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Hello it's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This is the Office 365 Roadmap Radar for October 2020.
Once again we've waded through the roadmap so you don't have to
and this month we've got 15 new features and changes to show you.
So here we go.
There's lots of love for Microsoft Forms this month.
First Microsoft Forms is coming to the Office mobile app.
The Office mobile app combines Word, PowerPoint and Excel into one
so you don't have to download individual apps onto your phone.
Microsoft is now adding Forms to this app
allowing you to open and create your forms from the comfort of your own phone.
The rollout of this new feature should be complete for Android users in October and ios is coming in November.
Now you can print your forms.
The form owner will be able to print a blank form to a printer or pdf
for anyone who can't complete the form online.
This feature is available now.
Microsoft Forms will now show responders a progress bar on multi-page forms and quizzes
if the forms owner enables it.
From your form just go up to the ellipsis, choose "settings" and then "show progress",
and this feature is available now.
Forms owners will be able to get responses from specific users or security groups.
You'll see a new sharing option when you choose the share button...
...and go to the "send and collect responses" section.
If you select "specific people in my organisation can respond",
then you can choose one or more individuals or user groups using their email addresses.
This update is rolling out now and will be complete in November.
And if that wasn't enough, Forms is also getting a new start page.
This feature offers a smoother experience for accessing and working with your forms.
This has started rolling out for targeted release users now
and will be available by the end of November for everybody.
Now onto Word.
There is a new feature being added to Word on the web,
the browser-based version of Word.
It's called Designer and Microsoft claims it will help to format and style your word documents.
You'll be able to use it to give your docs a consistent look and feel
and there'll be a set of new themes to choose from.
It can work out where your styles haven't been applied and fix them automatically.
To access Designer, open a document in Word on the web
and then select "Home" from the ribbon and then the "Designer" button.
This will be available to targeted release customers now and standard release in November.
Now on to Teams.
Microsoft is changing the toolbar in Teams meetings
so that it will always be visible for android and ios phones and tablets.
You'll see a toolbar snap to the side of the meeting stage
that will be visible for the duration of the meeting.
It will make it easier to hang up, mute sound and turn off your video.
This feature is rolling out now and will be complete by the end of November.
Presenters in Teams meetings will be able to choose an attendee
and make sure that everyone sees their video feed by choosing the new spotlight feature.
You can select the person from the grid of videos or the participant pane on the right hand side
and choose "spotlight".
When you spotlight someone, their video is locked onto the meeting stage and shown to all participants.
This feature is available now.
Now for some new features for SharePoint.
According to Microsoft, SharePoint Syntex is a new service that will use ai and machine teaching
to automate the capture of metadata from the documents you store in Office 365.
You'll be able to teach Syntex to recognize and extract parts of your documents
and use that information to categorise or integrate with other apps and services
like search or power automate.
Syntex also has new features for managing taxonomies and content types in SharePoint.
This feature is available now but requires a Microsoft 365 enterprise or academic license
and must be purchased as an add-on.
There will be a new web part that will allow you to add an organisation chart to your SharePoint page.
The web part can be added from the toolbox when a page is in edit mode.
The page author can choose how many levels of the hierarchy to display.
This web part is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of October.
Microsoft is changing the button that you use to bulk edit lists in SharePoint libraries and Microsoft Lists.
This feature will work in exactly the same way but the button will have a new name - "edit in grid view".
It's rolling out now and it should be complete by the end of October.
The new list templates and creation features that were brought in as part of Microsoft lists...
...are being added to SharePoint as well.
Now wherever you create a list you can choose from the eight built-in templates
and the creation workflow will look and feel the same as it does when you use the Microsoft Lists homepage.
This feature is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of October.
And speaking of Microsoft Lists,
now when you create a choices column in SharePoint for both lists and libraries
you'll be able to format them with a colour selection
and it will support single, multi-choice and manual fill as you add items to the column.
And we'll finally be able to create calendar views for our lists.
From the view drop-down there'll be a new option named "create new view".
We'll be able to make that a calendar and allow everyone to use it.
These new list features should be available to everyone by the end of October.
So there's my pick of the best of the roadmap coming to you in October.
Thank you for sticking with me to the end
and I'll see you next time.
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