Today we are excited to announce we have removed the preview label from Outlook for Android. In January, we released Outlook for iOS and a preview of Outlook for Android. At the time, the iOS version of Outlook was ahead of the Android version in terms of features and performance. We set a high bar for where we wanted Outlook for Android to be before we removed the preview label. Since our preview release we’ve updated Outlook for Android 17 times—that’s more than one update per week—to meet this bar. A big part of that work has been improving the performance and stability of the app along with work on localization, accessibility and other fit and finish pieces. The other part of this work was about delivering features to add new value, match the iOS version and respond to your feedback. Along with apps like Sway, the new Office universal apps for Windows 10, OneNote and others—Outlook is an example of Office’s new development model for building mobile apps—deliver a great first version of our apps and then iterate quickly with the help and feedback of our users. This removal from preview is not a change in that plan or a statement that we are ‘done.’ We will continue our pace of updates to make the app better each week in response your feedback. In case you haven’t been using Outlook as your primary email app yet, here are some of the end user features we have delivered in the past three months: Improved look and feel We’ve continued to polish the look and feel of the app. We updated our icon sets and simplified our fonts to provide a more consistent Outlook experience across operating systems and devices. But it was also important for Outlook to feel like a natural part of Android. We use common Android design principles like the Navigation Drawer to house the multiple tools offered in the app and have common actions like settings available in the App Overflow menu. IMAP support Outlook has always provided rich support for Office 365, Exchange, Outlook.com, iCloud, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts. In February, we added the ability to sync mail from email providers that support IMAP, like AOL.com and Comcast.net. Revised People section Earlier this month, we improved Outlook’s People section. We replaced our previous, lightweight "top contacts" view with a unified view or your contacts from all your email accounts. Selecting a contact lets you view their contact information, launch a new email, start a phone call or map your way to their location with a single click. Outlook also provides quick-clicks to easily find all the emails, meetings and files shared with the contact. Directory search In addition to updating our People section, we added directory search into Outlook. Sometimes you need contact details for someone in your company or school who’s not saved as a contact. Outlook integrates your full organizational directory (also known as the Global Address List or GAL) in the People section. Just type in the name of the person you’re looking for in the search bar and then select Search Directory. We’ve also integrated this same capability into the email compose experience so email within your organization is easier than ever. Three-day view in Calendar In April, we added a Three-day calendar view when in landscape. This complements the Agenda and Day views to show more of your calendar at once. This is especially useful on larger devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. We also delivered other improvements in the Calendar, including support for zero-length meetings, a ‘remove from calendar’ action for canceled meetings and an improved calendar day picker when creating and editing meetings. Customize swipe gestures Outlook’s swipe gestures make rapid email triage literally a one touch experience. You can swipe right or left to take actions like archive, delete, move, flag, mark as read/unread or schedule. Unlike other email apps, Outlook lets you personalize these swipe gestures to match your unique email habits. We added this feature in February. Change folders for swipe gestures Also in February, we added the ability choose and change your default folders for the Archive and Schedule swipe gestures at any time. Previously, Outlook prompted you to choose a folder for these actions during first use. Now when your email habits change, you can adjust these by going to Settings > Choose an account > Advanced Settings > System Folders. Empty trash/deleted items folders You can now permanently delete items from your deleted items folder. This was one of our top requested features from users. What’s next This is just the beginning and we will continue shipping valuable new experiences every few weeks to help you get even more done while on the go, as well as expand the capabilities that matter to IT. A key component in this process is your feedback, which helps us prioritize new feature releases, find bugs and improve the application for the Outlook community as a whole. Please share your feedback with us right from Outlook by navigating to Settings > Help > Contact Support. Thanks for using Outlook! —Outlook Team Frequently asked questions Q. What markets and languages is Outlook for Android available in? A. Outlook for Android is available in all markets supported by the Google Play Store. Users in any of these markets will be able to download Outlook. The Outlook user interface is translated in 30 languages: English, Norwegian (Bokmål), Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Q. What versions of Android are supported? A. Outlook can run on Android 4.0 and above. The post Outlook for Android comes out of preview appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re thrilled for the //build and Ignite 2015 conferences to kick off. We’ve spent the months since TechEd Europe in Barcelona last October preparing and pulling together tons of great new capabilities, content and experiences, which we will share with Office developers at these two conferences. Let’s dive into what we’ve cooked up for our spring release. We’ve crafted the sessions for //build and Ignite to cover the new capabilities, as well as provide guidance about how to get started building for Office 365. The sessions for //build include: //build Sessions 616 | Office Development Matters and Here’s Why… 630 | Get Your Hands Dirty with the Office 365 APIs, Authentication and SDKs 743 | Tried and True Practices for Transforming SharePoint Solutions to Cloud-ready Solutions 651 | Extending Custom Solutions with Excel, PowerPoint and Word Add-ins 655 | Overview of Cross-platform Mobile Development with Office 365 728 | Integrating Web Apps with Office 365 641 | Supercharging Your Custom Solutions with the Office 365 Unified API Endpoint 676 | Building Solutions with Office Graph 701 | Deep Dive into the Office 356 Groups REST API 694 | Build an Add-in for Outlook.com, Outlook and Office 365 that Reaches Over 400 Million Users 632 | Office 365 and Azure: A Developer’s Guide for Maximizing the Cloud 699 | Building Office Add-ins Using Node.JS 722 | iOS and Android Apps with Office 365 715 | Connecting to OneNote in the Cloud with Office 365 APIs 661 | Building Multi-Device Apps with Xamarin with Office 365 APIs 734 | New OneDrive APIs for developing against OneDrive and OneDrive for Business 742 | New Outlook APIs for developing against Outlook.com and Office 365 689 | Building a Single Page App Using Angular and Typescript Using Office 365 APIs 758 | Making Money with Office 365 643 | Introducing the Skype Developer Platform and the New Skype Web Developer Capabilities 767 | Building Universal Windows Apps with Office 365 APIs The sessions for Ignite are: Ignite Sessions PRE11      | Office 365 Development On-ramp FND2202 | Office Development Matters and Here’s Why… BRK3157  | Light Up Mobile Apps with the Office 365 APIs BRK3170  | Deep Dive into Custom App Provisioning and Deployment in Microsoft Office 365 BRK3164  | Deep Dive into Safe SharePoint Branding in Office 365 Using Repeatable Patterns and Practices BRK3203  | Extending Custom Solutions with Excel, PowerPoint and Word Add-ins BRK3101  | Developing with Microsoft OneNote in the Cloud with Office 365 APIs BRK4117  | Get Your Hands Dirty with the Office 365 RESTful APIs BRK4114  | Integrating Custom File Types with Office 365 with Files Handler Add-ins BRK3199  | Supercharging Your Custom Solutions with the Office 365 Unified API Endpoint BRK3118  | Getting Started Building Provider-hosted Apps On-premises or in the Cloud BRK3127  | SAP Gateway for Microsoft: Securely Integrate an On-premises SAP System to Microsoft Technologies BRK4123  | Building Business Apps Like They Do in the Valley with AngularJS, Node.js and More BRK4104  | Setting Up Your On-premises SharePoint Environment for Custom App Development BRK4111  | Future-proofing Your On-premises SharePoint Development BRK4109  | Developing with Yammer: Extensibility and API Overview BRK4126  | Dealing with Application Lifecycle Management in Microsoft Office 365 App Development BRK2195  | Everything You Need to Know about the Office Store BRK3156  | Build an Add-in for Outlook.com, Outlook and Office 365 that Reaches Over 400 Million Users! BRK3145  | Building Tenant-wide Apps with the New Exchange REST APIs Office 365 Developer Program While you’re there, sign up for our Office 365 Developer Program—launching at //build—to stay in the know on all things Office 365 developer. Once you’re signed up, you’ll receive a welcome email with details on how to get your free one-year Office 365 developer subscription. This will help you start building add-ins and connecting to APIs right away. Then you will continue to receive special resources, newsletters and key insights into developing for Office 365. Onsite mini labs We will also have two mini labs available as part of the Office 365 Developer Program. These labs are designed to help developers build a successful add-in or connect to Office 365 APIs in five steps or less. Once you sign up and complete a mini lab, you will receive an exclusive Office 365 Developer Program hoodie. Express talks At the //build conference we are hosting 15-minute presentations on key news that we’ve announced, as well as partner presentations on lots of topics we think developers will love! Partner Title Speaker Insightly Learn How Insightly Built Out Integrations with Microsoft Office 365 and Over 20 Other Saas Applications Without Breaking a Sweat Mohit Kukreja Docusign How to Build an App with Docusign Dan Reid Drip How Marketing Automation Can Help You Connect with Users, Drive More Usage and Build Better Apps Rob Walling Telerik Build Compelling .NET Apps that Span Web, Mobile and Desktop Michael Crump Telerik  Modern Web Apps with Kendo UI and Office 365 Sam Basu Boomerang Bringing Boomerang to Office 365 Alex Moore Do.Com    Making Meetings Productive on Do.Com with the Office 365 REST API Pascal Carole Uber Improving Your Daily Outlook Rahul Bijor and Amritha Prasad SmartSheet SmartSheet’s Integration Using Office Graph API: Lessons From the Trenches Brian Harper K2 Building Enterprise Productivity Apps with the Unified API Endpoint Jonathan King Nintex Build Low-code Workflow Solutions in Minutes with Nintex for Office 365 Sean Fiene Salesforce Learn How Salesforce Successfully Built its Next Generation Outlook Integration Using the New Office Add-ins Model. Phil Richardson Building Solutions with Office Graph Helge Solheim, Jon Meling Office 365 Unified API Speed Date Yina Arenas Yes, You Are an Office Developer: An Overview of Office 365 Extensibility Dorrene Brown Build an Outlook Add-in and Reach Millions of Users! Pretish Abraham Extend File Behavior with File Handler Add-ins in Office 365 Dorrene Brown Running Office 365 apps on a Raspberry Pi2 with AzureAD and node.js Andrew Connell Why TypeScript? Dan Wahlin At the Ignite conference we will be holding Theater Sessions as well, covering the following topics: Topic Speaker Yes, You Are an Office Developer: An Overview of Office 365 Extensibility Dorrene Brown Running Office 365 Apps on a Raspberry Pi2 with AzureAD and node.js Andrew Connell Building Solution with Office Graph Helge Solheim and Jon Meling Office 365 Unified API Speed Date Yina Arenas Office 365 Development: Let’s Get Real Mike Fitzmaurice and Chris O’Brien Extend File Behavior with File Handler Add-ins for Office 365 Dorrene Brown Office 365 Developer Program Overview Sonya Koptyev Partners It wouldn’t be a conference without our key partners who have built showcase solutions for Office 365. Our partners will have dedicated booths at the //build conference, where their key experts will be available to discuss their solutions and discuss lessons learned. Come visit in the Office 365 Partner area. Connect with Office 365 at the events If you’re attending, stop by our booth say hello. We’ll have extra fun swag on hand and our product engineers and experts ready to answer your questions. If you’re not able to join us in person, watch for updates on dev.office.com/latestnews for the latest and greatest on our announcements and resources for building for Office 365. Connect with Office 365 online If you’re not attending the events, there are plenty of ways to catch the news of all the cool new stuff we’re announcing. Just follow dev.office.com/latestnews for details on all the announcements. We’ll also be live tweeting from the events, so follow @OfficeDev. You can also follow along on our Office Developer Facebook page. You can also watch the live stream of the keynote address, the breakout sessions and a session we are hosting on all the Office 365 developer news from //build on Channel 9. We’ll post the exact link on all our social channels once it’s available. Either way, we hope to see you or hear from you soon. The post What’s in store for Office developers at //build and Ignite 2015? appeared first on Office Blogs.

