Tag: Microsoft 365

Since we announced Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions a few weeks ago, I’ve been uplifted by the unique and creative ways people have been using Office and other Microsoft tools to work, learn, and connect from home. From giving piano lessons over Skype to virtual family workouts at home to teachers using Microsoft Teams to read stories to their students, it’s moving to see us all adapting and maintaining connections with those who matter most in this time.

As everyone adapts to different and innovative ways of living, working, and organizing, we are here to help in that process. Today, we’re excited that Microsoft 365 has more to offer across free and premium experiences. Here are 10 ways Microsoft can help you and your family experience more efficiency, more enjoyment, and more ease—across your whole lives.

1. Connect with loved ones and friends over Skype—This continues to be critical in this time. Maintaining our relationships looks different for all of us. It could be wishing your friend a virtual happy birthday, setting up a weekend trivia night with family, or having a video happy hour with your neighbors. With the Meet Now feature in Skype, it’s easy to connect over video (for free) with up to 50 people in just a few clicks.

2. Become a better writer—Our desire and need to communicate during this time has not diminished, it has simply shifted. Quick café catch-ups are now social media discussions, and chats with coworkers are IMs. This is where Microsoft Editor can be a huge help. Now available as a browser extension in Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, Editor offers writing assistance whether you are relaying a story on Facebook, writing an email to your child’s teacher, or posting on Twitter. Across the web, Microsoft Editor is your virtual assistant to help you write more clearly and concisely.
3. Discover resources for your family, job, and schooling—There are thousands of free and premium templates available for you to use across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, many of which are very relevant today. With kids learning from home, we’re proud to offer a variety of Home Learning templates like alphabet flash cards, a reading log in Word, or multiplication tables in Excel. When you’re looking for ways to connect with your kids and family at home, we have Family Activity templates including an animal doodle coloring book in PowerPoint and Sudoku puzzle solvers in Excel. For those working from home, or on the hunt for their next job, we offer wide range of Presentation templates as well as Resume and Cover Letter templates.
4. Multi-task with ease—The Play My Emails feature in Outlook can be a lifesaver for those with a lot going on. Taking the dog on another walk? Fixing an afternoon snack for the kids? Have your emails read aloud to you so you can multitask effectively. And in this home/work/life blend we are all experiencing, it’s as important as ever to stay on top of your schedule. Outlook allows you to share calendars (so you can coordinate schedules with family members) and add calendars (so you can plan around important events).
5. Keep a handle on your to-dos—For most, our homes are now a hub for much more than what they used to be. They’ve become our workspace, classroom, cafeteria, gym, and living area. Our realities and locations may have shifted, but that doesn’t mean we can’t remain organized. With Microsoft To-Do, you can create the grocery list and share it with your spouse so they can order it. You can make a task list for the kids to check-off before time on their Xbox. You can share workout routines with friends. Whatever you need to accomplish, we’ve got you covered.

6. Craft standout presentations—PowerPoint has always been a wonderful tool to help you get your ideas across. Now, as we share more information and ideas with each other digitally, a strong presentation can make all the difference. Using intelligent technology, PowerPoint Designer offers beautiful layouts, rich animations, cinematic motion, 3D models, and modern icons to bring your presentation to life with a few clicks. Your subscription unlocks access to over 8,000 beautiful images and 175 looping videos, plus 300 fonts and 2,800 icons to create high-impact and visually appealing documents.
7. Become a top-notch presenter—While we might not be standing in conference rooms or on stage for the time being, many of us are still presenting to live audiences on a daily basis. It could be a formal performance on a live stream to many, or simply talking through a document on a video call with your colleagues. Either way, verbal communication is a vital skill—as well as something many folks wish they were better at. Presenter Coach uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help your speaking. It aids with pacing, filler words, and speaking suggestions. Now, you’ll also get real-time feedback as the AI analyzes monotone speech and speech refinement—giving you tips on variation, grammar and phrasing.

8. Share special moments and keep up connections—Do you have some cute photos of the Easter Egg hunt that took place around the living room? The grandparents would love to see them. Maybe you had a birthday celebration and want your friends to see the incredible cake your boyfriend baked? With 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage for Microsoft 365 subscribers, you can store these photos and any other files, as well as share them with others, with the knowledge they are always secured and backed-up.
9. Get peace of mind when tech issues arise—Our homes have grown into bigger tech hubs with family members working and learning from home. With your Microsoft 365 subscription we’ve got your back with ongoing technical support for Windows 10 and all included Microsoft 365 apps readily available through chat or phone.
10. Learn, meditate, manage, create and control—With a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription comes access to incredible partner apps and services through free, limited-time offers. Find mindfulness with Headspace, create with Adobe, and learn new skills with CreativeLive. You also get access to TeamSnap, Bark, Experian, and Blinkist.

On the horizon, we have even more exciting news to debut. Money in Excel* will soon allow you to manage, track and analyze all your money and spending in a single place. Also, in Excel, you will be able to make sense of your data with informative and interactive visualizations of everything from food to movies to Pokémon**. Also coming soon is the Microsoft Family Safety App, which empowers families in a variety of ways with both free and premium offerings, including managing screen time across Windows PCs, Android, and Xbox. There will also be new features in Microsoft Teams that make it easier to connect, organize, and collaborate with family and friends.

Today is just the first step in delivering new features and value that helps us all navigate life. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions are generally available today worldwide, with additional benefits added over time.

*U.S. only, subscription required.
**English only, subscription required.

The COVID-19 outbreak is the challenge of a lifetime for government officials, public health workers, and healthcare providers. The pandemic presents immense challenges for doctors and other health workers to screen, diagnose, and care for patients with the disease all while needing to stay healthy themselves. It presents communications, coordination, and logistical burdens for hospitals, public health departments, and government agencies trying to manage the outbreak.

