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Microsoft Ignite

Global experiences, localized content, in-person opportunities, and more—let’s get ready for a new kind of Microsoft Ignite.

Discover what's new

Empowering today’s digitally connected, distributed workforce

Microsoft 365 is the cloud-first platform for all the ways that people work today—wherever, whenever, however. From information workers to frontline workers. No matter how you run your company or your team. And, with Microsoft 365, organizations save more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of point solutions.²

Microsoft 365 comes alive in the new Microsoft 365 app, home to all your favorite productivity apps—Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook—along with new apps for creation and expression, like Loop, and any third-party apps you choose. It’s a secure, integrated, experience built on the Microsoft Graph that brings together all your documents, files, contacts, meetings, and more—with intelligent, Graph-powered recommendations personalized for you. Simply put, it’s a better way to work. And the Microsoft 365 app will be available to customers across our business, education, and consumer segments.

Learn more about the Microsoft 365 app.

Transforming meeting culture with Teams

Microsoft Teams is the app at the center of Microsoft 365. With more than 270 million monthly active users, Teams has changed how people work more than any other app in the past 20 years. We’ve introduced more than 450 new Teams capabilities in the past year alone to transform meeting culture and keep everyone in the flow of work.

It starts with helping everyone have better hybrid meetings. Last year, we introduced new AI-powered intelligent cameras to Microsoft Teams Rooms, dissolving the walls between an attendee’s physical and digital presence. Today, together with Yealink, we’re bringing you the SmartVision 60, the first 360-degree, center-of-room intelligent camera. The SmartVision 60 produces multiple video streams with AI active speaker tracking—and soon: people recognition. Learn more about SmartVision 60.

As Teams has become pervasive for collaboration, we’re expanding to every type of hardware. Today, we’re announcing that Cisco is now a Teams Rooms Certified Devices partner. For the first time ever, Teams meetings will be available natively across certified Cisco meeting devices, enabling customers to configure Teams as the default meeting experience. Get the details on Cisco and Teams.

We’re not stopping with better meeting experiences. We’re on a journey to help you transform meeting culture, starting with the new Teams Premium meeting offering. Teams Premium includes Intelligent recap, a powerful new AI experience that’s like having a virtual assistant at every meeting—even when you can’t be there. It creates tasks, automatically generates chapters from the meeting, and shares personalized highlights from the recording. Teams Premium also includes Live translation for captions, which delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. If an organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can enjoy live translated captions.

With Teams Premium, we’re also excited to bring you experiences that make meetings more personalized, intelligent, and secure.

• New meeting guides that automatically set up the right meeting options.
• Upleveled safeguards for confidential information with advanced meeting protection, including watermarking and sensitivity labels.
• Friction-free Virtual Appointments for personalized business-to-consumer engagements.
• The ability to host high-quality webinars using advanced functionality to drive deeper engagement and generate new leads.

Learn more about Teams Premium.

Introducing Microsoft Places: Transform your space into a place

Overwhelmingly, people come into the office for each other. That’s why we’re creating a new Connected Workplace category and introducing Microsoft Places to address the unique challenges of hybrid work. People are what give a space meaning and identity. In essence, people make a space, a place. Microsoft Places helps everyone understand who will be in the office when; where people are sitting; what meetings to attend in person; and how to book space on the days your team is already planning to come in. It also helps leaders understand how people use the office, and ultimately optimize their real estate investments. And third-party partners can build and integrate new and existing solutions on top of Microsoft Places.

Learn more about Microsoft Places.

Bringing the metaverse to work

Our data shows that 51 percent of Gen Z envisions working in the metaverse in the next two years.¹ Just yesterday, we announced with Meta that we’re bringing Teams immersive meeting experiences to Quest so you can connect, share, and collaborate in virtual reality as though you’re there together in person.

With Mesh avatars for Teams, you can create custom avatars to represent yourself—so you can take a break from the camera but still have a physical presence in Teams meetings.

Unlocking new collaboration patterns

Across Microsoft 365 and Teams, we’re making work better with collaboration experiences designed for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, creation and expression, and business processes in the flow of work.   

This starts with making meetings more hands-on and interactive. Rolling out in November 2022, Excel Live transforms how people collaborate in meetings, enabling every participant to live-edit the Excel file directly, right from Teams—without ever opening the file. Teams Live Share, now in preview, goes even further by turning any app shared in a Teams Meeting into a real-time, multi-user collaborative experience where participants can interact, annotate, and collaborate directly in the meeting window.

With the latest innovations in Together mode, meeting organizers and presenters can assign seats to meeting participants in the Together mode view and can also pin the Together mode view to the meeting stage so everyone has the same view of the group.

The new hours and location feature—accessible across Teams and Outlook—makes it easier to schedule in-person meetings by allowing people to specify and adjust from hour to hour whether they will be available in the office or working remotely.

The new Teams channels experience makes it easier to focus and collaborate, placing recent posts at the top so people can easily catch up on the latest conversations, contribute to discussions, and pop them out so they can return to them quickly. The new channels feature new post types like announcements and video clips and a customizable channel header.

New features in Teams chat give people more ways to prioritize their most important work, protect boundaries and time, express themselves authentically, and have fun. AI-recommended replies save time, while the ability to “@” mention everyone in a group helps grab the group’s attention quickly. With up to 800 reaction emojis, everyone can express themselves in natural and authentic ways, and Video clips in chat gives everyone the ability to easily record, send, and view a video clip in chat, lending a personal touch to help strengthen connection.  

Learn more about Teams chat and channels.

With asynchronous collaboration on the rise, people need solutions to help them communicate and collaborate across space and time. Last year we introduced Loop, which breaks down barriers between apps to enable fluid collaboration as people think, plan, and create together. Today, we’re excited to announce that the Loop app—featuring workspaces, pages, and components that sync across Microsoft 365, is in preview. We’re also excited to bring Loop components to Word for the web, Whiteboard, and Outlook for Windows, to meet users in the context of their work, across Microsoft 365 apps. Learn more about Loop.

With Microsoft Editor, you will soon be able to surface Loop components using Context IQ, our set of intelligent capabilities working in the background of Microsoft apps and services. Loop also now offers Dynamic 365 integration within Teams—you can now insert a Loop component into a Dynamics 365 record while in Teams chat. We’re also introducing Edge Workspaces in the Edge browser, so everyone working together on a project can view the same websites and files in one place as a shared set of browser tabs.

New creation and expression experiences in Microsoft 365 include Microsoft Designer, a new app powered by AI technology, including DALL-E 2, that helps you quickly create stunning social media posts, invitations, and graphics just by entering a text prompt or other content. Microsoft Create features thousands of creative templates to spark inspiration and up-level skills. Today, we also welcome video editor Microsoft Clipchamp to Microsoft 365 to empower anyone, regardless of skill or experience level, to tell stories with video. These creation and expression experiences will roll out first in the Microsoft 365 consumer experience. Learn more about Designer, Create, and Clipchamp.

We’re also helping organizations drive productivity with new experiences that bring business processes into the flow of work. Adaptive Cards is a new low-code way to design and deliver micro-apps directly inside Teams. With Cards, developers can bring interactable content from multiple applications and platforms into a single interface in Teams chat.

Content AI is a new category of technology solutions that uses advancements in cloud and AI to transform how content is created, processed, and discovered—empowering people and automating workflows at scale. Today, we’re introducing Microsoft Syntex, which integrates Content AI into the flow of work with services like content processing, content summarization, e-signature, and more, that help you enhance, manage, and connect your content. Learn more about Microsoft Syntex.

Empowering everyone to thrive with Microsoft Viva

While places still play a key role in helping people thrive at work, work is no longer just a place—it’s an experience. And you need an employee experience that people can access anywhere, anytime. Microsoft Viva is the first digital employee experience platform that brings connection, purpose, insight, and growth into the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best.

Just a few weeks ago we introduced a new set of apps and services in Viva to help align everyone in the organization around the most impactful work to drive business outcomes. Enhancements and integrations to goal-setting and objectives and key results (OKR) management solution Viva Goals bring the experience right into the flow of work. Viva Pulse lets managers and team leaders take the pulse of their teams for quick and confidential input, when they need it, to understand their teams’ needs on an ongoing basis and take action when it matters. And the new centralized communications management and publishing tool Viva Amplify helps employee communication teams and leaders communicate more effectively with their employees by automating publishing all from one place to reach people wherever they work—whether that’s Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, or Viva—and providing metrics to help understand and track message impact and improve over time.

Windows 11 and Windows 365: a new cloud computing paradigm built for the distributed workforce era

With Windows 11, we redesigned the operating system, from the client to the cloud, for hybrid work. Windows 365 is a new cloud computing paradigm built for the distributed workforce era.

With the new Windows 365 app, you can access your cloud PC directly from the Windows 11 taskbar or start menu and then stream the full Windows experience—all your apps, settings, and content—to any device. We also announced the availability of Windows 365 Government for Government Community Cloud and Government Community Cloud High customers in the United States. And, coming soon, organizations will be able to provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs for shift and part-time employees who only need a Cloud PC during their workday for a limited time. Learn more about Windows 365 news.

We’re also announcing updates to services expressly for IT professionals. Windows Update for Business reports will leverage Azure Workbooks to make deployment reports more modular and customizable to better fit your needs, and Organizational Messages makes it easy to communicate with people directly in the Windows UX, helping onboard employees or providing reminders of important training. We’re also adding branch office printer management and diagnostic reporting to Universal Print, as well as support for evaluating apps after an in-place upgrade with Test Base for Microsoft 365. We continue to add functionality to Windows Autopatch to help you move from Windows 10 to 11, and to support AVD patching to secure all your Windows instances—both in the client and the cloud.

Watch Panos Panay’s session for all the latest about Windows and join us on October 24 to 27, 2022, at our Microsoft Technical Takeoff event for an even deeper dive into Windows and Microsoft Intune.

Simplifying IT management

With Microsoft 365, we want to help you simplify IT management and reduce costs.

Today, we’re bringing new capabilities to the cloud-enabled Microsoft Intune suite, including endpoint privilege management, designed to dynamically elevate permissions, and Microsoft Tunnel for mobile app management, which provides secure access to company resources. And as I mentioned earlier, consolidating today with Microsoft 365 can save you more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of point solutions, while helping your employees stay secure in the flow of work.²

Learn more about Microsoft 365, Teams, Viva, and Windows

At Microsoft, we believe that energized, empowered employees are the key to durable competitive advantage for every organization. We’ll continue to innovate across Microsoft 365, Teams, and Viva to help everyone thrive—because technology, combined with the right culture and leadership, can create a better world of work for everyone.

¹Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing it Wrong? Work Trend Index Pulse Report, WorkLab, Microsoft. September 22, 2022.

²Modernize your business while managing costs, Microsoft 365.

Based on publicly available list prices of point solutions for identity and access, content and productivity, chat and collaboration, and meetings, vs. comparable Microsoft 365 solutions.

The post Microsoft 365 at Ignite—Re-energize your workforce in the office, at home, and everywhere in between appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Microsoft Places

Start creating Places today with Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Learn more

One consistent question I hear from customers is what is the purpose of the office? It’s clear that the role of the office has changed. To make the office worth the commute, employees need a good reason—more than simply “because I said so.” That reason, we’ve found, is each other.¹ But it’s hard to know when colleagues are coming in, and too often, employees have commute-regret: the unique frustration of making the commute just to be alone in the office, doing work they could have done from home. And to make matters more challenging, people returning to the office often find spaces that haven’t evolved since 2019.

Leaders, meanwhile, lack data and tools on employees’ evolving work habits, forcing them to make policy and infrastructure decisions without knowing if those changes will make things better.¹ Leaders deserve to know that the office spaces they’re investing in are right for how employees work best.

Optimize workspaces with Connected Workplace

Reimagining the workplace to support true flexibility will require technology to bridge the physical and digital divide. To do that, a new category of technology solutions is emerging called Connected Workplace. The Connected Workplace helps create modern workplaces equipped with technology that enables every employee to achieve their best outcomes. It then uses the information collected from modern workplaces to learn so places can easily adapt to employees’ changing needs.

“We believe that organizations can create more engaging experiences for employees while getting more from their physical assets, by using technologies that can help streamline the work day, balance employee inclusion and experience, and support ongoing portfolio optimization.”

—Phil Kirschner, a Senior Expert at McKinsey & Company on the future workplace. 

Employees want to work in spaces that have been designed for their needs. In fact, by 2025, organizations will spend USD81 billion² on technology solutions in the workplace in order to optimize the USD4.4 trillion³ corporate real estate market. This market spans several siloed segments that address workplace experience, provide valuable data on occupancy and space utilization, support the infrastructure of buildings, contribute to the design and construction of spaces, and guide strategic planning related to real estate portfolios.

“The ‘future of work’ necessitates a new approach—one that helps people connect to space and to one another in considerably more dynamic and engaging ways. Technology will play an essential role in enabling individuals to make daily decisions that optimize how they work and offer insight to organizations that are focused on managing their environments and operations with greater agility.”

—Georgia Collins, Executive Managing Director, CBRE.

Introducing Microsoft Places

When spaces have meaning and purpose, they become places. That comes from people gathering, bonding, and sharing an experience together. It’s what makes a house a home—and an office worth coming into.

Today I’m excited to introduce Microsoft Places, our new connected workplace platform that will reimagine hybrid and in-person work. This platform delivers solutions that coordinate where work happens, modernize the office with intelligent technology, and optimize the workplace for changing needs.

See more about the vision of where we’re heading with Microsoft Places.

Let’s go deeper into each of these areas to bring Microsoft Places to life.

Coordinate where work happens to achieve the right outcomes

Microsoft Places hybrid scheduling will leverage common data signals from Outlook and Teams to allow you to view the week ahead and see when your co-workers and close collaborators are planning to be in the office. You’ll understand the days with the most in-office attendance, allowing you to adjust your schedule to take advantage of valuable in-person connections. Intelligent booking will help you discover available spaces with the right technology to match your meeting purpose and mix of in-person or remote participants. And you’ll get recommendations for the shortest commute times—with prompts telling you when to leave based on that day’s traffic and when your meetings are scheduled. With Microsoft Places, you can prioritize your time while maximizing in-person connections.

Modernize the office with intelligent technology

Technology can dramatically improve the in-office experience, especially places that were not built for hybrid work. With wayfinding, you’ll no longer waste time looking for the right conference room or following outdated building signs; instead, you’ll be able to access a map on your mobile device that guides you to the right place. Hot desk booking will allow you to see where your closest colleagues are sitting and choose your desk accordingly. And once you get to the right room, Microsoft Teams Rooms empowers everyone to participate regardless of location, thanks to its thoughtful, inclusive features. With the goal of rebuilding and strengthening bonds, Microsoft Places will also facilitate serendipitous meet-ups, allowing colleagues to easily create impromptu meet-ups and share with others in the office. With Places, offices are more responsive to everyone’s needs.

Optimize space and costs for changing needs

To better manage physical space, leaders need space insights such as utilization data, energy-saving opportunities, and occupancy trends. These valuable inputs are what guide dynamic space adjustments on a particular day, like changing excess huddle rooms to overbooked collaboration rooms. And with advanced knowledge of expected occupancy, leaders can go further with their space optimization, reducing available floors on lighter days—saving energy expenditures and improving workplace experience. Leaders can also aggregate trends about people and places across their entire portfolio, creating more flexible, dynamic, and sustainable places that support new ways of working.

Finally, Microsoft Places will be integrated with the Microsoft 365 solutions customers use every day, like Outlook, Teams, and Viva. It will leverage and enhance the rich set of data available on the Microsoft Graph, combining people and place signals. Unifying those data assets will enhance first and third-party solutions and address our customers’ biggest challenges related to how, when, and where people work. All the data collection on the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft Places platform adheres to our stringent privacy standards. Users will know what data is collected and be able to opt-in and out, and information will show trends without singling out individuals.

Microsoft Places will be available in 2023.

Together with our partners

To make sure we’re solving the most pressing challenges about where work happens, we’ve partnered with companies across the Connected Workplace field. Our ecosystem of partners will build on top of the Places platform with new and existing solutions, leveraging and enhancing the rich data of the Microsoft Graph.

We’re proud to partner with industry leaders across all segments of the Connected Workplace market: Experience, Platform, Infrastructure, Environment, and Planning.

Accenture
Appspace
Autodesk
Avanade
CBRE
Condeco
EY
Genetec
HID Global
Honeywell
Host from CBRE
Johnson Controls
JLL
Kastle
LenelS2
RightCrowd
Robin
SwiftConnect

Together with our ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Places will help create holistic and impactful solutions to address the changing workplace needs of our customers.

Start creating your places today

The process of turning a space into a place starts with creating better, more inclusive employee experiences—and then capturing and accruing the data from those experiences to provide insights that guide further space optimization. That’s why Microsoft Teams Rooms is the right starting point for your organization. It not only is one of the most critical hybrid enablers in every office, but its usage and management data will be leveraged in Microsoft Places.

With the right technology, we can transform offices to fit our ever-evolving needs. By creating responsive, flexible, and dynamic places to work—and offering solutions that help prioritize time and maximize in-person connection—Microsoft Places will help make the promise of hybrid work a reality.

¹Hybrid Work is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong?, Microsoft Work Trend Index Pulse Report, September 22, 2022.

²Microsoft finance teams’ internal data with IDC

³Microsoft finance teams’ internal data with IBISWorld

The post Introducing Microsoft Places: Turn your spaces into places appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Virtual and hybrid meetings continue to take up the lion’s share of time spent at work. Now, more than ever, leaders need an integrated solution that combines all the advanced meeting capabilities, takes meeting culture to the next level, and allows them to do more with less.

Today, I’m excited to announce Microsoft Teams Premium. Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaboration experience of Microsoft Teams, this new offering makes every meeting from one-on-ones to large meetings, to virtual appointments to webinars more personalized, intelligent, and secure. Unlike the disconnected experience and costs of multiple point products or add-ons, with Teams Premium you get everything you need for just one low price.¹

Personalized: Easily create meetings that meet your needs

Meetings are not “one size fits all.” You wouldn’t go to a coffee shop for a confidential meeting or an auditorium for a one-on-one. Today, when you schedule an online meeting, you just use the default settings because drilling into meeting options takes valuable time out of your day.

The all-new meeting guides in Teams Premium help you to automatically create the experience that’s right for your meeting. The guide is easily customized and managed by IT. You can select a meeting guide—like a client call, brainstorming meeting, or help desk call—and the options will already be set, reducing the time and thought process around getting the meeting right. And with guides, leaders can rest assured that that meetings adhere to company best practices and policies.

Your office, your business card, your favorite swag on your desk—all embody your company brand. Shouldn’t your virtual connections? With Teams Premium, you can infuse customized meeting branding into the meeting lobby and create custom backgrounds and together modes for employees to enjoy and IT to manage, to never compromise your brand.

Intelligent: Focus on what matters with AI-powered meetings

We spend a lot of time in meetings. Are they really productive? We’ve all had those Monday morning meetings that you want to decline but need to listen in to just stay in the know. And to be honest, we’re all probably multi-tasking anyways. Or sometimes you may decide to skip a meeting to stay focused and put out that work fire that needs your urgent attention. But then you end up sifting through recordings and transcripts to find what is relevant to you. So what do we do? Set up yet another meeting in the after-hours to get the latest download. There has to be a better way.

With intelligent recap in Teams Premium, you get the power of AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful. First, intelligent recap uses AI to suggest action items and owners, so that follow-ups are not missed. It’s like having a virtual assistant attend every meeting.

After the meeting, intelligent recap will create smarter recordings with automatically generated chapters and insights such as when your name was mentioned, when a screen was shared, or when you left a meeting early, to help you discover important moments to quickly catch up.

Search also got smarter with suggested speakers that are personalized to you based on who you closely work with, so that you can quickly search through the transcripts by the people you might be most interested in.

Online meetings allow more people than ever before to connect. Currently, in Teams meetings, you can easily follow along with who’s saying what with speaker-attributed live captions and transcription. But if you are presenting to people who don’t speak the same language, how do you make sure the conversation is seamless? Live translation for captions delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. If an organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can enjoy live translated captions. This helps break down language barriers for your global meetings and calls to be productive and effortless.

Secure: Help keep confidential meetings confidential

When you need to set up a new meeting, it’s simple—create a new Teams meeting and send the invite, right? But the reality is, some meetings contain business-sensitive information that is screen-shared or covered in the conversation. Board meetings, financial discussions, and undisclosed product launch reviews are examples that likely need added security to help ensure that content remains protected.

With advanced meeting protection in Teams Premium, you can now safeguard confidential meetings. With new meeting options like watermarking to deter leaks and limiting who can record, you get additional protections to keep the discussion private. And for Microsoft 365 E5 customers with the most advanced security requirements, you can leverage your existing Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to apply relevant meeting options automatically. That makes setting up protected meetings even easier—simply select one of the familiar sensitivity labels you’re already using to protect sensitive data across Microsoft 365 and let the automation take over. Compliance admins can edit their existing labels in the Security and Compliance Center to enforce the meeting options that should be applied when the label is used in a meeting.

One simple offering for every meeting

How often do you manage, use, and pay for multiple meeting tools? Teams Premium also extends the familiar experience of Teams to help you engage more deeply with customers so you can do more with less.

Microsoft Teams Premium

Learn about the latest updates, including preview and general availability.

Sign up

Advanced Virtual Appointments

While connecting virtually with your customers, clients and patients may have started as a necessity, it’s now an opportunity to engage with customers in new ways and to grow your business.

With Virtual Appointments capabilities available today in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 offerings, your employees can easily schedule appointments and customers can join in a mobile browser—no need to download an app. And with Teams Premium, you get advanced Virtual Appointments to manage the end-to-end appointment experience.

Delight clients

Attendees may lack the technical know-how to successfully join a virtual meeting, or face log-in problems—not to mention simple forgetfulness to join an appointment in the first place. With Teams Premium, facilitate a seamless customer experience that allows your customers to receive text reminders and join custom branded virtual appointments through their mobile devices—without downloading Teams.

Streamline appointment management

Schedulers can lack a unified place to manage appointments or wrestle with nonintegrated platforms. With Teams Premium, appointment schedulers can set up and manage scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments in one location with advanced capabilities like appointment queuing.

Measure rich analytics

Finally, there can be a lack of metrics around attendance or participation over time, making it difficult to gain insights and trends to improve the customer experience and business outcomes. With Teams Premium, view usage trends and history of virtual appointment experiences and effectiveness like no-shows and wait times with staff-, department-, and organization-level analytics.

If you’re interested, learn even more about advanced Virtual Appointments here.

Advanced Webinars

And in today’s world of constant communications and distractions, it’s hard to stand out to attract and engage attendees, whether it’s employees in your organization or potential customers for generating new business.

Building upon the basic webinar functionality available in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 offerings—registration up to one thousand attendees, co-organizer role, interactivity with Q&A, attendee reporting, and Dynamics 365 marketing integration—with Advanced Webinars in Teams Premium, you get the familiar and secure experience of Teams combined with new host controls and event management controls that make it seamless to connect with any audience. Whether you are promoting a new product, onboarding and training new team members, or connecting with potential leads to grow your business, Advanced Webinars deliver a high-quality experience to help you before and during your event.

Streamline registration workflows

Building upon the basic webinar capabilities in Teams today, the registration experience is getting even better in Teams Premium with registration waitlist and manual approval. Enabling the waitlist will keep webinar registration open even after the event has reached the capacity set by the organizer. This allows additional people to register and be automatically added to the waitlist. As new spots open up, people will be automatically moved to the pending approval state, which enables the organizer to review their registration information and manually approve or reject each of the registrants. In addition, you can customize the registration start and end time to specify when you want registration to start and end, making it easier to plan for and manage your event.

To build excitement and attract attendees to your webinar, you can send automated reminder emails ahead of the event. These emails will be sent to every confirmed registrant on the day of the event and will include a custom-branded header, webinar details, and a link to join the event.

Customize presenter and attendee experiences

Similar to when you used to gather with the host and presenters in the physical green room ahead of your event, you will be able to connect and manage all the behind-the-scenes action in the virtual green room. Join together with the host and other presenters in a dedicated space separate from attendees, where you can socialize, monitor chat and Q&A, manage attendee settings, and review content before the event starts. And as attendees wait, they will be greeted with a welcome screen and can use chat and Q&A to engage with presenters and each other.

As engagement is key to making any webinar successful, it’s not just about how attendees can engage, but also what will keep them engaged. With the ability to manage what attendees see, you don’t have to worry about distractions in case someone’s video accidentally turns on or keeping focus while multiple profile photos of attendees show up on-screen. You can curate the attendee view so attendees only see shared content and participants you bring on-screen. This can include multiple presenters with a presentation or even an attendee raising their hand to ask a question live in the webinar.

Learn more about Teams Premium

We’re so excited to bring these advanced meeting capabilities together in Teams Premium to make meetings even better. Want to learn the latest updates about Teams Premium, including preview and general availability? Sign up to get updates on Teams Premium.

Features will begin to roll out in December 2022 as a part of Teams Premium preview, with general availability of Teams Premium in February 2023. Intelligent recap features will begin rolling out in the first half of 2023.

¹Today we are sharing the expected list price of USD10 per user per month. Official pricing will be available at general availability, including pricing per currency and programs.

The post Introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, the better way to meet appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Storage alone is not the answer. What’s needed is a new category of technology solutions called Content AI. Content AI utilizes advancements in cloud and AI to transform how content is created, processed, and discovered—empowering people and automating workflows at scale. It builds on cloud content services platforms and intelligent document processing with AI-powered workflows that transform digital work.

Microsoft Syntex

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Microsoft Syntex

We’re honored that customers trust Microsoft with their collaborative and mission-critical content. Every workday, on average, our customers add over 1.6 billion documents to Microsoft 365.

Today at Microsoft Ignite, we’re proud to launch Microsoft Syntex. Microsoft Syntex is Content AI integrated in the flow of work. It puts people at the center, with content seamlessly integrated into collaboration and workflows, turning content from a cost into an advantage. Syntex automatically reads, tags, and indexes high volumes of content and connects it where it’s needed—in search, in applications, and as reusable knowledge. It manages your content throughout its lifecycle with robust analytics, security, and automated retention.

Whether you’re focused on customer transactions, processing invoices, writing a contract that requires a signature, or struggling to understand the flood of unstructured content, Content AI with Syntex can help.

Let’s look at how Syntex helps you enhance, manage, and connect your content at scale.

Enhance

Syntex’s no-code AI enhances your content to help you understand and structure information, simplifying your business workflows. Whether you’re working with highly structured content like forms or text-heavy content like contracts, you can build models to understand your content the way you do. Syntex extends AI capabilities such as summarization and translations into the Microsoft 365 apps you already use, empowering you to engage them in the flow of work.

Document processing

Syntex helps you understand, tag, and secure information, integrating AI from Microsoft Azure, AI Builder, and other Microsoft sources. Syntex brings structure to your content, which is all part of our approach to intelligent document processing. Your content can be easily classified, tagged with extracted data, and secured with sensitivity and retention labels. These labels and taxonomy tags are integrated into Microsoft Viva Topics, seamlessly turning content into knowledge. Document processing is available now.

Translation

With business spanning many countries and cultures, Syntex enables you to translate content among dozens of languages.

Summarization

To help you focus on what’s important and needs action, Syntex uses AI to generate summaries of content to distill key points, on demand or using rules.

Content assembly

When you’re ready to create a new contract, invoice, letter, or other document, Syntex can help you automatically generate that document with templates and metadata using content assembly, which is available now.

Images, audio, and video processing

Images are one of the most common file types in Microsoft 365. You can process and tag images with nearly 10,000 automatically recognized objects “out of the box.” You will be able to automatically extract text from images in SharePoint and Exchange using optical character recognition (OCR) to optimize search and compliance.

Digital media is a major part of modern content, which is why we’re making transcription for audio and video available as part of Syntex. Extracting text from audio, especially meetings, is crucial to search and compliance, and we’re leveraging innovations from Microsoft Stream to automatically produce video transcripts for twenty-eight different languages and locales.

Connect

Syntex is designed to connect your content—helping you discover and reuse content with AI-powered search, eSignature, and integration into business workflows like contracts and invoice management.

eSignature

Enriching content is a vital factor to help you discover content and reuse it in business processes and applications. One of the fastest growing content transactions is eSignature. You can send electronic signature requests using Syntex, Adobe Acrobat Sign, DocuSign, or any of our other eSignature partner solutions and your content stays in Microsoft 365 while it’s being reviewed and signed.

Search

Syntex also brings the power of Microsoft Search to Content AI. As a part of Syntex, Microsoft Search becomes even more insightful through innovative deep learning models that encompass semantic understanding, question-and-answering, and natural language processing to help you intuitively discover information.

These new investments in Microsoft Search with Syntex will be available in 2023 and include:

• Natural language queries that let you ask specific questions like, “Show me sales presentations in California from last year for Contoso Electronics.”
• Semantic search lets you search by concept rather than keyword, resulting in better relevancy. 
• Employees May Ask lets you expand your search and explore answers to related questions, leveraging Microsoft AI that automatically generates question-answer pairs.

Syntex builds on top of Microsoft Search to provide powerful ways to query, shape, and discover the content and data embedded in your files. You can use form-based content queries to get back to any specific document easily. Coming next year, Syntex will let you save, share, and manage queries for you and your teams.

Annotation

You can use annotations, like ink, notes, redactions, stamps, and comments, on any content—not just Office documents—without modifying the original files, so you can preserve original records for critical business processes.

Content rules processor

The Syntex content processor lets you build simple rules to trigger the next action, whether it’s a transaction, an alert, a workflow, or just filing your content in the right libraries and folders.

Accelerators and templates

Finally, Syntex also provides a growing range of solution accelerators for common patterns and scenarios that every organization faces. Today you can use our solution accelerator for contract management, and we’re announcing our new solution for accounts payable coming later this year.

We’re also investing in new ways to turn your libraries, sites, and processes into reusable templates to deploy to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint in your environment or across multiple tenants.

Integrations

Syntex services offers new ways to create content-centric apps and processes. Many Syntex services, such as content assembly and structured document processing models, are tightly coupled to Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Platform. Syntex also lets you use AI Builder models for structured and freeform document processing alongside unstructured document models.

Most critical line of business applications consumes and generates lots of content. But too often, those content stores are siloed and disconnected from Microsoft 365. Most content begins in Microsoft 365—statements of work, for example—but once uploaded to your accounting system, they get disconnected from your cloud. Wouldn’t it be great to use the content platform you already have?

Next year, we’ll roll out new business app integration plugins, allowing you to use Microsoft 365 as the content engine for critical line of business systems. Today, these systems all work with and generate thousands of pieces of content, but often require a disconnected repository outside of Microsoft 365, or even storage within the line of business system’s expensive database storage, for storing the content. Syntex will allow you to use Microsoft 365 as the content platform for Dynamics 365 and many other critical line of business applications from third parties.

Manage

Microsoft 365 provides highly resilient and reliable storage, however bringing more and more content into the cloud requires new flexible ways of managing it. That’s why Syntex offers tools to manage, backup, and restore your content. It’s important to get maximum value from your content by keeping it in Microsoft 365, but we also understand the need to manage storage costs and comply with long-term archiving needs.

Backup and restore

Whether you need malware protection or preserved file copies from a particular point in time, Syntex backup can help. It preserves the state of your cloud—across Syntex, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange—so that you can get back to information from the last quarter, the last month, or the last decade with ease, keeping your backup stored conveniently in the Microsoft Cloud. Your backup is highly available and tightly integrated with your content policies.

Tiered storage

More content requires cost flexibility. Next year, we’ll also introduce Syntex archiving, allowing you to establish simple rules to move less critical content from SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to lower cost storage—kept in the cloud with the security and search you need.

Security and content management

Of course, bringing content and process together in Syntex requires world-class management capabilities. That’s the role of the Syntex Protector, which:

• Helps ensure that only approved internal and external resources can access sensitive content with advanced document library security and restricted access control policy.
• Get insights about sites where information may be overshared, with AI powering the new data access governance report.
• Engage data owners in site access reviews to review and attest the existing site permission and access controls for their content, helping security reflect business needs.

The Syntex ecosystem

Microsoft partners have helped deliver content solutions based on SharePoint and OneDrive to customers, expanding to include capabilities from Microsoft Power Platform, Stream, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Viva Topics, and now Microsoft Syntex. We’re honored to introduce our Microsoft Syntex Launch Partners:

“Syntex has powered richer content intelligence experiences for our customers, creating better search and knowledge experiences and enabling deeper process integration into the digital workspace. The ease of use and power of machine learning and AI unlock value previously out of reach for many customers.“

—Jesse Murray, Senior Vice President, Employee Experience, Rightpoint.

We’re grateful for the partnerships with Adobe, Avanade, AvePoint, ClearPeople, Colligo, Content+Cloud, DocuSign, Lighthouse, Protiviti, Rightpoint, SparkHound, TCS, and many others.

These partners and many more work with Microsoft through the Microsoft Content AI Partner Program (CAPP). CAPP supports our partners delivering solutions that make the transformation of your content management approach practical and attainable. If you’re a partner, you can learn more about the program, apply to join, or subscribe to our newsletter.

Customers using Syntex

Over the past year, early adopter customers like Northumbrian Water Group, the London Stock Exchange Group, and Aurecon have relied on Syntex to deliver content AI and digital transformation to their operations, helping shape and improve the product. We’re pleased to share even more customer success with you as we now launch Microsoft Syntex.

TaylorMade

TaylorMade Golf Company, founded in 1979, is a global golf equipment provider. TaylorMade has a legacy of breaking from tradition to reach new thresholds of performance and leads the industry in product innovation. They bring precision to all aspects of their operations, creating revolutionary products year after year and attracting many of the greatest athletes in all of golf.

