As it usually does, Microsoft has published a new blog post going over the major additions to the Microsoft 365 suite of apps over the past month. This time around, the updates are almost completely focused on Microsoft Teams integrations and Edge.
For Teams, one of the new features is the new Tasks app, which brings together items from apps like Microsoft To Do, Planner, and Outlook, and lets you manage them all from within Teams. Microsoft has also added features like the ability to edit multiple tasks at once, integrations with the Graph API and Power Automate, and task publishing, which is coming soon. With Power Automate, for example, you can create a new task directly from a message in a channel, or trigger a welcome message when a new team member is added.
It"s also now possible to add a Visio tab to Teams channels, so you can collaborate with others on diagrams directly within Teams. If you use Whiteboard in Teams, that should also be better now thanks to newly-added support for sticky notes, and improved performance, which Microsoft announced earlier in the month. Finally, there"s a new portal with curated apps designed for remote work in Microsoft Teams.
Moving on to Edge, Microsoft recently released version 85 to the stable channel, and with it came a few improvements to Collections and more. One of the improvements is that you can export a collection to OneNote, and Microsoft has also added a Picture Dictionary to reading mode, which lets you select a word to see a visual representation of it. The latest release also brought back the PDF highlighter tool.
The rest of the improvements this month mostly have to do with user and app deployments in organizations. A new integration between Azure AD and SAP SuccessFactors should make to easier onboard new hires, and Microsoft has also made it easier for FastTrack users to get help while deploying Microsoft 365. Microsoft also has a new setup experience to help small and medium businesses deploy a baseline security policy to their computers.
Rounding out the updates, the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel is now generally available, and so is Application Guard integration with Microsoft 365 apps. While Microsoft didn"t mention it in today"s blog post, the company also introduced Transcribe for Word earlier this week.