Sway is all about making it quick and easy for you to create and share an interactive and multimedia-rich canvas that brings your ideas to life and looks great on any screen. This blog series highlights great examples of Sways made by different types of people, across a variety of different scenarios. In the last Sway Use Case blog, we celebrated the amazing ways that educators have been using Sway. Today’s blog is all about food (you guessed it!). Warm food, cold food, local food, exotic food—we’ll dive deep into the visually delicious and artfully designed Sways that chefs, foodies, and culinary adventurers have created… all while salivating just a bit. Check out the highlights below! And maybe go get a snack… Using Sway to share an interactive and visual recipe Dan St. Hilaire (Vermont, @dansth) uses Sway to share recipes for delicious-looking food in a creative new way. Dan’s Sways provide fluid, interactive, visual step-by-step instructions on how to create mouth-watering meals. And it’s easy for friends, family and followers like us to use any device in the kitchen to follow Dan’s guidance in replicating these delicious dishes. Check out Dan’s delicious Sway on how to cook (spicy) Thai Pork Curry: Swaying friends and family with your food adventures Matt LeMay (New York, @mattlemay) shows us how Sway can be used to combine travel, food and blogging in a dynamic and interactive way. Matt decided to recap his three favorite meals from his last trip to Paris, using a combination of an interactive map (complete with trip highlight pins), images and personalized descriptions of his dining experiences. Check out Matt’s three great meals in Paris: Engaging customers with a dynamic presentation and menu Howard Lo (Singapore, @tanukiraw) has a raw bar and cocktail restaurant that serves a delicious array of food and drink. Sway helps Howard engage his customers in new ways. To celebrate Tanuki Raw’s new lunch menu, Howard put together what he called "an easy eye-catching presentation" and interactive menu using Sway. His creation brings the restaurant’s new Donburi ("rice bowl dish") selections to life, including descriptions of how they’re made and a video showing a runny egg yolk being broken at the beginning of a meal: Swaying in wine country Ben Carter (Tennessee, @benitowine) reminds us that our palates can savor not only delicious food, but beverages of all sorts as well—in Ben’s case, wine. Ben used Sway to transport his wine lover followers back to Lodi, California, where he toured in 2014. His creation was actually one of the earliest Sways made, and he pulled together multimedia and serves as a trip recap, wine blog and tasting notes all in one. Check out Ben’s spirited Sway: Spreading a sweet tooth with Sway Steve Siebert (@stevesloc) helps put a sweet finishing touch on today’s blog by bringing us Sway for dessert. Similar to Dan’s recipe Sway in Thai Pork Curry, Steve brings a tasty-looking recipe for gluten-free Monster Cookies to life using Sway’s web-based canvas. He shows us with rich visuals how large a role the raw wet and dry ingredients play, then wraps it all up with the baking instructions. Take a peek into the oven at these Monster Cookies: This is just a glimpse at some of the many great Sways we’re seeing daily from culinary connoisseurs. Many thanks to all of you who have spent time creating Sways and engaging your friends and other foodies with your interactive content. Feel free to continue sharing with us on Twitter at @Sway. We can’t wait to see what you eat… er… create next!   —Sway team, @Sway Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post Sway Use Case series #2: Food Sways appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Eric Shupps, in the second part of a call, to discuss the community work and user group that he helps run in Texas. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP49.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Microsoft acquires Wunderlist Office 365 Add-in rename cheat sheet Office 365 Developer Flipboard magazine Office 365 Developer slack channel Getting started with SharePoint Hosted Apps Objective C and Swift iOS code sample Get handle on your Site closure and Policies Refactor Office add-ins Sesssion values are lost in SharePoint Provider Hosted Add-ins PnP June community call PnP Usage Survey for May Nintex Wins WPC "Office and SharePoint Application Development" award Show notes Dallas Fort Worth User Group 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 Eric Shupps Eric Shupps is the founder and president of BinaryWave, a leading provider of administration and productivity solutions for Microsoft SharePoint. Eric has worked with SharePoint Products and Technologies since 2001 as a consultant, administrator, architect, developer and trainer. He is an advisory committee member of the Dallas/Ft. Worth SharePoint Community group and a participating member of user groups throughout the United Kingdom. Eric has authored numerous articles on SharePoint, speaks at user group meetings and conferences around the world, and publishes a popular SharePoint blog at www.sharepointcowboy.com. About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is based, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 049 with Eric Shupps on building a dev community appeared first on Office Blogs.

Your people and your data are your organization’s greatest assets. With Office 365, we continuously strive to provide you with more control over how your data is managed and accessed. At Ignite in May, we announced the ability to assign workload-specific service administrator roles to your organizations IT administrators for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online. We’re pleased to announce that this capability is rolling out starting today. The ability to assign workload-specific admin roles provides your organization more control over how your Office 365 administrators access your data. An admin assigned to a workload-specific admin role would only have access to the relevant controls and settings associated with that workload. For example, the SharePoint Online administrator role provides that admin access to only SharePoint related controls and settings in the Office 365 Admin Center. The SharePoint Online admin can manage SharePoint site collections, configure SharePoint settings such as the organizations external sharing policy and access SharePoint Admin Center for additional SharePoint capabilities. However, the SharePoint Online admin will not have access to other Office 365 service controls and settings such as mailbox configuration, transport rules and other non-SharePoint related settings. In addition, to better align the permissions to how your administrators are organized, there is more flexibility in assigning roles. If your Office IT administrators have multiple responsibilities and require permissions that are greater than what is offered in one administrator role, such as within SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online responsibilities, then you can assign both those roles to that administrator. Your organization is no longer limited to only one admin role assignment per administrator. To configure an admin role, the global administrator selects the user from the active user list, then selects edit user roles > Limited Admin Role to display the list of all the Office 365 admin roles. Simply select the applicable admin role(s) and you’re done. With the new workload-specific admin roles and the ability to select multiple admin roles, your organization now has more options to set the right level of permissions to your Office 365 IT administrators. Ultimately, this means you now have more control over who has access to your organization’s data. The post More control over data access with workload-specific admin roles appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Keith Carvalho, vice president of sales for Vitalyst. For more than 125 years, Southern California Edison (SCE) has delivered electricity to 14 million Californians in homes, businesses and communities in Southern and Central California. Although SCE is one of the nation’s top 20 electric utilities and is among the leaders in its percentage of sustained renewable resources (over 19.9 percent in 2012), SCE was the last large electric public utility to use Lotus Notes. With the aim of becoming a more modern public utility with enhanced internal capabilities and increasing productivity, SCE engaged in a partnership with Vitalyst and Microsoft Services to migrate its enterprise platform from Lotus Notes to Office 365. Organization Change Management (OCM) was identified as the most significant success factor, while the key business drivers were: Synchronizing and modernizing the desktop office experience Reducing investment and operational costs Supporting the company’s long-term mobile technology strategy Integrating workforce productivity tools for access anywhere, anytime and on any device The challenge The Office 365 enterprise migration project scope involved: Moving 16,500 individual user accounts Integrating 1,500 shared programs or collaboration mailboxes Migrating 1,500 document libraries to SharePoint sites Migrating the enterprise SharePoint portal from 2010 to 2013 Implementing Office 2013 from Office 2010 and incorporating OneDrive Moving from Internet Explorer 8 to Internet Explorer 10 Adopting Yammer, Microsoft’s social collaboration tool The Vitalyst solution Recognized as having a user community that was "high-touch" in comparison to other organizations, SCE needed to leverage Vitalyst’s unique capabilities and experience in maximizing end-user readiness and OCM. Together with SCE and Microsoft, Vitalyst launched a 600-person network of business transition managers with the goal of training the trainers and developing the appropriate internal knowledge necessary to facilitate change throughout the organization. Vitalyst collaborated with SCE to create customized educational materials, which were posted on the enterprise portal designed to share critical information and training on Office 365. This included, onsite training, webinar training and Just-in-Time training or live support that provided 24/7 access to consultants for answers to how-to questions. For the migration initiative, Vitalyst provided: High visibility, turn-key solution Full spectrum of learning resources, giving users just the right resource at just the right time Expanded utilization of productivity enhancements within Office 365 Program utilization data providing window into SCE operations and IT training needs Program content customized by job role/user type SCE effectively integrated Vitalyst’s live support services into its IT Call Center for Office 365. For example, by pressing a designated number, callers can indicate whether they have a problem or whether they have a how-to question about Office 365. Those who select "How-to" are linked directly to the Vitalyst live support network. By driving calls from its Tier One services to a customized live support service, SCE realized: Elevated user experience and extended internal capabilities, including: An avenue for SCE to assume a consulting role, helping users better utilize software apps High customer satisfaction and experience working directly with SCE’s workforce The ability to stay ahead of the latest Microsoft functionality releases Increased internal resources and operations efficiency, including: Expanded IT capabilities by offering expanded how-to support functions A best practice approach to support Guaranteed training and education content consistency throughout the enterprise Realizing the value of Vitalyst service Vitalyst’s service complements and adds capacity to the IT service desk. According to SCE IT leaders, customer feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Thirty-five percent of key users