Get rich insights from your data with intelligence in Excel
Those of us on the Excel team have been investing in intelligence for a long time, with the goal of making analysis easy and intuitive for everyone. Last week in this Office 365 blog post, we provided a closer look at a new feature called Insights. Insights is our newest artificial intelligence-powered capability that will roll out in preview to Office Insiders this month. We’re really excited about how well Insights will work alongside existing intelligent, results-oriented features like Flash Fill, Chart Recommendations, and PivotTable Recommendations, all of which are longtime user favorites. Read on for more information on Insights and the broader set of similar features already available in Excel. Releasing a preview of Insights Insights is a new service that automatically highlights patterns it detects in your data, helping you discover and analyze new insights such as trends, outliers, and other useful analyses and visualizations. It will look for interesting trends in your data and provide quick summaries with PivotTables and charts. Because this feature is powered by machine learning, it will provide increasingly advanced analysis as usage grows. We’re releasing Insights as a preview for Office Insiders this month. Automatic insights powered by AI Intelligence in Excel Excel is the go-to tool for millions when it comes to data and insights. Intelligence features in Excel help you accelerate your end-to-end workflow, from connecting and shaping data to understanding, analyzing, visualizing, and forecasting intricate information. Radically simple and powerful experiences in newer capabilities like Get & Transform and Power Pivot enable you to meet increasingly complex data needs by yourself. Here are some more examples of the Excel capabilities that help you uncover hidden data insights and be more productive. Recommended PivotTables—Recommended PivotTables is perfect for users who have limited experience with PivotTables. When you use this feature, Excel determines a meaningful layout by matching your data with the most suitable areas in the PivotTable. This helps give you a starting point for additional experimentation. After a recommended PivotTable is created, you can explore different orientations and rearrange fields to achieve your specific results. Recommended Charts—Instead of sifting through the dozens of options in Excel, the Recommended Charts tool automatically recommends a chart for you based on highlighted spreadsheet data, saving you time and giving you the best visual for your needs. Quick Analysis—The Quick Analysis tool provides immediate access to a gallery of formatting styles and visualizations, including charts, tables, formulas, and sparklines. It automatically recommends the best approach for analyzing your selected range of data, and then produces an immediate preview so you can quickly judge different options. For example, you don’t need to be a PivotTables expert to use them: Quick Analysis will generate one for you, giving you more time to analyze data instead of organizing it. Just like other Excel innovations, Quick Analysis was designed to save you time and help you quickly surface the right insights. Conditional Formatting—One of our customers’ favorite tools, Conditional Formatting gives you the flexibility to write rules that format data sets in a specific way. For example, it can highlight duplicates, add color scales, and incorporate icons to help you quickly identify anomalies and patterns. Error Checking Options—If you’re working with a lot of data, it’s easy to mistype a number or enter the wrong formula. Excel helps you avoid these errors with notifications that appear when a set of numbers or formulas seems wrong or inconsistent. These notifications also give advice for fixing the error, saving you time looking for a solution. AutoFill and Flash Fill—Both AutoFill and Flash Fill were built with one goal in mind: to save you time entering and manipulating data. With AutoFill, you can quickly populate an entire column with sequential data, like dates. Flash Fill works similarly, but recommends inputs based on data in adjacent cells. Flash Fill is often used to help people transform or clean their data for further analysis. Map Charts—Excel can automatically detect geospatial information in spreadsheets using Bing to produce data-infused maps. These maps help you segment data by country, state, county, or postal code to identify regional patterns. One-click forecasting—If you have historical time-based data, you can use Excel’s one-click forecasting to create a forecast. This feature creates a new worksheet that contains both a table of the historical and predicted values and a chart that expresses this data. A forecast can help you predict things like future sales, inventory requirements, and consumer trends. Plus, several partners have built Azure-enabled Excel tools that incorporate machine learning into the forecasting feature for more robust, customized insights. Get & Transform—One of the most significant additions to Excel 2016 was Get & Transform, a powerful set of tools that provide fast, easy data gathering and shaping capabilities. Using Get & Transform, you can connect, combine, and refine data sources to meet your analysis needs. You can connect to a whole host of data types like Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and data providers like Exchange, SalesForce, Dynamics, even Facebook. Power Pivot—Power Pivot performs powerful data analysis and creates sophisticated data models. With Power Pivot, you can mash up millions of rows of data from various sources, perform information analysis rapidly, and share insights easily. We also recently announced that Excel will soon be able to understand more data types than just text and numbers. Plus, it will be able to augment your data based on public and enterprise data sources over time. Lastly, we’ll be releasing a capability that enables developers and data scientists to create new functions that business users can leverage for more customized analyses. Stay tuned. If you’d like to stay connected to Excel and its community, read our Excel blog posts, and send us ideas and suggestions for the next version of Excel through UserVoice. You can also follow Excel on Facebook and Twitter. Insights in Excel is starting to roll out in preview to Office 365 commercial subscribers enrolled in Office Insiders in the United States this monthSalesforce Integration with Skype For Business
A while back you may have heard that there is a way to integrate Skype for Business with Salesforce. We just posted an article to the Skype for Business Community Blog detailing how to do this. Check it out here. Salesforce currently has this feature available as a public Beta. Over time we hope to see continued enhancements to this integration. Let us know what you think!Did you miss Ignite? Join Jamie Stark and Sean Wilson recap Ignite live at 5pm.
Live From Microsoft Ignite Jamie Stark and Sean Wilson will walk through Ignite talking about the latest updates we have announced in Skype for Business and good news from the Show Floor as well as a quick recaps of what the show has been like. Join us at 5PM Eastern Time Todyay Thursday September 29th at http://aka.ms/sfbcast.
