We’re excited to share that for the fifth consecutive year, Gartner® has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms. Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.

Figure 1. Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, Tim Nelms, October 18, 2021.

Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms report to learn more.

In its report, Gartner lists core, optional, and critical capabilities for content services platforms. After detailing the critical capabilities, Gartner goes on to state, “Of these critical functions, it is the last—PaaS/SaaS deployment—which has seen the greatest growth in importance over the last few years.”

We believe this recognition demonstrates our commitment to providing innovative content platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more, including:

• Managed content: Your organization’s content is what drives decisions and action. Utilizing AI to turn unstructured content into organized information, SharePoint Syntex helps you find, protect, and automate business practices. Learn more about how organizations like Northumbrian Water and London Stock Exchange Group captured knowledge and reduced inefficiencies with SharePoint Syntex. Our more recent updates to add: content assembly, contract management, and advanced metadata search.
• Knowledge management: Microsoft Viva Topics turns content into knowledge by automating content organization, making information easier to find. Leverage existing content and turn it into an advantage for faster learning and development. Learn more about how companies like Avanade discover and share knowledge easier with Viva Topics.
• Employee productivity: Microsoft 365 empowers customers with applications, like Microsoft Viva, that encourage collaboration and productivity. Allow people to work flexibly and stay connected from anywhere.
• Extensive third-party partner network: The Microsoft Partner Network offers a wide array of solutions designed to enhance our customer’s Microsoft 365 investments. In addition, we maintain the Microsoft Viva Engineering Partner Community/Content Services Partner Program to help content services partners deliver solutions that accelerate customer success.
• Integration with Microsoft 365: Our third-party partner ecosystem offers solutions and services built for integration that enable you to customize and enhance Microsoft 365 based on your organization’s needs. We also have tools to help partners and developers integrate with, build on, and extend their solutions into Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex, and Viva. Learn more about our growing Microsoft Content Services Partner Program (CSPP).

Do more with Microsoft 365

Visit the new Microsoft Viva and SharePoint Syntex adoption pages for resources to help increase Viva and SharePoint Syntex awareness and usage in your organization. On these sites, you’ll find helpful guides, tools, and templates, for getting started, building champions, and deploying solutions.

To learn more about the many content services features in SharePoint Syntex (and even get started training a model using your own content) or get a jump-start with a contract management solution, check out the SharePoint Syntex-powered site templates in the SharePoint look book. The look book lets you provision code-free solution templates on demand to your tenant. The instructional Content Center template can be provisioned without a license, while the Contracts Management solution will require a SharePoint Syntex license.

Figure 2. Contracts Management site provisioned from the SharePoint look book.

Finally, we’ve heard your requests to couple content and knowledge for faster ways to build out your knowledge base. Our new integration between SharePoint Syntex taxonomy and Viva Topics can help. You’ll be able to use SharePoint Syntex to automatically tag content and build out taxonomies—and dynamically turn taxonomy tags into managed topics for Viva Topics. This integration is rolling out now.

Figure 3. Topics built dynamically from the taxonomy term store.

Learn more

We’re consistently working to improve our content platform offerings and empower our customers for the new digital age. Here’s how you can learn more about Microsoft 365 Content Services and get started:

• Get more information about Microsoft 365 Content Services:
  • SharePoint product page.
  • SharePoint Syntex product page.
  • Viva Topics product page.
• Download the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms report.

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, Tim Nelms, 18 October 2021.

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.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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Earlier this year, IT leaders around the globe were forced to reprioritize their roadmaps, resources, and budgets to equip employees for remote work practically overnight. Suddenly, the use of video communications skyrocketed. People adjusted quickly to moving meetings online, but one of the most notable challenges driven by the shift to remote work has been to maintain the personal connections that come from the ad hoc and serendipitous conversations that happen in the physical office. 

In fact, studies show¹ that a person’s voice is the signal that builds personal connections and creates clarity, which is why actually speaking with colleagues and customers is more important now than ever. The use of Teams Calling has skyrocketed as well, with Teams users making over 650 million calls in October, up 11 fold over March of this year. And on average, calls are just one-fourth the length of a typical meeting, making calling a quick and efficient way to reconnect and collaborate. 

Today, we’re announcing several enhancements to Teams Calling that make it easier for organizations and their employees to strengthen connections and create new ones with just a quick call.

