Office 365

Microsoft 365 is getting a handy new Word feature today: voice transcription. With this, you can either upload a recording to Word or record something new within the app itself and have Word automatically transcribe it for you. The implementation within Word sounds like it's fleshed out and quite capable, but there are some big restrictions you should be aware of before you dive feet first into the world of Microsoft 365 transcription.

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Zoom might be the household name for video conferencing these days because of convenience (and hype) but its rivals are slowly but surely surpassing it in terms of features. Microsoft, in particular, is building up Teams to go beyond the usual end-users and turning into something that would better appeal to business customers that pay Microsoft big bucks. For this round, it's adding the ability to have as much as 20,000 participants in a meeting as well as choosing a branded background, for a price, of course.

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When Microsoft created Teams to compete with then rising communication star Slack, it probably didn't predict a workplace that would instantly become practically virtual because of a pandemic. That has become an opportunity and a motivation for the company to quickly push out features that will help workers, managers, and employers adjust to what has been dubbed as the new normal. Microsoft is now announcing its biggest feature dump for Teams yet and it unsurprisingly starts with trying to one-up the video conferencing king, Zoom.

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Microsoft delivered a news alert today tipping a "massive" phishing campaign using COVID-19 and Excel files to hook in unsuspecting users. Much like MOST phishing campaigns, users could avoid any harmful nonsense by avoiding downloading attached files or entering personal information prompted by email. This email campaign began on May 12, 2020, and posed as the Johns Hopkins Center to deliver a so-called "WHO COVID-19 SITUATION REPORT."

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Microsoft 365 is getting new text predictions, echoing Gmail's Smart Compose by adding easier ways to compose replies in Outlook. The new feature will suggest words and phrases as users write messages in Outlook.com and Outlook on the web, based on predictions as to what they're likely to want to say.

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Despite numerous attempts to kill it, the venerable email still remains one of the most-used forms of digital communication today, especially in businesses. Although relatively more secure than that other ancient messaging technology, SMS, email has its own set of flaws that are triggered even by well-intentioned users. One such problem is known as a Reply-All Storm and Microsoft Office 365 is now implementing a way to prevent that from taking down the company's email servers.

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Microsoft isn't just unveiling new Microsoft 365 subscription plans for families today, but also renaming its existing subscription services to make them fit with the new schemes. From April 21, for instance, Office 365 Business Essentials will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic.

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Microsoft has revealed the latest expansion of its cloud services, Microsoft 365, with Personal & Family subscriptions rolling out to all subscribers from April 21. It'll include features across the Office suite and in a new Teams for Consumer app, with functionality that helps polish up papers, avoid biased language, manage finances and more. Meanwhile there'll be tools to track teen drivers and control what kids can access online and in apps, along with a leaked password monitoring system keeping an eye on the dark web for stolen credentials.

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Five years ago, Microsoft suggested we "try the new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps", as the lot replaced the "Office Mobile" app. This week, Microsoft decided they were better off pushing those apps back into a single app, now re-named "Office." If you never deleted the Office Mobile app from your phone back then, all you need to do now is hit the update button. Easy as pie!

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Gathering everything you need for a work or school project can be a big project in itself, and it looks like Microsoft is plotting new Outlook features to help with that. Over the weekend, a new feature called Outlook Spaces surfaced. Details are still fairly slim as we're lacking an official reveal from Microsoft, but it appears that Spaces will be baked into Outlook for Web and let you organize the stuff you need for a project in one place.

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This morning Microsoft Office 365's own Microsoft Teams was indeed down this morning due to an authentication issue. The service was interrupted and/or completely down and out (for users attempting to access during the period of interruption) for approximately two hours. This issue occurred at around 8:30 AM Central Time, and was rectified approximately two hours later.

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Cortana is about to get a lot more chatty, with Microsoft launching a new Play My Emails feature for its assistant at Ignite 2019 today. The new Outlook mobile feature is joined by a new voice for Cortana, adding a masculine option to the existing feminine voice the assistant first debuted with.

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