Ignite, Microsoft’s new, premier enterprise technology event, kicks off May 4th in Chicago. If you’re planning to attend the event, try your luck in the Ignite Trip Report Challenge sweepstakes. To participate, create a remarkable trip report of your learnings at Ignite using the newest Office application, Sway, and get a shot at winning one of three awesome prizes—Surface Pro 3, Bose QuietComfort 20i Acoustic Noise-Cancelling headphones or GoPro HERO3 with an Office 365-branded chest harness. This gives you a fun way to share your experience with your colleagues back at the office while offering you the chance to win a great prize! Start building your Sway now, so it’s easy to add content once you are onsite at Ignite.   Get started: Create a free account at sway.com. Start building your Ignite Trip Report in Sway by providing the information on each of the eight Ignite experiences below. Ignite Experience #1—Introduce Yourself Start your Sway with an introduction including your name, where you are based, your organization and your area of interest/expertise. Include 2-3 goals for the week at Ignite. Remember, Sways are public, so all you have to do to share your Sway is share the link. Bonus tip: Add in a link to your profile on the Office 365 Network and Twitter/LinkedIn to help other attendees connect with you! Ignite Experience #2—Keynote Key Takeaways What announcement(s) in Monday’s keynote will impact your organization the most and why? In your Sway, note the news or demos in the keynote that you are most excited about or will have the biggest impact on your organization. Bonus tip: Try the Twitter embed feature in Sway to pull in your favorite keynote-related tweet. Tag @office365_tech so we can follow along! Ignite Experience #3—Best Sessions What is your favorite session(s) from the week? Explain why and include the top three takeaways from the session as well as the speaker’s name. Bonus tip: Videos of each session will be published to ignite.microsoft.com within 24 hours of the session. Share the link to the video if it’s available so your colleagues can check it out. Ignite Experience #4—Hands-on Time with Products To complete this challenge, you will need to grab a screenshot or picture of you exploring your favorite product(s) in the Office space on the Expo floor. It could be OneNote, Skype for Business, SharePoint or any of the others. Head to the Office booth in the Expo Hall to get started. Bonus Tip: Try using a product or application that is new to you. This is a great chance to get tips from the pros at the booth and test drive new technologies like Delve, Clutter, Office 365 Video and others. Ignite Experience #5—Photo Time Head over to the Office 365 Network photo booth in the Office area of the Expo Hall and get your photo taken with your favorite product props. Add the picture to your Sway. Bonus tip: There are a number of different ways to pull photos in to Sway. Upload from OneDrive, a USB, or even import from Twitter. Ignite Experience #6—After-Hours Fun Snap a picture and tag the best connection you made at one of the many after-hours events, such as the Welcome Reception Monday night, SharePint, #IamMEC, or just an impromptu gathering with friends new and old. Add the picture and a brief description to your Sway along with any relevant tweets. Bonus tip: Provide a link to your new connection’s Yammer or Twitter profile to help them build their network. Ignite Experience #7—Partner Solutions Head to the Expo Hall to check out some of the innovative solutions delivered by Microsoft partners. Many offer fun activities and giveaways at their booths, so this is also a great opportunity to add to your swag bag. Add a picture of the partner booth and a comment about what makes their solution interesting or noteworthy to your Sway. Bonus Tip: Add the link of the partner so your Sway audience can easily learn more about the organization and their offerings. Ignite Experience #8—Attendee Party No Microsoft event is complete without a special party on the last night! Snap a few photos and add them to your Sway along with notes on your favorite things about the party. We’ll read these and consider ideas for future parties! Bonus tip:  Try using the stack or group features to add more than one photo to Sway. When complete, submit your Sway to the Ignite Trip Report Challenge group on the Office 365 Network by 12 p.m. CDT Friday, May 8th for a chance to win one of the great prizes. Winners will be announced in the same group at 5:00 p.m. CDT Friday, May 8th. Get more information about the Ignite Trip Report Challenge in this Sway. See Official Rules here. Join us onsite at Ignite We also have a number of activities planned for Office 365 Network members who will be onsite at the event in Chicago: Stay on top of event discussions and info in the Ignite Event group on the Office 365 Network. Come to the Office 365 Network Breakfast Meetup Tuesday, May 6th at 8:00 a.m. CDT in the Hall B Meal area to meet other people active on the network and the community team. Meeting invite here. Test your luck in the Ignite Trip Report Challenge by building an interactive trip report using Sway and submitting it to the Ignite group. Get social updates and participate in daily contests by following @office365_tech on Twitter. Snap a photo with your favorite product props at the Office 365 Network photo booth in the Office Expo area. Prints and digital files will be available immediately. The post Going to Microsoft Ignite? Take the Trip Report Challenge! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Enterprise technology is evolving at lightning-fast speed, sparking trends like big data, cloud computing, unified communications, mobility and social. But how do businesses effectively capitalize on these trends to drive collaboration, productivity and better value for their customers? Register now to find out on the next Modern Workplace on May 5th, where we’ll come to you live from Ignite, Microsoft’s premier technology conference in Chicago. Microsoft luminaries Julia White, general manager of Product Marketing for Office, Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of Skype, and other guests will give us a preview of some of the latest technology and how it can revolutionize the way you work. The evolving role of technology May 5th | 8:00 a.m. PDT / 3:00 p.m. GMT Special guests Julia White—general manager of product marketing for Office, will share her thoughts on where technology is headed and how it will help businesses become more productive than ever before. Gurdeep Singh Pall—corporate vice president of Skype, will show what’s new in the latest release of Skype for Business and how it can be used along with other new technology to drive innovation and collaboration. Thomas Boxrud—director of the Information Services Group for Underwriters Laboratories, a global safety science company, will outline how they’re using Office 365 to reduce costs and position their business for future growth. Tune in to the live broadcast for a chance to ask questions of studio guests and Microsoft Office 365 product managers both during and after the show. For more information, visit www.modernworkplace.com. Register today! The post Next on Modern Workplace—the evolving role of technology appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kelli Etheredge, teacher and Microsoft Innovative Educator at the St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Mobile, Alabama. We all have our "go to" tools when we want to work efficiently. For me, when I really need to accomplish a task, I clear my desk, close my door, turn on Vivaldi, and open OneNote. Regardless of the project—lesson redesign with a teacher, research on learning spaces, creating professional development sessions—all of my notes, ideas, questions… everything is in OneNote. OneNote has been my go to tool ever since I discovered its power eight years ago. Two years ago, my administration asked me to help the 5th and 6th-grade teachers transition to a 1:1 learning environment with teacher created/curated content rather than textbooks. In my design of the program, the unquestionable tool at the center of this learning initiative was (and is) OneNote. Because I had been using a collaborative OneNote notebook with my own students since 2008, I knew it would meet the needs of every teacher—regardless of discipline. And so the process of building our own textbooks for our 5th and 6th graders began. Fast forward eighteen months. At the start of this school year, every 5th and 6th grader received a Lenovo Tablet 2 with their teacher-created textbooks loaded on it. Unlike the traditional hardback textbook, our teacher curated textbooks are interactive; they include text, images, videos and links to quizzes. The possibilities are limitless—whatever the teachers want to share with the students they can—simply by adding a page, inserting a file, or adding a hyperlink. Unlike the newer digitized eTextbooks, our teacher curated textbooks allow for personalization. The tablet has a digitized stylus so students are not only able to type, but they are able to handwrite, draw diagrams and graph within OneNote. Each student is, therefore, able to personalize their OneNote textbooks by annotating, tagging and adding materials in any way they would like and in the ways that best suit their learning styles. Mrs. Sara Holt, the 5th-grade reading teacher, sees the personalization OneNote allows as one of the more powerful aspects of the learning initiative. "OneNote has encouraged student creativity and helped them discover their learning preferences," Mrs. Holt shares. "When I gave the students their OneNote notebook, I had it organized by reading strategies. A student asked if she could organize it differently so that all of her vocabulary was together, etc., and I said, ‘of course!’ Because of the flexibility of the program, she was empowered to organize the material in a way that made sense to her." Mrs. Holt also loves the creativity that the program has allowed the students. "When I ask them to create a timeline (or anything visual), they can use the drawing tools to use different colors, shapes, whatever works for them. They achieve the same learning goal as in years past—or really BETTER than in years past—because they have more ownership in their work." Students utilize the highlighting tools to organize their notes for studying. The 5th-grade team utilizes OneNote for content delivery and have seen a tremendous difference between what they and their students could do before our learning initiative and what they are able to do now. In math, for example, before this year, students did not take notes on the day’s lesson. However, this year, Mrs. Lori Harris built her OneNote notebook with her daily interactive lessons she uses on her Promethean Board. Now, while she demonstrates a skill at the front of the room, every student sees the same content in their OneNote. They can write to the side of the slide or on the picture of the slide and takes notes as they listen. Additionally, the practice exercises—that used to be done by one student at the front of the room—are now done by everyone at their desk in their OneNote notebook. Mrs. Harris notes how invaluable this access is, "When they go home to study, they have the exact lesson I taught with their practice questions. Everything is right there for them as they prepare for their assessments." Students take notes on their math concepts right in their OneNote notebook on the printouts of their teacher’s Promethean Board slides that she uses in class. The accessibility of content is a common plus among all of the teachers. No more heavy backpacks, lost papers, or missed notes. Everything the students need is in one place—OneNote. The 5th-grade history teacher, Mrs. Jodi Ivey, loves that her students can access content she shared in class when they are at home. "OneNote has given me the opportunity to reteach and reinforce concepts with my students when they are at home," Mrs. Ivey explains, "A student was struggling with a concept, and I encouraged him to go back to the section in OneNote and not only review the text but watch the videos I shared in class again. He watched the videos twice! The next day he was able to discuss the concept with the class and demonstrate that he understood the concepts. Thanks to OneNote, we were able to collaborate even without me being there." Additionally, because we are an Office 365 school, our students sync their notebooks to their personal OneDrive account and can access their notebooks anytime, anywhere. Whether they are on their tablet, phone, or grandmother’s computer, they are able to access their teacher curated textbooks and their work within the notebook. As the year has progressed, some of our teachers transitioned from the packaged notebooks to the shared notebooks teachers can create using the Class Notebook app. When we launched the program, we did not have access to the Class Notebook app, but once the teachers learned about its functionality, they were certainly interested. The 5th/6th-grade writing teacher, Mrs. Heather Robinson, as well as the 5th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Donna Frederick, set up OneNote Class Notebooks for their students. They quickly discovered the instant feedback they could provide their students within the notebook is invaluable. Mrs. Frederick finds that, "The ability to proof, provide feedback, and edit all within OneNote has cut down on our process time dramatically." Mrs. Robinson reiterates her point: "The OneNote Class Notebook cut down on the amount of class time I needed to coach the papers. I was able to record all of my comments and explanations for my revision marks and then allow students to listen to the comments and revise during class. In the past, I have been able to coach 4-5 students per class, which translated to at least a week of revision work. While students at the beginning of the revision list were able to get coached and spend several days revising in class, those at the end of the revision list spent many days working on other classwork and had very little in-class revision time. This time, because I inserted an audio recording of my feedback for each student, I coached an entire class in one day. The other benefit to using OneNote to record my comments was that students were able to listen to my comments as many times as they needed. In the past, I have met with students one-on-one and had them take notes as we discussed their paper. While this was a fantastic way to revise in terms of individual attention, students often returned to their desks with a head full of ideas that quickly faded as they slugged through their revisions. Note taking, however diligent, left gaps in their recall, and often students forgot what their own comments meant. The result was a paper only partially revised. With OneNote, students could review my comments on each section and revise as they listened. Also, if students had questions about my comments or notes, I recorded our discussions about them, and students were able to go back and listen to their own interpretations as they worked through the revision process. I polled students for feedback, and every single student said that they like the recorded sessions much better. When I asked why, they said that they often forgot what we discussed in our coaching sessions, and being able to listen to the session over and over again made revision much easier. One final note: grades on these papers were far higher than on previous papers!" Teachers provide written and audio feedback to help students improve their writing or math skills. The success of the learning initiative is certainly spreading. Many of our 7th and 8th-grade teachers are preparing to transition to teacher curated textbooks using OneNote. When her textbook went on back order at the start of the year, 7th-grade history teacher, Mrs. Kathy Walker, began using OneNote to share materials with her students. Mid-year, she transitioned to a OneNote Class Notebook with her students and loves the conveniences of seeing students notes from class and their homework all in one place. As a result, she is able to check in and see who is paying attention and who needs further help on their note taking skills or homework. Students in 7th-grade with hybrid laptops are able to handwrite their notes in class, and their teachers can see their notes within the OneNote Class notebook. Additionally, Mrs. Margaret Cadden, 7th-grade math teacher, decided to pilot a class notebook with the students in her class who have hybrid laptops. Even though Mrs. Cadden does not have a hybrid laptop with a digitized stylus, she is able to use her Promethean Board and OneNote to write within the notebook as she teaches class. Additionally, her students are able to take notes and complete their homework right in the class notebook. She loves the instantaneous nature of the notebook and the ability to see the student’s work. As a result, she is planning on implementing OneNote Class Notebooks with all her classes next year. Student notes from 7th-grade math, using colors to help differentiate concepts within the discussion. Favorite features within the OneNote Class Notebook varies among teachers, but for 8th-grade science teacher Mr. Brian Thomas, the collaborative features are what sold him on its use in his class. Mr. Thomas recently used the OneNote Class Notebook feature so students could easily collaborate on a project to solve a real-world problem of their choosing. Students were able to work on the project both inside and outside of class. A collaborative project of this nature in the past would have taken months because students, who cannot drive, had a hard time meeting outside of class to complete the tasks. With OneNote, however, students, regardless of their after school activities, could access their collaborative space at times that worked for them and add ideas and plans to their section. Because the assignment was somewhat competitive, students utilized the password protection function so none of the other teams could see their ideas. Students, of course, shared their passwords with Mr. Thomas, so that the project progressed, Mr. Thomas could see everyone’s contributions and check-in with groups who seemed to be imbalanced in their efforts. Within the collaborative space, students can add their information to the same page, and teachers can see who has contributed to the project. As if the transformation OneNote is having in our classrooms is not enough, thanks to the Staff Creator Notebook app, the functionality and efficiency of OneNote is moving from our work with students to our administrative work as well. Recently, the school decided to revitalize an advisee program from years past. A team of teachers are working together to create the topics and resources that will be used within the program. With busy schedules and different planning periods, finding time to collaborate is challenging. With the OneNote Staff Notebook, the team has been able to work on the project whenever they are open. We are able to have conversations within the notebook and keep moving on the project. Utilizing OneNote for this process ensures that when we do meet our time is more efficient and productive. Educators are able to accomplish committee work more efficiently with OneNote’s Staff Notebook, saving teachers from unnecessary and unproductive meetings. For the last eight years, I have used OneNote professionally and personally almost every day. (The only days I don’t open OneNote are the days when I am completely unplugged.) Out of all the resources I have at my disposable in my professional "tool box," hands down OneNote is my most powerful tool. My school is also discovering the power of OneNote. Regardless of discipline and grade level, every teacher who introduces OneNote into his or her classroom reaches the same conclusion—OneNote is the ONE tool we cannot do without. The post OneNote—the ONE tool I can’t do without (and neither can my school) appeared first on Office Blogs.

