Today’s post was written by Shanen Boettcher, general manager for Class Dashboard and School Information Sync. Today, we are announcing the first phase of a Preview program for two new Education services: Microsoft Class Dashboard and Microsoft School Information Sync, which will be available to Office 365 Education users at no additional charge. Class Dashboard and School Information Sync simplify connections between systems, and simplify communication and collaboration between teachers and students. As a result, teachers have more time to focus on what they love—engaging with students—using Microsoft Office tools that they use every day. Introducing School Information Sync Schools and districts are looking for ways to ease the challenge of connecting their data and systems. School Information Sync automates and simplifies the complex and manual processes of connecting school Student Information System (SIS) data with educational apps and class websites. It syncs user profiles and class rosters from a school or district SIS, provisions groups and class websites, enables single sign-on (SSO), and allows learning apps to access student data over an encrypted connection. Because security and privacy are so important, schools and districts determine which apps can access student data, so they can remain in compliance with their policies. With School Information Sync and Office 365, teachers spend less time managing administrative access to class materials and more time with students. "School Information Sync will simplify the way we keep student profiles up to date across Office 365 and apps. Our students will log in once and access the apps we use. It saves time and simplifies access to important learning tools. We plan to expand our usage next school year and think School Information Sync will help make the back to school season a breeze," said John Nasset, Student Information Systems Manager, Helena (MT) Public Schools. Education partners are also looking for easier and faster ways to work with school data systems. With this service, SIS vendors will be able to support more apps with integration through a single API, allowing them to more efficiently provide access to classroom data. Districts may enable third-party applications to access student data to personalize learning experiences, all at no charge via cloud APIs, and let students enjoy the benefits of single sign-on with Office 365. With School Information Sync, ISVs will be able to deliver SIS independent applications faster than ever. Bryan MacDonald, Managing Director of School Systems, PowerSchool, says "PowerSchool is the market leading Student Information System. We are excited to partner with Microsoft to deliver a more integrated experience between PowerSchool and Office 365. Over 40 million parents, students and teachers rely on PowerSchool on a daily basis and through our integration with Office 365 we seek to drive improvements in both classroom and back-office productivity." "Two-thirds of U.S. school districts use our assessment and instruction programs, and we are excited about the single sign-on and data sync benefits Office 365 offers students and teachers," said Jack Lynch, CEO of Renaissance Learning. "We are always looking for ways to make educators’ work easier, and streamlining the use of programs like ours with information systems and productivity tools is a win-win for schools and the organizations that serve them." Introducing Class Dashboard Class Dashboard is an easy-to-use website that brings together familiar Office apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook in the context of the classroom. Teachers can get the most out of the tools they know and content they have, keep materials and classes organized and accessible, and engage students in new collaborative learning experiences to achieve better outcomes. Class Dashboard will be available to users of Office 365 Education at no additional cost. With Class Dashboard teachers and students can stay organized and save time. Each class section has a OneNote Class Notebook, and class materials, notes, assignments and shared calendars will be stored online and in one place. Teachers and students can easily access class notebooks and documents from devices while at school or on the go. Teachers will be able to build rich assignments with documents, links, and online reference material, and collaborate with students using Office Online, web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint accessible from a web browser. They’ll be able to share assignments with students, track progress, give feedback and assign grades, quickly and in one place. Engage your students in new ways Class Dashboard will seamlessly connect with tools for interactive lessons and presentations, facilitate discussions and collaboration, and support feedback so teachers can enable students to learn in new ways. With OneNote Class Notebook, students will be able to show their creativity and collaborate in notes, drawings, and pictures. "When we try new technology in our classes, the real test is whether teachers and students see the benefit. With Class Dashboard, the answer is yes!" said Kelly Arbuckle, Summer School Principal, Omaha, Nebraska. "Our teachers want to use their existing lessons and most of those are created with Microsoft Office products. With Class Dashboard teachers shared assignments with students in just a few clicks and gave feedback along the way. Our students liked the experience too! We’re excited to be part of this customer preview program, and looking forward to trying Class Dashboard in more classrooms next school year." There are many different technology tools available to educators, so we built Class Dashboard to easily integrate with solutions teachers already use in the classroom. Using existing Office 365 public APIs, technology partners can access the classes, documents and assignments used by Class Dashboard within their own products and services. For decades, we’ve invested in tools that enable people to communicate, collaborate, and unleash their creativity. We provide productivity services and devices for the mobile and cloud world. Building on solutions like Sway, Office Mix and OneNote Class Notebook, Class Dashboard is the latest example of our ongoing commitment to redefining learning and empowering teachers and students. School Information Sync will help schools put powerful teaching tools into the hands of teachers and students more easily. We are excited to bring these new services alongside the Office tools teachers and students love and use. To learn more about Class Dashboard or School Information Sync, please visit their product websites and sign up to stay in touch. To learn more about how to use OneNote in your class, please visit onenoteineducation.com. For more technical information, ISV partners can visit dev.office.com to start building applications that support single sign-on via Office 365, and call Office Graph APIs, which will be extended with School Information Sync. SIS Partners can also begin planning to integrate with School Information Sync. Contact your local Microsoft partner representative to share your integration schema and test data. The post Coming soon—new ways to achieve more in your classroom appeared first on Office Blogs.

Document imperfections can be distracting. Rather than producing more new content, you might spend time fixing a typo, correcting a formatting error, or moving a graphic. Over the next few weeks, Office Online is rolling out updates to eliminate these distractions to keep you focused on what matters. Watch this short video to see all the new features: Text formatting Office Online is releasing new autocorrect features. The first implementation will make straightforward changes such as capitalizing the first letter of a sentence. In the coming weeks, you will see more advanced automatic formatting such as transforming two hyphens into a dash—just like you’d expect in Word. Word Online is also adding the Format Painter, a popular office tool that can streamline document design. Format Painter allows you to copy formatting from the selected content (Ctrl + Shift + C) and paste it onto a different set of content (Ctrl + Shift + V). Object formatting in PowerPoint Online Text is great, but illustrations bring your presentation to life. PowerPoint Online’s latest update allows you to make your illustrations look perfect. You can easily select, move, resize and delete objects with your keyboard or mouse. The new Smart Guides feature helps you effortlessly align your objects with other content. Multiselect allows you to format more than one object at a time. You can even move objects outside the slide area while you format other content. Previously, PowerPoint Online only allowed you to view and relocate existing tables. The latest updates will allow you to create, edit and format your tables in the browser. You can even resize rows or columns. Easier viewing We know our customers use Office Online on a wide range of devices. PowerPoint Online’s new full screen Reading View and Zoom tool in the Editing View allow you to have a more comfortable experience on small screen devices. Word Online is also releasing a High DPI experience for viewing PDFs. Office Online is striving to be the best place on the web to create great content. If you have any feedback or a feature request for Word Online, Excel Online, PowerPoint Online or OneNote Online, please send it our way. If you haven’t tried Office Online yet, just go to Office.com to get started! The post Office Online makes formatting easy appeared first on Office Blogs.

