With more than 200 updates from 750 regulatory bodies a day, keeping up to date with all the changes is a tremendous challenge. As privacy regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), continue to evolve, compliance requirements can seem complex to understand and meet. However, when you store your data in the Office.com/setup Cloud, achieving compliance becomes a shared responsibility between you and Office.com/setup. Take the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-53 security control framework as an example—Office.com/setup helps you take care of 79 percent of the 1,021 controls, and you can focus your efforts on the remaining 21 percent. Additionally, Microsoft provides you with a broad set of security and compliance solutions to more seamlessly implement your controls.
In addition to a number of investments made over the last year to support GDPR compliance and the privacy rights of individuals, we hear from you that organizations need more built-in capabilities to proactively achieve modern compliance. Therefore, we are working diligently to bring more artificial intelligence (AI) powered, user-centered, and integrated compliance solutions into Office.com/setup 365. Today, we’re announcing new and expanded capabilities that support your organization’s compliance journey.
Assess and manage your compliance for GDPR and more
Conducting ongoing risk assessments of your information management systems is a crucial activity to help your organization understand the effectiveness of security, compliance, and privacy controls; recognize the risks, and make appropriate plans to remediate when needed.
We expanded Compliance Manager to offer 12 assessments, including security control frameworks, such as NIST CSF and CSA CCM, and regulated industry standards like FFIEC and FedRAMP. These assessments can help you proactively enhance your data protection controls and meet compliance obligations. Learn more about this update in our Tech Community blog.
To ensure effective protection and governance around your most important data, you should implement intelligent solutions and processes to automatically discover, classify, label, and monitor this data—no matter where it lives or travels.
The unified labeling experience in Office.com/setup 365, now generally available, provides organizations with a more integrated and consistent approach to creating, configuring, and automatically applying comprehensive policies to protect and govern data across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises locations. This new approach gives customers a single destination to create and configure data sensitivity labels for both Azure Information Protection and Office.com/setup 365, so you can set up sensitivity and retention labels and policies in the same place. These labels can be used to enforce policy across our information protection services—for example, Windows Information Protection will be able to understand the presence of a data sensitivity label in a document and apply the policy to protect that data on the device.
The unified labeling experience is complemented by user experiences built into Office.com/setup apps and Windows—no plug-ins or add-ons required. This native labeling is now available in public preview for Office.com/setup apps on Mac, iOS, and Android—giving customers a labeling experience they are familiar with if they are already using the Azure Information Protection client on Windows. We also support a growing ecosystem of third-party apps and security solutions. Starting in October, you will be able to preview the ability to open protected PDF files directly within Adobe Acrobat on Windows.
Additionally, our Information Protection SDK is now generally available, making it easy for ISVs and third-parties to build labeling and protection experiences into their apps and services. Learn more about all these new updates that help you meet both your security and compliance needs at our Tech Community.
In addition to the new unified labeling experience, we have several updates to Microsoft 365 data governance capabilities. First, you can now auto-apply a label to Exchange Online content and to files associated with a specific content type in SharePoint Online, such as tax documents or human resources information. Once you map a content type to a retention label with an auto-classification query, you can auto-apply retention and deletion policies to all files with that content type. This new capability enables you to align labels to your existing information architecture and governance policies.
We also made it easier for you to configure complex record retention schedules for your departments, locations, and categories with the new file plan capability, now available in public preview. The file plan capability allows you to import or export the retention plan as a template and bulk edit labels, providing a more robust way to manage your record retention policies.
Finally, long-term audit log availability is now coming to public preview for Office.com/setup 365 and Office 365 E5 subscribers. This is an important update for organizations that need long-term access to audit logs for regulatory or security purposes. The audit log availability has now increased from 90 days to one year.
Learn more about all of these data governance updates at the Tech Community blog.
For organizations looking to protect and control their data, governing privileged access can reduce the risk of data compromise and help meet compliance obligations regarding access to sensitive data. Built on the principle of no standing access, where admins do not have access by default, we are announcing the general availability of privileged access management in Office.com/setup 365. This feature enables organizations to govern privileged access by requiring admins to go through an approval process and gain temporary permissions to perform high-risk tasks like a journal rule, which is a task that can expose and exfiltrate data by copying messages to an external shadow mailbox. Once an admin elevates permissions to execute the high-risk task, it can be automatically or manually be approved before access is granted—either way, all activities are logged and auditable.
