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

Let’s dive into the details.

Be productive from anywhere with Windows 365

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

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

Work together and personalize your Microsoft Teams meeting experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increase productivity with new features in your favorite apps

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

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

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

Tools for the future of hybrid work

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

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

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

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

A specialty product for specific scenarios

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

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

About this release

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

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

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

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

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

Office 2021 for consumers and small businesses

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

Our commitment to customers

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

FAQ

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

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

Q. Will the next version of Office include OneNote?

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

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

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

The post Upcoming commercial preview of Microsoft Office LTSC appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Stay on track with Cortana in Windows 10—To help you save time finding what you need and stay focused, we’re releasing a new chat-based Cortana experience in Windows 10 focused on enhancing your productivity. With this, you can ask Cortana using natural language to quickly check your schedule, connect with people, set reminders, or add tasks in Microsoft To Do. You can also find local information, get definitions, and keep track of the latest news, weather, and finance updates with Bing as a Cortana optional connected service. Simply type or click on the microphone button and speak commands such as “Am I free at 9?”, “Find time with Nestor to talk about the budget,” “Join my meeting,” “Remind me to review expenses every Friday at 3 PM,” and more. This productivity focused experience is now generally available in English for customers in the United States with the Windows 10 May 2020 update. In the coming months, with regular app updates through the Microsoft Store, we’ll enhance this experience to support wake word invocation and enable listening when you say “Cortana,” offer more productivity capabilities such as surfacing relevant emails and documents to help you prepare for meetings, and expand supported capabilities for international users.

Stay organized and connected with Play My Emails—To help you manage your time and tasks while listening to new emails and changes to your day, we’re rolling out updates to the Play My Emails experience in Outlook for iOS. You will now be able to ask Cortana to schedule a meeting in response to an email and add an email to your tasks list, making it easier to get things done while you are away from your computer. We have also introduced voice commands and touch targets for sending responses to meeting invitations as well as an option to quickly join an active online meeting or send an “I’m running late” message to the participants. These new task and time management updates are now generally available for customers in the United States with Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS. And, we are excited to confirm that Play My Emails will start to roll out in Outlook for Android in the coming weeks.

Start your day on track with the Briefing email—To help you be well prepared for upcoming meetings and stay on top of commitments, we’re introducing the new Briefing email from Cortana. This personalized brief will appear automatically in your Outlook inbox near the start of your workday, providing intelligent, actionable recommendations of documents for you to review ahead of the day’s meetings and drawing your attention to pending requests or commitments from prior emails that you may want to follow up on. This email will also make it easy for you to reserve “focus time” during your workday for uninterrupted focused work with Microsoft Teams notifications silenced. Briefing is currently rolling out in First Release for Microsoft 365 Enterprise users with Exchange Online mailboxes in English.

As a personal productivity assistant that is a natural part of Microsoft 365, Cortana processes data safely and securely to fulfill your requests. Protecting your data and privacy is our highest priority, and we give you control over your data. These new Cortana experiences are delivered using services that fully comply with Office 365’s enterprise-level privacy, security and compliance promises as laid out in the Online Services Terms, and are enabled by default. For a closer look at the user experience and information on admin configurations, watch this Microsoft Mechanics demo. Try these experiences for yourself today and stay tuned for more innovations coming with Cortana in Microsoft 365 to help you make the most of your time.

The post Making it easier to stay caught up with Cortana in Microsoft 365 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.

Investments to help with your Windows 10 deployment journey

With Windows 7 end of support coming on January 14, 2020, we made investments to help you through every step of your journey to get and stay current with Windows 10.

To start, we built Windows 10 and Office 365 with compatibility as a core design principle, making investments across applications, add-ins, and macros in Windows 10 and Office 365 to ensure your environment continues to work as expected following an upgrade.

Tools like Windows Autopilot can help eliminate the cost and complexity associated with creating, maintaining, and loading custom images. Desktop Analytics (currently in public preview) provides intelligence to help you make informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows clients. The Office Readiness Toolkit helps you assess compatibility as you make the move to Office 365 ProPlus. The Desktop App Assure program from Microsoft FastTrack provides dedicated engineering resources to help remediate any application compatibility issues you might have across Windows 10 and Office 365.

New FastTrack deployment guidance for Windows 10

Sometimes you have a complex scenario and aren’t even sure where to start, or you’ve encountered a problem that has your migration stalled. There are times when you need to talk to an expert to get guidance on where to go next. Today I’m happy to announce new FastTrack for Windows 10 deployment guidance to do just that.

With FastTrack, we help you to envision a technical plan, determine how to onboard and deploy new services and/or users, and work with you as you deploy to get the most value out of your technology investments. This assistance is available at no additional cost for those with 150 or more licenses of an eligible service or plan.

Learn more and get started

Microsoft 365—which includes Windows 10 and Office 365—provides the most secure productivity experience. We’re committed to working with you every step of the way. To learn more, watch our Microsoft Mechanics video and then sign in to www.microsoft.com/FastTrack to request assistance and get started.

The post Speed up your Windows 10 deployment with new FastTrack guidance appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

• FSLogix technology, which improves the performance of Office 365 ProPlus in multi-user virtual environments, is now available at no additional cost for Microsoft 365 customers.
• Windows Server 2019 will add support for OneDrive Files On-Demand in the coming months.
• Office 365 ProPlus, our flagship Office experience, will be supported on Windows Server 2019.
• And we’ve added new capabilities to Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams in Office 365 ProPlus to improve the user experience in a virtualized environment.

Get the same reliable experience with Office apps in any environment with FSLogix

The FSLogix container technology is now fully integrated with Office apps in virtual environments. This technology improves the speed and reliability of virtualized Office apps to feel like the experience of using Office apps on a dedicated machine. The FSLogix containers work in virtualized environments, including those provided by Microsoft, Citrix, and VMWare. This technology is now included at no extra charge if you are licensed for any of the following Microsoft solutions:

• Microsoft 365 E3/E5/A3/A5/Student Use Benefits/F1/Business
• Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5
• Windows 10 Education A3/A5
• Windows 10 VDA per user
• Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Client Access License (CAL) and Subscriber Access License (SAL)

Learn more about FSLogix.

Easily access OneDrive Files On-Demand with Windows Server 2019

Using OneDrive Files On-Demand, people can access all their files in OneDrive while only downloading the ones they’re using to save hard drive space on their devices. In the coming months, Windows Server 2019 will support OneDrive Files On-Demand for virtualized Office apps users. This support will couple the fast access to files that users love, with reduced User Profile Disk storage requirements and cost savings that businesses need. Learn more about how to take advantage of this new capability with Windows Server 2019.

Run Office 365 ProPlus on Windows Server 2019

While Office 365 ProPlus provides the best experience when running on Windows 10, we know some of you rely on Windows Server to provide virtual desktop services for your users. For those still needing to migrate from Windows Server 2008/R2 before it reaches end of support in January 2020, or from Windows Server 2012/R2 before it is no longer supported as a platform for ProPlus, I’m happy to share that we’ll support Office 365 ProPlus running on Windows Server 2019. This enables you to take advantage of the Files On-Demand capabilities coming to Windows Server 2019 I mentioned above, and to leverage the latest Windows Server platform.

Get a better experience with Office apps in virtual environments

There are also significant enhancements to the virtualization experience for several apps in Office 365, including Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams.

• Outlook Cached Mode improvements help people running Outlook on virtual desktops access email and calendars faster:
  • Sync Inbox before Calendar means people get faster access to email so they can start working right away.
  • Reduce the number of folders that are synced by default, and an Admin option to reduce the Calendar sync window; both of which help syncs complete faster.
• OneDrive now features a per-machine installation option, allowing people to share a single installation of the OneDrive app while still maintaining their own individual folders and files as if they are on their own device.
• Teams also has a per-machine installation for Chat and Collaboration. In the coming months, we’ll offer Calling and Meetings in Teams through Audio/Video Media optimization in collaboration with Citrix. We’re also planning additional Teams enhancements, including improved app deployment, support for Windows Virtual Desktop, performance enhancements, and optimized caching for non-persistent setups.
• Windows Search per-user index allows each user profile to persist its own search index, so that search is fast and individualized.

If virtualization is an important part of your IT strategy, we think you’re going to love these new capabilities. If you’re interested in evaluating the Office 365 apps enhancements we announced today in your own virtual environment, please visit the Microsoft Download Center.

The post Improving the Office app experience in virtual environments appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As Windows 7 ends support on January 14, 2020, with Office 2010 closely following behind, it’s critical to ensure you not only have the most productive experience, but also the most secure. Microsoft 365 Business—which includes Office 365, Windows 10, and the latest security features—on a modern device can ensure you’re protected wherever you are.

This National Small Business Week, we’re celebrating small businesses who use Microsoft 365 Business to grow, compete, and offer a great customer experience while doing great work collaboratively and securely. Today, I wanted to share three customer stories that inspired us and introduce an offer to get you started on your own transformation: 15 percent off an annual subscription of Office 365 Business Premium—available from May 5, 2019 until May 11, 2019 in the U.S.

The PUR Company

In 2010, Jay Klein, the founder and CEO of The PUR Company, was going door to door with a “run-for-mayor” mentality to spread the news that PUR had developed an aspartame-free chewing gum. These were the humble beginnings that jumpstarted a business that can today report sales in more than 50 countries and 50,000 retail outlets. Despite this global impact, the business still has a lot of growing to do, with 65 employees spread across Canada, the U.S., and Europe.

As the company grew, so did concerns over data security, remote collaboration, and mobile device management. PUR chose Microsoft 365 to help it keep pace with its rapid growth and delectables-driven success.

With growth came the reality of employee onboarding and retention. Security threats from phishing and other malicious acts began to rear their heads. Employees in separate continents needed more secure, immediate, and reliable collaboration and communication channels. They needed a solution that didn’t require onsite maintenance, one that could grow at the pace of their business and offered the collaboration, mobility, and security capabilities that employees required—out of the box. PUR found the answer to all these needs in Microsoft 365.

Employees now use the persistent chat and document-sharing functionalities of Teams to improve collaboration. Also, with the company’s increased use of mobile devices, flexible device and app management capabilities matter more than ever. PUR uses Intune to grant or remove mobile device access to company data, help keep those devices compliant with company security protocols, and manage the mobile apps employees use. In adopting Intune, PUR has also reduced new employee device setup from an entire day’s work to less than an hour.

While the improvements The PUR Company has made in communication, security, mobility, and insights have been substantial, Cerys Cook, Vice President of People and Culture at PUR, sees the human impact as the company’s greatest achievement. “From a quality of life standpoint, and from the business-minded viewpoint of employee retention rates, we know our employees feel like they’re more part of the team now, like they’re family,” says Cook. “That means a lot to us.”

Meals on Wheels

If you or someone you love has ever had their mobility limited, you know just how incapacitating it can be. Meals on Wheels is a nonprofit organization that aims to deliver not just food, but human contact to those members of society who need it most.

Delivering hot meals to those in need might sound straightforward, but the simple mission of Meals on Wheels belies the complexities involved: daily fluctuations in volunteer numbers, an ever-changing clientele, and the sheer number of those in need.

In addition to managing a roster of 2,000 volunteers and their unique schedules, to maximize efficiency, Meals on Wheels of Greenville County routinely takes in sensitive data from diverse sources, data which includes payment information from donors and client diagnoses. Assuring access to this data, while taking steps to keep personal details secure, was a top priority.

Tackling the paramount need to optimize deliveries first, Meals on Wheels adopted both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft SharePoint. Teams allows volunteers and employees to communicate, via voice, video, or chat, from anywhere. Last-minute route changes are now simple to address and track, and if a volunteer gets lost or forgets their route, they can quickly ask for aid or check back through the day’s logs.