Get more out of every call, with a rich calling experience

Calling alone is a great way to reconnect and quickly share information. However, when you integrate calls with different modes of communication, they can act as a productivity force multiplier. We’re introducing several ways to create a more powerful and streamlined calling experience.

• Streamlined calling experience: Teams is the hub for chat, collaboration, meetings, apps, and workflows, and the enhanced Calls app brings the most important calling elements—the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts, and settings—into a single location, making it easier to stay connected in the flow of your work.
• Save call recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint: Call recordings are a great way to keep track of the ad hoc brainstorming that often happens on a call. Now, Teams Admins can take advantage of the tight Teams and OneDrive or SharePoint integration and elect to make OneDrive or SharePoint the default recording storage location, in lieu of Stream. This new capability provides powerful capabilities such as sharing with external guests, quicker access to transcripts, and greater storage capacity. Learn more.
• CarPlay support: Placing and receiving calls in the car will soon be easier than ever, thanks to CarPlay support for Teams Calling. With CarPlay, you can use your vehicle’s built-in controls to operate Teams, including using Siri to place and answer calls.
• Spam identification: Spam calls are frustrating, disturb the flow of work, and make you less likely to answer calls from unfamiliar phone numbers. Using advanced industry techniques, Teams will identify potential spam calls so you can feel confident answering incoming calls. Additionally, Teams will digitally attest outgoing calls to prevent these calls from being rejected by external recipients. 
• Transfer calls between mobile and desktop: Teams makes it easy to place and receive calls from several different endpoints, including desktop and mobile devices, but sometimes you need to move locations or devices to finish your call. Starting in early 2021, you will be able to shift your calls between your mobile and desktop endpoints with an easy-to-use interface on the Teams app.
• Call merge: Calling users can bring multiple different one to one calls together to combine conversations and simplify multiple conversations. Call merge is now available for both PSTN calls and VoIP calls.
• Low-data mode: Whether you want to preserve data or are just in a location with a poor or limited network connection, sometimes it’s helpful to limit the amount of data you’re using during a video call or meeting. Starting in early 2021, users will be able to adjust their settings in Teams to cap the amount of data that will be used during video calls and establish different settings based on network availability (cellular, wifi, or always).
• Enhanced reverse number look-up: With automatic reverse number look-up, you’ll see the name of the caller at the time they’re calling and in your activity feed and voicemail.

Provide advanced calling needs for your business

Some parts of the business require additional calling capabilities and workflows. Whether that’s keeping mission-critical operations running or resolving key customer issues, Teams supports a broad range of needs across your business with help from these new capabilities.

• Voice enabled channels: A new collaborative calling capability enables teams to integrate call queues into a specific channel, allowing for collaboration and information sharing before, during, and after the call. For example, IT or HR help desks can now be managed from a channel so available team members can answer the call, and easily share information about service tickets. Starting in early 2021, Teams users will have the option to create new channels that are voice-enabled, to start using this feature in preview.
• Certified Contact Center solutions: Resolving a customer call in contact centers is often a team sport, so it’s important to quickly identify and reach the right colleague. Contact center solutions can use presence and user APIs to seamlessly integrate with Teams, allowing agents to find the right colleagues to assist. Now, contact center providers can apply for Microsoft certification of their solutions, to provide customers with the confidence needed to manage important customer interactions. Learn more about the certification program and specific solutions that are undergoing certification, many of which will be complete in early 2021.
• Resilient calling: To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows users to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a network outage. This SBA will be available in preview this month to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network. 
• Call transfer ring-back: While call transfers can be useful to connect the right people, making sure that calls remain connected during the process is critical for a great caller experience. Now Teams users can rest assured that when you transfer an important call, it will not disconnect just because someone on the other end is unavailable. If the transfer recipient does not answer the call, the call will ring back to the person making the transfer.

Stay connected with a portfolio of high-quality devices

Teams provides a great integrated softphone experience on both mobile and desktop, and a robust lineup of hardware options allow you to choose the right physical endpoints for your needs. From low-cost phones, to traditional desk and video phones, to Teams displays, there are options to fit every user and calling need. We’re excited to share a few new ways this device ecosystem can help you stay connected, no matter where you’re working.

