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

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

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

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

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

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

Do more with Microsoft 365

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Prioritize and modernize training

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Build company culture that includes the frontline

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward

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

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

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

Earlier this year, IT leaders around the globe were forced to reprioritize their roadmaps, resources, and budgets to equip employees for remote work practically overnight. Suddenly, the use of video communications skyrocketed. People adjusted quickly to moving meetings online, but one of the most notable challenges driven by the shift to remote work has been to maintain the personal connections that come from the ad hoc and serendipitous conversations that happen in the physical office. 

In fact, studies show¹ that a person’s voice is the signal that builds personal connections and creates clarity, which is why actually speaking with colleagues and customers is more important now than ever. The use of Teams Calling has skyrocketed as well, with Teams users making over 650 million calls in October, up 11 fold over March of this year. And on average, calls are just one-fourth the length of a typical meeting, making calling a quick and efficient way to reconnect and collaborate. 

Today, we’re announcing several enhancements to Teams Calling that make it easier for organizations and their employees to strengthen connections and create new ones with just a quick call.

Get more out of every call, with a rich calling experience

Calling alone is a great way to reconnect and quickly share information. However, when you integrate calls with different modes of communication, they can act as a productivity force multiplier. We’re introducing several ways to create a more powerful and streamlined calling experience.

• Streamlined calling experience: Teams is the hub for chat, collaboration, meetings, apps, and workflows, and the enhanced Calls app brings the most important calling elements—the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts, and settings—into a single location, making it easier to stay connected in the flow of your work.
• Save call recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint: Call recordings are a great way to keep track of the ad hoc brainstorming that often happens on a call. Now, Teams Admins can take advantage of the tight Teams and OneDrive or SharePoint integration and elect to make OneDrive or SharePoint the default recording storage location, in lieu of Stream. This new capability provides powerful capabilities such as sharing with external guests, quicker access to transcripts, and greater storage capacity. Learn more.
• CarPlay support: Placing and receiving calls in the car will soon be easier than ever, thanks to CarPlay support for Teams Calling. With CarPlay, you can use your vehicle’s built-in controls to operate Teams, including using Siri to place and answer calls.
• Spam identification: Spam calls are frustrating, disturb the flow of work, and make you less likely to answer calls from unfamiliar phone numbers. Using advanced industry techniques, Teams will identify potential spam calls so you can feel confident answering incoming calls. Additionally, Teams will digitally attest outgoing calls to prevent these calls from being rejected by external recipients. 
• Transfer calls between mobile and desktop: Teams makes it easy to place and receive calls from several different endpoints, including desktop and mobile devices, but sometimes you need to move locations or devices to finish your call. Starting in early 2021, you will be able to shift your calls between your mobile and desktop endpoints with an easy-to-use interface on the Teams app.
• Call merge: Calling users can bring multiple different one to one calls together to combine conversations and simplify multiple conversations. Call merge is now available for both PSTN calls and VoIP calls.
• Low-data mode: Whether you want to preserve data or are just in a location with a poor or limited network connection, sometimes it’s helpful to limit the amount of data you’re using during a video call or meeting. Starting in early 2021, users will be able to adjust their settings in Teams to cap the amount of data that will be used during video calls and establish different settings based on network availability (cellular, wifi, or always).
• Enhanced reverse number look-up: With automatic reverse number look-up, you’ll see the name of the caller at the time they’re calling and in your activity feed and voicemail.

Provide advanced calling needs for your business

Some parts of the business require additional calling capabilities and workflows. Whether that’s keeping mission-critical operations running or resolving key customer issues, Teams supports a broad range of needs across your business with help from these new capabilities.

• Voice enabled channels: A new collaborative calling capability enables teams to integrate call queues into a specific channel, allowing for collaboration and information sharing before, during, and after the call. For example, IT or HR help desks can now be managed from a channel so available team members can answer the call, and easily share information about service tickets. Starting in early 2021, Teams users will have the option to create new channels that are voice-enabled, to start using this feature in preview.
• Certified Contact Center solutions: Resolving a customer call in contact centers is often a team sport, so it’s important to quickly identify and reach the right colleague. Contact center solutions can use presence and user APIs to seamlessly integrate with Teams, allowing agents to find the right colleagues to assist. Now, contact center providers can apply for Microsoft certification of their solutions, to provide customers with the confidence needed to manage important customer interactions. Learn more about the certification program and specific solutions that are undergoing certification, many of which will be complete in early 2021.
• Resilient calling: To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows users to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a network outage. This SBA will be available in preview this month to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network. 
• Call transfer ring-back: While call transfers can be useful to connect the right people, making sure that calls remain connected during the process is critical for a great caller experience. Now Teams users can rest assured that when you transfer an important call, it will not disconnect just because someone on the other end is unavailable. If the transfer recipient does not answer the call, the call will ring back to the person making the transfer.

Stay connected with a portfolio of high-quality devices

Teams provides a great integrated softphone experience on both mobile and desktop, and a robust lineup of hardware options allow you to choose the right physical endpoints for your needs. From low-cost phones, to traditional desk and video phones, to Teams displays, there are options to fit every user and calling need. We’re excited to share a few new ways this device ecosystem can help you stay connected, no matter where you’re working.

• Teams displays: Whether you are working remotely or returning to the office, adding an intelligent companion device like the Teams display can revolutionize the way you work. A new experience now available on the Lenovo Thinksmart view, Teams displays integrate Cortana for hands-free productivity, use AI to help you stay productive and organized, and provide a dedicated device for your Teams collaboration needs. Learn more.
• Low-cost phones: To empower organizations to bring the best of Teams Calling to as many users as possible, we’re excited to bring low-cost phones to market with trusted partners Yealink and AudioCodes in early 2021. These devices integrate natively with the Teams phone app, bringing core Teams capabilities to life.
• Device as a Service: The new Teams Device as a Service offering provides flexible monthly payments, making it easier and more affordable than ever to get your users the devices they need. Simply navigate to the Device as a Service site where you can add devices to your cart and place an order in a matter of minutes. This service is currently available in the U.S., and availability for additional regions will be coming in 2021.

Do more with the power of partners

We have seen strong growth across our Teams partner ecosystem and have more than 300 specialized partners with calling solutions for Microsoft Teams, a 100% increase over the last year. These partners assist our customers with a wide variety of services and solutions including Direct Routing as a Service, deployment, adoption, devices, managed services, and network monitoring and reporting. Examples include our Partner of the Year award winner Continuant, and finalists Enabling Technologies, Communicativ, and Orange Business Services.

Continued commitment to Calling

These innovations are examples of our ongoing commitment to support spontaneous collaboration and personal connections that voice enables. We are honored and humbled to be recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Unified Communications as a Service Magic Quadrant. We will continue working hard to make Teams the most trusted and reliable voice solution available. Now more than ever, we all need a seamless way to stay connected with colleagues and customers, and with these capabilities, you can restore personal connections and manage the most critical calls for every part of your organization. Learn more about how Accenture, Australia Catholic University, ENGIE, and Tony’s Chocolonely are using Teams Calling to stay connected.

Lastly, with all these great capabilities coming to Teams Calling, it’s important to keep in mind that Teams Calling can be rolled out in weeks—not months or years—as Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) showed by rolling out Calling globally to over 40,000 users in 4 weeks. You can always reach out to your account team for more information, and the links below provide additional information and guidance.

• Learn more about Teams Calling on the Microsoft Teams Calling webpage.
• Get started with Teams for free.
• Get guidance and resources to get up and running quickly on Teams Calling with FastTrack.

¹ Harvard Business Review, “Type Less, Talk More ” (October 5, 2020)

The post Restore and maintain personal connections with new Microsoft Teams Calling features 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.

Here’s a look at what’s new in May.

Updates from Microsoft Build to help develop people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

At Microsoft Build this month, we announced several new capabilities in Microsoft 365 to help developers create people-centered, cross-platform experiences.

Tap into your organization’s collective knowledge with Microsoft Search—We announced the general availability of Microsoft Search, an intelligent enterprise search experience that delivers a unified, consistent search experience to help you discover relevant people, content, commands, and activities across all the Microsoft 365 experiences you use daily. Wherever you’re working across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Search can help to complete a task, pick up where you left off, or discover answers or insights. The new Microsoft Search experience is available to all Microsoft 365 users now. To get started, try searching for me in Office.com or my documents in Bing.com.

Derive deep insights about effective work patterns with Microsoft Graph data connect—We also announced the general availability of Microsoft Graph data connect, a service that helps organizations bring together productivity data from the Microsoft Graph with their own business data and derive deep insights about effective work patterns. Microsoft Graph data connect is available through Workplace Analytics.

Modernize your command-line app experience with the new Windows Terminal—In addition, we announced the preview of Windows Terminal, a new feature-rich terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells, including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming and styling, and more. You can get started with the open source code on GitHub; public previews will be released to the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 this summer.

App updates to help people do their best work

This month, we introduced capabilities to help you get more done—including updates to SharePoint and the OneNote, Yammer, and Microsoft To-Do apps.

Deliver an intelligent intranet and build employee engagement—This month at the SharePoint Conference, we announced several new app updates coming this summer. SharePoint home sites deliver a new way for you to bring together news, events, content, conversations, and videos to deliver an engaging “landing page” experience that reflects your voice, your priorities, and your brand. With the upcoming Yammer question and answer feature, you can ask a question and then you or a group admin can mark the best answer. And soon you’ll be able to securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app.

