In July, we announced Send for iPhone for Office 365 business and education customers. Since then, we’ve seen a great response and have been busy adding new features based on your feedback. Users were eager for Send to be available more broadly, so today we’d like to introduce the Send for Android preview. In addition to U.S. and Canada, we’ve also brought Send for iPhone and Android to app stores in the UK, Brazil and Denmark. With today’s updates, even more people can take advantage of Send’s simple, quick text message-like experience when connecting with coworkers, customers and classmates on the go. It has been a busy month for Send—the app that feels like texting and works like email. Since the launch, we have been listening closely to your feedback and opinions, and have responded by making the app even more useful for you. We added the ability to delete conversations, add people to conversations, send direct messages to people from a group conversation, share your location, make a phone call and more. We have also added support for GIF sharing! Sometimes a simple GIF can express more than words ever could. Send has been welcomed by universities, organizations with office workers and organizations with a mobile workforce. We’ve heard the app is improving communication flow around offices, campuses and other workplaces, because it’s based on a universal platform that everyone has access to—email. You told us that Send is a much-needed alternative to the consumer chat applications that can find their way into an organization. As well as new features, our customers have been asking us to increase the availability of Send. Specifically, there are requests for Send to be on more platforms and available in more countries. With this in mind, we have this to share: First, we are releasing a preview version of Send for Android phones with 4.2 and up. The app is available now and will stay in preview status while we bring it up to speed with its iPhone counterpart. Many of you are also requesting a Windows Phone version, which we are currently working on. Second, in addition to U.S. and Canada, we also brought Send for iPhone and Android to app stores in the UK, Brazil and Denmark. If you’re in one of these countries, we’d love for you to download and try Send today. We want to take this opportunity to say "Thank you" to all of the early adopters of Send and "Welcome aboard" to those of you who are just joining. As always, feel free to tell us your thoughts, opinions and feature requests through UserVoice. We’ll continue to listen and improve the app based on your feedback. The post Expanding the availability of Send appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Dianne Krause, instructional technology specialist and coach in Wissahickon School District. Dianne is also a Microsoft Innovative Educator expert and master trainer and a professional learning specialist for the Northwest Council for Computing in Education (NCCE). The school year is off and running! Along with the preparation of bulletin boards, seating charts, classroom procedures and syllabi, it is also important for teachers to consider the go-to digital tools and resources they will rely upon throughout the school year. The five tools and resources outlined below can be utilized by teachers and students in many different classroom settings, grade levels and subject areas for creation, communication, collaboration and so much more. Tool #1—OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook As an instructional technology specialist in support of a 21st-century teaching and learning one-to-one laptop initiative, OneNote is part of my daily life, both in and out of school. Teachers, students and administrators in my district view OneNote as the backbone of our initiative and our digital educational lives. OneNote is the primary organizational tool in my school when it comes to the "business" of school through faculty manuals, collaborative project and lesson planning, data collection and team meeting notes. WMS faculty manual OneNote Notebook For teaching and learning, OneNote serves as a digital binder that pulls together all curricular materials and student work. But that is just the tip of the iceberg to what OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook can do in your classroom. Teachers can deliver engaging and interactive content easily and efficiently to their students using the built-in Content Library. Students can then pull the teacher-created pages into their own section of the notebook to complete work, annotate text, insert images, link notes and draw with digital ink. A great feature of the Class Notebook is that the teacher has immediate access to all student work in their individual sections and can provide on-going, detailed and specific feedback to each student privately, through text, ink, audio or video recording. Class Notebooks also have a Collaboration Space through which all students and teachers with access to that notebook can collaborate, communicate and create together. OneNote really is the ultimate classroom tool! Example of a Class Notebook OneNote Collaboration Space Be sure to check out onenoteforteachers.com to learn about OneNote and its use in school—and don’t forget—OneNote is free on all devices! Tool #2—Office Mix Whether you teach kindergarten or AP Calculus, or anything in between, Office Mix is for you. Office Mix is a free add-in to PowerPoint through which teachers and students can enhance and amplify their presentations to add interactivity and engagement. Office Mix offers voice and screen recording, digital ink annotation, video embedding, polling capabilities and content creation. Delivery is not only easy and efficient, but highly motivating to the end users—the students! In addition to the polling and questioning apps, there is a large variety of third-party apps, including Khan Academy, CK-12 and PhET, which can be searched and easily embedded into the Mix. That’s just the beginning though! Once the students go through the Mix and complete the embedded activities, teachers can view the analytics and data tied to the Mixes at a variety of levels. Teachers have the ability to view data by slides, visitors or exercises and drill down to the student level. At the student level, they can view how long each student remained on each slide and their responses to the questions posed. Talk about data-driven instruction! Although Office Mix is an excellent tool for any classroom, many educators believe it is THE ANSWER for the flipped or blended learning environment. Also remember, it’s not just for teachers! Students too can get "in the mix" to demonstrate their learning or teach a new concept to their classmates and ask questions of them to see if they were listening! To get Office Mix visit mix.office.com, and to learn more about using it in your classroom, visit mixforteachers.com. Office Mix ribbon Tool #3—Sway As the newest member of the Office suite, Sway has swept me away with its ease of use and beautiful end result. In just minutes, teachers and students can create stunning visual presentations with a unique web URL that can be easily shared for viewing or collaboration. By adding interactive content such as photos, videos, audio files, Twitter feeds, charts, documents and maps, students can easily demonstrate their learning and present their thoughts and ideas without having to spend a lot of time on the presentation itself. Don’t let the ease fool you though; there are many choices to choose from for different colors, fonts, layouts and navigation. In fact, Sway will suggest colors based on the images you have chosen, and there is a handy "Remix" button that randomizes the layout, colors and fonts for you. As it is web-based, Sway embraces the power of the Internet and automatically provides suggested search results to help you find relevant images, videos and other content. There is no need to leave Sway to find the content you want and need. Since Sways can be easily shared and are designed to look great on any device, they are a great way to share student learning with parents and faculty. Don’t miss the new Sway tutorial videos and start Swaying today! Tool #4—Skype How have you connected your classroom with the world? With Skype and Skype in the Classroom, it is easier than ever to connect your students with other teachers, classrooms, experts and projects to help break down the walls of your classroom to bring the world in. Not sure where to start? Play Mystery Skype with another classroom from somewhere around the world. It is a fun and easy way to get started with Skype and provide global opportunities for your students. Tool #5—Microsoft Educator Network Learning and using tools and resources from tutorials and websites is an awesome way to be a lifelong learner, but learning from and with others is the true hallmark of a 21st-century educator. The Microsoft Educator Network provides today’s educators access to a plethora of resources, including hot topics blogs, discussion communities, professional development courses, quick tip videos, tutorials, learning activities and opportunities for educators. In addition, the Microsoft Educator Network provides access to a host of free Microsoft tools and resources and the Bing in the Classroom daily lesson plans based on the Bing image of the day. Join the Microsoft Educator Network today! Microsoft Educator Network provides free tools for teachers. You can follow me on Twitter, read my blog or visit my website and Sway. I would love to hear how you are using these and other Microsoft tools to impact creation, collaboration and communication this school year! —Dianne Krause The post Top 5 back-to-school tools for creation, collaboration and communication appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re excited to release our newest OneNote for iOS update, which adds support for several new features of iOS 9, spiffs things up for the upcoming iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and—as always—has numerous improvements in response to customer feedback. If you thought our August update was big on small improvements, it’s because we were laboring behind the scenes to get everything prepped for this release. Twice as nice with iOS 9 With Split View, you can have OneNote open side-by-side with another app, making it easier than ever to take notes while watching a lecture, reviewing slides or reading a paper for class. Slide Over enables you to open OneNote atop another app and jot down whatever strikes your fancy without interrupting your current task. Search your notes with Spotlight We’ve added support for Spotlight to OneNote on iOS 9. Pop open search and start typing to jump directly to your notes. We’ll even search through images, PDFs and handwriting. Pencil it out on iPad Pro Prepare your sharpener for November—we’ll have Apple Pencil and iPad Pro support ready, waiting for you. Better UI support for Arabic and Hebrew in iOS 9 Support for Arabic and Hebrew has been greatly improved with the addition of mirrored UI; your text is no longer the only thing that’s right to left. Pick a side…any side (for the page list) Previously, we moved the page list to the left side of the screen to improve handwriting for right-handed users. You can now choose to have it on the right or the left side. Twice as many choices, 100 percent more satisfied lefties! Bugs zapped In the last release, our typographically inclined users let us know we hadn’t lived up to our excellent reputation for font rendering. We dug out our linoleum blocks and resolved the issue (a fix for Mac is in the pipeline). Additionally, we were a bit too fond of trips down memory lane, prompting you to sign in…repeatedly. Like your notes, your sign-in information will be fastidiously remembered. Last month today We added Page Previews to Landscape mode, and many customers rightly noted that we didn’t add a setting to turn them off and on. Now you can; we added a switch in settings. Excited about all the changes? Don’t already have OneNote? Get it here. As always, we appreciate your feedback. Please continue to give us input and ideas at the OneNote feedback site, onenote.uservoice.com. —Ryan McMinn, product manager for the OneNote team The post OneNote adds support for iOS 9 and iPad Pro with multitasking, Spotlight search and Apple Pencil appeared first on Office Blogs.

