Last week, Outlook for Mac released two highly requested features designed to help you get more done, quickly. First, we added support for the Touch Bar for MacBook Pro users. Through the Touch Bar, we intelligently put the most common inbox, formatting and view commands at your fingertips—all based on what you’re doing in Outlook.
Additionally, we’re bringing your favorite apps to your inbox with add-ins for Outlook for Mac. Whether it’s translating emails on the fly or updating your notes or project board, you will now be able to accomplish all this and more right from your inbox. These add-ins are also available across Outlook for Windows, iOS and the web, so your favorite apps are always there to help you accomplish tasks quickly.
Here’s a look at what’s new!
Intuitive commands at your fingertips with Touch Bar support in Outlook for Mac
The Touch Bar in Outlook intelligently provides quick access to the most commonly used commands as you work on email and manage your calendar. When composing a new mail or meeting request, the Touch Bar displays the common formatting options. When viewing your calendar, you can switch between different views. And when viewing the reminders window, you can join an online meeting with one tap on the Touch Bar.
Support for Touch Bar in Outlook for Mac is available to all Office 365 subscribers, as well as all Office 2016 for Mac customers.
Accomplish tasks quickly with new add-ins
Add-ins bring your favorite apps right inside Outlook, so you can accomplish tasks quickly without needing to switch back and forth between email and other apps. Last year, we announced the rollout of add-ins to Outlook 2016 for Mac in Office Insider. We are now making add-ins available to all Outlook 2016 for Mac customers who have Exchange 2013 Service Pack 1 or higher, or Office 365 or Outlook.com mailboxes. Use these add-ins to translate emails on the fly, edit a record in your CRM system, update your notes or project board, or set up a meeting over coffee and more—all without leaving Outlook. Outlook for Mac customers can take advantage of all Outlook add-ins available in the Office store, including:
Get business intelligence and track emails quickly with the Dynamics 365 add-in. Use the Nimble add-in to get real-time insights about your Outlook contacts.
Add email reminders and schedule emails with the Boomerang add-in for Outlook.
Say thanks to your friends and co-workers by giving them the gift of Starbucks through the Starbucks for Outlookadd-in.
Make emails more fun and visually expressive with GIPHY, when words aren’t enough.
To start using add-ins, just click the Store icon on the Outlook ribbon to open the Office Store. Next, search for the add-in you are looking for and turn its toggle to On. You will then see the add-in command appear in your inbox and can start using it. You just need to install add-ins once and they will be available for use across Outlook on the web, Windows, Mac and iOS.
The Office Store is introducing Power BI custom visuals to download and use in Power BI service reports and Power BI Desktop. Users will be able to easily discover and quickly download BI visualizations that interact with data to find key insights and drive important business decisions. Power BI custom visuals provide compelling data visualizations created by members of the community and by Microsoft. They behave just like the native rich visualizations already included with Power BI but can also be filtered, highlighted, edited and shared.
Here are some examples:
Word Cloud—Visualize the text in your data in a beautiful way.
SandDance—See all your data as grains of sand with animated transitions between views to help you explore, understand and communicate insights in your data.
Correlation plot—An advanced analytics visual based on R script to highlight correlations in your data.
Check Power BI custom visuals out for yourself—get started today!
New reasons to make Microsoft Bookings the go-to scheduling software for your business
Last year, we released Microsoft Bookings to customers in the U.S. and Canada, introducing an easy way for small businesses to schedule and manage appointments with their customers. Today, we are pleased to announce that we’re beginning to roll out the service to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers worldwide. Based on your feedback, we are bringing several new features to Bookings:
Add your Office 365 calendar to Bookings—Connect your Office 365 calendar to Bookings, so that the times you are busy will automatically be blocked in your public Booking page.
Add buffer time before and after your appointments—Do you need prep time before or after an appointment? Adding buffer time to a service automatically blocks that time in your Booking page too.
Bookings apps for your iOS and Android phone—Now you can book an appointment, contact a customer or check a staff member’s appointments while away from the office.
Customize your Booking page—We added more color customization options, so you can better personalize your Booking page.