TaylorMade’s journey with Syntex began with their legal team and Lighthouse (a Preferred Microsoft CAPP partner). They needed a comprehensive document management system to organize and secure emails, attachments, and other documents for intellectual property and patent filings.

Beyond securing and processing legal documents, they’re also using Syntex to explore bringing content AI to processing orders, receipts, and other transactional documents for their accounts payable and finance teams. Read more about TaylorMade and Syntex in our new customer story.

What’s next

Files and documents play a critical role in modern apps. We’ll continue to use Syntex to provide developer-optimized storage for the next generation of content-centric apps. In 2023, we’ll introduce new APIs in the Microsoft Graph to help you integrate Content AI into the flow of your applications, creating new ways to harvest Microsoft’s content management investments directly in your apps. If you need to build queries that look at all your content in Microsoft 365—potentially billions of files—Syntex will allow you to bring large datasets into Azure Synapse Analytics for additional data analytics and modeling. We’ll have more to share on Syntex for developers in 2023.

We’re already working with the next wave of product innovators and partners—many of them listed above—to build the next generation of content apps with Syntex. If you’re interested in learning more, we’d love to hear from you—sign up for Syntex today.

Get started with Microsoft Syntex

Microsoft Syntex is available now, including document processing, annotation, content assembly, content query, accelerators, and more. More services are coming to public preview later this year and even more coming in 2023.

This week at Microsoft Ignite, you can learn more in Jeff Teper’s session, Introducing Microsoft Syntex—Content AI for the Microsoft Cloud (October 13, 2022 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time).  Also, check out the Getting Started page on the Syntex Adoption Hub, which brings together all our Microsoft Ignite content, assessment tools, workshops, training, demos, research, adoption guides, and more.

Finally, you can learn more about Microsoft Syntex on today’s Intrazone podcast with Microsoft’s Ian Story and Chris McNulty, as well as Alan Pelz-Sharpe (Founder, Deep Analysis). And don’t miss the new Microsoft Mechanics show, Introducing Microsoft Syntex, with Microsoft’s Omar Shahine.

The post Welcome to Microsoft Syntex—Content AI integrated in the flow of work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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As Panos talked about this morning, the last few years have given rise to enduring changes in the way we live—online and offline. We’re seeing these emerging behaviors become everyday habits, creating new ways to use the PC. Essential PC tasks have increasingly moved online with innovation continuing in areas like content creation, helping to power a thriving creator economy. Creativity and self-expression are not one thing, one person, or one industry—anyone can be a creator with the right set of tools. Nearly 20 million US consumers now create and monetize their content online, and user-generated content now accounts for 39 percent of weekly media hours consumed.¹ At the same time, we’re all facing constraints at home and work as the cost of everything continues to rise. 72 percent of US consumers say rising costs are their number one concern and finding better deals is a top reason people shop online.² As we build new experiences across our apps and services, we’re focused on unlocking your self-expression and creativity while providing practical tools that help you make your life easier.

New creator tools in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge, and Bing

Today, I’m thrilled to announce new consumer tools in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge, and Bing designed to help all of us ignite our imagination and express ourselves. Everything begins with an idea but getting started and capturing your individuality isn’t always easy. For anyone who is trying to create a brand for themselves on social media or simply wanting to create a birthday party invitation for family and friends, we aimed to solve a few key challenges with creating and sharing content:

• When I have an idea, it’s hard to get started. To take an idea and make it into what I envisioned digitally, why doesn’t it ever look like I thought?
• When I’m creating content, it’s time-consuming. Why does formatting and resizing multiple images and text have to be so complex?
• It’s hard to make unique content that looks great. I’m not a trained designer but still want high-quality designs, why can’t this tool just read my mind?
• And most importantly, tools are fragmented (and expensive).

For the first time ever, I’m excited to announce Microsoft Designer, a graphic design app in Microsoft 365 that helps you create stunning social media posts, invitations, digital postcards, graphics, and more, all in a flash.

Microsoft Designer is powered by AI technology, including DALL∙E 2 by OpenAI, which means you’re able to instantly generate a variety of designs with minimal effort. Our cutting-edge AI supercharges your ideas.

With Designer, there’s no need to spend time building cards or social media posts from scratch. And you no longer need to search through thousands of pre-made templates. Designer invites you to start with an idea and let the AI do the heavy lifting. For example, with ‘start from scratch’ within Designer, you can simply describe an image you want to see, and the app does the work for you to create something totally unique. As you work in Designer, every surface of the app is powered by AI to help ensure consistent, aligned, properly scaled, and beautiful designs, even with or without any inherent design ability.

As you add more content like images or text, the ’design ideas’ feature magically integrates the content within the design in a single click. You can then share your designs with the world however you’d like, including publishing directly to social media platforms or downloading them to use anywhere.

The Designer app is born out of PowerPoint, where Designer uses AI to make template suggestions as you build out a presentation. Depending on the type of content, Designer in PowerPoint will offer several options for you to choose from. In fact, more than eight billion slide designs (and counting) have been saved by our customers with Designer in PowerPoint. We’re thrilled to expand on that legacy, adding the latest cutting-edge text to image AI, with the new Designer app.

To get started with the new Microsoft Designer app today, you can sign up for early access to our free web preview of the Designer app. We’re inviting people to try it out, give us feedback, and help us make it great. The current free preview does not include all planned features to come; we will be adding more over time. Once the app is ready for general availability, it will be available both as a free app and with more premium features available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.

We know that content creation isn’t limited to an app, it also happens online. So, we plan to integrate Designer into Microsoft Edge, delivering AI-powered design suggestions to visually enhance social media posts and other visual content without having to leave your browser window.

We realize that creators do not just want to build beautiful logos, social media posts, and invitations, they also want to create awesome videos. That is why I’m also pleased to officially welcome Microsoft Clipchamp to the Microsoft 365 family. For the first time, the Microsoft 365 suite of apps includes a free video editor so you can create beautiful videos in no time. Whether it is a daily vlog, a viral dance video, a family video, or a highlight reel, Clipchamp helps you weave together video, sound, and effects quickly and easily. Clipchamp empowers anyone to make professional-grade videos, without needing to be an editing expert. And Microsoft 365 subscribers will now have access to premium features within Clipchamp for more value than ever before, at no extra cost.

Microsoft Clipchamp is available today as the inbox video editing app on Windows 11 and on the web. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers and Clipchamp Essentials subscribers get access to premium Clipchamp features.

Today, we are also announcing a new website, Microsoft Create. We designed this with creators in mind to help them get inspired, save time, and up-level their skills. With Create, we are bringing together the Microsoft 365 apps you already know and love along with new creative apps—in one place—to help you express your creativity and make the most of your time.

Create is a space to help any type of creator get started with creating videos, graphic designs, documents, presentations, and more. It is the ultimate creator launchpad that brings together the power of our content creation apps—from Designer to Clipchamp to PowerPoint to Word and beyond. Create can help spark inspiration and up-level your skills with professional templates, curated articles, and videos from others who have been in your shoes. We are thrilled to bring this new website to help you try and learn something new about content creation.

The Microsoft Create website is live today and available for anyone to use. We’ll continue to build new functionality and content into the site over time.

Now let’s talk about finding that perfect image for your creations. I think we’ve all become accustomed to a world in which if you need a specific image, you search online until you find whatever is closest to what you had in mind. But if you were searching for an image that for whatever reason didn’t yet exist, you were out of luck. I’m excited to announce that with the new Image Creator from Microsoft Bing you will be able to create images that don’t yet exist, limited only by your imagination. Using the same DALL∙E 2-powered image-generator technology that is also in the Microsoft Designer app, Image Creator helps you bring your ideas to life. Simply type in a description of something, any additional context like location or activity, and an art style, and Image Creator will make it for you.

We are taking a measured approach to roll out this feature. We will soon start with a limited preview for select geographies, which will allow us to gather feedback, apply learnings, and improve the experience before expanding further. As Image Creator becomes available, you will be able to access it by navigating to the Bing Images tab and clicking on “Image Creator,” or through the Image Creator icon in the sidebar in Microsoft Edge.

It’s important, with early technologies like DALL∙E 2, to acknowledge that this is new and we expect it to continue to evolve and improve. We take our commitment to responsible AI seriously. To help prevent DALL∙E 2 from delivering inappropriate results across the Designer app and Image Creator, we are working together with our partner OpenAI, who developed DALL∙E 2, to take the necessary steps and will continue to evolve our approach.

For example, OpenAI removed explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train the model, and Microsoft deployed filters to limit the generation of images that violate content policy.

On top of that, Microsoft has integrated techniques that further help to prevent misuse, including additional query blocking on sensitive topics. Moreover, some prompts to DALL∙E 2 may surface biases embedded in the training data. We recently applied additional technology that helps deliver more diverse images to our results. This is an area we are actively working to address and continuously improve.

We welcome feedback, ideas, or concerns. For the Designer preview, people can provide feedback via a feedback button in the upper right-hand corner. For Image Creator, which is coming soon, we’ll have a ‘Feedback’ button in the lower right corner of the page.

New tools in Microsoft Edge to save you money and time

In addition to new tools for creators, we continue to look for ways to help you make the most of your time online—and help you save some money in the process. 

Researching products and shopping remain one of the most enduring activities in a browser and that has only become truer over the last couple of years. As an avid online shopper, I can attest that Microsoft Edge is one of the best browsers for shopping. Our built-in shopping features on Edge help customers save an average of $400 a year—no plug-ins needed. And Microsoft Edge has delivered more than $1.4 billion in coupon savings to date.³ That’s real money and impacts people’s day-to-day lives. Shopping in Microsoft Edge sidebar is a new feature that makes this even easier and more personal using the power of machine learning and AI to analyze product information from across the web like price history, price comparisons, coupons, and deals to help you save time and money. Now, with Shopping in the Microsoft Edge sidebar, you have convenient access to a personalized shopping hub with information like recent purchases, package tracking, recently viewed items, and open shopping carts as well as coupons and savings.

In addition to shopping, the sidebar in Microsoft Edge lets you access tools and first-party and third-party features side-by-side within your browser, even as you navigate between tabs. I use the sidebar to multitask and maximize my time online. Say my friend sends me a laptop recommendation. I can open the link from my Outlook inbox, and then click Shopping in the sidebar to instantly compare prices—without ever flipping between apps or losing my flow. The sidebar also lets you compare search results on different search engines in Discover, access easy tools like a unit converter, or check out Games when you need a quick break. The best part of the sidebar is that it is completely customizable so you can choose the features that allow you to make the most of your time online.

If you’re a Windows user, you can get started with Microsoft Edge and Bing today on your PC. For those who want to try Microsoft Edge and Bing and are on a macOS, mobile, or Linux device, download Microsoft Edge and let us know what you think.

Microsoft and Uber One

Last, but not least, we know that all of us, from creators to entrepreneurs, parents to students, can use a good deal these days. Starting today and running through January 10, 2023, new and existing Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers can get a six-month Uber One membership free with their subscription plus $25 off their first Uber Eats order. An Uber One membership includes unlimited $0 Delivery Fee, up to 10 percent off on Uber Eats, and 5 percent off Uber rides. To enroll and learn more, visit the Uber One offer here. We hope this helps make the every day a little easier. 

At Microsoft, we’re focused on how we can harness the power of technology to support you in this new world that has emerged over the last few years, rife with distraction and uncertainty. Enduring changes to the way we live, work, and play have become new habits. We’re looking for ways to remove barriers to create more seamless and personalized experiences across platforms and devices. To enable you to express yourself. To unlock the next wave of innovation and creation for you on the PC, through the power of the cloud and AI. We can’t wait to see what you do.

¹Tech Enabling User Generated Content to Flourish, Consumer Technology Association, June 15, 2022.

²How to Thrive in the Retail Space, Comscore, 2022.

³Annual savings are calculated using value of coupons presented to users signed into their Microsoft accounts from May 2021 – April 2022. Based on US data only.

The post New tools from Microsoft 365, Edge, and Bing bridge the gap between productivity and creativity appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

With more than 270 million monthly active users, Microsoft Teams offers developers an unmatched opportunity to build collaborative apps. Since the beginning of 2020, monthly active users of custom-built or third-party apps in Teams have grown more than tenfold. There are more than 1,400 Teams apps, with more and more independent software vendors (ISVs) generating millions in annual revenue from customers using their apps built on Teams and Microsoft 365 services. Looking ahead, we expect emerging technologies that bring the digital and physical worlds together, like Microsoft Mesh for Teams, to open new engaging possibilities for collaborative experiences on Teams. 

This year at Build 2022, we are sharing several enhancements and new capabilities for developers building collaborative apps for Teams and Microsoft 365. Watch my keynote with Charles Lamanna, Innovate with collaborative apps and low code, to view the highlights. Read on to get a full recap of our Build announcements, which are organized here in three sections: new ways to help you delight your users with rich collaborative experiences, scale your productivity and grow user engagement, and monetize your apps. We can’t wait to see what you will build with these innovations!

Delight users with rich collaborative experiences

Introducing Live Share: Interactive app experiences in Teams meetings

We are introducing Live Share, a capability for your apps to go beyond passive screen sharing and enable participants to co-watch, co-edit, co-create, and more in Teams meetings. Developers can use new preview extensions to the Teams SDK to easily extend existing Teams apps and create Live Share experiences in meetings. Live Share is backed by the power of Fluid Framework, which supports sophisticated synchronization of state, media, and control actions with only front-end development. This synchronization will run on Teams hosted and managed Microsoft Azure Fluid Relay service instance—at no cost to you. Our early partners building Live Share experiences include Frame.io, Hexagon, Skillsoft, MakeCode, Accenture, Parabol, and Breakthru. Watch our Live Share on-demand session and try out the new Teams SDK extensions.

Figure 1. Hexagon Live Share prototype enables engineers to annotate and edit 3D models and simulations, while they brainstorm together in Teams meetings.

Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay general availability

Fluid Framework is a collection of open-source, client-side JavaScript libraries that underpin the Live Share real-time collaboration capabilities. Azure Fluid Relay is a fully managed cloud service that supports Fluid Framework Clients. Developers are using Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay to enable real-time interactivity on their apps beyond Microsoft Teams meetings. Fluid Framework, the Azure Fluid Relay service, and the corresponding Azure Fluid client-side SDK will be ready for production scenarios and available in mid-2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs for updates. Watch the on-demand session to learn more about building collaborative web apps with Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay.

Create Loop components by updating Adaptive Cards

Microsoft Loop components are live, actionable units of productivity that stay in sync and move freely across Microsoft 365 apps starting with Teams chat and Microsoft Outlook. Today, we are announcing the ability for developers to create Loop components. Now you can easily evolve an existing Adaptive Card into a Loop component or create a new Adaptive Card-based Loop component. Additionally, Adaptive Card-based Loop components can be surfaced with Editor using Context IQ, our set of intelligent capabilities working in the background of Microsoft apps and services, to stay directly in the flow of composing an email. Zoho Projects is using these Adaptive Card-based Loop components to help its customers improve incident response times, reduce outage durations, and improve overall performance against service-level agreements (SLAs), by enabling users to complete these tasks across Teams and Outlook. Zoho Projects and ServiceDesk Plus Cloud are among the first products integrated with Microsoft 365 apps to implement Microsoft Loop. Developer private preview for this capability starts in June 2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs or follow us on Twitter @Microsoft365Dev for updates.

Figure 2. Zoho Projects is extending adaptive cards to be live, actionable Loop components that work across Teams and Outlook.

Introducing Microsoft Azure Communication Services sample app builder

Microsoft Azure Communication Services interoperability with Teams enables you to create experiences that support seamless communications between customers on any custom app or website and employees working in Teams. For example, Teladoc Health built the first-of-its-kind custom fully integrated clinical and administrative virtual healthcare solution that allows care team collaboration and access to relevant clinical data directly within Teams, and the ability to seamlessly deliver virtual care to patients who join from a custom app.

Figure 3. Teladoc Health is enabling care providers to work and connect from Teams while patients join from a custom app built using Azure Communication Services.

Today, we are introducing the Azure Communication Services sample app builder, enabling developers to easily build and deploy a sample application for virtual appointments in just a few minutes, with no coding needed. Through the sample app, customers can book appointments powered by Microsoft Bookings and join a Teams meeting through a custom web app with a company-branded experience, while staff use Teams to join scheduled appointments. The sample app is fully open source and developers can tap into the code for more customization. Visit Github to learn more.

Microsoft Graph API enhancements to embed chats and channel messages into your apps

Microsoft Graph chat APIs enable developers to embed Teams chats into their applications, enabling their users to collaborate seamlessly without having to switch back and forth across apps. We are introducing several new APIs in preview with capabilities such as enabling chats with federated users (like users outside your tenant), identifying which messages are read and unread by the current user, and subscribing to user chats and membership changes. These new APIs will be generally available in mid-2022. Visit our chat message resource type docs page and view the on-demand session to learn more.

SharePoint Framework and Microsoft Viva Connections

SharePoint is the most flexible content collaboration platform powering experiences across Microsoft 365. SharePoint Framework now lets you create parts and pages in SharePoint sites, Teams apps, and more. It is at the center of our extensibility capabilities for the new Microsoft Viva Connections employee experience platform. Check out the how-to session on building tailored employee experiences for Viva Connections that directly integrate with Teams apps.

Figure 4. A sample Microsoft Viva Connections app running in both Teams and on a mobile device.

Approvals extensibility

Approvals in Microsoft Teams help everyone—from frontline workers to office workers—to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly in the flow of work. We are introducing create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) APIs for Approvals. Developers can use the Approvals APIs to enable approvals within line of business apps and use webhooks to track changes and drive workflows with Approvals in Teams. The Approvals APIs will be available for preview in mid-2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs for updates. View the on-demand session to learn more.

Scale developer productivity

Build once and deploy anywhere across Teams and Microsoft 365

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the new Teams SDK that enables you to build apps for Teams, Outlook, and Office using a single application and deployment model and build collaborative apps that make use of the capabilities relevant to each product. Developers can now upgrade to the latest Teams JS SDK v2 and App manifest v1.13 to build production Teams apps, and run full-scale pilots with users on the preview channels of Outlook and Office. This will enable developers to get feedback and prepare for the distribution of their apps on Outlook and Office later this calendar year.

These updates are backward compatible so all your existing Teams apps will continue to work as-is in Teams with production-level support. Our Teams developer experience including our Microsoft Teams Developer Documentation, tooling, support, and code repository has been updated to support extended apps. You will be able to distribute both single-tenant and multi-tenant apps using existing Teams experiences. To learn more, check out our on-demand session about extending Teams apps across Microsoft 365.

Figure 5. MURAL is extending its Teams app’s personal tabs and search-based message extensions to other Microsoft host apps.

MURAL is among the early partners bringing the connected experience across Teams, Outlook, and Office to life with their apps, like the example above showing a search-based message extension inserting a MURAL directly into the Outlook message as an interactive Adaptive Card. In addition to MURAL, several other partners, including Adobe, eCare Vault, go1, monday.com, Polly, ServiceNow, SurveyMonkey, and Zoho have helped us get these new tools ready and we are excited to make them generally available to everyone at Microsoft Build.

Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and CLI now generally available

Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and command-line interface (CLI) are tools for building Teams and Microsoft 365 apps, fast. Whether you’re new to Teams platform or a seasoned developer, Teams Toolkit is the best way to create, build, debug, test, and deploy apps. Today we are excited to announce the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and CLI is now generally available (GA). Developers can start with scenario-based code scaffolds for notification and command-and-response bots, automate upgrades to the latest Teams SDK version, and debug apps directly to Outlook and Office. Get started building apps with Teams Toolkit today.

Figure 6. Building a notification app for Microsoft Teams using the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

Collaboration Controls in Power Apps

We are announcing Collaboration Controls in Power Apps to let developers drag and drop Microsoft 365 collaboration features like Teams chats, meetings, files, Tasks by Planner, and more right inside custom apps built with Power Apps. Collaboration Controls will be available in preview in mid-2022. View the on-demand session to learn more. Subscribe to the Power Apps blog for updates.

Grow user engagement and monetize your apps

App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program is designed to evaluate and showcase the trustworthiness of application-based industry standards, such as SOC 2, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 for security, privacy, and data handling practices. We are announcing the preview of the App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365 for applications built on Azure to help them accelerate the compliance journey of their apps. With this tool, developers can automate a significant number of tasks to achieve the certification faster and easier. This tool also produces reports that can be easily shared by developers to help IT gain visibility of app security and compliance. Learn more from our App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365 docs page.

Improved app management and discoverability

The Teams Store helps users find the right apps through updated app categories, curated app collections, featured top apps, and intelligent recommendations based on what colleagues and peers are using. This Microsoft Build, we are making available a central experience within the Teams Store to help users track the apps they are using across various Teams and group chats, and see what permissions are required by these apps. We are also making the discovery of apps through tabs, message extensions, and connectors more contextual to help users find the right apps and grow usage of the ISV apps in Teams. For example, in the context of composing messages, the message extension suggestions will be organized by tasks and actions users can take with it. Lastly, users on mobile devices can now add your apps right from the mobile device, such as from a link or QR code.

In-app purchasing for Teams apps

A top request from partners and developers is to provide the ability to include a paywall experience directly from within your Teams app. This gives you the ability to turn a free app into a freemium version, where you can choose when to prompt your users when to subscribe to your app. The new in-app purchase functionality is available today and can be invoked with a few lines of code. Learn more from our in-app purchases docs page.

Figure 7. Developers can enable freemium upgrades directly within Teams with a few lines of code.

Teams app license management

Another area we are making advancements in is enabling users to manage and assign purchased licenses. It’s previously been up to developers to build the license management component into their solution, whether on their landing page or directly within the app. To help streamline the license management experience, we will soon be offering the ability for you to offload the license management capabilities to Microsoft where users can manage and assign licenses—directly in Teams. License management in Teams will be available in preview in mid-2022.

New collaborative apps coming to Teams

We are excited to see ISVs bringing innovative collaborative apps to Teams across a broad range of scenarios. Here are just a few examples of the new apps available now or coming soon:

• MURAL app for Teams gives teams everywhere the ability to bring a shared collaboration space directly into Microsoft Teams. Users can improve teamwork with asynchronous visual collaboration, and transform disengaged conversations into productive, engaging meetings and workshops using hundreds of templates and proven, guided methods that empower teams to deliver breakthrough results. MURAL is a Microsoft preview partner, and the MURAL app now works across Teams, Outlook, and Office for a single, connected experience.
• Observable app for Teams allows companies to bring their data, context, and logic together in one place to uncover insights collaboratively and accelerate data-driven decision-making across the organization. New updates coming to the Observable app in June 2022 will offer Microsoft Teams notifications when collaborating through comments in Observable.
• SAP S/4HANA operational purchaser chatbot provides collaborative capabilities of Microsoft Teams to SAP S/4HANA users within a conversational user experience. It uses Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication and leverages Microsoft Graph APIs to allow users to call other parties or schedule Teams meetings with business partners directly from the bot in the context of the authenticated business user. This provides tight integration of the Teams collaboration experience in a standalone app in SAP, bringing connectivity and collaboration where users need them.
• ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app from ManageEngine, Zoho’s enterprise IT management division, leverages Microsoft Teams to streamline business and IT service delivery, manage and accelerate IT incident resolutions, and improve service experience across the enterprise. Coming soon, the ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app will enhance its existing static Adaptive Cards with Loop components, which will allow everyone working on the ticket to get the latest updates and trigger service desk tasks without switching tabs.
• Figma, the collaborative design platform, is introducing a new app that will enable teams to share, present, and collaborate in real-time on Figma and FigJam files within a Teams meeting. The app also leverages the new Adaptive Card functionality so when a user shares a link to a Figma or FigJam file in a Teams chat, the card unfurls, allowing users to open the file from within Teams. Users can also view and respond to file notifications directly from Teams. The Figma app will be available later in 2022 in the Teams app store.

Learn more

Here’s a recap of the key resources to learn more about developing collaborative apps on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365:

• Catch up on all the collaborative apps keynotes, breakouts, and into-focus sessions at Microsoft Build.
• Deep dive into the announcements with the Build on-demand sessions.
• Visit the Microsoft Teams Developer Center to start building collaborative apps with Teams.
• Visit the Microsoft Graph Developer Center to connect your apps with the data and AI in Microsoft 365.
• Read our Live Share blog to learn more about the technology and what you can do with it.
• Read more about how Power Platform is redefining low-code with new products and features from Charles Lamanna.
• Join our Microsoft 365 ISV program to get one-on-one support and other benefits.

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Not only do employees want to feel more connected, more aligned to their company’s purpose and mission, but they also want to grow, make an impact, and make a difference. Organizations, likewise, are at their best when people and teams have clarity and a shared understanding of their goals and can execute in sync to achieve the desired business outcomes. A clear, consistent business goal-setting process is the missing link between employee experience and business outcomes.

Today, we are excited to announce Microsoft Viva Goals, a new module for business goal setting and management, is now available in private preview. Powered by the acquisition of Ally.io,² a leading objectives and key results (OKR) company, Viva Goals brings purpose and alignment to Viva customers—alongside culture and communications, wellbeing and engagement, growth and development, as well as knowledge and expertise.

Introducing Viva Goals

Viva Goals aligns teams to your organization’s strategic priorities and unites them around the mission and purpose. It helps provide clarity on employees’ work and how that work makes an impact on the business’s most important priorities. With that alignment in place, teams then can focus on doing the work, making sound decisions, and driving the desired results for the business.

In addition, Viva Goals brings business goals into the flow of everyday work, making it easier to stay up to date with connected data and automated reminders as well as to share OKRs and their progress across the organization with customized dashboards and quick links. Viva Goals integrates with Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, and other work management and data tools that customers are already using—as well as more integrations to come with Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Power BI, and other Microsoft 365 apps and services. With Viva Goals, OKRs no longer exist in a silo separate from the employee experience and where people work.

Viva Goals will be included with the current Microsoft Viva suite subscription when it becomes generally available later in Q3 Calendar Year (CY) 2022.

Business goals connecting employee experience and business outcomes

Having clear goals and measures of success at the highest levels of the organization helps everyone understand what’s important and align their work to the most valued priorities. It sets the context for the work of the team and creates a shared vision and a common language, which is especially important in a hybrid work environment. This gives departments and teams a framework to focus their own priorities and define what success looks like together in connection with the business goals.

With clarity around organization-wide and team-wide goals, employees are empowered to think, collaborate, and act at the team and individual level, informed and aligned to the priorities and what others are working on, thus everyday work is moving the business forward in a more agile way. This connection and visibility to the bigger picture enables flexibility and purpose-driven work as employees can determine the best way to reach those goals. Knowing why you show up for work every day, taking a collaborative approach to defining goals, and understanding the progress you are making are all important to enhancing the employee experience.

It also encourages a culture of innovation and growth: according to an Ally.io survey, 73 percent of people who use a goal-setting framework like OKRs feel empowered to take risks at work (compared to 53 percent who do not)—and calculated risk leads to innovation.³

OKRs for everyone

With Viva Goals, we seek to empower teams to use OKRs at all levels. OKRs can help get everyone pulling in the same direction, but not when used only as top-down directives. Whether you are a C-suite leader, team lead, or individual contributor, you can incorporate OKRs as part of your one-on-one meetings with managers, progress updates to stakeholders, or regular planning process to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what should change.

In this new fourth installment of our blog series about Microsoft’s own employee experience journey, we share how teams at Microsoft are using Viva Goals and the OKR framework across the company at different levels to support new hires, define partnerships between teams, and drive innovation.

Looking ahead

We’re very excited about the opportunity to help customers build alignment and bring increased meaning and purpose-driven work into the employee experience as part of Viva. To learn more, explore Microsoft Viva Goals and watch the video below.

¹The Work Trend Index survey was conducted by an independent research firm, Edelman Data x Intelligence, among 31,102 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets between January 7, 2022 and February 16, 2022. This survey was 20 minutes in length and conducted online, in either the English language or translated into a local language across markets. At least 1,000 full-time workers were surveyed in each market, and global results have been aggregated across all responses to provide an average. Each market is evenly weighted within the global average. Each market was sampled to be representative of the full-time workforce across age, gender, and region; each sample included a mix of work environments (in-person, remote vs. non-remote, office settings vs. non-office settings, etc.), industries, company sizes, tenures, and job levels. Markets surveyed include: Australia and New Zealand (ANZ): Australia, New Zealand; Asia-Pacific (APAC): China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam; Europe: Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom; Latin America (LATAM): Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico; North America: Canada, United States.

²Microsoft acquires Ally.io to improve employee experience by aligning people’s work with team goals and company mission, Kirk Koenigsbauer, Official Microsoft Blog, Microsoft. October 7, 2021.

³2021 Report: A New Perspective on Goal Management and Company Culture, Kevin Shively, Ally.io. June 8, 2021.

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

A more inclusive, seamless working environment

Support neurodiversity in the hybrid workplace

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

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

Create tasks with natural language

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

Get more out of Yammer

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

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

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

Work securely from anywhere with Windows 11 and Windows 365

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

Drive productivity and hybrid collaboration with Windows 11

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

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

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

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

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

Empower IT with modern management

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

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

Simplify what it takes to protect your endpoints in the cloud

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

Govern data across your entire data estate

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

Empowering the future of modern work

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

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

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

³ Hardware dependent.

The post From intelligent tools built on inclusivity to the latest in Windows—here’s what's new in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We released Windows 11, the operating system designed for hybrid work, just over six months ago and are energized to hear how our customers, like Tower, are finding new ways to empower employees and move their business forward.

Talking to customers is one of the best parts of my role as General Manager for the Microsoft 365 business, and I learn a lot from every conversation—whether with an enterprise leader or a small business owner. Our team has also received a lot of feedback and input about the past two years and how it has forever changed the way we work, and I‘ve observed this just walking around my neighborhood in Atlanta—the way we work is different. Our work lives are in many cases more flexible, but also more complex. It makes sense, then, that the one thing I always hear is that organizations want solutions that are streamlined across their IT infrastructure, and seamless and easy for their employees to use.

We recently released the 2022 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries around the world. What we’ve learned from our 2021 and 2022 research is that this rapidly changing landscape is shaping how we think about how technology serves us at work. This has been our inspiration for the features we announced today and how we will continue to innovate in Windows for organizations and employees, helping our customers transform how we connect, collaborate, and communicate.

The most compelling data we gleaned from the Work Trend Index is that 73 percent of employees want flexible or remote options and see this as a more permanent way of working. That’s more than two-thirds of people surveyed—a compelling statistic.

As a leader at Microsoft who was hired during the pandemic and works fully remote, I can relate to the new challenges businesses are navigating in moving employees to a more permanent remote or hybrid work setting, and the challenge employees sometimes face in different environments.

So, I’m excited to build off what Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, shared today and give you some more details about the new features we are building in Windows 11 to power your businesses and your people, no matter where they are working.

Here’s what’s coming to Windows 11.

A faster, more dynamic Windows 11 experience powered by the cloud

Last year, we introduced Windows 365, the world’s first Cloud PC, to give people a simple way to stream their entire Windows experience from the Microsoft cloud. This means an individual employee’s personal settings, apps, and contents can be securely accessed on any device. And it’s persistent and always ready to go, so they can pick up right where they left off because Windows is streaming from the cloud. I’ve heard from many customers who are finding new uses for the Windows 365 Cloud PCs in critical hybrid work scenarios—from elastic workforces like interns or contractors to high-scale computing needs like developers, to remote workers and secure bring your own PC (BYOPC) needs. Windows 365 is easy to scale up so it’s particularly useful in times of change, like mergers and acquisitions. Coats, the world’s largest industrial thread manufacturer, was an early adopter of Windows 365.

Extending Windows to the cloud opens up new solutions that can help accelerate digital transformation by utilizing the power, intelligence, and capacity of the cloud to augment device capabilities. According to Gartner®, 72 percent of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders have invested or intend to invest in cloud-based user computing solutions during the next 24 months.

As the pandemic begins to slowly recede, and companies look to adopt more permanent hybrid work strategies, new integrated features are needed to enable more flexible ways of working.

So, we’re bringing the power of the cloud and familiarity of the PC together, giving people an even more seamless Windows experience without sacrificing security.

With Windows 365 Boot, I’ll be able to log directly into my Windows 365 Cloud PC at startup and designate it as my primary Windows experience on the device. This makes Windows 365 an even better solution for those temporary or frontline workforces I mentioned, where sharing devices and bring your own device (BYOD) scenarios are common. It allows different users to log in directly to their own personal and secure Windows 365 Cloud PC with their credentials.

If you are like me, you know the power of switching between desktop surfaces in Windows 11. Now we’re adding Windows 365 Switch, which will enable me to move between my Windows 365 Cloud PC and the local desktop just like I do between different desktops today in the Task switcher. I’ll even be able to use the same familiar keyboard commands, as well as a mouse-click or swipe gesture.

A new native Windows 365 app will give me another way to get straight to my Windows 365 Cloud PC from the taskbar or Start menu. All with a desktop path to my Windows 365 Cloud PC, providing a personal, customized welcome experience to tailor my settings, profile, and work style.

We are also working to deliver Windows 365 Offline, which will enable work in Windows 365 even when disconnected. When connectivity is restored, the Windows 365 Cloud PC will automatically resync with the Windows 365 service without data loss so the user experience and workflow are persistent.

Learn more about all these features in this Windows 365 blog and our new Microsoft Mechanics episode.

New inclusive and intelligent experiences and features for employees

In our most recent Work Trend Index research, we learned that 51 percent of people want a job that gives them the option to be fully remote, but they prefer a hybrid experience. The best news is that Windows 11, while designed for hybrid work, works for all scenarios—whether remote, onsite, or hybrid.

Today, I want to share with you some of my favorite new experiences coming soon to Windows 11 to make everyone working in these modern environments more effective. Best of all, these features are designed with accessibility in mind so everyone can enjoy the benefits of Windows 11.

