Let’s jump in.             

Microsoft Ignite

Global experiences, localized content, in-person opportunities, and more—let’s get ready for a new kind of Microsoft Ignite.

Discover what's new

Empowering today’s digitally connected, distributed workforce

Microsoft 365 is the cloud-first platform for all the ways that people work today—wherever, whenever, however. From information workers to frontline workers. No matter how you run your company or your team. And, with Microsoft 365, organizations save more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of point solutions.²

Microsoft 365 comes alive in the new Microsoft 365 app, home to all your favorite productivity apps—Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook—along with new apps for creation and expression, like Loop, and any third-party apps you choose. It’s a secure, integrated, experience built on the Microsoft Graph that brings together all your documents, files, contacts, meetings, and more—with intelligent, Graph-powered recommendations personalized for you. Simply put, it’s a better way to work. And the Microsoft 365 app will be available to customers across our business, education, and consumer segments.

Learn more about the Microsoft 365 app.

Transforming meeting culture with Teams

Microsoft Teams is the app at the center of Microsoft 365. With more than 270 million monthly active users, Teams has changed how people work more than any other app in the past 20 years. We’ve introduced more than 450 new Teams capabilities in the past year alone to transform meeting culture and keep everyone in the flow of work.

It starts with helping everyone have better hybrid meetings. Last year, we introduced new AI-powered intelligent cameras to Microsoft Teams Rooms, dissolving the walls between an attendee’s physical and digital presence. Today, together with Yealink, we’re bringing you the SmartVision 60, the first 360-degree, center-of-room intelligent camera. The SmartVision 60 produces multiple video streams with AI active speaker tracking—and soon: people recognition. Learn more about SmartVision 60.

As Teams has become pervasive for collaboration, we’re expanding to every type of hardware. Today, we’re announcing that Cisco is now a Teams Rooms Certified Devices partner. For the first time ever, Teams meetings will be available natively across certified Cisco meeting devices, enabling customers to configure Teams as the default meeting experience. Get the details on Cisco and Teams.

We’re not stopping with better meeting experiences. We’re on a journey to help you transform meeting culture, starting with the new Teams Premium meeting offering. Teams Premium includes Intelligent recap, a powerful new AI experience that’s like having a virtual assistant at every meeting—even when you can’t be there. It creates tasks, automatically generates chapters from the meeting, and shares personalized highlights from the recording. Teams Premium also includes Live translation for captions, which delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. If an organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can enjoy live translated captions.

With Teams Premium, we’re also excited to bring you experiences that make meetings more personalized, intelligent, and secure.

• New meeting guides that automatically set up the right meeting options.
• Upleveled safeguards for confidential information with advanced meeting protection, including watermarking and sensitivity labels.
• Friction-free Virtual Appointments for personalized business-to-consumer engagements.
• The ability to host high-quality webinars using advanced functionality to drive deeper engagement and generate new leads.

Learn more about Teams Premium.

Introducing Microsoft Places: Transform your space into a place

Overwhelmingly, people come into the office for each other. That’s why we’re creating a new Connected Workplace category and introducing Microsoft Places to address the unique challenges of hybrid work. People are what give a space meaning and identity. In essence, people make a space, a place. Microsoft Places helps everyone understand who will be in the office when; where people are sitting; what meetings to attend in person; and how to book space on the days your team is already planning to come in. It also helps leaders understand how people use the office, and ultimately optimize their real estate investments. And third-party partners can build and integrate new and existing solutions on top of Microsoft Places.

Learn more about Microsoft Places.

Bringing the metaverse to work

Our data shows that 51 percent of Gen Z envisions working in the metaverse in the next two years.¹ Just yesterday, we announced with Meta that we’re bringing Teams immersive meeting experiences to Quest so you can connect, share, and collaborate in virtual reality as though you’re there together in person.

With Mesh avatars for Teams, you can create custom avatars to represent yourself—so you can take a break from the camera but still have a physical presence in Teams meetings.

Unlocking new collaboration patterns

Across Microsoft 365 and Teams, we’re making work better with collaboration experiences designed for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, creation and expression, and business processes in the flow of work.   

This starts with making meetings more hands-on and interactive. Rolling out in November 2022, Excel Live transforms how people collaborate in meetings, enabling every participant to live-edit the Excel file directly, right from Teams—without ever opening the file. Teams Live Share, now in preview, goes even further by turning any app shared in a Teams Meeting into a real-time, multi-user collaborative experience where participants can interact, annotate, and collaborate directly in the meeting window.

With the latest innovations in Together mode, meeting organizers and presenters can assign seats to meeting participants in the Together mode view and can also pin the Together mode view to the meeting stage so everyone has the same view of the group.

The new hours and location feature—accessible across Teams and Outlook—makes it easier to schedule in-person meetings by allowing people to specify and adjust from hour to hour whether they will be available in the office or working remotely.

The new Teams channels experience makes it easier to focus and collaborate, placing recent posts at the top so people can easily catch up on the latest conversations, contribute to discussions, and pop them out so they can return to them quickly. The new channels feature new post types like announcements and video clips and a customizable channel header.

New features in Teams chat give people more ways to prioritize their most important work, protect boundaries and time, express themselves authentically, and have fun. AI-recommended replies save time, while the ability to “@” mention everyone in a group helps grab the group’s attention quickly. With up to 800 reaction emojis, everyone can express themselves in natural and authentic ways, and Video clips in chat gives everyone the ability to easily record, send, and view a video clip in chat, lending a personal touch to help strengthen connection.  

Learn more about Teams chat and channels.

With asynchronous collaboration on the rise, people need solutions to help them communicate and collaborate across space and time. Last year we introduced Loop, which breaks down barriers between apps to enable fluid collaboration as people think, plan, and create together. Today, we’re excited to announce that the Loop app—featuring workspaces, pages, and components that sync across Microsoft 365, is in preview. We’re also excited to bring Loop components to Word for the web, Whiteboard, and Outlook for Windows, to meet users in the context of their work, across Microsoft 365 apps. Learn more about Loop.

With Microsoft Editor, you will soon be able to surface Loop components using Context IQ, our set of intelligent capabilities working in the background of Microsoft apps and services. Loop also now offers Dynamic 365 integration within Teams—you can now insert a Loop component into a Dynamics 365 record while in Teams chat. We’re also introducing Edge Workspaces in the Edge browser, so everyone working together on a project can view the same websites and files in one place as a shared set of browser tabs.

New creation and expression experiences in Microsoft 365 include Microsoft Designer, a new app powered by AI technology, including DALL-E 2, that helps you quickly create stunning social media posts, invitations, and graphics just by entering a text prompt or other content. Microsoft Create features thousands of creative templates to spark inspiration and up-level skills. Today, we also welcome video editor Microsoft Clipchamp to Microsoft 365 to empower anyone, regardless of skill or experience level, to tell stories with video. These creation and expression experiences will roll out first in the Microsoft 365 consumer experience. Learn more about Designer, Create, and Clipchamp.

We’re also helping organizations drive productivity with new experiences that bring business processes into the flow of work. Adaptive Cards is a new low-code way to design and deliver micro-apps directly inside Teams. With Cards, developers can bring interactable content from multiple applications and platforms into a single interface in Teams chat.

Content AI is a new category of technology solutions that uses advancements in cloud and AI to transform how content is created, processed, and discovered—empowering people and automating workflows at scale. Today, we’re introducing Microsoft Syntex, which integrates Content AI into the flow of work with services like content processing, content summarization, e-signature, and more, that help you enhance, manage, and connect your content. Learn more about Microsoft Syntex.

Empowering everyone to thrive with Microsoft Viva

While places still play a key role in helping people thrive at work, work is no longer just a place—it’s an experience. And you need an employee experience that people can access anywhere, anytime. Microsoft Viva is the first digital employee experience platform that brings connection, purpose, insight, and growth into the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best.

Just a few weeks ago we introduced a new set of apps and services in Viva to help align everyone in the organization around the most impactful work to drive business outcomes. Enhancements and integrations to goal-setting and objectives and key results (OKR) management solution Viva Goals bring the experience right into the flow of work. Viva Pulse lets managers and team leaders take the pulse of their teams for quick and confidential input, when they need it, to understand their teams’ needs on an ongoing basis and take action when it matters. And the new centralized communications management and publishing tool Viva Amplify helps employee communication teams and leaders communicate more effectively with their employees by automating publishing all from one place to reach people wherever they work—whether that’s Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, or Viva—and providing metrics to help understand and track message impact and improve over time.

Windows 11 and Windows 365: a new cloud computing paradigm built for the distributed workforce era

With Windows 11, we redesigned the operating system, from the client to the cloud, for hybrid work. Windows 365 is a new cloud computing paradigm built for the distributed workforce era.

With the new Windows 365 app, you can access your cloud PC directly from the Windows 11 taskbar or start menu and then stream the full Windows experience—all your apps, settings, and content—to any device. We also announced the availability of Windows 365 Government for Government Community Cloud and Government Community Cloud High customers in the United States. And, coming soon, organizations will be able to provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs for shift and part-time employees who only need a Cloud PC during their workday for a limited time. Learn more about Windows 365 news.

We’re also announcing updates to services expressly for IT professionals. Windows Update for Business reports will leverage Azure Workbooks to make deployment reports more modular and customizable to better fit your needs, and Organizational Messages makes it easy to communicate with people directly in the Windows UX, helping onboard employees or providing reminders of important training. We’re also adding branch office printer management and diagnostic reporting to Universal Print, as well as support for evaluating apps after an in-place upgrade with Test Base for Microsoft 365. We continue to add functionality to Windows Autopatch to help you move from Windows 10 to 11, and to support AVD patching to secure all your Windows instances—both in the client and the cloud.

Watch Panos Panay’s session for all the latest about Windows and join us on October 24 to 27, 2022, at our Microsoft Technical Takeoff event for an even deeper dive into Windows and Microsoft Intune.

Simplifying IT management

With Microsoft 365, we want to help you simplify IT management and reduce costs.

Today, we’re bringing new capabilities to the cloud-enabled Microsoft Intune suite, including endpoint privilege management, designed to dynamically elevate permissions, and Microsoft Tunnel for mobile app management, which provides secure access to company resources. And as I mentioned earlier, consolidating today with Microsoft 365 can save you more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of point solutions, while helping your employees stay secure in the flow of work.²

Learn more about Microsoft 365, Teams, Viva, and Windows

At Microsoft, we believe that energized, empowered employees are the key to durable competitive advantage for every organization. We’ll continue to innovate across Microsoft 365, Teams, and Viva to help everyone thrive—because technology, combined with the right culture and leadership, can create a better world of work for everyone.

¹Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing it Wrong? Work Trend Index Pulse Report, WorkLab, Microsoft. September 22, 2022.

²Modernize your business while managing costs, Microsoft 365.

Based on publicly available list prices of point solutions for identity and access, content and productivity, chat and collaboration, and meetings, vs. comparable Microsoft 365 solutions.

The post Microsoft 365 at Ignite—Re-energize your workforce in the office, at home, and everywhere in between appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Virtual and hybrid meetings continue to take up the lion’s share of time spent at work. Now, more than ever, leaders need an integrated solution that combines all the advanced meeting capabilities, takes meeting culture to the next level, and allows them to do more with less.

Today, I’m excited to announce Microsoft Teams Premium. Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaboration experience of Microsoft Teams, this new offering makes every meeting from one-on-ones to large meetings, to virtual appointments to webinars more personalized, intelligent, and secure. Unlike the disconnected experience and costs of multiple point products or add-ons, with Teams Premium you get everything you need for just one low price.¹

Personalized: Easily create meetings that meet your needs

Meetings are not “one size fits all.” You wouldn’t go to a coffee shop for a confidential meeting or an auditorium for a one-on-one. Today, when you schedule an online meeting, you just use the default settings because drilling into meeting options takes valuable time out of your day.

The all-new meeting guides in Teams Premium help you to automatically create the experience that’s right for your meeting. The guide is easily customized and managed by IT. You can select a meeting guide—like a client call, brainstorming meeting, or help desk call—and the options will already be set, reducing the time and thought process around getting the meeting right. And with guides, leaders can rest assured that that meetings adhere to company best practices and policies.

Your office, your business card, your favorite swag on your desk—all embody your company brand. Shouldn’t your virtual connections? With Teams Premium, you can infuse customized meeting branding into the meeting lobby and create custom backgrounds and together modes for employees to enjoy and IT to manage, to never compromise your brand.

Intelligent: Focus on what matters with AI-powered meetings

We spend a lot of time in meetings. Are they really productive? We’ve all had those Monday morning meetings that you want to decline but need to listen in to just stay in the know. And to be honest, we’re all probably multi-tasking anyways. Or sometimes you may decide to skip a meeting to stay focused and put out that work fire that needs your urgent attention. But then you end up sifting through recordings and transcripts to find what is relevant to you. So what do we do? Set up yet another meeting in the after-hours to get the latest download. There has to be a better way.

With intelligent recap in Teams Premium, you get the power of AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful. First, intelligent recap uses AI to suggest action items and owners, so that follow-ups are not missed. It’s like having a virtual assistant attend every meeting.

After the meeting, intelligent recap will create smarter recordings with automatically generated chapters and insights such as when your name was mentioned, when a screen was shared, or when you left a meeting early, to help you discover important moments to quickly catch up.

Search also got smarter with suggested speakers that are personalized to you based on who you closely work with, so that you can quickly search through the transcripts by the people you might be most interested in.

Online meetings allow more people than ever before to connect. Currently, in Teams meetings, you can easily follow along with who’s saying what with speaker-attributed live captions and transcription. But if you are presenting to people who don’t speak the same language, how do you make sure the conversation is seamless? Live translation for captions delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. If an organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can enjoy live translated captions. This helps break down language barriers for your global meetings and calls to be productive and effortless.

Secure: Help keep confidential meetings confidential

When you need to set up a new meeting, it’s simple—create a new Teams meeting and send the invite, right? But the reality is, some meetings contain business-sensitive information that is screen-shared or covered in the conversation. Board meetings, financial discussions, and undisclosed product launch reviews are examples that likely need added security to help ensure that content remains protected.

With advanced meeting protection in Teams Premium, you can now safeguard confidential meetings. With new meeting options like watermarking to deter leaks and limiting who can record, you get additional protections to keep the discussion private. And for Microsoft 365 E5 customers with the most advanced security requirements, you can leverage your existing Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to apply relevant meeting options automatically. That makes setting up protected meetings even easier—simply select one of the familiar sensitivity labels you’re already using to protect sensitive data across Microsoft 365 and let the automation take over. Compliance admins can edit their existing labels in the Security and Compliance Center to enforce the meeting options that should be applied when the label is used in a meeting.

One simple offering for every meeting

How often do you manage, use, and pay for multiple meeting tools? Teams Premium also extends the familiar experience of Teams to help you engage more deeply with customers so you can do more with less.

Microsoft Teams Premium

Learn about the latest updates, including preview and general availability.

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Advanced Virtual Appointments

While connecting virtually with your customers, clients and patients may have started as a necessity, it’s now an opportunity to engage with customers in new ways and to grow your business.

With Virtual Appointments capabilities available today in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 offerings, your employees can easily schedule appointments and customers can join in a mobile browser—no need to download an app. And with Teams Premium, you get advanced Virtual Appointments to manage the end-to-end appointment experience.

Delight clients

Attendees may lack the technical know-how to successfully join a virtual meeting, or face log-in problems—not to mention simple forgetfulness to join an appointment in the first place. With Teams Premium, facilitate a seamless customer experience that allows your customers to receive text reminders and join custom branded virtual appointments through their mobile devices—without downloading Teams.

Streamline appointment management

Schedulers can lack a unified place to manage appointments or wrestle with nonintegrated platforms. With Teams Premium, appointment schedulers can set up and manage scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments in one location with advanced capabilities like appointment queuing.

