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.

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.

Before we jump into the latest product news, I’d like to highlight the new flexible work resources we’ve made available for you. Our redesigned hybrid work page demonstrates how Microsoft solutions can help you build flexibility across your organization and enable your employees to thrive in this new world of work. Please check out the new resources and let us know what you think.

Now, let’s dive into the news.

Empowering frontline workers

For the last two years, the nearly two billion global frontline workers have played a critical role in supporting our communities and economies, all while weathering health risks, supply chain issues, and labor shortages.

Nearly 90 percent of all organizations employ frontline workers. This means nearly every organization across every industry has faced the same challenge: balancing the needs of this critical workforce while also achieving business results.

Our latest research shows there is a tremendous opportunity for business leaders to drive positive outcomes for employees, customers, and the bottom line by prioritizing culture and communication while investing in technology that enables frontline workers to thrive.¹ This month, we announced several new capabilities aimed at addressing the pain points being felt on the frontline, and to help with wellbeing, growth, productivity, and engagement.

Technology like Microsoft Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams can play a critical role in bridging cultural and communication gaps between leadership and the frontline workforce. This month, we added new integrations in the Viva Connections app with strategic partners Workday and Espressive, enabling workers to easily access important company resources and actions, like payroll and HR resources, in one location.

Setting employees up for success requires providing the right resources and training. To help make training more accessible, we have updated the Viva Learning app to streamline the workflow for assigning learning from partner solutions like SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Saba Cloud. And new partnerships with learning providers like EdCast and OpenSesame connect workers to an extensive content library that can help them upskill and train, all in the flow of work.  

To help make communication on the frontlines easier, we’re deepening our strategic partnership with Zebra Technologies, a world leader in software and hardware for frontline workers. Earlier this month, we announced the general availability of the Walkie Talkie app in Microsoft Teams, with a dedicated push-to-talk button on a wide range of Zebra mobile devices, as well as general availability on any iOS mobile device.

To help remove friction from managing appointments, we’ve updated the Bookings app in Microsoft Teams to a comprehensive view of virtual appointments in one location, including real-time updates on wait times, queueing, missed appointments, and staffing delays to create a first-class experience for customers and patients.

To help provide workers with the flexibility to own their schedule, we’ve enhanced Teams’ integration with  Reflexis Workforce Scheduler (RWS)to create a seamless, real-time sync for viewing, assigning, and managing shift requests right within Teams.

Earlier this month, my colleague Steve Dispensa wrote about how we’re helping provide workers on the frontline with protected devices that make their lives and daily jobs easier. Read the blog, Using technology to reduce the load on frontline workers, for more information.

Create content that everyone can use

Making content accessible enables employees to more easily collaborate and contribute, which is why we’re simplifying accessible authoring and bringing it into the flow of work across Microsoft 365 Apps.

Keeping accessibility front and center throughout the creating and editing process helps make remediating accessibility issues more manageable. We are currently rolling out a new option to run Accessibility Checker in the background while you work within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows. This will help flag accessibility issues for you to correct right in your flow of work.

Alternative text (alt text) makes image-heavy, digital documents accessible to screen reader users. Recently, we rolled out the ability for users to provide alt text for images they share in Microsoft Teams Chat on Windows, with macOS coming soon. And Excel now provides screen reader users with automatic alt text for charts and PivotCharts, generated on-demand at the point the screen reader reaches the object to ensure that it’s based on the most recent data.

Creating content is a highly collaborative process, and in a hybrid world, that often means communicating asynchronously with each other. We’ve introduced several updates to Microsoft Teams to help enable flexibility in when and how you collaborate. Now, you can catch up or refresh yourself on what happened in unscheduled meetings or channel meetings with Live Transcript. For those who prefer to listen to the full recording, you can now adjust the variable playback speed (0.5 to 2 times) for Teams meeting recordings in Stream and view indexed recordings based on slide transitions to make it easier to listen at your own pace and quickly navigate to relevant content.

Increasing productivity with new features in your favorite apps

This month, we’re adding the ability to see the order of raised hands to Teams as well as bringing core Microsoft Visio capabilities to the Microsoft 365 suite.

The raised hands feature in Microsoft Teams enables meeting participants to inform presenters they want to speak or have a question without interruption. Now, Teams can show the chronological order of raised hands, helping presenters know the order of who to call on first to speak so that no participant is missed.

With the shift to hybrid work, business processes often need to be transformed and diagrams are a great way to illustrate how work gets done. To help make diagramming more accessible, we’re bringing core Visio capabilities to Microsoft 365, enabling you to create, edit, share, and coauthor diagrams with team members across your organization. With access to popular diagram templates and shapes, you can easily visualize any business process. The Visio web app in Microsoft 365 is now available to all users with a Microsoft 365 commercial subscription.

Also new this month

We launched a new Microsoft Edge training for business users. Register to learn how the fast and secure Microsoft Edge browser can help simplify your workday with intelligent search and innovative Microsoft experiences.

Looking to the future

Whether it’s helping frontline workers feel connected and empowered or making content more accessible for everyone, we’re committed to enabling every employee to thrive. We’ve got a lot more in store for 2022. Stay tuned.

¹The Work Trend Index, WorkLab, Microsoft. January 12, 2022.

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The established patterns of work we relied on for years are undergoing monumental changes. Asynchronous communication is the new norm. Meetings transcend time and space. The promise of AI is being realized—amplifying human ingenuity in ways that feel like magic.

To thrive in this new world, every organization needs a digital fabric that binds the organization together with secure communication, collaboration, and creation. This digital fabric will enable flexibility and strengthen connections across people and teams. It will seamlessly weave together data, automation, and AI—all in the flow of work. It needs to extend beyond organizational boundaries to customers and partners. And it needs to include every type of worker—information, frontline, and flexible workers.

We are innovating across the Microsoft Cloud to deliver this digital fabric to empower everyone in this new era. And at the center of it all is Microsoft Teams.

At Ignite, we are introducing exciting new apps and capabilities that in one year will be just as integrated into your daily workflow as Teams is today. Let’s dive in.

Collaboration that transcends boundaries and keeps you in the flow of work

As computing becomes embedded in the real world, the real world is being embedded in computing—that’s Microsoft Mesh, the metaverse platform. We’re taking that experience and building Mesh right into Teams, recreating a lot of what we value about being together and extending productivity beyond what was previously possible.

Mesh for Microsoft Teams introduces a new generation of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) meetings. How you project yourself in an immersive space really matters. Personalized avatars give you control to customize your avatar and use AI to imitate movements and gestures that enable you to bring your physical presence into the conversation, even when your camera is off.

Organizations will also be able to create immersive spaces that resemble physical spaces such as conference rooms, design centers, and networking lounges to enhance camaraderie, spark creativity, and foster serendipitous water-cooler connections. Learn more about Mesh for Microsoft Teams.

New updates to the Teams meeting experience

We are bringing new updates to the Teams meeting experience to foster more inclusive and productive hybrid meetings. Users can now assign roles from the scheduling form and see the order of raised hands to ensure that all the voices are heard. Also, we’re revamping the mobile overflow menu to prioritize key actions, like viewing chat and adding a notification drawer for in-meeting system messages, so users can preview, collapse, and clear all notifications with one tap.

Unlock better hybrid meeting experiences

In partnership with some of the world’s best hardware partners, we’re working to deliver Teams experiences on devices that help people stay connected and participate fully in meetings regardless of where they are attending from.

Upon certification, the Yealink desk Vision AIO24 with its new 24-inch display can be used as a standalone device for Teams collaboration or connected to a PC as a second screen.

Logitech Tap Scheduler is joining the Teams panels portfolio pending certification, enabling people to easily view meeting room availability, location information, and meeting details at a glance.

Direct Guest Join allows users to join a third-party meeting, with basic controls, from their Teams Rooms. Similarly, it allows people to join Teams meetings from their third-party room systems. Today, this is available with Zoom and Cisco. Next year we will expand this to include Bluejeans and GoToMeeting.  

Surface Hubs can now be managed from the Teams admin center alongside other Teams devices. In the coming months, Microsoft Teams Room managed services will be expanded to include Surface Hub in the cloud-based IT management and monitoring service.

Make cross-organizational collaboration easier and more secure

Work doesn’t happen in a silo—it requires communication and collaboration with individuals both inside and outside the organization. We’re delivering new capabilities to Microsoft Teams Connect that remove barriers and make it easier and more secure to collaborate with anyone.

Share a channel with individuals and teams across multiple organizations, schedule a meeting, collaborate in real-time on apps, and share channels with up to 50 teams and as many organizations as you need (available in public preview in the first quarter of 2022). Meanwhile, we are extending Teams chat capabilities, enabling you to chat with team members outside your organization with a Teams personal account (available by the end of 2021).

Deliver engaging and memorable events

A host of new webinars and broadcasting capabilities will make it easy to set up and deliver professional, engaging experiences to internal and external audiences. The virtual green room will enable organizers and presenters to socialize, monitor chat, conduct Q&As, manage attendee settings, and share content before the event starts. Organizers and presenters will be able to manage what attendees see to ensure that attendees will only see shared content and participants that are brought on screen. Both of these capabilities will be available in preview in early 2022.

Leading events and hospitality management platform, Cvent, is now integrated with Teams. Starting in early 2022, customers can use Cvent to manage the event lifecycle, including registration and agenda management, and to deliver the virtual meeting and event experience via Teams.

Unlock teamwork with collaborative apps

Collaborative apps are a new generation of applications with collaboration at the core. Designed and optimized for the flexibility of hybrid work inside Teams, they bring the relevant processes, data, and people together to accomplish more. New collaborative apps from partners including Atlassian, SAP, and ServiceNow enable customers to engage with these apps across chat, channels, and meetings. Meanwhile, new experiences between Dynamics 365 and Teams bring more data and connectivity right into your workflow.

The redesigned Teams Store, now available, makes finding the right app for your needs simple and streamlined.

Streamline the contact center experience

A new all-in-one digital contact center solution, powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Teams, brings together traditional contact center, unified communications, and customer service capabilities into a single, integrated software as a service (SaaS) solution. With this new all-in-one solution, you’ll be able to deliver chat and voice connectivity, extensibility with other business applications, and intelligence embedded at every step of the customer service experience.

Empowering creators everywhere

We’re completely reimaging Office to go beyond the traditional confines of a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, spilling over to entirely new mediums. Just like Teams transformed collaboration and productivity, Microsoft Loop is the next big breakthrough in Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Loop is a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that move freely and stay in sync across applications—enabling teams to think, plan, and create together. Microsoft Loop has three elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces.

Loop components are atomic units of productivity that help you collaborate and complete work right within chats, meetings, emails, documents, and more. You can build your own Loop components, or leverage ours, including:

• Voting table makes it easy for teams to brainstorm, drive consensus, and finalize decisions together.
• Status tracker will help you gather information from your team, track progress towards all aspects of your project, and always maintain an up-to-date view of the project across your team.

Loop pages are flexible canvases where you can organize your components and pull in helpful elements like links, files, or data in ways that suit your specific project needs.

Loop workspaces are shared spaces that allow you and your team to see and group everything important to your project. And workspaces make it easy for you to catch up on what everyone is working on, react to others’ ideas, and track progress toward shared goals.

Microsoft Loop components are rolling out in preview across Microsoft 365 apps, such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneNote in the coming months, with more Microsoft Loop functionality to follow.

The promise of AI has always been about augmenting human capability in ways that feel like magic. That’s becoming reality with Context IQ. Context IQ turns insights into action, harnessing the power of Microsoft Graph to glean insights about your work throughout the day, then predicting, seeking, and suggesting information you need, right when you need it—at the point of action.

For example, Context IQ takes Microsoft Editor, to the next level, helping with things like suggesting a relevant file or document, finding available calendar times with collaborators, suggesting colleagues to tag in emails, or suggesting related Loop components for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales opportunity records.

We’re boosting our support for video creation with the recent inclusion of Clipchamp to the Office family. Clipchamp empowers people to create beautiful, professional-looking videos easily and quickly. Its fun and intuitive interface combined with powerful capabilities and a large stock library help ensure people can bring their video visions to life.

We are launching new experiences on Office.com and the Office app for Windows with new Home, My Content, and Create pages. These new experiences make it easier to find all of one’s content and files across apps and storage locations, see what needs attention, and get to the apps and templates needed for work—all in one place.

The new experience will begin rolling out to users next week. Learn more about these updates in the Office blog.

The digital employee experience is the employee experience

The employee experience is no longer defined by or tethered to a physical location. We need new ways to keep employees engaged and informed, all in the flow of work. That’s where Microsoft Viva comes in.   

Microsoft Viva is now available for purchase as a suite that includes the Insights, Learning, and Topics modules. The Viva suite will also include a new goals management module in 2022 based on our recent acquisition of Ally.io. Viva Learning is now generally available for everyone. Finally, we are launching new experiences for Viva Connections mobile and desktop.  

Viva Insights will offer a new effective meetings experience and manager insights to help employees build new habits and norms that boost connection, productivity, and wellbeing.  

Finally, we’re happy to share that several of the partner integrations we announced for Viva Learning and Viva Connections earlier this year—including SAP SuccessFactors, Qualtrics, ServiceNow, Cornerstone OnDemand, and UKG —are now generally available. Learn more about all of our Microsoft Viva announcements.

Windows for a hybrid world

Each of these exciting new innovations are built for and powered by Windows—the only OS designed for hybrid work. The launch of Windows 11 means easy, zero-touch deployment and the ability to tune devices and tools to meet the unique needs of individual teams and employees:

• To make it easier for organizations using Intune to take advantage of the Windows Update for Business deployment service, we are integrating controls for scheduling and deploying Windows feature updates directly into Intune. Learn more in our blog post.
• Microsoft Test Base for Microsoft 365, now generally available, is a cloud service that enables independent software vendors, enterprise partners, and organizations to test their line of business applications against versions of Windows Client and Server. Read more about Test Base for Microsoft 365.

• Universal Print is a cloud service that allows users to securely print to any printer in the organization without a need for print servers. Learn more about Universal Print.

Read about 11 things we like about Windows 11 in this Tech Community blog.

New enhancements to Windows 365, including Windows 11 support on Business Edition

We’ve taken the PC to the cloud with Windows 365, so businesses of all sizes can securely stream a full Windows experience to any device. You can now choose to experience Windows 11 in the cloud with the Windows 365 Enterprise edition today. Support for the Business edition is coming soon.

There are several new updates being made to provide an optimal Windows 365 experience, including:

• Enhanced security and support via a virtual Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip to enable Windows 11.
• Web client improvements for faster load times, better performance, local resource settings, accessibility features, and more.
• Support for Azure Active Directory joined Windows 365 eliminates the need for on-premises or Azure infrastructure.
• Endpoint analytics resource reports in Microsoft Endpoint Manager provide metrics on central processing unit (CPU) and random access memory (RAM) performance in Windows 365.

For customers who want a modern cloud service for desktop and application virtualization but also need to support some apps and data on-premises, we are announcing the preview of Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI. Learn more about Azure Virtual Desktop announcements.

Also new to Microsoft 365

According to our research, more than 60 percent of small businesses said they didn’t feel equipped to handle cyberthreats. Microsoft Defender for Business is a new endpoint security solution that helps organizations with up to 300 employees protect themselves against cyberattacks. It will be available as a standalone solution and will be included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Learn more about Microsoft Defender for Business.

Looking ahead

From redesigning physical meeting spaces to include those not in the room to reinventing the way you create digitally in the world of hybrid work, we’re committed to enabling every employee to thrive in this new world of work. This is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months. Stay tuned.

The post What’s new in Microsoft 365—How we’re empowering everyone for a new world of hybrid work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

As hybrid work shifts from “new” to “the new normal,” we’re continuing to learn how to successfully navigate the transition. One thing remains clear: hybrid work is about providing flexibility. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. One of the latest findings from our Work Trend Index¹ illustrates this perfectly: when we surveyed our own employees, we found those who plan to spend the most and least time in the office are doing so for the same reason: focused work. Through the launch of new technologies, like Windows 11 releasing on October 5, 2021, we’re empowering employees to contribute and be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

This month, we’re adding more spoken languages to live captions and transcripts in Microsoft Teams. And in preparation for a season of new operating systems, from Windows 11 to Apple iOS and macOS, we are adding new capabilities to Microsoft Endpoint Manager to help ensure your employees have a great experience on day one. Let’s dive into these, and our other announcements, for more details.

Deliver more inclusive meetings for everyone

Earlier this month, we shared several new Teams announcements to help organizations prepare their physical office spaces for hybrid work, make remote meetings as effective as being in person, and enable employees to stay in the flow of work.

