Microsoft launched Office 2016 with a Global announcement and availability on Office 365 as well as a once only purchase for Macs. Online it has been rolled out to 40 languages so far.
Sharing at last
It has been possible to share and work on documents between people simultaneously for a while on Office 365 but Microsoft has now brought this functionality to the mainstream. Using OneDrive it is possible to have multiple people updating any Office document simultaneously and they can see the updates that others are doing at the same time.
This one feature has been a main differentiator between Office and other business applications such as Google Apps and Slack that have been making inroads into the dominance of Office. These are not the only collaboration enhancements to be released, though some are only available online.
Usefully Skype for Business is also integrated into the applications so that users can message, talk or video chat to one another easily while they are updating. Surprisingly this last feature is not yet included within Office 365 but will be released later in the year with availability on the Mac available in the second quarter 2016.
Office 365 Groups online allows users to create public or private teams that can work within Outlook 2016 as a single entity. They are able to share an inbox, calendar, cloud storage for group files, and a shared OneNote notebook. The functionality is available on desktop, iOS, Android and Windows Mobile devices which makes it incredibly useful for firms who have teams set up with shared mailboxes.
(Next:Task list finally modernised)
