Office 365 Roadmap
The Office 365 Roadmap lists updates that are currently planned for applicable subscribers. Updates are at various stages from being in development to rolling-out to customers to being generally available for applicable customers world-wide.
Office 365 Release Options Service Updates FAQ
This feature will allow any student or teacher leaving the district to easily transfer Class Notebooks from Office 365 Education/OneDrive for Business to a consumer/personal OneDrive. This feature will be surfaced in OneNote Online to allow any device to access the web and use it. The equivalent of "packing up your books" and copying the content to another location.
Adding support for 24 new languages which include Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian Latin, Serbian Cyrillic, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
Admins can determine a list of domains that their users can share with or a list of those that they can’t share with.
Basic Chat in Skype for Business Online allows instant messaging between users. Entry point is a Skype icon within the mail experience.
"Busy on Busy" is a feature that allows Skype for Business Server customers to configure users such that when they are on the phone or in a meeting someone who calls them will receive a busy signal instead of presenting the call to the end-user.
This new free add-in for the OneNote desktop is designed to help teachers save time and be even more efficient with their Class Notebooks. The add-in includes page and section distribution, quick review of student work, and easier access to the Class Notebook app. We are newly launching the Preview for Mac and are currently available for PC.
We are adding the following Class Notebook APIs for Public Preview:1) Ability to create "Teacher-Only" section groups in a Class Notebook that only the teacher can see2) Class Notebook permissioning APIs, including - Collaboration space "lock-down" (read-only) - Ability to create sections in the collaboration space that are assigned to specific students for small group work - Ability to hide specific sections in the collaboration space from other groups of students - Ability to make all sections in the collaboration space read-only other than the section you are assigned to by the teacher - Ability to create "turned-in sections" for each student private notebook where the teacher can give feedback on the work but the student can only read, but not change
The Delve Analytics personal dashboard will be updated to include meeting habits in the detailed meetings view. These insights will help individuals understand behaviors that may impact meeting effectiveness, such as multi-tasking, double booking, after hours, recurring and long duration.
The Delve Analytics Outlook add-in will be updated with a new entry point, new design and improved charting for read stats. The add-in will now be included in the Outlook ribbon, on the far right next to the store icon within the add-ins section. The new vertical design will highlight read stats on the mails you send helping you see patterns of what works and what doesn't. As well as people stats on the mails you receive to help you learn more about your email relationships with stats like volume of email, read rates and response times.
By improving the Yammer notification experience in both email and on mobile, Yammer notifications will become much smarter and easier to triage.
OneNote will add ink replay capabilities (OneNote for Windows 10).
In addition to the general availability of Learning Tools for OneNote, we’ve added a new set of capabilities, including:Localized user interface—Localization of the Learning Tools toolbar in over 35 languages.Dictation—Four new dictation languages (Spanish, French, German and Italian).Color themes—Now includes new yellow, green, blue and pink, which have been specifically designed and tuned based on research.Switching reader languages—Improved the ease of switching between text-to-speech languages in the immersive reader.Multiple language support—Ability to read back multiple languages on one page, such as English, Spanish and French on the same page.Speech controls—Simplification of speech controls and a new menu for all of them.Easy download—Easy instructions to download more text-to-speech languages. This will depend on your Windows version.
The Mark all as Read feature provides a way to quickly reset the Inbox count, (by marking all conversations as read), allowing users to work more effectively in Yammer.
Message Center is the primary mechanism for the Office 365 teams to communicate with organizations, whether it is awareness of a new service or when action is required by the tenant admin. To ensure that communications are meaningful and relevant to every admin, Microsoft is adding translation capability. Using machine learning translation, notifications can be converted to dozens of different languages.
Admins can filter receiving push notification for messages based on category: Stay Informed, Plan for Change, and Prevent and Fix Issue
We’ve implemented policy in Azure Active Directory that allows administrators to restrict group creation to certain users. This ensures that creation of Office 365 Groups through all endpoints can be given to selected users. The existing Exchange Mailbox policy only applies to creation in Exchange, Outlook, or the Outlook Groups mobile app.
We’re working on delivering a customizable classification system for Office 365 Groups that would allow separation of groups by policy type; e.g. unclassified, corporate confidential, or to secret. In this manner, your groups can exhibit the policies of other content in your organization. Extensible policy allows your organization to configure an endpoint that should be called whenever a group is created of changed where you can implement your own policies for group creation or change.
In an effort to make Office 365 communications more relevant, we are introducing new functionality in the Office 365 Message Center to allow individual admins to personalize their view. Based on feedback, we are implementing the ability to filter by service and translate messages into 45 different languages. Machine translation of communications and the ability to filter messages based on service allows you to ensure that notifications are relevant and clear. The default language is English, and this can be configured in the “Settings” gear at the top right of the Admin Center.
Provides IT Admins with the ability to view Office 365 ProPlus, Visio and Project activations as well as Last Activated Date and Device types (desktops (PC,Mac) and phones and tablets (Windows,iOS, and Android)). Admins can further track users that are enabled but not activated.
We have released the Service Assurance Dashboard as part of the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center, which provides you immediate access to:Details on how Office 365 implements security, privacy and compliance controls including details of how third-party independent auditors perform audits to test these controls.Third-party independent audit reports including: SSAE 16 / SOC 1, SOC 2 / AT 101, ISO 27001 and ISO 27018.Deep insights into how we implement encryption, incident management, tenant isolation and data resiliency.Information on how you can leverage Office 365 security controls and configurations to protect your data.
Beyond title and description, Office 365 Video will now track and display who uploaded the video initially. You, too, can associate various people who are in the video to enhance the discoverability of the video and highlight main speakers. This not only provides visual feedback on the player page, it also helps feed an additional layer of information to the Office Graph to inform other people about new content close to relevant people in their network.
Offline Messages for WindowsSendersPhase 1—sender support for Windows desktop usersPhase 2—sender support for other platforms to followReceiversMissed messages can be received on any platform using Skype for Business or email - Messages include links to download clients if needed
The OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client (NGSC) will now be supported on Windows 8.1. The first release of NGSC supported Windows 7, 8 and 10.
We are updating the OneNote Class Notebook with additional features for back to school. First, we are updating the Class Notebook Add-in for OneNote as generally available in the Class Notebook app in Office 365 Education. Second, we are also updating the Class Notebook app in Office 365 Education with a number of top educator updates like rename student sections, enable student teacher-only section group, and lock the Collaboration Space.
We are excited to announce the launch of the new OneNote Staff Notebook API for Office 365! We made it possible to now create OneNote staff notebooks programmatically as well. What this means is that IT admins, Microsoft Education partners and others can automate the creation and updates of OneNote staff notebooks across a school or district. This allows for large time savings and efficiency for teachers, as well as school IT staff. Read the MSDN article on the OneNote Staff Notebook API for in-depth instructions.
Rainbow? Glitter? Gold? All new special ink effects with OneNote to express yourself in even more ways.
We are making improvements to all of the places you see people in Outlook on the web.Hover card in Mail, Calendar, and Groups: Instant access to see who someone is and how you know them.People pane in Mail, Calendar, People, and Groups: Click on anyone to more deeply understand who they are, and get to content and people related to them without leaving your task at hand.Smart lists in People module: We'll show you the people you're meeting or whose emails you've missed to help you tackle your work day.People module contact list: Manage your contacts with a streamlined, more efficient view.Better search in People module: Quickly find the right person - even if you misspell their name.
When moving mail to a folder using the "Move To" dropdown, you can now
search for the destination folder. The
dropdown now features a search box in addition to the recently used folders. After you move an email to a searched folder,
it will be added to the list of recently used folder in the "Move To"
dropdown.
PSTN calling gives Office 365 customers the option to give their users the ability to receive and make calls to traditional phone numbers from their Skype for Business clients. Trial for UK customers announced in March 2016.
We are improving the
performance of retrieving the Task by Day information (TaskTimephasedDataSet)
from the Project Reporting OData service. Reading the Task by Day information
from the Project Reporting OData service will be faster. To take advantage of this
improved performance requires no action on the user.
The limit on the # number of site collections with Project Web App enabled, per tenant (currently set at 7) is being removed.
This feature will allow large files to be uploaded through the use of our SharePoint APIs in chunks. This will allow the files to be uploaded in multiple transactions to avoid timeouts and provide more reliability to your large file uploads.
The new SharePoint home page web experience enables you to easily get to, find and discover important sites and portals throughout your intranet – online, on-premises and everything in-between. Today, many Office 365 users use the "Sites" page – the 4th most clicked tile in the Office 365 app launcher. We are modernizing this experience and transforming it into a true home for SharePoint. What was the 'Sites' page is now the 'SharePoint home' and the “Sites” tile becomes the “SharePoint” tile - same logo, redesigned for a modern, responsive user experience. Clicking into the SharePoint Home displays the recent sites and portals you are most active in and following, recommended sites per the Office Graph, plus company-wide sites promoted by your company. From the SharePoint home, you, too, can create new sites - simple and fast. We’ve made huge improvements in the time it takes to create a site (targeting seconds to create), the flow & integrated value so that it naturally leads to the creation of an Office 365 Group in Azure Activity Directory (AAD), as well as establishing compliance controls for site classification.
Your intranet in your pocket, spanning Office 365 and on-premises SharePoint. The new SharePoint mobile app enables access to sites, portals, documents, lists, people and beyond – all stored and managed in SharePoint and SharePoint Online. You can also have multiple accounts, and can easily switch between them. This new app is infused with intelligence from the Office Graph to help you navigate more quickly and smarter to sites, content and people that matter to you the most. The Sites tab takes you to your Sites, Recent sites and Followed sites where you can keep up with site activity, navigate using quick launch, or see recent files. The Links tab takes you to sites and portals programmed for everyone in the company. And a People tab, giving you access to the people you work with and visibility into what they are working on. And Search is available throughout with clean results filtered by sites, files and people. The SharePoint mobile app comes first to iOS, followed by versions for Windows and Android in H2 CY 2016.
This document library update builds on the core value people have come to depend on for years, adding a new user experience and capabilities, designed to bring consistency for working on files throughout Office 365 while maintaining the full power of SharePoint document libraries. "Pin to top" helps increase visibility and discoverability for important items. You, too, can "add a link" to bring an item that is located outside the document library. To help you find and manage items, you can sort and filter columns, plus new, real time full-text search results appear directly in the document library experience, plus quick, inline metadata management. And finally, when the team needs to bring in files from OneDrive for Business, or publish files between document libraries, users can click Move to and Copy to move and copy files when they are needed in other locations across Office 365, without generating unnecessary versions of the same files.
The SharePoint Online 'Site contents' page is being redesigned to help site owners, members, and visitors understand the activities occurring within the site, provide visibility on top-viewed content, a site map, and site tips. Think of this as site-level activities and analytics. The new Site contents page provides clear access to add lists, document libraries, subsites and apps. There, too, are now quick buttons to access common actions and deeper site settings, plus you have the ability to return to "Classic SharePoint" which maintains access to previous "Site Contents" user interface.
The new Skype for Business Mac client will be available for Preview stage 1 including meeting functionality.
This feature adds support for toll free numbers to Skype for Business PSTN Conferencing.
Update to Citrix VDI solution to include support of Skype for Business 2016 client.
This feature is to help Office Online users dealing with .xls format work books at their company. Once this feature rolls out, user will be able to open .xls workbooks in Excel Online.
We are bringing customers into the Lockbox approval process for instances involving access to customer content. Use of the Customer Lockbox feature ensures that Microsoft engineer does not get access to the customer’s content without customer’s explicit approval. When the customer gets the request for access, they can scrutinize the request and either approve or reject it. Until the request is approved, the Microsoft engineer will not be granted access. Customer Lockbox is available to commercial customers, and this roadmap item is specific to US Government (GCC).
PSTN conferencing from Microsoft will give Office 365 customers the option to purchase traditional dial-in capabilities for their Skype for Business meetings directly from Microsoft. PSTN Conferencing is available to commercial customers in eligible geographies, and this release is specific to US Government customers (GCC).
We are adding 3 UML templates that comply with the latest industry standards: UML 2.5. Customers can now create:1) a UML Component diagram to show components, ports, interfaces and the relationships between them; 2) a UML Deployment diagram to show the architecture of a deployment of software artifacts to nodes;3) a UML Communication diagram to show the interactions between lifelines that use sequenced messages in a free-form arrangement.
Visio Online Preview offers anywhere access to Visio diagrams in a web browser. Users will be able to easily share their processes, floor plans, organizational structure and more with anyone across the organization. For IWs who do not have Visio client installed, they can also view the diagrams in full fidelity from nearly anywhere. Join Office First Release program to get access to Visio Online PREVIEW.
Paralleling the user experience on the Yammer web application, the group feed on mobile (currently iOS only) now includes two tabs called "New" and "All", making it easier for users to find, track and manage their conversations.
O365 profile pictures will be synced to Yammer if a user does not have an existing profile picture in Yammer. How it works: we will attempt to sync a photo from Office when:- an office mapped user has no existing Yammer photo- an office mapped user has previously been sync'd by our service (this keeps the photo updated from O365).
The Office apps are enterprise-ready. With Android M support for Enterprise and compliance with Android for Work, you can now use the Office Mobile apps in workplaces that require that compliance.
To accommodate customers who require very, very large archiving storage, you will be able to leverage an auto-expanding, highly scalable archiving. This allows you to take advantage of a truly bottomless archive without needing to call support or perform any manual steps. Through an update to our back-end architecture, we not only enabled auto-expanding archives, but also removed limits on the Recoverable Items store.
Within the new Delve profile people experience, Office 365 users will be able to send Praise to their colleagues that will be publically viewable, promoting recognition. In addition, giving someone Praise triggers an email to their manager to promote awareness of their employees' supportive efforts. The Praise then feeds into the broader Delve experience and can be discovered by others who can click Like further supporting and promoting individual recognition within the company.
Exclude duplicate messages from eDiscovery exports for Exchange data so that you can decrease the size of the export file.
eDiscovery Export Reports allow you to get accurate statistics of your eDiscovery export prior to executing the export
FastTrack Center will enhance the file migration services from the Box service provided by FastTrack. Migration of your data in the Box service to SharePoint Online Team Sites will be offered. This migration service will be available to customers with 150+ seats of eligible Office 365 plans.
The Focused Inbox helps you focus on the stuff that matters most. Loved on Outlook for iOS & Android, soon to be available on all Outlook endpoints. -
Microsoft Bookings makes managing online appointments easy for small businesses and their customers. With a few steps, a business owner sets up an online booking page which their customers can use to make appointments online, 24/7. Bookings helps business owners save time by reducing the amount of scheduling and re-scheduling of appointments, for both customers and employees. Bookings
is available through First Release and will roll out to Standard Release
tenants starting in October.
Office 365 Education includes Microsoft Classroom, a homepage where teachers can manage all of their classes and assignments online. Teachers can manage multiple class sections (like Biology A and Biology B), create or manage assignments and grading, collaborate with other teachers in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), and provide feedback to students with built-in Class Notebooks. In Classroom, students can collaborate with their teachers, their classmates, and access all the materials to be successful in the class even when they are absent. With Sway integrated, teachers can create interactive web-based lessons, assignments, project recaps, newsletters, and more—right from a phone, tablet, or browser— and even embed a quiz with the new Microsoft Forms. Students can access all their assignments on their mobile devices (Classroom app). Office 365 is now optimized for teachers and students along with an integrated platform with the aim of saving teachers time and improving student outcomes. This will be available for US customers only at the time of launch, withother countries added later.
Multi-factor-authentication (MFA) through integration of ADAL (Active Directory Authentication Library) streamlines sign on for the whole Office suite and layers security through the process in one single sign on.
The version of Outlook that is included in Office 365 Business Premium will now be able to access the Online Archive and Site Mailboxes as well as apply retention tags.
This update brings a fresh new look and feel to the Office 365 welcome page, and enables more consistent and unified experiences for work, education and home users across every device. This new platform also helps us respond to user feedback and deliver innovative new features at a faster pace than ever before.
This is an early peek into the
new Office 365 Admin Center Preview. The redesigned Office 365 Admin Center
Preview is more intuitive and informative making it easier to complete your
administrative tasks.This is a journey and as we continue to add more
features and functionality, the admin experience will not only be more
delightful to use, but also more insightful and scalable to meet more advanced
needs.
Admins will soon have better visibility in how their Office 365 service is being used by their users. This set of reports will include detailed reports for email activity and Office ProPlus.
Customers who purchase at least
20,000 licenses for an eligible Office 365 plan have access to additional benefits
from the FastTrack Center. This adds additional technical onboarding and
migration capabilities to the FastTrack benefit. The benefit additions include:Core Onboarding:Core onboarding services additions
include configuration guidance for geo-redundant Active Directory Federation
Services (AD FS) and AD FS client access policies for the service.Exchange Online service onboarding:Provide configuration guidance for
the following:Setting up unified messaging with Exchange OnlineConfiguring coexistence between Exchange Online and legacy
on-premises public foldersGuidance to remediate mail-enabled applicationsProvide guidance in creating a migration plan and grouping of
mailboxes for migrationSkype for Business Online service
onboardingProvide enhanced services for
on-premises Lync and Skype for Business user migration.Office 365 ProPlus service onboarding:Guidance to deploy and
configure Office Telemetry to help assess the use of business-critical Office documents
and solutions.For more information, see the FastTrack Center additional benefit
appendix in the FastTrack benefit for Office 365.
Guest access support will enable teams using Office 365 Groups to easily collaborate
with external team members (members that are not part of their
organization/tenant). Guest users will have access to all of the groups assets:
inbox, files, calendar and notebook. We'll introduce a number of administration
controls to help you manage guests in Groups.
Office 365 user purchases is a new feature designed to enable users to get the software they need. Using this new feature an individual in an organization will be able to purchase and individually own a subscription to additional software including Office 365 Pro Plus, OneDrive for Business, Visio and Project available via the Office 365 store.
Office integration is added back to the Next Generation Sync Client for OneDrive for Business including modern attachments, co-authoring, and more.