Measure rich analytics

Finally, there can be a lack of metrics around attendance or participation over time, making it difficult to gain insights and trends to improve the customer experience and business outcomes. With Teams Premium, view usage trends and history of virtual appointment experiences and effectiveness like no-shows and wait times with staff-, department-, and organization-level analytics.

If you’re interested, learn even more about advanced Virtual Appointments here.

Advanced Webinars

And in today’s world of constant communications and distractions, it’s hard to stand out to attract and engage attendees, whether it’s employees in your organization or potential customers for generating new business.

Building upon the basic webinar functionality available in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 offerings—registration up to one thousand attendees, co-organizer role, interactivity with Q&A, attendee reporting, and Dynamics 365 marketing integration—with Advanced Webinars in Teams Premium, you get the familiar and secure experience of Teams combined with new host controls and event management controls that make it seamless to connect with any audience. Whether you are promoting a new product, onboarding and training new team members, or connecting with potential leads to grow your business, Advanced Webinars deliver a high-quality experience to help you before and during your event.

Streamline registration workflows

Building upon the basic webinar capabilities in Teams today, the registration experience is getting even better in Teams Premium with registration waitlist and manual approval. Enabling the waitlist will keep webinar registration open even after the event has reached the capacity set by the organizer. This allows additional people to register and be automatically added to the waitlist. As new spots open up, people will be automatically moved to the pending approval state, which enables the organizer to review their registration information and manually approve or reject each of the registrants. In addition, you can customize the registration start and end time to specify when you want registration to start and end, making it easier to plan for and manage your event.

To build excitement and attract attendees to your webinar, you can send automated reminder emails ahead of the event. These emails will be sent to every confirmed registrant on the day of the event and will include a custom-branded header, webinar details, and a link to join the event.

Customize presenter and attendee experiences

Similar to when you used to gather with the host and presenters in the physical green room ahead of your event, you will be able to connect and manage all the behind-the-scenes action in the virtual green room. Join together with the host and other presenters in a dedicated space separate from attendees, where you can socialize, monitor chat and Q&A, manage attendee settings, and review content before the event starts. And as attendees wait, they will be greeted with a welcome screen and can use chat and Q&A to engage with presenters and each other.

As engagement is key to making any webinar successful, it’s not just about how attendees can engage, but also what will keep them engaged. With the ability to manage what attendees see, you don’t have to worry about distractions in case someone’s video accidentally turns on or keeping focus while multiple profile photos of attendees show up on-screen. You can curate the attendee view so attendees only see shared content and participants you bring on-screen. This can include multiple presenters with a presentation or even an attendee raising their hand to ask a question live in the webinar.

Learn more about Teams Premium

We’re so excited to bring these advanced meeting capabilities together in Teams Premium to make meetings even better. Want to learn the latest updates about Teams Premium, including preview and general availability? Sign up to get updates on Teams Premium.

Features will begin to roll out in December 2022 as a part of Teams Premium preview, with general availability of Teams Premium in February 2023. Intelligent recap features will begin rolling out in the first half of 2023.

¹Today we are sharing the expected list price of USD10 per user per month. Official pricing will be available at general availability, including pricing per currency and programs.

The post Introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, the better way to meet appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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As Panos talked about this morning, the last few years have given rise to enduring changes in the way we live—online and offline. We’re seeing these emerging behaviors become everyday habits, creating new ways to use the PC. Essential PC tasks have increasingly moved online with innovation continuing in areas like content creation, helping to power a thriving creator economy. Creativity and self-expression are not one thing, one person, or one industry—anyone can be a creator with the right set of tools. Nearly 20 million US consumers now create and monetize their content online, and user-generated content now accounts for 39 percent of weekly media hours consumed.¹ At the same time, we’re all facing constraints at home and work as the cost of everything continues to rise. 72 percent of US consumers say rising costs are their number one concern and finding better deals is a top reason people shop online.² As we build new experiences across our apps and services, we’re focused on unlocking your self-expression and creativity while providing practical tools that help you make your life easier.

New creator tools in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge, and Bing

Today, I’m thrilled to announce new consumer tools in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge, and Bing designed to help all of us ignite our imagination and express ourselves. Everything begins with an idea but getting started and capturing your individuality isn’t always easy. For anyone who is trying to create a brand for themselves on social media or simply wanting to create a birthday party invitation for family and friends, we aimed to solve a few key challenges with creating and sharing content:

• When I have an idea, it’s hard to get started. To take an idea and make it into what I envisioned digitally, why doesn’t it ever look like I thought?
• When I’m creating content, it’s time-consuming. Why does formatting and resizing multiple images and text have to be so complex?
• It’s hard to make unique content that looks great. I’m not a trained designer but still want high-quality designs, why can’t this tool just read my mind?
• And most importantly, tools are fragmented (and expensive).

For the first time ever, I’m excited to announce Microsoft Designer, a graphic design app in Microsoft 365 that helps you create stunning social media posts, invitations, digital postcards, graphics, and more, all in a flash.

Microsoft Designer is powered by AI technology, including DALL∙E 2 by OpenAI, which means you’re able to instantly generate a variety of designs with minimal effort. Our cutting-edge AI supercharges your ideas.

With Designer, there’s no need to spend time building cards or social media posts from scratch. And you no longer need to search through thousands of pre-made templates. Designer invites you to start with an idea and let the AI do the heavy lifting. For example, with ‘start from scratch’ within Designer, you can simply describe an image you want to see, and the app does the work for you to create something totally unique. As you work in Designer, every surface of the app is powered by AI to help ensure consistent, aligned, properly scaled, and beautiful designs, even with or without any inherent design ability.

As you add more content like images or text, the ’design ideas’ feature magically integrates the content within the design in a single click. You can then share your designs with the world however you’d like, including publishing directly to social media platforms or downloading them to use anywhere.

The Designer app is born out of PowerPoint, where Designer uses AI to make template suggestions as you build out a presentation. Depending on the type of content, Designer in PowerPoint will offer several options for you to choose from. In fact, more than eight billion slide designs (and counting) have been saved by our customers with Designer in PowerPoint. We’re thrilled to expand on that legacy, adding the latest cutting-edge text to image AI, with the new Designer app.

To get started with the new Microsoft Designer app today, you can sign up for early access to our free web preview of the Designer app. We’re inviting people to try it out, give us feedback, and help us make it great. The current free preview does not include all planned features to come; we will be adding more over time. Once the app is ready for general availability, it will be available both as a free app and with more premium features available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.

We know that content creation isn’t limited to an app, it also happens online. So, we plan to integrate Designer into Microsoft Edge, delivering AI-powered design suggestions to visually enhance social media posts and other visual content without having to leave your browser window.

We realize that creators do not just want to build beautiful logos, social media posts, and invitations, they also want to create awesome videos. That is why I’m also pleased to officially welcome Microsoft Clipchamp to the Microsoft 365 family. For the first time, the Microsoft 365 suite of apps includes a free video editor so you can create beautiful videos in no time. Whether it is a daily vlog, a viral dance video, a family video, or a highlight reel, Clipchamp helps you weave together video, sound, and effects quickly and easily. Clipchamp empowers anyone to make professional-grade videos, without needing to be an editing expert. And Microsoft 365 subscribers will now have access to premium features within Clipchamp for more value than ever before, at no extra cost.

Microsoft Clipchamp is available today as the inbox video editing app on Windows 11 and on the web. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers and Clipchamp Essentials subscribers get access to premium Clipchamp features.

Today, we are also announcing a new website, Microsoft Create. We designed this with creators in mind to help them get inspired, save time, and up-level their skills. With Create, we are bringing together the Microsoft 365 apps you already know and love along with new creative apps—in one place—to help you express your creativity and make the most of your time.

Create is a space to help any type of creator get started with creating videos, graphic designs, documents, presentations, and more. It is the ultimate creator launchpad that brings together the power of our content creation apps—from Designer to Clipchamp to PowerPoint to Word and beyond. Create can help spark inspiration and up-level your skills with professional templates, curated articles, and videos from others who have been in your shoes. We are thrilled to bring this new website to help you try and learn something new about content creation.

The Microsoft Create website is live today and available for anyone to use. We’ll continue to build new functionality and content into the site over time.

Now let’s talk about finding that perfect image for your creations. I think we’ve all become accustomed to a world in which if you need a specific image, you search online until you find whatever is closest to what you had in mind. But if you were searching for an image that for whatever reason didn’t yet exist, you were out of luck. I’m excited to announce that with the new Image Creator from Microsoft Bing you will be able to create images that don’t yet exist, limited only by your imagination. Using the same DALL∙E 2-powered image-generator technology that is also in the Microsoft Designer app, Image Creator helps you bring your ideas to life. Simply type in a description of something, any additional context like location or activity, and an art style, and Image Creator will make it for you.

We are taking a measured approach to roll out this feature. We will soon start with a limited preview for select geographies, which will allow us to gather feedback, apply learnings, and improve the experience before expanding further. As Image Creator becomes available, you will be able to access it by navigating to the Bing Images tab and clicking on “Image Creator,” or through the Image Creator icon in the sidebar in Microsoft Edge.

It’s important, with early technologies like DALL∙E 2, to acknowledge that this is new and we expect it to continue to evolve and improve. We take our commitment to responsible AI seriously. To help prevent DALL∙E 2 from delivering inappropriate results across the Designer app and Image Creator, we are working together with our partner OpenAI, who developed DALL∙E 2, to take the necessary steps and will continue to evolve our approach.

For example, OpenAI removed explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train the model, and Microsoft deployed filters to limit the generation of images that violate content policy.

On top of that, Microsoft has integrated techniques that further help to prevent misuse, including additional query blocking on sensitive topics. Moreover, some prompts to DALL∙E 2 may surface biases embedded in the training data. We recently applied additional technology that helps deliver more diverse images to our results. This is an area we are actively working to address and continuously improve.

We welcome feedback, ideas, or concerns. For the Designer preview, people can provide feedback via a feedback button in the upper right-hand corner. For Image Creator, which is coming soon, we’ll have a ‘Feedback’ button in the lower right corner of the page.

New tools in Microsoft Edge to save you money and time

In addition to new tools for creators, we continue to look for ways to help you make the most of your time online—and help you save some money in the process. 

Researching products and shopping remain one of the most enduring activities in a browser and that has only become truer over the last couple of years. As an avid online shopper, I can attest that Microsoft Edge is one of the best browsers for shopping. Our built-in shopping features on Edge help customers save an average of $400 a year—no plug-ins needed. And Microsoft Edge has delivered more than $1.4 billion in coupon savings to date.³ That’s real money and impacts people’s day-to-day lives. Shopping in Microsoft Edge sidebar is a new feature that makes this even easier and more personal using the power of machine learning and AI to analyze product information from across the web like price history, price comparisons, coupons, and deals to help you save time and money. Now, with Shopping in the Microsoft Edge sidebar, you have convenient access to a personalized shopping hub with information like recent purchases, package tracking, recently viewed items, and open shopping carts as well as coupons and savings.

In addition to shopping, the sidebar in Microsoft Edge lets you access tools and first-party and third-party features side-by-side within your browser, even as you navigate between tabs. I use the sidebar to multitask and maximize my time online. Say my friend sends me a laptop recommendation. I can open the link from my Outlook inbox, and then click Shopping in the sidebar to instantly compare prices—without ever flipping between apps or losing my flow. The sidebar also lets you compare search results on different search engines in Discover, access easy tools like a unit converter, or check out Games when you need a quick break. The best part of the sidebar is that it is completely customizable so you can choose the features that allow you to make the most of your time online.

If you’re a Windows user, you can get started with Microsoft Edge and Bing today on your PC. For those who want to try Microsoft Edge and Bing and are on a macOS, mobile, or Linux device, download Microsoft Edge and let us know what you think.

Microsoft and Uber One

Last, but not least, we know that all of us, from creators to entrepreneurs, parents to students, can use a good deal these days. Starting today and running through January 10, 2023, new and existing Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers can get a six-month Uber One membership free with their subscription plus $25 off their first Uber Eats order. An Uber One membership includes unlimited $0 Delivery Fee, up to 10 percent off on Uber Eats, and 5 percent off Uber rides. To enroll and learn more, visit the Uber One offer here. We hope this helps make the every day a little easier. 

At Microsoft, we’re focused on how we can harness the power of technology to support you in this new world that has emerged over the last few years, rife with distraction and uncertainty. Enduring changes to the way we live, work, and play have become new habits. We’re looking for ways to remove barriers to create more seamless and personalized experiences across platforms and devices. To enable you to express yourself. To unlock the next wave of innovation and creation for you on the PC, through the power of the cloud and AI. We can’t wait to see what you do.

¹Tech Enabling User Generated Content to Flourish, Consumer Technology Association, June 15, 2022.

²How to Thrive in the Retail Space, Comscore, 2022.

³Annual savings are calculated using value of coupons presented to users signed into their Microsoft accounts from May 2021 – April 2022. Based on US data only.

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With more than 270 million monthly active users, Microsoft Teams offers developers an unmatched opportunity to build collaborative apps. Since the beginning of 2020, monthly active users of custom-built or third-party apps in Teams have grown more than tenfold. There are more than 1,400 Teams apps, with more and more independent software vendors (ISVs) generating millions in annual revenue from customers using their apps built on Teams and Microsoft 365 services. Looking ahead, we expect emerging technologies that bring the digital and physical worlds together, like Microsoft Mesh for Teams, to open new engaging possibilities for collaborative experiences on Teams. 

This year at Build 2022, we are sharing several enhancements and new capabilities for developers building collaborative apps for Teams and Microsoft 365. Watch my keynote with Charles Lamanna, Innovate with collaborative apps and low code, to view the highlights. Read on to get a full recap of our Build announcements, which are organized here in three sections: new ways to help you delight your users with rich collaborative experiences, scale your productivity and grow user engagement, and monetize your apps. We can’t wait to see what you will build with these innovations!

Delight users with rich collaborative experiences

Introducing Live Share: Interactive app experiences in Teams meetings

We are introducing Live Share, a capability for your apps to go beyond passive screen sharing and enable participants to co-watch, co-edit, co-create, and more in Teams meetings. Developers can use new preview extensions to the Teams SDK to easily extend existing Teams apps and create Live Share experiences in meetings. Live Share is backed by the power of Fluid Framework, which supports sophisticated synchronization of state, media, and control actions with only front-end development. This synchronization will run on Teams hosted and managed Microsoft Azure Fluid Relay service instance—at no cost to you. Our early partners building Live Share experiences include Frame.io, Hexagon, Skillsoft, MakeCode, Accenture, Parabol, and Breakthru. Watch our Live Share on-demand session and try out the new Teams SDK extensions.

Figure 1. Hexagon Live Share prototype enables engineers to annotate and edit 3D models and simulations, while they brainstorm together in Teams meetings.

Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay general availability

Fluid Framework is a collection of open-source, client-side JavaScript libraries that underpin the Live Share real-time collaboration capabilities. Azure Fluid Relay is a fully managed cloud service that supports Fluid Framework Clients. Developers are using Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay to enable real-time interactivity on their apps beyond Microsoft Teams meetings. Fluid Framework, the Azure Fluid Relay service, and the corresponding Azure Fluid client-side SDK will be ready for production scenarios and available in mid-2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs for updates. Watch the on-demand session to learn more about building collaborative web apps with Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay.

Create Loop components by updating Adaptive Cards

Microsoft Loop components are live, actionable units of productivity that stay in sync and move freely across Microsoft 365 apps starting with Teams chat and Microsoft Outlook. Today, we are announcing the ability for developers to create Loop components. Now you can easily evolve an existing Adaptive Card into a Loop component or create a new Adaptive Card-based Loop component. Additionally, Adaptive Card-based Loop components can be surfaced with Editor using Context IQ, our set of intelligent capabilities working in the background of Microsoft apps and services, to stay directly in the flow of composing an email. Zoho Projects is using these Adaptive Card-based Loop components to help its customers improve incident response times, reduce outage durations, and improve overall performance against service-level agreements (SLAs), by enabling users to complete these tasks across Teams and Outlook. Zoho Projects and ServiceDesk Plus Cloud are among the first products integrated with Microsoft 365 apps to implement Microsoft Loop. Developer private preview for this capability starts in June 2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs or follow us on Twitter @Microsoft365Dev for updates.

