In response to viewer requests for us to feature a real organization adopting Office 365, today we kick off a special series featuring the IT staff of the Lotus F1 Team to follow their implementation. The roll out spans their race, engineering, operations and design teams. In this episode, I visit them at their Enstone headquarters in the middle of the race season where all focus is first and foremost on making the car faster and technology decisions are not taken lightly. This first show explores the decisions around their IT implementation of Office 365. Having started almost a year ago, they began with Azure Active Directory integration, email and Skype for Business. The team share their tips for choosing between identity options, service configurations, hybrid architectures and discuss their mobile strategy. Over 20 percent of their users are mobile, either racing, testing or designing the car or managing team logistics and operations, with at least 100 people traveling to 20 races in 20 different countries each year. In the coming months we’ll chronicle their journey rolling out more of Office 365 to match their long term aspirations, including work automation and BI as well as secure file sharing. We’ll see if they meet their ultimate goal to provide secure, robust access to any piece of information on any device, from anywhere in the world. —Jeremy Chapman The post How the Lotus F1 Team implemented Office 365—the IT journey appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on OneNote was written by Greg Akselrod and Avneesh Kohli, program managers on the OneNote team. Millions of people take handwritten notes in OneNote thanks to digital inking capabilities across popular devices including the iPad, Windows tablets and Android tablets. In fact, OneNote for Windows has supported handwriting recognition since 2006. Microsoft Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 users can start writing with a click of their pen and iPad users can use a variety of styluses designed for the iPad. Starting today, you can now search your handwritten notes that are in OneNote notebooks saved to OneDrive-just like you can search through typed text and text within images. Just type your search query into the OneNote search box to locate the page and the specific handwritten note. With OneNote’s powerful handwriting recognition, you’ll never have to worry about losing your notes again. OneNote for Windows 8.1 OneNote for iPad Handwritten notes saved to OneDrive are processed and searchable within two to five minutes and any pre-existing handwritten notes in your OneNote notebooks stored on OneDrive will be processed and searchable in the coming weeks. In addition, OneNote’s handwriting recognition works in 25 languages. We will expand language support and recognition accuracy, so stay tuned for future improvements. OneNote for Apple Watch We recently released OneNote for the Apple Watch to access your content when you’re on the go. We designed OneNote for Apple Watch with a strong focus on lightweight interactions and placed a premium on convenience. A core principle of our design was ensuring that you could quickly and easily reference the information you are looking for. If you pinned a note on OneNote for iPhone, we’ll surface it right at the top of your Apple Watch app, so you don’t need to hunt for it. This is perfect for when you’re frequently checking your to-do list. Additionally, OneNote for Apple Watch presents a unique opportunity to capture any quick idea, to-do, or thought you have while you’re on the go. All you need to do is speak what’s on your mind, and we’ll save it to OneNote immediately so you don’t forget it. Just tap the large + button and start dictating-it’s really is that simple. We encourage you to give OneNote for Apple Watch a try and let us know what you think! You’ll need OneNote installed on your iPhone and then you simply need to toggle it on from the Apple Watch app on your iPhone. Improvements to OneNote for iPad Lastly, we recently released an update to OneNote for iPad that introduced a new and improved way to organize your notebooks. Similar to the OneNote for iPhone experience, you can now easily swipe from the left to view the drawer where you can view all your notebooks, open or create notebooks, reorder and close notebooks. Additionally, you can now more easily access and manage your accounts and app settings in this all-new user interface. This makes all the ideas and information you keep in OneNote more convenient to recall. —Greg Akselrod and Avneesh Kohli, on behalf of the OneNote team. The post Handwriting Search and Apple Watch support for OneNote appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk about SharePoint development post all the announcements at Build and Ignite. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP45.mp3 Download the podcast. Show notes  All the Build 2015 sessions Jeremy’s top 10 build sessions All the Ignite 2015 sessions Intelligent, Ready-to-Go NextGen Portals in Office 365 The Evolution of SharePoint: Overview and Roadmap SharePoint UNPLUGGED! Questions Answered on Anything You Heard This Week What’s New for IT Professionals in SharePoint Server 2016 Microsoft Office 365 Groups Deep Dive MVP Panel: Sample Apps and Intelligent Solutions Showcasing Office Graph and Delve Extensibility 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 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  @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 blogs.msdn.com/b/richard_dizeregas_blog/ and follow him on Twitter @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 045 on SharePoint development post Build & Ignite conference appeared first on Office Blogs.

Just a little over a year ago we released OneNote for Mac. Since then we’ve delivered frequent improvements and new experiences that have made OneNote a top 10 free app in the Mac App Store. Continuing to make OneNote for Mac even better, today we’re introducing audio recording—one of the most frequently requested features by OneNote for Mac fans (especially students), and another powerful way to capture ideas and information into OneNote—plus the ability to recover notes you deleted accidentally and view equations created in OneNote for Windows. Picture this: You’re sitting in class, frantically taking notes. Your teacher is moving through the material quickly, and despite your best efforts, you fall behind. "Maybe it’ll be fine," you tell yourself. "Maybe the 30 seconds I missed weren’t that important." Then your teacher utters those dreaded words, "Remember what I just said because it’ll be covered on your final exam." Starting today, you’ll never have to go through that again—thanks to the new audio recording feature in OneNote for Mac. Next time you’re taking notes, click Insert, select Audio Recording and OneNote will start recording. It’s that easy! Use OneNote to record meetings, conference calls, classes, interviews, focus groups, brainstorm sessions, personal journals and anything else you don’t want to forget. Even better, any notes you type while recording will be synchronized to the audio. Reviewing your class notes and can’t remember exactly what your instructor said about the early music of the Beatles? Move your mouse over the notes you typed when the instructor was talking about that topic, then Control-Click to open the context menu and select Play Audio From Here. OneNote will play the audio that was recorded precisely when you typed that portion of your notes. Pretty handy! Don’t want to type a bunch of notes during your audio recording? Click the Add Bookmark button on the Audio tab to quickly flag an important point for later reference. Just like with text you’ve typed, you can Control-Click and select the Play Audio From Here command to play the audio recording from the point where you placed the bookmark. Here’s one last tip for making the most of audio recording in OneNote for Mac: Sit close to the person you’re recording so the microphone on your Mac will pick up the sounds more clearly. The level indicator on the Audio tab can help you determine whether the audio you’re recording is too faint. This is especially useful when recording in a large, open environment like a lecture hall. In addition to Record Audio, here are some additional updates we’ve included in this OneNote for Mac release. View mathematical equations created in OneNote for Windows First, we’ve addressed another popular customer request by providing the ability to view equations added from OneNote for Windows. Simply open a page that includes equations and you’ll see those mathematical symbols and Greek letters rendered in all their glory. Recover notes you deleted accidentally Second, we’ve made it possible to recover deleted content. If you’ve ever accidentally deleted a section or page in OneNote and then wished you could get it back, then this feature is for you. Simply click the View tab and then select Deleted Notes to see everything you’ve deleted in the last 60 days. To restore a deleted section or page, Control-Click on it and then select Restore To. We hope these updates make OneNote for Mac even more valuable to you. As always, we appreciate your feedback. Please continue to give us input and ideas at the OneNote feedback site. The post Audio recording comes to OneNote for Mac appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Rebecca Lawler and James Peters, program managers on the Outlook Web App team. Last year, we released the first wave of OneDrive for Business integration within the Outlook Web App for Office 365 customers. That integration allowed users to send OneDrive for Business files and set edit and view permissions using the Insert > Attachment menu, making it easy to share cloud files without having to separately navigate to OneDrive and leave the context of your inbox. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce improvements to this integration to make saving and sharing files to OneDrive for Business even easier in the Outlook Web App. Save attachments directly to OneDrive for Business The Outlook Web App now lets you save attachments you’ve received in email directly to your OneDrive for Business folder. This allows you to access these files from wherever you are and more importantly, gives you the ability to collaborate on these files in Office or Office Online without having to manage and keep track of multiple versions. In Outlook Web App, when you click Save to OneDrive or Save all to OneDrive, your files are added to a OneDrive for Business folder called Email attachments. Once they are stored in OneDrive you can move them to another folder, or send them in email as a cloud attachment. Let’s take a detailed look at how it works. The process begins when you open a message that has attachments. If you want to save a single attachment to OneDrive for Business, open the drop-down menu on the attachment and click Save to OneDrive. To save all the attachments to OneDrive click Save all to OneDrive. Once a file is added to OneDrive for Business you should see confirmation on the attachment. Guidance when sharing large files Sharing large files in email is tedious and unreliable. They can take a long time to send and frequently bounce back, never reaching the recipient—especially when emailing outside of your organization. At best, this process ends up wasting valuable time and at worst, it can result in lost business, upset customers or worse. Improving upon our first wave our OneDrive for Business integration, the Outlook Web App now automatically notifies you if the file you are trying to send is over your organization’s message size limit and then provides a one-click option to upload to OneDrive for Business. In this case, the Send as attachment option will be greyed out. The Outlook Web App also warns you when you try to attach a file that is fairly large and suggests that you upload and share with OneDrive for Business. In this way, you can keep your message size and mailbox smaller. This also ensures that your recipient will receive it, regardless of the file size. Currently, Outlook Web App supports uploading files up to 200 MB directly to OneDrive for Business. Over the next 4-8 weeks, this limit will be raised to 2GB. Frequently asked questions Q. When can I use these new features? A. Both of these features are rolling out worldwide to Office 365 customers. Most customers will see these features this week and we expect to roll out worldwide within 1-2 months. Q. Which Office 365 customers are receiving these benefits? A. All Office 365 customers with plans that include Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business, including commercial, government and academic plans will receive this benefit. Q. Does this apply for Outlook.com customers? A. This update applies to Office 365 commercial, government and academic customers using the Outlook Web App and OneDrive for Business. We have already released this functionality for Outlook.com and OneDrive.com. Q. Will these features be supported in the Outlook desktop client (e.g. Outlook 2013)? A. Not at this time, but we are working to bring it to the Outlook desktop client in a future version. You can accomplish the same capability as the Save to OneDrive feature in the Outlook desktop client by saving the attachments to your local OneDrive for Business sync folder on your computer. Q. Can I change the location where my file is saved? A. The Save to OneDrive action automatically saves your files to the Email attachments folder. Once they are in OneDrive for Business, you can move them to any other folder. Q. One or more of my files are failing to save to OneDrive for Business. What is going on? A. Check the file type of the file; some file types may not be stored in OneDrive for Business. Click here for a list of these file types. Q. What happens if I save the same file to OneDrive for Business twice? A. You will have two copies of the file in your Email attachments folder in OneDrive. The second file will automatically add (1) to the end of the filename. e.g. FileName.docx, FileName(1).docx Q. What if I need to upload and email a file larger than 200MB? A. We are updating the Outlook Web App over the next 4-8 weeks to support files up to 2GB. In the meantime, for larger files up to 2GB, users will need to navigate to and upload directly to OneDrive for Business. Q. I increased my company message size limit to 150MB. Why am I forced to upload files larger than 25MB to OneDrive for Business? A. Each organization has a set message size limit. The default maximum message size for Office 365 mailboxes is 25 MB, but we recently provided Office 365 administrators the ability to increase message size to 150MB. Currently, the Outlook Web App limits each individual attachment to 25MB or smaller. A user can attach multiple attachments up to the administrator set limit, as long as each is 25MB or smaller. Currently, anything larger must be uploaded to OneDrive for Business. We are working to remove that limit soon. The post Outlook Web App + OneDrive