To coincide with last week’s release of Office 2016, we put together a set of handy Quick Start Guides that introduce you to the newest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. Whether you’re coming from previous versions of your favorite apps and want a quick orientation about where to find familiar basics or you’re entirely new to Office and want an overview of how to get to some of the most important things, each of our Quick Start Guides provides helpful information that you can read, print out and share. Guides are now available for all three of our recent Office releases. Download just the ones you want or get the entire set for your preferred operating systems. Office 2016 for Windows Visit Office 2016 Quick Start Guides to download guides for the desktop versions of Word 2016, Excel 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Outlook 2016 or OneNote 2016 on any recent version of Windows. Office Mobile for Windows 10 Visit Office Mobile Quick Start Guides to download guides for the modern versions of Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, or OneNote on Windows 10. Office 2016 for Mac Visit Office 2016 Quick Start Guides for Mac to download guides for the Mac versions of Word 2016, Excel 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Outlook 2016 or OneNote 2016 on Mac OS X Yosemite or El Capitan. While viewing any guide, you can save a copy of it to your computer, zoom in to get a closer look at a screenshot, or search for feature names or keywords to quickly find something in the text. Please let us know if you find these types of guides useful and what sort of introductory content you’d like to see in the future. You can leave comments here on this blog post or at the bottom of each of the Quick Start Guide download pages. —The Office Team       The post Download our free Office 2016 Quick Start Guides appeared first on Office Blogs.

Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 enables organizations to establish a private, managed network connection to Office 365 as an alternative to connecting over the Internet. This direct connection offers customers more predictable network performance, an SLA for guaranteed availability and additional data privacy. As more organizations depend on Office 365 for document collaboration and communications, they will come to depend more and more on the network connectivity they have between their users and Office 365. Today we’re pleased to announce that Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 is now generally available from these network operators: British Telecom Equinix Tata Communications TeleCity Group Verizon You can read about how Microsoft is using ExpressRoute for Office 365 in the Microsoft IT white paper, "Optimizing network performance for Microsoft Office 365." Connecting your network to Office 365 using Azure ExpressRoute Depending on your network configuration, here’s how you can work with network operators offering ExpressRoute for Office 365 to establish a connection between your network and Office 365: If your organization already uses Azure ExpressRoute, your network operator can simply turn on the connectivity for you. Since use of Office 365 generates additional network traffic, you should discuss the requirements for additional bandwidth with your network operator. Organizations using IP VPN technology for a WAN provided by a network operator can ask the network operator to add Office 365 as a node on your WAN. Once Office 365 connectivity is added, Office 365 services appear as if they are on your WAN—like an offsite datacenter. ExpressRoute can also support large or point-to-point network connections. If you have a large broad network, then you may already have a network connection in a co-location facility where Azure ExpressRoute is available. You should work with your network provider to identify the best way to connect to Azure ExpressRoute. For more information, read about ExpressRoute for Office 365 here and watch this episode of Office Mechanics: Frequently asked questions Q. Where in the world is ExpressRoute for Office 365 available? A. Your users can connect from anywhere in the world that your network operator provides access. Each network operator connects to the Microsoft network at specific locations. They can provide networking from the user location to the Microsoft network connection. You should discuss the options with your network operator. The locations where they will connect to Microsoft’s network are listed here. Q. How do organizations purchase ExpressRoute for Office 365? A. Organizations interested in purchasing ExpressRoute for Office 365 should have an Azure subscription and should discuss details of the connectivity with an Azure ExpressRoute partner. Q. Are there any Office 365 services that Azure ExpressRoute cannot provide a connection to? A. Today connectivity is available for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business Online, Azure Active Directory, Office 365 Video, Power BI, Delve and Project Online. Services that ExpressRoute does not provide connectivity to include download of Office 365 ProPlus installation files, Yammer, Domain Name Service and Content Delivery Network servers. Q. Is QoS supported on Azure ExpressRoute? A. Yes. QoS is supported for Skype for Business Online over Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365. Q. Does Microsoft provide tools to test for network performance issues? A. Yes. We have the Office Client Performance Analyzer (OCPA), which was recently updated to add a number of new performance test metrics. Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 may be a solution to network performance problems experienced by users. OCPA can be downloaded from the Office 365 admin console here. For customers with Premier support contracts, Microsoft has a service offering for Office 365 Network Performance Assessment. Please contact your Technical Account Manager for details. Q. Can Office 365 for U.S. Government (GCC) use ExpressRoute for Office 365? A. Yes. ExpressRoute is compatible with Office 365 G SKUs. If a GCC customer chooses ExpressRoute, they should be aware that this will be the commercial Azure ExpressRoute service rather than the Azure Government ExpressRoute service. Currently Office 365 cannot be connected to via Azure Government ExpressRoute as announced here. The post Announcing general availability of ExpressRoute for Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities protect your data where it is stored, when it is moved, and when it is shared. We first announced last year our plans to bring DLP to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, and today we are pleased to announce DLP will begin rolling out to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online starting this week. By extending DLP to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, we are expanding upon the same protection you already have in Exchange, Outlook and Outlook on the web, offering broader protection of your data wherever it lives. In addition, Office 2016 also supports DLP in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook, scanning documents for defined sensitive information. DLP in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online During the private preview of DLP for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, we listened and incorporated feedback. DLP will now be available in premier enterprise SKUs, making these critical Office 365 compliance/protection capabilities available for both end users and IT admins. This is another important milestone in our efforts to deliver information protection controls to IT, to protect sensitive information and prevent it from being inadvertently disclosed. At the same time, we’ve built in policy tips and end-user education to help employees make the right choices when working with sensitive data. IT admins will see new controls in your Office 365 Compliance Center, allowing you to easily set up DLP policies for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. As a further protection, we recently announced even more protection controls with policy tips integrated throughout Office desktop apps—from Outlook and now to Word, PowerPoint and Excel—providing consistent notification across all of their productivity applications. IT admins also can configure their policy tips so that users can interact with the pertinent policy, for example, providing a business justification to override the policy or reporting a false positive. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue adding new features. Below is a brief overview of what’s available now and what’s coming next. Currently rolling out Coming next Create automated policies with any of the available built-in sensitive information types Exceptions for locations and conditions in your policies Detect external sharing and apply appropriate actions Ability to encrypt content as an action Scope DLP policies to specific SharePoint or OneDrive sites Support for custom classifications and document fingerprinting Policies based on document properties (metadata) Shared by/by member of conditions Block or restrict access to the sensitive content Customizable Policy tips and user notifications via policy tip and email Admin-facing Incident reports and reporting A comprehensive overview of information protection To learn more about DLP in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, watch today’s Office Mechanics show, in which Asaf Kashi, principal group program manager for Information Protection, provides a comprehensive overview of how DLP helps protect against data loss. Asaf explains how an enterprise IT infrastructure and the Microsoft cloud work holistically, enabling security and compliance without impacting end-user productivity. Microsoft then utilizes DLP to scan files in transit and at rest. Asaf also reviews how easy it is for IT admins to manage and audit their company policies through the Office 365 Compliance Center. As sharing and collaboration evolve across applications and devices, our vision is to deliver DLP to all the places where you want to protect your data, with the goal of protecting information from when documents are initially created to when they are stored or shared. As DLP rolls out to your Office 365 Compliance Center in the coming weeks, we encourage you to try it out. The post Data Loss Prevention in OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Office 2016 is rolling out appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today marks a huge step forward with OneDrive for Business. It’s the most significant set of updates we’ve ever released. First and foremost, we’re delivering a rock-solid new sync experience. Beyond this, we have a new browser experience, mobile app improvements, critical new IT controls and extended developer experiences to enable people to do and achieve more with OneDrive for Business. Our team has set up a site for you to reserve a spot for your organization to start testing out the limited preview of the new sync client. When the preview is ready, we’ll send you an email with instructions on how to download it and set it up. Updates across browser experiences, mobile apps, IT controls and developer experiences have already begun rolling out to Office 365. If that isn’t enough OneDrive news for you, we’ve also published how Lotus F1 Team’s IT crew implemented OneDrive for Business with recently updated IT controls on today’s Office Mechanics show. And we’ve begun rolling out Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online to work with the new Office 2016 apps. It’s a big day for OneDrive for Business, and you can find out more on today’s OneDrive Blog post. The post OneDrive for Business sync client preview and new browser, mobile, IT control and developer experiences appeared first on Office Blogs.

To coincide with today’s news about the most significant set of OneDrive for Business updates since the service was first released, we continue our series on Lotus F1 Team’s real-world implementation of Office 365. We take an in-depth look at how Lotus F1 Team’s IT crew implemented OneDrive for Business to protect its intellectual property in one of the most highly competitive environments while enabling secure file sharing and access to key information by a team that’s on the go, traveling from race to race around the globe. Following our first episode in the Lotus F1 Team series, we see how OneDrive for Business, activity auditing, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and mobile device management (MDM) are put to work by an organization that takes protecting its intellectual property—from design to track—extremely seriously. David Cadywould, from Lotus F1 Team’s IT crew, explains the great progress they’ve made in the last month with OneDrive for Business helping to control how the team stores and shares files—especially on mobile devices—and educate their users on organizational policies through the DLP feature. David also demonstrates how the Lotus F1 Team blocks offline file synchronization to unmanaged devices and limits permission-sharing options in the People Picker Control using simple PowerShell commands. Other demos cover modern attachments, activity auditing, mobile device/Intune management and DLP. Get started today with all of the new OneDrive for Business capabilities and stay tuned for the next chapter of Lotus F1 Team’s journey to Office 365, where we’ll show how they’re moving from pre-defined reporting using SQL Server to user-driven, self-service, interactive analytics with Power BI. —Jeremy Chapman The post How Lotus F1 Team races the globe with Office 365 and OneDrive for Business appeared first on Office Blogs.

