Microsoft 365 is adding a set of capabilities that help teams collaborate more naturally, whether they’re in the office, at home, or on the go.

Key updates in Microsoft Teams:

• Rapid adoption: More than 329,000 organizations now use Teams, including 87 of the Fortune 100. Over 54 customers have more than 10,000 active users, and Accenture has passed 100,000 active users.
• Smarter meetings with AI: New AI-powered features like background blur (using facial detection to keep the focus on people, not surroundings) and meeting recording (with captions and a searchable, timecoded transcript) are now generally available.
• Live events at scale: Organizations can create and stream live and on-demand events in Teams, Yammer, and Microsoft Stream to reach employees and customers wherever they are.
• Mobile video access: The Stream mobile app for iOS and Android lets employees watch videos on the go, including offline viewing.
• Optimized devices: New devices, including Surface Hub 2 (with the first phase, Surface Hub 2S, shipping in Q2 2019), are designed specifically for Teams meetings and calling, making it easier to bring interactive collaboration into any workspace.

Together, these capabilities help organizations reimagine meetings—from one-off calls to large-scale events—and make it easier for people to participate, catch up, and stay aligned regardless of location.

Microsoft 365 is extending Teams to better fit the day-to-day realities of different roles and industries, especially frontline and regulated environments.

For Firstline Workers:

• Schedule management: Managers can create and share schedules directly in Teams.
• Shift flexibility: Employees can swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working.
• Central communication: Important announcements can be shared in the same place where people check their schedules.
• These features are being made available starting in November.

For healthcare and other regulated industries:

• Care coordination hub: A new solution (in private preview) gives healthcare teams a secure hub in Teams to coordinate care across multiple patients, including integration with electronic health records (EHR).
• Secure messaging: New features like image annotation (now generally available) and priority notifications (rolling out by year-end) support HIPAA-compliant communication.
• These tools help clinicians avoid the privacy risks of consumer chat apps while still communicating in real time.

By tailoring Teams to specific workflows, Microsoft 365 helps organizations empower employees in every role—from shift-based workers to clinicians and specialists—while maintaining security and compliance.

Microsoft 365 is using AI to make it easier to find information and create higher-quality content without leaving your normal workflow.

Microsoft Search: faster, more connected search

• Unified search box: A consistent search experience across Edge, Bing, Windows, and Office apps puts search one click away.
• Beyond documents: You can quickly find people, content, and app commands, and navigate to what you need—even before you start typing.
• Connected to your organization: Microsoft Search extends across your organization’s data, inside and outside Microsoft 365, and uses the Microsoft Graph plus AI from Bing to personalize results.
• Smarter answers: Using machine reading comprehension, it can answer policy-type questions (for example, “Can I bring my family on a work trip?”) by understanding your organization’s documents.
• Preview is rolling out to Office.com, Bing.com, and the SharePoint mobile app, with more experiences coming to Edge, Windows, and Office.

Ideas and new Excel capabilities: AI for better content

• Ideas in Office: Follows along as you work and suggests improvements.
  • In PowerPoint, it recommends designs, layouts, and images.
  • In Excel, it recognizes trends, suggests charts, and flags outliers.
• New Excel data types: Stocks and Geography turn simple text into rich entities, making it easier to pull in live stock prices, company details, population, area, and more.
• Image to data: New image recognition in Excel lets you take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table and convert it into an editable spreadsheet.

These capabilities help employees spend less time searching and formatting, and more time analyzing, deciding, and communicating.