Figure 2. Zoho Projects is extending adaptive cards to be live, actionable Loop components that work across Teams and Outlook.

Introducing Microsoft Azure Communication Services sample app builder

Microsoft Azure Communication Services interoperability with Teams enables you to create experiences that support seamless communications between customers on any custom app or website and employees working in Teams. For example, Teladoc Health built the first-of-its-kind custom fully integrated clinical and administrative virtual healthcare solution that allows care team collaboration and access to relevant clinical data directly within Teams, and the ability to seamlessly deliver virtual care to patients who join from a custom app.

Figure 3. Teladoc Health is enabling care providers to work and connect from Teams while patients join from a custom app built using Azure Communication Services.

Today, we are introducing the Azure Communication Services sample app builder, enabling developers to easily build and deploy a sample application for virtual appointments in just a few minutes, with no coding needed. Through the sample app, customers can book appointments powered by Microsoft Bookings and join a Teams meeting through a custom web app with a company-branded experience, while staff use Teams to join scheduled appointments. The sample app is fully open source and developers can tap into the code for more customization. Visit Github to learn more.

Microsoft Graph API enhancements to embed chats and channel messages into your apps

Microsoft Graph chat APIs enable developers to embed Teams chats into their applications, enabling their users to collaborate seamlessly without having to switch back and forth across apps. We are introducing several new APIs in preview with capabilities such as enabling chats with federated users (like users outside your tenant), identifying which messages are read and unread by the current user, and subscribing to user chats and membership changes. These new APIs will be generally available in mid-2022. Visit our chat message resource type docs page and view the on-demand session to learn more.

SharePoint Framework and Microsoft Viva Connections

SharePoint is the most flexible content collaboration platform powering experiences across Microsoft 365. SharePoint Framework now lets you create parts and pages in SharePoint sites, Teams apps, and more. It is at the center of our extensibility capabilities for the new Microsoft Viva Connections employee experience platform. Check out the how-to session on building tailored employee experiences for Viva Connections that directly integrate with Teams apps.

Figure 4. A sample Microsoft Viva Connections app running in both Teams and on a mobile device.

Approvals extensibility

Approvals in Microsoft Teams help everyone—from frontline workers to office workers—to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly in the flow of work. We are introducing create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) APIs for Approvals. Developers can use the Approvals APIs to enable approvals within line of business apps and use webhooks to track changes and drive workflows with Approvals in Teams. The Approvals APIs will be available for preview in mid-2022. Subscribe to Microsoft Developer Blogs for updates. View the on-demand session to learn more.

Scale developer productivity

Build once and deploy anywhere across Teams and Microsoft 365

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the new Teams SDK that enables you to build apps for Teams, Outlook, and Office using a single application and deployment model and build collaborative apps that make use of the capabilities relevant to each product. Developers can now upgrade to the latest Teams JS SDK v2 and App manifest v1.13 to build production Teams apps, and run full-scale pilots with users on the preview channels of Outlook and Office. This will enable developers to get feedback and prepare for the distribution of their apps on Outlook and Office later this calendar year.

These updates are backward compatible so all your existing Teams apps will continue to work as-is in Teams with production-level support. Our Teams developer experience including our Microsoft Teams Developer Documentation, tooling, support, and code repository has been updated to support extended apps. You will be able to distribute both single-tenant and multi-tenant apps using existing Teams experiences. To learn more, check out our on-demand session about extending Teams apps across Microsoft 365.

Figure 5. MURAL is extending its Teams app’s personal tabs and search-based message extensions to other Microsoft host apps.

MURAL is among the early partners bringing the connected experience across Teams, Outlook, and Office to life with their apps, like the example above showing a search-based message extension inserting a MURAL directly into the Outlook message as an interactive Adaptive Card. In addition to MURAL, several other partners, including Adobe, eCare Vault, go1, monday.com, Polly, ServiceNow, SurveyMonkey, and Zoho have helped us get these new tools ready and we are excited to make them generally available to everyone at Microsoft Build.

Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and CLI now generally available

Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and command-line interface (CLI) are tools for building Teams and Microsoft 365 apps, fast. Whether you’re new to Teams platform or a seasoned developer, Teams Toolkit is the best way to create, build, debug, test, and deploy apps. Today we are excited to announce the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and CLI is now generally available (GA). Developers can start with scenario-based code scaffolds for notification and command-and-response bots, automate upgrades to the latest Teams SDK version, and debug apps directly to Outlook and Office. Get started building apps with Teams Toolkit today.

Figure 6. Building a notification app for Microsoft Teams using the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

Collaboration Controls in Power Apps

We are announcing Collaboration Controls in Power Apps to let developers drag and drop Microsoft 365 collaboration features like Teams chats, meetings, files, Tasks by Planner, and more right inside custom apps built with Power Apps. Collaboration Controls will be available in preview in mid-2022. View the on-demand session to learn more. Subscribe to the Power Apps blog for updates.

Grow user engagement and monetize your apps

App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program is designed to evaluate and showcase the trustworthiness of application-based industry standards, such as SOC 2, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 for security, privacy, and data handling practices. We are announcing the preview of the App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365 for applications built on Azure to help them accelerate the compliance journey of their apps. With this tool, developers can automate a significant number of tasks to achieve the certification faster and easier. This tool also produces reports that can be easily shared by developers to help IT gain visibility of app security and compliance. Learn more from our App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365 docs page.

Improved app management and discoverability

The Teams Store helps users find the right apps through updated app categories, curated app collections, featured top apps, and intelligent recommendations based on what colleagues and peers are using. This Microsoft Build, we are making available a central experience within the Teams Store to help users track the apps they are using across various Teams and group chats, and see what permissions are required by these apps. We are also making the discovery of apps through tabs, message extensions, and connectors more contextual to help users find the right apps and grow usage of the ISV apps in Teams. For example, in the context of composing messages, the message extension suggestions will be organized by tasks and actions users can take with it. Lastly, users on mobile devices can now add your apps right from the mobile device, such as from a link or QR code.

In-app purchasing for Teams apps

A top request from partners and developers is to provide the ability to include a paywall experience directly from within your Teams app. This gives you the ability to turn a free app into a freemium version, where you can choose when to prompt your users when to subscribe to your app. The new in-app purchase functionality is available today and can be invoked with a few lines of code. Learn more from our in-app purchases docs page.

Figure 7. Developers can enable freemium upgrades directly within Teams with a few lines of code.

Teams app license management

Another area we are making advancements in is enabling users to manage and assign purchased licenses. It’s previously been up to developers to build the license management component into their solution, whether on their landing page or directly within the app. To help streamline the license management experience, we will soon be offering the ability for you to offload the license management capabilities to Microsoft where users can manage and assign licenses—directly in Teams. License management in Teams will be available in preview in mid-2022.

New collaborative apps coming to Teams

We are excited to see ISVs bringing innovative collaborative apps to Teams across a broad range of scenarios. Here are just a few examples of the new apps available now or coming soon:

• MURAL app for Teams gives teams everywhere the ability to bring a shared collaboration space directly into Microsoft Teams. Users can improve teamwork with asynchronous visual collaboration, and transform disengaged conversations into productive, engaging meetings and workshops using hundreds of templates and proven, guided methods that empower teams to deliver breakthrough results. MURAL is a Microsoft preview partner, and the MURAL app now works across Teams, Outlook, and Office for a single, connected experience.
• Observable app for Teams allows companies to bring their data, context, and logic together in one place to uncover insights collaboratively and accelerate data-driven decision-making across the organization. New updates coming to the Observable app in June 2022 will offer Microsoft Teams notifications when collaborating through comments in Observable.
• SAP S/4HANA operational purchaser chatbot provides collaborative capabilities of Microsoft Teams to SAP S/4HANA users within a conversational user experience. It uses Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication and leverages Microsoft Graph APIs to allow users to call other parties or schedule Teams meetings with business partners directly from the bot in the context of the authenticated business user. This provides tight integration of the Teams collaboration experience in a standalone app in SAP, bringing connectivity and collaboration where users need them.
• ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app from ManageEngine, Zoho’s enterprise IT management division, leverages Microsoft Teams to streamline business and IT service delivery, manage and accelerate IT incident resolutions, and improve service experience across the enterprise. Coming soon, the ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app will enhance its existing static Adaptive Cards with Loop components, which will allow everyone working on the ticket to get the latest updates and trigger service desk tasks without switching tabs.
• Figma, the collaborative design platform, is introducing a new app that will enable teams to share, present, and collaborate in real-time on Figma and FigJam files within a Teams meeting. The app also leverages the new Adaptive Card functionality so when a user shares a link to a Figma or FigJam file in a Teams chat, the card unfurls, allowing users to open the file from within Teams. Users can also view and respond to file notifications directly from Teams. The Figma app will be available later in 2022 in the Teams app store.

Learn more

Here’s a recap of the key resources to learn more about developing collaborative apps on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365:

• Catch up on all the collaborative apps keynotes, breakouts, and into-focus sessions at Microsoft Build.
• Deep dive into the announcements with the Build on-demand sessions.
• Visit the Microsoft Teams Developer Center to start building collaborative apps with Teams.
• Visit the Microsoft Graph Developer Center to connect your apps with the data and AI in Microsoft 365.
• Read our Live Share blog to learn more about the technology and what you can do with it.
• Read more about how Power Platform is redefining low-code with new products and features from Charles Lamanna.
• Join our Microsoft 365 ISV program to get one-on-one support and other benefits.

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Not only do employees want to feel more connected, more aligned to their company’s purpose and mission, but they also want to grow, make an impact, and make a difference. Organizations, likewise, are at their best when people and teams have clarity and a shared understanding of their goals and can execute in sync to achieve the desired business outcomes. A clear, consistent business goal-setting process is the missing link between employee experience and business outcomes.

Today, we are excited to announce Microsoft Viva Goals, a new module for business goal setting and management, is now available in private preview. Powered by the acquisition of Ally.io,² a leading objectives and key results (OKR) company, Viva Goals brings purpose and alignment to Viva customers—alongside culture and communications, wellbeing and engagement, growth and development, as well as knowledge and expertise.

Introducing Viva Goals

Viva Goals aligns teams to your organization’s strategic priorities and unites them around the mission and purpose. It helps provide clarity on employees’ work and how that work makes an impact on the business’s most important priorities. With that alignment in place, teams then can focus on doing the work, making sound decisions, and driving the desired results for the business.

In addition, Viva Goals brings business goals into the flow of everyday work, making it easier to stay up to date with connected data and automated reminders as well as to share OKRs and their progress across the organization with customized dashboards and quick links. Viva Goals integrates with Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, and other work management and data tools that customers are already using—as well as more integrations to come with Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Power BI, and other Microsoft 365 apps and services. With Viva Goals, OKRs no longer exist in a silo separate from the employee experience and where people work.

Viva Goals will be included with the current Microsoft Viva suite subscription when it becomes generally available later in Q3 Calendar Year (CY) 2022.

Business goals connecting employee experience and business outcomes

Having clear goals and measures of success at the highest levels of the organization helps everyone understand what’s important and align their work to the most valued priorities. It sets the context for the work of the team and creates a shared vision and a common language, which is especially important in a hybrid work environment. This gives departments and teams a framework to focus their own priorities and define what success looks like together in connection with the business goals.

With clarity around organization-wide and team-wide goals, employees are empowered to think, collaborate, and act at the team and individual level, informed and aligned to the priorities and what others are working on, thus everyday work is moving the business forward in a more agile way. This connection and visibility to the bigger picture enables flexibility and purpose-driven work as employees can determine the best way to reach those goals. Knowing why you show up for work every day, taking a collaborative approach to defining goals, and understanding the progress you are making are all important to enhancing the employee experience.

It also encourages a culture of innovation and growth: according to an Ally.io survey, 73 percent of people who use a goal-setting framework like OKRs feel empowered to take risks at work (compared to 53 percent who do not)—and calculated risk leads to innovation.³

OKRs for everyone

With Viva Goals, we seek to empower teams to use OKRs at all levels. OKRs can help get everyone pulling in the same direction, but not when used only as top-down directives. Whether you are a C-suite leader, team lead, or individual contributor, you can incorporate OKRs as part of your one-on-one meetings with managers, progress updates to stakeholders, or regular planning process to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what should change.

In this new fourth installment of our blog series about Microsoft’s own employee experience journey, we share how teams at Microsoft are using Viva Goals and the OKR framework across the company at different levels to support new hires, define partnerships between teams, and drive innovation.

Looking ahead

We’re very excited about the opportunity to help customers build alignment and bring increased meaning and purpose-driven work into the employee experience as part of Viva. To learn more, explore Microsoft Viva Goals and watch the video below.

¹The Work Trend Index survey was conducted by an independent research firm, Edelman Data x Intelligence, among 31,102 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets between January 7, 2022 and February 16, 2022. This survey was 20 minutes in length and conducted online, in either the English language or translated into a local language across markets. At least 1,000 full-time workers were surveyed in each market, and global results have been aggregated across all responses to provide an average. Each market is evenly weighted within the global average. Each market was sampled to be representative of the full-time workforce across age, gender, and region; each sample included a mix of work environments (in-person, remote vs. non-remote, office settings vs. non-office settings, etc.), industries, company sizes, tenures, and job levels. Markets surveyed include: Australia and New Zealand (ANZ): Australia, New Zealand; Asia-Pacific (APAC): China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam; Europe: Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom; Latin America (LATAM): Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico; North America: Canada, United States.

²Microsoft acquires Ally.io to improve employee experience by aligning people’s work with team goals and company mission, Kirk Koenigsbauer, Official Microsoft Blog, Microsoft. October 7, 2021.

³2021 Report: A New Perspective on Goal Management and Company Culture, Kevin Shively, Ally.io. June 8, 2021.

The post Microsoft Viva Goals brings purpose and alignment to the employee experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This month, we’re adding new features across Microsoft 365 to improve accessibility, support flexible workstyles, streamline routine tasks, and offer more ways to make your voice heard. We’re also launching new capabilities in Windows 11 and Windows 365 to help make hybrid work a little easier. Let’s dive into what’s new.

A more inclusive, seamless working environment

Support neurodiversity in the hybrid workplace

Notification overload can be disruptive, especially for employees with conditions like autism and ADHD. We’ve been working to cut down the noise by providing more ways to customize which notifications Microsoft Teams shows you and when, and new ways to protect time with Microsoft Viva Insights. We’ve also added new capabilities to support and improve reading and writing like text prediction options, voice control tools, and accessible authoring features—great for everyone, but a true game changer for workers with dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Learn about these features and more intelligent tools to support neurodiversity in the hybrid workplace in our what’s new in Microsoft accessibility for spring 2022 blog.

Create tasks with natural language

The To Do Windows app now supports smart recognition of due dates, reminders, and repeat information from the task title.² Now you can simply use natural language—like submit project report on Friday or follow up with client on Tuesday at 1 PM—and To Do will automatically recognize and highlight the dates, times, and repeat information and add it to your task accordingly. Update your Windows To Do app to version 2.66 or above to get started.

Get more out of Yammer

We’ve released a series of updates to Yammer that help make it easier to find what you need, share ideas, and customize to your preferences. First, community members can now upvote a response if it’s a helpful or useful contribution to the question, making it easier for others to find answers. You can now also bookmark a conversation to see the post and its replies later. Finally, dark mode for Yammer web will be available soon.

