You may not have noticed it, but we"re almost 25% through the year 2019, and as we near the end of March, Microsoft is once again highlighting the updates that were released or announced for its range of Microsoft 365 products. There are a considerable amount of improvements this month, such as the replaceable backgrounds in video calls in Teams, which were announced last week.
In addition to being able to change the background of your video feed, Microsoft will also add live captions and subtitles to video chats, so communication will be easier for those with hearing impairments. Microsoft also announced a public preview of Whiteboard integration in Teams and an Intelligent Capture feature, which can grab content from a real-life whiteboard in real time and bring it into the app and is coming later this year.
The Whiteboard app itself has some new features, too. Ink grab is pretty similar to the Intelligent Capture above, but it works by taking a picture of a whiteboard instead of doing it in real time. There"s also an ink beautification feature, which turns illegible scribbles into ink stroke that you can actually read. Both features are available now in the Windows 10 app, but ink beautification should arrive on iOS sometime soon as well.
LinkedIn is more tightly integrated into Microsoft"s services now, and you can see your LinkedIn connections" profiles on Outlook.com, as well as OneDrive and SharePoint in Office 365. Targeted Release customers can now see LinkedIn contacts as suggestions when typing an e-mail, and these contacts can also be invited to co-author Office documents.
To help you be more productive, Outlook.com also now has a few new intelligent features which were announced yesterday, such as meeting insights, automatic smart replies for scheduling meetings, and more.
If you"re a Mac user, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are all getting support for 3D animated objects next month if you"re an Office Insider. This should help your presentations and documents stand out a little more - just make sure you don"t try to print Word documents with 3D models in them.
Other announcements from this month include Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), which is now Microsoft Defender ATP and available in public preview on Mac. Microsoft Defender will also include Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM), which lets customers "discover, prioritize and remediate known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations exploited by threat actors."
The Microsoft 365 security center is now generally available, providing a unified experience for security experts to manage the capabilities of Microsoft Threat Protection. You can get started with it here. Microsoft is also rolling out a new Microsoft 365 admin center, serving as an entry point to manage all of the components of Office and Microsoft 365, including Windows 10, the Office suite, and Enterprise Mobility + Security from a single place.
Finally, there are a host of smaller updates throughout the suite of products. Teams customers can now add Yammer tabs, the Office desktop apps can now handle links to their respective Office 365 documents instead of opening them in the web apps, and OneNote can now sync embedded files. Microsoft has also launched a public preview of Forms Pro, and custom policies in Azure Active Directory B2C are now generally available.