I'm thrilled to announce the IT Pro and Developer Preview of Office 2016 for those Windows desktop. We've visited private preview with Office 2016 for months. Now we're in a position expand the program to our commercial Office 365 customers, a relevant milestone that gives IT pros and developers a chance start testing the upcoming release. In reality, this early build doesn't yet contain each of the features we're gonna ship within your final product. However, into the duration of the preview, customers should be expecting to check the latest features delivered through monthly updates.

We'll share read more the end-user enhancements planned for doing it release at a later time, but here's this brief introduction to part of the valuable updates sell pros and developers.

Data Loss Protection (DLP)-Over of late we've added DLP to, Outlook, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. Now we're bringing similar classification and policy features to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With these new capabilities, IT admins can centrally create, manage and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing-and owners can get policy tips or sharing restrictions in case the apps detect a prospective policy violation.

Outlook-We're delivering a number of significant technical improvements to Outlook.

MAPI-HTTP protocol. We've replaced the RPC-based sync with a brand new Internet-friendly MAPI-HTTP protocol that supports Exchange/Outlook connectivity.
Foreground network calls. We've eliminated having foreground network calls for Outlook stays responsive on unreliable networks.
Multi-factor authentication. Because of this details the Outlook client, we'll support multi-factor authentication through integration making use of Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL).
Email delivery performance. We've reduced the amount of time it may take to download messages, display what it's list, and show new email after resuming from hibernation.
Lean storage footprint. We've added settings allowing users to enhance manage storage by only retaining 1, 3, 7, 14 or 15 days of mail concerning the device.
Search. We've improved the reliability, performance, and usability of Outlook search, and integrated the FAST-based se in Exchange.

Click-to-Run deployment-For customers on our Office 365 subscription service, the 2016 release includes new deployment features that this pros are now looking for:

Better network traffic management. We're introducing a good solid Background Intelligence Transfer Service (BITS) which will help prevent congestion on the network. BITS throttles back the application of bandwidth when other critical network visitors is present.
Enhanced distribution management. We're improving our integration with ConfigMgr making it possible for IT admins to efficiently download and distribute monthly Office updates considering the native ConfigMgr features.
Flexible update management. We've made opportinity for admins to do the interest rate what place they receive feature updates and bug fixes while continuing to obtain regular security updates.
Simplified activation management. We're adding an aspect during the Office 365 Admin Portal permit admins to treat device activations across users.

Macros and Add-ins-We're not coming to a changes to Macros or Add-ins in this release. It's rare that "no changes" is truly a something we'd want to highlight, but we believe it's worth celebrating the consistency from the programming model across releases. We know how important it is and we're about a high level of compatibility whenever we continually innovate. (See dev.office.com to get more about how exactly we're innovating in Office extensibility.)

Accessibility-We've addressed a few of readability issues in Outlook and introduced a dark theme for users with visual impairments.

Information Rights Management (IRM)-We've extended IRM protection to Visio files, enabling both offline and online protection of Visio diagrams.

Other ways part of the new capabilities IT pros and developers get each year in the Preview. We're anxious about this milestone throughout our development process and waiting for hearing your feedback. For more details with the Office 2016 Preview program and instructions regarding how to download the applications, visit the Office 2016 Preview program with the Microsoft Connect site. We'll can quickly update the information with the latest features because they become available all of which periodically highlight significant announcements here in the process.