Switch between accounts in Microsoft 365 web apps with a single click

Switching between user accounts can disrupt your flow of work when you need to sign out and sign back in again. Beginning this month, we have started adding support for multiple work and personal accounts on Microsoft 365 web apps in the same browser, enabling you to seamlessly switch between the accounts with a single click. Just add your accounts to the account manager on the top right of a Microsoft 365 web app to get started. Learn more about this new feature in the Tech Community blog Announcing account switching for Microsoft 365 web apps.

Work securely from anywhere with Windows 11 and Windows 365

Flexible work requires technology that’s built for a hybrid world. Earlier this month, we shared the latest Windows 11 and Windows 365 features that are designed to empower new ways of working. We’re bringing the power of the Microsoft Cloud and familiarity of the PC together, giving you an even more seamless Windows experience without sacrificing security.

Drive productivity and hybrid collaboration with Windows 11

With Windows 11, you can easily organize files you are working with in File Explorer by tagging them as favorites and using tabs to quickly access those you need.

New capabilities like automatic framing, voice clarity, background blur, and eye contact create more natural hybrid meeting experiences.³ Live captions provide a more inclusive hybrid work environment for the deaf or hard-of-hearing communities, as well as language learners. Finally, we added snap assist for touch to help people organize windows in predefined layouts on Windows tablets or two-in-ones.

Empower hybrid work with Windows 365, the world’s first Cloud PC

With Windows 365, employees can stream their entire Windows experience from the Microsoft Cloud, enabling them to access their personal settings, apps, and content securely on any device.

Windows 365 Boot enables users to sign in to Windows 365 at start up—no need to sign in to the local operating system first. Windows 365 Switch will enable users to move between the Windows 365 Cloud PC and the local desktop just like they do between different desktops today in the Task switcher. The Windows 365 app provides users with another way to access their Windows 365 Cloud PC from the taskbar or Start menu. And for those times you need to work offline, like on an airplane or in the field, Windows 365 Offline enables uninterrupted work, with an automatic sync as soon as you reconnect.

Empower IT with modern management

Managing devices for a dispersed workforce and keeping them up to date presents unique challenges for IT departments. To help, we’ve added Windows Autopatch, a new intelligent managed service designed to keep Windows and Office software up to date automatically, to Windows Enterprise E3 at no additional cost. Learn more about this announcement on our Tech Community blog post Get current and stay current with Windows Autopatch.

In addition, we are launching a new communications function in Microsoft Endpoint Manager that empowers IT to send targeted organizational messages directly to employees across various surfaces in Windows 11, including on the desktop or lock screen. Learn about this new cloud-managed capability and more in this Tech Community blog post The endpoint manager’s guide to what’s coming in Windows 11.

Simplify what it takes to protect your endpoints in the cloud

We announced our vision for advanced endpoint management and shared our plans to introduce a series of premium solutions over time in Endpoint Manager that will help organizations increase endpoint security, improve user experiences, and reduce the cost of ownership of your digital estate. Remote help for Windows is the first of these solutions, launched for general availability on April 5, 2022, and is featured in the new Microsoft Mechanics video about Windows cloud management.

Govern data across your entire data estate

To meet the challenges of today’s decentralized, data-rich workplace, we’re introducing Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions that help you understand, govern, and protect your entire data estate. This new portfolio combines the capabilities of the former Azure Purview and the Microsoft 365 Compliance solutions that users already rely on, providing unified data governance and risk management. Learn more about Microsoft Purview in the video Go Beyond with Microsoft Purview.

Empowering the future of modern work

As the future of work unfolds, Microsoft 365 is continuing to help organizations and teams embrace a flexible work model. No solution is better positioned to support the needs of a hybrid workforce than Microsoft 365. Be sure to check back next month, when we’ll be sharing the news from Microsoft Build, our annual developer conference. 

¹ 2022 Work Trend Index, Microsoft. March 16, 2022.

² Feature currently available in English (EN-) languages only.

³ Hardware dependent.

The post From intelligent tools built on inclusivity to the latest in Windows—here’s what's new in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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.

As we reflect on this milestone, we want to pause and say thank you to our customers and partners who have inspired us to do our best work. From hospitals to schools to nonprofits and commercial enterprises, we’re humbled that so many of you use Teams to achieve your goals.

Today, more than 270 million people rely on Teams for hybrid work. Over 50 percent of organizations have standardized on Teams, according to a recent Morgan Stanley chief information officer (CIO) survey.¹ With the shift from remote to hybrid work, active Teams Rooms devices more than doubled year over year, and Teams Phone now has nearly 80 million active users. From the office to the frontline worker, Teams supports every employee. In fact, usage of Teams by frontline workers has doubled year over year.

Our work is far from over. We continue to listen, learn, and innovate to enable every organization to thrive in the new world of work. With insights from today’s release of our 2022 Work Trend Index, it’s never been more apparent the ways we work and the expectations we have from work are dramatically different than just two years ago, and our solutions need to evolve, too.

Today, we are announcing new product innovations designed to help make hybrid work work. Whether it’s creating more engaging meeting experiences, enabling collaboration with external partners or customers, or giving you the flexibility to work on your terms, these new features and solutions address the new expectations people have for the workplace.

Let’s dive in.

1. Reimagine the office experience

After two years of hybrid and remote work, our data shows the office still matters for workers and managers. However, business leaders will need to rethink both physical spaces and cultural norms to make office time worth the commute. This means being intentional about the who, why, and where of in-person gatherings and ensuring physical spaces are designed to help hybrid teams feel connected and engaged.

In our survey, 38 percent of hybrid employees say their biggest challenge is knowing when and why to come into the office, while only 28 percent of companies have established team agreements about who will be working from where.  

To help coordinate your office time with your team, we are updating Outlook to allow you to RSVP to meetings and note whether you plan to join in person or virtually. These new RSVP options will be available in public preview in Outlook on the web in the second quarter of 2022.

For those joining hybrid meetings from within a conference room, we’re making it easier and less distracting to establish a personal presence with new enhancements to the companion device experience for Teams Rooms. Today, when you join a meeting in Teams Rooms with your personal device, your audio is automatically turned off to avoid feedback. Soon, you’ll be prompted to turn your laptop video on so you can be clearly seen by remote participants no matter where you are in the room. To avoid distractions, your video will be hidden from the front-of-room screen as well as from the gallery of people joining from companion devices in the room. These enhancements will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022. Learn more from our Tech Community blog Elevating hybrid experiences with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Teams devices.

To bridge the gap between digital and physical workspaces, we’re introducing a new meeting layout for Teams Rooms called front row. Designed specifically for hybrid meetings, it brings the video gallery to eye level at the bottom of the screen so people in the meeting room can see remote colleagues in a more natural face-to-face interaction—similar to as if they were in the same physical space. Content is centered on the screen and surrounded by additional meeting information and attendee sentiment, including chat, raised hands, and live reactions. Front row is now available in preview, with enhanced features to follow later this year. Learn more about front row for Teams.

We’ve been working to bring the latest Microsoft experiences built for hybrid work—across Teams, Microsoft 365, Windows, and Whiteboard—to Surface Hub 2S, a collaborative canvas and meetings device certified for Microsoft Teams. Remote team members now have a dynamic view of in-room interactions, thanks to the new AI-powered Microsoft Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera. Automatic framing technology within the device dynamically adjusts the view of the room, reframing when someone leaves, more people come in, or a person interacts with content on the display. Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera is now available. Learn more from our Devices blog.

Being seen and heard is essential to an inclusive meeting environment, as is being able to collaborate seamlessly. New touch-enabled display solutions for Teams Rooms from Neat and Yealink are in the process of being certified for Teams Rooms on Android and will be available in the second quarter of 2022. These devices combine audio, video, touch display, and compute in a single unit—allowing for easy deployment and enhanced collaboration experiences. Learn more from our new Tech Community blog.

2. Make every meeting matter

We gather trillions of data points to understand how work is changing. Weekly time spent in meetings increased over 250 percent since March 2020. At the same time, more flexible collaboration patterns are emerging as employees are reshaping their days. Meetings are getting shorter and more ad hoc. Users are turning to asynchronous channels like chat to get work done.

We are committed to enabling new ways to work. Whether it’s empowering presenters to be their best, or enabling asynchronous collaboration across different time zones, our goal is to create inclusive and engaging experiences, make your meetings efficient, and ensure everyone sees the impact of your work.

In September 2021, we announced cameo, the PowerPoint experience that seamlessly integrates your Teams camera feed into your presentation, letting you customize how and where you want to appear on your slides. It also offers layout recommendations through Designer in PowerPoint for optimal viewing. Cameo will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022.

We recently released recording studio, which allows you to record your presentation in PowerPoint and deliver on-demand video, enabling your team to consume content on their terms. PowerPoint recording studio is now generally available.

Today, we’re announcing that we’re bringing cameo and recording studio together. You’ll now be able to seamlessly create and produce your presentations, decide how and where you want your video to appear on your slides with cameo, and then record yourself speaking to any slide with recording studio. When it’s time to deliver your message, share your presentation with PowerPoint Live in Teams, whether or not you’re attending the meeting. The combined cameo and recording studio experience will be available in the second quarter of 2022.

It’s not easy to be in the spotlight. It’s especially challenging to deliver impactful presentations without an in-person audience. Speaker coach in Microsoft Teams, which is coming in the second quarter of 2022, uses AI to privately provide guidance on your pace, notify you if you are interrupting someone, and remind you to check in with your audience.

To make sure the impact of your words doesn’t get lost, we are announcing Language interpretation, which allows live interpreters to convert what the speaker says into another language in near real-time. The meeting organizer will be able to assign interpreters from their participant list and select up to 16 source and target language combinations, while attendees will hear the interpretation with the original audio playing at a lower volume in the background. Language interpretation will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022. 

Meetings often serve as collaboration spaces to ideate and solve problems as a team. Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams has evolved to become a valuable visual collaboration workspace where groups come together for effective hybrid brainstorming and learning. It offers a rich set of capabilities that bring visual collaboration to life in Teams, including collaboration cursors, more than 50 new templates, contextual reactions, and the ability to open existing boards and collaborate with external colleagues in Teams meetings. These features will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022.  

3. Collaborate and communicate—your way

More than 50 percent of hybrid workers are considering going fully remote in the year ahead, according to our data. With that demand for more flexibility and mobility, the days of a fixed desk phone in a fixed office are over.

Teams Phone will soon offer a truly mobile-first experience with Operator Connect Mobile in partnership with some of the world’s most innovative telecom operators including BT, Rogers, Swisscom, Telia, and Verizon. This gives you one phone number for your desk number and your mobile number, no matter what network or device you’re on. You also can move calls across networks and devices with no interruptions—as you’re transitioning from your cellular service while on the go to your office Wi-Fi, for example. Operator Connect Mobile for Teams Phone will enter preview next quarter with select operator partners. To learn more, check out the Operator Connect Mobile announcement blog.

Teams Connect is designed for seamless, secure, and easy-to-use collaboration across organizational boundaries, allowing everyone to work as one extended team while staying in their own Teams environment. In late 2021, we announced Teams Connect shared channels, which help enable collaboration with people inside and outside your organization from a shared workspace. For example, a team working on a new product will be able to share a Teams channel with an external design team to create one joint workspace across organizations. Everyone can communicate, schedule a meeting, share files, and collaborate on apps without switching accounts. Shared channels for Teams Connect will enter preview starting at the end of March 2022. To learn more and try out shared channels, read the Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels blog.

To effectively create and collaborate, we need a way to bring distributed information, documents, and teams together. In January 2022, we launched Loop components in Teams chat, offering a new way to ideate, create, and make decisions together. Today, we are introducing Loop components in Outlook mail. Now you can brainstorm, complete action items, and get the latest status from your team without having to switch context or apps. A single component can be updated at the same time whether you are in Teams or Outlook. To get access to the latest Loop components in Outlook, sign up to become an Office Insider.

Our data also shows that positive culture ranks as the number one thing employees want companies to provide, followed by mental health and well-being benefits. A new world of work requires technology to bring company culture to life—digitally.  

Today, we’re announcing the Inspiration library, a new feature available in preview through the Viva Insights app in Teams. The Inspiration library turns insights into action with access to curated content and best practices from top sources like Harvard Business Review and Thrive. The productivity and well-being insights delivered by Viva Insights are enhanced by premium content focused on driving better employee experiences and boosting engagement. The Inspiration library preview will begin rolling out to Microsoft 365 users with the Microsoft Viva Insights app in Teams later in March 2022 and will be available worldwide in 11 supported languages by the end of April 2022. Pin the Viva Insights app in Teams and learn more about the Inspiration library.

Finally, a common challenge of remote and hybrid work is maintaining social capital: the network of relationships that enables people and organizations to thrive. While creating friendships and relationships can be challenging in the hybrid work environment, we are investing in tools that help you express yourself and have fun while doing it.

Now you can bring even more of your personality to the conversation with the new Fluent emojis in Teams. With vibrant and fun styling, over 1800 three-dimensional emojis can infuse expression and playfulness into messages. Select a category and use the skin tone selector to pick an emoji that better represents you. Fluent emojis are now available in preview.

Looking ahead

While so much has changed about work, one thing remains constant: people are at the center. With technologies like Microsoft Teams supporting people, we can make hybrid work really work by bringing everyone—and everything—together.

We want to again thank our customers and partners who have been with us every step of the way over the last five years. To celebrate with us, look for the new custom backgrounds on Teams and check out our anniversary community blog for the behind-the-scenes on how Teams came to life.

¹Weiss, K., Baer, J., and Huang, B. (2021, October 5). CIO Survey Takeaways- Further Solidifying the Leadership Position. (p3). Morgan Stanley Research.

The post 3 ways to meet new hybrid expectations with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As we enter year three of the pandemic, more organizations are welcoming their employees back to the office, marking a move from remote to hybrid work. This shift is a return to a new kind of normal, and it poses an entirely new set of challenges. We are excited to share some product innovations helping to make this transition a little easier.

Stay tuned for a lot of product and research news next month, when we’ll release our second annual Work Trend Index, along with a series of innovations designed to make hybrid work work.

Let’s dive in.

Focus on what matters and collaborate across boundaries

This month we’re happy to release some of your most requested features across Microsoft Teams, Viva, and Yammer.

Pin or hide your own video in Microsoft Teams meetings

Seeing your own video feed in meetings has its benefits, but some find it distracting. Now, users can select to hide their own video in a Microsoft Teams meeting, while remaining visible to other participants. Users can now also pin their own video on the meeting stage.

Stay on top of required trainings

Microsoft Viva Learning can now sync with learning management systems (LMS) like SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Saba Cloud. With this new generally available integration, employees can view required learning assignments from their LMS in their My Learning view in Viva Learning as well as launch the courses directly. Employees will get Teams notifications when they receive a new assignment and a reminder when the assignment is due.

Get suggestions on Yammer communities and people to follow

We want you to discover communities and conversations that help you work better. Now, Yammer will suggest communities and followers based on previous interactions. Find and join new communities and follow people right from your feed. 

Auto-renew active Yammer communities

Community admins will no longer need to manually review communities that have views or engagement. Now, Yammer communities can be set to auto-renew when someone posts, reacts, or any file activity happens from within the community (including viewing the Yammer posts through actionable emails).

Collaborate with people outside of your geography while maintaining compliance policies

Members from Yammer networks located in the European Union can soon join Yammer external networks hosted in the United States. Rollout will begin mid-February 2022 and finish in late March 2022. Read our Tech Community blog Cross-geo external collaboration support on Yammer External Networks for the EU to learn more.

More flexibility in how you provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs

Hybrid work means organizations need more flexibility to provide access to Windows across different types of devices. Windows 365 Enterprise provides a powerful, simple, and secure full Windows 10 or Windows 11 experience that you can use to empower your workforce, regardless of location or device. In February 2022, we released a preview of Windows 365 Enterprise support for native Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Join and localized first-run experience.