With its new collaborative capabilities outlined, Meals on Wheels of Greenville County turned its focus to the equally important realm of security. Of particular interest to the organization was mobile device management. Each of the volunteers working with Meals on Wheels needed access to sensitive client data to make their deliveries, meaning that a single lost or misplaced device could potentially expose the personal data of hundreds of vulnerable homebound individuals.

Thankfully, Microsoft 365 includes powerful mobile device management capabilities, including the option to remove a user’s access to sensitive data while their device is missing. This way, no matter where a missing device ends up, sensitive data remains highly secure.

John’s Crazy Socks

Whether you like corgi dogs, puns, or Edgar Allen Poe, you’ll find colorful hosiery to match your interests at John’s Crazy Socks, a small company that sent 43,000 orders to 44 countries in its first year. Whether customers choose socks that glow in the dark, have troll doll hair you can comb, or promote awareness around disabilities like autism or Down syndrome, if the order comes in by 3:00 PM, the company’s “sock wranglers” ship it the same day.

Managing steep fluctuations in business and selling Monday Madness Mystery Bags of randomly selected socks are not the only unique business considerations. The company needed new tools for handling business data and helping its growing staff stay connected (John’s Crazy Socks went from 4 to 35 employees in 10 months). Many employees work part-time to avoid losing disability benefits, and they lacked ready access to computers outside of work; most had never had email addresses before. Coordinating shifts and exchanging event information with family and guardians happened on the phone or in printed documents.

Some employees use basic functionality like email and file storage and sharing, and others use more collaboration features like Skype for Business and Teams. For them, productivity and collaboration also mean security. People don’t need to remember separate user names and passwords to sign in to apps they use every day. “OneDrive works seamlessly with the Office apps we use every day and it’s included in our subscription, so it’s easier and more cost-effective than using a third-party solution,” says cofounder Mark Cronin.

Work like a small business

These stories make me excited about what we can all accomplish when we have the most productive and secure tools. Want to hear more about small business trends and some of the best new devices on the market for small businesses? Watch the new Coffee Across America segment for National Small Business Week.

The post Helping small businesses protect their greatest asset—their data appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we move to the next phase and announce the public preview of Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop. Now, all customers can access this service—the only service that delivers simplified management, a multi-session Windows 10 experience, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes and enjoy built-in security.

Through our private preview, we had the chance to work closely with customers and partners to help shape this new service. It has been rewarding to see the results so far—a great example being at X5 Music Group, a Warner Music Group company.

“Within the music industry, we have to access, manage, and store large volumes of complex metadata securely. Windows Virtual Desktop is a great way of bringing data-heavy applications into our cloud platform without the need to rewrite the application. Windows Virtual Desktop also provides several additional benefits, such as making it really easy to scale the number of users while minimizing the attack surface of our applications.”
—Klas Broman, CTO and Developer Lead, X5 Music Group

As we start public preview, we’ll continue listening and taking feedback, to ensure we’re meeting your needs as we head toward general availability in the second half of calendar year 2019.

With the end of extended support for Windows 7 coming up in January 2020, we also understand some customers need to continue to support Windows 7 legacy applications as they migrate to Windows 10. To support this need, you’ll soon be able to use Windows Virtual Desktop to virtualize Windows 7 desktops with free Extended Security Updates (ESU) until January 2023. This support provides a comprehensive virtualization solution for Windows 7 alongside your Windows 10 and Windows Server desktops and apps.

Solutions to extend Windows Virtual Desktop

In November 2018, we acquired FSLogix, a next-generation app-provisioning platform that reduces the resources, time, and labor required to support desktop and app virtualization. FSLogix technologies enable faster load times for non-persistent users accessing Outlook or OneDrive. FSLogix technology will support both client and server RDS deployments—helping on-premises customers more easily migrate to Windows Virtual Desktop and providing a great solution for customers in hybrid scenarios.

Windows Virtual Desktop will also be extended and enriched by leading partners in the following ways:

• Citrix can extend Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities with their Citrix Cloud services.
• Through our partnership with Samsung, Windows Virtual Desktop will provide highly mobile Firstline Workers access to a full Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus experience with Samsung DeX.
• Software and service providers will extend Windows Virtual Desktop to offer targeted solutions in the Azure marketplace.
• Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) will deliver end-to-end desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offerings and value-added services to their customers.

Access to Windows Virtual Desktop

To deploy and manage your virtualization environment, you just need to set up an Azure subscription. You can choose the type of virtual machines (VMs) and storage you want to suit your environment. You can optimize costs by taking advantage of Reserved Instances (up to 72 percent discount) and by using multi-session Windows 10.

For users accessing the Windows 10 and Windows 7 desktops and apps, there’s no additional cost if you’re an existing Microsoft 365 F1/E3/E5, Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5, or Windows VDA customer. For Windows Server desktops and apps, there’s no additional cost if you’re an existing Microsoft RDS Client Access License (CAL) customer.

Get started with the public preview of Windows Virtual Desktop

Windows Virtual Desktop is comprised of the Windows desktops and apps you’re delivering to users and the management solution hosted as a service on Azure by Microsoft. During public preview, desktops and apps can be deployed on VMs in any Azure region, and the management solution and data for these VMs will reside in the United States (US East 2 region). This may result in data transfer to the United States while you test the service in public preview.

We’ll start to scale out the management solution and data localization to all Azure regions starting at general availability. For more information on getting started, considerations for optimal deployment guidance, and to provide feedback as you preview the service, please visit the Windows Virtual Desktop preview page.

The post Announcing the public preview of Windows Virtual Desktop appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We are here to help you every step of the way. The Modern Desktop Deployment Center provides detailed step-by-step migration guidance. We are seeing 99.9 percent application compatibility with Windows 7, giving you confidence to upgrade or buy new Windows 10 devices. The Desktop App Assure program provides dedicated engineering resources to help you remediate any application compatibility issues you might have.

Security remains our biggest priority, and Windows 10 provides the most secure experience. For those of you who aren’t able to migrate all of your apps and devices to Windows 10 by the January 14, 2020, end of support date and need additional time to make the transition, we’ve got you covered with new options:

• As we announced in September 2018, we will provide Extended Security Updates for Windows 7.
• Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (coming soon) will provide a Windows 7 device with free Extended Security Updates through January 2023, giving you more options to support legacy apps as you transition to Windows 10.
• As a final resource those of you with legacy Windows 7 devices, Extended Security Updates will be available for purchase starting April 1, 2019. They will be sold on a per-device basis for eligible customers and the price will increase each year.

In addition, Office 365 ProPlus will be supported on devices with active Windows 7 Extended Security Updates through January 2023. This means that customers who purchase the Windows 7 Extended Security Updates will be able to continue to run Office 365 ProPlus.

Please reach out to your partner or Microsoft account team for more details or download our FAQs for additional information. Now is the time to shift to Microsoft 365.

The post Now is the time to make the shift to Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Stay ahead of threats and collaborate securely

New features and services help you better manage a complex threat landscape and communicate and collaborate securely.

Extend your security team’s capability with Microsoft Threat Experts—Our new managed threat-hunting service, called Microsoft Threat Experts, helps you proactively hunt and prioritize threats to get the most out of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). The service provides access to world-class experts who can help you work through tough investigation challenges with the new Ask a Threat Expert button. Go to your Windows Defender ATP settings to apply for the public preview.

Empower healthcare professionals to securely communicate and collaborate—This month, we announced new capabilities in Microsoft Teams that enable secure messaging and collaboration workflows for healthcare organizations. Priority notifications enable clinicians to focus on urgent messages to manage patient care. In addition, the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams enables clinicians to securely access patient records, chat with other team members, and even start a video meeting—all in one hub for teamwork. These capabilities are now in private preview; visit the Microsoft 365 and health page and partner site to learn more about how Teams and Microsoft 365 can empower your healthcare teams.

Move confidently to the modern desktop and cloud with Desktop App Assure and Microsoft FastTrack—Our new service from Microsoft FastTrack, Desktop App Assure, provides app compatibility services for Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus. FastTrack also now offers guidance on how to configure Exchange Online Protection, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Office 365 Message Encryption, and Data Loss Prevention policies. These services are now globally available to eligible customers with more than 150 seats at no additional cost. Sign in to Microsoft FastTrack and complete a Request for Assistance form to get started.

Get security alerts for your Microsoft account on your phone—Receive security notifications for important events on your personal Microsoft account now via the Microsoft Authenticator app. When you receive a push notification, you can quickly view your account activity and take actions to protect your account if needed. Microsoft Authenticator can also be used to add two-step verification to your account for added security. To get started, download the Microsoft Authenticator app and add your personal account.

Manage tasks and capture data with ease

New features expand capabilities to easily access all your apps and files, capture and convert data, and add context to your tasks.

Jump into your work quickly with the new Office app for Windows 10—The new, free Office app provides a simple experience to get started with and get the most out of Office. Anyone who signs in with a work, school, or personal Microsoft Account can use it to quickly access all the apps available to them and their most relevant files and documents. Organizations can also take advantage of the ability to integrate third-party apps, enable users to search for documents and people across the organization, and customize the experience with their own branding. The Office app can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store, requires a current version of Windows 10, and works with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, and Office.

Add data to Excel directly from a photo—Using the Excel app, you can take a picture of a printed data table on your Android device and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This new image recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter hardcopy data. This capability is starting to roll out for the Excel Android app with iOS support coming soon.

Quickly add photos and files to tasks in Microsoft To-Do—Attach files and photos to help make tasks more actionable with added context. This highly requested feature is now available on all platforms and syncs across your devices, so you can take your new file-attached tasks on the go.

Other updates

• New one-time passcodes (OTP) from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) make sharing and collaboration seamless for any user with any account.
• Azure AD now supports automated user provisioning from Workday, enabling fast and efficient identity creation, so employees can access their Microsoft 365 apps and all other critical resources on day one.
• Starting this month, the Teams desktop app will be installed along with the rest of the Office 365 ProPlus apps for all new installs.
• Updates to the SharePoint Migration Tool make it even easier to bring your information to the cloud, with improvements like the ability to migrate web parts, pages, and site navigation.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in February—advancing security and empowering a modern workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A big driver of customer adoption of Microsoft 365 is the need for security and compliance solutions in an age of increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats, as well as complex information protection needs due to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To help address these needs, we are introducing two new Microsoft 365 security and compliance offerings that will be available for purchase on February 1, 2019.

• Identity & Threat Protection—This new package brings together security value across Office 365, Windows 10, and EMS in a single offering. It includes best of breed for advanced threat protection services including Microsoft Threat Protection (Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Windows Defender ATP, and Office 365 ATP including Threat Intelligence), as well as Microsoft Cloud App Security and Azure Active Directory. This offer will be available for $12 per user per month.*
• Information Protection & Compliance—This new package combines Office 365 Advanced Compliance and Azure Information Protection. It’s designed to help compliance and IT teams perform ongoing risk assessments across Microsoft Cloud services, automatically protect and govern sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, and efficiently respond to regulatory requests leveraging intelligence. This offer will be available for $10 per user per month.*

All the value in these new offers remains available as part of the full Microsoft 365 E5 suite, which also includes business analytics and our enterprise grade phone system and audio conferencing. The full Microsoft 365 E5 suite includes not only security and compliance capabilities, but also offerings in business analytics featuring Power BI, and communications with audio conferencing and advanced phone system value. Additionally, customers can continue to purchase security and compliance components on a standalone basis.

There are no price increases or service impacts associated with any of these changes. The new Identity & Threat Protection and Information Protection & Compliance offerings are designed to provide customers with simpler purchase, deployment, and adoption of these security and compliance workloads.