We’re now introducing enhanced support for live captioning and transcripts and Microsoft Viva Topics integration between Microsoft Yammer and Microsoft Viva.

• Turn on live captioning and transcripts in more languages: Now, meetings held in one of the supported languages are also supported by real-time captioning and live transcripts. We have expanded to 27 new spoken languages including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi to name a few. Users on mobile can view captions in the supported languages, and desktop users will be able to switch the spoken language. This provides flexibility and additional clarity for your participants to engage in the meeting. Customers can access this via a Teams Meeting on the desktop app by clicking the More Actions option.

• Discover knowledge with Topics integration between Yammer and Viva: Yammer is integrating with and adopting Viva Topics to make community-sourced knowledge easily accessible across an organization and support a consistent experience in Microsoft 365. With this new integration, Topics will refer to the same thing whether in Yammer, Viva, or elsewhere in Microsoft 365. For example, users will see topics in Yammer enhanced with Viva Topics experiences, such as Viva Topic cards, and Viva Topics experiences like pages and cards will include content from Yammer—such as questions and answers and conversations. To get started, download the Yammer Topic API Changes documentation.

Co-author encrypted docs and create more colorful diagrams

This month, we’re adding support for co-authoring in encrypted documents and custom colors in Microsoft Visio for the web. 

• Co-author in encrypted documents in Microsoft 365 Apps: In 2019, we added support for sensitivity labeling in OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling labeled and encrypted documents to be opened, edited, and AutoSaved in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on the web for the first time. This month, we’re extending co-authoring and AutoSave to include Microsoft 365 apps on the desktop for both Windows and macOS. Now, multiple people can co-author Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents simultaneously, frictionlessly, with auto-save, while maintaining the sensitivity labeling and document protections, across the web and desktop applications. This capability helps enhance organizations’ ability to keep their sensitive content protected while empowering users to be more productive while working remotely. This feature is available for Current and Monthly Enterprise channels following our channel release cadence.

• Expand your color palette with custom colors in Visio for the web: Until recently, Visio for web users were limited to Theme Colors, Standard Colors, and the option to change the transparency for objects in their diagram. With the addition of Recent Colors and More Colors, you can now quickly access recently used colors in your diagram or choose from a full spectrum of colors. View the Recent Colors and More Colors documentation for details.

Ensure your employees can be productive from day one

This month, we’re releasing new capabilities to help ensure you’re prepared for your employees to be working from new versions of Windows, Apple iOS, and macOS.

• Understand device readiness for Windows 11 with Endpoint analytics: With Windows 11 nearing release, you’ll need to know which of your devices are ready for an upgrade. The Endpoint analytics service in Microsoft Endpoint Manager offers a new Windows metric that helps you measure the number of devices running older versions of Windows, and then provides remediation steps to upgrade your Windows OS version.

The digital employee experience plays a huge role in overall satisfaction and productivity. Our Endpoint analytics service provides your organization with meaningful metrics and insights for measuring the quality of your users’ experience, while also helping you assess the performance and health of various endpoints managed by Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Learn more about Endpoint analytics and how the recent enhancements can help you assess digital employee experience.

• Manage iOS 15 and macOS 12 with Endpoint Manager on launch day: Apple announced several changes coming to iOS 15 and macOS 12 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2021. This month, we announced that Microsoft Endpoint Manager will be able to support many of your endpoint management needs on day zero release of the new versions of Apple’s operating system to help keep your endpoints secure and protect company data. You can learn more about these and other new iOS, iPadOS, and macOS endpoint management capabilities that can improve the experience of workers on the frontline and hybrid work environments. These updates are rolling out now in line with the rollout of the new Apple operating system and through the October 2021 release of Endpoint Manager.

Looking to the future

From the upcoming launch of Windows 11 to the updates in Microsoft Teams that help every attendee feel more included, we’re committed to supporting the work-from-anywhere model required for hybrid work. And there’s more to come. Our next blog will cover announcements from Microsoft Ignite, our biannual product announcement event, which we’ll be brought to you digitally this year.

¹ Work Trend Index, WorkLab, Microsoft. 2021.

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This month, we are continuing to build on our recent announcements, from making Windows 365 available to everyone to introducing new features in Microsoft Teams and across Microsoft 365 designed to empower your people to work from anywhere.

Let’s dive into the details.

Be productive from anywhere with Windows 365

At Inspire, we announced Windows 365, a cloud service that introduces a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when available). Now generally available, Windows 365 gives everyone, from interns and contractors to software developers and industrial designers, the agency to connect to their apps, data, and settings from any device. With Windows 365, you can begin working on a laptop at the kitchen table, pick up where you left off on a tablet in the car between appointments, and finish up on your desktop when you get to the office. Windows 365 is always ready for you to jump back in—even when you switch devices—and makes it easier for organizations to scale to meet annual busy periods by eliminating the logistical complexity and security challenges of issuing new hardware to seasonal workers.

Learn more about Windows 365 or sign up for your plan today.

Work together and personalize your Microsoft Teams meeting experience

This month, we’re introducing additional collaborative apps from our partners, a new Q&A app for Microsoft Teams, a new Communities app, and more.

Take notes and edit records right within Teams with new partner apps—Last month, we announced the general availability of new collaborative apps from our partners. Confluence Cloud by Atlassian in Teams is designed to enable more effective meetings where users can take notes with a Confluence notes panel inside a Teams meeting. Confluence makes team notes digestible and action-oriented and allows users to format notes such as action items, decisions, code snippets, mentions, and tables. These notes are then formatted and automatically shared in a Teams channel.

Salesforce for Teams is also now generally available. With this collaborative app, sales and service teams using Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud can bring account data and records into their Teams workspace for better collaboration and decision making. With the Salesforce for Teams app, users can pin Salesforce records to channels, chats, and calendar meetings to easily keep access to them—with an expanded set of supported Salesforce records, including Custom Objects.

Simplify virtual health workflows for your frontline healthcare workers—To help healthcare workers schedule and manage virtual appointments more effectively, we have added Microsoft Bookings with Microsoft Teams in all Microsoft 365 for frontline workers product licenses. For example, with the Bookings app in Microsoft Teams, healthcare workers can easily schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits for simple telehealth workflows. Microsoft 365 for frontline workers provides an attractive, low-cost licensing option for healthcare providers that are interested in using Teams to support virtual health and care team collaboration.

Add open or moderated Q&As to any Teams meeting—To help provide a more structured question and answer experience during larger meetings, we introduced the new Q&A app that enables attendees to ask and reply to questions before and during a meeting. Organizers and designated presenters can mark best answers, filter responses, moderate and dismiss questions, and pin posts. Responses to questions are threaded in a conversation with the original question. Designated presenters can act as co-moderators to help screen questions. The Q&A app will be generally available in September. To add Q&A to a meeting, simply add the app during the scheduling process.

Experience the new Communities app in Teams and Outlook for web—The Communities app for Microsoft Teams brings a full-fidelity community experience, powered by Yammer, into Microsoft Teams. In the coming weeks, we’re updating the app’s design, bringing enhancements to notifications and deep-linking, and adding new capabilities like suggested communities, which uses AI to recommend valuable communities to join.

We also announced the new Communities app for Outlook for the web. Starting next month, you will be able to engage in communities, participate in conversations and live events, and share knowledge openly with your peers without leaving the Outlook web app.

Build in breaks and stay on top of what’s most important

Research has shown that small breaks throughout the day make a big difference in employee wellbeing. This month, we are introducing new features in Outlook and Yammer to help ensure you can plan breaks as needed throughout your day and help you keep track of important messages and critical tasks.

Get a break with speedy events—With increased online meetings and many of us being more sedentary than we would like, it is important to take breaks throughout the day and stretch our legs. In April, we introduced speedy events, which automatically sets events to start “late” or end “early,” helping people carve out essential breaks between back-to-backs meetings. This month, we are expanding support to the new Outlook for Mac.

Pin your most important messages at the top of your inbox—With large inboxes and busy days, finding a specific email you read earlier can be tedious and disruptive to your workflow. We’ve added the ability to pin a message, moving it to the top of your inbox so it’s easy to find later. Pinned messages is now generally available to all users in Outlook for the web, Mac, and mobile.

Get reminders to take action on email messages you might have missed—Message reminders in Outlook on the web help you stay on top of things by bringing messages you might have missed to the top of your inbox so you can easily take action on it. Don’t worry, we don’t want to clutter your inbox so Outlook will only remind you of one message at a time. Log in to Outlook on the web to try it out.

Post on behalf of in Yammer—We also announced that users can now post on behalf of another user in Yammer. Once approval is granted, internal communicators to share news and updates as well as reply to comments on behalf of leaders and their teams. To get started, leaders and teams will first need to setup their delegate in their Yammer settings.

Increase productivity with new features in your favorite apps

This month, we introduced suggested attachments in Microsoft Planner and the ability to create shapes in Visio for the web.

Find your files more effectively with suggested attachments—Planner now supports suggested attachments in tasks. Now, when you want to add attachments to a task, Planner will show you a list of related files for you to select from. No more hunting through your folders, servers, or cloud storage to find the right file to attach. Suggested attachments in Planner automatically recommends files that you might want to attach to the plan, saving you time. To experience the new capability, within a task in Planner for the web, scroll down to the bottom of the task to find the Suggested attachments section and select Add next to the file you’d like to attach.

Create shapes in your diagrams in Visio for the web—Currently, when you select a shape to add to your diagram from the available shape sets, the shape is added with predetermined dimensions. You then have to resize the shape based on their requirements. To help, we’ve added the Draw Shape tool, enabling you to draw shapes, including rectangles, squares, lines, circles, and ellipses, at the size and location you prefer. To create a shape in your diagram from the Insert tab, select the Draw Shape drop-down, select the shape you want, click anywhere in the canvas, and then drag to draw the shape.

Tools for the future of hybrid work

Hybrid work is here. As organizations across the globe navigate the increased complexities of this once-in-a-generation shift in the way we work, we will continue to deliver innovation that enables people to be productive and feel included in this new world of work. 

From Windows 365, which enables people to stream all of their personalized applications, tools, data, and settings from the cloud across any device, to the Q&A app for Teams, all of these capabilities are designed to empower people in this new world of work. And this is all just the beginning. Stay tuned for more. 

The post From Windows 365 to Q&A in Microsoft Teams meetings—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A decade of continuous innovation

Since its launch a decade ago, Office 365 has grown to over 300 million commercial paid seats. Along the way, we have continuously re-invested to meet the changing needs of our customers. Four years ago, we introduced Microsoft 365 to bring together the best of Office, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). That same year we added Microsoft Teams as the only integrated solution where you can meet, chat, call, collaborate, and automate business processes—right in the flow of work.

In fact, since introducing Microsoft 365 we have added 24 apps¹ to the suites—Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Stream, Planner, Visio, OneDrive, Yammer, and Whiteboard—and have released over 1,400 new features and capabilities in three key areas.

1. Communication and collaboration. Microsoft Teams is the new front end across work, life, and learning for more than 250 million monthly active users. We launched Teams in 2017 as the only integrated solution where you can meet, chat, call, collaborate, and automate business processes—with the power of the Office apps—all within the flow of work. In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities including Together mode, background effects, large gallery view, raise hand, live reactions, breakout rooms, live captions with speaker attribution, and Fluid components, just to name a few.

We introduced a new category of collaborative applications in Teams, empowering people and organizations for hybrid work through deep integrations with Power Platform, Whiteboard, Lists, Planner, Shifts, Forms, and SharePoint. Companies like Adobe, Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday have built apps that deeply integrate with Teams, bringing business processes and functions directly into the flow of work.

We continue to innovate on both real-time and asynchronous collaboration. We introduced real-time collaboration in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint desktop apps while a growing set of capabilities like @mentions, assign tasks, modern comments, and auto-save have streamlined the collaboration experience. We’ve added and expanded OneDrive cloud storage and the Exchange Online mailboxes.

2. Security and compliance. The cybersecurity landscape is more complex than ever. With the accelerating volume, sophistication, and scale of cyberattacks, security and compliance are a priority for every organization. Since we first introduced Microsoft 365, we have added new attack surface reduction capabilities to help organizations defend against ransomware and other threats. We have added capabilities like data loss prevention (DLP) for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption to help keep important data within the organization. And we have added powerful compliance capabilities that help organizations reduce risk and respond to increasing regulatory requirements such as Content Search, eDiscovery, and core Litigation Hold. Built-in mobile device management (MDM) and other management tools like Microsoft Endpoint Manager help admins support remote and hybrid workforces.

3. AI and automation. Over the past decade, we have infused AI capabilities across our productivity and collaboration applications to help everyone achieve more. Across Microsoft 365, we have introduced AI-powered innovations to help users be better writers, designers, and presenters. Cloud-powered AI now automatically creates maps, charts, and tables in Excel, and sorts email and removes clutter in Outlook. And AI-powered real-time translation, captions, and transcription make collaboration and communication more accessible and engaging for everyone.

Extending audio conferencing capabilities

And today, we are announcing that we will add unlimited dial-in capabilities for Microsoft Teams meetings across our enterprise, business, frontline, and government suites over the next few months. Even as cloud connectivity increases, we know that people join Teams meetings while they are on the go or struggling with a bad internet connection. Currently included with Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5, we have come to see dial-in as an important part of the complete Teams experience. Available with subscription in over 70 countries and with interactive support in 44 languages and dialects, unlimited dial-in provides peace of mind that users will be able to join their Microsoft Teams meeting from virtually any device regardless of location.

New pricing

The pricing changes we are announcing today will go into effect in six months. On March 1, 2022, we will update our list pricing for the following commercial products: Microsoft 365 Business Basic (from $5 USD to $6 USD per user), Microsoft 365 Business Premium (from $ 20 USD to $ 22 USD), Office 365 E1 (from $8 USD to $10 USD), Office 365 E3 (from $20 USD to $23 USD), Office 365 E5 (from $35 USD to $38 USD), and Microsoft 365 E3 (from $32 USD to $36 USD). These increases will apply globally with local market adjustments for certain regions. There are no changes to pricing for education and consumer products at this time.

As leaders around the world look to empower their people for a more flexible, hybrid world of work, it’s clear that every organization will need a new operating model across people, places, and processes. We’re committed to building on the value we’ve delivered over the past decade to continuously provide innovation that helps our customers succeed and thrive today and well into the future.

¹At launch in June 2011, Office 365 included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Lync, Exchange, and InfoPath. We’ve since expanded to add other apps – in whole or in part – and entirely new capabilities including: Access, Bookings, Delve, Forms, GroupMe, Kaizala, Lens, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote Class Notebook, Planner, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Publisher, SharePoint, Staff Hub, Stream, Sway, Teams, To-Do, Visio, Whiteboard, and Yammer.

The post New pricing for Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

With 145 million daily active users (and growing) Microsoft Teams is where people start their day and stay in the flow of work. Over the past 18 months, people have come to rely on Teams to meet, chat, call, collaborate, and—increasingly—automate business processes. In a very real way, Teams has become the new front end for a new world of work. But empowering people for flexible work isn’t easy. Every organization will need to build a new operating model across people, places, and processes.

This year at Inspire, we shared three ways that we are innovating to create new categories for a new world of hybrid work with the Microsoft Cloud:

• A new Dynamics 365 + Microsoft Teams experience demonstrates the power of collaborative apps and enables organizations to activate this capability at no additional licensing cost.
• Windows 365, which takes the PC to the cloud, gives people the ability to connect to their content, applications, data, and settings without limiting them to any single device.
• New partner integrations with Microsoft Viva enhance the employee experience.

We’re also announcing additional innovations across Microsoft 365—including new security capabilities, new app monetization capabilities in the marketplace, and Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. In a changing world of work, these announcements bring opportunities for our partners and customers. Let’s take a look.

Collaborative apps: Activate the flow of work with Dynamics 365 in Teams

Hybrid work requires a new class of apps that surface in rich ways across all the places people work – within chat, channels, and meetings. These apps are a fusion of people and business process, and we call them simply “collaborative apps.” They also present an incredible opportunity for our partners to connect with the 145 million daily active users in Teams and expand their total addressable market.

Together, Dynamics 365 and Teams offer powerful new ways for everyone across an organization to seamlessly exchange and capture ideas right in the flow of work. Today we announced a new collaborative app that brings together the best of Dynamics 365 and Teams. We’re also eliminating the licensing tax that has historically held organizations back from this kind of integration, making these experiences available within Teams to any user, at no additional cost.

