Today, we shared details about the future of Windows and how we are developing new experiences to enhance the way we work today, and in the future.

We released Windows 11, the operating system designed for hybrid work, just over six months ago and are energized to hear how our customers, like Tower, are finding new ways to empower employees and move their business forward.

Talking to customers is one of the best parts of my role as General Manager for the Microsoft 365 business, and I learn a lot from every conversation—whether with an enterprise leader or a small business owner. Our team has also received a lot of feedback and input about the past two years and how it has forever changed the way we work, and I‘ve observed this just walking around my neighborhood in Atlanta—the way we work is different. Our work lives are in many cases more flexible, but also more complex. It makes sense, then, that the one thing I always hear is that organizations want solutions that are streamlined across their IT infrastructure, and seamless and easy for their employees to use.

We recently released the 2022 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries around the world. What we’ve learned from our 2021 and 2022 research is that this rapidly changing landscape is shaping how we think about how technology serves us at work. This has been our inspiration for the features we announced today and how we will continue to innovate in Windows for organizations and employees, helping our customers transform how we connect, collaborate, and communicate.

The most compelling data we gleaned from the Work Trend Index is that 73 percent of employees want flexible or remote options and see this as a more permanent way of working. That’s more than two-thirds of people surveyed—a compelling statistic.

As a leader at Microsoft who was hired during the pandemic and works fully remote, I can relate to the new challenges businesses are navigating in moving employees to a more permanent remote or hybrid work setting, and the challenge employees sometimes face in different environments.

So, I’m excited to build off what Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, shared today and give you some more details about the new features we are building in Windows 11 to power your businesses and your people, no matter where they are working.

Here’s what’s coming to Windows 11.

A faster, more dynamic Windows 11 experience powered by the cloud

Last year, we introduced Windows 365, the world’s first Cloud PC, to give people a simple way to stream their entire Windows experience from the Microsoft cloud. This means an individual employee’s personal settings, apps, and contents can be securely accessed on any device. And it’s persistent and always ready to go, so they can pick up right where they left off because Windows is streaming from the cloud. I’ve heard from many customers who are finding new uses for the Windows 365 Cloud PCs in critical hybrid work scenarios—from elastic workforces like interns or contractors to high-scale computing needs like developers, to remote workers and secure bring your own PC (BYOPC) needs. Windows 365 is easy to scale up so it’s particularly useful in times of change, like mergers and acquisitions. Coats, the world’s largest industrial thread manufacturer, was an early adopter of Windows 365.

Extending Windows to the cloud opens up new solutions that can help accelerate digital transformation by utilizing the power, intelligence, and capacity of the cloud to augment device capabilities. According to Gartner®, 72 percent of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders have invested or intend to invest in cloud-based user computing solutions during the next 24 months.

As the pandemic begins to slowly recede, and companies look to adopt more permanent hybrid work strategies, new integrated features are needed to enable more flexible ways of working.

So, we’re bringing the power of the cloud and familiarity of the PC together, giving people an even more seamless Windows experience without sacrificing security.

With Windows 365 Boot, I’ll be able to log directly into my Windows 365 Cloud PC at startup and designate it as my primary Windows experience on the device. This makes Windows 365 an even better solution for those temporary or frontline workforces I mentioned, where sharing devices and bring your own device (BYOD) scenarios are common. It allows different users to log in directly to their own personal and secure Windows 365 Cloud PC with their credentials.

If you are like me, you know the power of switching between desktop surfaces in Windows 11. Now we’re adding Windows 365 Switch, which will enable me to move between my Windows 365 Cloud PC and the local desktop just like I do between different desktops today in the Task switcher. I’ll even be able to use the same familiar keyboard commands, as well as a mouse-click or swipe gesture.

A new native Windows 365 app will give me another way to get straight to my Windows 365 Cloud PC from the taskbar or Start menu. All with a desktop path to my Windows 365 Cloud PC, providing a personal, customized welcome experience to tailor my settings, profile, and work style.

We are also working to deliver Windows 365 Offline, which will enable work in Windows 365 even when disconnected. When connectivity is restored, the Windows 365 Cloud PC will automatically resync with the Windows 365 service without data loss so the user experience and workflow are persistent.

Learn more about all these features in this Windows 365 blog and our new Microsoft Mechanics episode.

New inclusive and intelligent experiences and features for employees

In our most recent Work Trend Index research, we learned that 51 percent of people want a job that gives them the option to be fully remote, but they prefer a hybrid experience. The best news is that Windows 11, while designed for hybrid work, works for all scenarios—whether remote, onsite, or hybrid.

Today, I want to share with you some of my favorite new experiences coming soon to Windows 11 to make everyone working in these modern environments more effective. Best of all, these features are designed with accessibility in mind so everyone can enjoy the benefits of Windows 11.

I love how easy the centered Start menu design in Windows 11 is, and I’m excited to share how we’re building on that with new app folders right inside the Start menu. Now, I can enjoy the simplicity of organizing and easily finding apps on my Windows 11 desktop just as I’ve been able to do on my mobile device and tablet.

Refreshed File Explorer in Windows 11 to help you find what you need fast

One of my favorite announcements today is the refreshed experience in File Explorer. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent looking for important files and folders over the years. Now, finding files is a breeze with new contextual suggestions in Windows powered by Context IQ. This recommends relevant content and contacts across Windows—including content to the cloud. For example, I can see what files I might want, including files that my frequent collaborators are working on that I also have access to.

And with Tabs in File Explorer, I’ll be able to multitask and find multiple files at the same time.

During our 2022 Work Trend Index research, we found that 35 percent of employees surveyed say they wish they could spend more time working on solitary or focused work in order to be more impactful or productive, which is why we are introducing new capabilities in Focus for Windows.

Save time with new features in Focus for Windows 11

As a senior leader at Microsoft, I’m in meetings most of my day, and it’s often challenging to find time to get important work done. I’ve found Focus to be one of the most impactful tools to increase my own productivity. Focus was first introduced in Windows 10 to limit visual distractions and reduce clutter on the desktop. Today, Focus inside Microsoft Viva Insights helps me protect my valuable time by automatically scheduling focus time based on my schedule for the next work week. This has been a game-changer for me. And today, I’m happy to share the new features coming to Focus in Windows 11, such as an integrated focus timer and do not disturb feature that makes it even easier to track and personalize my focus time.

More natural hybrid meeting experiences powered by AI

As companies continue to take a hybrid approach, we are delivering new advancements to make virtual and hybrid meetings and collaboration feel more natural. These features* include automatic framing to refocus your camera as you move around, voice clarity, voice focus, and background blur to reduce visual and audio distractions in the background. One of my favorites of these new AI-based features is called eye contact, which improves eye contact during virtual meetings and video calls.

Better audiovisual experiences with Live Captions in Windows 11

We are always looking for ways to improve the experience with accessible features, and today we’re making Windows 11 better for the deaf and hard of hearing communities, as well as language learners with Live Captions. This new feature empowers people to easily access captions from all audio experiences and apps across Windows, including web-based audio, such as audio from your favorite streaming websites. I love turning on captions when I’m watching my favorite shows, so this is another incredible experience we are bringing to Windows 11.

Multitasking is a snap with improved Snap layouts

What did we do before Snap layouts? I love this feature in Windows 11. It may be the feature I use the most as I’m always using multiple windows throughout the day. It’s so easy to snap together two or more related windows when I’m doing research or to multitask on up to four separate projects simultaneously. We’re always looking for ways to help people work smarter, not harder. So, now, I’m excited we are adding touch Snap layouts for touch-enabled devices. This capability is going to improve work for so many, including frontline workers using touch devices in their day-to-day work.

Empowering IT superheroes with modern management

IT departments had one of the most complex undertakings during the pandemic—keeping the digital estate of their entire, distributed workforce connected, up-to-date, and performing. And doing that as the IT administrators themselves were also working remotely added even greater complexity. With the diversity of devices used across the enterprise device landscape, including physical and Windows 365 Cloud PCs, IT truly needed to be superheroes to keep all the endpoints secure and productive.

It is cloud management in Microsoft Endpoint Manager that provides IT with the needed flexibility to protect and configure endpoints for a productive workforce as well as unlock the new features and functionality for Windows. With Windows 11 built as a cloud-powered OS, Endpoint Manager is key to helping organizations keep their devices up-to-date and upgraded when ready.

