I’ll keep this post short and sweet in honor of Friday!
Now if you are an avid follower of Microsoft, you got to agree that the most fascinating news (other than stock news) about the company is their shift to the cloud with platforms and products like Azure and Office 365. With so much exciting features coming through it’s tough to keep track. We at Perficient here, have the privilege to work with the latest greatest and keep you updated with the same. The three new features which caught my attention last week provide a great enhancement to user experience, be it mobile or desktop. I discuss them briefly here
Office on iOS
Office 365 Message Encryption Viewer – This app allows you to open mail attachments and send back an encrypted reply. Microsoft verifies your identity to ensure you are who you say you are. Get a one time pass code on your phone.
Information Rights Management (IRM)
This allows you to secure your information by encrypting it and applying an intelligent policy. This is an integral part of Office 365 trust center. Allows only internal and/or external people to“act” on your documents. Plus you have capability to sync these protected document to One Drive for Business. Access it on your phone, desktop, or tablet. (read my post here for how One Drive for Business plays on your phone).
Branding
Portal Sign In Page and Access Panel
Newly introduced sign in page and access panel allows company branding. OK, got to admit it’s not a whole lot but it does the job. You come in to your company sign in page and see custom image and text. Below you see the desktop and mobile versions for the sign in page.
Keep in mind, this is not the same as Office 365 portal branding. Users will see a branded sign in page when they visit a service with a tenant-specific URL such as https://outlook.com/contoso.com, or https://mail.contoso.com. If they visit a service with non-tenant specific URLs (such as https://mail.office365.com) they will see a non-branded sign in page. The sign in page will refresh to show your branding once users have entered their user ID or selected a user tile. Picture below shows you what is customizable on the sign in page and access panel
Self Service password reset
Self-service password reset for end users is only available when you enable Azure AD Premium or Basic. Below is an extremely helpful information from office 365 team.
Outlook for iOS
Conversation View – Outlook organizes your email into conversations, where all messages with the same subject line are grouped together. To toggle your selection go to Settings > Organize Mail by Thread
Swipe gestures come natural when on a smartphone. I’m always amazed at how my toddlers use these gestures way more comfortably than I still do. Outlook lets you personalize these swipe gestures to match your unique preferences. Previously only available on iOS, this feature is now also available on Android. I’ve included various images of how all these features lay out on an iPhone – Conversation thread, Archive, Swipe Gestures, Clear Cache (one of my favorites)
(Source: Office 365 team blog, MSDN, Technet)
New Additions to the Office 365 Family
by Vaibhav Mathur on February 20th, 2015 | ~ minute read