for Business just got better appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Igor Peev and Daniel Witriol, program managers on the Power Map team. In the May 2015 update of Office 365 we are proud to introduce a new core feature to Power Map: Custom Regions. The Custom Regions feature allows data to be mapped to the regions that matter most to you, even if they are not the traditional zip code, county, state or country regions. Custom regions are useful for scenarios involving sales districts, school districts, congressional districts, land lot development, crop rotation, geological analysis, and anything else using custom-defined polygons. The Custom Regions feature in Power Map allows you to import KML or SHP files which contain custom polygons. Once imported, you can use custom regions in the same manner as you would use standard regions such as zip codes. KML files can be created with a variety of free tools which are available on the Internet, you can read more about them here. We also support the import of SHP files, you can read more about the SHP file format here. Note that for SHP files we only support the WGS 84 standard coordinate system projection, more info here. Let’s walk through a specific example. When we can, we like to work with data that can have a social impact. In this case, we’ll analyze data about the homeless rate among students in Washington state school districts. We obtained the data from these two websites: http://www.k12.wa.us/HomelessEd/Data.aspx data.gov/dataset/tiger-line-shapefile-2013-state-washington-current-unified-school-districts- At a high level the data looks like this: There are columns for the school district name, the school year, the county and state the district is located in, and stats breaking down the number of homeless students in the district. Power Map can help visualize this data for authorities trying to reduce homelessness in our communities. Let’s start exploring the data. By default, Power Map detects the standard geographic fields, which can be used in the visualization. This is what you will see in the UI when you first open this data. The default geocoding level was automatically selected to County level. But today we are interested in comparing the data between School Districts. To do this, let’s add School District to Geography and Map Level and work with it by mapping it as a Custom Region. Any time you select Custom Region (.kml, .shp) from the drop-down, Power Map will ask if you want to import custom regions. Select Yes and browse to the KML or SHP file you want to use. Note you only have to import a region file once per-workbook. Afterwards you can re-use it by simply selecting Custom Region and choosing No to import. At this point, you can set a friendly name for your custom region. This is helpful when working with more than one set of custom regions. In the case of SHP files, there is also a drop-down allowing you to specify which field in the SHP file contains the names of your region. Power Map tells you how many regions will be imported in the workbook. Select Import and your custom regions are available to use. To see the highest percentage of the population of homeless students by district, use a shaded regions visualization. In this example, Power Map shows that in some coastal districts over 50 percent of their students have been homeless, and the higher percentages of homelessness occur in rural areas. To see how the homeless student percentages in the School Districts change over time, add the Year. This provides further insight into changing conditions and patterns which affect the problem. To manage custom regions after they are imported, select Import Regions on the ribbon.In the dialog, you can import a new region set (aka file), delete an existing set, or replace a set should the boundaries and descriptions change. For more examples of what you can do with the Custom Regions feature watch our video: New customization features In addition to the new custom regions functionality, we’ve added some other great features. You can now customize the formatting of your legends. Simply right-click the legend and choose Edit. You can also customize the background color of text boxes, date/time boxes, legends, and annotations to create emphasis or have it blend in. For example here we’re using color to emphasize an annotation. To set the background color as transparent, choose the No Fill option. This is the default now for text and date/time boxes. Finally, we’ve removed the extra green bar chrome you saw when you hovered over text boxes, date/time boxes, legends, and 2-D charts. Now it’s easier to line these boxes up or position them in corners. Click anywhere on the box to drag it around and then double-click or right-click to edit, or right-click to remove. We hope you enjoy this update. You can download all the files used in the Custom Region demo at: Power Map samples. —Igor Peev and Daniel Witriol on behalf of the Power Map for Excel team The post Power Map for Excel-May update for Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Editor’s Note 5/26/2015: We have revised the timeline for Clutter to be on by default and have updated the FAQs with the revised dates. Today’s post was written by Brian Shiers, senior product marketing manager and Kumar Venkateswar, senior program manager on the Exchange team. Last fall, we introduced Clutter, which moves less important emails out of your inbox and keeps you focused what’s most important to you. Today Clutter is moving over one million emails per day and saves users 82 minutes per month on average. Starting in June, Clutter will be on by default to help more people benefit from Clutter. We’re also introducing new administrative controls for Clutter and improving how Clutter interacts with users. Editor’s Note 6/8/2015: We have published an advanced Clutter enablement PowerShell reporting script sample, this new sample is linked in the post in the Administrator controls section. Administrator controls Additional controls are being added to help administrators manage Clutter. First we are introducing two PowerShell cmdlets to report on and turn off Clutter for users. These cmdlets are available for use today. Organizations who want to manage use of Clutter should use the cmdlet to turn off Clutter before it is turned on by default in June. The examples below show the most common uses for the cmdlets. This example turns off Clutter for users who have not already turned it on themselves:PS C:\Scripts> Get-Mailbox | ?{-not (Get-Clutter -Identity $_.Alias).IsEnabled} | %{Set-Clutter -Identity $_.Alias -Enable $false}This example provides administrators an easy way to see the use of Clutter for their users:PS C:\Scripts> $hash=$null;$hash=@{};$mailboxes=get-mailbox;foreach($mailbox in $mailboxes) {$hash.add($mailbox.alias,(get-clutter -identity $mailbox.alias.tostring()).isenabled)};$hash | ftYou can leverage these cmdlets to meet your enablement and reporting needs. This example script in the TechNet Script Center allows you to obtain the Clutter status for given list of users. The update is extending the personalization controls introduced in March.  Administrators can now configure a reply-to address for Clutter notifications, this is in addition to the existing options to change the sender display name and brand the message with a logo of your choice. These controls add to the existing options to allow organizationally critical messages to bypass Clutter and the ability to apply a default retention policy to the Clutter folder. Improving the user experience We are also improving how Clutter interacts with users. The existing inbox notifications are being replaced with alerts and summary notifications sent when Clutter is at work. The alerts are sent when new types of emails are moved to Clutter for the first time, you will receive a maximum of one alert per day. The summary notification is sent once per week making it easy to know what Clutter is doing for you. This example shows the new alert notification delivered to your inbox: We’re excited to reach this milestone in making Clutter on for everyone and delivering the controls administrators have asked us to deliver. We encourage you try out these new capabilities and please let us know what you think. You can provide us feedback at the Office 365 Network. —Brian Shiers & Kumar Venkateswar Frequently asked questions Q. When will Clutter be turned on by default for my tenant? A. Tenants in the First Release program will begin being on by default on June 15th. Standard release tenants will begin being on by default on June 30th. Q. Will new mailboxes created after Clutter is auto-enabled have Clutter on by default? A. Yes, new mailboxes will have Clutter on by default. Administrators can turn Clutter off using the PowerShell cmdlet after the mailbox is created. Q. What happens to existing mailboxes after Clutter is on by default? A. Users who have already turned Clutter on will continue to have Clutter on and will receive the new notifications. Users who have not turned Clutter on will have it turned on automatically. Users who have initially turned on Clutter and later turned it off will continue to have Clutter turned off. And finally, users whose admins have turned Clutter off on their behalf will continue to have Clutter turned off. Q. Can a user turn off the use of Clutter? A. Yes. Users remain in control and can elect to disable the Clutter feature when they choose, through the options page in Outlook on the web, Outlook 2016 Preview, or the link at the bottom of each notification. Q. How frequently will users receive notifications from Clutter? A. Users will receive one summary notification per week and up to one message per day when new message types are moved to Clutter, i.e. the first time a message from given distribution list is moved. Q. Why are the notifications delivered to my inbox? A. The notifications are delivered to your inbox to ensure you can stay informed across the range clients you might use, including Outlook desktop and mobile email clients. Q. Can a user or administrator opt-out of the Clutter notification messages? A. These notifications are an important part of the Clutter feature, because they keep users informed about which messages are being moved to Clutter. No option to deactivate them exists at this time. Q. Why are the Clutter cmdlets not available for some of my users? A. There’s still a small percentage of servers (about 2 percent) that don’t have the update containing the cmdlets as of May 26th. This means that for a small percentage of users the cmdlet will fail. You can retry at a later date, as the cmdlet is made available to the final portion of mailboxes. The post De-Cluttering everyone’s inbox appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Jared Spataro, general manager for the Office 365 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. In January, we delivered the Office apps for Android tablets—and we’re really proud of our 4+ rating in the Google Play store! Today I’m pleased to announce the preview for Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Android phones. Join the Microsoft Office for Android community to participate in the Preview program. The Office for Android phone apps are modern, optimized for touch and designed for work on the go. Here are a few things I think you’ll love about them: Familiar and consistent Office experience—The Office apps combine the familiar look, feel and quality of Office with a touch-friendly experience designed for Android phones. Documents open and render beautifully, with all formatting and content in the right place. In addition, familiar navigation and menu options in the ribbon are placed at the bottom of the screen within reach of your thumbs so you can easily review and edit documents on your phone. Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps make documents, spreadsheets and presentations look their best on your Android phone. Do great work—anywhere, anytime—With these new apps, you can be productive anywhere. Read, review, and make edits on-the-go. Turn numbers into insights with easy insertion of charts, text and tables in Excel. Tell your story on-the-go with PowerPoint—review, make quick edits and even present right from your phone. Reflow documents in Word to make them easier to read and navigate. Access your documents quickly—Create, open, edit and save files in the cloud from your Android phone so you can access them anywhere and anytime you need them. OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box and are all available to you. Work together—Share ideas, insights and presentations with others right from your phone. It’s easy to track changes, comment and markup documents so everybody knows the thinking behind the edits. Share your documents with others by simply emailing a hyperlink or attachment. Bringing these apps to Preview first provides you with an early look at the apps, while enabling us to gather critical user feedback helping us shape and improve the app experience on a wide range of Android phones across the world. The feedback we received from the Office for Android tablet Preview in January was critical to ensuring a high quality and consistent Office experience across Android tablet devices. Thank you! Please note that the existing Office Mobile app for Android phone will still be available in the app store during Preview. We will disclose more about our plans for this app later in the year when we announce general availability of the new Office for Android phone apps. You can get started with the Office for Android phone Preview in three easy steps: Join the Office for Android community. Once you join the community, Become a tester by clicking the links to the Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Wait for Google Play to replicate permissions (this may take ~up to four hours), click the above mentioned links and then follow the download links to install apps using Google play store. The post Office for Android phone Preview now available appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Office 365 was written by Rafael Bardales, Shared Services Director at CBC. The Central American Bottling Company (CBC) has been bottling and distributing beverages since 1885, and in the past 130 years we’ve seen many changes to the business and the world. From our initial roots in Guatemala, we’ve expanded operations to eight countries around Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. We’ve been distributing PepsiCo products since 1942, and we now also deliver drinks from major brands like AmBev and LivSmart to our 455,000 customers, most of which are small independent grocers. Building and managing an efficient distribution network that can reliably deliver products to so many customers in multiple countries presents many challenges.  