Today, OneNote and Office Mix team up to talk about the work we are doing to integrate with all major Learning Management Systems (LMS) and the benefits this brings educators. We have three key announcements: OneNote and Office Mix are both officially certified to the IMS Global Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard. OneNote Class Notebook LTI is now in General Availability release. OneNote now automatically adds all students enrolled in the LMS course to the course’s OneNote Class Notebook. LMS integration with LTI In June, both Office Mix and OneNote Class Notebook announced LTI support. This means that both apps are easily integrated with all major LMS—including Canvas, Engrade, Blackboard, Haiku, Moodle, Brightspace, EDUonGo, edX, EdCast and Schoology. OneNote Class Notebook allows teachers to launch the OneNote Class Notebook app from their LMS course page, walk through the notebook creation process, and add the created notebook to their course—all without leaving their learning environment. We’ve seen OneNote Class Notebooks created with many LMS systems, including Canvas, Schoology, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Haiku and Moodle. Our customers have also been excited about the new integration. Setting up OneNote Class Notebook with Canvas Setting up OneNote Class Notebook with Schoology Setting up OneNote Class Notebook with Blackboard Setting up OneNote Class Notebook with Brightspace Setting up OneNote Class Notebook with Haiku Learning Setting up OneNote Class Notebook with Moodle instructions coming soon! Here’s what a customer who has been using Canvas with OneNote Class Notebooks had to say: "OneNote Class Notebooks are one of the few tools that have had a substantial impact on the way we teach. One of the others was Canvas. To have these working seamlessly together is outstanding. It is an order of magnitude easier to build a OneNote Class Notebook through Canvas than it was a year ago. We have teachers spinning up a canvas course and building notebooks for clubs, advisory, athletic teams and a variety of scenarios we didn’t anticipate."  —Jonathan Briggs, director of technology at the Eastside Preparatory School. Office Mix adds functionality to PowerPoint that enables educators and students to record audio or video of themselves presenting, ink on their slides as they present them, insert quizzes, polls, online videos and more. Office Mix also enables users to do full screen capture and record anything on their PCs. Via the LTI connection, educators can embed interactive mixes created by themselves or by the community within their LMS as content or assignments. Office Mix seamlessly authenticates students, and their grades are automatically passed back to the LMS grade book. IMS certification We are also delighted to announce that both apps are officially IMS Global Certified. OneNote Class Notebook is compliant to version 1.0 of the standard, and Office Mix complies to version 1.1. Microsoft is a member of IMS Global Learning Consortium and we are committed to supporting open standards and interoperability. OneNote Class Notebook LTI now in General Availability release The OneNote team would also like to share that the OneNote Class Notebook LTI app is now in General Availability release. All of our existing Preview customers will be able to continue using OneNote Class Notebook LTI as normal. All app configurations will remain in place, and course notebooks will be linked as before. Enrolled students are automatically added to the OneNote Class Notebook Along with our general release, OneNote is now able to provide a new feature that will save teachers valuable time and effort. LMS integration allows students who are enrolled in a course to add themselves to the OneNote Class Notebook simply by clicking the LTI link. Teachers no longer have to type the names of all of their students during notebook creation. By simply leaving the default option to "Automatically add my students when they access this notebook from the LMS link," they can be confident that all enrolled students (and only enrolled students) are able to access the notebook. As well as saving time and hassle, this gives teachers much more flexibility—if a student is added to the LMS course roster later in the semester, the teacher does not have to add them separately to the notebook too. "Our teachers were hoping to be able to create Class Notebooks without typing in student names and keep the Notebooks tightly integrated with our LMS. By combining the power of Class Notebooks with the robust LMS features they are accustomed to using, our students are given one access point for all of their work. This is exactly the integration we have been hoping to achieve!" —Rebecca Keene, One-to-One program specialist for the Kent school district To learn more about OneNote Class Notebook and Office Mix LTI, please visit www.onenote.com/lti and mix.office.com/lti. —The OneNote and Office Mix teams The post OneNote Class Notebook and Office Mix announce new LMS integration features appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s Office 365 post was written by Bryan Ackermann, senior vice president and chief information officer at Korn Ferry, a global leadership recruitment and organizational advisory firm. Korn Ferry is in the people business. Our job is not only to make sure that our clients have the right talent in place, but to cultivate that talent at every stage by helping clients attract qualified executives, providing expert consulting services to develop skills from within, or delivering outsourcing services on a global scale. Our work demands close collaboration, both internally and with our clients and job candidates. With 85 offices around the world and employees continuously on the go, we need to stay productive from anywhere. This environment requires balancing flexible and mobile access to colleagues and data with the protection of confidential information of millions of the world’s most influential people. With multiple clients who operate in regulated industries, our firm also places a high priority on maintaining their levels of compliance. Yet there’s long been a conflict in the business world between productivity and security, especially for multinational organizations with mobile employees. Strict security constraints might protect information but could hamper the productivity of a workforce. And readily available access to data can promote employee productivity while simultaneously exposing the data to greater risk. Additional security measures could be put in place, but often at the risk of hindering collaboration. Fortunately, our firm has found a way to address that disconnect. We’re making a huge leap forward in our ability to support global teamwork, without sacrificing security and data privacy, by adopting the Microsoft Office 365 suite of cloud productivity services. Office 365 meets both our mobility needs and our security standards. We’re also excited about the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, particularly Intune for mobile device management. By gaining these capabilities, we’re no longer choosing between mobility and security—now we have both. We’re helping employees worldwide make daily process improvements, work more efficiently and effectively from anywhere at any time, and dramatically improve their accessibility to each other and to clients, all without compromising on our security standards. Our partner, CloudScale International, is providing valuable guidance as we implement Office 365 components, such as Microsoft OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. These will replace our file server infrastructure and make it easier for colleagues to essentially reach across oceans to access the documents and data that they need. We’re utilizing Office 365 to work more closely with our clients as well. We offer tailored learning solutions to help clients develop strong internal leaders. As part of that offering, we’ve created a platform that makes it easy for leadership-development participants to do their coursework, submit quizzes and interact with Korn Ferry instructors, all using SharePoint Online. We also plan to use it to centralize and streamline the onboarding process for our outsourcing business area, which scales up and down considerably with each client engagement. And we’ll use the flexibility of SharePoint Online to automatically set up a site that’s tied to a client engagement. This single collaboration point means stakeholders can find relevant information throughout an engagement, and the information will automatically be retired once the engagement has ended. One of the main drivers for adopting Office 365 was our rapid growth and the need for technology solutions that could ease the acquisition process and reduce maintenance burdens. We’re using a combination of Click-to-Run and Microsoft System Center to automatically deploy Office 365 and we’re expanding our use of Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus to ensure that employees always have the latest software. I can’t tell you how excited it makes my team to know that we’ll automatically have access to the latest Office tools and features. When you’re in the people business as we are, the ability to meet growth, security and mobility demands—without compromising any of them—is critical for your company’s health and well-being. We’re striking that perfect balance with Office 365. —Bryan Ackermann The post Promoting growth, mobility and close collaboration without compromise appeared first on Office Blogs.

