Today’s post on OneNote was written by Michael Williams, Social Science teacher at Weston Ranch High School, Manteca USD. I am a young educator who grew up in an educator family and have seen many movements to increase the amount of technology used in the classroom—but many of these were short term blips. Education has essentially been conducted in the same manner for thousands of years. A teacher passes on knowledge of a topic to the student and the student writes down the information. The student then studies the information to master the content. OneNote is the next technology step in the classroom evolution. OneNote allows me to adapt learning to each of my students needs by being able to check on my students work at any time. I can assess instant progress so I can adapt my teaching to better serve each student’s needs. It allows the student to create their own database of information and to become less dependent on the instructor. OneNote allows students to take ownership of their education because they have complete access to class content anytime and anywhere. This forces them to check their OneNote Class Notebook and answer the questions that they have themselves. It puts responsibility back on the student and their learning is up to them. It eliminates excuses because I can immediately check the status of their work. Evolution is a process for the teacher and the student. This is one thing that is hard to come to terms with as an educator. We think that it is always on the student to adapt, evolve and change, but the fact of the matter is it is the role of the teacher to change. Learning how to use OneNote in my classroom has changed me as an educator. It requires me to be fully prepared and organized. OneNote helps you achieve this without trying. This occurs because you have to restructure how you share, edit and guide students through tasks. All this can be done in OneNote. This changes the nature in which you interact with students because it is done virtually. Many educators may see this as a negative, but this allows students too shy/self-conscious about their work to be noticed. For students who never seek help but they need it, OneNote helps guide them along without their fears keeping them from seeking the proper guidance they need. The next thing is that you have to give up some control that you used to have in your classroom. By doing this, you gain a more accurate depiction of your students’ actual progress and struggle. There used to be a veil that students could use to hide their progress in the class. "I left it at home," "It is in my locker," and "I am already done so I do not have to work on it right now." This type of communication would take place on a regular basis to cover up what they didn’t want me know. The more difficult aspect was that they were keeping me for adapting my teaching to help them. Students for the longest time were able to mask from me their strengths and weakness because they were able to mask their work from me. If I cannot be aware of everything a student is going through as it pertains to my class, I cannot properly help them grow. OneNote has lifted this veil and allowed me to create several helpful tools to make my classroom and teaching diverse. OneNote as a classroom tool The first tool I use is a daily calendar that spans the entire year. The calendar allows my students to go back to a specific date to see what they missed or needed to review. It also allows parents to know what has been going on the entire year. This opens up channels of communication not just between the teacher and the family, but also between the parents with their children. Second, the students can use OneNote to save their own resources that they find. This is a way for students to go back and use work that they created for continued gain. Students are more likely to retain more information when they create and revisit information they gathered. What makes this even more valuable is that they are required to paraphrase in their own words, which is easier for them to understand. Third, I use OneNote to give students instant feedback even while they are working on a task. This holds students to another level of accountability knowing that their teacher can and will check up on them. To say that there will be no confrontation with this would be a mistruth. Many will fight you on this. But if you can push past the initial resistance they will adapt their perspective on what learning will look like from that point on. Finally, OneNote works well with the Microsoft Office 2013 suite to take projects and assignments created in PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Publisher and embed them into OneNote. This hasn’t really been possible before. The whole concept of knowledge and learning is discovering how to communicate and share ideas. This has been a very difficult thing to accomplish in the classroom, but OneNote breaks down many barriers to make it very simple. Students are able to develop life skills with technology in order to succeed in education. They will be more equipped when they go to college or apply for their first job. You have to allow time for the students with OneNote to understand that education has changed in your classroom. I am a high school teacher. By the time students have reached me they have been programmed to learn and conduct themselves in a specific way and learn in a specific way. When making this change in my classroom, I had to allow a great deal of grace and "hand holding" to help them change their expectations of themselves. I had to create brand new classroom procedures and practices to implement OneNote into my class. The beautiful thing about these new procedures is there is no one set way to do this. Every teacher can and should come up with a way that will work for them or it will not succeed. OneNote allows you to customize it any way that works best for your teaching. —Michael Williams The post How OneNote can evolve education appeared first on Office Blogs.

Thanks to the participation of more than 130,000 Google+ community previewers, we’re pleased to release Office Lens Android today. Called a "great app" by one tester, Office Lens turns your Android, iPhone or Windows Phone into a pocket scanner that works "flawlessly," delivers "crystal clear images" and does an "excellent job of transcribing a printed page, despite edge distortion (page from a hardcover book)," according to other users. First introduced for Windows Phone in March 2014, followed by the iPhone app early last month, Office Lens Android was the only version to have a public preview, which ran from April 2 to today’s formal release. Both iOS and Google+ communities quickly embraced the Microsoft capture app, with first-month downloads totaling more than 1.3 million for iPhone and 70,000 for the Android preview. To date, Windows Phone users have totaled 3.5 million Office Lens downloads. A before-and-after look at how Office Lens Android does an, "excellent job of transcribing a printed page," according to one previewer. The handy scanner app recognizes the corners of a document, whiteboard, electronic screen or any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens, enhances and cleans up the image, then enables saving to OneNote or OneDrive for easy retrieval from any device. With Android beta testers representing 270 makes of phones and just under 2,600 models, the Office Lens team worked hard to ensure a seamless user experience across all Android phones. As a result of a user experience refinements, Android phone owners share a feature with Windows Phone users: saving Office Lens images to multiple sources at the same time—for example, OneDrive and Word—which involves separate steps on the iPhone. From receipts to whiteboards, books to legal documents, the Office Lens Android pocket scanner recognizes the corners of any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens and enhances the image, which can be saved to multiple sources at the same time. Now available free in the Google Play Store, Office Lens was praised by an Android user for its "clean design." It offers the following capabilities and features across all three phone platforms: Converts images of paper documents, electronic screens and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and searchable PDF files for easy storage, editing and reformatting. Enables images to be sent via email, making it easy to share whiteboard notes with work colleagues, submit scanned business expense receipts or ensure family and friends have copies of important paper documents. Captures business cards and generates contacts, which can be sent to OneNote and added to your phone. Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image. Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by keyword for the image in OneNote or OneDrive. Inserts images to OneNote or as DOCX, PPTX or PDF files in OneDrive, providing options to save, export and share the image. Office Lens Android users will see the new OneNote location picker in the general release version, making it easy to decide where to save images and keep them organized. We’re excited to introduce the final version of Office Lens, ensuring that Android users in 123 countries or areas, communicating in 30 languages have access to what’s quickly becoming the preferred scanner app. Please download your version of Office Lens today—Android, iPhone or Windows Phone—and keep sending comments our way, either below, at the respective app store or our UserVoice site. Your feedback helps us understand what users like best and determine which features to deploy to other platforms. The post Office Lens Android now available at Google Play Store appeared first on Office Blogs.

