June has been another busy month of updates across our Office apps on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. We reached new milestones for Microsoft Planner and GigJam. We are also introducing Office 365 Advanced Security Management, new datacenter regions and the next cumulative feature update to Office 2016.
Office inking works on more devices and apps
In January, we added new inking capabilities to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote on Windows desktops and iPad. This was another step forward in making writing and drawing with your finger, pen or stylus more intuitive and powerful as a primary input in Office apps. This month we expanded inking on Android devices beyond OneNote to Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Office Insiders. Inking is also now available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows Phones and is coming to iPhone next month.
Inking is now available in Office on Android tablets and phones.
We’re expanding Shape Recognition to Excel on Windows PCs and Excel for iPad, and it will arrive in Excel for iPhone with next month’s inking release. Shape Recognition transforms rough hand-drawn shapes to perfect looking shapes, which in Excel can be used to easily build attractive dashboards, create custom button links and more. Shape Recognition in PowerPoint will expand beyond PCs and iPad to also be available on iPhone next month. Shape Recognition for Word is coming soon.
For the desktop, we brought the Draw tab and instant inking to Visio for subscribers on Windows PCs. You can now easily annotate and draw your feedback on complex diagrams and process flows. We’re also addressing a top OneNote for Mac user request with a phased rollout of trackpad-based inking, plus support for third-party stylus- and pen-enabled drawing tablets and displays.
New Sway capabilities for Office 365 subscribers
Sway is a digital storytelling app that makes it easy and enjoyable to create and share visually striking presentations, newsletters, personal blogs and more. Sway became generally available last August, and since then we’ve been excited to see the creativity expressed in the millions of Sways made by professionals, students, personal bloggers and more. Now, beyond the free version of Sway, Office 365 consumer, work and education subscribers can create more robust, professional Sways and control sharing more granularly with these three new features:
•Password-protect your Sways—Control who can view your Sways by adding password protection. On top of organizational-level sharing for Office 365 work and school users, anyone with an Office 365 account can add password protection for extra security and peace of mind.
•Higher content limits—Create longer, more robust Sways containing more images, videos, graphics and more. This is great for longer-form content such as company trainings, student projects and travel reports.
•Remove end-of-Sway footer—To customize the appearance of your content even more, you can now remove the informational footer at the end of your Sways.
Office 365 subscribers can now create more robust Sways and add password protection.
Stay on top of your travel and deliveries with Outlook
We’re adding new experiences in Outlook to help you stay on top of your travel plans and package deliveries. Outlook already automatically adds events from your email to your calendar. Soon you’ll see simplified summary cards for those events in your inbox and calendar, highlighting the most important details. You’ll be able to take quick action to check in for flights, change hotel reservations and track packages. And you’ll get dependable and actionable reminders to stay on top of flight check-ins. These experiences have started rolling out to Outlook for Mac and Outlook on the web. They will be coming soon to Windows, iOS and Android, as well as the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar apps. Learn more about these new travel and delivery experiences.
Microsoft Planner is generally available
Microsoft Planner has started rolling out to all eligible Office 365 commercial customers worldwide. Planner introduces a new and improved way for businesses, schools and organizations to structure teamwork and get more done. Teams can create new plans; organize, assign and collaborate on tasks; set due dates; update statuses and share files—all while visual dashboards and email notifications help with progress tracking. Read more about Planner, including customer stories. Get started with Planner in a few easy steps.
GigJam Preview is now open to all
Earlier this month, we announced the broad availability of the GigJam Preview to everyone on Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad. GigJam is for people with a co-working mindset. It empowers you to spontaneously and ephemerally involve others in your work. Summon all the live information you need from across apps, then divvy it up by circling what you want to share and crossing out what you don’t. Control what others—inside or outside your organization—can see or even co-work on with you in real-time. Visit aka.ms/gigjam and the App Store to get started, and share feedback in UserVoice. We’ll continue to update GigJam based on your input. We’re targeting general availability as part of Office 365 for later this year.
New Deferred Channel build, Office 365 regions and security capabilities for commercial customers
This month we have a number of updates for our commercial subscribers that provide more flexibility, manageability and control for their organizations:
•New Deferred Channel build—The second Office 365 Deferred Channel build is now available. This build effectively combines the February Office 2016 release with the last four months of security updates. The Deferred Channel option reduces the frequency of feature changes to the Windows desktop apps and provides IT with extra time to validate add-ins, macros, custom line-of-business applications, etc. Learn more about what’s included in this month’s release in the Office 365 Client Release Notes.