Developers get new ways to build with the Office platform, reach more people and extend their impact Office is the world’s most popular set of productivity tools for getting things done and is used by over 1.2 billion people around the world today. Developers play a critical role in the world of Office by building new experiences for users and customers that we could never have imagined. Developers can extend Office apps using add-ins to expose their custom capabilities to users and connect to Office 365 through open APIs. Today at the Build conference, we announced the next wave of new capabilities for developers to develop new integrated experiences that enhance productivity for more than a billion Office users around the globe. A sneak peek of the new Office Graph API—Now developers can build powerful solutions that tap into rich data and machine learning capabilities to build smarter applications, all through a new single unified API endpoint. Expanded Office add-in capabilities—With Excel for iPad support for add-ins, developers can reach over 100M additional Office users. Word and PowerPoint for iPad are coming soon. Add-ins for Outlook.com—Extend Outlook.com with your own capabilities to over 400 million users. Unified APIs for enterprise and consumers—Accessing data wherever it lives will be simpler through a standardized set of commercial and consumer APIs in Outlook and Outlook.com, OneNote, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business. Simpler API endpoint access—Access Office 365 data through a single API endpoint. Office 365 Groups API—Developers can now build applications that leverage the native team collaboration capabilities of Office 365 Groups. New Skype Developer Platform—New developer tools and opportunities for Skype for Business and Skype enable web developers to create solutions that allow businesses to connect with customers, vendors or partners through a simple Skype button, mobile apps, browser-based chat allowing sharing, audio, video calls and more. Office 365 Developer Program—To provide easy access to the latest news and resources, we’re introducing a new community for developers working with Office. Unleash intelligence with Office Graph Office Graph is an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to map the connections between people, content and interactions across Office 365. If that sounds familiar, it may be because Office Graph already powers experiences like Delve. Today, we are providing a sneak peek of this powerful functionality to developers, enabling them to develop smarter applications for any industry or organization. These new APIs not only expose a rich set of relationships and queries, but in time they will also allow developers to add their own data to the graph. The first two scenarios that we’re making available in Preview today are "trendingAround" and "workingWith." The trendingAround scenario allows developers to query relationships around a person or a piece of data in Office 365 and determine how it’s trending in the information network, while workingWith reveals people relationships and informal collaborations based on the interaction on various pieces of content within Office 365. To learn more about these capabilities visit dev.office.com/officegraph. Excel for iPad gets add-in support Starting shortly, Office for iPad will have the ability to include add-ins just like their desktop and online cousins. With this, developers can extend Office and put their applications in the hands of millions of Office users when they are using their iPad. We will start with Excel and then bring add-ins to Word and PowerPoint for iPad in the near future and will follow up with Office for Android extensibility later this year. Dunn & Bradstreet add-in running in Excel for iPad. Add-ins for Outlook.com and streamlined commercial and consumer service APIs A few months ago at Inbox Love, we shared our plans to bring add-ins to Outlook.com, allowing developers to leverage a single Outlook API across consumers and enterprise—extending the Office 365 opportunity to our 400 million active Outlook.com users. Today we’re pleased to say that we’re coming closer to this goal and we will begin rolling out add-ins for Outlook.com this summer.  We are working with some popular services for our launch including: Uber—Need a ride to your meeting or event? No problem, setup an Uber ride reminder for any calendar event with a single tap. Boomerang—Take control of your messages. With Boomerang you can write it now and schedule it to be delivered at the perfect time, get reminders if you don’t hear back and suggest free time to meet with someone. PayPal—Quickly send money to your friends without leaving your inbox. But Outlook is just the first step. Today, we’re also announcing unified consumer and commercial APIs for OneDrive and OneNote that are available now in Preview. We know you strive to write the most efficient code as possible, by streamlining the APIs for Outlook in Office 365, Outlook.com, OneNote, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, we made it simpler for you to write code once—no matter if you’re targeting consumer or commercial services. Learn more about these API at the links below to get started today: Outlook.com OneNote.com (Preview) OneDrive.com (Preview) Single API endpoint for Office 365 Last year we launched the new Office 365 APIs to help developers work with Office 365 services in a simpler and more consistent manner. Today, we are previewing the next step in this journey with a single unified API endpoint: graph.microsoft.com to access these API services. The new endpoint provides a simpler way to authenticate and access user information, files, groups, sites, mail, calendar and other Office 365 data. This removes the need to use multiple endpoints to query all Office 365 resources. For example, the new Office 365 Groups REST API supports both management functions such as create, read, update and delete operations, in addition to content operations around conversations, files and events. It enables third-party apps to both leverage the single Groups definition managed in Azure Active Directory (AAD) and as well as its native collaboration experiences. Office 365 Groups is a key part of our vision for modern collaboration—it helps teams self-organize, work together across any tool of their choice and build upon the expertise of others. The Office 365 Groups service creates a standard definition for team membership across Exchange, OneDrive, and later Yammer, Skype for Business and the rest of Office 365, managed through AAD. This new endpoint is currently in Preview, but developers can learn more about it at: dev.office.com/unifiedAPIs. Developing with the Skype Developer Platform Helping developers build for productivity impact means supporting the range of collaboration and communication that helps people get things done. New APIs and SDKs for Skype for Business Server enable developers to create solutions that allow businesses to connect with customers, vendors or partners through browser-based chat, sharing or audio and video calls. We are releasing a public Preview of our new Skype Web SDK, which enables developers to build tailored experiences for the web that integrate communications (messaging, A/V, presence) directly in-line with their own content and activities. These scenarios have historically required the local desktop client to be installed, but are now available on-demand from any browser. This will include support for WebRTC in Win10 and across other browsers later this calendar year, eliminating the need for plug-ins for the most common scenarios. The new Skype Developer Platform provides developers the opportunity to create business and vertical apps, extending capabilities and features that are required for their business and communications. For the first time, developers can utilize the reach of the Skype network of over 380 million connected users and the enterprise capabilities of Skype for Business Server to build intelligent, personal, collaborative experiences within the context of their applications. Imagine a scenario where a patient needs to talk to the doctor for an appointment directly from the browser or mobile device. Ready to try it out and develop your app? Please visit our new Developer website at developer.skype.com to navigate to all the information and content needed to get you and your organization ready. If you are interested to try out the brand new Web SDK and provide feedback to us, join our Preview at: connect.microsoft.com/UCDEV/skypedeveloperpreview. Join the community of Office developers We have heard from developers that they want easier access to tools and assistance to help them develop products and solutions for Office. Today we are introducing the new Office 365 Developer Program. Members receive monthly newsletters from the Office team with all the latest and greatest information about developing with Office along with a free Office 365 Developer subscription to help get started with development. The MVP community will be on hand too and we will host a series of challenges and shine a spotlight on developer’s solutions. Get started today Right now is an incredibly exciting time with a huge opportunity for developers to reach the 1.2 billion Office users worldwide, while helping shape the future of work. Our goal is to make it possible for developers to tap into the power and data across Office to build transformative experiences that enhance productivity and deliver greater impact for users. Visit the Office Dev Center today and start taking advantage of the growing capabilities and possibilities for developing on the Office platform: Sign up—Visit the dev.office.com and click the Sign Up button to join a vibrant and growing community of developers building solutions for Office 365. Get started—Visit dev.office.com/getting-started to get started with Office development The post Today at Build—new possibilities with the Office platform appeared first on Office Blogs.

We are thrilled to announce that Uber, Boomerang and PayPal are among the first partners to bring add-ins to our 400 million active Outlook.com users—leveraging the new unified consumer and commercial Outlook APIs announced earlier today at Build. The Outlook APIs create an open platform for developers to build contextual experiences for Outlook.com and Office 365 users that simplify everyday tasks, helping them get more done without the hassle of switching between multiple applications.  Here’s an early peek at what Uber and Boomerang will bring to our users this summer. Uber—Need a ride to your meeting or event? No problem, set up an Uber ride reminder for any calendar event with a single tap. Boomerang—Send messages at the perfect time, get a reminder if your email doesn’t receive a response, and add a smart calendar assistant that lets you schedule meetings and share your real-time availability, all without leaving your email. We’ll have more information to share about the PayPal experience, as well as other third-party partner announcements, in the near future. Build your add-in today Add-ins are easy to build with open standards like HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript for user interfaces, with the option to integrate further using REST APIs and OAuth for secure access to data and services - all delivered to a global audience of Outlook.com and Office 365 customers. And best of all, developers get the benefit of write once, run anywhere technology, meaning their apps will work in Outlook.com, Outlook Web App and Outlook desktop. If you’re one of the many developers at Build, stop by the Office 365 booth and talk with the team about our new Napa development tools that make it easy to get started. Also be sure to visit the teams from Uber and Boomerang to get a closer look at what they’re working on. For everyone else, go to dev.outlook.com and see how to get started with add-ins for Outlook today. Thanks! —Pretish Abraham, principal program manager lead on the Outlook team.   Frequently asked questions Q. I want to get started building an add-in targeted at consumers on Outlook.com.  Is there any way I can test the add-in on Outlook.com right now? A. We have a limited number of Outlook.com developer accounts available.  Please visit dev.outlook.com for details on how you can request an account. Q. Can the same add-ins really be used across Outlook.com, Outlook 2013 and Outlook Web App? A. Absolutely, add-ins for Outlook let you reach your users on any of these applications. Q. Will add-ins be available for Outlook.com users in all markets? A. Add-ins will be available worldwide, but availability of individual add-ins is dependent on the publisher. The post Add-ins for Outlook.com—build an experience that reaches 400 million users appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Rob Howard and Chakkaradeep Chandran about the announcements from Build 2015. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP43.mp3 Download the podcast. Show notes Build 2015 Build 2015 Recorded sessions Jeremy and Rob’s kick off session Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Rob Howard Rob Howard joined Microsoft in August of 2005 and currently works as a program manager on the Office Developer Platform team, where he works on the app models for Office clients, servers and services. His goal is to enable developers to build collaborative productivity applications more efficiently and effectively by leveraging the capabilities of Office, SharePoint, Exchange and a variety of other Office applications and services.  In previous releases, Rob worked on areas like the SharePoint app model, csom, sandboxed solutions, SharePoint solution deployment, the fab 40 and SharePoint Designer. Rob has a passion for collaborative applications because they can enhance individual and organizational productivity by ensuring that the people and information vital to completing a task are connected and readily available in the appropriate contexts. About Chaks Chaks works as a program manager for Microsoft with the Visual Studio team. He currently owns the Office 365 API tooling developer experience within Visual Studio, which helps developers discover and consume Office 365 services in their applications. This involves understanding how developers use Visual Studio and build an intuitive way to consume services. Chaks assesses product opportunities and defines the required product experience that allows developers to build cloud applications that connect people, documents and enterprise data to collaborate business processes on modern devices. You can find Chaks blogging at  Chaks Corner and tweeting at@Chakkaradeep. 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 solution architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Dallas, Texas, where he helps large enterprise customers architect solutions that maximize their Microsoft investments. Although a developer at heart, he has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting SharePoint-centric solutions in the areas of Search, Portals/Collaboration, Content/Document Management, and Business Intelligence. He is a passionate and skillful technology evangelist with great interest in innovative solutions that include Azure, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Lync, Kinect, and much more. You can find his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/richard_dizeregas_blog/ and follow him on Twitter at @richdizz. 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 Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 043 on Build 2015 announcements appeared first on Office Blogs.

