Tag: Microsoft 365

While Florida is the most moved-to state overall, Austin, Texas, leads among metropolitan areas as the most popular destination, based on LinkedIn members changing their profile locations. People seem to love Texas’s capital city: According to data from the LinkedIn Economic Graph Workforce Reports, which capture when members change the location in their profiles, it was the metro area that gained the most people during the 12 months ending in October 2022, for the fifth year in a row. It’s an enduring trend—Americans keep moving to Austin. 

“Austin has emerged as a hub for tech talent, with more open space, no income taxes, and greater affordability—although less so recently—than the traditional tech cities,” says Brian Xu, a data scientist at LinkedIn. “The pandemic made these qualities more desirable as workers were able to work remotely.” 

A newcomer on the October list? The San Francisco Bay Area, with a net migration rate of 55 per 10,000 LinkedIn members, the first time it has made the list since February 2017. (And the November report, just published, shows the same trend.)

According to a separate data set provided by LinkedIn, the Bay Area had a net gain of technology workers in the 12 months that ended in July, with 1.12 people moving there for every one person who left—a 48 percent increase from the same time last year. (Last year, it had a net loss, with 0.76 people in the technology industry moving to the region for every one person who left.) The New York City Metropolitan Area saw a similar pattern.  

In 2021, longer term remote policies had not yet been formed, Xu says, making it easy for technology workers in particular to move away or postpone their moves to these metropolitan areas. “Tech emerged as the industry with the greatest percentage of remote jobs. Many were not required to live near company headquarters in San Francisco or New York as companies decided on their remote work policies.” Now, though, more (but not all) technology companies have implemented requirements for employees to spend some time on-site, potentially contributing to what researchers Arjun Ramani and Nicholas Bloom have called the donut effect—movement from city centers to the suburban areas around them. 

The Other Great Reshuffle 

When people first started working remotely in large numbers, it was hard to judge how wide-ranging the consequences would be. News outlets covered stories of remote-work “zoomtowns” in rural parts of the country like Idaho and Arkansas. But now, people seem to be settling closer to where they started: the office.   

“The media stories about people going to rural areas may have been accurate for 2021,” says Riordan Frost, a researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Over the course of the pandemic, Frost says he did see rural counties go from a small net loss of people to a small net positive flow of newcomers. But in more recent data, he’s seen more of a re-sort, or reshuffle, than a mass exodus from cities.  

“Many people are going to have some kind of hybrid situation with their work so they can have more flexibility to live wherever they want within a metropolitan area,” Frost says. “We’re seeing these suburban counties in the metropolitan areas really gaining migrants.” 

Indeed, the October city-by-city Workforce reports show that the majority of workers were moving to more populated areas from suburbs or smaller cities in the same or nearby states, with the exception of large migrations to Austin from San Francisco, to Miami from New York City, and to Nashville and Seattle from Los Angeles. These moves were usually made by workers transferring from primary to secondary industry hubs, according to Xu. “San Francisco to Austin is tech; New York City to Miami is finance and the emergence of crypto; and Los Angeles to Seattle and Nashville is a mixture of healthcare, entertainment, and tech.”  

New Office Norms 

But even if people are returning to employment hubs, they still seek the flexibility they experienced over the past few years. Whether their workers are longtime locals or new arrivals, for now, most mid-to-large companies are resisting hard and fast 40-hours-a-week in-person requirements. According to our Work Trend Index research, the average company requires 2.3 days per week on-site, and while the average employee is on-site 2.2 days per week, they’d prefer to go in for an average of 1.7 days instead. That data also shows that the most popular day for hybrid workers to go into the office is Wednesday. The least popular, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Friday. 

Austin was early to this hybrid way of working: Bryce Bencivengo, the director of public relations for the Austin Chamber of Commerce, says that before the pandemic, many employers there already offered remote or flexible work. People were used to working from home when they wanted, and companies there didn’t seem to have much trouble getting people back to the office when it was needed. 

New York and San Francisco had the biggest increases for the six-month period we looked at, but Austin currently has the highest office occupancy rate of any major US city (and has for the past year), according to keycard data from Kastle, a security management company. It’s a state that has been ascribed to the city’s relatively young population and, tech boom aside, the rise of industries in the area that tend to require more in-person time, like manufacturing and professional services.   