We need to make sure that everyone in the company—from delivery drivers to executives—always has access to the information they need to keep the business running smoothly and keep our customers happy. Because of our affiliation with PepsiCo, we also need to ensure that we conform with U.S. regulations around data access and security. I manage the company’s Shared Services Center, which runs all of the company’s IT operations out of our Guatemala datacenter.  In 2009, we decided to move some of those operations to the cloud so we could better control our IT costs and make it easier to deploy new software quickly when we expand into new markets. We chose another vendor to provide our first cloud productivity platform, and while many aspects of their solution worked great for us, our employees found that it was missing a lot of the functionality they had come to rely on with Microsoft Office. So even after we migrated our email system, our employees continued using Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  Plus, we found we didn’t have the rights-management functionality we needed to meet U.S. regulatory demands and ended up using a workaround in order to comply. It was less than ideal, so we decided it was time to move on. When we evaluated our options, Office 365 was an obvious contender given our existing relationship with Microsoft and our use of Windows and SQL Server. After a successful pilot, we knew Office 365 was right for us and we signed on to begin the migration. Our IT staff is now on Exchange Online, and during 2015 we will migrate the rest of our 2,000 employees who use email. Grupo Sega will assist us as we roll out additional features like OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Skype for Business. The choice of Office 365 is streamlining our IT operations, because we can now replace single-function applications that we license for activities like web conferencing. As we consolidate more of our IT infrastructure on Microsoft products, systems administration becomes easier, and we make it simple for employees in different offices to work better together.  We’re currently expanding our use of mobile devices, and the commitment Microsoft has made to supporting all major mobile platforms will help our employees be productive anytime and anywhere. We’re excited about the benefits CBC will realize by strengthening our technology partnership with Microsoft through our Office 365 investment. Not long ago, I attended a forum where Microsoft demonstrated its current offerings and gave insight into future plans, including its emphasis on "cloud first, mobile first" development. I believe that Microsoft is taking the right approach, and I feel very comfortable that our partnership will allow us to fully support our IT and business goals. For more information, read the full story here at Why Microsoft. The post Central American Bottling Company (CBC) moves to Office 365 to streamline IT operations and simplify regulatory compliance appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Yammer was written by Sid Arora from iLink Systems. iLink Systems delivers next-generation technology solutions to help clients solve complex business challenges, improve organizational effectiveness, increase business productivity, realize sustainable enterprise value and transforms businesses inside and out. Our CEO, Sree, a strong advocate of the eat-your-own-dog-food philosophy, envisioned the iLink enterprise-level social network as one that can achieve internally for iLink what we claimed possible for our customers through our services—help achieve a cultural transformation. Since we live and breathe SharePoint both internally and externally, integration with Yammer seemed the logical choice to provide the needed social fabric experience, but we wanted to be thoughtful about how to bring a new tool into the organization and how it would create value for us. Within a short amount of time, Yammer started living up to its potential to foster a more connected and engaged culture. Being a technology services delivery company, we had many excited users from different parts of the organization come onboard within the first month of launch and have also seen a steady increase in that number to a point where most iLink teams and employees have now embraced  Yammer. One of the early success stories that helped the social networking tool gain popularity and mainstream acceptance was its use to announce a big data training to be conducted by an internal expert. Owing to the amount of interest and discussion generated, a Yammer group was created by the participants to store and share relevant content and news. This has grown to become one of the largest and more active groups within Yammer with a lot of knowledge sharing and discussions. Senior executives were aware and had started considering the need for a tool that was easy to use, social and could help people truly connect across levels and functions. Yammer served as the right platform, not only for unifying employees across geographies and languages, but also helped make employees more collaborative and engaged. Yammer has now started to become the de facto medium for broadcasting and seeking information, be it about latest trends in technology, process excellence, our delivery wins, or any internal/external trainings. It was a pleasant surprise to see the sales force embrace this channel early on, both to share latest customer wins as well as connect and find technical experts and information more easily. Of course, communication between employees has picked up, with conversations transcending departmental and regional boundaries. We are starting to see seeds of Yammer blooming into a breeding ground for innovation. It has empowered various groups to lead in new ways by bringing people together who share common interests and want to share ideas and collaborate on next-gen technologies. What next? Yammer has already improved the flow of information and ideas at all levels, such as between senior management and employees. There is a lot of excitement about the possibilities that Yammer opens up for us, including: Empowerment—Through enabling employees access to senior management and experts more easily, as well as help new employees get oriented faster on who’s who and what’s what. New employees can onboard faster to projects due to the opportunity to understand relevant context from Yammer conversations, which may have been previously been lost or hidden in individual emails. Employees can also learn about activities happening in other departments and locations. Listening to the workforce—By the very nature of Yammer being a two-sided network, taking it to the next level where it can help not only to get the word out on any internal initiative, technology or policy, but can also serve as a place to seek valuable feedback. Sree’s vision is to see Yammer help bring about a cultural transformation that breaks down internal barriers and replaces current top-down driven decisions by multiple dialogs and cross-group collaboration. It’s still early, but Yammer is already starting to prove itself to be the online work environment needed to consolidate internal communications, help employees connect, share and collaborate to meet business objectives. —Sid Arora The post iLink Systems—better and faster with Yammer appeared first on Office Blogs.

"OneNote has truly changed and evolved my classroom…adapting to the students’ needs on a quicker and more individualized basis." — Michael Williams, Teacher and technology champion at Weston Ranch High School, Manteca USD (Watch his Office Mix to learn more.) Today we are announcing a number of top requested features for OneNote Class Notebooks, OneNote Staff Notebooks, and OneNote across platforms coming soon to Office 365 customers. We realize that many schools and their IT administrators need a little time to prepare for major changes, like automatic installation of the OneNote Class Notebook app for Office 365 Education tenants. These updates will be available worldwide beginning in late May through mid-June—so you can count on them showing up in your summer planning for technology next school year in most of the world! OneNote Class Notebooks get easier for teachers Teachers in K-12 often have autonomy in choosing apps and services for the classroom and IT staff want to empower teachers to make technology decisions that are best for their students. We consistently heard from teachers that they were excited about trying OneNote Class Notebooks for organization and collaboration with their students. That’s why we are making the OneNote Class Notebook "wizard" automatically available to all teachers and faculty with Office 365 Education. Moreover, we are making Class Notebooks more discoverable for teachers by putting in their My Apps page in the App Launcher and accessible via simple URL. No more complicated permissions and setup scenarios—OneNote Class Notebooks will now be available to all teachers and faculty! Similarly, you will notice that we simplified the naming of the app from your feedback: OneNote Class Notebook (dropping "Creator"). OneNote Staff Notebooks get easier and goes global We’ve had a great response to the OneNote Staff Notebook, and like the OneNote Class Notebooks, we will also be rolling out Staff Notebooks to all existing and new Office 365 Education customers with E1 or E3 plans. Creating a OneNote Staff Notebook at your school will be as easy as logging into Office 365 and going to the My Apps page. In addition to making the Staff Notebook available more broadly, we will start rolling out the Staff Notebook in 45 more languages across new 60 markets. The list of languages is the same as the January 15th announcement with Class Notebooks. Plus, we heard your requests all the way in the Middle East and will soon be rolling out of OneNote Class Notebook and Staff Notebook in right-to-left languages, Arabic and Hebrew. See the Excel Power Map below for the current country list: New features for Class and Staff Notebooks Over the past few months, we’ve been listening to educator feedback on Class and Staff Notebooks, as well as talking and visiting with schools. Based on this customer feedback, today we are happy to announce new capabilities-driven from these top requests. The features below are rolling out in the coming weeks across the globe. Support for Active Directory security groups lists when adding students—To help make it easier for teachers to quickly get all students into a class notebook, we will be supporting Active Directory security groups in the Add Student Names page of the wizard. This will save a teacher time by allowing the entire class list to be added with one entry.  For example, now a teacher can enter a SharePoint Group alias into the Student Names field called Mrs. Smith Period 1. Assuming the directory has been set up with groups for each teacher’s class, we will use this information to create the private student spaces for the entire class based on the students listed in that Active Directory security group.  Here is an example: Ability to remove students and co-teachers from class notebooks—Another top request we’ve heard is to allow teachers to easily remove student or co-teacher permissions. If a student leaves a class, or a co-teacher or student teacher leaves the organization, it will be easy to remove that person via our new Remove Student and Remove Teacher Similar to how we allow a teacher to add a student, removing one will be just as easy. This feature will only remove the permissions of the student, the student notebook will be kept in place so the teacher has time to package it up before manually deleting it or archiving it. This functionality will also be added to the Staff Notebooks to allow the removal of Staff members and Staff co-owners. Have another feature that you would like to see in the product? Share your feature requests via our User Voice site or send us an email at OneNoteEDU@microsoft.com describing your school or classroom scenario. We love your feedback and feature suggestions, as you can see from our actions on them above! New APIs and LTI support for automation and LMS integration Extending the Class and Staff Notebook solution to existing learning management platforms and making them more automatic have been other top requests we’ve heard. In addition to our April release of OneNote APIs on Office 365, our new and upcoming REST APIs will allow IT administrators to automate Class and Staff Notebook administration processes such as class roster management and movement of pages in and out of OneNote. Partners will also be able to use the APIs to integrate the Class and Staff Notebooks deeply into their solution.  The API will allow programmatic access for: Creating Class and Staff Notebooks Adding & removing students and teachers (for roster synchronization with Student Information Systems) Copying OneNote pages (for integration into Learning Management System assignment distribution and collection workflows) Replicating notebooks (for end of year archival scenarios) We are also excited to announce upcoming Class Notebook support for the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) Standard. This will enable integration of the Class Notebook Creator with all major Learning Management System (LMS) providers—including Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, Schoology, Sakai and Desire2Learn—as well as many other providers and any other LTI compliant learning platform. Teachers with the LTI app installed will be able to launch the Class Notebook Creator, walk through the creation process, and add the created notebook to their LMS course, all without leaving their learning environment. Student-focused updates for OneNote across devices Of course, we cannot forget about the most important group in education: students. Last week, we released a few updates specifically for students who are using OneNote on different devices, including Apple devices. First, we made OneNote for Mac improvements from the top customer requests: Audio recording—Great for students recording their classes/lectures and jumping back to the most important points. View math equations—Now teachers can create equations in OneNote on a Windows device and they will show up for students on a Mac. Recover deleted pages—No more permanently deleted items if a student or teacher mistakenly deletes it. We also added Handwriting Search across all platforms and copy/paste pages on OneNote for iPad, key for Class and Staff Notebook scenarios where you want to move pages from the Content Library to a Private Notebook. We are excited for summer break as much as anyone, but even more excited for the amazing things school administrators, teachers and students will do with OneNote next school year. We love the feedback and the stories, which we will be sharing even more now with our new twitter handle @OneNoteEDU. Be sure to use #OneNoteClass and #OneNoteStaff. Also, now that you have some time, don’t forget your free professional development available at OneNoteInEducation.com. Have a fun and safe summer! The post OneNote gets ready for summer technology planning with updates for everyone appeared first on Office Blogs.

