Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.

We’re launching into 2018 by bringing great new value to Office 365 subscribers, with updates that enhance how teams work together and unlock new ways to create and manage content across devices. Read on for details.

Get more done in Microsoft Teams

New features for Microsoft Teams enable you to interact with apps in new ways, customize your personal workspace, and take quick actions.

Find and use apps in new ways—Now you can include interactive cards from apps in conversations the same way you would add an emoji or GIF. With one click, you can bring important information, like a task from Trello, into a channel conversation or chat. Finding new apps and services in Teams is now easier with the new Store, where you can search for apps by name or category, such as “Project management” or “Analytics & BI.”

Command apps and take quick actions across Teams—We also introduced the new command box in Microsoft Teams, a single point of entry that integrates your search and command experiences. Now you can quickly interact with apps, perform tasks, and navigate throughout Teams directly from the command box, in addition to searching across people, messages, files, and apps.

Work together more effectively with updates to iOS and Mac

New Office 365 capabilities for iOS and Mac enhance how teams create content together, make it easier to produce advanced documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from anywhere, and introduce new ways to search, preview, and interact with files.

Co-authoring for iOS and Mac—We made it easier for individuals to work together across devices with the general availability of co-authoring in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for iOS and Mac. Now, whether you work on a Mac, PC, or mobile device, you’ll know who else is working with you in a document, see where they’re working, and view changes. Co-authoring is already available on the Office desktop applications for Windows, Office for Android, and Office Online. Learn more at the Microsoft Tech Community.

Automatically save your work on Mac—Today also marks the general availability of AutoSave in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Mac for Office 365 subscribers who store their documents in OneDrive and SharePoint. Whether you’re working alone or with others, your latest changes are now automatically stored in the cloud, so you never need to worry about hitting the Save button again. You can also view and restore content from earlier versions of the document at any time with support for version history.

Drag and drop content and files on iOS—The Office and OneDrive iOS apps now support drag and drop for content and files. One of the most common and powerful tasks when creating content is integrating photos, graphs, and other objects from a variety of sources. Now Office 365 subscribers on iPad and iPhone can easily drag and drop content into documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from other Office apps or OneDrive. Support for drag and drop for iOS also enables you to move files to and from OneDrive and other sources—such as SharePoint or iMessage—making it easier to organize content scattered across different apps and services.

Access OneDrive files from more iOS apps—OneDrive for iOS now natively supports the new iOS 11 Files app. This means iPhone and iPad users can upload, access, edit, and save content to OneDrive or SharePoint from any iOS app that supports File app integration—a top requested feature. Users can also tag their favorite OneDrive and SharePoint files from within the Files app, making it easier to find and use the content that matters to you.

Preview more file types with OneDrive for iOS—We redesigned the OneDrive for iOS app with a more detailed list view, making it easier to scan file names, see relevant information, and sort files by specific attributes. The updated OneDrive for iOS app also creates crisp thumbnails and supports previews for over 130 file types, including Adobe Photoshop and 3D objects, so you can open, view, and share the right content without leaving the app.

Search across your organization with Outlook for iOS—The new search experience in Outlook for iOS leverages the Microsoft Graph to surface results from your top contacts, upcoming travel itineraries, package deliveries, recent attachments, and more. Together with proactive search suggestions and a unified design, it now provides consistent, personalized results that enable you to discover information from across your organization faster.

Improve reading skills with Learning Tools for Mac—Word for Mac now supports Immersive Reader and Read Aloud, tools previously available in Word for Windows and mobile apps. These tools enable content to be viewed in ways that are optimized for learning differences and allow documents to be read back with simultaneous highlighting. These features make it easier to recognize and correct errors as you write, improving reading and editing accuracy for everyone—especially users with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

Additional updates

• New ways to share on Yammer—Earlier this month, we introduced new ways for users to share engaging company-wide content from wherever they are with the Yammer mobile app. Users can now post announcements to groups, add animated GIFs, and more.
• Powerful inclusive learning tools—Last week at Bett, we introduced a range of powerful new tools that make teaching and learning in schools more inclusive and collaborative, including built-in dictation across Office 365 and the expansion of Learning Tools to Mac and iPhone.

Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office for Windows desktops | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office for Android. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider to be the first to use the latest and greatest in Office productivity. Commercial customers on both Monthly Channel and Semi-Annual Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through Targeted Release (Clients, Services). This site explains more about when you can expect to receive the features announced today.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability:
All updates in this blog have reached general availability and are beginning to roll out to Office 365 subscribers. Microsoft Teams updates are rolling out automatically and you can expect to see them in your Teams desktop client soon. For iOS and Mac updates, check for updates on your device. Some devices may receive these updates later than others.

The post New in January—enriching teamwork across devices appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
—

Today’s post was written by Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft.

I have known Andrew Wilson since he became Accenture CIO more than four years ago, and I continue to be impressed by what a strong IT organization he has built. Andrew not only motivates the IT organization, but he also takes a strong leadership role across the company, encouraging everyone to adopt new technology to transform the business. Just look at the stats. More than 420,000 Accenture employees in 120 countries embody the digital transformation experience. One of the first global corporations to migrate to Office 365, Accenture has 484,000 Exchange Online mailboxes. Consultants work in creative teams and stay engaged with the company through 20,000 SharePoint Online sites, and more than 25,000 employees are enthusiastic early adopters of Microsoft Teams. Cloud-first file storage is the norm, with employees enjoying mobile access to 900 million files or 2.2 petabytes of corporate data in OneDrive. And with employees racking up more than 309 million minutes of Skype for Business Online conferencing every month, it’s clear that they’re empowered to communicate on any device, when and where they need to. Mobility at this level does not come at the expense of security, because Accenture has the world’s largest deployment of Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security to manage approximately 450,000 identities and 104,000 mobile devices.

At Microsoft Ignite 2017, Brad Nyers, managing director at Accenture, walked us through the company’s global rollout of Windows 10. This will be the world’s largest Windows 10 deployment—comprising 450,000 users by the end of 2018—and it also includes Office 365 ProPlus and OneDrive. It was fascinating to hear about this latest example of Accenture using Microsoft technology to boost its own agility and productivity, so it can help drive its customers’ digital transformation stories.

To streamline the Windows 10 deployment, Accenture built the In-Place Upgrade Tool (IPU), which checks for adequate disk space and whether security tools are up to date. Employees with Windows 10–ready computers are notified via email. They follow a link to get the IPU package from OneDrive and perform the installation themselves. For employees whose devices are not ready, Accenture automatically generates remediation lists and points people to documentation that explains how to migrate their files to the cloud.

Storing data in OneDrive also helps employees who receive a new Windows 10 device. Because their data is in the cloud, when they get a new device, all they have to do is authenticate to access their information and get back to being productive. Accenture created a streamlined imaging process that layers its security tools and Office 365 ProPlus to achieve huge time savings for the company.

I’m excited to hear about the value that Microsoft technologies provide Accenture as it leads the way with a digital transformation that’s truly changing how its workforce—now 75 percent millennial—enacts the company’s mission. For a deeper dive into how “Accenture runs on Microsoft,” read the full story.

—Ron Markezich

The post Digital transformation on a global scale—Accenture runs its business on Microsoft appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
—

New features in Microsoft Teams make it an even more powerful hub for teamwork by enabling you to use apps in new ways—including the ability to command apps and take quick actions from the command box, as well as include content from an app in a conversation. This marks the biggest single release of new functionality since Teams launched last March.

You can now include content from apps—like a news article—directly in a conversation.

Use your favorite apps in new ways in Teams

Teams brings together everything a team needs in one place. You can integrate the apps and services you need, including Office 365 apps like Excel, and ones from our partners, including Trello, InVision, and SurveyMonkey.

Today, we’re introducing new ways you can use apps in Teams:

Include information from an app in a conversation—Now you can have a conversation about content from an app without the need to include a screenshot or a hyperlink to the information. In the same way that you can add an emoji or GIF, you can now bring information from apps into a chat or channel message with a simple click. For example, you can search for a specific task in Trello, a work item in Wrike, or a weather forecast, and include an interactive card with that information into a message.

Include information from an app, like Wrike, in your conversations.

Access a personal view of your apps—The new personal apps space makes it easy for you to access the apps you care about and see all the items that you have been assigned to across apps, like tasks in Planner, issues in Jira Cloud, or your filters or pull requests in Bitbucket Cloud. You can also easily see items you have recently accessed, such as OneNote notebooks or videos from Microsoft Stream.

Here you will also find Who—a new app powered by the Microsoft Graph—which allows you to search for people in your organization by name or topic. To access your personal apps space, click the … in the left navigation menu.

Access your personal apps space in Teams.