To gain a firsthand view of how COVID-19 is impacting healthcare organizations, we spent some time with Dr. Mike Myint, an infectious diseases specialist and the Physician Executive for Population Health at MultiCare Health System based in Washington State. MultiCare operates seven hospitals with 1,500 employed physicians, 3,000 affiliated physicians and a large clinical network including free-standing emergency departments, urgent care, and virtual care. Below, I’m sharing Dr. Myint’s observations from the interview—he covers everything from the human impact of COVID-19 to the technology his team uses to help combat it. I hope you’ll find his comments as insightful as I did. Over to Dr. Myint.

COVID-19 is unlike any epidemic we’ve seen before. Our patients and communities have a lot of concerns. And in the internet age, there’s a lot of information available. Some of it is good, and some of it is unhelpful. We are very focused on sharing accurate information that helps people stay healthy and ensures that our medical resources are being saved for the people who need them.

This pandemic has affected all of us, and some of the impacts are really hard. For parents, it has been hard to have schools close. Our elderly and at-risk populations are particularly worried, and most of us know someone who falls into that category. Many people in the gig economy and who work in the service industry have lost their incomes. So this is very destabilizing for many people.

From the medical side, the lack of testing has been a real challenge, and it’s only improving slowly. Our healthcare workers are mission-driven people and they come to work every day to help people. We have to focus on keeping our workforce safe, and we are.

In a disaster, we move from care of the individual to maximizing care to the entire population. We have to think about individual health and population health. Our clinicians are very focused on taking care of the patient in front of them, and that continues, but we also have to look at the entire picture, especially during a surge where equipment may be limited. I also worry about the impact of this crisis on people who are dependent on our care, such as dialysis patients.

Coordination and technology to address the crisis

We are using many digital tools, such as teleconferencing, electronic health records, and email. It’s critical that we get the right information and the right messages to the right people, and that’s hard when things are changing daily. The tools are helping, but there is room for improvement.

We are seeing some very positive uses of technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. We can use bots to screen patients and identify the ones who need urgent care. We’ve seen virtual visits with doctors explode—in our system, there is a 1,200 percent increase in virtual visits.

Virtual visits are great because they allow us to continue to treat chronic care patients who have cancer or diabetes, and we can see them safely. And we find that many of our older patients are comfortable with virtual visits because they have smartphones. The video aspect of the visits makes people feel like they are really interacting with their provider.

How we use technology

We are moving so quickly in this crisis that it’s been very helpful to have online communication and collaboration tools. They allow us to co-edit documents, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) use policies. In quieter times, we were able to send drafts back and forth to each other, but we don’t have time for that now. The availability of masks and other PPE equipment changes daily, so our policies need to adapt quickly. Many health workers are not very comfortable with these tools, and it’s hard to get people to start using them in a crisis, so that’s a challenge. Once you get people to use these tools, it is easier to develop, collaborate, and deploy information into the system.

Data usage and systems

I think that the testing delays we’ve seen will come to define the COVID-19 response. For example, it can still take 5–7 days to get a COVID test result, and it often takes time for a result to work through the system to the patient’s bedside. During this time, we may be using PPE that was unnecessary because the patient is negative, and that costs us valuable PPE. More seamless lab results and integration of systems will save us valuable supplies. Interoperability between the different systems would allow the nurses and doctors to see and act on the results more quickly.

The supply chain has been a big challenge for the hospitals. We’ve had to create some tools for predictive modeling using our spreadsheets. We can look at how much PPE we have, and the rate we are going through it, and look at infection rates, and make some predictions on how long our supply will last. We are creating these models from scratch and inventory management systems would really help us.

We have a lot of data, but a lot of it is manual. We need to develop a “smart hospital”—collecting information about beds, equipment, supplies, and workers into one database. We could use that, along with disease modeling and testing information to monitor infection rates, plan for patient surges, and deploy equipment the best way possible. We know that the tools exist for this, but they haven’t been deployed. This could save lives, because we could ensure that ventilators are available where they are needed, and not waiting in hospitals that don’t need them. Using predictive algorithms and machine learning would make a huge difference.

Across systems, all of the data, except test results, is available. We need better ways to visualize it, collaborate at scale, and use the data effectively.

Final thoughts

Most urgently, we need free, readily available access to COVID testing. People need to continue social distancing, and we need to focus on isolating patients who have the disease. Learning from successful countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, we can bend the curve and end this pandemic.

I am hopeful that we will get through this, and we will deal with the economic and other consequences of this pandemic. There will be other epidemics or pandemics, hopefully not as bad as this one, so I hope we take the lessons we are learning today to develop the tools and public health infrastructure to stop them early. We have the data and the tools, and I believe we can use them more effectively to keep people safe.

We are grateful to the government and healthcare professionals on the front lines of COVID-19, and look forward to bringing you more tips, stories, information, and resources in the coming days. If you’d like to learn more about how Microsoft can help empower healthcare organizations to provide the best possible care, this site offers all the details.

Today, we announced the Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Subscriptions, the first consumer offerings from Microsoft 365. I’m pleased to follow up here to announce related changes to our Office 365 subscriptions for small and medium-sized businesses—and to Office 365 ProPlus. Going forward, all of these products will use the Microsoft 365 brand.

This is a natural evolution. Microsoft 365 began in 2017 as a licensing bundle for enterprise customers—a combination of Windows, Office, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). It has come a long way since then. Today, we call it “the world’s productivity cloud” and it represents our vision for the future of Microsoft productivity tools—an integrated set of apps and services that puts artificial intelligence (AI) and other cutting-edge innovations to work for you. And for small and medium-sized businesses, that includes new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to help you host rich meetings and events online; cloud file storage and sharing capabilities so you can collaborate from anywhere; and security and identity solutions to safeguard your business. At a moment when businesses are facing extraordinary health and economic challenges, we are pleased to bring our consumer and small and medium-sized business customers into this growing Microsoft 365 family.

New product names

The new product names go into effect on April 21, 2020. This is a change to the product name only, and there are no pricing or feature changes at this time.

