Over the last year, we’ve helped thousands of customers with varying degrees of IT complexity onboard to Office 365 while reducing their implementation costs, accelerating their time to value and delivering a great customer experience. With our commitment to delivering the best customer experience, and based on feedback from our customers, we’re excited to announce the evolution of FastTrack from an onboarding service to our customer success service designed to help you realize business value faster with the Microsoft Cloud. First, we’re changing FastTrack from a one-time benefit to an ongoing benefit. This enables you to request support in onboarding new users and capabilities at any time, and as many times as needed, for the life of your subscription. In addition, we are expanding FastTrack to now offer customized support and resources across envisioning, onboarding and driving business value. This builds on our announcement earlier this year around the addition of new products to the FastTrack onboarding services, including the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), Azure Active Directory Premium, Intune and Azure Rights Management. FastTrack’s approach to customer success. Delivering the next level of service FastTrack now consists of best practices, tools, resources and personalized remote assistance available through a new web experience (FastTrack.microsoft.com) and through the FastTrack Center. The FastTrack Center is a team of hundreds of engineers who have been focused to date on providing IT professionals and partners all over the world with remote onboarding and migration assistance. Going forward, the expanded focus areas for the web and FastTrack Center experiences are: Envisioning—Through FastTrack.microsoft.com, we now offer resources and tools to help you build tailored success plans that include both technical implementation and user adoption strategies across Office 365, EMS, Azure and other services. Onboarding—Once you’re ready, request onboarding to get remote and personalized assistance from our FastTrack engineers who help you assess your technical environment and work with your IT staff or partner to ensure a smooth onboarding and migration experience. Driving business value—Our goal is to help you get the most out of your IT investments. To do that, we will provide you with best practices, guidance and resources on Office 365 user adoption to help you get started, and will connect you as needed with qualified partners who can help you do more. Meanwhile, you’ll benefit from tools and guidance to help you transform your existing IT practices and effectively manage change. Get started We hope you’re as excited as we are about the new FastTrack! Whether you are new to Office 365 or well on your way, we recommend checking out the following resources to learn more about FastTrack: Visit FastTrack.microsoft.com to get started today. Follow our Office 365 Roadmap to learn more about upcoming changes. Join our YamJam on Tuesday, October 13 from 9-10 a.m. PDT on the Office 365 Network to talk more about what FastTrack has to offer and ask your questions live! —Arpan Shah, senior director for the Office 365 team Frequently asked questions Q. Which customers are eligible to take advantage of FastTrack? A. All customers can benefit from resources and best practices publicly available at FastTrack.microsoft.com. In addition, Office 365 for customers with at least 150 licenses of Office 365 Enterprise SKUs, paid Government and Education SKUs, Kiosk SKUs and Nonprofit SKUs are eligible to take advantage of the FastTrack Center. Q. When will the new FastTrack be available? A. Eligible customers can receive Adoption Planning assistance, Onboarding and Migration services from the FastTrack Center today. Q. How do I learn about new updates? A. FastTrack is a service that is constantly evolving. We will publish upcoming changes as part of the Office 365 Roadmap. Visit roadmap.office.com to get the full list of future updates. Q. What onboarding and migration services does the FastTrack Center provide? A. For more details, please review the service description. Q. What languages and markets is FastTrack available in? A. FastTrack is available in all markets. The FastTrack Center provides remote assistance in the following languages: English, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese. In addition, FastTrack.microsoft.com will be available in English only at release (October 7, 2015). The content will be released in the languages above in November. Q. Where can customers and partners find more information about Microsoft FastTrack for Office 365? A. Visit FastTrack.microsoft.com to become familiar with what our customer success service has to offer, as well as Microsoft FastTrack for Office 365 service descriptions. In addition, partners can go here to learn more about the partner opportunity with FastTrack. The post The evolution of Microsoft FastTrack—the customer success service appeared first on Office Blogs.

Being a project manager is a tough job. There are constant demands on your time, people to keep on track, pressure to do a certain amount of work in what often seems like an impossibly short amount of time and much more. But it’s also a necessary role that can bring extraordinary value to your company. In fact, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than 60 percent of project failures are linked to internal issues such as insufficient resources or missed deadlines—i.e., situations a project manager can help avoid. In addition, it’s a growing industry, as more and more companies realize the importance of solid project management. Being a project manager is like being a juggler who spins several plates in the air at once—not easy. There are constant demands on your time, people to keep on track, pressure to do a certain amount of work in what often seems like an impossibly short amount of time and much more. In addition, it’s a growing industry, as more and more companies realize the importance of solid project management. Specifically, a separate Project Management Institute study estimated nearly 16 million new project management positions will be created around the world between 2010 and 2020, and the industry will grow by $6.61 trillion. All that said, managing projects is a huge responsibility, no matter who your employer is. Whether you’re an official project manager or simply leading a project, the following seven tips should help you get your bearings and set your project up for success. Tip 1: Establish clear goals for the project Take a look at the big picture and determine what you want to accomplish with this project. If a client or outside stakeholder is involved in the project, external sources will obviously help determine your goals. Overarching goals you should consider include: Preventing scope creep, which means keeping the scope of the project from growing. Staying within a given budget. Completing all aspects of the project. Providing quality work. Completing work on time. Securing the right resources in advance. Tip 2: Set expectations up front Everyone should be on the same page in order to guarantee a successful project. Clearly sharing your expectations as the project lead and asking others to communicate their own is an important step in setting up any project. These expectations should include specific ways your team can achieve the goals you’ve already established. In addition, you’ll want to include the following: List of deliverables and due date. Statement of scope. Roles and responsibilities defined. Q&A process. Communication plan, including how often you plan to communicate with stakeholders/client. Tip 3: Outline potential risks and how you’ll manage them if hazards arise Let’s face it—even if you’ve planned everything to the minutest detail, the unexpected can still occur. So what’s a good project manager to do? Make a plan for the unexpected, of course! Obviously, you may not be able to predict the exact hazard that might befall your project—everything from bad weather to political unrest to technology flubs can occur - but it is still possible to lessen the potential impact of hazards through risk management. Tip 4: Minimize the number of meetings A study by Verizon Conferencing found that only 22 percent of meetings are considered "extremely productive" and 44 percent "very productive." That leaves 34 percent of meetings as only somewhat or not at all productive. Obviously, meetings are a necessary part of project planning, but really consider whether a meeting is a best use of your time or if email or some other form of communication—like project planning software, which allows you to share files, assign tasks and exchange ideas without having to meet—can do the trick just as well. The more time spent in meetings means less time spent on actual deliverables. Consider that before sending yet another meeting invite. Tip 5: Plan the perfect kickoff meeting Speaking of meetings, the kickoff meeting sets the tone for the entire project. When planning this meeting, be sure to adhere to the following standards: Invite the right people and ensure the key players can be in attendance. Create a detailed agenda stating what the meeting will cover. This will help everyone stay on task and understand the meeting objective. Determine if this can be an online meeting or if it needs to be held in person. This will be different depending on how large the project is, whether you’re working with a new client, the budget for the project, etc. Keep in mind that in-person meetings are usually more complicated to plan—and more expensive too, especially if they involve travel. Reschedule if the key players can’t be there—there’s no point in holding a meeting without them. You’ll often have to hold another meeting to update them or get their input. Before forming the agenda, be sure to understand the point of the meeting and what information people should walk away from the meeting knowing. Tip 6: Pull reports throughout the project The only way to know if your project is on track is to pull consistent reports. This can often be accomplished through your project management software program. Reports help you measure the efficiency of your resource allocation and make sure you’re on track to reach your budget goals and deadlines. Tip 7: Get the right tools While there are many project management tools on the market, not all are created equal. Decide what you really need and compare the products that interest you. At the very least, be sure to choose a tool that allows you to do the following: Organize and link tasks to create timelines and plans. Share insights that help you better communicate progress. Quickly understand how to use the interface. Customize your plan to fit your team’s needs. Even though being an amazing project manager is difficult, it’s still doable. You simply need the skills, know-how and appropriate tools to get the job done and achieve the right results. The post The project manager’s guide to planning a perfect project appeared first on Office Blogs.