Microsoft Office 2016 Available Worldwide With New Collaboration Tools

Microsoft Office, the suite of workplace tools so commonly used that this very article is being written in it and most people reading this will have an Office application open at the same time, is about to launch its latest version. The worldwide general availability for Office 2016 has just been announced, and along with the usual tools comes an assortment of collaboration features.

The new Microsoft Office 2016 includes new or upgraded features, which are designed to allow users to work together more easily. Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote now have co-authoring, including a real-time typing experience in Word so co-authors working on the same document can see the changes made in real time.

Office 365 now has Groups availability through the Outlook Groups app, which is designed to help teams organize and work together across their tools. That’s in addition to the new Office 365 Planner, a team planning app designed to organize and manage tasks within a dashboard.

The latest version of Office is also designed to make Skype for Business accessible directly from the Office apps. This way, users can instant message, share screens, and communicate via voice or video directly in their documents. Microsoft is also introducing a new way for teams to communicate and work together across devices and apps with GigJam, which will be available in private preview.

Of course, there are more additions to Office 2016, such as new smart tools and insights, as well as upgraded security, but the slew of new collaboration tools is perhaps the most noteworthy. Almost everything has been upgraded with the intention of letting people work together on a single document, without needing to constantly send it back and forth between everybody involved.

“With Office 2016 Microsoft firmly and correctly focuses on collaboration. The co-editing features are really a ‘catch up’ move to Google,” says Kevin Kieller, UC Expert for UCStrategies. “However, the integration of Skype for Business within Word, Excel and PowerPoint are class leading. The Office bundle is incredibly powerful and organizations should think about how they can best drive usage and adoption of these new features so that the upgrade delivers true business results.”

Office 365 subscribers will be seeing the new and upgraded tools soon, although Office 2016 can also be purchased individually.

For more information, visit www.microsoft.com.