Provision Cloud PCs without an Azure subscription

In February 2022, we announced the preview of Azure AD Join in Windows 365 Enterprise, enabling organizations to provision Cloud PCs without requiring an Azure subscription or Azure connectivity to your on-premises environment. General availability will be announced soon. 

Localizing the Cloud PC experience

Organizations around the world use and love Windows 365, and we want to give them a familiar and natural user experience. In February 2022, we announced the preview for a localized first-run experience, empowering organizations to choose from an expanded list of languages when creating Cloud PCs for their teams in Windows 365 Enterprise.

Looking to the future

From offering the option to pin or hide your video in a Microsoft Teams meeting to Yammer community suggestions, these updates are designed to give everyone more flexibility for when and how they work. We’ve got a lot more in store for you next month. Stay tuned.

The post From hiding your meeting video to Yammer community suggestions—here's what's new in Microsoft 365 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.

As some regions begin to make their way out of the challenges and disruption of the past 18 months, we’re seeing a new world of work emerge. Organizations everywhere have transformed themselves through virtual processes and remote collaboration. And as people embrace hybrid work—with people returning to the office, continuing to work from home, or some mix of the two—things will be different all over again.

The ability to work whenever, however, and wherever it’s needed has become the new normal. All employees want technology that’s familiar, easy to use, and available across devices. And in the most complex cybersecurity environment we’ve ever seen, businesses need a solution that helps their employees collaborate, share, and create while also keeping their data safe and secure. 

We have an opportunity to design the tools that will empower this new world of hybrid work with a new perspective—and the power and security of the cloud.  

Today we’re excited to announce Windows 365, a cloud service that introduces a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when it’s generally available later this calendar year) for workers from interns and contractors to software developers and industrial designers. Windows 365 takes the operating system to the Microsoft Cloud, securely streaming the full Windows experience—including all your apps, data, and settings—to your personal or corporate devices. This approach creates a fully new personal computing category, specifically for the hybrid world: the Cloud PC.

Today I’d like to share with you why we think bringing the cloud revolution to personal computing will be such a milestone for how customers work in the future and the opportunities this will create for our partners.

A powerful, personalized, full Windows experience in the cloud on any device

Our recent Work Trend Index found that 73 percent of workers want flexible remote work options to stay, but at the same time, 67 percent say they also want more in-person collaboration, post-pandemic. This creates the hybrid work paradox, leaving organizations around the world to grapple with how to connect in a hybrid world and provide workers access to organizational resources at home, in the office, and at all points between.

Much like how we’ve embraced the cloud for other products, our vision for a Windows 365 Cloud PC is to deliver a new way to experience Windows through the power of the cloud—while solving both novel and traditional challenges for organizations. This new paradigm isn’t just about allowing and securing remote access. The user experience is more important than ever for attracting and retaining talent, improving productivity, and ensuring security.

The Cloud PC draws on the power of the cloud and the capabilities of the device to provide a powerful, simple, and secure full Windows 10 or Windows 11 experience that you can use to empower your workforce, regardless of location or device. Windows 365 provides an instant-on boot experience that enables users to stream all their personalized applications, tools, data, and settings from the cloud across any device including your Mac, iPad, Linux device, and Android. The Windows experience is consistent, no matter the device. You can pick up right where you left off, because the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices. You can get the same work done on a laptop in a hotel room, a tablet from their car between appointments, or your desktop while you’re in the office. Seasonal workers also can ramp on and off according to the needs of the business, allowing the organization to scale for busy periods without the complicated logistical and security challenges of issuing new hardware. Further, companies can be more targeted in how they outfit specialized workers in creative, analytics, engineering, or scientific roles who need greater compute power and access to critical applications.  

Windows 365 supports your business apps—Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform—line of business apps, and more. With Windows 365, we also stand by our promise of app compatibility with App Assure, a service that helps customers with 150 or more users fix any app issues they might run into at no additional cost.

Greater simplicity with familiar tools

One of the most important design principles of Windows 365 is simplicity. You can choose the size of the Cloud PC that best meets your needs with per user per month pricing. Organizations have two edition options that include a complete cloud-based offering with multiple Cloud PC configurations based on performance needs: Windows 365 Business and Windows 365 Enterprise.

For IT, we built Windows 365 to be consistent with how you manage your physical devices now. Your Cloud PCs show up right alongside your physical devices in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and you can apply management and security policies to them just as you do to all your other devices.

Windows 365 is built on Azure Virtual Desktop, but it simplifies the virtualization experience—handling all the details for you. You can scale processing power and monitor the performance of the Cloud PC to make sure your users are getting the best experience. We’ve also built analytics into the service to look at connection health across networks to make sure your Cloud PC users can reach everything they need on your network to be productive. From the Endpoint Analytics dashboard, you can easily identify the Cloud PC environments that are not delivering the performance needs of a given user, and not only can you get recommendations, but you can also upgrade them at the touch of a button, which is immediately applied without missing a beat. Our new Watchdog Service also continually runs diagnostics to help to keep connections up-and-running at all times. If a diagnostic check fails, we’ll alert you and even give suggestions for how to correct the issue. 

For greater customization and flexibility, especially if your organization has virtualization expertise, we recommend Azure Virtual Desktop, which continues to see significant adoption as organizations modernize VDI in the cloud. You can read more about our increased investments in Azure Virtual Desktop in today’s Tech Community blog.

For more information about the management experience, check out the Tech Community blog from Scott Manchester.

Cloud security powered by Zero Trust

With a focus on a Zero Trust architecture, Windows 365 also helps solve for today’s critical security challenges by design, storing and securing information in the cloud, not on the device. Multifactor authentication (MFA) works to explicitly verify any login or access attempt to a Cloud PC through integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). And within Microsoft Endpoint Manager, you can pair MFA with dedicated Windows 365 conditional access policies to assess login risk instantly for each session. We’ve also designed the user and admin experiences around the principle of least privileged access. For example, you can delegate specific permissions, like licensing, device management, and Cloud PC management using specific roles, so you don’t need to be a global administrator. You can use the security baselines for Windows 10, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and Microsoft Edge, just like you would for your physical devices now, and we’ve built a cloud PC-specific security baseline to help you get started quickly. 

If you use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to protect your devices, it also works seamlessly with your Cloud PCs. You can use Microsoft Endpoint Manager to quickly onboard your Cloud PCs just like your other devices with Defender for Endpoint. It not only protects your Cloud PCs, but also gives you security recommendations to lower risks, and helps you quickly discover and investigate any security incidents.

Finally, encryption is used across the board. All managed disks running Cloud PCs are encrypted, all stored data is encrypted at rest, and all network traffic to and from your Cloud PCs is also encrypted.

Windows 365 means new opportunities for partners

Windows 365 creates new opportunities for partners of all types across the Microsoft ecosystem to deliver new Windows experiences from the cloud.

Independent software vendors can continue to build Windows apps, and now, deliver them in the cloud to reach a broader audience. Windows 365 also presents new development opportunities, leveraging APIs available to partners, enabling them to bring their own innovations to market. In fact, check out the Tech Community blog that highlights the solutions ISVs like Nerdio, UKG, Service Now, and Net App are announcing today in support of different user scenarios with Windows 365.

Our customers will look to system integrators and managed service providers to help them get the most out of their entire Windows estate, using the additional services that our partners like Accenture/Avanade, Atos, Crayon, Content and Cloud, Convergent, Coretek, DXC, Glueck & Kanja GAB, Insight, and Netrix continue to bring to market. For small and midsize businesses, partners like Iconic IT LLC, MachineLogic LLC, and Nitec Solutions already support Windows 365 and can assist with additional services. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) gain an opportunity to integrate Windows 365 into their broad portfolio of services alongside their devices’ robust features and secure hardware.

Cloud PC represents the next big step in cloud computing that connects the Microsoft Cloud and personal devices in a powerful new way. With the announcement of Windows 365, we’re inviting organizations, employees, and partners to reimagine experiences with Windows and their devices and look forward to creating new scenarios for users everywhere.

Hybrid Windows for a hybrid world

We are so excited to share this new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when available) through the power of the cloud across all your devices. We believe this will give organizations of all sizes the power, simplicity, and security you need to address the changing needs of your workforce as you embrace hybrid work.

Windows 365 will be available on August 2, 2021, to organizations of all sizes. In the meantime, you can learn more about Windows 365 now.

We are excited to be on this journey together, and we can’t wait to learn about all the new ways you will get work done using Windows 365.

The post Introducing a new era of hybrid personal computing: the Windows 365 Cloud PC appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As workplaces open in many regions around the world, I hear from customers every day that they can’t wait to get back to in-person collaboration. I feel it myself—and look forward to seeing many of my coworkers in person one day soon. But even more than that, I look forward to finding new ways to help people connect and engage regardless of location and time zone. At Microsoft, we believe that hybrid work is the future of work and that to empower their people to succeed in hybrid work, business leaders will need to reimagine their organizations with a new operating model for people, places, and processes.

We’re also committed to building experiences that put everyone on equal footing—whether they’re together in a conference room in Atlanta, presenting remotely from a home office, or catching up with a meeting recording once the workday begins in Sydney.  

Microsoft Teams is mission-critical to this vision for a more flexible world of work. Teams is unique in that it brings together meetings, chat, calls, collaboration, and business process automation in a single app. Since COVID-19 spurred office workers around the world to work from home, we’ve been innovating in Teams to do things like create more natural and engaging meeting experiences—enable people to connect seamlessly with those inside and outside of their organizations and provide ways to make remote presentations richer and more impactful. And as we emerge into this new hybrid reality, we are focused on building experiences in Teams that are designed to ensure all voices are heard including the people not in the room—empowering everyone to connect and engage, from anywhere and at any time. And to make it easier to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously, we’re also announcing new Microsoft Fluid canvas innovations—in Teams and beyond. 

But COVID-19 also taught us that meeting fatigue and digital overload is real, and remote work has challenged our wellbeing. To help, Microsoft has built Microsoft Viva—our integrated employee experience platform—into Teams, so that employees can find ways to protect time and preserve their wellbeing right in the flow of their work.

Today we are announcing new innovations—in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva—all designed to empower your people for hybrid work. Let’s have a look.  

Participate on equal footing—at home, onsite, or on the go

Unlocking better hybrid meeting experiences for everyone begins with designing for the people who aren’t in the room, so that everyone feels like they have a seat at the table, whether they’re joining in the room, at home, or on the go. Today, we’re announcing enhancements to Teams meetings and Microsoft Teams Rooms built to create engaging experiences for every participant.



Over the course of this year, we will roll out front row in Teams Rooms, an immersive room layout that makes interactions feel more natural and gives in-room participants a greater sense of connection to remote participants. We’ve moved the video gallery to the bottom of the screen so remote participants are face-to-face with those in the room. And to help everyone stay engaged, meeting content is surrounded by contextual meeting information like the agenda, tasks, and notes. Meeting chat will also be clearly visible to those in the room, so they can see and respond to comments shared through chat.

To help remote participants establish their presence in the room and maximize inclusion, Teams Rooms will expand screen real estate using new video layouts that disperse the video gallery across multiple displays when content isn’t shared. The increased space means remote participants show up larger and more true to life. We’re also bringing more features from desktop to Teams Rooms this summer, to help bring attention to the remote participants engaging in the meeting. These features include live reactions, spotlight, and the ability to pin multiple video streams (coming this fall) and chat bubbles when using the classic video grid layout.

Remote participants should also be able to see who is in the meeting room, and what’s happening. Jabra, Logitech, Poly, and our newest Teams device partner Neat are using advanced AI-powered camera technologies to provide new video views optimized for hybrid meetings, allowing every person in the room to be seen more clearly.

We’re also making sure those who speak in meetings are clearly identified. The Teams intelligent speakers from EPOS and Yealink are now generally available and are built for Teams Rooms and use Microsoft’s voice recognition technology in Teams to attribute remarks to the meeting room speaker in the transcript. With speaker attributed—meeting transcription, people can focus on contributing to the conversation instead of taking notes, and those who missed the meeting can see a record of the conversation after the meeting.



And we’re thrilled to announce the new Teams Rooms on Surface Hub experience. Surface Hub is purpose-built for teams to meet and co-create, wherever they work, and the next generation of Teams on Surface Hub brings more of your favorite meetings features and controls from the desktop to the meeting room—including a modernized meeting stage, Together Mode scenes, and PowerPoint Live. Coming this fall, the new Microsoft Whiteboard experience will also be available on Surface Hub, so everyone can draw and ink on the same digital canvas.   

You can find more information on these Teams Rooms and partner announcements on our Teams Tech Community Blog.

To empower remote participants to initiate and facilitate whiteboard sessions, we’ve created a completely new, hybrid work-focused Whiteboard experience where all attendees can visually collaborate across the same digital canvas. Available in summer 2021, new features will enable anyone to bring existing content to Whiteboard to co-author; and new templates will help groups start ideating faster, improving their ability to follow along with contributors, and more.

Effective hybrid meetings require every participant to be able to present, and experience a presentation in a way that’s engaging and inclusive. New PowerPoint Live features help create a shared space for collaboration and contributions from everyone in the meeting. Slide translate allows attendees to see the presentation in their chosen language, for instance. And with our new inking experience, you can annotate your PowerPoint as you present—or use a laser pointer to call attention to key points. 

And look for these latest features in the Teams mobile app as well. You can now access PowerPoint Live and Dynamic view on your mobile devices. Custom background is also now on iOS and coming soon to Android.

Collaborate in the flow of work

To work effectively in hybrid and asynchronous models, people need a super-rich canvas that both creates and maintains context before, during, and after the meeting. Fluid components are atomic units of productivity that help you get your work done in the context of chat, emails, meetings, and more. Recently, we announced new Fluid components in chat to create live, collaborative experiences that can be edited in real-time and shared across Teams and Office apps. And today, we’re announcing the expansion of Fluid components for Teams meetings, OneNote, Outlook, and Whiteboard that make it easier to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously across Teams and Office apps. We’re also announcing new chat features that further support asynchronous collaboration, so you can keep the work moving forward in between meetings. Pin a message, providing your chat members with quick access to critical content anytime, and reply to a specific chat message maintaining context within the ongoing conversation.

Meetings have increased significantly over the past year, along with unstructured communications. Research from our Work Trend Index shows the average Teams user is sending 45 percent more chats per person per, week than they did one year ago. And ad-hoc, unstructured meetings are on the rise as well. To help manage this digital overload, new Fluid components in Teams meetings make it easy to co-create an agenda, take notes, and assign tasks, right within the Teams meeting, and access persistent recap content whenever you need it. And the note, agenda, and tasks from meetings will be automatically “placed” in the new meeting notes home of OneNote. While the meeting is underway, take the discussion a step further by ideating and brainstorming together by creating and editing live Fluid components in Whiteboard. Fluid components can also be leveraged across Outlook—in email or the calendar—making it easier to manage your time, agenda, notes, and tasks across apps.

Protect time and prioritize wellbeing

Weekly meeting time for Teams users has more than doubled since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back-to-back meetings increase stress and make it harder to stay engaged and focused. In just a few minutes a day, meditation and mindfulness with Headspace can help you reduce stress and improve focus. Starting later this month, we’re bringing a curated set of guided meditations and mindfulness exercises from Headspace to the Viva Insights app in Teams to help you start your day grounded, relax your mind before a big presentation, or disconnect from work in the evening.

Building upon the Viva Insights ability to schedule daily focus time to work uninterrupted with Teams notifications silenced, we are introducing a new focus mode in the Viva Insights app later this year. This will feature Focus music from Headspace and implement timers to help you make progress on important tasks in regular intervals with breaks planned in between.

