Today’s Office 365 post was written by Timothy Harris, vice president of global IT shared services at Mylan, a global pharmaceutical company. In information technology, it’s tempting to be wowed by a new product or swayed by a charismatic salesperson. But if I’m doing my job well, I actually look beyond the technology itself. I stay focused on solving my company’s business problems. For example, Mylan has been growing so quickly that we’ve found it difficult to establish a cohesive technology suite for our geographically distributed workforce. In the past several years, we’ve acquired new business units that expanded our capacity to produce life-saving pharmaceuticals, but they also created an IT environment with lots of overlapping products that confused users and made it challenging to work together, especially across business units. In response, our CEO sponsored the Connect, Collaborate, Communicate initiative to help us become a more unified organization—one that reached out to our internal knowledge base to improve operations and that shared best practices across the board. Those of us within IT needed to find and deploy technologies that would fully support this unification effort. Rather than looking at separate tools, we wanted a platform that provided comprehensive capabilities and a consistent experience for all Mylan employees. We established and now follow three guiding principles: buy instead of build, keep our number of technology vendors to a minimum, and look at the cloud first. Why a cloud-first strategy? We believe that the cloud brings agility to the business, plus the ability to scale. In addition, nearly every one of our cloud migrations ends up with a lower total cost of ownership five years down the line. Like any good business, we did our due diligence when choosing a cloud services provider. We looked at Google, but we felt that it would have added complexity without answering our business needs. For example, we saw that Google Docs just wasn’t robust enough to replace the Microsoft Office suite, which we use heavily throughout the company. So we still would have needed Office if we’d selected Google cloud services. We work hard to avoid that kind of overlap in functionality and the confusion it causes for employees on which solutions to use when. With Microsoft Office 365, we found the platform we were looking for. We’ve already migrated our messaging system to Office 365, deployed a new telephony system, and started to standardize our Microsoft Office suite on Office 365 ProPlus. We’re device agnostic, so we appreciate how easy Office 365 ProPlus makes it for us to securely connect almost any employee device. Next, we’ll extend our adoption to include cloud-based document storage and document collaboration capabilities. As our Office 365 usage expands, we’ll continue to increase productivity simply because it’s easier to connect with one another. For example, we use a follow-the-sun approach to research and development (R&D). R&D staff members in our Pennsylvania and India offices collaborate more closely and continually now that they have the presence functionality in Microsoft Skype for Business to see who’s available to work through an issue. A quick instant message exchange might get the question answered and the research back on track. Furthermore, someone may launch a call or videoconference to address more complex problems. Whatever the method, with these tools, we’re augmenting our pharmaceutical development process. In fact, we anticipate that our employees will be able to travel less because the communications capabilities now open to them make it easier to work together virtually. In the past, employees found our videoconferencing so complicated to set up that many groups just continued to hold physical meetings with printed presentations. But now that they can fire up a Skype meeting with a single click, employees meet virtually and share screens, which saves both time and paper. Our move to Office 365 definitely helps us get new employees up and running more quickly, both when we acquire whole business units and when we hire new employees individually. This has made us more nimble and scalable as a company, which has reduced our costs for messaging and conferencing alone by half. When we take advantage of the other collaboration and storage capabilities, our cost savings will keep increasing. Along with shifting our IT financial investment from servers and storage to cloud capacity, we’re shifting our staffing priorities, too. We no longer have to worry about system administration or hardware procurement. Instead, we’re investing our IT dollars in strategic projects that make a difference to our core business, such as exploring enterprise applications to automate our pharmaceutical factories and ensure data integrity. By adopting Office 365, we’re making a positive difference in our ability to grow and make greater strides in our pursuit of better healthcare around the globe. —Timothy Harris The post Office 365—allowing us to focus on what matters most: solving business problems appeared first on Office Blogs.

A few weeks ago, we announced the technical preview of the Skype for Business client, and today, we’re thrilled to announce that the new Skype for Business client is now rolling out as part of the April monthly update for Office 2013! In addition, Skype for Business Online is now rolling out to Office 365 customers worldwide, and we expect the roll out to be complete by the end of May. If you currently use Lync Online in Office 365, the new Skype for Business user experience will appear for you in the coming weeks. For customers that need a little more time to prepare for Skype for Business, we have provided the ability for administrators to switch between Skype for Business and the traditional Lync user interface.  You can learn more here for Lync Online or here for the client experience with Lync Server. Skype for Business is based on the familiar Skype experience that more than 300 million people use every month to connect with friends and family. It is built right into Office, so features like presence, IM, voice and video calls, and online meetings are an integrated part of the Office experience. And with Skype for Business, you can search for and connect with anyone in the Skype network-inside or outside your organization. You can learn more about Skype for Business here. Frequently asked questions Q. What is Skype for Business? A. Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync) is a communications and collaboration platform that brings together an experience inspired by Skype with enterprise-grade security, compliance and control. It offers features including presence, IM, voice and video calls, and online meetings. It is built right in to Microsoft Office, so initiating chats, calls and meetings is an integrated experience within Office. Q. Will Skype for Business automatically replace Lync Online for Office 365 customers? A. Yes. We will automatically update the Lync Online service to be Skype for Business Online, and all customers are expected to be transitioned by the end of May. Q. If I want more time to prepare for Skype for Business before upgrading, can I continue to use Lync? A. Yes. Administrators for current Lync Online or Lync Server customers can control when the updated experience is rolled out to their users. Visit this page to learn more about how to configure the Skype for Business client experience. Q. How can I learn more about the new client features? A. More information about the features available in the new Skype for Business client is available here. The post Skype for Business is here! appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re always looking for ways to improve how you can use Office Mix to deliver a compelling presentation and better engage your audience. We’ve done just that with two vital additions to Office Mix, Slide Notes and Closed Captioning. Be prepared with Slide Notes One of the most important aspects of delivering an effective presentation is being adequately prepared and knowledgeable enough to adapt on-the-fly. You may remember a presentation technique taught to us in grade school, which is to rely on notecards to ensure you hit your most salient points. With Slide Notes, the concept and experience are much the same. When you click the MIX tab in the PowerPoint ribbon, and then click the Record button, the recording view will open and the Slide Notes translucent text box is displayed at the top of your screen. Think of Slide Notes as a teleprompter for recording a mix—so you can focus on connecting with your audience, rather than worrying about memorizing your delivery. Your presentation will have smoother transitions, and you’ll record in fewer attempts. We think you’ll love this feature! Supplement with Closed Captioning We are also delighted to announce closed captioning for Office Mix! Our mission is to empower you to reach your full potential. With closed captioning, you now have the ability to personalize your Office Mix experience to make it easier to see, hear, and use. Beyond supporting those who are hearing-impaired, closed captioning can supplement audio that is hard to understand. Additionally, captions can be used as a tool for those learning to read or by individuals who simply like to read a transcript along with the presentation. Offering closed captioning in Office Mix reaches beyond merely satisfying some of our customer’s legal requirements—it’s a remarkable learning aid. Closed captioning allows you to observe and absorb presentations without interrupting or being interrupted by the world around you. It enhances the experience whether you are in a location that is busy and loud, like a subway or a public square, or tranquil like a library, or at home in front of the TV. Closed captioning can be effective in reinforcing key points or to improve your audience’s comprehension of the material. Although closed captioning in and of itself is nothing new, its utilization in Office Mix is a welcomed addition. To add closed captioning to a mix, ensure you check the box to create a video when uploading a mix. Then, download the video and utilize a third-party service to create the TTML file from your video. Once your TTML file is ready, go to your mix details, select the Upload TTML File link and upload your closed caption file.  From there, preview your mix to ensure your closed captioning is presented as you intended. For detailed instructions, read our Knowledge Base article. Office Mix is purpose-built to give audiences an engaging presentation that can be accessed at their convenience, and on their favorite device. These are just two of the great features we’ve launched to improve the experience for both presenter and viewer. Stay tuned for more! The post Deliver compelling presentations using Office Mix Slide Notes and closed captioning appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Miguel Llopis, program manager on the Power Query team. A Power Query for Excel update is now available for you and is packed with lots of new features including: New Navigator dialog Ability to create new queries from the Query Editor New Launch Editor button on Power Query ribbon tab Additional operators for date filtering in Query Editor Database connections—added support for Port number Additional Performance improvements   You can continue reading below for more details about each feature. New Navigator dialog The new Navigator dialog replaces the Navigator task pane, giving you search capabilities, an enhanced preview experience and optimized layout. Ability to search items in the tree—This has been a very common request for several months. The new Search box in the Navigator dialog enables users to more easily find items in the tree. Enhanced preview experience—Because the data previews are now part of the dialog (instead of in a small size fly-out), it is much easier to preview tables and use the scroll bar control. Similarly, the new preview experience is much more interactive for multi-dimensional sources (such as Analysis Services or SAP BusinessObjects), allowing users to immediately preview the output as they select items in the tree. Optimized layout when in "multi-selection mode"—The layout in this dialog has been optimized to allow for a greater number of items to show up in the tree. The new Show Selected control brings up the list of selected items in a secondary view. This allows the main view to be optimized around browsing, previewing and selecting items. Ability to create new queries from the Query Editor Another commonly requested feature was the ability to connect to external data sources and create new queries without having to leave the Query Editor dialog. We added a New Query section on the Home ribbon tab in the Query Editor, which provides access to all data connectors and recent sources. This allows users to focus on importing and transforming data across all of their queries without having to leave the Query Editor dialog. New Launch Editor button on Power Query ribbon tab With the New Query section added to the Query Editor and the ability to work with multiple queries in this dialog, it becomes much more desirable to be able to launch the Query Editor dialog from the Power Query tab in Excel. The new Launch Editor button lets users get directly into the Query Editor from Excel. Additional operators for date filtering in Query Editor We have added a few additional filter options for Date/Time columns in the Query view including Year to Date, Today, This Week, This Month and This Quarter. These options are displayed under the respective drop-down menu in the Date filters. Note that all of these filters use dynamic calculations, so for instance, Year to Date will always calculate from January 1 to the present day. Database connections—added support for Port number It is now possible to specify a Port number when connecting to a database. This can be done by using Server:Port in the Server Name field within one of the database source dialogs. Performance improvements We continue making incremental improvements to Performance in the product. This month there are two main areas where Performance has been improved: A 40-50 percent improvement when loading database tables without filters/transforms. Overall performance improvements to the Exchange Connector. That’s all for this update. We hope that you enjoy these new features and continue sending us feedback about the product. We have many other new features coming in the next few months so please stay tuned for future updates.     —Miguel Llopis ———————- Power Query for Excel is available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription, Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance, Office 2013 Professional Plus or Excel 2013 Standalone.  Download the add-in and learn more about getting started. Learn about all the powerful analytics and visualization features in Excel and take your analysis further by sharing and collaborating on business insights with colleagues using Power BI. Learn more about Power Query See all analytics and visualization features in Excel Get your Office 365 subscription Try Power BI Follow us: Facebook and Twitter The post 6 updates for Power Query for Excel appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Delve was written by Mark Kashman a senior product manager on the Office 365 team. "Through others we become ourselves." —Lev S. Vygotsky A company’s most important assets are its people—YOU. The knowledge and experience of you and your colleagues collectively brings great value to your company. And as you communicate and work out loud together within Office 365, the value of your work can be surfaced and discovered by others in Delve. Today, we are announcing enhancements to Office 365 that leverage Delve for easier people-based discovery and greater self-expression: People-based search and discovery—Enhancing the user profile experience A new way to express yourself in Office 365—Introducing the new Office 365 page authoring canvas Office Delve goes mobile—unlocking better discovery through people—New mobile apps for Android and iPhone Let’s delve into the details… People-based search and discovery Sometimes you want to search and discover content based on a keyword or topic, but often you want to learn more about a specific person and what’s trending around them. Today’s enhancements to the Office 365 personal profile experience, within Delve, deliver a richer people-based search and discovery. The look and feel of Delve has been updated to be cleaner and more action-oriented, and designed to help you find, connect and collaborate with the right people. The entire profile page is now responsive for a great experience across devices, from 4-inch screens up to the very largest displays. In addition to core profile information, each person’s organizational structure is now prominently displayed and easy to navigate. And there are numerous ways to get to someone’s profile: a Delve people search, clicking their name in OneDrive for Business or Outlook Web App (OWA), clicking About me and more. The new Profile experience in Delve, alongside the person’s Activity, promotes their About me information, ways to Contact them, their Organization structure, Blog and more. Note: some of the features pictured above, like Working on and Praise, will ship in the near future after today’s announcement. Learn more how to view and edit your profile and how you can find people and information in Delve—both articles will be updated to correspond with all changes. A new way to express yourself in Office 365 You will also notice a new section in your profile, Blog. We improved things to make it easy for you to express yourself within your organization in a more modern way. When you have new information or a point of view to share, simply click start writing in the Blog section of your profile. The new tool allows you to both edit and view pages from your mobile device, auto-saving as you go.  