These new capabilities will start showing up automatically in Bookings in the coming weeks. Let’s take a detailed look at what’s new.
Add your Office 365 calendar to Bookings
One of the top pieces of feedback we’ve heard is that you want to be able to add events from your Office 365 calendar to Bookings. So, we added integration between these calendars to help you avoid booking customer meetings during the time you’ve set aside for personal appointments, staff and partner meetings or other aspects of running your business.
To add Office 365 calendars to Bookings, click the Staff tab on the left navigation panel. On the Staff details page, select the Events on Office 365 calendar affect availability checkbox.
Once you activate this option, the system automatically blocks busy times on the Bookings calendar and on the self-service Booking page your customers see, so that you won’t get double-booked. Similarly, so your staff doesn’t get double-booked, you can also add their Office 365 calendars.
Add buffer time between appointments
Some services can be provided through back-to-back appointments. But another top piece of feedback you gave us was that many of your services require travel, prep and/or set-up time beforehand, and clean-up and travel time once the service was delivered. For customers with these needs, we added buffer times to give you more options to customize the services you deliver.
To add buffer times, click the Services tab in the left navigation column and either edit a current service or create a new one. Turn on the toggle below the Buffer time your customers can’t book and you will get buffer time selections that can be applied before and after the service appointment. These are times your customers can’t book an appointment with you before and after an appointment.
Apps for iOS and Android
We know it’s essential for you to keep up with your business while you are away from a desk, so we built mobile apps that let you manage your bookings and staff, or access your customer list while you’re on the go.
After you download the Bookings app on iOS and Android, you can use your phone to:
View and manage your Bookings calendar.
Create and edit bookings.
See real-time availability and whereabouts of your staff.
Respond to customers with bookings quickly and easily.
Get directions to your next booking.
Access your customer list.
Customize your Booking page
Your Booking page should look and feel like an extension of your business, and it needs to positively reflect your brand.
To help you achieve this, we added options to customize it. For example, you can choose your main color for your Booking page from a color palette, and choose whether you’d like to show your business logo.
To customize your page, click Booking page in the left navigation list and select the color you want. If you don’t want your logo to be displayed, uncheck the Display your business logo on your booking page checkbox. Once you are done, simply click Save and publish.
How to get started with Bookings
Bookings is included in all Office 365 Business Premium subscriptions, and getting started is easy. To simplify the work of customer scheduling for your business, just sign in to Office 365 and click the Bookings tile on the App Launcher. If you don’t see the Bookings tile, we may still be in the process of rolling out the service in your region—so check back a bit later. If you need more help, the article “Say hello to Microsoft Bookings” provides a quick overview of how to use Bookings.
Bookings is designed to delight your customers, simplify scheduling and free time for you to be on top of your business wherever you are. Your feedback has been extremely useful; please keep it coming by clicking the feedback links found on the Bookings home page.
In the modern workplace, an organization’s most important assets are its people. The knowledge, skills and expertise found throughout your carefully recruited teams are tantamount to individual and collective success.
All too often, however, this specialized knowledge is obfuscated by physical and organizational barriers. People know what information they need, but are unable to track down the answers they’re looking for. The popular adage “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” reminds us that the best-connected employees get the most done.
That’s where Office 365 can help. As Microsoft works to reinvent productivity for the modern workplace, our goal is to put people at the center of the connected suite experience. When you’re able to tap into the hidden knowledge throughout your organization and leverage your talent pool, you’re able to achieve more.
Starting today, we’re rolling out an extended profile card experience across Office 365 to enhance the way you collaborate with colleagues and external contacts. We’ve made several big improvements that improve on the existing experience across three pillars to create an intelligent, holistic and integrated profile experience.
Intelligent
Traditionally, employees looking for specific information had to manually connect the dots between people and units of knowledge. By tapping into the Office 365 graph and machine learning, the new Office 365 profile card can identify information relevant to you based on the person you’re looking up. This can help you quickly look up documents that have been shared with you, independent of how they were sent.
Holistic
We’re also working to help employees connect with people across the organization that they don’t traditionally interact with. The new Organization view shows a complete picture of the highlighted user’s position in the company, including their direct reports and co-workers. Office 365 will also surface other people relevant to the person you are looking up based on their working habits and communication.
