From Copilot in Microsoft Viva to the new Intune Suite—here’s what’s new in Microsoft 365

New research from the Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report shows employee engagement is important to the bottom line, especially amid economic uncertainty.¹ The analysis shows that organizations that doubled down on employee engagement in times of economic uncertainty performed twice as well financially as organizations that deprioritized it—with the most engaged outperforming the S&P 500 at the end of the year.

We’re excited to announce Copilot in Microsoft Viva to help organizations create a more engaged and productive workforce. And new productivity-focused insights with Microsoft Viva Glint help managers measure and improve employee engagement to drive business outcomes. We’re also empowering frontline workers with Windows 365 Frontline and keeping your distributed workforce more secure with updates to Microsoft Intune. And new capabilities in the Microsoft 365 app and Microsoft Stream give employees more ways to be productive and stay in the flow of work. 

Let’s dive into what’s new in Microsoft 365.

Copilot in Microsoft Viva and Viva Glint help managers unlock employee potential and performance

Copilot in Microsoft Viva is built on the Microsoft 365 Copilot system and will offer business leaders an entirely new way of understanding and engaging their workforce—helping turn data-driven insights into actions that can energize employees and unlock productivity for individuals, organizations, and leaders. Copilot in Viva helps leaders drive clarity and alignment across organizations, which is more important than ever.

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Goals will empower leaders to set clear strategies, giving employees clarity on goals that can help boost engagement and productivity. Working across existing Word documents like annual business plans or strategy papers, Copilot will draft objectives and key results (OKRs), help leaders track goal management across organizations, empower employees to measure their performance against goals, and offer tips to help them overcome blockers.

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Engage will help leaders craft more compelling and inspiring messages to help better engage their employees. Copilot will scan across trending topics within an organization to offer leaders relevant and tonally appropriate messaging to use in their posts and can then analyze engagement metrics and assess employee sentiment to help leaders focus future messages on what employees care about most.

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Topics and Copilot in Answers will help employees more easily and intuitively find relevant information to help them do their jobs better, while also helping experts respond to employee questions with richer, more thorough answers.

Viva Glint, which is now part of the Viva suite, will empower organizations with relevant quantitative and qualitative employee signals that can help leaders continuously improve employee engagement and productivity. And with Copilot in Microsoft Viva Glint, leaders will be able to accelerate and deepen their organizational understanding by receiving relevant and granular employee insights from thousands of signals like aggregated employee feedback from surveys and responses.

Copilot in Viva will begin rolling out to customers later this year, while Viva Glint will be introduced to customers in July 2023.

Learn more about Copilot in Viva from the Microsoft Viva Community page.

Empowering frontline workers with Windows 365 Frontline and Microsoft Intune

Windows 365 Frontline—now in public preview—offers businesses the flexibility and security they need to empower their frontline workforces. Now, frontline workers like nurses or call center employees, who work part-time or in shifts, can more easily and securely access their data on shared devices while staying in the flow of work. Businesses save money by having up to three people access a single cloud PC during their work hours. And IT admins can easily set organization-wide protocols, such as wiping data from a cloud PC at the end of the shift or signing out employees who forget to log off.

The new Microsoft Intune Suite empowers IT admins to keep their distributed workforce engaged, protected, and productive while helping to cut costs and simplify endpoint management.

• Endpoint Privilege Management helps reduce the risk of local admins with controls for elevations of standard Windows users by allowing them to do the admin tasks they need to on their desktop to stay productive.
• Remote Help offers your IT helpdesk teams capabilities to troubleshoot employees’ desktops through a trusted and verifiable cloud-connected session.
• Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile Application Management offers flexibility and security, enabling employees to bring their own devices (BYODs) to work while ensuring they’ll have secure mobile access to company apps and data.
• Advanced endpoint analytics scans across diverse signals to give IT admins better insight into where a problem began, enabling them to quickly identify and fix issues that can impact employees’ productivity.
• Anomaly detection and enhanced device timeline let IT admins understand an issue’s potential scope and severity and how many devices it may impact, which lets them identify and remediate issues before they can spread widely.  

Redesigned Microsoft 365 Apps deliver a more intuitive experience

The Microsoft 365 app has a new streamlined design, making it easier for employees to find, share, and create documents from anywhere and on any device. The newly designed Home screen on the Microsoft 365 app makes all your content readily available, accessible, and manageable on the My Content page. And Feed for commercial customers, which is rolling out this in April 2023, helps users discover new content and updates from colleagues, prepare for upcoming meetings, get insights about meetings that already occurred, and catch up on news from and about their organization.

The Microsoft 365 productivity apps for Apple devices, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, have a new, more intuitive design and now offer even more functionality to help people stay in the flow of work. While Mac users will experience an updated, simplified interface—called Aluminum theme—for their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps, and have access to more modern collaboration features like assigning Tasks in comments with an @ mention for commercial users, the all-new Share menu, and a world-class Recording Studio experience in PowerPoint that lets you pre-record and share your presentations as a video with Cameo. For iPad users, handling complex data in Excel is now easier than ever with Custom Sort and Conditional formatting, and the new Format Painter empowers you to create artful and engaging slides for any presentation.

New capabilities in Microsoft Stream make it easy to share rich video content and understand key analytics—right in the flow of work. The new playlists feature lets you seamlessly curate and then share lists of videos—just like you would do with a playlist of songs—while offline viewing gives you the freedom to download and watch videos whenever time allows, even if there’s no internet connection. Analytics in the Stream web app gives you insights into a video’s performance, including total views, viewers, and viewer retention, so you can quickly understand which content resonates and engages your audience.

Looking ahead

Join us in person at the Microsoft 365 Conference, May 2 to 4, 2023, in Las Vegas, Nevada, to learn more about how we’re bringing next-generation AI to Microsoft 365 to reshape how people work. Register now.

And check out these resources to learn more about this month’s announcements:

• Sign up to stay informed about Copilot in Viva.
• Learn more about Windows 365 Frontline.
• Discover the expanding set of products in the new Intune Suite.
• Leverage Microsoft 365 apps and services today.

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¹Work Trend Index Special Report, Microsoft.