There are a number of exciting new capabilities in Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In addition, we released the first cumulative feature update since the initial September release of the Office 2016 apps—otherwise known as the “Deferred Channel” build—for our commercial customers. Read on for the details.
Enhancing the Office experience on mobile devices
We’re continuing to make Office on mobile devices even easier, more natural, fluid and contextual, so you can use Office to do more, faster, with whatever device you have in your hand.
Annotate with ink on Windows tablets-Last month we discussed the evolution of the inking experience in Office. Now you can use your pen, finger and the new tools in the Draw tab to naturally write, draw and annotate in Word, Excel and PowerPoint Mobile on Windows tablets (available initially to Office Insiders).
Review and comment on documents with your pen or finger—no printing required.
Pin your docs to the Start menu on Windows phones and tablets—It’s even easier to pick up where you left off by pinning your favorite documents, spreadsheets, presentations and notes to the Windows Start menu. Get going in just a couple of taps!
Pin your documents to the Start menu to get going in one tap.
Insert images using the camera on your phone or tablet— Office apps are now integrated with your device’s built-in camera, so you can capture images, crop and insert them directly into your documents on Windows and Android phones and tablets. This is available now in PowerPoint for Office Insiders and will be coming soon for Word and Excel.
Capture and crop images directly into Office apps using the built-in camera on your Windows and Android phones and tablets.
Enabling partner storage to integrate in Office for iPhone and iPad—Last month, we announced the opportunity for all Cloud Storage Partner Program (CSPP) providers to integrate with Office for iOS. This integration is now available with Box in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Other partners are coming soon.
Box integration is now available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iPhone and iPad.
Boosting Excel with more functions, charts and sharing options
We added more ways to manipulate, visualize, and share your data with Excel. New functions make it simpler and faster to build common calculations, and improved Formula AutoComplete helps you find the function you’re looking for (click here for more information). The launch of Excel 2016 brought you new chart types, such as Treemap, Sunburst and Waterfall. Now we added the Funnel chart for Windows desktops, tablets and phones, as well as Android, enabling you to display data in progressively decreasing proportions. Learn more here.
The Funnel chart helps you display data in progressively decreasing proportions.
We’re also making it easier than ever to share what you work on in Excel with others. Excel is now more integrated into the Power BI service. This means you can now pin your workbook’s rich formatted charts and graphs directly to your Power BI dashboards and interact with them from anywhere—giving you even more options for telling your story through data. (Read more here; Power BI subscription required.)
Pin your Excel workbook’s richly formatted charts and graphs directly to your Power BI dashboards.
Outlook improves connections with Office 365 Groups and adds one-click Archive
Outlook 2016 helps you stay connected with your Office 365 Groups by providing integrated access to your team’s shared inbox, shared calendar, OneNote notebook, OneDrive and more. Now we’re making it even easier for commercial Office 365 customers to browse, join and create Office 365 Groups right from within Outlook 2016. We’re adding a new Groups section to the ribbon with easy entry points to browse and join Office 365 Groups. Suggested Groups offer one-click access to relevant Groups you might like to join, personalized based on information in the Office Graph. You can also create new Groups from the ribbon.
It’s even easier to browse, join and create relevant Office 365 Groups from within Outlook 2016.
We’re also introducing an Archive capability in Outlook 2016 that lets you quickly move messages out of your inbox and into another folder. This will allow you to triage your inbox with an experience similar to archiving in other email services like Outlook.com. Archive is rolling out to Outlook 2016, coming soon for Outlook for Mac, and available today in Outlook on iOS, Android and the web.
Archive is coming to Outlook 2016 to help you triage your inbox more quickly.
Office for Mac updates
Office has addressed key customer feedback with improvements and new features for Office for Mac.
Morph is now part of PowerPoint for Mac—Morph is one of the latest PowerPoint tools that helps you create stunning presentations quickly. The Morph transition effect helps you easily transform and move several objects at once across slides. Get started here.
The Morph transition effect is now available in PowerPoint for Mac, and the Quick Access Toolbar in the top-left is now customizable.
Customize the Quick Access Toolbar – In response to a top user request, Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Mac now allow you to customize commands in the Quick Access Toolbar. Pick your favorite commands (such as New, Print or Save) to show at all times in the top-left corner. Get started here.
Faster updates—Office for Mac users who stay current can now download just the latest incremental changes since the last release. This means faster downloads of smaller update packages, with download sizes to drop even more in the coming months.
We’ve seen over 150,000 downloads of early builds of Office for Mac apps through the Office Insiders program since initial availability last month. If you haven’t joined yet, opt in to the Office Insider build from the Microsoft Auto Update (MAU) tool on your Mac. To learn more about Office Insider on Mac, go to Office.com/Insider. Follow the updates and get Office Insider support @OfficeInsider on Twitter.
