Enhancing information rights management in Word, Excel and PowerPoint mobile apps

Finding the balance between protection and productivity is critical to any organization. With the increased distribution of data, organizations need sensitive data to be born protected. This is why we invest in Azure Rights Management to help you protect information in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world.

Information rights management (IRM) is now supported everywhere in Office Mobile as we are pleased to announce that we are extending Azure Rights Management to the Word, Excel and PowerPoint mobile apps for Android. You are now able to open, read and review rights-protected emails and Office documents on any device—whether it runs Windows, Mac, iOS or Android.

Other upcoming enhancements

We are hard at work building several other new features and enhancements to make the IRM experience even better for Office 365 subscribers in future updates.

These planned updates include:

• Document tracking and revocation with Azure Rights Management Premium—Azure Rights Management Premium users will be able to track usage of and revoke access to documents that were protected with rights management services (RMS). We’ll deliver this first for Office for Windows, followed by Office for Mac and Office Mobile for iOS.

• Single sign-on and multiple accounts in Office 2016 for Mac—We are making changes to support single sign-on in Office 2016 for Mac, which means you won’t need to sign in again to view an RMS-protected document if you’re already signed in. This will work for any Office 365 account that you’re signed in to—even if you have more than one account. We’re also removing the limitation where you have to view an RMS-protected document first before you are able to protect new documents with RMS.

• Improved user experience in Office 2016 for Windows—We’re making targeted improvements to our error-handling and authentication mechanisms to make reading and authoring RMS-protected documents and emails more seamless. If you are unable to read RMS-protected content because, for example, you aren’t signed in to Office or you don’t have permission to read the content with any of your signed-in accounts, we will clearly explain why and offer options to resolve the issue.

• Open legacy file formats—The Office apps for Windows Universal and Android will support opening RMS-protected documents that were saved in legacy formats, like .xls, .doc, and .ppt. Office apps for iPhone and iPad already support this.

Visit the Azure Rights Management website and read the product documentation to learn more. If you already use Azure Rights Management, make sure you update your Android devices with the latest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint today so you get all the new functionality we have released.

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The future of mobile app development

By Nat Friedman as written on blogs.microsoft.com

It is incredible how much has happened since Xamarin joined Microsoft just over a month ago, starting with Scott Guthrie’s Build 2016 announcements that Xamarin is now part of all editions of Visual Studio at no additional charge — from Community to Enterprise — and our plans to open source the Xamarin SDK. It is a dream come true for us to be able to put the power of Xamarin into the hands of all developers.

In just the first two weeks since Build alone, we helped nearly 3.5 times more developers get started building great apps with Xamarin than ever in our history as a company.

Now we are at Xamarin Evolve 2016, the world’s largest cross-platform mobile development conference, in Orlando. This morning we open sourced the Xamarin SDK and launched new ways to make Visual Studio the most complete mobile development environment. We also launched new ways to build native, cross-platform apps faster than ever using our popular cross-platform UI framework, Xamarin.Forms.

This is our third Evolve conference, but the first time we are showing the comprehensive developer experience that only Microsoft and Xamarin together can deliver.

Open source Xamarin: Ready for you!

We have officially open sourced and contributed to the .NET Foundation the Xamarin SDK for Android, iOS and Mac under the same MIT license used for the Mono project. This includes native API bindings for iOS, Android and Mac, the command-line tools necessary to build for these platforms, and Xamarin.Forms, our popular cross-platform UI framework.

Watching Xamarin co-founder and open source pioneer Miguel de Icaza announce this onstage was a proud moment for all of us. The future of native cross-platform mobile development is now in the hands of every developer. We look forward to seeing your contributions; go to open.xamarin.com to get involved.

Visual Studio: Your complete mobile development environment

Today we launched new ways to connect Visual Studio to your Mac to make it even easier for C# developers to create native iOS apps, and new ways to auto-generate mobile app test scripts in Visual Studio.

Our iOS Simulator remoting lets you simulate and interact with your iOS apps in Visual Studio — even supporting multi-touch interactions on Windows machines with capable touch screens. We also unveiled our iOS USB remoting, which makes it possible to deploy and debug apps from Visual Studio to an iPad or iPhone plugged into your Windows PC.

In addition, our Test Recorder Visual Studio Plugin now brings Test Recorder’s ability to generate test scripts to Visual Studio users. Simply interact with your app on device or in the simulator and Test Recorder automatically generates scripts that can be run on thousands of devices with Xamarin Test Cloud’s automated app testing.

Xamarin.Forms: Faster and easier mobile app development

We launched Xamarin.Forms a few years ago to help developers build mobile apps faster, maximizing UI code-sharing while still delivering fully native experiences.

Today, we showed three key new features that will be coming to Xamarin.Forms. Data Pages and Themes make it easy to connect apps to common entities and data sources, and create beautiful, native user interfaces with just a few lines of code. The Forms Previewer makes it easy to iterate on your Xamarin.Forms UI designs by providing real-time previewing of Xamarin.Forms user interfaces composed in XAML.

The new, mobile-optimized development lifecycle

We were able to show today the most streamlined mobile lifecycle available anywhere through our combined product lineup, including integrations between Visual Studio Team Services, HockeyApp and Xamarin Test Cloud. Through our combined mobile lifecycle solution, you now have a complete solution to build great mobile apps at scale, tackling the unique challenges of mobile DevOps.

We’ve heard great enthusiasm from our customers. Bryan Hooper, senior director enterprise architecture at Bloomin’ Brands, talked about how they have “paired Xamarin with Microsoft’s Azure technology, and we’re really excited about the new partnership between the two organizations.” Darrell Thompson, vice president of information system services at Coca-Cola Consolidated, says that “Xamarin and Microsoft have been excellent partners and brought our mobile development to a whole new level.”

If we’re able to deliver all of this for you in just six weeks, imagine what you’ll be able to do in six months with Xamarin and Microsoft!