In today’s economy, all companies have one thing in common—they’re constantly looking for ways to cut costs. Whether your business is small or large, nonprofit or for profit, the best companies are consistently seeking out ways to make their processes and people as efficient as possible. Online meetings are one way to do that. According to the Verizon Conferencing’s Meetings in America study, professionals who are extremely busy attend more than 60 meetings every month. While some executives still believe in the power of face-to-face meetings, most will acknowledge it’s just not possible all the time, especially for companies with multiple branches, global clients and remote workers. Fortunately, many also find that online meetings are just as effective as in-person meetings for most situations. Here are five reasons your company can save big when you implement a strong online meeting tool: You get one tool that allows multiple venues of communication, including voice, video, online chat and more. Bundling services in this way will usually cost less up front, and you’ll also save on IT resources when troubleshooting is required. In addition, migrating to one communication tool helps your people by giving them less to master. Less training is required and less time is wasted. Involving more people through a virtual setting results in fewer meetings overall. With the right online meeting tool, you can include hundreds of people on your company calls and they can connect remotely, no matter where they are. Giving people the ability to connect whether they’re at home, sick or traveling can lead to fewer repeat meetings and a more efficient use of your people’s time. And time saved equals higher productivity, which can lead to an increase in revenue. Less travel is required when online meetings are implemented. According to Verizon Conferencing’s study, a five-person meeting conducted in person (with plane travel required) costs seven times as much as an audio conference and three times as much as a video conference. With features like screen sharing, online chat and video conferencing, online meeting tools can significantly reduce the need for business travel. Online meetings make it easier for employees to telecommute and can lead to fewer overhead expenses. Having workers who telecommute can save your company when it comes to office space, utilities, materials and office supplies. In fact, according to statistics from Global Workplace Analytics, the typical business can save up to $11,000 annually per person who works half their time at home. Investing in an online meeting tool that allows all of your employees to connect effectively is a pittance compared to what you could save in overhead costs. You can connect globally for less money with online meetings. The cost to connect globally can be outrageous. The right online meeting tool will allow employees—and thus, your company—to save on direct-dial calls when you edit phone numbers to make them as local as possible for each country. Now that you’re aware of the benefits of online meetings, how do you go about selecting the right tool for your organization? Start by looking for a tool with the following features: Allows you to connect with clients or others who don’t have the same tool. Has bandwidth for hundreds of participants to join the same meeting. Integrates easily with your other programs, so employees can view contacts as well as each other’s calendars and online status. Is highly secure, ensuring protected conversations using authentication and encryption. Allows connection via any device, anywhere in the world. Includes ability to control employee accounts so you can assign features based on each employee’s collaboration needs. Online video-based meetings have largely replaced in-person meetings and will continue to do so more frequently. Make the jump—your employees and your bottom line will thank you. Learn how the new Office enables teams to collaborate better than ever. The post 5 ways to save big bucks with online meetings appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Bradly Green, the engineering director at Google, on the AngularJS framework. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP69_BradlyGreen.mp3 Download the podcast—Coming soon! Weekly updates $ yo office v0.4 released Implementing admin consent in multi-tenant Office 365 applications using implicit OAuth flow Versioning SharePoint Add-ins in your VSO Scripted build Office Dev PnP Webcast—Introduction to Office 365 Dev PnP PowerShell Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices graphics presentation Two practical things about the new Group Files API Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS is available iTunes or search for it on "Office 365 Developer Podcast" or add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Bradly Green Bradly Green is the engineering director at Google who manages AngularJS and GreenTea (CRM). You can follow him on @bradlygreen. 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 born, raised and based in Dallas, TX, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. 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 Episode 069 with Bradly Green on AngularJS—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

Since the release of Excel 2016 for Mac, customers have given great feedback about its ease of use and the benefits of the new features. We want to highlight the Excel 2016 for Mac features that customers rave about and share some tips and tricks that could save you a ton of time using the most powerful spreadsheet and data analysis tool on the Mac platform. 1. Recommended Charts Choosing a chart type to best represent your data is often challenging. Let Recommended Charts take some of the pain away. This feature allows you to see how selected data would be visualized on a variety of chart types before committing to one in particular. To see a collection of suggested chart types, select a cell in the range of data you want to visualize, and then on the ribbon, under the Insert tab, click Recommended Charts. 