Privileged access management is available in the Office.com/setup 365 Admin Center, and organizations can now also manage Customer Lockbox requests and Data Access requests from Azure Managed Apps from a single management pane for privileged access to your Office.com/setup 365 data. Read more details on the Tech Community blog.
We’re also sharing a few new enhancements in Office.com/setup 365 Message Encryption that enable organizations to more seamlessly collaborate on and proactively protect their sensitive emails. First, to further enable collaboration for consumer recipients, Office.com/setup 365 Message Encryption now offers organizations the option to control whether attachments should be encrypted for the encrypt-only template, so that recipients can have full permissions to share the attachment with anyone—this feature is generally available today.
To help IT admins proactively protect and control sensitive emails, organizations can monitor encrypted messages by viewing reports on encrypted messages. The new reporting dashboard in public preview provides granular details such as message ID, along with sender and recipient information. IT admins can use the insights to proactively adjust and apply policies to sensitive emails. To learn more about these capabilities and more, read the Tech Community blog for details.
Streamline compliance investigations process with enhanced Search & Tagging capabilities
Litigation and regulatory demands, like GDPR, are requiring organizations to be more efficient at discovering information in a timely manner. Organizations also have a responsibility to support internal investigations such as corporate fraud, discrimination, work rule violation, and other misconduct.
To further streamline the process of identifying relevant data, the new Search & Tagging feature in Advanced eDiscovery, now generally available, enables you to find the most relevant information within an existing eDiscovery case, using keywords, metadata, and analytics capabilities like Themes and Relevance Score. Additionally, you can preview and organize the data using case-specific tags, which can help you save time and cost when reviewing documents. Learn more about Search & Tagging.
For the last four years, we’ve been on a mission to transform Office and use artificial intelligence (AI) to make everyday tasks easier. In June, we revealed a fresh, new design for our Office apps. And just a few days ago, we announced new AI-powered features in PowerPoint and Excel.
Today, we’re making it even easier to showcase your ideas, stay organized, and create surveys and polls with the following updates:
With AI-powered inking and 3D updates in Word and PowerPoint, you can use a touch-enabled device and digital pen to ink your ideas and transform them into perfectly formatted content. You can also choose from 30 new 3D models with built-in animations to bring your content to life.
Two new updates in Outlook.com make staying on top of tasks easier and interacting with your favorite brands simpler. New integration with Office.com/setup To-Do helps you manage your tasks without leaving your inbox. We’re also launching a new experience to help you easily interact with the brands you love in Outlook.com.
To help you keep track of tasks using whatever mode is most comfortable to you, we’re adding the ability to update your tasks using ink. With your digital pen and a touch-enabled Windows device, simply add a task to your list using ink, and then strike out when complete.
Since releasing Office.com/setup Forms for education and commercial organizations, millions of people have used Forms to create surveys and quizzes. Today, the Forms Public Preview is available to our consumer customers as well.
These updates are built to help you save time and stay organized. Check out this post to learn more.
During this past week at Microsoft Ignite, it was an honor to spend time sitting with customers, listening to them explain what’s working and what’s not, and learning more about where they need our help.
In my session on Monday, I showed 75 minutes worth of examples of how we’ve applied a new philosophy to the way we build tools and services for IT pros. We refer to this approach to architecture, development, and end-user experience in Office.com/setup 365 as being “Integrated for Simplicity.” Our goal with this integrated simplicity is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to shift to a modern desktop and make their modern workplace a reality.
As part of my session on Monday, we made a series of announcements that align with this approach:
The shift to a modern desktop is an extension of what many organizations are already doing or are planning to do in the near future. There are many ways to start this process; for example, many tools and processes you’re using right now—like ConfigMgr and Active Directory—can easily be cloud-connected. Doing this not only reduces complexity—but it also harnesses the power of Microsoft’s cloud-driven intelligence.