called in for support. Top user communities included administrative and executive assistants. The service yielded strong service metrics and an end-user satisfaction rating of 9.3 out of 10.0. In addition, Vitalyst service has helped improve perceptions of the IT organization through delivery of a 7.3 second response time, 96.1 percent first call resolution rate and expert product knowledge. SCE employees have reported that the service provides tips and techniques that help save time and increase productivity levels, resulting in an estimated $1.1 million in productivity, and higher ROI on end-user technologies (average 10 percent). Program metrics Nearly 10,000 support calls 24,000 how-to solutions Averaged 2.4 solutions per call for more than 39 different applications 5,000 unique callers out of 16,000+ migrated Approximately 5,500 videos viewed via the self-help video portal Moving forward As a result of its Office 365 initiative, SCE documented lessons learned in seven key categories, which included OCM and Operational Readiness—both supported through the Vitalyst partnership and training. SCE’s IT Call Center realized tremendous value in Vitalyst’s live support network and the integration of a system that solely handles the Just-in-Time" learning component. The program garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from the client community and significant business value from an adoption perspective, ultimately leading SCE to extend the program out to its operations division. In addition, SCE’s Office 365 migration program success has been presented as a best practice example to the UNITE CIO Symposium—an industry Benchmarking Consortium. SCE’s ability to move future investments from IT to other capital investments aimed at making SCE a more modern public utility is a paradigm shift that has potential to translate to other industries and Fortune 500 companies. The post Increasing user satisfaction, adoption, production and ROI appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Matthew Boyd, public relations and communications executive for BrightStarr. At BrightStarr we work with the Microsoft enterprise technology stack, focusing on SharePoint, Office 365 and Yammer. We take great pride in our knowledge of these technologies and our ability to build great solutions for our clients. We have always had a SharePoint intranet for unifying our global business and making sharing and collaborating easier and faster. As Microsoft’s cloud platforms have continued to mature, we wanted to help our clients take full advantage of everything it had to offer so we developed Unily. Unily is our cloud Intranet as a Service built on Office 365, SharePoint Online and Yammer that delivers a cloud, mobile, social intranet all within a consumer quality user experience. Once we developed this solution for our customers we adopted it within our business.  Just like Microsoft, we drink our own wine. Our Office 365 intranet has surfaced a raft of Office 365 capabilities within a unified portal, allowing us to be as productive as possible from a single digital location. Within the main navigation we have surfaced our various SharePoint sub sites for quick access to our own projects and workspaces. For example, the marketing department accesses all of its assets and information from within Unily, whether it is press releases written in Word, budgets created in Excel, or artwork files stored with previews.  We use Skype for Business for project calls between locations. Within Unily we have a marketing calendar that features a list of all upcoming marketing events. This is really important for increasing exposure of marketing activities internally, allowing our colleagues to remain up to date at a glance. By having all of our marketing documents in Office 365, we have eliminated the hassle of sending emails with document attachments for collaborating on content. SharePoint search allows us to find everything we need in a matter of seconds, and using Office Apps we are able to edit documents directly within the intranet at the click of a button. With our Office 365 subscription, we also get access to Yammer, which we love! We have integrated Yammer comprehensively with the Unily solution so we can utilize our enterprise social functionality within our Office 365 intranet and across a variety of forms of content. Yammer is allowing us to start quick and insightful conversation around documents, videos, blogs and news articles. We use Yammer’s robust functionality to @ mention and tag people to quickly bring them into important discussions. We also monitor all of this social activity through our all company feed so we never miss a discussion that is important to us. And if enterprise social isn’t instant enough for us, we can always turn to Skype for Business for a quick catch-up or meeting. Also, as a part of our marketing work, we do attend and sponsor events (such as Microsoft Ignite). With the power of the Microsoft cloud and Unily’s inclusive native mobile applications for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, we are able to access our intranet when we are out of the office. While it might sound like we have it all, we have a lot more to look forward to in the very near future, thanks to the combination of the Office 365 roadmap and Unily’s own customer-led roadmap. The imminent launch of Unily’s spring update is a perfect example of the evolving nature of the platform. Aside from the amazing new user experiences you can see in these images the spring update is Delve ready. Once the Delve API is released from beta, our document and people experiences will be surfacing the content most relevant to the current user. It will also be used to populate the new dynamic smart feed on the solution homepage, which will target news and blogs for individual users. These are just a few ways that BrightStarr’s marketing teams are capitalizing on the amazing Office 365 feature set as an integrated intranet solution. I hope you found a marketer’s perspective on how the full Office 365 suite had made our working day much more efficient of interest. —Matthew Boyd The post BrightStarr integrates Office 365 into intranet appeared first on Office Blogs.

Germany’s CIO of the Year: With Office 365 ‘we’re not following, we’re leading’ At BASF, the world’s leading chemical company, Wiebe van der Horst is Senior Vice President Global Process & Enterprise Architecture. But given his philosophy, colleagues might also call him "captain" or "coach." Van der Horst runs IT at BASF in an optimistic, collaborative, "all-aboard" way, which is probably why he was named Germany’s CIO of the Year last year. Jurors for the German CIO award, which is presented by Computerwoche and CIO magazine, were pleased by van der Horst’s leadership in creating "a uniform, global workplace infrastructure using the latest technologies," such as social networking, online document collaboration and exchange, and web conferencing. Van der Horst recently talked with Microsoft about leadership, the importance of human-centered change and business-centered technology, his company’s leap to Microsoft Office 365, and the power of a "glass-half-full" outlook in modern IT. What was the IT environment like at BASF when you decided to bet on Office 365? I think this has not been a bet, first of all. Before we took this decision, we did a thorough analysis of the pros and cons of various vendors. Generally speaking, the tradition here was to play it safe. In doing so, I think in a certain way we were surprised by a few developments in the market. We had been thinking about a new approach to collaboration for a long time. With our well-established platform connect. BASF, we had a very successful business network for internal exchange. Nevertheless, we needed to broaden our scope. We knew we wanted to engage people internally more strongly, but also as a partner to our suppliers, to our customers, in our research—but we were lacking the occasion to make this happen. It was basically the right technology coming together on the one side, and a certain pressure to do something on the other side. You describe the company’s IT journey as going from follower to leader. How did you do that? We have a history reaching back 150 years and you can only manage that by embracing change. Of course, adopting Office 365 is a paradigm shift in technology and in how we work. I think one of the most daunting elements has been convincing people a cloud solution was secure enough. I think the important point there is to bring everybody along and make sure people understand the types of security built into Microsoft products, and that Microsoft has established first class security in their data centers. Have you noticed any dramatic changes since adoption? I would say it’s too early to declare we’ve succeeded, but we did win support. We attribute this in part to the people who have participated in the pilots of Office 365 and implementation of video conferencing.  It’s important to do very thorough change management. You may have current tools, but it doesn’t help much if people don’t change the way they work. When we show what Outlook and SharePoint and other new tools can do, people grasp how our way of working is changing. There are many people who say, "You know what? This is really making sense—this is really making my life easier. This is making a difference to how we do business." How would you describe your leadership style? I think I have a very collaborative and empowering style. I’m trying to give people the freedom they need to be able to shape and move things. Am I the best enterprise architect of the company? Definitely not. But I do ask the right questions, and I understand what is important, how technology fits with process and organization and how to reduce complexity. I see myself as a coach that challenges people to be their best. Is there some piece of advice you typically offer business and IT colleagues? The advice that I typically offer others is that IT is not about technology, it’s about generating business value. It’s not like being the electricity company in the background that delivers the juice, and everybody’s depending on you—that is necessary and important. The conversation you need to have is about how you can improve the business with what you’re doing, how IT can help make a difference for the business. Do you have a personal philosophy or motto? I want to enjoy myself when I work, and I want to enjoy my life. I’m definitely somebody who always tries to see the positive side of things, and then deal with what I need to when things are not right. I think this is very much also an American attitude. What would you call that? "The glass is half full", "Just fix it" and "Move on and get traction," you know? In school, many of us are trained to immediately find a hole or an inconsistency, but in doing so we forget about the 95 percent of things going well  and focus on the 5 percent that are wrong only. This produces great, great cars. But it might not be the best thing for an industry like IT, where you have such short lifecycles. What do you love most about your job? Most people in a position like mine have eight meetings a day and go home and think, "What did I do today, and what did I achieve today?" And it’s hard to pinpoint. However, if you look at things from a certain distance, and look at how things have evolved, you can see that the change you pushed for has occurred and how it has benefitted BASF and its people. So that gives me a lot of pride. In the case of the CIO award, it is very motivational for me, but also for our employees to see and think, "Wow, we’re on the right track, we’re doing something not everybody has done. We’re not following, we’re leading." The post IT leader of world’s no. 1 chemical company talks ‘business-centered technology’ appeared first on Office Blogs.

