Tag: Microsoft 365

This month, as communities around the world move from “remote everything” to a more hybrid model of work and life, I’m excited to let you know that many capabilities from past announcements are reaching public preview or general availability. We can’t wait to get these, as well as some new updates, into your hands as we swiftly release new tools to further enable remote and hybrid work.

A couple of highlights: We’re releasing some much-requested features in Microsoft Teams for our education community. These include expanding the Teams grid view to 7×7 (more on that below). Also, Microsoft Graph Connectors are now available to help you connect disparate systems and make content more accessible. Some of your favorite app improvements are also now available on more platforms—including Presenter Coach on Android and Polls in Outlook for all devices. And finally, new privacy settings in Edge and Microsoft Search provide IT with the flexibility to help you meet compliance requirements without impacting productivity.

Expand your view of participants and more with Microsoft Teams

See more faces and break out in groups during meetings—This month, we announced new features for Microsoft Teams to help you create a more engaging, connected, and collaborative meeting experience. Coming to preview soon, we are expanding the Teams grid view to 7×7, which will accommodate up to 49 participants at once on a single screen. And coming this fall, Breakout Rooms will allow meeting organizers to split meeting participants into small groups to enable ideation, brainstorming, learning, and discussions.

Create recurrent surveys in Teams—We’ve heard from many of our customers that they’d like an easier way to manage routine surveys in their Teams channels—including sending “pulse surveys” to employees on a regular basis. We’ve listened to this feedback and today we’re releasing new workflows for common scenarios like employee sentiment, employee issues and challenges, and employee health status. These new workflows include templates and the ability for users to choose frequency and set reminders for each Teams channel, making these surveys easy to get started and manage going forward. To get started, click Create a workflow to automatically collect response in the Forms tab and select Scenarios.

Keep the focus on you during video meetings—This month, we released new custom background effects in Teams, one of our most requested features. Now, you can customize your background by uploading one of your own images or choosing one from the collections of backgrounds available online. This feature is available to all users.

Keep up with your work and personal life in one place—In March, we announced several new features coming to Teams to help you connect, stay organized, and collaborate with family and friends. Managing responsibilities across work and life can be challenging, with many of us relying on multiple apps and standalone tools to stay on top of it all. You can now create groups to plan trips with friends, connect in group chats or video calls, collaborate over shared to-do lists, coordinate schedules, and more—all in one place. We’re excited to announce these features are now rolling out to Microsoft Teams mobile app users in preview.

Connect information across apps

New updates to Microsoft 365 make it easier than ever to find the information you’re looking for. 

Make more data searchable with connectors—Microsoft Search indexes all your Microsoft 365 data to make it searchable for users. With Microsoft Graph connectors, your organization can index third-party data hosted on-premises or in public and private clouds, so they appear in your Microsoft Search results. We’re delighted to announce that customers in Targeted Release can now begin deploying Microsoft Graph connectors. To get started, select the Connectors tab on your Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Microsoft Search page (must be an admin and signing in from your tenant).

Find answers with natural language queries across apps—It’s no secret that asking simple, everyday language questions is easier than adapting your query to the “language” spoken by a given app, search engine, or other user-interface. We’ve been hard at work innovating in natural language across Microsoft 365 apps and services. We’re excited to share several new experiences that demonstrate our progress. In Microsoft Word, you can ask questions related to the document and get answers based on the contents of the document. In Outlook, short responses are suggested based on the context of the message. Next, Excel users can now perform an analysis by asking plain language questions. Finally, SharePoint users can now see an “At a glance” summary of a document’s content. All are now generally available.

Create and share content more easily

This month we announced new features across your favorite Microsoft 365 apps.

Hone your public speaking skills with PowerPoint Presenter Coach for Android Mobile—Last fall, we announced Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web. Today, we are excited to announce that it’s now generally available on your Android device—in both the PowerPoint app and in the new Office mobile app. Presenter Coach uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide on-screen guidance on your pacing, use of inclusive language or profanity, and use of filler words and culturally insensitive phrases. To get started, simply open any presentation in your PowerPoint stand-alone app or Office Mobile app, tap on the more options menu (three dots), tap rehearse with coach, and tap start rehearsing when ready.

Additionally, PowerPoint Live for PowerPoint for the web is now generally available. This new feature helps presenters deliver a more personalized presentation experience to each audience member, enabling viewers to connect from their device and move through slides at their own pace, provide instant feedback with live reactions, and enable live subtitles in their preferred language.

