Part 4: Digital Learning SpacesDavid JakesEdTechTeam's Director of Learning SpacesDavid Jakes is the Director of Learning Spaces for EdTechTeam and leads the Learning Space Design Studio. The Studio, created to support schools in developing compelling and engaging learning environments, is the most recent addition to the comprehensive services offered by EdTechTeam.Many schools have adopted, or are in the process of adopting, a 1:1 program that provides students with a device and a new level of connectivity to resources, people and ideas. As expected, such capacity is disruptive to the ways in which education has operated for decades, and these programs directly challenge schools not only to rethink how students learn, but where they learn.New connective technologies for every student means that learning in the physical spaces of school has the opportunity to change and that this enhanced capacity should encourage the development of additional spaces for learning - specifically, dedicated digital spaces for learning. By using these new technologies to create such spaces, schools can create more expansive conditions for where kids can learn, effectively enlarging those conditions to include a mixture of spaces that can support learning in the typical physical classroom, online, and in a blend of both spaces.This larger ecology of learning spaces can look different for every school, but the time has come for schools to develop serious online locations for learning. Certainly, a thoughtful approach for developing digital spaces could include locations for teachers (Google Classroom) and for students (Google Apps for Education) that provide both with a range of tools that support teaching and learning. Additionally, and beyond "school-owned" digital spaces, schools must negotiate and find value (and acceptance) in the social spaces that students already inhabit. A mixture of school-supported spaces, coupled with student-selected spaces, can create a compelling mix that can support interesting learning connections.Blending a two-part digital space (teacher and student) with the traditional physical spaces of schools can create a multidimensional approach to how spaces are used for learning, and creates the conditions for a new contemporary spatial landscape. Forward-thinking schools will realize that using devices just to connect to the Web is not enough, but connecting students to intentionally designed digital spaces that provide students with a broader learning experience will be essential in creating relevant and inspiring schools.Join the Challenge!Check out the #InspiringSpaces on Twitter for learning spaces ideas from around the globe! We're giving away furniture from Smith System through December 11th so share a picture of your inspiring learning spaces for a chance to win! edtechteam.com/inspiringspaces Week 1 Challenge Winner: Simon's Thinking Road!

Hi all, We here at IITS are happy to announce a 48-hour film event, coming September 11 - 13. Students from the TriCo are invited to participate in the act of coming up with, producing, and editing a film all in the span of a weekend. Students will form groups (or fly solo) and come to the initial kick off meeting (happening at 6PM on  Friday, 11th of September, in the ITC, Stokes 205) to receive their required prop, character, line of dialogue and genre. From there, the groups will then go on to make their film in any manner they like. Finished projects will be due at 6PM on Sunday, 13th of September. A screening for competing entries will be held the week after, with awards to follow. Start thinking about who you would like to work with on this project. Pre-Registration is not required, but is encouraged. At least one representative for each group MUST be present at the kick-off meeting in order to be eligible for the competition. Please direct all inquiries to hc-techlearn@haverford.edu You are asked to not plan the film before the kick-off meeting. Rest assured, the required elements will throw you some curve-balls anyway.

Dear Faculty,   IITS is offering a workshop: Using VoiceThread for Flipped Classrooms, Assignments, Feedback, Group Projects, and Collaboration. This 30 minutes workshop will teach you how you can use VoiceThread in the following scenarios.   Flipped Classrooms: Do you use Powerpoint slides, Word documents, PDFs, or image files to create teaching materials? Do you want to add audio annotations with a highlighter and share them with your students via Moodle? You can ask your students to add comments via text, audio, or video.   Assignments: Do you want to give an assignment to your students to create a presentation using files and adding audio or video comments? This type of  assignment will be tied to Gradebook in Moodle.   Feedback: You can use VoiceThread to give audio or video feedback with a highlighter on your student’s papers.   Group Projects: Using VoiceThread, your students can create a multimedia project or discuss a topic by uploading images, PDFs, Powerpoint slides, or Word documents, and adding comments via audio or video.   International Collaboration:Since the conversation is asynchronous, you can use this tool for collaboration with students at different schools or students who are studying abroad. Workshop Topic: VoiceThread Date: Thursday, September 17 Time: 4:00 - 4:30 PM Location: Stokes 205 Instructor: Hiroyo Saito, IITS Registration Form (Note: If you prefer an individual session, please note that on the form.)

Dear Faculty, IITS is offering two workshops this coming Monday, September 21, 2015.   Panopto (Lecture Capture System) Workshop Panopto is an easy-to-use software that records video of your teaching material. Bonus-it adds universal design to your classroom, so you’re inherently benefitting all your students. We’ll cover how to use Panopto for: Lecture capture Flipped classrooms Event or presentation recording Date: Monday, September 21 Time: 3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Location: KINSC H109 Instructors: Upma Singh (uisingh@haverford.edu ) and Roger Hill (rhill@haverford.edu) Registration Form (Note: If you prefer an individual session, please note your availability on the form.) Moodle Quiz Workshop The Moodle quiz can help you assess student learning, see how your students are doing as a group, and provide immediate feedback to students-thus helping students understand materials better. At the end of this short workshop, you will be able to use the most popular features of the Moodle quiz tool. Specifically, you will leave with these skills:   Create a timed or untimed quiz Specify when a quiz is open or closed to students Add questions Organize questions into appropriate categories Understand grading Use powerful analytics to find out where students struggle. For example, in addition to seeing what is correct or incorrect, you can see how long students spend answering each question.   Date: Monday, September 21 Time: 4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. Location: KINSC H109 Instructor: Sharon Strauss (sstrauss@haverford.edu) Registration Form (Note: If you prefer an individual session, please note your availability on the form.) 

