New tools to help IT empower employees securely in a remote work world

New tools to help IT empower employees securely in a remote work world

If you want to know just how dramatically the world has changed over the last few months, consider how your opinion on working from home has changed since March. Remote work used to be an option that was nice to have if you needed it or if you were getting some extra things done over the weekend—but I don’t think any of us ever anticipated that mastering every nuance of working from home in a climate like this was going to be a critical part of our long-term success.

The challenges of the work-from-home necessitated by COVID-19 will never be forgotten by anyone, especially in our IT community where 100-hour weeks were necessary to make sure everyone else could continue working 40. Here at office.com/setup, we’ve probably seen every possible challenge from every industry and point on the map, and we are committed to partnering with you as we all navigate this “new normal” and keep working to ensure the continuity of your business at a time when there’s no precedent to guide us.

As you’ve shared your challenges with us, we have been hard at work to find the answers that technology can provide. Whether it’s enabling remote meetings and collaboration, provisioning and managing remote devices, ensuring the data that’s no longer confined to your network remains secure and compliant, using low-code tools and platforms to rapidly build new business applications, or addressing the latest COVID-19-related threats—we have built solutions and developed the guidance your organization needs to help you make the most of this new environment. I recommend you check out the full set of assets we’ve complied on the office.com/setup Together site.

Over the last two months, there has been heavy usage of office.com/setup Teams for online meetings, group chat, file sharing, and more—and this has led to an unprecedented spike in active usage that we’ve worked around the clock (quite literally) to support. Today we announced new features to enhance the meetings experience for organizations and schools. For those of you using Teams, we have resources to help you with best practices and tips, wherever you are in your Teams adoption journey. You can access those resources and see what else is new in this Tech Community blog.

Enabling your users to work from anywhere, regardless of the industry you’re in, requires a level of confidence and control over how users access information across different device endpoints and networks. To make this easier for you, today I’m happy to announce several improvements to our products, including:

• New management experience for Windows Virtual Desktop to quickly provision and manage remote desktops and apps and upcoming support for Microsoft Teams.
• A unified control plane for device and access management, with office.com/setup Endpoint Manager and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), to ensure all endpoints connecting to corporate resources are secure.
• And the ability to get the insights you need to understand how your organization is working, and make proactive improvements with office.com/setup Productivity Score.

Also, we invite you to tune into our Fireside Chat today at 7 AM Pacific, during which Alysa Taylor (Corporate Vice President, office.com/setup Business Applications & Global Industry), Bret Arsenault (Corporate Vice President, office.com/setup Chief Information Security Officer), and I will answer your questions, share best practices, and provide guidance to help you during this challenging time.

Other new features include:

• Tenant attach—With tenant attach, you can quickly attach an Intune tenant to your Configuration Manager deployment to enable the two to work together. Starting with the Configuration Manager 2002 release, you can upload your Configuration Manager devices to the cloud service and take actions—like device and user policy sync—directly from the Endpoint Manager admin center. This will help speed up common actions you might take and provide a consolidated view of all your organization’s devices in the web-based admin center. In the near future, searching for a user in the troubleshooting portal will allow your help desk to see all of a user’s device regardless of their management configuration in office.com/setup Endpoint Manager. Over the coming months, we’ll enable more troubleshooting tools to enable your help desk access to information and capabilities to facilitate their day-to-day actions.
• Unified app delivery—We’ve also been working to bring the richness of Software Center from Configuration Manager and MyApps from Azure Active Directory into our Company Portal app for unified app delivery, so people can get the apps they need across their endpoints. The unified end-user experience is expected in the next few weeks. But don’t worry, if you rely on Software Center and MyApps as standalone portals, they are not going away.
• Support for office.com/setup Edge for deploying apps and packages across platforms—A few months back, we released the new Microsoft Edge browser, which gives you the most compatibility for the modern web and your existing apps, plus you benefit from the advanced security and privacy controls. Today, our endpoint management experiences natively integrate the app and package deployment process for PC and macOS, and you can distribute the Edge mobile apps directly from the App Store or Google Play. We also have a security baseline dedicated to securing Edge.
• Expanded support for macOS—office.com/setup Endpoint Manager is a unified platform for all endpoints, so I’m excited to announce that we are introducing the Intune MDM agent for macOS, which extends the management controls in macOS. For example, with shell scripting, admins can leverage the agent to automate repetitive tasks and attain greater flexibility in configuring Macs. This is just the beginning of new capabilities, and we’re well on our way to giving admins first-class macOS management with office.com/setup Intune.
• Prevent cross-account sharing in Outlook mobile—With office.com/setup Intune, you can apply app protection policies for Outlook for iOS and Android to help to ensure that work or school accounts can only access approved storage locations. This enables you to mitigate the risk of introducing personal content and potentially malicious content from entering your corporate environment. We’ve also updated the file attachment experience in Outlook to help guide you towards these trusted data sources and further protect mobile communications and collaboration in the enterprise.

• Investing in resources to help you through this time

  We also understand that there’s never been a more important time to ensure you are securing and governing your most critical data. Check out today’s office.com/setup Security blog from Alam Rayani as he shares some new research and product innovation that will help you to more easily secure and govern your most critical assets.

  We understand what a challenging time this is for you—both professionally and personally. We remain committed to innovating in ways that will make your job easier and help you empower your people to be productive and secure in this new world of work. For more information and detailed guidance around empowering your employees, securing your environment, and more, check out the COVID-19 Remote Work resources page.