Reduce eye fatigue with Dark Mode in OneNote for Windows 10—OneNote for Windows 10 now offers Dark Mode, giving you a darker canvas and adjusted color scheme to reduce eye fatigue or simply have a change in (screen) scenery. Dark Mode is now available for Office Insiders. Additionally, you can now send an email in Outlook directly to your OneNote for the Windows 10 app. To get started, get or update your OneNote for Windows 10 app.

Improve your focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration with MyAnalytics—A new MyAnalytics experience delivers outcome-oriented insights to help you make progress in four key areas: network, collaboration, focus, and wellbeing. For example, insights that previously showed you the hours you spent on email, chats, calls, and meetings outside your working hours over the past week now show you the number of days you successfully disconnected after work over the past month. That way, you can set goals and build habits that help you achieve more quiet days. This new experience is generally available to Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Office 365 Enterprise customers who have MyAnalytics as part of the E5 plan, as an add-on to E1 and E3, or with Workplace Analytics.

Add data to Excel directly from a photo with your iOS device—Using the Excel app on your iOS device, you can now take a picture of a printed data table and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This image-recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter that data. This capability works across 21 languages and is now available for the Excel app on both Android and iOS.

Create engaging videos with Microsoft Forms in Microsoft Stream—You can now seamlessly add quizzes, forms, or polling directly into Microsoft Stream videos. The Forms integration into Microsoft Stream helps presenters interact with their audience and gives them a way to solicit feedback and measure participants’ comprehension. To get started, click Add a Microsoft Form on the Interactivity tab in Microsoft Stream. In addition, you can also now securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app. Download the latest Microsoft Stream mobile app for iOS and Android to get started.

Make tasks more visible across Microsoft 365 with Microsoft To-Do and Planner—This month, we announced that To-Do integrates with Planner. Now, you can see all your tasks across Microsoft 365 in To-Do, including flagged emails in Outlook and tasks assigned in Planner. View your tasks, deadlines, and details, and plan to get more done throughout your days. To get started, update your To-Do app and click Show List when prompted to Track tasks assigned in Planner.

Streamline records management and access control

New privacy controls allow you to meet compliance obligations and efficiently manage access requests at enterprise scale.

Streamline records management and monitor inappropriate conduct—Several new Advanced Data Governance capabilities help you streamline compliance requirements. You can now use native connectors to import non-Microsoft 365 data—such as data from Facebook and Twitter—into the Microsoft cloud for archival purposes. A new records management solution helps you easily manage business, legal, and HR records in a single location. Lastly, a new machine learning classifier helps you automatically identify offensive language across Exchange email, Microsoft Teams, and select third-party sources. For subscribers of E5 or Advanced Compliance add-on licenses, explore the new capabilities in the Office 365 Security & Compliance center today.

Govern access rights with powerful compliance and auditing controls—We recently announced the public preview of Azure Active Directory (AD) entitlement management. This new solution helps remove barriers to internal and external collaboration by automating employee and partner access requests, approvals, auditing, and review for Office 365, thousands of popular SaaS apps, and any line-of-business app integrated with Azure AD. The feature is available for preview today for users who have Azure AD Premium P2 or EMS E5 licensing. To get started, visit the Azure portal.

Other updates

• The Yammer conversations web part for SharePoint is now generally available, enabling you to integrate conversations from any Yammer group, topic, user, or home feed with your SharePoint pages, news articles, or SharePoint site.
• OneDrive differential sync now supports all file types, helping you accelerate sync and reduce network utilization by only syncing the part of files that have been changed.
• Microsoft Authentication Libraries .NET is now generally available, making it easier than ever for developers to securely sign in and authenticate any Microsoft identity, from your own APIs to Microsoft Graph.
• Windows Hello now has FIDO2 certification, furthering our journey to eliminate passwords. Developers can now leverage standards-based protocols and devices to enable easy, secure authentication to online services using face or fingerprint.
• A new app registrations experience in the Azure portal is now generally available, improving the developer experience and making it simpler to configure and manage all your apps that sign in to Azure AD accounts and personal Microsoft accounts.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in May—new tools to streamline compliance and make collaboration inclusive and engaging appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

The world-class applications in Microsoft 365—including SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow—enable digital transformation for more than 500,000 customer organizations and 180 million commercial active users.

Today, I’d like to share highlights of our innovations across the following areas:

• The intelligent intranet featuring SharePoint home sites.
• Innovations in Yammer and Microsoft Stream for employee engagement and communications.
• Intelligent file experiences, sharing, and controls with OneDrive.
• Turbocharging Microsoft 365 performance, security, intelligence, and innovation.

The intelligent intranet featuring SharePoint home sites

Visionaries know that an intelligent intranet powers employee experience, organizational alignment and cultural transformation. The heart of the digital workplace, an intelligent intranet provides shared content and solutions for collaboration, connects people and content across teams and siloes to harness collective knowledge, and drives employee engagement and communications.

Today, one such visionary—Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ Kevin Schramm, Head of IT Strategy and Operations—shared their compelling story. When Takeda, a world-leading pharmaceutical company based in Japan, acquired Shire, a U.S.-based company, they built a SharePoint intranet in just four months to connect the workplace, drive organizational alignment, and power communication for more than 60,000 employees worldwide. Kevin explained, “Starting on Day 1, we wanted to begin to create a shared culture that reflected our values. A new intranet was a key part of representing the combined company to our employees. SharePoint allowed us to meet very aggressive deadlines and helped bring our organizations together, successfully.”

For more than a decade, SharePoint has powered award-winning intranets for hundreds of thousands of customers, leading the industry across every geography and industry. With the move to the cloud, customers have inspired us to deliver even more out-of-box capabilities that accelerate time-to-value. Since the Future of SharePoint event only three years ago, SharePoint has reinvented the intelligent intranet, delivering flexible solutions for teamwork, engaging employee experiences, and AI-powered search and content management. Communication sites, organizational news, hubs, modern team sites, pages, lists, and libraries are now available across browsers and devices, and in the highly rated SharePoint mobile app.

Shareable video.

SharePoint home sites

Today, we announced a revolutionary step forward, further accelerating time-to-value for customers. SharePoint home sites are an intelligent, integrated employee experience—a landing page—for your organization that:

• Connects the workplace with Microsoft Search and megamenu navigation.
• Shares relevant news and content to each user based on their role and place in the organization.
• Engages employees with conversation and compelling video powered by Yammer and Microsoft Stream.
• Powers individual productivity with personalized content, information, and navigation.

SharePoint home sites provide a dynamic, engaging, and personalized employee experience for the organization.

A home site is a SharePoint communication site with superpowers that is:

• An organizational news source, by default. News published to the home site is visually marked to indicate it is official news and syndicated to all users with access to the home site.
• The landing page for the new home view on the SharePoint mobile app.
• Connected to the enhanced SharePoint start page (formerly referred to as “SharePoint home”), which features improved navigation, insights into activity across your sites, views of your documents to help you get back to your work quickly, and the enhanced saved for later view of news and content you’ve flagged for review.
• An enterprise-wide Microsoft Search experience, from the search box in the suite bar.

Where intranet portal projects of the past were often measured in months, you can now deploy a home site in minutes and then—with no code—customize and brand the out-of-box web parts, navigation, and site design to reflect the voice and priorities of your organization.

Of course, SharePoint remains a powerful platform for delivering applications on the intranet. Now, you can add any of the hundreds of third-party applications available in Teams to any SharePoint site. And you can embed solutions built with the SharePoint Framework by your developers or by our extensive network of SharePoint partners. We’re pleased to announce more than a dozen partners have agreed to integrate their intranet offerings closely with the SharePoint intelligent intranet to empower our customers with an extensive range of solutions that are optimized for performance and compatibility with the SharePoint mobile application and future innovations.

We’re thrilled to introduce home sites and to empower customers to build wholly new, intelligent employee experiences. Learn more about SharePoint home sites and other innovations for the intelligent intranet.

Innovations in Yammer and Microsoft Stream for employee engagement and communications

SharePoint home sites feature out-of-box integration with Yammer and Microsoft Stream. Today, we showcased innovations for Yammer and Microsoft Stream that unlock high-value scenarios for employee engagement, communication, and learning.

Innovations for Yammer

Yammer connects people across the organization with open conversation. Yammer’s lightweight conversational experience across devices fosters inclusivity by giving every employee a voice and the ability to express thoughts, ideas, and feedback. With the new Yammer question and answer feature, you can ask a question and then you or a group admin can mark the best answer—making the knowledge easier to share and reuse in the future. Additionally, a group can feature intelligent, bot-like responses to frequently asked questions.

Yammer question and answer makes it easier for people to find answers across the organization.

To accelerate your organization’s success with Yammer, we’re pleased to announce that e-Discovery for Yammer will be available to all customers using Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups. In addition, to support the unique data residency requirements for European customers, we’re accelerating availability of in-geo data storage for Yammer in the EU, available today. Now, Yammer messages and files attached to Yammer messages will be stored at-rest in our EU datacenters, for new Yammer networks in the EU.