Jumping into any new software program can be a taxing chore even when the potential benefits are known to be great. With our new Office Mix first run experience, we bring a sense of welcoming and enlightenment to the basics. When you first download and install the Office Mix add-in and then open PowerPoint for the first time, an interactive panel opens on the right-hand side of the screen where you’re presented with three buttons that each play a Quick Start Video tutorial. Additionally, you’re offered an option to "Create Your First Mix," which opens the Getting Started template. As you’ll discover, the interactive panel is resizable and can be undocked, which permits you to move to split-screen mode and follow in-step with the tutorial’s instructions. The tutorials include "What is Office Mix," "Screen Recording" and "Publish and Share." We’ve also included an easy way for you to "Create Your First Mix." In the coming months, we’ll be adding more tutorials. Let’s break down each tutorial individually here: What is Office Mix?—An overview of what you can do with Office Mix, such as inking, recording, editing and sharing. It also instructs you on how to set up video and audio, narrate using the Slide Notes feature and how to use our Ink marker to put notes on your presentation. You can also learn how to use the analytics to tell who is watching your mixes. In addition, you’ll see how easy it is to insert quizzes, polls and screenshots, as well as add video and audio files that really make your presentations come to life. You’ll also learn how to preview, edit and securely upload your mix to the cloud. It closes with a look at My Mixes, the place where you can view, manage and share your presentations. Screen Recording—Step-by-step video showing you how to take full advantage of the power and simplicity of screen recording. You’ll see a how-to covering the ins and outs of embedding video into your Mix. For example, it showcases how you can extract clips from a YouTube video and use the playback controls to get the perfect video experience, and then directly insert it into your Mix. We’ll soon be adding a deeper-dive tutorial on all screen recording features including audio, area selection and trimming. Publish and Share—Runs through a simple workflow on how to securely upload, publish and share your mixes. This includes how to upload mixes to the cloud and choose different options so your mixes can be played back on any mobile device or web browser. It also details how to set privacy levels for selective sharing with friends/colleagues. Quick Start Video Tutorials currently launches in a separate browser window to play and soon you will be able to watch them directly within PowerPoint as well. The experience for IT install users is slightly different from individual installs. At start, IT installs see the normal Home, but the Interactive Office Mix panel is also open, giving users their first glimpse of Office Mix. Individual installs see the open Mix Ribbon, the Welcome to Office Mix template and the open interactive Office Mix panel. While these three tutorials are essential jumping off points for Office Mix beginners and pros alike, the Office Mix team is hard at work to bring you many more instructional videos and templates. We think you’ll love having a stack of notes and discoverable features at your fingertips. The tutorials, produced by our Office Mix team, are as quick and enlightening as they are entertaining. Use them to optimize the flash and engagement of every PowerPoint presentation you create. Until next time, Happy mixing! The post Office Mix interactive panel tutorials helps you put your best face on appeared first on Office Blogs.

Since launching and developing our OneNoteInEducation.com (formerly known as OneNoteForTeachers.com) site, we have seen teachers clamor for ways to not only learn to use OneNote but also prove their mastery. Now, Certiport provides teachers with this support by offering their Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) OneNote certification. According the blog by Certiport last week, "Microsoft certifications are valuable credentials to increase competence, productivity and credibility, while preparing teachers for success in the classroom." OneNote training and certification at ISTE 2015 The OneNote team is dedicated to furthering these goals of your OneNote training and building credibility within your communities and are pleased to offer Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Teacher Academy (1-day) training, a "Prepare for Microsoft OneNote Certification" class, and the OneNote certification exam itself at the ISTE 2015 conference later this month. All are complimentary for ISTE attendees and more information can be found in the "Microsoft at ISTE 2015" blog post. We hope to see you there as you learn and prove your mastery of OneNote! To learn more about MOS OneNote certification and other Office certifications, visit www.certiport.com/MOS. The post Microsoft OneNote certifications—a valuable credential for teachers, available at ISTE 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

We are always looking for new ways to provide our customers with more flexibility and choice.  Opening up Office to customers and partners allows users to customize Office to meet their needs. Today, we are pleased that Box is announcing new integrations with Office Online that will help our joint customers more easily collaborate with documents and digital content. These new features enable users to easily browse, open and edit files with Office Online from Box, create new files in Office Online and save them back to Box. Earlier this year we announced a new Office 365 Cloud Storage Partner Program to make it easier for other cloud services to integrate Office Online into their applications. Box is part of the program and already offers integration with Office for iPad, iPhone and Outlook for iPhone and iPad applications. By working together, we can help people boost their overall productivity. For more information about the Office 365 Cloud Storage Partner Program, please visit here. The post Box announces integration with Office Online for enterprise collaboration appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) support for Office Mix and the addition of Microsoft to the IMS Global Learning Consortium as a Contributing Member. In this role, Microsoft represents the needs of our users as we participate in future standards development work. Office Mix is a free add-in for PowerPoint that makes it easy to author and share interactive online lessons. Educators can easily add audio and video narration, real-time inking, screen recordings, quizzes and polls within PowerPoint. Lessons can be viewed in practically any browser on any device. Through support of LTI, we have made it easy for educators to embed mixes into all major Learning Management Systems (LMSs), including Canvas, Engrade, Blackboard, Haiku, Moodle, Brightspace, EDUonGo and Schoology. Additionally, the LTI adoption enables McGraw-Hill Education (MHE) to utilize Office Mix to provide a custom teaching experience for adopters of the next generation of MHE products. Cengage Learning will be releasing an Introductory Computing MindTap pilot integrating Office Mix for fall 2015 classes. After Office Mix has been set up to work with an LMS via LTI, educators can easily embed interactive mixes, created by themselves or the community, within their LMS as assignments or assessments. LTI also seamlessly authenticates students, and their grades are automatically passed back to the LMS grade book. Educator Racquel Nedden in the Irvine Unified School District recently created 35 math lessons with Office Mix and embedded them within Instructure Canvas, a popular LMS. "Office Mix is an outstanding program for creating online course content. The program is especially well-suited for math," said Nedden. "Teachers can use the inking feature to write math symbols and equations directly on the presentation. The in-video quizzes provide checkpoints for students to assess their knowledge and increase engagement with the content. Office Mix is compatible with Canvas, our LMS, and creates a professional look to our courses." "LTI support ensures that we can deliver great Office Mix experiences across a wide range of LMSs so educators can more easily produce and deliver media-rich, highly interactive lessons," said Jim Federico, product manager for Office Mix. "With the help of our users, we have tested our LTI integration across a wide variety of LMSs and we’re excited about the value this new capability will bring to teachers and students." To integrate Office Mix with an LMS, educators can follow the steps outlined in the EduAppCenter or go to mix.office.com/LTI to learn how to set up Office Mix within specific LMSs. Stay tuned for future Office Mix enhancements and follow @OfficeMixTeam on Twitter to stay in touch!   Until next time, Happy mixing! The post Office Mix delivers LTI support and integration with major LMS providers appeared first on Office Blogs.

