As many of us are now used to working from anywhere from our preferred device, information protection controls need to evolve to protect data at the individual, file and service levels. The shift to mobility and personally-owned devices also means that the threat landscape is shifting with more individually targeted attacks that work across platforms. On this show, we take an early look at new controls for compliance, security and organizational search with next-generation information protection tools.

This week, Rudra Mitra, engineering lead for the Office 365 information protection team, takes a look at the core themes driving information protection investments and to give us an early look at what’s coming. Rudra describes the approach his teams are taking as they build new controls to be pervasive, transparent and people-centric.

Rudra highlight the new tools for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) coming to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, as well as Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) in Exchange Online to show how they’ve evolved to provide pervasive, platform-agnostic protection. These tools also provide new audit capabilities to show things like URL traces when people follow embedded hyperlinks in email and actions taken against centrally-stored files, plus new APIs available to query activity—all in the name of transparency. Transparency extends to organizational search with new eDiscovery analysis capabilities coming in Equivio Zoom.

The controls cannot just exist in isolation from users and core to Office 365 is the inclusion of people in the compliance solution. DLP policy tips are presented to users within email, file sharing experiences and even coming to Office desktop apps. User education of policy along with options to help people securely work on their device and apps of choice are all part of being people-centric.

On the show, Rudra demonstrates all of this and more to give an early look at what’s coming in information protection and as we think about integration with other cloud services.  He also provides insights into things to come. Watch the show to learn more and see you next week!

Five years after rolling out Office 2011 for Mac, Microsoft has made a first public preview of its successor, Office 2016 for Mac, available to testers for download.

Microsoft already has updated OneNote and Outlook (available in limited preview form) available for the Mac. On Thursday, the company is delivering refreshed public previews of those two apps in addition to the first public previews of the 2016 versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and is making all five apps available to anyone running Yosemite (Mac OS 10.10).

The Office for Mac 2016 preview is available for download from Microsoft’s Office.com preview site, and can be run alongside Office for Mac 2011.

Microsoft plans to deliver regular updates to the preview, and will let testers know via a notification from the Office for Mac Auto-Update tool. Every new preview build will expire roughly 60 days after it’s posted. The final preview build will continue to function for roughly a month after Office 2016 for Mac becomes generally available, sometime this summer, officials said. That’s likely to be several months ahead of the Office 2016 for Windows release in the second half of 2015. Officials said they’d have more news to share soon about opening up the Office 2016 for Windows suite publicly. (The Windows version has been in private testing for several months.)

Microsoft’s goal with Office 2016 for Mac is to make it look and feel more like Office for Windows (and other Office suite flavors), while not losing the styling that makes the suite feel like it’s built for Mac OS X, said Eric Wilfrid, director of Office product marketing.

The updated Mac suite includes a newly designed Ribbon that’s similar in formatting and organization to the Office for Windows Ribbon. The suite includes full support for retina displays and is built to be “cloud connected,” so it’s tightly integrated with OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint and Office 365.

Office 2016 for Mac allows users to access files across all their devices running Office by signing in with their Office sign-in credentials. This way, a user could start writing a document on Office for Android, access it later on Office 2016 for Mac and then finish it on Office for iPad, while always having access to the most up-to-date version.

In the new version of Word 2016 for Mac, Microsoft has added threaded comments to improve coauthoring. In Excel, there’s now support for the same keyboard shortcuts as Office for Windows users have. The PowerPoint 2016 for Mac update adds the same presenter view as is available in PowerPoint for iOS.

So far, as is the case with the Office 2016 for Windows private preview, new features and functionality seem rather limited for the next version of Office for Mac. So what took Microsoft so long to bring the coming version to market?

Wilfrid said that Microsoft shifted gears after rolling out Office 365 and decided to focus on Office 365 and prioritize some of the new Office mobile releases, such as Office for iOS.

Office’s focus is now on cloud connectivity, he said, noting that anyone who has a current Office 365 subscription with support for downloadable versions of the Office suite apps will get Office 2016 for Mac as soon as it is released for no additional cost. Microsoft is not yet releasing Office 2016 for Mac pricing for those who don’t have an Office 365 subscription.

This story originally posted as “Microsoft delivers first public preview of Office 2016 for Mac” at ZDNet.