The Outlook app for iOS & Android is now fully powered by the Microsoft Cloud for Office 365 customers! As the code for the Outlook app for iOS & Android was based on Microsoft's acquisition of Acompli, it previously leveraged cloud components that ran outside of Microsoft’s datacenters. While more than 40 million users and businesses have already adopted Outlook, moving these cloud components to run natively in Microsoft-run datacenters has been a top priority since launch. This move is now complete for Office 365 commercial customers. Moving fully into the Microsoft Cloud helps effectively address the legal, regulatory and compliance needs of Office 365 customers in industries like banking, government, public sector and healthcare. For Office 365 customers, the Outlook app is now fully delivered through Microsoft services that provide a strong commitment to security, privacy and compliance.
Office 365 tenant admins can restrict specific users from creating new Plans (or Groups). Also, admins can enforce naming conventions for Plan names, such as adding a prefix/suffix or enforce a list of blocked words.
As part of the removal of the "Other" option from Options menu in Outlook on the web, access to the Delivery Reports feature from Outlook on the web is no longer available. The Delivery Reports feature continues to be available from within Outlook. A replacement for this feature, that would be accessible via Outlook on the web, is under consideration for a possible future update. Yet, no commitment, nor future date for such an update, is provided at this time.
School Data Sync, which will be included in Office 365 Education, will mirror user profiles and class rosters from a Student Information System into Office 365. It models classrooms within Office 365 as Groups and Group sites, so teachers can easily manage classes and class materials. Our objective is to: help teachers save time by automatically creating groups and enabling single sign on to apps in the classroom help schools and districts save money by working with existing technology investments to reduce the time IT admins spend managing groups, troubleshooting, and auditing security help ISVs by providing a single, free, platform and API to connect their applications to SIS data help SIS providers by providing a single, free, platform API to connect to LMS and other classroom apps help increase school and student security and privacy by creating a single, secure source for identity and central control over which data gets shared and where.
The team site home page offers an updated entry point to where team members get work done. It is the quickest way to find and showcase the most relevant and important content. Team members can pin the content right up front and see site and people activites showcasing the intelligence from the Microsoft Graph. Modern team sites will be integrated with Office 365 Groups where every group (new and existing) gets the full power of a SharePoint Online team site. We’ve made huge improvements in the time it takes to create a team site—targeting “seconds-to-ready.” And site owners can see how content is being used and trending analytics in the updated 'Site contents' page. Plus modern team sites look great when accessed via the SharePoint mobile app, too.
As more and more teams embrace the breadth of capabilities offered in SharePoint Online grows across team sites, Office 365 Video and portal sites, their content storage requirements are growing. To address this, we will increase the SharePoint Online site collection storage limit from 1 TB to 25 TB.
Visio on iPad provides access on the go to processes, floor plans, IT architectures, engineering plans and more. Users will be able to explore real-world diagrams on iPad easily. Zoom out to the big picture, zoom in for the details in high fidelity, or filter by layers to get different visualizations of the same diagram. Preview is available to a limited number of users on invitation basis. Sign up now!
Office 365 Planner helps users efficiently organize their teamwork. Teams can create new plans, organize and assign tasks, set due dates and update status. Planner also offers the ability to attach documents to specific tasks, edit them together and have conversations around tasks. Planner’s visual dashboards and email notifications help keep everyone informed on the overall progress of their initiative
Improved on-boarding experience and sign up flow, allowing new users to get connected to their teams and groups in Yammer quickly. Other enhancements include a redesigned Yammer.com site (already completed), improved group discovery and group bulk adding.
We’re improving the App Launcher experience by implementing a broad range of customization options for admins including the ability to hide/show a tile and pin apps to the launcher.
Advanced Data Governance in Office 365 will intelligently bring this information overload under control and support our customers’ ability to achieve organizational compliance. By leveraging machine assisted insights we will help organizations stay compliant and reduce risk by finding and keeping what’s important while leaving behind redundant, obsolete and trivial content (ROT).
The Auto Attendant in Cloud PBX provides call treatment and routing to end-users in Office 365. Includes support for multiple languages, voice commands and menu options for all size businesses.
Automatic transcription and translation of audio in a Skype Meeting Broadcast. This was publicly demonstrated in the Enterprise Connect keynote -- see playback around minute 36 at http://aka.ms/eclive.
When your IT department defines a set of relevant departmental templates in Azure Rights Management (RMS), you can access them from within the relevant Office apps using Information Rights Management (IRM).
Add support for 64-bit numbers (BigInt) as a new Access/Ace DataType. Users will be able to use the new Large Number datatype and import/link to a SQL Database (via ODBC) that has BigInt columns.
Improved spell checking powered by Bing.
Over several updates from July to September, we are adding several highly requested features for the calendar in Outlook for iOS & Android. These include creating and managing recurring meetings, forwarding events, adding Skype for Business links to new meeting invitations and viewing the free/busy information of your colleagues when scheduling a meeting.
Call Queues in Skype for Business Cloud PBX provide the ability to queue and route calls using a service operating in Office 365. Callers hear custom greetings and music on hold and multiple routing options are available for flexible configuration.
Collaborate with anyone using PowerPoint Online. A whole classroom can work together in real-time on the same deck.
This update to the Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition provides for an automated update mechanism going forward, where any new updates to the software are automatically pushed from Office 365 and made available to the appliance, greatly simplifying administrative overhead of the software.
Provides the ability for customers with Cloud PBX in Office 365 to have their Exchange Server 2013 or 2016 on-premises act as a repository of their voicemails.
With the new Compliance Administrator role you can grant people access to important compliance and security features in Office 365. The Compliance Administrator can perform tasks in the Compliance Center such as manage data loss prevention policies, device management policies, and view auditing reports.
Copy and move files between OneDrive and SharePoint in web experiences. We’re rolling out the ability to copy a file from OneDrive to a SharePoint document library. Later this year, we’ll add the ability to move a file as well.
The ability to create your own sensitive information types that can be used in custom policies within the unified DLP experience (available across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Office Client applications)
Power Query for Excel, which was a separate downloadable add-in for Excel 2013 and 2010, is fully integrated in Excel 2016. These capabilities, found under the "Get and Transform" section of the Data tab, provide an intuitive and consistent experience for discovering and connecting to a broad range of data sources, including tables in public websites, corporate data in databases and cubes, cloud-based sources like Azure, unstructured data like Hadoop, and services like Salesforce or use web-like searching to discover the data shared across your corporations. Use intuitive options to clean, shape and combine to fit your unique business needs. Missed a step? No problem. The easy-to-use editor allows you to go back and change and reorder your transform steps and quickly reuse them over other sets of data. With one click, refresh your connections so your workbook has the most up-to-date information across all your data sources.
Connect to external dBASE database, and import or link to dBASE files.
Delve Analytics network insights will be updated to include the functionality to pin important people in your network. This will provide easy access to insights like collaboration time and response times to the most important people in your network.
Delve Analytics will start to send users a weekly reminder highlighting progress against goals and recommendations for improved time and relationship management.
Sign in and see what Delve can help you discover about the content and people around you in your organization – right from your Windows 10 desktop. Delve helps you stay in the know, powered by who you know and what they are working on. With this preview app for Windows 10, you’ll be notified about document updates, and get document suggestions that are relevant to your work. You can also find people and get back to your recent documents and attachments, all in one place – all in one app.
Metadata and sensitive data detection details of DLP policy matches will be available via the Management Activity API. This data feed enables incident management scenarios.
Export the results from one or more eDiscovery searches in a single export. This naturally decreases the duplicated content when overlapping searches would return the same exact document in the same exact location.
Provides
users the ability to edit posts after initial posting while maintaining the
discussion thread history.
Now you can embed videos, Office Mix, Sway and more straight onto the OneNote canvas
Office 365 admin center will be updated to include OneDrive for Business user management
Support editing and refreshing of workbooks containing Power Views and inserting PivotTables.
Admins will be able to add phishing levels similar to how they set up their spam levels
Express Analysis is an Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery feature which allows organizations to quickly analyze a case and export the results.
Project Online is going to support sharing Project sites with external users and also provide an ability to license external users for appropriate participation in project management workflows.
FastTrack Center will expand data migration services for
SharePoint Online. This expansion will add migration from on-premises
SharePoint Server 2013 to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The details of the scope are under development
at this time, additional details will be provided in future updates.
FastTrack
Center will offer file migration services from Dropbox to OneDrive for Business
as a new benefit provided by the FastTrack Center. This migration service will
be available to customers with 150+ seats of eligible Office 365 plans. Once available, please refer
to the FastTrack benefit for Office 365
to review eligibility details.
FastTrack will be
helping customers plan and implement SharePoint Online hybrid features for
customers running SharePoint 2013 and 2016 on-premises for qualifying
customers. Features include hybrid search, hybrid sites, hybrid OneDrive for
Business and hybrid extranet sites.
FastTrack is expanding onboarding support to assist customers in the use of the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service capability.This service provides additional guidance to help customers understand ATP and configure key ATP capabilities. This will include guidance in the configuration of safe links and safe attachments.FastTrack provides direct engineering support to help you onboard.
FastTrack is expanding onboarding support for the Exchange Online Protection (EOP) service capability.Provides additional guidance to help customers understand the capabilities of EOP, guide the configuration of EOP, and understand how to operate with EOP.FastTrack provides direct engineering support to help you onboard.
GigJam is a product coming to Office 365 later this year for people with a co-working mindset. It empowers you to spontaneously and ephemerally involve others in your work. GigJam became available in Preview in June 2016 and is targeting general availability be the end of CY 2016.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint will add ink replay capabilities (Win32).
From the OneDrive app, Discover view uses the Office Graph to suggest relevant and trending files from Office 365. The Discover view suggests content that is most relevant for each person based on the work they are doing and the people with whom they engage.
From the OneDrive app, Discover view uses the Office Graph to suggest relevant and trending files from Office 365. The Discover view suggests content that is most relevant for each person based on the work they are doing and the people with whom they engage.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for Mac will be available in Korean in November 2015.
Skype for Business Meeting Migration Service is the automated process that will update a users meeting coordinates for their Skype for business online meetings in Exchange online meeting requests after a migration to the cloud or a different region.
Visio Viewer for iPad provides access on the go to processes, floor plans, IT architectures, engineering plans and more. Users will be able to explore real-world diagrams on iPad easily. Zoom out to the big picture, zoom in for the details in high fidelity, or filter by layers to get different visualizations of the same diagram.
The ability from the OneDrive app to access your SharePoint Online files
The ability from the OneDrive app to access your SharePoint Online files
Using the OneDrive mobile app you can seamlessly take a photo, convert it to a PDF, and store it in OneDrive for Business. This will come first to iOS followed by Android and Windows Phone.
Support for a Mulit National Corportation tenant to have users be distributed across multiple Data centers for Skype for Business Online in the Multi-Tenant environment to provide better media quality by reduced latency.
The new Office 365 admin center makes it easier and faster for Office 365 admins to manage Office 365. At the same time, it provides admins with more control, more insights and more customization options. The preview has been available for several months and at the end of August, it will be complete and reach general availability.
New reports in the Office 365 usage dashboard. We continue to include more reports in the new admin center, including Office 365 groups, licenses used, Skype clients used and email clients used, to provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365.
New reports in the Office 365 usage dashboard. We continue to include more reports in the new admin center, including SharePoint clients used, OneDrive clients used, Yammer groups and Yammer clients used, to provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365.
Additional integration and reports from Azure Active Directory will be available. AAD Identity Protection Center alerts will be
visible (must have proper AAD license)AAD Identity risk scoring Option to force reset of users password as part remediating an alert
Gain enhanced visibility and control into your Office 365 environment with the built in application discovery dashboard with Office 365 Advanced Security Management.
Gain enhanced visibility and control into your Office 365 environment with the built in centralized control over applications that can access your Office 365 information with Office 365 Advanced Security Management.
Advanced Security Management will receive ISO 27001 and SOC Type 2 certifications
Support for connecting to a security information and event management (SIEM) system
Office 365 reporting content pack for Power BI enables customers to combine their organization's Office 365 usage data with their organization's user information to provide richer insights into office 365 usage patterns.
Office 365 custom themes will be updated to include more themes overall, the ability for a user to upload their own theme and an option to use Bing images as your theme. Note - tenant level customizations and enforcing org theme over user theme will be unchanged.
Administrators can configure a policy for appending text to the beginning or end of a group name and email address for groups no matter where a group is created (e.g. Outlook, Planner, Power BI, etc.). Administrators can also configure a list of specific blocked words that can’t be used in group names, and rely on the native list of thousands of blocked words to keep their directories clean.
With End user triggered encryption in OWA, end users will be able to directly encrypt messages with Office 365 Message Encryption. Today, it can only be configured with Exchange transport rules by admins, but with this capability end users can encrypt messages directly from OWA using Office 365 Message Encryption
Office 365 Secure Score provides visibility into your security posture and how to improve it.
Office Lens for Android will work with MSA and O365 Org Id. Now you can use scan your notes, business cards and more with your work and school accounts.
Now you have the power of a scanner right in your pocket! Office Lens will crop, format and improve your notes/whiteboard/business card capturing abilities. Office Lens will work with MSA and O365 Org Id.
Office Online apps can be used more easily by students with disabilities – Visually impaired, hearing impaired, keyboard navigation
We’re adding support for file names that contain ‘%’ or ‘#’ characters.
OneDrive for Business users will be able to share folders using guest and anonymous links. Currently they can only use restricted links after explicitly sharing a folder.
Office 365 admins will be able to set controls to throttle how much network bandwidth is used for OneDrive for Business sync.
This feature allows users who have folders shared with them from other OneDrive for Business users to be able to take those folders offline in the same way they can take their own files and folders offline today.
The ability to sync SharePoint document libraries, including Office 365 groups, is added to the Next Generation Sync Client (NGSC). NGSC will also sync OneDrive for Business Shared Folders.
OneNote is now smarter about natural grouping points of your pen strokes. You can double tap on an ink stroke to grab the word. Triple tap, and OneNote will grab the line or group of ink around a word. You can also right click to group or ungroup a set of strokes. Or use keyboard shortcuts to do all of this too. Useful in organizing and rearranging your inked notes.
Now you can record audio notes on Windows mobile
End users will be able to open and view OpenDocument files in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Mac.
Yammer is updating the Inbox for teamwork by providing better structure and workflow. As part of this, we're organizing inbox messages by group, introducing group bulk actions with the ability to mark a group as read, replacing "Mark as Unread" with "Read Later" that lets users flag messages for follow up for better workflow, and showing unread messages and messages marked "Read Later" as separate tabs within the inbox. We're also separating direct messages from group conversations in the inbox. Finally, we're streamlining the inbox by removing duplicate content that have been viewed elsewhere.
Provides a quick view of what is next in your day based on your calendar. Above the inbox, you will see a listing of what the next meeting is. Clinking on the meeting gives you meeting details as well as actions like accept, reschedule and decline. Clicking on Agenda gives you the same actions you would get in the calendar such as join the meeting in Skype.
In 2014, we announced a redesign of the end-user options menu within Outlook on the Web. In the new Options menu, we added an "Other" link to an earlier version of end-user options. This “Other” link also gave users access to three options not accessible in the new options menu – Distribution Groups, Delivery Reports, and Site Mailbox settings. Distribution Groups has been added to the "General" group within the new options menu in Outlook on the Web. But, as part of the removal of the "Other" link, Delivery Reports and Site Mailbox settings pages are no longer available in Outlook on the Web. Delivery Reports is still available from within the Outlook desktop client. A replacement for Delivery Reports, that would be accessible through Outlook on the Web, is under consideration for a possible future update, but no future date for such an update is available at this time. Site Mailboxes and the related app continue to be available in SharePoint.
First run experience (FRE) for on-boarding new Outlook on the web users. Walks user through set up their preferred signature,theme as well as a prompts to download Outlook for mobile for iOS and Android. Administrators can customize to deselect the prompt to download Outlook for mobile.
Creatively express yourself with in PowerPoint Online with enhanced slide effects, transitions and animations.
Project Online will support the ability to assign a team task to both a team resource and an individual. Once a team member assigns a team task to themselves, the task will continue to remain visible to other team members. Other team members can continue to assign the task to themselves to report time and status. Additionally, Project Online will support assignments to multiple teams on the same task.
PSTN calling gives Office 365 customers the option to give their users the ability to receive and make calls to traditional phone numbers from their Skype for Business clients. This will be available for US customers only at the time of launch, with other countries added later. This roadmap item is specific to Office 365 US Government (GCC).
An enhancement to the PSTN Calling service from Microsoft, customers will be able to search for, acquire and use in their tenant service numbers including both Toll and Toll-Free. This will allow for auto attendants and call queues to be directly dialed using numbers designed for high volume.
Send to Sway from OneNote – did you jot your notes or discussion in OneNote or OneNote Class Notebook and now want to turn them into a school report or team presentation? The OneNote and Sway teams are working to enable you to send all your work from OneNote to Sway within Office 365. With just a few clicks and finishing touches, you’ll be able to transform your notes into a web-based interactive presentation.
Your intranet in your pocket. The new SharePoint mobile app for Android enables access to sites, portals, documents, lists, people and beyond – all stored and managed in SharePoint Online. This new app is infused with intelligence from the Office Graph to help you navigate more quickly and smarter to sites, content and people that matter to you the most. The Sites tab takes you to your Sites, Recent sites and Followed sites where you can keep up with site activity, navigate using quick launch, or see recent files. The Links tab takes you to sites and portals programmed for everyone in the company. And a People tab, giving you access to the people you work with and visibility into what they are working on. And Search is available throughout with clean results filtered by sites, files and people. The SharePoint mobile app for Android supports both phone and tablet devices. Version 1 of this app is initially scoped at SharePoint Online. In the future, we do plan to support connections to SharePoint Server on-premises.
Your intranet in your pocket. The new SharePoint mobile app for Windows 10 enables access to sites, portals, documents, lists, people and beyond – all stored and managed in SharePoint Online. This new app is infused with intelligence from the Office Graph to help you navigate more quickly and smarter to sites, content and people that matter to you the most. The Sites tab takes you to your Sites, Recent sites and Followed sites where you can keep up with site activity, navigate using quick launch, or see recent files. The Links tab takes you to sites and portals programmed for everyone in the company. And a People tab, giving you access to the people you work with and visibility into what they are working on. And Search is available throughout with clean results filtered by sites, files and people. Version 1 of this app is initially scoped at SharePoint Online, and will focus on Windows 10 Mobile. In the future, we do plan to support a connection to SharePoint Server on-premises.
