One of the challenges of hybrid work is enabling teams to remain connected, engaged, and in sync. Ensuring everyone is on the same page may have felt easier when we were all in the office together, but we’re continuing to deliver updates to Microsoft 365 that bridge the digital and physical divide to bring employees closer to each other and to their organization’s mission and goals.
We’ve got lots of exciting news this month, including the private preview of Microsoft Viva Goals—a new module that helps organizations set measurable goals and enables employees to record and track progress along the way. We’re also adding new features that improve your ability to deliver compelling presentations and visuals, enhance security protections for small businesses, and help keep you organized—whether you’re working at home, the office, or somewhere in between.
Let’s dive in.
Working smarter with Viva Goals
In October 2021, we announced our acquisition of Ally.io, a leading objectives and key results (OKRs) company, to help revolutionize how organizations use technology to bring a deeper connection to work, purpose, and results. That solution comes to life this month through Viva Goals—the latest addition to the Viva suite.
Viva Goals aligns your teams to your organization’s strategic priorities, enabling employees to focus on the work and outcomes that are most critical to the bottom line. With customized dashboards and quick links, Viva Goals makes it easy to check in on progress and share results. By bringing OKRs into the flow of work, they’re accessible within the place employees work and spend their day. Explore Viva Goals today.
Bringing dynamic storytelling into the flow of work
The ability to clearly communicate your story has always been an important part of business, and that value has only increased in the shift to hybrid work. The ability to clearly communicate across mediums—from emails and presentations to graphic illustrations—is now a critical skill for most employees who need to connect with a dispersed audience. With updates to Visio and PowerPoint, we’re making it easier for you to get your message across, with a deeper connection to data and visual storytelling.
We’ve introduced new templates in Visio for the web to help you quickly create visual timelines for product launch roadmaps, marketplace rollouts, marketing plans, and annual goals, just to name a few. You can also choose from an expanding list of popular business frameworks, such as Porter’s Five Forces, PESTLE Analysis, 5 Whys, and the four Ps of marketing. We also offer industry-specific diagrams and templates to help you create simple but powerful visuals.
A key part of communication is being able to tell a compelling story rooted in data. There is no better storytelling tool than PowerPoint. With Storytelling, an integration between Microsoft Power BI and PowerPoint, we enable live, interactive reports within the slides. PowerPoint users are now able to add live report pages into PowerPoint slides without losing data interactivity, even when presenting their presentation.
A new enhancement to presenter mode enables the presenter to choose where they show up on the slide and the ability to resize their video feed while automatically adjusting content size accordingly.
Keeping work focused and organized, from anywhere
Being digitally connected is an important part of work today. But it also creates its own challenges—managing inbound information and requests across platforms, juggling competing deadlines, and managing streams of reminders and pop-ups. All of which can make it harder, rather than easier, to get work done. With updates to Microsoft Teams, Lists, and Forms, we’re helping streamline processes and minimize distractions.
We are now adding a notification drawer in Teams which appears at the top of your screen for in-meeting messages. This allows you to preview, collapse, and clear all notifications with just one tap.
Microsoft Lists for Android is now available in the Google Play store for Microsoft 365 commercial customers. With this new mobile app, you can access your lists on the go anytime, anywhere. Manage events, track issues and assets, help with new-employee onboarding, and keep coordinated across inventory. With access on the go, easy sharing, and quick photo capture, you can keep everyone connected with the latest information using Microsoft Lists. Get the app now.
We’re excited to announce two new experiences with Microsoft Forms. The first is the cross-device experience, which brings the full capability of Microsoft Forms to your mobile device. The second is the getting started experience for new users, which includes a series of templates that can be used across work, school, and life. Read the Tech Community blog, Create and Analyze Forms and Quizzes from Mobile, to learn more.
Bringing enterprise-grade endpoint security to small and medium sized businesses
Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) face increasing cyber threats, and many don’t have the resources they need to keep their information safe. On March 1, 2022, we made Microsoft Defender for Business generally available in Microsoft 365 Business Premium, our comprehensive security and productivity solution for businesses with up to 300 employees. We are now also offering Defender for Business as a standalone, giving these organizations multi-layer protection, detection, and response option.
Microsoft Defender for Business spans the five phases of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework—identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover—to protect and remediate against known and unknown threats. Read our blog, Microsoft Launches Defender for Business to help protect small and medium businesses.