Another way to keep things updated is with our new automated service, Windows Autopatch, designed to free up IT teams everywhere by making Windows and Microsoft 365 update management easier than ever. Autopatch offers IT peace of mind when it comes to ensuring endpoints are healthy, protected, and compliant, thus enabling them to focus on other business challenges.

Autopatch enables IT to strike the right balance between rollout speed and stability thanks to a ring-based, gradual deployment. It helps you get current and stay current while hardening endpoints against threats and increasing productivity by deploying new features with minimal friction and risk. If issues arise, they won’t turn into interruptions—the service can stop and even reverse updates, which means we’ve got you covered. Windows Autopatch will be available in July 2022 as part of the Windows E3 offering. Learn more about Autopatch in this blog.

Providing flexibility and data protection

Application management for Microsoft Edge enables people to access organizational resources from an unmanaged device while giving IT the ability to control the conditions under which the resources can be accessed. With app protection policies applied from Endpoint Manager, administrators will be able to configure how data flows in and out of the organization as well as define acceptable threat levels. This allows more businesses to safely employ a BYOD model, or empower employees to access company information through personal devices without compromising privacy or protection.

Improve communication with targeted messages in Windows 11

I am also excited about a new communications function that empowers IT to send targeted organizational messages directly to users across various surfaces, such as on the desktop, lock screen, or right above the taskbar. Imagine being able to share helpful messages to new employees onboarding or reminders for important training that might otherwise get lost in email. From the Endpoint Manager admin center, IT can create messages, provide customized links or URLs, configure the viewing frequency, and of course define the targeted set of users for the message based on the integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

A new era for endpoint management adds more simplicity

Our goal is to simplify what it takes for IT to protect the endpoints across their user computing landscape to help organizations support a Zero Trust security model. We are excited to enter a new era for endpoint management, one that will provide an expanded set of advanced solutions and capabilities in Endpoint Manager designed to increase endpoint security, improve user experience, and reduce the total cost of ownership of your digital estate. We are bringing together additional mission-critical endpoint and security management tools into a single, cloud-powered solution and it starts today. Read more about the news of our vision for advanced endpoint management in this Microsoft 365 blog and learn about our plans to introduce a series of premium solutions over time that will help protect endpoints in the cloud, on-premises, and across device platforms, foundational for organizations striving to achieve a Zero Trust architecture.

The 2022 Work Trend Index highlighted that more than 50 percent of hybrid employees are considering going fully remote in the next year, so on-site tech support can no longer be the only option to resolve complex technical issues. Today we are launching the first of our premium solutions in Endpoint Manager for general availability, remote help for Windows, a cloud-based, remote assistance tool that provides a secure, trusted helpdesk to user connections. The endpoint is the new workplace. Providing resolutions to users—delivered by the right helper, with the right permissions, at the right time—is crucial for organizations in today’s hybrid world.

Help keep hybrid work safe with new security features

Given the fast-changing cybersecurity landscape, we continue to see accelerating with new threats today, it wasn’t surprising to see that cybersecurity issues and risks was the number one concern for business leaders around the world. To help address those concerns, we’re introducing new security features coming to Windows 11 to make the most secure version of Windows we’ve ever built even more secure for hybrid and remote employees.

With built-in chip to the cloud protection, Windows 11 helps organizations address the new security challenges of the hybrid workplace, now and in the future. With every release, we are making Windows more secure by default and today we’re thrilled to show you how Windows powers the future of business.

We are all potential targets of sophisticated phishing and other cyberattack attempts. I’m excited about future Windows 11 updates we are adding, like enhanced phishing detection and protection built into Windows with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen. We are also bringing more protection against malware, ransomware, data loss, and the serious risk of hardware attacks if a device is stolen. We’ve designed security in Windows to be simple for all—for businesses large and small, from IT to consumers. Our Windows customers will benefit from layers of tightly integrated hardware and software security from the chip to the cloud, designed to help protect our customers from wherever and however they choose to work. To learn more about the security innovations coming to Windows 11, visit the Security Blog.

Taking the journey to hybrid work, together 

As workplaces and world events continue to evolve, so too will the needs of your employees and organization. That’s why we designed Windows 11 to be the most flexible, secure, and productive solution for hybrid work. The features we announced today ensure that you can continue to count on Windows to move your business forward with cloud-powered technology and services that adapt and evolve to meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s. 

Creating a durable hybrid work environment is a journey. Microsoft is on its own journey, learning as we go just like you are. That’s why we wanted to share our own Windows 11 deployment story with you, so we can all be students of the time, together. I invite you to check out my conversation with Nathalie D’Hers, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, highlighting the employee experience, and our case study on deploying Windows 11 at Microsoft.

One of our biggest learnings as “customer zero” for Windows 11 adoption is just how easy it was to do using familiar tools and processes like Windows Update for Business, Autopilot for new PCs, and tools in Microsoft Endpoint Manager like Endpoint Analytics to measure device health and status. With its common core and consistency across admin functions, it is easy to run Windows 10 and Windows 11 in your environment, side-by-side. And to ensure that we’re supporting you throughout your migration journey, we offer engineering-led services like Fast Track, as well as App Assure and Test Base, a powerful combination to help make sure that all of your apps are compatible.

ITC Secure, one of our earliest adopters of Windows 11, enjoyed the fast and simple process of migrating their organization and is now taking advantage of the full benefits of Windows 11.

Windows is designed for hybrid work and is ready for you today. Thank you for trusting Windows to be the platform for your business now and in the future. You can learn more about how Windows is extending to the cloud with Windows 365 here, and be sure to check out our Tech Community site for more in-depth information on features, deployment guidance, and best practices to help you on your journey to Windows 11.

*Hardware dependent

The post New experiences in Windows 11 and Windows 365 empower new ways of working appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

These innovations pull directly from our thinking around the Hybrid Work Paradox, ¹ which demands rethinking the operating model for every organization, and learnings from early Viva customers like Unilever, Humana, and REI.¹ Viva helps organizations transform their employee experience, which really is the digital experience of working for a company, to retain and attract talent in the Great Reshuffle.²

As a single solution, Viva ensures every employee is connected to their organization’s culture, personal productivity insights, expert knowledge, and key learning resources. And with the addition of Ally.io, it will be even easier to align employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities. In all, Viva empowers every level of the organization to address key challenges of hybrid work and employee burnout.

The Microsoft Viva suite: One plan for an integrated EXP   

With the Microsoft Viva suite, customers get an integrated EXP that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into the flow of work. The suite comes at a promotional price of $9 per user per month through August 2022, which is 25 percent less than purchasing the three premium modules individually (a total of $12). Customers who purchase the suite subscription now will also receive the new Ally.io module next year at no additional cost.

Since Microsoft Viva provides an integrated experience, IT administrators can now leverage the centralized Microsoft 365 admin center experience to access guided set-ups for deploying Viva. The admin center experience comes with a setup guide and list of tasks for each Viva module and related partner solutions to simplify the initial setup. A complete step-by-step set of deployment instructions for each module is also available in the documentation hyperlinks at the end of this blog.

Viva Connections: Culture and communications

Viva Connections is a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in the applications and devices you use every day—and later this month, those devices will include your mobile phone.

Starting today, you can engage with integrations from many industry leading partners to extend your culture and communications experience, including Workday, ServiceNow, Qualtrics, UKG, and more.

In addition to these partner integrations, you are now also able to add cards for Approvals, Shifts, and Tasks from Teams into your Viva Connections dashboard. These integrations will also allow you to engage in Viva Connections with new partner functionality, such as Adobe Sign and DocuSign for Approvals and Zebra-Reflexis and Blue Yonder for Shifts.

Finally, we are happy to announce that Espressive will be joining the Viva Connections partner family. Dashboard cards from Espressive will allow employees to get immediate, personalized self-help later this year.

Learn about all the new Viva Connections partners, including those coming on board soon, in our on-demand session. We’re also excited to announce that new module webparts are now available in SharePoint. You can learn about those in the on-demand session too.

Figure 1. Connect with your organization from wherever you’re working—including your mobile phone later this month. 

Viva Insights: Productivity and wellbeing

Viva Insights helps improve productivity and wellbeing through data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations. Today, we are announcing expanded capabilities to help managers and team leads navigate hybrid work and to help everyone in an organization run more effective meetings. For details on these and other upcoming features, read the Viva Insights blog.