New capabilities for Microsoft Stream

Customers are increasingly turning to video as a compelling way to support communications, learning, and engagement. Today, we celebrated new announcements for Microsoft Stream, powering intelligent video in Microsoft 365. You can securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app for iOS and Android. We also demonstrated how you can easily insert polls, surveys, or quizzes into videos with Microsoft Forms.

Record, upload, and share video securely with the Microsoft Stream mobile app.

Embed a quiz, poll, or survey in a video with Microsoft Stream.

Update on SharePoint spaces

At the SharePoint Conference 2018, we shared an early look at SharePoint spaces, which enable anyone to create compelling, mixed reality experiences viewable across headsets and browsers. Customer interest has been overwhelming, with over 1,800 companies across the globe and across industries applying for our limited preview. We’ve been working with a handful of those customers to develop our plans for SharePoint spaces, and we’ve been collaborating on industry standards for 3D and virtual reality.

Today, we gave another small glimpse into our progress by showing an example used here at Microsoft, which allows people to experience our original campus and to connect with the vision for the new campus using 2D and 3D video and 360-degree images. We look forward to sharing much more about SharePoint spaces at Ignite 2019.

At Microsoft, our own cultural transformation was scaled to include more than 110,000 employees worldwide by engaging employees with Yammer and live events. We’re excited to learn from our customers, who are now empowered with the same capabilities to drive cultural transformation, organizational alignment, open conversations, compelling communications, and immersive experiences for learning and development.

Learn more about announcements for Yammer and new features for Microsoft Stream.

Intelligent file experiences, improved sharing and controls with OneDrive

OneDrive is the files app in Microsoft 365 where you can work with all your files—your individual work files and the files shared with you across Microsoft 365—on PC or Mac, across browsers, and across devices with highly rated apps for iOS and Android. Improvements to sync include differential sync for all files—Office files already feature differential sync—which will accelerate sync and reduce network utilization, and support for Windows Virtual Desktop, currently in preview. These improvements enable organizations to deliver cloud-connected experiences and users to work with cloud files within native experiences like File Explorer and Finder.

OneDrive lets you find the files that matter most, with Microsoft Search in OneDrive and new, AI-powered experiences that provide personalized recommendations. OneDrive’s enhanced file hover cards will show you file insights, activity, and lifecycle signals such as DLP policies. And the new save for later feature lets you flag a file that you want to return to at a better time.

The OneDrive web application features a new, full-fidelity files experience for shared libraries, enabling you to sync files to your PC or Mac, work with metadata columns and custom views, and preview more than 320 file types—including 360-degree images and AutoCAD DWG files. And collaborators can now add comments to any of the 320+ file types—including images, CAD drawings, PDFs, and more—with new support for comments on non-Office files.

Intelligent experiences in OneDrive include a full-fidelity files experience for shared libraries, including conditional formatting and metadata; file hover cards with file insights and activity; and rich collaborative features.

We made it easier to collaborate on files with people inside and outside your organization—within the sharing policies set by your organization—directly from OneDrive. You can now create a shared library with a streamlined experience backed by an Office 365 group, allowing you to specify the people you want to share with. Of course, you can also share files in Teams, the hub for teamwork, where a new file sharing control in Teams chat lets you choose whether to upload a copy of the file or share a link, for which you can configure the access provided by the link. We’re also bringing the new sharing control to Outlook.

Manage access when you share files in a Teams chat.

Manage access when you share files in Outlook.

Finally, we’re introducing a new request files capability. You can select a folder and invite people to add files. Everyone can upload files to the folder and see only their files. And, as files are added, you receive a notification. Request files unlocks scenarios where files need to be collected from multiple individuals, while preventing individuals from seeing others’ files.

Learn more about these highlights, when they’ll arrive in your tenant, and the rest of the innovations we announced for sharing and working together on files on the OneDrive blog.

Powering content collaboration with turbocharged SharePoint file storage

Microsoft 365 is the most feature-rich, intelligent, and trusted cloud for your content. SharePoint powers content collaboration in Microsoft 365, and we’ve invested billions of dollars across research and engineering to drive massive improvements to the capabilities, performance, scalability, and security of Microsoft 365.

Today, we spotlighted some of those “behind the scenes” investments:

• Accessing data from Microsoft 365 is ten times faster than it was just two years ago.
• Your experience in Office 365 is three times faster than a year ago, with investments across our architecture that accelerate your experience even when you are working far from your own datacenter.
• To drive faster, more responsive intelligence and insights, we’ve worked so that content you add or modify is searchable in seconds.
• You can view more than 320 file types, without requiring dedicated applications, across Microsoft 365 web, mobile, and desktop applications and Windows 10.
• Differential sync, coming to OneDrive, will synchronize large files significantly faster and considerably reduce network utilization by sync.

SharePoint investments in performance, scalability, collaboration, and intelligence are powering significant innovations for content collaboration across Microsoft 365. Recent examples include the release of Microsoft Search to general availability across SharePoint, Office.com, and Bing.com, and revolutionary new capabilities for real-time, intelligence-assisted collaboration that we previewed in our demonstration of the Fluid Framework.

You can learn more about the SharePoint file storage improvements that make Microsoft 365 the best cloud for all of your content and collaboration in Turbocharging Microsoft 365 cloud user experiences.

Finally, we continue to invest in capabilities that enable IT organizations to govern users, devices, and content with industry leading security and compliance controls, so that IT can empower the business and rest easy that information is protected.

• Classification labels provide consistent management of information lifecycle, security, and compliance across Microsoft 365.
• High-value compliance control and global footprint, including general availability of Multi-geo Capabilities for SharePoint and Office 365 groups.
• New enterprise information archiving features to natively archive third-party data into Microsoft 365, new solutions to help organizations achieve compliance requirements, such as Records Management, and updates to Supervision including new out of the box machine learning models to harness intelligence and identify questionable content for further review. These solutions are generally available with Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Compliance offerings.

You can read more about today’s announcements for security, compliance, and manageability in Updates to SharePoint security, administration, and migration and New Records Management solution and machine learning updates come to Microsoft 365 compliance.

Inspiration and next steps

The innovations and vision we announced today are inspired by you—your success, your stories, your questions, and your wish lists. Our team listens closely and creates capabilities that we hope in turn inspire you to transform your organization with an intelligent workplace.

Watch the SharePoint Virtual Summit starting May 21, 2019 at 12 PM PT and keep your feedback coming. We’ll see you at Ignite 2019 where we’ll have—believe it or not—even more big announcements to share. Until then, I encourage you sign up for our new monthly update, which will be the best place to keep in touch with announcements, guidance, and tips across Microsoft 365’s communication and collaboration experiences.

Also, see the following resources to learn more:

• SharePoint home sites: a landing for your organization on the intelligent intranet
• New Yammer investments add engagement and compliance capabilities
• New Microsoft Stream mobile features, interactivity and more announced at SharePoint Conference 2019
• OneDrive announcements—SharePoint Conference 2019
• Turbocharging Microsoft 365 cloud user experiences
• Getting started with Microsoft Search
• Updates to SharePoint security, administration, and migration
• New Records Management solution and machine learning updates come to Microsoft 365 compliance
• What’s new for SharePoint Server
• Announcements for SharePoint developers
• Microsoft adoption resources center
• Optimizing business solutions with SharePoint and Office 365 at SPC19

The post New SharePoint home sites headline Microsoft 365 innovations for the intelligent workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

The PUR Company

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

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

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

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

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

Meals on Wheels

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

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

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

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

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

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

John’s Crazy Socks

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

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

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

Work like a small business

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

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

Here’s a look at what’s new in March.

Collaborate more easily

New features and services give you more ways to collaborate with colleagues and LinkedIn connections across platforms.

Boost meeting productivity and meet compliance obligations with Microsoft Teams updates—Last week at Enterprise Connect, we announced several new features in Teams including the ability to improve the effectiveness of remote meetings by replacing your background during video chats and increasing inclusivity with live captions & subtitles during Teams meetings. We also announced the generally availability of live and on-demand events in Microsoft 365, which enable you to deliver compelling communications to up to 10,000 employees, customers, and partners. We also announced new compliance capabilities in Teams such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations to help you keep information secure and meet your obligations.

Improve whiteboard ideation and collaboration—Two new intelligent inking features in the Microsoft Whiteboard Windows 10 app help improve the collaborative ideation experience. Now, you can easily capture a picture of a physical whiteboard and convert it to digital ink in the Whiteboard app using ink grab. Additionally, the new ink beautification feature can help increase the readability of jotted notes by analyzing handwriting and automatically replacing it with more legible strokes. Together, these intelligent inking features decrease the time spent on managing content, so you can spend more time collaborating on a digital whiteboard. Both are now available in the Whiteboard Windows 10 app.

Work seamlessly with first-degree LinkedIn connections—When you securely connect your LinkedIn account with your Office 365 account, you can now view others’ LinkedIn profiles in Outlook on the web, and in OneDrive and SharePoint in Office 365, and see relevant insights about the people you’re working with, both inside and outside your organization. Now rolling out to Targeted Release customers is the ability to send emails to and coauthor documents with many of their first-degree LinkedIn connections.

To get started, type a connection’s name in the To or Cc field when composing a new message or sharing a document in Outlook on the web, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word Online, PowerPoint Online, and Excel Online.

Create more engaging content and get more done

New Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on the web features help you create beautiful content and save you time.

