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

A more inclusive, seamless working environment

Support neurodiversity in the hybrid workplace

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

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

Create tasks with natural language

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

Get more out of Yammer

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

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

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

Work securely from anywhere with Windows 11 and Windows 365

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

Drive productivity and hybrid collaboration with Windows 11

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

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

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

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

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

Empower IT with modern management

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

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

Simplify what it takes to protect your endpoints in the cloud

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

Govern data across your entire data estate

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

Empowering the future of modern work

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

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

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

³ Hardware dependent.

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

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

Let’s dive in.

Focus on what matters and collaborate across boundaries

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

Pin or hide your own video in Microsoft Teams meetings

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

Stay on top of required trainings

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

Get suggestions on Yammer communities and people to follow

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

Auto-renew active Yammer communities

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

Collaborate with people outside of your geography while maintaining compliance policies

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

More flexibility in how you provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs

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

Provision Cloud PCs without an Azure subscription

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

Localizing the Cloud PC experience

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

Looking to the future

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

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A decade of continuous innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extending audio conferencing capabilities

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

New pricing

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

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

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

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

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

Hybrid work is the new norm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extend and digitize manufacturing workflows

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

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

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

Foster culture and learning in your team

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

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

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

News from Build 2020

Microsoft Teams

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

Productivity

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

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

Automation

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

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

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

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

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

Meetings and events

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

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

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

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

Secure and remote scheduling

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

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

Fluid Framework

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

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

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

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

Project Cortex

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

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

Outlook

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

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

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

Microsoft Edge

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Lists

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

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

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

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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.

This month, we’re introducing capabilities to help you work on the go, collaborate on content more easily, interact with apps in more ways, and customize your productivity experiences. The new Office app is now generally available for Android and iOS. We added collaboration capabilities to PowerPoint comments and brought coauthoring and Microsoft Teams integration to Visio. Word now has an improved speech-to-text functionality that supports more languages, while added inking features and Dark Mode make it easier to capture and read notes in OneNote for Android. Meanwhile, organizations can now customize their employees’ productivity experience—from search results pages and All Company Yammer feeds to a private preview of the new Microsoft Fluid Framework.

Read on for all the exciting Microsoft 365 updates this month. And for a deeper dive into the news, be sure to check out the second episode of the Modern Workplace podcast. This month, host Alex Bradley and I go in-depth on teamwork, the new Microsoft Fluid Framework, and more.

Be productive on the go

Work from anywhere with the new Office app—The Office app is a fully redesigned experience to help you be more productive from anywhere. It combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app, adds new capabilities to help you create content in uniquely mobile ways, and has integrated Actions that help you accomplish common mobile tasks. The result is a simpler, yet more powerful, Office experience for mobile devices. Read this blog post to learn more about the new Office app, now generally available worldwide on Android and iOS.

Improve collaboration across your favorite apps

New tools in PowerPoint and Visio make it easier for teams to work together.

Collaborate more fluidly in PowerPoint—Starting next month, we’ll roll out an updated comments feature in PowerPoint. Team members can now anchor comments to objects, use @mention notifications, discover and add comments more easily, and more. The new comments experience will be available to all Office 365 users with the latest update.

Coauthor Visio drawings in more ways—Visio for the web now allows collaborators to create, edit, and comment on drawings simultaneously. With live coauthoring and a simple presence indicator, teams can work seamlessly together to brainstorm and develop their ideas. Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users can visit visio.office.com to create and share Visio files today.

Team members can also use these capabilities directly in Teams. Now you can share your Visio drawings with colleagues, since files stored in your Team’s file library are accessible to every member—making it easy for colleagues to edit and comment on your work. To get started, click the Files tab above the conversation window in your Teams channel and select New > Visio drawing.

Personalize the way you work

Updates to Word and OneNote let users work the way they want.

Save time and simplify work with improved speech-to-text—It’s now easy to create content with your voice in Word thanks to a new dictation toolbar, suggestions experience, and auto-punctuation support. You can also now work in six new preview languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese. The new Voice Dictation in Word for the web is rolling out to all Office 365 users now.

Capture and take notes with ease—OneNote for Android phone and tablet now supports Dark Mode, enabling you to switch from bright white to a more subtle black and dark gray color scheme for easier reading. Additionally, we refreshed the inking experience to support bright new colors and continue leveraging pen types, highlighters, and erasers. And don’t miss the Lasso tool, which resizes and repositions objects on the page. These updates are rolling out to all OneNote users on Android phones and tablets.