• New manager insights and tools will help managers and team leads stay connected with team members, track outstanding tasks, explore personal habits that impact team culture, recognize accomplishments, and foster team norms such as no-meeting days—all through actionable recommendations. These insights will be available soon for any team size from the My team tab in the Viva Insights app for Microsoft Teams.
• A new effective meetings experience in the Viva Insights app for Teams will help meeting organizers get personalized insights and suggestions to improve their meeting habits. Users will also be able to create and share meeting plans to set team meeting norms such as shorter meetings by default and always including Teams links.
• Guided meditations from Headspace will be generally available in November 2021 in four additional languages: French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Figure 2. Empower managers to define no-meeting days for their teams.

Viva Topics: Knowledge and expertise

Viva Topics applies AI to automatically organize content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics, like projects, products, processes, and customers. That content appears as topic pages and topic centers—created and updated by AI—that enable experts to cultivate and share knowledge with wiki-like simplicity. It also pops up as topic cards that deliver knowledge just in time across Outlook, SharePoint, and Office. Soon, Viva Topics, which is now generally available, will make it easier to unlock that knowledge from even more sources. To learn more about these and other enhancements, read our Viva Topics blog or watch our on-demand session for Knowledge and Content Services.

• We’re unlocking adoption of knowledge across more of Microsoft 365 by integrating Viva Topics into Outlook, Yammer, Bing, and people profile cards. Available by the end of 2021.
• Our early adopter customers will soon be able to add Viva Topics directly to chats and channels in Microsoft Teams. Rolling out early next year.
• More ways for topic managers to oversee knowledge at scale, including automatic grouping of related topics into segments, usage analytics, and a streamlined topic center. Rolling out at year end.
• Support to crawl knowledge from content written in French, German and Spanish. Rolling out at year end.

Figure 3. Get context about organizational terms, projects, or team names directly in Outlook with integrated topic cards. 

Viva Learning: Skilling and growth

Viva Learning brings enterprise learning into the flow of work by connecting content from your organization, Learning Management Systems, third-party providers, and Microsoft. As of today, the module is generally available in Teams desktop and mobile. During the next couple weeks, Viva Learning will be available in your Microsoft 365 tenant—simply search “Viva Learning” in the Teams app menu to find it—with additional capabilities to expand your personal and social learning. Just a handful of these new capabilities are listed below. For a complete list of feature releases, partner integrations, and SKU details for enabling more advanced capabilities, read our Viva Learning blog.

• See assignments from integrated Learning Management Systems to easily stay up to date on required learning.
• Search across all the learning sources connected to Viva Learning and filter by interests, provider, or duration to find the exact content you need.
• Make learning recommendations to your team and colleagues and track the recommendations you’ve made. You can filter recommendations by status and the user’s reported completion rate.
• Add a curated set of learning resources as a tab in your Teams channels to bring learning directly into the flow of teamwork.

Figure 4. The Home view provides a personalized learner snapshot and access point for all connected learning content.

Ally.io: A new module for objectives and key results

We are excited to bring Ally.io, a leading objectives and key results (OKR) company, into the Microsoft Viva family as a new module during the second half of the calendar year 2022. This new module will help revolutionize how organizations use technology to bring deeper connection to work, purpose, and results in the hybrid world.

Aligning employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities is top of mind for every organization. To do this, leaders need to invest in tools that communicate transparency around big company bets and create ways to cascade aspirational goals and report results at all levels of an organization. Ally.io helps give everyone in the organization visibility and clarity into the entire work process, connecting everyday work to the company’s strategic objectives.

Figure 5. Enhancements to the Ally.io app in Microsoft Teams, as well as an official Microsoft Viva module based on the OKR solution, are on the way.

To learn more about the Ally.io solution, read our announcement blog and visit Ally.io.

The Microsoft Viva platform

Viva is easily customizable and extensible, accessible from anywhere you work, and integrates with tools you already use to fit your unique needs. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Viva now supports the following partner integrations, giving you access to industry-leading apps in the natural flow of work.

• Viva Learning: SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, Coursera, Skillsoft, Pluralsight, edX, Udemy, Go1, Infosec, Josh Bersin Academy, Udacity,* Harvard Business Review,* OpenSesame,* and EdCast.*
• Viva Connections: Qualtrics, ServiceNow, UKG, Talentsoft, StandOut by ADP, Adobe Sign, Moveworks, Lifeworks, Limeade, Tribute, Blue Yonder, Zebra-Reflexis, Workday,* DocuSign,* EdCast,* and Espressive.*
• Viva Insights: Qualtrics, Glint, and Headspace.

We are also offering a new joint plan for the Microsoft Viva suite with LinkedIn Glint to our enterprise customers. Together, Viva and Glint capture valuable employee feedback and translate insights into actions, allowing managers and teams to measure and improve the employee experience.

Microsoft Viva is an open and extensible platform and soon partners and developers will be able to leverage toolkits and APIs for each of the four modules. The Viva Connections toolkit is available now, while the 3P content support for Viva Topics is coming to private preview in 2022. The Viva Insights and Viva Learning APIs will be available in 2022 as well. Read our blog for additional details about Viva partners and extensibility.

EXP for every organization—including Microsoft

Through all the ups, downs, and profound changes of the past year, our mission is still to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—including every person at Microsoft. We’re on the same employee experience journey as our customers with Microsoft Viva, using it throughout our worldwide offices to promote connection, growth, and wellbeing at work.

We’re shedding light on that journey in a new blog series about the development of Microsoft Viva. The first installment recaps our early decisions around employee satisfaction; the realization that individual employee experience apps are great—but a centralized platform is better, and the shift we made to respond to the pandemic and reimagine our internal solutions for customers.

But like you, our journey has only just begun, and we’re excited to share our progress in the second blog installment that was just published today.

We’re humbled and excited that Microsoft Viva has already had such a profound impact on our employees and the employees at other global organizations. To learn how the world’s leading companies use Viva to empower their people, select the logos.

Get started on your employee experience journey

Our own journey with Microsoft Viva has helped us understand the kinds of resources needed to get started on this employee experience path. Since Viva was first announced in February, we’ve been continuously adding to our documentation to deploy, adopt, and manage Viva. Here’s a list of our most helpful resources, no matter where you are in the EXP journey. If you need even more information (or just want to bounce ideas off someone), talk to your Microsoft representative.

• Microsoft Viva
• Microsoft Viva pricing
• Microsoft Viva Tech Community
• Microsoft Viva Connections overview
• Microsoft Viva Insights documentation
• Microsoft Viva Topics introduction
• Microsoft Viva Learning introduction
• Visit Ally.io and read our acquisition announcement
• Microsoft Mechanics videos for IT admins
• Microsoft Viva Developer Page

¹ 73%: The Hybrid Work Paradox, Jared Spataro, Microsoft WorkLab. 8 September 2021.

² Microsoft and LinkedIn share latest data and innovation for hybrid work, Jared Spataro, Microsoft. 9 September 2021.

*Coming by the end of January 2022

The post Microsoft Viva is now generally available to help transform your hybrid work experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

In 2013, we established a deep technology partnership with the NFL. Our mission with the partnership was simple: use technology to empower the people who make the game of football great—the coaches, players, officials, and fans.

Nearly seven years later, Microsoft Surface has become a vital tool for the NFL on and off the field, transforming everything from instant replay, game planning, and the fan experience to the NFL Draft and Scouting Combine. With more than 2,000 Surface devices and 170 Windows Servers deployed across 35 global stadiums, Microsoft technology powers 333 events each year for the NFL on game day.

Today, we’re delighted to announce a multi-year expansion of our NFL partnership. We’ll continue developing innovative solutions for the NFL using Surface devices, and now expand our technology collaboration to include Microsoft Teams. With Microsoft Teams, we’ll empower the league and the individual NFL teams with technology to facilitate collaboration and creativity. The combination of Surface and Microsoft Teams will allow us, in partnership with the NFL, to continue to innovate for our collective fans.

