Partner Article

What You Get On Microsoft Office 365 Is More Than What You See

With over 100 million users worldwide, Microsoft Office 365 is among the most popular cloud based productivity software suites in the market today. It comes in handy with everything from managing spreadsheets to word processing, email and presentation deck management. But all of this is comprises a small part of the overall technology behind Office 365.

Last year, Microsoft rolled out a new feature on the Word 2016 for Office 365. Called Editor, this tool makes use of machine learning and natural language processing to proofread documents and suggest changes. Unlike the traditional spell-check feature of MS Word, Editor does not simply rely on a dictionary to identify and recommend changes. Instead, the tool understands the context and text usage of users based on their previous interaction and uses this to provide smart recommendations.

Researcher is another smart feature that was recently added to Office 365. This is a feature that automatically interprets the content you are working on, and taps into the Bing Knowledge Graph to instantly pull related articles and papers from the web. In essence, this tool lets users add citations to their documents without having to toggle between their word document and the web. Like Editor, Researcher is a product based on machine learning and NLP.

From an enterprise perspective, the scope for AI is immense. That is another thing that Microsoft has been working towards with their product, Microsoft Graph. Graph was initially conceived as a back-end tool that facilitates search across an integrated set of applications in the Office 365 stable. But now the objective of Graph is to make use of the 100 million plus user base of Office 365 to generate highly valuable user insights that enterprises might need. For instance, if a consulting firm is looking for an employee who has experience in the oil and gas sector, they could simply use Graph to analyze the thousands of documents written by its employees to identify the person on staff who would fit the bill. Such insights have dozens of use-cases in every organization.

Microsoft also has similar tools and features for the business user. Described by Rob Howard, the Director of Office365, as the ‘Fitbit for work,’, My Analytics is a very useful feature that helps users track and understand their work habits. Using data such as how much time a user spends drafting emails, or in meetings, My Analytics provides insights that may be used to enhance productivity.

Another area of focus for Microsoft in recent times has been to help declutter the document management experience. Delve is a recent addition to Office 365 that is, in some ways, a social network for Office 365 documents. Users can go to any user profile to view documents that they are working on and this can be added to your own favorites or board. In addition to this, Delve also makes it easy for users to access any document without having to remember the title or where it’s stored. The company uses artificial intelligence to identify documents that may be of interest to you and makes it available to the user.

Artificial intelligence has tremendous scope in productivity apps. With the Office 365 suite, Microsoft has identified the perfect audience that it could target. Are you an Office 365 user? Please tell us how AI and machine learning in Office 365 have helped your business in the comments.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Benjamin S Powell .