No other technology vendor offers this kind of integration and accessibility across the organization without the need to pay for multiple underlying software licenses.

View and edit Dynamics 365 records right within your Teams workflow

Dynamics 365 users can now invite anyone in the organization to view and collaborate on customer records right within the flow of a Teams chat or channel, ensuring the right individuals can take the next best action—faster and more efficiently without needing to switch context across multiple apps and data sources. For sellers, this includes sharing information like details on the sales opportunity, customer history, health of the customer relationship, key contacts, and more. For customer service representatives, this could include sharing the customer case record, sourcing troubleshooting steps, and tracking follow-up tasks.

Add a Teams meeting to appointments and capture notes

Dynamics 365 users can now add a Teams meeting when creating an appointment, enabling access to key customer information during a Teams call. Users can also capture notes directly with the Teams call, which is automatically saved in the timeline of the Dynamics 365 record. Only users with appropriate permissions can access the data, helping to ensure the most appropriate employees are viewing, interacting with, and sharing customer records. 

Stay up to date on records with automated notifications and connected workflows

With more employees collaborating on records, it’s critical for stakeholders to know when colleagues make key changes as they happen. Automatic notifications keep stakeholders alerted to updates. Users can select specific chats and channels through which notifications are sent, as well as the frequency of notifications. In addition, specific adaptive cards can be sent based on the notification type, enabling more connected workflows.  

Break down barriers with collaborative apps from our partners

Our new integrated experiences between Teams and Dynamics 365 represent just one example of a collaborative app. Today, we also announced a host of new and enhanced collaborative apps from market-leading independent software vendor (ISV) partners including Atlassian Confluence, SAP Sales Cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday. All these integrations bring structured business processes and data together into the context of collaborative work.

Manage your Teams app purchasing across the enterprise more easily

ISVs will also soon be able to sell their apps directly within Teams, offering new economic opportunities and providing a simplified experience for Teams IT admins to purchase apps and subscriptions directly from the Teams admin center on behalf of their organization.

Windows 365 Cloud PC: Hybrid Windows for a hybrid world

The past year has shown us the PC’s central role in keeping people connected, productive, and secure while they work, create, and learn. Last month, we introduced Windows 11, which reimages everything from the operating system to the store to provide real choice to users.

Today, we introduced Windows 365—a cloud service that offers a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when it becomes available later this year). From interns and contractors to software developers and industrial designers, Windows 365 gives users agency to connect to their apps, data, and settings from any device and any endpoint. It creates a new category called Cloud PC, which uses both the power of the cloud and the capabilities of the device to provide a full, personalized Windows experience, anywhere.

Log on to your Cloud PC from any device

With an instant-on boot experience, users can stream all their personalized applications, tools, data, and settings from the cloud across any device. The Windows experience—whether you’re using Windows 10 or the upcoming Windows 11 available later this year—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.

Provision Cloud PCs in minutes with no virtualization experience

A Cloud PC can be provisioned from the Microsoft Endpoint Manager dashboard. With provisioning policies, a group of Cloud PCs can be provisioned within minutes—including defining which version of Windows, assigning specific users or groups, and more.

Windows 365 is not just for enterprises; it has been designed to be approachable for businesses of all sizes. In fact, for small to medium-sized businesses, there are simple to use tools for helping citizen admins choose and configure their own cloud environments, ensuring everyone gets the opportunity to pick the right PC and bring the power of the cloud to their users.

Stay protected wherever you access your Cloud PC

Windows 365 is built on the principles of Zero Trust and is secure by design, helping solve today’s critical security challenges. Information is stored and secured in the cloud, not on the device. Windows 365 utilizes multifactor authentication (MFA) 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.

With Windows 365, you can bring collaborative apps, Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform—plus your security and identity credentials—with you anywhere, anytime. Access your Cloud PC no matter where you are—at home, the office, worksite, or on the go. Windows 365 will be generally available on August 2, 2021, and you can learn more in the Microsoft 365 blog from Wangui McKelvey.

Microsoft Viva: Employee experience in the flow of work

Microsoft Viva puts people at the center, connecting them to company information, communications, workplace insights, knowledge, and learning to help them achieve their very best. Powered by Microsoft 365, Viva is an employee experience platform designed to work with your existing solutions and can be easily customized and extended to be part of any company’s portfolio to help drive its culture transformation. Today, we shared new partnerships, development tools, research on employee experiences, and more. Read more about the news across the Microsoft Viva modules—Viva Learning, Viva Connections, and Viva Topics.  

Enrich your employee experience with new Viva partner integrations

Earlier this year, we announced a number of Viva partner integrations, ranging from content providers to learning management systems to wellbeing tools that make it easy for customers to connect employees with the solutions they use every day. Today, we announced 21 new partner integrations including Workday, Qualtrics, and ServiceNow. These partner integrations, in addition to the ones we announced earlier this year, will be available later this year.

Bring your solutions into Viva

We also introduced new tools to help our partners and developers integrate with, build on, and extend their solutions into Viva. Available later this year, Viva Connections APIs enable partners to integrate with the Viva Connections dashboard enhancing the discoverability and engagement of their tools directly within the Viva experience. Viva Learning APIs, available later this year as a preview, can be used to integrate content from learning providers, as well as due dates and assigned content from learning management systems where they can be accessed in Teams, Office.com, SharePoint, and Microsoft Search in Bing.

We are excited by the momentum we are seeing from our customers in their adoption of Viva. Customers like Old Mutual in collaboration with PwC are using Viva to empower managers to better understand employee behavior so they can foster a more inclusive and connected experience.

To help our partners build and market apps for Teams and Viva, we are also introducing a new set of benefits to build Microsoft 365 apps. These benefits include access to Microsoft technology, one-to-one consults with Microsoft experts to help our partners design, and build collaborative applications and employee experience solutions—marketing resources to scale to new customers, and support to achieve co-sell status to increase visibility with our 15,000 plus Microsoft field sellers.

As hybrid work becomes our new normal, ensuring your people feel engaged, achieve balance, and are empowered to be their best from anywhere is critical to success. In a recent study, we found that companies with best-in-class Employee Experience programs were 2.2 times more likely than peers to exceed financial targets and 5.1 times more likely to engage and retain employees. Read an executive summary of the report we commissioned with the Josh Bersin Academy for more information.

Secure your digital transformation

We are also empowering our partners to build trust with customers through new security offerings that prioritize inclusion, accessibility, and sustainability. Highlights are below—read our colleague Vasu Jakkal’s blog for full details.

Manage customers’ security posture at scale

We announced today that Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is entering preview. It provides managed service providers with one central location and standard security configuration templates to secure devices, data, and users for small and medium business customers that are using Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Specifically, Microsoft 365 Lighthouse empowers partners to quickly identify and act on threats, anomalous sign-in, and device compliance alerts. Reducing management complexity as our partners scale, and driving standardization across customers will allow partners to proactively manage risks and improve the security posture for the customers. You can learn more about Microsoft 365 Lighthouse in today’s Tech Community blog post.

Protect end customers against fraud

For partners who already help Azure AD business-to-consumer (B2C) customers manage identity and access for their customer apps, we are extending the scope of protection to include fraudulent activities by integrating Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection with Azure AD B2C.

Get visibility across more applications

We have built the app governance add-on feature to Microsoft Cloud App Security, entering preview today. Partners, who already manage Microsoft Cloud App Security for customers, can use app governance to monitor, protect, and govern Microsoft 365 apps and quickly identify, alert, and prevent risky behaviors.

Identify risky activities for users with critical positions

We extended the priority user group capability in Insider Risk Management to include fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC), now also in preview. It adds permissions to priority user groups to further limit alerts and cases to specific individuals instead of the whole group.

Customize regulatory assessments to fit unique requirements

New universal regulatory templates for non-Microsoft cloud in Compliance Manager enable partners to utilize the more than 300 templates available to manage customers’ compliance posture across different clouds and apps.

The future of work

As we emerge from this time of incredible challenges, we are optimistic that together we can empower people across the world for the flexible work of the future. We see an era ahead where people can have breakfast with the kids and quickly catch up on any missed meetings. Where organizations of all sizes—from a locally owned bike shop to a massive multinational corporate—can harness the full power of the cloud, from anywhere. And where every employee feels included and engaged, whether they’re working onsite, remotely, or some combination of the two.

The post From collaborative apps in Microsoft Teams to Windows 365—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365 at Inspire appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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.

Nearly every day, my team sits down with organization leaders and partners from across the world who are doing the hard work to ready their people for the coming future of work. Naturally, in these meetings, we are often asked: What is Microsoft doing? And the first thing I tell them is: Just like you, we’re learning as we go—studying data, listening to our employees, and responding with agility to what works and what doesn’t. Because a growth mindset is the key to charting a path forward in any moment of uncertainty. 

There’s no doubt that this shift to a more flexible approach to work will be an enormous undertaking for every leader and every organization. That is certainly true for us as we create a plan to implement a hybrid work model for our more than 160,000 employees across the globe. We know that no one person or organization will have all the answers, but we believe that, as part of a growth mindset, each of us will be better off if we share what we’re learning with each other. 

Two new resources for navigating the shift to hybrid work

That’s why we recently released two resources that detail what we’re learning as we adopt a hybrid work model at Microsoft, in hopes that we can help you create the hybrid work plan that best fits your organization. At their core, these resources reflect our belief that leaders will need to come together to create a new, flexible operating model—spanning people, places, and processes—to fundamentally rewire their organization for hybrid work.  

The first resource I want to point you to is our Hybrid Workplace Flexibility Guide—which we originally created for Microsoft employees. In it, you’ll find sample team agreements, templates, and tools for hybrid work. There are also detailed plans that encompass everything from strategies to keep your people healthy, to exact roadmaps for how to help divide your people’s time between a physical or remote workplace. And there’s much more to come soon. 

The second is called Hybrid Work: A Guide for Business Leaders, and it wraps up much of what we’ve learned about how to reimagine people, places, and processes for a hybrid world. Here’s a quick summary of the highlights:

People 

To help people thrive in a more flexible work world we need to rethink the entire employee experience—from creating culture to attracting and retaining talent and building listening systems. Every organization needs a plan and policies that put us on the path to extreme flexibility and help us build digital empathy into every aspect of our culture. At Microsoft, we’re giving employees a clear flexible work policy—any employee can work remotely up to 50 percent of the time. We’re also we’re building privacy-backed listening systems to capture digital signals with tools including Workplace Analytics, part of Viva Insights, which lets managers and leaders check in on the wellbeing of their teams and organizations empowering managers and leaders to “hire talent from everywhere” and create their own team norms.

Places

Our approach to places hinges on bridging the gap between the physical and digital, and evolving with employee needs. This starts with putting employee safety first. For instance, we’re analyzing data from multiple inputs across public and private sources in a Microsoft Power BI dashboard to determine when people should be allowed at the worksite and how many. And we’re using a simple app built with Power Apps to help employees self-attest to their health and wellbeing when they come into the office.  

And when it comes to meeting spaces, we’re turning our pre-pandemic design philosophy on its head and designing for the people not in the room. By combining new design patterns with Microsoft Teams Rooms innovations, we’re giving everyone a seat at the table so they can fully participate, no matter where they are. 

Processes

The shift to hybrid work gives business leaders a rare opportunity to transform key business processes in bold new ways. If you’re thinking of the next few months simply as “a return to the office,” you’re missing the big picture. Instead, take some time to identify and prioritize digital transformation processes that leverage and scale what you’ve learned over the last year. If you don’t, your competitors will. The winners of the future are being decided today.   

At Microsoft, we’re taking the opportunity to reimagine our key business processes—from operations to sales. For example, we’re transforming our inside sales team; using Microsoft Power Platform—Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Apps—to automate order-to-cash; and investing in a centralized Global Demand Center to increase lead gen and customer engagement through automated digital marketing. 

There’s a lot more on what we’re learning, and what we’re changing, in the guide, and I’d encourage you to download it to get all the details.  

The thing I love most about the growth mindset is that it encourages you to be open to the best ideas—no matter where they come from. I’m excited to share these two resources with you and hope that they’ll be useful for you. But I’m even more excited to hear about what you’re learning on your journey. Together, we have the opportunity to create a new world of work that can be better for everyone.

More to come soon.

The post How Microsoft approaches hybrid work: A new guide to help our customers 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.

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. 

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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.

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Earlier today, we announced new capabilities that enable customers to unlock the value of Microsoft 365 even if they rely on shared workstations or devices that must be offline for months at a time. We also reviewed new management capabilities that have come to Microsoft 365 over the past 18 months to help IT admins ensure their businesses are secure, and their people can work with confidence from anywhere. And now, I’m pleased to provide an update on Microsoft Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), the next perpetual release of Office. A commercial preview of Microsoft Office LTSC will be available in April.

A specialty product for specific scenarios

We have built Office LTSC for a limited set of specific situations: regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems that must stay locked in time and require a long-term servicing channel.

We expect that most customers who use Office LTSC won’t do it across their entire organization, but only in specific scenarios. The good news is that you can deploy both Office LTSC and the Microsoft 365 version of Office with the same deployment tools.

About this release

With this release, we will bring Office and Windows into alignment in support of the same limited scenarios. Both Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will remain governed by the Fixed Lifecycle Policy. Both products will be supported for five years, and both the next perpetual version of Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will be released in the second half of this calendar year.

Without access to the cloud, Office LTSC will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 Apps, building on the features included in past releases. New Office LTSC features will include accessibility improvements, capabilities like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, dark mode support across multiple apps, and performance improvements across Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. The next version of Office will not ship with the Skype for Business client app, which will be available as a download in the Microsoft Download Center. It will ship with the Microsoft Teams app, allowing customers to enable and trial this experience if they so choose.

In contrast, Microsoft 365 will continue to get the latest innovations in modern collaboration, advanced security, and intelligent capabilities and ship them as soon as they are available.

As with previous releases, Office LTSC will still be a device-based “perpetual” license. We designed it as a specialty product intended for specific scenarios and will increase the price of Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and the individual apps by up to 10 percent at the time of general availability. And, because we are always asked at release if there will be another one, I’m happy to confirm our commitment to another release in the future.

We will provide additional information about the next version of on-premises Visio, Project, Exchange Server, Skype for Business Server, Project Server, and SharePoint Server in the coming months.

Office 2021 for consumers and small businesses

We also plan to release Office 2021 for personal and small business use later this year. Office 2021 will also be supported for five years with the traditional “one-time purchase” model. We do not plan to change the price for these products at the time of the release. We will announce more details about new features included in Office 2021 closer to general availability.

Our commitment to customers

To fuel the work of the future, we need the power of the cloud. The cloud is where we invest, where we innovate, where we discover the solutions that help our customers empower everyone in their organization—even as we all adjust to a new world of work. But we also acknowledge that some of our customers need to enable a limited set of locked-in-time scenarios, and these updates reflect our commitment to helping them meet this need.

FAQ

Q. Will the next version of Office have a Mac version?

A. Yes, the next version of Office will have both Windows and Mac versions for both commercial and consumer.

Q. Will the next version of Office include OneNote?

A. Yes, the next version of Office will ship with the OneNote app.

Q. Will the next version support both 32- and 64-bit?

A. Yes, the next version of Office will ship both 32- and 64-bit versions.

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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.

Before I get to this month’s product news, I want to point out some new resources that support this effort. Recently, we published a webpage called Resilience at work to help demonstrate how Microsoft solutions can help you strengthen resilience in people, teams, and your broader organization. We also published a Remote teamwork guide to share how you can enable your people to be productive and secure from anywhere with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. And earlier this week, we launched WorkLab, a digital publication devoted to illuminating the future of work, grounded in research and the lessons of the pandemic a year in. Be sure to check all three resources out and let us know what you think.

Okay, on to the news!

Breakout rooms, Tasks publishing, Approvals, and more in Microsoft Teams

New announcements in Microsoft Teams make it easy for everyone to engage in large meetings, help connect organizations, empower frontline retail workers, and more.

Help people to connect meaningfully in large virtual meetings—We’re excited to announce that one of our most requested Microsoft Teams features is now generally available! Breakout rooms make it easy to divide your meetings into smaller groups to facilitate discussions, brainstorming sessions, and learning groups. Organizers can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. All meeting assets, including meeting files, whiteboards, recordings, and transcripts are available for the organizer to review and use.

Connect your organization from the corporate office to the frontlines with Tasks publishing—With the new publishing feature for Tasks in Teams, customers can now drive consistent execution of tasks at scale across all of an organization’s locations. Corporate and regional leadership can create and send tasks to configurable relevant locations—including specific retail stores—and track their progress through automatic real-time reports. Managers have tools to easily direct activities within their stores, and frontline workers have a simple prioritized list showing them exactly what to do next. Tasks targeting, publishing, and reporting are now generally available. To set Tasks up in your organization, visit our documentation page for setting up your team targeting hierarchy.