I love how easy the centered Start menu design in Windows 11 is, and I’m excited to share how we’re building on that with new app folders right inside the Start menu. Now, I can enjoy the simplicity of organizing and easily finding apps on my Windows 11 desktop just as I’ve been able to do on my mobile device and tablet.

Refreshed File Explorer in Windows 11 to help you find what you need fast

One of my favorite announcements today is the refreshed experience in File Explorer. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent looking for important files and folders over the years. Now, finding files is a breeze with new contextual suggestions in Windows powered by Context IQ. This recommends relevant content and contacts across Windows—including content to the cloud. For example, I can see what files I might want, including files that my frequent collaborators are working on that I also have access to.

And with Tabs in File Explorer, I’ll be able to multitask and find multiple files at the same time.

During our 2022 Work Trend Index research, we found that 35 percent of employees surveyed say they wish they could spend more time working on solitary or focused work in order to be more impactful or productive, which is why we are introducing new capabilities in Focus for Windows.

Save time with new features in Focus for Windows 11

As a senior leader at Microsoft, I’m in meetings most of my day, and it’s often challenging to find time to get important work done. I’ve found Focus to be one of the most impactful tools to increase my own productivity. Focus was first introduced in Windows 10 to limit visual distractions and reduce clutter on the desktop. Today, Focus inside Microsoft Viva Insights helps me protect my valuable time by automatically scheduling focus time based on my schedule for the next work week. This has been a game-changer for me. And today, I’m happy to share the new features coming to Focus in Windows 11, such as an integrated focus timer and do not disturb feature that makes it even easier to track and personalize my focus time.

More natural hybrid meeting experiences powered by AI

As companies continue to take a hybrid approach, we are delivering new advancements to make virtual and hybrid meetings and collaboration feel more natural. These features* include automatic framing to refocus your camera as you move around, voice clarity, voice focus, and background blur to reduce visual and audio distractions in the background. One of my favorites of these new AI-based features is called eye contact, which improves eye contact during virtual meetings and video calls.

Better audiovisual experiences with Live Captions in Windows 11

We are always looking for ways to improve the experience with accessible features, and today we’re making Windows 11 better for the deaf and hard of hearing communities, as well as language learners with Live Captions. This new feature empowers people to easily access captions from all audio experiences and apps across Windows, including web-based audio, such as audio from your favorite streaming websites. I love turning on captions when I’m watching my favorite shows, so this is another incredible experience we are bringing to Windows 11.

Multitasking is a snap with improved Snap layouts

What did we do before Snap layouts? I love this feature in Windows 11. It may be the feature I use the most as I’m always using multiple windows throughout the day. It’s so easy to snap together two or more related windows when I’m doing research or to multitask on up to four separate projects simultaneously. We’re always looking for ways to help people work smarter, not harder. So, now, I’m excited we are adding touch Snap layouts for touch-enabled devices. This capability is going to improve work for so many, including frontline workers using touch devices in their day-to-day work.

Empowering IT superheroes with modern management

IT departments had one of the most complex undertakings during the pandemic—keeping the digital estate of their entire, distributed workforce connected, up-to-date, and performing. And doing that as the IT administrators themselves were also working remotely added even greater complexity. With the diversity of devices used across the enterprise device landscape, including physical and Windows 365 Cloud PCs, IT truly needed to be superheroes to keep all the endpoints secure and productive.

It is cloud management in Microsoft Endpoint Manager that provides IT with the needed flexibility to protect and configure endpoints for a productive workforce as well as unlock the new features and functionality for Windows. With Windows 11 built as a cloud-powered OS, Endpoint Manager is key to helping organizations keep their devices up-to-date and upgraded when ready.

Another way to keep things updated is with our new automated service, Windows Autopatch, designed to free up IT teams everywhere by making Windows and Microsoft 365 update management easier than ever. Autopatch offers IT peace of mind when it comes to ensuring endpoints are healthy, protected, and compliant, thus enabling them to focus on other business challenges.

Autopatch enables IT to strike the right balance between rollout speed and stability thanks to a ring-based, gradual deployment. It helps you get current and stay current while hardening endpoints against threats and increasing productivity by deploying new features with minimal friction and risk. If issues arise, they won’t turn into interruptions—the service can stop and even reverse updates, which means we’ve got you covered. Windows Autopatch will be available in July 2022 as part of the Windows E3 offering. Learn more about Autopatch in this blog.

Providing flexibility and data protection

Application management for Microsoft Edge enables people to access organizational resources from an unmanaged device while giving IT the ability to control the conditions under which the resources can be accessed. With app protection policies applied from Endpoint Manager, administrators will be able to configure how data flows in and out of the organization as well as define acceptable threat levels. This allows more businesses to safely employ a BYOD model, or empower employees to access company information through personal devices without compromising privacy or protection.

Improve communication with targeted messages in Windows 11

I am also excited about a new communications function that empowers IT to send targeted organizational messages directly to users across various surfaces, such as on the desktop, lock screen, or right above the taskbar. Imagine being able to share helpful messages to new employees onboarding or reminders for important training that might otherwise get lost in email. From the Endpoint Manager admin center, IT can create messages, provide customized links or URLs, configure the viewing frequency, and of course define the targeted set of users for the message based on the integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

A new era for endpoint management adds more simplicity

Our goal is to simplify what it takes for IT to protect the endpoints across their user computing landscape to help organizations support a Zero Trust security model. We are excited to enter a new era for endpoint management, one that will provide an expanded set of advanced solutions and capabilities in Endpoint Manager designed to increase endpoint security, improve user experience, and reduce the total cost of ownership of your digital estate. We are bringing together additional mission-critical endpoint and security management tools into a single, cloud-powered solution and it starts today. Read more about the news of our vision for advanced endpoint management in this Microsoft 365 blog and learn about our plans to introduce a series of premium solutions over time that will help protect endpoints in the cloud, on-premises, and across device platforms, foundational for organizations striving to achieve a Zero Trust architecture.

The 2022 Work Trend Index highlighted that more than 50 percent of hybrid employees are considering going fully remote in the next year, so on-site tech support can no longer be the only option to resolve complex technical issues. Today we are launching the first of our premium solutions in Endpoint Manager for general availability, remote help for Windows, a cloud-based, remote assistance tool that provides a secure, trusted helpdesk to user connections. The endpoint is the new workplace. Providing resolutions to users—delivered by the right helper, with the right permissions, at the right time—is crucial for organizations in today’s hybrid world.

Help keep hybrid work safe with new security features

Given the fast-changing cybersecurity landscape, we continue to see accelerating with new threats today, it wasn’t surprising to see that cybersecurity issues and risks was the number one concern for business leaders around the world. To help address those concerns, we’re introducing new security features coming to Windows 11 to make the most secure version of Windows we’ve ever built even more secure for hybrid and remote employees.

With built-in chip to the cloud protection, Windows 11 helps organizations address the new security challenges of the hybrid workplace, now and in the future. With every release, we are making Windows more secure by default and today we’re thrilled to show you how Windows powers the future of business.

We are all potential targets of sophisticated phishing and other cyberattack attempts. I’m excited about future Windows 11 updates we are adding, like enhanced phishing detection and protection built into Windows with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen. We are also bringing more protection against malware, ransomware, data loss, and the serious risk of hardware attacks if a device is stolen. We’ve designed security in Windows to be simple for all—for businesses large and small, from IT to consumers. Our Windows customers will benefit from layers of tightly integrated hardware and software security from the chip to the cloud, designed to help protect our customers from wherever and however they choose to work. To learn more about the security innovations coming to Windows 11, visit the Security Blog.

Taking the journey to hybrid work, together 

As workplaces and world events continue to evolve, so too will the needs of your employees and organization. That’s why we designed Windows 11 to be the most flexible, secure, and productive solution for hybrid work. The features we announced today ensure that you can continue to count on Windows to move your business forward with cloud-powered technology and services that adapt and evolve to meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s. 

Creating a durable hybrid work environment is a journey. Microsoft is on its own journey, learning as we go just like you are. That’s why we wanted to share our own Windows 11 deployment story with you, so we can all be students of the time, together. I invite you to check out my conversation with Nathalie D’Hers, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, highlighting the employee experience, and our case study on deploying Windows 11 at Microsoft.

One of our biggest learnings as “customer zero” for Windows 11 adoption is just how easy it was to do using familiar tools and processes like Windows Update for Business, Autopilot for new PCs, and tools in Microsoft Endpoint Manager like Endpoint Analytics to measure device health and status. With its common core and consistency across admin functions, it is easy to run Windows 10 and Windows 11 in your environment, side-by-side. And to ensure that we’re supporting you throughout your migration journey, we offer engineering-led services like Fast Track, as well as App Assure and Test Base, a powerful combination to help make sure that all of your apps are compatible.

ITC Secure, one of our earliest adopters of Windows 11, enjoyed the fast and simple process of migrating their organization and is now taking advantage of the full benefits of Windows 11.

Windows is designed for hybrid work and is ready for you today. Thank you for trusting Windows to be the platform for your business now and in the future. You can learn more about how Windows is extending to the cloud with Windows 365 here, and be sure to check out our Tech Community site for more in-depth information on features, deployment guidance, and best practices to help you on your journey to Windows 11.

*Hardware dependent

The post New experiences in Windows 11 and Windows 365 empower new ways of working appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

Let’s dive in.

1. Reimagine the office experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Make every meeting matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Collaborate and communicate—your way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

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At Microsoft, we’re committed to supporting the healthcare workforce by designing products that can help improve the lives of those on the frontline, and the patients they serve. To do this, we’re working on products to connect care teams more seamlessly, provide solutions to efficiently manage and motivate care teams, and empower organizations to adapt to a dynamic and rapidly changing healthcare environment. I’m excited to announce a few new products to make their experience easier in Microsoft Teams.

A seamless experience for virtual appointments

This week at the HIMSS healthcare conference, we’re announcing exciting new features in Microsoft Teams for virtual appointments. We’ve seen the adoption of virtual appointments in healthcare skyrocket during the pandemic, and we continue to see outstanding growth. It’s an area that’s here to stay, with use cases that are core to the future of healthcare and many other key industries. Teams provides a simple and convenient experience for patients and providers for telehealth workflows. It builds on the momentum from the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, with new features to:

Schedule on-demand appointments (preview, April 2022)

Patients can request on-demand appointments with their provider. Organizations using on-demand scheduling can see and monitor on-demand appointments in a queue view through the Microsoft Bookings app in Teams. This builds on the waiting room and queueing features for scheduled appointments that are generally available.

Collect key information for virtual appointments with Microsoft Forms (preview)

Gather patient triage information as part of the virtual appointment in Teams through the integration of Microsoft Forms and the Microsoft Bookings app. When enabled, this feature allows healthcare organizations to collect patient responses and review them as part of the visit.

Help ensure patient devices are working correctly for the appointment—generally available

The new device tester can help you reduce no-shows by allowing patients to test their hardware settings before their virtual appointment. This allows the patient and provider to focus on the appointment, and spend less time on technical challenges. It’s now available through the Microsoft Teams EHR connector.

Send SMS appointment reminders (preview, April 2022)

SMS reminders are key to reducing no-shows and making it easier for patients to join their virtual appointments. While this experience is already available to customers using the Microsoft Bookings app through Teams in the United States, we’re excited to announce the expansion to customers in the United Kingdom.  

See analytics from your virtual appointments (preview)

Gaining insights into the performance of virtual appointments is critical to understanding key business insights like lobby wait time, impact of SMS notifications, appointment duration, and more. Authorized users can gain insights into these areas in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center for appointments scheduled through Microsoft Bookings and the Microsoft Teams electronic health record (EHR) connector.

Enhance clinical workflow integration

Building on the momentum we are already seeing with customers using the EHR connector for virtual appointments with Epic, we’re announcing the next phase of our first-party EHR connector for virtual appointments.  

Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Cerner—generally available

The new integration with Cerner expands the capabilities of the Microsoft Teams EHR connector, making it easier for clinicians to launch virtual appointments with patients or consult with other providers in Teams directly from their health record system. This is exciting for organizations using Cerner, which can now easily integrate virtual appointments into their existing clinical workflows.

“As a validated code application, Microsoft Teams EHR connector meets Cerner security, operational, functional and UX criteria designed to help improve the user experience for Cerner clients searching for a third-party telehealth solution.”—Jake Engle, Senior Director of Open Platforms, Cerner

The Microsoft Teams EHR connector offers powerful integration capabilities across healthcare. For example:

• Providers can schedule and launch virtual appointments directly from Cerner PowerChart, effortlessly invite other care team members to virtual appointments, and gain real-time status reports of their visits to help improve patient care.
• System administrators have access to simplified setup and configuration management directly in the EHR connector portal and can easily access downloadable consumption reports and call quality boards.
• Patients can test their device before the appointment, launch the appointment from SMS or email (without the need to download the Teams app), and will wait in a custom lobby before they are admitted by the provider.

Customers have already seen great results from the Microsoft Teams EHR connector. For example, Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital has been using it with Epic, saying “the greatest benefit is how we’ve used Teams to lower the threshold to care and make it possible for any patient to consult a physician, no matter their location or circumstance.”

Create an advanced virtual health experience

Teladoc Health Solo™ with Microsoft Teams

In collaboration with Teladoc Health, a global leader in virtual healthcare, we are announcing the general availability of Teladoc Health Solo™ with Microsoft Teams. This new offering transforms the virtual care experience by enhancing clinical collaboration, improving the user experience, increasing system efficiency, and expanding care delivery—making it easier for care teams to collaborate and manage their patients and resources, at scale.

Teladoc Health Solo™ with Teams simplifies the way healthcare organizations and care providers work by streamlining technologies and administrative processes, so clinicians can focus on what matters most—delivering high-quality patient care.

Empower your healthcare workers on the frontline

• Watch demos, read customer stories, and learn about new features on the Microsoft Teams and healthcare site for frontline workers.
• Learn more about the new announcements from the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
• Check out the latest WorkLab article, exploring some of the issues causing burnout of frontline healthcare workers and tools to help.
• Use Walkie Talkie in Teams to connect healthcare workers with a dedicated push-to-talk button on Zebra, Samsung, and newly announced Sonim devices.
• Discover new collaboration and virtual health solutions for frontline workers in this article and podcast from Becker’s Hospital Review.

Epic is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corporation

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We’re excited to share that for the fifth consecutive year, Gartner® has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms. Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.

Figure 1. Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, Tim Nelms, October 18, 2021.

Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms report to learn more.

In its report, Gartner lists core, optional, and critical capabilities for content services platforms. After detailing the critical capabilities, Gartner goes on to state, “Of these critical functions, it is the last—PaaS/SaaS deployment—which has seen the greatest growth in importance over the last few years.”

We believe this recognition demonstrates our commitment to providing innovative content platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more, including:

• Managed content: Your organization’s content is what drives decisions and action. Utilizing AI to turn unstructured content into organized information, SharePoint Syntex helps you find, protect, and automate business practices. Learn more about how organizations like Northumbrian Water and London Stock Exchange Group captured knowledge and reduced inefficiencies with SharePoint Syntex. Our more recent updates to add: content assembly, contract management, and advanced metadata search.
• Knowledge management: Microsoft Viva Topics turns content into knowledge by automating content organization, making information easier to find. Leverage existing content and turn it into an advantage for faster learning and development. Learn more about how companies like Avanade discover and share knowledge easier with Viva Topics.
• Employee productivity: Microsoft 365 empowers customers with applications, like Microsoft Viva, that encourage collaboration and productivity. Allow people to work flexibly and stay connected from anywhere.
• Extensive third-party partner network: The Microsoft Partner Network offers a wide array of solutions designed to enhance our customer’s Microsoft 365 investments. In addition, we maintain the Microsoft Viva Engineering Partner Community/Content Services Partner Program to help content services partners deliver solutions that accelerate customer success.
• Integration with Microsoft 365: Our third-party partner ecosystem offers solutions and services built for integration that enable you to customize and enhance Microsoft 365 based on your organization’s needs. We also have tools to help partners and developers integrate with, build on, and extend their solutions into Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex, and Viva. Learn more about our growing Microsoft Content Services Partner Program (CSPP).

Do more with Microsoft 365

Visit the new Microsoft Viva and SharePoint Syntex adoption pages for resources to help increase Viva and SharePoint Syntex awareness and usage in your organization. On these sites, you’ll find helpful guides, tools, and templates, for getting started, building champions, and deploying solutions.

To learn more about the many content services features in SharePoint Syntex (and even get started training a model using your own content) or get a jump-start with a contract management solution, check out the SharePoint Syntex-powered site templates in the SharePoint look book. The look book lets you provision code-free solution templates on demand to your tenant. The instructional Content Center template can be provisioned without a license, while the Contracts Management solution will require a SharePoint Syntex license.

Figure 2. Contracts Management site provisioned from the SharePoint look book.

Finally, we’ve heard your requests to couple content and knowledge for faster ways to build out your knowledge base. Our new integration between SharePoint Syntex taxonomy and Viva Topics can help. You’ll be able to use SharePoint Syntex to automatically tag content and build out taxonomies—and dynamically turn taxonomy tags into managed topics for Viva Topics. This integration is rolling out now.

Figure 3. Topics built dynamically from the taxonomy term store.

Learn more

We’re consistently working to improve our content platform offerings and empower our customers for the new digital age. Here’s how you can learn more about Microsoft 365 Content Services and get started:

• Get more information about Microsoft 365 Content Services:
  • SharePoint product page.
  • SharePoint Syntex product page.
  • Viva Topics product page.
• Download the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms report.

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, Tim Nelms, 18 October 2021.

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.

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 and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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

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

Let’s dive in.

Focus on what matters and collaborate across boundaries

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

Pin or hide your own video in Microsoft Teams meetings

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

Stay on top of required trainings

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

Get suggestions on Yammer communities and people to follow

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

Auto-renew active Yammer communities

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

Collaborate with people outside of your geography while maintaining compliance policies

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

More flexibility in how you provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs

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

Provision Cloud PCs without an Azure subscription

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

Localizing the Cloud PC experience

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

Looking to the future

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

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Microsoft Viva empowers organizations to foster a culture where people thrive

In just a year, Viva now has more than 10 million monthly active users. Over 1,000 paying customers—including Blum, Nationwide, Old Mutual, PayPal, REI, and Unilever—are using Microsoft Viva to build a better employee experience, from promoting growth and wellbeing in the digital office to building a connected culture for frontline workers.

Since our initial announcement a year ago, Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning are all generally available. Later this year, Viva customers will also benefit from a new Viva-based objective and key results (OKRs) service powered by our acquisition of Ally.io.

Together with our partners

To help customers realize value from Viva, we’ve recruited more than 200 Viva solution partners, including global firms like Accenture/Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC, and Tata Consultancy Services, and we’ve trained more than 5,000 partner individuals—both business consultants and technical architects. We’re committed to growing our Viva partner capacity and capabilities in the years to come.

Microsoft Viva is an open and extensible platform that integrates with and enhances your existing HR systems, learning management systems, content providers, and employee workflows. We have established a broad range of partnerships including ServiceNow, Qualtrics, Headspace, Cornerstone OnDemand, Workday, Espressive, OpenSesame, and EdCast, and will continue to bring new partners to the platform. In addition, we are working closely with our LinkedIn colleagues to integrate LinkedIn Learning and Glint into Viva.

At Microsoft, we’re on the same journey as our customers in adopting Viva for our own use. In our blog series about the development of Viva, we describe our early envisioning of an EXP as well as the recent progress on our own deployment here at Microsoft. It’s our hope that these experiences, which we’ll continue to share, will help you discover new ways to empower and support your people.

Looking to the future

Today, as we reflect on our first anniversary, we’re both inspired and humbled to see so much passion and enthusiasm from customers as they invest in their own employee experiences—and how Microsoft Viva is playing a pivotal role to help them transform as the world’s employee experience platform for the hybrid era.

¹Microsoft and LinkedIn share latest data and innovation for hybrid work, Jared Spataro, Microsoft. September 9, 2021.

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

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

Now, let’s dive into the news.

Empowering frontline workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create content that everyone can use

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

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

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

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

Increasing productivity with new features in your favorite apps

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

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

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

Also new this month

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

Looking to the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Prioritize and modernize training

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Build company culture that includes the frontline

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward

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

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

The post 3 ways technology can help rebuild your frontline workforce appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New updates to the Teams meeting experience

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

Unlock better hybrid meeting experiences

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

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

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

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

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

Make cross-organizational collaboration easier and more secure

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

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

Deliver engaging and memorable events

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

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

Unlock teamwork with collaborative apps

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

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

Streamline the contact center experience

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

Empowering creators everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The digital employee experience is the employee experience

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

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

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

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

Windows for a hybrid world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also new to Microsoft 365

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

Looking ahead

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

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

In the last 18 months, the world changed, and we adapted to a new working environment where people had to complement traditional communication tools and in-person collaboration with alternative solutions, quickly digitalizing everything we do across our life.

Schools moved to online-only classes, businesses got better at e-commerce, and companies hired a new generation of graduates who have met their teams only through a screen.

Additionally, communications moved to online meetings and chat, and digital content exploded spilling beyond traditional document types to more fluid, dynamic spaces. New kinds of content, formats, and channels demanded more flexible, powerful, and fluid tools to allow everyone to deliver a more impactful message and collaborate at their own pace.

So, Microsoft Office is changing with the times.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Outlook are better than they’ve ever been—with Microsoft Teams integration and cloud-powered AI across web, desktop, and mobile.

But we needed to go further. That is why we are reimagining Office, adding new apps to respond to new opportunities, and making Office a universal, interactive canvas for creators of all kinds.

Now let’s see how we are enhancing collaboration, expanding our creation tools, and bringing the power of AI to you.

Introducing Microsoft Loop. Think, plan, create—together

Today, we are introducing Microsoft Loop, a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that move freely and stay in sync across apps—enabling teams to think, plan, and create together.

Microsoft Loop consists of three elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces. 

Loop components: An evolution of Fluid components—are atomic units of productivity that help you collaborate and get your work done in the flow of your work—in a chat, email, meeting, document, or Loop page. Loop components can be as simple as lists, tables, notes, tasks, or as sophisticated as a customer sales opportunity from Microsoft Dynamics 365, and because components stay in sync, no matter how many places they live in, you and your team always work with the latest information. 

Today, we are introducing new components for collaboration:

A voting table that makes it easy for teams to ideate, drive consensus, and finalize decisions together.

Figure 1. Easily make decisions with your team with the new voting table.

And a status tracker which will help you gather information from your team, track progress towards all aspects of your project, and always maintain an up-to-date status across your team.

Figure 2. Easily stay on top of your projects across apps. 

We are also adding new Loop components to facilitate your business workflows—starting with Dynamics 365 records. And beyond the components that we build, third-party application developers will also be able to build Loop components by extending their existing message extensions applications and Microsoft Graph connectors integrations with minimal investments. We will be sharing more specific details on this at our developer conference, Microsoft Build, next year.

Figure 3. Loop components work in the app you use to make your workflow easier.

Loop pages are flexible canvases where you can organize your components and pull in other useful elements like files, links, or data to help teams think, connect, and collaborate. Pages are optimized for thinking together and getting work done. They can start small and continue to grow to match the size of your ideas and projects.

Figure 4. Pages grow with your team’s projects.

Loop workspaces are shared spaces that allow you and your team to see and group everything important to your project. Workspaces make it easy for you to catch up on what everyone is working on, react to others’ ideas, or track progress toward shared goals. Teams can collaborate synchronously or asynchronously whenever inspiration strikes. 

Figure 5. Multiple people can work at the same time from different apps. 

Microsoft Loop brings everything together, keeping you and your team more productive, on track, and connected than ever before. Microsoft Loop components across Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, Outlook, and OneNote will start rolling out this month. We will share more about the availability of the Microsoft Loop app in the upcoming months.

Microsoft Editor with Context IQ—puts the information you need at your fingertips

We are also announcing Context IQ—our set of natively integrated AI experiences across Microsoft 365 that predict, seek, and suggest information people might need, right in the flow of their work.

The first experience to be transformed by Context IQ is Microsoft Editor. Currently, Editor helps you write with confidence—correcting grammar and spelling across documents, email, and the web.  

Now, Context IQ takes Editor to another level. Here are some predictive-assistance benefits Editor with Context IQ will provide:

• When you need to attach, insert, or share a file with colleagues, Editor suggests a relevant file or document based on similar subjects or because you have created or worked on them before.
• When you try to schedule a meeting in an Outlook email, Editor will recognize that effort and will recommend times when everyone is available, saving you time and context switching.
• When tagging colleagues in a file using the @ symbol in a comment or email, Editor recommends potential people to tag based on colleagues you currently work with or stakeholders you have previously tagged for document reviews.
• When you may be collaborating on a sales opportunity, and need to pull in Dynamics data, Editor will suggest related Dynamics 365 information as a Loop component allowing you to update and take an action on it in the flow of your work.    
• When entering data or objects as you write, Editor suggests information such as a frequent flyer number when booking a flight online or a sales message when collaborating in Teams.

Learn more about Editor with Context IQ.

Figure 6. Editor, with Context IQ, gives you context-based suggestions.

Clipchamp joins the Office family

Traditionally, Office helps you create documents, spreadsheets, and slides. Those still remain super important, but we also recognize there is a high demand for digital content, especially video. That is why we are excited to expand our creation tools to include Clipchamp, so you can create and tell your stories for work, school, and fun your way.

Clipchamp empowers creators of all skill levels to create, edit, and share beautiful, professional-looking videos easily and quickly. Whether it’s an ad to promote a side hustle, a virtual history lesson for students, or a family video to capture memories—Clipchamp enables people to create and share their stories.

Learn more about Clipchamp.

Figure 7. Quickly create professional-looking videos with Clipchamp. 

While we are bringing brand new product offerings into Office to help people create and collaborate, we also have new features coming to our beloved apps.

Tell your story in your own words with recording studio in PowerPoint

Delivering your message to your audience should not depend on you being physically or virtually present. Recording Studio in Microsoft PowerPoint lets you tell your story, in your own words, helping you deliver more impactful and engaging presentations. It allows you to customize your background, annotate on your slides, and even select different views to help you record, and deliver your content with ease.

Once you’ve completed your recording, you can watch a preview, and if needed, re-record either a particular slide or the entire presentation. When you are done editing, you can share your presentation with others by simply exporting it. Recording Studio will be generally available in early 2022.

Learn more about Recording Studio in PowerPoint.

Figure 8. Click “Record” in PowerPoint to start.

Video is a great way to tell your story but, sometimes, numbers and data can deliver a powerful message too—especially when you can use Excel to personalize data for your organization.

Find, create, and share with Office.com and Office app for Windows

With Office.com we are building a new experience to serve as the hub for your content—one place where you can not only find all your content and understand what’s happening with it but also take action. Our latest enhancements to Office.com and the Office app for Windows are designed so you spend less time finding your files and apps and more time working on them.

The homepage was redesigned so you can both quickly get to your most important content in the Quick Access section, and see what things need your attention with a set of Recommended Actions. A new My Content page provides a robust search and filtering experience making it easy to find any of your content across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint at once. Additionally, a new Create page lets you see all your apps and tools in one place along with templates from multiple applications at the same time, making it easier to decide the best way to get started with your work.

These new experiences will begin rolling out in the next few weeks. Learn more about the new experiences.

Figure 9. See documents and files related to your content in Office.com

Easily finding the right tool for the job is key—and when you need to manage and analyze your data, Excel is your go-to app.

The next frontier for Excel data types

Until recently, Microsoft Excel only allowed two types of data, text, and numbers. Now, instead of simply basic strings of text or numbers, the cells themselves can contain much more complex entries like content cards, images, matrices, arrays, and more. 

We have been on a multi-year journey to up-level Excel’s possibilities with data types—first with the introduction of the Stocks and Geography data types and last year with the release of Power BI and Power Query data types, which allow customers to work with their own data as a data type.  

Now, we’ve taken linked data types to a whole new level again and are giving developers the ultimate freedom to build in Excel. Later this month, a new JavaScript API in Excel will be available in preview. This new API allows developers to create their own custom data types containing images, entities, arrays, and formatted number values backed by their own custom data source. It also allows for the creation of custom functions that can make use of these new Excel Data Types, both as inputs and outputs.

Figure 10. Bloomberg uses the new JavaScript API in Excel to bring information to their users

These more flexible structures give you the ability to organize complex data as objects and expose this data to users in more natural ways, while still providing easy access to the full information users care about for their analysis or reporting.

Figure 11. Easily analyze data from your organization.

Additionally, customers will be able to create their own add-ins or extend previously existing ones to utilize the power of data types, resulting in a more integrated and next-generation experience within Excel. You can share the power of data types across your entire organization and create add-ins or solutions which can connect data types to your own service or data. 

With this new API, we are giving the ultimate power to users and developers, allowing them to better organize, access, and work with their data.

Additional resources

I know we have covered a lot, so here is a summary of blogs and technical sessions that go into more details about these innovations:

Blogs

• Microsoft Editor with Context IQ
• About Clipchamp
• The new experiences in Office.com
• Recording Studio in PowerPoint
• New JavaScript API in Excel

Technical sessions

• Live components to think, plan, and create, together
• Excel Add-ins and Data Types
• Office Collaboration
• Office mobile app – Overview and new capabilities
• The Office experience on Mac, iPad, and the new Outlook for Mac
• Get the most out of Office.com
• Take care of your scheduling needs with Microsoft 365
• Complement employees’ skills with intelligent assistance in Microsoft 365
• Top 5 tips for managing your Microsoft 365 updates
• To Do – A lot of stuff

I hope you are as excited as I am about how we are changing with the times and bringing all these new experiences in team collaboration, human creation, and cloud-powered AI to Microsoft Office.

We can’t wait to see what you do next!

The post Microsoft Office—Transforming for the hybrid world appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

These innovations pull directly from our thinking around the Hybrid Work Paradox, ¹ which demands rethinking the operating model for every organization, and learnings from early Viva customers like Unilever, Humana, and REI.¹ Viva helps organizations transform their employee experience, which really is the digital experience of working for a company, to retain and attract talent in the Great Reshuffle.²

As a single solution, Viva ensures every employee is connected to their organization’s culture, personal productivity insights, expert knowledge, and key learning resources. And with the addition of Ally.io, it will be even easier to align employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities. In all, Viva empowers every level of the organization to address key challenges of hybrid work and employee burnout.

The Microsoft Viva suite: One plan for an integrated EXP   

With the Microsoft Viva suite, customers get an integrated EXP that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into the flow of work. The suite comes at a promotional price of $9 per user per month through August 2022, which is 25 percent less than purchasing the three premium modules individually (a total of $12). Customers who purchase the suite subscription now will also receive the new Ally.io module next year at no additional cost.

Since Microsoft Viva provides an integrated experience, IT administrators can now leverage the centralized Microsoft 365 admin center experience to access guided set-ups for deploying Viva. The admin center experience comes with a setup guide and list of tasks for each Viva module and related partner solutions to simplify the initial setup. A complete step-by-step set of deployment instructions for each module is also available in the documentation hyperlinks at the end of this blog.

Viva Connections: Culture and communications

Viva Connections is a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in the applications and devices you use every day—and later this month, those devices will include your mobile phone.

Starting today, you can engage with integrations from many industry leading partners to extend your culture and communications experience, including Workday, ServiceNow, Qualtrics, UKG, and more.

In addition to these partner integrations, you are now also able to add cards for Approvals, Shifts, and Tasks from Teams into your Viva Connections dashboard. These integrations will also allow you to engage in Viva Connections with new partner functionality, such as Adobe Sign and DocuSign for Approvals and Zebra-Reflexis and Blue Yonder for Shifts.

Finally, we are happy to announce that Espressive will be joining the Viva Connections partner family. Dashboard cards from Espressive will allow employees to get immediate, personalized self-help later this year.

Learn about all the new Viva Connections partners, including those coming on board soon, in our on-demand session. We’re also excited to announce that new module webparts are now available in SharePoint. You can learn about those in the on-demand session too.

Figure 1. Connect with your organization from wherever you’re working—including your mobile phone later this month. 

Viva Insights: Productivity and wellbeing

Viva Insights helps improve productivity and wellbeing through data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations. Today, we are announcing expanded capabilities to help managers and team leads navigate hybrid work and to help everyone in an organization run more effective meetings. For details on these and other upcoming features, read the Viva Insights blog.

• New manager insights and tools will help managers and team leads stay connected with team members, track outstanding tasks, explore personal habits that impact team culture, recognize accomplishments, and foster team norms such as no-meeting days—all through actionable recommendations. These insights will be available soon for any team size from the My team tab in the Viva Insights app for Microsoft Teams.
• A new effective meetings experience in the Viva Insights app for Teams will help meeting organizers get personalized insights and suggestions to improve their meeting habits. Users will also be able to create and share meeting plans to set team meeting norms such as shorter meetings by default and always including Teams links.
• Guided meditations from Headspace will be generally available in November 2021 in four additional languages: French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Figure 2. Empower managers to define no-meeting days for their teams.

Viva Topics: Knowledge and expertise

Viva Topics applies AI to automatically organize content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics, like projects, products, processes, and customers. That content appears as topic pages and topic centers—created and updated by AI—that enable experts to cultivate and share knowledge with wiki-like simplicity. It also pops up as topic cards that deliver knowledge just in time across Outlook, SharePoint, and Office. Soon, Viva Topics, which is now generally available, will make it easier to unlock that knowledge from even more sources. To learn more about these and other enhancements, read our Viva Topics blog or watch our on-demand session for Knowledge and Content Services.

