It’s been over a year since Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365, the complete, intelligent, and secure solution that empowers employees to drive their organizations to future growth. Customers are seeking to transform and support a workforce that is more diverse and mobile than ever before, and they are relying on latest advancements in technology to do so.

Microsoft 365 is growing quickly, built on the strength of more than 135 million commercial monthly Office 365 users. Windows 10 has approximately 200 million commercial devices in use, and there is an install base of over 82 million for Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS). In last month, Microsoft introduced new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that make it possible for every person to do their best work.

1. Microsoft Teams upcoming new capabilities

After less than two years in market, more than 329,000 organizations worldwide use Microsoft Teams, including 87 of the Fortune 100 companies. Microsoft continues to add powerful new capabilities to  foster teamwork and collaboration.

• Blur your background during meetings – New artificial intelligence (AI) powered meeting features are now generally available – including background blur and meeting recording. Background blur uses facial detection to blur your background during  video meetings, and meeting recording allows you to playback recorded meeting content at any time with captions and a searchable, timecoded transcript.

• Live and on-demand event video broadcast – General availability of new live event capabilities will begin to roll out worldwide in Microsoft 365 later this year. These new tools allow customers to create and stream live and on-demand events in Teams, Yammer and Microsoft Stream to inform and engage customers and employees, wherever they are.

• Mobile video offline viewing – Starting in October, employees can watch videos on the go with the Stream mobile app for iOS and Android, with support for offline viewing.

• Easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working – Microsoft is extending the power of Teams with new experiences that are tailored to industry-specific and role-based workflows. For example, new capabilities in Teams help empower Firstline Workers to do their best work. With new schedule management tools, managers can now create and share schedules, and employees can easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working as well as important announcements. These new features will now be available in November.

Easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working.

2. Create content that stands out with Microsoft 365

Three new features in Microsoft 365 use the power of AI to help you create content that shines.

• Ideas in PowerPoint – Ideas is a new feature that follows along as you create a document and makes intelligent suggestions. In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images.

• Ideas in Excel – In Excel, Ideas recognizes trends, suggests charts, and identifies outliers in your data. Additionally, new data types in Excel turn references to stocks and geographies into rich entities that can be used to build powerful, interactive spreadsheets. The Stocks and Geography data types – generally available soon – make it easy to get updated stock prices, company information, population, area, and more.

• New image recognition capabilities in Excel – Take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table and turn it into an Excel spreadsheet, making data entry as easy as taking a picture.

In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images for your presentation.

3. Work together with your entire network with LinkedIn in Outlook and Office web apps

When you connect your LinkedIn account to Office 365, you’ll soon be able to co-author documents with people in your LinkedIn network in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and send emails to them directly from Outlook.

• Work with LinkedIn Connected Parties – This brings your corporate directory and your LinkedIn network together, so you never lose touch with the contacts who can help you succeed, inside or outside your organization.

   

4. Microsoft Forms Enhancement

• Survey Branding Enhancement – One of the top requests Microsoft get from Enterprise customers is to include company branding with surveys. Microsoft is now offering more customization support in survey logo, theme, background, and thank you page. Many of you want to include a company logo at the top of your form. You can now also include your logo in its entirety without having to adhere to specific set dimensions. Once you’ve added your company logo, you can also customize the theme of your survey with a company color. You can also add a high resolution background image to make your survey pop. Finally, craft a personal thank you message for your customers. Go to More form settings (…) > Settings, then select Customize thank you message.

• Microsoft Forms in PowerPoint – Microsoft Forms is now integrated with PowerPoint for Office 365 to provide educators an easy solution of inserting a quiz or an assessment into a PowerPoint presentation. With the integration of Forms in PowerPoint, a teacher, for example, can add a quiz to his or her deck and share it out with students. Students can then fill out the quiz and submit their answers without leaving PowerPoint.

   

5.  Advancing security for IT professionals

The work Microsoft does in security at Microsoft gives us the broadest perspective on the challenges and a unique ability to help. Microsoft had announced several new enterprise-class capabilities that leverage the Microsoft intelligent Cloud and operational learnings to help organizations secure their people, devices, and data.

• Passwordless – New support for passwordless sign-in via the Microsoft Authenticator app is now available for the hundreds of thousands of Azure Active Directory connected apps that businesses use every day. Nearly all data loss starts with compromised passwords. Today, we are declaring an end to the era of passwords. No company lets enterprises eliminate more passwords than Microsoft.

• Microsoft Secure Score – The only enterprise-class dynamic report card for cybersecurity. By using it, organizations get assessments and recommendations that typically reduce their chance of a breach by 30-fold. It guides you to take steps like securing admin accounts with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), securing users accounts with MFA, and turning off client-side email forwarding rules. Microsoft is expanding Secure Score to cover all of Microsoft 365. Secure Score is also introduced for your hybrid cloud workloads in the Azure Security Center, so you have full visibility across your estate.

• Microsoft Threat Protection – An integrated experience for detection, investigation, and remediation across endpoints, email, documents, identity, and infrastructure in the Microsoft 365 admin console. This will save analysts thousands of hours as they automate the more mundane security tasks.

Microsoft Secure Score is expanding to cover all of Microsoft 365.

 

Microsoft and Superhub look forward to bringing these new ways to achieve more from unlocking creativity to advancing security. In addition, Superhub’s full spectrum of 365+ and Azure+ managed services enable and support SMEs and enterprises along their cloud transformation journey. Want to learn more about how these could help you to achieve more? Contact Superhub Cloud Advisor today.

Written by Superhub Team