• Office 365 Business Essentials will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic.
• Office 365 Business Premium will become Microsoft 365 Business Standard.
• Microsoft 365 Business will become Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
• Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will both become Microsoft 365 Apps. Where necessary we will use the “for business” and “for enterprise” labels to distinguish between the two.

Note that the changes to these products will all happen automatically.

Today, we’re simply announcing name changes. But these changes represent our ambition to continue to drive innovation in Microsoft 365 that goes well beyond what customers traditionally think of as Office. The Office you know and love will still be there, but we’re excited about the new apps and services we’ve added to our subscriptions over the last few years and about the new innovations we’ll be adding in the coming months. For questions, please refer the FAQs below and then head to the What is Microsoft 365 page for more details.

Frequently asked questions

Q. What Office 365 plan names aren’t changing?
A. The following Office 365 plans will have no changes:

• Office 365 for Enterprise
  • Office 365 E1
  • Office 365 E3
  • Office 365 E5
• Office 365 for Firstline Workers
  • Office 365 F1
• Office 365 for Education
  • Office 365 A1
  • Office 365 A3
  • Office 365 A5
• Office 365 for Government
  • Office 365 G1
  • Office 365 G3
  • Office 365 G5

Q. Why are you making these changes?
A. First, we want our products to reflect the range of features and benefits in the subscription. Microsoft 365 is an integrated set of apps and services that puts AI and other cutting-edge innovations to work for you. And for small and medium-sized businesses, that includes new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to help you host rich meetings and events online; cloud file storage and sharing capabilities so you can collaborate from anywhere; and security and identity solutions to safeguard your businesses. Second, we’re always looking for ways to simplify. This new approach to naming our products is designed to help you quickly find the plan you need and get back to your business.

Q. How does Office fit into Microsoft 365? Will I still be able to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?
A. The Office suite is core to the Microsoft productivity experience, and that’s not changing. But over the last several years, our cloud productivity offering has grown well beyond what people traditionally think of as “Office.” Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are more important than ever before. But in Microsoft 365 we’re breathing new life into these apps with the help of the cloud and AI, and we’re adding new, born-in-the-cloud experiences like Teams, Stream, Forms, and Planner. All of this is underpinned by a set of common services that keep your data safe and secure. It’s Office and a whole lot more.

Q. Is there anything new or different in Microsoft 365 Apps for business or Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise plans that wasn’t in Office 365 Business or Office 365 ProPlus plans? Any new features?
A. There are no price or feature changes to plans at this time.

Q. When will the Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise plans be available?
A. All plans will become available for customers on April 21, 2020.

Q. Are all of the Office 365 plans going away? What isn’t changing?
A. None of the plans are going away. The same plans are available, only with updated names. And in the case of Office 365 Enterprise, the name will remain the same and there will be no changes.

Q. I’m an existing SMB or ProPlus customer. Do I need to take any action?
A. Customers with the Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, or Microsoft 365 Business plans do not need to take additional action. The above changes will happen automatically.

Q. My company uses Office 365 ProPlus, and I have questions about this change. Where can I learn more?
A. Customers with the Office 365 ProPlus plan should consult this site for further details.

What a month it’s been. In just a few weeks, the way we work and live has changed. Our customers’ needs have never been clearer, or more urgent, than they are right now. And our top priority is to help you meet those needs by building the tools that help you enable your employees to work remotely; helping you find the right digital tools to transform your in-person events into virtual ones; and securing organizational assets to help you protect your business, even in challenging times.

This month, we have new features and capabilities designed to help keep your business moving during COVID-19 and beyond. New capabilities in Microsoft Teams, for instance, help you host more effective, inclusive, and focused online meetings and offer virtual solutions for one-on-one consultations. A crisis management site in SharePoint helps your organization quickly share information during emergencies. And an improved search experience in Outlook allows you to quickly find what you need in your email and calendar.

Below, we will get into all the Microsoft 365 news this month. But before we do, I want to once again point you to the monthly Modern Workplace podcast. This time, host Alex Bradley and I chat about what we’ve learned about remote work, both from our experiences at Microsoft and the experiences of our customers. Have a listen.

Host more inclusive, focused, online meetings

This month, we announced a host of new Teams capabilities that reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers, and bringing technological solutions to Firstline Workers and healthcare employees.

We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression minimizes distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.

In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

Industrial workers need to communicate and collaborate effectively while staying safe. Through a new integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, Firstline Workers will be able to access information and communicate hands-free with remote experts from their job site.

Conducting virtual meetings is a common requirement for situations such as healthcare patient consults, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.

Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and navigate more easily between ongoing conversations.

Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.

We’re also adding new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, delivers a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that’s simple to install and manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphones 700 UC will be available for purchase in late spring.

Finally, Microsoft 365 Business Voice in Teams is now available in the U.S., enabling small and mid-sized businesses to make and receive phone calls from anywhere. We also have a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that includes additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.

Check out new Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses

This month, we debuted Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, an evolution from our Office 365 for individuals and families offering. We also announced named changes to several of our small and medium-sized business and Enterprise offerings. Office 365 Business Essentials is now Microsoft 365 Business Basic; Office 365 Business Premium is now Microsoft 365 Business Standard; and Microsoft 365 Business is now Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Meanwhile, Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will be called Microsoft 365 Apps. While today this is a change in name only, we’re excited about the new apps and services we’ve added to our subscriptions over the last few years and the new innovations we’ll be adding in the coming months. These changes reflect our ambition to continue to drive innovation in Microsoft 365 that goes well beyond what customers traditionally think of as Office.

Respond to emergency events

Quickly build an emergency management site to connect people and information—Unexpected events like COVID-19 highlight the importance of establishing and keeping the lines of communication open. A new crisis management site in SharePoint enables your organization to consolidate news, related resources, and topical Q&A in response to emergency events in under two hours. Just head to your SharePoint start page and select Create site > Communication site to start configuring news, links, Q&As, site navigation, highlighted people, and more.