•Office 365 datacenters in Canada and South Korea—Embrace a cloud-first world on your terms. A new Office 365 datacenter region is now generally available in Canada, offering in-country data residency, failover and disaster recovery for core data at rest to customers in Canada. We will also expand the Microsoft Cloud to include a datacenter region in South Korea. These new datacenter regions join a growing list that includes Japan, Australia and India, as well as recent announcements of expansions in the UK and Germany.
•Office 365 Advanced Security Management—Earlier this month, we introduced Advanced Security Management, a new set of capabilities powered by Microsoft Cloud App Security, to provide enhanced visibility and control over your Office 365 environment. Monitor security incidents and identify high-risk and abnormal usage with threat detection. Tailor Office 365 with granular controls and security policies. Gain visibility into Office 365 and other productivity cloud service usage with an app discovery dashboard.
Watch this episode of “From Inside the Cloud” for more details:
Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office 2016 | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office on Android. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider to be the first to use the latest in Office productivity. Commercial customers on both Current Channel and Deferred Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through First Release. Thanks for your continued feedback and support!
Through our Cloud Solution Provider Portal you could sign up for a NEW Office 365 account and begin purchasing Microsoft Cloud Licensing solutions that fit your business (no minimum user counts).
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Only offered by Tier 1 CSPs
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Healthcare providers using cloud computing are saving money on overhead, providing the latest technology advances for their staff, and increasing productivity.
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3 ways Power BI can help your sales team succeed
With an ever-evolving market and a massive amount of data available, your sales team’s job of knowing their customer base isn’t easy. A multitude of information streams in every day. Sorting through data sets, spreadsheets and a dozen apps can slow them down—hindering the growth and success of your company. In fact, 90 percent of sales reps associate missed opportunities with the inability to leverage all available information.
Instead of solely focusing on dissecting the customer data in front of them, sales reps should be looking to data visualization to pull out insights not apparent at first glance. Microsoft Power BI in Office 365 can help by enabling your sales reps to collect, unify and visualize all their data in one place. It’s cloud-based and compatible with 59 different applications, which simplifies the process.
Here are three ways data visualization can transform your sales process:
1. Instant reports—Companies are always trying to find new ways to increase productivity. For a sales team, that can mean eliminating difficult and time-consuming manual reports and replacing them with a technology partner that can sort through data from myriad sources and produce actionable insights. Pipeline reports and sales trends can be generated in hours, minutes and sometimes seconds—instead of days—leaving you plenty of extra time to review and develop thoughtful strategies.
2. Data share across departments—For your sales team to succeed, your company’s other departments also need analytical success. Because Power BI supports nearly 60 applications, different departments can import the data they’ve collected to share with each other and provide deeper insight. When a sales team can see where marketing efforts have succeeded, for example, they can more effectively realign their strategies.
3. Quota management—In an ever-changing market, setting realistic quotas proves challenging, especially when your sales success depends on variables like region, month and customer segment. Power BI eliminates the difficulty by gathering past and present data—in one place—so you can set attainable goals for the future.
Your sales team already knows how to close a deal. Help them get there faster with the insights gained through data visualization.
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Greener datacenters for a brighter future: Microsoft’s commitment to renewable energy
As the world increasingly races to a future based on cloud computing, a host of new and important public issues are emerging. One of these issues involves the energy and sustainability practices of the datacenters that power the cloud. Over the past year we’ve spent considerable time focusing on our work in this area at Microsoft, and I wanted to share today where we’re heading.
When it comes to sustainability, we’ve made important progress as a company since the start of this decade, but even more important work lies ahead. Across the tech sector we need to recognize that datacenters will rank by the middle of the next decade among the large users of electrical power on the planet. We need to keep working on a sustained basis to build and operate greener datacenters that will serve the world well.
For Microsoft, this means moving beyond datacenters that are already 100 percent carbon neutral to also having those datacenters rely on a larger percentage of wind, solar and hydropower electricity over time. Today roughly 44 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters comes from these sources. Our goal is to pass the 50 percent milestone by the end of 2018, top 60 percent early in the next decade, and then to keep improving from there.
Especially given the magnitude of datacenter expansion that will continue throughout this time period, this is not a small goal. It requires that we understand where we’ve come from over the past few years and take a principled approach to our work in the future. We need to translate these principles into clear and concrete goals that we can use to hold ourselves accountable in a responsible way. And it will require work with many other important stakeholders and institutions, from environmental groups to utilities to governments themselves.
Important work to date
Our focus on sustainability is not new. We’ve been tracking and reducing emissions since 2007, and we’ve been operating our datacenters and the rest of the company at 100 percent carbon neutrality since 2012. We’ve achieved this progress by driving efficiencies, charging our business units a fee on carbon, and investing in sustainable energy projects and technologies. When we’re not able to eliminate our energy use or directly power our operations with green energy, we purchase renewable energy certificates to reduce carbon emissions. When we include the use of these certificates, 100 percent of our consumption has been powered by renewable energy since 2014.