Customize user collaboration experiences

New capabilities help you tailor your productivity tools to fit your enterprise brand and environment.

Create custom search results pages for Microsoft Search—You can now create custom search results pages in SharePoint Online. Use this new feature to control the layout and design of search results to tailor your SharePoint Online experience for your enterprise environment. The new feature will be available to all SharePoint Online subscribers. To get started, choose the site area where you would like to configure a custom results page and select Site Collection Settings > Search Settings.

Choose which “What’s new” features are visible to your users—You can now manage which features are shown or hidden from users in the “What’s New” Office desktop app. This content highlights a list of new features, accompanied by descriptions and guidance to help customers use the features. You can access this management tool using the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Office 365 Client Configuration Service.

Begin creating fluid collaboration experiences today—Microsoft Fluid Framework is a new component-based document model designed to enable new ways to collaborate on content creation. Now anyone with an Office 365 Enterprise subscription can check out the early preview. To get started, simply sign in with your organizational account ID at fluidpreview.com.

Strengthen your enterprise branding in Yammer—New capabilities in the current Yammer experience allow you to customize the All Company feed name, upload a community cover photo, land key messaging, welcome new members, promote organizational initiatives, and reinforce company values. Pair this with custom avatars to bring your branding and culture into your All Company feed. These new capabilities will be available to admins soon.

Manage Yammer eDiscovery from within the Microsoft 365 admin center—Yammer now supports eDiscovery for networks in Native Mode. Now admins will have access to all messages and files posted in their Yammer networks through the same eDiscovery tools they use to manage data throughout the rest of the Office 365 suite. This simplifies eDiscovery tasks and streamlines compliance obligations. To get started, make sure your Yammer network is running in Native Mode and then navigate to the eDiscovery module of the Security and Compliance Center.

Additionally, now all new files uploaded to Yammer communities connected to Office 365 are stored in SharePoint. With this change, your files will adhere to the rich security and compliance features policies that you’ve implemented for SharePoint—including eDiscovery, data loss protection, in-geo residence for files at rest, and others.

Also new this month

• Get help deploying the new Microsoft Edge in your enterprise with new FastTrack and App Assure support.
• Office 365 is now available from new regional datacenters in Germany.

Navigating work and life today requires great tools that are constantly evolving and improving. Our goal is to build the productivity experiences that enable you and your organization to succeed. We can’t do it without you, so please reach out with feedback, requests, or questions. We’re here to help.

The post Improve collaboration across apps and customize experiences—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in February appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We updated the conversation experience for Yammer mobile, so it’s easier to discover and share the content that matters most, and a new PowerPoint for iPad feature makes it (finally!) easy to share a single slide. The updated Microsoft To Do app keeps you productive on the go, and now you can export Visio workflows to Microsoft Flow—a great way to streamline business processes and save your organization money and time. Also new in September: automated incident response with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for more effective, efficient security.

Collaborate, save time, and improve productivity with app updates

App updates streamline your mobile experience and help you conquer your to-do list across devices.

Join the conversation with beautiful new experiences for the Yammer mobile app—We updated the conversation experience for Yammer mobile, so you can connect, discover, and share in a way that’s easy on the thumbs and on the eyes. Highlights include a new card-based design that sharpens content, easy-to-read formatting and styling, a new grid layout for docs and images that makes it easier to preview and engage with multiple images or files, and link previews and inline videos right in the feed. To experience these improvements, simply update your Yammer app to the latest version.

Get more done with the new version of Microsoft To Do—This month, we unveiled a new version of To Do with a fresh design, access from anywhere, and better integration with Microsoft apps and services. You can choose from customization options and backgrounds (including dark mode) to tailor your experience and suit your lists. You can also sync To Do across all platforms to take your lists with you wherever you go. In addition, you integrate To Do with Microsoft 365 apps and services or have one centralized view of your tasks. Think of To Do as your new task aggregator—from Outlook to Planner and Cortana and the Microsoft Launcher on Android, you can now see your whole list in one place.

To get started, download the To Do app. And if you’re coming from Wunderlist, you can import your existing lists in just a few clicks.

Share, communicate, and collect feedback more efficiently and effectively

New app features let you share individual PowerPoint slides, stay on top of your notes in OneNote, and conduct more effective surveys.