• We’re unlocking adoption of knowledge across more of Microsoft 365 by integrating Viva Topics into Outlook, Yammer, Bing, and people profile cards. Available by the end of 2021.
• Our early adopter customers will soon be able to add Viva Topics directly to chats and channels in Microsoft Teams. Rolling out early next year.
• More ways for topic managers to oversee knowledge at scale, including automatic grouping of related topics into segments, usage analytics, and a streamlined topic center. Rolling out at year end.
• Support to crawl knowledge from content written in French, German and Spanish. Rolling out at year end.

Figure 3. Get context about organizational terms, projects, or team names directly in Outlook with integrated topic cards. 

Viva Learning: Skilling and growth

Viva Learning brings enterprise learning into the flow of work by connecting content from your organization, Learning Management Systems, third-party providers, and Microsoft. As of today, the module is generally available in Teams desktop and mobile. During the next couple weeks, Viva Learning will be available in your Microsoft 365 tenant—simply search “Viva Learning” in the Teams app menu to find it—with additional capabilities to expand your personal and social learning. Just a handful of these new capabilities are listed below. For a complete list of feature releases, partner integrations, and SKU details for enabling more advanced capabilities, read our Viva Learning blog.

• See assignments from integrated Learning Management Systems to easily stay up to date on required learning.
• Search across all the learning sources connected to Viva Learning and filter by interests, provider, or duration to find the exact content you need.
• Make learning recommendations to your team and colleagues and track the recommendations you’ve made. You can filter recommendations by status and the user’s reported completion rate.
• Add a curated set of learning resources as a tab in your Teams channels to bring learning directly into the flow of teamwork.

Figure 4. The Home view provides a personalized learner snapshot and access point for all connected learning content.

Ally.io: A new module for objectives and key results

We are excited to bring Ally.io, a leading objectives and key results (OKR) company, into the Microsoft Viva family as a new module during the second half of the calendar year 2022. This new module will help revolutionize how organizations use technology to bring deeper connection to work, purpose, and results in the hybrid world.

Aligning employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities is top of mind for every organization. To do this, leaders need to invest in tools that communicate transparency around big company bets and create ways to cascade aspirational goals and report results at all levels of an organization. Ally.io helps give everyone in the organization visibility and clarity into the entire work process, connecting everyday work to the company’s strategic objectives.

Figure 5. Enhancements to the Ally.io app in Microsoft Teams, as well as an official Microsoft Viva module based on the OKR solution, are on the way.

To learn more about the Ally.io solution, read our announcement blog and visit Ally.io.

The Microsoft Viva platform

Viva is easily customizable and extensible, accessible from anywhere you work, and integrates with tools you already use to fit your unique needs. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Viva now supports the following partner integrations, giving you access to industry-leading apps in the natural flow of work.

• Viva Learning: SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, Coursera, Skillsoft, Pluralsight, edX, Udemy, Go1, Infosec, Josh Bersin Academy, Udacity,* Harvard Business Review,* OpenSesame,* and EdCast.*
• Viva Connections: Qualtrics, ServiceNow, UKG, Talentsoft, StandOut by ADP, Adobe Sign, Moveworks, Lifeworks, Limeade, Tribute, Blue Yonder, Zebra-Reflexis, Workday,* DocuSign,* EdCast,* and Espressive.*
• Viva Insights: Qualtrics, Glint, and Headspace.

We are also offering a new joint plan for the Microsoft Viva suite with LinkedIn Glint to our enterprise customers. Together, Viva and Glint capture valuable employee feedback and translate insights into actions, allowing managers and teams to measure and improve the employee experience.

Microsoft Viva is an open and extensible platform and soon partners and developers will be able to leverage toolkits and APIs for each of the four modules. The Viva Connections toolkit is available now, while the 3P content support for Viva Topics is coming to private preview in 2022. The Viva Insights and Viva Learning APIs will be available in 2022 as well. Read our blog for additional details about Viva partners and extensibility.

EXP for every organization—including Microsoft

Through all the ups, downs, and profound changes of the past year, our mission is still to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—including every person at Microsoft. We’re on the same employee experience journey as our customers with Microsoft Viva, using it throughout our worldwide offices to promote connection, growth, and wellbeing at work.

We’re shedding light on that journey in a new blog series about the development of Microsoft Viva. The first installment recaps our early decisions around employee satisfaction; the realization that individual employee experience apps are great—but a centralized platform is better, and the shift we made to respond to the pandemic and reimagine our internal solutions for customers.

But like you, our journey has only just begun, and we’re excited to share our progress in the second blog installment that was just published today.

We’re humbled and excited that Microsoft Viva has already had such a profound impact on our employees and the employees at other global organizations. To learn how the world’s leading companies use Viva to empower their people, select the logos.

Get started on your employee experience journey

Our own journey with Microsoft Viva has helped us understand the kinds of resources needed to get started on this employee experience path. Since Viva was first announced in February, we’ve been continuously adding to our documentation to deploy, adopt, and manage Viva. Here’s a list of our most helpful resources, no matter where you are in the EXP journey. If you need even more information (or just want to bounce ideas off someone), talk to your Microsoft representative.

• Microsoft Viva
• Microsoft Viva pricing
• Microsoft Viva Tech Community
• Microsoft Viva Connections overview
• Microsoft Viva Insights documentation
• Microsoft Viva Topics introduction
• Microsoft Viva Learning introduction
• Visit Ally.io and read our acquisition announcement
• Microsoft Mechanics videos for IT admins
• Microsoft Viva Developer Page

¹ 73%: The Hybrid Work Paradox, Jared Spataro, Microsoft WorkLab. 8 September 2021.

² Microsoft and LinkedIn share latest data and innovation for hybrid work, Jared Spataro, Microsoft. 9 September 2021.

*Coming by the end of January 2022

The post Microsoft Viva is now generally available to help transform your hybrid work experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

Deliver more inclusive meetings for everyone

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

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

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

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

Co-author encrypted docs and create more colorful diagrams

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

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

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

Ensure your employees can be productive from day one

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

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

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

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

Looking to the future

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

¹ Work Trend Index, WorkLab, Microsoft. 2021.

The post From expanded live captioning and transcripts to prepare for Windows 11—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Until recently, video was made by a few professionals while the rest of us felt it was too hard, required too much artistic ability, or took too long to make something that probably wasn’t all that good or didn’t meet our professional quality bar. That has changed. More and more of us are feeling we can make watchable, useful, or fun videos the way we might have typed an email before or snapped a photo. Video is establishing itself as a new type of ‘document’ for business, big and small, used inside and outside organizations to pitch an idea, explain a process, or communicate with team members.

Create videos with confidence with Microsoft and Clipchamp

Clipchamp is an in-browser video creation and editing experience founded in 2013 with a mission to empower anyone to tell stories worth sharing. The Clipchamp team is dedicated to making a video app they would personally love and are proud to have the world use as well. Clipchamp’s technical approach is to combine the simplicity of a web app with the ability to process video using the full computing power of a PC with graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, something that was formerly limited to traditional video applications.

Clipchamp’s template-driven, task-focused user experience gives everyone the confidence that they can create. Its rich library of filters, styles, transitions, and stock media combined with the power of a multi-track audio and video compositing editor gives everyone the fine control they need, and artistic help if they need it, to create exactly what they want, quickly and with confidence. Once you finish your story, Clipchamp helps you share it since it’s built for social media, offering output styles and aspect ratios for all the popular social networks. It lets you tell your story your way.

Small business owners, marketers, influencers, students, educators, families, and information workers of all types need the capability to make great videos with minimal effort. Whether it’s a 10-second social media ad, a 2-minute pitch for a product, or a 20-minute instructional video, Clipchamp and Microsoft will provide the tools and experience you need.

As a web app that uses the full power of your PC, Clipchamp is a natural fit to extend the cloud-powered productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 for individuals, families, schools, and businesses. It’s also a great fit for Microsoft Windows, which is a platform for boundless creativity. Whether you are editing game clips, making a school project, putting together a memory of your kids, or assembling the next indie short, Clipchamp and Microsoft will help you express yourself through the emotional power of video. If you are already a Clipchamp user, it’s all going to get better with more options, more power, and the easy creation experience you love.

I am bubbling over with excitement that Clipchamp will be joining Microsoft. The Clipchamp team is a creative powerhouse dedicated to quality and great customer outcomes, and we welcome them wholeheartedly as kindred spirits. We will be doing incredible things together—more to come on that later!

In the meantime, give Clipchamp a try, give us your feedback, and expect great things as we work to empower creators everywhere to express themselves through video.

The post Microsoft acquires Clipchamp to empower creators appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Let’s dive into the details.

Be productive from anywhere with Windows 365

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

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

Work together and personalize your Microsoft Teams meeting experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increase productivity with new features in your favorite apps

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

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

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

Tools for the future of hybrid work

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

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

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

A decade of continuous innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extending audio conferencing capabilities

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

New pricing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View and edit Dynamics 365 records right within your Teams workflow

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

Add a Teams meeting to appointments and capture notes

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

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

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

Break down barriers with collaborative apps from our partners

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

Manage your Teams app purchasing across the enterprise more easily

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

Windows 365 Cloud PC: Hybrid Windows for a hybrid world

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

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

Log on to your Cloud PC from any device

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

Provision Cloud PCs in minutes with no virtualization experience

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

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

Stay protected wherever you access your Cloud PC

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

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

Microsoft Viva: Employee experience in the flow of work

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

Enrich your employee experience with new Viva partner integrations

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

Bring your solutions into Viva

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

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

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

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

Secure your digital transformation

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

Manage customers’ security posture at scale

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

Protect end customers against fraud

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

Get visibility across more applications

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

Identify risky activities for users with critical positions

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

Customize regulatory assessments to fit unique requirements

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

The future of work

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

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

As some regions begin to make their way out of the challenges and disruption of the past 18 months, we’re seeing a new world of work emerge. Organizations everywhere have transformed themselves through virtual processes and remote collaboration. And as people embrace hybrid work—with people returning to the office, continuing to work from home, or some mix of the two—things will be different all over again.

The ability to work whenever, however, and wherever it’s needed has become the new normal. All employees want technology that’s familiar, easy to use, and available across devices. And in the most complex cybersecurity environment we’ve ever seen, businesses need a solution that helps their employees collaborate, share, and create while also keeping their data safe and secure. 

We have an opportunity to design the tools that will empower this new world of hybrid work with a new perspective—and the power and security of the cloud.  

Today we’re excited to announce Windows 365, a cloud service that introduces a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when it’s generally available later this calendar year) for workers from interns and contractors to software developers and industrial designers. Windows 365 takes the operating system to the Microsoft Cloud, securely streaming the full Windows experience—including all your apps, data, and settings—to your personal or corporate devices. This approach creates a fully new personal computing category, specifically for the hybrid world: the Cloud PC.

Today I’d like to share with you why we think bringing the cloud revolution to personal computing will be such a milestone for how customers work in the future and the opportunities this will create for our partners.

A powerful, personalized, full Windows experience in the cloud on any device

Our recent Work Trend Index found that 73 percent of workers want flexible remote work options to stay, but at the same time, 67 percent say they also want more in-person collaboration, post-pandemic. This creates the hybrid work paradox, leaving organizations around the world to grapple with how to connect in a hybrid world and provide workers access to organizational resources at home, in the office, and at all points between.

Much like how we’ve embraced the cloud for other products, our vision for a Windows 365 Cloud PC is to deliver a new way to experience Windows through the power of the cloud—while solving both novel and traditional challenges for organizations. This new paradigm isn’t just about allowing and securing remote access. The user experience is more important than ever for attracting and retaining talent, improving productivity, and ensuring security.

The Cloud PC draws on the power of the cloud and the capabilities of the device to provide a powerful, simple, and secure full Windows 10 or Windows 11 experience that you can use to empower your workforce, regardless of location or device. Windows 365 provides an instant-on boot experience that enables users to stream all their personalized applications, tools, data, and settings from the cloud across any device including your Mac, iPad, Linux device, and Android. The Windows experience is consistent, no matter the device. You can pick up right where you left off, because the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices. You can get the same work done on a laptop in a hotel room, a tablet from their car between appointments, or your desktop while you’re in the office. Seasonal workers also can ramp on and off according to the needs of the business, allowing the organization to scale for busy periods without the complicated logistical and security challenges of issuing new hardware. Further, companies can be more targeted in how they outfit specialized workers in creative, analytics, engineering, or scientific roles who need greater compute power and access to critical applications.  

Windows 365 supports your business apps—Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform—line of business apps, and more. With Windows 365, we also stand by our promise of app compatibility with App Assure, a service that helps customers with 150 or more users fix any app issues they might run into at no additional cost.

Greater simplicity with familiar tools

One of the most important design principles of Windows 365 is simplicity. You can choose the size of the Cloud PC that best meets your needs with per user per month pricing. Organizations have two edition options that include a complete cloud-based offering with multiple Cloud PC configurations based on performance needs: Windows 365 Business and Windows 365 Enterprise.

For IT, we built Windows 365 to be consistent with how you manage your physical devices now. Your Cloud PCs show up right alongside your physical devices in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and you can apply management and security policies to them just as you do to all your other devices.

Windows 365 is built on Azure Virtual Desktop, but it simplifies the virtualization experience—handling all the details for you. You can scale processing power and monitor the performance of the Cloud PC to make sure your users are getting the best experience. We’ve also built analytics into the service to look at connection health across networks to make sure your Cloud PC users can reach everything they need on your network to be productive. From the Endpoint Analytics dashboard, you can easily identify the Cloud PC environments that are not delivering the performance needs of a given user, and not only can you get recommendations, but you can also upgrade them at the touch of a button, which is immediately applied without missing a beat. Our new Watchdog Service also continually runs diagnostics to help to keep connections up-and-running at all times. If a diagnostic check fails, we’ll alert you and even give suggestions for how to correct the issue. 

For greater customization and flexibility, especially if your organization has virtualization expertise, we recommend Azure Virtual Desktop, which continues to see significant adoption as organizations modernize VDI in the cloud. You can read more about our increased investments in Azure Virtual Desktop in today’s Tech Community blog.

For more information about the management experience, check out the Tech Community blog from Scott Manchester.

Cloud security powered by Zero Trust

With a focus on a Zero Trust architecture, Windows 365 also helps solve for today’s critical security challenges by design, storing and securing information in the cloud, not on the device. Multifactor authentication (MFA) works to explicitly verify any login or access attempt to a Cloud PC through integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). And within Microsoft Endpoint Manager, you can pair MFA with dedicated Windows 365 conditional access policies to assess login risk instantly for each session. We’ve also designed the user and admin experiences around the principle of least privileged access. For example, you can delegate specific permissions, like licensing, device management, and Cloud PC management using specific roles, so you don’t need to be a global administrator. You can use the security baselines for Windows 10, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and Microsoft Edge, just like you would for your physical devices now, and we’ve built a cloud PC-specific security baseline to help you get started quickly. 

If you use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to protect your devices, it also works seamlessly with your Cloud PCs. You can use Microsoft Endpoint Manager to quickly onboard your Cloud PCs just like your other devices with Defender for Endpoint. It not only protects your Cloud PCs, but also gives you security recommendations to lower risks, and helps you quickly discover and investigate any security incidents.

Finally, encryption is used across the board. All managed disks running Cloud PCs are encrypted, all stored data is encrypted at rest, and all network traffic to and from your Cloud PCs is also encrypted.

Windows 365 means new opportunities for partners

Windows 365 creates new opportunities for partners of all types across the Microsoft ecosystem to deliver new Windows experiences from the cloud.

Independent software vendors can continue to build Windows apps, and now, deliver them in the cloud to reach a broader audience. Windows 365 also presents new development opportunities, leveraging APIs available to partners, enabling them to bring their own innovations to market. In fact, check out the Tech Community blog that highlights the solutions ISVs like Nerdio, UKG, Service Now, and Net App are announcing today in support of different user scenarios with Windows 365.

Our customers will look to system integrators and managed service providers to help them get the most out of their entire Windows estate, using the additional services that our partners like Accenture/Avanade, Atos, Crayon, Content and Cloud, Convergent, Coretek, DXC, Glueck & Kanja GAB, Insight, and Netrix continue to bring to market. For small and midsize businesses, partners like Iconic IT LLC, MachineLogic LLC, and Nitec Solutions already support Windows 365 and can assist with additional services. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) gain an opportunity to integrate Windows 365 into their broad portfolio of services alongside their devices’ robust features and secure hardware.

Cloud PC represents the next big step in cloud computing that connects the Microsoft Cloud and personal devices in a powerful new way. With the announcement of Windows 365, we’re inviting organizations, employees, and partners to reimagine experiences with Windows and their devices and look forward to creating new scenarios for users everywhere.

Hybrid Windows for a hybrid world

We are so excited to share this new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when available) through the power of the cloud across all your devices. We believe this will give organizations of all sizes the power, simplicity, and security you need to address the changing needs of your workforce as you embrace hybrid work.

Windows 365 will be available on August 2, 2021, to organizations of all sizes. In the meantime, you can learn more about Windows 365 now.

We are excited to be on this journey together, and we can’t wait to learn about all the new ways you will get work done using Windows 365.

The post Introducing a new era of hybrid personal computing: the Windows 365 Cloud PC appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Collaborate in the flow of work

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

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

Protect time and prioritize wellbeing

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

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

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

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

The post New hybrid work innovations in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build collaborative apps with Microsoft Teams

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

Create apps for meetings enabling richer experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enabling cross-platform collaborative experiences

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

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

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

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

Developer toolkits and resources to build and manage Teams apps

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

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

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

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

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

Get started with the Developer Portal today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full Microsoft Graph blog to learn more.

Build modern Windows apps that work seamlessly on any endpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Get started with new features in Windows Terminal.

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

Learn more about our updates on WSL.

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

Learn more about Power Automate Desktop and process advisor.

Learn. Connect. Code.

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

Happy coding!

Additional resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two new resources for navigating the shift to hybrid work

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

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

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

People 

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

Places

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

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

Processes

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.

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

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

Let’s dive in.

Make meetings more engaging, inclusive, and productive

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

Expand access and streamline the management of polls in Teams Meetings

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

Make meetings more inclusive and productive with live transcription

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborate with confidence with Show Changes in Excel Workbooks

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

Transform Word documents to PowerPoint presentations with just a few clicks

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

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

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

Categorize similar tasks with more editable labels

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

Making hybrid work environments more secure

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

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

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

Protect unmanaged devices with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

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

Also new this month

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

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

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

Now, manufacturers around the globe are straddling a bridge between yesterday, when most employees were physically present at work, and tomorrow, when hybrid work and the possibility of a safe return to the traditional factory floor will enable a path back to normalcy.

As Hannover Messe 2021 Digital Edition kicks off, it’s clear the manufacturing industry is accelerating its digital transformation—and the workforce and the workplace have changed forever.

Hybrid work is the new norm

To some extent, we can bank, shop, and even meet our doctors online, but a manufacturing frontline worker must continue to make what we need at the factory, and hence can’t stay at home. Manufacturers are increasingly talking about the ‘new normal’ of hybrid work and adapting new practices for ensuring safe and secure work in their factories.

When the pandemic hit, we saw customers accelerate their plans drastically, with two years of digital transformation occurring in just two months, and throughout the year we saw daily usage of Microsoft Teams double multiple times. Specifically, in the manufacturing industry, the daily active usage of Teams increased over 230 percent year-over-year. The need to digitally communicate and collaborate across an organization, while always important, is now essential.

Frontline workers have emerged as the heroes of the past year and business leaders are increasingly realizing the need to deploy tools that connect their entire organization, from corporate to the factory floor. Microsoft Teams is enabling new ways of working—from connecting the manufacturing workforce with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and digitizing business processes, to streamlining onboarding and skilling the workforce.

The need for all workers to be connected to mission-critical information remains real. In many manufacturing scenarios, the expectation is that everyone should be able to call for remote support.

Teams is also empowering the frontline workforce with purpose-built solutions to enable them to succeed and be safe. Microsoft’s partnership with RealWear is key in making that happen by allowing heads-up and hands-free collaboration.

Typically, factories and frontline workers haven’t always been the first to see digital transformation investments, partially because both software and hardware need to come together to provide optimal experiences. Customers like Honeywell are conducting virtual inspections and factory acceptance tests using Microsoft Teams and RealWear with hands-free video calling. Remote experts can provide real-time guidance to the factory floor, leading to decreased machine downtime and cost savings plus ensuring worker safety in rugged environments.

Mars Petcare, for example, has been redefining how it’s upskilling its associates on the frontline to handle day-to-day preventative maintenance on their pet food manufacturing machinery and equipment. They’re using the RealWear hands-free wearable to connect to remote experts working from home today. Mars expects a hybrid model in the future with 80 percent of work travel being eliminated.

Coming soon, Microsoft Teams and RealWear will have voice commands to use the device flashlight and adjust zoom level for your outgoing video, making it easier for those on the plant floor to show what they see hands-free.

Extend and digitize manufacturing workflows

Microsoft Teams is unique in that once you connect your information and frontline workers on the same communications platform, you can digitize your workflows—bringing the tools and processes you already use right into the flow of work. Customers are using Teams and Power Platform to perform factory quality assurance, and Toyota has digitized their continuous improvement (Kaizen) process, accelerating it from months to days.

Approvals are a critical component of how manufacturing frontline workers get their job done. To streamline workflows, new templates in Teams provide a repeatable structure for common approvals, like requesting overtime. And integrations with key partners, like Adobe Sign and DocuSign, allow for an electronic signature approval natively within the Approvals app for contracts and permits on the factory floor that require formal attestation.

Just like how coffee to some is fundamental to starting the day, clocking-in to one’s shift is fundamental for factory workers. Now, with new Time Clock APIs, organizations can create rules such as how late someone can clock-in without requiring manager approval or requiring a health screening survey before clocking-in for the day.

Foster culture and learning in your team

Reskilling and upskilling the workforce through ongoing learning and development has become a top priority for manufacturers. Connect your corporate office to the factory floor, share important information with the right audience so that everyone is on the same page. New essential announcements in Yammer allows publishers to guarantee every frontline employee will see important community announcements, even if it’s outside of their preferred notification settings. Corporate teams can now also monitor, manage, and improve content they share with their frontline workforce, like new training or safety policies, with Yammer communities’ insights.

Additionally, Viva Learning provides easy access to training content for job-related learning to quickly onboard operators and constantly build their skills. Continue to learn more about the value coming in the Microsoft Viva roadmap here.

Learn more

For a deeper dive and a demo of Teams for manufacturing workflows, check out the Manufacturing day in the life with Microsoft Teams video.

Join us in a LinkedIn Ask-me-Anything conversation between Emma Williams, Corporate Vice President, Modern Workplace Transformation, and Andrew Chrostowski, CEO of RealWear, facilitated by Julie Sanford, General Manager of Global Industry Marketing. Tune in as they talk about what they’re hearing from manufacturing customers on the frontlines. 

To learn more about how to empower your frontline workforce to do more with Microsoft Teams, register for the upcoming webinar, check out this blog on virtual Kaizen Events, dig deeper into each product announcement in the tech community blog, and stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing to learn how you can help manufacture a more resilient and sustainable future.

The post How Microsoft Teams is powering hybrid work and the frontline in manufacturing appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

Let’s dive in.

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

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

Improve collaboration and knowledge management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New meeting experiences for the hybrid workplace

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

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

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

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

Ensuring secure communications

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

Reimagining the employee experience for a hybrid workplace

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

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

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

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

Helping you on your Zero Trust Journey

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

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

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

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

Also new to Microsoft 365 

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

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

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

The post Flexible work is here to stay: Microsoft 365 solutions for the hybrid work world appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

Let’s take a look at each.

Create policy to empower people for extreme flexibility

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

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

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

Reimagine your physical spaces

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

Purposeful design

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

Connecting the physical to the digital

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

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

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

Invest in technology that connects people—anywhere and anytime

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

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

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

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

The post Hybrid work is here. Are you ready? 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Microsoft Viva

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

A new kind of employee experience

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

Let’s begin with Viva Connections.

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

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

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

Next, Viva Insights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now onto Viva Learning.

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

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

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

Finally, Viva Topics.

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

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

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

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

Together with our partners

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

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

Just getting started

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

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

Experience Microsoft Viva today

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

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

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

Okay, on to the news!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplify tasks, lists, and functions

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

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

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

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

Create beautiful diagrams

Visio capabilities bring new and familiar icons to your diagrams.

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

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

Also new this month

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

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

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

Earlier this year, IT leaders around the globe were forced to reprioritize their roadmaps, resources, and budgets to equip employees for remote work practically overnight. Suddenly, the use of video communications skyrocketed. People adjusted quickly to moving meetings online, but one of the most notable challenges driven by the shift to remote work has been to maintain the personal connections that come from the ad hoc and serendipitous conversations that happen in the physical office. 

In fact, studies show¹ that a person’s voice is the signal that builds personal connections and creates clarity, which is why actually speaking with colleagues and customers is more important now than ever. The use of Teams Calling has skyrocketed as well, with Teams users making over 650 million calls in October, up 11 fold over March of this year. And on average, calls are just one-fourth the length of a typical meeting, making calling a quick and efficient way to reconnect and collaborate. 

Today, we’re announcing several enhancements to Teams Calling that make it easier for organizations and their employees to strengthen connections and create new ones with just a quick call.

Get more out of every call, with a rich calling experience

Calling alone is a great way to reconnect and quickly share information. However, when you integrate calls with different modes of communication, they can act as a productivity force multiplier. We’re introducing several ways to create a more powerful and streamlined calling experience.

• Streamlined calling experience: Teams is the hub for chat, collaboration, meetings, apps, and workflows, and the enhanced Calls app brings the most important calling elements—the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts, and settings—into a single location, making it easier to stay connected in the flow of your work.
• Save call recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint: Call recordings are a great way to keep track of the ad hoc brainstorming that often happens on a call. Now, Teams Admins can take advantage of the tight Teams and OneDrive or SharePoint integration and elect to make OneDrive or SharePoint the default recording storage location, in lieu of Stream. This new capability provides powerful capabilities such as sharing with external guests, quicker access to transcripts, and greater storage capacity. Learn more.
• CarPlay support: Placing and receiving calls in the car will soon be easier than ever, thanks to CarPlay support for Teams Calling. With CarPlay, you can use your vehicle’s built-in controls to operate Teams, including using Siri to place and answer calls.
• Spam identification: Spam calls are frustrating, disturb the flow of work, and make you less likely to answer calls from unfamiliar phone numbers. Using advanced industry techniques, Teams will identify potential spam calls so you can feel confident answering incoming calls. Additionally, Teams will digitally attest outgoing calls to prevent these calls from being rejected by external recipients. 
• Transfer calls between mobile and desktop: Teams makes it easy to place and receive calls from several different endpoints, including desktop and mobile devices, but sometimes you need to move locations or devices to finish your call. Starting in early 2021, you will be able to shift your calls between your mobile and desktop endpoints with an easy-to-use interface on the Teams app.
• Call merge: Calling users can bring multiple different one to one calls together to combine conversations and simplify multiple conversations. Call merge is now available for both PSTN calls and VoIP calls.
• Low-data mode: Whether you want to preserve data or are just in a location with a poor or limited network connection, sometimes it’s helpful to limit the amount of data you’re using during a video call or meeting. Starting in early 2021, users will be able to adjust their settings in Teams to cap the amount of data that will be used during video calls and establish different settings based on network availability (cellular, wifi, or always).
• Enhanced reverse number look-up: With automatic reverse number look-up, you’ll see the name of the caller at the time they’re calling and in your activity feed and voicemail.

Provide advanced calling needs for your business

Some parts of the business require additional calling capabilities and workflows. Whether that’s keeping mission-critical operations running or resolving key customer issues, Teams supports a broad range of needs across your business with help from these new capabilities.

• Voice enabled channels: A new collaborative calling capability enables teams to integrate call queues into a specific channel, allowing for collaboration and information sharing before, during, and after the call. For example, IT or HR help desks can now be managed from a channel so available team members can answer the call, and easily share information about service tickets. Starting in early 2021, Teams users will have the option to create new channels that are voice-enabled, to start using this feature in preview.
• Certified Contact Center solutions: Resolving a customer call in contact centers is often a team sport, so it’s important to quickly identify and reach the right colleague. Contact center solutions can use presence and user APIs to seamlessly integrate with Teams, allowing agents to find the right colleagues to assist. Now, contact center providers can apply for Microsoft certification of their solutions, to provide customers with the confidence needed to manage important customer interactions. Learn more about the certification program and specific solutions that are undergoing certification, many of which will be complete in early 2021.
• Resilient calling: To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows users to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a network outage. This SBA will be available in preview this month to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network. 
• Call transfer ring-back: While call transfers can be useful to connect the right people, making sure that calls remain connected during the process is critical for a great caller experience. Now Teams users can rest assured that when you transfer an important call, it will not disconnect just because someone on the other end is unavailable. If the transfer recipient does not answer the call, the call will ring back to the person making the transfer.

Stay connected with a portfolio of high-quality devices

Teams provides a great integrated softphone experience on both mobile and desktop, and a robust lineup of hardware options allow you to choose the right physical endpoints for your needs. From low-cost phones, to traditional desk and video phones, to Teams displays, there are options to fit every user and calling need. We’re excited to share a few new ways this device ecosystem can help you stay connected, no matter where you’re working.

• Teams displays: Whether you are working remotely or returning to the office, adding an intelligent companion device like the Teams display can revolutionize the way you work. A new experience now available on the Lenovo Thinksmart view, Teams displays integrate Cortana for hands-free productivity, use AI to help you stay productive and organized, and provide a dedicated device for your Teams collaboration needs. Learn more.
• Low-cost phones: To empower organizations to bring the best of Teams Calling to as many users as possible, we’re excited to bring low-cost phones to market with trusted partners Yealink and AudioCodes in early 2021. These devices integrate natively with the Teams phone app, bringing core Teams capabilities to life.
• Device as a Service: The new Teams Device as a Service offering provides flexible monthly payments, making it easier and more affordable than ever to get your users the devices they need. Simply navigate to the Device as a Service site where you can add devices to your cart and place an order in a matter of minutes. This service is currently available in the U.S., and availability for additional regions will be coming in 2021.

Do more with the power of partners

We have seen strong growth across our Teams partner ecosystem and have more than 300 specialized partners with calling solutions for Microsoft Teams, a 100% increase over the last year. These partners assist our customers with a wide variety of services and solutions including Direct Routing as a Service, deployment, adoption, devices, managed services, and network monitoring and reporting. Examples include our Partner of the Year award winner Continuant, and finalists Enabling Technologies, Communicativ, and Orange Business Services.

Continued commitment to Calling

These innovations are examples of our ongoing commitment to support spontaneous collaboration and personal connections that voice enables. We are honored and humbled to be recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Unified Communications as a Service Magic Quadrant. We will continue working hard to make Teams the most trusted and reliable voice solution available. Now more than ever, we all need a seamless way to stay connected with colleagues and customers, and with these capabilities, you can restore personal connections and manage the most critical calls for every part of your organization. Learn more about how Accenture, Australia Catholic University, ENGIE, and Tony’s Chocolonely are using Teams Calling to stay connected.

Lastly, with all these great capabilities coming to Teams Calling, it’s important to keep in mind that Teams Calling can be rolled out in weeks—not months or years—as Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) showed by rolling out Calling globally to over 40,000 users in 4 weeks. You can always reach out to your account team for more information, and the links below provide additional information and guidance.

• Learn more about Teams Calling on the Microsoft Teams Calling webpage.
• Get started with Teams for free.
• Get guidance and resources to get up and running quickly on Teams Calling with FastTrack.

¹ Harvard Business Review, “Type Less, Talk More ” (October 5, 2020)

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

New apps, noise suppression, and more for Teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find and share information more quickly

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

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

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

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

OneDrive family and group sharing now available

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

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

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

Prevent data loss and diagram your IT solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

News from Build 2020

Microsoft Teams

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

Productivity

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

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

Automation

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

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

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

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

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

Meetings and events

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

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

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

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

Secure and remote scheduling

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

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

Fluid Framework

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

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

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

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

Project Cortex

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

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

Outlook

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

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

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

Microsoft Edge

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Lists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host more inclusive, focused, online meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respond to emergency events

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

Connect and collaborate with new app updates

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

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

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

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

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

Search your email and calendar more easily

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

Streamline common IT tasks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, we are delighted to announce that on April 22^nd, Office 365 will become Microsoft 365, the subscription for your life to help you make the most of your time, connect, and protect the ones you love, and to develop and grow. An evolution of Office 365, Microsoft 365 builds on the foundation of Office infusing new artificial intelligence (AI), rich content and templates, and cloud-powered experiences to empower you to become a better writer, presenter, designer, manager of your finances, and deepen your connection to the people in your life. These experiences start rolling out today and will reach the over 38 million Office 365 subscribers over the next few months.

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

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

Bring out your best writer with Microsoft Editor

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

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

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

Become a better presenter in PowerPoint

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

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

Kickstart your creativity in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

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

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

Seamlessly manage your finances with Money in Excel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organize your time across work and life with Outlook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Access to popular wellbeing, creativity, and enrichment apps

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

Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions broadly available on April 22—more value, same price

The new Office features start rolling out to current Office 365 customers today. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions will be available worldwide on April 22^nd. With Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions you get everything in Office 365, like premium desktop Office apps, 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage per person, 60 Skype minutes for calling mobile phones and landlines, advanced security features to protect you from malware and phishing attacks, ongoing technical support, plus all the new features and benefits announced today. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 USD a month. For the best value, a family of up to six people can use Microsoft 365 Family for $9.99 USD a month.

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

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

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

New product names

The new product names go into effect on April 22, 2020. This is a change to the product name only, and there are no pricing or feature changes at this time.

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

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

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

Frequently asked questions

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

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

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

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

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

Q. When will the Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise plans be available?
A. All plans will become available for customers on April 22, 2020.

