The release of Office 2016 is one of the major ways in which Microsoft is realising its ambitious goal of reinventing productivity and business processes in this mobile-first, cloud-first era.
This, as technological advancement and trends such as social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) have dramatically reshaped the operating environment for organisations, the business-consumer ecosystem, the way in which people work and how they maximise their downtime. What has not changed, though, is the fact that every person and organisation on the planet wants to make the most of their time by getting more done in less time and making every moment of their lives count.
Office 2016 has been designed to help change the nature of work within organisations of all sizes in a number of ways. Chief amongst these is the fact that work requires mobility of the human experience, not the device. Your work and data has to be accessible from any device, anytime, and from anywhere.
The Office 2016 apps are the latest addition to Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based subscription service that helps people do their best work, together by delivering new versions of the Office desktop apps for Windows that includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Visio and Access. By subscribing to Office 365, customers can get always-up-to-date, fully installed apps for use across their devices, combined with a continually evolving set of consumer and commercial services the likes of OneDrive cloud-based storage, Skype for Business, and the enterprise-class social network Yammer.
“These latest innovations take another big step forward in transforming Office from a familiar set of individual productivity apps, to a connected set of apps and services designed for modern working, collaboration and teamwork,” says Uriel Rootshtain, application services group lead at Microsoft SA.
Collaboration and big data analytics
Organisations also now require solutions that enable employees to collaborate toward shared outcomes with colleagues and partners, who are in different time zones and working on different types of devices that run various platforms. The Office 2016 apps simplify collaboration and remove barriers to team success. It includes functions like co-authoring which is now provided in Word, enabling users to see edits being made in real-time by their colleagues, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Skype in-app integration across the rich client apps provides users with functionality like screen share and video calling right from within their Office documents. Office 365 Groups now also comes integrated as part of the Outlook 2016 client app, while Office 365 Planner will also be available soon to assist teams in organising their work, with the ability to create new plans, organise and assign tasks, set due dates, and update status with visual dashboards as well as email notifications.
The final dimension in which Office 2016 assists companies to be more productive ties into the fact that productivity can no longer be bound to any single application. It has become a service that leverages the cumulative intelligence and knowledge that staff as well as their organisation need to do more and achieve more, using fewer resources and less time.
For instance, the new Tell Me feature helps users to quickly find the right Office feature or command, while Smart Lookup brings insights from the Web right into one’s documents. Excel 2016 now includes integrated publishing to Power BI and new modern chart types to help users to convert their data into actionable insights.
When the new version of Office is utilised in conjunction with Windows 10, it offers the most modern, secure, and the most complete solution for doing work. The Office 2016 apps run beautifully on the best Windows ever, including the new Sway for Windows 10 to create shareable, interactive stories that look great on any screen. Windows Hello logs you into Windows and Office 365 in one simple step, as well as Office Mobile apps on Windows 10 to empower on-the-go productivity.