MS Office 2016 New Features to Delight, and Beguile

Real Time Co-Authoring

Up until now the co-authoring functions have had a bit of a choppy time and Microsoft had settled on allowing co-authoring only in the browser IE when both users are logged in to the portal, which makes sense but was a bit disappointing given that we were allowed to see it in its full glory briefly.

However the 2016 update will allow for co-authoring when editing documents in OneDrive For Business which to be frank is the most likely place you would want to do it anyway, certainly for our clients (Network Managers/IT Directors) who are often in the office, at their desk working with colleagues. I have seen and "played" with the co-authoring function which seems to work well giving you real-time updates of what your colleague is doing to your document...and of course for a while we simply typed silly sentences at each other, marvelling at the misuse of technology. We did however speculate where this might be the most useful (other thanthe obvious use I have already mentioned) and we postulated this may be during meetings where a lot of notes need to be taken, seen by all and referred to. It could also be quite useful during scoping, and project management calls for projects too, providing everyone has the tech of course.

Link Sharing - Not Document Attachments

The default behaviour will be to share a link instead of attaching a document. Okay so this is a great idea and has been a long time coming, you can already get a link from SharePoint and share it but this is not the default behaviour for the system, or for most users. Exchange is already extremely clever about how it stores document attachments (heck it must be as I am awful at sending links!) but this new change will make email quicker, both to send and to search through, and ultimately save on disk space in Exchange. One possible problem that has been noted is that by default the link is set to "anyone can edit", however that is basically the same as sending the attached file without password protecting it, so not a biggy. What we are wondering is how this will affect older email, will the attachments still be available because I'm sure we have moved files/folders around in SharePoint a couple of times?!

Outlook Groups

Office 365 users will now be able to create a new type of group which will have a shared calendar, simple mailing list (group), library (document store) and some messaging tools via Skype for Business.

Clutter Update

Do you use clutter? This is a question I am asked daily. The answer is yes, but I also check it! Many users are not too keen to miss an important email so have turned clutter off straight away without testing it for a bit. Okay, fair enough, nobody likes change (or Microsoft "experiments") but if you are going to embrace the cloud, you might as well start using the apps that are built to make you more productive. The clutter function does hark back to the zero inbox method which I have come across. Basically this entails organising your email into several folders: Urgent, Important Not Urgent, Not Important...and thus cleaning up your very messy inbox. This allows you to concentrate on the most important things and potentially shift some of the other Not Important things on to another business function as you will probably find they are not super relevant to your job role. Streamlining is fun! So what is new? - You can manage it from within Outlook, not just online.

What Else?

That's basically it from us. Microsoft have just shown me their published changes which can be found at this URL here . Excel is going to have some new chart types but that's only of interest if you are a hardcore Excel user, most of us are not. So are you looking forward to 2016?

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