Enabling client-side web parts that take full advantage of the SharePoint ecosystem, but are developed by using client-side JavaScript based templating technologies. We will first ship this set of client-side web parts: image / image carousel, embedded video, ListView, document hook); this will be able to included in pages built with the new SharePoint Framework.
Over the years, customers use Lists for everything from tracking engineering bugs to managing event sessions or even to cataloging the t-shirt sizes of everyone on a team; a key tool for sharing data and building lightweight processes. The core of value and power of Lists goes unchanged. This update to SharePoint Online Lists brings a new user expereince, aligned to the look and feel to new modern document libraries experience. You'll first notice an updated top quick actions for commonly used Lists tasks. Lists, too, then become much more mobile friendly via modern mobile browser across devices, and a great experience when navigating Lists via the new SharePoint mobile app.
A new user experience (UX) development framework for SharePoint Online that consists of JavaScript libraries and modern REST endpoints that enable 1st and 3rd party developers to create client-side applications on top of SharePoint sites. These applications use JavaScript templeting framework (e.g. REACT / Angular) and interact with the site through Modern REST APIs to build beautiful experiences such as List Views, Team Site Capabilities (e.g. Video Portal) etc..
Unlock the Webhooks development scenario through the Microsoft Graph. These WebHooks set of APIs allow developers to get notified with changes from SharePoint lists and document libraries in a performant and reliable way.
General Availability (GA) for the new Skype for Business for Mac client.
Phase 3 of PSTN conferencing expansion, planned for June 2016. Will reach approximately 80 sell to countries and 100 dial-in countries.
Free online meetings from Skype for Business that is easy to set up with a personalized meeting URL, helps team collaborate with screen share and is built for business with reliability and encryption.
Smart recommendations to turn on DLP based upon the sensitive information you’re storing in OneDrive and SharePoint.
Lookup or research on Bing with contextually relevant results, directly from your document.
An essential component of regulatory compliance for financial and
related industries is the ability to review specific employee communications.
We will be introducing a new feature called Supervisory Review that will give
organizations the ability to define a subset of employee communications to be
reviewed by a group of internal or external auditors. Supervisory Review will
include both policy configuration and reviewer tools to perform supervisory
review.
Unified experience for creating a DLP policy that can apply across Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive for Business
When attaching a locally saved file to an email in Outlook 2016, users will be able to automatically upload the file to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business to share as a cloud attachment. This is the same feature that is available today in Outlook on the web.
New features in Office 365 based on the enterprise voice feature set in Lync Server and Skype for Business Server will enable Office 365 customers to eliminate traditional PBX systems for their users. Customers will be able to either add on PSTN service or leverage existing current PSTN contracts, carrier circuits, and numbers or purchase to make and receive phone calls.Includes traditional calling features including Call hold, history & redial, transfer, forward, call waiting, simultaneous ringing, team calling, delegation, DND routing, tagging and static E-911. Tenant Administrators will get great reporting including robust call detail records. This roadmap item is specific to Office 365 US Government (GCC).
Delve Analytics is a new set of capabilities coming to Delve for G5 customers, or as an add-on to G1/ G3 subscriptions. Delve Analytics will enable individuals and organizations to get time back and spend it more effectively. The capability leverages insights available within Office 365 communications and collaborations data to enable an Outlook add-in to understand reach and impact of emails, and a personal dashboard to provide personalized insights into time and relationships. Delve Analytics is already available for commercial tenants, and this roadmap item is specific to US Government (GCC).
The ability to import data into Office 365 in a quick and easy manner has been a known constraint of Office 365, and a solution for this issue has emerged as a key request from customers. We are working on a solution that will allow quicker imports of data into Exchange Online Archive Mailboxes. You will now be able to import Exchange Online data through PST files into the service without using third party tools. Drive Shipping and Network Based Ingestion options will use Azure-based services to import data. Over time we will be extending this to other data types across Office 365. Drive shipping is currently available to commercial tenants, and this roadmap item is specific to US Government (GCC).
Visio Online offers anywhere access to Visio diagrams via a web browser. Users will be able to easily share their processes, floor plans, organizational structure and more with anyone across the organization. For IWs who do not have Visio client installed, they can then view the diagrams in full fidelity from nearly anywhere.
Yammer
activity data will be integrated and accessible via Office 365 Management
APIs.
In order to help get newly created groups off to a successful start, Yammer is introducing a new onboarding experience for group administrators. When setting up a new Yammer group, group admins will be prompted to provide the right context and bring in the right people by writing a description, inviting members, and starting a conversation.
Yammer integration with the Office 365 Group service managed by Azure Active Directory enables standard membership across Office 365.
IT Admins will be able to restrict usage of the Yammer mobile app through an integration with Intune.
Yammer
will leverage Skype's rich audio video communication capabilities.
Add-in only authorization policy for Project Online allows an add-in to request an access token tied to a specific application. This would allow creation of add-ins which don't necessarily require a user.
As part of the changes Yammer is making to to help users work more effectively in their groups, each Yammer group will show unread inbox conversations from that group. Inbox conversations are considered high priority because they are explicitly addressed to users who have either posted, been at mentioned on, replied to, or followed these messages. By showing inbox messages in each Yammer group, the goal is to make it easier for users to read and respond to their priority messages within the context of their group.
Offering 1TB storage to OneDrive for Business users.
The Office 365 user profile page, aka "About Me," is getting a significant update. First, it will be more user friendly in its overall presentation and how it looks and responds across all devices. This update also introduces a new page authoring tool - that at first will be used to create stories within the company - then expand to enable creation of new types of dynamic pages. These stories and pages are created within the browser and have built-in hooks to add other Office 365 content (like documents from OneDrive for Business, videos from Office 365 Video and images a document library) in a seamless way. Finally, the new "About Me" page will highlight people and people search in a whole new way - from hierarchical views, to showing who people most closely work with, and even a method to send a kudo to a co-worker.
You can deploy Solver, Euro Currency, & Analysis ToolPak add-ins in the language of their choice via Click-to-Run.
Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery integrates Equivio machine learning, predictive coding and text analytics capabilities to reduce the costs and challenges that come along with sorting through large quantities of data for eDiscovery purposes.In today’s high volume data environment, the eDiscovery process for any given case could involve sorting through thousands of emails, text messages, instant messages and documents to find the small number of files that are most likely to be relevant.Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery reduces the volume of data by eliminating duplicate files, reconstructing email threads and identifying key themes and data relationships. Finally, it enables predictive coding, allowing users to train the system to intelligently explore and analyze large, unstructured data sets and quickly zero in on what is likely to be relevant.
Office for Android apps now support Android for Work.
Android: Quick Edit of email attachment and quick reply with Outlook
Get started quickly with an easier Sign-in/Sign-up process. The Microsoft Account or Office 365 OrgID already configured on the device is now pre-populated to eliminate manual typing, so you can now sign-in with a tap.
Presenter view is now available in PowerPoint. It lets you show and present your slides like a pro. View your presentation with speaker notes on your Android phone or tablet, but control what the audience sees when you project to a large screen*. * An Office 365 subscription is required to use this feature
Office 365 ProPlus provides thousands of configuration options via Group Policy and the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run. Now administrators can choose to exclude applications from the Office 365 ProPlus suite, such as Access or InfoPath. Updates to the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run will enable administrators performing push deployments of Office 365 ProPlus to exclude one or more applications during the initial Office installation, or add/remove applications to an existing installation.
Excel Online will support adding Apps for Office similar to the Excel desktop client.
This feature allows Apps for Office that are opened used in Excel Online APIs to take advantage of the Format.js APIs that are already present in the desktop client capabilities.
Apps for Project Pro for Office 365 will be able to write-back and update the project plan.
Updates include:Word: Tables built for touch: Working with tables got easier! Touch controls let you resize rows and columnsExcel: Open CSV files: You can now open comma separated values (.csv) text filesInsert and Edit SmartArt (tablet). Support loading shared Workbooks, files with Hidden workbooks and more.PPT: Create columns of text.: Split a block of text into easy to read columnsSuperscript and subscript: format your text with superscript and subscriptShared: Commands at your fingertipsEdit with speed! Have quick access to commands that make sense in the moment.
Key Updates include:Word: View differentiation: Show Page borders and fishbowl when
opening into or switching to Print Layout. Reflow - Reset zoom - Be smarter
about default zoom level to alleviate view confusion. Shared: Commands at your fingertips: Edit with speed! have quick access to commands when you work with shapes and graphics
Updates include:Word: Tables built for touch.Excel: Support loading CSV files, files with hidden workbooks,
files with invalid sheet names, shared workbooks and more. PPT: Create columns of textShared: Commands at your fingertips(Phone only. W/P only. Mobile Contextual Toolbar) ,Smart Lookup Enable
format painter for SmartArt.
A new Archive button will be added to Outlook 2016 on Windows, allowing users to quickly move messages out of their inbox to a folder of their choice. The user will be asked to choose their Archive folder on first use of this feature. This update will make the Archive feature available on Windows, just as it is on iOS, Android, Windows 10 Mobile and the web.
Extends archiving support in Office 365 for 3rd-party data such as:Social - Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, LinkedIn, and many moreInstant Messaging - Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk, Cisco Jabber, and many moreDocument Collaboration - Box, DropBox, and many moreVerticals - SalesForce Chatter, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and many moreSMS/Text Messaging - BlackBerry, MobileGuard, and many more
This feature will enable users to define a readable Project ID per Enterprise Project Type. On project creation, the Project ID will be auto generated. The Project ID can be added to Project Center, Project Detail Pages (PDPs) and in reports.
Automatic relationship detection is now available for everyone using Office 365. When you are building a Data Model PivotTable working with two or more tables with no relationships defined, you get a notification to run Automatic relationship detection. This will detect and create all relationships between the tables that are used for the Data Model PivotTable so that you don’t have to do any of the work yourself. Automatic relationship detection can also be run through the Relationship dialog.
Drilling up and down time groups and other hierarchical levels of your data is a common action in data analysis. This preview makes it easier for you to perform these actions with two new updates. Time groups are now automatically detected and created when you add rows of time fields to your PivotTables. Also, you can now drill up and down your data hierarchies directly from your PivotCharts visualizations, allowing you to explore deeper in your data right from your charts and graphs.
Azure AD reports will allow you to audit Office 365 user logins and admin actions in your directory such as creation of new users or admins, password resets, deletion of users and other admin actions. The link to these reports will be available in the Office 365 admin center under auditing.
Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) integration for Click-to-Run installations enables better network traffic management by lowering the download priority for Office updates when other protocols are being used on the desktop.
A board is a representation and collection of content that’s related to a topic. Users can visit and create boards in Delve. Users can add any content that they see in Delve to a new or existing board, get suggestions based on boards they've used recently and see existing boards created by others. Users can follow boards to get updates or share a board with others in their organization who they think the board will be useful for. Boards don’t change permissions, so people will only be able to see content in the board that you already have access to.
Browse and join Office 365 Groups right from within Outlook 2016. Previously, existing Groups were visible in Outlook, but in order to browse and join new groups, a user needed to use Outlook on the web.
We are updating the behavior when pasting mixed content (e.g. text and images) into the compose email form in OWA. Depending on the type of mixed content, OWA may only be able to paste one of the two types of content. Previously when this happened, OWA prioritized the image and pasting mixed content would result result in just the image being pasted (with no text). From customer feedback, we are adjusting this behavior to now paste all the text, but leave out the image. The user will have to individually copy in the image separately. We believe this is a better choice when we are unable to paste the entirety of the mixed content, and is also consistent with how other webmail services handle this situation.
We are no longer supporting connecting to LinkedIn within the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector in Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 & 2013. Customers who want information about their contacts from LinkedIn should download the LinkedIn for Outlook app from the Office Store. The LinkedIn app is supported in Outlook 2013 & OWA.
We are adding chart elements to Office for iPad: customize charts by adding or removing chart elements such as titles, legends, axis titles and more in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iPad.
Teachers can create and grade assignments in your Class Notebook that show up in their Learning Management System (LMS) or the new Microsoft Classroom. We are announcing over 25 partners that have committed to working with OneNote, with nine going live today and many more coming soon in future updates to the add-in. To see the current list of committed education partners, please visit our new OneNote Education Partners page. In addition to assignment and grading integration, based on feedback we’ve heard from teachers, we have many other improvements to make their lives a little bit easier.
Click-to-Run is a streaming and virtualization technology that makes it very easy to install Office products at scale at big enterprises, thereby putting the latest and greatest Office in the hands of end users quickly. Some gaps such as necessary security updates, bug fixes and meeting compliance requirements have been addressed, making the experience of running Click-to-Run easier.
New features in Office 365 based on the enterprise voice feature set in Lync Server and Skype for Business Server will enable Office 365 customers to eliminate traditional PBX systems for their users. Customers will be able to either add on PSTN service or leverage existing current PSTN contracts, carrier circuits, and numbers or purchase to make and receive phone calls.Includes traditional calling features including Call hold, history & redial, transfer, forward, call waiting, simultaneous ringing, team calling, delegation, DND routing, tagging and static E-911. Tenant Administrators will get great reporting including robust call detail records.
We are adding capabilities to help you control some aspects for the mailbox Clutter feature. These include the ability to exclude selection communications from Clutter, enabling items such as corporate communications to bypass the Clutter model. It also adds controls to provide customer controlled sending identity for communications from the Clutter feature, such as controlling the sending name and applying a corporate identity to improve trust in the messages. The round of updates also provides admin controls to assign a specific retention tag for the Clutter folder.
Clutter will become on by default for all users in tenants where the Clutter feature is available. As Clutter becomes on by default, it will introduce an enhanced user experience providing a concise way to stay informed of messages being moved to the Clutter folder. Users will continue to have the option to set their own preference. Additionally a PowerShell cmdlet will be made available to enable administrators to turn off the Clutter feature on behalf of users ahead of Clutter being enabled by default.
The default theme is now “Colorful” (previously, the default theme was “White”). You can always change your theme by going to File Account Office Theme.
The Office 365 Compliance Center is one place to manage compliance across Office 365 for your organization. You can define central policies that apply across your data in Office 365, such as preserve policies that keep content in SharePoint and Exchange indefinitely or for a set time period. Links to existing SharePoint and Exchange compliance features bring together the compliance capabilities across Office 365.
Enhanced search capabilities in the Office 365 Compliance Center allow you to search all mailboxes in your
organization, removing previous scale limitations. You can also search all SharePoint and OneDrive for
Business locations without configuring permission on each site and without
providing access to all of the content.
organization, removing previous scale limitations. You can also search all SharePoint and OneDrive for
Business locations without configuring permission on each site and without
providing access to all of the content.
A new search query experience with searchable properties helps you scope your search results. Search on SharePoint properties such as content type, result type, shared with external users, and sensitive information type. Search on Exchange properties such as message type, sender, recipient, external recipients, folders, and domains.
Admins can now select the Office 365 services that send push notifications when there is a service incident. For iOS users, Apple Watch is now supported. Push notifications and their relevant messages can be viewed right from the Apple Watch.
Outlook for Android will sync a user's contacts to the native contacts application on Android devices. This will allow those devices to leverage the contacts for use in the native Contacts, Phone and Messaging apps.
When using Content Search Export to identify the data you need, you can export that data to local computer. You can export the results from searching tens of thousands of mailboxes, and export up to 100GB of data in a single export. The Export feature includes new advantages such as maintaining the metadata when SharePoint documents are downloaded, no additional permissions setup required, and two factor authentication support.
Visio incorporates Office experience innovations such as dark themes, Delve, Tell Me and High DPI support to accommodate various diagram creation and collaboration needs. in Preview as of Aug 2015
The custom tile feature will provide the capability for an Office 365 tenant admin to quickly create an app tile from any public website, intranet or team site and push it to the my apps page of all users within their tenant. Users will then be able to add this app to their app launcher for quick access to a top site for their organization.
A new SharePoint Online admin center feature that allows admins the ability to show or hide "Newsfeed/Yammer," "Sites" and "OneDrive for Business" for their users' Office 365 navigation bar experience.
This new theme is designed to provide users with visual impairments who find overly bright displays unusable, with a more visually subtle background to work with in the apps.
Dark theme improves the accessibility and readability of Outlook 2016 on overly bright displays by adding a full dark theme.
Improved data entry and navigation for Excel for iPad, using both the hardware and formula keyboard with support for edit, enter, and point modes.
Data loss prevention for SharePoint Online will help to identify sensitive data stored in SharePoint content libraries. With this capability, you will be able to perform eDiscovery searches for sensitive content in these SharePoint libraries. Sensitive content detections will be stamped/available in the FAST index for query and integration with search and classification results can be easily exported.
Data Loss Prevention in Office 365 provides more than 50 Sensitive information types that you use out of the box. We will be expanding on this list with some more new sensitive information types.
Data Loss Protection (DLP) is a high-value enterprise feature that is well loved in Outlook. We are introducing DLP in Excel, PowerPoint and Word to enable real time scan of content based on a set of predefined policies for the most common sensitive data types (e.g., credit card number, social security number, and US bank account number). This capability will enable the synchronization of DLP policies from Office 365 in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, and provide organizations with unified policies across content stored in Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. One additional benefit of DLP is the ability it affords IT administrators to have some oversight and help end-users in their organizations better and more knowledgeably manage sensitive information.
Enabled Office 365 Commercial customers can defer regular feature updates while only receiving monthly security patches, allowing time for testing and validation against critical line-of-business apps, add-ins and macros. This update approach is called Current Branch for Business and will deliver feature updates and bug fixes a few times a year.
Delve (Codename Oslo) is the first experience to use the power of the Office Graph. Delve is a new way to search and discover content across Office 365 based on personalized insights. Delve will be available as a Windows 8 app, on mobile devices, and integrated in the Office 365 web experience. Office Graph is an underlying technology and a suite-wide intelligence fabric that will help you discover content and make new connections. The Office Graph analyzes signals and applies machine learning. Personalized insights are built up for each user, based on their behavior, their relationships to content, topics and one another. Content and signals are captured from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Yammer.
