On Thursday, local time, Microsoft carried out a series of updates to the Office office suite, aimed at adapting to the new work scenario of more people working at home and improving work efficiency.At present, Microsoft’s corporate customers are preparing to reopen their offices and at the same time allow more employees to move to remote offices. When the epidemic broke out, Microsoft’s Teams application business for chat and video calls grew rapidly. Now, Microsoft is working hard to ensure that the Office office suite can adapt to the so-called mixed office scenario, that is, some employees work in the office while some employees continue to work from home.
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Microsoft said that the updates to the Teams application will make it easier for people making video calls in conference rooms to see colleagues who work remotely. Microsoft pointed out that the new hardware configured in the conference room allows all users who join Teams to play videos.
PPT has also added a laser pointer function, the presenter can highlight part of the content during the presentation, so that users who are not in the meeting room can see the emphasized content. In addition, even if people are not sitting together, the updated Office suite allows users to collaborate on revisions of documents through features called “streaming components” in OneNote, Outlook, and Teams.
Microsoft has also introduced several new features in its whiteboard application, allowing more people to doodle, paste notes and paste pictures on the virtual whiteboard, which is more like a physical whiteboard in the office.
Ian Mikutel, Microsoft’s chief product manager, said that after the outbreak, Microsoft’s customers “rang from being interested in digital whiteboards to needing digital whiteboard solutions.” In March this year, Microsoft stated that the number of monthly active users of Microsoft’s whiteboard application was 12 times that of the same period last year.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, customer demand for virtual whiteboards has continued to increase. According to Nicole Herskowitz, general manager of Microsoft’s Teams application, this has led Microsoft to add new features more quickly. Microsoft introduced the whiteboard application in 2017 and integrated it into the Teams application in 2019.
The epidemic has made virtual whiteboard applications more important. Software sales company Okta said in February this year that from November 2019 to October 2020, the whiteboard program of the startup Miro was the second fastest growing application in its sales business, second only to Amazon. Miro claims that it has 20 million users and its software allows multiple users to use the virtual whiteboard at the same time.
According to Okta’s data, the third fastest growing application is the application design collaboration software Figma, which people use to collaborate on application design. In April of this year, San Francisco-based Figma also launched FigJam, a whiteboard tool integrated with major applications.
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