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.

The post 3 ways to meet new hybrid expectations with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

The post Empower frontline healthcare workers with Microsoft Teams 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.  

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

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

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

Let’s dive in.

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

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

Improve collaboration and knowledge management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New meeting experiences for the hybrid workplace

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

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

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

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

Ensuring secure communications

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

Reimagining the employee experience for a hybrid workplace

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

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

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

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

Helping you on your Zero Trust Journey

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

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

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

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

Also new to Microsoft 365 

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

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

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

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.

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

Okay, on to the news!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplify tasks, lists, and functions

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

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

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

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

Create beautiful diagrams

Visio capabilities bring new and familiar icons to your diagrams.

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

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

Also new this month

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

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

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

This month, we 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.

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

1. Share work from home guidance

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

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

2. Manage back-to-back meetings

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

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

3. Create space for people to disconnect

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

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

4. Continue driving team culture

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

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

5. Practice key management skills

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

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

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

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

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

What is Microsoft Teams?

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

Making Teams available for everyone

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

For individuals and businesses who purchase directly from Microsoft.com

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

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

For businesses served by partners

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

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

Frequently asked questions about Teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The five attributes

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

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

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

Teams customer success stories

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

Bold beauty: L’Oreal

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

From the factory floor to the C-Suite: Alcoa

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

Simplified collaboration: Telefónica

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

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

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

Connecting across the globe: Trek

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

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

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

The post 5 attributes of successful teams 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.

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.

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.

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.

Howdy folks,

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

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

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

Watch this quick video showing how it works:

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

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

Get started

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does it work?

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next

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

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

Stay tuned for more details early next year!

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

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

We heard our customers loud and clear—they want support for the Microsoft Authenticator app on Apple Watch. So, that’s why I’m thrilled to announce we are starting to roll out the public preview of the Microsoft Authenticator companion app for Apple Watch and plan to release to general availability within the next few weeks. This experience will allow you to approve sign-in notifications that require PIN or biometric on your Watch without having to use your phone.

The Microsoft Authenticator app on Apple Watch supports Microsoft personal, work, and school accounts that are set up with push notifications. All supported accounts automatically sync to the Watch.

Try it out

To test drive the app, upgrade to Microsoft Authenticator v. 6.0.0+ on your phone when it becomes available to you. If you want to try it out before it’s generally available, sign up to become a Microsoft Authenticator TestFlight user.

Once you have the upgrade installed, just follow these three steps:

1. Make sure your phone and Watch are paired.
2. Open the Microsoft Authenticator app on your Watch.

3. Under the account title, tap the Set up button. If there’s no Set up button next to your account, no action is required! You can now approve sign-in notifications on your Watch.

To see the full experience in action, sign in to your account using the Microsoft Authenticator. When a notification comes to your Watch, you can easily and quickly approve.

From a security standpoint, we still consider the experience on the Watch as two-step verification. The first factor is your possession of the Watch. The second factor is the PIN that only you know. When you put the Watch on your wrist in the morning, you will need to unlock it. As long as you don’t remove the Watch from your wrist and it stays within range of your phone, it will stay unlocked—so you don’t need to provide your PIN again.

If you have additional questions, please see our Microsoft Authenticator app FAQ page. Also, feel free to comment below—we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Microsoft Authenticator companion app for Apple Watch now in public preview appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

More than ever before, employees in the modern workplace seek work environments that unlock creativity, make their lives more productive and fulfilling, and foster a sense of connection with their organization’s mission and purpose.

A critical first step for your organization to thrive in this new culture of work is to drive alignment of your people around shared purpose and goals. Leaders realize that organizations who do this well have an advantage in attracting and retaining an engaged workforce.

Here are four ways your organization can enable leaders and employees to connect with new live events in Microsoft 365:

1—Use live events to kickstart interactive discussions across your organization

Today, executives at Microsoft—including CEO Satya Nadella—use Microsoft 365 to connect and communicate with employees around the globe. Now, any company or organization with Microsoft 365 can create these moments of high engagement, where people are focused on leaders and their messages and ask questions to clarify or reinforce conversations in the community.

Using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Yammer, you can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides. Attendees receive notifications and can participate in real-time, with high-definition video and interactive discussion using web, mobile, or desktop.

Following an event, it’s easy to make the recording available on an event page, allowing you to watch the event on your own schedule and catch up quickly with powerful AI features that unlock the content of the event recording. The recording is automatically transcribed and detects changes in speakers—making it simple to search for content later.

For employees who are in different time zones or unable to attend live, the conversation keeps going, so they still feel connected to leaders and peers—helping to overcome geographical or organizational boundaries.

The event and recordings are powered by Microsoft Stream, the intelligent video service in Office 365.

2—Foster sustained dialogue in open communities

Give everyone a voice—before, during, and after a live event in Microsoft 365—with Yammer communities that span functions or the entire organization. Providing a forum for employees to be heard is an important piece of transforming a culture. These communities are where people can come any time to raise ideas, concerns, or questions, and where leaders can reply in an authentic way.

An active Yammer community builds trust and a sense of connection and belonging. And it provides a forum where employees who might not feel comfortable speaking out during a live event can connect directly with leaders.

With inline message translation, live events in Microsoft 365 empowers people to express themselves in their own language.

3—Create an intranet site for leaders to share events, blogs, video, news, and resources

Communicate at scale as a leader with a continuous, online presence using content, conversation, and video channels within a SharePoint communications site. You can optimize for news distribution and blogs, and deepen engagement with related content, polls and surveys, and readership analytics.

This is also a great spot to share recorded events for later viewing. Simply create a dedicated page for each event where employees can submit questions and comments in advance. Leaders and organizers can then use this input to craft the messaging and content of the events.

4—Plan corporate communications and measure impact

Executive and internal communications may be managed by a team of one or a team of many—but it takes careful planning and execution to ensure success. Microsoft Teams—the hub for teamwork in Office 365—is ideally suited to work together in the creation and production of events and other executive communications. It provides an effective backstage for your live event, giving you a shared space to work with speakers and approve content before sharing with a broader audience.

Once you have begun engaging your audience, every message within a Yammer community has a visible count of how many people your post has reached. This helps both community organizers and employees understand what is being read. Group insights demonstrate how the knowledge and information created in the community benefit people—regardless of their membership status in the group. For example, passive visitors may gain value from group conversations and apply the information elsewhere in their daily work. You can also see the number of views for an event recording and across a channel, and how many people liked the video. Pages and news articles also have statistics to understand readership.

Empowering all leaders across an organization

Leadership, of course, does not just refer to organizational leaders. Leaders of communities may be subject matter experts, functional managers, or passionate individuals who are leading areas of expertise, practices, or interest groups. These same capabilities in Microsoft 365 can enable leaders at any level to create and sustain connection with their communities.

Patrick Yates, manager of Diversity and Inclusion at TDS Telecom, considers community connections and engagement an important part of the employee experience, and a boon to recruiting talent. “Younger generations entering the workforce especially want a modern, inclusive environment—to be part of something that’s larger than themselves.”

Connect your employees and leaders today

Experience the public preview of live events in Microsoft 365, and get started on connecting your leaders and employees today. We will be adding additional features and functionality based on your feedback in the Tech Community.

To create a live event, you will need an Office 365 E3 or E5 license and your admin must give you permission to do so. To attend a live event, you need an Office 365 license for authenticated users. Public (anonymous) access is possible in specific configurations.

To learn more, visit Connect leaders and employees on Office.com, and for more information on intelligent event capabilities, visit the Microsoft 365 live events post on Tech Community.

The post 4 steps to engage employees with new live events in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

If you follow the blog, you know that Azure AD Conditional Access (CA) lets you easily secure access to Office 365 and all the other apps you use with Azure AD. It is our fastest growing feature ever and more than 23M users are now protected by conditional access policies! As it’s taken off, we’ve listened closely to your feedback about how we could improve Conditional Access and what you’d like to see next.

One of the features customers like you have requested the most is integration with the Intune Managed Browser. So today I am excited to announce two enhancements that are now in public preview:

• Intune Managed Browser SSO: Your employees can enjoy Single Sign-on across native clients (like Microsoft Outlook) and the Intune Managed Browser for all Azure AD-connected apps.
• Intune Managed Browser Conditional Access Support: You can now require employees to use the Intune Managed browser using application-based Conditional Access policies.

Read on for more details.

Single Sign-on to Azure AD-connected apps in the Intune Managed Browser

The Intune Managed Browser application on iOS and Android can now take advantage of SSO to all web apps (SaaS and on-premises) that are Azure AD-connected. When the Microsoft Authenticator app is present on iOS or the Intune Company Portal app on Android, users of the Intune Managed Browser will be able to access Azure AD-connected web apps without having to re-enter their credentials.

Let’s see how simple this is to have a better sign-in experience on iOS devices!

• Install the latest Intune Managed Browser. When using the app for the first time, you can take advantage of Single Sign-on by installing the Microsoft Authenticator app. Complete this step.

• Sign-in, and navigate to any of your Azure AD-connected applications with Single Sign-on. You will be prompted to register your device to provide Single Sign-on to all applications. That’s it!

  This capability expands on our previously announced integration between Azure AD Application Proxy and the Intune Managed Browser.

Pretty cool right?

Secure mobile browser access using Conditional Access and the Intune Managed Browser

You can also now restrict mobile browser access to Azure AD-connected web apps to the Intune Managed Browser only, blocking access from any other unprotected browsers like Safari or Chrome.

This allows you to secure access and prevent data leakage via unprotected browser applications. This protection can be applied to Office 365 services like Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, the Office portal, and even on-premises sites that you have exposed via the Azure AD Application Proxy.

To secure access, configure application-based Conditional Access policy in Azure AD and an App Protection policy for the Managed Browser in Intune.

Here’s how you do that:

Azure AD

It’s simple to create an Azure AD Conditional Access policy to lock down browser access to Intune Managed Browser. Learn how to setup an app-based conditional access policy on Azure AD. Here’s a screenshot of a policy targeting browser access.

Intune

Only a few more steps now! Create an Intune App Protection policy and target all users with for the Managed Browser application. Learn more on how to setup Intune App Protection policies here. A screenshot here shows how to target the managed browser application.

Your configuration is now ready! Users attempting to use unmanaged browsers such as Safari and Chrome will be prompted to use the Intune Managed Browser. If this is the first time, users will be prompted to install the Microsoft Authenticator on iOS or the Intune Company Portal on Android. Here is a screenshot of a blocked access when using Safari on iOS.

I hope you’ll give these new enhancements are try today. Here’s a set of quick links to get you started:

Quick Links

• How to use Azure AD Application Proxy
• Authoring conditional access policy
• App-based conditional access technical documentation
• App protection policies in Intune
• Configure Managed Browser policies in Intune

As always, we’d love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have. Just go here and let us know what you think!

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Directory of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post The Intune Managed Browser now supports Azure AD SSO and Conditional Access! appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As long as we’ve had passwords, people have tried to guess them. In this blog, we’re going to talk about a common attack which has become MUCH more frequent recently and some best practices for defending against it. This attack is commonly called password spray.