As we speak to customers about the future of work, we know security and compliance are some of the highest organizational priorities and we hope these new offerings will help them achieve their security and compliance goals.

*Pricing for Microsoft 365 E3 customers before volume discounts.

The post Introducing new advanced security and compliance offerings for Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

A few key reasons to use the app include:

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

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

Let us know what you think

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

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

In honor of the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we’re announcing this new feature—powered by artificial intelligence (AI)—which provides captions and subtitles for presentations in real-time. Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint supports the deaf and hard of hearing community by giving them the ability to read what is being spoken in real-time. In addition, captions and subtitles can be displayed in the same language or in a different one, allowing non-native speakers to get a translation of a presentation. At launch, live captions & subtitles will support 12 spoken languages and display on-screen captions or subtitles in one of 60+ languages.

Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint brings:

• The power of AI to presenters, so they can convey simple and complex information across subjects and topics.
• Speech recognition that automatically adapts based on the presented content for more accurate recognition of names and specialized terminology.
• The ability for presenters to easily customize the size, position, and appearance of subtitles. Customizations may vary by platform.
• A peace of mind with security and compliance knowing that the feature meets many industry standards for compliance certifications.

The feature joins other accessible features in Office 365, like automatic suggestions for alt-text in Word and PowerPoint, expanded availability of automatic closed captions and searchable transcripts for videos in Microsoft Stream, enhancements to the Office 365 Accessibility Checker, and more.

Here’s what one of our customers had to say:

“We are constantly looking for new ways of ensuring that the Government of Canada sets the highest possible standards as an accessible and inclusive workplace. We welcome such positive advances in technology, like this feature, that allows everyone, and notably those with disabilities, to better communicate ideas. They help break down barriers and lead to greater inclusiveness to the benefit of individuals and society as a whole.”
—Yazmine Laroche, deputy minister responsible for Public Service Accessibility

Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint will begin rolling out in late January 2019 and will be available for Office 365 subscribers worldwide for PowerPoint on Windows 10, PowerPoint for Mac, and PowerPoint Online.

The post Present more inclusively with live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Howdy folks,

I’m so excited to share today’s news! We just turned on the ability to securely sign in with your Microsoft account using a standards-based FIDO2 compatible device—no username or password required! FIDO2 enables users to leverage standards-based devices to easily authenticate to online services—in both mobile and desktop environments. This is available now in United States and will roll out globally over the next few weeks.

This combination of ease of use, security, and broad industry support is going to be transformational both at home and in the modern workplace. Every month, more than 800 million people use a Microsoft account to create, connect, and share from anywhere to Outlook, Office, OneDrive, Bing, Skype, and Xbox Live for work and play. And now they can all benefit from this simple user experience and greatly improved security.

Starting today, you can use a FIDO2 device or Windows Hello to sign in to your Microsoft account using the Microsoft Edge browser.

Watch this quick video showing how it works:

Microsoft has been on a mission to eliminate passwords and help people protect their data and accounts from threats. As a member of the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), we’ve been working with others to develop open standards for the next generation of authentication. I’m happy to share that Microsoft is the first Fortune 500 company to support password-less authentication using the the WebAuthn and FIDO2 specifications, and Microsoft Edge supports the widest array of authenticators compared to other major browsers.

If you want to know more details on how it works and how to get started, keep reading on.

Get started

To sign in with your Microsoft Account using a FIDO2 security key:

1. If you haven’t already, make sure you update to Windows 10 October 2018.
2. Go to the Microsoft account page on Microsoft Edge and sign in as you normally would.
3. Select Security > More security options and under Windows Hello and security keys, you’ll see instructions for setting up a security key. (You can purchase a security key from one of our partners, including Yubico and Feitian Technologies that support the FIDO2 standard.*)
4. Next time you sign in, you can either click More Options > Use a security key or type in your username. At that point, you’ll be asked to use a security key to sign in.

And as a reminder, here’s how to sign in with your Microsoft account using Windows Hello:

1. Make sure you’ve updated to Windows 10 October 2018.
2. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up Windows Hello. If you have Windows Hello set up, you’re good to go!
3. Next time you sign in on Microsoft Edge, you can either click More Options > Use Windows Hello or a security key or type in your username. At that point, you’ll be asked to use Windows Hello or a security to sign in.

If you need more help, check out our detailed help article about how to get set up.

*There are a couple of optional features in the FIDO2 spec that we believe are fundamental to security, so only keys that have implemented those features will work. Read What is a Microsoft-compatible security key? to learn more.

How does it work?

Under the covers, we implemented the WebAuthn and FIDO2 CTAP2 specifications into our services to make this a reality.

Unlike passwords, FIDO2 protects user credentials using public/private key encryption. When you create and register a FIDO2 credential, the device (your PC or the FIDO2 device) generates a private and public key on the device. The private key is stored securely on the device and can only be used after it has been unlocked using a local gesture like biometric or PIN. Note that your biometric or PIN never leaves the device. At the same time that the private key is stored, the public key is sent to the Microsoft account system in the cloud and registered with your user account.

When you later sign in, the Microsoft account system provides a nonce to your PC or FIDO2 device. Your PC or device then uses the private key to sign the nonce. The signed nonce and metadata is sent back to the Microsoft account system, where it is verified using the public key. The signed metadata as specified by the WebAuthn and FIDO2 specs provides information, such as whether the user was present, and verifies the authentication through the local gesture. It’s these properties that make authentication with Windows Hello and FIDO2 devices not “phishable” or easily stolen by malware.

How do Windows Hello and FIDO2 devices implement this? Based on the capabilities of your Windows 10 device, you will either have a built-in secure enclave, known as a hardware trusted platform module (TPM) or a software TPM. The TPM stores the private key, which requires either your face, fingerprint, or PIN to unlock it. Similarly, a FIDO2 device, like a security key, is a small external device with its own built-in secure enclave that stores the private key and requires the biometric or PIN to unlock it. Both options offer two-factor authentication in one step, requiring both a registered device and a biometric or PIN to successfully sign in.

Check out this article on our Identity Standards blog, which goes into all the technical details around the implementation.

What’s next

We have tons of great things coming out as part of our efforts to reduce and even eliminate the use of passwords. We are currently building the same sign-in experience from a browser with security keys for work and school accounts in Azure Active Directory. Enterprise customers will be able to preview this early next year, where they will be able to allow their employees to set up their own security keys for their account to sign in to Windows 10 and the cloud.

Furthermore, as more browsers and platforms start supporting the WebAuthn and FIDO2 standards, the password-less experience—available on Microsoft Edge and Windows today—will be hopefully available everywhere!

Stay tuned for more details early next year!

Best Regards,
Alex Simons (@Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)
CVP of Program Management
Microsoft Identity Division

The post Secure password-less sign-in for your Microsoft account using a security key or Windows Hello appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

For many companies, the specific needs of their business require a virtualized desktop experience. The reasons for virtualization vary. For example, for regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, a virtualized desktop experience ensures compliance regulations are met and access to sensitive data is securely managed. For mobile workforces and Firstline Workers, desktop virtualization makes managing and provisioning access to corporate data and apps easier. It also gives IT options in supporting scenarios such as giving access to specific apps to certain employees.

Introducing the Windows Virtual Desktop

While desktop virtualization helps in many business scenarios, it has historically been complex and expensive to deploy and manage. To solve some of these complexities, we have developed Windows Virtual Desktop with both IT and the user in mind.

Windows Virtual Desktop includes the following benefits:

• The only service to enable a multi-user Windows 10 experience, including compatibility with Microsoft Store and existing Windows line-of-business apps while delivering cost advantages previously only possible with server-based virtualization.
• The best service to virtualize Office 365 ProPlus running in multi-user virtual scenarios. Microsoft Office is the most virtualized app used, and we are committed to deliver the best possible virtual experience. In the months ahead, we will have more to share on our investments in the Office 365 virtualized experience for the Windows Virtual Desktop service.
• The only service to provide Windows 7 virtual desktop with free Extended Security Updates, giving you more options to support legacy apps while you transition to Windows 10.
• The most scalable service to deploy and manage Windows virtual machines, using Azure for compute, storage, rich diagnostics, advanced networking, connection brokering, and gateway. You no longer need to host, install, configure, and manage these components yourself—so you can deploy and scale in minutes.
• The most flexible service allowing you to virtualize both desktops and apps, meaning you can choose between providing your users the entire desktop experience or delivering only specific apps. When you deliver virtual apps to a Windows 10 endpoint, they are integrated seamlessly into the user experience.
• Deeply integrated with the security and management of Microsoft 365. The Microsoft 365 conditional access, data loss prevention, and integrated management are natively built in—providing the most secure and simplest solution for protecting and managing all your apps and data.

Windows Virtual Desktop ecosystem

Windows Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive virtualization solution. However, we recognize that there is a need for different capabilities to serve our broad set of customers. To accommodate this need, we have built Windows Virtual Desktop as a platform that can be easily extended and enriched by partners in the following ways:

• We will have many partners that extend the service through the Azure marketplace and are already working with leading partners, including Citrix, CloudJumper, FSLogix, Lakeside Software, Liquidware, People Tech Group, and ThinPrint.
• The extensive network of Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers will be able to offer Windows Virtual Desktop to their customers and offer additional value around the service.
• We are also working with partners such as Citrix to deeply integrate and build upon the Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities.

We will have more to share on our ecosystem approach in the near future.

Access to Windows Virtual Desktop

We’re excited to offer this service to Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education customers. Once you sign up for Windows Virtual Desktop, you only need to set up or use an existing Azure subscription to quickly deploy and manage your virtual desktops and apps. The only additional cost to you is for the storage and compute consumption from the virtual machines themselves, which will live in your Azure subscription. You will be able to take advantage of any of your existing Azure compute commitments, including Azure Virtual Machine Reserved Instances (RI).

We are working hard to put the finishing touches on a public preview, which will be available later this year. If you would like to participate in the public preview, you can register your interest now. In the meantime, please visit the Windows Virtual Desktop website to learn more, or contact your Microsoft account team or Microsoft partner.

The post Microsoft 365 adds modern desktop on Azure appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

Blur your background during meetings.

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

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

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

3. Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search

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

Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search.

4. Create content that stands out with Microsoft 365

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

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

5. Office loves the Mac

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

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

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

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

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

7. Deliver a modern desktop with Azure

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

8. Manage your environment with the Microsoft 365 admin center

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

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

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

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

Compliance Manager now includes 12 assessments across different industries.

10. Advancing security for IT professionals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, we’re pleased to make three announcements that help you make the shift to a modern desktop:

• Cloud-based analytics tools to make modern desktop deployment even easier.
• A program to ensure app compatibility for upgrades and updates of Windows and Office.
• Servicing and support changes to give you additional deployment flexibility.

Analytics to make modern desktop deployment easier

Collectively, you’ve told us that one of your biggest upgrade and update challenges is application testing. A critical part of any desktop deployment plan is analysis of existing applications—and the process of testing apps and remediating issues has historically been very manual and very time consuming. Microsoft 365 offers incredible tools today to help customers shift to a modern desktop, including System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft Intune, Windows Analytics, and Office Readiness Toolkit. But we’ve felt like there’s even more we could do.

Today, we’re announcing that Windows Analytics is being expanded to Desktop Analytics—a new cloud-based service integrated with ConfigMgr and designed to create an inventory of apps running in the organization, assess app compatibility with the latest feature updates of Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus, and create pilot groups that represent the entire application and driver estate across a minimal set of devices.

The new Desktop Analytics service will provide insight and intelligence for you to make more informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows and Office clients. You can then optimize pilot and production deployments with ConfigMgr. Combining data from your own organization with data aggregated from millions of devices connected to our cloud services, you can take the guess work out of testing and focus your attention on key blockers. We’ll share more information about Desktop Analytics and other modern desktop deployment tools at Ignite.