On this week’s show, we catch up again with Mark Russinovich to explain the how security components in cloud services are managed. Mark discusses the shared responsibility from the IT and service provider perspectives. We cover real customer examples of Microsoft working with customers to detect tenant breach, correct issues and patch any security vulnerabilities. We also discuss the upcoming customer lockbox process and how machine learning and data analytics can be used to detect anomalous patterns. We’ve invited Mark Russinovich in the past to discuss to assess the top security risks of moving to the cloud and had Matt Swann explain how COSMOS uses the power of the cloud to detect anomalies in the cloud. On this show we walk through some real examples and explain the shared responsibility of moving to the cloud. It spans everything from monitoring activity and restricting access with secure logons to ensuring the latest software updates are available and applied. If you are assessing cloud services for infrastructure as a service, looking to lock down your existing cloud services or simply wanting to learn from real cases, this week’s show provides an inside look. If you want to learn more, watch the show and check out the Trust Center—trust.office365.com. See you next week! —Jeremy Chapman The post An inside look at Cloud service provider security with Mark Russinovich appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re excited to announce a faster and more lightweight way of searching within your organization’s data in Office 365. Compliance Search is a new capability in the Office 365 Compliance Center, designed for times when the full-fledged search case management of eDiscovery search isn’t required.  Compliance Search is ideal for quick searches across content in Office 365, such as searching for specific credit card numbers in SharePoint as part of a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) project.  Compliance Search lets you: Search all your Office 365 data without limits on number of mailboxes or documents Use Keyword Query Language for advanced search Preview search results with hit highlighting Use fine-grained permissions to control what can be searched Like our existing eDiscovery Search, Compliance Search is done in-place, using the existing search system of Office 365 so you’re always searching recent, up-to-date data. See Compliance Search in the Office 365 Compliance Center to learn more. To get started with Compliance Search, go to the Office 365 Admin Center, click Compliance to launch the Compliance Center, click Permissions and then grant the appropriate people the eDiscovery Manager permission. These users will now have the Search tab available in the Compliance Center and can create new Compliance Searches. Search all your Office 365 data without limits You can use Compliance Search to find data in individual Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive for Business locations, and Skype for Business data that has been placed on hold in Exchange mailboxes. There are no limits on the scale of these searches. You can run multiple searches simultaneously, and you can search one or hundreds of thousands of sites and mailboxes. With Compliance Search you can select all mailboxes and sites, distribution groups, or specific people and sites. Use Keyword Query Language for advanced search You can also enter search terms using Keyword Query Language and get an estimate of the results so you can get insights about your data. The Keyword Query Language allows you to use keywords, Boolean logic, wildcards and searchable properties. Recent improvements in the search system now make it possible to analyze interesting new scenarios. Learn more by visiting keyword queries for Compliance Search. Here are some examples: Scenario Search statement Assess the risk of data that’s been shared externally in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. ViewableByExternalUsers=TRUE Identify highly sensitive content that has more than 100 credit card or bank account numbers. SensitiveType:"Credit Card Number|100.." OR SensitiveType:"U.S. Bank Account Number|100.." Investigate if anyone sent email containing confidential information to a particular person outside the organization. Recipients:"jared@adatum.com" Identify a phishing message that was sent by a specific email address and has a specific subject. Sender:"jared@adatum.com" AND subject:"You are a winner, read me to learn more" Fine-grained permissions make it easy to control what can be searched The ability to search across data is controlled by the Compliance Center permissions. No additional permissions need to be configured in Exchange, SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. By default, Compliance Center eDiscovery Managers can search all Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive for Business locations. You can also configure fine-grained permissions using PowerShell to control the scope of what a user can search. For example, you can specify specific SharePoint URLs or mailboxes that can be searched based on Active Directory properties, location, or distribution group membership. Learn how to configure Compliance Search permission filtering. Preview search results with hit highlighting You can preview the results of a Compliance Search to analyze the data and check that your query is working as expected. The preview list of items and preview is in pane and the search terms are highlighted so you can see why an item was returned for your search. Compliance Search is available now in Office 365. In the next several months, additional capabilities will be rolling out including: Export search results Case Management and Hold Please watch the Office 365 Roadmap for updates on the availability of additional Compliance Search functionality. —Quentin Christensen, senior program manager lead for Office 365 Information Protection The post Introducing Compliance Search in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post about Office 365 was written by Greg Staky, director of information technology at Veriown Energy.   Veriown Energy began as a typical startup, in August 2013. Instead of an office, we held ad-hoc meetings in each other’s condos and homes. Everyone used whatever devices they had, and we all traveled a lot to meet with researchers, investors and potential customers. Today, we have a head office in Chicago, but that startup work style—mobile, agile, available and productive—remains. One of my first responsibilities was to find the right business tools to match our way of working and our corporate culture. We’re in the business of selling sustainable, clean, local energy consumption—imagine Veriown turning your roof or parking lot into a solar power plant, with almost no capital expense on your part, so you could lock into predictable, long-term energy rates. Given our business, we chose technologies that were cloud-based business tools. We looked at Google Apps for Work, but everyone in our industry uses Office. Cloud-based tools that work anywhere, and on any device, suited our mobility requirements. And, there’s a growing number of apps for Office 365 that you can use to extend your business platform. There’s plenty of enterprise-level functionality to build workflows and repeatable business processes. There are also cost benefits—we saved $30,000 by retiring third-party products and avoiding an on-premises PBX solution. If you replaced the word "energy" with "computing" in our slogan, "Energy the way it should be. Where you need it. When you need it. Your very own," you would get an idea of why we went with Office 365. We use the collaboration sites you get with SharePoint Online to build better relationships with investors. Investors go to a designated portal to track the progress of their investments in individual installation projects, or to review corporate information before they decide to invest in our company. We had such success with our collaboration platform that I began looking for a CRM-type app that worked with SharePoint Online. We wanted our sales reps to manage their pipeline online, rather than working with Excel spreadsheets. That’s when we discovered the SideKick365 xRM App from SkyLite Systems in the new Apps for Office marketplace. It was an excellent fit because it offered additional CRM and project management features built entirely in SharePoint Online. We worked with SkyLite Systems to create a simple process for onboarding external people into the SideKick365 xRM app and assigning appropriate access to our corporate data. It worked like a charm. And the real kicker is that external users get to use Office 365 and the SharePoint collaboration platform for free. All we pay for is the SideKick365 xRM app license. Suddenly, the business value of our online collaboration platform took a quantum leap forward. For example, some of our consultants and contractors bring sales to us. We wanted to capitalize on these opportunities, so we invited them to join our CRM site and they, along with our own sales reps, are using the SideKick365 xRM app to manage customers and analyze the sales pipeline. We also created a SharePoint site for project management activities for each customer. Now we can invite construction and engineering contractors onto these sites to use SideKick365 xRM app’s project management features so they can more easily manage their construction projects. The faster we can take our customers off the grid so they can start benefiting from clean energy consumption at a predictable price, the better. The business value of this extensible platform is huge. We needed CRM capabilities. We needed project management capabilities. We needed to show potential investors that our business systems were up to the job. Yet I didn’t have to go outside the Office 365 platform. I used a SharePoint app that was built on the platform we already owned to deliver a seamless and economical way to extend our IT investments that will scale with us as we grow. In a little more than a year, Office 365 has proven itself to be an extensible business platform that’s generated a lot of positive energy at Veriown. —Greg Staky To find out more, read Veriown’s unique Office 365 story or view their self-shot video: The post Going off-the-grid with Office 365—selling local energy generation with cloud-based IT tools appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last month at Ignite we showcased new mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) capabilities in Outlook for iOS and Android. Today, we are happy to announce that customers using Outlook for iOS and Android can now use built-in MDM for Office 365 or Microsoft Intune to secure email data on mobile devices within their organization. Combined with our recent update to enable OAuth and add support for Multi-Factor Authentication, Outlook now offers the leading set of controls for protecting corporate email and calendaring data on mobile devices while preserving a rich and empowering experience for users. Customers looking to manage Outlook for iOS and Android now have two great options—use core capabilities of the built-in MDM available in Office 365 or the full power of Microsoft Intune, which includes everything delivered in MDM for Office 365 plus additional mobile device and application management capabilities. Let’s take a look at the capabilities each of these provides. Managing Outlook with the built-in MDM in