Today’s post about Office 365 was written by Greg Staky, director of information technology at Veriown Energy.   Veriown Energy began as a typical startup, in August 2013. Instead of an office, we held ad-hoc meetings in each other’s condos and homes. Everyone used whatever devices they had, and we all traveled a lot to meet with researchers, investors and potential customers. Today, we have a head office in Chicago, but that startup work style—mobile, agile, available and productive—remains. One of my first responsibilities was to find the right business tools to match our way of working and our corporate culture. We’re in the business of selling sustainable, clean, local energy consumption—imagine Veriown turning your roof or parking lot into a solar power plant, with almost no capital expense on your part, so you could lock into predictable, long-term energy rates. Given our business, we chose technologies that were cloud-based business tools. We looked at Google Apps for Work, but everyone in our industry uses Office. Cloud-based tools that work anywhere, and on any device, suited our mobility requirements. And, there’s a growing number of apps for Office 365 that you can use to extend your business platform. There’s plenty of enterprise-level functionality to build workflows and repeatable business processes. There are also cost benefits—we saved $30,000 by retiring third-party products and avoiding an on-premises PBX solution. If you replaced the word "energy" with "computing" in our slogan, "Energy the way it should be. Where you need it. When you need it. Your very own," you would get an idea of why we went with Office 365. We use the collaboration sites you get with SharePoint Online to build better relationships with investors. Investors go to a designated portal to track the progress of their investments in individual installation projects, or to review corporate information before they decide to invest in our company. We had such success with our collaboration platform that I began looking for a CRM-type app that worked with SharePoint Online. We wanted our sales reps to manage their pipeline online, rather than working with Excel spreadsheets. That’s when we discovered the SideKick365 xRM App from SkyLite Systems in the new Apps for Office marketplace. It was an excellent fit because it offered additional CRM and project management features built entirely in SharePoint Online. We worked with SkyLite Systems to create a simple process for onboarding external people into the SideKick365 xRM app and assigning appropriate access to our corporate data. It worked like a charm. And the real kicker is that external users get to use Office 365 and the SharePoint collaboration platform for free. All we pay for is the SideKick365 xRM app license. Suddenly, the business value of our online collaboration platform took a quantum leap forward. For example, some of our consultants and contractors bring sales to us. We wanted to capitalize on these opportunities, so we invited them to join our CRM site and they, along with our own sales reps, are using the SideKick365 xRM app to manage customers and analyze the sales pipeline. We also created a SharePoint site for project management activities for each customer. Now we can invite construction and engineering contractors onto these sites to use SideKick365 xRM app’s project management features so they can more easily manage their construction projects. The faster we can take our customers off the grid so they can start benefiting from clean energy consumption at a predictable price, the better. The business value of this extensible platform is huge. We needed CRM capabilities. We needed project management capabilities. We needed to show potential investors that our business systems were up to the job. Yet I didn’t have to go outside the Office 365 platform. I used a SharePoint app that was built on the platform we already owned to deliver a seamless and economical way to extend our IT investments that will scale with us as we grow. In a little more than a year, Office 365 has proven itself to be an extensible business platform that’s generated a lot of positive energy at Veriown. —Greg Staky To find out more, read Veriown’s unique Office 365 story or view their self-shot video: The post Going off-the-grid with Office 365—selling local energy generation with cloud-based IT tools appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last month at Ignite we showcased new mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) capabilities in Outlook for iOS and Android. Today, we are happy to announce that customers using Outlook for iOS and Android can now use built-in MDM for Office 365 or Microsoft Intune to secure email data on mobile devices within their organization. Combined with our recent update to enable OAuth and add support for Multi-Factor Authentication, Outlook now offers the leading set of controls for protecting corporate email and calendaring data on mobile devices while preserving a rich and empowering experience for users. Customers looking to manage Outlook for iOS and Android now have two great options—use core capabilities of the built-in MDM available in Office 365 or the full power of Microsoft Intune, which includes everything delivered in MDM for Office 365 plus additional mobile device and application management capabilities. Let’s take a look at the capabilities each of these provides. Managing Outlook with the built-in MDM in Office 365 Earlier this year, we delivered built-in MDM capabilities for Office 365 customers at no additional cost. These MDM capabilities help organizations to protect their data and manage all mobile devices that come into contact with it. Behind the scenes, these capabilities are powered by Microsoft Intune, providing a core set of controls in the Office 365 admin center for organizations that need the basics. Outlook now fully supports the capabilities provided by built-in MDM for Office 365. Need a refresher on MDM for Office 365? Watch this short video overview. Once set up, Outlook and Office 365’s MDM capabilities work