Delve Analytics is a new set of capabilities coming to Delve for E5 customers, or as an add-on to E1/ E3 subscriptions. Delve Analytics will enable individuals and organizations to get time back and spend it more effectively. The capability leverages insights available within Office 365 communications and collaborations data to enable an Outlook add-in to understand reach and impact of emails, and a personal dashboard to provide personalized insights into time and relationships.
Designer, a feature that will essentially allow you to
deliver beautiful and impactful presentations with little to no experience.
With Designer it's like having a professional designer in the trenches with
you, providing suggestions on layout and imagery placement, all with a few
clicks of your mouse or swipe of your finger.
When searching for email in a mailbox connected to Office 365 or Exchange 2016, Outlook 2016 will show pictures from the company directory for any users surfaced in the search suggestions.
Office 365 customers who use federated sign-in can now use DirSync with password hash sync as a backup in case there is a failure with any part of the on-premises identity provider. In case of failure you can reconfigure the Azure AD tenant from federated to standard in a matter of hours to enable sign-in.
Office 365 customers who use federated sign-in can now use DirSync with password hash sync as a backup in case there is a failure with any part of the on-premises identity provider. In case of failure you can reconfigure the Azure AD tenant from federated to standard in a matter of hours to enable sign-in.
Admins will be able to block users from syncing their OneDrive for Business files to unmanaged PC's (PC's that are not domain-joined).
Exchange Online Protection will begin supporting outbound validation of Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM; see DomainKeys Identified Mail Signatures). DKIM is a method of validating a digitally signed message that appears in theDKIM-Signature header in the message headers. It ties an email message to the organization responsible for the message.
Exchange Online Protection will begin supporting outbound validation of Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM; see DomainKeys Identified Mail Signatures). DKIM is a method of validating a digitally signed message that appears in the DKIM-Signature header in the message headers. It ties an email message to the organization responsible for the message.
We are enabling the detection of Windows FCI content classifications for Office documents in Exchange Online. This includes the full range of FCI content classifications, from automatic to manual content tagging. For example, you will be able to create an Exchange transport rule (ETR) that is able to detect the FCI classified Office document as Protected Health Information, and apply appropriate action to prevent disclosure.Support for Same feature in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business will be included in DLP in SPO rollout
(Now in Private preview, with public preview targeted for Sep 2015) DLP in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business policy management will allow admins to create policies and take action if a sensitive document is detected. In addition, DLP in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business reports will allow admins to understand what DLP policies and rules matched within their organization.
DLP Policy Tips in Office Clients will allow end users in the rich desktop office clients (Excel, Word, PPT) to view notifications when working with sensitive information in the context.
DMARC support will be added to EOP service
Enhanced document collaboration in Outlook Web App allows a user to open a document from email and edit the document side-by-side with the original conversation using the Office Web Apps. The user can then reply to the original conversation with an edited version of the document automatically attached to the response. The document can either be physically attached to the original email or stored in OneDrive for Business.
Document deletion policies for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online will allow the ability to easily delete documents by creating policies which can be assigned to site collection templates, individual site
collections, and OneDrive for Business.
collections, and OneDrive for Business.
The ability to import data into Office 365 in a quick and easy manner has been a known constraint of Office 365, and a solution for this issue has emerged as a key request from customers. We are working on a solution that will allow quicker imports of data into Exchange Online Archive Mailboxes. You will now be able to import Exchange Online data through PST files into the service without using third party tools. Drive Shipping and Network Based Ingestion options will use Azure-based services to import data. Over time we will be extending this to other data types across Office 365.
Now Business Intelligence features are much easier to find in your Excel experience. If you’re using one of the BI feature (Power View, Power Pivot or Power Map) the rest will be turned on automatically for you. You can also turn on all the BI Features by going to Excel under File Options Advanced Turn on data analysis features, instead of File Options Add-Ins Manage “Com Add-ins” Go, which makes everything less time consuming
You can now search a maximum of 10,000 mailboxes and an unlimited number of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites in a single eDiscovery search query. However, if you specify the specific sites to search, the limit is 100 sites.
The new edit profile details page experience will be available for Office 365 users via the portal web experience. You can access the new experience via the gear in the top right of the navigation bar Office 365 settings Me. The new experience will include additional features including updated web design while in edit mode, responsive page layout on smaller devices, and quick link to change your profile photo.
The ability to set-up automatic email reminders for meetings and other calendar events in Outlook Web App.
Play your favorite YouTube, Vimeo, or Office Mix videos in OneNote! Paste the link into a note, grab some popcorn, and enjoy the show.
End users can access their quarantined messages directly and release messages to their inbox. Previously, only admins had this capability.
Maintain a single identity for Office 365 for easier management, while providing a consistent login experience for users just like any other Office 365 service. Using Office 365 identity, and choosing a federated identity for Office 365, means that your users can use single sign-on to access Yammer.
Bulk mail admin UI that enables admins to treat bulk as spam based on BCL values. This will allow different bulk mails to be treated differently based on the level of bulk spam confidence
Mail protection reports will include a more interactive reporting experience for Exchange Online and Exchange Online Protection admins. For e.g. when you click a report link, a new window opens and displays an interactive chart with summary level information. In addition, When you click a point on any report chart that is older than 7 days, a link to request an extended detailed report appears. When you create an extended report from a chart, you can specify the information you want and whether you want to be notified when the report is completed. You can further view the status of your extended report requests on the pending or completed queries page.
Over the next several months NDRs generated by Office 365 will be enhanced to make it easier to understand and fix many message delivery problems. To start, they'll look better, friendlier, less intimidating to end-users. They'll explain the problem and cause in simple, everyday language, with clear steps the sender can take to try to fix the problem. Enhanced NDRs will include an "at-a-glance" delivery status graphic that summarizes the cause of the problem and where it needs to be fixed (sender side, recipient side, or by Microsoft support
engineers). A "More Info for Email Admins" section will provide an in-depth explanation of the problem and solution, and will include expanded technical details, often with a link to a Web-based article for in-depth information. And while the original message headers, in their mono-spaced typeface and primitively word-wrapped magnificence, will still appear at the bottom of the NDR, we'll also expose them in a formatted table, making it
easier to follow the message's server to server hop path and more quickly spot problems between hops.
engineers). A "More Info for Email Admins" section will provide an in-depth explanation of the problem and solution, and will include expanded technical details, often with a link to a Web-based article for in-depth information. And while the original message headers, in their mono-spaced typeface and primitively word-wrapped magnificence, will still appear at the bottom of the NDR, we'll also expose them in a formatted table, making it
easier to follow the message's server to server hop path and more quickly spot problems between hops.
Yammer offers all customers a Data Processing Agreement with the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses for data processors, known commonly as the “EU Model Clauses,” through the Microsoft Online Services Terms (OST). Additionally, the standard HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (HIPAA BAA) for Microsoft enterprise online services is now available for Yammer customers.
Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection is a new filtering service that provides protection against sophisticated attacks with new capabilities such as Safe attachments and Safe Links. More details can be found at http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/08/introducing-exchange-online-advanced-threat-protection/
The security mechanism that changes the message filter verdict and moves an unread email message after it has been delivered as appropriate. For
example, if a message is delivered to your inbox and later found to be spam, Zero-hour
Auto Purge moves that message from the inbox to the spam folder; the reverse is
true for messages misclassified as spam.
The limit of Exchange Online Public Folder count will be increased from 10,000 folders to 100,000 total folders. Full hierarchy sync has been improved to the point where it can scale linearly as folder count grows within the environment. There have also been storage optimizations which will provide better performance when accessing public folders.
ExpressRoute for Office 365 allows Office 365 customers to establish a private managed connection between their network and Microsoft datacenters. Customers can get premium connectivity that is like having an on-premises datacenter and enjoy the benefits of predictable performance and guaranteed availability from a single networking agreement with one service provider. ExpressRoute for Office 365 is planned to be generally available in the third quarter 2015.
External collaboration settings have been consolidated into one place in the Office 365 Admin Center for admins to enable the access of their SharePoint sites and Exchange calendars with external organizations. In addition, admins can also enable their users to communicate with people outside of their organization using Lync.
FastTrack Center is expanding the capabilities enabled as part of the onboarding service for Skype for Business to enable the new services. This includes onboarding guidance for PSTN Conferencing, Cloud PBX, Skype Meeting Broadcast, and PSTN Calling Plans (limited to US only). The details of these expanded onboarding benefits will be available in the FastTrack Center service benefit description.
FastTrack Center (FTC) now offers adoption planning services to help customers initiate the use of Office 365 and drive value from the service. The activities will add to the existing onboarding services already offered by the FastTrack Center. These capabilities are detailed in the FastTrack Center Benefit for Office 365 (http://aka.ms/ftcbenefit).
FastTrack Center will offer file migration
services from the Box service as a new benefit provided by the FastTrack
Center. Migration of your data in the Box service to OneDrive for Business will
be offered. This migration service will be available to customers with 150+ seats
of eligible Office 365 plans.
FastTrack
Center will offer data migration services from on-premises file shares as a new
benefit provided by the FTC. Migration of your file share data to OneDrive for
Business will be offered.
FastTrack
Center will offer data migration services from on-premises file shares as a new
benefit provided by the FTC. Migration of your file share data to SharePoint
Online Team Sites will be offered. The details of the scope are under
development at this time, additional details will be provided in future
updates.
The FastTrack Center is expanding the number languages customers can receive assistance in. This change adds Simplified Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese as available languages. The FastTrack Center will now provide assistance in these languages.
FastTrack Center remote services will be
available to customers with 50 or more seats of eligible Office 365 products.
This change reduces the seat requirement from 150, making the FastTrack Center
available to more customers. FastTrack Center assistance will be requested by
the customer via the in-product request option or via the FastTrack site for
the newly eligible customers with less than 150 seats.
FastTrack Center onboarding support for Intune MDM-less MAM. FastTrack eligibility requirements remain consistent. The details of these expanded onboarding benefits will be available in the FastTrack Center service benefit description.
FastTrack Center (FTC) will offer upgrade assistance to help
existing Office 365 ProPlus customers upgrade to the Office 2016 version. The activities will
add to the existing onboarding activities already offered by the FastTrack
Center. Activities will include remote assistance and tooling automation to
ensure a smooth upgrade. These capabilities are planned to be added to
FastTrack Center benefits and will be subject to the FastTrack
eligibility requirements.
Power BI onboarding support will be provided by the FastTrack Center service. This service will include support for onboarding customers who purchase the Office 365 Enterprise E5 plan or a stand-alone Power BI plan. This will include the FastTrack Center core onboarding activities as outlined in the FastTrack Center benefit description.
FastTrack for Office 365 will provide a new customer success service. The service will help you discover Office 365 and plan for a successful rollout. You can collaborate with partner and Microsoft teams to help you evaluate, onboard, and drive adoption of Office 365. You will engage with service via the Microsoft FastTrack portal.
You can request help to setup Office 365 directly from the admin center. Every new customer with an eligible purchase of Office 365 over 150 seats is entitled to email migration and remote onboarding provided by a regional Microsoft FastTrack Center. You can now start the engagement with the FastTrack Center from your Office 365 admin center.
Updates include:- Auto-Save: We save your changes as you go, but you’re still in control. You can turn it off if you want.- Version History: All is not lost! Go back to view or restore an earlier version of your presentation.- Collaborative Authoring (for Word and PPT): Work with others at the same time on your presentations.- Fill Handles (for Excel): Automatically fill a range of cells by dragging a Fill handle.
Updates include:- Box works with Office: Your file storage options are growing! Now store and access your Office files on Box.- Discover More Office Apps: Word, Excel and PowerPoint now make it easy for you to discover and quickly install all the Office apps available for your device.- Save Your Slideshow Annotations (for PPT): Now keep the annotations and drawings you create during slideshow and presenter view.
Updates include:- Annotate with ink (for tablet only): Use your pen or finger to write, draw, and highlight with the tools on the new Draw tab.- Pin files to start: Pin your favorite files to the Start menu to keep them handy.- Convert a table to a range (for Excel): Work with your data the way you want. Easily convert a table into plain rows and columns when you need more flexibility and customization.- Grouping and outlines (for Excel): Get to the right level of detail. Now you can expand or collapse grouped rows and columns.
Office 365 continuously delivers product innovations – like new email or collaboration capabilities – as they become available. To help you best manage how you embrace new feature updates to your Office 365 subscription, we give you the choice to either follow our Standard Release process or opted into the First Release program for a select set of significant updates to the service. First Release includes a selection of enhancements to the Office 365 user experience for SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. Tenants that opt into First Release will receive new qualifying feature update a minimum of two weeks before customers on Standard Release.
Based on your feedback we’re adding a new “Select people” option to First Release. With this newly added option, you can select a set of users to
participate in First Release. These users will receive updates before
the rest of your organization, giving you time to prepare for changes. Additionally, First Release originally offered a selection of feature experiences for
customers wanting early access to Office 365 updates. We started with
new experiences, including Office Delve, Office 365 Video, Office 365 Groups and the app launcher.
While having faster access to these new capabilities has been
beneficial, you have asked us to roll out more changes through First
Release. Starting with Exchange Online, we are delivering more changes
to First Release customers before going to the rest of Office 365
customers.
First Release for Current Branch; First Release for Current Branch for Business are two new builds of the Office client that are released each month so that admins can have a preview build of the Current Branch and Current Branch for Business to test and prepare for changes before they are rolled out broadly in their organization
SharePoint Online & OneDrive for Business are adding support for First Release Select People, which exists currently for Exchange and Office 365 suite UI. This means that users with First Release Select People enabled will now get many SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business updates before they roll out to standard release.
When a customer first downloads and begins to use Office for iPad there will be more prompts to guide them along their first run experience.
With Format Background you can choose to change your slide background to a solid color or
to a picture that is saved on your computer. After you format the
background of your slide, you can use the Apply to All option to apply the background of the current slide to all the other slides in your presentation.
Use the new funnel chart to track values across a multi-stage process, such as
customer conversion of a website or sales pipeline performance. Feature is first
being rolled out to Excel 2016 for Windows and Excel Mobile for Windows.
Visio diagramming can be intimidating for someone who is new to Visio and not used to the rich set of tools offered. The Getting Started experience now makes the Visio canvas more inviting by providing a select set of pre-crafted starter diagrams which will help the users in some of the very core scenarios for that template. In addition, there are some tips provided with the diagram which help the users in editing and completing their diagram creation experience. Using Visio is easier than ever.
Group Search allows users to search for conversations and content within a specific Yammer group, directly from the group's description box.
Yammer's Group Updates feed provides a simple workflow through relevant group content to help users catch up on urgent conversations and discover what others are working on. Users can navigate easily between the feed and their groups, as well as join groups they’re not already a part of, from the feed itself. We'll also be giving users quick access to individual messages via a dedicated Direct Messages section. Together, the Group Updates feed and Direct Messages replace the existing Inbox which did not break out group and individual content.The Group Updates feed and Direct Messages will come to Android first with iOS following shortly after.
Groups is a cross-suite experience unifying people, conversations, calendars, and content across Office 365, enabling seamless collaboration across applications. Rolling out first to Outlook Web App and OneDrive for Business. Creating a Group in Office 365 will automatically provision a conversation feed, calendar, and file storage so members can easily collaborate with each other. Groups are open by default but can be made private if necessary, enhancing discoverability and sharing.
Higher DPI support for 250% and 300% so that your Office documents look great on larger screens.
This feature simplifies resolving conflicts when coauthoring. You can choose between two versions of the conflicting slides, your changes or others' changes, instead of sifting through the individual conflicts.
Outlook used to download a month of email on smaller devices. Outlook 2016 includes an improved sync slider to control how much data is synced to the device, with additional values including 3 days, 7 days, 14 days.
Through effective use of demand management workflows in Project Online, you can decouple project site creation from project publishing. This results in Project advancing to the next stage in the workflow much faster.
This update to Outlook 2016 will dramatically streamlines the discovery and acquisition of add-ins. Today, When clicking the "Store" button in the Outlook ribbon, user are taken to store.Office.com and have to enable the add-in in Outlook on the web. After this update, users will see an in-client experience that will allow them to browse and install add-in without leaving Outlook.
Viewing and editing your profile on Yammer apps for Android and iOS (iPhone and iPad) gets a revamped experience. Now you have consistent profile functionality across these devices, optimized carefully to provide a natural experience that is true to the essence of each mobile OS.
Currently Exchange Online users maximum message size is hard coded to 35MB Send, 36MB Receive (with 25MB shown as published default). This feature will allow a tenant administrator to allow customized maximum message size settings between 1mb and 150mb for a single mailbox, multiple mailboxes, and the default for new mailboxes.
By default, the recoverable items quota is set to 30 GB for all users. We are now increasing the Recoverable Items Quota to 100 GB for all users placed on In-Place Hold or Litigation Hold.
Visio files now offers Information Rights Management (IRM) features, which provide persistent online and offline protection of e-mail messages and attachments, documents and diagrams. Now you can protect sensitive information such as confidential product information, financial and sales process visuals, research and patent information and customer or employee data that live in Visio diagrams. Because people can now access their files from just about anywhere, large amounts of potentially sensitive information can suffer from information leakage can be a serious threat to organizations. To help prevent information leakage, protect your Visio diagrams with the new Information Rights Management (IRM) features.
When an admin opens a Support Request, the system will check to see if there are any related service incidents. If so, it will share the Service Health Dashboard messaging and advise admin on current status.
From the OneDrive app, Discover view uses the Office Graph to suggest relevant and trending files from Office 365. The Discover view suggests content that is most relevant for each person based on the work they are doing and the people with whom they engage.
Updates include:- Funnel Chart- New Functions to Enable Shorter Formulas- Easier Lookups- Autocomplete Support for Functions Containing the Search
String- Send as Attachment
Updates include:- Funnel Chart- New Functions to Enable Shorter Formulas- Support Loading Files that Contain Watch Window or Range
Protection- Zoom to a Specific Percentage- Display Zoom Value in Tooltip While Zooming- Zoom While Editing Cells- Annotate with Ink
JSON Light is a new MSOData serialization format that minimizes the metadata, and therefore total bytes, sent in a response to SharePoint's REST services. This is based on the OData 3 standard.
Previously blocked keyboarding scenarios in Excel for features like Pivot Tables and Slicers are now accessible, providing a more robust Excel feature set for all.