Learn more
This month, we made improvements to the average workday that help employees stay focused on the work that truly matters, communicate in more compelling ways, and keep their information safe. These innovations are all focused on helping employees adapt and thrive in this new world of work, which is ultimately what’s best for business. We’ve got lots more in store for you—stay tuned.
As highlighted in the recent release of our 2022 Work Trend Index1, organizations around the world are adapting to new ways of working, which means they’re faced with a new challenge: how to bring together culture, technology, and space to make hybrid work work. The tools we use every day need to be flexible and inclusive to empower people of all different needs to be productive from anywhere, at any time.
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.
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.3Live 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.
In this atypical year, many of us have discovered a new sense of appreciation for our computers as critical tools to get work done. Now more than ever, we are all looking for new ways to be productive on our laptops and desktops. At Microsoft, we are committed to delivering great Microsoft 365 experiences that help our customers work easier and faster on their favorite devices. With this in mind, we want to share some of the latest Microsoft 365 innovations that can make you even more productive on a Mac.
Universal app support for Macs with M1 is here
We are excited to announce that starting today we are releasing new versions of many of our Microsoft 365 for Mac apps that run natively on Macs with M1. This means that now our core flagship Office apps—Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote—will run faster and take full advantage of the performance improvements on new Macs, making you even more productive on the latest MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The new Office apps are Universal, so they will continue to run great on Macs with Intel processors. The apps are not only speedy, but they also look fantastic as they have been redesigned to match the new look of macOS Big Sur. Here is a peek at Outlook on the new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
If you have automatic updates turned on, you will start to receive these updates today. Otherwise, you can go to the Mac App Store and click the Updates tab, or with Microsoft AutoUpdate, you can go to your Office app’s Help menu and choose Check for Updates. Plus, find more commonly asked questions on our support page.
With more than 115M daily active users, Teams has become a critical part of the way many people are navigating the current situation. Teams allows you to meet, chat, call, and collaborate all in a single app. And, when people work in Teams, they all get the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams is currently available in Rosetta emulation mode on Macs with M1 and the browser. We are working on universal app support for M1 Macs and will share more news as our work progresses. Download the Teams app for your Mac here now.
Microsoft 365 experiences made for Mac
Over the past months, we have redesigned the experiences in our flagship apps for Mac with a focus on simplicity to improve ease of use. The new Outlook for Mac looks great with a redesign that matches the new look of macOS Big Sur, and an updated Office Start experience for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for Mac that incorporates the Fluent UI design system. This means that Microsoft 365 apps enable you to be more focused with immersive experiences that are easier to use right from the first screen. Experiences that feel both unmistakably Microsoft 365 and include elements that are native to the look of macOS so they are also unmistakably made for Mac. The new Office Start experience will be available next month.
We continue to learn how customers want to use our products through continued feedback. So, thank you to each and every one of you who have shared your experiences with us. Today we are pleased to announce support for iCloud accounts in the new Outlook for Mac. This will enable you to organize work and personal emails, contacts, and calendars together in one app so it is easier for you to stay connected to what matters. We will start to roll this out using the new Outlook for Mac in the coming weeks.
Work your way
Another area of focus is to make our Microsoft 365 apps work the way you do. Through many new innovations on our Mac apps, our goal is to help you get work done in more simple and intuitive ways.
Tell Me is a search box that quickly gets you to the Office tools you need or actions you want to take by just typing what you are looking for in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote for Mac. Microsoft Search in the new Outlook for Mac allows you to type out your query or question using language you use every day to find emails, events, and files—no fancy syntax needed. These capabilities help simplify how you use Microsoft 365 apps to achieve more and are now available to all Mac users.
A commonly used productivity hack is to use your phone to capture images of important information you want to work on. With Data from Picture, you can take a photo of a table directly on your iPhone and turn it into data you can edit in Excel for Mac. This handy new feature uses Continuity Camera on your Mac and is also available now.
Voice input is a growing part of our digital lives and can be a great way to simplify your workflow. A new dictation toolbar with voice commands for creating content with your voice is coming to Word and Outlook for Mac. In addition, to help you check spelling, correct grammar, and get writing style suggestions, we will enable Microsoft Editor in Word for Mac. We plan to make these updates available to customers with access to Microsoft 365 for Insiders in early 2021.
New ways to work together
The shift to remote work highlights the need for teams to collaborate with agility, while ensuring sensitive data stays secure and meets compliance requirements. Our Microsoft 365 app teams have been busy getting modern collaboration and compliance capabilities ready so you can work from home more effectively on your Mac.