In a password spray attack, the bad guys try the most common passwords across many different accounts and services to gain access to any password protected assets they can find. Usually these span many different organizations and identity providers. For example, an attacker will use a commonly available toolkit like Mailsniper to enumerate all of the users in several organizations and then try “P@$$w0rd” and “Password1” against all of those accounts. To give you the idea, an attack might look like:

This attack pattern evades most detection techniques because from the vantage point of an individual user or company, the attack just looks like an isolated failed login.

For attackers, it’s a numbers game: they know that there are some passwords out there that are very common. Even though these most common passwords account for only 0.5-1.0% of accounts, the attacker will get a few successes for every thousand accounts attacked, and that’s enough to be effective.

They use the accounts to get data from emails, harvest contact info, and send phishing links or just expand the password spray target group. The attackers don’t care much about who those initial targets are—just that they have some success that they can leverage.

The good news is that Microsoft has many tools already implemented and available to blunt these attacks, and more are coming soon. Read on to see what you can do now and in the coming months to stop password spray attacks.

Four easy steps to disrupt password spray attacks

Step 1: Use cloud authentication

In the cloud, we see billions of sign-ins to Microsoft systems every day. Our security detection algorithms allow us to detect and block attacks as they’re happening. Because these are real time detection and protection systems driven from the cloud, they are available only when doing Azure AD authentication in the cloud (including Pass-Through Authentication).

Smart Lockout

In the cloud, we use Smart Lockout to differentiate between sign-in attempts that look like they’re from the valid user and sign-ins from what may be an attacker. We can lock out the attacker while letting the valid user continue using the account. This prevents denial-of-service on the user and stops overzealous password spray attacks. This applies to all Azure AD sign-ins regardless of license level and to all Microsoft account sign-ins.

Tenants using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) will be able to use Smart Lockout natively in ADFS in Windows Server 2016 starting in March 2018—look for this ability to come via Windows Update.

IP Lockout

IP lockout works by analyzing those billions of sign-ins to assess the quality of traffic from each IP address hitting Microsoft’s systems. With that analysis, IP lockout finds IP addresses acting maliciously and blocks those sign-ins in real-time.

Attack Simulations

Now available in public preview, Attack Simulator as part of Office 365 Threat Intelligence enables customers to launch simulated attacks on their own end users, determine how their users behave in the event of an attack, and update policies and ensure that appropriate security tools are in place to protect your organization from threats like password spray attacks.

Things we recommend you do ASAP:

1. If you’re using cloud authentication, you’re covered
2. If you’re using ADFS or another hybrid scenario, look for an ADFS upgrade in March 2018 for Smart Lockout
3. Use Attack Simulator to proactively evaluate your security posture and make adjustments

Step 2: Use multi-factor authentication

A password is the key to accessing an account, but in a successful password spray attack, the attacker has guessed the correct password. To stop them, we need to use something more than just a password to distinguish between the account owner and the attacker. The three ways to do this are below.

Risk-based multi-factor authentication

Azure AD Identity Protection uses the sign-in data mentioned above and adds on advanced machine learning and algorithmic detection to risk score every sign-in that comes in to the system. This enables enterprise customers to create policies in Identity Protection that prompt a user to authenticate with a second factor if and only if there’s risk detected for the user or for the session. This lessens the burden on your users and puts blocks in the way of the bad guys. Learn more about Azure AD Identity Protection here.

Always-on multi-factor authentication

For even more security, you can use Azure MFA to require multi-factor authentication for your users all the time, both in cloud authentication and ADFS. While this requires end users to always have their devices and to more frequently perform multi-factor authentication, it provides the most security for your enterprise. This should be enabled for every admin in an organization. Learn more about Azure Multi-Factor Authentication here, and how to configure Azure MFA for ADFS.

Azure MFA as primary authentication

In ADFS 2016, you have the ability use Azure MFA as primary authentication for passwordless authentication. This is a great tool to guard against password spray and password theft attacks: if there’s no password, it can’t be guessed. This works great for all types of devices with various form factors. Additionally, you can now use password as the second factor only after your OTP has been validated with Azure MFA. Learn more about using password as the second factor here.

Things we recommend you do ASAP:

1. We strongly recommend enabling always-on multi-factor authentication for all admins in your organization, especially subscription owners and tenant admins. Seriously, go do this right now.
2. For the best experience for the rest of your users, we recommend risk-based multi-factor authentication, which is available with Azure AD Premium P2 licenses.
3. Otherwise, use Azure MFA for cloud authentication and ADFS.
4. In ADFS, upgrade to ADFS on Windows Server 2016 to use Azure MFA as primary authentication, especially for all your extranet access.

Step 3: Better passwords for everyone

Even with all the above, a key component of password spray defense is for all users to have passwords that are hard to guess. It’s often difficult for users to know how to create hard-to-guess passwords. Microsoft helps you make this happen with these tools.

Banned passwords

In Azure AD, every password change and reset runs through a banned password checker. When a new password is submitted, it’s fuzzy-matched against a list of words that no one, ever, should have in their password (and l33t-sp3@k spelling doesn’t help). If it matches, it’s rejected, and the user is asked to choose a password that’s harder to guess. We build the list of the most commonly attacked passwords and update it frequently.

Custom banned passwords

To make banned passwords even better, we’re going to allow tenants to customize their banned password lists. Admins can choose words common to their organization—famous employees and founders, products, locations, regional icons, etc.—and prevent them from being used in their users’ passwords. This list will be enforced in addition to the global list, so you don’t have to choose one or the other. It’s in limited preview now and will be rolling out this year.

Banned passwords for on-premises changes

This spring, we’re launching a tool to let enterprise admins ban passwords in hybrid Azure AD-Active Directory environments. Banned password lists will be synchronized from the cloud to your on-premises environments and enforced on every domain controller with the agent. This helps admins ensure users’ passwords are harder to guess no matter where—cloud or on-premises—the user changes her password. This launched to limited private preview in February 2018 and will go to GA this year.

Change how you think about passwords

A lot of common conceptions about what makes a good password are wrong. Usually something that should help mathematically actually results in predictable user behavior: for example, requiring certain character types and periodic password changes both result in specific password patterns. Read our password guidance whitepaper for way more detail. If you’re using Active Directory with PTA or ADFS, update your password policies. If you’re using cloud managed accounts, consider setting your passwords to never expire.

Things we recommend you do ASAP:

1. When it’s released, install the Microsoft banned password tool on-premises to help your users create better passwords.
2. Review your password policies and consider setting them to never expire so your users don’t use seasonal patterns to create their passwords.

Step 4: More awesome features in ADFS and Active Directory

If you’re using hybrid authentication with ADFS and Active Directory, there are more steps you can take to secure your environment against password spray attacks.

The first step: for organizations running ADFS 2.0 or Windows Server 2012, plan to move to ADFS in Windows Server 2016 as soon as possible. The latest version will be updated more quickly with a richer set of capabilities such as extranet lockout. And remember: we’ve made it really easy to upgrade from Windows Server 2012R2 to 2016.

Block legacy authentication from the Extranet

Legacy authentication protocols don’t have the ability to enforce MFA, so the best approach is to block them from the extranet. This will prevent password spray attackers from exploiting the lack of MFA on those protocols.

Enable ADFS Web Application Proxy Extranet Lockout

If you do not have extranet lockout in place at the ADFS Web Application proxy, you should enable it as soon as possible to protect your users from potential password brute force compromise.

Deploy Azure AD Connect Health for ADFS

Azure AD Connect Health captures IP addresses recorded in the ADFS logs for bad username/password requests, gives you additional reporting on an array of scenarios, and provides additional insight to support engineers when opening assisted support cases.

To deploy, download the latest version of the Azure AD Connect Health Agent for ADFS on all ADFS Servers (2.6.491.0). ADFS servers must run Windows Server 2012 R2 with KB 3134222 installed or Windows Server 2016.

Use non-password-based access methods

Without a password, a password can’t be guessed. These non-password-based authentication methods are available for ADFS and the Web Application Proxy:

1. Certificate based authentication allows username/password endpoints to be blocked completely at the firewall. Learn more about certificate based authentication in ADFS
2. Azure MFA, as mentioned above, can be used to as a second factor in cloud authentication and ADFS 2012 R2 and 2016. But, it also can be used as a primary factor in ADFS 2016 to completely stop the possibility of password spray. Learn how to configure Azure MFA with ADFS here
3. Windows Hello for Business, available in Windows 10 and supported by ADFS in Windows Server 2016, enables completely password-free access, including from the extranet, based on strong cryptographic keys tied to both the user and the device. This is available for corporate-managed devices that are Azure AD joined or Hybrid Azure AD joined as well as personal devices via “Add Work or School Account” from the Settings app. Get more information about Hello for Business.

Things we recommend you do ASAP:

1. Upgrade to ADFS 2016 for faster updates
2. Block legacy authentication from the extranet.
3. Deploy Azure AD Connect Health agents for ADFS on all your ADFS servers.
4. Consider using a password-less primary authentication method such as Azure MFA, certificates, or Windows Hello for Business.

Bonus: Protecting your Microsoft accounts

If you’re a Microsoft account user:

• Great news, you’re protected already! Microsoft accounts also have Smart Lockout, IP lockout, risk-based two-step verification, banned passwords, and more.
• But, take two minutes to go to the Microsoft account Security page and choose “Update your security info” to review your security info used for risk-based two-step verification
• Consider turning on always-on two-step verification here to give your account the most security possible.

The best defense is… following the recommendations in this blog

Password spray is a serious threat to every service on the Internet that uses passwords but taking the steps in this blog will give you maximum protection against this attack vector. And, because many kinds of attacks share similar traits, these are just good protection suggestions, period. Your security is always our utmost priority, and we’re continually working hard to develop new, advanced protections against password spray and every other type of attack out there. Use the ones above today and check back frequently for new tools to defend against the bad guys out there on the Internet.

I hope you’ll find this information useful. As always, we’d love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have.

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Azure AD and ADFS best practices: Defending against password spray attacks appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Updates in Microsoft 365—currently rolling out—help protect sensitive data and include:

• Compliance Manager general availability for Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 Business and Enterprise customers in public clouds.
• Compliance Score availability for Office 365.
• Azure Information Protection scanner general availability.

In addition to the updates announced today, capabilities in Microsoft 365 help to:

• Protect sensitive data in apps and across cloud services.
• Support data protection across platforms.
• Provide a consistent labeling schema experience (in preview).

We’re also going to expand sensitive data types to include a GDPR template to consolidate sensitive data types into a single template.

These Microsoft 365 updates and capabilities are designed to provide you with an information protection strategy to help with GDPR compliance.

“GDPR is coming. But with Microsoft’s information protection solutions, we will have a more efficient way to handle compliance.”
—Erlend Skuterud, chief information security officer for Yara

Assess and manage compliance risk with Compliance Manager

Because achieving organizational compliance can be very challenging, we suggest organizations periodically perform risk assessments to understand their compliance posture. Compliance Manager is a cross–Microsoft Cloud services solution designed to help organizations meet complex compliance obligations like the GDPR. The Compliance Manager is now generally available for Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 Business and Enterprise customers in public clouds.

“Compliance Manager really adds great additional value for Microsoft Cloud services by providing insights on the relationships between regulation, processes, and technology,” stated IT manager Nick Postma from Abrona, a Dutch healthcare organization that helps clients on their journey to becoming strong and confident members of society through social partnerships.