We are excited to announce availability of Project 2016. This release includes significant updates to Project Professional, Project Pro for Office 365 and Project Online. Project 2016 delivers on some of the most requested capabilities: Resource Management and Resource Capacity Planning. Supporting these key capabilities are enhancements such as new Resource Engagements, a brand new experience for resource managers, and Capacity heat maps. Project 2016 now provides an end-to-end experience for managing and optimizing your resource utilization. In addition to resource management, there are a host of improvements and new features to help you be more productive with Project, such as improved timelines, Tell Me integration and full support for Office Add-ins. Resource Engagements For project managers, securing resources to ensure your project is properly staffed has always been a challenge. With Project 2016, it’s now possible to systematically request a resource, and once approved, lock that resource to guarantee it’s available. Creating an engagement and submitting it for approval sets off a simple workflow that enables the resource manager to approve or reject the request. The project manager will always have an up-to-date view of the status of their requests from within Project Professional 2016 or Project Pro for Office 365. Once a locked resource is assigned to a project for a duration of time, managers of other projects will get notified if they try to overbook a resource. The resource manager experience The resource manager (or line manager) is a people manager who may not want to use the full Project client. To allow the resource manager to collaborate with the project manager, Project Online now has an area for the resource manager to view and approve or reject all proposed resource contracts. In addition, the new resource views allow the manager to understand the capacity utilization of their resources at a quick glance. Resource Capacity heat maps Ensuring that the resources are well utilized and productive is a key strategic need for any company. Project 2016 introduces the Capacity heat maps and a brand new set of intuitive reports to enable at-a-glance visualization of resource utilization. Both under- and over-utilization of resources can be problematic, and both can be seen quickly with the new heat map. Timelines Communicating the project schedule is a critical part of any project manager’s job. But for many audiences, a Gantt chart isn’t the best way to visualize the schedule. More than ever, a timeline is the best way to communicate how a project’s lifecycle lays out. With this in mind, we have overhauled the Timeline feature to include multiple timelines, each with different start and end dates, representing a user-defined set of tasks and milestones. There are several rich features in the new Timeline visualization, including: Independent start and end dates for each timeline. Drag and drop between different timelines. Save to PowerPoint with editable objects. Tell Me With so many features in Project 2016, wouldn’t it be great if you could just ask where a certain feature was, instead of having to hunt for it? With Tell Me, you can do just that. Better yet, the answer that Tell Me provides is a live button, so you just have to click the answer and it will do as you ask. It’s a huge time saver. Read/Write Office Add-ins Office Add-ins are extensions that you can download from the Office store that add functionality to Project. This means that Microsoft and its partners can continuously and easily deliver new features so you can customize Project to your tastes. With Project 2016 release, Office Add-ins now have full Read/Write access to the project you are working on, providing richer extensions than have ever been possible. Availability Project 2016 is immediately available online as part of Office 365. The new service side features, such as Capacity heat maps, are being rolled out into Project Pro for Office 365 and Project Online right now. When you choose to activate these features, we will automatically upgrade all of your existing Resource Plans to Engagements. The new resource management features will be available to on-premises customers in the spring of 2016 when Project Server 2016 is released. Enjoy the new Project! —Howard Crow, principal group program manager in the Project engineering team The post What’s new in Project 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Over the last several years, social networks have changed the way we communicate. In our personal lives, we show our approval by "Liking" a friend’s status update on Facebook and we "@Mention" others in a Twitter post to call attention to it. In our workplace, these same social concepts became popular through enterprise social tools such as Yammer. Today we’re taking the next step and introducing Like and @Mention to workplace email in Outlook on the web. Likes—bubbles up the best ideas Email is a great way to share and collaborate on ideas, make plans and drive consensus with friends and coworkers. Email threads often grow in length with any number of suggestions, thoughts and counter-points added through the course of a discussion. The new Like feature in Outlook on the web provides an easy way to visibly endorse a specific email and call it out as something worth attention—perhaps a statement or idea you support. To Like a message, simply click the thumbs-up icon in the reading pane. This turns the icon from gray to blue, notes within the email that you liked the message and adds a thumbs-up icon in the email list view. Anyone on the thread can Like a message, and their Likes are identified and captured within the message as well. If someone likes your email, you’ll receive a notification letting you know. Likes allow you to easily highlight individual messages. Mentions—highlights the individual While the focus of Likes is on specific emails, the focus of Mentions is on specific individuals. When collaborating on email, it is common to call out a specific person for an action or request. Another scenario is adding a person to an existing thread for their attention—perhaps you are on a thread and know that the person who can answer a question was not initially included. Using the Mentions feature ensures that the person is not only aware of the request but is also included in the thread. To use Mentions, simply add the @ symbol in the body of an email. This will bring up your frequent contacts as well as access to your directory. Select the person you want to highlight, and they will automatically be added to the To: line if they were not already included. In addition, their name will be highlighted in the message in blue and they will receive an @ flag in their inbox view next to the message. Furthermore, they can sort by their @ messages to ensure they respond to all messages in which they were mentioned. The Mention compose experience—highlight a person for action with the @ symbol. When you’ve been mentioned, you will have an @ flag next to the message and can sort by Mentions. Rollout of these changes The Like feature in Outlook on the web will begin to roll out today to Office 365 First Release customers whose Office 365 plan includes Exchange Online. We expect the feature to roll out broadly to eligible Office 365 commercial customers starting in late October. The Mention feature will begin rolling out to First Release customers in mid-October and broadly to all eligible Office 365 commercial customers in mid-November. In addition, our Outlook.com users who have been migrated to the new version of the service will start seeing Mentions in the December time frame as well. Frequently asked questions Q. When will other versions of Outlook support Likes and Mentions? A. We expect to roll out the Mention feature to the Office 2016 clients for Windows and Mac, as well as Outlook for iOS and Android, in the first half of 2016. We will provide updates in the expected availability of the Like feature at a later date. Q.  Which Office 365 plans will have access to the Like and Mention features in Outlook on the web? A. The Like and Mention features will be available to all Office 365 commercial subscriptions that include Outlook on the web, including Business, Enterprise, EDU and Government plans. The post Likes and @Mentions coming to Outlook on the web appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last month, we started a community project to help IT pros with Office client deployments using PowerShell to streamline the process. For more details, see Office Deployment Scripts for IT Pros. A month later, it’s time to check in on some of the new developments with this project. As a reminder, all of the scripts are available on our GitHub repository and released under the MIT license. Reorganized scripts For starters, we’ve added a folder structure to help IT pros to find useful scripts quickly and easily. We’ve divided all scripts into different categories including: Preparation Information Deployment Management Updates By grouping similar scripts together, it’s easier than ever for you to find the one you need. More documentation We’ve also added a wiki to the repository that contains useful information designed to provide context for using these scripts in real-world situations. The wiki is your go-to source for all information related to Office IT pro deployment scripts. It holds information explaining completed scripts, upcoming scripts and general information around contributing to the project. So if you are interested in learning about the scripts that are available or learning how to run different scripts, you will now find all of that information in the wiki. But it’s not all housekeeping; here are some of the new additions to the project. Office 365 ProPlus Configuration XML Editor The Notepad is either your tool of choice or a last resort for editing XML files, but without the red squiggly lines we have come to love in Office. If you have ever accidentally typed </congifuration> then the web editor for the Office ProPlus Click-to-Run Configuration.xml file is for you. This web page provides a graphical method to generate and edit the Office Click-to-Run Configuration.xml file. The Click-to-Run for Office 365 Configuration.xml file is used to specify Click-to-Run installation and update options. The Office Deployment Tool includes a sample Configuration.xml file that can be downloaded. Administrators can modify the Configuration.xml file to configure installation options for Click-to-Run for Office 365 products. The Click-to-Run Configuration.xml file is a necessary component of the Office Deployment Tool. Click-to-Run customizations are performed primarily by starting the Office Deployment Tool and providing a custom Configuration.xml file. The Office Deployment Tool performs the tasks that are specified by using the optional properties in the configuration file. For the Office 2016 release of the product, administrators can download the Office Deployment Tool from the Microsoft Download Center. We also took advantage of the awesome new Office UI Fabric project to hide our IT professional design sensibilities. Reverse engineer your configuration The Generate-ODTConfigurationXML PowerShell script queries the existing configuration of the target computer and generates the Configuration.xml file for Click-to-Run for Office 365 products. This XML is used with the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) to deploy Office Click-to-Run products. This script dynamically generates a Configuration.xml file to either install new or modify existing Office Click-to-Run deployments. This script is particularly useful when trying to deploy Office 365 ProPlus in environments where different languages are required. It allows you to dynamically configure Office based on the languages that are currently in use on the computer. More information can be found in the README. Putting it all together The Deploy-OfficeClicktoRun solution uses several scripts from the GitHub repository to create a complete solution to deploying Office Click-to-Run. The solution uses the Generate-ODTConfigurationXML function to generate the Configuration XML based on the current configuration of the user’s computer. It then uses the Edit-OfficeConfigurationFile functions to modify the Configuration XML to the desired state. Finally, it will utilize the Install-OfficeClicktoRun to install or modify Office Click-to-Run. There are several examples in the folder that show different approaches: Example Script 1: ExampleDeployGeneric.ps1—Provides an example on how to use the deployment scripts in one script to provide a solution for deploying Office Click-to-Run. Example Script 2: ExampleDeployWithOfficeFilter.ps1—Provides an example on how to use the deployment scripts in one script to provide a solution for deploying Office Click-to-Run, which includes an example on providing custom configuration based on the location of the workstation in Active Directory. More information can be found in the README. Fallback to the CDN for updating mobile PCs The Update-Office365Anywhere function is designed to provide a way for Office Click-to-Run clients to have the ability to update themselves from a managed network source or from the Internet, depending on availability of the primary update source. Setting the Office Click-to-Run update source to a local network source reduces the Internet traffic. However, mobile workers, who may not be in the office, may not get their PC updated. This script detects if the configured update source is available, and if it isn’t, it will update from the Internet. The script also has the ability to monitor the progress of the update and block the script from exiting until the update has completed. More information can be found in the README. Get involved! We strongly recommend that you check back often, as the existing scripts continue to evolve and new scripts are added on a regular basis. We would also like to hear from you on some of the current challenges you face with deployment and how we might be able to help by automating steps. Feel free to post your feedback and ideas on the Office 365 Network. As a reminder, anyone is welcome to contribute to the Office IT Pro deployment scripts GitHub project, but we ask that you clone the Development branch to create a feature branch where you can make changes to existing scripts or create new ones. Information on contributing to the project can be found in this README. Thanks for taking the time to catch up on the latest with this project. We hope that you will take advantage of these scripts and help us continue to improve on what is out there. —Alistair Speirs, senior operations program manager for the Office Deployment team The post Deployment scripts for Office 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Tristan Davis on the Office Extensibility team. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP65_OfficeExt.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates What’s new in Office 2016 for developers Increase the productivity of users’ with enhanced Office.js APIs in Office 2016Office Developer Swag Boxes for your user groups Using OAuth from PowerShell by Stephen Owen The Dev Intersection Countdown Show Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS is available iTunes or search for it on "Office 365 Developer Podcast" or add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Tristan Davis Tristan Davis is the group program manager of the APIs & Extensions team within Office Extensibility. His team is responsible for improvements to the Office 365 APIs, the new Apps for Office client extensibility model, as well as all existing flavors of Office programmability. Prior to joining the team, he was a member of the Word program management team from Office 2003 through office 2013. About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is born, raised and based in Dallas, TX but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Episode 065 on the Office Extensibility team with Tristan Davis—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s Microsoft Office post was written by Saeed Al-Shahrani, systems and operations director at King Saud University. At King Saud University, we are proud of our technological leadership and we strive to provide our students, faculty and staff with the most advanced solutions available. Because email is the primary method of communication for our 35,000 faculty and staff, we recently upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 to help maximize their productivity. Exchange Server also serves as a repository for documents and conversations, preserving critical organizational knowledge and helping faculty and staff manage their appointments. We found Exchange Server 2016 now makes it easy and inexpensive to provide 20GB mailboxes to all our faculty, but tracking down details within those mailboxes could be a challenge. Luckily, Exchange Server 2016 offers many improvements that help faculty and staff work more effectively, such as search. Search is a critical component of working efficiently with so much information. Our staff and faculty report that searches are fast and consistent across devices. Even if they type a word incorrectly, Exchange finds the messages they need almost instantly. Sending attachments with Exchange and the Outlook client has also never been easier. When I want to send an attachment, Exchange opens up the list of Recently Used Documents within the Outlook client, and I select the one I want. Ninety percent of the time I want to send a document that I have been editing so it will be in the list, and this type of built-in intelligence is a real time saver. Even more impressive: for documents stored on Microsoft OneDrive for Business, Outlook provides the option to send a link instead of an attachment. Exchange Server 2016 also sets the OneDrive for Business permissions automatically so that all recipients can access the document. This enables our organization to take advantage of the benefits of online document sharing, rather than sending attachments. In addition, our employees can now edit Microsoft Office files sent as links and attachments directly in Microsoft Outlook. Just click a link and the file opens in a side-by-side view with Outlook. Staff can make quick changes based on the content of the email, save the file and send it right back from the Recently Used Documents list. Exchange Server 2016 pulls everything together for us. We no longer have to spend a lot of time moving files and opening documents. Exchange offers a consistent user experience across the web, PCs, Mac computers and other devices when combined with the latest Outlook clients. Our employees use every kind of device you can imagine, and now everyone has the same Outlook experience across all of them. Our employees are more productive, and our IT support staff have an easier time answering questions and re-creating user issues. The IT benefits go beyond support. Deployment was very easy because of the complete interoperation with Exchange 2013. We followed the recommended architecture with the single server role, so all the hardware is consistent, and we need only two eight-server DAGs for the entire organization. Now we can survive two server failures with no service interruption, and we have much greater redundancy for the CAS server role. With improved redundancy, database failovers happen 300 percent faster than they did on Exchange Server 2013. With this level of protection, we no longer worry about email outages. —Saeed Al-Shahrani Read the full story to better understand how King Saud University is finding new efficiencies by moving to Exchange Server 2016. The post King Saud University gains speed and reduces redundancy with upgrade to Exchange Server 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last week, we launched the new Office, a set of integrated apps and services that empowers teams to do and achieve more. Today we announced the release of Exchange Server 2016, which brings key innovations in email, collaboration and calendaring in this Office release to on-premises customers. There’s a lot to like in the new Exchange for both users and IT admins. It integrates with Outlook, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business to enable new collaboration capabilities related to sharing, editing and receiving documents without ever having to leave Outlook. Inbox enhancements in Outlook 2016 and Outlook on the web, such as inline previews for URLs and video, help you stay focused and productive. Enhanced search capabilities deliver faster performance and more accurate results. IT admins will benefit from a simplified architecture that reflects the way we deploy Exchange in Office 365 and brings a new level of reliability with automated repair and faster recovery. Expanded Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and faster, more reliable eDiscovery help your organization comply with legal requirements. Exchange 2016 gives on-premises customers a future-ready messaging foundation, with built-in hybrid capabilities and options for tapping into cloud services. You can learn all about these and the many other capabilities in Exchange Server 2016 over on the Exchange team blog. —The Office team The post Exchange Server 2016 for on-premises customers now available appeared first on Office Blogs.

"Recognition is the greatest motivator." —Gerard C. Eakedale Organizational productivity and morale improve when individuals and teams are recognized for their work. The best productivity tools help people to easily share their knowledge and ideas, make their work discoverable inside their organization, and enable colleagues to show their appreciation and recognize each other’s work. As the modern workplace evolves, Office 365 is also evolving to help people collaborate, share and discover information more easily. Today we are excited to announce new "people experiences" in Office Delve, which include the new Praise feature, the ability to create modern pages in SharePoint Online and add Favorites from across Office 365. Let’s dive into the details. Recognize your peers by giving Praise With the new Praise feature in Delve, you are now able to send publicly viewable praise to your colleagues. In addition, an email is sent to their manager to make them aware of the individual’s efforts. The praise appears in Delve on the recipient’s profile, and colleagues can click Like to increase the recognition. We know users will appreciate its ease of use and companies will benefit from the power of it being used. Giving Praise is easy and powerful, as illustrated below: First, click + Praise. Write your message and click Send. The recipient and their manager will receive an email notification, and your Praise shows up on their Profile page. Praise is rolling out into Office 365 First Release customers in the U.S. starting today and is expected to roll out to all Office 365 commercial customers in the near future. Learn more on how to recognize your colleagues with Praise. Create new pages in SharePoint Online to express yourself Creating new, beautiful, multimedia-rich pages in SharePoint Online has never been easier. The new authoring canvas is rolling out to all eligible Office 365 commercial customers starting today. Accessed from the Delve Profile tab, the authoring canvas allows you to edit and view pages and auto-save as you work. And because it’s integrated across Office 365, it’s easy to embed documents inline from OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online Document Libraries, videos from the Office 365 Video portal—now with inline playback—and even images from your C:\ drive. Once published, new pages appear as new, discoverable content in other people’s Delve activity feeds. And to the consumer of the new page, it will be viewable across devices with beautiful, responsive design—keeping everything inline and in context without opening a bunch of tabs and windows. Today the authoring canvas supports blogging within the enterprise, with plans to enable creation of new pages throughout Office 365 in the future. Get your typing fingers fired up—the intranet is your oyster awaiting your pearls of wisdom. Watch this two-minute video showing how easy it is to write, embed and publish a blog post within your intranet: Collect content by adding to Favorites "Now that’ll be useful," you say to yourself. "I’ll want to save that for later." In comes Favorites, a new way within Delve to easily save information you want to come back to later. When you see something in your activity feed that piques your interest, you can hover over the card and click the star in the upper-right corner. When you want to get back to your favorites, you can visit the new Favorites tab in your ME view in the left-hand navigation. Once you’ve read or shared it, it’s just as easy to remove the item from your Favorites tab. Favorites are only visible to you and can be quickly accessed through your ME view in Delve. The Favorites feature has been available in the Delve mobile app for iOS, and starting today, Favorites is rolling out in the Delve browser experience to Office 365 First Release customers. Learn more on how to add to Favorites. What’s coming next… We’re really excited to bring you these new people experiences in Delve and Office 365 and we plan to continue innovating in this area, which will roll out to the service automatically when the new features are ready. Currently, we are looking at methods for people to customize their profile page and continuing to improve the overall Delve user interface. If you have an idea for a future Office 365 People Experience feature, please visit our Delve UserVoice page and submit your feedback using the People Experiences category tag. And vote items up! You will see us continue to iterate and build more and more of what you tell us you need. —Mark Kashman, senior product manager on the Office 365 team Frequently asked questions Q. When will I see these new features in my tenant? A. As of the publish date of this blog post, Praise is rolling out to First Release customers in the U.S. and Favorites is rolling out to First Release customers worldwide. The authoring canvas is rolling out to Office 365 commercial customers worldwide starting today and will take a few weeks to show up for all eligible customers. Q. Will my blog posts, originally created within SharePoint Online My Sites, continue to exist once the new Blog platform rolls out? A. Previous blog posts created within SharePoint Online My Sites will become accessible from the new Blog home page in your personal profile. Once it ships, the new Blog home page and authoring canvas platform will replace the My Site blog technology, and all new blog posts will be created using the authoring canvas. Q. Can I turn off Praise? A. During the First Release phase of rollout, it will not be possible to opt out. However, as we prepare to move beyond First Release, we are planning to enable a method for admins to control whether or not users have access to give and receive Praise. The post Office Delve adds Praise, Favorites and enhances content creation appeared first on Office Blogs.