Remote work has eliminated physical boundaries between work and life leading to an increase in after-hours chats, and a feeling of being always-on. We want to help your people find balance and protect personal time. Later this year, Viva Insights will offer the ability to configure quiet time to silence mobile notifications from Outlook and Teams outside your working hours as well as provide personalized insights on how well you are disconnecting. Quiet time settings will also be available for users in Teams and Outlook mobile and accompanied by IT administrator controls in Microsoft Endpoint Manager to support the creation of organization-wide policies to mute after-hours notifications.

As we all navigate this new world of work together, we will discover new ways to help people work both flexibly and effectively. At Microsoft, we’re committed to bringing you experiences that empower people to work from anywhere, at any time. By studying the research and the usage patterns in our apps—and talking to customers every day—we are continuing to hone our understanding of what people need, to bring their best selves to work every day. This understanding guides our innovation as we work to bring you and your people experiences that help them achieve more.

The post New hybrid work innovations in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Developers are at the heart of this transformation, and at Microsoft, we’ve seen evidence of this in the apps you’ve built on top of the Microsoft Cloud. Today, we’re sharing new capabilities and tooling for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams that will empower developers to build solutions for the new way of work.

A new class of apps designed for hybrid work: collaborative apps

Hybrid, global work requires structural changes to how we build and interact with apps. We need a new class of apps that are centered around collaboration versus individual productivity. Apps that enable synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaboration with real-time meetings, ad hoc messaging, document collaboration, and the business processes automation—all in a single organizing layer.

Microsoft Teams was built with the very purpose of enabling collaboration. With over 145 million people using Teams every day, Teams has become the digital platform for work and learning. This creates a net new creative and economic opportunity for developers to build the next generation of apps where collaboration is at the core. We call this new class of applications collaborative apps.

With collaborative apps, end users can easily work with others to complete their projects at any time, from anywhere, and stay in the flow of work without needing to switch across multiple apps and data. And with Fluid components, end-users can create live, collaborative experiences that can be edited in real-time and shared across Teams and Office apps.

For developers, we want to make building collaborative apps easy: 

• Use your existing skills: Easily integrate your existing apps solutions with Teams and use standard web technologies, JavaScript, and just a few Teams APIs to integrate into Teams messages, channels, and meetings quickly and easily. Hundreds of independent software vendors (ISVs) like Service Now, Workday, Adobe, SAP, and more are doing this on our platform today.
• Simplify development: When you build an app for Teams, it works across many platforms—Windows, macOS, Web, iOS, Android, and Linux. Our goal is to significantly reduce the learning and work for developers to create the next wave of apps. Build once, deploy anywhere.
• Support developer choice: Microsoft Cloud offers a full stack of technologies to build collaborative apps. For developers building a new app, you can pick and choose technologies across Power Platform, Azure, Graph, and more based on your needs. 

Learn more about our vision of collaborative apps built on the Microsoft Cloud at our technical keynote session led by Jeff Teper and at the Into Focus session with Rajesh Jha.

Build collaborative apps with Microsoft Teams

To further help you build collaborative apps, we are sharing new integration opportunities and enhanced developer tools for the organizing layer, Teams.

Create apps for meetings enabling richer experiences

Providing a first-rate experience to every meeting participant, whether remote or in person, is important. We’re announcing new features that will enable you to build richer meeting experiences into your apps for Teams meetings.

• Shared stage integration: Available in preview, shared stage integration provides developers access to the main stage in a Teams meeting through a simple configuration in their app manifest. This provides a new surface to enable real-time, multi-user collaboration experiences for your meetings apps, such as whiteboarding, design, project boards, and more. 

• New meeting event APIs: Available in preview, enable the automation of meeting-related workflows through events such as meeting start and meeting end—with many more event APIs planned to come out later this year.

• Together mode extensibility: Coming this summer, Together mode extensibility lets you create and share your own custom scenes for Teams meetings. This provides an easy design experience, within the Developer Portal for Teams, so developers can craft custom scenes to make meetings more engaging and personalized for your organization. Here’s a custom scene built by our very own team that you can try out today!

Media APIs with resource-specific consent: Coming this summer, get real-time access to audio and video streams to build scenarios like transcription, translation, note taking, insights gathering, and more. These APIs will have resource specific consent enabled, so IT admins can view these permissions from the Teams Admin Center and validate that such apps have access to just the meetings they have been added to.

With the recently released Azure Communication Services interoperability with Teams, enable Teams users to easily interact with customers, partners, and other key people outside of your organization. When you build custom applications using Azure Communication Services such as voice, video, and chat, take advantage of built-in interoperability with Teams. This will enable Teams users to join meetings and interact with customers and partners using your custom application. Even better, with Azure Communication Services on the back-end connecting to Microsoft Teams, developers enjoy free VoIP and Chat usage for Teams app users.¹

Get started with Azure Communication Services with Teams interoperability available in preview.

Enabling cross-platform collaborative experiences

We built Teams to enable collaboration—so we’re sharing new features and capabilities that will allow users to collaborate together within Teams and across some of our other platforms.

Fluid components in Microsoft Teams is now available in private preview and will expand to more customers in the coming months. Fluid components in Teams chat allow end users to send a message with a table, action items, or a list that can be co-authored and edited by everyone in line and that is shareable across Office applications like Outlook. Quickly align across teams and get work done efficiently, by copy and pasting components across Teams chats. With Fluid components users can ideate, create, and decide together, while holding fewer meetings and minimizing the need for long chat threads.

Message extensions will soon be supported in Outlook: Providing a unified development experience for message extensions that work with Microsoft Teams and Outlook on the web. When users compose a message, they will be able to select a new menu of search-based message extensions to choose from. For example, a user may be able to compose an email and then select a message extension that surfaces tasks from their Teams app to send to teammates.

In addition to making it easier to build low-code apps, bots, and flows in and for Teams, we are making it easier to distribute low-code solutions to end-users. Soon you will be able to share bots built with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents broadly with security groups just like you already can for apps built with Power Apps. We also recently made it easier to take your apps, bots, flows, tables, and associated resources from one Microsoft Dataverse for Teams environment to another, ensuring that you can leverage these assets for new scenarios. We also continue to release more sample apps for Power Apps to help developers and customers get started with Power Apps.

Developer toolkits and resources to build and manage Teams apps

As developers are building the next generation of collaborative apps to support hybrid work, we are investing in tools and resources to help you be more productive.

With the enhanced Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, available in preview, we’re making it easier for any developer to build Teams apps that interoperate with the Microsoft stack and across desktop and mobile. Whether you use React, SharePoint Framework (SPFx), or .NET—the toolkit is meant to meet developers where you are with the frameworks you already know and use. Some of the key updates include: single-line authentication, Azure Functions integration, SPFx integration, single-line Microsoft Graph client, and streamlined hosting to an IDE and CLI.

Learn more about the Teams Toolkit and install it today from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Writing code is the first step, but developers also need to manage and configure your apps—and so we’re happy to announce the preview of the Developer Portal for Microsoft Teams. With the Developer Portal (formerly App Studio), developers receive a dedicated app management console available via web or within Teams, which can be used to register and configure their apps within a single, central location. New features include:

• Access through any web browser and device for easy navigation.
• Manage environment configurations, removing the need to manage multiple manifests in different environments.
• Collaborate with peers by giving read/write access to apps to others to collaborate and update apps.
• Ability for ISVs to link software as a service (SaaS) offers to their apps for new in-Teams purchase experience.
• Gather helpful insights on usage of apps (in preview).

Get started with the Developer Portal today.

As a platform, our success is tied to your success. We thank our partners who have built innovative apps on Teams. We’re committed to enabling our partners to be successful by helping users easily discover, deploy, and adopt apps. And we’re happy to share that coming soon, users will be able to purchase subscriptions of partner apps directly from the Teams Store and the Teams Admin Center (via invoice billing or credit card)—making it even simpler for users to acquire and adopt apps while providing our partners more monetization opportunities for your solutions.

Deliver experiences built around data, insights, and security with Microsoft Graph

While Teams is the organizing layer for collaborative apps, a key aspect of those app experiences is the rich sets of data from Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph manages the data generated from trillions of connections across communications, content, and people—with privacy, security, compliance, and search—powered by advanced machine learning.

Here are some of the exciting new features on Microsoft Graph that we’re happy to share with you today.

Earlier this year we introduced Microsoft Viva, to help organizations around the world optimize workforce experience, and help employees thrive in the new way of work. Viva was built to be a platform, so we’re announcing the first of many planned extensibility points—Viva Connection cards are now available in preview with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for developers who sign up for early access. With this release you can now use out-of-the-box or custom web parts to build Viva Community dashboards, news feeds, and employee-focused resources, optimized for any platform or device.

Sign up to get early access to the next release of SPFx for building native mobile experiences for Viva Connections.

When it comes to who can access your organization’s data, authentication and security are always top of mind—which is why many developers utilize the Microsoft Graph. It’s built with Azure Active Directory’s (Azure AD) enterprise-grade security and authentication capabilities at its core. New features we are sharing today:

• Continuous Access Evaluation: Available for preview, it allows Azure AD to continuously monitor resources for security threats and revoke access tokens based on critical events or policy evaluation, rather than simply relying on a short token lifetime. 
• New authentication methods API so you can manage access to the data and resources in your app, using primary, two-step, or step-up authentication, and invoke a self-service password reset process (SSPR).
• General availability of the external identities APIs so your apps can establish secure business-to-consumer (B2C) user interactions using predefined, configurable policies while your users can use their everyday accounts to register with your solution.

One of the most common requests we’ve heard from customers and partners is how to bring their data into Microsoft Graph to surface it across Microsoft 365. That’s why created Microsoft Graph connectors, which allow developers to onboard, index, and surface metadata to enrich existing data sets within Microsoft 365—unlocking participation in core experiences like Microsoft Search and eDiscovery. We’re excited to announce several updates coming soon to Microsoft Graph connectors including:

• Support for enrichment of people profile from non-AAD sources that will enable admins to map properties from Microsoft Graph connectors to Microsoft 365 people cards in your organization.
• New Jira and Confluence connectors built by Microsoft, available later this year.
• Expansion of Search results to Microsoft Teams mobile and desktop clients and the Windows Search Box.
• eDiscovery support for Graph connectors developer preview will be available in Summer 2021.

We’re also announcing that Microsoft Graph Data Connect is available in preview on Azure. Microsoft Graph data connect is a secure, high-throughput connector designed to copy select Microsoft 365 productivity datasets into your Azure tenant. It’s an ideal tool for developers and data scientists seeking to create organizational analytics, or training AI and machine learning models. While most Microsoft 365 products are offered on a per-user/per-month basis, we’re offering Microsoft Graph data connect as a metered service so that developers only need pay for the data consumed in your solutions.

Learn more about Microsoft Graph Data Connect in our technical docs.

Lastly, we want developers to build people-centric experiences that span across our entire Microsoft 365 platform, but we understand that writing separate code to work across our different products is not optimal. That’s why we’re happy to share the availability of Universal Actions for Adaptive Cards. Now, using Azure Bot Framework, you can build and implement a single adaptive card that is seamlessly synchronized across Teams and Outlook mobile and desktop clients.

Read the full Microsoft Graph blog to learn more.

Build modern Windows apps that work seamlessly on any endpoint

With the shift to remote work and now hybrid work—the PC has never been more essential. With over 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10, modern apps built on Windows have become critical to enabling users to stay productive. Windows is essential to keeping workers connected and productive and the opportunity for developers to push the boundaries and find new innovative ways to help people is now.

If you’re a Windows developer, then you already know the importance of Project Reunion. With Project Reunion, you get access to modern Windows technologies and new features, plus the best of existing desktop (Win32) features. You get coherent, modern interactions and UX with WinUI 3—and great system performance and battery life for your apps. That’s why we’re excited to announce the Project Reunion 0.8 preview so you can create and modernize your Windows apps seamlessly for both client and cloud endpoints. You can build experiences optimized for device hardware with hassle-free app discovery and management and future-proofed for Arm64. Some of the key updates include:

• Down–level support to Windows 10 version 1809 provides a large addressable market in the Windows ecosystem and is a long-term servicing branch.
• .NET 5 support helps meet developers where they are, including WPF and WinForms.
• WinUI 3 and WebView 2 support modern, compatible UI development using the same technologies Windows is built around.

Learn more and start modernizing your Windows apps with the Project Reunion 0.8 preview.

We know that many developers use command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). With Windows Terminal, developers receive a beautiful, sleek, modern command-line experience in Windows—and this year, we’re excited to share that it can now be set as the default terminal emulator, enabling all command-line apps to launch via Windows Terminal. We also released a new feature called Quake mode that allows you to open a new terminal window with a simple keyboard shortcut from anywhere in Windows.

Get started with new features in Windows Terminal.

You can also receive GUI app support on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) so that all the tools and workflows are seamlessly at your fingertips. Windows allows you to work your way with seamless integrations with any workflow with GUI apps, Linux, and GPU accelerated machine learning training.

Learn more about our updates on WSL.

More and more organizations are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline business processes—from simple repetitive tasks to complex workflows. In the month after Ignite, where we announced Power Automate Desktop was available at no additional cost for Windows 10 users, we saw a six times month-over-month increase in downloads. Which is a testament to the untapped opportunity no-code RPA offers to help customers automate repetitive tasks and workflows. Today, we are making it even easier to prioritize the processes best suited for automation. Process advisor, now generally available, is a process mining capability that provides insights into how people work and takes the guesswork out of automation. You can now map workflow tasks, discover organizational bottlenecks, and identify which time-consuming tasks are best suited for automation—all from within Microsoft Power Automate.

Learn more about Power Automate Desktop and process advisor.

Learn. Connect. Code.

We hope you have a wonderful time at Microsoft Build this week. We have a great set of sessions we’ve produced just for you that spans across the entire Microsoft 365 platform.

Happy coding!

Additional resources

Check out these additional resources to learn more about developing on Microsoft 365:

• Watch the Build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work digital Microsoft Build session.
• Take a look at our Microsoft Teams announcements for Microsoft Build blog to see a summary of the new Teams features.
• Take a look at our Microsoft 365 Developer announcements for Microsoft Build blog to see a summary of the new features across Microsoft 365.
• Microsoft Teams Developer Center to access docs, blogs, tools, and more to start building Teams apps.
• Microsoft Graph Developer Center to access docs, blogs, tools, and more to start building Microsoft Graph apps.
• Windows Developer Center to access docs, blogs, tools, and more to start building Windows apps.

¹VoIP and chat usage for Microsoft Teams endpoints are included with Microsoft 365 licenses.

The post Build the next generation of collaborative apps for hybrid work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

From viewing live transcriptions during Microsoft Teams Meetings and tracking changes in Microsoft Excel documents to discovering and securing unmanaged devices, this month we’re announcing new features across Microsoft 365 designed to enable the flexibility that hybrid work requires. Other highlights include the ability to transform Microsoft Word documents into beautiful PowerPoint presentations using AI, expanded polling capabilities in Teams, and an updated Remote Desktop for Mac app.

Let’s dive in.

Make meetings more engaging, inclusive, and productive

This month, we’re announcing live transcriptions for Teams Meetings, new capabilities for polls, and the general availability of Meetings recap.

Expand access and streamline the management of polls in Teams Meetings

Last month, we announced several new features to help you deliver a seamless, engaging meeting experience using polls. We have expanded access to polling so meeting attendees who are external guests or are joining from Teams mobile app have the same quality experience. And meeting presenters and organizers can soon launch two new poll types—open text and multiple-choice quiz—providing more options to help ensure your attendees are heard and engaged. We’ve also released intelligent poll suggestions, which help minimize the effort it takes to create polls, and post-meeting poll insights to help uncover meeting engagement metrics and enable you to take action on your gathered information. These features will become available in the next few weeks.  

Make meetings more inclusive and productive with live transcription

Live transcription allows meeting participants to follow and review conversations (in English-US) alongside the meeting video or audio in real-time. This promotes inclusivity for participants who have hearing disabilities or different levels of language proficiency. Attendees who joined late, or missed the meeting, can also easily catch up by reading what was discussed and searching the transcript by speaker. Participants can also choose to not be identified in meeting transcripts. To enable live transcriptions, tenant admins will need to turn on the Allow transcription policy.