Experience the redesigned Yammer and other new capabilities—The new Yammer experience, built on our Fluid UI, is now in public preview. We’ve also added several new “All Company” community experiences based on customer feedback during private preview. Now, admins can change the name and cover photo to reflect their organization’s branding. And to help keep the group focused on corporate communications, you can now restrict who can post, to prevent users from adding unrelated posts. Finally, you can host live events and announce questions, polls, and praise with notifications to the entire “All Company” community—making it easier to share corporate updates, safety news, and other critical messages. Microsoft 365 Global Admins can configure access to the new Yammer preview through the Yammer admin portal by enabling the preview toggle.

Easily create polls, collect votes, and view results within an email—Polls are a way to quickly get a consensus from groups, but managing add-ons or including links to outside platforms can reduce response rates and effectiveness. Fortunately, Outlook users will soon be able to create a poll within Outlook without the need to find and install an add-in. Outlook on the web and Mac users will see this feature generally available this month, with Outlook for the Windows desktop app coming next month.

Create Visio diagrams in Excel with ease—This month, we’re announcing three new features to enhance the Visio Data Visualizer add-in experience. First, you can now access category-specific templates for basic and cross-functional flowcharts, plus organization charts directly in Excel. Next, single sign-on (SSO) integration allows users already signed into Excel to avoid a secondary sign-on to access the add-in. Finally, we added localization support that allows users to create diagrams in all of the languages already supported by Visio. These features will be enabled by the end of June.

Build database diagrams more easily and save diagrams as images in Visio for the web—This month, we’re announcing two new capabilities in Visio for the web. First, you can now design your database diagrams in Visio for the web. And to help get started more easily, we’ve provided a few starter diagrams to represent different scenarios for both Crow’s foot and Chen’s notation. To get started, visit visio.office.com, select the preferred diagram template, and start modeling your systems or databases.

Also, we’ve added the ability to save diagrams as an image file in Visio for the web. The Download as Image feature enables users to save time and easily customize the export of their Visio diagrams as image files for easy sharing with everyone—including those without a Visio license or subscription.

Stay secure and manage privacy

We’re committed to making Microsoft 365 a secure, end-to-end productivity solution. To meet that, we continuously add new built-in capabilities that help you improve your security posture, deliver more control over privacy, and automate routine tasks. This month, we’ve added new capabilities to help IT admins more effectively secure their organizations against malicious documents and manage privacy settings in Edge and the Microsoft Graph.

Verify documents are safe before they’re opened—Although opening documents in Protected View helps minimize risk from documents originating outside the organization, users often exit this protected sandbox to save time. We’re excited to announce that Safe Documents, which automatically checks against known risks and threat profiles before allowing documents to open, is now generally available. This built-in feature helps secure your organization against malicious content while delivering a more seamless, productive experience for end users. Safe Documents is now available worldwide to all customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Security.

Manage the types of data that sync for Edge users—Sync capabilities in Microsoft Edge allow users to sign in and get quick access to their personal data when using multiple devices or shared devices. However, some organizations might need to limit syncing of specific data—such as passwords—to meet compliance or company policy requirements. A new policy in Microsoft Edge allows IT professionals to precisely manage the types of data that sync for users—such as favorites, settings, addresses, extensions, and more. Check out our documentation on how to implement a policy to exclude data during sync.

Fine-tune your privacy settings for the Microsoft Graph—As the amount of data being generated in Microsoft 365 continues to grow, we’re continuing to invest in privacy controls that put you in control of your data. We’re pleased to announce a set of robust new privacy settings that provide the ability to configure the generation and visibility of Graph-derived insights, between users and other items in the Graph (such as documents or sites). These new settings will enable organizations to disable item insights for all users or just a subset of users. These new privacy capabilities will be available to everyone this summer.

Manage Microsoft 365 Groups more efficiently—We’ve released several updates to help streamline the management of Microsoft 365 Groups. First, we have enhanced the team creation experience with an updated user interface and improved error messages. Group information, including the Group ID, name, alias, and description, can now be exported as a .csv file using filtered properties or search results. Also, email addresses for a Microsoft 365 Group can now be edited, enabling group names to continue to evolve as needs change. Finally, you can now restore a deleted group directly from the Deleted Groups page. Visit the Microsoft 365 admin center to check out the new Groups management capabilities.