Connect and collaborate with new app updates

We’re announcing new app updates to help streamline conversations, create professional content, and maximize productivity.

Engage with Yammer conversations directly within your inbox—The new interactive Yammer emails in Outlook on the web enable users to interact with Yammer conversations, polls, and questions, and deliver praise. Now you can see the full Yammer thread and reply, like, vote, attach files, share GIFs, and even watch videos right from your inbox. These features are now available to all Enterprise tenants with releases in Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook for iOS and Android coming next quarter.

Create professional-looking content more easily with Office mobile—You can now view and edit data in Excel in a simple, digestible card format, eliminating the need to span across columns that extend beyond the limits of the screen. Also new to Office mobile, PowerPoint Designer helps you create professional presentations with design, formatting, and iconography ideas for your content. These features will be available in the next few months in the Office app for Android and iOS.

Collaborate on documents and assign tasks—Now, users can easily assign tasks to document collaborators in Word and Excel for the web. Simply @mention your teammates in the comments of your online Word or Excel document, check the box to assign it, and they’ll receive an email letting them know a task was assigned to them with a link directly to the document. This feature will be available in April with Tasks in PowerPoint for the web coming in June.

Enjoy a new connection experience in Visio for the web—A new feature in Visio for the web lets users move the connection point on a shape for better alignment. Users can also easily add multiple arrows between shapes to distinctively represent to-and-from relationships, and more. To get started, hover over the edge of the shape until green circles highlight the possible connection points, then click on the desired point and drag the connector to the desired destination point. This feature is now available to all Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users.

Search your email and calendar more easily

We are announcing new innovations in Microsoft Search that recognize natural language as a helpful way to find what you need in Outlook for iOS and Android. Simply find your emails, calendar events, contact information, and files faster and easier by using everyday language to narrow your search. You can either speak it or type it. Learn more in this blog.

Streamline common IT tasks

This month, we’re announcing two new services to help streamline common resources for IT.

Modernize your print infrastructure with a cloud-based print solution—We’re announcing the private preview of Universal Print, a new cloud-based print infrastructure that creates a simple, secure print experience. Now, organizations no longer need to maintain on-premises print servers or install printer drivers on devices, reducing the time and effort needed by IT to maintain the print environment. And users get a straightforward print experience that makes it easy to discover and print to nearby printers. Customers can register for participation in the private preview.

Seamlessly move your cloud files into OneDrive and SharePoint—We’re pleased to announce that Mover, a cloud-to-cloud file migration tool, is now available to Microsoft 365 customers worldwide. Mover supports migration from over a dozen cloud service providers—including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive—into OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling seamless file collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps and services. Mover makes it easy and inexpensive (it’s free!) to manage files that currently exist outside of Microsoft 365 in other cloud service provider offerings. To get started, sign in with your Office 365 credentials and follow the prompts.

From new meetings capabilities in Teams to updates that make storing files on the cloud easier, the announcements above reflect our ongoing commitment to continuing to improve and evolve the tools you rely on. But we also want to be here for you at this critical moment when so many organizations are adjusting to full-time remote work. In addition to these monthly updates, we are using this blog as a space to exchange remote-work tips, information, and customer stories, so check back here for frequent updates.

Last week, as COVID-19 cases continued to spread around the world, millions of people moved to remote work. We were right there with them. From Milan to Puget Sound, tens of thousands of Microsoft employees in impacted areas have begun working from home. Many of our customers have asked us to share the details of how we enable remote work for such a large workforce. My colleague Nathalie D’Hers is the exact-right person to do just that.

Nathalie and her team are part of Microsoft’s Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO), our internal IT team that builds and operates the systems that run Microsoft. They have spent the past few years transforming end-user productivity across the company and learning so much along the way. Here, she walks us through the top ways CSEO is enabling remote work. Over to you, Nathalie.

When people ask me about my job, I tell them my team and I make sure every Microsoft employee has the tools, resources, and solutions to be as productive, creative, and secure as possible—working from any location and on any device. For the last few years, that’s meant overseeing Microsoft’s journey to the cloud. Getting there has required that we manage identity and network access for all users; help ensure devices used to access the network are secure and healthy; and provide users access to the productivity-enabling apps they need.

Below, I’ve identified some of the top ways we are enabling remote work at Microsoft. I hope you find them useful, but I also understand that Microsoft has IT resources that many IT leaders may not. What is more, every company is at a different stage of their journey to the cloud. Maybe identity and device management are your top priorities, or you are digging into long-term projects like multi-factor authentication (MFA) or desktop virtualization. Maybe you are working to empower access to resources via a browser. Every IT leader needs to define the priorities to enable productivity from anywhere across their organization’s workforce. We get that, and we want to help. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a link to our new Enabling Remote Work Tech Community. I hope you’ll join and share your own journey there. With that, let’s get into the top 9 ways our team is enabling remote work.

1. User identity and access
   It all starts with managing identities. We have a hybrid environment that helps us both retain and expand existing systems while using a cloud-based control plane to enable people to work productively and securely. Whether they are an employee, partner, or supplier, every user who needs to access the corporate network receives a primary account synced to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). To learn more about our identity and access management practices, check out our IT Showcase covering user identities and secure access.
2. Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
   MFA is required to access any corporate resource at Microsoft. When a user connects remotely to our domain using their Microsoft work credentials on a device that we manage, MFA is almost transparent. We offer three authentication methods: certificate-backed virtual and physical smart cards, Windows Hello for Business (with PIN or biometric sign-in), and Azure Multi-factor Authentication. To learn more about enabling Azure MFA to support remote work scenario, check out this tutorial.
3. Managing devices
   At Microsoft, we manage a wide range of devices, including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Like many of you, we are making the transition to a fully cloud-based management environment. As we make that shift, we are using a co-management approach with Microsoft Endpoint Manager (MEM). MEM integrates Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager into a single console where you can manage all your endpoints and apps and take action to ensure they are secure and reliable.

