Welcome to this month’s update.
In the next few minutes I’ll be giving you a quick rundown of the latest new features and enhancements to Microsoft 365,
with the goal of helping you get the most out of the service.
Once again, everything I cover is fully documented in the transcript and resources guide at https://aka.ms/m365update-blog.
Now, onto the updates.
New Microsoft Teams announcements have been arriving at what can be best
described as a blistering pace over the last few months.
I covered the new Shifts app, and the customizable navigation experience, along with the Praise tool in January.
In February, it was priority notification and message delegation.
This month we’ve announced a bunch of new features, some of which I’ve personally been looking forward to.
You might remember me having a little fun when I covered background blur in Teams in the November 2018 Office 365 update.
Many of you no doubt wondered when the option to not just blur, but change your background, would be offered.
Well, the wait will be over with the addition of customized backgrounds later this year.
The ability to modify your background helps encourage the use of video,
but keeps the focus on you, and improves your ability to be productive in more places.
Live captions and subtitles make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees
who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location.
The English preview of this feature is coming soon and I’m sure more languages will follow.
This new functionality will help everyone more fully participate in Microsoft Teams meetings.
Secure private channels, one of the most requested features in Teams,
is coming later this year. With secure private channels,
you’ll be able to restrict channel participation and visibility without having to create an entirely separate team.
We also announced new compliance capabilities in Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard integration, and more.
I don’t have the bandwidth to cover them here but have provided links to all you need to know in the transcript and resources guide.
Microsoft Whiteboard was first a topic in my August 2018 update video while it was still in preview.
It’s a great place for ideas, people, and content to come together on the same virtual canvas,
around the world and across devices, in the Whiteboard app or from your browser.
Two new intelligent inking features in the Microsoft Whiteboard Windows 10 app, Ink Beautification and Ink Grab,
help improve the collaborative ideation experience.
Ink Beautification takes the notes you write and makes them more legible.
This addresses one of the most commonly cited concerns about why people don’t use inking more - terrible handwriting.
You can also easily convert content from a physical whiteboard to a digital whiteboard using Ink Grab.
This feature converts pictures of your notes to digital ink, making them easier to edit and share with others.
Together, these intelligent inking features decrease the time spent transcribing notes
and allow for more time collaborating on digital whiteboards.
Both are now available in the Whiteboard Windows 10 app.
I covered some of the new LinkedIn integration with Microsoft 365 in the January update and there is more on the way.
Targeted release customers can also now co-author documents with many of your first-degree LinkedIn connections.
To get started, type the name of your collaborator in the “To:” field when composing a new message
or sharing a document in Outlook on the web, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word Online, PowerPoint Online, and Excel Online.
You can enable these features by securely connecting your LinkedIn account with your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 account.
Since we’re on the topic, feel free to connect with me via LinkedIn at the URL shown on the screen.
I’m sure everyone can think of a word or phrase that ends with “makes everything better”
as in “peanut butter makes everything better” or “cute kitty videos make everything better”.
If you subscribe to the belief that “3D makes everything better”,
and you’ve got a Mac with an Office 365 subscription, then prepare to be delighted.
3D embedded animations are coming to Office insiders
running the Mac versions of PowerPoint, Word and, interestingly enough, Excel.
With your document, spreadsheet, or in this case, presentation open, select the insert menu, then click Insert 3D Models.
You'll be presented with the library of models available via Remix 3D.
In this case, I’ll select the option for All Animated Models and type in a search term.
I insert the one I want and apply one of the pre-built animations that best help me tell my story.
Incorporating 3D objects into your work will not only make your content stand out,
it can improve comprehension, increase engagement, and even entertain your audience.
Outlook on the web is a great place to test e-mail innovations
because its minimal impact on the client makes new features easy to roll out and test.
In keeping with that theme, Outlook on the web users should see some new features,
powered by Microsoft AI, starting to appear over the next few weeks.
Outlook on the web will now suggest attachments it feels are relevant to your conversation.