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

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

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

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

But first I want to talk to you about the moment we all find ourselves in. And I want to recognize the organizations, employees, and students across the globe who have been thrown into remote work and remote learning in an effort to keep themselves and the people around them healthy and safe.

Adjusting to remote work and learning

Around the world, millions of people have been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. It has affected how we work, how we socialize, our family life, and our community life. Here in the Puget Sound, we’ve asked about 50,000 Microsoft employees not to commute to work, and they are joined by tens of thousands of Microsoft employees worldwide who are now working remotely. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes it’s been downright disorienting. But our team is still connecting. Still collaborating. Still getting our work done.

In the face of COVID-19, there are countless stories from customers who are using Teams to connect and thrive in inspiring ways. A professor at University of Bologna in Italy shared on Twitter how the school moved 90 percent of courses online to Teams within four days, which is definitely a first in the university’s 900-plus year history. Doctors at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Pennsylvania will use Teams for videoconferencing with patients, especially those who are most vulnerable to coronavirus, as a way to protect both patients and healthcare providers. And the City of Osaka in Japan is using Teams to conduct orientations and trainings for hundreds of new incoming employees in April.

Stories like these are playing out in countries the world over. We believe that this sudden, globe-spanning move to remote work will be a turning point in how we work and learn. Already, we are seeing how solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration have become central to the way we work. We have seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users,* a figure that has grown by 12 million in just the last seven days. And those users have generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams each day this week.

It’s very clear that enabling remote work is more important than ever, and that it will continue to have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak. We are committed to building the tools that help organizations, teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart.

Transforming the way people work

Over the last three years, thousands of organizations, small and large—including 93 of the Fortune 100—have discovered how Teams can be their hub for teamwork, helping them to stay connected and engaged. Industry leading organizations are rolling out Teams enterprise-wide. In fact, 20 customers have more than 100,000 employees actively using Teams, including Ernst & Young, SAP, Pfizer, and Continental AG, as well as Accenture, which has 440,000 employees actively using Teams.

What’s new in Teams

We continue to invest in experiences that will make it easier for teams to communicate and collaborate. The new capabilities we are announcing today reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers; and bringing technological solutions to traditionally underserved professionals, including Firstline and healthcare workers.

• We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression helps to minimize distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.
• In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in when they have something to say. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

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

• Conducting B2C virtual appointments is a common requirement for situations like healthcare patient visits, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.
• Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and move more easily between ongoing conversations.
• Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.
• We are also expanding the Teams devices ecosystem, with new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, is the first collaboration bar certified for Teams, and brings together speakers, microphones, a camera, and a native Teams experience to deliver a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that is simple to install and easy to manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphone 700 UC is available for purchase in late spring.
• We’re pleased to introduce Microsoft 365 Business Voice in the U.S., a new offering for small-and mid-sized businesses that makes Teams a complete phone system, as well as a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that will include additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.
  

Unless otherwise stated above, the new capabilities will be available later this year.

Since we launched Teams three years ago, it has evolved to become the hub for teamwork—a place where you can meet, chat, call, and collaborate all in one place. We will continue to improve and expand experiences for all workers to be as productive and connected as possible. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to push people everywhere into remote work and learning, enabling remote work and remote learning has never felt more important, and we are grateful for the opportunity to stand by our customers at such an extraordinary time.

*We define daily active usage as the maximum daily users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period across the desktop client, mobile client, and web client. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. Passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app are not included.

The post Microsoft Teams at 3: Everything you need to connect with your teammates and be more productive appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Getting started

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

Set up your workspace

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

Communicate, communicate, communicate

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

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

Maintain healthy boundaries 

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

Running effective meetings

Embrace online meetings

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

Be mindful and inclusive

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

Record your meetings

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

Staying connected

Make up for missing hallway talk

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

Bring the team together

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

Have fun!

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

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

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

Remote work checklist:

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

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

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

Making Teams available for everyone

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

Individuals

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

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

IT professionals

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

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

Keeping Teams up and running

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAQs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me turn it over to Lily.

Dear Customers,

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

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

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

What I’ve learned from remote work

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

Stay well.

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

Go all in.

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

Support your teammates.

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

What I’ve learned from customers

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

Immediately open the lines of communication.

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

Keep it moving.

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

Even big meetings can be moved online.

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

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

Lily Zheng

Director, Microsoft China

The post Working remotely during challenging times appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This month, we’re introducing capabilities to help you work on the go, collaborate on content more easily, interact with apps in more ways, and customize your productivity experiences. The new Office app is now generally available for Android and iOS. We added collaboration capabilities to PowerPoint comments and brought coauthoring and Microsoft Teams integration to Visio. Word now has an improved speech-to-text functionality that supports more languages, while added inking features and Dark Mode make it easier to capture and read notes in OneNote for Android. Meanwhile, organizations can now customize their employees’ productivity experience—from search results pages and All Company Yammer feeds to a private preview of the new Microsoft Fluid Framework.

Read on for all the exciting Microsoft 365 updates this month. And for a deeper dive into the news, be sure to check out the second episode of the Modern Workplace podcast. This month, host Alex Bradley and I go in-depth on teamwork, the new Microsoft Fluid Framework, and more.

Be productive on the go

Work from anywhere with the new Office app—The Office app is a fully redesigned experience to help you be more productive from anywhere. It combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app, adds new capabilities to help you create content in uniquely mobile ways, and has integrated Actions that help you accomplish common mobile tasks. The result is a simpler, yet more powerful, Office experience for mobile devices. Read this blog post to learn more about the new Office app, now generally available worldwide on Android and iOS.

Improve collaboration across your favorite apps

New tools in PowerPoint and Visio make it easier for teams to work together.

Collaborate more fluidly in PowerPoint—Starting next month, we’ll roll out an updated comments feature in PowerPoint. Team members can now anchor comments to objects, use @mention notifications, discover and add comments more easily, and more. The new comments experience will be available to all Office 365 users with the latest update.

Coauthor Visio drawings in more ways—Visio for the web now allows collaborators to create, edit, and comment on drawings simultaneously. With live coauthoring and a simple presence indicator, teams can work seamlessly together to brainstorm and develop their ideas. Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users can visit visio.office.com to create and share Visio files today.

Team members can also use these capabilities directly in Teams. Now you can share your Visio drawings with colleagues, since files stored in your Team’s file library are accessible to every member—making it easy for colleagues to edit and comment on your work. To get started, click the Files tab above the conversation window in your Teams channel and select New > Visio drawing.

Personalize the way you work

Updates to Word and OneNote let users work the way they want.

Save time and simplify work with improved speech-to-text—It’s now easy to create content with your voice in Word thanks to a new dictation toolbar, suggestions experience, and auto-punctuation support. You can also now work in six new preview languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese. The new Voice Dictation in Word for the web is rolling out to all Office 365 users now.

Capture and take notes with ease—OneNote for Android phone and tablet now supports Dark Mode, enabling you to switch from bright white to a more subtle black and dark gray color scheme for easier reading. Additionally, we refreshed the inking experience to support bright new colors and continue leveraging pen types, highlighters, and erasers. And don’t miss the Lasso tool, which resizes and repositions objects on the page. These updates are rolling out to all OneNote users on Android phones and tablets.

Customize user collaboration experiences

New capabilities help you tailor your productivity tools to fit your enterprise brand and environment.

Create custom search results pages for Microsoft Search—You can now create custom search results pages in SharePoint Online. Use this new feature to control the layout and design of search results to tailor your SharePoint Online experience for your enterprise environment. The new feature will be available to all SharePoint Online subscribers. To get started, choose the site area where you would like to configure a custom results page and select Site Collection Settings > Search Settings.

Choose which “What’s new” features are visible to your users—You can now manage which features are shown or hidden from users in the “What’s New” Office desktop app. This content highlights a list of new features, accompanied by descriptions and guidance to help customers use the features. You can access this management tool using the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Office 365 Client Configuration Service.

Begin creating fluid collaboration experiences today—Microsoft Fluid Framework is a new component-based document model designed to enable new ways to collaborate on content creation. Now anyone with an Office 365 Enterprise subscription can check out the early preview. To get started, simply sign in with your organizational account ID at fluidpreview.com.

Strengthen your enterprise branding in Yammer—New capabilities in the current Yammer experience allow you to customize the All Company feed name, upload a community cover photo, land key messaging, welcome new members, promote organizational initiatives, and reinforce company values. Pair this with custom avatars to bring your branding and culture into your All Company feed. These new capabilities will be available to admins soon.

Manage Yammer eDiscovery from within the Microsoft 365 admin center—Yammer now supports eDiscovery for networks in Native Mode. Now admins will have access to all messages and files posted in their Yammer networks through the same eDiscovery tools they use to manage data throughout the rest of the Office 365 suite. This simplifies eDiscovery tasks and streamlines compliance obligations. To get started, make sure your Yammer network is running in Native Mode and then navigate to the eDiscovery module of the Security and Compliance Center.

Additionally, now all new files uploaded to Yammer communities connected to Office 365 are stored in SharePoint. With this change, your files will adhere to the rich security and compliance features policies that you’ve implemented for SharePoint—including eDiscovery, data loss protection, in-geo residence for files at rest, and others.

Also new this month

• Get help deploying the new Microsoft Edge in your enterprise with new FastTrack and App Assure support.
• Office 365 is now available from new regional datacenters in Germany.

Navigating work and life today requires great tools that are constantly evolving and improving. Our goal is to build the productivity experiences that enable you and your organization to succeed. We can’t do it without you, so please reach out with feedback, requests, or questions. We’re here to help.

The post Improve collaboration across apps and customize experiences—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in February appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Download for Android | Download for iOS

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

The Office app delivers several key benefits including:

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

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

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

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

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

More features coming soon

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

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

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

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

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

Get started with the Office app

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

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

Download for Android | Download for iOS

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

This month, I’d like to share with you some great tools and resources that you can leverage to help drive adoption with your users. These tools provide users with the resources they need to build the skillsets needed to be successful while providing you with the insights you need to track adoption.

Microsoft 365

Best-in-class productivity apps with intelligent cloud services that transform the way you work.

Get started

So how can we help bring your vision of the world’s productivity cloud—Microsoft 365—to life?

Step 1: Get industry-specific guidelines with the Productivity Library

Start with understanding how Microsoft 365 can improve productivity in your specific role or industry using scenarios and best practices with the Productivity Library. The Productivity Library is available for a wide range of industries including financial services, retail, and healthcare and gets granular for roles like operations, sales, and human resources.

Step 2: Develop a plan with the Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide

The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide helps you to not just identify and prioritize key scenarios, but also helps you understand how to best build and launch your adoption plan with your stakeholders. The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide will help you drive business value by showing you how to monitor and track adoption and usage.

Step 3: Create your advocates and champions

When you’re ready to start training your users, we recommend leveraging the power of the Office 365 Champions program. This program is designed to help you create a circle of influence for those early adopters or go-to people in your organization and empower them to become your Office 365 Champions. This program provides support and resources to help these users find more efficient way to tackle everyday tasks and then share those learnings with their peers.

Step 4: Build your own learning portal

Did you know you can build a custom training portal with just a few clicks? Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is a customizable, on-demand learning solution designed to increase usage and adoption of Microsoft 365 services in your organization. This includes on-demand custom training, SharePoint Online portal provisioning, and straightforward steps to provision, customize, and share your new portal with users.

Step 5: Track users progress

Once you implement some of these learning resources you’ll need some tools to help you to track your software adoption progress. The new Microsoft Productivity Score—currently in private preview—will provide you with visibility into how your organization works, insights that identify where you can enable improved experiences so people can reach their goals, and actions to update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work.

For companies who want to help their employees better understand how they spend their time and guide them to better work habits and team norms, we encourage you to turn on MyAnalytics. This tool helps users improve their focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration.

MyAnalytics is available to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise and Business suite users.

Finally, for a top-down view, we offer Workplace Analytics. Workplace Analytics provides more advanced tools to discover and analyze the business impact of the way people work and help drive change through MyAnalytics. It gives you a view into collaboration patterns that empowers organizations to act with agility, improve employee experience, and sharpen customer focus.

Workplace Analytics is available as a Microsoft 365 add-on service.

Check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast

To help you better understand why Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud, I encourage you to check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast. Hosted by veteran IT blogger Paul Thurrott and myself, this podcast series digs into the features and functionality across the products that make up Microsoft 365. We also share real-world tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the product. The first two episodes are available on demand.

Every company’s path to digital transformation is different. Over the next few months we’ll bring you more resources, as well as interviews with organizations who share their tips and secrets on their own successful transformations and their learnings from these projects on how they harnessed the transformative power of Microsoft 365—the world’s productivity cloud.

The post 5 steps for boosting your digital transformation with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Transitioning to Windows 10

More than 900 million devices use Windows 10 today. Part of Microsoft 365, Windows 10 uses the power and insights of the cloud to provide Microsoft’s most secure, productive experience to date. And with Windows 10 version 1909 now available, you can enjoy new capabilities and improvements, including intelligent security with Windows Hello, simplified updates, flexible management, and enhanced productivity. Some highlights of version 1909 include the new Windows Search experience in the File Explorer app, the new cloud clipboard with history viewing, support for third-party digital assistants, Microsoft BitLocker key rolling, and additional customizations in kiosk mode.

While every business needs to stay vigilant amid the sophisticated security threats we face today, small and medium businesses (SMB) remain the most vulnerable. As my colleague Brad Anderson detailed in a recent blog post, Microsoft has developed a comprehensive approach to helping your SMB stay secure. One key takeaway: moving to Windows 10 is an important first step.

Now, for those enterprise and SMB customers who haven’t yet had the opportunity to move to Windows 10, we do have ways to help you stay secure during the transition. For those who need it, we have Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU) available through our cloud solution provider partners and volume licensing. Under the ESU program, we will provide security updates for critical and important issues as defined by Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). But between you and me, this option is only a bandage. In order to get the best protection and security features of Windows Defender Antivirus and the full potential of Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), I strongly urge you to migrate to Windows 10 as soon as possible.

If virtualization is an option for you, Windows Virtual Desktop offers extended security updates for your Windows 7 virtual desktop at no extra cost to you, ensuring support for legacy apps while you move to Windows 10. And if you have application compatibility concerns, the Desktop App Assure service provides resources to help you remediate compatibility issues with Windows 10, Office 365, Microsoft Edge, and Windows Virtual Desktop. In fact, more than 99 percent of apps that worked on Windows 7 will be compatible with Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus.

While Windows 7 is no longer supported, we’ll continue to provide security updates for Office 365 ProPlus running on Windows 7 devices through January 2023. However, as long as their devices remain on Windows 7, Office 365 ProPlus customers will not receive new features updates. For the support dates for different versions of Office on Windows 7, see the Office system requirements matrix.

And if you’re a consumer customer, you can find more information about Windows 7 end of support on our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Greater productivity with Office 365 ProPlus

Powered by the cloud, Office 365 ProPlus is the future of Office. As I shared in a post this past October, users who still haven’t transitioned to it are missing out on essential productivity features critical to competing in today’s marketplace. I encourage you to get current today with Office 365 ProPlus, which will only improve with time as we continue innovating across, and investing in, the experience.

So, what’s my elevator pitch for Office 365 ProPlus? Three things stand out: First, AI and machine learning advance creativity and innovation in everything from PowerPoint design to Excel analysis. Second, the cloud enables real-time collaboration across apps and enables Microsoft Teams to be the hub for teamwork. Then finally, built-in, cloud-powered security protects your data and provides the peace of mind that comes with knowing your business will not only be productive, but also secure.

Once support for Office 2010 ends later this year—October 13, 2020 to be exact—we’ll no longer provide security updates or technical support for Office 2010. So, make sure your users have a highly secure Office experience with Office 365 ProPlus.

We designed several resources to help you to make the move to Office 365 ProPlus, such as:

• The Readiness Toolkit for Office, which can help you identify compatibility issues with your Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros and add-ins that you use with Office. It includes the Readiness Report Creator, which creates an Excel report with VBA macro compatibility and add-in readiness information to help your organization assess its readiness to move to Office 365 ProPlus.
• The Office cloud policy service, which helps administrators manage policies for all Office 365 ProPlus users and their devices, even if the device isn’t domain joined or otherwise managed. The Office cloud policy service is a cloud-based portal that allows administrators to define policies for Office 365 ProPlus and assign these policies to users via Azure Active Directory security groups. Once defined, these Office policy settings roam to whichever device the Office 365 ProPlus user signs in to and uses.
• The Microsoft 365 Deployment Center, which provides the latest and most up-to-date deployment and servicing guidance to upgrade to Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus.

Customers who need more time to move to Office in the cloud can opt for Office 2019, the on-premises version of Office. See this matrix for just some of the feature innovations we’ve made since Office 2010.

In a time of constant change, transitioning to new tools can be daunting. But we want to help you embrace that change with tools built to evolve and improve over time. With Microsoft 365—Windows 10, and Office 365 ProPlus included—every time your users turn on their devices, they’ll get a highly productive and secure experience. Meanwhile, IT professionals will find these tools so much easier to deploy and manage. I see the end of support for Windows 7 and Office 2010 as an opportunity for you to transition to tools designed for the way we work today. So, if you haven’t already, make the move now. We’re here with you every step of the way.

Note that today also marks the end of support for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2. To learn about your options, visit the Windows Server blog.

The post Windows 7 support ends today, and Windows 10 is better than ever appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Improving employee sentiment and employee loyalty is also a critical way for an organization to attract winning talent. When workers have a modern workplace experience that is connected, flexible, and empowering, it sends a clear signal that they’re valued and they work for a forward-leaning organization.

Cultivating and positively reinforcing these attributes within your workforce is obviously valuable, but to make these changes replicable and actionable among our customers worldwide, we needed to study and quantify how this happens. We worked closely with leading experience management company, Qualtrics, as they’ve exhaustively studied how to do this.

Here’s what we learned.

Modernize the workplace experience

It’s not particularly revolutionary to say that some of the most advanced tools for productivity and user experience are found in Microsoft 365. This platform empowers users to work anywhere across their devices—and it has been built to meet and exceed the needs and expectations of users, IT, and security, so that it is valuable to every stakeholder in your organization. I like to refer to Microsoft 365 as loved by users, loved by IT, and trusted by all.

To really make the most of Microsoft 365 value, we worked with organizations to help them modernize their workplace experiences by deploying Microsoft 365 through our Microsoft Managed Desktop service. With Microsoft Managed Desktop, we manage these PCs on behalf of the customers, and they use Microsoft 365 as the foundation for their productivity/management/security. This setup is something I call “Microsoft 365 native.”

A Microsoft 365 native PC:

• Is a modern device with touch capabilities.
• Runs the Office 365 ProPlus cloud-attached apps.
• Is managed and secured with Microsoft 365.
• Provides a fast, responsive work experience that isn’t bogged down by extra agents that slow down the way you work.

The result can be seen in something I like to call “the most boring demo in the world,” which I think will blow you away.

For these customers, we deployed the Microsoft Managed Desktop baseline and set of policies to manage and secure the environment. The Microsoft Managed Desktop service leverages the built-in capabilities of Microsoft 365. We consider it the gold standard when it comes to the architectural approach, the required policies needed to secure devices, and the ways we believe PCs should be deployed, managed, and operated to exceed the expectations both users and IT.

As these initial organizations were moving into the Microsoft Managed Desktop service, we had an interesting opportunity to work with a few organizations to measure and concretely quantify the difference in employee sentiment between the users with a modern workplace and the Microsoft 365 native experience delivered by Microsoft Managed Desktop. Accounting for dozens of variables, the impact and results of this study were impressive.

Adopt what works at work for workers

One of the biggest things we learned had to do with the reaction to changes in the technology experience. Comparing the two control groups, the Microsoft 365 native devices (managed by the Microsoft Managed Desktop service) had a boot time that was 85 percent faster, an immediate resume experience, 2x the battery life, and 85 percent fewer crashes. Users of these Microsoft Managed Desktop-based Microsoft 365 native devices definitely noticed these improvements:

The real question, however, is how this kind of change in technology impacts employee sentiment and loyalty. This question is an area where Qualtrics’ expertise in measuring, analyzing, and understanding employee experiences discovered some fascinating data on just how significant the impact was.

Below is a page I took directly from the report they delivered to us:

The measurement I found most impactful deals with how much more valued these employees feel by their company when they have that Microsoft 365 native work environment. This increase in employee sentiment translates into happier and more fulfilled employees. Having happier employees directly impacts the customer experience your organization delivers, which in turn increases long-term employee loyalty.

The data from the couple of organizations in which we deployed the survey indicates that loyal employees stay with an organization longer, and this results in less employee churn, which results in the entire organization operating at a higher and more productive level. One of the most rewarding things we’ve done with this research is to show the results to the senior leaders of these companies and emphasize to them the impact of their IT organization.

Make it real for your organization

These insights from Qualtrics really illustrate the impact of modern management. When you deploy modern technology and manage it in a modern way, you can extend this same experience to your users. The Microsoft Managed Desktop service uses System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and Microsoft Intune—what we now call Microsoft Endpoint Manager—to simplify management and ensure your users are having a great experience.

Announcing Microsoft Endpoint Manager

Learn how we’re integrating Microsoft Intune, Configuration Manager, and more into a single solution called Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Watch the video

Through Microsoft Endpoint Manager, we’re also making it easier for you to manage Office 365 ProPlus across devices to ensure your employees are secure and productive no matter how they need to work. In addition to providing device health insights that let you monitor the upgrade readiness of your devices to the latest feature update of Office 365 ProPlus, we also announced deeper integration for managing Office 365 using Jamf Pro. Our integration with the new Application and Custom Settings experience (demonstrated at the Jamf Nation User Conference (JUNC) 2109 a few weeks ago) allows you to easily set Office 365 policies using a familiar forms-based interface.

If you’re administering Mac devices, you centrally configure security, privacy, and update policies to deliver the very best Office 365 experience on a Mac to your users. We’re committed to helping you to provide a great employee experience, no matter the device.

Next steps

The question you’re likely asking right now is, “How do I get this kind of experience into the hands of my users?” First, if you want to take advantage of the Microsoft Managed Desktop service and offload this work to the experts at Microsoft, you can easily learn more.

Microsoft Managed Desktop

Delight users, protect devices, and focus on your core business by modernizing your workplace with Microsoft Managed Desktop.

Learn more

The new Productivity Score, announced last month, is being built to help guide you use the insights from both Employee Experience and Technology Experience to quantify the cultural impact of technology on your users. It also helps you understand the specific actions you can take to improve the management of each device to ensure your users are having a great experience.

To take advantage of Productivity Score, make sure you have enabled co-management by connecting ConfigMgr and Intune—now known as Microsoft Endpoint Manager. If you’re curious how to do this, check out my Mechanics video to learn how. In the meantime, work you can be doing is to take a hard look at three things, which are the most common causes of poor performance on your PCs:

• Take a deep look at all the agents you are deploying. The single largest cause of poor boot, resume, and battery life is loading the PC with too many agents. Do you really need what you have? Does what is built-in and part of Microsoft 365 meet your needs?
• Look at how many Group Policies are you applying. This has an impact the boot-to-productive time.
• Are you giving good hardware to your user? For example, if your devices have HDD drives instead of SSDs the performance impact is significant.

You can also benefit from your own research from Qualtrics. Like what we did with our Microsoft Managed Desktop service, you can gather a group of users to test the Microsoft 365 native deployment and then use Qualtrics to help you to measure the impact this native experience can have in your organization.

Learn more

To learn more about the Qualtrics data and Microsoft Managed Desktop, visit the Tech Community blog.

The post Research: A concrete way to measure IT’s impact on an employee’s at-work experience 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.

Last week, we announced several new capabilities that bring new inking capabilities to our Office apps, including inking in Slide Show while in PowerPoint on the web and Ink Replay to bring your presentations to life. Today, I’m excited to share our progress with you on a set of innovations to help people be more productive when away from their desk, utilizing voice, digital pen, and touch across Office 365 and our Surface devices.

Transcribe audio files or record your own while staying in the flow in Word

We spoke with researchers, reporters, lawyers, and teachers, and learned that people spend a ton of time recording audio interviews on their phone, and then spend even more time transcribing those conversations into Word.

Today, we’re announcing a solution that helps busy professionals upload their own audio files or record new ones on the fly, all within Word. Once your audio has been uploaded or recorded, Word—leveraging your OneDrive account to securely store the audio files and Azure Speech Services under the hood—displays a written audio transcription in the side panel and allows you to quickly and easily bring relevant snippets or the entire transcript into your document to edit. The transcript itself is automatically separated by speaker and into relevant chunks of content, and the interactive panel allows you to easily jump around the recording to find and verify the perfect quote.

Audio transcription in Word will be available in early 2020 in Word for the web, with integration into the Word desktop and mobile apps following in the spring. Exact plans and pricing will be announced closer to general availability.

Input data directly into your Excel workbooks with your digital pen

Excel is an extremely powerful tool to do complex data analytics, but that doesn’t mean you need to be sitting at a desk to use it. Today, people fill out checklists, research reports, and more using paper and a clipboard and then must type those results into their computer later. Or they fumble to balance a computer to type while walking around. To address these issues, we’re elevating what your digital pen can do in Excel so Firstline Workers, busy professionals, students, and researchers can easily write, edit, or delete values using only their digital pen and tablet. Now it will be easier than ever to be productive and stay connected for workers who aren’t always able to find a desk to work.

Data entry using a digital pen will be available in Excel for the web and desktop in spring 2020 for Office 365 subscribers.

Create and reply to comments from anywhere using pen or voice

With Ink Editor we’ve made it so that editing your documents is easier and more natural than ever, and now we’re extending those intelligent capabilities and the expressiveness of digital ink into the realm of commenting as well.

On devices with a touch interface and/or supported microphone, people will be able to create expressive ink comments directly from within the comment pane, or use dictation to provide feedback. Together, and combined with existing Ink Editor capabilities, anyone reviewing a document can now complete that task end-to-end using just their tablet, digital pen, and voice.

Expressive ink comments and easy entry to dictation in comments will be available starting with Word desktop in Spring 2020 for Office 365 subscribers.

Office + Surface are better together

Today at the Surface event, we showcased several new enhancements to Office that leverage the unique capabilities of Surface’s latest hardware advancements.

The new Studio Mics in the Surface Pro 7 offer best-in-class audio-capture with no additional hardware, which makes Office features such as dictation and transcription work at their best.

When using your Surface Earbuds together with PowerPoint, you get the benefit of incredible microphones to hear you clearly even as you walk around, allowing Live Captions and Subtitles and Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web to operate with better accuracy. The intuitive gestures can be used to navigate Slide Show and start/stop video without having to buy a separate clicker. You can even have just one in your ear for the best mic capture while keeping the other invisibly hidden in your hand to navigate slides.

Surface Earbud gesture support will be available in November, alongside the general availability of the Earbuds, in PowerPoint desktop for Office 365 subscribers.

The ultra-portability of the Surface Pro X allows you to be productive on the go, whether that’s using Excel to enter data or Word to review documents. The Pro X offers a revolutionary new storage mechanism for your pen so you’ll always have it handy when you need it. Office leverages the fact that the Pro X knows when the pen is removed from its storage to automatically bring your inking tools front and center.

In addition, Office will now showcase everything you can do with your Surface accessories within each app, whether that’s the Surface Pen, Earbuds, or the Dial. If there are new capabilities available in an Office app you’re using, they will be displayed, so you always know you’re getting the best out of your Office + Surface combination.

Support for reacting to the Surface Pen being removed from its storage location is available now in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for Office 365 subscribers. Surface tips in Office will first be available in November in PowerPoint desktop for Office 365 subscribers.

Listening to customers to improve the ink in PowerPoint experience

We recently announced a set of improvements to Office, including several additions to the overall inking experience in PowerPoint based directly on what we’ve heard from customers. This includes support for replaying pre-drawn ink in Slide Show, myriad improvements sourced primarily from educators who ink in Slide Show on Windows and Mac to teach their classes, and the beginning of bringing ink to Office for the Web, starting in PowerPoint Slide Show.

We’re happy to announce that all these capabilities are now rolling out to everyone.

Ink Replay is available in PowerPoint for Windows and Mac for Office 365 subscribers.

Inking is now available in Slide Show mode in PowerPoint for the web. Inking in PowerPoint Editor on the web will be available by the end of the year.

New templates for Microsoft Whiteboard

Microsoft Whiteboard helps you collaborate more effectively—whether you’re trying to brainstorm your next big idea or get everyone on the same page. New templates for Whiteboard can help you run more effective meetings with KANBAN sprint planning, SWOT analysis, project planning, learning, and more.

Pre-created layouts provide an immediate structure, so you don’t have to start from scratch. They’re perfect for collaboration scenarios like ad-hoc brainstorms, running meetings, and project planning. The Whiteboard canvas also dynamically expands to fit all your content. Read more about the new Microsoft Whiteboard templates.

Microsoft Whiteboard templates are in public preview for Windows 10 and rolling out to iOS this week. To add templates, click or tap the Insert button in the toolbar.

The post Microsoft 365 makes work and play more intuitive and natural with innovations in voice, digital ink, and touch appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Small and midsize businesses face many challenges in today’s economy. From engaging customers in new and different ways to attracting and retaining talent to remaining secure amid evolving threats, it’s not easy to stay ahead of the curve. The right tools help you meet those challenges, ensuring employees can be innovative and productive while your assets stay secure. They also save you time and money, and help you continue to earn the trust and loyalty of your customers. With Microsoft 365, we are building the tools to help our customers stay secure and current, setting them up for success now and in years to come. And today, we’re announcing a new offer that makes it easier than ever for small and midsize businesses to take advantage of these tools.

At Microsoft, we want to make sure you always have the right tools to set your business up for success. As following close behind in October, we have a new offer that will keep your employees productive and secure. Working with a modern device and Microsoft 365 Business—which includes Windows 10, Office 365, and the latest security features—you can do just that.

While many of you are well on your way to 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, through January 2023, we will extend the availability of paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU) to businesses of all sizes. (Previously, Windows 7 ESU was only available to Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise customers in Volume Licensing.) The Windows 7 ESU will be sold on a per-device basis with the price increasing each year.

Starting on December 1, 2019, businesses of any size can purchase ESU through the cloud solution provider (CSP) program. This means that customers can work with their partners to get the security they need while they make their way to Windows 10.

Partners within the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program can go to the Microsoft Partner Center to learn more. Meanwhile, Windows 7 customers looking to take advantage of the paid Extended Security Updates once they are available on December 1 can find out more by visiting our FAQ page. Finally, if you’d like to learn more about the end of Windows 7 support and the Office 365 Business, head to our support page.

We’re committed to always building the right tools for today’s businesses, big and small, so you and your employees are always set up for success—no matter what new challenges arise.

The post A new way for small and midsize businesses to stay secure and current appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Meet Personal Vault

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Vault is now available worldwide

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

Learn more in this Personal Vault podcast on Intrazone.

Backing up your folders just got easier

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

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

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

OneDrive fans rejoice—additional storage is now available!

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

Dark mode is now available on OneDrive iOS

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

Let us know what you think

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

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

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

We updated the conversation experience for Yammer mobile, so it’s easier to discover and share the content that matters most, and a new PowerPoint for iPad feature makes it (finally!) easy to share a single slide. The updated Microsoft To Do app keeps you productive on the go, and now you can export Visio workflows to Microsoft Flow—a great way to streamline business processes and save your organization money and time. Also new in September: automated incident response with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for more effective, efficient security.

Collaborate, save time, and improve productivity with app updates

App updates streamline your mobile experience and help you conquer your to-do list across devices.

Join the conversation with beautiful new experiences for the Yammer mobile app—We updated the conversation experience for Yammer mobile, so you can connect, discover, and share in a way that’s easy on the thumbs and on the eyes. Highlights include a new card-based design that sharpens content, easy-to-read formatting and styling, a new grid layout for docs and images that makes it easier to preview and engage with multiple images or files, and link previews and inline videos right in the feed. To experience these improvements, simply update your Yammer app to the latest version.

Get more done with the new version of Microsoft To Do—This month, we unveiled a new version of To Do with a fresh design, access from anywhere, and better integration with Microsoft apps and services. You can choose from customization options and backgrounds (including dark mode) to tailor your experience and suit your lists. You can also sync To Do across all platforms to take your lists with you wherever you go. In addition, you integrate To Do with Microsoft 365 apps and services or have one centralized view of your tasks. Think of To Do as your new task aggregator—from Outlook to Planner and Cortana and the Microsoft Launcher on Android, you can now see your whole list in one place.

To get started, download the To Do app. And if you’re coming from Wunderlist, you can import your existing lists in just a few clicks.

Share, communicate, and collect feedback more efficiently and effectively

New app features let you share individual PowerPoint slides, stay on top of your notes in OneNote, and conduct more effective surveys.

Share individual slides and overcome public speaking jitters with new PowerPoint features—Sometimes you only need to share that one specific slide, and sending it via email or creating a separate file can be cumbersome. Now, exclusively in PowerPoint for the web, you can share a deck with a link to a specific slide. Just right-click the slide thumbnail, select Link to this slide, and copy the link.

We also released Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web in public preview. Presenter Coach uses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to give users real-time, on-screen feedback to improve public speaking skills. Rehearse your presentation and get helpful tips on pacing and using inclusive language, as well as avoiding filler words like “basically” or “um,” or developing a rote presentation style.

Stay on top of your most recent notes and adjust your color schemes in OneNote—Updates to OneNote allow you to take your notes with you on the go and personalize your experience. Recent Notes is now also available on Mac, helping you easily pick up where you left off on any device with a chronological list of pages you recently viewed or edited.

On iPad, we integrated OneNote with Sticky Notes, so you can surface your notes there and avoid toggling between apps. Finally, you can now switch to a darker canvas with the new dark mode in OneNote for Mac. All these new features are available now.