It also provides the ability to post pages directly to Yammer, automatically creating friendly, readable URLs. And because it’s integrated across Office 365, it’s easy to embed documents inline from OneDrive for Business, videos from Office 365 Video, even photos from your desktop. And finally, it’s fast, modern and ready-to-go. This internal blogging tool is the first Office 365 experience to use the authoring canvas, a completely new page authoring platform for Office 365. Today, the authoring canvas helps you create engaging blog posts, and in the future, it will be enabled for use in creating various types of pages in Office 365, including those for individual profiles, Office 365 Groups and future NextGen Portals. And the authoring canvas will be backed by enterprise-grade, content management capabilities such as scheduling, versioning, compliance and taxonomy. (Left)The new authoring canvas in desktop edit mode. The inline toolbox pop-up helps you easily add content. (Right) Viewing a page on a mobile device. Office Delve goes mobile—unlocking better discovery through people We are excited to introduce Delve mobile apps for Android and iPhone, ensuring that connecting, discovering and sharing information with others is easy, even on the go. These mobile apps can notify you about updates to files you are actively engaged with at any given time. You can even receive notifications on your connected Android Wear. Take a quick look at this video to see how Delve mobile works: No matter how busy life gets, Delve has you covered, connecting you and your team with the right information and people—at the right moment—even on-the-go. With a single swipe, you can catch up on what’s new and relevant to your day—no matter where you are— with pivots on content and people. The images below highlight some of the new Delve app experiences: (Left) Main work activity feed. (Center) Discovering and finding people. (Right) New people layout with "WORKS ON," "WORKS WITH" and other pivots. Download the Delve for Android and Delve for iPhone app today. What’s next for people experiences? We’re extremely excited to bring these new ready-to-go people experiences to you via Delve and Office 365—and we’re just getting started. We are already hard at work planning and developing what comes next, which will roll out to the service automatically when the new features are ready. We will continue to refine the overall Office 365 profile experience, introduce a method to nurture your network via public kudos, provide ways to pull in additional profile information from trusted sources and machine learning insights, and enable customization of the profile experience via Add-ins and public APIs. 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. We will share and show more at Ignite (May 4-8 in Chicago). Hope to see you there. Join our YamJam to ask your questions On Wednesday, April 15th, the Office 365 Network will host a People Experiences in Office 365 YamJam from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PDT / 4:00-5:00 p.m. GST. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a "TweetJam" on Twitter or an "Ask Me Anything (AMA)" on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. In this YamJam, customers and partners can connect directly with the Delve and Profile product teams to ask questions and learn more about the announcement. Join the Delve group to participate. —Mark Kashman Frequently asked questions Delve mobile apps Q. Will the Delve apps for Android and iOS be available in all markets? A. Starting today, the Delve app for Android and iPhone will be available in the U.S., Ireland and Norway markets and will expand to all supported markets in the following weeks. Q. Which versions of iOS and Android do the Delve mobile app support? A. Delve mobile will run on iOS 8.0+ and Android 4.4 and above. Q. Do you have plans to support Windows Phone soon? A. Yes, we are hard at work on a Delve universal app for Windows and expect to provide more information soon. Q. Do the Delve mobile apps offer all of the same functionality available in the web experience? A. We’ll be iterating monthly to integrate not only the existing Delve web scenarios (such as Boards, improved profile, etc.) but will also look to introduce user-focused features to help you get even more done while on the go. Stay tuned for more updates. Q. Where can I learn more about Delve mobile apps? A. Please see this page for more information. Office 365 Profile updates Q. What if my company had customized the previous About Me experience? A. The new user profile page does not yet support customization. To help with your transition to the new experience, we will keep your custom My Site experience accessible to your users for the next six months. We are working on features to help you extend the new experience with custom capabilities. Q. Are the profile updates rolling out to all Office 365 commercial customers? A. Yes, profile updates will roll out to all Office 365 commercial customers. Customers with Exchange Online only plans will only see the core Office 365 profile page layout, which also received updates in terms of responsiveness across devices. Please note, if you opted out of Delve, the profile is located under Sites, not Delve. Q. When will the profile changes come to my Office 365 production tenant? A. The new profile experience began rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers today, and is expected to roll out broadly in the coming months. Q. Will my blog posts, created within SharePoint Online My Sites? Will they 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 authoring canvas. The post New Office Delve People Experiences in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post was written by Bryan Goode, senior director of Modern Collaboration. "Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much." —Helen Keller As we gear up for //build and Ignite and get ready to share more about the innovation going on across Office 365, I wanted to take a moment to share our vision for modern collaboration and address why Office 365 is uniquely positioned to usher in this new era. Over the past several years, advances in cloud, mobile and social technologies have forever altered the nature of work. But look a little deeper, and it’s about more than just the technologies; it’s about the impact they’ve had on the flow of information. We used to go looking for it. Now it comes to us. In this age of greater transparency and discoverability, it’s clear that the open exchange of information leads to quicker decision-making and increases the pace of progress. This deluge of information has also changed the way we interact in the workplace. Where work used to be a solitary pursuit, it’s now a communal one. Today, sharing and collaborating are strategies for getting ahead. People must be able to access, share and discover information in real time to move things forward. Having a collection of ideas and people is no longer sufficient—tapping into the collective thinking and "hive mind" model is the new approach to generating the best ideas and outcomes. Because of this, collaboration has become central to productivity, and the formation of teams to address a business need has become increasingly dynamic. It’s common today for people spanning different geographies, disciplines, even different companies, to come together quickly to work as a team towards a common goal. Indeed, with 40 percent or more of the U.S. workforce projected to be made up of contingent or independent workers by 2020, people will increasingly use networks to form teams of experts on-demand and dynamically "swarm" around projects and then disperse to the next. How can technology enable and support this agile way of working and enable friction-free collaboration anywhere, anytime? How do we make it easy for people to work as a collective, in real-time, while also building a knowledge base as they switch between projects? These are the questions driving how we think about modern collaboration. Empowering teams to work this way requires technology solutions that are seamless, allow teams to self-organize and work fluidly across locations, cultures and devices. It’s about delivering cross-platform tools that work together in concert and allow people to move seamlessly between them, even while on the go. Across Microsoft Office 365, our cloud-based productivity suite, we offer a holistic set of modern, connected collaboration solutions that allow teams to work the way they want and need—not in the way technology dictates. Office 365 enables a team to do things like co-author a report in real-time together, save it automatically to the cloud, discuss updates and changes from within the document itself and then easily share it with others by attaching the report as a link in email. To connect quickly for the rapid, iterative conversations that are so often at the heart of how work gets done, Office 365 enables you to automatically see colleagues’ presence and simply click a name to initiate an IM, or a voice or video call. Standing on the shoulders of giants But empowering a team to work more effectively requires more than just new choices and application-level integration. These days, as teams rapidly form and disband, we believe that it’s critical for people to be able to "stand on the shoulders of giants"—that is, quickly discover the work of others and build upon it through a shared intelligent fabric. This belief stands in stark contrast to the approach taken by disconnected point solutions, each maintaining a separate data silo, where useful information becomes stranded in a single app or buried within countless conversations. This belief in a common intelligent fabric is why we’ve introduced Office 365 Groups and Office Graph, two technologies that span Office 365 and beyond, helping teams self-organize, work together and build upon the expertise of others—ringing to life the inherent power of your network and powering personalized discovery experiences. Learn more about Office Graph. In just the last six months, Office Graph has mapped over six billion actions and interactions from across Office 365 applications. This common intelligent fabric allows us to enable new digital workspaces that span all of the Microsoft tools a team uses to get work done as well as provide a single way for IT to manage and secure corporate data and access. Learn more about Office 365 Groups. By continuing to innovate on tools that facilitate teamwork and extending a common intelligent fabric, we’re continuing to push the envelope and explore new, unique ways to make teams more effective. Stay tuned for more news here in the coming weeks! —Bryan Goode The post The rise of dynamic teams appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kevin Shaughnessy, senior program manager and Shobhit Sahay, technical product manager for the Office 365 team. For the last few years the largest email message you could send or receive in Office 365 was 25 MB. While 25 MB is more than enough for the majority of email, you might bump up against that limit when trying to send large slide decks, spreadsheets or videos. Outlook Web App (OWA) in Office 365 offers an easy way to "attach" a document as a link to where it’s saved on OneDrive for Business, a great option for sharing large files with your colleagues. But there are times when you’d prefer to send a large file as an actual attachment rather than a link. For those times, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve increased the allowed maximum message size to 150 MB, giving Office 365 administrators the ability to set the maximum message size of their choosing from 1 MB up to 150 MB. The default maximum message size for Office 365 mailboxes is still 25 MB, and we aren’t going to change the setting on existing accounts. It turns out that some folks want an even smaller setting than 25 MB and many don’t want to change the current setting at all. So instead of us foisting a one-size-fits-all setting onto everyone, we’re now giving Office 365 customers the freedom to choose the maximum size setting that’s right for them. Customized maximum message size You can customize the maximum allowed message size for any and all your mailboxes however you see fit. Want to go wild and allow everyone to send and receive 100 MB size messages? Go for it. Want to restrict students in your school from sending messages larger than 5 MB, while the faculty can send up to 50 MB? No problem. Do you have a hybrid mail configuration (some mailboxes on-premises, some in the cloud) and you want a consistent 10 MB restriction regardless where the mailbox is hosted? We have you covered. Whatever custom configuration you want to apply, whether for one, some, or all your mailboxes you can do it—as long as it’s between 1 MB and 150 MB. You customize the message size in the Exchange Admin Center, which requires global administrator role privileges. You can change the default for your organization by adjusting the default message size restriction. Simply select recipients > mailboxes then click ". . ." and select Set default message size restrictions. You can then specify the maximum message size for new mailboxes (those you create in the future). To edit multiple mailboxes select recipients > mailboxes and select multiple mailboxes. Then from the Bulk Edit pane under Message Size Restrictions select Update. Finally, you can customize a single mailbox by selecting recipients > mailboxes and then select a user’s mailbox. Click the edit icon , then under Message Size Restrictions, click View details and then specify the maximum message size.   