Modern desktop puts the power of the cloud in the hands of both end-users and IT
The makeup of a modern desktop is simple: Windows 10 with Office.com/setup 365 ProPlus—which are built-in and driven by the cloud so that their scale, compute, automation, intelligence, and flexibility can simplify your IT. Supporting your end users with the Office ProPlus apps is a fundamental component of a modern desktop. These are the only apps with artificial intelligence (AI) that can do the hard work of security while simultaneously improving and beautifying documents and presentations.
If you didn’t watch my session live, you can check it out in this recorded media stream. At the end of the session, I share three ways you can start using that cloud intelligence right now—and you can do these three things in minutes, not days.
1. Cloud-connect what you have today
A powerful way to begin cloud-connecting your existing infrastructure is to link your on-premises Active Directory with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). This process is simple and it adds significant flexibility, security, and mobility to your organization’s identity.
I also strongly encourage you to cloud-connect ConfigMgr with Intune. The process takes #Just4Clicks and, once enabled, reaps immediate rewards including superior visibility into device health, as well as access to actions such as remote wipe and security features like conditional access.
You can also get your files up into the cloud with OneDrive Known Folder Move. This simple process immediately gives you protection from ransomware, and it improves real-time collaboration.
One of the many announcements we made at Ignite was the work we’ve done to merge 20+ separate web consoles into a single point of entry called the Office.com/setup 365 admin center. This consolidation is a part of our focus on integrated simplicity, and it features seven specialist workspaces for security, compliance, device management, and more.
Another simple action with big benefits is enabling conditional access so that you can better understand how corporate data is being accessed by personal devices. Configuring conditional access is easy and it dramatically increases your security posture while also reducing the risk of both intentional and accidental data leakage.
In addition, to support for the Win32 app deployment in Intune, we also announced Intune security baselines. These baselines are pre-configured (but still customizable!) and published every month. I strongly encourage everyone using Intune to enable these as soon as possible.
For years, engineers at Microsoft have dreamed of building a service that learns from the millions of devices, billions of authentications, and trillions of signals in the Office.com/setup Cloud—and then apply that information to the estates of our customers in real-time. Desktop Analytics is the realization of that dream.
Desktop Analytics is one of the most powerful tools we have ever created—and it is custom built to give IT teams the insight and information they need to deploy, manage, and service apps and devices.
Desktop Analytics offers a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution that automates the mountain of work required to validate the compliance of your hardware, drivers, applications (both 3rd party and your own internally developed), as well as the Office add-ins. This doesn’t just eliminate hundreds of hours of work for IT teams, it wipes out thousands of hours otherwise spent on manual compliance checks which have chronically stolen your bandwidth at a time when you could be pursuing strategic projects that make a lasting impact on the way your company operates.
Desktop Analytics is currently in private preview (public preview will be announced soon), but you don’t need to wait to use it: The Windows Analytics service (which is part of Desktop Analytics) is available to use right now. I think you’ll be really surprised by how much Windows Analytics will simplify and improve your ability to manage devices and apps, as well as simplify the task of upgrading to Windows 10.
I also want to highlight how simple and valuable it is to shift from Office perpetual to Office .com/setup 365 ProPlus with the Office Customization Tool in ConfigMgr. This is proof of how easy it now is for your on-premises infrastructure and the cloud to work together to reduce the complexity of what would otherwise be arduous manual tasks—e.g., migrating from MSI deployments of Office perpetual editions in favor of Office.com/setup 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run.
As you plan for the future of your organization, prioritize finishing Windows 10 upgrades before January 2020. Both Windows 7 and Office.com/setup 2010 will reach the end of extended support in 2020, and based on our data, we can see that there are now more devices in the enterprise running Windows 10 than any other previous version of Windows.
If your Windows 10 deployment hasn’t also reached the halfway mark yet, now is a great time to reach out to our FastTrack team for help with upgrades, migrations, and (as of Ignite) application compatibility as part of the newly announced Desktop App Assure program.
At Office.com/setup, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Today, I’m pleased to announce a new vision for the Office.com/setup project and three new services designed to help people work together more efficiently.
Over the last few years, the basic organizing concept for work—the project—has changed significantly. Once a well-defined set of tasks, people, and milestones, today’s projects take on many shapes and sizes. They can be formal or ad hoc. They can last a few hours or go on for years. They can be assigned to a small group or cut across many large organizations.