Also new this month

• Forms for Excel is now generally available, making it simple and easy to collect info from users in the same organization. New features include metrics such as response time, responder name, images, videos, themes, and branching logic.

• We also introduced Money in Excel, a dynamic, smart template and add-in for Excel that allows you to securely connect your bank, credit card, investment, and loan accounts to Excel and automatically import your transaction and account information into an Excel spreadsheet.

• FastTrack has updated and improved the guides in the Microsoft 365 admin center to help customers save time on their configuration and deployment tasks. We’ve also released a new Remote Work Setup guide to help reduce the strain on your VPN infrastructure and optionally set up remote access for desktops and apps. Check out the new setup guidance page to get started.

All of the features and releases above reflect our commitment to building tools and experiences that enable our customers to be productive and secure while working and learning from anywhere. We will continue to listen and work towards releasing new experiences that meet your needs as situations continue to evolve.

Managing personal finances can be a daunting prospect for most people, but having the right tools can help make it less challenging. While millions of people use Excel to track their budgets, manually updating a budget spreadsheet every month with the latest transactions can be a very time-consuming process. As organizing and tracking finances becomes a critical task for many of us, we want to help make managing your personal budget in Excel a more seamless experience. Today, with the launch of Money in Excel, we’re embarking on a journey to simplify your day-to-day money decisions to help you stay on track of your longer-term financial goals.

Manage your money—without ever leaving Excel

Money in Excel is a dynamic, smart template and add-in for Excel that allows you to securely connect your bank, credit card, investment, and loan accounts to Excel and automatically import your transaction and account information into an Excel spreadsheet.

If you’re a current Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber, simply go to this link to download the template. Once downloaded, open the Excel template¹ and follow the on-screen prompts to connect your financial accounts using a secure third-party plugin supported by Plaid² (Plaid currently supports most major U.S. financial institutions). Once your account information is verified, the workbook will be updated with your latest transaction history³ and is now ready for use.

Now, let’s look at how Money in Excel can help simplify the task of managing your finances.

Keep track of your money

Once your financial accounts³ are connected, Money in Excel will automatically import your transaction information from all your accounts into one workbook. You no longer need to spend hours manually setting up a personal finance spreadsheet from scratch; Money in Excel does it for you in just a few seconds. And every time you want to update the workbook with the latest transactions, just click the Update button and get the latest snapshot of your transactions and accounts without ever leaving Excel.

Get closer to your financial goals

Once your transaction information is imported into Excel, it’s easy to track your spending habits to help stay on course and get closer to your financial goals. Use the “Snapshot” sheet to get an instant glimpse of how you’re spending across various categories such as groceries, household items, rent, and more. With the help of easy-to-read graphs, you can quickly track how your spending compares month over month. And to help ensure you are not caught unaware of any unwelcome transactions, Money in Excel will alert you to increases in your subscription fees, changes in bank and overdraft charges, or any big purchases that were posted during the month.

Easily customizable to suit your needs

We know people often choose Excel to manage their finances because it allows them to take a more personalized approach. With this in mind, we designed Money in Excel to be easily customizable to suit your needs and goals. For example, if a certain transaction does not fall within an existing spending category, you can simply add your own. If you want to perform a quick custom analysis, you can copy the relevant transactions into a new Excel sheet and use any of your favorite Excel features to do quick calculations. And while Money in Excel already comes with charts that have been created based on your transaction information—such as one for your recurring expenses—you can always create your own charts and tables and add them to the workbook.

From helping you track your monthly spending to alerting you about subscription price increases, Money in Excel makes it easy to manage your money. We hope that by using Money in Excel, organizing your finances becomes a more manageable and empowering experience. We can’t wait for you to try it out and share your feedback with us.

¹For the best experience, we recommend using Money in Excel on a PC or Mac. Optimal performance when using Windows 10 and Edge/Chrome browsers.
²Plaid is a third-party company that provides permissioned connections to financial accounts, at the user’s direction, to power Money in Excel.
³After granting permission for Plaid to connect a financial account with Money in Excel, Plaid will access the account’s balances, transaction history, and associated account information, like owner name and address. Plaid will not have access to your Microsoft 365 subscription login information and will not share financial institution login credentials with Microsoft. Contact Plaid at [email protected] or by clicking the support button at https://my.plaid.com/help to learn about options for managing your data with Plaid.
⁴For any additional information regarding Money in Excel, visit our FAQ.

