Today’s post on Sway was written by guest blogger and Slideluck Youth Initiative artist teacher Winston Struye. My job title at the Slideluck Youth Initiative is "artist teacher" and it’s not a job I take lightly. To me, the role of an "artist teacher" is similar to that of a "creative leader" in a workplace: someone who can incite creativity in others, open people to possibilities that they did not see before, and, above all else, point students towards the "artist" they all have within them. My method of doing this is by providing students with tools (such as ideas, applications, methods) that can potentially illuminate their own creative potential. And Sway has turned out to be one of the most effective luminaries for showing my students the artists they all within themselves. The Slideluck Youth Initiative is a branch of Slideluck that does photography outreach programs in under-served communities in New York City and Los Angeles. The program aims to empower students by having them look through the lens of a camera. I hope that by teaching my students how to take photos of the world outside them every day, they will begin to discover insights about what they already have inside of them. You see, the class is labeled as "photography class," but the themes I get across to my students are more along the lines of critical observation, storytelling, and seeing things from new perspectives. I’m currently to teaching two classes-one with a group of middle-school students in the East New York, Brooklyn, and another class with high-school students in the Bronx. I’m always trying to bring technology into my lessons. However, there are often issues when it comes to accessibility. Although creative technologies are bountiful for professionals, they are often difficult for young students like mine to access. And on top of that, they often have a steep learning curve, which can easily lead to frustration and loss of excitement for the project. For most of the classes I had taught before, I had been simply showing individual photos one-by-one to the class and discussing them. But I felt as if I was missing a lot of the process, the story-building and story-thinking methods that are so beneficial to empowerment. I wanted the students to start building stories, not just images, and I needed a program that was intuitive and easy to use like a text editor, but also powerful enough to create something that students could feel like was something of an admirable quality. This is where Sway comes in. With Sway, my students can now create dynamic, engaging, multi-media stories without any technological roadblocks. Because Sway is so easy to use, I can have my students lay out their images in a manner that is confusion-free, dynamic, and fun—all essential parts of the creative process that I’m constantly trying to maintain. And, the finished product will always be something they are very proud of and have confidence in, prompting them to return to the program and create more stories; therefore building more creative thinking blocks in their brain. Sway is going to continue to be a vital part of the Youth Initiative, not only for the students to use to create things themselves, but in its ability for them (and us) to share their creations. We’ve always shared students’ work through our blog, but that has been limited to roughly one photo at a time. And with a million photo blogs out there, we’ve been searching for new ways to showcase the work we’ve been creating with our students. Needless to say, our students have already been showing their Sways to their friends and family, and Slideluck plans on doing the same, and with the greater Slideluck community to increase exposure for the Youth Initiative. But, all this being said, my students aren’t the only ones using Sway! As a photographer myself, I too am constantly looking for new tools in which to build, edit, and share stories that I capture with my camera.  For a long time, I’ve thought about how images can tell simple stories, but how it often takes the relationships between multiple images to show people the extent of ideas and emotions attached to those stories. To see both what I’ve created myself in Sway, and to learn a little bit more about the Slideluck Youth Initiative, the kids, and their work, please have a look at my Sway here: —Winston Struye   Get Sway | Follow Sway The post Sway guest blog—artist teacher Winston Struye appeared first on Office Blogs.

The March Office 365 updates cover an impressive range: previews, significant improvements, new capabilities and connectors, and a new app. You can now preview Office 2016 for Mac, send information in Gmail messages straight to OneNote, preview your notes in OneNote for iPhone, capture web content more easily with OneNote Clipper 2.0, and more. For Office 365 business users, three new previews are available: Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview, Skype for Business technical preview, and Office 2013 client modern authentication public preview. Admins can now manage access to data on mobile devices, and use the admin app to perform common tasks on the go. Excel Power Query and Delve got significant improvements, and there’s a new Salesforce app for Outlook. And for JavaScript developers, new capabilities for working with the Office 365 APIs are here. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: February 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates Office 2016 Mac Preview is here—Office 2016 for Mac is designed to take advantage of the unique features of the Mac. It has full retina display support, full screen view, and even scroll bounce. And it includes updated versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook—with a redesigned ribbon, a refreshed task pane to make positioning, resizing, or rotating graphics easy, and new themes and styles. Office 2016 for Mac is cloud-powered, so you can access your files on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint on any device. Try the preview now. OneNote and Yammer welcome a new partner, Obindo—Obindo is the new Google Chrome extension that helps you capture ideas and files from Gmail and send them to OneNote or Yammer without leaving your inbox. Obindo routes all your great ideas, thoughts and files—which often get stuck in email—to OneNote, where you can work with them more easily. You can share a message in Gmail with others in your organization too, or start a conversation by clicking Yammer on the Obindo toolbar. Updates to OneNote for iPhone and OneNote for Mac—You can now preview notes in OneNote for iPhone, which is handy when you’re on the go and need to a find a specific note. You can also drag and drop your notebooks to easily re-order them. In OneNote for Mac, it’s now even easier to share notebooks. You can invite contacts to collaborate on notebooks, select whether they can view only or edit the notebooks, and remove access when needed. Introducing OneNote Clipper 2.0—This major update to OneNote Clipper makes capturing web content and enriching that