Microsoft delivered a ton of new software in the third quarter, with the release of Windows 10 on July 29 and Office 16 on September 22. Many of the new capabilities in Windows 10 and Office 16 have to do with collaboration and personal workflow optimization, but you almost need a lexicon to understand what is what.
Here's a look at eight of these new tools and a description of what they are intended to do.
1. Microsoft Office Graph - This Office 365 tool connects people to content, conversations, and the people around them. It is able to track email, documents, chats, audio/video calls, and all of the interactions among people who are using Office tools and, ultimately, Skype for Business.
Office Graph is going to be at the heart of future Microsoft collaboration capabilities and productivity tools by providing APIs for other tools to examine and display relationships among people, data, and communications.
Office Graph enables information to surface regarding what someone is working on, who they have shared a document with, who they have collaborated with, what projects they are part of, etc. When coupled with Skype's chat, calling, and Web collaboration capabilities, Office Graph provides a powerful profile of how people and organizations work together.
While not announced by Microsoft, I see the day when companies can use Office Graph data to identify highly functioning individuals and teams. When benchmarked across organizations, this information may have predictive capabilities about individual performance and overall company performance based on collaborative practices.
2. Office Delve - This is a social networking information app powered by Office Graph. It is designed to show customized, relevant content to Office 365 users based on with whom and on what they are working. Delve requires SharePoint Online services and is available for people who have Office 365 Enterprise (E1, E3, and E4), Office 365 Education (E1, E3, and E4), Office 365 Government (E1, E3, and E4), Office 365 Business Essentials, and Office 365 Business Premium accounts.
The Delve home page is like a dashboard showing what close colleagues are currently working on. It also has a "Me" page that shows your own profile and the recent documents on which you have recently worked.
Clicking a person's name under the People tab at the left displays a person's page with two additional tabs: Activity and Profile. Clicking on the Activity tab shows on which projects that person is working. Clicking on the Profile tab shows that person's profile. And, of course, the ability to connect via Skype for Business is embedded.
Delve is available as an app on Android and iOS devices, suggesting that Microsoft is trying to make its capabilities, in addition to Office, available on third-party operating systems.
3. Clutter - This Office 365 feature in Microsoft Outlook filters low-priority mail by moving it from the Inbox to a special "Clutter" folder. Exchange actually does the work by tracking emails you typically read and those you don't read, and moves those you typically do not read to the Clutter folder. Clutter's filtering logic kicks in after Exchange Server has filtered out any junk mail.
Clutter is one way Microsoft is trying to help users deal with information overload. Microsoft claims Clutter will get better and better with time and use by trying to understand what you don't typically read based on a number of criteria including a) the sender, b) whether you've participated in the conversation, c) if you are the only recipient, and d) the message's importance.
I have used Clutter, which Microsoft first introduced in an Office 365 upgrade to Outlook 2015, for several months now. Thus far, I have found it of some, but limited, value in filtering messages.
4. Office 365 Planner - This new tool, due for Q4 release, allows teams to organize teamwork in a simple, visual way. Teams can create plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat with one another, and get progress updates.
Each plan has its own "Board," which is represented by a Planner Card on the dashboard. Cards or plans can have due dates, attachments, categories, and conversations associated with them. Planner does not have the horsepower of Microsoft Project, nor the functionality. It is really more of a lightweight tool for project organization. In some ways, it resembles Yammer, but is not full Yammer either. So think of it as lightweight Microsoft Project coupled with lightweight Yammer. It does have some resemblance to Unify Circuit conversations or Cisco Spark rooms. Of course, Skype for Business capability is woven into Planner so that individuals working on the same plan can easily communicate.
Planner preview will be available in Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E4, Office 365 Education, Office 365 Education E3, Office 365 Education E4, Office 365 Business Essentials, and Office 365 Business Premium plans. When generally available, Planner will be included in several additional Office 365 plans.
5. Microsoft Continuum - This capability allows a Lumia mobile phone to run Windows 10 apps. To use this capability, a Lumia user would first connect a monitor, mouse, and keyboard to a display dock. Then using a USB cable from the phone, the user could run the full Windows 10 desktop, along with any Windows 10 apps including Office or the Edge browser, displayed on the monitor at a resolution of 1080p. Continuum also supports connectivity with OneDrive for storage.