Unify workforce management in Microsoft Teams through our new partnerships—We are excited to announce new workforce management capabilities with our partners, Blue Yonder and Reflexis. With this new integration, Microsoft Teams can now provide a richer, more unified workforce management experience, enabling employees to see and swap shifts, review their schedules, make changes, and more, without ever having to leave Teams.

Track and manage approvals right within Microsoft Teams to get faster results—Now generally available, Approvals lets you easily create, manage, and share approvals right in Teams. Quickly start an approval flow from the same place you send a chat, in a channel conversation, or from the Approvals app itself. Just select an approval type, add details, attach files, and choose approvers. Once submitted, approvals can be reviewed and responded to as needed. Install the Approvals app today to get started.

Simplify tasks, lists, and functions

New capabilities help make it easier to prioritize and organize tasks, access lists on the go, and use custom functions in Microsoft Excel workbooks.

Take your lists anywhere with the Lists mobile app for iOS—A new Lists mobile app for iOS now provides you access to your lists with full functionality from your iPhone. This new experience makes it easier than ever to open an existing list for quick reference, add or edit list items as you think of them, or create a new list from scratch or a ready-made template. Download the app now from the Apple App Store.

Manage your tasks more easily with intelligence—Available to To Do web English users, Microsoft To Do will use AI to help you plan your day better and focus on tasks that matter to you. AI in To Do will help identify tasks that seem important based on keywords and deadlines and suggest them in My Day to ensure that you stay on top of your key tasks and get more done each day. Get started with Microsoft To Do today. 

Turn Excel formulas into custom functions: Our new LAMBDA function makes it easy to convert your formulas into re-usable functions. Turn formulas into custom functions with unique names that can be easily re-used throughout your spreadsheet. Join the Office Insider Program and choose the Beta Channel to get early access to LAMBDA in Excel.

Create beautiful diagrams

Visio capabilities bring new and familiar icons to your diagrams.

Insert icons into your Visio files and more—This month, we’re announcing a couple of updates you’ve been asking for! First, you can now access a rich content library of icons and images that you can easily insert directly into your Visio diagrams. Rotate, recolor, and resize the selected content with no loss of image quality. This feature is available in both Visio for the web and the Visio desktop app. Second, you can now easily adjust the size of a page to fit your Visio drawing. The Fit to Drawing feature is now available in Visio for the web.

Visually represent your Azure architectural diagram using the latest shapes in Visio—Representing your infrastructure architecture through a diagram can be invaluable to your team during redesigns, implementations, documentation, and more. Two years ago, we added Azure shapes in Visio, making it easy to build diagrams for network topologies, virtual machine configurations, operations, and more. We are excited to announce that we have now released more than 250 of the latest Azure shapes. These refreshed icons are better aligned with the Microsoft Fluent design and let you create IT diagrams that accurately represent modern cloud services, tools, and frameworks from Azure. To get started, go to the Visio web app homepage and select your preferred diagram template to quickly start visualizing your Azure infrastructure. In the desktop app, select File > New > Templates > Network > Azure Diagrams.

Also new this month

Application Guard, which helps desktop users stay safer and more productive by opening Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files in a virtualized container, is now generally available for everyone with Microsoft E5 or E5 Security subscriptions.

From helping everyone engage in larger virtual Teams meetings with breakout rooms to enabling a more unified workforce management experience with a new partnership to helping you stay focused and in the flow with AI in To Do, all of these experiences were designed to help empower your people for the new world of work. And stay tuned—we’ve got all sorts of exciting announcements coming your way in the next few weeks.

The post From breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams to AI in To Do—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in January appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This month, we’re thrilled to announce that many of your top requested features—like background noise suppression in meetings—are coming to Teams and other Microsoft 365 services. Read on for details on those, plus the highly anticipated Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention and other new features across Microsoft 365 to help make it easier to pick up where you left off, keep track of your notes and tasks more easily, sketch out Amazon Web Services (AWS) application architectures in Visio for the web, and more.

New apps, noise suppression, and more for Teams

This month, we’re announcing the general availability of Teams apps for meetings, expanded Forms integration, and new capabilities that make it easier to build apps and bots right within Teams.

Enrich your meeting experience with Teams apps—Typically, collaborating with an app during a meeting required someone sharing their screen while they updated tasks, set reminders, managed requests, and more. This month, we’re excited to announce that you can now bring the capabilities of many of these apps directly into the meeting experience for everyone to interact with, making the time your team spends together more effective and collaborative before, during, and after your meetings. Checkout the new Teams apps for meetings now available in the Teams app store, including Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect (with more on the way), as well as familiar apps built by Microsoft such as Forms. If you’re a partner or developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings in our documentation.

Quickly gather feedback in Teams meetings with polls—Polls are a great way to turn passive listeners into active participants. Forms’ integration with Microsoft Teams now brings the power of polls to meetings, helping you conduct more engaging, informative, and productive meetings. Meeting presenters can prepare polls in advance and launch the polls during meetings that attendees can easily view and answer. The new Forms polls for meetings is currently rolling out and will reach you soon. You can get started by updating your Teams app and adding the Forms app to your meeting tabs.

Remove unwelcome background noise in Teams meetings—Earlier this year, we released the ability to minimize distracting background noise in videos on Microsoft Stream. We are excited to share that we’re bringing this technology to Teams meetings. This real-time noise suppression will help remove unwelcome background noise during your meetings, making easier to hear speakers in loud and distracting environments. Noise suppression is rolling out to all users now.

Automate routine tasks without leaving Teams—Also new this month is the Power Automate app for Teams. The app provides a lightweight designer experience and a number of templates to help you quickly get started building workflows right within Teams. This new app makes it even quicker and easier to automate routine tasks within Teams. To get started, make sure you’re running the latest version of Teams.

Easily build and deploy apps and intelligent chat bots in Teams—In September, we announced a new Power Apps and a new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams, running on a built-in low code data platform, now called Microsoft Dataverse for Teams— making it easy for creators to quickly build and deploy apps and bots for Teams—now those apps are generally available. Teams users can easily build applications and bots directly within Teams without needing to deal with connecting to storage, managing integrations, or switching applications. Dataverse for Teams makes the back-end tech logistics of creating and deploying business process solutions in Teams easier than ever. Built-in security and governance features provide seamless control of access to apps, bots, and flows, as well as their underlying data.

Find and share information more quickly

New capabilities help make it easier to find notes while working across Microsoft 365, capture and share content, and pick up where you left off.

Easily reference your notes when working on a OneNote page—Last month, we announced the OneNote feed for Outlook on the web, which conveniently combines your notes across Sticky Notes, recent OneNote pages, and even Samsung Notes so you can easily reference them while composing your mail. This makes it easy to reference your notes when working in a OneNote page and capture any new thoughts you have by creating a Sticky Note in your feed without having to leave OneNote. The OneNote feed is available in OneNote, OneNote on the web, OneNote for Windows 10, Outlook on the web, and Outlook.com. To get started in OneNote, click the Open feed icon in the top right corner of the OneNote app window to display the feed pane.

Capture and share web content and more in Microsoft Edge—This month, we released two new features to help make you more productive and find information more easily. First, Web capture in Microsoft Edge lets you easily capture and mark up web content, and then save or share it—simply drag a box to select what you want to capture even if you need to scroll. Second, we’ve added news and information from your favorite content providers in a new “My Feed” section within the enterprise new tab page. This customizable feed sits alongside your Office 365 content and is designed to keep you connected to information most relevant to your industry or your company.

Quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and more in OneDrive for iOS—A new home experience on the iOS mobile app for OneDrive will help you quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and easily re-discover memories from the past. Plus, you can now add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen that displays your photo memories on this day across previous years. See your recent files and On This Day photos as soon as you open the OneDrive app. To get started, update your OneDrive iOS app.

OneDrive family and group sharing now available

OneDrive family and group sharing now available—OneDrive has always made it easy to share docs, photos, videos, albums, and folders. But until now, sharing to a group of people meant typing in the names of all the people you wanted to share with. Last month, we simplified the process with one-click sharing to family and groups. Once you predefine your family or friend group, you’ll be able to share a photo, album, or important document to your group with one click. Family and group sharing are available in OneDrive for the web and included in all free and paid OneDrive consumer plans, as well in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans.

Hear Office documents read aloud to you on Android phones—As you move through your busy day, sometimes it’s easier to hear your document read aloud to you. Now you can use Read Aloud to do exactly that in Word for Android phone and in Word on the Office app for Android. New voices offer a more natural and pleasant listening experience. You can easily pause and resume Read Aloud as well as adjust the voice speed. To get started, open the Word or Office app on your Android phone, go to the Review tab, then tap Read Aloud.

Get Yammer notifications in your Teams activity feed and more—This month, we’re announcing several new and upcoming features in Yammer. Coming soon, notifications from your Yammer announcements and mentions will show up in your Microsoft Teams activity feed if you have the Communities app installed. We’re also now rolling out an updated experience in the Yammer Tab for Teams that brings modern capabilities like pinning, cover photos, live events, and more. Finally, also released this month is support for Yammer Q and A insights in Microsoft Productivity Score, an interactive guide to get the most out of Yammer, and an updated experience for topics and hashtags in Yammer.

Prevent data loss and diagram your IT solutions

New capabilities make it easier to prevent data loss on endpoints and sketch out IT solutions build on ASW.

Protect sensitive information on your endpoints—In July, we announced the public preview of Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP) which extends our data protection capabilities to devices. Now generally available, Endpoint DLP enables organizations to enforce policies that identify and prevent risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer, or use of sensitive information consistently across cloud, on-premises, and endpoints. We’re also adding new capabilities to a public preview based on feedback from customers—such as adding enforcement actions and locations-based sensitivity, a new dashboard in Microsoft 365 compliance center to manage DLP alerts, and more.

Watch this mechanics video or visit our documentation to learn more.

Sketch your Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture in Visio for the web—Diagrams are a great way for cloud architects to visualize the design, deployment, and topology of IT solutions built on AWS. We’re excited to announce that we’ve added support to build AWS diagrams for various topologies and service interactions in Visio for the web. More than 400 shapes are available to help architects redesign existing infrastructure diagrams, conceptualize application architecture, or visualize the current state of your cloud environment and plan for the future. To help you get started easily, we’ve provided a few starter diagrams using various AWS services. Go to the Visio web app homepage and select your preferred diagram template to quickly start visualizing your AWS infrastructure.

As you continue your navigation to a more sustainable, hybrid workplace, we are committed to developing technologies that help your people and teams thrive. From building low code apps right within Teams to new AI capabilities to help you manage tasks more easily, all of these updates are aimed at enabling your people to collaborate productively, securely, and safely from anywhere.

The post From new apps in Microsoft Teams meetings to Endpoint DLP—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in November appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Una nota para los desarrolladores antes de empezar: Tanto si creas tus propias aplicaciones o soluciones diseñadas para usarse en Microsoft Teams como en Outlook, tenemos toda una gama de innovaciones para ti. En Build esta semana, anunciamos muchas nuevas funciones que puedes usar para que tus aplicaciones estén más integradas y sen más eficaces e intuitivas. También presentamos nuevas herramientas de administración y para desarrolladores que facilitan aún más la creación y la detectabilidad. Obtén más información sobre todas las nuevas oportunidades para desarrolladores con la plataforma de Microsoft 365 anunciada en Build. ¡Comencemos!

Noticias de Build 2020

Microsoft Teams

Teams es el centro de trabajo en equipo que combina reuniones, llamadas, chat y colaboración en una única herramienta que conserva el contexto y mantiene al día a todos los usuarios.

Productividad

Desde plantillas personalizadas hasta nuevas funciones de tareas, presentamos nuevas modalidades para ser más productivos en Teams.

Crea equipos rápidamente con plantillas personalizables. Al crear un nuevo equipo, pronto podrás elegir entre una variedad de plantillas personalizables. Elige entre escenarios empresariales comunes, como la administración de eventos y la respuesta ante crisis, así como plantillas específicas de cada sector, como una sala de hospital o una sucursal bancaria. Cada plantilla se proporciona con canales, aplicaciones y directrices predefinidas. Los administradores también podrán crear nuevas plantillas personalizadas y convertir en plantillas a sus equipos existentes en la organización, para que puedan estandarizar las estructuras del equipo, exponer las aplicaciones relevantes y escalar los procedimientos recomendados. Las plantillas en Teams se implementarán en los próximos meses y aparecerán automáticamente.

Automatización

Nos complace anunciar mejoras en Power Platform que facilitarán la integración y la escalabilidad con Teams.

Crea y administra fácilmente bots de chat en Teams. La integración con Teams también es más fácil que nunca: solo tienes que seleccionar el bot que quieres usar y, después, hacer clic en Agregar a Teams. Para mayor comodidad, Power Virtual Agents ahora es compatible con el inicio de sesión único (SSO), de modo que los usuarios ya no tendrán que volver a autenticarse cuando usen Teams por primera vez.

Agrega rápidamente aplicaciones personalizadas y flujos de trabajo automatizados a Teams. Los desarrolladores y administradores pronto podrán agregar sus aplicaciones personalizadas de Power Apps a Teams con un solo clic en el botón Agregar a Teams. Para empezar, abre make.powerapps.com, haz clic en “…” junto a la aplicación de lienzo que deseas publicar y selecciona Agregar a Teams.

Mientras tanto, las nuevas plantillas de procesos de negocio de Power Automate para Teams permitirán a los creadores simplificar los flujos de trabajo mediante plantillas predefinidas o como una base para personalizar las suyas. Por último, gracias a las nuevas acciones y desencadenadores específicos de Teams podrás crear extensiones de mensajes personalizadas, automatizar las @menciones y el registro de mensajes en los canales, así como personalizar los nombres de los bots. Estas características estarán disponibles próximamente.

Compartir informes de Power BI en Teams. Los usuarios de Power BI ya pueden compartir informes, o gráficos específicos de los informes, en Teams con el nuevo botón Compartir en Teams. Los remitentes también pueden dirigir la atención del destinatario a un gráfico específico en un informe o compartirlo con todo el equipo. Para empezar, selecciona Enviar a Teams en el portal de Power BI y escribe el nombre del equipo con el que deseas compartirlo.

Reuniones y eventos

En distintas zonas horarias y escenarios de distanciamiento social, las organizaciones necesitan conectarse y colaborar en reuniones grandes y pequeñas. Las nuevas funciones de Teams te ayudan a diseñar la mejor experiencia para cada ocasión.

Programa citas virtuales a través de Bookings en Teams. Las organizaciones ahora podrán programar, administrar y realizar citas virtuales de negocio a consumidor mediante la nueva integración de la aplicación de Bookings en Microsoft Teams. Con una sola experiencia de programación, puedes administrar varios departamentos o ubicaciones y hospedar de forma segura desde entrevistas a candidatos y horas de oficina de estudiantes hasta consultas financieras y visitas médicas. Teams es compatible con el cumplimiento de HIPAA y está certificado por HITRUST. Solo en el caso de la atención médica, hubo más de 34 millones de reuniones de Teams en el último mes, incluidas las visitas virtuales. Actualmente, puedes descubrir cómo Microsoft Cloud para la atención médica hará que sea más fácil para las organizaciones mantenerse ágiles y centrarse en lo que mejor hacen: ofrecer mejores experiencias, información y cuidados.

Difunde eventos y crea producciones de estudio desde una fase virtual en Teams. Con tantas organizaciones que trabajan de forma remota, y con el récord más bajo de viajes, ¿cómo puedes volver a crear la magia de una presentación en persona o una entrevista para un público remoto en su totalidad? Presentamos la nueva compatibilidad con la interfaz de dispositivo de red (NDI) y la interoperabilidad de Skype TX para Teams. Ofrece un conjunto más avanzado de opciones de producción para difusiones públicas y privadas, personalizadas y de alta escala.

Próximamente, NDI para Microsoft Teams transformará una reunión de Teams en una fase virtual convirtiendo el video de cada participante en un origen de video discreto que se puede usar en la herramienta de producción de tu elección: OBS, Wirecast, XSplit y StreamLabs, entre otras. Esta funcionalidad permite usar reuniones de Teams de otras maneras, como el hospedaje de una difusión profesional.

Programación segura y remota

Turnos permite que los trabajadores de primera línea y sus directores utilicen dispositivos móviles para administrar horarios y mantenerse en contacto.