“Since 2013, Microsoft has helped transform the NFL through technology around our game. Microsoft Surface has quickly become an authentic tool to the game of football and is vital during all NFL games for coaches, players, and NFL officials. And now by working together to integrate Microsoft Teams across the League, together we aim to improve on communications and collaboration in a modern way.”
—Renie Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Vice President of NFL Partnerships

Launched nearly three years ago, and more than 20 million daily users strong, Microsoft Teams was designed to empower people to get more done together, with less friction and more human connection. Nowhere is the need for teamwork like this greater than in the fast-paced, global game of NFL football.

Rather than using separate apps for chat, calling, meetings, and document collaboration, with Microsoft Teams the NFL can stay constantly and securely connected in one hub for teamwork across all their devices, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

With Microsoft Teams and Surface together, the possibilities are endless. High-fidelity microphones and cameras on Surface devices make Microsoft Teams video calls more immersive. The touchscreen on Surface devices makes the digital whiteboard experience in Microsoft Teams the perfect platform for strategizing plays—no matter where team members are located.

NFL teams are already starting to take advantage of Microsoft Teams in their day-to-day work. For example, the Miami Dolphins used the platform to plan Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium. The New York Jets use Microsoft Teams across their football and business operations, including the NFL Draft process. And Super Bowl Champions Kansas City Chiefs’ scouting staff uses Microsoft Teams to coordinate with the club’s on-the-road scouts.

“In Microsoft Teams we can easily collaborate on files, manage shared calendars, host meetings, and utilize existing integrations. Teams made cooperation with the NFL possible throughout the regular season and with Super Bowl planning.”
—Kim Rometo, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for the Miami Dolphins

As part of the partnership expansion, we’ll continue supporting the NFL with innovations like the Microsoft Surface Sideline Viewing System and Microsoft Surface Instant Replay. We’ll also continue collaborating with every NFL team and their partners to develop unique business and consumer integrations ranging from Surface devices as playbooks, to film reviews being conducted on the Surface family of devices, to in-stadium usage on game days, to business operations teams using Surface devices in their front office.

This partnership extension, and the addition of Microsoft Teams, is just the beginning. We’re excited by the opportunity to continue collaborating with the NFL to develop new, custom technology solutions that transform the way the league communicates using a powerful combination of hardware and software.

The post Empowering the NFL with Microsoft Surface and Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

At Microsoft, we’re on a mission to help every team become a successful team. And so, we partnered with IDEO, a global design company known for its human-centered, interdisciplinary approach. Together, we researched successful workplace teams to find out what they had in common. Then we used what we learned to create The Art of Teamwork—a new digital curriculum built around the five attributes of a successful team.

And that’s not all. We’re also using the findings from the research to refine Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. What’s clear from the data is that the future of workplace collaboration won’t be defined by any one technology. Instead, successful teams need collaboration tools that combine a wide range of technologies in new and innovative ways. Teams brings together chat, meetings, calling, document collaboration, and workflow into a single app—and this unique combination is catching fire.

In fact, today Teams has more than 20 million daily active users. What’s more, while these users start with simple text-based chat, they quickly move on to richer forms of communication and collaboration. For instance, last month Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Teams.

The five attributes

Partnering with IDEO, we researched diverse workplace teams—including astronauts, chefs, television producers, and nurses—to understand what high-performing collaborators have in common. With a variety of workplace teams as our subjects, we used in-context observation, expert interviews, secondary research, and prototype activities to identify the specific dynamics that high-performing teams had in common. We found that successful teams shared five attributes:

1. Team purpose—Keeps teams focused, fulfilled, and aligned on achieving their objectives.
2. Collective identity—Fosters a sense of belonging and helps team members work together as a unit.
3. Awareness and inclusion—Enables teams to navigate interpersonal dynamics and value everyone’s perspective.
4. Trust and vulnerability—Encourages interpersonal risk-taking in teams.
5. Constructive tension—Serves as a generative force for new ideas, driving better outcomes.

To learn more about the framework, check out the video below:

Teams customer success stories

With Teams, our customers are breaking through the artificial boundaries created by standalone or loosely coupled collaboration tools and working together in new ways. Their stories bring the five attributes of successful teams to life and paint a picture of what is possible.

Bold beauty: L’Oreal

At L’Oreal, the global beauty company, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, Barbara Lavernos explains, “Our momentum is driven by people interacting, putting ideas on the table, and jumping on them through spontaneous discussion. The new technology that allows for personality, contributions, and real innovation is Microsoft Teams.” With Teams, L’Oreal employees have a space to be creative while moving at the speed and scale needed to deliver over 7 billion products to customers annually.

From the factory floor to the C-Suite: Alcoa

Firstline Workers at Alcoa, a global leader in bauxite, alumina, and aluminum production, have embraced Teams to access business information on their own mobile devices while working at their remote Iceland facility. Before using Teams, when managers needed someone to come in for a shift, they had to call them, often late at night. Now with Teams, managers schedule plant employees using Shifts, which they can access on their mobile devices. With Shifts, the problem of workers missing scheduled assignments has resolved, with the absentee rate falling to nearly zero. “Shifts in Teams is much more efficient for organizing people,” says Friopjófur Tómasson, a plant supervisor. “If I had to use one word to tell you what Teams means to me, it’s ‘efficiency.’ Shifts saves me at least an hour a day.”

Simplified collaboration: Telefónica

At telecommunications company Telefonica, employees conduct business-building projects in Teams. An offsite meeting of executives can now be coordinated in a highly secure, centralized hub. This simple meeting used to be a coordination nightmare, with up to 20 colleagues from several departments focusing on various workstreams. “Before Teams, we had to integrate different aspects of a project that had been created in isolation from each other. Now, a group of colleagues can build on the documents in a collaborative way and edit the project directly. This process used to take four weeks, now we can accomplish it in a matter of days,” says Jamie Rodriguez-Ramos Fernandez, Director of Strategic Analysis at Telefónica.

Putting patient care first: St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN)

St. Luke’s University Health Network providers are replacing different third-party collaboration apps with Teams, simplifying their lives with a single workspace for anytime, anywhere conversations about patients. “Even as we look to secure text messaging as one of the advantages of the ubiquitous cellphone, we still have to comply with HIPAA and other privacy requirements,” says Dr. James Balshi, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vascular Surgeon at SLUHN. “But we don’t have to worry about that with Teams. It’s equally functional on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer. I use the camera technology on the phone to share patient information in a more secure and HIPAA-compliant manner with colleagues during a Teams video call. I’ve also shared EMR notes and X-ray images.”

Connecting across the globe: Trek

Trek is a leading bicycle designer, manufacturer, and retailer that is adapting quickly to a fast-changing environment. Some U.S.-based employees work in locations other than the company’s Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters, including at other facilities, home, or retail locations. Trek’s international business has also grown quickly with the company expanding its operations to 17 established offices around the world. “Having good connectivity and digital meeting experiences is critical in making the way we work a success,” says Nathan Pieper, IT Business Applications and Collaboration Manager at Trek. The meetings capabilities in Teams “was the carrot that got people in,” says Pieper. “Teams adoption grew because people used it, told other people to use it, and invited them to online meetings on it.”

A high-performing team can do what otherwise would be impossible. And with Teams, there’s no limit to what you and your team can achieve at work. To improve teamwork in your organization, check out the digital teamwork guide at the Art of Teamwork home page. And if you’re not using Teams yet, get started today!

Note: Customers are ultimately responsible for their own HIPAA compliance.

The post 5 attributes of successful teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

I’m especially energized by Microsoft’s opportunity to empower the people who are in the best position to represent hotel and travel brands with their customers—Firstline Workers. These are the employees behind the front desk, from the concierge who delivers a knowledgeable recommendation, to the committed staff working behind the scenes from check-in to check-out.

Transforming the Firstline Worker experience

By giving Firstline Workers modern tools that enable them to access information, stay connected, and communicate with coworkers in real-time, hospitality companies can create a more connected organization, and address guest needs on the spot.

Here are just a few ways hotels are integrating Microsoft solutions to improve the employee experience:

• Using Microsoft Teams’ mobile-first capabilities, Firstline Workers can easily communicate, collaborate, and share best practices across the organization. Earlier this year, we announced new capabilities—including urgent messaging, location sharing, and image annotations—which enable hotels to act with agility, leading to a superior guest experience.

• Using PowerApps and Shifts, organizations can digitize everyday activities—from repetitive and administrative to more personalized and role-specific tasks. For example, housekeepers use it to keep track of room tasks, helping reduce costs and freeing up time to focus on delighting guests.