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released Office 2016 worldwide. The new Office delivers new value for Office 365 subscribers with a focus on collaboration, apps that work for you, and a perfect pairing with Windows 10. Sway was built from the ground up for seamless co-authoring and it provides powerful design assistance hosted in the cloud. The powerful Sway app for Windows 10 combines the full richness of Sway on the web with additional capabilities on your PC or tablet. Sway became generally available in August, and we’re continuing to release updates and address customer feedback just like we did during Sway Preview. We’re excited to announce that OneDrive for Business integration is available for customers signing in to Sway with Office 365 work and school accounts, as well as updates to Sway for iPhone and iPad. Sway now supports OneDrive for Business Sway makes it easy to pull your variety of media together, from built-in sources within the app. That way you can save time and avoid switching between different browser tabs and apps to drag and drop your content right into your Sway creations. Now when you sign in to Sway.com or Sway for Windows with Office 365 work and school accounts, you can access your OneDrive for Business account from the Insert tab. Drag and drop to add your images right into your Sways, or import PDF, Word and PowerPoint files to reuse their content in combination with additional multimedia in Sway. Support for adding video from OneDrive for Business (and via upload) is in the works—stay tuned for more! Now you can add your content from OneDrive for Business when you’re signed in to Sway with Office 365 work and school accounts. Sway for iPhone and iPad updates We’ve continued to update Sway for iPhone and iPad with capabilities focused on helping you quickly create and share polished, interactive content on the go from your mobile devices. Another updated version is now available for download in the App Store, which includes the following improvements: More grouping and navigation options—Make your Sways more interactive and dynamic on the go! Now you can use the Comparison, Slideshow and Grid Group options to transform your multimedia, as well as change your Sway’s overall layout to the recently added option that is optimized for presentations. Preview is faster now—It’s faster to switch between Edit and Preview, as well as refresh Preview. This makes it easy to see the polished and cohesive design continuously taking shape as you add and modify your content. Image insert problems fixed—We’ve fixed a problem some users experienced, where Sway stopped working in some instances when several images were added at once. Make your Sways more dynamic and interactive with an additional layout (left) and additional visualization options (right), including the Comparison option for two images (shown center). It’s been an important couple of months for Sway and Office, and we’ll continue to keep the updates coming! Keep following Sway and dropping us notes on UserVoice with your thoughts on Sway, how you use it, and what you’d like to see us do to improve the experience for you! —Sway team, @Sway Get Sway | Follow Sway The post Sway adds OneDrive for Business integration, Sway for iPhone and iPad updates appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Sandi Adams, technology project specialist for Cherokee County District. Fall is my favorite time of year to get outdoors and spend some time hiking and backpacking. No matter if it is a day trip or overnight, I always pack my little Swiss Army Knife—my one tool with so many uses. This time of year also involves my favorite education tool—OneNote. Like my Swiss Army Knife, OneNote is the one tool with many uses. A virtual notebook reminiscent of my old Trapper Keeper, OneNote organizes by sections or group sections with unlimited pages packed with documents, photos, emails, spreadsheets, recordings, inking and so much more. It gives me the ability to collaborate with colleagues and students, and best of all, I can access the most current version of my notebooks from my phone, iPad, Microsoft Surface, desktop or laptop. Photo credit: theshoppingmama.com Take a look at how OneNote is organizing the Cherokee County School District. Personal school notebook I start each year with a personal school notebook. This includes group sections for each school I service, with sections for logistics, schedules, training materials and communication. I have sections for conferences, special projects, staff meetings, instructions and MIEE. My notebook is synced to my iPad, phone, desktop and laptop, giving me quick access to everything related to my job. Staff services notebook Each member of the technology department has access to everything we need in our staff services notebook, including school floor plans, project workflows, organizational charts, resolutions to issues, personnel forms, project management and evaluation information. In addition, all changes occur in real time. Grade level notebooks Our lead teachers create a notebook for their team, allowing for collaboration of lesson plans, storing parent communications and organizing events that take place throughout the year. Having the ability to access all of this information in one place has proved to be an invaluable tool for the teams. Leader Keys Effectiveness System notebooks The Leader Keys Effectiveness System (LKES) is an evaluation system that allows the state to ensure consistency and comparability across districts, based on a common definition of leader effectiveness. Our leadership evaluation documentation has gone from spiral-bound paper copies to OneNote. Our principals share their notebooks with the superintendent’s office, providing a record with meaningful feedback supporting the continuous growth and development of each school leader by monitoring, analyzing and applying pertinent data from multiple sources toward attainment of established performance goals. LKES offers clear and precise indicators and resources to leaders throughout the process. OneNote provides data and information that is always current. School handbooks Every school has a handbook with all of the information for the school year, from discipline to leave information and everything in between. The OneNote Staff Notebook proved to be the perfect match for this task. The principals created notebooks sharing admin rights with the assistant principals, including all school data in the content section. Being able to update in real time to all staff members makes it the perfect tool. The Collaboration section is used for various meetings, leadership, technology, hospitality and staff meetings, which gives attendees the ability to contribute to the recording. This section is also a great way for principals to quickly gather information from the staff. Each staff member also has their own private notebook, which has a section for each of the Teacher Keys Evaluation standards, including: Professional knowledge Instructional planning Instructional strategies Differentiated strategies Communication Assessment strategies Positive learning environment Teachers upload their lesson plans, communication tools and professional development records. This process keeps all of the information in one spot, making it a professional and easy medium for the evaluation, with administration always having access. OneNote Class Notebooks Many of our teachers create notebooks using the OneNote Class Notebook for our students from 4th to 12th grade. The Content area provides the perfect place for subject textbook information, assignments and resources. Collaboration content can include a yearbook space for each student, essential question of the day or a discussion space for a class topic. Each student has a private space to turn in assignments and homework and journal. Grading papers from one location makes this seamless for class management. Introducing our students to OneNote has been incredibly rewarding and exciting. They moved to this environment easily and have been respectful of the Collaboration space, a great introduction to appropriate use of digital citizenship. Turning in their homework, maintaining their journal and having access to all of their content make this the perfect classroom tool. Additional uses for OneNote include notebooks for our Professional Development classes, Innovation Zones, EdCamp, the Office 365 Swat Team and lesson plans. For more information on OneNote, check out OneNote for Teachers and OneNote. —Sandi Adams The post OneNote—the Swiss Army Knife of education appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk about TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2015. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP66_TechCrunch.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Office Dev Show - Episode 13 - Getting Started with NodeJS  by Sonya & Richard msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt616496.aspx  —Word msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt616485.aspx —Excel Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices - October 2015 release External sharing API for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business Building an Excel 2016 Add-In with Angular and Enhanced office.js by Scot Hillier Office Add-ins: Launch in Office Online  by Simon Jager Office Add-ins: Launch in Excel Online from Visual Studio  by Simon Jager http://blog.mastykarz.nl/office-365-unified-api-mail  by Waldek Mastykarz O365 Dev Challenges - Part 1 - Introduction to creating a multi-tenant Office 365 add-in using VS2015  by Mikael Svenson Introduction to Office UI Fabric  by Mark Rackley OfficeUIFabric.com v1.0.0 - Full Sample Coverage of Office UI Fabric v1.0.0  by Andrew Connell Show notes Daylist Daylist integrates to-do lists into individual calendars. Within each calendar event on Daylist, users are able to plan the sequence of tasks for that event and access the resources (such as files, URLs or emails) required to perform each of these tasks. Zombie Club PowerPoint asset builder This Office Add-in pairs a Task pane with a Content viewer to allow for a dynamic selection and creation of video assets that can be done directly in PowerPoint. Data is housed with newly created domains of AllNightAtThe.Club and ZombieApocalypsePreparation.Club. Yes-Reply Sometimes, people prefer to just respond to an email and say: "unsubscribe," "I have some questions," "I’d like a group discount" or "I am having a problem." With Yes-Reply we can classify the action and create entries in the CRM turning auto-response into actionable data! MetroMail MetroMail extracts out all the attachments from the email inbox and creates a nice gallery of it (for images and any multimedia). MetroMail sorts all the documents and layouts it with nice preview for easy access, it identifies important documents like bills / invoices and lets you make the payments from within the inbox! It just makes the life easy! 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 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 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 066 on TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for the Office 365 team. As part of our commitment to making Office 365 the most trusted cloud service for productivity and delivering security, compliance and control to Office 365 customers around the globe, I am pleased to announce that Office 365 services will now be delivered in India from the local datacenters in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. With the launch of Office 365 datacenters in India, we are strengthening our support to the government’s Digital India vision. Following the launch of Microsoft Azure in India datacenters, our investment in Office 365 in the local datacenters reaffirms our commitment to the Indian market and is intended to accelerate the Indian government’s digital transformation initiative. Today businesses of all sizes in India are already using Office 365 to make their employees more productive, accelerate decision-making with real-time collaboration and secure their business-critical data. With the launch of our three new datacenters in India, Office 365 becomes the first global commercial cloud service to provide productivity and collaboration services from within India. Businesses in India will benefit from all the innovation, security and compliance capabilities that customers around the world have come to expect from Office 365. With the new datacenters they will also get the added benefit of data residency, which is particularly important to organizations in regulated industries, such as banking, government and healthcare. Office 365 takes a comprehensive approach to compliance, achieving industry standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 1 and SOC 2 reports, which provides the gold standard in security to government agencies, education and other commercial enterprises. To learn more about security and compliance in Office 365, please visit the Office 365 Trust Center. We’re thrilled to provide these technologies locally to help Indian businesses and organizations innovate and compete globally. The post Announcing the availability of Office 365 from local datacenters in India appeared first on Office Blogs.