Sharing your calendars in Outlook with your co-workers helps you manage your time more efficiently. By giving access to participants’ calendars through simplified permissions, planning meetings and events is quick and easy. Based on the Microsoft sync technology and connected architecture, Outlook can provide reliable and faster synchronization of calendar events across Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, and Web, keeping you on track of your time your way. The new Outlook for Mac will support shared calendars for customers subscribed to the Office Insider Mac Beta Channel in the first months of next year.
When creating new content as a team, the ability to collaborate around documents and presentations becomes especially valuable when your team is not in the same location. The new modern commenting experience in Word for Mac enables a contextual view of comments that allows you to focus on your content without missing active comments by contributors and reviewers. Modern commenting also includes improved @mentions in PowerPoint and Word for Mac that make it easier to reply to comments. The new @mentions experience is available now in PowerPoint for enterprise customers. Modern commenting for Word is in the Office Insider Beta Channel now and coming to Current Channel Preview in February 2021.
Have you ever collaborated with someone in a worksheet and suddenly your view changes and you are unable to finish your work? This can often happen when an active collaborator adds filters or sorts the data in a table of a shared worksheet. Excel sheet view is a new way to create customized views to sort and filter your data without disrupting what others see. This capability is an example of customer-driven product improvement and is now available on Excel for Mac.
Last, but certainly not least, Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels allow you to classify and protect your organization’s data with minimal effort through manual and automatic content labeling. Manual labeling is available on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for Mac. Automatic labeling is coming to these same apps for Microsoft 365 E5 customers in early 2021.
We are excited about the Microsoft 365 innovations we are delivering for our Mac user community and would love to hear your feedback about your experience using our latest features. If you want to try out new Office features first and make a difference in the products you use every day, please join the Office Insiders and check out the Mac channels.
Seven-year strategic agreement to help enterprise and midmarket customers accelerate digitalization
Enhance productivity and digitize business operations with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure as T-Systems’ preferred cloud platform in select solution areas
Support digital education efforts in Germany
BONN, Germany, REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 9, 2020 — Deutsche Telekom Group and Microsoft Corp. announced an expansion of their partnership that will help customers of all sizes accelerate their cloud transformation initiatives.
For many companies, the cloud represents an opportunity to reduce IT costs, increase flexibility and accelerate innovation. However, to fully take advantage of cloud computing, it requires a high-performance network that can scale to meet increasing technology demands. By combining Microsoft’s cloud and AI capabilities with Telekom’s Cloud Migration Framework and telecommunications services, the companies enable customers to increase their productivity, build more agile and resilient operations, and deliver new cloud offerings faster.
“We have agreed on the framework for joint strategic growth with our long-term partner Microsoft. We are delighted,” said Adel Al-Saleh, member of the Deutsche Telekom Board of Management and CEO of T-Systems. “This partnership will enable us to enhance services for our customers. We will also be supporting each other with digitalization and network build-out.”
“The case for digital transformation has never been more urgent. We know that the next decade of economic performance for every business, whether large or small, will depend on the digital investments made today,” said Jean-Philippe Courtois, executive vice president and president, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations. “Through this strategic partnership, which combines the power of Deutsche Telekom’s network and Microsoft’s cloud, customers will have more opportunities to become resilient, accelerate innovation and ultimately drive success.”
Trusted cloud infrastructure to accelerate business innovation
The delivery of secure and powerful software applications requires a modern IT infrastructure. To accelerate business innovation, Telekom plans to migrate the majority of its internal IT workloads to the public cloud by 2025, and Azure is a central part of that strategy. Through a companywide training program, thousands of Telekom employees will learn how to maximize the benefits of Azure.
Moving mainframe workloads to the cloud is one of the targeted areas of the partnership. Historically, mainframes were designed as scale-up servers to run high-volume online transactions and batch processing. Using cloud-based mainframes, businesses can deliver new services based on evolving customer demands without retrofitting legacy hardware. This means companies can drive scale, business continuity and energy efficiency while reducing operational and hardware costs.
Telekom will also offer its customers direct access to the Microsoft cloud through Azure ExpressRoute. By bypassing the public internet, customers will have increased agility through faster connectivity to better address regional compliance and data residency needs.
Enabling digital collaboration and streamlining business operations
To help people and businesses be more connected and productive from anywhere, Telekom will offer Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams. As part of this, the companies have started a project for German schools to reimagine traditional approaches to education, enabling remote learning through cloud-based IT infrastructure, modern devices and the cloud productivity and collaboration applications within Microsoft 365.