Traditional content migrations to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business can sometimes require lengthy data uploads over the network. The Office 365 Import Service enhances the document migration experience to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business by making it: Fast—Save time in migrating data to Office 365 by copying it to hard drives and shipping them rather than using the network to upload large amounts of data. However, if you prefer to use the network, especially for uploading smaller data sets, our new migration pipeline is faster than traditional migration methods by an order of magnitude. Simple—A free tool is available to package up your on-premises SharePoint or file share content and prepare it to be imported into Office 365. To take advantage of the Office 365 Import Service, first prepare the content and manifest packages based on content from an on-premises file system or SharePoint using the preparation tool. Once that is complete, simply navigate to the Import tab in the Office 365 admin center and create a new drive shipping or network upload job. From there, load the data onto drives and ship it to us using the address listed in the Office 365 admin center or upload the data to the specified location. Once your data is received, it is automatically imported into your tenant in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. You’ll be able to monitor the process in the Office 365 admin center. Visit the TechNet article for more details and start using the service today. Frequently asked questions Q. What happens to my data? A. Behind the scenes, the Office 365 Import Service uses the Azure Import/Export service. Azure provides secure datacenters located throughout the world to enable you to ship or upload your data to the location closest to you. When you upload your data or ship your drives, the data is temporarily staged within Microsoft Azure until it is imported into SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. All hard drives are encrypted with BitLocker protection, and the BitLocker key is sent separately from the drives. This protects them in the event they are lost or stolen in transit. If you choose to physically ship hard drives to Microsoft datacenters, they will be returned to you once the data has been imported. Q. How do I enable the O365 Import Service for my tenant? A. You don’t have to; the service is already turned on and available. We are working on enabling the service for both Office 365 Dedicated customers and SharePoint Online hosted in the Brazil, China, Japan or Australia datacenters. Q. How much will the service cost? A. There is no cost to participate in the preview, which is available now. After preview, Office 365 customers will be able to purchase the service through a separate Office 365 offer. Q. Where can I get more details? A. You can find all the details about the Office 365 Import Service in this TechNet article. The post Office 365 Import Service—migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business just became easier appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Richard DiZerega talks to Venkat Ayyadevara about the new unified APIs for mail/contact/calendar and the converged consumer/commercial app registration and authentication offered in Azure AD’s "v2" application model. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP63_OutlookConverged.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Office 2016 Launch on September 22 by Julia White Add-in samples moved to GitHub Office Dev Show Episode 10—File Handlers and Smartsheet with Sonya Koptyev, Dorrene Brown, Joe Adamson Office Dev Show Episode 11—Getting Started AngularJS with Sonya Koptyev, Richard diZerega Sending WebHooks with ASP.NET WebHooks Preview by Henrik F Nielsen Multi-Tenant Followup: Azure AD in Django with Python Social Auth by Elliott Miller Connecting Office Add-ins created using the Yeoman Office Generator to Office 365 by Waldek Mastykarz Show notes Getting Started with Mail, Calendar, and Contacts REST APIs Unified Outlook.com/Exchange Online APIs The Converged Azure AD v2 App Model 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 Venkat Ayyadevara Venkat is a program manager at Microsoft on the Outlook team and owns the mail, calendar, and contact APIs for Office 365, Exchange, Outlook.com. He has been at Microsoft for over seven years and has worked on the developer platform, server-to-server OAuth framework, an Exchange protocol-aware request-routing frontend, Outlook Web App, and a recent transport for Outlook/Exchange connectivity called MAPI over HTTP. Prior to Microsoft, Venkat worked at Amazon Web Services, Evoxis (a startup in Pittsburgh, PA), and Trilogy Software in Austin, TX. He lives in the Seattle metro area and enjoys reading about current affairs, watching murder mysteries and music of all varieties. 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 063 on unified authentication and Outlook APIs—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

Editor’s note 9/18/2015: The FAQs were updated to provide additional information about the Office 365 Admin Center Preview. Our mission is to empower you to achieve more. For Office 365 IT administrators, this means improving the experience of the Office 365 Admin Center so that it is more delightful to use, by making it more intuitive, informative, scalable and insightful. Introducing the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview We started with a clean sheet and looked at how we could truly modernize the experience. We focused on simplifying the dashboard and how you access the tools. We targeted on making it easier to complete common tasks without having to leave the dashboard—whether it’s adding a new user, resetting a password or even simply checking your monthly bill. By focusing on making the experience more intuitive, you will achieve more by quickly getting through your needed administrative tasks—no more searching. We realize that technology can be complex, and you may not be familiar with all the terminology and tools that are available. We are here to help by providing more informative ways of accomplishing your administrative tasks. We will introduce you to new features as they become available and provide detailed guidance so that you can easily follow the latest changes. There’s still more to come Since we are still early in our journey, not all the features are available yet. This is an early peek and there is much more to come. We are continuing to invest in providing you with tools to help you drive your organization to achieve more. Even though we are simplifying the experience, we are by no means removing capability. You will have the ability to customize your dashboard to surface the tools that are the most relevant for your organization. The left navigation menu lets you dive deeper into the advanced tools and controls and continue to give you access to specialized portals, such as the Exchange Admin Center. For Office 365 admins that require more advanced functions, your features will still be there. In addition, we are also investing in helping your organization become more productive. Office 365 can only help your organization achieve more if your users are using the tools. To help you ensure that your users are maximizing your ROI in Office 365, we will begin surfacing reporting usage dashboards that will help you get a better view of how your organization is using Office 365. If you need additional information, you will have the ability to drill down to get details so that action plans can be devised. We will continue to invest in providing more tools to inform you of how your organization is using Office 365. Try it out and send us feedback Today we are embarking on a journey to improve your administrative experience. The rollout will start with a set of small business and First Release customers. It’s an early peek and not all of the features are available yet. We are looking for your feedback so that we can continue to shape the product into something that will truly help you achieve more. Things will change and there will be updates as we learn from your feedback and get further down the road. Join us on the journey of helping you do more in Office 365. Stay tuned to Office Blogs and the Office 365 Roadmap for more information. Frequently asked questions Q. When will I see the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview? A. The Office 365 Admin Center Preview will start rolling out today to customers who have opted into First Release as well as some of our small business customers. Q. How do I access the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview? A. If your Office 365 subscription has the new Office 365 Admin Center enabled, you would need to sign in to the Office 365 Admin Center with your Office 365 administrator credentials. The preview to the new Office 365 Admin Center can be accessed in the banner at the top of the Office 365 Admin Center dashboard. Q. How do I provide feedback? A. There is a feedback widget on the bottom right corner of every screen. Please feel free to continually send us your comments. Q. Where can I find support in the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview? A. Support can be found in the classic view of the Office 365 Admin Center. Simply click the link at the top of Admin home in the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview. Q. I can’t find all the features I need, such as Message Center, in the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview? A. Since we are still very early into the journey of the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview, not all the features are available yet. To access features that are not yet available in the preview, simply go back to the classic view of the Office 365 Admin Center by selecting the link at the top of Admin home in the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview. Q. Where do I go for help? A. Help for the new Office 365 Admin Center Preview is available at aka.ms/new365admin. The post The new Office 365 Admin Center Preview appeared first on Office Blogs.

Ted Vu and his business partner, Scott Nguyen, were still in college in 2001 when they launched Tastea as a drink delivery business based in Vu’s garage. They soon started selling their drinks at festivals, where they proved extremely popular with young Southern Californians. Before long they decided it was time to open their first brick-and-mortar location. The big challenge was money—they didn’t have any. The bank laughed when they asked about a business loan, so Vu and Nguyen maxed out their credit cards, borrowed against their cars and took personal loans from family members who believed in what they were doing. "And that’s when the hard work began," Vu says. "We hired a contractor to help build our location and bootstrapped wherever we could to conserve costs. We’ve heard that the less money you have, the more creative you need to be, and that was certainly the case for us." Their vision, tenacity and hard work paid off. Today Vu and Nguyen have three Tastea locations and recently started selling franchises. Vu writes about the value of creating a strong bond with employees, paying attention to the numbers and sticking to a realistic budget: "The most important thing we did right was to value our employees from the very beginning. Even though we had little money to start, we treated our employees as family. This created an immediate and loyal bond with our team, which fostered passion, creativity and dedication. As a result, they were our strongest advocates. They spread the word to our target market and played a crucial role in our early success. Remember, this was before lots of social media sites were available to help get the word out—we were entirely dependent on word of mouth, and our employees provided the loudest voices. Treating all our employees as respected team members translated into our signature customer experience, the consistently positive way our team members serve our customers. Of course, not all our early decisions worked out so well. I wish we’d put greater emphasis on the importance of the numbers: our target sales per hour, the cost of goods sold, labor costs and other key indicators. In the beginning, we had strong sales but not equally strong profits, because we overstaffed and prepped too many perishable ingredients that later went to waste. We finally figured out the right balance, but it took a lot of trial and error, much of which we could have avoided by spending more time analyzing our data." To read the rest of Ted’s story and the stories of other small business owners like Ted, download our eBook, "What I wish I knew." The post Tastea’s small business story—east meets west for business success 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 seventh edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep up-to-date with what’s new in Office 365 development. This has been an exciting month of announcements for Office 365 developers. We launched a new Yeoman generator for building Office Add-ins. This is a powerful tool for developers who do not use Visual Studio but are interested in building Office add-ins. You can use it to generate a raw add-in manifest or a full add-in project using either plain HTML/JavaScript/CSS or AngularJS. The Yeoman generator supports all of the add-in types across Outlook mail, task pane and content add-ins. We also introduced the Office UI Fabric, a responsive, mobile-first, front-end framework for developers, designed to make it simple to quickly create web experiences using the Office Design Language. The Office UI Fabric makes it easy for developers to build add-ins and applications that look like Office. In fact, the framework is used internally on several products within Office 365. The Office UI Fabric is available through GitHub at github.com/OfficeDev/Office-UI-Fabric. We also announced the general availability of the custom file handler add-ins. This add-in type allows developers to create their own custom viewers and editors for non-Microsoft file types in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Outlook Web App. Engineering has provided a nice reference sample on GitHub, and full documentation is available on MSDN. Also, check out the Upcoming Events below to see our full schedule of onsite conferences and training events for the next six months. 