On this week’s show, Jeremy Chapman is joined by Julia White to take a look at the last year of updates in Office 365 give a sneak peek of what’s coming. We cover themes from machine learning advances and how to better manage your time and find information in Delve to improved collaboration in email and native information protection in Office apps. It’s been a big year for Office 365 with more than 450 updates to the service. In the past year, we’ve seen Office experiences delivered across multiple platforms, improvements for personalizing the experience with updates to Delve and the Office Graph and IT controls for mobile device management and data loss prevention. And that’s just scratching the surface. On the show, Julia White recaps the year and gives a sneak peek of what’s coming—including updates to Delve and Office Groups, integration between email and OneDrive for attachments, Sway joining Office 365 and a powerful dashboard and analytics coming to Power BI. I also demo what’s coming for information protection and IT pros with a sneak peak of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) native in Office desktop apps with policies in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business plus more Power BI for Office 365 admins in the Office 365 content pack coming later this summer. Of course in the short time we had, we were only able to hit on a few highlights coming to Office 365. To see some of these updates in action, be sure to watch the show! —Jeremy Chapman The post Quick tour of Office 365-recent updates and what’s coming appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s Office 365 post was written by Kevin Parlette, vice president of IT at Dana Holding Corporation. New cars and trucks come to market every year, with advanced features and capabilities designed to entice buyers to purchase. That yearly cycle affects the entire automotive supply chain, putting pressure on suppliers to innovate at a similar pace. At Dana Holding Corporation, we make automotive components that range from drivetrains to tire-management systems, and we’re constantly working to hone our product management process to not just keep up, but to get ahead. This year, one of our main business objectives was to develop more structure around our product launches. In the past, if we were designing a new axle, for example, we managed the project using spreadsheets, drawings that we shared through email, and (when possible, given our globally dispersed teams) face-to-face meetings. Today we rely on a solution that combines Microsoft Office 365 components and Microsoft Azure to streamline our launch process. Now, rather than searching for files and hoping that everyone’s looking at the most up-to-date version, team members go to one place for every piece of information related to the launch, from the issue log and product specs to the timeline and financials. We also hold formal and informal international meetings using Skype for Business video calls. The key is to have a repeated workflow process with the same steps, regardless of the product. When all stakeholders have visibility into a project and its status, we enhance both our quality and our timeliness, which results in smoother launches and better accuracy throughout. Our stretch goal is to improve our profit margin. If we can reduce the number and severity of issues along the project development process, we’re able to launch products with a lower cost, which means there’s a greater delta. Our use of Office 365 to provide structure and rigor will be an advantage because it puts us closer to perfection in the launch process, which is the aim throughout our company and industry. Of course, achieving perfection isn’t just about the process. At Dana, our people are the other integral aspect of the success we’ve enjoyed since 1904. By modernizing the technology tools that we give to our employees, we’re providing a better end-user experience, removing barriers to cross-company communication and collaboration, and freeing up our IT staff to deliver better, more strategic service for our employees’ benefit. Now that we’re using Office 365, it’s easier for colleagues to connect to each other from anywhere. And because we have 23,000 employees in nearly 100 locations around the world, that’s a big deal. The ability to share screens during video calls, view the latest presentations on our iPhones, and access files using any computer strengthens teams. Providing straightforward access to the same current, relevant information means that everyone works from the same set of facts and less is open to interpretation. Upgrading to Office 365 has not only made our existing employees happy, it also helps us attract new talent. We can be more competitive in terms of finding the right people to carry on our tradition of excellence. New recruits see that we’re investing in state-of-the-art elements that will keep Dana successful both today and well into the future. —Kevin Parlette Read the full story to understand how Dana is using Office 365 to reduce project development issues, launch products at lower costs and improve profit margins. The post Achieving greater accuracy and better product launches with Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Sonya Koptyev about the newly announced Developer Program. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP47.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Write a PHP app to get Outlook mail The Ultimate Script to down Ignite videos and slides Events SPTechCon Dev Days 24th - 26th June European SharePoint Conference  9th -12th November  Microsoft Recode 2015 in London 19th June Show notes Sign up at http://dev.office.com/ Dev.office.com Mini-Labs iTunes link Build/Ignite Sessions Microsoft Office 365 Groups Deep Dive Microsoft Office 365 Groups Overview and Roadmap Supercharging Your Custom Solutions with the Office 365 Unified API Endpoint Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Sonya Sonya Koptyev is a senior product marketing manager responsible for the Apps for Office developer platform. Sonya is a seven-year veteran at Microsoft and has worked in a variety of roles throughout the company, including a senior consultant and professional development manager with Microsoft Consulting Services.     About the host Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is based, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 047 on the Dev Program appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s business users want to work from anywhere, on any device, at any given time. Azure and Office 365 can help you enable your users to have uninterrupted services and the freedom to work when and where they need to. Microsoft Azure and Office 365 takes location out of the equation, so that your employees can live life on their terms.  Whatever you can do in the office, you can now do just as well on the go with enterprise-grade security and management. Office 365 offers flexible tools that fit the modern worker’s needs which makes for higher employee satisfaction. The Microsoft Technology Center (MTC), provides access to innovative technologies and world class expertise to help customers envision, design and deploy solutions. MTC Studios brings this expertise and insight to you with the opportunity to dialogue with the Microsoft technology architects and your peers through a virtual setting. They offer live and on demand webcasts for you to leverage webcasts on topics facing today’s business challenges. Join us Wednesday, June 3rd at 10 a.m. PDT for a 30 minute webcast to learn how you can fuel your organizations mobile productivity with Office 365. Microsoft technical architect Tyler Cooper will discuss how you can provide flexible tools to empower your workforce while keeping your company’s assets secure. Register here. Topics covered during this webcast include: How you can provide flexible tools to empower your mobile workforce with Office 365. Securing your company’s assets beyond the device with Office 365 and Microsoft Azure Rights Management. Reducing help desk calls with more user self-service options with Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Register for the Virtual Event Series and get the latest information about Office 365 and Mobile Productivity.  We hope to see you there! The post Office 365—fuel mobile productivity appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Terra Milles, communication manager and public information officer at King County. In King County, our customer service policy is "No wrong door." This means that when a citizen reaches any County employee, that employee will ensure the citizen is directed promptly to someone who has the answer. . To make this happen, we need technology that connects and enables our employees—Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Microsoft SharePoint Online are key tools in our communications and collaboration portfolio. King County has the largest population in Washington State: it’s home to the city of Seattle and nearly two million people. We have 14,000 employees working in more than 250 offices, which is a lot of people in a lot of places to connect at a moment’s notice. Increasingly, employees are using OneDrive for Business to store project plans, schedules, videos, and any other kind of file. This helps them collaborate across departments and devices to find what they need to respond to citizens and colleagues. Information is not buried on employee’s computers; it’s in the cloud—well organized and available securely, to everyone who needs it. Using Office 365 search capabilities, we can quickly find the information and people leading to that "right door." We use the presence feature in Skype for Business to see if the author of a document is available online, so we can reach out to them in real-time as needed. Cloud-based document access is especially important as our employees become more mobile, particularly field employees who often don’t work in offices or at desks. It’s important for them to be able to access documents from anywhere, using any device. With Office 365 and OneDrive for Business, they have that flexibility. We recently used OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to build an application that helps us coordinate and respond to public information requests. The application is now used by more than 60 County staff members in various executive branch and elected agencies and it’s an example of how we can build one integrated platform for wide-ranging deployment. As a public entity, we must respond to all public disclosure requests, and this new application offers greater efficiencies than previous siloed response and collection methods. We use OneDrive for Business to store records and utilize the permissions function to coordinate across agencies. Together, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online serve as our information-sharing backbone. We have hundreds of SharePoint sites that teams use to organize and manage projects ranging from internal coordination to event planning to large-scale information technology initiatives. We also use SharePoint Online as the foundation for our new intranet, which has become the gold standard in demonstrating to internal groups what they can do with the SharePoint service. Our intranet portal enables our staff to find employee news and spotlights, featured jobs, an events calendar, a photo of the week, and quick links to tools such as PeopleSoft, Healthy Incentives and training. They can also use the How Do I…, Work Tools and Employee Tools menus to access a wide range of county resources; check their department, agency, or division site (new or existing), bookmark their most frequently used intranet and SharePoint sites; and look up colleagues quickly using People Search. As a government entity, we have limited resources, so standardizing on Office 365 services such as OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online helps us reduce complexity and costs, as well as maximize our IT resources. We can also meet government security standards for cloud based data, such as HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services Division of the FBI) using the Microsoft Azure Government cloud. With OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, we are equipped to make sure that citizens encounter no wrong door when they call King County. —Terra Milles The post No wrong door appeared first on Office Blogs.