This post was written by Steffi Svendsen, teacher and Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert at the Skjetten Primary School in Norway. Living in the 21st century, the use of technology plays an important role in education. And I can understand why school leaders, educators, students and parents feel overwhelmed when they are introduced to new tools, programs, apps and so forth if the main focus is on the shifting to the new technology, rather than implementing the right technology. However, at Skjetten Primary School we all have one secret weapon—OneNote! From my perspective, OneNote is the best educational tool, with so many useful tools just waiting to be discovered and used in new and exciting ways. However, I would also like to bring the school as a whole into this educational use of OneNote. Not only are OneNote notebooks easily shared, through Office 365, but OneNote also has a lot of nifty collaboration and assessment features; no matter what device you use. Since Office 365 is cloud-based, the school leaders can share OneNote notebooks to administrate the school in real-time collaboration. The leaders at our school use OneNote to maximize their time, thus they can spend more time on the core business—teaching and learning. School leaders gain administrative efficiency, time to impact learning School leaders maintain "Administrative-meetings" notebooks to share agendas, notes and documents for upcoming meetings. By doing so, staff can prepare for meetings or follow the meeting virtually when unable to attend in person. Another nifty tool is the "Send to OneNote" feature. As a team leader, I can send emails directly from Outlook to our shared OneNote notebook and keep the team updated at all times. Outlook also lets you create tasks and assign them to a specific team member. So everyone knows what to do and when they are expected to be done with the task. Research shows that it is important for school leaders to be engaged with their teaching staff. Professor Viviane Robinson and Dr. Margie Hohepa (2009) found that school leaders have twice the impact on the students, if they promote and/or participate in effective teacher professional learning. After our school leaders started using OneNote they improved their leadership just by making their meetings more organized and effective. They now have more time to focus and discuss, and even participate in, the professional learning development at our school. They have altered their leadership which, enhances the learning of both teachers and students at the Skjetten Primary School. Teacher teams collaborate on lesson plans Our teachers work in teams by grade level—1st-grade teachers are one team, 3rd-grade teachers are a team and so forth. Since we started using OneNote, teachers have made staff time more effective and organized by collaborating in a shared OneNote "Team" notebook. Each team sets up their own notebook, enabling them to share lesson plans, timetables, curriculum, student information, events and information from weekly team meetings, just to name a few. OneNote Team page. Each month we start with a new main page containing a general overview including events, meetings and a table for scheduled absence, which is linked to the weekly agendas for that month. And in terms of saving time, the OneNote search engine is a true gem. The built-in search function not only allows you to search for keywords and text, it even allows you to search for words inside audio and video recordings. This is great if you have audio and video recordings from classes. You can also narrow or widen your search. "Teacher Sheets" as a content library for students When our school started using Office 365, sharing OneNote notebooks with our students became simpler, as a result we created a read-only "Teacher Sheets" notebook. This has been a huge time saver for teachers and students. Teachers can easily copy lesson plans, information, homework, worksheets, answer keys, group overviews etc. into this shared notebook, and students can just as easily copy and paste the specific pages into their own notebooks. Our teaching has become more effective, and it maximizes the time students are engaged with their tasks in the classroom, which again is important in relations to student’s outcome. OneNote Teacher Sheets notebook. Regardless of subject matter or grade level, the OneNote pages usually contain goals, a work list, criteria and assessment criteria. Using OneNote and custom tags for assessments Our formative assessments, in every subject matter and every grade level, allows us to monitor student learning and to provide ongoing feedback. OneNote in the classroom is a marvelous tool when it comes to formative assessment. Teachers always have access to students’ shared so they can see what students are working on, where they are at, and what the teachers needs to work on to help them reach their learning goals. I also believe it is important to teach the students how to assess themselves, becoming metacognitive, and thus become aware of their own learning process. Teaching children self-assessment in the classroom will benefit them in the future. They must know how to monitor their performance when working with new learning activities, and how to reach the new goals. Learning to assess to what degree they have met the target is therefore of great importance. And OneNote makes this development easier. At the Skjetten Primary School, we use two stars and one wish in assessment, to provide feedback on students’ work and to facilitate peer assessment and self-assessment. We also use customized tags to measure to what degree the students have met their learning objectives. Both of these methods are not only effective in terms of assessment for learning, it also makes the feedback more visual for those involved. Student collaboration with OneNote Our students also create, share and collaborate on a regular basis. Here are some examples how 7th graders at the Skjetten Primary School use OneNote. OneNote page illustrating how students collaborate with each other and the teacher during a group project. Shared notebook where students created a storyboard. When students work on a group project they usually create a shared notebook for the project so everyone has access to the work. Example showing how you can address assessment and feedback. Before we started our Biography-Project, students had to read a biography and assess the text based on the criteria—using two stars and one wish. This forces students to reflect upon why they assess the way they do. As you can see from the picture on the left this student is very good at being specific and concrete. Collaborating with parents Collaboration and assessment also includes the students’ parents. For example, I use OneNote to prepare for my teacher-parent conferences. This approach is highly effective, timesaving, organized and visually presented on the SMART Board. I also send assessments directly to parents by the end of our meeting through the OneNote-Outlook integration. Parents and I have the same notes from our teacher-parent conference; assessments, feedback, where the child is at, what the next step is, input from both parents and students etc. So as you can see, OneNote really is a secret weapon and these are just a few of MANY ways and reasons for why OneNote should be used in education. The post Our secret weapon—OneNote for sharing, collaborating and assessing appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Jared Spataro, general manager for the Office marketing team. Over the last 12 months, we’ve transformed Office from a suite of desktop applications to a complete, cross-platform, cross-device solution for getting work done. We’ve expanded the Office footprint to iPad and Android tablets. We’ve upgraded Office experiences on the Mac, the iPhone and on the web. We’ve even added new apps to the Office family with Sway and Office Lens. All designed to keep your work moving, everywhere. But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten where we came from. While you’ve seen us focus on tuning Office for different platforms over the last year, make no mistake, Office on Windows desktop is central to our strategy. In March we introduced an IT Pro and Developer Preview for the 2016 release of our Office desktop apps on Windows, and now—as a next step—we’re ready to take feedback from a broader audience. Today we’re expanding the Office 2016 Preview, making it available to Office users everywhere in preparation for general availability in Fall 2015. Office 2016 previewers will get an early look at the next release of Office on Windows desktop, but more importantly they’ll help to shape and improve the future of Office. Visit the Office 2016 Preview site to learn more about the Preview program and if it’s right for you. New in Office 2016 Since March, we’ve shared some glimpses of what’s to come in Office 2016. Today, we’d like to give a more holistic view of what customers at home and work can expect in the next release. In Office 2016, we’re updating the Office suite for the modern workplace, with smart tools for individuals, teams, and businesses. Your documents, anywhere—Across the Office 2016 applications, it’s easier to use the power of feature-rich applications to create, open, edit and save files in the cloud from your desktop, so you can access them from anywhere and on any device. In addition, new modern attachments in Outlook make it easy to attach files from OneDrive and automatically configure permission for the recipients—without leaving Outlook. All making it easier to share and collaborate on your work with others. Collaboration—Real-time co-authoring is available in the Office Online apps today and we’re bringing that experience to the Windows Desktop applications, starting with Word. When you and your team are working in Word 2016 and/or Office online, you’ll be able to see where other editors are working and what they are writing—all in real-time. Smart Applications—Applications will learn as you work, taking advantage of subtle cues and clues to help you stay on task and get more out of Office. Tell Me, a new search tool available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, serves up the commands you need by simply typing what you want to do. Clutter—a new Exchange feature that lights up in Outlook—uses machine learning to analyze your email patterns and de-clutter your inbox by moving lower priority messages out of your way and into a new Clutter folder. And Insights, powered by Bing, finds you contextual information from the web within the reading experience. Data analysis made faster and easier—New analysis capabilities are built into Excel, so you can pull, map, analyze and visualize your data faster and easier than ever. One-click forecasting. Create forecasts on your data series with one click to predict future trends. Intuitive data connecting and shaping capabilities. With integrated Power Query, use Excel as your personal analysis workspace by connecting to and viewing all the data around you. Take advantage of a broad range of data sources, including tables from websites, corporate data like SAP Business Objects, unstructured sources like Hadoop, and services like Salesforce. After bringing all your data together in one place, quickly shape and combine to fit your unique business needs and get to analysis in seconds Easy data modeling and powerful analysis. With improved Power Pivot features as part of Excel, map different data sets with drag-and-drop ease to build data models to give you the bigger picture of your business. Take advantage of intuitive analysis functions, automatic time grouping and other features that enhance your PivotTable and PivotChart analysis experience. Now with the ability to calculate 100s of millions of rows of data, perform deeper analysis with high speed. Publish to Microsoft Power BI Preview. Effortlessly publish and share your Excel workbooks to users of Power BI. New modern charts and graphs, including TreeMap, Sunburst, Waterfall, Box & Whisker and Histogram & Pareto in Excel help you to present your data in fresh ways. New for IT Office 2016 will offer new security, compliance, and deployment features, giving organizations more control over sensitive data and IT more flexibility in deployment and management. Compliance and security controls Data Loss Protection (DLP). DLP is now available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. IT admins can centrally create, manage and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing. End users will see policy tips or sharing restrictions when the apps detect a potential policy violation. Outlook Multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication now available in Outlook through integration with the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL). Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM protection is now extended to Visio files, enabling both online and offline protection of Visio diagrams. Flexible deployment and management options Better network traffic management. New Background Intelligence Transfer Service (BITS) helps prevent congestion on the network. BITS throttles back the use of bandwidth when another critical network traffic is present. Enhanced distribution management. Improved integration with ConfigMgr allows IT admins to efficiently download and distribute monthly Office updates using the native ConfigMgr features. Flexible update management. Admins can now manage the pace at which they receive feature updates and bug fixes while continuing to receive regular security updates. Simplified activation management. New controls in the Office 365 Admin Portal allows admins to manage device activations across users. Ready to get started with the Office 2016 Preview? Join here. Office 2016 Preview is still a work in progress, and while not all of the features we expect to ship in the fall are available for use now, new features will be added every month. We’ll share details on fresh updates to the Office 2016 Preview as they become available right here on the Office Blog. Meanwhile, we look forward to hearing your feedback on Office 2016! The post Office 2016 Public Preview now available appeared first on Office Blogs.