2. Formula Builder If you’ve ever had trouble remembering Excel functions or syntax, the new Formula Builder makes it easy. With the Formula Builder in Excel 2016 for Mac, building formulas just got simpler. It allows you to search and insert a function, add data to defined function arguments, and get help on any function. To access the Formula Builder, simply click the fx button on the Formula bar or press Shift+F3. 3. Chart Formatting task pane Excel 2016 for Mac offers a rich set of features that make creating and customizing charts simpler and more intuitive. One part of this fluid new experience is the Formatting task pane. The new Formatting task pane is the single source for formatting—all of the different styling options are consolidated in one place. With this single task pane, you can modify not only charts, but also shapes and text in Excel! To use the Formatting task pane, on the ribbon under the Format tab, click the Format Pane button or press Cmd+1 while a chart element is selected. 4. PivotTable slicers Slicers enable you to filter the data in a PivotTable report. It contains a set of buttons allowing you to find the items that you want to filter without the need to open drop-down lists. Creating a slicer is easy—just select the PivotTable you want to filter, and then on the ribbon, under the PivotTable Analyze tab, click the Insert Slicer button. To filter the PivotTable data, simply click one or more of the buttons in the slicer. 5. Data Analysis ToolPak Still looking for the Data Analysis ToolPak in Mac Excel? It’s finally here! Data Analysis ToolPak is an Excel add-in that helps develop complex statistical or engineering analyses. You provide the data and parameters for each analysis, and the tool uses the appropriate statistical or engineering macro functions to calculate and display the results in an output table. Some tools generate charts in addition to output tables. To enable this add-in, under the Tools menu, click Add-Ins, select Data Analysis ToolPak and then click OK. The Data Analysis ToolPak is now on the ribbon under the Data tab. 6. More (or new) keyboard shortcuts When building Office 2016 for Mac, one of our key objectives was to make it as easy as possible to transition from using Office for Windows to using Office for Mac and back again. That’s why you’ll notice an interface consistent with Office 2016 for Windows and why we added support for virtually all of the Windows Excel keyboard shortcuts. Windows users will rejoice that Windows key assignments like Ctrl+O for Open, Ctrl+F for Find and Ctrl+C for Copy now also work in the Mac version—no need to remember to press Cmd instead of Ctrl. If you want to clear the content of the selected cell or range, just press the delete key. This even works on your Mac laptops, where delete is actually the backspace key. Some popular shortcut keys are listed below; a complete list can be found here. Note that if a function key doesn’t work as you expect, then press the fn key in addition to the function key. If you don’t want to press the fn key each time, you can change your Apple system preferences: Go to Apple > System Preferences > Keyboard. On the Keyboard tab, select the Use all F1, F2, etc. as standard function keys If you want to customize a keyboard shortcut, you can refer to the steps in this article: Create a custom keyboard shortcut for Office 2016 for Mac. 7. New functions in Excel 2016 for Mac We worked hard to ensure your workbook is compatible and works seamlessly across platforms as often as possible. In Excel 2016 for Mac, we’ve added almost all new formula functions in Excel 2013 from the Windows platform. Why not have a try on the Arabic function (for example, try =ARABIC("LVII")) and see what you get. Note that the WebService, EncodeURL and FilterXML functions are not available yet in Excel 2016 for Mac. 8. Get data using SQL Server ODBC Say goodbye to having to use third party drivers before connecting to external data in Excel for Mac. Excel 2016 for Mac comes with a pre-installed and integrated SQL Server ODBC driver that supports ODBC data connections with SQL Server and Azure SQL Database right out of the box. It also has a brand new Microsoft Query (MSQuery) and Connection Manager to make creating and managing all of your data connections easier and more consistent with Windows. For more details, check out this blog post: Working with external data in Excel 2016 for Mac. What do you think? We just went through the basics of the new features available in Excel 2016 for Mac. Try them out for yourself and share your ideas for other features and improvements you’d like us to change or improve in Excel 2016 for Mac. The post 8 tips and tricks you should know for Excel 2016 for Mac appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president on the Office team. Welcome to our first new Office update post in which we share the features we are delivering to our Office customers across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Office Online. This month we expanded Skype integration in Office Online, introduced an Office Online extension for Chrome and delivered improvements in Office on Android and Office 2016 for Mac. We have several exciting new updates this month and hope you enjoy them! Skype voice and video integration with Office Online Giving customers better ways to work together is core to the new Office. Last month, we delivered Skype in-app integration with Office 2016 on the desktop and we promised that was just a first step. Now we’re taking Skype integration to the next level, first in Office Online and, over time, in the desktop apps, as well. Today we are announcing Skype voice and video integration in Office Online (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote Online) and in Outlook.com, so that you can now see and speak to your Skype contacts. The integration creates a natural, collaborative experience in which you can co-author and have a conversation using instant messaging or video calling right from within a document. Best of all, your instant messaging history stays connected to the document, so that the next time you open it, you can pick right up where you left off. Office Online exists to help you collaborate with anyone, anywhere, with just a browser. Now with Skype communication built right in, you can get more done, faster. Skype integration with Office Online will be available