My biggest concern about new technology has been whether it is actually making us more productive, so I was pleased to see Microsoft putting a renewed emphasis on productivity at this year's Microsoft Ignite conference.

In his technical keynote, Corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro said Microsoft 365 was shifting from "convenient way to buy Windows, Office, and EMS" into "the world's productivity cloud."

The company introduced a variety of new features within the Office 365 family, including everything from a new mobile Office app, Yammer community messaging added to teams, and new AI-inspired features in the core Office products, to an ambitious plan to convert data into knowledge called Project Cortex. Some of these features are available to everyone now, others will roll out over the next year, and some apply just to enterprise customers.

The underlying technology that dominated the discussion of most of the new features was AI, and in particular, machine learning techniques. Spataro talked a lot about "everyday AI"—in other words, how Microsoft is building AI into many of its products that people will just use, rather than thinking about the AI.

The New Office App and Outlook Changes

The first demo of the keynote was of a new feature for mobile Outlook that lets you say "Play My Emails" and have the system read back intelligent summaries of messages. It is now available on iOS.

Microsoft's Mary Sheppard showed how this can let you do things like flagging an important message. It can now work with a masculine voice for Cortana (in addition to the female voice that has always been part of the product.) Outlook also is supposed to be getting natural language search, to do things such as "show me emails from last week," though that didn't work in the demo.

Outlook is also gaining a Scheduler feature that will allow Cortana to schedule meetings for you, and starting next month, a feature that has Cortana creating a daily briefing email with a summary of your meetings and any commitments you've made via email.

Perhaps the bigger change to mobile is a new Office app that combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single mobile app. This includes the ability to view and create content in all of the components, and also a new Actions pane, which lets you do things such as share files between devices; create, view, and sign PDFs, and take a picture of a document and turn it into a editable Word file or an Excel table. This looked very cool.

Microsoft 365 Foundations General Manager Rob Howard said later that the new Office app takes up less space than of the individual applications today. He said it includes a machine learning-generation list of recommendations for documents you are likely to want to open, as well as a most recently used list, and can pre-cache the documents you're most likely to use, making "blazing fast."

It is available now in public preview on Android, and there is an iOS preview as well, though that seems to have hit its maximum user limit.

AI-Inspired features

In his keynote, CEO Satya Nadella said "We want to infuse AI into every experience out there," and indeed Microsoft has spent the past couple of years adding AI helpers to Office stalwarts such as PowerPoint and Excel. Many of these were also demonstrated at the show.

Some of these features have been around for a while, but keep improving, while others are new.

PowerPoint has some of the most visible AI features, including a "presenter coach" that listens to you as you rehearse giving a presentation and coaches you to speak clearly, to not just read the slides, and to reduce how often you say things like "um." This was in the version of PowerPoint that shipped in September.

Another feature is PowerPoint Designer, where you can just drag images and/or text to a blank slide and the program will suggest how the slide should look. These include things like making the image look good on the page to turning words into a process diagram. Designer was rolled out a while ago, but Howard told me that the feature has been getting better on a regular basis, and now understands more content within the slide and can handle more situations, such as fixing inconsistent punctuation, creating timelines, suggesting stock imagery, and using customized templates. He said more than 1 billion slides in PowerPoint have now used this feature.

One of my favorite features, which didn't get any attention at this show but is in the most recent monthly builds and should be in the semi-annual build—the one that many organizations use—in a few months, is one that will automatically create captions (subtitles) as you present. You can even have these translated into another language in real-time.

Similarly, Excel has a feature called Ideas, which can help you pick the right graph type for your data, show outliers in your data, or help with things like inserting a pivot chart. Now in preview is a new feature that adds Natural Language querying, so you can ask questions like "what percentage of sales in the confections category were chocolate?"