Microsoft was in fact one of the first large enterprises to implement a global internal carbon fee model, charging each business unit a fee based on the carbon emissions of its business operations. This provides a powerful incentive to find carbon-saving alternatives and invest in carbon-reducing innovations. Thanks in part to this program, Microsoft was ranked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the second largest user of green power in the United States. Earlier this year we were honored to receive an EPA Climate Leadership Award and to be recognized by the United Nations and World Economic Forum for our carbon fee model.
As part of our commitment to carbon neutrality, we also offset the carbon impact of our air travel. We do this by investing in community projects that focus on issues such as clean cookstoves, habitat protection and restoration, and solar power and lighting – impacting more than 7 million people worldwide.
As a result of this work, we’ve reduced carbon emissions by 9.5 million metric tons, purchased 14 billion kilowatt hours of green energy, and cut energy consumption by 10 percent at our 125-building main campus in Redmond, Washington. All of this represents important progress and creates a strong foundation on which to build.
A principled approach to the future
While we’re proud of our progress, we readily recognize that even bigger steps will be needed in the future. In part this is because of the unique and increasingly important role that datacenters will play in the decades ahead.
Over the past 250 years a few select inventions have served as the fundamental catalysts for human progress. In the First Industrial Revolution that began in the latter 1700’s, steam and the steam engine played this role. A century later, the Second Industrial Revolution was based on electricity and electrical power plants, and then gasoline and the combustion engine. The Third Industrial Revolution relied on the microprocessor. The Fourth Industrial Revolution we’re now entering will feature major technology advances in physical materials, biological processes and digital technologies. But the fundamental cornerstones for all of these advances will be data – the electricity of our age – and the datacenters that will make this massive use of data possible.
Datacenters have become the engine of transformation. The good news is that public cloud datacenters operated by companies like Microsoft are more energy efficient than the private server facilities run by individual companies or governments. This is natural, given the degree to which this has become a core competency, and it reflects our focus on both world-leading R&D and large capital investments to drive datacenter energy efficiency.
But there is no room for complacency. The largest tech companies today may each consume as much electrical power as a small American state. There may come a point in just a few decades when we each may consume as much power as a mid-sized nation. This creates an obvious responsibility that we need to take seriously.
To help us live up to this responsibility, we have established three principles to guide our environmental sustainability work:
Transparency. We’re committed to the type of transparency that will hold ourselves accountable and share our track record with the public. We’ll report annually our total energy consumption and consumption across regions, the mix of sources for the power that we use, the impact of our internal carbon fee model and the investments we make. We also will be transparent about where we are investing in renewable energy certificates or international equivalents, and our investments in carbon offset projects around the world.
Help to accelerate the transition to a clean energy infrastructure. We’re committed to using more clean energy every year. We will be mindful about siting datacenters and other facilities where renewable energy sources are readily available or can be made available during ramp-up or operational phases. Wherever we operate, we will work to bring new renewable energy sources online either through investments in new projects, by engaging on enabling policy changes that will help accelerate availability of more clean energy, and by working with utilities to increase the availability of renewable energy on the grid.
Investments in research. Finally, we’re committed to cutting-edge research and development investments to advance our energy responsibilities. We will continue, in particular, to focus on R&D that will lead to further improvements in the efficiency of computing infrastructure, datacenters, servers and software performance. We will also work to advance sustainability through the products, platforms, and capabilities we use to run our business and offer our customers and partners, and we will invest in new technologies that have the capability to create more clean energy at scale.
Practical energy commitments
We recognize the importance of translating these principles into action. We’ve concluded that this requires that we make to ourselves and to the public five clear and concrete commitments:
1. Improving our energy mix. First, we need to focus on our datacenters’ sourcing of electricity. Today, although 100 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters is renewable based on a mixture of direct projects and renewable energy certificates (or the equivalent), only about 44 percent of that power is generated by wind, solar and hydropower sources. Some of that electricity comes from projects where Microsoft directly procures renewable energy, such as the Keechi wind farm in Texas and the Pilot Hill wind farm in Illinois, while the rest is supplied by wind, solar and hydropower sources on the grid. But this means that we have a large opportunity to address the remaining 56 percent either with our own direct purchases or by encouraging the addition of new wind, solar, or hydropower additions to the grid.
We recognize that both the volume and percent of energy from these renewable sources needs to be higher. As we move forward, we will continue to purchase renewable energy certificates to ensure we reduce our carbon emissions to zero. But more important, we are setting goals to grow the percent of wind, solar, and hydropower energy we purchase directly and through the grid to 50 percent by 2018, 60 percent early in the next decade, and to an ongoing and higher percentage in future years beyond that. As we make progress, we’ll report on it and share how we’re thinking about our next milestone on this path.