Now, as people trickle back to the Bay Area, it remains to be seen if they’ll keep trickling back to the office too. 

The role of IT has changed dramatically over the past few years as the world shifted to hybrid work. IT leaders today advise on a breadth of capital expenditures and play an increasingly central role in the employee experience—occasionally resulting in a complex patchwork of tools and solutions to support and manage.

Now more than ever, IT leaders need to reduce cost and complexity while empowering a digitally connected and distributed workforce in an uncertain economic environment. Microsoft 365 is the cloud-first platform that brings together the capabilities organizations need in a secure, integrated experience—powered by data and AI—to help people work better and smarter.

Do more with less

A new Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft 365 E3 study by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Microsoft, found that adopting Microsoft 365 E3 saved composite organizations USD1,500 per user per year, with a return on investment of 205 percent and a payback period of less than three months. The report details three ways organizations can reduce cost and complexity with Microsoft 365:

1. Eliminate redundant solutions. Moving to Microsoft 365 E3, the composite organization can cut licensing spending by an average of USD55 per user per month—a 60 percent reduction in per-user licensing costs—while also reducing device spending by another 23 percent. We’ve heard from IT leaders about the redundant and overlapping solutions they’ve been asked to support over the last two years. This latest study shows how Microsoft 365 can help free you to cut redundant licenses for products across communications, chat and collaboration, file sharing, endpoint management, email, storage, mobile device management, identity and access management, information protection and labeling, and endpoint protection.
2. Simplify IT management. Moving to Microsoft 365 E3, the composite organization can reduce time spent deploying and managing new software by 25 percent using Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intune, decrease endpoint configuration times by 75 percent by using Windows Autopilot, reduce the time required to set up a user on a new endpoint by 75 percent by leveraging Microsoft’s modern application stack, and eliminate 15 percent of help desk tickets while reducing time to resolve remaining tickets by another 15 percent.
3. Protect and support a digitally connected, distributed hybrid workforce. Finally, moving to Microsoft 365 E3, the composite organization can save users an average of 60 hours per year through improved productivity. Other benefits included reduced travel and related expenses by 25 percent, as well as a substantial reduction in the risk of a security breach using granular Conditional Access policies, detailed and integrated security logs, multifactor authentication, and the overall security of Azure.

Microsoft 365 E3

Maximize your IT investment.

Moreover, a top reason IT decision-makers gave for adopting Microsoft 365 E3 was gaining the flexibility to reallocate IT admins and operations full-time equivalent (FTE) to other functions. One manufacturing customer was simply quoted as saying: “Microsoft is an essential partner in our transition to supporting hybrid working models.”

Learn more

Download the Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft 365 E3 study now to learn more about the measurable impact Microsoft 365 can deliver for your organization and learn how Microsoft can help you do more with less.

Watch the on-demand Microsoft Ignite session, Unlock new experiences across Microsoft 365 to lower costs and empower employees, to learn more.

Commercial and public sector organizations continue to look for new ways to advance their goals, improve efficiencies, and create positive employee experiences. The rise of the digital workforce and the current economic environment compels organizations to utilize public cloud applications to benefit from efficiency and cost reduction. However, organizations are rightfully concerned about data residency, privacy, and security, as evidenced by the myriad of privacy regimes, national security laws, and data residency requirements being erected by national and regional authorities. From a 2017 baseline of 67 laws and regulations in 35 countries, worldwide data residency measures have more than doubled to 144, spread across 62 countries.¹

Microsoft is a leader in helping organizations of all types throughout the world address their data residency, privacy, and security requirements. Microsoft has the most comprehensive compliance coverage of any cloud service provider with 100-plus offerings including more than 50 which are specific to global regions and countries.

Beginning in 2014 with our initial local datacenter region in Japan to our recent launch in Qatar, Microsoft 365 now has local datacenter regions in 15 countries worldwide with announced plans to launch 13 additional local datacenter regions over the coming years.² This unrivaled fleet of datacenter regions provides Microsoft 365 customers with global coverage coupled with local choice for customer data residency.

For commercial and public sector customers, we provide the leading data residency commitment in the productivity and collaboration space, storing customer data at rest in any of our multiple macro-regions or local datacenter regions to suit customer requirements. Until now, this unparalleled data residency commitment covered customer content in the core Microsoft 365 workloads of Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online.

