Skype announced today further integrations into Microsoft’s suite of online tools, with news that access to the communications app is now available while working in Office Online and OneDrive. This is an expansion of the earlier announcement from this past October, which then introduced the ability to use Skype voice and video from Office Online and Outlook.com. Starting now, Microsoft says that you’ll be able to call or chat with friends while using its cloud storage service, OneDrive, both while viewing the contents of online folders or while editing documents directly in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
When using Skype from OneDrive, files open up in Office Online where you can begin to co-edit with Skype’s messaging interface to the right of the screen. When this feature is used, your chat history will remain connected to the document in question and will appear again each time the document is re-opened.
The larger context here is that Microsoft wants to make Skype an integral part of its productivity software, whether that’s in its desktop software, using Office online, or accessing files wherever they may be found – like OneDrive or email, for example.
The news also comes at a time when Microsoft is said to be doubling down on its investment in Skype, having mulled then passed over an $8 billion bid for Slack in favor of its own communications software. Slack has succeeded in claiming mindshare in the business world, to the tune of 2.3 million daily active users – notable growth for the startup.
However, Microsoft Office’s install base dwarfs that – the company said last fall that more than 1.2 billion people use Office, and Outlook.com has over 400 million active users. It makes sense then, that the company believes it can expand Skype’s footprint by way of this large, heavily used productivity suite.
In addition to the announcement of the OneDrive integration, Microsoft also noted that the Outlook.com Skype integration has now completed. Skype is available to all Outlook.com users as of today.
Get ready for Yammer, Microsoft announced today – and it’s not kidding. Microsoft said this afternoon it will begin to activate Yammer for all its eligible Office 365 business customers starting today, in what’s a major push for the enterprise social networking service. The rollout will come in waves, beginning with those customers who have a business subscription, and fewer than 150 licenses, including one for Yammer.
The second phase of the rollout on March 1st will expand Yammer to larger business customers, who have fewer than 5,000 licenses, but excluding those with education subscription.
The final phase, or Wave 3, starts on April 1, and will include those education subscriptions, as well as all remaining customers.
The end result of this push is that every Office 365 users with a Yammer license will be able to use the service from the Office 365 app launcher, as well as start Yammer conversations from within SharePoint, Office 365 Video Portal, and soon, Delve and Skype Broadcast as well.
Effectively, it’s elevating the product to become more of a fully-fledged member of Microsoft’s suite of tools aimed at businesses.
By being baked into Microsoft’s existing products and services, Yammer will become more useful than when it was a standalone product ahead of Microsoft’s 2012 acquisition. For example, Yammer will be hooked into the Office 365 Groups service in the first half of this year, which will let customers do things like turning Yammer conversations into Skype calls, schedule meetings with Outlook calendar, access files in OneDrive, create tasks in Planner, from within Yammer’s groups.
Yammer has fallen out of the limelight since Microsoft bought the company for $1.2 billion several years ago. Not much had been said about the service since. And it’s fair to say that many wondered if Microsoft ever intended to do much of anything with it, beyond making it available for those who wanted it.
But in recent months, Yammer has seen new competitors arise. Currently, its biggest competition is Slack, which Microsoft also recently had to acknowledge the importance of, in its own way – the company introduced Skype integration last month, that is. And Facebook has been ramping up its efforts with its business-focused Facebook for Work, which could pose a challenge to Yammer in the future when it becomes publicly available.
For now, however, Yammer still has a shot at grabbing a foothold thanks to Microsoft’s big push to its Office 365 commercial customers.
With the rollout, Yammer will be switched on by default, though Microsoft says that admins will be able to dial that back, if need be, noting that “if you are not ready to fully adopt Yammer in your organization, you can un-assign Yammer licenses for those who should not access Yammer from Office 365.”
Well, seems like it would just be easier to go live on Yammer than have to go around turning it off for people, doesn’t it?
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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.
Skype Meeting Broadcast is a new component of Skype for Business. As part of Office 365 and Skype for Business Online, Skype Meeting Broadcast lets you produce, host, and broadcast meetings to large online audiences.
How Skype Meeting Broadcast works
You can schedule a Skype Meeting Broadcast for up to 10,000 attendees. You use the Skype Meeting Broadcast scheduling and management portal to schedule a meeting.
You use the familiar meeting experience within Skype for Business to produce a professional, engaging event for their audience. And, attendees can join from anywhere on any device, and engage in the meeting.
Skype Meeting Broadcast roles
There are several roles required for producing a Skype Meeting Broadcast. These include:
Organizer. Creates the meeting request and invites attendees. Reviews meeting reports.