content easier than ever. In response to popular user requests, the user interface was redesigned and new features were added, including a location picker to customize your clipping location, intelligence (for clipping just what you need, minus the clutter), and region clipping for Chrome. Sway updates—Sway makes it easy to add, visualize and share your content in new, interactive and exciting ways. Based on feedback from users, Sway was recently updated so it’s even easier to use and more powerful. You can now add OneNote images to Sway, use more third-party sources to embed web content, share your Sways in more ways to grow your audience, and more. Easier navigation and playback with Office Mix—Mixes, unlike other web videos, are partitioned by slides, not time, which makes it easier to re-watch parts—you just click the slide section on the timeline instead of dragging a slider to the right moment. You can also use the Slide Sorter to jump into and out of a mix fast, and the new Slide Content to easily navigate within online presentations and play back the slides you want. Office 365 for Business updates* The Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview is here—The preview gives IT pros and developers an opportunity to start testing the upcoming release. The preview doesn’t yet contain all the features planned for the final product, but new features will be delivered through monthly updates during the preview. New features include: data loss protection for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, significant technical improvements to Outlook, new deployments options and more. Skype for Business technical preview now available—Prepare your organization for Skype for Business! The technical preview of the Skype for Business client is already available, and the new Skype for Business client, server and online service will become generally available starting in April. Skype for Business is the next version of Microsoft Lync, and the technical preview gives current Lync customers a chance to try Skype for Business and get ready to upgrade. Office 2013 client modern authentication public preview—The Office 2013 client modern authentication features have moved to public preview. Modern authentication brings Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based sign-in to Office 2013 Windows clients. Previously, only a private preview of modern authentication was available. Now modern authentication is available to any customer running the March 2015 or later update for Office 2013. The public preview program is easier to join and production support is included for participants. Office 365 Admin app updates—The Office 365 Admin app now enables you to complete common admin tasks when you’re away from your computer, including resetting passwords, adding new hires, or deleting users have left the company. And to help you stay up to date with what’s happening in Office 365, the app now includes the Message Center, the central location for Office 365 service communications. Improved management of Clutter—Clutter helps you focus on the most important messages in your inbox by moving lower priority messages out of your way into a Clutter folder. Now Office 365 administrators can ensure that critical messages make it into the inbox, personalize Clutter notifications, and set retention policies for Clutter folders. Built-in mobile device management now available—With mobile device management, you can manage access to Office 365 data across a diverse range of phones and tablets—including iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices—to help keep your data safe. The built-in mobile device management features are included at no additional cost in all Office 365 commercial plans, including Business, Enterprise, Education, and Government plans. Updates to Excel Power Query—Performance was significantly improved in loading queries and connecting to Excel workbooks. A new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online connector was added. And several improvements were made in the Query Editor to make some transformations easier, like calculating the difference between two Date/Time columns and disabling column name prefix in the Aggregate columns. Office Delve worldwide rollout, plus support for new content types—Delve has begun rolling out to all eligible Office 365 business customers worldwide. Delve surfaces relevant content and insights tailored to each person. It’s powered by the Office Graph, which applies machine learning to map the connections between people, content and interactions across Office 365. Delve now surfaces two new types of content:  links shared in Yammer and email attachments. Announcing Azure ExpressRoute connectivity to Office 365—Starting later this year, Office 365 customers will be able to use Azure ExpressRoute to establish a private, managed connection to Office 365. Currently, ExpressRoute provides customers with dedicated network connectivity through a private connection from their network to Microsoft Azure, and now the same option is available for connectivity to Office 365. New Salesforce App for Outlook—The new Salesforce App for Outlook gives you a great new way to work with Salesforce right from within Outlook. You can view Salesforce contacts, leads, accounts and opportunities in the context of an email from a customer. Salesforce for Outlook works with Outlook 2013, Office 365, Outlook for Mac and the Outlook Web App (OWA). You can download the Salesforce App for Outlook for free. Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online available from datacenters in Australia—Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online are now available from Australian datacenters. In addition, Office 365 has just successfully completed a formal security assessment for Unclassified Sensitive government data via Australian Government’s Independent Registered Assessors Program (IRAP), with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online currently under a similar IRAP assessment. These new local services will provide even faster performance, offer geo-redundant back-up, and help customers address data residency considerations. Office 365 Developer updates Increasing opportunities for JavaScript developers—New capabilities enable JavaScript developers to interact with the Office 365 APIs. With cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) support, they now have the choice to call the Office 365 APIs from the server side or client side, which means they can write single-page applications. The OneDrive for Business and Sites APIs have CORS support now, and Mail/Calendar/Contacts will get it soon. As more Office 365 API endpoints come online for services, they will also support CORS, including Office Graph, Yammer, Video Portal, Skype and content services. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald  ——————————————————————————- *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: March 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s Office 365 post was written by Timothy Harris, vice president of global IT shared services at Mylan, a global pharmaceutical company. In information technology, it’s tempting to be wowed by a new product or swayed by a charismatic salesperson. But if I’m doing my job well, I actually look beyond the technology itself. I stay focused on solving my company’s business problems. For example, Mylan has been growing so quickly that we’ve found it difficult to establish a cohesive technology suite for our geographically distributed workforce. In the past several years, we’ve acquired new business units that expanded our capacity to produce life-saving pharmaceuticals, but they also created an IT environment with lots of overlapping products that confused users and made it challenging to work together, especially across business units. In response, our CEO sponsored the Connect, Collaborate, Communicate initiative to help us become a more unified organization—one that reached out to our internal knowledge base to improve operations and that shared best practices across the board. Those of us within IT needed to find and deploy technologies that would fully support this unification effort. Rather than looking at separate tools, we wanted a platform that provided comprehensive capabilities and a consistent experience for all Mylan employees. We established and now follow three guiding principles: buy instead of build, keep our number of technology vendors to a minimum, and look at the cloud first. Why a cloud-first strategy? We believe that the cloud brings agility to the business, plus the ability to scale. In addition, nearly every one of our cloud migrations ends up with a lower total cost of ownership five years down the line. Like any good business, we did our due diligence when choosing a cloud services provider. We looked at Google, but we felt that it would have added complexity without answering our business needs. For example, we saw that Google Docs just wasn’t robust enough to replace the Microsoft Office suite, which we use heavily throughout the company. So we still would have needed Office if we’d selected Google cloud services. We work hard to avoid that kind of overlap in functionality and the confusion it causes for employees on which solutions to use when. With Microsoft Office 365, we found the platform we were looking for. We’ve already migrated our messaging system to Office 365, deployed a new telephony system, and started to standardize our Microsoft Office suite on Office 365 ProPlus. We’re device agnostic, so we appreciate how easy Office 365 ProPlus makes it for us to securely connect almost any employee device. Next, we’ll extend our adoption to include cloud-based document storage and document collaboration capabilities. As our Office 365 usage expands, we’ll continue to increase productivity simply because it’s easier to connect with one another. For example, we use a follow-the-sun approach to research and development (R&D). R&D staff members in our Pennsylvania and India offices collaborate more closely and continually now that they have the presence functionality in Microsoft Skype for Business to see who’s available to work through an issue. A quick instant message exchange might get the question answered and the research back on track. Furthermore, someone may launch a call or videoconference to address more complex problems. Whatever the method, with these tools, we’re augmenting our pharmaceutical development process. In fact, we anticipate that our employees will be able to travel less because the communications capabilities now open to them make it easier to work together virtually. In the past, employees found our videoconferencing so complicated to set up that many groups just continued to hold physical meetings with printed presentations. But now that they can fire up a Skype meeting with a single click, employees meet virtually and share screens, which saves both time and paper. Our move to Office 365 definitely helps us get new employees up and running more quickly, both when we acquire whole business units and when we hire new employees individually. This has made us more nimble and scalable as a company, which has reduced our costs for messaging and conferencing alone by half. When we take advantage of the other collaboration and storage capabilities, our cost savings will keep increasing. Along with shifting our IT financial investment from servers and storage to cloud capacity, we’re shifting our staffing priorities, too. We no longer have to worry about system administration or hardware procurement. Instead, we’re investing our IT dollars in strategic projects that make a difference to our core business, such as exploring enterprise applications to automate our pharmaceutical factories and ensure data integrity. By adopting Office 365, we’re making a positive difference in our ability to grow and make greater strides in our pursuit of better healthcare around the globe. —Timothy Harris The post Office 365—allowing us to focus on what matters most: solving business problems appeared first on Office Blogs.

A few weeks ago, we announced the technical preview of the Skype for Business client, and today, we’re thrilled to announce that the new Skype for Business client is now rolling out as part of the April monthly update for Office 2013! In addition, Skype for Business Online is now rolling out to Office 365 customers worldwide, and we expect the roll out to be complete by the end of May. If you currently use Lync Online in Office 365, the new Skype for Business user experience will appear for you in the coming weeks. For customers that need a little more time to prepare for Skype for Business, we have provided the ability for administrators to switch between Skype for Business and the traditional Lync user interface.  You can learn more here for Lync Online or here for the client experience with Lync Server. Skype for Business is based on the familiar Skype experience that more than 300 million people use every month to connect with friends and family. It is built right into Office, so features like presence, IM, voice and video calls, and online meetings are an integrated part of the Office experience. And with Skype for Business, you can search for and connect with anyone in the Skype network-inside or outside your organization. You can learn more about Skype for Business here. Frequently asked questions Q. What is Skype for Business? A. Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync) is a communications and collaboration platform that brings together an experience inspired by Skype with enterprise-grade security, compliance and control. It offers features including presence, IM, voice and video calls, and online meetings. It is built right in to Microsoft Office, so initiating chats, calls and meetings is an integrated experience within Office. Q. Will Skype for Business automatically replace Lync Online for Office 365 customers? A. Yes. We will automatically update the Lync Online service to be Skype for Business Online, and all customers are expected to be transitioned by the end of May. Q. If I want more time to prepare for Skype for Business before upgrading, can I continue to use Lync? A. Yes. Administrators for current Lync Online or Lync Server customers can control when the updated experience is rolled out to their users. Visit this page to learn more about how to configure the Skype for Business client experience. Q. How can I learn more about the new client features? A. More information about the features available in the new Skype for Business client is available here. The post Skype for Business is here! appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re always looking for ways to improve how you can use Office Mix to deliver a compelling presentation and better engage your audience. We’ve done just that with two vital additions to Office Mix, Slide Notes and Closed Captioning. Be prepared with Slide Notes One of the most important aspects of delivering an effective presentation is being adequately prepared and knowledgeable enough to adapt on-the-fly. You may remember a presentation technique taught to us in grade school, which is to rely on notecards to ensure you hit your most salient points. With Slide Notes, the concept and experience are much the same. When you click the MIX tab in the PowerPoint ribbon, and then click the Record button, the recording view will open and the Slide Notes translucent text box is displayed at the top of your screen. Think of Slide Notes as a teleprompter for recording a mix—so you can focus on connecting with your audience, rather than worrying about memorizing your delivery. Your presentation will have smoother transitions, and you’ll record in fewer attempts. We think you’ll love this feature! Supplement with Closed Captioning We are also delighted to announce closed captioning for Office Mix! Our mission is to empower you to reach your full potential. With closed captioning, you now have the ability to personalize your Office Mix experience to make it easier to see, hear, and use. Beyond supporting those who are hearing-impaired, closed captioning can supplement audio that is hard to understand. Additionally, captions can be used as a tool for those learning to read or by individuals who simply like to read a transcript along with the presentation. Offering closed captioning in Office Mix reaches beyond merely satisfying some of our customer’s legal requirements—it’s a remarkable learning aid. Closed captioning allows you to observe and absorb presentations without interrupting or being interrupted by the world around you. It enhances the experience whether you are in a location that is busy and loud, like a subway or a public square, or tranquil like a library, or at home in front of the TV. Closed captioning can be effective in reinforcing key points or to improve your audience’s comprehension of the material. Although closed captioning in and of itself is nothing new, its utilization in Office Mix is a welcomed addition. To add closed captioning to a mix, ensure you check the box to create a video when uploading a mix. Then, download the video and utilize a third-party service to create the TTML file from your video. Once your TTML file is ready, go to your mix details, select the Upload TTML File link and upload your closed caption file.  From there, preview your mix to ensure your closed captioning is presented as you intended. For detailed instructions, read our Knowledge Base article. Office Mix is purpose-built to give audiences an engaging presentation that can be accessed at their convenience, and on their favorite device. These are just two of the great features we’ve launched to improve the experience for both presenter and viewer. Stay tuned for more! The post Deliver compelling presentations using Office Mix Slide Notes and closed captioning appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Miguel Llopis, program manager on the Power Query team. A Power Query for Excel update is now available for you and is packed with lots of new features including: New Navigator dialog Ability to create new queries from the Query Editor New Launch Editor button on Power Query ribbon tab Additional operators for date filtering in Query Editor Database connections—added support for Port number Additional Performance improvements   You can continue reading below for more details about each feature. New Navigator dialog The new Navigator dialog replaces the Navigator task pane, giving you search capabilities, an enhanced preview experience and optimized layout. Ability to search items in the tree—This has been a very common request for several months. The new Search box in the Navigator dialog enables users to more easily find items in the tree. Enhanced preview experience—Because the data previews are now part of the dialog (instead of in a small size fly-out), it is much easier to preview tables and use the scroll bar control. Similarly, the new preview experience is much more interactive for multi-dimensional sources (such as Analysis Services or SAP BusinessObjects), allowing users to immediately preview the output as they select items in the tree. Optimized layout when in "multi-selection mode"—The layout in this dialog has been optimized to allow for a greater number of items to show up in the tree. The new Show Selected control brings up the list of selected items in a secondary view. This allows the main view to be optimized around browsing, previewing and selecting items. Ability to create new queries from the Query Editor Another commonly requested feature was the ability to connect to external data sources and create new queries without having to leave the Query Editor dialog. We added a New Query section on the Home ribbon tab in the Query Editor, which provides access to all data connectors and recent sources. This allows users to focus on importing and transforming data across all of their queries without having to leave the Query Editor dialog. New Launch Editor button on Power Query ribbon tab With the New Query section added to the Query Editor and the ability to work with multiple queries in this dialog, it becomes much more desirable to be able to launch the Query Editor dialog from the Power Query tab in Excel. The new Launch Editor button lets users get directly into the Query Editor from Excel. Additional operators for date filtering in Query Editor We have added a few additional filter options for Date/Time columns in the Query view including Year to Date, Today, This Week, This Month and This Quarter. These options are displayed under the respective drop-down menu in the Date filters. Note that all of these filters use dynamic calculations, so for instance, Year to Date will always calculate from January 1 to the present day. Database connections—added support for Port number It is now possible to specify a Port number when connecting to a database. This can be done by using Server:Port in the Server Name field within one of the database source dialogs. Performance improvements We continue making incremental improvements to Performance in the product. This month there are two main areas where Performance has been improved: A 40-50 percent improvement when loading database tables without filters/transforms. Overall performance improvements to the Exchange Connector. That’s all for this update. We hope that you enjoy these new features and continue sending us feedback about the product. We have many other new features coming in the next few months so please stay tuned for future updates.     —Miguel Llopis ———————- Power Query for Excel is available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription, Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance, Office 2013 Professional Plus or Excel 2013 Standalone.  Download the add-in and learn more about getting started. Learn about all the powerful analytics and visualization features in Excel and take your analysis further by sharing and collaborating on business insights with colleagues using Power BI. Learn more about Power Query See all analytics and visualization features in Excel Get your Office 365 subscription Try Power BI Follow us: Facebook and Twitter The post 6 updates for Power Query for Excel appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Delve was written by Mark Kashman a senior product manager on the Office 365 team. "Through others we become ourselves." —Lev S. Vygotsky A company’s most important assets are its people—YOU. The knowledge and experience of you and your colleagues collectively brings great value to your company. And as you communicate and work out loud together within Office 365, the value of your work can be surfaced and discovered by others in Delve. Today, we are announcing enhancements to Office 365 that leverage Delve for easier people-based discovery and greater self-expression: People-based search and discovery—Enhancing the user profile experience A new way to express yourself in Office 365—Introducing the new Office 365 page authoring canvas Office Delve goes mobile—unlocking better discovery through people—New mobile apps for Android and iPhone Let’s delve into the details… People-based search and discovery Sometimes you want to search and discover content based on a keyword or topic, but often you want to learn more about a specific person and what’s trending around them. Today’s enhancements to the Office 365 personal profile experience, within Delve, deliver a richer people-based search and discovery. The look and feel of Delve has been updated to be cleaner and more action-oriented, and designed to help you find, connect and collaborate with the right people. The entire profile page is now responsive for a great experience across devices, from 4-inch screens up to the very largest displays. In addition to core profile information, each person’s organizational structure is now prominently displayed and easy to navigate. And there are numerous ways to get to someone’s profile: a Delve people search, clicking their name in OneDrive for Business or Outlook Web App (OWA), clicking About me and more. The new Profile experience in Delve, alongside the person’s Activity, promotes their About me information, ways to Contact them, their Organization structure, Blog and more. Note: some of the features pictured above, like Working on and Praise, will ship in the near future after today’s announcement. Learn more how to view and edit your profile and how you can find people and information in Delve—both articles will be updated to correspond with all changes. A new way to express yourself in Office 365 You will also notice a new section in your profile, Blog. We improved things to make it easy for you to express yourself within your organization in a more modern way. When you have new information or a point of view to share, simply click start writing in the Blog section of your profile. The new tool allows you to both edit and view pages from your mobile device, auto-saving as you go.  It also provides the ability to post pages directly to Yammer, automatically creating friendly, readable URLs. And because it’s integrated across Office 365, it’s easy to embed documents inline from OneDrive for Business, videos from Office 365 Video, even photos from your desktop. And finally, it’s fast, modern and ready-to-go. This internal blogging tool is the first Office 365 experience to use the authoring canvas, a completely new page authoring platform for Office 365. Today, the authoring canvas helps you create engaging blog posts, and in the future, it will be enabled for use in creating various types of pages in Office 365, including those for individual profiles, Office 365 Groups and future NextGen Portals. And the authoring canvas will be backed by enterprise-grade, content management capabilities such as scheduling, versioning, compliance and taxonomy. (Left)The new authoring canvas in desktop edit mode. The inline toolbox pop-up helps you easily add content. (Right) Viewing a page on a mobile device. Office Delve goes mobile—unlocking better discovery through people We are excited to introduce Delve mobile apps for Android and iPhone, ensuring that connecting, discovering and sharing information with others is easy, even on the go. These mobile apps can notify you about updates to files you are actively engaged with at any given time. You can even receive notifications on your connected Android Wear. Take a quick look at this video to see how Delve mobile works: No matter how busy life gets, Delve has you covered, connecting you and your team with the right information and people—at the right moment—even on-the-go. With a single swipe, you can catch up on what’s new and relevant to your day—no matter where you are— with pivots on content and people. The images below highlight some of the new Delve app experiences: (Left) Main work activity feed. (Center) Discovering and finding people. (Right) New people layout with "WORKS ON," "WORKS WITH" and other pivots. Download the Delve for Android and Delve for iPhone app today. What’s next for people experiences? We’re extremely excited to bring these new ready-to-go people experiences to you via Delve and Office 365—and we’re just getting started. We are already hard at work planning and developing what comes next, which will roll out to the service automatically when the new features are ready. We will continue to refine the overall Office 365 profile experience, introduce a method to nurture your network via public kudos, provide ways to pull in additional profile information from trusted sources and machine learning insights, and enable customization of the profile experience via Add-ins and public APIs. If you have an idea for a future Office 365 People Experience feature, please visit our Delve UserVoice page and submit your feedback using the People Experiences category tag. And vote items up! You will see us continue to iterate and build more and more of what you tell us you need. We will share and show more at Ignite (May 4-8 in Chicago). Hope to see you there. Join our YamJam to ask your questions On Wednesday, April 15th, the Office 365 Network will host a People Experiences in Office 365 YamJam from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PDT / 4:00-5:00 p.m. GST. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a "TweetJam" on Twitter or an "Ask Me Anything (AMA)" on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. In this YamJam, customers and partners can connect directly with the Delve and Profile product teams to ask questions and learn more about the announcement. Join the Delve group to participate. —Mark Kashman Frequently asked questions Delve mobile apps Q. Will the Delve apps for Android and iOS be available in all markets? A. Starting today, the Delve app for Android and iPhone will be available in the U.S., Ireland and Norway markets and will expand to all supported markets in the following weeks. Q. Which versions of iOS and Android do the Delve mobile app support? A. Delve mobile will run on iOS 8.0+ and Android 4.4 and above. Q. Do you have plans to support Windows Phone soon? A. Yes, we are hard at work on a Delve universal app for Windows and expect to provide more information soon. Q. Do the Delve mobile apps offer all of the same functionality available in the web experience? A. We’ll be iterating monthly to integrate not only the existing Delve web scenarios (such as Boards, improved profile, etc.) but will also look to introduce user-focused features to help you get even more done while on the go. Stay tuned for more updates. Q. Where can I learn more about Delve mobile apps? A. Please see this page for more information. Office 365 Profile updates Q. What if my company had customized the previous About Me experience? A. The new user profile page does not yet support customization. To help with your transition to the new experience, we will keep your custom My Site experience accessible to your users for the next six months. We are working on features to help you extend the new experience with custom capabilities. Q. Are the profile updates rolling out to all Office 365 commercial customers? A. Yes, profile updates will roll out to all Office 365 commercial customers. Customers with Exchange Online only plans will only see the core Office 365 profile page layout, which also received updates in terms of responsiveness across devices. Please note, if you opted out of Delve, the profile is located under Sites, not Delve. Q. When will the profile changes come to my Office 365 production tenant? A. The new profile experience began rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers today, and is expected to roll out broadly in the coming months. Q. Will my blog posts, created within SharePoint Online My Sites? Will they continue to exist once the new Blog platform rolls out? A. Previous blog posts created within SharePoint Online My Sites will become accessible from the new Blog home page in your personal profile. Once it ships, the new Blog home page and authoring canvas platform will replace the My Site blog technology, and all new blog posts will be created using authoring canvas. The post New Office Delve People Experiences in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post was written by Bryan Goode, senior director of Modern Collaboration. "Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much." —Helen Keller As we gear up for //build and Ignite and get ready to share more about the innovation going on across Office 365, I wanted to take a moment to share our vision for modern collaboration and address why Office 365 is uniquely positioned to usher in this new era. Over the past several years, advances in cloud, mobile and social technologies have forever altered the nature of work. But look a little deeper, and it’s about more than just the technologies; it’s about the impact they’ve had on the flow of information. We used to go looking for it. Now it comes to us. In this age of greater transparency and discoverability, it’s clear that the open exchange of information leads to quicker decision-making and increases the pace of progress. This deluge of information has also changed the way we interact in the workplace. Where work used to be a solitary pursuit, it’s now a communal one. Today, sharing and collaborating are strategies for getting ahead. People must be able to access, share and discover information in real time to move things forward. Having a collection of ideas and people is no longer sufficient—tapping into the collective thinking and "hive mind" model is the new approach to generating the best ideas and outcomes. Because of this, collaboration has become central to productivity, and the formation of teams to address a business need has become increasingly dynamic. It’s common today for people spanning different geographies, disciplines, even different companies, to come together quickly to work as a team towards a common goal. Indeed, with 40 percent or more of the U.S. workforce projected to be made up of contingent or independent workers by 2020, people will increasingly use networks to form teams of experts on-demand and dynamically "swarm" around projects and then disperse to the next. How can technology enable and support this agile way of working and enable friction-free collaboration anywhere, anytime? How do we make it easy for people to work as a collective, in real-time, while also building a knowledge base as they switch between projects? These are the questions driving how we think about modern collaboration. Empowering teams to work this way requires technology solutions that are seamless, allow teams to self-organize and work fluidly across locations, cultures and devices. It’s about delivering cross-platform tools that work together in concert and allow people to move seamlessly between them, even while on the go. Across Microsoft Office 365, our cloud-based productivity suite, we offer a holistic set of modern, connected collaboration solutions that allow teams to work the way they want and need—not in the way technology dictates. Office 365 enables a team to do things like co-author a report in real-time together, save it automatically to the cloud, discuss updates and changes from within the document itself and then easily share it with others by attaching the report as a link in email. To connect quickly for the rapid, iterative conversations that are so often at the heart of how work gets done, Office 365 enables you to automatically see colleagues’ presence and simply click a name to initiate an IM, or a voice or video call. Standing on the shoulders of giants But empowering a team to work more effectively requires more than just new choices and application-level integration. These days, as teams rapidly form and disband, we believe that it’s critical for people to be able to "stand on the shoulders of giants"—that is, quickly discover the work of others and build upon it through a shared intelligent fabric. This belief stands in stark contrast to the approach taken by disconnected point solutions, each maintaining a separate data silo, where useful information becomes stranded in a single