Share individual slides and overcome public speaking jitters with new PowerPoint features—Sometimes you only need to share that one specific slide, and sending it via email or creating a separate file can be cumbersome. Now, exclusively in PowerPoint for the web, you can share a deck with a link to a specific slide. Just right-click the slide thumbnail, select Link to this slide, and copy the link.

We also released Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web in public preview. Presenter Coach uses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to give users real-time, on-screen feedback to improve public speaking skills. Rehearse your presentation and get helpful tips on pacing and using inclusive language, as well as avoiding filler words like “basically” or “um,” or developing a rote presentation style.

Stay on top of your most recent notes and adjust your color schemes in OneNote—Updates to OneNote allow you to take your notes with you on the go and personalize your experience. Recent Notes is now also available on Mac, helping you easily pick up where you left off on any device with a chronological list of pages you recently viewed or edited.

On iPad, we integrated OneNote with Sticky Notes, so you can surface your notes there and avoid toggling between apps. Finally, you can now switch to a darker canvas with the new dark mode in OneNote for Mac. All these new features are available now.

Overcome language barriers in your surveys—Microsoft Forms now offers the option to create surveys in multiple languages without having to merge separate documents. Multilingual support enables users to reach a broader audience and helps respondents provide richer feedback by displaying questions in their preferred language. Beginning next month, you’ll be able to access multilingual support by clicking on the ellipsis in the top right corner and selecting Multilingual from the dropdown menu.

Export Visio workflows to Microsoft Flow to quickly automate business processes—Designing processes quickly and automating workflows can help accelerate productivity, but it’s often easier said than done. Now you can easily create new automation flows in the familiar diagramming experience of Visio and seamlessly export them as a fully functioning workflow to Microsoft Flow. Built-in Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) stencils have sharing and commenting capabilities, simplifying development and collaboration. Once the workflow’s complete, you can publish it to Microsoft Flow with a single click. This capability is now generally available to all Visio Plan 2 users through the Visio desktop app.

Streamline IT management and security

New features simplify the management of corporate Android devices, making it easy to add Microsoft 365 customers and ensure endpoints and devices are secure.

Manage corporate-owned Android devices with Microsoft Intune—With support for Android Enterprise fully managed devices, Microsoft 365 customers can deliver a high-quality and feature-rich productivity scenario for employees on corporate-owned devices, while maintaining an extended set of policy controls over those devices. Intune support for Android Enterprise work phone management is now available.

To get started, check out our Intune documentation.

Save time when adding new employees to Microsoft 365—Adding and configuring new employees or freelancers to Microsoft 365 just got easier. Beginning this month, you can create and use a template to save time and standardize settings when adding people in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Templates are particularly useful if you have employees who share many attributes, like those who work in the same role and the same location.

Beginning this month, head to the Microsoft 365 admin center and select Users > Active Users > User Templates > Add Template.

Automate incident response with Office 365 ATP—We’re excited to announce the general availability of Automated Incident Response in Office 365 ATP, which applies powerful automation capabilities to investigation and response workflows, dramatically improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your business’s security teams. These capabilities are available to organizations with the Office 365 ATP Plan 2, Office 365 E5, and Microsoft 365 E5 Security SKUs.

Evaluate security products with ease—The new evaluation lab in Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection removes the challenges of machine installation and configuration. Security experts can verify a potential platform, familiarize themselves with the product, learn about new features, or use the lab environment for attack simulations.

The new evaluation lab is now generally available. To access it, select Evaluation and tutorials > Evaluation lab directly from the navigation menu.

Also new this month

• The redesigned Outlook on the web is now generally available. The redesigned experience features a modern design, new and smarter features, and a faster framework.
• Now generally available, Security Policy Advisor—introduced in public preview this spring—can examine your policies and provide recommendations to improve security.
• Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available, delivering a virtual, multi-session Windows 10 experience. Windows Virtual Desktop enables you to deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes.

As always, every Microsoft 365 update reflects our commitment to improving the experience for you—so if you have feedback or ideas on how we can improve, don’t hesitate to let us know.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in September—updates to Microsoft To Do, PowerPoint, OneNote, and more appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what’s new in July.

Strengthen security while simplifying processes

New capabilities help you protect against, discover, and remediate cybersecurity threats.

Go passwordless to reduce risk and improve account security—This month, we announced the public preview of FIDO2 security keys support in Azure AD. Now, with FIDO2 technologies, you can provide users with seamless, secure, and passwordless access to all Azure AD-connected apps and services. Additionally, administrators can assign passwordless credentials to users and groups and allow self-service sign-up. To get started, check out our step-by-step documentation on enabling passwordless sign-in for Azure AD.

Discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities in real-time—Last month, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Threat & Vulnerability Management (TVM). TVM delivers a new set of advanced, agentless, cloud-powered capabilities that provide continuous, real-time, risk-based vulnerability management. If you already have Microsoft Defender ATP, the TVM solution is now available within your Microsoft Defender ATP portal. If you don’t have a subscription, you can sign up for a trial of Microsoft Defender ATP including TVM.

Improve productivity and collaboration

New capabilities in Microsoft 365 help you collaborate easily with others, organize tasks, and quickly find answers.

Communicate and collaborate more easily with new capabilities in Microsoft Teams—This month, we added new capabilities to Teams including Read receipts and Priority notifications to help ensure time-sensitive messages are received and prioritized. We also announced the new Announcements feature to highlight important news and now post a single message across multiple channels.

Finally, the new time clock feature in Teams for Firstline Workers brings clock in/out capabilities to the Team Shifts module. And the targeted communication feature enables messages to be sent to everyone within a specific role—such as sending a message to all cashiers in a store or all nurses in a hospital.

These updates for Teams will be rolling out over the next couple of months.

Add polls to your Outlook emails and book meeting rooms with Outlook on the web—This month, we’re announcing two new generally available features in Outlook on the web. With Microsoft Quick Poll, you can now add polls directly to your Outlook emails, so recipients can vote directly in the email or click the provided link and vote in a browser window. To get started, download the Quick Poll add-in for Outlook.

Additionally, you can now easily book meeting rooms in Outlook on the web. When creating a meeting, you can quickly see which rooms are available, search by city or room, and view rooms that are available during recurring events.

Make answers in Yammer more discoverable—Now, questions in Yammer will stand out from general discussions with new, unique styling. Post authors and group admins can also mark the best response to questions as a “Best Answer,” making it easier for users to find answers. These changes are currently in private preview and will roll out to all Office 365 subscribers later this summer.

Work together on tasks in Microsoft To-Do—Now, you can assign a task to someone on a shared To-Do list and work together to knock out tasks more quickly. To get started, just @mention someone to assign them a task, and everyone on the shared list will be able to see it.

Streamline IT management

Data-driven tools help you deliver seamless software deployments and improvements for Office in virtualized environments.

Improve the quality and reliability of software deployments—This month, we announced the public preview of Desktop Analytics, a cloud-based service that provides intelligence for you to make more informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows clients ahead of new Windows 10 deployments. In combination with System Center Configuration Manager, Desktop Analytics is designed to create an inventory of the Windows apps running in the organization and assess app compatibility with the latest feature updates of Windows 10. Desktop Analytics is currently offered as an Office 365 service and requires an Office 365 subscription in your Azure AD tenant. To get started, enable Desktop Analytics in the Configuration Manager console.

Improve the Office app experience in virtual environments—This month, we announced new capabilities to help improve the user experience in virtualized environments. First, FSLogix technology, which improves the performance of Office 365 ProPlus in multi-user virtual environments, is now available at no additional cost for Microsoft 365 customers. Second, Windows Server 2019 will now support Office 365 ProPlus and OneDrive Files On-Demand in the coming months. Lastly, Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams are getting new capabilities to improve the user experience in a virtualized environment.

Drive digital transformation with new Microsoft cloud regions—Microsoft Office 365 services are now available from our new cloud regions located in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These local datacenters open the door for more organizations to embrace the benefits of the cloud with resilient cloud services that can help meet data residency, security, and compliance needs.

Other updates

• Teams is now included in the monthly Office 365 updates for existing customers and will begin rolling out to existing installations over several weeks.
• We retired the “Online” branding for the Office apps on the web. You’ll see this change reflected in the product experience in places such as the app headers, platform-specific commands, and help menus. This change reinforces that Office is a cloud-connected experience, which you can use through apps on the desktop, web, or mobile devices.
• We recently announced OneDrive Personal Vault, a protected area in OneDrive that you can only access with a strong authentication method or second step of identity verification.
• These five Outlook mobile tips and tricks can help small business owners save time and get more done quickly.

The post New to Microsoft 365 in July—updates to Azure AD, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and more appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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.

We celebrate because our customers are empowering their employees both with the accessible technology built into Microsoft 365, and with the inclusive cultural practices that make people love coming to work. We are comparing notes and learning from them as we also build that same inclusive culture at Microsoft.