In collaboration with Microsoft and HarperCollins, Roads & Kingdoms—an independent media company backed by Anthony Bourdain—has reimagined the travel guide by inviting you to go beyond the pages of their new book, "Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels through Japan’s Food Culture," with an immersive web experience built with the Microsoft Office apps: Sway and OneNote. Get inspired with all seven robust digital travel collections, built using Sway, and get going with the OneNote city guides to customize and capture your story while on the ground in Japan—all available today, free at RoadsandKingdoms.com/Japan. We even included a Sway Collection titled "R&K Japan Guide: How to Use & the Basics" to help you fully appreciate these digital travel guides here. First, experience the story of Japan with the inspiring Sway Collections that include beautiful photography and maps. Next, with the mobile OneNote app, import the collection of must-do sightseeing lists from Bourdain and other experts in Japan for the seven most important culinary regions of the country: Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hokkaido, Fukuoka, Hiroshima and Kanazawa/Noto Peninsula. While food and drink is the focus of the Sway guidebooks, we also deliver indispensable travel information that make this digital guide the only one you need if you’re traveling to Japan. Once you’re on the ground in Japan, document your own experiences while following our paths with the mobile OneNote app. The Sway Collections and OneNote travel guides are all available for download today at RoadsandKingdoms.com/Japan. How it started The idea for the project began when HarperCollins and Bourdain sat down with Roads & Kingdoms co-founders Matt Goulding and Nathan Thornburgh to figure out how to reinvent one of the dustiest shelves of any bookstore—the travel guide section. Read their recounting of the birth of the idea here. "The guidebook genre has long been in need of a reboot," says Goulding. "We see the way forward as a two-part experience: a deep, narrative-driven book to give readers the inspiration they need to travel to Japan, plus a detail-rich digital guide to arm them with the information they need once they get there. Microsoft, with its variety of excellent digital platforms that fit perfectly into the food and travel space, is the perfect partner to bring that second part to life." The result is a transformation of the inspiration provided in the hardcover book to concrete information in the seven digital guides created using Sway and OneNote. "Rice, Noodle, Fish" is a literary narrative adventure through Japan, and the digital guides give travelers the chance to continue the story themselves. Even those who haven’t read "Rice, Noodle, Fish" will be inspired to create the trip of a lifetime using the more than 200 detailed reviews of restaurants, bars and hotels in each of the guides’ seven destinations: Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kanazawa, Fukuoka and Hokkaido. All of the tools that travelers need—maps, pricing, reviews, photos, hotel options—have been written by Goulding and Roads & Kingdoms researchers on the ground in Japan and are included in the digital guides. Bourdain even offered up his top picks for traveling and eating in Japan, along with his cinephile recommendations for the best movies to watch to get you prepared for the trip. There are additional original primers on the finer points of Japanese cuisine and etiquette from Bourdain and Roads & Kingdoms. Japan is a notably complex culture and destination. With the new digital guides, the traveler can not only eat where the locals know to eat, but can also navigate each meal with the ease and confidence of the locals themselves. "At Roads & Kingdoms, we believe that when it comes to travel, people want a deeper, more fully fleshed out experience," says Bourdain. "Ideally we’d like to provide the ability to hold a book in one’s hand, read at length about the places you’re thinking of going, the people you might encounter there, and the lesser known but fascinating aspects of the culture. We also want to add a digital guide: the hard information you’ll need to reproduce those carefully curated, personal experiences. Not just information but context. Not just what you need to know but a heartfelt argument for why you should know it. People are traveling differently, in ever-changing ways, and for very different reasons. We hope to be at the forefront of those changes." Take ramen as an example of the depth and breadth of the Sway guidebooks. There’s an entire digital guide to the iconic noodle soup in Fukuoka—the spiritual home of ramen, where more than 2,000 ramen shops ply their trade. Not only are there a series of recommendations for the best bowls in Fukuoka, the Sway travel guide includes a specialty map outlining the ultimate ramen crawl, an infographic on Japan’s regional ramen styles and a video clip from "Tampopo," Japan’s most famous ramen film. This is the ultimate ramen digital guide in the palm of your hand, making it not just a vital collection of expert recommendations, but also an educational and entertainment tool. To set the bar as high as possible, Matt Goulding and his team in Japan and the U.S. wrote and edited the digital Japan guide from scratch. Interact with the example Fukuoka Sway guidebook below: Swipe, tap, scroll and click to interact with the map, infographic, video and more in this ultimate Sway digital travel guide on ramen in Fukuoka. Experience the rest of these digital travel guides here. Continue your travel story with OneNote Install the OneNote app on any device you’ll be using to plan your trip, so that when you download all seven city guides in OneNote, you have the best local in-app experience at OneNote.com (desktop and mobile). All seven OneNote travel notebooks are free to download and fully functional on all platforms, even offline. Once you have the OneNote travel notebooks, you can edit across devices or with friends simultaneously while connected to Wi-Fi. You can even allow friends to follow your journey from home by providing access to your OneNote notebook, so they can see your notes, photos and videos from your travels. Once you have the OneNote mobile app installed on your device, download each guide: Tokyo Osaka Kyoto Hiroshima Kanazawa Fukuoka Hokkaido Combine travel guides in OneNote You can also combine all seven notebooks into one Japan travel notebook with sections from each guide. You can then open sections of the notebooks and then move or copy sections from one city’s notebook to another. On your desktop, just right-click in the notebook and then select Move or Copy. On your mobile device, select the Export icon on the top right of the screen to send or move the page to another notebook. Click anywhere within your OneNote travel notebook to add photos, sketch or draw or write notes to make the guide most useful