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

Helping our customers succeed

Leading hotel brands, including Marriott International and Red Lions Hotel Corporation (RLH), are at the forefront of empowering their Firstline employees with digital communication and collaboration. In doing so, they’re building cultures of employee engagement, and meeting the needs of their guests in new ways.

Marriott recently selected Microsoft 365 to enhance productivity, collaboration, and workflows. Sales specialist Peter McDermott says, “In a world where guests demand answers, it’s more important than ever to connect with your teams… With Teams, whether my coworkers are across the hall or across the country, we can always stay connected to exceed customer expectations.”

RLH is also using Microsoft 365 to help accelerate innovation and enable new capabilities inside the company. The company has rolled out Teams to its entire workforce to make it easier for employees to connect with coworkers in other departments and streamline processes.

“The persistence of communication is what distinguishes the Teams solution. The style is somewhere in between, where IM might be too loose, and email, which is much more formal. It’s much more of a conversation; it’s much more efficient. We don’t have people saying where’s this or where’s that because they haven’t lost it in the noise of email,” says John Edwards, CIO for RLH Corporation.

Join us at the HITEC conference

This week, members of the Microsoft team will be at HITEC, the annual hospitality tech conference. Visit us at the Microsoft booth (#1634) and learn how Microsoft is enabling intelligent hospitality.

The post Why hospitality industry leaders are focusing on employee engagement to enhance the guest experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we’re excited to announce we’re working with Nasdaq and Refinitiv to pull current financial information for the full range of U.S. exchange-listed equities, including stocks on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the world’s largest exchange company, and from Refinitiv, one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure, right into the Excel Stocks Data Type.

The Stocks Data Type turns Excel into a more robust tool for tracking personal investments, enabling you to track the latest stock prices, trading volume, and other financial information without leaving Excel to search outside sources. Now with trusted, real-time data from Nasdaq and Refinitiv, this becomes even better. Stocks in Excel now expands financial data to include bitcoin, bonds, international currencies, extended-hours pricing information and information about the company, like industry and company description, in addition to other previously available data like mutual funds and stock indexes, such as the Nasdaq Composite, Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and more.

“Expanding the reach of real-time market data is essential to making markets more accessible,” said Oliver Albers, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Partnerships for Nasdaq’s Global Information Services. “Our collaboration with Microsoft is a significant step towards bringing important market information to individual investors. Microsoft’s focus on empowering individuals aligns perfectly with our mission to make financial markets more inclusive.”

“Anyone with an interest in financial information needs quick, reliable data to navigate today’s complex and fast-moving global markets,” said Brennan Carley, Global Head of Enterprise at Refinitiv. “Refinitiv has many years’ experience in delivering data to financial professionals within Microsoft Excel and we are now delighted to give everyday investors access to these capabilities via our partnership with Microsoft.”

To understand more deeply how Stocks in Excel works, let’s look at the Microsoft stock. When you type in MSFT and click Stocks, Excel recognizes it as a stock and gives you an option to convert it into a rich entity linked with many properties of related information, including real-time attributes such as Price, Change, Last trade time, 52-week high/low, and other pricing information. You can choose to capture these attributes in different cells or use them directly in formulas. Recently updated data cards provide a better experience for Excel users working with such information allowing a quick preview of available categories. Imagine adding a list of ticker symbols from your stock portfolio in one column and having Excel provide the price and your daily gains or losses, refreshed with the click of a button.

By bringing together the power of Microsoft-backed data services with highly trusted sources of market information like Nasdaq and Refinitiv, we’re helping everyday investors like you access the same data as the market sees, enabling better financial literacy. And this is just the beginning: soon, you’ll be able to see historical data and automatically update the prices every few minutes.

We’re excited to continue our journey to continually improve Excel to help you get the most out of your data. Start tracking your personal investments using Excel for Office 365 today and this template to help you track your investments.

The post Microsoft, Nasdaq, and Refinitiv empower everyday investors with real-time data and insights in Excel 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.

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

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

The PUR Company

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

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

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

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

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

Meals on Wheels

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

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

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

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

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

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

John’s Crazy Socks

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

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

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

Work like a small business

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

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

More than 500,000 organizations, including 91 of the Fortune 100, use Teams to collaborate across locations, time zones, and languages, including Cerner, Cox Automotive, dm-drogerie markt, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Hendrick Motorsports, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, Mitsui & Co., National Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Razer, Ricoh, and Trek Bicycle. Teams is currently available in 44 languages across 181 markets, and soon we’ll roll out support for nine additional languages, including Hindi, Filipino, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Teams makes collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure

Microsoft Teams is improving workplace collaboration by helping organizations move from an array of disparate apps to a single, secure hub that brings together what teams need, including chat, meetings, and calling, all with native integration to the Office 365 apps. Users can customize and extend their experience with third-party apps, processes, and devices, giving them the tools they need to get work done.

Following the customizable mobile Teams experience announced in January, today we’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make meetings more inclusive and effective while delivering new levels of security and compliance.

1. Customized backgrounds takes our intelligent background blur technology further, allowing participants to select a custom background, such as a company logo or an office environment when working from home, to appear behind them during a meeting or video call. This improves the effectiveness of remote meetings by encouraging the use of video while minimizing distractions. Coming later this year.

2. Content cameras and Intelligent Capture in Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analog whiteboards. Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see whiteboard brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard. Coming later this year.

3. Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together directly in Teams. With upcoming support for Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams Rooms, in-person attendees can also contribute. You can even add content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch. Whether you choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely, Whiteboard in Teams enables everyone to actively participate in the conversation. Now in public preview.
4. Live captions & subtitles make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location. Improve meeting effectiveness by allowing attendees to read speaker captions in real-time, so they can more easily stay in sync and contribute to the discussion. English preview coming soon.

5. Secure private channels allow you to customize which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams to limit visibility. This is one of our top requested features and we’re excited to be actively testing this internally and with select customers. Coming later this year.
6. Information barriers avoid conflicts of interest within your organization by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other in Microsoft Teams. This helps limit the disclosure of information by controlling communication between the holders of information and colleagues representing different interests, for example, in Firstline Worker scenarios. This is particularly helpful for organizations that need to adhere to Ethical Wall requirements and other related industry standards and regulations. Coming soon.
7. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations enables customers to detect, automatically protect, and screen for sensitive information in chats and channel conversations. By creating DLP policies, admins can help prevent sensitive information from unintentionally being shared or leaked—either inside or outside of the organization. Now generally available in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that include Office 365 Advanced Compliance.
8. Live events in Microsoft 365 enables anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver compelling communications to employees, customers, and partners. Live events use video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer and can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time from anywhere, across their devices, or catch up later with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) features—such as automatic transcription—to unlock the content of the event recording. Now generally available.

To learn more about these announcements and more, read our detailed blog on the Teams Tech Community.

Hear it from our customers

All around the world, in businesses of every size and industry, people are using Teams as their hub for teamwork. With the help of Teams, airline crews stay connected, marketing agencies prepare pitches, teachers give all students a voice, financial analysts beat deadlines, patients receive better care, and employers find the right talent. We are thankful to all our customers, partners, and those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us.

NASCAR racing team Hendrick Motorsports gains competitive edge

Legendary race team Hendrick Motorsports chose Teams as the hub for its race communications and decision-making. While the cars speed along the racetrack, race engineers, mechanical experts, and strategists take their positions in the Team Operations Center in Concord, North Carolina—hundreds of miles away. They gather and analyze massive amounts of data and communicate in real-time with the team at the track. “Quick, clear, effective communication is of the utmost importance in racing,” says race engineer Zac Brown. Zac relies on Teams to stay in constant contact with his driver, his crew chief, and pit crew at the track. He uses Teams to share large files and says that because Teams is integrated with the full Office 365 suite, it saves critical seconds otherwise lost in toggling between apps.

Razer wins in the gaming industry with constant, clear communication

Razer dominates the fast-moving gaming lifestyle industry where speed of execution and quality keeps them ahead. Managing dual headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore and an international team spread across the globe, Razer requires the best tools for rapid communication, fast decision-making, and real-time collaboration. They chose Teams to meet this need and gain a competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry. “We use Teams for the rapid-fire burst of communications we need to be super productive, and we’ve really changed the workplace culture, accelerating efficient communications to speed time-to-market—from innovation to manufacturing to marketing,” says Patricia Liu, chief of staff at Razer.