Visio is the industry-leading diagramming solution used by over 12 million users, and today we’re thrilled to share our latest innovations with you. Visio 2016 makes it easier for everyone to define business processes, document best practices, visualize the future state of transformative initiatives and stay on top of operational insights. Using Office 365, you can share these Visio diagrams with everyone and communicate one version of the truth to drive organization-wide alignment. Visio 2016 offers starter diagrams, hundreds of smart shapes, one-step data linking, Information Rights Management (IRM) for compliance and so much more. Working visually is now faster and easier than ever. Get started quickly When starting out, the new Visio offers a set of pre-crafted starter diagrams and contextual tips and tricks to help you easily create, edit and complete your diagram. These quickly executable diagrams are available in 15 of the most popular domains (flowcharts, timelines, workflows, etc.) and will inspire and guide you from start to finish. The new built-in Tell Me support helps you navigate more than 800 commands in Visio. Just ask Visio how to do something and the relevant commands are displayed in a simple drop-down list. You can execute the command just by clicking one of the options listed. Now even new users can leverage the full capabilities of Visio. Be productive and compliant Visio offers thousands of shapes that meet industry standards, including BPMN 2.0, UML 2.4 and IEEE (new). Whether you want to map out an IT network, build an org chart, document a business process, draw a modern floor plan or capture a flowchart from a whiteboard, the new Visio can help you work visually and stay compliant. Here are some examples: One-stop process modeling. Updated office layout template with modern style. IEEE-compliant electrical diagram. Easily connect data to diagrams With Visio, you can link diagrams to popular data sources such as Excel, Active Directory, SharePoint and SQL Server to display data on top of real-world visuals. For example, you could depict an assembly line in Visio and connect different components of that diagram to real-time operational data. Data-linked diagrams can update automatically and will display different icons, symbols and colors to reflect changes in the underlying data. The Visio 2016 Quick Import capability now makes it easy for anyone to link data to real-world diagrams, plans and processes. With a single click, the new Visio can automatically identify the data source, import the data, link that data to shapes and apply data graphics. With one-step data linking, you can easily turn diagrams into dashboards and monitor progress or performance in real time. Visio 2016 also makes it easy to swap out the graphics to your preference with a single click and make your data easily digestible. Collaborate with confidence More than ever before, our day-to-day work involves collaborating with others. This means sensitive information within diagrams requires new levels of protection. Visio 2016 now supports Information Rights Management (IRM) and lets you control document rights at the individual user level. With Visio 2016 you can work visually, leverage data and protect sensitive information like never before. Experience the new Visio for yourself by starting your trial of Visio Pro for Office 365 now! Want to learn more? Test drive the new Visio. —Stella Lin, senior product marketing manager for the Visio team The post The new Visio is here—work visually appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services team. Editor’s note 11/19/2015: This post was updated to clarify the system requirements. Editor’s note 10/15/2015: This post was updated with information regarding how to upgrade to Office 2016. We are thrilled to see the positive response for the launch of Office 2016 last week. We’ve received a ton of great feedback and wanted to address some of your top questions: How do I get Office 2016 for Windows if I’m an Office 365 customer? As an existing Office 365 subscriber, Office 2016 is immediately available to you, and based upon your plan, you can choose to manually update or wait for the scheduled automatic update. Below are links to instructions to manually update to Office 2016: Office 365 Home, Personal or University customers will receive automatic update notifications in the coming weeks. For manual update instructions, please see How to update to Office 2016 using Office 365. Office 365 Business and Business Premium customers will receive automatic update notifications later this calendar year. For manual update instructions, please see How to update to Office 2016 using Office 365 for Business. Office 365 ProPlus (including E3/E4) customers are typically managed by an IT department and they determine when to deploy Office 2016. Please contact your IT department for your company’s specific timeline. Manual updates are available for download by Office 365 administrators. Please see Prepare to update Office 365 ProPlus to the Office 2016 version for more information. How do I get Office 2016 for Mac? Office 365 Home, Personal and University customers can browse to your MyAccount page on their Mac, sign in and follow the installation instructions. If you have Office 365 through your organization, go to portal.office.com/OLS/MySoftware.aspx. New customers can get Office 2016 for Mac with an Office 365 subscription or as a one-time purchase option at office.com/mac or through your software retailer. Can I get Office 2016 without an Office 365 subscription? Yes, one-time purchase options are available for both the Windows and Mac versions of Office 2016 from your software retailer and the Microsoft Store. When will Volume Licensing customers be able to get Office 2016? Volume Licensing customers will be able to download Office 2016 from the Volume Licensing Service Center beginning today, and Home Use Program (HUP) customers can install Office 2016 beginning on October 7, 2015. MSDN Subscriptions customers can download Office 2016 now. 5.  I just bought Office 2013 or Office for Mac 2011. How do I upgrade to Office 2016? If you recently activated a qualifying Office 2013 or Office for Mac 2011 product, you’re eligible for the equivalent Office 2016 edition for a $40 USD upgrade fee. Please refer to the Special offer for customers wanting to upgrade from Office 2013 or Office for Mac 2011 to Office 2016 or Office 2016 for Mac support article. 6.  Are there system requirements I should be aware of when installing Office 2016? Yes, Outlook 2016 requires Exchange Server 2010 or later. Additionally, Office 2013 Click-to-Run standalone applications, including Project and Visio, cannot run on the same device as Office 2016 Click-to-Run applications. We do have a workaround with a generous offer. Please refer to the Special offer for customers with Office 2016 and Office 2013 standalone applications support article. 7.  Can I install a subset of the Office 2016 applications? No, the ability to selectively install individual applications is not available with Office 2016. The vast majority of customers prefer the full installation of all of the Office apps so they are assured that they have the ability to open, view and edit any document they may need. We will continue to evaluate feedback on this topic. 8.  What features are only available with Office 365? Some of the features in Outlook 2016 such as Clutter and Office 365 Groups require Office 365 email and calendaring support. GigJam, Planner and Delve are only available to business customers through the Office 365 portal. Some qualifying Office 365 subscriptions also include support for unlimited online meetings, 1TB of cloud storage per user, and team websites. We will also be providing additional updates and new features to Office 365 customers on a monthly basis going forward that will not be available to those who buy Office 2016 as a one-time purchase option. 9.  I have a technical problem. How do I get help? The best place to start is support.office.com, where you’ll find information about known issues, top solutions, and how to contact support. 10.  How can I request a new feature? You can submit your feature request on the new suggestion box service for each application: uservoice.com, excel.uservoice.com, powerpoint.uservoice.com, outlook.uservoice.com, sway.uservoice.com and onenote.uservoice.com. Thank you again for the incredible response to Office 2016. The team is already hard at work on the first update for Office 365 customers, and we’ll share more information on this blog soon. Please keep sending us your questions, feedback and suggestions—it’s very helpful as we prioritize what you want, so that we can create the best Office experience for you. The post Your top questions about Office 2016 answered appeared first on Office Blogs.