Use the Exchange Admin Center or Remote PowerShell If your organization is comprised of less than 1,000 mailboxes, you’ll likely end up using the Exchange Admin Center user interface to make changes. But if your organization has more than 1,000 users, you may want to make these changes via Remote PowerShell. Updating thousands of mailboxes at a time can take a while to complete—a rough rule of thumb is around 5 to 10 minutes per 1,000. And while replicating the updates across the service typically takes an additional 15 minutes, allow up to 30 minutes after the update process is finished before testing out the new settings. Examples of the common commands you might use to customize these settings via Remote PowerShell include: ACTION COMMAND Update a single mailbox Set-Mailbox -Identity alias@domain.com -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB Update multiple mailboxes  ("alias", "alias2″, "alias3″) | % {Set-Mailbox -Identity $_ -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB} Update all mailboxes  Get-Mailbox | Set-Mailbox -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB Update the default settings (For mailboxes you create in the future.) Get-MailboxPlan | Set-MailboxPlan -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB Technical details There are a few technical details you should know when sending and receiving messages larger than 25 MB. First, as a message routes from mail system to mail system it can get larger than when it started. This happens because as a message traverses different mail systems, transcoding (or Base64/MIME conversion) may occur, most commonly between on-premises Exchange and the cloud. This results in a 33 percent larger message than when it left your outbox. Even though the maximum allowed message size is now 150 MB, this is the maximum message size threshold after any potential transcoding has occurred. If your message is going to get transcoded, then it will be limited to 112 MB maximum. Yet, not all messages are subject to transcoding. For example, most messages sent between mailboxes hosted within Office 365 won’t get transcoded, so they can be a full 150 MB in size. Second, email clients differ in their support for sending large messages. For example, in Outlook, assuming no transcoding is involved, you can attach a 150 MB size file and send it, and assuming the recipient is also hosted in the cloud and is configured to receive 150 MB size messages they’ll receive it. OWA, however, restricts the size of the message you can send to 25 percent less than the configured allowed maximum send size. It does this proactively to account for the possibility there might be a message size increase due to transcoding. For example, if your maximum allowed send size is set to 100 MB then using OWA you can only send up to 75 MB maximum. Additionally, in OWA, each attachment can be no larger than 25 MB. So with a 100 MB maximum send size, using OWA you could attach and send up to three 25 MB files in a single message. These conditions may change in the future, so be sure to check the official Office 365 documentation for the latest on the message size support provided by various email clients. Lastly, don’t forget that as an Office 365 customer, if you’ve customized your settings to 150 MB, you may be able to send and receive large messages up to 150 MB, but your associates may not. Whether it’s because their mail is hosted on a different email service or system that doesn’t support large message sizes, or they’re an Office 365 user but haven’t changed their settings, they may not be able to receive your large message. So if your message is over 25 MB be sure to ask them about it in advance before sending it to them. —Kevin Shaughnessy and Shobhit Sahay The post Office 365 now supports larger email messages—up to 150 MB appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post was written by Juliet Wei, a senior product marketing manager for the Yammer team. Yesterday we laid out our vision for modern collaboration in Office 365, which recognizes that collaboration is central to productivity and teams today are dynamic, extending far beyond the four walls of an organization. To get work done, teams need an easy way to self-organize, stay connected on the go, tap into the network of stakeholders inside and outside your company—and do all this while juggling multiple projects. In talking with customers about how they get the most out of Yammer, we’ve learned that those who realize the most value use Yammer as a home for their projects and initiatives.The new world of work we’re living in demands a new way for people to work together. That’s why we’re on a mission to transform team collaboration. Take a look at this video to see how teams use Yammer as part of Office 365 today. We’ve got lots of exciting innovations in store, so I’d like to share with you some of the things we’re doing in Yammer to help teams come together, work smarter and faster, and scale their impact. First, we’re integrating the Yammer experience more deeply within Office 365 by making Yammer a part of Office 365 Groups and Yammer signals a part of the Office Graph. Through this deeper integration, teams can seamlessly move between Yammer conversations, meetings in Skype for Business, Outlook email, files in OneDrive and content discovery in Delve. Next, we’re making Yammer itself a better place for teams to work by using our algorithmic feed to surface the teams and conversations you should know about, so you can stay on top of all your projects from the feed and engage more deeply within groups. And, because we know that teams themselves often span across organizations, we’re making it possible for extended teams to stay in sync and do more together. To this last point, I’m pleased to announce a new external messaging feature in Yammer, which enables you to add extended team members from outside your organization, such as partners, vendors and customers, to Yammer conversations. To include an external participant, simply add their email address to a Yammer conversation in your network, and they’ll be able to see and respond to this conversation from their own Yammer network or email inbox. Your data stays secure because outside participants only access the conversations they have been added to and not the rest of the information in your network. With 40 percent or more of the U.S. workforce expected to be made up of contingent or independent workers by 2020, companies need to empower the formation of dynamic teams. External messaging is an important step in that direction. Of course, we’ll continue to deliver these great new Yammer experiences on an enterprise-grade platform with centralized management, because we recognize that companies need a way to secure and manage their IP as teams and tools proliferate. So there you have it. Our goal is to make Yammer and Office 365 the place where teams work. Attend Ignite from May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago to see our vision in action for yourself. —Juliet Wei Frequently Asked Questions Q. How can I learn more about new Yammer features on the road map? A. Come to Ignite and attend the Yammer sessions!  We’ll be going over many of our key roadmap investments there, so you’ll be able to get an insider’s look at what we’re noodling over and actively working on. You can also stay up-to-date on new features we’ve publicly disclosed on the Office 365 roadmap. Q. How do I know that Yammer is the right tool for my team? A. As part of Office 365, Yammer enables teams to collaborate in the open by giving them the ability to easily self-organize, stay connected on the go, and tap into the network of stakeholders inside and outside your company. In the future, Yammer will integrate with Office 365 Groups so your team can share data across and easily move between Yammer, Outlook, OneDrive, Skype and Delve. Q. What will you do to ensure my conversations with external participants remain secure?  A. External messaging was designed to keep your IP safe and secure. We added several features to help identify, monitor and proactively protect your data. First, to create awareness among users, we revamped our UI to provide several warnings before an employee adds an external participant to a conversation. The UI also indicates if external participants are in a thread so new contributors know their audience before posting. Second, we added the ability to apply Exchange Transport Rules (ETRs) from Exchange Online directly to Yammer. Third, as many companies require a record of all employee communications, we refreshed data export so Yammer Verified Admins can monitor any conversation that originated in their network as well as conversations their employees are participating in outside networks. Finally, we provide Yammer users and admins the ability to remove external participants once they’ve been added, pulling that conversation entirely from the external participant’s inbox. To learn more about these security features, please visit this knowledge base article. Q. What if I want to continue using Yammer as a private network visible only to my organization?  A. We believe ETRs are the right way to control external messaging, allowing us to provide admins with one centralized set of controls to manage external communication across Office 365. Using ETRs, admins can impose necessary restrictions but still provide employees with the choice to use any modality that best suits their needs. In the case that ETRs are not sufficient, we provide the option for customers to block users from using external messaging and/or firewall users from receiving conversations from other networks at any time. To learn how you can opt out, see here. Before opting out, we highly encourage customers to first try the feature. From early beta testing with several of our largest customers, we found that External Messaging greatly improved user experience, helped drive meaningful engagement and connected teams that previously struggled to work together. The post Evolving Yammer for a new era of teamwork appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Office 365 Video was written by Mark Kashman, senior product manager on the Office 365 team. If a picture is worth a thousand words, video then makes a James Joyce novel look tiny. Video is a popular medium for effective, engaging internal communications—and its importance is growing. Office 365 Video, too, is growing, providing organizations with a secure, company-wide destination for posting, sharing and discovering video content. And the video experience—embedded within Office 365—meets IT requirements and wins the hearts and minds of users. Today, we are excited to announce the rollout of Office 365 Video to all eligible Office 365 business customers worldwide. We’re also pleased that Office 365 Video "gets mobile" with a new, native iPhone app and modern web experiences. Office Mechanics show on Office 365 Video with host, Jeremy Chapman, talking to Mark Kashman about all the new mobility enhancements, an overview of functionality and future innovation. Office 365 Video gets mobile New, native iPhone app We’re pleased to release the first Office 365 Video app into the App Store. The app gives users the same level of access and capabilities as the web experience—natively—making it fast and intuitive. The power of video at your fingertips. The power to communicate more easily across your organization—be it executive messages, insights from the field, training and more—now with you on the go. Office 365 Video for iPhone makes searching for and playing your company videos extremely easy. You can even create a video on your iPhone, or take a raw video, and upload it directly into Office 365 Video to the channel of your choice. Azure Media Services, then, outputs to the HLS format for optimized playback on the iPhone. The Office 365 Video for iPhone app allows you to navigate channels, search for and playback videos, and upload new videos directly to your company’s Office 365 Video portal. Once your tenant gets Office 365 Video, you can install and use Office 365 Video for iPhone. Learn more how to use Office 365 Video for iPhone. Responsive portal pages and the new HTML-5 player It’s a BYOD world—and we support that! We have been hard at work modernizing the Office 365 Video portal pages so they look great across devices and provide playback on all web browsers across phones, tablets and desktops (Windows PC, Windows Phone, Mac, Android and iOS). You’ll notice that the pages dynamically adjust to optimize player size, column width, menu and more. The first page you’ll see become responsive is the individual video player page, with all portal pages to follow shortly after. We have also introduced a new HTML-5 player so users can play videos no matter which device they are viewing on. This is in addition to the Flash player we introduced initially. Now, no matter which mobile browser you are navigating Office 365 Video from, when you click play on the playback page, you’ll get a secure, adaptive video stream. It just works. And if it’s your message, it gets heard. Office 365 Video portal pages (Home, Channels, playback, search, etc.) will be scale up and down page elements and video player for a great user web experience across devices. Meet Office 365 Video and review all browser requirements and HTML-5 support. Additional enhancements based on First Release feedback During the last few months, we have received a tremendous amount of feedback through various listening channels. We take this seriously and review everything on a regular basis. Here is a quick list of additional enhancements we made to the user interface, admin controls and service performance overall: Smarter "You may also like"—We increased the use of the Office Graph to make video recommendations more personal and relevant. Share via email—In addition to easily sharing via Yammer, users can now click the mail icon from each playback page and send an email with a direct link to the video. Built-in CDN—All videos are now backed by a built-in content distribution network (CDN) that improves playback performance across the globe. More granular permissions management—Within channels, there are now three permission levels that can be assigned to users: Owners, Editors and Viewers. Plus, Global Tenant Admins now have admin access to all video channels. Note: the create and manage a channel in Office 365 Video article has been updated to reflect this update. Improved performance overall—All upload activity, channel creation and search crawls now result in a much faster user experience. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. They are making Office 365 Video better every day. Looking ahead I’d like to take a moment and give you a sense of where we are going next with Office 365 Video. In the near future, we will enable users to select their own thumbnails; provide the ability to embed videos outside of the portal (on Sites’ pages, internal blog posts and in Yammer feeds); allow developers to use the public Video APIs (in preview here for your review); and make it easier to connect on-premises environments to Office 365 Video via SharePoint Server 2016 hybrid investments. If you have an idea for a future Office 365 Video feature, please visit our UserVoice page and submit your feedback and vote items up! We will share and show more at Ignite (May 4-8 in Chicago). Hope to see you there. Join our YamJam to ask your questions On Friday, April 17th, the Office 365 Network will host an Office 365 Video YamJam from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PDT / 4:00-5:00 p.m. GST. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a "TweetJam" on Twitter or an "Ask Me Anything (AMA)" on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. In this YamJam, customers and partners can connect directly with the Office 365 Video product team to ask questions and learn more about the announcement. Join the Office 365 Video group to participate. Thanks for reading more than a pictures worth—and happy videoing. —Mark Kashman Frequently asked questions Q. Is Microsoft planning to release native apps for platforms beyond the iPhone? A. We began to improve Office 365 Video mobility with investments in a native app (first for the iPhone), an HTML-5 player and responsive web pages. We will continue to improve mobility and review additional investments in web and app components. Q. Will all Office 365 Video portal pages be responsive, and are they all beginning to roll out today? A. Yes. We started with a responsive design for individual video playback pages. Over the coming months we will update the service to enable responsive design into the Home, Channel, Search Results and admin pages. Q. Which Office 365 plans are eligible for Office 365 Video? A. Office 365 Video is included in the Office 365 E1, E3 and E4 subscription plans (and the corresponding A2, A3 and A4 plans for Academic customers). Government plans are in the final planning stage and coming soon. We are currently reviewing the video needs for users on other plans (e.g. Kiosk) and how to enable the right solution for those scenarios. Q. Do customers have to incur additional costs for Azure Media Services consumption? A. The integrated Azure Media Services usage does not incur additional cost to customer; videos stored in Office 365 will count against SharePoint Online team sites pooled storage. Q. What Office 365 workloads must I have deployed for Office 365 Video to work? A. Office 365 Video requires SharePoint Online. Once Office 365 Video has been rolled out to a qualified customer (as specified in the previous FAQ), Office 365 Video will be enabled for all users that have one of the eligible plans and have a SharePoint Online license assigned. Q. When can I expect to see Office 365 Video in my tenant? A. Beginning today, Office 365 Video will start rolling out to eligible Office 365 business customers worldwide. We expect to be at 100% worldwide within 1-2 months. Q. Can I turn off Office 365 Video for my tenancy? A. Yes. You can disable and enable it from within the SharePoint Online admin center. Q. Will Office 365 Video be available for the Office 365 Business SKUs (formerly the Small Business plans) or the Office 365 Dedicated plans? A. No, Office 365 Video will not be available for the Office 365 Business SKU or the Office 365 Dedicated plans. The post Office 365 Video begins worldwide rollout and gets mobile appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Office 365 Dev Digest was written by Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 Dev team. Welcome to the second edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep-up-to date with what’s new in Office 365 development. It was great to hear that the first monthly digest was useful to you. Everyone here in Redmond is getting pumped to show you what we’ve been doing around the Office 365 developer platform at //Build and Ignite in a few weeks. We look forward to seeing you in our sessions, at our booth and online! Don’t forget to join the discussion on our Yammer network also. In the future, keep an eye out for the Dev Digest on the third Thursday of every month. Latest dev news Check out the latest news from Office Blogs that is useful to know as an Office 365 developer. I’m particular excited with the improvements to the API Sandbox for the Office 365 APIs that now support C# samples. You can also vote on UserVoice for other languages to be supported. Engineering teams are watching very closely, so have your say! Increasing opportunities for JavaScript developers on the Office 365 platform Cricket World Cup fever-analyzing the data with Power Query Download the new Salesforce App for Outlook Announcing the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview Dev documentation The Microsoft Content Publishing team works hard producing documentation to help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month: Apps for Office New: AppInsights and Office Extensions Office 365 APIs New: StartUpload method Updated: Create JavaScript web apps using CORS to access Office 365 APIs Updated: Set up your Office 365 development environment Updated: Integrate Office 365 APIs into .NET Visual Studio projects Updated: Resource reference for the Mail, Calendar, and Contacts REST APIs For more documentation check out Office developer documentation. Code samples Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the community. Connect your iOS app to Office 365 and make your first API call Office 365 code snippets sample for iOS Connect your Android app to Office 365 and make your first API call Office 365 code snippets sample for Android Connect your Windows app to Office 365 and make your first API call Populate your Office 365 Developer Tenant with sample data Python/Django Sample using Office 365 Contacts API Python/Django Sample using Office 365 Mail API VCard import/export tool built with Ruby on Rails js Wrapper for Office 365 APIs Client Library Office 365 CORS Sample for jQuery For more code samples check out the dev.office.com/code-samples. Most recent Office 365 Dev podcasts Since joining Microsoft last year, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group and I’ll go hunt the relevant people down to interview. Here are the most recent podcast interviews: Office 365 Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 042 on Exchange development futures with Venkat and Pretish Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 041 on the Property Inspector hero demo with Todd Baginski Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 040 on Xamarin development with James Montemagno Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 039 on the API Sandbox For more podcasts check out dev.office.com/podcasts. Patterns and practices The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working hard to release samples to show the power of the App Model. Don’t forget to join the monthly community calls to hear the updates from them directly on Skype for Business. Here are the latest updates from the team: Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP) - April release details PnP March community call recording New training package created based on the PnP guidance at OfficeDevPnPTraining Numerous new videos in the PnP Channel 9 check at OfficeDevPnPVideos Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at OfficeDevPnPMSDN Here are the latest guidance documents: CSOM releases and new capabilities—latest API changes GitHub Upload large files sample app for SharePoint (Updated) MSDN Github Branding and site provisioning solutions for SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online MSDN Use remote provisioning to brand SharePoint pages MSDN Update the branding of existing SharePoint sites and page regions MSDN Customize your SharePoint site UI by using JavaScript MSDN GitHub Using Microsoft Azure WebJobs with Office 365 MSDN GitHub Autotagging sample app for SharePoint MSDN Github For more on patterns and practices check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related on released materials and guidance can be added to our Yammer group at OfficeDevPnPYammer. Dev community blog posts The Office 365 dev community has been busy this month. It is really exciting to see the effort people put in to their posts in their spare time to share with the community. Check out these articles from the Microsoft field, MVPs and more: Using TypeScript in a SharePoint 2013 App | IT Unity Populate your Office 365 Developer Tenant with sample data - Exchange dev blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs "Just the Essentials" SharePoint Master Pages for SharePoint 2013 | Our SharePoint Experience Updated Fiddler OAuth Inspector - Kirk Evans Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs John Liu .NET - Blog - Azure Logic Apps: Build SharePoint Workflows by clicking buttons: a picture guide My time break for SharePoint: Add Custom Ribbon Button in Site Page to Popup all SharePoint Apps Chris O’Brien: Key skills and topics for today’s SharePoint/Office 365 developer Making seattle.master Responsive | Our SharePoint Experience The API Economy: Consuming Our Web API from a Single Page App - Kirk Evans Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs A Sample SharePoint App That Calls A Custom Web API - Kirk Evans Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Ruby gem for Mail, Calendar, and Contacts APIs - Exchange dev blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Wictor Wilén - SharePoint MCA, MCSM, MCM and MVP - SharePoint Online and Azure AD Dynamic Groups Office 365 APIs and Node.js - Exchange dev blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Upcoming events There are plenty of events on the horizon…don’t miss out on these great events with Office 365 content. Our team looks forward to meeting you all at these events, so don’t be shy come say hello at the Office 365 booth! April 29 - May 1 Build in San Francisco May 4 - 8 Ignite in Chicago May 18 - 21 Dev intersections June 24 - 26 SPTechCon Dev Days Aug 18 - 20 SharePoint Fest Seattle For more events check out dev.office.com/events. Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us on @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook. Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Chris Johnson (@loungflyz), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Dave Pae (@davidpae) and Jim Epes (@j_epes). —Jeremy Thake The post Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for April appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Seth Patton, senior director of product management for the SharePoint team. In February, we shared our vision on the evolution of SharePoint, outlining our plans for continued cloud innovation with SharePoint in Office 365, and providing a glimpse of the work underway to deliver our next on-premises server release, SharePoint Server 2016.  With Ignite just a few weeks away, we’re getting ready to share more details on the innovation we’re bringing to SharePoint 2016. In the meantime, I wanted to provide an update on release timing and share some of the key enhancements and new capabilities we’re focused on. Today, we are confirming that SharePoint Server 2016 will become generally available in Q2 2016, with a public beta planned for Q4 2015.  We also want to confirm our commitment to delivering on-premises releases of SharePoint for the foreseeable future. We envision a future where we will continue to have customers who choose a combination of on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployments for many years to come.  We’re excited to start sharing information on our SharePoint investments at Microsoft Ignite, so below I’ve highlighted some of the most relevant sessions to attend if you’re interested in learning more about the road ahead. As we think about the next version of SharePoint Server, we’re paying close attention to trends in content management, team collaboration, user experiences across devices, and how the cloud can be blended into existing on-premises scenarios in new and compelling ways. In particular we are focused on delivering value to customers as part of their on-premises deployments, while at the same time making it easier to take advantage of cloud innovation thru hybrid deployments of SharePoint Server with Office 365. With that backdrop, SharePoint Server 2016 will deliver enhancements and new capabilities in three major areas: Improved user experiences Cloud-inspired infrastructure Compliance and reporting Improved user experiences Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are critical capabilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. Users’ ability to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. SharePoint Server 2016 will provide improved mobile access to content, people and applications along with touch-based experiences across devices and screen sizes. It will make file storage and document collaboration more people-centric. And it will enable improved user experiences and capabilities derived from innovations in Office 365, available either as part of your on-premises deployment or through a hybrid implementation of SharePoint Server 2016 and Office 365. For example, users will be able to quickly discover contextually relevant information and data that is stored across both on-premises and cloud environments powered by Office Graph and Delve. And, we’re focused on helping you streamline communications with richer integration with Exchange and Yammer, as well as broadening access and management of new types of media thru integration with Office 365 Video as examples. Learn more about improved user experiences and hybrid investments at Microsoft Ignite: Implementing Next Generation SharePoint Hybrid Search with the Cloud Search Service Application MVP Panel: SharePoint On-Premises, Online and Everything in Between Cloud inspired-infrastructure SharePoint 2016 is the first on-premises server release representative of our experience running SharePoint at scale in Office 365, bringing our own internal investments to your datacenter that improve performance, reliability and scale as well as enabling true hybrid scenarios that can enrich your existing on-premises investments. In addition, with an improved, simplified user experience and integration with products such as the next release of Windows Server, the next generation of SQL Server, and Exchange Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2016 will simplify end-user training and support for IT. Finally, we’re focused on enabling a broad ecosystem of solutions and partners through a standardized set of APIs and experiences that span on-premises and the cloud. Learn more about how we’re reshaping SharePoint at Microsoft Ignite: The Evolution of SharePoint:  Overview and Roadmap What’s New for IT Professionals in SharePoint Server 2016 Compliance and reporting Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is non-negotiable, and overexposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint Server 2016 will provide a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains protected with investments in DLP, new scenarios to enable data encryption, and compliance tools that span on-premises servers and Office 365 while providing a balance between enabling user self-service and ensuring content usage adheres to corporate policy. Dive into compliance and reporting with these selected Ignite sessions: Microsoft SharePoint Data Security and Compliance End-to-End Data Loss Prevention Technology Adoption Program (TAP) If you’re interested in providing feedback on early versions of SharePoint 2016, we invite you to nominate your company for the Technology Adoption Program (TAP). Joining the on-premises TAP provides companies with a number of advantages, such as providing input and feedback for future releases of SharePoint, Project Server, and/or Exchange Server; developing a close relationship with the product teams; and receiving Pre-Release information about SharePoint, Project Server and Exchange. We look forward to seeing you at Ignite (May 4-8 in Chicago) where we’ll be sharing more details about SharePoint Server 2016, including a sneak-peek at an early version of the product. We’re excited about SharePoint Server 2016 and we’re sure you will be too! —Seth Patton The post SharePoint Server 2016 update appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Jared Spataro, general manager for the Office marketing team. Today I’m excited to share that the Office Universal apps preview for Windows 10 for phone is expected to be available by the end of the month. With this announcement, we’re rounding out our Office on Windows line-up, and I wanted to take the opportunity to explain our strategy of Universal and Desktop apps. Office Universal Our Office Universal apps are designed for on-the-go productivity. They’re touch-first, built for tablets and phones, and optimized for viewing, quick edits, notes and mark-up. On a tablet, the Universal apps are fast, fluid, and streamlined for an immersive, hands-on experience. They’re fantastic for reading and perfect for touch- and pen-based content creation. On a phone, the Universal apps adapt to the smaller form factor. Commands and controls are moved to the bottom of the screen so you can triage your work and make edits one-handed with your thumb. (That may sound like a small thing—but wait until you try it. It makes all the difference!) Word Universal for Windows 10 for phones PowerPoint Universal for Windows tablets Office Desktop While on-the-go productivity is increasingly important, people haven’t stopped using the Office Desktop applications for their most important creative work—and we expect that to continue for years to come. The upcoming release of our Windows Desktop apps (Office 2016) will offer our richest feature set ever for professional content creation. These apps are tuned for sophisticated authoring, easy collaboration, pixel-perfect layouts and deep analysis—and are designed for the precision and control of a keyboard and mouse. In Office 2016 some of the key investment areas include: Modern productivity. Updated look and feel—Office 2016 will deliver a modern look and feel that is visually aligned with Office across platforms and devices. So no matter what form factor you’re using, your Office experience will be familiar, consistent, and intuitive. Cloud connections—With a redesigned Backstage experience, we’re making it easier to use cloud services to create, open, edit and save your files directly from the desktop. In addition, new modern attachments in Outlook make it easy to attach files from OneDrive and automatically configure permission for the recipients—all without leaving Outlook. Intelligent experiences—The new Office apps will learn as you work, taking advantage of subtle cues and clues to help you stay focused on priority work. Tell Me, a new search tool available in Word, PowerPoint and Excel, will enable you to find the commands you need by simply typing what you want to do. Business intelligence. Office 2016 will also include a number of valuable business intelligence enhancements built right into Excel. New data visualizations will make sophisticated analysis faster and easier. And Power Query (previously offered as a separate download) will be fully integrated into Excel, giving the app native features for discovering, combining and refining data from different sources. IT control and manageability. For the Enterprise, Office 2016 will deliver improved controls and information management. Word, Excel and PowerPoint will include new Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features to manage sensitive information like credit card or social security numbers. Flexible click-to-run deployment options will allow IT admins more control over Office updates. And improved integration with Microsoft SCCM and Azure Active Directory will give organizations powerful controls for managing the Office apps across devices. With the preview release of the new Universal apps for Windows 10 for phones, we’ll have an exciting line-up of Windows 10 apps across form factors. The Universal apps will deliver tailored tablet and phone experiences for on-the-go productivity, and the Desktop apps will offer our broadest, deepest