In partnership with the OAR, IITS is offering three Adobe Creative Workshops (Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, and Premiere Pro CC) and two Working Faster, Working Smarter Workshops to students this fall. Here is the schedule. After the workshop, if you want to learn more after each workshop, you might want to try lynda.com. (Your Haverford username and password needed for login.) Date Time Title Location Contact/Instructor 9/24/2015 Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Creative Workshop: Adobe Photoshop CC Stokes Hall - STO 205 Instructional Technology Center (ITC) Charles Woodard (cwoodard@haverford.edu) 9/30/2015 Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Working Faster/Working Smarter: Excel at Microsoft Excel Stokes Hall - STO 118K OAR Large Conference Room Sharon Strauss (sstrauss@haverford.edu) 10/7/2015 Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Creative Workshop: Adobe InDesign CC Stokes Hall - STO 205 Instructional Technology Center (ITC) Charles Woodard (cwoodard@haverford.edu) 10/27/2015 Tuesday 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Working Faster/Working Smarter: Submit Papers with Style! Dining Center - DC 110 Pendle Hill Room Sharon Strauss (sstrauss@haverford.edu) 11/11/2015 Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Creative Workshop: Premiere Pro CC Stokes Hall - STO 205 Instructional Technology Center (ITC) Charles Woodard (cwoodard@haverford.edu)   IITS Fall 2015 Workshops in Partnership with the OAR

Dear Faculty,   The Instructional Technology Services group in IITS is looking for pilot participants for a program called Zaption.   Do you use existing videos such as YouTube, Vimeo, TED, PBS, Discovery videos to deepen your student’s understanding of content? Do you want to insert interactive elements such questions or discussion boards into specific points in a video? Do you want to access analysis tools to get immediate feedback on how your students interact with the video content?   If yes, please come to this 30 minute workshop or ask for an individual session and see if Zaption can meet your pedagogical needs.   Date: Thursday, October 1, 2015 Time: 4:00-4:30PM Location: Stokes 205 Instructional Technology Center Instructor: Hiroyo Saito Please register for this workshop or individual session on this registration form.   Looking forward to seeing you!   Thank you. Hiroyo

Hi Everyone, At the beginning of the Fall 2015 Semester, we put out a call for participants in our first 48 Hour Film Marathon (you can see the post here.) Participants were tasked with producing a short film within the span of 48 hours, from initial concept to finished product. We also provided each group with a line of dialogue, a prop, and a genre that they must use. Everyone’s line of dialogue was: "I am not a fan of the cactus." The prop was: A bowl of cereal. Each individual group was also given their own unique genre that they had to work with. All in all, we had 3 groups finish work for the event. After they were finished, we had our panel of judges (Vicky Funari, John Muse, and Robert Lukasik) review each piece and pick a winner. Our 2015 winners for our first inaugural event were: Cole Sansom and Anna Saum with their film Noirish (if you can’t tell, they were assigned "Film Noir" as a genre.) We’d like to thank everyone that participated in the event, and look forward to hosting it again next year!

Fall 2015 Teaching with Technology Forum Instructional Technology Services in IITS would like to invite you to the semi-annual Teaching with Technology Forum.   Eight faculty members will share their approaches and experiments using digital teaching and learning tools. Specifically, we will focus on four tools: Zaption, VoiceThread, Baiboard, and Glossary. These tools help increase student engagement with course material, their classmates, and faculty.  Following brief demonstrations of the tools, faculty members will share their experiences. We hope that you can join us and exchange ideas. Date: Wednesday, December 16th, 2015 Time: 9:30 - 11:30 AM Location: Stokes 102 Program Digital tools:  Zaption, VoiceThread, BaiBoard, and Glossary in Moodle Faculty presenters: Kathryne Corbin (Lecturer of French) Manar Darwish (Instructor of Arabic and Coordinator of Bi-Co Arabic Program) John Dougherty (Associate Professor of Computer Science) Ariana Huberman (Visiting Associate Professor of Spanish) Kenneth Koltun-Fromm (Professor of Religion) Monique Laird (Visiting Lecturer of French) Ana Lopez-Sanchez (Assistant Professor of Spanish) Tetsuya Sato (Senior Lecturer and Director of the Japanese Language Program)   This event is sponsored by the IITS (Instructional & Information Technology Services) and LACOL (Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning).  If you plan to join us, please register online. Thank you. Hiroyo

Technology, Innovation & Pedagogy Video  Have students ever come to your office hours confused about the material because they did not quite understand a concept discussed or may have written something incorrectly while trying to take notes and listen at the same time? This situation is what led Fran Blase (Provost & Associate Professor of Chemistry) to apply for a Teaching with Technology grant in 2011. She received the grant and worked with IITS to implement Panopto (lecture capture system) in her classes. This short video shows the experiences of three students who are taking classes that use Panopto. Brittany Robinson ‘19, Hanna Yoon ‘18, and Cooro Harris ‘19 Recorded lectures can be beneficial to students with diverse needs. Some students need notetakers, some want to review materials later, and some miss class. Think about the Universal Design for Learning (UDL)! If you have any questions, your colleagues Karin Åkerfeldt (Professor of Chemistry), Lou Charkoudian (Assistant Professor of Chemistry), John Dougherty (Associate Professor of Computer Science), Rachel Hoang (Associate Professor of Biology), and Robert Manning (Professor of Mathematics) are happy to share their experiences using Panopto. If you would like to try Panopto with your classes, follow these instructions or contact us for an appointment.