Add Microsoft Stream to your personal apps space to watch videos uploaded by your coworkers.

Discover apps for Teams in the new Store—We made it easier to search and discover apps and services available in Teams in the new Store. Now you can search for apps by name, category (such as Project management or Analytics and BI), or integration type (such as Bots, Tabs, or Connectors), and then choose to surface in your personal app view or in a specific channel in Teams.

Discover apps and integrations in the new Store.

Command apps, take quick actions, and search—all from the command box

Search is one key way people navigate Teams to get to the information they’re looking for. We integrated commanding with search and moved the command box to the top of the screen, so you can now command apps and take quick actions right from the box, in addition to searching across people, messages, files, and apps.

Command apps from the command box—We’re rolling out the ability to query or command an app right from the command box. Starting today, you can search for information in an app, such as an image in Adobe Creative Cloud or a news article, and easily insert a specific result into a chat or channel conversation. Over time, we’ll add more command functionality, like the ability to create a task in your project management app or start a build in Visual Studio Team Services. Simply type @ into the command box to display the list of apps you can query and command.

Take quick actions with slash commands—Slash commands are shortcuts you can type in the command box to quickly perform tasks or navigate Teams. For example, you can use a slash command to set your status to “away,” add a user to a team, or call a coworker. To get started with slash commands, type / to see the list of commands currently available.

Use slash commands to take action quickly in Teams.

Let us know what you think!

These features are rolling out starting today, and you can expect to see them in your Teams client shortly. Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your ideas via UserVoice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make Teams even better.

—The Microsoft Teams team

The post New ways to use apps and get more done in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
—

Today’s post was written by Russell Dyer, vice president and global head of communications at Mondelēz International.

When I joined Mondelēz International from Kraft Foods Group, I was excited by the challenge of communicating and building connections across a dispersed, culturally diverse workforce operating in many time zones. A leader in the snacking market, with iconic brands including Oreo, belVita biscuits, Cadbury and Milka chocolate, and Trident gum, Mondelēz International is a truly global business, operating in 165 countries, with more than 75 percent of its revenue generated outside the United States.

The business value of standardizing our best practices—what we call “The MDLZ Way”—is that it builds a company better equipped to compete in today’s global, digital markets. Our Information and Technology Solutions team is helping us achieve that goal by deploying Office 365 cloud services to our entire organization. Now that everyone uses a standard toolkit to communicate and collaborate, we’re starting to see some erosion of corporate silos, improved search and discovery, and easier access to colleagues and expertise.

Yammer is a great example. Our colleagues were craving a better internal social platform for that human connection, where they could share information and tell great stories about the company. Yammer improved our social collaboration with its simple, familiar interface and easy integration with other tools and services. While Yammer has had a presence at Mondelēz International for a few years, in May 2017 we relaunched it as our primary enterprise social platform for our entire organization.

The Yammer mobile app is the most seamless mobile experience we’ve ever delivered to our workforce, making the relaunch incredibly easy to drive adoption for our workforce. Today, there are nearly 20,000 individuals, more than 170,000 posts, and nearly 1,500 groups active among a range of communities, from functions like Corporate & Legal Affairs and HR to subject matter groups, social groups, and business strategy groups. Over seven months, we have seen a nearly 70 percent increase in active users and 13 percent increase in new groups.

Deploying a vibrant social platform is even more important as we build virtual workplaces to facilitate remote, mobile work scenarios. Where our employees sometimes felt a lack of human connection due to new, virtual ways of working, Yammer shrinks our world and makes us feel better connected. Our global sales force, one of the more remote populations of colleagues who use Yammer, stay engaged with their teams and the company. Sales reps take pictures of their stunning in-store snack displays and broadcast their innovative shelf setups to inspire other in-store reps.

Top-down and cross-functional communications that include the whole organization are now more frequent, natural, and interactive—driving overall engagement with our growth strategies. When we better understand our company, we feel more pride and are better engaged. For example, in a few of our quarterly conference calls for various regions and functions, we’ve hung up the phones and opened up “YamJams” to colleagues all around the world. With hundreds of questions and comments, and the most senior members of our leadership teams interacting with junior colleagues out in the markets in real time, everyone feels like they are at a virtual cocktail party.