Microsoft 365 has a heritage in providing sophisticated customer data residency solutions, like Multi-Geo Capabilities for multi-national companies that require more granular data location controls. In 2021, Microsoft also announced expanded commitments to create an EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud.³ With this commitment, Microsoft pledged to process and store commercial and public sector European Union customer data within the European Union. This commitment will apply across all of Microsoft’s core cloud services including Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365.

But we aren’t stopping there. In this new age of hybrid work and the increasing reliance on digital transformation, our customers are demanding additional controls for data, including where it resides and its treatment.

Microsoft Teams and data residency

With over 270 million monthly active Microsoft Teams users, customers have turned to Teams as an indispensable tool to communicate, collaborate, and stay in the flow of hybrid work. Microsoft is now adding Teams to the customer data residency commitments in our Product Terms, covering commercial and public sector customers in the existing 15 local datacenter regions. With this extension to our existing promises, Teams core customer data, consisting of Teams chat messages (including private messages, channel messages, meeting messages, and associated images), and meeting recordings,⁴ present in the tenant, will be stored at rest in local datacenter regions.

Microsoft 365 Advanced Data Residency add-on

We are also announcing the new Microsoft 365 Advanced Data Residency add-on that will extend the commitments for customer data storage at rest. With availability beginning in November 2022, the Advanced Data Residency add-on is designed to give regulated commercial and public sector customers of Microsoft 365 additional assurances that may help with their compliance with data residency laws, regulations, and industry standards. It will provide eligible customers with premium services, including data storage at rest commitments for expanded workloads including Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office Plan 1, Office for the Web, Microsoft Viva Connections, Microsoft Viva Topics, and components of the Microsoft Purview suite. Additionally, the add-on provides customers eligible to migrate their Microsoft 365 tenants into our local datacenter regions with prioritized migration benefits.

Looking ahead

We’re committed to building on the value and services available for Microsoft 365 customers with the Advanced Data Residency add-on and other data residency offerings. Microsoft continues to invest in data residency, privacy, and security advancements that allow our customers to have peace of mind in the ever-evolving regulatory landscape. Through the expansion of our local datacenter regions, advancements in data residency offerings across the Microsoft 365 portfolio, and connection to the Microsoft cloud, we are excited to continue helping customers across the world accelerate their digital transformation. 

¹How Barriers to Cross-Border Data Flows Are Spreading Globally, What They Cost, and How to Address Them, Nigel Cory, Luke Dascoli, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. July 19, 2021.

²Microsoft opens first global datacenter region in Qatar, bringing new opportunities for a cloud-first economy, Microsoft News Center. August 31, 2022.

³Answering Europe’s Call: Storing and Processing EU Data in the EU, Brad Smith, EU Policy Blog, Microsoft. May 6, 2021.

⁴Meeting recordings are included for customers using Microsoft Stream.

Breaks during the workday are essential to our well-being. Amid employee burnout and a human energy crisis in the workplace, we want to help in any way we can.¹ While a 15-minute break from your computer won’t fix everything, our research shows that even short breaks allow your brain to reset from the stress of back-to-back meetings.² It’s a bite-sized step anyone can take.

Enter the THINVITE

That’s why during National Cookie Month, Microsoft 365 and OREO THINS are teaming up to create the THINVITE, a 15-minute snack break delivered straight to your calendar—and your door.

Each THINVITE calendar hold will include a special Microsoft Teams live event link to the entertainment every workplace is hungry for—a glimpse into a day at the office for eight playful pups. The short video, Return to Pawfice, will debut during the first snack break on November 1, 2022, and stream during each THINVITE session. Anyone with the link can join!

And since it wouldn’t be a snack break without snacks, we’re also dropping a limited-edition OREO THINS Snack Break Expansion Cookie Pack. Each expansion pack includes custom-packaged OREO THINS emblazoned with helpful office tips from the iconic Microsoft office assistant, Clippy, plus a special accessory—the must-have Clippy Dippy, designed to keep your hands milk-free while dunking cookies during your snack break.³

To celebrate the collab, we’re also bringing OREO THINS emojis to Microsoft Teams—just type “oreo” or “oreoyum” in your Teams chat emoji search box to find them. The OREO emojis will appear below in the compose bar, just click or tap the one you want to send and press Enter or Send. They’re the perfect way to playfully remind your colleagues to hit refresh with a break.