Editor’s note 7/7/2015: This post was updated to clarify TLS connection requirements. Protecting your incoming and outgoing emails is a top priority for us, which is why we are always working to improve mail flow encryption. With new security vulnerabilities constantly being uncovered, and communication privacy being in the spotlight now more than ever, we seek to upgrade our service to only use the most secure Transport Layer Security (TLS)-based encryption available. In the last year, we have made several improvements to our service, and your mail has never been more secure. You can find out more about how we use TLS to secure your emails by reading, "How Exchange Online uses TLS to secure email connections in Office 365." TLS 1.2 support added Towards the end of last year, we rolled out support for TLS 1.2 and, as a result, we now offer the best-in-class industry encryption for email traveling to and from our service—as long as the other party also offers the same level of protection. TLS 1.2 connections now account for around 60 percent of all TLS connections to and from Exchange Online. All mail between our data centers is encrypted with TLS 1.2 using the most secure cipher suite we support. This change also adds TLS 1.2 support for browsing to the Exchange Online Protection Admin site. New cipher suite order We also updated the cipher order, used by our servers to conduct TLS negotiations, to include more secure cipher suites and prioritize Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Just over 75 percent of all inbound TLS connections and 50 percent of all outbound TLS connections are now protected by PFS. The new cipher suite order can be seen below. Protocols Cipher Suite PFS Cipher/Strength TLS1.2 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384_P384 Yes AES/256 TLS1.2 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256_P256 Yes AES/128 TLS1.0|1.1|1.2 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA_P384 Yes AES/256 TLS1.0|1.1|1.2 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA_P256 Yes AES/128 TLS1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 No AES256 TLS1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 No AES128 TLS1.0|1.1|1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA No AES/256 TLS1.0|1.1|1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA No AES/128 TLS1.0|1.1|1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA No 3DES/192 TLS1.0|1.1|1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA No RC4/128 TLS1.0|1.1|1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 No RC4/128 The first four cipher suites provide PFS security. For all cipher suite pairs, the stronger key strength is preferred. AES is preferred to 3DES and RC4, which are provided for legacy support but will be removed in future. SSL 3.0 support withdrawn With the discovery of the POODLE attack, web browsers and websites have been quick to respond and the demise of the protocol version has be sped up as a result. While mail flow is not exposed to the same level of risk, support for SSL 3.0 in our service was turned off to ensure only the most secure versions of TLS are supported. RC4 cipher support is being withdrawn Starting in June, we will remove support for the two legacy RC4 cipher suites on our list as we push to remove support for weak ciphers. This will result in a minority of connections to servers that only support RC4-based ciphers falling back to unencrypted. However, it does ensure that, for Forced TLS connections and SMTP Client Submission where TLS is compulsory, all TLS connections will not be able to use these weak ciphers and those connections will fail. To avoid this happening, you will need to upgrade your servers to support AES ciphers. Devices and applications such as multi-function printers that send mail will also be affected if they only support RC4. You will need to make sure that all your devices and applications have the latest firmware and software updates. —The Information Protection team The post Enhancing mail flow security for Exchange Online appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Mauricio Oliveira, IT infrastructure and technology manager at Kroton.  Kroton is the largest private education provider in Brazil, serving more than a million students of all ages across our vast country. As a leader in both distance learning and on-campus education, we have always believed in the power of technology to transform and improve learning. Giving our students familiarity with the latest tools is also critical to their ability to successfully position themselves for the latest job opportunities. When we merged with Anhanguera in 2014, we realized it was an opportunity to start with a clean slate and standardize on the productivity tools that would best support our students and organization going forward. Kroton’s staff was using Office 365, and everyone at Anhanguera was using Google Apps for Work. We performed a very deep evaluation of both solutions, comparing every feature that mattered to us, over the course of three months. In our comparison, Office 365 emerged the clear winner for a number of reasons. For one, Office 365 makes it easy for us to give students what they need to work together from anywhere. When they register for a class, they immediately get access to a virtual classroom with learning materials, collaboration spaces and more. The entire process is automated, so we can be sure everyone is getting the best tools for their education. We’re very excited about Yammer Enterprise, which will enable us to provide a protected social networking environment where students can really get to know each other and benefit from multiple perspectives and skills; this is an especially valuable opportunity given the breadth of diversity in our student populations. Plus, we’re trying Office Mix, an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint, to deliver internal trainings, and combining access to our three learning management systems through Active Directory and Office 365. Whether we’re using an on-premises, cloud or hybrid model, we know Office 365 will support it seamlessly. As time goes on, we plan to expand the boundaries of what we can do with Office 365 and integrate it even more closely with our existing systems. For example, we’re using technology to match our students’ skills and locations with employment opportunities, while also gathering information on what’s most in demand from new hires. We’re thinking about integrating this program with Office 365 single sign-on for greater platform control and interoperability. At Kroton, we feel a strong sense of responsibility to prepare our students for a dynamic, fast-changing world, and to increase economic prosperity in our country and our region. Microsoft is a great business partner for our mission, and Office 365 is the right choice for us. For more information, read the full story here at Why Microsoft. The post Choosing Office 365 over Google Apps for more than a million students across Brazil appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we’re excited to announce The Office Dev Show, a new dedicated Channel 9 show devoted to all things Office 365 dev-related. The show, hosted by Sonya Koptyev, will include guests from the Office 365 Extensibility engineering team, as well as key community members. The show will feature new code and capabilities that have been added for devs to customize the Office platform, including the desktop, online and mobile versions, as well as a series on how to "Get Started" building on the platform. The Office Dev Show airs weekly, on Wednesdays. The first show, released on July 17, 2015, features an interview with Yina Arenas, senior program manager, who describes all the great features available in the Office 365 unified API Preview. Upcoming shows In the following weeks, you can look forward to a series on Getting Started developing on Office, as well as detailed shows around File Handlers, Fabric UI, Office on iPad Extensibility, Store Updates and more. New shows will be released every Wednesday morning. The post A new way to keep up with all the Office 365 Dev news, tips and tricks appeared first on Office Blogs.

Microsoft Office has long been the home base for homework. Students use Word to write papers, Excel for their math classes and PowerPoint for presenting a final report in class. But students across the country have also used this technology to do so much more. From writing editorials to drafting love notes, students can rely on Microsoft products to help them create, revise and re-imagine. And now, with an accessory like the Universal Foldable Keyboard, students can be creative even when they can’t bring along their laptops. To get the imaginative juices really flowing, the Microsoft PC Accessories team is hosting a student writing contest. In 300 words or less, tell us how you use technology to be creative—in or outside of the classroom. Ten winners will receive Universal Foldable Keyboards and the grand prize winner will snag a Surface Pro 3. We want to know how technology enables you to leave your mark on the world. For some added inspiration, check out this Sway from our summer intern Molly, who uses her Universal Foldable Keyboard to write comedy sketches on the go. Winners will be rewarded handsomely. Each week, from July 17th to July 31st, five "Microsoft Write Now Authors of the Week" will each receive the just-released Universal Foldable Keyboard. The grand prize winner, to be announced August 5th, will receive a Surface Pro 3 outfitted with a Surface Pro Type Cover and an Arc Touch Bluetooth Mouse. Submissions will be accepted from now until July 31st, so "Write Now!" To submit your submission, email your essay to WriteNow@microsoft.com with the subject line WRITE NOW. Entries must come from a student, be 300 words or less, and should be written in a Word document or with Sway. Be sure to include your full name, school name and email address in the body of the email. See official rules here. Don’t have Office? If you are a student, there’s a good chance you’re eligible for free Office. Go to office.com/getoffice365 and enter a school-provided email address to find out. —The Microsoft PC Accessories team The post Write Now—student writing contest appeared first on Office Blogs.

