- Coming up on this special edition of Microsoft Mechanics,
we're joined once again by Microsoft 365 CVP, Omar Shahine
for a full tour of updates
to improve your hybrid work and collaboration experiences
across Microsoft 365.
So Omar, thanks for joining us again.
- Thanks. It's great to be back on.
- That's right. It's that time of year again you know,
when we do the roundup about what's new
and you and your team are really at the center
of innovations that we see for collaboration and sharing
at Microsoft, and with the hybrid work environment
that we're all living in,
what's the focus been of this latest round of updates?
- Yeah. We've been focused on capabilities
that give you more flexibility in the way you work,
whether that's in the office at home or anywhere in between.
You'll see the latest round of updates
fall into two main categories.
First, new ways to securely share your work
while collaborating with people
inside and outside your organization,
as well as the continued infusion of intelligence
across Microsoft 365 experiences to save you time.
- Let's start out by looking at file sharing
and what's new in OneDrive.
- Sure. So file sync with known folder move, or KFM,
has really been a huge enabler for hybrid work in Windows.
It keeps your desktop, documents and photos folders in sync,
no matter where you're working from
or which device you're using.
You'll notice my Mac here in front of me.
And I'm happy to say that these capabilities
are coming to MacOS too.
I'm running Monterey here with known folder move enabled.
In Finder, the files-on-demand experience
allows me to see sync status of what's in the cloud
and also what's local from this column of icons here.
And just like in Windows,
I can choose to locally hydrate files to use them offline
using the always keep on this device,
or free up drive space by keeping them only in the cloud.
That way other apps in Dearch
will see these cloud-stored files as if they were local.
And if you're on a newer Mac like mine here,
with an M1 processor, OneDrive runs natively,
so we no longer require Rosetta emulation.
Now pay attention to the files I have here in this folder.
You can see billing information,
some budget folders, a purchasing spreadsheet,
and the five-year vision doc, to name a few.
Of course, with hybrid work, a lot of organizations
are turning to remote desktop solutions
to securely connect to manage PC experiences.
So I'm going to show you the experience with Windows 365
where we automatically configure KFM
as part of the files experience.
I'm going to switch desktops here on my Mac
to my Windows 365 environment running Windows 11.
And you'll notice here in the File Explorer,
these are the same files you just saw
in the MacOS environment.
There are my budget folders, and as I scroll down,
you'll see the same docs and spreadsheets
that I showed before.
Everything stays in sync.
- It's really pretty amazing
to see the native ARM experience on MacOS,
and also I love that Windows 11 desktop
is running on the Mac.
- I'm actually a frequent Mac user myself,
and this is about being able to move more fluidly
across the device platform you may be using,
without compromise.
So that OneDrive is the best file sharing app
across platforms for the way you want to work.
Now, while I'm here in Windows 11,
I'll show you a few more updates.
First, notice how the file sharing buttons default
to OneDrive sharing in the top ribbon
once you're signed in.
Also, if I switch over to OneDrive
in the browser in my Cloud PC,
you'll see that I can get
to the same files and folders again,
but from the browser for ultimate flexibility.
- I'm glad that we're digging
into the OneDrive web experience,
but what else is new on the web?
- One of the biggest things we've done here
to make the OneDrive web experience
a progressive web app, or PWA.
I'll exit full screen here to prove it.
You'll also see that we took inspiration
from the quick access list in Windows File Explorer
to create a list of your frequently used places,
so that you can get back
to anywhere you've recently accessed
or open a file straight from your OneDrive.
And we've also added the capability
to pin these places in your left nav.
So you can easily and predictably find the places
where you work.
Sharing files is also an easier experience
with the new share dialogue box, which means that
whether you are changing editor view access,
sharing a file directly to Teams,
or even quickly glancing at users
who currently have access to a shared document,
all of this can be done in one place.
And you can now organize shortcuts
that you've added to your OneDrive,
which means you can drag and drop these shortcuts
into any of your private folders
for consistent discovery later on my phone, PC, or the web.
- So we just saw file organization at the user level,
but what are we doing then at the organizational level
for management of content at scale?
- Yeah, I want to draw your attention
to an AI-driven capability we recently launched
with SharePoint Syntex.