to customers worldwide with a Microsoft account in November. A quicker way to access and create Office documents on Chrome browser We want to bring Office to you wherever you are. If you use Chrome, there is a new extension that lets you create and open Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Sway documents using Office Online right from the Chrome browser. You can also use the extension to open and view existing Office documents stored on OneDrive, on OneDrive for Business and on your computer right from Chrome. Click here using the Chrome browser to get the new Office Online extension. Additional Office Online enhancements One of the coolest things about being able to update Office regularly is that we can now address customer feedback more rapidly. Based on your suggestions, this month we added an enhanced Navigation pane to help you work with large documents within Word Online. We also added a number of formatting improvements with Excel Online and made performance improvements to PowerPoint Online. Office on Android We put our Office on Android apps on a diet! You will see that our latest update reduced the apps footprint by 40 percent, and we’re going to keep working to get them down further. We also improved the sign up/sign in experience, so you can get started more quickly with your Microsoft account or Office 365 school or work account. Additionally, the Office apps are also now enterprise-ready with Android M support for Enterprise and compliant with Android for Work. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, you can now use Presenter View in PowerPoint on Android to show and present your slides like a pro. View your presentation with speaker notes on your Android phone or tablet while projecting to a large screen. Visual Basic Editor features come to Office 2016 for Mac A lot of developers asked for improvements to the overall Visual Basic Editor (VBE) on Office 2016 for Mac, and we’re pleased to deliver several top customer requests. You now have the ability to Add Modules from within the Project Viewer, Add Library References using a Dialog and use shortcut keys for debugging. We also recently added two new commands to the Visual Basic object model for Mac: GrantAccessToMultipleFiles and AppleScriptTask and a new conditional, MAC_OFFICE_VERSION. For more information, see the VBE improvements section of the VBA improvements in Office 2016 blog post. Get started We have an exciting set of new features and functionality coming in the next few months and we look forward to sharing them with you as they become available. In the meantime, thank you for using Office and please continue to share your feedback and feature requests with us at Office UserVoice. Are you ready to purchase? Buy Office 365 to get the new 2016 apps at Office365.com. Do you want to learn more? Visit Office.com/2016. Get the Office apps on Android, iOS or Windows devices. To get started with Office Online, visit Office.com. The post The new Office—October feature update appeared first on Office Blogs.

Now that Office 2016 is officially here, we are giving a special nod to one of our coolest features within the suite—real-time co-authoring. The Word team is honored to debut this new capability in Office 2016 for Windows. We work and live in a world where collaboration can’t always happen in person and sharing ideas and information can’t always wait. In fact, a lot of real-time collaboration went into delivering this very blog post—weaving comments and content together between engineering and marketing teams located in different buildings. At times, multiple people were in the document making changes at the same time. Real-time co-authoring in Word 2016 allows for this and, in fact, has been available since 2013, when we introduced real-time collaboration in Office Online. But with Office 2016, we take real-time collaboration to the next level by offering it within the client, delivering a ton of flexibility. In the client, users don’t need to go back and forth between experiences, collaborating outside of the client and then integrating those changes and conversations back to finalize their documents—allowing them to take advantage of the full feature set Office has to offer while they collaborate. Real-time co-authoring delivers instant engagement within the application, making it more like an in-person work session. Collaborators can align and finalize details of a document more efficiently and quickly in Office for Windows or Office Online. Start using real-time co-authoring To get started using real-time co-authoring, save your Word 2016 document to OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. Next, click the Share button, located in the upper right of the window. The Share pane is displayed, allowing you to invite your colleagues or friends to the document. When you click the Share button, your colleague or friend receives an invitation email with a link to the document. They have the option to edit or view in Word 2016 or Word Online (if they don’t have Word 2016 installed). If you are in the document at the same time as others, you will see a flag representing each person and where they are located. Set up real-time co-authoring If this is not your first time using real-time co-authoring in Word 2016 for the desktop, you will need to first enable automatic sharing of changes. When your colleague or friend first joins the document, you’ll see a notification in the upper-right corner of the screen that lets you turn this feature on—just press Yes and your user account is enabled to share automatically. You can revert back to not sharing at any time by going to the Share pane or the General tab in options. Watch this video to see a demonstration of real-time co-authoring in Word 2016 for the desktop: Real-time co-authoring was born out of our need to provide users a more cohesive experience when it comes to collaboration across the desktop, online and mobile scenarios. Even though real-time co-authoring is debuting on Word 2016 for the desktop, you can expect to see this feature come to life in other Office apps like Excel and PowerPoint in the near future. —The Word team The post Word real-time co-authoring—a closer look appeared first on Office Blogs.

"Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and focused effort." —Paul J. Meyer, entrepreneur and founder of Success Motivation International It’s no secret that Office 365 is one of the fastest growing businesses in Microsoft’s long history of providing innovative technology products and services that change lives and help organizations succeed. And when Microsoft announced its first-quarter earnings last week, the numbers clearly showed that people everywhere are choosing Office 365 to enhance their personal and professional productivity. Office 365 revenue grew nearly 70 percent in constant currency (a calculation that reconciles the inconsistencies that sometimes occur when converting other currencies to U.S. dollars) compared to the same quarter last year. In addition, the number of consumers who subscribe to Office 365 increased to 18.2 million, with 3 million of those people signing up during the first quarter alone. One reason Office 365 is so popular is that both business users and consumers always have the latest version of Office, so they can immediately take advantage of improvements such as the new History feature in Office 2016 for Windows. History lets users collaborate with confidence, providing an easier way for them to find and restore previous versions of their documents, and review the changes that they and their team have made over time. Businesses and other organizations worldwide are using Office 365 to improve communication and collaboration, increase efficiency and boost productivity. For Korn Ferry, a global leadership recruitment and organizational advisory firm with many clients that operate in regulated industries, Office 365 is an ideal way for the company to support global teamwork without sacrificing security and data privacy. Office 365 is also enabling McClone Construction, with offices in five states, to become a more integrated, agile and collaborative company that can share information in real time, from any location. And SunGard, which works closely with numerous financial services companies, is using Office 365 to transform its sales and marketing strategy without compromising security. At Microsoft, we understand that the growth of Office 365 is a direct result of how well it meets the needs of our customers, and we are committed to making Office 365 the world’s best cloud-based productivity service. Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy! Nadella’s cloud-first Microsoft is off to a great start—Learn how Microsoft’s new business strategy is transforming the company and the high-tech industry. Why Microsoft’s Office 365 is worth investing in—Find out what makes Office 365 such a great value for both businesses and consumers. What Office 365 features can help boost my productivity?—Discover some of the key ways that Office 365 can help you increase your efficiency and productivity. U.S. CIO tells IT leaders to trust the cloud—Find out why Tony Scott, CIO for the U.S. government, praises the security of cloud services like Office 365 and advises IT leaders to embrace the cloud without delay. Transition from on-premises to cloud reflected in Microsoft’s latest results—Learn how the recent Microsoft earnings report shows that a growing number of companies are moving to the cloud. The post Office 365 news roundup appeared first on Office Blogs.

