Upgrading and updating complex technology environments is no small task. To support you through every step of your Windows 10 deployment, we made investments to help you assess compatibility, make informed decisions, and reduce cost and complexity. While most of you are well on your way to upgrading to Windows 10, we know there can be unforeseen challenges. We created FastTrack for Windows 10 deployment guidance to help.
Investments to help with your Windows 10 deployment journey
To start, we built Windows 10 and Office 365 with compatibility as a core design principle, making investments across applications, add-ins, and macros in Windows 10 and Office 365 to ensure your environment continues to work as expected following an upgrade.
Tools like Windows Autopilot can help eliminate the cost and complexity associated with creating, maintaining, and loading custom images. Desktop Analytics (currently in public preview) provides intelligence to help you make informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows clients. The Office Readiness Toolkit helps you assess compatibility as you make the move to Office 365 ProPlus. The Desktop App Assure program from Microsoft FastTrack provides dedicated engineering resources to help remediate any application compatibility issues you might have across Windows 10 and Office 365.
New FastTrack deployment guidance for Windows 10
Sometimes you have a complex scenario and aren’t even sure where to start, or you’ve encountered a problem that has your migration stalled. There are times when you need to talk to an expert to get guidance on where to go next. Today I’m happy to announce new FastTrack for Windows 10 deployment guidance to do just that.
With FastTrack, we help you to envision a technical plan, determine how to onboard and deploy new services and/or users, and work with you as you deploy to get the most value out of your technology investments. This assistance is available at no additional cost for those with 150 or more licenses of eligible service or plan.
Use Desktop Analytics and machine learning to get current and stay current
Based on our work with consumers and organizations of all sizes, across more than 800 million Windows devices, we’ve learned that it’s easier to deploy Windows 10 when using the powerful intelligence of the cloud and machine learning. Since the Windows 10 April 2018 Update release, we’ve leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) at scale to improve the quality and reliability of our release rollouts. And along the way, we’ve learned the best ways to help ensure devices have a positive update experience.
Today, we’re making these same learnings available to organizations through the public preview of Desktop Analytics, which is available now. Desktop Analytics provides the insight and automation you need to efficiently get current and stay current. Desktop Analytics is a cloud-connected service that integrates with System Center Configuration Manager and will integrate with Microsoft Intune in the near future. With Desktop Analytics, it’s easier to deploy with confidence and keep your PCs up to date with the latest Windows 10 capabilities your employees need.
This service provides intelligence that helps you make more informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows clients. In combination with Configuration Manager, Desktop Analytics is designed to create an inventory of the Windows apps running in your organization and then assess app compatibility with the latest feature updates of Windows 10. By combining data from your own organization with data aggregated from millions of devices connected to our cloud services, you can take the guesswork out of testing these apps and instead focus your attention on key blockers. Historically, getting a view of the compatibility of your apps with new Windows releases was a time-consuming and tedious process of human testing—but now this can be automated through the intelligence of what we learn at cloud scale.
Desktop Analytics brings you data-driven recommendations that allow you to quickly and easily run successful pilots that represent your entire application and driver estate. You can then use the health signals of your pilots to evaluate the readiness of your assets and implement an optimized production deployment plan with Configuration Manager.
As Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, explained last September, Desktop Analytics is the evolution of Windows Analytics, adding deeper integration with Configuration Manager and providing a ring-based approach to deployment using health signals.
To learn more and get started with the public preview, read our Desktop Analytics article. For additional resources, check out the new Desktop Analytics community and read more details on Tech Community.
New SharePoint home sites headline Microsoft 365 innovations for the intelligent workplace
Today at the SharePoint Conference (watch the keynote online today at 12 PM PT at the SharePoint Virtual Summit), we showcased recent and upcoming innovations in SharePoint and across Microsoft 365—including SharePoint home sites, a dynamic, engaging, and personalized employee experience for your organization. These innovations power the intelligent workplace, where teams can collaborate and streamline workflows, organizations can engage employees and communicate effectively, and individuals can be more creative and productive with experiences and insights powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
The world-class applications in Microsoft 365—including SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow—enable digital transformation for more than 500,000 customer organizations and 180 million commercial active users.
Today, I’d like to share highlights of our innovations across the following areas:
- The intelligent intranet featuring SharePoint home sites.
- Innovations in Yammer and Microsoft Stream for employee engagement and communications.
- Intelligent file experiences, sharing, and controls with OneDrive.
- Turbocharging Microsoft 365 performance, security, intelligence, and innovation.
The intelligent intranet featuring SharePoint home sites
Visionaries know that an intelligent intranet powers employee experience, organizational alignment and cultural transformation. The heart of the digital workplace, an intelligent intranet provides shared content and solutions for collaboration, connects people and content across teams and siloes to harness collective knowledge, and drives employee engagement and communications.