for you. Create your sightseeing to-do list for your trip To create a sightseeing to-do list for your trip, click the To-Do tags at the top right of the Home section in the app’s navigation pane when using OneNote on your PC or Mac. We even added some examples at the bottom of the reviews in the Where to Eat, Where to Drink and Where to Sleep tabs. Check out our lists—including Anthony Bourdain’s top picks and his pre-trip movie recommendation list for inspiration—while planning your trip. Use custom tags in your itinerary Use the information in your OneNote guides to find hotels and then add custom tags to itinerary details in your notebook to easily search and find all your flight, hotel and reservation details within OneNote. Being offline is not a worry If you’re editing or adding to OneNote on your phone while offline, it will sync up next time you connect to Wi-Fi back at your hotel. You never have to worry about losing precious content. Share your story Easily create a Sway of your own at Sway.com. You can even export content from your OneNote notebook directly into Sway within the site. Post your Sways, pictures and videos with the tag #TravelJapan, so the Microsoft, Roads & Kingdoms and travel community can check out your story. Get inspired and customize your own travel guide for Japan today, free at docs.com/Roads-and-Kingdoms-Japan. The post Introducing the first travel guide that invites you to continue the story appeared first on Office Blogs.

Even with offices in five states, California-based firm McClone Construction had always managed to maintain an atmosphere of companywide teamwork, without a formal mobility infrastructure. But a recent shift in its business model—from a company composed of relatively autonomous divisions to an integrated whole—highlighted the need for a more effective collaboration and communications platform. "In the past, we didn’t have a lot of need for mobility," says Rick Owens, project/IT manager at McClone Construction. "But now that we’re pulling everybody together, that has changed." McClone Construction knew it needed to upgrade to a cloud solution that could unify the varying business processes of its former divisions, and it found that Microsoft Office 365 best met its needs. The decision was perfectly timed to support its transition to a more agile, collaborative company that needed to share information in real time, from anywhere. Employees now use Office 365 to create and manage a wide range of documents: schedules, contracts, drawings and customized Microsoft Excel spreadsheets—and share them in the cloud among offices. "We also use Office 365 for pricing, time sheets and daily reports, things that every superintendent is using on every job," says Owens. The company uses Microsoft SharePoint Online to address its need for a better way to share and manage files among offices. "We used to have a ton of back and forth with email and attachments. We had a lot of file duplication and it wasn’t a very effective way to communicate," says Owens. Now employees can keep all crucial documentation in one place that everyone can access. Previously, McClone Construction did not have the tools to hold an effective virtual meeting with multiple participants at once. With Skype for Business Online for videoconferencing and screen sharing, employees can conduct more efficient meetings in less time because they all have access to the same materials running off of the same platform. Owens also notes that there is a distinct benefit to being able to see colleagues during meetings, because it creates a more personal connection and fosters more precise communication among employees. "I prefer to have some kind of face-to-face communication versus just voice—being able to see facial expressions and gestures helps me understand what they’re trying to say," says Owens. McClone Construction is transitioning rapidly into a more agile, mobile organization. Owens says, "Office 365 has made it much easier to communicate and collaborate with team members from other offices, which is the direction that we’re heading." Key links Download the full case study Get the Forrester The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Office 365: Small and Midsized Businesses report See how others are realizing incredible business benefits with Office 365 The post McClone Construction creates personal connections, unites mobile workforce appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s Office 365 post was written by Colin Day, global head of marketing operations at SunGard. When it’s done right, selling is really a team sport, with marketing as a close partner. You can’t effectively do one without the other, and it takes tight-knit collaboration to do better, smarter business. At SunGard, we’ve changed our whole approach to selling, streamlining our processes to take our sales efficiency from average to outstanding, while increasing our sales force headcount by 20 percent in 2014 alone and improving our levels of service and support for customers. SunGard works closely with financial services customers in nearly every segment, offering one of the broadest and deepest ranges of solutions and services in the industry—from analyzing and automating critical business processes associated with trading and investment portfolio management to customizing software and running QA testing to ensure compliance and accuracy. To deliver the precise solutions and services they need, we have to make sure that our sales and marketing teams stay current and have the right mindsets, skill sets, and tool sets. First, we need knowledgeable professionals on board, and we need to know how to motivate them to do their jobs well. Second, we need to ensure that they have the right disciplines to effect change. And supporting it all, we need to give those employees best-in-class sales enablement and marketing tools, the ability to stay productive from anywhere, and the technology to foster a powerful sense of teamwork. We’ve recently launched pilot programs to explore the best way to handle that third piece of the puzzle. We gave a cross-section of our sales and marketing employees Microsoft Surface Pro 3 devices equipped with Microsoft Office 365 cloud services, and we’re seeing terrific results. They’re using that combination of hardware and software to get more accomplished together, regardless of their locations. For most of these employees, being away from the office used to mean a certain amount of downtime. Maybe they were on a plane to travel to a prospect’s site or sitting in a café between meetings. They could get some work done, but inevitably their laptops didn’t have the files they needed or were just too large and cumbersome to allow them to work comfortably, so they waited. Now, with Office 365, employees access presentations that they started back in the office on their Surface Pro 3s, collaborate with colleagues in real time on those