• Teams displays: Whether you are working remotely or returning to the office, adding an intelligent companion device like the Teams display can revolutionize the way you work. A new experience now available on the Lenovo Thinksmart view, Teams displays integrate Cortana for hands-free productivity, use AI to help you stay productive and organized, and provide a dedicated device for your Teams collaboration needs. Learn more.
• Low-cost phones: To empower organizations to bring the best of Teams Calling to as many users as possible, we’re excited to bring low-cost phones to market with trusted partners Yealink and AudioCodes in early 2021. These devices integrate natively with the Teams phone app, bringing core Teams capabilities to life.
• Device as a Service: The new Teams Device as a Service offering provides flexible monthly payments, making it easier and more affordable than ever to get your users the devices they need. Simply navigate to the Device as a Service site where you can add devices to your cart and place an order in a matter of minutes. This service is currently available in the U.S., and availability for additional regions will be coming in 2021.

Do more with the power of partners

We have seen strong growth across our Teams partner ecosystem and have more than 300 specialized partners with calling solutions for Microsoft Teams, a 100% increase over the last year. These partners assist our customers with a wide variety of services and solutions including Direct Routing as a Service, deployment, adoption, devices, managed services, and network monitoring and reporting. Examples include our Partner of the Year award winner Continuant, and finalists Enabling Technologies, Communicativ, and Orange Business Services.

Continued commitment to Calling

These innovations are examples of our ongoing commitment to support spontaneous collaboration and personal connections that voice enables. We are honored and humbled to be recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Unified Communications as a Service Magic Quadrant. We will continue working hard to make Teams the most trusted and reliable voice solution available. Now more than ever, we all need a seamless way to stay connected with colleagues and customers, and with these capabilities, you can restore personal connections and manage the most critical calls for every part of your organization. Learn more about how Accenture, Australia Catholic University, ENGIE, and Tony’s Chocolonely are using Teams Calling to stay connected.

Lastly, with all these great capabilities coming to Teams Calling, it’s important to keep in mind that Teams Calling can be rolled out in weeks—not months or years—as Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) showed by rolling out Calling globally to over 40,000 users in 4 weeks. You can always reach out to your account team for more information, and the links below provide additional information and guidance.

• Learn more about Teams Calling on the Microsoft Teams Calling webpage.
• Get started with Teams for free.
• Get guidance and resources to get up and running quickly on Teams Calling with FastTrack.

¹ Harvard Business Review, “Type Less, Talk More ” (October 5, 2020)

The post Restore and maintain personal connections with new Microsoft Teams Calling features appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

I’m excited to announce that Microsoft is placed in the Leaders quadrant!

We believe, this is a fantastic recognition of our solutions, the massive engineering investments we made, but, even more so, it is a highlight of thousands of successful EMS deployments all over the world.

Over the past couple of years, I have blogged many times about two core things:

1) The value of being deeply connected with customers, and

2)  Why I feel the Microsoft teams are more customer connected than ever before.

This tightly knit customer connection has been a key part of our understanding of what customers need, where they are today, and where they want to go in the future.

Working with 1,000’s of successful deployments has allowed us to learn and continue improving at a literally exponential rate.

Since the last 2017 Gartner Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) MQ was published, we have added more than 10M new devices under Intune management. There are now more than 135M PCs and mobile devices being actively managed by ConfigMgr and Intune. THAT is Unified Device Management – and that usage number is growing by more than 3M every month!

The Magic Quadrants are great resources when you want a snapshot today of the key providers and their innovations. This kind of view is important to many of the IT leaders I meet, but as they plan the future of their organization’s in the 3-5 years, they look at more. In my opinion to best predict that far into the future, these leaders also consider the velocity and acceleration of the providers year over year, monitoring their evolution.  Overlaying the last 3-4 Magic Quadrants (like UEM, for example) gives them a great view into how each provider is progressing over time.

The case of the UEM MQ is particularly interesting. Each year, of course, the requirements for each MQ changes a bit (e.g. changing from Mobile Device Management to Endpoint Mobile Management to Unified Endpoint Management), so, although the MQ’s are different, I think this evolution mirrors well the changes happening in the industry, as different categories converge and expand. This also often mirrors the evolving needs of the customers. Understanding how these categories are changing/shifting/converging over time is something every leader has to take the time to understand in order to effectively plan for the short-term and long-term.