To leverage the benefits of cloud computing for critical business processes, such as enterprise resource planning and supply chain management, Telekom supports its customers with moving their SAP environments to Azure. SAP solutions on Azure offer enterprise-grade security, and business continuity and reduce hardware expenses, making it easier for startups and smaller organizations to get started.
Accelerating cloud initiatives: assessment, migration, service
Telekom’s enterprise customer unit T-Systems has migrated and securely managed large-scale applications and critical enterprise workloads. With Azure as a preferred cloud platform for select solution areas, T-Systems is providing these capabilities to companies across all industries so they can harness the global scale, security and latest advances without needing to manage installation and maintenance. This Cloud Migration Framework combines automated assessment, cloud migration and services management to help accelerate customers’ cloud initiatives.
Small and medium-sized businesses will benefit from these offerings as they can focus on their core competencies and don’t need to provide the resources and knowledge usually required to implement a comprehensive cloud strategy.
Telekom and Microsoft will work closely together to continue to address compliance needs and European regulatory requirements.
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
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As we enter the holiday season, it’s been inspiring to see organizations condense years of transformation into just a few short months. Many of you are adopting new digital technologies, transforming your business processes, and fundamentally rethinking how work will get done going forward. Throughout all of it, we’ve been focused on studying how work is changing and listening to you, our customers, so we can prioritize features and capabilities that will help you adapt to these changes and improve your workflows.
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.
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.
For some time now, business leaders have made digital transformation a priority. But when the pandemic hit this spring, adopting and embracing digital technology went from being a matter of importance to one of sheer survival. COVID-19 has catapulted us into the era of digital everything. And to keep up with the pace of change, and build more resilient businesses to meet future challenges, we need to move digital transformation from art to science.
As leaders, it’s our job to make sure people have the tools they need to do their best work. But tools alone are not enough—you also need to help everyone in your organization build the habits that harness the true power of those tools. Until now, it’s been difficult for leaders to get insight into these habits and understand how to help people make the most of the technology they invest in. Today, with the announcement of the general availability of Microsoft Productivity Score, we take an important step forward. Let’s take a look at how Productivity Score can help your people succeed today and in the future.
Using Productivity Score to help power your digital transformation
As we’ve talked with many of you about your digital transformation efforts, we’ve heard that you need a better way to measure the value you’re getting from Microsoft 365 beyond usage. Productivity Score builds upon the Microsoft Graph data to give you insights that help you quantify what is happening across your organization and use aggregated measures to drive better outcomes for people by leveraging technology.
Because while every digital transformation is different, they all come down to those two things: people and technology. People are your most important asset, and helping them adapt to new ways of working is key to any successful transformation. Technology, meanwhile, is the enabler, helping to unleash the ingenuity that only people possess. Productivity Score leverages the depth and breadth of Microsoft 365 to give you visibility into how your organization works, insights to identify where you can make improvements, and actions you can take to update skills and systems so that everyone can do their best work. It shows you people experiences across five categories: content collaboration, meetings, communication, teamwork, and mobility. Meanwhile, technology experiences focus on endpoints, network connectivity, and Microsoft 365 Apps.
Using the insights Productivity Score provides, we can also help you improve experiences over time by recognizing and proactively addressing issues so you can derive more value from your investment. Productivity Score identifies areas where you can offer people training to learn how to use the tools to their fullest capacity. For example, the new teamwork category (available today) provides a score based on the percentage of people who engage in teamwork within shared workspaces like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and group mailboxes in Exchange. You can see how this engagement has changed over the past six months, which helps you measure your transformation journey. Insights like this can also help you to identify possible training opportunities so your users can collaborate in new or more efficient ways. You can learn more about this and other scenarios in the Mechanics video.
Figure 1: Teamwork category page
Commitment to privacy
Microsoft runs on trust, and we have a strong commitment to privacy across all our services. Using data responsibly is at the heart of how we built Productivity Score. Productivity Score gives you important insights about your organization, but we know you have a critical need to maintain users’ trust while using those data insights responsibly. You need a choice in who and to what level people in your organization can see user-level data.
We get it, and we are committed to privacy as a fundamental element of Productivity Score. Let me be clear: Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool. Productivity Score is about discovering new ways of working, providing your people with great collaboration and technology experiences. It focuses on actionable insights about the ways in which people and teams are using the tools so you can make improvements or provide training to further your digital transformation. For example, to help maintain privacy and trust, the user data provided in Productivity Score is aggregated over a 28-day period. We also give you controls so you can anonymize the user info or even remove it. You can learn more on the documentation page.