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 to produce documentation that help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month: Office 365 APIs Updated File Handler content for general availability: Overview of Office 365 file handlers Configure and update file handlers in Office 365 Create file handlers in Office 365 Updated: Office 365 Javascript controls New: Create pages in the default OneNote notebook in Office 365 SharePoint Add-ins New Office UI Fabric with SharePoint Add-ins FAQ All content is updated to reflect the name change from Apps for SharePoint to SharePoint Add-ins Office Add-ins Updated design guidelines that are compatible with Office Fabric UI New Theming API for Office 2016 All content updated to reflect the name change from Apps for Office to Office Add-ins 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. Seven SharePoint Add-in code samples migrated to GitHub. Examples: Localize the add-in web, host web, and remote components of a SharePoint Add-in Access SharePoint data with the Cross Domain JavaScript Library 32 Office Add-in code samples migrated and added to GitHub. Examples: Outlook Add-in—A mail add-in for a read scenario that checks whether the user is mentioned on the To line, cc line or body of an email Outlook Add-in—Mail add-in for a read scenario that finds and parses all links in the body of an email Outlook Add-in—View YouTube videos Word Add-in—Loading data into custom XML parts bound to content controls in a Word document Office Add-in—Use Bing Translator and ASP.NET in an add-in Check out dev.office.com/code-samples to see more. Most recent Office 365 Dev Podcasts Since joining Microsoft last year, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group and I’ll go hunt down the relevant people to interview. Here are the most recent Dev Podcasts: Episode 063 on Unified Authentication and Outlook APIs Episode 062 on the Office UI Fabric Episode 061 on the Office 365 File Handlers Episode 060 on the new Office Add-in Yeoman Generator For more podcasts check out dev.office.com/podcasts. Office Dev Show The Office Dev Show is our dedicated Channel 9 show focusing on all things Office 365 development-related. The show previews capabilities and features of the Office extensibility platform, as well as facilitating developers getting started building on Office 365 with a variety of technologies. Here are the episodes we have published to date: Episode 7—Getting Started with Python Episode 8—Office for iPad Extensibility Episode 9— Getting Started with Cross-platform Apps Episode 10—File Handlers and Smartsheet Episode 11—Getting Started with AngularJS Stay tuned to the show, publishing new episodes every Wednesday morning. Patterns and Practices The Microsoft Patterns and Practices (PnP) 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 monthly releases and future concentration areas. Thanks to everyone who contributed in the previous release of the PnP from the community side. Your input is highly appreciated. Here are the latest updates from the PnP team: Updated Transform page on office.com/transform First year of Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices (PnP) program blog post Office 365 Developer PnP—September 2015 release details PnP September 2015 monthly community call recording at Channel 9 Numerous new videos in the PnP Channel 9 check at Office Dev PnP Videos Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at Office Dev PnP MSDN For more on PnP check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related to released materials and guidance can be asked on our Yammer group at Office Dev PnP Yammer. 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: 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 Office UI Fabric—Creating Office Add-ins with Yeoman by Andrew Connell Matter Center OData Excel Office Add-in Mail add-in for Outlook using Office 365 APIs (ADAL.JS, ANGULARJS, WEBAPI, AZURE AD) by Matej Vodopivc Developers: SharePoint isn’t a platform, SharePoint is a service by Andrew Connell Episode 092 - Identity Convergence, App Registration Portal and AppModel v2 with Microsoft’s Stuart Kwan Eight characteristics of an ideal SharePoint customization by Doug Ware Web add-ins—using Office Open XML to extend the JavaScript APIs by Cindy Meister Setting properties via EWS on a Draft message is a compose Mail App by Glen Scales OWA Voting Button Compose App for Office365/Exchange 2016 by Glen Scales Using Azure Machine Learning with SharePoint by Matthias Einig LESS SharePoint Add-ins with Mixins by Sonya Madsen Index web property bag using JavaScript object model-AngularJS in SharePoint online by Vipul Kelkar Microsoft Cloud Show Episodes 093 Developers SharePoint is not a platform SharePoint is a service by Andrew Connell and Chris Johnson Architects: SharePoint is a platform, treating it as only a service is a mistake by Doug Ware IQParts Cloud app compatible web parts using AngularJS and Bootstrap by Doug Ware Using the SharePoint Client Object Model in AngularJS apps by Doug Ware Working with the converged Azure AD v2 app model by Richard DiZerega Building Office 365 apps with Node.js and the Azure AD v2 app model by Richard DiZerega Using Office UI Fabric in SharePoint Add-ins by Chaks Open XML SDK Intro by Ryan McIntyre Microsoft Cloud Roadshow SPLive360 Nov 16-20 Office 2016 Launch on September 22 by Julia White Add-in samples moved to GitHub Sending WebHooks with ASP.NET WebHooks Preview by Henrik F Nielsen Multi-Tenant Follow up—Azure AD in Django with Python Social Auth by Elliott Miller Connecting Office Add-ins created using the Yeoman Office Generator to Office 365 by Waldek Mastykarz Office Store The Outlook team has stepped up efforts to integrate with leading solutions and to increase the prominence of the Store in Outlook products as well. August saw the addition of four well-known brands to our Mail add-in library: the Uber ride-sharing service, the PayPal electronic-payment service, the popular note-taking service Evernote, and Boomerang. Integrations are in the works with Yelp, Wunderlist and IFTTT (If This, Then That). Full details are available here, but Boomerang offers a great example of one such Outlook integration. Boomerang‘s free Outlook integration lets you schedule emails for sending at the optimal time, reminds you to follow up on important messages that don’t get a response, and lets you schedule meetings with a single message by embedding a dynamically updated Free/Busy calendar right within the body of the email that’s visible even to recipients on other mail platforms! Like the other integrations mentioned above, Boomerang works on Outlook 2013, Outlook on the web, and is gradually rolling out to the 400+ million users of the Outlook.com consumer service. Outlook 2016 also features the Store button on the Home ribbon, making discoverability of Store solutions much easier. Developer marketing In mid-September, we released our sixth customer-evidence video touting partner solutions, on betterwith.office.com. This newest video shows how a Seattle cloud-integration company, Azuqua, uses the D&B Business Solutions Excel add-in to more quickly qualify their customer leads and close deals, all within the Excel experience. We’ll soon start marketing this video site broadly, and worldwide, to tell the developer value proposition, and we aim to scale this program to include many of our recruited partners in the DX (Developer Evangelism Experience) program. 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! October 12 Unity Connect—Amsterdam October 14 Dev Intersection—Amsterdam October 26 Dev Intersection—Las Vegas November 2-3 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Dallas November 5-6 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—New York November 9-12 European SharePoint Conference November 9-10 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Toronto December 7-8 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Singapore January 26-27 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Los Angeles February 2-3 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Mexico City February 22-23 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow— Dubai February 25-26 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Bangalore February 29-March 1 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—London March 3-4 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Copenhagen March 10-11 Microsoft Cloud Roadshow—Hong Kong 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), Dave Pae (@davidpae) and Jim Epes (@j_epes). —Jeremy Thake The post Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for September appeared first on Office Blogs.

More than a decade ago, Steve Johanns became fascinated with the idea of figuring out how the energy industry would look if it worked like the Internet, with people everywhere contributing to it. With his cofounder, Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, he launched a company to pursue that idea. Veriown, a distributed energy company, is working to extend energy to billions of people who have never had a reliable energy source. "I believe that the next 20 years will be the most transformative in all of human history," says Johanns, who serves as president and CEO of Veriown. "That’s saying something, considering all that the past 20 years have delivered. But right now companies everywhere are building on advancements in technology and communications, resulting in a convergence like we’ve never seen." Johanns advises entrepreneurs to take the long view of their business, build a core team that can help the company grow, and learn from their mistakes: "You may have an idea that works right now, but how will it fare in one, five or ten years? Before getting started, you have to test your idea to make sure it makes sense in the long term and at scale. In other words, don’t just capitalize on the moment—make sure your business concept is sustainable. Once you’ve got a viable concept, the next critical factor is your team. I believe that the core group you start with has a huge impact on your long-term success. Most business owners don’t pay enough attention to that element. Your ‘dirty dozen’—the first 12 people you bring on board—sets the tone for your corporate culture and can affect your next thousand employees. And hiring those initial team members is not just about each person’s résumé or past performance; it’s about having the right blend of heart, passion, dedication, skills and ability to execute." To read the rest of Steve’s story and the stories of other small business owners like Steve, download our eBook, "What I wish I knew." The post Veriown’s small business story—harness the power of entrepreneurship appeared first on Office Blogs.

