As is the case every month, Microsoft has detailed a bunch of features that have made it to its Microsoft 365 suite of apps in the month. While some months brought a huge number of changes and additions, some have been incremental. The enhancements for September are such as there are small yet useful improvements making it to the service. Highlights include new live captioning languages for Teams, co-authoring capabilities for encrypted Office documents on the desktop, and more.
The first of the improvements are coming to Teams, the Redmond firm’s popular collaboration service. The firm is adding additional languages to the live captioning and transcription feature, a welcome addition for those that rely on the capability to take post-meeting notes or those with accessibility needs. The added languages include German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, Hindi, and more, bringing 27 new languages in total.
Another collaboration offering that is receiving some love is Yammer, which is now integrating with Viva Topics for improved knowledge-sharing and information management within an organization. This means that licensed users will have access to the complete Viva Topics experiences, including Topic cards and more. You can read through the detailed blog here for more information on the availability of the feature.
Next up are improvements to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The company is adding the ability for Microsoft 365 users to co-author encrypted documents with sensitivity labels – created via Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) – right from the desktop, a feature that was previously available only on the web. Unsurprisingly, all authors will need to be on the latest version of the apps on Windows or macOS to leverage the feature. The detailed documentation can be found here.
Users of Visio on the web are also receiving a nifty new feature in the form of the addition of a full color palette for objects in the diagrams. The Recent Colors and More Colors options offer users added capability to choose from recently used colors or custom colors – using RGB or HEX values – from the palette, respectively.
The last of the updates are being made for IT admins to help them rollout and manage new operating systems. With Windows 11 right around the corner, the Endpoint analytics service in Microsoft Endpoint Manager brings a new Windows metric to manage devices on older Windows versions. The firm is also making it easy for Endpoint Manager users to manage iOS 15 and macOS 12 devices on day one, with the former already being released.
While this months updates were minor, expect to see much more in the coming months as the firm is slated to hold the second iteration of its Ignite conference in November.