To learn more about the collaboration, visit the OREO THINVITE page and sign up to join us for a break from 2 to 2:15 PM EDT or 11:00 to 11:15 AM PDT on November 1-3, 2022.

And remember to keep it going!

We’ve had a great time working with OREO THINS and planning the THINVITEs. But we also want to underscore the purpose behind the fun: breaks are an essential part of your workday to support wellbeing. That’s why we build features into technologies like Microsoft Viva to help people schedule focus sessions, meditate and set aside time for breaks.

We want to empower everyone to take time for breaks. Just remember to BYOM—bring your own milk!

¹Why Leaders Can’t Ignore the Human Energy Crisis, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft. September 15, 2022.

²Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks, WTI Pulse Report, Microsoft. April 20, 2021.

³Limited availability. Visit OREO.com/THINVITE for details.

In today’s shifting macroeconomic climate, Microsoft is focused on helping organizations in every industry use technology to overcome challenges and emerge stronger. From enabling hybrid work to bringing business processes into the flow of work, Microsoft 365 helps organizations deliver on their digital imperative so they can do more with less.

This month in Microsoft 365, we’re introducing new sharing experiences in OneDrive, enabling creation and collaboration in Microsoft Office, and connecting employees to organizational goals with Microsoft Viva Goals. And our new How to Hybrid: The WorkLab Guides offer practical guidance to help leaders make hybrid work work.

Let’s dive in.

Streamline file sharing and communication in the flow of work

OneDrive is the core system for powering all file-sharing experiences across Microsoft 365. We’re excited to preview new capabilities to help you access everything you need, whether you’re working alone on a project, collaborating with your team, or organizing important documents or files.

We’re creating a more intuitive sharing experience across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams that provides a quick, robust way to locate and share files and manage access settings across individuals and groups.

The redesigned OneDrive Home experience surfaces your most recent files along with any activity updates, so you can see everything at a glance and quickly prioritize where to start working. You can also filter by file type (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, and .pdf) using the buttons at the top of the Recent file list.  

Finally, to easily find and access the places where you continually work, you can pin document libraries to the Quick access section in the left navigation bar of OneDrive Home. Learn more about the latest OneDrive capabilities.

Microsoft Teams Phone is the market leader in cloud calling across VoIP and PSTN with more than 12 million PSTN users. We are introducing a new Teams Phone Pay-As-You-Go calling plan option to give customers even more flexibility to choose the plan that best meets their organization’s needs. Each Pay-As-You-Go license includes a phone number and unlimited inbound calling, while outbound calls accrue per-minute charges. The Pay-As-You-Go calling plan is now available in select markets.

Enable creation and collaboration with Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps. New capabilities in Microsoft Office make it easier to access, create, and organize ideas on the web or on your mobile device.

On the web, People Pinning under My content enables you to create a more personalized experience by pinning your top collaborators so that you can easily get back to the content from your most important contacts.

On the mobile app, Microsoft Feed lets commercial users discover interesting and relevant content, activity, and insights all drawn from their Microsoft 365 network.

And Microsoft Lens in the app uses interactive text to help you reuse information from existing photos, screenshots, or camera views to quickly capture notes, copy and paste across platforms, save to your device, or share with others.

Reconnect and engage a dispersed workforce

Organizations increasingly recognize that employee experience and wellbeing are essential to productivity—it’s why 25 percent of the Fortune 500 already use Microsoft Viva. We’re adding new capabilities in Viva and Teams to help keep employees connected to each other, their team, and to the organization’s mission, culture, and business goals.

Viva Goals—now generally available—connects employees to your organization’s goals, helps them stay aligned at scale, and drives business results to empower people and teams to understand their impact. Viva Goals supports the objectives and key results (OKR) goal-setting framework that naturally creates alignment between the work teams are doing and an organization’s top business priorities. Because Viva Goals is a part of Microsoft Viva, it integrates into the employee experience, empowering people and teams to be their best from anywhere. Use Viva Goals as a standalone web application or directly from inside Teams and our other third-party integrations. Learn more about Viva Goals.

