Microsoft just announced a flurry of new investments for Office 365, including an upcoming, and according to Microsoft “much anticipated” Skype for Business Mac Preview to run OS X El Capitan. The preview is now available to IT professionals upon request.

Microsoft said that the roll-out will be in three stages, eventually leading to public availability sometime in the third quarter of 2016. Before that Microsoft will make the preview available for IT professionals on the basis of invites. Commercial users can contact SkypePreview.com and request an invite.

At the moment the preview is limited, only allowing users to see and be in meetings. Although Microsoft said in a blog post this will soon be followed up with extra features, including contact list and conversations via chat, audio and video.

Skype for Business costs a small monthly fee but offers much more than standard Skype. This includes large group calls of up to 250 people, employee account management, Outlook integration and high level security.

The social networking service for enterprise, Yammer, has also been improved for Office 365 customers with the creation of external groups which Microsoft says should help to bring “seamless and secure collaboration across company and organizational boundaries.” The new feature works just like an internal group would work, sharing documents and links, etc. Except now customers can also be part of the group. If you’re worried about security, Microsoft says it has put, “controls in place.”

Other updates include new features for Office mobile, which should make editing a little less irksome. The new Edit with Speed function for Word, Excel and PowerPoint will let you tailor where you want to put your commands, making it easier to cut, copy, paste and format in Word, and the same with PowerPoint and Excel. The commands you choose will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Lastly, Windows Phone gets an audio facility for OneNote, and some changes have been made to Instant Inking. Improvements have also been made to Microsoft’s Smart Lookup, a Bing search-powered feature that allows you to select text to receive instant results relating to that text. Smart Lookup is available for Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iOS and Android.

Photo credit: Microsoft