Perform risk assessments with Compliance Score

Compliance Score—a Compliance Manager feature—enables you to perform ongoing risk assessments on Microsoft Cloud services with a risk-based score reference, giving you visibility into your compliance performance. Each control is assigned a risk weight based on the level of risk involved due to control failure, and as you implement and assess controls, you’ll see your score change. Compliance Score is currently available for Office 365 and will be rolling out to other Microsoft Cloud services soon.

Learn more about the key capabilities and updates for Compliance Manager and Compliance Score at our Tech Community blog.

Protect sensitive data on-premises

Azure Information Protection scanner addresses hybrid and on-premises scenarios by allowing you to configure policies to automatically discover, classify, label, and protect documents in your on-premises repositories such as File servers and on-premises SharePoint servers. The scanner can be configured to periodically scan on-premises repositories based on company policies. Azure Information Protection scanner is now generally available.

Read “Azure Information Protection scanner” to learn more. To deploy the scanner in your own environment, follow instructions in this technical guide.

Protect sensitive data in apps and across cloud services

Since data travels through many locations—across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises—it is important to build the protection into the file so this protection persistently stays with the data itself. Azure Information Protection provides persistent data protection by classifying, labeling, and protecting sensitive files and emails.

Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) can read files labeled by Azure Information Protection and set policies based on the file labels. For example, a file labeled as Confidential, with an associated policy of “do not forward or copy,” cannot leave your network via file sharing apps like Box.net or Dropbox. In addition, the service scans and classifies sensitive files in cloud apps and automatically applies AIP labels for protection—including encryption. To learn more about this feature, read “Automatically apply labels to sensitive files in cloud apps” and the related technical documentation.

Support for data protection across platforms

As part of our information protection vision, our goal is to cover all major device platforms. Building on our efforts to support non-Windows platforms, we are now previewing the ability to label and protect sensitive data natively, with no plugins required, in Office applications running on Mac devices. This enables Mac users to easily classify, label, and protect Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents in a similar manner that you are used to with the Azure Information Protection client on Windows. Considering that a significant amount of sensitive information is in PDF format, as part of our ongoing partnership, we are in the process of working with Adobe to have the same consistent labeling and protection of PDFs available in Adobe Reader.

To learn more about these new information protection capabilities, visit the Enterprise Mobility + Security blog.

Consistent labeling schema experience now in preview

We are previewing a consistent labeling schema that will be used across information protection solutions in Microsoft 365. To start, this means that the same default labels will be used across both Office 365 and Azure Information Protection—eliminating the need to create labels in two different places.

The consistent labeling model also helps ensure that sensitive labels—regardless of where they were created—are recognized and understood across Microsoft 365, including Azure Information Protection, Office 365 Advanced Data Governance, Office 365 Data Loss Prevention, and Microsoft Cloud App Security. Learn more about the preview of the consistent labeling experience.

“Microsoft’s information protection capabilities help you protect and manage your sensitive data throughout its lifecycle—inside and outside the organization,” stated an analyst from KuppingerCole, an international and independent analyst organization headquartered in Europe.

Detect and classify personal data relevant to GDPR

The ability to automatically classify personal data is a critical part of helping you achieve your GDPR goals. Today, we have over 80 out-of-the-box sensitive information types that can be used to detect and classify your data.  Soon we will provide a GDPR sensitive information type template to help detect and classify personal data relevant to GDPR. The upcoming GDPR sensitive information type template will help consolidate our sensitive data types into a single template—as well as add several new personal data types to detect (such as addresses, telephone numbers, and medical information).

To learn more about the current sensitive information types, read “What the sensitive information types look for.” To learn more about how to create and customize your own sensitive information types, read “Create a custom sensitive information type.”

For sensitive emails, Microsoft 365 enables users to collaborate on protected messages with anyone inside or outside the organization via Office 365 Message Encryption. To provide more flexibility over controlling and protecting personal information shared in sensitive emails, we are rolling out the new encrypt-only policy in Office 365 Message Encryption starting today. Read further about this and other updates in our Tech Community blog.

Get started on your GDPR journey with Microsoft 365

The Microsoft Cloud is uniquely positioned to help you meet your GDPR compliance obligations. Our cloud solution is built for power, scale, and flexibility. Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security—offering a rich set of integrated solutions that help you assess and manage your compliance risk by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to protect your most important data and streamline your processes with a sophisticated and holistic solution set.

No matter where you are in your GDPR efforts, the Microsoft Cloud and our intelligent compliance solutions in Microsoft 365 can help you on your journey to GDPR compliance. Learn more about how Microsoft can help you prepare for the GDPR and take our free online GDPR assessment. Get started with your organization’s information protection planning by downloading our free white paper and eBook.

—Alym Rayani, director of the Microsoft 365 team

The post Microsoft 365 provides an information protection strategy to help with the GDPR appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

I hope you’ll find today’s post as interesting as I do. It’s a bit of brain candy and outlines an exciting vision for the future of digital identities.

Over the last 12 months we’ve invested in incubating a set of ideas for using Blockchain (and other distributed ledger technologies) to create new types of digital identities, identities designed from the ground up to enhance personal privacy, security and control. We’re pretty excited by what we’ve learned and by the new partnerships we’ve formed in the process. Today we’re taking the opportunity to share our thinking and direction with you. This blog is part of a series and follows on Peggy Johnson’s blog post announcing that Microsoft has joined the ID2020 initiative. If you haven’t already Peggy’s post, I would recommend reading it first.

I’ve asked Ankur Patel, the PM on my team leading these incubations to kick our discussion on Decentralized Digital Identities off for us. His post focuses on sharing some of the core things we’ve learned and some of the resulting principles we’re using to drive our investments in this area going forward.

And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

———-

Greetings everyone, I’m Ankur Patel from Microsoft’s Identity Division. It is an awesome privilege to have this opportunity to share some of our learnings and future directions based on our efforts to incubate Blockchain/distributed ledger based Decentralized Identities.

What we see

As many of you experience every day, the world is undergoing a global digital transformation where digital and physical reality are blurring into a single integrated modern way of living. This new world needs a new model for digital identity, one that enhances individual privacy and security across the physical and digital world.

Microsoft’s cloud identity systems already empower thousands of developers, organizations and billions of people to work, play, and achieve more. And yet there is so much more we can do to empower everyone. We aspire to a world where the billions of people living today with no reliable ID can finally realize the dreams we all share like educating our children, improving our quality of life, or starting a business.

To achieve this vision, we believe it is essential for individuals to own and control all elements of their digital identity. Rather than grant broad consent to countless apps and services, and have their identity data spread across numerous providers, individuals need a secure encrypted digital hub where they can store their identity data and easily control access to it.

Each of us needs a digital identity we own, one which securely and privately stores all elements of our digital identity.  This self-owned identity must be easy to use and give us complete control over how our identity data is accessed and used.

We know that enabling this kind of self-sovereign digital identity is bigger than any one company or organization. We’re committed to working closely with our customers, partners and the community to unlock the next generation of digital identity-based experiences and we’re excited to partner with so many people in the industry who are making incredible contributions to this space.

What we’ve learned

To that end today we are sharing our best thinking based on what we’ve learned from our decentralized identity incubation, an effort which is aimed at enabling richer experiences, enhancing trust, and reducing friction, while empowering every person to own and control their Digital Identity.

1. Own and control your Identity. Today, users grant broad consent to countless apps and services for collection, use and retention beyond their control. With data breaches and identity theft becoming more sophisticated and frequent, users need a way to take ownership of their identity. After examining decentralized storage systems, consensus protocols, blockchains, and a variety of emerging standards we believe blockchain technology and protocols are well suited for enabling Decentralized IDs (DID).
2. Privacy by design, built in from the ground up.
   Today, apps, services, and organizations deliver convenient, predictable, tailored experiences that depend on control of identity-bound data. We need a secure encrypted digital hub (ID Hubs) that can interact with user’s data while honoring user privacy and control.
3. Trust is earned by individuals, built by the community.
   Traditional identity systems are mostly geared toward authentication and access management. A self-owned identity system adds a focus on authenticity and how community can establish trust. In a decentralized system trust is based on attestations: claims that other entities endorse – which helps prove facets of one’s identity.
4. Apps and services built with the user at the center.
   Some of the most engaging apps and services today are ones that offer experiences personalized for their users by gaining access to their user’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII). DIDs and ID Hubs can enable developers to gain access to a more precise set of attestations while reducing legal and compliance risks by processing such information, instead of controlling it on behalf of the user.
5. Open, interoperable foundation.
   To create a robust decentralized identity ecosystem that is accessible to all, it must be built on standard, open source technologies, protocols, and reference implementations. For the past year we have been participating in the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) with individuals and organizations who are similarly motivated to take on this challenge. We are collaboratively developing the following key components:
   

• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) – a W3C spec that defines a common document format for describing the state of a Decentralized Identifier
  
• Identity Hubs – an encrypted identity datastore that features message/intent relay, attestation handling, and identity-specific compute endpoints. 
  
• Universal DID Resolver – a server that resolves DIDs across blockchains 
  
• Verifiable Credentials – a W3C spec that defines a document format for encoding DID-based attestations.   
  

6. Ready for world scale:
   To support a vast world of users, organizations, and devices, the underlying technology must be capable of scale and performance on par with traditional systems. Some public blockchains (Bitcoin [BTC], Ethereum, Litecoin, to name a select few) provide a solid foundation for rooting DIDs, recording DPKI operations, and anchoring attestations. While some blockchain communities have increased on-chain transaction capacity (e.g. blocksize increases), this approach generally degrades the decentralized state of the network and cannot reach the millions of transactions per second the system would generate at world-scale. To overcome these technical barriers, we are collaborating on decentralized Layer 2 protocols that run atop these public blockchains to achieve global scale, while preserving the attributes of a world class DID system.
   
7. Accessible to everyone:
   The blockchain ecosystem today is still mostly early adopters who are willing to spend time, effort, and energy managing keys and securing devices. This is not something we can expect mainstream people to deal with. We need to make key management challenges, such as recovery, rotation, and secure access, intuitive and fool-proof.
   

Our next steps

New systems and big ideas, often make sense on a whiteboard. All the lines connect, and assumptions seem solid. However, product and engineering teams learn the most by shipping.

Today, the Microsoft Authenticator app is already used by millions of people to prove their identity every day. As a next step we will experiment with Decentralized Identities by adding support for them into to Microsoft Authenticator. With consent, Microsoft Authenticator will be able to act as your User Agent to manage identity data and cryptographic keys. In this design, only the ID is rooted on chain. Identity data is stored in an off-chain ID Hub (that Microsoft can’t see) encrypted using these cryptographic keys.

Once we have added this capability, apps and services will be able to interact with user’s data using a common messaging conduit by requesting granular consent. Initially we will support a select group of DID implementations across blockchains and we will likely add more in the future.

Looking ahead

We are humbled and excited to take on such a massive challenge, but also know it can’t be accomplished alone. We are counting on the support and input of our alliance partners, members of the Decentralized Identity Foundation, and the diverse Microsoft ecosystem of designers, policy makers, business partners, hardware and software builders. Most importantly we will need you, our customers to provide feedback as we start testing these first set of scenarios.

This is our first post about our work on Decentralized Identity. In upcoming posts we will share information about our proofs of concept as well as technical details for key areas outlined above.

We look forward to you joining us on this venture!