presentations, and use iPhones to quickly review them prior to a meeting—it’s a seamless process. Without waiting to get back to the office, sales reps prepare all the information that their prospects and customers might need during an upcoming meeting, synchronize on who asks which questions to frame the conversation, move a stalled deal forward, and send information to colleagues immediately following customer interactions. It’s easy now to get instant answers and offer instant support, which is what teamwork is all about. And, most important, they do all of that securely. Because we work with so many financial services companies, we are extremely risk-averse and are always concerned about data leakage. We can’t expose ourselves to any breaches—our reputation and the reputations of our customers are paramount. So we have to approach everything we do with a security-first mindset, but we don’t want that to impede our employees’ natural ways of working. With the security controls in Office 365, we are confident that we’re boosting productivity without compromising data privacy or security. We’re able to manage the full security life cycle in-house because of the tight integration among Office 365 components and their interoperability with our Active Directory controls. Our pilot users take advantage of Office 365 to conduct video meetings with colleagues around the world using Skype for Business Online, forging more human connections and providing a better sense of collaboration than email alone. You can tell so much when you can see hand gestures and facial expressions. We’re also working with Microsoft on a proof-of-concept project to connect Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 with our Salesforce.com system to give sales reps in the field better insights through customer data and analysis. Our target market consists of more than 500,000 different companies all over the world. We want our salespeople to be close to those prospects, but we can’t always have a SunGard office nearby. That’s why mobility is key to our sales force in particular, and Office 365 supports our mobile reps’ efforts by being always on, always there. The more we equip our sales reps with relevant, up-to-date information, the better they’ll be at answering customer needs and communicating a specific offering’s benefits to prospective customers, which increases our overall value and reach. We continue to invest in our sales transformation initiative. And it’s working! For the last three consecutive years, SunGard has been named the best company to sell for by Selling Power magazine, and we’re finding that it’s easier to attract and retain the best people when we give them the training and support that they need. As we move forward, Office 365 will be a critical part of that support. —Colin Day SunGard provides mission-critical software and IT services to the financial services industry. In August, SunGard announced its agreement to be purchased by FIS, with an expected close in the fourth quarter of 2015. The post SunGard—transforming the sales journey with Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Javier Soltero, corporate vice president for the Outlook team. It has been an exciting journey for all of us on the Microsoft Outlook team since launching Outlook apps for iOS and Android in January. As I said then, our goal is to bring a true Outlook email experience to every mobile platform. Today we’re thrilled and humbled to share that almost 30 million people are active users of Outlook on their smartphones and tablets. Roughly one in five of those are connecting more than one account, and we hear time and again from customers that they’re using Outlook regularly—both in and out of the office—to the tune of 1.2 billion sessions per month. These numbers show what we’ve known for some time—despite reports to the contrary—email is a key communications channel across all parts of our life, and there is growing demand for a mobile email experience that helps to effectively manage those conversations. We made terrific progress over the last nine months, but we are just getting started. To help us continue to accelerate this momentum, we asked our new friends from Sunrise for some help. Over the past few months, we put their design expertise and fresh thinking to work on helping us deliver a more beautiful and improved experience. For Outlook users on iOS, this will be rolling out beginning today. Users on Android can expect to see updates beginning in early November. Of course, Outlook comes pre-installed in Windows 10 Mobile. Stay tuned to learn more about Outlook when Windows 10 Mobile arrives on devices. A fresh new look for Outlook for iOS Outlook for iOS receives a clean, refined new look that puts your email, calendar, people and files front and center. Throughout the app, we focused on improving the small but important details that add up to making Outlook the best designed, most powerful mobile email app available. We tweaked UI elements by adding visual cues to help you see and process information more quickly at a glance. We also improved navigation around the app and made key features more prominent—so you can do more with fewer taps. When getting work done on the go, it’s these little time savers that count. For example, the message list on Outlook now clearly calls out event invitations. The "event" icon makes it easy to identify events at a glance, by showing the details of the proposed event with a clear action to RSVP right from your inbox. In addition, the "flag" and "attachment" icons are more prominently displayed on the right side of the message list, mirroring what Outlook users are used to on Windows. And when you’re scrolling down on your message list while triaging email, pressing the "Mail" navigation button pops you back to the top of your inbox. When composing a new message, the attachment options are simplified and easier to access. Both File and Photo attachments are now available in one click. The "Calendar" navigation icon now shows today’s date, while the "Today" button moves dynamically as you scroll through your calendar to help you visualize how far away from today you are. The day picker grays out days in the past, making it quick and easy to find the current day of the week or month. Drag down the day picker to show a full month view. When viewing event details, Outlook provides a cleaner, clearer representation of information. All the core details (date, duration, location) are grouped at the top, while attendees now have green, gray and red icons that represent their responses to your invitation. Outlook for Android gets a makeover We want Outlook to feel like a natural part of Android. By deeply leveraging Material design and its common interface elements, we are making it easy to get started and become familiar with Outlook. With this consistent design, Outlook for Android feels more cohesive. You’ll see right away as you open