Office 365- Teams Tool and other new features to look forward in 2017

It is incredible to watch how technology has transformed human lives. Technology has come a long way in such a short span of time and, needless to say, it is going to only advance further. Innovations and improvements in technology will never cease to happen and everyone must keep up with the pace of these improvements in order to reap maximum benefits.

Today, work and Microsoft Office go hand-in-hand. However, if it weren’t for Microsoft Office, the professional world would have been a very different place. Microsoft manages to come up with bright and innovative ideas just at the right time, and is renowned for streamlining the work of millions of organizations.

The tech giant continues to upgrade and improve Office 365, and has started rolling out its new upgrade in December and will continue through 2017.The upgrades are aimed at providing an enhanced user-experience and a ‘smart-work, rather than hard-work’ environment.

Microsoft Teams

On 2^ndNovember, at an event in New York city, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Teams-the new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft Teams enables its users collaborate with people, conversations, and content, enhance productivity and achieve more. Microsoft Teams was built to create an open, digital environment that makes work more transparent, integrated, and easily accessible, across the entire team. Microsoft has also announced the Microsoft Teams Developer Preview program, integrating the developer community with Microsoft Teams.

Modern chat experience

The first core aspect of Microsoft Teams is the modern chat experience that it provides to the teams of today. It supports persistent and threaded chats to keep the team engaged, the chats are visible to the entire team, by default, but can turn into private discussions. Its integration with Skype allows users to be a part of the voice and video conferences. Skype Meeting Broadcast will also allow the enterprises to host and broadcast meetings to a larger audience. What’s more, every user can create their digital personality with custom memes, stickers, GIFs, and emoticons, making work more fun.

A nub for teamwork

The second noteworthy aspect of Microsoft Teams is that it brings the entire Office 365 together to provide a hub for the teamwork. OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Planner, Word, Power BI, and Delve are brought together into Microsoft Teams, making all the information and the tools easily available at the user’s fingertips.

Sharing documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents that are shared within a team are synchronized with a Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud and a local SharePoint place, thereby making documents accessible or all the team members. With the help of Microsoft Teams, users can also communicate with third-party services via Connectors.

Security of the data

Microsoft Teams offers world-wide advanced security and compliance capabilities offered by the Microsoft Cloud. The data on Microsoft Teams is encrypted throughout and is covered by a clear operational model with restricted access to customer data. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides improved protected identification in order to ensure safety of data within a team. Moreover, Microsoft Teams supports data protection standards and key compliance, like European Union Model Clauses, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act business associate agreement (HIPAA BAA), ISO 27001, ISO 27018, and SSAE 16 SOC 1 and 2 reports.

Currently, the preview of Microsoft Teams is available in 181 countries and 18 languages.

We’ve designed Office 365 to meet the unique needs of every group, with purpose-built applications — like Outlook, SharePoint and Yammer — that all naturally work together. And now with Microsoft Teams, Office 365 accommodates all workstyles, said Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office.

Apart from Microsoft Teams, other impressive updates are as follows:

Bitcoin currency support

In Microsoft’s upcoming update, the tech giant has decided to include support for Bitcoin in its range of products. Office 365 users will be able to format, recognize, calculate, and analyzed in Bitcoin currency in Excel.

Conditional access policies for apps and locations

As Office 365 continues to grow and develop, security is also becoming increasingly important. Azure Active Directory authenticates the user and its device and grants access to Office 365 services only when the users conform to the policy set of the service. This is one of the location based security policy that will limit access to specific Office applications offered by Microsoft.

New data gathering and shaping capabilities in Excel

Power Query, an Excel add-in that enhances the self-driven Business Intelligence experience by simplifying data detection, integration, and data transformation. This is a boon for all those whose work heavily relies on Excel spreadsheets. For those who do not know what Power Query is, it enables an intuitive and consistent experience for finding and bridging to a wide range of data sources like Hadoop, Salesforce, Facebook, and also third part websites.

Improvements in OneNote

Microsoft developers are playing close attention to OneNote in 2017, and is promoting its classroom tool. The big giant is going add interesting features that will make sharing easier. Enterprises could leverage the new OneNote and get the most of it.