Microsoft 365: What's New?
Microsoft Inspire 2021
Registration is now open for Microsoft Inspire, which will be held virtually from July 14-15, 2021!
This is Microsoft’s largest partner event of the year. This will be a great opportunity to learn from and industry leaders and experts from around the world.
Microsoft Inspire also presents a chance to connect with Microsoft executives, including Satya Nadella, CEO; Judson Althoff, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer, Customer and Partner Solutions; Vasu Jakkal, CVP, Security, Compliance and Identity; Nick Parker, CVP, Global Partner Solutions; and Rodney Clark, CVP, Global Partner Solutions, Channel Sales and Channel Chief.
The agenda has now been posted. Register now for Microsoft Inspire 2021 here.
New Teams Client 2.o announced with Windows 11
The new Teams chat, call & meet client was highlighted during the Windows 11 announcements by Microsoft Teams CVP/CTO Rish Tandon. Here are some of the new information that was revealed in the announcement:
- Microsoft Teams will be integrated with Windows 11
- It will update from current desktop application internals (Electron) to Edge Webview2 technology.
- The new client will consume less memory than the current one.
- Multiple accounts
- Better performance.
- Teams app will replace Skype on desktop
Windows users will be presented with a Microsoft Teams icon within their taskbar. Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer, Panos Panay, explains the benefits of embedding Teams into Windows 11:
“Now you can instantly connect through text, chat, voice, or video with all of your personal contacts, anywhere, no matter the platform or device they’re on, across Windows, Android, or iOS. If the person you’re connecting to on the other end hasn’t downloaded the Teams app, you can still connect with them via two-way SMS.”
Music Mode for Teams:
Microsoft Teams is getting an option to set your sound to high fidelity. This can be used to reproduce music in high quality for things like online exercise classes, music classes or live music performances, but also to join teams meetings with more high-end microphones and not have teams compress and “optimize” the audio.
In music mode, Teams supports up to 32 kHz sampling rate mono audio at 128 kbps, Teams will automatically adjust the audio bitrate based on the available bandwidth, going down to 48 kbps if needed.
Meeting Join Custom Branding:
The new Organization Explorer in Outlook allows you to find, discover, and explore people and relationships through a new organizational browser experience. Find colleagues, discover team relationships, explore their skills, see their current availability, and more right within Outlook. Organization Explorer is now in preview and available for Office 365 Insiders.
This update gives users who join your meetings a branded experience distinctive to your tenant. The feature is part of the Advanced Communications license, meaning the logo will appear only if the meeting organizer has the license. The feature has been implemented as a meetings policy to give tenant admins choice and the flexibility to apply the logo to certain members or globally.
- Multiple logos can be upload at once, allowing you to assign different logos to different people or groups if that's helpful for your tenant.
- You will have an option to preview how the logo looks before uploading.
Manage customization policies:
Custom lobby meeting customization:
Custom lobby preview:
Look for this to begin rolling out towards the end of July.
Microsoft Word: Modern Comments
Microsoft is rolling out a new comments experience in Word with improved keyboard shortcuts as well as improved @mentions and notifications. This experience unifies how comments work across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Users will be able to respond to comments directly from an email notification. The new design provides a focused view of comments as well as an optional all comments view via the Comments pane. With the new post model, Ctrl+Enter is a keyboard shortcut for posting comments.