Editor’s Note 10/14/2015: This post was updated to provide more clarification on the audience for the Compliance Program. Is your financial services organization subject to strict regulatory oversight? Do you need deeper insights into your cloud provider’s capabilities related to meeting regulatory obligations? If so, the Office 365 Financial Services Compliance Program might be for you. We understand that some of our customers might need deeper insights into our cloud service’s capabilities, risks and performance, as well as contractual commitments related to meeting their unique regulatory obligations. With that need and our commitment to openness and transparency, we offer customers the ability to extend the standard Office 365, Azure, Intune and Dynamics service contracts. We’ve offered this special program under NDA to financial services companies and are now rolling it out to all eligible customers in the financial services industry. The Financial Services Compliance Program provides customers with an additional level of service fulfilling their regulatory needs to influence and examine our service. Elements of the program include: Direct access to Microsoft’s security and compliance staff. Information, data and reports related to meeting their unique regulatory obligations. Ability to request paid one-on-one time to address key questions. The Compliance Program is tailored to the requirements of the financial services customer. Through working closely with these customers over the last three years, insights, capabilities and improvements have been delivered to benefit all of Microsoft’s cloud service customers. For example, the Service Trust Portal was created to provide easy access to key compliance documentation and white papers, many of which have been developed as part of this program. If this program is of interest to you, please contact your Microsoft account representative to learn more. —Alym Rayani, GPM on the Office 365 Information Protection and Compliance Product Management team The post Compliance Program now publicly available for financial services customers appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Sonia S. Kalwaney, Science and ESL teacher. This picture might conjure feelings of stress combined with mild hysteria. Maybe the mild hysteria is just me. Yet, this was the former scene I faced when I received word of another interview. As a Long Term Occasional (LTO) teacher vying for a coveted contract position, an interview is always a blessing when the call arrives. The excitement of another job, school, group of colleagues and teachers/students to meet is soon overshadowed by the competition I face. As I sit with my tea and my pile of teaching examples, resources, awards, professional learning examples, qualifications, student work, thank you letters, resumes, Ministry documentation and even multimedia projects, I know these documents are all important in an interview. But how am I to "fit" them all into a folio case, let alone a 30-minute interview? Furthermore, I know I should be organizing this according to the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) standards of practice (SOP) so that when questions undoubtedly arise, I am not flustered as I rifle though pages of work looking for the right document to showcase. Last year, I got tired of this constant battle of "updating" my teaching portfolio only to find it bulging at the seams. The legal sized documents and oversized student work needed to be folded, shrunk or even dismissed to allow me to carry the mammoth binder. This is when I decided to put my passion for technology and education to good use and created my digital portfolio using OneNote. I tried a few different formats—for example, a Wikispace (that did not allow me the user control I needed), a website (that seemed daunting and expensive), Google Share technology (that seemed okay at first but did not provide the organization and collaboration aspect I needed). This was frustrating and often led me back into the safety of my paper portfolio. Then my vice principal asked me to complete a teacher performance assessment (TPA). This was a perfect opportunity to expand my use of OneNote, which I was already using in my classroom to create my teaching portfolio. The image below is the first page of my OneNote Teaching Portfolio, which is organized into subfolders that represent the OCT SOPs. Within each SOP, I included great examples from my portfolio and even my digital collection. I was able to create the entire portfolio over one very motivated weekend. One of my favorite examples of how this format helped me connect my theory to practice was with my 9th grade Applied Science class. The students were building an electronic game board for a summative project. They used their knowledge from an Electricity unit to build a circuit board and then taught other students about it in the Astronomy unit using the board game. Although I often integrate units, this was the first time I can say it wasn’t as stressful as it was in the past. I am now able to showcase my understanding and practice of the requirements of the Ministry’s Growing Success document for assessment and evaluation. This document states that we are to find a triangulation of data though the use of student products, conversations and observations to create a valid and reliable assessment of the student. This is what I am sure we have all come to know of as the assessment for learning. I am also able to record observations as students work on creating final products. In this example, students were in the research and building phase of the Astronomy unit. One student indicated that she was tired of "just reading" and wanted to paint her board game. I interviewed her at this phase as she described her progress so far, which I was able to document in OneNote. I was also able to create a video recording that allowed the student to reflect on what she had learned from the experience and how she worked collaboratively. Taking this metacognitive approach, she seemed to really enjoy the process and expressed a feeling of confidence and sense of resilience I had not seen in her before. Finally, I was able to take a picture of the final project, which allowed students to take their projects home to enjoy, instead of me asking to keep an example that would not fit into my portfolio! OneNote has also allowed me to take this idea of getting "a glimpse of my classroom" a step further, allowing a holistic view of my classroom. I include pictures of my lessons and resources (my Jenga blocks would break my portfolio) along with a reflection to allow a potential employer a glimpse into my classroom without having to be there. A video can also be included, which is something I am working on now. Finally, OneNote makes it very easy to share the hyperlink to my employers. I can allow them to edit this document and leave feedback for me or just have the viewing option to ensure my work stays unedited. I have received a great deal of favorable feedback about this format. There have been no problems with access to my board in the Peel District School Board (PDSB), which has OneNote in its suite of student and teacher application options. Even without this access, the online version of OneNote allows viewing and editing access to anyone with the link. During my last interview, I brought in my computer instead of my mammoth portfolio. After the interview, I sent the link to potential employers. I received some accolades for this format and I secured a position. As I move forward, I am hoping this technology can continue to help me gain meaningful, exciting and enjoyable experiences in my teaching career. —Sonia S. Kalwaney The post Bringing the teaching portfolio to the 21st century with OneNote appeared first on Office Blogs.