feature set for professional content creation. To experience them for yourself, I’d encourage you to download the apps and give them a try. The Universal apps for tablets went live in February with the Windows 10 Technical Preview, the Desktop IT Pro and Developer preview for Office 2016 launched last month, and the Universal apps for Windows 10 for phones are expected to be available with the Windows 10 Technical Preview by the end of April. Stay tuned to the Office blog for more updates on our Windows strategy. It’s an exciting time for Windows and Office, and there’s more to come in the next few weeks. —Jared Spataro The post Modern productivity—Office on Windows appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post is written by Kevin Shaughnessy, senior program manager and Shobhit Sahay, technical product manager for the Office 365 team. Regardless which email system or service you use, when an email message you send can’t be delivered you’ll receive a non-delivery report (NDR), also known as a bounce message. The NDR will tell you the message wasn’t delivered, but after that it’s mostly technical jargon designed more for computer science professionals than for the typical email user. You’re often left to fend for yourself to try to fix the issue, searching the web and posting questions on forums for clues to what’s going on and, more importantly, how to fix it. While advances in technology over the last 30 years have been immense, the state of the art in NDRs is still just an homage to 1982—overly technical and ill-designed for the modern email user. But that’s about to change. Over the next several months, NDRs generated by Office 365 will be enhanced to make it easier to understand and fix message delivery problems. To start, the stark and technical appearance of the "classic" NDRs will be replaced with a look that’s more approachable, more visually appealing. They’ll explain the problem and why it’s happening in everyday language, with clear instructions on how to fix the problem. They’ll include an at-a-glance view of the problem and who’s responsible for fixing it (the sending side, the receiving side, or Microsoft). And while a key objective is to make NDRs helpful to those who aren’t computer professionals, even the technically oriented bits, like the error details and message headers, get a makeover to the benefit of email admins and technical support professionals alike. Sample end-user section of an enhanced NDR To help you get the most out of these updates let’s take a closer look at the various elements of the enhanced NDRs. The Office 365 logo The first thing you’ll notice at the top of an enhanced NDR is the Office 365 logo. The logo doesn’t mean that Office 365 was responsible for the error—it just means that Office 365 generated the NDR and that either the sender or the recipient is hosted in Office 365. This can help reduce the confusion concerning which messaging endpoints or services are involved in the email transaction, information often obscured or unclear in NDRs today. Cause section Enhanced NDRs include a new Cause section that briefly states in everyday language the reason the message wasn’t delivered. It’s short and to the point—most people don’t want to know all the technical details about why their message couldn’t be sent. They just want to solve their problem quickly and get on with their lives. Your message couldn’t be delivered, here’s the problem, here’s how to solve it. Fix-it Owner Indicator In the past when you got an NDR it was difficult to assess who needed to fix the problem, and you could spend a lot of time investigating only to discover that the source of the issue was on the other end of the email transaction.  But with the Fix-it Owner Indicator you can skip the uncertainty and wasted time trying to figure out whose problem it is, and get the issue to the correct person right away. The Fix-it Owner Indicator, appearing immediately after the Cause section, is an at-a-glance view of the issue and who needs to fix it. This indicator shows the three basic "actors" in an Office 365 email transaction—the sender, Office 365 and the recipient. The area marked in red is where the problem usually must be fixed, and it includes a brief snippet of what the issue is. The example above indicates that it’s the sender (kevin) who needs to correct the out-of-date recipient address information. In the next example, the Fix-it Owner Indicator shows that it’s the receiving side that’s responsible for fixing the problem. While the sender still shows kevin, on the receiving side it’s now the domain name, contoso.com, that’s displayed, rather than the recipient’s alias. Why? Because in this example the email admin of contoso.com, not the recipient, will have to fix the problem at the domain level (for example, when the domain is configured to reject messages from anonymous users). If the recipient herself is likely responsible for the fix then her alias would be shown here instead of the domain name. Sometimes it’s unclear exactly who needs to fix it—the same problem could be caused by an issue on either end of the email transaction. So the indicator may not always correctly identify who’s responsible for resolving the problem in all situations, 100% of the time; but it’ll be right the majority of the time. While the Fix-it Owner Indicator is useful to quickly grasp the issue and potential resolution, the sections that follow it include detailed steps and guidance for how to fix the problem. How to Fix It The How to Fix It section of the enhanced NDRs is primarily designed for the end-user who receives the NDR. It uses everyday language to tell them how to fix the issue. Yet not all issues can be addressed by the person who sent the message. Sometimes someone else will have to fix it: their email admin, the owner of the distribution list they sent the message to, the recipient, the recipient’s email admin, or Microsoft Support. When Office 365 detects that the sender likely can’t resolve it themselves, Office 365 succinctly summarizes what needs to be fixed, and provides guidance to communicate the information to the person who can. More Info for Email Admins While the top section of the NDR is mostly designed for end-users, the section that follows it is specifically for email admins and technical support. The More Info for Email Admins section provides an in-depth explanation of the problem and solution, usually includes expanded technical details, and often contains a link to a web-based article for more detailed steps and reference information. The More Info for Admins section includes easy-to-identify Original Message Details and Error Details sub-sections to make it simpler to jump right to the most important technical specifics. The information in these sections is especially useful when you’re contacting Microsoft for assistance. If you ever have to engage Microsoft Support about an NDR, provide them with the entire NDR message. But if for some reason you can’t do that, give them the information from the Original Message Details and Error Details sections—this will greatly help expedite resolution of the issue. Note that while the language in this section is typically designed for the email admin of the sender, the details may be most applicable to the recipient’s email admin (not always the same as the sender’s email admin). The Fix-it Owner Indicator can be used to help determine which email admin will benefit the most from this information. Message Hops And lastly, while the original message headers—in vintage mono-spaced typeface and archaically word-wrapped magnificence— still appear at the bottom of the enhanced NDRs, a neatly formatted version of them in the Message Hops section is also included. This makes it simpler to follow the message’s server to server hop path so you can more quickly spot problems between message hops. Not all NDRs generated by Office 365 will appear as enhanced NDRs right away. But over the next several months we expect that most of the ones that Office 365 generates will be recast into the enhanced format. After all, no one wants the delivery of their message to fail, but when it does, it shouldn’t take a degree in computer science to understand why and what to do to fix it. Enhanced NDRs in Office 365 will make it easier to understand and resolve many message delivery failures when they do happen, so you can get them fixed and get back to business in less time than ever before. —Kevin Shaughnessy The post Enhanced non-delivery reports (NDRs) in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

We on the OneNote team are always working to improve our experiences and provide more to our customers.  From big release to small updates and enhancements we are always listening to your feedback. In today’s post we wanted to introduce you to a couple recent updates: Clip to OneNote in Bing Image Search and an update to the OneNote Online Spell Check. Introducing Clip it to OneNote Recently, the Bing Image Search team announced a brand new experience that lets you do more, learn more and be inspired through image search. The OneNote team is proud to be involved in this partnership and is pleased to introduce Clip it to OneNote, a new feature in Bing Image Search. Clip it to OneNote lets you organize images and links that you’re researching into your personal online notebook. Here’s what the widget looks like when you click it in Bing Image Search: Click Clip to send the selected results to a page created in OneNote. For example on OneNote for iPhone: As always all your notes are on all your devices. Researching a topic? Found an inspiration? Quickly clip it to OneNote and save it for later. OneNote Online Spell Check update Here on the OneNote team, we love to use OneNote for all sorts of things. At work, we have shared workspaces where everyone can contribute and see ideas for projects. Shared notebooks help us to keep track of to-dos, share our schedules and brainstorm and develop ideas. When developing ideas into well-formed thoughts and plans the OneNote Online Proofing tools, such as Spell Check, keep us looking professional and save us time. Right-click on a word to display spell check options. But sometimes quickly brainstormed ideas remain just that and don’t need to go through proofing for final presentation. Now in OneNote Online it’s easy to hide the red squiggly lines that highlight spelling errors. With this update to OneNote Online you can quickly hide your spelling errors and focus on your content rather than those red squiggles. On the Home tab, under Spelling, select Hide Spelling Errors. Poof, they are gone. OneNote Online now has the option to hide spelling errors. Spelling errors are hidden anytime you use OneNote Online on your machine, until you choose to show them again in the Spelling drop-down menu. We also love using OneNote Online at home, for things like trip planning and Hide Spelling Errors comes in handy for this too! For example, if you’re collecting information from the web for an upcoming trip, you can hide spelling errors and focus on the content, not those red squiggles. This feature comes to OneNote Online because of your feedback!  We love to hear from you and make improvements based on the things you’ve told us you need.  Please continue to share your thoughts and ideas through the Give Feedback to Microsoft button at the top right of the OneNote Online app. ——————————— Download OneNote: onenote.com Try Bing Image Search: bing.com/images Follow OneNote: twitter.com/msonenote Like OneNote: facebook.com/OneNote The post Bing Image Search + OneNote & OneNote Online Spell Check update appeared first on Office Blogs.

We just touched the surface of the problem area in today’s announcement, so we’d like to dive a little further with you in this post since this truly was an interesting problem. How does Sway automatically crop images? First a little background. When we built Sway’s "designer in a box" code, we created an algorithm that we call "Smart Cropping," and this has been working silently in the background since Sway Preview started in October 2014. This algorithm evaluates pictures in order to understand what is interesting and what isn’t so Sway can create well-composed image crops. When you drop a picture into your Sway, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Sway identifies things like faces, invariant regions (what’s uniform), horizons and other strong lines, and more, as well as how all of these elements play together. Then Sway looks at the context in which the author is using the picture. Is it in a heading? A title? A full-bleed ("intense") image? Does it have to fit within an interactive element? Sway then makes a choice of what it will show from that image (and how) given the unique constraints for your device and the chosen layout and style. Sway could consider things like the "rule of thirds" or the overall composition in order to deliver beautiful content. Smart Cropping can’t stand alone Of course, Smart Cropping alone isn’t good enough. For starters, the algorithm itself can always be improved. (And we’ll continue to make it better!) In fact, if you ever notice that your image isn’t cropped to what you thought was important and you don’t understand why, we’d appreciate it if you left us some feedback on UserVoice or by tweeting us. This way we can understand what we need to do to make Sway’s Smart Cropping even smarter. Another reason Smart Cropping can’t stand alone is the subjective nature of what you want to include in your Sway. We could have the best algorithm in the world, but Sway still wouldn’t know the difference between your child and a random child sitting next to each other (…at least not yet?). (In fact, one of our own team members was frustrated to see that Smart Cropping had excluded his daughter from an image he had taken of her playing soccer, focusing instead on a different player!) Additionally, we made some stylistic decisions to include extreme horizontal crops for some of our heading cards. This means Sway may knowingly make a less than ideal cropping decision to achieve the stylistic effect of the design you’ve chosen. We have received a lot of feedback from exasperated users outlining this exact problem, asking why we wouldn’t give them a way to manually reposition the crop. Unfortunately, just letting users manually reposition the crop in Sway isn’t as intuitive as it may seem. Let’s think about this a little bit… When you manually crop a picture (or even reposition it within the current constraint, like you might with a repositioning feature), you very specifically set length and width dimensions. But what does this mean when you hit Remix!, change the style or layout, move your picture to a different context (like from a title card to a heading card), or view your Sway on a different device? Yes, we understand that sometimes you just want to manually crop your image (and we are considering adding this as an override), but when you abstract the problem, what is the user truly trying to achieve in the majority of cases? From our user studies and from your feedback, we believe that the true issue was that what was important wasn’t in focus, not that the user wanted to fine-tune the crop (and worry about the myriad of devices and what their crop would look like on each one). And getting to the heart of what you want and intended, versus asking you to always specify the exact design details, is what Sway is all about. So why Focus Points? We considered a lot of different solutions, some that were very similar to manual cropping and others (like Focus Points) that were very different. We decided to move forward with the Focus Points approach because of its overall simplicity and because of how much more valuable it is for Sway to understand what’s important to you. Just imagine what else Sway could do with an understanding of what’s important to you, not just what settings you chose! By knowing, say, what two discrete portions of the image you care about, Sway could choose a better "unimportant" part of the image for text placement; or create different crops to induce parallax and bring them together; or animate between the two regions to make sure they’re both included. The potential is endless! It’s tackling challenging problems like this, to bring you a product that you love that is unlike anything you’ve used before, which makes working on Sway so exciting. We’ll continue to listen to your feedback and refine the experience, so please get in touch! We’re listening on the other end whenever you have suggestions or feedback for us. Sway on! —Sway team, @Sway   Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post The philosophy behind Focus Points in Sway appeared first on Office Blogs.

