{"id":117703,"date":"2015-03-16T05:30:36","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T12:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/?p=117703"},"modified":"2022-07-20T07:40:44","modified_gmt":"2022-07-20T14:40:44","slug":"announcing-the-office-2016-it-pro-and-developer-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/microsoft-365\/blog\/2015\/03\/16\/announcing-the-office-2016-it-pro-and-developer-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Today\u2019s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office 365 Client Apps and Services team.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m pleased to announce the IT Pro and Developer Preview of Office 2016 for the Windows desktop. We\u2019ve been in private preview with Office 2016 for several months. Now we\u2019re ready to expand the program to our commercial Office 365 customers, an important milestone that gives IT pros and developers an opportunity to start testing the upcoming release. To be clear, this early build doesn\u2019t yet contain all the features we\u2019re planning to ship in the final product. However, through the course of the preview, customers should expect to see new features delivered through monthly updates.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ll share more on the end-user enhancements planned for this release at a later date, but here\u2019s a brief summary of some of the valuable updates for IT pros and developers.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Data Loss Protection (DLP)<\/strong>\u2014Over the last few years we\u2019ve added DLP to Exchange, Outlook, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. Now we\u2019re bringing these same classification and policy features to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With these new capabilities, IT admins can centrally create, manage and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing\u2014and end users will see policy tips or sharing restrictions when the apps detect a potential policy violation.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Outlook<\/strong>\u2014We\u2019re delivering a number of significant technical improvements to Outlook.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>MAPI-HTTP protocol<\/em>. We\u2019ve replaced the RPC-based sync with a new Internet-friendly MAPI-HTTP protocol that supports Exchange\/Outlook connectivity.<\/li>\n<li><em>Foreground network calls<\/em>. We\u2019ve eliminated the use of foreground network calls to ensure that Outlook stays responsive on unreliable networks.<\/li>\n<li><em>Multi-factor authentication<\/em>. With this release of the Outlook client, we\u2019ll support multi-factor authentication through integration with the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL).<\/li>\n<li><em>Email delivery performance<\/em>. We\u2019ve reduced the amount of time it takes to download messages, display the message list, and show new email after resuming from hibernation.<\/li>\n<li><em>Lean storage footprint<\/em>. We\u2019ve added settings that allow users to better manage storage by only retaining 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days of mail on the device.<\/li>\n<li><em>Search<\/em>. We\u2019ve improved the reliability, performance, and usability of Outlook search, and integrated the FAST-based search engine in Exchange.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Click-to-Run deployment<\/strong>\u2014For customers on our Office 365 subscription service, the 2016 release includes new deployment features that IT pros have been asking for:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Better network traffic management<\/em>. We\u2019re introducing a new Background Intelligence Transfer Service (BITS) to help prevent congestion on the network. BITS throttles back the use of bandwidth when other critical network traffic is present.<\/li>\n<li><em>Enhanced distribution management<\/em>. We\u2019re improving our integration with ConfigMgr to allow IT admins to efficiently download and distribute monthly Office updates using the native ConfigMgr features.<\/li>\n<li><em>Flexible update management<\/em>. We\u2019ve created a way for admins to manage the pace at which they receive feature updates and bug fixes while continuing to receive regular security updates.<\/li>\n<li><em>Simplified activation management<\/em>. We\u2019re adding a feature in the Office 365 Admin Portal to allow admins to manage device activations across users.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Macros and Add-ins<\/strong>\u2014We\u2019re not making any changes to Macros or Add-ins in this release. It\u2019s rare that \u201cno changes\u201d is a something we\u2019d want to highlight, but we think it\u2019s worth celebrating the consistency in the programming model across releases. We understand how important this is and we\u2019re committed to a high level of compatibility as we continue to innovate.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Accessibility<\/strong>\u2014We\u2019ve addressed a number of readability issues in Outlook\u00a0and introduced a dark theme for users with visual impairments.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Information Rights Management (IRM)<\/strong>\u2014We\u2019ve extended IRM protection to Visio files, enabling both online and offline protection of Visio diagrams.<\/p>\n<p>These are just some of the new capabilities IT pros and developers will experience in the Preview. We\u2019re excited about this milestone in our development process and are looking forward to hearing your feedback. We\u2019ll continue to update the product with new features as they become available and will periodically highlight significant announcements here along the way.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014Kirk Koenigsbauer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m pleased to announce the IT Pro and Developer Preview of Office 2016 for the Windows desktop. We\u2019ve been in private preview with Office 2016 for several months. Now we\u2019re ready to expand the program to our commercial Office 365 customers, an important milestone that gives IT pros and developers an opportunity to start testing the upcoming release. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3368823,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"content-type":[4034],"product":[4047,4036,4063,4075],"audience":[4081],"tags":[],"coauthors":[4437],"class_list":["post-117703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","content-type-news","product-excel","product-microsoft-365","product-powerpoint","product-word","audience-enterprise"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Announcing the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview | Microsoft 365 Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/microsoft-365\/blog\/2015\/03\/16\/announcing-the-office-2016-it-pro-and-developer-preview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Announcing the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview | Microsoft 365 Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019m pleased to announce the IT Pro and Developer Preview of Office 2016 for the Windows desktop. 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