Standing behind our app compatibility promise

We’re also pleased to announce Desktop App Assure—a new service from Microsoft FastTrack designed to address issues with Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus app compatibility. Windows 10 is the most compatible Windows operating system ever, and using millions of data points from customer diagnostic data and the Windows Insider validation process, we’ve found that 99 percent of apps are compatible with new Windows updates. So you should generally expect that apps that work on Windows 7 will continue to work on Windows 10 and subsequent feature updates. But if you find any app compatibility issues after a Windows 10 or Office 365 ProPlus update, Desktop App Assure is designed to help you get a fix. Simply let us know by filing a ticket through FastTrack, and a Microsoft engineer will follow up to work with you until the issue is resolved. In short, Desktop App Assure operationalizes our Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus compatibility promise: We’ve got your back on app compatibility and are committed to removing it entirely as a blocker.

Desktop App Assure will be offered at no additional cost to Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education customers. We’ll share more details on this new service at Ignite and will begin to preview this service in North America on October 1, 2018, with worldwide availability by February 1, 2019.

Servicing and support flexibility

Longer Windows 10 servicing for enterprises and educational institutions
In April 2017, we aligned the Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus update cadence to a predictable semi-annual schedule, targeting September and March. While many customers—including Mars and Accenture—have shifted to a modern desktop and are using the semi-annual channel to take updates regularly with great success, we’ve also heard feedback from some of you that you need more time and flexibility in the Windows 10 update cycle.

Based on that feedback, we’re announcing four changes:

• All currently supported feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions (versions 1607, 1703, 1709, and 1803) will be supported for 30 months from their original release date. This will give customers on those versions more time for change management as they move to a faster update cycle.
• All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of September (starting with 1809) will be supported for 30 months from their release date. This will give customers with longer deployment cycles the time they need to plan, test, and deploy.
• All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of March (starting with 1903) will continue to be supported for 18 months from their release date. This maintains the semi-annual update cadence as our north star and retains the option for customers that want to update twice a year.
• All feature releases of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro, and Office 365 ProPlus will continue to be supported for 18 months (this applies to feature updates targeting both March and September).

In summary, our new modern desktop support policies—starting in September 2018—are:

Windows 7 Extended Security Updates
As previously announced, Windows 7 extended support is ending January 14, 2020. While many of you are already well on your way in deploying Windows 10, we understand that everyone is at a different point in the upgrade process.

With that in mind, today we are announcing that we will offer paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU) through January 2023. The Windows 7 ESU will be sold on a per-device basis and the price will increase each year. Windows 7 ESUs will be available to all Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise customers in Volume Licensing, with a discount to customers with Windows software assurance, Windows 10 Enterprise or Windows 10 Education subscriptions. In addition, Office 365 ProPlus will be supported on devices with active Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU) through January 2023. This means that customers who purchase the Windows 7 ESU will be able to continue to run Office 365 ProPlus.

Please reach out to your partner or Microsoft account team for further details.

Support for Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2016
Office 365 ProPlus delivers cloud-connected and always up-to-date versions of the Office desktop apps. To support customers already on Office 365 ProPlus through their operating system transitions, we are updating the Windows system requirements for Office 365 ProPlus and revising some announcements that were made in February. We are pleased to announce the following updates to our Office 365 ProPlus system requirements:

• Office 365 ProPlus will continue to be supported on Windows 8.1 through January 2023, which is the end of support date for Windows 8.1.
• Office 365 ProPlus will also continue to be supported on Windows Server 2016 until October 2025.

Office 2016 connectivity support for Office 365 services
In addition, we are modifying the Office 365 services system requirements related to service connectivity. In February, we announced that starting October 13, 2020, customers will need Office 365 ProPlus or Office 2019 clients in mainstream support to connect to Office 365 services. To give you more time to transition fully to the cloud, we are now modifying that policy and will continue to support Office 2016 connections with the Office 365 services through October 2023.

Shift to a modern desktop

You’ve been talking, and we’ve been listening. Specifically, we’ve heard your feedback on desktop deployment, and we’re working hard to introduce new capabilities, services, and policies to help you on your way. The combination of Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus delivers the most productive, most secure end user computing experience available. But we recognize that it takes time to both upgrade devices and operationalize new update processes. Today’s announcements are designed to respond to your feedback and make it easier, faster, and cheaper to deploy a modern desktop. We know that there is still a lot of work to do. But we’re committed to working with you and systematically resolving any issues. We’d love to hear your thoughts and look forward to seeing you and discussing in more detail in the keynotes and sessions at Ignite in a few weeks!

The post Helping customers shift to a modern desktop appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2—Use new intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365

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

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

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

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

3—Leverage analytics to build better collaboration habits

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

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

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

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

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

Some great news to share with you today! For the second year in a row, Gartner has positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Access Management, Worldwide, based on our completeness of vision and ability to execute in the access management market. Find out why in a complimentary copy of the report here.

According to Gartner, Leaders show evidence of strong execution for anticipated requirements related to technology, methodology, or means of delivery. Leaders also show evidence of how access management plays a role in a collection of related or adjacent product offerings.

Furthest in Vision in Leaders Quadrant

Microsoft is positioned the furthest in completeness of Vision in the Leaders Quadrant, for the second straight year. We believe our jump up in Execution also illustrates how important it is for us to execute on a strategy that can help organizations where they are at today and prepare them for the identity needs of tomorrow.

At Microsoft, we champion conditional access policies and threat protection for identities as critical capabilities for a world-class identity and access management solution. As part of a rich ecosystem with Windows 10, Office 365 and EMS, we’ve worked hard to integrate security policies across products to give you visibility and control over the full user experience. We’ve also taken in the insights and feedback from our customers this year to improve the experience and make it even easier to get all your identities in one place. We are committed to providing innovative and comprehensive identity and access management solutions for your employees, partners, and customers.

We could not have continued to be a leader in this space without the input and support from our customers and partners – thank you!

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

Important note:

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

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

The post Vision + Execution: Microsoft named a leader again in Gartner MQ for Access Management appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Not only does Windows Autopilot significantly reduce the cost of deploying Windows 10 devices but also delivers an experience that’s magical for users and zero-touch for IT.

I’m excited to share that we are extending that zero-touch experience even further with several new capabilities available in preview with the Windows Insider Program today.

• Self-Deploying mode—Currently, the Windows Autopilot experience requires the user to select basic settings like Region, Language, and Keyboard, and also enter their credentials, in the Windows 10 out-of-the-box experience. With a new Windows Autopilot capability called “Self-Deploying mode,” we’re extending the zero-touch experience from IT to the user deploying the device. Power on* is all it takes to deploy a new Windows 10 device into a fully business-ready state—managed, secured, and ready for usage—no need for any user interaction. You can configure the device to self-deploy into a locked down kiosk, a digital signage, or a shared productivity device—all it takes is power on.*
• Windows Autopilot reset—This feature extends the zero-touch experience from deployment of new Windows 10 devices to reset scenarios where a device is being repurposed for a new user. We’re making it possible to completely reset and redeploy an Intune-managed Windows 10 device into a fully business-ready state without having to physically access the device. All you need to do is click a button in Intune!

Windows Insiders can test these features with the latest Windows 10 build and Microsoft Intune now.

I cannot wait to see the feedback from the Insider community! To see how this works, and several exciting updates to Windows Autopilot, check out this quick video:

Source video.

You can head over to the Windows IT Pro blog right now for further details.

One final note: A big part of what we build is based on feedback from our customers. With this in mind, we also added several new Windows Autopilot capabilities into the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (version 1803) based on feedback, and these capabilities are also available today:

• Enrollment Status page—We received tons of feedback from Windows Autopilot customers who want the ability to hold the device in the out-of-box setup experience until the configured policies and apps have been provisioned to the device. This enables IT admins to be assured the device is configured into a fully business-ready state prior to users getting to the desktop. This is made possible with a capability called “Enrollment Status” and is available today with Windows 10 April 2018 Update (version 1803) and Microsoft Intune.
• Device vendor supply chain integration—We enabled Windows 10 OEMs and hardware vendors to integrate Windows Autopilot into their supply chain and fulfillment systems so that devices are registered in Windows Autopilot to your organization the moment your purchase is fulfilled. This makes the registration of Windows Autopilot devices completely hands-free and zero-touch for you as well as your device vendor/OEM. Contact your device reseller to find out if they are supporting Windows Autopilot.
• Automatic Windows Autopilot profile assignment—We integrated Azure Active Directory (AD) dynamic groups with Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune to deliver a zero-touch experience for Windows Autopilot profile assignments on all Windows Autopilot devices.

I said this in my prior post and I’ll say it again—Windows Autopilot is an absolute game changer. I urge you to spend some time learning more about it.

To learn more about how to use Windows Autopilot and Co-Management together, check out this quick video.

*Requires network connection and TPM2.0.

The post Simplifying IT with the latest updates from Windows Autopilot 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.

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

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

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

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

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

New Microsoft 365 experiences empower customers to achieve more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New opportunities for developers with Microsoft 365

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complexity is the absolute enemy of security and productivity. The simpler you can make your productivity and security solutions, the easier it will be for IT to manage and secure—making the user experience that much more elegant and useful. We’ve learned from building and running over 200 global cloud services that a truly modern and truly secure service is a simple one.

Microsoft 365 is built to help you solve this problem of complexity so that you can simplify. But let me be clear, simpler doesn’t mean less robust or less capable.

From thousands of conversations with customers, we heard clearly how important it is for IT to simplify the way it enables users across PCs, mobile devices, cloud services, and on-premises apps. Microsoft 365 provides that all with an integrated solution that’s simpler, yet also more powerful and intelligent.

Because the way you work and do business is so important to us, our work will never be done—we will constantly innovate, improve, and discover new and better ways to help your organization do more. Today, I am excited to announce some new capabilities and updates coming soon to Microsoft 365, including:

• A modern desktop.
• Solutions for Firstline Workers.
• Streamlined device management with lower costs.
• Integrated administration experience.
• Built-in compliance.

Each of these new capabilities will allow you to simplify your modern workplace, which means delighting and empowering your users, while enabling IT to protect and secure the corporate assets.

Time for a modern desktop

What do I mean by a “modern desktop?”

A modern desktop is powered by Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus and is always up to date with insights and security powered by the cloud. After years of refinements, we believe this is the most productive and secure computing experience for businesses. Not only does it provide the richest user experience, it also helps IT better manage devices and data, with lower costs.

Today, we are making two announcements about enhancements we’ve delivered for managing modern desktops:

First, Delivery Optimization enhancements are coming in the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (which you can learn more about in Yusuf’s blog today as well).

Delivery Optimization allows for one device to download an update and then use the local network to deliver that update to peers. This significantly reduces bandwidth (by as much as 90 percent) and that results in a much better experience for everyone on the network.

With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, you will be able to monitor Delivery Optimization Status using Windows Analytics—including how many devices are enabled and the bandwidth savings you’ve achieved.

Delivery Optimization Status using Windows Analytics.

Second, recently we announced the Readiness Toolkit for Office (RTO), which helps with your Office VBA, Macro, and add-in compatibility. The Application Health Analyzer (AHA) tool, which can assess the dependencies of your internally developed apps and help you ensure they remain compatible with Windows 10 updates, will be available in public preview in the coming months.

ConfigMgr also plays an important part in how so many of you manage the servicing process. In fact, I am excited to share that this week we hit a new milestone of 115 million devices under management by ConfigMgr! The recent 1802 release of ConfigMgr will add the ability for you to execute phased deployment rings. This will further automate the servicing of Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus by updating IT-defined groups one at a time, and automatically initiating the next group once the health of the first deployment is confirmed.