Office 365 Earlier this year, we delivered built-in MDM capabilities for Office 365 customers at no additional cost. These MDM capabilities help organizations to protect their data and manage all mobile devices that come into contact with it. Behind the scenes, these capabilities are powered by Microsoft Intune, providing a core set of controls in the Office 365 admin center for organizations that need the basics. Outlook now fully supports the capabilities provided by built-in MDM for Office 365. Need a refresher on MDM for Office 365? Watch this short video overview. Once set up, Outlook and Office 365’s MDM capabilities work together to keep data safe in three ways: Conditional Access—Outlook ensures that Office 365 email can be accessed only on phones and tablets that are managed by your company and are in a healthy state. During log in on an unmanaged device, Outlook prompts the user to enroll the device in Intune and validates that the device meets your organizations access rules regarding device health and security. Outlook prompts the user to enroll their device in order to access email data from Office 365. Device management and reporting—The enrollment process allows organizations to set and manage security policies to enforce device-level pin lock, require data encryption, block jailbroken or rooted devices and more, to help prevent unauthorized users from accessing corporate email and data. Each enrolled device appears in the Office 365 admin center and rich reporting is available to provide details on devices accessing your corporate data. Device management options available in Office 365. Selective wipe—Outlook will remove your Office 365 email data while leaving any personal email accounts intact. This is an increasingly important requirement as more businesses adopt a "bring your own device" (BYOD) approach to phones and tablets. Managing Outlook with Microsoft Intune If you are looking for broader protection capabilities beyond what’s included in Office 365, you can subscribe to Microsoft Intune, which is part of the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite. Intune provides mobile application management (MAM) capabilities for Outlook and other Office mobile apps in addition to the conditional access and device management capabilities outlined above. With Intune MAM, you can restrict actions such as cut, copy, paste, and "save as" of corporate data between Intune-managed apps and apps that are not managed by Intune. Additionally, the Intune-managed Outlook apps include a new multi-identity management feature that enables users to access both their personal and work email accounts in the same Outlook app while only applying the Intune MAM policies to the user’s work account - this provides a much more seamless user experience. For more detail about how the Microsoft Intune conditional access and mobile application management capabilities work, check out the Intune blog. Thank you for your feedback! Have a feature request? Share your ideas with us on our new Outlook UserVoice site. For any support requests or to report a bug, please contact us right from Outlook by navigating to Settings > Help > Contact Support. Frequently asked questions Q. Where can I find more technical resources about built-in MDM for Office 365? A. For detailed technical information, check out this TechNet article. Q. Where can I find more technical resources about Microsoft Intune? A. For detailed technical information, check out the Intune TechNet pages for conditional access and MAM. Q. What capabilities come with Intune versus built-in MDM for Office 365? A. Details for both Intune and MDM for Office 365 are outlined in this TechNet article. The post New Intune capabilities for Outlook on iOS and Android appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Phillip Tiongson, creative director at Potion. Potion is a design firm, first and foremost. We believe that good design integrated with technology has the power to amplify humanity. We strive to express ourselves by bringing story, art, design, architecture and computation together to deliver memorable and empathetic interactive experiences for our clients. The experiences we create range from beautifully designed mobile applications, to site-specific interactive installations in museums, cultural centers, healthcare, retail and hospitality environments. We specialize in creating interactive experiences rooted in storytelling. Unlike traditional services and software consulting companies that create products for any context, we challenge ourselves to make every experience that we build for our clients a bespoke, custom and original piece of software that uniquely conveys their story. Because of this, Potion’s creative process is built around creating a shared vision with our clients of what their original concept will look and feel like, how their stories will inhabit that concept, and how our unique approach to interaction design will bring it to life. A critical moment in our projects is when Potion first begins to understand and articulate a client’s story. We conduct interviews, hold kick-off meetings, and gather examples of the stories they want to use in the interactive installation or app. Those stories take many different forms and touch on different emotions—from global issues to the human experience. For example, for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, we created an immersive physical installation designed to speak to the story of energy at the epic scale of a complex human city—how it is consumed, generated and most importantly, conserved. Moving from epic to personal scale, we created an interactive exhibit table that allows visitors to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum discover the stories of individual immigrants’ lives—who they loved, where they worked, and how they survived to build their families and fortunes. Potion dives deep into the details of each client’s story so that we can effectively express their message through a bespoke interactive experience. Once we begin to collect our clients’ stories, Potion faces a challenge of communication. Clients do not think of their stories as "content" to be managed or "sample data," but rather a collection of material that together conveys a larger narrative. These stories come to us in many different stages of completion, from preliminary notes and images to final drafts ready for visitors. Because content is so integral to the interactive experience that we ultimately create, we start exploring it with our clients from day one—at a time when we are not yet ready to build the final physical installation, but when we need a way to communicate that we understand their story. At the same time, we’ve found that our clients also need a way to visualize their own stories to see the potential of the stories they actually have. How Sway fits into our process Over the past 10 years, we have tried almost every type of document sharing that exists with our clients. From email attachments to Word docs to custom websites—we have been looking for a way to share and present the clients’ own stories back to them in a well-designed package that is also time-efficient for us to work within. Sway allows us to gather and organize stories in a clear, coherent form that represents Potion well as a design firm but is also highly collaborative. We can work together on a story with a client that has minimal design skills, but strong narrative ideas, and allow them to incorporate those ideas in a real-time way with us. Because Sway allows us to work in the cloud, it eliminates huge pain points of working collaboratively with clients, such as dealing with incompatible versions of software, desktop or mobile platforms, email attachment limits, document versioning and technical support. But just as important to us as the practical improvements is the fact that our clients’ stories are represented in a professional, well-designed format that presents their stories with visual respect and impact. Although we have the option to create custom web pages or detailed presentation decks to describe the stories, Sway is more efficient for us to communicate our ideas quickly for feedback and iteration. And best of all, Sway then allows us to continue co-creating stories with our clients. Potion’s process in creating our interactive installations and apps can take place over months, and is a constant evolution from storyboarding to designing to writing code. Sway has the power to fill an important gap that exists in this process, from the first days when we gather content, to the final phase when content is live in the interactive experience. Sway provides us a place to share, play and collaborate with clients throughout the process, using a form that we are proud to share and express ourselves in. In our first exploration of Sway, we used it to share the story of creating the permanent interactive installation Future Energy Chicago, with the Museum of Science and Industry. The museum exhibit Future Energy Chicago is an all-digital, immersive gaming environment that gives audiences control over the direction the world is moving, by offering students and citizens the tools for making smart decisions to save Chicago’s future. It’s a multi-faceted project, with five interactive games, an overhead LED lighting sequence, and an animated scoreboard. Sway gives us a platform that allows us to tell the story of Future Energy Chicago in a dynamic and compelling presentation. As a Sway, we bring the case study to life, revealing how the interactive environment behaves and reacts, and the creative process that got us there. We are very proud of the work, and hope that our story inspires you to use Sway to tell your own stories, either to your clients, or to the world. Keep in touch with us, and our future Sways: @potion_design Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post Sway helps design firm Potion create and collaborate with clients appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Rohit Nagarmal about the Office 365 Groups API. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP50_Rohit.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates  Challenges in Office 365 development - and ways to address them Search videos using the Office 365 Video REST API Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices - June 2015 Community Call Unity Connect Keynote - Key Announcements for Office and SharePoint Developers Disabling apps can be done via PowerShell right now Show notes Office 365 unified API overview Office 365 unified API in depth Office 365 unified API reference Graph Explorer 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 Rohit Rohit Nagarmal is a program manager at Microsoft working in Office 365 on the Exchange Ecosystem team. He spends most of his days thinking about how to best RESTify APIs for Outlook (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Groups and more). In past life, he was an Engineering lead in SQL Server and before Microsoft, he worked as a Java Developer in an IPTV startup.   