Today’s post was written by Terra Milles, communication manager and public information officer at King County. In King County, our customer service policy is "No wrong door." This means that when a citizen reaches any County employee, that employee will ensure the citizen is directed promptly to someone who has the answer. . To make this happen, we need technology that connects and enables our employees—Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Microsoft SharePoint Online are key tools in our communications and collaboration portfolio. King County has the largest population in Washington State: it’s home to the city of Seattle and nearly two million people. We have 14,000 employees working in more than 250 offices, which is a lot of people in a lot of places to connect at a moment’s notice. Increasingly, employees are using OneDrive for Business to store project plans, schedules, videos, and any other kind of file. This helps them collaborate across departments and devices to find what they need to respond to citizens and colleagues. Information is not buried on employee’s computers; it’s in the cloud—well organized and available securely, to everyone who needs it. Using Office 365 search capabilities, we can quickly find the information and people leading to that "right door." We use the presence feature in Skype for Business to see if the author of a document is available online, so we can reach out to them in real-time as needed. Cloud-based document access is especially important as our employees become more mobile, particularly field employees who often don’t work in offices or at desks. It’s important for them to be able to access documents from anywhere, using any device. With Office 365 and OneDrive for Business, they have that flexibility. We recently used OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to build an application that helps us coordinate and respond to public information requests. The application is now used by more than 60 County staff members in various executive branch and elected agencies and it’s an example of how we can build one integrated platform for wide-ranging deployment. As a public entity, we must respond to all public disclosure requests, and this new application offers greater efficiencies than previous siloed response and collection methods. We use OneDrive for Business to store records and utilize the permissions function to coordinate across agencies. Together, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online serve as our information-sharing backbone. We have hundreds of SharePoint sites that teams use to organize and manage projects ranging from internal coordination to event planning to large-scale information technology initiatives. We also use SharePoint Online as the foundation for our new intranet, which has become the gold standard in demonstrating to internal groups what they can do with the SharePoint service. Our intranet portal enables our staff to find employee news and spotlights, featured jobs, an events calendar, a photo of the week, and quick links to tools such as PeopleSoft, Healthy Incentives and training. They can also use the How Do I…, Work Tools and Employee Tools menus to access a wide range of county resources; check their department, agency, or division site (new or existing), bookmark their most frequently used intranet and SharePoint sites; and look up colleagues quickly using People Search. As a government entity, we have limited resources, so standardizing on Office 365 services such as OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online helps us reduce complexity and costs, as well as maximize our IT resources. We can also meet government security standards for cloud based data, such as HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services Division of the FBI) using the Microsoft Azure Government cloud. With OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, we are equipped to make sure that citizens encounter no wrong door when they call King County. —Terra Milles The post No wrong door appeared first on Office Blogs.

We could not be more excited to welcome the team at 6Wunderkinder, the creator of Wunderlist, to Microsoft and OneNote. The acquisition of this market-leading to-do list app known for its simplicity, ease of use and innovative design fits squarely with our ambition to reinvent productivity and help people achieve more across all major platforms and devices—particularly on mobile. Wunderlist provides an easy way for people to capture, organize and collaborate on lists and to-dos—personally and professionally. It is a fantastic app, and, like OneNote, available on every device that matters to users—iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Android, Windows Phone, Windows and the web. Wunderlist recently announced integration with Sunrise and we will share additional integration updates in the coming months. Learn more about the acquisition on the Official Microsoft Blog. The post Microsoft acquires 6Wunderkinder, creator of to-do list app Wunderlist appeared first on Office Blogs.