together to keep data safe in three ways: Conditional Access—Outlook ensures that Office 365 email can be accessed only on phones and tablets that are managed by your company and are in a healthy state. During log in on an unmanaged device, Outlook prompts the user to enroll the device in Intune and validates that the device meets your organizations access rules regarding device health and security. Outlook prompts the user to enroll their device in order to access email data from Office 365. Device management and reporting—The enrollment process allows organizations to set and manage security policies to enforce device-level pin lock, require data encryption, block jailbroken or rooted devices and more, to help prevent unauthorized users from accessing corporate email and data. Each enrolled device appears in the Office 365 admin center and rich reporting is available to provide details on devices accessing your corporate data. Device management options available in Office 365. Selective wipe—Outlook will remove your Office 365 email data while leaving any personal email accounts intact. This is an increasingly important requirement as more businesses adopt a "bring your own device" (BYOD) approach to phones and tablets. Managing Outlook with Microsoft Intune If you are looking for broader protection capabilities beyond what’s included in Office 365, you can subscribe to Microsoft Intune, which is part of the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite. Intune provides mobile application management (MAM) capabilities for Outlook and other Office mobile apps in addition to the conditional access and device management capabilities outlined above. With Intune MAM, you can restrict actions such as cut, copy, paste, and "save as" of corporate data between Intune-managed apps and apps that are not managed by Intune. Additionally, the Intune-managed Outlook apps include a new multi-identity management feature that enables users to access both their personal and work email accounts in the same Outlook app while only applying the Intune MAM policies to the user’s work account - this provides a much more seamless user experience. For more detail about how the Microsoft Intune conditional access and mobile application management capabilities work, check out the Intune blog. Thank you for your feedback! Have a feature request? Share your ideas with us on our new Outlook UserVoice site. For any support requests or to report a bug, please contact us right from Outlook by navigating to Settings > Help > Contact Support. Frequently asked questions Q. Where can I find more technical resources about built-in MDM for Office 365? A. For detailed technical information, check out this TechNet article. Q. Where can I find more technical resources about Microsoft Intune? A. For detailed technical information, check out the Intune TechNet pages for conditional access and MAM. Q. What capabilities come with Intune versus built-in MDM for Office 365? A. Details for both Intune and MDM for Office 365 are outlined in this TechNet article. The post New Intune capabilities for Outlook on iOS and Android appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Phillip Tiongson, creative director at Potion. Potion is a design firm, first and foremost. We believe that good design integrated with technology has the power to amplify humanity. We strive to express ourselves by bringing story, art, design, architecture and computation together to deliver memorable and empathetic interactive experiences for our clients. The experiences we create range from beautifully designed mobile applications, to site-specific interactive installations in museums, cultural centers, healthcare, retail and hospitality environments. We specialize in creating interactive experiences rooted in storytelling. Unlike traditional services and software consulting companies that create products for any context, we challenge ourselves to make every experience that we build for our clients a bespoke, custom and original piece of software that uniquely conveys their story. Because of this, Potion’s creative process is built around creating a shared vision with our clients of what their original concept will look and feel like, how their stories will inhabit that concept, and how our unique approach to interaction design will bring it to life. A critical moment in our projects is when Potion first begins to understand and articulate a client’s story. We conduct interviews, hold kick-off meetings, and gather examples of the stories they want to use in the interactive installation or app. Those stories take many different forms and touch on different emotions—from global issues to the human experience. For example, for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, we created an immersive physical installation designed to speak to the story of energy at the epic scale of a complex human city—how it is consumed, generated and most importantly, conserved. Moving from epic to personal scale, we created an interactive exhibit table that allows visitors to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum discover the stories of individual immigrants’ lives—who they loved, where they worked, and how they survived to build their families and fortunes. Potion dives deep into the details of each client’s story so that we can effectively express their message through a bespoke interactive experience. Once we begin to collect our clients’ stories, Potion faces a challenge of communication. Clients do not think of their stories as "content" to be managed or "sample data," but rather a collection of material that together conveys a larger narrative. These stories come to us in many different stages of completion, from preliminary notes and images to final drafts ready for visitors. Because content is so integral to the interactive experience that we ultimately create, we start exploring it with our clients from day one—at a time when we are not yet ready to build the final physical installation, but when we need a way to communicate that we understand their story. At the same time, we’ve