The ability to take OneDrive for Business files offline, apply changes and then sync those changes back is fundamental to helping people manage their files effectively across devices. Many organizations want to ensure their users are only able to sync files to managed- or domain-joined PC’s thereby limiting data leakage possibilities on unmanaged home and personal computers. Today we’re excited to announce that we’re releasing this capability for OneDrive for Business administrators! This complements the other data loss prevention investments we’re making right across Office 365. To find out all the details on this exciting new feature then check out the OneDrive blog and our comprehensive TechNet article. We’re constantly striving to provide tools to allow IT administrators to protect key business files on OneDrive for Business and we’ve got more IT management capabilities coming during 2015, stay tuned! The post OneDrive for Business introduces new data loss prevention capabilities for sync appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Juliet Wei, senior product marketing manager for the Yammer team. With the whirlwind of Microsoft’s first-ever Ignite conference behind us, I’d like to take this opportunity to recap some of the Yammer highlights and key takeaways from the event. Our inaugural conference was successful on a massive scale, attended by 24,000 people including IT pros, developers, business leaders and influencers. Thousands of you packed into Yammer’s 20+ sessions to learn more about our new focus on team collaboration and see the experiences we’re currently working on in action. The deep level of engagement and enthusiasm you brought over the course of five days both humbled and invigorated us. The Yammer sessions built upon the foundational sessions from Day 1 of the event, where we laid out the Office 365 holistic set of modern, connected collaboration solutions for dynamic teams. Many of the key innovations coming to Office 365 are inspired by concepts that have long existed in Yammer. That’s because Yammer has deeply influenced Office 365’s approach to collaboration over the past three years. For instance, the new Office 365 Groups service, which creates a standard definition of team membership using Azure Active Directory, builds on the idea of user-created groups in Yammer that are open by default. And Office Graph, our machine learning engine, is inspired by the Yammer enterprise graph, which makes it possible to discover and build on the work of others. By expanding on these and other Yammer concepts, Office 365 celebrates the work Yammer has done to date while providing a platform for Yammer to innovate on an even greater scale. Some of you have asked how we think about the co-existence of Yammer and Office 365 Groups. To clarify, Office 365 Groups is an architectural element of Azure Active Directory—not an Office 365 app or experience—whereas Yammer is THE immersive social experience within Office 365. Together with identity, Office 365 Groups and Office Graph comprise a shared intelligent fabric across Office 365 that’s also extensible. Take a look at the schematic below, which illustrates the point: As you can see, every app in Office 365 and beyond will hook into the intelligent fabric. For example, integration into the Office 365 Groups service enables each app to deliver innovative new experiences such as Outlook Group Conversations, a massive improvement over traditional distribution lists, and modern attachments in OneDrive for Business. The first apps to take advantage of the Office 365 Groups service include Outlook, OneDrive, OneNote, Skype and Dynamics CRM. Yammer and Delve will soon hook into the service too as announced at Ignite. As a core part of Office 365, Yammer is committed to leveraging the Office 365 Groups membership service, which will significantly improve and expand the Yammer experience. Building this integration depends on the completion of the foundational identity work we’re currently doing with Azure Active Directory, so we’re targeting Office 365 Groups integration to be available during the first half of 2016. The Office 365 Groups service is a great example of how Yammer can use the Office 365 platform to deliver greater innovation. Some of the new cross-suite collaboration scenarios enabled by integration with Office 365 Groups include: The ability to escalate your Yammer group conversation to a Skype group meeting. Easily accessing file sync and share capabilities in OneDrive from your Yammer group. Leveraging intelligence from the Office Graph to deliver better insights to your team in Yammer. Giving teams in Yammer the ability to schedule group events in Outlook calendaring. So if you’re wondering how Yammer and Office 365 Groups fit together, think about the Office 365 Groups service making your Yammer experience even more powerful. While these cross-suite scenarios enabled by Yammer integration with the Office 365 Groups service are indeed exciting, there’s no need to wait to get your team started on Yammer. Industry-leading companies all around the world are already using and realizing enormous success with Yammer. And with the work we’re doing every day to make Yammer itself a better place for teams, we believe there is no better way to help your team work smarter and make a bigger impact than with Yammer. If you haven’t already done so, activate Yammer today and check out the resources in the Office 365 Success Center to drive adoption in your organization! If you’d like to learn more about what we’re delivering next in Yammer, join our YamJam. On Wednesday, May 27th, the Office 365 Network will host a YamJam from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PDT to discuss Yammer’s new product direction. Members of the product engineering team will be on hand to answer your questions. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a "TweetJam" on Twitter or an "Ask Me Anything (AMA)" on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. It provides the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of internal Microsoft experts on a particular topic. Here’s how to participate: Request access to the Office 365 Network. All requests will be approved as quickly as possible. Join the Enterprise Social group. You can find it by using the Browse Groups function or through the search bar. Log in at 9:00 a.m. PDT on Wednesday, May 27th to ask questions, follow the discussions and connect with Microsoft team members. —Juliet Wei The post Recapping Yammer highlights and key takeaways from Ignite appeared first on Office Blogs.

On today’s Office Mechanics show, we’ll take a look at the new Office 2016 Public Preview on Windows 10—both on the desktop and on a phone. Ben Walters joins Jeremy Chapman again to the give an app-by-app tour of Office 2016 Public Preview on a Surface Pro 3 and a Lumia phone. The Office 2016 Public Preview has been available since May 4th and today we are giving an early look at some of the capabilities coming to Office across Windows PCs and devices. There is more focus than ever on data analysis and visualization and in the show, Ben demonstrates what this means using the new chart types in Excel. Office 2016 makes it even easier to create, open, edit and save files in the cloud. We show how the attachment experience in Outlook integrates with OneDrive and automatically configures permissions for recipients. Beyond sharing files from a common location in the cloud, collaboration is also improved with real-time co-authoring—and we demonstrate what this will look like in Word on the show. Office 2016 has new compliance and security controls coming—like Data Loss Prevention (DLP)—native in the application experiences for Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Secure authentication is coming to Outlook to add support for things like Multi-Factor Authentication and Information Rights Management (IRM) is coming to Visio. I demonstrate DLP in Excel and show how we can protect information like credit card and identity numbers using DLP policy. Beyond the desktop, we also show the updated Windows Phone experience for Office. Ben highlights the richness and fidelity of the apps, including the new palette user interface to make the most of the reduced screen size. He also takes a round trip in the mail, calendar and reading experiences on the phone. Of course in the short time we had, we were only able to scratch the surface on all the things coming to Office. To see it in action, be sure to watch the show! —Jeremy Chapman The post Early look at Office 2016 Public Preview for Windows—on the desktop and phone appeared first on Office Blogs.