You're probably familiar with a standard document library.
Syntex gives you powerful and repeatable
AI-driven app models, or you can train your own.
These can be used to automatically classify files uploaded
to a SharePoint library and extract information from them.
We've now added the ability to add Syntex models
available to specific sites.
For example, I have a vendor agreements model here,
and when I open the model settings,
I can choose where to make it available:
either all sites or specific ones.
Here I'll add my contracts and agreements site.
Now, if I jump over to that site,
there's a new model discovery experience here on top.
I'll choose automate,
then view document understanding models.
And now I can see which models are available.
There's the vendor agreement model I just added.
And I can click in to their details,
this one for a service agreement.
And now we can even use AI to recommend the best model.
I'll do that, then choose a couple of models to assess.
Now I'll choose the file I want
to assess the models against,
and you'll see that it recommends a service agreement model
and the core information has been extracted.
I can also apply this model to the library.
And now as content is added to the library by myself
or others, it will get processed based on the model.
Each file will be classified
and the metadata automatically extracted.
- So after that process is run,
what's the user experience then look like?
- Metadata is obviously the essence of SharePoint
and where this lights up the most
is the new search experience,
where you can now directly search for metadata
extracted from each file,
which greatly improves information discovery.
I'll search for Fabrikam Industries as the clients
and a fee amount greater than $5,000.
And you'll see the results here
of all the files matching that criteria
with this new tile layout
that really highlights the extracted metadata.
Additionally, we're integrating Power BI
into the experience as well.
So I select that from my integrate tab
and then my agreement summary,
and there's our data visualization.
- You and your team have also been working
on integrated experiences that span Teams and SharePoint.
- We want to make it easy to build out
connected and rich experiences across Teams and SharePoint.
And I want to show you the work we're doing for that
with Microsoft 365 connected templates.
I'll start by creating a team using the normal workflow.
The templates you're seeing here
are built on Teams templates
that you can use to provision channels, tabs and apps,
except these also automatically configure
the SharePoint site, with multiple pages and lists
that you can view and now even edit
right from within Teams.
I'll choose manage a project
and you'll see the channels and apps it's going to build.
Next, I'll make this a private team and give it a name,
Project Ignites.
Now you can see my new team on the lower left.
I'll open the general channel.
In the tabs here I can navigate to our site
and I can now go to edit
and you'll see that that site is fully editable
from within Teams for all the content and web parts.
And when I'm done,
I can republish that site right here from Teams.
This new feature helps you save a lot of time
by bringing the customizations of Teams and SharePoint
into one step for users in your organization.
- Nice. And while you're in Teams,
why don't we switch gears to video,
because something super important now,
as we're collaborating more and more using online meetings
that I personally use every day,
is recordings and transcriptions,
really as a substitution for note taking.
And it's really great,
especially when you're working across time zones.
- Last time I was on,
we showed the new experiences for Microsoft Stream
and the new video player.
Now when you record a Teams meeting,
that video is saved directly in the cloud
in your OneDrive for private meetings
or SharePoint for channel meetings.
And we've added a lot more intelligence
to how the video is processed.
So the video is treated like a document.
I'll open the right pane here,
and you'll see that when a meeting is recorded,
the transcription is part of the video file.
So I can jump to the part of the meeting I'm interested in.
You can also explore the recording
based on what slides are presented during the meeting
with PowerPoint Live.
So you can easily find the part of the meeting
that's important to you.
There's also full comment support with videos
now with @mentions,
as you can see here with the conversation going on.
If I move to the new stream web app,
you'll see when I searched for a project Falcon,
I can find my meeting recordings
based on what was said in the meeting.
And we're adding the ability
to initiate video and screen capture
right here from the stream web app.
I can choose which screen, window or Edge tab to record
and whether to share system audio.
- Another area with a lot of interest is Lists.
So can you show us what's new with Lists?
- Yeah. Lists is one of my favorite tools
and we've been doing a lot to amplify the power of Lists.
In addition to templates that Microsoft provides by default,
you can now build your own custom List templates.
Here's the Contoso recruitment template
that I'll create my list with.
We want to extend what you can do with templates
by enabling you to package in rules
and Power Platform integrations like custom workflows,
forms and views.