We recognize, however, that organizations are in various stages of transition to the cloud. To support customers who are not fully ready to move to the cloud in the near future, we will release Office 2019 in the second half of 2018. Commercial previews of the Office 2019 applications on Windows 10 are available starting today.

Finally, in February we shared there are just two years before the end of extended support for Windows 7 and Office 2010 (January and October 2020, respectively). There has never been a better time than now to plan and accelerate your transition and upgrade to a modern desktop experience with Microsoft 365.

Solutions for Firstline Workers and kiosks

Whether for customers in your lobby or for your Firstline Workers, Windows kiosk devices often are the first representation of your organization’s brands, products, or services. IT needs a simpler process to configure and manage these devices for both Firstline Workers and customer-facing kiosks.

Today, we are extending the assigned access capabilities for Windows 10, so you can easily deploy and manage kiosk devices with Microsoft Intune for your single or multiple app scenarios. This includes the new Kiosk Browser that will be available from the Microsoft Store. Kiosk Browser is great for delivering a reliable and custom-tailored browsing experience for scenarios such as retail and signage.

Kiosk Browser available from the Microsoft Store.

Over the next year, we will add additional capabilities to help you streamline kiosk deployment and keep them in a pristine state for a reliable Firstline Worker experience. You can learn more about these investments in the Windows IT Pro blog.

Kiosks and Firstline Worker devices are most secure, resilient, and performant when deployed with Windows 10 in S mode. With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Windows 10 Enterprise can be configured in S mode, so organizations can deploy both Credential Guard and Application Guard, and benefit from centralized management of the Microsoft Store, Cortana, and more. All of this is available with a Microsoft 365 subscription.

In addition, we are also simplifying our licensing to add the Office mobile apps for iOS and Android to Office 365 E1, F1, and Business Essential licenses. With this change, all users licensed for Microsoft 365 and Office 365, including Firstline Workers, will be able to use the Office mobile apps and be productive on the go. Outlook for iOS and Android is available to users now. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote mobile apps will be available over the next few months.

Streamline device management at lower costs

Modern management promises to dramatically reduce and simplify the process of managing desktop images, saving valuable time and money.

Windows AutoPilot is a key part of the flexible device management approach needed in a modern workplace. It’s as simple as taking a new device from the box, powering it on, entering your credentials, and sitting back while it is configured and managed from the cloud with minimal user or IT effort. With no management of images!

Starting with the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Windows AutoPilot now includes an enrollment status page. This page enables you to ensure policies, settings, and apps can be provisioned on the device during that out-of-box experience before the user gets to the desktop and begins interacting with the device. Now IT can ensure every device is compliant and secure before it is used.

Windows AutoPilot enrollment status page.

Lenovo announced that they are the first Microsoft OEM PC partner to have direct integration with the Windows AutoPilot deployment service. They are ramping up to worldwide availability and working with early pilot customers. Dell is also now shipping PCs with Windows AutoPilot to customers in the U.S. and select countries and can enroll devices on behalf of customers in the factory for provisioning. HP, Toshiba, Panasonic, and Fujitsu remain committed to bringing seamless deployments of Windows 10 to customers through Windows AutoPilot on their respective PCs in the fall.

Windows AutoPilot is an absolute gamechanger. I urge you to spend some time learning more about how it can simplify your deployments, reduce the massive amount of time and money you spend provisioning hardware, and, of course, your users are going to love the simplicity.

An integrated administration experience

Our vision for the cloud services we build is to help simplify your work with a unified and intuitive management experience that spans your users, devices, apps, and services.

Back in March, we took a major step in this direction by announcing the Microsoft 365 admin center as the common management entry point for your entire Microsoft 365 implementation. Today, we are expanding this integrated and intuitive admin experience to Office 365 users.

The Microsoft 365 admin center.

Users of both Office 365 and Microsoft 365 will now have access to the same admin center with the same capabilities. For Office 365 users, this means a simpler admin experience that easily integrates with your other Microsoft services—all without giving up any capabilities or control.

If you want to manage Microsoft 365, you can now simply go to admin.microsoft.com. Previously, IT pros who were managing Microsoft 365 had to go to multiple consoles. Not any longer!

Compliance that’s built-in

The complexity and difficulty of managing compliance can be overwhelming, especially for larger organizations. We updated Microsoft 365 to include built-in and continuously updated capabilities that help with regulations that govern archiving, retention, disposition, classification, and discovery of data. These new features will really help reduce the complexity of executing compliance workflows.

The Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center is the central place that’s integrated with Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams—and it allows you to import data for retention and content discovery, as well as across cloud services.

The Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center.

We’ve recently added several new capabilities to the Security & Compliance Center, including:

• A new Data Privacy tab that gives you the ability to execute Data Subject Requests as part of the fulfillment requirements for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
• Privileged Access Management that allows you to prevent standing admin privilege by providing just-in-time access for admin roles and tasks in Microsoft 365.
• Multi-Geo Capabilities in Microsoft 365 that give you control over where your data resides at a per-user level based on your global data location and compliance needs.
• New Advanced Data Governance controls for event-based retention and disposition.

In addition to the Security & Compliance Center, each of the apps in Microsoft 365 supports the compliance levels you need. The latest application to join this list is Microsoft Forms, a simple app for creating surveys, quizzes, and polls. Used by more than three million users in education, thanks to customer demand, Forms was brought to commercial preview last year. Now, having received SOC compliance, and after feedback from 50,000+ companies during the preview, Forms is enterprise ready and generally available to all commercial customers. To learn more, visit the Forms Tech Community.

Simplifying your IT

I am really excited about the capabilities we are delivering today. These updates are going to positively impact the way you use Microsoft 365 across desktops, devices, services, and compliance—and you will tangibly see those benefits across the countless things your IT organization manages.

Here are a handful of things you can do right now to begin to simplify your IT management:

• Plan for Windows 7 and Office 2010 EOL (January and October 2020, respectively) and upgrade to a modern desktop.
• Enroll in Windows Analytics, activate Upgrade Readiness, onboard your devices, and upgrade to the latest version of Windows.
• Plan and execute your first Windows AutoPilot deployment.
• Get familiar with the new Microsoft 365 admin center experience.
• Start using the Security & Compliance Center and the Compliance Manager to track regulatory compliance and controls.

And don’t forget, Microsoft FastTrack is available to help guide you on your path to IT management simplification with Microsoft 365.

There is a real elegance in simplifying; it means having fewer things to manage, configure, integrate, secure, and (simply put) break down. This means fewer things that can go wrong and there are fewer places where a misconfiguration can create an entry point for an attacker. Now you have both a better user experience and improved IT control.

Simplified IT means better security at a lower cost, and more productivity with less risk.

The post Making IT simpler with a modern workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today I want to tell you about some exciting new features we’ve been working on that I think you’ll be pretty excited about. Specifically, today we are announcing that:

1. A limited-preview of Password-less sign-in using a FIDO2 security key will available in the next update to Windows 10 (coming this spring).
2. Azure AD Conditional Access policies can now check device health as reported by Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection.
3. Azure AD access reviews, Privileged Identity Management and Terms of Use features are all now Generally Available.
4. With the addition of domain allow and deny lists, Azure AD B2B Collaboration now gives you the ability to control which partner organizations you work with.

For more details, keep scrolling!

A limited-preview of Password-less sign-in using a FIDO2 security key will available in the next update to Windows 10 (coming this spring).

If you want to significantly improve your security posture, cut the risk of phishing attacks and cut your password management costs, then you are going to love the work we are doing to add FIDO2 support to Windows 10.

With the next Windows 10 update, we’re adding a limited preview of our FIDO2 security key support. This new capability will give your employees the ability to sign in to an Azure Active Directory-joined Windows 10 PC without a username or password. All they will need to do is insert FIDO2 compliant security key into their USB port and tab. They’ll be automatically signed in to the device and they’ll get single-sign-on access to all your Azure AD protected cloud resources, as well.

See how it works in this video:

We’ve got lots more work to do here of course, including adding support for delegated key creation, and support for hybrid environments. But this is going to be a HUGE step in our drive to eliminate passwords for good and we’re really excited about it.

Azure AD Conditional Access policies can now check device health as reported by Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection.

We’re also announcing some major improvements to Azure AD Conditional Access based on a new integration with Intune and Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection. You can now create access policies based on the risk level detected at Windows 10 endpoints, which helps you ensure that only trusted users on trusted devices can access your corporate data. With this new integration, Azure AD Conditional Access can now receive intelligence about suspicious activity in domain-joined devices and automatically block those devices from accessing corporate resources.

We have a video you can watch to learn more about how this integration works.

More updates!

We’ve got a few more updates to share that we think you’ll be happy to hear about, too.

At Ignite 2017, we announced the public preview of Azure AD access reviews, Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for Azure and Terms of Use and are now happy to announce the general availability of these three features in Azure AD Premium!

• Access reviews: We created access reviews to help you manage the drift in access rights over time. With GA, you can schedule access reviews to run on a regular basis. And review results can be automatically applied to help ensure clean compliance reviews.
  
• Azure AD PIM for Azure Resources: You can now use Azure AD PIM’s time-bound access and assignment capabilities to secure access to Azure Resources. For example, you can enforce Multi-Factor Authentication or an approval workflow whenever a user requests elevation into the Virtual Machine Contributor role. 
  
• Terms of Use: Many customers have told us they need a way to let their employees and partners how they should be using the data they are about to access, especially with the May 25^th 2018 GDPR deadline looming. Azure AD Terms of Use is now GA. We’ve recently added support for configuring terms with multiple languages and new detailed reports showing when specific users consented to which set of terms of use.
  

With the addition of domain allow and deny lists, Azure AD B2B Collaboration now gives you the ability to control which partner organizations you work with.

Last but not least you can now specify which partner organizations you want to share and collaborate with in Azure AD B2B Collaboration. To do this, you can choose to create list of specific allow or deny domains. When a domain is blocked using these capabilities, employees can no longer send invitations to people in that domain.

This helps you control access to your resources, while enabling a smooth experience for approved users.

This B2B Collaboration feature is available for all Azure Active Directory customers and can be used in conjunction with Azure AD Premium features like conditional access and identity protection for more granular control of when and how external business users sign in and gain access.

Go here to learn more.

Wrapping up

We’re excited to be able to bring you new ways to manage passwords, protect identities, and mitigate threats. Password-less sign-in in to Windows with Azure AD feature will soon be in limited preview, so let us know if you’d like to get on the waitlist to try it out.

And as always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please tell us! We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity DivisionVirtual Machine Contributor

The post Password-less sign-in to Windows 10 and Azure AD using FIDO2 is coming soon (plus other cool news)! appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

At Microsoft we’ve been working hard to eliminate passwords since the very earliest stages of Windows 10. We’ve made great progress with Windows Hello and our mobile Authenticator app that’s available on iOS and Android. But to date we have not had an interoperable solution that works across all industry platforms and browsers.

That’s why I’m so excited about the this weeks news from the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  On Tuesday the W3C advanced the Web Authentication spec (WebAuthn) to Candidate Recommendation status.  WebAuthn defines a web API that enables browsers and sites to use external authenticator keys based on the FIDO standard. This means we now have a cross-platform option for providing strong authentication without passwords!  And with support from Google, Microsoft and Mozilla browsers, we’re optimistic that WebAuthn will rapidly become widely adopted.  WebAuthn works together with the Client Authentication Protocol (CTAP), another FIDO standard.  CTAP defines the protocol for an external security key and talk to a client device.  With CTAP in place, we’re excitedly awaiting the wide variety of cost-effective security key options and form factors that innovative companies like Yubico, HID, Infineon, and Feitan are already working on.