In October 2014, we introduced Office Sway to the world as a brand new app joining the Office family. It’s been inspiring to see the variety of ways people have used Sway in their educational, professional, and personal lives. People all over the world tell us how excited they are to quickly create and share their ideas with a variety of multimedia using Sway’s polished, interactive, web-based canvas. Sway Preview has been an awesome journey as we’ve been listening intently to our customers and taking direction from their input. We’ve made significant improvements over the last few months based on that feedback; our customers really have shaped this product with us! Of course, there is so much more we can do and we’re not done taking feedback, in fact—we’ll always continue to listen! Today, we are excited to address a very popular request by announcing the start of Sway’s rollout to Office 365 business and education subscribers! Sway is rolling out to Office 365 customers in First Release later this month We’ve always believed that Sway’s promise—making it simple to create and share polished, professionally designed, interactive content—would appeal to professionals, educators and students. In fact, we’ve already seen many educators using Sway in really creative ways during Preview. We’ve also added features relevant to business and education customers—including simultaneous coauthoring, creating interactive charts, embedding Office documents (such as Excel charts and graphs) and more—all while crafting the basics of the Sway experience to be tighter and smoother. Later this month, Sway will support Office 365 work and school credentials, meaning all qualified* Office 365 for business or education subscribers can start Swaying, too! Sway for Office 365 will be available to First Release customers initially, and then we will roll out Sway to all eligible Office 365 customers over the coming months. Both Sway on the web and the next Sway for iPhone update will support logging in with Office 365 work or school accounts. Sway will soon allow you to log in using an Office 365 work or school account. The interface may vary when available. What’s different about the Office 365 version of Sway versus the consumer (Microsoft account) version? The fundamental value of Sway for business and education users is the same as for consumers: to easily create interactive reports, presentations, lessons and more that are polished, engaging, professional, and look great across devices. Therefore, the Sway creation experience will look and feel the same whether you’re logged in with a Microsoft account or an Office 365 work or school account. Sway is still your digital design assistant no matter how you use it. However, a few things will be different when you log in with an Office 365 work or school account: Content sources in the Insert tab will be optimized for Office 365—We’re evaluating which sources make sense for Office 365 users to access in order to easily pull together their multimedia content right within the app. For example, we’ll be replacing consumer OneDrive with OneDrive for Business and ultimately, Facebook with Delve. We’ll continue to tune that set of sources in Sway for Office 365 based on customer feedback. Sways are private to your organization by default—Office 365 users will see a fourth option called My organization under the Share button, which requires that viewers are logged in with credentials from your organization to see the Sway. My organization will be the default setting for all new Sways in Sway for Office 365. It is still possible to make Sways (such as product brochures, newsletters or class projects) accessible to those outside your organization by choosing either People with the link or Public as the sharing setting. Sharing to consumer social networks is more intentional—We’ve heard from Office 365 customers that they would like to make sharing organizational content to consumer social networks more intentional, so we’ve removed those buttons from the top level of the product. You can still share to social media (say, if you’re a marketer sharing a company brochure) if you change the sharing level to People with the link or Public and then copy/paste the link directly to the social network. Office 365 Admins can control the experience—Initially, admins will have some basic controls over Sway: the ability to turn off the Sway service and to disable external sharing at the organizational level. We’ll continue to grow the list of admin controls over time, using our extensive experience in understanding and accommodating admin control requests. How should business and education customers use Sway? Professionals will be able to use Sway to save time at work and easily create engaging, eye-catching interactive reports, presentations, and more which flow responsively across all device types. For example, marketing plans/campaigns, blogs, proposals and sales pitches, project plans/updates, brochures/digital fliers, newsletters, weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual reports, training manuals, and so much more. Why make a boring PDF that is hard to read on a phone when you can make a Sway? In education, teachers can use Sway to engage students by creating and sharing interactive lessons and study guides, field trip reports, assignments and class project recaps, which they can also share easily with parents. Many teachers also document their best teaching practices with Sway and share them with colleagues. Students can have fun while learning and stay engaged by using Sway to breathe new life into reports, assignments, projects, study materials, and portfolios. Sway will support more languages this quarter Sway.com has been accessible worldwide without restriction during Preview, and we’ve seen some great Sways written in non-English languages. But the Sway user interface has only been available in English, and we want to deliver the Sway experience to users worldwide in their language. This quarter Sway.com and Sway for iPhone will support more language versions, for both consumers and Office 365 business and education users. We’ll initially support Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, with more coming soon. Sway will begin rolling out local language support to the user interface this quarter. Keep the feedback coming and we’ll keep working to improve and expand Sway’s set of capabilities. Today’s announcements will make Sway available to an even broader set of people in organizations and around the world. We’re excited to have you come Sway with us! —Sway team, @Sway *Sway will be available to customers (initially in First Release) with subscriptions to the following SKUs: Office 365 E4, Office 365 E3, Office 365 E1, Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 OneDrive for Business, Office 365 Small Business, Office 365 Small Business Premium, Office 365 Midsize Business, Office 365 EDU E4, Office 365 EDU E3, Office 365 EDU E1, or Office 365 EDU ProPlus.   Get Sway | Follow Sway The post Sway is coming to Office 365 for business and education and adding more languages appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last month, we announced that the new Skype for Business client for Windows desktop and the online service in Office 365 have begun rolling out. Continuing the momentum, today at the Microsoft Ignite conference, we talked about modern meetings, which require that participants in any location can see, hear and collaborate within the meeting as easily as if everyone is sitting in the same room. We announced today that later this year we will deliver the ability to broadcast Skype for Business meetings to up to 10,000 people at a time. We also showed two new features coming this summer to Skype for Business: pre-loaded meeting attachments, which speeds meeting start times by having meeting content automatically show up at the start of a call; and in-call co-authoring, which makes it easy to initiate a co-authoring session so multiple people can work together on a single document right from within a meeting. Today, we’re also pleased to announce that Skype for Business Server is now generally available, and Office 365 and Skype for Business Server customers can now reach anyone in the entire Skype directory with Skype Directory Search. IT pros will love the key improvements and new features of Skype for Business Server, such as support for SQL Server AlwaysOn; native video interoperability with Cisco Tandberg VTCs; and a call quality dashboard to provide richer reporting options. With the server release, we’re also delivering enhancements to the Skype Developer Platform, and have announced a public preview of our new Skype web SDK, which enables developers to build tailored experiences for the web that integrate communications (messaging, A/V, presence) directly in-line with their own content and activities. Partners are already taking advantage of the extensibility in Skype for Business. Genesys, a market leader in customer care solutions, today announced that they are building on the Skype Developer Platform to deliver native integration with Skype for Business in their Genesys Customer Experience Platform. In addition, Event Zero, Nectar and Unify Square have plans to announce tools for IT pros that add to the built-in management and monitoring capabilities that help customers successfully plan, adopt and operate a Skype for Business communication environment. You can learn more about Skype for Business partner solutions here. We’ve made it easy for Lync Server 2013 customers to adopt Skype for Business Server via in-place upgrade. Customers can utilize existing hardware to quickly take advantage of the new server capabilities.  In addition, customers who upgrade to Skype for Business Server will be able to take advantage of future cloud enhancements such as broadcast meetings via a hybrid server and cloud approach. Moving ahead with Skype for Business We released the Skype for Business client for Windows desktop as part of the April Office update, and expect that even more customers will automatically upgrade from Lync to Skype for Business with the May Office update. If your organization is using Lync today and has not yet adopted the Skype for Business client, now is the time to take action to ensure your end users are aware and ready for the change. Here’s what you can do to get ready:     To best prepare for Skype for Business Server and the new innovation we’re delivering in the coming months, including broadcast meetings, get in touch with one of our global or national launch partners. These system integrators have the highest level of experience, training and commitment to the Skype for Business platform in their respective geographies, and are ready to help customers benefit from Skype for Business. The post Skype for Business gains momentum appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Julia White, general manager for the Office Marketing team. Today, at our first-ever Ignite Conference in Chicago, we announced new capabilities and solutions from across the company, all of which help IT Pros fuel innovation and transformation within their organizations. I was thrilled to join corporate vice president of Skype engineering Gurdeep Singh Pall on stage during today’s keynote to showcase the innovation we’re delivering across Office to empower IT Pros. For Office, our focus is on reinventing productivity for people and organizations. All of the new and coming Office capabilities we showed today at Ignite extend from our belief that productivity is at the heart of business success. But, how we work, where we work, with whom we work is changing rapidly and the technology must enable this modern workplace. Successful organizations have moved from static hierarchies of people and the way communication flows between them, to dynamic networks of open sharing; from individual productivity to collective value co-creation; from work being where you go to being what you do. And, for organizations, it is also about attracting and retaining the best, new talent. Today, workplace technology is a key factor as the Millennial generation become the majority of the workforce. For Microsoft and IT Pros together, this is our collective opportunity, and it couldn’t be a more exciting time! The cloud makes it possible to delight users, and at a lower cost than ever before. It’s now possible to deliver on the technology expectations driven by consumer experiences. Before we jump into more about Office 365, I want to also highlight that this week at Ignite, we will showcase Skype for Business Server 2015, Exchange 2016 and SharePoint 2016 in-depth for the first time. Across these new releases, you will see new user experiences, compliance and protection updates, impressive scale and performance improvements, and great support for hybrid deployment models that combine on-premises and Office 365. We know many customers rely deeply on our servers and we are absolutely committed to delivering a great wave of on-premises technology. Now, let’s break down what the workplace experience means. Teams Where work used to be a solitary pursuit, it’s now a communal one. People still work individually on their own devices, in their own space, often on their own time, but teams are increasingly central to how work gets done. Today we showed capabilities that enable teams to work more effectively together, with the foundation of new Office 365 Groups. The ability to quickly bring people together to solve a business problem must be simple, lightweight, user-managed, while letting team members work the way they want to, which is exactly how we built Office 365 Groups. It is the ubiquitous team element that allows members to email, meet, take notes, create content, video, IM, tweet—and ensure all the team members always have all the context. We showed a preview of the Office 365 Groups "hub" in Office Delve and group conversation in Outlook 2016, and this is just the beginning. Human Mobility Today, work is what we do, not where we go. Our charter is to ensure people can be productive wherever they are, using whatever device they have. We know that 80 percent of time spent on phones and tablets is within native applications, which is why we have invested so deeply to create fantastic native apps for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Skype, OneDrive, Yammer and more—across all devices and platforms. The new Office universal applications for Windows 10 are another great step on this journey. And, with 100 million Office for iOS and Android downloads, and 500 million Skype for Android downloads, we know we’re on the right track! Meetings Today, meetings are as often ad-hoc as they are pre-scheduled, and there are very few meetings where everyone is in the room—most meetings include one or more virtual attendees. We know that 55 percent of communication is body language, so audio-only meetings just don’t cut it. Virtual attendees cannot be treated like second-class citizens!  Moving forward, every meeting scheduled in Office 365 will automatically be a Skype for Business meeting, so users don’t have to do anything additional to make every meeting a video meeting.  