Key resources:

• Follow-us at @AzureAD on Twitter
  
• Get involved with Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF)
  
• Participate in W3C Credentials Community Group
  

Regards,

Ankur Patel (@_AnkurPatel)

Principal Program Manager

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Decentralized digital identities and blockchain: The future as we see it appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Azure AD Conditional Access (CA) has really taken off. Organizations around the world are using it to ensure secure, compliant access to applications. Every month, Conditional Access is now used to protect over 10K organizations and over 10M active users! It’s amazing to see how quickly our customers have put it to work!

We’ve received lot of feedback about the user impact of Conditional Access. Specifically, with this much power at your fingertips, you need a way to see how CA policies will impact a user under various sign-in conditions.

We heard you, and today I am happy to announce the public preview of the “What If” tool for Conditional Access. The What If tool helps you understand the impact of the policies on a user sign-in, under conditions you specify. Rather than waiting to hear from your user about what happened, you can simply use the What If tool.

Get started

Ready to start playing with the tool? You can simply follow these steps:

• Go to Azure AD Conditional access
• Click on What If

• Select the user you want to test

• [Optional] Select app, IP address, device platforms, client app, sign-in risk as needed
• Click on “What If” and view the policies that will impact the user sign-in

Sometimes the question that you’re trying to answer is not “What policies will apply” but “Why is a policy not applying?” The tool can help you with that too! Switch to the “Policies that will not apply” tab and you can view the policy name and, more importantly, the reason why a policy didn’t apply. Isn’t that cool?

Want to learn more about the What If tool?

Tell us what you think

This is just a start. We’re already working to deliver more innovation in this area. As always, we’d love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have on this preview, or anything about Azure AD Conditional Access. We’ve even created a short survey on the What If tool for you to participate in.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Public preview: “What If” tool for Azure AD conditional access policies appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

You can now include content from apps—like a news article—directly in a conversation.

Use your favorite apps in new ways in Teams

Teams brings together everything a team needs in one place. You can integrate the apps and services you need, including Office 365 apps like Excel, and ones from our partners, including Trello, InVision, and SurveyMonkey.

Today, we’re introducing new ways you can use apps in Teams:

Include information from an app in a conversation—Now you can have a conversation about content from an app without the need to include a screenshot or a hyperlink to the information. In the same way that you can add an emoji or GIF, you can now bring information from apps into a chat or channel message with a simple click. For example, you can search for a specific task in Trello, a work item in Wrike, or a weather forecast, and include an interactive card with that information into a message.

Include information from an app, like Wrike, in your conversations.

Access a personal view of your apps—The new personal apps space makes it easy for you to access the apps you care about and see all the items that you have been assigned to across apps, like tasks in Planner, issues in Jira Cloud, or your filters or pull requests in Bitbucket Cloud. You can also easily see items you have recently accessed, such as OneNote notebooks or videos from Microsoft Stream.

Here you will also find Who—a new app powered by the Microsoft Graph—which allows you to search for people in your organization by name or topic. To access your personal apps space, click the … in the left navigation menu.

Access your personal apps space in Teams.

Add Microsoft Stream to your personal apps space to watch videos uploaded by your coworkers.

Discover apps for Teams in the new Store—We made it easier to search and discover apps and services available in Teams in the new Store. Now you can search for apps by name, category (such as Project management or Analytics and BI), or integration type (such as Bots, Tabs, or Connectors), and then choose to surface in your personal app view or in a specific channel in Teams.

Discover apps and integrations in the new Store.

Command apps, take quick actions, and search—all from the command box

Search is one key way people navigate Teams to get to the information they’re looking for. We integrated commanding with search and moved the command box to the top of the screen, so you can now command apps and take quick actions right from the box, in addition to searching across people, messages, files, and apps.

Command apps from the command box—We’re rolling out the ability to query or command an app right from the command box. Starting today, you can search for information in an app, such as an image in Adobe Creative Cloud or a news article, and easily insert a specific result into a chat or channel conversation. Over time, we’ll add more command functionality, like the ability to create a task in your project management app or start a build in Visual Studio Team Services. Simply type @ into the command box to display the list of apps you can query and command.

Take quick actions with slash commands—Slash commands are shortcuts you can type in the command box to quickly perform tasks or navigate Teams. For example, you can use a slash command to set your status to “away,” add a user to a team, or call a coworker. To get started with slash commands, type / to see the list of commands currently available.

Use slash commands to take action quickly in Teams.

Let us know what you think!

These features are rolling out starting today, and you can expect to see them in your Teams client shortly. Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your ideas via UserVoice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make Teams even better.

—The Microsoft Teams team

The post New ways to use apps and get more done in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Our ongoing commitment to create more inclusive and collaborative learning environments continues today with the arrival of a number of powerful updates to Office 365 Education. Building on the momentum of OneNote Class Notebook, which has surpassed more than 15 million notebooks created since the beginning of this school year, and the launch of Microsoft Teams for Education, we have worked with students, teachers, and research institutes to ensure that Office 365 continues to deliver the best learning outcomes. This week at Bett, we’ll share how Office 365 Education enables teachers to engage every learner—ensuring equality and inclusion in schools to empower all students to do their best work.

Today’s updates to Office 365 Education include enabling students to write a paper using only their voice, thanks to Dictation in Office, the latest feature to join Microsoft Learning Tools, as well as improved access to assignments and class collaboration with the Microsoft Teams iPhone and Android apps. What’s more, we are delivering on the number one most requested feature from teachers, page locking in OneNote Class Notebook—allowing teachers to provide students with read-only access—and we will further help teachers save time through assignment and grade integrations with leading Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Student Information Systems (SIS), including Capita SIMS in the U.K. Office 365 Education gives teachers and students the power to unlock limitless learning. And best of all, it’s free for teachers and students.

Inclusive Learning Tools for better student results

Classrooms are diverse. Seventy-three percent of classrooms have students with reading levels that span four or more grades, and up to 50 percent of instructional time can be lost managing the students’ varying needs. Learning Tools is proven to help, and we are humbled by the results. In a recent study, it was shown to increase reading speed and comprehension for students of all abilities, leading to test scores that were 10 percent higher than students who did not use Learning Tools.

We are incredibly excited to see strong adoption of Learning Tools with more than 7 million monthly active users across Word, OneNote, Outlook, Edge, and Office Lens. Based on feedback from teachers, students, and parents, we have been working on extending the capabilities of Learning Tools even further—and today we are excited to announce several updates.

• Dictation in Office—This simple yet transformational tool will help students of all abilities to write freely by using only their voice. Starting in February, Dictation will be available in Word, Word Online, PowerPoint, Outlook Desktop, OneNote Windows 10, and OneNote Online—and in more than nine languages.

• Read Aloud—Allows students to hear the contents of an email while each word is highlighted in sync. It will soon be available on Outlook Desktop in more than 30 text-to-speech languages.
• Immersive Reader—To further support students of different backgrounds, Immersive Reader now supports an additional 10 new languages. It is also coming to even more platforms in 2018 and will soon be available on Word for Mac, iPhone, and Android, as well as Outlook Desktop and OneNote for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

New features for teaching and learning in Microsoft Teams

Since delivering Microsoft Teams for Office 365 Education last year, we’ve seen educators around the globe boost collaboration and learning outcomes using Teams as their digital hub. In addition to our recent announcement, we’re releasing a number of features that will make setting up, collaborating, and managing a classroom in Teams easier than ever before.

• Assignments support—Using the Teams app on their iOS and Android mobile phone or tablet, students can now access upcoming assignments, receive new assignment notifications, and turn in their work. Teachers can create new assignments, as well as review and make edits to existing assignments all while on the go. We also improved the search function on mobile to ensure both students and teachers can quickly find and navigate to individual assignments.

• On Demand Translation—Students and teachers will soon be able to turn content in a chat or in a team channel into the language that their tenant is configured in. This powerful feature allows teachers and students to converse comfortably in their chosen language and removes all language barriers.
• Assignment Analytics—Now teachers can track assignment engagement in real time—at a glance—to see who’s viewed and turned in their work.
• Join Codes—Saves teachers valuable time by allowing them to simply invite students to a class. This capability will also prove helpful for staff and PLC teams, ensuring an effortless start to collaborating with co-workers.
• Reusing a Team as a Template—Teachers can reuse an existing team as a template when creating a new team and can customize what they want to copy over—from channels, tabs, team setting, apps, and even users.
• Decimal Grading—Teachers can provide grading feedback in their preferred way using Decimal Grading.

New OneNote features for teachers

OneNote is also receiving helpful new features, which we know are going to prove popular among teachers.

• Capita SIMS—Updates to Class Notebook include assignment and grade integration with more than 35 of the most widely used LMS and SIS, including Capita SIMS in the U.K. These integrations are coming to OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote Online, and OneNote iPad, and will reduce administrative burden and save teachers time.
• Page Locking—To further simplify classroom workflows, we are delivering on the number-one request from teachers for Class Notebooks—enabling lock pages. Teachers can now lock pages as read-only after giving feedback to the student.
• Interactive math calculators—In OneNote, we are also enabling Desmos interactive math calculators, a set of popular applications for STEM teachers.
• New stickers—We also added four new fun sticker packs: Feathered Friends, Science, Circus Animals, and Arrows.

Teams integration with PowerPoint and Microsoft Stream

Our improvements to class collaboration don’t stop here. Teams has also joined forces with PowerPoint and Microsoft Stream to make it easy for teachers and students to create and share interactive content in just a few steps.

A teacher can use PowerPoint to build immersive class content (that includes ink, animations, and audio/video narrations), publish it to their Stream channel as a video, and have it surface in their Teams class to distribute to their students. Furthermore, Stream will also add automatic captioning to the videos to make them accessible to all learners.

We are incredibly excited to showcase these features and more at Bett this week. We believe that through inclusive and collaborative learning environments, Office 365 Education is built to support every type of learner to empower them to do their best work. To learn more about the exciting updates coming to Microsoft Education, check out the Windows blog.

—Eran Megiddo

Availability:

• Dictation in Office will begin rolling out in our Office Insider program this month, and then to all Office 365 customers in coming months.
• Read Aloud for Outlook Desktop will be available to Office Insiders this month, and then will roll out to all Office 365 customers in coming months.
• Immersive Reader for Mac Word, iPhone Word, and Android Word will be available to our Office Insiders program this month, and then to all Office 365 customers in coming months.
• Immersive Reader for OneNote iOS will begin rolling out to Office 365 customers at the beginning of February 2018 and finish by March 2018.
• Immersive Reader languages for text-to-speech, syllables, and parts-of-speech languages will start to become available today and will continue to roll out through February 2018.
• Teams iOS and Android updates and Decimal Grading are available worldwide today. Assignment Analytics, Join Codes, and Reuse a Team as a Template will begin to roll out to Office 365 Education customers enrolled in our Teams for Education beta program today. These capabilities will move to worldwide production by Spring 2018.
• OneNote assignment and grade integration with Capita SIMS will be available in February 2018. Assignment and Grade integration for OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote Online, and OneNote iPad will be available worldwide in February 2018.
• OneNote Desmos integration is available worldwide today to all Office 365 customers.
• OneNote Class Notebook Page Locking begins preview testing in February 2018 and will roll out worldwide in the coming months.
• Recording a PowerPoint and publishing directly to Stream is now available to all Office 365 Education customers.