Overview of FIDO2 architectural components

Microsoft has been working with the FIDO alliance for 4+ years now. We’ve made major contributions to the development of the FIDO2 set of standards and we are committed to adding full support of CTAP on Windows 10 and WebAuthn in the Edge browser. Microsoft’s identity products and services will also support FIDO.  This will allow Microsoft customers to use any Microsoft identity – both personal Microsoft accounts and organizational identities based on Azure Active Directory – to signin using a FIDO device instead of a password on any FIDO2 compatible device or browser.

The Password-less future is rapidly approaching and we’re excited for it to arrive!

For more information on the big announcement check out: https://fidoalliance.org/fido-alliance-and-w3c-achieve-major-standards-milestone-in-global-effort-towards-simpler-stronger-authentication-on-the-web/

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Big news in our drive to eliminate passwords: FIDO2 / WebAuthn reaches candidate recommendation status! appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

For data scientists transforming big data into input signals and experimenting with multiple machine learning models, processing time equals productivity. The same is true for researchers, engineers, and teams focused on predictive modeling. Content creation roles such as media professionals and graphic designers generate — and need to preserve — an enormous amount of data and intellectual property through their work.

Enter Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. With these devices, you can power through advanced workloads with server-grade data protection & performance.

These are revolutionary performance gains for desktop machines. With these new workstations, you’ll benefit from greater speed with faster processing & file transfers, greater resilience with server-grade storage, and you’ll enjoy the full power of high-performance hardware configurations.

Let’s look at the key benefits of Windows 10 Pro for Workstations:

Speed through demanding workloads & file transfers

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations supports devices with persistent memory¹ (aka non-volatile memory, or NVDIMM-N) so you can speed through advanced workloads with the fastest data storage possible on workstations. In addition, persistent memory keeps your files at hand in the event of a system power loss.

You’ll also save valuable time on file transfers between Server and PC with SMB Direct², a Microsoft solution for network adapters with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capability. This technology uses RDMA capable network adapters to utilize the full throughput of high-speed networks, transferring data at line speeds. It also provides very low-latency network requests, making remote storage perform like local storage. Finally, it significantly reduces CPU utilization, so you have more computing power available to run other applications such as Autodesk AutoCAD or Adobe Creative Suite.

Work confidently with server-grade data protection on your workstation

In addition to speed, you also get server-grade data protection on your workstation – a very new and highly valuable feature for anyone working with large volumes of data, including intellectual property that needs to be preserved over time.

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations combines Microsoft’s Resilient File System (ReFS) with Storage Spaces to provide highly resilient storage for large volumes of data so you can rest assured your data is automatically backed up to multiple mirrored drives. In addition, ReFS detects when data becomes corrupt on one of the mirrored drives, and then repairs data across your drives to ensure you’re working with clean data.

Feel the power of high-performance workstations

With Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, you can select high-performance configurations with up to 4 CPUs (previously limited to 2 CPUs) and add massive memory up to 6TB (previously limited to 2TB), and it is required for server-grade Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors. We’ve also rolled the workstation capabilities into Windows 10 Enterprise (see diagram below).

These machines provide an enormous amount of power to run advanced workloads, with compute cycles left free so you can run other apps simultaneously.

Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro for Workstations now!

You can purchase outstanding workstation devices running Windows 10 Pro for Workstations such as Dell’s new Precision 5520 or Precision 7920 Tower. We’ll be adding more new workstations to this list as they become available, so check back often. If you’re interested in upgrading your current device³ to Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, follow these steps.

Thank you to our customers and Windows Insiders for your input and feedback. We look forward to continuing to hear from you!

¹ Persistent memory requires NVDIMM-N compatible hardware, ADR-enabled chipset and compliant UEFI.
² SMB Direct requires RDMA capable network adapters on both endpoints of the connection: client/device and server.
³ The minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations are the same as Windows 10 Pro.

The post Windows 10 Pro for Workstations—power through advanced workloads 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.

End-to-end insights for Windows 10 adoption and deployment

Windows Analytics is a cloud based service that provides data driven insights, or analytics, about your devices, allowing you to detect problems, monitor device health, and remediate issues across the devices you administer. This suite of services makes upgrading to Windows 10 from legacy operating systems easier and streamlines keeping devices up-to-date and secure on Windows 10.

• Upgrade Readiness uses diagnostic data to identify and resolve application and driver compatibility issues as you plan and manage the upgrade process. Once your devices are up-to-date on Windows 10, Upgrade Readiness becomes a key tool for your Windows servicing process, continually providing these insights, so you can test and deploy Windows 10 Semi-Annual Channel feature updates faster.

• Update Compliance provides a unified view of Windows Update and Antivirus (AV) status of your Windows 10 devices to keep them secure and up-to-date, regardless of the management solution you use. Windows Update diagnostic data gives you immediate visibility into which of your devices are missing critical Windows security updates that help keep your devices secure and protected. It also assesses protection and threat status, and tracks deployment progress so you can troubleshoot issues as they arise.

• Device Health is designed to help IT administrators monitor and proactively maintain devices. Device Health uses data to identify and report common device performance and reliability problems employees may experience so they can be resolved quickly and efficiently. By pinpointing disruptive issues like kernel crashes or third-party driver issues, Device Health data provides insight into the scope and scale of an issue, so you can focus on mitigation and remediation over investigation. Proactive monitoring of device health and performance saves you time and money by reducing support calls and improving employee productivity.

Windows Analytics provides the right insights for testing and deployment planning

Windows Analytics is currently being used by hundreds of customers on millions of devices, in over 200 countries. Companies like Independence Blue Cross are using Upgrade Readiness to plan, test and deploy Windows 10 on thousands of devices as part of their migration process. The Upgrade Readiness planning tool simplifies this process.

We often hear from customers that application compatibility is one of the biggest pain points on the enterprise upgrade path. A typical enterprise may have tens of thousands of devices and applications. Before any large-scale migration, IT administrators want to ensure their legacy applications will work. With so many apps, it is time-consuming to figure out which may have issues and how to prioritize those apps that require attention.

“Windows Upgrade Readiness helped us to quickly design a strategic approach for our Windows 10 deployment by allowing us to focus on applications that needed special attention while moving quickly to upgrade machines that were Windows 10 ready. It is also the driving force behind our Windows as a Service adoption strategy.”

Upgrade Readiness collects system, application, and driver data for analysis. It then identifies compatibility issues that can block an upgrade and suggest fixes when they are known to Microsoft. Apps are automatically segmented and grouped for you, so you don’t have to review them one by one. You can see which apps are most widely used, which are supported by their software vendor, and which are considered low risk for compatibility problems. Based on this information, you’ll get suggestions on which apps to focus on, so you can start to resolve any blockers. This automated process is the same for evaluating driver compatibility, so you can fast-track upgrade readiness. As an IT admin, you have full transparency and control over the level of data gathered, so you can adjust the level or stop the flow at any time.

More tools to simplify upgrade readiness – Ready for Windows and Office 365 ProPlus solutions

Customers upgrading to Windows 10 want to know if a third-party product they use will work with the target version of Windows 10 before upgrading. To ensure a smooth upgrade process, we work closely with independent software vendors (ISVs), especially Antivirus (AV) and Security vendors, to provide customers with compatibility information on their most popular solutions on the Ready for Windows site. Third party application makers can formally assure customers that their verified software will run and be supported on Windows 10 by getting listed in the Ready for Windows directory.

Ready for Windows has also recently started collecting information from ISVs who are committed to supporting the Semi-Annual releases for Windows 10 (Always Up-to-Date), so organizations that are interested in keeping their employees’ devices up-to-date can more easily standardize on applications that will also be kept current on Windows 10.

Upgrade Readiness is not only about understanding the broad view of device readiness, it’s also about knowing which Office add-ins your employees depend on to make sure they are successful in their jobs. With diagnostic data as well as compatibility statements from Ready for Windows gathered from ISVs on Office 365 ProPlus solutions, you can easily check compatibility of the critical add-ins your employees rely upon every day. For even greater transparency and ease, Upgrade Readiness now pulls Office 365 ProPlus data into the apps view for your organization.

With Windows Analytics, you can feel confident to start testing and deploying Windows 10 sooner. You can begin pilot deployments of the latest feature update (Windows 10, 1709) using Upgrade Readiness to build confidence. Start by targeting and evaluating a small subset of your install base. We recommend using the application and device inventory data from the Upgrade Readiness service to select a set of devices that provide appropriate coverage. Then listen, monitor for issues, and remediate blockers. Once you are satisfied with the results of your pilot deployments, begin broadly deploying throughout your organization. This phased rollout follows what we do for consumers worldwide today.

Get Started with Windows Analytics today!

You can get started with Windows Analytics today by visiting our Windows for Business site. It’s free for enterprise E3 and E5 subscribers and Windows 10 Pro users. If you have questions about deploying and getting the most out of Windows Analytics in your organization, be sure to join our next Windows Analytics “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Tuesday, January 16^th, 2018.

I’ll continue to share more about new features and enhancements that support Windows Analytics in the coming months. We’d also like to hear how Windows Analytics is working for you by sending us comments or suggestions via the Feedback Hub app.

The post Accelerate Windows 10 Migration with Windows Analytics appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

In the course of our private beta, we saw startups use it to put together images, mockups, and notes as an inspiration board for their next big idea. We witnessed marketing agencies use it in online meetings as they work with clients on product designs in real time. And our team uses it to diagram engineering plans, with remote participants filling in their respective areas on the same working canvas. Ultimately, we see Microsoft Whiteboard Preview as enhancing how people go from personal ideation, team brainstorms, and group discussions to their finished products.

Collaborate effortlessly

The limitless surface ensures that imagination has room to grow and provides space for everyone’s ideas. Bring in teammates—whether they’re across the hall or in a different part of the world—with real-time collaboration across multiple devices. You can see where everyone is on the board and the updates they’re making—whether they’re adding images, putting up sticky notes, or creating diagrams. Now even remote workers can easily join in and contribute to the discussion.

Work naturally

Microsoft Whiteboard Preview lets you create in whatever way feels most natural to you. The pen-first, touch-first technology lets you make fluid gestures with your fingers or draw out finer details with your pen. Using your pen, you can jot down notes, draw precise illustrations, or search for images on the web. Using your fingers, you can swipe to different sections of your board, turn the virtual ruler to the angle you want, and drag and drop images to create a photo stack. Whether you use pen or touch, Microsoft Whiteboard Preview recognizes your intent and delivers your desired outcomes in an instant.

Create digitally

With the preview of Microsoft Whiteboard, you can use intelligent ink that recognizes your freeform drawings and turns them into standard shapes, so it’s easy to create great-looking tables, diagrams, and flowcharts. And unlike traditional whiteboards, the app automatically saves your boards, so you can pick up where you left off or share links to your boards, so others can build on top of your work.* No need to take photos of your canvas or email photos to others when you need to get them up to speed.

We’re truly excited for you to try out the Microsoft Whiteboard Preview as we think it will help you unlock creativity and harness the power of your teams. We look forward to receiving your comments, suggestions, and feature requests via the Windows Feedback Hub, which you can access from within the app.

—The Microsoft Whiteboard team

*The Microsoft Whiteboard Preview is rolling out to all English versions of Windows 10 within the next 24 hours, and will roll out to additional languages in the coming months. The app is free to use for anyone with a Windows 10 device, but one participant with an Office 365 personal, work, or school account is needed for multi-party collaboration. For SurfaceHub customers, the Microsoft Whiteboard Preview will eventually replace the native whiteboard app currently running on your SurfaceHub. In the meantime, you can install the preview of the Microsoft Whiteboard alongside your existing app.