found that our clients also need a way to visualize their own stories to see the potential of the stories they actually have. How Sway fits into our process Over the past 10 years, we have tried almost every type of document sharing that exists with our clients. From email attachments to Word docs to custom websites—we have been looking for a way to share and present the clients’ own stories back to them in a well-designed package that is also time-efficient for us to work within. Sway allows us to gather and organize stories in a clear, coherent form that represents Potion well as a design firm but is also highly collaborative. We can work together on a story with a client that has minimal design skills, but strong narrative ideas, and allow them to incorporate those ideas in a real-time way with us. Because Sway allows us to work in the cloud, it eliminates huge pain points of working collaboratively with clients, such as dealing with incompatible versions of software, desktop or mobile platforms, email attachment limits, document versioning and technical support. But just as important to us as the practical improvements is the fact that our clients’ stories are represented in a professional, well-designed format that presents their stories with visual respect and impact. Although we have the option to create custom web pages or detailed presentation decks to describe the stories, Sway is more efficient for us to communicate our ideas quickly for feedback and iteration. And best of all, Sway then allows us to continue co-creating stories with our clients. Potion’s process in creating our interactive installations and apps can take place over months, and is a constant evolution from storyboarding to designing to writing code. Sway has the power to fill an important gap that exists in this process, from the first days when we gather content, to the final phase when content is live in the interactive experience. Sway provides us a place to share, play and collaborate with clients throughout the process, using a form that we are proud to share and express ourselves in. In our first exploration of Sway, we used it to share the story of creating the permanent interactive installation Future Energy Chicago, with the Museum of Science and Industry. The museum exhibit Future Energy Chicago is an all-digital, immersive gaming environment that gives audiences control over the direction the world is moving, by offering students and citizens the tools for making smart decisions to save Chicago’s future. It’s a multi-faceted project, with five interactive games, an overhead LED lighting sequence, and an animated scoreboard. Sway gives us a platform that allows us to tell the story of Future Energy Chicago in a dynamic and compelling presentation. As a Sway, we bring the case study to life, revealing how the interactive environment behaves and reacts, and the creative process that got us there. We are very proud of the work, and hope that our story inspires you to use Sway to tell your own stories, either to your clients, or to the world. Keep in touch with us, and our future Sways: @potion_design Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post Sway helps design firm Potion create and collaborate with clients appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Rohit Nagarmal about the Office 365 Groups API. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP50_Rohit.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates  Challenges in Office 365 development - and ways to address them Search videos using the Office 365 Video REST API Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices - June 2015 Community Call Unity Connect Keynote - Key Announcements for Office and SharePoint Developers Disabling apps can be done via PowerShell right now Show notes Office 365 unified API overview Office 365 unified API in depth Office 365 unified API reference Graph Explorer 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 Rohit Rohit Nagarmal is a program manager at Microsoft working in Office 365 on the Exchange Ecosystem team. He spends most of his days thinking about how to best RESTify APIs for Outlook (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Groups and more). In past life, he was an Engineering lead in SQL Server and before Microsoft, he worked as a Java Developer in an IPTV startup.   About the hosts 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 050 on the Office 365 Groups API appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re proud to announce the release of a better, faster and touchier version of OneNote for iPhone and iPad. We’ve been working hard on this release, and we’re excited to share it with you today. Here are the details on what’s new: Updated lists on iPhone We received feedback that lists worked best with a keyboard, mouse and screens even the largest of cargo shorts couldn’t accommodate. Accordingly, checkboxes for ants have been replaced with checkboxes designed for humans. Quickly create a list from anywhere in the app by tapping the + button and selecting List. You can add new items by tapping Add Item or tapping return after you create or edit an item. In the event you no longer need a list item, simply swipe left to erase it from your view. We heard your feedback, now, checking an item moves it to the Completed section of the list. You can also show or hide completed items anytime. Tap Edit to rearrange, indent, or select multiple to-dos. List previews show how many uncompleted items are left to do. With improved functionality, you’re in control: you can switch any page from ‘note’ view (default) to ‘list’ view and back again. All lists will continue to work and sync as usual across all platforms. Equations on iPhone and iPad You can now view equations on iPhone. Much to the happiness of some students, they still have some excuses for not completing their homework, as it is not possible to edit equations. Yet. However, it’s now possible to view and edit equations on the iPad—teachers and students, rejoice! Lined and grid paper backgrounds for iPad Torn between your