Integrated
We’re integrating the new profile card everywhere you see a person’s name—but it’s important that the experience doesn’t interrupt your productivity. We’ve made it easy for users to achieve these tasks with as little interruption to their workflow as possible. Hovering over a name provides a quick look at their most important attributes, such as contact details, recent documents and manager. More details are only a click away with the extended flex pane that displays additional information without navigating from the page.
Over the next few weeks, the new profile card experience will begin rolling out in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online for Office 365 customers enrolled in first release. We’ll continue to roll out this service for all Office 365 users over the next few months.
Collaborate on Files From Anywhere
As written on products.office.com
Store, sync, and share files simply
Always have the latest version of files
Having your files stored online makes it easy to store, organize, and share them, so you can work on documents with teammates, share reports with business partners, or connect with customers. Your files are always up to date, so everyone has access to the latest version.
Get room for all your files
With 1 TB of personal document storage, you can store all your files online and access them anywhere from your PC/Mac or your iOS, Android™, or Windows device.
Share with anyone you choose
You can share files inside and outside your company. You always control access.
Share internally and externally
You control access to files
In our networked world, file sharing isn’t restricted to inside the office. But inside or out, you control who sees and edits each file. And you can create, edit, and review with others to avoid back-and-forth hassles and save time in the process.
Work together on the same file
No more emailing documents around and losing track of the latest version. Easily add, respond to, and track comments and status updates on one version of the document.
The power of social networking
Social networking enhances collaboration and sparks innovation. Get updates on documents and sites delivered automatically.
Keep your projects coordinated
Help teams stay in sync
Keep everyone up to date and working together as a team. Office 365 gives you many different ways to help ensure that everyone can find exactly the files they need fast and that all team members are moving forward together.
Build a team library
Keep project emails and shared documents together in one place with a project-specific mailbox only team members can access, so no time is wasted searching for what you need.
Create a team site
You control access to your team site. And with automatic policies, rights protection, and archiving, you can safeguard your team assets.
From pit stop to checkered flag—
NASCAR drives productivity through cloud-based IT innovation
In the midst of the deafening noise and speed of a NASCAR race, even mundane tasks like changing a tire become heroic. It’s the same with the technology we employ; simple tasks like collaborating on documents and sharing files support the essential teamwork that is at the core of the NASCAR enterprise. When the Technology Integration and Development team at NASCAR chose Microsoft Office 365, we knew we had found a platform that would simplify how we produce the exciting sporting events that are the NASCAR legacy. Today, we are about 25 percent migrated to Office 365, including SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
To say our business is mobile is an understatement; NASCAR holds 38 events a year all over the country. This means setting up the compound infrastructure, arranging catering and coordinating travel for our employees. For 10 months of the year, we are a traveling circus. It’s a huge undertaking, and it’s crucial that all the aspects of our operation run smoothly. In the past, the logistics of coordinating these events came down to printing out huge runbooks and relying on email to make sure everyone had the correct information before race day. That has fundamentally changed with the introduction of Office 365 and, specifically, SharePoint Online collaboration team sites. Using SharePoint Online, we created a brand-new intranet called Inside Track that employees use to collaborate simultaneously on documents, update spreadsheets in real-time and securely access the information they need on the road or from the track. Productivity is at a peak level in the company, and we’re setting up new races with maximum efficiency.
The company is also piloting Microsoft Teams to take chat-based teamwork to the next level. We have lofty expectations that Microsoft Teams can handle the extremely fast-paced collaboration that must happen trackside and in the pit. For example, we are interested to see if we can use Microsoft Teams to ascertain if a penalty has been handed out, rather than hopping on a radio channel or the phone.
Our fast-paced industry is unique, but NASCAR’s security concerns are much like those of any large enterprise. After doing our due diligence, we felt confident that the Microsoft cloud-based products were among the best in their class when it came to cloud security. We are confident that with Office 365 and a custom app built in PowerApps, we can easily manage data access for all of our employees and hundreds of freelance contractors to ensure everyone gets the information they need to get their work done.