Just in time for teachers, students and families preparing to head back to school—the all new Office for Mac is here. Packed with a whole new set of features, Office 2016 for Mac is sure to help scholars of all ages do their best work. To help you get most out of the new Office for Mac, we’ve narrowed it down to our top 10. Top 10 features and enhancements for students 1. If you save your Office documents in the cloud, a list of recently used files is available in the new Office for Mac. This helps you immediately pick up where you left off. Bonus: Pin the documents you use frequently and they will stay in the special "pinned files" list. 2. Working on an assignment with other students? Simply share your document in a few clicks and give permission to view or edit—all without leaving the application. 3. When you’re working with others in a Word document, PowerPoint presentation or OneNote notebook—several people can work on the same file simultaneously. And you can reply to people’s comments so that you can have a conversation right next to the relevant text. 4. Use Audio Recording in OneNote to record class lectures. Any notes you type while recording are synchronized to the audio. Later, when you review your notes, you can easily jump to the parts of the recording that correspond to the specific notes you typed at that moment. 5. Presenter View in PowerPoint is like mission control for your presentation. You see the current slide, next slide, speaker notes and a timer on your Mac, while the audience sees only the presentation on the big screen. 6. Side-by-side calendar in Outlook lets you see multiple calendars in a single view. 7. Clicking Smart Lookup in Word shows contextual information from the web. When you’re writing a report on the French Revolution, useful information will show up right next to your document (including a certain Napoleon Bonaparte). 8. Mathletes rejoice! Insert 11 types of equations in Word, Excel and PowerPoint and customize them to your heart’s content. You can also save frequently used equations to the Equation Gallery. 9. Make your presentations stand out with new transitions, pixel perfect animations and smooth video playback. 10. Want to make your report or presentation look awesome without breaking a sweat? Click the new Design tab to easily apply designer quality layouts, colors and fonts throughout your document. We hope you find these Office for Mac tips useful. If you have any favorite time-saving tips, please share them in the comments below. And don’t forget, if you’re a student or teacher, visit www.Office.com/student to see if you’re eligible to get Office 365, and the new Office for Mac, for free. The post Top 10 back to school features in the new Office for Mac appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post about Office 365 was written by Franck Le Moal, chief information officer at Louis Vuitton. I joined Louis Vuitton some years ago, and I still have the same passion for the company today as I did then—it is a fantastic, creative place that mixes innovation and modernity with history. My goal as CIO hasn’t changed drastically either: to deliver the best applications and IT tools to everyone at Vuitton, so we can work together to design, manufacture and distribute our products with a 100 percent focus on the customer. This tradition of customer service is the same now as it was in the 1850s, when Louis Vuitton honed his craft designing custom boxes and trunks according to clients’ wishes. We have the same spirit of innovation as we did in 1886, when Louis and his son, Georges, developed a revolutionary new lock to safeguard the goods inside their customers’ travel pieces. And we have survived the changing world of fashion for more than 150 years because we are agile and responsive. The applications and IT tools I bring to the company have to reinforce these qualities. That’s why Microsoft Office 365 has a place in the world of Louis Vuitton Malletier. We were first using Office 365 as a key pillar in a global collaboration initiative supporting our 6,000 sales associates working in 460 Louis Vuitton stores in 65 countries. Our associates develop close relationships with our customers, and Office 365 comes into play by helping them communicate with colleagues across the business to stay informed about our products. Customers in the luxury retail market know a great deal about what they buy—they visit our website, and they pay attention to social media. So it’s critical for our associates to talk to customers at that level, and there’s a lot for them to learn: we have many SKUs for leather goods alone, and we launch four different collections a year in shoes and ready-to-wear. Office 365 is a great, agile platform that we use to support daily exchanges between our merchandising and store teams. Office 365 is just as important in supporting collaboration between the designers and artisans who continue the tradition of excellence and craftsmanship at Louis Vuitton. Previously, we didn’t have one integrated platform for sharing design ideas and innovative practices easily among the 4,000 artisans who work together to deliver the best products to our customers. I love that we maintain the practice of collaborative craftsmanship at our 17 factories and ateliers across France but use Office 365 to speed up idea sharing—where to find a certain leather, for example, or how to improve on a pattern or refine the design of a buckle—to deliver better products more quickly. That’s a huge business benefit. We also see Office 365 as essential in helping us remain agile in an evolving industry. For example, when a new product is launched, its first week in stores is critical for collecting feedback from our sales associates. Yammer, the social network in Office 365, will be an excellent way to share product feedback from our factory teams. There’s another reason we value Office 365: as we grow globally, it enables us to address the risk of becoming too vertical in our operations. Reducing complexity and silos is key to staying agile, reactive and modern. For instance, in the past our staff had many different email addresses and many vertical tools; now everyone is united under the louisvuitton.com domain in a single collaborative platform. This reinforces that we are one company working in sync to deliver world-class customer service. With Office 365 at Vuitton, technology meets tradition—a winning combination that ensures our products and services continue to please our discriminating customers. —Franck Le Moal The post Building on a global culture of tradition and innovation to boost customer service and artistic excellence appeared first on Office Blogs.

Many performance improvements and architecture changes in the upcoming release of Exchange Server 2016—which is now available as a Preview to download—are based on our experience running Exchange Online at extreme scale. Our software development process allows us to incorporate things we’ve learned in the cloud in the product releases that we deliver to on-premises customers. We explain some of these under-the-hood improvements on this week’s Office Mechanics. Exchange engineering team veteran Greg Taylor provides insights into what IT admins can expect in Exchange Server 2016. He explains that the team focused on three key areas to enhance the newest member of the Exchange family: Simplification: both in server architecture and migration from Exchange Server 2013 and 2010. Reliability: key learnings from running Exchange Online enabled the team to get further ahead of potential failures through automation and predict problems before they occur. Performance and reducing total cost of ownership: improvements in indexing, search, connectivity and more, along with making sure we can run on low-cost commodity servers versus high-performance (and high-cost) servers. Of course, this isn’t a comprehensive list of the new capabilities coming to Exchange Server 2016. In-depth information can be found in today’s Exchange Team blog announcing the availability of the Preview. And to see what’s coming in Outlook, check out Ben Walters’ recent show: Early look at the new Outlook on the desktop, Windows 10 and phones. —Jeremy Chapman The post Bringing cloud technology on-premises in Exchange Server 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