Producer. Manages the meeting sources (live presentations, dial-in presentations, audio, video, and PowerPoint decks), records the event, and posts the recording to Office 365 Video.
Note: Using an embedded video in a PowerPoint presentation is currently not supported in Skype Meeting Broadcast.
Event team member. Participates in the meeting by presenting live or dialing in from a remote location.
Attendee. Watches the event online.
System requirements
System requirements for a Skype Meeting Broadcast
Browser (attendees) - Internet Explorer 11, Chrome, Firefox, OSX Safari, iOS 8 or later, Android (KitKat)
Client - Skype for Business client for Windows (producer, presenter)
For Skype for Business 2015 clients, you must have the September Update, build 15.0.4747 or later
For Skype for Business 2016 clients, you must be using Click-to-Run, build 16.0.4227 or later. (MSI installations only support the presenter role. Producers can join through a different client, as explained in this knowledge base article.
Lync for Mac 2011 (presenter only). See this knowledge base article for more information.
Find your client version information in Skype for Business by clicking Help > About Skype for Business.
Users - On-premises and online
License - You will need one of the following licenses:
Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 (or 3).
Office 365 Business Premium
Enterprise E1, E3, E4 or E5 - which contains the Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 license.
Authentication - On-premises customers must have established an online tenant. You should configure directory sync to make user accounts and DL memberships available to the Skype for Business Azure Active Directory in order to enable user authentication and meeting authorization using group membership.
Skype Meeting Broadcast producers cannot be enabled for modern authentication.
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New Office 365 profiles help people get to know their coworkers
Microsoft has unveiled a new profile page for Office 365 users aimed at making it easier to collaborate at work.
The profile pages, most accessible through Microsoft's Delve product, show a large photo of the worker, along with the files shared between that person and whoever is viewing their profile. The new feature, announced Tuesday, is a way for people to get a sense of their coworkers' responsibilities, even if they don't work in the same office.
An Office 365 user's profile also shows who they work with inside an organization, allowing the viewer to get a sense for how someone else fits into the business.
The new experience replaces a somewhat unwieldy two-page profile that Microsoft currently uses in Delve. Right now, users can see the files that someone else shares with them when they open up that person's profile, but have to switch to a different tab to get contact information.
With the new profile Microsoft is rolling out, the information will be on the same page, along with a button that lets users Skype their coworkers.
When people look at their own profile, they'll see the documents they've worked on recently.
Companies that have opted to get Microsoft's First Release updates for Office 365 will get the new profiles first over the next several weeks, and everyone else can expect to see the pages by the second quarter of this year.
It's all part of Microsoft's continued emphasis on helping people collaborate at work. Office 365 is focused on not only providing standby tools like Word and Excel, but also on new collaboration services that tie them together through features like real-time co-authoring.
As Microsoft faces increased competition with Google, Facebook, Slack and other companies for the workplace productivity business, these sorts of features are increasingly important.
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Introducing boards in Office Delve—a new way to organize and share work
As Office Delve continues to roll out to Office 365 business customers, we love hearing about how people are using this new, innovative experience to discover and explore content that’s relevant to the work they and their teams are doing. Using Office Graph, an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to content and interactions occurring in Office 365, Delve helps you get back to pertinent documents, discover relevant content that has been shared with you, and search for information related to subjects you care about.
Now, we are taking the next step by making it easier to organize all the valuable content that gets surfaced in Delve. We are excited to introduce a new feature in Delve called boards that help you organize content, so it’s readily accessible and easy to share with others.
In Delve, you can use boards to group together and share related documents. For example, you can create a board to collect and organize all documents related to a specific project your team is working on. Everyone in your organization can view and contribute to an existing board or create a board—but they can only see and open documents that they have permission to access.
Take a look at this video to learn how boards helps people organize content from across Office 365:
Add to your boards, discover new ones
When working with others, information tends to get scattered. And that’s OK. Organizing around ideas and topics with boards is easy and powerful. Just click + Add to board, enter a board name or pick from a list of existing boards.
Any card you see in Delve can be added to a board—documents, sites, videos and more.
Boards allow you to discover content related to topics and projects and make it easy to return to the content that matters most to you. From within Delve, you can search for a board, follow it to stay informed and discover other boards—all without having to know or remember where individual pieces of content live.
Your boards are always at hand. Add to your boards, discover new ones or follow them to stay up-to-date.
Collaborative, open gathering of ideas
Every board is a unique collection of ideas and information that others can discover and contribute to. Just as any view within Delve, boards only surface the content you have permissions to see.
