Microsoft announces solutions to help businesses modernize in the digital world

Company launches new Office 365 enterprise capabilities, Dynamics CRM 2016 and introduces PowerApps.

BARCELONA, Spain, Nov. 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Monday, at its annual Convergence EMEA conference, Microsoft Corp. introduced new innovations that will enable companies to succeed in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela detailed new capabilities in Microsoft Office 365, including meetings and voice services in Skype for Business; announced the worldwide availability of its customer engagement solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016; and introduced Microsoft PowerApps, a new enterprise service empowering employees to create the apps they need, connect to business systems in a secure way and easily share their apps with coworkers.

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In a new commissioned study of European business and IT leaders, Forrester Consulting found widespread recognition of the importance of digital transformation in their organizations, and the need to dramatically reshape their business around customer outcomes and desires. The innovations Microsoft announced Monday are aimed at helping businesses achieve this by igniting entirely new ways to collaborate and intelligently engage with customers. Through comprehensive first-party solutions such as Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, along with innovations that empower businesses to rapidly create new business apps and easily share them on any device, organizations can control and drive their own transformation.

"As businesses strive to keep up with the pace of change, they are looking to technology to drive digital transformation," Capossela said. "Microsoft can help businesses achieve their transformations by empowering individuals and organizations with innovative solutions that unleash the productivity and potential of their workforce, spur entirely new ways of collaborating, and infuse intelligence into their systems and processes."

New Office 365 enterprise capabilities

Today marks the general availability of new capabilities in Office 365 that modernize the enterprise across meetings and voice, intelligence, and security and privacy. These new services represent the single most significant release of new enterprise value in the history of Office 365:

• A complete meeting and voice solution. With Skype Meeting Broadcast, Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) Conferencing, PSTN Calling and Cloud Private Branch Exchange, Office 365 customers now have one platform for calling, conferencing, video and sharing integrated with the Office applications they use every day.
• Analytics and data visualization. Delve Analytics empowers individuals by providing rich, interactive dashboards that surface insights into how they spend their time and who they spend it with, so they can focus on the tasks and people that matter most.
• Advanced security and compliance. Customer Lockbox offers customers full control over access to their data in Office 365 by giving them ultimate approval rights in the rare instances when a Microsoft engineer must request access to the service. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery brings machine learning and text analytics that reduce the costs and risks inherent in managing large quantities of data for e-discovery.

Starting today, these capabilities along with Power BI and Advanced Threat Protection are available to customers in a new premium enterprise suite, Office 365 E5.