When we launched Sway Preview, our first priority was ensuring anybody could use the rich Sway web experience in any modern browser, regardless of whether you’re on a PC, Mac or tablet. That way, the broadest amount of people could use Sway to quickly create and share polished, interactive reports, presentations, personal stories and more. Every day, people also use native apps to get stuff done on their tablets, phones and other devices. Office has spent the last year bringing productivity applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote to all major devices and platforms. Sway for iPhone is already available, and we’ve heard your feedback loud and clear that you’re eager for Sway apps on more devices and platforms. So today, we’re excited to share more news and a roadmap for Sway apps. Sway for Windows 10 is coming this summer Windows 10 is coming July 29, and it’s going to be a great time for millions (billions!) of people upgrading to a more personal computing experience. We will deliver a Sway native app experience for Windows 10 later this summer and we couldn’t be more excited. Sway for Windows will deliver a rich, touch-first experience that syncs your Sways across your devices and the web, helping you quickly create and share Sways that look great on any screen, for anyone you share with. Just as with Windows 10, Sway’s initial release on Windows 10 will be for PC and tablets. Reserve your free upgrade to Windows 10 (if you haven’t already), so you’re ready when Sway for Windows becomes available this summer! Sway for Windows 10 is coming this summer. Sway for iPad is now available, along with updates to Sway for iPhone Today we’re also excited to announce that Sway for iPad is now available, as is an updated version of Sway for iPhone. Building on your feedback, it is now easier than ever to add pictures, videos and text to your Sway. Previewing your creations is also quicker than before—simply switch between Edit and Preview at the top to see the polished and cohesive design taking shape as you create. Sway for iPad is optimized for the larger screen. It allows you to create, view and share Sways in landscape and portrait mode and also includes a few additional capabilities, such as the Remix! button for quickly trying out different layouts and styles. Now is a perfect time to download or update Sway for iPhone and iPad from the App Store today! Sway for iPad is now available, along with an updated version of Sway for iPhone. Sway for iPhone and iPad support Office 365 work and school credentials Last month, Sway for Office 365 began rolling out to qualified Office 365 business and education customers. That rollout began with support just in Sway on the web for Office 365 work and school credentials. Today’s releases of Sway for iPhone and iPad now support these accounts as well! You can log in to Sway for iPhone and iPad using the simplified sign in interface just like in Sway on the web, or Sway can automatically log you in using the same account credentials if you’re already signed into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote on your iPhone or iPad. As outlined previously, Sway for Office 365 is still available to First Release customers initially, and it will become available to all eligible Office 365 customers over the coming months. Sway for iPhone and iPad support more languages and new markets Last month, we also announced that Sway on the web had added support for six more languages, which has since grown to include Japanese as well. With today’s releases, Sway for iPhone and iPad now support these languages too, for both consumers and Office 365 business and education users. Now you can use the Sway interface in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish (in addition to English). Sway for iPhone and iPad are also now available in the App Store for 43 new markets where those are official languages.* More languages are on the way! Sway for iPhone and iPad now support seven more languages and are available in new markets. With Sway apps coming to more devices and more platforms, including Windows, even more people will be able to create and share their interactive reports, presentations, personal stories and more with their devices while on the go, and in new ways. As always, let us know what you think on UserVoice! —Sway team, @Sway *Sway for iPhone and iPad are now available in: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Chad, Chile, Columbia, Republic of Congo, Costa Rica, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, France, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Liberia, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Suriname, Swaziland, Switzerland, United Republic of Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the British Virgin Islands.   Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post Bringing Sway apps to more platforms and devices appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Chris Johnson, Andrew Connell, Eric Shupps and Rob Windsor about the upcoming Office UI Fabric that is being privately tested right now. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP51_OfficeUIFabric.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Get SharePoint Apps for current web using JavaScript CSOM (Office 365) by Chris O’Connor Transforming SharePoint customizations to add-in model training package by Vesa Juvonen  Why Are We Talking About the New Office 365 Authoring Tools Again? by Marc Anderson on ITUnity.com Visual Studio 2015 RC Connected Services by Tim Ferro Developing Yammer apps for iOS/OS X with ADAL, REST API and Swift 2.0 by Stephane CORDONNIER MVP Dev Track Day1 - Native iOS Apps using Swift for Office365 by Sahil Malik Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting 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 051 on Office UI Fabric appeared first on Office Blogs.

Todays’ post was written by Vijay Kumar, the senior product marketing manager for Office 365 Security. If you’ve been following the From Inside the Cloud video series, you know we regularly bring you an insider’s view from the people who design, build and manage security, privacy and compliance in Office 365. The recent RSA 2015 Conference in San Francisco prompted us to go outside the box to present over 20 sessions on the technologies and operational practices that Microsoft employs to protect your data in the cloud. We recorded several sessions, which are now available for you to view on the Office 365 Trust Center: Why trust Microsoft cloud services?—David Cross and Vijay Kumar David and Vijay share an overview of the operating principles and no-standing-access approach to limit the ability to use customer data in the Microsoft cloud as well as additional measures and controls to protect data access from a security, privacy and compliance perspective. Behind the announcements, Advancing Security and Trust in the world of SaaS—Vijay Kumar and Chang Kawaguchi In this first show of the conference Vijay and Chang set context on the day’s announcements at RSA, including news about Office 365 Management Activity APIs, Customer Lockbox and Advanced Encryption. How can you move forward with cloud innovation in highly regulated industries?—Shawn Veney, Pete Satchwell and Cristin Goodwin A moderated discussion on what it takes to make the shift to cloud technologies in the face of constantly evolving regulations and laws at a regional, national and international level. Your hosts explore the ways in which you should seek to partner with your service provider as well as the specific efforts by Microsoft, both operationally and within the service, to help you answer the needs of your regulators and auditors. A first look at Advanced Threat Protection to stop unknown malware and phishing attacks in email —Jeremy Chapman and Shobhit Sahay For businesses looking to harden their email environment, Jeremy and Shobhit discuss what you can do with the latest in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). They look at the new capabilities in Exchange Online that consistently protect against phishing attacks with new features such as Safe Attachments, Safe Link and more to safeguard against malware and bulk spamming. Give us your feedback or ideas in the comment section below about future topics you would like to see—and of course you can access all the videos in the series and additional resources at the Office 365 Trust Center. The post "From Inside the Cloud" goes outside the box on security appeared first on Office Blogs.

Back in October 2014, we announced release of the Office 365 app launcher and My Apps—places where you can organize and personalize your list of first-party services accessible in Office 365. This week, we’ve started deploying an Office 365 Store to make third-party solutions manageable in the same way, where external web applications can be launched with a single click—all within the Office 365 experience and with no admin configuration or additional sign in steps. Rolling out to Office 365 customers in the First Release program, the Office 365 Store is accessible through an icon in the app launcher "waffle" in the top navigation bar (see below). Clicking the icon takes you to a special version of the Office 365 Store, in which applications registered at the tenant level of Office 365 appears at the top the page (see below). You can add these third-party solutions to your My Apps page with three clicks, which includes granting the app access to specified Office 365 data. Once loaded into My Apps, solutions can then be "promoted" to the app launcher simply by clicking the ellipsis next to the target app tile and "pinning" the app to the launcher. From there, you can launch any of these apps with no further sign in—existing Office 365 credentials do the job! You can also unpin or even remove apps you no longer need. Initially we’re working with a select list of pioneering partners for the apps in the Office 365 Store, but over time we plan to add hundreds of popular third-party solutions as Single Sign On apps to the Office 365 Store. Frequently asked questions Q. When will I see the Office 365 Store feature in my Office 365 environment? A. The Office 365 Store deploys to First Release customers the