2. Maintaining carbon neutrality. Through investments in energy efficiency, direct purchases of renewable energy, renewable energy certificates or the equivalent, and carbon offsets, we will continue to be 100 percent carbon neutral in our operations and business air travel.
3. Retiring all green attributes from projects in which we invest. Any time we purchase green energy, we will not sell the renewable energy certificates or any other green “attributes” for others to claim.
4. Investing in new energy technologies. We will continue to invest in new energy technology, such as our biogas and fuel cell work, that have the potential to accelerate the availability of new types of energy and drive new efficiencies.
5. Supporting public policies that help enable new renewable energy sources. Finally, we will support public policies that accelerate the availability of additional renewable energy in markets where we operate. We believe this is an imperative not only for our ability to meet our own commitments, but for the energy improvements that are needed by the tech sector more broadly.
Toward a broader conversation about a sustainable future
The more we’ve focused on these issues, the more apparent it has become that the world needs an ever-broadening conversation to make sustained progress. Much has been accomplished in this regard in recent years, including a new global commitment to address these issues. But we’ll all need to work together to translate this into the types of practical steps that are needed.
We definitely learned a lot earlier this year about the types of practical steps that can make a difference. Microsoft joined an innovative public-private partnership with Dominion Power and the State of Virginia to do just that. Dominion will build a 20-megawatt solar energy plant to bring new, additional clean energy to the grid in Virginia, and Microsoft helped fund it and will claim and retire the green attributes. Partnering with utilities and governments in these types of ways can impact the grid beyond our own operational needs and can help accelerate the transition to a cleaner energy economy.
The progress that’s needed will not come easily. The issues are complex and the steps that are needed are varied. Real progress will require that groups across the non-governmental, business and governmental communities find new ways to work together.
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. In a world of more than 7 billion people, this plainly comes with a responsibility to advance sustainability in our operations, including datacenters, to deliver innovative solutions that will help address the environmental challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
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Stay on top of your travel and deliveries with Outlook
Places to go, people to see. Pack your bags.
Travel can be stressful, even when you’re planning to go somewhere for fun. Staying on top of travel plans and package deliveries can become time-consuming and a hassle.
First, Outlook began automatically adding events from your email to your calendar. Now, we have more new experiences to help you stay on top of your travel plans and package deliveries, including the ability to:
•Verify your travel reservations and package delivery details with ease using simplified summary cards in your inbox and calendar.
•Check in for flights, change hotel and rental car reservations or track packages at the touch of a button.
•Stay on top of your flights with reliable reminders.
These features are rolling out to Outlook for Mac and Outlook on the web today and will soon be coming to Windows, iOS and Android, as well as the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar apps.
Smarter email, simpler reservations
Travel itinerary emails are complicated to read because they contain so much more than just your reservation. It especially gets complicated when the itinerary includes multiple flights, hotel reservations and rental car confirmations. Outlook now displays the most important information from travel itineraries and puts them in an easily readable summary on top of your email
Quick actions at your fingertips (or a click of your mouse)
In addition to helping you see your travel plans at a glance, the summary cards provide you with quick actions for the key things you need to do. No more hunting for the check-in link in a long confirmation email or trying to find where to change your hotel reservation. It’s now just a tap or click away in the summary card above the email to go directly to the provider’s specific web page for the action.
All your travel info, automatically added to your calendar
In addition to smarter email experiences, Outlook automatically adds travel events to your calendar with the same summary cards for each step of your trip detected in the reservations. The events include everything you need to know, such as date, time, locations, confirmation number and a few other key pieces of info you might need at your fingertips. You can go to the original booking email with a single click from the calendar event in case you need to look up more details.
Travel updates and cancellations happen—for good or not so good reasons. Either way, Outlook automatically keeps the events on your calendar updated with new information from your travel provider.
Helpful check-in reminders to keep you on time
Timing is everything and it can mean the difference between getting the seat you want or settling for one you really don’t want. Not all airlines are great at notifying and reminding you when it’s time to check in for your flight. Outlook will always send you a reminder email exactly 24 hours in advance with a link to the airline’s check-in experience. What’s more, you can set an Uber ride reminder so you always get to airport on time.
And three hours before your flight takes off, we’ll remind you again, so you can plan to be at the airport on time.
And never miss package deliveries!
We know travel is not the only thing you need to keep track of, so we are also adding package tracking experiences. When you receive a shipping confirmation email, we’ll summarize the most important info in a card above the email and automatically add an event to your calendar (for non-commercial accounts) to provide quick actions.
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