Make your presentations stand out with 3D objects on your Mac—Create stunning visuals and engaging content on your Mac with 3D embedded animations in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Improve comprehension and retention, increase engagement, and entertain audiences with content that seemingly comes to life. Select scenes and insert 3D models from a vast library of free content and rotate 3D objects to tell your story from every angle. 3D objects on Mac will start rolling out to Insiders next month.

Prepare for and schedule meetings faster with new intelligent features in Outlook on the web—Powered by Microsoft artificial intelligence (AI), Outlook on the web will now help you prepare for meetings by showing you relevant information you might need. It will also automatically suggest that you create a meeting directly from an email conversation and show you available days and times for people you include in a meeting invite. These features will begin rolling out to Outlook on the web users in the next few weeks.

Enhance security and streamline IT management

New capabilities help you better protect your organization and streamline IT management.

Ensure a healthy security posture with updates to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)—Last week, we announced that we’re extending our endpoint protection platform to support additional operating systems with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Mac, available now in limited preview. With this expansion, we’re also renaming the Windows Defender ATP platform to Microsoft Defender ATP. We also announced that we’re making Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capabilities available in Microsoft Defender ATP to discover, prioritize, and remediate threats and vulnerabilities—preview coming soon.

Access your security and investigation tools in the new Microsoft 365 security center—The Microsoft 365 security center is a new unified security experience that provides your security professionals with a dedicated workspace to manage and take advantage of the comprehensive security capabilities of Microsoft Threat Protection. The Microsoft 365 security center is now generally available. Get started with features and capabilities such as Secure Score, Advanced Hunting, and security alerts by visiting security.microsoft.com.

Manage your Microsoft 365 services with the new Microsoft 365 admin center—Last week, we announced that the new Microsoft 365 admin center will begin rolling out as the default experience for all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 admins. The Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to serve as a single entry point for managing services across Windows 10, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) in a more powerful, efficient, and personalized way.

Other updates

• Now, when opening links to Office 365 documents from the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook desktop apps, you will have the option to open them directly in the desktop apps instead of the web.
• Teams users can now add a Yammer tab to a Teams channel that loads a specified group or topic feed from Yammer.
• Microsoft Forms Pro, our new enterprise survey solution to professionally distribute surveys, is now available in public preview.
• OneNote now supports syncing edits of files embedded in your notebooks, eliminating the need to save copies of embedded files.
• The custom policies feature in Azure Active Directory B2C is now generally available and gives you more control over identity experiences to help you deliver personalized user journeys in your customer-facing applications.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in March—tools to enable teamwork and enhance security in the workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This is especially true as it relates to an organization’s Firstline Workforce. In manufacturing, Firstline Workers are the employees who deliver products and materials, drive product quality, and keep critical equipment running. To help manufacturers with their digital transformation, we’re enabling new ways to work with Microsoft 365 for Firstline Workers to learn, communicate, and collaborate more effectively.

Upskilling and equipping the Firstline Workforce

With the rise of Industry 4.0, manufacturers must reimagine the roles, skills, and tools to transform work throughout their organization. This means providing digital and soft skills, empowering workers with modern tools, and blurring the boundaries of technology with new immersive experiences. In an increasingly digital and complex landscape, the types of skills that employees need are rapidly evolving, and it is increasingly difficult for the workforce to keep pace.

Solutions in Microsoft 365 that enable Firstline Workers to learn, communicate, and collaborate include:

• Using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online, manufacturers can securely centralize training efforts, easily distribute onboarding and training materials, and connect all levels of the organization to find and share best practices.

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

To help equip workers to operate in a digitally-enabled manufacturing environment, Teams provides a single hub for teamwork to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate production from the engineering rooms to the factory floor.

• Earlier this year, we announced new capabilities—including urgent messaging, location sharing, and image annotations—which organizations can use to create a safer and more efficient workplace. For example, these features can help workers identify, communicate, and share the location of hazardous spills to help reduce operational disruptions.

• Additionally, Microsoft Teams is extensible and allows companies to transform business processes using Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. These services help to digitize everyday activities—such as documentation during quality assurance, data capture, and inventory management—helping reduce costs and free up time for Firstline Workers to focus on higher value activities.

As Industry 4.0 reshapes the manufacturing industry, finding new innovations to help workers learn, communicate, and collaborate remains a top priority. Microsoft is addressing these challenges through breakthroughs in hardware design, artificial intelligence (AI) experiences, mixed reality with HoloLens 2, and through business-ready solutions with Dynamics 365 and industry partners.

• Using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, technicians can solve problems faster by calling in remote experts via Microsoft Teams to help walk through repairs using mixed reality annotations, sharing diagrams and schematics. And with Dynamics 365 Guides, employees can learn new skills with step-by-step instructions that guide employees to the tools they need and how to use them in real work situations.

Helping our customers succeed

Leading manufacturers choose Microsoft 365 to prepare, equip, and empower their employees at all levels:

To accelerate productivity and information flow, Cummins replaced its existing productivity and collaboration tools with Microsoft 365, introducing a modern knowledge management and collaboration framework to reduce skills gaps and anchor a new culture of work.

“Our modern, tech-driven workplaces give employees the tools they need to innovate, so we can introduce new energy products and technology solutions to the market. It’s also a key strategy in attracting top talent.”
—Sherry Aaholm, VP and CIO for Cummins

Goodyear is using the integrated and adaptive tools in Microsoft 365 to help accelerate innovation and enable new capabilities inside the company. For example, Goodyear is connecting its workforce via tools like Teams, which is driving productivity and generating efficiencies to deliver the right products to the right place at the right time.

“Enhancing collaboration is crucial to us for improved decision making and to drive innovation, both in tires and beyond tires… Our multigenerational and multicultural global workforce is now sharing perspectives and ideas more quickly and easily than ever.”
—Sherry Neubert, CIO for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

We’re incredibly excited about our opportunity to help manufacturers transform and we are just getting started!

Join us at Hannover Messe and learn more

Next week, members of the Microsoft team will be at Hannover Messe, the annual manufacturing conference. Visit us at Microsoft stand C40 and learn how Microsoft is enabling Intelligent Manufacturing.

The post Closing the skills gap in manufacturing with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

For many teams focused on architecture, engineering, and manufacturing, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings are key to their workflow. By storing CAD drawings and DWG files in OneDrive and SharePoint, teams get the benefit of industry leading mobile and desktop applications, enterprise-grade compliance, and innovative collaboration capabilities. By tightly integrating tools and files together, tasks get simpler, you can stay in your flow, and you can integrate your data with business processes. For these teams, deeper connections between key business tools to files can transform how they work.

These new integrations with Autodesk—an innovator in the CAD industry—connect OneDrive and SharePoint to the drafting tools available through AutoCAD. As you work with DWG files across these applications, new integrated actions will allow you to open and edit DWG files in the AutoCAD desktop application, the AutoCAD mobile app, and the new AutoCAD web app—in just a few clicks.

Open and edit DWG files in the AutoCAD web application.

Design and draft with the AutoCAD web app

The AutoCAD web app lets you design and draft in AutoCAD on any computer. It gives you quick, anytime access to the latest drawings from anywhere without having AutoCAD installed on your machine. View, edit, and create CAD drawings in a simplified interface that runs in your local web browser. The AutoCAD web app is included with an AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT subscription.

The DWG file opens from SharePoint or OneDrive into the AutoCAD web app (web.autocad.com).

Of course, you can also open AutoCAD DWG files directly into the AutoCAD desktop application and use the full suite of tools, views, and workflows.

Learn more and let us know what you think

We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in late March 2019, starting today with OneDrive, and support for SharePoint coming in the following weeks. These integrations are just the beginning—Autodesk and Microsoft are exploring other ways to integrate and streamline productivity. We’re eager to hear your feedback on integrations in the CAD area and with AutoCAD products. Visit our UserVoice site and add your feedback.

In addition, more information around the Autodesk AutoCAD web app is available:

• Autodesk—About Accessing Drawings Remotely with the AutoCAD web app
• LinkedIn Learning—A brief introduction to using DWG files in AutoCAD web app by Shaun Bryant

The post Announcing new integrations with Autodesk AutoCAD for Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Stay ahead of threats and collaborate securely

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

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

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

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

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

Manage tasks and capture data with ease

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

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

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

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

Other updates

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

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

Via a personal dashboard, an Outlook add-in, and weekly emails, MyAnalytics summarizes how you spend your time at work, then suggests ways to work smarter—from cutting unproductive meeting time to reducing time spent working after hours. It even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you stay on top of your to-dos by flagging commitments you’ve made in email.

The MyAnalytics dashboard.

New insights give a more complete picture of how you spend time at work

As we continue to evolve the product, today we’re also making MyAnalytics insights more well-rounded. MyAnalytics currently provides insights based on time spent in Outlook emails and meetings, and Skype for Business calls and chats. This month, we’re adding new insights based on your Microsoft Teams calls and chats, as well as signals from documents you’re working on that are saved in OneDrive and SharePoint. With 329,000 organizations and 87 of the Fortune 100 using Teams, this takes us one step closer to providing you with a more complete picture of how you’re spending time at work.

MyAnalytics Outlook add-in and weekly email.

A recent Gallup study found that two-thirds of full-time employees say they experience burnout at work. Multiple factors are contributing to burnout—such as the increased pace of work, a rise in collaborative work like chats, emails, and meetings, and the continuing trend of technology blurring the lines between work and life. Our customers tell us they’re looking for ways to address these challenges by helping employees find time to focus, improve work-life balance, build better meeting habits, and create deeper connections with their colleagues. By making MyAnalytics features more broadly available to our millions of customers, it is our goal to make work days around the world a little more balanced and fulfilling.