Unexpectedly, but with remarkable success, Yammer has even served as a business continuity tool by helping us recover from a global malware incident that impacted many large corporations in June 2017. Starting in the minutes and hours immediately following the incident, Yammer became one of the reliable corporate communication channels that we used to run our playbook for managing this situation and staying connected. We shared official updates in real time around the clock, helped colleagues with questions, and broadcast technical FAQs so everyone knew what they needed to do as we managed through the recovery. And as teams worked hard to ensure business continuity, Yammer was a great way to celebrate our successes, sharing photos of teams all around the world tackling the same challenges in unique ways. It was an amazing use case for Yammer. It’s moments like these that are invaluable in building a winning culture.

Similarly, in Q4 we used Yammer to bid farewell to our long-time CEO, Irene Rosenfeld, after an amazing 11-year tenure leading our company. Colleagues from all around the world were able to say #ThanksIrene by sharing photos and personal stories of their fondest memories from Irene’s tenure. Best of all, everyone, including Irene, was able to engage in this global conversation. And when Dirk Van de Put, our new CEO, officially took over the company, he posted a selfie from his first town hall meeting, bringing our entire global employee base in on a fun and important message he shared that day.

At Mondelēz International, we believe that an engaged workforce is a more powerful one. It’s the rationale behind the first of our three corporate growth strategies: grow our people. We’re using Yammer to help achieve this goal. Today, we have a social enterprise platform that colleagues all around the globe use to celebrate their successes. One interaction at a time, we’re building an engaged, connected global workforce that pulls together to help us live our purpose and vision—to create more moments of joy by building the best snacking company in the world.

—Russell Dyer

The post Mondelēz International engages and inspires global workforce with Yammer appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
—

Today’s post was written by Eran Megiddo, corporate vice president of Education.

Our ongoing commitment to create more inclusive and collaborative learning environments continues today with the arrival of a number of powerful updates to Office 365 Education. Building on the momentum of OneNote Class Notebook, which has surpassed more than 15 million notebooks created since the beginning of this school year, and the launch of Microsoft Teams for Education, we have worked with students, teachers, and research institutes to ensure that Office 365 continues to deliver the best learning outcomes. This week at Bett, we’ll share how Office 365 Education enables teachers to engage every learner—ensuring equality and inclusion in schools to empower all students to do their best work.

Today’s updates to Office 365 Education include enabling students to write a paper using only their voice, thanks to Dictation in Office, the latest feature to join Microsoft Learning Tools, as well as improved access to assignments and class collaboration with the Microsoft Teams iPhone and Android apps. What’s more, we are delivering on the number one most requested feature from teachers, page locking in OneNote Class Notebook—allowing teachers to provide students with read-only access—and we will further help teachers save time through assignment and grade integrations with leading Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Student Information Systems (SIS), including Capita SIMS in the U.K. Office 365 Education gives teachers and students the power to unlock limitless learning. And best of all, it’s free for teachers and students.

Inclusive Learning Tools for better student results

Classrooms are diverse. Seventy-three percent of classrooms have students with reading levels that span four or more grades, and up to 50 percent of instructional time can be lost managing the students’ varying needs. Learning Tools is proven to help, and we are humbled by the results. In a recent study, it was shown to increase reading speed and comprehension for students of all abilities, leading to test scores that were 10 percent higher than students who did not use Learning Tools.

We are incredibly excited to see strong adoption of Learning Tools with more than 7 million monthly active users across Word, OneNote, Outlook, Edge, and Office Lens. Based on feedback from teachers, students, and parents, we have been working on extending the capabilities of Learning Tools even further—and today we are excited to announce several updates.

• Dictation in Office—This simple yet transformational tool will help students of all abilities to write freely by using only their voice. Starting in February, Dictation will be available in Word, Word Online, PowerPoint, Outlook Desktop, OneNote Windows 10, and OneNote Online—and in more than nine languages.

• Read Aloud—Allows students to hear the contents of an email while each word is highlighted in sync. It will soon be available on Outlook Desktop in more than 30 text-to-speech languages.
• Immersive Reader—To further support students of different backgrounds, Immersive Reader now supports an additional 10 new languages. It is also coming to even more platforms in 2018 and will soon be available on Word for Mac, iPhone, and Android, as well as Outlook Desktop and OneNote for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

New features for teaching and learning in Microsoft Teams

Since delivering Microsoft Teams for Office 365 Education last year, we’ve seen educators around the globe boost collaboration and learning outcomes using Teams as their digital hub. In addition to our recent announcement, we’re releasing a number of features that will make setting up, collaborating, and managing a classroom in Teams easier than ever before.