app or buried within countless conversations. This belief in a common intelligent fabric is why we’ve introduced Office 365 Groups and Office Graph, two technologies that span Office 365 and beyond, helping teams self-organize, work together and build upon the expertise of others—ringing to life the inherent power of your network and powering personalized discovery experiences. Learn more about Office Graph. In just the last six months, Office Graph has mapped over six billion actions and interactions from across Office 365 applications. This common intelligent fabric allows us to enable new digital workspaces that span all of the Microsoft tools a team uses to get work done as well as provide a single way for IT to manage and secure corporate data and access. Learn more about Office 365 Groups. By continuing to innovate on tools that facilitate teamwork and extending a common intelligent fabric, we’re continuing to push the envelope and explore new, unique ways to make teams more effective. Stay tuned for more news here in the coming weeks! —Bryan Goode The post The rise of dynamic teams appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kevin Shaughnessy, senior program manager and Shobhit Sahay, technical product manager for the Office 365 team. For the last few years the largest email message you could send or receive in Office 365 was 25 MB. While 25 MB is more than enough for the majority of email, you might bump up against that limit when trying to send large slide decks, spreadsheets or videos. Outlook Web App (OWA) in Office 365 offers an easy way to "attach" a document as a link to where it’s saved on OneDrive for Business, a great option for sharing large files with your colleagues. But there are times when you’d prefer to send a large file as an actual attachment rather than a link. For those times, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve increased the allowed maximum message size to 150 MB, giving Office 365 administrators the ability to set the maximum message size of their choosing from 1 MB up to 150 MB. The default maximum message size for Office 365 mailboxes is still 25 MB, and we aren’t going to change the setting on existing accounts. It turns out that some folks want an even smaller setting than 25 MB and many don’t want to change the current setting at all. So instead of us foisting a one-size-fits-all setting onto everyone, we’re now giving Office 365 customers the freedom to choose the maximum size setting that’s right for them. Customized maximum message size You can customize the maximum allowed message size for any and all your mailboxes however you see fit. Want to go wild and allow everyone to send and receive 100 MB size messages? Go for it. Want to restrict students in your school from sending messages larger than 5 MB, while the faculty can send up to 50 MB? No problem. Do you have a hybrid mail configuration (some mailboxes on-premises, some in the cloud) and you want a consistent 10 MB restriction regardless where the mailbox is hosted? We have you covered. Whatever custom configuration you want to apply, whether for one, some, or all your mailboxes you can do it—as long as it’s between 1 MB and 150 MB. You customize the message size in the Exchange Admin Center, which requires global administrator role privileges. You can change the default for your organization by adjusting the default message size restriction. Simply select recipients > mailboxes then click ". . ." and select Set default message size restrictions. You can then specify the maximum message size for new mailboxes (those you create in the future). To edit multiple mailboxes select recipients > mailboxes and select multiple mailboxes. Then from the Bulk Edit pane under Message Size Restrictions select Update. Finally, you can customize a single mailbox by selecting recipients > mailboxes and then select a user’s mailbox. Click the edit icon , then under Message Size Restrictions, click View details and then specify the maximum message size.   Use the Exchange Admin Center or Remote PowerShell If your organization is comprised of less than 1,000 mailboxes, you’ll likely end up using the Exchange Admin Center user interface to make changes. But if your organization has more than 1,000 users, you may want to make these changes via Remote PowerShell. Updating thousands of mailboxes at a time can take a while to complete—a rough rule of thumb is around 5 to 10 minutes per 1,000. And while replicating the updates across the service typically takes an additional 15 minutes, allow up to 30 minutes after the update process is finished before testing out the new settings. Examples of the common commands you might use to customize these settings via Remote PowerShell include: ACTION COMMAND Update a single mailbox Set-Mailbox -Identity alias@domain.com -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB Update multiple mailboxes  ("alias", "alias2″, "alias3″) | % {Set-Mailbox -Identity $_ -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB} Update all mailboxes  Get-Mailbox | Set-Mailbox -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB Update the default settings (For mailboxes you create in the future.) Get-MailboxPlan | Set-MailboxPlan -MaxSendSize 75MB -MaxReceiveSize 75MB Technical details There are a few technical details you should know when sending and receiving messages larger than 25 MB. First, as a message routes from mail system to mail system it can get larger than when it started. This happens because as a message traverses different mail systems, transcoding (or Base64/MIME conversion) may occur, most commonly between on-premises Exchange and the cloud. This results in a 33 percent larger message than when it left your outbox. Even though the maximum allowed message size is now 150 MB, this is the maximum message size threshold after any potential transcoding has occurred. If your message is going to get transcoded, then it will be limited to 112 MB maximum. Yet, not all messages are subject to transcoding. For example, most messages sent between mailboxes hosted within Office 365 won’t get transcoded, so they can be a full 150 MB in size. Second, email clients differ in their support for sending large messages. For example, in Outlook, assuming no transcoding is involved, you can attach a 150 MB size file and send it, and assuming the recipient is also hosted in the cloud and is configured to receive 150 MB size messages they’ll receive it. OWA, however, restricts the size of the message you can send to 25 percent less than the configured allowed maximum send size. It does this proactively to account for the possibility there might be a message size increase due to transcoding. For example, if your maximum allowed send size is set to 100 MB then using OWA you can only send up to 75 MB maximum. Additionally, in OWA, each attachment can be no larger than 25 MB. So with a 100 MB maximum send size, using OWA you could attach and send up to three 25 MB files in a single message. These conditions may change in the future, so be sure