In a world where technology is always evolving, email has become a primary source of communication for businesses large and small. According to this survey by digital magazine Windows IT Pro, 96.84 percent of survey respondents say that email is core to their day-to-day business. Regardless of industry—from health to education, retail to finance—most small businesses need an email and collaboration software that’s efficient and can help keep administrative costs down. But with so many email hosting services out there today, how can you find one that covers all of your needs? To begin, consider services that meet the following five criteria: 1. Security Keeping email content protected is a top concern for users looking into their next email solution, according to Windows IT Pro. Not only is it important to keep content secure, but proper email protection will help head off other hacking accessed through email. Companies that allow hacking leaks can land in a lot of financial trouble—because of the Sony email hack of 2014, the organization could lose up to $100 million. And though the loss from hacks of smaller businesses is often a lot less (an average of $8,700, according to USA Today), the risk of a larger loss isn’t worth it. Small business owners should look for email hosting services that use advanced tools to protect information. Specifically, anti-malware, anti-spam filtering, and data loss prevention capabilities should be in place. To ensure your data is backed up properly, find a hosting service that has globally redundant servers, a team of experts that’s monitoring your servers and is available 24/7 and the ability to employ effective disaster recovery techniques. In addition, it’s important for hosting services to maintain a number of security certifications and remain compliant with certain regulations. Specifically, select a host with HIPAA and FISMA compliance, which allows the email service to be fully acceptable for use in health care and government settings, respectively. Microsoft’s Office 365 is one of the top-ranked email hosting services for Exchange, a popular mail platform that allows users to make use of numerous helpful features. In addition to being HIPAA- and FISMA-certified, Office 365 is ISO 27001 certified, SSAE 16 certified, EU Safe Harbor compliant and EU Model Clauses capable. 2. Administration and ease of use The best email hosting services provide you with complete—or nearly complete—control over your email environment, but also offer assistance when it’s needed. Reliable customer service is a required given, and that should include 24/7 email, chat, and phone support. When selecting an email hosting service, you should be on the lookout for companies that offer web-based interfaces that are simple to use. For example, the Microsoft Exchange eDiscovery Center allows you to run In-Place eDiscovery across Exchange, SharePoint and Lync data from one interface. You can also remove confidential data from phones that have been lost, as well as create approved mobile device lists and enforce PIN lock. An easy-to-use interface gives your small business the flexibility it needs to complete administrative tasks in a timely manner. When you combine that with excellent help desk support, you’ve got a winning solution on your hands. 3. Compatibility and flexibility As a business owner, you know the value of productivity—and that’s why it’s vital to have an email system that works for you, not against you. Look for email hosting services that offer enterprise-level syncing with web-based applications and mobile devices. Whether your office has only two employees or two hundred, you will definitely want the ability to collaborate using global address lists, tasks, and shared calendars. As a host for Exchange, Office 365 brings compatibility with Outlook and Lync, as well as the ability to access your email, calendar, and contacts on all major browsers, across devices, wherever you are. You also will want the freedom to choose what email options you need and what you can do without. Select an email hosting service that offers a variety of features and several service levels. That way, you can begin with the basics—a more affordable option for companies on the smaller side or just starting out—and expand without switching hosting services down the road once your business has grown or changed. 4. Availability Because we live in an always-on world, even an hour of downtime—email or otherwise—can cost your business thousands of dollars. A 2014 report by IDC showed that 80 percent of small and midsized businesses lose $20,000 or more per hour of network downtime. Because email is a vital part of a business’s productivity and often contains company data, it’s important to find a hosting service that guarantees uptime of at least 99.9 percent. In addition, find a service that keeps you connected. Office 365 brings you automatic patching so you don’t have to maintain your own system. Also, be sure you can access your email environment on mobile devices across brands—so whether employees have an iPhone, a Windows Phone, an Android or a Blackberry, they can get to their emails, no matter where they are. 5. Archiving and storage There’s nothing worse than a cluttered email inbox that doesn’t allow for sorting messages easily. But there are some messages that contain important information you don’t want to delete. The solution is an email hosting service that provides adequate storage for archiving. Even better are the services that have an established archiving system in place. Specifically, you’ll want to look for a service that keeps all your data in one place and gives you the option to automatically move old messages to the archive. In addition, the host should guarantee access to your archived messages and protect data with continuous backup and disaster recovery. Select an email hosting service provider that will help you manage your archived email within your inbox—and say goodbye to annoying locally stored .pst files. You’ll also want a provider that can advise you on best practices for the development of an email retention policy and help implement it through your email system. Because technology is always evolving, your email service should get better and better over the years. Look for a forward-thinking email host that is always improving its services. Ultimately, that’s the best way to know you’ve made the right choice. The post 5 factors to consider when selecting an email hosting service appeared first on Office Blogs.