From art to science
Digital transformation is a challenge for all of us, but it doesn’t have to be a mystery. Productivity Score illuminates the essential insights to move your transformation from art to science, just as it’s doing at Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world. As you can see in this video, Nestle is using Productivity Score to transform assumptions into data-based facts that the company uses to build better user experiences. And as we hear incredible digital transformation stories like these from customers around the world, we hope that Productivity Score, along with the insights that are coming to Microsoft Teams, will help you discover even more ways to succeed in a new world of work.
Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of Microsoft Forms for personal use. Forms enables you to create a survey or quiz on any topic and works on any device via the web and the Office mobile app– making it easy to capture the information you need anywhere, anytime.
With easy-to-use tools and clear design suggestions, you can gather input and make plans for a variety of activities –survey your neighborhood friends for a weekly running time, coordinate your holiday gathering with family, or even host a virtual trivia night with friends from any location. Working through virtual learning this year? Use Forms to engage with students or create fun and interactive quizzes with the option to add video. Parents needing to organize fundraisers or other school activities can use Forms to easily collect information and ideas from other families.
Forms for personal use is available today and complements our existing experiences for business and education. It is free for anyone with a Microsoft account, with premium features such as an expanded number of respondents and more templates available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family subscribers.
Templates and themes offer creative design and AI-powered intelligence
With Forms, you can easily create, run, and analyze the results of your surveys and quizzes. Leveraging built-in intelligence, Forms does the heavy lifting for you by making smart template suggestions as you go, including recommended themes, plus additional questions and answer options based on what you type in the title.
You can customize each form for any scenario – from holiday planning to sports team organization – by selecting from a variety of themes and templates. The dozen templates available include invitations for holiday and birthday parties, feedback surveys, and even a t-shirt size sign-up form to help with team orders. Themes vary from events to holidays, travel, learning, food, and more – or you can use your own photos to personalize your form.
Once your form is ready, you can share it out via a link or QR code that can be accessed from virtually anywhere – from any device at any time. With real-time responses and automatically generated charts, your results are at your fingertips; Forms makes it easy for you to understand the results quickly and easily. Plus, you can export your results directly to Excel for additional analysis.
Ready to get started? Simply sign in with your Microsoft account (or set one up) at forms.microsoft.com and see what you can create! More information is also available on the Microsoft Forms website.
As we gear up for our annual Ignite conference, I’m struck by how much we’ve learned these past few months—from our customers, from researchers and experts in every field, and from our own experiences at Microsoft navigating remote and hybrid work models. For all of us, these lessons extend to our home lives as well. Maybe you’re coordinating factory floor operations from a kitchen table hundreds of miles away or greeting your Grandpa on a video screen as he virtually attends a family picnic, it’s probably dawned on you that our world is changing in durable ways. As we work to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we’re learning to embrace a heterogeneous future. Our mission is to enable people, teams, and organizations to thrive in this new world of remote and hybrid work and learning. Last month at Inspire, I shared how we’re working together with our partners to build new experiences for our customers designed to connect people, inspire creativity, and foster innovation. (To learn more how we’re meeting the evolving demands of the “next normal” with Microsoft 365, you can also check out my Inspire session).
We’re committed as ever to develop technology that helps you keep moving forward, no matter if you’re fully remote or in a hybrid work environment. This month, we’re releasing new features in Microsoft Teams to help users automate more of their workflow, ideate on digital whiteboards more easily, help improve readability while browsing the web, and more.
Let’s take a deeper look at these updates and what else is new in August.
Manage Tasks and more in Teams
New features to manage tasks, automate workflows, and streamline collaboration in Teams.
Stay on top of tasks without leaving Teams—Managing your tasks gets easier if you don’t have to flip between places to see them all. The new Tasks app in Teams provides a new unified view of tasks and assignments from across Microsoft To Do, Planner, and Outlook, helping you consolidate and prioritize your tasks. Along with a consolidated view of your tasks, we’ve also added a new List view with the ability to edit multiple tasks at once, Graph API and Power Automate integrations, and task publishing capabilities to come. The new experience is rolling out to desktop users now. To get started, add the “Planner” app (the name will later change to “Tasks”) to your Teams client or add it as a tab at the top of a Teams channel.
