Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft 365. This month we explore updates for Power Platform, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Teams, and One Drive and Visio including:
- New standalone tools for Power Platform and Microsoft Viva: Power Pages and Viva Goals
- Adjusting brightness and adding soft blur to your Teams Meetings,
- New Diagram Types available in Visio, and so much more.
We hope you find these interesting.
Power Pages
Power Pages is the newest member of the Microsoft Power Platform family.
Power Pages enable you to build sites by using the same shared business data stored in Microsoft Dataverse that you use for building apps, workflows, intelligent virtual agents, reports, and analytics with other Microsoft Power Platform components in your organisation.
It’s a secure, enterprise-grade, low-code software as a service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting, and administering modern external-facing business websites. Whether you’re a low-code maker or a professional developer, Power Pages enables you to rapidly design, configure, and publish websites that seamlessly work across web browsers and devices.
Viva Learning
Add to calendar
Easily prioritise time for learning by adding learning objects as time blocks on your Outlook and Teams calendar. Viva Learning intelligently suggests a time slot that fits the duration of the learning object chosen and matches with free time on your calendar. The add to calendar feature can be initiated from a course detail page, or a course thumbnail from the Home or My Learning tabs.
Viva Connections
Viva Connections Multilingual Dashboard
Create a Viva Connections Dashboard that can be viewed in multiple languages to support and include the different languages represented in your organisation.
Viva Goals
Microsoft Viva Goals is the newest addition to the Microsoft Viva family. It is a goal alignment solution designed to connect your teams to your organisation’s strategic priorities, uniting them around your mission and purpose, and driving business results. To do this, Microsoft Viva Goals leverages the power of the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. As part of Microsoft Viva, it integrates into the employee experience, empowering teams to be their best from anywhere.
Adjust brightness and soft-focus video filters
Enhance video quality even in poor lighting by turning on the Adjust brightness filter. You can also use the Soft focus to apply a subtle smoothing effect. Both filters are now available before joining meetings so you can figure out the right setting for you, as well as during meetings. Simply navigate to the device settings to enable these filters. Currently, Soft focus is not available for Education tenants.
View Together mode for everyone
We’ve discussed the together mode and its ability to create a virtual shared space so attendees feel like they are sitting in the same room. Now, the meeting organisers and presenters can start Together mode for all of a meeting’s participants.
Previously, this view could only be enabled for personal view. To enable this feature, simply check the Select Together Mode for Everyone option after you choose a scene. All meeting participants can then join this immersive experience together. This is currently only available for Teams Desktop users.
Chat & Collaboration
New Languages Supported in Suggested Replies
Microsoft recently introduced additional language support for Suggested Replies in mobile. So now Suggested replies are supported in Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Korean, Czech, Danish, Turkish, and Polish.
Choose your own status for a meeting
Organisers and participants of Teams meetings can now choose a Calendar Show As status feature such as free, busy, or OOF to reflect their status for scheduled meetings. In addition, organisers can select private meeting functionality, which will allow users to hide meeting details from other users when their calendar is shared.
Microsoft Visio
New diagram types are available in Visio in Microsoft 365
If you’ve been using Visio in Microsoft 365 since it was first introduced to your tenant, you’ll notice a couple of new diagrams available from the Visio home page. The first of which is organisation charts, org charts are a great way to show company structure, hierarchy levels, and reporting relationships. They can be a great way to organize a continuously evolving or complex organisation into a simple structure.
One Drive
Pin shared libraries to Quick Access
Microsoft are adding the capability to pin shared libraries to the Quick Access section in OneDrive Web, making it easier to find and access the places you regularly work. They are also surfacing a list of your recently used shared libraries in the “More Places” page within OneDrive to help you find the places that you’ve recently opened files from.
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.