We could not be more excited to welcome the team at 6Wunderkinder, the creator of Wunderlist, to Microsoft and OneNote. The acquisition of this market-leading to-do list app known for its simplicity, ease of use and innovative design fits squarely with our ambition to reinvent productivity and help people achieve more across all major platforms and devices—particularly on mobile. Wunderlist provides an easy way for people to capture, organize and collaborate on lists and to-dos—personally and professionally. It is a fantastic app, and, like OneNote, available on every device that matters to users—iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Android, Windows Phone, Windows and the web. Wunderlist recently announced integration with Sunrise and we will share additional integration updates in the coming months. Learn more about the acquisition on the Official Microsoft Blog. The post Microsoft acquires 6Wunderkinder, creator of to-do list app Wunderlist appeared first on Office Blogs.

In a world where technology is always evolving, email has become a primary source of communication for businesses large and small. According to this survey by digital magazine Windows IT Pro, 96.84 percent of survey respondents say that email is core to their day-to-day business. Regardless of industry—from health to education, retail to finance—most small businesses need an email and collaboration software that’s efficient and can help keep administrative costs down. But with so many email hosting services out there today, how can you find one that covers all of your needs? To begin, consider services that meet the following five criteria: 1. Security Keeping email content protected is a top concern for users looking into their next email solution, according to Windows IT Pro. Not only is it important to keep content secure, but proper email protection will help head off other hacking accessed through email. Companies that allow hacking leaks can land in a lot of financial trouble—because of the Sony email hack of 2014, the organization could lose up to $100 million. And though the loss from hacks of smaller businesses is often a lot less (an average of $8,700, according to USA Today), the risk of a larger loss isn’t worth it. Small business owners should look for email hosting services that use advanced tools to protect information. Specifically, anti-malware, anti-spam filtering, and data loss prevention capabilities should be in place. To ensure your data is backed up properly, find a hosting service that has globally redundant servers, a team of experts that’s monitoring your servers and is available 24/7 and the ability to employ effective disaster recovery techniques. In addition, it’s important for hosting services to maintain a number of security certifications and remain compliant with certain regulations. Specifically, select a host with HIPAA and FISMA compliance, which allows the email service to be fully acceptable for use in health care and government settings, respectively. Microsoft’s Office 365 is one of the top-ranked email hosting services for Exchange, a popular mail platform that allows users to make use of numerous helpful features. In addition to being HIPAA- and FISMA-certified, Office 365 is ISO 27001 certified, SSAE 16 certified, EU Safe Harbor compliant and EU Model Clauses capable. 2. Administration and ease of use The best email hosting services provide you with complete—or nearly complete—control over your email environment, but also offer assistance when it’s needed. Reliable customer service is a required given, and that should include 24/7 email, chat, and phone support. When selecting an email hosting service, you should be on the lookout for companies that offer web-based interfaces that are simple to use. For example, the Microsoft Exchange eDiscovery Center allows you to run In-Place eDiscovery across Exchange, SharePoint and Lync data from one interface. You can also remove confidential data from phones that have been lost, as well as create approved mobile device lists and enforce PIN lock. An easy-to-use interface gives your small business the flexibility it needs to complete administrative tasks in a timely manner. When you combine that with excellent help desk support, you’ve got a winning solution on your hands. 3. Compatibility and flexibility As a business owner, you know the value of productivity—and that’s why it’s vital to have an email system that works for you, not against you. Look for email hosting services that offer enterprise-level syncing with web-based applications and mobile devices. Whether your office has only two employees or two hundred, you will definitely want the ability to collaborate using global address lists, tasks, and shared calendars. As a host for Exchange, Office 365 brings compatibility with Outlook and Lync, as well as the ability to access your email, calendar, and contacts on all major browsers, across devices, wherever you are. You also will want the freedom to choose what email options you need and what you can do without. Select an email hosting service that offers a variety of features and several service levels. That way, you can begin with the basics—a more affordable option for companies on the smaller side or just starting out—and expand without switching hosting services down the road once your business has grown or changed. 4. Availability Because we live in an always-on world, even an hour of downtime—email or otherwise—can cost your business thousands of dollars. A 2014 report by IDC showed that 80 percent of small and midsized businesses lose $20,000 or more per hour of network downtime. Because email is a vital part of a business’s productivity and often contains company data, it’s important to find a hosting service that guarantees uptime of at least 99.9 percent. In addition, find a service that keeps you connected. Office 365 brings you automatic patching so you don’t have to maintain your own system. Also, be sure you can access your email environment on mobile devices across brands—so whether employees have an iPhone, a Windows Phone, an Android or a Blackberry, they can get to their emails, no matter where they are. 5. Archiving and storage There’s nothing worse than a cluttered email inbox that doesn’t allow for sorting messages easily. But there are some messages that contain important information you don’t want to delete. The solution is an email hosting service that provides adequate storage for archiving. Even better are the services that have an established archiving system in place. Specifically, you’ll want to look for a service that keeps all your data in one place and gives you the option to automatically move old messages to the archive. In addition, the host should guarantee access to your archived messages and protect data with continuous backup and disaster recovery. Select an email hosting service provider that will help you manage your archived email within your inbox—and say goodbye to annoying locally stored .pst files. You’ll also want a provider that can advise you on best practices for the development of an email retention policy and help implement it through your email system. Because technology is always evolving, your email service should get better and better over the years. Look for a forward-thinking email host that is always improving its services. Ultimately, that’s the best way to know you’ve made the right choice. The post 5 factors to consider when selecting an email hosting service appeared first on Office Blogs.