Recently we announced that Sway now allows shared editing and same-time collaboration, so you can work together to easily bring your ideas to life in an interactive way with friends, family and coworkers. Enabling collaboration in Sway was a top requested feature in our feedback forums, and it was a big step in our journey with Sway Preview—a journey which we’re continuing with more updates to announce today! Sway now lets you create interactive charts Since we introduced Sway to the world, it has always been our plan to add support for interactive charts and graphs, so you could support your narrative with the help of interactive data visualizations, along with other sorts of rich multimedia. In January, we added support for embedding Excel Online charts and graphs via embed codes, which was a great step. Now, we’re happy to announce that we’re rolling out support for creating interactive charts right within Sway! With the addition of native charts, it’s easy to add a variety of interactive data visualizations to enhance your Sways—including column, stacked column, bar, stacked bar, line, pie, donut pie, area, stacked area and bar charts with people icons. Check out an example interactive chart in this Sway, where you can tap or click "sales" or "profits" to filter the chart accordingly! It’s now easy to add a variety of interactive data visualizations to enhance your Sways. To get started making a chart in Sway, open the Cards tab and either tap or click a Chart (Preview) Card, or drag one onto the Storyline. The "click here" link in the Chart (Preview) Card will take you to a visualization of the chart, where you can add or edit your data, as well as choose the chart type and its appearance. We’re attaching the word "Preview" to the chart Card right now since we’ll definitely keep working on charts and ultimately let you edit the chart in the Storyline as well, but we wanted to get the feature out to you as soon as possible and start getting feedback! Let us know what you think on UserVoice. You can easily add and modify your chart’s data, its type and its appearance. Focus Points—bring what’s important in your pictures into focus There’s a lot going on behind the scenes when you drag and drop a picture into Sway, especially if it’s being stylized as a background image for a heading or title. Sway automatically crops your image by evaluating it and picking out what’s important, like your family’s faces or the horizon line in your beach photo, while also considering how to make the image fit the screen size and match the particular style you chose. While we continue to improve Sway’s intelligence, we know Sway doesn’t always get the cropping right. (For example, Sway doesn’t know which person accidentally photo-bombed your family photo.) Because of this, we’re adding the ability for you to express more intent to Sway on what’s most important in your images, to help ensure you end up with cropping you like. By using Focus Points in Sway, it’s easy to tell Sway what to focus on in your image with just a couple of taps or clicks. Whether you’re in the Storyline or the Sway Canvas, tap or click the image and select Focus Points in the toolbar or the buttons that appear. When the Focus Points pane opens, just tap or click on what’s important in your image! You can also move Focus Points around by dragging them, or remove them by tapping or clicking them again. And at the bottom of the pane, you can see a preview of how the resulting crop could look on tablet/PC screens and mobile screens. If you don’t want the image to be cropped at all, just select The entire image is important checkbox. This can keep you from losing important things, like text in the image or your company’s logo. It’s easy to use Focus Points to tell Sway what parts of your image are important and ensure they’re always included in the cropping. Sway remembers your Focus Point choices for your image even if you move it around, make it a background image for a heading, Remix! your creation’s style or layout, or view it on a different device. Sway will continue to adapt the cropping across device sizes, but don’t worry—the parts of your image you said were important will always be included. Now, you might be wondering: why doesn’t Sway just have crop handles and let me manually specify exactly how to crop the image? Well, because Sway continuously adapts the formatting to make sure your creation looks great on any screen, manual image cropping isn’t as intuitive as it seems. If you crop a picture, you very specifically set the dimensions. But what would this mean when you hit Remix!, change the style or layout, or view your Sway on a different device? It would mean Sway wouldn’t be as flexible to adapt your design to look great on any screen. We may eventually add manual cropping as an override, but for now, Focus Points lets you get the image cropping you intend while still letting the magic of Sway make your creation look great. Read more about these interesting challenges in this companion blog post. Accent—a new option for formatting your content For a while now, we’ve had Emphasis as the sole way to differentiate text in your Sways. The idea behind Emphasis is that you use it to ask Sway to change the selected text by making it more noticeable, typically from a distance. Therefore, depending on the style you are using, Emphasis will cause text or headings to be bold, underlined, colored, highlighted, bigger, brighter, more animated, etc. Now we’ve added Accent—an additional way to differentiate content in your Sway. Accent allows you to express your intent by telling Sway to be more subtle. With Accent, you can make a piece of content look different from its surroundings, while retaining the same visual impact level and layout. So changes to accented content are more refined, such as italics, soft glows, drop shadows, or saturation. At the moment, Accent can only be applied to text, and its effect in all styles will be italic formatting, but longer term Accent will be available for all content types and may apply different subtle changes depending on the style. So you can think of using Emphasis for content you want the reader view as key, such as your thesis or an important quote. Use Accent when you want to subtly differentiate something from its surroundings, such as which children in the class received honors or a word that is in a foreign language. To use Accent, simply select some text then tap or click Accent in the toolbar. To use Accent, select the desired text then tap or click Accent in the toolbar. Accent makes content look subtly different from its surroundings, while retaining the same visual impact level and layout. It’s easier to embed your Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files from your OneDrive or PC/Mac In January, we announced support for adding your content from popular third-party sites via embed codes, and we’ve been expanding the list of supported sites since then. In addition to other types of content, this has meant you can embed in your Sway a Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF document that is stored on your OneDrive. That way, anybody viewing your Sway can scroll the pages of your Word document, filter the charts and tables or your Excel spreadsheet, or flip through slides of your PowerPoint presentation. In other words, embeds preserve the original formatting and layout of your documents, and including them in Sway lets you display them along with other multimedia. While many people are used to seeing this type of embedded content across the web, not everybody is familiar with creating the embed codes for the content they’d like to include in their Sway—including embeds for Office documents. We updated Sway to make it super simple for you to embed your Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents in your creations. All you have to do now is drag and drop a document into Sway from your OneDrive, or upload a document from your PC or Mac. Sway will ask if you’d like to import the text and graphics from your document into Sway, or if you’d like to embed the document "as-is" as described above: When you choose Embed, Sway will automatically do the work for you of generating the embed code for your document and adding it to Sway. (If you uploaded a document, Sway will add it to your OneDrive.) Of course, you can still choose to manually create embed codes in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel Online (for documents you’ve uploaded and stored in your OneDrive). Generate the embed code from File tab (Share option) and then copy the code to an "Embed" Card in your Sway. Check out how embedded documents look in this Sway: Sway for iPhone v1.3 updates A few weeks ago, we released a major update to Sway for iPhone. In that update we added a number of capabilities such as Emphasis for text, bullets and numbering, support for video and more. With those changes, Sway for iPhone users could more easily create polished, interactive content on the go (this video shows those updates in action). We made a few more changes to the app and have an updated version of Sway for iPhone for you in the App Store! Its improvements include: Improved sign in experience—It’s easier to get going with Sway for iPhone. If you’re already signed in to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote on your iPhone, Sway will automatically log you in. You can go from launching the app for the first time to making and editing Sways in seconds! Improved accessibility—With Sway for iPhone v1.3, we have better support for reading and editing using Apple VoiceOver. Bug fixes—We continue to respond to your feedback by fixing bugs and improving app performance. For example, we made the image upload process more stable.   —Sway team, @Sway   Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post Sway updates—create interactive charts, image Focus Points, Accent, easier document embeds and Sway for iPhone updates appeared first on Office Blogs.

