Office 365 news roundup

We talk a lot about innovation at Microsoft, and innovation is clearly evident in many of the new improvements and capabilities that we build into Office 365. Yet not all innovation is the same.

Some innovations represent giant leaps forward. Office Delve was like that when we introduced it about 18 months ago. Delve was game-changing technology that gave you a new way to discover relevant information and connections from across your work-life, and provided a more intuitive way for you to view content.

In addition to revolutionary new features, some innovations are smaller steps. A recent example is the new update to the Office 365 people profile experience under Delve, a refinement that we announced earlier this week. It consolidates the profile and activity pages to make it easier for you to discover relevant content, connect with your colleagues and find experts inside your organization. The new profile page makes it easier for you to learn more about your colleagues, providing their contact information, photo, who they work for and a summary of their experience and expertise, as well as their recent activity and what they are working on now.

One thing all Office 365 innovations have in common, however, is that they lead to continuous improvement that benefits you and our other customers by increasing productivity, streamlining collaboration and making the service easier to use.

It is important for us to continue innovating and improving Office 365 by making new features and capabilities available to customers as soon as they are developed, and we recognize that some of our customers want to choose when to release those improvements within their organization. That’s why we recently introduced the first Office 365 Deferred Channel build for Microsoft Office 365 for Windows. The Deferred Channel allows organizations to choose an update schedule that reduces the frequency of feature changes for the Windows desktop apps, enabling IT admins and developers to have more time between releases to validate Office against their line-of-business applications, add-ins and macros.

Even with all of these ongoing updates and improvements, there are two things that won’t ever change. First, we’ll keep innovating to make Office 365 the best set of productivity tools we can provide. Second, we’ll keep listening to you and our other customers to ensure our innovations are designed to meet your business needs and help you achieve your goals.

Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Goodyear brings spirit of innovation to every facet of product development and delivery—Learn why Sherry Neubert, chief information officer for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, says, “the way we use Office 365 services to streamline the collaboration process is a key contributor to our enhanced ability to innovate.”

Mobile Doctors turns to cloud—Find out how Mobile Doctors 24-7, a Dubai-based healthcare and wellness control center, is using Microsoft Azure and Office 365 to provide patients with better care.

Yammer social networking tool arrives for Office 365 business users—Discover how Yammer will enhance communication and collaboration for Office 365 users.

MBRSLP adopts 10,000 Microsoft Surface devices—Learn why the Mohammed Bin Rashid Smart Learning Program (MBRSLP) initiative, which aims to raise the standards of education in the UAE, is equipping students with Microsoft Surface and Office 365.

Office 365 success validates Microsoft’s big cloud play—Find out how Office 365 is helping Microsoft maintain its competitive advantage in the enterprise market.

U.S. Department of Defense commits to upgrade 4 million seats to Windows 10—See why one of the largest enterprises anywhere—the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)—has joined the ranks of enterprise customers planning swift Windows 10 deployments.

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