Excel 2016 introduces new features and improvements that help you streamline your data analysis. Today we will walk through the new options for building PivotTables with a Date/Time column and show how to surface time-based insights in your data. Additionally, we will help you take advantage of the ability to navigate your PivotCharts using drill-down buttons. Automatic time grouping Automatic time grouping, a new feature in Excel 2016, helps use time-related fields in a PivotTable by auto-detecting and grouping them on your behalf. The automatic grouping creates new Date/Time columns and automatically populates the PivotTable in one action. This allows users to quickly start analyzing their data across different levels of time with drill-down capabilities. PivotTable grouping is used frequently by customers in many business scenarios. Implementing grouping for Data Model PivotTables allows for grouping to be used in conjunction with the power of the xVelocity engine and is a key feature for making Data Model PivotTables a replacement for native ones in the future. When used in a data model PivotTable, Time grouping adds relevant Date/Time columns such as Date (Year), Date (Quarter) and Date (Month) to the grouped table in the model; these columns could then be reused with other user endpoints of the data model, such as PowerView and Power BI. Time grouping columns in the model. The Date/Time columns are automatically added according to the Data column date/time granularity. For example, if the date data is in days and is for more than a year’s duration, then the added grouping columns would be for months, quarters and years. Once the Date/Time columns are added to the model, not only can you analyze your data over the different time granularities it entitles, but you may also find additional insights. For example, to get a monthly year-over-year comparison of your data, drag the Date (Year) column over from the ROWS drop zone to the COLUMNS drop zone while keeping only the Date (Months) column in the ROWS drop zone. Auto-grouping for a data model PivotTable also means that for the first time in Excel you are able to aggregate data larger than one million rows. Right-click Group and Group dialog. Changing the Group columns is always possible through the usual user interface. In the PivotTable, right-click the Date column and select Group. The Group dialog is where you can define other columns to be added or removed from the time group. You may have noticed that "Starting at/Ending at" and "Number of days" are greyed out; this is because we do not support these settings for data model PivotTables. Don’t like automatic grouping? Undo it just like you would any other applied change. The first undo (Ctrl+Z) removes the auto-added columns from the ROWS drop zone. The second undo removes the newly added columns from the model, so you are back at square one. In case these columns are already used in another PivotTable, then they will not be deleted from the model. Right-click Ungroup… is also supported and will act as if you have done the two undo operations, removing the group fields from the drop zones and the model. You can also turn off automatic time grouping. When the model already contains a "Date Table," we do not want to do time grouping, since the "Date Table" includes all required date columns already. So when building a PivotTable and dragging a Date column from a "Date Table" from the data model, automatic grouping would not apply. PivotChart drill-down buttons PivotCharts have always supported a double-click on a chart element to do a drill-down to the next level of the selected element. This is the same as clicking the plus sign on the PivotTable collapsed level. A tougher job is when you want to expand all objects in the PivotTable to the next level. This is where the newly added PivotChart drill-down buttons come in handy, as clicking the + (plus) or - (minus) buttons allow you to drill down to the next level of all elements in the charts with a single click. This functionality applies to any hierarchy or any set of columns in the ROWS drop zone of the PivotChart. When you open a PivotTable created on a previous version of Excel, you will not see the new drill-down buttons until you enable them on the Analyze ribbon. It is also possible to remove these buttons from a chart created in Excel 2016. Toggle viewing of PivotChart field buttons. Reuse of time group fields in Power BI The new Date columns really come in handy in Power BI. One noticeable value to users is that the Month column added to the data model through the Automatic Grouping in Excel is calendar ordered (Jan, Feb, Mar…). The new Date columns put to use in PowerBI.com. What do you think? We just went through the new time grouping functionality in Excel 2016. Try it out for yourself and feel free to add suggestions or vote for them if they already exist in the Excel UserVoice. The post Time grouping enhancements in Excel 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

It’s never been more important to be able to get work done and collaborate with others from anywhere—be it participating in an important meeting while traveling or sending a quick message during a coffee run. We’ve been working hard to ensure Skype for Business can make you productive on any device. Since we announced the Skype for Business for iOS preview, we’ve received great response, and today we are excited to announce that the new Skype for Business app for iOS devices is now publicly available. Along with the following features, the new app also resolves the sign-in issues that some of you experienced with Lync 2013 on iOS 9. Join a meeting in one touch An updated dashboard brings the contact search bar, your upcoming meetings and most-recent conversations to one place. The contact search bar allows you to search your Global Address List by first name, last name, email alias or phone number. Your recent conversations are at your fingertips, no matter which device you had the conversation on. You can also easily glance at your upcoming appointments—simply tap on the left for the meeting details or on the icon on the right to join immediately. Enhanced in-meeting experience Full-screen video makes for a more immersive meeting experience. Larger buttons to mute and the ability to add participants and manage your call make it a lot easier to meet while you are on the move. Simultaneous viewing of the content being shared and speaker’s video means that you never miss a moment. Watch for the ability to view PowerPoint slides in a meeting in a future update. In the meantime, you can view a PowerPoint presentation via desktop sharing. Additional authentication and security options Office 365 customers can now take advantage of Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based authentication. This enables your IT admin to configure multi-factor authentication for the Skype for Business iOS app, increasing the security beyond just a user name and password. With multi-factor authentication, users are required to acknowledge a phone call, text message or an app notification on their device after correctly entering their user name and password. Other Office applications also support ADAL-based authentication, which allows for consistent authentication across your organization. Learn more about setting up multi-factor authentication using ADAL. How you can upgrade to the new app The new Skype for Business iOS app is now available as a Universal app in the iTunes Store. iPhone users with Lync 2013 will automatically get updated to the Skype for Business app. iPad users with Lync 2013 need to download the new Universal app from the iTunes Store. If you are an IT admin, use the Skype for Business iOS productivity guide to learn more and prepare your users. What’s next? We are iterating rapidly to enrich the feature set on iOS and bring them to you as quickly as we can. Later this year, we will also make Skype for Business app for Android publicly available. Join the Skype for Business IT Pro Yammer community to subscribe to the upcoming product updates, interactive Skype broadcast sessions with the product team, and learn from the community. We look forward to hearing what’s on the top of your mind. Start using the new app today to stay connected and productive while on the go! —Praveen Maloo, product marketing manager for the Skype for Business team The post Skype for Business iOS app now available appeared first on Office Blogs.

Playing with Office Mix? We are too. As part of our Skype for Business training, the Office Training team created courses using Office Mix. We tested them with our customers and then released three Mixes covering Joining, Scheduling and Leading Meetings. When making your Mixes, consider some of the things we learned: Folks don’t know Mixes are interactive. In Mix intros, we recommend telling users they can click links or advance a slide to get to a more relevant part of the Mix. Have a few "rest stops" along the way. If you don’t narrate a slide, the viewer has to click or tap the Click next to continue button. This provides you an opportunity to have the customers pause so you can show off dense slides, like an annotated picture, controls or instructions. Use animation for more effective slides. As you talk over a slide, you can have parts appear as you talk about them. Yes, it takes a little practice to get the timing down, but it can be effective. Office Mix allows an easier way for others to customize. With Office Mix, you don’t need video editing software to change the video, just PowerPoint skills. You can download the Mix (the creator controls permissions) to change the text or add or delete a slide. Use video where you want to. We didn’t want to put the face of the trainer at the beginning of our Mix, but you may want to do that to make your Mix more personal. You can add videos in Mix and they just play. So on the previous slide, tell your audience a video is coming, as we did in the Leading Meetings Mix. Watch our video and then try Office Mix for free at mix.office.com. —Doug Thomas, senior content producer on the Office Learning and Video team The post What we learned using Office Mix appeared first on Office Blogs.

