How to Take Advantage of New Office 365 Features Planned for 2020
One of the advantages of signing up for an Office 365 subscription rather than making a one-time software purchase is that you continually get feature updates as they roll out.
These features include everything from new security additions for the platform to automation benefits to make your life easier. They’re also rolled out for multiple Microsoft programs, so you can take advantage of a productivity boost in several areas of your business workflow.
The Office 365 active user count has continued on an upward growth trajectory for several years, and as of September 2019, the platform had over 200 million monthly active users. The fact that Microsoft is continually enhancing the programs in the service most likely has a lot to do with the success.
To bring you a preview of some of the new features coming to Office 365 users in the near future, we’ve taken a look at the Microsoft Office 365 Roadmap of features in development and rolling out soon.
We’ll go through what’s coming and how you can take advantage of the updates.
Get Ready for Office 365 Features Coming Soon
If you don’t know when a new software feature is out, you could go months without taking advantage of it, simply because you were in the dark. We’re here to shine on light for you on some of the Office 365 updates that can improve your workflows, compliance, and security.
Safe Links Being Added to Teams
Safe Links is a security feature that’s included in Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). It allows you to set up policies that protect your users from malicious links through a time-of-click verification.
With this feature being added to Microsoft Teams, it will extend that protection, allowing your users to feel better about a link that they may receive through the platform.
What this can do is allow you to explore using teams more outside your organisation to interface with vendors and clients through a dedicated chat channel, since you have an additional web link safeguard.
Screen Recording & Editing in Steam
Enterprise users of Office 365 receive Stream with their subscription, which allows them to easily and securely share video content. A release planned for April 2020 will bring major upgrades to the tool with the addition of screen recording and editing.
You can take advantage of this by using Stream as a training tool for your employees or customers. The screen recording capability which allows you to capture screen, mic, and webcam, plus apply light edits, can significantly reduce the time and cost of creating your own tutorial videos.
Work & Personal Contact Separation (Outlook for Android)
A common problem when you’re answering email on your personal mobile device, which can include both work and personal contacts, is ensuring you don’t accidentally send your child’s football coach “John” the email intended for your large client account “John.”
This new feature for Outlook for Android will separate the two types of contacts for you based upon user intent, which will be a big benefit for those offices that use a BYOD (bring your own device) policy for mobile use.
General Availability for Microsoft Compliance Score
This next feature, planned for April 2020, is going to be a big benefit to any organisation that has to comply with GDPR, or any other data privacy or regulatory requirement.
Microsoft Compliance Score is a tool that allows companies to continuously monitor and access data protection controls. It’s been in public preview since November of last year and is designed to make it easier for companies to management compliance across global, industrial, and regional standards.
If your business has regulatory compliance requirements, then this is definitely an update you’ll want on your radar. You can learn all about it and be ready by reviewing Microsoft’s page.
Assign & Track Tasks in Word/Excel
Team collaboration and cloud workflows go hand in hand. Microsoft is making multi-author collaboration in Word documents and Excel workbooks even easier by adding the ability to create and assign tasks in both applications.
You can take advantage of this by adding task assignment in the tool to your workflows, which can reduce the time it takes to track document dependent tasks, such as edits, in other applications.
Bring Excel Data into a SharePoint List
Many people are familiar with Excel and use it for creating lists of contacts, products, shipments, etc. You’ll soon be able to more easily bring data from Excel documents into a SharePoint list through a simple import.
This new feature could help expand an organisation’s use of SharePoint lists by allowing them to work in Excel for certain data points, then just feed those into a dynamic SharePoint list that can make the data available throughout their Office 365 platform.
Get Help Customizing Your Office 365 Account
Office 365 has multiple feature customisations, and if your account isn’t tailored for your company’s needs, you could be missing out on better productivity through a custom workflow. Enable Technology can help you streamline and customise your use of Office 365 and other cloud services.