last week of June. Tentatively, all other customers should see it by July. Q. What types of apps will appear in the Office 365 Store? A. Any third-party web solution that is registered with Azure Active Directory (and uses OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect to provide identity federation and Single Sign On) can be published to the Office 365 Store. Azure AD is the same identity infrastructure that underlies Office 365. The Office 365 Store will give favorable merchandizing treatment to such apps that interact with Office data, but even web apps that don’t connect to Office can be published to the Office 365 Store by submitting a listing on the Seller Dashboard. For details on how to publish, see this article. The Office 365 Store will also offer traditional "Add-ins" for Office and SharePoint further down the Store page. However, Add-ins will still be launched within the specific Office product or service experience (Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, etc.) rather than from within the Office 365 app launcher. Q. How do I pay for Office 365 apps? A. For now, only free Office 365 apps are available via the Office 365 Store. Paid Office 365 apps, purchasable by a user for themselves via Office 365 credentials and a credit card, are under consideration for the future. Group purchasing of Office 365 apps must occur through the developer’s own commerce site and a license assignment for group purchases is managed by your Office 365 admin via the Azure AD section of your Admin Center. Once assigned by the Admin, these group-purchased Office 365 apps will also appear in the individual assignees’ My Apps page. The post Office 365 users gain one-click access to third-party apps appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today Choose2Matter, a social movement founded by educator Angela Maiers, announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft to bring authentic, passion-driven learning to classrooms and communities around the world. Microsoft is excited to help accelerate Angela Maiers’ work to advance passion-based learning in schools and to celebrate the unique genius of every individual. This work has already had a profoundly positive impact on so many students and educators. "I have been incredibly impressed by Microsoft’s commitment to understanding the needs of educators and students and providing them with the tools, information and educational experiences they need to succeed and thrive," said Angela Maiers. "Microsoft’s commitment to helping us move the Choose2Matter movement forward is stark evidence of this." Angela Maiers helped launch Genius Hour in schools with the publication of her book, "The Passion Driven Classroom," in 2010 (co-authored with Amy Sandoval). Since then, tens of thousands of teachers around the world have set aside some time in the school day for students to work on "passion projects." Liberating Genius in the Classroom is a day-by-day guide to the first 20 days of implementing the Genius Hour, guiding teachers through the essential habits and attitudes that students must develop to be active and informed citizens, and instructing them how to help students find and explore their passion. Microsoft will be the charter sponsor of Liberating Genius in the Classroom, a free e-book, authored by Angela Maiers, which guides teachers through the introduction of Genius Hour to their students. OneNote will be the preferred delivery platform for the e-book, and students will be able to download a custom OneNote genius notebook. Microsoft will also sponsor four Choose2Matter LIVE events in the 2015-16 school year, with the option to sponsor additional events. Choose2Matter has conducted eight of these real-time innovation events at schools throughout the U.S., with more than 20,000 students participating. It is now creating a complementary curriculum and intends to host eight-to-ten live events per year, in venues throughout the world. Schools that are unable to participate live will be invited to participate via Skype. Choose2Matter will announce availability of Liberating Genius in the Classroom and the OneNote genius notebook before the U.S. school year starts in August 2015. More details about Choose2Matter LIVE, including how schools can participate, will also be announced in August. Sign up for the Choose2Matter newsletter today to get the free e-book on OneNote and updates on LIVE events. The post Angela Maiers and Choose2Matter, Inc. collaborate with Microsoft for authentic, passion-driven learning appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Anne Mirtschin, teacher at Hawkesdale P12 College, a small rural prep school where students are culturally and geographically isolated. Anne is an active Skype Master Teacher. Picture the ideal classroom where there is fun, frequent laughter, intense concentration, powerful research, dedicated learning, lots of questions posed, and thinking in different ways. Students are pushed outside their comfort zones, confidence is being instilled, valuable 21st century communication skills are learned in a collaborative work environment. Deep, powerful learning is taking place. Mystery Skype can bring this atmosphere to the classroom—a classroom that can include any age group, culture, race and country across the world. Everyone loves a mystery and hence the increasing popularity of Mystery Skype. In this ‘game,’ students connect with another classroom or educator using Skype. Students do not know the location of their connecting classroom or educator. Though a process of questioning, students determine where their virtual partners are located. The learning does not stop there as follow-up activities can be planned such as further research on the location, culture and people of the other classroom. Also ongoing skype connections can be made. Personal reflections on the learning that took place play an important role. A wonderful and impressive resource is now available to document the skills and knowledge required and gained when using Mystery Skype in the classroom.  Mystery Skype OneNote Notebook is now available for use on this brand new website: mysteryskypeonenote.com. The site includes two options for getting the Mystery Skype OneNote Notebook, depending on your situation: 1. Mystery Skype Class Notebook app Have Office 365? Get this app! In addition to curriculum for Mystery Skype activities, the Mystery Skype Class Notebook gives you an exclusive interactive space for handouts and collaboration. And you can add students to it and give them private, real-time 1:1 feedback. Create a customized Class Notebook with this Office 365 app: mysteryskypenotebook 2. Mystery Skype Curriculum Don’t have Office 365? You can still get a OneNote notebook pre-populated with great content to help you plan and play Mystery Skype with another classroom across the globe…or around the corner. Download the notebook of curriculum now: mysteryskypecurriculum For those of you who don’t know, OneNote is a fantastic tool for educational use. It is a digital binder that allows you to create sections for all subjects, topics, themes and then add multiple page links within the sections. OneNote allows learning to be demonstrated through all types of media—text, audio recordings, images, videos, links as well as the ability to write with a Surface pen and utilize many Microsoft programs and tools. It has infinite possibilities to develop into a rich digital record of powerful learning and critical thinking. Sample of a collaborative OneNote reflection. The Mystery Skype notebook has something for everyone—teachers both new and experienced to Mystery Skype, and students of every learning style and ability. For "newbies" there are guidelines, links, video tutorials, tips and hints to ensure a successful experience. The notebook covers the nature of Mystery Skype, how to play the game and where to find others to play Mystery Skype with. There are sections for documenting class adventures; teacher resources; resources for students and tips/hints for successful use. Teachers can add the app to their Office 365 or download the curriculum on any device (since it is saved to your OneDrive) customize it to suit their needs. The only limit to its use is the teacher’s imagination and creativity. The Mystery Skype Class Notebook also allows teachers to add their students to individual sections of their notebook so they can see 24/7 what students are learning and documenting. In the "Documenting Class Adventures" section, students and teachers can capture their journeys around the world and track where they have been. They can also add highlights of their learning, document questions and answers from the videoconference, list their job assignments and suggest further tips and hints for future calls. Students can add their reflections using text, voice, Surface pen, pictures or images. Even very young students or those with learning challenges or disabled students can keep a rich record. "Mystery skype is a really good way to learn about other countries and their cultures. Last year when I came to this school I thought that it was amazing that I could do this and I really enjoyed it. It really makes you think about what cultures belong to what countries and you also learn a lot of geography when you are guessing what country they are from. It is an enjoyable way to learn!" —Lucy, Year 8 As students in my school, in rural south eastern Australia, are geographically and culturally isolated, they love to show where they have "travelled around the globe" by adding pins to the Bing Maps app in Microsoft Excel and then add the map to one of their Mystery Skype notebook pages. Sample of a Mystery Skype map for 2015. One of Mystery Skype OneNote’s richest features is to allow the notebook to be shared and enable collaborative student writing and documentation take place. If you haven’t tried Mystery Skype, do not delay, try the  Mystery Skype Class Notebook app or download the Mystery Skype curriculum for FREE and research the depth of materials there. Read more about my use of Mystery Skype and OneNote on my blog: www.murcha.wordpress.com. —Anne Mirtschin The post Learning adventures with the new Mystery Skype OneNote Notebook appeared first on Office Blogs.

