Microsoft Edge for Business Launches with New Enterprise Features

Published: May 23, 2023

Microsoft Edge

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Microsoft has announced a slew of improvements coming to its Edge browser at Build 2023. The new features include Microsoft Edge for Business (preview), Microsoft Edge management service, Microsoft 365 Copilot integration in Edge, and more.

Microsoft has introduced a dedicated workspace called Microsoft Edge for Business. The new experience features an app icon, the organization’s name as well as other visual references. Microsoft Edge for Business brings a new set of productivity and security capabilities as well as enterprise controls for organizations. It will soon become the standard browser experience for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) customers.

“This calls for a new browser model that enhances users’ privacy while maintaining crucial, enterprise-grade controls set at the organizational level. Microsoft Edge for Business honors the needs of both end users and IT Pros as the browser that automatically separates work and personal browsing into dedicated browser windows with their own separate caches and storage locations, so information stays separate,” said Lindsay Kubasik, Group Product Manager, Edge Enterprise.

Build 2023: Microsoft Edge for Business Launches in Preview

With Microsoft Edge for Business, users can automatically switch between different work and personal browser windows. It’s also possible to configure personal and work-related in Microsoft Edge’s settings. The new feature will help IT Pros to protect users against phishing and cyberattacks. Microsoft Edge for Business supports information rights management, built-in data loss prevention, and other enterprise features to improve security and compliance.

Microsoft Edge for Business is currently available in preview on managed devices. The company also plans to bring the new Edge experience to unmanaged devices later this year.

Microsoft Edge for Business now enables users to securely access corporate resources on iOS and Android devices. It supports a Shared Device Mode that lets multiple users share a single mobile device. Microsoft Azure AppProxy eliminates the need to use a VPN to access internal resources from anywhere. Moreover, IT admins can use Microsoft Intune and other management tools to manage and deploy Microsoft Edge for Business on mobile.

Microsoft Edge gets a new Microsoft 365 Copilot integration

Microsoft 365 Copilot will soon get a native integration within Microsoft Edge. The feature is currently available in public preview, and it’s accessible via a Bing icon in the toolbar. Users can click the icon to open the new Copilot experience within a sidebar in the web browser.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will let employees use natural language commands to access information from their organization. Users will be able to interact with third-party services via plugins. However, they will be required to sign into Azure AD accounts to use the Copilot tool in Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft Edge gets a new AI-powered Copilot integration

Smart Find is another new AI-powered feature that improves the existing search experience in Microsoft Edge. It’s designed to help users fix syntactic and semantic errors on the web page. Moreover, users will soon be able to find SharePoint sites and contextually relevant files directly from the Edge’s address bar. The text predictions feature is rolling out to Microsoft Edge users based in the US, Australia, and India, with Chinese and Japanese language support to follow in the coming months.

New Microsoft Edge management service

Microsoft plans to introduce a new Edge management service in preview in the Microsoft Edge admin center in the next few months. It’s a top-requested feature that will provide a simplified experience to let IT admins manage the web browser. The feature will be available alongside Microsoft Intune and other endpoint management services.

The Microsoft Edge management service is designed for small businesses that don’t have dedicated IT departments. It provides a central hub that enables IT admins to create new policies, modify/delete existing policies, add/delete extensions, and view user extension requests.

New Microsoft Edge management service

Microsoft Edge Workspaces – GA

Microsoft has announced that the Edge Workspaces feature will begin rolling out to all enterprise customers and consumers in the next couple of months. The company released this collaboration feature in an enterprise public preview last fall. It enables users to share a set of browser tabs with their colleagues in Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft Edge Workspaces

Sidebar app development for Microsoft Edge

Lastly, Microsoft detailed that the sidebar app development experience is hitting general availability this month. This means that developers can add a couple of lines of code to the JSON manifest file to add their existing progressive web apps (PWAs) to the Edge’s sidebar.

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