Now enjoy easy access to the Visio Shape Panel using your keyboard. F6 cycles into the shape panel, TAB cycles through the different sections of the shape panel. Arrow keys allow users to navigate between the individual elements. Ctrl + TAB will allow users to quickly switch between STENCILS and SEARCH views.
Searching in Outlook 2016 now leverages Office 365 and Exchange Server for simpler and more effective search. Outlook now provides Keyword & People suggestions as you type and surfaces up recent search queries.
New Learning Tools from OneNote will help individuals with learning needs be able to use the product better and help them in education settings; including improved ability to read
In First Release now as of September. Likes is a new feature coming to Outlook on the web for Exchange Online business users. Likes provides an easy solution to endorse a specific message within your inbox by clicking on the "thumbs up" icon within the message. If a user "likes" your message, you are provided an alert and the history of "likes" is retained in the email message thread.
In this new release, we include guest join, Certificate & Passive Authentication, Contact management and some significant performance enhancements and bug fixes.
Adding additional management options on the Windows Phone client for voice calls. Instead of 2 options around VoIP you now have the option to get your voice calls only over the cellular.
We are delighted to announce the release of Lync online active user activities report which provides abundant user level activity information. This is a customer requested report to enabling checking Lync Online service usage on a per user basis, and is a useful tool for assessing end user adoption.We are rolling out this new report and customers will begin to see this new report in Office 365 administrator portal (https://portal.office.com) beginning in January, 2015. It will take several weeks to roll out to worldwide customers.
The Lync Online client devices report tells you how many users in your organization have used one
specific type of device to take part in peer-to-peer or conference in a
specified month. The metrics in this report are available through
PowerShell Cmdlet: Get-CsClientDeviceReport, RESTFul WebService API:
CsClientDeviceMonthly as well as a graphical report in Office 365 admin center for client devices.
specific type of device to take part in peer-to-peer or conference in a
specified month. The metrics in this report are available through
PowerShell Cmdlet: Get-CsClientDeviceReport, RESTFul WebService API:
CsClientDeviceMonthly as well as a graphical report in Office 365 admin center for client devices.
In November 2015, all Lync Room System software will be updated to the Skype Meeting experience of Skype for Business. This updated user experience will be released as part of the November Cumulative Update.The update will work with Skype for Business Online as well as with both Microsoft Lync Server 2013 and Skype for Business Server 2015. The update does not require any IT Administrator intervention to enable. After the update it is not possible to revert back to the Lync Room System user experience, yet the user interaction will not be different from the original Lync Room Systems user experience.The updates will apply to the Lync Room System hardware of Crestron, Polycom and SMART Technologies.Microsoft will publish more guidance in October to support IT Admins to prepare for the transition and user awareness.
When joining a Lync meeting, users with Chrome set as their default browser will see a message instructing them to copy the Lync meeting URL, open Safari or Firefox and paste the meeting URL into the new browser window in order to start the Lync meeting. Microsoft is working on an update for Lync Online Chrome users to join meetings using Lync Web App. The Lync Web App will launch in a separate window where users can proceed with the usual steps to join the meetings. This new Lync Online launch experience will be the same for both Mac and Windows users using any browser as default.
These changes bring together two key aspects of collaboration: who has access to a given document and who is currently working with you on the document. Now you can view both pieces of information in one place from the Share pane dialog box.
This will enable customers to manage Yammer in Office 365. Customers will be able to assign and unassign Yammer
licenses for Office 365 users, which will determine if the user will see the
Yammer tile in the app launcher. In addition, customers will be able to enforce
the license which can determine if the user can login to the Yammer network.
This release is an update to Office 365 sign-in for Yammer and gives admins the ability to unify suspension rights . For instance, when an user is deleted in Office 365 they will automatically be suspended in Yammer.Please note, these changes will only affect mapped users in networks that meet the requirements to receive Office 365 sign-in for Yammer.
MAPI over HTTP is a new transport used to connect Outlook and Exchange. It is the long term replacement for RPC over HTTP connectivity (commonly referred to as Outlook Anywhere). MAPI/HTTP removes the complexity of Outlook Anywhere’s dependency on the legacy RPC technology. Update 1/5/2015 - roll-out continues into January 2015 for select regions, target roll-out completion for Q1 CY2015.
Key updates include:- Insert Picture from Camera (for Word and Excel): "Open the camera directly from Word or Excel and take a picture. Presto! The picture’s in your document."- Opening RTF files (for Word): You can now open rich text format (.rtf) files.- SmartArt Editing (for Excel and PowerPoint on Tablet): Take advantage of SmartArt graphics you know and love from Excel and PowerPoint.- Send as PDF: Quickly share your Office documents as a PDF file for easy viewing
Key updates include:Insert Picture from Camera (for Word and Excel): Open the camera directly from Word or Excel and take a picture. Presto! The picture’s in your document.Opening RTF files (for Word): You can now open rich text format (.rtf) files.Sharing is easier (for OneNote): Share your notebook with anyone right from OneNote, and they can view or edit it on any device.Embed videos (for OneNote): Play your favorite videos from YouTube, TED, Office Mix, and more in OneNote! Paste the link into a note, grab some popcorn, and enjoy the show.Storytelling with Sway (for OneNote): Embed interactive, dynamic content into your notes with Sway – for moments when showing is more meaningful than telling.Ink Grouping (for OneNote): Right-click a selection of handwritten notes or drawings to group them together. After that, it’s easy to move them around as one piece.
Clutter helps you prioritize the most important email. Clutter looks at what you've done in the past to determine the messages you’re most likely to ignore. It then moves those messages to a folder in your Inbox called Clutter, which is available on any device. From Outlook 2016, you can more easily move items to Clutter with the 'move to Clutter' command. This command will also educate the Clutter service on your preferences for future mail.
Math input control is now available in Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. You can write math equations with a digital pen, a pointing device, or even your finger, and have the ink converted to a “typed” format.
We’re delivering a comprehensive solution for MDM with OneDrive for Business and Office. Our plan focuses on an end-to-end Intune-based solution which provides the most complete MDM solution across both OneDrive and Office on iOS and Android.
PowerPoint for iPad can play back media in a presentation and you can insert videos and media to make your presentation more vibrant.
Mentions is a new feature coming to Outlook on the web as well as consumers on the migrated Outlook.com platform. Using the character @ within the body of a message will allow a user to add a name to the message. @user will be added to the "To" line if not already present. In addition, the Mentioned user will receive an @ flag in their inbox view to identify the messages they were Mentioned in. Users will also have the ability to sort their messages to view the ones in which they were Mentioned.
Message Center is adding the ability to filter notifications
based on Office 365 service, such as OneDrive for Business, allowing you to focus
on the messages most relevant to you.
Message Center is joining the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview. It will feature new in context viewing, the ability to rate messages and provide message specific feedback, read/unread status, ability to dismiss messages you've taken action on, and more. It will roll out in stages and iterated on based on usage and feedback.
New Office 365 app that allows anyone to easily and quickly create basic surveys, quizzes, questionnaires, registrations and more. Forms authors can invite others to complete forms via a link. Authors can view results as they are submitted via built-in analytics and data can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis.
New Office 365 app that allows anyone to easily and quickly create basic surveys, quizzes, questionnaires, registrations and more. Forms authors can invite others to complete forms via a link. Authors can view results as they are submitted via built-in analytics and data can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis.
The ability from the OneDrive app to access your SharePoint Online files.
This is the ability to take individual files offline on the iOS devices.
This feature allows for users to easily make edits on pdf files with their iOS mobile devices.
This feature is a great example of the Meetings Graph work being done across all of Office. A user attaches one or more files to an invite and they are preloaded to their meeting in the attachments area of the meeting. Once you join the meeting, they are already there. This helps save time allowing for more productivity. This feature does require Office 365 at this time. By default this service is on – Administrators can set a policy to turn it off.
Easily attach Office documents in Outlook 2016. When selecting 'Attach', a list of most recently accessed files will be available for attaching in a dropdown list, without having to dig through File Explorer. Files in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint will be shared as a link instead of as a traditional attachment, thereby enabling collaboration on one copy of a document. You have the option to share cloud files as an “Edit” or “View only” links without having to separately navigate to the file share to set permissions.
Emails can be sent as the shared mailbox itself or on behalf of it by members who have proper permissions. This change will allow newly created shared mailboxes to retain a copy of emails sent from the mailbox by default. You will no longer have to figure out which mailbox member sent an email as the shared mailbox or on behalf of it.
The translation features in Office (Whole Document Translation, Mini Translator, and Research and Reference Pane Translation) have all been improved such that communication with machine translation providers happens over an SSL connection. The user is notified when content that they are translating is using a machine translation provider (e.g. Bing)..
Morph makes captivating and beautiful motions with a few
clicks of your mouse or swipes of your finger. ANYONE can use Morph easily, no matter whether you dabble when
it comes to creating presentations or get paid to develop high end
professional slides. Morph's core value is its ability to help you get the most out
of PowerPoint's rich features, like animations and transitions, without
needing to be a professional designer.
We’ve improved the timeline view in Project Online so you can now have multiple timeline bars in a single view and you can set the date range for timeline bars so they can represent only a specific phase of your project.
In Project Pro for Office 365 you will be able to create multiple timeline bars within the Timeline view. You will also be able to set a custom date range for each timeline bar in order to just highlight a certain time period of the project in the Timeline view.
When receiving an email with multiple email attachments, Outlook 2016 users will now be able to multi-select attachments by holding Ctrl and clicking on individual attachments.
Backscatter spam occurs when a spammer spoofs your email address and sends it to a random person on the Internet. The random person’s mail server accepts the email message and then later discovers it can’t deliver it. There are a few reasons why this occurs:The random person’s mailbox is fullThe random person’s mail server rejects spamThe random person’s email address does not existWhen that happens, the random person’s mail server sends a bounce message (non-delivery receipt, or NDR) back to the sender saying “Sorry, I could not deliver this message.” However, instead of sending it back to the spammer who sent the message, the mail server sends it back to you.You then receive this NDR in your mailbox indicating that the message “you” sent could not be delivered. But rather than being informed “your” message bounced, you say “Why am I getting bounces for a message I never sent?” Often times, these bounces contain spam.Exchange Online Protection is improving its backscatter spam detection with Boomerang - a technique originating in outlook.com which using cryptography and checks to see if a message did originally originate within the service, or is spam. If valid, the message is delivered to your inbox. If backscatter, the message is marked as spam.This will ensure the backscatter NDR bounces stay out of your inboxes, but legitimate NDRs get delivered.
The following new chart types are available. They are particularly good for visualizing financial or hierarchal information and for revealing statistical properties in your data:
Financial: Waterfall, Statistical: Histogram, Pareto, Box and Whisker, Hierarchical: Treemap and Sunburst
Visio currently supports AutoCAD until version 2007. Now, Visio will support importing the latest file format versions namely AutoCAD 2010 and AutoCAD 2013. Additionally, customers will be able to import massive AutoCAD files of manufacturing facilities or layout faster and at the right scale. Adding shapes, elements and configurations, Visio makes facility and space management a lot easier and collaborative.
The Yammer iOS app features new capabilities that boost team
collaboration.Better photo-sharing and markup—Lets users attach multiple images
at once and mark up the parts of the image they want to call out with their
fingerAttach files from external file
storage services—Lets users find and attach files stored on
external services such as OneDrive and Dropbox, as well as files stored in
Yammer and on the mobile device.Inline at-mentioning—Yammer’s type-ahead functionality
suggests people and groups to address while users are composing a message, removing
the need to at-mention them separately.Search and invite coworkers by email—Searching by name or
email enables users to find existing members and invite new members to join
Yammer from their Yammer mobile app.
The Yammer Android app features new capabilities that boost team collaboration. The first capabilities to roll out are the ability to attach files from external file storage services such as OneDrive and Dropbox, and inline at-mentioning which uses Yammer’s type-ahead functionality to people and groups to address while users are composing a message, removing the need to at-mention them separately. Better photo-sharing and markup, which lets users attach multiple images at once and mark up the parts of the image they want to call out with their finger will roll out at a later date.
In Office 2016, existing Japanese and Simplified Chinese fonts have been updated with a Unified modern look and feel across the primary authoring apps: Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook Mail and OneNote.
A new cipher order will be enabled for Exchange Online Protection, which prioritizes more secure ciphers.
The time series forecasting sheet functions are used to predict future values based on historical data. For example, a monthly timeline with values on the 1st of every month or yearly timeline. For this type of timeline, it’s very useful to aggregate raw detailed data before you apply the forecast, which produces more accurate forecast results as well. In this preview, the following forecasting functions are available: Forecast.ETS() - Returns the forecasted value for a specific future target date
Forecast.ETS.Confint() - Returns a confidence interval for the forecast value at the specified target dateForecast.ETS.Seasonality() - Returns the length of the repetitive pattern Excel detects for the specified time series
New functions in Excel simplify and shorten your
formula expressions for more efficient spreadsheet editing. New string
functions - TEXTJOIN and CONCAT - provides more flexibility with concatenation
operations. New logic functions – IFS and SWITCH – streamline common operations
across multiple conditions.
Outlook for iOS and Android can now use built-in MDM for Office 365 or Microsoft Intune to secure email data on mobile devices.
Sway will soon switch to a per-user licensing model, so that organizations no longer have to choose whether to have Sway enabled for the entire organization vs. nobody at all. Access to use Sway can now be assigned to your organization’s users on an individual and group basis. When this change becomes effective, any organization that previously disabled Sway will have a period of time to re-disable it for all users on a per-user basis, or choose specific individuals for whom Sway should be enabled.
Our largest update to Power BI since it was first introduced in February. Features now available in preview include dashboards, mobile app for iPad, out-of-the-box connectors for popular SaaS services, highly requested new visualizations, and live connectivity to SQL Server Analysis Services. These features will be available to preview in the US in late December, with broader availability throughout 2015. Existing Power BI customers will find a preview option appear in their existing Power BI sites, if your are not currently a Power BI customer you can access the free public preview by visiting PowerBI.com.
We're excited to announce another wave of Yammer localization updates in web, mobile, email notifications and Success Center, bolstering our earlier announcement from June 2014. The Yammer web client and Success Center now support 28 languages. The Yammer mobile apps supports 25 languages in iOS/Android, 26 languages in Windows Notifier and 28 languages for localized email notifications. These updates help Yammer connect more people globally, breaking down silos and enabling them to work like a network.
Yammer is making a number of changes to the group experience to help users work more effectively in their groups. Up first, the new default landing experience returns users to the last group they visited, rather than the home feed, to to deliver continuity in their group experience. Inside each group, the new group destination shows all unread group conversations in a separate tab; dynamic indicators show when users have viewed these messages.Next up: each group will also provide an inbox view to show priority messages within the context of the group experience. Additionally, group admins will now have an onboarding process to help newly created groups off to a successful start.
OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client (NGSC) for PC & Mac brings improved reliability and performance as well as selective sync, support for large files up to 10GB in size and removes the 20,000 file sync limit.
Updates include:- Zoom in and out while editing in a workbook- Fill data automatically in worksheet cells with AutoComplete support- Better formula searching by matching any formula that contains the search term- Display and toggle outlines and groupings across rows in a workbook
Outlook now uses Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based authentication for Exchange Online mailboxes in Office 365, replacing the previously used basic authentication method. This new sign in method enables new benefits for IT including OAuth for Office 365 and support for multi-factor authentication.
Updates include:
- Find and Replace support
- See count of results when using the Find bar
- Fill Handle support to copy cells and fill series
- Use Table Styles for easy formatting
- Load workbooks set as Read-Only Recommended
- Load workbooks set in formula view
- Find and Replace support
- See count of results when using the Find bar
- Fill Handle support to copy cells and fill series
- Use Table Styles for easy formatting
- Load workbooks set as Read-Only Recommended
- Load workbooks set in formula view
The SharePoint APIs will soon support the OData v4 standard for all of the APIs.
Office 2013 rich client applications currently use the MS Sign-in Assistant to log into Office 365. This only supports the WS-Trust protocol and is not usable with any identity providers that require passive authentication with web page redirects such as WS-Federation and SAML/P. This feature is to enable Office rich client applications to work with third party Identity Providers and to work with the Windows Azure Multi-Factor Authentication implementation.
IN PUBLIC PREVIEW - Office 2013 Windows client modern authentication features have moved from private preview to public preview. This means that the program is easier to join and production support is included for participants. Modern authentication brings Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based sign-in to Office 2013 Windows clients. This update enables IT administrators to configure new security scenarios for sign-in with Office 365.
The Office 365 Admin App will be significantly updated with new features and a new user interface.The updates include:New dashboard view that provides an overview of the service status, the number of unlicensed users, new messages and active support requestsUser management capability such as adding, editing and disabling users as well as the ability to reset passwordsImproved service communications by integrating Message Center and simplifying the service health viewAbility to monitor active service requests The app will be available across Windows Phone, iOS and Android.
Admin app updates include the followingSupport for logging into multiple Office 365 tenantsUpdated settings page
Updates this month are focused around improving visibility, providing more control and improving access to support. Push notifications for service incidents will enable you to receive an alert at the beginning of each service incident and convenient access to additional service incident details. In addition, admins now have more granular control over what Office 365 services are enabled when assigning licenses and lastly, admins can now raise a support request ticket on the go right from the app.
The dashboard experience has been simplified for the new business plans to highlight only the most used tasks including setup, adding new users, resetting passwords and managing subscriptions.The complete set of settings and tools are accessible from the left navigation menu.
Updates this month are focused on providing more settings and surfacing more information for Office 365 IT admins. More control is available as Sway can now be enabled/disabled from the Office 365 Admin Center. This setting is only available if Sway is available to the tenant. Better visibility through proactive notifications. If you use DirSync, you will now be notified if there are provisioning issues. Errors will surface right on the user list. In addition, it will be easier to see who is receiving the invoices and renewal reminders as the contact details are now clearly listed in the billing menu. Lastly, UI enhancements such as the addition of more modal windows have been added to help the admin stay in context during the workflow when completing administrative tasks.
The horizontal sub-navigation menu will be integrated with the left navigation menu in the Office 365 Admin Center. Admins can now preview all the sub-navigation menu items from the left navigation menu before selecting the desired menu item and loading the related web page. This will speed up the navigation experience by eliminating unnecessary web page loads.
