What’s New for Communicators at the Microsoft 365 Conference
The Microsoft 365 Community Conference brings people together from all around the world to learn about the latest Microsoft. This year included a dedicated track for communicators, leaders, and IT pros to leverage the latest investments in Microsoft 365, Viva, and Copilot technology. Watch the full session now: Here is a detailed look at what’s new and what’s next: A unified platform We are committed to bringing popular Microsoft 365 and Viva productivity apps into a flexible, unified platform for communicators that can reach every employee. We’ve released a new home experience that connects everybody to the tools, knowledge, and people they need to get their job done. This updated News tab allows you to easily view SharePoint news from across your organization, find personalized news based on sites you follow, and catch up on the top daily news items through a Copilot-powered news summary. Engage content in the employee app A variety of Engage content is now landing on the company home, including banner announcements, the ability to spotlight news, a new feed dashboard card that features the latest community updates. We’re also bringing community experiences to other productivity hubs to ensure everyone stays connected. Storylines in Teams Storyline from Viva Engage is now integrated into Microsoft Teams, enabling leaders to reach their organizations and share personalized updates. You can use storyline to share experiences, celebrate milestones, propose ideas, and discuss interests – ensuring that your content gets to the people who need to see it. Learn more about how to start using Storyline in Teams. Communities in Teams We’ve also shipped a native communities experience when using Teams and Engage together in the mobile app. The new integration is built from the ground up using Teams styling and brings our top features to your fingertips. Check it out. New ways to work with Copilot The pace of innovation with Copilot continues to accelerate, and we are delighted to share some new ways that we are building AI into our apps and vice versa. Community Q&A coming to M365 Copilot Chat See Answers, top responses, and relevant conversations in your Copilot experiences. Answers content shown directly when an exact match answer is available for a user's question Copilot will show you which of those answers have been verified by experts. And of course, you can always see the conversation and answer sources to click into the original thread for additional context and verification. Copilot Drafting We’re bringing the super powers of Copilot to the SharePoint news text editor for help with drafting, tone, and style. The smart Copilot section offers suggestions of what to write next and it can even pull info from a document or meeting. Catch up on news with Copilot Copilot will soon be able to help keep you up to date with the latest news through news summaries and briefings. And to make it even easier, you will be able to listen to news while on the go with Copilot-powered news podcasts. More to share soon! Get summarized news in digestible formats that includes podcasts. Viva Connections Cards in Copilot Stay connected to your interactive dashboard cards when working in Copilot. Now, dashboard cards will surface in Copilot chats. Interact with dashboard cards directly from Microsoft 365 Copilot. Additional innovations for Communicators That’s not all! In the coming weeks we will be rolling out a variety of new features to help streamline your campaigns. Communications dashboard in Engage The new communications dashboard helps streamline multi-channel messaging, target specific audiences, and gain valuable insights into engagement metrics. Plus, it supports leadership engagement, advanced moderation, and it integrates seamlessly with other Viva apps. Publish to Engage from Amplify Publish to Engage communities and storylines directly from Viva Amplify. From the editing experience, you can choose the sender, post on behalf of someone, select the communities or storyline(s), tag people, and even select to send as an announcement. This capability also brings analytics from these posts into the Amplify reporting dashboard so you can better track multi-channel performance and engagement. This much awaited feature is rolling out to general availability. Amplify from SharePoint Amplify a SharePoint News post to Outlook, Teams, Engage & other sites. Kick off a post or news right from your SharePoint page to broadly communicate while still associating it with a campaign and capturing analytics across channels. Campaign association / Campaign & publication analytics Communications for Different Segments Often times, organizations have complex makeups and require different communications environments for different employees. Historically, this has been a challenge for employee bases that are on the same tenant, but we are excited to announce segmentation in Viva Engage, allowing users to view and engage with content specific to their assigned segment. This ensures that communities and people are scoped to relevant segments, enhancing the relevance of content while preserving security and established boundaries. Stay tuned Be sure to follow along with all of the action at Microsoft 365 Conference and on social. We’re counting down the days until Microsoft Build so keep an eye out for more announcements including timing, rollout, and availability for the items shared in this blog. In the meantime, check out our new website for communicators filled with best practices, playbooks, and resources. See you soon! -Michael Holste Michael is a Senior Product Marketing Manager
We are removing Feed on Microsoft 365 (Office)
As part of our ongoing efforts to streamline and enhance user experiences, we will be retiring the Feed feature (shown in figure 1 below) on the Microsoft 365 app. This change will affect web endpoints (www.microsoft365.com, www.office.com) and the Windows app (“Microsoft 365 (Office)”).Connecting tasks experiences across Microsoft 365
In this new normal, Microsoft’s vision for a unified tasks experience, which we first announced at Ignite last year, is more relevant than ever. Since then, we’ve made significant progress in creating a coherent, integrated, and intelligent experience to help you stay organized. Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do, and Office—specifically, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—all play a role in the Microsoft 365 tasks experience.Highlighting the importance of securing your business during National Small Business Week