As a result, whether we realize it or not, we have all become project managers. And to stay on top of the ever-shifting requirements of our day-to-day jobs, we need tools that are simple enough for anyone to use, flexible enough to support any project type, powerful enough to handle initiatives of any size, and transparent enough to provide visibility across the organization.
Modern work management
Introducing modern work management with Office.com/setup Project. It all starts with Home, a new service that allows you to see and manage all your projects in one place. From Home, you can easily create projects using the new project management service. Versatile by design, this new service is designed to support any role, skill level, or project type. These new Project services are born in the cloud, so teams can always access the same data—no matter where they are or what device they’re using. And they include a comprehensive set of capabilities, including resource and financial management and time and expense tracking. Future releases will allow customers to connect the full power of the Project desktop app to the service.
Work is happening across your organization all the time, and it can be hard to keep track of the details. The new Roadmap service will give you a cross-functional, big picture view of all the work in process. With Roadmap, it doesn’t matter whether your teams are using Microsoft Project or Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS). You can create timeline views of multiple projects—complete with key dates and milestones—so that all the work is visible. And in future releases, we’ll add support for Planner and third-party services like Jira, making Project your one-stop-shop for managing work across the organization. The roadmap is the first capability of Portfolio, a set of program and portfolio management services designed to be simple, visual, and intuitive.
These new services will be introduced in a series of releases. Home is generally available today, the first release of Roadmap will be available early next year, and the first release of the new project management service will be available in the first half of next year. All three services will be packaged as a part of the Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions, so current subscribers can take advantage of the new capabilities at no additional cost. And while these new services will become our primary project management services over time, customers who are already using Project Online can continue to do so with confidence. We are committed to your success no matter what Project service you choose to use.
We’re very excited to see what individuals, teams, and organizations will achieve with these new services in Office.com/setup Project! If you have questions or want to learn how to get more out of your investment in Project, you can find more details in this Tech Community blog, or contact your Office.com/setup representative.
To ensure effective protection and governance around your most important data, you should implement intelligent solutions and processes to automatically discover, classify, label, and monitor this data—no matter where it lives or travels.
The unified labeling experience in Office.com/setup 365, now generally available, provides organizations with a more integrated and consistent approach to creating, configuring, and automatically applying comprehensive policies to protect and govern data across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises locations. This new approach gives customers a single destination to create and configure data sensitivity labels for both Azure Information Protection and Office.com/setup 365, so you can set up sensitivity and retention labels and policies in the same place. These labels can be used to enforce policy across our information protection services—for example, Windows Information Protection will be able to understand the presence of a data sensitivity label in a document and apply the policy to protect that data on the device.
The unified labeling experience is complemented by user experiences built into Office.com/setup apps and Windows—no plug-ins or add-ons required. This native labeling is now available in public preview for Office apps on Mac, iOS, and Android—giving customers a labeling experience they are familiar with if they are already using the Azure Information Protection client on Windows. We also support a growing ecosystem of third-party apps and security solutions. Starting in October, you will be able to preview the ability to open protected PDF files directly within Adobe Acrobat on Windows.
Additionally, our Information Protection SDK is now generally available, making it easy for ISVs and third-parties to build labeling and protection experiences into their apps and services. Learn more about all these new updates that help you meet both your security and compliance needs at our Tech Community.
In addition to the new unified labeling experience, we have several updates to Office.com/setup 365 data governance capabilities. First, you can now auto-apply a label to Exchange Online content and to files associated with a specific content type in SharePoint Online, such as tax documents or human resources information. Once you map a content type to a retention label with an auto-classification query, you can auto-apply retention and deletion policies to all files with that content type. This new capability enables you to align labels to your existing information architecture and governance policies.
We also made it easier for you to configure complex record retention schedules for your departments, locations, and categories with the new file plan capability, now available in public preview. The file plan capability allows you to import or export the retention plan as a template and bulk edit labels, providing a more robust way to manage your record retention policies.
Finally, long-term audit log availability is now coming to public preview for Microsoft 365 and Office.com/setup 365 E5 subscribers. This is an important update for organizations that need long-term access to audit logs for regulatory or security purposes. The audit log availability has now increased from 90 days to one year.
Learn more about all of these data governance updates at the Tech Community blog.