Simplify actions and alert teammates more easily with new Power Automate capabilities—We’re adding new actions and triggers to Power Automate in Teams to allow users to streamline their workflow. Using the new “create a team” action, you’ll be able to seamlessly spin up a new team as part of your business process—such as automatically creating a team site with members for a project you’re working on. Also, you can now use @mentions in your flows to make sure important messages reach the intended recipient.
We’ve also added two new triggers to Power Automate. Using the “for a selected message action” trigger, you can now create customized message actions to initiate critical business processes directly from a message—including converting a message in a chat into a Sales opportunity in Dynamics. Also, when a team member is removed from a team, specific actions can be set in motion—like notifying the team owner. To get started, open the “Flow” app in Microsoft Teams and start building a flow with these two new triggers.
Boost productivity with Microsoft Teams apps designed for remote work—In a remote and hybrid work environment, ensuring everyone is informed, aligned, and engaged can be difficult. We’ve created a new web page with a curated a list of apps for Microsoft Teams that can help improve collaboration and productivity. From managing marketing campaigns and building sales proposals to solving issues with automating responses and prioritizing tasks, these apps will help keep you connected and moving forward in a remote and hybrid world.
Access Visio directly from a tab within Teams channels—As part of our commitment to make collaborating on Visio diagrams within Teams seamless, we have added “Visio as a tab.” Visio tabs in Teams allow team members to quickly access content in a dedicated space within a channel or in a chat. Adding a tab in Teams is available to all Teams users (editing is only available for those with a Visio Plan 1 or Plan 2 subscription). This feature is now available.
Collaborate and organize your work more effectively
New features to help you collaborate more effectively in meetings, access and create Visio diagrams, and browse the web more productively.
Run effective meetings, brainstorm, and think creatively with updates to Whiteboard in Teams—Though many of us aren’t physically together these days, we all still need our brainstorming and creative thinking sessions. But this can be hard in a remote and hybrid work environment. We’ve added new features to Whiteboard in Teams to make it easier to keep the creative process moving forward virtually. Now, you can quickly add sticky notes to a canvas, making it easier to contribute if you’re using a device without a digital pen. We’ve also added the ability to move and re-order objects on the canvas through a simple drag and drop gesture. Finally, we’ve improved the performance, so Whiteboard is now faster than ever. Learn more about these new capabilities and other features in our Whiteboard Help section.
Improve readability and manage notes more effectively in Microsoft Edge—60% of the time people spend on the PC is within the web browser, and it has become the primary way we work, learn and play. That’s why it’s critical that your web browser enables your productivity and helps keep you safe. This month we’re releasing several new capabilities for Edge. First, Collections now allows you to export to OneNote. When you send to OneNote, all your collected content retains its formatting, so you get visual links and all your notes organized neatly.
We’re also bringing Picture Dictionary to Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge. Picture Dictionary will provide a picture representation of a selected word on a web page to help increase comprehension. Get started by turning on the Picture Dictionary toggle in Reading Preferences.
Lastly, we’ve added 5 different highlighter colors, support for screen readers, and the ability to view and validate digital signatures to the built-in PDF reader.
Streamline user and app deployments
New capabilities and resources to help your IT departments streamline new roll outs.
Provision users to Azure AD from SAP SuccessFactors —With the integration between Azure AD and SAP SuccessFactors, you can now automate user access to applications and resources so that a new hire can be up and running with full access to the necessary applications on day one. The integration also helps you reduce dependencies on IT helpdesk for onboarding and offboarding tasks. Get started now by following our documentation.
Request help while deploying Microsoft 365 in your organization —Getting new tools deployed quickly and efficiently is critical to maintaining productivity. To help ensure we’re here for our customers, we’ve streamlined the process for requesting assistance from FastTrack for Microsoft 365. FastTrack is a benefit that comes with your Microsoft 365 subscription, at no additional cost, for customers with eligible plans of 150+ licenses. To get started, sign in and select “Request assistance from FastTrack for Microsoft 365.”
Quickly secure your Windows 10 PCs through a simplified security policy setup experience—With so many employees working remotely, it’s important to ensure their PCs are protected. We are rolling out a new setup experience within Microsoft 365 admin center that makes it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to deploy a lightweight security baseline policy for protecting their Windows 10 computers. This new experience will ensure their devices have the appropriate protections configured—such as encrypting hard drives with BitLocker or locking the screen when users walk away—and are better protected from unauthorized access and malicious threats like viruses and malware. This new policy applies to all Windows 10 devices that are enrolled in Microsoft Intune with a Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription plan.