Gain enhanced visibility and control into your Office 365 environment with the built in advanced threat detection alerts of Office 365 Advanced Security Management.
The Office 365 app launcher visual refresh will include additional end user customization updates including extending the user personal theme across the first party tiles and background color of the app launcher, as well as tile re-sizing capabilities, including a small, medium (current size) and wide tile option to accommodate a variety of personal preferences. Custom tiles will not be available for re-sizing or accept the personal theme set by users.
A new Office 365 plan for businesses of up to 300 users. Includes the full Office
desktop applications - Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher, with 1TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone.
A new Office 365 plan for businesses of up to 300 users. Includes the full Office
desktop applications - Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher, with 1TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone. Also includes the core Office 365 cloud services – business class email and
calendaring, Office Online, online meetings, IM, video conferencing, Yammer and
much more.
desktop applications - Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher, with 1TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone. Also includes the core Office 365 cloud services – business class email and
calendaring, Office Online, online meetings, IM, video conferencing, Yammer and
much more.
Office 365 Connectors bring useful information and content from 3rd party services into your Office 365 Group. Users can connect their group to services like JIRA, GitHub, Bing News, Twitter, etc., and get notified of the activity in that service. Developers can build connectors via incoming web hooks that generate rich connector cards.
Office 365 admins will have an updated purchase domain experience available soon within the Office 365 admin portal. This will provide benefits to Office 365 admins including reduced billing complexity, reduced log-ins required, automated domain management including DNS configuration - all directly from Office 365 rather than third party providers.
Office 365 FastTrack OnboardingService BenefitComingfall 2014, FastTrack will become the Office 365 onboarding benefit includedwith new Office 365 purchases*. As part of FastTrack, customers willreceive personalized assistance from a Microsoft onboarding expert ensuring theservice is ready to use. FastTrack will provide tools for current stateassessments, identity management, domain configuration, and provisioning ofOffice 365 workloads including Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Office 365 Pro Plus,and Yammer. Best practices and guidance, coupled with direct remoteassistance, support, and engagement from Microsoft enable quick and efficientonboarding to Office 365.*minimum seat purchase of eligible SKUs apply.
We are delivering the following improvements to the Office 365 Groups files experience: ability to open a document in either Office Online or Office desktop; ability to share a file with others; ability to rename, copy or delete a file. Additionally deleted files now support the Recycle Bin mechanism available in SharePoint Online.
We are delivering the following improvements to the Office 365 Groups experiences: group membership can easily be viewed in
Outlook 2013 similar to Distribution Group card; Group calendar provides the group availability by rolling up the availability of each member; elimination of the subscriber limit in conversations; support distribution groups naming policies for Group creation; introduction a new set of cmdlets to manage groups.
Outlook 2013 similar to Distribution Group card; Group calendar provides the group availability by rolling up the availability of each member; elimination of the subscriber limit in conversations; support distribution groups naming policies for Group creation; introduction a new set of cmdlets to manage groups.
Notebook enables teams to capture, compile, and share information within your Office 365 Groups experience. You'll find the notebook In the '...' menu in the group header, and you'll be able to jump right into the notebook from any of our other groups experiences.
When you create an
Office 365 Group, users have two privacy options: public (anyone can access the
Group's content) and private (only approved members can access the Group's
content). This update enables Group owners to change the privacy setting from public to private or vice versa by
editing the Group properties in your favorite browser.
We're introducing "Like" social gesture to Office 365 Groups conversations in Outlook Web App (OWA). The Like action enables end users to acknowledge or endorse a message from their colleagues in the Group conversation. A tally of Likes are displayed in the Group's Conversation in OWA. When a Like happens on a message you posted, you see a notification in the Office 365 Notification Pane.
The Azure Management Portal exposes group management events (creation, updates, membership changes, etc.) in the group audit report. In the future, these same events will appear in the Office 365 Compliance Center alongside other Office 365 events you’re used to tracking. This will give you a complete picture of the changes in your tenant over time.
Administrators can now create groups with rule-based memberships using the Azure Management Portal. Group membership is updated within a minute as users’ properties change. This allows easy management or larger groups, or the creation of groups that always reflect the organization’s structure.
Today, Office 365 Groups files consume from your organization’s SharePoint shared storage quota; team sites and groups share the same available capacity. We plan to deliver the ability to set quotas on groups’ underlying sites to help manage the consumption of shared storage by Office 365 Groups’ files.
Larger organizations use separate email domains to reflect different parts of their businesses. Office 365 Groups that are created by users in one domain will share that domain (as opposed to using a common domain across the tenant). Administrators now also have control to create groups in a specific domain of their choosing.
Group naming policies allow users to self-organize, but allows control on the way that these groups appear in the corporate directory. Now naming policy also applies to the email alias created for groups created through Outlook, Outlook on the web, or the Outlook Groups mobile app.
We will be adding support for Office 365 Groups into the O365 compliance center.Retention and Hold allow you to specify policies for how long to keep all groups content (protecting it from deletion, modification and tampering) and when to automatically delete it. eDiscovery allows you to search for specific content across all groups. Compliance features will apply to all groups' content: mailboxes, files, calendars and notebooks.
The new Office 365 help pane feature will include several capabilities including What's new, help content and help search. The "What's new" new feature discovery component will provide users the ability to contextually discover and see how-to information about recently introduced capabilities. The Office 365 help pane will be available across apps in the Office 365 web experience.
The Office 365 help pane search functionality will be updated to include application results, and the help pane will also incorporate tell me functionality to provide quick access to settings, search and workload commands.
With Office 365 for Government, Microsoft is able to support customer compliance with IRS 1075. IRS 1075 provides guidance to ensure that the policies, practices, controls, and safeguards employed by recipient agencies adequately protect the confidentiality of Federal Tax Information (FTI) and related financial tax return data.
In the upcoming Office 365 ISO 27001 audit, Office 365 will be including the ISO 27018 Privacy controls in their assessment. Inclusion of these new controls in the ISO assessment will further help Office 365 validate to customers the level of protection Office 365 provides to protect the privacy of customer data.
Microsoft is planning to host Office 365 services from a Microsoft datacenter in India. This is planned to launch by the end of CY 2015. Office 365 customers in India today will be able to migrate their tenant to this new datacenter once it launches. We will have additional information about Office 365 on the newly announced India datacenter closer to the time.
We are adding Office 365 commercial services into the catalog experience of special segments such as Education, Government (Public), and Charity. With this update our special segment customers will have the ability to purchase all of our commercial service offerings regardless of their segment.
The Office 365 My account page is a centralized location for commercial users to view and manage all information regarding their Office 365 account. The my account page has several features that bring together previously available information: 1) My account landing page provides an overview of the my account page and central navigation, 2) personal info page (previously profile) pulls my profile information from Azure Active Directory, and is separate from the Delve profile feature, 3) the subscriptions page shows any user purchases applicable to the user, and the organization assigned licenses available to the user, 4) the app permission page displays all applications that have access to a user's Office 365 account - this information was previously available within OWA and/ or SPO settings, 5) Install status shows information on Office 365 installs that was previously available on the My Software page, and 6) the settings page is the updated location for the Office 365 immersive settings experience.
A new persistent navigation bar across Office 365 services simplifies navigation and bringing system alerts, reminders and new mail notifications cross suite. The updated navigation bar will dynamically scale to accommodate different display widths. If the display is wide enough, all menu items will be visible. If the display is narrow, the additional menu items will automatically be added to the more menu (ellipsis). “My profile” controls will now be accessed via your photo which can be easily edited from any Office 365 service.
The new notification pane will provide end users with a single place to catch up on all system events (i.e. system alerts like password expiration, new emails, calendar reminders and eventually group likes) and will be available across apps in the Office 365 web experience. In order to access this new feature, a user simply clicks on the top right notification icon to open the notification pane. In the first phase the functionality will be limited to Office 365 Groups mail notifications and the icon will appear as multiple team members in the top nav bar.
Office 365 ProPlus user activation management allows administrators to view and manage Office 365 ProPlus activations on PCs or Macs directly from the Office 365 Admin Center
With the recent launch of new security features in Office 365, such as Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Device Management, we are expanding the mission of the Office 365 Compliance Center, and in turn, are renaming it the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center. We’ve also redesigned the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center, with a new user experience that is more intuitive, informative, scalable and insightful.
New reporting dashboard in the Office 365 Admin Center. The
dashboard will provide you with valuable insights about how the Office 365 services
are being used and delivers details down to the individual user level directly
in the new Office 365 admin center. The first version of
the reporting portal includes a variety of new reports that provide consistent
insights across all Office 365 services with a highly improved user experience.
Enhancements include a new
Activity Dashboard, new usage reports and the ability to drill down on individual
user activities.
The regulatory compliance and business risk landscape is continuously evolving.At Microsoft, we appreciate our customers’need to understand the Office 365 architecture and compliance with regulations to help them evaluate moving to Office 365. We also know you need to understand how we keep your data secure on the service on an ongoing basis.To help with your assessment needs, we are announcing Office 365 Service Trust Portal (STP).
Office 365 is planning to launch Office 365 services from Microsoft datacenters in Japan in December 2014. Each datacenter will service Office 365 customers with a business address in the same country. After the launch of Office 365 services from these datacenters, all new tenants with a business address in the service area will be created in that datacenters. New Office 365 datacenters in Japan and India will replicate data across datacenters in a single country only. Office 365 customers creating new subscriptions in Japan and India datacenters or who are moved to those datacenters will have the following data stored at rest only in that country (1) Exchange Online mailbox content (e-mail body, calendar entries, and the content of e-mail attachments, and (2) SharePoint Online site content and the files stored within that site. Existing customers located in the serviced countries can also take advantage of the new Office 365 datacenters. We will move all existing customers in the service area to the new Office 365 datacenters.
Microsoft is releasing Office 365 services from Microsoft datacenters in Australia in 2015. This new Office 365 region will host customers in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. After the launch of the new Office 365 region, all new tenants with a business address in the service area will be created in those datacenters. Existing customers located in the serviced countries can also take advantage of the new Office 365 datacenters. We will move all existing customers in the service area to the new Office 365 datacenters while sticking to the current SLA. Customers will get six weeks advance notice of their move date. More information about the tenant moves is published at http://aka.ms/move.
Office 365 settings experience will be updated to include contextual settings within the right hand pane of the Office 365 web experience. These contextual settings will include workload specific settings as well as Office 365 settings including theme and start page. The settings pane will include a search box to quickly search all settings, and a link to a full immersive settings experience that includes all Office 365 settings.
The setup wizard will support more options for migrating data to Office 365 including data from IMAP/POP email providers such as Google Apps.
Admins no longer have to choose between the basic and advanced setup options when setting up their Office 365 environment. The Office 365 setup wizard replaces these two options and guides admins through the Office 365 setup experience. The wizard supports migrating data from Microsoft Exchange server and integrating with the simplified domain setup experience released earlier.
With Office 365 sign-in for Yammer, users can access Yammer with their Office 365 credentials and work across Office 365 applications with ease. Office 365 users will be able to seamlessly access Yammer from their Office 365 navigation bar, providing immediate access to their existing Yammer account. Office 365 sign-in for Yammer will follow a phased roll-out between December 2014 and March 2015, shipping to Office 365 customers with the following criteria:Yammer Enterprise is activated in a network’s Office 365 Admin Center; andYammer single sign-on (SSO) is not enabled.
First Release Customers only. Will roll out to everyone by late July.
The Office 365 store will make it easy for Office 365 users to acquire, manage and use third party applications directly from within their Office 365 web experience. Users will start to see an Office Store icon within the app launcher in the top navigation bar. The icon takes users to a special version of the Store, in which applications registered at the tenant level of Office 365 (via Azure Active Directory) appear atop the page for rapid installation into the user's MyApps page of Office 365. Only free apps will be available to start, and First Release customers will see the feature first, and all others by late July.
The Office 365 store will make it easy for Office 365 users to acquire, manage and use third party applications directly from within their Office 365 web experience. Users will start to see an Office Store icon within the app launcher in the top navigation bar. The icon takes users to a special version of the Store, in which applications registered at the tenant level of Office 365 (via Azure Active Directory) appear atop the page for rapid installation into the user's MyApps page of Office 365. Only free apps will be available to start, and First Release customers will see the feature first, and all others by late July.
WW rollout started March 2015 and completed July 2015 - deployment to GCC targeted H2 CY2015. Office 365 Video is a secure, company-wide destination for video upload, sharing and discovery, and smooth playback across devices - all powered by Windows Azure Media Services. More here in the corresponding blog post: http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/18/introducing-office-365-video/ The deployment to GCC SKUs is targeted for H2 CY 2015.
If a video has been deleted from a channel, it is now possible to recover the video and restore it from the channel recycle bin. The channel recycle bin follows the same duration patterns as SharePoint Online recycle bin recovery times – 90 days. Hence it is possible to recover a video within 90 days of deletion.
It will be possible to select one of several auto-generated thumbnails to represent your video. Thumbnails come from throughout your video. You, too, will be able to manually upload your own graphic image to represent a video.
It will now be possible for more customers to access the Office 365 Video portal solution, as a part of Office 365 tenants in both Government Community Cloud (GCC) and for customers served out of the China datacenters.
Videos can now be played outside the Office 365 Video portal by embedding individual videos into a team site. You simply click the "Embed" button on an Office 365 Video player page, go to a team site in edit mode, click "add embed, hit save; now there is inline playback within the team site. This update, too, will enable Kiosk licensed users to get use rights to view videos embedded in a team site outside of the Office 365 Video portal; note, Kiosk workers would still not have use rights directly in the Office 365 Video portal itself. WW rollout July 2015 completed - deployment to GCC targeted H2 CY2015.
It will be easier to upload videos into Office 365 Video, with greater end user confidence. We will introduce a more-centralized method for uploading videos, where you go to an upload center and select the desired channel destination for your video(s). You will also be able to view progress bars and enter tile/description while the video(s) are uploading. This new upload center will also use responsive design for ease of upload across devices.
It is now easier than ever to embed a video into a SharePoint Online team site. Now you simply put the site into edit mode, go to the SharePoint ribbon, select Insert and then click the "Office 365 Video" button. The video picker will pop up, you select your video and then click save. Your video now plays inline and you were able to accomplish this all without leaving the context of your site edits.
We’ll support uploading subtitle files in the webvtt format. You can upload a different subtitle file per different language. We’ll also do work to attribute the text in the subtitle file back to the original video so you can find videos from enterprise search based off what’s said in the video.
Video statistics will focus on giving content owners insights into how their videos are being viewed and trending patterns. Users will see aggregate data on how many people have watched their video(s), how long they are watching and what the drop-off rates are over time. Greater insights let you know what’s working, how and when.
If an organization has Yammer enabled, video channel owners now have the ability to control the default Yammer group that conversations will go into when commenting on a video, or the option to disable Yammer comments all together for a channel. As a channel owner, go to a channel Channel Settings Yammer tab pick a default group or disable Yammer for the channel.
WW rollout started April 2015 - deployment to GCC targeted H2 CY2015. Office 365 Video went into First Release (FR) on 11/18/14. This update will both move Office 365 Video to the broader worldwide production environment, beyond FR customers, and bring new updates for increased mobility and improved performance. For mobility, Office 365 Video will now have a companion iPhone app in the App Store, responsive Web pages across the video portal for access across devices of all sizes (PC, Mac, Android and iOS), plus extend video playback to non-Flash capable devices via our new HTML5-based player from Azure Media Services. We, too, have taken user feedback to enable more refinement for some of the admin controls available to portal and channel owners.
This feature will enable the Office App Store in new markets, including availability for Office 365 operated by 21Vianet. The new market are, Russia, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Brazil.
This update will improve the recommendations algorithm for the Office App Store to be more precise and more relevant in the apps recommendations that it presents to users.
This update will remove the need for customers to sign-in when adding a free or trial SharePoint app to their Office 365 experience.
Office Online provides an immersive document collaboration experience inside Yammer. Edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files uploaded to Yammer using the immersive Office Online experience. Changes are automatically saved in Yammer where you have the ability to review the version history of each file and mark documents “Official."
Office Online provides an immersive document collaboration experience inside Yammer. Co-author Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files uploaded to Yammer with other people using the immersive Office Online experience. Changes are automatically saved in Yammer where you have the ability to review the version history of each file and mark documents “Official."
Office Online will increase the speed with which the Office desktop apps are launched from within Office Online.
Microsoft PowerView is now added as a reporting option for an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube connection. Just connect your Excel spreadsheet to an OLAP cube and select to view this data in your workbook as a Power View Report. In PowerView you can now build reports with KPI’s, hierarchies, calculations and table data coming from the OLAP cube.
With our new OneDrive app on Android you can now access both your personal and work accounts. This is the first example of how we’re creating a single, unified OneDrive experience that holistically addresses what people, businesses, and IT need. Because people are increasingly using the same devices and apps to get things done at work and at home, the ability to store and share files in the cloud is essential on both fronts.Users can now get to their personal or work files, easily share with family or coworkers, and ensure that they’re never without the files that matter to them – all from a single app. Your personal and work accounts are kept separate, and OneDrive makes it clear when you’re accessing your work or personal files. So you don’t need to worry about accidentally backing up your photos to your work account.
Administrators have the ability to define a list of file types that will be actively blocked from sync functions (upload and download).
In April 2014, we made a set of announcements related to OneDrive for Business, one of which was the availability of OneDrive for Business storage for all Office 365 ProPlus customers as part of their ProPlus subscriptions. Customers that add Office 365 ProPlus after December 1st, 2014 will automatically get OneDrive for Business provisioned as part of their ProPlus subscription. OneDrive for Business will begin rolling out to existing Office 365 ProPlus before the end of 2014, we expect all Office 365 ProPlus customers will have OneDrive for Business before the end of January 2015.
The user can put sync functions on hold rather than having to stop and restart the client when sync is not required.
Mac OS X will get a standalone desktop sync client application that enables desktop syncing between a user's OneDrive for Business folder in Office 365 and his or her computer.
We’re taking the UX look and feel, navigation of our consumer web UX and applying it to ODB. This will start to rollout in Q3 2015. Initially, users will be able to switch back to the existing “classic” UX on an as needed basis. After a period of time (TBD) the “classic” UX will be turned off.
