Today’s hybrid workplace poses many challenges, including maintaining employee productivity, streamlining communications, and facilitating collaboration. The good news is that Microsoft 365’s dynamic new features can help organizations overcome these problems. Let’s take a look at the productivity suite’s most promising upgrades, which make it better poised to support hybrid work than ever.

Excel Live

Last year, Microsoft introduced PowerPoint Live, a feature that allowed participants in a Microsoft Meeting to actively interact with presentations in real time. This year, Microsoft applies the same idea to the Excel app, giving us Excel Live.

To access Excel Live, simply select the Share tray in Teams, scroll down to Excel Live, and select the Excel workbook you’d like to share with the meeting participants. Whether you’re working on a sales report or analyzing financial data, your team can process data in real-time and jump right in to edit a workbook without switching between apps and leaving the meeting screen.

Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that fosters connection, growth, purpose, and insight. It is included in the Microsoft 365 subscription, but can also be purchased separately at $9.00 per user per month.

Viva in Microsoft 365 offers two key services, Viva Connections and Viva Engage.

Viva Connections

Viva Connections provides employees with timely news, relevant conversations, and other resources all in one place. Not only does it offer a personalized and branded employee experience, but it also appears in the apps that employees use every day, like Microsoft Teams. 

By connecting everyone in the company, Viva Connections unites employees around the organization’s vision and mission and top priorities. Viva Connections can also be deployed with minimal effort, as it builds on Microsoft 365’s existing capabilities, like Yammer and SharePoint.

Viva Engage

Viva Engage bonds people throughout the company regardless of location or time. By using the Viva Engage app in Teams, organizations can strengthen community ties, leadership engagement, and knowledge sharing while employees build their own professional networks.

Viva Engage can also serve as the platform where employees connect with mentors and colleagues, brainstorm or crowdsource ideas, highlight their experience, and find belongingness in various communities at work.

Teams Connect Shared Channels

With this feature, you can work together with people both in and out of your organization in one central space. It pushes the boundaries of what’s possible when it comes to collaboration, as it enables everyone to communicate, meet, share files and ideas, and create apps together regardless of location and which company they work for.

To start collaborating with users from an external Microsoft 365 organization, you’ll need to set up B2B direct connect. Note that you need to configure this setting for every company you wish to communicate with. Another way to connect with all external organizations is to enable shared channels with them.

Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform is a modern contact center solution that helps service teams engage customers through voice, video, and other digital channels. It is powered by trusted Microsoft services, such as Teams, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Azure, taking engagement to the next level.

In addition, Nuance’s conversational AI and automation bring faster issue resolution times and more personalized service to the contact center. Nuance can also help safeguard customer experiences by streamlining contact center security with integrated biometric authentication and fraud prevention.

These are just some of the many new features in Microsoft 365 that cater to hybrid workers To get the latest updates on this topic, drop us a line. Our experts are always ready to help.