This week, CEO Satya Nadella delivered Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report to Wall Street—our first in the era of COVID-19. On the call, Satya shared some new numbers: In April, we saw more than 200 million Microsoft Teams meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Also, Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, and two-thirds of them have shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams as well. As Satya put it, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”

To keep their teams connected in this world of remote everything, our customers need more than meetings or chat alone. Teams combines meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration into a single tool that preserves context and keeps everyone up to speed. Below, I dig into the role that Teams is playing to keep the world working and share customer stories about how Teams enables their work. But first, a bit more about those numbers.

About the numbers

Satya shared three important types of numbers in his call: daily meeting participants, daily meeting minutes, and daily active users. We see different vendors use these metrics in different ways, but we’re the only one on the market that can release all three. The reason for that is simple: Teams is the only solution that offers chat, calls, meetings, and collaboration in one.

So how do we define each? Our daily meeting participants number is the aggregate number of people joining a meeting in a day—so if someone participates in five meetings in a day, they would be counted five times. Meanwhile, we measure daily meeting minutes by adding together the total time people spend in Teams meetings within a 24-hour period. For example, if two people are in the same 10-minute meeting, we count that as 20 meeting minutes. Finally, we define daily active users (DAU) as the count of unique users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period in any of the Teams clients—desktop, mobile, or web. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. We don’t count passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app. We also don’t count Skype Consumer or Skype for Business usage, since that’s a completely different app. Our DAU numbers are de-duped, meaning we only count each user once.

Powering the world’s work

Across education, government, healthcare, and business, Teams is powering collaboration for organizations of all sizes while meeting the highest standards of security and privacy. Around the world, more than 183,000 educational institutions use Teams. In the United Arab Emirates alone, over 350,000 students are relying on Teams for remote learning. On the business side, 20 organizations have more than 100,000 active users on Teams, including Continental AG, Ernst & Young, Pfizer, and SAP. Just last week, Accenture became the first organization to surpass half a million users, and we expanded our partnership with the NFL. We even collaborated with the League to help bring the first-ever virtual NFL Draft to life with Teams!

And after weeks of learning, working and living this way, we’re all developing new habits. Some COVID-19-era habits will prove temporal—I know many parents who can’t wait for the return of in-person play dates, for instance. But we believe the habits we see in Teams are more durable and will persist well beyond the current crisis. Data from regions like China and South Korea, where many people have returned to the office, but continue Teams habits they developed while working apart, backs this up. For example, a report out this month showed more than two times the number of new Teams users each day in China compared to end of January. And the number of daily active Teams users in China also continued to grow week over week.

Helping our customers

We are so inspired by the ingenuity and agility of our customers as they navigate the shift to remote work. Here are a few of their stories.

Accenture:
“Accenture is one of the largest users of Microsoft Teams in the world, and during this unprecedented crisis, it is proving to be invaluable—both for us and for helping our clients maintain business continuity and stay connected to their people and customers.”
—Julie Sweet, Chief Executive Officer, Accenture

Goodyear Tire Company:
“Our work from home experience has been nothing short of phenomenal. We were able to transition 25,000 associates to working from home in a matter of just a few days, and Teams played a vital role in that. This is evidenced by a tremendous increase in Teams usage, which includes a 410 percent increase in Teams meetings compared to a normal week. We have continued to work in the Goodyear way taking care of our customers and associates with integrity and conscientiousness, with Teams helping our associates stay connected to their work and each other.”
—Sherri Neubert, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Goodyear Tire Company

Guildford Technical Community College:
“We found ourselves faced with implementing a collaboration tool in a couple of days versus the original 90-120 days we had originally planned. Fortunately, we had begun testing and building out some of the basic functionality in Teams, but not to the extent to complete an enterprise rollout. COVID-19 entered the picture and we had no choice other than to roll out Teams to all faculty and staff at the college and to include classroom instruction among other things. Thanks to the MS “team,” pun intended, we were able to pull it off successfully and we are now working to enable additional functionality to the faculty, staff and students. Thank you so much for your responsiveness and willingness to help us during a very trying time, MS team! You folks rock!”
—Ron G Horn, Chief Information Officer, Guildford Technical Community College