Amplía la aplicación Turnos de Teams. Las nuevas funciones de la aplicación Turnos amplían la funcionalidad y permiten la integración con sistemas existentes. En primer lugar, las API de Graph para Turnos ya están disponibles con carácter general, por lo que se pueden integrar con cualquier otra herramienta externa de administración de personal, incluidos los sistemas de administración de personal personalizados. Además, las nuevas acciones de Power Automate permiten a los desarrolladores tomar información de Turnos y crear flujos de trabajo personalizados con otras aplicaciones o realizar operaciones a gran escala. Por último, los nuevos desencadenadores y plantillas permiten admitir una gran variedad de escenarios de optimización de procesos que ahorran tiempo, como la habilitación de aprobaciones automáticas para las solicitudes de turno en escenarios donde no se necesita la aprobación del director.

Fluid Framework

En Ignite 2019, anunciamos la versión preliminar pública de Microsoft Fluid Framework, nuestra nueva tecnología y conjunto de experiencias diseñadas para facilitar la colaboración al romper barreras entre las aplicaciones.

Colabora con áreas de trabajo y componentes de Fluid en Outlook y Office.com. Fluid Framework está en un proceso para que el trabajo sea más adaptable y enfocado. Las primeras integraciones de Fluid Framework en Microsoft 365, que se incluirán en Outlook y Office.com, te permitirán colaborar en contenido dinámico y crear componentes conectados que se puedan compartir de forma simultánea y perfecta entre distintas aplicaciones. Se pueden insertar fácilmente tablas, gráficos y listas de tareas en Outlook para la web, por lo que los números de ventas, las tareas de proyecto y los informes de investigación siempre están actualizados. En Office.com, se pueden crear y administrar áreas de trabajo de Fluid, incluso dentro de la fuente de actividades del documento, la lista de recomendaciones y las @menciones, o bien se pueden buscar en Office.com. Y, dado que los componentes de Fluid Framework son ligeros, los cambios son instantáneos y permiten hacer el trabajo de manera rápida y flexible. Estas experiencias estarán disponibles para los usuarios con una licencia de Microsoft 365 Enterprise en los próximos meses.

Usa la infraestructura clave de Fluid Framework (ahora de código abierto) en tus aplicaciones. El marco basado en web de Fluid se puede usar para hacer que tus aplicaciones sean de colaboración en un instante. Incluye estructuras de datos que realizan la sincronización de baja latencia y un servicio de retransmisión para conectar puntos de conexión. Si reemplazas las estructuras de datos estáticas con estructuras de datos de Fluid, la aplicación permite la colaboración en tiempo real de forma instantánea.

Detectar todo el potencial de Fluid Framework solo puede lograrse gracias a la creación de una comunidad de desarrolladores diversa, abierta y vibrante. Por este motivo, Microsoft hará que Fluid Framework pase a ser código abierto, para que los desarrolladores y creadores puedan usar una infraestructura clave de Fluid Framework en sus propias aplicaciones. Junto con el lanzamiento de las herramientas y documentación adicional para desarrolladores, esto supone una invitación para que los desarrolladores puedan colaborar con Microsoft en la creación y el lanzamiento de Fluid Framework.

Project Cortex

Presentamos Project Cortex en Ignite 2019 y ahora nos complace anunciar que estará disponible con carácter general a principios del verano de 2020. Este servicio nuevo y eficaz aplica la inteligencia artificial (IA) y Microsoft Graph para crear una red de conocimientos que conecta el contenido de Microsoft 365, junto con los orígenes externos, para organizar el contenido y los conocimientos entre sistemas y equipos. Además, podrás administrar tu información y optimizar los procesos con controles de seguridad y cumplimiento avanzados, junto con los flujos de trabajo automatizados.

Trabaja con nuevas herramientas para desarrolladores ahora en la versión preliminar privada. Hoy presentamos nuevas API para desarrolladores de Project Cortex y los servicios de metadatos administrados (MMS) en Microsoft Graph, junto con la nueva integración con los servicios de Language Understanding en Azure. Actualmente, nuestro programa de versión preliminar privada se ha ampliado para incluir más de 75 organizaciones que ofrecen conocimientos de millones de documentos y videos, incluidos Unilever, Arla Foods y Siemens Healthineers. Te mantendremos al tanto de los nuevos hitos que se logren.

Outlook

En todo el mundo, nuestros clientes dependen de Outlook para organizar sus días y mantenerse en contacto. Las nuevas funciones les permiten hacer más cosas con la aplicación para ser más productivos.

Guarda pulsaciones de teclas en Outlook. Ahora, Outlook en la Web puede ayudar a redactar mensajes de correo con predicción de texto. Mediante el uso de tecnología inteligente para inferir el significado y la intención, Outlook puede ayudarte a redactar más rápido, evitar errores tipográficos y elaborar mensajes de correo pulidos.

Mantente al día con Yammer en Outlook. En Outlook para Windows, Outlook para Mac y Outlook Mobile ya es posible ver y responder a las conversaciones de Yammer, sondeos, preguntas y elogios sin tener que salir de la bandeja de entrada. Esta característica estará disponible de forma automática para los usuarios que tengan activadas las notificaciones por correo de Yammer.

Microsoft Edge

Este año en Build, anunciamos varias funciones nuevas en Microsoft Edge que agregan opciones de personalización y herramientas mejoradas para los desarrolladores web.

Explora rápidamente las colecciones relevantes de Pinterest. Pinterest ya puede ofrecer sugerencias en la parte inferior de tu colección, lo que te facilitará la búsqueda de más contenido similar. Al hacer clic en una sugerencia, se abrirá un panel de marcadores populares similares para que puedas encontrar rápidamente ideas relevantes para ti. Pronto las colecciones también serán compatibles con la función “Enviar a OneNote” para que te resulte más fácil exportar colecciones a las páginas de OneNote.

Ahorra tiempo en tus búsquedas. También presentamos la búsqueda de barra lateral para que puedas buscar cosas sin tener que abrir una nueva ventana o pestaña. Y para las personas que utilizan Microsoft Edge tanto para trabajar como para su uso personal, nos complace presentar la función de cambio de perfil automático, que detectará que el vínculo que intentas abrir necesita credenciales de trabajo y te pasará a tu perfil de trabajo autenticado.

Consulta las opciones ampliadas para desarrolladores durante la versión preliminar. Puesto que adoramos a los desarrolladores, estamos ampliando la versión preliminar con nuevas opciones para el desarrollo de .NET y UWP (WinUI 3.0), que permitirán insertar una vista web de Microsoft Edge basada en Chromium en las aplicaciones de WinForms, WPF y UWP/Win UI 3.0. También agregamos una vista 3D en DevTools. Consulta nuestra guía de introducción y la documentación o simplemente abre Visual Studio y descarga el paquete de WebView2 para empezar.

Microsoft Lists

Microsoft Lists es la aplicación de seguimiento de información inteligente en Microsoft 365. Con Lists, puedes realizar fácilmente un seguimiento de tus datos e información para mantenerte al día del estado más reciente.

Realiza un seguimiento de la información con Microsoft Lists. Ya puedes crear, compartir y realizar un seguimiento de tus datos e información (como el seguimiento de problemas e informes de estado), directamente desde Microsoft Teams, SharePoint y la aplicación móvil de Lists que se lanzará próximamente. Las listas resultan fáciles de crear y personalizar para todos los usuarios con plantillas, codificación en colores, flujos de trabajo If/Then y mucho más. Obtén más información sobre Microsoft Lists.

En estos tiempos de cambio sin precedentes, todos nos estamos adaptando rápidamente a una nueva era de trabajo. Desde desarrolladores de software hasta profesionales de la salud, equipos de primera respuesta de la administración pública y altos ejecutivos de las empresas multinacionales, todos están buscando nuevas modalidades para mantenerse productivos y conectados, independientemente de si trabajan juntos o separados. Las características y mejoras que anunciamos hoy están diseñadas para apoyar los increíbles logros de nuestros clientes en todo el mundo. Nuestro compromiso es continuar creando herramientas que mantengan en movimiento el trabajo de todo el mundo, a lo largo de esta crisis y después.

The post De Microsoft Teams a Fluid Framework: estas son las próximas novedades en Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Este mes, disponemos de nuevas características y funcionalidades para ayudarte a mantener tu empresa en movimiento durante la epidemia de COVID-19 y más allá. Las nuevas funcionalidades de Microsoft Teams, por ejemplo, permiten alojar reuniones online más efectivas, inclusivas y centradas en ofrecer soluciones virtuales para las consultas personalizadas. Un sitio de administración de crisis en SharePoint permite a la organización compartir información rápidamente durante las emergencias. Y una experiencia de búsqueda mejorada en Outlook te permite encontrar rápidamente lo que necesitas en tu correo y calendario.

A continuación, conoceremos las noticias de Microsoft 365 de este mes. Pero, antes de hacerlo, quiero volver a señalar el podcast mensual de Modern Workplace. Esta vez, el anfitrión Alex Bradley y yo charlaremos sobre lo que aprendimos acerca del trabajo remoto, tanto de nuestra experiencia en Microsoft como de la experiencia de nuestros clientes. Escucha.

Organiza reuniones online más inclusivas y detalladas

Este mes, anunciamos varias funcionalidades nuevas en Teams que reflejan nuestro compromiso con dos cosas: crear la mejor experiencia de reuniones online para nuestros clientes y llevar soluciones tecnológicas a los trabajadores de primera línea y empleados de la salud.

Todos participamos alguna vez en alguna reunión en la que un participante presiona ruidosamente el teclado al escribir o en la que se escucha una aspiradora de fondo. La supresión de ruido en tiempo real ayuda a minimizar el molesto ruido de fondo y permite escuchar lo que se dice.

En las reuniones grandes, en ocasiones puede resultar difícil que los participantes remotos se hagan oír. La característica para levantar la mano permite a todos los usuarios de la reunión enviar una señal visual para indicar que tienen algo que decir.

Los trabajadores industriales necesitan comunicarse y colaborar de forma eficaz, mientras se mantienen a salvo. A través de una nueva integración entre Teams y los dispositivos de casco de realidad virtual RealWear, los trabajadores de primera línea podrán acceder a la información y comunicarse sin usar las manos y de forma remota con expertos de su lugar de trabajo.

Llevar a cabo reuniones virtuales es un requisito habitual en situaciones como visitas sanitarias de pacientes, reuniones con clientes o entrevistas a candidatos para un puesto de trabajo. La aplicación de Bookings en Teams , anunciada este mes, facilita la programación, administración y realización de citas virtuales.

Teams pronto te permitirá abrir chats en ventanas separadas para ayudarte a simplificar el flujo de trabajo y navegar más fácilmente entre las conversaciones en curso.

La compatibilidad con el uso sin conexión y con poco ancho de banda te permite leer mensajes de chat y escribir respuestas, incluso sin conexión a Internet, para que sigas trabajando desde cualquier lugar.

También agregamos nuevos dispositivos certificados para Teams. VC210 Yealink, que ahora está disponible en general, ofrece una experiencia de reunión para salas de conferencias más pequeñas que son fáciles de instalar y administrar. Además, el auricular Bose Noise Cancelling 700 UC estará disponible para comprar esta primavera.

Por último, Microsoft 365 Business Voice en Teams ahora está disponible en EE. UU., lo que permite que las pequeñas y medianas empresas puedan realizar y recibir llamadas telefónicas desde cualquier lugar. También tenemos una nueva gama de planes de Microsoft 365 Enterprise que incluye opciones de licencia adicionales para trabajadores de primera línea.

Consulta las nuevas ofertas de Microsoft 365 para empresas pequeñas y medianas

Este mes, estrenamos Microsoft 365 Personal y Family, una evolución de nuestra oferta de Office 365 para personas y familias. También anunciamos cambios de nombre en algunas de nuestras ofertas para pequeñas y medianas empresas y para grandes empresas. Office 365 Empresa Essentials ahora es Microsoft 365 Empresa Básico; Office 365 Empresa Premium ahora es Microsoft 365 Empresa Estándar; y Microsoft 365 Empresa ahora es Microsoft 365 Empresa Premium. Mientras tanto, Office 365 Empresa y Office 365 ProPlus se llamarán Aplicaciones de Microsoft 365. Si bien en la actualidad se trata únicamente de un cambio de nombre, estamos encantados con las nuevas aplicaciones y servicios que agregamos a nuestras suscripciones en los últimos años y con las innovaciones que agregaremos durante los próximos meses. Estos cambios reflejan nuestra ambición de seguir intentando impulsar la innovación en Microsoft 365, que va mucho más allá de lo que los clientes suelen considerar como parte de Office.

Responder a eventos de emergencia

Crea rápidamente un sitio de administración de emergencia para conectar a las personas con la información: los eventos inesperados, como la epidemia de COVID-19, destacan la importancia de establecer y mantener abiertas las líneas de comunicación. Un nuevo sitio de administración de crisis en SharePoint permite que la organización consolide noticias, recursos relacionados y preguntas y respuestas de actualidad para reaccionar a eventos de emergencia en menos de dos horas. Solo tienes que ir a la página de inicio de SharePoint y seleccionar Crear sitio > Sitio de comunicación para empezar a configurar noticias, vínculos, preguntas y respuestas, navegación del sitio, personas destacadas y mucho más.

Conéctate y colabora con las nuevas actualizaciones de la aplicación

Estamos anunciando nuevas actualizaciones de la aplicación que te ayudarán a simplificar las conversaciones, crear contenido profesional y maximizar la productividad.

Participa en conversaciones de Yammer directamente desde tu bandeja de entrada: los nuevos correos interactivos de Yammer en Outlook en la Web permiten que los usuarios interactúen con las conversaciones, los sondeos y las preguntas de Yammer, y ofrezcan elogios. Ahora puedes ver el hilo completo de Yammer y responder, dar me gusta, votar, adjuntar archivos, compartir GIF e incluso ver videos directamente desde tu bandeja de entrada. Estas características ya están disponibles para todos los espacios empresariales de Enterprise con versiones de Outlook para Windows, Outlook para Mac y Outlook para iOS. La versión de Outlook para Android estará disponible el próximo trimestre.

Crea contenido de aspecto profesional con mayor facilidad con Office Mobile: ahora puedes ver y editar datos en Excel en un formato de tarjeta simple y digerible, lo que elimina la necesidad de abarcar columnas que superan los límites de la pantalla. Otra novedad en Office Mobile es el Diseñador de PowerPoint, que te ayuda a crear presentaciones profesionales con ideas de diseño, formato e iconografía para tu contenido. Estas características estarán disponibles en los próximos meses en la aplicación de Office para iOS y Android.

Colaborar en documentos y asignar tareas: ahora, los usuarios pueden asignar fácilmente tareas a los colaboradores de documentos en Word y Excel para la Web. Basta con que @menciones a tus compañeros de equipo en los comentarios del documento de Word o Excel online, marques la casilla para asignarlo y, a continuación, ellos recibirán un correo que les informa que se les asignó una tarea con un vínculo directo al documento. Esta característica estará disponible en abril y Tareas en PowerPoint para la Web estará disponible en junio.

Disfruta de una nueva experiencia de conexión en Visio para la Web: una nueva característica de Visio para la Web permite a los usuarios mover el punto de conexión en una forma para una mejor alineación. Los usuarios también pueden agregar fácilmente varias flechas entre las formas para representar de forma distintiva relaciones de ida y vuelta, y más. Para empezar, mueve el puntero sobre el borde de la forma hasta que los círculos verdes resalten los posibles puntos de conexión y, después, haz clic en el punto deseado y arrastra el conector hasta el punto de destino que desees. Esta característica ahora está disponible para todos los usuarios del Plan 1 y Plan 2 de Visio.

Busca en tu correo y calendario con más facilidad

Estamos anunciando innovaciones en Búsqueda de Microsoft que reconocen el lenguaje natural como una forma útil de encontrar lo que necesitas en Outlook para iOS y Android. Encuentra tus correos, eventos de calendario, información de contacto y archivos con más facilidad y rapidez mediante el uso de lenguaje cotidiano para restringir la búsqueda. Puedes hacerlo de forma oral o escrita. Obtén más información en este blog.

Simplifica tareas comunes de TI

Este mes, anunciamos dos nuevos servicios que te ayudarán a optimizar recursos comunes para TI.