Overcome language barriers in your surveys—Microsoft Forms now offers the option to create surveys in multiple languages without having to merge separate documents. Multilingual support enables users to reach a broader audience and helps respondents provide richer feedback by displaying questions in their preferred language. Beginning next month, you’ll be able to access multilingual support by clicking on the ellipsis in the top right corner and selecting Multilingual from the dropdown menu.

Export Visio workflows to Microsoft Flow to quickly automate business processes—Designing processes quickly and automating workflows can help accelerate productivity, but it’s often easier said than done. Now you can easily create new automation flows in the familiar diagramming experience of Visio and seamlessly export them as a fully functioning workflow to Microsoft Flow. Built-in Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) stencils have sharing and commenting capabilities, simplifying development and collaboration. Once the workflow’s complete, you can publish it to Microsoft Flow with a single click. This capability is now generally available to all Visio Plan 2 users through the Visio desktop app.

Streamline IT management and security

New features simplify the management of corporate Android devices, making it easy to add Microsoft 365 customers and ensure endpoints and devices are secure.

Manage corporate-owned Android devices with Microsoft Intune—With support for Android Enterprise fully managed devices, Microsoft 365 customers can deliver a high-quality and feature-rich productivity scenario for employees on corporate-owned devices, while maintaining an extended set of policy controls over those devices. Intune support for Android Enterprise work phone management is now available.

To get started, check out our Intune documentation.

Save time when adding new employees to Microsoft 365—Adding and configuring new employees or freelancers to Microsoft 365 just got easier. Beginning this month, you can create and use a template to save time and standardize settings when adding people in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Templates are particularly useful if you have employees who share many attributes, like those who work in the same role and the same location.

Beginning this month, head to the Microsoft 365 admin center and select Users > Active Users > User Templates > Add Template.

Automate incident response with Office 365 ATP—We’re excited to announce the general availability of Automated Incident Response in Office 365 ATP, which applies powerful automation capabilities to investigation and response workflows, dramatically improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your business’s security teams. These capabilities are available to organizations with the Office 365 ATP Plan 2, Office 365 E5, and Microsoft 365 E5 Security SKUs.

Evaluate security products with ease—The new evaluation lab in Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection removes the challenges of machine installation and configuration. Security experts can verify a potential platform, familiarize themselves with the product, learn about new features, or use the lab environment for attack simulations.

The new evaluation lab is now generally available. To access it, select Evaluation and tutorials > Evaluation lab directly from the navigation menu.

Also new this month

• The redesigned Outlook on the web is now generally available. The redesigned experience features a modern design, new and smarter features, and a faster framework.
• Now generally available, Security Policy Advisor—introduced in public preview this spring—can examine your policies and provide recommendations to improve security.
• Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available, delivering a virtual, multi-session Windows 10 experience. Windows Virtual Desktop enables you to deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes.

As always, every Microsoft 365 update reflects our commitment to improving the experience for you—so if you have feedback or ideas on how we can improve, don’t hesitate to let us know.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in September—updates to Microsoft To Do, PowerPoint, OneNote, and more appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Since we announced Windows Virtual Desktop last September, and through the public preview announced in March, thousands of customers have piloted the service and taken advantage of the Windows 10 multi-session capability—validating the importance of this feature as a core part of the service. Customers also represented, all major industries and geographies, helping us get feedback from different customer types and locations. As a result, as of today the service is now available in all geographies. In addition, the Windows Virtual Desktop client is available across Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, and HTML 5.

“Windows Virtual Desktop allows our employees to work in a secure manner wherever they are. Windows Virtual Desktop provides the Windows 10 desktop experience that our employees are familiar with across a variety of devices or web browsers.”
—Jake Hovermale, Chief Technical Officer, BEI Networks

With the end of extended support for Windows 7 coming 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 can use Windows Virtual Desktop to virtualize Windows 7 desktops with free Extended Security Updates (ESU) until January 2023. If you’re in the process of migrating to Windows 10 and need app compatibility assistance, read more about how we can help with the Desktop App Assure program.

To help increase productivity, we invested heavily in the Office experience in a virtualized environment with native improvements, as well as through the acquisition of FSLogix. In July, we made the FSLogix technology available to Microsoft 365, Windows 10 Enterprise, and RDS customers. Today, all FSLogix tools are fully integrated into Windows Virtual Desktop, enabling you to have the smoothest, most performant Office virtualization experience available today.

In addition to the significant architectural improvements for deployment and management, we’re also simplifying app delivery by supporting MSIX packaged apps to be dynamically “attached” to a virtual machine instead of installing it permanently. This is important because it significantly decreases storage and makes it easier for the admin to manage and update the apps, while creating a seamless experience for the user.

Check out the new video from Scott Manchester, Principal Engineering Lead for Windows Virtual Desktop, where he does a great job of walking you through the app “attach” experience.

Extending Windows Virtual Desktop

We also worked closely with our partner ecosystem to help our customers extend Windows Virtual Desktop and get the most out of existing virtualization investments.

• Starting today, Citrix can extend Windows Virtual Desktop worldwide, including support for Windows 10 multi-session, Windows 7 with free Extended Security Updates for up to three years, and support for Windows Server 2008 R2 with free Extended Security Updates on Azure.
• Later this year, VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure will extend Windows Virtual Desktop and its benefits, such as Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session and support for Windows 7 with free Extended Security Updates for up to three years. Preview will be available by the end of the calendar year.
• We also engaged with hardware partners, system integrators (SI), who provide turnkey desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offerings, and value-added solution providers, who add capabilities such as printing, application layering, assessment, and monitoring on Azure Marketplace. Learn more about Windows Virtual Desktop partners on the documentation page.

General availability of Windows Virtual Desktop is just the beginning. We’ll continue to rapidly innovate and invest in desktop and app virtualization. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months. In the meantime, learn more on our product page and get started with Windows Virtual Desktop today.

If you’re a partner and want to learn more about Windows Virtual Desktop, visit the Azure Partner Zone page for Windows Virtual Desktop.

The post Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Savvy financial institutions are now moving beyond this paradigm and employing a modern approach to cybersecurity—the Zero Trust model. The central tenet of a Zero Trust model is to trust no one—internal or external—by default and require strict verification of every person or device before granting access.

The castle’s perimeters continue to be important, but instead of just pouring more and more investment into stronger walls and wider moats, a Zero Trust model takes a more nuanced approach of managing access to the identities, data, and devices within the proverbial castle. So, whether an insider acts maliciously or carelessly, or veiled attackers make it through the castle walls, automatic access to data is not a given.

Limitations of a castle-and-moat approach

When it comes to safeguarding today’s enterprise digital estate, the castle-and-moat approach has critical limitations because the advent of cyberthreats has changed what it means to ward and protect. Large organizations, including banks, deal with dispersed networks of data and applications accessed by employees, customers, and partners onsite or online. This makes protecting the castle’s perimeters more difficult. And even if the moat is effective in keeping enemies out, it doesn’t do much for users with compromised identities or other insider threats that lurk within the castle walls.

The practices below are all sources of exposure and are common in banks that rely on a castle-and-moat approach to security:

• A single annual review of staff access rights to applications.
• Ambiguous and inconsistent access rights policies dependent on manager discretion and insufficient governance when staff moves occur.
• Overuse of administrative privileged accounts by IT.
• Customer data stored in multiple file shares and little idea who has access to it.
• Overreliance on passwords to authenticate users.
• Lack of data classification and reporting to understand what data is where.
• Frequent use of USB flash drives to transfer files that include highly sensitive data.

How a Zero Trust model empowers bankers and customers

The benefits of a Zero Trust approach have been well documented, and a growing number of real-world examples show that this approach could have prevented sophisticated cyberattacks. However, many banks today still adhere to practices that diverge from Zero Trust principles.

Adopting a Zero Trust model can help banks strengthen their security posture, so they can confidently support initiatives that give employees and customers more flexibility. For example, bank executives would like to untether their customer-facing employees—such as relationship managers and financial advisors—from their desks and meet clients outside bank premises. Today, many financial institutions support this geographic agility with analog tools like paper printouts or static views of their counsel. However, both bank employees and customers have come to expect a more dynamic experience using real-time data.

Banks that rely on a castle-and-moat approach to security are hesitant to disperse data outside the physical network. As such, their bankers and financial advisors can only tap the dynamic models of proven and disciplined investment strategies if their client meetings take place on bank premises.

Historically, it’s been cumbersome for bankers or financial advisors on the go to share real-time model updates or actively collaborate with other bankers or traders, at least not without VPNs. Yet, this agility is an important driver of sound investment decisions and customer satisfaction. A Zero Trust model enables a relationship manager or an analyst to harness insights from market data providers, synthesize with their own models, and dynamically work through different client scenarios whenever and wherever.

The good news is this is a new era of intelligent security—powered by the cloud and Zero Trust architecture—that can streamline and modernize security and compliance for banks.

Microsoft 365 helps transform bank security

With Microsoft 365, banks can make immediate steps towards a Zero Trust security by deploying three key strategies:

• Identity and authentication—First and foremost, banks need to ensure that users are who they say they are and give access according to their roles. With Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), banks can use single sign-on (SSO) to enable authenticated users to connect to apps from anywhere, enabling mobile employees to access resources securely without compromising their productivity.

Banks can also deploy strong authentication methods such as two-factor or passwordless Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which can reduce the risk of a breach by 99.9 percent. Microsoft Authenticator supports push notifications, one-time passcodes, and biometrics for any Azure AD connected app.

For Windows devices, bank employees can use Windows Hello, a secure and convenient facial recognition feature to sign in to devices. Finally, banks can use Azure AD Conditional Access to protect resources from suspicious requests by applying the appropriate access policies. Microsoft Intune and Azure AD work together to help make sure only managed and compliant devices can access Office 365 services including email and on-premises apps. Through Intune, you can also evaluate the compliance status of devices. The conditional access policy is enforced depending on the compliance status of the device at the time that the user tries to access data.

Conditional access illustration.

• Threat protection—With Microsoft 365, banks can also bolster their ability to protect, detect, and respond to attacks with Microsoft Threat Protection’s integrated and automated security. It leverages one of the world’s largest threat signals available from the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph and advanced automation powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance incident identification and response, enabling security teams to resolve threats accurately, efficiently, and promptly. The Microsoft 365 security center provides a centralized hub and specialized workspace to manage and take full advantage of Microsoft 365 intelligent security solutions for identity and access management, threat protection, information protection, and security management.

The Microsoft 365 security center.

• Information protection—While identity and devices are the primary vectors of vulnerability for cyberattacks, data is what cybercriminals ultimately want. With Microsoft Information Protection, banks can improve their protection of sensitive information—wherever it lives or travels. Microsoft 365 enables customers to 1) identify and classify their sensitive data; 2) apply flexible protection policies; and 3) monitor and remediate sensitive data at risk.

Example of a classification and protection scenario.

Simplify security management with Zero Trust

Microsoft 365 helps simplify the management of security in a modern Zero Trust architecture, leveraging the visibility, scale, and intelligence necessary to combat cybercrime.

As you consider how to safeguard your modern “castle,” a Zero Trust environment is optimal for modern cybersecurity threats. A Zero Trust environment requires up-to-the-minute oversight of who is accessing what, where, and when—and whether they should even have access.

Microsoft 365 security and compliance capabilities help organizations verify before they trust a user or device. Microsoft 365 also offers a complete teamwork and productivity solution. Altogether, Microsoft 365 provides a comprehensive solution to help bank executives focus on customers and innovation.

The post Why banks are adopting a modern approach to cybersecurity—the Zero Trust model appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A journey worth taking

It’s been an exciting journey since we announced To Do. From shared-list task assignments, list groups, and file attachments, to the Mac app and even more product integrations, we took your feedback and created the app you wanted. We’re grateful for your input and the support of both our Wunderlist and To Do communities. We’ve come a long way since those first Wunderlist days and today is one more step in our evolution. Let’s take a closer look at To Do.

A fresh new feel

We polished the design of To Do by reducing the header size and adding in more color to give the app warmth and personalization. It’s still the simple and elegant app you love, but now with more options to customize, so you can tailor it to suit yourself and your lists. With the new version of To Do, you can choose from a wide range of backgrounds, including the beloved Berlin TV tower that was a feature in Wunderlist. In addition, you can choose a different background for every list.

Want to give your eyes a rest? To Do has dark mode across Android, Windows, Mac, and coming soon to iOS. It’s not just about the backgrounds, though. We freshened up the look of To Do, so it feels simple, yet modern.

Shareable link.

Your smart daily planner

Like Wunderlist, we have smart lists where you can see your planned or important tasks in one list. But what makes To Do unique is the personalized daily planner feature, My Day. It helps you accomplish what’s meaningful and important to you every day. Smart suggestions in My Day help you plan what you need to accomplish that day. And tomorrow? My Day will refresh, so you can start the day with a blank slate. Any tasks you didn’t complete will be waiting for you in suggestions.

Access your lists wherever you are

To Do is available and syncs across all platforms, including Mac, iOS, Android, Windows, and the web. Now, wherever you are, you can take your lists with you. Commuting to work? Plan your day on your phone so you start work ready to check off all those tasks. And if you’re on Windows or Android, you can toggle between your work and personal accounts. As you head out the office in the evening, you can leave your work lists behind, and open up your grocery list or see what’s in store for movie night on your personal account.

Part of the Microsoft family

With To Do, we’re on a mission to bring everything you need to do—from anywhere tasks appear in your favorite Microsoft 365 apps and services—into one centralized view. Flag messages you need to follow up on and see them in the Flagged Email list (with Microsoft work or school accounts or Microsoft-hosted email accounts like Outlook, Hotmail, or Live). The Assigned to Me list shows you the tasks assigned to you in your shared lists and those from Microsoft Planner. From there you can add them to My Day to give you a holistic view of what you need to do today. But that’s not all—with our Cortana integration, you can also add tasks from your Amazon Echo.* Love Microsoft Launcher on Android? Guess what! To Do is integrated there too.

Security is top of mind

Security is paramount to us and you’ll be pleased to know that we made your data security a priority in To Do. Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security helps protect your data wherever it may be. With To Do, you can set up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to help make sure your lists are secured.

Get started today!

Now’s the best time to dive in and give To Do a try. We believe that once you do, you’ll love it! To help the process, we made moving your lists and tasks as easy as possible. It’s a snap to import your lists into To Do, so go ahead and click or tap the Download To Do button to get started.

Microsoft To Do

Your day in focus.

Download To Do

If you don’t already have a Microsoft account, you can register with your existing email address (for example, Gmail). As soon as you sign in, the option to import your tasks from Wunderlist is displayed, or you can find it in Settings. Just start importing and you’ll be ready to get started with To Do.

Learn more about the migration experience.

Final thoughts

We want to express our heartfelt thanks to you—our Wunderlist and To Do fans. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on what you think would make To Do even better, so please keep the feedback coming via Twitter and Facebook. We wouldn’t have gotten here without you, and we look forward to continuing this journey together!

*Cortana integration is available in English and the following regions: Australia, India, U.S., and U.K. The Cortana skill is still in Preview, so it’s currently only available in U.S. English with personal Microsoft accounts.

The post Announcing the new version of Microsoft To Do—we’ve come a long way! appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today marks another big milestone in this relationship: On behalf of the Microsoft 365 engineering team, I’m excited to announce Adobe has integrated Microsoft Intune application protection directly into the Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app for iOS and Android.

The Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app is the trusted global leader for reliably working with PDFs from anywhere. Hundreds of millions of users rely on the Acrobat Reader mobile app to edit, fill, sign, create, or convert PDFs on the go—and now this functionality is natively supported in Microsoft 365 management and security policies. Anyone using the latest version of the standard Acrobat Reader app will now have the industry-leading protection of Intune when handling their corporate documents and forms on mobile devices. Now, the “Acrobat Reader for Intune” app is no longer required and will reach end-of-service on both Android and iOS by December 1, 2019.

How does this help users?

This change aligns Adobe mobile app management with the same management built into the Office 365 mobile apps. This brings unprecedented simplification and security to millions of users and organizations. Adobe is one of the most common third-party mobile device apps used by Microsoft 365 customers, and these new Intune app protection policies will protect your company data at the app level. This type of protection is critically important because it allows you to protect company data on both managed and unmanaged devices. Because mobile app management (MAM) is based on user identity, the requirement for mobile device management (MDM) is removed. Both users and IT love this because it allows them to use the same app for both work and personal use, while maintaining the most productive experience possible.

Intune can determine whether you are working on a personal or work document and only applies the company security policies when it senses you are in a work-related document. This gives you the ability to respect personal privacy and secure company data without touching personal data—on a BYOD personal phone for example. The Adobe app on iOS now supports this multi-identity functionality.

Making it easy for IT admins to deploy

If you happen to already use the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Intune app with the Intune policies applied, you can make this change with minimum disruption. Our engineering team has made sure that any existing app protection policies targeted to Adobe Acrobat Reader for Intune will automatically target the Adobe Acrobat Reader app in the backend. All your users need to do is be on the latest versions of their app:

• Google Play Store for Android—version 19.6 and above.
• Apple app store for iOS—version 07.00 and above.

Please look for support notices with more details shortly if your tenant includes such configurations, and you can check out Adobe’s announcement regarding this change.

How to get Microsoft 365 app protection for your own apps

There is now a strong ecosystem of apps that serve the widest enterprise use cases, having made the decision to embed the Intune app protection capabilities directly into their mainline apps. The most commonly used mobile and cloud business apps (Microsoft Office apps, Adobe, Citrix, and more) have embraced the security and manageability of Microsoft 365 across various app stores. This delivers a unique value to modernizing your business.

If you’re an independent software vendor (ISV) or create your own line-of-business apps, you can also get Microsoft’s industry-leading app protection built right into your mobile apps. Based on your needs and resources, the Microsoft engineering team provides several methods to get app protection policies enabled for your app.

For apps that have more complex scenarios, such as editing or sharing corporate documents, we suggest the Intune SDK that Adobe has used. This approach is typically recommended when you have app developers to help you. For simpler line-of-business applications, such as time absence reporting apps, the wrapping tool is ideal for you and is meant to be used by IT admins.

In addition to Adobe, several other third-party apps have adopted Intune app protection for corporate data on mobile devices. You can check out our protected mobile app ecosystem, and you can follow that link to find even more resources to help you get started:

• Overview of the Intune SDK.
• Differences between the app wrapping tool and the Intune SDK.
• GitHub samples: Taskr (native Android to-do app) and Chatr (native iOS Swift-based chat app).

As always, we want to hear from you! If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments, please visit us on our Tech Community page.

The post Adobe Acrobat chooses Microsoft 365 for built-in app protection 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.

Here’s a look at what’s new in July.

Strengthen security while simplifying processes

New capabilities help you protect against, discover, and remediate cybersecurity threats.

Go passwordless to reduce risk and improve account security—This month, we announced the public preview of FIDO2 security keys support in Azure AD. Now, with FIDO2 technologies, you can provide users with seamless, secure, and passwordless access to all Azure AD-connected apps and services. Additionally, administrators can assign passwordless credentials to users and groups and allow self-service sign-up. To get started, check out our step-by-step documentation on enabling passwordless sign-in for Azure AD.

Discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities in real-time—Last month, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Threat & Vulnerability Management (TVM). TVM delivers a new set of advanced, agentless, cloud-powered capabilities that provide continuous, real-time, risk-based vulnerability management. If you already have Microsoft Defender ATP, the TVM solution is now available within your Microsoft Defender ATP portal. If you don’t have a subscription, you can sign up for a trial of Microsoft Defender ATP including TVM.

Improve productivity and collaboration

New capabilities in Microsoft 365 help you collaborate easily with others, organize tasks, and quickly find answers.

Communicate and collaborate more easily with new capabilities in Microsoft Teams—This month, we added new capabilities to Teams including Read receipts and Priority notifications to help ensure time-sensitive messages are received and prioritized. We also announced the new Announcements feature to highlight important news and now post a single message across multiple channels.

Finally, the new time clock feature in Teams for Firstline Workers brings clock in/out capabilities to the Team Shifts module. And the targeted communication feature enables messages to be sent to everyone within a specific role—such as sending a message to all cashiers in a store or all nurses in a hospital.

These updates for Teams will be rolling out over the next couple of months.

Add polls to your Outlook emails and book meeting rooms with Outlook on the web—This month, we’re announcing two new generally available features in Outlook on the web. With Microsoft Quick Poll, you can now add polls directly to your Outlook emails, so recipients can vote directly in the email or click the provided link and vote in a browser window. To get started, download the Quick Poll add-in for Outlook.

Additionally, you can now easily book meeting rooms in Outlook on the web. When creating a meeting, you can quickly see which rooms are available, search by city or room, and view rooms that are available during recurring events.

Make answers in Yammer more discoverable—Now, questions in Yammer will stand out from general discussions with new, unique styling. Post authors and group admins can also mark the best response to questions as a “Best Answer,” making it easier for users to find answers. These changes are currently in private preview and will roll out to all Office 365 subscribers later this summer.

Work together on tasks in Microsoft To-Do—Now, you can assign a task to someone on a shared To-Do list and work together to knock out tasks more quickly. To get started, just @mention someone to assign them a task, and everyone on the shared list will be able to see it.

Streamline IT management

Data-driven tools help you deliver seamless software deployments and improvements for Office in virtualized environments.

Improve the quality and reliability of software deployments—This month, we announced the public preview of Desktop Analytics, a cloud-based service that provides intelligence for you to make more informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows clients ahead of new Windows 10 deployments. In combination with System Center Configuration Manager, Desktop Analytics is designed to create an inventory of the Windows apps running in the organization and assess app compatibility with the latest feature updates of Windows 10. Desktop Analytics is currently offered as an Office 365 service and requires an Office 365 subscription in your Azure AD tenant. To get started, enable Desktop Analytics in the Configuration Manager console.

Improve the Office app experience in virtual environments—This month, we announced new capabilities to help improve the user experience in virtualized environments. First, 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. Second, Windows Server 2019 will now support Office 365 ProPlus and OneDrive Files On-Demand in the coming months. Lastly, Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams are getting new capabilities to improve the user experience in a virtualized environment.

Drive digital transformation with new Microsoft cloud regions—Microsoft Office 365 services are now available from our new cloud regions located in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These local datacenters open the door for more organizations to embrace the benefits of the cloud with resilient cloud services that can help meet data residency, security, and compliance needs.

Other updates

• Teams is now included in the monthly Office 365 updates for existing customers and will begin rolling out to existing installations over several weeks.
• We retired the “Online” branding for the Office apps on the web. You’ll see this change reflected in the product experience in places such as the app headers, platform-specific commands, and help menus. This change reinforces that Office is a cloud-connected experience, which you can use through apps on the desktop, web, or mobile devices.
• We recently announced OneDrive Personal Vault, a protected area in OneDrive that you can only access with a strong authentication method or second step of identity verification.
• These five Outlook mobile tips and tricks can help small business owners save time and get more done quickly.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in July—updates to Azure AD, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and more appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Office 365, delivered from local datacenters in South Africa, helps our customers enable the modern workplace and empower their employees with real-time collaboration and cloud-powered intelligence while maintaining security, compliance, and in-country customer data residency. The addition of South Africa as a new geography for Office 365 increases the options for secure, cloud productivity services combined with customer data residency in 16 geographies across the globe along with three additional geographies also announced.

In-country data residency for core customer data helps Office 365 customers meet regulatory requirements, which is particularly important and relevant in industries such as healthcare, financial services, and government—where organizations need to keep specific data in-country to comply with local requirements. Customer data residency provides additional assurances regarding data privacy and reliability for organizations and enterprises. Core customer data is stored only in their datacenter geography (Geo)—in this case, the cloud datacenters within South Africa.

Customers like Altron and the Gauteng Provincial Government have used Office 365 to transform their workplaces. This latest development will enable them—and other organizations and enterprises adopting Office 365—to ramp up their digital transformation journey.

“Altron is committed to improving our infrastructure and embracing a strategy to become a cloud-first company to better serve our customers and empower our employees through modern collaboration. We’ve noticed a tangible difference since making the move to Office 365.”
—Debra Marais, Lead, IT Shared Services at Altron

“Office 365 is driving our modernization journey of Government ICT infrastructure and services by allowing us to develop pioneering solutions at manageable costs and create overall improvements in operations management, all while improving transparency and accountability.”
—David Kramer, Deputy Director General, ICT at Gauteng Provincial Government

Microsoft recently became the first global provider to deliver cloud services from the African continent with the opening of our new cloud datacenter regions. Office 365 joins Azure to expand the intelligent cloud service available from Africa. Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, the next generation of intelligent business applications, are anticipated to be available in the fourth quarter of 2019.

By delivering the comprehensive Microsoft cloud—which includes Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365—from datacenters in a given geography, we offer scalable, available, and resilient cloud services to companies and organizations while meeting customer data residency, security, and compliance needs. We have deep expertise in protecting data and empowering customers around the globe to meet extensive security and privacy requirements, including offering the broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations in the industry.

The new cloud regions in South Africa are connected to Microsoft’s other regions via our global network, one of the largest and most innovative on the planet—spanning more than 100,000 miles (161,000 kilometers) of terrestrial fiber and subsea cable systems to deliver services to customers. Microsoft is bringing the global cloud closer to home for African organizations and citizens through our trans-Arabian paths between India and Europe, as well as our trans-Atlantic systems, including Marea, the highest capacity cable to ever cross the Atlantic.

We’re committed to accelerating digital transformation across the continent through numerous initiatives and also recently announced Microsoft’s first Africa Development Centre (ADC), with two initial sites in Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria. The ADC will serve as a premier center of engineering for Microsoft, where world-class African talent can create solutions for local and global impact. With our new cloud datacenter regions, the ADC, and programs like 4Afrika, we believe Africa is poised to develop locally and scale for global impact better than ever before.

Learn more about Office 365 and Microsoft in the Middle East and Africa.

The post Microsoft Office 365 now available from new South Africa cloud datacenters appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

1. Prioritize time-sensitive communication

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

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

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

2. Easily manage communications within and across teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy packages in the Teams admin center is coming soon.

Building a robust partner ecosystem with Teams

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

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

Helping our customers transform the way work is done

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

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

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

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

Get started with Teams

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

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

• 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.

Here’s a look at what’s new in June.

Secure your organization

New capabilities help you protect your company’s data, monitor access, and improve your security posture.

Discover Shadow IT with Cloud App Security—Discover the apps and services that are running on top of your IaaS and PaaS subscriptions, whether they are running on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform. Gain visibility into those apps and services, including which users are accessing them, transactions, IP addresses, and how much traffic is being transmitted. To get started, click the Discovered resources tab in the Cloud App Security portal or start a free trial today.

Manage how company resources are accessed—This month, we announced the availability of Azure AD Conditional Access policies for Microsoft 365 Business, designed for small and medium-sized business subscribers. These policies help you maintain control over your Office 365 environment and how your company resources are accessed. For example, you can define a conditional access policy that evaluates sign-in connections from mobile devices to Exchange Online, and requires employees use Outlook for iOS or Android to successfully access their work email and calendar. Microsoft 365 Business customers can enable Conditional Access policies via Azure AD.

Improve your organization’s identity security with tailored recommendations—Identity Secure Score, now generally available, helps you discover opportunities to improve your organization’s identity security. Recommendations are coupled with the guidance and workflows necessary to help security administrators implement the recommendations. Navigate to Identity Secure Score in the Azure portal to get started.

Tackle tough compliance obligations with powerful new capabilities

New features in Microsoft 365 help you meet compliance requirements.

Avoid conflicts of interest with information barriers in Teams—You can now limit the disclosure of information by restricting communications between groups of users in Teams with information barriers. This is particularly helpful for organizations that need to adhere to ethical wall requirements and other related industry standards and regulations, such as preventing the sales department from talking with research teams. Check out the documentation on how to define policies for information barriers to get started today.

Meet data residency requirements with Yammer—Yammer now offers local data residency to help organizations in the EU meet data residency requirements. This feature is available to all new Office 365 customers associated with a tenant in the EU. In the coming months, Yammer content will also show up in eDiscovery searches, bringing advanced security and compliance capabilities to Yammer groups connected to Office 365 Groups.

Address data residency needs with Office 365 Multi-Geo Capabilities—Starting this month, the minimum seat requirement for Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365 will be reduced from 2,500 seats to 500 seats. This licensing update brings Multi-Geo Capabilities to a wider range of organizations looking to address their regional, industry-specific, or organizational data residency requirements.

Improve your workflow

New features across Microsoft 365 help you streamline collaboration and document creation so you can save time.

Create professional presentations using your company’s branded templates with Designer in PowerPoint—Earlier this month, we announced several new updates to PowerPoint. Designer now works with company-branded templates, helping people create on-brand presentations with ease. Additionally, just by adding text on a slide, Designer now recommends high-quality photo backgrounds that are fully licensed for commercial use, along with theme styles and complementary colors for your presentation. Support for branded templates is available to Office 365 Insiders on Windows 10 and Mac, and the theme updates are rolling out to all Office 365 subscribers.

Quickly find documents and view previous versions seamlessly across your devices—This month, we announced that our Microsoft Office desktop apps now support Recommended Documents, which provides you with a curated set of documents to help you find files and get back to work quickly. Recommended Documents is available now on iOS and Mac with Win32 rolling out now. We also announced that we’re bringing Version History to Office for the web, enabling you to see what changes have occurred and revert to an earlier version if necessary. Version History is rolling out now, starting with PowerPoint on the web.

Stay in the creative flow with inking in Outlook—We are bringing the inking capability from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote to Outlook for Windows. Inking in Outlook enables you to use your digital pen or finger to annotate and make notes. You can also easily mark up photos and images directly in your emails. To get started, select the Draw tab on the ribbon to see all your new pens and start inking.

Share your most recently used files in Outlook for iOS—You can now share your most recently used files in Outlook for iOS, creating a coherent experience with files in your Office 365 apps and services, your most recently used files from SharePoint and iCloud, and local files on your iOS device. You can continue to share files through email from OneDrive for Business, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox cloud storage. Additionally, if you choose to add a link in your email rather than attach a file, the permissions to access it will align automatically with those set by your company. This feature is rolling out to iOS users now.

Other updates

• The Microsoft To-Do app is now available in the Mac app store—download to get started.
• Now you can give collaborators a “thumbs up” in Microsoft Whiteboard to show you like others’ content. This feature will be available in Microsoft Whiteboard for Windows 10 and iOS in the next few weeks.
• Excel now pulls Nasdaq and Refinitiv data, including current financial information for the full range of U.S. exchange-listed equities—like stocks on the Nasdaq Stock Market—right into the Excel Stocks Data Type.
• Azure AD now supports a maximum password length of 256 characters, which can help you improve the security of your organization by making your passwords harder to hack.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in June—updates to Microsoft Cloud App Security, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We’re also increasing the OneDrive standalone storage plan from 50 GB to 100 GB at no additional charge, and we’re giving Office 365 subscribers a new option to add more storage as they need it.

OneDrive Personal Vault

OneDrive runs on the trusted Microsoft cloud, which has many security measures in place to keep your files safe. But we understand that some people want more protection for their most important and sensitive files, which is why we’re introducing Personal Vault.

Personal Vault is a protected area in OneDrive that you can only access with a strong authentication method or a second step of identity verification, such as your fingerprint, face, PIN, or a code sent to you via email or SMS.¹ Your locked files in Personal Vault have an extra layer of security, keeping them more secured in the event that someone gains access to your account or your device.

Plus, this added security doesn’t mean added inconvenience. All your documents, photos, and videos in Personal Vault are easy to access on Onedrive.com, your PC, or capable devices.²

Personal Vault adds to the robust privacy and security that OneDrive currently offers, including file encryption at rest and in transit, suspicious activity monitoring, ransomware detection and recovery, mass file deletion notification and recovery, virus scanning on download for known threats, and version history for all file types.

Easy to use

Just enter a PIN, or use your fingerprint, face, or a code delivered by email or SMS¹ to unlock and access your files—no need to remember multiple passwords. Additionally, Personal Vault can be unlocked with the Microsoft Authenticator app. Whichever way you choose, unlocking is quick, convenient, and helps secure your data.

Scan and shoot directly into Personal Vault

You can use the OneDrive for mobile app to scan documents, take pictures, or shoot video directly into your Personal Vault, keeping them off less secure areas of your device—such as your camera roll. It’s easy to scan important travel, identification, vehicle, home, insurance documents, and more directly into your Personal Vault. And you’ll have access to these documents wherever you go, across your capable devices.²

Extra protection on and off your PC

Personal Vault uses more than just two-step verification to help keep your files safe and private. On Windows 10 PCs, OneDrive syncs your Personal Vault files to a BitLocker-encrypted area of your local hard drive. And like all files in OneDrive, the contents of your Personal Vault are encrypted at-rest in the Microsoft cloud and in-transit to your device. For further protection on mobile devices, we recommend that you enable encryption on your iOS or Android device. Together, these measures help keep your files protected even if your Windows 10 PC or mobile device is lost, stolen, or someone gains access to it.

Automatic locking after a short period of inactivity

Personal Vault automatically relocks on your PC, device, or online after a short period of inactivity. Once locked, any files you were using will also lock and require reauthentication to access. There’s no need to worry about whether you left your Personal Vault or your file open—both will close and lock automatically after inactivity.³

Available soon

We’re excited to provide these new capabilities to people who use OneDrive on the web, with our mobile app, or on a Windows 10 PC. Personal Vault will begin rolling out soon in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada and will be available to everyone by the end of the year.

If you already have OneDrive, Personal Vault will appear as a feature update when it launches later this year in your region. And if you aren’t yet a OneDrive customer, you can download the app or go to www.onedrive.com to start using it on your PC or on the web. If you are using OneDrive’s free or standalone 100 GB plan, you can try Personal Vault with a limited number of files. Office 365 subscribers can store as many files as they want in Personal Vault, up to their storage limit.