Application Guard, which helps desktop users stay safer and more productive by opening Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files in a virtualized container, is now generally available.
As organizations are navigating their transition to a more sustainable, hybrid workplace, we are committed to developing technologies that help people, teams, and organizations thrive. All of these updates are aimed at enabling people to collaborate securely and productively from anywhere. We invite you to stay tuned as we share many exciting new announcements next month at Ignite!
Now more than ever, we’re all very busy—juggling family, work, friends, and whatever else life throws our way. New enhancements in Office leverage the Azure Cognitive Services AI platform so you can harness the power of your voice to spend less time and energy creating your best work and focus on what matters most.
Save time and create great content using Transcribe in Word for the web
Whether you’re a reporter conducting interviews, a researcher recording focus group sessions, or an online entrepreneur recording informal discussions, you want to be able to focus on the people you’re talking to without worrying about taking notes and without having to spend hours transcribing your conversations after-the-fact. If that sounds like you, Transcribe in Word is here to help.
Now you can record your conversations directly in Word for the web and transcribe them automatically. Transcribe detects different speakers so after you finish recording, you can easily follow the flow of the transcript. After your conversation, you can revisit parts of the recording by playing back the time-stamped audio and you can even edit the transcript if you see something amiss.
Your transcript will appear alongside the Word document, along with the recording, which enables you to leverage your transcript to create great content in the way that is best for you. Say you want to pull the perfect quote from an interview to support the main point of your story—just click the plus icon on any line of the transcript and voila, the exact quote is inserted. Want to send the entire transcript to your colleague? Simply click “add all to document” and your full transcript will be laid out in Word.
Like many people, you might use a variety of tools to get the job done – that’s why Transcribe enables you to upload audio or videos you recorded outside of Word. Whether you record on your phone or via one of the many calling and video conferencing apps, you can simply select the file to upload and transcribe. Transcribe supports .mp3, .wav, .m4a, or .mp4 files.
Transcribe in Word enables you to stay focused on your conversation in the moment, saves you valuable time and energy by transcribing it for you, and is integrated into Word so you can focus on the message of your document and not fuss around with different windows or applications.
Transcribe in Word is available in Word for the web for all Microsoft 365 subscribers and is supported in the new Microsoft Edge or Chrome browsers. Currently, transcribing audio into English (EN-US) is the only language supported. At this time, there is a five hour limit of transcription time per month for uploaded recordings and there is a file size limit of 200mb. Transcribe in Office mobile will be coming by the end of the year.
Break away from the keyboard using dictation with voice commands
Since Dictate arrived on the scene, millions of people have leveraged the power of their voice to conquer the blank page. Whether you’re stuck waiting in the car to pick up takeout, on a short walk to stretch your legs, have a temporary or permanent disability that makes typing difficult, or you just think better when on the move, you need flexibility to transition throughout your day while getting everything done. We’ve been adding voice commands to Dictate so that you can break away from the keyboard. Whether on desktop or mobile (or transitioning between devices), you can stay in the flow and focus on your message by using dictation with voice commands to add, format, edit, and organize your text.
Say things like “start list” or “bold last sentence” to let your ideas flow without stopping to adjust your text. Voice commands understand a variety of symbols so you can add things like “ampersand” and “percent sign”, and you don’t have to sound like a robot! We’ve based commands on the way people naturally talk so that you can capture your ideas easily. So saying things like “dot dot dot” when you can’t remember “ellipses” works just as well.
Since you’re constantly juggling work and life, you may get that phone call you’ve been waiting for while working on your paper. There’s no need to rush to the keyboard in a panic. Simply say “pause dictation” and take the call. Working with others in the document? You can collaborate using your voice too—say “add comment [with your content here]” and capture your message in one shot without missing a beat.
Dictation can also help with informal writing as well—sometimes a message needs some personality! You can now say things like “smiley face” or “heart emoji” to give your message that little extra touch. Check out this article for a list of all the voice commands.
Dictate with voice commands in Word is available in Word for the web and Office mobile for free when signed into your Microsoft account. Voice commands are coming to Word desktop and Word for Mac apps towards the end of the year for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
We hope these new voice capabilities save you time and allow you the flexibility you require as you move throughout your busy day!
Today, we are excited to announce that the Microsoft Family Safety app, designed to help you protect your family’s digital and physical safety, is starting to rollout today on iOS and Android.
