Big updates for Teams, Visio, and more – what’s new in Microsoft 365 for September

Rabia Noureen

Teams Rooms

Microsoft has pushed out a monthly recap of all the new features and capabilities added to Microsoft 365 in September. This time around, the company has outlined updates rolled out to each of the Microsoft 365 apps and services, including Teams, Yammer, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Visio. Here’s a look at what you need to know.

First of all, Microsoft has launched AI-powered Live captions and transcription capabilities in Teams meetings in 27 new languages. The list includes French, German, Brazilian, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, and more. Users will be able to access this feature in the Teams desktop app by selecting the menu (. . .) icon and clicking the “Change spoken language” option. It will help to increase participant engagement and make it easier to take post-meeting notes.

With real-time captioning, go to the more actions section within your Teams meeting and select your desired spoken language.

Next up are improvements to Microsoft Yammer. The enterprise social networking service is getting a new integration with Viva Topics to help employees discover information from Yammer communities and manage knowledge-sharing within an organization. This release will let licensed customers access all the Viva Topics features, such as Viva Topic cards. You can find more details on the Yammer Topic API changes blog to understand the changes.

Next up are improvements to the Office suite of apps. Last month, Microsoft announced that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now support real-time co-authoring on encrypted and sensitive documents. This capability has previously been available on the web since 2019, and it is finally making its way to the Windows and macOS desktop apps. Visio on the web has introduced a new feature that brings support for fully custom colors in diagrams. This means that users can now access recently used or custom colors to highlight objects in the diagrams.

You can now co-author in encrypted documents in Microsoft 365 Apps.

Lastly, Microsoft has also detailed a few new capabilities for IT professionals that aim to help them deploy and manage new versions of operating systems. Microsoft Endpoint Manager’s analytics service has picked up day-one support for macOS 12 and iOS 15. The Redmond giant also added Windows metrics to analyze the number of machines running older Windows versions and determine which devices are ready for Windows 11.