Microsoft: New AI & Security for Office, Microsoft 365

Every bit has go standard at just about every vendor conference in the past year, much of the talk at this year's Microsoft Ignite briefing was about new "AI" and security features, particularly related to Microsoft 365, the company'due south name for the combination of Office 365 Pro Plus, Windows ten, and EMS (enterprise mobility and security).

Many of the new features were highlighted in a technical keynote by Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 Commercial and formerly the company's CIO. He talked about the big demand for a "modern workspace"—essentially Microsoft'southward style of proverb companies should move to Windows 10 and Part 365 and stay upward to date—and the need to suspension down silos betwixt different applications and sets of data.

For end-users, the biggest alter may be Microsoft Search, a new search box that volition eventually appear at the top of all of the Microsoft 365 apps, giving users easier access to both information in the "Microsoft Graph" (in other words, internal data) and the outside world (using Bing). This as well includes commands for specific applications, which will supercede the "tell me what you desire to practise" box in many of the electric current Office apps. Microsoft says this feature will be personalized and will acquire from your everyday work patterns. It's currently beingness rolled out to Office.com, Bing.com, and in the SharePoint mobile app, and will eventually come to Edge, Windows, and Office.

Some other big new tool is Ideas, where you click a lightning bolt icon then meet recommendations for things like layouts and templates, beginning in PowerPoint and Excel. Some of these features were there before, such as in the Designer tool for PowerPoint, just this makes it much easier to see unlike options. For case, in the demo with PowerPoint, Ideas suggested pictures that matched the names of cities, suggested give-and-take changes for consistency both of punctuation and spelling (should it be "website" or "web site"?), and suggested designed for various charts.

In Excel, you lot can bring upwardly information from Bing for things like geography and stock data, and apply publicly available data to fill in a tabular array with things like stock prices, population, and company information. This Data Types feature was announced earlier in the year just is at present generally bachelor.

Some other feature in Excel, at present in preview in the Android version, lets you accept a picture and convert it into an Excel table. Other Excel improvements include faster lookup-type functions, which now have seconds, instead of minutes.

Microsoft also said that later this yr information technology will be integrating LinkedIn contacts with Office 365, then you can electronic mail contacts directly from Outlook and co-edit documents with them.

While it isn't new, also featured in demos was the new optional simplified toolbar. Microsoft described it as in part designed to ensure that its Mac version of Role is now congenital on the aforementioned lawmaking-base as the Windows version, and volition have the same features. For example, a preview version of Mac Office at present bachelor includes the recent Files On-Demand characteristic, which synchronizes your available files across OneDrive and multiple machines, leaving links to files that are online when yous don't desire or take the space locally.

Brad Anderson, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 Engineering science, showed off new management and administration features, which looked to integrate a lot of the controls into a single panel, instead of in multiple different places on the web. I was impressed by a demo he did of Windows Virtual Desktop, in which he showed things such as adding ink to a OneNote application in a virtual desktop that was hosted in Azure on the West Coast. It looks like Microsoft has really improved the latency problem.

Microsoft continued to push button Teams as its collaboration platform. In one of the about interesting demos, participants witnessed real-fourth dimension transcription, including immediate translation of spoken word from Mandarin to English, with the organization also automatically compiling a list of follow-up items. Again, this has been shown before, but is now being generally rolled out.

Some other new characteristic is Background Blur, which uses facial detection to mistiness out a background during video calls. I can encounter how this could be interesting, but it nonetheless looked a fleck rough in the demo.

Security Features

A big part of Markezich's keynote focused on security. He began by pushing the concept of moving beyond passwords, using the Microsoft Authenticator unmarried-sign-on tool to log-into whatever app continued to Azure Active Directory. He talked near how using biometrics or a Pivot stored on a device was more secure, and claimed yous could reduce 99.ix percent of attacks past eliminating passwords.

Markezich also highlighted updates to Secure Score, a report menu that scores how secure your Office 365 surround is, and said that this has at present been expanded to all of Microsoft 365. Secure Score includes recommendations for controls in a variety of Microsoft products including European monetary system, and Microsoft Cloud App Security, Azure Security Middle, and Azure Active Directory.

In the demo, I was impressed past how easily it lets administrators see the whole environment, and how it recommends actions that tin improve security. Markezich said customers who utilise Secure Score can reduce their chance of a alienation by 30 times, and noted that this is at present bachelor for free to all enterprise customers.

The visitor announced Microsoft Threat Protection, a more than comprehensive anti-malware solution that combines its previous Advanced Threat Protection offering for Office 365 with remediation services for Windows. Once again, this gives administrators an integrated place to run across all threats, and from which to have action.

In addition, there is a single admin portal for managing all of Microsoft 365, along with integrated portals for compliance (where yous tin can create, configure, and apply policies), too as for security.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/news/29561/microsoft-new-ai-security-for-office-microsoft-365

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