SfB Broadcast Ep.49 Q&A - 3 things to consider when bringing your existing VTC into a modern meeting
Hi All The broadcast with Delanda Coleman and Eddie Clifton can now be viewed online here on YouTube. Please feel free to post any questions before that you would like to ask. Here are the questions that were asked during the broadcast. What's the difference between this and the Polycom RealConnect Solution? Polycom have RealConnect on premise (Clariti) and RealConnect for O365, both very different. Pexip Infinity Fusion wold be more similar with on premise Clariti, but also very different in how the solution is architected. Please contact us at (microsoft at pexip dot com) if you would any further information. Is there any plan to run PexIP in Azure like Polycom RealConnect? Pexip can already run and be deployed fully to Azure that you manage yourself. See here for further details https://docs.pexip.com/admin/azure_guidelines.htm So the Outlook add-in needs to be installed separately? No, there is no Outlook plugin needed, the extra information is added from within the Skype for Business Server Meeting configuration. An overview on the details is available here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt426640.aspx%20 What is the pricing Model...? There is a platform fee and then per user pricing model. When you say "Per user per month... Do you mean EVERY person in my org?" Not at all. It is quite likely that quite a few of your employees will never benefit from VTC interop, so you likley start out with a subset of users that will, maybe knowledge workers rather than the frontline workers would require a license. With this Pexip Gateway interop do we need SfB VIS ? No, there is no need for the VIS role with Pexip Infinity Fusion. Does content sharing works at 1080p resolution? or higher desktop resolutions? Pexip can handle 1080p content resolution whilst in calls with Skype users or meetings whether RDP or VbSS. Does Pexip provide "Join Buttons" for SFB meetings on VTC endpoints? Pexip does not have the "Join Button" feature, but we make it super simple to just either drag a VTC into a meeting or the user can dial the Skype Meeting ID to join the call. Additionally, if you have a Polycom system that is registered to Exchange for the room calendar, then if that system has the Skype Meeting invite, it can read the meeting ID and dial the conference ID via their Join button when it appears on the screen. We can also work with 3rd parties to provide the Join button to Cisco and Polycom VTCs and then dial out automatically to any other 3rd party VTC vendors. Any roadmap for enabling media bypass? Registering an endpoint to Pexip nails media up to the conferencing node instead of making it point to point media. This is something we are researching within R&D at present. Nothing committed as of today. The Pexip invite footer added to Skype meeting invites, is that enabled in Exchange/Skype server? Can it be enabled for a subset of users? The footer is configured in the Skype for Business Server. This is standard configuration on the Microsoft side. Some details here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt426640.aspx I believe this is for all users of Skype for Business users. I am not sure if this can be configured on a policy, best to check with your local Skype guru. Can we also integrate 3 screen Video endpoints? Pexip does not directly support with Immersive 3 screen systems with the TIP protocol. However, it can be used as a gateway from say Skype for Business users to the immersive 3 screen system via the existing MCU for telepresence systems. Many customers are doing this today with Pexip. Alternatively, Pexip can make use of the central screen using standards based VTC signalling and codecs. Does the Pexip solution work with Skype for Business Online? Yes, Pexip can work with Skype for Business Online. Details available https://docs.pexip.com/sfb/dmz_example.htm. Does this Pexip solution provide onsite MCU as well? Pexip Infinity is an MCU, but Pexip Infinity Fusion is our Gateway only version certified for Skype for Business. Do I need a 3rd party Outlook add-in for the meeting template to be updated with those custom VTC details? No, no 3rd party add-in needed to update the Skype Meeting template. This is done on the Skype Server side. Full details here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt426640.aspx How close can we get to a "one button to push" VTC join into a Skype MCU hosted meeting? You can do that with a 3rd party software working with Pexip today. With Polycom endpoints registered to Exchange, then the VTC can collect the join instructions from the meeting invite and users can click to join. However, it is super simple to just either drag a VTC into a meeting or the user can dial the Skype Meeting ID to join the call. Does this integration or InterOp provide OBTP for legacy VTCs? Pexip does not provide this directly. It can be achieved with 3rd party software or with Polycom endpoints registered to Exchange, it can interpret the Skype Meeting invite and it then just dials the conference ID when the Join button is pressed. However, it is super simple to just either drag a VTC into a meeting or the user can dial the Skype Meeting ID to join the call. Does SfB support 1080p30 video? and content at 1080p30? Details on Skype for Business video and content resolutions can be found here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj688132.aspx Can you register devices to Pexip Infinity Fusion? Yes, you can register SIP and H.323 devices to Pexip Infinity. Will Pexip be wearing some crazy pants at Ignite? Of course we will :)
Ignite Recap on Meeting Devices and Interoperability Capabilities
Microsoft Ignite was a tremendous event for Microsoft and our partners and customers. We introduced a new vision for intelligent communication and had some exciting announcements regarding Microsoft Teams. Comprehensive meeting capabilities are critical to this vision and we are excited about the expanded ecosystem that is growing in this space.Join our Broadcast - POLYCOM AND SKYPE FOR BUSINESS TEAM: VIDEO INTEROP IN THE CLOUD
Join Polycom and the Skype for Business team to hear and see a demo of the new Polycom cloud-based video interoperability service for Office 365 users. Built directly into the Skype for Business workflow, users can easily use this service to create an online meeting that Office 365 and other video endpoint users can join. Join the Skype Meeting Broadcast, Friday, September 9, 2016, at 9:00 a.m. PST. Speakers: Angela Donohue, Albert Kooiman, Adam JacobsInterop SfB and standard-based sip clients
Hi everyone, i would like to know how you handle Meetings where your participant wants to connect with his "legacy" sip/h.323 vc. Do you use something like pexip and let it act as a gateway or did you use a cloud based service like Starleaf Medley. Greets Jörg