And, with 830 million meetings scheduled with Office 365 each month, that just made a lot of meetings a lot more productive!  But, video meetings need to be as simple and seamless as walking into a conference room and sitting down. With the roll-out of the new Skype for Business experience, we are seeing this happen. It’s easy to get a meeting up and running in a few clicks, and video just works, particularly with the great hardware integration across the Surface Hub, Skype Room Systems, and with our partners including Crestron, Polycom and Smart. Today, we also announced Skype for Business broadcast meetings letting you broadcast meetings up to 10,000 people real-time, and supporting dynamic playback.  But, we’re not stopping there! Today, we also showed how Hololens takes meetings from 2-D video to 3-D holograms with a mind-blowing look into how companies are using this technology. Content co-creation With the Office 2016 Public Preview release today, you will see how Office has shifted from "me-centric" to "we-centric" work. All Office content is default saved to and shared from OneDrive; content is created and edited with real-time co-authoring coming to Word 2016 desktop, and email attachments are a thing of the past with Outlook’s new attachments that are simply shared from the cloud. I encourage you to get into the Office 2016 Preview and try it out for yourself.  More details on Office 2016 can be found here. I’m also excited to announce that Sway—which has been in consumer preview since October—will roll out to Office 365 business and education subscribers later this month! Sway, the newest member of the Office family, provides a dynamic, interactive canvas for sharing your ideas—with only a few clicks to get to gorgeous. We’ve seen amazing uses for Sway in the consumer preview and we’re thrilled that you can now Sway at work, too. You can find out more about Sway in Office 365 in this blog post. Intelligence The number of Internet-connected devices will double next year and we will grow from 4.4ZB of data created in 2013 to 44ZB of data created in 2020. And, remember, a ZB is 1 billion petabytes. Getting insight from this data isn’t just like finding the needle in the haystack—it’s like finding a needle in the universe! Technology must help us close the gap between this information and the insights we need. Before this crush of information, it used to be about making apps user-friendly—which was the solution—easier navigation, customizable menus to help users get work done. Today, experiences must be inherently intelligent to empower productiveness. This is the genesis of the Office Graph, an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to map the relationships and signals between people, content and interactions that occur across Office 365. Using the Office Graph, Clutter in Outlook removes low priority email based on the individual’s past behavior. And Delve uses the Office Graph to deliver personalized views of the people and content that are most relevant to each individual. Today, we showed an early preview of a new organization view in Delve, which provides an interactive dashboard for teams and individuals to identify key trends across employee engagement, team connections and even views like work life balance. Stay tuned to for more to come on this in 2015. Information Protection Of course, none of the amazing productivity experiences matter if your business information isn’t secure. We want Office 365 to be the most trusted cloud service, and we know that we can never stop in this pursuit. To this end, we recently announced important steps forward related to the transparency and control of information residing within Office 365. This includes file-level encryption for all content and email in Office 365, which is the foundation from which we can take the next step of "customer controlled keys" technology that we are planning for release 2016. We also announced the Customer Lockbox capability, which provides unprecedented customer control of data access within Office 365. What’s next All of these experiences are either possible today in Office 365, or will be released in 2015. Ultimately, the goal of Office 365 is to help IT drive business impact and delight users. A decade ago, rolling out experiences like this would require significant integration work, custom coding, new hardware and storage purchases, and taking on more legacy project debt. Now, IT gets the keys to the car, without having to build each piece of the car. IT can make the technology optimized for each individual business needs, engage with users on making the productivity tools most effective and drive new insights for the organization—because IT Pros know their business the best. It is incredibly exciting to work hand in hand with our IT partners and see how much is possible. Office is at the forefront of this evolving, modern workplace as we continue to deliver innovative experiences that rethink the entire notion of what it means to be productive. Stay on top of everything we’re talking about this week at Ignite through the Ignite site. And, as always, stay tuned to the Office blog for updates across everything in Office 365. The post Modern productivity-Office news at Ignite appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Paul Andrew, technical product manager for Datacenter and Networking on the Office 365 team. In March we announced Azure ExpressRoute connectivity to Office 365, which enables Office 365 customers to use Azure ExpressRoute to establish a private, managed connection to Office 365 for highly predictable performance and the reliability that comes with dedicated connectivity. A key part of delivering ExpressRoute for Office 365 are the network partners that provide connectivity between Office 365 services and your on-premises network. Network Service Providers manage and extend the customer’s WAN, routing it for direct connectivity to Office 365 and Azure services. Exchange Providers offer connectivity at the carrier neutral facilities where ExpressRoute is available. You can have a layer 3 connection directly at the carrier neutral facilities into your network equipment or contract another network company to provide a link to your premises. Today, we are pleased to announce the launch partners that will first offer this service, starting this summer. AT&T will offer ExpressRoute for Office 365 as a Network Service Provider via AT&T NetBond at Microsoft Office 365 locations including Dallas, Silicon Valley and Washington DC. BT will offer ExpressRoute for Office 365 as a Network Service Provider at all of their available global locations including Amsterdam and London. Equinix will offer ExpressRoute for Office 365 as an Exchange Provider at all of their available ExpressRoute locations including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Washington DC. Additional ExpressRoute network providers will add Office 365 to their service offerings in the months following initial general availability. All Azure ExpressRoute partners are listed here. And you can learn more about Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 here. —Paul Andrew, @pndrw The post Announcing first network partners to offer ExpressRoute for Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Office 365 was written by Raja Ukil, chief information officer at Wipro Limited.  The world of IT is changing, and our business is changing as a result. Much of our success has been built on developing large line-of-business applications for Fortune 500 companies. However, today many of our customers’ IT budgets are going directly to business departments that are deploying cloud-based solutions rather than building traditional IT infrastructure and management models. With customers asking us to help transform their businesses with cloud services, we realized that we needed to first transform ourselves to remain a challenger. And how did we transform? We decided to replace most of our extensive on-premises email, collaboration, and office productivity infrastructure with Microsoft Office 365, primarily to reduce costs and give employees more modern communications services. We realized that if we could deploy cloud productivity services to most of our 156,000 employees around the world, we could certainly speak with conviction when our customers ask us to do the same for them. We looked briefly at other solutions but didn’t feel they were enterprise-calibre or flexible enough for our needs. And with our IT staff and end users already well versed in Microsoft products, we didn’t want to introduce more changes and disruptions. Using Office 365 made it simple to create a hybrid email environment, with 125,000 mailboxes migrated to the cloud and 31,000 mailboxes remaining on-premises. These on-premises mailboxes include shared mailboxes, conference rooms and application-specific email IDs, and a few that were in compliance with U.S. government data security regulations and customer contractual requirements. We spent considerable time and effort on upfront planning and change management to ensure that we got it right. We then rolled out the Office 365 services one at a time, with dedicated, round-the-clock support to ensure that employees had a good experience. With executive support from the CEO and careful planning, we enjoyed great success migrating 125,000 mailboxes to the cloud in just 18 weeks. My vision is for our globally dispersed workforce to operate as a tight-knit community. With Office 365, it’s as easy for an engineer in Bangalore to have a conversation with a colleague in Boston as if they met in a hallway. With just a single mouse-click, they can chat online and share screens, thereby collaborating in real-time to enhance productivity. With the Office 365 co-authoring capability, teams can now work together in real-time to edit documents and pull together proposals and schedules quickly, without a lot of email back-and-forth. And with the social element—Yammer—teams can have continuous conversations that drive engagement and faster turnaround. Our next focus after email and Yammer is to deploy Office 365 document sharing and file storage. With everyone’s files stored in the cloud, employees will be completely device- and location-independent. This will be a huge uplift for productivity. By successfully moving to Office 365, we can now speak with conviction about digital transformation through cloud services. We have done it ourselves at scale and will help our customers do the same. —Raja Ukil Read the full story and about Wipro’s successful move to Office 365. The post Speaking with conviction appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today at Microsoft Ignite, we announced some exciting new Office 365 admin features. We focused on two key themes important to you—the Office 365 IT administrator—visibility and control. Enhancing these attributes, gives you greater capability to monitor how your organization is running and enable the necessary controls to keep your data safe. Greater transparency with new Office 365 reporting dashboards To truly understand how your organization is running, you need to see how your end users are consuming the services. Today, we introduced both a new and improved reporting dashboard and an Office 365 content pack for Power BI. With the new reporting dashboard, you get a better user interface with greater visibility into usage across Office 365 services. The new reporting dashboard provides a much more visual reporting experience with trend and summary views. To get more details, simply select the desired reporting tile for more detailed reports. We have plans to add more reports for additional Office 365 services including Yammer and Office 365 ProPlus in the future. We also showed an early preview of an Office 365 content pack for Power BI. The Office 365 content pack enables you to use the powerful reporting and analytics capabilities of Power BI to analyze and create interactive dashboards. The Office 365 content pack for Power BI combines usage reporting data with information from Active Directory (AD) so more combinations of data can be used to gain richer insights into Office 365 service adoption. Here is an example of a dashboard that you can create with the Office 365 content pack for Power BI: With both the in-product Office 365 usage reports and the Office 365 content pack for Power BI, you now have more tools at your disposal to monitor how your users are using the service and how you can maximize the ROI. Rollout for the new reporting dashboard reports is targeted to begin in Q3 2015. Availability of the Office 365 content pack for Power BI is expected in the coming months. More control with workload-specific admin roles With the greater visibility, your organization may also want to enable more control on how your organization’s data is being accessed by administrators. We are excited to introduce new global workload-specific service admin roles for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online. These new roles provide your organization with more options to improve compliance by limiting access to data to only those who need it. If your organization manages your Office 365 IT administrators according to workloads, then this feature is for you. In addition, there is now more flexibility in assigning roles. If your Office IT administrator has multiple responsibilities i.e. SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online responsibilities but not Exchange Online, you can assign multiple roles to that administrator. You are no longer limited to only one role assignment per administrator. With the new workload-specific admin roles and the ability to select multiple roles, we aim to provide you more options to select the right administrator permissions and control who has access to your data. The rollout for workload-specific admin roles is targeted for this June. Better manage your organization With the new and improved Office 365 reporting dashboards and new workload-specific admin permissions rolling out over the next few months, you will gain significantly more visibility and transparency into your organization and more controls to limit access of your data to better manage your organization. Stay tuned to Office Blogs and the Office 365 Roadmap for more information.   —Lawrence Chiu, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 team. The post What’s new in Office 365 administration from Microsoft Ignite appeared first on Office Blogs.

You have questions. We have answers. Microsoft is bringing the Microsoft Technology Center, a state-of-the-art environment, which includes the most current technology platforms, devices and applications, to you virtually. Hear about real situations users face every day and gain explicit know-how knowledge on the latest and most innovative solutions in market, with the opportunity to dialogue with the Microsoft Technology Architects and your peers virtually. Register for the virtual event series and get the latest information about Office 365 and Skype for Business.  We hope to see you there! The post Live from a Microsoft technology center—Office virtual events appeared first on Office Blogs.