Recently, we told you about the exciting new features and improvements in Excel 2016 that expand the business analytics capabilities available to you and your company. Today we will tell you about the changes we have made to help you get access to the features that fit your unique needs, including more Office plans that offer advanced analytics functionality. Giving analytics power to all Excel users No matter what Office plan you decide to purchase, you can leverage Excel’s powerful data analysis tools to help you discover, organize and analyze the data around you and find the business insights that matter. Rich chart types and easy formatting, a library of powerful functions and fast and flexible PivotTable capabilities are just a few of the core capabilities in every box of Excel 2016. The following are a few of the new features made available in Excel 2016: Rich charts and visualizations—The powerful new charts, like Treemap and Histogram, enable you to visualize your data in more compelling ways. Power Map, the popular 3D geospatial visualization tool, is now available to all Excel 2016 users and comes with a more intuitive name, "3D Maps." Easy access to data, using the Power Query functionality—We have integrated the Power Query add-in to be out-of-the-box for all Excel 2016 users. This feature, which used to be reserved for premium plans only, is now available in all Excel 2016 plans, on the Data ribbon under the Get & Transform section. Excel 2016 users can now benefit from the core functionality, connect to data from other CSV and Excel files, import data from public websites, access databases, OData feeds and more. In addition, Excel 2016 users can also now use the powerful Power Query capabilities to transform data in a variety of ways. New data analysis capabilities in Power Pivot—Since Excel 2013, all users have been able to take advantage of the data model in each Excel workbook to stay connected to large sets of data from different data sources to perform basic data modeling. Several new features have been added to make analysis on these models faster and more flexible. Some key additions include automatic relationship detection, automatic time grouping and inline creation of DAX calculated measures. These new capabilities are now available in all plans of Excel. Providing more advanced analytics functionality Excel 2016 provides capabilities that allow you to further enhance your data analysis experiences and share your data and analysis more effectively across your company. These features, usually suitable for professional business analysts, come with all premium plans of Office 2016, including Office 365 ProPlus, Office Professional Plus, Excel 2016 Standalone, and now also in Office 2016 Professional! Here is the list of the advanced analytics features: Advanced analytics and modeling capabilities with Power Pivot—With the full Power Pivot management UX, you can benefit from advanced modeling capabilities like Diagram View, KPIs, Hierarchies and DAX Calculated Columns. Advanced connectivity options with Power Query—For corporate users who require advanced connectivity and importing features, we have added the option to connect to corporate, big data and cloud data sources, such as Oracle, DB2 or MySQL database, a variety of Azure data sources, such as Azure SQL Database, Salesforce, Hadoop files and many more. Advanced collaboration—With an addition of Power BI license, you will also benefit from a corporate data search and will be able to share your import and transformation queries with other analysts within your organization through the means of a Corporate Data Catalog. New ways to get Excel premium features With the release of Excel 2016, we have provided two key improvements to our Office plans that make it easier to get these advanced analytics features: Office 2016 Professional feature updates—Office 2016 Professional includes all of Excel’s business analytics capabilities, making it much easier for you to take advantage of the complete suite as part of a one-time purchase of the Office desktop apps. And if you want to always be at the cutting edge of Excel innovation, you can also purchase the Office 365 ProPlus subscription, which comes with Excel 2016, and receive ongoing updates and new features in the future. Small business users—Office 365 small business users who are using one of the Office 365 Business plans for most of their organization can now purchase Office 365 ProPlus for users who need the premium features and leave the rest unchanged. Summary of the Excel 2016 business analytics features For the sake of clarity, the diagrams below provide a holistic view of business analytics features offered in Excel 2016: We hope that you’ll find this information useful and as always are glad to hear your feedback. The post New ways to get the Excel business analytics features you need appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 2016 is scheduled to begin rolling out on September 22, and we’ve already started delivering new tools and resources to help IT administrators prepare, deploy and manage it. We’ve also added new IT capabilities to Office 2016 and made significant improvements to the Office update model. As Julia White, general manager of Office 365 Technical Product Management, said in a recent blog post, "This is a seminal release for Office and one you won’t want to wait to deploy to your users, and thanks to the many new IT management enhancements, you don’t need to wait!" On the eve of launching Office 2016, we also announced the availability of the Project Server 2016 IT Preview. We’ve worked hard over the past three years to bring the latest innovations to Project Online and to incorporate customer feedback into Project Server 2016. You can now download Project Server 2016 IT Preview from the Microsoft Download Center and share feedback directly with our engineering teams through the new SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview forum. Office 2016 also offers plenty of great new capabilities for users as well as IT Pros. For example, we integrated Power Query technology into Excel 2016 to enhance the self-service business analytics experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery, access and collaboration. Meanwhile, we continue to do all we can to make Office 365 the world’s best cloud-based productivity service. Just this week, we announced Office 365 Service Trust Portal (STP). STP is a service feature in Office 365 designed to provide deeper information and greater transparency on how Microsoft manages security, compliance and privacy in today’s continuously evolving regulatory and business-risk landscape. And when Apple announced the new iPad Pro, iOS 9 and WatchOS 2, we were ready. We have already developed several new features for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Translator to take advantage of these enhanced Apple products, including multitasking, inking, intelligent search, wireless keyboard support and updates to Outlook and Translator on Apple Watch. With all of the new features and capabilities coming to Office 365 and Office 2016, there has never been a better time to upgrade or to start using Office for personal and professional productivity. Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy! Microsoft acquires Adallom to advance identity and security in the cloud—Find out how Microsoft’s acquisition of Adallom, an innovator in cloud security and a leader in helping customers protect their critical assets across cloud applications, will benefit Office 365 users. Yammer posts top one million—British Airways inspires innovative teamwork—Learn how British Airways is using Office 365 and Yammer to foster teamwork, collaboration and the sharing of great ideas among employees in the air and on the ground. Small jewelry company shines as a social business with Microsoft Office 365—Find out how Office 365 helped a specialty jewelry firm increase efficiency, unify its capabilities and save money. Scottish dairy strengthens family business values, customer service with Office 365—Discover how one of the largest independent milk producers in Scotland is using Office 365 to keep employees connected, boost agility and enhance customer service. Manufacturing productivity in the cloud—TE strengthens connections with Office 365 ProPlus—Learn how Office 365 is helping to make this innovative company a better place to work. The post Office 365 news roundup appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we’re excited to share an important step in our efforts to bring seamless real-time communication experiences on the web to everyone—the Object Real-Time Communications Community (ORTC) API preview for Microsoft Edge browser is now available in the latest Windows Insider Preview release! The ORTC API preview for Microsoft Edge is the latest result of a close, ongoing collaboration between the Windows and Skype teams. Together we’re able to apply decades of experience building great web platforms to deliver some of the largest and most reliable real-time communications services for businesses and consumers. What does this mean for you? For developers, we’re providing new ways to build innovative real-time communications into your web-based experiences. For people using Skype and Skype for Business at work or at home, calls and meetings on the web will soon get even easier and more seamless. ORTC API capabilities The ORTC APIs enable the development of real-time audio and video communications applications directly on top of the Microsoft Edge browser without the need to install any plug-ins. Using components provided directly by the browser, the ORTC APIs provide granular control over audio and video streams on the client machine as well as the transport layer that carries those streams over the network. ORTC APIs also support the development of more advanced real-time communications scenarios—such as group video calls with a diverse set of endpoints—using features like Simulcast and Scalable Video Coding (SVC), while preserving the ability to easily interop with existing telephony networks. ORTC and Skype investment in standards Building on the momentum of our updated Skype for Outlook.com and Skype for Web experiences announced earlier this summer, enabling ORTC API support in Microsoft Edge is part of our ongoing effort to bring seamless, real-time communication experiences on the web to everyone. We want Skype to help users reach anyone, anywhere, without interoperability concerns getting in your way. We also want to ensure web-based Skype experiences connect smoothly with the hundreds of millions of other Skype and Skype for Business clients running on desktops and various mobile platforms around the world. As a result, we’re making significant investments in standards-based, protocol-level support for ORTC and WebRTC interoperability across our platforms. Specifically: We are updating our Skype media stack on all platforms (Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android) with Standard transport protocols support, including STUN (RFC 5389), TURN (RFC 5766), ICE (RFC 5245), DTLS-SRTP (RFC 5764). The Skype media stack is used by all Skype and Skype for Business clients, cloud services and servers. For audio, on top of SILK, G.711, G.722, we have added support of the Opus codec in ORTC. We will continue to add native Opus support in our Skype media stack for all platforms. For video, Skype and ORTC in the Edge browser currently support 264UC. We are working on adding support for H.264. This will enable video interop between Skype and the Firefox browser, which currently supports H.264, and the Chrome browser when H.264 support is added to its WebRTC implementation. Here’s a high-level view of how a group video call will connect between Skype clients and the plug-in-less Skype for Web clients using ORTC/WebRTC from various browsers: Enabling seamless web experiences with Skype Starting later this year, we will start to enable seamless communication and collaboration experiences for Skype for Web, starting with voice and video, without the need for plug-ins on Microsoft Edge. We are also working on bringing the same seamless experience to Skype for Business. For Chrome and Firefox, we will leverage existing WebRTC APIs to offer similar plug-in-less experiences where possible for most scenarios. For those browsers without support for ORTC or WebRTC, we will continue to provide an integrated experience using a small browser plug-in. Lastly, for developers who take advantage of Skype Developer Platform capabilities such as Skype URI support and the Skype Web SDK Preview, we want you to be able to focus on building great web experiences that will work on the broadest range of browsers. We are working to integrate support for the ORTC and WebRTC APIs into our developer offerings while abstracting out the low-level details and differences in media handling between browsers with integrated real-time communications support and other browsers that still require a plug-in. Look for more details on these developer updates later in the year. We’re excited about the upcoming updates to enable even more seamless communications experiences on the web and look forward to sharing more details in the near future. In the meantime, we’re always looking to improve your experience on Skype, and we care about your feedback. We’d love to hear from you via Skype Community, Skype for Business feedback, Facebook and Twitter. —Hao Yan, Jonathan Watson, Daniel Jonathan Valik and Senthil Velayutham on behalf of the Skype for Business team The post Enabling seamless communication experiences for the web with Skype, Skype for Business and Microsoft Edge appeared first on Office Blogs.