The Technology Integration and Development team at NASCAR was born out of a single question: How do we empower the business to get more done? We chose Office 365, with its mobile-first, cloud-first benefits, to give our employees the best tools for working at the office or at the track. Putting a race together requires the same coordinated teamwork you see in the pit, and with Office 365 and SharePoint Online, we’re driving productivity into a new era of time- and cost-savings. That’s great news for NASCAR
The Mediterranean Shipping Company has been under the same family leadership since its inception 43 years ago, and while the company now manages its fleet of 480 vessels from offices in 150 countries, it’s fair to say that its caring, corporate culture is as strong today as it ever was. But while we all feel connected to a large corporate family, unfortunately, our IT systems did not support that connectivity, or the global communications that we needed to compete in today’s digital economy.
Container shipping has evolved over the years to become a commodity-based business. Today, we are facing an era of shrinking profit margins and a growing pressure on the revenue side. Yet we were able to ensure that IT played its part in minimizing operational expenses, while improving our business services to employees. That’s because Office 365 delivers a cost-effective, cloud-based solution to bring everybody up to the same level of mobility and productivity across our global operations.
When I became CTO in 2005, we wanted to replace the disparate business productivity solutions we had running in 480 offices around the world with a single digital workplace for everyone. After evaluating other web-based solutions, including Google Apps for Business (now G Suite) and Amazon Web Services, we chose Office 365 cloud-based communication and collaboration services to empower all employees with the same leading-edge, yet familiar business tools. Security also played into this decision: we had various security solutions in place across our global offices, and it took a tremendous effort to ensure that everyone achieved an acceptable standard of security practices. The beauty of Office 365 is that we are deploying Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection as a single security control for all our offices. This service addresses the latest attacks that can invade a network through email attachments or embedded links. In the end, we benefit from the Office 365 constant update model and uniformity of service, plus the added bonus that Microsoft takes care of running the service in the cloud on dedicated hardware.
Today, we use Office 365 to boost mobility and productivity to differentiate our personal service from that of our competitors. The faster we share information and collaborate on behalf of our customers, the more responsive our service. This was a significant challenge before, with so many different solutions in place around the world. Now our employees access their files anywhere from online storage, IM colleagues for quick answers to questions, or spontaneously invite their team members to a video conference. When we have the same easy connectivity across the hall, or around the world, we can make good on our promise to provide global service with local knowledge. And now that regional managers are benefitting from easy-to-use data analytics and dashboard tools to decide what’s best for their customers, we can provide more informed local service.
Mobility is especially important to enable the flexible service our customers have come to expect. Today, our employees are no longer bound to a specific device. Now that people can be more productive on their own terms, we expect efficient turnaround of information among colleagues and with our customers.
Microsoft Consulting Services was invaluable in the deployment of Office 365—it complemented our small, yet nimble IT team and helped us transform how the company works on a daily basis. Despite the variety of legacy environments in place across our offices, we achieved the migration in just nine months. And with our recent subscription to add 17,000 seats of Office 365 E5, we expect a similar rapid adoption of the latest advances in cloud telephony and Office Delve, which delivers personalized content from all your Office 365 apps. At the end of the day, providing a rewarding workplace with a state-of-the-art business productivity platform reaffirms our corporate culture of encouraging long-term employees in a supportive environment—and also gives us a competitive edge where we can work leaner and more efficiently to preserve our profit margins. That’s great business value!
Craft Brewer Reduces Costs and Increases Availability with Hosted Messaging Solution
New Belgium Brewing is the third-largest craft brewery in the United States. Founded in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1991, the brewery produces 29 varieties of beer and distributes across 26 states. About 1/3 of the company’s nearly 400 employees work at remote locations, so New Belgium deployed a Microsoft Unified Communications solution to ensure that employees have the latest capabilities without sacrificing reliable, available service.
Situation
New Belgium Brewing was founded in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1991 by husband and wife team Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan after Lebesch traveled through Belgium on a brewery tour and came home inspired. He named the company’s flagship beer, Fat Tire, for the fat tires on the mountain bike he rode to tour the European villages that inspired him to begin brewing beer. Employee owned, New Belgium Brewing emphasizes ecologically friendly practices. Today it is the third-largest craft brewer in the United States. New Belgium produces 29 varieties and more than half a million barrels of beer per year, which is distributed across 26 states.
