people and organizations globally. As we’ve learned from our 85 million active monthly users, all groups have a diverse set of needs when it comes to working together. Office 365 is designed for the unique workstyle of every group and includes purpose-built applications, all deeply integrated together.

• SharePoint provides intranets and content management solutions to more than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people.
• Yammer is the social network for work, enabling cross-company discussions for 85 percent of the Fortune 500.
• Skype for Business provides real-time voice, video and conferencing and hosts more than 100 million meetings a month.
• Office 365 Groups is our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another.

Turn on Microsoft Teams today

Early private preview customers are seeing benefits in using Microsoft Teams. “Based on our early use of Microsoft Teams in Office 365, we believe it is the digital cockpit we’ve been waiting for,” said Andrew Wilson, CIO of Accenture. With the public preview available today, administrators can enable Microsoft Teams through the Office 365 admin center. Ready to get started—see Microsoft Teams in action in our Microsoft Mechanics video.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Frequently asked questions

Q. Which Office 365 plans will include Microsoft Teams?

A. Microsoft Teams is available to Office 365 commercial customers with one of the following plans: Business Essentials, Business Premium, and Enterprise E1, E3 and E5. Microsoft Teams will also be available to customers who purchased E4 prior to its retirement.

Q. What action do Office 365 IT admins need to take to access the preview of Microsoft Teams?

A. To turn on Microsoft Teams, IT admins should go to their Office 365 admin center, click Settings > Services & Add Ins > Microsoft Teams.

Q. When will Microsoft Teams roll out broadly to all eligible Office 365 customers?

A. Microsoft Teams is available in preview to eligible Office 365 commercial customers beginning November 2, 2016. We expect the service to become generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2017.

Q. What platforms does Microsoft Teams support?

A. Microsoft Teams runs on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and web platforms.

Q. What level of security and compliance does Microsoft Teams support?

A. Microsoft Teams is expected to be Office 365 Tier C compliant at launch. This broad set of global compliance and data protection requirements includes ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SOC 1 Type I & II, SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA and FERPA. Microsoft Teams also enforces two-factor authentication, single sign on through Active Directory and encryption of data in transit and at rest.

Q. What trainings are available to help Office 365 admins learn about Microsoft Teams?

A. We have two different trainings currently available for our IT admins. To view the trainings, visit the Microsoft Virtual Academy website. We have a video on Microsoft Mechanics and more information on the Microsoft Teams Tech Community.

The post Introducing Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device

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

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

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

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

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

And before the end of calendar year 2016:

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

The mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

SharePoint mobile app—your intranet in your pocket

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

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

SharePoint home

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

Modern team sites

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps integration

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

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

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

Roadmap for the mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

And during calendar year 2016:

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

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

The SharePoint Framework—open and connected platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the third quarter of 2016, you will see:

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

And by the end of 2016, we will deliver:

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

Security, privacy and compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

To summarize, we currently support:

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

This quarter, we will release:

• Dynamic conditional access policies.

And by the end of 2016, you will see:

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

Learn more about these announcements in this video:

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

Connecting you with innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jeff Teper

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

Office 365 availability

Since launching Office 365 two years ago, we have continued to invest deeply in our infrastructure to ensure a highly available service.  While information has been available in detail for our current customers, today we’re making this information available to all customers considering Office 365.   We measure availability as the number of minutes that the Office 365 service is available in a calendar month as a percentage of the total number of minutes in that month.  We call this measure of availability the uptime number. Within this calculation we include our business, government and education services. The worldwide uptime number for Office 365 for the last four quarters beginning July 2012 and ending June 2013 has been 99.98%, 99.97%, 99.94% and 99.97% respectively.  Going forward we will disclose uptime numbers on a quarterly basis on the Office 365 Trust Center.

Here are a few more details about the uptime number:

1. The uptime number includes Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office Web Apps, weighted on the number of people using each of these services. Customers use these services together, so all of these are taken into account while calculating uptime.
2. This uptime number applies to Office 365 for business, education and government. We do not include consumer services in this calculation.
3. Office 365 ProPlus is an integral part of our service offering but is not included in this calculation of uptime since it largely runs on the users’ devices.
4. Individual customers may experience higher or lower uptime percentages compared to the global uptime numbers depending on location and usage patterns.

As a commitment to running a highly available service, we have a Service Level Agreement of 99.9% that is financially backed.

Availability design principles

We have been building enterprise-class solutions for decades. In addition, Microsoft runs a number of cloud services like Office 365, Windows Azure, CRM Online, Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Bing, Skype and Xbox Live to  name a few. We benefit from this diversity of services, leveraging best practices from each service across the others improving both the design of the software as well as operational processes.