love for the straight, orderly lines of ruled paper and the infinite possibilities of free-form note taking? Fret no longer! You can now add ruled or grid lines to your OneNote page. Imagine the geometrically regular possibilities! Sharing made easier with new sign up experience We simplified the iOS and Mac sign up experience so you can easily share notebooks with your friends, family, classmates, and colleagues. Now all you need is an email address, (it can be one you already have, such as Outlook.com or Gmail) and a password to create a new account and begin working together! Get the OneNote app today for iPhone and iPad. Tell us what you think We appreciate your continued feedback via the App Store, Facebook, and Twitter—we rely on it to continually improve OneNote and make it the best possible note-taking experience for you, our customers. Let us know what you think in the comments below. —Ryan McMinn, product manager for the OneNote team. The post Lists, equations, paper styles and sign up updates in OneNote for iPhone and iPad appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by James Gill, grade 6/7 teacher in SD43, Coquitlam, BC. I began my journey in Office 365 because I had a vision. I wanted to move my students’ work online because it would improve some things in their practice and allow me to improve some things in mine. I wanted students to be able to work online so that they could access their work from both school and home. Ideally they could access it anywhere. I wanted to take advantage of spellcheck for my many students for whom English is not their first language. I wanted to make editing their writing something that could be accomplished easily, especially for my students with learning disabilities. I also wanted to make it possible to take advantage of the many resources on the Internet, while at the same time teaching students how and why they need to cite their sources. But in order to accomplish this I had to tackle a few questions: What do I do when not every kid has a device? What do I do when not every device is the same? I began the year by having students bring their devices. It had to be a device they were allowed to bring to school on a regular basis, and their parents needed to sign the BYOD permission form. What I got was a lot of different devices. Some brought laptops, both new and old. Some brought iPads, including a few iPad mini’s. There were two Microsoft Surface 2’s and a few Samsung Galaxy tablets. One girl could brought her phone. In my inventory, I had two, then three refurbished desktops, and then later I got a couple of Chromebooks on loan. I also had a first generation Surface RT, on which I set up local accounts for several students. In an effort to get kids to develop a sense of ownership over their work, and to feel like they had some say in their learning, I implemented the Genius Hour program. Students would get some of their week to research their own inquiry question. I taught them how to ask a question that could not be found by just searching the web. I was astounded with the great questions they came up with: If Charles Darwin were alive today, what would he say about our future? Why is there war and why do soldiers obey? Why do people look at art, and why does it inspire them? Why is film photography still important today? Why do Greek Gods hate mortals? Is JavaScript the most important computer programming language? Why are people interested in origami? Where did turtles come from, and are they still changing? Coffee! Why is it so popular across the world? Such great questions! I had the good fortune of being included as a part of the Office 365 trial in my district. I created an account for each student and then I used the OneNote Class Notebook to post a link to the student notebooks on my website. Signing in was easy, and students began downloading the OneNote Class Notebook so they could launch OneNote on their device. Now that OneNote is free on all platforms, all my students could access it, and use it on whatever device they had. Those students, who didn’t want to download the app, could use the web-based version. We preferred having the work open in the app on the device, because this mean it would use less bandwidth as compared to using a web only tool. I taught my students how to use the Clipping tool first. It saves them a lot of time and trouble as clipping allows them to grab both pictures and text, and automatically records where they found their work. Now they can easily cite their sources as they go, and realize the importance of using other people’s ideas to support theirs—without claiming them as their own. When it came time to give feedback, I used OneNote’s Insert > Record Audio option to record my feedback as an audio note right into their work. In 30 seconds I can give better feedback than I could in the same amount of time if I wrote their comment. I also know that students of this age have higher listening comprehension than reading. I don’t tell my students their mark, but invite them to come find out. When they ask me, "What was my mark?" I ask in return, "First, what was my feedback?" For the last three months, I have been putting most of my work in the Content library, and teach almost all my lessons from there. As I am new to my grade, I didn’t have a lot of resources, so I have been creating my teacher notebook with the aid of Office Lens on my phone. The Office Lens app allows me to shoot content directly into my OneNote notebook. From there I put my assignments and lessons into the Content Library. This is a section that all kids have read-only access in their notebooks. They can copy the page with a single right-click to their own notebook and get started with their work right away. Some of my students have begun working in OneNote at home on a desktop PC or Mac and then coming to school without a device, (because they don’t own a laptop or mobile device they can bring school) and then looking to me to solve the problem. They prefer to work in OneNote, and are hopeful that I can find a way to help them keep working online on