the app, with our redesigned header, message list and compose experiences. Contact images appear to the left of your emails, making it easy to see who emailed you. Clearer and more prominent icons help you identify read versus unread emails, pick out event invitations and quickly see emails that include attachments. The Calendar Agenda view is overhauled with a beautiful new UI, showing more information about your events at a glance. Event details, the People list and contact details all get a fresh new Material look. Bringing the best of Sunrise to Outlook The Sunrise team is now officially a part of the broader Outlook product team, bringing a fresh approach to calendaring and combining it with Microsoft’s deep expertise in both email and calendar. Better Outlook calendaring gives you more ability to manage your personal and professional life from a single, powerful app. Over the coming months, you’ll see richer calendar experiences come to Outlook from Sunrise—including Interesting Calendars and connections to your favorite apps and services. You will also see improvements to Outlook’s ability to create meetings while on the go and handle meetings across time zones. All of this means Outlook will eventually replace the current Sunrise app. We will leave Sunrise in market until its features are fully integrated into Outlook, the exact timing of which we will communicate in advance. We continue to work to deliver amazing improvements in Outlook every single week. We need your feedback to help continue to make Outlook even better! Let us know what you think of our new designs in a comment below and suggest and vote on future feature ideas right within Outlook by going to Settings > Suggest a Feature. —Javier Soltero The post Outlook for iOS and Android gains momentum, gets new look appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Bryan Goode, senior director of Modern Collaboration. Yammer has long recognized that social networking has the ability to revolutionize information-sharing in the workplace, which is why we first launched an enterprise social network in 2008. Since then, more than 500,000 companies—including 85 percent of the Fortune 500—have realized the value of working with greater transparency and inclusiveness using Yammer. As a core component of Office 365, Yammer has also played an instrumental role in shaping how Microsoft approaches collaboration. Much of the innovation in Office 365—such as Office 365 Groups, Office Graph and the Office 365 Reporting Dashboard—are concepts drawn directly from Yammer. By bringing these key constructs to Office 365, Yammer helps make the productivity apps used by millions every day inherently more social and intelligent. At the same time, integrating with Office 365 gives Yammer a platform to innovate on an even greater scale. Microsoft named a Leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. Industry analysts have taken note of our efforts, and we are excited to share that Gartner recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace for the seventh year in a row. Microsoft is positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision and highest on Ability to Execute in the 2015 report. Gartner writes, "Leaders are well-established vendors with widely used social software and collaboration offerings. They have established their leadership through early recognition of users’ needs, continuous innovation, significant market presence and success in delivering user-friendly and solution-focused suites with broad capabilities." Office 365 vision for collaboration—a powerful suite of apps built on an intelligent platform comprised of Office Graph and Office 365 Groups. The recognition we’ve received reflects Office 365’s vision for collaboration, which aims to give teams a frictionless way to work together using the tools of their choice, while discovering and building upon the existing body of knowledge in their organization. To achieve our vision, we’re delivering a powerful suite of apps—such as Yammer, Skype, OneDrive, Delve and Outlook—which lets teams do their best work together, all built on an intelligent platform to harness the power of the network through personalized insights. Our goal is to transform collaboration by making it more seamless and transparent. We know that keeping corporate data secure remains a top priority, so we’ll continue to invest in capabilities that give organizations the right level of control, compliance, privacy and security. The number of companies using Office 365 and Yammer to work in a more open, connected way grows by the day. Ask British Airways, which uses Yammer to spark innovative ideas that help it operate more efficiently and improve customer service. Or AON, one of the world’s leading providers of risk management and human resources solutions, which uses Yammer and SharePoint Online to create a knowledge sharing culture. With this, I’d like to leave you with a final parting thought from Neeru Arora, chief knowledge officer at AON: "It is remarkable how much Office 365 and Yammer have helped us unlock productivity in our organization, and I think we have only scratched the surface." We’re taking our modern collaboration vision on the road and invite you to attend a Microsoft Cloud Roadshow near you to learn more about what Office 365 and Yammer can do to bring the power of social collaboration to your company. —Bryan Goode The post Gartner recognizes Microsoft as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace for seven years running! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last week, the Visual Studio team announced Microsoft’s primary fall developer event, Connect (); // 2015, on November 18 and 19 in New York City. As part of this event, the Office Extensibility team will host some very informative sessions for developers and IT decision makers, where we will make a series of exciting announcements. Mark your calendars for November 18 and 19 and join us virtually. The Office sessions will cover our announcements for new capabilities, both generally available and in preview, as well as roadmap items to look out for in the near future. Our key announcement will also be spotlighted within Scott Guthrie’s keynote, so be sure to watch the live webcast November 18 at 10 a.m. EST. Additionally, our team will host an hour-long virtual session on Thursday to discuss our vision of the Office platform and speak to how developers of all backgrounds and skillsets can build on Office. We promise it will be fun. There will also be more than 30 on-demand videos, with many of them touching on Office extensibility, showcasing our new capabilities and features across myriad products and technologies. We hope you can join us! Tune in on November 18  and 19. Additional details can be found by visiting www.visualstudio.com/connect2015. The post Join Connect (); // 2015—virtual event for developers appeared first on Office Blogs.

