At the heart of great teams is great communication. At work, productivity is centered on conversations - sometimes a quick text chat or call, and sometimes planned in advance with meetings including voice, video, and content sharing. People need tools that allow them flexibility in how they connect with one another, regardless of device or location, to address the constant challenge of time. With time being the scarcest resource, a recent Harvard Business Review article highlights that companies have an opportunity to liberate at least 20% of their employee’s collective hours by bringing greater discipline to time management. Modern communication tools are critical to helping companies modernize and empower employees to achieve more together.

Aligned with core ambition to reinvent productivity for individuals and businesses, Microsoft recently announced the availability of new capabilities in Office 365 across analytics, security and collaboration, available in a new enterprise plan called Office 365 E5. Priced at $35 per user/ month (existing enterprise Office 365 users can upgrade to this version at more competitive rates), this service is designed to modernize voice, video, and meeting experiences, while saving companies substantial time and money on an enterprise’s communication infrastructure. Together, the new capabilities mark the single most substantial release of new enterprise value in the history of Office 365, and make Office 365 the most complete, most secured cloud productivity offering ever.

Leveraging Personal & Organizational Insights To Make the Most Of Time

With the new Office 365, a broad range of live data can be monitored and analyzed through easy-to-use dashboards, interactive reports, and compelling data visualizations with Power BI. With out-of-the-box Power BI content packs for popular services such as Salesforce, QuickBooks Online, Marketo employees can begin visualizing the data in just minutes.  And with the new Excel 2016 one can publish to Power BI making it even easier to share data and insights.

Additionally, Delve Analytics empowers individuals through rich dashboards that provide insights on time and relationships, with the goal of helping individuals get time back and spend it effectively. Delve Analytics provides real time work analytics at the individual and organization level to optimize activities for the best business outcomes, to help improve personal and team effectiveness.

People- Centric Security

This is Microsoft’s most secure Office ever with best in class security as a natural part of the tools people use every day.  Microsoft has announced significant new security capabilities aimed at dramatically improving customers’ ability to protect their organizations. Office 365 gives IT unprecedented access controls, advanced threat protection and unified IT management. Security is “built in” to provide companies with real time protection against malware, viruses and malicious URLs. And Customer Lockbox coupled with DLP, gives IT explicit control over their content while reducing risk of leaking data with across the Office applications people use every day. This includes:

• Customer Lockbox gives customers new approval rights, transparency and control over their data in the cloud
• Advanced eDiscovery integrates Equivio machine learning, predictive coding and text analytics capabilities, to reduce the costs and challenges that come along with sorting through large quantities of data for eDiscovery purposes
• Advanced Threat Protection protects against unknown malware and viruses by applying behavioral analysis

Communication powered productivity- to help employees stay connected

Microsoft is rolling out new technology that applies machine learning to the way people work to empower individual to work more effectively. The new Microsoft Office 365 comes with, Skype for Business that enables communication-powered productivity. Built on the familiar Skype user interface, Skype for Business makes connecting with colleagues as easy and intuitive as connecting with friends and family on Skype. This is a core part of a complete productivity and collaboration suite, available across mobile platforms and at a global scale:

·         PSTN Conferencing provides the flexibility to dial in to a meeting from a traditional phone, in addition to the existing ability to join a meeting with a single click on your PC or mobile device.

·         Skype Meeting Broadcast makes it easier than ever to produce large virtual meetings for up to 10,000 meeting attendees, who can join from virtually any browser or device (see it in action). Now Skype for Business truly is a single platform for every type of meeting.

·         Cloud PBX enables companies to eliminate separate PBX systems and transition to the cloud with Office 365 as the central location to manage users for communication and

·         With PSTN Calling, Office 365 customers can also subscribe to Microsoft managed calling plans and phone numbers, starting in the U.S. with more markets coming later.

Microsoft is partnering with global systems integrator partners who specialize in the voice business, Telco operators and application and solution partners to help customers get the best experience with the new Skype for Business services in Office 365.