Editor’s Note 5/14/2015 This post and the FAQs have been updated to clarify the status of the preview. The import service is available as a public preview as outlined in this blog post. Interested customers do not need to join a preview program or first release program. Large migration projects are never simple and it has always been challenging to move email archive data to the cloud. Two years ago we released the PST Capture Tool, which makes this process easier by locating PST files scattered across your organization, collecting them into one place, and then uploading the contents directly into Exchange Online mailboxes. But no matter how you cut it, moving dozens or hundreds of terabytes across your existing Internet connection is going to be a costly and lengthy process. We have consistently been approached by customers and partners asking for help with migrations that could easily take multiple years to complete, because of the time required to move data across the wire. But no longer! We are thrilled to announce the new Office 365 Import Service, which provides two new options for speeding up the process of importing PST files into Exchange Online mailboxes. Option 1: For smaller sets of data, we are enabling network uploads of PST files to Microsoft servers, which we then import into Exchange Online mailboxes. Option 2: For larger datasets, you can copy PST archive files onto hard drives and mail them directly to Microsoft datacenters. Once we receive the drives, we copy the PST files to internal servers and then import the mail into Exchange Online mailboxes. Both of these options use our internal datacenter network, with significantly faster throughput and lower latency. We’ll publish more precise data on expected speeds in the coming months. Accessing the import service is easy. When you first log on to the Office 365 admin center there is a new IMPORT tab on the left-hand navigation bar. (If you don’t see this tab, make sure that you are assigned the mailbox import export RBAC role. For more info, see this article.) Once you’re on the IMPORT page, you can create a new drive shipping or network upload job. You can find all the details about the Office 365 Import Service on this TechNet article. —Danny Popper, program manager for the Office 365 Information Protection Team Frequently asked questions Q. What happens to my data? A. Behind the scenes, the Office 365 Import Service sits on top of the Azure Import Export service. When you upload your data or physically ship your hard drives, the data is temporarily staged within Microsoft Azure file storage until it is imported into Exchange Online mailboxes. All hard drives are encrypted with BitLocker protection, and the BitLocker key is sent separately from the drives. This protects them in the event they are lost or stolen in transit. We are also working on an additional layer of Azure RMS-based encryption on each file and will turn that on during the course of the preview. If you choose to physically ship hard drives to Microsoft datacenters, they will be returned to you once the data is copied into Azure. We are also working on an additional layer of Azure RMS-based encryption on each file and will turn that on in the coming months. Q. How do I enable the O365 Import Service for my tenant? A. You don’t! The service is already turned on and available for all eligible tenants (see next question). If you don’t see the UX shown above, follow these steps to grant yourself the required access role. Q. Who is eligible for the service? A. The O365 Import Service is currently available for Office 365 Commercial, Office 365 Education and multi-tenant Government (Government Pricing) customers. At the present time, the service is not available for: Office 365 Dedicated or Office 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) customers. Mailboxes hosted in the Brazil, China, Japan or Australia datacenters. Cross-premises archive mailboxes (where the primary mailbox is on-premises and the archive mailbox is hosted in Exchange Online). We are committed to enabling these scenarios as soon as we can. Q. How much will the service cost? A. There is no cost to participate in the preview, which will last through at least the end of August. Q. Where can I get more details? A. Right here! This TechNet article has detailed, step-by-step instructions for hard drive shipping and network uploads, as well as a list of frequently asked questions. Q. Will other types of data be added in the future? A. Yes, over time we will be extending this service to support additional data types across Office 365.   The post Making email archive migration easier with the Office 365 Import Service appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Andrew Salamatov about the Outlook announcements at Build and Ignite along with a two hackathons that were run in New York and Chicago. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP44.mp3 Download the podcast. Show notes Build 2015 Build 2015 Recorded sessions Jeremy and Rob’s kick off session Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Andrew Salamatov Andrew ia senior program manager at Microsoft, having worked there for six years. At Microsoft, Andrew worked on the Exchange team his entire career. Starting on Exchange Web Services, Andrew designed notifications protocol and throttling. Later, he moved on to working on mail apps. Starting on Exchange Web Services, Andrew designed notifications protocol and throttling. Later, he moved on to working on mail apps. About the host 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. About Richard Richard is a solution architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Dallas, Texas, where he helps large enterprise customers architect solutions that maximize their Microsoft investments. Although a developer at heart, he has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting SharePoint-centric solutions in the areas of Search, Portals/Collaboration, Content/Document Management, and Business Intelligence. He is a passionate and skillful technology evangelist with great interest in innovative solutions that include Azure, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Lync, Kinect, and much more. You can find his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/richard_dizeregas_blog/ and follow him on Twitter at @richdizz.  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 Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 044 on Ignite and Hackathons appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Christina Hansen and Kristen Messer, teachers from the Manteca Unified School District. I’ve seen "Send to OneNote" as a print option for over a decade. But until just over a year ago, it meant nothing to me. That is when the school board approved funding for the Manteca Unified School District (MUSD) Going Digital initiative, a year-long process of taking our District 1-to-1. But we did not just jump on the "1-to-1 bandwagon" our 1-to-1 initiative goes far beyond just getting a device into the hands of every student. It is a plan to make our students college- and career-ready by teaching them the 21st-century skills they need to succeed, and we are doing this by changing the relationship between teaching and learning. OneNote has been a major player in our plan—from the first planning stages of Going Digital to teacher collaboration before the 1-to-1 rollout, to teacher and student communication in class. In Manteca Unified, teachers were issued Surface Pro 2 devices the semester prior to when the students were issued their Windows 8.1 devices. While the outside of the teacher device looks different than the student device, the inside is the same. Both are Windows 8.1 tablets with the Office 365 software suite. MUSD knew that teachers needed to be comfortable with their device before they would be able to lead students with devices. In order to ease the concerns of and effectively introduce 1,200 Kindergarten-12th grade teachers to the realm of all things digital, MUSD created Tech Champs and Digital Support Technicians. This group of 100+ teachers and support staff from across 30 schools in MUSD met monthly to discuss the best ways to meet the needs of teachers at individual school sites. These staff members then acted as cheerleaders and liaisons at their individual school sites. The District Office administration created a OneNote Notebook for this group. During meetings, we could find agendas and such. But in the long stretches between meetings we able to ask questions, share information, complete Excel surveys (from links in the Notebook) and inspire and encourage each other. It did not take long for District Office administration to start using OneNote Staff notebooks during meetings. And from there it has trickled down to school site administration. Principals share staff meeting agendas and notes while teachers contribute photos, websites and lesson plans. And of course teachers in MUSD were quick to embrace OneNote notebooks. They have created different sections for different subjects and added links to supplemental materials, videos and images. Where once a filing cabinet stood in the corner stuffed so tightly that one could barely add another sheet of paper, now the OneNote notebook easily keeps track of all of those papers scanned into OneNote’s digital format separated into sections waiting for additional pages to be added with ease. Beyond OneNote for the teacher’s use is OneNote Class Notebooks, a game-changing addition to the OneNote program. The day in the life of an eighth grader attending Great Valley Elementary (MUSD) revolves around OneNote Class Notebooks. Each class period begins with students adding to their weekly planner in digital ink. The variety of ink hues and widths presents an opportunity to improve organization through a grade-level wide color coded system: blue denotes class work, red denotes homework. Once a red assignment is completed, students highlight it in green so that parents can be aware of what has been completed in their child’s list of work, and what is yet to be done. Each class/subject/teacher has outfitted their own OneNote Class Notebook, allowing the educator to tailor the organizational features and content. Students have access to notes, PowerPoint presentations, informational materials, homework and assessment for all six of the class they attend each day inside the sleek organizational system of OneNote. This eliminates one of the most common problems in a paper-laden educational system: the lost paper. Digital handouts cannot be forgotten on a desk, crammed into the bottom of a backpack, or run out of copies. It is always there, ready and available at a click. Backpacks are no longer overburdened. Juanita K., an eighth grader, expresses the positives in moving to OneNote Class Notebooks, "It’s so much easier than carrying around a lot of books every day for each class because it’s all in your device." Absent students can pick up right where they left off, and often from home using their personal Wi-Fi. Student work always has a name, thus ending the era of the no-name paper graveyard. From the educator’s perspective, it is an indescribable change. Instead of lugging home bags of paperwork, I simply start up my Surface Pro 2 and open the notebook for whichever class I would like to access. Finding a particular student is as simple as typing their name into the search bar. I can view compositions as students are crafting and provide feedback, which is monumentally more effective during the writing process rather than after. Class brainstorming can be recorded in real-time using the Collaboration Space, where the conversations can continue outside of class and are accessible to all students to use, even those who may be out of the classroom that day. OneNote Class Notebooks have redefined the instruction at my school site and level. Organizational practices are inherently taught through the program. Expectations and procedures move seamlessly between content areas and assignments because OneNote has become the way to disseminate content and showcase knowledge in every eighth-grade classroom. Students automatically locate and produce content; parents and families keep track of student learning through a living planner document; educators can easily interact with student work throughout the learning process. It is a cycle of education and growth made possible solely through OneNote Class Notebooks. But the benefits do not stop at my grade level or even at my school. Throughout MUSD, teachers and students are embracing OneNote Class Notebooks. Many teachers have started using OneNote for parent conferences because it is so convenient to organize work samples throughout the year that showcase a student’s strengths and provide concrete examples of where students can improve. A high school chemistry teacher makes electrons, protons and neutrons come to life, while a biology teacher uses OneNote for lab write up where students can insert photos from the lab and use digital ink to complete tables and graphs. A history teacher shows a reenactment of the Civil War. A fourth-grade teacher collaboratively brainstorms adjectives with her class. A second-grade teacher checks for mastery of fractions by providing circles and asking students to color one-half or two-thirds. And special education teachers discreetly provide additional assistance via OneNote to those students who need it. Students are also using a blank page in OneNote coupled with digital ink as a whiteboard for a quick check for understanding. Gone are the days of faded dry erase markers, ink on fingers or clothes, and laundering cloths used for erasing. The teacher can quickly see who is progressing and who may need a little more help. I have a feeling that MUSD staff and students will become even more enamored with OneNote over the next several months as we settle into our Going Digital initiative and find additional ways to encourage collaboration and creativity, to make learning personally engaging and meaningful for students, and to keep ourselves organized and excited about teaching. So the next time you hit "Print," go ahead and choose "Send to OneNote" and see just where it can take you and your students. The post OneNote Class Notebooks have redefined the instruction at my school appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Power Query update includes 11 new or improved features including: Support for all Excel 2013 Desktop SKUs OData V4 support Unified Options dialog Option to disable the Native Database Queries prompt Support for custom ADFS Authentication Services Updated Facebook connector due to Facebook API changes Support for Fixed Decimal Number type Alternate Windows Credentials Online Search is now Data Catalog Search and in a new ribbon location New transformations Additional performance improvements for loading medium and large datasets. Continue reading below for more details about each feature. Support for all Excel 2013 Desktop SKUs With this update, we’re making Power Query available to all Excel 2013 Desktop SKUs. There are some differences in features, depending on what SKU users are running: Microsoft Office 2013 Professional Plus, Office 365 ProPlus or Excel 2013 Standalone: Full Power Query feature set. All other desktop SKUs—Full Power Query feature set, except the following data connectors: Corporate Power BI Data Catalog, Azure-based data sources, Active Directory, HDFS, SharePoint Lists, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sybase, Teradata, Exchange, Dynamics CRM, SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce. Power Query detects your Excel 2013 SKU when launched and enables the appropriate set of features. OData V4 support We’re adding support for OData V4 feeds. You can just use the existing OData Feed connector, which will now also accept feeds built using the latest OData version. Unified Options dialog We have combined Workbook Settings and Options into a single dialog, organized by scope (current file versus global) and categories for easier navigation. Option to disable the Native Database Queries prompt One useful capability when connecting to databases is the ability to provide a custom SQL statement. This is helpful for customers who have complex SQL queries to pull data for their reports and want to get started with Power Query. However, there is a potential risk for these queries to contain malicious SQL code that could delete or modify content in a database when executed. Because of this risk, we have an existing security prompt whenever users try to run a native database query outside of the data source dialogs. It turns out that lots of customers are using this capability within Custom Columns or similar scenarios, so they can dynamically build and execute native database queries. The downside is that they would get prompted for approval of every distinct SQL statement, which would make the experience very inconvenient. To enable these customers to achieve their scenarios, we’re introducing an option to disable Native Database Query security prompts. However, please beware of the potential risks mentioned above before using. You can find this option within the Options dialog, under Global > Security. Support for custom ADFS Authentication Services With this update, we added support for using custom ADFS authentication endpoints through our Organizational Account credential type. This allows access to data sources that require ADFS authentication such as some on-premises instances of Dynamics CRM. After Power Query is registered by your admin, you will be able to approve a custom endpoint when prompted for access. You can also manage the list of already-approved endpoints within the Options dialog, under Global > Security. Updated Facebook connector As of April 30th 2015, Facebook expired v1.0 of its Graph API. The Graph API is what Power Query uses behind the scenes for the Facebook connector, allowing you to connect to your data and analyze it. This expiration means some changes in the Facebook connector as it currently exists. The most important difference is the set of permissions we’re able to leverage and the data those permissions return. For example, Friends Lists and News Feeds are commonly used permissions that are now changed or inaccessible. Queries built before April 30th 2015 may no longer work or return less data. After April 30th, Power Query leverages v2.2 in all calls to the Facebook API. You’ll likely need to re-authenticate to approve the new set of permissions. More details on the change in the Facebook API are available here. Support for Fixed Decimal Number type We have added support for Fixed Decimal Number type. This new type can be found in the Data Type drop-down menu under Home and Transform tabs in the Query Editor, as well as in the Change Type column context menu. Alternate Windows Credentials Added an option to use Alternate Windows Credentials (rather than current user) to the Windows credentials option in the Credentials dialog. Online Search is now Data Catalog Search and in a new ribbon location We renamed Online Search to Data Catalog Search and moved it from the Get External Data group to the Power BI group on the Power Query ribbon tab. New transformations We continue making incremental improvements to the set of transformations supported in the Query Editor. This month, we added the following new transformations: Remove Blank Rows. Median Operation available for Group By and Aggregate Column. Convert DateTimeZone value to Local Time. Performance improvements In addition to all the functional improvements described above, we also made Power Query faster when loading medium and large datasets into your Excel Workbook. Your queries will take approximately 20 percent less time to load than what they used to take with last month’s update. That’s all for this month. As mentioned previously, we’re making lots of incremental improvements to Power Query and we hope that you find it better with every new monthly update. Please continue sending us feedback using our "Send a Smile/Frown" feature, or by voting for what you’d like to see next. —Miguel Llopis, program manager on the Power Query team ——————— Power Query for Excel is available with an Office 365 subscription, Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance, Office 2013 Desktop SKUs or Excel 2013 Standalone.  