Microsoft has published an overview of all the new features added to Microsoft 365 over the month of September. This is something the company generally does every month, and it's a good way to catch up on features you may have missed.  This month, highlights include expanded real-time captioning support, co-authoring in encrypted documents, and support for iOS 15 and macOS 12 in Endpoint Manager.

Many of these improvements are focused on communication and collaboration, starting with expanded real-time captions and transcripts for Teams meetings. The feature now supports a total of 27 languages, including German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Hindi. Users can see spoken words turned to text so they can follow along, and desktop users can set what language is being spoken in the meeting so the captions change to match.

Another new collaboration feature is the integration of Viva Topics with Yammer. Viva Topics is meant to be a knowledge base for companies, and Yammer integration aims to make community-sourced knowledge available more easily to everyone. A Yammer topic becomes a Viva Topic, and coworkers can use Viva Topics to find information from Yammer communities.

Yammer and Viva Topics integration in Microsoft 365

Over on core Microsoft 365 apps - Word, Excel, and PowerPoint - Microsoft is enabling real-time co-authering on encrypted and sensitive documents. This has been possible since 2019 using the web versions of the apps, but now it's also available in the desktop apps for Windows and macOS. Visio on the web has also received a notable update, adding support for fully custom colors in diagrams.

Finally, IT administrators got day-one support for iOS 15 and macOS 12 devices in Endpoint Manager. This allowed business to reliably manage employee devices after the updates were released on September 20th.

September was a relatively slow month for new Microsoft 365 features, but that's the nature of constant streams of updates. Some months will be bigger than others. In October, Microsoft will release Windows 11 and Office 2021, which already makes next month more exciting than this one. These launches are coming on October 5th.