The post Microsoft Whiteboard Preview—the freeform canvas for creative collaboration appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

The evolution of technology and cloud innovation are democratizing data and in turn fueling digital transformation. Embracing every facet of this digital transformation offers organizations an opportunity to better engage with customers, empower employees, and optimize the creation and delivery of products and services. However, with the increased use of personal data to customize user experiences, new compliance laws—such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—are a logical policy component of our technology landscape. Microsoft 365 offers a complete cloud solution to help you with GDPR compliance, while Compliance Manager helps you assess and manage your compliance risk.

Compliance promotes innovation by building customer trust in technology

At its core, the GDPR strengthens personal privacy rights for individuals in the EU and requires organizations to provide individuals control over their personal data. To build and maintain the trust needed to manage customer relationships through technology, organizations need tighter controls over what personal data they hold and how they manage and protect this data. Systems and processes need to be modernized to prevent the unlawful use of data, accommodate personal data requests by individuals, and provide notifications of breaches in a timely manner.

Businesses are looking to the cloud for added value

Our research suggests that companies not only see the long-term value of building trust by protecting customer data, but in fact believe their investments in compliance will positively impact other areas of their business—like productivity and collaboration.* When IT decision makers in Europe and the U.S. were asked to identify their top concern in achieving GDPR compliance, “protecting customer data” was the #1 response while avoiding fines ranked #8. More than half of respondents said the GDPR brings added benefits like collaboration, productivity, and security. Cloud solutions like Microsoft 365 are a big reason that businesses see opportunity in compliance. Of those surveyed, 41 percent said they are likely to move more of their company’s infrastructure to the cloud to become compliant. And among leading cloud vendors, Microsoft was identified as most trusted by a wide margin (28 percent), followed by IBM (16 percent), Google (11 percent), and Amazon (10 percent). All told, 92 percent of IT decision makers in companies that store data primarily in the cloud identified as being confident in their GDPR readiness, compared with just 65 percent of those who prefer to store data on-premises.

Microsoft 365 is a complete cloud solution for GDPR compliance

The Microsoft Cloud is uniquely positioned to help you meet your GDPR compliance obligations, with the largest certified compliance portfolio, services architected to be secure by design, and the most extensive global datacenter footprint in the industry.

Our cloud solution is built for power, scale, and flexibility. Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security—offering a rich set of integrated solutions that leverage AI to help you assess and manage your compliance risk, protect your most important data, and streamline your processes.

Assess and manage your compliance risk with Compliance Manager Preview

Because achieving organizational compliance can be very challenging, understanding your compliance risk should be your first priority. Today, we’re making that easier with the preview of Compliance Manager.

Compliance Manager is a cross–Microsoft Cloud services solution designed to help organizations meet complex compliance obligations like the GDPR. It performs a real-time risk assessment that reflects your compliance posture against data protection regulations when using Microsoft Cloud services, along with recommended actions and step-by-step guidance. Learn more about Compliance Manager and how to access the preview.

Protect your most sensitive data

Beyond understanding your compliance risk, protecting both personal data and other sensitive content is key.

Microsoft information protection solutions provide an integrated classification, labeling, and protection experience, enabling more persistent governance and protection of sensitive data wherever it is—across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises.

For example, Office 365 Advanced Data Governance leverages machine assisted insights to help you automatically classify, set policies, and protect the data in Office 365 that is most important to your organization.

Azure Information Protection scanner addresses hybrid and on-premises scenarios by allowing you to configure policies to automatically label and protect documents on a Windows Server file share. Read “Azure Information Protection scanner in public preview” to learn more about the scanner.

Microsoft also provides external threat protection solutions to prevent and detect cyber-attacks across workloads—whether on devices using Windows 10, on-premises and Azure-based infrastructure, or with our cloud services like Office 365.

One of these solutions, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, is built into Windows 10 and helps spot most advanced targeted attacks by giving visibility into threats on your device, insights into the scope of the threat, and one-click response capabilities to isolate the threat immediately.

Streamline your processes

The GDPR requires organizations to be able to identify and locate personal data. Having a scalable investigation and audit-ready processes in place to meet requirements is paramount.

Content Search, a feature of Office 365 eDiscovery, makes it easy to search Office 365 for data related to individuals. Since the results of this search could result in large quantities of data or data that is confidential to the organization, machine learning in Advanced eDiscovery can be used to minimize the data so that you are only providing the relevant data in accordance with the GDPR.

Finally, Customer Lockbox provides an audit trail showing when personal data is accessed during service operations.

Get started today on your GDPR journey with Microsoft

No matter where you are in your GDPR efforts, the Microsoft Cloud and our intelligent compliance solutions in Microsoft 365 can help you on your journey to GDPR compliance.

—Ron Markezich

*Online survey conducted by YouGov PLC between 10/31/2017 and 11/8/2017. Sample size: 1,542 IT decision makers.

The post Microsoft 365 helps businesses increase trust and innovation through compliance with Compliance Manager Preview appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

New features power content creation

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

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

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

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

Cloud enhancements make file management easier

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

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

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

Expanding our online toolkit

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

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

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

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

Other updates

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

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability: 

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

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

Today at Microsoft Ignite, we unveiled a new vision for empowering Firstline Workers in the digital age and introduced Microsoft 365 F1—a new offering that brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security to deliver a complete, intelligent solution to empower all workers.

The modern workplace requires companies to meet new employee expectations, connect a more distributed workforce, and provide the tools that allow all employees to create, innovate, and work together to solve customer and business problems. A truly modern workplace brings out the best in employee ingenuity, creates a culture of innovation and action, and welcomes and empowers all workers from the executive team to the Firstline Workforce.

Firstline Workers comprise the majority of our global workforce. Numbering two billion people worldwide, they are the people behind the counter, on the phone, in the clinics, on the shop floor, and in the field. They are often the first to engage customers, the first to represent a company’s brand, and the first to see products and services in action. They form the backbone of many of the world’s largest industries, and without them, the ambitions of many organizations could not be brought to life.

We see an opportunity for technology to give Firstline Workers a more intuitive, immersive, and empowering experience. Microsoft is in a unique position to help companies tap into the potential of their Firstline Workforce with our commercial product offerings, spanning Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft IoT, Microsoft AI, and Microsoft HoloLens and the Windows Mixed Reality ecosystem.

The introduction of Microsoft 365 F1 represents a significant next step towards our vision of involving the Firstline Workforce in digital transformation by empowering every worker with technology.

Transforming the Firstline Worker experience

Microsoft 365 F1 includes the capabilities and tools to enable every worker to turn their ideas into action. It fosters culture and community, with Skype Meeting Broadcast for interactive townhall meetings and Yammer to help employees find and share best practices across the company.

Microsoft 365 F1 makes it easy to train and upskill employees, with Microsoft Stream to share dynamic, role-based content and video, and SharePoint to easily distribute onboarding and training materials and manage institutional knowledge in one secure place.

It supports firstline productivity and digitizes business processes, with Microsoft StaffHub, a purpose-built app for Firstline Workers to manage their workday and Microsoft PowerApps and Flow to automate everyday activities. Today, we’re announcing new capabilities coming to StaffHub, including the ability for employees to clock in/out and track tasks. We are also making it easier for employees to stay connected in StaffHub, by integrating messaging with Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork, and highlighting corporate announcements made in Yammer. Finally, we’re enabling customers to connect StaffHub to workforce management systems and other tools with the availability of general APIs.

Microsoft 365 F1 streamlines IT management, minimizes cost, and extends security to all employees and endpoints. Azure Active Directory provides management of employee identity and access; Microsoft Intune helps secure devices; and new features in Windows 10 simplify the management of Firstline Workers’ experiences, supporting locked down single purpose devices with Windows Assigned Access and automated deployment with Windows AutoPilot.

Finally, we recognize the importance of providing Firstline Workers streamlined and secure devices that minimize total cost of ownership. Today, we’re announcing new commercial devices with Windows 10 S from our OEM partners HP, Lenovo, and Acer. Starting as low as $275, these devices benefit from cloud-based identity and management and are ideal for firstline environments.

We are incredibly excited about our opportunity to empower Firstline Workers and we are just getting started!

To learn more about our vision, please visit our new Firstline Worker page and see the table below to learn what’s included in Microsoft 365 F1.

—Bryan Goode

The post All workers welcome with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Building on our vision for the modern workplace, today at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, we’re announcing the expansion of Microsoft 365 as well as a number of new product capabilities that empower everyone to be creative and work together, securely.

Expanding Microsoft 365 to new audiences

In July, we announced Microsoft 365, which brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security, delivering a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees. It represents a fundamental shift in how we design, build, and bring our products to market to address customer needs for a modern workplace. Starting October 1, 2017, we are bringing Microsoft 365 to several new audiences.

Microsoft 365 Education—A new offer that combines capabilities across Office 365 for Education, Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Minecraft: Education Edition, to provide students, faculty, and staff everything they need to create and work together securely in the classroom. Microsoft 365 Education is offered in two plans—Microsoft 365 A3 and Microsoft 365 A5. In addition, we’re excited to announce a new Microsoft 365 plan for non-profit organizations.

Microsoft 365 F1—A new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan designed to maximize the impact of the Firstline Worker. Numbering two billion worldwide, these are the individuals behind the counter, on the phone, in the clinics, on the shop floor, and in the field who form the backbone of many of the world’s largest industries. This new plan helps foster culture and community, train and upskill employees, digitize business processes, and deliver real-time expertise while minimizing risk and cost. We’re also adding new product capabilities to StaffHub and Windows 10 to keep everyone connected, automate device deployment, and manage single purpose devices.

We also recognize the importance of providing Firstline Workers with streamlined and secure devices that reduce total cost of ownership. Today, we’re announcing new commercial devices with Windows 10 S from our OEM partners HP, Lenovo, and Acer, with availability starting later this year. Starting as low as $275 (ERP), these devices benefit from cloud-based identity and management and are ideal for firstline environments.

New capabilities to unlock employee creativity

Work today has quickly shifted from simple execution of routine tasks to creative problem solving. Microsoft 365 provides the tools people need to express their ideas effectively, build on the work and expertise of others, and create compelling content.

New intelligent capabilities in Excel—We’re harnessing the power of AI to make Excel more powerful. Coming in early 2018, Excel will understand new data types, beyond text and numbers, and augment that data based on public and enterprise information. For example, Excel will know that “India” is a country and “MSFT” is a stock. Insights—a new service coming to Office Insiders this year—also uses AI to find and recommend patterns, helping you derive additional insights from complex data.

Intelligent, personalized search—New search capabilities enable you to discover people and information from across your organization and beyond. We’ve made improvements to help you quickly find the content and expertise you need across SharePoint and Office.com, and you can even search for people and content directly from your Windows taskbar. Bing for business, now in private preview, brings internal sites and content into Bing search results to help you find the right information and resources. Wherever you start your search—you get consistent, personalized results powered by the Microsoft Graph.

LinkedIn profile integration—Today, we’re announcing the ability to view LinkedIn profiles in Microsoft apps and services. This new experience, rolling out now to first release customers, provides rich insights about the people you’re working with—inside and outside your organization—right from within Office 365.

See LinkedIn profile information from Microsoft apps and services.

The universal toolkit for teamwork

One of the hallmarks of the modern workplace is the shift from individual productivity to dynamic teamwork. Microsoft 365 addresses the complete set of needs you have across your organization by providing a universal toolkit for teamwork with a broad set of purpose-built apps, all on a secure platform.

Intelligent communications with Microsoft Teams—Today, we’re announcing a new vision for intelligent communications to transform calling and meeting experiences by bringing comprehensive voice and video capabilities into Teams, along with cognitive and data services, and insights from the Microsoft Graph. As a result, Teams will evolve as the primary client for intelligent communications in Office 365, replacing the current Skype for Business client over time.