Lotus F1 Team generates terabytes of data—from operations to the track. Huge amounts of data can make it difficult to discover trends and efficiencies without data visualization. The team started their Power BI journey with operational data. The primary goal was to gain new insights and enable self-service Power BI without having to continually ask IT for custom views and reports. This week, Office Mechanics returns to Enstone to follow Lotus F1 Team’s implementation of Power BI. The IT crew discusses the shift from SQL Server and SSRS to self-service Power BI while providing a step-by-step demonstration of what they did to get Power BI running. If you follow Power BI, you’ll often see the finished results with new dashboards, charts and Q&A working, but not usually what it takes to get there. That’s not the case here, as we go hands-on with Kerrie Sparling and Carolyn Yarnold from Lotus F1 Team. They demonstrate how to pull data in from multiple data sources and build relationships using the new Power BI Desktop, grouping the data using DAX queries along with building and sharing dashboards. They also provide tips along the way to ensure Q&A can parse your data model. How did it turn out? We catch up with the team’s operations and manufacturing leads, Thomas Mayer and Ian Pearce, to get their take on Power BI and the capabilities. And we meet with Mark Everest, who manages the cars’ telemetry data, to explore a few possibilities using Excel, Power BI and Azure Data Lake to gain insights from the track. Of course, to learn a few tips and see how everything works, you’ll want to watch the show. Next time, we’ll see what the team is doing to manage race crew logistics using Office Add-ins, APIs and Office 365 extensibility. See you then, Jeremy Chapman The post Hands-on with Lotus F1 Team’s Power BI implementation appeared first on Office Blogs.

Microsoft Ignite is headed to Atlanta, Georgia, on September 26-30, 2016. Microsoft Ignite is for IT professionals looking for what’s next in technology and skill building across Microsoft’s technologies. Pre-register now and get ready for— 1,000+ hours of content, 700+ sessions and a multitude of networking opportunities. Insights and roadmaps from industry leaders. Deep dives and live demos on the products you use every day. Direct access to product experts. Interactive digital labs. Knowledge and answers direct from the source. Smart people talking tech everywhere you look. Pre-register now for the lowest price and claim your spot in Atlanta, September 26-30, 2016. Of course technology doesn’t wait, so we offer a range of smaller targeted events, as well, around the world. For those of you interested in learning more about Windows, Office, Azure or any other IT, developer or business technologies, join us at any of the following events: Convergence 2015 EMEA in Barcelona, November 30-December 2, 2015. Microsoft Cloud Roadshows. You can also find local Microsoft events at www.microsoft.com/events. If you want to learn more about Microsoft’s event lineup in 2016, check out Chris Capossela’s blog post. The post Talk to the Office 365 team at Microsoft Ignite 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Matthew McDermott about SharePoint search. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP67_MatthewMcD.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates dev.onedrive.com/sdks.htm Office Dev PnP Web Cast - OneDrive for Business Customizations Excel Add-in for Azure ML johnliu.net/blog/2015/10/posting-to-office-365-onenote-via-powershell github.com/waldekmastykarz/sample-yooffice-cors Show notes  Display templates and query rules—channel9.msdn.com/events/SharePoint-Conference/2014/SPC322 Search extensibility and content enrichment—channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK4124 Hybrid Search with Office 365 and Cloud Search Service—channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3134 Hybrid business connectivity—channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK4113 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 Matthew McDermott   Matthew is a founder and director at Aptillon, Inc, a nine-time Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP and part-time trainer for Critical Path Training. Matthew specializes in SharePoint integration, strategy and implementation consulting to help his clients solve business problems with SharePoint. Matthew is a speaker, content author, blogger and specialist in SharePoint technologies focused on web content management, collaboration, search and social computing. An accomplished cook and bartender, in his spare time Matt spends as much time with his wife as his dog will allow. You can find his blog at ableblue.com/blog and follow him on @MatthewMcD. 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 067 on SharePoint Search with Matthew McDermott—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

At Microsoft, we’re making important changes in the way we do business. We’ve embraced today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world, committed to reinventing productivity and business processes, and revamped our approach to global markets. But some things haven’t changed. We continue to deliver innovative products and services to millions of individuals, businesses, governments and organizations worldwide, providing the tools they need to work, communicate and collaborate effectively—any time, any place and on any device. As part of that commitment, we’re always working to increase the value and availability of Office 365. Earlier this week, we announced that Office 365 will now be delivered to customers in India from local datacenters in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai, making Office 365 the first global commercial cloud service to provide productivity and collaboration services from within India. And as more Indian businesses benefit from the local availability of Office 365, the value of the service continues to grow daily. Two key ways that we’ve made Office 365 more valuable for our customers are embodied in recent improvements to Microsoft FastTrack and the Office 365 Financial Services Compliance Program. Last week, we announced that we’re changing FastTrack from a one-time benefit to an ongoing program, and from an onboarding service to a customer success service designed to help you realize business value faster with the Microsoft Cloud. And this week we announced that we’re making the Financial Services Compliance Program publicly available for financial service customers, offering greater trust and transparency to financial service customers who may need deeper insights into our cloud service capabilities, risks and performance, plus contractual commitments to help them meet their regulatory obligations. New features and capabilities in Office 2016 are also adding to the value of Office 365. Office 2016 takes the work out of working together by making it easier than ever for you to collaborate and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with friends and colleagues. In addition, the new forecasting sheet functions and one-click forecasting in Excel 2016 help you analyze and explain your business data and understand future trends. Meanwhile, we continue to improve Office 365 in other ways as well. We expanded our preview of the new Skype for Business voice and meeting capabilities in Office 365 to a total of 15 countries worldwide. We’re also making OneDrive for Business integration available to customers signing in to Sway with Office 365 work and school accounts, and we’re updating Sway for iPhone and iPad for seamless co-authoring and powerful cloud-hosted design assistance across more devices. As we continue to transform our business, we will stay focused on our core values. And we will keep on providing productivity and collaboration solutions to help you succeed. Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy! Microsoft begins global release of Office 2016—Discover why people worldwide are excited about the release of Office 2016. Microsoft’s cloud serves up Office 365 in India—Learn how Microsoft is expanding its cloud services globally and delivering Office 365 to customers in India from local datacenters. 