In July this year, the European Union launched a formal antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s Office suite bundled with the Teams application. This was the first time Microsoft faced an EU antitrust investigation in 15 years.

At the end of August, Microsoft announced that it would separate Teams from Office to make it easier for rival products to be used with Microsoft software to avoid EU antitrust penalties.

But people familiar with the matter said today that the European Commission is not satisfied with this and is therefore preparing a statement of objections expected to be released in the next few months.

Microsoft and the European Commission have yet to comment.

The case stems from July 2020, when Slack Technologies complained to the European Commission that Microsoft abused its market dominance and eliminated competition for Microsoft Teams by bundling Teams with its popular Office productivity software.

Microsoft Teams is an intelligent chat-based team collaboration tool that can share documents synchronously and provide members with instant messaging tools including voice and video conferencing. And Slack Technologies operates a similar product.

Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with Office means millions of users are forced to install Teams with no way to remove it. Over the past decade, Microsoft has been fined 2.2 billion euros (approximately $2.6 billion) by the European Union for practices such as bundling.

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Microsoft Design team revealed last month that Aptos is the new default font for applications such as Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel, and will replace the 15-year-old Calibri font.

This font change will also be combined with changes to the default style and colour palette used in the document.

The biggest change to the colour palette is the removal of yellow in favour of dark green, and one of the lighter blues has been swapped for teal. Microsoft says this will allow for better contrast between the shapes and lines available in Office documents.

The default styles for Word and Outlook are also being updated to “make them easier to read, look more professional, and easier to navigate,” said Jess Kwok, Microsoft’s product manager for Microsoft 365 Apps.

Microsoft began testing these changes with Microsoft 365 Insiders in July, and the company now says they will roll out to all users sometime in September, so you can look forward to them.

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Microsoft is looking for a tenant for its more than 42,000-square-foot (3,900 square meters) office at 11 Times Square, according to data released by real estate data firm CoStar. Microsoft declined to comment on the news.

Microsoft, which has been cutting jobs recently, has also made other real estate cuts, including abandoning plans to build a new office building in London.

The real estate spending adjustments have exacerbated pressure on office landlords, who have previously suffered record vacancy rates and lower demand.

It’s a dramatic change for the technology sector, once a major driver of leasing. Companies including Google parent Alphabet, Meta and Amazon have all announced plans to cut their respective spending on real estate; Twitter and Spotify Inc. also began subleasing their office space this year.

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In a blog post, Microsoft Executive Vice President Rajesh Jha described three types of Microsoft 365 Copilot plug-ins that will be available: plug-ins that leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology, Teams messaging extensions, and Power Platform connectors. The sneak preview program will launch with more than 50 plug-ins, including products from Atlassian and Adobe. When the plug-ins are officially launched, Microsoft says there will be thousands available.

This is Microsoft’s latest move to make its AI tools more flexible and more relevant to more people, and could be an important way for the company to differentiate itself from its competitors. Google also has its own productivity-focused AI tool called Duet AI, but it’s not yet widely available and doesn’t support plug-ins. 365 Copilot isn’t the only app that supports plug-ins. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that plug-ins will appear in Bing AI chat, and OpenAI recently added support for plug-ins to ChatGPT, and these will support interoperability.

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Two people with direct knowledge of the decision said Microsoft had made concessions to avoid a formal investigation after rival Slack complained in 2020 that Microsoft’s bundling of the two services was anti-competitive.

When buying Office in the future, users will be free to choose whether or not they want to buy Teams if they wish, but the mechanics of how this will be done remain unclear, the sources said. The sources stressed that negotiations are still ongoing and it is not certain that an agreement will be reached.

The move is part of Microsoft’s attempt to avoid its first antitrust investigation in more than a decade, and Microsoft has been trying to avoid legal disputes with the European Commission that have hit it hard in the past.

In 2008, the European Commission accused Microsoft of using its dominant position to push users to download its Internet Explorer browser by bundling it with Windows at the expense of its competitors. Microsoft and the European Commission have since settled and offered users a choice of browsers, but in 2013 the EU fined Microsoft €561 million (IT House note: currently about RMB 4.252 billion) for failing to deliver on its promise.

It is unclear whether Microsoft’s proposal for Teams will be enough to allay the regulator’s concerns.