About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is based, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 050 on the Office 365 Groups API appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re proud to announce the release of a better, faster and touchier version of OneNote for iPhone and iPad. We’ve been working hard on this release, and we’re excited to share it with you today. Here are the details on what’s new: Updated lists on iPhone We received feedback that lists worked best with a keyboard, mouse and screens even the largest of cargo shorts couldn’t accommodate. Accordingly, checkboxes for ants have been replaced with checkboxes designed for humans. Quickly create a list from anywhere in the app by tapping the + button and selecting List. You can add new items by tapping Add Item or tapping return after you create or edit an item. In the event you no longer need a list item, simply swipe left to erase it from your view. We heard your feedback, now, checking an item moves it to the Completed section of the list. You can also show or hide completed items anytime. Tap Edit to rearrange, indent, or select multiple to-dos. List previews show how many uncompleted items are left to do. With improved functionality, you’re in control: you can switch any page from ‘note’ view (default) to ‘list’ view and back again. All lists will continue to work and sync as usual across all platforms. Equations on iPhone and iPad You can now view equations on iPhone. Much to the happiness of some students, they still have some excuses for not completing their homework, as it is not possible to edit equations. Yet. However, it’s now possible to view and edit equations on the iPad—teachers and students, rejoice! Lined and grid paper backgrounds for iPad Torn between your love for the straight, orderly lines of ruled paper and the infinite possibilities of free-form note taking? Fret no longer! You can now add ruled or grid lines to your OneNote page. Imagine the geometrically regular possibilities! Sharing made easier with new sign up experience We simplified the iOS and Mac sign up experience so you can easily share notebooks with your friends, family, classmates, and colleagues. Now all you need is an email address, (it can be one you already have, such as Outlook.com or Gmail) and a password to create a new account and begin working together! Get the OneNote app today for iPhone and iPad. Tell us what you think We appreciate your continued feedback via the App Store, Facebook, and Twitter—we rely on it to continually improve OneNote and make it the best possible note-taking experience for you, our customers. Let us know what you think in the comments below. —Ryan McMinn, product manager for the OneNote team. The post Lists, equations, paper styles and sign up updates in OneNote for iPhone and iPad appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by James Gill, grade 6/7 teacher in SD43, Coquitlam, BC. I began my journey in Office 365 because I had a vision. I wanted to move my students’ work online because it would improve some things in their practice and allow me to improve some things in mine. I wanted students to be able to work online so that they could access their work from both school and home. Ideally they could access it anywhere. I wanted to take advantage of spellcheck for my many students for whom English is not their first language. I wanted to make editing their writing something that could be accomplished easily, especially for my students with learning disabilities. I also wanted to make it possible to take advantage of the many resources on the Internet, while at the same time teaching students how and why they need to cite their sources. But in order to accomplish this I had to tackle a few questions: What do I do when not every kid has a device? What do I do when not every device is the same? I began the year by having students bring their devices. It had to be a device they were allowed to bring to school on a regular basis, and their parents needed to sign the BYOD permission form. What I got was a lot of different devices. Some brought laptops, both new and old. Some brought iPads, including a few iPad mini’s. There were two Microsoft Surface 2’s and a few Samsung Galaxy tablets. One girl could brought her phone. In my inventory, I had two, then three refurbished desktops, and then later I got a couple of Chromebooks on loan. I also had a first generation Surface RT, on which I set up local accounts for several students. In an effort to get kids to develop a sense of ownership over their work, and to feel like they had some say in their learning, I implemented the Genius Hour program. Students would get some of their week to research their own inquiry question. I taught them how to ask a question that could not be found by just searching the web. I was astounded with the great questions they came up with: If Charles Darwin were alive today, what would he say about our future? Why is there war and why do soldiers obey? Why do people look at art, and why does it inspire them? Why is film photography still important today? Why do Greek Gods hate mortals? Is JavaScript the most important computer programming language? Why are people interested in origami? Where did turtles come from, and are they still changing? Coffee! Why is it so popular across the world? Such great questions! I had the good fortune of being included as a part of the Office 365 trial in my district. I created an account for each student and then I used the OneNote Class Notebook to post a link to the student notebooks on my website. Signing in was easy, and students began downloading the OneNote Class Notebook so they could launch OneNote on their device. Now that OneNote is free on all platforms, all my students could access it, and use it on whatever device they had. Those students, who didn’t want to download the app, could use the web-based version. We preferred having the work open in the app on the device, because this mean it would use less bandwidth as compared to using a web only tool. I taught my students how to use the Clipping tool first. It saves them a lot of time and trouble as clipping allows them to grab both pictures and text, and automatically records where they found their work. Now they can easily cite their sources as they go, and realize the importance of using other people’s ideas to support theirs—without claiming them as their own. When it came time to give feedback, I used OneNote’s Insert > Record Audio option to record my feedback as an audio note right into their work. In 30 seconds I can give better feedback than I could in the same amount of time if I wrote their comment. I also know that students of this age have higher listening comprehension than reading. I don’t tell my students their mark, but invite them to come find out. When they ask me, "What was my mark?" I ask in return, "First, what was my feedback?" For the last three months, I have been putting most of my work in the Content library, and teach almost all my lessons from there. As I am new to my grade, I didn’t have a lot of resources, so I have been creating my teacher notebook with the aid of Office Lens on my phone. The Office Lens app allows me to shoot content directly into my OneNote notebook. From there I put my assignments and lessons into the Content Library. This is a section that all kids have read-only access in their notebooks. They can copy the page with a single right-click to their own notebook and get started with their work right away. Some of my students have begun working in OneNote at home on a desktop PC or Mac and then coming to school without a device, (because they don’t own a laptop or mobile device they can bring school) and then looking to me to solve the problem. They prefer to work in OneNote, and are hopeful that I can find a way to help them keep working online on any device! What a great problem to have with a relatively easy solution for me. Next up is for students to collaborate together online. In the Collaboration section, all students can write on pages together. My students are going to be working in pairs to use what they have learned about Simple Machines to work for several days on a Rube Goldberg machine. Photo credit: Arne Hendricks, Flickr, under CC license. We plan to use OneNote to store students sketches (some students may sketch directly into OneNote if they have a touch screen device), and create step-by-step plans, lists of who will bring recycled materials and then share their ideas with others. Another feature in OneNote I am taking advantage of is "Translate." I have a high population of non-native English speakers, and whenever someone needs to open a browser, or get a translation dictionary, they are more likely to just guess at the word, rather than make the effort to look it up. By having translation built-in, I can reduce the number of clicks it takes for a student to go from "Hmmmm" to "Aha!" I am very lucky to have been a part of this project, as using OneNote Class Notebooks allows me to teach in ways I couldn’t before. My students have benefitted, and I know that they have learned some skills that they can use to help them now and in the future. —James Gill The post BYOD with OneNote Class Notebooks—classroom learning with any device on any platform 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 fourth edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep-up-to date with what’s new in Office 365 development. This month has been a busy month of inquiries based on everything we announced at the Build and Ignite conferences, which has kept the team busy.  I encourage you all to engage on the Office 365 Technical Network with us with your questions. There have been some exciting new things released this month including support for Office Add-ins in Excel on the iPad. You’ll need to update your manifest file to do this to v1.1 and declare that you wish to support that client, which is documented on MSDN. One other item of note is that the Office Graph on the Unified Endpoint (TrendingAround/WorkingWith) is coming very soon to production tenants and I’d encourage you all to go play with it in our Graph Explorer tool. Also, a special shout out to Nintex for winning the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC)  Office and SharePoint Application Development award and to the runners up—K2, harmon.ie and DocuSign Inc. It is very exciting to see their efforts to build products in the Office Store celebrated at the WPC. Latest dev news Check out the latest news from Office Blogs that is useful to know as an Office 365 developer. And SharePoint makes three! Nintex wins the WPC "Office and SharePoint Application Development" award Microsoft acquires Wunderlist Windows 10-July 29th release date Office 365 Add-in rename cheat sheet Office Mix amps the slideshow experience with the personality of videos Salesforce, SAP, Uber, Do and Smartsheet add-ins and extensibility solutions for Office 365 Office Lens Android now available at Google Play Store OneNote welcomes three new partners—cloudHQ, Equil and WordPress 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 New Sideload an Office Add-in on iPad for testing purposes New name for apps for Office and SharePoint Updates Specify the Office hosts and APIs your app requires Checklist for submitting an app to the Seller Dashboard Submit apps for Office to the Seller Dashboard Validation policies for apps submitted to the Office Store (version 1.8) Publishing apps for Office and SharePoint Office 365 APIs New Submit web apps for Office 365 to the Seller Dashboard Synchronize events in an Outlook calendar view Office 365 Service Communications API reference (preview) Updates Outlook Calendar REST API reference Resource reference for the Mail, Calendar and Contacts REST APIs Office 365 unified API reference (preview) Preview developer features on the Office 365 platform Office 365 API code samples and video SharePoint Add-ins Deploy and install a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add custom columns to a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add a custom content type to a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add a Web Part to a page in a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Add a workflow to a SharePoint-hosted app for SharePoint Code Samples: OfficeDev/SharePoint_SP-hosted_Add-Ins_Tutorials SharePoint Client Side API The Log Export feature for Office 365 Dedicated has been updated in MSDN. Rendering issues caused by the duplication of the reference documentation in the MSDN TOC have been resolved by eliminating that duplication. All SharePoint reference documentation now only appears at: Reference for SharePoint 2013 OneNote Online Use note tags with the OneNote API For more documentation check out Office developer documentation. Code samples Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump-start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the dev community. New Office 365 Connect app for iOS (Swift version) Office 365 Android Profile (Unified endpoint sample) Office 365 iOS Profile (Unified endpoint sample) Office 365 Windows Profile (Unified endpoint sample) Updates Office 365 iOS Snippets (Mail/Calendar) Office 365 Android Snippets (Mail/OData Query options) Office 365 Windows Snippets (Mail) For more code, samples check out the 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 047 on the Dev Program Episode 048 with Eric Shupps on SharePoint Add-ins Episode 049 with Eric Shupps on building a dev community Episode 050 with Rohit Nagarmal on the Office 365 Groups API 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)—June release details 10 hours of FREE training released this week!—Read more New PnP transformation process guidance released—Read more PnP June 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: Replace SharePoint content types and site columns Replace files deployed using modules in SharePoint farm solutions Replace SharePoint lists created from list definitions Replace SharePoint web parts with app parts Customize OneDrive for Business site branding 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: Write a PHP app to get Outlook mail The Ultimate Script to down Ignite videos and slides Office 365 Developer Flipboard magazine Office 365 Developer slack channel Getting started with SharePoint hosted apps Objective C and Swift iOS code sample Get handle on your Site closure and Policies Refactor Office add-ins Session values are lost in SharePoint Provider hosted add-ins PnP June community call PnP Usage Survey for May V1.1 manifests for Online and iPad client support Waldek Mastykarz-Office 365 SPA on any platform and Office Graph hands on lab 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 19 Recode London June 24-27 SPTechConDev Days Burlingame, CA Aug 18 - 20 SharePoint Fest Seattle, WA Oct 12 Unity Connect Amsterdam Nov 9-12 European SharePoint conference For more events check out dev.office.com/events. Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us on @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook. Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Chris Johnson (@loungflyz), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Dave Pae (@davidpae) and Jim Epes (@j_epes). —Jeremy Thake The post Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for June appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Julie Kohler, program manager for the Project Engineering team. In listening to your feedback, we’ve learned that resource managers and project managers find it challenging to agree on and assign resources for specific projects and tasks. With no clear way to track who is working where, who is over-allocated—and with crossed lines of communication, things can start to break down. To address these challenges, we are introducing a new capability in the next update of Project called Resource Engagements, which helps align project managers and resource managers on the specific amount of work and time period associated with a project. Resource Engagements are an evolution of the old Resource Plan feature in PWA and all of your existing Resource Plan data will be converted to engagements upon activation or upgrade. What can project managers do? As a project manager, in Project Pro you’ll be able to create requests for resources in the new Resource Plan view. You can specify the dates and amount of work, and also request either a specific resource or a generic one. When you’re ready, submit your requests. Simply refresh your view to see the status of your requests and the decisions made for each. If you requested a generic resource, the resource manager may have swapped it out for a named resource in that role. You can always make edits and re-submit if you need to negotiate. What can resource managers do? As a resource manager, you can view the requests for the resources that you manage across all projects on the new Resource Requests page. You can make decisions about who is available using the capacity planning heat map. In the example below, you see that Allie Mack already has too many engagements for most of June but Kat Larrson has availability starting the week of the 6/14/2015.  You wouldn’t want to accept any more incoming requests for Allie Mack in June, and can also look back at the existing engagements to see what needs to be updated. You can then edit, accept, or reject the requests on the Resource Requests page. In this example the resource manager is about to reject the request for Allie Mack since she is already over engaged. You can create a New Engagement, which is automatically accepted and visible to the project manager who owns the project. What happens to my old Resource Plans? Existing Resource Plans in PWA will all be automatically converted into Engagements, and the old Resource Plan view will be removed. If you’re an on-premises customer, this will happen when you upgrade to Project Server 2016. For those of you on Project Online, you’ll be able to decide when you want to activate the new features, which will then migrate your old Resource Plans into Engagements. What about reporting? If you want to generate reports on how resources are being used in relation to engagements, you can create a custom report using OData, which supports the new engagement fields. The post Resource Engagements—coming soon to Project 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

As an Office 365 admin, you play an important role in delivering the best possible productivity for your users and organization. We share in this mission and remain committed to providing you a reliable service and transparency into our operations. Office 365 is designed with service continuity at the very center and we stand by this commitment through our financially backed guarantee of at least 99.9 percent uptime. Reducing the frequency and impact of service incidents remains an important part of our continuous improvements. We do not take lightly the imperative we have to earn your trust through reliability. This is why we invest in resiliency and redundancy at every layer of Office 365 and design with the core principle of ensuring a highly available service. As with any cloud service—and despite all our efforts—incidents can and do occur that may impact your experience. We realize that in these critical moments, it’s how we respond that makes all the difference for you and your organization. We’ve heard your feedback that receiving actionable communications that are timely, targeted and accurate during service incidents is essential. Based on this feedback, we made a number of improvements and today we’d like to share this progress and announce the availability of two new capabilities: push notifications and programmatic access to Office 365 service incident communications.  Receive service incident alerts the way you want Your first and best resource for staying informed in the event of an Office 365 service incident is the Service Health Dashboard. Signing into the Office 365 admin center provides you a personalized, detailed and up-to-date view into the availability of the Office 365 services you have subscribed. If there is an incident that impacts your service experience, the Service Health Dashboard is our primary communication channel to keep you current with what is happening and the steps we are taking to rapidly recover. After an incident, this is where you can review root cause details and access a 30-day history of past events. We’ve heard your feedback that the information we provide needs to be actionable. What follows is an update on how we’ve made improvements to better support you with the transparency and detail to understand the incident and how to best mitigate the impact for your users. First, we constantly strive to reduce the amount of time it takes to identify and then notify you about an incident affecting your Office 365 tenant. Through investments in new processes, which include advanced machine learning, anomaly detection and automation, we have already reduced the time to your first alert by 60 percent in many cases. We remain committed to reducing this even further. You also told us that more frequent status updates and faster post-incident analysis is vital for you to keep your organization informed. To support you better through these events, we added new details—such as the expected user experience, potential workarounds, estimated time to restoration and initial root cause analysis—to the regular updates posted to your Service Health Dashboard for a particular incident. This provides you greater context around the scope of the issue and helps you mitigate the impact on your users while we rapidly restore your service. We have an improved experience for your users through the introduction of new intelligent error messages. Today, Office 365 can inform your users if their access to SharePoint Online may be interrupted due to an ongoing service incident. The goal is to reduce the need for your users to call your help desk. Other Office 365 workloads will be supported in the coming months. Similarly, Office 365 can alert you if there is an active service incident affecting your tenant at the time you are initiating a new service request. We’re also focused on providing you proactive notification if Office 365 detects an issue that could cause a future service incident. For example, alerting you that some of your users are connecting to Office 365 with an older version of Outlook that may result in reliability issues. Stay informed with new push notification options  Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of new service incident push notifications with the Office 365 Admin app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices for first release customers with the worldwide release to follow. Now, when you are on the go and away from the Office 365 admin center, you can be alerted immediately if there is a service incident affecting your users and you’re one tap away from access to important details on any actions you can take to mitigate impact. And, you can stay current on the latest service health status from the same app. If you already have the Office 365 Admin app, this capability is available today.  