any device! What a great problem to have with a relatively easy solution for me. Next up is for students to collaborate together online. In the Collaboration section, all students can write on pages together. My students are going to be working in pairs to use what they have learned about Simple Machines to work for several days on a Rube Goldberg machine. Photo credit: Arne Hendricks, Flickr, under CC license. We plan to use OneNote to store students sketches (some students may sketch directly into OneNote if they have a touch screen device), and create step-by-step plans, lists of who will bring recycled materials and then share their ideas with others. Another feature in OneNote I am taking advantage of is "Translate." I have a high population of non-native English speakers, and whenever someone needs to open a browser, or get a translation dictionary, they are more likely to just guess at the word, rather than make the effort to look it up. By having translation built-in, I can reduce the number of clicks it takes for a student to go from "Hmmmm" to "Aha!" I am very lucky to have been a part of this project, as using OneNote Class Notebooks allows me to teach in ways I couldn’t before. My students have benefitted, and I know that they have learned some skills that they can use to help them now and in the future. —James Gill The post BYOD with OneNote Class Notebooks—classroom learning with any device on any platform appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Office 365 Dev Digest was written by Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 Dev team. Welcome to the fourth edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep-up-to date with what’s new in Office 365 development. This month has been a busy month of inquiries based on everything we announced at the Build and Ignite conferences, which has kept the team busy.  I encourage you all to engage on the Office 365 Technical Network with us with your questions. There have been some exciting new things released this month including support for Office Add-ins in Excel on the iPad. You’ll need to update your manifest file to do this to v1.1 and declare that you wish to support that client, which is documented on MSDN. One other item of note is that the Office Graph on the Unified Endpoint (TrendingAround/WorkingWith) is coming very soon to production tenants and I’d encourage you all to go play with it in our Graph Explorer tool. Also, a special shout out to Nintex for winning the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC)  Office and SharePoint Application Development award and to the runners up—K2, harmon.ie and DocuSign Inc. It is very exciting to see their efforts to build products in the Office Store celebrated at the WPC. Latest dev news Check out the latest news from Office Blogs that is useful to know as an Office 365 developer. And SharePoint makes three! Nintex wins the WPC "Office and SharePoint Application Development" award Microsoft acquires Wunderlist Windows 10-July 29th release date Office 365 Add-in rename cheat sheet Office Mix amps the slideshow experience with the personality of videos Salesforce, SAP, Uber, Do and Smartsheet add-ins and extensibility solutions for Office 365 Office Lens Android now available at Google Play Store OneNote welcomes three new partners—cloudHQ, Equil and WordPress Dev documentation The Microsoft Content Publishing team works hard producing documentation to help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month: Office Add-ins New Sideload an Office Add-in on iPad for testing purposes New name for apps for Office and SharePoint Updates Specify the Office hosts and APIs your app requires Checklist for submitting an app to the Seller Dashboard Submit apps for Office to the Seller Dashboard Validation policies for apps submitted to the Office Store (version 1.8) Publishing apps for Office and SharePoint Office 365 APIs New Submit web apps for Office 365 to the Seller Dashboard Synchronize events in an Outlook calendar view Office 365 Service Communications API reference (preview) Updates Outlook Calendar REST API reference Resource reference for the Mail, Calendar and Contacts REST APIs Office 365 unified API reference (preview) Preview developer features on the Office 365 platform Office 365 API code samples and video SharePoint Add-ins Deploy and install a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add custom columns to a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add a custom content type to a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add a Web Part to a page in a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add a workflow to a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Code Samples: OfficeDev/SharePoint_SP-hosted_Add-Ins_Tutorials SharePoint Client Side API The Log Export feature for Office 365 Dedicated has been updated in MSDN. Rendering issues caused by the duplication of the reference documentation in the MSDN TOC have been resolved by eliminating that duplication. All SharePoint reference documentation now only appears at: Reference for SharePoint 2013 OneNote Online Use note tags with the OneNote API For more documentation check out Office developer documentation. Code samples Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump-start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the dev community. New Office 365 Connect app for iOS (Swift version) Office 365 Android Profile (Unified endpoint sample) Office 365 iOS Profile (Unified endpoint sample) Office 365 Windows Profile (Unified endpoint sample) Updates Office 365 iOS Snippets (Mail/Calendar) Office 365 Android Snippets (Mail/OData Query options) Office 365 Windows Snippets (Mail) For more code, samples check out the office.com/code-samples. Most recent Office 365 Dev podcasts Since joining Microsoft last year, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group and I’ll go hunt the relevant people down to interview. Here are the most recent podcast interviews: Episode 047 on the Dev Program Episode 048 with Eric Shupps on SharePoint Add-ins Episode 049 with Eric Shupps on building a dev community Episode 050 with Rohit Nagarmal on the Office 365 Groups API For more podcasts check out dev.office.com/podcasts. Patterns and practices The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working hard to release samples to show the power of SharePoint Add-ins. Don’t forget to join the monthly community calls to hear the updates from them directly on Skype for Business. Here are the latest updates from the team: Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP)—June release details 10 hours of FREE training released this week!