We love when technology makes an impact on people’s lives—it’s really at the core of why we’re here! When we received word that an instructor used Office Mix to conduct a full week’s worth of blended classroom lectures so he could miss class to be with his wife and newborn daughter, we knew we had to share his heartwarming story. This story has a great ending but let’s start at the beginning. With class starting September 30th, Justin Harbin, an instructional designer at Lancaster Bible College was under a lot of pressure knowing his daughter could be born on that day, the next day or the day after. It was going to be a hectic week and Harbin was set to be out of class during a very critical time. He used Office Mix to create a full week’s worth of blended classroom lectures, while he missed class to be with his wife and newborn daughter. That’s life balance we can all appreciate! Harbin’s lectures were the start of an accelerated undergrad program conducted over six weeks. It included four one-hour classes five days a week. As such, there would be no room for time off and no way to bump the course schedule last-minute. Harbin had a lot of content, but had to deliver it online in an engaging way that would drive discussion among the students while he was out of class. Plus, it had to be easily uploaded to the school’s learning management system (LMS), Schoology. With one week to go before class started, Harbin turned to Office Mix, which enabled him to create five mini, interactive lectures. He added annotations, videos, narration, quizzes and recaps—all the good stuff teachers need to help them better evaluate students. Harbin then coupled his online class with discussion boards on the school’s LMS. Harbin’s approach was a success! He was able to teach his class, while also taking the time off to be with his wife and witness the birth of their daughter. The following Tuesday, Harbin met with students. "I was overwhelmed by how well it worked. Students grasped core concepts and interacted to a level where there was a lot of critical thinking, discussions were deep. It went far beyond the traditional audio and PowerPoint presentations we were used to," said Harbin. He now uses Office Mix regularly to embed assignments, walkthroughs, and expectations into the syllabus for easy reference by students. From an instructor perspective, Harbin says, "Office Mix drives the interaction and engagement across student, content, and instructor, which is at the core of any blended classroom. It works extremely well when you have a vast amount of content to cover." We tend to agree and couldn’t be more proud. We bet his family feels the same! The post Teacher uses Office Mix to deliver lessons appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today, businesses are required to understand a growing amount of company, market and social data to drive effective business decisions and remain competitive. This trend of analytics everywhere is driving a shift in the roles of business consumers, as the need for direct data access, ad-hoc analyses and in-depth reporting is growing beyond the capacity of their IT departments. Many specialized business intelligence and analytics solutions are entering the market to take advantage of this trend with most requiring installation of new data systems or new training of employees to learn new tools. But if you look closely—Excel—the Office productivity tool you already know and love, may already have the business analytics tools you need to empower you to drive the information analyses and data-driven decisions critical to your business. Building data models with drag-and-drop ease. Starting with Office 2013, Excel comes with a suite of self-service analytics features that allow you to find, connect, shape, model and analyze your company data in intuitive ways. While the product has always been a powerful calculation device, today’s Excel comes with in-memory technology that allows it to support hundreds of millions of rows of business data with incredible performance—letting you do the necessary analysis without the need for using a database or waiting for IT to develop the models for you. But like with most evolutions of a product, it can be hard to believe until you experience it for yourself. That is why we have provided innovative interactive tours that let you get a taste of each self-service analytics feature. In just one-click, these web-based tours put you in the driver’s seat of a demo without the need for installations or trial sign-ups. After taking the tours, the Excel for Business Analytics site provides you with the information you need to help get started using these features, whether you already have Excel 2013 or need to upgrade. Discovering data insights with 3D geospatial maps. Check out all the tours available for you and get started taking control of your data! ————————————- Get to all your data Power Query for Excel helps you discover and bring all your data together so you can start analyzing in seconds. Connect to data from public data, on-premises data sources, Hadoop datasets, streaming data and cloud services. Use search inside Excel to find data around you. Then freely shape and merge data from multiple sources so you can analyze all within Excel. Create sophisticated data models After connecting to your data, use Power Pivot for Excel to put it all together in sophisticated data models. This used to be something that only the IT department could do, but now you have the power to create models on your own desktop. Use the visual canvas to identify the relationships between the data tables and simply draw relationships to build your model. Analyze with stealth and power With Power Pivot for Excel, you can enhance your business data with custom calculated fields, hierarchies and KPIs to analyze in the way that makes most sense to your business needs. Best of all, still take advantage of familiar analysis tools, like Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, but now with more power. Excel’s in-memory technology allows you to analyze hundreds of millions of rows of data. Perform analysis across 3-D maps With Power Map for Excel, perform geospatial explorations of your data by taking advantage of any data with location to plot across 3-D maps. Interact and story tell with this captivating map tool to see your data in new perspectives and unlock deeper insights. The post Take control of data with Excel’s business analytics tools appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post was written by Vijay Kumar, senior product marketing manager, and Raji Dani, principal program manager for the Office 365 Security team. As a cloud services provider, we recognize that organizations understandably want to have full control over access to their content stored in cloud services. Today at RSA, we announced Customer Lockbox for Office 365, a new capability designed to provide customers with unprecedented control over their content in the service. Customer Lockbox gives customers explicit control in the very rare instances when a Microsoft engineer may need access to customer content to resolve a customer issue. In our efforts to maximize data security and privacy for Office 365 customers, we have engineered the service to require nearly zero interaction with customer content by Microsoft employees.  Nearly all service operations performed by Microsoft are fully automated and the human involvement is highly controlled and abstracted away from customer content. As a result, only in rare cases—such as when troubleshooting a customer issue with mailbox or document contents—does a Microsoft engineer have any reason to access customer content in Office 365. Microsoft Engineers do not have standing access to any service operation.  All access is obtained through a rigorous access control technology called Lockbox. Today, Lockbox enforces access control through multiple levels of approval within Microsoft, providing just-in-time access with  limited and time-bound authorization. In addition, all access control activities in the service are logged and audited. With today’s announcement, we are bringing customers into the Lockbox approval process for instances involving access to customer content. Use of the Customer Lockbox feature ensures that Microsoft engineer does not get access to the customer’s content without customer’s explicit approval. When the customer gets the request for access, they can scrutinize the request and either approve or reject it. Until the request is approved, the Microsoft engineer will not be granted access. Of course transparency and control are important in achieving trust, and all Customer Lockbox activity will be available to customers via the Office 365 Management Activity logs for easy integration into customer security monitoring and reporting systems. Customer Lockbox will be available for Exchange Online by the end of 2015, and for SharePoint Online by the first quarter of 2016. For more information about our trust principles and how we manage security, privacy and compliance, please visit the Office 365 trust center at trust.office365.com. Frequently asked questions Q: Is Customer Lockbox available to all customers? A: Our intent is to make Customer Lockbox available to all Office 365 commercial plans, as described here. Customers interested in using it will have the ability to opt-in. Q: Who is notified when there is a request to access customer’s content? A: Administrators in the customer’s Office 365 environment are notified that there is a request for access. Q: Who can approve or reject these requests in customer’s organization? A: Administrators in the customer’s Office 365 environment can control who can approve or reject Customer Lockbox requests. Q: Under what circumstances do Microsoft engineers need access to customer’s content? A: No one at Microsoft has standing access to customer content in Office 365. Further, we have engineered Office 365 such that majority of service operations are automated and abstracted from Microsoft engineers. An example of a rare circumstance when Microsoft engineers may need access to customer content is if the customer makes a support request that requires access. Q: What happens if a customer reject the Microsoft engineer’s access to content? A: Microsoft can only proceed following approval of a Customer Lockbox request. If a customer rejects a Customer Lockbox request, no access to customer content will occur. If a user was experiencing a service issue that required Microsoft to access customer content in order to resolve (though such circumstances are rare), then the service issue might simply persist. Microsoft would inform the customer of this outcome. Q: What happens to a Customer Lockbox request that was not acted upon by the customer in a timely manner? A: Customer Lockbox requests have a default lifetime of 12 hours, after which they expire and Microsoft engineer will not get access to customer content. The post Announcing Customer Lockbox for Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Nagesh Pabbisetty, partner group program manager on the Office 365 Information Protection team. The IT landscape is rapidly evolving, with trends like BYOD access, accelerated migration to the cloud, and many enterprises working with multiple cloud providers. These trends heighten the importance for companies to monitor access to their data as part of their overall approach to IT security. Today within Office 365, there are a variety of ways for service administrators to obtain transactional information, with all of these methods providing a synthesized view of what is happening in Office 365. In our continuing effort to provide greater transparency into Office 365 service operations, we are working to deliver more event types, greater detail in event records, and consistent schemas for per-person, per-transaction logs for all user, admin and operational events. In addition, we are enabling instrumentation across the entire Office 365 service suite and providing standard RESTful APIs with OAuth v2 for easy consumption of these logs, to power your security, compliance and operational applications that serve your business needs. The new Office 365 Management Activity API Today we are announcing the new Office 365 Management Activity API and preview program. The Management Activity API is a RESTful API that provides an unprecedented level of visibility into all user and admin transactions within Office 365. The benefits of the Management Activity API include: Access to more than 150 transaction types, with more planned in the future. Activity logs from SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory, with plans to expand to additional Office 365 services within the suite. A consistent schema across all activity logs in the service with a common core—fields including tenant, service, user, action, object, location and IP address, among others. Simple on/off option for customers to enable instrumentation for the activity logs We will release the API as part of a private preview program this summer. Starting today, customers and partners can sign up here to join the preview program. ISVs are already building security and compliance solutions! Select partners have already begun building solutions with the new API as part of a pre-release program. These rule-based, variance-based and machine learning-based security and compliance solutions provide sophisticated reports, interactive visualizations and operational dashboards to satisfy the complex needs of today’s enterprises. The partner solutions run the gamut, from those providing Office 365-specific solutions, to others that combine Office 365 logs with logs from other cloud services as well as on-premises installations. These integrations create a single pane of glass for integrated operations, security and compliance across the enterprise. Next steps Whether you are an admin or work in information security or compliance, you want to have a single view of security and compliance across your entire enterprise to know: Who is accessing your information Whether your security and compliance checks are working Who is using your services The Office 365 Management Activity API provides you with the increased visibility needed in today’s environment. We encourage you to sign up for the Office 365 Management Activity API preview program now, as space is limited. Read on to learn more about the partners participating in the pre-release program, and descriptions in their own words about the solutions they have built using Office 365 Management API. Come visit our booth at the RSA and Microsoft Ignite conferences to get an in-depth view of the sophisticated solutions being built on top of the Management Activity API.   PARTNER DESCRIPTION AlertLogic Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution protects cloud, hybrid and on-premises datacenter infrastructure, delivering deep insight and continuous protection for over 3,000 customers worldwide. AlertLogic can aggregate the Office 365 Management Activity events with other security information to identify potential threats and help customers protect their environment. AvePoint AvePoint enables enterprise collaboration across platforms and devices. Founded in 2001, AvePoint serves over 14,000 organizations worldwide and has a product portfolio including DocAve, Governance Automation, and Compliance Guardian. DocAve Policy Enforcer helps organizations rapidly respond to unauthorized modifications to Microsoft SharePoint configurations, security and management in the cloud and on-premises. BetterCloud BetterCloud, trusted by 50,000-plus organizations worldwide, provides critical insights, automated management and intelligent data security for cloud office platforms. By leveraging open APIs, BetterCloud securely connects with your data at its source. BetterCloud for Office 365, currently in Beta, provides intelligent alerting, monitoring and insights for the Microsoft Cloud Platform. CloudLock Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) CloudLock provides a unified Cybersecurity dashboard for organizations adopting multiple SaaS applications. Office 365 is now supported by its Cloud Security Fabric, integrating previously released Office 365 and Azure APIs with the new Office Management Activity APIs. Cogmotive Cogmotive provides automated Office 365 report building software used by customers worldwide to manage more than two million Office 365 seats. Cogmotive is building a powerful audit and compliance tool that will collect data on all employee Office 365 activities and analyze behaviors to help security officers prevent and respond to incidents. Logentries Logentries provides a real-time log management and analytics service built for the cloud, making business insights from machine-generated log data easily accessible to development, IT and business operations teams of all sizes. Logentries empowers Office 365 admins to better manage their system security and compliance by providing usage monitoring, data visualizations and alerting on abnormal user behavior. Netskope With Netskope’s Safe Cloud enablement solution, organizations can direct usage, protect sensitive data and ensure compliance in real-time, on any device, including native apps on mobile devices and whether on premises or remote and with the broadest range of deployment options in the market. Palerra Palerra designed LORIC™ to protect enterprise clouds, giving security administrators the information they need to discover, understand and remediate risks through correlation, big data analytics and machine learning. LORIC protects Office 365 applications such as OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange Online, monitoring user activity in these applications. Rapid7 Rapid7 helps reduce risk of breach, detect and investigate attacks, and build effective cybersecurity programs. Informed by deep knowledge of attacker methods, Rapid7 UserInsight allows you to detect and investigate security incidents faster. It identifies intruders that use stealth attack methods, such as stolen credentials and lateral movement. SkyHigh Networks SkyHigh Networks helps enterprises safely adopt cloud services while meeting their security, compliance and governance requirements. Over 350 enterprises, including Aetna, Cisco, DIRECTV, Hewlett-Packard and Western Union, use SkyHigh to gain visibility into all cloud services in use and their associated risk; analyze cloud usage to identify security breaches, compromised accounts and insider threats; and seamlessly enforce security policies. Sumo Logic Sumo Logic provides a cloud-based machine data analytics service that helps enterprises gain deep operational, compliance and security insights across hybrid environments at unprecedented scale while reducing cost and complexity. Sumo Logic for Office365 is a centralized dashboard to monitor system and user activity that helps enterprises to improve their security and compliance posture. The post Announcing the new Office 365 Management Activity API for security and compliance monitoring appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for the Office 365 team. In running the Office 365 service globally, we know that security, privacy and compliance are imperatives for customers, and that’s why these remain unwavering priorities for us. We recognize as a cloud service provider that providing customers with visibility into actions taken on their content and control over access to their content in the cloud are essential to earning and maintaining their trust, and so transparency and control are ongoing focus areas for our security investments in Office 365. Today, we are announcing three new capabilities that significantly enhance customers’ transparency and control of their data in Office 365. These new capabilities give customers greater visibility into actions taken related to their data, and enhanced control over access to their content residing in Office 365. Security and compliance signals We currently provide customers with a range of logs on their user interactions with content in Office 365. This provides customers with visibility that is important for meeting business policies, as well as regulations. Today we are announcing the expansion of these logs to include the majority of user, admin and policy related actions across Exchange Online and SharePoint Online in Office 365. We are also introducing a new Office 365 Management Activity API through which customers and partners can use the logs as Security and Compliance signals within solutions that provide monitoring, analysis and data visualization. The solutions built with this API will provide organizations with greater visibility into actions taken on their content, as well as enhanced security, for example, as an input into a Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) system. Several Office 365 partners have already built early solutions using this new API as part of a pre-release program. We will release the API more broadly this summer as part of a private preview program. Interested customers and partners can sign up here to be included in the preview program. Learn more in this blog. Customer Lockbox For the purpose of maximizing data security and privacy for Office 365 customers, we have engineered the service to require nearly zero interaction with customer content by Microsoft employees.  