to check the official Office 365 documentation for the latest on the message size support provided by various email clients. Lastly, don’t forget that as an Office 365 customer, if you’ve customized your settings to 150 MB, you may be able to send and receive large messages up to 150 MB, but your associates may not. Whether it’s because their mail is hosted on a different email service or system that doesn’t support large message sizes, or they’re an Office 365 user but haven’t changed their settings, they may not be able to receive your large message. So if your message is over 25 MB be sure to ask them about it in advance before sending it to them. —Kevin Shaughnessy and Shobhit Sahay The post Office 365 now supports larger email messages—up to 150 MB appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post was written by Juliet Wei, a senior product marketing manager for the Yammer team. Yesterday we laid out our vision for modern collaboration in Office 365, which recognizes that collaboration is central to productivity and teams today are dynamic, extending far beyond the four walls of an organization. To get work done, teams need an easy way to self-organize, stay connected on the go, tap into the network of stakeholders inside and outside your company—and do all this while juggling multiple projects. In talking with customers about how they get the most out of Yammer, we’ve learned that those who realize the most value use Yammer as a home for their projects and initiatives.The new world of work we’re living in demands a new way for people to work together. That’s why we’re on a mission to transform team collaboration. Take a look at this video to see how teams use Yammer as part of Office 365 today. We’ve got lots of exciting innovations in store, so I’d like to share with you some of the things we’re doing in Yammer to help teams come together, work smarter and faster, and scale their impact. First, we’re integrating the Yammer experience more deeply within Office 365 by making Yammer a part of Office 365 Groups and Yammer signals a part of the Office Graph. Through this deeper integration, teams can seamlessly move between Yammer conversations, meetings in Skype for Business, Outlook email, files in OneDrive and content discovery in Delve. Next, we’re making Yammer itself a better place for teams to work by using our algorithmic feed to surface the teams and conversations you should know about, so you can stay on top of all your projects from the feed and engage more deeply within groups. And, because we know that teams themselves often span across organizations, we’re making it possible for extended teams to stay in sync and do more together. To this last point, I’m pleased to announce a new external messaging feature in Yammer, which enables you to add extended team members from outside your organization, such as partners, vendors and customers, to Yammer conversations. To include an external participant, simply add their email address to a Yammer conversation in your network, and they’ll be able to see and respond to this conversation from their own Yammer network or email inbox. Your data stays secure because outside participants only access the conversations they have been added to and not the rest of the information in your network. With 40 percent or more of the U.S. workforce expected to be made up of contingent or independent workers by 2020, companies need to empower the formation of dynamic teams. External messaging is an important step in that direction. Of course, we’ll continue to deliver these great new Yammer experiences on an enterprise-grade platform with centralized management, because we recognize that companies need a way to secure and manage their IP as teams and tools proliferate. So there you have it. Our goal is to make Yammer and Office 365 the place where teams work. Attend Ignite from May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago to see our vision in action for yourself. —Juliet Wei Frequently Asked Questions Q. How can I learn more about new Yammer features on the road map? A. Come to Ignite and attend the Yammer sessions!  We’ll be going over many of our key roadmap investments there, so you’ll be able to get an insider’s look at what we’re noodling over and actively working on. You can also stay up-to-date on new features we’ve publicly disclosed on the Office 365 roadmap. Q. How do I know that Yammer is the right tool for my team? A. As part of Office 365, Yammer enables teams to collaborate in the open by giving them the ability to easily self-organize, stay connected on the go, and tap into the network of stakeholders inside and outside your company. In the future, Yammer will integrate with Office 365 Groups so your team can share data across and easily move between Yammer, Outlook, OneDrive, Skype and Delve. Q. What will you do to ensure my conversations with external participants remain secure?  A. External messaging was designed to keep your IP safe and secure. We added several features to help identify, monitor and proactively protect your data. First, to create awareness among users, we revamped our UI to provide several warnings before an employee adds an external participant to a conversation. The UI also indicates if external participants are in a thread so new contributors know their audience before posting. Second, we added the ability to apply Exchange Transport Rules (ETRs) from Exchange Online directly to Yammer. Third, as many companies require a record of all employee communications, we refreshed data export so Yammer Verified Admins can monitor any conversation that originated in their network as well as conversations their employees are participating in outside networks. Finally, we provide Yammer users and admins the ability to remove external participants once they’ve been added, pulling that conversation entirely from the external participant’s inbox. To learn more about these security features, please visit this knowledge base article. Q. What if I want to continue using Yammer as a private network visible only to my organization?  A. We believe ETRs are the right way to control external messaging, allowing us to provide admins with one centralized set of controls to manage external communication across Office 365. Using ETRs, admins can impose necessary restrictions but still provide employees with the choice to use any modality that best suits their needs. In the case that ETRs are not sufficient, we provide the option for customers to block users from using external messaging and/or firewall users from receiving conversations from other networks at any time. To learn how you can opt out, see here. Before opting out, we highly encourage customers to first try the feature. From early beta testing with several of our largest customers, we found that External Messaging greatly improved user experience, helped drive meaningful engagement and connected teams that previously struggled to work together. The post Evolving Yammer for a new era of teamwork appeared first on Office Blogs.