—Read more New PnP transformation process guidance released—Read more PnP June community call recording at Channel 9 New training package created based on the PnP guidance at OfficeDevPnPTraining Numerous new videos in the PnP Channel 9 check at OfficeDevPnPVideos Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at OfficeDevPnPMSDN Here are the latest guidance documents: Replace SharePoint content types and site columns Replace files deployed using modules in SharePoint farm solutions Replace SharePoint lists created from list definitions Replace SharePoint web parts with app parts Customize OneDrive for Business site branding For more on patterns and practices check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related on released materials and guidance can be added to our Yammer group at OfficeDevPnPYammer. Dev community blog posts The Office 365 dev community has been busy this month. It is really exciting to see the effort people put into their posts in their spare time to share with the community. Check out these articles from the Microsoft field, MVPs and more: Write a PHP app to get Outlook mail The Ultimate Script to down Ignite videos and slides Office 365 Developer Flipboard magazine Office 365 Developer slack channel Getting started with SharePoint hosted apps Objective C and Swift iOS code sample Get handle on your Site closure and Policies Refactor Office add-ins Session values are lost in SharePoint Provider hosted add-ins PnP June community call PnP Usage Survey for May V1.1 manifests for Online and iPad client support Waldek Mastykarz-Office 365 SPA on any platform and Office Graph hands on lab Upcoming events There are plenty of events on the horizon…don’t miss out on these great events with Office 365 content. Our team looks forward to meeting you all at these events, so don’t be shy come say hello at the Office 365 booth! June 19 Recode London June 24-27 SPTechConDev Days Burlingame, CA Aug 18 - 20 SharePoint Fest Seattle, WA Oct 12 Unity Connect Amsterdam Nov 9-12 European SharePoint conference For more events check out dev.office.com/events. Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us on @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook. Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Chris Johnson (@loungflyz), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Dave Pae (@davidpae) and Jim Epes (@j_epes). —Jeremy Thake The post Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for June appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Julie Kohler, program manager for the Project Engineering team. In listening to your feedback, we’ve learned that resource managers and project managers find it challenging to agree on and assign resources for specific projects and tasks. With no clear way to track who is working where, who is over-allocated—and with crossed lines of communication, things can start to break down. To address these challenges, we are introducing a new capability in the next update of Project called Resource Engagements, which helps align project managers and resource managers on the specific amount of work and time period associated with a project. Resource Engagements are an evolution of the old Resource Plan feature in PWA and all of your existing Resource Plan data will be converted to engagements upon activation or upgrade. What can project managers do? As a project manager, in Project Pro you’ll be able to create requests for resources in the new Resource Plan view. You can specify the dates and amount of work, and also request either a specific resource or a generic one. When you’re ready, submit your requests. Simply refresh your view to see the status of your requests and the decisions made for each. If you requested a generic resource, the resource manager may have swapped it out for a named resource in that role. You can always make edits and re-submit if you need to negotiate. What can resource managers do? As a resource manager, you can view the requests for the resources that you manage across all projects on the new Resource Requests page. You can make decisions about who is available using the capacity planning heat map. In the example below, you see that Allie Mack already has too many engagements for most of June but Kat Larrson has availability starting the week of the 6/14/2015.  You wouldn’t want to accept any more incoming requests for Allie Mack in June, and can also look back at the existing engagements to see what needs to be updated. You can then edit, accept, or reject the requests on the Resource Requests page. In this example the resource manager is about to reject the request for Allie Mack since she is already over engaged. You can create a New Engagement, which is automatically accepted and visible to the project manager who owns the project. What happens to my old Resource Plans? Existing Resource Plans in PWA will all be automatically converted into Engagements, and the old Resource Plan view will be removed. If you’re an on-premises customer, this will happen when you upgrade to Project Server 2016. For those of you on Project Online, you’ll be able to decide when you want to activate the new features, which will then migrate your old Resource Plans into Engagements. What about reporting? If you want to generate reports on how resources are being used in relation to engagements, you can create a custom report using OData, which supports the new engagement fields. The post Resource Engagements—coming soon to Project 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