If you’re #notatbett this week and would like to learn more about the other exciting updates coming to Microsoft Education, check out our summary of today’s big news here!

The post Office 365 Education delivers the next wave of innovation for inclusive and collaborative learning appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

If you follow the blog, you know that we support a wide array of options for connecting an on-premises directory or IAM solution to Azure AD. In fact no one in the industry gives customers as many options as we do.

So it’s not surprising that one of the questions customers ask me the most is which one I would recommend. I’m always a bit hesitant to give an answer. Over the last 6+ years working in the identity industry, I’ve learned that every organization is different and has different goals and requirements in terms of speed of deployment, security posture, ability to invest, network architecture, corporate culture, compliance requirements and work environment. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve invested in giving you options, so you can choose the one that best suits your needs. (That doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion of course – if it was my organization, I’d definitely want to use our new Pass Through Authentication capabilities and Azure AD Connect Sync.  They are both fast to deploy and low cost to maintain. But hey, that’s just one person’s opinion!)

Rather than spend a bunch of time worrying about what I or anyone else would recommend, how about we just look at what customers are actually using? That strikes me as the best place to start.

Azure AD Momentum

I want to start by sharing some numbers about the overall use of Azure AD so you have the context for the deeper numbers below. For Azure AD overall, we continue to see strong growth in organizations using our basic cloud-based identity services and accelerating growth of Azure AD Premium.

The trend I’m the most excited about is the incredible growth in the use of Azure AD with third-party applications. With over 300k third-party applications in use every month, we’re seeing tons of organizations turn to Azure AD as their preferred cloud identity platform.

Synching users to Azure AD

Most Azure AD tenants are small organizations that don’t synchronize an on-premises AD to Azure AD. Larger organizations almost always sync, and those that do represent >50% of the 950M user accounts in Azure AD.

Here’s the latest data on how organizations synchronize users to Azure AD:

• >180K tenants sync their on-premises Windows Server Active Directory to Azure AD .
• >170K tenants use Azure AD Connect to do so.
• A small number of customers use other solutions:
  • 7% use our legacy DirSync or Azure AD Sync tools.
  • 1.9% use Microsoft Identity Manager or Forefront Identity Manager.
  • <1% use a custom or third-party solution.

Authenticating with Azure AD

The last time I blogged about authentications, the data I shared was based on authentication volumes. Your feedback to me was that this made the numbers difficult to put in context and that you were more interested in active user numbers. So, for this update I’ll share numbers based on Monthly Active Users (MAU).

As of Oct 31, there were just over 152M Monthly Active Users of Azure AD. Of those active users:

• 55% authenticated using a federation product or service.
• 24% authenticate with Password Hash Sync.
• 21% are cloud only users.
• Azure AD Pass-Through Authentication, which went GA only one month ago, already has over half a million Monthly Active Users and that number is growing at 50% per month!

Diving deeper, here’s some more interesting data:

• 46% of all active users are authenticating with AD Federation Services.
• Just over 2% of all active users are authenticating using Ping Federate. Ping is the fastest growing and most popular third-party option.
• 2% of all active users are authenticating using a third-party IDaaS service like Centrify, Okta or OneAuth.
• 1% of all active users are authenticating using a third-party Federation Server other than Ping Federate.

Key Conclusions

This is some pretty interesting data and highlights a few trends:

1. Azure AD Connect has become the standard way to synchronize between Windows Server AD and Azure AD. Over 90 percent of synching tenants now use it.
2. Azure AD Password Hash Sync has become a very popular option for our customers with tens of millions of monthly active users.
3. As larger and larger enterprises have started using Azure AD, Ping Federate has become an increasingly popular option. Our partnership with Ping has really paid off for these large customers.
4. Despite all the press coverage and market hype, other IDaaS vendors remain a very small part of the Azure AD/Office365 business.
5. Our new Pass Through Authentication option, which only GA’d a month ago is off to a good start with >500,000 MAU already! If current trends hold, sometime in the next six months to a year, it will be used by more unique users than all the other IDaaS vendors combined.

Summary

Just like last time, these numbers tell a pretty clear story. We’ve designed Azure AD to be open and standards-based so our customers can use a wide variety of third-party options. However, the majority of customers find that our “off the shelf” identity solutions meet their needs. And this number continues to grow.

Additionally, the data also shows that the level of simplicity we’ve delivered with Azure AD Connect is having a big impact. The solution is being widely adopted and is far and away the fastest growing option for connecting Windows Server AD and Azure AD/Office 365.

Hopefully you found this blog post interesting and useful! As always, we’d love to receive any feedback or suggestions you have.

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post How organizations are connecting their on-premises identities to Azure AD appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

How can your company or department support different work styles without losing the power of a centralized project management system? With agile in Project, project managers and teams can choose the methodology that makes sense for the project at hand, including: agile, waterfall, hybrid, or task-oriented. The integration of Project with Microsoft Planner lets you connect Project tasks to a Planner plan and track detailed work in Planner.

Use agility in your Project portfolio

With agile in Project, you can use agile methods to track your projects in Project Online Desktop Client. You can create new agile projects or apply agile views to your existing waterfall projects. You can track your projects using Scrum and Kanban methodologies, including viewing task boards, creating backlogs, and tracking sprints, as well as viewing reports on agile statistics.

For more details, see “Use agile in Microsoft Project.”

Manage Project task work in Planner

With the new integration between the Project Online Desktop Client and Planner, task owners can track granular task details in a lightweight tool. Project managers retain control over the project’s work breakdown structure and can easily view the detailed work being done against a task.

This capability may also be used to reduce complexity of project plans in Project, enabling the project manager to control a smaller number of tasks while task owners can further break down the tasks in Planner. Teams that manage their work in Project Online can better streamline work with teams that use Planner.

For more details, see “Streamline cross-team work with the newly integrated Project Online Desktop Client and Microsoft Planner.”

We are excited to be adding agile functionality to Project and integration with Planner. Both are available now through Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions. We look forward to your comments and feedback—feel free to submit feedback through our Project UserVoice and Planner UserVoice sites!

Frequently asked questions

Q. How do I get the features included in agile in Project?

A. Agile in Project is available for Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions. The feature works with Project standalone .mpp files and with Project Online. It does not work with Project Server 2016—if you open Project connected to Project Server 2016, the agile in Project feature won’t show up. If you open an .mpp file with agile data in a previous version of Project, you won’t see the agile fields, but the agile data won’t be lost.

Q. How do I get Project and Planner integration capability?

A. To get the integration capability, you need to subscribe to either Project Online Professional or Project Online Premium. For Planner, you need to subscribe to Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1-E5, or an Education plan.

The post Introducing new ways to work in Microsoft Project appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Extending Visio to new audiences

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

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

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

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

Cloud-first innovations

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

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

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

New innovations, new subscription models

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

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

—The Visio team

Frequently asked questions

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

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

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

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

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

A. Please read this support article to learn more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With all the breaches of cloud identity services over the last few years, we get a lot of questions about how we secure customer data. So today’s blog is a dive into the details of how we protect customer data in Azure AD.

Datacenter and Service Security

Let’s start with our datacenters. First, all of Microsoft’s datacenter personnel must pass a background check. All access to our datacenters is strictly regulated and every entry and exit are monitored. Within these datacenters, the critical Azure AD services that store customer data are located in special locked racks—their physical access is highly restricted and camera-monitored 24 hours a day. Furthermore, if one of these servers is decommissioned, all disks are logically and physically destroyed to avoid data leakage.

Next, we limit the number of people who can access the Azure AD services, and even those who do have access permissions operate without these privileges day-to-day when they sign in. When they do need privileges to access the service, they need to pass a multi-factor authentication challenge using a smartcard to confirm their identity and submit a request. Once the request is approved, the users privileges are provisioned “just-in-time”. These privileges are also automatically removed after a fixed period of time and anyone needing more time must go through the request and approval process again.

Once these privileges are granted, all access is performed using a managed admin workstation (consistent with published Privileged Access Workstation guidance). This is required by policy, and compliance is closely monitored. These workstations use a fixed image and all software on the machine is fully managed. To minimize the surface area of risks, only selected activities are allowed, and users cannot accidentally circumvent the design of the admin workstation since they don’t have admin privileges on the box. To further protect the workstations, any access must be done with a smartcard and access to each one is limited to specific set of users.

Finally we maintain a small number (fewer than five) of “break glass” accounts. These accounts are reserved for emergencies only and secured by multi-step “break glass” procedures. Any use of those accounts is monitored, and triggers alerts.

Threat detection

There are several automatic checks we do regularly, every few minutes to ensure things are operating as we expect, even as we are adding new functionality required by our customers:

• Breach detection: We check for patterns that indicate breach. We keep adding to this set of detections regularly. We also use automated tests that trigger these patterns, so we are also checking if our breach detection logic is working correctly!
  
• Penetration tests: These tests run all the time. These tests try to do all sorts of things to compromise our service, and we expect these tests to fail all the time. If they succeed, we know there is something wrong and can correct it immediately.
  
• Audit: All administrative activity is logged. Any activity that is not anticipated (such as an admin creating accounts with privileges) causes alerts to be triggered that cause us to do deep inspection on that action to make sure it not abnormal.
  

And did we say we encrypt all your data in Azure AD? Yes, we do – we use BitLocker to encrypt all Azure AD identity data at rest. What about on the wire? We do that as well! All Azure AD APIs are web-based using SSL through HTTPS to encrypt the data. All Azure AD servers are configured to use TLS 1.2. We allow inbound connections over TLS 1.1 and 1.0 to support external clients. We explicitly deny any connection over all legacy versions of SSL including SSL 3.0 and 2.0. Access to information is restricted through token-based authorization and each tenant’s data is only accessible to accounts permitted in that tenant. In addition, our internal APIs have the added requirement to use SSL client/server authentication on trusted certificates and issuance chains.

A final note

Azure AD is delivered in two ways, and this post described security and encryption for the public service delivered and operated by Microsoft. For similar questions about our National Cloud instances operated by trusted partners, we welcome you to reach out to your account teams.

(Note: As a simple rule of thumb, if you manage or access your Microsoft Online services through URLs ending with .com, this post describes how we protect and encrypt your data.)

The security of your data is a top priority for us and we take it VERY seriously. I hope you found this overview of our data encryption and security protocol reassuring and useful.

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

[updated 10/3/2017 to add specific version information about our use of TLS and SSL]

The post How we secure your data in Azure AD appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Conditional access is one of athe fastest growing services in EMS and we are constantly getting feedback from customers about new capabilities they would like us to add to it. One of the most frequently requested is support for macOS. Customers want to have one consistent system for securing user accessing to Office 365 on all the platforms their employees are using.

So I’m excited to share that Azure Active Directory and Intune now support macOS platform for device-based conditional access! Administrators can now restrict access to Intune-managed macOS devices using device-based conditional access according to their organization’s security guidelines.

With the public preview of macOS device-based conditional access, you’ll be able to:

• Enroll and manage macOS devices using Intune
• Ensure macOS devices adhere to your organization’s compliance policies
• Restrict access to applications in Azure AD to only compliant macOS devices

Get started with macOS conditional access public preview in two simple steps:

Configure compliance requirements for macOS devices in Intune

Use the Intune service in Azure Portal to create a device compliance policy for macOS devices in a few easy clicks:

Configure compliance requirements for device health, properties, and system security per your organization’s requirements.