• Assignments support—Using the Teams app on their iOS and Android mobile phone or tablet, students can now access upcoming assignments, receive new assignment notifications, and turn in their work. Teachers can create new assignments, as well as review and make edits to existing assignments all while on the go. We also improved the search function on mobile to ensure both students and teachers can quickly find and navigate to individual assignments.

• On Demand Translation—Students and teachers will soon be able to turn content in a chat or in a team channel into the language that their tenant is configured in. This powerful feature allows teachers and students to converse comfortably in their chosen language and removes all language barriers.
• Assignment Analytics—Now teachers can track assignment engagement in real time—at a glance—to see who’s viewed and turned in their work.
• Join Codes—Saves teachers valuable time by allowing them to simply invite students to a class. This capability will also prove helpful for staff and PLC teams, ensuring an effortless start to collaborating with co-workers.
• Reusing a Team as a Template—Teachers can reuse an existing team as a template when creating a new team and can customize what they want to copy over—from channels, tabs, team setting, apps, and even users.
• Decimal Grading—Teachers can provide grading feedback in their preferred way using Decimal Grading.

New OneNote features for teachers

OneNote is also receiving helpful new features, which we know are going to prove popular among teachers.

• Capita SIMS—Updates to Class Notebook include assignment and grade integration with more than 35 of the most widely used LMS and SIS, including Capita SIMS in the U.K. These integrations are coming to OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote Online, and OneNote iPad, and will reduce administrative burden and save teachers time.
• Page Locking—To further simplify classroom workflows, we are delivering on the number-one request from teachers for Class Notebooks—enabling lock pages. Teachers can now lock pages as read-only after giving feedback to the student.
• Interactive math calculators—In OneNote, we are also enabling Desmos interactive math calculators, a set of popular applications for STEM teachers.
• New stickers—We also added four new fun sticker packs: Feathered Friends, Science, Circus Animals, and Arrows.

Teams integration with PowerPoint and Microsoft Stream

Our improvements to class collaboration don’t stop here. Teams has also joined forces with PowerPoint and Microsoft Stream to make it easy for teachers and students to create and share interactive content in just a few steps.

A teacher can use PowerPoint to build immersive class content (that includes ink, animations, and audio/video narrations), add Microsoft Forms–based quizzes, publish it to their Stream channel as a video, and have it surface in their Teams class to distribute to their students. Furthermore, Stream will also add automatic captioning to the videos to make them accessible to all learners.

We are incredibly excited to showcase these features and more at Bett this week. We believe that through inclusive and collaborative learning environments, Office 365 Education is built to support every type of learner to empower them to do their best work. To learn more about the exciting updates coming to Microsoft Education, check out the Windows blog.

—Eran Megiddo

Availability:

• Dictation in Office will begin rolling out in our Office Insider program this month, and then to all Office 365 customers in coming months.
• Read Aloud for Outlook Desktop will be available to Office Insiders this month, and then will roll out to all Office 365 customers in coming months.
• Immersive Reader for Mac Word, iPhone Word, and Android Word will be available to our Office Insiders program this month, and then to all Office 365 customers in coming months.
• Immersive Reader for OneNote iOS will begin rolling out to Office 365 customers at the beginning of February 2018 and finish by March 2018.
• Immersive Reader languages for text-to-speech, syllables, and parts-of-speech languages will start to become available today and will continue to roll out through February 2018.
• Teams iOS and Android updates and Decimal Grading are available worldwide today. Assignment Analytics, Join Codes, and Reuse a Team as a Template will begin to roll out to Office 365 Education customers enrolled in our Teams for Education beta program today. These capabilities will move to worldwide production by Spring 2018.
• OneNote assignment and grade integration with Capita SIMS will be available in February 2018. Assignment and Grade integration for OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote Online, and OneNote iPad will be available worldwide in February 2018.
• OneNote Desmos integration is available worldwide today to all Office 365 customers.
• OneNote Class Notebook Page Locking begins preview testing in February 2018 and will roll out worldwide in the coming months.
• Recording a PowerPoint and publishing directly to Stream is now available to all Office 365 customers. Additional features, including Forms integration, will roll out later this year.

If you’re #notatbett this week and would like to learn more about the other exciting updates coming to Microsoft Education, check out our summary of today’s big news here!

The post Office 365 Education delivers the next wave of innovation for inclusive and collaborative learning appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
—