As an Office 365 admin, you play an important role in delivering the best possible productivity for your users and organization. We share in this mission and remain committed to providing you a reliable service and transparency into our operations. Office 365 is designed with service continuity at the very center and we stand by this commitment through our financially backed guarantee of at least 99.9 percent uptime. Reducing the frequency and impact of service incidents remains an important part of our continuous improvements. We do not take lightly the imperative we have to earn your trust through reliability. This is why we invest in resiliency and redundancy at every layer of Office 365 and design with the core principle of ensuring a highly available service. As with any cloud service—and despite all our efforts—incidents can and do occur that may impact your experience. We realize that in these critical moments, it’s how we respond that makes all the difference for you and your organization. We’ve heard your feedback that receiving actionable communications that are timely, targeted and accurate during service incidents is essential. Based on this feedback, we made a number of improvements and today we’d like to share this progress and announce the availability of two new capabilities: push notifications and programmatic access to Office 365 service incident communications.  Receive service incident alerts the way you want Your first and best resource for staying informed in the event of an Office 365 service incident is the Service Health Dashboard. Signing into the Office 365 admin center provides you a personalized, detailed and up-to-date view into the availability of the Office 365 services you have subscribed. If there is an incident that impacts your service experience, the Service Health Dashboard is our primary communication channel to keep you current with what is happening and the steps we are taking to rapidly recover. After an incident, this is where you can review root cause details and access a 30-day history of past events. We’ve heard your feedback that the information we provide needs to be actionable. What follows is an update on how we’ve made improvements to better support you with the transparency and detail to understand the incident and how to best mitigate the impact for your users. First, we constantly strive to reduce the amount of time it takes to identify and then notify you about an incident affecting your Office 365 tenant. Through investments in new processes, which include advanced machine learning, anomaly detection and automation, we have already reduced the time to your first alert by 60 percent in many cases. We remain committed to reducing this even further. You also told us that more frequent status updates and faster post-incident analysis is vital for you to keep your organization informed. To support you better through these events, we added new details—such as the expected user experience, potential workarounds, estimated time to restoration and initial root cause analysis—to the regular updates posted to your Service Health Dashboard for a particular incident. This provides you greater context around the scope of the issue and helps you mitigate the impact on your users while we rapidly restore your service. We have an improved experience for your users through the introduction of new intelligent error messages. Today, Office 365 can inform your users if their access to SharePoint Online may be interrupted due to an ongoing service incident. The goal is to reduce the need for your users to call your help desk. Other Office 365 workloads will be supported in the coming months. Similarly, Office 365 can alert you if there is an active service incident affecting your tenant at the time you are initiating a new service request. We’re also focused on providing you proactive notification if Office 365 detects an issue that could cause a future service incident. For example, alerting you that some of your users are connecting to Office 365 with an older version of Outlook that may result in reliability issues. Stay informed with new push notification options  Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of new service incident push notifications with the Office 365 Admin app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices for first release customers with the worldwide release to follow. Now, when you are on the go and away from the Office 365 admin center, you can be alerted immediately if there is a service incident affecting your users and you’re one tap away from access to important details on any actions you can take to mitigate impact. And, you can stay current on the latest service health status from the same app. If you already have the Office 365 Admin app, this capability is available today.  All you need to do is configure your notifications. Not already using the app? You can download it from the following stores: For Windows Phone 8.1, download the app from the Windows Phone Store. For iOS 7+, download the app from the Apple App Store. For Android 4.0+, download the app from Google Play. We will continue to enhance and expand your options in future updates to the Office 365 Admin app. This includes adding more modalities for alerts—like SMS and email—and more customizable notifications. Integrate directly with your applications using the Office 365 Service Communications API We are also excited to announce the availability of a public preview of the Office 365 Service Communications API. The Service Communications API offers you programmatic access to Office 365 service incident communications. With this API, you now have the ability to surface critical Office 365 service communications directly within your existing help desk tools and service management solutions and simplify how you monitor across service health across your environment. The API gives you the flexibility to monitor real-time Office 365 service health status, as well as access historical details. Several leading providers of service monitoring and management solutions