March 2023 – Direction Forward

Closing dates for Easter 2023

This Easter, we will be closed for the bank holidays from 4pm on Thursday 6 April through to 9am on Tuesday 11 April.

Please note that support is not available during this period due to public holidays. All contact methods – including phone lines, other email inboxes and texts – will not be monitored during this time. Thank you for your understanding.

For contracted support please raise a ticket at directionforward.com/support, or email [email protected], and we will address it as soon as possible after the break.

The team at Direction Forward wish you all a happy Easter!

Google announces AI tool to rival Microsoft’s Copilot

In the race to commercialise emerging AI technology, Google has announced its own suite of generative AI features for its Google Workspace suite.

In the same week that Microsoft demonstrated its new AI assistant for Microsoft 365, called Copilot, Google shared the news that they would also be adding AI features to their popular apps, including Google Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.

They envisage that the AI assistant – which will be able to generate, summarise, and brainstorm text – will function in a similar way to OpenAI’s popular tool, ChatGPT, which is backed by Microsoft. Like Microsoft’s Copilot, the AI features are primarily aimed at productivity and freeing up workers’ time through content creation, and allowing you to edit and refine the text that has been generated in response to a prompt. You will similarly be able to produce AI imagery, audio, and video in Slides (similar to features available in the forthcoming Microsoft Designer and the popular Canva).

Google also emphasised the ways in which it could boost innovation and creativity – clicking the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ option in Gmail, for example, will “let AI try out a new playful voice altogether”. However, like Microsoft, they added a caveat to the news: “AI is no replacement for the ingenuity, creativity, and smarts of real people.”

However, only the writing tools in Docs and Gmail will be launched soon. In their blog post, they confirmed that these will be rolled out to testers later this month, but it is as yet unclear when they might be made publically available. More than three billion people already use AI-powered content generation in Google; including Smart Reply and Smart Compose in Gmail, and auto-generated summaries in Google Docs.

The early announcement demonstrates Google’s eagerness not to get left behind on the AI journey – particularly after the negative press which resulted from their launch of Google Bard, their alternative to ChatGPT, when experts pointed out a factual error in the information it provided in Google’s own promotional video.

Moving the navigation bar in Outlook back to the bottom

Some users of the newer versions of Outlook for Windows may have found that the navigation bar has moved from its previous place at the bottom of the window to the upper left side. If you prefer the old style of navigation, this change might feel inconvenient, especially as the new layout takes up more space on-screen.

However, it can be moved back to the bottom, via a setting, in just a few steps:

1. 1. In Outlook, click File > Options
  2. Select Advanced tab from the Options menu
  3. Uncheck the box Show Apps in Outlook under the heading Outlook panes
  4. Click OK to finish making changes
  5. When the prompt appears to restart, click OK and make sure you do restart Outlook for the change to take effect. The navigation bar will be back at the bottom.

On 16 March, Microsoft announced the addition of an AI assistant called ‘Copilot’ to its Microsoft 365 suite of applications, including Office.

In a demonstration last Thursday, the company showed how the new technology – powered by OpenAI language models in combination with data from Microsoft Graph – will be embedded into its most popular products, including Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and PowerPoint.

Microsoft envisages that this tool will be effective in improving productivity, creativity, and collaboration. Sitting in the toolbar within the Office applications, Copilot will act as an AI assistant, generating text or graphs, or summarising and analysing in response to commands and prompts. It is also designed to learn new skills; the more it is used, the more its ability to perform complex tasks and processes specific to your organisation’s context will increase.

In the announcement on their blog, Microsoft seemed keen to emphasise that Copilot would act as a “jump-start” on the creative process, giving you “a first draft to edit and iterate on,” rather than the finished article. It also stated that “sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong” to remind potential users of the pitfalls of solely relying on AI-produced content. Rather than acting as a replacement or substitute for our work, Copilot is intended to reduce the time workers spend on “busywork that bogs us down” (perhaps to alleviate some peoples’ concerns regarding the ethics of AI use).

Following the wide-spread use and popularity of OpenAI’s generative AI models and their latest launch of GTP-4 (which will power Copilot), this announcement by Microsoft cements them with a leading position in the market and the race to commercialise this swiftly emerging technology. Microsoft has offered Copilot as part of GitHub (which it acquired in 2018) since summer 2021, as an AI assistant for programmers.

Google has announced the launch of AI enhancements to its Google Workspace suite – we’ll post more details on these soon.

Copilot for Microsoft 356 is currently being trialled by some organisations and will roll out to more customers in the months ahead, although the exact timescale is as yet unclear. So far, the focus has been on the tool’s usefulness rather than the details: for example, licensing/pricing of the product is yet to be announced. We will keep you updated when Microsoft provides further information.

In late March 2023, Microsoft will begin a public preview of their new collaboration app – Loop.

This follows the initial period of private preview (which began in November 2022) and offers organisations the chance to explore, test and give feedback on its features.

The Loop app, which is being marketed as a productivity tool, is particularly relevant to organisations conducting hybrid working, and consists of three main parts: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces.

Its main benefit, in comparison to rival apps such as Notion, is the way in which these elements are integrated across all the other Microsoft products, which many organisations already use in their daily working practices.

For example, Loop components allows you to send content in a chat in Microsoft Teams for your colleagues to add their ideas and feedback to directly. Everyone can edit inline and see instant changes, which are then saved automatically to OneDrive.

Additionally, Loop pages allows users to share and collaborate on multiple Loop components, whilst Loop workspaces track and organise your pages into different groups or sections. This is particularly helpful for large projects, with multiple users able to work on pages and workspaces at once.

Microsoft envisages that, once it becomes generally available, Loop will help organisations to work together more efficiently in co-authoring, brainstorming, compiling data, and managing projects.

If you have a Microsoft subscription and would like to test Loop during the preview period, please contact us. Alternatively, for more information about purchasing Microsoft products, take a look at our list of Microsoft apps and services here.

Update now – Microsoft Outlook for Windows critical security vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397)

We’ve been made aware of a new critical vulnerability within the Microsoft Outlook email client for Windows. Microsoft has already released a patch for this, and we recommend updating your version of Outlook at the earliest opportunity.

More information on the vulnerability can be found here. And more information from Microsoft on what has happened can be found here.

All supported versions of Microsoft Outlook for Windows are affected. Other versions of Microsoft Outlook such as Android, iOS, Mac, as well as Outlook on the web and other M365 services are not affected.

To upgrade your version of Outlook on Windows, please do the following:

In Outlook click File
Select Office Account on the left-hand menu
Click Update Options > Update Now

These are the patched, and therefore safe-to-use versions of Outlook are:

Current channel – Version 2303 (Build 16130.20306)
Monthly enterprise channel – Version 2301 (Build 16026.20238) or Version 2212 (Build 154928.20298)
Semi-annual enterprise channel (Preview) – Version 2302 (Build 16130.20306)
Semi-annual enterprise channel – Version 2208 (Build 15601.20578) or Version 2202 (Build 14931.20944)

Please contact us if you need assistance.