Here’s everything that’s new in Office 365 for August 2016, including Word Researcher and Editor

Kellogg Brengel

Today the Office blog posted a roundup of the latest Office 365 news from the past month. The list of developments for Office 365 spans everything from new security features for big Enterprise E5 tier customer to a new Researcher capability in Word which will help countless students and academics. Here is the quick roundup of everything released for Office 365 recently.

The new features the Office Team is excited about

  • Azure Rights Management extended to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for Android. This extension completes full support for information rights management (IRM) on all Office Mobile apps. So now Office 365 users can “open, read and review rights-protected emails and Office documents on any device” regardless of it running Windows, MacOS, iOS, or Android.
  • Advanced Threat Protection and Advance Security Management come to Office 365 Enterprise E5 tier.
  • Microsoft Word Researched and Editor. These two new services intelligently help Office 365 users write within Word. Researcher helps writers look up information to cite for say an academic paper or a student’s book report. And once you use Researcher to find facts and figures to cite, Researcher automatically creates bibliography entries for that citation. Editor is another intelligent service within Word which is described as a digital writing assistant that provides advanced proofing and editing. We covered the release of these two new services last month and you can read more about them here.
  • Focused Inbox and @mentions extended to Outlook apps on every platform.
  • Modern SharePoint lists rolled out to SharePoint Online.
  • One-click integration of PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

Researcher-in-Word-2016-(1)
Word Researcher

In addition to Office 365 features, the Office Team also rounded up some of the bigger news items from their blog and around the web. They include:

The Office Team’s roundup of Office 365 news from around the web

Office 365 Bookings
Office 365 Bookings

The Office blog forgot to mention some other Office 365 news that is worth catching up on as well. Office 365 can now also leverage a new API for Excel to call out data stored within worksheets across other apps. Microsoft also announced a new tool, Bookings, for Office 365 to help companies deal with the task of booking appointments. As Office 365 continues to gain momentum and outpace other cloud-based productivity services like Google Apps, it will be interesting to see what the Office Team innovates with next.