Of its 385 employees, about one-third work at locations across the United States as sales people, field quality specialists, and event coordinators. New Belgium relies heavily on a Microsoft unified communications solution to keep its workforce connected. For messaging, it recently upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on-premises, and it uses a third-party product for spam filtering. It also deployed Exchange Unified Messaging so that employees can receive and manage both voice mail and e-mail messages in a unified inbox.
New Belgium also recently upgraded its collaboration and document management solution to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Its company intranet, known as “the Mothernet,” is built on SharePoint Server technology. Through the Mothernet, employees can access company information, project sites, cross-team sites, document libraries, and company wikis. They can also collaborate on projects and documents in real time.
For communications, New Belgium plans to upgrade to Microsoft Lync Server 2010, which provides enhanced versions of the communications capabilities provided by Office Communications Server 2007 R2—presence, instant messaging, robust conferencing, and enterprise voice—in addition to improvements in topology, deployment, and management tools. It also plans to use Lync enterprise voice as its primary voice solution. “We have used some version of Microsoft enterprise voice since Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007,” says Travis Morrison, Senior Systems Administrator at New Belgium Brewing. “We had it connected to our Cisco Call Manager. With Lync Server, we plan to retire our private-branch exchange telephony system and use Lync enterprise voice.”
Although New Belgium was happy with the way its unified communications solution helped to keep employees connected to each other, it still saw room for improvement in the areas of availability, storage, and reliability for its messaging solution. Some employees who work in production do not have dedicated computers to access email; New Belgium wanted to provide an easier way for them to manage email. Employees who use email on a daily basis have mailboxes with a size limit of about 7 gigabytes (GB), and as the company grows, its messaging solution requires more storage on its storage area network (SAN). Finally, New Belgium wanted to ensure that its remote employees could always access email, even in the event that the corporate servers were unavailable.
Solution
To complement its current on-premises messaging solution, New Belgium decided to consider a cloud-based email service. It joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program to evaluate Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 combines the familiar Office desktop with the next generation of cloud-based communication and collaboration services and includes Microsoft Exchange Online, which is based on Exchange Server 2010 technology. New Belgium wanted to understand how Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2010 would work together in its environment to help it reduce administration and increase availability for its employees. “We feel very comfortable moving our messaging solution to the cloud with Microsoft, because we feel like it is a very mature, stable service with all the latest capabilities,” says Morrison.
With Exchange Online, New Belgium can ensure that remote employees have access to their email as long as they have access to a computer or mobile device with an Internet connection, because Microsoft guarantees 99.9 percent uptime. “A third of our workforce is remote, so fault tolerance and high availability are things we have been expanding. As a smaller IT shop, we have looked for ways to facilitate that,” says Morrison.
With a hybrid solution, New Belgium can move mailboxes to Exchange Online at its own pace. It will begin by provisioning mailbox accounts for production workers in the cloud. New Belgium used Office 365 Directory Sync to maintain user and group configuration information between its on-premises environment and Office 365. The brewery also deployed Active Directory Federation Services to enable single sign-on, so that employees could maintain a single set of credentials. The IT staff can perform administrative tasks for both the online and on-premises environment through the Exchange Management Console. “Email is not where my time as an administrator is best spent,” explains Morrison. “With Office 365 and Exchange Server 2010, I can manage on-premises and off-premises mailboxes through a single console, which is very efficient.”
For employees without a dedicated computer, New Belgium will create kiosk subscriptions, so that employees can manage email through Outlook Web App on any computer with a broadband connection. Morrison explains, “Office 365 was intriguing to us because of the licensing model for kiosk workers versus [the licensing model] for office workers. [We] can provide kiosk workers who do not have a dedicated work area with the full functionality available in Exchange 2010.” They will have 500 megabytes (MB) of email storage available in the cloud, and they can also access many of the same capabilities as employees who use the Microsoft Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration client.