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

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Bradly Green, the engineering director at Google, on the AngularJS framework. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP69_BradlyGreen.mp3 Download the podcast—Coming soon! Weekly updates $ yo office v0.4 released Implementing admin consent in multi-tenant Office 365 applications using implicit OAuth flow Versioning SharePoint Add-ins in your VSO Scripted build Office Dev PnP Webcast—Introduction to Office 365 Dev PnP PowerShell Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices graphics presentation Two practical things about the new Group Files API Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS is available iTunes or search for it on "Office 365 Developer Podcast" or add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Bradly Green Bradly Green is the engineering director at Google who manages AngularJS and GreenTea (CRM). You can follow him on @bradlygreen. About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is born, raised and based in Dallas, TX, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician and lightning-fast runner. Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Episode 069 with Bradly Green on AngularJS—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode, Jeremy Thake talks to Paul Schaeflien, Elio Struyf and Waldek Mastykarz about the MVP Summit. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP70_MVP.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Office Dev Show—Episode 17: Grace Hopper Celebration Office Dev Show—Episode 16: Getting Started with Android Studio Display Events from an Outlook Calendar in SharePoint using Office 365 API’s Office Dev PnP webcast—Introduction to Office Dev PnP Provisioning Engine The new Office—October feature update 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 Paul Schaeflein Paul has worked with Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies since it was called the Digital Dashboard. This work encompasses substantial custom development, implementations and training. Also, Paul was granted the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for his community work - primarily presentations at national conferences, regional events and user groups. Check out Paul’s blog www.schaeflein.net/blog and follow him on @paulschaeflein. About Elio Struyf Elio is an Office 365 consultant working for Ventigrate and a board member of the Belgian Information Worker User Group, (BIWUG ). He focused on search and branding related topics in SharePoint and Office 365. He shares his ideas and experiences on his blog (www.eliostruyf.com) and through various public speaking engagements. About Waldek Mastykarz Waldek is a Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP and works as a SharePoint consultant at Mavention. Waldek shares his enthusiasm about the SharePoint platform through his blog, articles published in both online and offline magazines and on MSDN SharePoint forums. Waldek participates frequently as an "Ask-the-Expert" in community events such as SharePoint Connections, Microsoft TechEd and DevDays. He is also a Virtual Technology Solutions Professional for Microsoft Netherlands. In this role, he helps answer customer questions around SharePoint Web Content Management (WCM). Check out his blog mastykarz.nl and follow him on twitter @waldekm. About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is born, raised and based in Dallas, TX, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician and lightning-fast runner. Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Episode 070 at the MVP Summit—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

The Office 2016 launch in September was followed by a steady stream of improvements in October. The Skype for Business iOS app is here, and the preview of the new Skype for Business voice and meeting capabilities is now more widely available. FastTrack evolved from an onboarding service to a customer success service to help you realize business value faster with the Microsoft Cloud. Compliance updates include enhanced service organization controls (SOC) audit reports and the launch of local datacenters in India. OneNote inking is better than ever, Sway and Office Lens got enhancements and mobile updates, and the new Office was updated as well. For developers, there’s new on-demand video training, updates from the PnP team and more. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: September 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates Sway supports OneDrive for Business and adds mobile updates—Now when you sign in to Sway.com or Sway for Windows with Office 365 work and school accounts, you can access your OneDrive for Business account from the Insert tab, making it easy to add content stored in OneDrive for Business to your Sway creations. Updates to Sway for iPhone and iPad—such as faster preview and more grouping and navigation options—help you quickly create and share polished, interactive content on the go. OneNote inking (digital handwriting) better than ever—OneNote on iPad now supports writing with the Pencil by FiftyThree stylus. You can take the notes, lists or sketches you made in the FiftyThree Paper app and send them to OneNote. OneNote for iPad Pro now supports the Apple Pencil stylus. A new feature, Ink Shape Recognition, is coming in November for iPad, iPad Pro and the OneNote Windows 10 app. For Surface users, a new Surface Pen and Pen Tip kit are now available. Office Lens adds Office 365 support for iOS and enhanced business card scanning and storage—The pocket scanner app just got even more useful for business professionals, teachers and students. Office Lens for iPhone users can now share enhanced documents more securely using Office 365 work and school accounts. All Office Lens users for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone can use the Business Card mode to convert business card information into digital contacts in mobile address books. Updates to the new Office—Office 2016 launched just last month and already new features are being delivered. Skype voice and video integration in Office Online and Outlook.com was expanded, so you can now see and speak to your Skype contacts. An Office Online extension for Chrome was introduced to give you a quicker way to access and create Office documents on Chrome. And improvements were made to Office on Android apps and the overall Visual Basic Editor (VBE) in Office 2016 for Mac. Office 365 for Business and Education updates* Office Delve adds Praise, Favorites and new ways to create content—With Praise (rolling out now to First Release U.S. customers), you can send publicly viewable praise to colleagues. With the new authoring canvas (rolling out now to eligible commercial customers), you can easily create multimedia-rich pages in SharePoint Online. Favorites, which gives you a new way to save information from across Office 365, is available now in the Delve mobile app for iOS and rolling out in the browser experience to First Release customers. The new Visio is here—Visio 2016 starter diagrams, hundreds of smart shapes, one-step data linking, Information Rights Management (IRM) for compliance and much more make working visually faster and easier than ever. With