We are pleased to announce an update to Outlook.com that lets you make the most of the moments that matter to you—featuring a refined inbox, new ways to collaborate, an upgraded calendar and much more. This update is rolling out today, in Preview, to a small group of customers and is the first of many innovations coming as we upgrade Outlook.com to a new Office 365-based infrastructure.  These new features will be made available to a broader audience through an opt-in program in the coming weeks. Let’s take a look at what’s new. Familiar, but refined inbox Your inbox is part of your daily routine. It’s where you keep in touch with family and friends, check the shipping status of packages and find deals from your favorite companies. These new inbox features are aimed at creating a richer and more engaging inbox, while maintaining the same look and feel you love. Here’s what’s new: Clutter—Get help managing your inbox. Clutter works on your behalf, sorting messages you’re likely to ignore into a separate folder, so you can focus on what matters. The more you use Outlook.com, the better Clutter gets. You can help train Clutter by dragging messages in or out of the Clutter folder and you can turn it on or off depending on your preferences. Search Suggestions and Refiners—Find what you need, fast. Suggestions put the people you communicate with and the content in your mailbox at your fingertips when searching for content. Refiners let you pivot your search results based on the sender, folder, date received and attachments. We’ve also added highlighting, making it easy to spot your search terms within the results. New themes—We’ve added 13 new themes with graphic designs to help you express your personality in your inbox. Link preview—Just paste a link into your message and Outlook.com automatically generates a rich preview to give your recipients a peek into the contents of the destination. It works great with any webpage, but try it with video links from Vimeo and YouTube for something even better. Inline images—Copy and paste images directly into the body of your message, right where you want them. Pop-out read and compose—Multi-tasking is easy with messages that pop out into new windows. Pins and Flags—Keep essential emails at the top of your inbox with Pins and mark others for follow-up with Flags. Pins are now folder specific, great for anyone who uses folders to organize their email. Quickly find and manage your flagged items with inbox filters or the new Task module, accessible from the app launcher. Add-ins—Announced earlier this month at Build, add-ins appear while you’re reading or composing a message and are designed to help you complete the task at hand. In addition to the Bing Maps, My Templates and Suggested Meetings add-ins that are built-into Outlook.com, we’re excited to have third-party add-ins on the way from Uber, Boomerang and PayPal. Watch for more partner announcements soon. The Bing Maps add-in lets you effortlessly open a map and get directions to a location found in the body of a message. New ways to collaborate Whether you’re planning a camping trip with friends, working on a project with classmates or just trying to get everyone to agree on dinner plans—email is one of the most important ways you get things with others. With that in mind, we’re adding several new features to make staying on the same page a cinch. New Skype experience—Seamlessly shift conversations between email and Skype. Chat with a group, or one-on-one, using all your favorite Skype emoticons. Start a voice or video call by pressing the call button. Simplified sharing from OneDrive—Sharing files through the cloud is the best way to keep everyone on the same page, but uploading a file and setting permissions can add a lot of extra steps. Now it’s easy, just attach the file to your draft message—drag and drop or with the file picker—and with one click you can convert it to a shared OneDrive link. Side-by-side views—Open an attachment and see it side-by-side with the email. You can view or edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents while simultaneously replying to the original message. Best of all, any changes you make to the file are automatically saved and attached to your response when you hit send—no need to download, edit, save and re-attach the revised file. Side-by-side view works great with photos too. With side-by-side views, your content and conversations coexist. It works great with the free online version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Get time back on your side The Outlook.com calendar is one of the best ways to stay in sync with your friends and family. With new features and improved navigation, you can easily manage shared calendars, quickly find events by searching for the name, invitees, location or description and stay on top of the dates that matter to you with over 100 country and religious calendars. New collapsible panels on the left and right side of the calendar make it even easier to manage your time and stay on top of upcoming events. New mobile web experience The Outlook apps across Windows, iOS and Android provide a rich app-based for phones, but for those who prefer to access their account on a mobile browser, we’re introducing a cleaner experience with new features like swipe gestures and support for add-ins. You’ll also find great new mobile-friendly views for your calendar and contacts. Your voice, your vote In addition to the new features we’re announcing today, we’re also excited to share an important change to how we gather and prioritize feedback. We want to foster a more dynamic conversation—giving our community a chance to see and hear what others are saying and at the same time, creating a direct line of communication with the team that builds Outlook.com. Today we’re launching the Outlook UserVoice, an open forum for you to share feedback, recommend features, and vote for the ideas you like best. Joining the conversation in the updated web experience is easy—just click Feedback under the Gear icon and you can make your suggestion without leaving your inbox. If you’d like to see and vote on other ideas, you can always visit Outlook.UserVoice.com and sign-in with your Microsoft account. Simply post your idea or comment to give feedback directly to the Outlook.com team. We hope you’re eager to try out all of these new features. Stay tuned for more news from the Outlook.com team, including exciting new announcements and details on how you can opt-in to the new experience. Thanks! The Outlook.com team Frequently asked questions Q. Will I need to change my email address? A. No. We will never make you change your email address. Q. Will I need to change or update any settings on my phone or other apps to keep receiving email? A. The vast majority of customers will not need to make any changes. If changes are needed, Outlook team will proactively send instructions to ensure you stay connected. Q. Will Outlook.com users have to pay for an Office 365 subscription? A. No. Outlook.com will remain a free, ad-supported service. Q. After receiving the update, I don’t see any ads. Will the updated user interface be ad-free? A. No, Outlook.com will remain an ad-supported service. Q. When will I be able to opt-in and get these new features? A. Opt-in details will be shared in the coming weeks. Q. I have a custom domain configured with Outlook.com. Will I be able to keep it? A. Yes, if you have a custom domain configured on Outlook.com today, it will continue to work after this update. The post New ways to get more done in Outlook.com appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Julia White, general manager of the Office Marketing team. "Amaze your customers!" is how Bob Stutz opened his recent blog announcing the general availability of the spring 2015 release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. I share Bob’s enthusiasm since many people—especially those involved in sales—will be amazed at how they can save time and sell more through seamless integration of Dynamics CRM Online with Office 365. For the Office team, reinventing productivity is our mantra and we’re excited to collaborate with our Dynamics CRM teammates to help people become more productive, especially when they’re on the go. And aren’t salespeople always on the go? In addition to delivering increased productivity, our CRM and Office 365 platforms work together to provide sales professionals the Office tools they already prefer: Excel, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Skype, Word and Yammer. But rather than talking about these improvements, let’s walk through some of these new features: Email integration with Dynamics CRM—Use the new CRM App for Outlook to track incoming email and view contextual Dynamics CRM information about the people sending you email, including sales activities, cases and opportunities. This add-in also makes it easy for users to create new CRM records directly from Outlook. Email folder tracking—This is a new and intuitive way of tracking incoming email activities on any device that supports Exchange. Now you can track your email directly from virtually any device. Sharing notes and insights—Salespeople can share information more easily with OneNote embedded inside Dynamics CRM. You can create and view notes containing text, photos, voice, spreadsheets—even handwritten notes on a napkin—all within the context of the account, opportunity or any other record. With OneNote embedded in Dynamics CRM, account information is automatically linked with the CRM Online record. Immersive Excel experience—Now you can use Microsoft Excel Online to do a quick analysis right from Dynamics CRM Online, eliminating the frustration, time and effort required to switch between applications. Salespeople can view their data in familiar Excel spreadsheets, perform what-if analyses and upload changes with one click, all while maintaining the sales workflow. Self-service analytics—You can effectively analyze customer data using Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrated with Power BI. Using the new out-of-the-box connector and templates for Power BI, organizations can analyze sales performance, drive pipeline goals, prepare forecasts and efficiently manage account team activities. Call to action You’ll find more highlights about the spring 2015 Release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM here. If you’re a current Dynamics CRM customer, start using these new features to immediately enhance your productivity. Otherwise, take advantage of our free 30-day trial to experience full Microsoft Dynamics CRM functionality. We’re delighted to work with our Dynamics counterparts to meld the best of CRM Online with Office 365—and we’re even more excited to reinvent productivity for our customers involved in sales, service or marketing activities. Amazing, indeed! —Julia White The post Amazing business productivity through Office 365—Dynamics CRM integration appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Andrew Connell and Mike Fitzmaurice at DevIntersections conference in Scottsdale, Arizona poolside. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP46.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates My thoughts on future of SharePoint and Office 365 Development including SharePoint 2016 On-Premises | Nik Patel Easier prepare for a meeting with the Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in - Waldek Mastykarz Consuming Azure Hosted Web API from SharePoint Online using JavaScript and Office 365 identities | www.silver-it.com Chris O’Brien: Presentation deck/videos - Comparing SharePoint add-ins (apps) with Office 365 apps Office 365 API Walkthrough for Windows Store App - Exchange dev blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Chris O’Brien: Info and some thoughts on Office 365 "NextGen" portals - Microsites, Boards and the Knowledge Management portal Next Generation Office 365 Development with APIs and Add-ins - Richard diZerega’s Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Show notes Office 365 is a Development Platform: ePaaS Top 10 Build 2015 recordings not to be missed on Office development! 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 Connell Andrew is an entrepreneur and developer with an emphasis in Microsoft SharePoint and content management systems (CMS). In April of 2005 he was recognized by Microsoft for his community contributions by being awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Content Management Server and has received the award annually for SharePoint Server every year since. Most of his work these days involves working with the Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 and web development technologies. Read more at about  Andrew Connell  and follow him on @andrewconnell. About Mike Fitzmaurice Mike is a vice president of Product Technology for Nintex, and he used to work at Microsoft where he was involved with every version of SharePoint technology from pre-"Tahoe" through the 2010 release.  He cares about process automation, integration, collaboration, and a lot of other "ation"s.     About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a Software Engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are world-wide conferences, trainings, and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at http://www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is based, born, and raised in Dallas, Texas, but works on a world-wide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 046 platform dev with Mike Fitzmaurice and Andrew Connell appeared first on Office Blogs.

Earlier this year Microsoft acquired Equivio, an eDiscovery software company focused on document analytics, to accelerate our efforts to help customers meet legal and compliance challenges. Today we’re excited to announce that eDiscovery capabilities powered by Equivio Zoom are coming soon to Office 365. Equivio Zoom will become available through a preview program starting in June, followed by a broader release before the end of this year. Here’s a closer look at how it works. With Equivio Zoom you can better understand your Office 365 data and reduce your eDiscovery costs. Equivio Zoom helps you analyze unstructured data within Office 365, perform more efficient document review, and make decisions to reduce data for eDiscovery. You can work with data stored in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business. You can select groups, individual mailboxes and sites, as well as use keyword search to scope the data you want, and then easily analyze it with Equivio Zoom. More efficient document review Equivo Zoom streamlines and speeds up the document review process by identifying redundant information with features like Near-Duplicate Detection, which provides information about how similar documents are to each other; and Thread Analysis, which identifies emails that contain other emails in a thread, allowing you to review just the unique emails rather than every single one. These features reduce document review costs significantly. And when you export data, the near-duplicate and email thread metadata are available to be loaded into other eDiscovery tools. Reduce data for eDiscovery Equivio Zoom also offers a Relevance feature, which applies predictive coding technology to teach the system to identify relevant documents. Zoom learns from your tagging decisions on sample documents, and the system applies statistical and self-learning techniques to calculate the relevance of each document in the data set. This enables you to focus on key documents and make quick yet informed decisions on case strategy. By ranking documents by relevance, you can also precisely cull the data and prioritize review. Understand unstructured data Themes and Search are powerful features for early case assessment and internal investigations that help you quickly map the collection and find key data points. Themes groups related documents, allowing you to identify topics of interest, drill down to discover more material, find similar documents, and intuitively explore your data set by following up on related themes. You can also use the typical search capabilities that you would expect, such as wildcards, Boolean logic, conceptual search and term expansion. To learn more about this technology, you can watch our eDiscovery Redefined: Real Time and In-Place session from the Microsoft Ignite conference earlier this month. The Equivio-specific content, including a demo, begins at the 36:50 mark in the recording. We will provide additional updates on Equivio Zoom, including pricing and full technical details, in the coming months. In addition to enabling you to analyze Office 365 data, we’ll be adding the ability to send data to Equivio Zoom from Exchange Server 2016 and SharePoint Server 2016 on-premises environments. If you are interested in participating in the invitation-only Preview program, please apply at prereleaseprograms-public.sharepoint.com, use referral code 8721. In the comments field of the nomination form tell us you are interested in Equivio and why you would be a great addition to the Preview program. —Quentin Christensen, lead program manager at Microsoft The post Analyze Office 365 data with Equivio Zoom appeared first on Office Blogs.