Moderniza tu infraestructura de impresión con una solución de impresión basada en la nube: estamos anunciando la versión preliminar privada de Impresión universal, una nueva infraestructura de impresión basada en la nube que crea una experiencia de impresión sencilla y segura. Ya no es necesario que las organizaciones mantengan servidores de impresión locales ni instalen controladores de impresoras en los dispositivos, lo que reduce el tiempo y el esfuerzo que necesita TI para mantener el entorno de impresión. Y los usuarios disfrutan de una experiencia de impresión sencilla que hace que sea más fácil detectar impresoras cercanas e imprimir. Los clientes pueden registrarse para participar en la versión preliminar privada.

Desplaza los archivos en la nube de forma eficaz a OneDrive y SharePoint: nos complace anunciar que Mover, una herramienta de migración de archivos de nube a nube, ya está disponible para los clientes de Microsoft 365 en todo el mundo. Mover admite la migración desde más de una docena de proveedores de servicios en la nube, incluidos Box, Dropbox, Egnyte y Google Drive, hacia OneDrive y SharePoint, lo que permite una colaboración de archivos perfecta en aplicaciones y servicios de Microsoft 365. Mover hace que sea más fácil y económico (es gratis) administrar archivos que actualmente se encuentran fuera de Microsoft 365 en otras ofertas de proveedores de servicios en la nube. Para empezar, inicia sesión con tus credenciales de Office 365 y sigue las indicaciones.

Desde nuevas funcionalidades para reuniones en Teams hasta actualizaciones que facilitan el almacenamiento de archivos en la nube, los anuncios anteriores reflejan nuestro compromiso continuo de seguir mejorando y desarrollando las herramientas que usas. Pero también queremos estar aquí para ti en este momento crítico en el que tantas organizaciones se están adaptando al trabajo remoto a tiempo completo. Además de estas actualizaciones mensuales, usamos este blog como un espacio para intercambiar sugerencias para el trabajo remoto, información y casos de clientes, así que vuelve aquí para conocer las actualizaciones frecuentes.

The post Mejorar las reuniones virtuales y llevar a cabo consultas online: novedades de Microsoft 365 en marzo appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Esta es una evolución natural. Microsoft 365 comenzó en 2017 como paquete de licencias para clientes empresariales: una combinación de Windows, Office y Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). Pasó mucho desde entonces. Hoy, la llamamos “la nube de productividad mundial” y representa nuestra visión para el futuro de las herramientas de productividad de Microsoft, un conjunto integrado de aplicaciones y servicios que ponen la inteligencia artificial (IA) y otras innovaciones de vanguardia a funcionar para ti. Y para las pequeñas y medianas empresas, eso incluye nuevas capacidades en Microsoft Teams para ayudarte a hospedar reuniones y eventos completos en línea; las funciones de almacenamiento y uso compartido de archivos en la nube para que puedas colaborar en cualquier lugar, y soluciones de identidad y seguridad para proteger su empresa. En un momento en el que las empresas se enfrentan a desafíos de salud y económicos extraordinarios, nos complace acercar a nuestros clientes y clientes de pequeñas y medianas empresas a esta familia cada vez mayor de Microsoft 365.

Nombres de productos nuevos

Los nombres de productos nuevos se aplicarán el 21 de abril de 2020. Este es un cambio en el nombre del producto únicamente y no hay ningún cambio en los precios ni en las características en este momento.

• Office 365 Empresa Essentials pasará a ser Microsoft 365 Empresa Básico.
• Office 365 Empresa Premium pasará a ser Microsoft 365 Empresa Estándar.
• Microsoft 365 Empresa pasará a ser Microsoft 365 Empresa Premium.
• Office 365 Business y Office 365 ProPlus se convertirán en Aplicaciones Microsoft 365. Si es necesario, usaremos las etiquetas “para empresas” y “para grandes empresas” para distinguir entre los dos.

Ten en cuenta que los cambios de estos productos sucederán de forma automática.

Hoy, solo anunciamos los cambios de nombre. Sin embargo, estos cambios representan nuestra ambición de seguir intentando impulsar la innovación en Microsoft 365 que va mucho más allá de lo que los clientes suelen considerar como parte de Office. La versión de Office que conoces y amas seguirá ahí, pero estamos encantados con las nuevas aplicaciones y servicios que agregamos a nuestras suscripciones en los últimos años y con las innovaciones que agregaremos durante los próximos meses. Si tienes preguntas, consulta las preguntas más frecuentes que aparecen a continuación y dirígete a la página ¿Qué es Microsoft 365? para obtener más información.

Preguntas más frecuentes

P. ¿Qué nombres de planes de Office 365 no cambian?
R. Los siguientes planes de Office 365 no tendrán cambios:

• Office 365 para empresas
  • Office 365 E1
  • Office 365 E3
  • Office 365 E5
• Office 365 para Firstline Workers
  • Office 365 F1
• Office 365 para el ámbito educativo
  • Office 365 A1
  • Office 365 A3
  • Office 365 A5
• Office 365 para la Administración Pública
  • Office 365 G1
  • Office 365 G3
  • Office 365 G5

P. ¿Por qué realizan estos cambios?
A. En primer lugar, queremos que nuestros productos reflejen el conjunto de características y ventajas de la suscripción. Microsoft 365 es un conjunto de aplicaciones y servicios integrados que hace que IA y otras innovaciones de vanguardia trabajen para ti. Y para las pequeñas y medianas empresas, eso incluye nuevas capacidades en Microsoft Teams para ayudarte a hospedar reuniones y eventos completos en línea; las funciones de almacenamiento y uso compartido de archivos en la nube para que puedas colaborar en cualquier lugar, y soluciones de identidad y seguridad para proteger su empresa. Segundo, siempre estamos buscando formas de simplificar. Este nuevo enfoque de asignar nombres a nuestros productos está diseñado para ayudarte a encontrar rápidamente el plan que necesitas y volver a tu empresa.

P. ¿Cómo encaja Office en Microsoft 365? ¿Podré seguir usando Word, Excel y PowerPoint?
R. El conjunto de Office es el centro de la experiencia de productividad de Microsoft, y esto no cambia. Pero durante los últimos años, nuestra oferta de productividad en la nube creció mucho más allá de lo que los usuarios suelen considerar como “Office”. Word, Excel y PowerPoint son más importantes que nunca. Sin embargo, en Microsoft 365 les estamos infundiendo una nueva vida a estas aplicaciones con la ayuda de la nube y de IA, y estamos agregando nuevas experiencias originadas en la nube, como Teams, Stream, Forms y Planner. Todo esto se sustenta en un conjunto de servicios comunes que mantienen seguros tus datos. Es Office y mucho más.

P. ¿Hay algo nuevo o diferente en los planes de Aplicaciones Microsoft 365 para negocios o en Aplicaciones Microsoft 365 para empresas que no se encontraba en los planes de Office 365 Business u Office 365 ProPlus? ¿Hay nuevas características?
R. No hay ningún cambio de características o precios en los planes en este momento.

P. ¿Cuándo estarán disponibles los planes de Microsoft 365 Empresa y Aplicaciones Microsoft 365 para empresas?
A. Todos los planes estarán disponibles para los clientes el 21 de abril de 2020.

P. ¿Desaparecerán todos los planes de Office 365? ¿Qué no cambia?
R. Ninguno de los planes desaparece. Están disponibles los mismos planes, solo que con nombres actualizados. Y, en el caso de Office 365 Enterprise, el nombre seguirá siendo el mismo y no se producirán cambios.

P. Soy un cliente de SMB o ProPlus existente. ¿Necesito realizar alguna acción?
R. Los clientes que dispongan de los planes de Office 365 Business, Office 365 Empresa Essentials, Office 365 Empresa Premium o Microsoft 365 Empresa no necesitan realizar ninguna acción adicional. Los cambios anteriores se producirán automáticamente.

P. Mi empresa usa Office 365 ProPlus y tengo dudas sobre este cambio. ¿Dónde puedo obtener más información?
R. Los clientes con el plan de Office 365 ProPlus deben consultar este sitio para obtener más información.

The post Nuevas ofertas de Microsoft 365 para empresas pequeñas y medianas appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Pero primero quiero hablarles del momento en el que nos encontramos. Y quiero hacer un reconocimiento a las organizaciones, a los empleados y a los estudiantes de todo el mundo que se vieron forzados a adoptar el trabajo y el aprendizaje remotos para mantener la seguridad y el bienestar propio y de las personas que los rodean.

Cómo adaptarse al aprendizaje y el trabajo remotos

En todo el mundo, millones de personas se vieron afectadas por la epidemia de COVID-19. La epidemia afectó a la forma de trabajar, la forma de socializar, nuestra vida familiar y nuestra vida comunitaria. Aquí, en Puget Sound, les pedimos a unos 50,000 empleados de Microsoft que no se desplacen hasta el trabajo. Y lo mismo se les pidió a decenas de miles de empleados de Microsoft en todo el mundo, que hoy trabajan de forma remota. No fue fácil. En ocasiones, fue muy confuso. Pero nuestro equipo sigue conectándose. Sigue colaborando. Sigue trabajando.

Con la COVID-19, surgieron innumerables casos de clientes que usan Teams para conectarse y prosperar de una manera inspiradora. Un profesor de la Universidad de Bologna en Italia compartió en Twitter cómo la escuela trasladó el 90% de los cursos online a Teams en un plazo de cuatro días, sin duda algo inédito en la historia de más de 900 años de la universidad. Los doctores de St. Luke’s University Health Network en Pensilvania usarán Teams para realizar videoconferencias con pacientes, especialmente aquellos más vulnerables al coronavirus, para proteger tanto a pacientes como a médicos. Y la ciudad de Osaka, en Japón, está usando Teams para dirigir las orientaciones y formaciones para cientos de nuevos empleados en abril.

Casos como estas se reproducen en países en todo el mundo. Creemos que este cambio repentino a nivel mundial de transición al trabajo remoto será un punto clave en la forma en que trabajamos y aprendemos. Ya estamos viendo cómo las soluciones que habilitan el trabajo y el aprendizaje remotos por chat, video y colaboración en archivos se convirtieron en piezas fundamentales de nuestra forma de trabajar. Observamos un aumento sin precedentes en el uso de Teams. Ahora, tenemos más de 44 millones de usuarios diarios*, 12 millones de los cuales se sumaron en los últimos siete días. Y esos usuarios generaron más de 900 millones de reuniones y minutos de llamadas en Teams todos los días de la semana.

Queda claro que es más importante que nunca permitir el trabajo remoto, y que seguirá teniendo un valor duradero más allá de la epidemia de COVID-19. Nuestra empresa está comprometida con la creación de las herramientas que ayudan a las organizaciones, equipos y usuarios a ser más productivos y estar más conectados, incluso cuando necesitan trabajar por separado.

Transformar la manera en que las personas trabajan

Durante los tres últimos años, miles de organizaciones, pequeñas y grandes (entre las que se incluyen 93 empresas Fortune 100), descubrieron que Teams puede ser su centro del trabajo en equipo y ayudarlos a mantenerse conectados e involucrados. Las organizaciones líderes del sector están implementando Teams en toda la empresa. De hecho, 20 clientes tienen más de 100,000 empleados que usan activamente Teams, incluidos Ernst & Young, SAP, Pfizer y Continental AG, al igual que Accenture, que tiene 440,000 empleados que usan Teams de forma activa.

Novedades en Teams

Seguimos invirtiendo en experiencias que facilitarán la comunicación y la colaboración de los equipos. Las nuevas funcionalidades que anunciamos hoy reflejan nuestro compromiso con dos cosas: crear la mejor experiencia de reuniones online para nuestros clientes y ofrecer soluciones tecnológicas a profesionales que tradicionalmente carecen de la tecnología adecuada, incluidos los trabajadores de primera línea y los trabajadores de la salud.

• Todos participamos alguna vez en alguna reunión en la que un participante presiona ruidosamente el teclado al escribir o en la que se escucha una aspiradora de fondo. La supresión de ruido de fondo en tiempo real ayuda a minimizar el molesto ruido de fondo y permite escuchar lo que se dice.
• En las reuniones grandes, en ocasiones puede resultar difícil que los participantes remotos puedan hacerse oír cuando tienen algo que decir. La característica para levantar la mano permite a todos los usuarios de la reunión enviar una señal visual para indicar que tienen algo que decir.

• Los trabajadores industriales necesitan comunicarse y colaborar de forma eficaz, mientras se mantienen a salvo. A través de una nueva integración entre Teams y los cascos de RealWear, los trabajadores de primera línea podrán acceder a la información y comunicarse sin usar las manos y de forma remota con expertos de su lugar de trabajo.

• Llevar a cabo citas virtuales de B2C es un requisito habitual en situaciones como visitas sanitarias de pacientes, reuniones con clientes o entrevistas a candidatos para un puesto de trabajo. La aplicación de Bookings en Teams , anunciada este mes, facilita la programación, administración y realización de citas virtuales.
• Teams pronto te permitirá abrir chats en ventanas separadas para ayudarte a simplificar el flujo de trabajo y moverte más fácilmente entre las conversaciones en curso.
• La compatibilidad con el uso sin conexión y con poco ancho de banda te permite leer mensajes de chat y escribir respuestas, incluso sin conexión a Internet, para que sigas trabajando desde cualquier lugar.
• También ampliamos el ecosistema de dispositivos de Teams con nuevos dispositivos certificados para Teams. VC210 Yealink, que ahora está disponible de forma general, es la primera barra de colaboración certificada para Teams y reúne oradores, micrófonos, una cámara y una experiencia de Teams nativa para ofrecer reuniones para salas de conferencias más pequeñas con instalación sencilla y fácil de administrar. Además, los auriculares Bose Noise Cancelling 700 UC estarán disponibles para comprar esta primavera.
• Nos complace presentar Microsoft 365 Business Voice en los Estados Unidos, una nueva oferta para pequeñas y medianas empresas que hace que Teams sea un sistema telefónico completo, así como una nueva gama de planes para Microsoft 365 Enterprise que incluirá opciones adicionales de licencias para los trabajadores de primera línea.
  

A menos que se indique lo contrario, las nuevas funciones estarán disponibles más adelante este año.

Desde que lanzamos Teams hace tres años, ha evolucionado hasta convertirse en un centro para el trabajo en equipo, un espacio donde puedes reunirte, conversar, hacer llamadas y colaborar en un mismo sitio. Seguiremos mejorando y expandiendo experiencias para que todos los trabajadores sean tan productivos y estén tan conectados como sea posible. A medida que la epidemia de COVID-19 sigue forzando a personas de todo el mundo a trabajar y aprender de forma remota, es más importante que nunca permitir el trabajo y el aprendizaje remotos. Agradecemos la oportunidad de acompañar a nuestros clientes en un momento tan inusual.

* Definimos el uso activo diario como el número máximo de usuarios diarios que realizan una acción intencional en un período de 24 horas en el cliente de escritorio, el cliente móvil y el cliente web. Las acciones intencionadas incluyen el envío o la respuesta a un chat, unirse a una reunión o abrir un archivo en Teams. No se incluyen acciones pasivas, como el arranque automático, minimizar una pantalla o cerrar la aplicación.

The post Tercer aniversario de Microsoft Teams: Todo lo que necesitas para conectarte con tus compañeros de equipo y mejorar la productividad appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Una nota rápida antes de empezar: Estuvimos usando este espacio para compartir sugerencias, casos de clientes e información durante la epidemia de COVID-19. Esta publicación es un seguimiento de otra que compartimos la semana pasada con sugerencias sobre cómo adoptar el trabajo remoto con Microsoft Teams. También ofrecimos instrucciones para trasladar los eventos en vivo a Internet, con información detallada del uso de herramientas de Microsoft, así como información de nuestro líder de eventos en Microsoft. Y también compartimos sugerencias para el departamento de TI y los directores de Seguridad de la información, que aportaron líderes en esas áreas. Seguiremos publicando más contenido sobre el trabajo remoto aquí en los próximos días, así que vuelvan con frecuencia. Bien, veamos las lecciones de las últimas dos semanas.

1. Instrucciones para compartir el trabajo desde el hogar

La mayoría de las organizaciones tienen manuales de formación sobre cómo los empleados deben navegar en el entorno de la oficina. Cuando pasamos al trabajo remoto, rápidamente nos dimos cuenta de que los empleados también necesitan instrucciones para este tipo de trabajo. Muchos de nosotros nos enfrentamos al trabajo remoto por primera vez, y tuvimos muy poco tiempo para prepararnos para el cambio. Nuestro equipo tiene preguntas: ¿Cómo se prepara un espacio en el que puedes concentrarte? ¿Cómo te mantienes conectado cuando no puedes hacer reuniones presenciales? ¿Por qué parece que nunca es un buen momento para tomarse un descanso? A esto se suma el desafío de los niños u otros familiares en el hogar (una realidad para muchos de nosotros durante esta epidemia) y es inevitable que a algunos empleados les resulte difícil.