In a world where more than 30 million people work from home at least one day a week, the virtual workforce is rapidly becoming the rule, rather than the exception. And whether you work from your home office, your favorite coffee shop or your kitchen table, chances are good that online collaboration is critical to just about everything you do. Of course, working with people who may be a city, state, time zone or country away can be tricky, but with a few simple tips, a little patience and a steaming mug of caffeinated goodness, you can probably get more done at home than at the office. In fact, according to a study by the Telework Research Network, more than two-thirds of employers report increased productivity among their teleworkers. So let’s take a look at seven of the best ways to make seamless online collaboration a reality: Identify roles and responsibilities—Whether you’re working virtually or in the same office, if your team doesn’t know who’s responsible for what—and when—chaos ensues. Before starting any group project, make sure that everyone knows who’s managing the project, who’s doing what and when it’s due. Instant messaging—Find an instant messaging service that works across devices, including laptops, desktops, tablets and mobiles. This way, you can have quick conversations with your colleagues—no matter where they are or what type of device they’re using. You can also use IM to connect with colleagues socially. It’s amazing how a few minutes of banter from time to time can help you build a personal relationship with a colleague who is hundreds of miles away. Just a little effort like this can go a long way when it’s time to ask someone for help, information or advice. Collaborative software—This may be an obvious suggestion, but it’s surprising how many organizations lack software that makes real-time collaboration on documents possible. By finding software that allows team members to co-author or work simultaneously on the same document, you can ensure that everyone has access to the latest version, and can knock out deliverables in less time. Virtual meetings—When you need to get the team together and bring everyone up to speed on a project, idea or development, use a meeting service that allows for screen sharing. This way, you can keep people engaged (and away from their mountain of laundry that they need to fold) and share your point precisely. Check your ego—Collaboration is about bringing people together to support a common goal. You naturally have experience in areas that others do not, and vice versa. Allow your team members the same courtesy you’d expect and give everyone the chance to shine. Be accountable—Whether you are running the project or just have a role in completing it, when you’re collaborating online it’s important for your team to know what you’re working on and that you’re on track for an on-time delivery. By communicating this type of information and living up to your commitments, you can not only build trust, but help team members prepare for the next phase of the project. Be yourself, but reconsider sarcasm—Behaving like a task master or corporate drone will only get you so far before your colleagues start avoiding your emails and IMs. So don’t let your personality fall by the wayside just because you’re communicating in writing. After all, when your coworkers like you (and realize that they can count on you to get the job done on time), they’ll actually WANT to work with you. That said, if sarcasm is your basic M.O., you might want to reconsider using it in writing. Some things just don’t translate well in email and IM, and sarcasm is one of them. The right online collaboration tools, the right attitude and a killer collection of comfy clothes make working remotely a dream. However, with the wrong technology and teams you can’t communicate with (or trust), it can be a living nightmare. So before you start working remotely or managing remote teams, make sure that you have the tools you need to work together and run projects as you would if you were in the office. But most importantly, muster the discipline necessary to do the work properly and on time—no matter where you are.   Learn how the new Office enables teams to collaborate better than ever. The post 7 secrets to successful online collaboration appeared first on Office Blogs.

The worldwide release of Office 2016 for Windows on September 22 was another milestone in pursuit of Microsoft’s company ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes. To help making upgrading to Office 2016 a seamless experience for Office 365 customers, we also delivered resources to assist users, developers and IT pros, including a set of Quick Start Guides to introduce users to the newest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. We also provided guidance for businesses and introduced a new model to help administrators manage and deploy regular updates. And we gave developers detailed information about the new capabilities in Office 2016. In conjunction with the release of Office 2016, we introduced the collaboration tool Groups in Outlook 2016 and a new mobile app called Outlook Groups. We also announced that Office 2016 supports Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook, scanning documents for defined sensitive information, and we started rolling out DLP for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. Office 2016 wasn’t the only big news during the past two weeks, however, because we also continued to add other new features and improvements to Office 365. We introduced Office 365 Planner, which makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. We also introduced Invite, a new smartphone app that makes it easy to organize meetings on the go, and we took a page from social networking by adding Like and @Mention to workplace email in Outlook on the web. In addition, we announced the acquisition of several apps and add-ins for Project Online from our partners, to enable mobile project and portfolio management. And just this week, we announced that Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 is now available from several network operators, enabling organizations to establish a private, managed network connection to Office 365 as an alternative to connecting over the Internet. This direct connection offers customers more predictable network performance, an SLA for guaranteed availability and additional data privacy. The more you learn about Office 365 and Office 2016, the more reasons you have to make these premier productivity tools an integral part of your life and your business. Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy! Office 2016 review: Microsoft makes mobile-first, cloud-first a reality—Learn how Office 2016 and Office 365 are making Microsoft’s mobile-first, cloud-first vision real. For Office 2016, teamwork is everything—Find out how Office 2016 enables teamwork and collaboration. Office 2016 takes the work out of working together—Discover how Office 2016 improves teamwork and collaboration. Pandora opens up pathways to teamwork and productivity using the new Office—Learn how a global jewelry company uses Office 365 and Office 2016 to improve teamwork, boost productivity and support its growing business. Preparing tomorrow’s workforce in the classrooms of today—Find out how Georgia State University is using Office 365 to deliver 21st century education. At AON, collaboration is key—Discover how AON, one of the world’s leading providers of risk management and human resources solutions, is using Microsoft Office 365 to help its global workforce connect and collaborate. The post Office 365 news roundup appeared first on Office Blogs.

School has started in most parts of the world, and the OneNote team has some exciting announcements to share! As we mentioned on the Microsoft Education blog earlier this month, OneNote Class Notebooks and OneNote Staff Notebooks are now available for Office 365 customers (teachers and faculty) around the world. We’ve seen OneNote Class Notebooks created in 95 countries, and Staff Notebooks created in 45 countries. More OneNote Class and Staff Notebooks are being created by teachers and staff every day! We are listening to feedback from teachers and staff and improving Class Notebooks based suggestions from educators. Today we are happy to announce the upcoming release of two new capabilities, which are a direct result of talking to teachers and were also announced in our blog post back in May. We will gradually roll out these features to education customers over the coming weeks. We will also release these updates to Staff Notebooks in the near future. Remove students or co-teacher permissions from a Class Notebook The top request we’ve heard is to be able to easily remove a student’s permissions from a Class Notebook. When a student leaves the class, you can now quickly go into the Class Notebook app and remove that student from your class by clicking the Add or remove students tile. Removed students will not have access to the Class Notebook anymore. However, their work will still remain in your notebook, so that you can choose to archive it or delete it permanently. You can also now remove co-teachers by clicking the Add or remove teachers tile. This will remove permissions of any co-teacher who had access to the Class Notebook. Add student groups to a class notebook Teachers are now able to add groups (i.e. class lists) of students to a Class Notebook. This allows a teacher to add an entire class by just typing one name into the Add students dialog—e.g. "Mrs. Smith’s Math class Period 1." Previously, each student needed to be entered manually, so we hope this feature will save teachers a lot of time. We hope this will also help simplify the process of adding students to a class while leveraging work already done by IT staff for preparing class lists in Office 365. We also support Active Directory Security Groups and Office 365 Groups when adding students. Update group membership changes to your class notebook Did a bunch of students join or leave your class this year? Not to worry! The Class Notebook app can now grab updates in group membership from your school directory. Simply click the Add or Remove Students tile and proceed through the steps. You will be able to preview the latest list of students in your class, and we will set up or remove their student notebooks once you confirm. New languages supported In addition to these two top features, we also want to announce that OneNote Class Notebooks now supports Right-to-Left (RTL) languages, including Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. As always, reach us on Twitter @OneNoteEDU with feedback or email us directly at OneNoteEdu@microsoft.com. You can find answers to common questions here. The post Top teacher-requested features added to OneNote Class Notebooks appeared first on Office Blogs.

Join us for a live webcast series titled "Tips & Tricks for the Modern Workplace" and learn how to take your Office 365 skills to the next level. With the industry’s most advanced productivity suite—Office 365—Microsoft is focused on helping you be more productive, mobile and collaborative, making your day-to-day tasks easier. We are making updates weekly, monthly and quarterly to all parts of the cloud service, ensuring your users have "the right tool" at "the right time." As a result of the continued enhancement of our productivity suite, we’ve built this four-part webcast series to cover topics on PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and Skype. These are delivered from Microsoft subject experts with top industry knowledge to keep you informed on the latest capabilities you can bring to your organization. Register now and join us live or on demand to learn how you can empower your employees to be more productive, manage more effectively, stay connected and organized, and share their ideas through the power of Office 365. Join our upcoming session to take your PowerPoint usage to the next level. Build a story, present with clarity and conviction—and move forward, faster. Our first 45-minute webcast features Pump Up Your Presentations with PowerPoint on Wednesday, October 7th at 10 a.m. PDT. Register for the virtual event series and get the latest information on how Office 365 can help your organization and employees be more productive every day. We hope to see you there! Date Webcast title Registration link October 7-November 4 Tips & Tricks for the Modern Workplace series Series page October 7 Pump Up Your Presentations with PowerPoint Register here October 14 Organize Your Data in a Flash with Excel Register here October 21 Never lose your notes again, OneNote to rule them all! Register here October 28 Take Your Meeting Beyond the Boardroom with Skype Register here November 4 Organize and Discover your Documents on OneDrive and SharePoint Register here The post Tips & Tricks for the Modern Workplace webcast series appeared first on Office Blogs.