We're shipping a unified Windows Phone app for OneDrive in Q4 2014. This app will enable a user to connect to both their personal and business OneDrive from the same app experience. Users can tap between personal and work files quickly and easily. The app will also include a ‘Shared with me’ view and the ability to upload files from the device to your personal or business OneDrive.
The OneNote Class Notebook Creator sets up a shared notebook for a class. It creates two public sub-notebooks (or section groups) for the class and one for each student. Each student’s is shared with the teacher; synchronization enables student work and teacher feedback to be exchanged automatically, with no email or other action.This app should be added to your school web site by a tenant administrator. It will then only be used during notebook creation. Activity thereafter occurs in OneNote.
The OneNote Class Notebook Creator sets up a shared notebook for a class. It creates two public sub-notebooks (or section groups) for the class and one for each student. Each student’s is shared with the teacher; synchronization enables student work and teacher feedback to be exchanged automatically, with no email or other action.This app should be added to your school web site by a tenant administrator. It will then only be used during notebook creation. Activity thereafter occurs in OneNote.
Three updates: First, It makes OneNote for iPhone a standalone experience with the ability to create new notebooks and sections. This means that you can now create a notebook, share it with others, and get on the same page - all from the convenience of an iPhone. Second, It dramatically improves the look and feel of OneNote on iOS 7 making note taking and navigation of your notes much more fluid and efficient. Third, we've added Office Lens to OneNote for iPhone. Similar to Office Lens on OneNote for iPad, this popular feature turns your iPhone into a pocket scanner so you can use it to take pictures of things like receipts, or whiteboard notes. Then, with Office Lens you can trim, enhance and makes pictures more readable. Best thing is, images are automatically synced to OneNote, and if your picture includes printed text, OneNote can recognize the text with optical character recognition (OCR) so you can search for words in the image.
Now you can add files from your favorite cloud storage service to OneNote on your iPhone or iPad. We added support for adding, changing and removing section passwords from any Apple device. On iPhone, you can now rearrange your pages. In OneNote for Mac you can now open and sync notebooks stored on SharePoint Server.
We're happy to launch new iOS features for OneNote. iPad only: Move content on the canvas, resize and rotate images, support for Apple Pencil on 9.7" iPad ProiPhone: Resize, rotate, and move images.
Adding top requested features to OneNote for iPad and iPhone: OneNote for iPad and iPhone will support inserting Office documents, PDFs, video/audio files, opening with a double-tap, and easy sharing with AirDrop. OneNote for iPad and iPhone will let you lock or unlock password-protected sections created in OneNote for Windows. OneNote for iPad and iPhone will be able to add a PDF printout to any page and then take notes on it in OneNote. OneNote for iPad and iPhone will let you move pages and sections around your notebooks to get them organized the way you want. OneNote for Mac will let you share a page as email, just email the page and the formatting will stay the same as in your notebook. OneNote for iPad and iPhone will better copy and paste text from other apps while keeping the formatting you expect. Lastly, you will be able to create and sync notebooks from OneDrive for Business along with OneDrive.
Now you can add files from your favorite cloud storage service to OneNote on your iPhone or iPad. We added support for adding, changing and removing section passwords from any Apple device. On iPhone, you can now rearrange your pages. In OneNote for Mac you can now open and sync notebooks stored on SharePoint Server.
OneNote Online got even better with the ability to record audio clips and insert files like photos and documents like pdf in your online notes.
OneNote Staff Notebook, like OneNote Class Notebook, is an app for Office 365 that lets an education staff leader quickly set up a personal workspace for every staff member or teacher, a content library for shared information and a collaboration space for everyone to collaborate—all within one powerful notebook. With a Staff Notebook, administration and staff can save time, become more organized and collaborate more effectively.
Now all you need to get going with OneNote is an org id (work or school) account, no need to first sign in with a Microsoft Account (MSA)
Now all you need to get going with OneNote is an org id (work or school) account, no need to first sign in with a Microsoft Account (MSA)
Improvements to user flow when adding attachment. Allows user to check a box to automate steps, instead of being presented with each option each time you upload a file.Asks and remembers your preference when saving attachments from both the cloud and local files. You can save as copies, which will not receive updates if stored in the cloud, a physical document, which will receive updates if stored in the cloud or as cloud links.Can change your preference under Preference-General- Attachments.
Yammer is updating the inbox for teamwork by providing better structure and workflow. As part of this, we're organizing inbox messages by group, introducing group bulk actions with the ability to mark a group as read, replacing "Mark as Unread" with "Read Later" that lets users flag messages for follow up for better workflow, and showing unread messages and messages marked "Read Later" as separate tabs within the inbox. We're also separating direct messages from group conversations in the inbox. Finally, we're streamlining the inbox by removing duplicate content that have been viewed elsewhere.
A Project Web App (PWA) admin can now configure if a Project Site gets created for any new project. If teams do not plan to use the Project sites, turning off this feature can greatly improve the time it takes to create and publish a project. This also allows users to move from one Project Detail Page to the other faster. Also, with the option to turn off Project Site creation for any project, customers can now manage up to 5000 (previously 2000) projects per any site collection within Project Online.
By turning off the Task List Sync for enterprise projects, you will find that publishing a project is much faster. It will also help you navigate to the next Project Detail Page faster and generate your latest project status report lot quicker. This option can be accessed from the Connected SharePoint sites page.
Organization admins will have the opportunity set custom support contact information including email, website, phone number and a line of text that will be visible to users within the new help pane in the Office 365 web experience.
Outlook for Android will be able to open, read and reply to Information Rights Protected emails. It will also respect permission set by the send. For example, if 'Do Not Forward' is set, the Forward command will be disabled.
Microsoft Outlook, now available for iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets.
Outlook for iOS can open, read and reply to Information Rights Protected emails. It will also respect permission set by the send. For example, if 'Do Not Forward' is set, the Forward command will be disabled.
The new Outlook for Mac includes: better performance and reliability as a result of a new threading model and database improvements, a new modern user interface with improved scrolling and agility when switching between Ribbon tabs, online archive support for searching Exchange (online or on-premises) archived mail, Master Category List support and enhancements delivering access to category lists (name and color) and sync between Mac, Windows and OWA clients, Office 365 push email support for real-time email delivery, faster first-run and email download experience with improved Exchange Web Services syncing.
Pan and zoom while loading large charts/SmartArt
Partners who have the Partner Admin Center will have the ability to filter their customer list to display the most recently viewed customers or customers that have been manually flagged. This is useful for Partners that manage a large customer list.
The Office 365 Partner admin app will bring several of the capabilities available in the Partner admin center portal to a mobile app experience. This includes the ability to view your customer list, view a customer's service health, view a customer's service requests and change user passwords. The mobile admin app will be available for Windows Phone, Android and iOS.
Outlook has more Calendaring options than ever before. We’ve added the Persian calendar to Outlook’s family of non-Gregorian calendars.
Picture crop and reset in Office for iPad.
Updates to Outlook for iOS & Android including PIN lock, improvements to remote wipe, IMAP support, the ability to toggle conversation view, customize swipe gestures and more.
When you use time field groups or other hierarchical groupings of fields in your PivotChart, you can now take advantage of drill down buttons that, with one-click, let you toggle across different levels of your PivotChart’s data based on the hierarchical structure.
Excel Field List, used for adding fields to Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, now supports search functionality so that you can quickly find the fields you are looking for in longer lists.
PivotTable interactivity in Excel for iPad will allow opening an Excel spreadsheet that has a PivotTable, selecting data, visualizing the results, and saving the PivotTable back.
View & reply to a poll on Yammer iOS from directly within the app.
Withfiltering in Power Map, use familiar Excel filter controls to uncover moreinsights from your 3D geospatial visualizations. When using filters, you canadjust the amount of data shown, toggle between different categories or simplysearch and select specific values for more targeted analyses.Custom Mapsextends all the features of Power Map so you can tell rich and interactivestories using any map type. Simply choose an image – like building floor maps,the human body, public transit routes, and system architectures - and Excelwill guide you through transforming your data into visualizations that can beexplored and shared.
In Power View, you can now apply predictive forecasting, and hindcasting, when visualizing and exploring your data. Forecasting in Power View utilizes built-in predictive forecasting models using exponential smoothing to automatically detect seasonality in the data to provide forecast results from a series of data. Explore forecast results by adjusting the desired confidence interval or by adjusting outlier data to see how they affect results. You can also hindcast to see how Power View would have predicted the present and recent past based on older data.
Designer, a feature that
will essentially allow you to deliver beautiful and impactful presentations
with little to no experience. With Designer it's like
having a professional designer in the trenches with you, providing suggestions
on layout and imagery placement, all with a few clicks of your mouse or swipe
of your finger.
Animations: add animations such as entrance, emphasis and exit effects.
Themes: create a presentation and choose from a gallery of beautifully designed themes.
Switch to widescreen: easily switch between normal and widescreen layouts.
Background formatting: change the color or add a picture to the background of your slides.
Zoom in: Pinch to zoom in and see more detail while presenting
Morph makes captivating and
beautiful motions with a few clicks of your mouse or swipes of your
finger. ANYONE can use Morph easily, no matter whether
you dabble when it comes to creating presentations or get paid to develop high
end professional slides. Morph's core value is its ability to help you
get the most out of PowerPoint's rich features, like animations and
transitions, without needing to be a professional designer.
PowerPoint Online continues to improve in the following ways. Better formatting, faster slide interaction & inclusion of more symbols.
This feature will enhance the performance and telemetry of apps for Office in PowerPoint, Excel, and Word Online. The improvements are specifically around extra-details activation, usage latency telemetry, and general performance improvements.
This Preview feature will enabled some users to see pre-configured apps in the Word Online ribbon for better exposure and visibility of the apps in the Office interface.
Leverage Security Consideration Guide to quickly understand how to implement security features and controls available within Office 365. This guide is designed to provide you with information on key security and compliance features to consider when adopting, deploying, and managing Office 365.
Improvements in workflow, reducing the number of steps, and connecting with ease to printers. These improvements will be available for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iPad.
Customer DNS records are now automatically checked for potential issues. If potential issues are identified, admins are notified and actions are proposed. Subscribers with GoDaddy hosted domains have the option to have Office 365 automatically update the DNS records. For all other DNS hosts, admins will be provided with the correct DNS records and instructions on how to correct them. A confirmation screen will notify the admins once all issues are corrected.If custom DNS records are used in the tenant, admins are provided with the option to turn off the DNS records check to eliminate the error notifications.
This feature will proactively notify admins when their users are connecting using an out of date Outlook client. An email will be sent to admins that provides the symptoms of degraded user experience when using out of date client and guidance on how to get the current Outlook client.
Producer controls allow you to control all aspects of a Skype Meeting Broadcast. Decide who can be part of the broadcast, choose the video stream(s) shared, and control which content is available to the attendees.
The Project Online content pack for PowerBI allows users to bring the Project Online data directly into PowerBI and provides out of the box dashboards and reports based on this data. Users can also create their own custom reports and dashboards from within the PowerBI interface.For more information see this link.
Easier ways to provide feedback for Office for iPad from within the app experience.
PSTN calling gives Office 365 customers the option to give their users the ability to receive and make calls to traditional phone numbers from their Skype for Business clients. This will be available for US customers only at the time of launch, with other countries added later.
PSTN conferencing from Microsoft will give Office 365 customers the option to purchase traditional dial-in capabilities for their Skype for Business meetings directly from Microsoft. This will be offered initially in the US.
Users will be able to access Public Folder calendars or contacts from Outlook Web App as favorites. This makes the calendar and contacts accessible in OWA just as Public Folder messages are today.
The refreshed purchase and subscriptions experience provides an update to the UI for both the purchase and subscriptions pages within the admin experience. The update includes new features like dynamic resizing based on screen size, hover menu, updated shopping cart experience for easier editing and additions to the cart, and simplified purchase flow.
Customers, both end-users and admins, are now able to select multiple messages from the quarantine dashboard to release at once.
Users and admins will be able to look for additional details of a quarantined message and will now be able to view the body of the message to assist in making the decision whether a message should be released or not.
Visio diagrams can be connected with real-time data from various data sources so that users can visualize data in the context of organizational structure, IT network map, manufacturing floor plan, complex business processes and etc.. Users can now take advantage of the new one-step connectivity with Excel table to boost productivity. Swapping data graphics is also available one click away. in Preview as of Aug 2015
Quick navigation for tables helps you easily jump to a particular row, column or cell, especially when you have a large data set.
This feature increases the number of default shape styles by introducing new “preset” styles in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Open up an Excel workbook within SharePoint quickly in read-only mode to quickly get to what matters most.
When you're working with people in a Word document, you can see text changes others are making as well as the location of their cursor within the document. Changes are displayed automatically as people use and update the document. This capability is available in documents stored on OneDrive for Business and Office 365 SharePoint sites.
With Real Time Presence you get visibility into who is editing in the document at the same time and where.
With Real Time Presence you get visibility into who is editing in the document at the same time and where.
Skype for Business co-authoring environment during meetings. Launches meeting participants into real-time co-authoring session. After selecting an Office document from OneDrive for Business, opens the appropriate office online app in a co-authoring pane along with a voice/video window. When complete, the document is then saved back to OneDrive for Business.
Real-time indicators in the Yammer left-hand navigation pane call attention to group activity as it happens, alerting users to all their currently active groups and teammates.
When a user attempts to hard attach a file in Outlook Web App, we use a pop-up window to recommend the user uploads the file to OneDrive for Business. For items above the limit set by the admin in Exchange Online (and therefore would bounce) we force the user to use ODFB. For any file over 5MB but below the organizational limit, we have a fly-out panel recommending using ODFB.
Customer feedback around timeliness of communications at the onset of a service incident led to increased adoption of monitoring automation for SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online. Based on automated detection of a potential issue, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online services can automatically post an alert directly to affected customers’ Service Health Dashboard (SHD).
Visio 2016 has refreshed 4 templates under "Maps and Floor Plan" which allow users to accurately depict complex architecture with modern shapes. With refreshed Electrical template and solution, users can easily create and edit IEEE compliance circuit diagrams. Users can also create diagrams with 400 smart shapes including multi-chair trapezoid shapes.In Preview as of August 2015
The default 30-day retention period of deleted items folder on an Exchange Online mailbox will now be removed. This means the user no longer has to worry about their deleted items folder automatically deleting emails every 30 days, but instead they can choose to empty the folder at their convenience. The admin can set a limit through Exchange Admin Console and PowerShell if they want to set a default limit on the folder.
Project managers, working in Project Pro for Office 365 can systematically place resource requests in order to build their project teams. Soon thereafter, Resource managers working in Project Online will be able to view, modify, accept or reject those requests. Also, decisions made by Resource managers will be available to Project Managers within Project Pro for Office 365 to review and plan accordingly.
This feature allows support for $batch requests in SharePoint's OData REST services. This allows apps to make multiple REST calls in a single round trip to the service.
Developers and end users will be able to add custom ribbon tabs to Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Mac.
You may choose to create policy templates specific to the needs of departments or divisions. Departmental templates allows you to define the scope of these templates. In other words, you can define the list of groups or individual users who can apply a particular template. Only those people can view and use the templates to protect documents. Currently this capability is available in the RMS Sharing app. Support for Office applications will be made available soon.
We will add support for RMS in doc libraries for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business . Today the OneDrive for Business sync does not run for RMS protected libraries.
Outlook for iOS & Android will be able to view, send files from and save attachments to OneDrive for Business in the Files tab. Today, Outlook works with OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive & iCloud.
Search your Yammer networks from within the Yammer iOS app.
The OneDrive for Business Sync client will offer a simplified setup that will include taking over the sync functionality of Groove without having to re-sync
Send the document you're working on as a PDF via email on Word for iPad.
Send the spreadsheet you're working on as a PDF via email on Excel for iPad.
We’ll introduce the ability to set expiration dates for external guest links
Set Automatic Replies for when you are traveling out of the office. Available for Office 365 and Exchange Server accounts in Settings.
PowerPoint for iPhone will add Shape Recognition capabilities in the Draw tab.
Today a user can share an individual file from OneDrive for Business with an external party but they can't share a whole folder. We will add this support for additional flexibility in external sharing.
Shared computer activation for Office 365 ProPlus will enable users to access Office 365 ProPlus clients from remote desktops (terminals) or shared physical kiosk PCs. It will allow for installation of Office 365 ProPlus on servers with the Remote Desktop Services role enabled. In this solution, activation of Office is performed as the user launches Office applications per Windows log in session. Activations from licensed users do not persist for subsequent users logging in - those users also need to validate their license state when they log in to the shared PC. Use of shared computer activation does not constitute one of a user's five installations on PCs or Macs.
Site provisioning and branding support through an Office AMS solution pack for SharePoint sites in SharePoint Online with the use of Apps for SharePoint. Here is the full list of the additional CSOM APIs added: Expose get and set of SPWeb.AlternateCssUrl via CSOM (.Net, REST, JS), Expose get and set of SPWeb.SiteLogoUrl via CSOM (.Net, REST, JS), Expose get and set of SPContentType.MobileNewFormUrl, SPContentType.MobileDisplayFormUrl, and SPContentType.MobileEditFormUrl via CSOM (.Net, REST, JS).
We have rolled out advanced encryption at rest for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business called per-file encryption. Per-file encryption technology encrypts every individual file stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business with its own unique key, and also encrypts each subsequent update to the file with an additional unique key. This granular level of encryption vastly reduces the risk of unauthorized access to the content.SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business have always provided encryption in-transit.
Administrators can now more easily manage SharePoint Online team sites' storage quota based on real usage, and are no longer required to set fixed storage allotments per site collection. If an admin opts-in to the storage usage model, by selecting "Auto" within the SharePoint Online Admin Center, every site collection will utilize storage from the broad tenant pooled storage and will continue to 'auto'-grow up to a maximum of 1TB per site collection. If an admin chooses not to opt-in, and to manage storage "manually" per individually per site collection, they will now set usage caps instead of allocating fixed amounts. Whether you select "Auto" or to "Manual," SharePoint Online site collection quota management becomes simpler by removing management overhead and/or 'loss of storage' that has been allocated but not used.