7 secrets to successful online collaboration—Find out how online collaboration, the key to staying mobile and working remotely, is made easier with Office 365. Your top questions about Office 2016 answered—Get answers to all of your questions about Office 2016 and its features and capabilities. Office 365 to replace Redbird mail—Discover why Illinois State University chose Office 365 for its students and faculty. The post Office 365 news roundup appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Office 365 Dev Digest was written by Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 Dev team. Welcome to the eighth edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep up-to-date with what’s new in Office 365 development. It is extremely exciting to see the Office.js APIs grow in Word and Excel with new features. The Content Publishing team internally has been busy building out code samples to show off these new APIs. Check them out in the code samples section below. There has also been an update to the Office 365 Unified API preview for how you access users’ OneDrive for Business. This is a breaking change in the preview API, so if you are using these APIs now, please make sure you read this notification. Vesa Juvonen and the rest of the Office 365 PnP team have been extremely busy over the last two years, and he wrote a great blog post that summarizes all that hard work! The October release brings with it a huge amount of new concepts worth checking out! The team has also started a weekly webcast to talk about this in more detail. So now, each week, you have the podcast by Richard and me, Sonya’s Dev Show and the PnP webcast. The Property Manager Hero Demo that we’ve talked about since demoing it at TechEd Europe last year has been updated to take advantage of a bunch of new APIs in Preview. Todd Baginski also created six hours of on-demand video training, which walks through setting up the ASP.NET MVC web application and building the iOS or Android mobile apps from scratch. For Office 365 developer speakers, we have amazing SWAG boxes, which you can request to give out to your attendees at your next speaking session at a public user group or conference. In the next few months, we have a few hackathons running around the world, including the AngularConnect conference in London, SharePoint Europe conference in Stockholm and AnDevCon in Santa Clara. I hope to see you all there hacking away with your chance to win an Xbox One! I encourage you all to engage with us on the Office 365 Technical Network with your questions. Dev documentation The Microsoft Content Publishing team works hard producing documentation to help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month: Office Add-ins Debug add-ins in Office Online Debug Office Add-ins on iPad Office 365 APIs Updates: Understanding authentication with Office 365 APIs Office 365 Groups REST API reference (preview) Resource reference for the Mail, Calendar and Contacts REST APIs Outlook Mail REST API reference Examples of Office 365 unified API calls (preview) API endpoints of Office 365 for China Copy APIs enable Make It Mine scenarios for OneNote For more documentation check out Office developer documentation. Code samples Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump-start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the dev community. We added 13 new samples that show you how to connect to the unified API (preview) and make calls to it. The samples span three mobile platforms (iOS, Android and Windows) and six web frameworks (PHP, ASP.NET, Node.js, Angular and Ruby). The snippet samples demonstrate the variety of things that you can do with the unified API. Property Manager updates and new training O365-PHP-Unified-API-Connect O365-AspNetMVC-Unified-API-Connect O365-Nodejs-Unified-API-Connect O365-Angular-Unified-API-Connect O365-Angular-Unified-API-Snippets O365-Python-Unified-API-Connect O365-Ruby-Unified-API-Connect O365-Android-Unified-API-Snippets O365-Android-Unified-API-Connect O365-iOS-Unified-API-Snippets O365-iOS-Unified-API-Connect O365-UWP-Unified-API-Snippets O365-UWP-Unified-API-Connect Most recent Office 365 Dev podcasts Since joining Microsoft, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group, and I’ll go hunt the relevant people down to interview. Here are the most recent podcast interviews: Episode 064 on Office.js API updates in Office 2016 Episode 065 on the Office Extensibility team with Tristan Davis Episode 066 on TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 Episode 067 on Search with Matthew McDermott For more podcasts, check out dev.office.com/podcasts. Patterns and practices The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working hard to release samples to show the power of SharePoint Add-ins. Don’t forget to join the monthly community calls to hear the updates from them directly on Skype for Business and the previously launched Skype Developer Platform (developer.skype.com). Here are the latest updates from the team: PnP October 2015 monthly release notes at dev.office.com PnP October community call recording at Channel 9 New weekly PnP webcast series released, with first topic on the OneDrive for Business customizations Transforming your SharePoint customizations to add-in model—Resources New training package created based on the PnP guidance at OfficeDevPnPTraining Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at OfficeDevPnPMSDN For more on patterns and practices, check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related to released materials and guidance can be added to our Yammer group at OfficeDevPnPYammer. Dev community blog posts The Office 365 dev community has been busy this month. It is exciting to see the effort people put into their posts in their spare time to share with the community. Check out these articles from the Microsoft field, MVPs and more: Office Dev Show: Episode 13—Getting started with NodeJS by Sonya and Richard microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt616496.aspx—Word microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt616485.aspx—Excel Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices-October 2015 release External sharing API for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business Building an Excel 2016 add-in with Angular and Enhanced office.js by Scot Hillier Office Add-ins—Launch in Office Online by Simon Jager Office Add-ins—Launch in Excel Online from Visual Studio by Simon Jager mastykarz.nl/office-365-unified-api-mail by Waldek Mastykarz O365 Dev Challenges-Part 1: Introduction to creating a multi-tenant Office 365 add-in using VS2015 by Mikael Svenson Introduction to Office UI Fabric by Mark Rackley com v1.0.0-Full sample coverage of Office UI Fabric v1.0.0 by Andrew Connell What’s new in Office 2016 for developers Increase the productivity of users with enhanced Office.js APIs in Office 2016 Office Developer SWAG boxes for your user groups Using OAuth from PowerShell by Stephen Owen The Dev Intersection Countdown Show The new Office is here by Kirk Koenigsbauer Cloud Roadshow Cities Office Dev Show Episode 12—Office UI Fabric with Sonya Koptyev and Humberto Lezama Guadarrama Introducing ng-OfficeUI Fabric—angular directives for Office UI Fabric by Andrew Connell Introducing OfficeUIFabric.com—demos and reference samples for Office UI Fabric by Andrew Connell Using Azure Deployment Slots to implement dev/test/production ALM for Office 365 apps and SharePoint Add-ins by Chris O’Brien Two things that are not super obvious when working with the new Office 365 Groups API by Waldek Mastykarz Building File Handler add-ins for Office 365 by Richard diZerega onedrive.com/sdks.htm Office Dev PnP webcast—OneDrive for business customizations Excel add-in for Azure ML net/blog/2015/10/posting-to-office-365-onenote-via-powershell com/waldekmastykarz/sample-yooffice-cors Office Store Companies across the globe are extending the value of Office every day with Office Add-ins. See how these solutions are making a difference at real companies by watching their stories on betterwith.office.com! Upcoming events There are plenty of events on the horizon. Don’t miss out on these great events with Office 365 content. Our team looks forward to meeting you all at these events, so don’t be shy; come say hello at the Office 365 booth! Oct 26 Dev Intersection, Las Vegas Nov 9-12 European SharePoint Conference, Stockholm Dec 1-3 AnDevCon, Santa Clara For more events check out dev.office.com/events. Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us on @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook. Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Richard DiZerega (@richdizz) and Jim Epes (@j_epes). —Jeremy Thake The post Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for October appeared first on Office Blogs.