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust:
Consultant Medical Oncologist Jo Dent runs several clinics for cancer patients at the trust—many of them young women with busy lives, jobs, and children to look after. Previously, patients could choose from appointments at fixed times of the week and often travelled with their families for up to an hour for a five-minute check-up. Now, Dr. Dent can contact a patient using Teams at a time that suits them both. Dent says, “We can have a quick chat over video just so I can check that the treatment that I’ve prescribed is working how I would expect. It gives them the chance to drop the kids off at school and lets the appointment happen on their time, not our time. With Teams, we offer the patient the choice, and it’s less stressful for them.”
—Jo Dent, Consultant Medical Oncologist, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust

In this era of remote everything, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Teams is enabling this accelerated transformation by giving people a single tool to chat, call, meet, and collaborate. With Teams as their hub for teamwork, our customers are discovering new collaboration habits that we believe will persist well beyond this crisis. We are committed to continuing to build the tools that keep them connected and productive—through COVID-19 and beyond.

If you want to know just how dramatically the world has changed over the last few months, consider how your opinion on working from home has changed since March. Remote work used to be an option that was nice to have if you needed it or if you were getting some extra things done over the weekend—but I don’t think any of us ever anticipated that mastering every nuance of working from home in a climate like this was going to be a critical part of our long-term success.

The challenges of the work-from-home necessitated by COVID-19 will never be forgotten by anyone, especially in our IT community where 100-hour weeks were necessary to make sure everyone else could continue working 40. Here at Microsoft, we’ve probably seen every possible challenge from every industry and point on the map, and we are committed to partnering with you as we all navigate this “new normal” and keep working to ensure the continuity of your business at a time when there’s no precedent to guide us.

As you’ve shared your challenges with us, we have been hard at work to find the answers that technology can provide. Whether it’s enabling remote meetings and collaboration, provisioning and managing remote devices, ensuring the data that’s no longer confined to your network remains secure and compliant, using low-code tools and platforms to rapidly build new business applications, or addressing the latest COVID-19-related threats—we have built solutions and developed the guidance your organization needs to help you make the most of this new environment. I recommend you check out the full set of assets we’ve complied on the Microsoft Together site.

Over the last two months, there has been heavy usage of Microsoft Teams for online meetings, group chat, file sharing, and more—and this has led to an unprecedented spike in active usage that we’ve worked around the clock (quite literally) to support. Today we announced new features to enhance the meetings experience for organizations and schools. For those of you using Teams, we have resources to help you with best practices and tips, wherever you are in your Teams adoption journey. You can access those resources and see what else is new in this Tech Community blog.

Enabling your users to work from anywhere, regardless of the industry you’re in, requires a level of confidence and control over how users access information across different device endpoints and networks. To make this easier for you, today I’m happy to announce several improvements to our products, including:

• A new management experience for Windows Virtual Desktop to quickly provision and manage remote desktops and apps and upcoming support for Microsoft Teams.
• A unified control plane for device and access management, with Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), to ensure all endpoints connecting to corporate resources are secure.
• And the ability to get the insights you need to understand how your organization is working, and make proactive improvements with Microsoft Productivity Score.

Also, we invite you to tune into our Fireside Chat today at 7 AM Pacific, during which Alysa Taylor (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Applications & Global Industry), Bret Arsenault (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Chief Information Security Officer), and I will answer your questions, share best practices, and provide guidance to help you during this challenging time. If you can’t join us live, you can watch the replay here.

Enabling you with a virtualized desktop for remote work with Windows Virtual Desktop

Many of our customers have turned to the power of desktop and app virtualization to empower their remote workers on any device. Windows Virtual Desktop uses the scale and power of the Azure global footprint and network to enable a secure remote app and/or desktop experience wherever your users are.

Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve made some significant updates to help to make it easier for you:

• Updated management experience—Now get started with Windows Virtual Desktop faster with the new management experience deeply integrated into the Azure Portal. You can set up host pools, manage applications or desktops, and assign users—all from the Azure Portal. We have improved the auto-scaling experience through integration with Azure Automation and Azure Logic Apps. Check out the details in this Microsoft 365 blog.
• Compliance and security—Windows Virtual Desktop is already available worldwide and today we are giving users choice on where to store the service data to meet your regulatory and compliance needs. releasing support for service databases distributed across Azure regions for regulatory and compliance needs of data residency—service metadata can be distributed across the U.S. and Europe, with additional regions coming soon.
• Upcoming support for Microsoft Teams—Additionally, we will be improving the remote meeting and collaboration experience when using Microsoft Teams from Windows Virtual Desktop deployments with “A/V redirection” for video calling. This will create a direct path between your users when sharing video, significantly improving the video and audio experience. We expect this feature to be available within a month in Public Preview. Check out the deep dive.