As many of us are now used to working from anywhere from our preferred device, information protection controls need to evolve to protect data at the individual, file and service levels. The shift to mobility and personally-owned devices also means that the threat landscape is shifting with more individually targeted attacks that work across platforms. On this show, we take an early look at new controls for compliance, security and organizational search with next-generation information protection tools. This week I’m joined by Rudra Mitra, engineering lead for the Office 365 information protection team, to take a look at the core themes driving information protection investments and to give us an early look at what’s coming. Rudra describes the approach his teams are taking as they build new controls to be pervasive, transparent and people-centric. We highlight the new tools for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) coming to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, as well as Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) in Exchange Online to show how they’ve evolved to provide pervasive, platform-agnostic protection. These tools also provide new audit capabilities to show things like URL traces when people follow embedded hyperlinks in email and actions taken against centrally-stored files, plus new APIs available to query activity—all in the name of transparency. Transparency extends to organizational search with new eDiscovery analysis capabilities coming in Equivio Zoom. The controls cannot just exist in isolation from users and core to Office 365 is the inclusion of people in the compliance solution. DLP policy tips are presented to users within email, file sharing experiences and even coming to Office desktop apps. User education of policy along with options to help people securely work on their device and apps of choice are all part of being people-centric. On the show, Rudra demonstrates all of this and more to give an early look at what’s coming in information protection and as we think about integration with other cloud services.  He also provides insights into things to come. Watch the show to learn more and see you next week! —Jeremy Chapman The post Early look at next gen information protection in Office 365 and beyond appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today people send and receive more email than ever at work, which is one reason built-in archiving is one of the most popular IT-related features in Office 365. There are millions of Office 365 archives in active use, and the unlimited archive storage offered in our Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E4 plans continue to provide value to IT admins and end users alike. As customers began using our recently announced Import Service to import terabytes of data from on-premises systems to Office 365, or to manage high volume mailboxes, we’ve seen a few cases in which a customer reached a threshold that required them to contact Microsoft support and perform manual steps to provision additional space. But no longer. To accommodate customers who require very, very large archiving storage, we are pleased to announce new auto-expanding, highly scalable archiving. This allows you to take advantage of a truly bottomless archive without needing to call support or perform any manual steps. Through an update to our back-end architecture, we not only enabled auto-expanding archives, but also removed limits on the Recoverable Items store. This update retains the best-of-breed archiving experience that end users, IT pros and compliance officers love so much. End users continue to access their email data in the same way; IT pros continue to enable archiving for their users with the same user interface and PowerShell commands, and our comprehensive compliance stack—Auditing, Retention, Hold and eDiscovery—works seamlessly with the updated archiving architecture. We’re excited to deliver a solution that meets the most rigorous requirements of all our customers and industries we serve across the world. We’ll begin to roll out this offering worldwide in the coming weeks. —The Office 365 Archiving team The post Announcing auto-expanding, highly scalable archives for Office 365 email appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services Team. About a month ago, we invited anyone to participate in Office 2016 on Windows Preview. We now have over one million customers using the Office Preview across both Windows and Mac platforms. When we started the preview, we noted we would be adding features regularly for customers to test and just this month released several new updates. Here’s a quick look at a few of the highlights: Real Time Presence in Word—While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon. Simplified file sharing—We are simplifying the process of sharing files and making them available to others to review, comment, and edit. Just clicking Share on the Ribbon will save your file to the Cloud and make it available to others in one easy step. Insights for Office (currently in Word and Outlook)—Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your reading experience. Try it by selecting keywords, like people or places, in your content and watch as Insights pulls relevant information into the Task pane to help you learn more. Version History improvements—We made it easier to find different versions of files stored on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. You can click the History command in the File menu to view or restore any previous version. These are just a few of the highlights, with many others available including Power Pivot improvements, improved grammar checkers, and more. If you haven’t joined Office 2016 Preview, it’s not too late. Join here. We have more new features in the pipeline that will be showing up in the Preview over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more updates. Meanwhile, we look forward to hearing your feedback on Office 2016 and thanks for your support.   —Kirk Koenigsbauer The post Office 2016 on Windows Preview update appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Eric Shupps on his thoughts on SharePoint Add-ins. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP48.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Windows 10 - July 29th release date V1.1 manifests for Online and iPad client support Waldek Mastykarz - Office 365 SPA on any platform and Office Graph hands on Lab Show notes Office 365 Training on SharePoint Building Blocks Office 365 Development Patterns & Practices Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Eric Shupps Eric Shupps is the founder and president of BinaryWave, a leading provider of administration and productivity solutions for Microsoft SharePoint. Eric has worked with SharePoint Products and Technologies since 2001 as a consultant, administrator, architect, developer and trainer. He is an advisory committee member of the Dallas/Ft. Worth SharePoint Community group and a participating member of user groups throughout the United Kingdom. Eric has authored numerous articles on SharePoint, speaks at user group meetings and conferences around the world, and publishes a popular SharePoint blog at http://www.sharepointcowboy.com. About the host Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is based, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 048 with Eric Shupps on SharePoint Add-ins appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Power Query update includes four new or improved features including: Enhanced Privacy levels dialog New Text column filters: "Does Not Begin With…" and "Does Not End With…" Improved Salesforce connectors Improved "Excel Workbook" connector     You can continue reading for more details about each feature. Enhanced Privacy levels dialog We improved the Privacy levels dialog where users are asked to provide privacy levels for all data sources involved in a query. With this update, users can control whether privacy levels apply to a specific location or a more general one. For instance, you can now control whether privacy levels should be applied to a page versus an entire site. New Text column filters: "Does Not Begin With…" and "Does Not End With…" We added a couple of new filters for Text columns so you can filter by "Does Not Begin With…" or "Does Not End With…" In previous versions of Power Query, these filters required custom formula editing, but are now much easier to apply by simply selecting them from the Text Filters menu. Improved Salesforce connectors An area of feedback from many of our customers using the Salesforce connector is that they want to connect first to a custom domain, rather than the default (production) domain. Another common request is to be able to create relationships when loading Salesforce tables to the Data Model, based on the relationships that already existed in Salesforce. These two options were available by modifying the underlying formulas, but not surfaced in the UI. With this update, we added these two options to the Salesforce connector dialogs. The selection of Production versus Custom domain is available in both "Salesforce Objects" and "Salesforce Reports." The option to import relationships between Salesforce tables is available in the "Salesforce Objects" connector.   Improved "Excel Workbook" connector One of our most popular connectors is the "Excel Workbook" connector, which allows users to import tables, named ranges or raw worksheet data from an Excel Workbook. In this update, we added automatic column type detection for columns imported using this connector, making it easier for users to work with these columns without having to manually convert them to the right data type. We also made some performance optimizations so that the data previews in the Navigator and Query Editor for this connector load much faster. That’s all for this month. As mentioned previously, we’re making lots of incremental improvements to Power Query and we hope that you find it better with every new monthly update. Please continue sending us feedback using our "Send a Smile/Frown" feature, or by voting for what you’d like to see next.     —Miguel Llopis, program manager on the Power Query team ——————— Power Query for Excel is available with Office 2013 or Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance.  Download the add-in and learn more about getting started. You can receive update notifications in Power Query when there is a new version available. These notifications will show up in your PC’s system tray when you launch Excel. You can also check for updates by using the Update button in the Power Query ribbon tab. 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 on  Facebook and Twitter The post 4 updates to Power Query appeared first on Office Blogs.