Aon is using Microsoft Office 365 to help its global workforce connect and collaborate in fun and meaningful ways. But it’s not all fun and games—Aon clients also benefit from knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Aon, one of the world’s leading providers of risk management and human resources solutions, has 66,000 employees working for clients in more than 120 countries. As a globally dispersed company, Aon knew the importance of finding a strong communication and collaboration solution that was not limited to email. "We needed an open, real-time, knowledge-sharing platform where information could be broadcasted transparently and dispersed swiftly," says Neeru Arora, chief knowledge officer at Aon. The company decided to deploy Microsoft Office 365 to enable powerful employee connections and robust knowledge-sharing. Employees now use Office 365 productivity tools to share best practices, form dynamic teams and collaborate and communicate with colleagues across the building or on opposite sides of the world. Aon relies on Yammer and SharePoint Online to help unite its global workforce, and in the process, employees are discovering how they can do more together. Recently, the company used Yammer to coordinate and launch its annual service day, during which employees volunteer in their local communities. CEO Greg Case kicked off the day with a live address on Yammer, and employees used Yammer to sign up for volunteer projects. More than 2,400 employees shared pictures and posts with colleague’s companywide about their volunteer experiences. "This level of scale and involvement could not have been achieved through email or any other traditional communication channels," says Arora. After launching Yammer, Aon quickly grew its user base from 2,000 to 40,000. The company now has 550 active Yammer groups and more than 51,000 users, and it plans to continue using Yammer to broadcast key business announcements and to drive results for clients, including the company-wide Global Service Day and Empower Results Day. With a connected workforce and organization wide knowledge-sharing, it’s not just the employees who win—Aon’s clients benefit as well. "It’s remarkable how Office 365 can help unlock productivity in an organization, and we have only scratched the surface here," says Arora. The post At Aon, collaboration is key appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services team. It’s here! Today is the worldwide release of Office 2016 for Windows. This marks a milestone in delivering new value for Office 365 subscribers with a focus on collaboration, apps that work for you, a perfect pairing with Windows 10, and security features businesses will love. It also marks a new model for delivery, where subscribers can expect to get more frequent updates with new features and improvements. Along with Office 2016 for Windows, today we are also releasing Office 2016 for Mac as a one-time purchase option, along with several new and enhanced Office 365 services. The new Office—takes the work out of working together Collaboration is the way we get things done in the workplace, but the process itself can be complex and frustrating. It shouldn’t have to be. We set out to make working together easier and more impactful by building a suite of integrated apps and services that removes barriers and empowers teams to do and achieve more. Office has always been the go-to tool for helping individuals do their best work—whether for professional documents, powerful analyses or school presentations. People often start and end their work in Office, but there is often a messy middle that involves a lot of discussion—in person, by phone or via various tools—as well as multiple (sometimes conflicting) inputs. Today we are delivering a set of experiences that is built for making teamwork seamless. We have had real-time co-authoring in all of our web apps since 2013. We are now taking it to the next level by building it directly into our native apps. With this release, we’re making co-authoring in Word real-time, which lets you see what others are writing immediately, as it happens. We’re committed to expanding real-time co-authoring to each of our native apps and you should expect to see more over time. Skype for Business is now available in the client apps, allowing you to IM, screen share, talk or video chat right in your docs. This same experience will be coming to Office Online later this fall. Skype for Business also has faster screen sharing and now adds the option to start a real-time co-authoring session from any conversation or meeting. Keep teams connected with Office 365 Groups, now available as part of Outlook 2016 and in a new Outlook Groups app on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Office 365 Groups allows individuals to easily create public or private teams. Each group includes a shared inbox, calendar, cloud storage for group files, and a shared OneNote notebook to keep the team productive. Office 365 Planner helps teams organize their work, with the ability to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, set due dates and update status. Planner’s visual dashboards and email notifications help keep everyone informed on the overall progress of their initiative. Planner will be available in preview, to Office 365 First Release customers, starting next quarter. Originally unveiled earlier this year, GigJam is today available in private preview and will become part of Office 365 in 2016. GigJam is an unprecedented new way for teams to accomplish tasks and transform business processes by breaking down the barriers between devices, apps and people. Works for you In today’s workplace, we have too many apps, devices and tools—we just don’t have enough time. Office is built to cut through the complexity and help you get things done quickly. It gets work done for you. Some highlights: Outlook 2016 provides the smartest inbox yet, delivering lightning fast search, removing low priority mail automatically and making sure everyone on the To: line has the right access to modern, cloud-based attachments from OneDrive. We also have significant new updates to OneDrive for Business coming later this month across sync, browser, mobile, IT control and developer experiences. The highlight is the preview of the next generation sync client for Windows and Mac, offering improved reliability and selective sync, as well as increased file size and volume limits. Tell Me helps you easily and quickly find the right Office feature or command, and Smart Lookup brings insights from the web right into your documents. Previously available only in Office Online, Tell Me and Smart Lookup are now available across the Office 2016 client apps. Excel 2016 now includes integrated publishing to Power BI and new modern chart-types to help you make the most of your data. The cloud-powered most recently used documents list allows you to pick up right where you left off in seconds, because it travels with you across your devices whether working in Office Online, the mobile apps or in the 2016 client apps. Perfect with Windows 10 While we have made a lot of progress on delivering Office cross-platform and remain committed to this strategy, we see Windows as being "home" for Office. Together, Office 365 and Windows 10 are the most complete solution for getting things done. With Windows Hello, you can sign in to your PC and Office 365 with a simple look or a touch—no need to type a password anymore. In the coming months, Cortana will get even smarter and more useful by gathering intelligence on Office 365 through Outlook 2016 support. With the Office Mobile apps and Continuum on Windows phones, your phone can act as a desktop, and you can project, create or edit your presentation or sales budget from your phone to a monitor while using the same phone to take notes with the OneNote app. Sway on Windows 10 was released in early August, and customers love it! It has received a 4.6/5 app store ranking, with customers calling it "funtastic," "brilliant" and "elegant." People love Sway’s simple and intuitive yet powerful approach to next-generation digital storytelling. With Sway, you provide the content, and Sway creates beautiful, shareable, interactive stories that look great on any screen. Our Office Mobile apps on Windows 10 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) have also received great reception and 4+ app store rankings. Customers say they are touch-friendly, fast and easy to use—making them wonderful for on-the-go-productivity. For the enterprise Office 2016 apps with Office 365 provide the most secure Office yet. We are adding built-in Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to significantly reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data by giving IT admins tools to centrally create, manage and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing. Multifactor Authentication ensures secure access to content anywhere when employees are away from the corporate network. We are also adding Information Rights Management to Visio. Then, later this year, we will be enabling Enterprise Data Protection (EDP) in Windows 10, with support in Office Mobile, which allows more secure corporate content sharing across corporate managed apps and network/cloud locations, preventing inadvertent content sharing outside corporate boundaries. We will be following up with EDP for Office on Windows desktop in early 2016. Some of our favorite enterprise apps—Visio and Project—have been updated as well. With Visio 2016, customers can get started quickly with diagramming using starter diagrams and contextual tips. Bringing process models, manufacturing plant or IT architecture to life is now only one step away. With Project 2016, customers can streamline resource engagement processes, manage resource pools through visual heat maps, benefit from multiple timelines, and create custom experiences in Project desktop through write-back capabilities for add-ins. We are also making deployment easier and have a lot of other new capabilities to help IT professionals, as announced in our blog to IT admins two weeks ago. Office 2016 for Mac In July, we released Office 2016 for Mac to our Office 365 customers. The new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote are a significant step forward and provide the best of both worlds for Mac users—a familiar Office experience paired with the best of the Mac platform. The level of engagement and excitement about this Office for Mac release has surpassed our expectations. As promised in July, today Office 2016 for Mac will also be available as a one-time purchase. Ongoing Office 365 customer value Whew—that was a lot! With this release, we’re also shifting the cadence of Office on Windows to feel much more like the cadence we have on the Office mobile and web apps, which release every month with new value. So, going forward, Office 365 customers will now enjoy new features and capabilities delivered continuously in the Office desktop applications as part of their subscription. It’s a new day for our desktop apps. And as a bit of a teaser, here are some examples of the types of new features and benefits Office 365 customers will see: Built for teamwork—We’re committed to rich co-authoring and collaboration across our native clients, starting in Word 2016, with other big advances in collaboration coming throughout the year. By the end of 2015, we’ll introduce Office 365 Groups insights and discovery in Office Delve. In addition, we will have a new generation of personal work analytics in Office Delve that will help individuals, teams and organizations to be more effective at work by understanding their reach and impact, time allocation and network. Works for you—For those of you who are excited about our new charts and forecasting, we will be delivering even more new charts, formulas, connectors and other Excel capabilities throughout the year. (If you’re interested in telling us which charts and charting features you’d like to see first, we have a survey going on our Excel Facebook page right now!). We also have some very exciting developments in the pipeline for PowerPoint that will make it easier to design and deliver presentations to wow and engage your audience. Perfect on Windows 10—We are especially excited about how even more valuable your personal assistant Cortana can be when she has insights from Office. This will start to allow Cortana to unlock helpful scenarios, like retrieving your documents, preparing for meetings and more. Get started We want to thank all of our Preview customers who have been with us since as early as February, trying out the new apps, giving us feedback, and helping to shape the final product. Your feedback has been invaluable, and we thank you for helping make the best Office yet. We hope you are excited as we are about the new Office. Buy it, try it or learn more—but please keep your feedback coming! Are you ready to purchase? Buy Office 365 to get the new 2016 apps. Are you an existing Office 365 customer who is ready to upgrade? Go here for instructions on how to upgrade to Office 2016 for home, or here for business customers. Do you want to learn more? Go to office.com/2016. —Kirk Koenigsbauer The post The new Office is here appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last year, we introduced a new cross-suite service for Office 365 commercial and education customers called Office 365 Groups, which enables people to create public or private groups. The first apps to take advantage of the Office 365 Groups service include Outlook, OneDrive for Business, OneNote, Skype for Business, Power BI and Dynamics CRM. Yammer, Delve and Planner will also soon take advantage of this service. Along with today’s launch of Office 2016, we’re introducing Groups in Outlook 2016 and a new mobile