Digital handwriting—or inking as we like to call it—is now better than ever in OneNote, with support for a variety of new functionalities for our iPad and Windows 10 users. Pencil and Paper by FiftyThree support OneNote on iPad now supports writing with the Pencil by FiftyThree stylus. Use Pencil to write, draw and erase with enhanced precision and ease. Simply pair your Pencil with your iPad and then select it from your stylus options in OneNote. You’ll immediately notice the added feedback of the Pencil is great for a variety of inking scenarios, and the ability to easily flip the Pencil and erase in a familiar way, making it a top selling stylus for iPad. A fan of the Paper app by FiftyThree? Now you can take your notes, checklists and sketches and send them to OneNote to get your content on virtually any device and work with others in shared OneNote notebooks. Whether you want to use Pencil directly in OneNote or start in Paper and share to OneNote, we’ve got you covered. For full details on Paper’s OneNote integration, check out FiftyThree’s blog post. Apple Pencil for iPad Pro support As previously announced, we now have Apple Pencil stylus support in OneNote for iPad Pro. Now you can easily sketch, outline, write and annotate to your heart’s content. The only thing that can stop you now is a cramp in your hand. Home remedy tip—we hear bananas help with that. Ink Shape Recognition In response to one of our top requested features on OneNote’s UserVoice, we’re excited to announce a new feature called Ink Shape Recognition coming to OneNote this November for iPad, iPad Pro and our Windows 10 app. Ink Shape Recognition is a new mode that will automatically convert your hand-drawn shapes into perfect-looking shapes while inking. It recognizes over a dozen shapes including basics like circles, triangles and squares, but also more complex shapes like quadrilaterals, pentagons and hexagons. To turn on Ink Shape Recognition, just tap the new Convert to Shapes button on the Draw tab. Once enabled, simply draw shapes with your pen (or press the button to the left of Convert to Shapes to draw with mouse or touch) and watch as your shapes automatically are converted into better-looking versions of themselves! It’s great for everything from basic flowcharts and mind maps to Venn diagrams. We know teachers will be eager to try shape recognition out for Math class! New Surface Pen and Pen Tip support Along with the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book announcement came a new Surface Pen and Pen Tip kit, both of which are available for pre-order now and begin shipping October 26, 2015. The new Surface Pen has increased pressure sensitivity, adds an eraser at the top and lets you click and hold for Cortana—all while still letting you click once to open a blank page of OneNote—even if your Surface is locked. You can then quickly jot down any flash of inspiration, easily convert it to text and share it with others. The new Surface Pen Tip kit lets you choose a pen tip with the right feel for you. Stay with the medium tip for the familiarity of a #2 pencil or swap it for a low-friction tip similar to a fine point pen. Choose from four different tips in the kit—each of which is included with the purchase of the new Surface Pen or sold separately if you want to have extra tips on hand. Excited about all the changes? Don’t already have OneNote? Get it here. As always, we appreciate your feedback. Please continue to give us suggestions and ideas on the OneNote UserVoice. —Ian Mikutel, OneNote Ink product manager The post OneNote partners with FiftyThree to support Pencil and Paper, plus Shape Recognition coming soon appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 365 customers want assurance that effective controls are in place to safeguard their data. We have enhanced our Service Organization Controls (SOC) audit reports with two new trust principles, Processing Integrity and Confidentiality. These build on the established Security and Availability trust principles. The Office 365 SOC reports are designed to provide customers with transparency into the design, implementation and operational effectiveness of security and compliance controls, as well as results of control tests as noted by our independent third party auditors. Insights from these reports help you evaluate how Office 365 maintains compliance with your regulatory requirements and also helps you manage the move to Office 365. Based on customer feedback we also added controls and test results around the following areas: Data transmission and encryption—You are able to review controls that are implemented to encrypt data transmission between Microsoft employees and Office 365 datacenters, between Office 365 clients and Microsoft datacenters, between multiple Microsoft datacenters, as well as encryption at rest within Microsoft datacenters. Security development lifecycle—We detailed additional controls around how Office 365 adheres to secure development best practices, such as code reviews and risk assessments. Data replication and data backup—We enhanced our testing to demonstrate effectiveness of resiliency testing capability that covers a full datacenter outage. You can readily access this information directly from the Office 365 Service Trust Portal (STP) when you authenticate using your Office 365 credentials. To access STP, ask your Office 365 company administrator to sign in at the Service Trust Portal. Once your company administrator signs in for the first time, they can provide STP access to other users in your organization. If you are evaluating Office 365, you can use your Office 365 trial credentials to access STP. If you have a comment or question on this post or need the detailed onboarding guide to STP, email us at O365STPApprovals@microsoft.com. We look forward to seeing you on STP soon! —Sarah McCoy and Om Vaiti, senior program managers for the Office 365 Trust Engineering team The post Announcing the enhanced Office 365 SOC audit reports with new trust principles appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega about the Angular Connect event in London. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP68_AngularConnect.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Office Add-in with Knockout.js Outlook REST API changes to beta endpoint: Part II Update 2 on the Office 365 unified API Add-in command sample App registration tool Office Dev PnP webcast—remote timer job framework Retrieving posts from blogs available in Delve with Office 365 REST API com/OfficeDev/SayMyName-Mail-Addin com/thm1118/Provider-Host-App-java-Sharepoint-OnPremise-HighTrust 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 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 068 on the Angular Connect event—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 2016 for Windows includes a host of new features that take the work out of working together. With features like real-time typing and share making it easier than ever to collaborate, you and your teammates might be nervous about making a mistake and not being able to get back to where you were. With History, you no longer have to worry! In Office 2016, you can enjoy an improved version history experience for your SharePoint and OneDrive for Business documents, making it much easier to find and restore previous versions of your files. To see the list of previous versions of your files, open up the History pane by selecting File > History. You can easily scroll to see who edited your file and how the file evolved over time. Each version in the History pane shows when it was created and who last edited it. Click a version to open it and take a closer look. If you decide you want to go back to an older version, simply click Restore to revert your file back to that point in time. Don’t worry, if you restore the wrong version or realize you actually liked it better before, you can always return back to how it was before you clicked Restore. History helps you feel more confident while collaborating, because you have the comfort of knowing your and everyone else’s changes are always recoverable in a previous version, no matter how many people are working on a file. Even if you don’t want to go back to a previous version, the Office 2016 History feature enables you to see how changes have occurred over time, making it easy to get caught up on what has happened in the file. Go ahead and collaborate with confidence! History has your back. —Doug Milvaney, program manager for the Office Core team The post History—collaborate with confidence! appeared first on Office Blogs.

The show that brought you the latest in Office from the engineers behind the tech is expanding to cover the breadth of Microsoft technologies. Today marks the launch of Microsoft Mechanics, our official new show and video platform for tech enthusiasts and IT professionals. Beyond Office topics, we’ll begin covering the latest tech from the Azure, Windows and Surface teams with the same demo-packed 10-minute shows from the engineers and experts. We started on this journey at Ignite last May, when Ignite Studio shared the stage with teams across Microsoft. So you might be wondering if there will be less emphasis on Office now that we’re expanding scope. Actually, we’re doing more with Office than ever before and we recently even launched the Demo Bench, a 2-3 minute demonstration format typically delivered straight from the Microsoft engineers. We’ve already published more than a dozen of these in September alone, covering Office 2016, Exchange Server 2016 and OneDrive for Business updates. And there are many more to come, in addition to the longer Office-specific shows. The Office Blog and our dedicated Microsoft Mechanics site remains the home for all Microsoft Mechanics shows related to Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype and the breadth of Office 365 tools and technologies. Stay informed, follow us on Twitter and take part in our launch sweepstakes or subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics today. As always, let us know of additional topics that you’d like us to cover via our Office 365 Network Yammer group. Some of our best show ideas have come from the community—like the PowerShell, Power BI and Lotus F1 Team shows, among others. See you next week for the first Microsoft Mechanics show! —Jeremy Chapman The post Office Mechanics is expanding to become Microsoft Mechanics appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Michelle Hollingsworth, teacher and curricular head for the Earth and Life Sciences department at the North Park Secondary School. Technology is pervasive in our school communities and using it effectively in our teaching practice is the utmost goal. Recognizing areas of need in our practice and then identifying solutions to work around those issues is a regular practice of teachers. Effectively utilizing the various technologies available for those solutions is a challenge we all face. In my own practice, one of my greatest areas of need was identifying a method that would accurately record and log my evidences for triangulation of data. Our ministry of education wants teachers to utilize their professional judgment when assessing students and take into account all the observations, conversations and products that provide evidence of student understanding. However, in a high school classroom a lot of those observations and conversations happen informally and, as a result, can be extremely difficult to record. I took a variety of opportunities to work with colleagues to devise different methods of effectively and reliably recording these anecdotal evidences of learning, all of which ended up being a lot of work for mediocre benefit. It wasn’t until I was working with a colleague who had acquired a Microsoft Surface 3 and we started experimenting with the OneNote platform, which I saw a realistic way of effectively tracking, recording and using these forms of anecdotal evidences of learning. In addition, I found this to be a great way of managing and using a platform, which will further facilitate student learning. Unfortunately, at that time, OneNote wasn’t well adapted to my iPad, so I was forced to watch and suggest, as my colleague played on this new technological classroom platform, until Microsoft launched a rigorous version for the iPad. Since then, I have gotten my hands on OneNote Class Notebooks and I am thoroughly amazed by its versatility! I now use OneNote Class Notebooks in all of my courses. While it took students some time to adapt to using OneNote Class Notebooks, the ease of use and organization of the OneNote helped immensely with the transition. Where did my journey begin? Initially, I started using OneNote as a method of submitting work. This meant no matter where I was, if I had my iPad, I could mark, assess and leave feedback on student work. For example, while waiting for a delayed flight out of Phoenix, I was able to get a class set of biological diagrams marked and I didn’t have to lug a marking bag around on my vacation to do so! From there things have progressed greatly. I have had students create their own chapter of a virtual textbook where they’re only permitted to use 10 percent of their class textbooks—everything else must be found and appropriately sourced. This pushes students to evaluate the information they’re researching and create a document that others will understand. The next step is to give past chapters to students and have them evaluate the chapters and add to or refine them. Students are asked to justify their additions and changes, causing them to critically assess what they’re reading, identify good work and explain the rationalization of their choices. Now that’s student-focused learning! Using OneNote for student reflection I also use OneNote to have students reflect on their own progress. Because the documents are all in one place, they can track their own progress. It also allows me to hold the students accountable to themselves. If they say they need to do x, y or z in order to improve their performance, we can check at the next reflection to verify if they have done what they said they would and how that has affected their progress. Students comfortable with technology can embed videos, photos and voice-overs. While students who prefer to write, draw or build can submit their work in words and pictures or by using the draw function within OneNote itself. The most amazing thing about OneNote Class Notebooks is that by the time the semester is over students have a portfolio illustrating their progression throughout a course. As a teacher, I can pinpoint growth in a variety of areas, which is the end goal of all teachers! I formalized this process by asking students to reflect on their own learning, choose their best work and explain to me how they have progressed throughout the course. The OneNote Class Notebooks have helped draw student awareness to their own learning, recognize their own progress and realize their own greatest areas of development and progress. This empowers students in their own learning and helps them recognize their role to play in their own personal progression! By working with OneNote Class Notebooks, I am able to teach my students the 21st-century skills they will need beyond the classroom while ensuring they can be effective evaluators of their own work and that of others. Meanwhile, I am able to collect ongoing evidence of their learning and development, which enables me to triangulate evidence of their understanding in a variety of formats and allows every student to find their place to shine! —Michelle Hollingsworth The post OneNote—triangulation of evidence for learning and building 21st-century skills appeared first on Office Blogs.