Join us for another virtual event live from a Microsoft Technology Center to learn how to deploy office in your organization with Office Click-to-Run. Office Click-to-Run, the Office Deployment tool, allows administrators to customize and manage Office 2013 Click-to-Run deployments. This tool helps administrators manage installations sources, product/language combinations and deployment configuration options for Office Click-to-Run. Office Click-to-Run is a Microsoft streaming and virtualization technology that reduces the time required to install Office and helps you run multiple versions of Office on the same computer. The streaming technology enables you to download and begin to use an Office product before the whole product is installed on your computer. The virtualization technology provides an isolated environment for Office to run on your computer. This isolated environment allows you to run the latest version of Office side-by-side with an earlier version of Office that is already installed on your computer. Embrace the ease to live life and work the way that’s best for you. Join us for a 30 minute webcast to hear Mike Gannotti and Todd Furst, Microsoft technical architects on Wednesday, June 17th at 10 a.m. PDT to receive an overview and benefits of Office Click-to-Run. Register for the Virtual Event Series and get the latest information about Office Click-to-Run. We hope to see you there! The post Office 365—deploying Office in your environment appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we are introducing a set of new user experiences in Office 365 on the web that provide quick access to notifications, help and what’s new feature introductions, contextual and immersive settings and the integration of Skype for Business conversations - all within the context of your work. These new features will be available across Office 365 web applications via a set of persistent icons in the top right of the navigation bar. Let’s take a quick look at what’s new: Quick access to notifications A new notifications pane displays real-time updates on your system alerts, personal reminders and communications, including new mails and group likes. You can access the notifications pane via the persistent notification bell icon. The notification bell will display the corresponding number of available notifications. Updated Help pane and "What’s new" feature introductions The new Help pane delivers quick access to help content via a search box, as well as What’s new feature introductions  related to the application you are currently working in. Features included in What’s new include links to additional information, quick actions like "create group" and in some cases a call out on the application canvas about the new feature being introduced. The help pane question mark icon will show a snowflake alert to call attention to new features in a non-intrusive way. The Help pane will also include an organization support card for admins to set the support contact information for their organization including email, phone number and website. The organization support card, once enabled from the company profile tab of the admin portal, appears at the bottom of the Help pane for all users within your organization. Integration of Skype for Business conversations Conversations and real-time access to colleagues across locations, time zones, or even just down the hall have become commonplace for many of us. You will now have the option to start an instant message, voice and/ or video conversation with one or several of your colleagues right from the productivity of your inbox, OneDrive for Business or calendar application. Conversations will provide you with real time, direct access to the information you need directly from your colleagues and persist across applications. Contextual and immersive settings Finally, a new Settings pane provides direct access to contextual settings for the application you are working in, and quick access to the full Office 365 settings experience. In this way, you can personalize and customize your work environment without having to leave what you’re working on. Quick updates to your notifications settings, your password or your automatic replies are only a few clicks away. These new features deliver a more consistent, personalized, and productive experience within Office 365 on the web—enabling you and your team to achieve more with the Office 365 web experience. The features will begin rolling out to those in the First Release program over the next few weeks, and we expect them to be rolled out to all Office 365 business customers over the next several months. Let us know what you think and if you have any questions post in the comments below. —Nick Robinson, senior product marketing manager, Office 365 team The post New user experiences in Office 365 on the web appeared first on Office Blogs.

The April Office 365 updates includes new apps, integrations, security capabilities and opportunities for developers, along with enhancements to existing services and apps. There’s a new pocket scanner app for iPhone and Android phones and, for business users, there are new apps for automatic data insights, company videos, and personalized search and discovery. Improvements to OneNote, Office Mix and Sway make doing research and creating presentations easier than ever, while improvements to Outlook, Delve, and Power Query help keep you productive at work. Plus Skype for Business is here, the first partners are bringing add-ins to Outlook, and public previews of Data Loss Prevention capabilities in SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Office 2016 applications are on the way. A new email filtering service, now in private preview, is expected to be available this summer. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new March 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates Office Lens comes to iPhone and Android—Office Lens, one of the most popular free apps on Windows Phone, is now available on iPhone and Android phones. What makes it so popular? It’s a capture app that turns your phone into a pocket scanner and it works with OneNote. Use it to take pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards or sticky notes, then let Office Lens crop, enhance and save to OneNote. Just like that—the images you captured are accessible across your devices. Office Online and Dropbox on the web are now integrated—The latest step in making it easier to work with your Office applications and Dropbox is here. Now, when you’re working in Office Online you can add your Dropbox account to easily browse, open and edit Office files with Office Online. You can also save files created in Office Online directly to Dropbox. The same integration is available from Dropbox in a web browser. You can access Office Online directly from the file you’re viewing, open it, and start editing using Office Online. OneNote updates—Clip it to OneNote is a new feature in Bing Image Search that lets you organize images and links that you’re researching into your personal online notebook. And you now have the option to hide spelling errors in OneNote Online. When you’re brainstorming and don’t need to proof, you can hide those red squiggles that highlight spelling errors, so you can focus on content. As always with OneNote, all your notes are on all your devices. Enhancements to Office Mix­—Office Mix just added two new ways to help you deliver compelling presentations and better engage your audience. With Slide Notes, your notes are displayed at the top of your screen. It’s like having a teleprompter for recording your mix, so you can focus on connecting with your audience, rather than worrying about memorizing your delivery.  And with closed captioning, you can make your mixes easier to see, hear and use. Sway is now collaborative—Sway lets you create polished content in a new and interactive way to share with others. And now you can work on Sways together in real-time, from class projects to business reports to vacation recaps. It’s simple. Share an edit link with anyone you want to work with. They click the link, log in and start editing. You can track who is editing and control access. You can make a copy your Sways now, too, to preserve your original, create a template, or customize a presentation for your audience. Sway updates—The recent improvements to Sway help you create even more engaging presentations. You can now create interactive charts, and you can use the new Focus Points to tell Sway what to focus on in your images, so you can bring what’s important in your images into focus. Plus there’s a new option for formatting your content and it’s easier to embed Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files from your OneDrive or PC/Mac. Sway for iPhone v1.3 got updates too, including improved sign-in and accessibility. Office 365 for Business updates* Introducing Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection—Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is a new email filtering service that provides additional protection against specific types of advanced threats. ATP extends the Exchange Online Protection by providing protection against unknown malware and viruses, time-of-click protection against malicious URLs, and rich reporting and URL trace capabilities. Currently in private preview, ATP is expected to be available this summer as an optional service for Office 365 commercial customers. Skype for Business is here!—The new Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync) rolled out as part of the April monthly update for Office 2013, and Skype for Business Online is rolling out to Office 365 customers worldwide. If you currently use Lync Online in Office 365, the new Skype for Business user experience will appear for you in the coming weeks. If your organization needs more time to prepare for Skype for Business, administrators can switch between Skype for Business and the traditional Lync user interface. New BeyondCore Apps for Office for automatic data insights—Analyze and present data insights in a flash! BeyondCore’s App for Excel helps you discover the right questions to ask of data and how to interpret insights accurately. It automatically evaluates data in Excel workbooks and provides curated graphs and narrative explanations that point out the statistically significant insights. You can export the insights to a PowerPoint presentation or Word document, and then customize these reports using the BeyondCore App for Word and App for PowerPoint. 