One Excel addition that looked very good to me but didn't get much attention is a new function called "Xlookup" which builds on the existing Vlookup and Hlookup features by overcoming some limitations (such as not dealing correctly with column insertions) and offers a much more capable search feature with fuzzy matches. This is pretty esoteric, but those of us who have struggled with Vlookup will appreciate it. It is in Insider builds now, and should be more widely available in a few months.

Stream, Microsoft's service for hosting and sharing internal videos, is another example. Microsoft's Christina Torok explained that the system is being used for such things as corporate communications, and increasingly for peer-to-peer expertise sharing. This has been out for a few years and has recently added features such as live streaming. New features in the mobile version, include simple editing such as trimming the beginning or ends of the video, with more simple editing features coming to the web version as well. This is now part of the basic Office 365 plans.

Among the AI features in Stream are the ability to do automatic speech-to-text transcription of a video, or of a Teams meeting. This allows automatic closed captioning, and the transcript can embed clickable time codes, so someone could search for the text, then go directly to the relevant part of the video. She talked about getting customers to "think about video as the next document," one that can be pulled apart and used as needed. One new feature demonstrated at the show and due out next year is the ability to detect audio frequencies in a video and separate out the background noise, so you only hear the speaker.

One of the big new features highlight at the show was Office Scripts, a new way of automating tasks. Initially, this will be in Excel online, where you can just click on the "Automate" tab, and it will start recording the steps you take in a pane on the side of the window. Behind the scenes, this is creating code in TypeScript (Microsoft's JavaScript variant), and you can click on the code to edit it, with an editor that resembles the firm's Visual Studio Code developer tools including things such as the IntelliSense code completion tool

Of course, Excel has had macros for decades. Rob Howard explained that Office Scripts have a number of advantages, such as using a more modern language, storing the scripts in OneDrive instead of a workbook, and the ability to make the script part of a longer process, by plugging it into Power Automate, the more powerful process automation tool. He noted that for the moment this is just being testing in Excel online, but the plan is to extend it to Word, PowerPoint, and other tools, and eventually make it cross-platform. Howard told me that Microsoft will continue to support Excel macros in the desktop version, as that is important to many businesses, but will not bring support for macros to the online version. (He also said the firm has done a lot of work to make 32-bit macros work in the 64-bit version of Excel.)

Fluid Framework

One intriguing new initiative is the Fluid Framework, which is designed to allow you to have components of a document being edited and available simultaneously to a large number of users in a variety of applications.

In her demo, Sheppard showed you could be editing text in a document, while asking other people to add to the same document, but they would see it in Outlook or in Teams. A simple @mention would send a request to ask that person to fill in the information. Demos included doing this kind of editing with text, lists, or tables, all of which could be live and shared with a lot of people. Everything updates at the same time, she said, noting this will "break down the barriers between apps and enable a whole new way of collaborating," while Spataro said we should "think of it as an entirely new way to work."

I asked Howard what made this different from the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) concept Microsoft has been talking about for thirty years, and he said that while the scenarios were similar, it was built on a very different technology stack. The new stack is "grounded in the cloud and based on the web," he said, and uses the concept of "distributed state with eventual consistency." He thinks that will make it work better and that the growth and usage of collaborative apps such as Teams, in general, mean that it is solving a real need now. But he agreed that while the demos looked great, the proof will be whether people really use it. Fluid offers a "dramatically new experience for people," he said, and "we have to make sure we're doing it in a way that is helping them."

For instance, in the current product, components that are part of Fluid appear in other documents with a "shimmer" around them to help users understand that they are shared.

Howard said the Fluid Framework allowed much less latency than the co-authoring features currently in the existing Office tools, with latency about 10 to 15 milliseconds as opposed to 100 milliseconds. It can scale to hundreds or thousands of users, perhaps include some AIs in addition to people. Examples include typing in English with the words simultaneously translated into eight different languages in real-time. It certainly looked fast.