When we do our own research and planning for what our customers will be needing in the next few years, we see a world with not only many more cloud services and mobile devices, but also a number of categories that have converged and integrated to deliver a Modern Workplace that is “loved by users and trusted by IT.”  Specifically, solutions in Unified Endpoint Management, Identity and Access Management, and Endpoint Protection which will all need to be integrated in order to deliver the user empowerment, management, and security that is needed.  I encourage you to look at all these Magic Quadrants in conjunction to make your decision. These solutions are on a convergence path, and even if you don’t believe that, there is no question that all companies need them working tightly integrated.

Leaders making decisions about what to do right now (as well as in the future) need to look at the intersection of all of these and consider how they come together. Below you can see another Magic Quadrant; I think this expanded view helps us to see and understand how things are moving.

What you can see here matches the conversations I have with leaders from all over the world:  The categories that are converging the fastest are Identity Protection and Endpoint Management – and customers are looking for the best ways to ensure that only trusted users, using trusted devices, using trusted apps are given access to company data no matter where it rests (e.g. in the cloud or behind the firewall).

We continue to work hard to deeply integrate these cloud services in ways that will help you simplify while also increasing your security – and all while delivering the empowering modern workplace that enables your users to unleash their creativity and teamwork.

You can read the in-depth analysis from Gartner here or at aka.ms/IntuneMQ.

Disclaimer: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from [insert client name or reprint URL].
 
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.

The post Microsoft emerges as a Leader in Gartner MQ for Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Some great news to share with you today! For the second year in a row, Gartner has positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Access Management, Worldwide, based on our completeness of vision and ability to execute in the access management market. Find out why in a complimentary copy of the report here.

According to Gartner, Leaders show evidence of strong execution for anticipated requirements related to technology, methodology, or means of delivery. Leaders also show evidence of how access management plays a role in a collection of related or adjacent product offerings.

Furthest in Vision in Leaders Quadrant

Microsoft is positioned the furthest in completeness of Vision in the Leaders Quadrant, for the second straight year. We believe our jump up in Execution also illustrates how important it is for us to execute on a strategy that can help organizations where they are at today and prepare them for the identity needs of tomorrow.

At Microsoft, we champion conditional access policies and threat protection for identities as critical capabilities for a world-class identity and access management solution. As part of a rich ecosystem with Windows 10, Office 365 and EMS, we’ve worked hard to integrate security policies across products to give you visibility and control over the full user experience. We’ve also taken in the insights and feedback from our customers this year to improve the experience and make it even easier to get all your identities in one place. We are committed to providing innovative and comprehensive identity and access management solutions for your employees, partners, and customers.

We could not have continued to be a leader in this space without the input and support from our customers and partners – thank you!

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

Important note:

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

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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Azure AD Conditional Access (CA) has really taken off. Organizations around the world are using it to ensure secure, compliant access to applications. Every month, Conditional Access is now used to protect over 10K organizations and over 10M active users! It’s amazing to see how quickly our customers have put it to work!

We’ve received lot of feedback about the user impact of Conditional Access. Specifically, with this much power at your fingertips, you need a way to see how CA policies will impact a user under various sign-in conditions.

We heard you, and today I am happy to announce the public preview of the “What If” tool for Conditional Access. The What If tool helps you understand the impact of the policies on a user sign-in, under conditions you specify. Rather than waiting to hear from your user about what happened, you can simply use the What If tool.

Get started

Ready to start playing with the tool? You can simply follow these steps:

• Go to Azure AD Conditional access
• Click on What If

• Select the user you want to test

• [Optional] Select app, IP address, device platforms, client app, sign-in risk as needed
• Click on “What If” and view the policies that will impact the user sign-in

Sometimes the question that you’re trying to answer is not “What policies will apply” but “Why is a policy not applying?” The tool can help you with that too! Switch to the “Policies that will not apply” tab and you can view the policy name and, more importantly, the reason why a policy didn’t apply. Isn’t that cool?

Want to learn more about the What If tool?

Tell us what you think

This is just a start. We’re already working to deliver more innovation in this area. As always, we’d love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have on this preview, or anything about Azure AD Conditional Access. We’ve even created a short survey on the What If tool for you to participate in.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

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