6 updates for Power Query for Excel—A Power Query for Excel update is now available and is packed with lots of new features, including: a new Navigator dialog that gives you search capabilities and more, the ability to create new queries from the Query Editor, a new Launch Editor button on the Power Query ribbon tab, additional filter options for Date/Time columns in Query Editor, support for specifying a port number when connecting to a database, and performance improvements. Download the updated Power Query today. Office 365 now supports larger email messages—up to 150 MB—The maximum message size has increased to 150 MB. The default maximum message size is still 25 MB, but Office 365 administrators can now set the maximum message size to the size that’s right for their organization, from 1 MB up to 150 MB. And you can customize the maximum message size for any and all your mailboxes however you see fit. You can make the changes in the Exchange Admin Center or use Remote PowerShell. Enhanced non-delivery reports (NDRs) in Office 365—Over the next months, NDRs generated by Office 365 will be enhanced to make it easier for ordinary users to understand and fix message delivery problems. The NDRs will explain the problem and why it’s happening in everyday language, with clear instructions on how to fix it.  An additional section of the NDR for admins and tech support provides an in-depth explanation of the problem and solution, often with technical details and links to more information. Outlook updates for iOS and Android—Improvements continue to roll out. Outlook’s People section is now a complete address book—an alphabetical list of contacts from all your email accounts. To find people who are not in your contact list, you can now use Directory search, both in People or when you’re composing an email. Scheduling is easier with the new three-day calendar view, and searching your email is faster now that your search term is highlighted in the message list. More features, like mobile device management, are on the way. Outlook for Android comes out of preview— Since the preview was released in January, Outlook for Android has been updated 17 times to meet the high bar the team set for this app—that is an update a week! A big part of that work focused on improving performance and stability, along with work on localization and accessibility. The team also focused on delivering features to add value, match the iOS version, and respond to your feedback. They’ll continue this pace of updates to make the app better each week in response to your feedback. New Office Delve People experiences in Office 365—New enhancements to Office 365 leverage Delve for easier people-based discovery and greater self-expression. The enhanced personal profile helps you find, connect and collaborate with the right people. Blog, the new section added to your profile, makes it easy to express yourself in your organization—just click start writing. Delve mobile apps for Android and iPhone are available now, too, so connecting, discovering and sharing information is easy, even on the go. Office 365 Video begins worldwide rollout and "gets mobile"—Office 365 Video provides organizations with a secure, company-wide destination for posting, sharing and discovering video content. It’s now rolling out to all eligible Office 365 business customers worldwide. The new Office 365 Video for iPhone app gives you the power of video on the go, more responsive portal pages deliver a great user web experience across devices, and with the new HTML-5 player you can play videos no matter which device you’re using. Enhanced transparency and control for Office 365 customers—Three new capabilities significantly enhance customers’ visibility into actions taken on their content and control over access to their content in Office 365: the ability to employ user-interaction logs as security and compliance signals that provide monitoring, analysis and data visualization; a Customer Lockbox to explicitly control access to your content in the very rare instances when a Microsoft engineer logs in to the Office 365 service; and advanced encryption of email. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in SharePoint Online/OneDrive and Office 2016 applications—The public preview of DLP for SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business is on its way for eligible Office 365 tenants later this quarter. With the new capabilities, you can easily create policies to remediate violations and empower your users with policy tips and notification emails—just like you do today with DLP in Exchange. Later this quarter, DLP capabilities will also be available in the public preview of Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With these capabilities, users can be notified in real time about content they’re working on, right within the Office applications. Office 365 developer updates New ways to build with the Office platform, reach more people—Developers can extend Office apps using add-ins to expose their custom capabilities to users and connect to Office 365 through open APIs. New capabilities to develop new integrated experiences that enhance productivity for Office users include: Office Graph API, Excel for iPad support, add-ins for Outlook.com, unified APIs for enterprise and consumer, simpler API endpoint access, Skype Developer Platform, and more. First partners bring add-ins to Outlook.com—Uber, Boomerang and PayPal are bringing add-ins to our 400 million active Outlook.com users this summer, leveraging the new unified consumer and commercial Outlook APIs. The Outlook APIs create an open platform for developers to easily build add-ins for Outlook.com and Office 365 users that simplify everyday tasks, helping them get more done without switching between applications. More third-party partner announcements are on the way. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald ——————————————————————————- *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: April 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

The game of marketing has changed. Are you playing by the new rules? Today’s landscape of digital and social tools, sophisticated analytics, and internet-savvy consumers has resulted in a new frontier for marketers. Marketing has now entered the age of the empowered and informed buyer where the customer is at the center of every marketing decision. How can chief marketing officers (CMO’s) adapt to this new era of customer-centered and digitally-driven marketing? On the June episode of Modern Workplace, we heard from two top CMO’s about how the role of the chief marketing officer is changing in business today and how you can deliver the types of breakthrough experiences today’s sophisticated customers both expect and demand: Chris Capossela—CMO of Microsoft, discussed some of the digital engagement strategies his team is using to win business and build deep, lasting customer relationships. Amy Bohutinsky—CMO of Zillow Group, a leading online real-estate marketplace, shared some of the tips, best practices, and lessons-learned she’s acquired through growing Zillow’s marketing from the ground up. We also took a tour of Microsoft’s Social Command Center to learn how they’re using social listening to drive better customer relationships, stronger brand awareness, and increased sales. Watch the June episode of Modern Workplace webcast on-demand at www.modernworkplace.com Join us monthly on Modern Workplace for ideas about new ways to work. Each online episode includes interviews with business innovators who tell their story, provide actionable advice and answer questions from our live, online audience. Tune in to learn about the smart technology solutions that businesses are using to connect, drive innovation and grow their businesses. Register today for the new season of Modern Workplace that begins September 1st. Registered guests are invited to join us for live chat with studio guests and Microsoft product managers, both during and after the show, and will also receive exclusive access to whitepapers, eBooks, and more. For more information, visit www.modernworkplace.com. The post Next on Modern Workplace—the strategic CMO appeared first on Office Blogs.

The new Office Add-in and Office 365 API platforms give you integrated Office experiences with your favorite apps and the apps you use to run your organization. On this week’s show we explore Office extensibility updates and take a tour of solutions from Salesforce, SAP, Uber, Do and Smartsheet across Office applications, Office Online in the browser and even Office for iPad. On past shows, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what the Office platform can do for developers and some of the things that can light up for Office users. We’ve done everything from explaining what the model is, using Office Add-ins (formerly apps for Office) to navigate our way through Prague and even provide tips for developers when moving to the new model. This show is a bit different. We spend most of the time demonstrating what a few popular software as a service (SaaS) applications are doing with Office Add-ins and the extensibility platform. Office Add-ins and Office 365 APIs are the two primary means to extend Office experiences and connect your apps to Office 365 services. Imagine being able to see your sales data directly integrated with your email experience in Outlook, analyzing ERP data directly in Excel without an export or copy/paste, booking transportation right from your calendar with a single swipe gesture, or having your go-to app integrate with your business calendar, address list and Office 365 file storage - all of this is possible and we demonstrate all this and more on the show. If you want to learn more, watch the show and check out the Office Dev Center if you are interested in building out these experiences. See you next week! —Jeremy Chapman The post Salesforce, SAP, Uber, Do and Smartsheet add-ins and extensibility solutions for Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled Surface Hub, a new large-screen collaboration device that harnesses the power of Windows 10, Skype for Business, Office, OneNote and Windows universal apps to deliver a new kind of productivity experience for groups. Today, the Surface Hub team announced more details on how Surface Hub will come to market, including pricing and market availability. A core part of advancing our vision of communication-powered productivity with Skype for Business is building a rich portfolio of meetings devices that make meetings richer, more productive and engaging for businesses of all sizes. We believe every conference room and meeting space, small or large, should enable natural interactions between people in different locations, across voice, video, graphic and written communication. Surface Hub does that and so much more. With Skype for Business, Office and OneNote integrated directly into the operating system, Surface Hub delivers a new set of digital tools to help teams create and brainstorm in a way that’s both natural and efficient. We couldn’t be more excited about this milestone for Surface Hub. Head on over to the Surface Hub blog to learn more about today’s news, and stay tuned to the Office blog over the coming months for more on the future of Skype Room Systems. The post Get ready for Surface Hub to transform your meetings appeared first on Office Blogs.