Office 2016 build now available for commercial customers in Deferred Channel
We are releasing the first Office 365 Deferred Channel build, which is effectively the September 22, 2015 release of Office 2016 with four additional months of security updates included. Deferred Channel allows commercial customers to elect to receive cumulative packages of new Office features three times a year, instead of in monthly updates. This can be helpful for taking extra time to validate add-ins, macros, custom line-of-business applications, etc. Customers on Deferred Channel can get the new build of Office 2016 in the Office 365 User Software Page as well as the Office CDN.
You can learn more about what’s new in Office 2016 and Office for Mac. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider builds to be the first to use the latest and greatest 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.
More and more companies are discovering the benefits of employing a blended IT workforce, which can benefit your company in a number of ways. Below are some reasons why modern business is turning to a blended IT workforce.
CIOs are under pressure to boost business results and develop customer-facing applications.
Hiring Managers and CIOs complain that they lack the kind of IT staff that drive business results.
27% of modern IT and business leaders would remake their company's IT departments from scratch, according to a recent IDGE survey.
Companies need to have deep expertise in all of the many technologies and tools available today.
Full-time staff may not be equipped to tackle larger technology issues.
The blended IT workforce is becoming more and more popular because it involves utilizing a mix of full-time employees, independent contractors and temporary workers. This approach has resulted in increased productivity and decreased overall IT spending.
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
Over the past 10 or so years, the mobile workforce is a term that has been heralded as the “modern” way of doing business. I always found this amusing because as long as there’s been commerce, the mobile workforce has been around in some form or another. The first example that comes to mind would probably be the door-to-door salesperson. A case can be made that the way we approach the mobile workforce has evolved though. This was typically dictated by the technology of the time.
Many of you may remember when the PalmPilot and Blackberry devices started popping up in the late 90’s. They were innovative for their day but comparing those devices to modern day smartphones makes their capabilities seem very limited. If you think about it though, it set the stage for “business productivity in real life”. No longer were you tethered to a desk or office to perform certain business tasks such as sending and receiving emails or scheduling appointments in your calendar. The technology expanded what we were capable of accomplishing outside of that setting. But it wasn’t about employees becoming more “mobile”. It was about having the ability to interact and collaborate with your colleagues and clients regardless of your location.
The performance of mobile phones in the past 5 year have surpassed these earlier devices in leaps and bounds. Tablets have expanded the mobile platform even further. As mobile devices became more prevalent and, more importantly, the preferred method of accomplishing tasks, solutions are created to accommodate this behavior.
The ability for your Sales, Marketing and Services teams to effectively communicate in real time is imperative for business today. More and more business owners are asking for ways to improve operational transparency. A great way to accomplish this is to leverage a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It’s a great platform for collaboration in the office but more importantly, it’s optimized for mobile use (smartphone, tablet, etc.) when on the go. Two examples would be a salesperson that spends most of their time out of the office talking with potential clients or your professional services team that is usually at a job site. As we discussed earlier, the mobile workforce isn’t a new concept. The most important part is how you empower your employees when they are outside of the office.
As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
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InstantOffice: The Modern, Managed Workplace
InstantOffice provides a secure, managed, all-encompassing, productivity environment at a bite-sized per user, monthly price.
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Forget the headache of managing hardware costs and let us manage your hardware from implementation to end of life. InstantOffice provides a virtual desktop to enable your people to work from anywhere on any device, without compromising the integrity of the security of your organization.
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Empower your staff from anywhere at anytime with a full breadth of cloud based productivity tools based on the software needs of individual team members.
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Help desk support, along with monitoring and management of all the infrastructure needed to keep your team productive and connected wherever their work takes them.
Per user, monthly pricing means we're ready to scale up and down with you at a moment's notice, making it easy to keep your business on track:
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With InstantOffice your workforce will always have the latest secure, compliant productivity tools and support at their fingertips. Forget the headache of managing hardware costs and software licensing and order your ready to use workplace technology solution today.
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What is a CIE?
A CIE is a hands-on introduction to Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools. A true-to-life user experience, CIE takes you through everyday business situations, such as working remotely, analyzing sales data and collaborating with coworkers, and lets you see how Microsoft products make it all easy, convenient and secure.
Note takers rejoice! Take notes directly from a #Skype4B conversation by pressing Ctrl + N to open #OneNote. Conversation participants are automatically linked in the note for your reference.
Office 365 is the Ideal Cloud Solution for the Legal Industry
The power of working ‘in the cloud’ is changing how business runs by increasing productivity, reducing costs and resource expenditure, and enhancing collaboration and teamwork. Legal firms are looking to reduce overhead, increase the billable hours, increase efficiency so that its team can spend more time meeting their clients’ needs, maximizing revenue and securing client referrals.