And, it also automatically provides the option to create a meeting directly from an e-mail conversation.
Those new capabilities are great, but the new functionality that really caught my eye,
is Outlook on the web suggesting information available to me,
like files and e-mails, that I might find relevant to a meeting or event on my calendar.
Live Events in Microsoft 365 is now generally available and enables anyone to create live
and on-demand events using video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer.
Attendees receive notifications and can participate in real time, with high-definition video and interactive discussions,
using web, mobile, or desktop apps.
If those you want to connect with in your organization are already in Yammer,
you can create live events and have them show up there.
If instead, you want your audience to view the event in Microsoft Teams,
you can create the events so your viewers can join and watch via Teams.
Finally, if you want your viewers to watch in Microsoft Stream instead of either of the above,
you can do that too. For employees in different time zones or who are unable to attend live,
the conversation keeps going so they still feel connected to leaders and peers.
This helps to overcome geographical or organizational boundaries and scheduling conflicts.
Following a live event, it’s easy to make the recording available on an event page,
allowing you to watch it on your own schedule and catch up quickly with powerful AI features that unlock the content.
The recording is automatically transcribed and the AI detects changes in speakers, making it simple to search for content later.
This new functionality in Microsoft 365 helps to drive connection throughout the entire engagement life cycle
before, during, and after live events.
I’ve covered Microsoft Forms innovations more than once, recently.
A few months ago, it was Forms integration with Microsoft Stream.
The topic was Forms integration into PowerPoint in November.
I even used Forms to gather feedback about this video series last July.
We just announced the public preview of Forms Pro,
our new enterprise solution to professionally distribute surveys, including custom forms,
with robust capabilities to collect feedback and analyze your data.
It builds on the current survey-creation experience of Microsoft Forms in Office 365,
and offers new capabilities that make capturing and analyzing customer and employee feedback simpler than ever.
You can respond to the surveys by using any web browser or mobile device.
As responses are submitted, Power BI reports provide analysis to facilitate making decisions in real time.
Forms Pro will adhere to the compliance, security, and privacy you have come to expect from Office 365.
So, you can collect information without having to go to non-secure solutions or build and maintain your own custom surveying tools.
Sign up for the public preview today at https://formspro.microsoft.com.
The Microsoft 365 security center, available at security.microsoft.com
is the new home for monitoring and managing security across your Microsoft identities, data, devices, apps, and infrastructure.
It’s a unified dashboard that provides security professionals with a dedicated workspace
to manage the comprehensive security capabilities of Microsoft 365.
The new Microsoft 365 security center includes tools to
view security trends and track protection status of your environment with identity, data, devices, apps, and infrastructure threat reports,
including those for Cloud App Security;
analyze and take actions to improve your security posture with the all-new Microsoft Secure Score;
and hunt for intrusion attempts affecting your e-mail, data, devices, and identity.
The Microsoft security center is a one-stop shop to meet all our security needs across Microsoft 365.
The new Microsoft 365 admin center is built for IT teams as a simplified way to manage your Microsoft 365 and Office 365 services.
It provides a tailored experience based on the unique needs of your role or organization,
improves efficiency for everyday tasks, and provides actionable insights
that help you make data-driven decisions to deliver a better experience for your users.
While available in preview for some time, we recently announced that the
new Microsoft 365 admin center will begin rolling out as the default experience for all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 admins.
Last, but certainly not least, we recently announced the new Threat and Vulnerability Management capability in Microsoft Defender,
which helps identify threats and vulnerabilities in Microsoft and 3rd party applications and provides automated remediation
through Intune and System Center Configuration Manager, or SCCM.
Timing was such that there wasn’t a lot of information available when I did this recording,
but please check the additional resources to learn more.
That’s it for this month. As always, to get the most out of this update,
be sure to check out the transcript and resources guide at https://aka.ms/m365update-blog.
It includes the complete talk track and links to sources I used to create this video,
a list of roadmap-related content, and a reference of YouTube links to topics from past videos.
I’m Jim Naroski, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you again soon!