We are pleased to announce new access and security controls for Outlook for iOS and Android. With today’s update, Outlook now uses Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based authentication for Exchange Online mailboxes in Office 365, replacing the previously used basic authentication method. This new authentication method enables IT administrators to configure new access scenarios for sign in to Office 365 and to better control and manage Outlook on mobile devices in their organization. Quick introduction to ADAL-based authentication The ADAL-based authentication stack enables Outlook to engage in browser-based authentication with Office 365. Used by Office apps on both desktop and mobile, users sign in directly to Office 365’s identity provider (Azure Active Directory) to authenticate, rather than providing credentials to Outlook. The below screenshot shows the new sign in experience for users when connecting to an Office 365 Exchange Online mailbox from Outlook. The new ADAL sign in page for Office 365. This new sign in method enables new benefits for IT including OAuth for Office 365 and support for multi-factor authentication. OAuth for Office 365 ADAL-based sign in enables OAuth for Office 365 accounts, providing Outlook with a secure mechanism to access email without requiring access to the user’s credentials. At sign in, the user authenticates directly with Office 365 and receives an access token in return, which grants Outlook access to your mailbox. Outlook already uses OAuth for Outlook.com, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and Gmail. As Exchange Server on-premises does not support OAuth, we continue to use basic authentication for these users. You can read more about how we secure user credentials for Exchange on the Office 365 Network here. Support for Office 365 multi-factor authentication Outlook now supports multi-factor authentication for Office 365. Multi-factor authentication helps secure the user sign-in for cloud services beyond just a single password. When enabled, users are required to acknowledge a phone call, text message, or app notification on their smartphones after correctly entering their passwords. They can sign in only after this second authentication factor has been satisfied. Admins can learn more about turning on multi-factor authentication for Office 365 on TechNet. A straightforward sign in experience for users With this update, users now have an "Office 365" login tile for connecting to an Office 365 mailbox from Outlook. As many users are used to selecting the "Exchange" tile for accessing their Office 365 email, we built intelligence into the sign in process to prevent users from getting stuck. If an Office 365 user selects Exchange out of habit, or by accident, Outlook will guide the user to login via the new ADAL sign in method. Of course, we also have millions of users already signed in to Office 365 using basic authentication. Over the next week, all Office 365 users will receive a prompt to re-login, which will trigger the new ADAL sign in page. This will automatically convert their account from basic authentication to OAuth. If you’ve applied multi-factor authentication policies, these will immediately take effect. All Office 365 users will receive this prompt in Outlook, which automatically moves their account from basic authentication to ADAL-based authentication. More to come The ADAL-based authentication stack also lays the foundation for our upcoming support of built-in mobile device management (MDM) for Office 365, as well as the MDM and mobile application management (MAM) capabilities of Intune and the Enterprise Mobility Suite. As we announced and demonstrated (starting at 2:00 hour mark) at our recent Ignite Conference, Outlook will soon be supporting these controls for protecting mailbox data and managing mobile devices in your organization. Stay tuned to the Office blog for more details. Have a feature request? Share your ideas with us on our new user voice site at UserVoice.com. For any support requests or to report a bug, please contact us right from Outlook by navigating to Settings > Help > Contact Support. The post New access and security controls for Outlook for iOS and Android appeared first on Office Blogs.

Although we originally created Office Mix to help educators deliver interactive lessons, we’ve been amazed at what people are doing with it every day. Inspired by you, we tried something new and it turns out that Office Mix is just as good at flipping conferences as it is at flipping classrooms! Office Mix provides an innovative player that delivers a personalized experience. It groups content into scenes that are organized as PowerPoint slides, which lets viewers skip directly to the content that most interests them. Viewers can also use the slide sorter view to see all the slides together and jump directly to the content they want to watch next. Technically, Office Mix achieves this by combining the PowerPoint web app with high-fidelity adaptive bitrate video delivered by Azure Media Services. Thus, mixes are experienced as PowerPoint slides—complete with animations, transitions and hyperlinks. Viewers can easily share mixes via Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Office Mix in action Let’s look at Harry Shum’s The Next Era of Computing: Seeing the Future Before It Happens session at the recent Ignite conference to see how Office Mix performs differently than traditional video. The viewer starts with a picture-in-picture experience that presents both the PowerPoint slide and a video of the stage. On slide 14, you hear Shum outline how Microsoft Research thinks about, "Playing the Long Game." At other times in the presentation, the video the presenter is the focal point, so the Office Mix experience shifts to a full-screen view of the stage. (See slide 36 for an example.) Analytics helps strengthen presentations Perhaps the best part of the solution is that Office Mix provides analytics to authors. For instance, if there is a high drop-off rate, presenters might consider compressing their content in future presentations. If users tend to watch one slide multiple times, that could mean the content was particularly engaging. In an education context, Office Mix analytics provides a basis for personalizing instruction. If you are interested in seeing more from Office Mix, check out Keynote 1 and Keynote 2 from the recent Build conference. To create your own mix, download the free add-in to PowerPoint. Thanks for reading! Until next time, Happy Mixing! The post Office Mix amps the slideshow experience with the personality of videos appeared first on Office Blogs.