The Skype for Business team invites you to participate in the Skype for Business—IT Pro video broadcast series powered by Skype Meeting Broadcast! You can join these biweekly video broadcasts and interact with our team directly through the Office 365 IT Pro Yammer community—simply click here to join. Each session will alternate between a.m. and p.m. Pacific Time (PT) to cover viewers in Europe and Asia. The goal behind this series is to provide our IT Pro community an opportunity to engage and get more information on topics that matter the most on a regular and scheduled basis. This will give IT Pros an opportunity to understand and manage Skype for Business capabilities by bringing timely information on the topics that matter most. Topics will range from "Software Defined Networking (SDN)" to "How PSTN connectivity works with Cloud PBX." We will also use the Yammer community to crowdsource your hottest topics. This series of video broadcasts, streamed live using Skype Meeting Broadcast, was started last September as a trial, and we to date have covered Skype for Business Preview and iOS updates. We are continuing the series with our next two sessions: Skype for Business Meetings and Skype Meeting Broadcast—Friday, October 23 at 9:00 a.m. PT Skype for Business Cloud PBX—Thursday, November 5 at 5:00 p.m. PT Additionally, all sessions are available for on-demand consumption on the Skype for Business Yammer community. Skype Meeting Broadcast is a great way to get the word out to the community and your questions answered. Using this innovative technology, we can showcase the flexibility, resiliency and ease of use that Skype Meeting Broadcast brings to thousands of people. Skype Meeting Broadcast enables organizations to broadcast a Skype for Business meeting on the Internet to up to 10,000 people—who can attend from a browser on nearly any device—making it easy to host large virtual meetings. We will use integration with Bing Pulse, for real-time polling and sentiment tracking, and Yammer to enable attendee dialogue during the broadcast. We look forward to seeing you at the "Skype for Business Meetings and Skype Meeting Broadcast" session Friday, October 23 at 9:00 a.m. PT. Go join the Yammer community to get all the updates and the coordinates of each broadcast. The post Skype for Business—IT Pro video broadcast series goes live appeared first on Office Blogs.

Two of the top requests from our Office Lens users are support for Office 365 accounts, at work and school, and enhanced business card scanning and storage. Today we’re excited to deliver both of these features, making our pocket scanner app even more useful for business professionals, teachers and students. All Office Lens users for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone can now use Business Card mode to quickly convert business card information into digital contacts in mobile address books. Office Lens for iPhone users can now share enhanced documents more securely using Office 365 work and school accounts. Office Lens for iPhone enables users to protect their data in OneDrive for Business, ensuring the same high level of security and compliance provided for all enterprise data in Office 365. Office Lens for iPhone now includes Office 365 support Since launching Office Lens for iPhone in April and the Android version in May, we’ve been hard at work to exceed your expectations, especially since you’ve given our free scanner app a 4.7 out of 5 rating and positive reviews, including: "Never (have) come across a better scan application in years of application use." "Exceeded my expectations! Super useful and functional pocket scanner with images of excellent quality and sharpness …"  "The best app of the year; super useful for classes." Learn more about Office Lens on the iPhone in the following video: Today’s release of version 1.2 for iPhone builds upon the positive response to Office Lens, which turns your smartphone into a scanner by cropping, straightening and enhancing photos of whiteboards and documents. In addition to saving Office Lens-enhanced scans to your personal OneNote or OneDrive account, you can now sign in with your Office 365 work or school account and save documents to OneNote, Word and PowerPoint or as an image or PDF file on OneDrive for Business. You can then easily share your documents with colleagues or students in the secure and reliable Office 365 environment. IT pros and admins will appreciate that Office Lens for iPhone enables users to protect their data in OneDrive for Business, ensuring the same high level of security and compliance provided for all enterprise data in Office 365. Office Lens in Office 365 scenarios for business professionals include: Save and share whiteboard meeting notes. Scan receipts and simplify expense reports. Circulate contracts or documents requiring signatures and store for easy retrieval by multiple coworkers from any device. Scan and save business cards of customers or prospects that everyone can access. Use Business Card mode to convert card information into contacts in your tablet or phone address book. For K-12 and university teachers, Office Lens for Office 365 Education can be used to: Grade and annotate paper reports and share them with individual students or the entire class. Share lesson plans, lecture or meeting notes and other documents in a central faculty site. Capture classroom brainstorm sessions from a whiteboard or chalkboard into OneNote and then search by keyword with the Office Lens optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can edit or copy text into other documents or email. Students benefit from Office Lens by being able to: Take pictures of presentations or whiteboards, eliminating the need to take notes during lectures. Capture and share class projects, lab experiments, math equations and physical documents and securely store them as digital content in one place for easy retrieval. You’ll find more Office Lens user examples at our Docs.com page. Office Lens Business Card mode When using Business Card mode in Office Lens, converting business cards into digital contacts has never been easier. This feature, now available on all three phone platforms, lets you save a scanned business card as a virtual contact file (VCF) directly to your tablet or phone contacts. You can also extract business card content into the "Contacts" section of OneNote for easy storage and sharing. Currently, Business Card mode works best with English, German and Spanish business cards, with more languages coming soon. Office Lens users on all phone platforms now have Business Card mode, which allows business card information to be added directly as digital contacts to mobile address books or the "Contacts" section of OneNote. OneNote Clipper adds Office 365 support In addition to our Office Lens updates, we’re excited to announce that you can now use the OneNote Clipper with school or work Office 365 accounts. The OneNote Clipper lets you quickly capture any webpage to OneNote, where you can easily edit, annotate or share it. You can save the full page or a selection of the webpage to OneNote as an image, or you can clean up the webpage and send only the relevant text and images to your notebook. Download the OneNote Clipper for free at www.onenote.com/clipper and try it out! Download the new versions of Office Lens for iPhone or Office Lens for Android today and please continue providing feedback for Office Lens at UserVoice and for OneNote Clipper here or in the comments section below. We welcome your input! The post Office Lens now includes Office 365 support for iOS and more features for business professionals, teachers and students appeared first on Office Blogs.