Collaborating gets easier too. You simply share the URL of a board with your team, or click Send a link directly from the board, which remains fresh as your team works on and updates those documents over time.
Looking ahead
The journey with boards starts with Delve to help you stay organized as you collaborate on documents and discover new content. Going forward, the “Add to board” functionality will serve as a basis for new content curation and knowledge management scenarios within Office 365, in line with our vision for Next Gen Portals recently outlined with the introduction of Office 365 Video.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Matter Center Helps Legal Firms Do Better Business
As you might imagine, Microsoft employs one of the largest corporate legal teams in the world. Having access to Microsoft’s development team, the legal team has used tools such as Office 365 extensively and has benefited from customization of those tools to enhance their utility in a legal environment. If you’re legal professional you’re probably asking yourself how this helps you. Well the great news is that Microsoft is now making these enhancements more broadly available to their legal professional customers through an add-in called Matter Center.
By working with a Microsoft partner, like Managed Solutions, your firm will be able to enjoy the enhancements made possible through the work of Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs (LCA) team. Once installed, Matter Center allows your team to create or view legal matters right from Outlook; tie Word, Excel, OneNote and other files to those matters; and securely collaborate with other legal professionals inside or outside your organization.
By working with nearly 200 law firms and partners in the legal industry, the LCA team was able to solicit feedback and input that went into building a world-class solution for the legal profession. Learn more about the development of Matter Center by the LCA team in this short video.
Here’s a quick rundown of the key benefits that will make Matter Center a game-changer for your legal practice:
Complete integration with Office 365 – Create and view right from Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote and all the tools your team already has experience with.
Seamless mobile experience – Access Office 365 and Matter Center across all devices – PCs, Macs, tables and phones whether using Windows, Apple or Android OS.
Powerful and intuitive search and data visualization – You can easily and quickly search, find and retrieve matters and related documents across all cases.
Pinning and tagging – Track and pin frequently used matters and documents for easy access.
Learn more about boosting productivity for your office, both your team of legal professionals and for any IT professionals you employ or contract, with Office 365 and Matter Center.
Running Matter Center in the cloud will require Office 365 and Azure subscriptions. Matter Center has been designed to support multiple deployment configurations as well, whether on-premises or hybrid cloud. Managed Solutions can help your firm implement Office 365 and Matter Center quickly and cost-effectively. You can scale up and out at a pace that makes sense for your practice.
Getting work done often requires working not only within the company boundaries but also working beyond the firewall with business contacts who do not fall within your corporate domain. We’ve been hard at work to enhance the external sharing user experience so that sharing is more and more friction free, for both users and admins.
As such, we’ve made the following improvements to SharePoint Online and Office 365:
Get a link: create anonymous Guest Links in one click within
the Office 365 user interface.
Members can share: enable site members to invite external users, not
just the site collection owner.
All invitees on same
email To line: start a collaborative email with *everyone* when sharing a site or document.
These new external sharing updates are rolling out live worldwide right now.
Let’s dive into the details.
Get a link
It’s now possible, in one click, to generate a Guest Link (either a View Only or Edit anonymous link to a document) directly from your SkyDrive Pro and your SharePoint Online document libraries’ user interface. You click, copy and paste, and go. And when you no longer want the Guest Link to be active, you can disable it at any time from the document’s same Share dialog box.
The External Sharing dialog box now has a merged Invite people tab, a Get a link tab and a Shared with tab, so all the ways to share are in one place.
Members can share
Much of SharePoint Online and Office 365 is about administration delegation: empowering others to make the right business decisions, paired with giving them the right levels of control. Site collection admins can now allow members of the site to send a sharing invitation-both internal and external-without requiring the site collection admin to first approve/reject the invitation request. This removes a common barrier to sharing while enabling finer grain control per your preferred governance and productivity plans.
We’ve made it easier to notify all recipients at the same time, on the same email. Now, when you share with multiple people via the sharing dialog box in SharePoint Online, a single email message is sent to everyone you shared with-with you included on the Cc line-rather than sending a separate email to each recipient. Note: external email addresses typed in the people picker will still send individual external invitations, because external invitees need unique invitation links that properly route them through the external sharing process associated with Microsoft Account.
From the Share dialog box in SharePoint Online, you can share with multiple recipients with a single email message. Email recipients see all invitees on the To line.
Start sharing
Whether you’re collaborating with employees, customers, partners or suppliers, we hope the new set of external sharing enhancements helps you work more efficiently, delegate effectively, and collaborate.
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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.