have already started to integrate this new API into their own offerings, including BetterCloud, ENow, Cogmotive and Exoprise. For an example of how the API is enhancing partner solutions, check out this video from our partner Exoprise. To get started with the new Office 365 Service Communications API, visit MSDN where you can access sample code to start building your solutions. Commitment to reliable service and transparent operations Even with the progress we shared today, we remain relentless in our commitment to delivering a reliable, highly available service that exceeds your expectations. Core to delivering on this promise is our accountability through transparency as evidenced by the uptime numbers published to the Office 365 Trust Center. We encourage you to try out the new capabilities featured in this post and hope you find these improvements more useful. As we continue to build upon these investments in the coming months, your feedback is vital and welcomed. We will be hosting a YamJam next week on Tuesday, June 30th 9:00-10:00 a.m. PDT on the Office 365 Network to take your questions and feedback live. Learn even more about Office 365 service incident management by watching our Microsoft Ignite conference session, "What Really Happens When There Is a Service Incident with Office 365, and What’s My Role?" and this brief video. —Katy Olmstead Frequently asked questions Q: Can an administrator turn off the Office 365 Admin app notification messages? A: Yes, administrators have the ability to turn off notifications at any time in the phone settings for notifications.  Q: When will push notifications be available for Message Center communications? A: Message Center notifications will be available in the third quarter of 2015.   Q: When can I expect more customization for push notifications, such as being able to select specific workloads like Exchange Online or additional communication channels like email and text?  A: We will continue to enhance and expand your options in future updates to the Office 365 Admin app. This includes adding more modalities for alerts—like SMS and email—and more customizable notifications. Q: Which Office 365 customers are receiving these benefits? A: Tenant administrators for Office 365 customers including commercial, government and academic plans will be able to use the admin app and Office 365 Service Communications API. The post Improved communications and tools help you stay better informed during service incidents appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last month, we announced the summer rollout of a number of top requested features for OneNote Class Notebooks, OneNote Staff Notebooks and OneNote across platforms to Office 365 customers. One of our promises was that we are making OneNote Class Notebooks more discoverable for teachers to save them time. That’s why we recently put the OneNote Class Notebook app in the My Apps page for every teacher with Office 365 Education in the U.S. and made it accessible to them via a simple link with additional resources at onenote.com/classnotebook. Find OneNote Class Notebooks easily in Office 365 Education We have now made OneNote Class Notebook app automatically available to all U.S. teachers with Office 365 Education (E1 or E3 for Faculty) in their Office 365 App Launcher and My apps. This means teachers with Office 365 Education can more easily access and discover OneNote Class Notebooks so they are able to create class notebooks to save time, organize and collaborate with students next school year. We will be making this app automatically available to teachers with Office 365 Education worldwide in the near future. Teachers can check if they are eligible for free Office 365 Education at your school here or try for free by signing up on this site.   One link to create OneNote Class Notebooks The OneNote Class Notebook helps teachers to quickly set up a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities—all within one powerful notebook. Teachers can easily add students to a shared notebook to allow for differentiated instruction, content delivery and a collaborative digital space. Students can work together while teachers provide real-time feedback. To set up OneNote Class Notebooks: Go to the website onenote.com/classnotebook to watch the OneNote Class Notebooks video and access the interactive guides. Next, sign in with your school or district email associated with Office 365. In the new webpage that launches, run the simple wizard to set up your OneNote Class Notebook for your class. This wizard creates the OneNote Class Notebooks in the teacher’s OneDrive for Business in Office 365. In step 7 of the creation process, the wizard provides a link that can be used to open the OneNote Class Notebook in OneNote on any device. The students automatically receive a link to this notebook in their Office 365 (Outlook) email and in their OneDrive for Business under "Shared with me". NOTE: If your school prefers that OneNote Class Notebooks are stored on your class SharePoint sites, you will need to use the OneNote Class Notebook app on SharePoint instead and your IT administrator will need to install the app on your SharePoint site. Steps to do this are covered in our IT Administrator Guide and these interactive guides. For teachers who don’t have an Office 365 sign in, there is a link on the website to get one for free if you are at an eligible institution. What’s next for OneNote Class Notebooks? As we mentioned in our blog post last month, we have more planned before school starts in September. Stay tuned on the OneNote in Education blog and follow us on Twitter at @OneNoteEDU to stay informed on everything. Let us know if you have questions in the comments or email us at OneNoteEDU@microsoft.com. Submit other feature requests on our feedback and suggestions site, which we use to prioritize our next round of improvements to make you and your students’ lives easier for next school year. The post Teachers, create your OneNote Class Notebook from Office 365 App Launcher or OneNote.com/classnotebook appeared first on Office Blogs.