This is where Office 365 becomes the ideal technology partner for any firm. Cloud-powered Office 365 not only has the standard office applications everyone knows such as Word and Excel, it includes enterprise-grade services such as online storage, secure document sharing, real-time co-authoring and collaboration, along with content, search and social communication tools.
Why Office 365 for your firm?
Secured Enterprise-Grade Cloud Platform
Office 365 is compliant with all industry standards with built-in capabilities such as permissions, version control, eDiscovery and records management. Learn more about reducing costs and challenges with Office 365 eDiscovery.>>>
Ultimate Mobility – Work from Anywhere, Anytime
There is virtually no need for new hardware to maximize productivity and collaboration in your office. Get to your applications and files from anywhere on just about any device, whether Mac, PC, iPad, tablet, iPhone or Android smartphone. Better still, collaboration can take place between teammates, clients and lawyers from other firms. Criminal defense firm RTR in Miami, Florida switched from a dated workflow of fax machines, couriers and a suspect in-house server to Office 365’s powerful cloud platform – read the case study and see how their productivity jumped by 25%!
Store, Access and Share Securely from Anywhere
With 1TB of cloud storage, OneDrive becomes your online briefcase. You can store and access your matter documents online or offline with the ability share them securely with internal or external team members. Be more productive by reducing the time it takes to find documents and reduce expense by cutting back on paper needed to print version after version. Learn more about OneDrive’s capabilities.>>>
Simple Administration and Rock-Solid Security
Protect your data and control access – everything is done from a single admin portal. The built-in security of Office 365 deflects malware, spam, phishing attacks, and any other threats your team might come in contact with.
Scale at Your Own Pace
Whether you’re a large firm, a small practice or a solo practitioner, your journey into the cloud can happen at your own pace. You can choose from a full-scale deployment, hybrid system or a la carte services as needed.
A recent report from investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted that within 10 years, virtual reality hardware will be an $80 billion industry. This “base case” forecast assumed that adoption will be slow, as compared to that of smartphones and tablets, but, the report noted, “as the technology advances, price points decline, and an entire new marketplace of applications (both business and consumer) hits the market, we believe VR/AR has the potential to spawn a multi-billion dollar industry, and possibly be as game changing as the advent of the PC.”
While the conversation around VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) often focuses on gaming and video entertainment, the Goldman report theorizes that these use cases will account for less than half of the software market.
As a sometimes-gamer, it’s fun to think about strapping on a headset and diving headfirst into my favorite virtual worlds. But to limit our imagination to these applications is ignoring the unlimited potential of a hybrid reality created by augmented and virtual technology to affect every business and industry.
By combining analog, two-dimensional ways of working with new mixed–reality experiences, we can transform our ability to communicate, collaborate and create. The challenge for businesses will not be to provide a more immersive experience, but a more valuable experience.
The continued disruption of communication modalities
Message carriers were put out of work by the telegraph, the telephone was disrupted by the Internet and the good old-fashioned conference call was replaced by VoIP video conferences and screen-share-enabled unified communications systems.
Before the Internet, the historical evolution of long-distance communication technology was always toward replicating human connection in its clearest form: a face-to-face conversation. The telegraph may have missed the human voice, but its relative speed was a step toward an immediate verbal response.
Ironically enough, the first words spoken across a telephone line in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas A. Watson were, “Mr. Watson, come here — I want to see you.”
Most digital communication across the Internet lacks the verbal, facial and body language cues of a face-to-face conversation, but the reach of our messages and the media at our disposal (photos, videos, memes, gifs, articles, etc.) has made it a medium of undeniable allure and value.
Why would I call a friend on the phone and tell them about a great concert when I can post a status and let all my friends know at once, all while showing them a video of me belting out my favorite song with the performer?
That being said, to say there is sometimes communication breakdown across the Internet is an understatement that requires no further explanation for anyone that has ever read a Comments section.
Don’t get me wrong, a connected world is undoubtedly a better world. I defer to the mission statement of the Mark Zuckerberg-led Internet.org for a perfect summation:
“The internet is essential to growing the knowledge we have and sharing it with each other. And for many of us, it’s a huge part of our everyday lives. But most of the world does not have access to the internet. Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative with the goal of bringing internet access and the benefits of connectivity to the two-thirds of the world that doesn‘t have them. Imagine the difference an accurate weather report could make for a farmer planting crops, or the power of an encyclopedia for a child without textbooks. Now, imagine what they could contribute when the world can hear their voices. The more we connect, the better it gets.”