Read more about how Razer users Teams to accelerate collaborative product development.

Cerner’s empowered workforce adopts Teams with enthusiasm

Cerner is one of the world’s largest providers of health information technology solutions and services. Cerner’s associates work across the world in different shifts, different time zones, and different languages. Communication and content creation historically happened using disparate tools, making it difficult for employees to work together effectively. Now, Teams allows them to connect and collaborate intuitively. “You know a solution resonates with a workforce when it is adopted without any prompting from IT. This is the case with Teams,” says Bill Graff, CIO at Cerner. “In just a few months, our associates formed more than two thousand teams across the organization—and it all happened organically.”

Read more about how Cerner is consolidating communications in one modern experience with Teams.

Konica Minolta accelerates communication and collaboration

Konica Minolta is renowned for pioneering flexible work arrangements. It empowers employees to telework and do their best creative work from anywhere. Konica Minolta decided to embrace a new form of communication centered on chat, to make communication easier and speedier. With Teams, information workers have all their day-to-day tools in one place. Go Kawakami, IT infrastructure manager, says, “We manage tasks with Planner, report the status of projects with OneNote and Excel, and use SharePoint calendars as bulletin boards. With Teams, we can do this seamlessly.” The ability to invite people outside the company to a Teams channel has streamlined cooperation with partner companies. The company has seen many tangible efficiency improvements, from the PR division to the IT Help Desk.

Read more about how Konica Minolta is enabling remote working from anywhere with Teams.

These are just a few examples of how Teams is delivering an intelligent workplace for everyone—whether you’re a team at headquarters, a remote employee working from home, or a Firstline Worker serving customers each day. If you’re not using Teams yet, be sure to try it now.

To see what’s next in our vision for Teams, watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

The post Microsoft Teams wins Enterprise Connect Best in Show award and delivers new experiences for the intelligent workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

To address these challenges, today we are announcing new capabilities in Microsoft Teams that empower care teams and enable healthcare organizations to securely collaborate and communicate. Built on the secure, compliant Microsoft 365 cloud, Teams gives all healthcare workers a familiar way to communicate in real-time, coordinate patient care, and improve operational efficiencies.

New advanced messaging features include priority notifications for urgent messages and message delegation to securely manage urgent patient care. In addition, new platform enhancements provide the ability to integrate electronic health records for care coordination and make Teams an even more powerful hub for health team collaboration.

New messaging features allow care teams to securely coordinate patient care

Good patient care begins with a clinician who is empowered with unfettered access to the right information, the ability to communicate swiftly, and the peace of mind that all of this communication is secure and compliant with patient data protection regulations. This balance of convenience and compliance has been difficult for care teams to achieve. As a result, many clinicians have resorted to using consumer chat apps as part of their patient care. This can pose significant risks to security, compliance, and patient data privacy. And in a highly regulated industry, this can also result in heavy fines for inappropriate data governance and protection.

To help address these unmet needs, we are expanding Teams to enable additional secure communication and collaboration workflows. Building on the customizable mobile Teams experience announced last month, today we’re introducing new advanced messaging features. Priority notifications (now in private preview) alerts a recipient to an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. Message delegation (coming soon), enables a recipient to delegate messages to another recipient when they’re in surgery or otherwise unavailable.

Clinicians get repeated notices about critical information that needs to be treated differently than other messages.

With message delegation, clinicians and staff can assign another recipient to receive their messages when they’re not available.

These new capabilities come on the heels of new features, such as shifts, a smart camera with image annotation and secure sharing, so images stay in Teams and are not auto-stored to the care providers’ devices, and new Teams templates for wards and hospitals to enable administrators to deploy consistent healthcare experiences in Teams across their wards, departments, and hospitals.

With Teams, clinical staff can now quickly communicate and collaborate in a secure, compliant environment that brings together messaging, voice and video calling and meetings, as well as access to patient information and apps in one hub for teamwork. With Teams, customers can manage hospital operations like shift scheduling, safety processes, supplies, bed capacity, length-of-stay, and other critical operations.

New platform enhancements support healthcare data interoperability

As the healthcare industry moves to digitize patient data, enabling the interoperability of data has become a top priority. Microsoft is addressing the challenges of interoperability through emerging standards such as FHIR, providing new opportunities for digital transformation across the care continuum. Teams provides a hub to access digital health records and collaborate in real-time—streamlining workflows for clinical and operational professionals to help create better patient outcomes.

Today, we’re announcing the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams. Now, hospital and clinical staff on-the-go can securely access patient records, chat with other team members, and even start a video meeting, all without having to switch between apps. The ability to view EHR data in Teams is enabled through partnerships between Microsoft and leading interoperability providers, including Infor Cloverleaf, Dapasoft, Datica, Kno2, and Redox.

By integrating with electronic health records, Teams enables healthcare teams to use a secure hub for coordinating patient care.

Leading healthcare organizations choose Teams for secure collaboration

Today, 420,000 organizations, including 89 of the Fortune 100 and many of the most innovative healthcare providers, are empowering their employees with Microsoft Teams. Organizations including New York State’s largest healthcare provider Northwell Health; South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust; and Saiseikai Kumamoto Hospital in Japan have all chosen Teams to enable secure productivity and collaboration for their medical staff.

In addition, Microsoft commissioned the global research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan to complete an evaluation of Microsoft 365 for healthcare organizations, concluding that Teams directly addresses the top challenges facing healthcare providers with a modern, chat-based communication tool that doesn’t require compromising on security and compliance.

“Based on our research, Microsoft Teams directly addresses the top challenges facing healthcare providers in electronic messaging in hospitals and health systems.”
—Greg Caressi, Frost & Sullivan

Join us at HIMSS19 and learn more

Next week, members of the Microsoft team will be at HIMSS19, the annual Health Information Management Systems Society conference. Visit us at Microsoft booth #2500. Also, please visit Microsoft 365 and health page and partner site to learn more about how Teams and Microsoft 365 can empower your healthcare teams.

The post New capabilities in Microsoft 365 empower healthcare professionals appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A big driver of customer adoption of Microsoft 365 is the need for security and compliance solutions in an age of increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats, as well as complex information protection needs due to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To help address these needs, we are introducing two new Microsoft 365 security and compliance offerings that will be available for purchase on February 1, 2019.

• Identity & Threat Protection—This new package brings together security value across Office 365, Windows 10, and EMS in a single offering. It includes best of breed for advanced threat protection services including Microsoft Threat Protection (Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Windows Defender ATP, and Office 365 ATP including Threat Intelligence), as well as Microsoft Cloud App Security and Azure Active Directory. This offer will be available for $12 per user per month.*
• Information Protection & Compliance—This new package combines Office 365 Advanced Compliance and Azure Information Protection. It’s designed to help compliance and IT teams perform ongoing risk assessments across Microsoft Cloud services, automatically protect and govern sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, and efficiently respond to regulatory requests leveraging intelligence. This offer will be available for $10 per user per month.*

All the value in these new offers remains available as part of the full Microsoft 365 E5 suite, which also includes business analytics and our enterprise grade phone system and audio conferencing. The full Microsoft 365 E5 suite includes not only security and compliance capabilities, but also offerings in business analytics featuring Power BI, and communications with audio conferencing and advanced phone system value. Additionally, customers can continue to purchase security and compliance components on a standalone basis.

There are no price increases or service impacts associated with any of these changes. The new Identity & Threat Protection and Information Protection & Compliance offerings are designed to provide customers with simpler purchase, deployment, and adoption of these security and compliance workloads.

As we speak to customers about the future of work, we know security and compliance are some of the highest organizational priorities and we hope these new offerings will help them achieve their security and compliance goals.

*Pricing for Microsoft 365 E3 customers before volume discounts.

The post Introducing new advanced security and compliance offerings for Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

In honor of the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we’re announcing this new feature—powered by artificial intelligence (AI)—which provides captions and subtitles for presentations in real-time. Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint supports the deaf and hard of hearing community by giving them the ability to read what is being spoken in real-time. In addition, captions and subtitles can be displayed in the same language or in a different one, allowing non-native speakers to get a translation of a presentation. At launch, live captions & subtitles will support 12 spoken languages and display on-screen captions or subtitles in one of 60+ languages.

Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint brings:

• The power of AI to presenters, so they can convey simple and complex information across subjects and topics.
• Speech recognition that automatically adapts based on the presented content for more accurate recognition of names and specialized terminology.
• The ability for presenters to easily customize the size, position, and appearance of subtitles. Customizations may vary by platform.
• A peace of mind with security and compliance knowing that the feature meets many industry standards for compliance certifications.

The feature joins other accessible features in Office 365, like automatic suggestions for alt-text in Word and PowerPoint, expanded availability of automatic closed captions and searchable transcripts for videos in Microsoft Stream, enhancements to the Office 365 Accessibility Checker, and more.

Here’s what one of our customers had to say:

“We are constantly looking for new ways of ensuring that the Government of Canada sets the highest possible standards as an accessible and inclusive workplace. We welcome such positive advances in technology, like this feature, that allows everyone, and notably those with disabilities, to better communicate ideas. They help break down barriers and lead to greater inclusiveness to the benefit of individuals and society as a whole.”
—Yazmine Laroche, deputy minister responsible for Public Service Accessibility

Live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint will begin rolling out in late January 2019 and will be available for Office 365 subscribers worldwide for PowerPoint on Windows 10, PowerPoint for Mac, and PowerPoint Online.

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Every day, everyone in the Microsoft Identity Division comes to work focused on helping you, our customers, make your employees, partners, and customers more productive and to make it easier for you to securely manage access to your enterprise resources.

So, I was pretty excited to learn that Microsoft was recently recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Access Management, Worldwide.

In the announcement, Gartner explained, “The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings.” To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner maintains rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate.

Receiving this recognition is incredibly energizing. It’s a strong validation that we’re making a positive impact for our customers and that they value the innovations we added to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) this year.

To receive this recognition, a vendor must have a minimum of 50 published reviews with an average overall rating of 4.2 stars or higher.

Here are few quotes from the reviews our customers wrote for us:

“Azure AD is fast becoming the single solution to most of our identity and access problems.”
—Enterprise Security Architect in the Transportation Industry. Read full review.

“Azure Active Directory is making great strides to become a highly available and ubiquitous directory service.”
—Chief Technology Officer in the Services Industry. Read full review.

“[Microsoft] has been a great partner in our implementing an identity solution [that] met the needs of our multiple agencies and provided us with a roadmap to continue to move forward with SSO and integration of our legacy and newly developed application. We were also able to set a standard for our SaaS application authentication and access.”
—Director of Technology in the Government Industry. Read full review.

Read more reviews for Microsoft.

Today, more than 90,000 organizations in 89 countries use Azure AD Premium and we manage over eight billion authentications per day. Our engineering team works around the clock to deliver high reliability, scalability, and satisfaction with our service, so being recognized as a Customers’ Choice is pretty motivating for us. It’s been exciting to see the amazing things many of our customers are doing with our identity services.

On behalf of everyone working on Azure AD, I want to say thank you to our customers for this recognition! We look forward to building on the experience and trust that led to us being named a Customers’ Choice!

The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice logo is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinctions are determined by the subjective opinions of individual end-user customers based on their own experiences, the number of published reviews on Gartner Peer Insights, and overall ratings for a given vendor in the market, as further described here, and are not intended in any way to represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (@Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)
Corporate VP of Program Management
Microsoft Identity Division

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

Be more productive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make more informed decisions

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

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

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

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

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

Keep more secure

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

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

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

Get started

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

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

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

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

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

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This momentum is driven by customers—in every industry—who are transforming their organizations to enable high performance from a workforce that is more diverse, distributed, and mobile than ever before. Microsoft 365 is designed to empower every type of worker—whether on the first lines of a business, managing a small team, or leading an entire organization.

Today, we are introducing four new ways Microsoft 365 connects people across their organization and improves collaboration habits, including extending the power of Microsoft Teams and new AI-infused capabilities in Microsoft 365.

1—Try Microsoft Teams, now available in a free version

To address the growing collaboration needs of our customers, last year we introduced Microsoft Teams, a powerful hub for teamwork that brings together chat, meetings, calling, files, and apps into a shared workspace in Microsoft 365. Now, more than 200,000 businesses across 181 markets use Teams to collaborate and get work done.

Beginning today, Teams is available in a free version worldwide in 40 languages. Whether you’re a freelancer, a small business owner, or part of a team inside a large organization, you can start using Teams today.

The free version includes the following for up to 300 people:

• Unlimited chat messages and search.
• Built-in audio and video calling for individuals, groups, and full team meetups.
• 10 GB of team file storage plus additional 2 GB per person for personal storage.
• Integrated, real-time content creation with Office Online apps, including built-in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
• Unlimited app integrations with 140+ business apps to choose from—including Adobe, Evernote, and Trello.
• Ability to communicate and collaborate with anyone inside or outside your organization, backed by Microsoft’s secure, global infrastructure.

This new offering provides a powerful introduction to Microsoft 365. Teams in Microsoft 365 includes everything in the free version plus additional storage, enterprise security, and compliance, and it can be used for your whole organization, regardless of size.

As we advance our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, what’s most exciting are the stories of customers taking on big projects with a small workforce, such as The Hustle Media Company—who helps movers, shakers, and doers make their dent in the world. Their popular daily email provides their audience with the tech and business news they need to know.

“As a media company that nearly quadrupled in size over the last year, it became apparent we needed a solution to connect all of The Hustle’s offices. As previous Slack users, we found that Microsoft Teams has all the features that other chat-based apps bring, but the teamwork hub allows everything to live in one place.”
—Adam Ryan, vice president of Media at The Hustle

Or, take it from Urban Agriculture Company, a small business specializing in organic, easy-to-use grow kits of vegetables, flowers, and herbs. After landing on Oprah’s favorite things, founder Chad Corzine turned to Microsoft 365 Business and Teams to manage communication among his rapidly growing departments, onboard employees, and protect customer data.

2—Use new intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365

Today, we’re also introducing new capabilities that allow anyone in your organization to create live and on-demand events in Microsoft 365. Events can be viewed in real-time or on-demand, with high-definition video and interactive discussion.

AI-powered services enhance the on-demand experience with:

• A speaker timeline, which uses facial detection to identify who is talking, so you can easily jump to a particular speaker in the event.
• Speech-to-text transcription, timecoding, and transcript search, so you can quickly find moments that matter in a recording.
• Closed captions to make the event more accessible to all.

Events can be as simple or as sophisticated as you prefer. You can use webcams, content, and screen sharing for informal presentations, or stream a studio-quality production for more formal events.

3—Leverage analytics to build better collaboration habits

We’re rolling out the preview of a new Workplace Analytics solution, which uses collaboration insights from the Microsoft Graph, to help teams run efficient meetings, create time for focused work, and respect work/life boundaries. Organizations can use aggregate data in Workplace Analytics to identify opportunities for improving collaboration, then share insights and suggest habits to specific teams using MyAnalytics.

We’re also rolling out nudges, powered by MyAnalytics in Microsoft 365, which deliver habit-changing tips in Outlook, such as flagging that you’re emailing coworkers after hours or suggesting you book focused work time for yourself.

4—Work with others on a shared digital canvas with Microsoft Whiteboard

Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available for Windows 10, coming soon to iOS, and preview on the web. Whether meeting in person or virtually, people need the ability to collaborate in real-time. The new Whiteboard application enables people to ideate, iterate, and work together both in person and remotely, across multiple devices. Using pen, touch, and keyboard, you can jot down notes, create tables and shapes, freeform drawings, and search and insert images from the web.

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Teams for Intelligent Communications and Collaboration

Over the last year, Teams has evolved to become the ultimate hub for teamwork. Built on the strength and scale of Office 365 with over 120 million users, Teams delivers chat-based collaboration, meetings, calling, and soon, full enterprise voice features. All of this is underpinned by the Microsoft Graph, allowing for rich AI capabilities. As part of Office 365, Teams uniquely delivers these capabilities at scale, with enterprise-grade security and compliance standards to meet the needs of a global business.

