The edge based on Google’s technologies, which isn’t quite ready for prime time, will include a business-oriented new tab that IT administrators can customize for employees.
The developer in Redmond, Washington, explained one week after the first announcement of Edge’s new tab functions for corporate customers Release candidate “ of the browser.
“If you’re signed in with an Azure Active Directory work account (AAD), opening a new tab in Microsoft Edge provides a dynamic and personalized set of your most important office documents, internal websites, company resources, and other Microsoft 365 content,” said Chad Rothschiller, Senior Program Manager, and Matt Betz, Product Marketing Manager, said in a November 12 post to a corporate blog.
Without IT intervention by setting group policies, Edge looks the same in a company and works the same way as on a consumer’s PC. It includes a new tab that emerges from a general news feed. However, when you plug in GPOs, the browser becomes the front end for Office 365, the productivity software, and the Microsoft service subscription.
Each new company tab contains eight thumbnails of selected websites, of which the first three can be set by IT (and set so that employees cannot change them). These websites can be important intranet sites or mission-critical web applications that are specific to the entire company, department, team, or even individuals. The remaining five thumbnails – Edge allows only one row of eight – are based on websites that are accessed frequently or are created by the device user, as is typical for the new tabs of other browsers.
(More information on NewTabPageManagedQuickLinks Policy that sets the first three thumbnails is available here.)
Other areas of the new tab perform Office 365 landing page tasks, the most notable of which are referred to as “Recommended”, which come from recently edited spreadsheets or from working with other Word documents or the like from signals derived from user interactions with come the productivity applications and others in your company or team. To Recommended documents must be saved in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint websites. This is not surprising as these are the two cloud storage options for practically all Office 365 corporate customers.
This lists other Office 365 content and publishes access to the SharePoint intranet sites. In various views, users can filter for files pinned or received as email attachments, for example.
The overall appearance largely corresponds to what an Office 365 user sees when controlling www.office.com in any browser, including Edge. The fact that Edge offers it everyone A new tab means less work during a working day or, depending on how you see Microsoft’s ubiquitous presence in the office, cumbersome.
Microsoft, of course, sees it as the former. “((The new tabs)) The” Recommended Documents “function is the” magic “that shows what you need most,” said Rothschiller and Betz. “It’s the intelligence that monitors all file activity and uses machine learning to create a short list of files, which can save you time and keep you going where you left off.”
Office 365 also integrates the search field on the new tab. When the user logs in to an AAD account, the search returns not only results of the web in general, but also organization-specific information such as documents (again documents that are stored in OneDrive for Business or on a SharePoint website), personnel and intranet Websites that host industry web apps.
Rothschiller and Betz called for manageability – no shock since this was a strength of Microsoft browsers in the past – but did not compare Edge with Chrome, the enemy of its predecessor and its predecessor. This could have been a missed opportunity, since Chrome is neither equipped for a company-specific new tab (probably one linked to its G Suite) nor can it be integrated in any way into Office 365.
Edge’s first stable build – in other words, ready for production – is slated for release on January 15th. In the meantime, commercial users and IT administrators can kick the beta tires that they can be downloaded from here for Windows and MacOS.