For more details, go to https://aka.ms/macoscompliancepolicy.

(Important Note: for Conditional Access on macOS to work, the device will need to have the Intune Company Portal app installed).

Restrict access to Azure AD applications for macOS devices

Create a targeted conditional access policy for macOS to protect the Azure AD Applications. Go to conditional access under Azure AD service in Azure portal to create a new policy for macOS platform.

For more details on conditional access policies, go to Conditional Access in Azure Active Directory.

After you’ve taken these steps, macOS users covered in the policy will be able to access Azure AD connected applications only if their Mac conforms to your organization’s policies.

Supported OS versions, applications, and browsers

In the public preview, the following OS versions, applications, and browsers are supported on macOS:

Operating Systems

• macOS 10.11+

Applications

The following Office 2016 for macOS applications are supported:

• Outlook v15.34 and later
• Word v15.34 and later
• Excel v15.34 and later
• PowerPoint v15.34 and later
• OneNote v15.34 and later

Browsers

• Safari

Try it out today and let us know what you think! We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Azure AD and Intune now support macOS in conditional access! appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

Here’s a deeper look at what’s new.

Add or edit your important contacts while on the go

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

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

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

View details about your contacts at a glance

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

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

Save contacts to your device

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

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

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

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

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

Got a feature request?

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

—The Outlook team

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

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

With these updates, you can:

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

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

Recently released updates for Groups in Outlook

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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

—The Outlook team

Frequently asked questions

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

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

Q. Why am I not seeing Groups yet?

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

Q. Is Groups available to Outlook.com users?

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

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

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

Q. What about Outlook for Windows 10 Mobile?

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

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

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

Q. What is coming next for Groups?

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

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

• Add your Office 365 calendar to Bookings—Connect your Office 365 calendar to Bookings, so that the times you are busy will automatically be blocked in your public Booking page.
• Add buffer time before and after your appointments—Do you need prep time before or after an appointment? Adding buffer time to a service automatically blocks that time in your Booking page too.
• Bookings apps for your iOS and Android phone—Now you can book an appointment, contact a customer or check a staff member’s appointments while away from the office.
• Customize your Booking page—We added more color customization options, so you can better personalize your Booking page.

These new capabilities will start showing up automatically in Bookings in the coming weeks. Let’s take a detailed look at what’s new.

Add your Office 365 calendar to Bookings

One of the top pieces of feedback we’ve heard is that you want to be able to add events from your Office 365 calendar to Bookings. So, we added integration between these calendars to help you avoid booking customer meetings during the time you’ve set aside for personal appointments, staff and partner meetings or other aspects of running your business.

To add Office 365 calendars to Bookings, click the Staff tab on the left navigation panel. On the Staff details page, select the Events on Office 365 calendar affect availability checkbox.

Add Office 365 calendar events to Bookings.

Once you activate this option, the system automatically blocks busy times on the Bookings calendar and on the self-service Booking page your customers see, so that you won’t get double-booked. Similarly, so your staff doesn’t get double-booked, you can also add their Office 365 calendars.

Add buffer time between appointments

Some services can be provided through back-to-back appointments. But another top piece of feedback you gave us was that many of your services require travel, prep and/or set-up time beforehand, and clean-up and travel time once the service was delivered. For customers with these needs, we added buffer times to give you more options to customize the services you deliver.

To add buffer times, click the Services tab in the left navigation column and either edit a current service or create a new one. Turn on the toggle below the Buffer time your customers can’t book and you will get buffer time selections that can be applied before and after the service appointment. These are times your customers can’t book an appointment with you before and after an appointment.

You can turn on the “buffer time” option in the Services tab.

Apps for iOS and Android

We know it’s essential for you to keep up with your business while you are away from a desk, so we built mobile apps that let you manage your bookings and staff, or access your customer list while you’re on the go.

After you download the Bookings app on iOS and Android, you can use your phone to:

• View and manage your Bookings calendar.
• Create and edit bookings.
• See real-time availability and whereabouts of your staff.
• Respond to customers with bookings quickly and easily.
• Get directions to your next booking.
• Access your customer list.

Customize your Booking page

Your Booking page should look and feel like an extension of your business, and it needs to positively reflect your brand.

To help you achieve this, we added options to customize it. For example, you can choose your main color for your Booking page from a color palette, and choose whether you’d like to show your business logo.

To customize your page, click Booking page in the left navigation list and select the color you want. If you don’t want your logo to be displayed, uncheck the Display your business logo on your booking page checkbox. Once you are done, simply click Save and publish.

Use the Booking page tab to customize your Booking page. Remember to click Save and publish to keep your changes.

How to get started with Bookings

Bookings is included in all Office 365 Business Premium subscriptions, and getting started is easy. To simplify the work of customer scheduling for your business, just sign in to Office 365 and click the Bookings tile on the App Launcher. If you don’t see the Bookings tile, we may still be in the process of rolling out the service in your region—so check back a bit later. If you need more help, the article “Say hello to Microsoft Bookings” provides a quick overview of how to use Bookings.

Once you are signed in to Office 365 you can find the App Launcher on the top left corner.

Bookings is designed to delight your customers, simplify scheduling and free time for you to be on top of your business wherever you are. Your feedback has been extremely useful; please keep it coming by clicking the feedback links found on the Bookings home page.

—The Bookings team

Frequently asked questions

Q. Why can’t I see Bookings?

A. We are actively rolling out Bookings in all regions and it may take a few weeks for the updates to reach every customer. If you are already signed in to your Office 365 web experience, please try signing out and back in.

Q. Why can’t I see new features mentioned here, like Office 365 calendar integration and buffer time?

A. We are activating these new capabilities for all Bookings users, but the rollout will take a week or two to complete.

Q. Will someone outside of my company see my schedule and meetings?

A. No. Bookings will only use your Office 365 calendar free/busy information to block that time so you won’t be double-booked.

Q. I use Facebook as my business’s webpage. Can I use Bookings?

A. Yes. In October, we announced how to connect Microsoft Bookings to your Facebook page and grow your business.

Q. How do I learn more about the new features?

A. Our Microsoft Bookings support page has more details about Bookings.

Q. Will Bookings be available for Enterprise customers (E3 and E5)?

A. We intend to bring Bookings to E3 and E5 customers in the future.

Q. Where do I download the Bookings app?

A. The Bookings app for iOS is available in the App Store. The Bookings app for Android is available in Google Play in the U.S. and Canada, and will be rolling out worldwide in the next couple of weeks.

Q. Where can I learn more about simplifying my booking process?

A. Read our eBook, “4 Ways to Simplify Your Appointments Booking Process,” to learn more.

The post New reasons to make Microsoft Bookings the go-to scheduling software for your business appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We’re pleased to announce the worldwide general availability of Microsoft StaffHub—a new application for Office 365 designed to help staff workers manage their workday—with schedule management, information sharing and the ability to connect to other work-related apps and resources.

Manage schedules

Microsoft StaffHub makes it easy for managers to create, update and manage shift schedules for their team, streamlining what has been a labor-intensive process.

Employees have access to all their shift information, including the ability to easily swap shifts with others right from the Microsoft StaffHub mobile app. No more having to go into the breakroom at work to look at the bulletin board.

Managers create, update and manage shift schedules for the team.

Employees view their upcoming shifts at a glance on their mobile device and can request to swap a shift with someone else.

The app home screen provides a summary of upcoming shifts as well as any important notes. Employees can also see who else is scheduled for the day, which is useful if they want to know who they’ll be working with or if they want to swap shifts.

When schedule conflicts come up, Microsoft StaffHub makes it easy to swap a shift or offer a shift to someone else. Requests are always routed to the manager for approval, and updates and notifications are automatically sent to the team.

Share information

With Microsoft StaffHub, managers can quickly distribute important information to their team, such as policy documents, news bulletins or videos. Managers also have a fast and reliable way to send quick messages to team members. For example, to let an employee know “there is a spill on the floor” or “the regional GM is arriving in 20 minutes,” simply tap the employee’s name and type a message. Employees can also send messages directly to each other or to the entire workgroup.

Managers select the content they want to distribute to their team.

Employees can view the files on the mobile app.

Connect to other apps and resources

Companies often use multiple systems and tools to help manage their workforce, and we want to make it easy for Microsoft StaffHub to connect to these existing systems. We’re pleased to announce that StaffHub will support connections to Kronos, a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. Initially, this integration will enable managers to import individual and team schedule information from Kronos’s Workforce Central platform directly into Microsoft StaffHub. This functionality will initially be in private preview to a small group of Office 365 and Kronos customers. Stay tuned for more!

Microsoft StaffHub also supports the ability for admins to define custom links for workers to view in the mobile app, which can point to important resources or sites, such as HR systems for reporting time off, or to custom applications, built with tools such as Microsoft PowerApps. Managers can also export team schedule information to a .csv file for use in other systems.

Next steps

Microsoft StaffHub is enabled today for Office 365 customers with a K1, E1, E3 or E5 plan. Team managers can sign in at staffhub.ms, and employees can download the app on iOS or Android.

For a deeper look at Microsoft StaffHub, check out this video:

Frequently asked questions

Q. Which Office 365 plans include Microsoft StaffHub?

A. StaffHub is available as part of the Office 365 K1, E1, E3 and E5 plans (including the Education version of these plans).

Q. How can I access Microsoft StaffHub?

A. Microsoft StaffHub is initially available on the web as well as for iOS and Android apps. It is currently available in the following 15 languages: Chinese-Simplified, English (U.S.), Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French, Brazilian-Portuguese, German, Korean, Italian, Chinese-Traditional, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish and Danish.

Q. Does each team member need to have an Office 365 account to use Microsoft StaffHub?

A. Yes, each team member and manager using Microsoft StaffHub must have an Office 365 account.

Q. Can I turn off Microsoft StaffHub for my company?

A. Microsoft StaffHub is on by default, and IT admins can turn it off for their organization at any time by going to staffhub.ms/admin and setting Enable Microsoft StaffHub to Off.

The post Microsoft StaffHub is here! appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Starting today, people will be able to create SharePoint team sites connected to Office 365 Groups from the SharePoint home in Office 365—and it’s fast. Admins control how these new capabilities appear for their users. And it is more intuitive to adjust the site as business needs require. Now, no matter where users create an Office 365 group (from Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Yammer and more), they will consistently get a full-powered, modern SharePoint Online team site.

To work together as a team, people need to be adaptable, connected and mobile. In this modern era, it is essential that productivity tools, like SharePoint Online and Office 365 Groups, adhere to these very characteristics.

Let’s dive in to the details of how we’re connecting new sites with groups and making it lightning fast to get started.

Users quickly create sites connected to Office 365 Groups from the SharePoint home page

When it comes to managing information and building business apps, people turn to SharePoint Online team sites—to create multimedia news articles, manage documents, track data in lists and more. Users can create SharePoint Online team sites connected to Office 365 Groups by clicking the Create site button on the SharePoint home page in Office 365. A two-step creation wizard will fly out from the right. Step one: Enter the title of the team site, select whether the group will be public or private, choose the site classification and then click Next. Step two: Enter the owners and members, click Finish and you’re done. A modern SharePoint Online team site is provisioned and ready for use in seconds.