A preview of the technology will be available for Office 365 commercial customers soon at fluidpreview.com, but this is a new standalone example experience, designed for Microsoft to gather feedback. The plan, Howard says, is to build it into the Office and Teams applications, with the first such applications planned for sometime next year. He stressed that the Fluid framework is really a developer tool, one that should eventually be offered to third-party applications as well.

Collaboration: Yammer, Teams, and Automate

One big topic of conversation was how collaboration could make people more productive, with Microsoft Teams taking a bigger role. At the conference, a number of users—including those from Accenture, L.L. Bean, and more—talked about how they were using Teams, saying it made it easier for people to work together.

Among the new capabilities in these areas is "the new Yammer," called Yammer Communities, which is being integrated into Teams to allow for better knowledge-sharing and communication across an organization. (This is separate from the chat features already in Teams, which are more oriented towards individual or small group collaboration). Yammer will appear on the main navigation bar in Teams, and will include communities, events, and conversations. Other new features in Teams include Private Channels, and the ability to pin a channel to the top of the list, for things you access frequency. Also coming is the ability to add polls and surveys to messages or channels.

Teams is also getting better integrated with Outlook, so you can take an Outlook conversation and "Share to Teams" having that conversation appear within the Teams client. There is a new Task pane coming to Teams, which will include a single view of your personal tasks (created within Outlook or the To Do app) with tasks assigned within Teams and Planner.

Another new feature, called Workplace Analytics, is designed to track various projects and see how much time people are spending on them, and what that costs. This uses AI to analyze work by looking at things such as Outlook schedules and emails and work done in Teams.

Microsoft also announced improvements in its Power Apps set of tools for "citizen developers," meaning end-users who want to create tools that they are others might use.

The most important of these is Power Automate, a new version of its Flow workflow tool designed to make it easier to automate a particular process, and perhaps adding in some AI features, such as detecting part numbers from a picture. Using Power Apps, end-users or developers can create a simple flow, and administrators can edit and improve them, add them to Teams, or publish them to a library.

"AI is the defining technology of Microsoft," Spataro said, "but a close second has to be automation."

Cortex and Search

Perhaps the biggest news at the show was the changes Microsoft is making to how you find corporate information.

Microsoft Search now lets you search for things that are external to your organization (through Bing) as well as internal information, which it gathers from the information your organization is already storing in places like OneDrive and SharePoint. All of this shows up in a single view. Because organizations already assigned access rights for the other products, you only see the information you have rights to.

The big news was something called Project Cortex. Spataro says, "Productivity is combining the collective knowledge of your organization and helping you be able to do things you have never been able to do before."

Microsoft's Dan Holm demonstrated Project Cortex, saying it "uses AI to organize the information of your organization." Demonstrating this, he showed an email message in Outlook that references the code name of a project. You can click over this and see a "topic card" that explains what the project is and who is involved in it.

You can get more detailed information by bringing up a full page of information on the topic, which might have a larger list of people involved, documents related to it, and related topics. Holm described this as "like Wikipedia for the enterprise but AI does all the hard work for you." Project Cortex creates the topic pages automatically, although experts within your organization can modify and improve these pages.

Holm said that "topics can be projects, products, processes, customers, or any knowledge that's important to your organization." All of these together create a "knowledge center" for your organization, and you can use this to help find more information. He said this includes using the intelligent content services of SharePoint and adding in things like extracting data from scans, PDFs, and photos; along with integration with AI Builder to locate important information on forms. For less-structured information, such as contracts, you can use "machine teaching" where an expert teaches the system what is important. It has privacy and security controls, so you only see what you have access rights to.

All this together means the system can extract metadata automatically from the underlying contract, "bringing advanced AI to the mainstream."

Surveying all the announcements, Spataro said, "Productivity is not just about doing what you are doing today more efficiently, but also about brand new things." He concluded by saying Microsoft 365 "is a productivity service that puts AI to work for you."

I don't know whether all these things will actually improve bottom-line productivity, but it's great to see it as a focus.