In its present incarnation, Continuum can run multiple apps simultaneously, but only displays one app interface at a time, much like most phones allow the display of only one app at a time. Thus, while Edge and Word could be running at the same time, only one interface is visible, but you can toggle as well as cut and paste between them.
Will Continuum replace a PC? I'm not sure about that, but it may make for some interesting use cases for budget computing, mobile computing, and working in hotels or conference rooms. Some industry watchers have speculated that if Continuum ran something like Citrix desktop, then you could have your entire toolkit available from your mobile phone. This is clearly a Windows phone play for now.
6. Microsoft HoloLens - This is an untethered, holographic computer that enables high-definition holograms. In one demo, Microsoft showed how to create a holographic image of its popular Minecraft game, displaying it for the user on a wall or a table.
In the collaboration space, imagine using HoloLens for video and content collaboration. Polycom just announced a multiscreen, workspace collaboration solution branded RealPresence Centro that allows people to sit around a room and enjoy a 360-degree video collaboration experience. Similarly, people wearing HoloLens headsets could view all other participants in 3D, with content sharing as holographic images.
7. Windows Hello - This technology provides hardware-based authentication security and is, in part, intended to enable people to authenticate without requiring them to remember passwords. While Microsoft has had fingerprint authentication for some time, Windows Hello takes this farther by adding facial recognition and iris scanning as new ways to authenticate a user.
Facial recognition is accomplished via a camera based on the Intel RealSense F200 reference design. This device actually has three cameras: one for infrared, one for 3D, and a traditional webcam. Facial recognition is done at a distance (6 inches to about 3 feet) while iris scanning is done very close up. The iris scanning capability can either scan the iris (it looks at the patterns in the colored part of the eye) or the retina, looking at the blood vessel patterns in the back of the eye. Iris scanners will be built into Windows 10 mobile phones such as the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL.
8. Cortana - This personal digital assistant is Microsoft's answer to Apple's Siri. Cortana can help people search for files on their computers, perform Internet searches, manage calendars, and do speech to text. Cortana supports a notebook that allows people to customize Cortana content. For example, Cortana can track weather near where you are, keep you updated on news or music topics of interest, provide travel assistance for things like flight delays or weather at the destination, or provide traffic updates and routes for faster ways of getting home.
Next page: Will These Tools Make People and Organizations More Effective?
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Will These Tools Make People and Organizations More Effective?
Overall, these Microsoft collaboration and personal workspace tools feature a lot to like, but the user interface is going to be key to their usefulness. In using some of the new Windows 10 capabilities for presenting me with the most applicable information, I have found the interface confusing and sometimes difficult to navigate, given how the tools present the information. That being said, the tools do have tremendous potential.
I really like the social networking graphing capabilities Office Graph provides, as much from a capabilities perspective as from a management perspective. Office Graphs could potentially allow a manager to judge or gauge how well people are collaborating. It can also help identify superstars based on node analysis and provide quantitative feedback on how people could collaborate better. It may show when people collaborate too much as well as when they collaborate too little. It can also show levels of collaboration among teams in an organization, which may be critical to future organizational success.
In my opinion, Delve and Planner could be combined as they provide significant overlap. Merging the Planner capabilities with Delve would allow managers and team members a common application, single dashboard view of the projects a team is working on, who is working on what, and how they are interacting.
Clutter is OK, but as I mentioned I have not found it that helpful yet. Yes, it does filter out some email, but after a few months of using it, it does not filter out enough email, nor does it sort it into subfolders of interest, to make it extremely useful. Perhaps future revisions will improve its utility.
I really like the potential of Microsoft HoloLens. Microsoft did not showcase use cases of using HoloLens as a personal collaboration endpoint, but I think it could be a very compelling for representing people and data.
Microsoft is certainly trying to innovate and provide new ways to work with all of these tools. Note that most of these are Office 365-based, further strengthening Microsoft's cloud-based productivity and collaboration capabilities. While it may be too early to tell whether all of these tools will ultimately survive, I am highly encouraged to see Microsoft stretch the collaboration and personal productivity envelope with this suite of individual and group capabilities.