Just nine months ago the OneNote team released the OneNote Class Notebook app, which has already had a huge impact in classrooms around the world. The app allows instructors to quickly set up a personal section for each student, a content library for handouts and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities—all within one powerful notebook. Since then, we’ve continued to listen to your feedback and continued to improve the OneNote Class Notebook experience so we can best serve teachers needs when and where they need it in the classroom to organize and collaborate with students. Today, we are delighted to announce that OneNote Class Notebook support for the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard is now available for public preview. This means instructors will be able to use OneNote Class Notebooks with any LTI-compliant Learning Management System (LMS). This integration streamlines the notebook creation process even further, and makes the OneNote Class Notebook easily accessible alongside other learning materials within the LMS. Instructors, as well as IT administrators, can easily enable the app for their course in Blackboard, Brightspace, Canvas, Moodle or any other compliant LMS. Teachers will then be able to launch the OneNote Class Notebook LTI app from their LMS course page and walk through the notebook creation process directly within their LMS. Once a teacher has finished creating a notebook, it is added directly to their course for the students to access. All the rich content available in OneNote is now one click closer for students and teachers. To get started and to find out more about integrating OneNote Class Notebook with your LMS, go to www.onenote.com/lti. With the announcement of LTI support for OneNote and also Office Mix, Microsoft is committed to supporting open standards and interoperability, so we can work with others to provide the most seamless experience for our users.  OneNote Class Notebook support for LTI will be in public preview for the summer season and is planned to be available for productive use ahead of the fall school year. The post Now available for public preview—OneNote Class Notebook with LMS integration via LTI appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 365 is about helping you be more productive so you can make the most of every moment. We believe the future of productivity involves technology that is truly personal and can work on your behalf. This belief is a driving force behind Microsoft’s personal digital assistant Cortana, which is coming to PCs and tablets, with Windows 10. Cortana learns your preferences to provide relevant recommendations, fast access to information, and important notifications. Cortana in Windows 10 can help you at home, at work and on the go. We’re pleased to announce the ability to integrate Cortana in Windows 10 with Office 365 for businesses, available in the latest Windows Insiders preview build. Cortana in Windows 10 will be now able to connect to Office 365 to help you accomplish more at work. You can preview this initial integration between Cortana and Office 365 starting today if your company is opted into First Release for Office 365, and you are enrolled in the Windows Insider Program and running Windows 10 preview bits. Today, Cortana is already great at letting you quickly see what your day is going to look like, see when and where you first meeting is, get a sense of travel times to work, or even get updates for upcoming trips from your calendar. Quickly glance at your day, know what’s next and take action. Cortana gets even better when connected to Office 365. For instance, at work many of us spend significant time and energy on meetings. By integrating with Office 365, Cortana can proactively help you prepare for an upcoming meeting. Cortana brings you helpful information about the people you’re meeting with, recent documents they’ve worked on, and reminders about when and where you need to be next so you won’t be late. Be better prepared for meetings with rich insights. See when and where you need to be next. People are the heart of the workplace. Everything we do, whether it’s sending an email or preparing a presentation, all comes back to the people we work with and having a great relationship with them. Through Office 365, Cortana can pull together insights to help you be more connected—like how you and your colleagues are connected to each other, documents you share and your upcoming meetings with them. Cortana will even deliver reminders when that important person contacts you. If you’re enrolled in the Windows Insider Program, running the Windows 10 preview bits, and have an Office 365 account at work, you can connect Cortana with Office 365 starting today. In addition, Office 365 admins can opt-out of Cortana connectivity in the Office 365 Admin portal. We are just starting this journey, and we’d love to hear your feedback on the Cortana and Office 365 integration preview, so please join the Windows Insider Program to give it a try, and share your feedback with the Insiders community. Frequently asked questions Q. Is the ability to integrate Cortana with Office 365 now available to all Office 365 customers? What does someone need to have in order to try it out? A. The requirements for you to be able to preview Cortana integration with Office 365: Your company needs to select the First Release option in the Office 365 Admin Center You need to be enrolled in the Windows Insider Program and running Windows 10 preview bits. Also, please note that Cortana is only available in select languages and markets today. Please check the Windows Insider Program site for more information. Q. What is the Windows Insider Program? A. The Windows Insider Program is a public preview program to gather feedback from our users to help us shape and improve the experience before general availability of Windows 10 on July 29th. Q. Which version of Windows will be supported? Will these support Windows Phone 8.1 Cortana? A. The ability to integrate Cortana with Office 365 will be available in Windows 10 desktops and tablets. Mobile phone integration will happen later this year. Q. Can Office 365 admins control access to Cortana? A. Yes, we are providing a new Office 365 admin control for Cortana to Office 365 customers. At this stage it is available only to customers using First Release. When Office 365 access is disabled, Cortana will still work on end users’ devices, but it will not have access to Office 365 information. You can find out more information here. The post An early look at Cortana integration with Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Starting today, PowerShell for Office 365, a new website designed to help Office 365 IT administrators get started on Windows PowerShell for Office 365 is now live. Announced at Microsoft Ignite, this website is targeted at IT administrators with little to no experience with Windows PowerShell. The website is focused on simple scenarios that are focused entirely for Office 365 administration. Learning PowerShell for Office 365 makes the job of IT admins easier and more efficient. For example, say your company goes through a large reorganization where departments change names and move to different management. If you are dealing with a few changes and a few people, the Office 365 Admin Center can quickly be used to make the changes. However, consider the task at hand if the changes involved hundreds or even a thousand users. While the Office 365 Admin Center is more than capable of making all the changes, the amount of work and the time it would take would be massive if the IT admin had to edit the users one-by-one. With PowerShell the updates can be made in three steps. First, you export the list of users into a CSV (comma separate values) file. Second, you make the necessary edits in the CSV file. Third, you import the edited user list back into Office 365. With a few PowerShell scripts, you have just automated the process of updating the company directory to match your organization. And you saved yourself significant amounts of time. PowerShell does not replace the Office 365 Admin Center. In fact, they are complementary tools and should both be used. The strength of PowerShell only really becomes apparent when you need to handle scenarios such as: Adding or editing a large number of users. Using multiple filters to sort through data. Exporting data such as user lists and groups. Configuring less commonly used settings. The new PowerShell for Office 365 website is targeted to get you up to speed with PowerShell as soon as possible. The website is organized to provide you with the following right from the start including: Consolidated guide to help you setup your machine to run PowerShell. Simple and applicable common scenarios. Sample scripts you can download, edit and then use right away. Links to resources such as TechNet to get more details. Connect with your peers and with us in the Office 365 Network. By using the PowerShell for Office 365 website, you start the journey in learning a valuable tool for administering Office 365 to help you complete your tasks quicker and get more done. Get started on PowerShell for Office 365 today. —Lawrence Chiu, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 team. The post Get started on PowerShell for Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Compliance is no longer about email alone. It has extended into realms that include social media, instant messaging, and collaboration platforms, to name just a few. In just a few years, these communication channels have become so prevalent that entire industries have spun up around them. Governance and regulatory policies have been updated to reflect the growing influence of these new mediums. When thinking of compliance, organizations must now account for all of these new communication tools that are frequently used by their employees. Today, Office 365 helps customers stay compliant with an archiving solution that covers email, documents in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, and Skype for Business meetings and conversations. But, our customers require and have asked for more—they want Office 365 to provide the same rich archiving capabilities over non-Microsoft data sources, such as social and messaging data, as well. To accommodate customers who require archiving of non-Microsoft data in Office 365, we are pleased to announce new partnerships with two popular vendors in the archiving space: Actiance and Globanet. The Actiance  platform provides real time policy enforcement, content monitoring and capture of 70+ leading social media, unified communications, collaboration, and IM channels. The company services small to large size businesses across all industries and counts among its customers all of the top 10 US, top 5 Canadian, top 8 European, and top 3 Asian banks. Globanet’s social media and message capture platform - Globanet Merge1™ - extends archiving, eDiscovery and compliance to data sources including email, IM, social media, financial, and mobile text communications.  The product is a dynamic, user-friendly and affordable way to merge all company data streams into a single database. Thanks to extensive collaboration and deep integration with Actiance and Globanet, Office 365 extends its rich and comprehensive archiving solution to cover a wide array of third-party data sources: Social — Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, LinkedIn, etc. Instant messaging — Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk, Cisco Jabber, etc. Document collaboration — Box, DropBox, etc. Verticals — SalesForce Chatter, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, etc. SMS/text messaging — BlackBerry, MobileGuard, etc. The entire compliance stack in Office 365—eDiscovery, Retention, Hold and Auditing—will have access to these new data sources. Both Microsoft as well as non-Microsoft data will be treated alike throughout the system. Our partners are doing work to integrate their products seamlessly with Office 365. By simply indicating Office 365 as an archiving destination in their products, customers will be able to immediately capture data from numerous data sources. There is no need for any additional configuration in Office 365. All captured data flows into Office 365’s auto-expanding archives. Once data is housed in Office 365, it is fully available to the Compliance tools that our customers are familiar with. Using our eDiscovery and Equivio analytics tools, customers will be able to search, preview and conduct extensive reviews on all ingested data and associated properties. Customers will be able to define retention policies for specific data sources—such as "Delete Facebook data after one year" and so on. And finally, every incoming piece of data, regardless of type or source, will be fully tracked and logged by our comprehensive Auditing tools, with full transparency to customers. An early preview of our upcoming eDiscovery experience in Office 365 with native support for non-Microsoft data. To give customers the full breadth of choice, we are also inviting more data capture specialists to integrate with Office 365. Interested parties can email Office 365 Archiving Partners to learn more and participate in this program. We’re excited to deliver a solution that meets the varied requirements of all our customers and industries we serve across the world. We’ll begin to roll out this offering worldwide in the coming months.   —The Office 365 Archiving Team The post Announcing archiving for non-Microsoft data in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Zig Serafin, corporate vice president for the Skype for Business team. When Microsoft launched Skype for Business earlier this year, I described our plans to deliver new Skype for Business voice and meetings capabilities in Office 365, beginning with a technical preview this summer. These new capabilities will enhance the existing Skype for Business experience, and allow us to offer a complete, enterprise-grade communications solution at global scale as part of Office 365. I’m pleased to announce that the technical preview is here. Starting today, Office 365 enterprise customers can register for the following previews: Skype Meeting Broadcast, available to eligible Office 365 customers worldwide, enables broadcast of a Skype for Business meeting on the Internet to up to 10,000 people, who can attend in a browser on nearly any device. Skype Meeting Broadcast makes it easy to host large virtual meetings like internal "Town Hall" style meetings and public webinars. The preview includes integration with Bing Pulse, for real-time polling and sentiment tracking, and Yammer, to enable attendee dialogue during the broadcast. PSTN Conferencing, available in preview to Office 365 customers in the U.S., allows people invited to a Skype for Business meeting in Office 365 to join the meeting by dialing in using a landline or mobile phone. This traditional dial-in capability is in addition to simple, single touch join options on PC, smartphone and browser, and allows people to join an online meeting even in places with no Internet access. PSTN Conferencing in Office 365 will also allow people to add others to a meeting by dialing out. Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling, also available in preview to Office 365 customers in the U.S., provides people the ability to make and receive traditional phone calls in their Skype for Business client, and manage these calls with features like hold, resume, forward and transfer. This preview is built on the proven enterprise voice technology available in Lync Server and Skype for Business Server. Later this year, we will ship Cloud PBX for customers worldwide, with a configuration option for customers to use existing on-premises phone lines for inbound and outbound calling. In addition to these previews delivered by Microsoft, our strategic partners, AT&T, BT, Colt, Equinix, Level 3 Communications, Orange Business Services, TATA Communications, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone, we will deliver direct connections to Office 365 Skype for Business customers later this year through Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365. ExpressRoute enables customers to create private connections between their premises and Microsoft datacenters, and offers more predictable network performance, the ability to better manage network availability, the reliability that comes with dedicated connectivity and additional data privacy. Office 365 is the world’s cloud for productivity. Through these investments, we are making complete, enterprise-grade communications an integral part of Office 365. In doing so, we’re enabling people to connect with one another across all forms of human expression—verbal, written, visual and emotional. With these new services, we will bring traditional calling and conferencing into the new era of workplace communications, and also add an entirely new way of communicating at much higher scale with much greater flexibility over the Internet. We can’t wait for you to try them! —Zig Serafin To see a demonstration of the Skype Meeting Broadcast experience and learn more about how it works, watch this Office Mechanics video: Frequently asked questions: Q. What are the eligibility requirements to participate in the preview? A. The Skype Meeting Broadcast preview is available worldwide to customers with an Office 365 enterprise plan or Skype for Business Plan 2. The previews of PSTN Conferencing and Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling are available in the U.S. to customers with an Office 365 enterprise plan or Skype for Business Plan 2. Q. Can end users sign up for the trial? A. No, the trial must be provisioned for the customer tenant by an Office 365 administrator. End users interested in trying the new services should contact their Office 365 administrator. Q. Are interested Office 365 customers required to trial all of the services currently in preview, or can they choose to preview only a subset? A. Eligible Office 365 enterprise customers may choose to trial any or all of the services now in preview according to the geographies where each preview is available. Q. When will these services be generally available, and how will they be priced? A. We expect to make these services generally available before the end of this year.  We will share pricing and licensing details when we are closer to general availability. The post Announcing preview of new Skype for Business services in Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services Team. When we launched the Office 2016 Preview in early May, we said that we would share regular updates on new features as they became available. Here’s a quick update on what we’ve delivered in the last month. New charts in Excel—There has been a lot of enthusiasm for the new charts in Excel we delivered— all based on user feedback. The six new charts include Waterfall (shown), Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap (shown) and Sunburst. Real-time typing in Word—Real-time typing is now in Word! You can see where others are working and what they are typing as they type it. To try this, save a document to OneDrive for Business and invite your colleagues to join you in a simultaneous authoring session. Insights in Excel and PowerPoint—Last month we delivered Insights in Word and Outlook, and we just brought it to Excel and PowerPoint. As a reminder, Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your Office experience. Fact check or explore terms without leaving your spreadsheet or presentation. Just right click any word or phrase and select "smart lookup." Tell Me—Tell Me is an entirely new way to find the commands you need. Just type what you want to do in the Tell Me box at the top of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, and you will get a set of results that let you take the desired action directly from within those results. Convert Hand Written Equations to Text—Use the Insert Equation feature to write math equations in Word, Excel and PowerPoint with a digital pen, a mouse, or even your finger, and Office automatically converts it to a "typed" format. We keep adding new features, and there’s definitely more to come. If you haven’t joined the Office 2016 Preview, it’s not too late, you can join here. Please stay tuned for future updates and thank you for your feedback and interest in Office 2016! —Kirk Koenigsbauer The post Office 2016 Preview—update 2 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Jean Paoli, Rob Dolin and Doug Mahugh from the Microsoft Open Teach EDU team. Last Friday at MS Open Tech we announced new open source integration with Open edX and Office 365 and also provided an update on the evolution of open source Moodle integration with Office 365. These are exciting developments in the education technology space, and in this post we’ll cover how they fit into the broader trend toward more openness and interoperability, which is being enabled by Office 365’s open REST APIs. Whether you’re a fourth grader at your local elementary school, a forty-year-old working on an evening MBA, or a fourth year associate enrolled in training at your company, there’s a good chance that you use a popular LMS (Learning Management System) or MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platform such as Moodle, Open edX or others for submitting homework and managing your education. There’s also a good chance that you use Microsoft Office 365—the world’s leading productivity suite—for creating content and collaborating with others. Wouldn’t it be great if you could seamlessly move back and forth between Office 365 and your LMS or MOOC, using tools like OneNote and Word to create content, or OneDrive to store documents and Outlook to manage your calendar? The Office 365 open REST APIs enabled the open source community to work with MS Open Tech on turning this vision into a reality. Office 365 REST APIs can be used from any programming language. For example, Moodle is written in PHP and edX is written in Python, but in both cases we’ve used the same open REST APIs. At the heart of these integrations is single sign-on (SSO), which allows instructors and students to move between Office 365 and Moodle or Open edX without the need to log in each time. For example, you could be logged in to Office 365 and working on a Word document, and then you’d like to go into Moodle to upload the document as an assignment or submission. In Moodle, you can now simply click Log in with Office 365 and you’re authenticated in Moodle with full access to Office 365 documents and services—ready to get your work done. To further streamline the workflow, these integrations give students and teachers the option to allow Moodle or Open edX to appear in the My Apps app launcher within Office 365. So your LMS or MOOC can be one click away whenever you’re working in Office 365. SSO integration with Moodle and Open edX leverages Azure Active Directory, using the OAuth2 standard and OpenID Connect (OIDC). We’ve also taken advantage of the Calendar API and OneNote API to enable a variety of integration scenarios in Moodle and both Moodle and Open edX can pull content from OneDrive into assignments. For example, students using Moodle can now choose to synchronize their Outlook calendars to the Moodle course calendar, so that when a teacher reschedules a class they’ll see the update immediately on their smartphones. In the spirit of contributing to the open source community, OIDC support has been implemented for Moodle and Open edX in a manner that allows use by any OIDC provider—not just Office 365 and Azure AD. We’ve done the same for OEmbed support, so you can use the new OEmbed plugin for Moodle to embed an Office Mix, or to embed any other OEmbed source such as YouTube, Slideshare and many others. The Moodle plugins for Office 365 were released in January, and include SSO, OneNote submissions and feedback, OneDrive integration, Outlook calendar sync and Office Mix (OEmbed) integration. Moodle is the world’s most popular LMS, used by both corporate and educational institutions worldwide. For this project we worked closely with Moodle’s partner, Remote-Learner, taking advantage of their deep expertise in Moodle and our team’s expertise in the open Office 365 APIs to create a seamless experience for educators and students. We’re continuing to work with Remote-Learner on evolving the Moodle plugins for Office 365 based on feedback from the community. The Open edX integrations will be available in the Open edX "Cypress" release coming in early July, and initially include SSO and OneDrive integration. Open edX is the world’s most popular open source MOOC platform, and we’re continuing to work with the Open edX experts at OpenCraft to expand the ways the Office 365 and Open edX can be used together. For more information about these projects, see the recent blog posts about Open edX integration and Moodle integration over on the MS Open Tech blog. —Jean Paoli, Rob Dolin and Doug Mahugh The post Office 365 now offers seamless integration with educational open source software appeared first on Office Blogs.