It’s been an exciting month for Sway and our journey with Sway Preview! At the Ignite conference, we announced that Sway would roll out to Office 365 business and education customers and add support for more languages. Today we’re excited to announce the start of these rollouts, as well as other changes that expand the type of content you can add and the ways you can visualize the multimedia that brings your Sways to life. Check out the details below! Sway for Office 365 rollout has started Sway now supports six more languages, with more to come Insert Wikipedia snippets about people, places and other terms Add personal and community images from Flickr Add new structure to your Sway with the Grid Card Sway for Office 365 rollout has started Today, we’re beginning the rollout of Sway to qualified Office 365 business and education customers. This opens the door for many new people to use Sway at work and school, and we’re excited to get a whole new set of feedback from these customers as part of Sway Preview! We even have a dedicated UserVoice forum for feedback on the Sway for Office 365 experience. As mentioned earlier this month, Sway for Office 365 is initially rolling out to First Release customers, and it will become available to all eligible Office 365 customers over the coming months. Today’s rollout includes support in Sway on the web for Office 365 work and school credentials, with the next update to Sway for iPhone supporting these accounts as well. Sway on the web now also has a simplified sign in interface that provides the corresponding Sway experience for you, depending on whether you sign in with a Microsoft account or an Office 365 work or school account. Sway.com now has a simplified sign in experience. With Sway for Office 365, professionals can save time at work and easily create engaging, eye-catching interactive reports, presentations, and more which flow responsively across all device types. Teachers can use Sway to engage students, faculty and parents with interactive lessons, assignments, project recaps, newsletters and more. Students can have fun while learning and stay engaged by using Sway to breathe new life into reports, assignments, projects, study materials, and portfolios. If your organization is not already in First Release, Office 365 admins can visit the Office 365 admin center (under Service settings > Updates) and select either Entire organization or Select people to turn First Release on. The setting change can take up to 24 hours to take effect. At that point, Sway will begin to roll out to your organization. Sway now supports six more languages, with more to come Also as promised earlier this month, Sway on the web now supports six more languages, for both consumers and Office 365 business and education users. Now you can use the Sway web interface in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (in addition to English). Support for Japanese is also coming soon, with other languages to follow. Sway will automatically set its language according to your browser’s language settings, but you can change languages by adjusting your browser settings if you speak multiple supported languages. Sway for iPhone will be updated soon to support these languages as well, and become available in the App Store for markets where those are official languages. Insert Wikipedia snippets about people, places or other terms into your Sway Suggested searches in Sway helps you while you create by anticipating what content you might want to incorporate. It uses natural language processing to continuously show you tags for related words and phrases you might be interested in searching on, based on what you’ve already written and the specific content in the area you’re working on. In March, we expanded the results of Suggested searches to include YouTube videos and tweets, in addition to images from Bing Image Search. Now, Suggested search results include Wikipedia snippets that you can easily add to your creation to complement the other multimedia you use to share your narrative. For example, let’s say you’re creating a Sway about ancient history and use Suggested searches to find additional information about famous historians and philosophers—including Herodotus. As long as a Wikipedia article exists, and it has an infobox containing an image (an infobox is the small fact table on the right side of many Wikipedia articles), the Suggested search results will include a Wikipedia article abstract. Then you can easily add that snippet to your Sway, which brings the snippet’s picture together with the Wikipedia article’s first paragraph as its caption, as well as a citation. Sway’s Suggested search results can now include Wikipedia snippets containing an image and article abstract. Add personal and community images from Flickr Sway makes it easy for you to pull together your rich multimedia content from a variety of sources, right within the app. Millions of people use Flickr to store and share their images in its community. By integrating Flickr into the consumer version of Sway, now you can easily access your Flickr images and quickly drag and drop them right into your creations. And that is not all! If you don’t have a Flickr account, you can still search for community images tagged with Creative Commons licenses. Sway now lets you browse your personal images from Flickr, as well as searching Flickr community images (shown). Get started by selecting Flickr from the Insert tab. Then search for images using the search box. You can also connect to your Flickr account right within Sway to access your personal images without leaving the app. Photostream displays all images that you uploaded to Flickr, and Albums helps you navigate individual albums you’ve created. Add new structure to your Sway with the Grid Card We’ve added another powerful way to visualize and structure your multimedia content in Sway! The new Grid Card organizes any images, videos and text you’ve added to it into a uniform grid, which will adjust automatically to look great on each screen size where it is displayed. The Grid Card can be a great way to put together a series of photos that are all similar, when you want to display them close together in your Sway, using the same size, and all on the screen at once. It’s also another great example of how Sway lets you express your intent ("keep these things together, all showing at once and visually consistent with each other") and acts as your digital design assistant to ensure your creation looks great across devices. The new Grid Card displays your images, videos and text in a consistent grid that adapts to look great across screen sizes. There are two ways to get started. You can add a blank Grid Card from the Cards tab, and then add multimedia to it. Or, select a collection of images, videos and text you’ve already added, select Group, and then choose the Grid option that appears on the left. Sway will ensure that your images and other content look great in a Grid layout, even if they weren’t originally the same size or aspect ratio. Sway intelligently inspects and crops the images to fit in the grid, and you can also use Focus Points to help make sure what’s important shines through. We’re really excited about the new possibilities that the Grid Card provides. Give it a try and let us know what you think! Thanks for all the feedback you’ve been providing during our Sway Preview journey together. Please keep it coming! And welcome to all of our new Sway for Office 365 users! As always, feel free to drop us a line on UserVoice. —Sway team, @Sway   Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post Sway has started rolling out to Office 365, added more languages, and more! appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Office 365 Dev Digest was written by Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 Dev team. Welcome to the third edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep-up-to date with what’s new in Office 365 development. We have a huge amount of news to share with you this month based on all the announcements that were made at Build 2015 in San Francisco. For me, the most exciting announcements were the: Support for Office add-ins in Excel for iPad (and very soon Word and PowerPoint) and Word, PowerPoint and Excel Online. New Office 365 Unified API endpoint preview and add-in Commands inside Outlook 2016 Preview. Office 365 Store support for web applications in the Users’ My Apps page. Latest dev news Check out the latest news from Office Blogs that is useful to know as an Office 365 developer. Personally, I think it’s exciting to see Office for Android phone in preview this month. But obviously, the biggest news was all our announcements at Build 2015 this year in San Francisco. Announcing the new Office 365 Management Activity API for security and compliance monitoring - Office Blogs Office for Android phone Preview now available Today at Build—new possibilities with the Office platform Support for work and school notebooks on Office 365 (in Preview) Top 10 Build and Ignite sessions There were a ton of great sessions at Build and Ignite. Here is a list of the most popular sessions from both events now available on-demand: 1. Build 2015 day one keynote This is not to be missed with Rob Lefferts on stage with our CEO Satya Nadella demonstrating Outlook add-ins like Uber, SAP and our Unified API using the Office Graph Explorer. 2. Office 365 development…why it matters This was my only session of the week with Rob Lefferts and we did a demo palooza of all the new announcements. 3. Integrating web apps with Office 365 Todd Baginski and Dorrene Brown did a great job of demonstrating the Property Manager Hero and how it was put together. It’s a great project to showcase what you can do with the Office 365 APIs in a real-world scenario. 4. Supercharging your custom solutions with the Office 365 Unified API endpoint Yina Arena has been spearheading the Unified API endpoint efforts and she does an amazing job of explaining what it’s all about in-depth. 5. iOS and Android apps with Office 365 Todd Baginski and Josh Gavant showcase how to build native iOS and Android apps against the Office 365 API SDKs. 6. Connecting to OneNote in the cloud with Office 365 APIs One of the most exciting announcements for me was the fact that you can call the OneNote APIs with an Azure AD token! 7. Building multi-device apps with Xamarin with Office 365 APIs Chaks and James did a great job demonstrating Xamarin and Office 365 APIs, they are a pleasure to watch! 8. Building a single-page app using Angular and TypeScript using Office 365 APIs Andrew is one of my favorite presenters and he killed this session on Angular and TypeScript. 9. Building Office add-ins using Node.JS Another one by Andrew Connell, I really want to personally get plugged into Node.JS and this was a great intro. 10. Get your hands dirty with the Office 365 APIs, Authentication and SDKs Rob Howard totally blew away the crowd with his Fiddler skills explaining the Auth stack on Office 365 and Azure. Dev documentation The Microsoft Content Publishing team works hard producing documentation to help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month: Office Add-ins Office add-ins (Improved and simplified getting started experience with new Napa.) Get started creating a content app for Excel with Napa Get started creating a task pane app with Napa Get started creating a mail app for Outlook with Napa Publish add-ins for Office and SharePoint (Consolidated all Office Store-related publishing and updated content.) Validation policies for add-ins submitted to the Office Store (version 1.7) Brand your app for Office or SharePoint Office 365 APIs Get Started Preview features Unified API Office graph Release notes SharePoint add-ins (Improved and simplified getting started experience.) SharePoint add-ins Get started creating SharePoint-hosted add-ins Get started creating provider-hosted add-ins Tools for developing add-ins for SharePoint Set up a development environment for add-ins for SharePoint on Office 365 Set up an on-premises development environment for add-ins for SharePoint SharePoint Online How to avoid getting throttled or blocked in SharePoint Online For more documentation check out Office developer documentation. Code samples Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump-start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the community. Email Peek (An iOS sample app that peeks at just email conversations you truly care about when you are away.) Office 365 Directory sample for web using the Office 365 unified endpoint Office 365 Profile for Windows using the Office 365 unified endpoint Office 365 Profile for Android using the Office 365 unified endpoint Office 365 Profile for iOS using the Office 365 unified endpoint New Android code snippets for creating a recurring calendar event and working with email attachments For more code, samples check out the dev.office.com/code-samples. Most recent Office 365 Dev podcasts Since joining