The Create site wizard is connected to Office 365 Groups and creates a SharePoint Online team site in seconds.

Admin controls for how team site creation works from SharePoint home

What about managing the Create site functionality? SharePoint Online admins can control the user availability and behavior of the SharePoint home Create site button, and in cooperation, Office 365 global admins can control how site classification appears to highlight usage guidelines to their users.

The updated Site Creation settings can be found in the SharePoint Online admin center—within the settings tab. The new experience will let users create sites that include Office 365 Groups by clicking the Create site button on the SharePoint home page that starts the new Create site wizard. If you already enabled the original Start a Site for your users, we recommend that you review the new settings to ensure you selected options that meet your business needs.

Admins control how Create site works using the Site Creation settings within their SharePoint Online admin center.

Admins can manage whether Create site appears at all, and when it does, admins can adjust who sees the Create site button and what their provisioning experience should be (classic, modern or custom).

Learn more about how to manage Site Creation in SharePoint Online. Additionally, admins can control additional aspects of Office 365 Groups. Learn more about how to manage Office 365 Groups.

Adjust team sites as needs grow and change

As the entire SharePoint Online team site experience becomes more modern, users can more easily adjust commonly used settings without having to click multiple times into a classic site settings page—but rather accomplish tasks more intuitively within the context of what they are doing.

Editable home page

Create your site to meet your team’s needs. The team site home page is now editable. This means you can go into Edit mode and add, remove and reorder your site’s various web parts. Do you need to see a rollup of certain content on a particular topic? Add the Highlighted Content web part, select the filtering criteria and watch as content adjusts dynamically based on search. Want to add a group forum discussion? Throw the Yammer web part in the mix. There are a lot of web parts already available, and more are coming. Also, as you add and adjust, you can be confident the page and web parts will look great on web and mobile (within the SharePoint mobile apps).

When in Edit mode, users can use the toolbox to add new web parts to their home page.

Learn more about using web parts on pages.

Modern create panel for new libraries and lists

We’ve modernized the experience for creating new lists and document libraries, to help users add value to their team sites right from the top portion of the team site home page, instead of multiple clicks in. Click + New, choose the new component from the drop-down menu, and out pops the create wizard.

Click + New > List to bring up the inline creation pane to provide details, and then click Create.

In-place navigation editing

We’ve also brought forward in-line editing of left navigation elements, a nice feature that helps site owners encourage all members to find and make use of the site’s full capabilities.

Easily add new URL links to the left-hand navigation and adjust where and how the link shows up in the left-hand nav.

Edit site information

As needs change—for instance, a project codename getting a final public name—we’ve built in to the modern team sites experience a new way to edit site properties without leaving the home page. The editing panel is available for connected Office 365 Groups sites—accessible from the top-right gear menu. It allows owners to update the site name, description, privacy level and classification. Changes made here will also be reflected in the group. Note: we will be removing Site Settings from the gear—instead, we’ll show Site Information to make it simple to change the most common information, and from this panel, users will have a link to the full site settings page if they need more advanced configuration.

Edit site permissions

Beyond site information, site owners may want to further refine the level of access group members have when working in the team site. For this, we’re bringing a site permissions panel for connected Office 365 Groups sites—also accessible from the top-right gear menu. We think owners of public groups will particularly appreciate how easy this makes it to decide whether non-members should have full edit permissions, or whether public access should be limited to read-only viewing.

Give your classic site a modern home page

It is now possible to create a modern page in a classic team site and declare it as the new, modern home page. You simply go to the Site Pages library within Site contents. Create a new, modern page and add whatever web parts make sense for the front of the team site. Once it looks as you want it to, select the page from within the Site Page library and choose Make homepage from the command bar above. Your classic site just got a modern face lift.

Select Make homepage to declare a modern page as Home in a classic team site.

We look forward to your feedback

SharePoint Online team sites and Office 365 Groups bring integrated content collaboration to a new level. And there’s more to come, making it easier to create, use and manage content and information throughout the work cycle. We look forward to your feedback every step of the way. Please share your thoughts in the SharePoint space of the Microsoft Technical Community and submit your ideas to the SharePoint UserVoice page—and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.

Frequently asked questions

Q. What is the rollout plan for the new Create site capabilities on SharePoint home in Office 365?

A. This week, we will first update the Start a Site settings in the SharePoint admin center for our First Release customers. The new settings will be renamed Site Creation, and admins can then decide if they want their users to get the new site creation experience. The user capability to create modern sites connected to Office 365 Groups will then be enabled the following week.

Q. What happens if my company already built a custom site collection provisioning solution?

A. If you have built a custom site collection provisioning solution, you will be able to maintain it when you select the Use this form at this URL: checkbox. We are working on updating SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) guidance so you can provision a new, modern team site connected to Office 365 Groups (instead of a classic site)—you will be able to programmatically do one or the other per your requirements.

The post Create connected SharePoint Online team sites in seconds appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

What’s new

Helping people share files and collaborate on content has always been central to our mission. That’s why we’re creating a better experience for document libraries that’s faster, more intuitive and responsive.

Here’s a look at what’s new:

The new, modern document library experience, showing two documents and a link pinned to the top.

User interface

Modern document libraries combine the power of SharePoint with OneDrive usability—Modern document libraries have an updated user interface that offers an experience similar to OneDrive, so it’s more intuitive to create a new folder and upload files in the browser. The ribbon has been replaced with a trim command bar, which provides intelligent commands relevant to the tasks at hand. If your organization has customized the ribbon with buttons that map to critical business functionality in your enterprise, those buttons will appear in the command bar as well. With this update, each new Office 365 group now gets a full modern document library, replacing the former “Files” page.

Important documents easily highlighted—Click Pin to top to add documents “above the fold” in any onscreen view.

Copy and move files from the command bar—Copying isn’t new, but the copy and move gestures are intelligent about displaying your information architecture and letting you create new folders on the fly.

Copy files from SharePoint command bar.

Import files from other libraries—You may not have to make as many copies any more. Document libraries are also intelligent about remembering other files you’ve been using in SharePoint. That’s why you can import other files from other libraries as links, without having to duplicate files between multiple sites. You still see thumbnails and metadata for native files. And SharePoint shows your list of most recent documents, so you don’t have to cut and paste a link.

Create a link in modern document libraries.

Personalization

Personalized views simplified—The new document libraries let you group files directly in the main page without clicking to a separate admin screen. You can also click and drag to change the size of your columns, as well as sort, filter and group from any column header. To make the view available to everybody else in the library, just click Save View.

Responsive and accessible design—Mobile browsers have the same features as the desktop, making SharePoint productive for every user—whether they interact via mouse, keyboard, touch or screen reader.

Metadata

Document metadata now available inline—You can now edit metadata directly from the main view in the information panel. No more clicking into multiple screens to apply an update! If you’re in a view that groups files by metadata, you can drag and drop files between groups to update the metadata. And if you miss something required, the document is no longer hidden behind enforced checkout—you just receive a reminder to enter the data when you can.

One-stop shopping for everything about your documents—Thanks to Office Online integration, you can navigate a complete document preview at the top of the information panel. The panel offers metadata, including the history of recent activity, updates to the file and who received a share to the file. You can also add more users or immediately stop all sharing. Finally, all other file properties are displayed, in case there’s anything else not already covered.

The document information panel.

Keeping it authentically SharePoint—While we enhanced the document libraries to make them as intuitive and productive as possible, we know that the power of SharePoint has always been in your ability to customize document libraries to work for your team. At the same time, there’s a rich tradition of using content types, check-in/check-out, versioning, records management and workflows in SharePoint. Modern document libraries inherit all of these.

Navigation

Modern libraries come to Office 365 Groups—To bring enhanced content management to group files, libraries belonging to an Office 365 group have a new header control at the top of the page. Unlike the old control, which included links to the group’s conversation, calendar and member management, the new control has a single link to the group’s conversation, from which users can navigate to calendar and member management.

Getting started with modern document libraries

As we roll out modern libraries into production, we know it’s important to focus on several key aspects of managing the overall user experience.

Since usability requires manageability, we keep IT in control of the experience. You may be ready to adopt this across the board or you might want to stay in classic mode until you can prepare your users. We give you full control of using classic or modern looks at the tenant, site collection and library level.

When we bring modern document libraries into production later in June, it will become the new default for all libraries in most cases. However, we will add the tenant and administrative controls in advance of the actual library rollout, so if you choose to opt out, you can do so before users start seeing the new experience. We also included customization detection, so if we see certain features and customizations that don’t work in the modern experience, we automatically drop back to classic mode.

And we’ll keep classic mode running well into 2017 while users and developers adapt and adopt the new capabilities. See the support.office.com article “What is a document library?” for more details.

There’s more to come

First Release customers have been actively using many of these features since April and their feedback has guided our improvements announced today. You can join that conversation on the Office 365 Network on Yammer and weigh in on the improvements that will be part of our general release. For more context on the future of team sites beyond the new, modern document library experience, read “SharePoint—the mobile and intelligent intranet.”

We heard your feedback on extensibility and customization in particular, and we’ll have more to share in a future update. We plan to add support for customizing the page using modern techniques. Until then, customized library pages should stay in classic mode.

In the meantime, learn more about using and supporting libraries in “What is a document library?,” try out the new document libraries in SharePoint Online and give us feedback directly inside the modern document library experience with the Feedback button.

Thanks for using SharePoint.

—Chris McNulty, @cmcnulty2000, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

Frequently asked questions

Q. Will new document libraries support customization?

A. Yes, modern document libraries will continue to support declarative CustomActions that represent menu and command actions. Solutions that are currently deployed that make use of this mechanism should continue to work as before, with actions appearing in the new command surface in addition to the ribbon in classic mode. CustomActions that deploy script, JSLinks and additional web parts on the page are currently not supported. Environments that require these unsupported features should continue using classic mode for the time being.

Q. How long will classic mode be supported?

A. We recognize the need to test and prepare for any disruption to user experiences such as document libraries. We expect to run the two modes in parallel into 2017.

Q. Will these modern experiences come to on-premises servers?

A. Bringing modern experiences to SharePoint Server 2016 is central to our vision and is very much a part of the roadmap. At this time, we have no information to share yet about how or how soon this will happen.

Q. Which versions of Internet Explorer work best with modern libraries?

A. SharePoint Online supports the latest version of the Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Edge browsers, along with Internet Explorer 10 and 11. Older versions of Internet Explorer are already out of support generally. Internet Explorer 8 and 9 were previously noted as a “diminished experience” in SharePoint Online. Users of these older browsers should remain in classic mode or, preferably, upgrade to a currently supported version.

The post Modern document libraries in SharePoint appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Customers who would like to evaluate the capabilities of Project Server 2016 can download trial versions at this website.