Sway is a digital storytelling app that makes it easy for people to bring all sorts of stories—educational, professional and personal—to life in a new and interactive way. This blog series highlights the great examples of Sways made across different categories by all sorts of people to make their ideas shine. In the last Sway Use Case blog, we highlighted some of the many ways that small businesses and professionals alike are using Sway to share ideas internally and with their customers. In today’s blog, we’ll hit the road and check out many ways that travelers and adventurers are using Sway to share the secrets, wonders and adventures they’ve experienced around the world. Check out the highlights below! Swaying your vacation and adventures with interactive multimedia Dexter L. (shared with us via UserVoice) created a detailed series of Sways to chronicle an incredible trip to Taipei. Dexter brings his travels—and Taipei itself—to life in a new way for his audience by using a full range of multimedia in his Sways, including embedded maps, videos, images and more. Whether you’re tapping to sift through a photo stack, sliding to compare warm beverages or pinching and zooming a map to get a sense for the different places he visited, Dexter’s use of Sway helps you feel like you were along for the ride. Check out the first day of Dexter’s Taipei trip in this Sway: Reviewing vacation accommodations with Sway Kent and Caanan (@NVRguys) have crafted a "no vacation required" lifestyle with an aim to "live fully now." They use digital tools to share their take on maximizing life, travel and work with others across the web. In this Sway, reviewing their experience at the Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay in Hawaii, Kent and Caanan combine Sway’s engaging new format together with their own vast travel expertise to educate the reader on ways that technology can improve the guest experience in the hospitality industry. Check out Kent and Caanan’s piece on "The Future of Hospitality:" Using Sway’s format to celebrate amazing scenes in nature Leonardo Sobrado (@lsobrado) and his family have Swayed a number of their hiking adventures, including a trip to Logan Pass. Leonardo’s use of Sway celebrates the stunning nature scenes his artistic eye is able to capture, and his creations bring his friends and family along on the journey in an exciting way. Combining his breathtaking images with one of Sway’s simpler designs, Leonardo’s aesthetic blend helps tell his family’s story and inspires us all to spend a bit more time outdoors. Check out Leonardo’s image-rich Sway: Swaying your vacation Sways Nathan Carroll (@DNCarroll) reminds us that in addition to combining a variety of interactive multimedia in a Sway—including images, text, videos, tweets, charts, maps and more—you can embed Sways in a Sway as well! Nathan does this in a creative way to share a collection of Sways he made for each stop during a trip to Italy in 2015. Each of the embedded Sways tells a great story with images, videos and more (the button in the top right of each Sway lets you explore it in full-screen mode). Altogether, Nathan’s "table of contents" Sway is a great way to organize his vacation Sway collection to share with friends and family, to explore in the sequence they see fit. Experience Nathan’s tour of Italy: Sharing upcoming travel plans with Sway Kristin Luna (@LunaticAtLarge) is a travel and food writer who used Sway to share her upcoming plans for the summer of 2015. Bringing images and text together in Sway to tell a forward-looking story reminds us of the myriad reasons we all have to share our narratives—not all of which are retrospective. Whatever type of story you wish to tell, Sway can help you bring it to life in a new way. Check out Kristin’s summer plans Sway (we hope you had a great summer Kristin!): Publish your professional collection of digital travel guides with Sway Roads & Kingdoms (@RoadsKingdoms)—an independent media company backed by Anthony Bourdain—has recently reimagined the travel guide by inviting you to go beyond the pages of their new book, "Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels through Japan’s Food Culture," with an immersive web experience built with Sway and OneNote. For each of the seven cities covered in their physical book, Roads & Kingdoms published a collection of Sways providing an overview and detailed information on where to eat, drink and sleep. Each Sway inspires the viewer with beautiful photography, interactive maps, videos and more. These Sway guidebooks, together with downloadable OneNote city guides, offer a one-of-a-kind experience showcasing how travel can come to life in new ways with apps like Sway. Check out the full set of Roads & Kingdoms Japan guides, including this Kyoto collection: Well, we don’t know about you, but we certainly have the travel bug after seeing all these amazing adventures come to life in Sway! If you need any tips on sharing your adventures, check out this vacation Sway tutorial video. And of course, continue to share your Sways and ideas with us on Twitter @Sway or our "Show us your Sway" forum on UserVoice! Happy trails! —Sway team, @Sway Get Sway  | Follow Sway   The post Sway Use Case series #4: Travel Sways appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Brad Shreffler, digital instructional coach at West Orange High School. At West Orange High School, we have launched into OneNote as a school platform with both feet. At this point, just nine weeks into our one-to-one program, we have roughly 80 percent of our teachers using OneNote Class Notebooks for their day-to-day activities and 97 percent of our staff using the devices every period of every day. We believe that the biggest reason for this