Editor’s Note 7/7/2015: We added the sample workbook used to create the charts, which you can download here. As part of a wave of new updates delivered in the Office 2016 Public Preview last month, we unveiled a set of highly anticipated new charts to give you more ways to explore data and tell rich stories across Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Say hello to Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap and Sunburst—six powerful charts that help you quickly visualize common financial, statistical and hierarchical data. Read on to see how you can take advantage of these new charts and then try each one out by installing the Office 2016 Preview. You can download the sample data used to create these charts here. Waterfall—visualizing financial statements with ease Most business owners seek to better understand their finances in order to ensure their success. Profit and loss statements can help explain the bottom line of your business. However, quickly understanding and communicating your gains, losses and balances by viewing financial statements can be challenging. With a Waterfall chart, you can quickly illustrate the line items in your financial data and get a clear picture of how each item is impacting your bottom line. The example below shows the income statement for a bookstore. It’s clear to see that the cost of inventory nearly cut net revenue in half while operating costs accounted for an additional third of net revenue. A Waterfall chart provides a simple visual of the running total of your financial data, identifies the contributions and provides clear subtotals, giving you a ready-to-present financial report in a few clicks. Learn more about the Waterfall chart. Histogram—exploring and analyzing a distribution For a bookstore owner, it is important to continuously find new ways to attract customers. Stocking books with both high-end and low-end prices can help appeal to a wider range of readers. The new Histogram chart can display the distribution of the book prices in inventory so the bookstore owner can ensure inventory can meet the customer’s needs.. Commonly used in statistics, a histogram automatically displays the frequencies within a distribution. In this example, the horizontal axis represents the book price. Each column, called a "bin," shows the number of books within a given price range. Here we see that this bookstore has a good distribution of books, both high-end and low-end. Excel now makes it is easy for you create the Histogram chart. After creating the chart, use the intuitive options to change the bin ranges to dig deeper into the data. Learn more about the Histogram chart. Pareto—finding the largest impact Continuing with the bookstore example, the owner now wants to focus on quality control by reducing the number of returned books. Each day, a number of books are returned and tabulated for various reasons—maybe the book is a defect or the customer bought the wrong book. The Pareto chart will help the bookstore owner to see the most common reasons customers return books. Using the Pareto chart, you can automatically sort the frequency of the most prevalent issues (the bar graph) and then show the additive contributions of each issue as you move along the horizontal axis (the line graph). In the example below, each column represents a reason for a book return. The line graph shows how each column, or issue, contributes to the overall total of returned books. Notice, from the bar graph, that the "defect" category caused 2,025 book returns. From the orange Pareto line in the chart, we see that this means defects contributed to 40 percent of all book returns. By improving on just the top three reasons for returns—defects, incorrect pricing and wrong products—the bookstore owner can address over 80 percent of the returns! The Pareto chart allows you to prioritize the improvements you want to make in the bookstore to address the most critical issues. Learn more about the Pareto chart. Box & Whisker—bringing statistics to distribution Like the Histogram chart, the Box & Whisker chart shows the distribution of information. For deeper analysis, this chart goes further by providing key insights about the distribution in one view, including range, quartiles, mean and outliers. And you get all of this information with a few clicks. In this example, we are able to compare the price distribution of books by genre. The Box & Whisker chart automatically groups the books by their genre and displays the characteristics of the distribution of pricing in a way that can be easily analyzed. Notice that the book prices of Romance have a wider range and is especially skewed by the one $300 item. Box & Whisker chart adds a visual angle to Excel’s statistical functionality, creating a simple snapshot view of the data’s characteristics. Learn more about the Box & Whisker chart. Treemap—analyzing across hierarchies in one view For the bookstore owner, it is very useful to know which book genres provide the largest source of revenue. But what if you could easily identify the largest revenue generators for each level of genre categorization … in one view? The Treemap chart is an ideal visualization for this purpose because it provides a hierarchical view of your data and an easy way to compare different levels of categorization. In this example, we can see each sub-genre grouped to its parent genre automatically, by color and proximity. The size of each node, marking a sub-genre, represents the total revenue of all books under that category. You can easily see that most of the revenue comes from Children’s books and Romance books, but also that 1st Readers and Young Adult titles are the most lucrative. With Treemap, large datasets with innate groupings can be effectively visualized in a simple way. Treemap draws the big picture, so you can draw comparisons between similar or competing products. Learn more about the Treemap chart. Sunburst—revealing every level of your hierarchy While using a Treemap chart is ideal for comparing the relative sizes of groups, the Sunburst chart shows the full hierarchy of the groups to provide deeper analysis capabilities. With a Sunburst chart, it’s easy to see the largest contributing segments within a hierarchy of multiple levels. The visual layout is intuitively natural for finding how each slice is broken down to the most basic contribution. The Sunburst is versatile, displaying any number of levels for any category. Learn more about the Sunburst chart. These six new chart types provide a rich new set of storytelling tools in Excel, Word and PowerPoint that enable you to do more with your data. Additionally, each chart can be customized to fit your specific needs with the intuitive design tools you are already familiar with in Excel. Use these features to change style and layout of the chart, add chart elements, like legends and data labels and fine-tune the fonts, colors and effects. After the release of Office 2016, expect to see even more innovative chart types added to Excel through your Office 365 subscription. As part of the modern Office experiences, we are committed to providing the best in class visualizations for data analysis and storytelling. Get started today by installing the Office 2016 preview and then apply these new chart types to your own data. The post Introducing new and modern chart types now available in Office 2016 Preview appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 365 offers a comprehensive compliance toolset that spans Exchange email, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business documents, and Skype conversations. Some customers store valuable information in Exchange public folders, and have requested that we broaden Office 365’s compliance solution to cover public folder data as well. Previously, external archiving solutions were required to meet this need. Today, we are pleased to announce that the Office 365 archiving and eDiscovery toolset is being extended to include public folders. Customers can now place public folder content on hold to preserve it for legal or regulatory requirements. They can perform eDiscovery functions on public folder data, including search, preview and export. Entire public folders or specific content (based on keywords) can be preserved immutably. They can delete aged items out of public folders. And all administrative activities on public folders are fully audited. Throughout all these operations, users can continue to interact with public folder data without any change in their experience. To perform an eDiscovery search on public folders, you simply specify "public folders" as the source. Specifying public folders as a source for an eDiscovery search. If you choose to put public folder content on hold, we preserve that data immutably using a model similar to the Recoverable Items architecture that we use in regular mailboxes. A DiscoveryHolds folder is created to store the data in a way that is accessible to eDiscovery searches, but not accessible or editable by end users. We’re excited to bring Office 365’s rich compliance offering to Public Folders. We’ll begin to roll out this offering worldwide in the coming weeks.   —The Office 365 Archiving Team The post Announcing compliance toolset for public folders appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Mark Rackley about client side development on SharePoint. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP52_Rackley.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Office 365 users gain one-click access to third-party apps Azure Logic Apps Implementing AD integration with Office 365 using a sub-domain (for dev/test) by Chris O’Brien Hooking SharePoint APIs with Android by Kris Wagner Inconvenient ADAL JS Angular with simultaneous CORS requests by Waldek Mastykarz Using The Force With Office 365 by Todd Baginski Office for Android phone is here! SPTechCon Developer Days Follow Up by Marc Anderson 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 Mark Rackley Mark is Partner and CTO at PAIT Group with more than 20 years of experience designing and developing software solutions. Mark’s daily responsibilities include forging the direction of solution architecture and development projects for clients while providing the best solutions for clients’ unique problems. As a globally recognized SharePoint geek, Mark is an active blogger, presenter, author (and bacon aficionado) who is eager to lend his real-world knowledge of SharePoint to all who need it. In addition to speaking at various SharePoint conferences, Mark is the organizer of SharePointalooza in Branson, Missouri and can be found speaking at as many Saturday events as his professional and family life will allow. Mark engages his audiences with humor, real-world stories from the trenches, and practical solutions. You can follow him on www.sharepointhillbilly.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 052 on client side dev with Mark Rackley appeared first on Office Blogs.