Welcome to the Collaboration in Office blog! With the recent release of Office 2016 and a renewed focus on making it easier for our users to collaborate within Office, we’ve created a new blog series focusing on and highlighting new and existing collaboration features within Office. In the coming months, we’ll cover a wide variety of topics related to collaboration and how to get tasks related to collaboration done in Office. We’ll also talk about Office collaboration in different contexts—like in the office, the classroom and at home. So we hope you find these topics interesting and worth sharing. We’ll start the series off with a post about Sharing from Jade Kessler, program manager for the Office Core team. —The Collaboration Experiences team Last week, we introduced Office 2016 for Windows, which takes the work out of working together. Using Word, PowerPoint and Excel 2016, you can now easily share your documents with friends and colleagues and work with others on the same document simultaneously while using the rich formatting options you know and love. Collaborating in Office has never been easier! Tired of sending attachments back and forth and ensuring that everyone stays up-to-date? Tired of manually merging everyone’s edits into the final copy? Using Office 2016, your content stays in one place and no one has to miss out on other people’s edits ever again. Collaborate without the hassle of passing around different versions of your documents. Seamless collaboration is at your fingertips. Here are four ways the new Share feature in Office 2016 will change the way you work with others: Ready to collaborate? Invite your friends and colleagues! If you’ve already saved your document to OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, all you need to do to invite others is to click the Share button in the upper right of the screen and type in their names or email addresses in the Invite people text box. Next, you can give your collaborators different levels of permission, allowing them to make edits or restrict their access to View-only. If you choose View-only, then only you will be able to make changes to the document. Before you’re done, don’t forget to include a personal message with your invite. Click the Share button and you’re all set! It’s as easy as that, and now you can see who the document is shared with in the pane. You will get a notification in the upper right-hand corner as soon as others join the document. In Word 2016, you will be able to co-author with others simultaneously and see their changes as they type. Otherwise, press Save to refresh the document and see other people’s contributions. If you’ve just created a new document or have saved it to your local drive, you need to save it to your OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint first before you can share. To do this, click the Share button in the upper right corner and then click Save to Cloud. In the Save As dialog, select a cloud folder and save your document. Once the save completes, you are automatically returned to Share so you can invite others. Share a link with a group If you want to share your document with a wider audience and don’t feel like typing a long list of email addresses, you can get a sharing link from the Share pane. Simply, click the Share button and then click Get a sharing link at the bottom of the pane. Note, this option is not available if your IT admin has disabled anonymous link sharing. You can choose to create an Edit or View-only link. If you choose View-only, then you are the only one who can make edits to the document. Once you’ve created a sharing link, you can copy it and paste it in OneNote, Facebook, Slack, Skype, email—anywhere you want! No need to sign in, and everyone works on the same version of the document. You will see a notification in the upper right-hand corner when people open the link you sent and join the document. Keep track of who is working with you You can keep track of the number of co-authors present in the document at any time by checking the number on the Share button. If you want to find out who’s there, take a look at the co-author list in the Share pane. In Word 2016, you’ll see who’s using the real-time co-authoring feature and whose edits you’ll see as they type (marked as Editing in real time) and who is not using the feature (marked as Editing). You’ll also see who has the document opened multiple times (e.g. Editing from three devices). Lastly, with in-app Skype for Business integration, you can start a chat, call or video with people you’ve shared your document with by simply hovering over their name in the people list. Change permissions on the fly To manage the permissions to your document, go to the Share pane and right-click on someone in the list of collaborators. You can remove them from the document completely or change their level of access (i.e. give them View-only or Edit permissions). If you’ve created a sharing link, right-clicking on it in the collaborators list will give you the option to remove it. After you do that, people with the link to the document will no longer have access to it. Now you know how to start collaborating in Office 2016. To work better together, start sharing today! Your colleagues and friends are only a few clicks away. We have more exciting updates in store for you and will keep rolling out features to help you be more productive together. Stay tuned and send us your feedback! —Jade Kessler, program manager for the Office Core team The post Share with the click of a button in Office 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

If you already know what you want to say to an audience, PowerPoint makes it easy to say it in a visually stunning presentation. With Office Mix, you can even make that presentation interactive, host it on the web and share it with the world. But what if you don’t know what to say—or how to say it? James Whittaker to the rescue! Or @docjamesw if you’re a fan of Twitter. In "The Art of Stage Presence," the man who left Microsoft to join Google and came back to Microsoft teaches the world five basic laws of delivering a great presentation. In fact, rather than just tell you the laws, he demonstrates them. In a talk-within-a-talk, Whittaker gives a sample presentation on "The Magic of Software" and then deconstructs what he did and how he did it. "An idea is a terrible thing to waste," says Whittaker. "The quality of the idea matters less than the quality of the presentation of the idea. We need to get better at presenting our ideas." Brought to you by Office Mix, this distinguished engineer shares the wealth of his experience at how to avoid glassy-eyed stares from an audience, how to save them from "death by a thousand slides," and how to get your idea across in a way that gets people talking about it. There’s no requirement to use PowerPoint, Windows or even a computer. Stage presence is a life skill that you can tap into whenever you need to communicate an idea. Want more inspiration? Check out the other inspiring speakers in the Office Mix Gallery. Then download Office Mix for free and put James’s advice to work for you. The post Master "The Art of Stage Presence" with James Whittaker appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Brent Thrasher, 8th grade Math teacher at Rickman Elementary School. This past spring our school district started tossing around the idea of moving to open educational resources (OER). I was actually glad to hear this idea because I knew what opportunities it could offer our students. At the same time, I knew the challenges it would pose to us teachers. If you don’t know much about OER, this article is a good place to start learning. Basically, the idea of OER is a community of educators creating "free-to-use" content. This content is open to anyone who wants to consume it or modify it to make it their own. It can distributed to students and updated as many times as the teacher wants, without any fee. Of course, we tend to focus on the free aspect of OER, but I think that is only a small benefit of OER. I think the biggest and most powerful aspect of OER is the community. As I mentioned before, OER is content developed by a community of educators. With thousands of educators out there creating content, there is what seems like too much content to comb through. When I started my adventure in the OER world, gathering almost everything I found, I realized two things. One: I could never sort through all of this content by myself before the start of school. Two: I needed a way to organize all the content and insert new lessons as I come across them. Well, it didn’t take long to realize OneNote was really the answer to both of my problems. The first problem was the manpower. When you get started reviewing and gathering OER you will soon find out it seems endless. I needed some help, so I contacted a fellow math teacher in my district and we decided to work on the project together. OneNote made this easy. I simply started a Notebook and shared it with my colleague by sending her an email. Right away we started dragging and dropping the lessons we had found out on sites like Engage New York and cK-12. Also, thanks to OneNote, we were able to work asynchronously. I could work on the project when I had time, and she could do the same. We did not have to set up times to meet. With OneNote, my edits instantly synced to her version. As I mentioned before, an important aspect of OER is that you can edit it and make it your own. OneNote again made things really easy for us. In OneNote, you get a great open workspace so that you can easily make annotations and comment on the content. This allowed us to collaborate and throw ideas back and forth. OneNote also helped us organize our content. As I mentioned earlier, with OER it is easy to pile up the content and lose track of what you have. To remedy this problem we built an index page with a table that contained links to the pages for each lesson. We are still working on our OER project and we are making a lot of progress. Since we began, we have invited several other teachers in our district to participate and add feedback. It is pretty awesome to see what we are accomplishing thanks to the communication OneNote provides. If you aren’t familiar with OneNote, you should check it out. You can get it here for free, even if you don’t have an Office 365 subscription. —Brent Thrasher The post Using open educational resources to make your own textbook? You need OneNote! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 2016 is here! That’s the big news, but a host of new apps, tools, features, integrations, services and previews arrived in September too. Check out Snip, an exciting new tool for screen captures. For Office 365 for business, there’s a new Office 365 Admin Center Preview and the next-generation sync client for the updated OneDrive for Business is now in preview. There’s also a new Office 365 Import Service, a new experience called Office 365 Planner, and a new service feature, the Office 365 Service Trust Portal. Invite, which helps you easily organize meetings on the go, and Outlook Groups are the new mobile apps. Several posts this month highlight what’s new for Excel 2016 and Project 2016. Others focus on helping admins prepare for, manage and deploy the new Office. For education users, security features were added to Office 365 Education, and the developer community saw the launch of a new Yeoman generator for building Office add-ins. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: August 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates Introducing Snip, a new tool to help you get more done in Office—Why just show when you can show and tell in three easy steps? Snip is a new way to perform the familiar task of snipping—capturing material to paste in email, documents or notebooks. With Snip you can capture anything on your screen, add audio narration or inked notes, and then paste the annotated snip, send it as a URL, or save it as an MP4 video. Teachers and students have already caught on to how useful Snip is. Try it yourself and see how much more productive you can be. Download Snip today. Office updates for the iPad Pro, iOS 9 and WatchOS 2—New features for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Translator have been developed to take advantage of these recently announced Apple enhancements. The new features include multitasking on iPad, inking on iPad, intelligent search on iPad and iPhone, wireless keyboard support for iPad and updates to Outlook and Translator on Apple Watch. The updated apps will be available when the new iPad Pro, iOS 9 and WatchOS 2 are released. If you install the apps now, you’ll get the new features when the updates are published to the App Store. OneNote adds support for iOS 9 and iPad Pro with multitasking, Spotlight search and Apple Pencil—Support was added for several new features of iOS 9. With Split View you can have OneNote open side-by-side with another app, with Slide Over you can open OneNote atop another app, and Spotlight makes searching your notes much faster. Improvements were added, too, including better UI support for Arabic and Hebrew in iOS 9 and the option to have your page list on the right or left side of the page. And in November, Apple Pencil and iPad Pro support will arrive. The new Office is here!