success is the use of OneNote Staff Notebook at the administrative level. As an admin team, starting from the principal down, we believed that the only way to get our teachers to use Class Notebooks was to model proper use and notebook setup. To do this we started thinking about the systems we previously had in place to deliver and receive information from our teachers. Our school heavily depended on SharePoint, and the tools there were extremely useful to us. Looking at the way our workflow went with SharePoint, and considering the power of Staff Notebooks, we broke our system into a total of three primary administrative notebooks. School-wide Staff Notebook—Team WARRIORS Our primary purpose for SharePoint was for distribution of documents, forms and lists to the staff. This included things like pre-planning schedules, professional development calendars, school maps, etc. To accomplish this goal, we developed a school-wide Staff Notebook called Team WARRIORS (our school mascot). We removed the individual teacher tabs and just use the Content Library, Collaboration Space and Welcome area. Here is a look at some of the key sections: The Welcome page for our school-wide Staff Notebook. In a Staff Notebook, we have lots of organization options. By breaking our content into the various sections within the Content Library, information is easy for our teachers to find. Here is an example of the Discipline section: Information is organized by section and then the various pages within the section. As we entered further into the school year, we found that Team WARRIOR became the perfect place to store tutorials and how-to’s for the technology that we use in our classrooms. Teachers can download a document and then click on the page to see it immediately. It also allows us to make our content dynamic. For example, if a software application has an update and the tutorial or how-to becomes dated, I can make a new version and replace it on the page. OneNote automatically downloads the most recent version, ensuring that all teachers have the most recent information. The Technology section of Team WARRIORS. This Staff Notebook has been hugely beneficial to our staff for finding documents. Even more importantly, it forces our staff to actually use OneNote and helps them make connections between what a Class Notebook can do and how they might actually use it in their classroom. Leadership Team Staff Notebook Our principal created a Leadership Team Staff Notebook and added the assistant principals, deans and support personnel who make up the leadership team. The Leadership Team Staff Notebook helps the principal disseminate information to the team, such as the weekly newsletters from our deputy superintendent, agendas for our weekly leadership team meetings and the supervision schedule and maps. In addition, it maintains the classroom teacher observation schedule, ensuring that all administrators know who they should be observing in the classroom each week. It also allows our principal to ensure the observations are completed. The best use of the Leadership Team Staff Notebook is the use of the Collaboration Space for the team meeting agendas. Here our principal supplies the agenda, and everyone in the meeting can follow along as he goes. In addition, we can make notes for the rest of the team to see, and comments can be added with questions or more details as we go through the meeting. This process helps prevent interruptions or stopping the flow of the meeting to get clarification. An agenda, with added notes, from our last meeting. Evaluating administrator notebooks—Team AP The most useful, and beneficial, Staff Notebooks are the ones set up by each of the evaluating administrators at our school. These notebooks add all of that administrator’s direct reports (primarily broken into the different subject area departments). Within each of these are the specific documents that the administrator wants shared to the teachers and support staff that they oversee. In each of the teachers’ own sections, they submit their syllabus at the beginning of the year, their weekly lesson plans and their quarterly grade verification. View of the individual teacher section of the Staff Notebook. In addition, the Collaboration Space of this notebook has been beneficial for departments and grade levels within departments to collaborate. The Reading department, for example, has taken to using the Collaboration Space for all of their documents. Take a close look at the navigation panel and organization structure of the example below: Organization of the Reading department Collaboration Space. By grade level, by quarter, by standard. Advantages to using Staff Notebooks There are two major advantages to our use of Staff Notebook to run our school. The first is efficiency. OneNote allows each administrator to directly control how their system is set up, and each administrator only sees their direct reports, instead of everyone. The other major advantage, and in my opinion the bigger of the two, is that it gives our teachers the chance to use OneNote. More accurately maybe, it forces our teachers to use OneNote, so that when they begin to integrate it in their classroom, they already know how to use it. The use of a Class Notebook is an expectation of all of our teachers. OneNote is an extremely powerful tool, and the OneNote Class Notebook Creator is an amazing tool for instruction. Encouraging our staff to use Staff Notebooks showed them once you start to use it, you get a conceptual vision of the functions of the various components. If you have any questions about our implementation at West Orange, feel free to email me, brad.shreff@gmail.com. —Brad Shreffler The post OneNote as a school platform appeared first on Office Blogs.