Visio 2016 diagrams, everyone can easily define business processes, document best practices and visualize the future of initiatives. Using Office 365, you can share Visio diagrams with everyone and communicate one version of the truth to drive organization-wide alignment. Top teacher-requested features coming to OneNote Class Notebooks—Based on teacher and staff feedback, OneNote Class Notebooks are getting three new capabilities, enabling you to: easily remove a student’s or co-teacher’s permissions from a OneNote Class Notebook; add groups of students (such as a class list) to a OneNote Class Notebook; and grab updates in group membership from your school directory. These improvements are rolling out to education customers in the coming weeks and will be released for OneNote Staff Notebooks soon. Preview of new Skype for Business voice and meeting capabilities in Office 365 is expanding—The PSTN Conferencing preview is now available in 14 more countries, and the Cloud PBX preview is available worldwide. For users of the PSTN Calling preview in the U.S., number portability has been enabled, and for Cloud PBX customers worldwide, voicemail has been enabled. Soon several IP phone models will become available for preview with Cloud PBX, and a call quality dashboard will be added. The evolution of FastTrack from onboarding service to customer success service—FastTrack is changing from a one-time benefit to an ongoing benefit and expanding to offer customized support and resources for envisioning, onboarding and driving business value. FastTrack now consists of best practices, tools, resources and personalized remote assistance available through a new web experience (FastTrack.microsoft.com) and the FastTrack Center. Office 365 services now delivered in India from local datacenters—With the launch of three new datacenters in India—in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai—Office 365 becomes the first global commercial cloud service to provide productivity and collaboration services from within India. With the new datacenters, businesses in India receive the Office 365 security and compliance capabilities, as well as the added benefit of data residency, which is important to organizations in regulated industries. The Financial Services Compliance Program is rolling out to all eligible customers in financial services—The Financial Services Compliance Program, which extends the standard Office 365, Azure, Intune and Microsoft Dynamics service contracts, provides an additional level of service to help fulfill regulatory needs. It includes: direct access to Microsoft security and compliance staff; information, data and reports related to meeting your unique regulatory obligations; and the ability to request paid one-on-one time to address key questions. Skype for Business iOS app now available—The new app is now available in the iTunes Store. iPhone users with Lync 2013 will automatically get updated to the new app. iPad users with Lync 2013 need to download the app from the iTunes Store. With the new app, you can join a meeting in one touch, use full-screen video for a more immersive meeting experience, set up multi-factor authentication for enhanced security, and more. Enhanced service organization controls (SOC) audit reports—Office 365 SOC audit reports have been enhanced with two new trust principles, Processing Integrity and Confidentiality. Controls and test results were also added around data transmission and encryption, security development lifecycle, data replication and data backup. These reports are designed to provide transparency into Office 365 security and compliance controls and the results of control tests as noted by independent third-party auditors. Office 365 Developer updates Dev Digest for October—This month’s highlights include code samples that show off the new Office.js APIs, an update to the Office 365 Unified API preview for how you access users’ OneDrive for Business, lots of exciting news from the Office 365 Developer PnP team, on-demand video training for setting up the ASP.NET MVC web application and building the iOS or Android mobile apps from scratch, upcoming hackathons and more. As always, get the list of new and updated dev documentation, code samples, add-ins, Office Dev podcasts, patterns and practices, blog posts, Office Store news and upcoming events. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald ——————————————————————————- *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: October 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

In March 2015, we announced that Microsoft Lync has been rebranded as Skype for Business, bringing the familiar and well-loved Skype experience to the workplace, combined with the trusted enterprise-grade Lync platform. We are happy to announce that Lync Rooms Systems will be updated with the Skype for Business experience. On November 10, we are rolling out a Cumulative Update to all existing Crestron, Polycom and SMART Lync Room Systems, updating the user interface (UI) and branding to Skype for Business. The Cumulative Update will either be applied automatically, or manually, depending on the policy set by the IT admin. The update does not change the functionality, but users will see a sleeker, darker design theme, attuned to large-screen viewing. Let’s take a look at the new user interface. The image below shows the pre-meeting calendar UI on the console. The console, positioned at the center of the meeting room table, is used to control the meeting room experience. The design changes include a dark background theme, round icons and a round presence indicator, as well as the Skype for Business logo. Pre-meeting calendar UI on the console. The in-meeting UI of the console now also closely resembles the Skype for Business look and feel and includes buttons like Pause Video, Mute Room and New Whiteboard, specific for meetings. In-meeting UI on the console. The video gallery UI on the displays in front of the meeting room also has been updated to the Skype for Business design. Dual displays in front of room with the video gallery. The UI of presenting a PowerPoint on the display in the front of the room will not change, though also, here the video gallery on the second display gets a slightly darker background color, as shown below. Dual displays in front of room, presenting PowerPoint. The end-user education, basic meeting room use scenarios go unchanged. Meeting room organizers will continue to be able to start meetings, share content and change display modalities the same way they did before the Cumulative Update. System administrators should note that the Admin UI under Options > Settings has undergone minimal design theme change—largely restricted to "Lync" text being changed to "Skype for Business." New Private settings Ever walked past a meeting room and noticed that the Lync Room System calendar is visible through a glass barrier or door? Meeting organizers have always had the option of marking a meeting as Private in an Outlook invite, but this prevents executive administrators from being able to see the subject line. To improve this experience, we’ve added a feature in this Cumulative Update that allows the room admin to turn the room calendar subject line visibility on or off. This feature is accessed on the console in Admin mode, under Options > Settings. Going forward Previous Cumulative Updates added quite a number of new features, such as the ability to directly project from a PC in the room into the meeting, a redesign of the dial pad on the console, steps to add a Skype Meeting and the ability for IT admins to install anti-virus software on the Room System. In the next update, we will continue our mission to span a wider range of meeting room sizes and enable additional cameras and sound systems. Stay tuned for the next update! —David Groom, senior program manager for the Skype for Business team The post A new Skype for Business look for Lync Room Systems! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Tired of digging around for the file you want to attach when you were just working on it earlier? Tired of later trying to sift through emails to find links shared with you? With the Windows release of Outlook 2016, attachments just got a whole lot better. You can now skip the hassles associated with finding and sharing files, regardless of whether you were working on them on your computer, phone or tablet. The next time you go to attach a file to your email, the first thing you’ll notice is a list of recently accessed documents under the Recent Items. The Recent Items list is comprised of documents on your local hard drive as well as OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint—making it simple to pick files you have accessed across any of your devices. If you can’t find what you were looking for in the Recent Items list, we make it easy to navigate to your OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint locations by selecting Browse Web Locations. To find other files saved on your PC, choose the Browse this PC option to open File Explorer. If you select a OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint file to share, Outlook’s new attachment feature shows you what permissions you’re granting to your recipients at a glance. Of course, you also have the ability to change these permissions or even attach a copy instead—all without having to go to where it’s stored. When you send your email, Outlook does the work of granting everyone the right set of permissions behind the scenes. Additionally, because the OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint links now appear side-by-side with your other attachments, you’ll notice a paperclip associated with them and have the ability to search for them just as you do with attachments today. This new attachment experience is available today for users of Outlook 2016 on Windows devices, while continuous improvements and new features will be delivered to Office 365 subscribers. The best way to get the latest features with Office is to subscribe to Office 365. If you aren’t already taking advantage of the new experience, give it a try with your next attachment! —Misbah Uraizee, program manager for the Outlook team The post Attachments in Outlook 2016—ready for collaboration appeared first on Office Blogs.

Join us for a virtual webcast series live from the Microsoft Technology Center to learn how to empower your employees and organization with tools from Office 365. With the industry’s most advanced productivity suite—Office 365—Microsoft is focused on creating the modern workplace to help you communicate and collaborate without borders and barriers. We know that connecting with coworkers, customers and partners is critical for your business. With better tools and better connections, your opportunities for business growth are limitless. This three-part webcast series will help you learn about the industry’s most innovative productivity suite. Today, with Office 2016 and Office 365, there is no one else who takes such a broad view of productivity. We think about productivity across individuals, teams/groups and organizations. Explore how you can take advantage of our solutions to create a more modern workplace. Join this virtual webcast series to hear insights into Microsoft’s latest productivity solutions and to understand how you can: Improve meetings with new features in Skype for Business and Office 365. Collaborate and share files in real time with advanced tools and the cloud. Enable mobile productivity with Office 365. Date Webcast title Registration link November 12, 2015 at 10 a.m. PST 5 Ways You Can Modernize Your Meetings Register here November 19, 2015 at 10 a.m. PST Drive Connected Collaboration Register here December 4, 2015 at 10 a.m. PST Fuel Mobile Productivity with Office 2016 Register here Register now and join us live or on demand and learn how you can empower your employees to be more productive from anywhere on any device or platform. The post Join us for Create the Modern Workplace webcast series appeared first on Office Blogs.

The November Power Pivot for Excel 2013 update delivers a better experience when using Power Query with Power Pivot as well as support for Key Performance Indicators (KPI). These fixes are delivered as part of following updates (there are 32- and 64-bit versions of each): KB3039739—Update for Office 2013, which includes the first part of the Power Pivot and Power Query working better together fix. KB3039800—Update for Office 2013, which includes the second part of the Power Pivot and Power Query working better together fix; the issue will not be resolved if you install just one of these patches. KB3085502—MS15-099 security update for Excel 2013, which enables single sign-on (SSO) for ADAL on cloud domain-joined computers, respecting additional icon sets for a KPI in Power Pivot and several other fixes. Using Power Query with Power Pivot For data in Power Pivot that has been added through Power Query, the following operations can now only be done through Power Query, which resolves conflicts previously seen in Power Pivot. Edit Table Properties Column-level changes: Rename, Data type change, Delete Table-level changes: Rename, Delete A detailed KB article on the subject can be found here, and the scenario is outlined below: Using Power Query, import your data from a data source of your choice. 2.  Once your Power Query data manipulations are complete, select Close & Load To… 3.  When prompted, select Add this data to the Data Model and then click Load. 4.  Next, open the PowerPivot window, select a column on the table you just loaded using Power Query and rename that column. The same will apply to delete column, delete table and edit table as mentioned above. 5.  An attempt to rename a column in the model created with Power Query is blocked with a message that data originated in Power Query should be updated in Power Query; doing this prevents conflicts between the two tools. KPI support Power Pivot allows customers to define KPIs with various settings such as the target value, icon styles and KPI description. The Excel 2013 update for KPIs includes: Additional icon sets for a KPI status, including five levels of icon sets. Alignment with the absolute KPI target value data type with that of the type of the measure. As a result, both Value and Goal measures now show the same data type on a PivotTable. We hope these updates will increase your analysis productivity with Excel! If you have suggestions or feedback, visit Excel UserVoice. The post Power Pivot in Excel 2013—November 2015 customer update appeared first on Office Blogs.