It is a common misconception that cyberattacks only threaten large corporations. In reality, 1 in 3 small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) have experienced a cyberattack (1), ranging from phishing schemes to ransomware attacks. The average cost of a cyberattack is over $250K up to $7M (2), which can be a significant financial loss for a small business. This National Small Business Week, we want to highlight product innovations, customer stories, and resources. To help you understand the importance of cybersecurity and discover ways to protect your small and medium business. Microsoft 365 Business Premium helps you run your business, securely. Many small businesses do not have a dedicated IT team to manage their security needs. As a result, they need a simple and affordable solution. Microsoft 365 Business Premium combines essential security and productivity capabilities in a solution that is easy to use and cost-effective. It provides layered protection across user identities, devices, email and collaboration apps, and data security. To meet the growing needs of small businesses, we announced AI-powered phishing protection in Defender for Office 365. This helps detect and filter business email compromise (BEC) with 99.5% accuracy. We integrate with some of the top managed detection and response (MDR) providers such as Huntress, Blackpoint Cyber, Chorus Cyber, and ConnectWise MDR. For partners, we introduced the SMB-Verified Solution Status within the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA). The status highlights purpose-built technology solutions for SMBs and MSPs. As your security needs grow, Microsoft 365 E5 Security is available as an add-on: As cyberthreats continue to grow, and as cyber insurance and regulatory requirements evolve, many small businesses are now looking for enterprise-level security. To support the growing security needs, Microsoft now offers Microsoft 365 E5 Security as an add-on for Business Premium. E5 Security brings enterprise-grade protection on top of Business Premium. It gives organizations access to Microsoft’s most sophisticated security technologies. The Microsoft 365 E5 Security suite is cost-effective, saving organizations up to 57% compared to buying each product individually. Microsoft 365 E5 Security adds additional enterprise-grade XDR capabilities to what is already available in Business Premium. Such as: Identity, access, and protection controls: Business Premium includes Microsoft Entra ID P1, providing single sign-on, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and device and IP location based conditional access helping SMBs manage user identities and enable access from anywhere. Entra ID P2, as part of Microsoft 365 E5 Security, has Entra ID Protection offering risk-based conditional access that helps block identity attacks in real time using behavioral analytics and signals from both user risk and sign-in risk. Entra ID P2 also includes ID Governance capabilities to help automate workflows and processes that give users access to resources. With Privileged Identity Management (PIM) companies can provide users with only the minimum privileges needed to accomplish the tasks they're authorized to perform. Microsoft 365 E5 Security has Microsoft Defender for Identity which identifies, detects, and investigates threats for on-premises identities. Email and Collaboration security: Business Premium includes Microsoft Defender for Office 365 P1, which provides anti-phishing and anti-malware defenses, including Safe Links and Safe Attachments for real-time scanning of URLs and files sent via email, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. Microsoft 365 E5 Security includes Microsoft Defender for Office 365 P2, which enhances the protections in P1. Providing automated investigation and response capabilities, as well as cyber-attack simulation training for both email and Microsoft Teams. Defender for Office 365 now offers end-to-end protection in Microsoft Teams. Organizations can report suspicious Teams messages, leverage advanced threat hunting capabilities within Teams, and gain more control over external organizational communications. Device Security Business Premium includes Microsoft Defender for Business (MDB) which brings AI-powered endpoint detection and response with automatic attack disruption, automated investigation and remediation, across Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android devices. E5 Security includes Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P2 adds advanced hunting, access to threat experts, and 6 months of data retention on the device. E5 Security also includes Microsoft Defender for IoT, which helps protect connected devices such as network printers and cameras. Software-as-a- service (SaaS) security: Microsoft 365 E5 Security introduces Defender for Cloud Apps, which helps prevent breaches caused by SaaS app misconfigurations—a common attack vector. Defender for Cloud Apps enables automated and continuous monitoring of SaaS apps to reduce security vulnerabilities and increase compliance by detecting misconfigurations and providing remediation steps for risky configurations. Lean more about Microsoft 365 E5 Security. See Customers in Action: “It’s valuable that Microsoft 365 Business Premium provides all the native controls for us to implement security benchmarks in audits and dramatically reduce the attack surface area”- JJ Milner, Cloud Architect and Managing Director, Global Micro Solutions Acumen Group partnered with Global Micro Solutions, a Microsoft partner, to help implement Business Premium due to increasingly complex mobile device management and security requirements as they scaled. “As part of our Microsoft E5 license which provides security features such as data loss prevention (DLP) and information labeling, we get just about every app under the sun and the more we delve into it, the more we can use it”- Danielle Brautigan, General and Finance Manager, McGees Property McGees Property switched to Microsoft 365, moving from on-premises servers and services to the cloud after being hit by a ransomware attack. The attack locked McGee’s employees out of their files for more than four weeks, forcing them to work from personal email accounts. Resources: At Microsoft, we have created multiple resources to help highlight the importance of cybersecurity and how to get started with Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Are you a customer? Visit our website to learn more about Microsoft Security solutions for SMBs. Are you a partner? Check out our partner playbooks to get started on your SMB managed services journey,– Microsoft 365 Business Premium Partner Playbook and Microsoft 365 E5 Security deck. References: [1, 2] 7 cybersecurity trends and tips for small and medium businesses to stay protected, Scott Woodgate. October 31, 2024
