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

News from Build 2020

Microsoft Teams

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

Productivity

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

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

Automation

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

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

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

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

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

Meetings and events

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

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

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

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

Secure and remote scheduling

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

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

Fluid Framework

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

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

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

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

Project Cortex

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

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

Outlook

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

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

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

Microsoft Edge

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Lists

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

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

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

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

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

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

The five attributes

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

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

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

Teams customer success stories

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

Bold beauty: L’Oreal

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

From the factory floor to the C-Suite: Alcoa

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

Simplified collaboration: Telefónica

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

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

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

Connecting across the globe: Trek

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

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

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

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

1. Prioritize time-sensitive communication

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

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

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

2. Easily manage communications within and across teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy packages in the Teams admin center is coming soon.

Building a robust partner ecosystem with Teams

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

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

Helping our customers transform the way work is done

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

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

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

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

Get started with Teams

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

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

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

Transforming the Firstline Worker experience

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

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

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

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

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

Helping our customers succeed

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

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

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

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

Join us at the HITEC conference

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

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We’re expanding Teams with new capabilities to digitally empower the Firstline Workforce. Today’s news includes: a customizable mobile experience with mobile-only features such as location sharing, a Graph API for the Shifts scheduling tool, which provides integration between Teams and workforce management systems, and the new Praise feature that makes it easy for managers and employees to recognize their coworkers right within Teams.

Here’s a look at what’s new:

Enable Firstline Workers to communicate and collaborate effectively with a customizable Teams mobile experience and new mobile features

For Firstline Workers, such as retail associates, flight crew members, and field service workers, being mobile is the nature of the job. Because these employees often need to share information with others inside their organization, many have resorted to using unsecure consumer chat apps to communicate with coworkers. But this poses security and compliance risks, as well as process inefficiencies. Today, we are announcing a new customizable mobile Teams experience that gives Firstline Workers the tools they need to communicate and collaborate effectively on the go. It’s simple, familiar, and secure, with several new mobile-only features that have particular relevance for Firstline Workers, including location sharing and smart camera, as well as the ability to record and share audio messages. The customizable mobile experience is available starting today.

Workers need different capabilities depending on their role. While some might need access to private chats, calendars, and calls, others may only need access to teams and channels. IT administrators can now give each employee role-based access to the primary Teams features they need. This capability can be used for employees in any role, with the option for IT to create a custom policy or use the newly available Firstline Worker configuration policy template. Employees can further customize their experience by pinning the modules they need most from their module tray to their navigation bar.

Customizable mobile Teams experience and new mobile features: Keep all conversations in one place (left), share location and record audio messages (middle), and customize the navigation menu (right).

Integrate workforce management systems with Teams using a new API

Many companies rely on workforce management systems to handle important operational tasks related to their Firstline Workforce, such as shift scheduling, payroll, benefits, time, and attendance. We’re working on a set of new APIs that enable organizations to integrate their existing workforce management systems with Teams.

The first API is the Graph API for Shifts, the schedule management tool in Teams. With Shifts now available in Teams for all customers, the new API makes integration between Shifts and enterprise scheduling systems possible, enabling seamless access to workforce management systems for managers and employees, right from Teams. The Graph API for Shifts will be in public preview this quarter.

With Shifts, managers can easily plan shift schedules, and team members can review schedules and make schedule change requests, all in real time.

Keep your Firstline Workers engaged and motivated with new Praise feature

Firstline Workers such as retail associates play a key role in representing a company’s brand, but this segment of the workforce experiences some of the highest turnover rates. Taking steps to engage and recognize employees can go a long way to improving their satisfaction and reducing turnover. The new Praise tool, rolling out this quarter, gives managers and employees a simple way to recognize coworkers, right in the Teams app where the whole team can see it.

With Praise, share badges to celebrate every success, communicate your appreciation with your team members, and foster greater comradery.

Next week, members of the Microsoft team will be at NRF 2019, the annual retail industry conference. Visit us in booth #3301. Also, please visit our Teams for Firstline Workers page to learn more about how Teams can empower your Firstline Workforce.

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