   With more employees working remotely and across devices, it’s important to support bring-your-own-device (BYOD) scenarios. We offer self-service enrollment so users can quickly and easily join Azure AD and enroll in MEM to access company resources. Once enrolled, MEM then applies appropriate policies, for example, to ensure that a device is encrypted with a strong password and has certificates for access to things like Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and WiFi. MEM can also ensure that devices are adhering to policy by checking-in the device’s health compliance status to Azure AD as it processes the user’s authentication. For guidance on deploying and using MEM, your teams can check out our MEM documentation and tutorials.

4. Productivity applications
   With this foundation in place, we are driving our employees to work in the cloud. This is particularly important for our large population of information workers working remotely. Microsoft 365 enables users to access resources and share files with Office apps across the web, mobile, and desktop, storing their content in the cloud by default. Outlook mobile, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive are deployed on all of our corporate devices, so people can access their emails, calendars, and files within File Explorer on Windows, Finder on Mac, and Office Apps on mobile devices. We’ve made it easy for users to save their files to OneDrive the same way they traditionally saved files to their C: drive; this has been key to getting files to the cloud. Our users are also now able to do real-time coauthoring and commenting in documents in the cloud, which has proved extremely useful for a distributed workforce.
5. Meetings and collaboration
   All of us at Microsoft use Teams daily for chat, meetings, calls, and collaboration. Now that we find ourselves working remotely, we’ve been able to stay productive because we are accustomed to a digital workspace. Every meeting is now a Teams meeting, often with video. We‘re using features like background blur to block out our naughty kids, our barking dogs, and our mismatched furniture. As we rally to help our customers prepare for remote work, we’ve found that the ability to record meetings has become essential. All attendees can access recordings of meetings they’ve missed and then listen in to the most relevant parts. We also rely on the Microsoft 365 environment to empower employees to collaborate through self-service creation of Office 365 Groups or teams within Teams while ensuring appropriate security, compliance, and manageability are in place. To learn more about our experience enabling remote work with Teams, check out our IT Showcase post.
6. Access to line of business (LOB) applications
   Microsoft has migrated most of our legacy applications to the cloud. But even with most applications accessible in the cloud, some still require VPN. Additionally, we are in the process of rolling out Windows Virtual Desktop and are scaling up this offering to support the devices that our developers want to use (more on this later in the post). To get stated with Windows Virtual Desktop, you can point your teams to this tutorial.
7. Service monitoring
   With the increased load and usage from so many people working remotely, service monitoring has proven crucial to making sure everything is operating as it should. We carefully monitor application and network performance and we’ve built product telemetry monitoring into every solution so that we can check reporting for user satisfaction metrics and changes to service behavior.
8. Culture and change management
   Remote work can create challenges to maintaining a healthy work culture and managing change. Modern social and engagement platforms can help make sure messages are heard, leadership is visible, and best practices are shared. In our company, Satya Nadella and other executives connect with the organization using live events and Yammer. Our team recently held an 18-hour global live event to drive employee connections, engagement, and learning. And we educate employees to use Yammer to build communities that connect people across teams. For example, we recently set up a work-from-home (WFH) Yammer group with tips and tricks for making the switch to remote work.

Here are some of the main points we emphasize in our end-user education:

• Save files to the cloud so you can coauthor within the Office 365 suite of products. Users should save individual documents and drafts in OneDrive, where files are private by default but can be shared. They should save shared documents to the Teams or SharePoint sites where your group works.
• Share links rather than attachments in email to make sure everyone’s using the latest version of a document.
• Use Teams to the fullest. We tell users to think of Teams as a virtual office. Hold every call and meeting on Teams. Use channels, rather than email or group chats, for team-level conversations. Turn on your camera to connect during meetings. Use Live Events for larger gatherings. If your organization allows, record meetings to access the transcript later. We also remind the Teams meetings aren’t just for 1:1s or small standups. They can range from informal “coffee breaks” in channels, to highly collaborative quarterly planning offsites with a hundred employees or more.

9. Designing for specific roles
   A lot of the resources we’ve discussed benefit information workers most. It makes sense, we have a lot of those at Microsoft. But it’s important to enable other types of workers to work remotely as well.

Developers: Engineers need to be able to collaborate on code and build their workflows into Teams for remote collaboration. We have a number of developers who typically work exclusively on desktops. We are providing them with laptops with a WVD solution so they can remote into their dev environment.

Call center and help desk: At Microsoft, we have walk-up help desks as well as online technicians. They all have Microsoft-managed PCs, which enables those who typically work onsite to switch instantly over to a remote work model and remain productive.

Firstline Workers: It’s key to connect all workers so that they are equipped with the knowledge to take appropriate steps for themselves, customers, and the community. Teams serves as the single productivity hub for retail employees and managers across Microsoft Stores, connecting remote sites, digitizing workflows, and ensuring workers have real-time access to the right information at the right time. During the COVID-19 outbreak, they’ve used the Store Portal application in Teams to communicate latest policies and procedures including sanitation updates, staffing changes, and event status. Additionally, the Stores team uses Teams to run daily standup meetings and for Q&As with associates and team members that drive dialogue and collaboration on key topics.

Enabling a team to work remotely is an ongoing challenge, and we get that this challenge is different for every organization. I hope that reading about our approach has been useful to you, and as I wrote earlier in this post, I’d love to learn more about yours. To share your experiences, ask other IT professionals and partners for advice or information, and find additional resources, join the new Enabling Remote Work Tech Community. Let’s keep the conversation going there!

With COVID-19 continuing to impact people and countries around the world, teams everywhere are moving to remote work. Earlier this week, I posted a letter from Lily Zheng, our colleague in Shanghai, detailing her team’s experience using Microsoft Teams to work from home during the outbreak. Lily’s team is one of many. Here at Microsoft in the Puget Sound, we’re encouraging our teams to work from home as much as possible, as are many organizations in this region. And we expect this trend to continue across the world. At Microsoft, our top priority is the health and safety of employees, customers, partners, and communities. By making Teams available to as many people as possible, we aim to support public health and safety by keeping teams connected while they work apart.