OneDrive gets additional storage

Today, we’re also excited to share two storage plan updates.

Store more with OneDrive 100 GB plan—We’re increasing the amount of storage in the OneDrive standalone plan from 50 GB to 100 GB⁴ for the same $1.99 per month. That’s enough space to store over 50,000 pictures (at 2 MB per photo). This new plan is perfect for automatically backing up your phone’s camera roll and scanning and saving documents, receipts, and more right from your phone. You can also use it to back up your files and share and collaborate on documents. This new plan will roll out soon. If you’re currently using our 50 GB plan, you’ll automatically get 50 GB more storage added to your account at no additional cost. For more information, see OneDrive plans.

Get additional OneDrive storage as you need it—Your Office 365 subscription starts with 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and many people have asked for even more storage. Today, we’re announcing OneDrive additional storage, which lets you add more storage—as you need it—to your existing Office 365 subscription. You can add storage in 200 GB increments starting at $1.99 per month, going up to 1 TB of additional storage for $9.99 per month.

If you need 2 TB of storage, we now have an option for you. Pay only for what you need and increase, decrease, or cancel your additional storage plan anytime. OneDrive additional storage will be available in the coming months wherever Office 365 is available.

Let us know what you think

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

Notes
¹ Face and fingerprint verification requires specialized hardware including a Windows Hello capable device, fingerprint reader, illuminated IR sensor, or other biometric sensors and capable devices.
² The OneDrive for mobile app on Android and iOS requires either Android 6.0 or above or iOS 11.3 and above.
³ Automatic locking interval varies by device and can be set by the user.
⁴ 100 GB plan offers 102,400 MB of storage.

The post OneDrive Personal Vault brings added security to your most important files and OneDrive gets additional storage options appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A few years ago, the PowerPoint team took a bet on artificial intelligence (AI) and started the PowerPoint Designer effort. We aspired to help our customers overcome some of the fear around building an effective slide by offering up suggested slide designs. We started with making photo slides compelling, eventually adding capabilities around transforming text slides into their more visual—and hopefully impactful—counterparts like process diagrams and timelines. More recently, we started complementing text with iconography.

Today, we’re excited to share that not only have we hit a major milestone in PowerPoint Designer usage, we’re also announcing new Designer capabilities that suggests high quality content to jumpstart authoring and provides perspective suggestions for quantitative content. And yes, in a “but wait, there’s more” moment, we’re ready to share that our AI effort is moving beyond Designer—with our new Presenter Coach—intended to help our users build confidence in their presenting abilities.

Designer in PowerPoint crosses the 1 billion slides mark

Every day Designer offers up millions of slide suggestions to PowerPoint users. When someone chooses to insert a design suggestion, we know we’ve provided them value. In fact, the adoption rate of these slides has grown astronomically over the last few years, and in April 2019, we reached a major milestone of 1 billion slides created with Designer since launch!

Building on our momentum, today we’re announcing several new capabilities in Designer that allow people in large enterprises, and small and medium-sized businesses, to use branded templates and support those who don’t have a branded template to get started quickly with theme ideas. These new capabilities are designed to help people make effective slides and presentations with minimal time and effort while staying in their creative flow.

Get intelligent design recommendations and stay on brand with Designer for branded templates

One of our biggest asks from customers has been to make Designer work seamlessly with a company’s branded templates. With the launch of Designer for branded templates, companies can now make sure the design recommendations people see meet their corporate branding and visual identity guidelines.

Shareable video.

When working with branded templates, Design Ideas that people see are created directly from the layouts in the Slide Master, using the content on the user’s slides. Designer’s AI chooses the most suitable layouts for the content, intelligently crops images, and automatically recommends relevant icons and pictures. Organizations can design their templates for optimal Designer support, broadening the choices available to their users.

In today’s fast-paced work environments, people are pressed for time, and AI-powered features like Designer help people create visually engaging and immersive presentations with only a few clicks. Now users can get this streamlined experience while working with their organizations’ templates, using branded layouts instead of needing to improvise. Designer for branded templates is currently available to Office 365 Insiders subscribers for Windows 10 and Mac.

Easily create beautiful decks from scratch with Designer theme ideas

For people who don’t have a branded template but want to get started quickly and easily, we’re introducing theme ideas in Designer. Now getting a presentation started is easier than ever. When you open a blank presentation and enter words onto the slide, Designer recommends a selection of new high quality photographs that reflect the slide text, along with theme styles and complementary colors. These photos are fully licensed for commercial use and are coupled with one of PowerPoint’s high quality themes and a corresponding color palette to easily create visually impactful presentations with minimal effort.

Designer theme ideas is rolling out now in PowerPoint for Windows, Mac, and on the web for Office 365 subscribers.

Make data easily understood by adding Designer perspectives to your slides

Presenting data in slide decks can be challenging because people have difficulty conceptualizing large and unfamiliar measurements. Studies published by Microsoft Research have shown that adding relatable references for large numerical values makes information easier to understand and increases retention. That’s why we added this capability into PowerPoint Designer!

Thanks to an integration with Microsoft Research’s Perspective Engine, Designer can now recognize when a slide contains a large number that might be difficult to interpret and put into context by automatically augmenting the text with a corresponding perspective. With the additions of perspectives, Designer makes numerical slides more digestible and helps presenters effectively convey their information. For example: The size of Afghanistan, which is 652,232 km², is hard to interpret, but adding that it’s “about equal to the size of Texas” makes it easily understandable. These relative measurements are now automatically surfaced in Designer.

Designer perspectives is currently rolling out to Office 365 subscribers. Designer perspectives is currently available for English only.

Nail your next presentation with Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web

From classrooms to boardrooms, our belief is that everyone can improve how they present. Training and feedback help people gain confidence and empower them to achieve their personal and professional goals. Over the last few years, we’ve received feedback from educators, students, and customers that people want an easy way to practice their presentations to improve their public speaking abilities.

Today, we’re announcing the upcoming availability of Presenter Coach in PowerPoint. Presenting in front of a live audience is a vital life skill. Based on academic research and field studies, we’ve integrated presentation best practices into Presenter Coach to help people give more effective presentations.

Shareable video.

This feature allows you to enter rehearsal mode and while speaking you receive on-screen guidance about pacing, inclusive language, use of filler words, and culturally insensitive phrases. It even lets you know when you’re just reading off the slide. At the end of each rehearsal session, a detailed report with metrics for additional practice is provided. Presenter Coach will be available on PowerPoint for the web later this summer.

We’re excited to release these new capabilities to our customers and look forward to your continued feedback to help us improve PowerPoint. Thanks for your help along our incredible journey.

The post PowerPoint AI gets an upgrade and Designer surpasses a major milestone of 1 billion slides appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Transforming the Firstline Worker experience

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

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

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

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

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

Helping our customers succeed

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

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

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

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

Join us at the HITEC conference

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

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

Today, we’re excited to announce we’re working with Nasdaq and Refinitiv to pull current financial information for the full range of U.S. exchange-listed equities, including stocks on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the world’s largest exchange company, and from Refinitiv, one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure, right into the Excel Stocks Data Type.

The Stocks Data Type turns Excel into a more robust tool for tracking personal investments, enabling you to track the latest stock prices, trading volume, and other financial information without leaving Excel to search outside sources. Now with trusted, real-time data from Nasdaq and Refinitiv, this becomes even better. Stocks in Excel now expands financial data to include bitcoin, bonds, international currencies, extended-hours pricing information and information about the company, like industry and company description, in addition to other previously available data like mutual funds and stock indexes, such as the Nasdaq Composite, Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and more.

“Expanding the reach of real-time market data is essential to making markets more accessible,” said Oliver Albers, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Partnerships for Nasdaq’s Global Information Services. “Our collaboration with Microsoft is a significant step towards bringing important market information to individual investors. Microsoft’s focus on empowering individuals aligns perfectly with our mission to make financial markets more inclusive.”

“Anyone with an interest in financial information needs quick, reliable data to navigate today’s complex and fast-moving global markets,” said Brennan Carley, Global Head of Enterprise at Refinitiv. “Refinitiv has many years’ experience in delivering data to financial professionals within Microsoft Excel and we are now delighted to give everyday investors access to these capabilities via our partnership with Microsoft.”

To understand more deeply how Stocks in Excel works, let’s look at the Microsoft stock. When you type in MSFT and click Stocks, Excel recognizes it as a stock and gives you an option to convert it into a rich entity linked with many properties of related information, including real-time attributes such as Price, Change, Last trade time, 52-week high/low, and other pricing information. You can choose to capture these attributes in different cells or use them directly in formulas. Recently updated data cards provide a better experience for Excel users working with such information allowing a quick preview of available categories. Imagine adding a list of ticker symbols from your stock portfolio in one column and having Excel provide the price and your daily gains or losses, refreshed with the click of a button.

By bringing together the power of Microsoft-backed data services with highly trusted sources of market information like Nasdaq and Refinitiv, we’re helping everyday investors like you access the same data as the market sees, enabling better financial literacy. And this is just the beginning: soon, you’ll be able to see historical data and automatically update the prices every few minutes.

We’re excited to continue our journey to continually improve Excel to help you get the most out of your data. Start tracking your personal investments using Excel for Office 365 today and this template to help you track your investments.

The post Microsoft, Nasdaq, and Refinitiv empower everyday investors with real-time data and insights in Excel appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what’s new in May.

Updates from Microsoft Build to help develop people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

At Microsoft Build this month, we announced several new capabilities in Microsoft 365 to help developers create people-centered, cross-platform experiences.

Tap into your organization’s collective knowledge with Microsoft Search—We announced the general availability of Microsoft Search, an intelligent enterprise search experience that delivers a unified, consistent search experience to help you discover relevant people, content, commands, and activities across all the Microsoft 365 experiences you use daily. Wherever you’re working across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Search can help to complete a task, pick up where you left off, or discover answers or insights. The new Microsoft Search experience is available to all Microsoft 365 users now. To get started, try searching for me in Office.com or my documents in Bing.com.

Derive deep insights about effective work patterns with Microsoft Graph data connect—We also announced the general availability of Microsoft Graph data connect, a service that helps organizations bring together productivity data from the Microsoft Graph with their own business data and derive deep insights about effective work patterns. Microsoft Graph data connect is available through Workplace Analytics.

Modernize your command-line app experience with the new Windows Terminal—In addition, we announced the preview of Windows Terminal, a new feature-rich terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells, including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming and styling, and more. You can get started with the open source code on GitHub; public previews will be released to the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 this summer.

App updates to help people do their best work

This month, we introduced capabilities to help you get more done—including updates to SharePoint and the OneNote, Yammer, and Microsoft To-Do apps.

Deliver an intelligent intranet and build employee engagement—This month at the SharePoint Conference, we announced several new app updates coming this summer. SharePoint home sites deliver a new way for you to bring together news, events, content, conversations, and videos to deliver an engaging “landing page” experience that reflects your voice, your priorities, and your brand. With the upcoming Yammer question and answer feature, you can ask a question and then you or a group admin can mark the best answer. And soon you’ll be able to securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app.

Reduce eye fatigue with Dark Mode in OneNote for Windows 10—OneNote for Windows 10 now offers Dark Mode, giving you a darker canvas and adjusted color scheme to reduce eye fatigue or simply have a change in (screen) scenery. Dark Mode is now available for Office Insiders. Additionally, you can now send an email in Outlook directly to your OneNote for the Windows 10 app. To get started, get or update your OneNote for Windows 10 app.

Improve your focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration with MyAnalytics—A new MyAnalytics experience delivers outcome-oriented insights to help you make progress in four key areas: network, collaboration, focus, and wellbeing. For example, insights that previously showed you the hours you spent on email, chats, calls, and meetings outside your working hours over the past week now show you the number of days you successfully disconnected after work over the past month. That way, you can set goals and build habits that help you achieve more quiet days. This new experience is generally available to Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Office 365 Enterprise customers who have MyAnalytics as part of the E5 plan, as an add-on to E1 and E3, or with Workplace Analytics.

Add data to Excel directly from a photo with your iOS device—Using the Excel app on your iOS device, you can now take a picture of a printed data table and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This image-recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter that data. This capability works across 21 languages and is now available for the Excel app on both Android and iOS.

Create engaging videos with Microsoft Forms in Microsoft Stream—You can now seamlessly add quizzes, forms, or polling directly into Microsoft Stream videos. The Forms integration into Microsoft Stream helps presenters interact with their audience and gives them a way to solicit feedback and measure participants’ comprehension. To get started, click Add a Microsoft Form on the Interactivity tab in Microsoft Stream. In addition, you can also now securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app. Download the latest Microsoft Stream mobile app for iOS and Android to get started.

Make tasks more visible across Microsoft 365 with Microsoft To-Do and Planner—This month, we announced that To-Do integrates with Planner. Now, you can see all your tasks across Microsoft 365 in To-Do, including flagged emails in Outlook and tasks assigned in Planner. View your tasks, deadlines, and details, and plan to get more done throughout your days. To get started, update your To-Do app and click Show List when prompted to Track tasks assigned in Planner.

Streamline records management and access control

New privacy controls allow you to meet compliance obligations and efficiently manage access requests at enterprise scale.

Streamline records management and monitor inappropriate conduct—Several new Advanced Data Governance capabilities help you streamline compliance requirements. You can now use native connectors to import non-Microsoft 365 data—such as data from Facebook and Twitter—into the Microsoft cloud for archival purposes. A new records management solution helps you easily manage business, legal, and HR records in a single location. Lastly, a new machine learning classifier helps you automatically identify offensive language across Exchange email, Microsoft Teams, and select third-party sources. For subscribers of E5 or Advanced Compliance add-on licenses, explore the new capabilities in the Office 365 Security & Compliance center today.

Govern access rights with powerful compliance and auditing controls—We recently announced the public preview of Azure Active Directory (AD) entitlement management. This new solution helps remove barriers to internal and external collaboration by automating employee and partner access requests, approvals, auditing, and review for Office 365, thousands of popular SaaS apps, and any line-of-business app integrated with Azure AD. The feature is available for preview today for users who have Azure AD Premium P2 or EMS E5 licensing. To get started, visit the Azure portal.

Other updates

• The Yammer conversations web part for SharePoint is now generally available, enabling you to integrate conversations from any Yammer group, topic, user, or home feed with your SharePoint pages, news articles, or SharePoint site.
• OneDrive differential sync now supports all file types, helping you accelerate sync and reduce network utilization by only syncing the part of files that have been changed.
• Microsoft Authentication Libraries .NET is now generally available, making it easier than ever for developers to securely sign in and authenticate any Microsoft identity, from your own APIs to Microsoft Graph.
• Windows Hello now has FIDO2 certification, furthering our journey to eliminate passwords. Developers can now leverage standards-based protocols and devices to enable easy, secure authentication to online services using face or fingerprint.
• A new app registrations experience in the Azure portal is now generally available, improving the developer experience and making it simpler to configure and manage all your apps that sign in to Azure AD accounts and personal Microsoft accounts.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in May—new tools to streamline compliance and make collaboration inclusive and engaging appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Quickly capture paper-based data to unlock new insights

To help you bring analog data into Excel, we developed the Insert Data from Picture feature, which became available for Android this past March, and as of today, is now generally available for iOS with the iPhone Excel app. Also, starting today, the feature will support 21 languages on both iOS and Android. With this feature, you can easily grab any data in a table format—financial spreadsheets, work schedules, task lists, timetables, and so on—and convert it to a digital format in Excel, so you can arrange and analyze that information quickly and in context to make better decisions on the fly.

The Insert Data from Picture feature works by combining advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology, layout understanding techniques, and machine learning models to transform paper-based information into digital data. We’ve used these and other technologies across Office apps, including the PDF Reflow feature for Word and Office Lens and in the Seeing AI app.

Read more about the Insert Data from Picture feature in this article.

Insert Data from Picture is now available in 21 Latin languages.

Convert handwritten notes to digital text with ease

Let’s look at how we’re helping users go from analog to digital. Before, you had to copy whiteboard notes by hand at the end of meetings. Later, you could take photos of whiteboards with your phone. Either way, you still had to type in the notes later. Now, with ink grab you can take a picture of notes scribbled on a physical whiteboard, convert them to digital ink in the Microsoft Whiteboard app, and continue brainstorming with others on the digital canvas. We also built handwriting recognition into tools like OneNote, so you can convert notes to text quickly to share in messages, documents, or presentations.

We’re also exploring more advanced ways to help you convert analog data to digital information that you can use across your Office apps. For example, we envision that you’ll be able to take a picture of handwritten notes on paper and import the text directly. Other areas we’re exploring include scanning a picture, PDF annotation, and signing.

Analyzing the physical world

In addition to importing data from a physical piece of paper, there are many other ways we see customers leveraging Excel to help them analyze data from the real world. For example, with the Hacking STEM program, teachers use Excel to help students explore and analyze real-world phenomena. Leveraging the Excel Data Streamer add-in, students can easily move data from the physical world in and out of Excel—introducing them to data science and the internet of things (IoT)—for example, using pressure sensors to measure brain impact during a concussion.

Brain impact workbook using Data Streamer in Excel.

At Microsoft, we’re dedicated to finding ways to build artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning models into user apps to help you be more productive and stay focused on critical deliverables instead of mundane tasks.

Download the Excel iPhone app today. To learn more about Insert Data from Picture, read this article and watch this Inside Excel episode.

Availability note: You can find the list of all the languages Insert Data from Picture supports in this article.

The post Take your analog data digital for a faster, more efficient way to work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

The world-class applications in Microsoft 365—including SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow—enable digital transformation for more than 500,000 customer organizations and 180 million commercial active users.

Today, I’d like to share highlights of our innovations across the following areas:

• The intelligent intranet featuring SharePoint home sites.
• Innovations in Yammer and Microsoft Stream for employee engagement and communications.
• Intelligent file experiences, sharing, and controls with OneDrive.
• Turbocharging Microsoft 365 performance, security, intelligence, and innovation.

The intelligent intranet featuring SharePoint home sites

Visionaries know that an intelligent intranet powers employee experience, organizational alignment and cultural transformation. The heart of the digital workplace, an intelligent intranet provides shared content and solutions for collaboration, connects people and content across teams and siloes to harness collective knowledge, and drives employee engagement and communications.

Today, one such visionary—Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ Kevin Schramm, Head of IT Strategy and Operations—shared their compelling story. When Takeda, a world-leading pharmaceutical company based in Japan, acquired Shire, a U.S.-based company, they built a SharePoint intranet in just four months to connect the workplace, drive organizational alignment, and power communication for more than 60,000 employees worldwide. Kevin explained, “Starting on Day 1, we wanted to begin to create a shared culture that reflected our values. A new intranet was a key part of representing the combined company to our employees. SharePoint allowed us to meet very aggressive deadlines and helped bring our organizations together, successfully.”

For more than a decade, SharePoint has powered award-winning intranets for hundreds of thousands of customers, leading the industry across every geography and industry. With the move to the cloud, customers have inspired us to deliver even more out-of-box capabilities that accelerate time-to-value. Since the Future of SharePoint event only three years ago, SharePoint has reinvented the intelligent intranet, delivering flexible solutions for teamwork, engaging employee experiences, and AI-powered search and content management. Communication sites, organizational news, hubs, modern team sites, pages, lists, and libraries are now available across browsers and devices, and in the highly rated SharePoint mobile app.

Shareable video.

SharePoint home sites

Today, we announced a revolutionary step forward, further accelerating time-to-value for customers. SharePoint home sites are an intelligent, integrated employee experience—a landing page—for your organization that:

• Connects the workplace with Microsoft Search and megamenu navigation.
• Shares relevant news and content to each user based on their role and place in the organization.
• Engages employees with conversation and compelling video powered by Yammer and Microsoft Stream.
• Powers individual productivity with personalized content, information, and navigation.

SharePoint home sites provide a dynamic, engaging, and personalized employee experience for the organization.

A home site is a SharePoint communication site with superpowers that is:

• An organizational news source, by default. News published to the home site is visually marked to indicate it is official news and syndicated to all users with access to the home site.
• The landing page for the new home view on the SharePoint mobile app.
• Connected to the enhanced SharePoint start page (formerly referred to as “SharePoint home”), which features improved navigation, insights into activity across your sites, views of your documents to help you get back to your work quickly, and the enhanced saved for later view of news and content you’ve flagged for review.
• An enterprise-wide Microsoft Search experience, from the search box in the suite bar.

Where intranet portal projects of the past were often measured in months, you can now deploy a home site in minutes and then—with no code—customize and brand the out-of-box web parts, navigation, and site design to reflect the voice and priorities of your organization.

Of course, SharePoint remains a powerful platform for delivering applications on the intranet. Now, you can add any of the hundreds of third-party applications available in Teams to any SharePoint site. And you can embed solutions built with the SharePoint Framework by your developers or by our extensive network of SharePoint partners. We’re pleased to announce more than a dozen partners have agreed to integrate their intranet offerings closely with the SharePoint intelligent intranet to empower our customers with an extensive range of solutions that are optimized for performance and compatibility with the SharePoint mobile application and future innovations.

We’re thrilled to introduce home sites and to empower customers to build wholly new, intelligent employee experiences. Learn more about SharePoint home sites and other innovations for the intelligent intranet.

Innovations in Yammer and Microsoft Stream for employee engagement and communications

SharePoint home sites feature out-of-box integration with Yammer and Microsoft Stream. Today, we showcased innovations for Yammer and Microsoft Stream that unlock high-value scenarios for employee engagement, communication, and learning.

Innovations for Yammer

Yammer connects people across the organization with open conversation. Yammer’s lightweight conversational experience across devices fosters inclusivity by giving every employee a voice and the ability to express thoughts, ideas, and feedback. With the new Yammer question and answer feature, you can ask a question and then you or a group admin can mark the best answer—making the knowledge easier to share and reuse in the future. Additionally, a group can feature intelligent, bot-like responses to frequently asked questions.

Yammer question and answer makes it easier for people to find answers across the organization.

To accelerate your organization’s success with Yammer, we’re pleased to announce that e-Discovery for Yammer will be available to all customers using Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups. In addition, to support the unique data residency requirements for European customers, we’re accelerating availability of in-geo data storage for Yammer in the EU, available today. Now, Yammer messages and files attached to Yammer messages will be stored at-rest in our EU datacenters, for new Yammer networks in the EU.

New capabilities for Microsoft Stream

Customers are increasingly turning to video as a compelling way to support communications, learning, and engagement. Today, we celebrated new announcements for Microsoft Stream, powering intelligent video in Microsoft 365. You can securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app for iOS and Android. We also demonstrated how you can easily insert polls, surveys, or quizzes into videos with Microsoft Forms.

Record, upload, and share video securely with the Microsoft Stream mobile app.

Embed a quiz, poll, or survey in a video with Microsoft Stream.

Update on SharePoint spaces

At the SharePoint Conference 2018, we shared an early look at SharePoint spaces, which enable anyone to create compelling, mixed reality experiences viewable across headsets and browsers. Customer interest has been overwhelming, with over 1,800 companies across the globe and across industries applying for our limited preview. We’ve been working with a handful of those customers to develop our plans for SharePoint spaces, and we’ve been collaborating on industry standards for 3D and virtual reality.

Today, we gave another small glimpse into our progress by showing an example used here at Microsoft, which allows people to experience our original campus and to connect with the vision for the new campus using 2D and 3D video and 360-degree images. We look forward to sharing much more about SharePoint spaces at Ignite 2019.

At Microsoft, our own cultural transformation was scaled to include more than 110,000 employees worldwide by engaging employees with Yammer and live events. We’re excited to learn from our customers, who are now empowered with the same capabilities to drive cultural transformation, organizational alignment, open conversations, compelling communications, and immersive experiences for learning and development.

Learn more about announcements for Yammer and new features for Microsoft Stream.

Intelligent file experiences, improved sharing and controls with OneDrive

OneDrive is the files app in Microsoft 365 where you can work with all your files—your individual work files and the files shared with you across Microsoft 365—on PC or Mac, across browsers, and across devices with highly rated apps for iOS and Android. Improvements to sync include differential sync for all files—Office files already feature differential sync—which will accelerate sync and reduce network utilization, and support for Windows Virtual Desktop, currently in preview. These improvements enable organizations to deliver cloud-connected experiences and users to work with cloud files within native experiences like File Explorer and Finder.

OneDrive lets you find the files that matter most, with Microsoft Search in OneDrive and new, AI-powered experiences that provide personalized recommendations. OneDrive’s enhanced file hover cards will show you file insights, activity, and lifecycle signals such as DLP policies. And the new save for later feature lets you flag a file that you want to return to at a better time.

The OneDrive web application features a new, full-fidelity files experience for shared libraries, enabling you to sync files to your PC or Mac, work with metadata columns and custom views, and preview more than 320 file types—including 360-degree images and AutoCAD DWG files. And collaborators can now add comments to any of the 320+ file types—including images, CAD drawings, PDFs, and more—with new support for comments on non-Office files.

Intelligent experiences in OneDrive include a full-fidelity files experience for shared libraries, including conditional formatting and metadata; file hover cards with file insights and activity; and rich collaborative features.

We made it easier to collaborate on files with people inside and outside your organization—within the sharing policies set by your organization—directly from OneDrive. You can now create a shared library with a streamlined experience backed by an Office 365 group, allowing you to specify the people you want to share with. Of course, you can also share files in Teams, the hub for teamwork, where a new file sharing control in Teams chat lets you choose whether to upload a copy of the file or share a link, for which you can configure the access provided by the link. We’re also bringing the new sharing control to Outlook.

Manage access when you share files in a Teams chat.

Manage access when you share files in Outlook.

Finally, we’re introducing a new request files capability. You can select a folder and invite people to add files. Everyone can upload files to the folder and see only their files. And, as files are added, you receive a notification. Request files unlocks scenarios where files need to be collected from multiple individuals, while preventing individuals from seeing others’ files.

Learn more about these highlights, when they’ll arrive in your tenant, and the rest of the innovations we announced for sharing and working together on files on the OneDrive blog.

Powering content collaboration with turbocharged SharePoint file storage

Microsoft 365 is the most feature-rich, intelligent, and trusted cloud for your content. SharePoint powers content collaboration in Microsoft 365, and we’ve invested billions of dollars across research and engineering to drive massive improvements to the capabilities, performance, scalability, and security of Microsoft 365.

Today, we spotlighted some of those “behind the scenes” investments:

• Accessing data from Microsoft 365 is ten times faster than it was just two years ago.
• Your experience in Office 365 is three times faster than a year ago, with investments across our architecture that accelerate your experience even when you are working far from your own datacenter.
• To drive faster, more responsive intelligence and insights, we’ve worked so that content you add or modify is searchable in seconds.
• You can view more than 320 file types, without requiring dedicated applications, across Microsoft 365 web, mobile, and desktop applications and Windows 10.
• Differential sync, coming to OneDrive, will synchronize large files significantly faster and considerably reduce network utilization by sync.

SharePoint investments in performance, scalability, collaboration, and intelligence are powering significant innovations for content collaboration across Microsoft 365. Recent examples include the release of Microsoft Search to general availability across SharePoint, Office.com, and Bing.com, and revolutionary new capabilities for real-time, intelligence-assisted collaboration that we previewed in our demonstration of the Fluid Framework.

You can learn more about the SharePoint file storage improvements that make Microsoft 365 the best cloud for all of your content and collaboration in Turbocharging Microsoft 365 cloud user experiences.

Finally, we continue to invest in capabilities that enable IT organizations to govern users, devices, and content with industry leading security and compliance controls, so that IT can empower the business and rest easy that information is protected.

• Classification labels provide consistent management of information lifecycle, security, and compliance across Microsoft 365.
• High-value compliance control and global footprint, including general availability of Multi-geo Capabilities for SharePoint and Office 365 groups.
• New enterprise information archiving features to natively archive third-party data into Microsoft 365, new solutions to help organizations achieve compliance requirements, such as Records Management, and updates to Supervision including new out of the box machine learning models to harness intelligence and identify questionable content for further review. These solutions are generally available with Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Compliance offerings.

You can read more about today’s announcements for security, compliance, and manageability in Updates to SharePoint security, administration, and migration and New Records Management solution and machine learning updates come to Microsoft 365 compliance.

Inspiration and next steps

The innovations and vision we announced today are inspired by you—your success, your stories, your questions, and your wish lists. Our team listens closely and creates capabilities that we hope in turn inspire you to transform your organization with an intelligent workplace.

Watch the SharePoint Virtual Summit starting May 21, 2019 at 12 PM PT and keep your feedback coming. We’ll see you at Ignite 2019 where we’ll have—believe it or not—even more big announcements to share. Until then, I encourage you sign up for our new monthly update, which will be the best place to keep in touch with announcements, guidance, and tips across Microsoft 365’s communication and collaboration experiences.

Also, see the following resources to learn more:

• SharePoint home sites: a landing for your organization on the intelligent intranet
• New Yammer investments add engagement and compliance capabilities
• New Microsoft Stream mobile features, interactivity and more announced at SharePoint Conference 2019
• OneDrive announcements—SharePoint Conference 2019
• Turbocharging Microsoft 365 cloud user experiences
• Getting started with Microsoft Search
• Updates to SharePoint security, administration, and migration
• New Records Management solution and machine learning updates come to Microsoft 365 compliance
• What’s new for SharePoint Server
• Announcements for SharePoint developers
• Microsoft adoption resources center
• Optimizing business solutions with SharePoint and Office 365 at SPC19

The post New SharePoint home sites headline Microsoft 365 innovations for the intelligent workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We celebrate because our customers are empowering their employees both with the accessible technology built into Microsoft 365, and with the inclusive cultural practices that make people love coming to work. We are comparing notes and learning from them as we also build that same inclusive culture at Microsoft.

Here in the U.K., we recently celebrated a milestone—a point on our journey—with recognition from the U.K. Government as a Disability Confident Leader. This status is awarded to organizations that commit to diversity and inclusion and encourage suppliers and vendors to do the same. Our team has worked tirelessly to put processes in place that can both create and sustain a diverse and inclusive culture; attracting and recruiting people with disabilities via our global Inclusive Hiring Program; training managers to understand the needs of those with visible and non-visible disabilities; assessing people for roles more flexibly so those with disabilities have the best opportunity to show their skills; adjusting workplaces to include sign language interpreters, and ensuring all staff have access to disability equality awareness training.

Looking ahead

We also look ahead to our big vision—an accessible and inclusive workplace for everyone—and what more we can do as a company and as a community to make it a reality. Today we’re excited to announce that live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint are rolling out now, and will soon be generally available to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscribers worldwide for Windows, Mac, and the web. We also look forward to the coming release of other new inclusive technologies built into Microsoft 365, like live captions and subtitles in Teams Meetings.

Present inclusively with live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint—We know how powerful a great presentation can be—whether it inspires us or aligns us to a common goal. Now, with support for 12 spoken languages and 60+ on-screen captions or subtitle languages, people who are deaf or hard of hearing can be included in these important team building moments. Additionally, with an increasingly global and remote set of collaborators, those who speak a different language from the presenter, or are listening in from a loud environment, can also more easily be included.

Transform the meeting experience for people with disabilities—We also know the critical role meetings play in how we work, and recently announced that live captions and subtitles will also be available in Teams Meetings. These capabilities are coming soon as a preview in English and complement the captioning and transcription features already generally available for recorded Teams meetings and live events in Stream, Teams, and Yammer. Whether in a 1-1 with your manager, or a company-wide all hands, everyone should feel included when the team gets together to meet, including people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

We constantly release new features and improvements to make our products not just compliant with the latest standards, but empowering for all users, both with and without disability. We encourage you to read all about these features in the Microsoft Accessibility Features Sway.

Building the inclusive workplace together

Many of our customers are committed to making this vision of an inclusive workplace a reality and are partnering with us to make it happen. Last month the Federal Government of Canada chose Microsoft as a partner in their effort to create a more modern and accessible Public Service. The Honourable Carla Qualtrough, Minister of Public Services and Procurement and Accessibility, said, “Equipping our public servants with accessible, reliable, and innovative technologies will unleash the potential of our world-class public service and result in better service delivery for all Canadians.” Here at Microsoft we agree—only when we represent the diversity we see in the world internally can we build the most innovative technology and serve our customers as they ought to be served.

We also see Rogers Communications, a leading Canadian communications and media company, shares our vision of a more inclusive workplace. Rogers is doing everything from transforming their physical workplace to be more collaborative and inclusive, to using the accessible technologies built into the Microsoft 365 applications their employees can use every day. Best of all, we’re helping and learning from each other along the way—our teams work regularly with Rogers to understand how our technology can better support their commitment to building an inclusive workplace, and Rogers’ Persons with Disability Diversity group works with us to learn how we embed Inclusive Design principles into our products and our culture. Read the full blog, published today, to learn more about how Rogers is building an accessible and inclusive culture to benefit employees, customers, and the broader community.

Join us!

We have so much more to do—as an organization, an employer, a leader, and a follower—in this journey towards an accessible and inclusive workplace, and we hope you’ll join us. Visit the Microsoft Accessibility site to learn more about our approach. Share your learnings with #LearningTogether and #GAAD and continue the conversation with @MSFTEnable on Twitter.

The post Building the inclusive workplace we imagine, together appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Via a dashboard, Insights in Outlook, and weekly email digests, MyAnalytics provides insights and AI-powered suggestions to help you work smarter. A new MyAnalytics experience—generally available starting today—makes the insights more outcome-oriented in four key areas: focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration. For example, insights that previously showed you the hours you spent on email, chats, calls, and meetings outside your working hours over the past week now show you the number of days you successfully disconnected after work over the past month. That way, you can set goals and build habits that help you achieve more quiet days.