For many years, Office on Windows has offered users the ability to embed fonts within electronic documents such as Word documents or PDF files. However, we often get questions about the font embedding feature and today are providing you with details on what font embedding is and how you can use in your electronic documents. Put simply, font embedding is taking a digital font file and including it within another digital file. Usually when people refer to font embedding they are talking about document font embedding. Document font embedding ensures that the recipient of a document can view it properly even if they don’t have the fonts you used to create it installed on their machine. How to take advantage font embedding Font embedding settings are usually included as an advanced option under the document "Save" or "Export" menus of Word, PowerPoint and Publisher and can be enabled by selecting the Embed fonts in the file checkbox. Fonts types that can be embedded within documents All TrueType and OpenType fonts have "embedding permissions" encoded within them, these are typically set by the font’s supplier, and are defined as part of the OpenType font file specification. There are a number of settings, but the main ones of interest are as follows: No embedding—The font supplier does not allow embedding. These fonts are quite rare. Print and preview—The font supplier allows for embedding but the document is locked and cannot be edited. Most third-party fonts have this setting. Editable—The font supplier allows the font to be embedded within a document and allows the document to be edited using that embedded font. Installable—This is the most permissive setting. The font supplier allows the font to be embedded within a document, and permits the document viewing application to permanently install the font on the user’s computer. Most applications treat these fonts like those set to Editable embedding. Embedding fonts supplied with Windows and Office The end user license agreement for Office includes a font section that permits document font embedding using the fonts supplied with Office, while Office is running and based on the embedding permissions encoded within each font. These documents can be shared, posted and redistributed just like documents that don’t include embedded fonts. Most of the fonts Microsoft supplies with Office are set to "Editable" embedding, meaning documents can also be edited by recipients.  Microsoft license agreements can be found here. Embedding third-party fonts Although an application that properly supports font embedding, as Office does, will respect the embedding permissions defined by the font supplier when embedding a font in a document file, you will need to review the license you agreed to when you obtained a third-party font to make sure your use is in compliance with that license. Embedding fonts within a document will increase the file size of the document, and some fonts can be quite large. To minimize the file size of documents that include embedded fonts, select the Embed only the characters used in the document checkbox. Support for font embedding within Office is limited to the Windows desktop versions of Word, PowerPoint and Publisher and is not supported on the Mac OS, iOS, Android or web versions of Word or PowerPoint. The post Document font embedding demystified appeared first on Office Blogs.

It’s an exciting time for Skype for Business as we deliver communication-powered productivity in Office. In the last few months, we’ve delivered the Skype for Business client for Windows, the new Skype for Business Server, and Skype for Business Online in Office 365. And just last week, we announced previews of new meetings and voice capabilities in Office 365 through the Skype for Business Preview Program. Today we’re pleased to announce the availability of the Skype for Business app for Windows Phone. What’s new—intuitive interface, more emoticons, improved server communications If you are familiar with the Lync app for Windows Phone, you’ll notice a number of enhancements in the new app. The most noticeable differences right off the bat are the Skype for Business brand and UI, which is intuitive and familiar if you happen to use Skype in your personal communications. We’ve also revamped emoticons, which now offers over 100 emoticons to land your message visually. We have improved how the app and the server handle conversation notifications. Once you’re notified of a new conversation on your phone, the other clients you have logged in won’t be able to grab the conversation and prevent you from responding on your phone. We’ve also enhanced security with at-rest data encryption, so your conversation history and voicemail is encrypted by default. And your most recent conversations are now synchronized across devices whether they took place on your PC, tablet or phone, as long as you’re running the latest server software. We’re working hard to enable that for Office 365 users as well, so stay tuned for more news to come. How you can upgrade today Most people who have the Lync 2013 app on their Windows Phone will be automatically updated to the new Skype for Business app, but here are the particulars depending on which version of Windows Phone you use: If you have a Windows Phone 8.1 and higher but do not have the Lync 2013 app, you can download the new Skype for Business app in the Windows Store. If you have Windows Phone 8.1 and higher and currently have the Lync 2013 mobile app, the new Skype for Business app will replace your existing app and tile automatically. If you have Windows Phone 8.0, you will continue to use Lync 2013 or Lync 2010, which remains compatible even if your organization is running the new Skype for Business Server. We hope you enjoy the Skype for Business app for Windows Phone! The post Skype for Business Windows Phone app is here! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post about Office 365 was written by Gordon Loeb, chief operating officer at Loeb Consulting Group. Loeb Consulting Group grew out of my wife Natalie’s expertise and passion about helping people reach their potential at work. It all started about 17 years ago, when Natalie began consulting for the law firm where she had worked as a training manager designing professional development programs. Her drive to help people achieve as much as they can in the workplace and enjoy what they do is responsible for the growth of her consulting business. I joined her full-time about two and a half years ago, and today, with four employees and 25 consultants working across the United States and in the United Kingdom, Loeb Consulting Group has reached a juncture in its evolution. At this critical moment, it’s essential for us to look professional and to have sound business practices and a reliable, scalable infrastructure so we can attract new investors and partners. That’s why we use Microsoft Office 365 business productivity tools. Our in-house training department, one-on-one executive coaching sessions, management and leadership development workshops, and student leadership programs are all expanding. Natalie travels a lot for leadership coaching and to meet with clients, partners, and consultants, and I’m transitioning to more of a business development role. We are bringing on a business consultant and expanding our services. All this would be a lot more difficult to manage without the communication and collaboration services in Office 365. We have standardized company email addresses for our staff and consultants, so the firm presents as a cohesive group with a consistent brand and a high level of professionalism. Previously, consultants used their own email addresses and it was difficult to share calendars to arrange meetings. It took a while to bring a consultant on board, even for a short-term project. Now we have a seamless process for signing up consultants in Exchange Online, so we can onboard them quickly to meet client requirements. These changes have been helpful, but the collaborative possibilities available in Office 365 will make the biggest difference to how we work as a team. This is a document-heavy business; we coauthor proposals, presentations, and articles and share files constantly with consultants, partners, and customers. With Office 365, we can store all our Microsoft Office files securely online, then access and share them internally and externally anytime on any device using Microsoft OneDrive for Business. Natalie and I have Office 365 ProPlus, which enables us to run the latest version of Office on all our devices. We look forward to knowing that any edits we make to a file will be saved to the cloud, and that we can access the current version later on a different device. Now we can coauthor drafts using Office Online to access files directly from the browser. Creating proposals will be so much easier because we won’t be sending versions around as email attachments. We also plan to use Office 365 to help our business accommodate a growing trend in the training and leadership development market: e-learning. While nothing can replace the benefits of in-person one-on-one mentoring, we believe that the videoconferencing feature in Skype for Business will be an effective way to supplement our in-person sessions. Natalie will also use videoconferencing to connect with clients and to debrief with consultants immediately after a public workshop series, so we can understand if there are areas that we can improve upon going forward. And when we set up team sites using Microsoft SharePoint Online, we will be able to collaborate with our partners more closely to keep them apprised of our client interactions and conversations so we can coordinate our efforts more effectively. These solutions will also save Natalie a lot of travel. The scalable, cost-effective business productivity solutions in Office 365 are helping us grow, and they will be the foundation for our business as we head into this period of transition. In a way, Office 365 reflects what we do at Loeb Consulting every day: help people achieve as much as they can in the workplace—and enjoy what they do. — Gordon Loeb The post Management consulting firm picks Office 365 at critical growth moment—driving professionalism, productivity, and collaboration appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Ketaki Deshpande, senior program manager and Tom Kaupe, principal program manager, for Office 365. As companies move their data to the cloud and employees use a growing number of devices to get their work done, many organizations are facing new challenges across security, privacy and compliance. That’s why we are continually investing to provide our customers with greater visibility into actions taken on their content and greater control over access to their data in Office 365. We are pleased to announce the rollout of new activity logging and reporting capabilities for Office 365, including the Office 365 activity report, comprehensive logging capability, PowerShell command or cmdlet and a preview of the Office 365 Management Activity API. Let’s take a look at how each new capability provides you increased transparency, allowing you to monitor and investigate actions taken on your data, and comply with laws and regulations. Office 365 activity report The Office 365 activity report enables you to investigate a user’s activity by searching for a user, file or other resource across SharePoint Online, One Drive for Business, Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory, and then download the activities to a CSV (comma separate values) file. You can filter by date range, user, file/folder and activity type. This feature is especially useful for compliance reporting purposes for companies that are