You can read more about these new Windows Virtual Desktop features in a Microsoft 365 blog I wrote together with Julia White today. In addition, for a robust set of videos from the Windows Virtual Desktop engineering team demoing step-by-step deployments with all this new functionality and more, watch the Virtual Event content.

New features to help you to manage and secure your endpoints remotely

Securing remote work starts with a strong identity foundation. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enables your remote workers to find and access the apps they need from anywhere without compromising security. Many of our customers use Azure AD Conditional Access policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure access to their resources aligned with the principles of Zero Trust, and enable remote collaboration with external users with B2B collaboration capabilities.

Today, we’re extending the ability to use Azure AD single sign-on (SSO) with as many cloud applications as you’d like across all pricing tiers, including Azure AD Free. This means any Microsoft customer using a subscription of a commercial online service can connect all their cloud applications to Azure AD for single sign-on, and protect this access with multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a security default at no extra cost. We are also introducing several new features to make it easier for IT administrators to secure and manage access. You can learn more in the Azure AD blog authored by Alex Simons.

With Microsoft Endpoint Manager, we’ve done a lot to help ensure that your people can access information and services securely from almost any device. For broader endpoint management, across your apps and devices, we’ve improved the integration between Configuration Manager and the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center in Azure. You can try the new Endpoint Manager portal yourself at endpoint.microsoft.com.

Other new features include:

• Tenant attach—With tenant attach, you can quickly attach an Intune tenant to your Configuration Manager deployment to enable the two to work together. Starting with the Configuration Manager 2002 release, you can upload your Configuration Manager devices to the cloud service and take actions—like device and user policy sync—directly from the Endpoint Manager admin center. This will help speed up common actions you might take and provide a consolidated view of all your organization’s devices in the web-based admin center. In the near future, searching for a user in the troubleshooting portal will allow your help desk to see all of a user’s device regardless of their management configuration in Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Over the coming months we’ll enable more troubleshooting tools to enable your help desk access to information and capabilities to facilitate their day-to-day actions.
• Unified app delivery—We’ve also been working to bring the richness of Software Center from Configuration Manager and MyApps from Azure Active Directory into our Company Portal app for unified app delivery, so people can get the apps they need across their endpoints. The unified end user experience is expected in the next few weeks. But don’t worry, if you rely on Software Center and MyApps as standalone portals, they are not going away.
• Support for Microsoft Edge for deploying apps and packages across platforms—A few months back, we released the new Microsoft Edge browser, which gives you the most compatibility for modern web and your existing apps, plus you benefit from the advanced security and privacy controls. Today, our endpoint management experiences natively integrate the app and package deployment process for PC and MacOS, and you can distribute the Edge mobile apps directly from the App Store or Google Play. We also have a security baseline dedicated to securing Edge.
• Expanded support for macOS—Microsoft Endpoint Manager is a unified platform for all endpoints, so I’m excited to announce that we are introducing the Intune MDM agent for macOS, which extends the management controls in macOS. For example, with shell scripting, admins can leverage the agent to automate repetitive tasks and attain greater flexibility in configuring Macs. This is just the beginning of new capabilities, and we’re well on our way to giving admins first-class macOS management with Microsoft Intune.
• Prevent cross-account sharing in Outlook mobile—With Microsoft Intune, you can apply app protection policies for Outlook for iOS and Android to help to ensure that work or school accounts can only access approved storage locations. This enables you to mitigate the risk of introducing personal content and potentially malicious content from entering your corporate environment. We’ve also updated the file attachment experience in Outlook to help guide you towards these trusted data sources and further protect mobile communications and collaboration in the enterprise.

Improve employee and technology experiences with Productivity Score preview

Remaining productive in this new remote work-centric world can be challenging on many levels. Employees are using new tools to collaborate, meet, and communicate, while needing to securely work anywhere. Enabling this requires a powerful and consistent technology experience. As an IT Pro, you’re responsible for ensuring both the employee and technology experience. Productivity Score can help by delivering visibility into how your organization is working, insights to improve productivity, and recommendations actionable in Microsoft 365 to fix issues and impart helpful changes.

