Microsoft Publishes Office 365 Education Roadmap

Microsoft has given students and academic institutions more information about the future development path of Office 365, which is provided free of charge to students and teachers via their relevant academic institution.

“Anyone investing in technology for their school, college or university has the added responsibility of building an environment that will shape the learning paths of hundreds or even thousands of young people,” said Microsoft. “Therefore, it’s important to know not only what the current capabilities of technology are, but where it’s going in the future.”

Roadmap Ahead

So what exactly is the Office 365 Education Roadmap? Well, two years ago Microsoft began offering a similar roadmap for the business community, and for the education market valid users will now be able to see what features have been launched, what features are in development, and which ones have been rolled out or cancelled.

For example the roadmap reveals that multi-factor authentication is being rolled out to ensure greater levels of privacy. It also revealed it is developing the ability to IM chat with document co-authors whilst the user is co-editing a document.

More Open?

Microsoft of course is continually working on its Office 365 product suite. Last month it patched a vulnerability in Office 365 that could have allowed an attacker to gain access to any account at a business with a federated domain.

Redmond under CEO Satya Nadella has opted to become more open with its customers about the future direction of its products. Earlier this year it revealed future security enhancements for Office 365 and its Azure cloud platform, as well as plans for integration with third parties.

All of this is part of Nadella’s overall plan (outlined last year), about how the ‘cloud-first Microsoft’ is best positioned to protect businesses and consumers from an array of cyber threats, as people and companies move away from fixed perimeter computing and into a constantly connected world.

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