The new dawn of creativity is shining upon us. Creativity is the fragrance that emanates from the workplace. But what makes a workplace creative? The answer is anything that inspires your employees. Anything that makes your work environment engaging, dynamic, and motivating can bring out the creativity in your employees. Microsoft Office 365 is a great way to bring about that creative atmosphere in your organization.  After two years of launch, the new features of Office 365 continues to inspire with its set of services and apps that make your work easy to collaborate and share. The key to promoting interactions in a digital workplace is an intranet portal. The Microsoft SharePoint is the best option for you to build your organization around. It allows you to take full advantage of the Microsoft Office Suite, the Office 365 Intranet facility, Yammer, and much more. Here we primarily discuss the latest features in Office 365, which Microsoft announced lately to build a workplace that is innovative, smart, and creative.

The Fluid Framework

Office 365 comes with an exciting new framework that will revolutionize user experience on the web. It comes in the form of the Fluid-structure, a developer technology which promotes a new shared and integrated working on documents and files.

The primary features of the fluid framework are:

• It will support multi-person co-authoring of documents at a speed which is unprecedented in the industry till now.

• Authors can now make collaborative content blocks out of documents. These blocks can then be used with flexibility in combination with other docs or create new docs.

• You won't be alone. Smart technologies will now assist you in translating words, fetching the right contents, suggesting better edits, checking for compliance, and much more. This feature is going to integrate into Microsoft Word, Teams, Outlook, and the whole Office suite to revolutionize your workplace.

What Fluid Means for Your Workplace:

It will be a built-in solution to your woes in handling documents. The SharePoint based document management system with Office 365 integrated into them can harness this Fluid framework to bring delightful experiences at the workplace. Also Read:  A Complete Guide To Performance Management Process

Go Deep With Microsoft Graph

At every point in your organization, every moment new data generates. But have you ever wondered about the possibility these discrete sets of diverse data offers?  Just imagine the large number of data a Human Resource Manager collects about his employees. The HRM collects broad productivity data. The employees in each department generate a large number of day to day business data. What if we can use every previous data to give us more insight into our current work? Microsoft Graph makes this idea possible. The Microsoft Graph combines your previous data sets to give you a clear picture of your progress till now. It empowers organizations to chart their course and plan better. The HRM can figure out the best working pattern that integrates employee satisfaction and productivity by compiling data from performance management system.

Microsoft Graph offers the following new features:

• It creates a secure pathway between your Organization's Office 365 user and the central Azure Data Factory. It means that now the entire data collected from your organization can be made available to every Office 365 user. The access points can be secured to allow selective and authority based access, as previously possible.

• The type of data that can be made available through your office applications and the kind of access etc. has to be approved beforehand. It ensures data security.

• You can create work specific data sharing policies. The policies can be initiated from the developer side as well. Such procedures then can be approved by Office 365 administrators.

• Microsoft Graph toolkit makes it easy to add the tools in the Microsoft Graph to your app. All it takes is a few lines of code in React, Angular or any other Java frameworks.

What Microsoft Graph means to your Organization?

 

Get Everything at Your Fingertip

The new Microsoft Search is the dream of every worker irrespective of the domain. Microsoft puts it as a search experience that “works with and for you.” [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtjJdltMoWU[/embed] It is direct access to the whole repository of your work files, your transactions, work chats, previous operations, and anything you want to know. The remarkable feature of the new Microsoft Search is that now it appears as a standard search bar for all your Office 365 utilities.  Be it Outlook, Word, SharePoint, Bing, et al. Imagine you are preparing a critical summary of the recent conference held in your company. You may have the presentation in your OneDrive. With Microsoft Search, you won't have to toggle back and forth between OneDrive and Word. The file will be accessible from your Word search bar itself. Microsoft Search brings together the best of the web and office without the need to switch the context. It combines the world knowledge of Bing with the working knowledge from Microsoft Graph to give you a unified experience of your workplace knowledge. Also Read:  Features and Benefits of a Document Management System

Stay Focused with MyAnalytics

Work is no more monotonous in the modern world. Every day is strewn with meetings, presentations, discussions, and so on. The real challenge in a contemporary workplace is thus to sustain the focus in one's work. Office 365 experience has just the right tool. The MyAnalytics monitors your work pattern, your schedules, etc. to give you personal productivity statistics. It focuses on four core areas:

• Focus

Your work is broke into little pieces. Then based on the inputs you provide the total hours you send in collaboration; the time you spend with a focus on your work etc. is determined. If you mark yourself as out of office, then it will be excluded from the calculation.

• Wellbeing metrics

An intelligent system that tells you how well you are using your off days to rest and enjoy effectively. MyAnalytics nurtures a culture of employee wellbeing. It reminds you not just to work but to take a rest as well. Depending on your Outlook calendar it marks the quiet days. The quiet days are those in which you spent less than 2 hours collaborating actively outside your work schedule. It gives you actionable suggestions to turn off work, when not at work. You can turn off notifications for specific days so that you can reconnect with your surroundings away from the daily announcements and updates. It plans emails and updates according to the free hours of coworkers to respect each other's personal space as well. All this can be customized to match your priorities.

• Network

It shows the whole set of your connections. Suggestions are provided based on your past interactions through interaction history. If the system feels that you need to connect more with your managers and officials, it helps you list the most important persons. It compiles a category of the following:

• 1. Top collaborators - It will be based on the emails, calls, chats you make with your co-workers

• 2. Active collaborators - Co-workers with whom you connected within four weeks fall under this category

• 3. Important collaborators - You can mark them so in MyAnalytics.

• Collaboration

Elaborates on the most recent collaboration you made recently at work. It will be based on the meetings, Email, chats, and calls, documents, etc. Suggestions are also given about collaborations and tips are provided as well. Microsoft is unveiling new focus plans for this year, watch the demo below from Microsoft to get an idea about what is the future of Office365: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9sokkEjGaE&feature=youtu.be[/embed] Also Read: Performance Management Techniques and Automation Tools

Respond Instantly with Actionable Messages

Do you remember the emails that come with readymade answers for you? All you have to do is swipe on the mail update and click the action.  The actionable message lets you approve financial reports, granting access to documents, fill quick surveys at lightning speed. You can also give that light tap digitally to assign small tasks to your colleague using the @mention inline in Word documents. It can help get quick reviews, nods, and opinions without even leaving the context of your application. It will be built by taking full use of the Adaptive Cards in the Outlook.

The New Edge Features

The latest features in the Microsoft Edge browser will deal with the most annoying and frustrating situations that users feel while browsing.  One such feature is the direct integration of the Internet Explorer into the Edge it is called the Internet Explore Mode. It allows you to use the legacy apps that used to work in Internet Explorer. There are more security levels to block third-party apps from tracking your work files now. The three modes - Unrestricted, Balanced, and strict, give you that freedom to decide. All this and much more awaits you in the new version of the Microsoft Office 365.  Aufait Technologies provides you the complete package to transform your workplace into a digital fiesta. Our Sharepoint based Performance management systems handle the whole process from setting parameters to performing appraisals.  So get your free demo now.