Enhanced content sharing with OneDrive and SharePoint—The new unified sharing experience, now in Windows, Mac, web, and mobile, will come to the Office apps in the coming weeks. The new experience provides a simple, consistent, and secure way to share and control access to files across Office 365. And you can now securely share files with people outside your organization who don’t have a Microsoft account. In addition, you can customize the look and layout of SharePoint pages, add dynamic content from over 100 new web parts and connectors, as well as share those pages on SharePoint sites or as a tab in Teams.

Cross-org connections with Yammer—We continue to invest in Yammer as the best way to connect with people across your organization. Today, we’re announcing deeper integration with SharePoint, new group insights for community managers, and enterprise-grade compliance with local data residency.

Yammer group insights show trends for group members and non-members.

Simplifying IT management

In the modern workplace, the role of IT has never been more important. Microsoft 365 is designed to meet business needs and minimize total cost of ownership across the IT lifecycle, from deployment to management and ongoing servicing. Only Microsoft delivers a complete solution for your entire productivity infrastructure.

Simplifying management—Beginning in early 2018, Lenovo, HP, Panasonic, Fujitsu, and Toshiba will join Surface in supporting Windows Autopilot on new Windows 10 devices, automating new device deployment and configuration. This fall, we’ll also introduce new capabilities in Microsoft Intune to manage Windows 10 devices with Office 365 ProPlus, configure Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, and deploy Win32 apps.

New migration capabilities—To help customers on their transition to the cloud, this fall, we’ll introduce co-management, a new set of capabilities to help customers migrate to cloud-based management of Windows 10 devices with Microsoft Intune. We’re also announcing FastTrack for Microsoft 365, which provides planning, guidance, and assistance to help IT professionals drive adoption and usage across Microsoft 365.

New proactive insights—Office 365 Usage Analytics, generally available in early 2018, will enable IT professionals to analyze and visualize service-wide usage data in Power BI. On the desktop, we’re updating Windows Analytics this fall with new update compliance and device health capabilities to help proactively identify and address new issues that may impact user experience and productivity.

The new usage analytics dashboard uses Power BI to unlock rich insights about service adoption.

Intelligent security and compliance updates

As employees embrace a new culture of work across devices and cloud apps, their interactions can become more difficult to secure. Updates to Microsoft 365 provide broad security capabilities, powered by Microsoft’s Intelligent Security Graph, to help protect people and sensitive data from new, sophisticated threats, and to help you meet compliance obligations.

Expanding conditional access—To help you better secure the “front door” of your organization, we’re expanding conditional access capabilities. To secure sessions inside SaaS apps and protect sensitive documents, we are integrating across Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and Azure Information Protection as well as extending multi-factor authentication to include third-party support.

The Microsoft Cloud App Security dashboard.

Information protection—Microsoft 365 helps you detect, classify, protect, and monitor your data, regardless of where it is stored or shared. Today, we’re announcing the integration of Azure Information Protection with Office 365 Message Encryption, which makes it easier to send protected emails and documents to recipients using consumer email services such as Outlook.com and Gmail.

Phishing protection and automatic remediation—Today, we’re unveiling new threat protection capabilities built on the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. New Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection features help mitigate content phishing, domain spoofing, and impersonation. We’re also announcing a limited preview of Azure Advanced Threat Protection to help detect attacks on user identity sooner, and the integration of our recent Hexadite acquisition into Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection to automatically help investigate, assess, and remediate threats.

Compliance Manager—We’re also announcing the upcoming preview of Compliance Manager, a tool to help organizations meet compliance obligations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It performs a real-time risk assessment with a score that reflects your compliance position against data protection regulations when using Microsoft Cloud services, along with recommended actions and step-by-step guidance.

Compliance Manager helps organizations meet compliance obligations.

With over 700 sessions at Ignite this week, there’s plenty more news to come. If you didn’t register before the event sold out, you can still be part of Microsoft Ignite online.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

The post Advancing intelligence, management, and security to empower the modern workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, created with feedback from Windows Insiders, introduces new features to leverage the power of high-end PC hardware

The value of Windows 10 Pro for Workstations is directly aligned to increase the performance and reliability of high-end PCs, with the following features:

• ReFS (Resilient file system): ReFS provides cloud-grade resiliency for data on fault-tolerant storage spaces and manages very large volumes with ease. ReFS is designed to be resilient to data corruption, optimized for handling large data volumes, auto-correcting and more. It protects your data with integrity streams on your mirrored storage spaces. Using its integrity streams, ReFS detects when data becomes corrupt on one of the mirrored drives and uses a healthy copy of your data on the other drive to correct and protect your precious data.
• Persistent memory: Windows 10 Pro for Workstations provides the most demanding apps and data with the performance they require with non-volatile memory modules (NVDIMM-N) hardware. NVDIMM-N enables you to read and write your files with the fastest speed possible, the speed of the computer’s main memory. Because NVDIMM-N is non-volatile memory, your files will still be there, even when you switch your workstation off.
• Faster file sharing: Windows 10 Pro for Workstations includes a feature called SMB Direct, which supports the use of network adapters that have Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capability. Network adapters that have RDMA can function at full speed with very low latency, while using very little CPU. For applications that access large datasets on remote SMB file shares, this feature enables:
  • Increased throughput: Leverages the full throughput of high speed networks where the network adapters coordinate the transfer of large amounts of data at line speed.
  • Low latency: Provides extremely fast responses to network requests, and, as a result, makes remote file storage feel as if it is directly attached storage.
  • Low CPU utilization: Uses fewer CPU cycles when transferring data over the network, which leaves more power available to other applications running on the system.
• Expanded hardware support: One of the top pain points expressed by our Windows Insiders was the limits on taking advantage of the raw power of their machine. Hence, we are expanding hardware support in Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. Users will now be able to run Windows 10 Pro for Workstations on devices with high-performance configurations including server-grade Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors, with up to 4 CPUs (today limited to 2 CPUs) and add massive memory up to 6TB (today limited to 2TB).

Performance is a very important requirement in this new world of fast-paced innovation and we will continue to invest on Windows 10 Pro for Workstations to enable Windows power users to maximize every aspect of their high-performance device. Windows 10 Pro for Workstations utilizes significant investments, that Windows has made in recent releases, for scaling up across a high number of logical processors and large amounts of memory. Our architectural changes in the Windows kernel take full advantage of high-end processors families, such as Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron, that package a high number of cores in single or multi-processor configurations.

Thank you to our customers and Windows Insiders for your feedback. We look forward to continuing to hear from you.

The post Microsoft announces Windows 10 Pro for Workstations appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

The ElitePOS modernizes the retail POS device with an innovative, sleek modular design that supports use cases beyond checkout to help the retail and hospitality industries deliver a consistent and compelling experience. With options such as a receipt printer that integrates into the column stand and a magnetic stripe reader that can be built into the display, retailers can complement their store environment with a clean counter space.

The ElitePOS is built to withstand extensive usage, with an extended lifecycle that retailers depend on. The system is designed to pass various military standards – or MIL-STD – tests, can handle spills by channeling liquid away from the device components, and provide efficient cooling with side venting for improved reliability. Additionally, line-busting will be a breeze with Windows 10 or Windows IoT, fast DDR4 memory, and 7th generation Intel Core processors with optional vPro technology.

As security continues to be a major concern in the retail and hospitality industries, the ElitePOS delivers both hardware-based and integrated software security features, including:

• BIOS-level device security to provide protection in the event of a malware attack with HP Sure Start Gen3, the industry’s first self-healing BIOS, and HP BIOSphere Gen3, the industry-leading firmware ecosystems.
• User authentication technology, including an optional fingerprint reader with Windows Hello, to help prevent unauthorized access; Credential Guard for secure user authentication and password protection, and Device Guard, which lets IT managers create rules to run only signed, trusted, and approved applications on the POS system to help protect against walk-up and low-level attacks through USB ports.
• Physical security of the device itself with an optional bolt-to-counter configuration, or VESA mounting and K-Lock features.

The ElitePOS is expected to be available in August 2017. To learn more about the point-of-sale system, visit hp.com/go/elitepos, or see the ElitePOS in person August 6-9 at RetailNow 2017 in booth #410-412.

The post HP announces new point-of-sale system powered by Windows 10 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today at Inspire, Satya Nadella unveiled Microsoft 365, which brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, delivering a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees. It represents a fundamental shift in how we will design, build and go to market to address our customers’ needs for a modern workplace.

The workplace is transforming—from changing employee expectations, to more diverse and globally distributed teams, to an increasingly complex threat landscape. From these trends, we are seeing a new culture of work emerging. Our customers are telling us they are looking to empower their people with innovative technology to embrace this modern culture of work.

With more than 100 million commercial monthly active users of Office 365, and more than 500 million Windows 10 devices in use, Microsoft is in a unique position to help companies empower their employees, unlocking business growth and innovation.

To address the commercial needs from the largest enterprise to the smallest business, we are introducing Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise is designed for large organizations and integrates Office 365 Enterprise, Windows 10 Enterprise and Enterprise Mobility + Security to empower employees to be creative and work together, securely.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise:

• Unlocks creativity by enabling people to work naturally with ink, voice and touch, all backed by tools that utilize AI and machine learning.
• Provides the broadest and deepest set of apps and services with a universal toolkit for teamwork, giving people flexibility and choice in how they connect, share and communicate.
• Simplifies IT by unifying management across users, devices, apps and services.
• Helps safeguard customer data, company data and intellectual property with built-in, intelligent security.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise is offered in two plans—Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5. Both are available for purchase on August 1, 2017.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise is built on the foundation of the highly successful Secure Productive Enterprise, which grew seats by triple digits in the last year. Going forward, Microsoft 365 Enterprise replaces Secure Productive Enterprise to double-down on the new customer promise of empowering employees to be creative and work together, securely.

Microsoft 365 Business is designed for small- to medium-sized businesses with up to 300 users and integrates Office 365 Business Premium with tailored security and management features from Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security. It offers services to empower employees, safeguard the business and simplify IT management.

Microsoft 365 Business:

• Helps companies achieve more together by better connecting employees, customers and suppliers.
• Empowers employees to get work done from anywhere, on any device.
• Protects company data across devices with always-on security.
• Simplifies the set-up and management of employee devices and services with a single IT console.

Microsoft 365 Business will be available in public preview on August 2, 2017. It will become generally available on a worldwide basis in the fall (CYQ3) of 2017, priced at US $20 per user, per month.

As a part of our commitment to small-to-medium sized customers, we’re also announcing the preview of three tailored applications that are coming to Office 365 Business Premium and Microsoft 365 Business:

• Microsoft Connections—A simple-to-use email marketing service.
• Microsoft Listings—An easy way to publish your business information on top sites.
• Microsoft Invoicing—A new way to create professional invoices and get paid fast.

Today, we are also announcing that Microsoft’s mileage tracking app, MileIQ, is now included with Office 365 Business Premium.

Satya also discussed how Microsoft 365 represents a significant opportunity for partners to grow their businesses. Microsoft 365 will drive growth by enabling our more than 64,000 cloud partners to differentiate their offerings, simplify their sales processes and increase their revenue.

According to two Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Studies (commissioned studies conducted by Forrester Consulting), Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business increase average partner margins by an estimated 35 percent and 20 percent, respectively, over three years. Partners can learn more and explore training, sales and deployment resources on the Microsoft 365 partner site.

We are incredibly enthusiastic about Microsoft 365 and how it will help customers and partners drive growth and innovation. To learn more about Microsoft 365, please visit Microsoft.com/Microsoft-365.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer 

The post Introducing Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.