Availability: MyAnalytics insights from Microsoft Teams and documents saved in OneDrive or SharePoint will begin rolling out to existing customers with MyAnalytics in January 2019. With today’s updates, MyAnalytics features will be available for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business, and Office 365 E5, E3, E1, Business Premium, and Business Essentials plans. MyAnalytics functionality will roll out in phases, beginning with the Outlook add-in. Beginning mid-March, 2019, MyAnalytics licenses will be assigned and activated; however, users will not be able to see any MyAnalytics functionality. In mid-April, admins will begin to see a toggle in the Exchange Admin Center that supports tenant-level management of MyAnalytics functionality. The add-in functionality will begin rolling out on May 15, 2019.

Note: Today, we’re also announcing new security and compliance packages for our enterprise customers. Please read Introducing new advanced security and compliance offerings for Microsoft 365 to learn more.

Editor’s note 3/15/2019:
This post has been updated to reflect the most current availability of MyAnalytics features.

The post MyAnalytics, the fitness tracker for work, is now more broadly available appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

A few key reasons to use the app include:

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

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

Let us know what you think

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

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

The gig economy, which includes freelancers, consultants, contractors, and solopreneurs, is on the rise. According to Staffing Industry Analysts, the total spent on gig work in 2015 was $792 billion. Experts believe that within 10 years a larger proportion of the U.S. workforce will participate in the gig economy. In addition, according to Field Nation, 86 percent of independent workers intentionally choose freelancing.

The implications for enterprise companies are profound. To thrive in a highly competitive environment with rapidly changing technology and customer needs, enterprises must be agile and adapt to new business models to get work done with external talent. While adding on-demand freelance talent to the mix offers measurable results in speed and efficiency, the path to transforming existing policies and processes is largely undefined.

Our launch partner for this toolkit is Upwork, one of the largest online global marketplaces with over 375,000 freelancers in over 180 countries. We specifically are partnering with Upwork Enterprise, their end-to-end compliance and freelance talent sourcing solution.

The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit offers solutions for the main friction points enterprises encounter when deploying a freelance program, including: internal communications and awareness, team-wide collaboration, data analytics, and workflow automation.

Internal communications and awareness

One of the major challenges of launching an enterprise freelance program is driving awareness and education among internal stakeholders and adopters. Employees need a place where they can get started to learn how the program works, access required training, and review best practices for engaging with freelancers.

Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit solves for this with the SharePoint communication site template—a “one-stop shop” for program details to help accelerate freelance adoption and onboarding, including:

• Repository for relevant documentation and presentations about the program.
• Use cases to show employees the kinds of projects they can get done with freelancers.
• FAQs seeded with the top questions from enterprise employees.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the SharePoint expert talent pool.

See our SharePoint communication site infographic to learn more.

Team-wide collaboration

The nature of enterprise freelance projects requires team members to collaborate on multiple files, manage varied tasks, and communicate across time zones. To keep cross-functional, multi-geographical teams moving in the same direction, the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit provides guidance around using Microsoft Teams as a powerful hub for teamwork that brings chats, meetings, calls, files, and apps into one shared workspace.

With Teams, enterprises can manage their freelance communication and collaboration needs, specifically through:

• Communication—Public and private teams for members to engage in discussion.
• Task management—One place to track progress and align each team member’s workflow via integration with project management tools like Microsoft Planner.
• File storage—One place to store shared files and retrieve them through intelligent search.
• External guest access—The ability for external users worldwide to collaborate in all aspects of freelance projects through the free version of Teams.
• Security—External guest access to project-specific teams keeps your information safe without giving wholesale access.

See our Teams infographic to learn more.

Data analytics

A major challenge in scaling an enterprise freelance program is capturing, tracking, and communicating performance KPIs. The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit leverages Microsoft Power BI, a business analytics service that deliver insights by collecting real-time data from multiple sources, simplifying data prep, and producing customized, easy-to-understand reports and dashboards.

Power BI helps enterprise program managers to:

• Make data-driven decisions.
• Compare freelance program results to conventional staffing solutions.
• Identify the teams within your organization currently leveraging freelance talent by discipline type to help identify future opportunities within your company.

To enhance the core functionality of Power BI for a freelance environment, the freelance toolkit offers:

• A Power BI template with sample visualizations.
• A Power BI connector to pull data from disparate sources into dashboards.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the Power BI talent pool.

See our Power BI infographic to learn more.

Workflow automation

An enterprise freelance program requires provisioning, compliance, and monitoring, all while providing a frictionless process for your employees. To reduce the need for manual completion of repetitive tasks, Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit uses Microsoft Flow to create automated workflows between apps and services that send notifications, synchronize files, and collect data.

For example, Microsoft Flow can help business decision makers automate the following scenarios:

• Employee training and compliance. By visiting the freelance program SharePoint communication site, employees can sign up for the pilot by completing a compliance training video supported by Microsoft Stream.
• Internal community signup. After an employee completes the compliance training video, the employee is automatically added to an internal Teams channel where employees can collaborate with others who are part of the program and share experiences.
• Upwork account creation. After the employee is added to the Teams channel, their account information, which includes their name and email address, is sent to Upwork for account creation on their platform, so they can start posting jobs on the platform.

In addition to core Microsoft Flow functionality, the freelance toolkit offers:

• Case studies to show how you can use Microsoft Flow within an enterprise freelance program.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the Microsoft Flow talent pool.

See our Microsoft Flow infographic to learn more.

Our journey and what we learned

Like many of our customers, Microsoft is also in the process of navigating how to responsibly weave freelance engagements into our enterprise environment. Over the past year, we completed over 2,000 freelance projects across writing, research, video editing, translation, design, and data science—spanning 25 internal teams and hundreds of employees.

But getting to this point was not easy—we had to internally transform ourselves, and we needed to build an infrastructure that could support the complexities of an enterprise freelance program. This led us to develop the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit, which combines our leading enterprise productivity apps with curated tools, templates, and best practices to address the specific needs of enterprise freelance programs. The work has paid off. To date, we’ve seen measurable cost and time savings.

Get started

Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit is available for no additional cost as part of an Office 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscription. Learn more about Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit and a Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscription.

Please note: Each enterprise will need to evaluate and determine its own needs—including such things as data handling and compliance requirements—and should use their existing Microsoft 365 investments they determine appropriate.

Learn more about the freelance toolkit journey with Upwork.

The post Introducing Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit—a solution to launch and scale your freelance workforce appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Create content that stands out

We’re excited to introduce new capabilities that help enhance the visual look and feel and overall impact of your documents and presentations.

Bring your content to life with Embedded 3D Animations—Earlier this month, we announced that you will be able to insert Embedded 3D Animations in Word and PowerPoint to help easily illustrate more complex ideas in your presentations using 3D. Simply insert and play embedded 3D animated models, so you can improve the comprehension and retention of your content. This feature will available beginning November 2018.

Convert ink to text and shapes at the same time—We’re enabling more natural ways to work with Ink in PowerPoint. You’ll be able to easily convert your digital pen ink into text on a slide. And when you draw a more complex diagram with words and shapes, you can select everything in the slide and convert it to text or shapes all at once. The feature requires a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription and a touch/ink-compatible device. This feature will be available beginning November 2018.

Build impactful content with curated slide recommendations in PowerPoint—Now, regardless of whether your words are handwritten or typed, Designer in PowerPoint uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to convert text into curated slide recommendations. These recommendations include multiple design themes and intelligent SmartArt and icons—based on words in your slide—to bring your ideas to life. You’ll save time, stay in the design flow, communicate more clearly with imagery, and create better slides. This feature is now available to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscribers.

Easily edit documents with a digital pen—New gestures in Ink Editor enable you to edit documents using familiar shorthand with a digital pen while in tablet mode. Now, you can insert new lines, add missing words, and delete and highlight content quickly and naturally while on the go. These capabilities are available with a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription when using a touch-enabled device and a digital pen.

Convert Word documents into beautiful webpages using Transform to Web—With Transform to Web, you can easily transform your Word documents into interactive, easy-to-share webpages with just three clicks. Transform to Web offers a variety of styles that look great on any device, helping you easily publish a wide variety of polished content, including newsletters and training manuals. You can also view analytics on the page, including who has viewed or read your content. To transform a document, go to File > Transform and select a style. This feature will be available for Word with an Office 365 subscription and Word Online beginning November 2018.

Easily transition to and work in the cloud

We’re introducing capabilities across Microsoft 365 to help you move your files and applications to the cloud and help your users easily get help and support when they need it.

Migrate your files to the cloud with the SharePoint Migration Tool—The new SharePoint Migration Tool is a simple and intuitive way for commercial customers to migrate their existing SharePoint, OneDrive, and File Share content to SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. To take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions in Microsoft 365, download the SharePoint Migration Tool at no added cost to bring your on-premises content to the cloud.

Ensure app compatibility with Desktop App Assure—Desktop App Assure is now available through FastTrack to assist customers who encounter app compatibility issues when deploying Windows 10, Office 365 ProPlus, and feature updates. Desktop App Assure for FastTrack customers is currently available in North America and will be available worldwide by February 1, 2019.