Shareable video.

To make these insights even more actionable, in the coming quarters, we’ll introduce the ability to create personal plans to make it easy to set goals and take steps toward improving your work patterns each day. Focus plan will be the first in this series of MyAnalytics updates. By helping you plan focus time on a regular basis to complete your most pressing tasks and limiting distractions, focus plan in MyAnalytics will help you balance collaboration with meaningful output. Today, we’re unveiling the core elements of the focus plan.

Create a personal focus plan

Productivity preferences are different for everyone, but experts on deep work report that setting aside regular blocks of time to focus on challenging work can have massive benefits. With the focus plan, MyAnalytics will help you establish a daily focus time routine. The focus plan will offer you the flexibility to have daily focus time booked automatically based on your availability, or surface suggestions to book focus time manually as you work in Outlook. The automatic booking algorithm will prioritize booking morning hours, if they are open, so you can be at your peak capacity for tackling challenging analytics tasks.

Maintain your focus routine

If you receive a meeting invite that conflicts with booked focus time, Outlook will provide inline suggestions and weekly email digests with actionable messages—making it easy to reschedule the focus time right from your inbox and maintain your routine.

Make time for outstanding tasks

To help you set aside time for pressing tasks—tasks you promised to complete for coworkers and tasks they asked you to get done—new inline suggestions and adaptive cards in email digests will be introduced in Outlook. These will use AI to surface outstanding tasks from emails, making it seamless for you to reserve focus time for them.

Work uninterrupted during focus time

Information worker studies find it takes an average of around 23 minutes to return to your original task after interruptions or self-distractions. To help limit these when you are trying to get deep, meaningful work done, Microsoft Teams will automatically switch to “Do Not Disturb” during focus time. Your status will be set to “Focus” and you will only get notifications for messages that are urgent or from contacts with priority access during focus time.

We’re on a journey at Microsoft to build technologies that empower you to do your best work. Visit the new MyAnalytics personal dashboard and check out the weekly email digests—generally available today. They can help you better understand your current work patterns and get actionable insights to prioritize focus, disconnect and recharge, keep up with important contacts and relationships, and improve team collaboration.

Stay tuned in the coming months for the preview of focus plan to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise customers who have MyAnalytics as part of the E5 plan, as an add-on to E1 and E3, or with Workplace Analytics. Over time, focus plan will become available with additional plans that have business hosted email (Exchange Online).

The post Minimize distractions and stay focused with AI-powered updates in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Underpinning all of this innovation is the Microsoft Graph, our customers’ secure and compliant record of their productivity activity in the Microsoft Cloud. It helps developers create people-centered, cross-platform experiences by providing context about an organization’s work that flows across documents, apps, and devices. The Microsoft Graph powers the most important components of Microsoft 365, from “born in the cloud” experiences like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Search, and MyAnalytics, to modern, cloud-connected collaboration in existing apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Read on for the latest updates to these experiences and the underlying developer technologies that make them possible.

Leverage the power of the open web with Microsoft Edge, whether you’re browsing or developing

In December, we announced our intention to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop. We’re excited to work with the larger Chromium open source community to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers. Today at Build, we’re announcing a host of new features for the next version of Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 that address some of the fundamental frustrations with browsers today, including:

• Internet Explorer mode—Internet Explorer mode integrates Internet Explorer directly into the new Microsoft Edge via a new tab. This allows businesses to run legacy Internet Explorer-based apps in a modern browser.
• Privacy Tools—Additional privacy controls which allow customers to choose from 3 levels of privacy in Microsoft Edge—Unrestricted, Balanced, and Strict. Depending on which option you pick, Microsoft Edge adjusts how third parties can track you across the web, giving customers more choice and transparency for a more personalized experience.
• Collections—Addressing the information overload customers feel with the web today, Collections allows you to collect, organize, share and export content more efficiently and with Office integration.

And for developers who have built Chromium compatible websites or extensions, we’re ensuring they’ll see the same compatibility in the Edge browser without additional work. These features and more will begin to roll out over time as we get closer to the broader launch of the next version of Microsoft Edge. To download the latest preview builds, visit the Microsoft Edge Insider site. For more detail on today’s announcements, please visit our developer blog.

A new class of shared, interactive web experiences powered by the Fluid Framework

We’re also committed to making the web more productive and collaborative for all browsers. Today we’re announcing the Fluid Framework, a developer technology for building a new class of shared, interactive experiences on the web. It offers three key capabilities. First, experiences powered by the Fluid Framework will support multi-person coauthoring on web and document content at a speed and scale not yet achieved in the industry. 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. We’ll make this technology broadly available to developers and integrate it into Microsoft 365 experiences like Word, Teams, and Outlook to transform the way that you work with these tools. We will launch both the software developer kit and the first experiences powered by the Fluid Framework later this year.

Moving from commands to conversations: a new approach to intelligent agents

At Build this morning, we demonstrated a new approach to virtual agents that moves beyond the restrictions of self-contained commands to a truly conversational experience. The traditional approach to virtual agents relies on a manually curated set of skills or intents to map what a person says to the appropriate action in a back-end system. As a result, virtual agents today can’t combine skills or carry the context of one interaction into the next.

Last year, Microsoft acquired a company called Semantic Machines, bringing with it some of the world’s leaders in conversational AI. Together with Microsoft researchers, we’ve built breakthrough new conversational AI technology that will power a new class of multi-turn, multi-domain, and multi-agent experiences. Our technology builds up memory from turn to turn to let you get more done. It crosses skill boundaries, connecting together back-end services, both within Microsoft and externally. And it’s aimed towards a future where every organization has their own agents with their own unique contexts, just like they have their own websites and apps today, and where those agents can seamlessly interoperate.

This new conversational engine will be integrated into Cortana and made available to developers through the Bot Framework, as well as other Azure surfaces and beyond, powering conversational experiences across the company and our customer ecosystem.

Derive deep insights about effective work patterns with Microsoft Graph data connect

Data can be a powerful enabler of cultural change and new ways to work. Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Graph data connect, a service that helps organizations bring together productivity data from the Microsoft Graph with their own business data securely and at scale using Azure Data Factory. The Microsoft Graph is an incredible resource to help individuals and organizations understand how they work. But without data on the context and outcomes of their work—like sales or line of business performance—it’s an incomplete picture. By allowing organizations to maintain control of their data, while bringing it together in a secure and compliant way, data connect lets organizations derive deep insights about effective work patterns that they can promote throughout their organization. Visit this blog post to learn more about all of the Microsoft Graph announcements at Build 2019.

Use Microsoft Search to tap into your organization’s collective knowledge

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Search, rolling out to customers now. The collective knowledge of your organization is one of its most powerful tools, and Microsoft Search provides the ability to tap into it without leaving the flow of your work. You’ll now find the Search box in the same prominent place across Microsoft 365 experiences you use daily, including Office, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Windows, and Bing. And through a deep connection to the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Search will help you discover relevant people, content, commands, and activities from across Microsoft 365 where and when you need them—from your desktop at work to your mobile device when you’re on the move. Visit this blog post to learn more about Microsoft Search.

Minimize distractions and stay focused at work with MyAnalytics

In a modern workplace where back to back meetings and urgent requests are the norm, you might have difficulty finding the time, space, and concentration required to do your best work. This summer, we’re launching a preview of new Microsoft 365 capabilities to help you prioritize focus time—blocks of time reserved on your calendar for deep, uninterrupted work. Through the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft 365 experiences like Microsoft Teams will automatically protect scheduled focus times by holding notifications, so you can work without distractions. And to help you establish a focus time routine, MyAnalytics will offer a focus plan that gives you the flexibility to have daily focus time booked automatically based on your availability and surfaces AI-powered suggestions to book focus time for outstanding tasks as you work in Outlook.

Shareable video.

Act swiftly with Actionable Messages in Outlook and inline tasks in Word

Prompt action is essential in an increasingly fast-moving world. Available now, developers can build Actionable Messages for Outlook mobile by taking advantage of Adaptive Cards in Outlook. Actionable Messages enable people to take action now, without having to switch apps—making it faster to get things done. With an Actionable Message, you can approve expense reports, grant document access, book focus time, or answer quick surveys right from your inbox. In addition, you can now give others a digital tap on the shoulder with an @mention inline in a Word document assigning colleague a task, asking a question, or prompting a quick review without ever leaving the document. Look for inline tasks in Word Online in late summer.

Ideas in Word: your AI-powered editor in the cloud

Throughout Microsoft 365 we use AI to make people more productive by extending their capabilities and supporting their work. Today we’re announcing Ideas in Word, giving every Word user an AI-powered editor in the cloud. Ideas follows along as you write and provides intelligent suggestions to make your writing more concise, readable, and inclusive. It can even use machine learning to suggest a rewrite for a tricky phrase. Ideas will also help when you’re reading documents by providing estimated reading times, extracting key points, and decoding acronyms using data from the Microsoft Graph. A preview of Ideas is coming to Word Online this June. To learn more about AI in Office and throughout Microsoft, read the Microsoft AI blog.

Microsoft Teams: a hub for all your teams’ apps

Microsoft Teams will also be a central topic in the Microsoft 365 presence at Build this year—both as an app and as a developer platform. It plays a crucial role as the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365, and it’s now used by more than 500,000 organizations as a result. We continue to innovate with Teams, adding recent features like live captions, customized backgrounds, data loss protection, and a magical whiteboard camera. And today we’re announcing support for new policies that allow IT administrators to customize their users’ Teams experience by deploying and pinning third-party and line-of-business apps to specific roles or departments.

New developer tools for Microsoft 365

Finally, none of this would be possible without developers creating experiences for the future of work. Kevin Gallo, Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Developer Platform, talks about the new developer tools across Microsoft 365 in more depth in this blog post. We’re delivering exciting new tools for developers, like the brand-new Windows Terminal that’s modernized to support how developers build today. The new React Native for Windows delivers a simple way for developers to write cross platform web code with a native feel. And Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 improves Linux compatibility, and can run Docker containers natively to simplify development.

We’re excited to share the latest updates to Microsoft 365 experiences and the developer platform. To see these technologies in action, watch the Vision Keynote, Microsoft 365 Tech Keynote, and a host of Microsoft 365 sessions on the Build 2019 site. We can’t wait to see what you build.

The post New people-centered experiences in Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We are excited to announce that earlier this week we released an update to Office that reflects these principles.

Office is a connected experience

The way we use technology to be productive at work and at home is changing. We work more on the go, we use more than one device to complete our tasks, and we often collaborate as part of a team—even when that team is our family and friends. At Microsoft, we’re committed to providing you with the best-in-class applications and experiences to meet these modern needs, while respecting your privacy and keeping you in control of your data.

We continue to introduce new and exciting capabilities to Office to help you create, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. Sometimes it’s as simple as helping you find a document you wrote a week ago, or helping you find the perfect image for a school report. Or maybe your team needs to collaborate and communicate on a project in real-time across different devices. Office can help you create professional-looking presentations by suggesting design layouts for your PowerPoint slides, and it can also help you find key insights in complex data sets.

To deliver these experiences, Office uses the power of the Microsoft Cloud. Like any other connected service or website, required service data must be shared between your computer and Microsoft to enable these features.

For example: Perhaps you would like PowerPoint to provide live subtitles as you present and even translate your words into a different language. To transcribe and translate your spoken words, PowerPoint sends a recording of your voice to our Speech and Translation service, where it’s automatically machine transcribed and translated. The generated text is returned to your computer, so that PowerPoint can display it on the screen in (almost) real-time. Your voice and words are used only to do the transcription and translation you’ve asked us to do.

If you want to learn more about which connected experiences are available to you in Office, please read Connected experiences in Office.

You’re in control of cloud connected experiences

We understand the importance of keeping you and your organization in control of connected experiences when working in Office apps. With this update, you now have settings that allow you to disable or re-enable the following types of connected experiences, including:

• Experiences that analyze your content. Experiences that use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights, and similar features. For example, PowerPoint Designer or Editor in Word.
• Experiences that download online content. Experiences that allow you to search and download online content, including templates, images, 3D models, videos, and reference materials to enhance your documents. For example, Office templates or PowerPoint QuickStarter.
• Other connected experiences. Experiences such as document collaboration can be also turned off by disconnecting the Office desktop apps from the Microsoft Cloud.

Some services are essential to how Office apps function and cannot be turned off. For example: syncing your mailbox in Outlook, authenticating and verifying your Office license, and determining if Office is up to date.

Although these improvements have come to Office on Windows first, in the coming months, similar controls and experiences will be introduced in Office on other platforms.

If Office is connected to your work or school account, your IT administrator is empowered to make choices about which connected experiences are available to you in your organization. To learn more about improvement to the IT controls and the options available, please see Overview of privacy controls for Office 365 ProPlus.

Keeping Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected

Our customers choose Office because of its strong track record of capability, quality, security, reliability, and compatibility. Just as with our cloud-backed experiences, we use data to keep the Office apps secure, up to date, performing as expected, and to make product improvements.

For this purpose, we collect diagnostic data to detect, diagnose, and rapidly address issues before they become large-scale problems or cause security risks. If one of our apps runs too slowly, or has some other error, we want to know about it as quickly as possible, so we can work on fixing it. This diagnostic data helps us keep your Office working the way it should.

Consistent with the data collection framework outlined in Julie’s blog, there are two levels of diagnostic data for Office desktop applications:

• Required data—The minimum data necessary to help keep Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected on the device it’s installed on. For example, required data is collected when we update Office on your device. To ensure the update packages are downloaded and installed correctly, we collect information about the success (or failure) of this operation. Or when you add a new email account to Outlook, we collect required diagnostic data about the success of adding this new account. Increased rates of failure could indicate a change made by your email provider or regression in support of this provider in our software.
• Optional data—This is data that is collected in addition to required data and only with your consent. If collected, optional data helps us detect, diagnose, and fix issues even faster; and it helps us make improvements to meet your productivity needs now and in the future. Optional data, for example, is collected on whether files are saved locally or in the cloud; this helps us to better understand our customers’ storage preferences. Or tracking the number of times a feature is used to better understand the ways our customers interact with new Office features. We generally use optional diagnostic data to learn about the preferences across a large set of customers. We continually work to improve Office to make it work better for you and the rest of our customers. We appreciate you choosing to provide optional diagnostic data to make this possible.

For more information about diagnostic data in Office, and how to control which category you provide, see Diagnostic data in Office. If you’re using a work or school account, your IT administrator will have additional options to disable collection of diagnostic data and may have made some choices about options available to you.

Regardless of whether you stay with required data or opt in to optional data, the diagnostic data we receive doesn’t include your name or email address, the content of your files, or information about apps unrelated to Office. We take great precautions to ensure your privacy, including how we handle your diagnostic data. Our system creates a unique alphanumeric ID that it associates with the diagnostic data before it leaves your computer. Although unique, this ID by itself cannot be mapped back to any individual person. We use this ID to help us differentiate between an issue happening on 100 different devices or 100 instances of the same issue happening on a single device.

We want to be open and transparent about the data we collect to detect, diagnose, and fix issues. We created a free Diagnostic Data Viewer, where you can see the diagnostic data sent to Microsoft. For details, read Using the Diagnostic Data Viewer with Office.

Office is built on trust

Julie’s blog announced a new framework and emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to trust and privacy. This update to Office embodies these principles.

Making our privacy experience and controls clear and helpful is critical to building and keeping your trust in our products and services. Many experiences you’re seeing in this update to Office are the result of many hours of conversations and research with customers like you. We’ll continue to learn and improve our product behaviors and user experience as we receive more input. Your feedback will be important in helping us deliver future privacy-related updates.

It’s our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We can only accomplish that by earning your confidence that we respect you, your data, and your privacy.

The post Microsoft Office brings you new privacy controls appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

In this environment, privacy and compliance professionals play an increasingly strategic role within organizations. As data continues to grow exponentially and travel across organizational boundaries, providing your teams with the right tools to maintain control and manage risk across data, wherever it lives, is our priority.

Today, we are excited to share updates in Microsoft 365 that provide organizations with more control and options to strengthen their data privacy practices.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Compliance

New capabilities coming to Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Compliance—previously known as Information Protection & Compliance—include controls to automatically expire or revoke access to encrypted emails, data investigation capabilities, and new compliance features in Microsoft Teams. In addition, the new Advanced eDiscovery experience is now generally available.

Control encrypted emails shared outside your organization—When sensitive emails are shared outside your organization, despite encrypting the message, it can be difficult to further prohibit access. Now with Office 365 Advanced Message Encryption, admins have additional controls to automatically expire or revoke access to encrypted emails through a secure web portal.

For example, with Advanced Message Encryption, you can leverage sensitive information types—such as health IDs—and automatically encrypt and expire the message after 30 days, which may be specified by the organization’s internal or external compliance requirement. Learn more in our Tech Community blog.

Search and take action on at-risk sensitive data—Oftentimes, customers need to quickly investigate security and privacy incidents such as data leakage or phishing attacks. Data investigation capabilities in Microsoft 365 enable you to search and take action to remediate risk.

For example, in the event of a data leak, you can create an investigation to search and identify impacted content or people, then delete the email messages that may contain confidential information to prevent end users from accessing the content. The data investigation capabilities in Microsoft 365 are in preview. Learn more in this Tech Community blog.

Block sensitive information in chat messages and channel conversations—Microsoft Teams is improving workplace collaboration by bringing together chats, meetings, and calling in a more secure and compliant way. We recently introduced new features in Teams, including data loss prevention and information barriers, to help you prevent sensitive information unintentionally being shared or leaked when using Teams. Learn more in this recent announcement.

Keep relevant data in place for data discovery and workflow—The new Advanced eDiscovery experience that we announced in January is now generally available to help organizations perform in-place eDiscovery with Microsoft 365. Use the new built-in custodian management workflow, working sets, and review and redact features to significantly reduce the cost and risk associated with data discovery and investigation. Learn more in our Tech Community blog.

Additional updates to enhance your compliance and privacy controls

Additional compliance and privacy updates include new Compliance Manager features and additional options for Multi-Geo Capabilities.

Manage compliance beyond Microsoft Cloud and get automatic updates of security controls—Your organization’s data lives in a heterogeneous world beyond the Microsoft Cloud, and it’s important to manage compliance across data assets in a unified way. Compliance Manager now enables you to create your own assessments—including on-premises and non-Microsoft applications—against any regulation or standard. This allows you to manage your data protection controls, collaborate between teams, and prepare for audits—all from one cloud-based compliance management tool.

Additionally, Compliance Manager can now detect your tenant settings and automatically update the status of your controls by integrating with the Secure Score API. For example, when security-oriented controls, such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), are implemented, the risk assessments in Compliance Manager automatically reflect the updated status.

These new features of Compliance Manager are in public preview for all commercial plans. Learn more at the Tech Community blog.

Implement granular data residency controls for shared resources—With more data residency measures being legislated around the world, global businesses are challenged with meeting certain compliance requirements while moving to the cloud. Multi-Geo Capabilities addresses these challenges by giving you the flexibility to choose where your Office 365 content is stored at rest. We’re expanding Multi-Geo Capabilities beyond Exchange Online and OneDrive to include SharePoint Online and Groups, so you can control where content from these shared resources is stored at rest. Multi-Geo Capabilities can be purchased as an add-on to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscriptions. Read Multi-Geo in SharePoint and Office 365 Groups to learn more.

Learn more about privacy and the Microsoft Cloud

Privacy and compliance are deeply ingrained in the culture at Microsoft and embedded in the practices that are at the core of how we build and deliver our products and services.

To learn more:

• Contact your Microsoft account team to inquire about Microsoft 365 E5 or get a free trial.
• Experience first-hand how Microsoft solutions can help solve your business challenges by registering for an upcoming hands-on online experience (U.S. only). Visit the Productivity Library for free Microsoft 365 Compliance product training outside the U.S.
• Register today to attend this free virtual conference on May 14, 2019 with KPMG and Microsoft experts.

References

1. Forrester: The New Privacy: It’s All About Context Vision: The Customer Trust And Privacy Playbook by Fatemeh Khatibloo, January 2019
2. Forrester: Benchmark Your Cybersecurity And Privacy Maturity, 2019 by Christopher McClean, Trevor Lyness, and Stephanie Balaouras

The post Grow and protect your business with more privacy controls in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what’s new in April.

Assess and reduce risk and protect sensitive data

We’re releasing new solutions designed to help you assess your compliance risk and manage policies to protect sensitive data both inside and outside of your organization.

Manage sensitive and high-risk data—Today, we announced the availability of several new compliance capabilities to give you more control over data privacy across your organization. Compliance Manager now allows you to create custom risk assessments of any application used by your organization. Office 365 Advanced Message Encryption enables admins to revoke and expire encrypted emails. Additionally, the new data investigation capability in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center enables you to search for high-risk content, such as phishing emails and leaked sensitive data, and take actions to remediate risks.

Address data residency needs with Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365—Multi-Geo Capabilities now enables customers to control where SharePoint Team sites and Office 365 Groups content are stored at rest, in addition to Exchange and OneDrive data. Multi-Geo Capabilities helps multinational companies address their regional, industry-specific, or organizational data residency requirements in Office 365 by enabling them to control where each employee’s Office 365 content is stored at rest. Contact your Microsoft representative for more information.

Deploy security policies tailored to your organization’s security needs—Security Policy Advisor is a new service that uses behavior-based analysis to help IT admins quantify the risks and benefits of applying a tailored policy and then monitor policy health over time. Admins can also deploy policies with one click and easily update or even roll back policies. Together, these capabilities help IT admins streamline their workflow and manage across their policies. This service is now available as a preview for all organizations with Office 365 ProPlus. To get started, administrators can visit the Office client management portal.

Improve your security posture with Azure AD Password Protection—Earlier this month, we announced that Azure AD Password Protection is now generally available. Azure AD Password Protection proactively helps users avoid choosing weak and vulnerable passwords, lowering the risk of being compromised by a password spray attack. To get started, sign in to the Azure Portal with a global administrator account.

Reach and engage more people

New capabilities help you connect with more people and create more engaging content across multiple languages.

Connect and engage both inside and outside of your organization with Microsoft Kaizala—Earlier this month, we announced that Microsoft Kaizala, a simple and secure work management and messaging app, is rolling out to Office 365 customers globally and will become part of Microsoft Teams over the next 12–18 months. Kaizala enables you to securely connect and engage with large groups outside your organization’s directory—including contract workers, vendors, partners, and customers—using a phone number-based identity for easy onboarding and a simple mobile user experience. You can download Microsoft Kaizala today from the iOS and Android stores.

Break down language barriers with multi-language support for Editor in PowerPoint—Receive suggestions on grammar, word choice, and conciseness regardless of which languages are included on your slides. Editor in PowerPoint even supports multiple languages on the same slide—perfect for all-hands, global presentations, lesson plans, and inclusive learning. Multi-language support for Editor in PowerPoint will begin rolling out to Office Insiders this month.

Other updates

• IT administrators can now determine the level of diagnostic and related data that Office sends to Microsoft to help ensure your Office apps are up to date, secure, and performing as expected.
• A new Mini toolbar in OneNote now appears above text when content is highlighted with contextual formatting tools for faster editing.
• There are now nearly 350 new icons to choose from when you insert an icon throughout Office 365, including new categories like accessibility, holidays, and process.
• We released new 3D guidelines in Office 365 to help designers and professionals create custom 3D objects that are compatible with the Office ecosystem.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in April—new tools to streamline compliance and make collaboration inclusive and engaging appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what’s new in March.

Collaborate more easily

New features and services give you more ways to collaborate with colleagues and LinkedIn connections across platforms.

Boost meeting productivity and meet compliance obligations with Microsoft Teams updates—Last week at Enterprise Connect, we announced several new features in Teams including the ability to improve the effectiveness of remote meetings by replacing your background during video chats and increasing inclusivity with live captions & subtitles during Teams meetings. We also announced the generally availability of live and on-demand events in Microsoft 365, which enable you to deliver compelling communications to up to 10,000 employees, customers, and partners. We also announced new compliance capabilities in Teams such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations to help you keep information secure and meet your obligations.

Improve whiteboard ideation and collaboration—Two new intelligent inking features in the Microsoft Whiteboard Windows 10 app help improve the collaborative ideation experience. Now, you can easily capture a picture of a physical whiteboard and convert it to digital ink in the Whiteboard app using ink grab. Additionally, the new ink beautification feature can help increase the readability of jotted notes by analyzing handwriting and automatically replacing it with more legible strokes. Together, these intelligent inking features decrease the time spent on managing content, so you can spend more time collaborating on a digital whiteboard. Both are now available in the Whiteboard Windows 10 app.

Work seamlessly with first-degree LinkedIn connections—When you securely connect your LinkedIn account with your Office 365 account, you can now view others’ LinkedIn profiles in Outlook on the web, and in OneDrive and SharePoint in Office 365, and see relevant insights about the people you’re working with, both inside and outside your organization. Now rolling out to Targeted Release customers is the ability to send emails to and coauthor documents with many of their first-degree LinkedIn connections.

To get started, type a connection’s name in the To or Cc field when composing a new message or sharing a document in Outlook on the web, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word Online, PowerPoint Online, and Excel Online.

Create more engaging content and get more done

New Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on the web features help you create beautiful content and save you time.

Make your presentations stand out with 3D objects on your Mac—Create stunning visuals and engaging content on your Mac with 3D embedded animations in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Improve comprehension and retention, increase engagement, and entertain audiences with content that seemingly comes to life. Select scenes and insert 3D models from a vast library of free content and rotate 3D objects to tell your story from every angle. 3D objects on Mac will start rolling out to Insiders next month.

Prepare for and schedule meetings faster with new intelligent features in Outlook on the web—Powered by Microsoft artificial intelligence (AI), Outlook on the web will now help you prepare for meetings by showing you relevant information you might need. It will also automatically suggest that you create a meeting directly from an email conversation and show you available days and times for people you include in a meeting invite. These features will begin rolling out to Outlook on the web users in the next few weeks.

Enhance security and streamline IT management

New capabilities help you better protect your organization and streamline IT management.

Ensure a healthy security posture with updates to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)—Last week, we announced that we’re extending our endpoint protection platform to support additional operating systems with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Mac, available now in limited preview. With this expansion, we’re also renaming the Windows Defender ATP platform to Microsoft Defender ATP. We also announced that we’re making Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capabilities available in Microsoft Defender ATP to discover, prioritize, and remediate threats and vulnerabilities—preview coming soon.

Access your security and investigation tools in the new Microsoft 365 security center—The Microsoft 365 security center is a new unified security experience that provides your security professionals with a dedicated workspace to manage and take advantage of the comprehensive security capabilities of Microsoft Threat Protection. The Microsoft 365 security center is now generally available. Get started with features and capabilities such as Secure Score, Advanced Hunting, and security alerts by visiting security.microsoft.com.

Manage your Microsoft 365 services with the new Microsoft 365 admin center—Last week, we announced that the new Microsoft 365 admin center will begin rolling out as the default experience for all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 admins. The Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to serve as a single entry point for managing services across Windows 10, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) in a more powerful, efficient, and personalized way.

Other updates

• Now, when opening links to Office 365 documents from the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook desktop apps, you will have the option to open them directly in the desktop apps instead of the web.
• Teams users can now add a Yammer tab to a Teams channel that loads a specified group or topic feed from Yammer.
• Microsoft Forms Pro, our new enterprise survey solution to professionally distribute surveys, is now available in public preview.
• OneNote now supports syncing edits of files embedded in your notebooks, eliminating the need to save copies of embedded files.
• The custom policies feature in Azure Active Directory B2C is now generally available and gives you more control over identity experiences to help you deliver personalized user journeys in your customer-facing applications.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in March—tools to enable teamwork and enhance security in the workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This is especially true as it relates to an organization’s Firstline Workforce. In manufacturing, Firstline Workers are the employees who deliver products and materials, drive product quality, and keep critical equipment running. To help manufacturers with their digital transformation, we’re enabling new ways to work with Microsoft 365 for Firstline Workers to learn, communicate, and collaborate more effectively.

Upskilling and equipping the Firstline Workforce

With the rise of Industry 4.0, manufacturers must reimagine the roles, skills, and tools to transform work throughout their organization. This means providing digital and soft skills, empowering workers with modern tools, and blurring the boundaries of technology with new immersive experiences. In an increasingly digital and complex landscape, the types of skills that employees need are rapidly evolving, and it is increasingly difficult for the workforce to keep pace.

Solutions in Microsoft 365 that enable Firstline Workers to learn, communicate, and collaborate include:

• Using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online, manufacturers can securely centralize training efforts, easily distribute onboarding and training materials, and connect all levels of the organization to find and share best practices.

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

To help equip workers to operate in a digitally-enabled manufacturing environment, Teams provides a single hub for teamwork to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate production from the engineering rooms to the factory floor.

• Earlier this year, we announced new capabilities—including urgent messaging, location sharing, and image annotations—which organizations can use to create a safer and more efficient workplace. For example, these features can help workers identify, communicate, and share the location of hazardous spills to help reduce operational disruptions.

• Additionally, Microsoft Teams is extensible and allows companies to transform business processes using Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. These services help to digitize everyday activities—such as documentation during quality assurance, data capture, and inventory management—helping reduce costs and free up time for Firstline Workers to focus on higher value activities.

As Industry 4.0 reshapes the manufacturing industry, finding new innovations to help workers learn, communicate, and collaborate remains a top priority. Microsoft is addressing these challenges through breakthroughs in hardware design, artificial intelligence (AI) experiences, mixed reality with HoloLens 2, and through business-ready solutions with Dynamics 365 and industry partners.

• Using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, technicians can solve problems faster by calling in remote experts via Microsoft Teams to help walk through repairs using mixed reality annotations, sharing diagrams and schematics. And with Dynamics 365 Guides, employees can learn new skills with step-by-step instructions that guide employees to the tools they need and how to use them in real work situations.

Helping our customers succeed

Leading manufacturers choose Microsoft 365 to prepare, equip, and empower their employees at all levels:

To accelerate productivity and information flow, Cummins replaced its existing productivity and collaboration tools with Microsoft 365, introducing a modern knowledge management and collaboration framework to reduce skills gaps and anchor a new culture of work.

“Our modern, tech-driven workplaces give employees the tools they need to innovate, so we can introduce new energy products and technology solutions to the market. It’s also a key strategy in attracting top talent.”
—Sherry Aaholm, VP and CIO for Cummins

Goodyear is using the integrated and adaptive tools in Microsoft 365 to help accelerate innovation and enable new capabilities inside the company. For example, Goodyear is connecting its workforce via tools like Teams, which is driving productivity and generating efficiencies to deliver the right products to the right place at the right time.

“Enhancing collaboration is crucial to us for improved decision making and to drive innovation, both in tires and beyond tires… Our multigenerational and multicultural global workforce is now sharing perspectives and ideas more quickly and easily than ever.”
—Sherry Neubert, CIO for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

We’re incredibly excited about our opportunity to help manufacturers transform and we are just getting started!

Join us at Hannover Messe and learn more

Next week, members of the Microsoft team will be at Hannover Messe, the annual manufacturing conference. Visit us at Microsoft stand C40 and learn how Microsoft is enabling Intelligent Manufacturing.

The post Closing the skills gap in manufacturing with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

For many teams focused on architecture, engineering, and manufacturing, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings are key to their workflow. By storing CAD drawings and DWG files in OneDrive and SharePoint, teams get the benefit of industry leading mobile and desktop applications, enterprise-grade compliance, and innovative collaboration capabilities. By tightly integrating tools and files together, tasks get simpler, you can stay in your flow, and you can integrate your data with business processes. For these teams, deeper connections between key business tools to files can transform how they work.

These new integrations with Autodesk—an innovator in the CAD industry—connect OneDrive and SharePoint to the drafting tools available through AutoCAD. As you work with DWG files across these applications, new integrated actions will allow you to open and edit DWG files in the AutoCAD desktop application, the AutoCAD mobile app, and the new AutoCAD web app—in just a few clicks.

Open and edit DWG files in the AutoCAD web application.

Design and draft with the AutoCAD web app

The AutoCAD web app lets you design and draft in AutoCAD on any computer. It gives you quick, anytime access to the latest drawings from anywhere without having AutoCAD installed on your machine. View, edit, and create CAD drawings in a simplified interface that runs in your local web browser. The AutoCAD web app is included with an AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT subscription.

The DWG file opens from SharePoint or OneDrive into the AutoCAD web app (web.autocad.com).

Of course, you can also open AutoCAD DWG files directly into the AutoCAD desktop application and use the full suite of tools, views, and workflows.

Learn more and let us know what you think

We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in late March 2019, starting today with OneDrive, and support for SharePoint coming in the following weeks. These integrations are just the beginning—Autodesk and Microsoft are exploring other ways to integrate and streamline productivity. We’re eager to hear your feedback on integrations in the CAD area and with AutoCAD products. Visit our UserVoice site and add your feedback.

In addition, more information around the Autodesk AutoCAD web app is available:

• Autodesk—About Accessing Drawings Remotely with the AutoCAD web app
• LinkedIn Learning—A brief introduction to using DWG files in AutoCAD web app by Shaun Bryant

The post Announcing new integrations with Autodesk AutoCAD for Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint 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.

Here’s a quick summary:

• Windows Virtual Desktop is now in public preview, providing the best virtualized Microsoft 365 experience across devices.
• Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) now supports Mac, extending Microsoft 365 advanced endpoint security across platforms.
• The new Microsoft Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capability in Microsoft Defender ATP will help detect, assess, and prioritize threats across endpoints.
• Office 365 ProPlus will now include the Microsoft Teams app, enabling a new way to work.
• We’re reducing the time it takes to apply Windows 10 feature updates, making it easier to deploy and service Windows 10.
• We’re enhancing Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune with new insights and deployment options to make it easier to manage your devices across platforms.
• Microsoft 365 admin center is now generally available.