Microsoft last year, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group and I’ll go hunt the relevant people down to interview. Here are the most recent podcast interviews: Episode 046 on platform dev with Mike Fitzmaurice & Andrew Connell Episode 045 on SharePoint development post-Build & Ignite conference Episode 043 on Build 2015 announcements Episode 044 on Ignite and Hackathons Episode 042 on the future of Exchange development with Venkat and Pretish For more podcasts check out dev.office.com/podcasts. Patterns and practices The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working hard to release samples to show the power of SharePoint Add-ins. Don’t forget to join the monthly community calls to hear the updates from them directly on Skype for Business. Here are the latest updates from the team: Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP)— May release details PnP May community call recording at Channel 9 New training package created based on the PnP guidance at OfficeDevPnPTraining Numerous new videos in the PnP Channel 9 check at OfficeDevPnPVideos Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at OfficeDevPnPMSDN Here are the latest guidance documents: Injecting JavaScript into SharePoint the safe way Query SharePoint change log with ChangeQuery and ChangeToken MSDN GitHub Transform farm solutions to the SharePoint add-ins MSDN GitHub Recipe - Custom field type Recipe - Remote Timer Jobs Recipe - Site Columns and Content Types Recipe - Site Provisioning Recipe - Themes Recipe - MMS manipulation Recipe - Elevated Privileges Customize OneDrive for Business site branding SharePoint metadata, site navigation and publishing site features For more on patterns and practices check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related on released materials and guidance can be added to our Yammer group at OfficeDevPnPYammer. Dev community blog posts The Office 365 dev community has been busy this month. It is really exciting to see the effort people put into their posts in their spare time to share with the community. Check out these articles from the Microsoft field, MVPs and more: My thoughts on future of SharePoint and Office 365 Development including SharePoint 2016 On-Premises | Nik Patel Easier prepare for a meeting with the Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in—Waldek Mastykarz Consuming Azure Hosted Web API from SharePoint Online using JavaScript and Office 365 identities | www.silver-it.com Chris O’Brien: Presentation deck/videos—Comparing SharePoint add-ins (apps) with Office 365 apps Office 365 API Walkthrough for Windows Store App—Exchange dev blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Chris O’Brien: Info and some thoughts on Office 365 "NextGen" portals—Microsites, Boards and the Knowledge Management portal Next Generation Office 365 Development with APIs and Add-ins—Richard diZerega’s Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Info and some thoughts on Office 365 "NextGen" portals—Microsites, Boards and the Knowledge Management portal Next Generation Office 365 Development with APIs and Add-ins - Richard diZerega’s Blog—Site Home - MSDN Blogs Office 365 iOS Apps Using Swift What Should you Make of Angular 1.x, 2.0 and Moving Forward Integrating AngularJS with Azure Active Directory Services Upcoming events There are plenty of events on the horizon…don’t miss out on these great events with Office 365 content. Our team looks forward to meeting you all at these events, so don’t be shy come say hello at the Office 365 booth! June 24 - 26 SPTechCon Dev Days Aug 18 - 20 SharePoint Fest Seattle For more events check out dev.office.com/events. Office Store News The Office Store has made a number of advancements. The dedicated Office 365 Storefront, easily discoverable from the 365 App Launcher, will deploy to the first waves of customers at the start of June. The storefront will promote SaaS solutions (registered with Azure AD and using OAuth2/OpenID Connect for authentication/authorization) as well as featuring the existing apps/add-ins in the Office Store. Outlook makes it even easier for users to discover Outlook add-ins in the Office Store via the latest Outlook 15 update, and will appear in Outlook 16 when it is Released to Market in June. This will enable direct acquisition of Mail add-ins from within Outlook itself. Outlook 16 also will pioneer the new "Add-in commands" for Office clients, in which developers can specify in their Manifest that their add-in be assigned a dedicated tab in the Outlook ribbon for hosting multiple Add-in Command buttons for their solution (such as Upload, Save, etc.). This feature starts as an Outlook Preview and will migrate to the other Office clients in the coming months. The Office Store is now live with the streamlined acquisition flow for SharePoint and Mail add-ins, in which users can install directly into a SharePoint site or Outlook inbox without having to leave the Store experience. No more starting within the Office product! This lets you create impactful ad campaigns (on your website or in email) to drive customers to the Store to directly acquire add-ins. You can also add the "Download from the Office Store" badge to your campaigns, in small, medium, or large. Want your Excel or Word add-in to reach more users on more devices? Make sure you resubmit your Word or Excel add-in using version 1.1 of the manifest schema and office.js 1.1. To reach customers on iOS, you’ll also need to provide your seller ID in the seller dashboard. Look for us equip all the clients and Office services, on all platforms, with Office Store functionality over the coming months. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Office Store has now been localized for 60 markets worldwide —every market where Office.com is localized—and offers add-ins in 40 languages! We’ve worked with Lionbridge to launch localization and market reach services for Office Store apps—full pricing details on their portal. The BetterwithOffice.com site is live, with three SMB-focused videos and case studies about customers of your solutions that Office professionally produced. Look for Office to localize these videos, add more and start marketing them to customers and to add an EDU set of videos early in 2016! Developers can get a peek preview of how their Office Store submission looks and behaves before releasing it to the world, via a new feature called Preview. Previews are not visible unless an Office Store visitor has the code needed to enter into the Store search box. Developers can "hide" their solution during Office Store submission via Seller Dashboard, simply by including an alphanumeric Preview code of up to 20 characters in the Notes field. The Store team will send a confirmation email regarding Preview status and developers can later "unhide" their add-in by responding to the same email address. Want to persuade more customers to contact you about purchasing—or want to get better user reviews for your app? Our Best Practices Add-in has been published to the Office Store as an Office Preview offering. Just search for code build15 in the Store and you can then install this hidden solution to your SharePoint dev site. (You can get it on Github, too, but the Store version takes care of the licensing flows). The add-in comes packed with sample code on GitHub that you can copy into your solution to make it more engaging. You can pop an email form to gather contact info for new customers; solicit reviews and feedback; expose premium features; launch tutorials and just generally engage your prospects to convert them to paid customers. You also should think about pushing all those harvested email addresses into an outbound email campaign engine like Marketo, Mail Chimp or the free Drip account we are providing (on a limited basis) to Developer Program members. Want to watch the full set of announcements from Build 2015? Watch the video on Channel9. Top new add-ins the Office Store Since mid-April, we’ve seen more than a dozen top-rated add-ins published through the Office Store validation process. Some are updates, most are brand new—and several were published in a variety of European languages. Here’s a partial list: Theme Builder by SONJAsAPPs SharePoint tool to change the look and feel of your site.   Resource Forecast by Corporate Project Solutions Ltd. SharePoint add-in that gives users the ability to view resource demand/availability.   SideKick DCM Ultimate by SkyLite Systems Scalable, customizable dynamic case management built for SharePoint.   Key/Badge Management by ProcessLynx SharePoint add-in that simplifies the management of keys and employee badges in your company. Smartsheet for Outlook (Beta) Coordinate and collaborate on any type of work in real time, right from your inbox.   Navigator by Corporate Project Solutions Ltd. SharePoint add-in that lets users quickly navigate to key areas of PWA.   Pro3 Supplier Management by Derigo Oy SharePoint add-in for managing suppliers.   Site Radar by Architect 365 SharePoint solution provides an interactive analytics dashboard for monitor your team site usage. BeyondCore Apps by BeyondCore (invite only) One-click analysis, statistical evaluation and narrative explanation for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Wazoku Office App by Wazoku Enables you to seamlessly attach documents directly to your ideas from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint. CloseFox by CloseFox Increase revenue by empowering your team to better use sales videos and documents. Outlook add-in. QuickTix by Blue Sphere Solutions Ltd. An Outlook add-in that makes time entry by users of ConnectWise simple.   Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us on @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook. Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Chris Johnson (@loungflyz), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Dave Pae (@davidpae) and Jim Epes (@j_epes). —Jeremy Thake The post Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for May appeared first on Office Blogs.

Just over a year ago we launched the OneNote partner ecosystem and a new service for developers to connect their products to OneNote via an API (the technical pipeline between an app on your phone or tablet and a cloud service like OneNote). Since then, our ecosystem has grown to include a wide variety of complimentary partner experiences that extend the power of OneNote to a range of apps, devices and services, such as hardware and software scanners, mail apps, web clippers, news readers and tools. Heading into our second year, we’re excited to welcome three new partners into the fold, including cloudHQ, Equil and WordPress. cloudHQ When you deal with a lot of cloud services on a daily basis—it’s great to be able to connect them all together to easily share files, notes and pictures. cloudHQ offers a cloud app integration for anyone that’s looking for an easy collaboration solution, and wants to keep everything safely backed up. Scenarios include an automatic sync of your OneNote notebook with a folder in Dropbox, or an account in Salesforce; either of which will let you view and edit your information, in real-time, with nothing to download. To learn more and get started, visit cloudHQ’s OneNote page. Equil Connecting OneNote notebooks to the physical world using digital pens is one of our favorite scenarios for using OneNote. The Equil Smartpen 2 and Smartmarker from Luidia are solutions to connect the physical surfaces of notepads and whiteboards to digital notebooks like OneNote. By connecting the Equil Note app with OneNote, you can easily keep all your notes together, whether you created them by writing on your Surface Pro 3, typing on your iPad, writing in your notebook, or sketching on a whiteboard. For more information about the Smartpen 2 and Smartmarker, visit www.myequil.com. WordPress WordPress is the world’s largest blogging and publishing platform. How great would it be if you could connect OneNote to WordPress to transform ideas and information into meaningful blog posts?  Thanks to a new OneNote plug-in for WordPress, you can! For installation instructions visit here. Once you’re up and running, simply author your posts in OneNote, then in WordPress, click the OneNote button and your content is added. Next in WordPress pick the pages you’re ready to publish. That’s all there is to it! We hope you get to experience the productivity of connecting your favorite apps, services and devices to OneNote. Check out our favorites at www.onenote.com/apps and if one of your favorites doesn’t connect with OneNote yet, let the developers know and have them get in touch with us at @onenotedev. We’d love to hear from them! If you’re a developer, we have lots of new capabilities and tools for you, and more to come over the next few months. Head over to dev.onenote.com and check out our new roadmap on our developer blog. The post OneNote welcomes three new partners—cloudHQ, Equil and WordPress appeared first on Office Blogs.

