Microsoft’s fall event 2022: all the news from the online Surface event

Workspaces is a new feature coming to Microsoft Edge designed to make it easier to organize and share the dozens of browser tabs that you use on a daily basis. The feature has been popping up in Edge’s early preview builds for over a year now, but Microsoft is offering more detail on it today as part of its Ignite conference alongside new security and shopping features for its browser.

Screenshots of Workspaces in preview show how users can create groups of tabs by clicking an icon to the left of the tab row. They can add tabs and name and color-code each group. They can then access, edit, and open previously created groups from that same icon. If you’ve ever used a tab manager add-on like OneTab, then Workspaces seems like a neat, integrated version of this software with more management options.

Microsoft is rebranding its built-in Office apps on Windows to Microsoft 365. While the existing app is mainly used for quick access to Office apps, this new Microsoft 365 one is designed to really leverage Microsoft’s Graph network to provide additional apps, relevant documents, and a feed of meetings and information that might be useful to plan a day ahead.

This new app won’t be limited to Microsoft’s commercial customers either, as consumers and students will also be able to take advantage of it. It will include the regular access to Office apps, a feed of recent documents and files, and the ability to browse by meetings.

Microsoft is launching Microsoft Teams Premium today, a new offering designed to boost its chat and collaboration app with some AI-powered smart features. The biggest addition is a new meeting recap feature that essentially adds an AI virtual assistant to each meeting to share highlights and automatically capture all of the important parts. It’s like having your own assistant to take notes for you, even if you’re not there.

“Today you get a meeting recap, after a meeting you get a recording and the transcript so you can get all that information, but you spend a lot of time sorting through the information to find ‘what’s pertinent or relevant to me,’” explains Nicole Herskowitz, general manager for Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge. “What intelligent recap does is it breaks the meeting up into intelligent chapters.”

As part of today’s Ignite conference, Microsoft is launching a new workplace app specifically designed to help with the challenges of hybrid working. The app is called Microsoft Places, and the company says it’s launching “soon” in beta.

A screenshot of the app published by Microsoft today shows a dashboard view that tracks what percentage of your team is due to be in the office on a given day and lets you list where you’re working in a given week. As well as tracking people’s locations, the app is also designed to help you organize your work around them by giving “insights and guidance” on travel time as well as helping people navigate to work locations within offices themselves.

Apple Music is finally arriving in the Microsoft Store today. Xbox users will be able to access it immediately, and it will also arrive on Windows next year. Both Apple Music and Apple TV will be available in preview versions soon for Windows, allowing Apple subscribers to access music and TV shows natively on Windows without having to use web versions or the pre-existing iTunes app. Microsoft is also integrating iCloud photos into its built-in Photos app on Windows 11.

A new update will see iCloud photos appear in the main Windows Photos app, making it easy for iPhone owners to find photos from their devices on a Windows PC or laptop. All Windows users need to do is install Apple’s latest iCloud Windows app to get this integration, and it’s available to Windows Insiders right now.

Microsoft is introducing two new Teams-certified accessories to improve hybrid meeting setups: the Microsoft Audio Dock and the Microsoft Presenter Plus remote control.

The Audio Dock is a pill-shaped all-in-one speakerphone system with a passthrough PC charger and four different ports (HDMI, USB-A, and two USB-C) designed to help reduce desktop clutter. You can connect up to two monitors with HDMI and USB-C connections, with the passthrough charger supporting up to 60W of power, which is enough for most modern laptops. It provides dual forward-facing microphones with noise-reduction capabilities, and there’s an integrated mute control atop the device that clearly indicates your microphone status to spare you from any embarrassing mishaps in whatever meeting app you prefer. It’s certified for Microsoft Teams, though, so you get an integrated Teams button to quickly join meetings and raise your hand.

Microsoft has announced that its range of Adaptive Accessories will be available to purchase starting on October 25th in select markets. The Adaptive Accessories were first announced in May and are designed to address common issues that can prevent people from getting the most out of their PC, especially if they have difficulty using a traditional mouse and keyboard.

The wireless system includes a programmable button, an adaptive mouse, and the Microsoft Adaptive Hub, which connects up to four Microsoft Adaptive Buttons to as many as three devices. The mouse is a small, square-shaped puck that can clip into a palm rest with a removable tail and thumb support. The mouse and button can be customized using a range of modular components, enabling users to find the best fit to suit their usability requirements. For example, the adaptive buttons let you add eight programmable inputs to your computer, allowing them to be used as a joystick or D-pad.

Microsoft is adding AI-generated art to its suite of Office software with a new app named Microsoft Designer.

The app functions the same way as AI text-to-image models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, letting users type prompts to “instantly generate a variety of designs with minimal effort.” Microsoft says Designer can be used to create everything from greeting cards and social media posts to illustrations for PowerPoint presentations and logos for businesses.

Microsoft’s fall Surface event is set to happen on Wednesday, October 12th at 10AM ET, 7AM PST

If you’re planning to tune in live, the best place to watch is from the official Microsoft landing page, which doesn’t offer much in the way of details but gives you the option of adding a convenient reminder to your Outlook calendar.

Cisco’s video conferencing hardware will be updated to let users set Microsoft Teams as the default video conferencing software, the two companies have announced. Initially, six devices will be certified to work with Teams in the first half of next year, including the Cisco Room Bar (a combined speaker and webcam), the 55- and 75-inch versions of the Cisco Board Pro (a freestanding screen designed for video conferencing) and the Cisco Room Kit Pro.

Cisco’s press release stresses that its own Webex video calling software (which it paid billions for a little over a decade ago) isn’t going anywhere. “The devices will continue to support joining Webex meetings with all the features and functionality customers enjoy today,” the release notes. But building in native support for Teams and allowing it to be set as the default recognizes how many businesses are entrenched in Microsoft’s ecosystem and rely primarily on its software for video conferencing.