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 I’m joined by Rudra Mitra, engineering lead for the Office 365 information protection team, to take 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. We 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! —Jeremy Chapman The post Early look at next gen information protection in Office 365 and beyond appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today people send and receive more email than ever at work, which is one reason built-in archiving is one of the most popular IT-related features in Office 365. There are millions of Office 365 archives in active use, and the unlimited archive storage offered in our Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E4 plans continue to provide value to IT admins and end users alike. As customers began using our recently announced Import Service to import terabytes of data from on-premises systems to Office 365, or to manage high volume mailboxes, we’ve seen a few cases in which a customer reached a threshold that required them to contact Microsoft support and perform manual steps to provision additional space. But no longer. To accommodate customers who require very, very large archiving storage, we are pleased to announce new auto-expanding, highly scalable archiving. This allows you to take advantage of a truly bottomless archive without needing to call support or perform any manual steps. Through an update to our back-end architecture, we not only enabled auto-expanding archives, but also removed limits on the Recoverable Items store. This update retains the best-of-breed archiving experience that end users, IT pros and compliance officers love so much. End users continue to access their email data in the same way; IT pros continue to enable archiving for their users with the same user interface and PowerShell commands, and our comprehensive compliance stack—Auditing, Retention, Hold and eDiscovery—works seamlessly with the updated archiving architecture. We’re excited to deliver a solution that meets the most rigorous requirements of all our customers and industries we serve across the world. We’ll begin to roll out this offering worldwide in the coming weeks. —The Office 365 Archiving team The post Announcing auto-expanding, highly scalable archives for Office 365 email appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services Team. About a month ago, we invited anyone to participate in Office 2016 on Windows Preview. We now have over one million customers using the Office Preview across both Windows and Mac platforms. When we started the preview, we noted we would be adding features regularly for customers to test and just this month released several new updates. Here’s a quick look at a few of the highlights: Real Time Presence in Word—While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon. Simplified file sharing—We are simplifying the process of sharing files and making them available to others to review, comment, and edit. Just clicking Share on the Ribbon will save your file to the Cloud and make it available to others in one easy step. Insights for Office (currently in Word and Outlook)—Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your reading experience. Try it by selecting keywords, like people or places, in your content and watch as Insights pulls relevant information into the Task pane to help you learn more. Version History improvements—We made it easier to find different versions of files stored on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. You can click the History command in the File menu to view or restore any previous version. These are just a few of the highlights, with many others available including Power Pivot improvements, improved grammar checkers, and more. If you haven’t joined Office 2016 Preview, it’s not too late. Join here. We have more new features in the pipeline that will be showing up in the Preview over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more updates. Meanwhile, we look forward to hearing your feedback on Office 2016 and thanks for your support.   —Kirk Koenigsbauer The post Office 2016 on Windows Preview update appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Eric Shupps on his thoughts on SharePoint Add-ins. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP48.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Windows 10 - July 29th release date V1.1 manifests for Online and iPad client support Waldek Mastykarz - Office 365 SPA on any platform and Office Graph hands on Lab Show notes Office 365 Training on SharePoint Building Blocks Office 365 Development Patterns & Practices Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Eric Shupps Eric Shupps is the founder and president of BinaryWave, a leading provider of administration and productivity solutions for Microsoft SharePoint. Eric has worked with SharePoint Products and Technologies since 2001 as a consultant, administrator, architect, developer and trainer. He is an advisory committee member of the Dallas/Ft. Worth SharePoint Community group and a participating member of user groups throughout the United Kingdom. Eric has authored numerous articles on SharePoint, speaks at user group meetings and conferences around the world, and publishes a popular SharePoint blog at http://www.sharepointcowboy.com. About the host Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is based, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 048 with Eric Shupps on SharePoint Add-ins appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Power Query update includes four new or improved features including: Enhanced Privacy levels dialog New Text column filters: "Does Not Begin With…" and "Does Not End With…" Improved Salesforce connectors Improved "Excel Workbook" connector     You can continue reading for more details about each feature. Enhanced Privacy levels dialog We improved the Privacy levels dialog where users are asked to provide privacy levels for all data sources involved in a query. With this update, users can control whether privacy levels apply to a specific location or a more general one. For instance, you can now control whether privacy levels should be applied to a page versus an entire site. New Text column filters: "Does Not Begin With…" and "Does Not End With…" We added a couple of new filters for Text columns so you can filter by "Does Not Begin With…" or "Does Not End With…" In previous versions of Power Query, these filters required custom formula editing, but are now much easier to apply by simply selecting them from the Text Filters menu. Improved Salesforce connectors An area of feedback from many of our customers using the Salesforce connector is that they want to connect first to a custom domain, rather than the default (production) domain. Another common request is to be able to create relationships when loading Salesforce tables to the Data Model, based on the relationships that already existed in Salesforce. These two options were available by modifying the underlying formulas, but not surfaced in the UI. With this update, we added these two options to the Salesforce connector dialogs. The selection of Production versus Custom domain is available in both "Salesforce Objects" and "Salesforce Reports." The option to import relationships between Salesforce tables is available in the "Salesforce Objects" connector.   Improved "Excel Workbook" connector One of our most popular connectors is the "Excel Workbook" connector, which allows users to import tables, named ranges or raw worksheet data from an Excel Workbook. In this update, we added automatic column type detection for columns imported using this connector, making it easier for users to work with these columns without having to manually convert them to the right data type. We also made some performance optimizations so that the data previews in the Navigator and Query Editor for this connector load much faster. That’s all for this month. As mentioned previously, we’re making lots of incremental improvements to Power Query and we hope that you find it better with every new monthly update. Please continue sending us feedback using our "Send a Smile/Frown" feature, or by voting for what you’d like to see next.     —Miguel Llopis, program manager on the Power Query team ——————— Power Query for Excel is available with Office 2013 or Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance.  Download the add-in and learn more about getting started. You can receive update notifications in Power Query when there is a new version available. These notifications will show up in your PC’s system tray when you launch Excel. You can also check for updates by using the Update button in the Power Query ribbon tab. 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 on  Facebook and Twitter The post 4 updates to Power Query appeared first on Office Blogs.

