A roundup of Microsoft 365’s latest announcements

Over the last few months we’ve shared many key updates and innovations that have been announced through the Microsoft stack. We go through the latest announcements and new features throughout Microsoft 365 to enable businesses to successfully adopt hybrid working.

Windows 365 for productivity and hybrid working

We previously mentioned the announcement of Windows 365. The cloud service is now available in Windows 10 and Windows 11 ,allowing users to connect to their apps, data and settings from any device and any location. It’s all ready for users to pick back up from where they left off, even when switching devices. It’s also now easier for businesses to scale between users, and avoid the logistics and security challenges around providing seasonal employees with new hardware.

Personalised Microsoft Teams meeting experience

Make notes and edit records within Teams with new partner apps

Users can now take notes inside a Teams meeting using the notes panel, powered by the Confluence cloud app. Confluence has designed the notes to be easy to understand and action-oriented. Users can format the notes as actions, decisions, mentions, tables and code snippets. Once formatted, the notes will be shared in the Teams channel.

Q&A’s in any Teams meetings

With the new Q&A app, users can now add, open or moderated Q&A’s to Teams meeting. Attendees will then be able to ask and reply to questions at any point during the meeting. Organisers and presenters can mark the best answers, moderate and dismiss questions. The app will be available to everyone from this month.

Communities app in Teams and Outlook for web

The Communities app for Teams is powered by Yammer. Soon the app will be updated in terms of the design to add new capabilities like suggested communities which uses AI to recommend valuable communities to join.

Communities app for Outlook for the Web

From next month, users will be able to engage in communities, get involved I conversations & live events, and share knowledge with their colleagues without having to leave the Outlook web app.

Schedule in breaks and stay on top of critical information

Many employees are participating in long meetings, and end up idle for a large portion of their working day. Taking regular breaks throughout the day makes a world of a difference when it comes to employee wellbeing.

With that in mind, the latest features in Outlook and Yammer will help users to plan breaks and keep track of critical messages and tasks. The new ‘Speedy events’ feature will allow users to automatically set events to start ‘late’ or end ‘early’. This will ensure employees can get those much needed breaks between meetings. This will also support the new Outlook for Mac.

Other key features will allow users to:

• Pin the most important message at the top of their inbox
• Set message reminders in Outlook for the web to stay on top of their inbox
• Post news and updates, as well as reply to comments on behalf of leaders and colleagues on Yammer

Find files with suggested attachments

Microsoft Planner now suggests attachments within tasks. Users will be able to see a list of related files to select from when wanting to add attachments to a task to save time. This new capability can be used in Planner for the web at the bottom of the tasks. Simply find the suggest section and select ‘Add next’ to the file.

If you’re looking to learn more about Microsoft 365 and its latest features, contact our cloud team today.