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As this has become the norm for just about every supplier conference over the past year, much of this year's discussions The Microsoft Ignite conference focused on new "AI" and security features, particularly related to Microsoft 365, the company name combining Office 365 Pro Plus, Windows 10 and EMS (Mobility and Enterprise Security).
Ron Markezich, vice president of Microsoft 365 Commercial and former chief technology officer of the company, presented several of the new features. He spoke of the need for a "modern workspace" – essentially the way Microsoft said that businesses needed to upgrade to Windows 10 and Office 365 and stay up-to-date – and the need to separate applications and applications. datasets.
For end users, the biggest change can be Microsoft Search, a new search box that will appear at the top of all Microsoft 365 applications, allowing users to more easily access both information contained in the "Microsoft Graph" (in other words, internal data) and to the outside world (using Bing). This also includes commands for specific applications, which will replace the "Tell me what you want to do" box in most current Office applications. Microsoft says this feature will be personalized and learn from your daily work habits. It is currently deployed on Office.com, Bing.com, and in the SharePoint mobile app, and will eventually apply to Edge, Windows, and Office.
Another important new tool is Ideas, where you click a lightning – fast icon to display recommendations on items such as layouts and templates, first in PowerPoint and Excel. Some of these features were already present, as in the Designer tool for PowerPoint, but it makes it much easier to see the different options.
For example, in the demo with PowerPoint, Ideas suggested images corresponding to the names of cities, suggested word changes for both punctuation and spelling consistency (should it act d & # 39; 39 a website or a website)? .
In Excel, you can view geography and stock market information from Bing and use publicly available data to fill a table with information such as stock prices, population, and company information. This data type feature was announced earlier in the year, but is now available.
Another feature of Excel, now previewed in the Android version, allows you to take a picture and convert it to an Excel spreadsheet. Other Excel enhancements include faster search-type functions, which now take a few seconds instead of a few minutes.
Microsoft also said that later this year, it will integrate LinkedIn contacts with Office 365, so that you can send email contacts directly from Outlook and co-edit documents with them.
Although this is not new, Microsoft has also introduced an optional simplified toolbar. Microsoft has described it as designed in part to ensure that its Mac version of Office is now built on the same code base as the Windows version and that it will have the same functionality. For example, a preview version of Office for Mac, now available, includes the recent On-Demand Files feature, which synchronizes your available files to OneDrive and multiple computers, leaving links to files online when you do not want it. space locally.
Brad Anderson, Vice President of Microsoft 365 Engineering, introduced new management and administration features that seemed to integrate a large number of controls into a single console instead of multiple locations on the Web. I was impressed by a demonstration that he made of Windows Virtual Desktop, in which he showed things such as adding ink to a OneNote application on a virtual desktop hosted in Azure on the west coast. It seems that Microsoft has really improved the latency problem.
Microsoft has continued to promote the teams as a collaboration platform. In one of the most interesting demonstrations, attendees attended a real – time transcription, including an immediate translation of the spoken word from Mandarin to English, the system also automatically compiling a list of speakers. monitoring elements. Again, this has already been shown before, but it is now generally deployed.
Another new feature is Blur in the background, which uses face detection to scramble the background during video calls. I can see how this might be interesting, but it still seemed a little rough in the demo.
Security features
Much of Markezich's conference focused on security. He began by pushing the concept of going beyond passwords, using the Microsoft Authenticator single sign-on tool to connect to any application connected to Azure Active Directory. He explained that the use of biometrics or a PIN code stored on a device was more secure and stated that you could reduce attacks by 99.9% by eliminating passwords.
Markezich also highlighted updates to Secure Score, a scorecard that secures your Office 365 environment, now extended to the entire Microsoft 365. Secure Score includes control recommendations for various Microsoft products, including EMS and Microsoft Cloud. Security App, Azure Security Center, and Azure Active Directory.
In the demonstration, I was impressed by the ease with which administrators see the environment as a whole and how it recommends actions that can improve security. Markezich said that customers who use Secure Score can reduce their risk of breach by 30 times, and that this solution is now available for free for all corporate customers.
The company has announced Microsoft threat protection, a more complete anti-malware solution that combines its previous offer of advanced threat protection for Office 365 with Windows-based remediation services. Again, this gives administrators an integrated place to see all the threats and from which to act.
In addition, there is a single administration portal to manage the entire Microsoft 365, as well as integrated portals for compliance (where you can create, configure and apply policies), as well as for security .
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