Project Server 2016 value

Project Server 2016 delivers value in the following areas:

• Evolution of resource management—Project Server 2016 introduces a new interaction model between project managers and resources managers. This new feature is called Resource Engagements and it helps facilitate coordination and commitments around resources and the projects they spend their time on. In addition, resource managers also get a new feature called Capacity and Engagements Heatmap that provides a visual view of the capacity of their resources, so they can make informed allocation decisions. More information about these features can be found at a recent blog post.
• Performance and scale inspired by cloud—From an engineering standpoint, Project Server is built from the same code used to deliver our cloud service. Everything we learned from running our cloud service at scale in Office 365 contributed towards improving the reliability, scalability and performance of Project Server 2016. This release is a summation of the enhancements we have been making to our cloud service, e.g., unified scheduling, performance and scale optimizations, etc.
• Infrastructure consolidation—In Project Server 2016, all the project data is stored alongside the SharePoint data in the SharePoint content database. This simplifies the administration of the SharePoint farm since each Project Web App (PWA) site no longer requires a dedicated database that needs to be maintained. This reduces IT overhead and improves the backup and restore story.
• Ease of deployment—The Project Server 2016 installer is fully integrated into SharePoint Server 2016 Enterprise—a separate installation is no longer required as it was in previous versions.
• User experience improvements—Users of the browser-based PWA will get some new features, such as the ability to add multiple timelines to the Project Center or schedule pages, as well as the ability to customize the date range or look and feel of these timelines.

Learn more in the Project Server 2016 TechNet documentation. We welcome any feedback through our forums, UserVoice and social channels.

The post Project Server 2016—born in the cloud appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Editor’s note 6/2/2016:
Post has been updated to reflect the rollout of the new Site Contents page to First Release customers.

The intranet is at the epicenter of many organizations, as the place where employees can get company news and information, plus search for people and content.

Now, we will make the intranet a more personalized experience, one that is where you need it, when you need it. Welcome to the mobile and intelligent intranet. Spanning on-premises and Office 365, the mobile and intelligent intranet brings together the productivity of SharePoint Team Sites, the broadcast reach of publishing sites and portals, and the mission criticality of your most important business applications—accessible from your desktop to your mobile phone—and powered by the Office Graph, so information finds you, instead of you having to find information.

Today, we announced The Future of SharePoint, which detailed our vision and innovations, including the new SharePoint mobile app, a new SharePoint home in Office 365, modern team sites with Office 365 Groups, responsive page authoring and updates to document libraries and Lists. We also announced SharePoint integration with Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. We’re committed to evolving your intranet to be more accessible on the go and more personal, with intelligence-driven content based on your activities across sites, the people you work with and the content you work on.

Watch this Microsoft Mechanics video with Adam Harmetz, principal group program manager for the SharePoint engineering team, to see the mobile and intelligent intranet in action:

Let’s dive in to the details…

Your intranet in your pocket

Untether with the SharePoint mobile app

It’s time to untether with the SharePoint mobile app, which enables you to stay connected to important content, sites, portals and people from your intranet while you’re on the go.

Get the full power of SharePoint on your phone. This new app, too, is infused with intelligence from the Office Graph to help you navigate more quickly to content and people that matter to you the most.

• The Sites tab takes you to your Sites, Recent sites and Followed sites, where you can keep up with site activity, navigate using quick launch or see recent files.
• The Links tab takes you to sites and portals programmed for everyone in the company.
• The People tab gives you access to the people you work with and visibility into what they are working on.
• Search is available throughout with clean results filtered by sites, files and people.

The SharePoint mobile app on Windows, iOS and Android.

Users can also have multiple accounts online and on-premises, and can easily switch between them.

The SharePoint mobile app for iOS, SharePoint mobile app for Android and SharePoint app for Windows 10 Mobile are now available. And a planned future update to the apps will bring company news and announcements to your device.

Experience SharePoint home within Office 365

The new SharePoint home creates a space for SharePoint on the web within Office 365 that allows you to quickly find and create sites. And just like the SharePoint mobile app, the SharePoint home web experience enables you to easily find and discover the places, information and people you need to be productive.

Users simply click the SharePoint tile from the Office 365 app launcher—formally the Sites tile but with the same logo—to launch a redesigned, modern and responsive user experience with intelligence and site activities front and center.

Once in your SharePoint home, you’ll see the sites and portals you are most active in alongside recommended sites per the Office Graph and company-wide sites promoted by your company, the entire intranet of an organization. Here, too, is the heart of enterprise search. Start typing in the upper-left search box and you’ll see results intuitively organized, with results visually displayed.

The SharePoint home in Office 365, accessed by clicking the SharePoint tile in the Office 365 app launcher.

One app, one Web, a click and a tap away. The SharePoint mobile app and SharePoint home is your new “gateway” to experiences in SharePoint. Our goal is to make it simple and fast to navigate your entire intranet across any device, so you can keep track of the sites, work and people in SharePoint and Office 365 that are important to you.

To learn more about the SharePoint mobile app and the SharePoint home web experience, check out the new Microsoft Mechanics video, “Your Intranet in Your Pocket: The SharePoint mobile app,” with Andy Haon, principal group program manager for the SharePoint engineering team. Learn more about how to find sites and portals in Office 365.

Modern team sites

Team sites + Office 365 Groups—First, the updated team site home page is the quickest way to find and showcase the most relevant and important content. Team members can pin the content and news right up front. With intelligence from the Office Graph, team members can view recent people and content activity. The team site home page offers an updated entry point to where team members get work done and is applicable to new and existing team sites.

It is now simple and fast for users to create team sites. And by default, every group in Office 365 Groups gets the full power of a SharePoint Online team site. We’ve made huge improvements in the time it takes to create a team site—targeting “seconds-to-ready.” The provisioning flow and integrated value leads to the creation of Office 365 Groups in Azure Activity Directory (AAD), as well as establishing governance and compliance controls for site classification.

The updated SharePoint Online team site home page brings important documents and site activities to the forefront, with clear visibility to the associated group in Office 365 Groups and its members.

The same team site when accessed via the new SharePoint mobile app.

Modern document libraries experience—The second aspect, the true heart of team sites, is the document library, a secure location to create, share and organize team files. This update builds on the core value people have come to depend on for years, adding a new user experience and capabilities, designed to bring consistency for working on files throughout Office 365 while maintaining the full power of SharePoint document libraries.

We focused on helping your team get to work right away and highlight what is most important.

Use Pin to top to increase visibility and discoverability for important documents, videos and more at the top of the document library for all users. You can also add a link in an Office 365 document library to an item that is located outside the document library. For example, you can add a link to a file or folder located in a different document library or website. When you add a link in a document library, the link shows up in the list of items in that library with a web globe icon to identify it as a linked item.

To help you find and manage items, you can now sort and filter columns. In addition, new, real-time full-text search results appear directly in the document library experience along with quick, inline metadata management. And finally, when the team needs to bring in files from OneDrive for Business or publish files between document libraries, users can click Move to or Copy to move or copy files to other locations across Office 365, without generating unnecessary versions of the same files.

The new modern document library experience, showing two documents and a link pinned to the top.

Learn more about how SharePoint Online document libraries have been updated.

Modern Lists experience—And what about managing structured data in SharePoint Online Lists? Over the years, customers have used Lists for everything from tracking engineering bugs to managing event sessions or even to cataloging the t-shirt sizes of everyone on a team, making Lists a key tool for sharing data and building lightweight processes.

We’re excited to share that Lists are also getting a visual refresh, aligned in look and feel to document libraries. The core value and power of Lists goes unchanged. This update to SharePoint Online Lists brings a new user experience, aligned to the look and feel to new modern document libraries experience. You’ll first notice an updated top with quick actions for commonly used Lists tasks. Lists are much more mobile friendly via modern mobile browser across devices and a great experience when navigating Lists via the new SharePoint mobile app.

Integration with Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow coming—We are also excited to announce integration plans with Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow (announced last week); both are planned to be built right into SharePoint Online Document Libraries and Lists—helping automate your teams’ processes—especially while on the go. It’s a great way that SharePoint can be connected to a world of data sources without great cost of time or development complexity.

The Add flow button within a SharePoint Online List takes you to Add a new flow and into Microsoft Flow designer.

Beautiful, modern pages experience—The mobile and intelligent intranet pivots on modern page creation to create multimedia content, like a trip report or information about a new product launch information, using a fluid, inline and responsive page authoring experience. Pages are a great way to communicate and to assemble information from a variety of sources. We updated the page authoring experience to make it effortless to add simple content and powerful web parts. The pages you create can be shared and are part of Office Graph, so users can more easily discover your pages. And our modern pages render beautifully on screens of all sizes.

SharePoint will modernize published portals and pages with a new responsive design that can run in the web and the new SharePoint mobile app. This will include simple branding, page layouts, editing and video support built on Azure Media with extensibility through modern web parts covered below. Now, every team site comes with the ability to quickly build out and publish professional, polished reports and pages.

Modern pages area easily created in your browser when you click Add a page within a team site.

Site activity and insights on the Site Contents page—The SharePoint Online Site Contents page is being redesigned to help site owners, members and visitors understand the activities occurring within the site. The Site Contents page will provide visibility on top-viewed content and a site map, and will offer users site tips. Think of this as site-level activities and analytics. The new Site Contents page will also provide clear access to add lists, document libraries, subsites and apps. New quick buttons will allow access to common actions and deeper site settings.

Updated Site Contents page in SharePoint Online showing Site visits and Trending content.

Learn more about the SharePoint Online Site Contents page.

Roadmap for the mobile and intelligent intranet

As you can see, our team has been busy creating exceptional new experiences that empower you work effectively across your intranet—from very personal experiences with the people and content that matter to you to rich and responsive team sites and applications, all the way up to collaboration and content management across the organization.

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

• Modern document library experience (in production now).
• SharePoint mobile app for iOS (available now in the Apple App Store).
• SharePoint home in Office 365 (in production now).
• Modern List experiences.
• Site activity and insights on the Site Contents page (in production now).

And during calendar year 2016:

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

Nine out of 10 intranet design award winners selected SharePoint as their chosen platform (Nielsen Norman Group 2016 Intranet Design Awards). As you consider updating and expanding your intranet, we know SharePoint will be an important element to support you and your teams into the future. We welcome feature requests and feedback via the Office 365 UserVoice, @SharePoint and @Office365 on Twitter, and in the comments below. We’re eager to hear your feedback and use it to provide the best experience possible.

Frequently asked questions

Q. What mobile platforms are planned for the new SharePoint app and when can we expect them?

A. We are building the SharePoint app for Windows, Android and iOS. We will ship the SharePoint app for iOS by end of the first half of 2016, followed by Windows and Android versions by end of the second half of 2016.

Q. Can I use the SharePoint app for online and on-premises?

A. Yes. The SharePoint app will connect to your environment whether you are using SharePoint Online in Office 365, SharePoint 2013 or 2016 on-premises, as well as with hybrid deployments.

Q. When and how can I expect to see the new SharePoint home in Office 365?

A. We will begin rolling out the new SharePoint home page within the next few weeks, initially to First Release customers and then into the worldwide production environment. Once the new SharePoint home is available to an Office 365 customer tenant, the existing Sites tile in the Office 365 app launcher will become the SharePoint tile and the main, top-navigation will say Office 365 > SharePoint.

Q. Will every Office 365 Group get a full SharePoint team site?

A. Yes. When you create a new site from SharePoint home, you are asked to give it a title, assign the proper form of usage classification and assign appropriate members. When you add members during site provisioning, you are creating a new Office 365 Group into the tenant’s Azure Active Directory (AAD). Existing Office 365 Groups will also get a full SharePoint team site.

Q. Can I adjust the default experience for SharePoint Online document libraries from new or classic and back?

A. Yes. To learn more from a user and an admin perspective, please review this Office Support article.

The post SharePoint—the mobile and intelligent intranet appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.