Microsoft responded to the Financial Times by saying: “As a large technology company, we are well aware of our responsibilities in the EU. We will continue to work with the Commission on its investigation and are open to pragmatic solutions to address its concerns and serve our customers well.”

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Microsoft said that Office 2016/2019 users will no longer provide support for Microsoft 365 connections starting October 10, 2023. Users will still be able to access Microsoft 365 after that date, but there may be various scenarios such as unstable connections.

Microsoft made a clarification in a statement sent to foreign technology media ZDNet in August last year, and the attached content as follows:

 We do not prevent supported Office 2016/2019 from connecting to Microsoft 365 cloud services. However, as announced in April 2017, we plan to end mainstream support for Office clients connecting to Microsoft 365 cloud services.

 This means that as we make updates to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and other Microsoft 365 services, they won't be built around the inherent limitations of legacy, perpetual Office clients that have outgrown mainstream support. Users' connections will not be hindered, but they may not get full functionality from the cloud service. Over time, they may encounter unexpected problems.

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Recently, the Android and iOS mobile apps for Microsoft Office have been officially renamed Microsoft 365, and the name and icon have been changed in the Apple App Store and Google Play store.

▲ iOS version was updated to version 2.69.1

The new version of the Microsoft 365 application, except for the replacement of the name and icon, the rest of the features of no major changes, you can use them as usual.

Microsoft 365 is the ultimate everyday productivity app that helps you create, edit and share anywhere, anytime, according to Microsoft. With Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Microsoft 365 is the destination for dynamically creating and editing documents when you need them most.

It’s easy to write a blog in Word, managing a budget in Excel, or practice your next business pitch in PowerPoint. With integrated editing features, Microsoft 365 is a complete document editor at your fingertips. You can also scan and sign important documents, create PDFs, and update resumes from anywhere with just a few clicks.

With intelligent cloud services and trusted security, Microsoft 365 apps help you maximize productivity at work and in life.

Microsoft previously said that users will continue to have access to applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook as part of Microsoft 365. Microsoft will also continue to offer one-time purchases of these applications to consumers and businesses through the Office 2021 and Office LTSC programs. In addition, there are no changes to the Office 365 subscription program.

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Microsoft BillBär said in a blog post.

"When using Microsoft Outlook, users can quickly choose to send a document as a traditional attachment or upload it to OneDrive and share a link to the file. Sending a link in an email that jumps to a OneDrive or SharePoint document can reduce the size of the email.

If you choose to send as an attachment, you can attach the entire document to the email just as you would if you were selecting the file on your computer. Now you can search for those legacy attachments in Outlook through Microsoft Search."

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Microsoft has brought a new feature to Word in this update that allows the creation and assignment of tasks directly in Word documents using @mentions in comments. Once the assignment is complete, the recipient will receive a notification asking them to take action.

The entire procedure is as follows

1. Open an existing file stored on OneDrive or SharePoint. 2.
2. Highlight the text that contains the information you want to comment on.
3. Select “New Comment”, write your comment followed by the name of the team member you want to tag @. 4.
4. Press Ctrl + Enter to publish the comment and select the “Assign to” checkbox to convert the comment to a task.

In the new version of Office Insider for iOS, Microsoft has added a deep scan feature to the Office Mobile app that allows unlocking and high usage of content from a particular photo.

Of the feature, Microsoft describes, “Deep Scan intelligently identifies text and visual components in any photo and highlights them so you can take quick actions such as copying, sharing, saving, searching, emailing, and more. You’ll be able to add what you copy from a photo to your document.”

However, in addition to the features mentioned above, Microsoft has not added any other new features or changes, nor has it brought bug fixes or improvements.

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Users testing Office applications can try out the updated contextual menu command bar and ribbon palette by opening a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet and editing its contents. The redesigned menus will appear at the bottom of the screen, providing quick and easy access to the most relevant features, depending on what is currently selected. For example, inserting a photo or other object in a PowerPoint presentation, formatting text in Word, or selecting a function in Excel.

The updated menu is now available for Office Insiders in version 2.67 (build 22110700) or later. Users can try them in standalone Office apps or in unified apps.

Microsoft is rolling out the new features gradually, which means some Office Insiders will get the new visuals a little later than others. This allows Microsoft to ensure a steady rollout of new features and prevent widespread bugs.

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