—The worldwide release of Office 2016 for Windows on September 22 marks a milestone in delivering new value for Office 365 subscribers with a focus on collaboration, apps that work for you, a perfect pairing with Windows 10 and security features businesses will love. It also marks a new model for delivery, which delivers more frequent updates with new features and improvements. Office 2016 for Mac as a one-time purchase option was also released, along with several new and enhanced Office 365 services. Find out how the new Office takes the work out of working together and read highlights of the new apps, Windows 10, Mac users and enterprise. Office 365 for Business & Education updates* New security features for Office 365 Education—New features were added to Office 365 Education to help schools meet their security and compliance requirements in the age of collaborative, cloud-connected teaching and learning. In addition to the basic services—Office Online, 1TB of OneDrive storage, Exchange email and Skype—Office 365 Education now includes advanced features such as Legal hold and eDiscovery to help you find and analyze content, Rights Management Services for access control, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to help you identify, monitor and protect sensitive information in your organization. Office 365 Education is free to all academic institutions. Power Query integrated into Excel 2016—If you often import data into Excel or you need to shape your data before you analyze it and build reports, your get-data experience in Excel is now a lot easier. With Excel 2016, Power Query is no longer an add-in. Power Query technology is integrated into Excel 2016 as part of the Data ribbon, under the Get & Transform section. Power Query enhances the self-service business analytics experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery, access and collaboration. Learn about the new capabilities and try them out for yourself. Announcing the Office 365 Service Trust Portal—The Office 365 Service Trust Portal (STP) is a new service feature in Office 365 designed to provide deeper information on how Microsoft manages security, compliance and privacy. Insights from this portal help you evaluate how Office 365 maintains compliance with your regulatory requirements and how you can mitigate the risks with moving to Office 365. Through STP you can get direct access to a variety of compliance reports and trust resources, such as Office 365 SOC 1 / SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402, Office 365 SOC 2 / AT 101, and Office 365 ISO 27001 independent audit reports. Find out how to access STP and what it can do for your organization. Updates to Power Query add-in for Excel 2010 and Excel 2013—The ability to provide a custom query in MDX or DAX when importing data from Analysis Services was added. This allows users to leverage their existing MDX or DAX queries from other tools, instead of having to build them from scratch in Power Query. Improvements to the Navigator dialog include the ability to resize and to multi-select items. Query Editor improvements include easier query group creation and deletion, the ability to extract steps from a query, and updated query icons so they now reflect the type of query. Send now more widely available—Send is the app that feels like texting and works like email. Send for iPhone became available for Office 365 business and education customers last July, and now Send for Android is available in preview. Also, Send for iPhone and Send for Android are now available in app stores in the UK, Brazil and Denmark as well as the U.S. and Canada. With these updates, even more people can take advantage of Send’s simple, quick text message-like experience when connecting with coworkers, customers and classmates on the go. Office 365 Import Service—migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business just became easier—Office 365 Import Service makes migrating documents to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business faster and simpler. You save time when migrating your data to Office 365 by having the option to copy it to hard drives and ship them instead of using the network to upload large amounts of data. And to simplify the process, a free tool is available to package up your on-premises SharePoint or file share content and prepare it to be imported into Office 365. New Office 365 Admin Center Preview—To empower administrators to achieve more, the Office 365 Admin Center has been updated to be more intuitive, informative, scalable and insightful. The dashboard and the way you access the tools were simplified, so it’s easier to complete common tasks like adding users or resetting passwords without leaving the dashboard. Not all features are available yet, but you can get a sneak peek in the Office 365 Admin Center Preview, which is rolling out to First Release customers now. New ways to get the Excel business analytics features you need—The analytics power of Excel 2016—including rich charts and visualization and new data analysis capabilities in Power Pivot—is now available to all Excel 2016 users, no matter which Office plan you purchase. More advanced analytics functionality comes with the premium plans of Office 2016, features such as advanced analytics and modeling capabilities with Power Pivot, connectivity options with Power Query, and collaboration. Plus, there are new ways to get the premium Excel features for Office Professional 2016 users and small business users using one of the Office 365 Business plans. Seamless real-time communication on the web with Skype, Skype for Business and Microsoft Edge—The Object Real-Time Communications Community (ORTC) API preview for Microsoft Edge is now available in the latest Windows Insider Preview release. The ORTC API preview for Edge is the latest result of a close, ongoing collaboration between the Windows and Skype teams. What does this mean? For developers, it means new ways to build innovative real-time communications into your web-based experiences. For people using Skype and Skype for Business at work or at home, it means calls and meetings on the web will soon get even easier and more seamless. Admin tools, guidance and resources for Office 2016—This post is a one-stop shop for the tools, guidance and resources admins need to prepare, deploy and manage Office. Find out about improvements to the upgrade and installation experience, the new deployment and management options, and the newly added support for DLP across the Office 2016 apps, multi-factor authentication and other mission-critical control capabilities. New events, tools and resources are coming in November with the kickoff of a new IT- and developer-focused event series, the Microsoft Cloud Roadshow, which will offer free 2-day technical trainings in 12 cities around the world for topics spanning Office, Azure and Windows. Admins for small and midsized businesses—get ready for Office 2016—Find out what to expect now that Office 2016 has been released and what you need to do. The Office 2016 release for Office 365 introduces a new model for managing and deploying updates, a model primarily for larger enterprise customers that reduces updates to every four months. Small businesses running Office 365 Business will continue to receive regular monthly updates. When Office 2016 is released for Office 365, you’ll receive an email offering you two choices for updating to Office 2016, at your convenience or with automatic upgrades rolling out over several weeks. The new Office is here!—The worldwide release of Office 2016 for Windows on September 22 marks a milestone in delivering new value for Office 365 subscribers with a focus on collaboration, apps that work for you, a perfect pairing with Windows 10 and security features businesses will love. It also marks a new model for delivery, which delivers more frequent updates with new features and improvements. Office 2016 for Mac as a one-time purchase option was also released, along with several new and enhanced Office 365 services. Find out how the new Office takes the work out of working together and read highlights of the new apps, Windows 10, Mac users and enterprise. Introducing Office 365 Groups in Outlook 2016 and the Outlook Groups mobile app—Office 365 Groups, the new cross-suite service that enables people to create public or private groups, launched last year. With the Office 2016 launch, two new capabilities are being introduced—Groups in Outlook 2016 and a new mobile app called "Outlook Groups"—that offer a better way to get work done with others and a number of benefits compared to traditional distribution lists. Creating a group is easy and new colleagues can also join existing groups and quickly get up to speed. Find out more about Outlook Groups and the app and how easy they make it to create and join groups, even on the go. Introducing Office 365 Planner—Office 365 Planner, a new Office 365 experience, gives you a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. It makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. You can use Planner to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project or organize coursework, prepare for a customer visit or just organize your team more effectively. Office 365 Planner will be available in preview to Office 365 First Release customers starting in the fourth quarter of this year. Find out more, including which Office 365 plans are eligible for Planner. New app to organize meetings on the go—Invite—Organizing group meetings can be tricky—especially when you’re on the move, trying to coordinate several different schedules on a small screen. A new app, Invite, greatly simplifies this process: you suggest times that work for you and invite attendees; they select all the times they can attend; and you pick the time that works best after everyone has responded. Invite is available for iPhones in the U.S. and Canada, and is coming soon to Windows Phone and Android phones. The app works best with Office 365 business and school subscriptions, but it also works great with any email—Outlook.com, Gmail and Yahoo Mail included. Office 365—project and portfolio management (PPM) for the mobile-first, cloud-first world—Several apps and add-ins are being acquired for Project Online from Sensei Project Solutions, Inc. and Projectum ApS, winners of the 2014 and 2015 Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Partner of the Year awards respectively. The mobile apps are Sensei Task Master™, Sensei Project Dashboard™, and Sensei Portfolio Dashboard, and the add-ins are Project Financials and Project Snapshot. These additions to Project Online, plus Wunderlist and Office 365 Planner, give you cloud-based solutions to manage everything from simple tasks to the most advanced projects, programs and portfolios, anywhere, on any device. ExpressRoute for Office 365 now generally available—Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 enables organizations to establish a private, managed network connection to Office 365 as an alternative to connecting over the Internet. This direct connection offers more predictable network performance, an SLA for guaranteed availability and additional data privacy, all of which are important as more organizations depend on Office 365 for document collaboration and communications. ExpressRoute for Office 365 is now generally available from these network operators: British Telecom, Equinix, Tata Communications, TeleCity Group and Verizon. What’s new in Project 2016—Read about the significant updates to Project Professional, Project Pro for Office 365 and Project Online in this release. Project 2016 delivers some of the most requested capabilities: resource management and resource capacity planning. The enhancements supporting these key capabilities are new resource engagements, a brand new experience for resource managers, and capacity heat maps. Other improvements and new features include improved timelines, Tell Me integration and full support for Office Add-ins. Project 2016 is immediately available online as part of Office 365. Deployment scripts for Office 2016—The Office Deployment Scripts for IT Pros community project that began last month helps IT pros with Office client deployments using PowerShell to streamline the process. All of the scripts are available on the GitHub repository. This month’s updates include the addition of a folder structure to help find useful scripts quickly and easily, a wiki to the repository with information designed to provide context for using these scripts in real-world situations, Office 365 ProPlus Configuration XML Editor, the Generate-ODTConfigurationXML PowerShell script, the Update-Office365Anywhere function and more. Likes and @Mentions coming to Outlook on the web—Soon you’ll be able to use Likes and @Mentions in your workplace email. The new Like feature in Outlook on the web gives you an easy way to visibly endorse a specific email and call it out as worthy of attention. When you’re collaborating in email, Mention makes it easy to call out a specific person for an action or request, or to add a person to an existing thread. Like is rolling out now to Office 365 eligible First Release customers and is expected to start rolling out broadly to eligible Office 365 commercial customers in late October. Mention will begin rolling out to First Release customers in mid-October and broadly to eligible Office 365 commercial customers in mid-November. Meet the new OneDrive for Business—This is the most significant set of OneDrive for Business updates ever released. First and foremost is the new rock-solid sync client, now in preview. The new client offers improved reliability, selective sync, a new deployment option and more. The preview is rolling it out in stages to make sure the setup experience is smooth and reliable. The next-generation sync client is just one of the many enhancements in this release, which also include a new, simplified browser experience, new sharing options, new mobile app features, critical new IT controls and extended developer options. See how much more you can do and achieve with OneDrive for Business. Office 365 Developer updates Dev Digest for September—Read this month’s exciting news, which includes the launch of a new Yeoman generator for building Office Add-ins, the general availability of the custom file handler add-ins, and the arrival of Office UI Fabric, a responsive, mobile-first, front-end framework for developers, designed to make it simple to quickly create web experiences using the Office design language. And check out the schedule of onsite conferences and training events for the next six months, so you can prepare for upcoming events. And, as always, get the list of new and updated dev documentation, code samples, Office Dev Show episodes, patterns and practices, blog posts, Office Store news, plus the latest in developer marketing—the newest customer-evidence video touting partner solutions, showing how a Seattle cloud-integration company uses the D&B Business Solutions Excel add-in to more quickly qualify their customer leads and close deals. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald ——————————————————————————- *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: September 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future," said Danish physicist, Niels Bohr. Well, it just got a lot easier with Excel’s one-click forecasting. Often we use Excel to analyze time-based series data—like sales, server utilization or inventory data—to find recurring seasonality patterns and trends. In Excel 2016, new forecasting sheet functions and one-click forecasting helps you to explain the data and understand future trends. Let’s take a closer look at some of the capabilities that come with these new features, including how to detect seasonality, understand the level of confidence in the prediction, and create the forecast in one-click. Using Exponential Smoothing for forecasting There are many ways to generate a forecast for your historical data. Before Excel 2016, many used the FORECAST() sheet function, which performs a linear forecast or extended trendlines in chart properties to extrapolate forward. The new functionality in Excel 2016 utilizes another algorithm, called Exponential Smoothing or ETS. Exponential Smoothing methods are a popular way to forecast and are among the leading methods that have become industry standards. The main advantages of using the ETS method are the ability to detect seasonality patterns and confidence intervals. Seasonality patterns In many business scenarios there is a seasonality pattern that we would like to take into account in the forecast. An example of this could be ice cream sales presented in monthly data. We would expect to have a yearly cycle in this case, which would repeat itself every 12 points (months). Another example is hourly traffic data, where a seasonality of 24 points (hours) makes sense. In the example below you can see how a yearly seasonality was detected and applied in the forecast. Since the data is monthly and repeats every 12 points, the detected seasonality was 12. In some cases we know what the seasonality length is, but in other cases we do not. This forecasting method looks for seasonality patterns in the historical data and tries to determine the pattern that best matches the data. For this to work properly, the more repeating cycles the historical data contains the better. It is recommended to have at least 2-3 full seasonal cycles in the historical data. The automatically detected value in the Seasonality section can be found in the Create Forecast dialog under Options. In case the seasonal data was not significant enough to be detected, or you know which seasonality you expect, you can manually override the automatically detected value by selecting Set Manually. Confidence intervals Apart from predicting future values for the input time series, the ETS forecast can also return a confidence interval. The confidence interval is the range surrounding each predicted value in which 95 percent of future points are expected to fall based on the forecast (with normal distribution). The confidence interval helps you figure out the accuracy of the prediction. A smaller interval implies more confidence in the prediction for the specific point. The default level of 95 percent confidence can be changed using the up or down arrows and can be used in two ways: You can deduct from the width of the confidence interval to understand the accuracy of the prediction. You can experiment with several of the advanced options (such as how to account for missing points, seasonality, etc.) and observe if the previewed confidence interval got thinner or wider. This provides an indication of how well the underlying model fits the historical data. How do I create a forecast? To create a forecast sheet, first make sure you have your time-based series data set ready (it should have a time series and values series). Next, under the Data tab, click the Forecast sheet button. This launches the forecast dialog that walks you through the process. For detailed instructions on how to create a forecast, visit Create a forecast in Excel 2016 for Windows. Alternatively, if you are comfortable with using sheet functions, you can do exactly the same using the new FORECAST.ETS* sheet functions, which are described here: Forecasting Functions Help. Using the functions allows you to use the exact same functionality. How do I know whether my data is forecasted accurately? Can trust it? As with many statistical tools, the accuracy of the forecast would depend on this input data. As data is rarely perfect, it’s important to investigate the forecast and understand the applicability of it in the case of your specific data. There are several things you can do in order to understand how accurately your data is being forecasted: Look at the width of the confidence interval that was described above. Experiment with the Forecast From control by setting it to a date earlier than your last historical point. This allows you to see how your prediction would have looked had it been calculated only over the earlier subset. In this case, you can look at the overlap between the forecast series and the actual series and see how close it was. This is marked in red in the example below, and we can see that the prediction was very close to the actuals. In this case the same can be achieved using the sheet functions by providing as input only part of the historical series and then comparing the forecast with the actuals. If you happen to know your way around statistics, check the Include forecast statistics checkbox to display a summary of several accuracy metrics. Select Include forecast statistics to display a table of statistical values in the forecast. All of the statistics are computed using the FORECAST.ETS.STAT() function and described here. What do you think? We just went through the basics of the new forecasting features available in Excel 2016. Try it out for yourself and then share your ideas for other features and improvements in Excel. The post One-click forecasting in Excel 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Ali Rohani, principal program manager lead and Jamie Stark, senior product manager on the Skype for Business team. In July, we announced a preview of new Skype for Business voice and meetings capabilities in Office 365, including PSTN Conferencing and Calling, Cloud PBX and Skype Meeting Broadcast. More than 4,000 companies are currently previewing the new services, with usage growing at an average of 20 percent every week. Today we’re excited to announce that we are expanding the preview to provide support for additional countries, as well as adding several new features. PSTN Conferencing preview now available in 14 additional countries Initially available only in the U.S., the PSTN Conferencing preview will now be available to customers in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom starting this month, with Finland, Norway and South Africa coming in November. The new PSTN Conferencing services enable customers to add dial-in and dial-out capabilities to existing audio, video and web meetings in Skype for Business Online, all provided by Microsoft. The preview will be localized for these countries to include their native languages and local phone numbers for meetings. Cloud PBX Preview now available to customers worldwide Skype for Business Server customers around the world will now be able to preview Cloud PBX in Office 365 using their existing phone lines for inbound and outbound calling. Using this on-premises PSTN connectivity, customers worldwide can use Cloud PBX to eliminate separate PBX systems for users but still take advantage of their existing carrier contracts and circuits. In this hybrid configuration, Office 365 customers use on-premises Skype for Business Server software and their own existing IP-PBX or carrier connection to make and receive calls to landlines and mobile phones. Initially, this hybrid option requires an on-premises Skype for Business Server installation, but we plan to provide additional options over time. Number portability and voicemail In addition, we are enabling number portability for users of the PSTN Calling preview in the U.S., which allows customers to use their existing phone numbers with our new PSTN calling service, ultimately simplifying adoption. We are also enabling voicemail for Cloud PBX customers worldwide, providing a simple way to leave a message for someone when they are unavailable. IP Phones with Cloud PBX In the coming weeks, several IP phone models will also become available for preview with Cloud PBX. Existing Skype for Business customers can use Polycom CX600 and CX3000, HP 4120, and Mitel Mivoice 6725 (previously sold as Aastra 6725 IP) devices running the latest firmware. New customers can purchase Polycom VVX series devices pre-loaded with the necessary software to connect directly to Office 365—more information can be found on Polycom’s website here. Over the next several months, the list of supported devices will expand to include additional models and manufacturers. Call Quality Dashboard Finally, later this month, we will add the Skype for Business Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) to the preview. This dashboard offers IT admins quick and easy access to aggregated quality information for both meetings and calls. It will include daily and monthly views of call volumes along with the ability for customers to assess call quality as a function of IP network type and user location. Sign up to try the new features today! We really appreciate all of our preview users and the time customers have taken to test and help us improve our service prior to launch. Now, with the new countries supported with PSTN conferencing and the worldwide preview of Cloud PBX, even more enterprise customers can preview the new capabilities. Go to www.skypepreview.com in order to learn more and get signed up. —Ali Rohani and Jamie Stark Frequently asked questions Q. What are the eligibility requirements to participate in the preview? A. The Skype Meeting Broadcast and Cloud PBX previews are now available worldwide to customers with an Office 365 enterprise plan or Skype for Business Plan 2. The preview of PSTN Conferencing is available to customers in the U.S., Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, with an Office 365 enterprise plan or Skype for Business Plan 2. Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling is available in the U.S. to customers with an Office 365 enterprise plan or Skype for Business Plan 2. EDU and Nonprofit tenants are not eligible for the preview at this time. Q. Can end users sign up for the trial? A. No, the trial must be provisioned for the customer tenant by an Office 365 administrator. End users interested in trying the new services should contact their Office 365 administrator. Q. Are interested Office 365 customers required to trial all of the services currently in preview, or can they choose to preview only a subset? A. Eligible Office 365 enterprise customers may choose to trial any or all of the services now in preview according to the geographies where each preview is available. Q. When will these services be generally available, and how will they be priced? A. We expect to make Cloud PBX generally available worldwide before the end of this year.  PSTN Calling and PSTN Conferencing we expect to make available in the pre-release markets before the end of this year. We will share pricing and licensing details when we are closer to general availability. The post Expanding the preview of Skype for Business services in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.