Productivity geeks can now rejoice with recent leaked documents from Microsoft indicating the launch of Office 2016 on September 22.
Microsoft considers the update to be incremental, but there are substantial changes. From a visual perspective, styling between Windows, OS X, and mobile apps will be more consistent as each application receives a boldly titled color bar reflecting the icon color. End users will also experience improved collaborative editing, rights management, and data analysis capabilities.
Enterprise clients will be able to move on from the E4 plan with Office 2016 with the introduction of Office E5. The new E5 offers a new cloud-based PBX capability, enabling businesses to use Office 365 for all their IT and infrastructure needs. This will allow businesses to move more of their infrastructure and productivity services to the cloud, while also taking advantage of upgraded data analytics and security capabilities.
If you’re a business owner thinking about an upgrade, there’s a lot to be excited about. We combed through some of the new features so you didn’t have to. Check them out:
1. New data-driven features
Data-driven organizations will be very excited to get their hands on Office 2016. Microsoft has included new chart types, data linking into Visio, Excel Power Query integration, forecasting functions, and pivot table features. You’ll be able to view your data in numerous ways while forecasting the future and adapting business intelligence to business decisions.
2. Improved email functionality
New Office 2016 features also demonstrate that email is not going away anytime soon. The new Clutter feature in Outlook will let end users move low priority messages out of their inboxes into a dedicated folder. Additionally, Office 2016 also streamlines the adding of attachments and provides improvements on searching for colleagues to communicate with. In all, handling email is much easier.
3. Collaboration from the cloud
Cloud-driven collaboration is bigger than ever in Office 2016. End users will now be able to easily share files and collaborate, streamline the way they save files in OneDrive for business, and see how others have made edits in Word. Deeper OneDrive and Outlook integration mean file recipients can also click to an attachment right from an email message. A frictionless experience will ultimately mean more productivity.
4. Visual improvements
End users who use Office for visual projects can get excited as well. The productivity suite comes with visual improvements, including higher DPI support at 250% and 300% for document previews, correct image insertion, and the ability to edit large charts and SmartArt immediately. Documents can now be completed in a quicker manner without delay.
5. Greater IT control and manageability
Finally, your IT department will get more control and manageability with this release of Office 2016. Microsoft Excel now has Data Loss Protection (DLP) which aids in the management of sensitive information while multi-factor authentication streamlines application security through one single-sign-on. Azure departmental templates are available as well through the new Information Rights Management feature.
Get Started on Office Applications Today
What do you think of the new additions? Will they enable you to be more productive? Check out what we offer from the Microsoft Office line of applications on the myhosting.com Marketplace today, and transform your business.