We had a great time at Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) last week, where more than 14,000 people gathered to celebrate our Partners’ vital work and to share information that will help them continue to serve our customers and grow their businesses. Office 365 was a huge part of WPC, and we gave our Partners a first look at some innovations we are unleashing to help organizations transform how they work. We also announced a significant expansion of the Cloud Solution Provider program to include Azure and CRM Online as well as Office 365, and we are making the program available to all eligible Partners in 131 countries. Mobile and cloud technology were big topics at WPC, which is unsurprising when you consider how much they have changed the way we work and the number and variety of devices we use every day in both our personal and professional lives. Office 365 is designed for today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world, and recent improvements make it even easier to be highly productive on multiple devices and switch seamlessly between Windows, Mac and Android platforms. Shortly after releasing Office for Android phone, we made Office 2016 for Mac available to Office 365 subscribers and introduced another round of important updates to the Office 2016 Preview for Windows. We also recently announced our plan to bring Sway to more platforms and devices. As busy as we were getting ready for WPC, we still delivered on our commitment to continually provide a highly secure service with powerful tools. We added Compliance Search to make it easier for you to search all of your Office 365 data, extended the Office 365 archiving and eDiscovery compliance toolset to include content stored in public folders, and announced new activity logging capabilities to give you more control over your information. We believe these and other significant investments in security are reflected in the recently published 2015 Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways from Gartner, which positions Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant. In addition, we enabled one-click access to third-party apps and launched PowerShell.office.com, a new website designed to help IT administrators get started on Windows PowerShell for Office 365. Finally, we released the Skype for Business Windows Phone app, announced the preview of our new Skype for Business services in Office 365, made significant formatting improvements to Office Online, and offered an early look at our plan to integrate Cortana with Office 365. For even more Office 365 news, have a look through the below roundup of key items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy! GE selects Office 365 for employee collaboration and productivity—Discover why GE chose Office 365 to enhance collaboration and productivity for its 300,000 employees in 170 countries worldwide. Building on a global culture of tradition and innovation to boost customer service and artistic excellence—Learn from Franck Le Moal, chief information officer at Louis Vuitton, how Office 365 is helping the celebrated design firm stay customer-focused. Canadian Cancer Society improves TCO, collaboration with Office 365—Find out how the nonprofit Canadian Cancer Society is using Office 365 to reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO) while improving collaboration, productivity and mobile support. Microsoft announces new top-of-the-range E5 plan for Office 365—Discover how E5, the new Office 365 option, will offer business customers added benefits. Microsoft Office in a world of multiple devices—Learn how Office 365 delivers exceptional cross-platform functionality at an outstanding price. New Office 2016 for Mac makes life easier for the cross-platform crowd—Discover how Office 2016 for Mac makes switching between a Windows PC and a Mac pain-free while preserving the familiar look and feel of the Mac. DORMA delivers access to innovation for 7,000 global employees with Office 365—Learn why DORMA, the trusted global partner for premium access solutions and services for enabling better buildings, chose to set up an intranet based on Office 365. U.S. Air Force moves to the cloud with Collaboration Pathfinder—Find out how the U.S. Air Force is taking flight with Office 365. Management consulting firm picks Office 365 at critical growth moment—driving professionalism, productivity and collaboration—Discover how Office 365 is helping Loeb Consulting Group grow its business. Microsoft makes Office 365 freely available to nonprofits—Learn how qualifying nonprofit organizations can use Office 365 free of charge. USEK goes greener helped by Microsoft Office 365—Find out how the USEK university in Lebanon is using Office365 to reach its environmental goals while providing better service to faculty and students. Digital India: Microsoft to focus on rural internet, cloud solution—Discover how Microsoft is working with the Indian government to transform rural India with cloud technology. The post Office 365 news roundup appeared first on Office Blogs.

Windows 10 is here! The best Windows yet, delivered as a service and kept automatically up-to-date with new innovations and security updates, launched last week as a free upgrade. As part of the launch, we also released the all new Office Mobile Apps for Windows 10. Customers in 190 countries can now download and install the apps from the new Windows Store and immediately start being more productive on the go. In conjunction with the launch, we also spelled out which capabilities in Windows 10 will benefit Office 365 admins. Windows 10 is big news, but it’s not our only news. As part of our ongoing work to deliver the richest email and calendar experiences on the web, we announced an array of exciting updates to the web version of Outlook in Office 365. "Outlook on the web," formerly known as the Outlook Web App (OWA for short), is getting an improved user interface (UI) and new features to help you work more efficiently, stay on top of your inbox, and do a better job of managing your calendar. We also launched Send, a new app designed for quick, brief, in-and-out email, similar to a text or instant message. Send is connected to Office 365, which means your conversations are synced with Outlook, letting you continue the conversation from anywhere. And just like regular email, you can message anyone with an email address. In addition, we announced the general availability of Sway, the digital storytelling app that lets users create and share interactive reports, presentations, assignments, lessons, projects and more. We’ve started rolling out Sway to all eligible Office 365 business and education customers worldwide, and of course, any consumer can use Sway with a free Microsoft account. We also introduced Sway for Windows 10, along with new layout and publishing capabilities. All of these innovations and improvements are part of our ongoing commitment to make Office 365 the best productivity solution for every device and every platform. Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy! Review: Windows 10—Learn why you should upgrade to Windows 10, according to the editors of Wired. Microsoft’s cloud bets pay off as Office 365 sees big growth—Find out how Office 365 is growing quickly and contributing to the company’s cloud strategy. UL—product safety leader maintaining security and moving at the speed of innovation with Office 365—Find out why protecting customers’ intellectual property is UL information security director Robert Jamieson’s top priority—and how Office 365 helps him achieve that goal. Adventist Health System boosts productivity with Office 365 ProPlus while complying with HIPAA—Discover how Office 365 helps this large healthcare organization stay productive, secure and compliant. Office 365 joins IFTTT to automate routine tasks—Learn more about using IFTTT on Office 365. Microsoft levels up web version of Outlook for business customers—Find out more about the changes, upgrades and improvements Microsoft has made to the web version of Outlook. Souping up Office 365—Learn how Microsoft is continuing to improve Office 365. The post Office 365 news roundup appeared first on Office Blogs.