Available in preview, Productivity Score is an analytics solution that measures employee and technology experiences versus benchmarks and your own business goals. These goals are flexible and personal to your organization, making it a key tool to maximize your IT investments as you adjust to new remote workstyles and needs now, and in the future, when onsite work begins to restart.

Based on feedback from our initial November announcement at Ignite 2019, we are moving beyond providing tenant-level information and can now give you more granular insights in critical categories, including:

• Content Collaboration, so you can understand how people are reading, authoring, collaborating, and sharing content though OneDrive and SharePoint.
• Mobility, to help you see how your employees work from any device, anywhere though their use of email, documents, and Microsoft Teams across the web, mobile, and desktop versions.
• Communications, a new category designed to drive awareness and action so people can easily communicate via email, chat, and Yammer posts.

At Ignite, we also talked about how technology is critical to productivity. Today we are adding to Productivity Score, insights on how endpoints and your network contribute to your organizational productivity. The Network Connectivity category provides visibility into which worksite locations have network challenges that may inhibit access to critical workloads such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and in the future, Microsoft Teams.

Endpoint Analytics helps you measure and improve one of my favorite things—time to productivity. In other words, the time it takes someone to get up and running. Lag time leaves your employees waiting—and unproductive. For example, people are surprised when I share that my managed device cold boots in under 15 seconds with all the security and policy controls applied. I strongly believe this can be achieved in any environment and I want to help you get there. Endpoint Analytics can help by identifying policies or hardware issues that may be slowing down devices in your estate, and proactively make changes without the need to disrupt end users or generate a help desk ticket.

To learn more about what’s new with Productivity Score, check out this Tech Community blog.

Investing in resources to help you through this time

We also understand that there’s never been a more important time to ensure you are securing and governing your most critical data. Check out today’s Microsoft Security blog from Alym Rayani as he shares some new research and product innovation that will help you to more easily secure and govern your most critical assets.

We understand what a challenging time this is for you—both professionally and personally. We remain committed to innovating in ways that will make your job easier and help you empower your people to be productive and secure in this new world of work. For more information and detailed guidance around empowering your employees, securing your environment, and more, check out the COVID-19 Remote Work resources page.

In this world of remote everything, our customers are discovering so many new ways to work and learn online. And we’re committed to shipping updates and improvements to our tools that help them stay connected, productive, and secure through the current crisis and beyond. This month, we’re announcing a new Yammer app in Microsoft Teams as well as a new way to intuitively search data in Excel. Meanwhile, capabilities in Microsoft Edge make it easier to copy and paste between tabs and apps, manage open tabs, organize information more intuitively, and better protect your data as you browse and work online. Let’s dig into all of April’s news.

Connect and create with app updates in Yammer, Excel, Outlook, and Visio

This month, we’re introducing app updates that bring the new Yammer experience to Teams and mobile; help you easily analyze data in Excel; and quickly make changes to diagrams in Visio for the web.

Bring Yammer into Teams—Last November at Ignite, we unveiled the new Yammer, with a beautiful new design that powers community, knowledge-sharing, and employee engagement. The new Yammer includes a fully interactive Yammer app called “Communities” that brings your communities and conversations directly into Microsoft Teams. Put simply: It’s Yammer, but in Teams. No more toggling between apps or confusion about where to chat—just pin the Yammer app in the navigation rail and start discovering communities, knowledge, and conversations alongside your projects, chats, and meetings. Install the Yammer app in Teams to get started.

Experience the new Yammer on mobile—The new Yammer app for iOS and Android connects your entire organization with a redesigned live events experience that allows everyone to watch and participate right in the app, enhancing company-wide engagement. Plus, mobile users can experience the new Yammer layouts and styling that make it easier to discover content and post replies, like comments, and include better previews for images, videos, links, and files. Finally, we’ve improved the performance of uploading attachments and large videos. Download or update your app from the App Store or Play Store.

Quickly turn data into insights with natural language queries in Excel—Data analysis in Excel just got incredibly intuitive. At Ignite last year, we announced that we were bringing natural language queries to Excel, enabling you to ask a plain language question of your data to get answers. We’re excited to announce that the natural language queries feature is now generally available to Microsoft 365 subscribers in Excel for Windows, Mac, and Excel for the web. Simply open the Ideas pane in Excel, enter a question in the query box at the top of the pane, and press Enter.

