What’s new in Office 365 in June: Teams classroom experiences, Streams and more

Microsoft’s Office team seemed pretty busy in the month of June as it broadly released Microsoft Teams, offered up Office 365 security protection and compliance updates as well as making their Stream service generally available.

Fortunately, every month the Office team compiles a list of all the updates issued in a month and publishes them as a record keeping process.

Here are the updates that came to Office and Office-related services this month in detail:

Microsoft Teams to everyone

We’re excited to announce that the new classroom experiences in Microsoft Teams are now rolling out to Office 365 for Education customers. For students, Teams helps create safe and engaging classroom environments with rich conversations including text, video and voice, as well as custom class themes, stickers and emojis. Educators can save time with student class rosters automatically populated from the school’s information system. They can also move effortlessly between planning lessons, creating content and providing feedback with the help of integrated OneNote Class Notebooks, Assignments and Office apps. Lastly, Teams provides a hub for educators and staff to connect with each other outside the classroom (for example, in professional learning communities), all from a single experience within Office 365 for Education.

Office 365 Security Updates

Windows Information Protection (WIP) support is expanding beyond Office mobile apps to Office on Windows desktops. WIP helps prevent accidental data leaks while letting your employees maintain control over their personal data. They can simply designate content created in these apps as “work” or “personal,” so your IT department can protect or remove only business data. Learn more about Windows Information Protection.

The Office team also announced some additional security and compliance updates that include enabling threat management and protection of sensitive information. The new update can be found in Office’s Advance Threat Protection service which offers newly enhanced reporting through Safe Links policy configurations.

Microsoft Forms comes to more users

Previously available for education customers, Microsoft Forms is rolling out for commercial customers, providing a lightweight web tool for creating surveys, quizzes and polls. It helps anybody in your organization easily collect customer feedback, measure employee satisfaction, organize team events and more.

Stream is now generally available

Microsoft Stream is generally available—Microsoft Stream is an intelligent video service for commercial customers to easily and securely upload, share, manage and view videos in a single experience. Speech-to-text transcription, face detection, intelligent search and more make video consumption more efficient. IT can also tailor Microsoft Stream to fit their organization’s needs with management and security capabilities.

And the rest…

Even with adding all the above additions for users, the Office team managed to pack a few more lesser highlighted features to the June release of Office 365.

Office 365 users can now share their work habits with co-employees using the MyAnalytics insights addition. Managers and staff can optimize meet times, after hours email correspondence and based on the insights gather over time through shared MyAnalytics reports.

Lastly, the recently released Office Researcher tool got some much needed love. Researcher can now be used beyond Word on the desktop app for PCs. Researcher is now being supported on the Word app for Macs as well as OneNote for Windows 10. While not the full openness some would like to see, the recent baby steps in availability are promising.

As Microsoft continues to mold Office 365 into its own self sustaining platform, its users on all platforms that appear to be the big winners.