All you need to do is configure your notifications. Not already using the app? You can download it from the following stores: For Windows Phone 8.1, download the app from the Windows Phone Store. For iOS 7+, download the app from the Apple App Store. For Android 4.0+, download the app from Google Play. We will continue to enhance and expand your options in future updates to the Office 365 Admin app. This includes adding more modalities for alerts—like SMS and email—and more customizable notifications. Integrate directly with your applications using the Office 365 Service Communications API We are also excited to announce the availability of a public preview of the Office 365 Service Communications API. The Service Communications API offers you programmatic access to Office 365 service incident communications. With this API, you now have the ability to surface critical Office 365 service communications directly within your existing help desk tools and service management solutions and simplify how you monitor across service health across your environment. The API gives you the flexibility to monitor real-time Office 365 service health status, as well as access historical details. Several leading providers of service monitoring and management solutions have already started to integrate this new API into their own offerings, including BetterCloud, ENow, Cogmotive and Exoprise. For an example of how the API is enhancing partner solutions, check out this video from our partner Exoprise. To get started with the new Office 365 Service Communications API, visit MSDN where you can access sample code to start building your solutions. Commitment to reliable service and transparent operations Even with the progress we shared today, we remain relentless in our commitment to delivering a reliable, highly available service that exceeds your expectations. Core to delivering on this promise is our accountability through transparency as evidenced by the uptime numbers published to the Office 365 Trust Center. We encourage you to try out the new capabilities featured in this post and hope you find these improvements more useful. As we continue to build upon these investments in the coming months, your feedback is vital and welcomed. We will be hosting a YamJam next week on Tuesday, June 30th 9:00-10:00 a.m. PDT on the Office 365 Network to take your questions and feedback live. Learn even more about Office 365 service incident management by watching our Microsoft Ignite conference session, "What Really Happens When There Is a Service Incident with Office 365, and What’s My Role?" and this brief video. —Katy Olmstead Frequently asked questions Q: Can an administrator turn off the Office 365 Admin app notification messages? A: Yes, administrators have the ability to turn off notifications at any time in the phone settings for notifications.  Q: When will push notifications be available for Message Center communications? A: Message Center notifications will be available in the third quarter of 2015.   Q: When can I expect more customization for push notifications, such as being able to select specific workloads like Exchange Online or additional communication channels like email and text?  A: We will continue to enhance and expand your options in future updates to the Office 365 Admin app. This includes adding more modalities for alerts—like SMS and email—and more customizable notifications. Q: Which Office 365 customers are receiving these benefits? A: Tenant administrators for Office 365 customers including commercial, government and academic plans will be able to use the admin app and Office 365 Service Communications API. The post Improved communications and tools help you stay better informed during service incidents appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last month, we announced the summer rollout of a number of top requested features for OneNote Class Notebooks, OneNote Staff Notebooks and OneNote across platforms to Office 365 customers. One of our promises was that we are making OneNote Class Notebooks more discoverable for teachers to save them time. That’s why we recently put the OneNote Class Notebook app in the My Apps page for every teacher with Office 365 Education in the U.S. and made it accessible to them via a simple link with additional resources at onenote.com/classnotebook. Find OneNote Class Notebooks easily in Office 365 Education We have now made OneNote Class Notebook app automatically available to all U.S. teachers with Office 365 Education (E1 or E3 for Faculty) in their Office 365 App Launcher and My apps. This means teachers with Office 365 Education can more easily access and discover OneNote Class Notebooks so they are able to create class notebooks to save time, organize and collaborate with students next school year. We will be making this app automatically available to teachers with Office 365 Education worldwide in the near future. Teachers can check if they are eligible for free Office 365 Education at your school here or try for free by signing up on this site.   One link to create OneNote Class Notebooks The OneNote Class Notebook helps teachers to quickly set up a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities—all within one powerful notebook. Teachers can easily add students to a shared notebook to allow for differentiated instruction, content delivery and a collaborative digital space. Students can work together while teachers provide real-time feedback. To set up OneNote Class Notebooks: Go to the website onenote.com/classnotebook to watch the OneNote Class Notebooks video and access the interactive guides. Next, sign in with your school or district email associated with Office 365. In the new webpage that launches, run the simple wizard to set up your OneNote Class Notebook for your class. This wizard creates the OneNote Class Notebooks in the teacher’s OneDrive for Business in Office 365. In step 7 of the creation process, the wizard provides a link that can be used to open the OneNote Class Notebook in OneNote on any device. The students automatically receive a link to this notebook in their Office 365 (Outlook) email and in their OneDrive for Business under "Shared with me". NOTE: If your school prefers that OneNote Class Notebooks are stored on your class SharePoint sites, you will need to use the OneNote Class Notebook app on SharePoint instead and your IT administrator will need to install the app on your SharePoint site. Steps to do this are covered in our IT Administrator Guide and these interactive guides. For teachers who don’t have an Office 365 sign in, there is a link on the website to get one for free if you are at an eligible institution. What’s next for OneNote Class Notebooks? As we mentioned in our blog post last month, we have more planned before school starts in September. Stay tuned on the OneNote in Education blog and follow us on Twitter at @OneNoteEDU to stay informed on everything. Let us know if you have questions in the comments or email us at OneNoteEDU@microsoft.com. Submit other feature requests on our feedback and suggestions site, which we use to prioritize our next round of improvements to make you and your students’ lives easier for next school year. The post Teachers, create your OneNote Class Notebook from Office 365 App Launcher or OneNote.com/classnotebook appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services team. Today I’m pleased to announce the general availability of the new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android phone. These join our previously released Office apps for Android tablets to complete the Office experience for the millions of Android users around the world. Download Word, Excel and PowerPoint on your Android phone today to get started. Five weeks ago, we announced the Office for Android phone preview. We are so grateful to our preview users, and with their help we were able to test the apps on over 1,900 different Android phone models in 83 countries. During the preview, we heard from thousands of these users, and over the last few weeks we were able to incorporate a lot of their feedback into the apps we’re launching today. For example, we made it easier to connect to other popular third-party storage offerings like Google Drive and Box, as well as many usability adjustments to make it easier to navigate commands within the apps. Here are a few of my favorite aspects of our new Android phone apps: On the go reviews and edits—I often need to squeeze in quick reviews in between appointments during the day. I can review documents in full fidelity, read comments and then easily add my own. Presenting from my phone—I love just bringing my phone to a meeting to present wirelessly.  PowerPoint for Android phone gives me the same transitions, animations and design that I would have from my desktop, and I can even use inking to highlight important points while presenting. Quick access to my documents—I can quickly find the document I was working on in the office from my phone.  It even shows me where I was last working. Additionally, while I am a faithful OneDrive user, I can also access documents stored in Dropbox, Google Drive or Box with our support for third-party cloud storage providers. Easy to get—We’ve partnered with over 30 global, regional and local OEMs such as Samsung, Sony, LG and many more, to pre-load these apps on Android devices. Many of these devices will be landing in retail stores later this year. You can download the Word for Android, Excel for Android and PowerPoint for Android apps from the Google Play* store beginning today. We hope you enjoy using them as much as we enjoyed making them. —Kirk Koenigsbauer *Word, Excel, PowerPoint apps are available in the following app stores in China: Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi, CMCC, and through the Samsung Galaxy Store worldwide. "Android is a trademark of Google Inc. Google Play is a trademark of Google Inc." The post Office for Android phone is here! appeared first on Office Blogs.

On this week’s show, we invite Michael Tejedor back to give us an update on Power BI. Michael explains the options for connecting Power BI to the cloud and even on-premises data sources. We share news about content packs allowing you to connect and gain insights into data from popular cloud services immediately. Finally, Michael demonstrates the new push APIs to allow Power BI to display real-time data from IoT devices. On previous shows, we’ve highlighted the capabilities of Power BI - from quickly gaining insights to vast amounts of operational data to new dashboard capabilities in the Power BI Preview. We’ve even used Power BI to help us predict the outcome of the El Clásico match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. This week we also give a quick recap of the Power BI Preview with its new dashboards, chart types and optional connectivity to on-premises data via SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) using the Power BI Analysis Services Connector. We highlight available and upcoming content packs to connect and quickly gain insights to Microsoft and third-party service data and demonstrate the new Power BI REST API for sending real-time push data into Power BI—like sensor data from IoT devices and more. If you want to see all of this and more in action along with lightweight Power BI apps for iOS and Windows, check out this week’s show. —Jeremy Chapman The post Early look at Power BI updates and new customization options appeared first on Office Blogs.