Today, one such visionary—Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ Kevin Schramm, Head of IT Strategy and Operations—shared their compelling story. When Takeda, a world-leading pharmaceutical company based in Japan, acquired the Shire, a U.S.-based company, they built a SharePoint intranet in just four months to connect the workplace, drive organizational alignment, and power communication for more than 60,000 employees worldwide. Kevin explained, “Starting on Day 1, we wanted to begin to create a shared culture that reflected our values. A new intranet was a key part of representing the combined company to our employees. SharePoint allowed us to meet very aggressive deadlines and helped bring our organizations together, successfully.”
For more than a decade, SharePoint has powered award-winning intranets for hundreds of thousands of customers, leading the industry across every geography and industry. With the move to the cloud, customers have inspired us to deliver even more out-of-box capabilities that accelerate time-to-value. Since the Future of SharePoint event only three years ago, SharePoint has reinvented the intelligent intranet, delivering flexible solutions for teamwork, engaging employee experiences, and AI-powered search and content management. Communication sites, organizational news, hubs, modern team sites, pages, lists, and libraries are now available across browsers and devices, and in the highly-rated SharePoint mobile app.
SharePoint home sites
Today, we announced a revolutionary step forward, further accelerating time-to-value for customers. SharePoint home sites are an intelligent, integrated employee experience—a landing page—for your organization that:
- Connects the workplace with Microsoft Search and megamenu navigation.
- Shares relevant news and content to each user based on their role and place in the organization.
- Engages employees with conversation and compelling video powered by Yammer and Microsoft Stream.
- Powers individual productivity with personalized content, information, and navigation.
A home site is a SharePoint communication site with superpowers that is:
- An organizational news source, by default. News published to the home site is visually marked to indicate it is official news and syndicated to all users with access to the home site.
- The landing page for the new home view on the SharePoint mobile app.
- Connected to the enhanced SharePoint start page (formerly referred to as “SharePoint home”), which features improved navigation, insights into activity across your sites, views of your documents to help you get back to your work quickly, and the enhanced saved for later view of news and content you’ve flagged for review.
- An enterprise-wide Microsoft Search experience, from the search box in the suite bar.
Where intranet portal projects of the past were often measured in months, you can now deploy a home site in minutes and then—with no code—customize and brand the out-of-box web parts, navigation, and site design to reflect the voice and priorities of your organization.
Of course, SharePoint remains a powerful platform for delivering applications on the intranet. Now, you can add any of the hundreds of third-party applications available in Teams to any SharePoint site. And you can embed solutions built with the SharePoint Framework by your developers or by our extensive network of SharePoint partners. We’re pleased to announce more than a dozen partners have agreed to integrate their intranet offerings closely with the SharePoint intelligent intranet to empower our customers with an extensive range of solutions that are optimized for performance and compatibility with the SharePoint mobile application and future innovations.
We’re thrilled to introduce homesites and to empower customers to build wholly new, intelligent employee experiences. Learn more about SharePoint homesites and other innovations for intelligent intranet.
Innovations in Yammer and Microsoft Stream for employee engagement and communications
SharePoint home sites feature out-of-box integration with Yammer and Microsoft Stream. Today, we showcased innovations for Yammer and Microsoft Stream that unlock high-value scenarios for employee engagement, communication, and learning.
Microsoft Office brings you new privacy controls
Earlier this week, Julie Brill, Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft, published a blog that outlined Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to privacy and provided details on the direction we are taking as a company. In her blog, Julie introduced principles that guide our approach to increasing transparency and customer control over data collected by Microsoft’s major products.
We are excited to announce that earlier this week we released an update to Office that reflects these principles.
The office is a connected experience
The way we use technology to be productive at work and at home is changing. We work more on the go, we use more than one device to complete our tasks, and we often collaborate as part of a team—even when that team is our family and friends. At Microsoft, we’re committed to providing you with the best-in-class applications and experiences to meet these modern needs, while respecting your privacy and keeping you in control of your data.
We continue to introduce new and exciting capabilities to Office to help you create, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. Sometimes it’s as simple as helping you find a document you wrote a week ago, or helping you find the perfect image for a school report. Or maybe your team needs to collaborate and communicate on a project in real-time across different devices. Office can help you create professional-looking presentations by suggesting design layouts for your PowerPoint slides, and it can also help you find key insights in complex data sets.
To deliver these experiences, Office uses the power of the Microsoft Cloud. Like any other connected service or website, required service data must be shared between your computer and Microsoft to enable these features.
