Turbocharging Microsoft 365 cloud user experiences

[Mark Kashman]

Fast | Phenomenal | Fluid

Don’t sit and wait. Be productive … in a snap. Twiddling thumbs is so 2018.

Today at SharePoint Conference 2019, we announced the latest innovations in Microsoft 365 – specific to SharePoint, OneDrive & Microsoft Teams. We first launched Microsoft 365 almost two years ago by bringing together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security into a single solution. Since then, we’ve introduced new offerings like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Search, and updated existing services like SharePoint and OneDrive to create a set of deeply connected experiences available whenever and wherever you want to be productive – without slowing you down.

Without a doubt, Microsoft 365 is the most feature-rich, intelligent, and trusted cloud for your organization. We’ve invested billions of dollars across research and engineering to drive massive improvements to the capabilities, performance, scalability, and security of Microsoft 365. Not all the features show up as a new experience – some are turbocharging the back-end service – making all experiences better, faster, and easier to govern.

We’ve turbocharged SharePoint. Accessing data from Microsoft 365 is 10x faster. We're seeing 3x perf improvements from core SharePoint plus Azure and Office architectures. 8x search indexing mean content is searchable within seconds. View more than 320 file types, without requiring dedicated applications. We’ve built the most sophisticated content storage system, and the most innovative, intelligent experiences on top of it, to drive value for end users, and IT, and developers. [slide shown during Jeff Teper’s SharePoint Conference 2019 keynote address.]

We want to take a moment and share many of the leap-frog innovations across user experiences, AI-powered insights and intelligent security. They are fast, phenomenal and fluid.

Much of the below are proof-point technologies either in place or coming to Microsoft 365 per related announcements from Microsoft Build 2019 and SharePoint Conference 2019. Let’s dive into the details…

Microsoft 365 is filled with fluid, innovative experiences

With great power comes great productivity. Office.com and the Office apps themselves help you onboard to the service quickly – with the primary goal of making you productive – getting you back to work and presenting you with the most important and relevant work happening around you. Microsoft is committed to delivering unique, intelligent experiences to power insights, action, and decision making across numerous experiences when viewing profiles, files, meetings, email, conversations and activity.

These innovations power collaborators:

• Fluid Framework + new file formats form a breakthrough in high-speed collaboration. AI-driven, shared interactive web experiences utilize innovative access patterns for hyper-fast co-authoring, fast multi-lingual translation, plus Fluid components that make it easy to re-use content across apps that are always up to date. The back-end data structure that powers Fluid is SharePoint, while developers can use SharePoint Framework to talk to the Fluid Framework for powerful, fast custom solutions. [video: shown at //build 2019]
• You can co-author files in real time using web versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well as desktop and mobile applications. We, too, focus on incremental open so we get you to being productive on what matters most, in addition to designing the Office clients for instant open with zero round trip between client and service.
• Unique collaboration features, including @mentions in comments, email follow ups, integrated tasks and seamless share-and-notify illustrate deep integrations between Office apps and Microsoft 365.

• Coherent intelligent file and sharing experiences across SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams and Outlook – inclusive of 320+ file previewers which now includes Autodesk AutoCAD DWG and 360° image
• Microsoft Search helps you complete a task, pick up where you left off, or discover answers or insights — from within the apps you’re already using including Office, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Bing and Windows to name a few.
• AI-powered insights save time and focus attention with on-hover file cards with estimated time to read and key points, and the Recommended view in OneDrive.

• Comprehensive Fluent Design provides a consistent look and feel across apps and services. When you simplicity and coherence through a shared, open design system across platforms

• Powerful out-of-the-box and custom Microsoft Flow capabilities transform business processes in hours and days, not weeks and months.

 Speed: “behind the scenes” investments put the turbo in turbocharge

Underpinning all this innovation is our content collaboration platform – powered by SharePoint and OneDrive – providing our customers a collaborative, secure and compliant location for all productivity activity in Microsoft 365. We’re building the world’s productivity cloud—a solution to help people work smarter together on any device.

• Accessing data from Microsoft 365 is ten times faster than it was just two years ago – no matter where you are in the world the experience is three times faster than a year ago – with enterprise-level security, compliance, and manageability intact.

• You can open almost any file—even the largest PowerPoint decks—in seconds in Office online – no matter where you are in the world.
• You can view more than 320+ file types, without requiring dedicated applications, across Microsoft 365 web, mobile and desktop applications and Windows 10.
• Content you add or modify is searchable within seconds alongside powerful AI-driven collaborative experiences. Improved search freshness makes Microsoft Search timely across all end points so you never feel as if your search is missing something. Content is pushed into the Microsoft Graph – no longer a wait for a timer-job crawl.
• Differential sync, coming to the OneDrive sync client, will synchronize large files significantly faster and considerably reduce network utilization for PC, Mac and Windows Virtual Desktop (preview).

The Microsoft 365 architecture improves every day, and we’ve great plans in place to lay a continuous foundation for much more to come.

Built with enterprise-level security, compliance and governance plus open developer extensibility

We continue to invest in capabilities that enable IT organizations to govern users, devices, and content with industry leading security and compliance controls, so that IT can empower the business and rest easy that information is protected.

• Broad e-Discovery across email and content stored in sites and libraries. Use eDiscovery in Office 365 to search for content in Exchange mailboxes, shared libraries, SharePoint and OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams discussions.
• Classification labels provide consistent management of information lifecycle, security and compliance across Microsoft 365 – alongside Data Loss Protection (DLP) policies.
• Desktop compliance, cloud backup and greater file collaboration powers via OneDrive Known Folder Move (KFM) for Windows PCs.

• Protection against over exposure of data using conditional access and sharing controls, plus DLP policies across content types and services for sensitive information management.
• High-value compliance control for global customers, including general availability of multi-geo capabilities for OneDrive, SharePoint and Office 365 groups.
• Configure business solutions across SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow, in conjunction with modern document sets, powerful SharePoint lists and templating across SharePoint site designs, document templates, and Microsoft Teams templates; all to help better gather and manage data and documents.

• A new enterprise information archiving features to natively archive 3rd party data into Microsoft 365 compliance, new solutions for Records Management, joint Supervision and other features to help regulated organizations achieve complex compliance requirements, and new out of the box classifiers harness intelligence to identify questionable content for further review.  
• Open standards development options lead by a single end point - Microsoft Graph API – alongside a powerful, consistent OneDrive Files API.

Microsoft 365 turbocharges your move to the cloud

Microsoft offers the broadest range of features and services to facilitate your move to the cloud. Out-of-box tools, such as the SharePoint Migration Tool, lets you migrate content from file shares and on-premises SharePoint farms to Microsoft 365. Microsoft FastTrack offers self-serve and engineer-led planning, deployment, and adoption services. Finally, Microsoft Services and the industry’s largest partner ecosystem stand ready to bring their vast knowledge and experience to accelerate your planning, deployment and adoption.

We’re excited to share the latest updates to Microsoft 365 experiences. To see these technologies in action, watch the SharePoint Conference 2019 Keynote, and all SPC19-related blog posts published today to the SharePoint community blog.

We can’t wait to see how you collaborate at the speed of light.

-- Mark Kashman, senior product manager – Microsoft 365 Marketing