Office 365 Updates are back after a whirlwind of news that came out of Ignite this September. While you really shouldn’t miss any of the updates that came out of Ignite (you can see a blog posthere), there are some really good updates for October as well.
The biggest update, in my opinion, is the addition of guest access forMicrosoft Teams. Jim Naroski shares that over 100,000 organizations have adopted Teams in its short lifespan. Guest access was the most requested feature for Teams and Microsoft has delivered. Commercial and education tenant customers will see this feature rolled out and can begin to invite individuals who are outside their organizations to participate and collaborate on content. Naroski notes that Microsoft focused on three core tenants as it worked to create guest access: 1) Teamwork and collaboration, 2) Security and compliance, and 3) IT manageability. At Withum, we are already using it, and it’s pretty great.
Many of the other updates are features that can really improve our ability to do our jobs and serve customers. Often these feature updates get overlooked. I hope by sharing them through this post, you may be able to take advantage of many of these great updates. With that said, here is a quick listing of the remaining updates shared this October:
Presentation Translator – Add subtitles to a PowerPoint slide deck in real time. There are 10 supported languages and 60+ supported subtitle languages. If you have a need to deliver information across several languages, this feature may be a fit for you. Download this add-in at the microsoft.com/garage site.
Support for 3D Objects – Support for 3D objects has been added for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. A small library is available that includes several 3D objects to add to your file. You can use 3D controls to rotate the image.
PowerPoint Live Survey – Make presentations more interactive by adding a survey. Live Survey allows you to create the survey question, response options, and the graph to display results. Live Survey then generates a QR code for participants to respond live using their mobile device. There are many ways this can be leveraged to enhance the presentation experience.
Excel Get and Transform Functions – Improved get and transform functions enable processing data and manipulating rows and columns easier and quickly. Excel 2010 and 2013 are also able to enjoy this update by downloading the latest Power Query for Excel add-in.
Power BIon iOS – Mobile filters are now available on iOS devices. This enables filters already accessible on a report to be used on the mobile device as well.
Apps for Outlook Android – There are a lot of great apps available that extend the capability of Outlook and integration with many of the most popular productivity apps on the market. Take a look for many of these apps in the Android library for Evernote, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Translator, Nimble, Smartsheet, Trello, Wrike, and Meister. You can check out the September 8th Office blog postfor more information.
Yammer Gif Library – Yammer is getting a Gif library to enable animations to be added to messages. The Gif library will be G rated to filter out inappropriate content. However, this should enhance users’ ability to further express themselves to their colleagues in messages.
That’s the update for this month. See you in November.
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