Office 365 news roundup

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been sharing a lot of new information about SharePoint—a core part of Office 365—and talking about the future of the product and the capabilities it offers customers like you. We recently unveiled a new cloud-first, mobile-first vision and roadmap for SharePoint, along with innovations that empower people, teams and organizations to intelligently discover, share and collaborate on content from anywhere and on any device.

To start with, we announced the general availability of SharePoint Server 2016, which includes new hybrid capabilities that enable on-premises customers to tap into the innovation we’re delivering in Office 365. We also revealed our vision for file management in Office 365 across OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. The idea is to provide unified access and intelligent discovery for all of your Office 365 files, making it easier than ever for you to create, share, collaborate on and manage documents from anywhere, on any device.

We’re also using SharePoint to make your intranet more mobile, intelligent and personalized based on your activities across sites, the people you work with, the content you work on and the business processes you use. And the new SharePoint mobile app, designed for Windows, iOS and Android, puts your intranet in your pocket, with full-fidelity access to your company content, sites and apps—no matter where you are. We also announced the SharePoint Framework, a more open and connected platform to better meet the evolving needs of developers in this mobile-first, cloud-first world.

In addition, we’re continuing to improve Office 365 with innovations such as Skype for Business for Mac, now in preview, and the new external groups feature in Yammer, which enables you to collaborate with people outside your organization. We also made the Office 365 Education Roadmap generally available, to help our education customers understand what updates and improvements we have planned for the software they’re using. And just this week, we announced the general availability of a new Office 365 datacenter region in Canada—following recent announcements of new datacenter regions in Japan, Australia and India—which will provide our Canadian customers with in-country data residency, failover and disaster recovery for their core data at rest.

Plus, in late April, Microsoft FastTrack announced the addition of user adoption services to FastTrack for Office 365, including guidance to help you secure executive support, generate awareness and implement end-user training to show everyone in your organization how Office 365 is relevant to their jobs and your business. Microsoft FastTrack is our customer success service designed to help you move to the cloud and realize business value faster, and it has rapidly evolved over the past year from a one-time onboarding benefit for our largest customers to an ongoing customer success service available for free to customers with 50 seats or more of eligible Office 365 plans. FastTrack is still evolving, so stay tuned for more announcements like this in the future.

Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Marks & Spencer uses Office 365 to boost competitive edge in global business—Find out how this famous retailer is using Office 365 to enable and support a new business culture that is modern, agile, connected and collaborative.

Seal Industries switches direction, gets to the cloud with minimum impact—Learn how Office 365 and Microsoft FastTrack helped this petrochemical company make a smooth transition to the cloud and connect its global workforce.

Microsoft FastTrack team helps airline soar to the cloud in 8 weeks—Discover how Air Malta was flying high with Office 365 in just a few weeks with the help of Microsoft FastTrack.

Driving successful adoption of Office 365 at Mott MacDonald—Find out why this international consulting firm called on the Microsoft FastTrack team to help it implement Office 365.

How the Browning Law Group helps safeguard client trust with Office 365—Discover why security played a key role in this California law firm choosing Office 365 for communication and collaboration.

Microsoft to expand cloud computing business in China—Learn why a growing number of Chinese companies are choosing Office 365 and Azure.

Nadella hails Office 365 as key to Microsoft’s platform growth—Find out why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that Office 365 is the new cornerstone of Microsoft’s embrace-and-extend philosophy.

Indivior poised for growth with Office 365—Discover how this pharmaceutical company is preparing to grow with Office 365.

Atkins to become “digital by default” with move to Office 365—Learn how this global consulting company is using Office 365 to help its 18,000+ employees collaborate more effectively.

Global manufacturer switches to Office 365 to capture promise of digital manufacturing—Find out how Office 365 is helping a global manufacturing company compete in the digital economy.