app called Outlook Groups. These new capabilities offer a better way to get work done with others and offer a number of benefits compared to traditional distribution lists. In Outlook 2016, creating a group is easy and new colleagues can also join existing groups and quickly get up to speed. Each member of a group can participate in conversations, schedule meetings, share files and notes and even initiate a Skype for Business voice and video call for urgent real-time decisions. Learn more about Outlook 2016 and its new Groups features here. With the new Outlook Groups mobile app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, you can now engage with your group on your phone while on the go—continue conversations, view files, @mention colleagues and even discover other relevant groups. You can learn more about the Outlook Groups app here—we’d love to hear what you think, so please submit a review. Group conversations in Outlook 2016 and in the Outlook Groups mobile app. If your organization already has Office 365, download Office 2016 to get the newest version of Outlook for your Windows PC, and download the Outlook Groups app on your phone today. Please keep your input coming as we continue to help teams work more effectively together across Office 365 and beyond. —Christophe Fiessinger, senior product manager for the Office 365 team, @cfiessinger Frequently asked questions Q. What are the systems requirements for Outlook 2016? A. Outlook 2016 supports PCs or Windows tablets running Windows 7 or higher. View the Office system requirements for more information. Q. What is the minimum requirement for installing Outlook Groups on my phone? A. Outlook Groups requires an Office 365 work or school account. We’ve listed the minimum requirements across Windows Phone, iOS and Android here, as well as the mobile app frequently asked questions. Q. When will Delve and Yammer integrate with the Office 365 Groups service? A. By the end of 2015, we’ll introduce Office 365 Groups insights and discovery in Delve. We are targeting the Office 365 Groups and Yammer integration to be available during the first half of 2016, as mentioned in this post last May. For more information on our roadmap, please visit Office 365 Roadmap and the Office Blogs. Q. Why didn’t we call the mobile app "Office 365 Groups?" A. Office 365 Groups is a cross-suite service enabling individuals to easily create public or private groups. Individual apps such as Outlook Groups will take advantage of the Office 365 Groups service and deliver new team collaboration experiences. Q. Where can I go to learn more about these Office 365 Groups updates? A. If you’d like to learn more about Office 365 Groups in Outlook and the new mobile app, join our YamJam. On Thursday, October 1, the Office 365 Network will host a YamJam from 9-10 a.m. PDT / 8-9 p.m. GST. Members of the product engineering team will be on hand to answer your questions. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a "TweetJam" on Twitter or an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. It provides the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of internal Microsoft experts on a particular topic. Here’s how to participate: Request access to the Office 365 Network. All requests will be approved as quickly as possible. Join the Office 365 Groups group. You can find it by using the Browse Groups function or through the search bar. Log in at 9-10 a.m. PDT / 8-9 p.m. GST on Thursday, October 1 to ask questions, follow the discussions and connect with Microsoft team members. The post Introducing availability of Office 365 Groups in Outlook 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

We are excited to introduce a brand new experience in Office 365—Office 365 Planner, which offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively. Teamwork organized One of the most valuable aspects of Planner is that it helps teams organize their work visually. Each plan has its own Board, and within each Board, each work item or task is represented by a Card that can have due dates, attachments, categories and conversations associated with it. Team members receive an email notification whenever they are assigned a new Card or added to a conversation. Every Card can have documents (or pictures) attached that automatically get rich image previews, so it is easy to understand what the Card is about at a glance. In addition, Cards can be organized on the Board into customizable columns called Buckets, which can be prioritized and tagged with colored labels. Planner also gives you views to keep your work on track. The Hub view lets you track overall progress across all plans, while the "My tasks" view lets you filter down to see just what you need to do across every plan. In addition, the "Charts" view includes interactive charts for visualizing people’s progress against deadlines. Click a red segment on the histogram to quickly see which aspects of a plan are behind schedule and use the Board to rebalance work across the team. With Planner, everyone is always on the same page. A single glance of the Charts view is all it takes to know where things stand. Works great with all of Office 365 As a member of the Office 365 suite, Planner is integrated with other Office 365 services, such as Office 365 Groups, so all of the conversations in Planner are available in Outlook 2016, Outlook on the Web and the Outlook Groups Mobile Apps. Planner is also an ideal way to organize your Office files. Attach your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to a Card and start editing them right away. When a document is attached to a Card, it is stored in a SharePoint Online document library, allowing you to work on them offline. Planner in education Plans are also a great way to organize schoolwork. Every plan has a OneNote Notebook created for it, which means you can organize your coursework and share all your notes with classmates. Enterprise ready, globally available We have worked hard to ensure Planner lives up to the rigorous requirements of Microsoft’s largest enterprise customers. Technical features such as multiple redundant backups, virtually instantaneous recovery and HIPAA, FISMA, ISO27001 and EU Model compliance ensure that your data is safe, secure and always available. To make certain everyone has fast access to Planner, the service is deployed in multiple datacenters around the globe, so everyone has their work close at hand. You can visit Office 365 Trust Center to learn more. Planner availability Office 365 Planner will be available in preview to Office 365 First Release customers starting next quarter, so keep an eye on your Office 365 app switcher and give us your feedback after you make your first plan! Sign up for Office 365 today! Enjoy! —Howard Crow, principal group program manager on the Planner Engineering team Frequently asked questions Q. Which Office 365 plans are eligible for Planner preview? A. The following plans are eligible for Planner preview: Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E4, Office 365 Education, Office 365 Education E3, Office 365 Education E4, Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium. When generally available, Planner will be included in several additional Office 365 plans. Stay tuned for more details. Q. How can customers join the preview program for Planner? A. Starting Q4 of this calendar year, Planner will be available in preview to Office 365 First Release customers. Setup instructions will be sent to eligible Office 365 administrators once the preview is available for use within their tenant. The post Introducing Office 365 Planner appeared first on Office Blogs.

The announcement today about the brand new Office 2016 desktop apps and admin resources is exciting—but what does it mean for admins in small to midsized businesses (SMBs)? Deploying the right technology can mean the difference between surviving and thriving for an SMB, but coordinating the timing of the deployment can also impact your day-to-day operation. This post provides you with what to expect now that Office 2016 has been released and what you need to do. The Office 2016 release for Office 365 introduces admins to a new model for managing and deploying regular updates. This model is primarily for larger enterprise customers and reduces the frequency of updates to every four months. For SMBs running Office 365 Business (the version of Office that comes with some Office 365 plans such as Business Premium), you will continue to receive regular monthly updates—nothing changes in your update frequency! Shortly, you will receive an email announcing the new Office 2016 release for Office 365, which will offer you two choices: Update when it’s convenient for you. Simply sign in to your Office 365 Admin Center and select Install to manually download the new Office 2016 desktop apps. Let Microsoft do it for you with automatic upgrades scheduled to roll out over the next several weeks. And when you’re ready to announce the new Office 2016 to your organization, we’ve also included a link in the announcement email to a template you can use to inform your users of the exciting features in store for them. In the meantime, take a few minutes to learn more about what’s new in the Office 2016 release of Office 365. The post Small and midsized businesses—get ready for Office 2016! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s Office 365 post was written by Phil Ventimiglia, chief innovation officer at Georgia State University. More often than not, "innovation" in a university setting is thought of as breakthroughs in scientific research—but in my case, it applies to how we deliver higher education as a whole. At Georgia State University, we’re taking a fresh look at how to reach today’s students and give them the most valuable education we can. We are proud to serve an extremely diverse student body that comes to us with a wide range of knowledge and experiences. Take technology, for example. Some incoming students have been using specialized technologies for years, and others’ experience is limited to smartphone apps. We aim to not just bridge that technology gap, but also to prepare our students—all of our students—for the working world that they’ll enter after leaving the university. I arrived at Georgia State recently, after several once-in-a-lifetime career opportunities in the private sector, with much of my time spent working in Fortune 500 companies. As chief innovation officer, I want to empower the education sector with the same sorts of technological advantages I saw in the business world. My role includes figuring out what 21st-century education looks like and establishing Georgia State at the forefront of that movement. We’ve already taken some exciting steps. One of our biggest initiatives focuses on digital literacy—everything from increasing students’ comfort with using computers to teaching them how to create and maintain a blog. We want our students to be a step ahead when they enter the workforce, and that effort requires an understanding of how people work together today and the tools that support effective collaboration. That’s one of the reasons I was so pleased to see that the university had already adopted Microsoft Office 365. Getting accustomed to Office 365 will serve our students well, not just when it comes to learning how to leverage technology for their course work, but in their future careers. Being savvy across the spectrum of Microsoft productivity technologies is key preparation for the working world, because they’re the tools of choice for the majority of employers. We know we have a choice in productivity solutions, and we continue to choose Microsoft. I believe Office 365 is a best-in-class set of cloud-based capabilities that just keeps improving. Clearly Microsoft has already made a significant investment in Office 365, and the platform continues to evolve to give us useful new features. No other productivity software has the same enterprise-grade pedigree, and it’s important to give our students, faculty and staff high-quality technologies. The university’s fledgling Digital Literacy Innovation Fellowship program challenges our faculty to dream up ways to put new technologies to use in the classroom to optimize learning opportunities. They’ve immediately responded with creative ideas that include using Office 365 components to help us reach students and amplify those "learning moments." For instance, we’re going to launch Skype for Business as a platform for virtual classroom discussions and virtual office hours, so that students have greater access to professors in the moments that they need help most, without inconveniencing those professors. In addition, some of our research teams now use Microsoft SharePoint Online to collaborate more closely with colleagues at other institutions to further their collective goals, and our math department is looking to use Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 to replace graphing calculators with modern capabilities that get to the heart of analytics. I believe that collaboration will be the foundation of the future of education, and we are poised to make great strides because of the opportunities to work more efficiently and effectively that we get from Office 365. To be successful today, higher education must bridge many gaps—not just the digital divide, but also the gulf between how students work and what employers expect. We’re confident that we’re giving our students the experience that they need to move forward in their careers of choice. Office 365 is a critical component of that preparation. For more information, read the full story at Why Microsoft and visit Phil’s blog at the Office of the Chief Innovation Officer. The post Preparing tomorrow’s workforce in the classrooms of today appeared first on Office Blogs.