Join us for another virtual event live from a Microsoft Technology Center to learn how to deploy office in your organization with Office Click-to-Run. Office Click-to-Run, the Office Deployment tool, allows administrators to customize and manage Office 2013 Click-to-Run deployments. This tool helps administrators manage installations sources, product/language combinations and deployment configuration options for Office Click-to-Run. Office Click-to-Run is a Microsoft streaming and virtualization technology that reduces the time required to install Office and helps you run multiple versions of Office on the same computer. The streaming technology enables you to download and begin to use an Office product before the whole product is installed on your computer. The virtualization technology provides an isolated environment for Office to run on your computer. This isolated environment allows you to run the latest version of Office side-by-side with an earlier version of Office that is already installed on your computer. Embrace the ease to live life and work the way that’s best for you. Join us for a 30 minute webcast to hear Mike Gannotti and Todd Furst, Microsoft technical architects on Wednesday, June 17th at 10 a.m. PDT to receive an overview and benefits of Office Click-to-Run. Register for the Virtual Event Series and get the latest information about Office Click-to-Run. We hope to see you there! The post Office 365—deploying Office in your environment appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we are introducing a set of new user experiences in Office 365 on the web that provide quick access to notifications, help and what’s new feature introductions, contextual and immersive settings and the integration of Skype for Business conversations - all within the context of your work. These new features will be available across Office 365 web applications via a set of persistent icons in the top right of the navigation bar. Let’s take a quick look at what’s new: Quick access to notifications A new notifications pane displays real-time updates on your system alerts, personal reminders and communications, including new mails and group likes. You can access the notifications pane via the persistent notification bell icon. The notification bell will display the corresponding number of available notifications. Updated Help pane and "What’s new" feature introductions The new Help pane delivers quick access to help content via a search box, as well as What’s new feature introductions  related to the application you are currently working in. Features included in What’s new include links to additional information, quick actions like "create group" and in some cases a call out on the application canvas about the new feature being introduced. The help pane question mark icon will show a snowflake alert to call attention to new features in a non-intrusive way. The Help pane will also include an organization support card for admins to set the support contact information for their organization including email, phone number and website. The organization support card, once enabled from the company profile tab of the admin portal, appears at the bottom of the Help pane for all users within your organization. Integration of Skype for Business conversations Conversations and real-time access to colleagues across locations, time zones, or even just down the hall have become commonplace for many of us. You will now have the option to start an instant message, voice and/ or video conversation with one or several of your colleagues right from the productivity of your inbox, OneDrive for Business or calendar application. Conversations will provide you with real time, direct access to the information you need directly from your colleagues and persist across applications. Contextual and immersive settings Finally, a new Settings pane provides direct access to contextual settings for the application you are working in, and quick access to the full Office 365 settings experience. In this way, you can personalize and customize your work environment without having to leave what you’re working on. Quick updates to your notifications settings, your password or your automatic replies are only a few clicks away. These new features deliver a more consistent, personalized, and productive experience within Office 365 on the web—enabling you and your team to achieve more with the Office 365 web experience. The features will begin rolling out to those in the First Release program over the next few weeks, and we expect them to be rolled out to all Office 365 business customers over the next several months. Let us know what you think and if you have any questions post in the comments below. —Nick Robinson, senior product marketing manager, Office 365 team The post New user experiences in Office 365 on the web appeared first on Office Blogs.