Customer will no longer see SharePoint generated emails for shared items getting incorrectly classified as spam.
Emails sent by SharePoint, such as sharing emails, alerts, or workflow emails, will now be transmitted inside SharePoint datacenters in a secure way using Transport Layer Security (TLS).
New usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and Yammer, give IT greater visibility into usage across these services in Office 365.
Sign-in Page Branding enables an Office 365 customer to select custom colors, text and Imagery for their Office 365 sign-in page. Self Service Password Reset allows a user who has forgotten their password to reset it based on prearranged alternative personal information. These two features were previously available with the Azure AD Premium subscription and are now being made available to all Office 365 subscribers.
The Office 365 sign-in page can be branded with the additional purchase of Microsoft Azure AD Premium subscription. This subscription includes Company Branding which can be used to customize the sign-in page for all applications including Office 365, and also the Azure Management portal and the Azure Access Panel page.
Improves usability to enable admins to complete common admin tasks quickly. Simplifications include a new user creation workflow with a single form, automatic license assignment, and confirmation page. The user profile detail panel contains more user information including assigned license and alias email addresses. Admins can optionally manually assign set passwords for new users.
Setting up your domain is now
easier with the redesigned domain setup wizard. The new wizard has reduced the
number of steps required when adding a new domain to Office 365. The setup wizard
also automatically detects your DNS host and ensures that the DNS records for
your environment are correct. Lastly, customers on enterprise plans
can now manage their DNS records at Microsoft.
Manage your users more simply within the Office 365 Admin Center. The user profile detail panel has been updated with more relevant user details including user photo, job title and department name. Editing of user license assignments and user email addresses now conveniently happen in context with the user profile detail panel. Managing mailbox permissions now also happens within the Office 365 Admin Center.
You can now easily use single sign-on with your Yammer mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. We've improved the back-end sign-up and sign-in flow to provide a streamlined experience across devices. It now even supports 'no e-mail users' by using unique identifiers - when no e-mail address is assigned - to allow your front-line or field workforce to join and leverage your Yammer network.
Added a new Site Folders view that takes you directly to document libraries of sites you’re following. Now you can get to sites you’re following fast, right from OneDrive for Business.
The Sites page, when a user clicks on the "Sites" tile in the app launcher, will get improvements. There will be a new section on the page called "Recent sites" - giving you a list of Office 365 sites you've recently visited, plus an update to the query that drives the "Suggested sites" section of the page; this now will leverage the Office Graph to provide a great level of relevancy to the sites being suggested to users.
The new Skype Developer Platform provides opportunities to customize and extend the capabilities not only with Skype for Business but also through Skype. Developers don't have to think anymore in "silos" for business and allows for more consumer customization opportunities. Find in-depth developer resources, how-to documentation, SDKs and references, and code samples for Skype developer platform verticals.
Skype for Business - Windows Phone update replaces the Lync 2013 mobile client and bring the power of Skype for Business to your Windows mobile device. This includes voice and video over wireless, rich presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and calling features from a single, easy-to-use interface. New features for this release:Rebranded to Skype for BusinessUI changes (see below)Emoticons available for your IMsConversation history across devicesAt-rest data encryption (requires that the user uninstall and re-install the client)UI changes include round avatars, updated presence icons, color and typography changes, the text input box appearance, and IM windows now include rounded bubbles.NOTES. This update fully replaces the Lync 2013 entry in the store. New users searching for Lync will be directed to this entry instead and should install it as it supports Lync 2013. Users should be aware that this is an automatic update for all users of Lync 2013 mobile client on Windows Phone 8.1. Policy settings for the desktop client do not apply - all users will be updated.
The Skype for Business App SDK Preview provides native Android and iOS APIs for embedding Skype for Business audio and video capabilities into mobile and tablet applications. For the initial preview release, this SDK enables remote advisor experiences built upon Skype for Business. Similar to the Web SDK, the App SDK may be used with both Skype for Business Online and Skype for Business Server.
Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition connect an on-premises PBX or PSTN circuit with Skype for Business Cloud PBX operating in Office 365. This allows customers to deploy the Cloud Connector Edition on-premises, connect it to their existing PSTN operator, and have it operate for calls made by users enabled with Cloud PBX.
Users
now have the option to start an instant message conversation with one or
several colleagues right from the their browser. Conversations provide you with
real time, direct access to the information you need directly from your
colleagues and are persist across applications. This experience is available in
Office 365 Outlook Web Access and, over time, will be accessible across Office
365 web applications via the persistent Skype icon on top navigation bar.
Lync will become Skype for Business with a new client experience, new server release and updates to the service in Office 365. The new client will be called "Skype for Business", not Lync, and will use familiar Skype elements including icons and colors. We expect that this will simplify adoption for new users, though it will represent a change for existing users.
Later this year, we will replace Lync 2013 app with Skype for Business in the Google app store. Users will see the new Skype for Business UI after updating the app.
Early October, we will replace the current Lync mobile applications with Skype for Business mobile in the iOS app store. Users will see the new Skype for Business UI after the update is automatically applied.
This feature helps new users learn about Skype for Business. A one-time notification when appear when users try search for the first time. They will be informed that they also can search for Skype Consumer users as well.
Lync will become Skype for Business with a new client experience, new server release and updates to the service in Office 365. The new service will be called "Skype for Business Online", not Lync Online. It will include all of the features of the existing Lync Online service plus new enhancements. The admin portal will be reflected to update the new name and any new capabilities.
Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling for US customers, which gives Skype for Business users in Office 365 the ability to make and receive calls from landline and mobile phones in their Skype for Business client, and to manage these calls using features such as hold, resume, forward and transfer. This preview is built on the proven enterprise voice technology available in Lync Server and Skype for Business Server. Please visit the preview site to sign up if you are a O365 Admin.
Preview PSTN Conferencing for US customers, which allows people invited to a Skype for Business meeting in Office 365 to join the meeting by dialing-in using a traditional telephone. This traditional dial-in capability is in addition to simple, single touch join options on PC, smartphone, and browser, and allows people to join an online meeting even in places with no Internet access. If you are O365 admin, please visit here to sign-up for the preview.
This is a Preview program that customer may optionally choose to participate in. Skype Meeting Broadcast, which enables broadcast of a Skype for Business meeting on the Internet to up to 10,000 people, who may attend in a browser on nearly any device. Skype Meeting Broadcast is useful for a variety of scenarios, including internal, organization-wide “Town Hall” style meetings and public webinars. The preview will include integration with Bing Pulse, for real-time polling and sentiment, and Yammer, to enable attendee sharing during the broadcast. Please visit here to sign up.
Skype Meeting Broadcast allows up to 10,000 people to view a broadcast of a Skype for Business meeting on the Internet. This capability is useful for a variety of scenarios, including internal, organization-wide “Town Hall” style meetings and public webinars. Broadcasts may be viewed live, or after the event.
Smart Lookup is available in Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint and helps you learn more about your content by bringing you precisely the right information in context of what you are reading or writing about. With information from a variety of sources like Bing Snapshot, Wikipedia, Bing image search and Oxford dictionary, you can do anything from a quick look up to a detailed exploration without leaving the Office application. Smart Lookup can be accessed by right clicking a word or phrase, through the Review tab on the ribbon, or via the Tell Me box.Insights is powered by Bing and uses the selected text and some surrounding content to get contextually relevant results.
Now you can rename tables, columns and calculated fields/measures within the Power Pivot add-in and take advantage of PivotTables being seamlessly adjusted to the new names in the Data Model.
The new OneDrive for Business search box is now smarter, with type-ahead features helping you find a document that might have been shared with you, or one that you tucked away several folders deep. You can also perform actions, like sharing these files, directly from the search results. Finding files and sharing them is even faster with the improved search box.
This update will bring two key enhancements for Sites in Office 365, videos uploaded into Office 365 Video, and OneDrive for Business. First, you will be able to upload files greater than 2GB - up to 10GB - to both Sites' document libraries and OneDrive for Business. We, too, will provide a greater amount of default storage for Office 365 Sites usage (for documents and information); Office 365 tenants will now get 1TB + (500MB * # of E/A/G users); this calculation used to be 10GB + (500MB * # of E/A/G users).
The Office 365 subscription management experience refresh will provide admins with a new subscription management experience within the admin portal. The updates include a simplified subscription card view, easy transitions and upgrades, improved navigation, notifications, integrated tasks and subscription status.
We are enabling customers to both increase and reduce seats licensed through the office 365 admin center where previously a phone call was required to reduce seats. An Office 365 billing admin can simply go to the billing page in the Office 365 admin center and choose the subscription. In the subscription details they can change the quantity of seats licensed. The license change is effective immediately. Note that reducing seats that were purchased with a term discount may be subject to an early termination fee. This is available for all annual subscriptions which are paid monthly and does not include government, academic, or charity subscriptions.
This change now allows you to select multiple items in an Excel Slicer on a touch device. This is a change from prior versions of Excel where only one item in a slicer could be selected at a time using only touch input. You can also enter Slicer multi-select mode by using the new control located in the Slicer’s label.
Outlook 2016 will adapt to smaller screens with a dynamic layout. Includes a new Portrait view where the Ribbon, Navigation Pane and Reading Pane automatically adjust.
Sway for Windows 10 will add support for starting a
new Sway on the My Sways page by reusing content from an existing PDF, Word, or
PowerPoint file.
Right-click on the Sway app in the Windows taskbar to access the most recent Sways you've viewed. You can also pin your favorite Sways to the taskbar, so they'll always show up in the Jump List.
The Taxonomy Refinement Panel Web Part will help site visitors filter content that’s displayed on a page. The filters are terms from the site’s navigation. Faceted navigation lets site visitors filter content that’s displayed on a page. The filters are category specific, so site visitors can use different filters depending on where they are on the site. Faceted navigation is configured in the term store. This means that content managers won’t have to create and maintain one unique page for each category.
Tell Me saves you the time you would normally use to look for a specific function within the Ribbon. You can type what you’re looking for in the Tell Me box at the top right corner of the Ribbon in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access, and with “word-wheeling”, which enables results as soon as you start typing, every keystroke refines the results so that you can click on what you’re looking for as soon as you see it. For example, when you want to mark your document as confidential, just type “confidential” or “confidential banner” and Tell Me will bring back the “Insert Watermark” command. When you click in the Tell Me box, you'll also see a list of the last five commands you ran from within Tell Me, saving you time getting to the feature you want to use.
The OneNote team has been listening to
feedback from teachers and staff and improving Class Notebooks based
suggestions from educators. We have just announced a set of new
capabilities for Class Notebooks. These include:The ability to Remove Students and Co-teacher permissions via the Class Notebook wizard.Support for AD Security groups and Office 365 groups when adding StudentsIn addition, we rolled out RTL Language support for Arabic, Hebrew and Persian a few weeks back
Originally 'Touch Design' was built and designed to ensure a fast, consistent experience across your devices - providing access to OneDrive for Business no matter what mobile browser you use; finger-first touchability.Office 365 will expand Touch Design features and footprint to cover more of SharePoint Online, plus enhancements to the overall OneDrive for Business mobile Web experience. New features include:- Touch Design for your Team Site homepage- Touch Design for your Sites' document libraries, plus new capabilities for these libraries and your OneDrive for Business the ability to sort documents, create documents (Windows tablet and iPad only), create folders & upload files. We continue to invest in the bringing you the best mobile experience across the Office 365 service. Look for more in this area in the future, too, as we expand even further to all sites beyond the main Team Site.
This allows developers to integrate OneDrive into their apps to store and manage user data across all major platforms, including Windows, the web, iOS, and Android. With this new RESTful API, you can build on a scalable cloud storage platform that reaches users across the entire family of Microsoft consumer services.
We are announcing the removal of current limits on external users for all SharePoint Online plans. Specifically, the changes will be as follows. The external users limit for Office 365 Small Business and Small Business Premium will change from 500 to Unlimited. The external users limit for Office 365 Midsize Business and Office 365 Enterprise plans (including E1 – E4, A2-A4, G1-G4, and SharePoint Online Plan 1 and Plan 2) will change from 10,000 to Unlimited.
Office 365 customers on our premium Enterprise, Government and Education plans will receive OneDrive for Business unlimited storage. Specifically, this includes unlimited storage for individuals in organizations with more than five people subscribing to one of the following plans:•Office 365 Enterprise E3, E4 and E5•Office 365 Government E3, E4 and E5•Office 365 Education•OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2We've increased storage available to these customers up to 5 TB per user. Global Admins can increase user storage quotas up to this amount using the SharePoint Online Management Shell. We'll have more information on increasing storage beyond 5 TB soon.Customers on all other Office 365 Enterprise, Business and standalone plans that include OneDrive for Business will continue to receive 1 TB of storage per user
Groups is now in its own menu item in the unified left navigation menu.The groups landing page shows a list of all your groups and their associated email address if applicable.The groups detail panel now enables admins to edit group membership and manage group attributes such as its name, description and email address as well as delete the group.
The new people profile experience will bring additional information into your profile tab including each individual in your organization and documents shared with, colleagues working with and working on documents. Existing elements like contact information and organization chart will be visually updated.
User activity reports will allow you to audit SharePoint and OneDrive for Business user actions such as views, edits, deletes, downloaded files, and sharing of files. These reports will be available in the Compliance Center.
Users can now personalize their Office 365 workspace by selecting from 22 predefined themes.The themes modify the color of the top navigation bar, menu text, Office 365 logo, the selection focus, and some of the text on the canvas as well as potentially adding a background image to the top navigation bar.
Exchange Online Protection standalone and Exchange Enterprise CAL with Services subscribers can now directly manage recipients from within the Exchange admin center (EAC). This includes the ability to add, edit, or delete mail-enabled users (mail recipients who are internal to the organization) from the EAC and the ability to use mail enabled users as part of filtering policies and rules. Learn more. In addition, You can use Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to create mail-enabled groups for an Exchange organization. You can also use EOP to define or update group properties that specify membership, email addresses, and other aspects of distribution groups. You can create distribution groups and security groups, depending on your needs.
UserVoice makes it easier to provide feedback within Outlook on the web. To provide feedback, just click Feedback under the gear icon and add your suggestion. In addition, we’ll be adding an Outlook on the web forum to Outlook UserVoice, where you can share your feedback, recommend features and vote for the ideas you like best.
Video Based Screen Sharing is a more efficient way of sharing content. This version supports P2P sharing only. We expect conference sharing to be supported in a later release.
The OneDrive app can be used on Windows 10 PCs and the Surface Hub in addition to the Windows Phone. Access, edit and share files without having to sync them to your device. Additional features previously only available in the browser experience are also available.
As part of ongoing performance improvements and feature
additions to Word Online, this month you’ll see the following: a) Image Resize
handles: You can now resize images right in your document without having to use
tools from the ribbon. Use the corner resize handles to maintain your picture’s
aspect ratio. Use the mid-line resize handles to skew your picture. b) Plus
there are improvements to list rendering, proofing, AutoSave UI and addition of
more symbols. b) Performance improvements to co-authoring to allow more
concurrent co-authors.
Workload-specific admin roles will provide more flexibility to organizations that want to structure admin access to Exchange Admin Center, SharePoint Admin Center, and Skype for Business Admin Center. For example, an Exchange admin will no longer require Office 365 global admin rights to manage Exchange Online.
As Yammer continues the process of redesigning its user experience, Yammer is excited to announce the modification of its user profile picture. Previously, a person's photo was in a square format. But, moving forward, the pictures will now be rounded.This change will start as a/b testing over the next couple of months. Users will not have to do anything to their profile pictures as we go through this process. However, a small population of users who customize their photo to add distinguishing traits will need to be familiar with some technical details. For these users, we recommend that their new profile photos be at least 100x100 pixels and that they keep custom badges within the new circular format
Discovery feed surfaces
conversations users might miss from relevant groups, Updates in the Discovery feed clearly identify which groups the
conversations come from and provide the ability to quickly navigate to and join
the groups users are not already a member of straight from the feed.
Yammer Enterprise now included in Office 365 Midsize Business and Education plans, including Office 365 Midsize Business, Office 365 Education A2, Office 365 Education A3, Office 365 Education A4.
External Groups helps extended teams collaborate closely in Yammer. Users will be able to invite outside participants such as vendors, partners, and customers into a group in their Yammer network.
As a companion app for the Yammer mobile and web experiences, Yammer for Apple Watch provides instant notification of conversations and activities at a glance and lets users take quick action such as "Like", "Mark as Unread" for follow-up, or "View on Phone" to continue working on their iPhone.
Yammer groups will have a greater sense of place and
be more engaging with a full-width header, a cleaner look to focus attention on high impact activity and content, and a wider feed for team conversations.
Prioritize the Yammer groups users belong to by moving the All Company group to the bottom of the groups list in the left hand navigation panel.
To improve the user experience, Yammer will auto-detect the language on a user's browser setting and apply the correct language to that page.
The Yammer web experience now supports a total of 28 languages. You can easily select your preferred primary language from the language picker under Company Resources in your home page, under Access Options in a group, or in the footer of every page that doesn’t support infinite scrolling, default is “English (US)”.
This update enables you to create, join, and search Yammer Groups on your Yammer Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad) mobile apps. Now you have consistent Yammer Group functionality across these devices, optimized carefully to provide a natural experience that is true to the essence of each mobile OS.
Yammer mobile apps now support 12 languages across iOS, Android and Windows Yammer Notifier. We are also taking mobile localization a step further, with inline message translation: a translate button will appear below the initial post. Clicking translate will instantly convert the entire conversation, including related responses, into the user’s default language.
When users are done viewing the new conversations in each Yammer group, a
banner appears prompting them navigate to their next group.
We're expanding anytime, anywhere productivity with Yammer on Android Wear devices. Glance at your wrist to quickly read and ‘like’ team messages and even reply using voice commands–directly on your smartwatch. It’s never been easier to stay connected with your team, on the go. Just install Yammer on your Android phone and Yammer is seamlessly extended to your Android Wear device
Yammer will be moving its video encoding services from a third party service to Azure Media Services, which provides better fidelity for large video files and stronger compliance. Using Azure Media Services, users will be able to upload a video file and post to Yammer before the video encoding begins.
All key properties from Azure Active Directory users will be one way synchronized to Yammer.