If you are an Office 365 administrator, there are a number of new tools, reports and resources coming to help save you time when managing Office 365. On today’s Microsoft Mechanics, Lawrence Chiu joins me to take a tour and review Office 365 updates for admins. We take a look at the latest tool updates, including the new simplified portal design, an early look at upcoming reporting capabilities, updates to the Office 365 Admin app and new PowerShell resources for managing Office 365 and Office 2016 deployment. If you missed the recent announcement about updates to the Office 365 Admin Center, Lawrence provides a visual drilldown of the enhancements we’re making to save you clicks. The workflows for password changes and acquiring new user licenses are highlighted as examples where significant optimizations have been made. The new Admin Center also provides a number of new reporting capabilities requested by admins—including new usage reports across Office 365 workloads. Lawrence gives a first look at what’s coming in the new reports—before it hits the Office 365 Admin Center Preview—and we provide another sneak peek at the upcoming Power BI Content Pack for Office 365 admins. The Office 365 Admin app also continues to provide more management capabilities for Office 365—from user management to incident and message center notifications. Lawrence shows a few new capabilities to control device notifications, so you can stay up-to-date with Office 365 service status and important messages from your phone. These apps are available on Windows, iOS and Android phones. Finally, while these enhancements to the portal and mobile experiences are good for light day-to-day management, we’ve also been working on the tools and guidance for scaled automation with PowerShell. The new PowerShell for Office 365 site helps you get started with using PowerShell to manage your Office 365 and related Microsoft Cloud services. If you’re a more advanced PowerShell user or just looking for new tools to manage Office 2016 deployment and migration, the new Office Deployment Scripts for IT pros resources on GitHub provide a collection of constantly evolving tools and script samples to help. To see everything in action and learn more, watch this week’s Microsoft Mechanics show and subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates for tech enthusiasts and IT pros spanning Microsoft Azure, Office, servers and the Surface. See you soon, Jeremy Chapman The post Office 365 admin updates—from portal enhancements to PowerShell appeared first on Office Blogs.

Whether you work in the corporate world or not, you probably send and receive multiple emails every day. It’s a fast, convenient way to communicate with peers, colleagues, clients, friends and family. Of course, email is an extremely popular communication tool for companies—in part because of its ability to document conversations and serve as a searchable repository of information. In fact, studies suggest that three-fourths of an organization’s intellectual property is contained within email and messaging systems. That means it’s important to protect this data and not just send it to the trash. But keeping that much information can overload your company’s storage servers. So what’s the best solution? Email archiving is nothing new. The tool has been around for years—so why don’t more companies use it? Here are five benefits to using an email archiving solution: Storage. When email data is stored on live servers, it can greatly reduce performance as the server gets fuller. The only other options are to delete emails altogether—not a wise option, since important data can be lost forever—or store them elsewhere. Email archiving follows this latter option and moves data to a secure off-site server or cloud environment. Some solutions use advanced compression and/or deduplication to reduce the required disk space in the archive—sometimes by 50 percent or more. Restoration. Depending on what backup solutions you already have in place, email archiving can speed up the process whenever your data needs to be restored. This is because the archived data takes up less space. In addition, restoring non-archived emails becomes faster and easier, because the mail server’s data load is lessened. Security. Just because your old emails are "out of sight" and stored elsewhere doesn’t mean they aren’t protected as well as emails in your live inbox environment. If you’ve got the right email archiving solution, your data is immutably preserved and safeguarded with continuous data backup and premier disaster recovery capabilities. For the best service, look for a provider that delivers reliability, availability and performance with a guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime and financially backed service level agreement. Productivity. When your live servers are bogged down with tons of email data, it can make searching for a specific email or a specific subject grueling and slow. In addition, by getting rid of email box quotas and setting up automatic email archiving, employees no longer have to spend precious time deleting emails or moving them to PST files like the old days. Finally, when you give your employees the ability to easily access archived and backed up email data, you place the power in their hands—meaning they won’t have to engage the IT department to do it for them. Compliance. Most industries require organizations to keep business records—and since emails often contain such records, deleting them is a no-no. Specific industries like health care, financial services, pharmaceuticals and energy have even stricter regulations about what business records must be kept. When you consider an email archiving solution, remember to research providers and select one that will deliver a user-friendly solution that keeps you in control and maintains high standards of security and reliability. Related content: IDC Analyst Report: How the Hosted Exchange Server is Redefining SMB Cloud IT Adoption White paper: Sync, send, and receive: Why cloud-based email and storage make sense for your business The post Email archiving—5 reasons why this is the best email feature you never use appeared first on Office Blogs.