Over the past few months, I have been using the preview with my family, and it has been a game-changer! As a kid, my two favorite things to do after school were to ride my bike and play soccer with my neighborhood friends. Nowadays, my kids are always on their devices, whether playing video games with their friends, on social media or learning remotely. Kids have access to more information and endless ways to connect with other people. This can be scary for parents. As a mom, I seek to give my kids the independence to learn and grow whilst ensuring that they are also safe online and in the real world. Today, I am excited to share with you how any family worried about their kids’ online safety can benefit from the Microsoft Family Safety app and how it has helped us to create healthier habits for my kids, while also giving my wife and me peace of mind.
Here are the top 5 ways my family has benefited from the Microsoft Family Safety app:
1. Use the weekly activity report as a conversation starter.
Every week, parents and kids receive an email with highlights of the child’s digital activity. This creates a great mechanism to drive a conversation between parents and kids about how much time they are spending on their devices and what websites and content they are viewing. Last week, the weekly activity email for my youngest showed that he had spent 30 hours playing Minecraft. Believe me, that started a conversation!
Below you can see an example report that parents and kids receive.
2. Limit screen time for play and make more time for learning.1
In recent months, we have all spent a lot more time at home. This means that my kids have naturally spent more time on their devices. However, much of this time is necessary since their schooling and summer camps have moved to remote learning. One of my favorite features has been the ability to set app and game screen time limits. These limits give my kids the flexibility to be on their devices more for learning but help keep them focused by limiting the amount of time they can spend on other apps and games. My wife and I can also give them more screen time if they run out and request additional time, providing our family with the right level of flexibility for our busy schedule and changing needs.
Below is an example of how parents can set up app limits.
3. Set healthy boundaries with web and search filters.2
This is one of the features that has provided me the most peace of mind. In the past, my seven-year-old son has unknowingly come across some unwelcome search results. With the Family Safety app, we have been using web and search filters to block adult content and set browsing to kid-friendly websites with either allowed or blocked websites list. This feature works in a tight concert with the Microsoft Edge browser on Windows, Xbox, and Android. My son now feels empowered to explore online, knowing we set up a safe place for him to explore and we know he is safer online.
Below is an example of how parents can set up content filters and help ensure a safer web browsing experience.
4. Get purchase request emails to avoid surprise spending3
Have you ever received a credit card bill with a bunch of unexpected app store purchases? I have and it is not a fun surprise! I love that I get an email request before one of my kids can purchase something from the Microsoft Store. This has limited surprises and allowed us to talk about purchases before they happen, instilling more responsible spending habits.
5. Know where your family is when things start to open back up.4
When things eventually open back up, Family Safety will also help you to stay connected in the real world. Location sharing lets you see each of your family members’ last known location on a map and save favorite locations like “home” to see, at a glance, that everyone is safe and sound.
It is also important to me that my family’s privacy is protected. I am not a fan of apps that sell or share my family’s location data to third parties. Microsoft Family Safety provides you full control around how and why data is collected and used. Unlike other location-tracking apps, your family’s location data will not be sold or shared with insurance companies or data brokers.
These are just a few ways my family has benefited from the app. In addition to my own kids’ feedback (and they have a lot!), we have also learned more about what all our other preview users want to see in Family Safety as we evolve the app. Our team has been hard at work making improvements based on this early feedback. Here are just some new user benefits that we have already implemented:
We added a new feature to block or unblock specific apps.
We updated our designs to be more accessible and inclusive (i.e. improved visual contrast to help low vision users and provided additional context for screen reader users).
We added more time options for parents to quickly respond to requests for screen time (i.e. you can now easily add 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 3 hours of more of screen time).
We added location clustering to see when multiple family members are at the same location (i.e. when multiple people are in one place you can see that there are 4 people and zoom in to see who it is).
And this is just the beginning. We are excited to launch Family Safety and we will continue to add new features to help you protect your family. In the coming months, we plan to introduce two premium features that will be part of Microsoft 365 Family subscription: (1) drive safety5 to help to build better habits behind the wheel with insights on driving behavior and (2) location alerts to notify you when a family member arrives or departs a specific location. We are also in the process of working to bring digital safety features to iOS to set screen time and content filters on iPhones.
1 Windows, Xbox, and Android apps and games only. 2 Enables SafeSearch with Microsoft Edge on Windows, Xbox, and Android. 3Applies to apps and games downloaded from the Xbox and Microsoft stores; these settings can be managed at family.microsoft.com. 4 Location permissions must be active. 5 Drive Safety features will be available only in the US, UK, AUS, and CA.