Para abordar esta necesidad, la semana pasada distribuimos una completa guía para trabajar desde el hogar para los empleados. Pensamos que tal vez podría interesarte, por eso creamos una versión para clientes para que la compartas con tus empleados, según lo consideres necesario. Está llena de sugerencias concretas sobre todo, desde preparar las estaciones de trabajo físicas y virtuales hasta las prácticas recomendadas para comunicar la disponibilidad a los compañeros de equipo.

2. Administración de reuniones consecutivas

En la oficina, las reuniones consecutivas tienen pausas naturales que las separan. Una caminata por el pasillo, esos primeros momentos en la mesa mientras esperas a que todos lleguen y la conversación informal que tiene lugar a medida que los compañeros de equipo se saludan y se ponen al día. Muchas veces, estos breves descansos durante el transcurso de la semana laboral pasan desapercibidos. Luego pasamos al trabajo remoto y nos damos cuenta de cuánto los necesitamos para frenar el ritmo vertiginoso de un día con muchas reuniones.

¿Cómo puedes asegurarte de que tú y tu equipo se reúnen con la frecuencia necesaria, pero pueden tomarse un descanso intermedio? Animamos a los empleados a que programen las reuniones para que concluyan cinco minutos antes de que finalice la hora o la media hora. De este modo, se reduce ligeramente el tiempo del encuentro, pero se evita el posible desgaste que generan las reuniones ininterrumpidas.

3. Creación de un espacio para que los usuarios puedan desconectar

Cuando trabajamos en nuestra vida cotidiana, encontramos formas diarias de desconectar, a menudo sin darnos cuenta. Preparar la cena para la familia, reunirnos con amigos en una clase de gimnasia después del trabajo o relajarnos en el trayecto en autobús del trabajo a casa nos ayuda a distanciarnos de los eventos del día para prepararnos para el día siguiente. Incluso en las mejores circunstancias, la desconexión cuando trabajamos de forma remota puede ser difícil. Para ayudar a los empleados, empezamos a ofrecer sesiones virtuales de meditación a las que se pueden unir cuando necesitan un momento de desconexión del trabajo.

Si quieres hacer lo mismo, aquí te mostramos algunas sugerencias prácticas para compartir con empleados sin experiencia en clases de meditación online. Primero, busca un espacio silencioso donde nadie te interrumpa. Después, silencia el micrófono para que otros usuarios puedan disfrutar del silencio. Por último, usa la cámara para ver al líder de la sesión que brinda instrucciones sobre técnicas de respiración. Cuando sientas que entiendes bien, puedes apagar la cámara para centrarte completamente en aquietar la mente.

4. Seguir impulsando la cultura de equipo

Desde reuniones con todo el personal hasta la celebración de pequeños hitos, una cultura de equipo sólida se basa en encuentros frecuentes. El hecho de que muchos de nosotros pasamos de repente al trabajo remoto hace que sea tentador entrar en modo “solo lo imprescindible”, y posponer eventos importantes y momentos divertidos con el equipo hasta que podamos volver a la normalidad.

Descubrimos que, siempre que sea posible, es mejor seguir alimentando la cultura de equipo incluso cuando esa construcción se realice a distancia. ¿Programaste una fiesta de cumpleaños de un compañero de equipo? Entra a una reunión de Teams y envía GIF de feliz cumpleaños. ¿Se acerca una importante conferencia de ventas en la empresa? Empieza a pensar cómo podrías llevarla a cabo de forma virtual. Y si llegó el momento del evento trimestral de fortalecimiento del equipo, no lo dejes pasar. Tu equipo estará más que listo para compartir ideas y conectarse. Al principio, puede que organizar encuentros remotos para impulsar la cultura de equipo parezca difícil, pero vale la pena ese esfuerzo adicional para mantener a todos conectados y avanzar.

5. Practica de técnicas de administración clave

Los empleados confían en que los administradores los acompañan de cerca y los guían en la implementación de cambios, y se muestran dispuestos a ayudarlos a resolver problemas y crear. A medida que tu equipo desarrolla una forma nueva de trabajar (mientras atraviesa también una crisis de salud global), necesita de tu apoyo como gerente más que nunca. Pero, ¿cómo puedes administrar correctamente cuando se trabaja por separado?

Compartimos lo que aprendimos acerca de la administración remota en la guía de trabajo desde casa. Esto abarca reforzar la inclusión, informarse a menudo y ayudar a los compañeros de equipo a descubrir sus propias prácticas recomendadas para el trabajo remoto. Cada empleado se enfrenta a desafíos únicos en este momento, y cada empleado aborda la situación de distinta forma. Como administradores, es muy importante tratar de comprender las necesidades individuales lo máximo posible y responder a ellas.

En estas lecciones se reflejan algunas de las primeras impresiones después de dos semanas de aprendizaje remoto. Desde programar reuniones hasta permitir descansos para administrar equipos remotos de forma efectiva, estamos descubriendo muchas cosas acerca de esta nueva forma de trabajar. Estoy seguro de que el valor de estas clases perdurará más allá de la epidemia de COVID-19, ya que las organizaciones de todo el mundo siguen dando prioridad al trabajo remoto. Pero queremos saber también lo que tú y tu equipo están pensando y aprendiendo. Únete a la conversación en nuestra Comunidad para posibilitar el trabajo remoto.

The post Dos semanas en casa: aprendizajes sobre el trabajo remoto appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Somos conscientes de que, como pyme, no puedes perder el contacto. Sabemos que necesitas seguir ofreciendo servicio a los clientes existentes, emprender nuevos negocios, reunirte con empleados y hacer lo que haga falta para que tu empresa siga en funcionamiento. Es por eso por lo que ahora Microsoft Teams está disponible para todos, incluso aquellas organizaciones que no tienen Office 365. Sigue leyendo para obtener más información sobre cómo empezar a usarla hoy.

¿Qué es Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams es una solución de software que permite a las pymes realizar varias tareas empresariales básicas de forma remota. Con Teams, puedes conversar, colaborar y reunirte de forma virtual con empleados, clientes, proveedores y partners. Las aplicaciones de Microsoft Office están integradas en Teams para que puedas usar y compartir los archivos que creaste en Word, Excel, PowerPoint y Outlook sin salir de la herramienta. Recientemente, compartí sugerencias para nuestro equipo sobre cómo empezar a trabajar de forma remota con Teams. Si eres nuevo con la herramienta o con el trabajo remoto, te permitirá familiarizarte con ellos.

Poner Teams a disponibilidad de todos los usuarios

Teams forma parte de Office 365. Si tu organización tiene una licencia para Office 365, ya cuentas con Teams y puedes iniciar sesión aquí. Incluso si no tiene Office 365, queremos garantizar que todos tengan acceso a Teams durante estos tiempos difíciles. Estas son algunas formas sencillas de obtener Teams para todos los usuarios de tu compañía de inmediato, aunque no tengas Office 365.

Para personas y empresas que compran directamente desde Microsoft.com

Si deseas obtener Teams directamente de Microsoft, puedes hacerlo de las siguientes maneras:

• Suscríbete a una prueba gratuita de Office 365 Empresa Premium, que incluye una versión completa de Teams.
• Si usas una dirección de correo personal como Gmail o Outlook, puedes registrarte en la versión freemium de Teams siguiendo este vínculo.

Para empresas con servicios de partners

Si eres un cliente nuevo o establecido de Microsoft que actualmente no tiene licencias que incluyan Microsoft Teams (como Exchange Online u Office 365 Empresa), puedes trabajar con tu partner para recibir una prueba de Teams gratuita durante seis meses. Si aún no tienes un partner y te gustaría trabajar con uno, puedes buscar partners con experiencia en Microsoft Teams en este vínculo. Esta oferta es adecuada para empresas con hasta 1,000 usuarios.

En un momento en el que muchos de nosotros adoptamos el trabajo remoto, esperamos que Teams te ayude a hacer que tu empresa siga avanzando. Debajo encontrarás las respuestas a algunas de las preguntas más frecuentes de pymes sobre cómo empezar a trabajar con Teams. Una vez que estés listo, consulta aquí las sugerencias, los casos de clientes y los artículos informativos que te ayudarán a adaptarte al trabajo remoto. Estamos juntos en esto, y nos comprometemos a ayudar a los clientes a mantener sus empresas en funcionamiento durante estos momentos difíciles.

Preguntas más frecuentes sobre Teams

P. ¿Qué ocurre cuando un usuario inicia sesión con credenciales laborales?
R. Si el usuario tiene una licencia para Teams, iniciará sesión en el producto. Si el usuario no tiene una licencia, iniciará sesión en el producto y automáticamente recibirá una licencia gratuita de Teams que será válida hasta enero de 2021. Esto incluye reuniones de video para hasta 250 participantes, eventos en vivo para hasta 10,000, grabaciones y uso compartido de pantalla, junto con chat y colaboración. Se pueden encontrar detalles para TI en este documento.

P. ¿Qué incluye la versión freemium de Teams?
R. Esta versión ofrece chat ilimitado, un grupo integrado, llamadas de audio o video de uno a uno, 10 GB de almacenamiento de archivos del equipo y 2 GB de almacenamiento de archivos personales por usuario. También obtienes colaboración en tiempo real con las aplicaciones de Office para la Web, como Word, Excel, PowerPoint y OneNote. No hay fecha de finalización. Obtén los detalles aquí.

P. ¿Existe un límite de usuarios en la versión freemium?
R. No, no hay restricciones de límite de usuarios.

P. ¿Puedo programar reuniones en la versión freemium?
R. En el futuro, los usuarios podrán programar reuniones. Mientras tanto, puedes llevar a cabo reuniones y llamadas de video improvisadas.

P. ¿Qué sugerencias tienes para trabajar desde casa?
R. Como se mencionó anteriormente, nuestro equipo publicó recientemente una lista de sugerencias para Teams. Además, Lola Jacobson, una de nuestras principales redactoras técnicas, publicó cuatro sugerencias adicionales la semana pasada. Y actualizamos la página Asistencia para trabajadores remotos con Microsoft Teams en docs.Microsoft.com. Tenemos más contenido en camino, así que mantente atento.

The post Ayudamos a pequeñas y medianas empresas a trabajar de forma remota con Teams. appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Como leímos en sus respuestas a la carta de Lily, nos quedó claro que hay dos grandes preguntas en sus mentes. En primer lugar, ¿cómo pueden acceder las personas a las ofertas gratuitas de Teams que Lily mencionó? En segundo lugar, ¿cuál es nuestro plan para evitar interrupciones del servicio en períodos de mayor uso? A continuación, encontrarás respuestas detalladas a ambas preguntas. Y durante los próximos días, compartiremos más sugerencias, actualizaciones e información relacionada con el trabajo remoto aquí. Por ello, vuelve a menudo.

Poner Teams a disponibilidad de todos los usuarios

Teams forma parte de Office 365. Si tu organización tiene una licencia para Office 365, ya cuentas con Teams. Pero queremos asegurarnos de que todos los usuarios tengan acceso durante este tiempo. Estas son algunas formas sencillas de conseguir Teams de inmediato.

Particulares

Si deseas empezar a trabajar con Teams, puedes ponerte manos a la obra de inmediato.

• Si tienes una dirección de correo a través de tu cuenta laboral o educativa, inicia sesión mediante este vínculo. Te daremos acceso a Teams en breve.
• Si usas una dirección de correo como Gmail o Outlook, puedes registrarte en la versión freemium de Teams siguiendo este vínculo.

Profesionales de TI

Los vínculos de autoservicio de más arriba son útiles para los usuarios, pero si eres un profesional de TI que quiere implementar Teams de forma centralizada, sigue este procedimiento.

• Si trabajas para una empresa que aún no tiene licencia de Teams, te proporcionamos una oferta gratuita de Office 365 E1 durante seis meses. Ponte en contacto con tu partner de Microsoft o representante de ventas para empezar hoy. (Nota: La misma oferta está disponible en la nube de administración pública, pero no está disponible en GCC High y el Departamento de defensa).
• Si trabajas en el ámbito educativo y quieres organizar a profesores, alumnos y administradores en Teams, utiliza Office 365 A1. Esta versión gratuita de Office 365 está disponible para todas las instituciones educativas. Regístrate siguiendo este vínculo.

Mantener Teams en funcionamiento

Tú y tu equipo dependen de nuestras herramientas para mantenerse conectados y llevar a cabo el trabajo. Asumimos esta responsabilidad de forma seria y tenemos un plan para asegurarnos de que los servicios estén en funcionamiento durante momentos impactantes como este. Nuestro plan de continuidad empresarial anticipa tres tipos de impactos para los aspectos básicos del servicio:

• Sistemas: Cuando se produce un repentino aumento del uso, como en la sobrecarga que se vio recientemente en China.
• Ubicación: Cuando se produce un acontecimiento inesperado específico de la ubicación, como un terremoto o una fuerte tormenta.
• Contactos: Cuando se produce un acontecimiento que puede afectar al equipo que mantiene el sistema, como el brote del COVID-19 en el área del Estrecho de Puget.

Recientemente probamos la continuidad del servicio durante un pico de uso en China. Desde el 31 de enero, hemos observado un aumento del 500 por ciento en las reuniones, llamadas y conferencias de Teams en esa área, así como un aumento del 200 por ciento en el uso de Teams en los dispositivos móviles. Pese a este aumento de uso, el servicio ha sido fluido durante la epidemia. Nuestro enfoque para ofrecer un servicio altamente disponible y resistente se centra en los siguientes aspectos.

Diseño activo/activo: En Microsoft 365, estamos avanzando para tener todos los servicios diseñados y operados en un diseño activo/activo que aumenta la resistencia. Esto significa que siempre hay varias instancias de un servicio en ejecución que pueden responder a las solicitudes de los usuarios y que se hospedan en centros de datos geográficamente dispersos. Todo el tráfico de usuarios viene del servicio Front Door de Microsoft y se enruta automáticamente a la instancia del servicio localizada de forma óptima y en torno a cualquier error de servicio para evitar o reducir el impacto en nuestros clientes.

Reducción del alcance de los incidentes: En primer lugar, intentamos evitar incidentes, pero cuando suceden, nos esforzamos por limitar el alcance de todos los incidentes teniendo varias instancias de cada servicio divididas entre sí. Además, continuamente estamos impulsando mejoras en la supervisión mediante la automatización, lo que permite acelerar la detección de incidentes y su respuesta a estos.

Aislamiento de errores: Al igual que los servicios están diseñados y operados en un modo activo/activo y se dividen entre sí para evitar que uno de los errores afecte a otro, el código base del servicio se desarrolla mediante principios de partición similares denominados aislamiento de errores. Las medidas de aislamiento de errores son protecciones incrementales que se llevan a cabo en la propia base del código. Estas medidas ayudan a evitar que un problema en un área caiga en cascada en otras áreas de operación. Puedes obtener más información sobre cómo hacer esto, junto con todos los detalles de nuestro plan de continuidad del servicio, en este documento.

La adaptación al trabajo remoto puede ser un reto. Lo comprendemos y estamos aquí para proporcionarte las herramientas, los consejos y la información que necesitas para que tú y tu equipo se puedan adaptar a ese desafío. Nos inspiramos en la agilidad y el ingenio que las escuelas, los hospitales y las empresas afectadas han demostrado durante el COVID-19, y estamos comprometidos a ayudar a las organizaciones de cualquier lugar a mantenerse conectadas y productivas durante estos momentos difíciles.

Preguntas más frecuentes

P. ¿Qué ocurre cuando un usuario inicia sesión con credenciales laborales o educativas?
R. Si el usuario tiene una licencia para Teams, iniciará sesión en el producto. Si el usuario no tiene una licencia, iniciará sesión en el producto y automáticamente recibirá una licencia gratuita de Teams que será válida hasta enero de 2021. Esto incluye reuniones de video para hasta 250 participantes y eventos en vivo para hasta 10 000 personas, así como grabación y uso compartido de la pantalla, chat y colaboración. Detalles para TI.

P. ¿Qué incluye la versión freemium de Teams?
R. Esta versión ofrece chat ilimitado, un grupo integrado y llamadas de audio o video uno a uno, 10 GB de almacenamiento de archivos del equipo y 2 GB de almacenamiento de archivos personales por usuario. También obtienes colaboración en tiempo real con las aplicaciones de Office para Web, como Word, Excel, PowerPoint y OneNote. No hay fecha de finalización. Puedes ver los detalles aquí.