Access help and support when using Office.com—The new help and support pane for Office.com will provide you access to the latest support information and support articles, and give you help with the common issues for the app you’re using without leaving the app. For commercial customers, you’ll be able to search your organization’s help desk information, if enabled by your admin. The new experience will launch next month on www.office.com and will roll out across Office 365 web apps over the next six months.

Other updates

• Office 365 has earned HITRUST CSF Certification, helping health and life sciences organizations meet their compliance requirements, while building capabilities to transform patient care and patient experiences.
• Office 2019 servers are now available, including Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019.
• New SharePoint admin center updates, including simplified controls and an improved site management experience, allow you to more easily and effectively manage SharePoint sites in Office 365.
• Microsoft was recently recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Access Management and Content Collaboration Platforms (CCP), as well as a Leader in the Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant for 2018.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in October—tools to create impactful content and help transition to the cloud appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

Experience Microsoft Search today

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

Microsoft Search in Bing.com

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

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

Microsoft Search in Office.com

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

Microsoft Search in SharePoint mobile app

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

Microsoft Search in the Outlook mobile app

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

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

Connect and curate data across your organization’s systems

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

Coming in the first half of 2019

Microsoft Search in Office

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

Microsoft Search in Windows

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

What’s coming next?

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

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

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

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

Today, we are announcing upcoming capabilities that, along with our recent investments, combine the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with content stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint to help you be more productive, make more informed decisions, and keep more secure.

Be more productive

A key to being productive is leveraging existing content so you’re not reinventing the wheel. Historically this has been challenging due to the exponential growth of digital content, particularly with image, video, and audio files. Until now, these rich file types have been cumbersome to manage and painful to sift through to find what you need, when you need it.

Video and audio transcription—Beginning later this year, automated transcription services will be natively available for video and audio files in OneDrive and SharePoint using the same AI technology available in Microsoft Stream. While viewing a video or listening to an audio file, a full transcript (improving both accessibility and search) will show directly in our industry-leading viewer, which supports over 320 different file types. This will help you utilize your personal video and audio assets, as well as collaborate with others to produce your best work.

Once you’re ready to make a video broadly available across the organization, you can upload and publish to Microsoft Stream. You’ll continue to get transcription services plus other AI driven capabilities, including in-video face detection and automatic captions. Importantly, your audio and video content never leaves the Microsoft Cloud; it is not passed through potentially costly and insecure third-party services.

Searching audio, video, and images—Announced last September, we are unlocking the value of photos and images stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. Using native, secure AI, we determine where photos were taken, recognize objects, and extract text in photos. This recognition and text extraction allows you to search for images as easily as you search for documents. For example, you could search a folder of scanned receipts for the receipt that mentions “sushi.” Video and audio files also become fully searchable thanks to the transcription services described earlier.

Intelligent files recommendations—Later this year, we’ll introduce a new files view to OneDrive and the Office.com home page to recommend relevant files to you. Suggested files are based on the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph and its understanding of how you work, who you work with, and activity on content shared with you across Microsoft 365. This deep understanding of user behavior and relationships among coworkers is unique to Microsoft 365 and continues to be enriched as you collaborate on content in OneDrive and SharePoint.

AI also makes it easier to create new documents by reusing existing content. The Tap feature in Word 2016 and Outlook 2016 intelligently recommends content stored in OneDrive and SharePoint by understanding the context of what you are working on. This allows you to leverage and repurpose a paragraph, table, graphic, chart, or more from another file while working on a new document or email.

Make more informed decisions

OneDrive and SharePoint make your life easier thanks to innovative AI that helps you make more informed decisions while working with content.

File insights—Earlier this year, we rolled out an updated file card, providing access statistics for any file stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. This allows you to see who has looked at the file and what they have been doing, and it helps you decide your next action. Later this year, we’ll bring these valuable file statistics directly into the native Office application experience.

Additionally, we’ll introduce additional insights to the file card with “Inside look,” giving you important information at a glance—including time to read and key points from the document, so you can choose to dive in deeper or save it for later.

Intelligent sharing—Later this year, you’ll have the option to easily share relevant content with meeting attendees. For instance, if you just presented a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll be prompted to share it with the other attendees once the meeting is over. In the OneDrive mobile app, we’ll automatically prompt you to share photos taken during the same meeting, perhaps of a whiteboard where you brainstormed new ideas with your colleagues—all based on your Outlook calendar. This type of real-world intelligence allows you to quickly keep everyone informed and move on to your next task and is exclusively available when you store your content in OneDrive and SharePoint.

Data insights—Earlier this year at the SharePoint Virtual Summit, we showed you how you could immediately enrich your OneDrive and SharePoint content with intelligence by leveraging the flexibility of Microsoft Flow and the power of Azure Cognitive Services. Since these services are powered by Microsoft Azure, you can get sentiment analysis, key word extraction, and even custom image recognition—all while keeping your content secure in the Microsoft Cloud and away from potentially costly and insecure third-party services. Additionally, you can use information provided by these cognitive services to set up custom workflows to organize images, trigger notifications, or invoke more extensive business processes directly in OneDrive and SharePoint with deep integration to Microsoft Flow.

Keep more secure

When your files are stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, AI also helps to protect your content, keep you compliant, and thwart malicious attacks.

OneDrive files restore—Earlier this year, we released OneDrive files restore including integration with Windows Defender Antivirus for business and personal users to protect you from ransomware attacks by identifying breaches and guiding you through remediation and file recovery. With a full 30 days of file history and sophisticated machine learning to help us spot potential attacks early, OneDrive gives you peace of mind for every file you store. Best of all, moving your files to OneDrive has never been easier thanks to Known Folder Move.

Intelligent compliance—In addition to being able to apply native data loss prevention (DLP) policies and conduct native eDiscovery searches on textual content stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, with the innovations discussed above, we’re making it even easier to use these key compliance capabilities with audio, video, and images later this year. Soon you’ll be able to leverage the text extracted from photos and audio/video transcriptions to automatically apply these policies and protect this content.

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As you can see, by leveraging Microsoft’s industry-leading investments in AI we believe we have made OneDrive and SharePoint in Microsoft 365 the smartest place to store your content. In fact, Microsoft is recognized as a Leader by Gartner in both their Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms and Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms reports. It was also recognized by Forrester in both their cloud and hybrid Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms Q4 2017 reports.

You can start realizing these benefits and more by moving your content to OneDrive and SharePoint today, just as Fortune 500 customers MGM Resorts International, Walmart, Johnson Controls International, and Textron are doing. You’ll automatically get more value as we continue to invest in these and other new AI capabilities to help you achieve more.

Microsoft has a bold vision to transform content collaboration for the modern workplace inclusive of files, dynamic web sites and portals, streaming video, AI, and mixed reality, while reducing costs and improving compliance and security. Be sure to join us at Microsoft Ignite from September 24–28, 2018 in Orlando, Florida, or on-demand, where we’ll continue to unveil how AI will accelerate content collaboration in the modern workplace.

Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms, Monica Basso, Michael Woodbridge, Karen Hobert, July 3, 2018.
Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Karen Hobert, Michael Woodbridge, Joe Mariano, and Gavin Tay, October 5, 2017.

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

The post Microsoft 365 is the smartest place to store your content appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Streamlining the way you work

Updates to the Office 365 user experience—We announced updates for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook that are designed to embrace the breadth and depth of Office 365 features, while simplifying the user interface and improving accessibility. These updates include a simplified ribbon to encourage focus and collaboration, modern colors and icons to improve rendering and accessibility, and AI-powered search to quickly surface relevant information. These changes will start to roll out to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscribers over the next few months.

Connect Office 365 Groups to SharePoint sites—Office 365 Groups can now connect to existing SharePoint sites, allowing newly created Office 365 groups to integrate with your existing SharePoint infrastructure. Connecting a group to a site provides a single starting point to find content, team news, and communications with modern pages, libraries, and lists—without losing any previous content or permissions.

Reduce distractions with Outlook for Android—We introduced “Do Not Disturb” in Outlook for Android to help you reduce distractions and get more done. Now, subscribers can set timed or scheduled periods when email and calendar notifications will be paused. For those with multiple Outlook accounts, Do Not Disturb settings can be customized for each email address—enabling granular control over how you spend your focus-hours.

Manage progress in Microsoft To-Do—This month, we introduced “Steps” in Microsoft To-Do—a new feature that allows you to break down tasks into smaller, incremental steps—making large projects more manageable. Now, when a you create a To-Do item, you can add a range of detailed steps that are tracked through to completion. We also introduced the ability to share your To-Do lists, enabling you to work together on tasks and complete projects with colleagues and friends.

Dictation in OneNote—Office 365 subscribers with Windows 10 can now take advantage of hands-free dictation using nine languages in OneNote. Dictation provides a simple, yet transformational, way to express ideas and capture notes using only your voice. You can also make edits using your keyboard without having to pause the recording. Simply click or tap the Dictate icon and start speaking.

Adobe PDF integration in Office 365—Last September, we expanded our strategic partnership with Adobe to focus on integrations between Adobe Sign and Office 365 products, like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. This month, the Adobe Document Cloud team announced new capabilities for OneDrive and SharePoint that provide improved fidelity when working with PDF documents. Once integrated by your administrator, PDF services provide rich previews of PDF documents in OneDrive and your SharePoint sites, and allow you to combine several files into a single PDF in your document library.