But the more we connect, the more important it is that we connect better.
Virtual, augmented and mixed experiences that exist at the intersection of our physical and digital worlds will bring the humanity of the face-to-face conversation back into the evolution of our communication.
Don’t make the mistake of equating these virtual experiences solely with sci-fi and gaming applications in which you have a surrogate and exist in a different, alternative reality system.
Mixed reality, or hybrid reality, merges real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.
I’m not talking about plugging into the Matrix as a means for improved communication. I’m talking about the ability for two people across the world to put on a headset and share any experience they choose — whether it’s to sit next to each other and physically flip through a photo album or to visit their dream destination.
Five or 10 years ago, we used text to communicate. Today, we communicate and share with photos and videos. Tomorrow, with VR, we’ll be able to communicate with experience.
What does this mean for the future of the workplace?
For one, it means improved collaboration. Mixed reality has the potential to allow a global workforce of remote teams to work together and tackle an organization’s business challenges. No matter where they are physically located, an employee can strap on their headset and noise-canceling headphones and enter a collaborative, immersive virtual environment.
Language barriers will become irrelevant as AR applications are able to accurately translate in real time. Imagine Google Translate acting in real time between two or more people.
It also means a more flexible workforce. While many employers still use inflexible models of fixed working time and location, there is evidence that employees are more productive if they have greater autonomy over where, when and how they work. Some employees prefer loud workspaces, others need silence. Some work best in the morning, others at night.
Employees also benefit from autonomy in how they work because everyone processes information differently. The classic VAK model for learning styles differentiates Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic learners.
Visual learners will appreciate the immersion and optic stimuli of mixed reality. If nothing else, auditory learners will benefit from the reduction in auditory distractions that plague the modern open office space. Kinesthetic learners that learn best by moving, touching and doing will benefit from being able to explore and collaborate in mixed reality. Conference calls that cause kinesthetics to tune out can be replaced by interactive, tactile modes of work-like whiteboarding sessions.
This greater autonomy in where, when and how employees work will serve to maximize productivity by empowering them to complete tasks in the manner that is best for them. It will allow employees to enter and work in “flow” states of complete absorption.
Named by renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow refers to “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
Video gamers should immediately recognize this mental state, as game design is particularly adept at inducing flow states where hours and hours fly by and the player is completely enveloped in the game.
Csikszentmihalyi theorizes that in order to retain flow and “stay in the zone,” the activity must reach a balance between the activity’s challenges and the participant’s abilities. If the challenge is too great, it promotes anxiety — too easy, and it promotes boredom.
The seesaw between anxiety and boredom is far too familiar to the modern workforce. Without fail, we try to get heads down on a project, and the emails, slack messages and “do you have a minute?” desk drive-bys keep us from ever being able to focus. Anxiety rears it ugly head.
We finally get the project done and while we are waiting for feedback from the client or organizational leadership, the communication channels miraculously quiet down. This is where boredom comes in.
Mixed reality is conducive to inducing flow states because of its ability to immerse employees in designed experiences that match their learning styles, preferences for stimuli and ability. But perhaps more importantly, it can serve to limit the distractions that cause anxiety and the latency that leads to boredom.
Distractions are eliminated by the worlds we are able to design that only push the messages imperative to the work we are doing.
Latency, or the time between an action and its response, is eliminated when our work is memorialized digitally as we complete it. A client or supervisor is able to join our work process digitally at any time to track and review progress.
Last, but certainly not least, mixed reality creates solutions for the universal problem of finite resources.
Aside from eliminating the monetary travel cost and the opportunity cost of time spent on red-eye flights and in jet-lagged meetings that plague global business, mixed reality reduces an even more sparse resource — real estate.
On a macro level, population is increasing and space is not. Reducing the need for large offices by creating virtual workspaces will make the office park a relic.
On a micro level, just think about your own office. There are never enough conference rooms, and never enough workspaces. That awesome whiteboard you just covered with great ideas? Your colleague is coming in 30 seconds after you finish for a client call and needs it erased.
Mixed reality workspaces that memorialize our work while we complete it will not require furious note taking and cell phone picture snapping in those 30 seconds.
In fact, those 30 seconds will not exist, because whether we are sitting at our desk, in our home or in Starbucks, accessing a perfectly designed virtual workspace is as simple as putting on your headset.
The future of communication and collaboration at work will be defined by virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences that provide economic value. To equate this collision of our physical and digital worlds solely with play and entertainment is to miss one of the great upcoming technological evolutions of our workforce.
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Pin your documents to the Start menu to get going in one tap.
Capture and crop images directly into Office apps using the built-in camera on your Windows and Android phones and tablets.
Box integration is now available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iPhone and iPad.