We now have an improved polling experience in Teams. Teams meeting owners can easily create and launch new pre-defined polls or repurpose recent polls to increase engagement and collect input from their meeting attendees, as well as share the results live. A new, dynamic experience with animations for voting and results views makes polls more interactive and engaging. We’ve also added Rating as a new question type. Read more about what’s new in Microsoft Teams.  

Leverage the How to Hybrid: The WorkLab Guides

For leaders grappling with how to make hybrid work work, check out the new WorkLab Guides. From collaborating asynchronously to hosting effective meetings to knowing how and when to come together in person, these detailed guides include hands-on advice to help leaders navigate the new approach to work and figure out what works for their teams. Learn more at The WorkLab Guides.

How to Hybrid: The WorkLab Guides

Leverage hands-on advice to help leaders navigate the hybrid work world.

Looking forward

This month we debuted enhanced capabilities across Microsoft 365 to help people collaborate and stay connected and engaged in the flow of work. Stay tuned for more developments next month, as we highlight a number of new product innovations in Microsoft 365.

Get better control over time and tasks  

Tools that foster a sense of control over time and tasks can help alleviate anxiety, contribute to better work-life balance, and reduce the chances of burnout. In previous installments of this blog, we’ve noted some of the ways that Microsoft 365 tools can help users manage their time more effectively – for example, by enrolling in a Focus plan or relaxing your mind with a Headspace meditation in Microsoft Viva Insights.  

In recent months, we’ve continued to innovate in this space, with improvements in Outlook, Teams, and Viva Insights. In Outlook, you can now pin important messages to the top of your inbox, or drag and drop email messages as tasks on your To Do list to help ensure important messages don’t fall through the cracks. To capture stray thoughts, you can now use the Teams Chat with Self feature to send yourself notes, messages, files, and images or videos, helping you keep everything in one place for tracking or transferring to your To Do list. And in Viva Insights, you can now tap into a curated set of guided meditations from Headspace in four additional languages: French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. 

Note to our government customers 

We’re also pleased to share that the following Microsoft 365 features, all of which are currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments, have now also rolled out for Microsoft 365 GCC, GCC-High, and/or Department of Defense (DoD) customers, as noted: 

Microsoft Teams 

• Live captions in Meetings for VDI – VMWare (GCC) 
• Live captions in Meetings for VDI – Citrix (GCC) 
• Multi-window support for VDI – AVD, Windows 365, Citrix (GCC/GCC-H) 
• Customize chat density settings (GCC/GCC-H/DoD) 
• Chat with Self (GCC/GCC-H/DoD) 
• Anonymous meeting join across clouds (GCC/GCC-H/DoD) 
• Live Transcript for meetings on VDI (AVD) (GCC/GCC-H) 
• Suggested Replies on Mobile (GCC/GCC-H/DoD) 
• Together Mode on VDI (GCC-H) 
• Presenter mode: controls to move and resize presenter video (GCC-H/DoD) 
• CART captioning in meetings (Desktop) (GCC-H) 
• Together Mode on web (GCC-H/DoD) 
• New default for Teams notification style (DoD) 

Microsoft Stream 

• Add or edit captions and transcript for a video in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business (GCC/GCC-H/DoD) 

Microsoft Viva  

• Briefing email from Microsoft Viva (GCC) 
• Viva Insights app in Teams (GCC) 

Help shape the future of Microsoft 365 accessibility 

Our commitment to accessibility is powered by input from our customers and employees with disabilities – and it is driving exciting new work across Microsoft. At the 12th annual Microsoft Ability Summit in May, we celebrated a new and expanded Inclusive Tech Lab and unveiled Microsoft adaptive accessories designed to give people with disabilities greater access to technology. These adaptive accessories were designed to empower anyone who has difficulty using a traditional mouse or keyboard. People can use these accessories to create their own custom setup wherever they choose to work. Explore videos from the Ability Summit on demand. 

Ensuring that our products empower everyone to connect, communicate, and contribute is core to Microsoft’s mission, and we are committed to continual improvement in this space. And by far our most important guide on this journey is feedback from you, our customers. You can always reach us right within the Microsoft 365 apps you’re already using: just go to the File menu and select “Feedback” then “Send a suggestion” and include the tag #accessibility.  

