What’s new in Microsoft 365?
The last 6 months have gone by in a blur. With people focused on new projects, delivering new system’s and starting the ‘Hybrid Life’. While all of this has been going on Microsoft have been working hard to make your lives easier while you Work from Home, or work in the office, mix the two and also mix work tasks with personal ones.
What have been the big changes as we see it?
1. Teams for Home
Microsoft Teams can now be used by everyone, not just people with a licence.
You can now get your parents, kids and friends to use it bringing you the same functionality you’re used to in the office and more.
See this page for more information.
You can use it for task management (think chore management), holiday planning with friends (diary planning) and even polls (where/when should we meet now that we’re WFH and in the office.
Hopefully, this allows us to decrease the number of video conferencing apps you have installed… and finally see the death of Skype for example.
2. PowerPoint Live via Teams has transformed presentations.
We present loads of presentations to clients and our team alike. Particularly as we’re not all in the same place anymore, having a 1st rate experience presenting and being able to get feedback easily from what you’re presenting is fundamental to achieving your goal of informing or coming to decisions with people.
PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams has allowed us to do this by enhancing the experience for all making our presentations slicker with presenter mode while giving our audience the ability to interact and feedback to us with live reactions.
See this page for more information.
3. Approval workflows in Microsoft Teams are now easy… really easy.
Being part of a small team doesn’t mean you don’t need to formalise some actions.
Think approvals for holidays, approval for change requests or any of dozens of common approvals which most of them I bet you do over email currently.
Having spent the best part of a morning finding just such an approval I can vouch for the benefit of using Approvals in Microsoft Teams to centralise and formalise those processes that your company or Team think will add value.
Some out of the box templated workflows are for example: Leave Request, Gift application, Work from Home request, Reimbursement request.
You also can create your own if the existing workflows don’t suit you. Keep an open mind and see how these can help you.
See this page for more information.
4. Analytics in Teams
Being quite an intense Microsoft Teams user, we often wonder who is seeing conversations, files and other links we’ve set up in Microsoft Teams.
Analytics helps with this by giving you the information you need to see who is looking at what content and also letting you identify who isn’t looking at content.
We’ve recently gone through a re-structure and as part of that, we’ve archived several Teams and channels which weren’t in use. Simplifying and making communication better for all involved.
See this page for more information.
5. Windows 11 is coming! (it’s free)
If you are buying a new laptop or thinking of replacing an older one be sure to check that it supports Windows 11 at a minimum. Ideally, I would put this off if possible until after Windows 11 is released and it comes pre-installed. Rumour has it that this will be in October, but plan for December in the UK.
Rumour has it that Microsoft Teams will be embedded in Windows 11 bringing this application front and center to everyone who uses it. If you’re not familiar with it, you may need to be in the future, so why not have a look and see what it’s like compared to Zoom or other applications now?
Here are some links for learning more about it:
And by Techradar
Be sure to check your laptop is compatible by checking the details on this page.
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