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

A seamless experience for virtual appointments

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

Schedule on-demand appointments (preview, April 2022)

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

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

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

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

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

Send SMS appointment reminders (preview, April 2022)

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

See analytics from your virtual appointments (preview)

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

Enhance clinical workflow integration

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

Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Cerner—generally available

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

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

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

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

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

Create an advanced virtual health experience

Teladoc Health Solo™ with Microsoft Teams

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

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

Empower your healthcare workers on the frontline

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

Epic is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corporation

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

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

Deliver more inclusive meetings for everyone

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

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

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

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

Co-author encrypted docs and create more colorful diagrams

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

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

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

Ensure your employees can be productive from day one

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

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

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

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

Looking to the future

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

¹ Work Trend Index, WorkLab, Microsoft. 2021.

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

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

Okay, on to the news!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplify tasks, lists, and functions

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

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

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

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

Create beautiful diagrams

Visio capabilities bring new and familiar icons to your diagrams.

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

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

Also new this month

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

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

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