Stay on track and keep work moving forward after meetings are over with meeting recap

Microsoft Teams now will provide a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, and attached files being shared with participants in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab. Those who missed the meeting, joined late, or want to revisit what was discussed can play the recording or review the transcripts respectively. Meeting recap is now rolling out.

Collaborate more easily in Excel workbooks, stay organized, and save time creating presentations

This month we’re announcing several long-requested features to Microsoft 365 apps.

Collaborate with confidence with Show Changes in Excel Workbooks

One of our most requested features for Excel is finally here—the ability to track changes. Now, you’ll see the details of who changed what, where, and when, along with the previous value of the cell for quick reversion. You can narrow down the list of changes by selecting any sheet, range, or individual cell to see all changes that were made, including bulk edits. Show Changes is now available.

Transform Word documents to PowerPoint presentations with just a few clicks

Last month, we announced a new capability in Word for the Web that enables you to export a Word document as a professional-looking PowerPoint presentation. This new capability uses AI to suggest imagery, icons, videos, themes, and fonts to arrange your content. This feature is now available to all users.  

Connect, organize, and get things done more seamlessly with updates to Outlook for the web

This month, Outlook for the web is rolling out an update to make it even easier to navigate Outlook and access your favorite apps. We’re updating the experience with a new location for your core Outlook capabilities such as email, calendar, and contacts, as well as providing easy access to launch other Microsoft 365 applications like To Do, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Yammer, and Bookings, all from the left side of Outlook. Start a presentation after checking your mail by simply clicking PowerPoint—one click, and you’re on your way. In the next couple of months, we will also be offering this update to Outlook for Windows to those who wish to try it.

Categorize similar tasks with more editable labels

Labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks in Planner and Tasks in Teams. Currently, you might use labels to tag tasks with the same completion requirements, dependencies, or issues, and then filter your plan on those labels to zero in on related tasks. But we’ve heard from you that you need more label options, and we’re happy to announce we’re increasing the number of available labels from six to twenty-five. This update is now available on all platforms.

Making hybrid work environments more secure

This month, we’ve added the ability to discover and secure unmanaged endpoints and network devices to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and released an updated Remote Desktop for Mac app.

Remain productive and protected on M1 and Intel-based Macs with Remote Desktop

Given today’s remote work scenarios and the shift to hybrid work, more and more businesses rely on virtual desktops to help ensure their employees can remain productive and secure wherever they work. We’ve updated the Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac to add native universal support for macOS, making it easier for those using M1-powered Macs to have an optimized remote desktop experience. This update also provides Kerberos integration and support for East Asian keyboard input.

Protect unmanaged devices with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

As we have entered into new hybrid work environments, businesses need to think about how they will proactively protect their organizations from the influx of new or “bring your own” (BYO) connected devices. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now provides a new set of capabilities that empower organizations to discover and secure unmanaged workstations, mobile devices, servers, and network devices on their business networks. No need to deploy new hardware or software or make changes to the network configuration to get protection. This new capability is now in preview—turn on preview features to try it out today.

Also new this month

• Microsoft Viva Connections is now available for the Teams desktop experience, providing a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.
• Microsoft Viva Learning is now available in preview. Sign up to test out the app in Teams which creates a central hub for learning where people can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries across an organization.
• The Microsoft Visio desktop app now includes support for sketching Amazon Web Services (AWS) architectures, offering more than 400 infrastructure shapes to help visualize the design, deployment, and topology of IT solutions built on AWS.

As we all navigate a new world of work, we’re committed to helping every organization embrace flexibility in when, where, and how people work. From live transcriptions that make Teams meetings more inclusive to remote desktop updates that help make hybrid work more secure, all of these new capabilities reflect that commitment. There’s so much more on the way, so stay tuned. And be sure to check back here next month when we’ll be sharing the news from Microsoft Build, our annual developer’s conference.  

The post View live transcripts in Microsoft Teams meetings, track Excel changes, and increase hybrid work security—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Every customer I talk to wants to empower people for a world of work that is dynamic, fluid, and cloud-powered. They want to find ways for people to work not just from anywhere but at any time, with solutions that allow both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. And it’s a ‘whole organization’ shift. From IT, to HR, to operations, to marketing and manufacturing—this is a conversation that requires leaders across the entire organization to come together to rethink work. 

As students of the new world of work, we’ve been experimenting and sharing what we learn as work evolves. Today, I want to share our approach to empower your employees around the world for a flexible work world. It’s a three-part strategy: First, create policy to empower people for extreme flexibility. Second, reimagine physical spaces. And third, invest in technologies that connect people anywhere and anytime.

Let’s take a look at each.

Create policy to empower people for extreme flexibility

The choices you make today will impact your organization for years to come. It’s a moment that requires a clear vision. You need a plan and policies that put you on the path to extreme flexibility. These decisions will impact everything from how you shape culture to how you attract and retain talent to how you respond to changes in the environment to future innovation.

Many organizations have already stepped forward with strong stances on flexible work. Twitter declared its workers could work remotely “forever.” Dropbox announced it will essentially eliminate office space for focused work, transforming physical locations to cater to meetings and collaboration. Spotify hopes to lure talent with New York and San Francisco-level salaries for employees working remotely anywhere in the world. And at Microsoft, employees can now work from home up to 50 percent of the time. 

Empowering people for extreme flexibility begins with answering critical questions: Who will be able to work remotely? Who will need to come into the office, and for what amount of time? When people do focused work, where will they do it? What about collaborative work? And in a world where ongoing disruption is part of the new normal—with natural disasters, geopolitical events, and global health crises—you need to be prepared to respond to sudden changes. New, flexible policies take the answers to these questions and codify them, providing clarity and guidance to employees as they experiment. 

Reimagine your physical spaces

Once you’ve determined your policies for extreme flexibility, use them to guide your approach to physical space. From here on out, we will no longer rely solely on physical spaces to collaborate, connect, and build social capital. But space will still be important. We’re social animals and we want to get together, bounce ideas off one another, and experience the energy of in-person events. Moving forward, office space needs to bridge the physical and digital worlds and meet the unique needs of every team—and specific roles.

Purposeful design

At Microsoft we’re surveying employees and looking at everything from social graphs to employee traffic patterns to understand how to equip teams with the spaces they need, knowing those needs will evolve over time. Sales teams who need to come to the office infrequently can use a hoteling model to book workstations for the day or hour, while engineering teams may need dedicated collaboration spaces and workstations. To accommodate remote workers, we’re exploring offsite coworking hubs. Because we know how we work will continue to evolve, we’re building flexibility into every space we design.

Connecting the physical to the digital

It’s also critical to think about bridging the gap between in-person and remote experiences. Working together when everyone is in the office is fairly straightforward. And over the last 12 months, we’ve figured out how to get things done when everyone is at home. It’s how to handle that messy middle—when some people are physically together and others are joining virtually—that’s going to be a challenge. 

Today’s state-of-the-art Microsoft Teams Rooms include high-quality audio and video to help everyone be seen and heard. Meeting room cameras deliver high-definition video streams and optimize the view by framing the people in the room or following the active speaker. Intelligent speakers identify who in the room is speaking, and individual names and profiles are represented in meeting transcripts. Features like live captions, live transcription, raise hand, reactions, and chat help people follow along and offer opportunities to chime in non-verbally or without interrupting the speaker. Digital whiteboards—accessible both in the room and at home—foster collaboration and co-creation. People onsite can ink directly on a Surface Hub or from their own phone or laptop and remote participants can draw on the same shared digital canvas. In addition, our Intelligent Capture cameras can capture, focus, resize, and enhance analog whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard.

All of this is available today in Microsoft Teams Rooms, but we’re just getting started. We see a not-so-distant future where meetings become immersive experiences that allow us to ‘be there’—from anywhere and at any time. Our vision for the future includes changes to meeting room layouts; the addition of multiple screens create dynamic views of participants, chat, whiteboards, content, and notes; and enhancements to in-room technologies to help remote participants track and participate in the flow of the meeting. 

Invest in technology that connects people—anywhere and anytime

Along with physical spaces, your plan for extreme flexibility should include technology that enables teamwork and creates a new digital employee experience that follows your employees no matter where they go.

When the pandemic compelled people everywhere to shift to remote work, videoconferencing was the primary tool that people used to connect and keep work moving. Within months, people were participating in 55 percent more digital meetings compared to pre-COVID-19—and we all felt the related stress and burnout. Videoconferencing will always be important, but it’s just one tool, and doesn’t provide the communication and collaboration infrastructure needed to power hybrid work. Microsoft Teams is the only solution that combines meet, chat, call, and collaborate in a single place—all integrated with the Office apps and business process automation tools. What’s more, it opens up collaboration between knowledge workers and frontline workers and blends synchronous and asynchronous work naturally. It’s the only app that does it all, providing an organizing layer that supports the flow of work across the organization. 

We’ve introduced more than 100 new features in Teams over the past year, all built with extreme flexibility in mind—and there are many more on the way. But we need to go even further to support the new emerging patterns of distributed work. Microsoft Viva, is the first integrated employee experience platform designed for hybrid work. Taken together, Teams and Viva deliver a technology platform that will connect your people and help them navigate the new reality.

Work is evolving rapidly, and there’s just no going back to our pre-pandemic world. As vaccines begin to roll out globally, business leaders everywhere need a plan for the new operating model—extreme flexibility. While we’re all still learning as we go, it’s clear that every organization is going to need three things: new policies, re-configured physical spaces, and technology that binds it all together. There are challenges ahead but we are optimistic about creating a future that empowers people to connect from anywhere, at any time, and to be and bring their best each day.

The post Hybrid work is here. Are you ready? appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

And it’s clear that flexible work is here to stay: According to research conducted for Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, over 80 percent of managers say they expect more flexible work from home policies post-pandemic, and more than 70 percent of employees say they expect to take advantage of them. So we can anticipate some pretty significant changes in the weeks and months to come.

To thrive in this new hybrid world, people and organizations need solutions that are fluid, dynamic, and cloud-powered.

At Microsoft, we’re building experiences to help everyone thrive in this new hybrid world of work and learning. Today at Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing new features designed for a hybrid world. From new digital event experiences in Microsoft Teams designed for internal and external attendees to new availability announcements about Microsoft Viva, there’s so much to share.

Let’s dive in.

Break down boundaries to make it easy to connect and collaborate across organizations

Now more than ever, rich, engaging digital events are critical for successful collaboration—whether you’re inviting internal participants, external participants, or a combination of the two. We’re introducing new features that make it easier to collaborate across organizations and event sizes. 

Improve collaboration and knowledge management

Microsoft Teams supports a spectrum of communication needs, from small internal meetings to large virtual events. Now with Teams, you can easily organize and conduct interactive webinars for people inside and outside of your organization with up to 1,000 attendees. Webinars include end-to-end experiences—like custom registration, rich presentation options, host controls such as the ability to disable attendee chat and video, and post-event reporting. And if your webinar grows to over 1,000 attendees, Teams will seamlessly scale to accommodate a 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience. Plus, during this time of increased remote work, take advantage of even larger 20,000-person broadcasts through the end of this year. These new event capabilities are included with many of the Office and Microsoft plans your organization uses today!

Coming soon, new integrations will bring together Teams events with the robust attendee management experiences from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. Managing attendee information across Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 Marketing to nurture attendees before, during, and after the event is now easier than ever before.

And we’re announcing Microsoft Teams Connect, which allows you to share channels with anyone, internal or external to your organization. The shared channel will appear within an individual’s primary Microsoft Teams tenant alongside other teams and channels, making it easy for everyone to access it in their workflow. In the shared workspace, you can leverage Microsoft Teams rich collaboration capabilities: chat, meet, collaborate on apps, share, and co-author documents in real-time. Admins have access to granular controls, allowing their organization to stay in control of how external users access data and information. Microsoft Teams Connect is available today in private preview and will roll out broadly later this calendar year.

Better meetings and presentations for a work-from-anywhere world

With hybrid work and learning, we need meetings that offer a first-rate experience to every participant whether they’re in the room, remote, or on the go. And as education continues to evolve, so does the technology used to enable digital and hybrid classrooms. New experiences in Microsoft Teams help speakers create more impactful, dynamic presentations while connecting with everyone in the meeting more naturally.

Presenters often share their desktops in virtual meetings, creating an inconsistent presentation experience and limiting the ability of the audience to interact. Today, we’re announcing Microsoft PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, which will enable presenters to deliver more impactful and engaging presentations. Presenters will now be able to lead meetings more confidently with notes, slides, meeting chat, and participants all in a single view. Meanwhile, attendees can personalize their experience by privately navigating the content at their own pace or using the screen reader to make content accessible. PowerPoint Live is now available in Teams. Learn more about PowerPoint Live.

The new Presenter mode empowers presenters to customize how their video feed and content appear to the audience. Our first mode, Standout, shows the speaker’s video feed in front of the shared content. Next, Reporter will show content as a visual aid above the speaker’s shoulder, just like during a news segment. Third, Side-by-side will show the presenter’s video feed alongside their content as they present. Presenter mode will be available soon.

Today, we are also announcing Dynamic view, which intelligently arranges the elements of your meeting for an optimal viewing experience. As people join, turn on video, start to speak, or begin to present in a meeting, Teams automatically adjusts and personalizes your layout. We’ve also added a new option to place the participant gallery at the top of the meeting window, helping you maintain a natural eye gaze. Dynamic view will be rolling out soon.

New meeting experiences for the hybrid workplace

Historically, meeting rooms were designed to facilitate in-room collaboration. As meetings evolve around hybrid work norms, room experiences must be inclusive so everyone can be seen and heard clearly, and fully participate in the meeting.

We are bringing new gallery views to Microsoft Teams Rooms, including Together Mode and large gallery, to make it easier to see everyone in the meeting. And whether the room has one screen or two, you’ll be able to see meeting content, along with everyone joining from home, at the same time.

We’re also announcing new Microsoft Teams Intelligent speakers that can identify and differentiate the voices of up to 10 people talking in a Microsoft Teams Room. These speakers were created in partnership with EPOS and Yealink, and allow attendees to use the transcription to follow along or capture actions, by knowing who in the room said what. Whether you are working remotely or following the meeting in the conference room, you can effectively see who said what during the meeting. To enable privacy and security, users are in full control and can turn attribution on or off at any time.

We’re expanding our portfolio of devices that users can choose from when building out their home offices. Today, we’re announcing the first monitors certified for Microsoft Teams, the new Dell Video conferencing monitor, and the Poly 21. These new monitors integrate critical conferencing hardware like a microphone, speaker, camera, and light right into the monitor, so employees can simply attach their PC via USB to get started on collaboration and maximizing productivity. The new P15 video bar from Poly is an easy-to-mount peripheral that transforms an existing monitor into a high-quality Teams endpoint. Lastly, the new Cam 130 by Aver integrates lights as well, allowing users to present their best selves in video meetings.

Ensuring secure communications

To further address our customers’ security and compliance requirements, Teams will support end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for one-to-one Microsoft Teams calls, providing an additional option for conducting sensitive online conversations. IT will have full discretion over who can use E2EE in the organization. E2EE for Microsoft Teams one-to-one ad hoc VoIP calls will be available to commercial customers in preview in the first half of this calendar.

Reimagining the employee experience for a hybrid workplace

As hybrid work models become the norm, reimagining how we nurture employee development and training—along with how we access benefits and wellbeing opportunities for digital workers—becomes critical to success. Last month, we launched Microsoft Viva, our new employee experience platform built to empower people and teams to be their best from anywhere. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, it is experienced through Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use every day. Learn more in our Microsoft Viva announcement blog.