“One of the things we have struggled with is mailbox size growth,” explains Morrison. With Exchange Online, remote employees with dedicated computers who use email more frequently will have larger mailboxes with 25 GB of storage in the cloud, and they can manage email and voice mail through Outlook Web App or the Outlook 2010 client. Whether their mailboxes are on-premises or in the cloud, employees share the same email domain name and can view the same global address list. They can also view each other’s calendar and free and busy data. In addition, they can move messages into a personal archive for long-term retention. They can easily search both their inboxes and their archives when they need to find something. “What we like about the larger mailboxes and the personal archive capability is that we can both reduce the amount of storage on our SAN and let employees manage their own email rather than applying more IT policies,” says Morrison. In addition, they can use Conversation View, which groups together messages from a single conversation, so they can quickly and easily identify the most recent messages, view the chain of responses, and see a preview of each response in a conversation when they open individual messages. With MailTips, employees are automatically alerted—before they click the Send button—whether a message recipient is out of the office, an attachment is too large to send, or a distribution list contains external recipients.
Because of the interoperation between Lync Server 2010 and Exchange Online, employees can continue to see rich presence information through Outlook Web App or Outlook 2010. They can also start chat sessions with available colleagues, and they can escalate to a voice call or online meeting with a single click of the mouse.
Benefits
By implementing a hybrid messaging solution with Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2010, New Belgium can better address the needs of its employees without sacrificing any of the unified communications capabilities they need to do their jobs. Production workers will have ready access to email through kiosk computers, and it can ensure that remote employees have stable, reliable service. It can also reduce costs and reduce administration.
Helps Reduce Costs
With Office 365, New Belgium can easily provision accounts for new employees in the cloud, so as the company grows, it can avoid additional software and storage costs as it adds people. In addition, after it has moved most of its mailboxes to Exchange Online, it can guarantee email availability without taking on the additional cost to maintain the solution on-premises. It can also retire its third-party spam filtering product. “It costs us a considerable amount to guarantee 99.9 percent uptime for our Exchange servers,” says Morrison. “With Exchange Online, we can reduce those costs, and we gain time to perform other tasks.”
New Belgium can also reduce hardware costs as it transitions more mailboxes to the cloud, because its on-premises solution will require fewer servers. Because most of the messaging data will be stored in the cloud, it can also reduce storage costs because the solution requires less storage overall. For messaging data stored on-premises, it can use less expensive SATA disks.
With Exchange Online, New Belgium can also ensure that employees have access to the latest technology without incurring the cost of upgrades that might require more hardware or storage. “We like to be on the leading edge,” says Morrison. “With Office 365, we will always have the latest version. We do not have to worry that cost will prohibit us from giving employees access to the latest capabilities.”
Reduces Administration
As New Belgium transitions to the cloud, it can gradually reduce administration tasks. “Because we can rely on Microsoft to manage maintenance for our mailboxes in the cloud, we can spend our time working on business projects instead of managing email servers,” says Morrison.
The IT staff especially appreciates the larger mailboxes and the personal archive in Exchange Online. “Because we will not have to worry about storage, we can allow people to manage their own email,” says Morrison. “For us, it alleviates the headache of enforcing quotas and applying policies.”
Enables Scalability
When New Belgium adds new employees, no matter where they are located, it can quickly provision new accounts. “Planning for growth is much simpler with a hosted service,” says Morrison. “We can add people without having to worry about whether we have enough licenses or storage to support them.”
Increases Availability
For its remote employees, New Belgium can ensure that service will be consistently available. With Exchange Online, it can expect disaster recovery through continuously-replicated, geo-redundant data centers that are third-party certified to international standards. The brewery can also take advantage of premium antispam and antivirus protection, 24 hour a day, seven days a week IT-level phone support, and a financially backed, 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement.
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The Mediterranean Shipping Company has been under the same family leadership since its inception 43 years ago, and while the company now manages its fleet of 480 vessels from offices in 150 countries, it’s fair to say that its caring, corporate culture is as strong today as it ever was. But while we all feel connected to a large corporate family, unfortunately, our IT systems did not support that connectivity, or the global communications that we needed to compete in today’s digital economy.
