We don’t talk the talk…we walk the walk!
August is the perfect month for downing tools, taking a holiday and stepping away from work. But, that’s not how we spent the month! We used our time to scan the web and social media, so we could stay on top of our game and keep learning about the latest from Microsoft. We discovered plenty and are delighted to share our findings with you.
What we learned about Microsoft in August:
- Teams is at a ‘feature parity’ with Skype for Business. Last year, Microsoft announced that it would replace Skype for Business online with the Teams group chat platform, to support messaging, meetings and calling in the cloud. New features in Teams would include call parking, group call pickup, location-based routing and shared-line appearance. Microsoft has said it’s on track with these developments but attendees at its partner conference questioned this, commenting that phone support in Teams isn’t ready.
- Microsoft Office 365 now has some new capabilities for us all to benefit from. Planner has been integrated with SharePoint, so you can do task management directly in Teams. Threaded comments have been introduced in Excel for better collaboration and so the experience is consistent across Excel, PowerPoint and Word. We especially like that you can now create Teams usage reports using Microsoft 365 usage analytics. As remote workers, it will help us to see how our organisation works together in Teams using chat, channels and meetings. Take a look.
- Teams goes from strength to strength. In August, Microsoft announced that you can get important notifications whilst in ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode and that you can share just a PowerPoint file in a meeting to save on video bandwidth. We’re cheering that you can now take private notes in the new Wiki app, making it much easier to keep all your notes in once place and nicely filed! Find out how to use the private notes Wiki app.
- Last month we mentioned that you can now hold Live Events in Teams and since this announcement Microsoft has shared further detail. In short, Live Events enable users to broadcast video and content to large online audiences; and, that it’s really like an extension of a Teams Meeting. This great snapshot tells you all you need to know, giving you an introduction to how Live Events works and the components involved from scheduling and production to streaming.
- Microsoft is all about the cloud, but it has acknowledged that some companies – for justifiable reasons – are committed to keeping their data on premise. So, they’ve announced a bunch of new features in its 2019 release for Office, SharePoint and Skype for Business that will give on-premise users similar features to users of 365. Learn what’s on offer.
And, that’s a wrap for August! Get in touch if you believe we’ve missed out any vital Microsoft news that you would like us to feature in our next Microsoft blog post.