As we have read through your responses to Lily’s letter, it has become clear that there are two big questions on your minds. First, how can people access the free Teams offerings that Lily referenced? Second, what is our plan for avoiding service interruptions during times of increased usage? Below, you’ll find detailed answers to both. And over the next few days we’ll be sharing more tips, updates, and information related to remote work here. So check back often.

Making Teams available for everyone

Teams is a part of Office 365. If your organization is licensed for Office 365, you already have it. But we want to make sure everyone has access to it during this time. Here are some simple ways to get Teams right away.

Individuals

If you want to get started with Teams, we can get you up and running right away.

• If you have an email address through work or school, sign in using this link. We’ll get you into Teams in no time.
• If you’re using an email address like Gmail or Outlook, you can sign up for the freemium version of Teams by following this link.

IT professionals

The self-service links above work great for individuals, but if you’re an IT professional who wants to roll out Teams centrally, here’s what to do.

• If you work for a business that isn’t currently licensed for Teams, we’ve got you covered with a free Office 365 E1 offer for six months. Contact your Microsoft partner or sales representative to get started today. (Note: the same offer is available in the Government Cloud, but not available in GCC High and the Department of Defense.)
• If you work in education and want to set up teachers, students, and administrators on Teams, use Office 365 A1. This free version of Office 365 is available to all educational institutions. Sign up by following this link.

Keeping Teams up and running

You and your team depend on our tools to stay connected and get work done. We take that responsibility seriously, and we have a plan in place to make sure services stay up and running during impactful events like this. Our business continuity plan anticipates three types of impacts to the core aspects of the service:

• Systems: When there’s a sudden increase in usage, like the surge we recently saw in China.
• Location: When there’s an unexpected event that is location-specific, such as an earthquake or a powerful storm.
• People: When there’s an event that may impact the team maintaining the system, like the COVID-19 outbreak in the Puget Sound area.

We’ve recently tested service continuity during a usage spike in China. Since January 31, we’ve seen a 500 percent increase in Teams meetings, calling, and conferences there, and a 200 percent increase in Teams usage on mobile devices. Despite this usage increase, service has been fluid there throughout the outbreak. Our approach to delivering a highly available and resilient service centers on the following things.

Active/Active design: In Microsoft 365, we are driving towards having all services architected and operated in an active/active design which increases resiliency. This means that there are always multiple instances of a service running that can respond to user requests and that they are hosted in geographically dispersed datacenters. All user traffic comes in through the Microsoft Front Door service and is automatically routed to the optimally located instance of the service and around any service failures to prevent or reduce impact to our customers.

Reduce incident scope: We seek to avoid incidents in the first place, but when they do happen, we strive to limit the scope of all incidents by having multiple instances of each service partitioned off from each other. In addition, we’re continuously driving improvements in monitoring through automation, enabling faster incident detection and response.

Fault isolation: Just as the services are designed and operated in an active/active fashion and are partitioned off from each other to prevent a failure in one from affecting another, the code base of the service is developed using similar partitioning principles called fault isolation. Fault isolation measures are incremental protections made within the code base itself. These measures help prevent an issue in one area from cascading into other areas of operation. You can read more about how we do this, along with all the details of our service continuity plan, in this document.

Adjusting to remote work can be a challenge. We get it, and we are here to provide the tools, tips, and information you need to help you and your team meet that challenge. We’re inspired by the agility and ingenuity that impacted schools, hospitals, and businesses have shown throughout COVID-19, and we are committed to helping organizations everywhere stay connected and productive during this difficult time.

FAQs

Q. What happens when an individual signs in with work or school credentials?
A. If the individual is licensed for Teams, they will be logged into the product. If the individual is not licensed for Teams, they will be logged into the product and automatically receive a free license of Teams that is valid through January 2021. This includes video meetings for up to 250 participants and Live Events for up to 10,000, recording and screen sharing, along with chat and collaboration. Details for IT.

Q. What does the freemium version of Teams include?
A. This version gives you unlimited chat, built-in group and one-on-one audio or video calling, 10 GB of team file storage, and 2 GB of personal file storage per user. You also get real-time collaboration with the Office apps for web, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. There is no end date. Details here.

Q. Is there a user limit in the freemium version?
A. Beginning March 10, we are rolling out updates to the free version of Teams that will lift restrictions on user limits.

Q. Can I schedule meetings in the freemium version?
A. In the future, we will make it possible for users to schedule meetings. In the meantime, you can conduct impromptu video meetings and calls.

Q. How can IT admins access Teams for Education?
A. Teams has always been free to students and education professionals as a part of the Office 365 A1 offer. Access it here.

Q. Do you have any tips for working from home?
A. Lola Jacobson, one of our senior technical writers, posted a few basic tips last week. And we updated the Support remote workers using Microsoft Teams page on docs.Microsoft.com yesterday. We have more content on the way, so stay tuned.

We live in exciting, but busy, times. As we try to navigate a rapidly changing and complex workplace, little things can make or break our experience—including the tools we rely on. At Microsoft, we get it, and we’re listening. We’re working hard to incorporate your feedback and requests—from simple tweaks to new tools—into the Microsoft 365 experience. It’s all about building the best productivity service to help you and your organization get more done, and we’re committed to making sure your experience only gets better with time.

This month, we’re introducing capabilities to help you work on the go, collaborate on content more easily, interact with apps in more ways, and customize your productivity experiences. The new Office app is now generally available for Android and iOS. We added collaboration capabilities to PowerPoint comments and brought coauthoring and Microsoft Teams integration to Visio. Word now has an improved speech-to-text functionality that supports more languages, while added inking features and Dark Mode make it easier to capture and read notes in OneNote for Android. Meanwhile, organizations can now customize their employees’ productivity experience—from search results pages and All Company Yammer feeds to a private preview of the new Microsoft Fluid Framework.