Excel is the world’s most widely used and familiar data analysis tool and for good reason! It provides flexibility at each stage of your analytic journey, with tools that support both quick ad hoc calculations and exploration across large data sets. Last month, Microsoft expanded its BI offerings by releasing the latest version of Power BI, a groundbreaking cloud-based business analytics service, which has gained over 500,000 unique users, from 45,000 companies and across 185 countries during the public preview. One question we are asked a lot is, "How does Excel work with Power BI?" Here is an overview of how these tools work together to solve your analytics needs. Excel 2016 and Power BI are a portfolio of tools that is unique in the industry. Together, they provide a broad set of capabilities that allow business analysts to more easily gather, shape, analyze and visually explore their data. The new Power BI service is a business analytics collaboration and delivery environment where anyone in your organization can bring together data from a wide range of sources—such as Excel workbooks, on-premises corporate data, Azure services and other popular cloud-based offerings like Salesforce.com or Marketo—to view and share it with live dashboards and interactive reports. Along with this new service, we released Power BI Desktop (previously named Power BI Designer), a visual data exploration and interactive reporting tool that allows business analysts to navigate data quickly across a free-form canvas and easily design dashboards and reports for the Power BI service. And of course, Excel is best for flexible, powerful data analysis—providing a collection of integrated features that enables analysts to shape, model and analyze millions of rows of data within its familiar grid environment. If you are one of the hundreds of millions of people who use Excel as their analysis and reporting tool today, you should find it easy to begin using the Power BI service and Power BI Desktop to expand the capabilities of your analytic toolset. Excel 2016 and Power BI Desktop are deliberately compatible, using the same underlying technologies—like sharing the same data access capabilities and publishing directly to the Power BI service. Additionally, you can import your Excel workbooks into Power BI Desktop and take advantage of the queries, data models and reports you have already created in Excel. This makes it easy to move between these powerful desktop tools as your business needs change. Power BI enables users to use Excel workbook data to build Power BI dashboards and reports, as well as view and interact directly with rich Excel-built reports through Excel Online. The design of the new Power BI offerings was based on an incredible amount of customer and partner feedback, ensuring that the experiences worked well for all users. You have also given feedback about the business analytics features within Excel, which has driven us to make several improvements. In addition to providing a set of new charting and analysis capabilities, expect to see the following changes in Excel 2016: All Excel 2016 users can take advantage of Power Query, our powerful data gathering add-in. We have fully integrated this set of capabilities into Excel—no add-in required—and removed the "power" name. Simply find the Power Query features as part of the data access and management experiences under the "Get and Transform" section of the Data tab. Similarly, Power Map, our popular 3-D geospatial visualization add-in, will also be integrated fully into Excel. Now with a more descriptive name, "3-D Maps," you can find this functionality alongside other visualization features on the Insert tab. We heard from you that Power View, our premium free-form interactive reporting add-in, provides a compelling new way to report. You also made it clear that you value the consistent look and feel of the familiar charting experience already in Excel. This feedback helped lead us to develop Power BI Desktop, which is built with the same technology as Power View and provides a dedicated environment for visual data exploration and reporting. New investments in this space will be done in Power BI Desktop, and we encourage users of Power View to take full advantage of the new tool. With the newest releases of Excel 2016 and Power BI, we are providing a complete, flexible and robust business analytics toolset that works great together. Use these tools to discover the deeper business insights with more speed and power, and spend less time trying to find the right way to share with peers and workgroups. Try our new offerings out, leave your comments below, and share your ideas for improvements and new features. Preview Excel 2016 now! Download Power BI Desktop Sign up to try the Power BI service The post Helping business analysts take full advantage of Excel 2016 and the new Power BI appeared first on Office Blogs.

