Office 365 February Updates Include Improvements to Word, Teams, and StaffHub

Office 365 February Updates Including Improvements to Word, Teams, and StaffHub

Microsoft today documented the many updates it provided in February across the Office 365 stack on multiple platforms.

“New Office 365 capabilities this month include tools to improve the quality of your work, craft compelling resumes, and work with team members outside your organization,” Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer writes. “Office 365 administrators also benefit from new ways to manage collaboration at scale, communicate complex ideas, and protect their employee and customer data.”

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As always, there’s almost too much to cover. But here are the highlights.

New Editor overview pane in Microsoft Word. A new Editor overview pane in Word 2016 for Windows desktop brings together a ton of editing tools—potential corrections, refinements, and stylistic suggestions—in a single place. In educational environments, this pane provides a classroom-wide dashboard for teachers so that they can see common mistakes from among all the students. This feature requires an Office 365 subscription and it replaces the old spell check pane.

Resume Assistant for Microsoft Word. Powered by LinkedIn, this new Word 2016 for Windows desktop feature is available to both consumer and commercial Office 365 subscribers. “Resume Assistant helps job seekers showcase accomplishments, be more easily discovered by recruiters, and find their ideal job,” Koenigsbauer explains.

Guest access in Microsoft Teams. As Mehedi reported earlier today, Microsoft Teams is picking up its most eagerly-awaited new feature, the ability to add anyone to a team. “Starting next week, anyone with a business or consumer email address—including Outlook.com and Gmail.com—can participate as a guest in Teams with full access to team chats, meetings, and files,” Koenigsbauer notes.

StaffHub improvements. A new StaffHub Now tab includes a preview of your workday, with notes, activities. And StaffHub has been added to the Office 365 App Launcher on the web for easier access.

Administration updates. Microsoft has also added a number of new management features for administrators, including naming convention enforcement across Office 365 Groups, advanced network diagrams in Visio Online, and new GDPR compliance capabilities.

 

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Conversation 3 comments

  • Tony Barrett

    01 March, 2018 - 6:22 am

    <p>Glad to see MS are adding lots of new features, because I don't know anyone using Office 365 who has anything approaching a stable or reliable experience. Most curse it, and find it's either slow or crashes a lot.</p>

    • peterh_oz

      02 March, 2018 - 7:54 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#249723"><em>In reply to ghostrider:</em></a></blockquote><p>Been using O365 for a couple of years. Not slow, doesn't crash. Main use is on a Beelink M1 (8Gb RAM, Intel N3450, which is my TV streaming box). I ao use it on my Surface 3 (not Pro) 4Gb RAM. So not exactly high end machines! If it was slow, I'd expect to see it on these.</p>

  • aengineer

    Premium Member
    01 March, 2018 - 8:19 am

    <p>I'd note that at least online and Android OneNote have recently experienced what I regard as a vast improvement. They now support "folding" so only the chosen levels appear. I didn't see an announcement about it, but just found that it at last works.</p>

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