To advance our vision for Intelligent Communications, we are announcing new Teams features coming later this year, including:

• Cloud recording—Will provide one-click meeting recordings with automatic transcription and timecoding, enabling all team members the ability to read captions, search within the conversation, and playback all or part of the meeting. In the future, it will also include facial recognition, so remarks can be attributed to specific meeting attendees.
• Inline message translation—People who speak different languages will be able to fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.
• Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices—Will enable you to easily make a call, join a meeting, or add other people to a meeting in Teams using spoken, natural language. This functionality will extend to IP phones and conference room devices.
• Background blur on video—The ability to blur your background during video calls will allow other meeting attendees to focus on you, not what’s behind you.
• Proximity detection for Teams Meetings—This feature will make it easy for you to discover and add a nearby and available Skype Room System to any meeting.
• Mobile sharing in meetings—Meeting attendees will be able to share a live video stream, photos, or the screen from their mobile device.

These new capabilities build on the breadth of new features that have come to Teams in the last year, including guest access, new ways to interact with apps, and new meeting and calling capabilities.

Today, we are also announcing new enterprise-grade calling features in Teams, including consultative transfer and call delegation and federation. In addition, we’re introducing Direct Routing, which will enable customers to use their existing telephony infrastructure with Teams for calling. When you combine a Microsoft Calling Plan or Direct Routing with our Phone System for Office 365, Teams becomes a full voice service. These new capabilities are expected to be available in the second quarter of 2018.

Intelligent Communications for your devices

Hardware plays a critical part in delivering consistent, high-quality video and voice experiences. We are announcing that Teams is now enabled for a full spectrum of calling and meeting room devices, including:

• Microsoft collaboration devices—Microsoft Surface Hub is a powerful all-in-one large-screen team collaboration device. Microsoft Teams will be natively supported on Surface Hub, enhancing the capabilities of Teams in huddle spaces and meeting rooms equipped with Surface Hub.
• Meeting room systems—Lenovo and HP join existing partners Logitech, Crestron, and Polycom to transform the conference room experience with rich audio, HD video, center-of-room control, and one-touch join. All Skype Room Systems will support Teams meetings.
• Connections to existing equipment—Teams will certify new solutions from BlueJeans, Pexip, and Polycom to support interoperability for meetings in Teams with existing hardware investments.
• Desk and conference phones—New desk phones from AudioCodes and Yealink—and new conference room phones from Crestron, Polycom, and Yealink—run a native Teams application for consistent and streamlined calling experiences.
• Mobile phone stations—New mobile phone stations from Plantronics combine the Teams experience with desk phone capabilities for the mobile user.

To learn more about the portfolio of Teams-powered devices and the roadmap dates, visit the Microsoft Tech Community blog.

Growing ecosystem of Teams apps

No ecosystem would be complete without the apps that make it thrive. We recently released a new store in Teams featuring a wide array of tools and services from our partners. Some of the most popular apps among Teams customers include Adobe Creative Cloud, Hootsuite, InVision, Polly, SurveyMonkey, Trello, Wrike, Zoom.ai, and many others.

Hear it from our customers

As we celebrate our first birthday, what’s most exciting are the stories of companies like RLH Corporation, Technicolor, and General Motors, for which Teams is truly changing the way people come together, innovate, and move business forward.

• RLH Corporation—In 2014, when Greg Mount took on the role of CEO at RLH Corporation, parent company to hotel brands like Red Lion Hotels, GuestHouse, and America’s Best Value Inn, he shifted the company’s strategy to move from being a Pacific Northwest regional brand to being a nationwide one. Since then, RLH Corporation has acquired multiple hotel brands, growing from 62 to over 1,100 hotels in just three years. To address change management and help drive a consistent culture within the company, RLH Corporation started using Teams last year. They looked at other chat-based collaboration tools, but because they were already using Office 365 and Power BI, Teams was the clear choice. Now, all corporate employees use Teams. The leadership team has moved from a more in-person and paper-based process for communications to more real-time interaction and data flow.
• Technicolor—A leader in the media and entertainment sector, Technicolor has used Teams within the Production Services CTO office to provide a new way for employees to collaborate around all things technical—from strategy to purchasing and everything in between. Technicolor Production Services business units are also starting to use Teams for high profile projects that require greater transparency and collaboration across many time zones and global offices, reducing the number of recurring meetings and flow of information internally and benefiting from a sole source of truth with cloud documents. Technicolor Production Services plans to expand its usage within other parts of its organization.
• General Motors—Here’s what Fred Killeen, CTO at General Motors, had to say about Teams: “Our mission to transform transportation relies on strong teamwork across every aspect of our business. Teams enables our employees to connect across geographical and organizational boundaries through a single place to access all the conversations, files, and content. Teams’ integration with the rest of Office 365 and third-party applications and services makes it easier for our employees to find relevant information and do their best work on their own and as a part of a team.”

As we celebrate our first year in market, we are thankful to our customers, partners, and of course those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us. We look forward to continuing to bring you experiences that enable your teams to achieve more together.

Tune in to Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect this week to hear what’s next in our vision for Intelligent Communications. Watch it live Wednesday, March 14, 2018, at 10 AM ET or watch on-demand at: Enterprise Connect keynote.

—Lori Wright, general manager for Microsoft Teams and Skype

The post Microsoft Teams turns 1, advances vision for Intelligent Communications appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

To address the needs of organizations of all sizes, we introduced Microsoft 365 Enterprise for large customers, and Microsoft 365 Business for small and medium-sized businesses. They provide a comprehensive set of productivity and security capabilities while simplifying delivery and management for IT.

As part of this, EMS protects across users, devices, apps and data and is specifically designed to work together with Office 365 and Windows 10 to enable security that does not compromise user experience. EMS also secures and manages across thousands of SaaS applications, on-premises apps, as well as safeguarding data across iOS and Android devices. Most recently we integrated the management experience for IT into a single easy to use console. All this adds up to an intelligent security solution to support your organization’s digital transformation.

In the 3 years that EMS has been available, over 46 thousand organizations have chosen EMS and our install base has seen 12 consecutive quarters of triple digit Y/Y growth. These customers have chosen EMS to secure their move to a new culture of work.

Plante Moran, one of the largest certified public accounting and business advisory firms in the United States, chose EMS to enable productivity and security:

“We were using Good for Enterprise to manage and secure mobile email access, but that was just managing email, not devices,” says Sean Bulger, End User Systems Administrator at Plante Moran. “We wanted to go beyond that, so our professional staff could access all kinds of information, not just email, from any place and any device, while maintaining a strong level of security.”

G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers uses EMS to centrally manage and protect devices and an expanding portfolio of on-premises and cloud-based applications and services:

“We needed to provide single sign-on for ADP [payroll services], for Oracle, for Meraki, for all of these software-as-a-service solutions that we have. We also needed to secure our mobile devices and push applications to them. We’ve completely transformed the way our business operates.”
Eric McKinney, Cloud Services Manager at G&J

Gränges, a leading global manufacturer, relies on research and development to stay a leader and data security is a high priority. That’s why the Swedish manufacturer turned to Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS).

“We sleep better at night knowing that the information is not accessible for parties who shouldn’t access it. It’s important for us to be sure that we can secure business critical data that we don’t want to share with everybody else.”
Bilal Chebaro: Chief Information Officer, Gränges

If you’re in Washington DC this week attending Microsoft Inspire do come see some of our sessions or visit us at our booth.

The post Microsoft 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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

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

Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365

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

Chat for today’s teams

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

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

Hub for teamwork

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

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

Customizable for every team

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

New Bots help you to complete tasks within your conversations.

Security teams trust

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

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

Customers achieve more with Microsoft Teams

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

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

Start using Microsoft Teams today

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

Start using Microsoft Teams today.

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

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

*Additional subscription may be required.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device

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

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

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

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

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

And before the end of calendar year 2016:

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

The mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

SharePoint mobile app—your intranet in your pocket

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

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

SharePoint home

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

Modern team sites

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps integration

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

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

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

Roadmap for the mobile and intelligent intranet

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

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

And during calendar year 2016:

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

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

The SharePoint Framework—open and connected platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the third quarter of 2016, you will see:

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

And by the end of 2016, we will deliver:

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

Security, privacy and compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

To summarize, we currently support:

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

This quarter, we will release:

• Dynamic conditional access policies.

And by the end of 2016, you will see:

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

Learn more about these announcements in this video:

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

Connecting you with innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jeff Teper

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