Below are some examples of best practices applied in design and operational processes for Office 365.

Redundancy. Redundancy at every layer–physical, data and functional:

• We build physical redundancy at the disk/card level within servers, the server level within a datacenter and the service level across geographically separate data centers to protect against failures. Each data center has facilities and power redundancy. We have multiple datacenters serving every region.
• To build redundancy at the data level, we constantly replicate data across geographically separate datacenters. Our design goal is to maintain multiple copies of data whether in transit or at rest and failover capabilities to enable rapid recovery.
• In addition to the physical and data redundancy, as one of our core strengths we build Office clients to provide functional redundancy to enable you to be productive using offline functionality when there is no network connectivity.

Resiliency. Active load balancing and constant recovery testing across failure domains:

• We actively balance load to provide end users the best possible experiences in an automated manner. These mechanisms also dynamically prioritize, performing low priority tasks during low activity periods and deferring them during high load.
• We have both automated and manual failover to healthy resources during hardware or software failures and monitoring alerts.
• We routinely perform recovery across failure domains to ensure readiness for circumstances require failovers.

Distributed Services. Functionally distributed component services:

• The component services in Office 365 like Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office Web Apps are functionally distributed, ensuring that the scope and impact of failure in one area is limited to that area alone and not impact others.
• We replicate directory data across these component services so that if one service is experiencing an issue, users are able to login and use other services seamlessly.
• Our operations and deployment teams benefit from the distributed nature of our service, simplifying all aspects of maintenance and deployment, diagnostics, repair and recovery.

Monitoring. Extensive monitoring, recovery and diagnostic tools:

• Our internal monitoring systems continuously monitor the service for any failure and are built to drive automated recovery of the service.
• Our systems analyze any deviations in service behavior to alert on-call engineers to take proactive measures.
• We also have Outside-In monitoring constantly executing from multiple locations around the world both from trusted third party services (for independent SLA verification) and our own worldwide datacenters to raise alerts.
• For diagnostics, we have extensive logging, auditing, and tracing. Granular tracing and monitoring helps us isolate issues to root cause.

Simplification. Reduced complexity drives predictability:

• We use standardized components wherever possible. This leads to fewer deployment and issue isolation complexities as well as predictable failures and recovery.
• We use standardized process wherever possible. The focus is not only on automation but making sure that critical processes are repeated and repeatable.
• We have architected the software components to be loosely coupled so that their deployment and ongoing health don’t require complex orchestration.
• Our change management goes through progressive, staged, instrumented rings of scope and validation before being deployed worldwide.

Human back-up. 24/7 on-call support:

• While we have automated recovery actions where possible, we also have a team of on-call professionals standing by 24×7 to support you. This team includes support engineers, product developers, program managers, product managers and senior leadership.
• With an entire team on call, we have the ability to provide rapid response and information collection towards problem resolution.
• Our on-call professionals while providing back-up, also improve the automated systems every time they are called to help.

Continuous learning

We understand that there will be times when you may experience service interruptions. We do a thorough post-incident review every time an incident occurs regardless of the magnitude of impact. A post-incident review consists of an analysis of what happened, how we responded and how we prevent similar incidents in the future. In the interest of transparency and accountability, we share post-incident review for any major service incidents if your organization was affected. As a large enterprise, we also “eat our own dogfood,” i.e., use our own pre-production service to conduct day-to-day business here at Microsoft. Continuous improvement is a key component to provide a highly available, world-class service.

Consistent communication

Transparency requires consistent communication, especially when you are using online productivity services to conduct your business. We have a number of communication channels such as email, RSS feeds and the Service Health Dashboard. As an Office 365 customer, you get a detailed view into the availability of services that are relevant to your organization. The Office 365 Service Health Dashboard is your window into the current status of your services and your licenses. We continue to drive improvements into the Service Health Dashboard including tracking timeliness of updates to ensure so that you have full insight into your services health.

We also have some exciting new tools to improve your ability to stay up to date with the service.  Last week we released a new feature in the administration portal called “Message Center”. Message Center is a central hub for service communications, tenant reporting and actions required by administrators.  Also, by the end of this year, administrators can expect a new mobile app that will provide service health information as well as other communications regarding their service.

Running a comprehensive and evolving service at ever increasing scale is a challenge and there will be service interruptions despite our efforts. We want to assure you that we are continually learning and are relentless in our commitment to provide you with a reliable highly available service that meets your expectations.  Service continuity is more than an engineering principle it is a commitment to customers in our SLA and as one of the key pillars of Office 365 Trust Center (the other four pillars being Privacy, Security, Compliance and Transparency). This public disclosure of Office 365 uptime is evidence of our ongoing commitment to both Service Continuity and Transparency.

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