Our first module, Viva Connections, gives you a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources. Today, we’re announcing that the desktop experience for Viva Connections is now generally available. Viva Connections will be available to all customers as part of their existing SharePoint license.

Viva Insights, now in preview, gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. Starting next month, the virtual commute experience we announced last year will begin rolling out as part of the Microsoft Viva Insights app to help you mindfully wrap up your workdays. The new Home tab will also be available next month, providing a seamless way to stay on top of pending tasks, reflect on your feelings, send praise to your colleagues, and take a breathing break anytime during the workday—all without leaving Microsoft Teams. Learn more in our Viva Insights blog.

Finally, Viva Learning provides a central hub in Microsoft Teams where people can discover, share, recommend, and learn from best-in-class content libraries across the organization—including LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third-party content providers, and an organization’s own custom content. The Viva Learning app for Microsoft Teams will be entering preview starting in April, and we expect to make it generally available later this year. We encourage you to sign up to learn more about Viva Learning, including further details about new experiences, partner APIs, and preview as they become available.

Helping you on your Zero Trust Journey

At Microsoft, our approach to digital safety is unique in our industry because we bring two superpowers to security. The first: an integrated, end-to-end approach. The second: incredible AI and automation. We can use these together to tackle security from all angles, at scale in the cloud—combining security, compliance, identity, and management as an interdependent whole for total protection. Since you can’t stop what you can’t see, we put world-class artificial intelligence (AI) to work for you, analyzing more than eight trillion threat signals every single day to give you enhanced visibility and always-on vigilance that helps catch what others miss.

We build these protections into our platforms for a seamless experience that won’t slow users down or stifle business innovation. This week at Microsoft Ignite, we are making several important announcements across all of these areas to help you on your Zero Trust journey. A few quick highlights include:

• Co-authoring of documents protected with Microsoft Information Protection. This enables multiple users to work simultaneously on protected documents while taking advantage of the built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible protection for documents and emails across Microsoft 365 apps. 
• Threat Analytics in Microsoft 365 Defender. Now in preview, the new Threat Analytics provides a set of reports from expert Microsoft security researchers that help you understand, prevent, and mitigate active threats, like the Solorigate attacks, directly within Microsoft 365 Defender.
• Passwordless authentication is now generally available for cloud and hybrid environments. Now you can deliver a more secure, seamless sign-in experience for all employees where they no longer need to enter passwords to sign in and access data. Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) passwordless supports sign-ins with biometrics or a tap using Windows Hello for Business, the Microsoft Authenticator app, or a compatible FIDO2 security key from Microsoft Intelligent Security Association partners such as Yubico, Feitian, and AuthenTrend. You can customize policies for different users, groups, and types of credentials and track your progress with new reporting tools. With Temporary Access Pass, now in preview, you can generate a time-limited code to set up or recover a passwordless credential.

But there’s so much more. Please check out the Security blog post from my colleague Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President of Security, Compliance, and Identity, for all security announcements.

Also new to Microsoft 365 

Last year, we announced our Microsoft 365 cloud print solution, Universal Print, which offers simple and secure printing in zero-trust environments. Now generally available, Universal Print enables workers with workplace-joined Windows devices to easily discover printers based on location and print without installing any additional software. Later this summer, users will also be able to print documents from the OneDrive for Business web experience on any device using the browser of their choice. Learn why other customers and partners value the solution in our Universal Print blog.

To help customers meet data residency requirements, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo allows customers to provision and store data at rest in the geographic locations they’ve specified. We are announcing that Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo will be extended to include Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to specify where their Teams customer data is stored down to the team and end-user. Microsoft Teams support for Multi-Geo will be rolling out in Spring 2021.

From physical spaces to digital solutions to employee experiences—we’re working alongside our customers to reimagine work and learning for a hybrid world. While we’re always so happy to share our latest innovations with you, we know that this is just the beginning. We can’t wait to share more with you in the weeks and months to come. 

The post Flexible work is here to stay: Microsoft 365 solutions for the hybrid work world appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

In my role at Microsoft, I get the chance to talk to our customers every day about their experiences in this new digital era. It’s exhilarating to work on the tools that have unlocked new forms of connection and collaboration for their people—even as they navigate the challenges of the pandemic. We built Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 as the organizing layer for all the ways people work, learn, and collaborate. Microsoft Teams is the only solution with meetings, calls, chat, content collaboration, and business process workflows—all in a secure, integrated user experience. This fall, we saw the daily active users number in Microsoft Teams climb to 115 million, while Microsoft 365 users around the world generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day as people communicated, collaborated, and co-authored content. And in our new hybrid work reality, Microsoft Teams is empowering everyone in organizations—from information workers to frontline workers, and everyone in between.

But to truly empower people to feel connected, supported, and able to bring their best selves to work we need to do more.

Today, organizations spend over $300 billion a year on employee experience. That number includes employee development and training, benefits and wellbeing, and a whole host of employee experience technologies. But too often, these technologies are fragmented, hard to find, and disruptive to the flow of work. 

As digital tools become more crucial to a great employee experience, business leaders across every industry are embracing the opportunity to learn, and they’re re-evaluating both their spending and their approach. 

We believe what’s needed is a new approach and a new category of technology solutions called employee experience platforms (EXP). In the past few months, my team and I have been talking with analyst Josh Bersin, who closely studies this space. These conversations helped solidify our vision of EXP as a digital platform that provides people with the resources and support they need, seamlessly integrated within the same tools they use to do their work, so they can succeed and thrive no matter their location.

Introducing Microsoft Viva

Today we’re introducing Microsoft Viva, the first EXP built for the digital era. Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, it is experienced through Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use every day.

A new kind of employee experience

To start, Microsoft Viva will include four modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics—with more on the way. I’ll walk you through each one.

Let’s begin with Viva Connections.

Research from our Work Trend Index shows nearly 60 percent of workers feel less connected to their team since the move to remote work. And we’re struggling to replace the comradery once created by things like company town halls, offsites, and events. This is challenging for all of us, but especially impactful on new hires—imagine how it feels for an employee who has never been to the office or ever met anyone face-to-face.

Accessed in Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections provides a single-entry point for employee engagement and internal communications. You can think of it as a gateway to your digital workplace.

Viva Connections is built on Microsoft 365 capabilities like SharePoint to provide a curated and branded employee destination. Leaders can connect with employees via company town halls, and employees can access everything from company news, policies, and benefits to employee resource groups or communities they want to join with Microsoft Viva’s integration to Yammer. It provides a personalized feed and dashboard to help you find all the helpful resources you need from Microsoft Viva and from other apps across your digital workplace. The content can also be customized for specific roles within the company—including frontline workers—so that they have a comprehensive view of just the resources they need.

Next, Viva Insights.

At a time when over 30 percent of workers say the pandemic has increased their sense of burnout, it has never been more important to help people unplug and make the most of their scarcest resource: their time.

Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. It brings new personal wellbeing experiences, insights, and recommended actions from Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics into the flow of people’s work in Microsoft Teams.

Accessed in Microsoft Teams, Viva Insights for individuals help employees stay connected with their colleagues and protect time for regular breaks, focused work, and learning. Experiences we announced last summer, like virtual commute and integration with Headspace, kickstarted our work here. They will now be part of Microsoft Viva and will start rolling out in the coming months. 

For managers, Viva Insights provides data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations to foster healthy, successful teams. For instance, Viva Insights can help a manager see if their team is at risk of burnout and provide recommendations like encouraging your team to turn off notifications, set boundaries in their calendar, and set daily priorities to focus on what matters most. 

For company leaders, Viva Insights helps address complex challenges and respond to change by shedding light on organizational work patterns and trends. These could include wellbeing opportunities, but also things like space planning as companies reimagine their offices for hybrid work. Viva Insights also provides leaders with organizational network analysis to understand the connectedness and cohesion between and across teams.

These organizational insights are even more powerful when combined with other data sources. Today, we’re excited to introduce a new dashboard for Microsoft Viva and LinkedIn’s Glint customers that maps insights about how people work to employee survey data about how people feel. In addition to using data and signals from Microsoft apps and services, Microsoft Viva builds on an organization’s existing investments. A customer can also leverage data from third-party tools like Zoom, Slack, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors.

To help ensure privacy and security, Microsoft Viva uses aggregation, de-identification, and differential privacy. This means personal insights are visible only to the employee, while insights for managers and leaders are aggregated and de-identified by default to protect individual privacy.

Now onto Viva Learning.

Organizations need to develop a culture of learning to keep up with the pace of change and to retain great talent. Specifically, a recent report from LinkedIn found that 94 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development.

Viva Learning helps make learning a natural part of both every employee’s daily work and company culture.

With Viva Learning, employees can easily discover and share everything from training courses to microlearning content. And managers get the tools they need to assign learning and to track the completion of courses to help foster a learning culture. Viva Learning creates a central hub for learning in Teams, with AI that recommends the right content at the right time. It aggregates content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, your organization’s own custom content, and trainings from leading content providers like Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight, and edX. Viva Learning also works with leading learning-management systems. Today we’re announcing partnerships with Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, and SAP SuccessFactors. And there are more are on the way.

Finally, Viva Topics.

As we have all experienced, finding an expert, understanding company acronyms, or surfacing the content you need can be tedious, especially when you’re a new employee or working remotely. In fact, our research shows that people spend the equivalent of seven weeks per year searching for or re-creating information.

Viva Topics enables you to harness the knowledge of your organization, and connect people to that knowledge, in the apps they use every day. Think of Viva Topics as a Wikipedia with AI superpowers for your organization. It uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise into relevant categories like “projects,” “products,” “processes,” and “customers.” 

When you come across an unfamiliar topic or acronym, just hover. No need to search for knowledge—knowledge finds you. Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards as people work in apps like Office, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. When employees click on a card, a topic page appears with documents, videos, and related people. Experts at the company can also help curate the information shown in Viva Topics by sharing knowledge through simple, highly customizable web sites called Topic Pages.

Along with content from the Microsoft Cloud, Viva Topics also surfaces information from third-party services like ServiceNow and Salesforce and builds on integrations made by partners like Accenture, Avanade, BA Insight, Raytion, and ClearPeople. And Graph connectors make it easy to connect to even more content that employees would find helpful. 

Together with our partners

Designed to be an open and extensible platform, with a strong and growing ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Viva is easy to integrate with the systems and tools a company already has in place. Integrations with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and third-party products and services will deliver a complete employee experience in the flow of work. In addition to our integration ecosystem, we’re joined in this mission by our global network of services partners who provide strategic guidance, advisory services, implementation, adoption and change management, and more.

You can hear from some of our partners in this video:

Just getting started

We all know that engaged, healthy employees who feel a sense of ownership, purpose, and belonging have a greater impact on our organizations. And at Microsoft, we’re committed to helping our customers empower all their people, whether they’re working onsite, in the field, at home, or on the go. Today, we begin the journey of creating an entirely new employee experience designed for the digital era.

With Microsoft Viva, we aim to make it easier and more natural for everyone to stay connected, access knowledge, learn on the job, and use privacy-protected insights—to enable individuals to prioritize wellbeing, empower managers to lead more effectively, and help leaders drive better decision-making across the organization. But while we’re so excited to introduce you to Microsoft Viva today, there’s so much more to come. We believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build people-centered experiences that help our customers drive extraordinary outcomes. And we’re just getting started.

Experience Microsoft Viva today

Want to help your people experience Microsoft Viva right away? As of today, Viva Topics is generally available. We’re also announcing the public preview of Viva Insights and a private preview of Viva Learning. And we’ll be announcing more innovations throughout 2021. To learn more and get started, check out the Microsoft Viva website.

The post Microsoft Viva: Empowering every employee for the new digital age appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A quick note before we dive in: We have been using this space to share tips, customer stories, and information throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. This post is a follow-up to one we shared last week detailing tips for moving to remote work with Microsoft Teams. We’ve also offered guidance on moving live events online—with details on using Microsoft tools as well as insights from our events leader at Microsoft. And we’ve shared advice for IT departments and CISOs from leaders in those areas as well. We’ll continue to post more remote-work content here in the days to come, so please check back often. Okay, on to our lessons from the last two weeks.

1. Share work from home guidance

Most organizations have training manuals for how employees should navigate their office environment. When we moved to remote work, we quickly realized that employees need guidance for this type of work as well. So many of us are experiencing remote work for the first time, and with very little time to prepare for the change. Our team has questions: How do you set up a space where you can focus? How do you stay connected when you can’t meet face-to-face? Why does it feel like it’s never the right moment to take a break? Add in the challenge of kids or other dependent family members at home—a reality for many of us during this outbreak—and it’s inevitable that some employees will struggle.

To address this need, last week we distributed a comprehensive work-from-home guide to employees. We thought you might find it useful, so we created a customer version for you to share with your employees as you see fit. It’s full of concrete tips on everything from setting up your physical and virtual workstations to best practices for communicating availability to teammates.

2. Manage back-to-back meetings

In the office, back-to-back meetings have natural pauses between them. There’s the walk down the hallway, those first few moments at the table when you wait for everyone to arrive, and the casual conversation that happens as teammates greet one another and quickly catch up. Often, we barely notice these little breathers as we move through our work week. Then we switch to remote work and realize just how much we needed them to punctuate the rat-a-tat pace of a multi-meeting day.

How can you make sure you and your team meet as often as you need to, but are able to take a break in between? We are encouraging employees to schedule meetings to conclude five minutes before the end of the hour or half hour. This shortens your time together slightly but goes a long way towards avoiding potential burnout from uninterrupted back-to-backs.

3. Create space for people to disconnect

When we’re working in the world, we find daily ways to disconnect, often without having to try. Making dinner for your family, meeting friends at an after-work exercise class, or a daily zone-out on the bus ride home help us separate from the events of the day so we can get ready for the next one. Even in the best of circumstances, disconnecting when you work remotely can be a challenge. To help our employees, we’ve started offering virtual meditation sessions they can join when they need a moment to unwind from work.

If you opt to do the same, here are a few practical tips to share with employees new to online meditation classes. First, find a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted. Next, set your microphone to mute so others can enjoy the silence. And finally, use your camera to watch the session leader for guidance on breathing techniques. Once you feel like you’ve got those down, you can switch off your camera to fully focus on calming your mind.

4. Continue driving team culture

From all-hands meetings to celebrating small milestones, healthy team cultures depend on frequent get-togethers. With so many of us moving suddenly to remote work, it’s tempting to switch into “essentials only” mode, postponing important events and fun team moments alike until we can get back to normal.

We’ve found that whenever possible, it’s best to keep building team culture even when you need to build it apart. Scheduled a birthday party for a teammate? Jump into a Teams meeting and fire up the HBD GIFs. Big onsite sales conference coming up? Start figuring out how to hold it virtually instead. And if it’s time for your quarterly team-building off-site, just go for it. Your team will be more than ready to share ideas and connect. The get-togethers that help drive team culture may seem challenging to pull off remotely at first, but it’s worth the extra effort to keep everyone connected and moving forward.

5. Practice key management skills

Employees rely on their managers to check in, coach them through changes, and show curiosity to help them problem-solve and create. As your team navigates a whole new way of working—while also navigating a global health crisis—they need your support as a manager more than ever. But how can you manage successfully when you’re working apart?

We share what we’ve learned about managing remotely in the work-from-home guide. This includes reinforcing inclusion, checking in often, and coaching your teammates to help discover their own best practices for remote work. Every employee faces unique challenges right now, and every employee will approach this situation differently. As managers, it’s so important to try to understand and react to their individual needs as much as possible.

These lessons reflect some of our early takeaways after two weeks of remote learning. From scheduling meetings to allow for breathers to effectively managing remote teams, we’re discovering so much about this new way to work. I am certain that these lessons will have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak, as organizations everywhere continue to prioritize remote work. But we want to hear about what you and your team are thinking about and learning, too. Please join the conversation in our Enabling Remote Work Community.

The post 2 weeks in: what we’ve learned about remote work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.