Read on for all the exciting Microsoft 365 updates this month. And for a deeper dive into the news, be sure to check out the second episode of the Modern Workplace podcast. This month, host Alex Bradley and I go in-depth on teamwork, the new Microsoft Fluid Framework, and more.

Be productive on the go

Work from anywhere with the new Office app—The Office app is a fully redesigned experience to help you be more productive from anywhere. It combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app, adds new capabilities to help you create content in uniquely mobile ways, and has integrated Actions that help you accomplish common mobile tasks. The result is a simpler, yet more powerful, Office experience for mobile devices. Read this blog post to learn more about the new Office app, now generally available worldwide on Android and iOS.

Improve collaboration across your favorite apps

New tools in PowerPoint and Visio make it easier for teams to work together.

Collaborate more fluidly in PowerPoint—Starting next month, we’ll roll out an updated comments feature in PowerPoint. Team members can now anchor comments to objects, use @mention notifications, discover and add comments more easily, and more. The new comments experience will be available to all Office 365 users with the latest update.

Coauthor Visio drawings in more ways—Visio for the web now allows collaborators to create, edit, and comment on drawings simultaneously. With live coauthoring and a simple presence indicator, teams can work seamlessly together to brainstorm and develop their ideas. Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users can visit visio.office.com to create and share Visio files today.

Team members can also use these capabilities directly in Teams. Now you can share your Visio drawings with colleagues, since files stored in your Team’s file library are accessible to every member—making it easy for colleagues to edit and comment on your work. To get started, click the Files tab above the conversation window in your Teams channel and select New > Visio drawing.

Personalize the way you work

Updates to Word and OneNote let users work the way they want.

Save time and simplify work with improved speech-to-text—It’s now easy to create content with your voice in Word thanks to a new dictation toolbar, suggestions experience, and auto-punctuation support. You can also now work in six new preview languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese. The new Voice Dictation in Word for the web is rolling out to all Office 365 users now.

Capture and take notes with ease—OneNote for Android phone and tablet now supports Dark Mode, enabling you to switch from bright white to a more subtle black and dark gray color scheme for easier reading. Additionally, we refreshed the inking experience to support bright new colors and continue leveraging pen types, highlighters, and erasers. And don’t miss the Lasso tool, which resizes and repositions objects on the page. These updates are rolling out to all OneNote users on Android phones and tablets.

Customize user collaboration experiences

New capabilities help you tailor your productivity tools to fit your enterprise brand and environment.

Create custom search results pages for Microsoft Search—You can now create custom search results pages in SharePoint Online. Use this new feature to control the layout and design of search results to tailor your SharePoint Online experience for your enterprise environment. The new feature will be available to all SharePoint Online subscribers. To get started, choose the site area where you would like to configure a custom results page and select Site Collection Settings > Search Settings.

Choose which “What’s new” features are visible to your users—You can now manage which features are shown or hidden from users in the “What’s New” Office desktop app. This content highlights a list of new features, accompanied by descriptions and guidance to help customers use the features. You can access this management tool using the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Office 365 Client Configuration Service.

Begin creating fluid collaboration experiences today—Microsoft Fluid Framework is a new component-based document model designed to enable new ways to collaborate on content creation. Now anyone with an Office 365 Enterprise subscription can check out the early preview. To get started, simply sign in with your organizational account ID at fluidpreview.com.

Strengthen your enterprise branding in Yammer—New capabilities in the current Yammer experience allow you to customize the All Company feed name, upload a community cover photo, land key messaging, welcome new members, promote organizational initiatives, and reinforce company values. Pair this with custom avatars to bring your branding and culture into your All Company feed. These new capabilities will be available to admins soon.

Manage Yammer eDiscovery from within the Microsoft 365 admin center—Yammer now supports eDiscovery for networks in Native Mode. Now admins will have access to all messages and files posted in their Yammer networks through the same eDiscovery tools they use to manage data throughout the rest of the Office 365 suite. This simplifies eDiscovery tasks and streamlines compliance obligations. To get started, make sure your Yammer network is running in Native Mode and then navigate to the eDiscovery module of the Security and Compliance Center.

Additionally, now all new files uploaded to Yammer communities connected to Office 365 are stored in SharePoint. With this change, your files will adhere to the rich security and compliance features policies that you’ve implemented for SharePoint—including eDiscovery, data loss protection, in-geo residence for files at rest, and others.

Also new this month

Navigating work and life today requires great tools that are constantly evolving and improving. Our goal is to build the productivity experiences that enable you and your organization to succeed. We can’t do it without you, so please reach out with feedback, requests, or questions. We’re here to help.

Since the early days of personal computing, information workers have benefited the most from technology. That makes sense, since these workers tend to spend the bulk of their day at a computer screen. But there are 2 billion workers in the world who don’t work behind the computer. You’ll find them, instead, behind the counter, on the factory floor, in the operating room, and out on the tarmac. First with customers, first with products, and first to represent your brand, these Firstline Workers are the lifeblood of organizations across the planet. And for too long, they’ve been underserved by technology.

With Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud, we’re changing that. Thanks to new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, we can build experiences across devices to connect organizations from the shop floor to the top floor. So, while we continue to unlock new productivity experiences for information workers, we can help their Firstline colleagues get more done too.

Firstline Workers already use tools like Microsoft Teams and Power Apps to digitize shift schedules, take meetings from anywhere, and simplify workflow. And this month, I’m thrilled to announce some exciting new tools to help Firstline Workers collaborate and complete tasks, along with management tools to make managing them simple and fast.

