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Microsoft brings together Cloud, social, Big Data on Office 365

Microsoft vice president Jeff Teper showcased the new innovations in a keynote speech

Microsoft is attempting to bring together Cloud, enterprise social, Big Data, machine learning and mobile capabilities through its Office 365 platform.

Microsoft vice-president, Jeff Teper, showcased the new innovations in a keynote speech to about 10,000 customers and partners at its SharePoint conference.

Teper outlined additions to the platform which are aimed at the end user, the developer community and IT professionals.

For the end user, the company launched new “personalised” experiences integrating social capabilities throughout Office 365 which seeks to help rapidly find information or find others working on similar projects so that they have more time to get things done.

This is achieved through Office Graph, a new Office 365 intelligence fabric that remains unseen to the user but is constantly analysing content, interactions, and activity streams to intelligently connect the most relevant users to one another.

It includes, Oslo, an application using personal interactions and machine learning to provide a view of the most relevant, timely information for each individual using Office 365 across SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Yammer and Office.

Another feature is Groups, which attempts to unify people, conversations, calendars, emails and files across the Office 365 suite, enabling a collaboration experience across applications.

Further, Inline Social allows the ability to have social conversations inside documents stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive.

The addition of the Office 365 Video Portal gives users a portal supporting the upload, storage and discovery of videos in a secure manner.

This enables businesses to categorise videos into channels for specific business needs and stream them on mobile devices, with all of the video compression, optimisation and rendering done by Office 365.

With more than 3.4 million Office and SharePoint developers, Microsoft announced investments aimed at enabling customers and partners to build contextual productivity solutions across browsers, PCs and mobile devices.

This includes the release of Office 365 SDKs for Windows 8 and Android, helping developers build solutions powered by Office 365, enhancements to Office 365 APIs for PowerPoint and Outlook, New APIs for files, people, email, calendar and tasks, and the ability to seamless activate app information.

There are also new capabilities enhancing Office 365 security and privacy deliver the tools needed to help protect organisations.

These include data-loss prevention, OneDrive for Business, easy SharePoint social transition to Yammer.

According to Microsoft this makes it easy for IT pros to replace the out-of-the-box SharePoint Server 2013 social experience with Yammer.