Microsoft are releasing a huge overhaul and new look for the Office.com (and the office app) experience. This will make it even easier to find all the content associated with you and your teams, simplify and enhance the search experience and bring all your apps, tasks, templates and actions together in one place.
AI Overhaul
The main thing you notice first off is how much more simple and intuitive the Office.com pages now look.
Microsoft goal here has been to put you and your most important work at the forefront of the experience. The power of Microsoft 365 will anticipate which files (and people) are most important to your work at a given moment based on your habits and routines, the docs or projects you are working on, the activity happening within them and what you need to do to accomplish your work.
On the left pane, is a familiar navigation pane where users can quickly get to things like the new My Content page and Create Pages making it simple and easy to search for or create new content across Microsoft 365. As new fluid components like Loop (also annouced last week), these will also surface themselves here.
Home page updates includes new or overhauled sections around providing:
- Recommended Actions
- Quick Access
- My Content
- Creating content
Recommended Actions
Recommended actions analyse and bring together anything that needs (or may need) your attention or action. From here you can jump into your upcoming meeting, add (or complete) a To-Do or Planner task, reply to recent comments in documents, and see potential actions you have discussed in an email.
In addition to the Recommended Actions on the home page, you can also find content actions in line on any of the content lists within Office.com by clicking on the “triple dot” menu.
Quick Access
The Quick Access section let’s your easily collaborate on content by Sharing via Teams or booking time to review content with your team or manger. This section is all about helping you jump into and review content that’s important to you. This content can be viewed as either a list or adaptive cards for a more visual layout depending on your preference.
Microsoft have made it really easy to filter this content by recently opened content, content you have shared with others, content around a particular topic, or person and group and even your favourite content.
My Content
Here you can view all your content and again view it by recently opened, shared, and favourites or custom filters to find what you need. As with quick access, you can leverage the powerful filters to quickly find the content you need.
As above, you can easily filter by type of document, activity and time and unlike most searches there no need to set a number of results as it the results like just adapts as you scroll.
The power and depth of search filters is very extensive and even contains specific filters like document you are @mentioned in or where an action was assigned.
You also have the ability to browse by People and Meetings. When you click on People for example you can view an easy to digest card view of people and documents that have been shared. When you click on Meetings, you can find all meeting content like recordings, shared documents or adaptive components, notes, and chat from your previous meetings.
Microsoft have also added some cool quick access tools, for example you can convert docs to PDF, Share docs straight into Teams, Add things to your Calendar, and Add to To Do lists.
Creating content
This update makes it easier than ever to create new content across all the Office suite. As well as being able to create new blank documents, users can so create content using an extensive set of new tools and templates. Everything from surveys and brainstorming sessions, Power BI reporting dashboards, project plans and dynamic presentations. IT can also customise the templates to allow employees to have quick access to templates from your organisations branded content by having all corporate templates in one place central place.
Availability and Release
At Ignite last week, Microsoft said this new experience would start rolling out in the coming weeks to insiders and then targeted release channels before making its way to everyone BY January 2022.
You can watch a video from Ignite on the new experience here.