As the updates and enhancements delivered last month show, Office 365 is continually being improved to help you get more done at home, school and work. Check out the new capabilities in OneNote and Outlook.com or the new and updated apps for phones, and get a look at what’s next with the Office 2016 Public Preview and the Office for Android phone Preview. For business users there are new change management, Data Loss Protection (DLP) and data analysis capabilities, plus integrations, connectors and a new email archive migration service. The simplified and enhanced OneNote Class and Staff notebooks will help educators get a jump on the new school year. And for developers there’s a host of updates—from documentation and code samples to on-demand webcasts. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: April 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home, and Office 365 University updates Office 2016 Public Preview now available—Get an early look at the next release of Office on Windows desktop (Fall 2015), and help shape and improve the future of Office. Read the blog post to find out what’s new for documents, collaboration, data analysis, and security. To see if the program’s right for you, visit the Office 2016 Preview site. OneNote updates—Now you can search handwritten notes in OneNote notebooks saved to OneDrive—in 25 languages—just like you search typed text and text within images. And with OneNote for the Apple Watch, you can access your content on the go. Quickly check your to-do list, or capture ideas or to-do’s by just tapping and dictating. OneNote for Mac updates—One of the top-requested features is here! You can now record meetings, conference calls, classes, interviews, brainstorm sessions, or personal journals, with any notes you type while recording synced to the audio. Plus, you can now view equations added from OneNote for Windows and recover sections or pages of notes you deleted accidentally. OneNote welcomes three new partners—cloudHQ integrates your cloud apps for easy collaboration—like automatically syncing your OneNote notebook with a folder in Dropbox—and helps keep everything safely backed up. Equil connects the physical surfaces of notepads and whiteboards to digital notebooks like OneNote. And with the new OneNote plug-in for WordPress, you can quickly transform your notes into meaningful blog posts. New ways to get more done in Outlook.com—A refined inbox, new ways to collaborate, an upgraded calendar, and more are rolling out in Preview now and will be available to a broader audience through an opt-in program soon. These are the first of many innovations. Share feedback, recommend features, and vote for the ideas you like in the newly launched open forum Outlook UserVoice. Office for Android phone Preview now available—Get an early look at how the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps make documents, spreadsheets and presentations look their best on your Android phone, and help shape and improve the app experience on Android phones. To participate in the Preview program, join the Microsoft Office for Android community. Office Lens Android available in Google Play Store for free—This popular app that turns your phone into a pocket scanner is now available for Android as well as iPhone and Windows phones. The app recognizes the corners of a document, whiteboard, electronic screen, or any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens, enhances and cleans up the image, then enables you to save it to OneNote or OneDrive. Updates to the OneDrive Android and Windows Phone apps—OneDrive now supports Android Wear. With the OneDrive watch face, each time you activate your watch, you see a photo from the last 30 days. With Cortana search integration, finding files in your personal OneDrive with Windows Phone is now simpler. Just say what you’re searching for—for example, "OneDrive search for Hawaii sunset photos" or a specific word or phrase in an Office document or PDF—and Cortana will find it for you. Office 365 for Business updates* New ways to manage change and stay informed—Recent Office 365 updates help you plan, prepare and communicate to your organization, simplifying change management. First Release now gives you more controls for managing change and, in response to your requests, more updates and new features are rolling out through First Release. And to help you stay better informed, the Office 365 Message Center and the Office 365 for business roadmap have been improved. Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online now integrated—Save time, sell more with the new integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online with Office 365. The new CRM app for Outlook integrates your email and contacts. Easily share information with OneNote and use Excel Online to do a quick analysis—right from Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. These plus integrations with PowerPoint, SharePoint, Skype, Word, and Yammer will boost your productivity. Easier email archive migration—Moving email archive data to the cloud is now easier with the new Office 365 Import Service, which provides two options for speeding up the process of importing PST files into Exchange Online mailboxes. Find out how you access the import service, who’s eligible, and more about the public preview, which will last through August. Clutter updates—Clutter, which moves less important emails out of your inbox and keeps you focused on what’s important, will be on by default in Office 365 starting in June. There are also new administrative controls to help you manage Clutter in your organization, and the way Clutter interacts with users has been improved, with new alerts and weekly summary notifications. New DLP capabilities for sync in OneDrive for Business—New administration features allow your IT to manage the sync function in OneDrive for Business to limit potential data leakage. This new DLP capability helps ensure that your users are able to sync files only to managed or domain-joined PCs. Find out how easy it is to set up and manage. Easier to save and share files to OneDrive for Business from Outlook Web App—Outlook Web App now lets you save attachments you received in email directly to your OneDrive for Business folder. Plus, Outlook Web App now automatically notifies you if the file you’re trying to send is over your organization’s message size limit and gives you a one-click option to upload the file to OneDrive for Business. Updates to OneNote Class Notebooks and OneNote Staff Notebooks—Get ready for the next school year! The OneNote Class Notebook is now automatically available to all teachers and faculty with Office 365 Education—no more complicated permissions and setup scenarios. The OneNote Staff Notebook is easier to use too. It’s rolling out to all new and existing Office 365 Education E1 and E3 customers and is also going global. Both notebooks also got new features plus new APIs and LTI support for automation and learning management system (LMS) integration. Updates to Power Query—Check out the 11 new or improved features in Power Query, including support for all Excel 2013 desktop SKUs, OData V4 support and support for custom ADFS Authentication Services. Power Query got a performance boost too—loading medium and large datasets into your Excel Workbook is now faster. Power Map for Excel updates—A new core feature, Custom Regions, was added to Power Map.  Custom Regions lets you map data to the regions that matter to you, even if they’re not the traditional zip code, county, state or country regions. You can use custom regions for scenarios with sales districts, school districts, congressional districts, land lot development, crop rotation, more. You can now customize the formatting of your Power Map legends too. Coming soon—analyze Office 365 data with Equivio Zoom—eDiscovery capabilities powered by Equivio Zoom are coming to Office 365, starting with a preview in June. Equivio Zoom helps you analyze unstructured data within Office 365, perform more efficient document review, and make decisions to reduce data for eDiscovery, so you can meet legal and compliance challenges and reduce eDiscovery costs. New way to create connectors to set up email flow in Office 365—The connector experience in Office 365 was completely overhauled. Now there’s no guesswork—you can know up front whether you need to create connectors for your email scenario. Enhancements to the connector setup wizard make setting up your email flow easier, and you can now validate that a connector works before you start using it. First network partners to offer ExpressRoute for Office 365—Network partners that provide connectivity between Office 365 services and your on-premises network are a key part of delivering ExpressRoute for Office 365. The launch partners that will offer ExpressRoute for Office 365 first this summer are AT&T, BT and Equinix. More ExpressRoute network providers will add Office 365 to their service offerings soon. Sway rollout to Office 365 business and education First Release customers—Sway is rolling out to Office 365 business and education customers in First Release. Sway makes it simple to create and share polished, professionally designed, interactive content. The features that have been added for business and education users include simultaneous coauthoring, creating interactive charts and embedding Office documents (like Excel charts and graphs). Sway rollout to all business and education customers, plus more updates—Sway for Office 365 has started rolling out to all business and education customers. Sway now supports six more languages for business and home users. And now that you can now insert Wikipedia snippets about people, places and other terms, add personal and community images from Flickr, and add new structure to your Sway with the Grid Card, you can create even more amazing Sways. Office 365 developer updates Monthly Dev Digest for May—Check out this round-up of what’s new in dev. Find out about the latest updates for Office 365 developers and the new and updated documentation, code samples and patterns and practices samples, plus podcasts, blog posts and Office Store news. This month’s digest also includes a list of the top 10 Build and Ignite sessions you can watch on-demand. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald ——————————————————————————- *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: May 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Shobhit Sahay, technical product manager for the Office 365 team. Rights Management Service (RMS) is one of the encryption mechanisms that helps you protect your Intellectual property in Office 365. One of the new RMS capabilities we announced earlier with was departmental templates, a feature that allows organizations to define different policies that will be deployed to different departments (or roles) for their use in documents and emails. We are excited to share that this capability is now natively supported in Office 2013. Departmental templates make use of an additional parameter for each template, called the "scope," where you can designate groups that receive this template. This is especially handy when an organization wants to define a policy for specific departments so that only users within that department see that template. Users can consume content protected with this template based on the rights defined in the template. Office 2013 has been refreshed with the latest updates to support this new feature, so no further action is needed for these clients to properly display departmental templates. You can also enable the feature in Office 2010 by deploying the templates via a script or task that supports these templates—details can be found in the RMS blog. Support for departmental templates in Office Online and OneDrive for Business will be coming at a later point. In the meantime, you can learn more about departmental templates here. The post Rights Management Service departmental templates comes to Office 2013 appeared first on Office Blogs.