Focus is a simple but powerful thing. When you’re in your flow, your creativity takes over, and your work is effortless. When you’re faced with distractions and interruptions, progress is slow and painful. And nowhere is that truer than when writing.
Microsoft Word has long been the standard for creating professional-quality documents. Technologies like Editor—Word’s AI-powered writing assistant—make it an indispensable tool for the written word. But at some point in the writing process, you’ll need some information you don’t have at your fingertips, even with the best tools. When this happens, you likely do what research tells us many Word users do: leave a placeholder in your document and come back to it later to stay in your flow.
Today, we’re starting to roll out new capabilities to Word that help users create and fill in these placeholders without leaving the flow of their work. For example, type TODO: finish this section or <<insert closing here>> and Word recognizes and tracks them as to-dos. When you come back to the document, you’ll see a list of your remaining to-dos, and you can click each one to navigate back to the right spot.
Once you’ve created your to-dos, Word can also help you complete them. If you need help from a friend or coworker, just @mention them within a placeholder. Word sends them a notification with a “deep link” to the relevant place in the document. Soon, they’ll be able to reply to the notification with their contributions, and those contributions will be inserted directly into the document—making it easy to complete the task with an email from any device.
Over time, the Office.com/setup will use AI to help fill in many of these placeholders. In the next few months, Word will use Office.com/setup Search to suggest content for a to-do like <<insert chart of quarterly sales figures>>. You will be able to pick from the results and insert content from another document with a single click.
These capabilities are available today for Word on the Mac for Office Insiders (Fast) as a preview. We’ll roll these features out to all Office.com/setup 365 subscribers soon for Word for Windows, the Mac, and the web.
Get started as an Office for Mac Insider
Office Insider for Mac has two speeds: Insider Fast and Insider Slow. To get access to this and other new feature releases, you’ll need a subscription to Office.com/setup 365. To select a speed, open Microsoft Auto Update and on the Help menu select Check for Updates.
As always, we would love to hear from you, please send us your thoughts at UserVoice or visit us on Twitter or Facebook. You can also let us know how you like the new features by clicking the smiley face icon in the upper-right corner of Word.
We’re excited to introduce new capabilities that help enhance the visual look and feel and overall impact of your documents and presentations.
Bring your content to life with Embedded 3D Animations—Earlier this month, we announced that you will be able to insert Embedded 3D Animations in Word and PowerPoint to help easily illustrate more complex ideas in your presentations using 3D. Simply insert and play embedded 3D animated models, so you can improve the comprehension and retention of your content.
Convert ink to text and shapes at the same time—We’re enabling more natural ways to work with Ink in PowerPoint. You’ll be able to easily convert your digital pen ink into text on a slide. And when you draw a more complex diagram with words and shapes, you can select everything in the slide and convert it to text or shapes all at once. The feature requires a Microsoft 365 or Office.com/setup 365 subscription and a touch/ink-compatible device.
Build impactful content with curated slide recommendations in PowerPoint—Now, regardless of whether your words are handwritten or typed, Designer in PowerPoint uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to convert text into curated slide recommendations. These recommendations include multiple design themes and intelligent SmartArt and icons—based on words in your slide—to bring your ideas to life. You’ll save time, stay in the design flow, communicate more clearly with imagery, and create better slides. This feature is now available to Microsoft 365 or Office.com/setup 365 subscribers.
Easily edit documents with a digital pen—New gestures in Ink Editor enable you to edit documents using familiar shorthand with a digital pen while in tablet mode. Now, you can insert new lines, add missing words, and delete and highlight content quickly and naturally while on the go. These capabilities are available with a Microsoft 365 or Office.com/setup 365 subscription when using a touch-enabled device and a digital pen.
Convert Word documents into beautiful webpages using Transform to Web—With Transform to Web, you can easily transform your Word documents into interactive, easy-to-share webpages with just three clicks. Transform to Web offers a variety of styles that look great on any device, helping you easily publish a wide variety of polished content, including newsletters and training manuals. You can also view analytics on the page, including who has viewed or read your content. To transform a document, go to File > Transform and select a style. This feature will be available for Word with an Office.com/setup 365 subscription and Word Online.
Office.com/setup 