Securing the modern workplace

We introduced several new important capabilities that strengthen your organization’s identity-driven security, and ensure important data is kept safe.

Secure your organization with baseline security policy in Azure Active Directory—We introduced the preview of a baseline security policy in Azure AD that enforces multi-factor authentication for privileged accounts. This new policy will apply to all organizations that have Azure Active Directory and help secure the most important accounts in your tenant. Customers can opt in to the baseline protection policy in preview, and at general availability will be opted in by default with the ability to opt out at any time.

Block legacy authentication using Azure Active Directory conditional access—This month, we introduced the preview of conditional access support for blocking legacy authentication, which enables organizations to stop users from authenticating to legacy apps. Identity attacks such as password spray almost exclusively target these older client apps. This feature improves the overall security of your IT environment by getting users to move to more modern clients that support modern authentication mechanisms.

Enhance data classification across your organization—The new Label Activity Explorer in Office 365 provides a quick overview of how the data in your organization has been labeled—allowing you to investigate risky or abnormal activity. To help you manage labeling across the lifecycle of your organization’s content, we enhanced the Data Governance dashboard with new features like the Data Governance toolbox, added links and tools for common data governance tasks, and provided a single resource for guidance.

Other updates

• Microsoft Teams has reached FedRAMP Moderate Compliance and will start rolling out to U.S. Government Community Cloud (GCC) customers on July 17, 2018.
• Visio Online is now available in Microsoft Teams. Coworkers can now collaborate on Visio Online diagrams from within their team or channel without toggling between apps.
• SharePoint Swoop—our new enterprise reality show—features a team of MVP experts with just three days to help a Microsoft 365 customer modernize their intranet.
• At Computex 2018, we outlined our vision for how partners can build intelligent edge devices and solutions.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in June—streamlining teamwork and security appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

Empowering creative teamwork

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

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

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

Create immersive virtual environments in seconds with SharePoint spaces.

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

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

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

Source video.

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

Creating a secure and compliant workplace

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

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

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

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

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

Other updates

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

Check out these other updates from across Microsoft 365:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SharePoint brings AI to content collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other announcements at the SharePoint Virtual Summit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for a modern desktop

What do I mean by a “modern desktop?”

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

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

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

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

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

Delivery Optimization Status using Windows Analytics.

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

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

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

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

Solutions for Firstline Workers and kiosks

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

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

Kiosk Browser available from the Microsoft Store.

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

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

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

Streamline device management at lower costs

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

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

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

Windows AutoPilot enrollment status page.

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

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

An integrated administration experience

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

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

The Microsoft 365 admin center.

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

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

Compliance that’s built-in

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

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

The Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center.

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

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

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

Simplifying your IT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get more done in Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

Work together more effectively with updates to iOS and Mac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional updates

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

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

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

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

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

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

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

Automatically unlock rich insights with AI (preview)

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

Excel will provide automatic insights.

Master company lingo with machine learning

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

Master company acronyms in Word Online.

Get to events on time with Outlook

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

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

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

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

Find text in images with intelligent search

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

Search for text in images stored in Office 365.

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability:

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

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

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

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

New features power content creation

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

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

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

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

Cloud enhancements make file management easier

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

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

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

Expanding our online toolkit

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

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

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

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

Other updates

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

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability: 

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

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

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.

Customers’ successes inspire us and illustrate how SharePoint and OneDrive in Office 365 empowers individuals, teams and organizations to share with confidence, transform business process, inform and engage the organization, and harness collective knowledge. Today’s announcements make it easier than ever for you to drive these outcomes and accelerate your digital transformation. For even more insights, read Jeff Teper’s post, “SharePoint Virtual Summit showcases growth, innovations and customer success.”

Here’s a recap of the headline announcements that Jeff covered in his blog, and the broader set of innovations we highlighted during the SharePoint Virtual Summit.

Share with confidence

OneDrive lets you share files securely with anyone—inside or outside your organization. Its deep Office integration, which powers rich co-authoring, allows you to collaborate on these shared files with others in real time. And it lets you access all your Office 365 files, including your individual work files and files shared with you by individuals, teams and the organization—regardless of whether you’re on a PC, Mac, an iOS or Android device or a Windows phone.

See all your files in File Explorer with OneDrive Files On-Demand  

Last week at Microsoft Build 2017, we announced OneDrive Files On-Demand, coming to preview on Windows 10 this summer. Files On-Demand enables you to work with all your files in Office 365—both work and personal, across OneDrive and SharePoint—right from File Explorer, without having to download them and use storage space on your device.

Work with all your files in Office 365 from File Explorer with Files On-Demand.

Share files directly from File Explorer on Windows and Finder on Mac

Today, we also announced that starting this summer you will be able to share Office 365 files directly from File Explorer on PC and Finder on Mac. The sharing experience has been simplified, so you can share a file or folder with specific people or send a link that enables anyone who needs access, inside or outside your organization. In addition, you can now control how long a link provides access, and you can easily view and modify the permissions you have granted. The new sharing experience is the same, whether you share on the web, in Explorer on Windows 10 and Windows 7, or in Finder on Mac.

Share files and folders with colleagues inside and outside your organization directly from File Explorer on Windows 10 and Windows 7.

Share files and folders with colleagues inside and outside your organization directly from Finder on Mac.

Innovations that we’ve released over the last year and announced today are sparking customers to choose OneDrive over other file storage and sharing solutions. Read “File sharing and cloud storage with OneDrive and Office 365” to learn more.

To learn more about these and other announcements for OneDrive, read “New sharing features for OneDrive and SharePoint” and watch OneDrive for Business updates: simplified sharing and files on demand.

Connect SharePoint team sites with other Office 365 content and services

Over the last year, we modernized SharePoint team sites and connected them with Office 365 Groups. Today, we announced additional enhancements—coming later this year—which will further unify collaboration experiences in Office 365, including:

• The ability to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups, so you can augment existing sites with shared conversations, calendar and Planner.
• Support for adding SharePoint pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams so you can add a tab with a news article or your team site’s homepage, for example. This builds upon the existing ability to add tabs for SharePoint document libraries in Teams. More integration between Teams and SharePoint will be shared at Microsoft Ignite.

Add a SharePoint page to a Teams channel.

To learn more about these and other announcements for SharePoint team sites, read “Personalize team sites in Office 365 and amplify your work using Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups” and watch New personalized, focused experiences across your SharePoint team sites.

Transform business process

SharePoint enables you, your team and your organization to streamline tasks, automate workflows and integrate processes seamlessly into your work—on any device and from anywhere you work.

Create custom SharePoint forms and digital experiences with PowerApps

Starting this summer, you will be able to use Microsoft PowerApps to easily create custom forms and rich digital experiences that surface right in the context of a SharePoint list or library. Users can then create, view and interact with data using your custom form or experience, rather than default SharePoint forms.

Create custom forms inside SharePoint lists and libraries with no code using PowerApps.

This is a significant milestone for both SharePoint and PowerApps, as it empowers any user to drive transformation of team and organizational processes.

Simple approval flows built in to SharePoint libraries

We also continue to deepen integration of SharePoint and Microsoft Flow. New built-in approval flows let you send any document for approval with a custom message. The recipient can approve the request directly from a rich, actionable email message, so approval and feedback can be given without leaving your inbox.

Approval flows, built in to SharePoint, send a rich, actionable email message.

To learn more about these and related announcements we made today, read “Reinventing business processes in SharePoint” and watch Zero code business process apps in SharePoint with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

Inform and engage employees

An intranet lets you communicate to people—keeping them informed of news and information. And it enables you to communicate with people—to engage employees and foster open conversation. It is this engagement that is fundamental to driving digital transformation and culture change.

Reach a broad audience with SharePoint communication sites

As the next step toward ushering in the next generation of intranets, we announced SharePoint communication sites—coming this summer. A communication site is a beautiful, dynamic site that lets you reach a broad audience to keep the organization informed and engaged. Communication sites look great on the web, on a PC or Mac, on mobile browsers and in the SharePoint app.

Easily create beautiful intranet sites to reach a broad audience across your organization.

While your team site lets you share within your group as you’re working, a communication site lets your group share broadly and communicate its message across the organization. News published on a communication site surfaces on SharePoint home in Office 365 and on SharePoint mobile to all users who have access to the site.

Communication sites can be created in seconds. You can configure the default web parts on your site’s pages to tell your story. You can customize page layout with new multi-column sections and drag-and-drop authoring with a range of richly functional web parts, including an image gallery, interactive Bing maps, videos from a Microsoft Stream channel, and a new events web part. Add the Yammer web part to solicit feedback and foster conversation, right in the context of a communication site.

To learn more about communication sites, read “Reach your audience via SharePoint communication sites in Office 365” and watch An overview of SharePoint communication sites.

Harness collective knowledge

As the pace of work accelerates, it’s more important than ever to harness collective knowledge by making it easier to find information and expertise, right when it’s needed, and to encourage best practice sharing.

Find people, expertise and content faster with powerful, personalized search

Today, we announced a more personalized search that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence from Microsoft Graph to surface more relevant and valuable results, faster. When you click in the Search box on SharePoint home in Office 365, recommendations appear instantly. You’ll see recent files, making it easy to get back to your work, as well as relevant content, sites and news.