Download the add-in and learn more about getting started. Learn about all the powerful analytics and visualization features in Excel and take your analysis further by sharing and collaborating on business insights with colleagues using Power BI. Learn more about Power Query See all analytics and visualization features in Excel Get your Office 365 subscription Try Power BI Follow us: Facebook and Twitter The post 11 updates to Power Query appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Stacey Roshan, High School Math Teacher at the Bullis School in Maryland. Have you ever been super excited about "gamifying" a review session only to realize that the competitive feel in the room becomes overwhelming? Each year, around this time, I play a game of AP Calculus Jeopardy review with my class. We have just finished learning new material and are ready to hit review mode. The game is a way to begin synthesizing material from the beginning of the course through to the end. The timing of this activity usually falls right before spring break, so throwing in a Jeopardy game seems particularly appropriate as a way to enliven the classroom before the vacation. Using OneNote to take the game beyond simply an in-class experience certainly enhanced this activity. Requiring students to make corrections and write brief reflections on the problems they solved in class forces them to look back at the questions we had solved together. I think this assignment really gives some closure to the activity. And I love the fact that students create an organized, searchable resource (ePortfolio) to study from! So how did I make this happen? My top three goals in setting up this activity were to: Have this activity to become a resource students could study from later. Increase participation from all students. Avoid having the game to turn into a speed race. Here are the problems faced in reaching these goals and how I solved them with the tools, like OneNote. Problem 1: Awarding points based on speed The one problem that I’ve often run into is that Jeopardy is a speed race. And honestly, the last thing that I want is to award points based on speed. I was never the quickest one in the class to respond to answers and I know a lot of times it made me feel like my peers were smarter, which we all know is not the case. But it took me a while to discover this. And so, in my teaching, I really look for ways to allow students to work at their own pace. It’s definitely a huge inspiration behind my flipped classroom. Problem 2: Students don’t take notes during a typical game Another issue that I’ve run into when playing games is that students don’t take as careful notes as they typically do during instruction or classwork. Obviously, if they are feeling pressed for time, they are going to just scribble their work anywhere to get to the proper answer. And in a Jeopardy-type game, it’s really hard for students to take notes since we are shuffling through categories. Traditional AP Calculus Jeopardy setup So back to the activity at hand—the AP Calculus Jeopardy review. Traditionally, l simply split the class into teams and display my Jeopardy PowerPoint on the projector. Students "buzz in" when they think they have the correct answer jotted down on their piece paper. I even tried giving a time minimum (i.e. you cannot buzz in before one minute) but then it became pretty arbitrary when choosing who to call on. And that resulted in me losing some of the enthusiasm behind the game. And maybe the worst part of all, students really didn’t have any notes to study from. And the purpose of this activity was to kick start our review. Solution 1: New and improved AP Calculus setup Tool 1: PearDeck This year decided to use PearDeck to push out the Jeopardy questions to each student’s computer screen. Briefly, the way PearDeck works is that the teacher creates an interactive presentation within the platform and then students’ log on to that presentation from their own computers. The teacher controls the pace of the presentation and students engage with the interactive slides. The teacher receives student responses in real-time. Tool 2: Wacom tablets I also have a class set of Wacom tablets so that students can handwrite on their screens. Using PearDeck’s drawing question type, I can ask students to use their Wacom tablets + pen to handwrite. One of the features of PearDeck that I love is that the teacher can see what students are writing as they are writing! Session dashboard view in PearDeck; updated in real-time. When playing AP Calculus Jeopardy, I could see which student was coming up with the most detailed, thorough response (in a timely manner); this provided me a way to award points in a way that wasn’t purely time-based. And since students were inking directly on the question at hand, I could ask students to take a screenshot of the slide after they had written their response to serve as a resource to study from. Which takes me to tool #3…. Tool 3: OneNote The next piece of this puzzle was to have students document the activity to have as a resource to study from later. This is where OneNote comes in. I had students organize all the screenshots they had taken of their PearDeck slides into appropriate tabs in their OneNote notebook. With OneNote, all you have to do is drag the image onto the appropriate OneNote page to copy it there. And a huge added bonus—with OneNote’s awesome OCR support, text search within all images works seamlessly. This allows students to easily search their questions for key words and topics as they do their studying. Solution 2: Revising answers and reflecting on takeaways Finally, I wanted students to think about our game. Again, the purpose of this activity was to help them begin to synthesize all of the material from the beginning of the year and to call attention to areas where they needed review. Since everything is so neatly organized in their OneNote notebooks, I asked students to write corrections and reflections to all of the questions we had covered. I thought this part of the activity was a great way to force students to look back over their work in a calmer environment and ask them to recall what we had discussed on the board when talking about that particular question. Perhaps them knowing that this reflection piece was required helped them stay engaged and focused when we were talking about the question as a class on the board. Example of a student correcting work in their OneNote notebook. Reflections All in all, I was really pleased with this activity and will definitely use this format in future games we play. I think this activity is a perfect addition to my student’s ePortfolio, as the reflection piece was built right into the assignment. And I think the game mentality of Jeopardy encouraged students to engage with their full energy. I will admit that I was worried that there were several moving parts to this assignment, but it really didn’t turn out to be a problem. Note that most of my students have Macs, so I don’t feel that OneNote is limited to only those with PC’s! To learn about more interactive activities using technology in the classroom, read my TechieMusings blog and follow me on Twitter @buddyxo. —Stacey Roshan The post AP Calculus Jeopardy review -"Gamifying" with OneNote and PearDeck appeared first on Office Blogs.

It probably comes as no surprise to most business owners that email is a primary way hackers can gain access to sensitive company data and information. But it may alarm you to know that small businesses are particularly vulnerable. Specifically, overall cyber-attacks on companies with 250 or fewer employees doubled in the first six months of last year—and the loss per attack was more than $188,000 on average. The effect of cyber-attacks on the American economy as a whole is a high cost of $100 billion annually, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That’s one reason the great Sony email hack of 2014 was such a big deal—it left every business wondering how they could avoid the same fate. It stands to reason that if such a large company, with multiple layers of security, can be hacked, small businesses with fewer resources have no hope, right? Maybe not. There are many ways to ensure your business is protected through secure email. Since your business’s security is only as strong as your weakest link, the secret is to get employees involved and invested in the success of your security. Here are seven tips to get you started. Make it a top priority to create and implement a cybersecurity plan. Of course, this involves more than simply considering how to ensure secure email service—it should also include strategies for keeping your website, payment information, and other information safe—but addressing email security should be a main part of your plan. The Federal Communications Commission created a handy tool, the Small Biz Cyber Planner 2.0, to assist you in creating a customized plan. Consider email encryption. Email encryption helps to protect personal information from hackers by only permitting certain users to access and read your emails. There are several methods of email encryption depending on the level of security—and convenience—you require. For example, you could download or purchase extra software that will plug in to your Microsoft Outlook. Or, you could install an email certificate like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), which allows your employees to share a public key with anyone who wants to send them an email and use a private key to decrypt any emails they receive. Another simple solution is to use a third-party encrypted email service. Office 365 provides ready to use encryption options like S/MIME and Office 365 Message Encryption services to help you meet these needs with little up front work. Ensure passwords are secure. All employees should have their own password for their work computer and email system. These passwords should be reset every three months; also consider requiring multifactor authentication when employees change their passwords. The strongest passwords consist of at least 12 characters and a combination of numbers, symbols, lower-case letters, and capital letters. Passwords should not be something obvious (e.g., birthdays, children’s names, etc.) but should be memorable. In other words, employees should steer clear of the two most common—and worst—passwords of 2014: "password" and "123456." Also, employees should not use the same password for multiple accounts or websites. Consider allowing the use of a password manager or single sign on function. Some great solutions for small businesses looking for tools to store codes, bank accounts, email accounts, PIN numbers, and other account information in one place include CommonKey, LastPass, and Password Genie. How do you know whether your password has been compromised? Sign up for watchdog services like PwnedList or Breach Alarm, which monitor leaked passwords and will report automatically to you if any of your email addresses are vulnerable. Develop an email retention policy that makes sense. Ask employees to purge emails that do not support business efforts and implement a policy to ensure compliance. Many companies institute a 60-90-day standard, with steps toward automatic archiving and permanent removal after a set time period. Remembering to delete emails that don’t comply with this standard can be difficult for some employees, so frequent reminders may be necessary. Train employees in email security. Employees play a crucial role in keeping data secure through email. They should be trained on what types of behaviors to refrain from and what types of emails to avoid. Unfortunately, according to InfoSight, nearly half of all companies spend less than 1 percent of their security budget on programs that train employees on how to be aware of security threats. Yet 64 percent of organizations experienced some level of financial loss due to computer breaches and 85 percent detected computer viruses. Wouldn’t it be worth the low cost of training to mitigate the potentially large cost of a hack? Specifically, employees should be trained to comply with the following rules: Never open links or attachments from unknown persons. Don’t respond to emails that request a password change and require you to divulge personal information—no matter how official the source appears. Ensure antivirus and anti-spy software is updated on your computer. Encrypt any emails containing sensitive data before sending. Don’t use your company email address to send and receive personal emails. Don’t automatically forward company emails to a third-party email system. In addition, some companies have found success in instituting programs that test employees with phishing campaigns, spear-phishing emails, and other cybersecurity threats and then reward them when they pass these tests. Office 365 offers capabilities to help educate users in context to keep them out of trouble while keeping them productive with features like as Data Loss Prevention Policy Tips to inform users if they are attempting to share data in an unsafe manner. Additionally, Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection adds new protection for specific types of advanced threats. Maintain strict standards for company-related mobile device usage. When using a company-issued mobile device, or a personal mobile device where you send and receive company emails, employees should encrypt data, keep the device password-protected, and install approved security apps so hackers cannot access devices via shared WiFi networks. Office 365 provides built-in mobile device management capabilities, providing options to help you keep your data safe with conditional access, device management, and selective wipe of company data. Avoid common pitfalls when securing email. Besides all of the things we’ve already discussed, email can remain unsecured in other ways as well. Be sure to consider the following: All computers—not just a few—should use email encryption. There’s no point in encrypting emails unless the same standard is applied across the board. Unlocked computers should never be left unattended. Make it company policy for employees to lock their computers (which should be password-protected at login) before getting up from their desks. By being purposeful when creating policies involving your small business’s emails, you will head off a lot of issues before they even come to pass. Get employees on board and reward them for assisting in developing an environment where information is secure. Together, it’s possible to keep employee, customer, and business data safe—one email at a time. The post The small business’s guide to secure email appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Office 365 was written by Mike McNamara, chief information officer at Tesco. In late 2014, I participated as a judge in a Tesco Hackathon. I’ve done this before, but this time there was something new about the competition. Instead of just asking developers to come up with an exciting new app in 24 hours, we used Yammer to involve more non-technical Tesco colleagues. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a group of young retail colleagues in the North of England got a team together and presented a great idea to make our Store Locator app more social and friendly; when you look up the location of the nearest Tesco, along with the usual opening hours and whether or not the store has a pharmacy, you get a glimpse into the human side of our company, with colleagues’ stories and pictures. It’s a brilliant idea that helps build strong customer response to our brand, and it all came about because of the new communication and collaboration tools in Microsoft Office 365 to the business. This is just one example of why our new business productivity platform is so important to Tesco. The story goes back about 10 years, when Tesco began to evolve from a UK-based grocery store to a multi-national, multi-channel, general merchandizing business. We’ve grown from 500 stores in the mid-1990s to 7,599 retail stores and franchises today with 500,000 colleagues working for Tesco in 12 countries. While this transformation didn’t happen overnight, in the last three years, we have made great strides in fostering a collective pride in, and connection to, our global company. The result is more engaged employees who are empowered to improve the Tesco customer experience. Today 48,500 colleagues use Office 365 to collaborate better in hundreds of ways, streamlining business processes and virtual teamwork across time zones and geographies. For example, take the complex supply chain and global coordination required to launch the spring line for our F&F clothing brand. Colleagues all over the world use SharePoint team sites to orchestrate the many steps it takes, from sourcing raw cotton in India, to sending it to another country for printing, and to another country for cutting and sewing, and to yet another country for adding in a zip. And because colleagues can get a lot of the background work done through online collaboration, we’re no longer flying buyers around the world, which was massively expensive and inefficient. Instead, we use SharePoint Online to expedite product design and manufacture on a huge scale to meet the retail deadlines of fashion’s major spring and fall seasons so our customers can choose from styles that are timely and relevant. Retail colleagues use Yammer on their smartphones to create a fantastic network for communicating with peers in spontaneous, store-to-store dialogue. If you are a baker with 20 years’ experience and you want to share some new ideas about a better way to display cakes, you can share your thoughts and get feedback and make changes happen that result in a better customer experience. I get great satisfaction from the way that Tesco is erasing hierarchical communications and democratizing the business to the point where anyone can contribute. Every day on my Yammer feed I see people talking, creating communities, solving problems, and sharing ideas—all with the goal to deliver more value to the customer. By using Office 365, everyone is equally able to turn that goal into reality. —Mike McNamara Read the full story to better understand how Tesco is using Office 365 to inspire employees and improve customer service. The post Democratizing a global business while building brand and customer loyalty appeared first on Office Blogs.