If you have a disability and need technical assistance with any Microsoft product the Disability Answer Desk (DAD) can assist you via phone (800-936-5900) or chat. We also have an ASL option available for our customers who are deaf or hard of hearing in the U.S. (+1 503-427-1234), as well as video support through the Be My Eyes app. Enterprise customers can also reach out to the Enterprise Disability Answer Desk (eDAD) with questions about accessibility features, product compliance, and assistive technologies. 

The ways we work have changed dramatically over the past several years, and those changes go so much further than whether work happens at home, in an office, or somewhere in between. In this collaboration-first world, every organization needs a digital fabric that binds people together—from the C-suite to the frontline, and across every role and function.

At the center of this digital fabric is Microsoft Teams, and it’s enhanced by the productivity tools of Microsoft 365, the digital employee experience in Microsoft Viva, and the power and security of Windows.

We have lots of new updates this month across Microsoft 365, including a first-of-its-kind solution with Microsoft Viva Sales, and new capabilities for Teams, Outlook, Word, and more. And we’ve upgraded endpoint security to keep businesses safe and give IT departments better tools.

Let’s dive in.

Facilitating deeper customer connections

Microsoft Viva is the digital-first employee experience for every employee. It connects employees to the organization’s mission and culture and supports engagement and retention. Now, it goes further to help employees excel at their job.

Microsoft Viva Sales reimagines the selling experience, giving salespeople AI-driven insights and data automation right in the flow of work. Sellers will be able to automatically capture, access, and register data into any customer relationship management (CRM) system. Enriched with data from Microsoft 365, Viva Sales helps salespeople create deeper connections and relationships with customers to make better, faster sales.

Viva Sales is the first of its kind solution, and we’re excited to roll out additional business-specific tools soon. Learn more about Viva Sales announcement.

Increasing communication, time management, and search in the flow of work

Overflowing inboxes are nothing new but continue to be a pain point for many. We’re introducing new features in Outlook to help you better manage your time: Bookings with me puts you in control of when people can book an appointment with you, updates to Microsoft Forms help streamline communication, and enhancements within Search make it easier to find and share information with your co-workers.

With Bookings with me in Outlook, you can create, customize, and share a personal Bookings page where people can book time with you based on your personal preferences. Start customizing your Bookings page in the web calendar by clicking on Create bookings page.

Microsoft Forms has a new distribution and notification experience, available now. You can share with people directly, create a QR code, embed a link, or even generate an email invitation with a dedicated template. You can easily keep track of responses and send reminders with one click.

Microsoft Search is a modern, AI-powered search solution for your workplace. Whether your users are looking for a ServiceNow knowledge article, a Confluence wiki, or a document on a Windows file share, you can use Graph connectors to index all your content to save them time and increase productivity by bringing that information into the flow of their work.

Improving the Office.com experience

We’re enhancing the productivity tools millions of people rely on every day to get work done, with an improved Office.com experience. These new updates will allow users to create, share, and collaborate all in one place with their favorite apps. 

The newly designed Office.com sign-in and sign-up page greets you with a modern entry point to get your day started on the web. We are introducing a new onboarding experience that helps you understand how to better use and engage with Office. Additionally, with the new Create experience, you can access new creation templates in a single location.

Enabling visual storytelling

When it’s time to “show” rather than “tell” your story, Word Designer can help deliver inspiration thanks to updates that contextualize image suggestions, offering customized recommendations to meet your unique needs.

Updating endpoint security for IT departments

When work can happen from anywhere, the management and security of endpoint devices have become more critical and more complicated. So, our efforts to be a reliable, consistent, and trustworthy digital endpoint manager have only increased.

Microsoft Endpoint Manager now offers IT administrators a way to create organization-level policies to mute after-hours notifications and can get visibility into which devices models are most performant for people in their organization. This further enables organizations to improve the employee technology experience with the endpoints they use every day.

IT departments subscribed to Windows E3/5 can now rely on Windows Autopatch to handle endpoint updates for M365 software, Windows 10, and Windows 11. Automatic updates help reduce gaps in security and build organization-wide trust that endpoints are secure. This new service will be available July 7, 2022, at no additional cost and requires Intune and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

Looking forward

This month, we rolled out a series of updates and improvements to Microsoft 365, all designed to give employees the insights, context, and support they need to get their jobs done effectively. There’s more coming next month as we announce several product innovations at Inspire, our largest partner event of the year. Stay tuned.