These integrations are critical
to keep stakeholders in the loop
and enable them to come back periodically
to keep things up to date.
As you can see in the features area,
this template comes with a reminder workflow
to trigger a notification to the interviewer
three days before the interview date.
I'll start the template
and there are a few steps to complete the setup
and you're good to go.
With your list started,
you can now organize list information in one board.
This view is great when you want to track items
as they move forward in a process or workflow.
In this list, moving candidates through stages
is as easy as dragging and dropping.
I'll move Sam to send offer, then offer sent,
and finally offer accepted.
One thing I do a lot is send reminders to myself
and others in my team for things we need to do.
Here you can see there are already @mentions
in the comments.
And if I add one,
this helps grab their attention for what needs to be done.
Next, Lists now supports
all the same link sharing capabilities of files.
So if you hit share,
you can now easily send or copy a link
and share it internally or externally.
I'll add Patty and send her a sharing link
to let her know about our offer.
And one more thing with Lists that I want to show you.
If I hit F11, you'll see that the entire time
I've been demoing Lists as a progressive web app.
And it works both online and offline.
I'll sync back up once I reconnect.
Also, if you've been waiting
for an Android version of the Lists app,
like we have for iOS, well, that's coming soon.
- So a lot of Lists updates there,
but one thing we haven't talked about yet
is Outlook and email.
What's new there?
- In Outlook, I want to start by showing a few things
that we're doing specifically for time management,
as more and more of us are working hybrid.
Now, Outlook will let you set times
when you are expected to be in-person or remote.
In this case, I'll enable work remotely
and choose Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday
for remote working days.
You'll be able to respond to meeting invites,
as you can see under the yes,
to say if you're in-person or remote.
And this information can be used
when you're booking conference rooms.
So you can more easily match room size and capacity
with the people who will be in person.
And I've been mentioning how we're adding AI
across Microsoft 365 experiences,
and since email has always been super important,
of course we're infusing more intelligence there as well.
So let me show you a couple of ways that we're doing this.
In Outlook on the web, @mentions are a lot more powerful,
and the actions use AI to be contextually aware
of what you're trying to do.
Of course, I can @mention a person
and that will automatically put them on the to line.
As I type, it can also recognize the intent
of what I'm trying to do
so that I can use the at symbol
to quickly find files I want to share.
I'll choose this R and D file.
And it can also predict
if I'm about to share my phone number and bring that up.
Phone numbers sharing also works in Outlook mobile
on your phone.
Related to that, I want to show you in Outlook,
how Viva Topics help deliver knowledge
right in the flow of your work.
If you've ever had to scan through a long thread
to get context, let me show you how Topics can help.
I'm opening a long email thread here
about engagement clarification.
The first time Topics discovers knowledge for me,
I see this simple invitation to explore.
I can see the number of topics available
across this entire thread
and get a summary of all topics
that are automatically detected.
Hovering over the topic shows me the topic card,
in this case for project Atna,
where I can get up to speed on the definitions
and different shorthand ways people use for the same topic,
as well as the people and resources.
And when I'm replying to an email,
I can transmit the knowledge of my organization
and all that shared context by using a hashtag
to cite another topic while I'm typing the response,
the Elbert project, in this case.
This goes even beyond Outlook
and makes it easy to share knowledge quickly
in the context of Teams.
As I'm typing my chat,
I can reference my organization's knowledge
right in the flow of words.
For example, I'll add #Omega and project Atna,
so the folks I'm chatting with
can comprehend specifically what I'm discussing
while also adding context
and further resources for their benefit.
So in Outlook and Teams,
I can easily develop a shared understanding
with the people I work with every day.
- These are all great updates
to really make hybrid collaboration a lot better.
- So much to cover in so little time.
What I showed you today are just some of the highlights
of the best-in-class apps and services
that give you powerful, AI-driven capabilities,
as well as features to make working remotely
and from the office easier.
And if you're wondering when this all will be available,
a lot of what I've shown today is either rolled out
or should be coming to your Microsoft 365 environment
real soon.
So try it out and let us know what you think.
- Thanks so much for joining us today Omar,
and also thank you for watching.
And of course, keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for all the latest updates.
Subscribe if you haven't already,
and we'll see you again soon.