P. ¿Existe un límite de usuarios en la versión freemium?
R. A partir del 10 de marzo, estamos implementando actualizaciones en la versión gratuita de Teams que levantarán las restricciones de los límites de usuarios.

P. ¿Puedo programar reuniones en la versión freemium?
R. En el futuro, los usuarios podrán programar reuniones. Mientras tanto, puedes llevar a cabo reuniones y llamadas de video improvisadas.

P. ¿Cómo pueden los administradores de TI tener acceso a Teams para el ámbito educativo?
R. Teams siempre ha sido gratuito para estudiantes y profesionales de la educación, como parte de la oferta de Office 365 A1. Consíguelo aquí.

P. ¿Tienes alguna sugerencia para trabajar desde casa?
R. Lola Jacobson, una de nuestras principales redactoras técnicas, publicó algunas sugerencias básicas la semana pasada. Y el día de ayer actualizamos la página Asistencia para trabajadores remotos con Microsoft Teams en docs.Microsoft.com. Tenemos más contenido en camino, así que mantente atento.

The post Nuestro compromiso con los clientes durante el COVID-19 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Lily Zheng es una buena amiga y colega que vive en Shanghái. Hemos trabajado en persona en China, pero la mayoría de las veces nos reunimos en Microsoft Teams. Recientemente, Lily escribió una carta para los clientes de la región sobre lo que ella y su equipo han aprendido trabajando de forma remota mientras capean la epidemia. Su carta inspiró a nuestro equipo para hacer que Microsoft Teams esté disponible de forma gratuita para las personas que pasen al trabajo remoto durante estos tiempos difíciles. Quiero compartirla con las personas de todo el mundo que puedan beneficiarse de la experiencia de nuestro equipo en Shanghái. Espero que les resulte tan útil como a mí.

Le doy la palabra a Lily.

Estimados clientes:

Mi nombre es Lily Zheng y soy una empleada de Microsoft que vive y trabaja en Shanghái. Como el brote del COVID-19 continúa afectando a millones de personas aquí en China, experimentamos un enorme aumento en el trabajo remoto. Es como si todas las escuelas, los hospitales y las empresas de China fueran ahora una organización distribuida, aunque solo sea temporalmente. Existen varios motivos por los que trabajar de manera remota podría ser necesario de pronto, desde brotes de virus como el COVID-19 hasta emergencias climáticas inesperadas. Por ello, quisiera compartir tres lecciones que aprendí durante las últimas semanas, así como tres lecciones que hemos recopilado de nuestros clientes a medida que se adaptan al trabajo remoto.

Como muchos de ustedes, empecé a recibir información sobre el virus en enero, principalmente en las redes sociales. Pero no me percaté de la magnitud que implicaba hasta justo antes del Año Nuevo chino. Fue entonces cuando, debido a la avalancha de viajes por el Festival de Primavera, el número de personas afectadas empezó a elevarse rápidamente. El 23 de enero, el gobierno acordonó la Provincia de Hubei para frenar la propagación del virus. El día siguiente, la víspera del Año Nuevo, mi familia tenía planeado ir al cine. Cuando nos enteramos por la prensa de que las salas de cine de la ciudad habían cerrado, caímos en la cuenta de la gravedad de la epidemia. Dos días más tarde, el gobierno anunció cancelaciones sin precedentes de los eventos del Festival de Primavera y yo cancelé unas vacaciones familiares programadas hace tiempo. Los niños estaban devastados, pero nuestra salud y seguridad tenía que ser una prioridad.

¿Qué debo decir cuando las personas me preguntan cómo está siendo trabajar hoy en China? Trabajar de forma remota ha reducido el tiempo que pasamos en el transporte y ciertamente ya no nos preocupa cómo nos vestimos. Y con tantos restaurantes cerrados, todos estamos refrescando nuestras habilidades culinarias. Sin embargo, con los niños fuera de la escuela (y las niñeras encerradas en casa también), permanecer productivos puede ser un desafío.

Lo que aprendí del trabajo remoto

Si bien nuestro equipo está acostumbrado a trabajar de forma remota, estas últimas semanas nos clarificaron lo que se necesita para que el trabajo remoto sea exitoso y sostenible. Estas son mis tres lecciones principales.

Mantenerse sanos

Con esta transición al trabajo remoto se trata de proteger nuestra salud física minimizando el contacto con el virus. Eso todo el mundo lo entiende. Lo que resulta menos obvio es que trabajar donde vives puede crear su propio tipo de estrés. Tomarse tiempo para hacer ejercicio, comer y disfrutar de un descanso real lejos de las pantallas es fundamental para mantener el bienestar mental mientras se trabaja en casa.

Ir a por todas

Puede resultar tentador posponer cosas mientras trabajas de forma remota. Sin embargo, los equipos que prosperan de forma remota encuentran la forma de hacer todo online. Si tienes programadas reuniones uno a uno, mantenlas. Si planeaste reuniones de gran tamaño, mantenlas. Si estás listo para una lluvia de ideas de una próxima presentación, usa la llamada de video.

Ayudar a tus compañeros de equipo

También aprendí a partir de esta experiencia que ayudar a otros es la mejor forma de mantenerse positivo y con energía. Usamos nuestras herramientas online no solo para trabajar, sino también para compartir fotos de familiares y mascotas, y preguntar por los demás a lo largo del día. Darse ánimo mutuamente no solo es bueno para mantener la moral, sino que también ayuda a unir a nuestro equipo mientras trabajamos de forma separada.

Lo que aprendí de los clientes

En un período de pocas semanas, vimos que los clientes en China transformaron verdaderamente la forma en que trabajan. Estas son tres cosas que aprendí de los clientes para preparar a la organización para el éxito.

Abrir de inmediato las líneas de comunicación

Cuando los empleados trabajan de forma remota, es más importante que nunca asegurarse de que todos permanezcan informados sobre la empresa. Uno de nuestros clientes, una gran compañía de seguros con sede en Asia, empezó a difundir mensajes de video al personal para asegurarse de que todos tuvieran acceso a la información más reciente. Con todos los usuarios haciendo malabares para trabajar desde casa con el cuidado de los niños y otros desafíos, los videos grabados les dan a las personas la oportunidad de ponerse al día cuando no pueden participar en una reunión o sesión informativa.

No dejar de moverse

Aunque puede resultar tentador posponer planes hasta que todos puedan reunirse en persona, las empresas aquí están encontrando formas de seguir avanzando. Con el apoyo del gobierno, muchas escuelas pudieron empezar sus ciclos escolares a tiempo haciéndolo todo online. Han estado apoyando a sus alumnos creando programaciones claras, ofreciendo eventos para levantar la moral de todos, como desafíos de cocina, y comunicando cuidadosamente las tareas y otra información para que los alumnos no se sientan abrumados.

Incluso las grandes reuniones se pueden hacer online

Muchos de nosotros estamos acostumbrados a llamadas rápidas o videochats con algunos compañeros de equipo, pero las reuniones grandes y formales también se pueden realizar online con éxito. Con tantos empleados que están optando por trabajar de forma remota, los hospitales de aquí han estado reuniendo a su personal de forma remota. Por ejemplo, un hospital en Dalian ha estado organizando reuniones con gran cantidad de personal a través de Teams. Entre las claves para una reunión online exitosa se incluyen establecer un programa claro, practicar la inclusión resolviendo cualquier problema de audio al inicio de la reunión y tomar notas claras para compartir como seguimiento más adelante. Recuerden también que si su organización lo permite, pueden grabar reuniones para las personas que no puedan asistir.

Para mí, y para muchas personas en el mundo, esta no es la forma en la que imaginábamos el inicio de un año nuevo. Pero aprendimos mucho. Y Teams ha sido una herramienta increíblemente eficaz para ayudarnos a superar estos desafíos. Muchas personas no lo saben, pero Teams ya está disponible de forma gratuita. Haz clic aquí para obtener más información. Independientemente de las herramientas que elijas, espero que estos consejos te resulten útiles y les deseo a ti y a tu familia todo lo mejor.

Lily Zheng

Directora, Microsoft China

The post Trabajar de forma remota en tiempos difíciles appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Este mes incorporamos funcionalidades que te ayudarán a trabajar desde cualquier lugar, colaborar en el contenido de forma más sencilla, interactuar con las aplicaciones de más maneras y personalizar las experiencias de productividad. La nueva aplicación de Office ya está disponible de manera generalizada para Android y iOS. Agregamos funcionalidades de colaboración para los comentarios de PowerPoint e incorporamos la coautoría y la integración de Microsoft Teams a Visio. Word tiene ahora una funcionalidad mejorada de voz a texto que admite más idiomas, mientras que las características de entrada manuscrita y el Modo oscuro agregados facilitan la captura y lectura de las notas en OneNote para Android. Entretanto, las organizaciones ya pueden personalizar la experiencia de productividad de sus empleados, desde las páginas de resultados de búsqueda y todas las fuentes de Yammer de la empresa a una versión preliminar privada del nuevo Microsoft Fluid Framework.

Sigue leyendo para ver todas las actualizaciones interesantes de Microsoft 365 este mes. Y, para profundizar más en las novedades, no olvides echarle un vistazo al segundo episodio del podcast de Modern Workplace. Este mes, el presentador Alex Bradley y yo profundizaremos en el trabajo en equipo, el nuevo Microsoft Fluid Framework y mucho más.

Ser productivo desde cualquier lugar

Trabaja desde cualquier lugar con la nueva aplicación de Office. La aplicación de Office es una experiencia completamente rediseñada que te ayudará a ser más productivo desde cualquier lugar. Combina Word, Excel y PowerPoint en una sola aplicación, agrega nuevas funcionalidades que te ayudarán a crear contenido de formas exclusivamente móviles y tiene acciones integradas que te ayudarán a realizar tareas comunes en dispositivos móviles. El resultado es una experiencia de Office para dispositivos móviles más sencilla, aunque más eficaz. Lee esta entrada de blog para obtener más información sobre la nueva aplicación de Office, que ahora está disponible en todo el mundo para Android e iOS.

Mejorar la colaboración en tus aplicaciones favoritas

Las nuevas herramientas de PowerPoint y Visio facilitan el trabajo en equipo.

Colabora de forma más fluida en PowerPoint. A partir del próximo mes, se implementará una característica de comentarios actualizada en PowerPoint. Ahora, los miembros de equipo pueden anclar comentarios a objetos, usar notificaciones de @mención, descubrir y agregar comentarios más fácilmente, entre otras opciones. La nueva experiencia de comentarios estará disponible para todos los usuarios de Office 365 con la actualización más reciente.

Crea en coautoría dibujos de Visio de nuevas maneras. Visio para la Web ahora permite que los colaboradores creen, editen y dejen comentarios en los dibujos de forma simultánea. Con la coautoría en directo y un indicador de presencia simple, los equipos pueden colaborar perfectamente para aportar y desarrollar ideas. Los usuarios de Visio Plan 1 y Plan 2 pueden visitar visio.office.com para crear y compartir archivos de Visio.

Los miembros de equipo también pueden usar estas funciones directamente en Teams. Ya puedes compartir los dibujos de Visio con tus compañeros de trabajo, puesto que los archivos almacenados en tu biblioteca de archivos del equipo son accesibles para todos sus miembros, lo cual facilita que tus compañeros puedan editar tu trabajo y dejar comentarios. Para empezar, haz clic en la pestaña Archivos en la parte superior de la ventana de la conversación en el canal de Teams y selecciona Nuevo >Dibujo de Visio.

Personalizar tu forma de trabajar

Las actualizaciones de Word y OneNote permiten a los usuarios trabajar como quieran.

Ahorra tiempo y simplifica el trabajo con la conversión de voz a texto mejorada. Ahora es fácil crear contenido con tu voz en Word gracias a la nueva barra de herramientas de dictado, la experiencia de sugerencias y la compatibilidad con la puntuación automática. Además, ya puedes trabajar con seis nuevos idiomas en versión preliminar: danés, neerlandés, finés, sueco, noruego y japonés. El nuevo dictado de voz en Word para la Web se está implementando ahora para todos los usuarios de Office 365.

Captura y toma notas con facilidad. OneNote para tabletas y teléfonos Android ahora es compatible con el Modo oscuro, lo que te permite cambiar de blanco brillante a una combinación de colores negro y gris oscuro más sutil para facilitar la lectura. Además, actualizamos la experiencia de la entrada manuscrita para admitir nuevos colores brillantes y seguimos aprovechando los tipos de lápiz, marcadores de resaltado y borradores. Y no te pierdas la herramienta Lazo, que cambia el tamaño y la posición de los objetos en la página. Estas actualizaciones se implementan para todos los usuarios de OneNote en teléfonos y tabletas Android.

Personaliza las experiencias de colaboración de los usuarios

Las nuevas funciones te permiten personalizar las herramientas de productividad para adecuarte a la marca y al entorno de tu empresa.

Crea páginas de resultados de búsqueda personalizadas para la Búsqueda de Microsoft. Ya puedes crear páginas de resultados de búsqueda personalizadas en SharePoint Online. Usa esta nueva característica para controlar el diseño de los resultados de la búsqueda con el fin de personalizar tu experiencia de SharePoint Online para tu entorno empresarial. La nueva característica estará disponible para todos los suscriptores de SharePoint Online. Para empezar, selecciona el área de sitio en la que te gustaría configurar una página de resultados personalizada y selecciona Configuración de la colección de sitios > Configuración de búsqueda.

Elige qué características de “Novedades” están visibles para los usuarios. Ahora puedes administrar las características que se muestran u ocultan a los usuarios en la aplicación de escritorio de Office “Novedades”. Este contenido resalta una lista de características nuevas, junto con las descripciones y las instrucciones para ayudar a los clientes a usar las características. Puedes obtener acceso a esta herramienta de administración mediante el Centro de administración de Microsoft 365 y el Servicio de configuración del cliente de Office 365.

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Empieza a crear experiencias de colaboración fluidas hoy. Microsoft Fluid Framework es un nuevo modelo de documentos basado en componentes, diseñado para permitir nuevas formas de colaboración en la creación de contenido. Ahora, todos los usuarios que tengan una suscripción a Office 365 Enterprise pueden consultar la versión preliminar anticipada. Para empezar, solo tienes que iniciar sesión con tu identificador de cuenta de la organización en fluidpreview.com.

Refuerza la personalización de marca de tu empresa en Yammer. Las nuevas funciones en la experiencia actual de Yammer te permiten personalizar el nombre de la fuente Toda la empresa, cargar una foto de portada de la comunidad, enviar mensajes clave, dar la bienvenida a los nuevos miembros, promover iniciativas de la organización y reforzar los valores de la empresa. Empareja esta información con avatares personalizados para incluir la personalización de marca y la cultura en la fuente Toda la empresa. Estas nuevas funciones estarán disponibles pronto para los administradores.

Administra eDiscovery de Yammer desde el Centro de administración de Microsoft 365. Yammer ahora es compatible con eDiscovery para las redes en modo nativo. Ahora, los administradores tendrán acceso a todos los mensajes y archivos publicados en sus redes de Yammer con las mismas herramientas de eDiscovery que usan para administrar datos en el resto del conjunto de aplicaciones de Office 365. Esto simplifica las tareas de eDiscovery y simplifica las obligaciones de cumplimiento. Para empezar, asegúrate de que la red de Yammer se esté ejecutando en modo nativo y, a continuación, ve al módulo de eDiscovery del Centro de seguridad y cumplimiento.

Además, ahora todos los nuevos archivos cargados en las comunidades de Yammer conectadas a Office 365 se almacenan en SharePoint. Con este cambio, los archivos se aplicarán a las directivas de características de cumplimiento y seguridad enriquecidas que implementaste para SharePoint, como eDiscovery, la protección de pérdida de datos y la residencia de datos para los archivos en reposo, entre otros.

Novedades de este mes

• Obtén ayuda para implementar la nueva versión de Microsoft Edge en tu empresa con el nuevo soporte técnico para FastTrack y Asesoría de aplicaciones.
• Office 365 ya está disponible en los centros de datos regionales nuevos de Alemania.

Navegar entre el trabajo y la vida diaria hoy en día requiere de una gran variedad de herramientas que están evolucionando y mejorando constantemente. Nuestro objetivo es construir las experiencias de productividad que te permitan a ti y a tu organización tener éxito. No podemos hacerlo sin ti. Por ello, envíanos tus comentarios, solicitudes o preguntas. Estamos aquí para ayudar.

The post Mejorar la colaboración entre aplicaciones y personalizar experiencias: estas son las novedades de Microsoft 365 en febrero appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.