Here in the U.K., we recently celebrated a milestone—a point on our journey—with recognition from the U.K. Government as a Disability Confident Leader. This status is awarded to organizations that commit to diversity and inclusion and encourage suppliers and vendors to do the same. Our team has worked tirelessly to put processes in place that can both create and sustain a diverse and inclusive culture; attracting and recruiting people with disabilities via our global Inclusive Hiring Program; training managers to understand the needs of those with visible and non-visible disabilities; assessing people for roles more flexibly so those with disabilities have the best opportunity to show their skills; adjusting workplaces to include sign language interpreters, and ensuring all staff have access to disability equality awareness training.

Looking ahead

We also look ahead to our big vision—an accessible and inclusive workplace for everyone—and what more we can do as a company and as a community to make it a reality. Today we’re excited to announce that live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint are rolling out now, and will soon be generally available to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscribers worldwide for Windows, Mac, and the web. We also look forward to the coming release of other new inclusive technologies built into Microsoft 365, like live captions and subtitles in Teams Meetings.

Present inclusively with live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint—We know how powerful a great presentation can be—whether it inspires us or aligns us to a common goal. Now, with support for 12 spoken languages and 60+ on-screen captions or subtitle languages, people who are deaf or hard of hearing can be included in these important team building moments. Additionally, with an increasingly global and remote set of collaborators, those who speak a different language from the presenter, or are listening in from a loud environment, can also more easily be included.

Transform the meeting experience for people with disabilities—We also know the critical role meetings play in how we work, and recently announced that live captions and subtitles will also be available in Teams Meetings. These capabilities are coming soon as a preview in English and complement the captioning and transcription features already generally available for recorded Teams meetings and live events in Stream, Teams, and Yammer. Whether in a 1-1 with your manager, or a company-wide all hands, everyone should feel included when the team gets together to meet, including people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

We constantly release new features and improvements to make our products not just compliant with the latest standards, but empowering for all users, both with and without disability. We encourage you to read all about these features in the Microsoft Accessibility Features Sway.

Building the inclusive workplace together

Many of our customers are committed to making this vision of an inclusive workplace a reality and are partnering with us to make it happen. Last month the Federal Government of Canada chose Microsoft as a partner in their effort to create a more modern and accessible Public Service. The Honourable Carla Qualtrough, Minister of Public Services and Procurement and Accessibility, said, “Equipping our public servants with accessible, reliable, and innovative technologies will unleash the potential of our world-class public service and result in better service delivery for all Canadians.” Here at Microsoft we agree—only when we represent the diversity we see in the world internally can we build the most innovative technology and serve our customers as they ought to be served.

We also see Rogers Communications, a leading Canadian communications and media company, shares our vision of a more inclusive workplace. Rogers is doing everything from transforming their physical workplace to be more collaborative and inclusive, to using the accessible technologies built into the Microsoft 365 applications their employees can use every day. Best of all, we’re helping and learning from each other along the way—our teams work regularly with Rogers to understand how our technology can better support their commitment to building an inclusive workplace, and Rogers’ Persons with Disability Diversity group works with us to learn how we embed Inclusive Design principles into our products and our culture. Read the full blog, published today, to learn more about how Rogers is building an accessible and inclusive culture to benefit employees, customers, and the broader community.

Join us!

We have so much more to do—as an organization, an employer, a leader, and a follower—in this journey towards an accessible and inclusive workplace, and we hope you’ll join us. Visit the Microsoft Accessibility site to learn more about our approach. Share your learnings with #LearningTogether and #GAAD and continue the conversation with @MSFTEnable on Twitter.

The post Building the inclusive workplace we imagine, together appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2—Foster sustained dialogue in open communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

4—Plan corporate communications and measure impact

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

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

Empowering all leaders across an organization

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

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

Connect your employees and leaders today

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

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

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

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

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

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

New features power content creation

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

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

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

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

Cloud enhancements make file management easier

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

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

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

Expanding our online toolkit

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

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

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

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

Other updates

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

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transforming the Firstline Worker experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Bryan Goode

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

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

Expanding Microsoft 365 to new audiences

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

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

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

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

New capabilities to unlock employee creativity

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

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

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

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

See LinkedIn profile information from Microsoft apps and services.

The universal toolkit for teamwork

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

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

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

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

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

Simplifying IT management

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligent security and compliance updates

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

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

The Microsoft Cloud App Security dashboard.

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

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

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

Compliance Manager helps organizations meet compliance obligations.

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

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