Over the past few years, you’ve provided feedback on how we could improve the experience for creating connectors to set up mail flow in Office 365. We heard you loud and clear… Out with old, in with the new. We completely overhauled the connector experience in Office 365 to provide you with better guidance, a simplified user interface and an easier way to check that everything works as expected. This topic digs into all the details, but here are a couple highlights. No more guess work Setting up mail flow can be complex given the number of systems that can be involved on a mail path. Here’s a quick look at the different mail flow scenarios in Office 365: Depending on your scenario, you may or may not need to set up connectors. Wouldn’t it be great to know up front whether you need to create connectors for your scenario? Since we thought so, we created some guidance and made some additions to the setup wizard to help you along. You can start with this TechNet article for a list of the different mail flow scenarios and whether connectors are needed. Enhancements to the connector setup wizard To set up a connector, go to the Office 365 admin center, navigate to the Exchange admin center, click ADMIN and then click Exchange. The connectors tab is on the mail flow page of the Exchange admin center. Once you begin the process of creating a connector, specify your mail flow scenario to determine if a connector is mandatory or optional. For example, although a connector isn’t needed for mail to flow between your Office 365 organization and a partner organization you do business with, you might want to create one to apply addition restrictions. Know that it’s working Previously, you’d create a connector and then cross your fingers that it worked as expected. Give those fingers a rest. You can now validate that a connector works before you start using it. After running through a few validation steps, the results are displayed to let you know if anything needs fixing. And to make sure you’re not left scratching your head about how to fix any problems, we’ve included a link to a troubleshooting topic to help you out. Don’t worry—if you can’t validate the connector right away, you can still save it and validate it later. We’d love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve your experience with Office 365! Learn more Do I need to create a connector? Configure mail flow using connectors in Office 365 Set up connectors to route mail between Office 365 and your own email servers Set up connectors for secure mail flow with a partner organization The post Announcing a new way to create connectors in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today post on OneNote was written by Marija Petreska and Hristo Uzunov from a primary school in Drugovo Macedonia. The one thing my students carry with them at all times is their phones, so I often think of ways they can be used in the service of education. My students use a lot of apps they aren’t aware that can be used for learning—like Instagram for sharing photos and videos, Tumblr for digital vocabulary walls, SoundCloud for building an audio library and finally Office Lens for streamlining class work. When I first installed Office Lens, I was already using Scannable and CamScanner and thought it was just another pocket scanner, so I didn’t pay much attention to the send to OneNote, Word or OneDrive feature. It was at the Educator Exchange (E2) event that I discovered I can turn an image into text using Office Lens. It was the first thing I tried in my classroom when I got back, since I’ve been having a lot of trouble with our textbooks. Schools in Macedonia give students free textbooks to use for the year. It’s great that they don’t have to buy their own textbooks, but not so great if you are a Math or English teacher because there are a lot of exercises in the textbooks. Since students can’t write the answers in the book they have to rewrite the exercises in their notebooks. You can only imagine how thrilled they were to see how using Office Lens to send a snapshot of an exercise to OneNote allows them to do the exercise in OneNote. I could also now attach the audio file from the exercise so everyone could listen to the lesson at their own speed and not together as a class. There isn’t a student in my school who is not using Office Lens and doing their Math and English exercises in OneNote. Over the years, I have noticed that when I ask a student to read out loud they start right away, never first reading the text to themselves, check a dictionary or ask me about the pronunciation of some words. If I correct the student, they just go on reading and ignore my input. But if I tell them we are recording, the student will ask for some time to read the passage to themselves, ask their classmates or search for the pronunciation of words using online dictionaries and typically come to me once or twice to make sure they read the word right. If I correct them while recording they will start over. So I made a habit of recording my students reading. I like to use different digital storytelling apps, but we mostly use SoundCloud. Since ten students are recording and posting at the simultaneously it is impossible for me to listen to all of them at the same time and post comments or point out the mispronounced words. So I use an If This Than That (IFTTT) recipe, which automatically sends the students SoundCloud recordings to a OneNote notebook called, My Students Read. Later I can listen to all the recordings and give them feedback. And if they don’t finish their reading on the lesson they can do it at home and every time they publish their recordings it’s saved in my notebook. Now all the recordings from the users I follow (make sure you only follow your students) go to My Students Read notebook under the Reading section. Another app my students use is Tumblr. There are at least 5 to 10 new words we cover each lesson and we need to find a way to keep track and have them all in one place. So for homework, apart from writing them down a couple of times, (that’s how I got my nickname, Ms. Ten Times) they have to keep an online journal of the unfamiliar words, usually explained with an image or video or quote which makes Tumblr perfect. With the IFTTT recipe, we can easily put all blog posts from the students into one shareable OneNote notebook. The posts then go directly to my Vocabulary Wall notebook under the section New Vocabulary, so we have all the new words explained by each student in one place The school year ends in less than a month and there will be a lot of traveling, selfies and sunsets that I can later use as a learning activity. Last year, my older students kept observation journals and used an app called Jelly. The activity is very simple; they have to look around any new place they visit and take a snapshot of anything they don’t know the English word for. Over this summer vacation, their only homework will be to take as many photos of the things they can’t name. The only condition is to use the hashtag ‪#‎observationjournals, so all the photos posted with this hashtag are sent to a collaborative OneNote notebook. When they have time for some learning, they can sit down to check out each other’s photos and search for some answers. There you have it my three OneNote recipes and the one app that will keep our books new. The post How a Macedonian teacher incorporates mobile technologies and OneNote in her classroom appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Andy Jankowski, founder and managing director for Enterprise Strategies, a Microsoft partner. When I first read Gartner’s prediction that," Through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will fail to achieve the intended benefits due to an overemphasis on technology and inadequate leadership involvement*," I laughed and then, I cried. For the last five years, my company, Enterprise Strategies has helped Fortune 500 organizations roll out enterprise social networks and establish a new, more social way of working. It all started when a group of ex-management consultants recognized the potential of social inside of companies, and thought they could make a dent in the information silos, broken communication chains, and inefficient or non-existent collaboration processes of large corporations. What we didn’t realize is that what seemed so obvious to us, was viewed by many as not important enough to spend time on. Why? One reason is that although enterprise social networks are based on the same social networks that have transformed the way we communicate in our personal lives, there’s a key difference between how we use them with friends and how we use them at work: We don’t come to work for the relationships.  Relationships are the glue of consumer social media. We connect to people on Facebook because we are or want to be friends. In a work setting, people come together as colleagues working to solve business challenges, and then build relationships to make the work experience more effective and enjoyable. In the early days of enterprise social, we approached it as a means to improve communication and collaboration, but enterprise social networks require a different kind of glue than consumer social networks, namely, work objects. While relationships are the glue of social media, work objects are the glue of internal social networks. A work object is a report, sales proposal, project deliverable, executive presentation, or customer question that needs to be addressed. It’s the stuff employees actually work on together. Everything outside of work objects is secondary, and that’s where the focus needs to be. Nowhere did this scenario play out more clearly than during the Yammer adoption program we ran at Aon, a global professional services firm that provides risk management, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, human resource solutions and outsourcing services. Dressed in suits, accustomed to reading and writing large highly-regulated business documents, and generally pressed for time, our audience was as excited to see us as a red cancellation notice on an airport flight monitor. We knew we had one chance to make an impact, and as such, we went right for the…work object. Our approach for driving the adoption and business value of enterprise social networks has several components, one of which is what we call business team activation. Business team activation is an artfully crafted combination of business process reengineering and change management. Here is how it works The term Enterprise Social Network leads everyone to believe that all activities related to one can and should include the entire enterprise. We, too, believe this to be true, with the exception of how initial business value is presented and attained. It is very hard to quantify the value of "improved enterprise communication" or "better collaboration across business and geographic boundaries." In fact, it is my personal belief that many of the egregious value claims that were initially made by enterprise social software companies, present company excluded of course, led to people trying to quantify the unquantifiable (e.g., the ROI of improved communication). I do believe in the power of these platforms, but if I were to set my expectations with the connotation of the marketing and sales presentations I have seen my disappointment would be inevitable. So what is a well-meaning employee tasked with proving the business value of an enterprise social network to do? Start with the small picture We actually begin our projects by interviewing company executives to confirm and deeply understand each executive’s business objectives. Please note that I did not say their objectives for an enterprise social platform. The objectives we seek and which serve as the basis for our entire enterprise social network adoption program, are the actual—existed before we arrived—business objectives of the company. With this understanding, we are able to back into the business processes that most directly impacts the attainment of these objectives. Our next set of meetings is with the business process owners themselves (i.e., the people who actually orchestrate and do the work) to better understand the way these processes are currently being executed from a people, process and technology perspective. With this knowledge, we are able to back into what use cases make up each business process. And, finally, which of these use cases an enterprise social network can most impact. To put this in perspective, we may be engaged at a 70,000-person company, but at this point we are working to improve a single business process of one business team. This process may be something like "naming a new product before it goes to market" or "fiscal period end close," but the key is that it is an existing process that: Requires input from, and information held by, multiple people. Is executed on a regular basis. Is critically important to the organization. Can be materially impacted (e.g., cycle time and errors reduced, quality of results improved, etc.) by leveraging the inherent benefits of an enterprise social network. We then show how this business process would work (better) by executing the identified use cases using an enterprise social network. It is a simple story: "Here is the current process, here is the process leveraging an enterprise social network, and here are the results," but once told in this context, to the right person, enterprise value becomes clearly visible. For example, explain to your CFO how you can reduce the time to close the books each month (and the errors caused by fact checking financials via email) in one division, and she will extrapolate the potential time and cost savings enterprise-wide. Tell a similar story about reducing the time it takes to name a product to your head of product development and he will multiply the savings by your company’s number of product lines, geographies and number of times the process is repeated. This is the real network effect and the real path to enterprise social network business value. As I stated in the beginning, the above is just one component of our Enterprise Social Network adoption program, but it is an important one, and based on five years of experience rolling out and driving the business value of enterprise social networks across many organizations. The other parts of our process include various forms of communication planning and execution, executive mentoring and employee training, and of course, the business-driven campaigns and gamification activities that make it all stick. All of which is based on our research of Why Enterprise Social Initiatives Fail. So what happened at Aon? Well, to be honest, it is still happening. Aon boasts one of the largest Yammer networks, currently over 45,000 members, representing about 60 percent of their workforce worldwide. We have been strategically executing the Business Team Activation process, team by team, for the last six months. The network effect is indeed kicking in and the results speak for themselves, and the work continues on three fronts: Partnering with the business to identify use cases where collaboration is critical to meet the business goals. Ensuring the community managers are playing their roles in conversation facilitation. Activating leaders so that they are walking the talk on collaboration. "A successful Enterprise Social Network implementation is less about technology and more about the cultural and process transformation that needs to happen for management and colleagues to embrace a new, more social way of working. Andy and the Enterprise Strategies team have been instrumental in developing our training programs and for helping us manage the change management activities needed to ensure that Aon has a thriving community network." —Neeru Arora, SVP, ASC chief information officer and chief knowledge officer at Aon. We feel very fortunate to be working with Microsoft and Neeru’s team on their Yammer initiative. And we honestly believe enterprise social network success is attainable by any organization. It is not rocket science, but it is a process and requires focused attention and deliberate actions. Start with business objectives. Start with one business team and one business process. And from there, create one clearly depicted, quantifiable story. Let your executives extrapolate and quantify the full enterprise business value of an enterprise social network. And whatever you do… don’t be the 80 percent. —Andy Jankowski *Gartner, Use the Gartner Business Model Framework to Search for Social Business Opportunities, January 2013, refreshed August 2014. The post Driving Yammer adoption, one business team at a time appeared first on Office Blogs.