For example: Perhaps you would like PowerPoint to provide live subtitles as you present and even translate your words into a different language. To transcribe and translate your spoken words, PowerPoint sends a recording of your voice to our Speech and Translation service, where it’s automatic machine transcribed and translated. The generated text is returned to your computer so that PowerPoint can display it on the screen in (almost) real-time. Your voice and words are used only to do the transcription and translation you’ve asked us to do.
If you want to learn more about which connected experiences are available to you in Office, please read Connected experiences in Office.
You’re in control of cloud-connected experiences
We understand the importance of keeping you and your organization in control of connected experiences when working in Office apps. With this update, you now have settings that allow you to disable or re-enable the following types of connected experiences, including:
- Experiences that analyze your content. Experiences that use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights, and similar features. For example, PowerPoint Designer or Editor in Word.
- Experiences that download online content. Experiences that allow you to search and download online content, including templates, images, 3D models, videos, and reference materials to enhance your documents. For example, Office templates or PowerPoint QuickStarter.
- Other connected experiences. Experiences such as document collaboration can be also turned off by disconnecting the Office desktop apps from the Microsoft Cloud.
- Some services are essential to how Office apps function and cannot be turned off. For example: syncing your mailbox in Outlook, authenticating and verifying your Office license, and determining if Office is up to date.
Although these improvements have come to Office on Windows first, in the coming months, similar controls and experiences will be introduced in Office on other platforms.
If Office is connected to your work or school account, your IT administrator is empowered to make choices about which connected experiences are available to you in your organization. To learn more about improvement to the IT controls and the options available, please see Overview of privacy controls for Office 365 ProPlus.
Keeping Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected
Our customers choose Office because of its strong track record of capability, quality, security, reliability, and compatibility. Just as with our cloud-backed experiences, we use data to keep the Office apps secure, up to date, performing as expected, and to make product improvements.
For this purpose, we collect diagnostic data to detect, diagnose, and rapidly address issues before they become large-scale problems or cause security risks. If one of our apps runs too slowly, or has some other error, we want to know about it as quickly as possible, so we can work on fixing it. This diagnostic data helps us keep your Office working the way it should.
Consistent with the data collection framework outlined in Julie’s blog, there are two levels of diagnostic data for Office desktop applications:
Required data—The minimum data necessary to help keep Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected on the device it’s installed on. For example, the required data is collected when we update Office on your device. To ensure the update packages are downloaded and installed correctly, we collect information about the success (or failure) of this operation. Or when you add a new email account to Outlook, we collect the required diagnostic data about the success of adding this new account. Increased rates of failure could indicate a change made by your email provider or regression in support of this provider in our software.
Optional data—This is data that is collected in addition to the required data and only with your consent. If collected, optional data helps us detect, diagnose, and fix issues even faster; and it helps us make improvements to meet your productivity needs now and in the future. Optional data, for example, is collected on whether files are saved locally or in the cloud; this helps us to better understand our customers’ storage preferences. Or tracking the number of times a feature is used to better understand the ways our customers interact with new Office features. We generally use optional diagnostic data to learn about the preferences across a large set of customers. We continually work to improve the Office to make it work better for you and the rest of our customers. We appreciate you choosing to provide optional diagnostic data to make this possible.
For more information about diagnostic data in Office, and how to control which category you provide, see Diagnostic data in Office. If you’re using a work or school account, your IT administrator will have additional options to disable the collection of diagnostic data and may have made some choices about options available to you.
Regardless of whether you stay with required data or opt in to optional data, the diagnostic data we receive doesn’t include your name or email address, the content of your files, or information about apps unrelated to Office. We take great precautions to ensure your privacy, including how we handle your diagnostic data. Our system creates a unique alphanumeric ID that it associates with the diagnostic data before it leaves your computer. Although unique, this ID by itself cannot be mapped back to any individual person. We use this ID to help us differentiate between an issue happening on 100 different devices or 100 instances of the same issue happening on a single device.
We want to be open and transparent about the data we collect to detect, diagnose, and fix issues. We created a free Diagnostic Data Viewer, where you can see the diagnostic data sent to Microsoft. For details, read Using the Diagnostic Data Viewer with Office.
The office is built on trust
Julie’s blog announced a new framework and emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to trust and privacy. This update to Office embodies these principles.
Making our private experience and controls clear and helpful is critical to building and keeping your trust in our products and services. Many experiences you’re seeing in this update to Office are the result of many hours of conversations and research with customers like you. We’ll continue to learn and improve our product behaviors and user experience as we receive more input. Your feedback will be important in helping us deliver future privacy-related updates.
It’s our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We can only accomplish that by earning your confidence that we respect you, your data, and your privacy.
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