Nearly all service operations performed by Microsoft are either fully automated so there is no human interaction, or the human involvement is abstracted away from Office 365 customer content. As a result, there are very few activities requiring any direct involvement by a Microsoft engineer. But, we didn’t want to stop there. We are taking the next step by putting the customer in explicit control over access to their content in the very rare instances when a Microsoft engineer does to log into the Office 365 service. This new capability, Customer Lockbox for Office 365, provides unprecedented customer control over content residing in Office 365, so customers can be assured that their content will not be accessed by Microsoft employees without their explicit approval. It brings customers into the access approval loop, requiring the customer to provide explicit approval of access to their content by a Microsoft employee for service operations. The Customer Lockbox feature will be enabled in Office 365 for Exchange Online by the end of this year, and for SharePoint Online in the first quarter of 2016. You can learn more about Customer Lockbox in this blog. Advanced encryption for email Today, Office 365 encrypts customer content at rest and in transit. In addition, Office 365 has a number of customer-controlled encryption solutions such as Rights Management, S/MIME and Office 365 Message Encryption.  In 2014, in addition to BitLocker for drive level encryption, we implemented content level encryption with per-file encryption for documents in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. In the next few months, we will add a similar content level encryption for email in Office 365. Implementing this feature will increase the separation of server administration from the data stored in Office 365, resulting in an added layer of security. This new layer of content level encryption uses keys that are protected using hardware security modules certified to FIPS 140-2 Level 2.  This new advanced encryption for email will be provided in Office 365 by the end of 2015. We are already working on additional security features that build upon the content-level encryption enhancements. In 2016, we expect to enable customers to generate and control their own keys for encrypting content in Office 365. Additional investments going forward Today’s announcements are just part of our continued investments in security, privacy and compliance capabilities within Office 365.  Recently, we also announced new security controls such as advanced threat protection for email, new Data Loss Prevention capabilities in SharePoint Online and mobile device management for Office 365. Our work is ongoing and you can expect much more from us in this area moving forward. For more information about our trust principles and how we manage security, privacy and compliance, please visit the Office 365 trust center at trust.office365.com. —Rajesh Jha The post Enhancing transparency and control for Office 365 customers appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Shobhit Sahay, technical product manager for the Office 365 team. Everywhere your data exists, moves or is shared, we want to protect it. Office 365 has provided Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities for email since Exchange 2013. As collaboration extends beyond email to sites and documents, we are extending the DLP capabilities to these services. Last year at TechEd Barcelona, we showed a quick glimpse of our vision for expanding DLP and today we are pleased to share more details on these capabilities. Announcing upcoming public preview of DLP for SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business For the last couple of months, we have worked hard to test some of these cool new capabilities in a private preview with select customers. Later this quarter, we will bring a public preview of these capabilities to every single eligible Office 365 tenant. Last year we made some early DLP capabilities from Phase 1 available allowing you to find sensitive information in SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business. These helped you identify high-risk items and allowed you to take manual actions on that sensitive content. But with the Phase 2 public preview, you can now create proactive policies to remediate violations and empower your users with policy tips and notification emails so they can take the right decision while working with sensitive data, just like you do today with DLP in Exchange. Let us now look at these enhancements in detail. Easily set up your DLP policies for your organization With the public preview, admins can now easily set up DLP policies for SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business from the Office 365 compliance center. Policies take the simple construct of conditions, actions and exceptions and admins can use any of the existing out of box templates to get started. End users empowered through constant policy education We understand that end users are a critical part of the solution to keeping data safe. As such, we help them make the right decisions when working with sensitive data, providing them with rich notifications in the context of where they are working. Furthermore, if they move out of context, we send an email notification with the policy tip information. All of this is configurable by the admin, who can set up rules that allow users to override policies by providing a business justification, which allows users to be productive while still being compliant. Tracking policy usage and incident management Admins can track the effectiveness of policies with the rich reporting built into Office 365. In addition, they can create admin-facing incident reports with information about each incident that can later be reviewed by their security teams. What’s available now? What’s coming later? With all the great new capabilities, you might ask, "What is coming next?" Well, we are not done here, we will continue to innovate and release a new set of capabilities in our Phase 3 release. Here is a view of what’s available now versus what is coming in Phase 3, which is planned for second half of 2015. Available in Phase 2 public preview Coming in Phase 3 Create automated policies with any of the available built-in sensitive information types Exceptions for locations and conditions Detect external sharing and apply appropriate actions Ability to encrypt content as an action Scope the policies to specific locations or sites Support for custom classifications and document fingerprinting Scanning for document properties (metadata) Shared by/by member of conditions Block or restrict access to the sensitive content Detect content scanning errors Customizable Policy tips and user notifications via policy tip and email Richer content types and more enforcement endpoints Admin facing Incident reports and reporting Announcing public preview of DLP for Office 2016 applications Last month when we announced the Office 2016 preview, we mentioned DLP as one of the core capabilities within the Office applications. Later this quarter, we will make these DLP capabilities available in the preview for three different Office applications—Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With these capabilities, end users can be notified in real-time on the sensitive content they are working right within the familiar Office applications they love and use. Let’s look at some of these capabilities in detail. Admins can easily set up policies for SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business that will automatically apply to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2016 applications. If users open a sensitive file from SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business, they will be notified of the sensitive information in context within the Office application. Depending on the policy, the user can simply choose to ignore the policy or be asked to provide a business justification in order to continue working on the sensitive data. Users also have the option of turning off notification policies from within the Office applications. With these advanced capabilities, you will have the ability to create DLP policies across different services while retaining the best end user experience We look forward to you using these capabilities. —Shobhit Sahay Frequently asked questions Q. When is the public preview planned for DLP in SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business? A. Public preview is targeted for second quarter of 2015. All eligible tenants will start seeing these capabilities in their tenants then. We will be adding more enhancements to DLP in SPO/ODB later in the second half of 2015. Q. When is the public preview planned for DLP in Office 2016 applications? How can I get access? A. Public preview is targeted for second quarter of 2015. For more details on the Office 2016 Preview program and instructions on how to download the applications, please visit the Office 2016 Preview program on the Microsoft Connect site. Q. Can DLP policies on Office applications be configured on their own? (i.e., without requiring the SPO policy) A. No, DLP policies in Office applications are designed to work in unison with SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business, so policies created for the service are also applied in Office applications automatically. The post Evolving Data Loss Prevention in SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business and Office applications appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on OneNote was written by Andrew Howard, principal of the Sandymoor School in the UK. OneNote has truly revolutionized the way schools can use technology to enhance and transform their processes. For a number of years, schools have used technology to replace old ways of doing things. The chalkboard was replaced by the whiteboard, which in turn was replaced by the interactive whiteboard. But this is merely replacement; if a teacher from the Victorian age were to come forward in time to view a normal school, they would recognize an amazing amount of the day-to-day work of a modern teacher. However, this is without OneNote. I have written before on how we are using the OneNote Class Notebook to create digital exercise books, but there is another member of the OneNote stable that is revolutionizing the admin of schools—the OneNote Staff Notebook. Using OneNote to coordinate and collaborate effectively from the admin side of things was obvious from the moment I started using OneNote. The one drawback was the number of separate notebooks I needed. Effectively, you need a separate notebook for every combination of meeting and staffing committee in the organization. However, it was still worth it, for the evidence and ability to keep on top of discussions, innovations and collaborative working in the school. The one thing I use OneNote heavily for, and more so since introducing the OneNote Staff Notebook, has been the process of pre-meeting discussions and collaborations. Every meeting has a OneNote page, with the details required for the meeting, and pre-meeting questions already loaded; everyone who is contributing is required to not just read the meeting notes ahead of time, but have put down some thoughts and points for further discussion. This frequently leads to much richer discussions in the meetings. And, of course, the minutes are recorded in OneNote for everyone to refer to after the event. The simple tools in OneNote make for much better organization all round. In addition, with the ability to create task lists and all the full integration in the whole Office 365 ecosystem, everything is easier to manage. But it is in the day-to-day running of the school where the OneNote Staff Notebook really comes into its own. There are, effectively, three sections—the collaborative space, the content library and the individual staff areas. The Collaborative space is a notebook where everyone can read, write and create. We have our collaborative space sectioned up into a number of areas, but the most used is the Inset (or staff training) section. In this area, we have all the guidance for our Action Research-based staff development program, and staff collaborate on different areas of school development in this space. This provides a great source of evidence, too, for staff performance management. The Collaborative space has sections devoted to initiatives that groups are working on, which provides a wonderful transparency for everyone to be able to see what is going on and contribute if they wish. "I have found that OneNote is a great way to communicate with other colleagues, it enables us to share ideas and have conversations about students without having to have face-to-face meeting time. It means that we can stay ahead of the game, and are both able to see easily when changes are made or ideas are updated." RRU—Assistant Head We also have a section for financial matters—in the UK, we are funded directly from central government and so have to show that we are being prudent in spending the tax payer’s money. Part of this is the need to show that purchases are made following a selection process, choosing the ‘best’ value from a minimum of three quotes. This can be intensely time-consuming, so a section is set up for just this. Because of the ability to print direct to OneNote, any quote, whether it’s a webpage, or an email, can be easily attached to the OneNote page for review by the financial team. The Content Library is probably the area that filled up most quickly with a wide range of resources moved from the more traditional staff shared area (or network storage) into a note page or section. This creates a much more user-friendly route to find information for staff, all in one location. Staff meeting notes, for example, are published here, for all staff to read whenever they need to. There are also sections on important policies and procedures, along with dates and deadlines. The OneNote Staff Notebook is an adaptable staff handbook containing everything that new and existing staff needs, all in the one place. This on its own would be enough to make this a powerful tool for school administrators to want to embrace, but when added to the final section, the individual staff pages, make the OneNote Staff Notebook a deal sealer when it comes to transforming the effective running of the school. Every member of staff has their own section within the OneNote Staff Notebook, which is theirs to use. There are pre-populated sections for performance management, meetings, parental communication, etc. Staff can personalize the section for their own roles too. This provides excellent communication and makes the OneNote Staff Notebook a document that all staff refers to on a regular basis as it is their own effective admin notebook. We encourage all staff to use this for all their admin and most are now doing this. Here, for example, we have the Head of English developing a grammar and spelling guide, which will be pushed out to all Class Notebooks once it’s been finalized by staff. I can review her work, comment, suggest and approve as she works on the various sections. "One Note is great for providing resources for students, cutting down on expensive photocopying. I’m also really appreciating not having to carry home lots of exercise books. The Content Library is a great place to add resources that can be referred to again and again." JRO-Head of English The simple fact that OneNote highlights in bold when a notebook, section or page has been altered makes the whole system streamlined. A quick scan through the sections and I can easily see whether there is anything I need to act on. This means that staff knows they can work on things they are passionate about and I can encourage and provide support without having to delay things due to arranging a meeting to be updated on developments. In simple terms, OneNote and its full integration with the Office 365 ecosystem provides a streamlined, transformed approach to the administration of a school as well as the delivery of teaching and learning. The combinations and flexibility of this digital notepad has ensured that the Sandymoor School is committed to building OneNote into the heart of all its systems and practices. OneNote provides the transformation necessary to live by our founding ethos to be a ‘Fresh Approach to Education.’ —Andrew Howard The post OneNote Staff Notebooks—streamlining the administration of a school appeared first on Office Blogs.

On today’s Office Mechanics show, we’ll take a look at new Outlook mail and calendar experiences across the Windows desktop, Windows 10, iOS and Android. Ben Walters joins Jeremy Chapman again to the give an end-to-end tour of Outlook across platforms and device types. Email is still the most common way many people communicate at work. New Outlook experiences in Office 2016 Preview, Windows 10 IT Pro and Developer Preview and on phones provide the richest Outlook capabilities to date. On the desktop, Outlook in the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview is cloud-connected, it innovates on how attachments are discovered and used, integrates with machine learning to de-clutter your inbox and has an updated look and feel. Outlook Mail and Calendar in Windows 10 provides rich authoring capabilities, improved touch support with new swipe gestures for inbox triage and pinch to zoom in the calendar; it also works with a broader list of email services and protocols. Outlook Mail and Calendar are part of recent Windows 10 Technical Preview builds. Outlook for iOS and Outlook for Android lets you do many of the tasks you might have previously reserved for Outlook on your PC of Mac. From Focused inbox and quick email triage, to accessing cloud storage and your calendar, Outlook Mobile helps you get more done and is constantly evolving with new capabilities. Of course, if you want to learn even more and see all of these Outlook apps in action, you’ll want to check out the show. The post Early look at the new Outlook on the desktop, Windows 10 and phones appeared first on Office Blogs.