When you’re searching for knowledge, it may be found in content such as files, sites and news. And it might also be found through your colleagues. Now, your search results will include people whose skills, interests and projects—part their Office 365 profile—are relevant to your query.

Search results activate people cards, so you can learn at a glance about a person and the content they work on. One more click activates an extended view with richly detailed information from the user’s profile. These enhancements to search will roll out over the next few months.

Find what you need faster with instant, personalized results that include files, sites, news and people.

We also demonstrated how building communities using Yammer with SharePoint encourages people to share content, knowledge and best practices across the organization, by adding a conversational layer to your intranet.

Build a community with shared content and conversation using a SharePoint communication site and Yammer.

To learn more about Yammer integration with SharePoint and related announcements made today, read “New in Yammer: Building a More Engaged and Connected Organization” and watch Updates to Yammer: Integrating conversations into your SharePoint experiences.

Secure your content and manage your service

Innovation in the cloud drives tremendous business value, and it delivers new capabilities to the IT professionals who work tirelessly to support, configure, administer and secure their organizations’ content and services.

Empower administrators with the new SharePoint admin center

Today, we announced the new SharePoint admin center, which will begin rolling out in the fourth quarter of 2017. From the homepage, you’ll notice just how much better it is, with interactive usage reports, Message Center posts and a Service Health dashboard tuned to the needs of SharePoint administrators.

The new SharePoint admin center surfaces usage, health and administrative messages.

You’ll easily find and work with the dozens of SharePoint settings we give you to configure sharing, access and the service. And we know you’ll love the dynamic new Site Management page, which lets you view, filter and edit the configuration of all of your SharePoint sites—including sites connected to Office 365 Groups.

Manage all of your sites in the new SharePoint admin center.

To learn more about these and other announcements regarding SharePoint security and manageability, read “Secure your information with SharePoint and OneDrive” and watch New admin controls for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.

Extend SharePoint and OneDrive

Just as we innovate for business users and IT professionals, we innovate for developers and partners. Last week at Microsoft Build 2017, we unveiled new capabilities to extend SharePoint experiences and build custom applications with SharePoint and the Microsoft Graph. We enhanced the SharePoint Framework with new extensions, coming soon in preview, for sites and libraries. We announced web part connections and File Handlers version 2, in preview, supporting more deeply integrated experiences. Finally, Microsoft Graph features new production endpoints for site data, as well as extended APIs for lists, in preview.

To learn more about announcements for SharePoint developers, read “Your guide to SharePoint at Microsoft Built 2017” and watch Updates to the SharePoint Framework with SharePoint Framework extensions.

Continued commitment to on-premises and hybrid customers

Last year, we released SharePoint Server 2016 to general availability and announced a vision to bring cloud innovation to on-premises customers through Feature Packs. We released Feature Pack 1 in November, with a new, responsive user interface for OneDrive and cloud coexistence features, including hybrid taxonomy and hybrid auditing. And today, we announced that we will bring the first components of the SharePoint Framework to SharePoint Server 2016 with Feature Pack 2 later this year. This will enable developers to use an updated client-side development model to create web parts and solutions that can power new solutions on-premises, in hybrid experiences and in Office 365.

To learn more about innovations for on-premises and hybrid SharePoint customers, read “SharePoint Server 2016 and Beyond” and watch SharePoint Server 2016 updates and advances in Cloud coexistence.

Accelerate your digital transformation

Today, we unveiled the latest innovations for SharePoint, so you can share and manage content, knowledge and apps and build a more connected workplace. We announced new features for OneDrive and deep integration across Office 365, Azure and Windows. And there’s more to come. Join us at Microsoft Ignite, where we look forward to hearing your feedback—and celebrating your success—as we partner to accelerate your digital transformation.

—The SharePoint and OneDrive teams

If you missed the event today, you can view the recording of the SharePoint Virtual Summit.

The post New SharePoint and OneDrive capabilities accelerate your digital transformation appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

Transforming the Firstline Worker experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Bryan Goode

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

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

Expanding Microsoft 365 to new audiences

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

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

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

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

New capabilities to unlock employee creativity

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

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

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

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

See LinkedIn profile information from Microsoft apps and services.

The universal toolkit for teamwork

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

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

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

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

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

Simplifying IT management

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligent security and compliance updates

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

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

The Microsoft Cloud App Security dashboard.

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

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

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

Compliance Manager helps organizations meet compliance obligations.

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

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

Create a beautiful communication site in seconds

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

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

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

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

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

Share your plans and updates in engaging, interactive ways

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

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

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

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

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

Communication sites help further refine and enhance your message

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

Make your home page and sub-pages look great

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark your calendars

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

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

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

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

Frequently Asked Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365

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

Chat for today’s teams

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

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

Hub for teamwork

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

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

Customizable for every team

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

New Bots help you to complete tasks within your conversations.

Security teams trust

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

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

Customers achieve more with Microsoft Teams

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

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

Start using Microsoft Teams today

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

Start using Microsoft Teams today.

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

*Additional subscription may be required.

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

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 with modern SharePoint lists

Modern SharePoint lists provide a powerful way for people to collaborate on structured data directly from their team site to help teams organize content—such as investment account onboarding details, field service requests or even softball team T-shirt sizes. Over ten million custom lists are already in use across Office 365.

Now, we’re delivering a modern list experience that looks great and is responsive, accessible and easy to use on any device. The modern SharePoint list experience will be automatically available to all existing classic SharePoint Online lists.

With modern SharePoint lists you can:

• Improve ease of use by empowering users to add columns to lists and sort, filter and group data in place.
• Elevate data quality by viewing and editing all item details in the information panel without leaving the list.
• Improve productivity by bulk editing list items with Quick Edit.
• Automate simple business processes with versions, approvals and alerts.
• Enrich static information with rich data types including people, images and managed metadata tags.

Modern SharePoint lists in the information panel.

In addition, modern SharePoint lists look great on the SharePoint mobile app—making every location and every device a first-class component of business processes.

Editing list items in SharePoint mobile browser.

Modern and classic SharePoint list experience

Almost all SharePoint classic lists will automatically inherit the new modern SharePoint list interface. Modern SharePoint lists support the themes, navigation and custom buttons that were created in classic mode. We monitor the compatibility of customizations every time a user visits a list. If we see a compatibility blocker—like an unsupported browser or JSLink customizations—the list automatically reverts to the classic experience. Users can choose to revert to the classic experience at any time, and administrators can configure classic experience as default at the list, site, site collection or tenant level. And rest assured—we have no plans to remove classic mode anytime soon. Classic mode supports your customizations today and tomorrow. Looking forward, we’re going to continue to develop rich customization scenarios for modern experiences along with the SharePoint Framework.

Integrating PowerApps and Microsoft Flow

Customers regularly exchange data between SharePoint lists and other systems to support business processes. These scenarios become more powerful with deep integration of Microsoft Flow with SharePoint modern lists. Flow automates workflow and data exchange between SharePoint and a variety of Microsoft and third-party services. Now, you can create and launch Flows directly from a SharePoint list and store and modify that data within SharePoint.

With PowerApps, you can connect, create and share business apps on any device in minutes. You can build efficient mobile forms and apps directly from a SharePoint list, without needing to write code. PowerApps and Flow share a common connector framework that allows you to weave in dozens of data sources on-premises and in the cloud, including Exchange, SQL, Dynamics, Salesforce, Google, Mail Chimp, Twitter, Wunderlist and more.

Building a PowerApp from a modern SharePoint list.

Set up a new Flow from SharePoint.

Automatically build a new Flow from SharePoint.

Flow and PowerApps are both currently in public preview.

To learn more about PowerApps and Flow integration, watch this video:

What’s next?

The initial rollout of modern SharePoint lists to First Release customers will be in early August 2016. After that, we will add PowerApps and Flow to the command bar. With Office 365 groups all receiving full team sites soon, even more users than ever will have access to our business app tools. We will have even more to show at Microsoft Ignite this fall in Atlanta.

Early preview of modern SharePoint lists

We recognize that customers want to validate these modern SharePoint list experiences for potential impact to users, training, customizations, or third-party solutions. Starting today, we are providing an early preview of the modern SharePoint list experience ahead of First Release and we look forward to your feedback.

See the Office 365 Network for details about how to enable early preview of modern lists.

—Chris McNulty, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

The post Modern SharePoint lists are here—including integration with Microsoft Flow and PowerApps 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device

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

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

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

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

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

And before the end of calendar year 2016:

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

The mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

SharePoint mobile app—your intranet in your pocket

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

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

SharePoint home

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

Modern team sites

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps integration

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

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

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

Roadmap for the mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

And during calendar year 2016:

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

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

The SharePoint Framework—open and connected platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the third quarter of 2016, you will see:

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

And by the end of 2016, we will deliver:

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

Security, privacy and compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

To summarize, we currently support:

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

This quarter, we will release:

• Dynamic conditional access policies.

And by the end of 2016, you will see:

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

Learn more about these announcements in this video:

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

Connecting you with innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jeff Teper

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

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.

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Office 365 availability

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

Here are a few more details about the uptime number:

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

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

Availability design principles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distributed Services. Functionally distributed component services:

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

Monitoring. Extensive monitoring, recovery and diagnostic tools:

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

Simplification. Reduced complexity drives predictability:

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

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

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

Continuous learning

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

Consistent communication

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

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

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

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