We all know that organizing group meetings can be tricky—especially when you’re on the move. It’s difficult to coordinate multiple people’s schedules on a small screen. As a result, many of us delay scheduling meetings until we’re back at our desks. Today we’re launching a new app through the Microsoft Garage that greatly simplifies this process. Say hello to Invite—the easiest way to organize meetings on the go. Invite is available for iPhones in the U.S. and Canada, and coming soon to Windows Phone and Android phones. The app works best for people with Office 365 business and school subscriptions, but also works great with any email—Outlook.com, Gmail and Yahoo Mail included. The way Invite works is simple: You suggest times that work for you, and then invite attendees. You can use the app to invite anyone with an email address—even if they are outside your organization. They select all the times they can attend. Once you’ve invited your attendees, they receive an email or an app notification if they have Invite installed. Attendees can then choose on the times that work for them, from the app itself or from a browser. They can also see what options work best for other attendees. Once everyone has responded, you pick the time that works best. You choose a final date and time whenever you’re ready. Just pick the time that most people can make the meeting and tap Send Calendar Invites to get it on their calendars. Invite is designed to overcome the biggest obstacle when scheduling meetings—not being able to see the calendars of attendees outside your organization. As a result, your proposed meeting can be repeatedly declined until you find a time that works. Invite simplifies this by letting organizers suggest multiple times that work for them and attendees can pick from those suggestions. Invite also shows everyone what times other people have said are good for them. Also, certain meetings on your attendee’s calendars could be easily moved if something more important were to come up—but only they know which ones. To accommodate this, Invite lets attendees pick times that work for them, even if that means moving one of their own meetings. Yep, doing your expenses 30 minutes later isn’t going to hurt anyone. With Invite you won’t have to worry about whether attendees are inside or outside your organization, what platform they’re on, or whether they have less important meetings squatting on valuable calendar space. Say hello to a simple mobile app that lets you find meeting times that work for everyone from anywhere. Invite. Accept. Done. Invite is available for iPhones in the U.S. and Canada. We’re shipping through The Garage with an intent to learn. We’re looking for some very passionate people who are hoping to put this project through its paces and tell us what they think. Love it? Think we could improve? We’re listening to your feedback, which you can submit under the Help section of the app. You can also check out more productivity apps at the Microsoft Garage. This app is brought to you by the same team that was responsible for Microsoft Send and Microsoft Tossup. Frequently asked questions Q. How does Invite work with an Office 365 account? A. Invite can be used with any email address, but works best with an Office 365 business or school subscription. When you sign in using an Office 365 business or school subscription, a list of your frequent contacts are displayed—so you can invite relevant people quickly and easily. Attendees will also see everything as coming directly from you, and will be able to directly accept or decline the meeting like a regular Exchange meeting request. If you send invites from a non-Office 365 account, your attendees will instead receive invites in the form of an email containing a .ics file. Q. Do the meetings scheduled from Invite show up in my calendar or somewhere separate? A. They will show up in the calendar of the account you have signed in with. Q. How is this different than the "Send Availability" feature included in Outlook on iOS and Android? A. The "Send Availability" feature in Outlook is great for sharing your calendar availability to organize meetings. Invite, however, provides additional automation to this process. You suggest times that work, attendees choose the times that work for them, and their responses are automatically summarized for you. No need to cross-reference potential meeting times yourself. Q. Does the Invite app show calendar availability (free/busy) for all event participants who are inside your organization? A. No. Invite allows users to suggest times that work for them, rather than relying on what’s advertised in calendar free/busy availability. The post Invite—the easiest way to organize meetings on the go appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s Microsoft Office post was written by Phillip R. Kennedy, director of Information Technology at Pandora, a global jewelry manufacturer and retailer. At Pandora, our goal is to design and sell signature jewelry that delights the women who wear it. Our pieces are sold in more than 9,500 stores in over 90 countries; sometimes our end customers shop at our corporate-owned stores or franchises, while others seek out Pandora jewelry at other retailers. As a company, Pandora is growing—by leaps and bounds, which is a testament to the beauty and quality of the products we make. To smooth the way, we’ve taken a fresh look at how we operate. It isn’t enough anymore for our different offices to use whatever supplies, processes and technologies they have at hand. Instead, we need to grow as a single cohesive organization, putting the right support in place for our workforce so that employees worldwide stay efficient and effective in their daily work lives. Our efforts to help employees design and market our jewelry include providing the latest technology solutions companywide. We’re using some of our new solutions to help us make sweeping changes to the way we interact with our franchisees and to transform the shopping experience for our customers. Other technology upgrades are all about incremental efficiencies. We adopted Microsoft Office 365 a while back and find ourselves constantly benefitting from the continuing innovations that Microsoft adds. For example, we recently gave Microsoft Office 2016 a try so we could take advantage of lots of time-savers. Our geographically dispersed employees have already become enthusiastic users of the new Office Groups features, which give them an easy, organized way to share conversations, calendars and notebooks. Office Groups are easy for anyone to create, and they’re particularly effective when used in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook, because everything related to a team project shows up right within Outlook, which is where I spend most of my day. It’s even more powerful when we add in Microsoft OneNote, which may be the best app ever developed. Having a single place to put anything you think of (notes, images, jewelry design sketches, production schedules, logistical information), making it searchable, and being able to access it from any device and share access with others is pretty amazing. In fact, one of our executives used to be a strictly paper guy. He had special notebooks that he carried around everywhere. When we showed him OneNote, he immediately switched over completely, and now he uses it for everything, making his notes available to the executive team, who comment on them electronically. It’s not just our executives who’re making faster decisions and moving the company forward. Pandora employees everywhere now use Skype for Business for instant messaging, telephony, presence and video calls. Our ability to interact visually during conference calls makes a huge difference to our communication—it’s important to be able to see facial expressions and reactions so we know if we’re connecting and understanding one another, which is especially critical because it helps bring together our teams around the world. We share desktops during these calls, which improves the teamwork because we can share our work, whether it’s a design for a new bracelet, a marketing campaign or an IT schematic. Plus, we’re saving on long-distance costs and reducing travel expenses. I’m convinced that we wouldn’t be as successful operating as a unified global company if our distributed teams couldn’t collaborate using capabilities like Office Groups and Skype for Business Online. Employees use simplified sharing features to help keep track of document versions and work faster. For example, when I want to send out a document for review, I use cloud-based attachments, which means that my colleagues receive a link to the document in Microsoft OneDrive for Business. They don’t have copies of project plans or spreadsheets cluttering up their Inboxes. And when they click on the link, it takes them to the latest version of my document, so I can keep modifying the document even after I send the email. I also appreciate the cross-platform functionality, touch capabilities and digital ink, because I can stay productive even when I don’t have a mouse and keyboard. I use a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, a MacBook Pro and an iPad. Office 2016 provides a seamless experience as I edit, save and share documents on any device. We’re getting so much value from Office 365 and the new Office 2016 suite, but I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do for us. Already, we’re connecting teams, streamlining processes for increased productivity, and working more efficiently from everywhere across a range of devices. But I’m looking forward to exploring Sway for more polished reports and presentations and Outlook Clutter to help keep me focused and prioritize my email. With so many ways to save time and gain insight, we’re better able to keep pace with the demands of our growing business. That’s good news for jewelry lovers everywhere! —Phillip R. Kennedy The post Pandora opens up pathways to teamwork and productivity using the new Office appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Naomi Gebremeskel Haile, a student at Renton Prep, with an introduction from one of her teachers, Dr. Michelle Zimmerman. This is the story of a girl with a strong identity in two worlds: Ethiopia and the United States. I have had the opportunity to loop with a cohort of students for four years and have been able to watch Naomi grow, just as she and her classmates have helped me grow as an educator and researcher. I’ve learned how essential it is to train students to understand learning design (see 21 CLD and Teaching Kids Learning Design and Assessment), standards and content progression so they can now help design and articulate reasons for the direction of their learning. One of my goals is to help students learn to think on their own, use tools, resources and alternate perspectives to push that thinking, and create original works that can challenge the thinking of their peers and adults. I want them to be able to transfer their learning and help others learn from their own experiences. That goal is what led to a redesign of the structure of our school so that middle and high school students intentionally merge content in meaningful ways and demonstrate their understanding through projects and in teaching others, including younger students. Although our middle school and up has been 1:1 with laptops since 2009, this is our first year with Surface’s for grades 3-10. Naomi’s work gives a glimpse into real-time co-authoring and collaboration across Office 365, Word, OneNote, Sway, Office Mix, Docs.com, Movie Maker, Community Clips, Skype and Snip working together to complete Project Based Learning. It shows what is possible with the personal and global connections to experiential and blended learning at our school. As educators, we all have goals for our students. We have goals for our own teaching career. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in teaching and assessing and worrying about keeping up with the latest technology. When we take the time to listen to the individual stories of the kids in our classes, we have the chance to help them create a powerful story. With access to technology, we can help them amplify that story and let their voice be heard. The rest of this post was written by Naomi. When asked how she felt about authoring this blog, she said, "It made me feel important." —Dr. Michelle Zimmerman Hello educators of the world! I’m Naomi, a 14-year-old 9th-grade student living in Seattle, Washington, USA. My mother and father are both Ethiopian immigrants who have had struggles with their education. My mother never had a chance to learn anything past the 5th grade. And although my father was able to attain his bachelor degree, he had to stop going to school after 6th grade because of the war going on around him. He then resumed his schooling in Ethiopia many years later, as a 21-year-old. Education is equally important to both of them, as they want me to have access to more opportunities than they did at my age. For me personally, knowing where I’m from helps give me guidance towards what path to take. Something that my uncle recently told me that really stuck with me is that "culture is everything" and that it defines who you are, but not in a negative way. Identifying and embracing your culture builds community, a place for you to thrive with the support and counsel of people who want the best for you. In a traditional classroom, there may not be room to investigate, create and explore culture, and express that part of me back to my classmates, or anyone else in this lonely, lonely world. That’s where OneNote comes in. OneNote is a computer program that serves as a notebook, but also as a platform for creativity, collaboration and communication between students, teachers, and parents. My class recently went on a field trip to see Seattle Art Museum’s "Disguise: Masks and Global African Art" exhibit. We are now working on a project where we connect things from the museum that relate to all of our in-school subjects. Also, we picked themes to focus on and relate to things we saw at the exhibit. Click here to see my Sway and my collaborator Tre’Shawn’s Sway. Our team’s Office Mix is embedded within each Sway. If you’re wondering what it looks like for us to collaborate while we’re using these tools, watch the Office Mix. I used the screen recording feature to show glimpses into real-time co-authoring: These tools allow me to express and create while still meeting the school’s requirements, as well as covering core content like math, science, history and my fourth language. See an example of what inking in OneNote looks like while I’m learning Spanish. OneNote is accessible through a variety of devices, including non-Windows products (iPhones, Android tablets, etc.). It differs from a notebook or a textbook because it allows for teachers to access their students’ work, as well as provide direct feedback and insert homework assignments, important documents and notes for the whole class to see immediately. A OneNote page displaying in class notes, formatted by the teacher and completed by the student. It is also a platform for students to work on projects collaboratively while the teacher has complete access to everything in their students’ notebooks. This is also one of the factors that makes OneNote more effective than not using technology—you have access to whatever, whenever, so it gives you more control over your students’ work. For collaborative work, our teachers can see when we made additions or edits and can see our initials next to the work we contributed. In the screenshot below, you can see an example of this with "JF," "TT" and "AB," my classmates’ initials. Below the text there’s a hyperlink. When we copied and pasted text from the article in ABC-Clio’s Ancient History Database, OneNote automatically cited our source. A project completed collaboratively between students in OneNote’s Collaboration Space. This history project focused on great ancient civilizations of Africa, as background research for our projects focusing on the Seattle Art Museum exhibit that we went to. The Performance of Understanding (POU) Japan was a project that I did back in 7th grade, and it was inspired by our class’s field trip to the Seattle Art Museum to see the "Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion" exhibit. OneNote allowed us to create a portfolio filled with multiple connections to Japanese culture, history, literature, as well as the field trip. After researching all the topics that were Core Knowledge criteria, we entered our information in each of the given sections and created artifacts that showed everything we learned. I came up with the idea of writing haikus for each of the subjects, a type of poetry that originated in Japan. Watch the video that I made using Community Clips and Movie Maker. OneNote gives us the flexibility to build content in class from different perspectives. It gives us a place to communicate our ideas with others and to work collaboratively with fellow classmates. My parents wanted me to get the best education possible, which now translates into an education where I’m able to design how I learn and communicate from a global perspective—Africa, Japan and Latin America are all represented within this blog post—made possible by technology! The blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity, a dream that my parents had for me. —Naomi Gebremeskel Haile The post OneNote—a platform for creativity, collaboration and communication appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Richard diZerega talks to Rob Howard about the Office.js API updates in Office 2016 for Excel and Word add-ins. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP64_Office2016APIs.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates 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-OfficeUIFabric: 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 Show notes Office.js Docs GitHub repo Office.js Snippets Explorer GitHub repo 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 Rob Howard Rob Howard joined Microsoft in August of 2005 and currently works as a program manager on the Office Developer Platform team, where he works on the app models for Office clients, servers and services. His goal is to enable developers to build collaborative productivity applications more efficiently and effectively by leveraging the capabilities of Office, SharePoint, Exchange and a variety of other Office applications and services. In previous releases Rob worked on areas like the SharePoint app model, csom, sandboxed solutions, SharePoint solution deployment, the fab 40 and SharePoint Designer. Rob has a passion for collaborative applications because they can enhance individual and organizational productivity by ensuring that the people and information vital to completing a task are connected and readily available in the appropriate contexts. 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 064 on Office.js API updates in Office 2016—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

As you’ve read, the new Office is here and for developers, this is an exciting time! The ability to insert add-ins into your documents, call new Office.js APIS, launch task panes inside your Office clients and run commands directly from the ribbon increases the productivity of your entire team! Add-ins now work across Office 2016 running on Windows, Office Online in your browser, Office 2016 on the Mac (Outlook currently) and Office on the iPad. Office 2016 on Windows introduces some new extensibility features that will roll out over the other Office clients over time. Add-in commands Add-in commands provide ways to initiate specific add-in actions from the ribbon. This lets users access add-ins in a simple, intuitive and unobtrusive way. Because they offer increased functionality in a seamless manner, add-in commands allow developers to create more engaging scenarios and add-ins. Add-in commands are declared in the add-in manifest in a new node called VersionOverrides. This node ensures backward compatibility because, in an environment that doesn’t support VersionOverrides, existing add-ins will continue to function as they did without add-in commands. Check out Overview of add-in commands for mail and Create a manifest for add-in commands for details. The screenshot below shows add-in commands on the ribbon at the right. There is support for ribbon groups too as shown in this screenshot: Run JavaScript using add-in commands Add-in commands can also run JavaScript functions without further user input. In Outlook add-ins, you can perform actions such as track, remind me, print or for receiving more in-depth information from a service. Launch task pane commands You can use an add-in command button to launch a task pane to get more information from users. For example, the add-in may require changes to settings, or the completion of certain fields. For details, check out "What UX shapes exist for add-in commands?" Theming capabilities for add-ins You can use the new Theming APIs in your mail and task pane Office Add-ins to integrate your add-in with the Office theme. This widely requested feature allows your add-in to look and feel like the rest of the Office experience—regardless of the user’s preferences. To learn more, see Context.office Theme property. The recently announced Office UI Fabric takes advantage of this new API. Excel and Word Office.js functionality The new Excel and Word Office.js APIs provide a variety of Excel and Word specific functionality related to the documents being collaborated on. Examples include populating content controls in Word or inserting formatted charts in Excel and are a result of UserVoice feedback from Partners and developers worldwide submitted. We’ve been working on a Snippet Explorer for both Word and Excel to let you browse through code snippets for common scenarios and learn how the new Excel and Word APIs work. The example below highlights the Diet Tracker code sample that inserts rich charts using the Office.js APIs in Excel: This screenshot highlights a Statement of Work Builder code sample that inserts rich formatted content into a document using Office.js in Word: For more information on the new Word and Excel Office.js capabilities, read "Increase the productivity of users with enhanced Office.js APIs in Office 2016." My apps now are My add-ins Office 2016 has been updated to reflect the platform name change from "apps for Office" to "Office Add-ins." For details about the name change, see "New name for apps for Office and SharePoint: Office and SharePoint Add-ins." Our partners We continue to acquire more incredible partners in our Store. As mentioned in a previous blog post: Uber, PayPal, Evernote and Boomerang all have released add-ins that take advantage of these new development features. PayPal task pane add-in paying a person directly within Outlook. Boomerang task pane add-in inserting availability into the body of a mail. Evernote task pane add-in inserting content into the body of a mail. Uber task pane add-in setting a reminder for an Uber at a particular location and time in the appointment directly from Outlook. So what are you waiting for? Jump over to dev.office.com/getting-started/addins and try it out. —Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 team The post What’s new in Office 2016 for developers appeared first on Office Blogs.

Four months ago, we announced the acquisition of Wunderlist, the highly acclaimed to-do list app. Last week, we announced the preview of Office 365 Planner for lightweight project management, and today, we are thrilled to announce that we are acquiring several apps and add-ins for Project Online from our partners—Sensei Project Solutions, Inc. and Projectum ApS. Between Wunderlist, Office 365 Planner and Project Online, you now have tailored, cloud-based solutions to help you manage everything from simple tasks to the most advanced projects, programs and portfolios, anytime, anywhere, on any device. Our partners have been innovating for the mobile-first, cloud-first world and have created multiple solutions on top of Office 365. Like many of our other project and portfolio management (PPM) partners, Sensei Project Solutions, Inc. and Projectum ApS have fully embraced the Office and SharePoint Add-in model and have built cloud solutions that helped them win the Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Partner of the Year awards for years 2014 and 2015 respectively. We are so excited to see the innovations coming from our partner community and are thrilled to bring some of these solutions directly into the Project Online service. Taking Project Online mobile for the first time are the following app acquisitions: The Sensei Task Master™ app with versions for the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone platforms. You can use it to enter timesheets and update tasks statuses on the go. The Sensei Project Dashboard™ app for iPad. As a project manager, it helps you stay updated on all your projects. The Sensei Portfolio Dashboard app for both iPad and Project Online. These provide multiple PPM reports based on industry best practices, giving you visibility and insight into your portfolio of projects and resources. We have also acquired the Project Financials add-in and Project Snapshot add-in from Projectum ApS.  The Project Financials add-in allows you to work with time-phased cost data and can be used to manage project costs, benefits and forecasts. The Project Snapshot add-in allows project managers to create snapshots of all project level information such as budget, actual cost, KPIs, and more. We look forward to bringing these capabilities to our customers with Project Online. —Brett Brewer, general manager of the Project engineering team ___________________________________________________ Sensei Project Solutions, Inc., winner of the "2014 Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Partner of the Year," specializes in PPM deployments with Microsoft Project Online, Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Project. Projectum ApS, winner of the "2015 Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Partner of the Year," specializes in PPM deployments with Microsoft Project Online, Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Project.   The post Office 365—project and portfolio management (PPM) for the mobile-first, cloud-first world appeared first on Office Blogs.