Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft 365. This month we explore updates for SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365 Marketing and more.
What’s New in SharePoint
SharePoint Syntex: Content Assembly
The content lifecycle doesn’t end when you classify documents and decide where to store them in SharePoint.
With Content Assembly, you can build that new contract, PO, presentation, invoice, or another document from existing data sources, or, by leveraging AI, you can turn your existing document into a template to be used for your business-specific needs.
What’s New in Microsoft Viva
Top news card on Viva Connections dashboard
You may recall the recently rolled out news boost feature. Well, now it’s possible to see the important boosted news and announcements within the Viva Connections Dashboard. This is the highly personalised feed of actionable info and insights – right in Teams (Web or mobile, whatever your preference really).
Authors can boost posts to highlight announcements to all employees. The update this month extends the value of the overall news service throughout Microsoft 365. Ensuring that important news reaches its intended audience.
Microsoft Viva Insights: Enrol in a Focus plan from the Insights app in Teams
Viva Insights is introducing updates that enable users to protect time for focus directly from the Viva Insights Teams app. This comes as an update to the Protect time page – allowing you to enrol in a focus plan and adjust preferences to auto-book your focus time.
Focus mode expands on the focus time feature in Viva Insights, enabling Microsoft 365 users to work uninterrupted with Teams notifications silenced.
And once you’ve turned this feature on, you will start to see insights about your progress towards their focus time goals; kind of a meta reflective point to gain and give feedback to yourself to know how effective focusing your time can be.
What’s New in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels are rolling out for public preview
Collaboration with external partners is part of our day-to-day routine. Teams Connect helps streamline collaboration to strengthen relationships with partners. With shared channels, you will be able to create a shared workspace for internal and external stakeholders, right from your Teams account.
And it’s not just about content: you can have conversations, schedule a meeting, share, and co-author files, without ever switching tenants. Without switching teams. Previously, you had to create a very separate Teams team for external sharing, but now it’s one step closer to managing your internal business and your external collaboration all within the same workspace – a single team, multiple channels (standard, private, and now shared).
Search results page in Teams
A new search results page experience from Microsoft Search in Teams will make finding messages, people, answers, and files faster and more intuitive. A new All page will show the top results from each domain, Bookmark, and Acronym.
This experience should provide better answers, declutter search result snippets, display preview message results for more context, more discoverable filters, and previews for files with better relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
Automated webinar invite
As webinars are set up, invites are sent to attendees to register. When attendees register, the webinar invite will now automatically be added to the attendee’s calendar, making it easy to plan and remember when the event takes place.
Music on Hold for VoIP Calls
Help callers feel at ease, safe in the knowledge that they’re still connected to a call with music on hold. Music on hold is now available for calls on hold and consult-then-transfer scenarios for both VoIP and PSTN calls. Music on hold is enabled by default. The music that is played for callers on hold is either the default music provided by Microsoft or custom music that administrators can upload and configure.
Schedule Meetings on Mobile
When you’re on the go, mobile functionality is key to staying on top of your schedule. Teams users are now able to schedule meetings over mobile from within the Teams calendar or the chat window.
What’s New in Dynamics 365 Marketing
Pre-Defined Personalisation Tokens
Personalisation drives impact. Companies with significant growth generally have a higher usage of personalised marketing. Personalisation within the email editor is also faster and easier than ever before. You can use pre-defined dynamic text to personalise your emails without the need to know the underlying data model to do it.
Use Microsoft Teams Chat natively in Microsoft Dynamics
Creating great marketing content and journeys has and will always be a team effort. With Teams chat, you can easily collaborate with your team without leaving the customer journey area or email editor. For example, as you create an email you can tag someone to review your content. Or, while creating a journey, you can collaborate with a coworker on which data to use in a branch. This gives you the added benefit of seeing feedback over time and referring back to comments people made.
We hope this new feature breakdown was useful, and you can utilise some of the above features to improve useability and employee experience. We regularly share tips on how to make the most out of your Microsoft 365 investment on LinkedIn and Twitter, you can follow us here or you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter to get these tips directly in your inbox.