in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals and financial institutions. Please see the Frequently asked questions below for information on when you can expect to see this feature. Please refer to the Run the Office 365 activity report article that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to use this report. Comprehensive logging capability User and admin activity events are logged across SharePoint Online, One Drive for Business, Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory. This is useful for helping to see what types of files a user has been sharing with others in the organization. Today, you can search on over 150 events (with more coming soon), including file views, mailbox owner activity, Azure Active Directory log ins and many more. In the future, we plan to expand these capabilities to include activities in other Office 365 services, such as Yammer and Skype for Business. Please refer to the Run the Office 365 activity report article for step-by-step instructions on how to retrieve this data. Search PowerShell cmdlet Another new way to search activity logs is with PowerShell, using the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet, which enables you to run scoped queries against the audit storage log, such as by date, record type, operation and file extension. This cmdlet also lets you export those logs to a file. For example you could run the following cmdlet to search user activity logs for all events from May 1, 2015 to June 26, 2015:Search-UnifiedAuditLog -StartDate May 1, 2015 -EndDate June 26, 2015Please refer to the Search-UnifiedAuditLog article to find out more about this cmdlet and how it can help you form scoped queries to get the data you are looking for. Management Activity API Finally, we’re excited to announce the preview of the Office 365 Management Activity API, which allows organizations and other software providers to integrate Office 365 activity data into their security and compliance monitoring and reporting solutions. Visit the Office Dev center to register for the preview. Participation is currently limited, but our goal is to incrementally open the preview to everyone who’s interested. Also, check out these resources on MSDN to learn more about developing an app using the API: Getting started guide, which walks you through the steps necessary for configuring your application in Azure Active Directory and obtaining admin consent to enable OAuth authentication. Activity API reference, which describes the operations and syntax to call the API. If you have questions about the Activity API or OAuth configuration in Azure Active Directory, please ask your question on Stack Overflow and tag it "office365." These new logging and reporting capabilities represent just some of the enhancements we’re delivering to provide you with greater transparency and control over your data in Office 365. For more information about our trust principles and how we manage security, privacy and compliance, please visit the Office 365 trust center at trust.office365.com. —Ketaki Deshpande and Tom Kaupe Frequently asked questions Q. When are these capabilities rolling out to Office 365 customers? A. These capabilities will be rolling out starting this month. Please check the Office 365 public roadmap to get updates. Q. How will I know when the new activity logging and reporting capabilities are available for my tenant? A. Once the functionality rolls out, expect to see the Office 365 activity report link in the Reports section of the Admin Compliance Center. Please refer to the Run the Office 365 activity report article for help on how to use this report. The post Announcing new activity logging and reporting capabilities for Office 365 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 we are taking a big step forward for Mac® users—Office 2016 for Mac is now available in 139 countries and 16 languages. Based on feedback from the great Mac Office community, we’ve made major updates to each of the apps, and we couldn’t be more pleased to deliver it first to our Office 365 customers. Unmistakably Office, designed for Mac The new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote provide the best of both worlds for Mac users—the familiar Office experience paired with the best of Mac. If you already use Office on a PC or iPad, you will find yourself right at home in Office 2016 for Mac. It works the way you expect, with the familiar ribbon interface and powerful task panes. Mac users will appreciate the modernized Office experience and the integration of Mac capabilities like Full Screen view and Multi-TouchTM gestures. With full Retina® display support, your Office documents look sharper and more vibrant than ever. Office for Mac is cloud-connected, so you can quickly get to the documents you’ve recently used on other devices and pick up where you left off. New, built-in document sharing tools make it easy to invite teammates to work on a document together. When sharing documents, you won’t have to worry about losing content or formatting, as Office for Mac offers unparalleled compatibility with Office on PCs, tablets, phones and online. Five modern, first-class applications Word for Mac—Word’s powerful writing and reviewing tools make it easy to create great-looking documents. The new Design tab lets you easily apply designer-quality layouts, colors and fonts throughout your document. You can work on the same document simultaneously with your teammates and use threaded comments to have a conversation right next to the corresponding text. Excel for Mac—The new Excel for Mac helps you visualize your information by recommending charts best suited for your data with chart previews. Familiar keyboard shortcuts, autocomplete and an improved formula builder save you time when creating spreadsheets or entering data. For deeper analysis, new PivotTable Slicers help you filter large volumes of data and discover patterns. PowerPoint for Mac—PowerPoint’s improved Presenter View gives you full control when you present by showing you the current slide, next slide, speaker notes and a timer on your Mac screen, while the audience only sees your presentation on the big screen. The new animation pane helps you design and fine-tune animations, and the latest set of slide transitions add polish to your presentations. Outlook for Mac—Managing your email, calendar, contacts and tasks has never been easier. The new Outlook for Mac has push mail support so your inbox is always up-to-date. The improved conversation view automatically organizes your inbox around threaded conversations, so you won’t have to hunt for related messages. And the new message preview shows you the first sentence of an email just below the subject line so you can quickly decide if you want to read it now or come back later. OneNote for Mac—OneNote is the newest addition to Office for Mac. You can capture your ideas in digital notebooks and access them on any device. Find things quickly with the OneNote search engine that tracks your tags, indexes your typed notes and recognizes text in images and handwritten notes. Bold, italicize, underline or highlight notes, insert files, pictures and tables and organize your notes however you want. You can also share notebooks with friends, family or colleagues so everyone can work together on travel plans, household tasks or work projects. Made better by Mac users The customer participation in our Office for Mac preview since its launch in March exceeded our expectations, making it our largest Office for Mac beta ever. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the preview program and helped us improve the product. Mac preview participants provided us with over 100,000 pieces of feedback. Based on this feedback, we released seven updates in four months with significant improvements in performance and stability. We also added features like improved Mail Merge in Word, Propose New Time in Outlook and support for External Data Connections in Excel. And the best news is that Office for Mac will continue to see ongoing improvements over time. We plan to release updates and new features for Office 365 customers at least once per quarter. Available today for Office 365 customers Office 365 subscribers can get the newest version of Office for Mac today. All you need is an Office 365 subscription (Office 365 Home, Personal, Business, Business Premium, E3 or ProPlus), which includes the rights and access to use Office applications on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android devices, along with additional value in OneDrive and Skype. Here are a few different ways to get Office 2016 for Mac today: Already an Office 365 customer? On your Mac, just browse to your account page (office.com/myaccount), sign in and follow the installation instructions. If you have Office 365 through your organization, go to portal.office.com/OLS/MySoftware.aspx. Are you a student? You may get Office 2016 for Mac for free or at a substantial discount. It takes only 30 seconds to find out at office.com/student. Otherwise, go to office.com/mac or buy an Office 365 subscription at your local retailer. Office 2016 for Mac will become available as a one-time purchase option this September. We hope you’re as excited as we are about the new Office for Mac. It’s one of many important releases this summer where we are improving the Office experience across devices and platforms. We released Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Android phones just two weeks ago, which join Outlook and OneNote for Android phones, and we are just weeks away from delivering Office Mobile apps for Windows 10. Please keep sending us your feedback and suggestions, and we will continue to improve your Office experience. —Kirk Koenigsbauer   *Apple, Mac, Retina and Multi-Touch are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. The post Office 2016 for Mac is here! appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Bob German about micro services. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP53_German.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Reddit Save the date - Visual Studio 2015 RTM on July 20th An early look at Cortana integration with Office 365 Getting started with adaljs and Office 365 APIs Troubleshooting SharePoint Add-ins configuration on-premises SharePoint client-side devs be heard Office 365 Video Portal API deep dive Microsoft Garage - Tossup app Show notes SharePoint as a Service http://bob1german.com/2015/07/02/sharepoint-as-a-service/ Microservices http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html Modern Apps and Microservices http://theundocumentedapi.com/2015/01/05/modern-apps-and-microservices/ Get Started with the Office 365 APIs https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/getting-started-Office-365-APIs API Management in Microsoft Azure http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/api-management/ 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 Bob German  Bob German is principal architect at BlueMetal Architects, where he leads SharePoint development and deployment engagements for enterprise customers. Bob has been developing on the SharePoint platform since it was called "Site Server," and is a co-author of SharePoint 2010 Development with Silverlight for Addison-Wesley. Prior to joining BlueMetal, Bob was an architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Boston. He also worked for Microsoft Consulting Services building and performance tuning websites and other networking solutions.           You can follow Bob on Twitter @Bob1German or on his blog at http://bob1german.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 053 on micro services with Bob German appeared first on Office Blogs.