Earlier this week we explained how Excel—the world’s most widely used and familiar data analysis tool—works with the new Power BI and Power BI Desktop to provide business analysts with a powerful portfolio of analytic tools unique in the industry. Today we unbox Excel 2016’s new and improved business analytics features, so you can take full advantage of each capability as it applies to your unique business needs. Excel 2016 improvements have been designed with the analyst’s journey in mind, from gathering to consuming data: Faster and easier ways to get data Before analysis can begin, you must be able to bring in the data relevant to the business question you are trying to answer. Excel 2016 now comes with built-in functionality that brings ease and speed to getting and transforming your data—allowing you to find and bring all the data you need into one place. These new capabilities, previously only available as a separate add-in called Power Query, can be found natively within Excel 2016. Access them from the "Get & Transform" section on the Data tab. Use these capabilities to connect to data from a wide range of sources—like tables in public websites, corporate data in databases and cubes, cloud-based sources like Azure, unstructured data like Hadoop and services like Salesforce—then bring the data into your workbook’s data model or display them as tables within a worksheet. The Query Editor, which opens when creating a new query or opening an existing one under Get & Transform, provides intuitive data shaping and transformation options, enabling you to prepare a data set with only the information you want to see and in the way you want to see it. Each step you take to transform the data can be repeated and rearranged to help you work faster and more efficiently. When you refresh the data connections, every step you took to transform the data is preserved. And once you have the information prepared, you can share your queries easily with others. Additional features available under the Get & Transform section include accessing recent sources you’ve used in previous queries and options to combine queries together. With a premium version* of Excel 2016 and a Power BI license, you can also use search to discover corporate data available to you across your company that is shared in a corporate catalog or even share your own queries with others. Integrating the Power Query technology also provides benefits for programmability. With these features integrated into native Excel, you can use VBA and the Object Model to program a related query and transform actions. And if you need more than the predefined actions provided, you can use the powerful query language (M) to create additional actions and capabilities. Streamlined data analysis Excel is known for its flexible and powerful analysis experiences, through the familiar PivotTable authoring environment. With Excel 2010 and Excel 2013, this experience was significantly enhanced with the introduction of Power Pivot and the Data Model, bringing the ability to easily build sophisticated models across your data, augment them with measures and KPIs, and then calculate over millions of rows with high speed. In Excel 2016, we focused on making these experiences more discoverable, consistent and streamlined, so that you can focus less on managing your data and more on uncovering the insights that matter: Automatic relationship detection discovers and creates relationships among the tables used for your workbook’s data model, so you don’t have to. Excel 2016 knows when your analysis requires two or more tables to be linked together and notifies you. With one click, it does the work to build the relationships, so you can take advantage of them immediately. Creating, editing and deleting custom measures can now be done directly from the PivotTable fields list, saving you a lot of time when you need to add additional calculations for your analysis. Automatic time grouping helps you to use your time-related fields in your PivotTable more powerfully, by auto-detecting and grouping them on your behalf. Once grouped together, simply drag the group to your PivotTable in one action and immediately begin your analysis across the different levels of time with drill-down capabilities. PivotChart drill-down buttons allow you to drill in and out across groupings of time and other hierarchical structures within your data. Search in the PivotTable field list helps you get to the fields that are important to you across your entire data set. Smart rename gives you the ability to rename tables and columns in your workbook’s data model. With each change, Excel 2016 automatically updates any related tables and calculations across your workbook, including all worksheets and DAX formulas. Multiple usability improvements have also been made. For example, delayed updating allows you to perform multiple changes in Power Pivot without the need to wait until each is propagated across the workbook. The changes will be propagated at one time, once the Power Pivot window is closed. New forecasting capabilities We also revamped the forecasting capabilities provided in Excel 2016. In previous versions, only linear forecasting had been available. In Excel 2016, the FORECAST function has been extended to allow forecasting based on Exponential Smoothing (i.e. FORECAST.ETS() …). This functionality is also available as a new one-click forecasting button. On the Data tab, click the Forecast Sheet button to quickly create a forecast visualization of your data series. From the wizard, you can also find options to adjust common forecast parameters, like seasonality, which is automatically detected by default and confidence intervals. New and modern charts Effective visualizations are critical to effective analysis as well as compelling storytelling. In Excel 2016, we have provided a new set of modern charts with the consistent look and feel of the familiar charting experience that Excel provides natively, to expand the ways to visualize your data. These new charts—with the same rich formatting options that you are familiar with—help you cut through the tedious work it used to take to create some of the most commonly used business data visualizations, like the Sunburst and Waterfall charts below: As part of an ongoing effort to provide more value in Excel’s visual offerings, you can expect ongoing updates through Office 365 to deliver even more new charts and visualization improvements. We have also made our popular 3-D geospatial visualization tool, Power Map, accessible to all Excel 2016 users by delivering its features right out of the box. This innovative set of storytelling capabilities has been renamed to 3-D Maps and can be found along with other visualization tools on the Insert tab. With the new Power BI Desktop offering, which is built with the same free-form reporting experience of Power View, you can have a dedicated environment for visual data exploration and report authoring. You can expect more investments in this type of reporting experience through this new tool, like new interactive visualizations. If you have Power View reports in Excel and want to continue working on them in Power BI Desktop, simply import your Excel workbook. For those who elect to continue to use Power View in Excel, the feature is fully supported in Excel 2016, and the insert Power View button can be enabled with a few steps. Publishing and sharing in Power BI A report is not complete without being able to share it with the right people. Once you’re finished preparing your data analysis, you can share it with your workgroup or clients through Power BI with just one button. Once published to Power BI, use your data models to quickly construct interactive reports and dashboards. With Excel Online support built into Power BI service, you can also display your fully formatted Excel worksheets as well. Taking advantage of Excel Online With rich features in Excel Online, your peers and clients are able to view and interact with your Excel data analysis and reports from anywhere. All you need to do is share your workbook through Power BI, SharePoint or OneDrive. Recently, we’ve included new features to make it even easier to consume and interact with your workbook from the web, including Search in Filters and the ability to change the settings of a value field in a PivotTable. With Office 365, we are providing more features and improvements to Excel Online on a regular basis. Try the new features out for yourself! With Excel 2016, we have provided enhancements at every phase of your analytic journey. Try each new feature and improvement out now by downloading the Office 2016 Preview for Windows and then share your ideas for improvements in Excel 2016.   * Premium features for Excel 2016 (like corporate data sources and query sharing) can be found in Office 365 ProPlus and other business plans, as well as Office 2016 Professional and Excel 2016 Standalone—more details coming up. The post What’s new for business analytics in Excel 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Andrew Connnell about the new Office Add-in Yeoman Generator. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP60_Yeoman.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Office Dev Show Episode 7—Getting Started with Python with Sonya Koptyev and Richard DiZerega Graph Organization Explorer Angular by Richard DiZerega Graph Organization Explorer Windows 10 (UWP) by Richard DiZerega Announcing availability of SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview and cloud hybrid search Connecting and extending Office with Microsoft Office developer tools for Visual Studio Getting all boards to which a document belongs using the Office Graph by Stephane Cordonnier The future of client-side development in SharePoint and Office 365 by Eric Shupps Show notes Generator-office GitHub source nodejs.org/download www.npmjs.com yeoman.io/generators How to use npm global without sudo on OSX bower.io gulpjs.com Deep Dive into Office 365 Development on non-Microsoft Stack Publishing Office Add-ins Azure CLI 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 Andrew Connell   Andrew is an entrepreneur and developer with an emphasis in Microsoft SharePoint and content management systems (CMS). In April of 2005, he was recognized by Microsoft for his community contributions by being awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Content Management Server and has received the award annually for SharePoint Server every year since.  Most of his work these days involves working with the Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 and web development technologies. Read more at about  Andrew Connell  and follow him on @andrewconnell. 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. 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 aka.ms/AskSharePointDev aka.ms/AskOfficeDev 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 060 on the new Office Add-in Yeoman Generator—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we are announcing the general availability of Office UI Fabric on GitHub. Office UI Fabric is a responsive, mobile-first, front-end framework for developers, designed to make it simple to quickly create web experiences using the Office Design Language. It’s simple and familiar to get up and running with Office UI Fabric—whether you’re creating a new app from scratch or adding new features to an existing one. With Office UI Fabric you can apply simple CSS styles to make your web applications look and feel like the rest of Office. The styling takes into account typography, color, icons, animations, responsive grid layouts and localization. Along with styling, there are reusable components such as input, layout, navigation and content (persona card, list item and table views). The framework is used internally on products within Office 365—such as our suite branding, OneDrive.com, Outlook.com, Delve and the Video Portal. Not only has the framework been tested with internal engineering teams on production products, it was also shared with our partners in our Preview Program. You will start to see the add-ins in the Office Store updated to use Office UI Fabric, which will increase the consistency of add-ins you use to increase your productivity day-to-day. It is very straight forward to integrate Office UI Fabric into a web application. Simply add some JavaScript into your web application and reference the CSS file from the CDN in your HTML file. The following starter template represents the minimum recommended HTML structure for an add-in that uses Office UI Fabric.<!doctype html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> <title>Application Name</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <!-- Fabric core --> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/fabric.min.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/fabric.components.min.css"> <!-- Application-specific CSS --> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/[your application].css"> </head> <body> <!-- Application content goes here --> <h1 class="ms-font-su">Why, hello, world.</h1> <!-- jQuery - Needed for Fabric Components JS --> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.js"></script> </body> </html>It is designed to work across Office Clients where Office Add-ins are supported. Right now that is the Windows desktop, web browser, Mac desktop and iOS on iPad. The images below illustrate the use of typography, the font icons (search icon), the search box styling, the pivot navigation, the drop-down styling and the list item component on various platforms. Windows desktop Browser iPad Office UI Fabric can be used with SharePoint add-ins and standalone websites launched from the App Launcher. One thing to note is that it hasn’t been optimized for these scenarios just yet. This is something that the team is working on for future releases. Documentation The documentation is written as part of the GitHub repo in sync with the releases. This is a new initiative for engineering, and the results so far have really shown the value in this collaborative approach between our internal teams (program managers, developers and technical writers) and our external communities. There are great visuals in the documentation that help developers understand what is available in Office UI Fabric. In addition to the Office UI Fabric documentation in the GitHub repository, there are new Office Add-in UX Design Guidelines that discuss at a higher level considerations when designing your add-ins. Controls We have also been busy shipping our first controls that leverage the Office UI Fabric. These controls can be used in Office Add-ins, SharePoint Add-ins and standalone websites with a few lines of code. Below is a screenshot showing the People Picker Control using the styling elements of Office UI Fabric: Another widely used control is the Detailed Persona Card, which takes the Persona Card component in Office UI Fabric and makes it a bindable control that can be used in a few lines of code. There are more controls in the pipeline, including the Office 365 Web App Chrome Control for use with standalone web applications launched from the App Launcher and a File Picker control for use with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint files in the user interface. For more information on these controls please check out the Office 365 JavaScript Controls documentation. So what are you waiting for? Head over to github.com/OfficeDev/Office-UI-Fabric and get started! —Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 team The post Introducing Office UI Fabric—your key to designing add-ins for Office appeared first on Office Blogs.

