Microsoft Office 2016, Skype for Business previews now available

At the Convergence 2015 event held in Atlanta, Microsoft launched a technical preview of Office 2016 for the Windows desktop. This preview will aim at IT professionals and developers. Users can sign up for Microsoft’s Office 2016 preview  here.   At the same event, the company also released a technical preview of Skype for Business. The new version specifically targets companies and other organisations as it offers enterprise-level security along with the necessary management controls for IT professionals. The preview is now available for download from Microsoft’s TechNet Evaluation Center. As Microsoft Office 2016 is an early build version, it does not contain all the features that the company is planning to ship in the final product, says the Office Blog. In terms of features, the preview will improve search for Outlook 2016, storage footprint and also email delivery performance. Along with this, Microsoft has made some improvements to image insertion in Word 2016 and Excel 2016. The use of ‘foreground network calls’ has been eliminated and a new Background Intelligence Transfer Service (BITS) has been added which helps prevent congestion on the network. Also, the Office 365 Admin Portal will now allow admins to manage device activations’ across users. Along with the Office 2016 preview, Microsoft also released a test version of Skype for Business. This version is a replacement for the company’s primary communications tool Lync. This announcement was made last November. [caption id=“attachment_259184” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Image: Office Blog[/caption] The preview, which looks very similar to Skype’s consumer version will have the ability to integrate closely into various Office apps. It will also allows users to connect and chat with other Skype users whether inside or outside of their organization. The final version of Skype for Business will be available in April.