Starting with this month’s “What’s new to Microsoft 365” blog post, we’re partnering with Modern Workplace on a new podcast that complements both the blog and the Modern Workplace video series. For the first episode, host Alex Bradley and I talked about news coming out of the National Retail Federation (NRF) tradeshow, this month’s Microsoft 365 updates, and my 2020 productivity New Year’s resolutions. Please have a listen, subscribe if you want to hear more, and feel free to leave a comment with topics you’d like us to cover.

Read on to learn all the important Microsoft 365 updates this month.

Empower your Firstline Workforce

Several new Microsoft Teams updates help you drive higher levels of employee engagement and enhance customer experiences.

Improve collaboration with Walkie Talkie in Teams—Now Firstline Workers can more easily communicate and manage tasks at the touch of a button. The new push-to-talk experience in Teams delivers clear, instant, and secure voice communication over the cloud, turning employee- and/or company-owned smartphones and tablets into walkie talkies. This new feature not only reduces the numbers of devices your employees need to carry but can also lower IT costs. And when integrated with new devices—such as the recently unveiled Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro—your Firstline Workers can communicate with each other instantly. Walkie Talkie will be available in private preview in Teams in the first half of this year.

Streamline user experiences for Firstline Workers—Firstline Workers can now sign in to all their Microsoft 365 and custom apps using one-time SMS codes—streamlining their sign-in experience. And shared device sign-out enables users to sign out of their apps on shared devices with just one tap, helping to protect customer data while improving the user experience. Finally, an updated Tasks feature in Teams delivers new capabilities and reporting to everyone from the C-suite to Firstline Workers.

Make management easier for your IT pros—Now you can minimize management of employee tasks for IT pros. The new delegated user management feature allows IT managers to approve password resets and enable Firstline Workers to use their phone numbers for SMS sign-in via a single, customizable portal. In addition, Azure Active Directory (AD) user provisioning now integrates with SAP SuccessFactors, making it easy to onboard and manage identities at scale, across any application. And finally, off-shift access controls for the Teams app enables your IT administrators to limit employee access to the Teams app on their personal devices outside of working hours. These updates are rolling out over the next couple of months.

Save time and create more impactful content

Deliver more engaging content find what you need quickly and easily.

Connect with your audience during presentations with Live Presentations—Presentations can provide a great opportunity to communicate information and connect with your audience, but language barriers, screen distance, and pacing can all affect audience engagement. With Live Presentations, audience members can turn on live captioning (available in 60 languages), navigate between slides to catch details, or send reactions to the presenter—all in real-time. Live Presentations is coming soon to PowerPoint for the web. Presenters can access it as part of any Office 365 subscription.

See why the new Microsoft Edge is the browser for business—Built on the Chromium open source project, the new Microsoft Edge is simple to manage with world-class performance and compatibility, Microsoft security features, and tools to help your organization be more productive. You can download the new Microsoft Edge today for all supported versions of Windows and macOS in more than 90 languages.

Find what you need quickly with Microsoft Search—Searching through personal files or a company intranet without knowing what you’re looking for (or when you do) can make your search experience difficult and time-consuming. Our new Microsoft Search experience is built with AI technologies and intelligence and insights from the Microsoft Graph. You’ll get contextually relevant results, when you need them, where you’re already working—whether in Microsoft Word, SharePoint, or Bing. To get started, just click in the new Search box and instantly see answers and insights from the applications, people, and information that matter the most.

And over the course of the next couple of months, we’ll add new features for businesses. Using Microsoft Graph connectors, available now in preview, you can search over content sources beyond Microsoft 365. Additionally, we’re also announcing capabilities to set up custom verticals, add your own refiners, and use adaptive cards to create your own visualizations in the results page in Office.com and SharePoint. Finally, to help ease the transition, we’ve enabled developers to use the tried and true SharePoint framework to customize the appearance and develop applications on top of Microsoft Search.

Create and share data-driven Visio diagrams directly in Excel—You can now create impactful Visio diagrams (such as flowcharts or organizational diagrams) from your data directly in Excel with the public preview of the Visio Data Visualizer add-in. Each diagram category provides a wide range of layout styles and theme options, making it easy to build a diagram to fit your needs. Visio Data Visualizer is available to Office 365 subscribers. To get started, add the “Visio Data Visualizer” add-in in Excel.

Model systems and processes using Unified Modeling Language (UML) shapes in Visio for the web—We made diagramming simpler and easier for everyone by bringing UML shapes and functionalities to Visio for the web. UML diagrams provide software developers and systems architects the ability to design and visually represent software-based systems, as well as model business processes and workflows. To start diagramming, all Visio Plan 1 and Visio Plan 2 users can visit visio.office.com, select the preferred UML diagram, and start modeling their systems or processes instantly.

Access company branded templates from within Office apps—It can be tricky to find your organization’s templates when creating new presentations and documents. Office now provides easy access to company-branded templates right from within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—saving you time lost to digging through intranet and document stores. To get started, update Office to the latest version, select File > New, then select your organization’s name.

Make IT management easier

New capabilities and resources to help you migrate from Windows 7 and meet data residency requirements.

Migrate from Windows 7 to Windows 10—This month marked the end of support for Windows 7. Fortunately, Windows 10 enables you to harness the power of the cloud while making you and your organization more productive and secure than ever before. And when purchasing Windows 10 with a Microsoft 365 license, your users will get a highly productive and secure experience, while IT will find these tools much easier to deploy and manage. Check out our Windows 7 end of support resources to start your migration path today.

Meet data residency needs in Switzerland with new Microsoft datacenters—Now new Microsoft Office 365 customers in Switzerland will have their Office 365 data stored in an in-country datacenter, helping organizations with data residency requirements to meet their obligations.

Also new this month

I am so thrilled to bring powerful tools for Firstline Workers while continuing to bring new productivity experiences to information workers as well. It’s all about helping entire organizations be more productive and connected, from the shop floor to the top floor. As always, every Microsoft 365 update reflects our commitment to improving the experience for you—so if you have feedback or ideas on how we can improve, don’t hesitate to let us know.