Easily schedule shorter meetings—As we learn more about remote work productivity, we’re finding that teams tend to prefer shorter meetings while working apart to help break up the day. This month, we’re announcing a new Outlook feature that lets you end appointments and meetings early so you can get 5, 10, or 15 minutes back after every meeting. You’ll be able to set this up in the Calendar settings soon.

Bring ideas to life in Visio for the web—We’re adding a trio of new capabilities in Visio for the web. Now you can replace an existing shape in a diagram with a more relevant one in just a few clicks. The new shape will retain the formatting, connectors, and all other characteristics of the original shape. You can also add images of diagrams to other documents to easily share with stakeholders. Finally, you can now more easily focus on certain elements in a diagram with the new pinch-and-zoom functionality.

Copy and paste and more in Microsoft Edge

This month, we announced a host of new capabilities coming to Microsoft Edge that demonstrate our commitment to help you work more quickly, stay organized, save time, and have more control while you browse and work online. This month’s updates deliver more control over your data and your family’s online information, and offer new ways to organize your online research. If you haven’t yet tried the new Microsoft Edge, you can download it here.

Copy and paste between tabs and apps—Smart copy will make it easier to select, copy, and paste the exact content you want from the web while preserving the rich web format. This allows you to save valuable time since you don’t need to re-format tables, fonts, and more. Smart copy is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Manage many tabs at once—For those who like to have dozens of tabs open at a time, we’ve introduced vertical tabs to make it easier to manage many open tabs at once. No more struggling to see which tab is which or accidentally closing a tab as a result. Vertical tabs is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Search more securely—Each year, millions of online personal credentials are exposed in data breaches and end up being sold on the dark web. Password Monitor helps keep your online accounts safe from hackers by notifying you if the credentials you’ve saved to autofill have been detected on the dark web, and providing a way to update them. Password Monitor is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Browse privately—InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Search with Microsoft Bing keeps your web browsing and Bing search history private by automatically deleting history, cookies, and site data when you finish a browsing session. InPrivate searches are never saved to Bing or Microsoft browsing history, and Bing prevents you from signing into your Microsoft account, so searches are not attributed back to you. InPrivate Mode with seamless integration of InPrivate Search is now generally available. Download Microsoft Edge and try it now.

Organize your research—When researching online, it can be difficult to organize your results, resources, and content you find across the web. Collections helps you easily collect information from different websites and organize it so you can pick up right where you left off between sessions. And with Microsoft 365 integrations, you can export your collections to Word or Excel. Send to Word allows you get a head start on research with automatically generated citations, and Send to Excel creates an automatically formatted table with key information, perfect for side-by-side comparisons. Collections is now generally available. Download Microsoft Edge and try it now.

Give back more easily—Finally, you can now donate to causes just by searching in Bing. The new Give Mode feature enables you to automatically donate the Microsoft Rewards points you earn to the nonprofit of your choice. Give Mode is now generally available. Try it now and start giving back to your community.

Move to remote work more easily

We’re updating our small and medium-sized business offerings and adding new reporting tools to help organizations move more easily to remote work and make the most of their Microsoft 365 investments.

Ease the move to remote work with new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Business Premium—With so many employees working from home, small and medium-sized businesses need to stay productive without compromising security. We’re adding the full Azure AD Premium P1 License to Microsoft 365 Business Premium (formerly called Microsoft 365 Business). With this addition, customers will now get features like Cloud App Discovery, application proxy, dynamic groups, and more, which help employees maintain secure access to work apps from home. This change is rolling out to new customers now, and existing customers will see it added automatically in the coming months.

Get insights into how your organization is working—To help our customers understand how remote work is impacting their organization’s usage behaviors, we added new data to the Microsoft 365 usage reports. The updates include helping you measure calendar activity in the email report, understanding the total activity across Microsoft 365, and a new report to help you see Microsoft 365 app (formerly Office 365 ProPlus) usage. We also added a new card to the usage report homepage to help you understand how solutions that contribute to remote work are being used. You can learn more about usage reports and see your specific data in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

At a time when we are all navigating a lot of uncertainty, we are committed to building the tools that enable our customers to work and learn remotely. From bringing Yammer right into your Teams app to finding new ways to help you search more securely and give to the causes that matter to you most, these updates are aimed at helping you stay connected, productive, and secure through the current crisis and beyond.