Over the past two years, Microsoft’s legal department set out to create an internal tool that didn’t exist—a way to organize its legal matters and collaborate on documents within the familiar Office 365 tools attorneys use most. So last year our Legal & Corporate Affairs Group (LCA) shared its vision for an Office 365 Add-in that would do just that. Since then, LCA has worked to turn this concept into Matter Center for Office 365, an Office 365 Add-in currently in use internally at Microsoft, and is becoming available to legal professionals at law firms and in-house departments of all sizes. In fact, we have already shipped Matter Center to IT solutions providers who specialize in serving the legal community. These Microsoft partners are now offering Matter Center on a limited basis, and will begin offering it broadly in the coming weeks. These partners include Epona, Handshake Software, LawPoint365, Perficient, Ubiquity Wave, Project Leadership Associates and the PayneGroup. Microsoft Services will also offer for-fee consulting and support services for Matter Center beginning in September. And finally, we’ll be making Matter Center available broadly through GitHub this calendar year. Once installed, Matter Center allows people to create or view legal matters right from Outlook; tie Word, Excel, OneNote and other files to those matters; and securely collaborate with other legal professionals inside or outside their organizations. There are a few benefits that make Matter Center stand out: Access anytime, anywhere—Like Office 365, Matter Center is available across PCs, tablets and phones, across Windows, Apple and Android devices, and allows you to access matters and documents either online or offline using OneDrive for Business. Real-time collaboration—Using the automatic version control feature of Office 365, you can simultaneously edit documents with multiple people inside or outside your organization. Intuitive search and data visualization—You can easily search, preview and find matters and related documents across all cases directly within Outlook and Word. Power BI can be configured to visualize your matter data. Pinning and tagging—You can track or pin frequently used matters and documents and connect to Delve to provide personalized experiences about who on your team is working on them. Compliance with security standards—Matter Center allows you to control who can access, review or edit a document and provides all the same enterprise-grade security, management and administrative controls as Office 365. Better flexibility and control—By offering Matter Center through an open GitHub repository, customers and partners can build or extend the solution to meet specific customer needs faster. As part of developing Matter Center, LCA conducted a preview program with nearly 200 law firms, partners and others in the legal industry, as well as our in-house counsel. As a result of the feedback we received during the preview, we have improved the solution over the last year. And LCA currently has early pilot customers including Olswang; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Ragen Swan; and Shook, Hardy & Bacon. LCA is committed to continued investments in this modern, world-class collaboration solution. And as we make Matter Center available to our customers and partners, we are also rolling out the latest version to more than 1,200 Microsoft legal professionals globally. This is only the beginning. You can expect additional capabilities and features to be delivered over time. Visit the Matter Center website for more information on the solution and how you or your organization can start using Matter Center. Running Matter Center in the cloud will require Office 365 and Azure subscriptions. Matter Center has been designed to support multiple deployment configurations as well, whether on-premises or hybrid cloud. You can find additional information on Matter Center capabilities, case studies from partner law firms, and a complete list of partners making Matter Center available here. —Nishan DeSilva, senior director for Technology Solutions and Evangelism, Legal & Corporate Affairs (LCA) at Microsoft The post We’re making our in-house legal software—Matter Center for Office 365—available broadly appeared first on Office Blogs.

Join us for a virtual event series live from a Microsoft Technology Center to learn how to empower your employees and organization with tools from Office 365. With the industry’s most advanced productivity suite—Office 365—Microsoft is focused on reinventing productivity to help you become more productive, mobile, collaborative and intelligent without sacrificing trust or security. We are making weekly, monthly and quarterly updates to all parts of the cloud service, ensuring your users have "the right tool" at "the right time." As a result of the continued enhancement of our productivity suite, we’ve built a four-part webcast series delivered from Microsoft Subject Experts live from a Microsoft Technology Center to keep you informed on the latest capabilities you can bring your organization. Register now and join us live or on demand to learn how you can empower your employees to be more productive from anywhere on any device while maintaining compliance and security controls. Embrace the ease to live life and work the way that’s best for you. Join us for our first 45-minute webcast featuring Bring Your Office to the Cloud on Thursday, September 3rd at 10 a.m. PDT. Register for the Virtual Event Series and get the latest information on how Office 365 can help your organization and employees be more productive every day. We hope to see you there! The post Reinvent Productivity webcast series appeared first on Office Blogs.